No Other World

by Rahul Mehta

  Other selves, other worlds. Was it possible? Kiran remembered hearing a theory that the universe was really a multiverse where any and every alternate self and outcome existed. In another model, the universe was like an origami object. Each facet, each plane, was a different world, a different point on the time-space continuum. But then it would flatten out and you would realize it was just one single flat piece of paper: the other selves, the other worlds, were really all one. Then as quickly as it had flattened out, the paper would fold itself into something new—a sailboat, a cat, a crane, a rose.

  “You don’t believe all that Maha Diana stuff, do you?” Kiran asked after Pooja had told him the story of Guru Ma’s devotion. “That she is a goddess?”

  It was evening. The two had become close in the week Pooja had been there. It happened quickly. They told each other their stories, though they hadn’t needed to; they had known each other from the start. They were walking along the banks of the wide river, which seemed gentle, though Bharat had warned Kiran that the current was much more powerful and dangerous than it appeared. Earlier, Kiran had bought a double string of marigolds from a street vendor, and Pooja was now wearing the flowers in her hair, bursts of orange entwined in her black braid.

  Kiran had watched Princess Diana’s wedding when he was eight: 1981, the Year of the Mouse, the year his uncle Prabhu had come to live with them. In fact, the wedding had been just days before Prabhu Kaka’s arrival, before everything was to change for all of them.

  His mother arranged pillows and couch cushions and comforters on the green carpeting in the subterranean family room in front of the only color television in the house, and they slept there overnight. Shanti, Kiran, and Preeti: three burrowing creatures, huddling close. They had to wake up very early, and this way they would not have to go anywhere, would not have to climb stairs or fumble for house slippers, would not have to miss a minute.

  Kiran marveled at the tiara, the ivory taffeta gown, the impossibly long train, enormous, everyone said, but it had to be long, Kiran thought, for surely such a colossally bright star would leave a glittering trail of proportional length. Kiran marveled, yes, but he was careful not to marvel too loudly, lest his mother and sister take note. He shouldn’t have bothered trying to hide his emotions: Shanti and Preeti could feel excitement rising from him like steam. For her part, Preeti—who had already begun to experiment with the eye-rolling, too-cool-for-school posture de rigueur for the town’s teenage girls, particularly for one on her way to becoming a cheerleader—was plainly awestruck. She audibly gasped when Diana first emerged from her glass carriage.

  But it was Shanti who was most transformed. She was girlish in the way her hands fluttered and clapped when something exciting happened: the Queen making her appearance in a blue hat, or Diana gliding down the aisle, or the couple kissing their clearly passionless kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, though who would have thought at the time that it was anything other than innocence and shyness. Shanti had not noticed it while watching the ceremony, but afterward the commentators made a big deal about how the couple had omitted the word obey from the vows.

  After it was all over, Shanti served tea: not the chai she simmered with cardamom and cloves in a dented, handle-less stainless steel pan she lifted using metal tongs, but rather proper English tea, made weak for the children, poured from a porcelain teapot and served with the Nabisco Social Tea Biscuits she usually reserved for company.

  Kiran asked Pooja, “You don’t actually believe that Princess Diana sends—what’s her name . . . Guru Ma?—messages, do you? You have to admit it’s pretty far-fetched.”

  Pooja touched the marigolds in her hair. “In your world,” she said. “Not in ours.”

  Watching the wedding with his mother and sister had been one of the last times Kiran had felt so close to them. Years later, he watched Princess Diana’s funeral alone. He was moved by her younger brother’s fiery eulogy; his excoriation of the press for hunting her; his coded criticism of the royal family. Her brother made a wish that her children, unlike their mother, would have a life not circumscribed by “duty and tradition” (Kiran remembered his word choice so vividly), but one in which their “souls” could “sing.” He was so fierce in the way he defended his sister, continued to defend her, even after she was gone.

  “We live in the same world,” Kiran said.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  The words coming out of Pooja’s mouth were Guru Ma’s, not her own, but even as she said them, she felt that—perhaps for the first time—she believed them.

