She was calm. “Now tell me again,” she said. “What you just told me.”
The truck’s horn erupted behind us, shaking me to my toes.
“Tell me,” Mom said calmly. “Again.”
Before I could speak, I heard a loud banging from the back of the car. I turned my head and saw the truck driver. He had climbed out of the truck and was thumping his fist on the trunk. I could see his teeth, stained brown, spit spilling onto the back window. He walked around to Mom’s side of the car, his fist clenching, unclenching. Cars honked at him. The slow boil of my stomach felt ready to erupt.
“Lady!” he shouted, his voice muted by the thin glass, as though underwater. “Lady! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
His eyes terrified me.
She opened the door. The bursting noise of the freeway crowded in on us; the hot afternoon air, the smell of the trucker, of his belligerence, assaulted me. I didn’t know what she was doing. She stepped out of the car. I wanted to scream at her to stop, to get back in, to shout for help. But I didn’t do any of those. I opened my own door, the hills to my right staggered into mountains and I let my head fall toward the pavement, spewing pale green and white vomit onto the black and insensible surface.
When I sat up I could see her shouting at the guy. Her hands cracked taut gestures in the air; all around us, horns blared, passing cars sucked air from the small cabin, my stomach boiled. This guy was going to throw her into the oncoming traffic. I knew it, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I opened my door again and vomited. The puke spilled down the side of the car and formed the beginnings of a channel along the black edge of the highway.
But she didn’t die. She stepped back into the car, and for the first time in how long I could not remember, I was filled with a surging pride and love for her. How beautifully she was dressed! How well she looked in that odd T-shirt and cheap pants! The trucker shuffled back to his truck, the car horns and faces now angry with him. I looked over my shoulder as he stepped up into the cab; he looked small and ineffectual, and I thought, how could she have seen that so easily when to me he was a horror.
I searched for something to say; I wanted to tell her how magnificent she had been, how I knew that no one—not Dad, not the kid’s father—would have done that for me, but my throat was clogged with vomit and any words that tried to seep out soon choked and were made incomprehensible. I opened my door again and heaved and this time I kept at it for a whole minute, retching and puking, my throat gargling out my innards as though driven by the motor of some impassive engine pushing up against everything I wanted.
I sat up and turned to look at her. Her face blistered with rage. Without warning, she started to slap at me violently and I held my arms up weakly to protect myself. Her blows came harder and harder and soon she was using both hands with uncontrolled force. “You and your father!” she shouted. “You and your father! To be like that in public. Why can’t you control yourself. Always! Always the same!”
She finally relented and dropped her hands into her lap. My face and arms and shoulders stung with pain. She was crying. I could hear her voice catching in her throat.
“Why do you always have to be sick,” she said.
I said nothing. I could still taste vomit in my mouth. I felt my nose and found it was bleeding. We drove in silence to the next exit where she wound the car around the looped ramp and parked in a 7-Eleven lot. I dropped my head into my hands and felt the warmth of my forehead and the drip of blood onto my bare wrists.
“American girl,” I heard her say. Her voice was rough and excited. “American girl,” she repeated with a threat in her voice.
I heard the door open and she stepped out and I raised my head and watched her walk into the store. She returned after a couple of minutes carrying a Coke and a handful of paper towels. I could feel my face swelling up already. “You drink this,” she said without violence. “It’ll settle your stomach.” Her voice was resigned and exhausted. I took the Coke carefully from her hands and drank from the straw. After a minute, I wiped myself clean with the towels. When I examined them, I found less blood than I had expected.
A car pulled up next to ours, its stereo blasting a song by Nirvana. Two guys sat in the front. They seemed in no hurry to get out of the car; I could see them joking with each other the way guys do, laughing and punching each other. One turned his head and when he saw me, winked and smiled. He had a handsome, broad smile and I think the corners of my mouth turned up.
