The Caretaker

by A. X. Ahmad

  * * *

  He parks the truck in the brush along Lighthouse Road, scrambles down a steep stretch of hillside, and lies behind the tall shrubbery, watching the house.

  It seems empty, its tall windows glinting blindly in the mid-morning sunlight; from here he can look right into the empty living room and even see the tall display case. Ten, then fifteen minutes pass, and his back feels as stiff as a board, but there is no movement inside.

  The thieves have left the front door unlocked, and it opens with a push of his hand. Inside it is silent and dark, and the air is still scented with cumin from last night’s dinner. He edges into the living room and stops abruptly. The cabinet is full of dolls, and he walks closer, seeing that there are none missing. So what the hell did they come to steal?

  Running down the curved stairs to the lowest level, he enters their bedroom: it is as they left it, the sheets rumpled, Preetam’s faded nightgown thrown on the bed. He pulls open the bottom drawer of the dresser and sees her flat red jewelry boxes; when he opens them, heavy gold necklaces and bangles fall onto the bed. What kind of thieves leave jewelry behind?

  He sits on the bed, exhausted and confused, and just then his cell phone buzzes. Preetam has cooled down and realized that she’s made a mistake. Maybe she and Shanti are on the return ferry. He quickly flips open the phone.

  “It’s okay, just come back and—”

  “Ranjit? Hey, Ranjit?” It is a familiar coy, mellifluous voice.

  “Celia? Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I haven’t seen you for so long. Did you forget about me when you moved up-island? How is life as a bachelor?”

  He slumps back on the bed. “Bachelor? Why do you say that?”

  “My cousin works on the ferry, he saw your wife leaving.” Her voice is low and teasing. “What happened, you two had a fight or something?”

  He presses his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets. “How many cousins do you have, Celia? They’re everywhere.”

  “A lot.”

  “Well, your cousin is imagining things. Preetam’s on a short holiday. What do they call it here? Vacation. Yes, she’s going to Boston for Christmas.”

  “Oh, Boston.” Her laugh is high and silvery. “That’s what I thought. She always goes to Central Square in Cambridge, right? Her uncle has a store there? Well, listen. You’re alone, and I’m cooking a big Christmas dinner. Roast turkey, bacalhau, farofa. You should come over.”

  Ranjit can imagine Celia sitting in her small office at Mike’s Tow, her feet up on her desk, her short skirt riding up her long legs. He wants to shout, Leave me alone, and hang up, but he controls his voice. Normal. Everything has to appear normal.

  “Thanks, but I’m working today.”

  “Oh, working. Even on Christmas Day, you’re working. You need to relax, Ranjit. You’ll have a heart attack.”

  “Listen, I have to go—”

  “Hey, when you get a big new job, don’t forget to thank me.” Her voice is playful.

  “What do you mean?” He shifts on the bed, feeling one of Preetam’s wedding necklaces dig into his thigh.

  “Two men came by this morning looking for you. They told me they need a caretaker for a big place up-island. I said that your wife had left for her uncle’s place in Boston, and I wasn’t sure if you went too, so I gave them your cell number. Now, when you make big bucks—”

  He sits upright. “Men? What did they look like?”

  “I don’t know. Rich. Nice suits.”

  “Was one tall, with blond hair? Almost white?”

  There is a short silence. “Yes. Hair like a fantasma, how do you say it, ghost? Why?”

  “Oh my God.” The thieves are looking for him. In heaven’s name, what do they want?

  “Ranjit? Hello?” Celia’s voice is confused.

  “What else did they ask you?”

  “Only if you had a green card, if you were legal. I said to them, Ranjit is hired by Senator Neals, of course he’s legal. Did I say something wrong?”

  He takes a deep breath. “Celia, those men aren’t looking for a caretaker. They just wanted information about me. If you see them again—”

  “Oh my God, Ranjit, are they from U.S. Immigration? I’m so sorry, me and my big mouth … do you think they’ll come back? Jõao has his green card, but me, no, I came here on a visitor’s visa, and—”

  “Just don’t tell them anything. I’m sorry, Celia, I have to go now.”

