by Mira Jacob
Dimple, standing in Amina’s bedroom in a towel, bony-shouldered and frazzled with excitement. Bala running down the driveway with flowers so that the Roys would not enter the property without something of beauty to welcome them. Thomas and Chacko, heads bent over the fuse box, trying to figure out what had tripped the outage in the back half of the house. Kamala sprinkling more chili powder into Raj’s sambar while he looked in the fridge. Sanji, sneaking a cigarette out on the Stoop because “What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?”
Later, there would be the arrival of the Roys, Sajeev shaking hands with Chacko at last, the fumbling of rings, the dinner. Prince Philip would make off with a leg of tandoori, Chacko and Dimple would have the pined-for father-daughter dance, and Amina and Thomas would join in at the end, at the beckoning of the others.
At nine o’clock, just when it looked like the Roys were getting ready to announce their departure for their hotel, Amina put on “At Last” and waited for it to work its magic. It did not disappoint. Couple by couple went to the dance floor until all five were dancing. Sanji and Raj clung to each other, exhausted, while the Roys floated by. Dimple and Sajeev swayed, her head tucked firmly under his chin. Bala kept talking to everyone, no matter which way Chacko turned her. Kamala and Thomas barely moved, foreheads pressed together, hands clasped around each other’s waist. Amina stepped onto a dining chair to get a shot of everyone, while Jamie steadied her hips.
The talking started sometime after midnight. Amina knew because it didn’t seem like that long since she’d fallen asleep, and then suddenly there was Thomas’s voice in the dark, as sonorous and insistent as a ringing phone, dragging her back from her dreams. She sat up in bed. Made her way to the window.
The wedding lanterns were still on, casting a faint golden glow into the fields and defining the back ridge of the sofa and the light smudge of Thomas’s head, so that when the breeze parted the grass he looked like a rafter awash in a green-black sea. His words floated up in patches. Amina leaned forward. What was he saying? Nothing she could make sense of so far away. She went downstairs.
The kitchen was dark, drying china spread out on every countertop like the bones of some prehistoric animal. She walked carefully past them, through the laundry room and onto the dark back porch. She pressed her face to the screen door.
“The bow and arrow,” Thomas said. “For concentration.”
Next to him in the grass, Prince Philip’s tail thumped in reply.
“Hey, Dad—” Amina yelped as a hand slammed over her mouth.
“No!” Kamala hissed, dragging her backward and down. “No talking!”
“Mmph!” Amina tried to stand straight, but Kamala clung to her, eyes gleaming like a feral monkey’s until Amina forced herself to take a deep breath and nod at her mother to signify she understood. Yes. Fine. No talking. Kamala slowly loosened her grip. Outside, Thomas rocked back and forth in his seat, excited about something.
“You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Is it—?” Amina started, but she didn’t need to finish. There was really no one else it could be.
It was an outpouring, a monsoon. The entire night and into the dawn, Thomas sat on the couch, a deluge falling from his lips. While much of what he said to Akhil was spoken too softly to be understood from their spot on the porch, the tiny bits that Amina could make sense of—how a shunt works, why cricket games could last so long and still be exciting, what it was like to bring Akhil home from the hospital as a baby—seemed to be equally unrelated and urgent, as if there was a list of subjects he’d sworn to cover before the day was over.
By midmorning he showed no signs of slowing down, and Kamala made tea and toast, stepping around a disapproving Amina to deliver it to him.
“I thought you said no talking.”
“What talking, dummy? This is eating.”
Amina followed her mother out to the couch, where her father greeted both of them with a preemptively raised hand, as though he was on a phone call.
“Tea!” Kamala announced. “Toast!”
“But he won the Oscar,” Thomas said, motioning for her to leave the tray. “And the Padma Shri! You think the Indian government goes around giving honors to people who insult the integrity of the country?”
“Ben Kingsley?” Amina couldn’t help asking, and her father nodded irritably, shooing her away.
