by Mira Jacob
Amina tugged on her father’s hand. “Who is it?”
“Will you have a bit of tea with us, Doctor?” Thomas asked, oblivious to her. “We were just starting.”
“That would be lovely, thank you.” The man turned to Ammachy. “Miriamma, you’re looking well. We miss you round the hospital, you know.”
“Oh, pah.” Ammachy looked pleased.
“And how is Sunil doing these days?”
“Fine, fine.” Ammachy led the way to the dining room, where Amina saw that someone—Mary-the-Cook?—had sneaked in, placing an array of sweets and savories on the table, along with a fresh pot of tea and clean dishes. “Dentistry will always be needed, as you know.”
“Though less so since the Brits left.” Dr. Abraham waited for the laugh, and Ammachy supplied it, pouring a cup of tea.
“Sugar?”
“Yes, please. I can never get enough of sweetening.” Dr. Abraham ladled four spoonfuls into his cup, stirred, and took a sip. “So, Thomas, what brings you back?”
Thomas nodded as though this was the first of many questions in an oral exam. “Just a family visit, sir. My wife hasn’t seen her sisters in too long, and of course, we want the children to know the family.”
“Ah, yes! The children.” Dr. Abraham looked down at Amina, who stared back, mute. “And who is this?”
“This is my only granddaughter, Amina.” Ammachy poured tea into her own cup. “She’s eleven years old, and top of her class back at home. Champion of spelling itself.”
“Really?” Dr. Abraham took a sip of tea. “And what next? Are you going to be a surgeon like Daddy?”
“I’m going to be a vet for puppies and kittens only,” Amina said.
“I see,” Dr. Abraham appeared unfazed. “And how are you finding India?”
“It’s good. It’s hot. Today we saw a cobra and—”
“You’ve met Thomas’s son, Akhil?” Ammachy passed the doctor a bowl of plantain chips.
“Yes, yes, I believe I did on Thomas’s first trip back. How old was the boy then? Six!”
“Four. He’s fourteen now,” Thomas said.
“And he is back in the States?”
“No sir, he’s just upstairs with his mother napping. Sorry not to have him down to meet you, but I didn’t—”
“Nothing doing! No problem at all. It’s a big change for the children, no? But they recover quickly, I find. I think they know it’s home, yes? Physiologically speaking, of course. What’s the expression?” He paused, and Amina wondered if he was really waiting for an answer or just asking himself more questions out loud. “Ah, yes, they know it in their bones! Don’t you think, Amina?”
He looked at her expectantly, and Amina nodded because it seemed better than not nodding.
“And how have you been, sir?” Thomas passed a tray of neon sweets. “Are you still splitting your time between here and teaching at Vellore?”
“No teaching at the moment. Everything has taken a bit of a backseat to getting this rehabilitative center into tip-top shape.” Dr. Abraham set two plump balls of ladoo down on his plate as though they were baby chicks. “I would feel sadly if I didn’t think the work was vitally important, of course, but what an opportunity … your mother has told you a bit of what we’re doing?”
“A bit, yes.”
Dr. Abraham nodded encouragingly.
“It sounds very interesting,” Thomas offered.
“I’m so glad you think so!” Dr. Abraham smiled. “Of course it’s not a neurosurgical wing, as I’m sure you’re aware, but we are putting together a first-rate facility for trauma and recovery.”
“Yes.” Thomas looked vaguely panicked. “What a nice project for you all.”
“You remember M. K. Subramanian from your class? He is in the process of interviewing the physical and cognitive therapists, while I am recruiting doctors from round the country. And what a stroke of luck that you are here at the right time! When your mother called, I could hardly believe it. Perhaps you’d like to meet with him tomorrow?”
Thomas smiled, clearly pained. “Well, now, you see—”
“Perfect! Tomorrow is perfect.” Ammachy placed a pakoda on the doctor’s plate. “We were planning on going to the hospital anyway in the late afternoon; we could stop and meet you both then itself.”
