by Rahul Mehta
Kiran ran to the window. Bharat had taken hold of Pooja by the hair and was dragging her across the dirt. One of her hands was holding her hair, desperately trying to save her scalp, the other was struggling to keep her skirt down.
“You’ve done this, you goat-fucking whore! I will make you pay!”
“Brother, please, no!”
“Don’t call me brother, you filthy cunt!”
Kiran saw Bharat turn and kick Pooja. She covered her face with her hands. Her body curled into itself. Hanu pulled at Bharat’s pant cuff, but Bharat kicked him away. He raised his whole foot and positioned it over Pooja, bringing it down in a loud stomp. “It’s your fault. Your fault!”
Kiran rushed to the other side of the room and grabbed the speckled rock from the bedside table. Back at the window, he took aim at his cousin. He heard Shawn’s voice, “You throw like a girl. You throw like a girl.” He hurled the rock at Bharat as hard as he could. He didn’t stay to watch its sad arc, its limp landing in the dry bush. He raced down the stairs, three at a time, bolting out the front door, onto the porch past the jhoola swing, out into the yard.
The Dianas held vigil in the hospital room. Maha Diana, aka Princess Diana (“Diana, really, please, just call me Diana”), charmed all the orderlies and nurses. She wore a jade-colored salwar kameez, the scarf modestly covering her head, and folded her hands, bowing “Namaste” to everyone who entered, even the women squatting to empty the trash and sweep the floor. She drank tea not like a proper English lady, pinkie extended, but like an Indian, pouring the hot sweet liquid into the saucer, slurping it up. She planted herself bedside, holding and stroking the patient’s hand; she barely slept.
Diana Hayden wasn’t what anyone expected. She may have arrived in elbow-length white gloves, but she quickly shed them. She was the most down-to-earth, the one still of this earth. She was the first to recognize when a bedpan needed changing, a brow needed mopping, an IV drip needed replenishing, and when she couldn’t find a nurse to do it, she did it herself.
Unexpectedly, and without anyone noticing, a third Diana arrived. Wrapped in a white tunic, she was luminescent, carved from moonlight. Grecian goddess, goddess of the hunt, Diana stood guard at the foot of the bed, a dog by her side, bow and arrows at the ready, slung over her shoulder. Goddess of birth, she brought with her a breeze no one could feel but her. It blew perpetually through her hair; its sound was the whisper of new beginnings.
Together the three Dianas formed an impenetrable circle around the hospital bed. Hours stretched into days. The dingy room reeked of ammonia and ointment. The walls, cracked, were further marred by ancient stains from splattered fluids. Fluorescent lights flickered. Each of the Dianas had her own way of rallying flagging spirits. Diana of the Hunt sang Judy Collins songs. (“To every thing, turn turn turn, there is a season, turn turn turn.”) Diana Hayden told off-color jokes. (“How many beauty queens does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Beauty queens screw in hotel rooms, not lightbulbs!”) Maha Diana needed to do nothing; she was serenity personified.
The days became a week. A week became two. The Dianas never left the hospital room.
After fifteen days, Kiran finally opened his eyes. At first, the light in the room was impossibly bright. He could make out only blurry outlines. Objects morphed, shape-shifted, started off as one thing and then settled into another. He saw, standing over his bed, first his mother. Then his sister. Finally, squatting in shadows in the far corner of the room, Pooja and her dog.
Chapter 25
Bharat knew to stay away the day Kiran returned to the house. Kiran’s parents had already collected his belongings and brought them to the air-conditioned hotel suite next door to the hospital, where they’d been staying since their arrival just two days after receiving Kamala’s phone call informing them of Kiran’s “accident,” his subsequent coma, and the doctors’ fears he might not awaken. Even Preeti had come, and she was with his parents now waiting in the hotel suite, three-year-old Sheila perpetually balanced on her hip; her newborn, Chance, back in Mississippi with his father.
