by Tony D'Souza
“Is it going to happen?” my mother asked my uncle as he held her.
“It is going to happen,” my uncle told her.
“But you’ve never shown houses, Sam.”
“I am going to show houses now.”
“You are the best of India,” my mother told him, “resourceful like no one else in this world.”
My uncle wrote the necessary letters to India, and just before Christmas, my cousin Winston wrote back that a Gujarati tile merchant had transferred enough funds into his father’s account to satisfy the Canadian embassy that he would go back home because of it: The Canadians had granted him a ninety-day tourist visa. The price had been expensive, the Gujarati had taken all the bangles off his mother’s and married sister’s wrists, but Winston wrote that soon enough he would be in America and working, and he would quickly buy the bangles back. Sam went and saw the Sardar, and the Sardar congratulated him and gave him an envelope. In the envelope was a piece of paper, and on the paper was a map. The map was a hand-drawn detailing of the rural roads that connected Canada with Vermont. On one of those roads was an X, and the Sardar had written in vernacular Hindi, “Lax border control at this crossing.” My uncle folded the paper into the bible in his dresser drawer and the following Saturday, he and my mother looked at it over beers in my uncle’s kitchen.
“Lawrence is going to New Orleans for a conference in early February,” my mother said. “He’s very excited because he’ll get to see Mardi Gras. You know how he likes all those things. I’ll leave Francisco with the Firths, and we’ll drive in your car to Vermont. Winston will come down from Montreal, and we’ll wait in Burlington until he calls us. Then we’ll follow the map and pick him up.”
“I’ll write to Winston with the dates and times.”
“Do you think he can manage to get it right?”
“If he means to come as much as his letters say he does, then he’ll be waiting at the border even before we get there.”
My uncle wrote the letter and Winston wrote back that he understood. There was no quibbling in his letter that Canada was a place he’d never been, that maybe he wouldn’t be able to manage the French language in Montreal. He simply wrote back, “I will be there. And, Uncle, I am very happy.” Then it was for my mother and my uncle to wait quietly in anticipation of their trip, to keep their excitement from my father, to think about the time they’d have alone together, as neither of them could bring themselves to mention that part of it.
My father, on the other hand, crossed off the days to Mardi Gras with red Xs on the calendar on our fridge as though counting down the days to his election to heaven. In his excitement, he even began to say things to my mother like, “The women show their breasts for nothing more than a necklace of plastic beads,” and “If I wasn’t already married, Denise, perhaps I’d be about to have the most wondrous days of my life.”
What could my mother do but roll her eyes? She said to my father, “Watch your drinking, Lawrence. The last thing I want to happen is to see you drunk in a jail in New Orleans.”
My father said back, “I know that you only say these things because you are jealous. I’ll take a lot of pictures and bring you and Francisco souvenirs. Maybe I’ll even keep some of those necklaces for my own. Everyone is saying that this conference is less about work than it is about Mardi Gras. Six years without a break, imagine? Finally I get to have my reward.”
My mother dropped my father off at O’Hare in the snow. He was bursting with excitement, had bought new white slacks, a cuffed red shirt, and a blue corduroy hat just for the occasion. He kissed my mother squarely and deeply at the curb, pinched her ass like he hadn’t done in a very long time. My mother loved my father when he was in moods like that. Soon enough, he was gone through the sliding doors, and my mother also loved someone else.
My mother left me with the Firths on the pretense of visiting a sister, who didn’t exist, in Moline. The fact was my mother had no idea where her sisters lived, and the Firths were very glad to have me because they’d never had children. My uncle was sitting at our kitchen table in his jacket, waiting for my mother to come back. I remember crying when my mother kissed my cheek good-bye, but also that the Firths had two blue-eyed Siamese cats, and that I was soon engaged in tormenting them.
My mother and uncle had two days to themselves before they had to be at the motel in Burlington where they would wait for Winston’s call from Montreal. And though they had to stay focused on driving in order to get there on time, they also had enough time to make a trip of it. They drove through Chicago in the late and gray winter morning, and the afternoon saw them across Indiana’s and Ohio’s bleak fields of snow. In western Pennsylvania, they turned north. My mother had brought all of her favorite eight tracks, Dylan of course, John Lennon, and Fleetwood Mac, and my uncle had brought Marvin Gaye and A1 Green. They stopped once to have a late lunch at a truckers’ diner on the interstate, where they each drank two bottles of Stroh’s. As they drove into New York State late in the night, my uncle rested his hand on my mother’s thigh, and she looked at the dark woods passing at the side of the road beyond the reach of the headlights.
In their motel outside Buffalo, finally, my uncle held my mother’s body to his as the moon arced in the finest of slivers across the sky in its new light. Neither of them slept, though it didn’t have anything to do with the moon.
