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by Sameer Pandya

  And then she left. I was glad to say goodbye.

  In the harsh light of the doctor’s office, as I got out of my clothes, my body felt old and dry and ashen. I wished I had taken a shower before coming, but I had been too busy getting the kids ready.

  A few minutes later, the doctor came in. Barely in his mid-thirties, he seemed not to have lost his baby fat. Kimberly followed behind. “I understand Kim here used to be a student of yours.”

  “Yes,” I said, wanting Kim to disappear.

  “That’s why I don’t practice where I went to school,” the doctor said with a silly grin on his face. “How awkward is this?”

  I avoided Kim’s eyes. Clothes don’t offer much protection, but a hospital gown is basically tracing paper. I couldn’t hide my protruding belly or my chest, which wasn’t nearly as lean and muscular as I liked to imagine.

  “Well, let’s check you out,” the doctor said cheerfully. Perhaps he thought he was displaying positive bedside manner. To me, he just sounded like a kid playing doctor.

  He pulled down my gown so it was hanging around my waist. Kim now had an iPad and was scrolling through it with some purpose, doing her best to pretend that I was not nearly naked.

  I have seen plenty of muscular forty-four-year-old bodies and plenty of soft ones. Mine was what it was: the result of too much work and not enough time in the gym. I played a lot of tennis, and that mitigated the worst of it. And anyway, I had convinced myself long ago that Indian men were genetically incapable of strong, defined bodies, despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary.

  As promised, the doctor checked everything. He pulled down the back of my boxers and, using a wooden stick like a tongue depressor, pulled apart my cheeks and took a quick peek. When he got to my groin, which he kept covered, I stared at the wall in front of me.

  “I hope you don’t find anything down there,” I said. I had to say something.

  He lifted my scrotum with his cold, gloved fingers. It felt like he was down there for a long time, checking, separating, tugging. “All pretty normal here,” the doctor finally replied. “So let’s see this mole.”

  I sat down on a reclining chair and he took a close look at my heel with a lighted magnifying glass.

  “Kim, you want to come take a gander?”

  Kim walked over to my mole.

  “Do Indians get skin cancer?” I asked. I had always figured that one advantage of being brown was freedom from this particular bit of life’s nastiness.

  “The last guy I had in here was Saudi,” the doctor said. “Had something on his heel as well. It was much larger, the size of a quarter. So no, you aren’t immune.”

  I felt my stomach fill with bile.

  The doctor studied the mole again through the magnifying glass. “I don’t like the look of this,” he said.

  This was a phrase you never wanted to sense a woman thinking as you undressed in front of her for the first time, or hear from a doctor examining any part of your body.

  “The heel is a pretty popular place for these things to grow. You say it’s been getting bigger?”

  “I think so. But it’s been so gradual that I can’t tell.”

  “We should cut it off and get it tested.”

  “It’s all yours,” I said.

  The second I said this, Kim came forward with the iPad and asked me to sign a consent form. A minute later, the doctor gave me an injection to numb my heel. Despite the numbing, I could feel it tug as he sliced the mole out.

  “It should take us about a week to get the results. I’ll call you.”

  “So what happens if it’s bad news?”

  “We cut out about four millimeters from that area and graft it with skin from elsewhere. Your thigh, probably.”

  I wanted him to say something reassuring about the mole he just removed. Maybe that, judging from others he had cut out, he could tell it was probably benign. But I knew he wouldn’t. I looked at Kim, whose eyes were full of youth and pity.

  After they left, I put my clothes back on and walked out of the office.

  In the parking lot, I sat in my car, which had warmed from the rising sun. Here it was: I was a middle-aged man waiting for my biopsy results. This is how the downward spiral truly begins. I had thought it was when my regular doctor told me that I needed to get my cholesterol under control, or when my students had begun to compare me to their parents. But no. This was it. Now on my arms I noticed little spots that I hadn’t seen before; I checked my face and my neck in the rearview mirror.

