by Rahul Mehta
The man looked at Chris. “It wasn’t a trick.” A few seconds later he added, “You know, you could do this. You’ve got what it takes. We could train you.” His eyes drifted toward Amy. “But it’s not an easy life. We’re on the road much of the year, a hundred shows a year, spreading the Word of God. Like I said, it’s not an easy life. But it’s a good life, a life with purpose. Think about it. If you want to join, contact our office down in Virginia. Tell them Gabe sent you.”
Seeing the light in Chris’s eyes, Amy knew that, were it not for her pregnancy, were it not for her, Chris would have gone. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the life he had, it was just that he also wanted something else. Wasn’t it natural, the desire, if only fleeting, to live another life, to be able to capture one more of the infinite versions of oneself floating around in the ether like so many fireflies?
Now, in bed, having decided not to ask Chris about his meeting with Dr. Shah earlier that day, Amy listened to Chris breathe. She knew he was awake, but he was pretending to be asleep; she was doing the same. For just a moment, just two or three breaths, their inhalations-exhalations were exactly the same. She strained to extend the moment, to keep their breaths synchronized. She felt if she could do that, if she could just keep their breaths in sync, everything would be all right.
Chapter 2
Western New York, 1981
Later, in their family shorthand, they would refer to this time as the Year of the Mouse, even though most of the memorable events (not that anyone wanted to remember them) happened over the course of just a couple of months during late summer and early fall. Still, the events were momentous enough that they would loom, for each of them—Shanti, Nishit, Preeti, and Kiran—over the entire year, and unspeakable enough that they needed a euphemism to contain and to neutralize them. They might just as easily have called it the Year of Prabhu, since it was also when Nishit’s elder brother was living with them, visiting from India. But Prabhu was complicated; the mouse was not. The mouse was only a minor annoyance. It could be exterminated.
It was early August when she first appeared. “She” because Shanti was the only one who’d actually seen her—although Preeti had noticed the chewed-through Saltines sleeve and they had all seen the tiny, torpedo-shaped droppings in one corner of the kitchen counter—and Shanti had decided she was female. “Her body was misshapen,” Shanti said. “I think she might be pregnant.”
The children begged their parents not to kill her.
“If you kill her, you’ll kill the babies,” Preeti said.
Kiran said, “We’re not going to murder Minnie, are we?”
“Darling, it’s dirty,” Nishit said, pulling his son close to him. “We can’t just let strange creatures live in our house.”
Kiran glanced sideways at his uncle Prabhu. His kaka had just arrived a week earlier, and Kiran was suspicious, both children were. They had never met him before; they’d only heard stories, or rather, overheard stories. And then, of course, there was the portrait of Neela Kaki, Prabhu’s deceased wife, which hung at the top of the stairs and, positioned as it was, seemed to float over their lives. It was a framed and garlanded photograph in an alcove, illuminated by its own recessed lights, which were always on, even at night, a place of prominence, never mind that Neela Kaki was no blood relative, only an in-law, and only for two years at that. Both the photo—black and white and blurry—and the woman in it seemed to belong to another world, one that felt very far away to the children, a world in which women could die in childbirth, which was in fact how she had died, giving birth to a son named Bharat.
Kiran returned his attention to his father. “What about Kroncha?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Preeti said, “What’s the difference between Minnie and Kroncha?”
“Stop calling her Minnie. It. Stop calling it Minnie. It is an it. Its do not have names.”
“You haven’t answered our question,” Preeti said.
“They’re not the same,” Shanti said, trying to help out her floundering husband. “Kroncha is a pet. Minnie is wild.”
“A mouse is a mouse,” Kiran said.
“You didn’t see Minnie,” Shanti said. “She looks nothing like Kroncha. She is dark and ugly with beady eyes. Not cute like Kroncha. If you had seen her . . . it . . . if you had seen it, you would want it gone.”
The children huffed and crossed their arms.
“Babies, Dad.” Preeti turned to her mom, looked up at her with big, pleading eyes, enunciating each syllable: “Ba-bies.”
