When I stepped into Neel’s room, Arun was hanging on to Eva’s leg, saying, “I want Mom too.”
Eva shot me the look that she reserved for giving up on things.
Neel’s room was a special kind of messy. Whenever we cleaned it, his stuff was back on the floor in a matter of minutes. He had a tendency to pour all of his concentration into one thing, fully and intensely, at the expense of everything else. If he wanted one specific Lego out of the hundreds of stray pieces that littered his room, he would rifle through everything until he found the right piece. But he would never go back and unrifle once he’d found what he was searching for. The mess stayed. Still, at the end, without fail, he would have produced some remarkable car or building, something that he would have envisioned entirely in his head and then executed with his hands. In some ways, this trait had been there right from the start. He had literally torn through Eva, intent on getting out of her belly and into the world, no matter the mess he left behind. As the years passed, this behavior had evolved, and Neel’s hyperactivity and his quick shifts between intense focus and wandering attention had led to a diagnosis of ADHD, and the attendant prescriptions to manage it. His room was a reflection of everything that was going on inside his head.
On one wall he had a poster of Chris Burden’s Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture of a massive cityscape with roadways and cars that the boys had been mesmerized by for hours when we took them to see it at LACMA. On another wall was a poster of Ganesh, drawn in colorful street art. Of all the Indian stories I’d shared with the boys, the story of Ganesh was Neel’s favorite. I’m not sure what he liked about it exactly—maybe the fact that Ganesh was the beloved son of Shiva and Parvati. Or maybe, strange as it may seem, that Shiva had chopped his son’s head off when he didn’t recognize him after returning home from a long trip, and replaced it with an elephant’s. I think Neel appreciated the ingenuity. On the bottom of the poster, in ornate lettering, it said, The God of Removing Obstacles. As he got older, Neel would have more and more obstacles along the way, and the idea that Ganesh might be watching over him—as shaky as my belief in the gods may be—felt comforting.
“Get out,” Neel said again. “Or admit that I didn’t take your Lego.”
Arun walked up to Neel, twisted his upper body a full ninety degrees, and landed a significant left hook into Neel’s belly. Neel instantly folded over, cried out.
“Arun!” Eva yelled, her anger bringing him to tears.
Neel did not retaliate, which showed more restraint than we often gave him credit for. He easily could have crushed Arun.
It was as I was standing there, with the boys screaming and crying, unable to control the situation as it worsened, wishing desperately that I could spank them into submission, which of course I would never do, that I suddenly remembered the headless man.
“Arun,” I said, “come with me right now.”
I thought he would object, but knowing he had pushed things too far, he walked out of the room.
“Let’s go,” I said. We walked through the house and out to my car. I opened the door, reached in, and removed the Lego man I had seen the previous evening. I hadn’t noticed then that it was Darth Vader’s body.
“Is this what you lost?”
Arun’s body stiffened a little. He examined the Lego. I wondered how he was going to react. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to get mad at him. But while he wasn’t innocent in this instance, he so often got caught up in Neel’s hurricane, it was hard to punish him for behavior he observed in his brother all the time.
We walked back into the house, and into Neel’s room.
“I’m sorry,” Arun said, unable to look up as he talked. “Darth was in Dad’s car.”
Neel was buying time, figuring out how best to respond. He had been unfairly accused of doing something he hadn’t done. He now had some power to punish Arun and to punish us for not believing him. He took a step toward Arun, and my body stiffened, afraid that he was going to retaliate for the earlier punch. But Neel’s body seemed to be loosening.
“It’s OK,” Neel replied. He leaned in and gave Arun a big, enveloping hug. Neel could pivot from one emotion to another very quickly. As intense as his rages could be, he also knew how to forgive and forget quickly.