I wanted to say something to Mom, but nothing came, and even if it did I can’t now imagine what it might have been because at that moment I had no understanding of her anger: it was an anger not at anything I had done, but at me, at my essence, and there was no way I could persuade her that I was not the person she saw. After a minute, I looked out the window and into the sky. The two guys had walked inside. I didn’t want to look at her. I folded my arms on my stomach and pushed hard with my forearms. For a moment I wanted to crush whatever life was inside me. Up in the sky the trail of a plane’s exhaust hung like a bridal train. I dug my nails into my palms. I released my arms, though it felt more out of weakness than any decision on my part.
The two guys walked back, each carrying a twelve-pack. Before they stepped inside their car, I quickly stepped out of mine. I could hear her breath release in anger but I slammed the door. I smiled at each one of them and gestured to their car with my eyes. They turned their heads, glancing at each other, surprised, and then they blossomed grins and I got in between them on the wide front seat, feeling the warmth of their thighs squeeze mine. “Fast,” I said. The car skidded out of there, and the last I saw of her was a figure lost on that small island, waving, as though to a passing plane, the green of her T-shirt burning against the concrete and our black car.
III
I was living with a guy named Bala in a small two-room London flat. Kulwant was already a toddler. I was in Britain illegally and couldn’t work and so relied on Bala for food and cash. He was a truck driver who said he came from somewhere east, never telling me where; I thought sometimes that maybe he didn’t know, and his curiously olive and brown skin insinuated some mixed Eurasian background. I don’t know why he helped me. He wasn’t my lover. He had a round of men and women, though I never met any of them. He was a leftie who read Proust and Dostoyevsky and picked up strays out of the pricked conscience of what he hinted at were upper-class roots. Those evenings when he was home, which were few, he read aloud long passages from what he called difficult books and then explained them and we would argue because I almost always thought his rendering was half bullshit.
One afternoon he appeared, unshaven, a newspaper folded under his arm and a catlike grin on his face. Inside, he claimed, holding the paper aloft and twisting it in the air, was printed Idi Amin’s home phone number. Amin was living in Saudi Arabia, driving a BMW to the beach. A journalist had printed the number in some small leftie paper Bala read; the writer had spent several weeks tracking Idi for an interview, calling him incessantly, following Idi’s Beemer, cornering friends, but no luck. Whenever he phoned, a woman answered and said the boss was out. She called him the boss.
Hearing Amin’s name resurrected childhood nightmares. I studied the photograph in the newspaper. It was an old one, from his days as dictator. His stare was impenetrable, the stare that had haunted my room at night, the face that had engulfed and menaced my sleep with the certainty that I came from him: without him I would not be who I was, and even as a child I had understood this. I told Bala this, and said that I never really believed in his reality. He was a vampire or a god whose monstrosities were etched in their own hieroglyphic, an unknown language which had for years exerted the influence of its incomprehensible grammar on my life.
Bala urged me to phone. He gave birth to a wicked and becoming smile: “Go on, call the fucker. He’s just another crackpot. You’ll be better for it.”
“Maybe,” I offered, “when you’re gone.” He laughe
d and took Kulwant up in his arms and threw him in the air and caught him with commanding grace. “Your mum’s gonna have a chat with the devil.” Kulwant broached a frightened laugh and I rested myself against a wall, trying not to spew.
I stared at a poster of Malcolm X, one finger pressed against his temple, his face deep in concentration. I liked that poster: it reminded me of Dad doing his yoga, his face serious and without joy. The room smelled musty and was filled with the aroma of old beer and cigarettes. Bala never opened the windows and I never asked him to: he was paying the rent.
I waited until the evening to phone. Bala was out, either driving or getting laid: he never told me which. It was a hot summer night and I had opened the door to let some air in. In the flat above, a party was shifting into high gear. Salsa pounded down through the ceiling and feet beat on the floor in fast, ecstatic rhythm.
Kulwant stood in the doorway, swaying to the music. I didn’t know what he was yet: a pisser or shitter or sweater or spewer. After he was born, I cursed him for not having a larger nose, for not sniveling, for not producing snot. Sometimes I shook him violently and shouted into his face, calling him a series of violent and nasty names. But he always smiled back and dribbled and then laughed revealing perfect gums behind thick and fleshy lips and soon I found I couldn’t continue abusing him. He could be, after all, no worse than me.
