by Antani, Jay
* *
The post office was a drab room fermented in damp heat. It reeked of that indescribable mix of soot, sweat, and Indian spice that I was now getting used to, an acrid sweetness that was repulsive and intoxicating at once. The place hummed with the chatter of locals and the whir of an oscillating fan positioned on a counter next to jars caked with brown glue.
I wished I had my video camera with me, even though that might’ve attracted too much attention. I imagined running off a few shots of the moldy, peeling walls on which a “Don’t Spit” sign was painted, the men in short sleeves, clasping zippered satchels in their thin hands, a few of them with bidis poking out of wrinkled mouths. Stumps of bidis and bits of paper littered the room. The deeper I entered, the more out of place I felt.
My brown skin wasn’t enough to ensure that I blended in; there was too much that gave me away as an outsider. I didn’t have the bristly moustache, for one thing, that many of the young men here sported, and I didn’t dress like the men here, with their short sleeves, slacks, slippers, or loafers. I didn’t pomade my hair and comb it in that severe part. (Top to toe, the men here were trapped in some 1950s time warp, to be honest.) And as thin as I was, eleven years of pizzas and McDonald’s had given my face a filled-out appearance unlike the locals here, raised on rotis, rice, and lentils. Everywhere I went I stood out about as much as a white-skinned tourist who’d lost his way.
Anjali led me to a grilled window where a clerk weighed my mail and sold me stamps along with a dozen postcards. I put the postcards in the pocket of my shorts as Anjali guided me back to the counter where I began fixing the stamps onto the envelope using the brush from the glue bottle. The bristles of the brush had hardened into a solid chunk, and it was like using a flat stick.
“Oh-ho, America!” came a voice behind me, and I became aware of a hand fingering the fabric of my shorts—a pair of white cottons with “Wisconsin” in large red letters along the side. “Hey!” I said, swatting the fingers away and stepping aside to find a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, backing away from me.
He grinned, a hand at his hip, and, in Gujarati, asked if I could spare him some money. But his tone wasn’t pleading. It was wry, almost derisive, too much so for a kid his age. “How about it, boss? You got something extra for me?”
Then Anjali shouted at him, waving a finger toward the door. “Jao! Hutt!”
The kid, still grinning, gestured back at her with a flat, upturned palm. “Wah-re-wah,” he chortled, “a little girl talking that way, you should get a good phadda-phut,” and he mimed a slap and backslap, then took to his heels out the door. A few men glanced in our direction, indifferent.
“What was that about?” I asked Anjali.
“No school,” she replied in Gujarati. “So they do that only, making mischief.”
In bold letters, I wrote “AIR MAIL” on the envelope. The black ballpoint smudged and leaked, but the words were clear enough. I started to put the pen away then hesitated. Turning over the envelope, I hastily scribbled on the seal: “Miss You,” keeping my back turned so that Anjali wouldn’t see. I handed the envelope to the clerk who pounded dirty, illegible stamp marks all over it. And as he tossed it onto a pile of grubby aerograms, I got the same feeling as when I’d turned over my video camera to the customs agent in Bombay. It was this lonely, slightly terrified feeling, and I felt sorry for my letter, lying in that sad pile, left to the mercy of this miserable place.
The heat felt heavy on our heads as we walked back to the guesthouse, but then a breeze kicked up. And the sun, for a moment, got clouded over as a rush of wind swooped in from behind us. Dust sailed across the road, and a paper kite that a group of kids had been struggling to lift suddenly took off. It lifted as high as the upper stories of the apartment block to the cheering of the children who now ran along on bare legs, tugging and lifting at the line as the kite fluttered far above.
“Monsoon’s here,” Anjali said, squinting upward, shielding her eyes. Thunderheads had reared up in the western sky, a whole army of them. We picked up our pace. I didn’t want to get the postcards soaked. More than that, though, I was beginning to feel naked out there in the open gaze: the outsider in his American clothes.
