by Amrit Chima
“Just a quick cup,” he nodded as she pulled down a mug and strained the hot tea. “And one for Navpreet, too.”
He took both mugs into the living room and placed one on the table by his sister’s foot. He sat on his father’s hard chair, the only place, aside from the bed, where Manmohan could rest without too much pain.
She reached for her tea. “You are making me late,” she said again.
“It’s Thanksgiving. Everything is closed.” He blew into the steamy mug.
“I have plans.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Just give me a minute to sit. I need to sit here and drink my tea.”
She cautiously took a sip, grimacing as she burnt her tongue.
“I need you to take over my lab shift tomorrow,” he told her. He had recently begun working in Kaiser’s lab, learning the practical application of what he had been studying in school: hematology, microbiology, testing for glucose, cholesterol, drugs, and the condition of heart enzymes. Dr. Levi had been sad to see Darshan dropping shifts in pathology, but nonetheless wrote an impressive recommendation for a full-time job in the lab after graduation. “I could use one full night of sleep.”
“No,” she said. She had still not managed to make an impression on her bosses in the several months that she had been employed in the lab and was more than a little affronted by Dr. Levi’s high regard of her brother, as well as by Darshan’s easy rapport with her direct manager, Dr. Gerard. She had even gone so far as to accuse Darshan of sabotaging her future career in medicine when she saw the recommendation letter on his dresser.
He set his tea on the table. “It will give you an opportunity to work more closely with Gerard.”
She shrugged. “He likes me.”
“He doesn’t know you at all.”
“I spoke with him the other day.”
“How many more favors should I do for you before you help me once? What do any of us have to do for you to give even a little?”
“Did you know that I got accepted into Oxford?” she asked.
He shook his head.
She regarded him coolly. “I got accepted, but you were here so we all had to be here.”
In the silence of that moment, he saw that she was not simply refusing, but that she was enraged by his request, that she hated him for it.
A sudden and loud noise caused her to jump and scream. Darshan turned sharply toward the window at the sound of a collision down on the street, at the cacophony of metal slamming into metal. They both vaulted out of their seats, running to look.
“What was that?” Jai shouted from down the hall.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Darshan cried and bolted down the stairs and outside. His Falcon was shredded against the curb, the engine pressed up into the front window, the vinyl seats twisted and bent in a contorted tangle of chrome and metal paneling.
The driver of the van who had lost control and veered against the line of parked cars along 24th Street moaned and called for help, a cut above his eye bleeding badly.
“Can you get out?” Darshan asked, rushing over to him. He pried the van’s door open and took the man in his arms. “Let’s call someone.”
“How will I get anywhere now?” Navpreet shouted from the apartment above.
A crowd was gathering.
“Hey man,” the driver said groggily, holding a hand to his face as Darshan helped him stand. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
“Don’t worry,” Darshan said, the man’s arm draped around his shoulder. “No one has been seriously hurt. It is not a problem.”
But it was. There, shattered glass and crushed metal pushed right up onto the sidewalk, was the last vestige, the last memory of Darshan’s freedom, the last hope of flight.
Still Swallowed Whole
1970–1972
Family Tree
A massive open-jawed creature had come to Darshan in 1957, burrowing into his imagination, haunting him the whole of that year and far beyond, threatening to engulf him in its great cavernous gut. Death had manifested the creature, the death of a woman whom he had never met. She had known how dangerously close this monster loitered, tentacles extended ominously, brushing against the family, bringing enormous and calamitous consequences upon them all.
Sada Kaur’s existence, the discovery that Baba Singh once had a woman in his life, was a disquieting revelation for Darshan at the age of ten. His grandfather seemed far too remote for such intimacies, so rigid and uncompanionably aloof, which was likely the reason he had locked her away in India, to be unseen and unknown so that none of them would understand him to be only a man.
There had been a kirtan at the main house to honor Sada Kaur’s passing, and seventeen years later Darshan recalled that day as if there was no gap in time between then and now, the hairy shell of the coconut in his palm, the coldness of the mud under his bottom when he sat next to Baba Singh under the house, the slight give of earth as he placed the coconut between them. He could not say why he had believed a coconut would be an appropriate means to express his condolence. From up in the tree, when he saw his grandfather slip away from the kirtan and settle against a stilt under the house, a sudden rush of compassion forced upward from his chest to constrict his throat, making his eyes sting with gratitude. He had experienced it before, though not with any thematic consistency: Livleen’s birth, the happiness of Diwali. And there had been episodes after: the afternoons he watched from his shack as Jai hung the clothing on the main house’s balcony rail to dry, the days his father had been too weak after electroshock therapy to walk unaided to the car, and on the night Mohan was cast out of the house.
“Life will swallow you whole, Darshan,” his grandfather had said that day, planting the first seed of apprehension. “That is what she knew; it is what she told all of us.” Picking up the coconut, he held it out, gauging its weight.
He wandered off soon after, and Darshan had seen him only once more. On the evening before his grandfather’s flight to India, Vikram visited the main house to summon Darshan, saying gently, “If you have a moment, your dada is waiting for you at the farm. He wants a word.” The request, which sounded so capitulating, so unpatriarchal, also had the upsetting quality of a warning.