Kiran’s parents knew his injuries were the result of something other than his jumping from a moving bus, as Kamala had claimed. (“I’m sure it was just an accident? I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hurt himself? Though you said yourself how fragile he was when you sent him.”) They knew by Bharat’s complete avoidance of them and by Kamala’s and Prabhu’s refusal to make eye contact during their solitary visit to the hospital—the same hospital where Ameera had died during childbirth—that there was more to this story, but, looking at each other, they’d made an unspoken agreement not to ask questions. One day, perhaps; not now. So it was with trepidation that they let Kiran return to the house to say good-bye and to do so alone, as he requested.
Kiran had been out of the hospital for a few days now. Tomorrow they were all heading back to America. He was still in recovery, but his parents wanted him to continue his healing in America, and the doctors said he was finally strong enough to fly. They had sprung for first-class tickets to make the long flight easier.
As the hired Ambassador bumped along, Kiran could feel, in his bruised and broken rib cage, every dip and divot in the road. The car turned from the busy thoroughfare onto the quiet lane. The stone house slowly came into view. Looking at the yard—seeing the familiar peepal tree, the dirt, the scraggly bushes—Kiran winced. The previous day, meeting him at an outdoor chai stall near the hotel, Pooja described to Kiran what had happened that fateful morning in the yard. She told Kiran about how not a molecule in her body doubted that Bharat was going to kill her. And that when Kiran bounded out of the house and threw himself on Bharat, trying to wrest him away from Pooja . . . well . . . she had heard the phrase “blind with rage” before, but she’d never actually witnessed it. “Whatever it was he was seeing, it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you. His physical body was here, but the rest of him was somewhere else. It was like the rest of him was in another world where the only thing that existed was his anger and his grief.”
Pooja promised Kiran she had nothing to do with Ameera’s death, and Kiran said, “I know. You’re incapable of such a thing.” Pooja had wondered whether Kiran meant incapable of such cruelty or incapable of magic, but she didn’t ask. Much later, back in her own town with Guru Ma and her sisters in the run-down section of slums where they lived, Pooja would find that there was a tiny part of her—it shamed her to realize this—that felt proud that Bharat had finally believed in her powers, even if it meant he also thought she was a monster. She even wondered herself: there had been a moment—really, a blink-and-you-miss-it nanosecond—when she did wish harm on Bharat. Was it possible she somehow made it happen? The thought chilled her.
In the years to come, Pooja would come to believe that what we think, the invisible things we hold in our hearts, is what we ultimately manifest in the world, and wasn’t that a kind of magic? It was not an easy thing to explain, and she didn’t have it completely clear even in her own head, but this she believed: everyone was capable of curses, and everyone of miracles.
Pooja planned now to leave the same day as Kiran, returning to Guru Ma and her sisters. She would meet him one last time as he departed for the airport; she refused to leave even a second earlier. Despite the danger she faced by staying—especially after the horrible things Bharat had been saying about her to anyone who would listen—she insisted that Kiran needed her. Manoj had taken her in and had made a space for her in the stock room; and even though it was a potential threat to his stock, he looked the other way on nights when Pooja let Hanu inside to sleep with her.
After he entered Prabhu’s room, it took Kiran’s eye some time to adjust to the darkness; exactly how long, Kiran wasn’t sure. Time in this room seemed to have little relationship to time outside it. Prabhu’s room was its own world with its own logic, its own laws of physics: a windowless, interior room that must have been unbearable during the hot season. Even now the air could only be characterized as stagnant and dull
; the listless ceiling fan was little help. A low-watt bare lightbulb glowed bedside; a diya flame flickered in the corner altar. With a nod of the head, Prabhu invited Kiran to take a seat on one of the ripped cushions positioned on the bare floor. If he was taken aback by Kiran’s appearance—the bandage over his left eye and torn earlobe, the cast on his right arm, the bandages wrapped around his rib cage—Prabhu didn’t betray it on his face. In some ways, the room reminded Kiran of his own dark room in the sixth-floor walk-up in New York, albeit a much cleaner version. Both rooms were spare and minimally furnished, with frameless mattresses floating raftlike on the floor.
After some silence, Prabhu said, “You’re going back.”
Kiran contemplated the word: back. It was the same word his father had used that summer. We think you should go back to India.
