The Leaving of Things

by Antani, Jay

  My father turned to me, arms folded, nodding. I felt the need to explain somehow, to rationalize this feeling. “At first,” I said, “applying to the school was just something to kill the monotony. To see if I could even get in. It kept me going.”

  “But now that you’re in,” my father replied, “you need to do all you can to see it through, no?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “With Mummi’s health the way it is … I feel like …” A valve turned, shutting off the words. I couldn’t bring myself to say them.

  Across the road, a Hindi pop tune blasted from the speakers of the truck parked in the shopping complex. The noise aggravated the senses—a chirrupy voice bouncing above a crazy arabesque of tablas, trumpets, a flamenco guitar. One by one, the streetlights blinkered on.

  “I don’t want to not be here,” I tried, ‘if something happens to her.”

  “Your mother’s health should not be an issue. You can’t let what is unknown run your life, can you?” He was obscured now in the lengthening dark, the skittering of headlights. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “When I myself left for America, my father said to me one thing: ‘Do not come back until you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do. No matter what happens.’”

  “Was that the promise?” I asked him, remembering Hemant Uncle’s words.

  “Hmm?” He gave me a quick, curious look. “Yes,” he nodded pensively. “He made me promise. He knew, of course. He knew he was not going to live much longer. He was already in poor health by then. Deep down, I think we both knew. But he made me promise. And as difficult as it was for me, especially after I got the telegram that he was gone, I stuck it out. I knew no one. I was just a new student up there in New York. And you, Anand, your mother hadn’t left for America yet. I had maybe a hundred dollars. Yet somehow I got through.”

  I thought about that, my father alone, a student just beginning his studies at Cornell. Feeling cut off. And I thought more about my conversation with Hemant Uncle that past Diwali, how angry and bitter I’d then felt toward my father, and Hemant Uncle’s words to me. “He thinks you’re a brave man,” I told my father now. “Hemant Uncle. He really admires you.”

  My father smiled. “It’s not a question of brave or not. It’s just … see …” He held out his palms. “Every opportunity is a dividing line. Here, you have things as they are.” He raised one palm then the other. “And here, things as they can be.” His palms were but vaguely discernible shapes in the dark. “You choose if want to commit to stepping over the line, easy as that really.”

  I filled him in on the visa form I’d received and about my gambit with the art department.

  “Can’t hurt to try to get some money out of them,” he said with the skepticism of a jaded gambler. He told me he had money back in the States, at our bank in Madison. Over the past few years, he had begun saving, whatever he could put aside, for the possibility that Anand and I might one day need it. But at this point, it wouldn’t cover more than a year of tuition, so he had put in for a loan. Enough, he told me, to see me through undergrad studies (and paying out-of-state tuition at that). That had to be a monster of a loan, I thought.

  This was sounding outlandish to me again, a selfish scheme on my part that would set my parents back way too much. I told him I was sorry. I’d see my way through another two years, but this was all getting out of hand. As I said it, though, I felt a wrenching, a resistance from deep within. I couldn’t go back now, not against myself.

  “Money or time, it’s going to cost one or the other,” my father said. “Which is more precious to you—money or time?”

  I said all right, fine. “But I will pay back the loan, whatever it is, down the road. You need to let me do that.”

  My father laughed, but it was the laugh of a father. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  The Hindi song from the speakers across the road rose in a smash of tablas and trumpets, the whooping of singers, then a narrow bridge of silence before the next track.

  “When will you know?” I asked. “About the loan?”

  “Before Bombay, I should think.”

  The living room doors opened, and my mother’s silhouette appeared, edged against the wash of interior light, the blaze of guns from the TV. She stepped onto the balcony and slipped out toward us. Leaning over the parapet, she peered down at the garden.

  “Nice how you can smell the roses from up here, no?” She turned to me, reached up, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and touched my shoulder. “So, you’re leaving us?”

