Through the kitchen window, I watched the first of the morning light streaming through the thicket of pink bougainvillea growing in the back. I’d planted them as little shrubs soon after we’d moved into this house several years earlier, and here they were, immense and unruly, needing to be cut back. I’d chosen them, along with a cherimoya tree, because they reminded me so much of India. Here, in my wife’s hometown, through the alchemy of wet ocean air and dry mountain heat, the plants grew ferociously. In some ways, when we’d moved here, we’d both returned home.
I went out through the sliding door into the cool morning. The damp lawn wet my feet as I walked over to the chicken coop. Arun loved eggs to start the day, and I loved cracking them open on a sizzling pan, watching the orange yolk harden and change color. There were two waiting for me in the laying boxes, and they were warm in my hands.
In the distance, I could hear Mexican radio, and this early in the day, it sounded like a norteño morning call to prayer. We lived next door to a large organic blueberry farm, and the work of picking always started very early. We’d bought our ranch house, and the half acre of land it sat on, when the housing market had crashed, and now that the market was returning and the trees on the property were bearing consistent fruit, buying the house felt like the single best financial decision we’d ever made.
We couldn’t have made it without some help. As he neared retirement, my father had written a weekly column for a newsletter that went out to our entire extended family: “The Upanishad Guide to Investing.” He liked the Upanishads and he liked investing; he thought that the philosophical core of this particular Hindu religious tradition—to be neither happy in victory nor daunted in defeat—was as useful a principle for investing as any fancy algorithms Goldman Sachs could come up with. He took special pride in his returns and became a little obsessive about it. Not because of the money he was making, but because—at least this is what I think—it was his way of getting back at America for all of the promotions he hadn’t gotten in the years he’d been working in the country. In India, he’d been in charge of monetary policy at a large national bank, but here, he’d hit his ceiling quickly as the branch manager of a local bank, spending his days and years approving home improvement loans for garage additions and new kitchens.
He started each of his columns with the same statement: “I am not telling you how to invest. I’m simply telling you how I invest. What you do with the information is up to you.” He’d then write a paragraph—with supporting numbers and charts—justifying each new stock he picked. In addition to preaching dispassion once the stocks were bought, he’d explain his choices by applying two further principles. First, invest in companies that were at least five years old, because they were sustainable yet still hungry; don’t invest in companies that had been around for more than twenty-five years, because they were comfortable and had no desire to innovate. And second, he picked businesses that made things or provided services that he himself could reasonably use. For his sixty-fifth birthday, we put all the columns together in a book and printed a hundred copies to give out to the family. For a lark, one of my younger cousins put the book on Amazon. For a while nothing happened. Then a few copies sold, and then several more. An investing blog picked it up and wrote about it, dubbing my father “the Guru of High Returns.” After that, we had to print more. A small business publisher paid him a decent amount of money to repackage and properly sell the book. Some of the proceeds from the book, but mainly his judicious use of the advice in it over the years, had helped pay for our down payment.
He never saw our house, but I imagine he would have liked its rural feel. To the right of us was the farm, and to the left, about two hundred yards away, were a couple of houses occupied by older neighbors. A retired art professor and his wife lived in one; inside their house, the walls were covered with the abstracts he had painted over a lifetime. In the other house was an older man named Max, whom I only saw riding on his John Deere, mowing his large backyard. The one real substantive exchange I’d had with Max was when he noticed a Bay Alarm truck in our front yard soon after we moved in. “I have an alarm system too,” he’d said with a mischievous grin. “My shotgun.” In the name of new neighborliness, I’d smiled back, though in truth, guns, and the Second Amendment culture that often surrounded gun ownership, made me pretty uncomfortable. I feared that the right to bear arms would loosely translate, at some point, into a right to shoot me.
In some ways, we were boutique homesteading. The daily world my children woke up to couldn’t have been more different from the one-bedroom, sixth-floor apartment that I had lived in with my family in south Bombay until I was eight. The apartment had felt big to us then, with the salty air of the Arabian Sea blowing through. Every weekday morning, my sisters and I would descend into the hectic, crowded streets and walk to the Gandhian school we attended, where the principal had outlawed clapping during assemblies because he thought the motion was too violent. In my earliest memories of the city, I smell the fresh loaves of bread baking in the Iranian café near our apartment, and I walk past whole families who slept on the sidewalk, cows meandering nearby, red double-decker buses barreling past them on the street, mere feet away from their heads. I see schoolchildren like me, oil in their hair, talcum powder on their faces, trying to stay cool in the humidity that never seemed to break.
I’m not sure which set of early impressions I preferred for Neel and Arun. On the one hand, I would have liked for them to be urban children, aware that the very act of walking down the street was a complex negotiation between beauty and danger. And yet, I loved that they often woke up to the piercing sounds of a red-tailed hawk flying high above and that they flinched less and less at the sight of a gopher snake. But I did feel some parental responsibility to balance out this world they knew with the world I’d grown up in, so that when it was time for them to choose lives for themselves, they could make an informed decision.
