The Abundance: A Novel (21 page)

Flight or drive, it’s no use pleading. The times are there on the creased printout. Or else the drive’s first leg has to be coordinated with Vivek and Shivani’s after-lunch nap. The thinking is practical. The parents’ need to leave hastens their farewell hugs.

Shivani is in her car seat. I tap the van window for a smile. I screen my temples against the tinted glass and make a face at Vivek. After the van pulls out, a window slides down so a hand can wave. The hand pulls in, the window slides up. All four profiles have turned toward home. Then the van is gone, but for a few beats afterward I am still waving. Abhi and I cross our arms and shuffle back into the house too big by two rooms again. Abhi turns on the television, but in vain. Not silent is not the same as full.

I still take care of the mail. My daily expedition is to bring it indoors. I open and sort it and pay the utilities and credit card bills. Abhi insists he can do it all online, just a few clicks on the tablet he carries around the floors now, but I don’t want to let go of mailing our payments. The stamp may be a cracked bell, but up its edge is the word
FOREVER
. At some point during my overlong day, sealed indoors against the too-hot Ohio summer that quite recently was a too-cold Ohio spring, I pile the credit card solicitations and home improvement deals with the weekly SuperSaver circular; the utility and Amex bills with the bank and Scudder statements; the medical journals with the CME conference flyers: Alzheimer’s in Maui, Sleep Medicine in Tampa, Cerebrovascular Thrombolysis in sunny San Diego.

I have a fourth category, for Abhi’s mathematics-related mail. For years there was nothing at all. For six months, it filled its own bin. Since then, the mail has petered off. Intermittently, Abhi gets envelopes from strangers in faraway universities. These are separate from the e-mails, of course, and their attachments. Because he is (or was) a fellow amateur, other amateurs tend to send Abhi copies of the Unified Field. I sort the occasional manila envelope from an obscure professor in Hungary or South Africa, addressed using small, closely packed capital letters. They never spell his name wrong.

Four times in May, I noticed the thin envelopes that meant payment for publication. I held each to the window light and could make out a check. The fourth check was from the London Mathematical Society.

“You’ve been doing a lot of good work recently, haven’t you, Abhi?” I asked him when he got home. “You’re getting papers published everywhere. London, too, I saw?”

He nodded as he unlaced his shoes. “How was the day? Did you do okay?”

“You aren’t telling me the good news anymore. You used to tell me every time you got something accepted.”

“Don’t worry about those mailings.”

“I still care. I still want to know if you are having more success, Abhi.”

He slid one shoe over the heel, then the other. “Of course, I don’t doubt it. I’m just saying you can put it in a pile. I can take care of it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me such good things were happening?”

He hooked a finger in his tie and loosened it. “It’s a very long process. It gets read, it goes to peer review, the professors take their time. It comes back, they read what the professors said about it … It takes time. That is work I did last year. They only got back to me recently.”

“The London Mathematical Society, Abhi! Isn’t this a big thing?

“Yes.”

“When did they get back to you?” My voice, involuntarily, fell. “December?”

“January.”

“It wasn’t a good time.”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t have minded celebrating. It might have cheered me up.”

He shrugged. “It didn’t cheer
me
up.”

“Well, now you can be cheerful, right?” I asked as if something had changed between January and June. As if things hadn’t gotten, in their own slow humiliating way, worse. “Abhi? Can’t we celebrate tonight?”

His sunken eyes turned to me. He stood abruptly to change the mood.

“How do you want to celebrate?”

“I don’t know.”

“We can sit on the recliner together and watch
Chupke Chupke
again.”

I smiled. My hands came up and clapped two noiseless claps. “Yes! Can we do that?”

My smile didn’t make him smile. My shrunken face must have crinkled strangely and clashed with his memory of my smile. He looked away.

“You don’t have to finish something, do you?”

“No. Not at all. It’s been a long time since we last saw it. Let’s watch it tonight.”

