“Home?” Gopal said. “Of course I am not home. You reached me at the shop.”
She knew that. She was at work, too. She meant, How are things at home? But she didn’t wait for an answer. “Motabhai, you aren’t looking out for my interests. Those men you set me up with are taking advantage.”
She heard him pull out drawers and slap thick folders onto his desk. She shouldn’t feel hurt. Being the oldest, Gopal didn’t listen to any of them. But they were colleagues, almost business partners. No woman she knew had come close to what she’d done. Her Columbus friends worked, but only helping their husbands in the pharmacies and dry cleaners.
While she waited for him to respond, she heard the new doorbell she’d installed after her run-in with the dashiki thief. A blond head poked through the doorway. Urmila held up a finger—one minute—but the head disappeared. Now her brother had cost her a customer.
Finally, he said, “Working with Africans is difficult. You know this. They say they understand but they do not. They are not completely honest. If I talk to them, they will say, ‘Okay, sir, problem is solved.’ But I tell you they have not understood the problem in the first place. Yes, these packaging boys are careless. But they are not my direct employees.”
When Urmila visited the old shop in Nairobi, she still felt a thrill. For her father’s lasting work, for the hustle bustle, for commerce—she even liked the grimy feel of the bills and the coins warm from hands and pockets. She reveled in the noise and traffic smoke. Her store, of course, was nicer. Clean and orderly and American. Gopal had never seen it. Though recently, since the embassy bombings, he’d been making noises about visiting. A few trips to lay the legal groundwork, in case he needed her sponsorship suddenly. Africanization was rising like a flood, he said. What if their president turned on them, like Idi Amin?
“I tell you what,” her brother said. “When you visit here, you can meet the men face to face. Insist for yourself.”
Well, why not? She put down the phone and tried to repel the smug echo of her brother’s voice in her ears. She surveyed her wares, eyeing one of the blue and black kikoys printed with Swahili words. When someone had asked what it meant, Urmila could not remember, so she’d said: Home is where the hearth is.
When Urmila went back home to Nairobi, she wanted to be a little celebrated, not thrown to the hyenas.
And here, in her adopted country, she wanted to feel buoyed, confident, like the American women who managed stores in the mall, but she did not.
Yet Urmila also knew that the lack of script and social order had freed her. From living with her controlling mother-in-law in Nairobi, for one thing, kissing the woman’s wrinkled feet, following her orders like a slave. But these same freedoms had also built the walls of her loneliness. Raising a son in this country should have rooted her, but it hadn’t.
What made Sunil so hard to talk to? So eager to condemn her high standards and her absences from his school events. The un-American things she’d done when she hadn’t known any better. Running into the arms of an American girl was spite, she was sure. A way of showing her how little he cared, how well he could do without her. Urmila worried Sunil and the girl were living together, and thinking about their sharing an apartment suddenly made her feel cornered, helpless. She could lose him for the rest of her life.
What would heal the years of anger and bind them together again? There were many things she had never told him. Maybe if he knew.
2.
[00 h: 01 m]
They were starving there on the farms of the Saurashtra, so they left. They left mothers, sisters, elders, everyone who had watched them grow. They left the paths worn by their own feet, from hut to field to stream. Paths they imagined leading to the sea but which they had never taken to the end. They left the morning birds, cobwebs they’d watched being spun. They had to leave because their fields were dry, the millet stunted, the rice vanishing. They left behind their wives and the girls their sons might have married. They weren’t so lucky as my Urmila when she accompanied her husband to America.
Do you know how hard this was, my grandsons? Are you getting all this? You here and you across the ocean? How we do love to cross oceans!
My father, all the men, they were promised so much by the scouts—the Britishers sent to India to bring labor to East Africa. Our men took a few rupees, all they had, a gold bangle if they were lucky, and sewed them inside their pockets. Many died with the pouches still sewn shut.
On the stepping-stone of a promise, they boarded the dhows.
They were used to bright light, but not to ocean. Used to cramped quarters, but not to being trapped—unable to walk away from an argument, a bad smell. They knew poverty, rations of food and water, but not the stinginess of so many strangers. They did not know being away from their families. They began to count clouds as friends. Gave names to the birds perched on the mast. They dreamed—nightmares—of stars falling and drowning in the waters around them.
They were not originals, you know. From early days, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Indian coastal people had crossed the seas to Africa. They were traders, exchanging silk for ivory and gold. An Indian steered Vasco da Gama himself across the ocean. But our people, our family, lived on farms some kilometers inland, too far when you are counting in footsteps, and it was a long time until the chance to leave, for a better life, came to us. Until the British needed our strength and numbers.
Our people did not know it then, when they were starving, but they were walking every day on oil fields. Our old homeland is a big city now—largest oil refinery in the world! But then, then they had only their hands digging into dry earth. So they left.
They crossed.
They arrived.
They remained.
And hear this. Their names, your ancestors, are inscribed on the great iron snake stretching from Mombasa across the plains, all the way to Lake Victoria. Our men who knew nothing but the most important thing, survival, built the railroad. It’s important you know this, my boys. The generations are passing.
Fareh teh chareh. He who roams advances.
3.
