Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “Mom?”

  Uma turned to her, frowned.

  “You drove here from Sacramento?”

  “What else? You didn’t answer the phone. Rishi told me you fainted, what was I to think?” Uma shut the fridge door and walked to Kavya. She placed her hand on her forehead, a hand on her neck. She grabbed her by the wrist and led her to the kitchen table. “Sit,” she said.

  Kavya sat. Uma sat beside her, wrapped broad, moist hands around Kavya’s and beamed.

  “And then?” Uma asked.

  “What?”

  “Any news?”

  “Well. I have a foster child.”

  Uma’s smile fell.

  “That’s why you are sick and fainting?”

  Uma’s meaning fluttered into the room, like a moth breaking from its cocoon. It flitted across Uma’s face and drew out a conspiratorial smile.

  She leaned in and whispered, “I think you’re expecting.”

  Kavya snatched her hands away. “No!”

  “Kavyaaah,” her mother sang. “I think a baby is coming, Kavya.”

  “Mom, I’m not pregnant. I don’t even want to be.”

  “Shuh,” Uma hushed her. “Don’t say such things. It is a blessing from God.”

  Kavya took one deep breath, then two.

  “I have a baby, Amma. I have a baby already.”

  “I mean your own baby, Kavya. You will know what motherhood really is, kanna. This will be your very own, and you will be a mother.”

  “Okay—let’s start over. I’m not pregnant, okay? Definitely not pregnant. And we have a child. Ignacio. You know about Ignacio, Mom. He’s here.”

  Uma turned to look behind her, as if she expected the child to be lurking in a doorway.

  “He’s living with us and he’s ours, okay? And you haven’t even seen him yet! You haven’t even—” She burst into sobs.

  Uma’s chair screeched back, and she stood, returned to the fridge, and pulled out a pot. She banged it on the stove, banged open a drawer, banged the stove on, banged a drawer shut. She turned on the stovetop fan. The kitchen fell silent but for the churning of the fan. Kavya wiped at her eyes and willed herself to stop crying. She crouched in her chair, and forced herself to stare at the ground, motionless. Uma crossed her arms and scowled at the rasam. Only the steam, rising from its pot, moved freely.

  The room grew hot with it, hot with the anger of a mother and a daughter, and Kavya got up, at last. She went to her room and slammed the door, like a teenager, and like an angry teenager, she flopped onto her bed and cried into her pillow.

  An hour passed. Kavya returned to the kitchen for a glass of water, her head heavy with the morning’s vertigo. Her mother placed a plate of rice before her. It sat soaked in rasam, thin and tangy and peppery and soothing, just what Kavya had craved when she was pregnant.

  “I’m going to my room,” she said when she finished eating. In the face of being overlooked and disobeyed, Kavya didn’t rage like her mother did. She receded. She turned past the question marks to a fresh blank page. She slept, her head still throbbing, for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon.

  She woke to the sound of passing schoolchildren, in time to remember that she had a child of her own. That child was at daycare, and that daycare had rules. The clock read 5:45. Pickup was at six.

  “Shit. Shit.” She couldn’t ask her mother. Her mother didn’t even know what Iggy looked like. Her mother was frightened of the narrow Berkeley streets.

  She dialed Rishi’s work number.

  Ninety minutes later, Ignacio entered, perched on Rishi’s forearm, sucking on his own wrist. “I was late,” Rishi said. “You couldn’t have sent your mom?”

  Kavya ignored this and took Iggy in her arms. “You must be hungry, little boy.”

  Rishi took one look at Uma, one look at Kavya, and disappeared to the bedroom. He did manage to greet his mother-in-law, but not the way he should have, not with any hint of filial respect or affection. Kavya pretended not to notice. Now, hitched to her hip as if he’d always lived there, was Ignacio. Sitting at the table, her eyes locked on the child, was Uma.

  Iggy pointed to the window. “He likes the windows to be open,” Kavya said. She walked him over, and they cranked the pane open together.

