The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  “You see how mad she gets, my little Sita-devi?”

  “He rolls on me and rolls off.”

  “And she lays there like a dead bangadee.”

  “I’ll go home.”

  “Then go.”

  “You, Samuel. You have made my life from a dream to a misery.”

  “That is the problem with devis. All is dreams, is it not, my Sita-devi?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “You are my wife. So you are also my devi.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Sita-devi,” my uncle Sam would say, and pop a sliver of ginger in his mouth, wink, and go back to his cooking. When it was time to leave, my mother would gather my sister up in her arms, and my uncle would carry me on his shoulder. My aunt Asha would watch from the door.

  As they set our sleeping bodies in the car, my mother would whisper, “You’re not the Sam I know.”

  “I have been unhappy since I stepped off the plane.”

  “Be nice to that poor girl,” my mother would say as she finished buckling my sister into her seat.

  “Why have you done these things, Denise? Why did you go to India? Why did you bring us here? It is you. Everything that has happened has always been because of you.”

  “You are not my Sam.”

  “I am that very same.”

  The tomatoes came like the mail, even on Sunday. Some of the nights, my mother would lie awake to hear them. They were the quickest of sounds, at two thirty A.M., at three, like a small flight of birds who had lost their way. How could those soft sounds downstairs make this awful mess? My father snored through it every night with the scotch that put him to bed.

  While my father washed the tomatoes off the window in the mornings like another of the chores in the running of this new house, my mother soon found her footing. For one, no matter who she and her husband were or where they had come from or what they had done in their adult lives that they could have done differently and now regretted, my mother understood instinctively that they were not bad people, that they didn’t deserve this. Secondly, she had children.

  The insulting of our house affected my father more than anything else that had happened to him in America. No matter how rigidly he constructed his vision of America and his place in it, like it or not, this was a thing that had let itself into his world. As he washed off the window, as he rode the commuter train to work in his suit and polished shoes, as he looked over the edge of his morning Tribune and glanced at the faces of the white men around him, all fathers, all career men like he was reading their papers, my father wondered for the first time what they really thought of him. He began to feel small among them in a way he hadn’t before. He began to question his place here, as well as his self-worth.

  “We have to call the police,” my mother told him the Tuesday morning the week after it started, the window again dressed in seeds and pulp.

  “This is kids, Denise. It will pass. This is what kids do here. You see how they throw toilet paper in the trees at other people’s homes.”

  “That is to celebrate their football teams. That is something their families are happy to wake up and see. This isn’t like that, Lawrence. This is something very different.”

  “I don’t know what I should say to them.”

  “You should say that you are being harassed. You should tell them that you are being harassed, and that you have a wife and children who have been frightened by it.”

  “It will be worse if I call them.”

  “What can be worse than this?”

  “We have never called the police.”

  “We have never had to.”

  My father pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes as he and my mother stood before the stained window. He said in a quiet voice, “I am embarrassed,” and though at that moment my mother saw in him the slender young man in India who had taken her for walks along the stream, had listened and laughed at the things she’d had to say to him then, had made her feel unique and loved before the man he would become in America ruined those good memories, too much now had happened between them, and she didn’t allow herself to express the sympathy for him that she felt. Instead she said, “Lawrence, we are in this house because of you. No one else made us move here. We were happiest in the city. Now you have a problem that has touched your family. You are the one who has to take care of it.”

  My father nodded, looked through the stained window at the brightening morning. He showered and dressed, drank his morning glass of orange juice, tucked his paper under his arm, and went out to his car to drive to the train station. At his office, he closed the glass door, with his name on it on a metal plaque, and looked through the door awhile at the busy underlings moving about in their cubicles. The day was starting, and all would soon settle down to work. And that was all that my father wanted to do, to work, to advance, to be invited to join the Ridge Lawn Country Club and fulfill the promise of the man he had been raised to be. My father’s office didn’t have a single Indian thing in it other than him. And all through his life here, he hadn’t acknowledged that. That he hated India. That he’d wanted to leave it behind even as a child. My father stood up from his chair and looked out over the city, at the wheeling pigeons far below, at the offices across the way and the people in them, and his place in the world felt small. Then he sat down, picked up his phone, hunched his shoulders, and called Information.

  “What listing please?” the woman’s voice said.

  “The Ridge Lawn Police Department.”

  “I can connect you,” the voice offered, and my father agreed to that.

  The line rang twice and a man answered and said, “Police.”

  My father rubbed his temple with his forefinger. He said into the phone, “Good morning, sir. My name is Lawrence D’Sai. I live at 1012 South Hamlin Avenue. For some nights, unknown people have been throwing tomatoes at my house.”

  “How many nights?”

  “One full week.”

  My aunt Asha had said to my mother that Saturday, “My sister-auntie, please let me come and live with you at your house. I cannot stand this man. He does not respect me. I will die if I have to continue living here. You are the only one in the world who is my friend.”

