“Sunil’s getting a doctorate at Harvard, he’s no slouch. She wants the same things we all do for our kids.”
“Yes, Harvard is very good. But how many jobs do you know for this field? He will struggle forever.”
“Every college must have at least one or two philosophy professors. Don’t they still teach it? It’s not a dead language like Latin.”
“Some men are gifted to be leaders and others learn. He is a learner, but he lacks ambition, that is what I am saying. A mother-in-law cares about these things. Also, he is very dark.”
Maddy’s yellow hair fell across her face. She stopped and stepped aside to let a man with enormous hearing aids push by with his walker. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know. You don’t need to ask,” Urmila said quietly, knowing this would silence her friend.
The sun was warming, concentrating on them. Urmila felt conspicuous, and wondered if Maddy did, too. Or if everywhere felt natural and normal to her. Coming down the street was the bus Maddy had told her about, the transport that would allow her not to drive in the winter. Urmila said, “But where is the green? I thought you said there was some park.”
“I said there were athletic fields near here, soccer and baseball. I never promised you a park. I never said this would be easy.”
Urmila again felt herself on the edge of tears. “I have no one to help me now but you! Naturally I do what you suggest. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She straightened her glasses, smudging them. “You are an American, you have lived in this place longer, you know the way things are.” Sunil used to be the one to guide her through this place.
“And who are you?” Maddy stood, arms crossed. Behind her squatted low garages and mid-rise buildings. The sky shone blue over the flat land.
“Just an immigrant,” she said. “Just a woman. Once the store is gone, there will be nothing left of me.” Just a mother, she thought, though she did not dare say it.
Maddy looked down, chin doubled. Sometimes, with her blond hair pulled back and a bright T-shirt on, she looked like the high-school girls that had volunteered at Premchand’s hospital, souls bursting with goodness and light, but today she looked middle-aged and brittle and irritated. Maddy said, “One thing I definitely don’t suggest is self-pity. Do me a favor and see your son. Call him at least.”
“He can call me.”
“But you said … you told me what you said to him. I know you regret it. Did you apologize to him?”
Urmila shook her head, feeling desolate and removed from everything she cared about. She did not understand how love was not a given, how it constantly needed to be reaffirmed. Why did she need to apologize when it was so obvious her grief had gotten the best of her? Of course she loved her son! With her whole heart, with a heart larger than her body.
Maddy looked at her watch, signaling her impatience. “Have to go home and do laundry, my sister is visiting this weekend. Come and join us some night.”
But Urmila saw the invitation was halfhearted. Better to let Maddy go.
Back in her apartment, Urmila considered the telephone. She itched to pick up the receiver and dial. She wanted to know what he thought of the papers she had sent. No matter what Maddy said, if her son truly cared, wouldn’t he have called her by now? She knew Sunil thought she could be overbearing, and so, this time, she would prove him wrong. She would show she could respect his silence. She would step back and let him come to her, no matter how much she wanted to hear his voice.
11.
The shower was rusted, the paint ballooned from the ceiling. Sunil closed his nose against the lingering grease smell and turned his back on the armies of ants that marched across the windowsills with enviable determination. What he liked was the twenty-minute, litter-strewn walk to the T. One of Amy’s wishes had come true: he was enjoying the exercise, the fall air. He’d found this tiny apartment before Amy left, but he hadn’t told her. Didn’t want her to set foot in it. When the Kauffmans had picked up his wife in the Volvo that signaled her entry into a gleaming professionalism, Sunil had pretended to have a meeting with James. He was a coward; he couldn’t have borne their scrutiny or the loss of her; he might have cried.
That was three weeks ago. This was the first September of his life—since he was three—that he had not been in school.
