by Rahul Mehta
Dedication
Every book is for Robert Bingham.
This one is also for Susan Morehouse.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Within This Tree
Prologue
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Interlude Chapter 16
Part Three Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Rahul Mehta
Copyright
About the Publisher
Within This Tree
Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of grey
the same,
its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.
—Jane Hirshfield
Prologue
Western New York, 1985
Kiran—twelve, almost thirteen—stood in the tall grasses on the edge of Sherman Road, which rose in a steady incline, climbing past fields, a dairy farm, an evangelical ministry called Ray of Light housed in a large, boxy building that looked more like a storehouse for farm equipment than a place of worship, and a section of woods he and the other neighborhood kids had always called the Cathedral because of the firs and pines that towered like spires and the way the light on a sunny day (when they were lucky enough to have one) shot down in beams. At the top of the hill was a T, and you could turn left or you could turn right, but either way you ended up in the same place, back at the main road that headed into town.
It was early fall, the leaves had not yet turned. They fluttered in the breeze like winking eyes in day’s last light. Fall so suddenly became winter in these parts, winter itself stretching endlessly like an enormous gray carpet being slowly unfurled.
Kiran stood midway up the hill, his back to the woods, and across the street was a house, an A-frame, an anomaly among the old wooden farmhouses haunting the lane. The newer houses were farther downhill where Kiran lived, in the small subdivision that pooled off Sherman Road.
It didn’t occur to Kiran how similar the A-frame was to a dollhouse his older sister, Preeti, had when they were younger, and which Kiran loved but wasn’t allowed to play with since it was Preeti’s and he was a boy. When she wasn’t hunched over playing with it, she kept it on a high shelf she had to stand on her bed to reach. It didn’t occur to him as he looked at the A-frame, and yet the image must have been there—the high shelf, the bed he wouldn’t dare step on—sloshing around in his head in a sea of other images.
It had been over two weeks now that he had been stopping here, each evening before dusk, just as the light outside was disappearing but before anyone had thought to draw the curtains, not that there was much of a need, there being no real foot traffic on this road and no houses on the opposite side.
This was what he would see:
Amy Bell standing at the kitchen window, washing dishes. Another time, at the stove, stirring a pot.
The children doing homework in their bedrooms. Or watching TV. Or in the backyard on the trampoline. Who would guess—watching them fly one by one into the air—that in the future one would become a BMX champion, another a large-animal veterinarian, a third would marry very young and struggle her whole life with alcohol addiction, and Kelly, the oldest, the smart one, the ambitious one, just one year younger than Kiran, would be class president and then study at Duke and then take a job in investment banking in New York and would die when the towers were attacked and her mother would be very angry for a very long time and would spit unscripted at Kelly’s memorial service the following words: “No one knew my daughter. No one. If you think you knew her, you’re wrong.”
And finally, Chris Bell in the living room with a tool in his hand, hunched over something broken. Or at the kitchen table, sorting through mail, the light from the pendant lamp making his blond hair glow in the same way his hair glowed that day, four years earlier, when Kiran spotted him on the far end of the skylighted food court at the Elmira mall, a day that would change everything.
Kiran had stopped boarding the bus after school. He’d also quit Odyssey of the Mind. Instead, he walked. Two hours. Three hours. Sometimes four. He wandered. He walked in circles. Sometimes he stopped at home. But he always ended up here. Outside this house.
Slowly dusk brushed its murky gray wash across the landscape. Shapes around Kiran became fuzzy, indistinct, crispening by contrast the illuminated rooms of the A-frame house. Tonight, Chris was upstairs in the bathroom, washing away the dirt that his long day as a building contractor had left on him. Kiran had seen him go in there, had watched him unbutton his blue shirt, toss it on the floor, unbuckle his pants, slide them down, move into the shower. Steam clouded the window. Several minutes passed.
Images from the fated summer and fall four years earlier flashed through Kiran’s memory. A four-armed monster in silhouette, a demon come to life from the Ramayana, emerging from the woods, only to reveal itself to be not a monster at all but his half-naked sister swimming in a man’s sweater. Days later, Kiran’s sister holding a brick, barking, “Look away, Kiran! Look away!” Another day, Chris Bell’s damp, flannel-sleeved arm slung across the back of his pickup truck’s seat, hovering behind Kiran. And the look on his mother’s face. He’d see that look twice that summer and fall and then never again, not quite the same look in all the years that followed.
In Kiran’s mind, the events of that summer and fall were all connected, and they all came back to this: Chris.
The bathroom window turned a steam-blurred beige as a figure approached, curled its fingers under the cracked window, and slid it halfway open. For a second Kiran could see a strip of Chris’s bare, clean skin. And then Chris—aware of the darkness, perhaps even aware of the boy who stood within it—pulled the curtain closed.
