Aerogrammes

by Tania James

  May read aloud the next two aerogrammes as Mr. Panicker sat in the rocking chair, poised like a director with his hands in steepled prayer, his ankle perched on his knee. Each letter contained a troubling inconsistency. Satyanand Satyanarayana had no opinions on Bollywood stars; twice he referred to Shah Rukh Khan as a “she.”

  Despite his doubts, Mr. Panicker delighted in elaborating upon every letter May received. He described Satyanand’s possible route to school, how he and his friends would have to wend through the crush of taxis and rickshaws and fling themselves onto the train—the older boys hanging out the doorway if they were so bold—and how the rushing wind would dry his washed hair cold and crisp.

  He spoke of his own son only when she asked him how Sunit was doing. “Sunit is Sunit,” Mr. Panicker said, before changing the subject. Eventually she learned to stop asking.

  He would have been happy to limit his social circle to her alone, but May begged him to attend the Fall Sock Hop. It was held in the dreaded rec room, site of Wii Wednesdays and Film Noir Fridays, by a troop of local Boy Scouts. A news crew arrived to tape the event; one lady told the camera, “It’s just so lovely to have young people with us. The girls never have enough partners to go around.”

  Mr. Panicker hid behind the punch bowl until May hooked her arm through his and steered him onto the floor. The Boy Scouts held their ladies at arm’s length, shifting their gazes around the room, avoiding one another’s eyes. None of the ladies seemed to care. They rocked and swayed to the crooning music, chins raised, eyes cloudy with pleasure and memory.

  Mr. Panicker held May’s hands in front of him, as if gripping the reins of a horse. Instead of risking any leg movement, he stayed in place, bending his knees according to his own erratic rhythm. Eventually he was lulled by the scent of baby powder on her skin, the rise and fall of the music. He twirled her under his arm. Later, May got him to admit that he was enjoying himself, even if he had abstained from the conga line.

  A breeze swept through Mr. Panicker’s lungs while he walked around the courtyard. It was early in the day, the clouds pink-bellied and young; dry leaves swirled in midair like shoaling fish. Today was Mercy’s birthday.

  His wife had never wanted any fuss made on her behalf. Mercy was tidy, brisk, uncomplaining, always the first to finish her meal before urging Sunit to eat up, eat fast, as if talking were a waste of time. She rarely disclosed her own preferences to Mr. Panicker, whether they were discussing a school for Sunit or a television program to watch. She always deferred to Mr. Panicker with “Whatever you like.” After a while, he stopped asking her opinion.

  Once, for her birthday, he surprised her with a gift delivered to their home: a double-mattressed DreamSupreme, as wide as twice his wingspan, with pillows fat and sugar white. It filled their bedroom, and for once, Mercy smiled and said, yes, she liked it. For two more years, he and his wife slept soundly, a whole wingspan of space between them, until she fled the DreamSupreme for Sunit’s math teacher, and whatever banana peel of a cot a math teacher might have to offer.

  Sunit was only seven when they moved to America. Back then, Mr. Panicker told the boy to sleep in his own bed, and though the darkness seemed smothering, the hallways choked with shadow, Sunit agreed to sleep alone. But on some mornings, fresh from another drowning dream, Mr. Panicker would roll over to see his son, a snoring resolute curl on the other side of the bed. Always Sunit avoided his father on those days, ashamed perhaps, though Mr. Panicker never mentioned it. Nor did he mention how every morning was a trial, and sometimes it was simply the weight of Sunit’s presence that gave Mr. Panicker the strength to rise.

  When Mr. Panicker returned to his room, he found a pink slip on his door with the heading WHILE YOU WERE OUT. Sunit’s name was scribbled below this, and a check mark was leaping out of the small box next to URGENT.

  Mr. Panicker dialed the numbers, gripped the phone with both hands.

  “Dad?” Sunit answered.

  “What happened? Tell me.”

  “No, it’s good news—I got an offer! I got an offer from Two Tigers, the company I was telling you about, the guys who produced the road-trip movie with the lesbian and the arranged marriage? The woman who played the lesbian read it and she wants to costar.”

  “Is there a lesbian in your story?”