More than the grime and the roaches, it was the silence that corralled his misery; silence was the hunter that took aim at hopeful forms and picked them off one by one. The apartment’s one grace note was the kitchen window that at night offered a full-on view of the moon. Otherwise, the apartment’s sparseness settled in him so deeply that the car horns and television, even other people’s love murmurs and angry outbursts, did nothing to alleviate the Amy-less loneliness. During the two years they’d lived together, Sunil had begun making noise as soon as he awoke—his tuneless rhymes, his mumbled dreams and midnight thoughts, stats and developments in the NBA. He riffed joyfully, ridiculously, into the morning air while Amy laughed, swatted him away, told him to shut up, ignored him. She was his loving ear.
Erik bought him a nighttime companion, a teddy bear with an “I ♥ Harvard” T-shirt.
Over the phone, Amy told him that she and her epidemiologist boss were investigating strains of multidrug-resistant TB. There had been terrible outbreaks in Russian prisons, so some of her work focused on underfunded American jails, places where the disease was likely to go undertreated.
“During the day I’m a detective,” she said. “And then when I go home I’m a captive. So really, I see both sides.” Her parents’ religiosity, which had been subdued during their May visit, was on full display. The continual blessings and prayers, rigidly observing the Sabbath, their attempts to drag her and Monica to synagogue. “I don’t want to leave my room because I might succumb. It feels unfair that I have to say no to them, when I feel like they’re the ones who broke the contract. They’re the ones who changed.”
Sunil lay on his bed, phone to his ear. Tried to feel the warmth of her breath. “What’s the worst thing that will happen if you don’t do what they want?”
“My mom got me this great job. I’m living here for free. I feel like I owe them.”
“She got you the job because she’s your mother and she cares about you. There’s nothing wrong with saying thank you and living your own life. Like you said, they didn’t consult you before deciding to live religious lives.” In the bathroom, a faucet dripped. Scratching in the walls. Sunil squeezed the spongy bear around the middle with savage force.
“When are you coming to visit?” she asked every time they talked. Sunil waited for this moment. He craved it. Some days he didn’t understand why they had to be apart—why she couldn’t have stayed to help him through. But it wasn’t realistic for her to stay, and he knew it. Love was simply not enough to get them through this next difficult stretch. They were adults, and they owed it to each other to pursue their individual goals, or they could never be happy together. Yes, they were obligated. Committed, as Amy had said in the Nepalese restaurant the day they—she—had announced they were engaged. And Sunil believed this to be right and true. For they were equals and had committed each to the other.
But Sunil had decided that he didn’t want to visit DC until he had something to show for himself. He had begun working in earnest in her absence. He now had sixty pages and guessed he had sixty or eighty more to go. Philosophy dissertations were not nearly as long as those in other areas of the humanities, so that was a blessing at least. Still, Sunil undersold his progress because he was not yet confident he could keep up the pace. They would see each other when he had a draft. Which he would! He just needed more time.
But he said, instead of all this, that they didn’t have the money since they were saving for another apartment.
“I’m worried about you. My parents are worried. They want to see you.”
�
��Sure, to convert me.”
She laughed, but his jokes wouldn’t hold out much longer. He hoped they wouldn’t have to. He had sent Lieberman his sixty pages two days ago and had barely slept waiting for her response.
“We need to see each other,” she said.
Something sharp in her tone, some undercurrent of warning. He said, “That doctor you work with, what’s his name again?”
“My boss is a woman,” she said evenly. “I told you that.”
What about the other people in her department, he wondered, the men in the staff room on her lunch break? Who walked her down the hall to her lab? Their concrete, purposeful walks echoing side by side.
“Soon,” he promised.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she said, “but you should call your mother. I know she’s at fault for a lot of things. She hurt you and went against your father’s wishes. But you don’t even know if she has any money or how she’s getting along. Maybe the store is failing.”
It was a painful thought. His mother needed her African bazaar more than ever to keep her life together. He said this to Amy, then added, “But that doesn’t make it easier to reach out to her. Love, I feel like she disowned me. Because that’s pretty much what she said! Can I really pretend what she said was just fine? No consequences?”
