by Rahul Mehta
Now, Shawn looked directly at Kiran. He smiled his crooked, snaggletoothed smile and winked. “Run along, slugger.”
“Sorry,” he said, kissing her cheek, her neck, the delicate edge of her collarbone. He repeated it, “Sorry,” and with each utterance, “Sorry,” his lips found another part of her body, another scar, another wound, offering each a kiss to make it better: “Sorry” her hair, “Sorry” her arm, “Sorry” her fingers, her wrists, her breasts. Under the bleachers at the high school field, Shanti melted beneath Chris’s touch. It was their first time seeing one another since she’d spoken at his ministry. “Sorry I put you through that,” he said.
“I felt like I’d been shot through with arrows.”
That afternoon was chilly, but Chris felt warm against her. Heat radiated from his body, even though he was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt. It seemed to Shanti that in America she and Nishit were always cold. They’d never quite gotten used to the climate of Western New York, bundling themselves in sweaters when everyone else was in shirtsleeves. But Chris, he had spent his whole life here as had generations before him, and all that genetic material was inside him, instructing his body to generate warmth. At that moment what his body radiated was exactly what Shanti needed. When his mouth found hers, Shanti was surprised by his hunger, and frightened by her own.
It had been Chris’s idea to meet there that Saturday, after Shanti’s half day at the bank. And even though the cliché of kissing beneath bleachers was not one with which Shanti was familiar from her own youth, when Chris kissed her she understood right away that in his high school days he had kissed countless girls beneath these bleachers, had surely kissed his own future wife here. She knew in the years to come her own children would likely have their own experiences in this very spot.
Sunlight filtered through, creating alternating bars of shadow and light. A lone girl ran the track. As she passed by, Shanti imagined she could hear, in the girl, an echo of her own heavy breath, her own racing heart.
Back home, Kiran paced the subterranean family room, shuffling across the thin green carpet covering the concrete floor. What he’d seen in the woods was like being in the upside-down world again, Planet Narik. Earlier Preeti had been pining for Shawn, and now she was with him, they were together again, just as she had wanted. But everything about the scene was wrong. This wasn’t how she wanted to be with him.
He didn’t know what to do. His father was at the hospital. His mother should have been home by now. Prabhu Kaka was in his room—the guest room—as he always was, the door shut. Kiran didn’t know Prabhu Kaka, didn’t trust Prabhu Kaka, and his mother had instructed him not to bother his uncle except in an emergency. But wasn’t this an emergency?
Kiran wished his mother were here. But what exactly would he tell her? How would he explain what he saw? Is that even what Preeti would want? But the question that was foremost in Kiran’s mind was: What if then Shawn told what the two of them had done together? Kiran remembered the feel of Shawn’s hard cock in his hands, the smooth, taut skin, the way Shawn shuddered when he came. It terrified Kiran. But he had felt something else too. There was power in being able to do this to Shawn, an older boy, a baseball star. Power and pleasure.
Kiran wondered what his mother or father would say if they knew what had happened, if they had seen Kiran’s hand coated in Shawn’s mess, if they had heard Shawn’s sticky, rank laugh. What would they think of their son?
Eventually, Kiran abandoned his pacing and flopped down on the couch. It was scratchy and plaid; his parents had bought it a year ago secondhand from a family who did not have much money but who had been fortunate enough to inherit from a relative a beautiful sofa with shimmering beige floral fabric. Kiran had accompanied his parents to the house. The satiny sofa and the scratchy couch were jammed up right next to each other in the wood-paneled room with the dirty brown carpet. Kiran remembered thinking, when his parents sat on the plaid couch, testing it out, hadn’t they made a mistake? Shouldn’t they be bouncing up and down on the other one? Behind the satiny sofa crouched a young boy with elf ears and a pallid complexion. Kiran recognized him from school: an unpopular, bullied kid. Lobbed insults always gravitated toward him, circled him in permanent orbit. Inevitably, and at least weekly, someone would fart in his face. Not long after Kiran’s parents bought the couch, one such incident occurred—during science class, while the teacher was in the hallway—and at the exact moment of the boy’s humiliation, he looked at Kiran sitting in the next desk and his eyes said not so much Help! as, Lucky: It could be you. It should be you. One day it will. Kiran imagined him, after school that day, lying on the satiny beige sofa, licking his wounds, Kiran stuck with his scratchy castoff.
