by Leena Clover
“None,” I admitted.
“You see? Now look on both sides!” he ordered.
The Episcopal Church came up on the right and then an empty lot and a thrift store. There was what seemed to be an apartment building on the left and an empty lot. I wrote down the numbers of two more buildings that seemed liked apartments as Tony turned left on Birch.
I jotted down two more house numbers. Luckily, a huge parking lot spanned the entire block on the right. This time, Tony made a left on 4th. I eliminated the single family houses and the churches, and got nothing on this street. After making another loop, we were back on 5th. Two more churches and empty lots, and three big buildings were noted.
“Looks like we have a wide variety of churches, all a few yards of each other. Never knew that!” Tony smiled.
“Only one vertical run now,” he promised.
We finished that quickly, mostly coming across a grocery store, the Chinese Mission and a deserted house which I decided to cross off.
Tony pulled to a side and read the notes I had.
“I know guys who live in a couple of these.” Tony crossed two more houses off the list. “And I think I saw kids' toys and bikes in front of three of these. So they certainly don't belong to students.”
He struck three more names off.
“Where does that leave us?” I asked.
“There are 5-6 apartment buildings here. Let's start with the ones closer to 6th.” Tony suggested.
“Makes sense. But can we eliminate any more?”
Tony thought for a moment and shook his head. “I think we will have to talk to people now and ask them. I know. Let's split up. You take 5th, and I will take 4th. That way, we'll save time.”
We headed off in opposite directions.
I paused in front of a small frame house that seemed to be done up in apartments. A guy with a backpack walked up to it and took a key out of his pocket.
“Excuse me! Can I ask you something?”
“Sure. What’s up?” he said in a friendly tone.
“I’m looking for an Indian girl, a new girl this semester. Does she live in this house, by any chance?”
“There's 6 apartments here, but no Indian girls as far as I know,” he volunteered. “Only one of these is occupied by foreign students, and they are Chinese or Korean. Certainly not Indian, far as I can tell.”
I was about to turn away, but I persisted. “Thanks! But have you seen a girl in ethnic dress and a long plait around here?”
He brightened.
“Oh! I remember her. I’ve seen her a couple of times around here somewhere, sure. But no idea where she lives, dude.”
“Thanks a ton!”
I struck one more place off my list.
I saw Tony walking toward me.
“Back already?” I was surprised.
“No foreign students in one house. One of them had Malaysian and Nigerian students but no Indians. Another building has a lot of Indian students but all guys. They did mention seeing someone who looked like Jyothi around here, though.”
I was excited.
“We’re getting warmer. Another guy I talked to said he saw someone like Jyothi around here somewhere too.”
We walked up to a big red building on the corner. Doors were numbered 1 to 10, and clearly this was an apartment building. A bunch of bikes chained out front, and the typical battered student cars parked outside indicated that this was another student abode. A couple walked up, bags of takeout from KFC in their hands, sipping sodas from giant cups. They seemed to be busy cuddling each other. I nudged Tony and pushed him toward them. The girl took one look at Tony and giggled. Tony did the hand shake thing with the guy and spoke a few words. Then there was some backslapping and Tony was back with a smile on his face.
“Well, they think there are some Indian girls in two of these. But they say there’s another apartment building two houses down. I think that's the last one on our list.”
“So do you want to look here first, or go to that one?” I was impatient.
“Let's see if we can catch anyone outside over there. I think I see a bunch of people sitting out.”
We walked to the next corner and came upon a bunch of kids who were deep into an argument, busy passing a cigarette around. There were some girls among them and they all looked brown skinned.
It was my turn now.
"Excuse me,” I said, gagging on the smoke, trying not to show it.
“Hi! I’m Meera. I am looking for an Indian girl who lives around here somewhere. I wonder if you've seen her?”
They looked at me and exchanged glances.
“Do you have a name?” one of the girls asked. “There's a dozen ‘Indian girls’ living around here.”
