by Antani, Jay
“I’m getting married,” she said.
“What?” I said, disbelieving, laughing tentatively. “You’re only eighteen. How could you be getting married?”
“My father’s arranged the whole thing. It’s this guy from New York. He just got his MBA from Columbia. He’s 25 and going to work for this investment something or other …” She trailed off as if she were absolutely uninterested in the details, weary of rehashing it all again.
“How do you know him?” I asked carefully. The words themselves felt icy.
“My dad got us in touch last summer before college started. He came out here so we could meet.” She lowered her gaze. “And I told my dad yes.”
My mind stumbled around in this maze she’d dropped me in. “Why—? When?”
At least from her appearance, Priya seemed more or less composed, in control. “He’s coming here over New Year’s, and the wedding will be right after that.”
“But how … ?” I could only stand there and stare at her blankly. “Do you even know him?”
She arched an eyebrow, one side of her mouth turned down in a sneer. “I suppose.” She sighed, turned her face away. “Anyway, he seems smart, nice enough. Handsome. It’s a way out.”
I pretended not to hear “handsome” but felt diminished immediately. “I didn’t realize you wanted out of India so bad.”
“It’s not India,” she said. “It’s just … a way out.”
“A way out of what?”
She didn’t answer. I thought she’d walk away from me again, turn on her heels and go back upstairs. But she stayed, her eyes fixed straight ahead on the spines of books.
“I don’t want you to go.” It was the most intimate thing I had said to anyone in months.
Priya’s eyes looked watery, and holding her gaze upward, she wiped at them.
“You’re going right away?” I asked, feeling absurd even asking such a question.
“After April probably. When the year ends. My father wants me to finish college in the States anyway.” She seemed emotionless and there was a resignation to her words, and it was all hard to take.
I stared at the ground, down at emptiness and my future as gray as the floor, and exhaled deeply to get myself breathing again.
“Thought you’d be happy, Vik,” Priya said and, laughing, added, “or jealous, ’cause I’ll be going back to the States.”
I kicked at the underside of the shelf. “Jealous, yes. But not because you’re going back.” My breath tightened. I soldiered on anyway. “But who you’re going back to.” Even in the dull yellow light, her face glowed, her hair parted evenly, falling on her lovely shoulders, her black irises giving away nothing. Why was she here now, with me? Why here, in this musty room, to tell me this?
“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said.
“I should go now,” she said.
A shuffling of feet. But instead of moving away from me, she took a step toward me, and I toward her, making to follow behind her hair, her shoulders, the sway of her skirt. Then a pressing of hands as my body brushed past hers.
Who went for whom, I couldn’t tell. Only a flash in the mind, a burst of fire. I was aware only of the warmth of her mouth, kissing her in the secretiveness of that dim room, every second that I could; of the scent of her perfume, whatever it was, entering my senses sweetly faint and mixed with sweat and cardamom; how her body felt smaller and suppler in my hands than I had imagined. She kissed hesitantly, unsure at first; then again, so did I, every capillary on our skin trembling; then she swept in at me, on me, once, and I returned it, hair matting our mouths, not minding because the softness of her mouth against mine made me wish we could keep on and forget whether anyone was there; the thin cotton texture of her shirt below her breasts, only a hint did I get of her skin, her waist, with two nervous fingers. She did return my eagerness, if only for that moment, I sensed that much, but when I wanted more, I heard a gasp. Priya pulled away, a scent of her hair under my nose, before the thudding of feet sounded on the stairs.
Priya, flustered now, leaned her head into the aisle, her eyes on the door. She let go of her breath, her eyes closed, her body caved ever so slightly, as if a fear had been realized.
“Manju,” she whispered to me.
“She see us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t care who saw us,” I said, reaching for her hand, feeling righteous now. “Forget about her.”
She stepped away, exposed in the aisle then tentatively walked toward me. She did not reach for me but looked at me, a pitying look I did not understand. Then she backed away from me and disappeared. I heard her steps echo up the stairs like the thunder trailing before the sky settles and the storm moves on.
