The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  My uncle followed all of those red trails that ran through that dark forest, and once he found an old stone shrine with three rusted swords cemented into it, and another time he came upon a dead tree whose lower branches were so covered with black bangles that they looked as if they were wrapped in glass. No one was about, and a wind came and made the bangles rustle like chimes. What did these Hindu things mean? Why were the Hindus so different from him? My uncle looked about, into the forest, behind him on the path, and then he slipped one of the bangles off a branch, put it into his pocket. All the way back to the plantation, he felt regret about what he’d done, and he woke up in the night wracked with sweats and fever. In the morning, he hurried up the mountain to find that holy place, and he put the bangle on its branch again. By the time he was back at the house, he was well.

  Once, on a whim he walked into the workers’ village, and it had been noisy with the sound of children playing rag ball, women hollering about this and that as they cooked, the blue smoke of their fires seeping up through the planks of the roofs to join the forest mist. Everyone fell still and silent as soon as the first child saw him. What could he do but walk past all those staring eyes? They were poor people who lived in the rain. My uncle understood that they knew who he was, and he hadn’t liked that. He didn’t go back there again.

  When the beans came ripe on the bushes in their greens and reds, my uncle would walk through the terraces at night with my grandfather’s shotgun, ready to shoot poachers. But he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t be able to shoot anyone. Once, he shined his light on six sambars, their horns curving up like bows, and they’d let him look at them a moment before they’d leaped away.

  Those two wet years in the mountains passed slowly, the longest time of my uncle’s life. But he learned to love the mists and trees, the echoes of the birds, all that shadow and green. His heart was in his town, Chikmagalur, and he counted down the days between each visit. But this thing in the mountains also belonged to him.

  Strange things happened up there among those superstitious Hindus. One night, there was a moaning at the door. My uncle lit the lantern and went to it. An old woman lay on his stoop in a tattered sari, and in the shine of his lantern he could see figures running away. The old woman looked like a wet rag, a scrap of something, all long bones and angles, bird-like, not human at all. My uncle carried her into the house and set her on the chair.

  “What is it, mother?” my uncle said, shining the lantern on her face. Her face beneath her sari was as weathered as a nectarine pit.

  “My master’s son, I have worked for your father all of these years. Now it is my time to die. I have asked them to bring me here so that you could see my death. So long I have worked for your well-being. Look at me now at the end of mine.”

  My uncle made tea, gave it to her. After the tea, she vomited rice onto the floor. My uncle wiped her face with a cloth and helped her sip water.

  “Your father took this land from us,” the old woman said. “We had small plots here. He came the first time with papers from the British. His officers all had guns. They took our harvest because your father had those papers. My husband walked down the mountains to Mysore. The district governor said the papers meant that the land belonged to your father. If we wanted to stay on the land, we must work the land for him. When the British left, we had our land again. Then your father came back. He had new papers, from the new government. My husband walked down to Bangalore. The new government told my husband the very same thing.”

  My uncle didn’t say anything.

  “If my husband had had a gun, I would have told my husband to shoot your father. Every day that you have been here, I have wished that a serpent would bite you. My husband died here, and now I will die in your house.”

  My uncle took two aspirin from the bottle he’d brought with him, helped the woman swallow them with tea. This meant that he held her chin while he poured the tea into her mouth.

  “Is it modern medicine, my master’s son?”

  “It is modern medicine, mother,” my uncle said.

  My uncle carried her into the second room, unfurled his lungis to make a bed for her. All through the night he sat over her as she moaned. In the morning, the old woman walked home to the village.

  In the days that followed, no one came to say anything to my uncle, to inform him about the woman’s well-being, or any of it. As quickly as someone had entered his life, my uncle was alone again. There was nothing around him on the mountain but the rain and the mist, the hoots of the night birds as they hunted in the dark.

  My uncle Sam’s absence from our house after the birth of my sister became an emptiness that my mother let herself feel. And though my father also never saw him, still he knew my uncle was nearby in the city, single, unsettled according to my father’s understanding of that, alive and doing something, though my father did not know what. What in the world was his brother really doing?

  What my uncle Sam was really doing was going on his drives. And often, these drives would lead my uncle to Ridge Lawn, to Aldine Avenue, where we lived. He’d drive slowly down the street once, twice, as though to make sure that our dark house was still there, that we were asleep, that this part of his life was a real thing. Maybe he did this to see that we, his brother and sister-in-law, his nephew and niece, were safe in the night. Maybe he did this for another reason. Though we were not in his life, we were always on my uncle’s mind. Often, he would smoke at his kitchen window in the night before bed, a vice he had lapsed back into, look at the sprouting plants of his garden, and he would think, This is what it is. This is the life that belongs to me.

