No Other World

by Rahul Mehta

  Kiran believed this just as—a decade earlier—Shanti believed it about her own transgressions with Chris. Not that anyone had criticized her, not openly, but on rare occasions when she received a certain nasty look in the drugstore and she wondered, just wondered, if perhaps Pearly Franklin or Sarah Bradshaw or whoever it was somehow knew about her and Chris (although they had been so careful), she thought if only these women had felt what she felt—his large, hot palm under her blouse on the small of her back, stubble on his cheek, his hardness through his jeans (jeans Amy had picked out for the way she knew he would look in them)—they’d be shooting her other looks, looks of jealousy, not judgment.

  Of course, as is often the case with the stories we tell ourselves, eighteen-year-old Kiran’s recollection of those afternoons were at odds with how eight-year-old Kiran had experienced them. The memory had lived in his body all these years, transforming as his body transformed. It was like looking at multiple photographs of the same scene taken from different angles. In the photograph his eighteen-year-old self was seeing, all of the fear and confusion felt by his eight-year-old self disappeared into the background; front-and-center, in crisp focus, was desire. But which photograph was true? Were all the photographs true? Were any of them? Was his experience of those afternoons now any less true than his experience then? In some sense, wasn’t his memory of it now more true, in that it continued to influence how he saw his past, present, and future?

  After the Wicca ceremony, on the couches in the fourth-floor lounge, Jeffrey had not asked Kiran what he thought of when told to visualize his deepest regret, and if Jeffrey had asked Kiran, Kiran would not have told him, but this is the image he saw: the four-armed monster in silhouette stumbling out of the woods. But the regret itself was more specific than that. Kiran worried about the reason he had waited so long to report what was happening to Preeti. He hadn’t wanted anyone to find out about what he and Shawn had been doing together. But was it really because of the shame, as he had continued to tell himself? Kiran worried it wasn’t. He worried it was really because then they would have had to stop.

  Bharat had begged Maria to leave the semiformal early, and now they were driving home. The snow came down faster than Bharat thought possible. Maria’s wipers swiped at the snow, but it was futile: declawed Gracie swatting at a ribbon. The highway was completely covered. Shallow tire tracks, barely visible, were their only guide; that and the occasional guardrail reflector winking in the light of their headlamps.

  “If I’ve done something wrong, just tell me,” Maria said. She’d layered a shearling coat over her sari and swapped her strappy sandals for snow boots stashed in the trunk. Bharat looked at her as she concentrated on the road. Her teardrop bindi had slid sideways.

  At the semiformal Maria had buzzed and bubbled. She’d been giddy, effervescent, winding her way through crowds, introducing Bharat, touching his arm lightly, bangles on her wrists. He had done his best but had little to say. It wasn’t just that he was worried about his smell. When she wanted to dance, he demurred. Then he asked to leave.

  “Why did you dress this way tonight?”

  “Is that what’s been bugging you?” she said, craning her neck, trying to decipher the faint outline where road became bank became ditch. “Back at the house you said I looked beautiful.”

  “You do. It’s just, I wish you’d dressed . . . you know . . . normal.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with this?”

  Bharat found himself unable to say. Did he feel exoticized? Or did seeing a young woman in a sari make him miss India? Was her earnestness making him feel guilty for not telling her about Ameera? Or had the juxtaposition of the silk sari and shearling coat brought into focus how much he did not belong here? He didn’t know the answer. It was like his hives, a pain he didn’t understand and could not name.

  “Americaria,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m suffering from Americaria.” He’d never said the word out loud—never even imagined doing it—and once he did, he heard how silly it sounded. “It’s just a name I made up for my condition.”

  Maria shifted, sighed. “These months have been really hard for you, haven’t they?”

  “Yes,” he said softly, a quiet admission to himself as much as to her.

  The snow kept falling. The car crawled south, switching from highway to country road, burrowing deeper and deeper into the foothills of the mountains. By the time they reached it, the familiar green sign announcing four more miles had disappeared.

  Chapter 15

  At the end of his four months in America, Bharat made the requisite trip to New York City. From there he’d be joining a tour group that would make its way across the United States, ending up in Los Angeles, where Bharat would catch a flight back to India. When he first arrived in America, he’d been excited about seeing the Big Apple. The thought helped get him through the lonely weeks in the small town. But now that the time was here, he hardly cared anymore. He just wanted to go home. But he knew in India he’d be asked to show his photos, and if he didn’t have one of himself standing at the top of the Empire State Building or on the Liberty Island Ferry, the green statue behind him, people would wonder. He remembered seeing a photo album, a couple of years earlier, from someone else’s trip: a neighbor girl about his age. She had been fitted for contact lenses especially for the trip. She was going to meet relatives. It was her first time in America. She had shown Bharat her puffy album with tulips on the cover. The photos were all in plastic sleeves. There must have been four hundred.