Baba Singh’s home on the dairy farm was dark, humid like trapped tears. Bending low, his face close, his skin weak and weary, the old man asked his grandson, “You think I will see her again?”
Darshan’s insides twisted with fear. “Should I know?”
“I thought you would.”
“How?”
Baba Singh’s eyes had lost focus, as though he were no longer there in that room. “Because I feel like we have met once before.”
“Dada,” Darshan whispered, his body stiff with terror.
Closing his eyes, Baba Singh smiled weakly, a thin, fatigued smile. “Everything is okay,” he said then, turning away. “You can go.”
Slim legs pumping hard the entire two miles home, Darshan had fled, bruising his right foot because he lost one of his sandals in his haste to get to the safety of his coconut tree, horrified because he understood more than he had been willing to admit.
The sensation of being devoured had always remained with Darshan, a residual impression on his mind like the incandescent outline of an overexposed photo. And now, after so many years, he dreamt of the beast once more. When he woke to the shrill ring of the rotary phone and went to the living room to find Manmohan dropping the receiver gently into its cradle, he was not surprised by what came next. “My father is dead,” Manmohan told the family. “He was seventy-two. He was alone in that house. We should all be very sorry about it.” He slowly rose from his chair and retreated to his bed where he remained for nearly two days, sick and growing older.
~ ~ ~
Manmohan’s mood deteriorated following Baba Singh’s death. His usually quiet severity escalated to impatient and irrational outbursts made worse by the tedium in which his body forc
ed him to live. He snapped cantankerously about the intermittent hot and cold water for his baths, the taste of the city air in his food, the parks that were not green or lush enough, the hills he could not climb and which therefore limited his exploration, the contempt on people’s faces as they stared at him on the streets. He demanded better doctors and medicines and more visits to the East Bay where the Indian population had begun to congeal. He hated the new Ford station wagon that Darshan had bought after graduating from San Francisco State, paid for with more overtime at the lab. When he dropped heavily into the front seat, lacquered wooden cane stretched between his legs, he complained that his body was cramped in the narrow seat and that the window crank was too stiff.
Darshan did his best to sympathize; however, his efforts so contemptuously disparaged, it was challenging to constantly deflect the criticisms, particularly when he had such industrious plans to manage the family’s welfare. He had purchased an apartment complex south of Market on Howard Street in his parents’ names with money he managed to save despite Livleen’s meager contribution and the fact that Navpreet had steadfastly refused to share. Darshan intended to rent out the six units in order to provide a steady income for his parents who were in no physical condition to work, and yet Manmohan refused to accept it.
“No,” his father said as Darshan drove the family to see the building. With a stiff forefinger he violently tapped the bank statement for the account his son had opened for his parents, then furiously held up the property deed. “You did not ask me. You put your mother’s name on everything. I have never done that. I have always taken care of her.”
Darshan glanced through the rearview mirror at Jai who was sitting directly behind him, her expression inscrutable. “It is only a precaution,” he told his father.
“Against what?”
“In the event something happens to you.”
“What will happen?” Manmohan asked.
“You never listen,” Navpreet said from the back, taking her sister’s hand. In the center seat, Livleen stared through the windshield, apparently not paying attention.
“The laws are different here,” Darshan said. “She will not have anyone to protect her if—”
“I will protect her,” Manmohan said, jabbing his cane into the car’s foot well.
Darshan took a breath and nodded. “I know you will, Bapu.” Slowing the station wagon, he parked in front of a considerably derelict building. “I only want you both to be free of worry.”
“This one?” Navpreet asked, looking at the building with angled bay windows and rotted hood moldings. The upper façade was a repulsive sea-foam green that contrasted horribly with the dark red hue of the entrance overhang. The paint was chipped and stained by car emissions, and chunks of molding were missing.
Circling around to the passenger side Darshan tried to help his father out of the car, but Manmohan drew his arm away, struggling with difficulty to get out by himself. When he was on his feet, he surveyed the street, the neglected condition of it, the shifty men on the street corners, the mini-marts run by Chinese and Mexican families, the shallow in the sidewalk leading to the building’s one-car garage littered with stray newspapers, cigarette butts, paper-coated wire-twists, empty soda cans, beer bottles, and wads of black, flattened gum. He wordlessly approached the entrance, deed and bank statement gripped in his fist, waiting for Darshan to unlock the gate. Pushing through, the family trailing after him, he climbed the narrow stairwell coated densely in colorful graffiti.
Assessing the broken light fixture on the first-floor landing, Manmohan guardedly opened a door to one of the units. The worn and grooved hardwood floors inside had been painted the same dark red as the front overhang. A grayish, black strip of dirt was tracked down the long hallway past the two bedrooms and bathroom to the kitchen and living room. Jai opened the kitchen cupboards, releasing a flood of cockroaches that darted into crevices and corners. In the living room, she touched the yellow-orange tobacco residue on the walls with her forefinger, disgusted by its stickiness. The bathtub and toilet were crusted with body dirt and oils, and the linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom had large holes, the glue once used to hold it down now flaking off. Livleen curiously opened the rear door to a back staircase that led to a small yard below, but Darshan stopped her before she stepped outside. “The stairs aren’t safe,” he told her. “We will have to rebuild them.”
