I crossed the cul-de-sac again and knocked. The red door was framed by a few petal-shaped pieces of glass, as though the door were the pistil and the rest of the house the flower’s bloom. I didn’t see any light filtering through. But they couldn’t have departed so quickly. I knocked again, louder; no answer. I padded behind the out-of-bloom azalea bush, lifted the red watering can, and retrieved the spare key. In the foyer, I didn’t remove my shoes, only kicked any spare summer dust from their soles against the doorframe.
“Just gonna get my knife,” I said to no one. Anita’s house opened wide in either direction: to the left, her mother’s room, and a living room filled with formal stuffed chairs. To the right, a dining room with a long wooden table and a mahogany cabinet stocking china. Farther along, the lived-in parts of the place: the kitchen, a den with a plaid sofa and an unobtrusive television.
I made for the kitchen. But as I passed that china cabinet, I noticed an open door to my left, in the middle of the hallway—the door to the basement, which I knew to be unfinished, like mine, just cement floors and boxes and storage. Through the open door, light—the only light I could see anywhere in the house—was flowing.
I took one step toward the door, edged it further open with my toe, and listened for voices. All that came was a peculiar whirring and glugging. Something like a drill seemed to be buzzing, and I heard it the way you hear a dentist’s tools in your mouth: in your temples, in the space below your eyes. The sound lifted. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I hurried to the kitchen and located, on the countertop, in the darkness, my knife.
The lights flipped on. Behind me were Anita and her mother. The door to the basement was flung open behind them. Anita looked perfectly vital, completely well. From Anjali Auntie’s arm dangled one of those totes that she had kept me from grabbing. In Anita’s hand was a glass that at first I thought was empty. But I looked again and saw that the bottom of it was filled with a kind of sunlight-yellow sediment. Some bubbles popped in a column. Anita quickly drained the sediment. That otherworldly yellow was gone through her lips in a moment.
“You look healthy,” I said. I held up my Swiss Army knife. “I left this.”
Anita was very still. Her breath seemed to be coming intentionally, as her chest rose and fell slowly.
The open basement door swung in my peripheral vision. Anjali Auntie took a step back and kicked it shut with her toe. She and Anita glanced at each other for the briefest moment. They really were starting to look alike. Anita was becoming a new creature and her mother had never looked much like a mother, anyway—no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, not a sprinkling of silver or gray in her hair. As Anita grew taller, grew breasts, it was as though they were not getting old and older but moving toward a prearranged meeting point in the middle.
“I was just making Ani some of the stuff my mother used to make me when I was sick,” Anjali Auntie said. I looked again at the glass. “You know turmeric milk, right, Neil?” she said.
I knew it: a horrible dark yellow thing my mother brewed whenever someone came down with a cold or cough or stomach bug. I knew turmeric milk, and I knew it had never and would never look like what had been in Anita’s glass just then.
“Sure,” I said. “Guess it perked you right up.”
I lifted my knife in the air again to remind them I had gotten what I came for, and walked to the door without saying anything else. I spent the rest of that night home, alone, attempting to wend my way through the gilded sentences of The Great Gatsby—my summer reading book—but instead staring out my bedroom window at Anita’s front lawn, where there was no seductively blinking green light like Daisy Buchanan’s, only a mustard yellow house with all its lights on, as though its denizens were having a party for just the two of them.
2.
In summers past, I’d traipse down to the neighborhood swimming pool with Prachi and Anita and Kartik and Manu, toting sunscreen that someone’s mother had prescribed, which we would all ignore, opting to become the color and texture of bottom-of-the-bag raisins. There had been a few day camps—one where I went trout fishing with a pink-skinned park ranger, to my Brahmin mother’s chagrin. In those summers, my dreams followed me into my waking hours, their logic lingering, turning the humid days magical, overlaying the season like a very thin net.
