by Tony D'Souza
“Can you wrap your mind around the idea of it?” Jacqueline asked my uncle as they looked at a diagram of the gravitational pull of a black hole.
My uncle looked at the diagram a long time. He said, “I know enough to know I’ll never know the first thing about any of it.”
“What if somebody gave you the chance to go up to the moon?”
“I would stand on the moon and look around. Then I’d say, ‘Now what?’”
“I like it here, too, Sam. I like the way the world feels around me. That’s why I get scared. I don’t ever want to not be able to feel it.”
Along the way were booths with electronic scales in them, dark, like phone boxes, the names of the planets on placards above them. They took turns weighing themselves on Jupiter, on Venus. On Jupiter, Sam weighed 375 pounds. “Time to diet,” he said, and grinned over his shoulder, patting his flat stomach. On Venus, Jacqueline weighed 112 pounds. She smiled and said, “Excuse me, can I get some assistance, please? I think I’d like to take this scale home with me.” Then my uncle stepped into the booth that weighed him on the moon.
“How much do you weigh on the moon, Sammy?” Jacqueline said behind him.
“Twenty-five pounds,” my uncle said, and laughed.
Jacqueline stepped into the booth, put her arms around my uncle’s waist. “And how much now?”
And so they had their first kiss, kissing on the moon.
Somewhere in the world, my uncle knew as he smoked in the night at his window, my father, my mother, my sister, and I were existing in our bodies, our hearts beating, our lungs drawing in breath, the children that my sister and I were, growing, my parents aging as he was, the universe expanding around all of us. Somewhere in the world, the Konkans of India were growing and aging as well. Did he like this girl? In fact, he did. Did he want to spend his life isolated from his family? My uncle didn’t know.
He and Jacqueline went to the Jazz Festival in Grant Park, to ChicagoFest later, when she was on summer vacation. They went to Sox games at Comiskey, and twice they went to Marriott’s Great America in Gurnee to ride the roller coasters and eat cotton candy in those thick crowds.
Jacqueline lived on the second floor of a two-story brownstone, which she shared with an orange tomcat named Steve, and a goldfish in a cognac snifter on the windowsill of her kitchen named Anthony, whose scales glinted like metal when the sun shone through the glass. She was a nice girl, modern, image conscious, interested in things. She had a short case with books stacked on its shelves, JFK, Malcolm X, black-and-white photographs she’d taken around the city in simple frames she’d made herself and hung on the walls. There was a shot of three black men leaning against the wall of a liquor store in their hats, a shot of a garbage truck dripping beside a fire hydrant, a shot of a pigeon standing by a squirrel eating a nut on the grass in a park. There was a big framed poster of an Egyptian woman beside an obelisk, and all the words on the poster were in French. There was a beaded bag from India hanging on the doorknob of her bathroom. Jacqueline tried to get my uncle to smoke pot and dance with her in her kitchen to the Commodores, but the pot made my uncle slow and gloomy, so she opened a bottle of Spumante for them instead.
Her apartment smelled like incense, was warm in a good way even in the depth of night. And it wasn’t about the apartment at all, but about her, who she was, who she’d decided to be in the world. She didn’t have much money; she didn’t care. There were occasional gunshots in the neighborhood; she ironed her clothes and had her nails done. Her car would break down now and again; she’d buy a newspaper and take the bus. Jacqueline wanted to know about India; she dated my uncle.
All the weekends of that summer, the night breezes lifted the gauze curtains of Jacqueline’s bedroom like veils, like mists in a dream. She would lead my uncle by the hand from the spaghetti dinner they’d made together in the kitchen, from the empty bottle of wine, and light a candle on her dresser, where a framed picture of her family stood. Her family were black people; they pressed their faces together and smiled in the sun. Jacqueline would smile at him as they unbuttoned their jeans, took them off, pulled their shirts off over their heads, and my uncle would slide the straps of her bra off her shoulders after she’d unhooked it. Then Jacqueline would fold herself back onto the bed as she looked at him, and my uncle would stand a moment to look at the length and color of her body against those white sheets.
