Gods Without Men (8 page)

Jaz could never understand why his mom and dad were so scared. He lived his life in B-more, not the Punjab. He went to a school ruled by black kids, Americans, not the other blacks, the Somalis and French speakers who came from families as adrift in the country as his own. He spoke English, recited the pledge, knew the capitals of the fifty states. He met plenty of white kids, Americans and new immigrants from Slovakia and Poland and the Ukraine. He met Latinos. He and the other “Asians,” Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Iranians and Tamils, none numerous enough to form their own clique, counted for little in the school hierarchy, but even as a skinny brown kid with freakishly long hair, he felt American. He played baseball, not cricket. He listened to the top forty on his Walkman. He’d go to the park with his family and the big world would parade before them, the Frisbee throwers and joggers and sunbathers, the crazy old ladies and baggy-shirted skateboarders, all seeming so free and easy, sharing the open space. Meanwhile his mom and dad would be delineating their boundaries by laying down blankets, huddling with the children over tiffin carriers and Tupperware containers of food, too timid even to bring a radio.

But, Mom, why can’t I go? It’s just a rock concert, just music
.

You have your studies, beta
.

His studies. Always that. Luckily he was clever. Math and science were his subjects. He could make numbers do the things he wanted. And just as he could see the patterns in an exponential or a logarithm, he could see there were other kinds of life to be led than his, lives that involved going on foreign vacations, having piercings, keeping a pet dog or a garden or a boat in the marina, playing with your band on MTV, locking your bike outside the vegan coffee shop and necking with your dreadlocked girlfriend. In such a life you could meet gora girls with short skirts and long legs, who’d talk to you instead of holding their noses and pretending to be disgusted by the phantom odor of curry. For a while, these girls were the sole focus of his life, girls in his class, in the neighborhood. Becky and Cathy and Carrie and Leigh … There were insuperable barriers to becoming their friend, let alone sleeping with them. His geeky Asian-ness. His hair. Above all, his hair. By fifteen he’d
swapped the topknot for a turban, but even then he had a carpet of soft down on his chin and long black wisps snaking along his jaw, a mess of unruly and undeniably childish growth that made the hormonal chaos of his adolescent skin look even worse. He was a monster, a pariah.

Some of the other Sikh boys did the unthinkable. They went to the barber. They endured their dads’ beatings, their moms’ tears. As if to taunt their more compliant brothers and cousins they began to spend hours in front of the mirror, shaving complicated fades and pencil-thin beards, teasing out fierce patterns of gelled spikes. They dressed like gangsters, smoked dope, drove their pimped-out rice-burner cars down to bhangra dances in D.C. They were the real Punjabi shers, the brave-hearts, always ready to go after the dirty black bandars walking on their block, the sick slut who dated white boys. Jaz couldn’t have copied them if he’d dared. He was a nerd, a mathlete. On the fridge in his parents’ kitchen was a yellowing photo of him, aged sixteen, standing behind his prizewinning statistics exhibit at the city science fair. He always noticed his eyes in that picture. Glazed, fixed on escape.

Everyone had heard of MIT. Uncle Daljit had even visited the campus on some kind of tour. It was A-number-one, the best. Of course Jaz would need a scholarship, but his teachers said that wasn’t impossible. He was an exceptional student, gifted. How good that sounded in his parents’ ears.
Our gifted son
. So it was decided: Jaz would try for MIT. The household organized itself round the mission. The television was muted. Meals were brought up on a tray. His mother and sisters moved around like ground technicians on an immigrant moon shot. He was too self-absorbed to wonder why similar weight had never been put on the ambitions of his sisters. What had Seetal dreamed of before the hospital laundry? Or Uma, who packed chocolate bars alongside their mom? Both girls had been married by the age of twenty-one. No scholarships for them, just Uncles Amardeep and Baldev.

He worked obsessively. On the physical level, energy and matter were tractable; unlike higher-order phenomena such as girls, their difficulties could be tamed by formulae. His SAT scores were exceptional, and one day he found himself walking across the MIT campus wearing a wide
batik tie and one of Uncle Malkit’s old suits, expertly altered by Seetal so it had looked, to the tastemakers on the family couch, quite stylish. Whether it was his manic determination or his impeccable minority credentials, the admissions board was impressed, and amid family rejoicing, he was offered a full scholarship, on condition he maintained his academic performance. The eagle had landed.

