8.
[06 h: 23 m]
You both were alive when, to the west, the gates of hell burst open. Always we kept our eye on Uganda, and our people there looked at us, knowing that anything ripening in one place could easily burst over the thin border. The seeds were sewn with the trade boycott back in fifty-nine. Still, it was a shock when that dictator Amin seized the country with machetes and machine guns and erased the Asians overnight. All in the name of national economic development. Just as the British had kept us down while hiding behind the claim that they were protecting the natives.
In this country, just three years before, Tom Mboya was assassinated. He was a government minister, close to Kenyatta. Terrible, though we all were aware of the tribal rumblings. Kikuyu suspected Luo and vice versa.
Asians stole away in the night, in the cargo holds of planes and boats and trains, the boots of cars. Families split apart—men here, women there, children another place. Cash and gold sewn into coats, just like the rupees carried on the dhows from India years before. Some of them escaped as far as America, and they are over there now with you, grandson.
Of course we in Kenya saw our own faces in their open mouths of terror.
In August, when Amin began his so-called economic war, the rains fell and fell here, drowning us in mud. Over there, in Uganda, properties and businesses were taken. Imagine how we felt, like old men sitting down to eat, having given years of life to the household, only to find that the wives have abandoned and taken all the food.
How were we cheating, conspiring, and plotting? What we earned, we put back, in schools, hospitals, and temples. Amin wanted to hold on to the doctors, the lawyers, but no Asian in his right mind would stay with that madman.
There was madness in our own country too, of course. After the Africans took power, they made us choose the color of our passport—did we want to stay British or change over to Kenyan? Oh, that was a hard one. If you chose British, the Africans would not allow you to work! So in some families, we split. The mothers, who were not working anyways, took British, as a safeguard. Fathers like me pledged our allegiance to Kenya, because Britain was cold and far away, and in truth the British did not want us. They limited how many nonwhites from the colonies they would take—they did not put it this way, you understand, but the rules amounted to as much. It was all a scam. Kenya-born Asian men took British passports, then the new government went after them. Arrested them! Then Britain said, no, they would not take them in. Such duplicity, I am telling you.
You were just babies then.
When Amin started his expulsion and his witch-hunts, no one came to our defense. Not the Africans, not the British, not even India. Not a peep.
Bimal, your parents talked of sending you away to America. Very expensive telephoning! But it was a reasonable idea. Good for your English. Some time with your cousin-brother. I still think it would have been a marvelous time for the two of you. For a while everyone was enthusiastic, but your parents were worried, you were so young to be so far away, and who knew for how long. Once you went there, maybe you would never come back? And there were so many more of us here to take care of you, aunties and uncles, many cousins in the same boat. You didn’t know, eh? Well, it amounted to just some talk. No one put you on a plane now, did they? Really, it would have been too hard on your mother.
I went to the store and sat with the other men, helpless, listening to the radio. We bet on how many days before we fell, too. We knew those stolen businesses would fail under the Big Men, and we were right.
Here, more and more money was salted—you know, overinvoicing the imports and underdoing the exports—the difference going into a Swiss account or some such. Not me, but many others.
I don’t blame those who fled, but we here have turned out all right. I say what I have always said, We will live until we are gone. But in their defense, for those who managed a voucher, who had the money to leave, things did get worse here before they got better.
9.
The wind-scrubbed expanse in his chest, an enormous vacancy called missing. Sunil had existed only in some small corner of his father’s life, the boy his father found in his house every night. The memories cropping up now—his father saying funnily enough, or fingering bills as crisp as his starched shirt to buy them hot dogs at a football game—were too gossamer to embody or examine. They were just scenes, a vision, missing heft and consequence. Even if there were more details to be mined, Sunil would never know the most important thing: how his father thought.
And Bimal? Did he feel more like a brother now that their father was dead? Now that they’d lost the man who’d imparted their narrow faces and girlish legs, hair that sprouted like thick Ohio lawns. The man who’d given them, more than anything, silence and privacy. Sunil was grateful; these were not small gifts. But, in the end, they were not enough. They had not protected Sunil from his mother. They’d not given Sunil and Bimal each other.
To feel this now, these layers of lacks, filled him with sorrow.
In the days surrounding the funeral, Bimal had shared Sunil’s loss without hogging it, without needing to own it. Bimal had loved Premchand, but not as a father. He left that to Sunil. Sunil had felt this generosity in the silence Bimal had allowed him in the sickroom, even after Sunil had offended him. Like their father, Bimal was sometimes too calm, unmoved when he should be angry or upset or full of awe, but Sunil was filled with admiration for his brother’s strength.
Where could they go from here? They’d traded a few emails, but sporadically and brief. They wouldn’t see each other again for years and years—probably not until another death, maybe even his mother’s, perhaps another two or three decades. Who knew if they’d even live that long? Maybe knowing that their brief days in Nairobi were a rare window was what had spurred Bimal’s parting gift. A gift to be unwrapped, or rather, decoded. Because the tapes, a series of brief interviews with their grandfather that Bimal had recorded for a college oral history project, were not in a language Sunil could understand.