By the late afternoon they were back, taking turns sitting on the couch with him. Kamala darned socks for the better part of an hour, while Amina shot three rolls of close-ups. It wasn’t that she needed to know what he was saying, Amina told herself, taking a picture of Thomas’s much thinned profile, but rather that the rambling was renewing in some way, the rat-tat-tat-tat of a soft summer rain on a tin roof, washing off the heat and misery they had endured.
Her father was finally happy. It was not hard to see this. Joy blossomed across his face, filling his cheeks and eyes with an intensity not seen since he had performed his last surgery. His hands flew around as if reaping the air for sentences. He laughed on occasion. Once, he even turned and winked at her, making her feel like she was in on an elaborate, goofy conspiracy.
“Maybe it’s healing him?” Raj asked when he arrived the next morning to retrieve his dishes, and the hope in his voice nipped at Amina’s heart even before he went to sit on the couch himself, listening and nodding along.
That afternoon, the family came in shifts, first Sanji, then Bala, and at last Chacko, who surprised everyone by showing remarkable endurance for the natter, sitting for an eight-hour stretch before dismissing himself to go home and sleep.
“Still?” Jamie asked that night.
“Still,” Amina confirmed. She held the phone close to her bedroom window, where Thomas’s voice droned in like a swarm of bees. “You hear that?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Well, he’s still there.”
It wasn’t until the fourth day, when Thomas stopped eating, that she began to really worry. Sanji, Kamala, and Amina sat in the kitchen, staring at the rejected bowl of chicken and rice like it was a bowl of snakes.
“Nothing for breakfast either?” Sanji asked, and Amina pointed to the toast she’d left on the counter hopefully, as though he might come look for it.
“Probably just queasy or something,” Sanji said, but called Chacko at the office anyway.
“Eda,” Chacko said that evening, kneeling in front of Thomas so he’d be forced to make eye contact, to stop talking. “You have to eat.”
“Later,” Thomas said.
Chacko patted his leg. “You need your strength. You’re getting depleted.”
“Later,” he repeated, ignoring further entreaties from everyone, including Raj, who brought down a box of every single one of Thomas’s favorite foods by dinnertime. That night the family sat in the kitchen, the uneasy silence between them emphasized by Thomas’s increasingly frenetic chatter. Contrary to what Chacko had warned, he was growing more animated than ever, jumping breathlessly from subject to subject like a man auctioning off entire areas of thought.
“The exodus is subsiding,” he said.
“You mother didn’t think so.”
“Slingshots!”
On the sixth morning, he skipped his tea and juice.
“You have to drink,” Amina said, bringing him a plain glass of water, just in case that was the problem.
“But some narcolepsy responds to norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors,” Thomas said, and a tendril of panic curled around her lungs.
“Dad, you’re getting dehydrated.”
Thomas looked up. His pupils dilated and retracted, finding her for the first time in days.
“I’m coming to your show,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier.” His breath was sweet and rotten, like bread fermenting in a bag. “Your mother will love it.”
She found Kamala in the laundry room was
hing bedsheets.
“Yes,” her mother said after she’d been dragged to the porch to look at him. “I see.”
“So what now?” Amina clenched and unclenched her hands, wiping them on her jeans. How would they get him all the way out to the car? They needed to get him into the car. Chacko and Raj would both have to come down to help—there was no other way to manage.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Amina repeated, annoyed. Had Kamala gone soft, too? Taken tranquilizers? Her mother’s eyelashes beat slowly in consideration, butterfly wings testing the wind.
“Not yet,” she said.
But when? That day, as Thomas’s voice went from hoarse to ragged, as his lips dried into twin strips of beef jerky and the sun dawdled across the sky, Amina paced the field, unable to sit next to her father or to let him out of her sight. He was still talking, or at least trying to talk, his voice a low, droning motor. It looked painful now, his tongue dry and dark in his mouth, the corners of his lips crusted with white. He grimaced as he shifted, and Amina realized that he must have been skipping his pain medication, too.
