Where Earth Meets Water

by Pia Padukone

  “Karom? When you were in India, did you ever think about looking up your birth parents? See what happened to them? Learn their story?”

  “No. What’s the point? I had parents. They died. Then I had other parents. And they died, too. I loved my parents, without question, even though they kept this huge secret of my origin and my first near miss. I missed both of my parents’ deaths by a hair, a hair. Someone—or something—has always been looking out for me. Something bigger than me really wants me around.”

  Malina begins a gentle snore and Lloyd reaches over and brushes the hair lightly away from her face. She shifts in her seat and holds his hand, encircling her fingers around the fleshy part of his wrist. Her fingers cool his skin; it is almost as if he can feel a cool blue line of relaxation where her body meets his.

  Suddenly, Lloyd feels a deep rush build up within him. It erupts from his ear across the phone, and unlike the blue line that appears where Malina touches his skin, this force field is bright red and pulsing with anger. He is angry. Angry at Karom, angry that all these years have been taken from him, angry about unrequited love as a theory, angry that Karom has failed to appreciate what he had, angry that Karom may never understand. He grits his teeth, breathes through his nose and speaks.

  “I need to say something and I need you not to talk until I finish.”

  “Okay.” On the other side of the phone, at the small inn and vineyard, Karom shifts nervously.

  Lloyd opens his mouth again to a flood of words. He can barely stop them. He has imagined saying them in the past but had never had the guts or the timing. He’d never been prepared. But now he realizes that in order to say these words, he could never have prepared.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Karom. It’s just too hard. I can’t watch you play this game, even if I just hear about it or know about it or feel you playing it in the backs of my eyeballs from all the way across the country. I can’t watch you live your life like this without realizing what’s in front of you. I can’t talk to you about what you’re going through or hear the same story over and over, the same shuffle—two steps forward, one step back. I can’t imagine people, conjure up people in front of my nose that haunt me through my days. I felt like I was going mad at times. I felt like I’d lost all control of myself. I couldn’t see where I was going.

  “Gita is far stronger than me when it comes to you. She knows what she has in front of her. She knows it’s tangible and accessible and she wants to keep having it. Whereas I could never have it and I’ve been passively, uselessly hoping for it.

  “I can’t do this to myself anymore, Karom. I can’t absorb your sweat or cry or languish over you or your game or the memory of holding you tight in that dorm room when it felt like there was nothing else but the two of us. I can’t do it to myself anymore. I can’t do it to Malina, or Gita. It’s not fair. I hope you understand, but I won’t ask if you do. It’s too terrible a fate to be relegated to for the rest of my life. I’m going on my honeymoon. I’m going to get married to a wonderful girl and then I’m going to live happily ever after the rest of my life with her. Without you.”

  There is a considerable silence after which Lloyd wonders if the in-flight phone has petered out, and they are too high in the atmosphere to connect to land anymore. But he hears a sudden scratching from the other end of the line and he hears Karom clear his throat softly and say, “I understand,” and he hears himself move the earpiece of the phone and look at the receiver, as though if he stares long or hard enough, he will see a tiny Karom way on the other end, across miles and miles of phone line like a tin can or a microscope. And then he hears himself lean forward slightly in his seat so as not to disturb his fiancée’s slight hand that still encircles his wrist, turns the receiver away from him and replaces it into its holder. Then he turns off his overhead light, adjusts his hand softly and sleeps.

  Kamini

  Miles away in Delhi, Kamini stands back and surveys the slim woman in the pressed khaki pants and the button-down shirt. The woman has her back to her as she inserts a small placard into the groove in the windowpane and wipes her hands on the backs of her knees. She cocks her head at her handiwork and turns toward Kamini, who sits mildly in the chair by the door, lacing her fingers together in a steeple.

  “Mrs. Pai? Auntie?”

  “Hmm, yes?” Kamini looks up and smiles at the girl. This girl reminds her of Savita in her youth: ebullient, sweet, unchallenging.

  “We’re all set. We’ve posted an ad on the Net and we’ll have an open house in a few weeks once we gain some interest in the flat, but with the market being what it is, you should be out of here in no time.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Where will you be relocating?”

  “To America. Ohio. To be with my daughter and her husband.”

  “That’s nice. It’s good to be with family.”

  “Mmm. Thank you for everything on such short notice.”

  “It’s not a problem at all.” The woman picks up her briefcase and holds it to her chest. She sticks out her hand before she lets it float back down and envelops Kamini in a loose hug. “I’m sorry. I just thought you needed that. I’m sure it can’t be easy getting rid of this place. I’m sure you’ve lived here for a long time, that there are memories caught in the crevices and the corners. You’re doing a very brave thing.”

  “It’s not brave, actually. It’s quite cowardly running away from this place. But I have no use for it anymore—had no use for it for quite some time. Somehow there were always loose ends to tie and a reason to stay, and I suppose I made excuses for far too long,” Kamini says, adjusting her glasses.