Apparently, she had taken some objection to my question.
“Jyothi Sudhakaran! She is new this semester.”
“Oh Jyothi! Now why didn't you say that before?” the girl said. “Haven't seen her recently. At least, not since that big fight.”
I sincerely hoped they were not talking about Thursday Night Smackdown.
“Do you know where she lives?” I ventured, hesitantly.
The girl rolled her eyes.
“Of course, the last door in this row, Number 5,” she pointed. “The one where you see that pumpkin light.”
I glanced in the direction she was pointing and noticed the plastic pumpkin shaped lantern someone had placed outside a door.
I thanked the girl and pulled Tony along. My heart was racing and I was trying not to get my hopes up. But maybe, I was finally about to discover something about Jyothi Sudhakaran. At this point, I would take the smallest tidbit.
Chapter 23
There was a light inside and a slight flickering indicated the TV was on. I knocked on the door and stood back.
“Use your key, Ruby!” someone yelled from inside.
I knocked again, this time a bit more strongly.
“Who is it?” The voice yelled again, clearly disgruntled.
I looked at Tony and he raised his eyebrows. There was no way we could shout our identity through a closed door.
I waited a couple of minutes and knocked again. Some choice swear words were uttered and footsteps came toward the door. The door was jerked open and a girl peered out, an irritated look on her face. She looked us up and down, and we did the same. Standing barely five feet, the little hellion was dressed in hacked off shorts and a tank top. Her hair was cut pixie style and it was shocking pink. She glared at us.
“Whaddaya want?”
“That's a nice welcome,” I muttered.
“Look, Gilmore Girls is on, and like, I don't wanna miss it. So spit it out already!”
I realized this was the new serial on WB. Becky and I had seen a couple of episodes but missed it later. It was aired on Mondays and was getting popular.
“My name is Meera!” I held out my hand.
The girl stood with a hand on her hip.
“So?”
Just then, another girl walked up the drive. She stopped to say Hi to the smokers and came toward us. She was dressed casually in Jeans and a Pioneer Poly T-shirt, with a heavy backpack slung over her shoulders.
“What's the matter?” she wanted to know.
“Finally! Take care of these folks, Ruby!” the other girl ordered. “I don't wanna miss Gilmore Girls.”
She went in and sat on a couch, turning the volume of the TV higher.
“Sorry about that,” the other girl apologized.
She seemed to be the reasonable one.
“I am Ruby Singh. And that's Durga Bose. Don't mind her. She just turned in a big project today and wants to crash in front of the TV.”
I reassured her we didn’t mind.
“Oh no, no problem at all. We just wondered if we could talk to you about something.”
“Sure, what's up?” Ruby asked.
“I'm Meera Patel, and this is my friend Tony.”
We did the round of handshakes.
“I’m trying to look for Jyothi Sudhakaran. Does she live here?”
Ruby Singh sighed.
“I guess.”
“What does that mean?” Tony asked. “Either she does or she doesn't.”
“Look, I'm pretty tired. I've had a long day. Can we discuss this later?” Ruby tried some evasive tactics.
I persisted.
“Actually, this is pretty urgent. I think it best that we talk this out now.”
Ruby pushed open the door and invited us in. She flung her backpack on a side table and told us to sit.
“Please give me a few minutes to freshen up.”
We sat on a small loveseat, and Tony put his arm around the back. The apartment was decorated in the thrift store meets Salvation Army style, but at least it had all the basic elements. Durga Bose glared at us. We ignored her.
A girl in a blue plaid skirt driving a Jeep came up against a deer on the screen. The deer dented the Jeep and ran off. The girl went in shock.
Ruby came out, her face freshly scrubbed. She poured a packet of potato chips into a bowl and set it in front of us. Then she popped open three cans of Coke from the refrigerator and handed them to us without a word.
“Believe me, you're gonna need these if you want to talk about Jyothi!”
