by Rahul Mehta
He wondered if it was something in the air, some gas or foreign molecule peculiar to this country, or something in the soil, some chemical—a pesticide maybe?—that was entering his body through the food.
Eventually he realized it had something to do with his body temperature, that when it rose unexpectedly—for any reason, like stepping from the cold into a warm building, or walking briskly, or feeling angry or embarrassed or anxious—that’s when he broke out in hives. Still, he longed for a classification, a medical term to tag the condition. He understood the comfort that comes from knowing the name of your pain. Denied official diagnosis, he devised his own taxonomy. Taking lexical cues from urticaria, the medical term for hives, he dubbed his suffering Americaria.
When Bharat was young, there was a boy in school no one liked. His name was Aziz, but everyone called him Asleaze or Disease or Oh, Please. Aziz was always off alone, and when he explained that he couldn’t play cricket, or anything else for that matter, because he was allergic to his own sweat, one of the boys said, “Naturally, even you can’t stand yourself.” Bharat hadn’t been the one to start the teasing, but years later he would be ashamed of the extent to which he went along with it. At the time he hadn’t wanted to see that the teasing was connected to the fact that Aziz was the only Muslim boy among them, but deep down he always knew.
Shanti had set Bharat up in Kiran’s room, which had been recently vacated, Kiran now a freshman in college. It didn’t seem appropriate to put him in Preeti’s room—funny Shanti still thought of it that way; Preeti hadn’t lived at home in more than four years—and the guest room of late had become overgrown with unfiled papers, forgotten junk mail, bills, and receipts, sprouting from carpet, from chair, from bed, spreading like weeds. It seemed to Shanti that their lives were always in a state of transition; they were always sorting through this, filing that, trying to put things right. Kiran’s room was the option that made the most sense.
Bharat had never met his American cousins. He had pried a few stories from his father, Prabhu, but Kiran and Preeti had been so young then, and his father, even when pressed, revealed very little about those months here. Bharat really had very little to go on. So he tried to piece together what he could from what he saw.
As he lay in Kiran’s bed, he noted the Marilyn Monroe poster on the bit of wall between the closet and the door, a life-size still from The Seven Year Itch, the famous scene of her standing over the street grate, struggling to hold down her skirt. Another poster was for the Cure, the heavily made-up lead singer with his thick mascara, red lipstick, wild eyes, and wild hair. From the wall shelves peered a yellow ceramic Ganesh, a visible crack in the arm where it had been broken and repaired, and a poorly constructed cat-shaped wooden doorstop with “Kiran ’87” carved crudely on the underside. A large stuffed Bengal tiger sat guard at the foot of the bed.
On the dresser was a triptych of framed photos: Kiran in a formal portrait wearing a suit jacket and a tie; another more casual photo of him in a sweater, perched in the opening of an enormous circle cut into a wall; a third of him standing with one foot on a fake boulder, the suit jacket slung over his shoulder, dangling from a hooked finger. Kiran’s hair was thick and long, falling almost to his shoulders, a length that must have displeased his parents. Bharat had received a print of the formal portrait in the mail last May, accompanied by a note from his aunt identifying it as “Kiran’s Senior Photo.” Bharat was not familiar with the tradition of senior photos and thought it strange that graduating from high school to go to college was considered a transition worthy of commemoration, as if this by itself were an accomplishment rather than just one small step, no more significant than any other, toward a destination that was still a long way away. The mailed parcel had also included a photo labeled “Prom,” though that picture was not displayed here. Back in India, the comments had been polite. “He’s a nice-looking boy,” Kamala, Bharat’s stepmother, had said flaccidly, but what everyone was really thinking was How strange he is, and Who is this dumpy girl he is holding?
Examining the triptych, Bharat was thinking something else, too. He was remembering his father’s visit a decade earlier. He had understood even then that part of the reason for his father’s visit was to see if another life was possible, not just for himself but for the whole family. Fifteen at the time, Bharat had not been sure what to hope for—to stay, or to go. Over the years, Bharat sometimes wondered what his life might have looked like had they immigrated. Now, in Kiran’s room, he was collecting clues not only about his American cousin but about his own alternate American self.