  I put my arm around her. I could think of no gesture, no words that could express the inner breaking I felt, that contradiction of loss and optimism. And I realized that there is a gratitude that cannot be articulated. No words I knew, and no picture I could ever make could be equal to it. It was a gratitude you spent your whole life trying to live up to—you tried in the choices you made, the paths you took. You tried in the sum total of your actions. This, I sensed, was a rare kind of gratitude. It made me feel like a small child.

  It reminded me that, above and beyond everything, I was their son. The feeling infiltrated the nerves and the blood and got me a bit jittery as I let it sink in. And as scary and overwhelming as the feeling was, I welcomed it and wanted to be equal to it.

  * *

  We heard nothing more from Wisconsin before we left for Bombay. My father did hear from the bank. They had approved half the amount he had applied for. Anyway, we put together my visa application, along with my admissions letter, passport, my father’s bank statements, and loan letter. We figured we had enough ammo to forge ahead.

  In Bombay, I felt myself in the presence of a metropolis that owed nothing to the rest of India. It lay sprawled on the Arabian Sea, a massive, glittering sea creature made out of soot, steel, asphalt, and sweat, stretching its tentacles of train tracks and roadways into the Indian coastline. The city sent out energy waves in all directions, from every seaside Victorian cupola and modern-day high-rise that studded Marine Drive. We walked along the drive, and I could feel Bombay’s warm breath in the sea air. The hotels and office buildings were its organs pulsing with white light, electrical currents in its veins. Its neurons and pulsations registered in the call of vendors and revelers on Chowpatty Beach, the roaring of the beaten-in red double-deckers, the drone of the hornet-like taxis, the clip-clop of horse-drawn buggies, the flower sellers who worked and slept on the street corner. In the evenings, we maneuvered past the bodies of migrants camped on the pavement, wrapped in and surrounded by everything they owned, as we headed back to our hotel on Marine Drive. It was a cramped room for the four of us, but it was clean. The leaky bathtub pooled water all over the bathroom floor, but at least we weren’t sleeping on the pavement under the shadow of high-rises and storefronts like the many we’d just seen outside. Plus we were near both the hospital and the consulate, the twin purposes of our visit.

  We spent our first couple of days in the lobby of the Breach Candy Hospital while my mother underwent the tests that the specialist had ordered. I saw this specialist briefly when we went up to meet him at his office on one of the hospital’s upper floors. He was a small, genial man with eyes as gentle as the tone in which he addressed us. I supposed he knew how to put his patients at ease, and that gave me comfort. Soon after we introduced ourselves, though, my father asked Anand and me to wait down in the lobby.

  We sat through the afternoons on cushioned black chairs alongside an anxious mother—a Muslim woman, I guessed, with a sheer veil pulled over her head, who tried to keep her bored child from getting crabby. The lobby sweeper swept, the orderlies in their shirtsleeves sauntered past, and now and then, the intercom itched with a gravelly voice paging one doctor or another. The unsettling smell of sweat and pharmaceuticals hung in the air.

  We kept our attention on our books. Anand’s finals and mine were coming up at the end of the month, and the only way to see our way through this—all of this�
��was to plow through it like hacking through the jungle with machetes toward signs of daylight on the far side.

  At the end of the second day, my mother looked tired, but at least she was in good spirits. She told us it was more of the same—a sonogram, biopsy, blood tests—along with another CT scan “just to be safe,” the specialist had said. She said it would be a couple of days before the results came back, and she had to see the specialist again.

  “Crap,” I said, “not more waiting.”

  “He’s a good man, though,” my father said. “At least there’s that.”

