The Leaving of Things

by Antani, Jay

  How’d I get in here? Where was I? What day was it?

  A man’s face, paunchy, a flat nose and tiny eyes came into view. He smiled pleasantly as his hands worked the thread back and forth over the right side of my head.

  “It is okay now,” he said. “You were needing seven, eight stitches. Very deep. But don’t worry. It’s all fine now.” His tone was businesslike, as if he were giving me the price of produce at the market. He smelled of Ahmedabad, the dust and sweat, of paan masala mixed with a trace of cologne.

  I heard concerned voices in the small blue-painted room. A ceiling fan whirred above me. Pictures of Krishna and a Ganesha figurine sat in a niche in the wall. A Hindu devotional calendar hung next to it. Above the niche, high on the wall, hung a picture of a middle-aged man, garlanded. Some dead relative, no doubt.

  “Do not move too much.” He cut the thread, dabbed iodine—cool to the forehead—and taped on the gauze.

  Incense burning. The redolence of Gujarati cooking, the clank of kitchen utensils.

  “Where am I?” I groaned. No sooner had I asked than Vinod came into view. His eyes were bleary, bloodshot. He carried a tray with a steel cup of water. He put the tray down and slumped into a chair.

  The man rose from the cot, scooping up a metal pan with scissors, thread, gauze, and dark bottles.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Vinod in his chair, head bowed, hands covering his face.

  “Quite a deep cut,” the man said. He wore a dark green safari shirt with a pen in the breast pocket. He extended his hand, I shook it. “I am Dr. Arvind Deshpande. You are in our flat. I am … I am his older brother.” He gestured at Vinod and sighed. He said I had no sign of a concussion and asked if I had a headache.

  “Just where the rock hit me,” I said, sitting up. “I’m glad you’re a doctor. Don’t know what I’d have done.” I touched the gauzed-up wound. It felt tender. The wound bit at my nerves where I touched.

  “Dentist actually,” Dr. Deshpande said. “In two weeks, you go to clinic and get the stitches removed, hm?” He cocked his head at me, waited for my reply.

  “Two weeks,” I said. “Okay.”

  The older woman in the yellow sari—Vinod’s mother—entered the room. In Gujarati, she asked if I needed anything.

  “Just water,” I said and took the cup that Vinod had set down on a small square stand beside the cot. I sipped it.

  “Okay?” the brother asked, palms upraised.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The brother tipped his head once to the side, smiled. “Okay.” He turned and spoke to his mother. “Chalo, to the kitchen.”

  They went away. Vinod did not look up, his face buried in his hands. He began to shake his head and wouldn’t stop. When he raised his face, his eyes looked worn out from tears. “I am sorry, Vikram. So sorry. I did not know that boy would do that.”

  “You with your knife and him with his rocks. What is he? Your personal hit man or something?”

  Vinod turned away, smirked. “That knife, that was only to scare you, I would never—I am so sorry.” He broke off, choking back tears, then continued, “And that boy Raju is thinking I am some hero. So he comes to defend me. He ran away. Scared, I think so.” He sniffed. “I am no hero.” He hung his head. His breath came in sniffs and gasps. “I am sorry, truly sorry.”

  My eyes turned to the picture on the wall, a black and white portrait wreathed in a marigold garland. The man’s expression had a military sternness. He wore a tie and a starched white shirt, clasped his hands in front of him, and looked off at an angle from the camera. I asked who he was.

  “My father,” Vinod answered. “Died five years back.” Vinod turned his eyes away, gazed off through the kitchen onto the patio at the gathering evening. Nervously, he rubbed his palms together. “Ever since,” he said, “I am … feeling a bit stuck.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Vinod kept his face in the direction of the kitchen, but his eyes shifted toward me. I noticed a tentative smile on his face. “You are stuck also, huh?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was. For a long time.” But then I thought about my photography and the college application, the constant studying and the scholarship. “It’s a rotten feeling. But it lasts only as long as we let it, I guess. If we really want, we can get ourselves unstuck. It’s possible.”