When I got back inside with the eggs, the kettle was whistling. As I made my coffee, I wondered what advice my father would have given me about how to proceed following the previous evening’s debacle. Somewhere around my freshman year in college, he had decided it was time to start communicating with me as an adult. This didn’t translate to real conversation, or even the metaphoric intimacy a lot of fathers and sons find in, say, sports talk. No, my father spoke to me through photocopied clippings from the Wall Street Journal, which he mailed to me every month or so. Where were the originals? Perhaps in a folder called “Stuff Sent to My Son for Guidance.” Those envelopes left me with so many questions. Why wasn’t he writing me an actual note? Did this article mean he thought I wasn’t saving my money properly? Did this one mean I was ruled by my heart? Now I desperately wish I’d saved them all, but of course I hadn’t. I was young; it didn’t occur to me that they were clues. My father didn’t share much about himself with me; imagine what I could’ve pieced together from what he did.
There were some things he had revealed over the years. His favorite album was pre-radical Harry Belafonte’s Live at Carnegie Hall. When “Jamaica Farewell,” a song about sailors leaving home, came on, he would turn up the volume slightly and hum along, his mind clearly somewhere far from our living room. He’d said that he wanted to study psychology in college but it just felt too impractical. He’d once recalled to me that his favorite psychology professor had said that ninety percent of men masturbate, and the other ten percent lie about it. I had looked over at him, startled; that was as risqué and off-the-cuff as my father ever got, perhaps a sign that there had been more going on beneath his insistently calm, controlled exterior than he let on. More humor, more playfulness. I wish I could have known that side of him.
He’d loved Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He thought poorly of films in general, that they were a waste of time, but when he watched that one, he seemed to be in another world, one I could neither understand nor access. I always assumed he saw himself as Sidney Poitier. But he talked most often about th
e Spencer Tracy character, the pissy white dude who finally comes around to his daughter’s choice of a black partner. I didn’t understand why until much later, when Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was angry that they had given it to de Klerk, who had benefited handsomely from apartheid. My father countered: the greater courage is de Klerk’s, who, having seen the error of his ways, was willing to admit his wrongs to the world by releasing Mandela from jail.
Why had he been so taken with making amends, with admitting fault? Perhaps he’d done something in his life that he’d later wished he’d handled differently. Whatever the reason, I was sure that if he were here now he would tell me to apologize quietly to everyone and move on. Neither happy in victory nor daunted in defeat: the dictum that shaped his investing and the primary advice he gave his children on how to manage life’s vagaries. Every day when I woke up in my sturdy house, I was thankful for that counsel. And yet this time I didn’t want to move on, to smooth things over, to remain even-keeled.
Coffee in hand, I went to shower.
On my way there, I stopped in the hall between the kids’ rooms. Eva was still asleep with Arun. I walked into Neel’s room, placed my coffee on his desk, and crawled into bed with him. It wouldn’t be long before he outgrew his twin bed. He stirred and then turned to me, his breath sour from the night.
“Is everything OK?” he asked.
He was asking because I’d gotten into bed with him without having been called for. He was asking because when he was in that space between sleep and waking, he saw the world most clearly—he often professed deep love for us in the hazy minutes before he fell asleep at night. And he was asking because he was always tuned in to my emotional tremors.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I just wanted to see you before I left for work.”
Relieved, Neel purred and leaned in close to me. I held him tight, as if the purity running through his body could somehow cool the continued burning in my chest.
I got up and went to take a shower, my coffee getting a little cold. When we’d had the bathroom redone, we’d asked the tile guy to build a small shelf for the shampoos; I preferred to use it for my mug.
The door creaked open while I was rinsing off. Eva walked in and sat gingerly on the toilet. Every American romantic comedy seemed to have this moment as a marker of a couple’s intimacy. It had always made me wonder: How did this practice evolve? How many real, non-movie people actually did this? Were they just in America? Did couples in Swaziland do this? Norway? What were the cross-cultural habits of couples who peed in each other’s presence? Maybe there was an essay in that for me—though the list of essays I thought about writing kept getting longer and longer, and I never seemed to sit down and draft any of them. Essays, like so many other things in life, were much better in my mind than in reality.
A few seconds later, Eva slipped into the shower and turned on the other showerhead. Her naked body, a bit of Venus on the half-shell, which, after fifteen years of marriage and two babies, still gave me a twinge.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said.
The shower used to be our thing. I passed her the mug.
“How did it go last night?” she asked, taking a sip.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll meet later this week to figure it out.”
“Anyone interesting?”
We were that couple who talked about absolutely everything. But I wasn’t quite ready to tell her about Bill Brown. I needed to process it longer on my own, to be clear about how I wanted to move forward before I heard her take on it. I trusted her opinion so much, it was easy for our thoughts to become intertwined; I wanted to have a clearer sense of where I stood myself before that happened.
