One Amazing Thing

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“I think so,” Cameron said from the far doorway. His voice rasped painfully, but he held on to the flashlight. “Water, please—”

  Malathi splashed over to the counter with the filled bowls. “They’re full of dirt,” she said. Dismay made her forget to lower her voice. The opening in the ceiling had created echoes. Ert, Ert, they called. Making her way to Malathi, Uma saw that chunks of plaster had crushed most of the bowls they had filled with such care. The few remaining bowls were full of debris. Only the water in the tea and coffee boiling pans, which had lids, might still be clean. Malathi rescued a bowl and took it to the bathroom sink to wash and refill. Her voice was panicky. “No water coming from the tap.”

  They crowded in the bathroom doorway. Mangalam shouldered his way in—it was his bathroom, after all—and jiggled the faucet. Nothing. He pushed against the faucet handle as hard as he could. The ancient top broke off in his hand, but no water came. When the ceiling collapsed, the pipe bringing water to the bathroom must have broken. Suddenly, their drinkable water had shrunk to what was in two saucepans, four mostly empty bottles, and the toilet tank.

  Uma went back to the counter, cleaned out a bowl the best she could with one hand, dipped it into a pan, and took it to Cameron. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her, trying to gauge how much water she was giving him and thinking, Shouldn’t she have given less? She didn’t care. She would give Cameron her share, if it came to that. When Cameron had drunk the whole bowlful, he stepped gingerly through the water—no telling what had come down with the ceiling and lay in wait under its dark surface—to check the damage on the other side of the room. He found a gaping hole in the ceiling—that’s where the sunlight was coming from. He’d been hoping to find an opening to the world outside. Even if they couldn’t reach it, seeing such an opening would have done them good. But arcing over the hole was a gridlock of broken metal with a gap large enough for only a single ray to make it through. He turned his attention to the ground.

  Debris had fallen in a pile of Sheetrock and beams—and furniture: an office desk cracked in two across its middle; several chairs; a computer monitor, its glass unbelievably intact; a metal file cabinet bent into an L; and other objects too beat up to recognize. He felt around them gingerly. Then his fingers touched what he had been afraid of finding: a portion of a human body. It was an arm, sticking up through a gap between two rollaway chairs. He could tell from the rigor mortis that the person had been dead for hours. He stepped away, heart hammering, though this wasn’t the first body he had touched, by any means. It was the asthma that was making him jumpy. He touched the inhaler in his pocket, longing to use it. But he had only one dose left. He had to save it for his story.

  He decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the body.

  THE COMPANY TOOK THEIR SEATS AGAIN. SUNLIGHT FELL ON some of their faces. Uma wasn’t sure if she felt better because of that. The light seemed to be coming from very far away, and soon it would be gone.

  Tariq wasn’t in the mood to continue, but Lily wouldn’t let him be.

  “You can’t stop here! Who were those people Ali was living with? Did you like them? Were they…terrorists?”

  Tariq said, “They didn’t tell me much about themselves—only that they were planning a march. They ordered pizza for dinner and wouldn’t take any money from me. What I liked best is how close they were to one another. Like brothers. Watching one another’s backs.”

  “Will you come back to America?” Lily persisted. “Will you live with them? What about Farah? What will happen to her if you come back?”

  Tariq shook his head. He had no answers. “From having put up my story against the others, I can see this much: everyone suffers in different ways. Now I don’t feel so alone.”

  Lily put an arm through his. “You could stay with us,” she said, surprising Uma. “You remind me of my older brother. He’s in my story.”

  “Very well!” Cameron said. “I can take a hint as well as the next person. Go ahead and tell your tale.”

  12

  When I was too young to know better, I was a pleaser. That’s what my parents tell me. Their story goes like this: “When you were little, you were so cute. You recited Chinese nursery rhymes whenever guests came over, whether anyone asked you or not. And now, look at you. We can’t even get you to come out of your room to say hello.”

  Sometimes it’s like this: “Whenever your mom made dumplings, you insisted on helping, even though you made a mess all over the kitchen floor. But now that you’re old enough to be useful, you refuse to enter the kitchen, and you’re always complaining that eating Chinese food makes you smell bad.”

