The Abundance: A Novel (15 page)

I did everything anyway. Abhi and I didn’t meet for days at a time. I slept in my mother’s flat—lay there the whole skittering, cricket-loud night. I saw Ronak and Mala’s logic in preferring the flat board of the swing: it had no legs in contact with the ground, so there was less chance of a cockroach adventuring over you. I tried to ignore the midnight circus of her rats—the scrape of a thali, the tumble of a pot …

Once I shook my mother awake at two in the morning and demanded we stay at my brother’s. She said no. “I want to stay in my house,” she insisted. What house, her house was sold years ago, this was just a flat in the city. She said it was
her
house and that she had kept everything running these past years all by herself. She laid her arm over her eyes. A small mound in a white saree, but stubborn as a mountain. She wasn’t going to move, so neither could I.

I shouldn’t have asked, knowing her stubbornness. I had always urged her to come stay in America. I still see fantasies of that alternate life for her, that alternate death. On my first visits home, I used to beg her to let me book a plane ticket. The Western Lands felt magical and healing. If I could just get her there, I imagined, her hair might thicken and darken, her cheeks might fill out. I had seen them for myself, those grandmothers who came over. She could have been one of them: an old maaji in sneakers, brown cardigan over the saree, strolling past Bath & Body Works, the Gap for Kids, the food court. Bespectacled and otherworldly but covered by Medicare, paramedics never more than five minutes away. I fantasized about seeing her peel the stickers off Chiquita bananas—gigantic, yes, but not as sweet as Indian ones, she would declare. I could picture her sipping milky, cardamom-flecked tea, her Ritz crackers and chevda on a separate saucer. She would have had her own room on the ground floor—I imagined it sometimes when I went into Abhi’s study: at once neater and dirtier than the rest of the house, a little patch of India, smelling of her, smelling of India, Parachute coconut oil in the blue plastic bottle, ayurvedic turmeric, mothballs, that luggage scent that never went away, her own stale body odor, gods and kumkum in the corner, a tiny incense stand (silver, blackish with collected ash), the hexagon of sandalwood incense sticks from the Indian grocer, pills for hypertension on the nightstand, cotton balls to stuff in her ears come winter, a quilt in a square at the foot of her bed. She would have folded clothes, she would have sliced zucchini for me, she would have watched the children and perhaps taught them more Gujarati than I was able to. I would have brought her bhajans,
Ramayana
recitations, Sanskrit stotras intoned with the ocean in the background. At first cassette tapes, then CDs, finally an iPod with everything on it.

Years more, ten years, maybe fifteen years more she might have lived. She might have retired to her room at seven like always and passed from half-sleep to nothing, propped on two down pillows, earbuds in her ears and the white cord vanishing beneath the blanket, blissful, the lamp still on at her elbow, Track 04 still playing, some spiraling alaap of Pandit Jasraj that would follow her soul through the chimney and up into the slate-gray Ohio sky. But she never agreed to come.
I want my own flat, I want my own place
, she explained.
And besides
,
a parent mustn’t live in a daughter’s house.

At night, after everyone is asleep, Mala opens her laptop and sits in the glow. She starts to type, rapidly, as everyone of her generation does. It sounds like a small private rainfall. Our house has high ceilings and hardwood floors. Her key strokes echo. I can hear her from the study, where I am sleeping for the first time tonight. Maybe she is writing an e-mail to Ronak, giving him an update. Does he care to be told of anything but the big changes?

The ceiling of my days has been lowered by one flight. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping here. I regretted the night winding down. Sachin, who had made our cheeks ache with Gujarati jokes, put away the pistachio ice cream, and Mala rinsed the bowls and spoons. They went upstairs. Abhi and I went to the study.

Its dimensions felt wholly strange in the darkness. Twenty minutes into my sleeplessness, I whispered to Abhi, “I didn’t want you to give up your study.”

There was no need to check if he was awake. I had my head on his shoulder, and I could sense his body’s tense wakefulness. “I haven’t given up my study,” he said. “I just moved my study upstairs.”

“That room is half the size.”

“I didn’t use most of the room I had in here. It was empty space.”

“It wasn’t. It was space for you to think.”