Nishit found the live catch traps at the hardware store. Frank, at the counter, was skeptical. “You can try them, but the mice around here are smarter than you’d think. At best, you might catch a couple of the young ones, the ones that haven’t learned yet. But the adults, you’re going to need something else. Snap traps. Or better yet, poison.”
“We’ve only got one mouse,” Nishit said. “We only have to catch the one.”
Frank wanted to tell Nishit he’d only seen one; there were more. But he knew better than to contradict him. He could tell that Dr. Shah was not the type to listen to men behind counters. And, judging from the tassels on his loafers, he was not the type who could catch a mouse.
At home, the children wanted to see the traps—they didn’t trust their father—so Nishit showed them: gray plastic boxes with doors that shut automatically. “Just like garages,” he said cheerfully. The trap operated a little like a seesaw. It was on a fulcrum, the back end pitched slightly up, the front end down. When the mouse ran inside the weight was supposed to shift, the back end falling, the front end rising, then the door was supposed to snap shut. The whole thing looked cheap to Nishit, and he was beginning to see Frank’s point: no mouse would be so stupid. But the children seemed hopeful.
“What should we use as bait?” Nishit asked.
“Oreos,” Kiran said. “Or licorice.”
“The instructions recommend cheese or dry cereal.”
“Froot Loops.”
“I think they mean uncooked oatmeal. Or we could use granola?”
“I heard mice like peanut butter,” Preeti said.
“Frosted Flakes. They’re grrreeeeeeaaat!”
In the end they settled on a crumb of Parmesan cheese in one trap and a smear of peanut butter in the other. Nishit wore rubber gloves so his human scent wouldn’t rub off onto the traps. But if the mouse was so afraid of human scent, he wondered, what was it doing on the kitchen counter in the first place?
Kiran ran in circles. “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!” As his father laid the traps, Kiran fetched the crinkly bag they kept beneath the kitchen sink and refilled the food pellets in Kroncha’s cage.
Before Kroncha, the pet mouse, there had been a pet bird, and before the pet bird another bird: two birds—first Shilpa, then Deepa—both ill-fated. Ostensibly they were for the children, who had wanted a dog, or a cat, though Nishit and Shanti had been firm: they were too much trouble, a cat would scratch up the furniture, a dog would have to be walked, who would scoop the poop? and what would they do when they visited relatives who, even more so than they, would never allow such a filthy creature in their houses? Pets for the children, that’s what they had said about each of the birds in turn, and yet somehow they had become Shanti’s, both of them. She was the one they fell in love with. It wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help that the birds loved her more—more than they loved Nishit, more than they loved the children—and she couldn’t help how much she loved them back. She doted on them. In the winter, after Nishit had gone to bed, Shanti, worried that Shilpa was cold in her cage, secretly nudged the thermostat higher. Shilpa loved to be bathed. Shanti let her sit on the edge of the kitchen sink and used her own fingers to gently drip water in between her feathers. Then there was Deepa, whose tiny bird heart ached when she was apart from Shanti, her homing instincts always tugging her Shantiward. She perched on Shanti’s shoulder at all times, even in the morning as Shanti sat on the toilet, as she brushe
d her teeth, even in the evening as they ate dinner, or afterward as she warmed her back just inches from the glowing space heater.
And it was this love, perhaps, that ultimately did them in, because, loving them so much, and knowing firsthand—though she never would have admitted this, not even in the deepest recesses of her consciousness—what it was to have clipped wings, Shanti wouldn’t hear of clipping theirs.
One summer afternoon when Shanti walked into the subterranean family room, she saw that the sliding door that led out into the backyard was wide open and that the children were upstairs after having played all day in the yard and that Shilpa was gone. A year later, Deepa flew across the house into the kitchen where Shanti was standing at the stove, cooking. But Deepa, whose name meant light, just like Kiran’s name, misjudged the distance, missed Shanti’s shoulder, landed, instead, in a skillet of hot oil. Shanti rushed her to the vet and for a week afterward rubbed ointments and salves into Deepa’s claws, but they didn’t heal. Finally Shanti took the bird back and held her in her cupped palms as Dr. Paulson plunged the needle into the creature and depressed the syringe. When Preeti, who was old enough to want to know about such things, asked her mother what it was like to hold Deepa as she died, Shanti described having the sensation that her spirit was flying to heaven, just like in cartoons when someone gets hit by a train, and then a faded miniature version with halo and wings flies out of its body. But that wasn’t what it was like. It was an indescribable loss, a sudden darkness. It was a light going out.