Bharat was in America because of what the astrologer had said. It had been a cool spring morning, mist hanging like rags snagged in trees, when he and his parents headed out, their butts wedged into the narrow backseat of the auto rickshaw like toes into too-tight shoes. Armed with star charts for Ameera—Bharat’s intended—Kamala had so many questions for the jyotishi. Was it a harmonious match? What was the most auspicious date for the wedding? How many children would they have, and what sex? Would the couple be happy? Would they prosper?
Ten minutes into their journey, Kamala already knew she would be miserable for the rest of the day, and she had no choice but to brace herself. She had worn new sandals, aiming to impress, and hadn’t anticipated how badly they’d pinch her feet. She had no idea of the true misery that would be revealed by the end of the day, and that that misery would stretch on for months.
As the auto rickshaw puttered through a maze of uneven alleyways, Kamala recalled her own marriage to Prabhu after the death of his first wife. She had known full well no one would consider her a catch. She was short and extremely thin-framed—no hips, no breasts—her neck, torso, appendages, nothing more than twigs. Her complexion was smooth, but three shades darker than most of her would-be suitors (and their mothers!) would prefer. Her face was pinched, and all of her features were pulled forward and distorted like stretched putty. Still, she knew that it was her father’s actions more than a decade earlier that had truly cursed her. Kamala’s mother, until the day she died, always referred to the incident as a fall—“he fell”—though everyone knew that he jumped. Kamala’s mother looked at that window in their sixth-floor flat for a full year before finally having it bricked over, a sacrifice in an already dark and stuffy sitting room. If Kamala’s mother had had money, she would have moved. Even after the entire wall had been replastered and repainted, Kamala felt sure she could see the faint outline of where the window had been. Kamala’s mother might have thought she was filling a hole, but for Kamala she was creating one: a constant reminder of what was once there (even if what had been there was itself a hole to begin with).
So, given her looks and her sad personal history (“very inauspicious,” any matchmaker would have proclaimed), Kamala knew she’d have few prospects, but sometimes she wondered, if she had known the full extent of Prabhu’s troubles (as his parents certainly must have), would she have married him? Sometimes she blamed his parents for not having been completely forthright. And yet was there anything a mother and father wouldn’t do for their son if they thought it might bring him happiness, even if it brought someone else suffering? Now she was marrying off her own son, and wouldn’t she do the same? Stepson, to be precise, but she had never once thought of Bharat that way. Prabhu had made it clear even before they married that he did not want another child. He didn’t want to risk a repeat of what had happened to his first wife, Neela. “Besides,” he said, in a rare instance of being clearheaded and practical, “there isn’t money to raise more than one.” This was fine with Kamala. When she first held Bharat, not even a year old, his perfect, tiny body curling instinctively against hers, she felt immediately that it was a blessing greater than any she had right to expect.
So when the astrologer, upon completing Bharat’s own star chart, answered none of Kamala’s questions and instead said, directing her comments to the parents, not to Bharat, “Your son must quit India,” Kamala felt her heart pound an
d her chest tighten. “September through December. That’s the danger period. His life is at risk if he stays here.” When pressed for details, the jyotishi revealed few, saying over and over, “It is written,” adding only that this was a critical period in his life, a dangerous one. The actual word she used was something like slippery, and Kamala seized on this in the weeks afterward, her panic building. “What will he slip on? Or slip from? Or slip into? Why are we sending him away? If he’s in danger, who better to protect him than his mother and father? What if we keep him in the house? We won’t let him out. Just for four months. We won’t even wash the floors; nothing to slip on.” But she heard, in the jyotishi’s words, chilling echoes of the past—He fell—and she knew they had to act.
