“What if they’re not civil back?” he said.
“Do you really think that will happen? They’re going to be happy to see you. If they’re really being bastards, you can dole out one punch in the face each, but that’s it.”
The first time Amy had taken his hand in a dark movie theater, she had audaciously thumbed the inside seam of his jeans. Once they began sleeping together—which she had initiated, taking ice cream bowls out of their hands and straddling his lap on the couch—he could not get enough of her lips.
Then there was the moment on the street. Amy had stopped abruptly, obliviously, to tie her Keds in the middle of the sidewalk, causing an avalanche of bodies to stack up behind her. As she apologized and gathered up the oranges and paper towels tumbled from bags, she had managed to make everyone laugh at her folly, at their joint chaos, until they all were standing and smiling and shaking hands and Amy appeared like the ringleader of a small, beautiful circus of the everyday.
When Sunil had learned that Amy had run—and lost—a bid for class president in high school with the slogan ‘A’ for Amy, ‘A’ for action, complemented with a two-fisted sky-punch, Sunil was smitten.
With her jokey comment about punching his family, Sunil realized he was taking his wife into a battlefield. He had given Amy the option of staying home, but she had refused. They had to do this together.
So he laughed and agreed to her plan, even though the wound of deception felt larger than could ever heal. But he would try. He took two Dramamine and knocked himself out.
7.
Premchand looked for his wife first in the bedroom, then the bathroom. He found her at the small table in the kitchen, shoulders hunched under her black cardigan, bare feet clasped under the chair. She had disappeared after dinner. Premchand was moved by the brown lines of his wife’s soles, calluses worn with age. It was a miracle of modern science how long people lived now. If he’d had a life like his parents, he’d welcome an early death, but in today’s world he could still see patients, still learn, even at his ripe old age.
“Darling, what are you doing?”
Urmila startled, and as she turned, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You are eating the shrikand.”
“Just tasting. You know how my sister sometimes makes her desserts too, too sweet. I came into the kitchen for a glass of water and decided to be a help to the chef.”
“You have eaten fully one-quarter of the dessert.”
Urmila looked at the bowl. “Not true.” But her expression was doubtful, her mind somewhere else.
“I know what I see. Now hurry and fix it so the damage is not so obvious. This is the problem staying here. You don’t eat good food, only the fry and the sweet. What you eat affects mood, rest, everything.” He said, “Bimal is going to be okay, you know. Broken bones heal.”
He remembered how gently Urmila had held Raina at the hospital the night of the accident, how her body had filled with ease and joy.
She said, “You have that pink liquid with you—the soothing one?”
“Yes.”
“Well, will you bring? I am in need.”
“Because you ate too much shrikand!” But he pitied her. In some ways she did not belong here any more than he did, despite her closeness to her sister and her business connections.
“How many more days are we staying?” she asked.
“First you make the tickets for two weeks and now you ask about leaving? Sunil is arriving tomorrow.” Premchand was eager to see his son, but he was nervous. Already Urmila was on edge, and he couldn’t imagine how his son was feeling, coming back to Kenya after so long. Having just learned about Bimal. Premchand touched the beating pulse in his temple with his fingertips. He was relying on Sarada to help make the visit smooth. There was a time when she was the daughter that he would marry, but Sarada had preferred someone else, or was already engaged, he could not remember now. Urmila, too, once had another prospect, a man in Mombasa who owned a chain of tourist hotels.
“Just bring me the pink.” Urmila waved her hand. “It is hard to keep track of the days.”
She took the Pepto-Bismol; they said good night to the family and got ready for bed. Soon Urmila was asleep beside him, lightly snoring, but he stayed awake, remembering.
The first year they lived in America, Urmila had stayed up until he came home, in the middle of the night, to make sure the food he ate was hot, nourishing. The second year, she was more often asleep, both when he woke in the morning and when he returned. He ate congealed dal standing up at the two-burner stove at two, three, four in the morning.
