Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Mama wouldn’t say goodbye. She locked herself in the bedroom. “Mama,” Soli called. She banged on the door. “Mama, come and say goodbye to me. Mama?” She said it twice, and then she shouted it. She commanded that her mother come out. She scraped at the door, as she used to when she was small and her parents would shut themselves in there some afternoons.

  “Mama,” she said. “Don’t be angry.”

  From inside, she heard her mother sob. “M’ija, get out of here.”

  “Mama! This is your last chance.”

  But she didn’t come out. Later, Soli would realize that if her mother had come out, if she had wrapped herself around her girl the way Papi had, she would never have let her go.

  • • •

  SOLI SPENT TWO DAYS in a car with Manuel, and the one good thing she could say about him was that he didn’t lay a finger on her. He didn’t talk much, either. When she asked him questions, he answered them and fell silent again. Mostly he hummed to the radio, American music she recognized from youth nights at the church, which she’d stopped going to because eventually she and not-all-there Torta were the only youths left. They drove first from Popocalco to a place near Oaxaca City. Soli had been to the city before, but never beyond it. After a night in Morelia with her mother’s aunt, they were meant to head up through Mazatlán, then Obregón, as Manuel had shown Papi, tracing his map with his highlighter pen. Soli was no genius, but she could read a map. And so, when Manuel veered right and sped off on a junction marked for Monterrey, she sat up fast. All this time, they’d been heading west. Without warning, Manuel had turned east.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going the wrong way. You’re going east.”

  “You mind your business.”

  “This is my business. Where are we going?”

  “I’ve got business to take care of this way, okay?”

  “With who?”

  He waited before answering. “With a contact.” His eyes slid from Soli to the road.

  “That’s not what you told my family,” she said. “You need to get me to California. You gave your word!”

  He said nothing.

  “Get me out of here! Let me out!” She pulled at the door handle. She beat on the window.

  “Who’s the driver?” His roar filled the car. “Who is the driver?”

  Soli cowered in her seat, certain he would strike her. The doors were the high-tech kind that locked while the car was moving. A good thing, too, because if she’d opened the door and jumped from that car, her story would have ended there.

  Later, it would make sense that this handsome man who was supposed to be her companion, her easy ticket in, had veered east when Papi had given everything for a promised west. She’d had a lot of time in the car to think—sixteen hours, precisely—enough time to come to a few conclusions.

  First. A man like Manuel doesn’t do things to be kind. Soli had heard how other people crossed, in the backs of trucks, stacked like tortillas, one atop the other. Sitting in the cool cushion of that car, she realized that her parents could not have begged, borrowed, or stolen enough money to pay for a chauffeured, air-conditioned ride through the border. It was a conclusion that could come to light only when she’d broken from her parents, when the speed and sky and solitude of her journey opened new vistas of logical thought. When they took the eastern route to Monterrey, she knew for sure that polite Manuel, handsome Manuel, Manuel with the gleaming, purring lion of a car, had told her father a big sweaty lie.

  Second. Never trust a man who plucks his chin. Manuel plucked his chin every time he thought she was asleep. Sometimes he’d do it at high speeds, one hand on the steering wheel, the other plying his devil-beard with a pair of gold tweezers.

  Third. With the ship sinking, she’d have to rescue what she could. When Manuel walked off for a piss in the bushes that day, she opened the trunk and crammed as many bottles as she could into her backpack. Later that afternoon, he stopped the car and said he had to make a call. When he was out of sight, she opened his glove compartment and found three things: a tape cassette from someone named Prince, a tube of hand cream, and a blade, nine inches long and sharp enough to make her fingers tingle through its sheath. She took all three.

  • • •

  SOON THEY CAME TO AN encampment with red trucks and large tents, dusty men and a few women sitting in groups, waiting in lines. Like her, they were heading for the border, and the camp was a place to stop, sleep, and, if they were lucky, eat.

  “This is where you stay tonight,” Manuel said.

  “And then what?”

  Manuel sighed through his nose, turned to Soli, and said, “Okay. I’ll show you.” He pulled over at the outer edge of the camp, hopped from the driver’s seat to the back.

  “The compartment?” he asked. “Remember that?”

  He yanked at the backseat and the cushion lifted. The compartment into which Soli had folded herself, all those days ago, was packed now with cloudy green plastic, wrapped around blocks of white. Even through the green, she could see how pure the white was.

  “You want me to do something with that?”

  “Good girl. Fast learner.” Soli listened with equal parts denial and fascination as Manuel explained his plans for her, speaking with a buoyancy she’d never seen in him. In Manuel’s mind, Soli would get to the United States, all right, but she wouldn’t be going through the border, not in his Cadillac, and certainly not in the secret compartment. He held his sides, laughing high and wheezy, when she reminded him that she’d planned to hide in there. “I can’t believe you fit in that thing,” he said, and giggled. “I couldn’t believe it when you got in! I was like, Oh, shit, she’s getting in!” He broke into full-gale laughter, and then paused. “Soli.” He took her hand in his. “We’ve spent many days together, and I feel like maybe we’re friends.” He searched for her gaze. “Are we friends? Yes?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Then I feel like I can trust you. I feel like you can do this, like you’re smart enough. Take a walk with me.” As they walked toward the camp, Manuel explained to Soli that he would drive her to Piedras Negras, on the Texas border.