  Shanti and Nishit drove him. They stayed overnight at Nishit’s cousin Rohit’s apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the next morning, they all drove into the city—Rohit’s family of four and the three of them all crammed into Rohit’s Mercedes station wagon. Bharat sat in the way back. Rohit’s girls should have sat there, but they cried and clung to their mother and in the end it was Bharat who was put back there. Like luggage, he thought, and in some ways he understood that this was a fair comparison. For both his uncle and for Kiran, he must have seemed like baggage from the past.

  After their sightseeing, Kiran was to take the train from his college upstate and meet them at Rockefeller Center for dinner. Bharat hadn’t seen him since his visit home during fall break. Kiran had bowed out of Christmas. There was a skiing trip with some friends from college and something else, Bharat couldn’t remember; even Nishit Kaka had seemed unclear when he explained it all to Bharat.

  Waiting, Nishit kept saying, “Ten more minutes.” He and Bharat stood outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art Store, where they had agreed to meet, while the others popped in and out of surrounding establishments, partly to browse, but mostly to keep warm. The girls were cranky and tired, and everyone was hungry. From outside the store Bharat had a good view of the enormous tree towering above the sunken skating rink. It was beautiful, it was all beautiful, but Bharat thought there was also something a little sad about the decorations, the elaborate shop windows, now that Christmas had passed. It was like seeing the ripped streamers and confetti the morning after the party. Finally Rohit said, “It’s been an hour and a half. Kiran is not coming.”

  “Something must have happened,” Nishit said.

  Twenty minutes earlier Shanti had used a pay phone inside to call Kiran’s dorm room. The machine had clicked on and beeped and Shanti had held the receiver for several seconds, trying to think of what to say, what message to leave, but in the end all she left were thirty seconds of ambient noise from the bustling corridor in the cavernous building. Much later Kiran would listen to that message and hear in his mother’s silence everything she had stopped herself from saying, everything he knew she wanted to say and that he knew he deserved. He would listen to it again and again over the course of the next few weeks, a kind of torture, listening, each time, with anticipation, for the final sigh, the final exhalation of disappointment and resignation before his mother hung up the phone, until finally Kiran erased the message.
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br />   “I just hope he’s OK,” Nishit said as they walked the three blocks to the parking garage where they’d left the car. They’d decided there was no point eating in the city now; everything in the area was so expensive. They’d just drive back to Fort Lee and eat in the apartment.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Shanti said.

  “But something must have happened. This isn’t like him.”

  It was exactly like him, at least of late, but Shanti didn’t contradict her husband.

  Back at the car, everyone resumed the seating arrangements from the morning, though it would have made sense now for the girls to sit in the way back. They were tired now, they would fall asleep in the car; they could just lie down back there. But before anyone could suggest this, Rohit lifted the back gate and said to Bharat, “Hop in, my friend,” and Bharat obeyed.

  Bharat slumped down and craned his neck so he could see out the window: an uncomfortable position, a terrible way to see the city. His perspective was skewed, the angle was strange. It was dark now. Lights sliced through the car—traffic lights, streetlights, lights on the signs and in the windows of the stores, store after store after store. He was riding backward, looking back at the city he was leaving, the country he would soon be leaving, too, the four months that were coming to an end.

  They’d only driven three or four blocks when Bharat saw (or thought he saw), on the sidewalk, Kiran eating a hot dog. Bharat repositioned himself, put his face right up to the window to get a better look, but the light changed and the car lurched and Bharat lost his balance. “Wait,” Bharat said, and then more loudly than he’d intended, “Stop!”

  Rohit slowed the car. “What is it?”

  Bharat pressed his face to the window, but the young man eating the hot dog was gone. “Nothing,” Bharat said. “Sorry.” Bharat’s hives flared. He wanted to rip his skin off.

  Had he seen it correctly? Hadn’t that been Kiran? Wasn’t that his leather jacket? And, wrapped around his collar, one of the plaid scarves Shanti had bought? She had mailed him one, given a second to Nishit, a third to Bharat as a Christmas gift, apologizing the minute he opened it. “Oh, what was I thinking? You won’t have any use for such a heavy wool scarf in India. We’ll return it.” But Bharat wanted to keep it. As much as he had struggled in America, some small part of him liked knowing that when he returned to India on the other side of the world, his uncle, and yes, even his rotten cousin, would be wearing the same scarf he was; that they were all still, despite all their differences, somehow connected.

  Interlude

  Chapter 16

  A few years later, on a different block in the same city, a different cousin, a minkey, cousin-brother from the World of Cousins, traveling home by car service late at night after a sixteen-hour day as a first-year analyst in an investment bank, would have a similar experience of looking out the window and thinking he sees Kiran but not quite believing his eyes. The figure he would see would be laughing with two men, one of whom would be wearing tight leather pants, and the figure he would believe was Kiran would be swathed in a gold sari—not swathed, because swathed means enveloped, swathed means cocooned, and this figure would be neither. His midriff would be bare and the sleeves of his blouse very short; there would be gold metal bands wrapped snakelike around his upper arms, and though it would be dark, the cousin would notice, as the figure passed beneath a streetlamp, that his skin was shimmering with body glitter.

