“I am—” she said and stopped.
“You are a greedy, ignorant American. You are a tourist to us, that is all.”
At first she thought Spohr’s voice had caused the water in the glasses to ripple, but slowly the sound of chanting protestors funneled through the open windows. They screamed a child’s rhyme about money, greed, and thieves—colonize, monopolize, despotize—and no one in the conference room spoke as the chant grew louder. Spohr folded his arms over his stomach and nodded to Narayanan and Hinduja, as if some truth had finally slipped into their ears this morning from the refrains of the street. Something happened as Madi sat there waiting for the parade to pass. She knew she had spoken too broadly about India, had written the colonels off as narrow-minded complainers who couldn’t grasp the larger picture, one she had worked so hard for so many years to shade in. She felt her lips go cold and her eyes sting, a tremor of doubt slipping up into her brain like a splinter. What was the larger picture? What was this money doing for the people of Bangalore? Who did she think she had been helping? What is a remote outsource service doing in India in the first place?
“We are not politicians,” she said to break the silence, her voice shaking at the truth of her own words. “We are not responsible for the burdens of the poor. We have to look at the numbers. That’s what our investors ask of us.”
“Gentlemen,” Marcus interceded. “I will be in Bangalore next week. Madi will remain here to work on the problems from this end. The temperature is rising fast, but we can keep it from boiling over on all of us.” Madi nodded her head compliantly, as she realized that Marcus had just cut her from partaking in the larger picture, her trip to meet the prime minister, the glorious moment she had envisioned as a crowning achievement for a lifetime of brilliant work.
THE MEETING ENDED ten minutes later, and Madi did not speak another word. As Marcus shook hands with the three colonels, she fled to her office. Marcus followed her a minute later, his head shaking in reproach.
“You were out of line,” he said coldly, and she forced herself to stare at him because she knew if she were being watched she wouldn’t cry. “Emotions don’t help the situation. While I’m gone on this trip, I want you to think about your role in this company. It shouldn’t be personal. If it’s personal, then you’re going to be of no future assistance in keeping this project grounded.” He turned and walked out, slamming the door behind him.
Standing alone in the hush of her office, she avoided the photograph of her father. Project and company and situation. What empty distant words these were to describe a whole country of people whom she thought she had been helping by delivering jobs from overseas. Of course it was personal, just as the hate letters she received daily on her desk from angry Americans were filled with personal slurs. Madi stood frozen at the side of her desk, unable to sit down in her chair. What was she then, dressed half in a sari, half in trousers, not here and not there?
She looked around her office as if inspecting it for the first time. The walls, the carpet, even the files arranged neatly in a rack, were all beige. The color of nothing, she thought. Of nowhere. The yellow tulips Marcus had sent her were dead and withered on the windowsill. She fought a shiver and tried to breathe, but there was only beige air in a beige room that floated like an obscenely bland bubble twelve flights above the ground. She suddenly felt like her fingers had been touching nothing for the last six years: not a billion people, not even a single one. Impulsively she grabbed the vase of dead flowers and carried it with her as she careened through the lobby, desperate for the wet, fresh air of the street. She took the elevator down and exited through the revolving doors, thankful for the last drops of rain that fell on her face and hands.
The protest march had vanished as quickly as it had materialized. The sunlight guttered through the nearby construction sites and filled her face and eyes. Madi searched through her purse for her sunglasses while holding the vase at her hip. Maybe she wasn’t one of them. Maybe she was just what they said, an American getting rich while farmers killed themselves in front of nightclubs in some country she had only imagined she could call her own.
She tried to think where Raj might be at this hour on a Friday. Raj would talk sense to her. Her older brother would remind her of a place she inhabited beyond the terminal beige of an office tacked in foreign investment strategies. “Do I have to remind you that we’re from Florida and we’re Sikh not Hindu and you used to swim for a high school team called the Bald Eagles?” Raj had once asked her. Yes, she should have answered. Yes, she needed to be reminded of that. She pictured the long docks in the Keys with her father standing on the wood planks drinking a Budweiser with his powder-blue turban wrapped across his forehead.
Madi took tired steps toward the street corner. Maybe next week she would fly back home for a day or two and force Raj to come, because he would have to go with her, she would need him with her to see their family.
She breathed deeply, as she watched the crosswalk light change.
Yes, she wanted Florida, the yellow palms and the morning surf that brought in the reef air and her father in his tiny apartment praying the Guru Granth Sahib and maybe even her mom, sucking on Newports in the house they had grown up in. Raj would come. They could stop fighting for a weekend. They would be good kids again. India could be fixed when she got back.
She stepped into the street, slipping the sunglasses over her nose, and heard tires gunning over the cobblestones. One look, a dirty sparkling windshield framed in blue, going the wrong way. Madi only had time to straighten her back, her hands dropping the glass vase and reaching out as if to pull someone back who was walking away.
