The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  “They will fuck your wife in front of you.”

  “They will massacre your children.”

  “They will put a bullet in your brain.”

  “I will go to Goa.”

  “Your corpse will go to Goa.”

  “The corpses of your children will go to Goa.”

  “Don’t talk all of this!”

  “I will take my family and go to Goa.”

  “Your corpse will go to Goa.”

  “Your corpse will go to Goa with its dick stuffed in its mouth.”

  “And your wife will be fucked.”

  “And your children will be dead.”

  “I say, don’t talk all of this!”

  The youngest one turned to my grandfather. He said across the fire, “Captain D’Sai? What will you do if the British leave?”

  My grandfather drew on his cigarette, scratched his knee, and looked at the fire. Then he looked across the fire at the faces of his worried men. They were sitting together on the logs like children. What more could be expected of them? Yes, they were all firstborn sons, but none of them were firstborn sons of firstborn sons reaching all the way back beyond memory. That was why he was the leader and they were the men. That was what my grandfather had inside of him.

  “The British will not leave. They have the guns. Whoever has the guns has everything. Even history will belong to them. In two years’ time, no one will have heard of this mutiny. At the same time, do what any sensible Konkan would do. Put some gold somewhere. Give some gems to your sisters to bury in the garden. Put some money here and there. Educate your firstborn sons. But do not ever fear. If we have to start again, we will. That is what we do. We are Konkans.”

  In the morning, they went on patrol through the forest, and when they heard the sawing, my grandfather put up his hand and his men crept back and hid. There were Hindus in black-and-white checkered head wraps sawing down sandalwood trees. Five of them. One watched with his rifle while the other four worked. Sunlight came down on them in a shaft in the clearing of the fallen trees. The eyes of the one with the gun shifted from side to side. My grandfather crawled back to his men. Then they waited throughout the morning on their bellies while the poachers felled the trees. When my grandfather felt that enough trees had fallen, he waved his men in. They stepped into the clearing with their Lee-Enfields on those men. My grandfather said to the man with the rifle, “Put that weapon down!” in Kannada, and the man in his checkered head wrap lifted the rifle and shot him. Then that man was killed by all of them but my grandfather, who was sitting down. The others were easy to run down and shoot in the trees, and the one that didn’t run, they clubbed to the ground and shot in the back of the head.

  My grandfather’s men made a stretcher of two poles and a blanket, and they ran him out of the forest on the path. As they did, my grandfather could see the blue of the sky between the leaves of the trees. Why could this world be so beautiful? But also, why hadn’t he just shot him? He wouldn’t be foolish like that again. And the trees had been cut down.

  When I was growing up in Ridge Lawn, at the new house as well as the old, my mother and I would often take my sister for a walk in her stroller. The tomatoes on the windows the autumn before had made my mother hate what she once simply hadn’t liked, but this was still her place in the world, and she was still going to live in it. My mother liked to take these walks in the evenings. The lightning bugs would rise up from the lawns like embers, and to the people we passed who said hello to us, we said hello back, and to the people who did not, we did not.

  Sometimes we would walk the eleven blocks to Aldine Avenue, where we used to live. The blocks in Ridge Lawn were not very long, and it wasn’t a long way to go. When we’d see our old house, my mother would say to me, “Do you remember when we lived here?” and I would say, “Yes, Mom,” and then she would say, “And do you remember Nelson Street?” The times I said that I did, my mother would sigh and say, “You mustn’t make up stories, Francisco. I know that you were too young to remember that.”

  The Bings lived on the corner of our old block on Aldine Avenue, and sometimes when we’d walk past their house with my sister in her stroller, Mrs. Bing would be on the swing on their front porch with Jason and Jenny, and my mother would stop to talk. The Bings’ was the only house where we did that. As our mothers talked on the porch with our sisters on their laps, Jason and I would have a few minutes to play. We’d lift up the flagstones at the side of their house to see the pill bugs and ants underneath. The bugs would scatter, and the black ants would take their white eggs down the holes in their pincers.

  My mother had explained something to me in the car one night that winter as we’d driven home in the dark and snow from the library. When we passed the Bings’ house, I saw that the strings of lights on their bushes were blue. Everyone else’s lights in Ridge Lawn were white. The snow around the Bings’ bushes was also blue from those lights. I said to my mother while my sister slept behind us in her car seat, “Why are the Bings’ Christmas lights blue?”

  My mother said, “The Bings’ lights are blue because Mr. Bing is Jewish. The Jews put out blue lights at Christmastime. If you see blue lights outside a house, then you know that the family inside is Jewish.”

  “What is Jewish?”

  “It’s a religion. A certain kind of people.”

  “Like Konkans?”

  “Like Konkans. In fact, the Konkans are called the Jews of India.”

  “Why are the Konkans called that?”

  My mother looked out her window at the snow. Then she looked at the road again. “The Konkans are called the Jews of India because they aren’t really a part of India the way the Hindus are. Because they have their own religion. Because they put the education of their children above everything else. That’s why I take you and your sister to the library, Francisco. When you have an education, you get to have a better life than other people do. I made myself get an education. Otherwise, I would have never gotten to go to India. And that is also why many people in India are jealous of the Konkans. Just like the Jews.”