But this summer was cold with reality. I’d been grounded, due to my public display of impertinence in telling my parents I preferred not to attend the Nagarajans’ party. I was banned from Kartik’s, the only place I could play video games, and allowed to go only to the Kumon math center and to the library—the latter when accompanied by my debate partner, the acidic Wendi Zhao, who oversaw my work and berated me for my mediocrity. In the evenings, I was to sit in my room, doing my reading and math. If I wanted proof that summer had descended on Georgia, I had only to open my window. The insects were out, katydids and cicadas and flashing lightning bugs, little green constellations.
“Don’t you have assigned reading?” my mother said when I complained.
“The thing is, The Great Gatsby is a really short book,” I pointed out.
My father shouted from the bathroom, over a trumpeting fart: “In our schools, you never got hundred percent in anything!” He flushed. In the kitchen, hands washed, he continued: “Sixty percent was considered very good! You should jolly well never be done!”
I suspected that I had become a casualty of Prachi’s Spring Fling misbehavior. But my sister, the perpetrator herself, was allowed to roam free due to her pageant activities. It seemed immensely unfair. Perhaps my parents feared my descent into averageness more than they feared Prachi’s tumbles into vice. They trusted Prachi. My sister telegraphed her ambitions in the Duke poster on her wall and the Duke T-shirt she tugged on whenever she had a test, for good luck. She had a dream to lose. Me? I had no college poster, no talisman.
On the first evening of my imprisonment, I grabbed the upstairs cordless in hopes of calling Kartik to arrange a covert video game rendezvous. But my mother was already on the phone.
I heard Mrs. Bhatt’s voice on the other end of the line saying, “And that Anjali Dayal!”
“How would she go do something like that?”
“Why, mujhe toh pata nahi, but Ramya, I saw her going into my bedroom during Manav’s toast, and I waited, soch rahi hoon ki, maybe she just needs to use the bathroom—”
“She should have been using the powder room! Who enters the master bathroom like that—”
“But just wait, I sent Meena in, usko maine bola, ‘Meena, go see if Anjali Auntie needs something, or if she’s looking for me,’ so Meena went into my bedroom.”
“And?”
“Toh, that woman is just standing in my closet!”
“That’s what Meena said?”
“Yaaah, yah! Not only that, looking at all my clothes, my jewelry!”
“She opened your jewelry cabinet?”
“I had left it open, I remembered later, because I kept trying to choose, which earrings—”
“Itnaa nice-nice earrings.”
“And also I kept trying to get Jay to wear the gold Om his daadi gave him, but these boys won’t wear necklaces, saying ‘Mummy, I look like a girl,’ and then people started ringing the doorbell and I never shut it all up . . . anyway, strange behavior—”
My mother tutted. “She’s jealous, Beena. She goes to all these parties-schmarties as catering, no husband in sight, and you’re always wearing those niiice saris and stoles and—”
“Skinny-mini gold digger shouldn’t need my saris.”
“Gold digger? Kya matlab?”
“Ramya—you know. All these kids listening to that song these days, you must keep up with them or you will lose them. Get down, girl, it goes, some such thing. Anyway, my cousin Rakesh was Pranesh Dayal’s senior at IIT Bombay. He only told me. She went round with all the boys. Then chose Pranesh because people said
he’s the class topper, going to make lots of money, going to America and whatnot.”
“Hanh—” my mother paused. “Thought I heard something on the line.” (I muted the phone.) “Lekin, back there marriage can be a little transactional, na? Gold digger, bahut American way to think about it, Beena.”
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs; my mother liked to pace around the house, complementing gossip with exercise, so I returned the cordless to its cradle and rushed back to my bedroom to stare out at the Dayals’, beginning a pattern that would define the summer. I ran through hypotheses as time rolled by, as I squinted through the heat and fireflies and the low glimmering of the suburban streetlights. Did the Dayal women need money—money to be garnered from Prachi’s necklace, or something in Mrs. Bhatt’s closet? Was a divorce pending? Was Pranesh Uncle not funding the fancy-schmancy school? Or was something else altogether setting in?