One September morning, with his waist-length hair wrapped in a bright pink turban, a garland round his neck and a tikka mark on his forehead, he was taken to the station in his uncle Inderpal’s cab and put on the train to his new life. His mother was already putting the word out for a bride.

In Cambridge, the first thing he did—before looking for his dorm, before registering for classes—was find a barber. He was determined that his student ID would have a new person on it, the one who lay in bed that first night running his fingers over his buzz-cut bristles, feeling the unfamiliar shape of his skull and trying not to cry. The next day he falteringly began to invent a different character, more suitable than Jaswinder Singh Matharu to inhabit the domes and towers of a university campus. As Jaz—no family name—he avoided the desi scene, stayed away from the speed-dating, the cultural societies—anything that might remind him of the shame he was trying to outrun. His roommate Marty took it upon himself to introduce him to activities he’d previously seen only in the teen comedies he’d rented back home in Baltimore. Together they shotgunned beer, smoked pot and went to rowdy parties where people dressed up in bedsheets or bathing suits and groped one another in upstairs bedrooms. At one of these parties Jaz lost his virginity to a girl called Amber, who was just like the goris he’d always dreamed about, except paralytically drunk on Red Bull and vodka. Afterward he thought he was in love and followed her around for a couple of weeks, until she told him to stop, explaining that what they’d done was a “onetime thing.” He asked Marty what this meant. Nothing good, bro, was the answer. Jaz told himself she was nothing but a gandi rundi, a filthy whore like all white girls.

In this way, most of his first semester passed before he had to face his
parents and show the Punjabi world what he’d done. His cousin Jatinder was getting married in Philadelphia. He had to attend. No excuses. At least, he told himself, it would get the whole thing over with in one shot. His arrival at the reception, held in a banquet room at a hotel, was dramatic. Uncle Malkit, taking a call outside, didn’t recognize him at first. When Jaz said hello, Uncle Malkit’s eyes widened. His parents were literally speechless. Instead of hugging him, his mom held him at arm’s length, a stricken expression on her face. His father wouldn’t even shake his hand. Later, he followed Jaz into a restroom and grabbed his collar, his face contorted with anguish. For a long time he struggled for words. Jaz wondered when he was going to hit him. “You look like a thug,” he whimpered, then let him go.

His sister’s husband, Baldev, was deputized to give him the lecture. He hoped Jaz was happy. He hoped it felt good spitting in the faces of his parents, who’d slaved every day, who’d made such sacrifices. So proud of him, but the minute he left home he’d thrown away his religion. He was a grown man; it was his decision. Baldev understood how hard it was to keep to one’s culture, especially in this maderchod Amrika. But couldn’t Jaz see how cruel he was being? He’d killed something inside his maa; he’d trampled on his father’s honor. How could the old man hold his face up in the community now that his son was no better than those black gaandus who ran around behaving like monkeys, fighting and making trouble? Jaz muttered something about finding his own path, a phrase much on his mind at the time.

After Jatinder’s wedding, he threw himself into guilt-ridden study. He stopped going to parties, abstained from drinking and, apart from his weekly trips to the barber, tried to go back to being the good Sikh boy who appreciated his parents’ sacrifice. His mother eventually broke the silence, phoning him to ask if he was coming back for the vacation. No, he told her. He had work to do. He promised to see the family as much as his studies permitted, but for the next couple of years his visits were few and far between.

Marty, never the most sensitive of souls, didn’t really understand the change in his party apprentice. He and Jaz grew apart. In his second year
Jaz found different friends. He read European novels and bought a lava lamp. Day and night, he wore a pair of John Lennon glasses with purple lenses. He’d sit under a tree, pretending to read, desperately hoping to be distracted. In this way, he met his first real girlfriend, a gothy biology major called Lynsey who seemed to accept him as a tortured intellectual. They were together almost two years. The simple things they did—going camping, eating in restaurants—convinced Jaz there really was something worthwhile about the larger America, something richer than his hormonal fantasies.

