by Amrit Chima
It was written in the scribble of a man who had been annoyed when writing it: “Your son failed to attend classes today. His marks, as you are aware, need serious improvement. I do not think he is studying at all. If there is some family matter that requires Mohan’s absence or that is affecting his progress, please keep me informed as I cannot plan for his best interests without this information.”
Manmohan flung the note aside. “That boy must hate me,” he said, slapping the table with his palm.
They waited over an hour, sitting stiffly in the kitchen. Neither spoke, saving their words, their lips pressed into knife slits. They knew Mohan would come home, eventually. If it were something awful, they would have heard about it from the neighbors. It was a small island.
Darshan tugged at Manmohan’s leg once, wanting to be lifted, but Manmohan did not respond. Jai gestured the boy over.
Without warning, the front door swung violently inward, banging against the wall. Their Hindu neighbor Mr. Ram Seth entered the house, eyes wild with outrage. Raising his fist he shouted, “Your son is a misfit troublemaker!”
He shoved Mohan roughly inside by the shirt collar. “I do not want him near my son again.”
“What happened, ji?” Jai asked.
“They got into an accident,” Mr. Seth screamed. “On that stupid motorcycle of yours. They did not know what they were doing! Narain was almost killed. Don’t you watch your children?”
Manmohan nodded, not betraying his surprise, his face still hard. “I am sorry, ji. I did not know. We will talk with him.”
“You should have known,” Mr. Seth said, pivoting on his heel. He yanked the doorknob, slamming the door on his way out.
There was silence.
With a loud groan on the linoleum, Manmohan pushed his chair back and stood with deliberate slowness. He approached his son who was rocking unsteadily in the archway that separated the living room from the kitchen. Glancing around vacantly, Mohan smiled foolishly. There was a gash on his cheek.
Manmohan sniffed. Alcohol, potent like a spilled bottle. He grabbed the boy roughly by the chin and bent forward to smell his mouth. Grimacing, he pushed Mohan away.
“I have seen you drink, Bapu,” his son said, indignant.
Manmohan grabbed him violently by the arm. “Not like this!”
Jai coolly examined Mohan’s cut. “He seems fine.”
“It is not so bad,” Mohan replied, his speech slurred.
“What happened to the Seth boy?” she asked. “Is he all right?”
“Narain?” Mohan chuckled. “He is fine. Fine, fine, fine.”
Jai dabbed at his cut with a cloth and he waved her away. “Bapu, I had to try it.” He staggered then caught his balance, suddenly smiling. “We did it! We fixed the old thing! There is something I can do right!” He laughed.
“Stop it,” Manmohan said sharply. “What is wrong with you?”
Mohan stopped laughing, and his eyes grew very large as he considered the question. “I do not know, Bapu.”
“Get yourself together.”
“It rides nicely,” Mohan said. “It was perfect. Although we did not get very far.” He pointed toward the street, stumbling backwards.
At this Manmohan snatched up his truck keys and went out. He found the motorcycle in a ditch at the bottom of the hill, just before the road turned into Suva. Using the two-by-eight ramp of wood he always kept in the back to heave up large crates from the docks, he rolled the bike onto the truck bed. One of the motorcycle’s side mirrors had broken off, and there was a deep dent in the fuel tank. At home, he chained the bike to one of the tarpaulin shed’s wooden posts. And for good measure, he kicked it, watching it wobble on its kickstand.
He went inside to discover Mohan had passed out in his room.
Idiocy, Manmohan thought, winding up the gramophone, turning the handle quickly, releasing his rage. The Duke was still on the table and he placed the needle on Dusk.
“Bapa,” a small voice said from behind him.
“It’s Bapuuu,” Manmohan replied, looking down at Darshan.
“Haaaan,” Darshan said. Yes. It was his first word, and he used it for everything.
“Come,” Manmohan said, his anger subsiding, leaving behind the dull pain of disillusionment. He lifted the three-year-old into his arms and went to the couch. Darshan’s breath smelled like cumin seeds. The boy touched his father’s beard with a small, clammy hand.