“Can I watch TV for just a few minutes?” Pink Hair fumed.
“Simmer down, Durga! They want to talk about Jyothi. You can switch off the TV or mute it and switch on captioning.”
The girl meekly put the TV on Mute.
“What is your interest in Jyothi?” Ruby Singh asked, taking a sip of Coke.
Tony put his arm over my shoulder, silently supporting me. I decided to come clean.
“Well, it's like this. She came to me a couple of times asking for a job. I couldn't help her and I explained but she didn't get it. Now the cops are thinking I argued with her and had something to do with her disappearance.”
I gave a whittled down version to the girls and asked, “First of all, is she really missing?”
Ruby and Durga looked at each other.
“Well, we don't know. She's not here for sure. We think she got her own apartment.”
“Another apartment? But I thought the first one over at the university apartments was the temp one, and this was her own.”
I was puzzled. How many times had this girl changed houses?
“She did come to live with us mid-August,” Ruby admitted. “There's four of us. Durga and I are in our last semester, and Jyothi and another girl, Richa Patil, are new.”
“Go on,” I nodded.
“Jyothi was the most, how do you say, 'ethnic' of us all. She comes from a village in India and has never watched an English movie, for example.”
“She's never heard of The Titanic, or Michael Jackson,” Durga Bose volunteered, finally losing interest in the TV set and joining our conversation.
“I think she felt the culture shock most of all. She kept to herself, wanted to use her own plates and glasses and stuff. She wanted us to not eat eggs!” Ruby said.
I recollected Jyothi Sudhakaran and her high cast spiel.
“That's not possible in communal living, you know?” Durga Bose was getting warm. “I mean, a Bengali like me not eat fish, all for that puny girl? Not gonna happen!”
Ruby Singh supported her.
“Yeah! And you can't take a Singh girl away from her chicken.”
“Was that the only problem? Diet choices?” I asked diplomatically.
“Oh no! It was the tip of the iceberg. She didn't get a job because she had so many conditions. We told her to grab the cafeteria job but she let that slide. Then I was going to get her one at the Custodial Services, but she turned that down too.”
Durga added. “She pinned all her hopes on a job at the library. She insisted she had an 'in' there, and there was an Indian lady there who was gonna give her a job.”
“Actually, I am that lady.”
I explained how Jyothi had come around repeatedly to talk to me.
“Ohhh! But you're not Indian, are you?” Ruby Singh inspected me more closely.
“Actually, yes and no,” I told them. “I'm American but my name is Patel.”
“Go on,” Tony nudged the girls in the right direction.
“She wouldn't pay rent. Nor the electricity bills or the heating bills. She said she didn't use any of it. How stupid is that?”
“Yeah Dude! And the same for the phone line! We're all on a tight budget. We can't afford the utilities unless they are divided by four.”
“I understand,” I sympathized with them.
Splitting all the bills was a given when you had roomies.
“Then what happened?” I asked Ruby to go on.
“Well, we waited almost two months. She didn't pay up. So we told her to go.”
“Go where?” Tony asked.
“Look for another place,” Ruby said. “If she's not gonna pay the rent, we'll at least live more comfortably.”
Part of me thought it sounded callous, but the girls had a point. There was a certain code and everyone had to follow it. Why would anyone support a stranger?
“What about the fight?” Tony remembered what the group outside had mentioned.
“That had nothing to do with me!” Ruby crossed her arms and looked away.
We looked at Durga Bose, hoping for some enlightenment. She looked pissed. We didn't back down.
“Okay, Okay!” She sounded irritated. “It’s like this. I have a boyfriend. Who doesn't?” she asked, daring us to contradict her.
We nodded in agreement.
“Jyothi didn't like that he came here. We struck a truce. He wasn't allowed to be in the living room, definitely not when she was in.”
“So he came in and directly went to your room, right?” Tony grinned, his thoughts clearly written on his face.