“Please,” she said, sitting down next to him with the pills, and when he didn’t even acknowledge her, a voice that must have been hers screamed, “PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!”
“Amina?” Kamala came running from the house. “What is it? What happened?”
“He’s not drinking!” Amina said, her voice breaking, and her mother sat next to her on the couch, taking the pills and water from her hand.
“Go,” she told Amina. “Sleep.”
That night, Thomas’s words crawled like insects into Amina’s dreams, filling them with a low, humming buzz that kept her tossing and did not fade as she woke up. It was the seventh day. Her brain hurt. If Thomas were Creation, he’d be making Man by now. Amina got up and looked out the window. He was still on the couch.
Kamala was plucking coriander leaves from the stems when she entered the kitchen.
“Did he drink anything?” Amina asked, and when her mother shook her head, it came to her finally, something so obvious and unimaginable that it clattered through her body, rearranging her bones to make space for a grief so large it felt like a new organ. She clutched the counter, panting.
Kamala was standing in front of her, saying her name, pushing her hair behind her ear. Koche, she was saying. Baby. My girl. She kissed Amina’s hands, one by one, and then each cheek, her eyes blazing. “You’re going to be okay,” she said.
But could this be Kamala? Could this be the same mother that Amina had grown up with, the unwilling immigrant, the dubious participant, the damned and damning loner? That afternoon, as Monica’s big blue sedan rolled into the driveway, Amina watched her mother hug the woman she’d barely talked to over the last twenty years, then take her by the hand and lead her into the house and down the hall.
“Thanks for calling me,” Monica said as Kamala opened the porch door.
“He’ll be so glad to see you,” Kamala said.
Whether Thomas registered Monica at all was debatable, his voice reduced to an occasional grunt, but Amina watched through the window as her father’s physician’s assistant wept, holding on to his hand, kissing his forehead as she stood up. Outside in the driveway, she handed Amina a vial of morphine.
“If he needs it,” she said, and barreled into her car and down the driveway before Amina could think of what to say.
The next to come was Anyan George, who didn’t stay long or sit at all but said some very nice things nonetheless, his hands tugging at his shirt cuffs, his eyes focused on the space above Thomas’s head.
At the end of the day Kamala led the family out to him. Bala knelt and touched his feet. Sanji kissed his cheeks and forehead. Raj whispered something sweet and rushed into his ear before fleeing back to the car. Chacko held his face between his hands like he was trying to carve it into his own memory, and Thomas looked at him, blinking. He grunted.
“What?” Chacko asked, leaning in. “What is it?”
“Later,” Thomas whispered.
EPILOGUE
Jamie hated flying. Not that he was copping to it, or even hinting at it, but it was obvious from the way he fidgeted in his seat as the plane taxied down the runway, flipping open the flight safety cards and the long-defunct ashtrays like they might contain an escape hatch.
“You want to leave?” Amina asked. “Should we just call it quits right now so you can get out while you can?”
“Yes.” Jamie closed and opened the window shade with a wince in either direction. “You know me so well.”
He lifted her hand to his face, inhaling her wrist like it was a calming agent, and Amina turned to look out the window to the shimmering runway, the barren stretch of mesa spreading out behind it for miles. It seemed ridiculous to be leaving so soon after the funeral.
“What ridiculous?” Sanji had asked when she’d said as much the night before, both of them watching Kamala scrub the courtyard bricks from the kitchen window. “You can’t miss your own show, dummy. And you’ll be back in a few days. The grief will still be here; your mother will still be here. The mess might even still be here if that bloody woman doesn’t quit driving us fifty kinds of crazy!”
Why Thomas’s departure had unleashed a cleaning frenzy in Kamala was anyone’s guess, but in the days since, she had been terrorizing every room in the house and the family right along with them. So far Raj and Chacko had beaten twenty-odd rugs while Sanji cleaned the pantry and Bala took on the fridge. And while all of them complained to Amina about being “forced into slave labor” (Sanji’s words), they also seemed to be strangely happy doing it, their hands and heads fully occupied with the work. Kamala, for her part, stalked from room to room, zealous and tyrannical. At night she slept on Thomas’s side of the bed, clutching a couch cushion like it was a flotation device.
