Mital wore a new turquoise sari, her hair pulled back in the same severe way as always. Face still long and horse-plain. The two women had not spoken since Premchand’s funeral. But now here she stood, empty-handed, unembarrassed, as if there had never been any disagreement. She inquired about Urmila’s health. Could she accustom herself to this Kenyan life after such a long time in America?
“All going very smoothly. Of course there are many modern conveniences that I miss. Not things you would notice if you never had them.” Then she swallowed her pride and invited her sister-in-law to stay for tea. While the milk warmed, Mital apologized for the cloudy days.
“I think the weather has been fine.” Urmila found cups and saucers and spoons and made the tea very strong and very sweet. There was a tin of biscuits that she brought to the table, where Mital waited patiently, as if this had been an afternoon ritual for years. After some moments of silence, thinking of nothing else to say, wondering if there was something flawed and idiotic about them all living so close together with their mixed-up problems, Urmila finally said, “And how is your son?”
“Like you, he says he thinks the change will be for the better. He is looking forward to all the new opportunities.”
“Change?”
“You didn’t hear the news? He has a new job in America, a place they call the research triangle in the Carolinas. He left the day before you arrived.”
Urmila sipped the scalding tea, trying not to choke on her dismay. “I see. When you next speak to him, please pass along my regards.”
16.
[7 h: 35 m]
I will read you just this bit from the newspaper. “Asians in Kenya, to talk from experience, are very tribalistic. Just try to enter their temples or mosques, impossible because of the rungu-wielding askari. I have a friend who is very much in love with an Asian girl. Why is he not allowed to see her? Why can she not ride the bus with him?”
This is a laugh, don’t you think, in this tribalistic country? We welcome anyone to visit our temples, as long as they observe that they are sacred places. I would not demand entrance to some Christmas ceremony without first knowing about it. Why does the Golden Rule not here apply?
We have certain rules of respect and purity, grandsons. Alcohol is not bad because it makes you drunk—though this is a big problem—but because it causes unnecessary life through fermentation. Ease happens between people who have grown up in the same culture. Don’t you think this is so? Those one or two who have married English women, we have accepted them with all our hearts. But it takes getting used to. Each side has to give.
After so many years, it is tiresome still to account for ourselves. All we have ever asked for is a little freedom. To be allowed our lives according to our beliefs. To take care of our souls; each man to try and rid himself of the karma tying him to the physical world and the cycle of life and death. The ascetics rid their karma by practicing austerities. This perhaps is not so practical for all of us, but we do aspire. Our people are so far away from things that few ascetics come to visit, and our idols are unconsecrated, but we get along with our lay community. My father was not a very religious man, but he read his sacred texts each morning in front of the shrine with the murti of Mahavira.
Do you know, grandsons, when the ascetics achieve enlightenment, karma drops away and the soul is released—never to be dirtied again? But no divine being can help emancipate your soul—no short-cutting. Only you can do this. And this emancipation is only possible when happiness and unhappiness in the world are balanced.
Stay now, you here, share our food, and watch some cricket with me. I enjoy watching the most when there is someone at my side.
17.
Douglas Berman’s beard was gnarled and hung to his chest, but his hair was recently cut. His shirt untucked but not overly wrinkled. Sunil had last seen DD-36 outside the library in mid-summer, the last vision Sunil had wished to encounter after ingeniously squandering several hours walking between the stacks, chewing off the end of a pen, while his wife worked eight hours at Blue Cross. Perhaps that was why, as Berman approached their table, Sunil joked to his friends about a phantom white shell buried in the hair below the man’s chin.
“And I thought we were gathered here to reboot your normal condescension,” Andrew said. “Apparently our services are not needed.”
“He finishes one dissertation and poof!” Erik said.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Sunil said. He had drunk too much. He felt he was still decompressing from the months of caffeinated thinking and typing, and the emotional crucible of DC. He had promised Amy he’d take good care of himself, and he would. He would continue to walk everywhere, eat three times a day. He just needed some downtime with his friends.
“Libation, old sport?” Erik asked Berman, who accepted the plastic cup of yellow beer.
Berman said, “I saw you all walk in here on my way to the talk, three hours ago. Sunil, you should have come. It was in your bailiwick.”
“I’m off this semester.”
“Never off,” Berman said. “That’s the first thing I learned. Philosophy is a worm that burrows inside you. Dormancy is the most you can hope for.”
“So what did Morgan have to say?” Andrew asked.
Sunil was too tired, too distracted by the thought that in Berman he was staring at a very nearly missed future, to pay close attention, but he did notice that in a few short sentences Berman had laid out the speaker’s argument, then demolished it with an objection. It had been so long since he’d had an actual conversation with Berman. He’d forgotten how precisely and clearly he spoke—an ambassador of the short, declarative sentence. And as Berman talked on, Sunil thought that if this haggard, hangdog, arrogant, sorry excuse for a graduate student could marshal his resources so quickly and impressively, Sunil, too, had to press confidently on. His defense was scheduled for April.
