by Rahul Mehta
For many days in a row, Kiran sat with Preeti while she talked on the phone with Shawn. He continued his cat act, strutting around the room, rubbing up against her, and eventually curling up in a circle, his head either in or next to her lap. Kiran couldn’t make out the words on Shawn’s end of the conversation, but he could hear the murmur of his voice: deep, already dropped; a man’s voice. The voice thrummed through Kiran’s small boy body, resonating, filling his chest.
Kiran liked hearing his sister’s voice, too. The previous year, Preeti, twirling her hair, had told Kiran stories of an upside-down world, a world in which everything was the opposite of this world. People walked backward, soles on the sky, were born old and grew young, kissed their enemies, clobbered their beloved, sobbed when happy and laughed when distraught, said the opposite of what they meant, the words themselves anagrams of their Planet Earth counterparts. Preeti told Kiran that this opposite world was a planet called Narik. She said the word with emphasis, enunciating the syllables with crystal clarity, and looking at Kiran meaningfully, but it was only some days later that Kiran realized the planet’s name was his own, backward.
Preeti hung upside down on the edge of the bed, as if to emphasize her point.
Kiran believed, or at least half believed, his sister’s stories about the upside-down world, in spite of what he’d learned in school about the solar system and its planets. He understood, as children do, that there was an immense universe out there, unimaginably vast, in which anything, anything, was possible. The stories of Planet Narik evoked in Kiran excitement, but mostly terror. The upside-down world was unsettling enough to a young boy just learning the rules and laws of physics of this world, but on top of all of that there was the name. What was he to make of it? What did he have to do with any of it?
But even as he found the upside-down world unsettling, Kiran begged his sister for more stories, and she obliged, spinning wild tales about Planet Narik night after night. Kiran thought the stories were what he wanted from his sister, but they were not. He wanted to hear her voice, to have her close. He wanted to lie in her lap, just as he was now.
Then one day, without warning, the phone calls with Shawn stopped. Preeti wasn’t in their parents’ bedroom after school, as usual; instead, she was sulking on the couch in the family room. Kiran pushed his head against Preeti, purred.
“Cut it out,” she said.
He pushed again, ever more insistent, unwilling to be rebuffed.
“I mean it,” Preeti said, taking a throw pillow and slapping him over the head.
As she did this, she noticed the rakhi on Kiran’s wrist. She had tied it a few weeks earlier in the middle of August, on Raksha Bandhan Day. It was an annual tradition, when a sister ties the sacred thread for her brother, a sign of her love and blessings in return for the brother’s promise to protect her. Their mother had taken her up to the Indian store in Rochester to buy it. The selection had not been huge. She chose the girliest one, pink (an auspicious color in Hindu culture), partly because she hoped Kiran would get teased at school for it, but partly because she knew that he would secretly like it. She had seen the covetous way he eyed her dolls. As for the Raksha Bandhan tradition itself, she didn’t know if she really believed in any of it, but she always got a gift out of it: this year, Pat Benatar’s new LP, which Kiran had wrapped in last year’s Christmas paper.
She and Kiran sat cross-legged, facing each other in front of the mandir. The diya was lit. They said the prayers, mumbling their way through as they always did. Preeti tied the string on Kiran’s right wrist and pressed vermilion to his forehead. She pinched a ladoo sweet between her fingers and leaned in to feed him.
Kiran watched the ladoo come toward him, as if in slow motion. Something was not right. Was Preeti smirking? Was there a twinkle of mischief in her eyes? With a sudden swipe, Kiran knocked the ladoo out of her hands, and it went flying across the room.
Shanti was horrified. How many times had Kiran closed his mouth and turned his head away, picky eater that he was, and how many times had she had to tell him, “Absolutely not. You cannot refuse prasad. Take a tiny bite at least”? You did not refuse something that had been offered to God and blessed by Him. Never mind that Shanti had her own doubts about the existence of a Supreme Being. Culture was culture; tradition, tradition. And you absolutely did not throw prasad across the room and let it fall on the floor. And in front of Prabhu Bhai? Visiting from India? Just wait until word got around about Shanti’s wild brood. “What are they doing over there in America?” people would whisper.