The family found the new Jaz hard to understand. He was dimly aware he made everyone uncomfortable by reading
The New York Times
at the breakfast table, commenting acidly on Bill Clinton or Bosnia. If he’d been able to put it into words, he would have said he was trying to broaden their horizons. One summer he worked double shifts in his cousin Madan’s convenience store, then got a passport and went to Europe with friends. When he came back, he drove home, and without thinking went downtown to a deli, bought a few things and stashed them in his mom’s fridge. It wasn’t just the strange food (a Camembert and some sliced mortadella) that outraged her; it was the invasion of her space, the implicit criticism of her mothering. Her son was in her house: It was her job to feed him. Jaz was angry that she threw his stuff in the trash. Then he remembered where he was. Even heating a can of beans would have been a provocation.

He had his vacation pictures developed and showed his dad the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate. He expected him to be interested, or at least proud that his son had visited such exotic places. He tried to make him laugh by repeating some mildly spicy Italian phrases he’d learned in Naples, but the old man just looked dejected. At the time Jaz interpreted it as disapproval. Later he realized it was a kind of mourning; he was sad because he couldn’t connect himself with this image of his smiling crop-haired son, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, clinking glasses with sunburned white boys over plates of steak frites.

Lynsey broke up with him. She wanted, she said, to be part of his life, but he kept shutting her out. He tried to tell her it wasn’t like that.
How could he explain the impossibility of taking a gori back home, let alone introducing one as his girlfriend? None of his friends had met his parents. The few times his mom and dad made the trip up to MIT, he hustled them off campus as fast as possible. He endured a torturous lunch and took them to see the sights in a rental car. They were polite and attentive, but the feeling of relief when it came time for them to leave was obviously mutual.

And so his compartmentalized life continued. He stayed at MIT for grad school, partly because it deferred the moment when he’d have to choose a career. He’d always been more interested in theory than experiment, and his adviser steered him toward the field of quantum probability, where he worked on reconciling competing mathematical descriptions of the physical world, attempting to understand life at a scale where precision dissolved into indeterminacy.

As if, back then, he had any idea of what indeterminacy really meant.

The boy was now four. He didn’t speak. He didn’t make eye contact. He wasn’t toilet trained. And Jaz was wrestling with him by the swimming pool in a cheap motel, the kind of place they were condemned to stay in because even though they had money, money Jaz wanted to use to give his family the best of everything, the romantic inns he and Lisa knew from the old days wouldn’t put up with the disruption. It was always the same. Calls from the front desk; the discreet suggestion that they find somewhere more child-friendly. They’d tried it on the way from LAX. A junior manager had knocked on the door of the room. Was everything OK? She was sorry to intrude but there’d been a complaint from another guest.

Some vacation. Raj kept them up all night. At five a.m., since they were both awake and angry, they’d decided to leave. They’d driven on until they saw the sign from the highway.
Drop Inn. Vacancy
. It was mid-morning. They’d had no breakfast. Jaz didn’t think they could make it any farther. He figured that in a place like this no one would look down their noses. The woman at the desk was polite enough. She probably saw and heard worse on a regular basis. As a precaution, he took the two rooms at the end of the block: one for the family and the one
next door for insulation. No one should have to endure the sound of his son through thin walls.

“Come on, Raj. Let’s help Mommy unpack.”

He picked him up and slung him under one arm like a parcel. Raj began to scream properly, the full amplified monotone. For a moment Jaz fantasized about throwing him into the pool, watching him sink to the bottom. His angry face disappearing under the rippling water, the silence afterward.

Joanie had to shield her eyes against the glare. She’d scrambled up the cliff to get a better view of the site and boy, was it hot work! Her sundress was clinging unpleasantly to her figure and she could feel little droplets of sweat running down under the band of her straw bonnet. She didn’t care. The place looked so magnificent! The gleam of cars and trucks and trailers, parked all higgledy-piggledy on the desert floor among the mesquite and creosote bushes, the people swarming past the tents and stalls—what a hive of activity! What a carnival!