by Sonali Dev
In Paris, the flat he had rented had come furnished and, truth be told, he had barely ever been there except to sleep and shower. His time had been spent almost entirely at Andre’s. His sister had spent half that time in America and Emma’s clothes, bags, and shoes were taking up one entire room in his flat right now. And hats—who even wore hats anymore? What was this, Regency England?
The rest of her stuff took up the rest of the flat. Canvases—only a few, she had left most of those in storage at Green Acres. Easels—apparently one needed three different sizes and styles. Art supplies—scores of them. He would never have pegged his sister for a hoarder.
He had to admit the smell of paint suddenly made these rooms feel like the Southhall ones they had grown up in: ramshackle yet somehow safe. He’d loved how her paints mingled with the fresh paper she liked to make by hand. The mix smelled lush and earthy, almost like the dirt on vegetables before you washed it off. Like something life-giving and alive.
And there were books, two boxes of books. Absently, DJ picked up the one that lay on top of the nearest box. Persuasion—their mother’s copy. Through all her years of hard labor as a baggage handler at Heathrow airport he never remembered seeing Mum without a book on her person.
“If I didn’t read,” she had told him once, “I wouldn’t know how to believe that there was more to the world than this.”
Patti Bamina Caine was written in impeccable penmanship at the top of the first page that had yellowed with age. The “Caine” was written in a slightly different shade of blue ink. It had been added after she’d married Dad.
DJ stroked those careful letters that looked almost as perfect as a typeset font. Mum had come to England from Rwanda when she was twelve, but she had credited her mother for her perfect penmanship.
After her parents had been killed in the Rwandan revolution when the country made a violent transition from a Belgian colony to a republic, Patti’s aunt had sewn a pocket to the thigh of her pants and placed Patti’s mother’s single silver chain in there, along with some Rwandan francs, and put her on a plane with an Indian family fleeing to England. The francs had become completely useless once they had landed at Heathrow, but DJ knew Emma still had those currency notes tucked away in a music box in one of these boxes strewn around his floor. Emma had become the keeper of their few family heirlooms. DJ had done all he could to distance himself from them.
The less baggage you carried, the lighter you landed when you got thrown out on your arse.
The Indian family had kept Patti with them for a year and then they had decided to move on to America, and she had been left behind at St. Joan’s Home for Young Women, an orphanage for girls like her who had nowhere to go. There Patti had dreamed of going to university, maybe becoming a nurse and returning home. She had even received a scholarship to go to Queen Mary’s but it only covered a part of her university fees and she had no way of making up the rest. That was how, when she outgrew the orphanage at eighteen, she found herself working at the Rounder’s Rubber Plunger factory.
On her first day at the factory, James Caine had stepped on her toe and broken it. The man had immense feet, Mum always said. Over the nursing of her toe he had lost his heart—another immense appendage. He’d also lost his mind, if his family were to be believed.
James’s Anglo-Indian ancestors had migrated to England from India in the forties to get away from what Churchill was rumored to have called “rascals, rogues, and freebooters.” Once they had arrived in England, they had immediately gone to work on wiping away their brown half with the cleaning cloth of their lightish skin and the very British last name they had acquired from the cavalryman who had either fallen in love with or abducted—DJ had heard both stories—an Indian woman, DJ’s great-grandmother.
DJ’s grandfather had then married an Englishwoman (probably without telling her about his Indian lineage). The Caines had believed that they had removed the visible stain of brownness from the family line and been folded back into the bosom of their rightful heritage.
That was until James Caine, their pride and joy, with his very British factory job and his hazel eyes, had lost his mind and become mixed up with a refugee girl.
James’s father, who had diligently kept out of the sun for fifty years to prevent his Indian genes from making themselves shown, had been heartbroken enough to threaten to disown his only son if he married an “African gold digger”—not that there was any gold in sight in their Clapham neighborhood. It was a threat he and his wife had more than made good on.
Despite James’s disinterest in reconciling with his relatives, Patti had always craved a family. She had tried hard to coax James into winning his back. But when they had rejected her children, she’d decided James knew what he was doing and she’d given up on them too.
Had the accident not happened, she would never have regretted that decision. Had James lived past thirty-five, maybe he would have made up with his parents, or maybe he would have moved his wife and children out of the flat that, unknown to Patti, still belonged to James’s father on paper although James had paid it off and cared for it for years. If that had happened, the fact that James’s father deeded the flat to his daughter wouldn’t have mattered, and James’s sister would never have been able to throw her brother’s widow and children out into the street after his death.
As it turned out, Patti was forced to regret her decision when, for the second time in her life, she had found herself without a roof over her head, and in need of charity. Then Emma had forced her to swallow her pride, and after a few days of sleeping under the London sky, she had gone to St. Joan’s and sought help. With the help of their pastor, she had found herself a job lifting bags off belts at Heathrow and turned into the kind of mother who said to her children: “Your mum’s a baggage handler, but she’ll be damned if you don’t end up doctors and engineers.”
For all her efforts, it was yet another thing that had not gone Patti Bamina Caine’s way.