  “Well, I think you’re brave,” the woman says, moving toward the door. “Good for you for moving on, whatever the reasons are. Shall I leave you, then? We’ll be in touch.”

  “Thank you.” The door clicks shut and Kamini looks around the room. The ceiling fan has been removed and the walls and the paint above her have been replaced. The new air-conditioning unit hums busily in the corner. The furniture has been reupholstered and the floor polished to a shine where if she peers low enough to the ground, she can see her face against the tile. The woman had suggested all these cosmetic changes. It will appear more appealing, she’d said. It will help potential buyers envision a life here, a home here. It’s a great starter apartment.

  But Kamini is finished. Over the years and years when Savita had requested she move to their sprawling home in Columbus, Kamini had resolutely refused, first on the basis of inconvenience, then because she claimed that America didn’t understand her, didn’t get her—the shopgirls could barely understand her accent—and then because she was far too settled to uproot everything and start over. But at this stage in her life, starting over isn’t an option. She will continue her life where the plane touches down in Columbus—her seventh plane ride, for the record. She will continue cooking and making meals for herself—and now her daughter and Haakon. She will continue living, surviving, as she has for the past eighty-two years of being shuttled back and forth between homes and then hostels and then finally this house. She has done it for Savita, because although Kamini knows that she can care for herself in this house—in fact, other than writing, it’s the one thing she knows how to do—she knows that Savita is uncomfortable with her old mother living here alone, without family members dropping in every day, without someone here for company. Savita is insistent that Kamini is lonely though she doesn’t realize it. And what’s more, in Columbus Kamini won’t feel beholden; Savita has been very clear on that distinction. “You’re not staying in my house, Amma, you’re staying in our house. You shouldn’t feel like a guest here. I don’t want that. I don’t want you to move here if you’re going to feel obligated. Promise me you won’t.” And Kamini had promised, because she is tired of being lonely, because it would be nice to live with her daughter and her daughter’s kind, solid
husband. And she is tired of needing to feel beholden. In fact, after all these years, she has forgotten just how to do that.

  On her small wrist, there is a reassuring ticking. It is gentle, unobtrusive, yet it is still there, reminding her of the gift Karom left her when he and Gita left Delhi a few months before. When she found the Rolex hidden between the sheets that had comprised Karom’s bed while he stayed in her living room, she’d instinctively jumped up and attempted to run after the rickshaw that had taken them off to the airport before realizing that Gita and Karom had left hours before. She’d opened the laptop and tried to fire off a quick email to Karom, letting him know that she’d found his watch and would send it to New York through the very next person that might be flying there. But she’d been surprised by a fresh email in her own in-box.

  Subject: “Talisman”

  Dear Ammama,

  Please take care of this for me. It is both my most prized possession and my most mortal enemy.

  Thank you.

  Love, Karom

  From that moment, she had slipped it onto her hand, but her tiny wrist was no match for the strap and it had swung this way and that. The following morning she had taken it to the leathersmith’s down the road, where she had two more holes punched into the alligator watchstrap so that it now fit snugly against her wrist. She had never worn a watch before, and certainly never a man’s watch. At first, it felt heavy against her body, but after some time, the large face with its tiny little crown and gentle ticking served as a rhythm for her day. It set the tone for her morning ritual and she began listening for the tapping of the second hand as she meditated after lighting the lamps in her shrine. She would take care of it, she told herself. She would see to it that the watch lived its life out to the fullest. She would ensure that Karom never had to worry about what it meant again.

  Now she moves toward her computer, where it lies hidden underneath a dust cloth. Delhi is so dusty; everything valuable has to be protected. Ohio isn’t like this, she remembers from her three visits in the past. She opens the computer, and the document she’d started before the Realtor arrived springs open. She taps away at the keys, finishing a thought, adding some color to the last sentence, before she presses Return and faces a blank page. When she’d first started writing, blank pages had scared her, actually frightened her because she’d felt intimidated by what could be. So she’d seasoned herself to begin, begin anywhere, to see black ink on the pages or perfect letters on the screen even if she had to scratch it out or, when she got a computer, delete it later on.

  Whiteness looms before her and she takes a deep breath, disturbing the wisps of hair that surround her face. She puts two fingers to the keys and begins a new chapter.

  Karom

  As a New Yorker, there are things one knows. There are specific separate pieces of information unique to those who inhabit the city. The sun rises past the East River and sets beyond the Hudson in the west. Downtown is south and uptown is north. If you’re a woman, you can comfortably wear high heels to certain train lines, but for the ones that are farther away, you do the New York Changeover, carrying your heels in a purse and slipping off your sneakers or flip-flops around the corner from your destination. You know which subway car to enter for perfect alignment with the exit for your mad dash on a late morning to work. You know to feign sleep when a panhandler slides between the doors on your train. You know which fruit-stand guy—and there is one on every corner of every main thoroughfare—has the best deal on bananas. You know which gutter consistently gets flooded each time it rains. You know which city block smells the most rancid in the summertime.