“Yes,” Kiran said. “Tomorrow.”
Prabhu nodded.
Kiran opened his mouth, closed it, tried again, three, four times—a fish out of water, choking on air. Finally he said, “What did you see when you found her in the woods?” Kiran didn’t say his sister’s name. He couldn’t and didn’t need to. “It was my fault. I’m to blame. So I need to know. What did she look like? What did I do to her?”
But Kiran was asking the wrong question. He didn’t want to know the details; Preeti had already told him enough in her letter. What he was really asking, without even knowing it, was for Prabhu, the only adult witness to his deepest failing, to tell Kiran, It’s OK, you were just a child. It wasn’t your fault, none of it was. This dark room a confessional, Kiran hoped to be forgiven.
Prabhu looked at his nephew, recognized the pain on his face, the burden he carried. Prabhu had lived through enough tragedies: first his own wife’s death; now Ameera’s. Kiran’s pain—no less, no greater than anyone else’s—was his own to manage.
“Beta, darling, whatever it is you need from me, I can’t give you.”
Kiran watched the diya flicker in the altar, light lapping at framed images—Ganpati, Ram, Durga, Neela. A small insect skirted Kiran’s cushion, searching for safe passage. Kiran’s ankles pressed uncomfortably against the hard floor. The air hung around him in heavy curtains.
“It’s time for you to go.”
Even after Pooja would leave town (the same day as Kiran; she kept her promise and met him at the airport before finding her own way back to Guru Ma), the crows would remain, a reminder for folks that Pooja had been there. They watched from trees, sharp-eyed, heads able to articulate in every direction. They circled and cawed, swarmed and swooped. Bharat, seeing the crow-darkened sky or hearing their cries, would think not of Pooja, but only of what he’d lost.
It wasn’t fair, Bharat thought. He couldn’t believe in God—his very life began with his own mother’s death, what God would allow that?—and he wrote off religion as superstition, but deep down he wanted to believe that the world wasn’t random, that people got more or less what they deserved. But where was the justice in this? He had done everything right. He was a good son, all his life he’d done what he was told. He had even behaved toward his American cousin, who had humiliated him years earlier, with kindness and generosity.
Maybe this was why he had snapped. It wasn’t true that he’d been blind with rage when he was trying to destroy Kiran. He saw Kiran clearly, perhaps more clearly than he had ever seen him. And he hated what he saw: the smugness, the selfishness, the privilege. It shouldn’t have been Ameera. It should have been Kiran. If there were justice in the world, he’d be the one dead.
It wouldn’t have helped Bharat to imagine—as Kiran sometimes did—that there was another world, one in which Ameera lived, in which they were still together, happy. He wanted her in this world.
The jyotishi his parents had consulted seven years earlier had said over and over, It is written. Was this written? What else did the future hold that he couldn’t control? At least his daughter had survived, but he wondered how he could protect her. He cradled the baby in his arms, tucking her blanket tighter.
One day late in spring, suddenly and without anyone really noticing, the crows disappeared. They departed first in a flock, flying then turning, tilting extravagantly, the evening light silvering their wings. In the darkening sky they transformed into origami cranes. Back in college at the end of his freshman year, Kiran had left all the cranes he’d collected over the year in the dresser drawer. He intended the dorm room’s next occupant to inherit them. Kiran had been miserable here, but at least this was some positive energy he could leave behind for the next occupant in hopes he would have an easier time. Kiran didn’t realize that a cleaning crew would come through before then, charged with discarding whatever students had left behind, items they no longer wanted or would rather not bring back to their childhood homes for summer. The origami cranes were dumped into a trash barrel containing a ripped teddy bear, jeans that no longer fit, a dead lizard, a pink dildo.
Now, in India, the crows-turned-cranes scattered, each following its instinct in a different direction, looking for its next home, ready to unfold, smooth itself flat, fold itself into something new.
When Kiran returned from meeting Prabhu Kaka, taking the lift up to the air-conditioned hotel suite—two bedrooms attached to a sitting room with a kitchenette—he was dragging behind him, using his one good arm, the enormous stuffed tiger. Shanti was the only one who saw him. She was on the couch in the common room. Preeti and Sheila were in one bedroom, and Nishit was catnapping in the other.
