by Rahul Mehta
The other clients had given Shanti keys to their houses, but not Mrs. Sharp. She was always there when Shanti cleaned, dressed as if she were about to dash off somewhere else, somewhere she might be seen by someone who mattered, someone other than Shanti. Shanti didn’t matter. Shanti knew this. She knew by the way Mrs. Sharp greeted her at the door, her thin lips mouthing a curt “Hello.” Occasionally she’d have special instructions for Shanti, but beyond that she didn’t speak, never asked after Shanti, never asked, in the kind though slightly patronizing voice Shanti was becoming accustomed to, “How are you settling in, dear?” As quickly as she could, she would turn her attention to some other activity: making a telephone call, paying bills at the wooden secretary in the living room alcove, paging through McCall’s in the breakfast nook.
It happened in the master bathroom, amid the pink wallpaper and the gold-toned fixtures, the countertop shimmering with metallic flecks, those beautiful jars of cream in the cabinet on glass shelves next to bottles of Lanvin Arpège and Chanel No. 5. In the peach-colored toilet bowl, beneath the carpet-covered lid Shanti lifted, there it was: excrement. Not a formed turd, but rather a soupy, putrid stew, accented by shredded ribbons of gray toilet paper. Shanti immediately shut the lid and flushed not once, not twice, but four times, waiting between each flush for the tank to refill. She wondered if Mrs. Sharp, sitting downstairs, would note all the extra flushing, would wonder what was going on, would even perhaps remember, in horror, that she had accidentally forgotten to flush the toilet, had left a mess. Shanti was embarrassed for her, embarrassed for herself. She dumped in double the cleaning powder she would ordinarily use and turned her head sideways as she bent over the bowl, scrubbing.
When Shanti came downstairs, Mrs. Sharp was in the kitchen, standing at the island counter, licking a postage stamp and carefully affixing it to the corner of a greeting-card envelope. She looked up at Shanti. Something about the way Mrs. Sharp smiled, the tightness of her mouth, a certain wildness in her eyes, made Shanti feel sure Mrs. Sharp had deliberately left her shit for Shanti.
Shanti sat for a moment in a kitchen chair, removed her clean white sneakers—her designated indoor sneakers—and pulled on the street shoes in which she’d walk home. She was still getting used to the fact that Americans wore shoes in their houses, that she also was expected to wear shoes in their houses, and, even harder for her, to allow them to wear shoes in hers.
“Will you pop this in the mailbox on your way out?” Mrs. Sharp asked when Shanti stood. “You know how it works, right? You just flip the flag up?”
“Yes,” Shanti said. She took the envelope, along with two folded ten-dollar bills. Mrs. Sharp followed her to the back door, her heels clicking across the floor.
In the driveway, Shanti admired the creamy, pale pink envelope, the quality of the paper, the perfect placement of the avian postage stamp. She admired Mrs. Sharp’s elegant script, the dips and loops spelling out “Dr. Greta Weingarten, Hollyhock Drive, Sunnyvale, Calif.” And yet she couldn’t get out of her head the image of what Mrs. Sharp had left for her, and then the wild glint in her eyes. Shanti had the urge to pocket the pink envelope, to toss this beautiful, perfect thing into the filthiest public trash bin she could find. But she knew, without having to look back, that Mrs. Sharp was watching her from the window, that she would want to make sure that Shanti remembered to put the flag up as instructed.
The very next day Shanti put on a white blouse, gray wool slacks, a black cardigan, and black flats, pinned her hair up, and without telling Nishit (and without an appointment), walked into the bank, asked to speak with the branch manager, and walked out with a job as a teller. Over time Shanti would grow to like working there, even if she sometimes felt uncomfortable having such intimate knowledge of the financial accounts of friends and neighbors. She sometimes knew things about people, about their finances, even their spouses did not. Like a hairdresser, a bartender, or, yes, a doctor, she too would become the keeper of secrets.