A modest front yard featured three young, bitten trees, barely visible at this hour. The place had been recently painted, a subtle green Sunil liked. It was Sunday, and the neighborhood of well-kept houses and straight yards was quietly active with push mowers and runners stretching in driveways. Kids on bikes grabbed the last rays of light.
The landlady was much older than Sunil expected. Unusually tall. “I was tidying up,” she said and smiled, wide and toothy.
He wanted to trust the woman. He chose to ignore that he and Amy were just two prospective renters among legions, that there could be a garbage mound on the floor crowned by a giant rat and still rivals would draw blood over a well-located one-bedroom.
The woman opened the second-floor apartment and swept her arms open, as if to say, All this could be yours. “It was my son’s place. Him and his ex-wife.”
Sunil held Amy’s arm. She reached a hand behind his back and covertly pinched the top of his thigh.
The kitchen offered a scuffed linoleum floor, an avocado table, and a beige refrigerator. Beyond was a larger room with gangly potted plants. Windows faced the street, but fortunately little noise floated up. The furniture was floral, the walls hung with drawings of trees with human arms and smiling sunflowers. But the bedroom was painted a cheerful white, and the office had a large window with what seemed to be a view of a backyard. A layer of spring snow flecked the brown earth.
“No laundry?” Amy asked, looking herself like she could use a bath. Amy believed that her sweat was inoffensive, clean, and she often resented showering as a waste of time. Today, she showed up straight from a run, her clothes dry but neck still damp around the collar. It was true, she didn’t smell ripe—he happened to like her undertone of old lemon—but her disregard for impressing the landlady embarrassed Sunil.
>
The woman said there was a laundromat around the corner. Sunil took note. Laundry was his job. Amy paid the bills and fought the credit card and utility companies.
It was a quiet block, academics and families, the landlady said. There’d be a slight reduction in rent if they mowed the lawn. “If it ever gets to be spring.”
He would mow the lawn. He loved spring, the pulsing, daily greening of the world. The give in the ground, the strengthening sun on his face. Amy slipped from sweaters into fitted T- shirts, like the orange scoop neck she was wearing the day they met. Yet spring signaled summer, the dead months; he had a hard time getting work done during the limp, boneless season. This summer, Amy would need a job. And Sunil would finish his dissertation. He had to.
Sunil looked around again excitedly. They’d take down the floral art and put up pictures of Boston, artful shots of places they’d seen and been together: the courtyard of the Gardner Museum; an Old World streetcorner in the North End. Buy real flowers from the corner store and set them in jelly jars. The books on shelves instead of the milk crates they used now.
The old woman slid heavily into a chair at the kitchen table. Surely questions about their finances were forthcoming.
Instead she asked Amy to bring her a glass of cold water—“You have to run the tap thirty seconds, dear”—and instructed Sunil to pull the chain on the light fixture. “Now I can get a good look at you.”
Amy delivered the water, then peered intently into the cabinets; she had already opened closets and inspected shelves. She was registering potential improvements—wedges under rickety table legs, hooks on the back of doors. Her silent inquisition made Sunil nervous that they appeared ungrateful, but she would say such inspection was their right. She was also a snoop, though she wouldn’t admit it. Such eagle eyes had discovered, the first night she spent in Sunil’s apartment, a birthday card from two girlfriends ago. She’d brought it to him with sly pride, like a cat delivering a bird.
As the woman looked Sunil full in the face, his hopes began to sink. He prepared himself for some good old Boston Brahmin racism. And sure enough, she said, “What are you?”
Here it was. The white person’s arrogant insistence on knowing not who or where but simply what, as if he were a mineral or some other piece of ground.
“Indian,” he said flatly. He didn’t bother saying he was born and grew up in Ohio and didn’t know his parents’ language well enough to understand it, much less speak it. No one ever cared about that.
But the woman surprised him by nodding approvingly. “Some day all the babies will be brown, long after I’m gone. Café au lait.”
Standing near the table, girlfriend at his side, Sunil was overcome with longing to sit in this room together in the mornings: reading, typing, drafting their joint lives. He held his breath as Amy slipped off the cap that made her look like a boy and gripped it in her hands behind her back.
“We love it,” Amy said. “When can we move in?”
Sunil exhaled. He had worried Amy would shy away from saying what she felt. She was not timid, and if she was feeling scrutinized or defensive, she’d order enough food for an elephant, or shout at a stranger who’d jostled her. She’d told him this came from being small all her life; when threatened, she felt that she had to prove she could eat, kick, rage as hard as anyone. Yet sometimes, with him, if she sensed that he felt strongly, she pretended her own desires didn’t matter in order to placate or relieve him. Sometimes her yielding did make things easier for Sunil, but more often he was frustrated by her withholding. He felt locked out. Now Amy moved closer to him. They waited for the verdict. He wondered if Amy had suspected, as he had, that his brownness might interfere. Unlike a lot of white girls in the Midwest, Amy had known him to be Indian right away, having grown up in a DC enclave packed with foreigners and immigrants. What she never fully fathomed was his distance from his family, and their so-called culture. She’d been saying for more than a year that she wanted to meet his parents. But he hadn’t seen his parents in longer than that.