“Fantastic. I would love to show you the facilities, and have you meet a few of the staff.” Dr. Abraham tucked his napkin into his shirt collar. “Doesn’t this look delicious!”
He busied himself with spooning a generous amount of chutney onto the pakodas, so he did not notice how Thomas dropped his head between his hands, how he rubbed his knuckles against the side of his head as if ironing out knots.
“Are these from Sanjay’s?” The doctor raised a ladoo to his lips. “I do love their sweets, you know.”
“I remember.” Ammachy smiled. “I bought them especially.”
“You needn’t have gone through the trouble—”
“No trouble, no trouble at all.”
A mewl escaped from somewhere deep in Thomas’s throat, stopping the others as it turned into a full-throated groan. The doctor’s eyebrows went up and Ammachy’s back went rigid as Thomas pushed his chair back from the table.
“Dr. Abraham, sir, would you mind very much if we went for a walk in the yard?”
“Now?”
“Eat first, then talk!” Ammachy pushed a tin of mixture at the doctor.
“I’m terribly sorry.” Thomas looked slightly ill. “If you wouldn’t mind?”
“Oh. No.” Dr. Abraham looked ruefully at his plate. “Of course not.”
Thomas rose, revealing a damp U where the sweat had soaked through the back of his shirt, and walked straight out of the room. Dr. Abraham took the napkin from his collar and carefully folded it, nodding to Ammachy. Her mouth fell in a hard line as he followed Thomas into the garden.
And what were the men saying, under the shadow of the leaves? Amina watched them through the heavily slatted window, heads ducked to the onslaught of the white sun, arms tucked neatly over chests. They stared at the plants in front of them with such concentration that they might have been discussing fertilization or watering schedules. Dr. Abraham nodded once, curtly, and then again, a little more heavily. Arms were uncrossed, hands clasped. The men walked toward the front of the house with slow steps, where the whinny of the gate latch and the roar of traffic soon gave way to silence. Amina waited for her father to come back and finish his tea. Minutes passed.
“Where did Dad go?” she finally asked.
Ammachy, who appeared to be studying the tablecloth very hard, did not answer. Amina was about to ask again when a tear ran down her grandmother’s cheek, as fast and unexpected as a live lizard. Amina panicked. Should she say something? Hug her? Both seemed equally impossible. Still, when another tear followed the first, Amina found herself holding her grandmother’s hand. It was thin and pale and cool as marble, the skin almost moist with softness. Ammachy took it back as Kamala entered the room.
“Oof.” Kamala yawned, sitting heavily in a chair and pouring herself a cup of tea. She stirred in sugar drowsily, finally glancing up at the full plates and empty seats. “Where did everyone go?”
Ammachy pursed her lips, as if to spit.
“Uncle and Itty went to the bank,” Amina explained.
Kamala blew on her tea. “And your father?”
“Dad went out with Dr. Abraham.”
“Really?” Kamala’s eyes flew to Ammachy. “When?”
Even not looking directly at her, Amina sensed how her grandmother seemed to ignite suddenly, a palpable flame ready to damage anything it could. She was silent for so long that Amina thought maybe she hadn’t heard Kamala’s question. Then she leaned across the table.
“Fat like one angel,” she spat. “Thomas was born so strong and fat, I knew he would become something. Engineer, head of the Indian National Army, best brain surgeon in all of America. He could have married anyone! Such dowries
we were offered!”
Kamala looked at her stonily. “You should have taken them.”
“It was not my decision.” Ammachy stood up and cleared the men’s plates so that they clanged and jostled and threatened to break between her hands. She turned her back on the table, marching toward the kitchen with stiff shoulders. “It was not my decision at all.”
But where had her father gone? Now missing for more than six hours, Thomas had sent the house into tumult in his absence. Ammachy wandered from room to room, fighting with anyone who crossed her path. Sunil, having crossed her path twice already, found a bottle of toddy and was devouring it in the rarely visited parlor. Divya had tucked herself in a corner of the verandah. Itty ran circles on the roof. Kamala, Akhil, and Amina sat on the upstairs bed, playing their fourth game of Chinese checkers.