“This is the room I think in,” he said, tapping on his head. “Besides, we were going to turn this room into a first-floor guest room, remember? If Ma or Ba had come to live with us, I would have transferred upstairs anyway.”

“We talked about that years ago.”

“So?”

I shook my head. “This has been your study for years, Abhi.”

“I like it up there.”

I lifted my head and looked at his face to see if he was lying. I can tell when he is lying; he does it to spare me sometimes. Like:
Of course they processed it wrong, they’re going to pay for that scan in full
. He looked as if he meant it, but I could only see his profile by the flame-shaped night-light.

“The window upstairs, it looks out over the back. Just yesterday, I saw the neighbor’s grandchildren on their trampoline.”

I nodded.

“I think I’m going to sneak out to their trampoline one warm night and do some jumps.”

I smiled. He yawned.

“Let’s go to sleep, okay?”

Abhi, arm across my stomach, is pretending to sleep right now, here in the room where he used to come alive. He has started lingering until I fall asleep. His mind stays awake. He leaves when I steady my breathing for a minute straight. I have told him he can go right away, he doesn’t need to lie next to me, but he says he wants to. He enjoys getting more rest, he says, he’s fresher during the day. But I know he doesn’t care about being groggy during the workday so long as his nights in the study have him at peak alertness. He can prescribe Sinemet or check a Babinski reflex on two hours of sleep or fewer. That can all be done on the auxiliary generator. It’s brain-stem function for him. The main generator kicks on at midnight. His study burns white against a backdrop of sleeping suburban houses.

I slow my breathing. He starts to extricate himself. His arm goes weightless by degrees. He turns gingerly, watching how his movements transmit across the mattress. It’s the way he used to leave for work on those kindergarten mornings when Ronak, scared of lightning or simply wanting his mommy, had shuffled into the master bedroom and come between us to sleep. (Even though she was the kid sister, Mala had no fears back then. Monsters, Abhi used to joke, were scared of her.) As he has done every night recently, Abhi stands and looks at me a while. Even though I am keeping my eyes shut, I can sense his gaze on my face. Its warmth makes me feel like I’m napping outdoors in the sun. He keeps the knob turned as he closes the door.

I try to sleep for real, but I can’t. Abhi is upstairs now—the light on in his new study, his mind in low earth orbit. I go outside to where Mala is typing. She works by the dull light from the hall. Answering e-mails from work, maybe. I put my fingers on the switch, but I don’t turn on the light. Should I ask her first? Best not to disturb her concentration. It is so rare for her, now that she has the kids, to get this kind of alone time. She usually checks her e-mail and the news before sleep. When I was a mother, I don’t remember having anything I needed to catch up with. I never felt left out. Mothers now do; motherhood feels like pulling over and parking on the shoulder of a highway. I peer more closely at the screen. She isn’t on the Internet, I don’t think. The light from the screen illuminates a card from this afternoon. Three more are at her elbow. She sets it down and types again, her fingers moving while her head is still turned. I step up noiselessly (what do I weigh anymore?) to read the file name across the top: Mom.doc.

Mala turns. “Hey, Mom.”

I smile and stroke her hair. “Busy?”

“Just taking some notes.”

“Keep working.”

“I’m almost done. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t sleep?”

“I’ll sleep soon.”

Her hair feels like mine used to. She has many of her father’s features, but this detail, at least, is mine.

“What recipe is that?” I ask.

“The dahl we made today.”

I see what I have been doing forever only now that I can read it. What always felt like one reflex is really a sequence of small steps. It astonishes me that the dahl I have been making for the past thirty years can fill a whole screen with letters. It seems so important there, so permanent. But it’s really just a cup of dusty-yellow mung beans soaked overnight.

“Do you need anything, Mom?”

“I’m just getting a glass of water.”

“Are you sure you don’t want the monitor?”

She doesn’t say
baby
monitor; she’s certain I would never say yes to
baby
monitor. Tonight, over ice cream, she proposed “the monitor” for the first time; she had gotten Sachin to make a case for it to me. She had probably coordinated with him, knowing I would be less likely to say no to him. A baby monitor! As if I would let my every toss and grunt be transmitted upstairs in case I needed—what? A walk to the bathroom? “I’ll be fine, Mala. I’m getting a glass of water.”