“We do not belong here,” Manmohan told Darshan, stopping in the front bedroom to look out onto the loud and heavy Howard Street traffic.
“It is not for us to live, Bapu. It is only for money.”
Jai pulled her chuni up over her hair and gathered her heavier shawl more tightly about her shoulders. His mother appeared small to him now, but she had been so big in Darshan’s memories. She had never shied away from hard work, aggressively attacking the projects set before her, systematically accomplishing everything asked of her without complaint, still energized when everyone else had collapsed with exhaustion. Darshan had always attributed the success of the mill and their family’s prosperity in Fiji to Manmohan. Now, seeing an absence of the strength he had always taken for granted in his mother, he understood that it had not been his father. It had been her, beneath him, holding him up. As he glanced from his mother to his sick, bent father, he understood her fatigue. Manmohan, in this new country, was now a heavier burden.
“It is ours. It is everything we have,” Darshan told his father, who would not pull his eyes from the street below.
Formerly the refined residence of intellectuals and professionals who dined and entertained in splendidly decorated rooms lit by gas lamps, over the decades the apartments had eventually been laid waste by alcoholics, chain smokers, and aging couples too feeble to care for them. The building’s seventy-five-year-old Victorian spirit had been lost under layers of grime and thick piles of garbage. Upon inspection it was officially deemed hazardous, and the old and decayed apartments were hit hard with city code work, overwhelming the family with more labor than initially anticipated and requiring Darshan to continue working overtime to pay for more supplies and materials. The building, still outfitted with gas lighting, would need modern heaters, which would require complex and wall-invasive electrical work. They would need to re-floor, entirely replace weak walls as well as unsafe windows, reinforce the front stairwell, and erect scaffolding to repaint the exterior and change the window hoods and moldings that threatened to come loose and fall to the sidewalk.
Little by little, however, spending his free time renovating the units, Darshan began to develop an affection for the building as the family restored some of its old charm, reconstructing the back staircase, exterminating the cockroaches, scrubbing the insides with bleach and industrial kitchen soaps, repainting, and clearing away the years of accumulated trash. In his mind, Ranjit was somehow linked to this place. He had been here, had stood across the street in the fog, wistfully watching the warm, yellow-lighted windows as children were tucked safely into bed, their parents extinguishing candles before sinking into their own blissful dreams, hoping that one day he would be free enough in this world to call this place his own.
It was difficult work, in particular for Jai. With Darshan and Livleen’s help, she handled her tasks—chiefly cleaning—with as much fortitude as she had done all things in her life, but now far more wearily, which made Darshan uneasy. On her knees, scrubbing claw-foot bathtubs, she appeared normal and as industrious as ever. But she was too quiet, no longer contentedly humming the Punjabi folk songs Darshan remembered her humming while working. And she was dangerously unsteady on her feet, often stumbling over one of the many stray nails lying around the units, staggering after landing too hard in a pavement dip on her way to the store, or lurching forward when one of her slip-on shoes came loose. Her surroundings seemed to have become irrelevant. As if there was no point any longer in paying attention to the world around her, she simply floundered through it.
“What can I do for her?” Darshan asked
Elizabeth. He had not been able to sleep and had gone to see his girlfriend, to be reassured, to be told as she always told him that no problem was without its solution, without its measure of hope.
The smell of eggs in butter filled her apartment as she scrambled them in a pan with a spatula. “What was that?” she asked, sprinkling some salt over the eggs.
“My mother isn’t well,” he told her again.
Turning off the stove, she scraped the eggs onto a plate, shook some pepper over them, and sat on a floor cushion by the coffee table. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, taking a bite. The eggs still too hot, she waved a hand in front of her open mouth.
He frowned. “Elizabeth, I don’t know what to do.”
She set her plate on the table and placed the fork next to it with a dull click of metal on wood. She laced her fingers together around one knee. “Was there something in particular you wanted me to say about it?”
“Why are you so angry with me?”
“You haven’t even said hello.”
“I did.”
“No, you didn’t. It’s been over a week since I last heard from you, and you didn’t even say hello.” She picked up her fork and tried another bite.
Darshan sank to the floor beside her, pressing his forefingers into his eyelids. “I did not mean to ignore you. Or Stewart. If you knew what kind of person my mother was, you would understand.”
“But I don’t,” Elizabeth said, regarding her eggs with disinterest.
~ ~ ~
The sun was warm on the pavement outside Howard Street, but the cool Bay air cut into Darshan’s skin, intensifying his agitation. Elizabeth’s hand was clammy in his as he helped her out of Stewart’s Chevy. Tersely returning her smile, feeling pressured to bring her into the Toor fold, he gently pried her fingers loose to help his friend unload supplies from the bed of the truck. He lifted the tools mechanically, their weight straining his arms, stretching his tendons downward as he thought of his father waiting unaware upstairs, of the ruthless expectations that no son could ever hope to fulfill, of his own pitiful desire to fulfill them.