  Pooja removed one of the marigold strands from her hair and reached to put it in Kiran’s.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “But you look so lovely,” she said. “And your hair is even longer than mine!” Kiran relented, and Pooja wove the garland into his hair. For a moment together they were girls giggling.

  Pooja plucked one of the blossoms and popped it into her mouth, smiling.

  “What does it taste like?”

  “Sunshine. Joy.” She picked another blossom and held it to Kiran’s mouth. “Taste.” At first he resisted. Then he closed his eyes and opened his mouth and let her feed it to him like prasad.

  “So? Joy?”

  Kiran looked at her. When he was her age, roaming the halls of his high school, he was invisible—ironic, since being one of the only brown-skinned kids, he should have stood out. But he’d been grateful to fade into the background. Camouflaged, he could keep his true self hidden. But here was Pooja, hiding nothing. He was beginning to understand how brave she was, how much she had to risk every day to be who she was, and how much she’d been forced to sacrifice in the process.

  “Joy . . . ,” Kiran said, “. . . dish detergent.” He made a face. Pooja laughed, though Kiran knew his joke made no sense in Hindi.

  “Brother, are you sure you even know what joy tastes like?”

  If he had known that Chota Kaka was dropping by, if Chota Kaka had given any notice, Kiran wouldn’t have stayed at home. To make matters worse, it was early afternoon and Bharat was still at work and Kamala Kaki was preparing dinner, so Kiran was left to entertain Chota Kaka on his own.

  Chota Kaka was wearing another brightly colored kurta, this one an orange that made Kiran think of mango sherbet, though his uncle was anything but sweet. Still, his demeanor was a little different today. There was none of the chortling, with its scary dark edge. Chota Kaka was almost serene, sitting on the daybed, one leg folded below his fat belly Ganesh style.

  “Dear boy, I have an important question to ask you,” he said grandly while popping pistachios into his mouth, shelling them with just one hand, prying them open with a single thumb and dropping the shells onto the glass-topped cocktail table. Kiran waited for the question, but Chota Kaka was taking his time.

  “I have known your father since he was a baby. I washed his dirty bottom more times than I can count. Which brings me to my important question.” Chota Kaka inspected the nut in his hand a moment. “My, this is delicious pista! You brought this from America, didn’t you?” Kiran nodded. “See, see, I know. You think I don’t know, but I do.” His voice lowered slightly. “I know everything.

  “As I was saying,” he continued in a louder voice, “I have known your father his whole life. I know lots of secrets, lots of juicy-juicy tidbits about your father, your mother, everyone. Someday maybe I’ll tell you. But that’s not what I want to talk about now. I want to ask you a question.”

  Kiran reached for a pistachio from the quickly diminishing stock, and Chota Kaka slapped his hand away.

  “Your father loved India. He was such a happy boy. It wasn’t easy for him to leave. But he did. Do you know why?”

  “Because he was doing what his father told him,” Kiran answered.

  “Yes, true, but that’s not the whole story.” Chota Kaka didn’t describe for Kiran the day Nishit had come to him and sat on the floor by his rattan chaise—as Nishit’s father had certainly instructed his
son to do—and asked for money to help with his journey to America, a journey that was supposed to benefit eventually the entire extended family. “Your father might have said no. He could have convinced his father. He was so charming, so persuasive.”

  Kiran had never thought of his father as charming. As a child, he’d only ever seen his father as embarrassing.

  “He came for you. You and your sister. He thought things would be better for you in America. That’s why he sacrificed, leaving the country he loved, leaving behind his own brother. Who knows how Prabhu’s life might have turned out if your father had stayed? But he did it for you. So let me ask you: Was it worth it? To your father, was it worth it?”

  At some point, without Kiran noticing it, Chota Kaka had finished the pistachios and moved on to a small glass bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that must have been hidden in one of the folds of his flowing kurta. The afternoon was wearing on, the heat causing Chota Kaka to slowly melt to mango syrup. But Kiran hadn’t answered Chota Kaka’s question, and Chota Kaka continued to call from the puddle he had become, his very voice liquid: cloying, clawing. “Tell me, gandu, what would your father say? Was it worth it?”