“That’s the way diplomats at the United Nations talk, adversaries like the US and Russia. She’s your mother and she made a big mistake. But I can’t believe she meant it.”
“Do you think she didn’t mean those cruel things she said to you?”
Amy sighed. “I think her temper got the best of her. And anyway, I’m not her child. Now she has no one but you. And even if you don’t want to forgive her, at least make sure she is okay. Women do better than men after the death of a spouse, but the data is pretty clear that widows need social support.”
“Like you said, we’re talking about two people here, her and me, not abstractions. Why don’t you call her?” he suggested, knowing this was a terrible idea. He deserved the heat that came next.
“She doesn’t want to talk to me. She wants to her from you. Her son!”
“Okay! You’re right. You’re right! I’m a stubborn jerk. I’ll call her.”
And then something happened that changed how he thought of both his parents. An envelope arrived in the mail. There was no return address, but his name was in his mother’s hand. It had been forwarded from his old apartment, the gloriously light-filled one in Somerville; the place that was supposed to be his and Amy’s home for years. Feeling the loss of those cheery rooms made him morose, mad at himself all over again.
He stared at the envelope. His mother had written in large block letters across the seal: PRIVATE. SUNIL CHANDARIA ONLY. He remembered her doing this when she sent packages to Nairobi, thinking she could scare off the meddlesome, and underpaid, Kenyan postal workers. It made him laugh to see her carry on the habit. But he wondered what could be inside. Perhaps it was the copy of the autopsy he’d requested—mistakenly sent first to next of kin? He now regretted asking for it; he couldn’t imagine wanting to read it. And so he let the envelope sit on the counter for days, then a week. In the meantime he kept up his new routine, basic but fruitful: Dunkin’ Donuts, Widener, Au Bon Pain, All Together Now (ten hours a week steering weedy, unpromising youths like the one he had been toward the philosophy section), Widener, and then, when he was too blurry to see the keyboard or a page in front of his face, he went home. He walked everywhere, to save money and to make his wife proud.
One night Erik swung by to take him to a movie. Sunil had been turning down invitations for several weeks, and his friends thought he needed a break. Waiting for Sunil to put on his shoes, Erik pulled the envelope from under a pile of junk mail. “What’s this?”
“You’re a worse snoop than my wife,” Sunil said. “I don’t know what it is, but put it down, we have to go.”
After the movie, they retired to Rosie’s. Starting in on the first pint glasses from their pitcher, Erik said, “You know what your problem is, old sport?” Erik had recently read and admired The Great Gatsby. “You have to get over yourself.”
“This is what I get from a philosopher? Barbershop advice?”
“What I mean is that no philosopher is expected to live the way he outlines in a stupid paper. Philosophical reflection is insulated from ordinary life, thank God. We puzzle over oughts, what makes for a good life, but none of us believes those theories should have that much power over how we actually live.” Erik grinned. “When Hume got overwhelmed by skeptical arguments, he played backgammon, and his doubts evaporated.”
Sunil understood why Erik had a hard time with women. There was something both of the devil and the clown in his smile, and it was sometimes hard to tell which was which.
“Hume was weak,” Sunil said.
Erik laughed. “He did like his claret.”
“That fat dude also got himself stuck in a bog.”
Like Hume, Sunil had to work hard to keep undermining thoughts at bay. As a human immersed in daily life, he found the idea that we lived in a world without knowledge of independent moral truths unpalatable. He had to remind himself that as a philosopher he should be exploring what scared him. Because it was fascinating, and because if he didn’t see this idea through, he’d lose not only his direction and his friends, but also his wife and his self-worth.
When was he going to hear from Lieberman? He’d sent her his most recent pages, and her silence ate at him. So he ordered a plate of fries and stuffed them into the void.
When the fries were gone, Erik cleared a space and pulled from his jacket the envelope he’d taken from Sunil’s apartment. “Open it.”
“What the fuck? That’s my private mail.”
“I think it is something important,” Erik said, unapologetically.