After three years, she had had enough. His wife wanted to go back to Nairobi. But he couldn’t. He’d come too far. One day early in 1969, a few months after they’d moved to Columbus and were trying to start afresh, Urmila began packing. She would go back on her own. Premchand had believed this was the end of them. He would live alone in USA. Then, three weeks into their separation, they learned of Urmila’s pregnancy. She didn’t want to return to Columbus, to him, but she could not raise a child on her own. Her family made that clear. What should they do? Premchand had seen it as a stroke of luck that Anup and Mital could not conceive, could take the child as their own, but Urmila had been the one to carry him, to birth him. She had given him up unwillingly, then flew back to Columbus, to try to restart her American life. She had not been consoled, as Premchand was, by the birth of their second son ten months later. Regret had invaded his wife and stayed.
Baggage claim was a swarm. Clamoring reunions in all languages, hawkers pushing flowers, phone cards, newspapers. Beyond picking out the Arabs in dishdashas and the lanky Maasai with their red blankets, Premchand couldn’t identify the tribes anymore—the Kikuyu, the Luo, the Kalenjin. Not the way he could now tell from a patient’s name and appearance if he was Vietnamese or Thai, Somali or Ethiopian.
Premchand hoped Sunil’s presence would break the monotony at his sister-in-law’s. After so many days, conversation had been scraped down to the bare bones. The family and classmates who’d stayed behind in Kenya had regressed, he thought. They lived in nice houses with modern appliances, but their thoughts were staid and backward. It was a world without science.
Last night, Gopal had gone on about snakes and their mystical qualities. He had recently fasted, for the first time in many years, and it had led to a purity of mind, he said. “We are all striving for moksha, are we not?” The night of the fast he’d dreamed of a snake and then, the next day, he’d come across an old photograph of his mother. This was a sign that his mother’s spirit was unwell. That she wanted something from her children. Then a cousin-brother had launched into a story about a Japanese dog who waited for his master at the train station every day, but the day the man died of a heart attack in the office—“because the Japanese work too hard, yet that is why they are ruling the technological world”—the dog stayed home.
Premchand was sensitive to not overusing his physician’s authority, but he could not let the absurdity go on. He’d thought momentarily of Sunil, pursuing a doctorate at the most prestigious university in the world. Even if he never finished his degree, attending lectures, keeping his mind sharp was the main thing. Premchand had cleared his throat and pushed his voice over the table to assert, “There is no relationship between one ridiculous tale and another ridiculous tale. People die. We cremate the bodies. End of story.”
But his victory was short-lived. The conversation ran to the American political contest, but that, too, derailed when Premchand tried to ask about Kenyan elections. “Every citizen should vote,” he’d said. His wife had rolled her eyes, and Gopal said, “What we say doesn’t matter. The African majority looks out only for itself. They all want to be big men, go back to their tribes, and get another wife. Even in your country the big money wins.”
Premchand had acceded to the last point and went to bed early, but h
e had not slept well.
As he waited for Sunil to emerge, his body fought fatigue. He felt pressed thin and lifeless as a gauze bandage under the terrible airport lights. Premchand’s brother-in-law, Ajay, stood beside him, rocking back and forth on his heels.
“Dad!” Sunil’s hand waved high above the other black-haired heads, and he walked toward them. He looked tall, thin. The collar of a wrinkled button-down shirt opened over a navy sweater, and his jaw was speckled with black.
Premchand squeezed Sunil tightly, quickly. Here he was. Solid, in the flesh, with the beard of a grown man.
“Dad, this is Amy. My wife.”
Premchand inhaled sharply. “Who?” A wife? He held his breath while the girl—how old was she?—came slowly into focus: slight and pale like vanilla cake. Disheveled from travel but lively. Eager and nervous and holding out her hand. She gripped Premchand’s palm and gave it a shake firm enough to snap the neck of a snake. “Dr. Chandaria. I’m so happy to meet you.” She looked from him to his son. “You look alike,” she said. “Your hair is wavy and Sunil’s is straight, but you have the same eyes and nose.”
