Urmila was weary of depending on her siblings—not just to fix the problem at her store, but having to be driven everywhere, needing translation. Bimal’s accident and Sunil’s marriage pushed extra tension into every moment. Now the girl, the wife, was here.
Since he went to college, Sunil had begun to corner Urmila with his talk. When she forgot what he’d said about his classes, he would say she did not pay attention. She made him repeat himself every time they talked, he said. He questioned her motives—sometimes asking if she really cared, or if she only wanted to appear so. She cared! But his world was so far away and foreign to her. Was she supposed to write it down, all his details? “I just never know if you’re even listening,” he said. It infuriated her, to be doubted like that.
Sarada warned: if you pull too hard you will push him away. But Sarada had not raised Sunil. She did not know where he would give and where he’d stick. Urmila knew they all needed to relax, to get comfortable with each other. Sunil needed to see that his family were not strangers. But she did not know how to do this. She could not even outwit a slow-moving African or convince her own brother to help her.
Gopal found her scraping the bottom of a plastic take-away bowl of coconut ice cream and leaning against the window of a wig shop. He spoke to her in an even, patronizing voice. Urmila looked at the wigs while he talked, the straight black bobs, the wild curls, the tangles of tiny braids. How did women wear them—a different one for each day, depending on one’s mood?
“You knew they would not accept,” she said.
“Urmilabhen, you are not fooling me. I know the state of your business is poor. You’re going along only with your husband’s salary. I am not saying this is a bad thing—a husband can do this for his wife, to keep her busy, happy—but if you want to be truly successful you have to address the difficulties in your plan. The problem is not the supplier. Put this on the back burner until you have sorted matters out. This is my advice.”
In her mind, Urmila bought all three wigs. She would use them as disguises, to avoid anyone she was ashamed to confront.
Bimal was asleep when they arrived at the hospital. His broken leg was bound in gray plaster; his bare toes bony and forlorn. The slash in his face had begun to stitch itself together, but it was still terrible to look at. Urmila drew the sheet over Bimal’s toes then held his dry cool feet, her palms against his soles. The nurse had told her that most of the time Bimal lay in a thick fog of pain medication.
“I think I will get a cup of tea,” Sarada said tactfully, as soon as they arrived.
Their brother Anup would arrive soon, with Mital. Urmila had only a few minutes alone with her son.
She did not expect him to reply, but perhaps he could hear her. So she told him about her life in Columbus, her few friends (the Savlas, mostly), her routine. Her pleasure in donating to the temple at the end of the year so she could see The African Bazaar and her name printed up in the lists of patrons. She recounted the books she read, biographies of Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. On Saturdays and Sundays, Premchand took long walks and read the paper for hours. They hardly saw friends anymore, and over the years invitations had dried up. “What am I supposed to do with myself?” she’d asked her husband. He mentioned card games, jogging, bicycling, volunteer work—things done by the wives of the doctors he worked with. “That is what Americans do, this leisure. That is not for me,” she said to Bimal, who continued to lie very still, only his chest rising and gently falling. “What will we do when he retires?” At the very thought, her mouth gummed up, dry and pasty. Thankfully that time wouldn’t come for many years.
But then, as if he were there to help her with her problem, Bimal’s eyes fluttered open, and his head rolled drunkenly toward her. “Aunty,” he mumbled.
“I should call the nurse?”
He shook his head. “No more drugs. Sleepy.”
This would have to be enough for now. She nodded. “Rest now, just rest.”
Urmila tidied up, threw away plastic cups, and refilled the water pitcher. Shook the crumpled blanket and folded it. Using tissues from her purse, she absorbed the sweat on Bimal’s brow and wiped down the metal guardrails. As she cleaned under cups and vases, she began to feel better—industrious, necessary.
The room in order, her breathing calmed by the regular rhythm of Bimal’s, she took his hand, warm and giving. If they could not talk, she wanted him to feel her. She spread his fingers against her collarbone, pressing the tips into her skin. There, my son. But there was no change in the quality of his touch, the tension in his skin. So she lifted the collar of her sweater and slid his hand down the slope of her breast, the heel of his palm flat above her nipple. Had she been the one to breastfeed him, as nature had intended, he would have felt exactly this skin as a baby.
“Mom,” said a soft voice. Startled, she dropped Bimal’s hand and spun around to see Sunil. In the flesh! She would not have been more surprised to see a rhinoceros. “What are you doing here? You are alone?”
He shook his head. “I wish I could be that brave, to come here alone. No, I asked Anup and Mital to take me. I insisted, actually. They are waiting in the hall.”
She was relieved that Sunil’s wife hadn’t accompanied him. “Come say hello to your brother.”
Sunil nodded, though he looked afraid, hesitated.
Bimal rustled under the sheets and murmured something.
“Look you have woken him up! Do not tire him. He needs his rest.”
Sunil said to Bimal, “How are you feeling? I couldn’t wait any longer to see you.”
Bimal slowly opened his eyes as wide as he could and said in a scratchy voice, “It is a little painful to talk with the tube in my throat … please stay five minutes. Seeing you is like a dream.”