I punched him in his arm.
“What?” he laughed out.
“No such luck, you guys!” Durga Bose said in disgust. “Jyothi did not approve of him being here at all. She kept banging pots or knocked on the door, made silly excuses to come into my room.”
I felt a giggle coming on but curbed it.
“Then one day, she ran smack into him as she was coming out of the bathroom. He was just stepping into my room. All hell broke loose. She screamed at us, threw a tantrum.”
Ruby nodded her head and supported Durga.
“I was there. It was quite ugly.”
“Jyothi called us all sorts of names, blamed our characters. She even blamed the break-in on us.”
“What break-in?” I was confused.
“It was in the paper,” Ruby supplied. “A couple of men, runaway thieves, broke into our house and trashed it. Jyothi cut herself on some broken glass.”
I remembered reading about the break-in.
“That was here too? My, you guys have had your share of action this year!”
I was amazed.
“But how's that connected with your boyfriend?” Tony asked Durga Bose. “Is he an ex-con?”
Durga Bose was furious.
“Don't even kid about it. That is just what Miss Jyothi Sudhakaran believed. She said we got attacked because I had a guy coming in. Something 'bout thieves thinking we had loose morals. Or some such rot.”
Tony shook his head. “Doesn't make a lot of sense.”
“Thank You!” Durga Bose waved her hands wildly. “Exactly my point. Nothing she did or said made any sense. She was a total whacko!”
“That's enough!” Ruby Singh glared at her roommate.
“So anyway, we told her to leave by September end, but no specific date was mentioned, you know. We thought she might cough up the money by then. Then we had this big scene, and we haven't seen her since. Most of her stuff is gone, and we thought she'd come back for the rest later. But she hasn't turned up yet.”
Chapter 24
I was chopping cauliflower for Aloo Gobhi, a simple potato cauliflower stir fry. Today's dinner
was going to be a typical Indian meal with roti bread, veggies, lentils and rice. Tony had dropped me off at the diner and I had picked up my car and headed home.
I was going over the conversation we had with Jyothi's roomies in my mind. I tried to imagine myself in her place. She was in a strange place, a new country actually, with no one to call a friend. She seemed to have problems with many aspects of the lifestyle. She didn't have money to pay rent. I wonder what she ate. Getting an ultimatum from the roomies to leave her apartment must have been a big blow. What would a person who was so desperate do? I shrugged away worst case scenarios. The police would check on that and find something, I was sure.
The Daal lentils bubbled on the stove and the rice cooker switch popped up with the auto shut off. I hit the dinner gong and set the table as everyone trooped in. Dad avoided looking at me.
Pappa looked at us and cleared his throat.
“What's new at work, Meera?” he asked.
“Nothing much!”
I wanted dinner to be over soon so I could talk to Dad. Or at least try to.
Jeet was discussing the merits of Stanford over Princeton.
“You're not in yet,” I reminded him.
“But he will be,” Motee Ba smiled fondly and pulled Jeet's cheeks.
They were all pretty confident he would have his pick of Ivy League schools.
Finally, the table was cleared and the dishwasher loaded. Pappa was settled in front of the TV, Motee Ba was on the phone gossiping with someone and Jeet was in his room with his headphones on, lost in some cacophony or other.
I took a deep breath and headed to Dad's study. He had retreated there and shut his door firmly as soon as dinner was done. I knocked, timidly at first. Then I knocked a bit louder. There was no response. Dad could probably tell it was me. I pushed the door open slowly and went in, shutting it behind me. Dad's chair was turned around with its back toward me.
“Dad,” I ventured. “Dad, can we please talk? I've come to say sorry.”
The chair turned around and Dad looked at me. He had an empty look in his eyes and his mouth drooped.
“Hmmm …” was all he said.
“I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean to say you let Mom go. I am sure you must've tried to find her. It's just, I was so young ...” I rushed ahead and stopped abruptly.