by Laura Furman
Her father looked at her. “You were six.”
“Why are you going?”
“Because I hate oil and I hate oilmen. And I hate these goddamn kom-mersants. If I’d done it when Bernie first offered—” Her father stopped. “You do not need to hear about this.”
Julia didn’t need to hear about it; she already knew. Her father was taking the job in Bombay—doing exactly what her mother had wanted him to do—just as her parents were getting a divorce. The only explanation was that he’d found out about Dr. Fabrol. Even though her mother was going to New York (where she would have to find another psychologist to help her get over Julia’s), Julia could see how her father wouldn’t want to stay in Paris. He would want to get as far away as possible.
Julia steered the conversation safely toward business: “It's like mobile phones, right?”
“It is mobile phones.” Her father smiled at her. “Something you know about.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“No, you’re not.”
They’d walked a circle in the shade, on the promenade above the park. Her father stopped, as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to go around again.
“It's not even two years,” Julia said. There was relief just in saying it, the same kind she’d felt certain mornings before grade school, when her mother had touched her head and s aid fever.
Her father looked at the Pont Neuf; he seemed to be fighting with himself.
“I’d rather start over in college—with everybody else,” she added.
Her father was nodding slowly. “That's something we could explain to your mother.”
As you got older, Zubin noticed, very occasionally a fantasy that you’d been having forever came true. It was disorienting, like waking up in a new and better apartment, remembering that you’d moved, but not quite believing that you would never go back to the old place.
That was the way it was with Tessa. Their first conversation was about William Gaddis; they had both read Carpenter's Gothic, and Zubin was halfway through JR. In fact he had never finished JR, but after the party he’d gone home and lain on his back in bed, semierect but postponing jerking off with the relaxed and pleasant anticipation of a sure thing, and turned fifty pages. He didn’t retain much of the content of those pages the next morning, but he remembered having felt that Gaddis was an important part of what he’d called his “literary pedigree,” as he and Tessa gulped cold red wine in the historic, unheated offices of the campus literary magazine. He even told her that he’d started writing poems himself.
“Can I read them?” she asked. As if he could show those poems to anyone!
Tessa moved closer to him; their shoulders and their hips and their knees were pressed together.
“Sure,” he said. “If you want.”
They had finished the wine. Zubin told her that books were a kind of religion for him, that when things seemed unbearable the only comfort he knew was to read. He did not tell her that he was more likely to read science fiction at those times than William Gaddis; he hardly remembered that himself.
“What do you want to do now?” he’d asked, as they stepped out onto the narrow street, where the wind was colder than anything he could have imagined at home. He thought she would say she had class in the morning, or that it was late, or that she was meeting her roommate at eleven, and so it was a surprise to him when she turned and put her tongue in his mouth. The wind disappeared then, and everything was perfectly quiet. When she pulled away, her cheeks and the triangle of exposed skin between her scarf and her jacket were pink. Tessa hung her head, and in a whisper that was more exciting to him than any picture he had ever seen, print or film, said: “Let's go back to your room for a bit.”
He was still writing to Asha then. She was a year below him in school, and her parents had been lenient because they socialized with his parents
(and because Zubin was going to Harvard). They had allowed him to come over and have a cup of tea, and then to take Asha for a walk along Marine Drive, as long as he brought her back well before dark. Once they had walked up the stairs from Hughes Road to Hanging Garden and sat on one of the benches, where the clerks and shopgirls whispered to each other in the foliage. He had ignored her flicker of hesitation and pointed down at the sun setting over the city: the Spenta building with a pink foam of cloud behind it, like a second horizon above the bay. He said that he wouldn’t change the worst of the concrete-block apartments, with their exposed pipes and hanging laundry and water-stained, crumbling facades, because of the way they set off plain Babulnath Temple, made its tinseled orange flag and bulbous dome rise spectacularly from the dense vegetation, like a spaceship landed on Malabar Hill.
He was talking like that because he wanted to kiss her, but he sometimes got carried away. And when he noticed her again he saw that she was almost crying with the strain of how to tell him that she had to get home right now. He pointed to the still-blue sky over the bay (although the light was fading and the people coming up the path were already dark shapes) and took her hand and together they climbed up to the streetlight, and turned left toward her parents’ apartment. They dropped each other's hand automatically when they got to the driveway, but Asha was so relieved that, in the mirrored elevator on the way up, she closed her eyes and let him kiss her.
That kiss was the sum of Zubin's experience, when he lost it with Tessa on Jason Bennet's green futon. He would remember forever the way she pushed him away, knelt in front of him and, with her jeans unbuttoned, arched her back to unhook her bra and free what were still the breasts that Zubin held in his mind's eye: buoyant and pale with surprising long, dark nipples.
Clothed, Tessa's primary feature was her amazing acceptability; there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way she looked or dressed or the things she said at the meetings of the literary magazine. But when he tried to remember her face now, he came up with a white oval into which eyes, a nose and a pair of lips would surface only separately, like leftover Cheerios in a bowl of milk.
