by Rahul Mehta
Chris knew this house intimately, knew its very bones, had poured his own sweat into its foundation. He had stood on its roof, had spent hours on ladders on every side of the structure and in every kind of light, had, during his lunch breaks, straddled its windowsills inhaling hoagies. Now, from the street, he searched those same windows for a sign of Shanti: a flutter of curtain or a shock of black hair turning a corner.
He didn’t even notice Kiran beneath the tree until he’d been standing in the street for more than a moment.
“Hey, buddy.”
Kiran, though looking intently, didn’t respond. Chris followed his gaze to the huge tiger he held to his chest, its head resting on his shoulder, like a child being burped. “Fall Fest,” Chris explained. “Ball toss.” He looked behind him. Kelly and Jim had gotten distracted by something on the edge of the road, a small critter or a particularly exotic insect.
“Where’s your mother?”
Kiran sat blinking. Chris had asked on impulse and didn’t know what he would have done even if Kiran had answered. He looked again at the house. He thought he saw movement in an upstairs window, shifting shadows, a flash of fabric. Then Jim was behind him, poking at the back of his thigh with a twig. He dragged his tiger behind him. Chris looked again at Kiran. “I’ll win you one, buddy.”
Chris had always been good at games. He’d varsity lettered in three sports—football, basketball, baseball: the Holy Trinity. And perhaps, at least partly, it was this athletic prowess that allowed him so effortlessly to pitch the ball into the narrow-mouthed milk jug. But it was partly something else, too; after all, he didn’t have quite the same luck with other carnival games. Standing there that Saturday, sinking ball after ball, he felt that everything was in perfect alignment—his height, the length of his arm, the weight of the ball, the distance to the jug, the thickness of the lip, the diameter of the opening. Nothing in his life had ever been as effortless. It was as though he were made for this game, as if his body had been engineered specifically for this purpose. And yet, if that were the case, wasn’t that sad, Chris thought. This was what God made him for? This was his calling? Throwing a ball into a jug? He remembered the steel bar he’d tried to bend at the Gladiators for Christ show. “You could do this,” the man had said. “You’ve got what it takes. It’s not an easy life. But it’s a good life, a life with purpose.”
So it was a strange relief Chris felt when, the following day—after church, while Amy shepherded the children from Bible study to birthday parties—he found he’d lost his magic. Balls hit the lip of the jug, bouncing out, not in; some missed altogether. “A i r b a l l,” a high school teammate might have called, cupping his hands around his mouth, stretching the word out into an admonishing drone. Chris wondered if the jug was smaller, if the man had swapped it out after his winning streak the previous day. Or maybe the ball was different—didn’t it feel lighter? Or was it the clouds, or the wind that swept periodically through the fair, unsettling dirt, launching hot-dog boats and food-soiled wrappers into the air? Much later Chris would wonder if these had all been signs he should have heeded. He should not be here. But he had made a promise. He thought of Kiran sitting in the dirt beneath the tree, miniature car caught mid-race clutched in hand. Chris couldn’t disappoint a child.
The man sold him three more balls but didn’t call them balls, called them “chances,” then sold him three again, and again. “Three more chances?” the man asked, and how could Chris say no? Who didn’t want more chances? By the time Chris finally won, he had all but emptied his wallet. Peering into it, he was glad he couldn’t remember how much he’d started with, what he’d lost. Chris had not walked today, he had driven, and back at the truck he set the tiger upright in the passenger seat, almost buckling it in. But then he thought better of it and shoved the animal down on the floor in the back of the cab, where no one would see.
Neither was being entirely honest—not even to themselves—about their need to be in Elmira that day. Chris said he had a job out that way. Shanti mentioned a gift for an upcoming wedding. Both instinctively understood they wanted to meet somewhere they wouldn’t be recognized.
