An Obedient Father (28 page)

Mausiji and Mamiji sit on the living-room sofa. Both are small and fat, with nearly white hair. I prepare tea and bring out biscuits.

"How are you?" Mamiji asks when I return from the kitchen.

"Good."

"We worry about you," she says. This cannot be true, for why has it taken them so long to visit?

"Now what, daughter?" Mausiji asks. Shakuntala Mausiji is Ma's older sister, and even though I know not to believe that people of her generation are especially protective or wise, I expect them to be.

"Have you thought of marriage?" Mamiji interprets the question. "There is a man I know who works in a ball-bearing factory. He is good, but was married to a Muslim for two years."

Because I am worried they might discover what I am doing to Pitaji, my voice remains softly polite. "One marriage in one life," I say, trying to appear as traditional as possible.

"Throw yourself on a pyre, then?" Mamiji responds.

"Asha can live with us," Mausiji says. "It'll make getting a husband easier."

Hearing this is a shock. "Asha is the light of the world."

"Daughter, don't cry."

I wipe my face with a fold of my sari.

"Something has to be done," Mamiji says.

"Pitaji is fine to live with."

"It might be safer for Asha to be away," Mausiji adds.

Immediately tears roll down my cheeks. "Don't say that." I cannot imagine what might force me to give up Asha. Without her not a single good thing would have happened in my life.

After a while Mamiji asks, "Should we say hello to your father?"

This frightens me. "He's lying down," I say, hoping they will understand this as his being asleep.

"Is he awake?"

"I don't know."

Together we go into the common room. Pitaji is still lying in his underpants.

"Namaste," Mausiji says.

After a moment Pitaji replies, "Namaste."

"How is your health?"

"All right."

Mausiji and Mamiji exchange glances. They linger. I think they

cannot decide whether to mention the man who works in the ballbearing factory.

"Namaste," Mausiji says. They depart.

This time I do not close Pitaji's door till I have washed the pot the tea was made in and the cups in which it was drunk. Bare and still and so passive, he does not seem dangerous. But I cannot imagine the future with him in it. The need to live is so strong that only a mountain piled on top can stop it. With Pitaji, living is the same as destroying. He was able to wait twenty years and then act exactly the same as he had before. Yet nothing in his soft round face or his swollen stomach demands the death I wish him. When I close his door that afternoon it is not to cage him, as it has been before, but to remove him from sight so I can forget.

"I am a good woman," I say to myself

"Who can understand what I have suffered?"

"Or how alone I am."

In the weeks and months that come, I forget him, sometimes for several hours. Then something will remind me and I will know exactly when I last thought of him and how I nearly imagined him while mopping the floor, and again when the fan's breeze stirred some newspapers. I talk so little, I begin to envy Asha for being able to go out into the world and speak to other children.

Late one night Pitaji begins to scream. He is so loud that Asha jumps upright on the bed still half-asleep. "What?" I say to her, as if I cannot hear. Pitaji continues. The shrieks are high and desperate. I turn on all the lights and go to the common room. Asha follows. I look at his blue door. It is unbolted and he has not been out that night. "He'll ask if he needs help," I murmur.

"Do something," Asha says angrily.

"He knows what's best for him."

"God!" Pitaji bays.

The fan whirrs. The tube light keeps the dark dammed out of the common room. At times Pitaji's cries drop, becoming moans.

The doorbell rings. I go to answer it. It is the woman from next door, a widow with such a square face she looks almost like a man.

"Pitaji ate onions with yogurt and got a stomachache," I say. Asha is with me.

"When he had his heart attack, my boys kicked open your front door." She is smiling, as i{ this was an adventure, and then, almost with regret, says, "This time we won't have to." She leaves.

The cries stop an hour or so before dawn. But Pitaji does not appear that morning. Late in the afternoon, when I have begun thinking I should check to see if he is alive, Pitaji enters my bedroom. I am sitting in bed reading the newspaper. He is wearing only his underpants. His stomach pushes their top down.

"I'm not dead," he says quietly. He comes and stands close to me.

I remain silent, because I do not know how he will react to anything I do.

"I cannot die, serpent."

