Aerogrammes: And Other Stories

by Tania James

  This I didn’t see coming, but I tried to sound casual. “Oh, the Anafranil? Long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “It really messed with my head.”

  “Your head is already a mess!” she cried. I must have looked scared for a second because she lowered her voice. “If you don’t want the Anafranil, then we’ll meet with Dr. Fountain and try some other medicine.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What maybe?”

  “Those are my decisions, Mom. I’m a grown-up.”

  “Oh, so grown.” She leveled me a sad-eyed smile, and it made me feel like a kid again, a boy who didn’t realize how bad things really were. “I can’t go ten feet without worrying where you are.”

  We stood there in silence, the water lapping all around us, the paddleboat knocking against the post. I looked at my mom; her arms were folded. Panic caught me by the throat.

  “Where’s the postcard?” I asked.

  She said nothing.

  I met her at the end of the pier, and she stepped aside, looking down at the water.

  “Leave it,” she said, taking urgent hold of my arm. “Come back with me.”

  She had tossed it into the water. My mom had tossed my world into the water. I felt a strange, slow lightening as my eyes scanned the surface, as I imagined its ink bleeding, its cursive unspooling to a line as flat as the distance from one person to another.

  But as soon as I spotted the postcard drifting away, white side up, I plunged in after it as if by instinct (I’m not a swimmer), flailing and plowing until I felt it between my fingers. For we are bound, sometimes against our will.

  I heard my mom yelling my name as I dog-paddled the few feet back to the pier. With one arm and both legs, I hugged the first slimy post I could grasp. She was kneeling above me, pulling on my shoulder as if she could hoist me out of the water, but I shook her away. She sat back on her heels, a rivulet of mascara down her cheek. “Give me the card, then,” she said. “I won’t throw it again, I promise.”

  She extended her hand, my mom, as she always has.

  But I didn’t give her the card, not immediately. I hung on to the post and listened to the faint murmur of the party in my waterlogged ears. Earlier in the evening, someone had asked her where she planned to honeymoon, and she had shrugged, saying, “Oh, not too far away.” I thought of Kirk’s Nashville photographs—the guitars, the tulips, the sights I had seen before—and all the far-flung journeys they could take instead if only they were free of me.

  •

  Since that day, I’ve secured an apartment and a full-time job at Red Carpet Cinemas, where for eight dollars an hour I stand behind a glass window and slide tickets through a cut-out hole, half price for seniors and children under twelve. Over time, I hope to acquire the funds to resuscitate the Review, but as bills accumulate (one of my roommates wants HBO on Demand), this hope grows ever distant.

  Sometimes, on my lunch break, my mom visits. She and Kirk have been traveling again, and most recently they returned from the Bahamas with three straw hats. I hung mine on a nail in my room.

  My mom looks good in her hat, her skin tan and varnished from the sun. She keeps asking if she can see my new place, but I keep telling her that I still have to put my room together, even though it was put together the day I moved in, with just space enough for a narrow bed and my father’s desk.

  My mom is given to worrying about me, but she’s happy all the same. She’s in love. I can tell because of the bill she signed at lunch the other day. Anna Bäumler, the umlaut not unlike a colon my dad once placed after my name on a birthday card with Superman on the cover, flying through the air beneath the words HAVE A SUPER-HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  Exhibit D: Birthday Card from Prateep Pachikara

  Some might mistake the colon as a formal mode of address, used for letters of application or complaint. But note how this colon was made by a double stroke rather than a double stab. I have scanned and magnified each dot fourfold, revealing the slight eyelash left by the lingering pen. A double stroke, a double blink, a fond quickening of the heart.

  Aerogrammes

  • • •

  In his first week at Renaissance Gardens, Mr. Panicker divided all the nurses into the black ones, the white ones, and the mannurse, but never called any of them by name. Knowing names, it seemed, would root him there indefinitely.

  His cousin Preeti had campaigned loudly against the move. “Our people don’t use these kennels,” she informed his son.

