by Tony D'Souza
“E Puri Kon Achi?”
My uncle Sam’s deal with the Sardar cost him in the short run, but within a year he was on his way to fulfilling his commitment to the Sikh. And something greater happened because of it. Showing houses to all those people, my uncle began to become known and trusted among the Indian community of Devon Avenue, at least as far as real estate went. Between their natural distrust of the greater white world, and their growing and well-founded distrust of the Hindu and Sikh merchants now established in the city, the burgeoning class of Indian doctors and engineers newly arrived in America on their skilled workers’ visas found my uncle Sam, the lone Konkan among them, to be a safe third way; someone who knew India well enough that they could do business with him in their slow and fickle manner, but who was not so much a part of their community that they were beholden to him to let him cheat them.
My uncle was not destined to grow wealthy by any means, but he would do better, and by the time I was nearly four, he had managed to buy a two-bedroom house in Norridge Park, only two and a half miles from where we lived. The Kennedy Expressway separated leafy Ridge Lawn from working-class Norridge Park just as surely as any railroad tracks separated the nice part of town from the bad. So though he was much closer to us than he had been, my uncle was still on the wrong side of the tracks as far as my father was concerned.
In the winter, my uncle would pick me up in his Cutlass. He’d given up smoking because of a long bout of pneumonia the summer before that left him feeling exhausted and distant from his own body at times, and he drove with his hands holding the bottom of the steering wheel in a casual way in his newfound health, his elbows resting on his thighs. That was my uncle’s way about everything in the world, never pushing the way my father always did, at ease, enjoying the day and the ride wherever it would take him. Instead of taking me directly to his house, he would sometimes drive through Ridge Lawn’s side streets. There were hundred-year-old elms in the parkways at that time—though they would all be lost to the Dutch beetle in the late eighties—as old as the town itself, stately and sacred, arching in their tallness to reach their mates’ branches on the other side, like lovers holding hands. Even in winter they formed vaults over the streets like the lofty innards of an immense cathedral.
At my uncle’s house, I would sit on the table where he set me and help him cook. What this meant was that I peeled the onions and garlic as best I could, and then he would chop them before browning them in a pan with curry powder. The onions made my eyes water, the smell of the curry made me sneeze, and my uncle would give me a slice of white bread to chew and calm down. Next came the coriander and meat that led up to the evening meal. Often after we’d arrive, my uncle would pull off his shoes at the door, go into his bedroom, and come out again in a checkered lungi wrap, the traditional dress of the Konkan male. There was always music from his tape player, Hindu and Konkan, and as he’d shave ginger on the cutting board with a razor, he’d lift a piece to his mouth now and again. He’d offer me a sliver to see if I would try it. I always did. Sometimes it would be fine in my mouth like a piece of peppermint candy, and other times not. He’d cool my mouth with a glass of milk.
My uncle always told me stories of India, and I did not know enough about anything to wonder if they were true. He had left India as a very young man, and so his stories were childhood stories, stories drawn from the times even before he had been born. My uncle wore a gold necklace with a St. Christopher medallion that hung in the hair of his chest where the V-neck of his T-shirt revealed it, and above his bed hung a plain brown cross with a dried palm frond tied around it. The week before Ash Wednesday, he, like my father, would take the frond to church to be burned, to wear it again as ashes on his forehead.
But even though there was always music and the crackling of the cooking things in the pan on the stove, my uncle’s house had a quietness to it that made it feel as though we were the only people in the world. He had some assorted furniture, a television, his old orange chair that he’d used to spin me in the living room by the window, but he had no posters or paintings or ornamentation to add any distraction to that place. The white walls were the canvases on which my uncle’s words painted his stories.
“Who is the father of the Konkans, Francisco?” my uncle would ask me, grinding fresh coriander for chutney in his stone mortar.
“God is.”
“And after God?”
“Captain Vasco da Gama.”
“Who came to India with Vasco da Gama on his ship?”
“St. Francis Xavier.”
“And what are the gifts they brought us that made us the Konkan people?”
“The Catholic Church, Konkani, and they taught us how to count and read.”
“Where is Captain Vasco da Gama now, my Francisco?”
“At the bottom of the sea.”
“And where is St. Francis Xavier?”
“In a glass coffin in Panjim.”
“What is the most important thing for a Konkan boy to learn how to say?”
“E puri kon achi.”
“And what does it mean?”
“‘Whose daughter is she?’”
“You are the firstborn son of the firstborn son. Do you know what that means?”
“I always have to protect my family.”
“And what is your God-given name?”
“Francisco D’Sai.”
