by Rahul Mehta
“Two,” Shanti said.
“I know.”
“How can I help you today?”
“I need to get into our safe deposit box.”
“One minute then,” Shanti said. She closed up her station and came around from behind the counter. She kneeled and offered a lollipop to Jane, and Jane looked at her mother before taking it.
“What do you say?”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Shah.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Shah.”
Shanti handed three more lollipops to Amy. She had counted them out behind the counter. Sarah, the baby, was too young for lollipops, but Shanti thought four children, four lollipops. Maybe Amy would eat it herself. Or she would give it to Chris, “From Mrs. Shah.” Shanti thought of the lollipop she had slid Chris two months earlier.
She led Amy and the children into a back room, passing an automated shoe shiner Kiran loved to play with when he visited. “Wait here,” she said as she disappeared into another room and fetched the box. “And you have the key?” she asked, and Amy replied, “Yes.”
“I’ll leave you then. Just press the buzzer when you’re ready for me.”
As she waited, Shanti couldn’t help wondering what Amy was doing, what she was adding or subtracting or double-checking in the box. Shanti didn’t know what was in there, but she could imagine: titles, wills, certificates of insurance, items needed should your home be ravaged by the unexpected: a fire, a twister, a thief.
When Amy finished and pressed the buzzer, Shanti felt the weight of being summoned. She remembered her weeks cleaning houses before she got the bank job. She thought of what Mrs. Sharp had left her in the toilet.
In the room, Amy had left the locked metal box on the wood table, and she was already stepping away from it. “It was good of you to speak at our congregation, Mrs. Shah. You are welcome there anytime.” She looked Shanti up and down. “Next time, you’ll be sure to bring your husband.” Amy exited. Shanti slid the box back into the wall of identical containers.
It was an October day, and when Shanti left the bank late that afternoon, instead of going straight to her car in the parking lot out back she took a walk, starting on Market Street and then turning down one of the tree-lined side streets with the grand old houses. Fall was one of the few things about America Shanti truly loved. There hadn’t been fall in Pune, not in the same way. There the variation from season to season was less dramatic; the seasons blended into one another. There was less of a sense of time moving forward and circling back. She loved the turning of the leaves, the colors, the way they fell and covered the sidewalks. She loved back-to-school: cellophane-wrapped twenty-packs of pencils, Elmer’s glue, spiral-bound notebooks, wide-ruled for Kiran, college-ruled for Preeti, new clothes, new shoes, first days. In India, school had been year-round, and while Shanti agreed that such a system was probably better for education, she also felt there was something to be said for long summer vacations, the idea that there was a time for everything. Summer was about running free. Fall was about reining it back in.
There was a nip in the air, and as Shanti continued to walk farther down a street she’d never been on, she flipped the collar on her coat and pulled it close to her neck. It was a new jacket. A couple weeks earlier, when Shanti was standing at the hall closet in front of the jumble of coats—light coats, heavy coats, all different sizes—Nishit had said, “Something is wrong. I can tell.” And because she couldn’t tell him, didn’t quite know herself, wouldn’t have been able to put words to the emptiness she felt, she said, “Nothing. I’m just thinking about Reshma.”
Nishit, remembering Shanti’s spectacularly wealthy college friend, reflected on the reality of the life his wife was living versus what she might have dreamed of. He knew she and Reshma had been inseparable in college, roommates talking together late into the night. He knew Reshma had given Shanti a glimpse into a lifestyle very different from her own practical, middle-class background, her unassuming bungalow—shared by three brothers’ families—in a respectable neighborhood, bland furnishings, a jointly owned white Hindustan Ambassador parked on the street. By contrast, Reshma’s father when visiting would have arrived in a silver Mercedes with black leather seats or some equally exotic machine. Reshma herself married—quite young—a boy from an equally wealthy family. Is this what Shanti was trying to tell him? Whatever wealth Nishit was to accrue as a doctor was still many years away. Now there were still debts to be paid, dollars to be sent to relatives in India, money to be saved for Preeti and Kiran for college. Was Shanti trying to tell him that the life she expected, the life she deserved, was not the one he had given her?