Burlington was a historic and nice town once they reached it, the forests leading up to the city deep and green against the snow, many of the homes and college buildings from before the turn of the century, and students in scarves hurried everywhere. My mother and uncle held hands as they walked up the main street toward the high steeple of the Unitarian church. Would my mother like a candle, my uncle asked her outside the beeswax-candle shop, and though my mother nodded yes, she also said she didn’t need to be bought anything. Would my uncle like a pair of fur earmuffs? My uncle said that he would, but also, that his ears weren’t really all that cold. In the late afternoon they went bowling, which my mother liked to do, and for dinner they had chicken-fried steak at Denny’s. My mother’s cheeks grew rosy in the motel room after a couple of Michelobs from the six-pack they bought, and then Johnny Carson took his golf swing into the band to end his monologue that opened The Tonight Show. When my uncle opened the drapes to look out at the lot, he saw falling snow.
“Snow will always be beautiful to me, Denise. So long I wondered what it would look like, feel like. It is the one thing I will never tire of in this life,” my uncle said softly as he looked at it, and my mother smiled at him from the bed and said, “And what about me?”
“About you?”
“Yes, about me, Sammy.”
“You were in my dreams even before we met.”
“It’s wrong, you know.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong or right in this life,” he said, and pulled from his beer while standing at the window.
“Then maybe we should run away for good. Live every day in rooms like this. Leave this world and its garbage and finally be happy.”
“I wonder if it seems happy to us only because we can’t do that.”
“But don’t you ever wonder what it would be like if we could?”
“I don’t torment myself with impossible things.”
“Why do you tell yourself it’s impossible?”
“Because you are my brother’s wife. Because I love my brother, as well as you, and you are the mother of his child, who I also love.”
“I made a mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake.”
“I married Lawrence because I wanted to marry India. Now I’ve given my life up for that.”
“Your marriage to Lawrence has brought you many good things.”
“You know, there was once a time when I didn’t know what a Konkan was.”
“Konkans are now half your life.”
“Once there was a time when you knew nothing of America.”
“And now America is all around m
e.”
“Come and sit by me, Sam.”
“I know that I shouldn’t.”
“Come and sit by me, my Sam.”
“It is the one thing I know simply that I should not do.”
My uncle went and sat beside my mother on the bed. The people on TV were talking, but my uncle and my mother couldn’t hear them. My mother took my uncle’s bottle from his hand, set it beside hers on the nightstand. Then she reached over and turned out the light.
“We shouldn’t.”
“I know we shouldn’t.”
“It’s bad, what we do.”
“Then we are bad.”
“Then they will always say of us that we were bad people.”
“Let them say that, then. Do we care? Who are those other people? Let’s forget there are any other people tonight and not share this with anyone.”
Only the phone’s ringing in the morning roused my uncle from my mother’s arms.
“Uncle Sam?” Winston’s voice said from the phone, “I am here. I am in Montreal. I came off the plane last night. I am at a student hostel and all of the people are speaking French. What am I to do?”
My uncle stood up from the bed in the dark room. He said into the phone, “Listen to me, Winston. You have to get this exactly right. You get into a cab and tell the driver to take you to Philipsburg. If he asks any questions, tell him you are going to visit your uncle. If he tells you a higher price, then pay it. If he runs the meter, pay him that, too. When you get to Philipsburg, you must go to the end of the town. Don’t let anyone see you. At the end of the town, go into the trees. Keep the highway in your sight. But you must stay in the trees, and if any cars come along the road, hide yourself until they pass. You have to do this for four miles. Do you understand me, little cousin? Like walking in Chikmagalur from the soccer pitch to the water tank. It is not a short walk. Stay close to the highway so that you don’t lose it. But don’t go so far into the trees that you get lost. When you see the signs marking the border, go into the trees so that you cannot see the road. When you feel that it is safe, come to the road again. Then it isn’t far to the first crossing. This will be Gore Road. Wait in the trees until you see a blue car pass twice on it. If it goes and then comes back, that will be our car.”
“Are there tigers in this forest, Uncle?”
“Why are you asking me such a thing?”
“Are there animals in this forest, Uncle?”
“They’ve killed all the animals, Winston. Do not fear.”
“I was not ready for this cold.”
“So you are beginning to know about America. Enough. Now go and buy the things you need. Buy a jacket and gloves. Don’t worry now about saving money. South along the road in the trees is all. Do not talk to anyone. If you see any people, run away. We’ll be waiting for you at five P.M. Today will be cold, but tonight you will be with us in America. Bring me a souvenir. Buy me some small thing so that I will know that you were in Canada.”
“I am going to make it, Uncle.”
“I know that you will.”
“I am going to become a very great man in America.”
“Then you will share that money with me.”
My uncle hung up the phone. He looked at my mother. It was still dark in the room.
My mother and uncle watched television in the room to pass the day, The Price Is Right, The Days of Our Lives, and in the afternoon they went out for Chinese food and came back and watched Emergency! On the news were scenes from Cambodia, another Khmer Rouge bombing in Phnom Penh. Then they went out to my uncle’s car and drove the few minutes in the settling evening to Gore Road. All around them was falling snow. They did not play music or smoke cigarettes. Nothing they had ever done had prepared them for this. Sam drove a mile along Gore Road’s dark length, and then he turned the car around. My mother said, “He could freeze to death out there.”