My uncle would pop a sprig of coriander into his mouth and chew it as he worked, and then he’d smile to himself and say, “One day when you are grown, you will go to India and visit our home, and we will take you in a rickshaw to one of the five beautiful rivers. They will cut a fresh coconut for you, and you will drink its milk. It is very hot in India, Francisco, you will sweat like you do when we are in the garden in the summer. But there, you will drink the coconut milk and be cooled, and you will sit on the bank of a beautiful river. Fish will be swimming in the dark water, and now and again they will leap from the water to snatch the yellow insects that flutter above it. If it rains a moment, all the trees will drip with rain. Then the sun will break through the clouds, and you will see a girl in a golden sari crossing the river on a canoe. She will be standing up because Konkan women stand up when they pay the ferryman to pole them from bank to bank. She will have white flowers woven into her hair, and she will look like the goddess Lakshmi. Then you will fall in love with her, Francisco, so much so that you will not want to see anything else in this world but her. From the very first time that you see her, she will enter your dreams. Perhaps I will be there with you, to speak Konkani to her for you. Or perhaps it will be your father. But regardless, we will be old and you will be young, and you will see this girl, and then what will you say to me, my son?”
“E puri kon achi.”
“That’s right. ‘Whose daughter is she?’”
I liked it when my uncle Sam called me “my son,” and sometimes when he did, I’d say, “I am not your son, I am Lawrence D’Sai’s son,” even though I liked it. And my uncle would pop a carrot or celery chunk in his mouth and roll his eyes at me and say, “Come on, old man, give me a break. Are you not a Konkan like I am? In India, every old man is ‘my uncle,’ and every boy is ‘my son.’”
“But I’m not really your son.”
“No, you are not.”
“So where are your sons, Uncle Sam?”
“In heaven, in the stars, looking down at me and saying, ‘When are you going to get married, man, so we can come down to earth and play with our cousin Francisco?’”
“Mom wants me to have a sister.”
“Whatever you get, you must lead it, just the way your father has led me. You are the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the firstborn son. Me, I’m nothing but a second, but you old man, in India they show your picture to one another and say, ‘This is our Francisco. Our little Rama.’”
“Dad says there is only the Holy Ghost and Jesus and the Father.”
“Ah,” my uncle said and turned and wiped from
the board the mound of the latest thing he’d chopped to sizzle in the pan. “Your father is right. There are only those things.”
“Then why did you say ‘Rama’?”
“It is only a thing we say.”
“My dad doesn’t say that.”
“Then it is only a thing your uncle says.”
When the meal was ready and set on the table with its steaming pot of curry, the bowl of new rice with the damp cloth spread over it, my mother would arrive and let herself in. I would run to her, and she would take me in her arms and kiss me. In the winter, her coat was cold from the air, and in the spring, her jacket would be wet from the rain. She’d hang her things up in the closet and shake out her hair, and she was always happy in a way that she wasn’t at home. Once in a while she would swing me around in the living room and sing to me in an Indian language, before setting me down and saying, “Francisco, when did you get so big? And who told you to grow up anyway? Not me.”
“Uncle Sam told me.”
“Then your uncle Sam is a very bad man.”
My father would be away on business, which I liked because he always came home from wherever he’d been with a treat, a T-shirt from London or a candy bar from the airport, and once he brought me a stuffed lion as big as I was, with a long tail and wearing glasses from the Harris Bank in New York, where he’d had a meeting. “I told them about you, my son. They said to me, ‘Lawrence D’Sai, what is your son like?’ and I said to them, ‘He is as tough as a lion.’ So they gave me this to give you.” And the times my father was at home, he was either playing golf or closed up in his study.
We’d sit at the table, my mother, uncle, and I, and I would sit on two telephone books. Then my uncle would spoon mounds of rice onto our plates, then ladles of the curry that turned the rice red. Even the window above the sink misted over from the heat of it. The rule at my uncle’s house was that we eat with our fingers, which my mother loved to do, just as she’d done in India.
“Did you have a fine afternoon, Denise, with all your men away?” my uncle would ask.
“It was quiet and wonderful.”
“Did you get anything special done?”
“Nothing but reading a book. I lay on the couch and read. That’s all I did from the moment you boys left. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Soon enough, Francisco will learn to read as well, and then he’ll know why his mother likes to be left alone with her books. What did you boys do over here?” my mother would ask, and make a face at me. I’d chew and smile and say, “My uncle Sam told me a story about a Konkan girl in a golden dress who is waiting for me in India to be my wife.”
“But I thought you were going to marry me when you grow up?”
“I’m going to marry her, and then I’m going to marry you, Mom.”
“E puri kon achi?” my uncle would say, and wink, and I’d say back, “Whose daughter is she?”
After dinner, they would make a bed for me out of a sleeping bag and a pillow on the floor of the living room, and the living room would be dark, and I would watch my mother in her chair at the table through the doorway of the lighted kitchen. My mother smoked a cigarette and drank from a golden bottle, of beer, and though I could see her, I couldn’t see my uncle. Often they would talk about Les and Winston, about my uncle’s real estate job and his dealings with the Hindus and Sikhs, and sometimes they would talk about my father, about how hard he worked. One time my uncle said a strange thing to my mother in a quiet voice that made me remember it: “We thought we knew so much about the world, didn’t we, Denise? About who we were and all the things we thought we knew about ourselves. But what did we know? What will we ever know? We thought that coming here would make everything good. Winston, Les, all of us. That we would set our feet here and life would be easy.”
“But it hasn’t turned out that way, has it?”
“It only gets harder.”
“My heart will always long for it.”
“I don’t know where my heart is anymore.”