“This is it, right?” Jamie said as the plane gathered speed. “It’s happening now?”
“Jesus, have you ever been on a plane?” Amina wrapped her hand over his clenched one.
Outside, the mesa blurred into a line of beige and the air pressed hard against them, slamming them into their seats as the plane ascended. Jamie looked pale and a little sick, his eyes shut tight as the plane banked north.
They were turning now, panning past the Sandias, the deep black-green crags and rocky faces, the ribbon of road leading to the white crest. Amina looked down on Albuquerque, the light bouncing off the sprawling tile of houses and pools, the cars running along the highways like busy insects. She imagined all of it gone, undone, erased back to 1968, when the city was nothing but eighty miles of hope huddling in a dust storm. She imagined Kamala on the tarmac, walking toward a life in the desert, her body pulled forward by faith and dirty wind.
For my father, Philip Jacob (1939–2006)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When it takes you ten years to write a book, you have many people to thank. My immense gratitude goes to:
My husband, Jed Rothstein, for telling me when a scene wasn’t working, no matter how awkward it made dinner; my agent, Michelle Tessler, for believing in this book when it was just a handful of scenes; my best friend and partner in crime, Alison Hart, whose countless comments over the years made this smarter and sharper with every pass.
My mother, for instilling my early love of books, politics, and food; my brother, for instilling my early love of heavy metal. Also, thanks to both of you in advance for not smacking anyone who makes the regrettable mistake of thinking either of you are Kamala or Akhil. (And sorry about that.)
My family around the world, the Seattle Jacobs, the Rothsteins, the Cheriyans, the Abrahams, and the formidably charming Eliamma Thomas. My “family in this country, anyway”—the Koshy/Avasthi/Kulasinghe/Weissman/Mangalik/Kurians—most especially Anita Koshy, who provided invaluable medical expertise, and Koshy Uncle, who chased after obscure facts with the diligence of a bloodhound.
Sean Mills, who gave me a
space to write and a series of great conversations when I needed them most; Jacob Chacko, who read this book and then answered more questions than any person should have to without getting a cash prize afterward.
My fantastic readers throughout the many stages of this book: Amanda McBaine, Chelsea Bacon, Joanna Yas, Alice Bradley, Karla Murthy, Sara Voorhees, Emily Voorhees, Monica Bielanko, Deborah Copaken Kogan, Noa Meyer, Garrett Carey, and Abigail Walch. Mentors Dani Shapiro, Abigail Thomas, Honor Moore, Sylvia Watanabe, Diane Vruels, and Robert Polito. David Dunbar and his City Term classes.
My editor, Kendra Harpster, for her sharp eye and enthusiasm; Susan Kamil, Karen Fink, Kaela Myers, and the entire team at Random House for their incredible efforts; Diya Kar Hazra and Helen Garnons-Williams of Bloomsbury for their thoughtfulness and input.
John D’Agata, for his essay “Collage History of Art by Henry Darger.”
Everyone at Building on Bond who kept me fed and caffeinated while I wrote, especially Norman Lynn Vineyard.
Andy McDowell, Dave Thrasher, all the fine folks at Pete’s Candy Store, and every single reader who ever graced our stage.
My son, for turning it up to eleven.
My father, Philip Jacob. I still see you everywhere.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As is often true in novels, historical events in this novel have been distorted, embellished, and reimagined. While the $162 million settlement for the Puyallup Tribe of Tacoma Indians was a real event, Bobby McCloud is an invented character, and his tragedy and the resulting quotes from tribe members are wholly fictional imaginings; any other resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. I do not intend to speak for the tribe or their feelings about the settlement—my interest was with the intersection of the “Indian” narratives, and what it means, as an immigrant, to make a life in a stolen country.