“Today I ran into Double-D 36,” Andrew said. They’d discovered Doug Berman’s age by grossly flattering the department secretary. “He was pulling hard-boiled eggs out of his pocket and peeling them—eating them—on the street.” His face turned gleeful. He patted Sunil on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen to you.”
“At least poke your head into my cardboard box, check my pulse.” Sunil drank his beer, shifted in the hard wooden booth. Then he announced, “Amy and I are getting married.” It was the first time he’d said it out loud, put those striking words together in a sentence. But he didn’t get the charge from them he’d expected. He still felt awkward, nervous.
“Hey! That’s some good news! What did her parents say?”
Andrew had been the one to point Amy out in the café where they met. Blond, petite, color in her cheeks and forehead. Playful. In the thick of a spirited game of timed Scrabble with her roommate. She was five years younger than Sunil, but driven, ambitious, certain. When he was her age, he’d been flat, directionless. Amy’s dreams had shape and promise.
“She doesn’t want to invite her parents to the wedding. She’s worried a civil ceremony would only offend them, so we’re not going to tell them until it’s done. It’s the first major decision she’s ever made without her parents.”
“Won’t that be worse? Them finding out after the fact?”
Sunil nodded. “Probably. Especially because she wants her sister to be there. Which means her parents will feel even more slighted. It’s just conflict avoidance. Amy hates fighting with her parents. Their conversion made her angry, but she doesn’t want to show it because she’s worried it will put more distance between them.”
“It sounds like disagreements with the Kauffmans are inevitable,” Andrew said. “I’m thinking of that ‘anti-God’ conversation you told me about.”
“Exactly,” Sunil said.
The Kauffmans liked Sunil—Ariel affectionately called him “duckling” because of his boyish face and out-turned toes—but he wasn’t a Jew, and they were skeptical of his moral compass. During a bitter spell this past winter, over a meal at Legal Seafood, Ariel had said to Sunil, “I know you are an ethicist, this is what you study. But what do you believe? I’ve read that Jains aspire to ‘the three jewels’: right belief, right knowledge, and right conduct. But you say you’re not an observant Jain.”
Sunil had told her that he did not believe in transcendental codes—laws that came from a divine power. “So you’re both anti-God and amoral,” Ariel said. “Because morality comes from God’s commandments.”
Sunil had responded, gently, that he could not be against something that didn’t exist. And before he could address the charge of amorality, Amy had exclaimed, “Mom, how can you say that!” The meal had ended with a no-hard-feelings sharing of crème brûlée, but Sunil was left with a worrisome taste in his mouth. He didn’t know whether the Kauffmans had felt the same.
Sunil slowly shook his head. He said to Andrew, “I have no idea how this is all going to go down.”
“Well, they are out of the country, right? Aren’t yours, too?”
“They left for Nairobi a couple days ago. They’ll be gone for two weeks.”
“Maybe that’s your excuse?”
Sunil sighed. “Not one that holds much water.”
Walking home from the bar, having reached the bottom of the pitcher and the end of happy hour, Sunil felt a clammy tightness in his chest. He was starting to fret about money, about his ability to succeed at what he’d set out to do. Why couldn’t he be calm and focused like his father, who every morning ate the same bran cereal with applesauce. Who woke and went to sleep, taking all that came his way, with the same mild expression on his face. Premchand could go days without even talking, leaving the house early on weekend mornings without telling them where he was going or when he’d be back. This mute stoicism had made Sunil worry that his father was so unhappy he’d leave them, and because of this, he had hated his father’s absences. But most of all he had resented being left alone with the livid, changeful emotions of his mother, who had ruled their world and made Sunil feel powerless. He knew he was hard on his mother, but she had been hard on him. He couldn’t quite summon the same anger for his father, whose reasons for leaving the house Sunil had always understood. And despite his father being gone a lot, Sunil couldn’t help but admire his steadiness, as well as his dedication to his profession, to work that he found fascinating.
Sunil remembered the day he’d been admitted to Pick Academy. He had not been a good student, but Pick needed pleasant brown faces for their catalogs, and he’d been elated to leave public school, where he was trailed by kids who tapped their mouths to make ow-ow-ow sounds.
Private school had been his father’s idea, and his father had helped him with the application. But his mother had also come to the admissions interview and asked if they could they pull Sunil out and get their money back if the teachers were not able to improve him very much, if they were unable to provide the structure needed to guide a lazy boy’s mind. When his father insisted that it was worth paying money for good teachers and a better quality of classmate, she’d exploded. Why didn’t he care as much about her, and her happiness, as he did about their god-forsaken, do-nothing son? Sunil had just turned ten.
Sunil didn’t remember, did not in fact know, the exact phrase she’d used, but it was a curse worse than buckwass, worse than benchod, which he’d been slapped once for mindlessly repeating.
He knew now that his mother had been cursing out his father, not him. When he’d brought it up, years later, she’d been embarrassed. But when his father’s car had pulled out of the driveway after that fight, headlights sweeping across his bedroom window, Sunil had felt as though the whole neighborhood had tuned in to the immigrant family who could not get along.