That evening, Nishit had taken Shanti to JCPenney and insisted she buy something new, something nice, something not on sale. “Full price,” he had said, and Shanti found a plum-colored Liz Claiborne coat, plucked it from the rack, hastily tried it on, barely looking at herself in the skinny mirror on the end of the aisle, not even bothering to look in the three-way mirror by the dressing rooms. She had not wanted to see her reflection.
She hadn’t lied when she’d told Nishit she was thinking about Reshma. Perhaps she wasn’t thinking about Reshma in that exact moment, standing in front of the hall closet, but she had been thinking about her quite a bit lately. Late one night in the darkness in their dorm room, Reshma had told her about her betrothed: “I don’t love him. I barely know him. Maybe I will grow to love him, maybe I won’t. It doesn’t really matter.” Shanti had heard her shift in the darkness, had seen her shadowy figure roll away. Reshma lay on her back, looking at the ceiling. “He is the man I belong with,” she said. “It is my destiny.” At the time, Shanti had wanted to ask Reshma what she meant, but that was not the nature of their relationship. Shanti did not ask Reshma questions.
Shanti’s own engagement and marriage was six years away, but she would remember that conversation with Reshma when Nishit was first brought to meet her in the bungalow in Pune—all of her uncles and aunts hovering. Nishit was handsome enough. Smart enough. Ambitious enough. Were sparks supposed to fly? Shanti wasn’t sure. No one had prepared her for this moment.
Now, many years later, Shanti was wondering about Reshma and Ketan. That’s what she had been thinking about that day when Nishit asked her what was wrong. Had Reshma and Ketan’s marriage been happy, had Reshma made the right decision? Shanti hadn’t seen them since her own wedding fourteen years ago, and she hadn’t been in regular contact, never knowing where to send letters or which phone numbers were still operational. Reshma and Ketan moved so much; he was always checking in on this family business in Kenya or monitoring that investment in Singapore, or Reshma and the children were spending the summer months in Mussorie or, one year, in Switzerland.
Every now and then Shanti would receive a hastily written letter from Reshma with a recent photograph tucked inside—the family on vacation posing in front of the Louvre or the children sitting on a plaid blanket in the grass by a river. In college they had spent countless hours together dreaming about their future lives. Now they both had children—each a girl and a boy—the other had never met. A few days earlier, Shanti had opened the shallow top drawer in her dresser, where she kept Reshma’s letters and photos. She searched for clues, anything that might tell her what Reshma and Ketan’s married life had been like. She noticed, in her short letters, how little Reshma mentioned herself. She noticed, in one photo, how far Reshma and Ketan seemed to be standing from one another—the children between them—how their bodies seemed to be turned away from one another. But then there was another photo with their arms around each other and bright, eager eyes.
Shanti was walking in circles now, in the unfamiliar neighborhood adjacent to the bank. She was deliberate about not straying too much, worried that if she walked too far in any one direction she might get lost. Nishit would have laughed at her, the girl from Pune, not a huge metropolis but not a small village either, afraid of being lost in this tiny town.
At the bank
, when Shanti and Amy were together in the back room, Shanti thought Amy smelled like Prell shampoo, not that Shanti knew what Prell smelled like. She had never bought it. She only knew it from the commercials with the beautiful spokesmodel with the blue eyes and the teeth like pearls (though in three years she would know the scent well; Prell would become Preeti’s brand of shampoo). Yet even not knowing the smell, it is what she thought: Amy smells like Prell. And something about it triggered a realization for Shanti that wasn’t so much logical as it was cellular. She felt it in her body. Chris was drawn to her because—like the boys going on mission to Calcutta—he had never been anywhere; just as she was drawn to him because—despite having lived in this town fourteen years—she had never been here.
From the daytime soaps Shanti spent hours watching when she first arrived in America—Another World, All My Children, One Life to Live—(“So I can learn the American idiom,” she assured Nishit [and herself]), and from movies (American, not Hindi), Shanti was familiar with what was said when one spouse finally comes clean to the other, sometimes in the kitchen, late at night, the kids asleep, one spouse standing back to the sink, arms crossed, the other seated, bent over the kitchen table, one lone pendulum light hanging above: I’ve found myself stuck living a life I don’t want.