  “Whose people?” Sunit said, scowling into the rusty insides of Mr. Panicker’s toaster oven. Sunit and Preeti had flown in to help pack up the house and organize a yard sale. Mr. Panicker was sitting at the table, watching them, his knee still too weak to help.

  “You don’t understand,” Preeti said. “You were raised here.”

  “And you didn’t find Dad blacked out at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “We’re only trying it out,” said Mr. Panicker. He fingered the border of a CorningWare dish, the first plate he ever bought in this country, ugly and indestructible. “I might join Sunit in New York. We’ll see.”

  “You hear things about these places,” Preeti said. “Nasty things. People messing with people. People shooting people. You don’t know.” She pressed her lips together to demonstrate that she knew a great deal.

  Though Mr. Panicker had yet to witness a shooting at Renaissance Gardens, Preeti’s mantra had taken on a foreboding truth. The enrichment activities held little resemblance to the descriptions touted in the brochure, next to photographs of gently amused residents. The pranayam breathing sent him into a dizzy panic, while all around him residents huffed like angered bulls. He avoided Wii Wednesdays in the rec room, where people stared slack-jawed at the television, lurching around like marionettes. His rock garden resembled a pyre of turds.

  Most of the time, Mr. Panicker watched Perry Mason marathons in his room. When he was not watching Perry, he was leaving message after message in Sunit’s voice-mail box, addressing the deficiencies all around him, such as the dimensions of his room, which was so narrow that if he sat in his armchair and crossed one leg over the other, his foot hit the baseboard of his bed. “How am I supposed to cross my leg? I talked to the nurse about moving to a different room, but she says they are full.” At the end of the week, Sunit’s voice-mail box announced that it, too, was full.

  There was one complaint Mr. Panicker couldn’t imagine conveying to his son. The female neighbor to his right was carrying on with the male neighbor on his left.

  It was a nocturnal affair. On certain nights, Mr. Panicker would hear the careful click of her door lock, followed moments later by the click of his. For the next thirty minutes, Mr. Panicker had no choice but to stare at the light fixture overhead while the flex and squeak of bedsprings intruded through the wall. The woman was quiet, but toward the end, the man issued a morbid groan.

  During the daytime, Mr. Panicker made sure to rush as much as his knee would allow past his neighbors’ rooms. He wanted no leery, yellow smiles attached to such sounds, no details bolting him to this place at all. Some faces he could not ignore, like that of the receptionist who lifted her stenciled eyebrows whenever Mr. Panicker approached, knowing full well that his only inquiry, his constant inquiry, was whether Sunit had called.

  In the second week, Mr. Panicker looked out his window to find an ambulance parked outside the front entrance. A gurney carrying a sheeted body waited behind it. Mr. Panicker went out into the hall and found the door to his neighbor’s studio propped wide open. People were passing slowly by, peering into the empty room, where not a square foot of space remained on the walls, thick with framed photos, Hoosier pennants, a giant periodic table—so many places for the eye to dwell that the man might have succeeded in forgetting where he really was. Beneath the bed were a pair of red velvet booties, toes pigeoned inward.

  Struck by a sudden sense of trespass, Mr. Panicker hurried down the hall, to the dining room.

&n
bsp; Pink bunting festooned the walls in honor of Family Day, which Sunit had already called to say he could not attend. He had appointments in New York, with several production companies who were considering his script. Sunit rarely managed to send his father an e-mail, but he had sent a copy of his screenplay. It belonged to a growing subgenre, he said, not quite Bollywood, not quite Hollywood: Indians in America or England Torn Between Identities.

  What most confused Mr. Panicker was how a thirty-eight-year-old man could still be writing about his twenty-year-old self, and how this thirty-eight-year-old man had not solved some of these issues by now, or at least shoved them aside to make new issues for himself, like how to stay with a woman for more than a year. Or how to find a job that offered a yearly vacation, not a year-long vacation interrupted by sporadic jobs.

