by Antani, Jay
Hemant Uncle rolled up in his green Fiat, which Anjali and my parents piled into along with most of the luggage. Kamala Auntie climbed into the rickshaw, and Anand and I followed with backpacks, a suitcase, and the flowers Anjali had handed me.
Kamala Auntie instructed the driver to follow the Fiat in front of us. The rickshaw growled and shuddered to life, and we began motoring through the sensory assault of scooter-truck-bicycle-and-bullock-cart traffic toward Ahmedabad.
Signs of the city gradually appeared—whitewashed storefronts open to the streets, signboards in Gujarati and English, men sitting in groups, smoking and talking, amid blocks of cement housing complexes. Bony cows lingered in corners, nosing through trash. And the trash—rotting food, plastic bags, and sodden newspaper—littered the roadside in abundance, scattered from dumpsters by the animals. Kamala Auntie tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see enormous macaques that had overrun what looked like an abandoned bungalow girded with bamboo scaffolding. The profusion of wildlife in the middle of a city was too bizarre, too ridiculous. It was also oddly embarrassing; I didn’t want to share any of this with my friends back home.
Anand and I exchanged looks of puzzlement, and that got Kamala Auntie emitting a kind of quick, high giggle. “It’s like zoo, no?”
I tried to smile back warmly, nodded.
“You will get used to,” she said.
I caught sight of a naked child—five or six years old—squatting over a dug-up hole in the ground. He squinted at me through the glare, his arms hanging off his knees, as he crouched there, shitting openly in the dirt. The child’s eyes followed me as we passed, his expression completely innocent, without a trace of shame. For him, it was just another afternoon, defecating in a hole on the side of the road.
Kamala Auntie’s words came back to me: “You will get used to.” Used to! But I don’t want to get used to! I just wanted to go home. But this was home now. And she was right. Terror swept over me.
We joined streams of gathering traffic and began passing over a bridge, a concrete bridge.
“Sabarmati River,” Kamala Auntie said, pointing.
But the Sabarmati wasn’t much of a river—more like an epic gash of cracked earth with a vein of brown coursing down the middle.
I wondered exactly where we were headed, how much farther we had to go. My father had mentioned something about a guesthouse, some place we’d be staying until the bungalow in Ahmedabad was ready, but I knew nothing else. Never even wanted to ask.
Now, in Gujarati with a few English phrases thrown in, Kamala Auntie filled us in: Last night, she, Anjali, and Hemant Uncle had driven in from Baroda (my father had arranged for the guesthouse key to be sent to them weeks ago). They had already checked out the guesthouse, bought groceries, refrigerated several bottles of boiled water, and had a meal cooked and waiting for us. They would stay with us for a couple of weeks while we settled in.
Wherever this guesthouse was, it was far—like boonies far. The city became sparser, and we were soon bumping along a two-lane, potholed road, bordered on both sides by dirt fields, food stalls, and hole-in-the-wall bazaars. Children played with kites, couples cut us off on scooters.
After a few minutes of lurching along this road, I noticed Hemant Uncle’s Fiat ahead of us veer to the side and stop. We rolled up behind it, and the rickshaw gurgled and came to rest.
In that heavenly second of silence, I could hear myself breathe.
I checked my watch: sunrise over Lake Monona right about now, quiet and clear, over the elms in Shannon’s backyard. I pictured Shannon in her bed, the green tank top, the freckled collarbone, the peek of her waist where the blanket covered her—
“Chalo,” Kamala Auntie said, stepping out of the rickshaw. “We are here.”
Next to the road was a red metal gate and, beyond it, a paved driveway. A row of trees overhung one side of the driveway and an apartment building stood on the other. Five or six apartments, steps leading up to each, lined the drive. From the Fiat, I saw my parents and Anjali emerge. Anand and I extracted ourselves from the rickshaw, hoisting up our backpacks, while Kamala Auntie paid the driver.
My father turned up the hasp on top of the red gate, and it squeaked open. Hemant Uncle pulled the Fiat into the driveway.
I approached my father and asked, “Where are we?”