  “Are the Jews good or bad?”

  “Some are good and some are bad.”

  “What about Konkans?”

  “That same thing.”

  “Why don’t we put out different-colored lights?”

  “Because we are Catholics.”

  “But we’re different.”

  “Everyone who is Christian puts out white lights. Catholics are Christians. So we put out white lights.”

  “Is Jason a Jew?”

  “Jason’s not a Jew because his mother’s not. Mrs. Bing is Irish. To be Jewish, your mother has to be one first. Mr. Bing is Jewish because his parents were. Don’t talk about this to anybody, Francisco. Mr. Bing doesn’t want everyone to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they could be mean to him.”

  “Then why does he put out blue lights?”

  “Because he also does want them to know.”

  “Isn’t he scared?”

  “No one here knows what the blue lights mean.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Because Mrs. Bing told me.”

  “Are we afraid to tell people we are Konkans?”

  “No, Francisco, we are not.”

  Looking at ants with Jason that spring, I said to him, “Your dad’s a Jew.”

  Jason looked at me. He said, “Your dad is a Hindu.”

  What happened to my father in the spring of that year was this: He had been at Hinton & Thompson for eight and a half years, and after watching many younger people advance quickly past him, it was his turn to be called into his boss Marshall Caldwaller’s office.

  My father emulated Marshall Caldwaller in every way. Marshall Caldwaller had a mahogany desk in his office. My father had a mahogany desk in his office, but smaller. Marshall Caldwaller lived in Barrington. My father lived in Ridge Lawn. Marshall Caldwaller played golf and tennis. My father played golf and tenn
is. Marshall Caldwaller kept bottles of single-malt scotch on a shelf behind his desk. My father drank single-malt scotch at home.

  “I’m proud of you,” the older man said, and smiled, folded his hands together on his desk. “You’ve been my personal project all these years.”

  “I am grateful.”

  “How does junior VP, Aeronautics and Navigation Division, Chicago branch, sound to you?”

  “It sounds very good to me, Marsh.”

  “I’m sorry you had to wait so long for it.”

  “That’s over now.”

  “They’re going to want you to make tough personnel decisions.”

  “I’ll make them.”

  “Are you still taking those pronunciation classes I recommended you take?”

  “Every Wednesday after work.”

  Marshall Caldwaller opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a gold-colored nameplate. On it were the words LAWRENCE D’SAI, JUNIOR VICE PRESIDENT. He handed it to my father.

  My father took the nameplate back to his office. I know that my father wept.

  How my uncle Sam dealt with the history of his father was a different thing entirely. There was the story he’d tell me about the poachers and the sandalwood trees and my grandfather getting shot, but there was also what had really happened. Because those Hindus had come to the house to kill my grandfather after the British left. And while my father left Chikmagalur for his education, my uncle Sam had stayed. Time had taken care of the rest. Everyone knew what everyone else had done during the Raj. They told their children, and their children told each other.

  The best thing for my uncle Sam to do was to turn history into a story to entertain his nephew. Even better was to not think about it at all. Because when he did, he saw his father lying on the table in his blood-soaked undershirt, the wet wound of the gunshot when the surgeon cut the shirt off, yes. But my uncle also saw that glade in the forest, the felled trees running with sap, the brightness of the raw yellow wood, the yellow sawdust in piles, the smoke of the guns, the Hindus running through the trees, the last one burbling out Kannada even as the rifle bucked from the back of his head. And he saw all of the other times like that as well.

  What my father’s advancement at Hinton & Thompson really meant was that he became the Chicago branch’s axman. And more than just firing people, the company used my father to fire Hispanics and blacks. They’d had to start hiring minorities because of affirmative action, and the racial lawsuits had started, even at the corporate level. So they thought it best to use a colored man to fire other colored men to take that angle away.

  They flew my father everywhere that summer, to New York, yes, but also to San Francisco, Baltimore, Atlanta, and LA. In each place, they put him up in the Hilton. And in each of those cities, my father met men who were not white in the hotel’s restaurant, bought them martinis on the company’s dime, and fired them.

  At dinner, my mother would sometimes say to me, “How do you say no in Konkani, Francisco?”

  “Naka,” I’d tell her.

  “And how do you say yes?”

  “Woyee.”

  My father would set his fork down on his plate. “Why do you insist on teaching him all of these things?”

  “And how do you say basement?”

  “Sekla.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Where Dad goes after dinner.”

  My uncle rented a rototiller in the spring, and he and my mother used it two weekends in a row to turn the soil for that year’s garden while my sister and I played with a soccer ball in the yard. My mother wore blue jeans, and a yellow bandanna to hold back her hair. They both wore gardening gloves. Inside, my aunt Asha watched television with her legs tucked under her on the couch because she was tired from her week at work. She always wore blue jeans now. “You should plant pumpkins this year, Sam,” my mother said as she kneeled in the soil to take out a stone and toss it onto a pile with the others. “They take a long time, but then the kids will get to carve them.”

