“Aside from me, I guess you mean?”
“Of course! I meant the store is closed. It was a failure in the end.”
He knew how much it had meant to her, and he felt as if his heated conversation with his father in the Blixen house had willed its demise. “I’m proud of you, Mom. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to make that decision.” He was glad she was going to Nairobi, he said. No more Ohio winters. She had always hated the itchiness of wool and thought fleece an abomination. Sarada Aunty would take good care of her, he said. “And Bimal,” he added, his voice thin and frayed, “of course he is there.”
She waved her hand at this. “They do not want me near him. They are too protective.” She appeared to be bracing herself. “But I have to be respectful because everyone is healing.”
He poured himself a glass of wine, refilled his mother’s tea, and they awkwardly clinked glass to porcelain. Sunil had never imagined reconciliation would take this form, in this place foreign to both of them. But perhaps all they had needed was neutral territory and some clear time and space.
Headlights cut through a Venetian blind and swept across them, gleaming the gold rings on his mother’s hands. Sunil thought of the one photo he had seen of his parents’ wedding and wondered how his mother had felt that day.
“So, have you and Amy had a chance to talk, since you’ve been here?”
She shook her head. She had arrived at the house while Amy was picking him up from the station. “Why are you asking?”
“I just think it would mean a lot to her if you showed that you accepted her. She was upset when you were being pushy about having an Indian wedding, and the things you said about her being a stranger. You could tell her you’re sorry.”
His mother was quiet, clasped and released her fingers. Her eyes drifted over the tea set. “You know, a long time ago when your father went away on one of his trips, he came back with a gift for me. A brand-new set of pots and pans. He bought them at a factory outlet for a very good price. I was so happy! The old ones were from Nairobi and were too scarred and scratched. I cooked elaborate meals in the new pans, and, oh my, everybody loved it. A year goes by, maybe two years, and he asks me, So, darling, do you like your present? And I laughed because it was so obvious!”
Sunil stared at her. “I’m confused. What are you trying to tell me?”
“That all of this please-and-thank-you politeness, this needing of this emotion and that one, is for the birds! Such sensitivity, as if we are all children. He gave me a gift and I gave back to him, and what is the more to it?”
Was she saying that the best he could ever have would be to understand that her outbursts—in her own mind, at least—were trivial? Did not mean what they appeared to?
“Don’t you see, Mom, he wanted to know that he made you happy. To know that the reason you made those meals was not some wifely obligation but because you were appreciative. Just like with Amy. I don’t know why you said those things to her, but I don’t think it was to hurt her. She should know that.”
“I am entitled to my opinion,” she said in an offended voice. “Everybody is.”
He gripped the seams of the sofa cushion.
After a moment of silence, he said, “I have some good news.”
“Yes? What is it? You have found a job?”
He smiled. “Not exactly. Not yet. But I did finish a solid draft of my dissertation. I still have to revise, and get feedback from my advisers, and then I have to defend, which should happen sometime in the spring. So someday I’ll have a job and you can finally be proud of me.”
She nodded eagerly. “We are all waiting for that day!”
And if they had said good night right then, perhaps the wine and the tea and the tasteful, cushioned room would have caressed them into, if not comfort, then acceptance.
But his mother then asked if Amy had found a job. She remembered that in Nairobi she had been waiting to hear the results of some interviews.
Sunil told her about his wife’s admirable position at the NIH, and how she was thriving there. She had recently been promoted and would soon have her name on a paper coauthored with her supervisor.
His mother appeared confused. “NIH is here in DC, isn’t it? But you are in Boston. Wait, you have been there all alone? Without your wife?” She was getting upset. “Where is the support? She should be with you!”
It was well intentioned, he told himself—she was concerned about his welfare. Yet her words only revived her dismissal of Amy in Nairobi. Sleeping dog to jackal. “It’s just temporary,” Sunil explained. “I’m the one who let her down. She needed to come here to get a good job.”