“Ghatlodiya,” my father replied, already walking back to the Fiat so that he could begin to pull out suitcases.
Ghatlodiya. What an awful name. It spoke of all the backwater villages in this backwater country, far removed from the world.
The rickshaw that had brought us here fired up again. The driver wheeled it around, and soon he was puttering back the way we’d just come, toward the sun dropping now behind the sheds and shacks bordering the road.
Soon, he faded from view, lost in the orange scrim of dust and humanity and traffic. In a way, that rickshaw driver was my last link to America, the last piece of the journey that had brought me here. My heart ached to see him go.
I couldn’t picture Shannon here, nor Nate nor Karl, nor anyone from back home for that matter. Again, the thought of sharing this with any of them—this part of me—embarrassed me.
Soon it would be my first night in India. And I was still having trouble breathing: smoky, muggy, dung-scented, this was the air I’d better get used to. I wanted to breathe in the fragrance of the flowers Anjali had given me, then realized I’d forgotten them in the rickshaw.
3
Waking up was a nightmare. As if life had played the dirtiest of tricks on me. I’d be dreaming the same things I did when I was in America. But then I’d wake and reality was like a hand reaching in for my soul and strangling it. And my soul would instantly collapse and fall away … And I could feel its fall all the way to the bottom of my heart. It was like that for several weeks but worst on those first days: that horrific sense of exile.
Anand and I would wake to a monsoon torpor, disoriented from jet lag, achy, bleary-eyed, and the heat slouching over everything by 8 a.m. like a swamp animal. We’d take a look around: the whitewashed cement walls; the pale, flecked tiles on the floor; the ceiling fan squeaking as it spun; and the noise of utensils from the kitchen downstairs. From downstairs too came raised voices, all of which seemed so unreal to me: Hemant Uncle joking with Anjali or my mother asking Kamala Auntie a question. Who were these people? Through an open window, I would see an unfamiliar crumbled roadside, rundown storefronts, the sump behind the guesthouse, and a cow browsing for scraps.
One morning, we heard a knock at the door, a quick rap that I recognized as my father’s. “Anand,” he called, opening the door, “be ready, okay? We’ll pay a visit to a couple of schools this afternoon.”
Anand turned over and pulled a pillow over his head.
“Be ready, huh?” my father repeated, then, leaving the door open, walked back down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.
“I’m not going,” he said in a muffled voice beneath the pillow. “I don’t want to go.”
I checked my watch, and, almost automatically, I began rolling the hours back in my head, trying to make the India-Madison time jump. But I stopped myself. I didn’t feel like bumming myself out first thing in the morning. I crawled out of bed.
“I hate this place,” I heard Anand say. “I’m not going.”
Summer break had just started back home, but here schools were starting up again. Anand and I had a couple of weeks to snap out of our jet-lagged funk and get into the swing of … whatever this was going to be.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
The guesthouse, thankfully, had Western-style toilets and sinks, one upstairs and one down. The bathrooms were Indian otherwise: no bathtub, just an undefined area marked by a drain, a spigot for running water, and, above that, a handheld showerhead attached to a tiny water heater. It made for a continuously wet floor that got dirty easily as people came and went, tracking their bare feet in and out. I picked my way to the sink and brushed my
teeth.
My stomach hurt. I felt hopeless. No matter. Today I would write Shannon a letter. I would write it and get it mailed before the post office closed. And while I was at it, I’d get a bunch of postcards too to send to Nate, Karl and a few others to whom I’d made—and gotten—promises to stay in touch.
Downstairs consisted of the kitchen and one large room divided into dining and living spaces. Hemant Uncle sat at a sofa, focused on the Gujarati-language morning news on the TV while Anjali hunched over the dining table with the crayons and the Disney coloring books my parents had given her. Perched over a book, her knees planted on a chair, she carefully worked in the colors that lay scattered next to her. Anjali also loved the chewing gum, the Bic pens and the Jif peanut butter my parents had brought.
“So!” Hemant Uncle boomed from the sofa. “How is jet lag?”
I told him I was better, a bit better.
