The Leaving of Things

by Antani, Jay

  The thought of a humongous pair of underwear hanging outside the principal’s front yard was enough to get Anand, Anjali and me laughing pretty hard.

  Hemant Uncle solemnly added, “But such mushkari got me suspended from cricket team. And also I got low marks on my exam.” He smiled, taking a sip of the chai. “So now I’m in State Bank only.”

  I plucked up another piece of fafada, ate it, and started into another, laughing in fits and starts. It was reassuring to know that I still had it in me, this instinct to laugh.

  The conversation at the table moved on, but by now my attention had turned to something else: I had become aware of a faint stirring in my gut. This twisting, a churning, a kind of thudding. Pretty soon, I began to feel like there was a beast stamping its hooves around my insides.

  It may have been the ditchwater I’d swallowed during my back-ass spill the day before or the paan I’d eaten days before that. In any case, sanitation was not exactly a priority in Ghatlodiya with its pools of standing water along the road and out behind the guesthouse, where cows lingered and from where swarms of flies launched daily raids through the kitchen door. All those things might’ve had something to do with it.

  All I knew was that the third fafada triggered a stampeding sensation from my chest down to my lower gut. There went the thudding, stamping hooves. My gut twisted, tightened. I backed away from the table, turned, aware only of a puzzled look from my mother and the sight of my father leaning in beside the radio so he could hear the sports announcer above Hemant Uncle’s voice. And that was all. I was aware only of retreating to the toilet, hoping dimly for mercy.

  * *

  All day Saturday, I shook and sweated. I was either gripped with chills or so hot that you could’ve heated rotis on my forehead. I spent the day in bed, in a moaning, gut-rotted malaise. Once my father came in and asked if I was feeling any better. I moaned for him to get out of the way as I pushed past him, clutching my gut, toward the bathroom. One bite of the rice and bland dal my mother brought up to me, and I felt my insides caving. I pushed away the plate, turned over, and went to sleep. It was an underground kind of sleep, and by that night, I didn’t care if I lived or not.

  The following day wasn’t much better, but I could rise from my coffin of bedsheets long enough to see Hemant Uncle, Kamala Auntie, and Anjali off. They had to drive back to Baroda that morning: Hemant Uncle had the State Bank to get back to on Monday, and Anjali was starting fourth standard.

  Kamala Auntie and my mother insisted on a marathon of picture-taking. We felt like circus animals as they posed us individually, in pairs, and all together.

  In one group picture, Hemant Uncle put an arm around me and drew me nearer on the sofa. “Come closer, Vikram. This is family picture,” he said, and he kept his arm around me. Family picture. It was strange to think of myself as belonging to a larger family, bound by blood and shared history, and there was a warmth to the belonging, a comfort that was shockingly new to me. For eleven years, “family” had meant Anand and me and our parents—that’s all. But this, I sensed, was a truer, more authentic feeling of family. Everyone in this picture belonged here, now, together. It made me even sadder about Hemant Uncle, Kamala Auntie, and Anjali having to leave. It would be lonely out here in Ghatlodiya without them.

  * *

  The drumbeat of thunder sounded. Another downpour was imminent. In a hurry, Hemant Uncle finished loading up the Fiat, including the TV, which he shoved into the backseat. Anjali slid in next to the TV as the first sprinkles began to fall, and the light shifted from a lighter to darker gray.

  “The boys will adjust,” I heard Kamala Auntie say in Gujarati to my mother. They stood together at the bottom of the steps. “Just give it time. And they’ll be local in no time.” She hugged my mother. “Come to Baroda. Come during Diwali.”

  “Chok-kus,” my mother said, wiping her hand across her cheek.

  Car doors slammed shut, the engine revved up, and calls of “aavjo” traded back and forth. Anjali opened the back window, leaned out, and waved good-bye. Soon, they’d backed out of the driveway and pulled away, motoring farther and farther down the ragged strip of road.

  I told my father it was too bad we didn’t have our video camera to record their going-away. My father agreed and let me know that he’d written to the customs office in Bombay. And if it came to it, he was willing to go down there personally and pry it away from them. “Let’s give them a little more time. Then we’ll see.”