  My skin was going to betray me after all.

  As I started the car, my phone rang. It was my mother. She’d memorized my teaching schedule, and if I screened her call when she thought I should be free, she would call back until I picked up. She didn’t believe in leaving a message or text­ing. She did believe that I was forsaking her if I didn’t answer the phone every time she called.

  I now visited her less and less because it was hard for me to be in that house, picking peaches and plums off the trees my father had tended with such care. And she didn’t visit us because she didn’t like being away from the bed that they had stopped sharing in his final years, but which she now slept in religiously. In lieu of actual visits, we talked on the phone often. Sometimes daily. My sisters Swati and Rashmi took turns visiting her on the weekends, and so I saw these calls as my particular duty, one I had come to enjoy. Sometimes we talked for thirty seconds, sometimes for my entire drive home from work.

  “Hey, Ma.”

  There was silence on the other end, like there always was when she had something on her mind.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, since you asked,” she said. “There’s something I wanted to tell you about.”

  “What is it?” I tried not to sound annoyed. I wished we didn’t always have to go through this back-and-forth.

  “There’s this man,” she said. “In our group. He’s new. He cooked a chicken biryani that everyone liked. You know, we’ve been vegetarian at our functions. But he had come the first day with this dish, and no one said anything, but one by one we all had it, and soon the bowl was empty. He had added a bit of saffron. What kind of man thinks to add saffron?”

  Several years after my father’s death, my mother had started socializing with a group of Indian retirees, all of them figuring out how to grow old in a country they still considered foreign.

  “And so now everyone is bringing new dishes,” she said. “Not me, of course. We’re eating fish and chicken. But no beef.” She talked about food for a while. And then: “Well, the second time he came, he sat next to me at dinner. He was very friendly and chatty.”

  Here I could sense her voice dipping. “I’m sorry your mother is talking about these things. She shouldn’t.”

  I knew the widowers often paid attention to my mother. She liked the attention, but didn’t like that she liked it. She had grown up with the idea that proper Hindu women were supposed to be objects of desire only for their husbands and that their own desire back should be muted, nearly inarticulate. I knew she wasn’t comfortable saying anything like this to my sisters, but she felt OK talking to me. She considered me her sensitive son, or more precisely, she thought that because, as a child, I had been infused with more American culture than my siblings, I wouldn’t judge her for expressing an interest in men other than my father.

  “It’s fine. Continue.”

  “But now he keeps calling me. The first couple of times I picked up and we talked.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “First, the biryani. He said not being stingy with the saffron is the key.”

  Growing up, my mother used to make a small tin of saffron last for a couple of years. I knew nothing about this guy, but it was hard for me to trust a man who had loose hands with saffron.

  “Then we talked about Bombay. He lived there with his family. Quite close to us, actually.”

  The mention of the “us” gave her pause. I knew she was thinking a
bout my father.

  “Where?”

  “Near Kemp’s Corner.”

  “It’s a small world,” I said, wanting her to feel at ease.

  “Yes. Well. Now he calls every day.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. At first, it was fine. It was fun to talk to someone new. But now I feel a little trapped, like I have to wait around until he calls. He doesn’t like leaving messages.”

  But neither do you, I wanted to remind her.

  “Well, if you’re tired of talking to him, then the next time he calls, tell him to stop. You can be nice about it. But firm. If that doesn’t work, I can talk to him. Or maybe it’s just going to take some time to figure out how to have these types of conversations. How to set your boundaries.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “How does that sound?”

  “Good,” she said tentatively.

  My mother was in her late seventies, still healthy and strong, with some years ahead of her. But she was unmoored from the family life she’d had for nearly forty-five years. Not long after my father died, she’d noted that, having gone from being a daughter straight to a wife and mother, she was now on her own for the first time in her life. She’d said that with anticipation, but I think the freedom could be hard for her to navigate.