Urmila threw up her hands. “Yes, I know something about difficult people, people for whom the job is everything, the job is life, and so this is why I am urging you to think again about your choice of wife. It is not too late! You need more than someone who runs away at the first difficulty. I have known this about you your whole life.” Her feet shushed agitatedly across the plush carpet, her nose wrinkling, her voice growing louder and more adamant.
“Mom, please at least be quiet,” he urged. “I don’t want the Kauffmans to hear you. What you’re saying is unkind and untrue. And I want you to respect my decision. And to respect Amy.”
But his mother had only been gathering momentum. Something had set her loose and Sunil could do nothing but watch her unwind. How many times had his father done the same? “I am warning you. Because I wish I had known this about myself, about him,” she continued. “I wish I had not been duped. You know they said he was perfect, not one flaw! Why did they not tell me about his cold side? His always-out-of-the-house side.”
“Think of all Dad did for you,” he said, his voice thickening, coming up in volume. “Beyond the stupid pots and pans, think about the store. The biggest and best example of his caring for you. You told him that having a store was your dream, and he agreed to help you.”
“It was a good investment!”
“No, Mom, it wasn’t. That’s the point. Dad helped you not because it was prudent, but again, because he wanted you to be happy.” He put his head in his hands. This was supposed to be his area of expertise, and yet he could not even convince his own mother how important it was to make motives clear—to do right because it was right. Because he himself was convinced—if not on paper, if not in theory, then in action: he knew how he ought to live his life.
“I just want to be clear about one thing. Amy didn’t abandon me. I encouraged her to take a job here because I love her. Just like Dad sacrificed for you. I don’t know how to put it any other way.”
His mother was silent, her shushing feet slowed. She looked at him through her large glasses, the metal sidepieces shining through her brittle, dark hair. “Naa,” she said, shaking her head. “He set me up for failure. And I will not hold back in telling you that the same will happen to you if you keep up this dream of being married to someone who doesn’t understand us.”
“What are you saying? Are you telling me to get divorced?”
“What is the big deal? You are American first and foremost you always say, and the Americans do it all the time.”
He felt the furnishings in the room fall away. Sunil stood, leaving his place beside his mother, and taking a seat on the couch opposite. The jazz was still playing, a sax solo, and it thinned his nerves further. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. She was forcing him to choose. He said quietly, enunciating every word, “That’s the last time you give me an ultimatum. And the last time you talk that way about Amy. When you’re ready to apologize, you let me know. Until then, I don’t know how we can have anything more than a superficial relationship. But maybe that’s enough for you.” He shrugged. “It will have to be enough for me.” This last utterance had exhausted him, and he lay down sideways on the couch. His ear pressed again the cushion, which mercifully subdued the jazz, his mother’s spiky bre
athing.
She had made it clear she did not believe in her own fallibility, in apologies, and so he would never know if she was sorry for anything, or if she ever meant what she said. And that was a terrible thing to consider.
A moment later his mother was waving a piece of paper near his shoulder. “I almost forgot this. I want you to have it.” It was a check for a thousand dollars.
He could not take money from her; he was sure she did not have enough for herself. “You keep it,” he insisted. “You’ll need it for your new life.”
Sunil barely ate anything at dinner. Urmila had begged fatigue and an early flight and had gone up to her room. The Kauffmans talked among themselves. He couldn’t bear to tell Amy about the disappointment, the fracture, that had come of the meeting she had planned out of love. He excused himself before dessert and went upstairs to lie down. Sometime later, he heard Amy talking to someone. His mother. They were both in the adjacent guestroom.
Sunil crept out of bed and put his ear to the wall.
“You’re crying,” he heard his mother say.
Amy had not been crying at dinner.
“I was.” A pause. Then, “When you wrote me asking if Sunil had received the envelope, I invited you here. I risked a lot for you. And there’s something I deserve to know. Why didn’t you apologize for telling him to go away, that he didn’t belong to you? You’re here, so you obviously didn’t mean it.”