  “What? No. I just got the call from my manager, so I don’t know much yet, but I think like thirty thousand. It’s called an option. I’m optioning my script.”

  “Now what? What does this mean?”

  “It means,” Sunit said, with the enthusiasm of a game-show host, “you should come to New York!”

  Mr. Panicker was sure that Sunit had no idea when or how this grand prize would be awarded.

  “I already spoke to Preeti Auntie,” Sunit said. “She wants you to come live with her in Queens.”

  “You called Preeti?”

  “Yeah, we’ve been talking for a few days,” Sunit said. “I told her we’d hire someone to stop by every day, and she said she’d love for you to have the room next to Biju and Binoy.”

  Mr. Panicker cringed at the memory of the greasy doorknobs in Preeti’s house, Biju and Binoy’s hair gel traveling from their spiny coifs to their hands, to the doorknobs, to Mr. Panicker’s hands and wherever else.

  “But how close are you to Queens?” Mr. Panicker asked.

  “Like forty-five minutes.”

  “You’ll visit?”

  “Of course, Dad. When I have the time.”

  “I can’t talk to those boys. They have no sense.”

  “Dad, I’m at Preeti Auntie’s place right now.”

  Preeti picked up another phone in the house. “What is there to argue? You’ll live next to Biju-Binoy.”

  “Aha, Preeti! I just mean I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “Disturb, what disturb?” she said. “It disturbs me to care for family?” He pictured her with her telephone jammed under her chin as she arranged the items in her refrigerator just so, according to a system Mr. Panicker did not care to learn. “You’re starting to talk like the velumbin you live with.”

  Mr. Panicker knocked on May’s door for breakfast only to find that she had a visitor, a plain young woman sitting at the foot of the bed. She wore blue hospital scrubs, her hair knotted at the base of her neck. She was slicing an apple in her palm, a napkin spread across her knee.

  Mr. Panicker offered to leave, but May, who had answered the door, waved him into the room. “See, look, Hari, this nice girl from church brought tea.”

  “Hi, I’m Leanne,” the woman said, waving hello with her paring knife.

  “Leanne,” May agreed, nodding. “Sit, Hari, sit.”

  Mr. Panicker lowered himself into the rocking chair but declined when Leanne offered him his pick from a box of Constant Comment teas. He considered tea bags and tea to be two different things.

  “At least have a muffin,” Leanne said, nodding at the white paper bag on the blue tiled table. For a stranger from church, she seemed oddly at home in her surroundings, one leg folded beneath her on the bed. She would have been pretty, perhaps, if not for the downturned slant of her lips.

  “You and May belong to the same church?” Mr. Panicker asked.

  “Um …,” Leanne said, arranging the apple slices on a plastic plate. She glanced at May, who was rummaging through her dresser drawer, then shrugged. “I was baptized at her church. Haven’t been since.”

  Mr. Panicker hesitated, confused, before May cut in: “I was just telling her about Satyanand.” May pulled out a small packet of aerogrammes, secured with a rubber band, and happily fanned them at Leanne as if they were a stack of bills. “See? Look how many.”

  “I know,” Leanne said, a humoring lilt to her voice. “You told me.”

  “I can’t wait to show him,” May said.

  “Show me what?” Mr. Panicker asked.

  “Not you. My son.”

  “I thought you have no children.” Mr. Panicker sat forward, trying to understa
nd. He looked at Leanne, who was also staring at May, though with less bewilderment, as if waiting for her to complete her sentence. May, meanwhile, was carefully depositing the stack of aerogrammes into her dresser drawer. “Who is this son?”

  “Satyanand Satyanarayana.” May uttered his name with nearly perfect pronunciation. She pushed the drawer shut and straightened the lacy runner draped across the top. “He’s coming to visit. All the way from Bombay.”

  May went on about Satyanand with a distant, feverish look in her eye, mulling over what the boy might like to eat or see or do once he got here. Leanne listened placidly. Time and again, Mr. Panicker asked where May had gotten this idea, but she brushed off all his questions, concerned only with her own. “Do you think he’s vegetarian?” she asked him, at which point Mr. Panicker stood up, flustered and queasy, and excused himself from the room. He had lost his appetite.