Sunil shook his head. Clasped his hands on the bed’s metal rails that Urmila had just cleaned. “All the way over here I was thinking about what I would say, and now I can’t think of anything! I really just wanted to see for myself that you are okay. It’s hard to get details in this family, you know?”
Bimal nodded with a small smile that tugged at his scar. “But there are plenty of opinions, as many as you like.”
Sunil laughed, and Urmila, who was standing gingerly at the foot of the bed and looking back and forth between the two, astonished at their proximity after so many years apart, felt her knees turn to jelly.
Bimal said gently, “You look yourself like you have had an accident.”
“Just the shock of my life! Seeing you recovering makes everything better.”
“Welcome back, bhai.”
Sunil’s face flushed right through his date-colored skin, and Urmila felt her pulse quicken, as if watching a hawk and a chicken make friends. At the sound of her brother Anup’s voice in the hall, Urmila hurried out to shush him. “Calm your tongue! The boys are in there! My prayers have been answered.”
Her brother put a hand on her arm and said, “Mital will be here in ten minutes; she is getting some mango juice at the shop. I told her—”
But Urmila had already turned back into the room, rejoining her sons. Sunil was asking if Bimal needed anything, and the one in the bed was shaking his head apologetically; he was tired now and needed to sleep.
“Of course,” Sunil said. “Mom, we should go.”
“Don’t forget,” Bimal said with effort.
Sunil nodded solemnly. “I won’t.” Urmila saw something then: the eyebrows! Both boys had weedy strips above their eyes, just like their father.
“You go,” she said to Sunil.
“We both should. He’s tired, Mom, plus Mital Aunty and Anup Uncle are here. They want to be with their son.” Urmila would have contested these words except for the appearance of Mital on the other side of the bed. Her sister-in-law’s frown cemented Urmila’s desire to stay. She would not be pushed aside in this important moment. The reunion of her
sons!
Sunil looked at her, then at Mital, sighed, and left the room.
“What a good boy,” Urmila said, loud enough for her sister-in-law to hear.
Mital, who wore a neatly pressed sari and a faded vermilion part in her hair, handed Urmila an open bottle of orange cola and several pieces of pistachio barfi. “Hardly he is alone in this room,” she said, gesturing toward Bimal, whose meds had tugged him back into a deep sleep. Gradually they would lighten the drugs, though they wanted to keep his breathing comfortable given his cracked ribs. Then Mital folded her arms, her expression hard to read; the skin of her horse-face sagged.
“We are trying to share the burden—you can’t be here all the time,” Urmila said.
“A mother is very strong. She can withstand almost anything for her child. Don’t you think so?”
“Of course.” Urmila sipped the warm cola, pop they called it in Columbus.
“You know, my husband never stops praising your mother? How she raised you all with so little money, arranged all the right marriages. You all were dressed so nicely for school, your faces scrubbed and socks pulled up tight. Coins in your pockets for the beggars. A real sadhvi!” Mital paused. “I sometimes wonder what she would think of this younger generation, the way they stray from their homes, marry outside, lose the language. Or your father, who still lives and breathes.”
“I hope you are not suggesting something,” Urmila said.
“Only that holding on to your son is hard. There are risks in America. So much temptation. Who can say who or what is to blame? I think of you often with sympathy.” Mital ran thin fingers down the length of her braid, pulled off the tie at the end where the strands had frayed, and rebraided.
“You! Saying these things about me after all I have given you?”
“I never asked you. You were desperate. You would have left the child on the street. Or worse! I know you considered worse. I remember you from that time. You did nothing but complain about your husband, and now you march back and try to reclaim what you never wanted.” Mital leaned forward, lips pulled back in a snarl. “Listen carefully, sister. I refuse you. I repudiate you. My son doesn’t need you, he never has. Get away from here. Go home.”
Thirty-one years ago, Urmila had left her husband in Columbus because she could not live with such a rigid man, not in a city of strangers so far from her family. He was too busy, and even the most industrious housewife could not make all the time go by. She had taken little jobs doing office work—they would not let her answer the phones—and once a job as a crossing guard at an elementary school, where she marveled at the huge rucksacks strapped to their little backs. She had no one to tell these things to, though, and the phone was much too expensive for more than once every few months. She disliked writing letters; they reminded her of school. She could not put her feelings in them. Her husband resisted meeting other Indians, always too tired. He encouraged her to take courses, English or arts and crafts, but she had never been handy. What she wanted was her sister, the all-day back and forth, being heard and speaking. Even quarreling was reassuring, she realized, when she did not have it in her life. She had thought that even if she could not divorce, could never start a new family or be a mother, she would at least be living with people who knew her, loved her. She came back to Nairobi planning to take up her old job teaching primary school. Live with her sister and help raise her niece and nephew.
Then Urmila had discovered she was pregnant. For a while, she believed she could keep the child and live under her sister’s roof. In America, people lived like this all the time. But her family told her it was impossible. Her father, especially, was emphatic and prescriptive. Single and separated was one thing. Single mother another. She’d wept against her sister’s shoulder.
“He is yours,” Urmila had said to Anup. That was all. They never discussed names or how Mital had prepared the house. They took him straight from the hospital.