  My father took us around his old stomping grounds—the restaurant where he used to eat lunch when he was an IIT student back in the late ’60s. It was a low-ceilinged hall, strictly working-class, much like the Xavier’s mess hall. Servers rushed around with rotis, vegetables, and dal in tin pots, making sure everyone’s plates were full. We hired a driver who took us around winding Malabar Hill, lined thick with trees, past shady colonial bungalows, the addresses of the moneyed, a stark contrast to the city’s teeming open-air markets, all jostling warrens of trade and traffic, where I couldn’t take pictures fast enough of flower stalls, fabric shops, hole-in-the-wall record shops, anything that flitted past the window of my camera. The Gateway of India seemed to me a gorgeous monstrosity of volcanic rock, a sea god’s throne lifted straight out of the Arabian Sea. It had none of the subtlety of the Taj, but it was impressive still in all its blunt, imperial features—thick-shouldered, with muscular columns on either side of a Mughal-style archway, topped by turrets that decorated the Gateway like epaulets on an admiral’s shoulders.

  From the jetty along the sea-facing side of the Gateway, we boarded a boat along with a handful of Indian tourists for a ride far out into the bay. Anand and I stood on the top deck. Not a sound out there in the still and heavy air but the boat’s ripsawing motor as we plied the dense, gray-blue water. I saw warships anchored farther out past Bombay’s promontory, and out where the water became glassy white, merchant-marine freighters floated like phantoms against the horizon. I wondered where they were headed and about the lives of all the people aboard all those ships. People I would never know. People whose futures, out there in the shimmering and silvery expanse, along all the shipping lanes of the world, seemed the most adventurous and exotic of escapes.

  * *

  On the morning before our appointment at the consulate, I was anxious, couldn’t relax. After a couple of hours of attempting to study, I finally put away my books, got dressed. My father and I got our papers together, and we walked to the consulate, past the Breach Candy Hospital, past a glimpse of the sea. We didn’t say much. There was nothing left to do now but to see this through.

  The consulate was a high-security fortress. Marines stood guard at the front gate, flanked by palm trees, while the American flag hung from its rooftop pole in the breeze-less air. Metal detectors scanned us as we passed through the entrance.

  While it all gave an intimidating impression, I tried to think of it as a brief return home. I filed in with a steady stream of visa hopefuls through the security area. To the Americans dressed in navy-blue blazers, walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, I was no more and no less than anyone else in that crowd of would-be immigrants.

  We took numbers that told us our place in the queue, and we were ushered into a gray-carpeted waiting room filled with rows of chairs where everyone gathered: families with infants, the newly married, old women who could scarcely speak a word of English, and students like me applying for their own visas. Artificial plants in decorative pots stood in the corners of this strangely antiseptic space, and a portrait of President George Bush, in his square metal glasses, stared back at us from the wall.

  Seated behind thick glass windows along the far side of the room, like tellers at a bank, were the consulate’s staffers calling up and interviewing the applicants one by one. The applicants being interviewed leaned toward narrow slots at the base of the windows—the only channel of communication—through which they spoke in low, anxious tones and pushed files back and forth. The air hummed with nervous anticipation punctuated now and again by a tinny, two-note chime that summoned the next applicant in the queue. My father and I waited for our queue number to flash up on one of the displays above the windows.

  I don’t know how long we waited—an hour, two hours—before we heard the chime and saw our number come up. We got up and approached our window where a youthful-looking American who could’ve passed for a high-school guidance counselor greeted us with an officious smile. Hunched forward, his fingers intertwined, the interviewer began asking for our passports, case number, and the “nature of our visit.” The doors of the landing boat had finally dropped, and I felt myself charging from the boat and up the choppy strand under a hail of interrogation.

  To be fair, the interviewer was friendly and welcoming. He spoke admiringly of Wisconsin and of the university. He looked over my visa application, the admission letter, and the loan papers—everything we had in our small arsenal. Then he told me that he was placing my file on hold, saying he wasn’t convinced that the loan amount, plus whatever money my parents would be putting up, would be enough to meet my board and tuition costs. My father countered by showing him proof of his employment as director at the Institute and his balance at the State Bank. With his income, he assured him, he could easily supplement the loan and the money already in our Wisconsin account. But the interviewer stayed fast and told us the consulate would communicate with the university about my case. “Sorry,” he said, “but that’s the best I can do.” He smiled, his mouth a thin comma, and sat with his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped, as if he’d just finished reprimanding a student about poor grades. “Good luck,” he said as we gathered up our things.