  “This is all perfectly normal,” I added. “To want to talk to someone and then to decide you’ve had enough. You have the right to change your mind.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  Her voice was lighter; I was glad to have helped her solve her problem. That feeling of utility was not one I had much of in my life these days.

  “But otherwise, you like spending time with all those people?”

  “Oh yes, it’s wonderful. We’ve been going on these widows’ walks. Women-only hikes. I get exercise and my money stays in my pocket.”

  After my father died, my mother had filled her days at an Indian casino. It got to the point where she was going three or four times a week. My sisters and I had tried to get her to stop, but after months of heated arguments, we finally dropped it. It was easier not to talk about it. She went, and we knew she went, but it seemed that she was going less than before, and I guess that was the middle ground we had reached. Maybe now she wasn’t going at all.

  “A win-win,” I said.

  “How are you?”

  This was a signal that our conversation was coming to an end. She meant the question, and there was a time several years ago when I would’ve answered it honestly. But now, I knew that she wasn’t as able as she used to be to process emotional problems that had no easy resolution. I wasn’t doing well, but telling her that would force her to confront the fact that she didn’t know how to help me. So I lied.

  “All is well,” I said.

  “Good.”

  And then she hung up abruptly, like she felt vulnerable.

  I pulled out of my parking spot and drove onto the street. The doctor’s office was in a building adjacent to the main hospital in town. As I drove past, I slowed down. It had recently gotten a facelift and now, with its liberal use of glass, appeared more tech office than hospital. I drove around the block, returned to the parking spot I had just left, and walked the hundred or so yards to the entrance.

  The lobby was big and bright. On one wall there was a large directory, with the various specialties, the names of doctors, and their office locations. Under Cardiology, I found William E. Brown, MD. His office was on the fifth floor. I walked over to an elevator and stood next to a shrunken, elderly woman leaning on a cane. When the doors opened, I held them so she could go in first. She stepped in, turned around, and faced me. The doors remained open.

  “You coming in?” she asked, her voice firmer than I would have expected from that infirm body.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. I couldn’t just show up in Bill’s office and ask to see him. He was a doctor seeing real patients with real problems. And I was terrified that he’d have me thrown out of the hospital, though I knew that likely wasn’t a rational concern. He would be well within his rights to do so, but it seemed out of character. Still, as long as I didn’t actually see him, I could pretend that he wasn’t furious with me.

  The elevator doors began closing. I placed my hand in between and they opened up again.

  “Make up your mind,” the woman said, this time with the sharpness of an elbow.

  I looked down at my T-shirt and jeans and then at the clean, bright lobby behind me. I turned around and quickly walked away. I’d email Bill and set up a time to have coffee.

  “What an asshole,” the woman said as the doors closed.

  I made my way out of the hospital with my head down, hoping that Bill wasn’t going to walk by. As I stepped outside, thinking it was safe, I saw Mark Black walking toward me, alongside two colleagues. They were all men, wearing ties and white doctor’s coats, laughing. One was Indian. Mark hadn’t noticed me yet, but I knew that if he spotted me looking away, he would think I was avoiding him. And so in the second that passed, I kept my eyes on him, and he turned from his colleagues and saw me. He didn’t break his stride as we approached one another. He resumed his conversation, and as he went by me, looked my way, smiled, and said, “Nice to see you, Raj.” I wanted to go home and crawl under the covers. But I couldn’t. I had to talk to Cliff, and I had a feeling that conversation would bring still more chaos into my midst.

  * * *

  When I reached campus, all the spaces near my building were already taken. Each successive parking lot I drove through was full, until I finally found a spot on the top floor of a parking structure, under the bright sun. As I walked to my department, I was sweating in the late morning heat, and my heel burned from where the doctor had made his incision.

  I snuck into my office for a minute to gather myself. I didn’t like using the overhead fluorescent lights, so it was usually dark except for a single lamp on my desk, which had inspired the majors who took a lot of my classes to dub my office the Bat Cave.