“‘Open your mouth and flies will enter,’” Urmila said. “This is what my mother always told me. “Too much talk is no good. Don’t you say that actions speak louder than words? And I am here! I came here.” There was a rustle of bedclothes, a creak in the floor. Downstairs dishes clinked into the dishwasher. “No one can say that that my heart is not in the right place.”
“I think I can say that.”
Sunil inhaled and held his breath. When his mother spoke, he could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “If you think it is so important, you can tell him I feel regret. I do feel it. But what does it matter? He will never change his view of me. When you are old and abandoned by everyone, you will understand.”
The next morning she was gone, up in the air. What she left behind was a neat pile of boxes filled with Maasai jewelry, soapstone candlesticks, batik wall hangings, and rusted knives sheathed in stiff leather.
He looked out Amy’s bedroom window onto rain-splattered leaves. The sun had just come up, which was a relief because he’d been awake for hours already. The lengths to which Amy had gone to help him astonished and humbled him. Feeling the immensity of her love and effort, his hip weighed against the windowsill, and he pressed it harder until he felt a slow bruise blooming around the bone. Rays of sunlight began to angle through the tree outside the window, warming the side of his face. The forecast promised several days of Indian summer.
When Amy yawned and said, “What time is it?” he pulled up a chair beside her bed and kissed her warm forehead. He said, “I have to tell you something.” He told her then, in as straight a manner as he could, exactly how his dissertation had come to be written. Unabridged, unlike the rendition he’d given his friends—he’d told them about the kiss but not about how sick he’d been, not how Rivka had found him shriveled on the floor.
“It sounds like you needed her,” Amy said uneasily. “You needed an intervention, like a drug addict.” Users and recidivists were a group she knew well, though she did not say this. “I couldn’t have done what she did. I don’t have the tools.”
“And you shouldn’t have to. This was my fault, not yours.”
“I know,” she said. “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel awful. But do you want to keep seeing her? I mean, beyond her role as your adviser?” He saw her prepare herself for the worst, the final withdrawal, and it eviscerated him.
“No,” he said. “Not at all. I only want you.”
She reached out and pulled him into bed, with all her strength, under the covers in all his clothes.
After breakfast the four of them piled in the car and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. Monica was already at the library, studying. Sunil stood before the thirty-six columns and the inscribed Gettysburg Address and inhaled the damp, staggering lawn. In the afternoon, the zoo. Straight to the primates—the baboons and gorillas—where Amy said, with a soft touch on his arm, “A different kind of safari, isn’t it?”
Gravel under his feet, glass panes between them and the animals, monkey-shaped stuffed toys and balloons for sale—nothing was the same. He said, “Now that I know that my father was already dead while we were on the plains, looking for rhinos, those days feel impossible. Like I made them up in order not to think about him.”
“They were real,” Amy said firmly. “We had a wonderful time.”
He knew this. Sometimes he could summon their joy, and he fed off morsels of recalled elation. As they watched the tufted orangutans now, all Sunil could think was how they could best be together. Stay together. He would go back to Cambridge, back to his hovel, and grit his teeth through the rest of the semester, sitting in on seminars, revising his dissertation, preparing for his defense and to teach in the spring. He wanted to ditch his paralyzing fellowship for the living work of the classroom. Amy encouraged this plan. She would stay put, too, at least until the summer. Commuting the next nine months would not be easy, but they thought they could do it.
Sunil watched one orangutan, off in the corner of his artificial world, sullenly stare at his own reflection in the glass. Reach an arm toward the glossy image then bare his teeth. With rubbery fingers, he plucked things off the ground and threw them down at an increasingly rapid rate.
For years Sunil had tried to exile his parents from his private life, to separate his problems with them from what he desired and loved most. And yet his mother had still landed herself squarely in the middle of the only relationship that had ever spoken to him of the future. The threat had been real, but it had not toppled them.