“She did something!” Kiran said, pointing at Preeti. “The ladoo! She took a bite out of it!”
“Did not,” Preeti said, smiling. She was telling the truth; she had done nothing. Still, she was enjoying the scene Kiran was causing and the trouble he was sure to be in.
“She did! I saw it!”
Because the ladoo had crumbled into pieces when it hit the wall, they were unable to verify Kiran’s claim. Kiran insisted.
“But I swear,” Preeti said. “I didn’t do it.”
The children looked at each other a moment and then, almost in unison, cried, “Minnie!”
They’d been checking the live catch trap every few days, but it was always empty. Completely empty. Somehow the mouse had been managing to abscond with whatever goodies had been left there without getting caught. Was the mouse getting bolder? Had she really nibbled on the prasad in the hour or so it sat on the mandir before the rakhi ceremony began?
Now Kiran was on the couch next to Preeti. Unfazed by the pillow-pummeling, he was licking the side of his hand and cleaning the fur behind his ears. She looked again at the rakhi. If anyone was going to protect her, she thought, it would not be this goofball. She would have to do it herself.
Kiran had not told Preeti—had not told anyone—what happened with Shawn earlier that summer when he was over at Greg’s house.
Greg only ever wanted to play Star Wars, and he had an almost exhaustive collection of every action figure, every spaceship, every landscape, ever released. Birthdays, Christmas, Easter, the only gifts he wanted were Star Wars action figures. He also collected baseball cards—organized in two shoe boxes underneath his bed—but his real love was Star Wars.
When they played, Greg always insisted on being Luke Skywalker (“My house, my rules”) in the same way, a year or two earlier, Greg would demand to be the cowboy to Kiran’s Indian (“Because that’s what you are, no offense”). Greg’s claiming of Luke Skywalker was fine by Kiran; he preferred the dark-haired, complicated, cocky Han Solo. Or R2D2, with his sputtering of clicks and beeps, never a word wasted. Who he really wanted to be was Princess Leia, but he knew better than to tell Greg. He’d have to wait some years before he could be her, finally, one year when he was living in New York, dressing as Leia for Halloween and marching in the parade in Greenwich Village, re-creating her iconic hairstyle by affixing cinnamon buns to a headband.
“Kool-Aid?” Greg asked and Kiran said, “Uh-huh,” and Greg said he would go make some. A minute later, Kiran pushed himself up from the carpet and went to find Greg. He wanted to remind him about his special Kool-Aid technique. You had to at least quadruple the directed amount of red crystals, so that the liquid would reach a saturation point and some crystals would remain undissolved, settling like silt on the bottom of the glass to be slurped up later. But Kiran was intercepted. Just as he was passing the bathroom, the door swung open and Shawn popped out, freshly showered. He smelled strongly of bath soap: coconut and chemicals. Shawn’s straw-colored hair was wet and messy; he hadn’t combed it in the steam-streaked mirror the way Kiran always did after a shower. He was naked except for a threadbare, too-small brown towel tied tightly around his waist. Seeing Kiran, Shawn flashed a crooked, snaggletoothed smile. He ducked into his bedroom, only to reappear a second later—in parts. Body parts. First a leg poked out, then disappeared. Then an arm did the same thing. Then a hip. All the while he was whistling and humming Sheena Easton’s
“For Your Eyes Only.” When he was done, Shawn tossed the towel into the hallway and disappeared into his room.
