by Mira Jacob
“A beach like Hawaii?” Akhil asked. “Does the hotel have TV?”
“Yes, I believe it does.”
“Does it have a swimming pool?” Amina asked.
“It has a very nice pool,” Thomas informed her. “I believe there’s even a bar in the middle, where you can swim up and order a fizzy drink.”
Amina gulped, dizzy with possibility.
“Thomas,” Kamala said sharply. “We can’t just go.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not!” She raised her eyebrow at the bedroom door, as though it were Ammachy herself. “Have you told her?”
“Don’t worry about that! I will explain tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll understand.”
“Tomorrow? Understand? Have you lost your minds? Besides, what will the neighbors think? Everyone will talk!”
“Who cares what the neighbors think?” Thomas scoffed.
“Everyone cares what the neighbors think!”
“Kamala,” Thomas sighed, rubbing his neck. “It’s not such a big deal. We’ll be leaving a few days early to go to the coast, that’s all. Don’t make it into a federal case, okay?”
Kamala got off the bed and opened the bedroom door. She looked at the children. “Out.”
“What? No, Mom, this is a family discussion, right? We’re entitled to—” Akhil started.
“OUT.”
Akhil and Amina scooted off the bed as quickly as the marbles and bedsheets would allow, walking straight across the hall into their own room. They waited exactly five seconds after Kamala shut the door to slide out onto the verandah, where they could watch their parents but remain hidden in the dark.
“—can’t. It’s just not done,” Kamala was saying.
Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off with the flat of her hand.
“Bad enough the son leaves for America, then he comes home and stays for all of three days only?”
Thomas sniffed. “Don’t let’s start with all that.”
“I am not starting anything! You yourself started this business!”
“Enough, Kam. I am warning you.”
“You don’t warn me when I’m warning you!”
“She lied to me!”
“So what, now you want to run away? All because Dr. Abraham came?”
“She told him I wanted a job!”
“And you told her you would come back after studies! So? You are two liars! So what?” Kamala spun toward the window and Amina ducked, but her mother wasn’t looking at her. She was scooping up loose marbles and placing them in the game box.
“I did not lie, Kamala. It’s not as though I planned this.”
“No, of course not, His Holiness of Sainthood and Angels! You would never do such a thing!” Kamala shoved the top onto the game box. “You just studied the one branch in all of medicine that would be difficult to practice here and were shocked to death to learn that you could not practice it here!”
Thomas’s mouth hung open. He blinked several times before answering. “You saw me, Kamala. I asked at Vellore. I checked in Madras. I even looked in Delhi, for the love of God!”
“Yes, you said.”
“And what? You think I’m lying to you now?”
“No,” Kamala said, uncertainty creeping onto her face.
“The technology is not here yet! What do you want? You want me to work some miserable job just so we can be here?”
“I am just saying—”
“Answer me! Is that what you want? How about if I become a dentist? We can live right here, upstairs.”
“That’s not what I—and anyway, what’s so bad? So you don’t do the surgery! You are still a doctor! We could still have a good life.”
Amina had not known, until that very moment, that her father could look so bloodless, the color draining from his face until it looked like an angry husk. “What is so wrong with your life, Kamala?”
“We are not talking about me!”
“What is it that you long for? What opportunity have you not been given?”
Kamala fumed at the floor. “Nobody is talking about that.”
“Is it the house? It’s not big enough? You don’t like your car?”
“Don’t be a silly.”
“You want to come back here, is that it? After all these years, after everything we have built for ourselves there, after all that I have tried to give you, you want to uproot the kids from their entire lives and just move back here?”
Kamala’s lips clamped shut.
“What can you have here that you can’t at home?” Thomas took a step forward. “Really, tell me! You sit here like some pained mermaid longing for her sea, but what is it, really, that you don’t have back in the States? Your sisters who live in all different towns here anyway? Your independence? Enough help around the house? Someone to—”
“Myself,” Kamala said.
Thomas swayed a little bit, as if slapped.
“Myself,” Kamala said again, her eyes filling with tears she wiped away hastily, and Thomas’s arms dropped in their sockets. They did not look at each other then, but at the floor. A moment later Thomas turned and left the room, shoes heavy on the steps. Amina leaned over the verandah’s edge a few seconds later, watching him cross the yard, heading back to the gate. Akhil tugged her arm.
C’mon, he mouthed.
The lock screeched open again, letting Thomas back out to the street, and Kamala sat on the bed. Something round and hard moved from Amina’s throat to her gut, making it difficult to breathe. Akhil frowned at her.
“Let’s go, stupid,” he hissed, and she turned and followed him back inside, glad to have somewhere to go.
What was it that woke her? Late that night, Amina found herself awake, blinking into the dark. Scraping footsteps. The settling of weight. She stared at the fan cutting the air above her for several seconds before rising out of bed. The verandah was empty, but the tar on the roof was still warm from the day’s sun as Amina took the path back up to the top. The high, warbling songs of newfound Tamilian love rose from the movie theater down the street, along with smoke from the beggars’ fires and the bidi Thomas smoked, his back slumped into a yellow chair, beer between his feet. He glanced over his shoulder as she approached.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Ami.” He looked neither surprised nor unhappy to see her, and though the night was too hot and she was a little too big for it, she climbed into his lap, shoving her forehead against his jaw.
