by Lavie Tidhar
“Chicken enchiladas for you, Mr. Joshi. My dad insisted that you’d be hungering for Mexican food. But I have samosas, aloo tikki, papri chaat, bhel puri, and pani puri for the real Gujuratis.”
“My daughter Nisha,” Aravind said, “has spent the last three summer breaks teaching our Mexican cook how to whip up Gujarati snacks.”
“This table looks like a chaat-stand,” Subhir’s mother said, nodding. “Are you in attendance at Stanford as well?”
“Wouldn’t I wish!” Aravind said. “She’s been studying computer science at IIT-Bombay. Took the entrance exam without my knowing. I said, ‘the world has enough sliderules. All they’ll teach you is how to cram for tests and take orders.’ Told her to take Yale up on their offer. Or, hell, Berkeley woulda been even better. Major in English and minor in raising Cain. But she ignored me, as usual.”
Nisha rolled her eyes. “Six of the world’s twenty richest men went to IITs. Even the ranchhands who get trashed in here every Saturday know IITB is the best engineering school in the world. But he wouldn’t even take me to visit.”
It was Subhir’s turn to roll his eyes. Of course she’d gotten into the Indian Institute of Technology. With the quotas for Diasporic Indians, any Brit or American or Australian who got a score above the minimum cutoff could get in, while Subhir—who’d scored in the top decile—had failed to secure a spot. Twice.
She took a seat next to her father, who belatedly said, “Not that computer science has to get in the way of having a little fun, Subhir. Especially at Stanford. Your folks met in that department, after all. I remember the first time your dad brought Priya home. I had to make all the beds for a week while my mom whipped up feasts for them. She was convinced your mom had to be really homesick if she’d settled for Ray here.”
The table drifted into nostalgic remembrances for the better part of an hour as Nisha poured the whiskey and Subhir stared at the walls. He noticed that all three of them were careful to keep it light, and avoid the topic of his family’s final expulsion. Finally, his mother visibly yawned, and the table stood up.
“Have you all seen the old homestead yet?” Aravind said. “The Koreskys—the folks who tried to farm it after you all left—finally packed it in. Place is abandoned now, but lots of it is still standing. We can take the kids tomorrow. They’ll get a kick out of it.”
* * *
“Do you remember this at all?” Subhir’s father said.
Their car was parked on the overgrown grass at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch. Nisha and Aravind had retreated towards it, leaving the visitors amongst the wreckage. Subhir and his mother were sitting on the steps to the bungalow’s cracking front porch. To their right, the rusting hulk of some sort of farm vehicle was sitting in front of a barn that had fallen in on itself. The next closest building was a silo in the distance, no more than a thumbnail tall.
“Though there would have been more trees when you were a baby,” his father said. “And when I was your age, all of this was orchards.”
Now there wasn’t a tree in sight. The grass had colonized these gently rolling hills where Subhir’s grandparents had struggled to eke a living from some of the richest, most fertile land in the world. But the summer droughts kept getting longer. And the water demands from fishermen, ecologists, and the thirsty cities of Southern California kept growing. And every year, his grandparents had to let more of their almond trees die, and let more of this golden poison reclaim the land.
Until, finally, they’d stood out here and watched the water district dam up their sluices. Even after three decades, the dotheads who owned “the Johnsons’ plot” were still foreigners. And foreigners had been the first to lose their water rights. That night, they’d packed a few bags and left the rest for the tax assessors. When Subhir’s father heard about the court order, he’d left his Silicon Valley job and gone with his wife and newborn son to Bangalore to found a software startup. Subhir’s grandparents eventually moved back to India. Even now, they refused to talk about the long evening of their stay in this foreign land.
Subhir’s mother was stroking the wood of the porch. “Remember Memorial Day weekend?” she said. She looked up at his father. “We sat out here until dawn, while your mother peered down every fifteen minutes. She stayed up all night too, and fell asleep at the breakfast table.”
