by Akhil Sharma
That night he lay awake listening but his father did not talk on the phone to his lover. The next night he did, quietly. And the third night, he was laughing like he always was. Lakshman felt revolted by him.
Weeks passed. The door to his mother’s room remained closed. They told no one of her death. By this time in America they had stopped socializing, and so people only knew them tangentially and there were few to tell. Finally his father informed an acquaintance or two and somehow the news got to school. There Lakshman was pulled out of class by his guidance counselor and asked how he was doing. Talking to a white person in authority was frightening and Lakshman quietly said he was fine.
After perhaps a month, his father opened the door to Lakshman’s mother’s room. All the linens and clothes were, following tradition, going to be thrown away. Lakshman stood in his mother’s room as his father opened the drawers and dumped the red, gold, peacock saris in black garbage bags. “I miss Ma,” Lakshman said.
“You should. She was your mother.” His father studied him for a moment before returning to work.
“Do you miss her?”
“Of course.”
Later, the garbage bags sat slumped at the end of the driveway. It rained before the garbagemen came and the creases on the bags filled with water.
WHEN LAKSHMAN WENT to India the summer after his mother’s death, his father’s family complained regularly about not receiving help from his mother’s relatives. He still did not understand that his mother had been murdered, and to him, his mother’s family no longer helping meant a fraying of relations and it made him feel again that his mother was dead.
“Just because Aarti is gone shouldn’t mean the relationship is finished,” his grandmother said. “These relationships go from generation to generation.”
“What can one do with a family that raises a drunk?” his father’s second-oldest brother, skinny and with a scraggly beard, answered. “They are all crazy.”
“They are not so crazy when it comes to their own interests,” his grandmother spat back in the weird conspiratorial way she sometimes spoke.
Often these conversations occurred in the afternoon, after the family woke from its midday nap. They would all be groggy and irritable and the complaints would be like the bitterness in their mouths.
For a while Lakshman’s uncle, the second-oldest brother, tried hinting what had happened. “They are scary people. Nobody owns seventy trucks without committing crimes.”
Late in the summer, Lakshman realized what his uncle was suggesting. But his grandmother and uncle often said strange accusatory things, like that the local milkman diluted his milk with water and one time there had been a fish in the milk. It was hard, therefore, to take what his uncle said seriously.
“Who dies from dengue after one day?” his uncle insisted one afternoon.
“Keep quiet, idiot,” Lakshman’s grandmother said.
Besides, when Lakshman had arrived in Jaipur at the start of summer and visited his mother’s family, his grandmother on that side had grabbed him and hugged him tight and sobbed. He could recall exactly his grandmother’s arms around him, the boniness of her chest, the sharpness of her arms. All this seemed to cut through any of his uncle’s hinted accusations.
But slowly, as the weeks passed and the monsoon came and people ran laughing through the streets and then God Krishna’s birthday came, Lakshman began to feel a nervousness overtake him. He started having a hard time sleeping at night. The street dogs barking at two or three in the morning would wake him and he would become wild with panic. His grandmother sighing as she made her way to the toilet through the darkened house would pitch him into misery.
He went to the farm as he always did. There were gypsies passing through the area and at night there were puppet shows and men singing before the main house. In the morning there were the girls visiting his uncles. Once, he was walking through a field and he thought he saw the girl his father loved sitting beneath a tree talking to another girl. He walked toward her in the shimmering heat. As he did, the girl got up quickly and hurried away. Later that day, he asked the farm manager about the girl and the man said he would have her called. Lakshman told the man no and rushed back to the house. As he did, as he crossed the burnt grass, sadness filled him. It seemed awful that his mother had died, that his father seemed to have forgotten her, that this woman was still living her life.
That night, he couldn’t sleep at all. He sat up in bed and the crickets were screaming and he thought of his mother and how on her nightstand she would sometimes have books from AA, how when she was going into a detox, she would become frightened at being away from home and would start crying, how for a while she had phoned the old white woman with the dusty skin who had taken her to the first detox, and his mother would stand in the backyard and speak urgently into a phone.
Around four the crows started cawing, and soon the smaller birds were chattering, as if they had dreams they were eager to share. At five the girls arrived on the veranda, slipping out of their rubber slippers on the steps, the slippers making a scratching sound as they slid onto the cement, then their bare feet going past his room, and the teacups they were bringing rattling on their saucers. Lakshman sat and listened and had the certainty that he could never come back to the farm again, that whatever happened he could never come back.
THE WELL
We lived frugally. If somebody was coming to the house, my mother moved the plastic gallon jugs of milk to the front of the refrigerator and filled the other shelves with vegetables from the crisper. The only meal my mother did not cook herself was our Saturday lunch. For this, my father walked six or seven blocks to get us slices of pizza. One Saturday morning, my father went to see a man who had recently come back from India with pickles and letters for his acquaintances, the way people used to do in the seventies. My father came home with a jar of mango pickles, but without the greasy paper bag from the pizza parlor. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with a cup of tea and the newspaper. When my mother went into the bedroom and asked if he was hungry, I heard my father say he had already eaten. My mother said nothing, only stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. After an hour, my father emerged from his nap and began to move around the apartment. Every time he came into a room my mother was in, she would get up and leave. Finally, my father demanded to know what ghost had stuffed itself into her. She started to cry. “I am just a servant. It doesn’t matter what I feel. You would like it if I cut out my tongue and threw it away.”