Without husband or child, she was unwanted, like a cup of cold tea. Her best chance at her own life, at a slice of freedom and maybe even love, lay with Premchand in America. In the end, no one exiled her from Nairobi, but not even her sister had encouraged her to stay. When she boarded her flight bound for London, then New York, then Columbus, she had felt she was fleeing.
She reentered Ohio as if she’d never left. No one asked about her year away.
When Sunil was born, just one year after Bimal, his head thick with dark whorls, they’d skipped all the ceremonies. She was too tired, no one from Nairobi could come, and then what was the point? She did apply oil to his hair when she remembered.
Now, again, Urmila felt forced to flee from people and a place she’d once thought would care for her, defend her.
Urmila cornered her younger brother in the hallway. He gave her a handkerchief for her tears, gingerly touched her shoulders. Mital has been under great stress, he told her. Her mother was ill and she was on rough terms with Sheetal, their daughter-in-law. All this in addition to Bimal’s slow recovery.
“You can override,” Urmila said. “I must be allowed to see my son.”
His body was skinny, but her brother’s face was wide across the cheekbones, like hers, but without firmness underneath. Soft like a baby’s. Now the flesh of his cheeks twitched. He said, “Your own son is healthy. He is here. He is brave, you know, he took a taxi back on his own. You should be spending time with him and his wife, Urmilabhen.”
A trio of nurses in purple uniforms pushed a squeaking metal cart past them. The women sang softly, braiding their voices.
Then Anup sighed. He said, “In a few days, Bimal will be enough recovered and will come home. You can talk to him more then. Though I think you will have to compete with your Sunil for his attention! Don’t worry. Everyone will feel better in a few days.”
But would she feel better? What could be made whole? In America they had ideas about marriages as partnerships. She had never expected this glossy dream, nor had she been fooled by Bollywood movies about romance. What she had wanted was companionship, and a comfortable life with some luxuries. She had gotten some much-loved comforts (her own car, a microwave), but the isolation ate at her. Where was the second chance they promised you in the novels and TV of her adopted country? Yes, she saw now, there was bringing Sunil and Bimal together. This was a good start. She was not so sure what to do with Amy, but she would think of some way to bring her round.
Sarada drove her back to the house. Urmila paused on the stairs leading to the second floor; faint starlight crept in through the windows. The immigrant families living in the back were quiet; still many hours until sunrise. Outside Sunil’s door Urmila paused, pressed her ear to the wood. No one stirred. She turned the handle and the hinges creaked. Her feet slipped over the threshold. She should not be doing this. But her need grew arms and she pushed open the door.
What she saw: two bodies under a heap of blankets, a small white foot poking out the bottom, a brown arm curved over a hump of shoulder. Blankets furled around and over them like silk. The back of Sunil’s head was so thick and dark she knew she must have rubbed in the oil every one of his infant days.
12.
Day four: the Karen Blixen house. Sarada Aunty ushered them out of the house to the minivan, where the driver and his father were waiting. “You must be stifled spending so much time with us old people. When Meena comes back, the young ones can go out.” And soon Bimal would be home, where they could visit him with ease. His aunt put her hands on his shoulders. “I am so happy to see you, after all these years.”
Sunil smiled. He saw the effort she was extending to welcome them. Then they rolled out of the driveway, past the guard, down the residential streets, and out into the clogged roads and roundabouts.
Sunil told Amy about his latest anxiety dream, a comic nightmare, in which James had been running after him through a field with a pitchfork. His clock was running out. He had to
email his thoughts to Lieberman, so he could write them up more fully, with her feedback, when they got home.
Amy turned to look at him, skeptically. “I thought you didn’t need her help.”
“I think I was wrong.” How could he possibly work here? His family crowded out all other thoughts. He needed to get reacquainted with his brother. And yet Sunil could not ignore the dire position he was in. If he did not make progress, and soon, the department could take away his funding. He wished he could share his troubles with Amy, but the problem felt too big, and too much his own fault.
Amy pulled at the plastic pearl buttons of his mother’s sweater, which she’d been wearing for days. She’d taken on some color, but she didn’t look happy. For a moment after breakfast, in the bright kitchen, his mother and Amy had stood side by side in matching cardigans, sharing some discomfort, looking like an advertisement for a multinational pharmaceutical. But what would they both be selling? Valium? Blood-pressure meds? He thought of Bimal in his wrinkled hospital gown, the purple splotch on the back of his hand where the IV attached. When he told Amy about his visit, short as it was, she had been ecstatic. He had waffled for nearly an hour before resolving to go to the hospital. He had been scared, when it came down to it, to face his mother’s favored son. Bimal had shown, though, that he had a sense of humor, which counted for a great deal. His brother had also, without providing a reason, extracted from Sunil a promise: that he see their grandfather. He was old and his mind was struggling, but he still had moments of clarity, and would want to see his American grandson. “Maybe he will tell you some things you do not know,” Bimal added. Bimal referred to their grandfather as Nana, which was new to Sunil, who thought of him as Bapuji because that’s what his mother called him.
The Limits of the World Page 11