When Prabhu spoke to his brother in America, following Kamala’s instructions, he glossed over the threat of danger. Yes, the astrologer had mentioned something, but who really believed in that stuff anymore? he said to Nishit. The main reason they were sending Bharat to America, Prabhu claimed, was because it might be his last chance, at least for some years. Soon he would be marrying Ameera, and then there would be a baby and then another. Who knew when he would get a chance to see America, and shouldn’t every young man see a little of the world before he settled down? Of course Prabhu wasn’t quite so articulate in explaining all of this—he stammered and grunted and filled the spaces with ums and uhs and ums in his usual way—but Nishit understood. And without making his brother suffer the indignity of asking (although Nishit had hesitated a moment, had allowed the briefest moment of silence, hoping his brother for once, just once, might admit that he needed his help and might ask for it), he said he’d purchase the plane tickets, make all the arrangements, and organize some activities to keep Bharat occupied in America, including a tour: the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls, the whole bit. “You have nothing to worry about, brother. Just send him.”
Chapter 10
Cousin-brother. Kiran had grown up hearing this term. Always “brother” because—sad for Preeti—there were no female cousins (sad, but also not; how all the aunties and uncles doted on her! what beautiful dresses and diamonds and bangles they heaped on her!). As far as Kiran’s parents were concerned, first cousins were the same as siblings, and Kiran grew up with a troop of lanky, troublemaking “minkeys” (his father’s term of endearment). He spent almost every summer with some cousin or the other, all of them close in age, the children of Shanti’s three brothers. Kiran rarely went to their houses; they would almost always come to Western New York, their parents oohing and ahhing over the bucolic setting and extolling (jealousy in their voices) the safety of small towns. The cousins crawled like ants over every inch of the neighborhood, the woods, the creek. They caught crawdads, collected quartz. They spent hours weaving daisy chains, stretched them across Sherman Road, and cheered when a pickup truck came crashing through. They built backyard forts from kitchen chairs and wool blankets, hiding so long underneath that once, during a particularly potent heat wave, Mrs. Yamamoto made a rare appearance at the Shahs’ front door, having donned a large straw hat and sunglasses just to cross the side yard and ring the doorbell; she gesticulated wildly, saying nothing more than “Chickens are dying!” over and over, and it was only several minutes later, after Mrs. Yamamoto had returned home, that Shanti understood what the neighbor was concerned about. They picked fights with neighborhood kids, the cousins a tag team, tube socks pulled up to their knees. They played Marco Polo in the shallow end of the town pool (after Kiran finally learned to swim) and Smear the Queer in the lot for sale next to the Dickinsons’ Tudor and marathon games of air hockey in the chlorine-scented concrete rec room at the Y and Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II Plus on a metal desk in the corner of the subterranean family room. They raced bikes down the big hill past the woods, past Ray of Light Ministries, the dairy farm, the two barking dogs tied to doghouses on opposite sides of the road, often wiping out in one of the fields or in the tall grass along the side of the road. The cousins left their mark on the land, their blood in the dirt, their sweat slicking the trunks and branches and boughs of climbed trees. Their histories were inscribed here, the double helixes of their DNA vining up, across, around every bit of land, indelible reminders for Kiran of the glorious World of Cousins in which he’d spent his youth.
As for Shanti, if she had hoped for something from her brothers’ visits, a closeness, a late-night sibling heart-to-heart, she was disappointed. She should have known better. They had not been close as children; why would they be in adulthood, even if they now had the shared experience of being newly American, adrift in a world not quite theirs? Her brothers came only to drop and collect their children, Shanti’s house a summer camp. They barely stayed one night. For dinner, they requested and then praised dishes their mother had made, their own wives looking askance. They remarked how wonderful it was their children were growing up together, tying tight bonds, unable to see the ways in which Shanti needed them, in which they needed each other. Her brothers were blind to the signals: Shanti lingering alone in the kitchen late at night, herself not quite knowing that what she was waiting for was her brother, whichever one was visiting, to need a glass of water, to see her in the breakfast nook holding a cup of ginger tea with both hands, to slide in next her: “How have you been, sister?” She hoped that as her own children became adults they would have a different relationship than she had with her brothers, that they would know how to read the signs.
