Don't Let Him Know (29 page)

‘Do you want something to drink?’ said Amit. ‘Tea?’

‘No, no, it’s too late. It will keep me up all night.’

‘I’ll get something,’ said Amit standing up.

‘Here, let me give you some money.’ Romola opened her handbag and started fumbling inside.

‘It’s all right,’ said Amit. ‘I have some.’

‘I know you do,’ she said with a wan smile, holding out a note. ‘But let me get it for you.’

Amit took the money from her. It was a fresh note, crisp with unused promise. At the soda counter, he suddenly folded the note and put it back in his wallet as if it was a letter, or a piece of paper with an important phone number. Pulling out one of his own crumpled notes, he asked the man if he had any Diet Coke.

‘No, sorry sir,’ he replied. ‘Only Pepsi. Mirinda. 7Up.’

He got himself a cup of neon-orange Mirinda. The man filled it carefully to the brim as if he was decanting a chemistry experiment and then handed it gingerly to Amit. It was fizzy at least, though it coated his mouth with instant cloying sweetness. He chugged it down sitting next to his mother.

‘When will you reach San Francisco?’ she asked.

‘It will be two in the morning for you, I think,’ he said.

They fell silent. It was almost a relief when the announcer’s plastic voice told all passengers of Flight 227 to Singapore to proceed for their security check.

‘I should go,’ said Amit standing up, gently prying the carry-on bag away from her fingers.

Romola clutched his hands instead, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, her lips trembling with the effort to keep them in.

‘Call me when you reach San Francisco,’ she said slowly as if reciting a prayer even though he’d just told her it would be 2 a.m. for her. Next to him a young newly-wed bride, her forehead awash in bright red sindoor, was preparing to go on the same flight and was weeping loudly, being passed from one snuffling family member to another, while her husband stood by awkwardly next to a small mound of luggage. For a moment Amit wanted to touch Romola’s feet to ask for her blessings. But they’d never been a family into demonstrations like that.

‘I’ll call,’ he said awkwardly wrapping his arms around her just as he had when he had first walked into the house. ‘Eat properly. Take care of yourself.’

After he checked his bags in, right before he walked into the security area, he looked over. She was still standing there just as he’d left her holding the rail. For a second he wondered what she’d do if he went running back and said it was all a misunderstanding, of course she was coming to San Francisco to live with him, forget the house. Or that he was coming back to live with her.

But instead he just raised his hand in tentative goodbye.

Then he turned and walked down the long empty hallway without turning back. And with every step he took, he felt Romola recede from him, growing smaller and smaller until she was just a pinprick of light in the indigo darkness swallowing up the city behind him.

It was only when he turned the corner and knew she could no longer see him that his shoulders suddenly sagged and his knees buckled. For the first time since he had come to India after his father died Amit began to weep, his tears coming in such great nauseous heaves, he was afraid he would throw up the Mirinda he’d just drunk. He could almost taste it in his mouth again, the plastic sweetness now tart with the taste of his betrayal. He held on to the wall for support as he rummaged in his pockets for some tissue.

The passengers boarding the flight filed past him quietly, weighed down by overstuffed carry-on bags, their gazes turned away, studiously avoiding him as if he was contagious. Only the weeping bride, merely sniffling now, her eyes still red, the eyeliner smudged, paused near him uncertainly. But then her husband nudged her elbow and she too moved on towards the airplane, looking back just once, her moist dark eyes luminous with gentle commiseration that he felt he didn’t deserve, but was nevertheless grateful for.

XII

The Scene of the Crime

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In friendly chat with bird or beast –

And half believe it true.

– Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

Romola had never wanted to come back to Carbondale. It had been Amit’s idea entirely. ‘It will be a change,’ he said cheerily one day after he had come home from work. ‘Why don’t we all take a trip together?’ Romola, who had been sitting on the loveseat in the afternoon sun, looked up at him perplexed. Outside another warm October evening in California was gliding to a leisurely close. The neighbour’s sons were riding their bicycles up and down the sidewalk, whooping and hollering, ringing their bells with mad glee.