Behind them the orangutan screeched. The day was warming up, and Sunil’s back and wrists prickled with sweat. He submitted to a bench. David sat beside him and clasped his clean, lean hands in his lap. Crossed his runner’s legs. Love each other he’d once said to them, before Amy had met anyone in Sunil’s family, when she knew only what he’d told her about where he came from. “What about your brother? Will you keep up with him?” David asked.
“I hope so. I think about him a lot now.”
“That’s no small thing.”
“I do know that. I absolutely do.” Despite last night, despite the loss of his father, who still haunted the margins of his vision, Sunil felt his world to be larger now. Even if it was an uncertain one that caused his head to buzz, his knees to twang.
The women now flanked them at the bench, Ariel beside David and Amy beside Sunil. Their palms touched their husbands’ shoulders.
“I’m sorry it went badly yesterday,” Ariel said. “But I hope you can see that we all thought there was a chance it would do everyone good.”
“It was a long shot,” Amy admitted.
Sunil gave a sad laugh and pressed his palm to his wife’s face. “But we need long shots for breakthroughs, too, right?” Because in the world they had created for themselves, the success or failure of this particular experiment didn’t matter to their future. What mattered was that they paid attention; that even their mistakes were motivated by love.
15.
Her relatives did their best. They brought small, welcoming presents: a battery-operated radio for blackouts, a new silk scarf, embroidered slippers, a coupon for a new hair salon. “Treat yourself!” they said. But Sarada said, “The sooner you are used to not being coddled and treated like a guest, the better.” Urmila exchanged frequent emails with Maddy, who promised to visit Kenya someday, as soon as she could afford the ticket and to leave her shop for a couple of weeks. As long as the weather in Columbus was dry and not too cold, the
workers could continue constructing the greenhouse. There were a dozen different seedlings she wanted ready for sale by Easter.
When Maddy had told her to accept her family’s kindness, Urmila said, “May this never happen to you.”
To the Kauffmans, whom she had promised to call when she’d settled in, she was breezy, maybe, but also true: You know what they say about Africa? The dirt never washes off your heels.
For weeks she resisted Sarada’s entreaties to join the morning meditation class, but finally they drove the few blocks to the Oshwal Centre, and Urmila smiled weakly at the women she recognized in the candle-lit room. She sat on the cushion as she was told, piling the blankets high under her seat to avoid compression in her joints, but soon her knees pulsed violently, and staring at the black insides of her eyelids made her dizzy. She thought she would faint. She left Sarada to finish on her own, and for thirty minutes she walked in circles around the cinder trail in the sports yard. Before she left USA, the doctor had given her medicine for high blood pressure and instructed her to take two walks per day.
Her husband had tried walking in this city, and look what happened to him.
What would do her the most good, she thought as she circled, pebbles lodging in her shoes, was seeing her son and granddaughter. She craved the girl. Saw Bimal’s face on the young men in TV movies. But she had not asked about seeing him, had not even inquired for news. In another month she would reach out to Bimal, once she had been reabsorbed into the fabric of this place. And she would write to her Amerikana just to tell him she missed him and wish him good luck on what came next—at the moment, she could not remember. A breeze picked up and cooled the back of her neck. Beyond the high walls of the Oshwal Centre hung laundry strung between smog-stained sandstone.
Today Urmila was home alone. She opened the novel she had bought with one of her welcoming coupons, but the street noise in the front room was too distracting to read. Something jostled at the edge of her hearing, and she peered nervously out the windows at the front of the house. There was nothing to see through the hedges. She circled to the back and watched the sister, the tall one living in the far shack, scold her younger brother. He immediately started to bawl, so she picked him up, sighing, and kissed his tears. The young woman seemed to sense that she was being watched because she looked pointedly toward the house. Urmila hastened back to her chair and sat, unreading, unmoving, with her feet up. Then the doorbell rang.
The Limits of the World Page 26