But he wasn’t thinking of the boy now. Even as he gazed at the television—which he’d switched on almost by habit, his regular Saturday ritual of watching Happy Days, a small cassette recorder propped against the TV speaker—even as he watched Fonzie snap his fingers, summoning two women, “chicks” he called them, one on either side, or watched Ralph Malph trying to squirm his way out of whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into that week, Kiran thought only of his sister up in the woods with Shawn.
In the coming days, sequestered in whatever small, dark space he could find, he would listen back to the episode, again and again. He had memorized every line of dialogue, every joke and punch line, every word of Mr. Cunningham’s inevitable dispensation of his midwestern, midcentury version of wisdom. Kiran was comforted that he knew exactly what would happen and how everything would end.
“Take me to her. Immediately!” Prabhu boomed in a tone Kiran had never before heard from him. Kiran had waited until almost five to pull himself from the couch cushion, red marks on his face where he had rubbed his cheek raw. Prabhu didn’t change from the white kurta pajama he’d been wearing while lounging in his room. He threw on only a ratty brown sweater that had once belonged to Nishit, and in the foyer slid his feet into plastic chappals that slapped against the asphalt as he and Kiran raced up the hill.
When they reached the edge of the woods, Prabhu asked Kiran to explain where the spot was, and then he told Kiran to wait. Kiran watched Prabhu disappear into the woods, his loose pajamas ballooning in the wind.
Minutes passed; too many, Kiran thought. He fiddled nervously with the rakhi on his wrist, almost two months old, now just a ratty, faded piece of string. A pickup truck rumbled by; someone in the driver’s seat he wasn’t sure he recognized waved. He waved back. He coughed, choked by exhaust and dust. Geese honked overhead, bound south. Light waned. Where were they?
After what seemed to Kiran like a very long time but may have been only minutes, something finally emerged from the woods. At first it looked to Kiran like a monster. He couldn’t decipher the shape. He saw it only in silhouette, and it seemed so tall, with four arms. As it approached he realized what it was: Prabhu carrying Preeti—still shoeless and wearing Prabhu’s sweater—on his back. Looking at his uncle, Kiran never would have guessed he had the strength or energy to carry her this way down the hill all the way back to their house, but that’s exactly what he did.
Preeti wouldn’t meet his gaze, but Kiran stole glances and tried to piece together what he could of what had elapsed in the hours since he’d last seen her. Physically she looked fine. There were no obvious wounds, no visible scars. Her body slumped against her uncle’s, her head rested on his shoulder. It bobbed and bounced as Prabhu, in kurta pajamas and plastic chappals, hustled down the hill, wanting to beat his brother and sister-in-law home, which he did, if only by a few minutes. When they reached the house, standing in the split-level foyer, he released Preeti from her perch. He kneeled down and held her head with both of his hands, one on each side. He held her there a minute, gently kissing her forehead and whispering, “Beti, beti,” and then he let her go and she disappeared up the stairs.
“Why?” Prabhu asked, turning his attention to Kiran. “You sat here all day long, knowing your sister was out there. Why?�
� He was still on his knees, and his face, inches from Kiran’s, was huge. Like the moon, that face would follow Kiran his whole life, emerging at night, ever present even when Kiran could see only a sliver or but a blur through clouds.
Just then, they both heard a key being inserted into the lock of the front door, the bolt being turned. Shanti swung open the door, jangling a ring heavy with keys. “Hi, darling,” she said to Kiran. Her hair was mussed. The crisp creases from her careful ironing were dulled. “Your father isn’t home yet, is he?” she asked, though she would have noticed that his car was not there. Kiran didn’t know how he knew it—maybe it was the look on her face, the same one he had seen when he gazed at her in Chris’s truck, Chris’s damp arm behind them, or maybe it was something in her voice, some singsong glee he recognized from their day at the lake—but somehow he knew she had not been home that afternoon because she had been with Chris.