  “I don’t think so I will get to such a point. In jail perhaps, but …” he trailed off, and the bitterness in his eyes finished his words for him.

  “You’ll get it together, Vinod. And I doubt it’ll be in jail,” I said, smiling. I got off the cot unsteadily, keeping my hand over the bandaging. “We just get to a point where we want to cut out all the BS, you know? I think, ultimately, we want to fix things up so we can at least live with ourselves. And maybe even be proud of ourselves, you know?”

  “Proud of myself.” He considered those words for a moment. “I’m finding that difficult these days.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “I know that feeling too. Take it as a sign. You’re ready for change.”

  Vinod got to his feet. From his pocket, he produced Pradeep’s money—three thousand rupees—folded and bound with a rubber band. He handed it to me.

  “Why don’t you give it back to him?” I said.

  He lowered his eyes, staring down at the pebbled tiles of the floor. Gradually, he drew back his hand and nodded. “I only hope he will forgive.”

  “He will,” I said, “or I don’t know Pradeep.”

  * *

  Before we parted ways, Vinod offered to fill up the tank in the Luna.

  “There’s a gas station in Ghatlodiya?” I joked. With no money in my pocket, I took him up on it.

  On our way out through the patio, I asked Vinod about the Harley motorcycle in the corner. He told me he’d gotten it two years ago from the father of a friend of his at Xavier’s—a friend who’d since graduated. The father had brought the motorcycle back from the States after his graduate studies in the ’70s, and it had since fallen into disrepair. The bike, Vinod said, was a 1975 Aermacchi Harley and, “just junk when he gave it to me. It did not run. I had to take apart and bring back here on rickshaw or in bus, all the way from Navarangpura.” He laughed at the memory. “Needed umpteen parts, clutch, gearbox, and you cannot get parts for this bike in India, so I have to … improvise.”

  I shook my head, impressed by his efforts. “And when you’re finished, you’ll have your dream motorcycle, eh?” I pointed to his Harley T-shirt, now sweaty and dust-streaked. “You’ve been working on it this whole time, and we never knew it?”

  “Not whole time,” Vinod admitted. “I used to spend a lot of time with that bike, but in the last few months,” the sides of his mouth turned down, “not so much.” Then he shrugged, “Eh, it’s just hobby anyway. Nothing to mention as such.”

  “Nothing to mention? Dude, this is impressive stuff.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps.”

  “But how impressive would it be to finish? And be riding around India on that bike?”

  Vinod smiled under his moustache, and his face beamed. “It may happen. It will happen.”

  * *

  I picked up my Leaving Certificate from Rajkumar the following day. He asked about the bandage on my head, and I told him I’d gotten mixed up in a local riot. He tsked a few times and rummaged through the final exams mark sheets stacked beside him on the counter. Rajkumar finally found mine and pulled it from the stack. He glanced at it, scrunching his nose, and handed it to me. “But your father was so bright,” he said, his face putting on a look of mock-pity. “Such a pity.”

  “It is a pity,” I said. “With marks like these, I may end up like you. See you around.”

  Father D’Souza stamped the certificate with the college seal and signed it. He didn’t say a word to me, just sat hunched at his desk as he stamped the certificate and passed it back to me with a quickly worded “good luck.” He then took up a sheaf of papers and began stamping away some more. I wondered i
f he was happy to be getting rid of me, the American interloper. I wanted to tell him, “I’m sorry I made out with a girl in your library. But it really was the most fun I had all year,” and see what he would do. But I settled for, “Thank you, Father,” and made my exit.

  * *

  Pradeep was in his room, all smiles, and greeted me. He wasn’t wearing his customary sunglasses today, and it was strange seeing him without them. His eyes weren’t clouded-over the way I’d imagined but were dark and clear. His irises roved side to side, turned up along the upper rim of his eye sockets. Pradeep told me Vinod had stopped by that morning and returned the money. Vinod had told him everything that had happened, right down to the rock-to-the-head finale.

  “How is it looking?” he asked.

  “Check it out yourself.” I leaned forward, and he felt around the gauze bandaging.

