by Akhil Sharma
Outside, the light reminded Kusum of how little she had slept. The morning smell, thinly herbaceous, with whiffs of diesel and sweat, meant India to her. Everything was so much the same, she could have left yesterday. Kusum’s stomach clenched. A crowd waited along the terminal windows. Terrorism in the early eighties had forced people to greet returning relatives on the airport’s wide sidewalks.
Even after ten years, Anita was immediately recognizable. She had some wrinkles and her hair was almost white. She stood slightly at an angle, as if to keep a greater area under surveillance. Rajesh was near her. He had gotten so enormously fat that his head seemed supported by his chins.
“Say namaste to Kusum Mausiji,” Anita said in English, and that’s how Kusum realized that the tall, broad-shouldered girl standing a few feet away was Asha. Asha was wearing a long olive army raincoat and eating a sugar cube. Kusum’s image of Asha was from a decade-old photograph in which she sat tiny between her parents on a sofa. Asha still had a child’s moon face, round and soft, and this was the only part that looked her age. Kusum had expected someone less distinct.
“Namaste. Can I go to America with you?”
Laughing politely, Kusum replied, “If you want.”
“I do. When?” Asha stared at Kusum.
“Quiet. They’re too tired for your jokes,” Anita said, again in English.
“We slept on the plane,” Ben said, smiling in a puzzled and slightly conciliatory manner.
“Shall we take a bus?” Rajesh asked. Etiquette should have required that he, as the man from Kusum’s side of the family, pay for a taxi. Rajesh owned two Pizza King restaurants and could afford the taxi.
“Shame, Rajesh,” Anita said in Hindi. “We should pay.” Rajesh grimaced and did not answer. Kusum knew Anita had little money. Inflation had destroyed the value of what little Pitaji had left her. She was planning to sell the flat she and Rajesh had inherited and either move in with Rajesh or rent a single room.
“You don’t want the presents I brought?” Kusum said to Rajesh in Hindi, smiling as if she was teasing.
“Teach him a lesson,” Asha said, and laughed.
A bed dominated the front room of the flat. Rajesh sat beside Ben on two chairs and showed him a five-hundred-rupee bill. “Three, four years ago, you almost never saw these. Soon they’ll have bills as large as an undershirt.” Kusum sat cross-legged next to Anita on the bed and looked at Asha’s report cards. Everyone but Carolyn was drinking tea. The report cards were from first standard through ninth. In the last two years, Asha’s marks had improved enormously.
The report cards, Kusum understood, were marketing materials for Asha, but she did not feel put upon. Kusum looked at Carolyn sitting near her and thought how difficult it was to be a good mother. Carolyn was staring anxiously at the twirling ceiling fan.
“It won’t fall on you,” Rajesh said to Carolyn.
Carolyn looked at him and then at the fan, which not only spun but shuddered, as if its speed was about to wrench the bolts out.
“God is kind,” Asha added, “they tend to fall when their owners are asleep.” She was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Carolyn’s face tensed. Kusum noted the teasing. “Don’t worry, every flat in India has one,” Asha said.
Carolyn kept looking at the fan.
Ben laughed. He was sitting on a chair against a wall. “Tell Asha you’re going to sleep on the side of the bed and make her sleep right beneath the fan,” he said.
Carolyn looked shyly at her father and, unable to muster up the meanness to tease, said, “I’m going to sleep on the side,” and giggled.
Asha laughed as well.
“Asha would be number one in her class, but the father of the student who is first is a doctor and gives free medicine to the principal,” Anita complained.
Ben laughed.
“It’s true,” she said. “This is India.”
“Does the principal take whatever medicine is given or does he ask for specific ones?” Ben asked.
Rajesh chuckled, and Anita began protesting.
“Mummy says the secret to success is working hard and cheating,” Asha said. As everyone stopped in surprise, she grinned.
“You don’t cheat, do you?” Ben asked.
“Asha, what’s wrong with your head?” Anita asked. “Do you think a stick would fix it?”