When he returned from the States the second time, Asha was married to a lawyer and living in Cusrow Baug. She had twin five-year-old boys, and a three-year-old girl. She had edited a book of essays by famous writers about Bombay. The first time he’d run into her, at a wine tasting at the Taj President, he’d asked her what she was doing and she did not say, like so many Bombay women he knew, that she was married and had three children. She said: “Prostitution.” And when he looked blank, she laughed and said, “I’m doing a book on prostitution now. Interviews and case histories of prostitutes in Mumbai.”
When their city and all of its streets had been renamed overnight, in ’94, Zubin had had long discussions with Indian friends in New York about the political implications of the change. Now that he was back those debates seemed silly. The street signs were just something to notice once and shake your head at, like the sidewalks below them—constantly torn up and then abandoned for months.
His mother was delighted to have him back. “We won’t bother you,” she said. “It will be like you have your own artist's loft.”
“Maybe I should start a salon,” Zubin joked. He was standing in the living room, a few weeks after he’d gotten back, helping himself from a bottle of Rémy Martin.
“Or a saloon,” his father remarked, passing through.
He didn’t tell his parents that he was writing a book, mostly because only three of the thirty poems he’d begun were actually finished; that regrettable fact was not his fault, but the fault of the crow that lived on the sheet of tin that was patching the roof over his bedroom window. He’d learned to ignore the chain saw from the new apartment block that was going up under spindly bamboo scaffolding, the hammering across the road, the twenty-four-hour traffic and the fishwallah who came through their apartment blocks between ten and ten thirty every morning, carrying a steel case on his head and calling “hell-o, hell-o, hell-o.” These were routine sounds, but the crow was clever. It called at uneven intervals, so that
just as Zubin was convinced it had gone away, it began again. The sound was mournful and rough, as depressing as a baby wailing; it sounded to Zubin like despair.
When he’d first got back to Bombay, he’d been embarrassed about the way his students’ parents introduced him: “BA from Harvard; Henry fellow at Oxford; Ph.D. from Columbia.” He would correct them and say that he hadn’t finished the Ph.D. (in fact, he’d barely started his disserta- tion) when he quit. That honesty had made everyone unhappy, and had been bad for business. Now he said his dissertation was in progress. He told his students’ parents that he wanted to spend a little time here, since he would probably end up in the States.
The parents assumed that he’d come back to get married. They pushed their children toward him, yelling at them: “Listen to Zubin; he's done three degrees—two on scholarship—not lazy and spoiled like you. Aren’t I paying enough for this tutoring?” They said it in Hindi, as if he couldn’t understand.
The kids were rapt and attentive. They did the practice tests he assigned them; they wrote the essays and read the books. They didn’t care about Harvard, Oxford and Columbia. They were thinking of Boston, London and New York. He could read their minds. The girls asked about particular shops; the boys wanted to know how many girlfriends he had had, and how far they’d been willing to go.
None of his students could believe he’d come back voluntarily. They asked him about it again and again. How could he tell them that he’d missed his bedroom? He had felt that if he could just get back there—the dark wood floor, the brick walls of books, the ancient rolltop desk from Chor Bazaar—something would fall back into place, not inside him but in front of him, like the lengths of replacement track you sometimes saw them fitting at night on dark sections of the Western Railway commuter line.
He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes sitting alone in his room there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly—that life, his life, was rolling away outside.
“But why did you wait three years?” his mother asked. “Why didn’t you come home right away?”
When he thought about it now, he was surprised that it had taken only three years to extract himself from graduate school. He counted it among the more efficient periods of his life so far.
He saw Julia twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One afternoon when his mother was hosting a bridge tournament, he went to her house for the first time. A servant showed him into her room and purposefully shut the door, as if he’d had instructions not to disturb them. It was only four o’clock but the blinds were drawn. The lights were on and the door to her bathroom was closed; he could hear the tap running. Zubin sat at a small, varnished desk. He might have been in any girl's room in America: stacks of magazines on the bookshelf, tacked-up posters of bands he didn’t know, shoes scattered across a pink rag rug and pieces of pastel-colored clothing crumpled in with the sheets on the bed. A pair of jeans was on the floor where she’d stepped out of them, and the denim held her shape: open, round and paler on the inside of the fabric.
Both doors opened at once. Zubin didn’t know whether to look at the barefoot girl coming out of the bathroom, or the massive, bearded white man who had appeared from the hall.
“Hi, Daddy,” Julia said. “This is Zubin, my tutor.”
“We spoke on the phone, sir,” said Zubin, getting up.
Julia's father shook hands as if it were a quaint custom Zubin had insisted on. He sat down on his daughter's bed, and the springs protested. He looked at Zubin.
“What are you working on today?”
“Dad.”
“Yes.”
“He just got here.”
Julia's father held up one hand in defense. “I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t get into college. Then you could just stay here.”