  My father called my uncle to invite him to my sister’s christening. And more than that, he called because he wanted to talk to his brother. This was early one Saturday morning, when my father knew that my uncle would be home. In all their years together in America, my father had not once called my uncle on the telephone, and so this was a singular moment for both of them. My father called my uncle from his study, and as he did, my father took out the picture from the drawer of the family in Chikmagalur when they’d been kids.

  “Samuel?”

  “Yes, Babu?”

  “My daughter’s baptism is next Saturday.”

  “Saturdays are busy for me, Babu. They are the best days for showing real estate.”

  “Regardless of that, it is best that you come.”

  “Then I will be there.”

  “How is work, brother?”

  “Work is fine.”

  “Are you healthy, happy?”

  “I am fine, my Babu.”

  “Have you written to Father lately?”

  “Every Sunday after church.”

  “How is Father?”

  “Father is aging.”

  “He’s very proud of us, you know.”

  “He tells me in every letter.”

  “Samuel?”

  “Yes, Babu?”

  “I have been meaning to see you about something. There is something that has been troubling me that we must discuss.”

  “Is it something about the children?”

  “The children are happy and fine. It is about something else. It is about you specifically, my brother.”

  “Babu, I am happy and fine.”

  “Nonetheless, we must discuss. We will see you Saturday. You will have lunch with us after.”

  “Yes, Babu.”

  My uncle Sam did and did not want to go to my sister’s baptism, just as he did and did not want to turn past our house on every single one of those drives. The night before the christening, my uncle could not sleep, and he got up in the middle of it and wrapped his checkered lungi about his legs. In his kitchen, with his fingers he mixed rice flour and water in a plastic bowl until it was a soupy dough, and poured dollops of it onto the crackling griddle. When the bubbles rose up through these rice pancakes, he flipped them with a sliver of wood he’d knocked off a two-by-four in his garage with a screwdriver and hammer just for
this purpose, a piece of wood as thin as a playing card. Then he sprinkled the dossa, pancakes one by one with sugar as he ate them at the table with tea, his favorite treat as a boy in Chikmagalur, which he could now make for himself when he needed it. Later, he turned out the light, lit a cigarette at the window, and looked at his plants in their first shoots: corn, squash, green beans, zucchini, things he had not known before he’d come here but had grown to like eating. Then he looked up at the stars. There were few stars to see because of the brightness of the city.

  Did he feel happy or unhappy in America? my uncle asked himself as he smoked. He’d often felt both happy and unhappy. Then what was this feeling now? Tonight he felt that he simply was. Yes, he wanted to go to the baptism to see my sister, to see my mother and father and all of us, but no, he did not want to go to the baptism because he also didn’t want to see any of us. Our faces spun through my uncle’s mind, my smile as I’d leap at him to be carried, the suck and yawn of my sister’s mouth, my mother’s long look at him in the darkened rooms of their affair, my father’s commanding mustache and jaw. How would he be able to go through this life always wondering about all of this?

  My uncle lay on his bed in his room, which had nothing more on its walls than the wooden cross with the palm frond tied around it because he had not been successful in America the way my father had. The way he lived in America meant he would go on having bare walls like this. My mother’s face crept into his mind in all of those looks that she had given him, and again she was opening the door for him when he’d first come back from Portland, again she was reaching to turn out the light on them in that motel room in Vermont, again she was shutting the drapes in Babu’s bedroom and dropping her robe from her shoulders for him. How could they have done those things? Her body came to him, her breasts with their dark nipples, her long and opalescent thighs. Why had she done those things to him? Her waist, her lips, how dark his hands seemed against her skin as he held her wrists above her head. Had she loved him?