They stayed there for a while, and soon Darshan was sleeping. Manmohan listened to The Duke until the very end. When the gramophone quieted, he put his son to bed and locked up the cabinet radio, ignoring the growling of his stomach. He had not eaten dinner.
Jai was still awake when he brought the gramophone into their bedroom. She said nothing, but watched as he opened the closet door and tucked the machine away, followed by the key to the radio and a box containing his LP collection, Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra on the top.
He did not touch his music for the next two years.
And he did not touch the bike, either. It developed a rash of orangey-red that spread like a disease. The overhead tarpaulin collected pools of water until it finally tore and collapsed under the weight. For the next twenty-four months, it covered the bike like a shroud.
~ ~ ~
There was a great deal for which to be grateful. Manmohan had only to look at the accomplishments of his life, at the course on which he had so resolutely stayed in order to make something of himself. He had been waking long before dawn, sleepily strapping on his watch that told him he had eternities. It took two more years of diligence, of backbreaking labor to sustain the family dairy trade, of sweat and grit, of animal waste and patience, holding his tongue while Satnam did nothing and Baba Singh loved him anyway.
It had, however, been worth it. In Veisari, not far from the farm, there was a lumber mill once run by a family who had since returned to India, and now it was his, the fully operational business smoothly transitioned into his possession. He had already hired help, a few Hindus and also Onkar, an old villager from Barapind. He had already bought two Caterpillars, another World War II truck from Junker Singh, two flatbeds to haul wood across the island, and new machinery to treat felled logs transported from his several acres of backland to the mill where he would treat them in his kiln. Because the need for lumber was steady but not excessive, the business was valued as only moderately lucrative, as Baba Singh had noted several times since Manmohan signed the Fijian government’s one-hundred-year lease. Nonetheless, it was his, “as long as he could still contribute on the farm,” his father had told him.
Manmohan had built a sprawling new house in the lumber mill’s circular clearing, the entirety of it raised up on stilts to protect it from the lowland’s regular tropical flooding, with five bedrooms, a living room, as well as a room for his ever-growing book collection. The kitchen was magnificently large and sensibly arranged with abundant counter space and a walk-in pantry where Jai had already begun to store dried dhal, sundry condiments, spices, pots and pans, flour for roti, and medicines. He had even built furniture to fill the house: cabinets; tables; bed frames; chairs; shelves for curios, for his books, and for clothing.
Yet, wandering through his emptied and already-sold house in Tamavua, his sandaled heels scraping gently on the linoleum, Manmohan found that although he had so assiduously sought a means to assert his independence and successfully achieved it in every logistical sense, now living and breathing a business wholly his own, he could not help wondering if he had made a mistake.
Baba Singh seemed to believe so. Out in the jungle, removed from Tamavua’s westernized housing and lamp-lit streets, their new home in Veisari was dramatically different. In the jungle, the Toor family would now live a life more similar to that of the village in India. No central plumbing, they would instead use an outhouse. An electric generator buzzed nearby, but it only supplied electricity to the mill in order to operate the kiln and saws. The house itself had no power source.
Jai would need to cook by the heat of wood-burning ovens, and when it grew dark she would need to light the grounds and rooms with candles and lanterns. After listening to Baba Singh’s disappointingly reasonable argument that they had come to Fiji for a life of modernity and opportunity, he wondered about her reaction to their changed circumstances. Despite his doubts, however, she seemed truly happy with the transition, returned to a life with which she was most familiar, an Indian life.
He let his eyes roam the nakedness of his Tamavua bedroom, stopping at the closet where he once stored his police uniform, which had collected a layer of dust in all the years he had not touched it; where he had once kept his leather boots; where he had hidden away his gramophone, his LPs, and the key to the cabinet radio. He had tried so often to shut the music out of his mind, yet he still sometimes craved it, which was why he had not thrown anything away, why it was all tucked up in the rafters of the mill house where he now stored all things forbidden: the plywood box, unlabeled bottles of alcohol used for medicinal purposes, and the old knickknacks from India that reminded him of happier times. It sometimes seemed excessive to him, to shut the music out entirely, but then he thought of Mohan’s rebellious nature, his blatant whip-like contempt these past two years, his voice full of acid, his son, who should adore him without question.
