The Leaving of Things

by Antani, Jay

  “Maybe I won’t even want to go to America anymore in four years.”

  “You might not,” I said, “but that would mean something even better came along and took its place, right?”

  Down at the gate, we noticed a rickshaw pull up. The rickshaw driver got out, unlatched the gate, swung it open, and got back inside the rickshaw and puttered into the gravel drive, round the bend, disappearing around the corner to the downstairs doors. It couldn’t be Hemant Uncle; he’d have driven up from Baroda in his own car. Maybe Kamala Auntie was paying us another visit.

  I unbolted the front doors and switched on the stairwell lights. As I descended the steps, I could hear the rickshaw motor idling and voices talking outside, near the front entrance. I threw on the outside light and opened the doors to see Devasia lifting a wooden box, about twice the size of a tackle box, from the rickshaw. Its brown veneer was flaked and chipped.

  “Devasia?” I called. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a train?”

  Devasia turned around, beamed his perfect teeth at me. “I am on my way.”

  I stepped out, and we shook hands. “What’re you doing here?” I noticed suitcases filling every square inch of the rickshaw’s backseat except for the far corner where Devasia could perch. The driver, meanwhile, slumped in his seat, staring ahead idly, smoking his bidi.

  “On my way to station,” Devasia said. “But before that, Pradeep wanted me to give you this.” He held out the brown case. I took it by the handle. The thing was heavy and looked like it had been dragged around for years, through mud, up and down mountains. “And here is a note from him,” he said, producing a folded slip of paper from the front pocket of his kurta.

  “Thanks,” I said, asking if he had time to come upstairs, chat, meet my family.

  “I would like that,” he said, “but I should be going. My train leaves in one hour.” He placed one foot inside the rickshaw. “Hold on to my Madras address,” he said. “You are always welcome there. Also, send me some photos.”

  “Will do,” I said, wishing him a safe journey. “I expect to see them framed and on display when I visit.”

  “Promise.” He smiled, and in Hindi instructed the rickshaw driver to proceed. I watched the rickshaw putter away, its tiny headlamp bobbing like a giant firefly.

  * *

  Back upstairs, I unfolded Pradeep’s note:

  Dearest Vikram,

  I think you will get better use out of this than I am able. Please accept it as a token of my appreciation for your help settling difficulties with Vinod. I hope it is still in working order. It has not been used in many years.

  I unlatched the top of the case. Anand stood beside me, as curious as I was. A whiff of mustiness spiced with cumin and turmeric hit us as soon as I opened the lid to find a film camera inside.

  It was a bulky camera, industrial brown, molded out of thick plates of steel, with the words “Bell & Howell” on a tiny metal plate. I imagined you could crack a skull with it. It seemed indestructible. A turret in front with three lenses, fixed, of different sizes—like those eye-testing gizmos in the optometrist’s office—and next to the large turret, a smaller one, a miniature of the first, connected to a tube that ran the length of the camera’s body ending at a tiny eyepiece. I flipped the camera over to find a metallic windup key edged with rust and nearly as wide as my palm. I turned the camera over in my hands then returned to the note:

  I am at my family home in Bharuch and remembered only yesterday that we had this stored in a trunk for many years. My family is not using it so I hope it has found a home with you. This film camera used to belong to my late uncle who was a cameraman in Indian Army during 1960s. There are also a few old film rolls which, who knows, may still be usable. If not, I’m sure you can find more in States. I am sending it with Devasia to pass on to you.

  I am off for Bombay for remainder of vacation and shall send you copy of my recordings when all is complete. Wishing you much success in your future, Vikram bhai. Please write at your earliest.

  Best wishes,

  Pradeep

  “Check it out,” Anand said. He pulled out three cases of square black plastic. Masking tape sealed their lids shut. I peeled open the tape and pried open one of the cases. Inside, a film roll—the acetate shone in the room’s white light—within a black metal spool. Quickly, I snapped shut the lid.

  “What was that?” Anand asked. “Is it old?”

  “Film,” I said. “Probably.”

  From the bottom of the brown case, Anand pulled out a booklet, stained and dusty. “Man, this looks ancient,” he said. “Is it from a museum?”