And the folks at the bank would grow to love her, would think sophisticated her postcolonial British accent (courtesy of a convent education); they would feel fortunate to have her. Later, when she wanted time off to stay home with the children when they were young, her manager said, “Of course,” and then, a few years later when she was ready to return, she was welcomed back.
After getting the bank job, Shanti didn’t call Mrs. Sharp, as she had her other clients, to tell her she wasn’t returning. Instead, using her fanciest stationery, with a floral motif and a lined envelope, she wrote a note, which she slipped the next afternoon into Mrs. Sharp’s mailbox, and which read in full:
Dear Mrs. Sharp,
I regret to inform you I shall not be continuing my employment with you.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Shah
The note took her twenty minutes to craft.
Years later the image still sometimes returned to her, not just when she ran into Mrs. Sharp, as she inevitably did in the small town, but at other times too: when she was waiting in the hallway of her children’s school on parent-teacher conference night, or when she was at a dinner party at the house of one of her husband’s colleagues. She would remember the swamp of sewage; the hot, putrid smell that lingered in her nostrils for hours; the tight smile, the wildness in Mrs. Sharp’s eyes.
Shanti didn’t know exactly how or when her feelings had shifted. She knew it must have occurred over time, in tiny increments, like crocuses pushing up, inch by inch, through winter’s ground. But when you notice them it is all at once, a splash of impossible purple in the melting snow. That’s how it felt that day, sudden and surprising, a light switch being flipped. Shanti looked up from the counter. It was a quiet morning. She had been rolling quarters, a task she liked. Carefully counting the cold coins and tucking them into their paper wrappers, she imagined tucking children into bed (Good night, quarters). She saw him across the lobby, and something asleep came alive inside her.
He came in often. He had reason to, since he had both a personal account and one for his general contracting business. But if Shanti was being honest with herself, maybe she had noticed that he’d been coming in a little more often than necessary and that he seemed always to end up at her window regardless of how many of the other tellers were free.
She realized that she had unwittingly picked out a particularly beautiful shawl to wear today. Usually she wore a cardigan. She kept it on a hook in the back, a light blue cardigan with faux pearl buttons. But this morning she had grabbed a Kashmiri shawl in deep purple with delicate embroidery. It was Tuesday. Of course. He always came in on Tuesday mornings. Even if she wasn’t fully conscious of it, she must have known that when she chose the shawl.
When he came to her window, she pushed aside the rolls of quarters.
“Good morning, Mr. Bell.”
“Chris.”
“Chris. How can I help you today, Chris?” Feeling her mouth smile, her cheeks flush, she looked down.
So many years ago, when Nishit was brought to meet her for the first time in the bungalow in Pune—her brothers and all of her uncles and aunts and cousins from the joint household hovering—the only instruction she had been given by her mother was “Don’t look him in the eyes.” So she looked down, risking only furtive glances at his neck, beautiful and smooth and long and string-thin in the way-too-big, clearly borrowed checked dress shirt.
Chris slid the checks and the deposit slip, already filled out, across the counter. His hand lingered a few extra seconds on her side of the counter, and then he withdrew it.
Much later, when she would hold him, when she would bury her head in his chest, his blue T-shirt sweat-damp against her cheek, it was his size she would notice most. He must have been six-three, maybe six-four, still with the build of the high school football player he once was, and enormous hands, of course she would notice the hands, hands she had seen again and again across the bank counter, hands that would now be touching her hands, her back, her neck, her hair.
In India, she had not known men like this. Nishit had such slender fingers, perfect for removing his eyeglasses, folding them, laying them gently on the bedside table, a gesture Shanti loved. Perfect, too, for his duties as a surgeon, for extracting what was diseased or damaged, for suturing what was torn.
When she gave Chris the receipt for his deposit, his new balance printed in small gray digits, she included a lollipop. He smiled, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth. Much later, when she would reach up and touch his face and he would take her fingers in his mouth, she would remember this moment.