  But somehow, even though you know all these tiny pieces of information, it is still baffling to think of what is in there at each moment, scurrying through the streets, bustling in the thousands of buildings—people pulling vacuums along dusty carpets, taxis floating along the avenues. The street-cleaning trucks shuffling along the road, their tough bristles scuffing against the earth. There is something delicious sounding about these brushes to Karom. He has always wondered if it was somehow Pavlovian, as every time he’s heard that sound, he’s yearned to bite into something textural, like hair or an acrylic sweater. There is always something going on within the mazelike architecture. There is always something alive and indefinite.

  There is something alert within the streets today, as Karom holds his girlfriend’s hand in his left one as he locks the door of his parents’ brownstone with his right. Gita’s fingers are loose and cool, unlike when they arrived in the morning, Karom watching the tears glimmer in the corners of her eyes because she knew what an invitation into this house meant. She knew that it was the last hurdle to scale that would enable the two of them to move forward once he had introduced her to the mausoleum that held painful memories of Karom’s previous life intact inside.

  Karom remembers the words in Fairytales of Freedom, in “The Invisible Husband, Parts I and II.” He remembers how Janaki, Kamini—he’s not sure because they blur into the same person in his brain—had been so strong but had faltered when she recognized how isolated she’d been, how alone. He had thought to himself that he couldn’t allow the same thing to happen to the two of them. He had thought to himself that something had to change. Something had to give. So he’d asked Gita into this last vestige of his past so that they could both move forward together.

  When the door had creaked open hours before, she’d collapsed against it, weaker than Karom had been a few years before when he had arrived with the box of photos that reunited him to his first past, the one he couldn’t remember. He’d sunk down next to her, cuddling her head into the crook of his neck, letting her sob hard and long before she gathered herself up and walked toward the entrance to the house, fighting with all her will to move forward but sniffling with each step. Inside, after Karom had placed surgical masks over their ears as protection from the dust, Gita had walked slowly, solemnly, as if she were in a museum, taking everything in: a signed framed glossy photo of Dharma Sen on the landing, Mohan’s editing trophies, Rana’s cookbook collection, the brassy pots and pans in the kitchen hanging from hooks.

  Karom had followed her around silently, not saying a word, not even directing her one way or another because there was nothing that was off-limits to her—she could look and touch everything; she could open closets and ask questions. But there had been none of that. She’d opened every drawer in his parents’ room without touching anything within them, and when she got to their bedside drawer, she’d looked at him quizzically and he’d nodded, soundlessly conveying to her that, yes, that was the drawer in which he’d discovered the letter to himself.

  She gets choked up again in Karom’s room over a Kurt Cobain poster, and when he moves toward her, she shakes her head and holds her hand up, continuing to cry quietly on her own, wrapping her own arms around herself and insisting on moving forward. She inspects every single book title on the shelves, the sports paraphernalia under the bed, the grunge T-shirts hanging in the closet, the piles of CDs stacked like Stonehenge on the ground.

  Tears stop leaking from her eyes as she winds her way down the stairs and into the living room, the one room in the house she has overlooked until now. The carpet is still thick with dust, and there is a faint imprint of Karom’s body where he’d lain on the ground and let the spinning world overwhelm him years before. The photographs are still taped on the wall, though some have fallen off as the tape’s adhesive lost its strength, and she walks from one end of the wall to the other, stopping at each and every photograph, reading the protest signs, memorizing faces and architecture. She picks up the fallen photographs that have curled over with age and props them on the couch so she can survey them one by one. Karom licks his lips repeatedly; he’s not quite sure what to say or to do. But once she’s examined all the thousands of photographs, she turns to him questioningly and he realizes that there is nothing left to say, there’s not
hing left to do. So he looks at her, he watches her, just as patiently as she’s examined the artifacts of his past. He watches her face and recognizes how for the first time it appears relaxed, but he can make out circles beneath her eyes and tiny wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. He realizes what a toll this all has taken on the woman he loves. And he recognizes that he doesn’t want to be responsible for that anymore. He wants to take in her beauty and shed the responsibility for her pain.

  When he first approached Gita on the street that morning at the flea market, it wasn’t because of her light eyes and her dark hair, her olive skin, a perfect olive mixture that combined the darker paint of Savita’s skin and the fairness of Haakon’s, her taut cheekbones that created hollows above her jaw, her plump lips that looked as though they might burst if flicked. Or maybe it was those things, but it was a deeper attraction, a somewhat Freudian one. He imagined that this was what his mother had looked like, the one he’s never seen. The one who either had expired with a soft exhaustion of breath after her lungs had collapsed like a deflated balloon or was still living a new life in the tired streets of Bhopal, with a new husband or maybe even the old one, dressing her new son for school or perhaps her old daughter—his sister—for her wedding day. He imagined that his mother, regal but soft, with ruined hands from hard labor, was reflected in the same hollows that dipped under Gita’s collarbones and in the gentle webbing between her fingers. He imagined the space between her nose and her lip, that gentle dimple, that groove where his pinkie finger fit so perfectly, was the same distance on both women.