Western India, 1998
They were not expecting it, even though they had heard the commotion coming toward them on the quiet lane in the afternoon heat. They heard two voices—one deep and strong, the other more tentative—warbling a bawdy call-and-response folk song. They heard rhythmic clapping, crowds laughing, the ruckus coming closer and closer until it sounded as though it were just outside their house. Still, it had not occurred to them that it was all intended for them until they heard the sudden silence and then four sharp raps at the door.
When Kiran’s older cousin, Bharat, opened the door—leaving the iron security gate shut—what Kiran noticed first was not the woman directly in front of them, and not the girl behind her, but rather the crowd that had formed, that must have followed them, first one curious onlooker, then another. Kiran hadn’t been in town long, but he recognized many of the faces, or at least thought he did. He knew firsthand how quickly crowds could form. He’d already experienced it, his first day: the children who lived on the quiet lane spilling out of their houses to gawk unabas
hedly and unreservedly at the long-haired, brown-skinned, but unmistakably American oddity, and the women and men hovering in doorways or porches, being slightly more discreet, but gawking nonetheless.
When his attention finally did turn to the woman at the door, he noticed how she was leaning possessively with her forearm propped against the doorframe, how dirty she was, how dirty she and the girl both were, the oily film on their faces, the heavy makeup, the cheap outfits in shiny, stained synthetic fabrics, inferior versions of the chaniya cholis his mother and sister wore to special family occasions. The woman was about fifty, he guessed, a little heavy in the hips, and the girl was maybe fifteen, maybe a little younger, slender and flat-chested despite presumably passing puberty.
Kiran couldn’t have known that Guru Ma was leaning against the doorway not in some show of dominance but out of exhaustion. He couldn’t have known how she and Pooja had traveled all day, how they had left early that morning, hoping to arrive by noon, but how at the station where they were to switch buses, the driver of the second bus had refused to let them board—“Your kind is not welcome”—even though they had purchased tickets, and despite their protestations, which started off calm, then escalated. By the end of it Guru Ma was clutching, in tight fists, the cloth of her lehenga, threatening to lift her skirt, to expose her mutilated genitalia, to curse the driver. “I’ll show you,” she had said, “and once I do, you will never be the same.” But the driver’s eyes had been red, he called them “disgusting” and spat on the floor of the bus and reached behind his seat for some heavy object—a tire iron or a large wrench, Guru Ma didn’t see it clearly—and she thought to herself, It’s not worth it, and unclenched her fists and took Pooja’s hand and led her away. Kiran could not have known how they had walked the rest of the way in sandals during the hottest part of the day, or how, when they got to town, they had to perk up, regardless of how withered they felt; they had to sing, they had to dance. They were hijras—everyone expected a show.
Later, Kiran would keep coming back to this moment: the opening of the door, the woman and the girl on his cousin’s doorstep. At the time he didn’t notice their Adam’s apples. But when he photographed Pooja days later—after the two had told each other their stories, not that they needed to; kindred souls, they had known each other immediately, the way one accustomed to standing outside knows another—it was the feature he focused on most. Pooja in profile, her neck elongated, the setting sun behind her, an arc of light along the mound of her throat, the sharp edge of a crescent moon, that heavenly body ancient and honest and brave.
Part One
Chapter 1
Western New York, 1985
Did the boy think they couldn’t see him?
Amy, from the kitchen window, watched him watching them, as she had for several evenings in a row. Today was an unusually frigid evening for early fall, and, seeing him—his skinny, awkward frame in baggy shorts and a rugby shirt, though it was obvious this boy didn’t play rugby, probably didn’t play any sports—the mother in Amy wanted to bring him something warm, a sweater or a barn jacket from Chris’s closet, clothes she understood would never fit him.
She knew him from the neighborhood and from around town; everyone knew everyone. And while she had never spoken to him, she had seen him just days earlier at the dollar store. She had stopped at the end of an aisle when she spotted him halfway down, thumbing through neon poster boards. He saw her and looked quickly away, and then turned back toward her when it was clear she wasn’t leaving. She wanted to confront him. “We see you,” she would say. “We know you’re out there. This has to stop.” Maybe she’d even accuse him of being a pervert, a voyeur—“It’s disgusting what you’re doing”—though she knew that wasn’t what this was about. But seeing him under the fluorescent lights—his mop-cut hair, the braces on his teeth as he smiled, clearly terrified, the beginnings of acne along his jawline, acne that would get much worse in the coming years, so much so that when his orthodontist removed his braces two years later, leaning in close, Kiran would see him wince in revulsion, and Kiran would come home and spend a full four minutes in the garage staring at the electric sander, wondering what would happen if he took it to his face, would he be given a transplant? some beautiful, smooth new skin?—seeing all of this, and remembering what her daughter had said when she asked her what Kiran was like at school (“He’s a loser, Mom.” “Kelly, we don’t use words like that.” “Fine, he’s . . . weird”), she decided to leave it.