“Do you think I’m pretty, Sam?”
“Yes, Jackie. Do you think I am handsome?”
“Very much.”
Biting was fun, wasn’t it? But not too hard. And what was that sensitive spot in the middle of her belly? Earlobes could be as nice to suck as nipples. And wasn’t it nice to go to sleep all tangled up with somebody?
In the exhausted late night, the candle snuffed out, the city around them as asleep as it would ever be, Jacqueline would say to my uncle as he held her, “Tell me about India, Sam. Some little thing. Make it a story. Make me see it like I’m already there.”
My uncle petted her hair, tucked it back behind her ear. “There are peacocks in a town on the railway to Delhi called Gwalior. The peacocks live on the slopes of the yellow hill that the stone castle stands on. They gather in the banyan trees and glide up and down the slopes like kites of blue. The castle is abandoned since ancient times, but even now when you see it, you can imagine how it once was, the banners of the king waving from the ramparts.”
“I see trees everywhere.”
“The people who had once lived there are said to have been giants, each man seven feet tall. They built thermal baths in the caverns beneath their castle which are still steaming, even today. When the Mughals came to conquer them, those giant men put on their bronze helmets and rained arrows down from the ramparts so that they killed even Tipu Sultan’s royal elephant. Then the Mughals brought their great army down from Delhi and laid siege to the Gwalior castle until every last one of those people was dead.”
“No, Sammy. Not stories like that. Pretty stories. That’s what I want to hear about India.”
“India is not all pretty stories, Jackie.”
“Let India be pretty stories tonight.”
“Near my home, in the Kingdom of Mysore, there is a series of gardens in the form of mazes. A great Arab architect came to India on a camel on the Silk Road many centuries ago to design them. The gardens are still there, and when electric lights were invented, the maharaja of Mysore had the hedges and flowering trees of the maze strung with lights. Tens of thousands of lights. At night, the maharaja would turn them on for his maharini, and she would look at them from the latticed windows of the harem. Then the British lords came to Mysore in carriages with their army, and they found the gardens to be so beautiful, they decided not to take the maharaja’s kingdom from him. In return, the Maharaja of Mysore invited the British women to walk in the garden with their parasols. Now the maharaja’s grandson has opened the gardens to everyone. If we have the fee, we can get lost in the maze of lights as though wandering in the stars.”
“And the elephants of the coffee mountains?”
“The elephants have long lashes over their eyes that are even more beautiful than women’s.”
“Were you ever in love there with some girl?”
“Not really.”
“Tell me that you were.”
“Then I was.”
“What did she look like, Sam?”
“She wore a golden sari and golden sandals on her feet. Her hair was pulled into a tight braid that hung down her back. Her hair shone as though it was oiled. Her mother wove a strand of white flowers to hang all through her hair.”
“Did she dance for you?”
“On the bank of the stream.”
“Were the stars around her shoulders?”
“Every single one.”
“You make me feel good.”
“I’ve put you under an Indian spell.”
“Do you remember our first kiss, Sammy?”
“We kissed
on the moon.”
“I’d like to kiss you in a sari at the Taj Mahal.”
“Then we’ll see it for the first time together, kiss on its steps as Shah Jahan and Mumtaz never could.”
“I’d have never guessed an Indian.”
“An Indian on the moon.”
There was Jacqueline the girl who cocked her hip in a smoky bar and looked at him, Jacqueline who was always nice, Jacqueline’s body in the candlelight on those white sheets. But there were also those letters that had begun to arrive from India. What in God’s name did he think he was doing? the letters asked. Did he intend to bring every single one of them to their knees with shame?