“Take me to America.” Asha addressed Kusum. “Here the answer to everything is ‘stick.’”
Now Kusum worried whether Asha cheated. One more complication she would have to deal with if they adopted Asha. “Why did your marks go up so much the last two years?” Kusum asked.
“She began going to an all-girl school,” Anita said.
“I found a friend with a VCR and I started watching movies and understood I would never have any of what I saw unless I worked,” Asha added.
“What about wanting to make me happy?” Anita asked.
“You’ll never be happy.”
“I’m making more tea,” Anita said, and stood. From the kitchen she called for Asha.
Asha hissed, “Stick,” and left.
In the aisle, between the chairs along the wall and the bed, Kusum began unpacking the suitcases. To make space for her, Rajesh moved from beside Ben to the bed. She was glad to be able to talk with Rajesh without Anita present.
The sound of Asha’s and Anita’s voices arguing came from the kitchen.
Kusum took an electronic thermometer out of a suitcase and placed it on the bed. “Is that the one I asked for?” Rajesh inquired.
“Yes.”
He took the thermometer from its box and, after spending several minutes discovering how to use it, put it in his ear. “Did Anita write crazy letters?” he asked Ben, because Ben was the husband.
“No,” Ben said. Another reason Kusum loved him was that he was discreet, even on behalf of those who were not discreet themselves.
Rajesh appeared offended at being rebuffed so directly. A moment later he spoke in the patient voice of a friend delivering a warning. “Anita’s crazy. Whether she acts it or not.” Rajesh had written Kusum once in ten years, and then only to ask for the thermometer and a Walkman because he had learned she was coming to India. Listening to him, Kusum wondered why being away for so many years did not make things feel more unexpected.
“She must be unhappy,” Ben said.
“What does that explain? I’m unhappy, too. What she says Pitaji did happened how many years ago? After all those years she suddenly had to tell people?”
Ben’s face froze the way it did when he was offended and was waiting so that he would not speak from automatic disgust.
“Pitaji threatened Asha,” Kusum said. She was thrilled to hear evidence that she need not adopt Asha and wanted to confirm the evidence.
“I don’t believe that. Ask Asha what Pitaji was like and she’ll only say good things.”
“Why do you think Anita’s crazy?” Kusum asked.
Rajesh took the thermometer from his ear and looked at his temperature. When he spoke, he sounded embarrassed. “After she told everyone about Pitaji—who knows whether everything she said was true—the family said she should get married and she wouldn’t.”
“You want to use the bathroom, Carolyn?” Kusum said. This was the excuse she and Ben had developed to tell her to leave a room. Carolyn departed. “That’s not crazy.”
“But she kept telling everyone about Pitaji—who knows whether it was true—even when it would do no good. After he was dead. She told everyone in the compound. Did she expect them to be kind to her? Did she expect them to admire her bravery? Asha walks down the street now and boys grab their buttocks and show her their tongues.”
“Is that true?” Ben asked.
“Asha keeps a razor blade with her in case she’s attacked. Once, in her old school, she was suspended because she used it on a boy who attacked her.”
“No,” Ben exhaled. Kusum knew this story. When the first of Anita’s letters arrived telling of Pita
ji, Kusum had felt accused, as if she had stolen something. This sense had not faded over the years, and when she translated Anita’s letters for Ben, she left out the details that most revealed the abjectness of Anita’s and Asha’s lives.
“Yes! Yes! This is what Anita’s done.”
“How is this Anita’s fault?” Kusum asked, avoiding Ben’s surprised, inquisitive glance.
“Everything had been quiet for twenty years when she started this.”
“How have you helped?” Ben asked softly.
“You don’t know my worries,” Rajesh said. “Everybody thinks I have plenty of money, but I don’t.”
Ben waited a moment. “I ask only because it seems Anita and Asha have so little.”
Rajesh looked out at the gallery and the blue sky. “I might let her live with me.”
