by Rahul Mehta
At home, Kiran slammed the car door (had he meant to slam it?) and scurried off to his room. It was only much later, removing her rings and bangles and placing them in the jewelry box in the top drawer of the bureau, massaging night cream into her hands and elbows, and climbing into bed with Nishit, that Shanti realized she had not asked Kiran to return her wristwatch, and that now, not wanting to remind him of that day, she would never get it back.
“I’ve got to make this right with the boy,” Chris said. “You’ve got to let me try.”
Shanti twirled the cord from the canary-yellow kitchen phone around her finger. She wasn’t sure whether to be alarmed that Chris had called her at home. Before the kiss, it wouldn’t have mattered. But now . . .
“I’ll take you both out to the lake. I’ll bet the boy has never been fishing, has he? A boy growing up out here? He should know how to fish.”
That Chris never referred to Kiran by name, only as “the boy,” struck Shanti as strange. Was he afraid he wouldn’t pronounce his name properly? Or was he trying to reinforce something? And what did he mean that Kiran “should” know how to fish? Was this a subtle (or not-so-subtle) criticism of Nishit?
Shanti had no intention of agreeing to such an outing. It was one thing for her to be walking the dangerous edge of murky waters, quite another for her to drag one of her children into the mire. But when the moment came for her to say no, her lips—remembering, on some cellular level, the touch of his lips—betrayed her, and the word they formed was When?
It happened toward the end of their day together, after they had driven up to the lake, Chris’s pickup rocking along the potholed dirt road, tossing the trio about like a carnival scrambler; after Shanti had unfurled on the grass the Rajasthani block print bedspread, not the one that was currently on her and Nishit’s bed, but the one that had been on their bed before it faded and frayed and they replaced it with another almost identical one; it happened after Shanti had cracked open the stainless steel dabbas, one with potato parathas flecked with cilantro, one with turmeric-yellow cauliflower sautéed with ground cumin and mustard seeds, one with pickle homemade with mangoes imported by the Indian grocer in Rochester; after Chris had said, “This is delicious,” and Shanti had breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that he, having never had Indian food, would love it once he tried it; after Kiran had cracked open the tackle box, lifting the lid slowly like the lid of a treasure chest, after he’d been wowed by the vast array, bait in all shapes and sizes, bait that sunk and bait that bobbed, each piece asleep in its own small bed, the colors (neon, iridescent), the feathers that looked like earrings worn by certain teenage girls he saw (those earrings, bait of a different sort, Kiran supposed), after Chris had instructed Kiran how to select the right kind of bait for the right kind of fish; after Chris had knelt next to Kiran on the rocking dock, his hands guiding Kiran’s as he threaded the bait and cast the line in a graceful arc (more graceful than Kiran thought himself capable of) over and into the water; it happened after Kiran had excitedly pulled the small brown fish from the muddy water and Chris had helped him remove the hook and release the fish back into the pond, and Shanti thought, What a strange fate, to spend one’s life swimming in this tiny pond, nowhere to go, just around and around, to be caught and released, caught and released, and then she wondered, Does it hurt less? Each time, does the flesh toughen, does the hook sting a little less?
It happened after all of this. It happened so fast. One minute Kiran was on the rocking dock, the next he was in the water, under the water, flailing. Shanti didn’t even have time to scream, “He doesn’t know how to swim!” There was a moment she thought she had lost him, she had lost him, it was her fault, but so quickly Chris dove in. And then there Kiran was, in his arms, being pulled ashore.
