“He knows who I am?” he asked his aunt.
Apparently surprised herself, Sarada nodded, pressing her chin into the wicket of gold necklaces around her neck. “He says he has already been talking to you.” She shook her head. “See, I am telling you he is losing it.”
“Let him talk,” Sunil said.
“He says it is a long story.” For a while, she translated. Too much rain. They were thirsty and then the lights went out. “Goodness, he is saying something about a hippopotamus!”
“Ask him about the railroad,” Sunil urged. “Mom once told me that he worked there for a while. As a coolie.”
His grandfather continued, his voice thick with phlegm, pointing first to himself, then as if over his shoulder. Sarada frowned, “He is saying he hardly had anything to do with the trains, maybe just one year, and now he is simply listing a lot of places where the train stopped, all these little, forgotten towns. Wait.” She paused and shook her father on the shoulder, asked him a question. “He says it was his father who was indentured.”
“Indentured? Like a servant?”
She shrugged. “That is the word he used.”
He turned to Amy, who was sitting a few feet away to give him space, but he wanted her closer. He pulled on her arm.
“Aunty,” he said, “before he gets tired, I want you to introduce Amy.”
His mother, who had tried to appear as if she were not listening, now moved closer as well. She sat down on the floor beside them. “Do not tell him you married an American. It will upset him.”
Sunil looked in the old man’s face, the sunken eyes that appeared to be piercingly active. “Why do you think that, Mom?”
“My own experience,” she said quietly.
“But think about how much change he has already witnessed! I think you are selling him short. Aunty, please tell him.”
And so Sarada raised her voice and made a V-shape with her arms, one hand on Sunil’s shoulder, one on Amy’s. In turn, Sunil and his wife grasped each of his grandfather’s hands. “Just to be clear, I’m not asking for his blessing!” Sunil said. He meant this as a joke, and to his surprise his mother laughed.
Amy shook her head, smiling, and said, “No, you would never,” then pressed her forehead briefly to Sunil’s, just as she did when he had a fever, as he knew her father had done for her.
Sunil was sure that his grandfather absorbed this information from the way his tremulous chin swung first toward one of them, then the other. He had no teeth, and his mouth did not change shape—no hint of a smile—but Sunil thought that he gently nodded, a slight bow of the head. It was an endorsement he chose to believe in.
After a few more minutes, Sarada pronounced her father tired. She stood up quickly, as light on her feet as his mother had been coming down to the floor. “It is time for tea,” she said. While she set the water to boil and brought out the chevdo, Sunil and Amy stayed were they were, for a few moments longer. Sunil closed his eyes. Let sound and feel and smells come over him: the scratchy carpets over the cool tile floor, lingering spices and floor wax. From somewhere came color memories—a blurry scramble of field, sea, and sky, like a child’s drawing. The past and the present swallowed each other, a snake eating its tail.
Sunil’s palm landed inadvertently on the soft toe of the old man’s slipper, and he kept it there. Perhaps unaware that his translator had left, his grandfather talked on. Sunil began to detect the repetition of certain sounds, the words for water, light, river. Father, fear, labor, lions … no, now Sunil was inserting, substituting. He would take home the truth, if he was to take anything at all. And the one truth he had found here so far, he was sad to realize, was loneliness. His grandfather alone inside his aged memories; his father’s desire to escape to the New World, his mother admitting how little she knew about her own parents.
David Kauffman had said to them, Be patient. Don’t rush to conclusions. Ariel had instructed, severely, Remember everything. They needed this trip to mean something. Otherwise, what were all of these excruciating scenes for? Except that this last encounter was different from all the rest. For one thing, it had fulfilled the promise he’d made to Bimal.
For another, Sunil had felt seen, not passed over, for a millisecond at least, his wife beheld as well, even if they could never be sure what was really perceived by the withered man with the peach-pit eyes.
His grandfather continued to murmur, barely audible, and Sunil thought it was time to go. He rose to his tingling knees. But his father, already standing, motioned for Sunil to stay put, then gathered the rest of the family in a circle and told them to listen. Sunil and Amy still on the carpet, like kindergarteners; their relatives perched on footstools, the edges of chairs. Premchand cleared his throat, and Sunil swallowed tightly, looked at Amy, at his mother. Both appeared baffled; his mother also looked scared. His father only took charge like this when he was pressed to his limits.
“Being here today, with the elder generation, what remains of it, strikes me as a propitious time to speak the unspoken.” Again he cleared his throat, and Sunil’s own tightened further. “I am not sharing any secrets when I say that we have had some hard times.” Premchand drew a line in the air between himself and Urmila. “Especially in the beginning, the early years in USA. My work was very demanding, I was not a lot in the home. We were struggling with the language, Urmila—your mother—was missing her family.”
Sunil glanced at her, expecting her to jump in, but she remained quiet, almost prim, hands folded in her lap. Eyes locked on his father’s face like a dutiful wife.
“So, son—”
Sunil’s heart beat faster. He was hot. Amy took hold of his ankle. Tethered him.