Subhir stepped up onto the porch. He twisted the knob of the front door and felt something crack inside the mechanism. He took a step back, but no one else had heard. The door creaked open. A short hall led into the living room, where three wooden chairs were still arranged around a plastic folding table; the house smelled clean, like rain and wind, even though the fixtures were thick with mold. Subhir grazed a hand over the pile of pulpy boxes left next to the door. He lost any hope of remembering something. Too much had happened since he’d last crawled through this hallway. The place reeked of a hasty exit: a family packing, resentfully, under the eyes of the sheriff’s deputies.
“This is yours, you know,” Nisha said. She’d wandered in behind him. “Your dad had my dad buy it at the tax auction three years ago. He swung up from the Bay Area last year and visited it.”
Subhir laughed. “He got it back the same way he lost it.”
“How do you figure?” Nisha said.
“I mean, when my grandparents left, it must have been sold off at a tax auction too.”
“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know what happened to the lands,” she said. “Maybe they did just abandon it. Place wouldn’t have been very valuable with the water rights sold off.”
“With the rights taken away, you mean. Under the Alienation Acts.”
“What? Your grandparents weren’t aliens; they were naturalized citizens. None of that applied to them. But they sold out to a water district in So-Cal. And not just for a year or two, but permanently. Back then, it was a huge deal for the biggest shareholder in the Sinclair County Irrigation District to sell his allocation. Folks broke their windows, cut their fences, even welded their sluices shut…they left in the middle of the night, after getting death threats. My dad refused to speak to your dad for ten years.”
“That’s not true,” Subhir said. “My grandparents loved America. They were driven out.”
“Not for being foreign. For having a son who could see what everyone else couldn’t,” Nisha said. “The rains were failing; the San Joaquin river was a ghost of what it used to be. People still thought the Sacramento would flow forever, but your dad could see that the southern water districts were just waiting to make a grab. He negotiated the deal during his last year in grad school.”
“My father would never have sold out his—”
Nisha said, “What does it matter? History proved him right. All the other farmers, they were just slow off the mark. They got wiped out during the reallocation. Nowadays, you can’t win a poker game without ending up with a fistful of worthless, superseded water rights. But your dad, he turned that money into capital, and built a business that’s lasted a lot longer than this farm would have.”
Un-American. Profiteer. Parasite. Those slurs—leveled against all the foreigners—had brought tears to his father’s eyes when he told stories about his last years in America. Tears of shame, Subhir realized.
“That’s all history,” Nisha said. “But your dad thinks he can make it right. My dad owns two million acre-feet of superseded rights that he picked up for next to nothing. They want to use your dad’s money to go to court and get those rights reinstated, like the vineyards in Napa did. This trip was supposed to, you know, ease you all into the plan.”
Subhir’s father came in. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you the creek.” His accent was resurfacing. He’d pronounced it “crick”.
“Why did you tell me this land was stolen from us?” Subhir said.
“We were…what have you been telling him?” his father said.
“I just…” Nisha retreated back into the living room as Subhir stepped forward.
“You chose to leave,” Subhir
said. “Why force me to come back?”
Subhir’s father turned around and marched out of the house. “Dammit Aravind,” he said. “What’ve you been telling her about me?”
Subhir and Nisha edged towards the door, and saw Subhir’s father confront Aravind out by the car.
“Shit,” Aravind said. He’d taken off his hat, and now he was twisting at the brim. “I don’t know what she said. Anyway, that’s all in the past. I’m just glad you decided to make it right. Took you long enough.”
Subhir’s father said, “Make it right? How can you still think I was wrong? I was the smart one. I left before I was forced to leave. How many of the people we went to high school with have stuck around here?”
“That’s different, Ray,” Aravind said. “And you know it’s different. They went to Los Angeles or Seattle or Sacramento. They didn’t run out on their country when it needed them.”
* * *
The argument continued in the front seat of the car.