It didn’t occur to Shanti or Kiran that had it not been for Chris, they would not have been there in the first place; Kiran never would have fallen in. It didn’t occur to them when Shanti coaxed Chris and Kiran out of their wet clothes and she wrung them out forcefully, with strong hands, thinking of her family’s dhobi squatting on the hot cement on the roof in Pune, wringing out washed clothes over a storm drain. It didn’t occur to them when Shanti hung the clothes on a tree bough, hoping they’d dry at least a little before they had to leave, watching Chris and Kiran sitting on a log in their wet underwear, thumb wrestling. It didn’t occur to them when, as they cruised down the hill, down past the clearing in the woods, the farm, Ray of Light Ministries, down past Chris’s house and toward Shanti’s, Chris slung his arm across the back of the truck seat, the still-damp flannel of his shirt sleeve steaming behind Kiran’s head, smelling of lake water and sunlight. It didn’t occur to them when Kiran gazed up at his mother and she was smiling and humming a sentimental Bollywood song Kiran didn’t recognize but was by Kishore Kumar, and her hair, pulled back in a long black braid, danced on her back as the truck bounced along. At the time, they only thought of Chris as their savior. It only occurred to them some years later, and separately: Kiran, age twelve, standing in the tall grass across from Chris’s house, looking in; and Shanti, decades after that, holding Nishit’s hand in the hospital after his heart surgery, thinking, Chris may have been Kiran’s savior, but—even if she could only see it now, after a long life together, highs and lows, peaks and cursed valleys, and more days and months and years of stumbling around in dark caverns than she’d like to admit—Nishit had been hers. Just as she had been his.
Now, returning from the lake, Kiran dug out from the Tercel’s trunk the black trash-bagged tiger he knew had been there since the day at the Elmira mall. That night he slept with it, and dreamed of being dragged deeper and deeper into dark water, water filling his lungs. Then: Chris’s arms around him, pulling him toward the surface, toward the light. Kiran pulled the tiger close.
Kiran loved the tiger, and loved—in a way he didn’t quite understand—the man his mother loved, the man who had won it for him. He continued to feel this way, despite what happened later that fall—what happened in the woods, and the four-armed monster in silhouette stumbling out after—and the role Kiran thought Chris, however indirectly, played. It was as though the tiger had cast a spell.
In seventh grade, he would loan it to a shy, awkward girl in his pre-algebra class, who was going into the hospital for a surgery she hadn’t explained to anyone, but which seemed to Kiran serious. Kiran would say, “He’ll keep you safe,” and he wouldn’t understand that this gesture would make her fall in love with him, a love he had no interest in reciprocating, and that she would continue to pine for him until graduation and beyond.
And then there would be a third incident, a third spell cast, but that was on another continent, and still many years away.
Shanti said, her back turned to Nishit, “I can’t live this way anymore.” She stood in the kitchen, rubber-gloved, wiping the narrow pathway between backsplash and dish drainer, collecting mouse turds, shaking out scouring powder, scrubbing. Nishit said, “We’ll catch it. It takes time.” He watched her from behind. Her hair was long. Soon she would cut it and would wear it short from then onward, but now she still had the hair she’d had when she married him. Nishit watched her scrub, then he saw her stop, saw her shoulders suddenly round and convulse.
Tears came fast. She allowed herself to cry, allowed herself to knock over—not quite by accident—a break- and chip-resistant Corelle cereal bowl that, hitting the hard tiled floor, worse than broke or chipped, worse than shattered, slivered into shimmering shards the size and shape of nail clippings. Nishit rushed to her, trash can in hand, and they knelt a minute together before Nishit said, “Go. I’ll take care of it.” But Shanti, still crying, wouldn’t budge, even when Nishit held her wrists, tried hoisting her up off the floor. Was it that she didn’t want Nishit to have to clean up the mess she had made? Or was it that this was her kitchen, and she wasn’t sure she trusted him to inspect the space beneath the refrigerator door or the floor under the butcher-block-topped cart, to find every spli
nter?
Afterward, she would know it was neither of these. She had stayed because she had wanted Nishit to witness her ugly tears. She had wanted him to see her broke open.
Shanti in a rose-colored salwar standing back against the altar, facing the congregation at Ray of Light Ministries, couldn’t help remembering her own youth, Father Torres, how different his view would have been—little faces framed by pigtails, white-frocked brown bodies swallowed by God-size Victorian pews—compared to hers now—red-faced farm families firmly planted on plain pine. She noticed in particular the four young men, broad-shouldered, sitting ramrod straight right up front, and knew these must be the ones going on mission. Chris had said they were all eighteen, but Shanti could see clearly they were still just boys.