  Mr. Panicker peeled two hard-boiled eggs in solitude. His iron tablets left the taste of pennies in his mouth, and after only a bite of beloved pineapple, he had to lay down his fork and nudge the bowl away.

  He tried to remember his dead neighbor’s name. Bill? Hal? He could barely recall a face, only parchment wrinkles, liver spots, broken capillaries on the tip of a bulbous nose, the sorts of traits that made a brotherhood of every man here. If, by chance, the ambulance were to come for Mr. Panicker, would anyone in Renaissance Gardens recall his face, or even linger in his doorway?

  On his way back to his own room, the door to the dead man’s room was shut. As Mr. Panicker searched his pocket for his key, a woman walked down the hall and stopped before the door next to his. The door that belonged to the dead neighbor’s mistress.

  He snuck a glance at her. She wore a sweater hectic with flowers, a white turtleneck beneath it. Her hair was a long, limp curtain of silvery gray, nothing like the teased halos of most women her age. She looked over at him with moist, melancholy eyes that betrayed her nightly relations with the deceased. Mr. Panicker knew, and she knew that he knew.

  He turned to her. The proximity of death made him bold. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said, the longest sentence he had spoken to another resident.

  She blinked at him. “I think you mean Lily.”

  “Sorry?”

  She aimed her chin at the door across the hall from his. “Him and Lily were the ones who went at it every night. Well. Except for last night.” She gave him the patient smile of a preschool teacher, but the words coming out of her mouth made his face go warm. “I’m May. Who are you?”

  “My name is Hari Panicker.”

  “Panicker?” She grasped a piece of hair and wound it around her finger, like a little girl. “As in Panicker’s Produce? On Chenoweth Lane?”

  Hari smiled shyly, nodded. He had sold the store to a grocery chain that had renamed the place, somewhat hyperbolically in his opinion, Garden of Eden.

  “I lived right around the corner!” May said. “I remember your commercial. The one with the talking ear of corn?” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Who listens to customers?”

  “He was a paid actor. My cousin. But I paid him.”

  “What kind of name is Panicker? Are you Indian?”

  “Yes.”

  Her hands shimmied in the air, a reaction he had never before received. “I wasn’t sure because your skin is so pale. You could pass for Arab or Italian or Syrian or Egyptian …” Listing other pale-skinned nationalities, she unlocked her door. “Do you have a minute? I have a question for you.”

  He followed her into her studio. On one yellow wall hung a trio of gold frames, a fruit floating in each: apple, orange, and pear. Someone else must have hung the frames; they were too high for her to reach. Beneath these was a small breakfast table, tiled in cobalt blue, and a rocking chair in the corner with a quilt thrown over the back. She gestured to the rocking chair; he settled carefully into it.

  “You have family coming today?” Mr. Panicker asked.

  “No, no kids for me.” May opened the top drawer of her dresser and pushed some items aside until she surfaced with an open aerogramme. “Hah! Here it is.” She offered it to him with both hands.

  Mr. Panicker had always loved the slick texture of an aerogramme between his fingers. He remembered plucking them from his old mailbox, squinting and turning each one around and around like a kaleidoscope, as there were always more messages that his mother had crammed up and across the margins. In this one, the print was large and earnestly etched, wasting vast margins of blue on every side.

  “Is this a girl or a boy?” she asked. “The name at the bottom.”

  Dear Miss May Daly,

  Hello, my name is Satyanand Satyanarayana. I am ten years old. I live in Bombay India. I like to swim and play cricket. I also like to draw pictures of tigers and elephants. But I do not have a lot of time to swim or draw because I have to beg for food so my mother and I can eat.

  Miss Daly, when you were waking up in your bed this morning, Satyanand was waking up on a bed of wet newspapers. When you were taking a shower, Satyanand was bathing in waters where children were defecating a few yards upstream. With your donation, little Satyanand can buy resources, medicines, and food for the month. Thank you for your sponsorship and continue to keep Satyanand in your heart.

  “Boy,” he said.