Kiran looked at his uncle. For now he would be spared from having to respond to his question, spared from the out-loud uttering, but not spared from the repercussions of what he knew to be the answer. For years these twin weights—shame and regret—would threaten to pull him under.
Preeti and Kiran had individually both begged Prabhu to say nothing about the events at the Cathedral to their parents, and yet, the next afternoon, sitting with his brother on the scratchy plaid couch, Prabhu knew that he must. They were watching golf, a sport with which Prabhu had no familiarity and in which he felt no interest. It was Nishit’s game, not his. Nishit spent long weekend afternoons out on the green with colleagues. It was something he’d learned in America. In India, Prabhu knew no one who golfed. He remembered when they were growing up how passionate Nishit had been about cricket. Back then, could Nishit have imagined, Prabhu wondered, a future self who would find it impossible to name even one member of the current India cricket team?
“Brother,” Prabhu said. Nishit turned to him.
Nishit had difficult words of his own for his brother, and he’d been waiting for the right moment. Shanti had helped him practice. We are only saying this because we love you so much. Yes, life has dealt you a hard hand. Losing Neela Bhabhi wasn’t fair. But you cannot continue this way. You’ve got to find your way back. If nothing else, think about your son. Think about Bharat’s future. But turning now to his brother, looking at his face, looking in his eyes, Nishit was distracted by Prabhu’s eyeglasses, frames Nishit had bought for him at Sears when he first arrived. His glasses from India were outdated, the frames heavy, cracking plastic, the lenses thick and scratched. At Sears, Nishit had asked Prabhu to pick and Prabhu said he didn’t care, so Nishit had chosen for him a smart gold wire-rim with tortoiseshell details. Nishit had paid extra for thinner lenses, and this was what distracted him now: the greasy smudges on the glass. Why had Prabhu not cleaned them? How could he be so careless? How could he see properly through all that grease?
“Give them to me,” Nishit said, holding out his hand, speaking in a voice he usually reserved for his children. “Your glasses, give them to me.”
Confused, Prabhu removed them, folded them, handed them to his brother. Prabhu’s pupils struggled to refocus—his vision had always been quite bad—and then he looked down, finally closing his eyes. Because his eyes were not open, he did not see the anger and frustration in his brother’s face, or that frustration melt into something else as Nishit untucked his shirt and used his shirttails to clean the lenses. Prabhu didn’t see how carefully Nishit completed this task, holding the lenses up to the light, examining his work two, then three times. But he did feel his brother gently replace the glasses on his face. When he opened his eyes, Nishit was already getting up to leave.
Having been lurking on the stairs, though not close enough to hear their conversation or to know if Prabhu Kaka had betrayed their trust, Kiran saw his father now squeeze distractedly by him, not stopping to tussle his hair or even to say hello. When he went downstairs, he saw Prabhu Kaka on the couch, his head down, staring vacantly at his lap.
Kiran had sequestered himself in the kitchen pantry—holding the cassette recorder to his ear, listening back to Happy Days—when he saw something moving out of the corner of his eyes. He howled. Within seconds, as if by magic, Preeti was there. “Are you OK?” These were the first words she had spoken to Kiran since the incident with Shawn in the woods more than a week before. Kiran pointed. A creature, half alive, was wriggling helplessly, its neck pinned beneath the crossbar of a snap trap, blood dripping from its mouth. For the children, this was the mouse known as Mickey, formerly known as Minnie, the mouse their parents had promised to catch, not kill. They knew neither about the half dozen rodents Nishit had already disposed of in the preceding weeks, nor about the fifteen infants Shanti had shoved in a public receptacle outside the bank. It didn’t occur to them that there had been mice before this one and that there would be still more mice to come.
Preeti acted swiftly, fetching thick gardening gloves from the garage. She scooped up the mouse with one hand, wielding a brick with the other, and headed out to the driveway. “Look away,” she instructed Kiran, and then more loudly, when he didn’t comply, “Look away!” Kiran, head turned, heard the brick thwap once, twice, three times, imagined he heard Mickey squeal and cry, then stop. When he opened his eyes and turned to his sister, she was breathing heavily, still clutching the brick, the weapon frozen midair.