My father hurried from the house to get the pizza. When he returned, my mother refused to eat her slice. We were in the living room with its TV and plastic folding chairs, but none of us sat down. My parents stood there facing each other, and I stood between them. I began hopping in place. “I’ll eat it,” I chanted. I imagined myself from the outside, as if we were on a TV show and people were laughing at my cuteness.
“You have shown your heart,” my mother scolded my father. “What else is there to say?”
“I’ll eat it,” I sang.
“Uma, are you a little girl?”
“My head hurts now. I can’t eat.”
“I’ll eat it,” I continued.
“Uma.”
“I’ll eat it.”
My father turned to me. “You’ll eat it?” he demanded.
I became afraid. I felt that if I did not go on hopping and acting cute, it would mean admitting that I was not like a boy on a show, that I was pretending and so I would reveal that I was dishonest. I nodded.
He smashed the slice into my face.
We stood quietly for a moment.
My mother took me to the bathroom and leaned me over the sink.
IN THOSE DAYS, I was always falling in love. I fell in love with Mrs. Muir from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with Mary Jane, Spider-Man’s girlfriend, with Wonder Woman. I loved the last two especially.
I would imagine going for drives with Lynda Carter or for walks in a park. I imagi
ned us sitting on a sofa and holding hands. The fact that I could not drive and Wonder Woman would have to drive for us embarrassed me. It made obvious the difference in our ages. I felt that the proper relationship for me was with Mary Jane, who was younger and a cartoon, although I liked Lynda Carter more.
Years passed. We moved from Queens to New Jersey. I was thirteen and the town we moved to had a lot of construction going on. When a house was nearly done, it would stand with landscaping around it, but one could see through the front windows into the backyard. If, on my father’s evening walks, he came to a house with a new lawn that had freshly laid rectangles of turf, he would hurry home, get into his car, and drive back to the house. He would crawl over the lawn, peeling sections of turf from the yard. He would carry these into the back of his car and bring them home to our own lawn, which was yellow and sunburnt with rectangular patches of bright green.
One summer evening, I was sitting at my desk, in my room upstairs, when I heard my father’s car. In the back were the sheets of turf. My mother came running out of the house and stood by the driver’s side door. “If you are going to steal, don’t steal during the day,” she screamed. “Do you know nothing?”
“Grass doesn’t belong to anyone,” my father said, getting out of the car. “Grass is like air.”
“Do people pay to put air on their lawn?” My mother was so angry she was panting.
I cranked open my window. I leaned out. “Are you circus folk?” I yelled.
THEN, TOO, I OFTEN thought I was in love. First there was a girl named Joanne, who was very skinny and had square blonde hair and who worked at a dry cleaner. In high school, there was a pudgy girl with pasty skin named Cathy. Both were quiet and listened intently in class. Both were good at math and hoped to be engineers. Although I spoke to them only a few times, in each case I thought about the girl all day and dreamt of her at night. I would fantasize about living happily together and being good. When I am married, I thought, I will give my wife a single flower every day. In my fantasies, we were always married, although this idea was vague to me, represented mainly by our living in a house that had a dining table.
I went to Rutgers for college. I was fat. I didn’t know much about women. My father once told me, “Pavan, don’t be proud. Marry someone taller than you.”
My mother laughed with malice. “The first well that gives this boy water, he will build his house next to.”
After college, I started working as an accountant in the comptroller’s office of a big pharmaceutical company. I liked working. I liked going to an office and getting a salary. I liked driving into an office park with lush green plantings and a fountain. I felt that I had been allowed into an important world. It was here that I met my first true love.
Betsy had short blonde hair and was thirty-one and very pretty. She had green eyes and her hair curled over her forehead. Sometimes a patch of it on the side of her head would stick up, and then she reminded me of Tintin. There was a scar on her right thigh where a malignant melanoma had been removed. And she played tennis, which made her seem more white than the other whites in the office. Betsy also flirted with all the men. If any of them had been away on vacation, she would greet him with a tight hug. The men in the office resented her, because she had gone out with a professional baseball player. The women disliked her, too.
For me, Betsy’s beauty and her whiteness were hard to separate. I had only slept with one person till then, a very fat Hispanic girl. When I had lain on top of her, her belly had lifted me up and her face had been several inches below mine. I had penetrated her, but in the jerkings of my climax I had flicked out and had come on her bedsheets.