  He hangs up. Why would the thieves care about his immigration status? He looks at the empty drawer and realizes with a sickening lurch that their battered red pouch is missing. Maybe it’s in another drawer. He hunts through Preetam’s faded underwear, his turbans and sweaters, but there is no pouch, and he stands stock-still, staring at the mess.

  Inside the missing red pouch are three blue Indian passports with black-and-white photographs: in them Shanti is still a baby, Ranjit is wearing his army uniform, and Preetam is a young woman with a shy smile. Stamped inside each passport is a wavy red-and-blue U.S. tourist visa, valid for a stay of exactly six months, and all these visas have expired.

  The men who took that pouch now know exactly who Ranjit is. They also know that he and his family are illegal.

  Think, Ranjit snarls at himself, think.

  The missing passports can only mean one thing: that the thieves want to track him down. Why would they go to such great lengths? Breathing deeply, he remembers the men standing in front of the glass case full of dolls; then they had gone to Shanti’s room to continue their search.

  He runs up the stairs and peers into her pink bedroom: the bed has been stripped, the mattress turned over, and all the dolls from the shelves have been thrown to the ground.

  Crouching down among them, he smells the sweet smell of old plastic: there are round-headed baby dolls, Barbies in miniskirts, even male Ken dolls with the smug expressions of small-town Romeos. Each one of the dolls has been stripped naked, then discarded. Pink plastic dolls lie on top of each other, their limbs entangled. It looks just like … don’t think of that now. Not now.

  He sinks down on Shanti’s bed. Whatever the men were looking for, they thought it was in this room.

  What are the men going to do now? Celia has told them that Preetam has gone to her uncle’s place in Boston, and that he has perhaps gone there too. The next logical move for them would be to follow him to Boston. And if they left this morning, they’ll have a head start on him.

  He looks at his watch. The ferry docked at Woods Hole an hour ago; Preetam and Shanti will now be on the mainland, driving away in Lallu’s car.

  He calls Preetam’s cell phone and she must recognize his number, but she doesn’t pick up, and he gets a recording.

  “Preetam,” he says. “Please call me back right away. You’re both in danger. Call me, it’s important.”

  Damn her stubbornness. He can take the ferry across, but what if the men are watching for him, either at the ferry terminal, or on the mainland? He rapidly dials Celia.

  Her singsong voice answers on the second ring. “Hell-lo, Merry Christmas, Mike’s Tow, you wreck it, we fix it. Can I help you?”

  “Celia? It’s Ranjit again.”

  Her voice turns warmer. “Hey, so you are coming over? You’re not mad at me? You’ll love my farofa, I make it with butter and bacon—”

  “Listen. I have to get off the island today. Are you guys taking any wrecks across?”

  She pauses, puzzled. “Today? Of course not, it’s Christmas, Ranjit. Tomorrow, maybe. We have an old Cadillac that needs to go to the junkyard.”

  “I need to get to the mainland now. I can’t just drive my truck onto the ferry, those men might be watching. Please. It’ll take Jõao a couple of hours. Here’s what I’m thinking…” He lays out his plan for her.

  “Wait. Let me talk to Jõao.” She speaks rapid-fire Portuguese, and when she returns to the phone her voice is flat and matter-of-fact. “Yes. Jõao will take you on the two o’cloc
k ferry. I’m so, so sorry I talked to those men, Ranjit, I had no idea—”

  He hangs up. Whatever happens, he has to get their stuff out of the house. He takes the duffel bag from the closet and fills it with all their clothes. Then he methodically cleans the house, wiping telltale black hair from the bathrooms. He scrubs the kitchen and sprays air freshener everywhere.

  When he leaves, there is no trace that they ever lived there. The smell of cumin has been replaced by the artificial scent of peonies.

  * * *

  The sun is bright in the sky as Jõao’s tow truck drives slowly up the ramp of the ferry and into its dark maw. Swinging behind it on a hook is a red 1970s Cadillac Coupe deVille, its rear fins still gleaming, its chrome front grille staved in by a massive impact.

  The ferrymen don’t give the truck or the wreck a second glance. They shout Christmas greetings to Jõao and direct him deep into the dark hold. Ranjit lies on the floor of the wreck’s backseat, covered by a prickly wool blanket.

