by Rahul Mehta
Nishit first noticed it when they stopped at the rest area halfway to Rochester. Already irritated that they were stopping at all (Couldn’t his brother go an hour and a half without having to pee? Hadn’t he thought to go before they left?) Nishit—waiting in the car, tapping the steering wheel—watched Prabhu shuffling into the shelter.
When Prabhu returned to the car, Nishit barked, “Pull up your pant cuff.”
“What? Why?”
Nishit leaned over the passenger seat, reached down, yanked roughly at Prabhu’s trouser leg. “Pull it up.” Prabhu complied, revealing gray tube socks.
“Why aren’t you wearing the dress socks I gave you?”
“These are better.”
“How?”
“Warmer.”
“What ‘warmer’? It’s not winter. It will be close to seventy today!”
“My feet are always cold. Besides, the way you crank up the AC in the car? I’m sure it will be the same or worse at Kodak. Shouldn’t I be comfortable in the interview? Isn’t that what you said? Just be myself? How can I be myself if my teeth are chattering?”
“I never said ‘Just be yourself.’ I wouldn’t have said that.”
“Somebody said it.”
“Somebody was wrong.”
For the next half hour, Nishit gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands. When they arrived, he pulled up to the building and reminded Prabhu of the name of the woman he was to ask for. “Listen,” he said, “forget what I said earlier. Of course be yourself.” He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Silly,” Prabhu said, opening the door, “who else can I be?”
Nishit liked to call it MACK-Donald’s. The children would protest in the backseat of the car, “Dad, c’mon, McDonald’s, say it right,” and Nishit would say, “Yes, yes, MACK-Donald’s,” and the children would harrumph and laugh.
There weren’t many options for a vegetarian. Sometimes he’d get an apple pie or a milk shake. Today he ordered a small coffee (he only drank tea at home) and a small order of fries, not knowing (no one knew then) that the fries were flavored with beef. The woman behind the counter had an asymmetrical haircut and blue eye shadow. “Here, hon,” she said, handing him the brown tray with the small cup and the fries in their paper wrapper. He collected several ketchup packets and a pile of napkins and retreated to a quiet booth.
He looked at his watch. He’d give himself fifteen minutes and then he’d head back over to Kodak. He’d be early, but he didn’t want Prabhu to have to wait. He imagined him sitting in a vast lobby, a leather couch swallowing him, his pant legs hiked high, his gray tube socks showing.
It was nice, Nishit thought, to be in the city, to be anonymous, no one coming up behind him, “Hi, Dr. Shah.” It was nice to be called “hon” by an attractive young woman he didn’t know. When he’d ordered, he had noticed her smooth neck, the delicate gold chain and glinting pendant nestled in the hollow above her collarbone. He ate his fries slowly, deliberately, holding each one and squeezing a teardrop of ketchup on its tip before popping it into his mouth.
“She was not an engineer. Or a scientist of any sort. She did not know the first thing about research and development, or design, or production. You were aware of this?”
“Your seat belt,” Nishit said. Prabhu reached behind him and pulled the strap across his chest, struggling to find the buckle. No one wore seat belts in India; Prabhu was always forgetting. Nishit watched him wrestle with it a moment before sighing, reaching over, and clicking it locked for him.
“You knew who this Mrs. Lee was?”
“I don’t personally know her, no, but she’s in personnel, right?”
“Per-son-nel. What does someone in per-son-nel know about what I can do? She has no qualifications to assess my suitability.”
“It’s just a first step. Big companies always have you screened first. Besides, it was an informational interview. You understood that, didn’t you? Just a chance for you to get on their radar?”
“She didn’t even have an office. She was in one of those—what do you call them?” Prabhu waved his hand dismissively.
“Cubicles,” Nishit said quietly, almost to himself.
Nishit drove. Prabhu looked out the window. After several minutes Nishit asked, “What did she actually say?”
“She had no qualifications to judge me. None whatsoever.”