In the months after Shilpa disappeared but before they’d gotten Deepa, Shanti often thought she could hear Shilpa calling her from the woods at the end of their yard. A few times she had even gone to look, trudging into the thicket, emerging later, a leaf in her hair, a twig in her sweater. But then after almost a year had passed, she was still hearing Shilpa’s voice, and how could that be, how could a tropical house bird survive a Western New York winter? And besides, Shanti reminded herself, she had never been one to know things by their names, to know trees by their leaves, flowers by their blooms, birds by their calls. She would not have known one hurt creature calling out from the woods from any other.
For someone else it might have meant something, it might have been a deliberate choice, a symbol of something larger. But for Nishit it was an accident, or at the very least not a choice he was conscious of making. He hadn’t even noticed it until this particular Thursday night, during their weekly puja. (“Cheers is on!” the children would complain in years to come, in screeches grating enough that Nishit would eventually switch puja night to Tuesdays, but for now it was still on Thursdays.) They were all sitting on the floor in his and Shanti’s bedroom, Prabhu was sitting next to him, and Nishit looked down and saw that the bell Preeti was ringing—the bell they always rang while singing the aarti, Preeti and Kiran alternating weeks—was a replica of the Liberty Bell, crack and all. They huddled around a makeshift mandir consisting of a few pictures and statues of gods Nishit brought carry-on aboard Air India and held in his lap (“Bagwan does not travel baggage class,” his mother had reminded him at the airport) and in America arranged on a low platform in the corner of the bedroom. The diya flame was fueled by Crisco, not ghee, and the bell rung during the aarti prayer was, yes, a Liberty Bell—someone else may have seen symbolism here, but Nishit knew none of it was planned.
Nishit was not particularly patriotic. He liked America, even loved it at times, but he also loved India and hadn’t entirely ruled out returning one day. Still, he and Shanti had vowed that they would not be like the Yamamotos, who lived next door in the pale green, square-shaped bungalow. They had arrived even before he and Shanti, and yet for all the years they lived in this community they had been a mystery to most of the residents. Without Nishit and Shanti even meaning to pry, neighbors volunteered stories about how, when the Yamamotos first arrived, they refused every dinner invitation, claiming they were still settling in, still unpacking, or sometimes giving no excuse at all; the neighbors were eager to offer these stories, praising the Shahs by comparison. Year after year the Yamamotos skipped the annual back-to-school block party, which happened to take place almost directly in front of their house, so that when people were sliding along the buffet table, loading up their disposable plates with macaroni salad and hot dogs and stuffed peppers, they couldn’t help but gaze across to the Yamamotos’ house, the door shut, the windows on this particular day each year always closed, even if it was hot and despite the fact that the Yamamotos had no air conditioner. When the boys were old enough, they would come to the block party without their parents. The older one seemed normal enough, but the younger one, who was Preeti’s age, was always quiet, barely seemed able to speak at all, and was his brother’s shadow.
Every summer, practically from the day the kids got out of school until the day before classes resumed, Mrs. Yamamoto would return with the children to Japan. Nishit had been told by a colleague—though he wondered how the colleague could possibly know this—that Mrs. Yamamoto was just biding time until her husband retired from the hospital, where he read X-rays, and they could return to Japan to live permanently, that she always thought of her life in America as temporary. “Everything is temporary,” Shanti said, when Nishit told her what his colleague had said. “What in this life is forever?”