That morning Kiran had insisted so emphatically, and in front of Nishit, that he wanted to go with his mother that Shanti had no choice but to bring him along. Kiran sat in the front seat of the car—thighs sticking to the vinyl seat of the Tercel, their second car, the bare-bones car, the car Nishit said was just for rambling around town, no need for air conditioning—and commandeered the radio. He flipped obsessively back and forth among the three stations they could receive—one country, one oldies, one pop (its tagline morphing over the years from “Lock it in, then rip off the knob” to the not-so-subtle racially coded “All the hits, without the rap”)—never settling on a song for more than a minute. Another time Shanti would have slapped Kiran’s hand away from the console, but she was glad he was occupied; besides, her mind was elsewhere. Voices from the radio drifted through her head—Crystal Gayle, Perry Cuomo, Rick Springfield (she did love his steamy Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital, though his flawed physician portrayal would surely make Dr. Nishit Shah fume)—mixing with her own internal dialogue with herself (Aré baap, Shanti Shah, have you gone mad?—What? It’s all very innocent. I’m speaking at his church, aren’t I? He and I have to prepare, don’t we?). Hot air—an Indian summer, everyone said—rushed past the half-open windows (only half, so Kiran could still hear his radio). Outside: valley fields, cows ruminating, hills rising gently out of the ground, smooth and round as river rocks. For their part, the cows watched idly and without interest but watched nonetheless. They’d seen so much: not just the dramatic—an eighteen-wheeler wiping out, taking half a dozen cars with it, a helicopter landing on the highway to airlift the injured—but the prosaic—countless vehicles racing (to the cows, they were always racing) hither and thither, shuttling folks to births or anniversary parties or lunch with Grandma in the nursing home or just to work, someone’s daily morning and evening commute. None of it mattered to the cows. They tugged at the grass and continued their steady ruminations.
Shanti was sitting before the Styrofoam container of greasy noodles when Chris arrived. It had been her idea to meet in the food court at the mall. She really had needed a wedding gift for the wavy-haired, almond-eyed daughter of a Venezuelan surgeon in Rochester who had mentored Nishit when he first arrived in the region.
Earlier, when they first reached the mall, Shanti had given Kiran three dollars for video games and her own slim wristwatch and told him she’d fetch him from the arcade at two o’clock. Then she’d gone to the department store where the couple had registered and bought, off the list, a heavy crystal bowl. She wanted to tell them, You will never use this; it will sit in your breakfront thirty years and you’ll be lucky if you use it even three times, but she knew it was a lesson they would have to learn for themselves. Funny the chasm between the life you envision for yourself and the life you get. When she and Nishit married, Reshma, a particularly wealthy college friend and roommate her first two years, had given them table settings for twenty (twenty!)—plates, bowls, cups, everything, even flatware—all one of a kind, black and white, very modern, designed by a famous Indian artist. Shanti fantasized about elaborate dinner parties, guests in gold jewelry and expensive silks. In fourteen years of marriage, Shanti and Nishit had not once used the place settings. They sat in the hutch in the dining room they also rarely used, and when they did have friends for dinner, they used the same plates and bowls they used every day—Corelle in the Snowflake Blue design Shanti had selected, thinking it seemed appropriate for their new lives in snowy Western New York.
Shanti had arrived early at the food court, thinking she’d have enough time to wolf down some Mr. Wok before Chris arrived, or at least she thought she was early; giving Kiran her watch had hampered her ability to keep close tabs on time. She had chosen one of the tiny round tables against the railing, not conscious of the fact that what stood between herself and Chris—fi
rst a bank counter; then a rectangular table wedged into a diner booth; now a metallic-finished pedestal table with a top not more than eighteen inches across—was, over time, shrinking. The table was so small there was only room for her food; she slung her purse over the back of the chair and set on the floor the shopping bag containing the crystal bowl, already wrapped, miniature gold wedding bells affixed to the bow.
Their meeting was ostensibly so that Chris could bring her specific questions from the boys going on mission. But Shanti, watching him cross the vast open space toward her, could see no notebook or leather portfolio in his hands; instead, he was cradling in one arm a large black trash bag. He pulled up a third chair and set the plastic bag on it upright, as if it were a third guest.