“Yeah, I think it’s my father’s autopsy. You want me to open that now? Here?” A sickening feeling rose in Sunil’s throat.
Erik did look regretful for a moment, shamefaced but endearing like the hartebeest Sunil and Amy had loved in the Maasai Mara. “I’ll open it for you, and if that’s what it is, we can set it aside.” Erik took a clean knife and slit the top. Sunil looked away, peering into the dim recesses of the bar, then forcing himself to look further, higher, toward the door, where the autumn evening light was still bluely visible.
Erik said, “I think you’re going to want to see this.”
His friend handed him a stack of papers, varied shapes and sizes, many of them stuck together. Sunil began to peel them apart, one by one. On top were red construction paper hearts folded in half, crusted with dried glue stick: Valentine’s Day cards made at school for his parents. Then a jumble of his report cards and teacher’s notes, names he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. His eyes picked up phrases remarking on his generally good disposition but noting, too, “recalcitrance” and “tempers.” He was often alone and easily distracted. One teacher had asked if perhaps Sunil watched a lot of television at home? He laughed out loud. “They didn’t know the half of it,” he said, mostly to himself. Usually he’d watched TV from the time he got off the bus until dinner, and then from after dinner until bed.
There were ten or twelve drawings flattened and pressed in a stack. Some of the older, stickier pages had to be pried carefully apart, flaking off decades-old bits of crayon, pencil lead, finger paint. Clearly, his mother had not already gone through all this. Here was a crayon sketch so big it had been folded in quarters. He spread it out on the table and saw that the scene was populated with animals, some fantastic and some copied from their 1970 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Elephants, a spotted cat, a shakily striped zebra, a lyger. A lyger! In the corner the date, 1979, and the name of his fourth-grade teacher. And this was not even the most surprising. Stapled to his Kenyan re-creation of Noah’s Ark was a second drawing: a brown crayon stick figure with a swir
l of gray turban standing next to a glossy cutout of a train. This one also had a title: “My Grandfather.”
“A veritable Edvard Munch!” said Erik, never missing a chance to pump up the reputations of his countrymen.
“My father must have kept all this,” Sunil said softly. “I had no idea.” His father whom he had believed to be as unsentimental as a polished spoon.
In Kenya, his father had told him about the large number of Somalis he saw in his infectious-disease practice; they carried African fevers and variants that American-educated doctors didn’t recognize. “It is very difficult being an immigrant,” he’d said. “They do not know the language, the system, and all of these procedures are very frightening to them. It’s my job to convince them the tests and so on are necessary. Their lives depend on it. Also, they look to me to comfort them.” He had sighed. “I am less effective at this part.” Sunil had understood then that his father no longer thought of himself as an immigrant; maybe he never had. Coming to America was his due as an educated man. He’d lived in several American cities, owned a series of American cars, made down payments on American apartments and houses, each bigger and in a better neighborhood than the last. When his father returned to Kenya, he, like Sunil, felt more American than ever. And his safeguarding of these papers from Sunil’s childhood confirmed what Premchand had valued just as much as his own freedom: his son’s education.
“There’s something on the back of your portrait,” Erik said. It was a postcard, a Nairobi street scene: women in saris and salwar kameez leaning over a grocer’s abundance of oranges. Above, a handwritten sign: Chandaria Stores Ltd. Only one word was written on the back, in Gujarati, and somehow Sunil’s brain recalled and recognized: his grandfather’s name. It would have been his mother who, years ago, had affixed the drawing to the postcard; the taping was a particular black electrical tape she was fond of using for everything.
The vertiginous feeling that had begun its ascent when Erik first withdrew the envelope from his jacket now rose higher, lodging in Sunil’s throat and inhibiting, for the first time Sunil could recall, his powers of speech. The two of them finished the pitcher in silence. Erik looked him in the eyes and nodded sympathetically, while Sunil felt his throat close up and his eyes fill. He covered both his eyes with his hands and leaned his elbows on the table.
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