“Sunil is lucky,” Ajay said. “The gray hair comes late to the doctor’s family.”
Premchand suddenly realized that his brother-in-law had not been surprised by the girl’s appearance, the word wife. Urmila must have known and told Sarada, who told Ajay. Everyone had known and kept it from him. Ajay’s silence he could at least understand. His brother-in-law would want to see the effect of the surprise; he was always needling Premchand, hoping for a spectacle. But his own wife? Premchand crunched his fists into his pockets.
“Dad, are you all right? How is Bimal?”
“He is recovering, yes, do not worry. Everything will be just fine.”
Passengers with taped-together suitcases streamed around them. Skinny men with high foreheads, fat men with yellow eyes, broad women with skirts and headscarves in wild, bright patterns of blue and green and red and yellow. Everyone else moved, but the four of them stood still.
“What are we waiting for, eh?” Ajay said, adjusting his belt to fit better below his belly. “Come, strong man, pick up these bags so your newlywed does not think we are barbarics.”
They wheeled the suitcases across the parking lot, weaving in and out between the cars. A few were sleek Mercedeses, but most were dented, collapsing, crusted in dirt, paint barely visible through the rust. Ajay proudly drove a brand-new Audi. Premchand offered his son the front seat, but Sunil wanted to sit in the back with Amy.
Cars on the access road slowed to a crawl. Women and children gestured at their closed windows with bouquets of rolled newspaper. So many looked lost, like they needed help.
“She didn’t tell you, did she?” Sunil said to him.
Premchand ignored this and pointed out the window. “Groundnuts,” he said. “The Africans are very fond of them. They resemble peanuts.”
“Dad—”
But Premchand, stifling irritation, waved his hand. “We will talk about everything after the meal. You must be hungry.”
The vendors multiplied and merged. In the dusky light their torn clothes faded into their skin. Women carried stacked plastic buckets on their heads; men shouldered string bags of bananas. He looked over their heads to the jagged skyline, the new high-rises lit up with the last rays of sun. From the back, Premchand heard only low, fierce, whispers.
Then Sunil said in a too-loud voice, “This is awful traffic. Is it always like this?”
“Twenty-four hours, seven days a week!” Ajay said cheerfully. “And the matatus.” He pointed to one passing, bags stacked high on top, the fee collectors hanging off the running boards. “You can see, they are so filthy crowded. Every such distance stop and stop and soon they are all hanging out the back like monkeys. You can’t believe how they live.”
“Like monkeys?” Sunil said.
“No, he doesn’t mean that,” Premchand began. He looked at Ajay, but the man was oblivious.
“What are matatus?” Amy said.
“Buses for monkeys, apparently,” Sunil said.
“Minivans,” Ajay said.
Premchand shared a look with his son, who was shaking his head.
As he drove, Ajay told them about Nairobi’s population explosion, segueing, unprompted, into Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Asians from Uganda in 1972. “This is the fear we are always living under. Ever since independence, there’s Africanization. The government can take away your business at any time. It’s not right, but there is nothing we can do. They want the locals to have all the power and all the money. We are an oppressed minority.”
“I thought Asians owned lots of businesses,” Sunil said. “Mom told me that. Don’t Indians have more money than all the Africans put together?”
“But there is no political representation for Asians,” Premchand interjected and then wondered if this was still true. Kenya had been a democracy for almost forty years.
Ajay did not contradict him. He was smiling at Amy in the rearview mirror.
They drove through the darkening city, past skyscrapers and weary petrol stations. The pastel greens and purples of the older concrete buildings were barely visible, though Premchand picked out the steel bars bolted across the storefronts. In the daytime, when the city’s trees unfurled, Premchand would tell Amy about Nairobi’s old nickname, The Green City in the Sun.
Obviously, Urmila had known about the marriage. But Premchand was sure she hadn’t arranged for the girl to come along. How would she react? And how had his son paid for the trip? He knew that even with his own contributions, Sunil barely scraped by.