  “Texas? You said California. Is California close to Texas?”

  He looked into her eyes then, and she caught a shimmer of irritation. “Yes, Soli, Texas is very close to California.”

  She waited for more.

  “I’ll take you to a market run by my friends, very nice people. Good people, Soli. And from there, you’ll pass into America. With a few small packages.”

  “The ones from the car?”

  He closed his eyes, smiled, and nodded. “That’s it! Easy, don’t you think?”

  “But what about the border? And what about the car? Can’t I just come with you?”

  “The border, Soli, is up here.” With his foot he drew a line in the dirt. “And the passage you’ll be taking?” He pointed at the ground. “The passage you’ll be taking is way down there. Under the ground.” He took a step closer to her, his lips at her ear. The base of her spine caught a warm shiver. He murmured low. He murmured like a lover. “You’ll be crawling under the feet of the pinche idiota border guards, Soli, and they won’t have a clue. I urge you to give them the finger as you pass. They’ll never know. From Mexico to the States, just like that.” He began to laugh, quietly, through his teeth. “Good, right? Right, Soli?”

  “I’ll be crawling? Through a tunnel?”

  “You’re small. You fit in that compartment? You’ll have no problem with a tunnel.” He gripped her elbow, leaned in until she hardly had space to breathe. “It’s good, right, Soli?”

  Soli searched for words, for her voice, for a gust of air. “Yes,” she whispered. “It’s good.”

  “Good! Now go get yourself some food, chul
a. Beans are hot!” He gave a small hop and spun around. “The beans are hot and good, Soli,” he called, as she walked away. She turned to watch him lean back, open his arms, and roar to the sky: “THE BEANS ARE HOT AND GOOD!”

  3.

  The wedding ceremony began. It had been nine months since Kavya had stopped drinking. Two glasses of prosecco, and she began to rock and keel like a storm-weary ship.

  “You’re leaning on me,” Rishi muttered.

  “You’re comfortable.”

  He sighed and put his arm around her. Kavya closed her eyes. She could feel the light wind in her nostrils, the fading sun on her eyelids. Soon she felt nothing. She was asleep.

  Rishi squeezed her arm. “Wake up.”

  The ceremony had begun. The guests around her had been watching her and smiling, but turned back to the mandap when she woke.

  “Jesus.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Uma sat several rows away, and hadn’t noticed. She’d grown used to the small embarrassments her daughter chose to inflict—her undesirable hairstyles, the torn jeans she’d worn for the duration of the nineties, the time she was interviewed on camera at some sort of protest, surrounded by a gang—and what if they really were a gang!—of young men, their angry mouths, their arms around her shoulders. Later, she bore with dignity Kavya’s failure to dive straight from college into a professional degree, the jobs she took making coffee and pizzas. Her own husband rarely emerged from his study, and she was forced to save face alone. She brought her woes to her lady friends, in a Munchausen by proxy of maternal strife. Her friends played their roles. No need to worry, Uma. The world is getting smaller. If this Rishi doesn’t marry her, somebody else will. She is a good girl, she will know what to do. She is a smart girl, no?

  This was little comfort to Uma, who had watched the smartest girls, the goodest girls, fall victim to caprice, some marrying Europeans and running off across the world, others marrying Americans and quickly divorcing, one caught cheating on her husband. Another—and this bored into Uma’s deepest fears—married an African. And moved to Kenya. Or maybe it was Uganda. I think of it and want to faint, Uma told Kavya. Even the arranged marriages seemed to falter—one girl marrying a caste-compliant engineer who turned out to be a homosexual. Uma had assumed her own daughter was more vulnerable than these other good-smart girls, and that she too would end badly. The world was getting smaller, and the smaller it got, the more intensely Uma sensed its darkest corners.

  • • •

  KAVYA AMBLED THROUGH THE REST of the evening without overtly embarrassing her family. After the ceremony, a summary of Hindu ritual during which the priest translated his Sanskrit prayers to English and the guests actually listened, Rishi took Kavya by the arm. “Let’s go say hi,” he said. “Come on.”

  As they approached the head table, Preeti stood and took off her marigold garland. She reached out and clasped both of Kavya’s hands in her own. “Kavya! You always look so elegant.” She turned then to Rishi. “Rishi, you must know Vikram already.”

  Kavya was still digesting the fact that Preeti remembered Rishi’s name. That their husbands would know each other hadn’t occurred to her. Vikram spoke first. “I hear you’re at Weebies, Rishi-bhai.” His accent was thick with education, and like some Indian-Indians, his English was so fluent it was nearly incomprehensible.

  “It’s a big place,” Rishi said to Preeti. “Huge.” Kavya searched for some flaw in Vikram Sen, but could find none. His jaw was strong, his teeth perfect, but not disturbingly so. His eyes were piercing and black, and his hair was cropped close to the scalp, salt-and-pepper, perfectly suited to the angles of his face. He was neither haughty nor sniveling. He held Kavya’s hand after shaking it and spoke to her with gravity that conveyed respect, grace, class. He patted Rishi on the back and called him “brother,” as if they’d one day be old friends.