I went into my bedroom for the first time since I got home. I sat in my reading chair, my head hanging. And as I was sitting there, Neel walked in. He was in his frayed boxers, the ones he refused to change for days on end because he found such strange comfort in them. Why did he descend into this chaos so often? Why didn’t that beautiful boy, Neel’s better nature, not appear with more frequency? Wouldn’t that be better for us all? We would scream less; he would get the things he wanted. And perhaps we could even sit down for a meal together at the table that Eva always set. I didn’t know what to say. Neel stood by himself in the middle of the room, wanting to be rescued, his face puffed up from all the crying and raging.
And then I heard the words “No one wants to be with me” come out of his mouth. I got up and grabbed him and brought him close. I held him tightly. “No one wants to play with me at school,” he said. He broke into a deep, wailing sob, head buried in my chest. I ached for him.
“Come,” I said.
“I don’t want to shower,” he said, giving me a sly grin through the tears. His unwillingness to shower was one of our long-standing disagreements.
We both got into the hot double shower. I shampooed his hair, and he insistently soaped himself, once and then twice. After, we put on pajamas and went into his room, where Eva had left a plate of dinner for him, along with his math homework. He ate, listened to a book on tape, and did his fractions. Then he drew in his sketchbook while I cleaned up. We crawled into his twin bed together, though there wasn’t enough room for both of us. He smelled like shampoo, and as he entered the hazy space right before sleep, he kissed me and bundled himself in his blanket. I walked out.
Usually Eva fell asleep with Arun, but when I came out of Neel’s room, I noticed that he was in his bed alone. I went and touched his soft cheek and then covered him in the blanket that he’d already kicked off.
In the kitchen, Eva was sitting at the table, finally eating her dinner. There was a stack of bills next to her and the half-empty wine bottle.
“He seemed better after the cry,” she said. “Maybe he just needed to get it out.”
We were both all about the hope of the next day. I poured myself another glass of wine.
“I’m completely at fault here, and I’m trying to figure out how best to fix this,” I said, turning to the conversation that I knew she wanted to have. “But it’s more complicated than that. In this instance, the fault is mine. But there’s a larger problem at that place, and for that they’re at fault too. They all are. I always feel like I’m on the verge of breaking some unwritten rule that no one thinks to tell me exists. And the constant questions about India. I can’t deal with it anymore. I was just happy that finally there was going to be someone else kind of like me, someone I wouldn’t feel I had to prove myself to, someone I could feel comfortable with. And I totally screwed that up.”
“I get it. And I understand why you’re frustrated. We talked about the problems with the TC before we joined.”
“And, ultimately, I wanted to join as much as you,” I said, guessing she was going to bring this up. “Maybe even more.”
One afternoon, several years earlier, the two of us had driven to the TC for our membership interview. After years of moving between small apartments, we now had a mortgage and two young kids, and were discussing joining a tennis club. We were becoming domesticated very fast, simultaneously hopeful and terrified at this new turn in our lives. Eva, who had wanted to return home to California perhaps a sliver more than I did, had been taking the move a little harder lately. She had liked her old job. She’d liked how quickly the Q dissected Manhattan; our annual visits to Flushing to watch rowdy, muggy tennis; the sheer mixedness of people walking
down most any New York block, a marked contrast to how she’d grown up.
“What are we doing? We leave the city and suddenly we’re staid suburbanites, joining a tennis club?” she asked from the passenger seat as we exited the freeway. “Let’s forget this. I’ll call Leslie and tell her we’re not coming.”
Eva was concerned about propriety; she followed through on any promise she made. And so either she was being overly dramatic or she genuinely didn’t want to do this interview.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “Leslie worked so hard getting things together for us, having people write all of those letters of recommendation.”
“Pull over,” she said, her voice strained.
I drove into a neighborhood with big houses and lush yards, and parked. We had about ten minutes of wiggle room before we needed to be at the TC. “Are you having a panic attack about joining a tennis club?”
“I’m having a panic attack about all of this,” she said, pointing to the houses. “About coming back here. About raising our boys in such a decidedly homogeneous place.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I miss our old life. I certainly don’t miss not having Neel and Arun. But I miss getting falafel on the street. I miss the simplicity of getting just enough groceries that I can carry in my arms. The crisp fall days. Though I think in the time we were there, we actually had about four of them.”