16
Fog blanketed the wintry fields out the train windows. It was the last stretch of our overnight journey from Ahmedabad to New Delhi. My father had bought us a full berth, first class, but I had spent much of the ride out in the passageway in my sweater and scarf, leaning against the open entrance to the car with my Walkman and headphones. I thought of Priya and what she was doing just then. Was her home garlanded with marigolds and festive with visitors? I imagined her father dominating a household full of guests in saris and kurtas. Traditional Hindu marriage music snaking the air, sinuous and insinuating. Was she in a crimson wedding sari, her hands decorated with blood-red henna, the color of her lips? I wished for her lips but pushed that thought away, almost resentfully. She was gone. As distant as America.
America. December now in Madison. Snow powdering the branches, slushing along the edges of Whitney Way, University Avenue, the gray tufts of smoke from the stacks of the power plant near campus. I thought of the decorated shopping centers, the snow-freshened air, the glistening lights strung up on bare trees on State Street and around the perimeter of Capitol Square to make a twinkling wreath of it all and the white-marble dome at its center. I wondered if Nate and Karl were in Madison over Christmas break and who Shannon was spending it with. A new boyfriend? Sooner or later, there would be a new boyfriend. It was inevitable. Here I was, ten thousand miles away, so why was I letting it bother me? I missed her, no question. I missed her graceful, freckled shoulder blade and the swerve of her waist and her mouth that often tasted of Doublemint when we should’ve been studying. Now, all paths diverged, and I was left with a train as it sped farther and farther into the Indian heartland and that feeling of distance between Shannon and me loomed again in the universe of my mind. Everyone blasted into separate ways, fiery flakes scattering in the night.
I had my camera at least. And I snapped photos of the bracing fields as we passed. Farmers crossed the grayness, two by two, wrapped in shawls. It was desolate country, dotted with occasional settlements, the outermost satellites of Delhi. I sighted the signposts at small whitewashed stations, bearing in black letters the undecipherable names of these far-flung places, and the gray-cloaked and narrow lanes that ran in and out of random towns before the view morphed back into farmland—farmland peppered with tumbledown sheds and ancient field implements, all overseen by blackbirds.
I caught as much as I could with the click of the shutter. The frame advance wheezed and locked: end of roll. I lifted the tiny winch and began rolling the film back onto its spool, wondering whether and how any of the shots would turn out.
“Chalo, Vikram.” My father poked his head out of our compartment. “Eat something. We’ll be there soon.”
Anand slept on the upper bunk, his back to the wall.
A steward must have come by already; there was chai steaming from a teapot, ceramic cups on a tray, and a variety of small pastries, sweet and savory, on a square steel plate. My father proceeded to pour the chai into the cups.
“Wake him up,” he told my mother, “otherwise, we’ll leave him here only.” He turned to Anand, and, in a show of fatherly authority, commanded, “Anand, get up now! Time to eat. That’s it!”
Leisurely, Anand rolled onto his back and propped up on his elbow
s, surveying the food. “We almost there?” he asked groggily.
He climbed down, wearing his striped flannel pajamas, the first time he’d had to wear them since our arrival in India. My mother handed him his toothbrush and toothpaste as he slid open the door and slipped away.
“Like a mule, that boy,” my father said. “Never met anyone so stubborn. Reminds me of me.” He shook his head, chuckling, and my mother smirked.
I sniffed the pastry and began eating it as my father poured me a cup of chai. “You want anything else?” he asked. “They’ve got a breakfast menu. Parathas, omelet, anything?”
“It’s okay, thanks.” I sipped the hot, sugary chai.
A wide road with multiple lanes came into view as we passed over a short bridge. Traffic had neatly ordered itself inside the lanes. Colonies of concrete bungalows, a redbrick multistory shopping complex, girded with yellow railings, bordered the road.
“See the roads here,” he pointed out the window as we passed into New Delhi.
