As I walked past the pool, I could feel my breath getting shallow, an acute feeling of nausea taking hold. It felt like the flu was coming on, which didn’t surprise me. For years, whenever we went on vacation, I would be hit with a bad cold on the first day, my body signaling that it needed a break. And if ever I needed a break, it was now. I sat down again, hoping a moment of rest might help.
“Is he gone?” Eva asked. She had gotten the kids out, I guessed as a precaution in case Robert came back; they were standing next to her, water dripping off their shorts.
“Yes,” I said, my voice feeble. “They can go back in.”
“Come in with us,” Arun said to Eva.
“I will, sweetheart,” she said, her eyes still on me. “You OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said, certain I was about to throw up. “Fine. Go in. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Eva removed the tunic she was wearing, placed it on a chair, and dived gracefully into the pool.
Obviously I wasn’t fine. My chest felt like it had just caught on fire. I looked up at the bright sky and then at the illuminated hills behind us, hoping that the passing seconds would return me to normal. Arun was on the diving board, getting ready to jump in, his swim trunks hiked up to his belly button. Neel was waiting in the water, anticipating the splash Arun was about to create. I labored to catch my breath. My head felt heavy, as if my body could no longer bear the added weight, and I slumped to the side of my chair, which gave out. I could feel the hot, wet asphalt on my cheek, and I began to fall into a deep sleep, only to be pulled back for a few more seconds by Eva’s frantic screams. But then I let myself go.
* * *
My shirt was off and I was hooked up to a machine that made all sorts of beeping sounds. There was an IV in my right arm. And now there was someone standing above me.
“Hey, Raj. Are we going to play that doubles game soon?”
Bill Brown, in a white doctor’s coat, prayer beads still on his wrist.
“Just as soon as I get out of here,” I said in a weak voice.
“How do you feel?”
“Exhausted.”
“You should. You’ve had a heart attack. Not a bad one, but bad enough. For me, even the mildest attack is a cause for alarm. You’re a little too young and too fit for something like this. Do you have any family history of heart problems?”
I thought of my grandfather. We’d just returned to Bombay for the start of school, after a long summer with him in Ahmedabad, when he died of a heart attack. The first time I ever saw my father cry was when he heard the news. Years later, not long after that trip we went on to Kauai, he succumbed to his own faulty heart.
“My father and grandfather both died from them,” I said, scared of saying this aloud, scared of recognizing that I was next in line.
“That’s certainly family history,” Bill said.
“Am I going to be OK?”
I didn’t want to ask the question.
“You will be if you take care of yourself. Indian men have four times higher risk of heart disease. I’ve seen way too many of you in here through the years. Of course you know this, but you have to be careful with sugar and red meat. Did you grow up a vegetarian?”
“I did.”
“Are you still?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea to go back to that. It can’t hurt.”
I nodded my head.
“Did you save me?” I asked.
“I was the cardiologist on call. It took me a few minutes to figure out why you were so familiar. I’m sorry the paramedics had to cut open your nice shirt. You were in bad shape. You gave your wife quite the scare.”
He tilted his head to the side of the room where Eva was standing. I could see she’d been crying.
“Go ahead and talk,” Bill said. “I have to check on another patient. I’ll be right back.”
The nurse helped me sit up a bit and gave me a small glass of water. She was a beautiful older woman, her silver hair tied back. The deep wrinkles on her face looked like the map of a country I’d like to visit.
Eva walked up to me, trying to pull back her tears.
“I thought you were giving the quake victims too much of your attention,” I said, joking. I could vaguely recall the details of the attack: slumping over in the chair, Eva’s frantic commands to stay awake, the paramedics walking over.
She stood next to the bed and tapped me on my arm, a little harder than I’d expected. She was about to say something, but started to cry. There were so many things I found graceful about Eva, but her crying was not one of them. Her face was a wonderful mess.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“You scared me. Really badly.”
“I’m sorry.”
She took a tissue out of her pocket and wiped away her tears.
“I know you’ve had the week from hell. Sometimes it feels like all of our weeks are crazy, though. That we’re hoping that somehow the following week will be better, mellower. I’m running one way, you’re running another.” Eva squeezed my hand. “Let’s slow down. Maybe I can pull back on my work.”
I knew that we couldn’t afford for her to do that. And besides, she was better at her job than I was at mine.
“The kids saw it?”
“I’m afraid so. Arun is freaked out. Neel has gone mute.”
“Are they here?”
“They’re with my mom.”
Bill walked back in.
“I’m going to call and give them an update,” Eva said, stepping out of the room.
“So what now?” I asked Bill.
“We’ll keep you overnight. I want you to get some rest. And we’ll do some tests. Hopefully there isn’t a major blockage in there.” He read the chart in his hands. “You’ve had quite the busy week. A skin biopsy too?” I could feel myself getting tense; the last thing my heart needed was more tension.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It’s clean.”
“Good clean or bad clean?”
