by Shruti Swamy
“Hi Ravi.” It came out almost like a yelp. My throat was rough from all that laughing.
“You okay, buddy?”
“What are you doing here?”
I looked at him, his body. I had formed against him, my shape had shaped to fit him. Now, separate, we seemed so odd. He wore his worry all over him, but there was nothing he could do to soothe himself like he used to.
“Janaki?”
I was falling asleep on my feet, something I had not thought possible. My eyes jerked open. Vertigo. I put an arm out and the wall held me up. What on earth? his face was saying. I still had that bristle on me so he didn’t try to reach. Me. If only I had learned earlier to quill myself. A crumple between the brows. Such a handsome divorcé.
“You drunk?”
“Yup. So?”
“So nothing. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t having, like, a stroke.”
I smiled. “No droop.”
“Okay, why don’t we sit down.”
“Okay. Don’t patronize me.”
“I didn’t think I was.”
“Tone.”
I sat down on the floor. He might be surprised how neat the apartment was, now that I lived alone. When we lived together I assumed an anti-housework position that sprang from our collective confusion about what a wife was. Even my own shit, my clothes, would pile up around the dresser and the bed in formations he called berms. Now, I often put the clothes I discarded in the hamper, or right back on the hanger. “Want some. Whiskey?”
“No thanks.” He sat down too, awkwardly. His legs didn’t fold easily into cross but frogged up at his sides. My stupid husband. He loved a woman named Sophie now, and I intuited that Sophie would be pregnant soon; she was a little older than us and wanted kids, and I know this because she told me at dinner the very first time we met. He had said in the car that it was his fault, which was vain and infuriating besides being untrue. Your fault? As if he had any kind of control over my life, let alone the things that happened to me. If we hadn’t gotten divorced, you wouldn’t have gone on that date. We both wanted the divorce. In fact, the divorce was my idea. My idea, my fault? And then he was backpedaling, saying no one’s fault, no one’s fault. Which is incidentally what the state of California had said about our divorce and would say about my rape. No one’s fault. Not enough evidence. Your word against his.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“If you had the chance to go to the moon, would you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What about Mars? Mars you don’t come home.”
I could feel him looking at me. “Look at you, you can hardly keep your eyes open.”
“Moon yes, Mars yes. For me. Actually moon yes Mars maybe.”
“Jaan.”
“You don’t get to do this anymore.”
“Jesus, someone has to. Up.”
I was lifting myself to my feet. His hands were cold and familiar. For a moment I remembered my body. Then it became too heavy. I was in bed. The old days were over, I understood, the awkward easy days of living freely. What lay ahead felt austere and frightening. In fact, I couldn’t look at them full in the face. I shut my eyes.
My professor told me that she had accepted me into the program because my laughter was unique and troubling and she saw potential. But I would have to learn how to blend. That was an odd comment to me because I thought of myself as perpetually blending, a child-of-immigrants instinct that I was working very hard to unlearn, because it made me a bad actress. But my instincts had always been different with laughter: my laughter professor told me to blend, but she also said she had a laugh she thought would be perfect for me. I went to her office with the hope that I would be her protégé, a hope I didn’t bother to disguise, I was so eager to mentored. In fact, she did become a mentor to me and to all of us, all of us who wanted to be mentored, and she didn’t play favorites. She gave us each a laugh to learn that was ours.
Aroof—aroof—ek—ek-ek-ek
It took a while. “More guttural. Spit it. It has blood.”
I didn’t understand yet that some laughs are not happy. It was a powerful dark noise she made, an incantatory sound, barely controlled, controllable. The laugh changed her face, her kind, maternal face, made it snarling. The bones stood out. We spent a long time, several hours, on those tiny syllables, and she was more patient than I was: I was hungry. Then I laughed a long thread of it, accurately if not expertly, it fell out of me like a strand of red silk, and in the stillness of that room, I sat flushed with my own daring, my own blood.
“What’s it called?”
“You already know the name of it.”
There was a tiny moon in the window of her office, tiny because it was alone in the window and there was nothing to compare it to but itself. Fall. “Death-laugh.”
“Ah. What kind?”
“There’s more than one?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Laugh-in-the-face-of,” I said.
She was not smiling. “Yes.”
Didi
When I got back from the grocery store, my wife was sitting in an armchair and looking out the window at the rain. She seemed startled to see me, and wiped away her tears with her palms, and then I could see her carefully arranging her face before she turned it to me.
“Back so soon?”
“The bus came right away.”
“Did you get everything?”
“Yes, everything,” I said. I went to the kitchen and put all the bags of groceries down on the counter. I liked the strain in my arms and my shoulders and was sorry to let the bags go. They slumped down. My wife padded in behind me and went to the sink to wash her hands. She was wearing a beautiful dress of a dark, fine material that she wore sometimes when we went out on rare occasions to fancy restaurants. Now that I got close to her I could see the makeup on her eyelids and smell her perfume. It was eleven thirty in the morning.
“Where are you going?”