Then he goes back to his room and lies on his cot. He does not close the door. I am too frightened to do so. I stay in the living room. When Asha descends from the roof into the common room a little later, Pitaji calls out to her, "Your mother is murdering me. She throws away my medicine and is feeding me so much I have had another heart attack." I come into the common room. Asha looks at him and then at me. It is strange to have everything described so clearly. Asha climbs back up the ladder. "Murderess," Pitaji tries shouting, but his voice is no louder than a normal person speaking. He falls asleep and I lock his door.

When he wakes, he shakes the door instead of knocking on it as he normally does when he wants to be let out. I bolt him in when he goes back to sleep.

The thing that made him scream also leaves him without energy. Most days he remains on his cot. But he no longer lets me lock the door. As soon as he finds out he is locked in, he begins shaking the door.

One afternoon he comes into my room. I am sitting on a chair lengthening Asha's school skirt. "I don't want to see your unlucky

face," he says. His voice is buried and far away. "Keep the door closed. But I am no animal to be locked in."

At first I am half relieved, because it suggests Pitaji will stop me eventually. But he does not go to buy his medicines and he continues to eat the ridiculously rich food I make. I put butter even in his yogurt.

The new compromise works for a while.

I want to celebrate Asha's birthday quietly. I do not know what Pitaji might do if he finds out. I make halva for her before she goes to school. I pray with her in our room.

Asha takes the bowl of halva I have given her to Pitaji's door. "Nanaji, it's my birthday. Do you want some halva?" I am in the kitchen.

Pitaji opens his door. Asha holds the bowl forward with both hands. He looks surprised and then angry. Pitaji takes the bowl and turns it upside down in front of Asha. The spoon in it clinks on the floor.

Pitaji stops lying on his cot except at night. He wanders the flat. Periodically he grabs folds of his stomach, shakes it at us, and speaks in a falsetto, as if it is his stomach talking. "After he dies, will I keep living?" I refuse to answer him when he is in such moods. In front of Asha he has his stomach say, "It's his penis that made problems, not me. Why should I die, too?" Mostly Pitaji makes pronouncements and does not attempt conversations.

Pitaji tries to enter every part of our lives. He plays cards against himself on our bed. He sits beside us during meals and sometimes in the middle of them starts spooning subji from our bowls and breaking off pieces of our rotis. I can't touch my food after he's touched it. He treats Asha the same way he treats me. I ignore him, and Asha begins to follow my example.

Pitaji sometimes comes into our room in the middle of the night and turns on the light and sits at the foot of the bed without saying anything. Sometimes his anguish stirs my own and I wish to comfort him. In these moments I look away.

But one day I notice Pitaji's ankles are dirty. Then I understand that patches of his skin have turned black from the absence of blood. I start to cry. When unhappiness is so great, how can one separate mine and yours?

Pitaji looks down at his ankles and murmurs, "My life."

There is a period when Pitaji takes to leaving the flat. He goes down the gallery to the flat next to ours and tells the widow who lives there and her two sons that I am killing him for money I believe he has.

The widow tells me this. "If we had money, wouldn't we spend some?" I tell her. I am afraid of being robbed and murdered if rumors of wealth spread.

Then Pitaji goes down into the compound and tells them what he has done to me but claims that these are all lies. I learn from the widow that he cries as he tells the story. Then he always tells his audience that he is being slowly poisoned for money.

I do not care that he is telling them what happened or claiming that this was a lie. But I worry about crime. One evening, when he is wandering around the compound with his story, I go down and shout, "Senile fool, leave these people in peace." Then I address the two old women he had been talking to: "Come upstairs. Look in my home and see what we have that's worth stealing." They follow eagerly while Pitaji stays downstairs. I show them how dull my knives are. I point out that I've been thinking of buying a deodorant for the latrine but don't want to get caught up in unnecessary expenses.

One day Pitaji comes into my room and announces, "I am taking the flat back." He is wearing pants and shoes. Going down the gallery, he moves with his feet splayed out and carefully, as if he is afraid to slip. I wonder how the clouds and blue sky look to him.

When he returns from his lawyer, he again lies down on his cot.

It is the last time he leaves the flat.

Once, I find Asha standing beside Pitaji's cot.

"Come here," I demand, and she does. Pitaji looks at the ceiling.

His face is wet as it almost always is. "What were you talking about?"

"I asked why he cries all the time."

Asha looks at me. She has the face of someone so much older that I am afraid. "What did he say?"