  I flinched. “Ouch.”

  “Sorry, bhai.”

  “Just kidding.”

  “And, Vikram, you must have forgot this.”

  He went across the room, his arms feeling for the edge of his desk under the window. From the desk, he picked up my camera.

  “There it is,” I said, taking the camera from him. In all the commotion of finding Pradeep’s room broken into, I’d left it here and forgotten about it. I thought of the events of the previous day and my conversation with Vinod. “In all this,” I said, “I guess I feel worst for Vinod.”

  “I do as well,” Pradeep said. He opened a desk drawer and began running his fingers over the contents. “I am having trouble finding my glasses today. Ah, here,” his fingers fished out his glasses, and he put them on. It struck me how, until I had seen him without his glasses, I hardly ever noticed his blindness. He lived beyond the handicap, above it. He had defeated it, and he welcomed the rest of us, while we were in his company, to share in that victory with him.

  “When he returned the money, I was angry,” Pradeep said. “But not at him. Angry that it had gotten so bad that he felt he needed to steal it.”

  “None of us could have suspected,” I said. I asked if he knew about Vinod trying to rebuild the Harley motorcycle.

  “Oh-ho?” Pradeep sounded surprised. “He never told me!”

  “It’s a big project,” I said, filling him in on how he’d taken the bike apart, transported it, reassembled the thing, and was now trying to bring it back to life.

  “Brilliant,” Pradeep remarked.

  “Wonder why he never even told you about it.”

  Pradeep grabbed his stick leaning against his cot. “Maybe he was feeling embarrassed by it, I don’t know.” He stood there, thoughtfully, tapping the stick on the floor. I lined Pradeep up in the viewfinder of the camera and snapped a photo. “You said so yourself, no? The system is not kind to you if you function outside its rules.”

  “If I did, you just said it better,” I said. “Pradeep, one question, though. I take it Vinod also lied about studying at all those schools in America?”

  “He is having an uncle in New York,” Pradeep answered, his tone now solemn, almost secretive, “who he visited once after his father passed. Uncle paid for his ticket and all. But I think Vinod tried to stay longer there, illegally you see. His uncle could not find him. Then Vinod called from Florida after six weeks. It was a big tamasha, yaar. He got kicked out, his uncle paid fine or some such to immigration people, and I don’t think so he gets on well with his family.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and Devasia craned his head in.

  “Pradeep,” he began, “you have spoken with Vikram.” Then seeing I was there, bandaging and all, his eyes went wide. “My god!”

  “It’s okay,” I told Devasia. “Glad you’re both here now,” and that’s when I caught them up on my American news.

  “So it is official. You will not be with us,” Devasia sighed. “I had no idea you had even applied.”

  “It was a lark,” I said. “A long shot.”

  “Not lark,” Devasia countered. “Faith. It took faith to do it, no?”

  For old times’ sake, I wanted to contradict him, tell him faith had nothing to do with it, that what got me the admission, the scholarship, the visa was a hundred percent pure luck. But then I wondered what it was that had gotten me this far, if not faith—faith in myself. “Damnit,” I replied. “You holy men are always right. How do you do it?”

  “We get our information from above,” he laughed. Devasia said this was his last day in Ahmedabad. He’d be returning to Madras tomorrow till college started up again.

  “Then it’s a good thing you stopped by,” I said. “Otherwise, who knows when we’d have met again.”

  “We will meet one day surely.”

  “You think so?”

  “One day, I am sure.”

  We strolled over to the mess hall. Only a smattering of students now. The aroma of rotis, vegetables, and dal wafted here as deliciously as ever. Devasia took his herculean helpings of everything on the menu. Pradeep had already eaten but took a plate of rice and yogurt anyway. I actually took a plate myself, a sampling of everything.

  “But if I get sick,” I told Devasia, “I’m coming after you.”

  I snapped pictures of us in the mess, with the servers who I’d seen each time I’d come here with Devasia. And then we said our goodbyes, making promises to keep in touch. Devasia, in his florid hand, wrote down his address at the hostel and in Madras too. “Come to South,” he said. “It’s much more beautiful than this Ahmedabad.”