“Where would I be going?” she said. She lifted each item out of the grocery bag carefully, turning each orange over in her slim hands to inspect them or bless them. She took out a large wooden bowl and placed the oranges inside, and she was right to do so; they were beautiful in that bowl.
“Those are cara cara,” I told her. “I had a sample in the store.”
“How much were they?”
“Four-fifty a pound.”
“Four-fifty!” She looked displeased, and I was honestly glad. I wanted to see something on her face, even displeasure.
“Try one,” I said.
“I’m not hungry right now.”
“Here,” I said. I took one out of the bowl and peeled it messily; the juice got all over my hands. My clothes were still damp from the rain outside. I held out a section to her. “Here, try it.”
She stood with her arms folded. She took it up like a game: angry wife, foolish husband.
“Here,” I said. The fruit was a reddish orange inside, almost the color of a grapefruit. I came toward her, holding the piece in my hand. She stood still. I brought the fruit to her lips. “Here,” I said, putting the fruit right to her mouth, wetting her lips with the juice. She looked very small, standing with me in the kitchen. Her dark hair was parted neatly at one side and gathered at her neck. She had wide-set eyes and very narrow shoulders. She didn’t resist me. Her lips opened. She ate the piece of fruit I offered her, and then opened her mouth for another. So I stood there and fed her the orange. I was grateful to her. When we were finished she wiped her mouth.
In the bus earlier there had been enough room for me to sit down and put the bags of groceries on the seat beside me. I was in a sort of trance when I looked out the window. It was the sound of the wheels on the rainy street and the rain splattering down on the window. I hardly knew where I was. I had an urge to lift a bag of flour from the bag of groceries. I took out the bag of whole-grain flour and sat it down on my lap. I wanted to feel the weight and heft of it in my arms. I put my a
rms around it and closed my eyes. For a little time it felt right, pressing down into my thighs, bouncing with the movement of the bus, almost like a live thing. But after a while I began to feel unsatisfied and I put it away.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I said now.
“Oh,” she said absently. She was looking out the window again. “I just wanted to feel pretty.”
During this time my wife made bread every day, too much bread for just us, so we would walk around on Saturday mornings and give the loaves away to the people who lived on the street in our neighborhood, though we often got the feeling they would have preferred something else. We thought about getting a dog. My wife occupied herself during free time by teaching herself Hindi. I had my books; sometimes I went alone to bars. We spent some quiet months. I saw her eyes track the children in restaurants or in the park. Once on the way out of a pizza shop a little boy grasped her hands with his little fingers and tried to climb up her leg, saying, “Mommy, Mommy!” It was when he saw her face that he realized his mistake and skittered off, and when I put a hand on my wife’s shoulder, she turned away from me. Again, I could see her carefully arranging herself. When she looked up I saw she was trying to laugh.
I had taken to telling the story, when my wife was elsewhere, to strangers at parties. After a few beers I would have a nice feeling in my stomach. It was a warm anger. I would say, “The worst part, I mean the really fucked part is that I’m not even sure I want to be a father. In fact, I think that it is fundamentally evil to bring life into this world. You think about the things you know your child must suffer, any child, even if you give him the best life you can. Think about death, for example,” I’d say. “Think about the carrying capacity of the earth, for god’s sake,” I’d say. “Think about pedophiles.” We stopped getting invited to so many parties.
There was a way my wife touched her stomach a day or two before she told me. I saw her gathering her strength. I gathered mine too. The nine months were like a single held breath.
Then our daughter was born. When she was a baby I liked to listen to a particular song by Echo and the Bunnymen on the weekend and watch her kick her legs up into the air. By the time she was five I knew she would never be pretty; she had all of my looks. She was stout, solidly built, dark as me or darker, with thick brows and small, curious eyes that peered out of her face like a badger’s. Her name was Diviya: we called her Didi.
“You ever think,” I said to Didi, “that you and me just sitting here at the table is going to only be relevant to us?”
“No,” said Didi. It was a Sunday morning and she was smacking down a glass of milk; she was a big eater, and ate always with relish.
“I mean, when I die, and when you die, this moment is not going to matter to anyone. Nobody else is here.”
“Mom’s here.”
“Mom’s in the other room.”
“It’ll matter to me.”
“Well, you’ll be dead.”
“No, I won’t.” Then she took out her 101 Vacation Jokes book and read some jokes aloud. She had learned to read early, and at six she was working through Wuthering Heights. I was afraid that her idea of the world of adults was getting skewed, but supposed she’d sort it out eventually. She was sitting at the kitchen table and swinging her legs off the seat while I drank my coffee. “Why do I love omelets so much?”
“You don’t like omelets.”
“No, the joke person likes them.”
“Okay, why.”
“Because they’re egg-cellent.” She had a deadpan delivery.
“That’s so bad it physically hurts. Anyway, what does that have to do with vacation?”
“Beats me,” she said. She read, “Disney and I have something in common. We both love a happy ending.”
“A what?” I said.
“A happy ending. I don’t get it.”