  Chapter 23

  When Pooja told Kiran she had never had her picture taken, Kiran couldn’t believe it. He had been inside, looking out the window, admiring the late-afternoon light bathing the yard in a warm glow, and he decided to come out with his camera to capture what he could of it. He’d brought his expensive camera with him from America, intending to document his experiences in India, though, as with the Superman journal, he had barely touched it. From inside he had not noticed Pooja, but now here she was, sitting on the ground with the dog he had come to think of as hers, and he asked her if he might snap a picture.

  His Hindi being what it was, he was never completely sure he was saying what he meant or that he understood what he was being told; there was always the possibility of error. “Never?” he asked. “You have never had your photograph taken?”

  “Never.”

  Kiran’s own life had been documented in such a feverish and relentless way, starting from infancy: hundreds of photographs if not more, a dozen photo albums in the cabinets beneath the bookshelves in the family room, framed photos sitting atop credenzas and side tables and hung on the walls. After his parents acquired a video camera when Kiran was in high school, there were videos, too: Kiran, a selected participant for the Senior Waltz (chosen no doubt more for his contribution to “diversity” than for his grace or dancing ability), the video shot entirely in zoom, no wide shots to get the full effect of the choreographic formations, just five shaky minutes of close-cropped Kiran and Jodi Klinger stumbling through Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

  He wondered how his parents had decided which of the hundred of photographs to frame, to hang. Did those pictures remind them of particularly happy moments? Did they reinforce some narrative his parents wanted to believe about their lives, about their children’s lives? He thought of a snapshot they had enlarged and hung on the wall next to the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. In it, Kiran is five or six, hunched over homework, pencil in hand, his father sitting next to him, helping. Kiran looks like he is concentrating so hard, as if he is solving a difficult mathematical proof, though he couldn’t have been doing anything more complicated than “Trace the dotted line to complete the letter A.” There was another photograph of him reading Time magazine while sitting on the toilet, clearly posed. He must have been three.

  Kiran thought of another framed photograph, this one the black-and-white, garlanded portrait of Neela Kaki in the illuminated alcove at the top of the stairs. The exact same photograph had greeted him when he first arrived in India. Even though it had creeped him out as a child, here it was a source of comfort; he had been looking into those eyes his whole life. The photograph was not a flattering image, and many years ago, when he asked his father why that particular image was chosen to remember her, he explained it was one of very few photographs that had ever been taken of her. Cameras were not so cheap back then, not in India, and many people didn’t have them, not families like hers. They would have to go to a professional studio to have their pictures made, and where was the money for that? They were all lucky they had even this photograph to memorialize her, his father said.

  “I want to take your photograph,” Kiran said to Pooja again.

  The light was beautiful. Kiran had come outside thinking he might photograph the dramatic peepal tree, half alive, half dead, or the potted jasmine with its delicate petals in the corner on the porch. But now he wanted something edgier, something human. In New York, he had seen an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs—outsiders, people on the margins: dwarves and giants, circus performers, the transgendered, the morbidly obese—and he had something like that in mind for his portrait of Pooja.

  Pooja fiddled with a crow feather. She wasn’t sure it was exactly true that she had never had her photograph taken. She had performed at plenty of weddings and births. Surely someone had snapped a photo. But she’d never been asked, and she certainly had never seen a photograph of herself. She thought of the framed photograph of Princess Diana on Guru Ma’s altar. She thought of the photographs of Diana Hayden in her tiara and her long white gloves.

  Kiran lifted the camera. “No,” Pooja said. “Not here, not now.”

  “Why? This is perfect.”

  “How? I am sitting in the dirt with a dog.”

  “But that’s perfect. We’ll never have light like this again, the way it is hitting your face. You can’t see what I see. Trust me. You look beautiful.”

  Pooja felt her face get hot. Had he just called her beautiful?