* *
Back in my room, I sat at the desk and wrote out the postcards. Every now and then, I’d prop myself on my elbows and watch the frenzy of rain out the window. Rapidly, over the course of the afternoon, rain clouds shrouded the sky, and the wind muted out the clank and clatter of the street. Earlier, I’d noticed how still the world got just before the monsoon broke; the children had all run inside, the men disappeared inside their shops or scootered off home.
The rain riddled the baked earth. I made a viewfinder of my hands—the palms touching at right angles—and panned across all I saw. The muddied pockmarks of animal tracks. The corrugated rooftops of the shops peppered with raindrops, everything dripping and gleaming.
The downpour was interrupted only by the far-off thunder, like gunshots across a canyon, as I sat back down to my postcards. I wrote quickly to friends, starting with Nate and Karl—more anxious about getting my messages to the other side of the world than with the messages themselves. Throughout the postcards, I practiced the same easygoing attitude as I’d tried for in my letter to Shannon: full of good humor, casual. I was the adventurer in India, after all; the last thing I wanted was to scare friends away with cries of confusion, loneliness.
I mentioned nothing of the dreadfulness of Ghatlodiya, Ahmedadbad, of India, of the days passed in panic, boredom, fear, and the heat that hammered my brain. I did not mention the terrible chasm of distance I had felt the other day, lying in bed, staring up at the mindless circling of the ceiling fan. Nothing about the desperate yearning of the heart toward distant people in a distant place, nothing about the emptiness that now echoed within me or about a future that seemed now like a dark, forbidding road lit only by the faint, flickering hope that friendships would hold.
* *
The dice clattered on the living-room floor. Anand tallied the result, and, groaning in disgust, jotted the number down on a piece of paper. I could hear him muttering the play-by-play of an imaginary baseball game under his breath as I took a seat next to my father, engrossed in paperwork, on the sofa.
“How’s the game going?” I asked.
“Detroit is up by three,” Anand grumbled, without looking up, “man on base.”
He rolled the dice again, shook his head, and scribbled more numbers and symbols on his paper. I was glad that our move to India hadn’t put an end to Anand’s fantasy baseball games—his own invention and played with the fervor of a baseball strategist—featuring his favorite team, the Brewers, squaring off against their major league rivals. Of course, he himself was the star pitcher and hitter.
“What he is doing?” Hemant Uncle asked, smiling, turning his attention from the TV.
My father looked up from his work. “It’s what he does. Baseball on paper.”
Hemant Uncle chuckled. “Why on paper? Why not really play?”
“I watch the games,” Anand said. “But I’m not much of a player.”
“Nonsense,” Hemant Uncle shot back. “If you enjoy it, you should play. Good or not is of no importance.”
“Anand,” my father added, “in India, they play cricket. Hemant Uncle can show you. You know he used to be champion cricketer.”
“Or,” I said edgily, “Anand can do what he wants to do. What a novel idea.”
* *
Over dinner that night, my father explained how he and Anand had visited three different private schools in Ahmedabad. At each one, the principal made the matter of enrolling Anand into a major hassle.
“We can’t accommodate transfer students, they told me. But I knew what they were really getting at,” he said, dipping a bit of roti into a small steel bowl of mango custard. “Baksheesh. What a shame.”
“You didn’t do anything that people here don’t already do, all the time,” my mothe
r said.
“It’s not a game I like to play,” my father said.
But with the start of the school year only a week away, my father had given in: After being turned away at two schools, he gave the superintendent at the Gujarat Law Society Secondary an extra thousand rupees to “expedite” his enrollment.
Kamala Auntie said, “The bribe to get Anjali into the school we wanted was double that.” It was not meant to be a boast, but it came out that way, an ironic boast. “Best to pay the babus,” she said. “Otherwise your children get nowhere in India. If not school, then it’s about getting your phone hooked up or electricity service, marriage, job. In everything, there is bribing.” That made her laugh, wiping mango custard from the side of her mouth.
“That was your choice,” Hemant Uncle said. “I wouldn’t have paid such a bribe. But that school was your choice.”
Confused, fidgety, Anjali spoke up, “Why is everyone mad? I got first class, didn’t I?”