  Ten minutes later, Leanne knocked on his door. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Panicker, but would you mind walking me to my car?”

  Only once they stepped outside did Leanne explain that she was May’s grandniece. She worked at Baptist East as a nurse. He noted her height, a few inches taller than him, and wondered if this was the woman who had hung the framed fruit on May’s wall.

  Leanne didn’t seem bothered by the news of May’s “son.” The year before, May had suffered a stroke, and ever since then, the delusions came and went. “A few months ago, she thought her bedroom was her office. She wouldn’t see me unless I called and made an appointment. She got mad if I wore jeans.”

  “Maybe she has had another stroke,” Mr. Panicker said. “Maybe that is why she’s talking like this.”

  Leanne shook her head. “I had her squeeze my fingers. Her grip was fine, so that’s a good sign.”

  “Good,” he repeated. He watched his reflection in the window of her car, nodding.

  “Good as it gets.” Leanne smiled at him, heavily.

  “Here, let me give you my info,” she said, and began digging through her purse for a pen and paper. “I’d really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on her. Just let me know if she’s acting funny? Or funnier than usual, I guess.”

  “I will not be here very much longer,” he said. “This was to be a temporary stay for me.”

  “Oh.” Leanne looked up. “Oh, good for you.”

  “But write it anyway. In case.”

  After she handed the paper over, Mr. Panicker brought it close to his face, making sure he could read all the numbers before he bid her good-bye.

  All day long, Mr. Panicker avoided May’s room. After lunch, he began to pack. He balled his socks and ordered them along the northern border of his suitcase, black, gray, black, blue, a mindless industry that freed him from his present and released him to his fruit-market days, arranging and rearranging boxes of fruit. They could have been clementines, these socks, if he ignored the rip of static between them, if he closed his eyes and thought himself back to the pine-green awning of Panicker’s Produce on Chenoweth Lane, balancing tangelo against grapefruit, building pyramids and ziggurats as artful as the fruit market displays he’d known as a boy.

  For years, Sunit had helped out at the store, until he entered high school and began losing all patience with customers. Once, when Mr. Panicker was ringing up a customer, Sunit beside him, clicking the price gun over a crate of bagged snacks, the customer looked at Sunit when asking for directions to the interstate. “Ask him,” Sunit said, tilting his head at Mr. Panicker between clicks. “He knows English.”

  “No, the customer isn’t king,” Sunit said later, when Mr. Panicker scolded him. Mr. Panicker didn’t know when that note of condescension had entered his son’s voice, but after he left for college, it only hardened. If Mr. Panicker shared his opinion on Sunit’s choice of studies, Sunit returned with terms like “entrenched” and “model minority,” talking about Mr. Panicker’s brain as if it were a tangle of ill-connected wires that only he could unravel.

  Even now, Sunit thought he understood everything of Mr. Panicker’s life, though he knew nothing of sitting in the fading light of a foreign room, running a finger over a tiny hole in the wall where someone must have tacked up a photo of loved ones, someone who was here at one time, and now was not. His son was ignorant of that hollow feeling. Mr. Panicker hoped he would remain so forever.

  Before dinner, Mr. Panicker made himself knock on May’s door, to see if she wanted to join him. There he would tell her that he would soon be leaving.

  She had left her door slightly ajar. He nudged it open to find her hunched in her chair, frantic and flipping the petal-thin pages of her Bible. In her lap lay a pile of newspaper clippings, cards, pictures of saints, and all matter of memorabilia valuable only to her. She rubbed her hands together, her eyes flying about the room until her gaze landed on him.

  “I lost them,” she said. “I lost his letters.”

  “Whose?”

  “What kind of a …” She clapped her hands to her mouth and began to whimper. “What kind of mother am I?”

  “Did you look in your dresser?” Mr. Panicker asked.

  “You look. Maybe I missed them.” She hurried to her closet, but he hesitated. “Well, look, goddammit!”

  He opened the drawer to a weedy tangle of graying brassieres and poked through them halfheartedly. She pulled an empty hat box from a shelf and dropped it behind her, then disappeared farther into the closet, her head bobbing among sweaters, a beaded blouse he had never seen her wear.

  “Did you find it?” he asked.