So, despite his not being particularly patriotic, Nishit had to concede he had bought the Liberty Bell some years ago when his aunt and uncle were visiting from India and he had taken them on a fast-paced sightseeing tour of the mid-Atlantic—New York, DC, and Philadelphia in three packed days—and had brought it home for the children, along with, come to think of it, an action-figure-size Statue of Liberty, so it must have meant something more to him than he was willing to admit.
It hadn’t been Nishit’s idea to come to America. His father had suggested it. More than suggested; instructed. Prabhu, the eldest son, would be the son to stay in India and, as tradition dictated, take care of the parents; Nishit, the second son, would be the one to go. Only now did it occur to Nishit that maybe his parents had insisted Prabhu stay not so he could take care of them but so they could take care of him. It was convenient to blame Prabhu’s problems on grief from the unexpected loss of his young wife, but Nishit wondered now whether the problems had started even before then. Perhaps their parents, knowing their son in ways others could not, had seen signs of what was to come.
The bank was cold. It was always cold, no matter how hot it was outside. Today, being the end of August, was sweltering. The management deliberately kept it freezing, as if the money inside needed to be preserved lest it rot or spoil. Cold cash, Shanti thought, shivering.
Before working at the bank, Shanti had briefly held another job. Shortly after she arrived in America, Dr. Phillips, head of surgery at the hospital, arranged a dinner party to introduce her. Nishit had reminded Dr. Phillips that both he and Shanti were vegetarians. (Shanti had not yet started eating meat; later she would eat chicken and fish, even as Nishit remained a vegetarian: an inverse of most of the Indian couples they knew in America.) When the plates came out, the ones served to Nishit and Shanti looked liked all the others minus the roast chicken and with an extra dinner roll. Shanti pushed around the bland vegetables and creamed corn but was grateful for the warm rolls. In India there were all kinds of flatbreads and there was the packaged Britannia-brand sliced bread, but she rarely experienced the wonderful, fluffy, fresh bread you found everywhere in America.
She was complimented on her enamel earrings. She was told her husband was a real asset to the hospital, to the whole community. She was asked how she liked America so far. (She was tactful. She did not answer, “Well, at least the bread is first-class!”)
After a while the conversation turned to the Phillips’s housecleaner, and Nishit, who had been quiet most of the evening, showed great interest. At the time Shanti assumed Nishit was contemplating hiring her.
That night, when Shanti was turning over in her mind all that had happened that
evening, what she remembered most was not meeting Nishit’s colleagues or their spouses or any of the conversations she’d had, but rather Nishit asking Dr. Phillips about the housecleaner, “How much does she get paid?” She had not noticed it at the time, but now the phrasing seemed significant. He had not asked, “How much do you pay her?” It was not about the paying; it was about the getting paid.
The next evening, after dinner as they were washing up, Shanti said, “Maybe I should work.” She knew about the money Nishit had borrowed from an uncle to come to America. She knew about the medical school loans and another loan to buy the house. She knew, too, about the money he had been sending his older brother, although she knew he didn’t know she knew. “I can help out in people’s houses.”
Shanti’s family had always had servants. Even in lean times, there was always someone at least to clean floors and toilets and to wash the clothes every few days and to come after dinner and scrub the pots and plates and pans. She was ashamed to think of it now, but she had never known any of their names, had hardly even noticed when one was replaced by another. She had only ever known them as Bai, “Woman.” It never occurred to her that in America she might become one of these nameless women.
She had wanted Nishit to say, “Absolutely not,” but instead he said, “It would only be for a few months.”
Two days later Nishit had already managed to line up three clients for Shanti, one of whom was a woman named Mrs. Sharp. Mrs. Sharp was perhaps fifteen years older than Shanti. She was pretty, not beautiful; it was the kind of prettiness that could be purchased. Shanti admired, in the bathroom cabinet (which she sometimes had to open to replace an item—say, tweezers—left out on the counter), small, beautiful glass jars of creams, and in the walk-in closet, silk blouses on padded hangers, hanging not clumped all together but with a sliver of space between each, as though each garment needed room to breathe. Shanti imagined weekly trips to the salon: hair and nails; Swedish massage; feet submerged in a warm salt bath.