“A week should give us all enough time,” the woman said.
Sunil swallowed his astonishment and smiled widely. “Thank you.”
“This is such good news!” Amy bounced on her toes and gave the woman a quick squeeze. Hugging strangers was a behavior he would never understand.
Then their new landlady said, “Of course, you’re married? Stability, that’s the main thing in life.”
As she said this, Sunil realized he’d been thinking it.
But what could they reasonably say? He threaded his hand behind Amy’s back and felt her fingers—lively, anticipating—respond. Then she surprised him. She slipped her small opal ring, a college graduation gift from her parents, from her right ring finger to her left.
“Engaged,” she said, bringing her hand—thin, bright, trembling—into the light to be inspected.
Here was action, here was progress.
They tumbled to their seats inside the Nepalese restaurant, one of their favorite places. Sunil sucked on ice cubes from his water glass, and Amy crunched happily on papadum. “What do you think?” she said.
“Don’t you want to?” he said.
“Of course. It makes sense. I love you. We’ve been together three years. But I wasn’t sure. Do you think she would have rented to us anyway? As we were?”
He shook his head. “No one asks about marriage if they don’t want the answer to be yes.”
Amy looked at him closely. “What’s wrong?”
“Marriage is scary, isn’t it?”
“Why?”
“I’m just thinking about my parents. When one of them is strong, the other becomes weak. It’s an awful way to be.” How did couples keep their individual dignity? “We can’t let our marriage be about power.”
The waiter brought clean white bowls of soupy yellow dal. Sunil lifted the bowl straight to his lips while Amy blew on a spoonful.
“No, we’ll be equally committed,” she said. “Like inmates.” Her hair mussed, her cheeks wide and lit from within. A light scrim of salt lined her temple; he leaned in and lightly licked it off.
He said, “You know, a real wedding, a big one, would be impossible given our families. Your parents wanting kosher, mine wanting their five hundred closest friends from Nairobi, London, Columbus …”
“Maybe a five-year anniversary party,” she said. Then, after a long pause, “Actually, I think I don’t want my parents at our wedding.”
“Really?” He was shocked.
“They’re too crazy right now.” A few years ago, Amy’s parents had undergone a radical and confusing conversion to Orthodoxy. Her father had been a business journalist at the Post, but started to crave a more consequential life. Her mother had been a free-lance architecture critic, which she decided was a vacuous profession. So they secured jobs at Elie Weisel’s Moment, where the people around them were living the kind of exceptional, purposeful, selfless lives the Kauffmans sought to emulate. The path to such worthy lives, they came to believe, was the Torah.
Their conversion had happened quickly, during Amy’s last few months of college. “I broke out into hives,” she’d admitted to Sunil early in their relationship. “I was afraid of losing them to a relentless fundamentalism. So I treated them like fifteen-year-old anarchists who were going through a phase.”
Sunil always had admired Amy’s toughness, even though he suspected that bottling up her confusion and frustration wasn’t good for her in the long run.
“Are you sure?” He hated how even low-level arguments with her parents knocked Amy off her even keel for a day or two, but he had also seen that there was long-standing love between all of them. A resilient, enduring love that Sunil envied.
“Yes. They’re in Israel now anyway, and I don’t want to wait.”
Together, silently, he and Amy watched the young sons of the r
estaurant owners slide into the back booth. The boys’ father sat down heavily next to his children and gestured to the worn schoolbooks on the table. For years, when he was a child, Sunil had wanted a brother badly.
“Still, I do need to finally meet your parents,” Amy said. “It’s time, and it’s only fair.”
“Fair to whom?”
Amy raised her eyebrows, which lifted the boyish cap off her ears. “Don’t you think I need to know what I’m getting myself into? I’ve given you a full disclosure.”
Sunil groaned. “That’s exactly what I don’t want.”
He believed that Amy could handle his mother’s abrasiveness and his father’s unsettling quiet. What worried him was what dark behavior Amy would suddenly see in him when they were all in the same room.
Sunil tried to push these thoughts away. He looked at Amy across the shiny Formica table, and saw the future. Of course she would meet his parents, but they would marry without either the Kauffmans or the Chandarias present. He ripped a naan in two and gave her the larger half. She ate greedily, and demanded another from his hand.
The next morning, Sunil woke singing one of his blurry, half-awake love songs: Amy is my cuckoo clock, and I love my cuckoo.
The coffee was already started when Amy emerged from the bedroom and slipped down the stairs barefoot, in short shorts and sleeper T, to get the Globe. Sunil wove into his song her grumpy expression and slept-in hair, her nose reddened from the morning cool.
Amy read every square of the front page, then the travel section. Over yogurt and granola, she mockingly read aloud the last paragraph of the pro-Bush op-ed. Some conservative was arguing that Dubya had significant foreign policy experience because Texas was a border state. A few minutes later, Sunil left to work in Widener, leaving her the kitchen table, the only available workspace in the apartment. Amy—who ran and biked and swam in all the public health charity athletic events (good health, good networking)—always, irritatingly, urged him to walk to the library because he didn’t get enough fresh air and exercise.
The Limits of the World Page 2