  A few weeks later, when the cousin was scheduled to meet Kiran for brunch, he would arrive first, and while he waited for Kiran, standing on the sidewalk, not seated at a table because the restaurant would only seat full parties, he would wonder, would worry, what Kiran would be wearing. He would remember the gold high heels, perilously high, and how assured the figure had seemed, how he didn’t teeter but stomped. Waiting, he would realize he didn’t know Kiran, and he would remember how close they had been as children, the long summer visits, letters written to each other on birch bark, the lake, the way they would take turns swinging from the bough of a tree and then letting go, plunging into the water. He would both long for that closeness and worry in retrospect what that closeness meant. When Kiran finally did arrive, twenty minutes late (“The F train was a disaster”), Kiran would be wearing jeans and a crewneck sweater and the cousin wouldn’t mention what he thought he saw and Kiran, without lying, would be careful what he revealed about his life. Without realizing it, sitting at the table, they would turn away from one another, and this pattern would continue for almost two decades until one day the cousin would invite Kiran to his apartment on the Upper East Side. The cousin would have made more money in twenty years than Kiran would make in twenty lifetimes, and the apartment would be enormous, an entire floor of a building, with an elevator that opened into the apartment itself, and there would be a Chinese vase the size of an eight-year-old child and an original painting by an up-and-coming artist (“Art is a great investment,” the cousin would say) and three separate sitting rooms. As he walked through the apartment, Kiran would worry that his shoes weren’t clean enough, the same way as a child sitting in his cousin’s parents’ car he would worry his pants weren’t clean enough, his hands weren’t clean enough, because the seats in that car were plush velvet, royal blue, and the seats in his parents’ cars were only ever easy-to-clean vinyl. Something in the apartment would surprise Kiran: an air hockey table. The cousin would have just bought it; in fact, it was the reason he had invited Kiran. They had played as children in the chlorine-scented concrete rec room at the Y. They would play now, and after an hour, when Kiran started to make excuses to leave, the cousin would say, “One more.” When the cousin made a particularly good shot he would say “Sorry,” and Kiran would remember he did that as a child, too, said “Sorry,” sorry for hitting a fabulous shot, sorry for winning, sorry because it meant someone else lost. And even though that had been the cousin’s verbal tic, not Kiran’s, Kiran would do it now, say “Sorry” every time the puck went careening into the goal slot. Back and forth: sorry, sorry, sorry. Four hours would pass, and although they wouldn’t talk about their two decades of near silence, they would have said that day all that they needed.

  By that point in his life, Kiran would recognize how sorry stretched like a slick slide over huge swaths of his past. He understood this, even if he couldn’t always bring himself to ride that slide for fear of where in his past it might plop him. Still, during Kiran’s time in India, he’d never said sorry to Bharat for how he’d treated him in America. He’d had opportunities, had even tried to form the word, but he never quite managed. If he had, would things have turned out differently? Would Bharat, blind with rage in the yard under the peepal tree, have stopped himself? And if he had, would it have mattered?

  Part Three

  Chapter 17

  Western India, 1998

  “But the baby hasn’t even been born yet,” Bharat said, trying to sound calm from behind the iron fretwork of the front door’s security gate. “Come back then.”

  “Come back?” Guru Ma asked. The half-day journey had been an exhausting one both for her and for Pooja. The distance was not very far, but the roads were pocked and broken and indirect, and the buses were slow. And of course there had been the bus driver who had refused them passage despite their tickets and had threatened them with a tire iron, calling them “disgusting.” It was especially difficult for Guru Ma. Pooja was still young, fourteen or fifteen (even Pooja herself wasn’t sure exactly). But Guru Ma, though not particularly old in years, felt ancient in body. Lifelong poverty had taken its toll. “You want me to come back?” she said again. “You are telling me no? You would dare risk being cursed by a hijra?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. But you have to admit, the blessing is supposed to be given upon the birth of the baby. I will welcome you at that time. Besides, if I pay you now I’m sure some other hijra will show up when the baby is born and demand additional money for the blessing.”

  Guru Ma looked at the man befor
e her: his meticulously trimmed mustache, his narrow shoulders, his belly just beginning to show the telltale swell of middle-class privilege. She could tell he wasn’t going to budge. He had made up his mind, made his offer, and now—standing in his doorway, a crowd of his neighbors gathered on the street, watching—he considered it a matter of pride. But behind him, Guru Ma glimpsed someone else—another man, a younger man, hair to his shoulders, and a T-shirt and way of standing that marked him instantly as foreign. She could see it immediately: he did not belong here any more than she did.

  Guru Ma stepped away from the door and spoke a minute or two quietly to Pooja. She turned back toward Bharat. “Brother, I am doing you a favor,” she bellowed. Bharat was now standing outside the front door’s iron security gate, brushing the top step with his foot, as if Guru Ma had left behind dirt. “I am not coming back, but I’m leaving behind my daughter. The second the baby is born, you pay her. You hear me? The second!”