"He said he doesn't want to die."

Kusum worried as she watched the low white buildings of Indira Gandhi International Airport drift by the window. The flight had been delayed in London, and it was early morning. To Kusum the slow confusion of the trucks and vans guiding the plane seemed the result of fatigue. Ben, Kusum's husband, was asleep in the aisle seat, and their six-year-old daughter, Carolyn, her bare feet hovering midway between seat and floor, lay dozing in the center. Kusum and her family had arrived in Delhi to meet Asha and decide whether or not to adopt her.

Waiting in line to go through customs, Kusum slipped two fingers through a belt loop of Ben's jeans, and he, automatically, caressed the back of her neck. Several times since Pitaji died they had discussed taking in Asha. Because all the neighborhood knew of Pitaji's rape of Anita, Asha was considered naturally inclined toward depravity. Grown men sometimes surprised her when she was walking alone and shoved her into walls and then pressed themselves against her. Now that Asha was fourteen and developing breasts, the molestations were more frequent and violent. Also, she was nearing the age when the U.S. government would make immigration difficult. "I won't let Anita force us into anything," Kusum said, looking up at Ben. She released Carolyn's hand and put both arms around her husband's waist. Ben was slender, with thinning curly hair. Beneath the airplane odor on his shirt, she found his smell of clean laundry and apples and wondered why she was so distrustful of people.

Outside, the light reminded Kusum of how little she had slept. The morning smell, thinly herbaceous, with whiffs of diesel and sweat, meant India to her. Everything was so much the same, she could have left yesterday. Kusum's stomach clenched. A crowd waited along the terminal windows. Terrorism in the early eighties had forced people to greet returning relatives on the airport's wide sidewalks.

Even after ten years, Anita was immediately recognizable. She had some wrinkles and her hair was almost white. She stood slightly at an angle, as if to keep a greater area under surveillance. Rajesh was near her. He had gotten so enormously fat that his head seemed supported by his chins.

"Say namaste to Kusum Mausiji," Anita said in English, and that's how Kusum realized that the tall, broad-shouldered girl standing a few feet away was Asha. Asha was wearing a long olive army raincoat and eating a sugar cube. Kusum's image of Asha was from a decade-old photograph in which she sat tiny between her parents on a sofa. Asha still had a child's moon face, round and soft, and this was the only part that looked her age. Kusum had expected someone less distinct.

"Namaste. Can I go to America with you?"

Laughing politely, Kusum replied, "If you want."

"I do. When?" Asha stared at Kusum.

"Quiet. They're too tired for your jokes," Anita said, again in English.

"We slept on the plane," Ben said, smiling in a puzzled and slightly conciliatory manner.

"Shall we take a bus?" Rajesh asked. Etiquette should have required that he, as the man from Kusum's side of the family, pay for a taxi. Rajesh owned two Pizza King restaurants and could afford the taxi.

"Shame, Rajesh," Anita said in Hindi. "We should pay" Rajesh grimaced and did not answer. Kusum knew Anita had little money. Inflation had destroyed the value of what little Pitaji had left her. She was planning to sell the flat she and Rajesh had inherited and either move in with Rajesh or rent a single room.

"You don't want the presents I brought?" Kusum said to Rajesh in Hindi, smiling as if she was teasing.

"Teach him a lesson," Asha said, and laughed.

A bed dominated the front room of the flat. Rajesh sat beside Ben on two chairs and showed him a five-hundred-rupee bill. "Three, four years ago, you almost never saw these. Soon they'll have bills as large as an undershirt." Kusum sat cross-legged next to Anita on the bed and looked at Asha's report cards. Everyone but Carolyn was drinking tea. The report cards were from first standard through ninth. In the last two years, Asha's marks had improved enormously.

The report cards, Kusum understood, were marketing materials for Asha, but she did not feel put upon. Kusum looked at Carolyn sitting near her and thought how difficult it was to be a good mother. Carolyn was staring anxiously at the twirling ceiling fan.

"It won't fall on you," Rajesh said to Carolyn.

Carolyn looked at him and then at the fan, which not only spun but shuddered, as if its speed was about to wrench the bolts out.

"God is kind," Asha added, "they tend to fall when their owners are asleep." She was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Carolyn's face tensed. Kusum noted the teasing. "Don't worry, every flat in India has one," Asha said.