“I worry about Francisco.”
“He is an American boy, Denise.”
“It won’t always be easy for him.”
“Who is it easy for? Francisco has many people who love him. Not like you had. Not like what happened to you. I also felt alone as a boy in my own way. People all around me, yes, but always it was Babu who mattered. That was a small thing. But you, to be as alone in the world as you are?”
“Everything was worth it, Sam. To get me here to this place with my son. I’m not alone anymore. I also have people who love me.”
“You have people who love you very much.”
“I know that it’s true,” my mother said, and my uncle’s hand touched hers on the bottle in that lighted kitchen, which was the last image I saw of them before the heavy sleep, which I’d been fighting, rolled me into itself. I would wake up in my bed in the mornings, not remembering how I had gotten there, who had carried me out to the car, who had taken me on their shoulder, then later, up to bed.
Sundays were my father’s day, and he made breakfast for us in his paisley pajamas. We had scrambled eggs and pancakes, and my father melted extra butter on my toast in the pan so it was soggy and yellow, the way I liked it. Then I’d shower with my father while my mother brushed her hair for church. I’d ask my father why his penis was big while mine was small and as the water thundered all around us, my father would laugh above his mustache and soap my body and say, “Your elephant trunk will grow as you do, my son. Then you will use it to make a son for yourself the way you are a son to me.”
“How will my elephant trunk make a son?”
“First you have to find your wife, and then she will explain everything that you must do. How to make sons is the secret thing that only our wives can tell us. If you have patience and find your wife, she will tell you every important thing. What will you name your son, my Francisco?”
“I will name him ‘Lion.’”
“But you are already my lion.”
“Then there will be two lions.”
After my father had toweled me dry, I’d sit on the cool counter beside the sink where my father would set me, and watch him shave while my mother came in, too, and put on her makeup beside him, and sprayed her hair. The sound of my father’s shaving was loud like it hurt, but he’d only smile at me from where the razor had taken away a line of his white beard of soap and left behind his smooth skin.
“Who is my good son?” my father would say as he shaved in the mirror.
“I am, Dad.”
“And who is our God?”
“Jesus.”
“Everyone is proud of you, you know. Your grandfather, your grandmother, your uncles and aunties and every single person in India.”
“Uncle Sam says a girl in a golden dress is waiting to be my wife there.”
“Ah, what does your uncle Sam know? Four years in this country and where is his wife?”
“Maybe Uncle Sam’s wife is waiting for him in India.”
“If his wife is in India, then your uncle Sam should have stayed in India. Too much music and running around. Your uncle will grow up to be a lonely old man if he doesn’t start to get his head right about what it means to be in this country.”
“What does it mean to be in this country, Dad?”
“To leave India in India and be a man here.”
“Isn’t Uncle Sam a man here?”
“Not if he doesn’t have a wife.”
My father would dress himself, and I would pick his cuff links for him out of the leather box on his dresser where he kept his tie clips and watches. I always picked the black cuff links, but sometimes he’d send me back for the green. Then, when he was dressed and smart in his suit, he would help me on with mine, would knot my tie around my neck, pull it tight. As he did, I could look at him closely, at his mustache and long eyelashes, at the color of his skin, which was darker than my own. That his skin was dark was a marvel to me, the way it never was with my uncle Sam. I would look
right into the pores of my father’s nose. Then we would wait by the door for my mother, who always had some last thing to do in the bathroom, and then we’d go out to the car, my mother with her purse and hat. At Communion, I would be alone in the pew, the people in the church moving forward in their lines, and then my father and mother would come back, kneel in the pew on either side of me, fold their hands, and close their eyes, chewing the bread that the priest had given them.
“What does it taste like?” I’d ask my mother, and my mother would hiss at me to be quiet.
“We don’t talk in church,” my father would say when they were done praying, and twist my ear. Always there were people in the crowd outside at the end who would pinch my cheek and say, “Francisco is becoming handsome. Such a unique little boy,” and the priest in his robe would pat my head and say to my father, “A fine boy here, Lawrence. A future altar boy if I’ve ever seen one. Everyone is so glad that you came today, Francisco. Everyone is so glad that your family is here.”
Sometimes we would go after church to the Bailey’s restaurant with the fountain in the front with the big goldfish in it, where many of the families went, and my mother would eat a salad, and my father would cut a corner of his steak off for me, and sometimes we would go instead to the gym of the school beside the church, where there would be cookies and juice, and my parents would drink coffee and talk to the other adults while the priest, in his black clothes, would go around and talk to everyone. I’d wrestle with the other kids in our Sunday clothes under the drapes of the tablecloths. But the times I liked best were when my father would say, “Let’s go for a drive.”
It was a long way on the highway where he wanted to go, and I would sleep and wake up with a world of green around me. This was Barrington and Inverness and Crystal Lake, where the big homes were, where he wanted us to live one day. I liked to go there because there were horses, and some of the houses looked like castles. They had creeks running through their long lawns with little bridges over them. There were never any people.
“What do you think of this one, Francisco?” my father would ask as we’d pass a house, and from the backseat in my tie, I’d say, “I like it, Dad.”