Sunil had finally escaped to college, but still he shouldered a collection of injuries and insults, a clumsy sack of brittle sticks. He had not known how to exist in the world as a steady person who could carry his own load with eyes ahead and an even step. Who could appreciate and love other people and be entirely loved in return.
As an adult, he could not simply hurl his sticks at whatever threatened him. He had to use reason. And to unfurl the empathy he’d kept tightly pressed to his chest.
Over the past year, Sunil had made numerous attempts to cast his worries aside and tackle his dissertation. But every time he tried to articulate his argument, several serious objections reared their heads, and Sunil abandoned what he’d begun. Sunil possessed his mother’s ferocity, but he lacked his father’s sureness and discipline. At every stop he felt his weaknesses, his lack of entitlement to the elite position he now occupied.
In the apartment, he found Amy in yoga clothes, surrounded by boxes. Her hair was pinned up in a ridiculous mess, fine hairs falling loose as she danced to Janet Jackson on a small travel radio. She flipped her elbows and knees out and in like the Tin Man in a chorus line. Breasts compacted by a sports bra, thighs and butt bopping to the beat, her whole glistening body unselfconscious and exuberant.
“Hey, crazy hair,” he said. He looked around at the taped-up cells of their lives. She’d packed most of their clothes, plus her books and photo albums. His books lay scattered around the apartment still, as well as a few old pairs of shoes, not yet worn enough to discard. The one thing they’d bought together, the toaster oven, was still on the counter.
“I’m going to need these cool moves in our new apartment, don’t you think?” she said. “I’m so happy we’re moving.”
“I can tell. You must really hate this place.”
“Loathe it. Abhor it. Execrate it.”
The rusty water that sometimes emerged from the taps gave Amy’s hair a brownish sheen, and two of the four burners on the stove had been broken for a year.
Amy turned the radio off and said, “I’m
starving. What did you bring us?”
With just three days left in this warped and worn place, they’d stopped buying groceries. Sunil remembered he was supposed to pick up sandwiches on his walk home from campus.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I spaced. I’ll go back out.”
“You forgot our dinner?” While she had been home packing. She growled. “Don’t bother. I’m too hungry.” She opened the freezer and pulled out a carton of ice cream, which they ate with sliced bananas and salted nut mix. Amy served herself more than she could possibly eat—nearly the whole half-gallon—to show how put out she was by his forgetfulness.
Sunil started to tell her what he’d been thinking about on the way home, but she cut him off. “No,” she said, “you don’t get to forget dinner, then hijack the conversation.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Tell me about your day.”
Today her project model for addressing multidrug-resistant TB had passed departmental approval. She simply needed to write up the final pages describing existing community resources. Then she listed the job applications she’d sent to public health research orgs and nonprofits all over Boston. She thought continuing TB work would be interesting, because it was localized within certain intimate populations, like prisons, but she also wanted to work with immigrant women.
“You’re looking only in Boston?”
“Are you trying to get rid of me? We’re engaged, remember?”
He smiled. “I remember. I just don’t want you to limit yourself. You always said you wanted to work at the NIH.” Amy’s grandmother had been a biologist and was one of the first women to head up her own research team in the forties, during the war. He did not know how he could live alone, without Amy, but she was too young to restrict her options.
“Someday,” she said.
But it bothered him that she refused to own up to her own ambitions. It didn’t make her desires less real, just less transparent.
After dinner, Sunil washed and dried their bowls and spoons, and they sat on the couch, looking at the room, empty except for the TV—the NBA playoffs had started. Amy lifted her feet into his lap. He was tired and bloated from the ice cream, but she wiggled her toes insistently.
“Do you think being married will change anything?” she said.
“I won’t love you any less,” he said. “Plus I’ll get to call you the old ball-and-chain.”
“What am I supposed to call you? The ball-peen hammer? The Phillips head?”
“I don’t even know what those things are.”
“I know. That’s why it’s funny. How about ‘the old rusty pitchfork?’ Or just ‘the tool’?” She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “I suppose we are following a long, proud line of practicality. My parents married because my mom was pregnant. Your parents’ marriage was arranged. We’re doing it for a good deal on an apartment.” She said this breezily, happily, then closed her eyes to enjoy the pressure of his thumbs on her feet.
“We’re not like them,” he said. “Neither of them. Why would you say that?”
“Say what?” She opened her eyes.
“Draw our parents into this. You really think their examples are that relevant?” The thought terrified him.
“Of course they are. You know they are.”
“But their values, their wants, what makes them happy or unhappy—we don’t have to deal with any of it. We can start fresh. That part is really important. We don’t have to take their baggage with us.”
She withdrew her feet from his lap and placed them firmly on the floor.
He wished he hadn’t raised his voice. He thought of how his father turned his head and showed his profile when taking on his mother’s fury, and her own rapid headshaking when she was overcome.
“We’re not. I’m the one who said I didn’t want my parents at our wedding,” Amy said. “But we can’t erase our upbringing. Our parents are the closest examples of real marriages we have.”
Sunil sighed. “Yes, of course, I just don’t want to be like them. They don’t, they aren’t—” He couldn’t finish.