Shanti recognized the stuffed tiger immediately. She had sent it with Bharat seven years earlier—“For your and Ameera’s first baby!”—never guessing it would take so long for them to conceive, or that Ameera would die.
After leaving Prabhu Kaka, riding in the back of the bumping Ambassador, Kiran had spotted something in the abandoned lot near his cousin’s house. He wasn’t sure, but he asked the driver to stop and he got out and there it all was, among the ruins and the neighborhood trash—the A-frame dollhouse, the Tonka truck, the tiger—the peacocks picking their way around the mess.
“Oh, I remember this guy,” Shanti said, trying to sound casual as she rushed to help Kiran, still struggling in the doorway. “You loved him so much.” She lifted the tiger, hugging it a moment. The synthetic material itched her nose. She remembered when Chris had presented it to her at the food court in Elmira, the kiss that followed. She remembered afterward sitting in the hot car in the parking lot, crying, the creature in the trunk.
“Sheila will be over the moon.”
“It’s for Pooja.”
“Pooja?”
“Remember Pooja? From the hospital?”
Shanti didn’t immediately recognize the name. It took a moment for the image to fade in, like a ghost finally showing itself. It had been like that in the hospital, too. The first day she had not even noticed her, so focused was she on her son. The second day, seeing the creature—that’s how she thought of her—crouching barefoot in the corner, she assumed she was some hospital maid, a bai, a nameless woman there to empty the bedpans and sweep the floors. Finally, the third day, Shanti asked her who she was.
“Fr . . . friend,” Pooja stuttered in English, even though Shanti would have understood her Hindi.
Shanti never asked her son about Pooja. She thought she knew the story. Sensitive soul, Kiran as a child brought home hurt birds, hoping to help them. Had she been honest with herself, Shanti would have seen this wasn’t what was happening with Pooja. But she needed to believe this narrative about her son.
“Pooja needs it,” Kiran said.
Shanti paused a moment, then said, “Well, you better hide it before Sheila sees it. Otherwise it’ll be hers for sure.” She helped Kiran wrestle the animal into the closet by the door.
Hearing the ruckus, Nishit came to check on his son. “You’re back,” he said, sounding relieved. “How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“Did you say your good-byes?”
“Huh?”
“
Isn’t that why you went?”
“Yeah,” Kiran said.
Nishit had wanted so much to accompany Kiran, not just to assist him in his infirm state, but to see his own brother one last time before he left India. He’d only seen him that once when he and Kamala had come to the hospital room; Nishit had been too occupied otherwise shuttling back and forth from the hotel to the hospital and caring for Sheila while Shanti and Preeti remained day and night in the hospital room. Who knew when he’d have a chance to see his brother again. But Kiran had been so insistent that he needed to go alone.
“Did he seem OK?”
“Who?”
“Prabhu. How was he?” Nishit noticed Kiran’s eyes shift to the side and the muscles in his face tense.
“The same. He’s always the same.”
Nishit remembered Kiran slumped against the wall in the sixth-floor walk-up months earlier while Nishit scrubbed the apartment. He would protect his son; he would do what it took.
Sheila burst into the room, barreling into Nishit’s arms. Nishit lifted her onto his shoulders; she squealed. He was grateful for the distraction, glad to be able to change the subject. “I’m famished,” he said. “Who’s hungry?”
No one wanted to leave the comfort of the air-conditioning, so they ordered room service. Biryani and curries for the four adults, cornflakes (“cornflaks,” the menu read) with hot milk for Sheila. They sat around the wooden dinette table, eating. It would be the only time the four of them were ever all together in India, five of them counting Sheila. Kiran would make future trips, surprising his parents, considering his near-death first experience. Even more surprising to them, Preeti would also return, coming every couple of years to volunteer with her husband at a Christian mission hospital. Children in tow, she’d tell them each time, as if they somehow didn’t know, “This is where your Nana and Nani are from.”