  22

  March 12, 1989

  Dear Vik,

  Sorry to hear the news is so mixed. I’m glad to hear your mother’s doing much better, and the doc in Bombay gave her the all-clear. But on the “coming back” front, we’re still in the dark, I guess.

  Nate and I were kicking around ideas for a bunch of ten or fifteen minute shorts we could shoot this summer. We’re thinking a James Bond-meets-Woody Allen spy spoof, like we tried to do a couple of summers ago, remember? But with real dialogue and editing this time. What do you think? Over spring break, we’re going to start roughing out ideas. Feel free to jump in.

  (By the way, when you see Nate again, if you ever do, you won’t recognize him: his hair’s down to his shoulders, and he’s grown a goatee. The man thinks it makes him look sexy. But I don’t see the girls exactly flocking to his dorm room.)

  Let me say, though, that it’s not his hairdo that bothered me recently but his attitude. After winter break, Nate called up and invited me over to his dorm to hang out. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months because of classes and work and so on, but I was eager to see him. Then I get to his room and realize he’s throwing a kegger with all his floor mates. He’s halfway to hammered when I show up, and after an hour, it’s like I’m not even there. I tried to catch up with him, find out how his semester went, but the whole night he pretty much blew me off. It was very strange. All he’s doing is getting shitfaced with all his smarmy dorm friends, passing the bong around. After a couple of hours, I just left. Something felt very wrong. He didn’t seem like the same Nate.

  The next day, I called him up and confronted him about his dick attitude, and he, of course, got defensive and called me a wuss or whatever. The whole thing got ugly. Anyway, we didn’t talk again till last week. I ran into him at the Union after class, and we actually sat and talked. Really talked this time. He apologized and said he had cut down on the partying—guess the day after his kegger, he got into some major trouble with his RA. We talked about our spring semesters, about working on some creative projects again, and little by little, it began to feel strangely like old times again. Minus you of course.

  Speaking of the spring semester, I’m a busy bee these days.
The job at WHA is going great—I’m actually running the switcher during the Badger basketball games now, and they got me working a couple more shifts. It gets pretty intense over there. In fact, I may be able to get you work at the station if you’re interested. You know, work study or something.

  Vik, if you want my two cents—not that it matters—I would say to let things take their course and don’t let them bum you out just yet. Let’s see how this visa thing shakes down, take it from there. Write as soon as you can.

  Karl

  p. s. What’s up with Priya? Nate’s still waiting for a picture.

  * *

  No information came from the consulate for weeks following our Bombay trip. My afternoons were abandoned caves in which I hunkered and studied while outside the April heat reared its angry head. By midafternoon, the streets were blinding white.

  Anand spent more time with his new tutor, cramming for his own finals in Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati. He grumbled because the Nintendo was off limits for the time being.

  I continued to wonder about Priya: where she was and whether, as Manju alleged, I had anything to do with whatever had become of her.

  One day after French lecture, Madame Varma asked if I’d had any news of Priya. I told her no, I hadn’t, but perhaps Manju or Hannah might have news. Madame Varma shook her head, bundling her notes and textbook in her arm. “They say they haven’t heard anything,” she said in a tone both concerned and disappointed. “Her family simply says she’s gone away on holiday or some such.” A corner of her mouth turned down, and she shrugged. “Wherever she is, I do hope she keeps up with her studies. She would do well to continue in her French.” I was still mulling over Madame Varma’s mysterious bit of information—or lack thereof—when she stopped at the door to say, “Tell me, will you Vikram, if you find out anything?” I told her of course I would.

  As I crossed the college courtyard, I wondered why Madame Varma thought to ask me about Priya. How could she have known that Priya and I knew each other? Had we been so obvious? Ah, well, I thought, what does it matter now anyway? She was gone. Safely away from this place.