  When the tow truck is parked, Jõao switches off the engine, and Ranjit hears him clamber down and head to the top deck for a beer.

  Lying still, Ranjit can feel the ferry rising and falling with the waves. His entire body aches and he wants to get out and walk around, but he can’t risk it. He pulls the blanket off his head and breathes deeply, inhaling the strong smell of dried blood. Leaning forward, he sees that the driver’s seat of the Cadillac is soaked a rusty brown, and its shattered speedometer is stuck at a hundred and ten miles an hour.

  Engines deep below the deck begin throbbing and the ferry pulls away from the land.

  Lying in the darkness, he thinks through his next steps: the ferry will get him to Woods Hole in time for the afternoon bus to Boston, and he’ll go straight to Lallu’s store and make sure that his family is safe.

  He feels his heart race as adrenaline begins to pump. Life suddenly loses its shapelessness and takes on the sharp velocity of an arrow in flight. It is a strangely familiar feeling, and then he remembers: this is the way he used to feel when he began a mission.

  Chapter Twelve

  At twenty-one thousand feet on the Siachen Glacier the night sky is blue-black, closer to space than to the earth.

  The Captain and his men have pitched their tent high up on the ridge, packing snow around it so that it is almost buried. The machine-gun fire that killed Dewan has been replaced by artillery shells that hammer down for hours. Suddenly, past midnight, they stop. It seems that even the Pakistani gun crews have to sleep sometime.

  The men huddle around a map, listening to the Captain speak.

  “This is the quickest route to the top.” His finger traces a line up the steep eastern face of the Sia Kangri. “There are several places where we’ll be exposed to enemy fire. We could take a longer route, but we might run out of rations. Personally, I’d rather take a bullet than freeze to death.”

  There is a murmur of assent, but after the Captain has put the map away, the men can’t even look at one another. Dewan was the mascot of the group, and losing him has spooked them.

  Sergeant Khandelkar is huddled in the corner, his long priest’s face etched with pain. He turns to the Captain and speaks softly, so that the others cannot hear. “Dewan was alive, Captain. He was still breathing when I cut him loose.”

  Khandelkar knows—as they all know—that Dewan is now dead, having drowned in snow, the icy fragments filling his nose and mouth.

  The tent is full of the dead boy’s presence. The Captain has to do something, fast.

  He digs deep into his backpack and takes out a small bottle of Old Monk rum. Alcohol is forbidden at this altitude, but what the hell, they might not live long enough to regret it. He unscrews the top and raises the bottle, the amber liquid gleaming.

  “To Dewan,” he says quietly. “He sacrificed himself for us. We will find his body on the way back and take him home.”

  The rum goes down with a burn.

  The men pass around the bottle, taking controlled swigs, wiping their mouths, saying Aaaah.

  “To Dewan. May he fly on wings to heaven.”

  In unison now, five voices speak, hoarse with exhaustion, blurred by alcohol.

  “To Dewan. To Dewan.”

  The soldiers sit back, bleary eyed, but the mood has lifted. The tent fills with the thick fumes from their kerosene stove, mingled with the stink of unwashed bodies.

  The bottle reaches Khandelkar. He drinks, grimaces, then turns to the Captain, his breath hot with rum. “We’ll find the boy? We’ll take him home?”

  The Captain nods and gulps down another mouthful. “I promise you, Sergeant.”

  Khandelkar lowers his voice. “Sir, one more thing. We’re the first Indian team to probe this area, right? But the Pakis seemed to be prepared. First the machine-gun post, then the artillery. It’s almost like they were ready for us.”

  “Are you saying that the mission has been leaked?”

  “Why couldn’t they tell us what the target is? Who the hell was running the briefing, anyway? The officer at the back?”

  The Captain thinks back on the briefing, run by two men from the Special Frontier Forces. They were young and arrogant, wearing uniforms with no insignia, dealing out satellite photos like magic playing cards. Hidden at the back of the darkened auditorium was an army officer who had left halfway through the briefing, a flash of light illuminating the row of medals on his chest.

  “I don’t know who that officer was, Sergeant. Let’s not worry about it now. Get some sleep.”