Chris had told her to keep her remarks short, that mostly she was there to field questions. She did not tell them that she had never been to Calcutta, that one of the only people she knew from that region of India was a Bengali man who was employed by her family for some years, a driver with long lashes and faraway eyes whom her father had fired for twice showing up late. Instead, she told the audience that Indians were among the most welcoming, accepting, and hospitable people in the world. “Your boys will have absolutely nothing to worry about,” she said. “An Indian will invite anyone into his house. That guest, even if there only for ten minutes, will leave with a full belly and having drunk at least two cups of tea.”
The woman who raised her hand first was a large woman holding a white handkerchief the detail of which Shanti could not have seen but which was stitched with red strawberries. Timidly, she asked, “Is it as bad as what all you hear? People”—she hesitated and then dropped her voice even lower—“starving, dying in the streets. Open sewage. Filth everywhere.”
Another man, without raising his hand, popped up and addressed Shanti. “I saw something on TV about the caste system. There are people who aren’t allowed to walk on the sidewalk or make eye contact with anyone or hold any jobs other than cleaning toilets, which aren’t even toilets like we know them. They’re just holes in the ground, right? And it’s all because of what their religion says? About what family they were born into? And there’s no escape?”
There was a murmur in the audience, but before Shanti could answer, the first woman spoke again. “I mean, when you hear about all that, it’s clear how desperately our boys are needed over there, the world of good they’ll be doing.” Someone in back started applauding slowly, and then it caught, rolled in waves up and down the pews. Someone sitting near the four boys in the front row motioned for them to stand. They faced the audience, and the applause roared.
Shanti had told Nishit not to come, citing as her excuse that he would make her nervous (though of course she had other reasons for not wanting him there), but now, gazing across the sea of white faces, she wished for someone familiar, someone who understood. And then she saw Chris, and he saw her and he smiled. She wasn’t sure what all was contained in that smile. Was it sympathetic, conspiratorial? Did he understand that she’d felt like an animal on display, that she’d never felt more than at this moment so far from home: a zebra in the Bronx, a lioness in Cincinnati? It didn’t matter what the smile meant. It was a beautiful smile, big and warm, and for a brief moment it made Shanti smile, made the molecules in her body stand on their chairs and jump up and down.
Of course no one could have known that day that one of the boys, an especially beloved native son, would fall ill in Calcutta and die of a particularly virulent strain of malaria. The young man himself, so used to flexing his muscles, so used to the role of small-town hero, could never have imagined that he could be felled by something so minuscule as a mosquito, and in the course of doing God’s work no less. Though no one from the community ever said anything, Shanti did sometimes wonder if they blamed her. Was there something more she could have said? Had she mentioned mosquito net? Had she stressed insect repellent? Afterward, she couldn’t remember. She wondered if people were secretly bitter that, in trying to help one of her people, they had sacrificed one of their own. No one would appreciate the way the boy’s untimely death had martyred him and made him immortal. He would never grow old, never disappoint, never fall short, the way so many would, the way Shanti’s own children sometimes would (though Shanti would never admit it). This boy would be forever golden.
Amy witnessed the electricity that passed that afternoon between Shanti and Chris, saw in Chris’s eyes the fire she’d seen so many years ago when he spoke to the man at the Gladiators for Christ show. Now, as then, she didn’t blame him. She knew the seduction of those alternate lives—bending steel on stage, taking a dark-haired lover from the other side of the world. She had fantasies of alternate lives of her own. But she also knew about fire. She knew the way it would, if left unchecked, burn.
Chapter 6
“If your hand is bigger than your face it means you’ll die of cancer,” Kiran said, barely looking away from the television set as he let Greg in, using one hand to pull open the sliding glass door and the other hand to balance a cereal bowl with a slice of store-bought apple pie smothered in a full half pint of heavy whipping cream. Greg had pressed himself up against the glass, peering in, before pummeling the door with two fat fists.
If Kiran had been paying attention—if he had seen how Greg was covered in sweat, how his mouth was formed in the shape of an enormous O—he would have known right away that something was wrong. And yet, in the years to come this particular if would be the least of the ifs that would haunt him. If his parents had been home. If his father had not been spending Saturday in surgery. If his mother, working a half day at the bank, had returned after noon as she was supposed to. If he had noticed the house seemed particularly quiet that morning. And the one that haunted him most: If he had said something to someone earlier.