  Then she turned to Uma. “Here he is.” Iggy wriggled from her arms to the floor, where he grabbed hold of a chair to gain his balance. He cruised from chair to chair—something he’d started doing that week—stepping strongly, but holding on. Uma watched without speaking. Kavya half expected her to gather her things and leave. But Uma did not. She half expected her to melt at the sight of the child, undeniable now, and flawless. But Uma’s reaction came from someplace that neither half of Kavya could have fathomed. Uma rose from her seat, returned to her paper bag, and pulled from it one last item, a tinfoil parcel, creased and scrunched enough to look like recycling. She unwrapped it with careful fingers, pressing out each metallic fold, until it lay open on her palm. At its center sat one round and golden gulab jamun, the size of a ping-pong ball. Its syrup pooled into the foil. It had been squashed on one end, and its pale insides peeked out from the amber crust. Gulab jamun: deep-fried and solid, bathed in syrup. Gulab jamuns spoke of spoiled, peachy-faced children, fat and soft in the arms of doting grandmothers. Uma lowered herself to kneel on the floor. Iggy stopped cruising when he reached her and squatted on the floor before her. The two remained motionless, staring at each other. Neither smiled.

  With maternal ease, Uma picked up the gulab jamun and popped it into Iggy’s mouth. Before he could turn away, before Kavya could say No-wait-sugar-oils-trans-fats, Ignacio was chewing, the sweet as big as his mouth, bulging against his cheek. Kavya could almost feel the crisp dough breaking against her own molars, the warm nectar of it streaming down her throat, and for a moment she wanted the prize for herself. She wished that it were hers.

  And no, Uma and Ignacio were not fast friends from this point. Ignacio scanned Uma with an appraising eye, gripped the seat of the nearest chair, and hoisted himself to his feet. His hands moved from chair to chair as he cruised back to Kavya.

  “I will sleep here tonight,” Uma announced. Kavya would wait to tell her mother that the old guest bedroom had become the nursery, that her mother would have to sleep on the sofa. A model Indian daughter would have moved her husband and herself out to the living room and given her mother the king-size bed. Iggy climbed back into Kavya’s arms. He clung to her neck, stroking with his fingers the slope of skin between her ear and shoulder, the place where her fever resided, where Miguel had placed his palm, and Uma. By now her skin had cooled, and Ignacio’s hand was hot to the touch.

  Uma leveled a long and quiet gaze on the boy. This is my child, Kavya wanted to say. But something more than obstinance stopped her. It was a long-buried superstition, unearthed in her mother’s presence, that one shouldn’t name a thing before it existed on paper. Kavya was Iggy’s mother; this much she knew and had always known. But was Iggy Kavya’s child? He called her Mama. But surrounding this lone fact were skulking apprehensions, stepping out now from the corners of her happy Craftsman home and her healthy Berkeley life. She felt them in the kitchen as surely as she felt the stormy heat of the rice cooker, its lumens of steam broken only by a breeze from the open window.

  The next day was Saturday. Kavya wouldn’t have to be back at work until Monday morning. This meant she’d have the weekend, hours and hours of it, to spend with Uma. Saturday morning, she woke with a start. Normally it was Iggy who woke her, shouting Hey! Mama! from his crib. But today she woke to silence. She leapt out of bed, her dizziness abated. Ignacio’s crib was empty. Rishi’s laptop bag was gone. In the kitchen, she heard the tinging of spoons on plates. On silent sock feet, she hovered just out of sight. Uma plucked grapes from their stems and placed them on Iggy’s high-chair tray. She counted them out first in English, the
n Tamil. She counted them again in singsong, as he pushed each grape into his mouth. Ondru, rendu, moondru, naalu. The grapes filled his cheeks, like eggs in a sack, and juice squirted from his lips when he chewed. Kavya thought to stop it, to point out the choking hazard, to swoop in and cut the grapes in half, to cup her palm to Iggy’s mouth and ask him to spit. But instead she watched. The food was chewed, the food went down. Iggy held up one finger, then two, then a third from his other hand. Uma laughed and clapped.

  When Kavya entered, Uma sat up straight and sucked in her smile. She cleared her throat, raised her eyebrows, and rose from the table. “You are hungry?” she asked. “These days you eat breakfast, don’t you? It’s good for you to eat breakfast in the morning, Kavya. You need to keep up your energy.”

  “Good morning, Piggy.” Kavya kissed the top of Iggy’s head, then filled the teakettle and set it on the stove. “I’ll just have tea,” she said. She scanned the counter for Rishi’s keys.