“Look, we still going to do business or not?” Aravind said.
“How can I work with someone who’s held a grudge against me almost twenty years?” Subhir’s father said. “I can’t believe you still think I’m a traitor. Do you know how stupid you’re being?”
“You did betray us,” Aravind said. His voice was quiet. “I don’t know whether this county would’ve turned out the same either way. But you didn’t even care what happened to us. You worked on those poor old parents for years while you made deals behind their backs. Told them they could be rich. Spun them stories about the high life. And when you finally broke them down and made them sign, you whisked them away from the land they loved and lived on and spent their lives improving and you shut them up in an apartment in Bangalore, right above the muck of the sewers, while you let this place go to hell.”
Subhir’s father was quiet for a few minutes. The motel came into view. His mother gripped Subhir’s arm and whispered, in Gujarati, “You should not be blaming your father—”
Then Subhir’s father cleared his throat and said, “Every day, my father sits in a restaurant in Bangalore, reading the English newspapers and loudly mocking your president for his latest blunder. Our cousins stop by and ask him for advice on how to raise their children. He is present for every wedding, funeral, and birthday. Anyone in need just has to ask, and they’ll get money for their health or educational expenses. He and his expat cronies sit there for hours, and tea comes to him without asking, and people call him ‘sir’. People like your father. He died behind that reception desk, didn’t he?”
As soon as Subhir’s father stopped the car, Aravind grappled with the door. He stalked into the lobby of his motel and disappeared.
* * *
The door buzzed as Subhir and his parents were packing. When his father answered, a uniformed man said, “Mr. Rajiv Joshi, I’m Sheriff Pereira.”
“Joe?” his father said. “I didn’t know anyone was still around, besides Aravind.”
“Yeah, Ray, I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave.”
“I haven’t committed any crime,” Subhir’s father said.
“None that I can arrest you for, anyway. But the hotel’s full up. You have to go.”
“I know my rights. This is racism. The Civil Rights Act. You can’t do this.”
“You’re not being kicked out over your color,” the sheriff said. “But I heard tell you gave up your citizenship years ago. Right now Americans need these rooms, and, well, Vin would be breaking the law if he rented to you instead of them.”
“That bastard,” Subhir’s father said. “Fine. We’ll be out soon.”
“We need these rooms immediately,” the sheriff said. He stepped to the side and two deputies walked in. They nodded at Subhir and his mother, who were standing by the beds, and then gathered up armfuls of clothing right out of the open suitcases. One ripped Subhir’s laptop from the wall and bundled it up with the rest. Then they headed out and down the hall.
“Dude, this can’t be right,” said a voice from the hall. “We’re not sharing this time?” A teen came by and poked his head into the room. He was wearing an Eastland High football jersey. “Umm,” he looked at the sheriff. “Coach said this was my room. Number 308.”
“It’s all yours,” the sheriff said. “Would you three please step out?”
In the lobby, Subhir and his parents sorted through the pile of clothes left by the door while teenagers rampaged around them. The coach said to the sheriff, “Thanks for donating us these rooms. I thought we were going to have to sleep all crowded up on the floor at my sister’s place again.”
Aravind came in through the door behind the counter and said, “Here’s your receipt for the rooms, Joe.”
“No problem, Vin,” the sheriff said. “And here’s the receipt for your contribution to the Sinclair County Police Benevolent Association.” He stared at Subhir’s father while saying these words, but Aravind looked away.
“Aravind,” Subhir’s father said. “How could you do this?”
“What are the regulations on a foreigner owning land in California?” Aravind said. “I hear there’s something funny about the titling to the Koresky place.”
“I’ll have to look into that,” the sheriff said.
As they were leaving, Subhir saw Nisha standing in the door to the restaurant, wearing her uniform shirt. She ventured a faint wave at them, but only his mother returned it.