Kusum felt relieved that Ben had not asked her how she had helped her sister. She too stared out the door.
“Did you ever get Ma’s saris?” Rajesh asked.
“No.” She had never even thought of inheriting anything from her mother.
“Pitaji told Anita to divide up Ma’s saris between you and her.” She knew Rajesh wanted her to be angry at Anita. Kusum wondered if she would have felt guilt without years of Ben’s steady goodness as an example. What would Ben think if he could read her thoughts?
She said to Ben, “I’ll go help Anita with the tea. She works hard.”
The next morning Kusum kept trying to wake, but her eyes would only open a minute or two and then sleep reclaimed her. In her dreams she heard a whapping sound, and it was this sound that woke her at last and drew her to the door of the living room. Carolyn and Asha were beating the sofa with broom handles. First one hit; the sofa puffed dust several feet high; they laughed; then the other lashed. They were covered in sweat and grime. Carolyn was wearing the dress that she was supposed to have on when they went to see the relatives who had raised Kusum. Kusum felt her hand curving to grab Asha. Asha should have noticed Carolyn’s dress and not let her play this ridiculous violent game.
When angry, Kusum tried to be especially sweet. “Baby, come here and kiss me.” Saying this was enough to calm her. Carolyn walked to her and kissed the chin Kusum thrust forward and then the nose she tilted down. Asha briefly regarded the kissing and returned to thrashing the sofa. “You might tear the cover,” Kusum said to her.
“Why should I care,” Asha answered, looking over her shoulder. “I am going to America.”
Kusum wondered if Asha was crazy. Even a child knows to hide the most blatantly selfish parts of herself. “You might not go,” Kusum said, and struggling, forcing herself, continued, “I don’t know if I want to bring you.”
Asha did not turn around. She kept beating the sofa. She raised her arms far behind her back and whirred down as long a portion of the broom’s handle as possible. “I’ll begin shouting at the airport that I’m your daughter and you’re leaving me behind. I can cry any time I want. You want to see me cry?
“I’m joking, Mausiji,” Asha said as Kusum left the living room.
In the kitchen Kusum found Ben photographing Anita. Anita was frying chiwra and Ben kept making her move back and forth because of the sunlight and the waves of heat from the oil. It was probably years since Anita was last photographed, and she followed his directions eagerly.
Kusum bathed quickly, and soon they were out of the flat and on their way to Bittu Mamaji’s house, where Kusum had grown up.
The houses are taller in Sohan Ganj than in the Old Vegetable
Market, and this makes the alleys shadowy, so that they seem narrower. The side streets were noisy and crowded in a way Kusum’s memory had left out. Some of her memories had even been addled. The shop whose owner she used to defeat regularly at cards was nowhere near the bottom of a sloping alley. And there were things she had completely forgotten. Badly maimed cows were everywhere. They passed a calf that had had one of its hooves pulped, so that a leg ended in a long dark flap of skin. The calf was hobbling toward a pile of garbage in such stunned fly-specked misery that Ben picked up Carolyn to keep her from the vision.
Kusum and Ben carried plastic bags full of gifts. They had wrapped the presents, although most were specifically requested.
“Where did you play?” Carolyn asked.
“All over. We were told to stay in one or two alleys, but, of course, we didn’t. I knew every building.”
“Did you play with Aunt Anita?”
“We lived apart. I didn’t see her much.”
“Did she live far away?”
“No.” It was only a ten-minute walk from where Anita had grown up and where she had. At this idea Kusum thought, I am no worse than most people. I am good for even coming to India and thinking of adopting Asha.
They came to Bittu Mamaji’s house. It was so narrow that a scooter parked in front covered half its length. There was a water pump across the street. “I remember when we got running water. Till then I used to be the one who carried the buckets for the entire house. That pump is where I got my bad back.” Kusum laughed then, because she did not want to sound self-pitying. The stone steps up to the first story where Bittu Mamaji lived had grown beveled over generations. “My buckets did that,” she said, and laughed again.