I marveled at the glimpse of orderly traffic. “I had no idea they could have such a thing here,” I said. “Ahmedabad is the exact opposite.”
The clack-clack of the train slowed down now as we approached the station. A grainy mist covered everything, a kind of fog I’d never seen.
Dharmanshu Uncle met us outside the train. A stout-looking man of medium height, a tad taller than my father, he wore dark spectacles and his hair was a thick, silvery mane. A silvery moustache remained of the beard he once had. He greeted us in the same noble baritone I could still hear in my mind from years back. My mother hugged him for a long time, tears gathering in her eyes. He and my father shook hands warmly. Wasn’t Dharmanshu Uncle cold? He wore his overcoat unbuttoned, beneath it only a shirt, and a scarf that hung uselessly around his neck.
“Anand, good to finally meet you,” he said.
Shyly, Anand extended his hand. Dharmanshu Uncle took it and slapped Anand jovially on the back. “Welcome, welcome,” Dharmanshu Uncle said. “There’s much I want to know about your life. How you are getting along here and all?”
Anand nodded, “Yeah.”
“He’s doing quite marvelously,” my father said, glancing back at Anand.
“Atcha! Very good,” Dharmanshu Uncle declared. “I know India must be challenge.” Taking a look at us, he burst into laughter, a powerful boom from his barrel chest, and took the suitcase from my mother’s hands.
It was biting cold, far colder than Ahmedabad this time of year. A patina of sunlight, filtering through the glass panes of the roof, cast thin, cold angles across the general grayness. I reached into my backpack and threw on my jacket.
Dharmanshu Uncle turned toward me. “Grown up now,” he said, smiling. “How long it’s been since you were last here? Ten years?”
“Eleven,” my mother replied. “Yes, he looks more and more like you every day.” She asked me, “Do you remember him at all?”
I told them I remembered the beard and that he had a son, older than me by a few years.
“Dilip, yes.” Dharmanshu Uncle nodded his head. “He just finished his MBA in London. Now he’s doing consultancy for one firm there.”
“Always a brilliant boy,” my father said, more to me than the others. “He was tops in his class right from”—he held out his palm at waist length—“when he was a boy.”
“To me, he will always be that boy,” my mother said. “I remember babysitting him, when you and Alka used to go out together.”
We walked from the platform through the great cement-gray station and out into a crush of traffic. Taxi and rickshaw drivers in knit caps, sweaters, some smoking bidis, waited outside their vehicles, chattering with each other, beckoning travelers now and then as they passed by. We made for Dharmanshu Uncle’s black Fiat, loaded our suitcases, and motored away into the roundabout fronting the station.
“Vikram,” Dharmanshu Uncle called from the driver’s seat, “I can remember you as a baby.”
“Mango syrup, mango syrup,” my mother said. “Do you remember?” She turned from the front seat to me, seated between Anand and my father, and pointed at Dharmanshu Uncle. “He used to put mango syrup on your cheeks, on your forehead, and we all used to lick it off of your face. You were so cute.”
I felt slightly embarrassed, my father sitting there listening to this; I felt no longer myself but another person, a projection of the baby they remembered. “I can only remember the beard,” I said.
“It used to scare you,” my mother said. “When Dharmanshu Uncle would come near, you’d start screaming.”
That got Dharmanshu Uncle laughing again, nodding at the memory.
We drove through a shopping district—sari shops, tea and juice stalls, men’s tailoring, the offices of Citibank and British Airways—and into a district of housing colonies, wending around scooters and street children, the occasional congregation of cows. We turned onto a narrow gray lane lined with doorways and cluttered with bicycles and motorbikes. Dharmanshu Uncle pulled over to the side, and we all got out. The shouts of children playing could be heard from one of the flats above us, their voices tinkling like wind chimes in the air.