“Let me ask you something, Berman,” Sunil said. “You’re an awfully smart guy. Why the fuck are you still here?”
Berman drank the warm beer and dispassionately eyed the waitress as she squeezed past him with a loaded tray of scavenged dishes on her shoulder. He stole a fried potato wedge off a plate of demolished food.
“Being a critical philosopher isn’t so hard,” Berman said, gesturing with the wedge. “Taking down other people’s positions. What’s hard is building up a positive view, something creative that explains what others haven’t. I guess I’m still searching for that. I’ll keep trying until I find it. What else is there?” Berman was a seeker, Sunil realized. From beneath his beard pushed a smile, and his shoulders shrugged, meaning, yes, this task might take the rest of his life.
Yes, that was right. And for the first time, this thought was freeing. Sunil had been approved to teach in the spring. His fellowship had been given to a Pakistani-American grad student named Ahmed. Sunil had another shot at forward.
Sunil slid over, making room for Berman. But their bearded friend turned around now and left the bar, tossing his cup in the garbage at the door, as if he had better places to be.
Sunil shopped for a few items every day, a few small reasons to get out of the house. He did not clean the apartment with soap and water, but every night after heating his dinner he straightened up a little. Recycled old papers, cleared the dust off the TV, aligned the kitchen table neatly against the wall, folding cardboard under the short leg as he had seen Amy do in their old apartment. The mornings were cool, and he resumed his walks to Dunkin’ Donuts. He’d expected some of the younger, college-aged staff to turn over once the school year started, but they hadn’t. One guy with a horse tattoo on his neck said it was nice to see him again, and Sunil said, gratefully, “And you.”
There were a few brilliant leaves left on the trees, slumped scarecrows hanging on in front yards, but the wind these days had an arctic undercurrent, and Sunil wore a hat in the mornings. The days grew shorte
r and they set the clocks back. One brisk afternoon, Sunil walked the four miles from Emerson Hall to his apartment just to prove that he could.
He called Amy every night at eight. Sometimes she was home, and sometimes she was out, still at work, Ariel said, or having dinner with her sister or her colleagues. Ariel suggested he try her new cell phone, but he could wait. He was not going anywhere, and neither was she.
One morning in the Maasai Mara, Sunil and Amy had made a mistake. Waiting for a young herder to cross the road with his bony cattle—trademark red cloth hung over his shoulder, gaze hard yet passive—Amy had pushed her camera out the window.
The herder had turned and run toward them, shouting, wielding his club, threatening, darkly silhouetted against the golden plains. Kioko, in his calm, round voice, explained you had to pay for pictures, but he arranged for them to make it up when they visited the herder’s village.
After paying their debt to the Maasai, late in the afternoon they’d crept alongside a wild and burnished pride of lions, seven or eight adult females and a handful of fully, incredibly maned males, whiskers thick as rope. They stretched and rolled and padded from one spot to another, releasing long glistening tongues and dull roars. Shockingly at ease. They belonged utterly to that place, to the grasses and cracked earth.
That night Rawley told them that there were lions around the camp. Purity had verified. “But do not allow that Mr. Rawley scares you,” she said.
“Now do we believe it?” Amy had asked Sunil. Did they believe in the man-eating lions?
Her look of genuine curiosity. Her patience. Their joint consideration of what to believe.
“Yes and no,” he’d said.
Me too, she’d said, me too.
One night Sunil met Rivka Lieberman for coffee at a busy café off the square. She would be taking a job at Hebrew University next year. Her father was weakening, and she wanted to be closer to him.
One night, Sunil fell asleep on the couch watching TV and woke up in the morning to the ringing phone. He answered immediately.
His accented name, exclaimed with enthusiasm. “I am so happy to hear your voice!” After a pause, “You don’t recognize me. Because I’m so much stronger now.”
“Bimal?”
“You remember you have a brother? At least a cousin-brother?”
“Is my mother okay? What time is it there?”
“She is fine, I think. But I am here, in your city. I’m inviting you to lunch today. Can you meet me in Harvard Square at one o’clock?” Bimal named the restaurant where the department took candidates after job talks.
Sunil dressed hastily and fretted while he waited for the T, regretting he hadn’t sprung for a cab. He kept checking his pockets, wondering what he might have forgotten. He had not had time to shave, and his jaw was thick with stubble. Bimal wore a suit, and Sunil felt embarrassed arriving without a jacket. The last time he’d eaten on a white tablecloth was the day he and Amy married. Six months had blinked by.
All the tables were packed. The brick-colored walls resounded with talk. Sunil balanced on a high wire, nervous and excited. Look at them—brothers! The scar tracing from Bimal’s eye to his chin had faded to pink. It was a line that would always remind Sunil of the place that sliced time into before and after.
“I am looking recovered, yes? Not the invalid you saw. Or even the one with the cane at the funeral.” He ordered bottled water for the table. Bimal explained how quickly and surprisingly the job offer had come in and they’d moved—all in three weeks. “I think you were the inspiration. You are such an American cheerleader.”