“Your move, Mom,” Akhil said.
“Yes.” Kamala glanced down at her watch and inched a blue marble toward a yellow triangle.
“What time is it?” Amina asked.
“Nine-thirty.”
Akhil did an elaborate series of jumps, sliding one more marble into configuration.
Amina sighed. “I don’t want to play anymore.”
“That’s just because I’m winning,” Akhil countered.
“You win every game!”
“So don’t play.” Kamala rubbed her own forehead, smoothing out the lines that had settled into it.
“But there’s nothing else to do!”
“Enough of whining! Go see what Itty is up to!”
But Amina didn’t want to see Itty any more than she wanted to see the Chinese checkerboard, or the inside of her parents’ sweltering bedroom, or Akhil gloating for the millionth time in a row. She pushed off the bed, heading instead to the stifling, fanless stairway, and lay down at the top of steps, letting the marble’s momentary coolness slide into her. A whole muffled world rumbled under her ear, clicks and groans of the house, the shup-shupping of someone’s slippers, slow, whale-like moans that she imagined coming from the depths of a huge, cool ocean. Her hip bones dug into the floor, and she heard something else. Singing. Was someone singing? Amina lifted her head off the floor.
“… fingers in my hair, that sly come-hither stare …”
Music! It was coming from below. Amina peeked over the stairwell. She crept down a few steps, and then a few more, until she was able to see into the parlor.
“Witchcraft …,” the record sang, and Sunil along with it, his eyes shut, his face shining. A record spun in neat circles on the turntable, and next to it, her uncle followed, arms cupping the air in front of him, knees bouncing.
Amina stared in dismay as Sunil pivoted from one foot to the other, his hips cutting the air in deft strokes. It was like watching a muskrat slip into the Rio Grande, all of its clumsiness turned to instinctual grace. His meaty upper half arced, dipping near to the floor, then back up.
“I know it’s strictly taboo …”
The lightness in his face was something Amina had never seen before. He was, she realized for the first time, a handsome man. Not movie-star handsome like Buck Rogers, not even tall and sharp-jawed like Thomas, but appealing all the same. He took one quick step back and twirled to the right, his hand guiding an invisible partner.
“Sunil!”
Both Sunil and Amina jumped as Ammachy appeared in the doorway, arms folded tightly over her chest, sniffing at the room. Amina turned and ran up a few stairs, so she wasn’t sure what happened next, whether her grandmother actually sent the needle skidding across the record or if Sunil had done it himself, but the quiet that followed hummed with potential disaster.
“This again,” Ammachy said.
Shuffling. The sound of liquid being poured. A glass slammed on a table.
“You’ve had enough already, Sunil. Go to bed.”
Silence. Amina leaned forward. They were switching rapidly between English and Malayalam, which always just sounded like argada-argada-argada to her, until her grandmother demanded, “And where exactly is your brother?”
“I already told you, I don’t know.”
“So? You can’t be bothered to look for him?”
A sigh, a snort. “Please, Amma.”
“He’s your brother!” Ammachy snarled.
“Argada-argada.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Sunil loosed another sigh, but this one was forced, feigned boredom hiding anger. “It means that Thomas is Thomas and he will go where he wants when he wants. You of all people should know that.”
“Oh, stop it with that. No one is interested in your babbling.”
“Surprise!”
“Idiot! You’re drunk. Argada-argada-argada.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Amina slid her feet over the edge of one stair, then another. She peeked around the wall to find her uncle slumped into a living room chair, all trace of music and movement sucked from him. Ammachy hovered over the chair, the bright green silk of her sari glowing.
“How dare you do this?” she hissed.
“What now?” Sunil shut his eyes, leaning his head back on the chair.
“Feeling sorry for yourself again. Today of all days!”
“I don’t know what—”
“The house! You finally got him to give it to you.”
There was a moment while this sank in, Sunil’s bid for detachment redirecting. He sat up. “You think … you think signing over the house was my idea?”