Sunil was left with a pared-down image of his father, and this slim, dark older man haunted him. He had appeared an hour ago at the grocery store, then disappeared around the corner of the cereal aisle. He’d even shown up in Emerson Hall, just down from Lieberman’s office, and the proximity of those two visions was overwhelming.
Sunil unloaded the grocery bags in his kitchen. Amy would be home soon. Yogurt, eggs, baby carrots, hummus. Paper towels. On impulse, he’d bought a small African violet, which he now set on the kitchen table.
When he first started doing the shopping, he’d made some mistakes, bringing home celery instead of leeks because the labels had been switched, but Sunil liked procuring things. He was grateful for the assignment. He’d shop all day and mow lawns all over town, for free, if that would help ground him. Cheerios, apples, bananas, pasta sauce. Laundry detergent.
Amy had not complained about her job. Not once. The crude Blue Cross boss of Sunil’s imagining was an elderly Mr. Ricci, and he was pleasant, agreeable, appreciative. The other assistants were friendly. But on weekends, Amy slept more. Talked less. She still rode her bike along the river, still read novels on the porch, woke at four-thirty to get to the pool, but she asked few questions about Sunil’s days, lost her cool when he failed to wipe down the table after dinner. She didn’t shout, as he would have, but issued lengthy, exasperated sighs. He’d urge her to the couch to watch TV at night, but she begged off to read journal articles, to keep up on the research in her field. Sunil often went to bed before her now. The annual road race for cervical-cancer screening was coming up, but Amy said she was too tired to participate.
Salt, chicken broth, soy sauce. He didn’t know where these last things went. Opening cupboards and drawers, he found only plates, glasses, silverware, Tupperware, spices. He made a rough triangle of the items, placing the blue salt canister in front. Stacked and unstacked. Squared items into the
wrong cabinets then removed them.
The phone rang. He thought it was Amy calling from work. “Love?” he said.
But it was Ariel.
“How are you feeling, duckling?”
“Better. But I still see him everywhere, you know. My father. Yesterday he was the seller at the newsstand—what a stereotype! Has that ever happened to you?” Ariel’s father was still alive, but her mother had died years ago.
“I used to see my mother at the pool. There was an older lady in the water-aerobics class who got me every time.”
Ariel said she was glad to hear Sunil’s energy was coming back. That he was spending time at the library, trying to turn his inventory of notes into arguments and pages. “And holding up the housework, too!” Then she paused, “But listen, duckling, I hate to say this, but this job Amy has isn’t good for her. She should be getting her career off the ground.”
“Ariel, I know. I’ve tried so many times to tell her.”
She continued in a more accusatory vein that skewered him, but not because it wasn’t true. “It’s an enabling situation. Maybe for both of you.”
“You do realize that we really love each other, right? I begged her not to take this job.” He thought of the opportunity with the Welcomers that had passed Amy by while they were in Nairobi. He owed her so much more than he had been able to give.
“But she felt she had to.”
Ariel had a plan. And when she was finished, he was in complete agreement, even though he was not sure if he could bear it. He would have to.
A memory painful to him now. The first time they talked about marriage. On a stairway, in the Gardner Museum, where the works of art snugged cozily together on the walls, and the rooms were how he imagined a maharajah’s palace—overflowing with paintings of all shapes, sizes, and colors; polished furniture, expansive rugs, gleaming silver and candlesticks.
Amy was talking about her friend Lena, who’d wanted her to be a bridesmaid, but Amy wasn’t happy about the wedding. “She hasn’t even started her first real job, and Alex has never liked her music, or tried to understand why she writes these weird atonal pieces. He thinks she should compose some pleasant Mozart rip-offs so Starbucks will sell her CD by the cash register.”
They’d stopped in front of the gilt-framed portraits of the Gardner family, then crossed the sun-limned courtyard and headed up the stairs to see the Titian.
“What’s the rush? We’re still so young.” Her hand rested lightly on the banister as they climbed, opal ring glinting. A turtleneck sweater cupped her chin.
Sunil agreed. He said he didn’t believe in marriage.
“Because you’re a feminist?” She didn’t show her teeth but her lips rose at the corners.
He didn’t think marriage was wrong, just unnecessary. Relationships were about trust, honesty, reliability, caring, all the abstractions.
“What about passion?”
“There are different kinds of passion. Wait until you’re old like me.” His fingers walked up the banister to touch the tips of hers. He didn’t know precisely what he meant, just that he didn’t mean lust, as she did. When he thought of passion, he thought, disturbingly, of his mother, her emotions always at a near-boil. The touch of his and Amy’s fingers, the stuttering brush of their softly ridged skin, thrilled him, stirred him, made him want her, but he didn’t think of their relationship as passionate. That was one of the things he liked about it. He’d been with passionate women, insane women. An attraction to steadiness was part of what he meant by being old, though he was then not even thirty.
They reached the painting, in which cherubs peered down on a gleaming woman in disarray, a coral scarf whipping overhead.
“It’s a rape,” Amy told him. She pointed to the shiny white bull at the right of the frame.