I searched through a battered phone book for the international dialing codes to Saudi Arabia and then found the number Bala had scribbled on a yellow pad that lay among various piles of those books he called difficult, porn magazines and political pamphlets. I picked up the heavy black phone from the floor. It was one of those old phones where you actually dialed every number. The slow process always frustrated me. I carried the phone to the open door. Kulwant pressed himself against my leg. The hall was dark except for light leaking through my neighbor’s door frame. From downstairs I heard a woman moaning; I couldn’t tell if she was crying or getting laid. I knew who it was: a young Egyptian who had moved in last month. She spoke little English and when I passed her in the hall, she would turn her head away, hiding a bruised lip or a battered eye. She was about my age and when I first spotted her I developed an immediate sympathy for her; she appeared constantly confused, though when I offered help she backed away and shook her head. I never saw the boyfriend or husband, only heard him berating her in a language I didn’t know. I told myself that I would do something, but courage always fled me. When it gets bad, I thought, because I didn’t know what bad was then. When I told Bala, he would say, “That bastard. I’ll fix him,” but Bala never did anything.
A woman’s voice answered the phone. She spoke in a foreign language. For some moments I was speechless. The last thing I had expected was for someone to actually answer. I did not know what to do or say and I realized I had not prepared to answer a real human voice, as though the whole long process of dialing were to me an act in itself; the inevitable exchange was irrelevant.
Finally, I said, “Mr. Idi Amin?”
She said, “Hold on,” though now with a clear American accent and I was surprised how much those simple words meant to me. I had not heard another American in months.
She came back on the line. “Who are you?”
I was comforted by her voice and wanted to keep her talking. “I read the number in that paper and—”
She cut me off. “You’re one of them.”
“No,” I said, and oddly, I found myself wanting her to be on my side. “It’s not like that.” But I didn’t know what it was like. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
Her tone softened: “You’re an American?”
“Sort of.”
I heard a muffled laugh of understanding. Then from somewhere behind her I heard a voice. It was a man shouting. A deep, bellowing voice calling out in a language I didn’t know.
“Hold on,” she said again, but this time with greater intimacy.
I heard the two of them shouting at each other, and after that her voice again. “You didn’t really want to talk to the boss, did you?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“There’ve been so many like you these last few days. They call for what reason? I don’t get it. He’s just a fat old motherfucker. You should know this. That’s all he is.”
“But . . .” I stopped.
“I don’t know your story but this isn’t the guy you want. Not anymore. Why not just let the fucker die?”
“I didn’t know he lived.”
There was silence after that. I heard the phone being placed onto a hard surface and I heard voices again, now quieter.
Someone picked up the phone and said something with a thick, gruff voice, the kind of voice I imagined a crabby but well-meaning grandfather would have. I said nothing. Then the voice again. It was more demanding now. I didn’t understand the language. It was not the voice I had expected. It was a man’s voice, and somewhere behind him I heard a woman’s subdued laugh. Was that all he was?
Finally I said what I’d meant to say all along, only I hadn’t realized until that moment.
“You great bastard. That’s what my papa calls you. The Great Bastard. I think he’s too nice.”
There was a long silence, then shouting, and finally I dropped the receiver back into the cradle. My hands were shaking.
Downstairs the moaning had traveled out into the hall and I forgot for a moment about Amin and stepped outside to see what was happening. The young Egyptian woman sat on the landing below, squatting against a wall. She was bleeding from a cut slicing down from one eye. Her small body heaved back and forth as she let out low groans of pain and anger. I picked Kulwant up. I could hear a man shouting from inside their apartment and I resolved to go down there immediately. But as I carried Kulwant back inside, I doubled over and fell. Kulwant slipped from my hands and I began to throw up more violently than I had ever done before. I heaved and retched and spat. My insides felt like they were being ripped right out of me. I was on the floor for a good five minutes and a thick pool of my own vomit formed around my hands and knees. Kulwant stood a few feet away, staring at me and grinning.