“There’s no bad clean,” Bill said with a smile. “You’re fine. All you have to worry about is your heart.”
I felt in my heart what I felt in the rest of my body: broken and tired and relieved.
“How’s that stress level?”
“Maybe a little high since we first met,” I said, feeling pathetic that I had let the stresses of the week threaten my life.
“We’ll get all your blood work back and try to see the whole picture,” Bill said, looking up from the chart. “But your family history plus stress is not an ideal combination.”
“I’ve had a pretty bad week.” My voice cracked as I said this.
Bill placed his warm hand on mine.
“I would worry less about your skin and more about your heart,” Bill said. “I’ve seen what stress can do to how the heart functions. Just walking down the street here, or even in a big, mixed place like LA or New York, watching people watch you, listening to their questions, and figuring out the right answers, can calcify arteries. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
The warmth from his hand traveled through my body, as if he were restoring some life force within me merely through touch. If my purpose was to give a decent lecture now and again about purity and danger, then Bill’s was to be a doctor. He saved lives for a living. He made hearts beat again. My god. It was bad enough that I had debased Bill when I just thought of him as a kind, smart man. But to do this to a man with the gift of life seemed an unforgivable crime.
It was time to do what I should have done days before.
“I’m sorry, Bill. From the bottom of my damaged, ill-beating heart, I apologize. It was a stupid, stupid joke. I meant no harm or insult. I was desperately trying to connect with you in a place where connection has been hard to find. Most days, I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.”
“I know that feeling very well,” Bill said. And what he said next had
so much more weight because he was a doctor and he was wearing a white coat and he had just restarted my heart: “But I’ve learned to make nowhere the somewhere I live. And I like it. I’ve settled in. And now with a job I like, in a city where I’m not constantly fighting to find a parking spot or worrying about shoveling snow, I have some more free time. And I’m thinking maybe I’ll join a nice club, and that maybe there will be a club within a club.”
I nodded my head in agreement.
“We’re straight,” Bill continued, returning to a more professional voice. “Let’s just get your ticker back on track. That’s our main goal.”
“I’m so sorry they asked you about Tiger.”
“Val and I had a good laugh about it in the car. I didn’t want to say it, but I did have a class with him. Introduction to African-American History.”
“You’re kidding.”
Bill shook his head. “With a professor who was an expert on MLK.”
“What was he like?”
“Like a guy who was an expert on MLK.” Bill winked. “Tiger was fine. The place was full of overachievers, so you tried not to make a big deal about it. He was actually a little dorky. We were friendly enough with each other. Both of us these light-skinned young black men playing these very white country-club sports. But I got the sense that he wasn’t trying to make friends. Or to make some black guy connection. He went by Tiger then. Completely un-ironically. Who does that? And like his namesake, he didn’t travel in a pack.”
The nurse walked into the room and asked for Bill.
“I’ll be right there,” Bill said to her and then turned to me. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back in the morning. And I’m serious about doubles.”
“Just one more thing.”
“Sure.”
“On Sunday night, when you and Valerie were driving out of the parking lot at the TC, did you see me?” I asked.
“I did. Valerie wanted me to stop. But I didn’t want to.” He paused and bit at his lower lip. “I was mad at the whole situation. I wasn’t mad at you. Or maybe I was and I just needed a moment.”
I wondered if the week would have been different if Bill had stopped. Maybe not that much. And I suppose it was a week that needed to happen. But what effect would that one little apology, given with the hope of acceptance, have had on the contours the week ended up taking?
Though Bill was assuring me that my heart was fine, that I was stable, I still felt a weight on my chest. Through luck, circumstance, history, whatever—here we were: me with my shirt ripped open, hooked up to a machine that monitored my cautiously ticking heart, and Bill in his white jacket and his beads and that sweet watch I coveted. Where did we fall on the long arc of history? On a gradual climb up? At the peak, looking at the long drop below? Or maybe we were a small uptick, as if we’d leaped into the air as high as we could.
“I’ll see you soon, Raj,” Bill said. “Get some rest.”
The God of Removing Obstacles
AS I WAS getting ready to leave, Eva placed her hand on my arm, pulling me back.
“What else am I going to do?” I asked her. “I can’t stay at home all day anymore.”
Three weeks had passed since my heart attack. Bill had released me after two nights in the hospital with a prescription for rest, a stern warning about the dangers of stress, and a promise to hit some balls. That first evening home I’d sent Cliff a text, and five minutes later he’d called.
“What in the world happened?” he’d asked, the concern reaching straight through the phone.
“I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
We’d talked for a few minutes, and by the end of the conversation, he’d told me to take the term off. “We’ll figure things out here. Take as long as you want.”
I had been waiting for this offer for years. A sabbatical. I could take a proper look at what I had written on Ahmedabad. Or I could dig into the difficulties of second acts again. Maybe Cynthia was right—a book was hiding in there.