  Or, “Remember that favorite dress you had when you were in kindergarten, pink with cherry blossom flowers all over it, and bows? You loved it so much. You insisted on wearing it to school every day. We had to hand wash it each night so it would be clean and dry by morning. Now—black, black, black, all the time. Do you even wash that T-shirt? And is that black lipstick?”

  You get the idea.

  My parents thought my metamorphosis from charming caterpillar to stinging wasp came from teenage angst combined with evil American influences, but they were wrong. I gave up on being a pleaser because of my older brother.

  My parents believed—and I secretly agreed—that Mark was the perfect child. In fact, he hardly seemed like a child at all. He was polite and obedient and serious about his studies. Most of his friends were from Chinese school. He wanted to become a scientist specializing in cancer research, and by ninth grade had already written a paper that went on to win a national science award. My parents would have preferred that Mark become a doctor or a businessman. (In addition to the supermarkets he inherited, my father owns a large Chinese import-export business that my mother helps him run. They’re terribly proud of that business and were hoping to pass it on to Mark.) But they understood and admired Mark’s humanitarian calling—and made sure all their friends did, too. I’d overhear them at Spring Festival parties: “Anyone can get a medical degree and make money, but to spend your life discovering a cure for those poor, suffering people—ah!” They would stop there, overcome by emotion, forcing the listener to complete the sentence: “Now that’s true dedication.”

  “AND THIS IS THE YOUNG MAN I REMIND YOU OF?” TARIQ ASKED.

  I KNEW IT WAS USELESS TRYING TO COMPETE FOR MY PARENTS’ attention by being good. For a while, I tried to hate Mark, but my heart wasn’t in it. When he had time (which wasn’t often, what with his schoolwork and Kumon classes and music lessons and science fair projects), he let me come into his room and check out his old Dragon Ball Z cards or listen to his favorite bands (downloaded from illegal Internet sites, he confided to me). I would watch him play Knights of the Old Republic and give him advice, which he sometimes listened to. When I had trouble with homework, he tried to help, though most of his explanations went above my head. He spent weeks on science projects that awed me: elegant solar systems that rotated at different speeds around a sun, or intricate contraptions with beakers and burners that extracted water from ink. And he let me touch them. How could I not love him?

  But I had to do something about my pathetic standing at home. I didn’t plan on being seriously bad, like the girls the aunties gossiped about who ran away from home and got pregnant. I wanted to be just sufficiently disobedient to force my parents to notice me. I started with little rebellions—not making my bed, refusing to go to Chinese language class, coming down late for dinner so the family would have to wait for me, not turning in homework on time so the teachers would send home a note for my father to sign. I slept late and missed the school bus, forcing my mother to drive me to school. I acted up in class and got sent to detention, where I became friendly with kids who smoked in the bathrooms and got into fistfights and drank cough syrup to get high and cut themselves.

  Soon I was getting plenty of attention at home. Gramma cried and talked about evil spirits; my parents yelled, grounding me, taking away my iPod, cutting off my allowance. It did
n’t satisfy me the way I’d thought it would; I only felt emptier. But I couldn’t just turn around and become my old good-girl self. I was too stubborn. I started dressing in black and experimenting with cough syrup myself—thanks to Gramma, who catches chills easily, we always had some lying around. One day I skipped school and went to this tattoo parlor with Kiara and got my eyebrow pierced. Boy, did that get me a lot of parental notice!

  Things were going downhill fast when Mark came to my room one night. I told him to get out—I thought he was going to lecture me, like the others—but he didn’t get angry. Instead he gave me a long, narrow box, and when I opened it, I saw it contained his old flute. I remembered that, although now he played the violin, for a while he had taken flute lessons. He gave me a stack of music books and offered to teach me. “Let’s just keep it to ourselves,” he said. I think it was the idea of having our own secret that appealed to me. I suspect he knew it would.