Mohan was probably somewhere with his friends now, lounging on the beach, drowning in beer or rum. That first taste he had the night he ran off with the motorcycle had not been his last. He and his friends lapped it up like dogs, tripping over themselves, hooting clownishly, listening to the transistor radio they stole from Manmohan’s truck before he had a chance to bring it inside. Manmohan had seen them once, had crept to the edge of the beach behind the mangroves to watch. He had never seen Mohan so uninhibited, his head thrown back in the throes of laughter. It looked like joy.
Manmohan had taken revenge for the stolen radio, for the hours of amusement it had afforded when at home he had prohibited such revelry. Last year when Fiji Airways had announced it would land the first jetliner on the island, marking 1951 as the first time the country had ever seen such a massive commercial airliner, Manmohan had refused to let Mohan go. He went alone on the three-hour drive across the island to Nadi airport. He stared at the apron through the chain link fence with all the other onlookers, at the whitewashed stone paths connecting the apron to the terminal, watching defiantly as the plane landed, forcing his eyes to swallow up the entirety of it, taking in the details and storing them away, remembering every second of what he had forbidden Mohan to see. But it was foolish. He discovered later that Mohan had gone with Narain.
He poked his head into the other emptied bedrooms, checking for anything left behind, and then he went to the living room where the discolored squares of paint on the walls indicated where the family portraits had once hung. The photos were the only items left unpacked in the new house. He had not allowed Jai to hang them. He was considering new pictures, the old ones imbued with too much history.
He went outside, glancing at the two tarpaulin-covered, rusted motorcycles parked across from his cucumber garden. Junker Singh had been devastated when he saw the second bike. “At least tell me it was an offering to God. That I can understand, ji, because God would be most impressed with her.”
The tarpaulin rustled, and a movement caught Manmohan’s eye. A small head with a topknot of hair peeked out from under the tarpaulin. “Oi!” he called. “I can see you.”
The small head quickly ducked down.
“Boy, I said that I can see you,” Manmohan called. “What are you doing out here? You are supposed to be in the truck with your mother.”
Darshan stood. He was a gangly five-year-old, too tall for his age, arms sheepishly clasped behind his back. “I was just checking, Bapu,” he said. “I don’t want to leave anything behind.”
“Is your sister with you?”
Darshan glanced guiltily down behind the canvas. “She was helping.”
Peering over, Manmohan found his two-year-old daughter Navpreet covering her head with her arms. She did not move.
Darshan tapped her shoulder. “He can see you.”
She slowly lowered her arms and looked up, her eyes wide. “No,” she said.
Manmohan squatted next to one of the wooden posts that had once held up the tarpaulin bike shop and beckoned his children over. “Come around here.”
They approached slowly, Navpreet petulant. “Do as you are told,” he said. “Get in the truck. We do not live here any longer.”
Navpreet hugged the post and began to cry. Manmohan felt that she cried quite a lot. He loosened her grip from the post, prying her fingers off, and she screamed and pounded her fists into his chest as he carried her away. “No, no, no, no.”
“Is this the only word you know?” he muttered, tucking her under his arm like a rolled-up carpet while she continued to flail. “Darshan, let’s go.”
Jai was already waiting in the truck, holding their infant daughter Livleen. Scooting over on the bench seat, she made room for them all. Released, Navpreet crawled to her mother, and without warning pinched the baby.
“Enough!” Jai said, slapping Navpreet’s hand.
Darshan squeezed in next to his sister, and she leaned against his shoulder as Manmohan steered away from the curb, his mood sour.
They arrived at the mill shortly after. As Manmohan entered the clearing and navigated his way toward the house past a row of tamarind trees, he sensed Jai stiffen. Beyond the trees he saw Mohan waiting at the top of the staircase by the house’s main entrance, wearing a turban. Manmohan wondered with a stab of regret who had taught him to tie it.
