The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

  “The doctor was ambitious,” Ajay said. He slid into the next lane, barely avoiding a moped. “He always wanted to live in USA. He was not truly made for this country.”

  Premchand was irked by this dismissive tone, but he could not disagree with the words. He had never in Nairobi felt like he belonged.

  Sidestreets vanished into dimness. They passed a mall where, earlier in the day, they’d bought home-care supplies for Bimal, and soon they were in front of Ajay’s gate, waiting for the askari to open it. The guard smiled broadly, teeth shining, hands loosely on his gun.

  Sunil looked up at the house, which loomed tall and wide in the dark. He said, “I hope something looks familiar in the morning.”

  8.

  [01 h: 08 m]

  Some men returned to India with small riches, quickly spent. But most remained in Africa, and the stories of opportunity grew and grew. Must be good if some are staying, no? Better than famine at least, which was all across the Saurashtra. The dhows set out for Mombasa in November, when the sweet weather began. Sailed with the monsoon winds. Men who had never even seen the sea trusted their lives to the nakhodas, who took on no freeloaders. Even the crew were one-way passengers. For food and shelter, they swept the deck, jiggered the sails, and secured the dhows through the storms.

  The storms! Sky shaking, waves pounding. The boats overflowed, and they emptied with buckets, rain slashing their faces. Tied everything important down with rope, sometimes themselves. The dhows set out in groups, seven or ten at a time, and it was not unusual for one or two to be lost at sea.

  To keep up their spirits they would sing, Salavo, salavo … one man leading and the others following, We are here, sail on!

  They ate boiled gram, chapatis, a few grains of rice. One cup of water per day.

  Women, too, began to come. They lived entirely below deck, cooked with kerosene in circles of hot stones, breathing the soot-filled air. Up into the light and sea breeze only to use the toilet, a dank box pitched over the waves. If you were a tall one, the others could see your head.

  Your grandmother arrived when she was twelve. Her body was cramped for so many weeks she forgot how to walk. Her parts grew crooked, too—that’s why two of our children died in their first weeks of life.

  Some, of course, died at sea. Of fevers, weakness. There was nothing to do with the bodies but pitch them overboard, and this has always, always haunted me. Where are their souls now?

  Do you know what I am saying? Without the funeral pyre, the soul is in limbo. We used to sing about the golden pyre, the silver body, a golden flame is burning, silver smoke is rising to the sky. The soul needs to be released. Fire allows the soul to detach. Flames prevent new life from growing in the body.

  Promise me you’ll take care of my body in the proper way, when the time comes?

  After all this horror, the Mombasa skyline was a glorious sight. It was thick with fruit trees and shade, the colors soft and pleasing. You have been there, but you have never seen the city from the sea, as I have, coming back from a trip to Zanzibar—the island that smells of cloves. From the sea, you think you can grasp the city in your hand, scoop in your palm all the trees and mosques and white coral houses that glitter like grains of rice. You hold your breath, dreaming of fresh coconuts. You are a sailor, an explorer. Land!

  In the harbor you look around at the other dhows, trying to read their stories from their weathered skin. These boats, they feel like family. You feel relief. Also regret, because some sights are once in a lifetime. The instant you see, you know you will have to keep the picture in a little warehouse in your mind. It is funny, isn’t it? I have never lived in that city, but I miss the ocean, the sea breeze. Asians have lived there for so many years, we are part of the air, the stones and streets.

  Mombasa was, and still is, a mixed-up town. When my father arrived, the city was filled with Swahili traders. The Asians here then were Muslims, but they spoke our language, and they soon surpassed the Swahilis. You have seen their folded turbans and wide beards? They were clerks, middlemen, loan officers, they made things happen. Whites relied on them. Colonials gave these men letters of recommendation and soon everybody knew them. Merchants like J. M. Jeevanjee and Allidina Visram—you know their names, either of you? They grew rich. Owned hundreds of shops here and across Uganda.