  We decided to meet for lessons after school at a park in another neighborhood. Mark warned me that he would be able to teach me only the rudimentaries of flute playing, but the very first time I put my lip against the embouchure, I had the strangest feeling, as though I had done it before. And perhaps I had, in some other lifetime. How else did I learn so fast?

  I loved our afternoons in the park and the walk back home together, when I gabbled on about school and my friends (ex-friends, really, since I no longer hung around after school let out). Mark raised his eyebrows at the cough syrup but told me that cutting was not cool because kids who started doing it often developed serious mental problems.

  Soon there wasn’t any more that Mark could teach me. He downloaded sonatas off the Internet onto his iPod for me. (Mine was still confiscated.) Bach and Handel and some Mozart. And he gave me a book about the lives of the great composers. I read and reread that book late into the night instead of doing homework. My favorite story was Beethoven’s—not so much for his music (I prefer Bach) but for his tragic life. I thought often about his troubles: his beloved mother dying early, his alcoholic father, his dead brother’s son, whose guardian he was, giving him all sorts of trouble. No one in his family appreciated him the way they should have. Mostly, I admired his ability to keep going after he realized—early in his career—that he was going deaf. I would have thrown myself into the Danube, but he just went on composing.

  I went to the park straight after school each day with Mark’s iPod and my flute. I’d find a bench hidden behind some overgrown shrubs and listen and practice on my own until it turned dark. Sometimes kids stopped to watch me, but I knew what to say to make them move on fast. My grades didn’t get much better. My parents yelled at me for coming home so late. And I still wore black. But inside, something had changed. I no longer wanted to waste my energy on being bad.

  One afternoon, when I thought I was ready, I invited Mark to the park and played all the sonatas I’d learned for him, plus a few short melodies I’d composed. I expected applause when I finished, but he just sat there looking at me. Then he said, “Lily, you have a gift. You can’t waste it. I need to tell Mom and Dad so they can get you lessons.” At first, I refused, but Mark can be persuasive. Soon I was in our living room, playing the flute for my astonished parents and Gramma. I messed up a few times because I was so nervous. In spite of that I must have sounded pretty good, because afterward they all hugged me and my mother cried and said I should have told them. The next day they arranged for me to have lessons with Mrs. Huang, who everyone in Chinatown agreed was the best teacher around. My parents got me an expensive new flute, too (although they rented it from Brook Mays, just in case).

  Just like that, I became the subject of much admiration at home and amazement at parties. (“Wah! Did you hear about that Lily? Learned to play Beethoven overnight, all by herself! Others practice until their fingers are bones, but that one, she’s a born genius!” Gramma would rush in to avert the evil eye then: “No, no, she makes lots of mistakes still, not half as good as your Caroline.”) I watched Mark carefully to see if he minded my ascension, but he appeared relieved. He was busy with college preparations. He had been accepted to MIT and spent much of his time on the Internet, checking out professors’ credentials and student ratings, deciding who he wanted to do work with. Dually blessed in their gifted progeny, my parents went around smiling all the time—humble smiles, of course.

  Mrs. Huang was an ambitious teacher, and she pushed me. I didn’t mind. I was hungry. I listened meekly when she scolded me about having learned things the wrong way. I even stopped composing my own music—though I missed it—because she said that I must first get a full classical education. When she entered me in a local contest, I was nervous about playing in front of strangers. But I won. She entered me in a more important contest. I won again, and this second time I was less nervous. I began to realize that I was better than the other players. I enjoyed the attention of the audience and my parents’ excited hugs afterward. I asked Mrs. Huang for more competitions and practiced feverishly for them. I put away my dark clothes and Goth makeup and became positively suburban, additionally delighting my parents. Mark was away at college. It was his first semester, but neither my parents nor I paid much attention to how he was managing so far from home. We were too busy winning (a bigger high than entire bottles of cough syrup). And Mark was Mark, after all. We knew he would perform superbly.

  When I e-mailed him details of my success, he wrote back congratulating me. At the end of the note, he added, Don’t do too much too soon. I thought it was a strange thing to write. I felt exactly the opposite. Music had come to me so late. I had to struggle to catch up with all those boys and girls who had been practicing since pre-kindergarten. How could it ever be too much?