I turned over and lay on my back. Sick was everywhere. Floating in it were porn magazines and difficult books and political pamphlets and the phone and what few clothes Bala and I owned and Kulwant’s toys and I looked up at the ceiling and breathed in something of my own stink. The music from the party continued to pulse through the walls and I heard Kulwant’s laugh and I looked across at the door to discover him in the arms of the young Egyptian woman. She balanced him with one arm and stood impassively, staring at me with a mixture of curiosity and bewilderment and unabashed need. I could tell she had no idea what to do. I held out my hand so she could help me to my feet. A line of red arced down her cheek. I told her I’d clean the cut up and bandage it. She handed me Kulwant and he giggled as he was passed into my arms and I saw something I had never seen before: the faces of my parents shining in his features. The image lasted only a moment, and then it was gone. I wondered if I was softening.
I led the Egyptian woman to the bathroom. It was down the hall and on the left. Inside, with the door shut, the music was muffled. The mirror was decades old and the backing silver half gone. The only way to get a clear picture of myself was to keep moving.
The Order of Things
IT’S ONLY A GAME, HE SHOUTED, VOICE FADING ON THE wind. Those very words. I could still feel the grip of his fingers where he had held my child’s arm, his hand large, engulfing it, fingers touching at the tips. A line of grey already infected his beard, though a young man, yet even then retired and a national name. His beard tied back into a second, scruffy chin, a pink turban, his eyes on me, Watch the ball, not me, and again his voice, Watch the ball! But I always looked back into his eyes. Why was he here, why wasn’t he out there, where the newspapermen attacked each other for his photograph, where the radio sang his praises, where all India looked to the holy dirt his feet walked on? It’s only a
game, he shouted. They said he had walked with Gandhiji to the sea. They said that he never, not even as a baby, wore anything but homespun. They said that on every corner he passed, an assassin waited—why?—but that divine forces protected him. I launched the cricket ball into the air, and it fell thudding in the hot dirt only a few feet away, a red, undistinguished ball, and he looked at me as though I, personally, had lost Pakistan.
Over thirty years later they found his body in one of the small alleys suffocating the dark streets around the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, the shops crowding into it, the hands of beggars having stripped most possessions from his body, a kirpan, a holy knife, in his gut. I heard this on the BBC World Service, sitting alone—my wife had taken our daughter shopping for a prom dress—in our Berkeley home with its fake English countryside façade. Outside, the automated sprinklers silent in the drought. That year, the lawn died as summer aged. Three days ago, and only now had the news squeezed out of a Punjab under martial law. A month before, Indira Gandhi’s own Sikh bodyguards had murdered her, claiming it as vengeance for the attack she had ordered some months previous on the Golden Temple. Thousands had been killed in that original attack, and thousands more died after the assassination. Anil was Kirpal’s son and my business partner and he celebrated both events, because both, he assured, would show the Sikhs how important it was to have a separate country, to finally rise up and forge a free Khalistan.
But why hadn’t Anil told me of his father’s death? I had spoken to him two days earlier and he had said nothing. I pressed the button on my phone with his name on it. Anil? Anil, I heard, I . . . I don’t know what to say . . . His voice, clear, strong, Yes, yes, I know, the falling sari prices in Pakistan. Have you seen The Wall Street Journal? What? I said, confused. No, Anil bhai, I heard about your father. Kirpalji. Your father. It is terrible news. I am so sorry. And then, my voice revealing a strained but rising frustration, Why didn’t you call and tell me, why did I have to hear this on the radio? Anil was silent, and I could imagine him looking at the telephone, annoyed. He was never one to talk about things like this, never one to give reasons, root out explanations. Finally he said, The funeral was yesterday. They took his ashes and dumped them in the Ganges. His wish, and not the Sutlej as we wanted. For all he did, he was at least a hero of Punjab. They should have thrown his ashes in the Sutlej. Then he added, his voice crisp, unaffected, We are still on for the auction tomorrow? It is important with all that has happened. I protested, Anil, we don’t have to do this.
Good Indian Girls: Stories Page 14