“You should be asleep,” he told her, his breath burning her eyes.
“You should be asleep,” she said, and he grunted.
“Are you having a good time?”
“Sure,” she lied. “Are you?”
He nodded once, heavily. He sighed and she sighed with him, feeling his belly rise and fall at her back, his heart thumping behind hers.
“She’s never satisfied,” he said.
Kamala? Ammachy? Amina was scared to ask.
“Where did you go?” she asked instead.
He shrugged.
“Are we still going to the beach?”
His stubble scratched her forehead as he nodded.
Amina closed her eyes. The pool. Tomorrow she would be crawling through the clear turquoise while light dappled the walls around her. Until her ears hurt. Until her fingers pruned. Maybe there would even be a slide, one of those long ones that curled like a giant’s tongue and spat you into the cool water.
“How is your brother?”
Why was he asking her? Amina opened her eyes to the muggy dark. “Mean.”
Thomas laughed.
“No, it’s true, Dad! He’s worse here than at home.”
“That’s because it’s hard for him here.”
“It’s hard for me, too!”
“Not the same way, koche. He was born here. He remembers more.”
This seemed like one of those things that her father had wrong, like the time he said that being famous would be terrible. Why would it
be harder to be somewhere you remember more? What about when you didn’t remember anything if you’d ever even known it in the first place and everyone was always exchanging dark looks over it like you were blind or dumb or didn’t understand what scorn looked like?
“That boy is going to be something else,” Thomas said suddenly, wistfully, like he was seeing the end of some movie she couldn’t. “He’s difficult now, but one day he’ll grow into himself, and then you watch. He’ll shine brighter than the rest of us combined.”
Amina’s heart puckered with jealousy. She wanted to remind her father about how sometimes Akhil spoke so fast that you couldn’t even understand him, and even when you could understand him, he didn’t always make sense, but just then something crashed below them in the yard.
“What was that?” She jumped up, ran and looked over the edge of the roof, seeing a flicker of white. Now came a deep thud, followed by a string of curses and a growl.
“Shit.” Thomas frowned at her side.
Down below, weaving like a ghost through a forest, Sunil wandered through the yard in his white mundu. He took a few steps forward and then turned back, bending over something. He dragged it toward the wall.
“Shit,” Thomas said.
Amina blinked in the dark, trying to focus. What was he dragging? It was heavy, apparently. And dark. A chill shot through her. A body? Was it Ammachy? Sunil reached the gate and tried lifting whatever it was up and over. It dropped on his foot.
“AAAARGH!”
“Sunil, please!” And here was Divya Auntie, running across the yard now in her nightie. “Stop this nonsense and put it all back! You’ll wake the whole house.”
What on earth was he doing? Amina watched as her uncle bent over, tugging at something.
“Sunil—”
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” Sunil roared, stumbling backward so that Amina could finally see what he had been dragging.
“Is that our suitcase?” She looked at her father.
“Shit,” Thomas said.
“BLOODY BULLSHIT ARTIST!” Sunil hit the lock on the suitcase so that it popped open.
“Dad, what is he doing?”
“Shit.”
The first item to fly over the gate was a hiking boot. The other soon followed, hitting the ground directly in front of the group of beggar children. One of them scrambled to pick it up, and another shrieked as a cassette landed in their midst. There were rustlings, and Amina watched a small shadow run to the gate, pointing to it. The rest of the children followed, staring up in wonder. At that moment, Sunil chose to get rid of the tube socks. One by one, the white balls flew into the night, and on the other side of the gate, children bobbed and weaved, snatching them before they landed.
“Sunil, stop!” Divya cried, tugging at his arm. He smacked her away.
Three more cassette tapes followed, and these caused a bit of a scuffle until one of the pairs of Levi’s flew over and a full-on war began. Someone thumped someone. Someone else screamed. One of the jars of Avon cream shattered on the ground, but the next was caught, resulting in cheers. The candy cane filled with lip balms sailed into waiting hands. There was a small pause, and then Sunil raised Itty’s tennis shoes above his head.
“No, no, Sunil!” Divya screamed, running at him. “Nonononono!”
But it was too late, the shoes were flying through the air and over the gate, twin satellites spinning into orbit and caught by swift hands. Divya scrambled for the lock, throwing her whole body against it until the gate clicked open. She shoved through it and stopped. The children watched her. She was breathing hard. She took a step forward, hands out, and they backed up. Amina watched as her aunt said something, reaching toward the children, and they scattered, running in all directions across the street, shoes and creams and cassette tapes tucked tightly under arms as they disappeared.
Amina was shaking. She did not realize this until her father put two hands on either side of her shoulders, pulling her toward him and clamping her still. Her face pressed into his ribs, and her mouth chattered.
“D-d-d—”
“It’s okay,” her father said, but she could hear the forced calm in his tone.
“W-we have to get Itty’s shoes back! Or get him another p-p-pair! He’s going to go crazy without them!”
“Okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Why was he picking her up? Amina hadn’t been carried by her father in years, but there he was, scooping her up and crushing her, forcing her head down on his shoulder like she was some small, small child. Amina reared back, wanting to scream at him or scratch his face, and instead found herself crying harder.
“It’s okay,” her father whispered, rubbing her back as if she didn’t know better.
They were packed. How this had happened was a mystery to Amina, who, along with Akhil, had been woken, fed a breakfast of toast and tea, and then led to the driveway by a terse Kamala. The sun was rising fast, spreading muggy air over them like carpet. Mary-the-Cook and the servant girls dutifully ran whisk brooms over the yard, sneaking looks their way but saying nothing as Itty howled and clutched his bare feet on the lawn.
“Itty, koche, pavum,” Divya said in a soothing voice. Her hair charged out of her bun in a haphazard corona; her eyes were red-rimmed.
Itty had been, as Amina predicted, inconsolable when his first shrieks rang across the pink morning. For the last two hours he moved from wracking sobs to soft whimpers and back as steadily as a commuter train on a loop.
Akhil walked over to him, tentatively patting his shoulder. “You want to go play cricket for a minute? We’re not leaving yet.”
Itty shook his head miserably, a gob of snot landing on his shirt. Divya sighed but forced a smile on her face when Amina looked at her, and it was this as much as anything else that sent Amina’s stomach sliding into a greasy shame.
Bad. They were doing something bad. What, exactly, she wasn’t sure, because no single element—the packed bags, the eating upstairs, the sweating outside now—seemed like a horrible act in itself, and yet somehow it had turned them against the Salem house, landing them up in the driveway like pillagers escaping with a country’s pride. Outside the Wall, the morning traffic rose in a steady stream, honks and shouts multiplying on one another.
“Does Ammachy know we’re leaving?” Akhil asked.
“Yes, of course,” Kamala said.
“Then where is she?”
“She isn’t feeling well this morning.”
Akhil looked skeptically at his mother. “Are we even going to say goodbye?”
“Of course!” She bristled. “Who doesn’t say goodbye?”
“Okay!” Thomas called, walking down the steps with two bags. “Almost done here!”
“Thomas, please.” Divya clutched her pink sari tightly around her. “All year she has waited for you and the children to come. What will the neighbors think, all the commotion and sudden leaving?”
“Oh, pah.” Thomas shrugged, shoving Akhil’s backpack into the trunk. “Don’t worry about that, it’s no big—”
“And the party?”
“What party?”
“She was going to have a party for you and the children on Friday.”
Thomas looked momentarily thrown. “She didn’t tell me.”
“It was a surprise.”
Amina watched her father take this in. “Then I will tell her I am sorry.”
Divya shook her head, walking into the house, and Itty wailed anew, the high-pitched whinnying. Akhil patted his head gingerly, and Amina crossed the lawn and crouched next to him.
“Hey,” she said in the same soothing voice that all the parents were using, and it seemed like the right thing to do until Itty looked up at her and she had nothing more to say.
“Vel-cow,” he whispered, panicked, tremulous.
“I know,” she said, and he shuddered, ducking his head.
The hurrying sound of footsteps came from inside the house, followed by Divya and a much-worse-f
or-the-wear-looking Sunil.
“Ho! Thomas, what’s this?” He was hastily tying a lungi around his plump waist as he walked. “Divya says you’re leaving?”
Thomas nodded curtly, not looking him in the face.
“I thought you were staying until Saturday.”
“We’re going now,” Thomas said, looking coolly toward the Wall. “We need to be somewhere more comfortable.”
“Comfort … you … have you told Mummy?” Sunil managed at last, his face running from indignant to alarmed.
“I have.”
Sunil walked a few paces toward the car and turned around. “You can’t even manage a few more days?”
“Nights, actually.”
The blood rushing to Sunil’s face darkened it like a shadow, and Amina scooted closer to Itty and her brother, unsure if there would be another explosion. Instead her uncle swallowed, saying quietly, “Thomas, bah. That is no reason to leave.”
“Oh, it’s quite enough—”
“No, I mean”—Sunil cleared his throat—“you don’t want to see me? Fine. I will go. But you stay.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Sunil snorted in disbelief. “What can’t? Who can’t?”
There was a long silence while Thomas struggled to come up with an answer.
“We can’t,” Kamala said, startling Amina and Akhil. “The children are sick with the heat, and I told Thomas to book one room at the beach.”
This was a lie and they all knew it, but invoking the children had done the neat work of making the rest of the conversation impossible, and Sunil looked away, beaten.
“Just tell the neighbors the kids aren’t used to the weather,” Kamala continued. “They’ll understand. Weak American constitution and all.”
Amina could not look at anyone, not Sunil, not Divya, and definitely not Itty. She felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders, propelling her forward, through the yard and up the verandah steps, down the hallway, past the living room and dining room and all the other bedrooms, to the one that smelled of camphor and roses and something else sweet and rotting, like a caramel roll left under the bed. The shadow of a fan cut across the pale blue wall, and in the bed, Ammachy was hunched under her sheets, her long hair loose from its customary braid, her eyes fixed on the pillow next to her.