Kiran spread his hand mask-like over his own face. “See, I’m not going to get cancer.”
Greg, panting, put his open palm against his face, and just as he did this Kiran shoved Greg’s hand hard. “Gotcha!”
“That hurt.”
“Wuss.”
“What?”
“Wuss!”
“Well, maybe I won’t tell you what I came to tell you,” Greg said, crossing his arms.
“I don’t care.”
“You’d care if you knew what it was.”
“Doubtful.”
“It’s about your sister.”
“Oh, then I definitely don’t care,” Kiran said, making a show of turning his attention back to the television set, though he was beginning to feel the first bubbles of worry in his chest and the back of his throat.
“Kiran, this is serious.” Kiran looked at Greg. Greg looked scared. “You need to come with me.”
“Just tell me.”
“I can’t. I don’t know how.”
So Kiran and Greg set off, stormed up the hill, up Sherman Road, past the Satterfields’ house and the Parkers’ and the Bells’ and the Jaspers’—Mrs. Jasper out front fussing with something or other on the front porch, stopping to wave and call, “Where you boys going in such a hurry?” a question that went unanswered—past the dairy farm and the two barking dogs tied to doghouses on opposite sides of the road, past the frog pond, past Ray of Light Ministries, to the steepest part of the hill, Greg huffing and puffing, pushing his glasses up on his face, past the Ellmanns’ house, which had the best view in all of the town, then through the maple grove, deep into the woods to the spot all the neighborhood kids knew so well, the spot, surrounded by pines, called the Cathedral.
When they arrived, the first thing Kiran noticed were the dozen or so neighborhood kids milling about, faces grave with amazement. Later, Greg would explain they’d been coming all morning into the afternoon, first in trickles, then in waves—Kevin Brachfield, Melissa Dennison, Kristin Pringle; Ronnett Chapman, who the previous year had fought Gretchen Crookshank behind Peter Logan’s house after school; Timothy Meyers, whose birthday party Kiran and Greg h
ad attended just last week, who had a Popeye-themed birthday cake the inside of which was dyed spinach green; Kelly Bell, Cheryl Higgins; both Yamamotos, Eric and Henry; Sherman Barry; Janice Baldassari, who in eleventh grade would become the subject of a persistent rumor about a three-way with Zach Miller and Jeff Burston; Caleb Cranbrook, who, eight years after high school graduation, Kiran would see behind the counter of a local video store and who would respond, when asked what he’d been up to, “Mostly working on my metaphysical drawings.” Later, Greg would say that they’d all agreed someone had to tell Kiran but no one wanted to do it, and in the end Greg volunteered “on account of Shawn’s my brother and you’re my best friend.”
Spotting Preeti, Kiran found there was nowhere safe for his eyes to rest, each detail more distressing than the last. She was tied to the trunk of a sapling, her wrists bound with a jump rope. Her hair was styled in a way he’d never seen before, tight braids on either side of her face, and she wore a fake leather headband with a plastic feather Kiran recognized from Greg’s toy chest. Her jeans were dirty, her shoes were missing, her pink-and-yellow-striped socks, her favorites, were soiled. Her torso was completely bare, covered in goose bumps from the autumn chill: her small breasts evidence of her twelve-year-old body transforming. She said nothing and did not look up from her downward gaze at the pine-needle-covered ground beneath her.
Shawn stood nearby, clutching discreetly—though visibly—a bowie knife. “Pocahontas is mine.” He was wearing the baseball shirt that had been crumpled next to Kiran when he crouched under Shawn’s bedroom desk: the number thirty-eight in shiny red vinyl. Images of that afternoon flashed through Kiran’s mind: the threadbare, too-tight brown towel around Shawn’s waist, water drops freckling his shoulders. He thought too of another afternoon, watching Preeti through the wood slats of her closet door, her head thrown back as she wailed Pat Benatar lyrics: “Never again, isn’t that what you said?”