“Just barely,” Kamala Auntie shot back. “And don’t jump all over your chair.” Kamala Auntie straightened Anjali’s chair and went on to impress on her (and on Hemant Uncle) how she’d better raise her marks so they could transfer her to secondary school in Bombay when the time came. Otherwise, she said, “How else you will become doctor?”
“I don’t want to be doctor,” Anjali muttered under her breath, kicking her legs under the table.
My father chewed, staring thoughtfully at his plate. “I hope there won’t be such a problem getting you set up,” he said, pointing at me.
“Where am I being sent off to?”
“St. Xavier’s. Where we both went,” my father said, indicating himself and Hemant Uncle. “I was science, and you were … what?”
“History. History major,” Hemant Uncle said jokily, then turned to me, adding, “I was not good student. I liked to play cricket only. Your father was first class, but I ‘cut class,’ we used to say.” He and my father shared a short laugh, nodding at the memory.
Anjali slunk in her chair. “Vacation goes by so fast.”
“Sit up straight,” Kamala Auntie said sharply. “And this year all first class, understood?”
Anjali made a supercilious smirking sound, puckered her mouth and twisted it from side to side. “Can’t wait for Diwali,” she said under her breath.
“Fine,” I told my father, “but first I need to make a quick trip to the post office.”
“Another one? You were just there today.”
“Few more things to send out.”
“Girlfriends?” Kamala Auntie said wryly, a glint of mischief in her eyes.
“He already sent to girlfriend,” Anjali announced. How she knew that I had no idea.
“Oh, Vikram has girlfriends,” my mother said, “lots.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “Just show her your wallet,” she went on. “He has pictures of all them. So many friends.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, show me,” Kamala Auntie enthused, “after dinner.”
* *
I pulled open the Velcro flap of my wallet and handed it over to Kamala Auntie. She sat on the sofa next to Hemant Uncle with Anjali between them leaning against Hemant Uncle’s arm. My parents sat together on the other sofa, everyone watching a Hindi TV serial in progress.
Kamala Auntie flipped through the pictures tucked into plastic sleeves inside the wallet and asked me the names of my friends. There was Nate, struggling to look natural, the studio lighting useless against the acne, a chin propped in one hand affecting a thoughtful pose (it made me laugh every time I looked at it); and there was Karl, bushy-haired, the bangs planing across the ridge of his eyebrows, lips pursed in a refusal to smile.
Kamala Auntie turned over to the next picture. Mine. In that stiff gray suit—my father’s—my hair fluffed and featured into a kind of Erik Estrada bouffant by the studio’s makeup lady, the powdered nose bulbous in the lighting. I hated that picture. But Shannon had expressed a fondness for it. When I first showed it to her, she fawned over it. Then, I’ll never forget, she kissed it. She kissed it. Never in all my days.
“You are looking very smart,” Kamala Auntie said.
“Thank you.” But I was anticipating the next picture, the last one. Shannon’s. I adored it. Her lips, the straightened line of her teeth smiling at the camera full on, and the sparkling dark eyes, her dark-blonde hair that fell to her shoulders. The lighting washed out her freckles. Her cheeks dimpled like a young girl’s, but her jawline had the clean elegance of a sophisticated woman. It was that contradiction that drew me in. She gave me both.
“This is your girlfriend?”
I cleared my throat, my face starting to feel warm. “A friend.”
Kamala Auntie looked up at me and back to the picture. “I think she is more than friend,” she giggled. Then she handed me back my wallet.
As I sat there beside Kamala Auntie, Anjali, and Hemant Uncle, staring at the TV, I couldn’t help but think of Shannon. Night here, day there. What was Shannon doing that minute? I pictured her sunning her back on the Union Pier, her sunglasses on, watching the sailboats or reading a book of plays. In the back of her mind, did I still exist?
* *
Back upstairs in our room, as Anand slept, I lay in bed and thumbed through my Ray Bradbury book till I found the short story I hadn’t been able to shake since I’d arrived in India: “Kaleidoscope.”