One of the other baggage handlers at Heathrow, Charan Singh, had a few rooms to let in his house in Southall. Southall was a suburb of London just east of the airport that felt like it was a few thousand miles east of London, all the way in the middle of the Indian state of Punjab with its open street bazaars and the smell of spiced meat cooking in clay tandoor ovens scenting the air.
The rent was low enough that Patti could just about afford it. But he had offered her an even better deal: if DJ, who had been twelve at the time, spent the afternoons and evenings watching Charan Singh’s epileptic mother, he would forgo the rent altogether. That meant DJ and Emma could go to a private school in Richmond.
So Patti had worked sixteen-hour days, eight at the airport and eight at a bookstore in Hounslow, and given her children the kind of education she believed would break them out of the cycle of poverty. DJ had hardly seen his mum during those years at Charan’s. He was aware of how much guilt she carried about not having been there for her children. Not that DJ had ever had the time to miss her presence. He had come home from school every day, started Emma off on her homework, and then taken care of Charan’s Ammaji.
Ammaji had seizures a few times a month. It was only alarming that first time he’d witnessed it. She’d collapsed as if in slow motion, the white cotton of her loose kameez and salwar pants billowing around her before settling in a cotton cloud around her spasming body.
With nothing more than the slightest deepening of his always furrowed brow, Charan Singh had shown DJ how to push a piece of rubber into her open mouth as her limbs stiffened and shook without pause and her eyes turned up in her head. When she was done, Charan had placed a hand behind her back, propped her up, and led her to the bathroom where she could clean up.
Aside from the seizures, Ammaji was the most energetic person DJ had ever met. Every day she cooked enough to feed fifty people. Together they packed all the food in small plastic containers that Charan took to the corner store to be sold. No matter how much she made, they always sold out. No
one in the neighborhood knew where the Khalsa General Store sourced their saag paneer, chicken makhani, and aloo gobi. Even Mr. Khalsa, the owner, didn’t know where Charan got the food from.
Ammaji was never allowed to leave the house. It was absolutely crucial that no one ever saw her have a seizure because Charan’s two brothers and two sisters had children they needed to get married off. Ammaji had explained to DJ in her at once patient and impatient way that no one in their community would marry her grandchildren if they knew of her ailment.
So she never left the house.
Charan, who was single, was tasked with the sick mother. The other children only visited on weekends every once in a while when DJ and Emma sat by the attic door and giggled at the spirited fights between the people from Ammaji’s stories. On weekdays Charan worked the evening and night shift, which meant he slept during the day. The only way he thought to accomplish this was to string small brass bells to a bracelet on his mother’s wrists. That way, when she had a seizure she woke him up, her convulsions rattling the bells like an alarm.
When DJ first started watching Ammaji, Charan had assured him that he could go about his schoolwork so long as he kept an ear out for the bells. But Ammaji hated those bells. “They give me a headache,” she said. “All day chun-chun-chun like a nautch girl in some brothel.”
She’d said all this to him in Punjabi, her bright brown eyes dancing with amusement instead of sadness. DJ had never heard Punjabi spoken before that, but she had a way of talking with her hands and her eyes and it had been remarkably easy to understand her. When he came home from school, the first thing DJ did was remove the bell bracelet. She always reminded him to clasp it back on before he left at the end of the day. Her children had made sure the metal band needed two hands to remove and put on.
In the years that he spent with her, DJ had learned to speak Punjabi like a Punjabi munda. But it wasn’t the only thing she taught him. Before he was thirteen he could outshine the most skilled cooks in all Southall. He could smell the readiness of onion in every one of its stages of cooking and knew exactly what stage worked best for each dish. He could identify the exact rapidity with which milk had to boil before adding the lemon to make the cheese curd separate into paneer. He could sense exactly when to add the tomatoes to tie together the onion, garlic, and ginger so that the curry came together perfectly with the oil separating from it in syrupy rivulets.
Ammaji’s love for sharing her gift, for teaching and instructing, found its perfect match in DJ’s enthusiasm. She tested him, quizzed him, inculcated in him the thing that even Europe’s finest culinary school could not teach: how to harness the spirit of food to beguile those who ate it.
His best memories from those years were of Mum coming home, exhausted, to his food. Her happy sighs as she ate. Being able to erase even her nastiest day. Knowing how to blend what Ammaji taught him about spices with maize Ugali porridge and steamed plantains. Coaxing the milder African flavors of Mum’s own cooking into his food so he could take her back home with it, and loosen those smiles out of her weary face. Emma, for her part, had devoured everything he cooked with equal fervor. Her palate never judged him, and the ease of that gave him courage to fly.
DJ LOOKED UP from his mother’s book to see his sister watching him. She was showered and ready to go. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she wore white jeans and a bright red ruffled blouse, with huge hoops dangling from her ears.
“It’s mood dressing,” she said and sniffed the air. “Are those brownies?” She headed into his kitchen and was about to start searching for goodies, but he pulled her back and pushed her into a chair.
“Would I make you just brownies? What am I, a teenager?”
The mood dressing was certainly working on him. For all his worry, not seeing her lying in a hospital bed in that awful gown was nice. Now that he had decided what he needed to do—remind her how very precious her life was—he didn’t feel quite as pushed into a corner himself.