  “Brother,” she said, “just now I am not beautiful. Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow I will show you.”

  Kiran didn’t want to wait. This was the photograph he wanted. He already had an image of how the photograph would look hanging on the wall of his apartment in New York, not the sixth-floor walk-up, but a new apartment, a better one. He would enlarge it and frame it with a gallery-quality frame. Maybe it would even get him into a group show in Williamsburg or SoHo. He would title it something simple and descriptive: Village Scene, Western India, 1998. Never mind that this wasn’t really a village (the place where he grew up in Western New York was a village). This was more like a small town on the outskirts of a large one. But “village” seemed right for the photograph.

  “Let me snap a few now,” Kiran said. “I have plenty of film. We’ll do more later.”

  “No,” Pooja said. She was not used to saying no, and it was particularly difficult to say it now. Of everyone in this family, Kiran was the only one who had shown her kindness, who had brought her food, who had smiled. They’d grown so close during their walks by the river. Was it right for her to deny him?

  She said, as firmly as she could, “Brother, tomorrow.”

  After Guru Ma returned home after leaving Pooja at Bharat’s house to wait for the birth, she immediately arranged for some things to be sent for Pooja with a friend she knew would be passing through town. Not much. A sleeping mat. A cotton blanket. A pink bar of Lux soap. Two changes of clothes. These simple outfits wouldn’t do for Pooja’s portrait. She wanted something special.

  If Kiran photographed her from the waist up, she didn’t have to plan a whole outfit. A beautiful dupatta draped modestly over her shoulders would do the trick. Guru Ma had taught her the art of illusion. No one who saw the photograph would know that beneath the stole was a dingy cotton blouse.

  One of the men who came to see her at night owned a shop. She had walked by one evening and seen him standing on the steps and recognized his name on the sign: “Manoj’s Saree Emporium.” The men from the shops on either side of his were standing on their steps, too, and one of them said loudly to the others—“Do you smell something? Is there a wet dog trotting by?”—and the men laughed.

  Pooja knew this game. It was the game people played with hijras. She was supposed to say som
ething sassy in return, snap her fingers, clap her hands, maybe make a joke about their manhood. Her job, after all, was to entertain. Their job was to remind her that she was not one of them. But she had not wanted to play that evening. She looked at Manoj. He had been tender the night he was with her. He had stroked her hair afterward. Now he was laughing with the men.

  When she and Guru Ma first came to the town on that very first day, on their way to the house where the baby was to be born, they had stopped at each of the stores and extracted what they could from the merchants as payment of sorts, as was their right as hijras. Sometimes it was money. Often it was merchandise: a scarf, glass earrings, a lipstick. They had already taken from Manoj what was due. Pooja couldn’t now demand more. And the money she had collected from the men who came to her was not enough for the quality of dupatta she wanted. Besides, Guru Ma surely knew all about the men and certainly was expecting her cut.

  She still didn’t know how she was going to convince Manoj to give her the dupatta when she arrived at the back entrance to his store, just as he was closing for the afternoon. Almost immediately she regretted having come the way she did. She should have come during regular business hours to the front entrance. Who knew if Manoj would have let her in, but she should have insisted. She should have picked out something simple, something she could pay for in cash. She should not have come scratching at his door like an animal.

  Manoj smiled at Pooja, and she could not tell what kind of smile it was. Was it too late to change her mind? She wondered if she could still pull out her packet of folded rupee notes and be any other customer: a housewife, a dentist, a businesswoman, a servant girl.

  Manoj put his arm around her, placed the palm of his hand against the small of her back, pulled her toward him. He took her hand and brought it to his crotch, which was already hard.

  The several minutes she was with him, as he was pressing himself against her, she found her thoughts wandering—for reasons she couldn’t explain—to her mother. She thought partly of what her mother had done for money over the years. Pooja had watched her mother carry rocks on her head from one end of the construction site to the other, imagined the ache she must have felt in her neck and shoulders and legs from the weight pressing down on her. It was Pooja’s last image of her mother.