What this meant to my uncle as he smoked at his window weeknights when Jacqueline wasn’t there to make him think of nothing but her was that he thought of his faraway father, how his disobedience was surely tearing the old man up, that the Konkans were shaking their heads in apoplexy, that my father was livid. Has Babu ever done one thing to bring me any happiness? Who gives a fuck about this man Babu ? my uncle would say to himself at the window. But he also knew in his heart of hearts that his Babu would always be his Babu.
Every Sunday night, away from Jacqueline, my uncle would resolve to end it with her. And then the week would go on with its busy days of work, the fatigue at night, and his desire for Jacqueline would rise in him again. Friday night when she’d buzz him in, he’d run up the steps like a sprinter.
The reality of the Konkans was that most of them were poor, illiterate, traditional people as stuck and burdened in their insular ways as the Hindus and Muslims they lived among. The stereotype of the Konkans as the “Jews of India” came from the small but visible percentage of them who had amassed wealth as traders, speculators, usurers, and when the opportunity presented itself, as collaborators. There were castes among them, not as formalized as the Hindus’, but just as rigid. My grandfather’s family were upper-class Konkans, not wealthy, but in relation to the tall poverty of India, rich enough. They had always managed to educate at least one son, so that he’d be able to take advantage of things when the moment came. My grandfather had been given enough education to pass the British oral and written tests for police officers, and he’d managed to educate his son Lawrence enough in turn that he was able to woo my mother. Most Konkans lived in small huts with no lights, and they always would. They told stories to their children of Vasco da Gama and his ship, St. Francis Xavier and his cross, over hearth fires of charcoal if they were lucky, cattle dung if they were not. They spun these tales—in the fishing villages of the coast, in the labor camps of Karnataka’s coffee mountains—instead of the stories of Krishna and Arjuna that their Hindu neighbors told next door.
Why couldn’t my uncle Sam disappear into America the way my uncle Les had, the way Winston and all the others who had stepped out of the trees in Vermont the past years had? No, he was not a firstborn son. But he was also not a third. Maybe it was the second brother’s curse to have none of the privileges of the first son, as well as none of the freedoms of the third. But maybe, too, and this is what troubled my uncle most, all of this had nothing to do with any of that. Maybe it was simply about him: Samuel Erasmus D’Sai.
So every time he drove to Jacqueline’s, it was with the intention of breaking up. And every time, he didn’t. “You make me happy,” she’d say to him, her body beside his as spent as his would be, deep in the night. What could he do but close his eyes, hold her, wonder what would happen, and take the happiness she offered him?
One night late in the summer when my mother was nursing my sister, when my father sat in his basement with his scotch and his desire to achieve something in this place called America, my uncle lay in bed at the opposite end of Chicago with a young woman he called Jackie. They were both nude in the dark. She said to him in her softest voice, “Tell me a story from India.”
My uncle held aside her hair to kiss her neck. “I have told you stories from India until you can even see the grains of sand on the beach as da Gama planted his sword in it. You tell me about where you come from. Tell me who she is, this person that I’m holding.”
She was quiet a minute as she thought. Then she said, “I like to read. I like teaching the kids. I like living down here. My parents are in Gary, my grandparents in the Carolinas. I don’t know much beyond that. There isn’t much for me to know.”
“Why do you live here when you can live somewhere else?”
“I know it’s not safe down here. But I don’t want to live up north. You know how they open the fire hydrants here? You know who does that? Somebody’s dad. He probably works for the city himself. Has the big wrench in his car. The water spraying everywhere, all the kids dancing in it. Then the cops come and everybody runs away. The kids, their parents, the cousins, the aunties. Just the old women stay on their stoops to watch the cops get all wet as they try to shut the thing off. It’s a lot of fun. We get to do that down here, Sam. They don’t get to have fun like that up there.”
“If we were in India, we would not be allowed to be together.”
“I guessed that.”
“India is not the way you wish it to be.”