I watched that Crayola yellow house that night and all summer, not knowing entirely what I was looking for, but aware that it deserved my attention.
* * *
• • •
My vigils over the Dayals’ were interrupted by library trips, where I was stuck researching the upcoming debate topic. A bunch of high schoolers would spend the year discussing the fossil fuel crisis, something that felt distant, even invented, from my perspective amid Atlanta’s gas-guzzler-crammed highways, where all seemed quiet, the apocalypse staved off in the comfort of concrete suburban stasis.
My parents had feared debate at first, because of the tournaments that took students out of town on weekends. Surely my mother imagined nonsense playing out beneath the noses of the chaperones in Howard Johnson hotels. But they relented when talk at Indian parties centered on the clarity of purpose that debate offered—you have one job, and it is not to tell the truth about the fossil fuel crisis. It is simply to win. Debate gave children ambition, the Indian parties concluded. Ambition: the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents. Ambition: the point of that summer, for me, was to acquire some.
I’d set up in a light-filled corner of the Hammond Creek Public Library in the mornings, at a table with a view of a slippery pine-needled slope leading to a ravine. There I took direction from Wendi Zhao. She was rumored to be among Harvard’s top choices for debate recruits the next year and did not need a partner so much as a “tool” (as the debate kids said)—someone to do as she demanded amid the high heat of a tournament’s elimination rounds. She had reduced female teammates to tears too many times, so the coaches decided she’d pair best with a guy.
I was uninterested in the policy papers Wendi forced me to read. Stuff about planning for a distant future. Solar wind capture. Hydrogen fuel. I found myself wandering the library, seeking higher-order material, in hopes of becoming the kind of competitor who opted for a philosophical approach over a wonky one. We called the former kritik debaters, or K-debaters, and their ranks were populated by enviably nonchalant potheads from alternative private schools, some of whom would grow into Harvard humanities professors. I spent my days aspirationally tunneling into the work of Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, sneaking these texts under the table until one day when Wendi approached silently—she had assassin’s footsteps—and caught me.
“What’s that got to do with alternative energy?”
I jumped as she slammed her palm down on Being and Time. “I was reading online,” I stuttered. “I—I was reading about how sometimes policy making is the wrong thing to do because we have to, like, address the philosophy? Erm, ontology. Ontology. Behind the policy?”
She scowled. “I don’t trust the abstract. Read this shit on carbon taxes.”
It was during those library days that I encountered the imported grandfather. He was a huge guy, perhaps six feet, over two hundred pounds. He hulked in the corner over his books, reading with uncanny stillness, twitching only to turn a page, taking no notes. Sometimes he’d lean toward a closed hardback and press an elephant-flappy ear to the cover as though the pages had some secret to whisper. He was always there before I arrived around ten, remaining in his reading posture when I departed at one or two.
The day after Wendi pried Being and Time from my hands, the man whispered, with a shimmer in his eye, “I rather think she likes you.”
“Weird way of showing it.” I drummed my fingers on my laptop.
It began, then—the Neil-and-adult script. I told him, somewhat monosyllabically, about the debate team, Okefenokee, math classes, my sister.
“This debate business,” he said after I had explained the basics, “it’s fun for you? You enjoy the rush of testing ideas?”
I frowned. “I guess?”
“I have put words in your mouth. What is it you like about it?”
I sighed. I was thinking about my father’s face when he picked me up from the novice state tournament, how his expression had been vacant when he pulled up to the curb but then suddenly animated at the sight of my trophy—a gold-colored figure opining atop a wooden block, one hand lifted, unspooling some brilliant oration. “That is yours?” he’d said, and the whole way home, our normal car silence had been somehow warmer than usual, like the feeling of pressing fresh-from-the-dryer laundry against your skin.
“Winning,” I said. “That part is nice.”
He pointed at the book that I’d tugged back down from the shelf after Wendi confiscated it, and spoke in an accent more British than Indian. “I have always wanted to visit Mr. Heidegger’s home in the Black Forest. It would certainly be something.”