Pulling to a stop, Manmohan jumped out of the truck onto the soil, soft from the recent rain. Appraising the house momentarily, Manmohan then crossed the clearing and climbed the stairs. On his way inside, he nodded curtly at his son and said, “Come to steal something?”
“I thought I should be here today.”
“I do not see how it matters,” Manmohan replied, noticing several empty boxes stacked just inside the main entrance. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust after the bright sunshine outside, and then he saw the family photos he had not wanted to unpack. Next to the black velvet scroll map of Fiji was one of the pictures he hated most, that unsmiling image of himself standing between Satnam and Vikram who seemed so much more relaxed than he.
In another photo he was seated next to Jai on one of the wooden chairs on Tamavua’s backyard patio. In another, he was with his father, on opposites sides of a cow. Some were more recent, shots of Navpreet and Darshan in the cucumber garden, and of them playing games in the living room. The shots of him and Mohan working on the bike were missing, which fueled Manmohan’s anger. A person could not simply cancel out their wrongs by excluding them. And then he saw the one he hated most, the only photo of his dead son, hanging above the couch just like it had in Tamavua, that smiling three-year-old face.
“What is all this?” Manmohan asked, pointing at the walls.
“I thought it would make things feel more like home,” Mohan replied.
“Why aren’t you out with your friends?”
“You never told me about this place. I did not want to be left behind.”
His son appeared so sincere, Manmohan almost believed him. “I wanted to wait, to decide for myself what stays and what goes,” he said, pulling Darshan’s photo off the wall. “I did not want to see all this, all these stupid mistakes and bad memories. I did not ask you to do this.”
He abruptly left the room to go to the kitchen. There was a ladder against the far wall. He moved it under the entrance to the rafters and climbed up, pushing the door in. The plywood box was off to the left. He dragged it close, opened it and shoved the picture inside, slamming the lid down tight, pressing the latch in firmly.
Mohan was still in the living room when he returned, his head hung as he began to remove the photos from the wall.
“Leave them,” Manmohan told him. “
But add the others, the ones you did not hang, the ones of us.”
Mohan stopped, his hand suspended near one of the frames he was about to take down.
“And stay,” Manmohan told him, his voice stiff, “if you mean it, if you really do not want to be left behind.”
~ ~ ~
Later that year in July, for perhaps four days, the island was suffocated by humidity unmatched in all the fourteen years Manmohan had been in Fiji. Logging slowed somewhat. He had pulled a number of employees from their lumberjack duties to haul water in the World War II trucks to the backlands to ensure no one fainted of heat exhaustion or dehydration. Conditions inside the mill were so unbearable because of the added warmth generated by the kiln that they had to shut it down. Yet, Manmohan did not want to risk halting operations entirely, so the loggers continued to log and fresh tree trunks piled up in the mill’s clearing because they could not be processed.
Bathing was pure futility. He did not have the energy to carry water from the river to the bath chamber upstairs and pour it in the aluminum tub. But this did not matter. He was always wet anyway. After bathing he could not get dry. And Jai fed everyone cold, leftover curries without roti because she refused to start the oven. During the day, the children retreated to the river to play, but in the evenings they barely moved, lounging about in the main house living room, limp like ragdolls.
“Why doesn’t it rain?” Mohan asked desperately, pointing at the dark clouds above the jungle while holding Livleen. She had been sleeping all morning, her head sweaty, her hair matted.
Manmohan watched as Mohan gently wiped the baby’s face before giving her to Jai. Ever since he had chosen to stay with the family, Mohan made Manmohan decidedly uncomfortable—and suspicious—with his newfound and determined loyalty, with his many contributions to the mill and his affection for Darshan and the girls.
Glancing out the window, he replied, “It should come very soon.” The sky was nearly black, but nothing stirred. He closed his eyes. Day four had undone them. He felt beaten and drowsy. There had been nothing left to do but wait, so he finally succumbed and shut everything down before midday. The family had gathered in the house for lunch, but their plates of cold food were scattered about the floor, untouched.