Shanti would not have one of those late-night kitchen scenes with her husband; she would not stand at the sink, he would not be slumped at the table. By the time she circled back to her car parked in the bank lot, she felt sure of this. This town was no Llanview or Bay City or Pine Valley, and she was no Erica Kane. She was Shanti Shah. Her very name meant peace. She would not leave Nishit. And she had no intention of seeing Chris again. In the years to come, she and Nishit would have other late-night kitchen conversations: there would be Preeti’s brief period of rebelliousness, the sneaking out at night, the short skirts, and then, unexpectedly, Preeti’s conversion to Christianity, her joining the very church Chris attended, her fiery Bible-thumping. There would be Kiran’s coming out, after college but before he went to India, the letter he mailed them, handwritten on lined paper ripped from a spiral-bound notebook and sealed in a plain white business envelope, and which Shanti read first and then Nishit later that evening, seated at the kitchen table, Shanti sitting diagonal from him, her hand resting on top of his.
Just as Reshma had said so many years ago about herself and her own husband, Shanti and Nishit were meant to be together. It was their destiny, and who was she to question destiny? Their names were near anagrams: Shanti, Nishit; an “a” for an “i.” One letter was all that separated one from the other.
At the airport, Prabhu wore a blue Buffalo Bills toboggan pulled low on his head and a heavy sweater beneath a plaid flannel jacket lined in quilted synthetic fabric, articles of clothing discarded by Nishit or bought cheap at a discount store, clothes Prabhu would surely shed immediately upon landing in India if not before. Nishit watched him wandering down the long wing, clutching a cheap duffel with a prescription drug logo, a pharmaceutical freebie. Moments earlier they had embraced in the airport lobby, and in a moment of sentimentality, Nishit had bent down and touched his older brother’s feet. Nishit felt silly almost immediately and popped back up and looked around to make sure no one he knew had seen.
Back home, the children had said their own shy good-byes. As far as Nishit could tell, and despite his fervent hopes, the children hadn’t bonded with their uncle. It wasn’t their fault. They were from different worlds.
Now he watched his brother, unrecognizable all bundled up, bumbling down the corridor. He couldn’t help but think of a character from what had been one of the children’s favorite bedtime stories: Paddington, in his hat and oversize overcoat and brown suitcase and paper tag imploring, “Please look after this bear.” Lost: looking for a hand to grab hold of. Please look after this Prabhu.
Nishit flashed on a childhood memory. He didn’t so much see it as feel it: the afternoon sun on his face, a warm breeze. He was five, his brother eleven. Their mother had instructed Prabhu to trim his brother’s fingernails. Nishit leaned out the second floor window, his brother’s hand holding his, the snip snip snip of the nail scissors. Nishit tried to follow the tiny clippings to the ground, to see where they landed, but Prabhu warned, “Be careful, you’ll fall,” his grip on Nishit both tender and firm. Though Nishit hadn’t said it then, he thought it now as he watched Prabhu disappearing: Don’t let go of me. Never let go.
Chapter 8
Western New York, 1985
Chris pushed his grocery cart into the line behind Shanti’s. He hadn’t noticed her at first, and when he did—when he recognized the pixie haircut she’d been sporting the last few years and the slender back of her neck—he considered trying to pull into another lane. It was solely for her benefit so she wouldn’t feel awkward, he told himself; he was not the type of man to avoid something or to hide. Still, it proved too late. Another cart had parked itself behind his.
It had been three weeks since he’d taken Nishit to the roadside barbecue, an encounter Nishit had never told Shanti about. She knew nothing of the weeks her son had been standing across the street, peering into the Bells’ house.
Shanti, glimpsing Chris, tried to feign like she hadn’t. She pulled her shopping list from her coat pocket and pretended to scrutinize it.