  But the Captain cannot sleep, either. He feels around in his backpack and finds a small photograph wrapped in plastic. By the faint glow of the kerosene stove he can make out the smiling oval face of his wife, a curly-haired baby in her arms. The photograph had arrived in a rare mail drop, and was six weeks old by the time it reached him.

  The Sergeant’s voice comes out of the darkness. “Don’t worry, Captain. You’ll see them again.”

  The Captain hurriedly puts the photograph away. He dozes for a few hours and wakes the men before dawn, before the artillery shells begin again.

  Like ghosts, heads covered with white hoods, they begin the final climb. Their faint plumes of breath are the only trace of their earthly existence.

  II

  MAINLAND

  Countless rulers who commit tyranny.

  Countless cutthroats who commit murder.

  Countless liars, wandering lost in their lies. Countless sinners who keep on sinning.

  Countless barbarians who eat their ration of dirt …

  —Guru Granth Sahib, Jup

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Peter Pan bus from Woods Hole to Boston is nearly empty. Ranjit sits by a window, watching the fields and woods fade away, replaced by strip malls and brightly lit fast-food places. As the bus lumbers over the Bourne Bridge to the mainland he glances at his watch: at this rate he won’t get to Boston before dark, and if those men get there before he does …

  To distract himself he flips through a crumpled copy of The New York Times lying on the seat next to him. As usual, the world is in disarray: Somali sea pirates have hijacked another oil tanker, the Palestinians and Israelis are at it again, and a predator drone in Afghanistan has killed the wrong people.

  A small graphic on an inside page catches his attention. It is just an abstract triangle of gray with a dotted line below it, but he recognizes it instantly and grips the newspaper tighter. The triangle is the Siachen Glacier, and the dotted line under it is the northern border between India and Pakistan, ending suddenly at coordinate point NJ9842. When the border was hastily drawn in 1947, no one had bothered to extend it into the uninhabited, frozen wasteland to the north.

  That wasteland, hotly contested now, is the highest battlefield in the world, its slopes and peaks changing hands as battles are fought and men die.

  The headline over the graphic says “Global Warming Comes to a War,” and the article continues:

  The Siachen Glacier is claimed
by both India and Pakistan. For over a decade, the two armies have fought each other here at altitudes over 20,000 feet. Soldiers on both sides have died in skirmishes and artillery battles, and been killed by avalanches and frostbite. Many others have suffered from high-altitude pulmonary cerebral edema, a leakage of brain fluid that leads to hallucinations and death. Now, adding to the list of killers is global warming.

  Unseasonal temperatures have led to a sudden melting of the snow along the glacier, opening up a treacherous network of crevasses. Our correspondent in Leh reports that at the southern mouth of the glacier, the melting snow has swollen the Nubra River, which is threatening to overflow its banks …

  Ranjit stops reading. Sergeant Khandelkar had said that the snow on the glacier was melting. If he was just a hallucination, how could he have known that?

  Ranjit shivers as he shuts the newspaper. The past, long buried, seems to be coming alive, and there is nothing he can do to stop it.

  * * *

  The bus station in Boston is built in the air over the tracks of South Station, and as the bus climbs an elevated ramp, Ranjit has an airplane view of the city. The sun is setting, and the redbrick buildings of Chinatown and the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District glow in the fading light; beyond them is the gray loop of the Charles River, separating Boston from Cambridge. That is where Preetam and Shanti should be, in the apartment above Lallu’s store.

  Seeing the city again, he thinks of the two miserable winters he spent in that small, run-down apartment. It had snowed endlessly, and the city, crowded with ancient brick buildings, had seemed like a bad dream, populated by pale-faced inhabitants who spoke in a harsh, flat accent. When he left, he had sworn never to return, and yet here he is.

  The bus lumbers up the ramp, and just as it wheezes to a stop Ranjit’s cell phone begins to chirp. He grabs it, sure that Preetam is finally calling back, but when he checks the caller ID, he sees a restricted number. Hitting “Ignore,” he waits for the call to go to his voice mail, but there is no message. The phone begins to ring again, loud and insistent, and he quickly silences it.