  My uncle turned in his bed, clutched his pillow to himself. He pounded his running legs through streets of Chikmagalur as a boy again in his memory to put the thoughts of my mother away, again he chased the pigs that rooted in the gutters, again he scaled the trunk of a mango tree to toss down the fruit. Sunday washing. His mother stood the children in buckets one by one, soaped their bodies, scoured their ears with a rough rag so hard that they cried out. Then it was head to toe with the towel and on to the next one. Putting on the Sunday clothes. Following their father in a line out of the house in their suits and dresses, my grandmother at the end with her maroon sari and parasol. They were different from the Hindus, they were better. My grandfather in his uniform, my grandfather putting on his belt. The white men in their red jackets. The trumpets, the blue and red and white flag. The crowd of them. The crossed lines of that flag. The Hindus worshipped false gods. “Take it to hell with you,” my grandfather said to the laundry washer, throwing the shirt in the man’s face because the shirt still had a stain on it. The heads of the Hindu gods in the temples: the elephant Ganesha, the monkey Hanuman, Lord Vishnu with his arms: the cudgel, the conch, the lotus, the shield, his knee lifted to dance. The cobras. The five gifts of the cow, even the piss. The flowers. Krishna in his chariot. Da Gama on his ship. Arjuna with his bow. Xavier with his cross. The pictures of children talking in the books. The raising of the Indian flag. “What is that round thing, Babu?” “Ashoka’s Wheel.” “Who is Ashoka?” “The Hindus’ king.” The hunched and pinching nuns. Babu crying on the bus. Babu stepping off the bus again. Babu in his fine clothes. Babu at the head of the table. The white woman on her bicycle. The white woman picking out the obbe. Babu and the white woman. Babu helping the white woman over a puddle. The white woman laughing. Babu laughing. “She is beautiful,” said Lira, under the tree. “You are beautiful.” “I have not felt like this.” “I have not ever felt it.” “E puri kon achi?” All those servants. His parents. Had anyone really loved him? The white girl. Who had heard of such a thing? On a bicycle. Her white knees. Her hair. The golden strands of her hair. Lesley Wenceslaus had one. “Give it to me.” The golden thread in the sunlight. The white girl in a blue sari. In a white sari. In a saffron sari. Touching all the harijans. Touching the harijan children. The white woman’s blue eyes. The white woman’s eyes looking at him. “I won’t eat the pork.” Ms. Denise. Ms. Denise in a white sari in the rain. Ms. Denise with her hair wet. Mrs. Denise D’Sai. Lawrence’s wife. Lawrence and his wife waving from the bus. They had all looked at one another at the station. What had anyone to say? The first aerogram. Babu is in America. The plane on the tarmac. “But how does it fly, Samuel?” “With the engines.” “But where are the engines?” “The round things under the wing, Lesley, can’t you see?” “I thought those were the horns.” The cold like pain. Babu is fat. The cold that burns the fingers. The lights of the cold city. “Why have you grown those ridiculous mustaches?” “Where in the world are we?” Ms. Denise opening the door in jeans, in a white blouse, smiling at him. Lawrence’s wife. “You don’t have to call me that anymore, Samuel. We’re in America. And we’re also all grown up.” “Call him Sam.” “His name is Samuel. Samuel Erasmus, as a matter of fact.” “Call him Sam for god’s sake, please, Denise. He’ll never make it here with that ridiculous name.” A whisper, a squeeze of the hand. The color of her hand on his skin. “He gets so crazy about fitting in. Forget about it. I’m glad you are here. I’ve needed a break from him.”

  My uncle Sam shaved in the morning, put on the same white collared shirt and black tie that he wore to show houses, picked up a bouquet of carnations at the Dominick’s supermarket on Cumberland, and went to my parents’ church in Ridge Lawn. He arrived late and watched from the doorway as the priest poured the holy water over my sister’s forehead at the altar. This woke my sister, who let up a cry from my mother’s arms, and my mother smiled and hushed her as my father dabbed her forehead dry with the white cloth. My uncle came and stood beside me in the pew where my parents had left me.

  “Uncle Sam!”

  “Shh,” he said, touching his finger to his lips. Then he petted my hair. “Afterward, give these flowers to your mother.”

  The priest said, “And so we welcome Elizabeth D’Sai to the family of our Lord, and into the community of our church. Amen.” Everybody in the church said, “Amen,” and then it was the next baby’s turn, and my sister was baptized like that.

  After the service, the priest shook my father’s hand, and people came to peer at the baby in my mother’s arms. My mother was in a hat and veil, and people told her how nice she looked. Then the crowd went to their cars and there was no one left but us, my parents on the steps of the church with my sister, my uncle below them with me, holding my hand.

  “Come and look at her,” my mother said and came down the steps in her heels. “Isn’t she pretty?” she said and cooed at my sister. “The prettiest girl in the world.”

  “Like her mother,” my uncle said.

  My mother looked at him and said, “That’s nice of you, Sam.”

  We walked my uncle to his car. My father jingled his keys and was happy. He said, “Coming to lunch with us today, Sammy?”

  “I have to show some houses, Babu. We’ll talk another time. Very important Patels straight from Gujarat. You know how it is: ‘Cheapest price only, thank you very much.’ Today is for you to enjoy. Let me go and deal with these people.”

  “The Patels are coming every day,” my father said to no one.

  “Uncle Sam, I want to go with you.”

  My uncle pulled his hand from mine. “You should be with your family today, Francisco.”

  “Aren’t you also our family?”

  “One more Konkan,” my father said, and smiled.

  “Yes, one more, Babu,” my uncle said.

  “I will call you soon to talk, Samuel.”

  “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

  Then my uncle Sam put on his sunglasses, got in his car,
and drove away. My sister stirred and my mother quieted her by putting her finger in her mouth. What could I do but throw the flowers on the ground and stomp on them?

  My father cuffed my ear. He said, “Why did you do that, Francisco?”

  “Because I wanted my uncle Sam.”

  My father picked me and the flowers up. I wrapped my arms around his neck, lay my head on his shoulder. I went on crying for a time as we started back to our car, and then that left me. I watched the lot and the trees beyond it tilt with my father’s stride.

  “Are you finished?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “You must control yourself.”

  “I know.”

  “You must never act like that.”