The car struck her, tossing her out of her shoes and slamming her against its hood. Her limp body slid over the left bumper as the car lurched to a stop. She was dead two minutes after she landed on the wet cement of the street.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO
THIS IS HOW William was supposed to go: flying across the map of America, one blue cell traveling the arteries of the Eisenhower Interstate System, first south and then west. He was supposed to be a man living one page of the atlas at a time, gunning the motor, memorizing the number of the next off-ramp. He accelerates, stays in the far left lane, and sets the cruise control to seventy. At fill-up stations, he chooses self-service, grabs a bathroom key attached to a piece of particle board from the attendant, and, in a buzzing Dairy Farmers outside of Farragut, Tennessee, buys a discount cassette tape of Princess Stephanie singing “Live Your Life.”
He was supposed to follow the West Express to I-78 and then merge onto I-40 South, passing Knoxville rodeos and strip mall water parks. He flows down I-75, the Mississippi of highways, and threads through Chattanooga on the straight shot to Birmingham. From there, it’s a slingshot right, fighting the western sun until darkness races past the blue Cressida. Baton Rouge foams in the distance like a fallen meteor. The gulf sparkles. Dust halos ragweed. The moon glows the exit signs all the way through the suburbs of Houston.
He was supposed to be building a rhythm, becoming a loose blur, burning fuel without leaving tracks. The flat pink boom of Texas skies. The Cressida devours the blacktop as he sings “Live Your Life” until he knows it by heart and tosses the cassette into a trashcan near the Salado Junction. He creeps through a surprise border check on the outskirts of El Paso and disappears into Tucson. Phoenix is a mirage of locked liquor stores and hitchhikers who have given up on their thumbs. He shoots through the desert at dawn, blasts the radio into coyote country, does eighty through Twentynine Palms, catches I-10 for a few more miles, before he steers the car into the baked, stalled traffic of Los Angeles and, just beyond it, the sea. Four days on the road, and he would have been out there. He would be crashing in Laurel Canyon with friends who went out years ago to rent pool houses with sofa beds that open up for him. He would have been guilty of nothing worse than car theft, for which he knew in his heart Quinn would never file charges. Four days flashed thro
ugh his mind in four minutes.
William never got out of New Jersey.
He checked into a motel off the West Express, parking the Cressida in the back lot between two dumpsters. He tried not to look at the damage as he struggled out of the driver’s seat, but he could see the fat dent in the hood, the broken blinker, a warp in the front bumper with pieces of red fabric caught in its splintered plastic. His hands shook as he signed the motel registry under the name Joseph Guiteau.
“Do you have ID?” the scrawny teenage girl asked, her mouth gumming a piece of banana, her eyes freezing on him. In the room behind her, a television flashed the five o’clock news.
“What? No,” he groused. “I don’t. I’m only staying a night or two.”
She managed a hard swallow and gave a flirtatious grin.
“That’s fine. I trust you. Just pay up front. We got a fun ’80s night at the bar next door. You should come if you got nothing else to do.”
He tried to smile as he took the key, but he just made it out into the parking lot before he vomited, twisting down on one knee with a hand pressed against the cement as his stomach unloaded yellow acid. William didn’t wait for more convulsions. He sprinted down the walkway to room six, unlocked the door, bolted it behind him, shut the curtains, and collapsed across the bed.
William pushed his fingers into his closed eyes, producing a constellation of red stars, but he still saw her, he still felt the impact with his entire body. Suddenly, a dark-skinned woman in red silk and black hair appeared just beyond the windshield in all of that blinding Manhattan sunlight. He had slammed the brakes and watched as her body slid off the hood. He wished he had stopped, wished he had jammed the emergency brake, jumped from the car, called 911, made sure her eyes still focused and her wrist held a pulse, but he hadn’t. Some instinct had taken control of his right leg and applied the gas, slowly at first, like he was trying to find a place to park, and then, as he looked back in the rearview mirror and saw no one on the street crowding around her, sped faster, his foot more attentive to the movement of the car, turning right at the next intersection. Seeing the green light on the corner, he went through it, and then through the next one, green, and then the Holland Tunnel, a big black exit hole in the earth, with two black policewomen in yellow reflector vests waving him underground.
William jerked over onto his back, but he couldn’t slow the panic. His right leg kicked wildly like it was caught in a rope. “FUCK,” he screamed into the fingers that covered his mouth. He tried to take account of his crimes. He hadn’t stolen a car, because he hadn’t gotten out of the East Coast. He had driven the wrong way down a Tribeca street. An accident. He had hit some woman who had run out of nowhere just to collapse on his hood. An accident. One minute earlier or one minute later and it wouldn’t have happened. An accident. Driving off was an accident too, fight or flight, which seemed to him now like the same exact thing. He lurched forward off the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed. The room was purring in the white noise of an air-conditioning unit on low. Trucks rumbled the light fixture on the ceiling. He stared at his reflection in the blackened television set bolted to its stand, and he tried not to think of her in the emergency room, tried not to think of the broken legs or the fractured arm or the split tongue that could barely articulate the description of the car and/or driver to a bedside of police detectives.
If he sat still, maybe he could think clearly. But his muscles were tweaking, his shoulders bunching up and then his arms flailing uncontrollably. He moved to the window and pushed the curtain aside. The sun was setting. Cars drove by so quickly. The sky was pink over the abandoned gas station across the street.