But first, I had turned to more immediate things. While Eva was at work and the kids were at school, I spent my time in the kitchen, transforming it into a laboratory for good health. Quinoa, beans, and turmeric in absolutely everything. I wanted us to give up meat. Generations of my ancestors had been fine without it—though, according to Bill, it hadn’t been enough to help their hearts in the end.
My mother had come to visit, and I’d made her cook with me the whole time. It was so relaxing that I started daydreaming about opening an Indian food truck—or, perhaps more practically, an Indian food sedan. But after a few days of teaching me recipes she knew only by feel, avoiding the topic of my heart attack, and playing with the boys when they returned from school, my mom was tired; she needed a break. The morning before she planned to leave, she dropped the boys off at school and spent the day at a nearby casino, returning home about half an hour before I needed to pick them up.
“Tea?” she offered, joining me in the kitchen.
“Please.” I sensed she wanted to talk about something before she left.
She reached down below the stove to get a small pot and moved around the kitchen swiftly, mixing water, milk, tea, masala, and sugar. There was very little frailty in that nearly eighty-year-old body.
Before she took a seat, she went to her purse, pulled something out, and placed it on the table between us. It was a stack of bills, maybe forty or fifty of them, all held together by a dirty rubber band. I looked down at Benjamin Franklin’s sad eyes.
“I’ll pay the taxes on it, but why don’t you put it in the kids’ college fund.” She took a careful sip of the tea and added, her attention in the cup, “Or spend it some other way. Whatever will help relieve some of your stress.”
I tapped the stack with my fingertips. I knew this was coming from a place of concern. But it made me feel a bit like a child, unable to take care of my own needs.
“I’m set,” I said, pushing the stack a little closer to her.
“How old are you?” she asked.
It could have been a rhetorical flourish, a setup for what she was going to say next, or it could have been a genuine question. She’d never really tracked my birthday. More than once, she’d gotten the month right, but not the day.
“Forty-four.”
“You know how old your father was when we came here?”
“Forty-seven.”
The number had a near-mythic quality in my head. He’d essentially started over at that age: a new place, a new job, a new life.
“You were too young to remember this, but the years leading up to the move were difficult for us, and particularly for him. He’d had a bout of typhoid. He didn’t think he was getting anywhere in his job, even though he’d just gotten a pretty decent promotion. And he was nervous about your future in India, yours and your sisters’. He kept saying that was why he wanted to come here. But in reality, he was desperate to shake things up. And so he picked us all up and we moved. I wanted to come as much as him. Maybe I was having my own middle-life crisis. Is that what you’re having now?”
“Maybe,” I said, smiling. “Maybe.”
“Give yourself a break. You’re doing fine. You have a far more open, honest relationship with Eva than I ever had with your dad. The kids are a challenge, I know. They’re meant to be a challenge. That’s their job.” She took a sip of the tea. “And there are plenty of jobs around. If this one is bad, go do something else. Go work for Google. They’re always hiring.”
I couldn’t remember her ever being so clear and direct with me.
“It’s all a gamble, isn’t it?” she continued. “All of it. You make decisions. Decisions are made for you. Sometimes you get lucky. And sometimes you take a lot of losses before you hit a jackpot.” She pushed the bills back toward me and gave them a tap. “I know you take after your father, always trying to be so calm and even-keeled, even when things get crazy. But I don’t think that’s right. You need to celebrate the victories and mourn the losses. And then you can mov
e on.”
“I miss him,” I said. “Even more than after he first died. He’s been on my mind so much lately. I need him to guide me through these years.”
“I miss him too. You know that he and I didn’t always get along very well. We fought a lot. But I still miss him and the life he and I built together.” Her eyes were a little glassy. “You’re doing just fine without him, though. Maybe I am too.”
She left the next day.
In the days that followed, the conversation swirled around in my head. I appreciated her confidence in the progress of my life, but clearly I hadn’t been doing fine. And as the days stretched into weeks, I missed the routines I realized I had come to love. The commute to school, the nerves I felt as I stepped into a full classroom, which disappeared roughly five minutes in. I missed the students, the ones I had gotten to know and the new batch that would come in at the start of every new term. I missed helping them understand a school of thought they had no sense of before.
I appreciated all the concern, from Eva and my mother and Cliff, but I longed for normalcy. And I wanted to return to this one particular classroom, with this particular set of students. If I didn’t go back in there, they would always remember me as the guy who went nuts after lecture one day. I wanted to try to explain myself.
“Maybe end class early today,” Eva suggested.
“I’ll be fine. I’m going to take it completely easy. I promise. What time is the show?”
“Five,” she said. “Let’s meet here and go together.”
“OK.”
Eva hugged me, as if I were being deployed for war. “Please be careful.”
“I promise to keep the screaming to a minimum,” I said, a smile on my face.
I got in the car and headed to campus. I’d missed this ride, when I would rehearse the witty things I was going to say in class. At the entrance to my building, there were no announcements on the glass door. The hallway inside, where the hunger strikers had struck, was strangely antiseptic, as if it had been scrubbed clean. I took the elevator up.
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