Getting to see her like this, living under the same roof as him, made him feel oddly young. As though he should be tugging at her pigtails while Mum grumbled at him to stop bothering his sister without pausing in her housework. It was a memory from when dad had been around, before they had been forced into all the other shapes their lives had taken, but it was still a stronger memory than all the ones that had followed.
“Aw, I love when you go all Skinner from Ratatouille on me!” Emma teased, but she sank into the chair and waited, her eagerness shining in her eyes, her wet ponytail a riot of curls framing her too-drawn face.
It was a good thing she had slept in. It had given him time to finish up his trip to the farmers’ market and of course to whip up her favorite dessert.
DJ placed the sundae on the plastic folding picnic table in front of her. It had taken him an hour to get the flavors exactly right. But instead of digging into it, she leaned back, the plastic chair creaking at the movement. Plastic Chic, that was his current style profile. Big Lots clearance aided by Craigslist beanbags. Good thing she wasn’t the only artist in the family, because it was perfect ethos for a starving artist. He definitely preferred the ethos of a healthy bank account, but what good was money if you couldn’t use it when your family needed it?
Bankruptcy was a temporary condition; family was the only permanent thing in this life. Nonetheless, right about now he wanted Emma to have even the modest comfort of his Paris flat so badly it was an actual physical ache. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
He hated when she looked sad. It was a knife twisting in his chest.
When he didn’t respond, she looked at the boxes and at all her stuff piled high against the walls. “I’ve totally disrupted everything for you.” She’d given notice at her art therapist’s job. But they were going to let her continue to work there for two weeks, or until they found someone new, or until she could no longer do the job. It all depended on which came first.
He grinned. “Story of my life, baby girl. Totally used to it.” He slid into the chair across from her and she punched his arm. Then he watched as she dunked the tall spoon into the ice cream.
The anticipation in her eyes was all the reasons why he cooked. It turned her right back into his baby sister, no sickness, no unforgivable mistakes. She’d been such a happy child, his Emma. Joy hadn’t fit inside her. It was what made her art magic. Amid all the relentless dark dinginess of their Southall attic, her art had exploded with light.
Back before adulthood wrapped her art in things like conscious exploration of identity, it had been just her diving into herself and, despite the world around her, finding brightness there. Her art had almost been enough to make the gray moroseness of their childhood bearable.
“Dear Lord in heaven, Darcy James Caine!” she managed around a mouthful, her eyes sparkling, her head tipping back, her entire body sinking into itself as it absorbed the taste in her mouth.
He grinned like an idiot.
He’d made the double chocolate brownies with a hint of cherry liqueur just the way she liked them, and almond praline. Of course almond praline.
Almond praline was their thing. In all the years they had spent apart, every time they met he had found a new way to surprise her with it. It was one of the ways he had compensated for the distance, a way to keep her from feeling abandoned. He reached across the table and clasped the tall glass in both hands. They no longer hurt from the burn, but the chill of the glass felt good against his peeling skin.
He pulled the glass to himself. Or tried, because she grabbed it and scooped up a gigantic bite before she let him steal it.
He took a bite. Oh yeah, that look on Emma’s face: it was the Truth.
He gave it back to her and watched the joy explode on her face again and again, soaking it up.
How could she even think about not getting the surgery? How could she not see that she was all he had?
“So about those test results . . .” he said, wishing he could just watch her eat
in silence. But he had to breach the topic somehow.
She pointed her spoon at the glass. “Really? Are you going to ruin this for me with serious talk? Can we at least wait until I’m done rolling around in this for a bit?”
She grabbed a spoon from the spoon holder on the table and handed it to him. “I’ll even share.”
He wasn’t a terribly hopeful person by nature. Hope was a terrifying thing. Taking things as they came was more his style. But right now, try as he might, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that this girl who spread light, who saw things in ways that could change the world, had chosen to give up so easily.
It just wasn’t going to happen. He would not let it happen.
“Stop looking so serious. It makes me feel like all the things you want to talk about are waiting at the bottom of this glass.”
He let his pursed lips curve into a smile. “Then hurry up and get through the brownie . . . and the gelato . . . and the praline . . . and the sea salt caramel first,” he said, stretching his words out playfully.
“Oh, the things you demand of me, brother,” she responded, hamming it up.
It wasn’t easy but he let her eat in silence, taking a bite every now and again. “If only all the waiting in life were this easy,” she said finally.
“Listen, Emma.” There was only an inch of melting sundae to go, so he wasn’t exactly breaking his word. “How can you not fight this?”
She jabbed the brownie so hard the spoon sliced through it and hit the bottom of the glass with a clink. “Fight what? The tumors in my brain? Fight them how exactly? By yelling at them to get lost?”
“No. Your doctor is going to take care of that for you. You just have to let her.”
“Sod it all, Darcy! What she’s going to do isn’t taking care of things. Not for me.” She slammed her hand on the table and the glass jumped and tipped over. The few drops of syrupy chocolate left in the glass splattered on the stack of mail sitting nearby.