“Hi, Quinn,” he said after the beep. “Just wanted to let you know I got upstate okay. I’ll see you in a couple of days. It’s beautiful up here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE
JOSEPH TURNED ON his cell phone as he left Aleksandra’s hotel room. In the elevator down, he listened to a message five hours old. “Madi’s gone,” Del said. Her voice sounded so distracted and uncertain, so lost in the air space, he knew immediately to read her words for their worst meaning. “I’m going to see Raj,” she told him. “I don’t know what to say.” He tried to call her but got no answer. He tried three more times but she didn’t pick up.
He took a cab to their apartment, asking the driver to hurry. Night lit up midtown, and they sat in its stalled traffic. When he reached home it was after ten. He opened the door to find the apartment dark. Joseph ran through the rooms turning on the lights, but he already knew he wouldn’t find her there. Her purse was open on the kitchen table with its makeup spilled on the floor. The faucet in the bathroom was running. A record skipped on the record player. The clues to panic were everywhere, and now, Joseph was here, too, ready to console her. But Del didn’t come home that night.
CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR
THE POLICE HAD called him to identify the body. Madi stored his number twice on her phone, once under his name and a second time under “emergency contact.” Raj stood in the cold hospital basement and when he looked, her skin was wiped white, as if her whole body had been scrubbed, and her lips were blue. But he had already known by the shape of the body under the sheet. He had already known because she was the only person on the planet who stored his number under “emergency contact.”
“It’s her.”
“Do you need to sit down, sir?” the supervisor asked, lifting a hand over Raj’s shoulder and leaving it to levitate there, as if knowing that a touch can either encourage or shatter whatever strength remained.
“No.”
He called his mother from the hospital. She screamed into the receiver, her voice pleading with him to take back the news. She wouldn’t get off the phone, not until he promised to take it all back. After fifteen minutes of his mother weeping into his ear, he asked if she would phone his father. He couldn’t tell him, he couldn’t say “Madi’s dead” again to another parent.
As Raj walked outside and drifted down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, his whole body stiffened as he imagined, at that very moment, his father finding out that his favorite child was gone. He wished it had been him instead of her, and it occurred to him suddenly like absolute logic that he could be the dead child for his father and Madi could be the one lost for his mom: splitting the burden, sharing the responsibility, sparing each parent the loss of their favorite. That was the kind of ludicrous proposition that only he and Madi would think up. But there was no Madi. There had been Madi up until an hour ago, and now there wasn’t. There was only Raj.
The thought of leaving her on that table in the hospital basement barreled through him, and he swerved on the sidewalk to lean against a brick wall surrounded by outdoor tables. He careened around two couples eating plates of spaghetti and pressed his head against the wall of the restaurant. Raj expected tears to come, but they didn’t. He returned to the sidewalk, knocking against one of the tables, and started up the street.
An hour later he found himself standing at his own doorstep, not remembering a single second of the walk home. He called Del. “Madi was killed by a car this afternoon. The driver didn’t stop. She was gone by the time the ambulance arrived. No way of knowing . . . ” He meant “no way of knowing if she had suffered any pain.” Or maybe he meant “no way of knowing what to do now.” Or “no way of knowing anything.”
Del didn’t wait for clarification. She said she was on her way.
She met him on his doorstep after running down the sidewalk with her eyes swollen, her teeth gritted, her arms out at her sides like her muscles had frozen, unwilling to touch anything, even herself, until she first touched him. Del hugged him so tightly that her fingers yanked his hair, a shot of pain that he hoped would wake him up. To anyone else on the street, they could have passed for two lovers reuniting after a long separation. They went up to his apartment not touching again for a while. Del sat on the couch, crying against her knees, while Raj stood by the window, then by the desk holding hi
s stomach, and then in the hallway biting his nails.
“No,” Del murmured, her face crumpled in pain. “This wouldn’t have happened to her. She’s too careful. That’s one of the things I can never stand about her. She looks both ways. She’d never let anything hit her.” She rubbed her left eye with her palm and gulped on mucus. “The driver didn’t even stop? If he’d stopped, maybe he could have—”
“He didn’t stop,” Raj said quietly, unsure if she even heard him from the other end of the hall. He waited for Del to ask what Madi’s injuries were, the shattered pelvis, the broken breastbone, the damage to the internal organs, the horizontal gash on her left cheek, but she didn’t, and he was thankful.
“What did the police say?” she asked instead. “Do they have any leads? I can’t believe there isn’t a video camera, or an eyewitness, someone who wrote down a license plate. I mean, what kind of city is this?”
He walked over and sat on the arm of the couch. He placed his hand on her shoulder to steady her shaking.
“Please, Del. I don’t care about the driver right now. What’s important is I can’t get her back.”
She made tea at midnight, dragging the leaves through the hot water, and spooned honey into two cups. She placed the cups on his desk, but neither of them touched the tea. Del turned off the lamp, and the blue floodlight of a boat turning on the Hudson River trailed across the walls, coloring their faces and then leaving them in the dark. Raj could hear her phone vibrating in her pocket, but she didn’t reach to answer it. They crawled into bed together in their clothes and shoes, and Del wept into the pillow.
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