It was the one about the astronauts. They’re out there, the three of them, spacewalking, making repairs to their ship. Then a terrible malfunction, an explosion, and a blinding light. The explosion severs the lines anchoring the astronauts to the ship and launches them in three separate directions. Shock and terror fill the headsets as the astronauts drift deeper and deeper into space, farther and farther, trying to communicate through a weakening radio signal. Each man condemned to his end, however it comes, alone.
4
You want to know the exact epicenter of my current catastrophe? I can pinpoint it to one weekend last year, last October—about six weeks into the start of my senior year. Without the disasters of that weekend, I would not be in India. I would be at home, in Madison, enjoying the summer with Shannon, Nate, and Karl before the start of college in August.
It was Homecoming weekend. I’d made plans with Nate and Karl to get together after school that Friday. We were going to work on ideas for our next movie project.
Nate, Karl, and I made movies, ever since we’d met in film studies class in our sophomore year. Super 8s at first then video once Karl got a second-hand camcorder. Mostly we made five-minute spy and zombie movie rip-offs, nothing fancy, just wild and hilarious. We had a blast making them.
Anyway, after school that Friday, Nate and I walked over to his place to start jotting down movie ideas. But then Karl called up to tell us he wouldn’t be able to join us. We said not to worry, we would carry on without him. But deep down Nate and I both knew that without Karl around to “crack the whip,” we weren’t much good. And we weren’t. To be fair, we did hit on a sweet idea, a cross between James Bond and Woody Allen set on a space station.
But an hour or so later, our story session degenerated into jokes and watching Daisy Fuentes on MTV before Nate reached for the shoebox on the top shelf of his closet. The shoebox where he stashed his weed.
I knew Nate to partake of it now and then, though we didn’t communicate that fact to Karl because we knew he wouldn’t approve, and Karl was asthmatic anyway. I would take a hit, just a hit, to be companionable. This time, though, I took more than a hit, and before I knew it, we had cashed two joints. The walls soon pulled away, and we were laughing our asses off as we ate our Red Baron pizzas.
Some time later, it got dark out, and Nate’s father came home. Nate suggested we clear out, take the bus back to school, and check out the Homecoming Game. Now, I hated football games, school spirit, and all that. Didn’t care for it, didn’t even get it, and neither did Nate. But we were too well baked by then to let the evening die
out on us.
Shivering in our jackets at the top of the bleachers, we passed another joint between us. Nate offered to get us sodas and hot dogs. He handed me the pot, wrapped in cellophane, to hold on to.
In our state, the game was a psychedelic blur—a carnival of helmets and bodies, pom-poms and mini-skirts, a havoc of shouts and flailing arms and anxious, giddy faces. We won after a field goal late in the fourth quarter, and the whole place just erupted. Nate and I even got into the spirit of things by then—we were surprised by just how much, cheering and clapping and stomping our feet.
As we left the field, walking toward the bus stop, we wondered in our giddy daze what to do next, and I told him we should hit the post-Homecoming game party over at Emily Price’s house. Emily Price was gorgeous. She was in my Spanish class, and for whatever reason, she had invited me.
It wouldn’t be quite our crowd—all the popular, rich, and beautiful kids and whatnot—so I didn’t think Nate would be up for it. But to my surprise, he actually said why the hell not. We agreed we wouldn’t stay for long; the buses only ran till midnight anyway.
Emily Price lived in a brownstone off Monroe Street. Very leafy, very old money. Intimidating. Nate and I knew no one there. Madonna, Journey, and Def Leppard blasted from the stereo while the popular kids, plastered and loosened up, packed the house wall to wall. There were liquor bottles everywhere, and PBR cans stacked into a pyramid on the glass coffee table.
Emily said a few words to me, glassy-eyed and giddy, yet gorgeous the whole time, while Nate stood at the kitchen counter behind me. Over the noise, she chatted with me about our Spanish class and gushed on and on about how much funnier the class was with me in it. (I took it as a compliment.) I introduced her to Nate and started talking about the game (because what the hell else do I talk about with Emily Price?) when Emily began swaying a bit. Her eyes closed, and she uttered, “Whoa.” She lifted a finger, “I drank waaaaay … excuse me.” Then she turned, giggling with a girl next to her, and the two of them melted into the drunken uproar of the party.