Chapter 3
One day, not long after the school year started, Kiran picked up the kitchen receiver and caught them on the phone together. Kiran had just started using the phone to call friends now and then, but he hadn’t yet learned the art of conversation, so his calls were always very brief. Hello, Greg. What are you doing? I’m doing my math homework. What did you get for number five? Me, too. What are you having for dinner? OK, bye. Occasionally he’d pick up the receiver even when he had no intention of dialing. He’d walk by and see the shiny canary-yellow contraption on the wall and he’d pick up the receiver on a whim, because he liked the heaviness of the receiver in his hand, liked the way the cradle flipped up, liked even the soothing sound of the dial tone on the other end. He couldn’t have put words to it at the time, but part of what drew him to the dial tone was feeling connected to something outside of himself, outside of the house, something far away. With a few rotations of the dial, that tone could turn into anything, anyone, anywhere.
That his sister was talking on the phone to his best friend’s brother surprised Kiran. Shawn was two years older than Preeti. He was a freshman in high school. He couldn’t possibly have been interested in going with Preeti. (Kiran had only recently learned the term going with, had even been asked by Carla on behalf of Staci, on the first day of school, if he wanted to go with her, and he had said yes; but that was three weeks ago, and absolutely nothing had changed except that kids occasionally referred to Kiran and Staci as “going together,” and sometimes his friends, mostly Greg, would ask—sometimes over the phone—“Are you still going with Staci?” and Kiran would say, “Yes,” and Greg would say, “Cool.”)
In the minute or so that Kiran listened to their conversation, Preeti spoke very little, which was probably why he hadn’t noticed that she was upstairs on the phone in the first place. Neither of them spoke much. It wasn’t so much a conversation as it was a stretch of silence interrupted by brief utterances.
“I’m going to get me a car,” Shawn said.
Brief silence.
“What kind?”
“Doesn’t matter. But in the next two years for sure. I’m saving up. I’ll want it the minute I turn sixteen.”
More silence.
“You can ride in it,” Shawn said. “We can go anywhere you want.”
Kiran listened to them breathe. He hadn’t seen Grease, but a friend of his had trading cards with stills from the movie, and sometimes they would spread them out on the carpet and spend the afternoon looking at them and listening to the sound track. Kiran pictured Shawn and Preeti as Danny Zuko and Sandy snuggling in the front seat of the hot rod that lifts off into the sky in the final scene. Sweaty-palmed, Kiran fumbled the receiver before recovering it and pressing it back to his ear.
“Do you hear something?” Preeti said.
“Huh?”
“I heard something. Is someone else on the line? Kiran? Kiran! Is that you?!”
Kiran quickly hung up.
The next day after school, when Kiran saw Preeti go up to their parents’ bedroom, the pompoms on her socks bouncing up the carpeted stairs—socks she’d begged their parents to buy her, along with the Nikes with the powder-blue swoosh, the first pair of name-brand shoes either of the children had ever been permitted (“I know you think it’s not fair, Kiran,” Shanti had said, “but you can have Nikes when you’re in seventh grade”)—he waited several minutes and then tiptoed into the kitchen and, as quietly as he could, picked up the yellow receiver.
“Cathy Pacofsky is a cunt,” Shawn spat.
Kiran didn’t know who Cathy Pacofsky was. He had never heard that word before, had no idea what it meant. He suspected that Preeti, still in middle school, might be equally ignorant on both counts. But hadn’t they both heard the sharp edge of anger in Shawn’s voice? Were they complicit in having overlooked signs of what was to come?
Kiran waited for Shawn to elaborate or for Preeti to ask a follow-up question, but instead there was silence. He could almost hear Preeti holding her breath. When she finally spoke and asked a question, it wasn’t the one he was expecting.
“Kiran? Is that you? Kiran, I can hear you. I know you’re on the line. Again! I can’t believe it. I’m going to kill you!”
Kiran pressed down on the cradle to disconnect his extension. He held his hand there, while with the other hand he continued to hold the receiver to his ear. After a minute he very gently released the cradle and continued listening.
One afternoon, lying on the bed in her parents’ bedroom, talking on the phone with Shawn, Preeti thought she heard scratching at the door. She ignored it, assuming she had imagined it, but a moment later there it was again: scratching.