Later, Kiran would tell himself that it was the smell that somehow—almost against his will—drew him down the hallway, the way it happened in cartoons, the wavy lines emerging from an apple pie and forming a long arm, a hooked finger. He would not be able to admit that a switch had been flipped, that something he couldn’t understand and had no name for had come awake, that he had followed Shawn down the hallway because he wanted to. When Kiran entered Shawn’s bedroom, Shawn was already naked, lying on the bed. Somehow Kiran knew to shut the door behind him. He scurried across the room and dove under Shawn’s desk. He crouched there, knees pulled to chest. Shawn played baseball. In a couple of years he would be named All-State, the apex before a downward slide so precipitous that it would terrify, if not completely surprise, all those around him. Next to Kiran, crumpled on the floor, was Shawn’s baseball shirt, number thirty-eight, sweaty and stained from his most recent on-field heroics. A baseball bat was leaned against the closet doorframe; on a shelf, the Jim Palmer–signed baseball Greg and Kiran weren’t allowed ever to touch or even to look at, but sometimes, when Shawn was out, they would sneak in and take turns holding it, turning it over in their hands. On the bedside table to the left of Shawn’s head, a leather mitt. On the wall above his bed, a Rush poster. Once, while Kiran was waiting for Greg, Shawn tossed a baseball back and forth with him out front of their house. Shawn’s pitches occasionally thudded into Kiran’s borrowed mitt but mostly whizzed past him; Kiran’s all fell short, fizzling into the unmowed grass. “You throw like a girl,” Shawn had said.
Lying there, naked, Shawn looked so strange to Kiran. Kiran couldn’t quite figure it out. It was like a What’s Wrong with This Picture? puzzle, or maybe One of These Things Just Doesn’t Belong, because, reflecting on it years later, Kiran would realize it was the thing between Shawn’s legs that didn’t belong. It was almost comical, the juxtaposition of Shawn’s body—skinny legs, skinny arms, the thin chest of a boy—and this enormous, thick, hairy penis of a man.
Shawn began stroking his penis. Head propped on the pillow, he stared at Kiran, his eyes glinting like glass.
“You can touch it.”
Kiran stayed under the desk. He hugged his knees tighter, tried to make himself smaller, imagined pulling himself into a small, tight marble, a cat’s eye.
“Go ahead,” Shawn said. “Touch it.”
Kiran unfolded himself and, on hands and knees, crawled over to Shawn’s bed. He extended an index finger and poked at Shawn’s penis, as if it were an animal lying on a dirt path and Kiran was testing to see if it was still alive, if it was going to snarl and bite him.
Shawn laughed. He took Kiran’s small hand, unclenching his fingers, and placed it on his shaft. He held Kiran’s wrist, helping him move his hand up and down. Shawn leaned his head back onto the pillow.
It wasn’t long before he came.
Kiran was terrified by the way Shawn shuddered and convulsed. Afterward, Shawn laughed a sticky, rank laugh.
“Good job, slugger,” he said, smiling his crooked, snaggletoothed smile, punctuated by the briefest of winks, a single flap of a butterfly’s wing.
Kiran washed his hands in the hall bathroom before returning to Greg’s room.
“Where were you?”
“In the bathroom.”
“I looked there.”
“The other bathroom. Your parents’.”
“Why?”
“Um . . . you know . . . I had to . . .”
“Oh. I thought you were taking a long time.”
Greg had already rearranged the action figures. He had devised a new scenario, but it was really still the same as all the others: Princess Leia, although fierce, is in need of rescue. This time she was being held captive by Darth Vader on top of the bookshelf. Luke and Han would have to climb all the shelves, but—Be careful!—there were stormtroopers hiding behind books. One wrong move, and they’d all be doomed.
Kiran kept thinking he still smelled Shawn on him, though he had washed his hands meticulously. He kept seeing his snaggletoothed smile, hearing him say “slugger.” He felt sick. Kiran tried to play that afternoon as if nothing had happened. He was in charge here. Well, Greg was in charge, but he was second in charge. This was their world. They could make the action figures do whatever they wanted.
Chapter 4
“Some of the boys from Ray of Light are going on a mission,” Chris said across the counter. “Calcutta. Do you think you might come to the church and speak to the congregation, Mrs. Shah? Let them know what to expect?”
“I’ve never been to Calcutta,” Shanti replied. Chris may have insisted she call him by his first name, but she had never made the equivalent offer, and she was glad he had not taken liberties. There was the matter of propriety, of course, and not wanting to give Chris the wrong idea. But for Shanti there was also the irritation she felt—still felt—upon hearing mispronunciations of her name. Poor Americans, it wasn’t their fault. The problem was the t that sounded more like a th. There simply wasn’t a sound quite like that in the English language. But hearing her name pronounced “shaunty” like jaunty, or worse, “shanty,” as though she were some third-world shack slapped together from discarded lumber and scrap metal, always made her feel so, well, out of place.