On Friday evenings, most of us went from the office to a bar. In the bar, I would try to be useful to Betsy and ferry drinks for her. I would stand near her among the other men and notice how long she spoke with each and what she said. I also regularly had lunch with her in the cafeteria. Often we talked about dieting. I would raise the subject because I felt the need to make my body real before her, to show that I, too, had a body. Also, Betsy was proud of her slenderness and liked talking about what she did to be so thin: having only coffee for breakfast and rinsing her mouth immediately so her teeth remained white, eating lettuce leaves with mustard for dinner several nights in a row if she knew she would be going out to a restaurant later in the week.
Often, I believed Betsy was beginning to like me. She would come by my cubicle at different times of the day or smile broadly when I went to her office. Then I would see her smile the same way at someone else and my heart would sink.
When Betsy drank too much on Friday nights, I drove her home. Many of the other men offered, but I think she felt safer with me. This belief of hers, that she was safe with me, made me angry. It was because I was Indian, I told myself, it was because she did not see me as a man.
One Friday night in December, perhaps because she had not eaten anything all day, she got very drunk. I held her by the bicep as we left the T.G.I. Friday’s. “Be careful,” I said, as we stepped off the curb. It was one of those cold nights when sounds seem loud and hard. We got to her apartment building and along the edges of the parking lot were snowbanks shining blue in the moonlight. “Let me walk you to your apartment.” My mouth was dry. “It’s icy.”
The apartment was dark and smelled of ginger, and there was a ticking sound. As she stood there, in the dark of her open kitchen, I tried to kiss her. “No,” she said, and swung her head away. But I tried again, and she did not step back. This seemed promising to me. I kept my hands on her waist and kissed her cheeks, her ears. I remembered when my mother would hold both my wrists in one hand and slap me and I would try to duck and her hand would strike my brow, my eyes, the side of my nose. After a minute or two, Betsy put her hands on my face and kissed me in the practiced way of a woman trying to make a man feel desired. Now I became nervous. I felt that I had forced the situation into being.
“Should I go home?” I asked.
“Yes.”
After this night, we kissed regularly, but only after she had been drinking. I would drive her to her building and say that perhaps I should walk her to her apartment, and my mouth would grow dry as we walked.
Kissing her was wonderful. To stand for an hour in her dark apartment, kissing, swaying side to side, made me so happy that I wanted to tell someone. In the car, driving back to my apartment, I would speak out loud to myself. “Is there anything better than kissing a beautiful woman?” I would say. “If there is, God is keeping it for himself.”
At least once or twice a month we went to her apartment and kissed. There were occasions, though, when for several weeks in a row she would have dates on Friday night. I would feel very sad. My arms and legs would grow heavy, and I would find myself blinking away tears. I felt sad and also I would hate her. Although I was the one chasing Betsy, I felt that she was using me, that to her I was simply a source of attention.
One day in the pantry at work, I came up to her as she was making tea in the microwave. “I would like to take you out on a date sometime,” I said. I murmured this.
Betsy looked at me. She didn’t say anything, then she patted my cheek and left.
On a sunny Saturday in spring, I was driving down U.S. 1 toward my parents’ and I saw a blue Corolla like the one Betsy drove. I began following the car. I knew it probably wasn’t hers, but every time I lost sight of the car, my heart began to race. “This is stupid. This is crazy,” I said to myself, and the words spoken aloud made me feel my helplessness even more. I followed the car for an hour, until I lost it near the exit for Cranbury.
The weeks and months kept passing. I tried to distract myself. I would go to see my parents. My mother had lost a tooth near the top center of her mouth. The gap made her appear young. She remained mean, though. One of my high school classmates had become an investment banker, and she had learned from his mother what he earned. At the kitchen table, she asked me how much I made, even though she already knew. I thought
periodically of telling her about Betsy, but I knew she looked forward to the prospect of negotiating my marriage, and she would get angry and perhaps start cursing me and Betsy if I told her.
BETSY AND I began having sex. I always tried to do it without a condom. She was still going on dates with other men, and I believed that if I could get her pregnant she would stop. Sometimes she demanded I wear a condom, sometimes not. Once, in the middle of sex, as she was on her knees and I was inside her, I, full of sexual excitement, asked what she wanted. “A rubber,” she said angrily.
Despite the fact that we were having sex, I thought she did not care for me, that she was probably just tolerating me. I think, though, that she did care for me. I don’t think it is possible to have sex with someone regularly without caring for the person. Once she told me I was the best lover she had ever had. I don’t know what this meant. She sometimes spoke of a French soccer player she had dated as being the great love of her life. I asked her one night if she had told any of her friends about me. She said no.
Betsy was afraid of getting pregnant. For some reason having to do with her skin cancer, she couldn’t go on the pill. Twice she had had abortions, once because of a rape. Occasionally after we had sex, she would lie there in the dark murmuring to herself, “I am pregnant. I can tell.” She looked small and helpless then, her hair damp, sticking to her forehead. I couldn’t understand why she would have sex with me without a condom. The only possible explanation was that there was something in her that was weak and baffled, just like there was in me. The sympathy I felt seeing her lie there, in the dark, murmuring to herself, would briefly brush aside my insanity. I would have the sense that I should leave this poor woman alone.
BETSY GOT PREGNANT.