“I miss the subways,” I said.
“Yes. And I miss the walking. Sixth Avenue went on and on and on. For my whole life, I’ve been moving forward. I needed to get out of here, and I did. And I love being back. That we don’t have to worry about parking. I love how much easier it is with the kids. That we didn’t have to go through some elaborate lottery system to get them into elementary school. That my parents are here whenever we need them. But part of me feels that in coming home, I’ve also taken a huge step back.” We sat in the car for a long minute. I could see Eva’s mind churning between her misgivings and her sense of decorum. “Maybe we can go through with the interview, since they’re waiting for us, and then postpone joining until we’re ready. In a couple of years.”
“That sounds like the right middle ground.”
If I’m being honest, I was relieved. While I wasn’t quite ready to admit it to Eva, I had come to realize by then that I really wanted to join the club. I thought I would play my best tennis on those pristine courts. And that pool looked awfully nice.
I started the car before Eva had a chance to change her mind. “Let’s just get through the interview.”
Leslie and Tim were waiting for us in the parking lot when we arrived.
“We were worried you guys weren’t showing,” Leslie said, smiling to cover what might have been genuine worry. She hooked her arm into Eva’s. “I’m so excited. You and the boys are going to become as attached to this place as we are.”
We all entered the clubhouse smiling. I remember that whatever nervousness I might have felt dissipated the moment we walked in. Everyone was very welcoming, as if we were the guests of honor at a small, intimate party, arriving right at the crest. A few people on the committee knew Eva from childhood. They gave us warm hugs. Someone asked about her parents.
“I think now that they have grandchildren, you’ll see them here more and more,” Eva had said.
They offered us wine, and a minute later we all sat down with glasses in our hands. They asked us the same basic questions then that the current committee had been asking this latest crop of potential members. Eva talked about her familiarity with the place, how after years of being on the East Coast, she was ready to be home. And when it came time to talk about our interest in tennis, I had answered, “I played a bunch in high school, but I’ve been away from the game a bit. I can’t wait to get back on the court.” I wondered if they got this answer a lot. So I added, as Valerie Brown had, “And Eva and I had our first date on a tennis court.”
After the interview, the four of us went out for dinner.
“You two were perfect,” Leslie said enthusiastically. “And Raj, you sealed it with that first-date-on-the-tennis-court thing. Is that true?”
“Partially,” Eva said. “We weren’t actually playing. Big spender here had gotten us nosebleeds at the US Open.”
“I wanted us to be able to talk,” I replied. “There was plenty of room up there. And a view of the city.”
“Well, it clearly charmed the men and the women in the room, which is hard to do,” Leslie said.
We got our letter of acceptance very soon after. Eva and I privately gloated that we must have been at the top of the list. By then, she’d set aside her reservations. After joining, I took a few lessons with Richard to jump-start my game. And we went a lot. I went a lot. At some point, it seemed that I knew more people there than Eva did.
Now, years later, as I sat sipping my wine and thinking back to that evening, I tried to pinpoint why, despite my reservations, joining the TC had been so alluring. It was something I’d been thinking a good deal about recently as I sat through the membership meetings. It was hard to peel away the layers, but when I saw that well-shaded jewel box for the first time—the clubhouse and the pool and the tennis courts—it felt like I was returning to a kind of safety.
In the decade that passed between our arrival in America and my departure for college, my parents worked very hard in order to move us from apartment to condominium to house. By the time we made it into the house, I felt settled and rooted and protected. But that feeling dissipated the second I stepped out the door. With my parents at work and my sisters figuring out their own way, I traveled to and from school alone, first with a key around my neck, and later with it hidden in my pocket. My English was improving, but still far from perfect. To get to the first school I attended, I walked down our street and through a dark tunnel that went underneath a freeway. Every morning and every afternoon, I ran the length of the tunnel as fast as I could, hoping desperately that no one took the time to notice me. There weren’t many other Indian families around back then, and so I learned to navigate among the black and white kids, doing my best to lie low until I worked things out. During this time, the one person who helped me the most was my fourth-grade teacher, a black woman in her fifties named Mrs. Holmes, who paid careful attention to my work and to me. Maybe she’d noticed how confused I must have seemed in class. From the start of the year, she was liberal with her praise and encouragement and attention, which provided me with the backbone I needed to do well in school that year and for years after. On the last day of school, she gave all the children hugs. When she came to me, she added a kiss to my forehead and a whisper in my ear: “I’m so proud of you.”