Then he turned back to the American Revolution and I blinked vaguely, wondering how this peculiar old man knew all about Heidegger.
I found out over the next few weeks that Ramesh Uncle, a retired professor, had been imported unceremoniously from his prior life in West Bengal to suburban America. “Calcutta is a place alive with the past,” he said one morning when we bumped into each other at the water fountain, near the children’s section—away from Wendi’s probing gaze. “You cannot walk outside without running into ghosts.” He could not live in Hammond Creek, in America, without knowing its history, so he was absorbing American history like a second language.
“So, were you a history professor?” I asked, taking my sip of water and brushing my lips on my sweatshirt sleeve.
“In a way.” He grinned. “I am a physicist. Which makes me a philosopher of time.”
Wendi, on the other side of the library, would have had little tolerance for this exchange. I pressed on the water fountain a few times to watch it spurt. “What’s that mean?”
“There is a little philosophy that was once considered heretical,” he said, folding his arms and leaning against the corkboard that advertised, in primary colors, toddlers’ story time each afternoon at four. “It is, however, the sort of thing a Calcuttan knows to be true.” He paused, as though to gauge whether or not I was following. I nodded. “Eternalism,” he pronounced. “The idea, see, is that the past and present and future are all equally real. Perhaps even coexisting.”
“How old are you?” I suddenly asked, then flushed. There was something mesmerizing about the way Ramesh Uncle spoke of history, as though he’d witnessed it firsthand.
“I am one of those trees with so many age rings round its middle that you cannot really tell anymore. Come,” he said. “We must both get back to our books, mustn’t we?”
Each morning, I’d wait for Wendi to retreat into her work, and then I’d turn to Ramesh Uncle to be briefed on his day’s pursuits. He wound through a self-made syllabus on America—on where we’d been, and where we seemed to be going. W. E. B. DuBois and Walt Whitman and the Wobblies; Thoreau and Twain and Tippecanoe.
“Are you writing something?” I asked after a while, as I’d been wondering what reading a bunch of books about America would add up to.
“Why should I write something? There are so many good books al
ready to read.”
“So, what do you, you know, want to do with . . .”
“The books?”
“Yeah.”
“I would say I would like to read them, and then think about them, and maybe come back and read them again some more, later. Would that be an acceptable plan?” A smile was always inching across his face when he said stuff like that, as though he was inviting a challenge.
Soon, Ramesh Uncle began to take on more specialized pursuits. One afternoon, as I helped him carry a few fat volumes from the nonfiction section to his desk, he told me he was now looking into the early histories of Indians in America.
“Uncle,” I whispered, depositing the books with a clunk, “I think you’re supposed to say Native Americans.”
“No, no, Indians like us.”
“How much history could there be?” I said. I’d thought we were new here—hence all the unsettledness, all the angst, all the striving.
We sat down in our glass-window corner. Nearby, Wendi Zhao worked in a study carrel, surely blasting G-Unit in her noise-canceling headphones.
Ramesh Uncle smoothed his short-sleeved collared shirt as though he had been awaiting this question a long time. “Very much,” he said. “You just see.”
June rolled on. I hated math, I saw few friends, Wendi whacked me upside the head. And Ramesh Uncle ordered books from afar. The Hammond Creek library plugged into the college and university loan systems, making that little stretch of table where we sat gorgeously expansive, containing much more than our cramped lives. While other kids were splashing in the pool, shooting hoops, making out, I was listening to this old man tell stories in throaty whispers of Swami Vivekananda, showing up in Chicago to lecture Americans on Hinduism at the World’s Fair, and of Bhagat Singh Thind, who went to the Supreme Court in 1923 to sue for the right to be considered “white.” I learned, too, that Indians weren’t allowed to enter the United States for decades. He even showed me, once, a 1912 clipping from an Atlanta newspaper. It mentioned the Hindoos who had come to town, peddling exotic fabrics, trinkets, and jewels—dark as the Negroes, yet somehow different in complexion and mannerisms.
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