  My mother felt my aunt Asha’s tight grip on her wrists, felt India rise up in her at the sight of my trembling aunt in her sari, in the bangles on my aunt’s wrists. How many of them had said this very same thing to her in her time there? This man is bad to me. Let me come and live at your house.

  My uncle stood in his lungi in the kitchen doorway, his arms crossed, watching the white woman talk to his wife. An Indian man in a doorway with his arms crossed was a familiar sight to my mother as well.

  Maybe it was the tomatoes that did it. Maybe it was something else. But my mother looked at my aunt Asha in her wet and awful need, and she said the thing that she felt was most true in her heart, “Your place is with your husband.”

  For a week, a Ridge Lawn patrol car sat outside our house at the curb like a visitor, the officer in it, a sentinel in the night. Now and again when she’d rise from bed to tend to my sister, my mother would part the curtains of my sister’s bedroom upstairs to see that the black-and-white patrol car was still there. It was. My father sat in his basement and looked at his painting like looking at nothing. With that car out there in front of his house, he felt that the eyes of the world were now on him, and more than that, that he had failed. He tilted his head to pour scotch into his mouth. No one said anything about it to him anywhere. And still he felt their eyes on him as he waited on the platform for the train in his raincoat in the mornings: There he is, the Indian, the one who can’t handle it here, the one who called the cops. What was there left for him to do but drink? To wish that this would pass, to wonder over and over if the world would relent and give him his life back?

  The police car sat outside, and the tomatoes went away. Then the officer came to the door. No one had seen anything, this would be the las
t night they’d be out there. “Real sorry about it,” he said, and shrugged. What could my mother do but thank him?

  After she’d closed the door, my mother said to my father, “They have been nice to do this.”

  My father held his wrist in his hand.

  “I know, Lawrence, that I haven’t always been the best of wives to you. But I don’t want you to think that I’m ashamed of you.”

  “I don’t think that,” my father said.

  The police officer lifted his hand to my father in the morning, started his engine, drove away. My father went to work, had his meetings, and as he had been doing all of this time, he tried not to think about it. He sat a long time that night before his painting, drinking scotch, thinking of his own father, the family, everything he had been given and the others denied so that he could have all of this. He had done his best, hadn’t he? He had done every small thing. He went upstairs and put himself to bed with his back touching my mother’s. Maybe if he hadn’t been born the firstborn son. Maybe then he could have been happy. When he opened the drapes in the morning, there were the tomatoes.

  Once upon a time in India, men had come to my grandfather’s house to kill him. My father and his siblings had watched with their mother from the window as my grandfather went out to meet those men. My father hadn’t known why those men wanted to kill my grandfather. He only knew that he loved him. My grandfather said some words to those men that my father hadn’t been able to hear. My grandfather had stood at the gate with his hands on his hips like the immovable thing that he was, and soon enough those men had gone away.

  My grandfather came back into the house covered in red paan spit. He changed his lungi and told my grandmother to make tea for him. Then he sat in his chair, and my father and the others went to him.

  Of all of those children, my father was the one that my grandfather had picked up. He sat my father on his lap and he kissed his hair. “Did those Hindus frighten you, my son?”

  “Yes, Dad,” my father had said.

  My grandfather petted my father’s face. He sighed and said, “I was frightened, too.”

  There was a thing to deal with now, the first real thing of my father’s life. My mother was very quiet that morning, holding my sister in her arms. She looked at my father, and he looked at the window. There was nothing left to say. My father showered and shaved and dressed, drank his orange juice, ate a banana. He picked his newspaper up off the walkway and tucked it under his arm. Then he got in his car and drove away. My mother washed the tomatoes off the windows that morning, the first time she had done that. As she looked about her at the wakening neighborhood, its leafy trees, the large and manicured lawns that the people here paid so much to have, she did not wonder any longer who among them was doing this to them. She understood that they all were.

  Of all the history that she’d brought with her from India to America in the form of my father, in his brother Sam, in the lives of her children that her body had delivered into this world, even in her own life and what she had escaped and what belonged to her now, my mother was not concerned with any of that. What my mother was consumed with that morning, as she gathered me up from my bed to wash and feed my sister and me and start the new day, was the idea that she’d made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed, that she’d brought all these people here only to see them hurt. For a moment, she thought to call my uncle Sam, to tell him all that had been happening, and to apologize to him. But, too, Sam had his life now with my aunt Asha, which my mother knew she had played a hand in forcing on him.

  My mother helped my father out of his raincoat when he got home, held her arms out for him to lay his tie across, his shirt. My mother rubbed my father’s shoulders as he sat on the edge of the bed, and he let her. Then she led him in to dinner, which she had waiting.

  “I’m sorry for every little thing, Lawrence,” my mother said to my father as he ate.

  “We have two fine children.”

  My parents put us to bed. My father worked in his new study while my mother washed the dishes. Later, she lay and read on the couch. At midnight, my father set one of the kitchen chairs in the middle of the living room and closed the drapes, and my mother in her nightgown rubbed his shoulder, kissed the top of his head.