  “He’s gone out,” Uma said. “He took his briefcase. Probably working, no?”

  “Yes, he’s probably working.” Rishi seemed to have thrown himself completely into a company for children, seemingly to avoid the company of his own child. Sensing this chord of discontent, Uma reached out and plucked it.

  “Does he always work like this?” she asked. “Weekends, too? Doesn’t he help with the child?”

  Kavya refused to reply. Rishi should have been home—he’d promised to do more. Her mother sensed this somehow. She was circling, waiting like a falcon to swoop.

  “You are lucky, at least, isn’t it?” Uma went on. “You didn’t have to go through childbirth. Childbirth can make a husband very unhappy, isn’t it, Kavya? You know your Appa was so angry after you were born? We had no sex for five months.”

  “Mom!”

  “Five months, Kavya. I had stitches.”

  “Okay. That’s enough.”

  Uma sat next to Iggy and ran her nails through his hair, from his crown down, from the nape of his neck up. She paused, rummaged through his curls, and squinted. “See this,” she said, turning Iggy’s head to expose a tightly wound dreadlock. Kavya waited, certain of a comment on racial mixing, the risks of shadowy genetics. Instead: “He’s going to Kashi for pilgrimage, you see. He’s thinking of his past life, when he was a holy man. And now he’s planning to go back to the temple.”

  “Oh,” Kavya said. “Okay.”

  “My hope is that you are keeping your husband happy, Kavya. He does not seem very happy to me.”

  She knew only that she missed him, that she wanted him home on a Saturday. It hadn’t occurred to Kavya that Rishi could be unhappy. Stressed, yes. She was used to stress. His job came with a drip feed of stress so continuous that it eventually went unnoticed. But for him to be unhappy, and unhappy enough for her mother to notice, was something Kavya hadn’t thought possible, especially now that she had what she wanted.

  “He’s not unhappy, Amma.”

  “Do you know this? You are sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But is he happy?”

  Uma left later that afternoon. “Sacramento will be roasting,” she said, fanning herself in anticipation. August in Berkeley was more muggy than warm. When she’d loaded the car with empty Tupperware, Uma picked Ignacio up. She took a slow, affectionate sniff of his cheek and put him down again.

  “He’s eating too much sugar,” she said to Kavya. “Be careful with his health.”

  Kavya breathed deeply and smiled. She kissed her mother’s cheek and picked up Iggy. Together, they watched the beige Lexus disappear, its windows glinting.

  • • •

  WHETHER RISHI WAS HAPPY or unhappy, whether such an abstraction could be captured and pinned to a life, like a slow-winged butterfly, was not something Rishi bothered to ask himself. He assumed that happiness was a constant, an immovable mesh, through which intermittent miseries passed and vanished.

  At home, their domestic experiment seemed to be working. Iggy had accepted Kavya as his mother, or at least his mother for now, though he suspected that for a child Ignacio’s age, there was no for now, only a series of forevers. Kavya was a natural mother. She moved fast and sharp around the kitchen in the mornings, bright with Ignacio, cheery and warm. She glinted with certainty. This was the Kavya he’d always known, but a sharper iteration of her.

  They had names for each other; Kavya called Ignacio Iggy, Igs, and other more imaginative nicknames that Rishi couldn’t have predicted. Iggy called Kavya Mama. Not a great creative leap, but better than what he’d called her before, which was nothing. As for Rishi himself, Iggy still called him nothing. In the face of Kavya’s joy, her rabid embrace of motherhood, Rishi could only wonder if she’d ever felt such joy for her husband, or whether he himself had ever felt such joy about anyone, let alone Kavya, let alone the boy. Back in college, he’d fallen in love with Kavya because she didn’t seem to need a boyfriend or hand-holder or assurances of impending marriage. She’d been wholly an individual, even as a half-awake college student, happy enough to follow her own meandering path. She wanted him, but didn’t need him. She was Club Kavya, closed to membership, and Rishi her much-loved affiliate. Now her one-person club had taken a second member, and it wasn’t Rishi. What was more—and this was the real shock—it turned out that she did need. But the person she needed was Iggy. She had woven herself inextricably with this two-foot-tall unexpected love, and while Rishi was fine and good and necessary for things like adult conversation, shared dinners, and sex, he felt increasingly like the dispensable member of the family.