  I blew a film of dust off the booklet and wiped it clean before I leafed through it. It was the camera’s instruction manual, and it looked at least thirty years old. “It might have a bit of kick left before it’s time for the museum,” I said.

  I needed to be frugal with the film rolls. The next day, I managed to get one of them threaded inside the magazine, using the diagram in the booklet. I didn’t dare press the button till I knew what all the dials and levers and the settings and the different lenses did. Anand lost patience with me after a while and went over to his friend Jyoti’s house to play Nintendo.

  Finally, I just couldn’t resist. I had to shoot some footage and listen to the film whir inside the camera. Through the eyepiece, I framed my mother, her hands actually, as she sifted through grains of rice out on the balcony. It wasn’t a soft gliding sound, as I’d hoped, but an angry stuttering: the film had jammed in the gate. I went back to my room, tried rethreading it till the film whirred softly through the magazine. That sounded right.

  I went down to the garden, ran off close-ups of the flowering shrubs, the textures and elliptical designs left by the tire tracks in the drive. I roamed the H.L. College cricket grounds—got off shots of the wickets, the sunburned pitch, the shady neems that lined the field’s far side. Then I went out under the peepul at the center of the crossroads. I’d looked out at this spot of ground every day from our balcony and couldn’t believe this was the first time I was standing in it. Farmers in white turbans and tunics took shelter from the heat here, sitting or lying on the floor of their wooden carts. Their bullocks dozed against the great tree roots. The farmers smiled as I framed them and went back to sleep as I bopped from angle to angle, aiming the camera lens up at the gnarled, sun-flickering tree branches, at the Fellini-esque circus of scooters and rickshaws, and at flies diving like kamikazes at the bulls’ ears.

  As inconspicuously as I could, I got at something I’d been framing in my mind for months: the cleaning girl’s copper-dark hands against the shimmer of her bangles, her sun-scorched face upturned as she hung the wash on the line, the swirl of her skirt as she moved through the bungalow.

  Dharmanshu Uncle sent us a postcard, asking after us, and to apologize for our summer tour of the northeast not panning out—the one he’d proposed during our Christmas visit. He said a roadworks project had stalled, and he had to postpone taking time off for his vacation till June. He’d been thinking about my mother’s suggestion, though, to visit Dilip in London finally. I wrote him back immediately to tell him my plans to return to the States. But more than that, to express to him how glad I was he’d decided to visit Dilip, to see a bit of the world after meaning to for so long. I was sorry our excursion to Sikkim and Darjeeling had to be put off, I said. Still, I couldn’t pass up the photographs from a trip like that, so let’s put it on our agenda. Let’s make it soon, I said, because time has a way of getting away from us.

  At the end of May, the cleaning girl suddenly went away. My mother said she’d gone back to her village in northwestern Gujarat. I asked her if she’d gotten married, maybe to that man I’d seen her with in the stairwell so many times.

  “No, he was a drunk, they found out,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I knew he wasn’t right for her.”

  The girl had been vague about her going away. A match had been found was all she would say, and she needed to leave
the city. We never saw her again.

  * *

  I got the stitches from my forehead removed at a clinic just across Nehru Bridge, not too far from that lunatic asylum of a college where I took my final exams. In the side mirror of a parked scooter, I checked the scar the rock had left. It seared two inches up the right side of my forehead, with small dots where the thread had pulled through. Quite the war wound, I thought.

  Near the clinic was an Air India office where we bought my ticket—Bombay to Chicago, via London. To buy the ticket, I insisted we use the money from the compensation check issued by the Bombay airport customs office for the lost video camera. It seemed fitting somehow.

  * *

  At my usual photomat, I asked Ajay where I could get film rolls for the Bell & Howell. He scratched his head and ponderously swung it side to side. “No such film in Ahmedabad for such old camera. Bombay maybe or Delhi but here no.”

  Still, I trolled around Ahmedabad’s camera and antique shops in the old sections of the city—in the hive of bazaars, alive with bartering and music and the fantail sparks from welding torches. Bicycle and moped parts, scooter and motorcycle parts, cassette and radio parts, TV and VCR parts. Men pushed past each other, past the cows and over the dogs that had retreated from the scorch of the open streets. I asked around for where or how I could get my hands on more film rolls, but everyone stared at the camera as if it were a prehistoric turd and shook their heads. By the end of that afternoon, Ajay had proven himself right.