  As I trudged back upstairs, I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: that those criminal customs agents took my camera, or Kamala Auntie’s talk about how I was going to “adjust” and be “local in no time.” I flung myself back into bed, kicking the sheets off and resenting the damp heat. There was so much to resent.

  * *

  In the morning, the first day of Anand’s school and my first of college, the fever still clung to me. I lay in bed, listening to the clink and clatter of my mother fixing breakfast. From my parents’ bedroom came the chiming and jingling of Hindi advertising on the radio, reverberating up and down the stairwell, as my father dressed for work. Anand got into his school uniform—beige pants, a white short-sleeved shirt with the Gujarat Law Society emblem embroidered on the breast pocket—and packed his backpack with new schoolbooks. I noticed he stuffed his baseball magazine in with everything. Then he left the room and shuffled off in his school-regulation dress shoes downstairs.

  I heard a rickshaw stuttering into the driveway, then a commotion of voices—my mother and father, and Anand—followed by much shuffling and the opening of the front door. “Bye, beta, have good day,” my mother said. “Be alert and careful,” my father shouted from the front door. I heard Anand mumble a few words, and he was gone. The rickshaw faded on up the road.

  Silence brooded. Nothing stirred. Not even the faintest breeze came through the window. The ceiling fan spun above me, offering nothing. I craved for a signal. Something. Was I like those astronauts in Bradbury’s story? I fished out my copy of Rolling Stone from my backpack, but all it did was bring back reminders. I put on my headphones and lay there listening to Document. R.E.M.’s last record. Transmissions. Twanging echoes light years old. Musical radiowaves suffused with messages of America. After a while, the thought crept over me that no one back there gave a goddamn what happened to me. Not anyone. Friends can be such imposters.

  My mother knocked at the door—two dainty knocks. “So?” she asked. “How do you feel?”

  I took off my headphones. Pressed my abdomen. It made a noise like a toad.

  “Maybe I should see a doctor.”

  The private clinic was a hole in the wall there in the boonies, with a dingy little waiting room crammed with sobbing infants, stick-thin mothers, and lethargic old men in dhotis, fanning themselves. The clinic’s doctor—sleepy-eyed and soft-spoken—asked after my symptoms. Then he asked me to lie down on an exam table, tapped around my belly, and prodded about with a stethoscope. Throughout, his face remained calm, expressionless. Then he stepped away and produced a packet of pills out of a cabinet. He told me there was an epidemic of amebic dysentery going around Ghatlodiya; fecal contamination of the rainwater, he thought and told me to avoid the water.

  I thought again of how I’d swallowed ditchwater the other day when I took that spill. Fecal contamination. God, I wanted to vomit right then and there. “I see,” I said, sliding off the exam table. I thanked him and took the packet of medicine.

  Over the next several days, I kept to a strict diet of rice and yogurt, popped anti-parasitic pills, and slowly regained my strength. I also kept to my room, reading my Bradbury, my Galapagos, my Rolling Stone, till the pages were dog-eared, damp with sweat, Bruce Springsteen’s face on the cover torn and creased. The afternoons ached, riddled with boredom and rain. Flies raged. I swatted as many as I could. Armies of them. When I was too exhausted to swat, I resorted to chasing them out through the kitchen door, back to the muck where they spawned. But they came back, always cam
e back, filling up the kitchen and crawling all over the dining table.

  “I’ve been chasing flies out that damn kitchen door all day,” I told to my father one evening.

  “That won’t do any good,” he chuckled, after a day in his air-conditioned office.

  “I’d like to keep from getting sick again,” I countered.

  “You look better.” He untucked his dress shirt and drew up a chair at the dining table. “Good! That means you won’t miss your whole first week of classes.” My mother set down a cup and saucer of chai in front of him, a couple of Parle-G biscuits tucked on the saucer against the cup.

  My mother asked after my father’s work, how things were shaping up. He said things were “very good,” that they’d already landed a high-profile contract with the government to do some research ahead of the launch of a satellite the following year. “Quite exciting.” They went back and forth like that, and I was startled by the matter-of-factness of what was happening. A new domesticity seemed to be taking shape here, my parents’ chitchat unfazed by the changes around us.