‘Where, Dad?’ said Neel. He was sitting on the carpet near Romola trying to build a monster Lego truck and watch cartoons at the same time. Romola, who wanted to watch a talk show on television, was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her grandson on the loveseat, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the Lego manual, but it had complicated pictures and instructions. She leafed through the newspaper though she had already read it in the morning.

‘We’ll go to a small town in the middle of Illinois,’ Amit told his son. ‘It’s very pretty. It’s where your grandfather went to college. Did you know your grandmother lived there once as well?’

‘Is that where I am going to study?’ asked Neel, pausing in his construction work.

‘Oh no,’ his grandmother quickly said, taking off her gold-rimmed reading glasses. ‘You, my prince, will go to somewhere like Stanford. Or Harvard. Stanford is closer to home, na? But Amit, why do you want to go to Carbondale?’

‘I thought it would be nice to show Neel Baba’s old university,’ said Amit. ‘And aren’t you curious about what the town looks like now? It must be what, over thirty-five years since you saw it?’

‘There is nothing to see,’ Romola said sharply. ‘It’s just a university town. It’s not like it has monuments and temples. Or the Himalaya mountains. Or Disneyland.’

‘Yes,’ Neel thumped on the floor with his half-finished truck. ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’

June was taking Tupperware containers of food out of the refrigerator and putting them into the microwave. From her silence, Romola understood this was something that had already been discussed and decided, though Amit had framed it as a question.

‘Plus I think it would be good for you, Ma,’ said Amit gravely. ‘You know, for your, um—’ he cast a sideways glance at Neel, ‘your condition.’ His tone formed little quote marks in the air slotting Romola’s condition, quaintly, as unmentionable.

Romola had just been diagnosed with what the doctor called a mild case of depression. Amit would leave her pills out on the granite kitchen counter every morning before he went to work with a glass of water and a little yellow Post-it note that said ‘TAKE ME’ on it in large ballpoint letters. Romola didn’t know why she was supposed to take pills for something as natural as missing her own bed in Calcutta and being rather bored in California. Every morning she took the blue pill and popped it into a plastic Ziploc bag she kept tucked away at the bottom of her handbag. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t just flush it down the toilet, its water already bright blue from the Clorox toilet-bowl cleaner June used. Romola was a hoarder by nature and it seemed a waste to flush the pills away. Sometimes when she was stressed she put her hand in the bag and ran her fingers over the nubbly shapes. Their mere presence was strangely comforting, like prayer beads. Her mother used to like to go to bed with sleeping pills under her pillow, pills she never ever took but liked to keep close by. Her grandmother-in-law used to store jars of homemade mango chutney under her bed just in case she got sick and bed-bound. Perhaps some day her pills would come in handy too, thought Romola.

Since Romola had arrived in America for an ‘extended stay’ several years after Amit’s father’s death, she knew her son was trying to keep her busy and engaged. None of it was working that well. First he tried to teach her how to get online so she could email her nephews and nieces in India but Romola found it too confusing. He then took her to the Indian senior centre somewhere in Silicon Valley. Everyone there seemed to talk in either Gujarati or Telugu, neither of which she understood. Aren’t there any Bengalis here, she thought irritably. Someone asked her if she would like to come to the temple on Sunday and Romola, who had only visited temples in Calcutta when forced to by her grandmother-in-law, had a panic-stricken vision of being strapped into the back seat of the family sedan and forced to go on pilgrimage through the beige suburbia of Livermore. By the time the last senior yoga stretching exercise was over and the extra-perky middle-aged woman with a saccharine voice and streaky hair-dye job had led them through the ‘breath release’, Romola was beside herself. For a few days Amit kept asking her when she wanted to go back to the centre and Romola kept inventing excuses to avoid it. Eventually he gave up.