“Not really.”
She was rinsing the shampoo from her hair, suds streaming over her breasts.
“How were the boys last night?” I asked, stepping out of the shower and drying off.
“We had our moments, but for the most part they were fine.”
I quickly pulled on my teaching uniform: 501s and a red Lacoste shirt that I always air-dried to keep it from shrinking and a pair of high-top black-and-white Vans I’d recently bought. When I was a teenager, my parents would never have bought me the shoes because they were expensive and impractical. So, of course, as soon as I’d been able to afford them, I’d bought them for myself; but now they made me a little self-conscious, as if I were too blatantly channeling my teenage self. What’s worse than a middle-aged college lecturer pretending he’s not? But the Vans were comfortable and reminded me that, at least when it came to shoes, I now had the freedom to buy what I wanted. I tried to leave it at that. The first day I’d worn them, I gave a particularly lively lecture and the students were engaged through the full hour. When I was done, I said, “It’s gotta be the shoes.” They all just stared at me blankly and shuffled out of the classroom.
I ate a piece of toast with peanut butter and started making sandwiches for the kids’ lunches. On Monday mornings, I usually left early to get to my office. I did the drop-offs and pickups on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while Eva took Mondays and Wednesdays. We roshamboed for Fridays.
“You go,” Eva said when she came into the kitchen, taking the butter knife from me. “I’ll do it.” She gave me the once-over. “Nice. Keep your door open during office hours.”
“I always do.”
I tried to put together the sentences that would explain and defend what had happened with the Browns. Certainly she was going to hear it from Leslie at drop-off; Leslie loved the intimacy of gossip.
“What’s up?” Eva asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I knew that once I told her, the conversation would go on for a while, and I wasn’t ready for that. “Busy day today?”
“Nothing unusual. But whenever I say that, the earth shakes.”
Eva and I had met in graduate school at Columbia, a couple of Californians bonding over long winters that neither of us could comprehend. I was getting a PhD in anthropology, and she was getting a master’s in international and public affairs. I had picked Columbia because it was a highly ranked school, yes, but also because I desperately wanted to have a New York period in my life. I wanted to grow away from my family, something I had decided all young men needed to do, and going to the gloriously hectic urbanity of New York felt like returning to the urbanity of Bombay. I had also wanted to study with the distinguished Palestinian literary critic Edward Said. Years before, in college, I had seen him give a talk on the broad influence of his seminal book Orientalism, in which he lays out the stereotypical ways in which the East has been portrayed—as religious, feminine, exotic—within the long tradition of Western literature and history. He was brilliant; I was rapt. But I also kept my eyes on the perfectly tailored mustard corduroys he was wearing. Mustard? My god. A revelation. You could dress well and say the world was unjust and quote Foucault, all at the same time. I wanted to be that person; I wanted to share bad news about the world, and I wanted to be sharply dressed while I did it.
I did my fieldwork in India and then returned to New York to write my dissertation, before settling into my first teaching job in Queens. In the meantime, Eva had graduated and was working for various foundations in New York that collected money from billionaires and used it to fight diseases and promote democracy around the world. She swiftly climbed up. When we moved back to California, she got a job before I did, at a well-funded NGO called Rapid Responders International. Earthquake in Haiti? Rapid Responders was there within hours with food, water, and supplies, while the UN and other nations, with their various bureaucracies, were still figuring things out. Cholera outbreak in Somalia? Doctors were there treating patients before the story appeared below the fold of the New York Times. As the years passed, Eva coordinated bigger and bigger operations from the safety of California. She loved the job, and she was really efficient at managing large-scale, complex logistics. The hours were flexible when things were calm in the world, but she could easily be in
the office for fourteen-hour days during hurricane season.
She didn’t seem to mind, though the social requirements of the job did bother her. There were plenty of rich people in town ready to throw events to raise money for Rapid Responders. It was a sexy organization to support. For a while, I’d accompanied her to some of these. But I stopped going after one, at a stunning oceanfront estate, where men in tailored jackets and women wearing thousand-dollar garden dresses listened to a doctor talk about the problems of syphilis in sub-Saharan Africa. Sure, by the end of the night some money had flowed from those who didn’t need it to those who desperately did. I just couldn’t stomach the idea of dressing up and drinking specialty cocktails to help the poor.
But I watched from the sidelines. Eva always forwarded me emails about the various fundraisers going on around town, for her organization and for others. The affluent, I discovered, like to role-play while they give away their money. Arabian Nights, A Night in the Hamptons, The Roaring Twenties. My favorite? Bollywood Dreams—a gala at which the guests were encouraged to wear their best Indian costumes, and there were designations for the amount of money the attendees gave, from highest to lowest: Queen Victoria, Viceroy, Governor, Maharaja. The lowest category? Sahib. Donate a thousand dollars, and for a night you could wear linen and feel like a midlevel colonial functionary. The rich truly don’t give a fuck.
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