  But I was aware of an emptiness too and new silences now that Hemant Uncle, Kamala Auntie, and Anjali were gone. Hemant Uncle’s booming voice, Anjali humming to herself, busy with her coloring books, and Anand sneaking up behind her, pulling loose the ribbon tying her hair. And Kamala Auntie peeling mangoes to make custard in the afternoons.

  After a few words were exchanged, the room fell quiet. My father sipped his chai and my mother sat with her arms crossed, a finger tapping at her chin. After a while, she glanced out the window, humming an old Hindi tune to herself, lost in her thoughts.

  7

  My first day of college began with a walk to the bus stand, my backpack slung behind me. I’d loaded it up with a couple of notebooks, a battered Macmillan History of English Literature hardcover (all the copies at the bookshop looked like that), a paperback of Restoration comedies, another of Victorian poetry—all the above assiduously unopened—a water bottle, and a tiffin of rotis, dal, and vegetables (my sustenance till dinner).

  The walk took me along the road’s muddy fringe of tin-roofed shanties, where men smoked and slept on charpoys and children ran barefoot and shat among chickens and dogs. The shanties abutted the now-familiar sight of paan sheds and snack vendors and other concrete shop fronts, painted over with Gujarati signs for shoes, umbrellas, and dentists.

  You walked the length of this road till it ended at a junction with the main road—a slightly wider but much louder version of this road—took a left, and continued a few more blocks, hoping not to get knocked down by a bicycle or your leg or arm clipped by a passing truck or rickshaw. The bus stand itself was a meager shelter—a red metal awning—that squatted there at the foot of a row of soot-stained, mildewed apartment blocks.

  It was mid-morning and hot already. There weren’t too many others out, which surprised me. I was used to seeing Ahmedabad’s bus stands crowded at all hours, but we were in the outermost reaches of the city where, perhaps, there were fewer commuters.

  I stood under the awning, behind an elderly woman in horn-rimmed glasses—it could have been the same woman I had helped to her feet that day in the rain—with a tote bag full of newspaper-wrapped greens. I took out my wallet and removed from it a slip of paper. On it, my mother had jotted down a few Gujarati numerals, these were the numbers for the buses I’d need to catch. First, I caught the “43” to Xavier’s, then “62” to the Alliance Française, and, finally, the “72” to get from the Alliance back to Ghalodiya in the evening.

  I put the list back into my wallet and, as I waited, began looking at the pictures in their plastic sleeves. Looking at Shannon still made me ache. She seemed farther away than ever. I thought of her now, her skin, her mouth, the pressing against and the pulling away, and the softnesses, everything now thousands of miles and many weeks removed from my experience. The picture was the most beautiful thing I had brought with me, and it was all that mattered just then.

  I heard kissing noises and taunting male voices. I turned to find two shaggy-headed boys, not much older than me, craning over my shoulder. The first leaned his elbows against the railing, and the second had his arm slung around the other. Around here, I had seen boys strolling the streets, hand-in-hand or arms around each other’s shoulders, and I knew it for what it was—a friendly gesture—but it still made me uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed.

  The boys started chuckling. “Girlfriend?” the first one said, cocking his chin in my direction and grinning. “American girlfriend?”

  I smiled a neutral smile and turned back around. The boys began moving away.

  “We find you nice Ahmedabadi, American,” the second one said. “Much better than that one.” They shambled away on their slippers, across the road, and became lost in the blur.

  Then I realized something, and checked my watch to make sure. It was July 4. Fireworks day. Summer day. Barbeque day. Green backyards. The aroma of hamburgers. I stood there, dreaming of hamburgers. Melted cheddar and onions and ketchup. Potato salad. Potato chips. In my mind, I imagined a conversation with Shannon.

  “Let’s go to the lake today,” I say to her. James Madison Park. Across the lake, we see downtown looming up on either side of the Capitol, the dome and spire clear and sharp against peninsulas of summer clouds. We lie on blankets then drive through town to Emily’s—she has the pool. We swim and dive in the afternoon. I see Nate and Karl there, a whole congregation of friends. Afterward, Shannon ties her hair back (the way I like it), and the whole group treks off to Elver Park, into the wide open of its meadow. Shannon lies on my shoulder, and I clasp her hand. I hear Nate crack open a beer, offer it Karl. But Karl doesn’t want it. Not a good idea, anyway: He drove, after all. Nate makes jokes out of it. Then he passes the beer to me, I take it, sip it under the sky and the fireflies. Frisbees whir waywardly across our vision, a child scampers after it. Blooms of fireworks open up above us, vast as the heavens. And the dark field bursts with whistles and cheers.