Chapter 7
Chris had not introduced Amy to Shanti that day at Ray of Light Ministries, although, standing before the congregation, Shanti had felt the intensity of Amy’s eyes on her, as she did again now. It was unusual for Amy to come inside the bank. Previously, when she had bank business, she had pulled up to the drive-through. These were how Shanti’s previous interactions with her had been. The women exchanged pleasantries through the crackling intercom and completed transactions via capsules sucked through pneumatic tubes: checks and deposit slips in one direction; cash, receipts, and lollipops in the other. This time, Amy parked the car and came inside with two blond children, one in her arm, the other waddling beside her, still not steady on her feet, holding her mother’s hand.
Amy was wearing a gold cross on a delicate gold necklace. Shanti herself had never been religious. So much in Hinduism—at least the way those she knew practiced it—seemed to Shanti less about spirituality and more about superstition, about asking for things. If I do this, I will get that. If I make the right offerings to the right gods at the right times, I will get protection for my beloved brother, good grades on an exam, a new car, blessings for my marriage, the birth of a son. Shanti remembered visiting her friend Meena in Chicago. The morning of Shanti’s departure, Meena, who was driving her to the airport, was running late. Meena’s children had been ornery that morning, and she had barely managed to get them out of the house and onto the school bus. And Meena didn’t want to leave morning dishes in the sink. Just when Shanti thought they could finally leave, Meena said she had to do the morning puja. She always did it, and especially on a day when Shanti was traveling, it was her duty to procure the proper blessings to ensure her guest’s safe passage. So Shanti waited another fifteen minutes, sitting quietly with Meena in front of the mandir while Meena mumbled her prayers. Afterward they were so late they had had to race through the snow to the airport, and Shanti felt grateful that the children weren’t with her, that they were back in Western New York safe with Nishit, because she felt sure the car was going to crash and that they were going to die and that it would be all because Meena had had to say her prayers.
Looking at Amy’s cross, Shanti wondered what exactly it meant to her. A month earlier, during a weekend of free HBO-Showtime-Cinemax, Shanti found the children in the basement, a vampire movie flickering in the dark. She should have made them stop watching, but in the minute or two it took her to realize what was on-screen, she got hooked and sat down with them. Besides, she could tell the movie was ending soon; the action was in its final stages. During a climactic struggle, the heroine of the movi
e presses a cross into the forehead of a vampire, and it sears the vampire’s flesh. He bares his teeth, shrinks back, cowers. Kiran jumped into Shanti’s arms, and she stroked his beautiful hair, still brown though it would turn coal black over time. Even in that moment Shanti felt more for the vampire than she did for the woman. He couldn’t help who he was, couldn’t control his need. That night, awake in bed as Nishit snored beside her, she heard with every intake of his breath the sizzle of the vampire’s flesh.
“Gorgeous children,” Shanti said to Amy. “Tell me their names again.” Again, though Shanti wasn’t sure she had ever known their names to begin with.
“Jane,” Amy said, slightly raising the infant in her arms, and then “Sarah,” nodding toward the girl holding her hand. “Jim and Kelly are in school.”
Jim, Jane, Kelly, Sarah. Yes, those would be their names, Shanti thought. Easy names. American names. Names that could go anywhere and do anything. When he first started school, Kiran came home from the first day grumbling, “Why’d you give me such a dumb name? Everyone calls me Karen.” And Nishit had said, “Count your blessings, son. I have ‘shit’ in my name,” and Kiran was so shocked to hear his father say “shit,” he didn’t know if it was OK to laugh. She might have expected Preeti to have had it easy: Preeti, pretty. But of course pretty was a lot to live up to, even if you were pretty, which Preeti was. As time went on, Shanti worried that in choosing her name, they had unwittingly influenced the course of her life; that pretty was all Preeti would want to be.
“You have children,” Amy said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.