“Yes,” Chris said, “but you can at least tell them what India’s like.”
“Pune and Calcutta are worlds away, Chris. It would be like you trying to tell someone what they’d find in Los Angeles.”
“How do you know I’ve never been to Los Angeles?”
Shanti looked Chris up and down, noting his faded T-shirt and farmer’s tan, the dirt under his fingernails.
“I know.”
Chris blushed. “Anything you say would be useful. They know absolutely nothing.”
Shanti thought of the presentation Preeti had been asked to give to her third-grade class four years earlier when they were studying India in social studies. Preeti had neatly copied out, word for word, passages from the World Book Encyclopedia entry on India and read it out loud to the class. It was her first time encountering a semicolon; Shanti had had to explain what it was. Practicing her presentation at home, when she reached that particular punctuation she’d say “semicolon” out loud. Shanti kept telling her it’s just a signpost, like commas and periods. No different. But Preeti couldn’t seem to break the habit. Shanti didn’t know if Preeti said “semicolon” during her presentation to the class, but even so she felt sure the whole thing was not at all what Mrs. Henry had wanted. But honestly, what had Mrs. Henry expected? Preeti didn’t know any more about India than any of the other children in class. Well, maybe a little more, but not much. At least Shanti had sent with her a marble replica of the Taj Mahal, and it was Preeti’s own idea to bring in a record with her favorite Bollywood song, the disco-tinged “Mehbooba Mehbooba,” though afterward Preeti never seemed to want to listen to it, and Shanti wondered if her classmates had snickered. Now Kiran was in Mrs. Henry’s class. Would he be asked to give the same presentation? Would he copy the same article out of the same World Book Encyclopedia? Would he play his favorite Bollywood song—“Aap Jaisa Koi”—and would his classmates cough “loser” into their fists? Would Shanti allow him to make the same mistakes all over again?
“Hearing from you would put them at ease some. Their parents, too. These boys have never been anywhere.”
Shanti remembered what it was like to have never been anywhere. Before coming to America she had barely traveled, and never without her parents. She had sat on the New York–bound flight alone, her first time on a plane, having no idea what would meet her on the other side. She had eaten almost nothing because she couldn’t open the cellophane in which the silverware was packed, her hands were trembling.
Across the counter, Shanti looked at Chris. His eyes smiled an honest blue, skin crinkling at the corners. Shanti shivered.
“You’re nervous,” he said. “Let’s have coffee. We can practice. I’ll talk you through it.”
That his brother hadn’t brought a suit infuriated Nishit.
“How could I have known I’d need one?”
It was true that when Prabhu was planning his trip, Nishit hadn’t been totally transparent about his plans for his brother, but hadn’t Prabhu understood that he was there partly to see if a new life might be possible, and hadn’t it occurred to him that a new life might require a good suit?
“You can borrow one of mine, but there isn’t time for alterations.”
Shanti let out the trouser cuffs—still too short, but at least it didn’t look like he was wearing high waters. There was nothing to be done about the jacket, two sizes too small. Prabhu would have to find a way to fit into it.
Growing up, Prabhu had been the smart one, hunched over homework afternoon onward, always top of his class, leaving big footsteps Nishit couldn’t fill. Nishit was also smart, but not like Prabhu. Prabhu had graduated top of his class with a degree in industrial engineering from an excellent school in Baroda and immediately landed a coveted position in civil service. True, Prabhu’s situation there had started to deteriorate even before Neela’s death (Nishit recalled Prabhu’s complaints that his coworkers were all idiots, small-minded pencil pushers, provincials really, not an ounce of innovation among the lot of them), but surely he would have eventually sorted it out were it not for his nervous breakdown in the wake of his wife’s death, and really who could blame him for that? So even though Prabhu hadn’t worked in his field for many years—hadn’t done meaningful work of any sort in that time—Nishit felt confident that, given another chance and the right support, Prabhu could thrive somewhere like Eastman Kodak. It was only an informational interview, but Nishit had had to call in favors to get it and was hopeful it might lead somewhere.