On the table, next to a water bottle, steel tumbler, and container of spicy Indian snack mix, I noticed a loaf of bread and a carton of Amul butter. I got out two slices and put them in the toaster that sat at a small window in the wall between the dining table and the kitchen.
“Vikram,” my mother called from the kitchen, “is Anand awake?”
“Not really,” I said.
“That boy,” she groaned in Gujarati. “I’m going to have to go up there.”
“Hemant Uncle,” I asked, “is there a post office around here?”
“Post office?” he wondered aloud. He got up from the sofa, turned off the TV, and sauntered toward the dining table, his hands in his pockets. “Not familiar with this area.”
“There is,” said Anjali, looking up from her drawing, in a haughty voice. “By the bus stand. I saw it when we went to the dispensary the other day.”
Hemant Uncle’s brows scrunched together. “Dispensary? Why the dispensary?”
Anjali shrugged. “I went with Mummi.”
Just then, Kamala Auntie entered from the back door, through the kitchen, with an armful of line-dried clothes. “We went for bhabhi,” she said, meaning my mother. “She was having some pain that I knew some medicine for. It’s nothing.”
“Achcha.” Hemant Uncle nodded thoughtfully.
The toaster clacked, and two half-jammed, half-burnt slices of toast shot out. I pulled them out and spread Amul butter on both. The bread here was dense, coarse as though sand grains had gotten mixed in with the flour, and the slices were only about half the size of the Wonder Bread I was used to.
The Amul butter made up for the bread, though. Fragrant with fresh cream, it tasted exactly as I remembered from Sunday mornings of childhood, when Hemant Uncle would bring home Amul butter and Italian bread from the specialty bakery.
My mother set a small steel cup of milk for me on the table and went upstairs to get Anand out of bed.
“How are things in Baroda?” I asked Hemant Uncle, taking a sip of the milk. “You’re at the State Bank, right?”
“Hmm,” he said, pushing away the coloring book he’d been absently flipping through. “State Bank since fifteen years. From Ahmedabad, I transferred to Baroda only five years back.”
“Are you still playing cricket?” I asked him.
He shook his head, laughing softly. “No. Now there is no time.”
“You used to play a lot back in college, didn’t you?”
“Right from my school days,” he said, reaching for the snack mix. “Then played on college team, even on State Bank team.” He ate the snack mix and wiped his hands free of crumbs. I couldn’t help but notice he was heavier now than I remembered; there was a thickness to his face and around his middle.
“Your uncle is sportsman,” came Kamala Auntie’s voice from the living room. She was folding the laundry, stacking the clothes in neat rows on the sofa.
“Vikram bhai, watch this,” Anjali said, leaping out of her chair. She asked her father if she could swing from his arm. Hemant Uncle obliged by extending an arm and letting his daughter swing from it with both hands. She giggled, and soon Hemant Uncle started laughing along with his daughter as he turned in half circles and she was lifted high on his arm, her legs swinging in midair.
I remembered how Hemant Uncle would play with me when I was a kid, and he would let me swing from his arm and launch me onto the living room couch as I pretended to be Hanuman from The Ramayana, leaping the mythical archipelago from India to Ceylon.
“Ready, Hemant?” my father called, hurrying downstairs.
Hemant Uncle settled Anjali onto the sofa. “Chalo!” he said. “Just waiting.” He reached for the tumbler and water bottle on the table, poured the tumbler half full, and gulped it down.
“Where are you off to?” Kamala Auntie asked.
“To Institute,” my father said. “Some paperwork there still to finish.” He snatched up his briefcase from the floor beside the TV.
Kamala Auntie and Hemant Uncle shared a few quick words, and my father shouted up the stairs that he’d be back in a couple of hours. “And Anand,” he ordered, “make sure you’re up and ready by then.” Then, he and Hemant Uncle shuffled out the door, and they were gone.
“Would you mind showing me the way to the post office later?” I asked Anjali.
“Hmm,” Anjali replied, taking up her position at the dining table with her coloring books. “Cho-kus.”