We lugged our baggage into a narrow room, simple, small, and cold. The paint job seemed only half-finished; a swath of blue covered the upper portion of the living room and the dining area beyond. The rest was whitewashed, smudged hastily with plaster. The bathroom, about as roomy as a phone booth, was of the Indian variety: a pear-shaped pit, a bucket, and a tap. There was a definite air of neglect about the place, and I began to wonder where Dharmanshu Uncle had been putting his civil engineer’s salary all these years.
On one wall hung a framed photograph of Alka Auntie, wreathed in garlands as if she were wearing a high collar of marigolds. I knew her only from a small photo, perhaps two-by-three inches, taken in the late-’60s, just before her death. The photograph showed her and my mother sitting on a bench at the Taj Mahal, both smiling together like the closest of sisters, with Dilip, an infant resembling a large potato with curls of dark hair, yawning on Alka Auntie’s lap.
* *
As we ate, the cook—a short, grizzled man in a white undershirt, pyjama pants and flip-flops—appeared from the kitchen to provide a steady supply of hot rotis. Dharmanshu Uncle gave the cook dinner instructions at one point and joked with him about repeatedly showing up late, at which the cook laughed shyly, nodded, and shuffled away. Mostly Dharmanshu Uncle’s attention kept to the conversation, as he and my parents talked—about my father’s job and about the difficulties of our peripatetic life in America, and, likewise, the difficulties of moving back to India.
I’d taken a seat next to Dharmanshu Uncle. Though my attention occasionally strayed to a Hindi soap opera that blared from the TV in the living room, I couldn’t help notice how restless he was. As he listened, his knees fidgeted, and he would compulsively brush his sleeve with his hand as if there were crumbs there or pick at his collar or at crumbs near his plate. These actions seemed mostly a way of keeping his mind occupied and distracted while he carried on the conversation. But distracted from what, I wondered. Sometimes he interrupted my father to ask a question with pressing urgency—a point of minor detail—or to make a joke. It wasn’t as if he’d disappeared into his own world; Dharmanshu Uncle was very much present, he absorbed everything my parents said, and his observations about our adjusting to Indian life were keen and sensitive. But I sensed a nervous energy at his core, palpable in his every intake of breath.
Dharmanshu Uncle asked Anand and me about our schooling in America, what sorts of classes we took, the subjects we liked. He asked about American TV and cars and shopping malls. He said he wished he could buy a Ford in India and lamented the country’s protectionist politics. He said the government was corrupt and useless and succeeded only in making life difficult for everyone, and if you had a shred of ambition, it was best to get out of the country.
Even as a government employee himself, he had no qualms about lambasting t
he babus. Almost every engineering project he had supervised had gotten whittled to a fraction of its original scale because, he said, “one or another of these bloody bastards—bureaucrat, policeman, some local goondah—everyone is taking baksheesh. And, along the way, all my work had to become simpler and smaller. A four-lane highway becomes two-lane after bribes are taken. The quality of concrete to make one bridge becomes degraded. Drainage pipes are poor quality because it’s all that can be afforded after payoffs. All kinds of mischief.”
“Can’t anyone call them on it?” I asked. “This is a free country, isn’t it? There’s freedom of the press here—”
“Now and then, people do, but it comes to nothing.” He wiped at the corner of the table with his thumb and shifted in his chair. “But if you are close to government as I am, there is risk, you see.”
“You say something,” my father tsked, “and you’re transferred to some backwater.”
“You mean like Ghatlodiya?” Anand said.
My father emitted either a quick laugh or a hiccup, I couldn’t tell. “Exactly!”
“Or,” Dharmanshu Uncle said, “you are dead.” The table fell silent. “I do remember a case, long time back, of a colleague who was found murdered. Right there on the railway track.”
“Really?” Anand asked, his eyes bugging from his head. “Was he decapitated?”
“Body was found one night in Gurgaon.” Dharmanshu Uncle smiled with an ironic wave of his hand. “Police said it was suicide.” Then, pithily, he added, “It was not suicide. I don’t think so.” He sniffed. “In India, corruption is harder to erase than caste. It is not going anywhere. Corruption is caste,” he added, “and vice versa.”