“—your mother took some time away, back here with her family. It was a very reasonable course of action. She needed some time to consider if we should continue together.”
Behind Sunil, his grandfather mumbled faster, steadily, like the hum of an appliance, then abruptly he stopped and his head drooped, and saliva pooled at the corner of his mouth. Sunil’s aunt jumped up to wipe it away with a handkerchief, which only caused Premchand to speak louder, as if the entire room were suddenly in chaos. “We did not know she was expecting, okay. And the way things were in USA, we were not ready. It is hard to explain so many years later, to paint the picture, but let us say the uncertainty made us believe Mital and Anup were the best choice. They had no children of their own.”
Urmila was fixed in place. Her glasses reflected the sunlight cutting in through a crack in the drawn curtains. Gopal Uncle leaned back in his chair, legs crossed, struggling to keep something like amusement off his face. Ajay pulled threads from the arm of the chair until Sarada slapped his hand.
“It is not much of a story, telling it now, but we don’t want you children to think this is some big secret. It is simply something that happened a long time ago, a product of the circumstances. This is the way life goes. The air is clear now, is it not?” Then Sunil’s father leaned back against the wall and gently bowed his head.
In the minutes of daylight left before dinner, Sunil and Amy circled Sarada Aunty’s property. He snapped a small branch off a hedge and twirled it in his hands. They’d counted two tenant families. One consisted of two women, maybe sisters, a man, and four children. The other family seemed to be motherless. There was a man who looked like he was in his forties, but was probably ten or fifteen years younger, plus an older daughter who took care of the baby and a younger girl who left the compound in a school uniform each morning. “That’s one kid out of seven going to school,” Amy had pointed out.
Now she walked, hands in pockets. Today it was finally warm enough to discard his mother’s sweater, and her shoulders stretched taut her shirt.
“I get five minutes of explanation for a lie that’s lasted my whole life?” Sunil fumed.
“Maybe he doesn’t understand his own motives, and he�
��s confused and ashamed.”
“Then why didn’t he say that.”
“I think he did, in his way.”
“You’ve gone soft on him,” Sunil said, both irritated and pleased. “I’m glad. But still, you can’t expect there not to be questions and even anger. And also, you notice it was my father speaking, not my mother.”
“Yes, he was trying to speak for both of them. In any case, I think what’s important now is getting to know Bimal in this new way, not to learn more about why your parents did what they did. Your questions shouldn’t be about why they are the way they are, but why you are the way you are—the two of you.”
“Those questions are not mutually exclusive. Anyway, don’t you think this event shaped their lives?”
“Of course.”
“So if it affected them, it necessarily affected me.”
The boy child was being chased by his older sister. He pulled a wide leaf off a bush, planted it on top of his head, and fell to the ground. Played dead.
Amy said, “It’s hard for anyone to imagine their parents when they were young, and with your parents their context was so radically different from what you grew up with. And they are not very good at explaining.”
“That’s an understatement,” he said, wishing he could peel away the layer of hurt that clung to his body, his voice.
When the sister’s back was turned and she’d walked several paces away, the boy stood up, wound his arms like propellers, and barreled toward her. She whirled around at the last second and he smacked into her thighs. She scolded him and he burst into tears. Then she swept him up, held him with one arm, patted the back of his neck, and pulled clothes off the line with her free hand.
Adding up the hours of family get-togethers and dinners—the adults talking, the children playing outside or upstairs—and the time in and out of their uncles’ shops, Sunil thought he and Bimal had spent no more than two weeks together total. Two weeks spread out over thirty years, maybe half a dozen trips altogether, including when he was too young to remember much more than colors and smells, special dishes he liked that appeared only in Nairobi. It was easy to connect during childhood—they barely had personalities, were just bundles of desires running around and slamming into each other, boys with boys, and girls with girls, all teasing and eating and getting dirty. When the boys started working for their uncles, they were separated by their tasks, often one of them taken out to run errands—usually Bimal because he spoke Gujarati and Swahili—and Sunil left behind to count inventory, clean, and double-check columns of arithmetic with the new calculator brought over from the Service Merchandise in Columbus. Sunil believed he would have behaved differently during those hours if he had known of the bond he and Bimal shared. He mourned what could have been.
The girl from the motherless family leaned over the coals. Her braid slipped over her shoulder and she swung it back with a toss of her head. Forearms darkened with ash and smoke. Onto the circle of stones she hefted a bellied pot, then wrapped something in foil and buried it in the embers. “The rural life of my ancestors, right here in the backyard,” he said. He looked at Amy. “Don’t worry, I’m not plotting any scenes.”
“You want someone to blame.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Soon after they started sleeping together, Amy had woken up one winter morning with a nosebleed. On his blue pillowcase was a map of red.
At first, he was too stunned by the blood to act, then he’d pulled off his T-shirt and held it to her face. “What happened?”
“You hit me,” she said. “In your sleep.”
“I did?” He was horrified.
“No. It happens sometimes, the dry air.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
She’d responded with a look both confused and disgusted. And then he realized the absurdity of his question, as if she was supposed to prepare him for every possibility of their togetherness?