“All the time he is giving you things, feeling sorry for you! Poor Sunil didn’t get the same opportunities, poor Sunil doesn’t have enough! And now you’ve taken the house!”
“He gave it to me.”
“Because he is always taking care of you.”
“Because he wanted me to take it from him.” Sunil rose from the couch. “You think he wants to live here?”
“He doesn’t know what he wants yet!”
“He doesn’t … You believe that, Amma? That Thomas has been gone these ten years because he doesn’t know what he wants?” Sunil laughed, but underneath there was tightness in his voice. “You think he wants to sit and rot every day in this place instead of running off to America and sending checks?”
“He sends the money for you!”
“He sends it for himself, Amma! He sends it so he doesn’t have to come. My God, you must know that by now.”
If she did know it, Ammachy gave no sign, choosing instead to wrap the end of her sari tightly around her shoulders. “Go to bed!”
“You think Thomas would ever give me something he actually wanted?” Sunil shouted as she walked into the hallway, and Amina covered her ears, suddenly understanding that she had heard too much. She felt for the step behind her with one foot, then the other, hoping illogically that if she walked all the way to her parents’ room backward, she would unremember the entire conversation. The knob was cool against her palm as she twisted it and shuffled into the bedroom.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Amina turned around to find her mother frowning at her.
“Nothing.” Amina sat on the bed.
“You’re feeling sick?”
“No.”
“Did you make BM today?”
“Yes!”
Akhil rolled his eyes. “Sure you did, poo bag.”
“Akhil,” Kamala snapped. “Enough. Your move.”
“Helloooo, Mom, anyone home? I won already.”
“Fine, so do something with yourself.”
“Like what? Make Amina poo?”
Amina rushed at him, digging deep into his belly with her nails so that he shrieked, knocking over the game and the marbles, which spilled across the bed, providing an unlikely torture device as he slammed her on her back. He twisted his head to spit on her, and Amina grabbed an ear, pulling as hard as she could.
“AMINAKHIL! STOP THIS BUSINESS AT ONCE!” Kamala pushed between them, sharp hands collaring their necks. She forced them apart.
“Diaper!”
Amina kicked at him again, and her mother squeezed her throat. “Ow!”
“My God,” Thomas said from the doorway. “What is all that about?”
The family turned to him, panting, and Thomas walked into the room, a sweet and funky cloud of toddy on him. He smiled his lopsided smile, and no one knew what to say.
“You missed dinner,” Kamala finally said.
“I know, I know. Sorry.”
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
“Out where? Doing what?”
“Well …” Thomas looked at them, as if considering something. “Making plans, actually.”
“What plans?”
“Well …” He looked from Akhil to Amina to Kamala and back again. “Okay, listen. I have some big news.”
“You do?” Kamala’s hands dropped, and her voice was soft with excitement.
“We’re going on a trip!”
“What?”
“To the beach! Sundar Mukherjee’s wife is a travel agent, and she booked us rooms at the Royal Crown Suites in Kovalam!”
“What’s Kovalam?” Akhil asked.
“Rooms?” Kamala’s face darkened. “What for?”
“Kovalam is the beach on the peninsula,” Thomas told Akhil. “It’s very nice.”
“But we don’t have time, Thomas! My sisters will be—” Kamala began.
“We’ll get to Lila’s on time. We’ll just leave here a little early.”
“Early?” Kamala asked. “How early?”
“Tomorrow midday.”
“What?”
“We need to rest, koche. A real vacation.”
“Vacation?” Kamala’s voice dropped an octave, like she was saying drug binge or spending spree. “Thomas, what are you talking about?”
“A break! A little peace and quiet! You know, a chance for us to just relax.”
“I’m relaxed!” Kamala protested, looking anything but.
“No you’re not. And how could you be with my mother nagging you all the time?” Thomas raised his hands into the air. “Impossible! She’s made it impossible. It’s not fair to you or the children. No wonder everyone is fighting!”