  As I rode west on my Luna over the Sabarmati, the grit buffeting at my face, I thought of how in a month’s time, the monsoon would be here again. The winds would cool off the asphalt and concrete, and the thunderheads would roll in like an armada from the Arabian Sea over the Gujarat plains. In the hours before the first storm, the city, like a muscle that had for months kept itself contracted under the weight of summer, would relax. The streets would feel deserted, its noises muted, and everyone felt a quiet kinship in having survived together long enough to enjoy that very moment. I looked forward to it. It would only be a few weeks now. But I realized that no sooner would the rains arrive than I would be gone.

  26

  I was stingy with the second film roll. I wanted it to last the whole week we spent at Hemant Uncle’s place in Baroda. He and Kamala Auntie seemed happy for me when I told them the news of my leaving for the States but not Anjali.

  “But you just got here,” she said, “and now you want to go away again?”

  I told her this was only for school, and that I’d be sure to visit. She didn’t look at me though. Only shrugged her shoulders and dangled her feet from the chair where she sat, eyes on the TV screen.

  “I promise,” I said. She tipped her head sideways once—an indifferent gesture for “okay.”

  From the half-open front door, over the cartoon playing on TV, I could hear Hemant Uncle coaching Anand and a couple of neighbor kids on batting techniques. The cricket bat smacked against the ball; Hemant Uncle shouted instructions and encouragements. “Keep the bat closer,” I heard. “With the wrist like this, then turn away.” Another smack. Laughing followed from Hemant Uncle, yelling from the kids.

  I turned to Anjali. “Want to get a Cadbury? My treat.”

  She said nothing at first. “You must really not like here with us.” Her eyes kept straight ahead on the TV screen.

  “I never said I didn’t like it here.”

  “You don’t need to say,” she said flatly. “But I know it. From the first day we saw you at airport. You were not so happy to be with us.” She slid off the chair and went out to the porch. “So go then.”

  I found myself watching the rest of the cartoon—a videotape of Sleeping Beauty. I’d noticed Anjali watching it often over the past Diwali holiday. That visit had begun well, I remembered, but it had ended with me in a foul temper over the permanent loss of the video camera.

  Anand came back in, flushed and out of breath, his skinny arm hoisting the cricket bat over his shoulder. “I think I can do this,” he said between breaths. “I could get the hang of this game.”

  A moment later, Hemant Uncle strode in, swinging his stout arms as he tossed a tennis ball from hand to hand. “Good practice,” he said to Anand. He wiped at his brow, shiny with sweat and darkened bronze by his youth spent on cricket fields, and pulled at his wet polo shirt. He chucked the ball into the dining room, putting a tight spin on it so that it caromed at a sharp angle after it bounced.

  “You should coach a cricket team,” Anand said. “Maybe we could get a team together. Like a beginner’s team.”

  Hemant Uncle sauntered through the archway into the dining room, nodding in contemplation. “Could be, could be.”

  “You’d be a great coach,” I said, remembering when he played for the State Bank cricket team, going to the cricket stadium with my grandfather, mother, and Kamala Auntie, sitting in the covered benches, watching him in his floppy hat and batsman’s uniform sprinting across the pitch. Even now, I could almost smell the air redolent with chutney sandwiches and roasted peanuts.

  Hemant Uncle pondered, “State Bank could organize few youth teams.” He wiped his hand across his jaw, nodding. “Let me see. I will speak with the branch director here.”

  “Cool,” said Anand before he plucked up the tennis ball, hoisted up his bat again, and went out the front door.

  “Where did he go off to now?” my mother asked, shaking her head, bringing a pitcher of water while Kamala Auntie began setting the table for dinner.

  “I think he wants to be next Sunil Gavaskar,” Hemant Uncle chuckled.

  “Or Hemant Mistry,” I said.

  Kamala Auntie made my favorite dessert that evening—doodh pakh, rice pudding served cold, scented with cardamom and laced with slivers of pistachios. I went through three helpings. “Who knows in America who will make this for you?” she joked.

  “Could be,” my mother teased, “he will find some good Gujarati girl there.” Then she gasped with delight, “Maybe we should put ad in India Abroad.”