* * *
His father spent the four-hour drive in silence, except for a single muttered “Dammit” occasioned by traffic around the Bay Bridge.
“Baseball traffic,” his mother said. “You used to check the game schedule to make sure it would not interfere with our drive home.”
Shortly after, Subhir said, “You missed the exit for the airport. Or are we flying from San Jose?”
“We’re still flying out of SFO,” his father said. “The two of us.”
“After all this?” Subhir said. “How can you justify leaving me here?”
“This had nothing to do with you,” his father said.
“You lied to me,” Subhir said. “You weren’t driven out. You wanted to leave. Let me make the same choice.” He wished that he was in the front seat, where he could speak to a face, instead of just radiating words towards the barren highway unspooling in front of them.
“When I left, it was always meant to be temporary,” his father said. “And now it’s time to come back. It’s time to rebuild.”
“Why did you do it?” Subhir said. “You grew up with them. And for them to hate you…”
“You can’t understand,” his father said. “They didn’t understand, not even at Stanford. Things were changing, but they all did the same things in the same way and said everything would turn out fine. And they were so smug about it. Smug enough to call me a traitor, when I did the only sensible thing. I tried to show them… but they drove me away.”
“Things did turn out fine,” Subhir said. “Aravind seems fine. People are still living. They didn’t need you. And even if they did, you didn’t try to help them. You just took the money and left.”
The car drifted towards the barrier wall and then swerved to the right as Subhir’s father overcorrected for the drift. Then they were decelerating and pulling onto the shoulder. When they came to a stop, Subhir’s father pressed his head to the steering wheel. The horn rang out an unceasing note.
His mother opened her door and stepped out, then yanked open Subhir’s door. “Get out,” she said.
His father was still slumped over. A hand grabbed Subhir by the sleeve and pulled him out, onto the grass. His door slammed shut. The car’s horn fell silent, but his father wasn’t looking up. A truck flew past, screaming sound and air at them, and missing the side of the car by a foot.
After long silent moments, his mother said, in Gujarati, “Can you really hate him for leaving this place?” she said.
“He lied to me,” Subhir said. “You both did. America didn’t drive
him out. He left because he could make more money in India. And before he left, he stole. He took their water and gave it away. He made those people poorer, while he got richer.”
His mother shook her head and said, “Do you think it wasn’t stealing when your father’s father stayed here? A wealthy modern farmer with a master’s degree in agronomy? Couldn’t India have used him while its people were starving? Couldn’t he have saved lives? India, America… they’re just places. We all went to where we could find a future. There are plenty willing to stay behind, and sell their lives to a place… to dirt… and they do stay…and they become poor… and those places still prosper or decline as the rains, or the markets, dictate. Because places don’t care if you devote your life to them.”
Then his mother opened the door and said, “Challo, he will be late for moving in.”
But his father got off at the next exit, and said, “Use my phone, book another ticket back.”
He entered the highway in the other direction: away from Stanford, away from America. Subhir’s mother leaned over the seat and glared at her son.
Subhir looked out over the highway. It was just another stretch of the same mile of wasteland that he’d been travelling through for the last four hours. To him, this was America. And Subhir didn’t hate it. How could he? It was too hapless to hate.
It was just a place. And he didn’t feel anything towards it. Not anymore. He knew that if he said, “Wait,” they would happily deposit him here, and he’d sink down into America and serve out his time. He wanted to. Just to make them happy.
He warred with himself for hours over that word. But… how could he repeat his father’s mistake? How could anything he learned here ever be relevant to his life? How could even a single moment spent here ever be real? He knew where he belonged, and he wouldn’t gamble that away.
Then they were on the plane, and he saw his father, one row up, lean past his mother and slam the window shut. Subhir looked out his own window, and soon those golden hills were receding beneath him and taking the burden of that unspoken word with them. And all that his choice left behind was a tiny residue in his heart as he flew towards a home that he would have to love all the more because of the losses he’d suffered in returning to it.