  Rishi cleared his throat and leaned in toward Vikram. “If I can do anything for you at Weebies,” he offered, “don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Preeti said. Then she leaned farther over the table and hugged her friend around the neck, for longer than Kavya expected, the scent of marigolds hypnotic and deep.

  “Stupid,” Rishi muttered, as they walked away.

  “What’s stupid?”

  “If I can do anything for you,” his voice a hokey mockery. “Like he’d need anything from me.”

  “What does he do there?”

  “He runs it. More or less.”

  She halted. “He runs Weebies?”

  Rishi nodded. Kavya fell silent.

  • • •

  THERE WERE RULES around portion sizes at these things: Just enough was not enough. Excess was adequate. Inadequacy unthinkable. Kavya ate until the drawstring of her underskirt cut into her belly. She let the others leave the table to dance, ignored the calls to the dance floor. The DJ played nothing but bhangra, and there was a limit to how long she was willing to shrug and hop on one foot. So she sat by herself and went on eating, because when she ate with a particular brand of intense focus, most people left her alone. That was when Anuja Jain pulled up a chair and fell into it, her knees ramming into Kavya’s. Kavya barely recognized her. As girls they had gone to school together, and to each other’s birthday parties. Anuja Jain didn’t seem to notice she was eating. She leaned in.

  “I hear you’re trying to have a kid.”

  The food in Kavya’s mouth went dry.

  “Listen. I’m giving you fair warning. I love my kids, okay?”

  Kavya sighed.

  “And you’ll love your kids, too, but they will suck you dry, Kavya. They will suck away your time, your body, your mind, your sleep, your plans—everything you wanted to do. Gone. You will be a dry husk of your former self. You will be an angry drone. You, as you know it? Over.”

  Anuja Jain sat back and waited for her words to take effect. Kavya shoved another wedge of naan into her mouth.

  “You won’t recognize yourself in ten years, my friend. You will be a tumbleweed. And you’ll never have sex again. With Rishi or anyone else.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s over. It’s over for all of us, but no one tells us, do they? I’m telling you, though. This is your warning.”

  Kavya said nothing. A long silence followed.

  “I mean, I love my kids. I do. I love being a mom. You’ll see what I mean when it happens.”

  Kavya swallowed her food. “Fair warning,” she said.

  The childhood friends, women now, looked each other over. “Let me ask you something,” Kavya said. “Did my mom tell you I wanted to get pregnant?”

  “Oh. You know.” Anuja gazed across the yard. “These things, weddings. It’s all talk talk talk.”

  Kavya rose and stepped away from the table. She abandoned her plate and Anuja Jain, the dried and angry husk of Anuja Jain, and went off to find a dark and quiet corner.

  Tucked into a distant nook of the yard, she found what seemed to be a surplus gazebo. But because there were no dark or quiet corners when her mother was around, it wasn’t long before she heard a familiar shuffle and the high tinkle of Uma’s bangles. The prosecco had made Kavya happy first, then sleepy. Now she sat in its depressive exhaust. A moment later, Uma stood before her, her bun of hair haloed by a nearby floodlight.

  “Kavya?” Uma sounded angry. “Kavya? Why you’re sitting here?”

  Kavya didn’t answer. When she was a child, she’d pretend to have stomachaches when her mother was angry, and Uma would melt with guilt and worry.

  She waited for her mother to sit. “Why did you tell people?”

  Uma crossed her arms.

  “Why did you tell people I couldn’t get pregnant?”

  “Pah! I didn’t say anything.”

  “Then how do people know? Why did Anuja Jain come over and warn
me not to have kids?”

  “She’s a bad mother. She has no patience.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Chih! Don’t insult me.”

  “Who did you tell?”

  “Kavya, kanna, listen to me.” She tilted her head, honey-voiced, conciliatory. “I only said you are wanting to have a child. Nothing more. Why so much fuss?”

  “But you told people. I told you not to tell.”

  “And so? When they ask me about you, they say why this Kavya isn’t having any babies, and what do I say then? Of course you want a baby, isn’t it? You are trying. This is what I tell them.”

  “And then they spin it into this huge thing, Mom!”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  The floodlight timed out, and they sat in the fresh black of the garden. In the distance, she could hear the galloping beat of bhangra, the shouts of people who could let go and enjoy themselves. She wondered where Rishi was.

  “So?” Uma asked quietly. “What now? What’s the plan?”

  Kavya sat back and crossed her arms. “I’d rather not say.”

  Uma blinked. “And if no baby comes? What then?”

  “I guess we’ll adopt.”

  Uma threw her head back and laughed. It was not an amused laugh. It was more a shout to the heavens, a final renunciation. And with that she stood, sighed, and exited the gazebo. In the moist grass, her footsteps faded to silence.

  Kavya let her mother go. From beyond the foothills, a breeze blew across the property, heavy with magnolia, sweet with camphor. It was time to go home.