  “I will,” I said. “But don’t knock Ahmedabad. This is my town, you know.”

  * *

  An express letter came from Wisconsin. It explained about the scholarship. The art department liked the portfolio enough to offer to cover half my tuition. Along with the loan and whatever on-campus work I could get, my father and I figured we had things covered.

  “I’m proud of both of you,” he told Anand and me after he finished reading the letter. We stood out on the balcony, watching the evening sun swell over the shopping complex and the endless and expanding tracts of cement housing colonies beyond. Anand swatted at pigeons just above us, roosting in the eaves, trying to distract them, and the traffic honked and rattled around the crossroads. From the dusty lot of the shopping complex, the “music truck” blared its repertoire of Bollywood show tunes while shoppers browsed the tables of music cassettes under its awning.

  “And Anand, I know this has not been the easiest transition,” my father said. “Anand? Stop that, listen to me—” Anand turned his attention from the pigeons. “I know this has not been the easiest transition. But in spite of that, you’re doing better in Hindi and Sanskrit than even I was doing at your age.” He patted Anand on the back and told him how proud he was.

  I agreed with him and asked Anand how he did it. His answer was matter-of-fact: “Once you figure out one language—say, Gujarati—it’s not too big a jump to figuring out Hindi and from there to Sanskrit. They’re all related, so ….” He shrugged. There was a strangely dismissive tone to his answer, as if he couldn’t be bothered with our baffled admiration and didn’t want to spend much time explaining his own genius. He turned his attention to the traffic, leaning his thin frame against his elbows on the parapet. “I still want to go back to America.”

  “But so long as you’re in India,” my father smiled, “I want you to love it.” He turned around to address both of us. “I’m thinking of building a house in Gandhinagar. I’ve been looking at land there, and it’s much quieter and cleaner than the city. Close to the Institute. Your mother will like it.” He waved his hand at the plot of ground in front of our bungalow. “She’ll be able to garden properly there. Lots more land.”

  “Am I going to have to switch schools again?” Anand asked.

  “Not for another year, and only if you want to.” He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, plans for the home taking shape in his mind. My mother and he were going out for a walk, he told us, and he handed me back my letter. “Take c
are of that. That’ll be a souvenir one day.”

  Anand and I stayed out on the balcony watching it grow dark, the flash and pulse of traffic. Swallows made graceful arcs in the open sky.

  “So I guess you’re gone, huh?” Anand said. “You think you’ll ever come back?”

  “Of course I’ll come back.”

  “To visit?”

  “To visit, but after college, who knows? I could come back or stay … don’t know.”

  After a long pause, Anand said, “Yeah, but what about me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re leaving, and that leaves me here.” He turned his head toward me. I sensed him staring at me. “No one here knows what we know.”

  “Anand, I’m not leaving you. I’m just going away to school.” Anand nodded, leaning his back against the parapet, and nervously fidgeted with his fingers.

  “Look,” I said, “you’ll be in ninth grade. In four years, you’ll be out of there too.”

  “I don’t mean about four years from now. I’m talking about right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t given much thought to how Anand might react to my leaving. He always seemed so engrossed in one thing or another—his studies, video games, movies, baseball (or cricket, depending on his mood), and his friends. “It’s not terrible, is it, Anand?” I asked. “You seem to be getting along well here.”

  “But they don’t know our life, what it used to be, how much it’s changed,” he said, the words rushing out. “Only you and I do. My friends are all right, but they think America is some big Disneyland. You know, like what they see in the movies. They don’t know America or what this has been like for me. And Pappa, he just wants this all to work out for Mummi and him, and that means America’s pretty much forgotten about here. Only you and I went through what we did.”

  “You’re not forgotten about,” I said. “One thing I found out, what you want is what Pappa wants even though it may not always seem like it. And he’ll do whatever he can to back you up.” I stepped up next to him, propped my arms against the parapet. “It’s going to be fine. You’re going to have a great next four years. And after that, you can go wherever, do whatever you like.”