“These are pretty much done,” said Ronak, spatula tilting one patty. “Plates are right there.”
Dave told us to enjoy as he walked toward the pond. Don and Dottie, now that we had food, felt free to go off as well. Ronak slid the slightly ragged-looking patty onto a half of bun. I suddenly wished I didn’t have to eat it. I wished I could limit myself to the clean, safe slices of limp tomato, the lettuce, the pale hoops and arcs of onion, the disks of sweet-and-sour sandwich pickle … what a happier, cleaner sandwich that would have made. I sat next to Abhi and lifted the sandwich and thought about the beef that had been cooked on the same rods. What juices and oils … what seepage must have come off those beef burgers and onto mine? Meat as I had glimpsed it before, in supermarkets, came to mind: pink, shrink-wrapped on a Styrofoam rectangle, label-gunned with a barcode and a price. Ground-up muscle, shaped into a palm-sized patty … what India’s villagers did to cow dung was in America done to the cow herself. I ruminated on slum women forming black-green cakes between their hands and slapping them on a squat wall. My Boca burger sat between sesame buns, half covered by wet lettuce, tomato slice sliding on ketchup … I had bought veggie burgers dozens of times. I kept them as backup, good for a quick brunch when Abhi didn’t want me “holing up in the kitchen.” Yet they were deliberate imitations—in flavor, form, texture, look, down to the fake grill-marks—of something that revolted me. I wouldn’t eat fake dung if they made it out of soy. But fake dead cow? I purchased it, I microwaved it on a covered saucer. And on that picnic bench, I was eating it. The mingled seepages merged, in my mind and mouth, the fake flesh and the true flesh.
Ronak, bringing the corn, sat down next to us to keep us company. Maybe Don had relieved him at the grill so he could be with us. Or maybe Ronak had asked him to take over so Amber’s relatives wouldn’t think he was neglecting us. He didn’t have much to say. I put butter on the corn. At home, when I made corn, we rubbed each length with a lemon wedge dipped in chili powder and salt. All they had here was butter, salt, and pepper. Ronak was waiting for me to eat, so I did, all of both, but my dizzy distaste for the soy burger kept me from enjoying the corn. I looked down and discreetly picked the shreds from my teeth, my fingernail drawn vertically in the space between my incisors. I felt ashamed, as if my etiquette might be judged. I fought back nausea the rest of the evening. I was never so sustainedly nauseous again until years later. By which I mean, until now.
Ronak sat beside us until a new relative, later even than we had been, arrived to a small fluster of high fives and handshakes. This was Rob, I would learn later, the cousin who lived in Cincinnati. I did not learn whether he had a family of his own; he had driven up alone. Rob looked coarser than the others. He had not shaved, and he wore beige work boots under his jeans, even in this heat. Ronak rose and left us when he heard the others greeting him, a quick “I’ll be right back” after he had stood. The green beer bottle, which he had kept off the table, in the grass at his heel, went with him. He stood outside the cluster of men, bottle in front of him, navel level. I saw his hand false-start for a shake then drop to his side again. Moments later he saw his opening and shook hands with the celebrity. To my surprise, they started talking.
“We shouldn’t have come,” said Abhi quietly, in Gujarati.
I felt the flush up my neck and cheeks. “I will say no next time, okay? We were invited.”
“No. I mean for his sake.”
I said nothing. Ronak was still talking. Rob said something that made him laugh.
Abhi turned his corncob past a pocked-black patch and carefully placed the next scrape of his teeth. He is very finicky about burned food. He spoke with the corn raised to conceal his lips.
“Don’t keep staring.”
“He is so many people,” I said. “They are all bundled up in him.”
Amber, seeing us unattended, buttoned herself and left her place on the grass. She took Ronak’s seat and showed me Dev sleeping in her arms. By reflex, my hands swept the air over his sleeping face and rose as fists to my temples and opened. This was how to collect stares of envy off a child and gather them onto oneself. Envy works the ruin of what it envies if measures are not taken. Blessings bring risk. Amber was used to this old-fashioned, superstitious precaution of mine. When Dev was born, I tapped his cheek, as I had done Ronak’s and Mala’s, with a pinky-fingertip of kohl. One had to satisfy envy with a fake birth blemish. Move on, envy, this one is flawed. Stare at someone else’s grandchild.