Rohit was the first to see them. “Hello,” he shouted, and led them into Bittu Mamaji’s rooms. Vibha came out of a back room at his shout. “Kusum, sister,” he said, and shook Ben’s hand. Then he lifted Carolyn and said, “You’re the one in the photos.” They moved into Bittu Mamaji’s rooms.
Bittu Mamaji appeared, putting on a shirt. He had sandalwood paste smeared on his forehead and was a round head on a round body. Sharmila followed him. Soon they were all sitting in the main room drinking tea. The bags of gifts were placed in a line against a wall and nobody mentioned them for a while.
The talk first scratched across the details of life in America. Was Morris Plains near enough to Jersey City for Kusum to deliver a rose to a friend of Bittu Mamaji’s. “I could, if you wanted, Mamaji. But it’s not nearby.” Kusum had never liked Bittu. She had thought he was lazy and so had no right to the condescending voice he had always used. But for some reason she now wanted to please him. She wanted Bittu Mamaji to admire her.
“Have you seen an Indian rose?” Bittu Mamaji asked Carolyn.
No, she shook her head.
“We’ll show you that. Yes, Rohit?”
“Yes.”
“Come sit beside me,” Bittu said to Carolyn, and she joined him on the bed. “We’ll show you Indian clouds. We’ll show you some Indian birds.”
“So now you are a full believer in the BJP,” Kusum said.
“I love my country. Yes,” he replied quickly. “I would never leave where I was born.”
“Why is Sonia Gandhi running for Parliament?” Ben asked.
“Some files about her husband’s bribery are about to be released and she wants to stop that,” Bittu Mamaji answered, his voice soft and polite before the family’s son-in-law. “And this way she keeps enough power to let her daughter run for office later if Priyanka wants to.”
Relatives began arriving. Among them was Koko Naniji, Kusum’s grandfather’s sister, the woman in the family Kusum liked most. Koko Naniji was well past eighty, with a deeply pockmarked face. “Namaste, daughter,” she said, and squatted easily in one corner. She believed chairs made you sick.
“Namaste,” Kusum answered. “Carolyn, go touch Koko Naniji’s feet.” Koko Naniji’s smile broadened. Because Koko Naniji was so old, as far back as Kusum could remember she had always been more of the bully than the victim. She occupied a large room on the ground floor of the house Bittu Mamaji lived in. Periodically family members tried taking over the room. Once, when she was away on a pilgrimage, a nephew and his wife had been moved into her room. Upon returning and discovering this and finding that her demands that the room be returned to her were being ignored, she took a stick and broke everything that could be shattered in the room. Then
she went out on the street and began shouting that her family was making her homeless and that she needed a place to sleep. All those years of authority had made Koko Naniji’s craziness seem amiable.
Everyone was nervous around Ben’s whiteness, and so the conversation remained at the level of facts. Ben explained his work. Someone asked him if he knew that Indians had invented the airplane. He said it didn’t surprise him, and there was a pleased murmur in the room. People spoke one at a time.
When enough of a crowd had gathered, Kusum began handing out gifts. Everyone was impressed by the wrapping and the little taped cards with their names on them. Somehow when the gift wrap was carefully eased off and the requested portable phone or the iron with the automatic off was discovered, there was a sense of surprise. A blood-pressure measurer was passed around. “Thank you, Mr. Ben,” said people who felt uncomfortable applying the ji to a white man’s name. A few acknowledged Kusum, but quietly, so as not to offend him. Koko Naniji received an elegantly thin shortwave radio, and she was so pleased that she clapped her hands and refused to let anyone touch it, even to put in batteries. “This is a good gift,” she said to Ben, “but not enough for an educated girl who can go out and earn money.”
Someone translated for Ben and he joked, “You haven’t been getting my checks?” He acted so shocked that when this was translated back, Koko Naniji was convinced that somebody had been taking the envelopes in which the checks arrived.