Two years later, when I tested out of that school, I always had a bus pass to take me to the better schools farther from home. There were two rules to riding the bus: pay the fare and never, ever make eye contact with anyone. Eye contact was a threat. And if someone thought you were threatening them, then you lost something—your glasses, your backpack, your dignity.
Junior high school was an ecosystem full of tribes and factions. One afternoon as I sat on the bus, I felt something on the back of my head. I was about to turn around, but I caught myself. I ignored it. Soon, more things landed on me—chips, rolled-up pieces of paper, spitballs—accompanied by laughter. When I’d first gotten on the bus, I’d noticed several kids from school in the back, and they’d noticed me. They weren’t in any of my classes; most of the black students were tracked separately. Perhaps I was wrong, but I assumed these were the kids who were throwing things at me. As my stop neared, I wanted to pull the cord to signal to the driver to stop. But I didn’t want to announce that I was getting off. I was hoping that someone else would pull it, and then I could just run off the bus.
Someone else did. The bus slowed down. I grabbed a hold of my backpack, but kept it hidden. When the bus came to a stop, I shot out of my seat and raced to the front door. As I stepped off, I checked to the right. The kids had all rus
hed out the back door. For a second I thought about getting back on the bus, but the driver closed the door.
I started walking away as quickly as I could.
“What’s the hurry?” one of them said. “You don’t like chips?”
They came after me and I took off running, the sound of their footsteps getting closer and closer. I ran and ran, hoping I’d see someone I knew. At one point, I felt a foot kick mine. At full speed, I wobbled, my arms flailing. If I fell, I’d have to accept the beating, from them and the hot concrete sidewalk. Somehow, I regained my balance and kept going. By the time I finally stopped, in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize, my chest burning, I was completely lost, but at least they’d given up their pursuit. From then on, whenever I saw one of those kids at school, smiling at me, I knew it was a reminder: I would never be safe. For some years after, I assumed they had gone after me because I wasn’t black. That picking on a brown boy had no consequences. But later, I knew that it was more complicated than that. In flexing their power over me, they were perhaps flexing a bigger power they didn’t have, and knew they would never have. My time on these buses, in these neighborhoods, in these schools, was limited. Soon I would leave and go on to better things. Perhaps they sensed this and tried to beat the freedom out of me.
During that time, going back and forth to different schools, I tried to stay invisible. But I could never shake the feeling of exposure.
What did this have to do with joining a tennis club? God, everything and absolutely nothing. Maybe all these years later, I wanted to feel protected, wanted my children to feel protected.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about why I was more comfortable joining the club when you were so unsure about it,” I said to Eva as she finished her dinner. “I have these great memories of being at the Bombay gymkhana, of my parents spending time with my dad’s work friends over dinner while all the kids ran around, going in and out of the pool, drinking sodas we weren’t supposed to have. Maybe I thought that joining the TC would cure me of all my exhausting nostalgia for that time. Or maybe I was excited to be part of a group. Though I knew I wouldn’t be fully accepted. I don’t know if I know this now, in retrospect, or knew it when we first joined. Or maybe I just liked the game so much, the feel of the racquet in my hand, the sound of the ball bouncing on the hard court, the pain in my heels after a strenuous match. Maybe that was enough to overlook everything else.” I couldn’t understand how I had been so hopeful. “I’ve been avoiding you today because I’m embarrassed. About the fool I made of myself last night. But I’m also embarrassed for thinking that joining the TC would mean that I actually belonged to the TC. Was that just incredibly naïve?”
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