“Listen, love. Whether your parents love you or love you enough is not the only fact about them. It’s impossible for our parents to be irrelevant. What matters is how we deal with them.”
He was silent for a moment. “I agree with you. Maybe I’m just trying to prepare you. I don’t think you’ve met anyone like my mother. She is deaf to me—so unbending. And she can be mean, explosive. She’s not going to accept you easily.”
Amy nodded, as if trying to ready herself. “Even so, we’re the children. We’re the ones who have to imagine, and believe in, good outcomes,” she said quietly. “As much for us as for them. C’mon, philosophers excel at thought experiments.”
“So we say.” He leaned in, embraced her. Inhaled her. Did not let go.
Yet Sunil still felt that Amy didn’t understand how important it was for the two of them to be unconstrained, to be able to love without holding on to the obligations of their parents.
Yes, he had his idealism—he would prefer to call it having standards—and perhaps that tainted his view of his childhood. This idealism sometimes gave rise to self-righteous anger. But didn’t anger make him good at philosophy? Isn’t that what Lieberman meant by his passion? He had ideas, good ones. He wanted to think about these things for the rest of his life; he wanted to teach, to make progress. There were good people on his side. He would not let them down.
Amy said she had reading to do, and went into the bedroom. Sunil turned on the TV and watched the end of the Lakers game.
Three minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Lakers were down by eight. Sunil leaned in, sensing a momentum change. Something was about to happen. Then Kobe rolled off a pick, received a pass, shook his defender with a crossover dribble à la Tim Hardaway, and shot from downtown with a hand so close to his face he could’ve licked it. Twenty seconds later, Kobe scored again. Sunil swore happily and muttered the triple double, 25-10-11. Commercial break.
The phone rang, and Amy padded to the kitchen to answer it.
She appeared in front of him with wide eyes, covering the receiver with her palm. “Your mother.”
He grabbed the phone and jumped around Amy to see the resumed play. “Mom? Are you all right?”
“There was an accident,” she said. Her voice was thinner than he remembered. He hoped it was a bad connection.
“You? Is Dad all right? What happened?” He gestured for Amy to turn off the TV.
“Yes, yes, fine, fine. It’s your brother.”
“Slow down. Who? You know I never understand that cousin-brother stuff.”
“Bimal, he has been in a terrible car accident.” She started to cry. Noisy, heavy sounds. So loud that Amy stepped closer, but Sunil held up his palm.
“Is it serious? Is Dad there?” He’d get better information from his father. He wished his father had been the one to call.
“No.”
“Dad isn’t there?”
“I want you to come here,” she said. “I will buy you the ticket.”
Sunil sat, stunned.
Amy watched him, tentative.
“Mom, I’m really sorry, but I can’t just go to Nairobi. I have a lot of work here. Bimal’s going to be okay, isn’t he? He’s conscious and everything?” Bimal was the cousin closest to him in age, and the one Sunil knew best, but they hadn’t seen each other since they were young teenagers. Sunil pictured a skinny, shirtless boy on the beach waving to a low-flying plane.
“That is what they are saying.”
“What? What are they saying?”
“That he needs to stay in hospital for a while, but he will survive. Please, please come.”
His mother never begged. She demanded, she threatened, she guilt-tripped, but she had never said please, please. She was crying harder. Amy was movi
ng her hands and mouth, but he couldn’t read her. Was she saying to accept? Or just to take a deep breath?
He took a deep breath. “If I go there,” he began, “Amy has to come too.”
“What’s this, your girlfriend is not family. This is serious!”
He tried again, but his voice was overrun by a barrage of sobs mixed with words that he couldn’t understand.
His eyes on Amy, he said, “Mom. Listen to me. Amy is not just my girlfriend. She’s my wife.”
This silenced her, for a moment. “Liar,” she said.
“No,” he said softly. “I’m telling you the truth. We got married. I just haven’t been able to tell you before now.”
“Why do you insult us? You think we are just some after-the-fact thoughts?”
Sunil wound the phone cord around his wrist. “You’re the first person we’ve told. It just happened.”
“—anything you want, and we were so proud … and Harvard … but we are your parents! Heartless, just like your father. No one in our community has ever done such a thing.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“True!”
“Can I talk to Dad?”
“No.”
“Then let me talk to Sarada Aunty.”
“Everything is my fault, chho? You think I have caused this accident? No. It was fate. Now you listen to me. I am going to tell you something.” There was a strange pause. “Bimal is your brother.”
“Mom! Don’t say stuff like that just to get me to come. I’m really sorry about Bimal’s accident, but he’s going to be all right. And I haven’t seen him in fifteen years.”
“I am talking about brother-brother, blood brother!”
Was the shock making her confused? He walked into the kitchen and back to where Amy lay on the floor doing anxiety sit-ups. She stopped and looked at him for explanations.
“I am telling you, Bimal is your one hundred percent brother. Born before you, in Kenya. It was a bad time. We gave him to your uncle. We thought it was the right thing, but you—you.” She swallowed what came next, but Sunil was sure he heard the word mistake.
The Limits of the World Page 4