He knew, too, that he had not fooled his son. He sighed. Already there was a wrong to right. And who was this girl? What was she like?
“When can we visit Bimal?” Sunil said.
“You are eager to see your cousin-brother, eh?” Ajay said.
“I’m worried about him.” Sunil paused, holding something back. “What exactly happened? Mom wasn’t very clear.”
The night of the accident, the phone had rung, and then in a great whoosh, the women had swept up their purses, the men started the cars, and suddenly there they were, at Aga Khan. “We did not know much, only that Bimal was in critical condition and the other driver had died on impact. Head-on collision on the Outer Ring Road.”
“The other driver died?” Sunil said.
“Yes, it was very unfortunate.”
“He was an African,” Ajay said. “Bimal was not at fault.”
“Then you waited around the hospital all night?”
“Yes,” Premchand said. “Anup and Mital, and Bimal’s wife, Sheetal, with their daughter, Raina. We were all crowded together in the waiting area like a bowl of gulab jamun.”
Sunil laughed, and Premchand felt a spark.
“We waited for many hours until Bimal emerged from surgery.” Premchand did not tell his son that he had been so jet-lagged that after this he had fallen asleep. After a while, he’d felt his arm moving, a woman crying. “Tell me it is going to be all right, Uncle.” He had struggled to come to the surface. Something was expected of him, but he didn’t know what. He wasn’t even sure what language people were speaking. His whole life he’d spoken English and Gujarati, switching easily between the two, but then all he could say was, “You are speaking … English, beti?” And then he hadn’t heard anything at all.
Craning his neck toward the back seat, he said, “You know I used to work at Aga Khan.”
“When you were back here repaying your loans?”
Premchand nodded. His tuition to B. J. Medical College in Ahmedabad had been paid by two Nairobi Asian organizations, who required that he spend three years in Kenya practicing and training others.
“Did you like living in India?” Amy asked. She leaned forward in her seat to better hear him, one hand on Sunil’s knee.
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“Yes, very much.” Premchand had thrived in school. “Finally I could identify the ‘fevers’ everyone was suffering and dying from in Kenya. Cholera, dysentery, malaria, meningitis, encephalitis, schistosomiasis.” He’d even seen rabies, a disease that destroyed like a demon. “I had excellent classmates.” Ravenous young men, hungry for fellowship and knowledge. They worked up appetites during long walks and endless nights of cards. Premchand read crime novels and saw movies, shopped back alleys for interesting old coins and miniature chess pieces.
In those days, he carried in his pocket a jade knight he’d bought in a tiny shop near Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram. The knight was his favorite for its ability to jump, for being the only piece that could attack a king, queen, bishop, or rook without risking reciprocal attack. The knight was gallant and a little mischievous.
He patted his right pants pockets. The jade knight he’d lost long ago, but here was the tiny plastic one he carried most days. Its neck was beautifully curved, like a seahorse. The ears worn down to soft nubs over so many years.
“So why did you go to the States?” Amy said. “You could have stayed here or gone back to India, right?”
“Oh, well, here there was Mau Mau, instability. The others”—Premchand forced a nod in Ajay’s direction—“had more backbone. They were less afraid of what would happen when the British broke and withdrew.”
“At least under the British there was some order,” Ajay griped.
It was true that when the Africans took charge, everything was up in the air. But Premchand cared more about privacy than power. In Ahmedabad, Premchand had discovered he liked being a stranger. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d returned to Kenya in the last thirty-five years.
“We stayed through independence, but in sixty-five we left. There was a training job in Jackson, Mississippi.” He’d toiled twenty-hour days in a crumbling hospital with dozens of other Indians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, and Argentines, a force of brown doctors-in-training caring for a vast sea of black patients. He became an infectious-disease specialist and was invited to Columbus by a Ugandan Gujarati friend who’d been two years ahead of him in Jackson and before that in Ahmedabad. A small train of pioneers following medicine from one country to the next.
The Limits of the World Page 7