  It wasn’t as if Rishi hadn’t tried. In the weeks since his last earthquake day, he’d taken the boy to the playground, had swung him on the swing and sent him sailing on the seesaw. He’d taken the boy to a library story time. He’d fed the boy applesauce and made his breakfast three times, maybe four. He’d read him stories and held his shape-sorter while the boy tried to cram square blocks into triangular holes. Rishi had filled his end of the equation, had shuffled his variables, calculated and recalculated, but wasn’t getting what he wanted, which was a sense of fatherhood. He didn’t feel like a father, and Ignacio didn’t feel like his son.

  That morning, he had walked into the kitchen to find Uma slicing a banana. Without intending to, he backed into the living room, picked up his bag, opened the front door, and left.

  Rishi got in his car and drove, planning to plant himself in a student café, where he could disappear for hours for the cost of a coffee. But instead he found himself leaving Berkeley, merging from 580 to 880, on a southward conveyor belt that would take him, without his express consent, to the Weebies parking lot. It occurred to him, pulling into the nearly empty expanse, that perhaps the father-son bond was an impossibility that no series of trials and recalculations could surmount. Ignacio was simply not his child, and while Rishi could provide for him the best of all resources, he wouldn’t feel the pull of fatherhood that he’d always expected. Maybe, he thought, this was how all fathers secretly felt. Maybe only mothers needed children.

  On a normal Saturday, he and Kavya would have lingered in bed, stood in line for brunch, wandered up the hills and back to bed for the rest of the languorous afternoon. Normal: When he and Kavya were enough for each other. Rishi’s state of mind was shifting and cracked by multiple and conflicting forces. He was a father, and yet he was not. He was proud of his wife and frustrated. Beneath his awe for her devotion sat a destructive wedge of resentment at being left behind. He told himself he was working to ensure his future at the company so that the boy would have a guardian with a well-paid job, so that the boy could go to a private school if he needed to, where he would be treated like a child of privilege, not a minority. He remembered how the Latino kids at his own school in Ohio had been treated, largely ignored, unless being singled out for blame. He remembered the Latino kids in the detention room after school, their features muddle
d by the windowpane, their hands gripping the ends of their desks, hunched over, bored. This couldn’t be Ignacio, Rishi thought. No child of his would spend his afternoons in detention. At a private school, Ignacio would be part of the inner circle. He wouldn’t be Mexican. He wouldn’t be adopted. He would simply be.

  Hopping on a Weebike, Rishi maintained his passive state, letting his feet and the roads take him where they would. As he rode, the warm valley air made its way through him, untangling the knots of conflict that had begun to weigh on him so unrelentingly. By the time he arrived at Weebies HQ, he felt his shackles had fallen away. He looked up and saluted the baby atop the purple building. He flashed his badge to the guard and made his way up to Vikram Sen’s office, expecting to find it empty. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do with this visit; somehow it seemed perfectly natural that Rishi would pop in on a Saturday to say hello to the CFO of one of the western hemisphere’s most successful corporations. He passed the programming center, where a group of programmers clustered in a far corner, hunched over their keyboards as if unaware that Friday had come and gone. He arrived at the marble foyer outside Sen’s office, where Sally normally sat guard at her desk, managing the visitors who’d requested an audience with the Don. Today, the foyer and Sally’s desk were empty but for the usual workday detritus—a coffee mug, a binder, a cell phone, and sunglasses. Peering down the hall, he saw that Sen’s door stood ajar.

  “Hello?” he called. He tried again, louder this time, then made his way down the hall, trying in vain to step heavily on the thick Persian rug that absorbed his every footfall. Reaching Sen’s door, he raised a hand to knock and stopped. Through the six-inch crack in the door, he saw the Don, sprawled on his white leather sofa, eyes closed. Draped over Vikram Sen was Sally, her head on Sen’s chest, fully clothed, her flaxen hair sprawling and covering her eyes. She lay on him like a child, and was in fact as small as a child, in comparison. Rishi had never noticed either her astonishing slightness or her boss’s height. The two of them seemed to be sleeping, though Sen laced his fingers through Sally’s hair. Together, they were in another world.