  “Are you sure? Because he’s my Street Angel now, and they said they’d send a picture but they didn’t and it’d be nice to be sure.”

  “Definitely boy.”

  She brought the aerogramme close to her face, as if its nearness could prove him right. “You can adopt a Street Angel from just about any third world country, you know. I requested India.” She took a step toward him. He leaned back in the rocking chair, cornered by her curiosity. “What’s Bombay like?”

  “Bombay? Dirty.”

  “Dirty? That’s all?”

  He’d never been outside the airport in Bombay, only remembered his plane touching down, the tarp and tin sheeting of slums reeling like a filmstrip past his window. “Bombay, I don’t know very much. I am from Kerala, much south of there. It’s a beautiful place. Coconut trees, paddy fields. God’s own country, they call it.” She still looked vaguely disappointed. He felt like a travel agent, unable to sustain her interest.

  “Is it close to Bombay?”

  He told her to hold on a moment, springing up from the rocking chair so quickly that he had to steady himself on the armrests.

  Minutes later, he returned with a map, which he unfolded on her bed. He pointed out the sliver of land called Kerala, barely the size of a nail clipping. They spoke Malayalam, he said, like him. Cricket was a more sophisticated form of baseball, with slimmer players in prim sweater vests. In Bombay, the boy most likely swam in the sea, not a swimming pool.

  “But isn’t the water polluted?” she asked.

  He rolled up the map like a sacred scroll. “Our people have excellent immune systems.”

  •

  May began a habit of stopping by Mr. Panicker’s room before every meal and accompanying him to the cafeteria, where they sat with people she knew. Mr. Panicker tried to engage in small talk, though his attention often swayed to the window, where mango-colored leaves were beginning to shiver against their branches. Mealtime provided him with some daily distraction, but still there was the grit he could not ignore, the dusty blinds like lengths of bone-gray ribs, the potent smell of detergent in the pillowcases.

  Before his mind could wander too far, May would guide him back into the conversation with a question. He was grateful to her because he had never excelled at making his presence known among groups of people. Sometimes the accumulation of his silence seemed to heap upon him, as slowly as snow, until he felt he could no longer be seen.

  Mr. Panicker was far more at ease when they were alone. She had consulted him for her response to the first aerogramme, and on his recommendation, she had asked Satyanand what he thought of the cricket star Sachin Tendulkar. When Satyanand’s second aerogramme arrived, she brought it directly to Mr. Panicker.

  Dear Miss Daly,

  T
hank you so much for your twenty dollar donation. With this money, I was able to buy chappals for school and plenty of rice for my family to last the month.

  “What’s a chappal?” May asked.

  “A kind of sandal. Or flip-flops.”

  In response to your question, though I like to play cricket, I am not familiar with players as I do not have a television or a radio.

  “Maybe you should stop this Street Angel business,” said Mr. Panicker. “It could be a trick.”

  She held the letter to her chest. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “What kind of Indian boy doesn’t know Tendulkar?”

  Her eyes flitted over the letter with affection. “My boy.”

  Watching her, Mr. Panicker remained silent. It didn’t seem so wrong at the time, the way her fingers were breezing back and forth across the writing. She deserved that moment of peace, and he wanted to preserve it for her, if he could, in return for all the small ways she had thus far preserved him.

  By the end of the month, Sunit began calling Mr. Panicker again, bearing better, if not good, news. Mr. Panicker could hear the fraying hope in Sunit’s voice as he explained how his manager was passing the script to someone else and then someone else; it was widely described as “hot.”

  “Sounds like a game of Hot Potato,” said Mr. Panicker.

  Sunit paused, then forced a chuckle. “Yeah, it’s good to keep a sense of humor about these things in case, well …” He paused. “So anyway, if you really can’t handle it at Renaissance Gardens, then we’ll move you up to New York, I guess. Once I get this thing sold.”

  “But don’t sign a lease or anything, not until I get there. It should be a place big enough for both of us. I have my savings, so we can manage it.”

  “We, like you and me? Roommates?”