That night, back at home, I could not soap my lips enough. I brushed a long time. In bed, a single oily belch made the toothpaste taste vanish. Finally I knelt over the toilet and rejected it: the only meal ever served me by my son.
* * *
Amber visited us the first week in January, driving straight from her family in Pittsburgh. Ronak had not told her any earlier. Christmas Eve, when I cried and spilled it all, the tears and the words made me understand what Abhi’s mother had felt when she rang her bell and picked haplessly at her wet bedding. The closest analogy has to be that: I was incontinent of tears, incontinent of secrets. How to clean this up without getting other people involved?
All four of us had sat on the bed. The original four, so rarely reunited. At one in the morning, squinting groggily at our sleepless high noon (we had the closet light, room light, and bathroom light all on), Sachin showed up in the doorway. I began again. We weren’t ready to talk about Christmas morning and the presents until 3 AM.
“We cannot tell Vivek and Shivani until later,” I said. “They have been looking forward to this for so long.”
Mala nodded at Sachin. “We have to ease them into it.”
Abhi said, “Children can always sense something is up.”
I buried my face in my hands.
“But we will manage it,” Abhi hurried to say. “We have come this far.”
“I’m not calling Amber then, either,” Ronak added quietly.
“Of course not,” I said. “Let her and the kids have a normal Christmas over there.”
“I mean, this isn’t an emergency, is it?”
“You can tell Amber when the time is right.”
“When will the time be right?” Ronak looked at me uneasily. He chewed a hangnail on his index finger. This was one thing we hadn’t discussed. “Mom? Did they say…?”
I shrugged and shook my head.
“So we don’t have a time frame?”
Mala interrupted, her voice very high. “Tell Amber when you’re all back in New York, okay? It’s past three.” With a glance she checked her wrist and touched her pajama waistband. She wasn’t wearing a wristwatch or a pager; it was a confused reflex from the stress. Sachin sensed the same thing I did and held her upper arm, steadying her on the inside. “Look at us, we need to sleep,” she said incredulously. “It’s so late. It’s too late.”
Sachin nodded. He stood with his hand still on her arm. “Mala is right. The kids are going to wake up at seven.”
Actually Vivek woke up at six thirty, Shivani a few minutes after. I insisted on handling the camera; I wanted no image of me, not even a glimpse while the photographer panned from one gift to the next. The video I took never leaves their bright faces, never tilts up to the three too-wise observers in the scene. There’s one snippet of Sachin’s profile as he kneels and stacks scraps of glittery red wrapping paper. Ronak doesn’t look up as he scissors the hard plastic around some batteries and fits them in a sleeping puppy’s back. He sets the puppy down, and I take the camera to its level. Its eyelids open. It lives.
We adults opened our presents hours later, off camera. It was really just part of the cleanup around the tree, which Abhi stripped and packed away shortly after lunch.
Ronak stayed through the New Year and called Amber as she was leaving Pittsburgh. She took an exit and merged west while still on the phone with him.
Amber’s sons banged their boots against the outside of the house before setting them on the mat. Even Raj, who was only a little o
lder than Shivani, imitated his brothers. Dev, the eldest, held a broken model airplane in his hands, both wings, one wing rotor, and the intricately etched, minutely stickered body. The boys gave us hugs on tiptoe and accepted kisses on their foreheads. We kissed them on their foreheads the way we had seen Dottie and Don do. Dev used to flinch and wipe away the cheek-crushing kisses we gave, but we hadn’t stopped and changed until we saw the hello kiss he was used to.
Dev held up the model airplane. “Do you have any superglue here?”
Raj interjected, stammering with eagerness, “We, we, we, we need to fix it.”