  She emerged empty-handed, murmuring a breathless prayer not unlike a nursery rhyme. She continued chanting while she turned her Bible upside down and shook it as violently as she could, though only a holiday card fell to the floor. “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please look around, my son has been lost and cannot be found—”

  Mr. Panicker tried to gently pry the Bible from her fingers, but she yanked it back with a force he hadn’t expected.

  “What do you know about it?” she said, the Bible splayed against her chest. “You don’t know a thing!”

  “I do know. I have a son.”

  “Son.” She snorted. “No one’s ever seen him around here.”

  He stared at her.

  Gradually, her eyes softened and grew full. She sat down in her chair and searched the ceiling and walls, the windowsill, the paintings of bright, blank fruit.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I will show you.”

  •

  Back in his room, Mr. Panicker rummaged through one of his suitcases, thumbed through papers, tossed books aside, rifled through shirts and pants. He found it in his dresser drawer, tucked inside a black address book: the photograph of Sunit in his school uniform—white dress shirt, navy shorts, backpack, chappals. His oil-slick hair had been combed into two distinct sections, one smaller than the other, a style that emphasized the gravity in his coal-black eyes. This, Mr. Panicker would tell her, was a real son, not a boy who existed only in letters.

  And yet, her words, almost an accusation: No one’s ever seen him.

  He flipped farther through his address book in search of an adult picture of Sunit, but he discovered only more baby pictures. He had brought no pictures of Sunit as a man.

  In the second drawer, beneath his sweaters, Mr. Panicker found a thick block of paper, secured with three shiny gold tacks. It was Sunit’s ninety-page script, which he had said was “totally not autobiographical,” though the cover page read, “An Indian-American man struggles against his overbearing single father.” Here the script had remained for weeks, buried and unread. Mr. Panicker pulled the sweaters back over it.

  He returned with the photograph and found May still seated, now wearing her glasses, staring at a fixed point out the window. He hovered in the doorway for a moment, unsure of himself. Their fight seemed far from her mind.

  “See this,” he said, and extended to her the photograph. She pulled her gaze from the window and looked down at his hand. He raise
d the photograph to her face, which remained blank, until she surprised him with a tiny, breathless cry.

  “Satyanand,” she breathed, and took the picture with both hands.

  “Sunit,” he corrected her.

  “Satyanand,” she said in the same drifting voice. “He looks sad.”

  Staring at the photo, Mr. Panicker remembered that he was the one responsible for his son’s hairstyle. Usually, his wife combed Sunit’s hair, but she had left them a few days before. Mr. Panicker recalled crouching over Sunit, moving the comb all too gently across his scalp. “Is this the right way?” Mr. Panicker had asked. In response, Sunit had looked in the mirror with the same expression he gave in the photo: neither approving nor disapproving but detached, set adrift.

  After a time, Mr. Panicker said, “Sunit hated having his picture taken. He could never stay still.”

  “Satyanand,” she corrected him, with the insistence of a child.

  He looked more closely at the photograph and tried to remember that day, those days, the sense of coming ruin. In the months prior, Mercy had suffered from an edgy restlessness, one eye always on the window. Like mother, like son. Sunit would never visit him in Queens, and Mr. Panicker could not bear another slow abandonment.

  “Satyanand Satyanarayana,” May said to him, slowly, teaching him how to form the words.

  Mr. Panicker nodded, repeating after her. “Satyanand.”

  She smiled, enchanted by the name settling like dust over the picture, and touched her forefinger to the boy’s face, drawing from this some strength. They spent minutes like this without a word, and for Mr. Panicker, for now, this was enough.

  Ethnic Ken

  • • •

  My grandfather believed that the guest bathroom drain was a portal for time travel. I didn’t mind his beliefs until they intruded on my social life, what little I had. My friend Newt and I were playing slapball against the side of my house—I was up to a record sixty-seven slaps—when my grandfather came outside and yelled at me in Malayalam for leaving a clot of my long hair in the bathtub drain, thereby blocking his route. His mundu was tied up like a miniskirt, wet scribbles of hair against his spindly calves. After calling me a “twit,” my grandfather stormed back inside, leaving Newt to stare at me with a dispiriting combination of pity and shock.