“I know that, too. I’m still allowed to have my dreams. About India. About any of it. You’re not white. But you’re not black either. If I was ever to take you to Gary, don’t you know that my parents would be uneasy about it? They’re proud of what I’ve done. But they’re also from another time. I think about these things as much as you do. What is it like for me to be with you? What is it like for you to be with me?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be on the moon?” my uncle said.
“But we’re not. We’re right here. I’m scared, Sam. I’m scared about what you are going to do to me.”
The weeks passed, the letters came. They were covered in stamps with slogans in Hindi about the triumph of mechanized agriculture, about the might of Indian heavy industry. Some of the letters were written in the crabbed and angry curlicues of Kannada script, some came in crabbed and angry printed English. All of them had so much to say. They were from my grandfather, yes, but they were also from every uncle and cousin that my uncle had ever met. The letters all said the same thing in the end: He has been allowed to play in America long enough, a suitable girl has been found by the matchmaker, everyone is now waiting for him to come back to India and claim her, why would he demoralize everyone in this way? Everyone up and down the Konkan Coast, from Mangalore to Panjim. Even in Mysore, they are pulling out their hair. Would Samuel Erasmus be the one to disgrace the Chikmagalurian D’Sais? Would Samuel Erasmus really resist his father’s wishes?
And as for my mother? What was she thinking about at this time? Of all the things she could have done or said, she rocked my sister to sleep on her knees, and did nothing.
My uncle took Jacqueline to the planetarium, and they kissed a long time on the moon. He said to her, “I have had fun all summer long. You have given me the best time I will ever know in this life.”
“You can have much more than that, Sam,” she said in her quietest voice. “Right here, right now, this is how we change the world.”
My uncle flew to Bombay one week later, on September the sixth of that year. On the eleventh he was married. He took his bride to Mysore for their honeymoon and walked through the lights of the Brindavan Gardens. They stayed in India three more weeks, waiting for her visa to clear. Then they flew to Chicago, and my mother and father picked them up at O’Hare.
My uncle Sam brought back all sorts of gifts from the family in India. There were carved sandalwood boxes with sambars reclining on them in their horns, silver oil lamps filigreed along their bases like lace, a cricket ball from one of my father’s old teammates on the Britishers’ Chikmagalur Boys’ Cricket Club, and silver bangles for my mother. Both Sam and his bride smelled like India in the car, and they were quiet and tired. My uncle sat up front beside my father, and his bride, Asha, sat in the back in her bridal sari with me on her lap. My sister was in her car seat in
the middle, and my mother looked out her window at the city as it passed.
“So many lights,” Asha said, and my mother said, “This is only the very beginning of them.”
“It is very cold as well.”
“This is only the beginning of that, too.”
My uncle called Jacqueline’s apartment now and again in the evenings, while Asha in her sari fried onions in the pan in the kitchen for curry. He would sit in his old orange chair in his living room and sip a tumbler of scotch as he listened to the line ring. My father had given him a bottle of it to celebrate his marriage.
The one time Jacqueline answered the phone, she said to my uncle, “I don’t have anything more to say to you, Sam.”
“I know that,” my uncle said back.
My uncle had brought back a pair of gold earrings from India, lotus blossoms, the Hindu symbol for purity. He’d left them in an envelope in her mailbox. “Did you get my gift?” he asked her.
“I’m wearing them.”
“I hope you wear them every day.”
“I will for a while.”
“And then?”
“And then I won’t.”
“I’m sorry that I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me.” There was a long pause on the phone. Then she said, “You are going to hurt from this longer than I ever will. It’s true that I didn’t know what kind of Indian you were. But what hurts me most is to know what kind of man.”
The Country Club
My father was perhaps the most enslaved person on earth. He wasn’t so much a person as an engine, tinkered with before he could even babble to be the firstborn son of a firstborn son, and it so happened to be that he was born to a family of a tribe of people who after five centuries of tried-and-true methodology understood like faith that their best chance for success in this world was to put their energies, resources, and cultural imperatives into one male child—though they also had as many other children as they could—and this one male child in my grandfather’s family happened to be my father.