  Ivory was the big trade, of course. The Swahilis sent parties to the plains to shoot, then sent tusks back to the coast in long caravans. It took months, braving the savages and hostile lands, wild beasts. In Mombasa, whites snatched up the precious bone and posed for pictures with the long tusks crossed high above their heads.

  They traded slaves, too, until the Queen abolished.

  But this was not for our people, this business of killing and owning. Ahimsa requires we treat every living thing with respect. Even the tiniest creatures that flit in the air and live in the ground.

  The lions? Oh yes, killing them was terrible, but it had to be done. Finally, the sahib, Patterson, got them. When the bodies of Ghost and Darkness were paraded around, my father wept. He almost forgave sahib the punishing pace he’d exacted from the frail men. Almost. Fear had eaten not only their flesh, but also their hearts.

  9.

  He remembered a night years ago, when she’d stood in the living room in a long purple vest and pants, stylish platform shoes. Black hair pulled up, twisted. His parents were going to a friend’s house to practice disco dancing. The woman Sunil saw now, in an expensive sari, hair short and frizzed, didn’t look upright or keen or confident, but shrunken and sad.

  His mother embraced him fiercely, and he smelled the coconut oil in her hair, a scent he still associated with being bawled out. He nearly drew away in an act of instinctive self-preservation, but she gripped his arms and swaddled him so hard he couldn’t even hug her back. Was she crying over him, over Bimal, from exhaustion? It was awful to see her black mascara tears, her distraught face, and he wondered what comfort he could offer her.

  She pulled out of him something he had long tried to keep in a dark, airless place.

  Then his mother surprised him by grabbing Amy, too—so fast it was more a thump than a hug. Then Sarada Aunty took hold of Amy, exclaiming, “Look at you, as pretty as a doll!” Big mistake, Sunil thought, but things were moving too fast to correct it. Soon everyone was hugging, jabbering, asking questions. Sunil began to introduce his wife, but she didn’t need his help with formalities. She managed grace in the scrum, standing at just the right angle to include several people at once, repeating her name—not Jamie like James, but Amy like … Amy. He saw her strain to catch their accents and keep a smile. His cousins’ English was good, clear; his aunts’ and uncles’ accents were stronger. Sunil’s younger cousin Meena threw her arms around both of them at once. She had Sarada Aunty’s wide nose and wore sunglasses to hold back her hair. “So happy to see you! Our long-lost American cousin.” Her energy and animation and sleek black hair were just what he remembered of his aunt when she was younger, though Meena’s voice lacked her mother’s sharp imperiousness.

  His family had waited hours to eat—it was nearly ten—and Sunil and Amy were sent to wash their hands. He’d forgotten how the bathrooms here were like those at restaurants, with the sink, soap, and trash bin in the hall and only the toilet closed off, a tiny room just large enough to sit. Sunil used the toilet, and when he emerged, Amy was on her knees peering into the cabinet under the sink, a small pile of cleaning supplies and sanitary napkins next to her.

  “What are you doing? Get out of there. Someone might see you.”

  “Looking for the hot water pipe. Only cold water runs from the tap. It’s freezing.”

  He couldn’t see her face but he knew that she’d been snooping. “Sure you were,” he said. “If you’re cold, you can borrow something from Meena.”

  Amy quickly replaced the items she’d removed, stood up, rearranged her hair, and press
ed her skirt down, trying to stretch out the wrinkles and make herself taller. She ran a damp towel around her neck and under her arms. “Do I stink?” she asked.

  “That’s a first for you,” he said.

  “Nerves smell different than exercise. Proven by studies with rats.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, then leaned down to smell her neck and collarbone and shoulder, their almond sweetness cut faintly with sweat. “You’re fine. Just don’t give any monster hugs.”

  “I was thinking of arm wrestling your uncles.”

  It occurred to him, for the first time, that Amy’s nosiness might be a nervous compulsion. Because he could see her withdrawing into herself tonight. She had nailed introductions, his family swirling around her circus-like, just like the people on the street when she’d caused a pileup. But sometimes those moments of elegant orchestration were followed by clamming up, uttering only the blandest comments. He had seen her do this around pushy strangers, as well as her own parents when an Orthodox obligation or prohibition was mentioned. “You have to promise me something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t shrink.”