  “This year, I will grow pumpkins and gourds. I know a man on Maxwell Street who always buys gourds to hollow and paint.”

  “Maybe one day you’ll get Asha out here to garden with you.”

  “Asha is busy. The only person in the world who has ever liked to garden with me is you.”

  “Pretty soon, it will be ten years since I left India.”

  “It will soon be six for me.”

  “Have you heard from Les?”

  “Les is fine.”

  “And what about Winston?”

  “They’ve closed Gore Road.”

  “How are they getting in now?”

  “North Dakota and Maine.”

  “It’s got to be so strange for them to see North Dakota.”

  “It is strange for them to see anywhere here at first.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then they are here.”

  Later, they patted seeds into the rows they’d made, corn, butternut squash, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini. Then my mother took off her gloves, wiped her face with the bandanna, called to my sister and me, and after we’d kissed our aunt good-bye inside, my mother took us home. The very next day, my uncle Sam drove to the True Value on Irving Park Road, came home again, and planted the pumpkin seeds he’d bought.

  Every evening in the summer after work, when he wasn’t out of town on business, my father would drive to the Maine South High School tennis courts in his whites, unzip his racquet from its case, chalk his name up on the board, and wait his turn to battle it out with whoever was next in line for an open court. Tennis was his new sport. The players were fathers from all over Ridge Lawn, and none of them belonged to the country club. My father often played Michael Bing, the husband of my mother’s friend.

  My father and Mr. Bing noticed in each other something that summer that would make them close friends for years: When they’d play against each other on the high school courts, their running and cursing and volleys and anger told them that they understood life in a similar way. The game, as with all things, was not to be played for fun, but to be won. Though neither of them was very good, they were evenly matched, and even when they were scheduled on the board to play other people, they began to defer their turns to wait and play each other. Sometimes Mr. Bing was the victor, and sometimes my father was. At the end of each one of these matches, they would hurry to the net to shake hands and say, “Nice game.”

  The Bings invited us over on the weekends, and sometimes we would walk there with the lightning bugs lifting off the lawns around us, and sometimes we would go in the car. Once our sisters were tucked in on the big bed upstairs and we were playing Star Wars in Jason’s room with our toys, our mothers would sip their wine and look at each other with sympathetic eyes on the Bings’ screened-in porch as our drunken fathers cursed politicians, the Soviets, the Green Bay Packers, and the underlings who worked for them, as well as the bosses they worked for.

  “He’s an arrogant prick.”

  “He’s an insufferable ass.”

  “He thinks I give a shit.”

  “He can suck my cock.”

  Yes, our mothers occupied the same physical space on that porch as our angry fathers. But quick glances at each other dismissed our fathers as well.

  My father would stand up with his tumbler in his hand and say, “Nobody in this world knows what I am capable of! They haven’t yet made the test that I can’t pass!”

  And Mr. Bing would stand up, making the plates and bottles clatter on the table, and he would shout back, “You think I don’t know, Lawrence? Nobody knows the things I know in this goddamned world!”

  Mr. Bing worked downtown like my father did, as a claims manager for Travelers. While my father had his painting to explain his life to himself, Mr. Bing had scuba diving. Once a year, he went on a two-week diving expedition without his family to some remote corner of the world—Mozambique, Madagascar, Egypt, Thailand—and brought back the fan coral, the Emperor conch s
hells, that lined every windowsill in their house.

  As our fathers’ fury rose at all those things inside them, Mrs. Bing would lean to my mother across the table, smile, and say quietly, “We’re all grown up now, aren’t we, Denise?”

  “And it’s been a lot of fun, hasn’t it, Laura?”

  “At least somebody in this world knows what I go through.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if that made it easier?”

  Jason and I were supposed to stay in his room, to play with our toys, but not to wrestle. When we’d get tired of wrestling, we’d creep downstairs in our socks to hide behind the sofa and look at our parents.

  “Your dad is a Jew.”

  “Your dad is a Hindu.”

  “My dad is a Konkan.”

  “Don’t you know that’s the same thing?”

  The last week of August, Marshall Caldwaller called my father into his office. He looked at my father and said, “We’ve worked out a severance package for Charles Curtain.”

  My father sat down in the chair. He looked at the file on Caldwaller’s desk, didn’t pick it up. “What is this about?” my father said.

  “I went to bat for him. Believe me, I’m not happy about it either.”

  “I hired him myself, Marsh.”

  “I know that you did.”

  “Get someone else to do it.”

  “There is no one else.”

  More than anything, my father liked Charles Curtain. My father’s years in America had evolved him in some ways, and when the young man had come into my father’s office with his briefcase, his smart handshake, my father had liked him. Charles only had a degree from DePaul, some internship experience at Citicorp, but his recommendation letters glowed, and he was articulate and quick. He dressed well, the raincoat he hung up was Burberry, and his yellow-and-blue-striped tie was clearly Italian. My father was able to see himself in Charles. My mother noticed my father’s good mood when he came home from work that day.

  “Are they sending you to London again?” she asked him as she set the table for dinner.