  Kamala Auntie began giggling.

  I looked at the food laid out on the table. I wondered how long it would be till I ate Indian food this good again after I set foot on that plane for America.

  As we ate, my father asked Hemant Uncle about what it would take to build a home in Gandhinagar, just outside Ahmedabad. My father already had ideas for acreage and square feet and how many rooms and floors, even building materials and landscaping. I had no idea he had already given the subject so much thought, and I sensed that this was the culmination of something, the peak after a long climb.

  “You’ve thought this all through, my god,” Hemant Uncle remarked.

  “It was her,” my father admitted, pointing a thumb toward my mother. “Home layout is all her idea and landscaping also.”

  “I managed,” my mother said, tossing her head in a whimsical gesture, “to remember few designs and ideas from the old days.”

  “And you thought your heart wasn’t in it anymore,” I said.

  My mother smiled, helping herself to more doodh pakh. “Heart can change its mind.”

  Hemant Uncle said he could help with loan arrangements at the State Bank and spoke of his own experience building his own home. He said he could recommend a contractor, a close friend from his days in Ahmedabad.

  “You remember him?” he asked my father. “Kirit bhai.”

  My father narrowed his eyes, trying to remember.

  “Sure, I remember him,” I said. “Didn’t he used to go to the movies with us?”

  “Exactly,” Hemant Uncle nodded.

  It was as if the memory, long embalmed in the back of my mind, were suddenly animated back to life. It had been like that all year: A trove of childhood memories, more than I’d ever imagined I’d stored away—memories of everything from cherished, long-gone family members and treks to the revival house to see vintage Tarzan movies with Hemant Uncle to the heavenly taste of that Italian bread smothered with Amul
butter—had all sprung to life. I was glad for their company.

  “Kirit bhai will do all the contracting, subcontracting for you,” Hemant Uncle said, assuring my father that he would do the job quickly and well. “But first you will need land itself.”

  “We have already begun that process,” my father said.

  Anand and I looked at each other.

  “We have?” he asked.

  My father turned to us. “By end of the year, we should have it finalized and start building.”

  I was stunned. “So everything will be different. Next time I see you.”

  “Hmm,” my father finished his doodh-pakh, cleared his throat. “You won’t be coming back to that bungalow in Navarangpura. But a brand-new house. All ours.”

  “Congratulations,” Kamala Auntie said to me. “On scholarship and admission.” In Gujarati, she added, “That’s a big achievement.”

  “Hmm,” Hemant Uncle concurred, nodding, watching me with a bemused smile.

  Kamala Auntie got up, stepped around the table, her plate in one hand, and tousled my hair. “Make us all proud, huh?” And she went away, taking up Hemant Uncle’s empty plate on her way to the kitchen.

  At that moment, I felt myself on two continents, one foot on each, and I could feel them drifting apart. I knew that soon I would have to lift my foot away and be entirely on the one continent while the lives of all those around me would be on the other, pulling farther and farther away. I didn’t want my family ever to drift, to choose between them and my own life. I felt like an island in that room.

  I looked at Anand and Anjali in conversation, at Hemant Uncle and my parents, and felt my breath catch in my throat. I sniffed deeply, blinked, and took a gulp of water, hoping nobody had noticed that my eyes had teared up. But it wasn’t easy to hide the tears. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

  * *

  The day we left Baroda was the day the monsoon clouds appeared. Throughout the morning it grew darker, and the world looked as if all color were drained from a photograph, leaving only shades of gray. Anand, Anjali, and I went up to the rooftop terrace where I ran off my last roll of 16mm film: figures silhouetted against the pregnant sky, the anxious earth, the branches stirring in the first cool breezes of the season. The rain fell in tentative drops at first then began smothering the city in a lovely and luxurious torrent. It sizzled against the asphalt, pattered like mad against the city’s rooftops. In seconds, we were drenched. I ducked into the doorway, covering my camera with a towel I’d brought upstairs with me. Anand followed me into the doorway, but Anjali stayed out in the terrace, mouth open to catch the rain, jumping up and down, arms flailing. Hers was the last image I framed—a laughing, capering girl, gesturing for us to join her—before I heard the roll empty, and the camera wheezed with nothing left.