“No,” I said. “Oh no. No, no, no. Let me have that book.” It was written by some asshole named Nicholas Trevor. I showed it to my wife. She was in the bedroom, reading a book of Hindi poems. “We have to burn this book,” I said.
“I think you may be overreacting.”
“Do you even know what a happy ending is?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know what a happy ending is.”
I sat down on the bed with her. Something about the way we were positioned, her lying on her back with her book and me very close to her, not touching her, reminded me of when she was pregnant with Didi, and I had put my hand on her belly for the first time and felt a live thing kick. My wife told me her senses had sharpened. “It’s so strange,” she had said. “I can smell everything. I imagine this is what the world is like for a dog. Even though the window’s closed I can smell the rain on the street, and the wet grass and dirt.” She told me I smelled like eight different things and listed them all, the last one being nervousness.
“What does nervousness smell like?” I asked her.
“Sort of a sour smell. It’s in your sweat.”
“You can’t smell that.”
“You’re not nervous?” she said. She grasped my elbow with her hand. I was almost angry with her for noticing. “I’m nervous too,” she said. But pregnancy had given her the calm radiance of a Buddha, and I didn’t believe her.
“What are we going to tell Didi?” I asked her now.
“Tell her about what?” said my wife.
“Sex, death, happy endings,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Everything, I suppose.”
In high school I was a wrestler. I remember being quite good, though at some point I just gave it up. I can remember very vividly that smell of sweat and the deodorant and the powder we wore under our shorts to keep from chafing. Closer down to the mat there was the odor of feet, the sticky plastic of the mat too, and I loved that smell because I didn’t allow myself to smell it unless I had won.
There is one particular match I think of often. It was one of the last matches I had, before I gave up wrestling. Before a match I would try and make my mind cool and blank. I needed to feel no emotion toward my opponent. I thought of myself as a soldier in some ways. I listened to the voice of my coach—he understood me. He knew it was not the things he said to me but the sound of his voice, and he used his voice to talk to me the way one uses their voice to talk to a child or an animal, with attention to pitch and tone.
My opponent and I were in the same weight division, but he had an immense presence, the presence of a bull, and he was dark-skinned like me, his ancestry similarly tropical. At first I avoided eye contact with him, because I was struggling to clear that space in my mind. Each time he met my eyes I felt as though I had brushed against a thin, prickly thing, like the spine of a fish. But I didn’t want to seem weak or frightened, so after a while I began to meet his eyes. I fixed his face in my mind—the same flat contour of South Indian nostril, the purple-brown lips—his head was shaved like mine, and like me his ears stuck out almost sweetly, and when his mouth opened I could see his teeth, slightly tinged with yellow, irregularly shaped, nearly shining against his dark skin. Close enough that I could see the pores in his face, and I began to make all sorts of novice mistakes, giving him too much ground when I should have been on the offensive, staying up high, though my true strength is in my legs. All of a sudden he caught me in his arms. He stood behind me, hugging the breath out of my stomach and chest. At first I felt pure panic, and then another emotion came through. The emotion was almost a sound I heard, ringing in my ears. I lay back into my opponent’s arms.
I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. Didi was at a sleepover; it was too late in the night for good news. I raced to the phone.
“Hello?”
“Dad?”
“Didi?”
“Hi, Dad.” She was whispering.
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
My eyes were beginning to adjust. I took the phone with me back to the bedroom, where the light from the street poured in f
rom the windows, and sat down on the bed. “Didi,” I said to my wife, who rubbed her eyes with her hands, looking for a moment like a child. I took her warm foot in my hand.
“Will you come get me?”
“Didi, what happened?”
“Is my bed still there?”
“Of course your bed is still here. Did something happen?” But I couldn’t get an answer out of her. I had almost never heard her frightened before. It was her first sleepover. I covered the mouth of the phone with my hand and explained the situation to my wife, who said that we would go get her in the morning. “I told you she was too little for a sleepover,” she couldn’t help adding. It had stopped raining, and I began to put on my pants and shoes. “Honey, it’s two in the morning,” she said, and then, sighing, “Take a taxi, at least.”
But I walked. It was warmer outside than I expected. The sky was the kind of bruisy purple that it was in early mornings before rain, almost red, an eerie glow. After I crossed Valencia the streets were empty. As a young man I had walked like this, before dawn in the city streets, when I couldn’t sleep. People told me it was dangerous, but I saw all sorts of things. I liked to stand at the corner and watch the traffic lights change even though there were no cars. I was the last man on earth, but the lights would still change. I would wait my turn.
Didi was sitting on the top step outside her friend’s apartment with her backpack on. She was wearing yellow pants and a pink sweatshirt she had outgrown but still insisted on wearing.
“What the heck are you doing, guddu?” I said. It was strange to see her there. She tilted her face toward me so the light washed down over it. Nobody will have this picture of her—not her mother or the man who will take her away, for it will die with me. My daughter’s brown face in the light from the street, the glitter in her black eyes.