  “I’m not.” Her shoulders stiffened.

  “I mean it. Be you. I don’t want them thinking I married you only for your looks.”

  A tiny smile turned the corners of her lips, but her rigidity remained. “I asked questions in the car,” she said.

  “Two.”

  “It’s loud in there, and I can barely understand what people are saying.”

  “You said you wanted to come, that you would be up to this. You’ll be manipulated if you aren’t strong, and you won’t get to know anyone, which is what you wanted.” Amy often struggled to say things that might appear mean or insensitive. Her humor had come out only gradually as they were dating. When she was a girl, her comments intended as jokes had been taken as insults, and she’d become hesitant.

  “Let’s just relax and let things go easy this first night, okay? We’re all tired. I’ll be fine.” Then she added, a touch cruelly, “You don’t remember them all, do you? You have that uncomprehending smile.”

  “I didn’t even know I was smiling.”

  He knew she was still annoyed at him about the plane ticket: he’d refused to ask her parents for a loan and instead had charged a credit card they couldn’t pay off. He said he’d get the money later, from his father.

  “Good thing you’re along to tell me how I feel.” He was teasing, but he meant it. Another breath, taking her hand, then, “Ready?”

  She exhaled. “Ready.”

  They sat at a table the size of the room, squeezing in around every inch. Sarada Aunty passed an endless number of dishes, each introduced with a flourish to Amy, who eagerly and insistently piled food on her plate until it threatened to overflow. Sarada would have been cooking for days. Chakli, bhajia, pulao with vegetables Sunil didn’t recognize, chana dal, moong dal, chutneys of pineapple, mint, and mango, multiple salads. Every few minutes a servant carried in hot parathas, pooris, and stuffed naan.

  While they were eating, tasting, nodding, appreciating, Ajay Uncle told them there was a restaurant in Nairobi Sunil and Amy had to try. “Famous. The best. All the Americans like to go.” He looked at Amy. “You eat meat, yes? Because at Carnivore’s, they cook what you can’t imagine. Crocodile, zebra, gazelle … waiters walking around with meat on long sticks, these spears used by the locals.”

  His uncles’ black, thick-framed glasses from the seventies had been replaced by frameless or gold-rimmed ones, and their temples sprouted gray. Their forearms had thickened; wrists bared fat watches. Anup Uncle, Bimal’s father, was the slightest, his thin wrists barely visible beneath his too-long sleeves. They all wore dress shirts, some with sweater vests, and smelled of cigarettes. Sunil was touched by the sharp, pressed clothes, and his aunt’s huge spread. Diagonally across from him was his cousin Prakash, looking glum and soft and saying little, taking one more paratha every time it was offered. Sunil remembered him as fast, sleek, sprinting down the driveway and diving for obscure corners during hide and seek. Was he the one whose depression had caused him to take off from school? The one who went to seek treatment from specialists in the UK? Someone else had spent two months at an ashram in India, but he couldn’t remember who that was.

  Sunil never believed he’d be back here, so he’d never prepared for this moment. Now he felt protective and incredibly nervous. Especially when he saw that Amy alone used a fork. True to form, she was packing it away, proving she did not have the appetite of a delicate doll. He wanted to protect her, but also to share her. To make his parents, at least, see who she was. Here was a moment that neither Amy’s evidence nor Sunil’s a priori reasoning could have prepared them for. None of this was a controlled experiment. Between Sunil and his parents, patterns had been set, Amy had pointed out before they left, patterns they could—and should—seize the opportunity to alter by providing different inputs. Sunil wanted his family to know Amy as he did, to see her as the sharp interlocutor he knew her to be. But he did not know how to draw her out before his family. Based solely on their encounter with her at the dinner table they’d be justified in thinking she was another blonde American girl with an eating disorder. A “California type” the Indians he’d grown up with would call her.