“Okay. But if you kept the monitor, you could ask for it, and we’d hear.”

“I am okay without it.”

At the refrigerator, I drink and pause and listen to her typing. The sound comforts me.

“Do you want water, Mala?”

“Sure, thanks.”

I open the cupboard to get her a fresh glass.

“Your glass is fine, Mom,” she says distractedly, picking up the card again and setting it in her done pile, on the other side of the laptop.

I know her. She will want two ice cubes. I set her water beside her finished note cards without speaking. How satisfying it feels to set drink before thirst, food before hunger. I pass the light switch again and rest my hand on it.

“Do you want the light on?”

“I’m almost done. Last thing is uploading the pics.”

“The ones you took on your phone?”

“Yeah.”

“The light will be better for your eyes.”

“All right. Turn it on.”

The brightness, sharp as a whistle, shatters the quiet. I use the dimmer to restore some softness to the night.

“Good night, Mala.”

“Night, Mom. Tell me if you need anything.”

“Okay.”

I turn to the hall that my shadow fills. Mala types another line, then sips from my glass, her mouth where my mouth was.

In the study I still can’t sleep. I look around. My bed is where his desk was. His room smells of books. His walls have no nail holes—this space is for pure mathematics, austere. Uninterrupted planes. Abhi even kept the picture of me and the children propped on the bookshelf, not mounted. As a rule, he doesn’t like paintings or pictures on walls. A Home Sweet Home plaque and three staggered porcelain wall-tiles hang in the kitchen because the kitchen is under my jurisdiction. The main room’s vast walls are bare. It is where we entertain guests, or used to. Whenever we had someone over, I would see our blank walls through their eyes and complain to Abhi that we needed paintings or at least mirrors. He would shake his head and say the walls were beautiful the way they were. Why clutter them? He thought blank sheets of printer paper beautiful, too. Blank sheets of graph paper, even more so.

Before today’s move upstairs, this study had been disrupted only once. After Abhi got his award, a local station asked to interview him for the ten o’clock news. He had fielded phone calls for several days prior to this, and six different magazines had done written interviews with him, but this was the first interest shown by a television station. When the crew said they wanted to do the taping in his study, he agreed right away.

The next day, two cameramen, keeping their boots on, set up their equipment. Soon a huge camera tripod was squatting in Abhi’s sanctum like a gigantic insect. After a second trip to the news van, they brought a lamp on a pole, the sort used at photography studios. They had to tilt it through the doorway. Dirty-looking orange extension cords coiled on the hardwood. We kept staring at their boots, but it was too late to say anything. The soiling was done. The cameraman moved Abhi’s chair so he was sitting in front of some books.

The local news had sent the doctor who did its health segments to do the interview, probably because Abhi was a doctor, too. It was the closest thing to a qualification anyone there could claim. We had watched Dr. Tim’s segments for years. I had no idea his face was so pink in real life. It could have been from the sun, but the flush looked more like the kind that comes from smoking—Dr. Tim, who always warned how cigarettes cause lung cancer.

Before the taping started, Dr. Tim wanted Abhi to put the medal around his neck, but Abhi explained how one didn’t generally wear awards of this nature. It wasn’t done.

“That’s probably true, but it would be helpful for the viewers to, you know, actually
see
the medal,” Dr. Tim suggested, aligning papers on his lap.

“It’s not from the Olympics.”

“Sure, sure.”

“I can stand it on the shelf behind me.”

“That would be helpful—Chuck, is it in the shot?”

The cameraman nodded and leaned forward to speak quietly to Dr. Tim. “It’s in the shot, but you can’t see it. There’s glare off the case.”

“Maybe I can take off the cover?” said Abhi.

“Let’s see. You know … why don’t we take it out?”

Abhi brought out the medal, which had a ribbon affixed to it. Dr. Tim held out his hand. The cameraman and Dr. Tim tried different locations and finally set up the medal so that it dangled off the shelf. The case itself they used as a weight to hold the ribbon in place. I stood in the doorway behind the cameraman. Abhi touched a handkerchief to his forehead and scalp, where the light’s reflection shone intensely white.