“Let’s see what my Air Force Repair Shop can do,” said Abhi, taking his reading glasses out to see a wing’s break site up close. He brought the rotor to the engine to see if it might click back into place and spin, but it didn’t. “First tell me this: Did it get shot down over Iraq or Afghanistan?”
Dev said patiently, “It’s a World War Two bomber. They flew those in World War Two.”
“And it’s Affghanistan, not Uffghanistan,” said Nik.
Abhi glanced up over his glasses, eyebrows high, as if startled at this information. He nodded. “So, Germany.”
Raj pointed at the plane. “And, and, and my great-grampa flew those in the sky.”
“Wow!” Abhi lifted the plane high and made it wobble and descend. “Help, help, the Nazis are shooting me down! Was your great-grandpa okay? Did he parachute out?”
“My great-grampa,” said Dev, “served in the Pacific.”
Amber stood very close to me. She had not yet fully detached from her hug. “Tell Dada how it broke, boys.”
“Nik dropped it.”
“No I didn’t! Ma!”
Amber didn’t raise her voice. “Dev.” All three boys went quiet. “What kind of truth do we tell?”
All three: “The whole truth.”
“So what’s the whole truth? Dev?”
“We were fighting over the plane.”
“No matter, no matter. Let’s see what we can do, shall we?” Abhi turned to me. “Do you remember that little … that tiny screwdriver you used on my eyeglasses?”
“The drawer closest to the fridge. The superglue is there, too.”
He went to get it, trailed by the boys, who kept to an orderly line. Amber turned to talk again, but I followed Abhi, and she stayed next to me. He began pushing some things around.
“In the tray with the scissors,” I said.
“Found it,” he said, holding up the repair kit and superglue. He set them on the dining table. The boys climbed wordlessly into the other chairs and observed him. Amber and I found our way onto the couch for hushed words. I asked her how much she had told the three boys.
“I haven’t told them anything, Mom. You can see. I wouldn’t have let them come here without making you cards, if I’d told them.”
“Why do they think they’re here, then?”
“They think it’s a surprise.”
“When are you going to tell them?” She put her hands on my hands. The contrast between our skins startled me. “Do you want me to tell them?”
“No. I think … we need to ease them into this.”
This was the phrase Mala had used. They had been talking. That was only right; they were both mothers with children to safeguard against too much knowledge too quickly.
“You’re right, Amber. We can take our time.”
“And you would prefer to have them like this, right? Not knowing?”
Had she thought of this on her own? Did she know me that well? It couldn’t be. She must have talked to Ronak and Mala. They had told her I wanted the family over without this pall, so she was giving me her three boys as I longed for them, carefree, no shadow. I stared at Ronak and Amber’s children. Amber parted their hair on the left, unlike Ronak’s because he now combed his straight back. When he combed it like that, he looked even less Indian. Maybe Latino, you would think, or a particularly handsome Iranian; quite a few friends used to tell me, even when he was a boy, that he didn’t look Indian. They meant this as praise. I had always admired the sharply drawn features of half-white, half-Indian children. An all-Indian child who looked like Ronak’s boys would have been thought very beautiful indeed, back home—such fair skin, such light eyes, he will grow up to be a film star! But knowledge of one white parent changed the way you saw the beauty. It seemed foreign, and you didn’t compare the child to Indian children. Your eyes picked out in the face what was Indian (the nose, the deep-set eyes) and what was white (the jawline, the cheekbones). You parsed the beauty. Or I—I parsed the beauty. Usually just for a split second, when I saw the boys after a long absence—which way are they going? Is there any trace of us left? With Dev and Nikhil, I would say no. I would not think them Indian if I did not know who their father is. Ronak’s good looks had that disadvantage: he brought no indissoluble Indianness of nose or chin to the mix. Raj had something of Ronak in him. But so had Nik at that age, and he had lost it by five. They became more Amber as they grew older, and not just on the outside.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Is everything all right?”
I nodded. I wondered how hurt she would be if she knew my thoughts just then. Could anyone love anyone if our skulls were clear glass? “What will the boys eat?” I asked. I was more able then—the spread was less and the first injections were a week in my future.