In the days that followed, Nishit watched his brother transform, retreat, drift from room to room like dust riding drafts. He would become ghostlike: there and not. Once, Nishit would find Prabhu paused in front of the alcove at the top of the staircase, where the portrait of Neela hung. Another time, Nishit would be on the couch a full ten minutes reading Fortune before realizing his brother was also in the room. Prabhu was sitting in a straight-backed chair he had positioned by one of the windows in the subterranean family room, the eye-level window flush with the ground outside. He was staring across the expanse of grass—now the green-brown of early fall—that separated their house from the Yamamotos’.
Many years later, in the age of Prozac and Paxil and television commercials depicting anthropomorphized balls regaining bounce they thought they’d lost or perhaps never knew they had, Nishit would attempt to put a name to Prabhu’s troubles and wonder if there was more he could have done, more he could still do. But by then it would be too late. Prabhu would have settled into darkness, a literal darkness, a light-starved interior room he rarely left, the only illumination a naked low-watt bulb on the bedside table and the flickering diya flame lit during lengthy morning and evening pujas. He spent his days tending to the gods’ needs, washing the idols, dressing them in silks: deities having replaced the humans for whom he no longer had need. Prabhu’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He was the man that he was, he was not a bouncing ball. He was not interested in becoming someone new.
It wasn’t Kiran’s intention to spy, so if he occasionally heard something he wasn’t supposed to, he told himself that wasn’t his fault. He crouched in crawl spaces, hid in attics, curled up in closets. Enclosed spaces made him feel safe. It wasn’t so different from pulling the covers over your head during a lightning storm. He especially loved the linen closet, the bottle-spring scent of freshly laundered towels and sheets. He liked his parents’ closet. Hangered clothes brushing the top of his head reminded him of his father tussling his hair.
Years later, it would become the punch line to a joke. “When I came out of the closet, I literally came out of the closet,” he would tell friends. And in fact the week before he announced his homosexuality to his friends at college, he had spent three straight days in the closet of his shared dorm room, emerging only to fetch grilled cheese sandwiches and curly fries from the dining hall downstairs and to use the bathroom. His roommate, a track star, told his own friends over the phone, “This isn’t even the weirdest thing he’s done.”
Kiran was not allowed in Preeti’s room under any circumstances, and certainly not permitted in her closet, but that’s where he was—camped out amid ballet slippers, resting in a nest of shirts and skirts and culottes she hadn’t bothered hanging up or folding—when Preeti came in. She was just back from school, and through the wooden slats he could see her sloughing off her backpack, tugging a purple scrunchy from her hair. The LP was already on the turntable. Preeti dropped the needle and there it was, through the speakers, volume on high: Pat Benatar wailing “Promises in the Dark.” It took a minute for Preeti to get into it, but soon she was singing along, flailing around. She clenched her fists, hugged her arms to her chest, threw her head back.
At first Kiran found his sister’s display of preteen angst comical, but he quickly understood it was deeply felt. He had never seen her like this. Everything about her body indicated to him that she was in pain. He wanted to comfort her, but he had no comfort to give, and even if he did, he knew she wouldn’t accept it from him. He wasn’t even supposed to be there. Still, he felt proud that Preeti was listening to the album he had bo
ught her for Raksha Bandhan, proud that he had known what she would want.
No one was there to witness it, the shape-shifting way he became liquid, let his body pour through the crack between the wire gate and the plastic tray. No one heard the awful rattling of the cage, or saw the relentless way he chased her and then held her neck in his mouth, held her down as he mounted her. No one heard her shrieks. No one knew anything at all until one morning three weeks later, when Nishit noticed the tiny pink creatures in the cage, wet and barely formed.
It took a few minutes for the family, gathered round, to realize what had happened. Finally Shanti said, “Looks like our Minnie is a Mickey.” Kiran thought for a moment, then said, “No, Speedy Gonzalez. Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!”
“And what about Kroncha?” Nishit asked. When they’d given her the name, they’d assumed she was male (isn’t that what they were told at the pet store?).
“Kali?” Preeti suggested.
“No way,” Kiran said. “Kroncha is Kroncha.”