Julia rolled her eyes, a habit that struck Zubin as particularly American.
“We’ll start working on her essay today.” Zubin turned to Julia: “Did you do a draft?” He’d asked her the same thing twice a week for the past three, and he knew what the answer would be. He wouldn’t have put her on the spot if he hadn’t been so nervous himself. But Julia surprised him: “I just finished.”
“What did you write about?” her father asked eagerly.
“The difficulties of being from a broken home.”
“Very interesting,” he said, without missing a beat.
“I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“I try,” he said casually, as if this were the kind of conversation they had all the time. “So maybe we don’t even need Zubin—if you’ve already written your essay?”
Julia shook her head: “It isn’t good.”
Zubin felt he should say something. “The new format of the SAT places much greater emphasis on writing skills.” He felt like an idiot.
Julia's father considered Zubin. “You do this full-time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you always want to be a teacher?”
“I wanted to be a poet,” Zubin said. He could feel himself blushing but mostly he was surprised that he had told these two strangers something he hadn’t even told his parents.
“Do you write poems now?”
“Sometimes,” Zubin said.
“There are some good Marathi poets, aren’t there?”
“That's not what I’m interested in.” Zubin thought he’d spoken too forcefully, but it didn’t seem to bother Julia's father.
“I’ll leave you two to work now. If you want, come to dinner sometime—our cook makes terrible Continental food, because my daughter won’t eat Indian.”
Zubin smiled. “That sounds good—thank you, sir.”
“Mark,” Julia's father said, closing the door gently behind him.
“Your dad seems cool.”
Julia was gathering up all of her clothes furiously from the bed and the floor. She opened her closet door—a light went on automatically—and threw them inside. Then she slammed it. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong.
“Do you want me to take a look at what you have?”
“What?”
“Of the essay.”
“I didn’t write an essay.”
“You said—”
Julia laughed. “Yeah.”
“How do you expect to get into Berkeley?”
“You’re going to write it.”
“I don’t do that.” He sounded prim.
“I’ll pay you.”
Zubin got up. “I think we’re finished.”
She took her hair out of the band and redid it, her arms above her head. He couldn’t see any difference when she finished. “A hundred dollars.”
“Why do you want me to write your essay?”
Suddenly Julia sank down onto the floor, hugging her knees. “I have to get out of here.”
“You said that before.” He wasn’t falling for the melodrama. “I’ll help you do it yourself.”
“A thousand. On top of the regular fee.”
Zubin stared. “Where are you going to get that much money?”
“Half a lakh.”
“That calculation even I could have managed,” Zubin said, but she wasn’t paying attention. She picked up a magazine off her night table, and flopped down on the bed. He had the feeling that she was giving him time to consider her offer and he found himself—in that sealed-off corner of his brain where these things happen—considering it.
With $200 a week, plus the $1,000 bonus, he easily could stop all the tutoring except Julia’s. And with all of that time, there would be no excuse not to finish his manuscript. There were some prizes for first collections in England and America; they didn’t pay a lot, but they published your
book. Artists, he thought, did all kinds of things for their work. They made every kind of sacrifice—financial, personal, moral—so as not to compromise the only thing that was truly important.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Zubin said.
Julia looked bored.
“You try it first. If you get really stuck—then maybe. And I’ll help you think of the idea.”
“They give you the idea,” she said. “Remember?”
“I’ll take you to a couple of places. We’ll see which one strikes you.” This, he told himself, was hands-on education. Thanks to him, Julia would finally see the city where she had been living for nearly a year.
“Great,” said Julia sarcastically. “Can we go to Elephanta?”
“Better than Elephanta.”
“To the Gateway of India? Will you buy me one of those big, spotted balloons?”
“Just wait,” said Zubin. “There's some stuff you don’t know about yet.”
They walked from his house past the Hanging Garden, to the small vegetable market in the lane above the Walkeshwar Temple. They went down a flight of uneven steps, past small, open electronic shops where men clustered around televisions waiting for the cricket scores. The path wound between low houses, painted pink or green, a primary school and a tiny, white temple with a marble courtyard and a black nandi draped in marigolds. Two vegetable vendors moved to the side to let them pass, swiveling their heads to look, each with one hand lightly poised on the flat basket balanced on her head. Inside the baskets, arranged in an elegant multicolored whorl, were eggplants, mint, tomatoes, Chinese lettuces, okra, and the smooth white pumpkins called dudhi. Further on a poster man had laid out his wares on a frayed, blue tarpaulin: the usual movie stars and glossy deities, plus kittens, puppies and an enormous white baby, in a diaper and pink headband. Across the bottom of a composite photo— an English cottage superimposed on a Thai beach, in the shadow of Swiss mountains dusted with yellow and purple wildflowers and bisected by a torrential Amazonian waterfall—were the words, Home is where. When you go there, they have to let you in. Punctuation aside, it was difficult for Zubin to imagine a more depressing sentiment.