  “What’ll we do with our lives?” says Shannon in my ear.

  “We’re going to do everything.”

  * *

  The bus was utterly empty when it arrived; this had to be the farthest stop on the route. I climbed on, took a seat in the back. The conductor—a thin man in khakis and gray bristles of hair—stepped up to me, very businesslike, and asked, “Bolo?”

  When I told him my destination, he opened the lid of a metal box hung from his shoulder, pulled out a paper ticket, and punched a hole in it with a ticket-puncher. I paid him and took the ticket. He went on, and I was so glad that he paid me no more attention than if I were any other passenger.

  The bus driver stood outside, a steel tumbler of water in his hand, eating a piece of fruit and chatting with a vegetable seller. Finally, he rinsed out his mouth, spat out the water, and handed the tumbler back to the seller. They said their goodbyes, and the driver climbed back into his seat. When the passengers had all paid up, the conductor struck the overhead bar with his ticket-puncher: Tink-tink! Tink-tink!

  With that, the red rusted beast of a bus growled to life, and we rolled out. From my seat in the back, I watched through the barred window as Ghatlodiya turned into Ahmedabad, going from the housing communities of drab apartment blocks to thickly crowded roundabouts and avenues. The bus bullied its way into the city, roaring and screeching, and heaved toward the side of the road whenever it approached a bus stand, heedless of everyone and everything in its path. I watched the stands too—each one more crowded than the last, a gathering of determined and desperate faces.

  I yearned for the video camera again, just to start shooting out the window and keep shooting as Ghatlodiya morphed into Ahmedabad—the satellite into the city. Right now, I’d settle for anything: a still camera, something I could use to frame the madness around and in my mind. I wanted the chaos outside contained but, even more, the chaos inside contained, transfigured into something I could touch, command, and concentrate. Maybe t
hat way my mind could cut the chaos into shapes I could understand.

  When I left Ghatlodiya, there were a dozen or so other passengers on the bus. Now, it was standing room only—elbows, torsos and wild stares everywhere. Every few minutes, a few vacated the bus from the back doorway, in a frenzy of hollers and shoving, but double that number piled on up front. At regular intervals, I heard the tink-tink of the ticket-puncher.

  It had been more than a week since I sent off my first letters and postcards. I wondered if my transmissions had been received. Right then, it seemed so easy—so easy it terrified me—for a message to get lost, out there in the wide, chaotic darkness.

  * *

  The scent of sweat and coconut oil wafted through the college corridors and lecture halls, swirling with Gujarati faces and voices. I had three lectures that day: Victorian Lit, General Psychology and Intro to Economics. A feeling of death by boredom crept over me. I shook it off and pressed through the swaths of mingling, gossiping students.

  I entered the already-thrumming lecture hall in the wake of a stream of girls with ribbons in their hair and salwaar kameez outfits ruffling in the breeze behind them. Three aisles of long wooden benches ran along the hall—the kind you saw in old English boarding schools. I noticed right away that the sexes did not mingle; the boys inhabited one half of the hall, the girls the other. It was a neat and disappointing division. The tube lights overhead were all turned off; no artificial light seemed necessary as daylight flooded in from a row of windows along the far wall. It was shady in the hall, almost cool, with a pleasant brightness.

  About halfway up the lecture hall, I took a seat at one end of a mostly empty bench and set my backpack at my feet. In the midst of the chattering and nervous energy in the hall, I just wanted to sit there quietly and not draw any attention. That’s when a student in a cream-colored kurta pyjama strode up my side of the lecture hall, his books under his arm, and slid into the bench directly in front of me. His skin was mahogany dark, and his looks were striking: gleaming, coal-dark eyes; thick, glistening hair impeccably combed back; and a handsome, chiseled jawline. He opened his notebook and, from the pocket of his kurta, produced an inkwell and a dip pen. I had never seen such writing utensils before. I wanted my video camera, any camera, some way to capture the details in his manner, his look, his antique accessories.