The cousins as children had all been mischievous boys, but at some point in their teens they all transformed into responsible, accomplished young men—valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, Ivy Leaguers studying to become doctors and scientists and investment bankers—all, that is, except Kiran. Though not a terrible student, Kiran had not excelled, and he considered himself lucky to manage admission to an upstate branch of the State University of New York. Kiran marveled at how his cousins had shed old selves as easily as they shed old clothes, or so it seemed to him. He didn’t know the way each of them in his own quiet way struggled: one cousin who worried that no matter what he did, he would never be successful enough to please his demanding parents; another who would always regret swapping his college girlfriend, the love of his life—an African American woman from South Carolina—for the parent-approved Gujarati girl from Edison, New Jersey; a third whose anxiety and panic attacks he’d manage to keep secret until one Christmas break when his father-in-law found him doubled over on the cold tiles of the guest bathroom, unable to move. And just as the cousins themselves transformed, the World of Cousins—which for so much of Kiran’s life, whether he was completely conscious of it or not, was a safety net—was changing into a different kind of net, a fishing net, and he was thrashing around, trying to escape it.
Bharat—being Kiran’s lone Indian cousin and from his father’s side, not his mother’s—had not been part of this World of Cousins. Having never met him, Kiran had no idea what to expect.
When Kiran returned home for four days for fall break, Bharat had been living in the house barely two months, but Kiran could see plainly—everything in Bharat’s demeanor told him this—that Bharat was miserable. Bharat had accompanied Kiran’s father to fetch him from the train station an hour away. Kiran’s first glimpse of Bharat was of him on the platform, slumped in such a way that it seemed to Kiran that it was just a matter of time before gravity had its way and made Bharat fully and forever part of the pavement. But when Kiran approached, Bharat’s whole body transformed. He rushed toward Kiran, smiling an enormous smile, and took Kiran’s hand, took his whole arm, shaking it firmly, almost maniacally. Kiran recognized in Bharat’s huge eyes a state Kiran himself knew well: desperation.
Bharat remembered the first time, upon his arrival to America, that he had hugged his uncle. Nishit Kaka wore a crisp dress shirt, not like the damp shirt his own father had worn the day Bharat hugged him good-bye in India. And the smell! Later, he would learn this was the smell of laundry-detergent-plus-fabric-softener. (F
abric softener! First his kaki used softener to soften the fabric, then she sprayed starch on his uncle’s dress shirts to stiffen them!) Later Bharat would come to smell this way too: his dress shirts would be softened and then starched. But at the time of hugging his uncle (after touching his feet, of course), he thought, This is it. This is the smell of America.
But Kiran did not smell like this. Not that he hugged Kiran the way he had hugged his uncle; everything in Kiran’s body language signaled to Bharat that this would not be welcomed. And even though he hadn’t expected it (he certainly hadn’t expected it), it had crossed Bharat’s mind that Kiran might touch his feet (he was, after all, his elder) or might call him Bharat Bhai as a sign of respect. But none of this happened, and in the end all he got from Kiran was a limp handshake. But even from that distance it was clear to Bharat that Kiran did not smell like laundry-detergent-plus-fabric-softener. He smelled stale. He had traveled by day by train, a short trip really, just a few hours from his college in upstate New York, but the smell was of overnight bus.
Kiran could imagine that Bharat had been anxiously awaiting his arrival, had been counting on Kiran to rescue him from the boredom and isolation he must have felt. Yet in the car during the drive home, Kiran found himself pulling away from both his father and his cousin, especially his cousin. Sitting in the passenger seat, Kiran had an invisible force field around him. His father couldn’t see it. Bharat couldn’t see it. But if they tried to penetrate it, they’d know—they’d smack hard into the wall, and the harder they tried, the more it would hurt them.
Two months earlier, when Kiran’s father had brought him to college, he had stayed two nights at a nearby hotel in order to help Kiran settle in. Spotting the Indian boy moving in down the hall, Nishit had been solicitous, had asked the boy where he was from (“Bangalore”), had asked if he had any family here to help him set up (“No”), and then had insisted the boy come with them on excursions to Kmart, to the grocery store, to dinner at Applebee’s. The morning he left, Nishit had told his son, “You should be friends with him. He is exactly the type of person you should be friends with.” Seeing Kiran’s face, Nishit said, “I know you think he is uncool. That’s all you care about now: cool. In ten years, cool will mean nothing in your life. But by then it will be too late to correct the mistakes you made when you were busy trying to be someone you are not.”