  “I love you, Lawrence.”

  “I know that you do.”

  Then my mother let my father sit there, and she went to bed.

  My father sat with his hands in his lap. The clock ticked away the time. He thought about his father, about what his father would have done, about what his father would expect of him now, and he thought of my mother, my sister, and me. How he loved every one of us. At two A.M., the tomatoes hit the window. My father sprung up from his chair, opened the front door, which he’d left unlocked, and ran out into the night in his house slippers. There were figures on the lawn in the moonlight, and the figures were men. The men began to run away. My father felt something like light come into him until he thought of nothing but the running, the capturing of one of these people. He picked one out of the group, closed in on him. For a moment as they ran together, my father’s hand touched the small of the figure’s back, and for the space of those two heartbeats, they were connected by that touch like friends. Then my father turned that touch into a grasp, and he had a handful of someone’s jacket, and he whirled that someone onto the ground. He pounced on him, grasped his hair, and beat his face into the lawn. The man began to holler, my mother called the cops, every bedroom window in the neighborhood turned yellow. The light that had come into my father’s body left.

  My father was saying, You fucking fuck bastard, which is what people say when they’ve caught someone who’s been throwing tomatoes at their home.

  The crowd formed in its pajamas, the police car came with its sound and lights, the cops pushed through the people, and my father finally let go of what he had so far refused to. Then my father walked across the lawn to take my mother into the house by her waist.

  It was a neighbor’s kid of course, a high school senior, a drummer in the marching band, a tax attorney’s son from three doors down. The boy licked his bloody lips in the glare of the police car’s headlights as they put the cuffs on him. He was crying already. They’d only meant it as a prank. He raided out the others’ names right there. But his was the only name that would go in the Ridge Lawn Herald’s police blotter that week, because he was the only one who’d already turned eighteen.

  His father came to my father. He asked in our living room that the charges against his son be dropped. It hadn’t been about race. It was a prank that kids did at this age. The whole family was ashamed and sorry. Certainly they would punish him. They had raised this boy to be a good boy. This was only a mistake he had made. If my father prosecuted this, it would keep his son out of Notre Dame, the family’s alma mater. My mother listened from the kitchen. My father nodded and let it go.

  My father and mother dressed up in their best clothes in the early spring. They let the women from the country club look all around their new house. My father didn’t say anything to my mother after the country club women left, and my mother didn’t say anything to him. The rejection letter came in the mail.

  PART 3

  Sita-Devi

  Now when Captain Vasco da Gama set sail with St. Francis Xavier from Portugal, my uncle would tell me as I’d sit in his lap at his house those drowsy Saturday afternoons that spring, da Gama and Xavier had been very young men. They had been young and strong in their beards, and the captain wore a sword at his side and the saint held a tall silver staff with a bronze crucifix on top of it. They had only one dream, to sail all the way around the world to India, where they knew a people were waiting for them on its coast. They knew they must take their language, their religion, and their knowledge of numbers and letters with them, and brave the terrible sea voyage. Then they would give those things as gifts to the people who waited for them, so those people could learn them and become the Konkans.

  It was a new time for P
ortugal, a fresh time, a time of blue skies and golden wheat, of fat black grapes on the vines, and cattle herds lowing in the fields with their curly heads. All of the people of Portugal were happy, because after seven hundred years of slavery, young men like Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier had charged their warhorses into battle against the Muslim Moors who had conquered their country, and the Catholic armies of Portugal and Spain had finally driven the terrible Moors back across the sea to Morocco, where they belonged.

  The fighting had lasted for years and years, the fields of Portugal and Spain had been soaked with young men’s blood. Every family lost at least one son. The Moors never gave up. Even when the Catholic army drove them to the top of the Rock of Gibraltar, the Moors raided their curved swords and rained their arrows down onto them. The Catholic knights climbed up the rock on their hands and knees, even over the bodies of their killed brothers, holding their shields before them. Each of their shields bristled with arrows, and still the Catholics went on. When the king of the Moors saw the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ closing in all about him on the shields of those men, he sent his women and children across the water to Morocco in small boats. Then he did what any defeated king must do: He breathed one last sigh and threw himself from the tower of his castle. The Catholic knights took off their helmets to look down at the king of the Moors’ broken body on the rocks at the edge of the foaming sea.

  So Portugal was finally free, and everyone in the land rejoiced. The king called Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier to him in his royal court in Lisbon, and they kneeled before him as he sat on his throne. The old king held the ruby ring on his finger out to them, and they kissed it to show their allegiance to him. The king stood up and everyone in the court bowed. He drew out his sword and held it up, and it gleamed in a ray of sunlight streaming in from a high window. Was the king going to cut off their heads? Instead, he tapped the two men on the shoulders with it. He said, “Vasco da Gama and Francis Xavier, you have been chosen by God to face the perils of the sea and journey to India, where a people will greet you on the shore. Are you brave enough to face the sea, the monsters at its edge, the terrible savages who will try to kill you on your way?”