She and Chris had not spoken about it, though she felt sure he had noticed, too. It was a delicate topic to broach. Besides, she could barely admit this, even to herself, but there was a tiny part of her that liked that Kiran was out there, that liked being watched by him. She was proud of her home, proud of what she and Chris had created together. She was proud of everything. The house itself. The furniture, each item with a story. The sideboard, a family heirloom. The couch from an upscale furniture store in Rochester they bought just after they got married and which they could barely afford, even on a monthly payment plan. The occasional tables they’d found at an estate sale two towns over after a pancake breakfast at a place high in the hills that featured its own homemade maple syrup, outside aluminum buckets hanging on tree trunks; they’d literally stumbled into the sale, hand in hand, full and happy, syrup on their lips. They had painted all the rooms and picked the colors so carefully. They had done it all themselves and had laughed and fought and spilled paint. She was proud, too, of her children, beautiful children, and of her husband. It made perfect sense to her that someone would want to see, would yearn to be inside that house. A boy like Kiran: he would always be on the outside looking in. And yet she knew that was not why he was out there. That wasn’t the whole story.
“I’m going to talk to his mother.”
Chris didn’t respond. They were lying in bed in the dark, the room quiet. They had just had sex. They had been particularly loud, loud for them, so much so that in the midst of it he had wondered if their children could hear them. Amy had been loud. She had climbed on top of him and arched her back and thrown back her head in a way he wasn’t sure she’d ever done before.
Ever since Kiran had started standing outside, Chris had experienced the sensation of being watched even when he knew he wasn’t. He had been thinking about it just then, as they were having sex, imagining that they were being watched. He wondered if Amy had been thinking about it, too, if that was why she had arched her back in such a way, if that was why she was mentioning Kiran now.
“It’s gone on long enough,” she said. “I’ll call his mother tomorrow.”
It wasn’t only when he was home that Chris experienced the sensation. He felt it at work, and even while driving his truck the forty-five minutes to Olean to his current construction project. It had made him sit a little straighter in the seat of his cab. It had stopped him from singing along off-key to the Supremes song he had landed on while switching through stations. Chris remembered a sermon his brother had given several Sundays earlier at Ray of Light about how God was always watching. It was meant to be both a warning and a comfort: even when we thought we were alone, we were not.
“No,” Chris said. He put his hand on Amy’s shoulder. “I’ll do it.” He felt Amy’s body tense and turn the slightest bit away from him. “I’ll go see his father at his office. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Chris didn’t go see him the next day. He called. He told the receptionist he wanted to talk to Dr. Shah directly. It was personal, he said, and of some urgency. When he got Dr. Shah on the phone, he repeated those words: personal, urgent. He did not say, It’s about your son.
“Today is impossible,” Nishit said. “Tomorrow? Lunchtime?”
Chris could have easily cleared his schedule, but he said, “No, that won’t work,” and suggested the following day. Nishit said, “No,” and they settled on the day after that, which in fact wasn’t particularly convenient for Chris, but he’d already shot down the day that was convenient
for him, and he didn’t want to draw things out any longer.
Nishit’s haggling over the date baffled Chris. If someone called you and said he had a “personal” and “urgent” matter to discuss, Chris wondered, would you wait three days, allowing your imagination to run wild with possibilities? Wouldn’t you want to know immediately?
But in fact Nishit did not want to know, not immediately, maybe not ever. He of course did not know why Chris wanted to meet, but he had a theory, and if his theory was correct, he had no interest in discussing such matters with Chris.
That evening he and Shanti arrived home at the same time: he from the office, Shanti from the bank. They had been trying to sort through old items; their garage was in disarray, so they parked their cars side by side in the driveway. Nishit kissed Shanti on the cheek.
The house was empty. Nishit went upstairs to wash. Given all the germs with which he came into contact, he was fastidious about washing. He’d first developed the habit when the children were born. He’d worried about what he was bringing home, what microscopic organisms might have hitched a ride on his tie or his shirt cuff or might have nestled in the web of skin between his fingers; he’d worried about how fragile his children seemed, these new lives, how desperately they were in need of protection.
These days, Preeti was almost never home in the evenings. She had just gotten her driver’s license, and if she wasn’t at cheerleading practice she was at the ministry up the road at a Bible study group or helping to serve a beef-on-weck dinner to raise money to build a church in Haiti or to send some boys on a mission to Uganda or Uruguay. He and Shanti had not been thrilled when Preeti had said, two years earlier, she wanted to convert, but they hadn’t stopped her. It occurred to Nishit just then that maybe his theory was wrong. Maybe the reason Chris wanted to see him wasn’t what he imagined. Maybe it had something to do with Preeti. After all, they did belong to the same church.