He hadn’t meant to accuse. He was sorry. He’d been so alarmed by the thought of hurting her, of being unknowingly violent.
Her disappointment in his reaction had seared him. Worse than any scolding he’d received as a child. This kind of awfulness, he had realized, was new, was tied up with love and the kind of obligation he desired, did not shirk from, and he needed to learn from it. Act on it: break from the defensive posture that had seemed to him natural, reasonable, but which might instead be an obstacle to happiness.
Amy had taken off her stained clothes, rinsed out his shirt, washed the blood off her face. When she came back, she was naked, and she’d stood for a moment beside the bed, hands on his face. “I love you,” she had said, for the first time. “But don’t talk like that again.”
He had circled her waist, head on her chest. He loved her, too.
For a few months, they jokingly blamed each other for everything—a cloudy day, the deli running out of ham. On February 14, he’d brought home a heart-shaped red velvet cake with the words My Bloody Valentine.
Last week, Sunil had said to his wife, “Why didn’t you tell me I had a brother?”
“Because I knew you’d take it badly.”
He’d laughed. But now, seven thousand miles from home, watching a young girl unselfconsciously make food for her family in front of strangers, peepers beginning their evening song, Sunil realized Amy might have meant it more as a warning than a joke.
16.
[03 h: 31 m]
The State of Emergency lasted eight years, until 1960. This whole time Kenyatta is in jail, but the Mau Mau fight without him. It is very bloody. Not only black against white, but in some pockets there is civil war: Mau Mau kill the Kikuyu loyal to the British, village against village. There is burning and hacking people to pieces. The rallying cries are about land. It is stealing, plain as day. Even the Asians can see this. We, too, have been denied.
But Mau Mau cannot hold forever, not with so many jailed and disappeared. Not with their top leader in prison, and then the main military chiefs are captured and arrested. One of them is executed. Soon Ghana becomes independent. We are nowhere close to Ghana, hardly we can find it on a map, but we know it is Africa, and that Africa is changing. Everyone can feel the independence movement growing, even though day-to-day we do more or less the same. We cheer the improvements as they come along—the radio broadcasting services, then the big new hospital, Aga Khan, opens in 1958. It is so shiny; we are so impressed. Premchand goes to India for medicine, the first in our family, to bring back what we do not have, doctors of our own, and when he is employed at Aga Khan as a physician, we all boast and go in to visit him like children to a factory where miracles are made.
Finally Kenyatta is released into house arrest. The KANU party is formed by these men, Tom Mboya and the name I love to say, Oringa Odinga. In just three more years Kenyatta will be prime minister. We are on the brink of enormous change.
The British have been so strong, so merciless, these years of the emergency, but the colonials see they have to give some few concessions to the natives. Higher wages, allowance to grow coffee, things like this.
They are creating space for the Africans, and we do not make much of a fuss. Our goal is to hold on. We Asians are now even in the police force, in all aspects of bureaucracy, but we do not know if it will last. The Asians long against the colonials become even more vocal, men like Makhan Singh involved in the unions. Eventually he is arrested.
Even in these days of so much activity, it is hard to believe independence will one day come, and that soon after we will have to choose between two countries, neither of which wants us. By the end of the fifties, I myself am fifty years old. All of my children graduated secondary, knowing no other life, starting jobs. We are arranging marriages, paying dowries.
Your grandmother got very sick one year—1960. A year in the thick of everything, but when illness comes the world shrinks to just you and your fam
ily. I wish you never experience this. We were worried for polio, but it was another fever, and she was in bed for three months. The children were not allowed to see her and she got skinny like a stick. Premchand Fua watched over her. I was all the time on River Road, thinking about where to increase and where to reduce. Radios were selling big time. Turntables and records for the Europeans. Do you remember your grandmother? She recovered from the fever, remaining healthy until the cancer was too far progressed, but that was many years later. Anyway, she came out of those fevered months in her room saying Alam, enough, determined to stay, a kind of loyalty to this place I had not seen before. She was tired, could not see moving to another continent, again. I kept an eye on the finances. Savings, hand in hand with our low consumption, it is how people get ahead.
Your generation, both here and in America, what has happened? You are buying clothing as if these things cannot be washed!
And so, during this time it is tumult, but feels every day like any other. The bazaar is expanding, because more of our people are coming from the countryside. In the sixties, Africans get on their feet and set up their own dukas in little towns, leaving no space for the Asian originals. Just beyond the edges of our own shops in Nairobi, the Africans are creeping in. Little huts with piles of whatever they can find—onions, bananas, bicycle wheels—at too cheap prices. They begin taking control of the produce chain. Things we used to sell for them they are selling for themselves, to their own people. What, we are going to become farmers, the Asians who were never allowed to own good land? Too late for that. We have been perfecting our role as middlemen, not as men of the earth.
Mostly, we looked straight ahead and up. It seemed the British would be leaving and maybe we could fill their shoes. This is not so much what happened, but it gave us some hope to stay.
The Limits of the World Page 14