They watched the tiny bodies, each the size of the tip of a baby’s finger, wriggling beneath their mother. Fifteen. Shanti knew the number because later that very morning, after the children had boarded the school bus, Nishit had gone to his office, and Prabhu had retreated to the guest room, she lifted them, one by one, with a plastic teaspoon, deposited them into a black plastic bag from the liquor store, and dropped them—along with the spoon—into the garbage receptacle on the sidewalk outside the bank. That evening she told the children she’d taken them to the pet store, that was what was best for them, and when the children whined she cut them off with sounds sharp like slaps—Eh! Chah! Ouh!—and they understood there was nothing more to be done.
“You believe in Jesus?” Chris asked. They were at a diner in town, sitting in a booth in back, a full hour after the lunchtime rush. Shanti had been telling him about her convent-school youth: the strict nun who would rap her knuckles with a ruler when she held her pencil wrong; the kind one who once, after Shanti was tormented by her peers for some long-forgotten infraction of whatever social code had been in place back then, spoke softly to her as she braided her hair; Father Torres, jovial and bumbling, with his caterpillar eyebrows and porpoise nose.
“At that time it was very common for girls from good families to go to convent school, regardless of their religion,” Shanti explained. “Going to convent didn’t mean anything. The curriculum included very little explicit Christianity—morning prayers, chapel on certain holidays, an occasional Bible verse thrown in here or there.” What Shanti didn’t mention is that the one activity in which she always participated, even though it was not required, was confession. She loved sitting in the confessional across from Father Torres, loved knowing that she was being listened to (no one listened to girls), that there was someone deeply concerned for the state of her soul. She liked being told, in Father Torres’s voice—jolly even when he was being his most serious—that God would forgive her, even if she wasn’t so sure this God, the Christian God, was the one with power to do that.
When she saw that Chris was still waiting for an answer—did she believe in Jesus?—she said quietly, holding her small coffee cup with both hands, “I’m Hindu.”
“For Hindus, what is your version of Jesus?”
“Ram? Maybe Shiva? There are many.”
“And that’s what you believe?”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe. Hinduism is not just a religion, it’s a culture. When you’re Hindu, you’re Hindu. You can’t not be Hindu.”
Chris understood tradition. His father had founded the ministry. From the beginning, it had been inextricably linked to every aspect of Chris’s life. It was his home. There was never any question that he and his brother would assume leadership roles. There never seemed to be a space in his life to question anything. He had never considered what he believed independent of what he’d been taught. Still, noting that Shanti had not really answered his question, he pressed her.
“Is that what you believe?”
Shanti didn’t reply. She gazed absently into her coffee cup, which was almost empty, which had been almost empty for several minutes. Was their server being neglectful? Or had she sensed they wanted privacy? Shanti had been nursing the last sips, not wanting to empty her cup. Once it was empty, she’d have to put it down. She needed something to hold on to. “I’m not sure what I believe.”
Chris reached across the table, taking both of his hands and closing them around hers. Together, like that, they held the cup. Chris was no longer thinking about the question he had asked, no longer thinking about God. He was thinking only of how long he had waited for this moment, how much he had needed to touch her.
She suspected Chris’s church was nothing like this one. Still, it was with him in mind that, flipping through channels, Shanti allowed the dial to rest on the program: the huge auditorium, packed to the rafters, organ music droning and steady, the stage strewn with white lilies, the televangelist with his white hair and his white three-piece suit. “Laying on of hands,” he called it. “The touch that heals.” She watched the men and women crowd the aisles, the ones who wanted their suffering stopped, the ones in wheelchairs or with bent backs or arthritis, or feet swollen from diabetes. Cancer, hearing loss, cysts in wombs. Torn ligaments, shattered elbows. Weak knees. Cloudy vision, irregular hearts, wandering eyes. The litany of ailments was endless. And then there were those who didn’t know what was wrong, just knew that something was; like the old man in the plaid shirt who stood onstage shaking his head and muttering, “I’m just not right, Reverend. Can’t remember the last time I felt right.”