  When I’d first moved in, there had been an old desk lamp that must have been purchased secondhand in 1968. It was heavy, grey, and did the job well. But eventually it started making a crackling sound. The department secretary, in what had seemed then like a generous gesture, insisted that I could use her discretionary funds to pay for a replacement. At the campus bookstore I found a sturdy lamp, something that might have been used on a partner’s desk in a 1950s insurance company. I’d grown attached to it over the years; the lamp felt like the one thing that I actually owned in my office, though of course I didn’t. But at least I’d picked it out.

  Today, though, when I reached to turn on the lamp, it was gone. Dan liked pulling little pranks on me. Often, when I left the office to use the bathroom, he would open my browser so that it looked like I was shopping for hemorrhoid cream or something to help with constipation. I texted him: “I want my lamp back.” And then: “Showered yet?” Then I opened up his browser and left it up on a popular dating site.

  I went to see Cliff. Right before I knocked on his door, I peeked into the secretary’s cluttered office. Mary had worked in the department for well over twenty-five years, her closet now filled with the ethnic clothing she’d asked various faculty members to get for her while traveling the globe doing fieldwork. Some days, she wore an Indian salwar kameez, on others a long Guatemalan skirt. Today she had managed to make an intifada scarf look marmish.

  Mary made the department whistle and hum. She knew how to get nearly any expense reimbursed. She could arrange for your classes to be when and where you wanted them. And so we all overlooked her quirks. Like the way she went through everyone’s garbage to make sure we were recycling; or that for department lunches she always ordered Chinese food from one particular place because she liked taking home the chow mein; or that she gathered donations from the faculty herself for her gift during Staff
Appreciation Week, guaranteeing we all felt obligated to leave a generous sum.

  Now I saw that my lamp was lighting up her desk. Magnificently, of course.

  She looked up from her work.

  “I borrowed your lamp,” she said.

  “I see that.”

  “The light is really soft. Soothing.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t need it today, do you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “You can use the overhead lights. I’ll put it back tomorrow morning.”

  She turned back to her work. She was daring me to say something, but she knew I wouldn’t. She had boundaries with the tenured members of the department, but with grunts like me, not so much. I knew that if I complained, she would find small ways to torture me, and she knew that I knew that. She would heavily monitor my use of the supply closet, or say that I was making too many photocopies, or place a TA in our office. It was her version of a prison shanking. A stern look was really the only recourse I had available to me, as pitiful as that was.

  I knocked on Cliff’s door.

  After I’d left my first teaching job in a shadow, Cliff had done me a solid. My advisor from graduate school and Cliff were old friends, and Cliff had offered me a lectureship. “Considering your qualifications, I’m sorry we can’t offer you something better,” he had said when I first came to his office. He was being kind. I had a fancy degree and extensive teaching experience. But what I didn’t have, and what the university valued the most, were publications.

  For all his unforced erudition in everyday conversation, for his charming streaks of self-deprecating humor, Cliff was a remarkably bad speaker in front of students. He had a slight stutter when he was nervous, and teaching too many students at once made him nervous. In contrast, I could give lectures in my sleep, but I hadn’t written much of anything. So there we were. I admired Cliff’s brilliance, and he admired my ability to convey the brilliance of others to students.

  “Come in,” Cliff said.

  I walked into his office. There was a department rumor that once, some years back, the office had been used in a movie about a distinguished professor. It was larger than everyone else’s, and Cliff made full use of the space. There must have been three thousand books neatly ordered on the bookshelves, and he had read every last one of them. Once I had flipped through the top few books on a stack of volumes—The Collected Works of Max Weber—that sat on his desk. There were check marks and notes throughout them all. I knew the Weber hits on bureaucracy and the Protestant work ethic; Cliff knew the entire discography intimately. He made a habit of knowing the B-side of things.