“We stopped by at Hardee’s an hour ago. I hate giving them that food, but the boys were getting ornery.”
“An hour? They might be hungry again. I made my veggie lasagna when I heard you were coming.”
“I doubt they’re hungry. Boys?” They looked at her. “Anyone hungry for lasagna?”
Dev and Raj murmured “No,” already distracted by Abhi, who was laying a careful trail of superglue along the wing. Nikhil gave a blech, pointing his finger in his mouth. This made Amber say his name; he shut his mouth, but he didn’t look at her.
“They did eat a lot,” Amber apologized.
“Did you eat? Can I get you a piece? It’s very fresh.”
“Um…”
“It’s very fresh. And very healthy—squash, zucchini, spinach. I used light ricotta.”
“Sure, I could probably eat a piece.”
“Only if you are hungry.”
“I’d love a small piece, Mom.”
“Abhi? Do you want any lasagna?”
“I am contributing to the war effort,” he said, his glasses on his nose. “No time for a break when the Germans are on the march.”
“The Japanese,” Dev said impatiently.
The fluted pasta corners had not been cooked through properly and were dry and hard as plastic. I cut Amber a soft piece from the center. I microwaved it twenty seconds so her tongue would know it was fresh. I had kept it bland for the boys but I knew Amber liked spicy, so I offered her the crushed red pepper shaker and the grinder for black pepper. She agreed to some orange juice. Her forkfuls were slow to rise. She chewed slowly. I realized she was as full of burger as the boys but eating for my sake. She even showed an interest in the recipe, meatless though it was, lasagna that wasn’t really lasagna. When she was done, she sipped her orange juice and watched Abhi. He was trying to figure out how to reaffix the rotor to the wing engine in a way that would still let it spin. For the first time I can remember, I bent down and kissed Amber’s brown hair, something I did naturally to Mala.
Amber stiffened briefly. Her glass paused at her lip. She turned and beamed up at me with a joy and gratitude whose intensity was startling, almost disproportionate—a simple press of my lips! She had seen me kiss Mala that way in the past, I think. I did it absentmindedly sometimes, if I happened to find Mala sitting. The habit had originated in her high school years: she would be bent over calculus or American history, and I would visit her with a bowl of grapes and a kiss. Amber I had never kissed that way, not until that afternoon—such a small morsel of affection, but it made her rejoice. I never should have starved her.<
br />
The time Mala and I spend now, in the kitchen, is sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. The day after the landscapers arrived to work in the backyard, Mala and I go from tenderness to argument without intending to. I am about to drop some cumin in the dahl when Mala stops my wrist.
“Wait, wait,” she says. “How much are you putting in?”
My fingers are pinched together. I turn them up slightly. “This much.” I drop it in.
“No, Mom, wait. I need to know how much that was.”
“Why?”
“So I know for the future.”
“It doesn’t matter how much exactly.” I pinch my fingers and open them again. “This much. You use your sense.”
“I don’t have a sense.” She points at the notepad she has at her elbow. “That’s why I’m writing all this down for myself.”
“Write down ‘some.’”
“‘Some’? How much is ‘some’?”
“Write down ‘a pinch.’ Even cookbooks use ‘a pinch.’”
“Cookbook writers aren’t as neurotic as me.” She picks up the stacked plastic measuring spoons and holds out the smallest one. “Here. Sprinkle the same amount into this so I can see, at least.”
I do, even though I feel silly doing it, and the grains barely fill the depression. She makes a notation. I roll my eyes. “Are you going to measure it in micrograms, Doctor?”
“If I could, I would.” She sets down the pen. “I want to get things exact.”
“However you make things will be right.”
“I don’t want right.” She takes up the ladle and stirs. “I want exact.”
She keeps stirring, maybe so she doesn’t have to look at me.
“I want you.”
I want to hug her when she says that. I hold back. I see she does not like the heat. I tear a square of Bounty off the roll and touch her forehead.
The Abundance Page 15