“Sorry,” Shanti said, slurping noodles, then covering her mouth with one hand. “I was hungry.”
“We are in a food court.”
“Then you’ll eat, too?”
Chris smiled and shook his head.
The sun was strong and streamed through the skylights, making the food court gleam. At a nearby table, a sparrow that had somehow gotten inside pecked at a bit of pizza crust someone had left there.
“So,” Shanti said, “what questions do the boys have for me?”
Chris held up his empty palms and shrugged. “When I asked them, they looked at me blankly, like I was speaking another language or something. Honestly, Shanti, it’s all so foreign to them. I don’t think they even know where to begin.”
He had said her first name, Shanti noted, for the first time. He had pronounced it well, not perfectly, but the best she could have hoped for. She did not know that he had practiced it for weeks in front of his bathroom mirror and while driving in his truck; that he heard her name over and over in his head, soft like a lullaby, like the prayer that it was: Shanti . . . Shanti . . . Shanti . . . Peace . . . Peace . . . Peace . . .
“So, yeah, sorry,” he said, “I didn’t bring any questions for you.”
“Then why are we here, Chris?” As soon as she asked, she knew she did not want him to speak. She did not want to hear the answer.
“Well, I had to give you this,” he said, pointing to the black garbage bag sharing their table. “Actually, it’s for Kiran.”
“What is it?”
Chris opened the bag, revealing just the head of the roaring tiger.
“For Kiran?”
“He’ll understand. Just give it to him, OK?”
Shanti looked down at her Styrofoam container and lifted a forkful of noodles into her mouth. Just as she did this, Chris leaned over and kissed her, his tongue all of a sudden in her mouth, probing the half-chewed food, the grease, the garlic; this, his first taste of her: Mr. Wok. Later, it would shame Shanti that this was what he tasted. But Chris by contrast was intoxicated. For years afterward he craved MSG, sesame oil, soy sauce, pouring more and more on whatever food was put in front of him.
Kiran didn’t go to the arcade, not immediately anyway. Instead, he found the camera store in one of the forgotten wings of the complex. He’d been there before, and it was the reason he wanted to come to the mall with his mother in the first place. He loved everything about the shop: the gray industrial carpet and fluorescent lights; the intricate, expensive cameras of all shapes and sizes in the glass display cases; the accessories, straps and flashes, zoom lenses and leather cases; the huge posters on the wall, examples of photographs one could take—flowers, mountains, a family posed in front of the Grand Canyon, Caribbean waters nudging a white sand beach. As an adult, Kiran would become a professional photographer, not an art photographer as he had hoped, or a fashion photographer, his second choice, but an events photographer—weddings, bat and bar mitzvahs, the odd quinceañera. He liked being able to slip in and out of other people’s lives during key milestones, an observer, not a participant. Even in his own life, he’d often have a camera with him, something to hold between himself and the world. Now, despite having never taken a photograph, he found himself drawn to the cameras and the possibilities they promised. He hovered over the glass, gazing at the small sleek machines his allowance could never afford, until the sales clerk shooed him away.
Shanti wiped her lips with the back of her hand, trying to wipe away Mr. Wok and Mr. Bell, though the latter proved impossible to erase. In the moment he kissed her, Shanti had forgotten everything about her life. All her narratives about who she was in the world fell away. She was not wife, daughter, mother, friend, not house cleaner or bank teller or immigrant. She was only her naked, thumping heart, not even fully human, or perhaps, conversely, the most fully human she had ever been. And the only other human in the world was Chris. That was the moment he kissed her. The moment after he kissed her was entirely different. After the kiss, just after, truly seconds after, Shanti saw in the corner of her eye, peeking from behind a fat, white pillar, her blinking son. She had forgotten he was at the mall at all, just as she had forgotten she herself was there.