  Sunil’s mother now put a hand on Sarada Aunty’s arm and looked directly at Amy. In another family, it might be time for a toast—he had brought his bride!—but Sunil had never seen a toast at any gathering of Indians, never mind from his mother, and his throat tightened. Urmila announced, “Everyone loves my sister’s cooking. She spares no expense, no effort. At the market she picks out the best of this and that, the very freshest. Oh, you should see her negotiate! She is very economical. And you just wait until the dessert.” Though her comments were directed at Amy, she spoke in a brassy voice that silenced the rest of the table. Just like his mother to start with a brag.

  “We Indians are vegetarians,” she continued, shifting her gaze to Sunil, then back to Amy, whose jaw had begun to jut in a hard line. “We eat just these vegetable dishes and some rice and these breads and we are satisfied. I have been telling my sister that probably you do not get this kind of food where you live. I know Boston is a big city, but my sister does like nobody else. And the issue of meat, we understand if you need to get some outside the house, like my brother said. He has done this all his life.” She pointed at Sunil’s father. “I think you’ll see we are very open-minded.”

  As if soothing a child, Sarada said, “They will see, Urmilabhen, don’t worry.”

  “They’re here now, we have to teach her. Him too. They don’t know anything. Even with all his tip-top schooling.”

  Sunil felt the buried bitter capsule break open and seep into his blood. They’d traveled three thousand miles to be found wanting. The age-old worry that his mother was ashamed of him was already gnawing away at his insides, his mother who always wanted him to be more like his Nairobi relatives.

  One fall Saturday when he was twelve, his mother came into his bedroom, turned off the TV, and said that if he wasn’t studying, why couldn’t he review for an exam? And if he was done with schoolwork, there was the yard to mow. Didn’t he see that, yet again, his father was not there to do it? Sunil put on a hat to shade his eyes and mowed quickly, striping back and forth. Back inside in time for the next episode. But while he was taking off his shoes in the front hallway, a boy he knew from school, Chris Altman, had called to ask if he wanted to meet at the mall arcade. At first his mother had said no, she wouldn’t drive him, he wouldn’t waste his afternoon, but then the phone rang again, and his mother spoke in Gujarati, then she told Sunil she had to go out anyway and would take him to meet his friend if the boy’s parents brought him home.

  Getting dressed, he changed his shirt three times. Wore his jeans with the ragged cuffs. Girls he knew might pass by the arcade. Or, better,
girls he didn’t know.

  His mother appraised his clothes, the cuffs, but said nothing.

  When she turned left instead of right at the Methodist church—Welcoming All God’s Children (since 1967)—he thought they were driving the long way around. But Sunil soon realized they were over by the high school, passing the bleak, off-the-grid railroad tracks where he’d hang out with degenerates a few years later. They were on the opposite side of town from the mall and spinning farther away every second. They passed signs for the airport. Panic swept in, slowly at first, then, with each plane passing overhead, with such urgency and force it left no room for doubt. At last his mother turned to him and announced that she was shipping him off to Kenya because she couldn’t stand his indolence anymore. She’d told him several times that week how messy and slothful and ungrateful and stupid he was, how unlike his Nairobi cousins. In the back seat was a British Airways duffel bag. Couldn’t be more than a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush in there. He was too terrified to speak.

  Would he have a chance to escape once his ticket was taken? Maybe he could hide in the bathroom. Had his father approved

  this plan? He checked his pockets for change for a pay phone and found only pennies.

  Sure he hated his life, but he didn’t want to grow up in Africa.

  When they pulled into the driveway of their family friends, the Savlas—where his mother was presumably stopping to pick up a suitcase of the shoes Ramesh Uncle got at a discount from managing the Payless, to ship with him to Nairobi—Sunil rolled out of the car and took off. His shoe caught on a twig, he fell and scraped his knee, scrambled again to his feet, and kept on running, pumping his arms like Carl Lewis. Behind him, adults shouting. Ramesh Uncle’s voice carrying, “Hey!”