  But one Saturday morning, just a day before a major state-level competition, I woke up with a heaviness in my fingers. Actually, I felt heavy all over. I didn’t want to go into the room my parents had set aside for my practice (Mark’s old room). I didn’t want to play Bach’s Sonata No. 5 in E Minor, which was supposed to have been my opening piece, though it was one of my favorites. I wanted to call a girlfriend and go to the mall and giggle over girlish things—but I didn’t have a friend to call. My obsession had pushed my friends away.

  When I realized that, I wanted to cry. Instead, I called my brother.

  Mark’s voice on his cell phone sounded sleepy, although on the East Coast it was long past noon. I was surprised because he’d always been an early riser. I asked him what he’d been up to—we hadn’t spoken in a while—and why was he still sleeping. He said he’d been out late the previous night.

  “Were you partying?” I asked. It was a joke; Mark never partied. His idea of a good time was meeting his geeky friends at the local Borders for a latte and discussing lesser-known scientific theories.

  “I guess you could call it that,” he said.

  Intrigued and amused, I asked if he partied often.

  “Hey, listen,” he said abruptly. “Can I call you back? I have a terrible headache.” Before I could respond, he hung up. I waited around a couple hours, but he didn’t call.

  My conversation—actually, nonconversation—with Mark made me feel heavier. By this time, it was afternoon and I definitely should have been practicing for the contest. Instead, I sneaked out of the house, took the 38 down to the ocean, and went for a walk, hoping the salty, stinging air would clear my head and help me figure out what was going on. Music had been my life for the past year. I heard it in my head while I went through the boring necessities of daily existence. The pieces I was dying to compose as soon as my teacher gave me permission flitted around in my sleep like colorful birds. Then why was I feeling that I couldn’t care less if I never saw my flute again? And Mark—was something wrong with him, as I felt in my gut, or was I just projecting my own gloom? Should I tell my parents about our chopped-off conversation, or would that be betraying him? I decided to wait until Mark came home for Thanksgiving and I had a chance to see him face-to-face.

&nbs
p; I WAS HOPING THAT NEXT MORNING I WOULD BE BACK TO NORMAL, but by then a numbness had spread across my lips, and my fingers felt like they belonged to the Tin Man. I told my mother I didn’t feel well, but she said it was an attack of nerves and piled me into the car with all my musical paraphernalia. I’ll cut the painful details short: halfway through my first piece, I froze and had to be called off the stage. My parents took me home and put me to bed, sure I was coming down with the flu. Gramma felt my forehead, which was cool, declared that my spirit was sick, and burned some special incense in my room. She was closer to the truth. I’m not sure if the incense did its job, but the next morning I told my parents I didn’t want to enter any more contests and that Mark was in some kind of trouble. As I expected, both statements made them go ballistic.

  At that time I was pretty ballistic myself, but now I don’t blame them too much. They’d tried hard to be good parents. They’d dedicated evenings and weekends to schlepping Mark around to his activities. They’d supported my sudden and expensive love affair with the flute. Most important, during all those years when we thought I wasn’t good at anything, they hadn’t nagged me about it. (For Asian parents, that’s as close to sainthood as you can get.) Now, it was as though they’d been handed a gold medal only to have it snatched away.

  You can imagine the shouting matches. They took away my new flute and canceled my lessons. I retaliated by going back to black and putting on my eyebrow ring. Then they forgot about me because they got a call from Mark’s advisor. They didn’t discuss it with me, but by eavesdropping on their agitated conversation with Gramma, I gathered that Mark was failing his classes. I caught snippets of phrases: fallen into bad company, drinking habit, cutting class. Mark’s advisor had told them that this sometimes happens to kids from strict, traditional homes—they can’t handle the sudden freedom. I couldn’t fit my brother into a cliché like that. I was sure there was more behind his disaster. That weekend my stunned parents put a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign in their office window (the only other times they’d done that was when my mother went into labor) and left for Boston.