Kiran looked so small, standing on the far end of the gleaming food court. Shanti thought she had never seen him so small. Even when she held him for the very first time, when he was technically at his smallest, he had not seemed that way to her. In her arms, his tiny face just inches from hers, he had seemed huge; in fact, he was all she could see. She had pledged then—perhaps not consciously, but implicitly; the pledge was inseparable from the swelling of her heart, so large she worried it would literally split her body open—to protect him, just as she had made the same pledge with Preeti four years earlier. Now he was a brown speck in a sea of white, looking utterly lost. As small as he was, Shanti’s maternal superpowers allowed her to zoom in and see clearly her son’s bewilderment. The world he thought he knew—this shopping mall he’d visited a dozen times or more, this food court in which he’d eaten tacos and corn dogs and drunk Orange Julius—had transformed into something else: an upside-down world where his mother was kissing a man who was not his father.
Chris followed Shanti’s gaze and saw the boy. Seeing the boy’s distress—Was that the right word? Was that what he was seeing on the boy’s face, in the boy’s body? Is this what he was responsible for?—Chris instinctively moved toward him. Kiran turned and, lizard-like, darted away, searching for the nearest rock to wedge himself beneath.
Shanti looked in the hobby and toy store. She looked in the boys’ section of JCPenney where they bought most of Kiran’s clothes, even though she knew he hated clothes shopping and it didn’t make any sense that he would be there. She didn’t know about Kiran’s affinity for the camera store, but she knew how he gobbled free toothpick-skewered samples at Hickory Farms and how he liked having his feet measured at the shoe store, quantifiable confirmation that he was still changing, still growing. She checked all of those places before finally finding him exactly where he was supposed to have been in the first place: standing outside the arcade, statue-still, the chaotic cavern of blinking lights and roaring race car engines and intergalactic laser guns behind him.
“There you are,” she said, smiling. She was holding the black trash bag she had been dragging back and forth across the mall. Her heart was racing, but she tried to sound calm. “You ready to head home?”
Kiran said nothing but started walking in the direction of the car. Shanti followed.
She shoved the trash bag into the trunk and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was very hot. It had been sitting in the sun for hours. Kiran in the passenger seat rolled down his window immediately, but Shanti kept hers up. She sat for a minute in the hot car before starting the engine, allowing her face to flush, allowing sweat to stream down her face and a few hot tears to fall.
A few times, during the drive home, she tried to speak. She had no intention of trying to explain the kiss (she had no explanation) or of asking Kiran not to tell his father (she didn’t have that right). She only wanted to know that he was OK. But the air howled too loud past the open windows and the radio continued its schizophrenic skip through country-pop-oldies land and Shan
ti found her voice too weak to make itself heard.
They were halfway home before Shanti realized she had forgotten the shopping bag with the crystal bowl on the food court floor. Never mind, she thought. She’d give instead the customary gift at Indian weddings: cash. The crystal bowl now crossed off the registry, no one would buy it. The couple would not be saddled with a gift they only thought they wanted. They would be spared at least this mistake.
She watched the Southern Tier landscape unscroll before her, the same landscape she’d just driven through, that she’d been driving through for years and would likely continue to drive through for decades: lazy streams skirting lazy hills, old farmhouses with wide porches, wood fences. The same cows she had driven past that morning—who neither knew nor cared what had happened to her in the food court of the Elmira mall—were still in the same place in the same roadside field, still chewing their cud.
As she approached their town, spotting the familiar green sign announcing four more miles to the exit, Shanti thought of something. She had once heard that the Indians—those other Indians—had never settled in the part of the valley where Shanti and Nishit now lived because they believed it to be cursed. She was told this by a woman who would sometimes come into the bank. “White folks can’t read landscape,” she’d said. “Leave it to us to be stupid enough to stay.” But Shanti wasn’t included in that “us,” she thought. She wasn’t white. Eventually the woman stopped coming to the bank and Shanti heard that she’d moved to California. Shanti heard that the woman didn’t even bother cleaning out or closing up the house that had been in her family for three generations, which she inherited and inhabited alone. She loaded what she wanted (and what would fit) into the back of her Subaru and drove west.