“Got everything?” she heard Chris’s voice ask. It vibrated through her, and for a second Shanti felt a surge of panic that she had forgotten something essential, and she found herself glancing quickly over the products crowding the checkout aisle: chocolate bars, packs of gum, batteries, nail clippers, lint brushes.
Looking up, she said brightly, “Mr. Bell, how have you been?”
“Mrs. Shah: Can’t complain.”
Two days earlier, Chris, at twilight, had crossed the street to Kiran. “You do know this can’t go on?” he had asked. Kiran nodded. His cheeks were wet. Chris wiped them, one at a time, with his thumb.
“And you?” he said.
Shanti smiled.
How Chris missed that smile! Seeing it now lifted him, and made him ache.
“Ma’am?” the cashier said. Shanti spun back around. The customer who had been in front of her was already disappearing out the automatic doors. The empty checkout belt whirred, its thick seam disappearing with a thwump beneath the metal guard.
Chris started helping her unload her items onto the belt, their arms, their hands, so close to one another as they reached into the cart. Shanti distracted herself by taking silent inventory: Pepperidge Farm thin-sliced bread, two percent milk, Kraft singles, spaghetti; potato chips, cucumbers, iceberg lettuce; Yoplait yoghurt for Preeti, protein powder for Kiran, Lorna Doones for Nishit, because he liked to have just one, on a plate, in the evening as he sat in his swivel chair in the family room next to the yellow lamp. Her cart was piled high with groceries for the entire week; the days, the meals, stretched out in front of her.
When the last of her purchases had been placed on the conveyor, Shanti nodded to Chris. “You’re very kind.”
“Nice seeing you, Mrs. Shah,” he said, but she had already turned toward the cashier and was fumbling in her purse for a checkbook.
Out in the parking lot, Shanti turned the ignition, the car rumbling to life, and sat for a moment listening to the engine throb. She drove four blocks before turning around and heading back to the supermarket. She didn’t even lock the car door as she dashed inside, down the starkly lit aisle, the loudspeaker humming easy listening, and toward the hot bar, where she picked out six Buffalo wings and dropped them into a wax-paper bag.
She’d bought them for herself—Nishit was, of course, a vegetarian, and the kids, in the past year, had followed suit—and she’d intended to eat them at home, a snack, a private indulgence, before preparing dinner for the family. But halfway home she turned down the potholed dirt road toward the lake, where she sat cross-legged on the rocking dock and devoured her wings.
Satiated, she gazed across the water. The leaves were
starting to turn; a fiery orange had already engulfed a group of maples. Soon the geese, who came every spring to mate and to hatch and raise their young, slickening the grasses with guano, would be heading south.
Shanti told herself she had been hungry, that was all; that was the reason she stopped at the lake. The smell from the backseat was too tempting. She wasn’t trying to hide anything; after all, her family knew she ate meat.
She dumped the wax-paper bag full of bones into the trash can by the parked car, and then returned to the water’s edge to wash her hands clean in the cold water. She found a container of moist towelettes in the car and wiped her hands again, rubbed at her mouth and her lips, doing a check in the mirror. Still, she knew that there would always be something—her poor appetite at dinner, her breath, a small piece of chicken caught between her teeth—that would give her away. There was no hiding. One way or another, they’d know.
Part Two
Chapter 9
Western New York, 1991
At first Bharat thought it might be America itself that he was allergic to. In his twenty-five years, he’d never had this reaction in India: hives that bloomed suddenly in itchy thickets all over his arms, his legs, his torso, forming whole landscapes, peaks and valleys, ridges and ravines—a topical map of his suffering. It was unbearable, burning his skin, sometimes lasting just minutes, but sometimes for an hour or more. Often it happened in public, at some dinner party his aunt and uncle had dragged him to, or while he was in class, Introduction to Accounting at the local community college, which his uncle had insisted he attend, even though he’d already earned a college degree in accounting in India. He’d have to try his best to keep his composure, to keep making small talk with his uncle’s colleague or to answer the instructor’s question about gross versus net earnings, when all he wanted to do was collapse on the floor and curl up and wait for the pain to pass.