The door, which was shut all but a crack, creaked open. Kiran came crawling in, his ass pitched high and waving in the air. “Meow.”
“What?”
“Meow.” Kiran circled the carpet, stretched his front limbs, alternated pressing his paws into the shag.
“Get out! What? Oh, nothing. It’s just Kiran. He’s in the room. He’s being a brat. A weird brat.”
Soon Preeti got pulled back into the conversation. When she hung up forty-five minutes later, Kiran was curled in her lap, purring. She had been absentmindedly petting his head. She gently tickled his neck. He giggled.
“So you’re a cat, huh? What kind? Are you a tiger? Or are you a pussy?” Preeti laughed. “How about catching that mouse?”
The previous spring, Nishit telephoned Prabhu to try to convince him to come to America.
A few days earlier, he had spoken with Shanti about it. “At least he can sleep at night,” Nishit said, citing a recent conversation with Kamala Ben, Prabhu’s second wife.
(What Kamala hadn’t told him was that Prabhu’s real problem was the opposite: not that he couldn’t sleep but that he couldn’t wake up. Many mornings he stayed in bed, only to emerge midday, moving through rooms only half alive. In a rare moment of clarity and honesty, Prabhu had described it as living on a different plane than the rest of the world. It was like the world was a movie and he was sitting alone in the vast theater, watching.)
When Nishit said this, Shanti knew that he meant it, that he was genuinely grateful and relieved that his brother—despite all his problems, despite all they heard about him from relatives recently returned from India, tidbits spoken in stutters and whispers, dropped like slips of paper from pockets—could somehow sleep. She also knew that, without any bitterness and without explicitly saying so, Nishit was contrasting his brother to himself: Nishit could not sleep.
Kiran, overhearing the conversation, knew in his own eight-year-old way what his mother knew. He had heard the footsteps at night, the familiar series of sounds: the door of the cabinet above the refrigerator, where the gin was kept, clicking open and shut; the ice from the automated dispenser on the freezer door tumbling and clinking into a jelly jar; the two-liter bottle of flat Sprite, only ever drunk on these occasions—the children were not permitted to drink soda—being fetched from the shelf on the inside door of the fridge. Kiran could only imagine that this came after an hour or more of his father lying awake in bed, worrying about this or that, or this and that, and that this little ritual, not nightly but almost, was the last resort. His father would sit for half an hour in the recliner, watch cable, sort junk mail, until the gin kicked in, taking just enough of the edge off that he could fall back asleep.
When he said, “A
t least he can sleep at night,” Nishit wasn’t implying that Prabhu was in any way responsible for Nishit’s own sleeplessness, though if he had intended that implication, it might not have been entirely untrue. After all, Prabhu’s difficulties—financial, mental, emotional—weighed heavily on Nishit, even if Nishit was the younger brother. Nishit sent what money he could, often more than he could; the dollar being strong against the rupee, he knew that a small extra sacrifice on his end would translate to a larger payoff on the other end, and it was penance for not being able to see his brother or comfort him in other ways.
So Nishit and Shanti agreed: they would invite Prabhu to come stay with them for six months, so he could see what it might be like to live in America, and so that they could assess whether he might be better off living closer to them. But Nishit knew that Prabhu would not want to come. He’d have to convince him.
International phone calls were so expensive. You never knew when you would get a line—sometimes you’d wait an hour or more—and when you did finally get one, you didn’t know how long it would last. Nishit wrote out everything he wanted to say. He made a bullet point list on the back of one of his business cards—the limited space, he knew, would force him to be brief and to the point. He listed:
Better opportunities.
Fresh start.
Close to family.
Better for Bharat.
Nothing to lose.
Just try.
If you don’t like, go back.
But when the time came, when he actually had Prabhu on the phone, when he knew that every word counted, every word cost money, and the distance those words had to travel seemed so enormous, he said none of what was on the card. What he said surprised him because as soon as he said it he knew—without knowing how or why, as if in a premonition—that it was true: “Big brother, come. I need you.”