There were no other cars this night, nothing but trees in their mandes of snow, and even the tracks the car had left behind were covered by the time they turned around again. After three more passes, my uncle idled the car on the shoulder with the lights out where Winston should have already emerged. The flakes fell in a hurried flurry.
My mother said, “What do we do if he doesn’t show up?”
“What can we do?” my uncle said as he gripped the steering wheel.
“We’ll have to find the police.”
“Not yet, Denise. First we have to wait.”
There were so many things they could have talked about, but didn’t. The snow fell, and the windshield wipers pushed it away. My mother could have said, “What are we really doing?” And my uncle could have said, “What about what we are doing do you think is real?” The snow fell and melted on the hot hood of the car. Then a figure hurried across the road with a suitcase.
My uncle started the car and swerved around. The door opened and closed, and Winston was in the backseat. All of them would eventually talk about this for the rest of their lives. But not yet.
“Hello, Uncle Sam! Remember me, Auntie Denise! Chikmagalur is very far away now Uncle Sam, I have a souvenir for you!”
My mother looked over the backseat at the boy. He was wearing nothing more than a sports jacket over his shirt and tie, and she knew he was wearing Indian loafers on his feet, even though she couldn’t see them. Snowflakes were melting on his shoulders, and he shivered even as he smiled. He was a thin young man with a downy mustache on his lip. She had seen Indians like him a thousand times. So another one of them was here.
My uncle drove them through the snow to Burlington, Winston regaling them with the details of his adventure.
“The taxi driver spoke nothing but French. I said to him, ‘Philipsburg,’ and gave him the money. Then he asked for more but I said that there wasn’t any. That was very smart of me. He let me out on the side of the road and pointed this way and said, ‘America.’ Certainly it is something I will tell my children.
“I walked through the trees, can you believe it? I have never seen snow before yesterday, and now I have walked all through it. I could not have imagined that it would be so cold. It was like pain all over my skin. I thought that my fingers would die. The cold is such a burning thing. Montreal is so full of people and lights. If it was America, I would have been happy to stay there. I ate pizza from a stand in the street. It was the only food that I could afford. I like pizza very much. Is pizza the food that we eat here? In the hostel, there were men and women sleeping in the same rooms. Some of them came back to the room very drunk! So many white people everywhere. Everyone was very nice. Then I walked through the trees. How cold it was! I felt that I would die in it, but the idea of America kept me warm. Everywhere I saw tigers, even though I knew there weren’t any. Still, I saw them, and I tell you that they are really there. When I tell my children the story, there will be tigers in it. Even if nothing better happens to me, walking through the trees was good. How alive I felt. But also afraid. How could I know that you would really be there? Now I have something to tell my children. Certainly I must be married first, but once I am, what a story I will have to tell. How I walked through the trees. How my feet made prints in the snow until even my socks were wet and frozen. Are we far from Babu’s house? How I want to tell Babu my story.”
My uncle glanced at my mother, and she glanced back.
“How is Babu? Why didn’t he also come?”
My mother and Sam took Winston to his first American meal at the Burlington Denny’s. At the table Sam shook the snow globe that Winston had brought for him from Canada, a barn and horses, a pastoral scene. Along the blue plastic of its bottom was printed the word QUEBEC. What the boy had done felt real and absurd. They ordered a steak and fries for Winston, and as they waited for it, they explained to him that Babu did not know he was here, would not be pleased to know what they had done. It was a very dangerous thing they had done in bringing him to America, and someone with a good job like Babu’s could not be a part of it. If he was ever to see
Babu, he must tell him that he’d gotten a visa on his own, that they’d picked him up at the airport in Chicago. Not a word about this trip. Winston ate greedily and nodded. He was so glad to be in America, and the food was better than any he’d ever had. As he threw it up later in the bathroom in the motel, my mother and uncle sat beside each other on the edge of the bed.
“At least we’ve had these days,” my mother said.
My uncle looked at his hands and said, “These days belonged to us.”
Winston came out of the bathroom with his smile, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “It is very fine food,” he told them. “It is only that my stomach is not as ready for America as my heart.”
Winston stayed at my uncle’s for four months, working days as a stock boy at Dominick’s and nights at Walgreens to save money, before he struck out on his own for New York City, where he found work as a waiter in an upscale Gujarati restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Within a decade, he would go into partnership on a restaurant of his own in Schenectady, and first he brought his older brother over through Gore Road, and then his two younger brothers and their wives. If we were ever to visit New York, he always wrote, then we must stay with him. But we never made it to New York. A dozen Konkans came into America through Gore Road before the Border Patrol closed it, and then they came in through a different crossing, in northeastern Maine.
But before all of that happened, my mother and uncle brought Winston back with them to Chicago. He was in the backseat of the car when my mother and uncle went to the airport to pick up my father. My father’s neck was heavy with colored Mardi Gras beads, and after kissing my mother hello and rounding the car to get in, he looked in the backseat to first see my uncle, whose face was grim, and then Winston, who was beaming. All the stories my father had brought back from Mardi Gras disappeared in an instant. Winston opened his mouth as wide as my father’s eyes and said, “Look at me, Babu! I am also here!”