An older woman in a peacock blue scarf turned to look disdainfully at Amy. “That takes all the magic away,” she complained.
“What do you see?” Amy asked gamely. Sunil would have retorted, and then regretted it.
“I see a magnificent painter at work.”
“Of course,” Amy said, “But this is a scene, there’s something happening. I mean, look at the energy of that scarf!”
But the woman simply shook her head. “I choose to see beauty—the gorgeous supple colors. You young women and your sexual politics. It just gets in the way of pleasure.”
The woman began to walk away from them, but Amy had to have the last word. “Truth and beauty are not mutually exclusive. Also, the word rape is in the title!” she called after the woman, who was striding purposefully into the next room, shaking her head.
Sunil laughed into his hand, as Amy turned to him and, trying to keep her own mirthful scoff inside, said, “Well, that was a total failure.”
“You were saying about Lena, my bra-burning feminist?” he prodded.
“Right!” With renewed energy, Amy said, “If Lena got married, it would be an obstacle to her leaving Alex if it didn’t work out. Marriage would be a reason to stay.”
“A bad reason,” Sunil said.
But marriage would make Lena feel differently about the relationship, she insisted. In that way, marriage mattered. It put a finality on things.
“But aren’t you undercutting Lena’s agency here? You said she wants to get married. She sees that ‘finality’ as a good thing. Maybe the emotional stability she’ll get from marriage will actually help her find her way as a composer.”
Amy was skeptical. “I just don’t see it playing out that way.”
“Aren’t you being kind of judgmental? Getting in the way of Lena’s pleasure, like that wise woman just said.”
And then she had turned to him, so emphatic she actually stamped a Ked-shod foot. “That’s my job! For me to judge the things she can’t see herself.” Softening, she added, “Maybe what you mean is that when things are good, marriage doesn’t make a difference—doesn’t make things better.”
Maybe, he said. Maybe that was what he’d meant. So why did it matter more when things were bad?
“No,” Amy said. Ariel had called her, too, at work and explained her “plan.” “I’m not moving back in with my parents. What self-respecting person would want to do that? I told her this was just a stopgap, but she doesn’t listen.” Unbuttoning her shirt, she walked to the bedroom to change into her summer evening uniform— the gray skirt, red T-shirt (braless, nipples edging through), and flip-flops. She continued to wear her hair long and straight, like a missionary. “We’re having stir-fry for dinner, so take out the rice?”
Sunil took out the rice. Pulled out onions, peppers, and a cutting board.
Amy measured the grains and water and stirred them together. Chopped and sliced. Told him to set the table.
But Ariel had found Amy a good job, an interesting job, a résumé job. It was at the NIH in Washington, where Amy had long wanted to work, and she’d had to pull some strings to get it. She had told Sunil she needed his help convincing her daughter.
“Look how tired you are after just six weeks,” he said.
“And what, you live here by yourself doing nothing? Where’s the garlic?”
Sunil retrieved a papery bulb from the windowsill, and she plucked it from his palm with an authority that reminded him of his aunt with the vegetable vendors in the market.
“I have James, my friends; I’ll audit a class.” He’d not seen James recently, but he had added ten pages to his dissertation. He told Amy about his progress.
“I know.”
“How?” Then he realized. “You snooped on my computer? You’re checking up on me?”
She shot him a look. “What would you do if you were me?”
He took a deep breath. Huge. Let go.
He’d move. Amy shouldn’t spend any of her earnings on him. The summer before grad school, he’d worked in a socialist bo
okstore in Cambridge called All Together Now. He’d actually loved the battling politics, the shouted conversations between the aisles, but they were too loose in their thinking. He had needed a system, and philosophy was nothing if not systematic; there were rubrics for how to think about the most troubling questions. Even if the answers to those questions remained in doubt. It was time for Sunil to say to philosophy, All in. To see if he could succeed at the thinking, the language he loved. Sunil still patronized the bookstore occasionally, though, and the owner might give him some hours.
What worried Sunil most was that when he’d asked Ariel how long the job was for, she’d told him that what her daughter did when the job ran out was Amy’s choice.
Amy flattened her cheek against his chest, wrapped her arms around him, and breathed him in. Her heart pulsed through his skin. She was flooded with guilt. And yet he knew she was fed up with him. And who could blame her. “I can’t leave you now,” she said, and he knew she would take the job. She wanted to.
He swallowed hard. His jaw resisted what he was about to say, the making light of desperation, his panic and resentment that she’d caved so quickly. Even if it was for the best. “I lived alone before I met you, remember? I’ll get a parrot to keep me company, to talk back to me. You need to do this for you. I’ll finish my work. I promise. Then we’ll be together again.” Sunil was not in the habit of making promises, but at the moment he’d promise anything he could.
The view was expansive, the sea sparkling, the sun high, and the breeze soft. The air heady and inspiring. She met him, sleepy-eyed and smelling like hotel sheets, on the white porch the inn was named after. Sunil poured coffee from a French press the owner had delivered to his side. “Is it hot enough? I’ll get you some orange juice. Fresh-squeezed.”
The Limits of the World Page 21