Perhaps it was that guilt that prevented her from protesting too strongly about the trip to Carbondale. Perhaps in the deepest recesses of her heart she was curious. Though she rarely mentioned it, she had thought of Carbondale often, of coming there as a young bride, of her first taste of America and how it had made her recoil.

‘It will be like going back to find our roots,’ laughed Amit.

It’s like going back to visit the scene of the crime, thought Romola but she kept it to herself.

Carbondale had not changed too much from how she remembered it, even though almost four decades had passed. As they drove into town in their rental car, Amit said, ‘So, Ma, what do you think? Does it look familiar at all?’

Romola stared out of the window at the little rows of white houses on small streets with names like Poplar and Laurel. It was autumn already, or what they called ‘fall’ here. Some of the trees were starting to change colour, the leaves turning gold with hints of burned orange. She recalled whole streets turning into a blazing bonfire of red and gold, something that never happened in Silicon Valley. She remembered a perfect brick-red poplar leaf she had picked up from the street and stuck in her diary. It was her first autumn in America. ‘What will you do with that dead leaf?’ Avinash had asked.

‘I’ll save it,’ she had replied. ‘Autumn leaves, like in that song.’

She had been wearing an ugly puffy blue jacket they had bought at the discount store that day. Its zipper would always get stuck. It had been her first ‘winter purchase’. She had left the jacket behind in America. But years later, back in Calcutta, she had found that leaf in her diary, still whole but brittle, like memory.

How young they had been, she thought, younger than Amit and June, scarcely older than the students sitting on the steps of the little houses and chatting, some of them smoking, holding bottles of beer. They drove slowly down the street, braking for a young man in denim cut-offs who ran out to retrieve an errant Frisbee.

‘Do you remember the street where you lived when you first came here, Romola?’ said June.

‘No, that was so long ago,’ Romola replied. ‘It wasn’t a sweet little house like these. It was an ugly modern apartment building. Who knows if it even exists anymore?’

But she did remember. If she closed her eyes she could picture it perfectly. It used to be called the Nile Apartments. The town had an Egyptian fixation. Their school newspaper was named the
Daily Egyptian
. There was nothing Egyptian about the Nile Apartments, though – squat, nondescript blue-grey blocks of identical buildings each with a pocket-handkerchief-sized threadbare lawn in front. Many of the international students ended up there, especially ones with families. The place always smelled of curries, as if years of homesickness had seeped into the walls. She remembered how her heart had sunk when she’d first seen it, this place she was going to have to call home. For a while she had tried to bravely make a home out of it – organizing her kitchen, buying brightly coloured cushions at yard sales, putting up wall hangings she had received as wedding presents. The day after she discovered Avinash’s illicit affair, it became the place she needed to escape.

She remembered standing at the window of the apartment every day combing her hair after a shower. Her hair had been long and black then, falling almost to her waist. The up-and-down rhythms of her hairbrush would calm her down, allaying her homesickness for one more day. Now her hair was grey, thinning at the top, the ends straggly. June had given her a trim the other day and it barely reached her shoulders now. ‘It looks trendy,’ Amit had said with an approving chuckle. Yes, of course, she remembered that apartment as if it had only been yesterday when Avinash turned the key in the lock and brought his new wife and their heap of luggage inside. Her mother-in-law had tied red ribbons, saved from their wedding presents, around the bulky suitcases, so they would have no trouble recognizing them at the airport.

‘No,’ she lied to her son. ‘I can’t remember where it was at all.’

But all day long she kept returning to it in her head, as if tripping over a child’s toy someone had left lying in her path. She remembered Michael Koh, the studious Malaysian physics PhD student who lived below them, and his brother George, who was taking courses in electrical engineering. She wondered whatever happened to them. When she and Avinash had finally left Carbondale, the Kohs had helped them load their suitcases into the taxi. As the taxi rounded the corner, Romola had turned back to wave to them – two men in floppy shorts silhouetted against the midday sun, their hands raised in farewell.