Upstairs in our room, Anand lay curled up, his back turned to my mother who sat at the edge of his bed. A tension hung in the room. I tried to steer clear of it as I stepped over to my bed and began straightening the sheets.
“If you really hate the idea of going to school here, don’t go,” I heard my mother say. “Go and be like those rickshaw wallahs. Is that what you want?”
Not a word from Anand. No sound to be heard but the cawing of crows outside. Abruptly, he whipped the sheet away, rolled over, and got up. Eyes downcast, mouth in a frown, he began to shuffle away. “None of my friends have to do this,” he said. “I hate this place.” He walked out, and we heard him slam the bathroom door.
My mother grabbed the bedsheet from my hands. “I’m washing this today. I’ll take care of it,” she said sharply. She stripped the fitted sheet from the mattress and tossed the pile of sheets onto the floor. From the corner of my eye, I could see her shaking her head—out of what? frustration? guilt?—as she turned to Anand’s bed and began pulling off the sheets.
“Do they have washing machines here?” I asked, if only to make conversation.
“Don’t know.” She gathered up all the sheets in her arms, adding, “I’m used to.” She left the room, and her feet faded away down the steps. Used to. Those words again. But laced with a faint trace of cynicism, of the fatalism I’d heard in her voice many times over years and years.
I went to the desk in the corner of the room, opened the drawer, took out the pad of paper I’d bought at the stationary shack down the road a day earlier, grabbed a pen, and sat down.
“To my love,” I began, then crumpled up the paper and tossed it aside. “Dear Shannon,” I wrote on a new sheet. “Three days into the great adventure in the subcontinent, and I’m finally getting around to writing you.” I went on to write about the journey across the world that ended in Ghatlodiya, about the sights and sounds and smells of the streets, and India’s late-June heat and humidity. I wrote about meeting my family and about the video camera being confiscated in Bombay. Throughout, I tried to keep my tone casual, off-the-cuff; I threw in a wry, sarcastic joke, the kind I knew she would appreciate. But the more I wrote, the heavier my heart felt and the more badly I wanted to be with her. The feeling got worse till I was afraid my heart might burst, and I’d spill onto the page the truth about how much I missed her, how I wanted more than anything to be back in Madison, in her room the way we used to, under her posters of New Order and The Clash, while the sun went down over Lake Monona.
But then I imagined what her response would be: “You’re really down right now, Vik, but it’s just a phase. This is a big move for y
ou, and I think the sooner you get into the spirit of this trip, the sooner you’ll start enjoying it.” Such a reply might only drive me farther away from her, and I didn’t want to risk that. I was also afraid that spilling my guts might freak her out and she would break up with me immediately. So I cut things short and signed off with “Love, Vik.”
As I sealed the letter in the envelope, Anand came in, just bathed, indifferently toweling his wet, tangled hair. He wore a clean short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks—his “school-visiting clothes,” I presumed. My brother had conceded. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
“Got anything to mail out?” I asked. “I’m going to walk over to the post office with Anjali.”
Anand scrubbed the towel against his head a few more times and threw it bunched-up on his bed. “No.” He dropped himself onto the edge of the bed, sighing deeply.
“Look,” I said, turning to face him, “everything’s going to be fine.”
“How do you know?” Anand didn’t look at me. He began biting his fingernails, picking at them—a longtime nervous habit of his.
“We missed out on summer vacation this year,” I said, “but they get a lot of vacations here. A lot more than back home. Think Diwali comes up in four months, and that’s a whole month off. The year will be over before we know it, and then we’ll figure out a way to get back.”
Anand mulled that over, glancing at the wall. Finally, he nodded. “What day is it?” he asked.
“Tuesday.”
He sighed again. “Brewers are off today.”
“Who do they play next?”
“Oakland.” Anand bent down, picked up a baseball magazine lying on the floor, and began poring through it.
“Coming with us to the post office?”
“I’ve got this school thing,” he said. “Might as well get it over with.” He looked up at me. “You think the kids here know anything about baseball?”
“Doubt it,” I said, trying a smile. “You’ll have to teach them everything you know.”