Carolyn kept looking at the fan.

Ben laughed. He was sitting on a chair against a wall. "Tell Asha you're going to sleep on the side of the bed and make her sleep right beneath the fan," he said.

Carolyn looked shyly at her father and, unable to muster up the meanness to tease, said, "I'm going to sleep on the side," and giggled.

Asha laughed as well.

"Asha would be number one in her class, but the father of the student who is first is a doctor and gives free medicine to the principal," Anita complained.

Ben laughed.

"It's true," she said. "This is India."

"Does the principal take whatever medicine is given or does he ask for specific ones?" Ben asked.

Rajesh chuckled, and Anita began protesting.

"Mummy says the secret to success is working hard and cheating," Asha said. As everyone stopped in surprise, she grinned.

"You don't cheat, do you?" Ben asked.

"Asha, what's wrong with your head?" Anita asked. "Do you think a stick would fix it?"

"Take me to America." Asha addressed Kusum. "Here the answer to everything is 'stick.' "

Now Kusum worried whether Asha cheated. One more complication she would have to deal with if they adopted Asha. "Why did your marks go up so much the last two years?" Kusum asked.

"She began going to an all-girl school," Anita said.

"I found a friend with a VCR and I started watching movies and understood I would never have any of what I saw unless I worked," Asha added.

"What about wanting to make me happy?" Anita asked.

"You'll never be happy."

"I'm making more tea," Anita said, and stood. From the kitchen she called for Asha.

Asha hissed, "Stick," and left.

In the aisle, between the chairs along the wall and the bed, Kusum began unpacking the suitcases. To make space for her, Rajesh moved from beside Ben to the bed. She was glad to be able to talk with Rajesh without Anita present.

The sound of Asha's and Anita's voices arguing came from the kitchen.

Kusum took an electronic thermometer out of a suitcase and placed it on the bed. "Is that the one I asked for?" Rajesh inquired.

"Yes."

He took the thermometer from its box and, after spending several minutes discovering how to use it, put it in his ear. "Did Anita write crazy letters?" he asked Ben, because Ben was the husband.

"No," Ben said. Another reason Kusum loved him was that he was discreet, even on behalf of those who were not discreet themselves.

Rajesh appeared offended at being rebuffed so directly. A moment later he spoke in the patient voice of a friend delivering a warning. "Anita's crazy. Whether she acts it or not." Rajesh had written Kusum once in ten years, and then only to ask for the thermometer and a Walkman because he had learned she was coming to India. Listening to him, Kusum wondered why being away for so many years did not make things feel more unexpected.

"She must be unhappy," Ben said.

"What does that explain? I'm unhappy, too. What she says Pitaji did happened how many years ago? After all those years she suddenly had to tell people?"

Ben's face froze the way it did when he was offended and was waiting so that he would not speak from automatic disgust.

"Pitaji threatened Asha," Kusum said. She was thrilled to hear evidence that she need not adopt Asha and wanted to confirm the evidence.

"I don't believe that. Ask Asha what Pitaji was Uke and she'll only say good things."

"Why do you think Anita's crazy?" Kusum asked.

Rajesh took the thermometer from his ear and looked at his temperature. When he spoke, he sounded embarrassed. "After she told everyone about Pitaji—who knows whether everything she said was true—the family said she should get married and she wouldn't."

"You want to use the bathroom, Carolyn?" Kusum said. This was the excuse she and Ben had developed to tell her to leave a room. Carolyn departed. "That's not crazy."

"But she kept telling everyone about Pitaji—who knows whether it was true—even when it would do no good. After he was dead. She told everyone in the compound. Did she expect them to be kind to her? Did she expect them to admire her bravery? Asha walks down the street now and boys grab their buttocks and show her their tongues."

"Is that true?" Ben asked.

"Asha keeps a razor blade with her in case she's attacked. Once, in her old school, she was suspended because she used it on a boy who attacked her."

"No," Ben exhaled. Kusum knew this story. When the first of Anita's letters arrived telling of Pitaji, Kusum had felt accused, as if she had stolen something. This sense had not faded over the years, and when she translated Anita's letters for Ben, she left out the details that most revealed the abjectness of Anita's and Asha's lives.

"Yes! Yes! This is what Anita's done."

"How is this Anita's fault?" Kusum asked, avoiding Ben's surprised, inquisitive glance.