“Jesus will make you whole,” the reverend said, the heel of his palm on a supplicant’s forehead, the man or woman, held up by helpers on either side, almost always then falling backward. Must be plants, Shanti thought, because invariably they were cured: the chair-bound could walk, the deaf could hear, the blind could see. Shanti, in India, had seen her fair share of fakirs—men walking barefoot across hot coals. Can’t be real. And yet when the reverend asked the television audience, asked her, to put her palm to the glass, to feel the healing power of God through the television screen, she found herself complying, spreading her fingers wide, pressing her hand against the screen, pressing hard, harder than she had intended. She imagined Chris’s large hand with its dirty fingernails pressing against hers. Minutes later, she sprayed the television screen with cleaning fluid and wiped it with a dust cloth before heading off to work.
Chapter 5
Early that October, Fall Fest made its annual descent upon the village green. Kiran, years later, an adult—nomadic, though always urban-dwelling—remembered it fondly, called it “country quaint,” until a trip home, husband and rescue mutt in tow, revealed it for what it was: a dingy assortment of death-trap scramblers and carousels, sour-breathed barkers, talentless cover bands trolling after shows for willing local girls, clowns with smeared makeup handing out balloons that would be found, weeks later, deflated, draped over tree branches, looking obscene.
Preeti and Kiran couldn’t get enough.
Their anemic allowances meant they had to be choosy about games and rides, but grounds entry was free, and most afternoons it was enough wonderment simply to wander after school among the fried dough, the bings and bongs, the lights, the merchant booths hawking hand-tooled leather cuffs and belts, crystal pendants promising powers to heal or to ward off unwanted energies, customizable T-shirts with airbrushed arrow-pierced hearts awaiting “Randy-’n’-Suzy 4ever.” Preeti’s fantasy was this: she’d find Shawn repentant on her doorstep, in his hand an offering, a T-shirt emblazoned “Shawn’s Girl.” It’d be too big, and she’d wear it to sleep, and during the day knotted at the waist with acid-washed jeans.
But it was Kiran, not Preeti, who Fall Fest week would greet an unexpected guest, not exactly on the doorstep, but close. Chris Bell, stopping in the street in front of their house, pulling a wagon with a nodding-off toddler, two more childr
en straggling behind, four enormous stuffed tigers distributed among the four of them. Kiran was in the yard, crouched beneath the tree, racing Hot Wheels in the dirt. He knew animals—could tell an Indian elephant from an African, a turtle from a tortoise, a rabbit from a hare—and he knew tigers: Sumatran, Siberian, Indochine. These were Bengal, Kiran decided. And not Tigger tigers. Jungle Book–obsessed, Kiran dubbed them Shere Khans. He smiled mischievously, imagining the stuffed cats come to life, batting at the fair-haired Bell children, devouring them one by one.
Had anyone been watching—and wasn’t someone always watching? Mrs. Yamamoto in her kitchen window? Or Mr. Miller across the street, leaning on a rake in the side yard?—they would have thought Chris lingered in front of the Shahs’ house to allow young Kelly and Jim to catch up. But Chris had his own reasons.
The Shahs’ house had been one of the first Chris had worked on, when he was still a young man, a fresh high-school graduate, a summer hired hand for the Buffalo-based developer. The developer, overzealous and underinformed about the economics of this particular swath of the Southern Tier of New York State, had overbuilt: twelve brand-new houses on one street edging a ridge, all similar, but each a little different, facades of brick and stone fronting cheaper materials; split-levels and modest colonials and two ranches, side by side, with small windows tucked high against the eaves, like tired eyes. Only half the houses sold within a year of their completion, and the Shahs’ house, or more accurately, what would eventually become the Shahs’ house, had remained empty for many years, until Nishit, seeing this house and only this house—not appreciating that his new bride, arriving from India in less than a month, might want some say in the decision, and knowing, upon seeing the maple cabinets in the kitchen and the beadboard walls in the slate-floored foyer, that this was nothing special, but that it was the best they would find, and that it was a perfectly suitable, even an ideal, blank canvas on which to create their new lives—had made an offer on the spot, which was quickly and gratefully accepted.