Sunil said how healthy he looked, how glad he was to see him. “But I thought you liked Nairobi. And Sheetal, doesn’t she miss her family?”
Between tastes of tomato soup, Bimal said, “Nairobi is a very fine place to live. Nice community and good business contacts. Family is there, of course. But Raina is so smart, we want her to have the best education, and education is the best in America—the most options, the least cost, especially if you have residency for state schools.” He set down his spoon. “I don’t mean to bring bad memories, but the death of Premchand Fua was a great shock. Raising children, you want someplace safe. America has violence, but it is a big country—just as you said.” His hands rested on the table, his fingers slender like their father’s, gold wedding ring catching and throwing the light. Sunil fingered his own ring in his lap. If he closed his eyes, he could hear in Bimal something of their father’s voice, its taut instructional quality, which Sunil had always found comforting. Bimal added shyly, “And we are not alone. You are here. And I think we can be good friends. Don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” Over the past months, in the moments when Sunil had expected to be most in control, directing his own work, he’d been powerless. Bimal, on the other hand, had executed something radical and impressive out of disruption and trauma.
How did you grow a brother as an adult? What could they learn from each other? What could they give and what should they take? Well, they would discover.
After dessert, they walked down Brattle Street. Bimal, something of a dandy, Sunil realized, wound a scarf, pulled on a wool hat, and tugged his hands into snug leather gloves. Walked the mild Cambridge streets with confidence, alert, taking everything in. Sunil tried to see things from a foreigner’s point of view: the smooth stones under their feet, the shiny storefronts and clean window glass, the disarming variety of people. Clumps of pigeons ravaging a crust of bread, though there was nothing so local in that. Bimal had been around the world, far more places than Sunil had ever dreamed of visiting.
“Listen, there is something I have been meaning to tell you. Those tapes I forced on you at the funeral. Nana addressed them to both of us. I think he knew his mind was getting weak, and he wanted his story told, especially to his American grandson.”
Though Sunil had been careful to move the tapes to his new apartment, he was embarrassed that he’d forgotten all about them in the last several months. “To both of us?” Sunil felt a jolt. “I had no idea. But I can’t understand them.”
“Hakuna matata,” Bimal said with a lopsided smile. “We will translate them together.”
That night, Sunil called his wife on her cell phone. She didn’t answer, but over three messages he unspooled the whole story of his afternoon. The strange reassurance he’d felt just walking down the street together. Sunil wanted to confirm Thanksgiving, that he’d spend it with the Kauffmans—maybe Bimal and his family would come, too—but he had already gone on too long. He ended by saying, simply, “There’s more, love. So much more.” Which she already knew.
18.
When Urmila was a girl, once or twice her father had borrowed a car and driven to the game park outside the city. In those days it was informal, you hired a local guide at the gate, a man with a gun, and he drove you around. She had loved all the animals, but most of all the antelope. They were nimble and beautiful and never alone. Out there, under the wide sun, she felt such relief from the city and the bazaar. To be out in the wild where the beasts roamed free and dangerous was a thrill she had remembered all her life.
She had the day off from helping Gopal in his store, expanding the souvenir section. She’d been dismayed to realize she had to deal with the suppliers she’d spurned, the fat president and his son, but she managed. Whenever they made a mistake, she recorded it. In time she would report to her brother. Today she would have beauty and space. Just go and enjoy. There was something uplifting about these sun-scorched plains.
In traffic, the driver had tried talking with her, first in Swahili, then in English. But it was her day, and she was not obliged to be polite. Small talk was for tourists. At the Langata Road entrance, he escorted her to a Jeep with big tires and open sides. The new driver lifted and spread his hands and explained that from the back seat she could stand and look three hundred and sixty degrees.
&nb
sp; Vast sky was what she was expecting, and yet her breath caught to see the stretching, stretching world. For miles and miles rolled away grasses and trees until they were too far to see. She could almost see her childhood, that’s how vast it was. Because from within the park you saw the animals against the backdrop of the city, its skyline of scrapers big and small.
First, the scampering Thomson’s gazelles.
“No camera, madam?”
“No.” She lived here now—again. No need for pictures.
The guide pointed to the small herd. “Always they are watching for predators. The plains are very dangerous place.”
“Life is dangerous,” she said. She had bought two lion postcards at the gift shop and would send one each to Sunil and Bimal, her American sons.
As they drove, the guide told her the names of trees and plants, but she was here to watch the things that moved. Soon giraffes appeared. The Jeep slowed, crept along, and she craned her neck up and up and up and thought that her gaze would never reach the top. Way up in the sky, the giraffes circled their jaws.
“Where are the elephants?” Last week Lillian Ross had emailed to report the death of her husband. The ivory elephants had been on the shelf beside his bed until the end.
“Very sorry, madam. No elephants in the park. Too small. For elephants you must visit Sambura, Meru, Tsavo East—”
“Yes, yes, okay, I understand,” she said, but she was disappointed.
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