"Everything had been quiet for twenty years when she started this."

"How have you helped?" Ben asked softly.

"You don't know my worries," Rajesh said. "Everybody thinks I have plenty of money, but I don't."

Ben waited a moment. "I ask only because it seems Anita and Asha have so little."

Rajesh looked out at the gallery and the blue sky. "I might let her live with me."

Kusum felt relieved that Ben had not asked her how she had helped her sister. She too stared out the door.

"Did you ever get Ma's saris?" Rajesh asked.

"No." She had never even thought of inheriting anything from her mother.

"Pitaji told Anita to divide up Ma's saris between you and her."

She knew Rajesh wanted her to be angry at Anita. Kusum wondered if she would have felt guilt without years of Ben's steady goodness as an example. What would Ben think if he could read her thoughts?

She said to Ben, "I'll go help Anita with the tea. She works hard."

The next morning Kusum kept trying to wake, but her eyes would only open a minute or two and then sleep reclaimed her. In her dreams she heard a whapping sound, and it was this sound that woke her at last and drew her to the door of the living room. Carolyn and Asha were beating the sofa with broom handles. First one hit; the sofa puffed dust several feet high; they laughed; then the other lashed. They were covered in sweat and grime. Carolyn was wearing the dress that she was supposed to have on when they went to see the relatives who had raised Kusum. Kusum felt her hand curving to grab Asha. Asha should have noticed Carolyn's dress and not let her play this ridiculous violent game.

When angry, Kusum tried to be especially sweet. "Baby, come here and kiss me." Saying this was enough to calm her. Carolyn walked to her and kissed the chin Kusum thrust forward and then the nose she tilted down. Asha briefly regarded the kissing and returned to thrashing the sofa. "You might tear the cover," Kusum said to her.

"Why should I care," Asha answered, looking over her shoulder. "I am going to America."

Kusum wondered if Asha was crazy. Even a child knows to hide

the most blatantly selfish parts of herself. "You might not go," Kusum said, and struggling, forcing herself, continued, "I don't know if I want to bring you."

Asha did not turn around. She kept beating the sofa. She raised her arms far behind her back and whirred down as long a portion of the broom's handle as possible. "I'll begin shouting at the airport that I'm your daughter and you're leaving me behind. I can cry any time I want. You want to see me cry?

"I'm joking, Mausiji," Asha said as Kusum left the living room.

In the kitchen Kusum found Ben photographing Anita. Anita was frying chiwra and Ben kept making her move back and forth because of the sunlight and the waves of heat from the oil. It was probably years since Anita was last photographed, and she followed his directions eagerly.

Kusum bathed quickly, and soon they were out of the flat and on their way to Bittu Mamaji's house, where Kusum had grown up.

The houses are taller in Sohan Ganj than in the Old Vegetable Market, and this makes the alleys shadowy, so that they seem narrower. The side streets were noisy and crowded in a way Kusum's memory had left out. Some of her memories had even been addled. The shop whose owner she used to defeat regularly at cards was nowhere near the bottom of a sloping alley. And there were things she had completely forgotten. Badly maimed cows were everywhere. They passed a calf that had had one of its hooves pulped, so that a leg ended in a long dark flap of skin. The calf was hobbling toward a pile of garbage in such stunned fly-specked misery that Ben picked up Carolyn to keep her from the vision.

Kusum and Ben carried plastic bags full of gifts. They had wrapped the presents, although most were specifically requested.

"Where did you play?" Carolyn asked.

"All over. We were told to stay in one or two alleys, but, of course, we didn't. I knew every building."

"Did you play with Aunt Anita?"

"We lived apart. I didn't see her much."

"Did she live far away?"

"No." It was only a ten-minute walk from where Anita had grown up and where she had. At this idea Kusum thought, I am no worse than most people. I am good for even coming to India and thinking of adopting Asha.

They came to Bittu Mamaji's house. It was so narrow that a scooter parked in front covered half its length. There was a water pump across the street. "I remember when we got running water. Till then I used to be the one who carried the buckets for the entire house. That pump is where I got my bad back." Kusum laughed then, because she did not want to sound self-pitying. The stone steps up to the first story where Bittu Mamaji lived had grown beveled over generations. "My buckets did that," she said, and laughed again.