Having ice cream or sparkling grape juice to celebrate wouldn’t have worked, now that I neither hunger nor savor, so we saw the movie instead. We were rewatching all our old comedies, one a week, cycling through them a second time. I like going back to the old Hindi movies. Abhi is indifferent. He watches them to be with me. I know I am taking up his time, but by now it is a ritual. He catnaps on me, then works in his study into the early morning. I am not soft anymore, although I am his pillow. I make sure I laugh without shaking my shoulders. I stay very still from the neck down. My face, ghosted white by the screen’s light, periodically tilts back, and my lips peel away from my teeth.

*   *   *

After Mala’s weeklong visit, I decide to let people know.

It is a project. Abhi sits next to me holding the handset and an old-fashioned spiral-bound notebook where he has scrawled the numbers of our circle. I tell him we should only call family and let the news spread on its own, but he has more liberal notions of who deserves a call. Not just every family in India; not just the local friends with whom we had dinner parties and after-dinner card games. Our old, once-a-year friends in Tennessee and the Bay Area all, in his opinion, would do well to hear my voice. “They are going to call you anyway when they find out,” he says.

“I know, so let them.”

“Who knows how things will be two months, three months from now?”

So that is the time frame he has in his mind. “Big news travels faster than that.”

“But it doesn’t travel that fast
uniformly
,” Abhi says, waxing professorial as he does when he wishes to convince me. “People get left out. People get missed. These are our people.” He points at the book. “At least people like Dhimant bhai.”

“We haven’t gone to Virginia in six years!”

“I have the book out. This is the morning. Let’s just take care of everyone and get it over with. Then if you want to leave the phone off the hook for a while, fine.”

“Why call Virginia?”

“Let’s do the India calls and then see how we feel.”

“Dhimant bhai is your friend. He is not my friend.”

“Wait a minute. He is a family friend. He helped me in New York when I came here for the first time. I stayed in his apartment for two months.”

“At least start with the India calls.”

“If your friend Kalyani had this going on, imagine how you would feel finding out from some third party. Just over dinner at someone’s house…”

“This is going to be more exhausting than you think.”

He is already dialing the international code. “Let’s take it one call at a time.”

“Who are you calling first?”

This is a petty point, but he is dialing his own eldest brother, and I want the first India relative who knows to be my brother—even if only by minutes. Abhi aborts the call without arguing, licks his thumb, and flips to my brother’s number.

The calls take hours, as I predicted. I had put off this strange obligation for as long as possible. I am a shy person, and there is nothing so public and look-at-me as spilling one’s mortality in a living room three thousand miles away. The closest relatives in India suggest flying over to help. They are well-off, but they are not rich; two families have daughters with weddings coming up, and I do not want them tapping into their savings. I claim I will ask if I need them to come. I point out how Mala stayed the week with me, and how both families are visiting next month.
I am taken care of here
, I tell my brother. It makes me feel very proud to say that. I get to show them all: Look, here in America our children are close to us, too. I raised them right. They are caring for me in my time of need.

I dread telling the cruise-loving Nainas of our circle most of all. I fear my chitchat-and-potluck relationships will break under the weight of my news. I don’t want their awkwardness, their visits, their feelings of obligation. But everyone, including Naina herself, reacts as I imagine myself reacting to a similar phone call. Their shock and grief are genuine and full of urgency. The wives offer to bring meals. Calls come in over the rest of the day as word spreads locally. Abhi has trouble remembering which family he has promised which evening, so he starts a database on a scratchpad, the days of the coming weeks listed in columns. Soon each day has a dash and a name.

They offer to drive me to appointments any time I need. They offer this sincerely, but who would take up such an offer? The meal is different. It can be made and dropped off at their leisure. But a ride I don’t want. My friend’s day would have to be built around my two hours. I would bring my odor of mortality into her car, her mind, her morning.

The visits begin the day after the phone calls. They all want to help, my book club friends, my dinner-party doctors’ wives, my house-key and houseplant neighbors two blocks over—and they all want to know. Has it spread? When could I first tell that something was wrong? What was the first thing I felt? (Prompting, I am sure, the inevitable thought:
I have an ache there, too, sometimes…)
What did the doctors say? How are they treating it? And then the question never verbalized but ever-present, the one they ask every time their eyes flick over my wasting body. How long?

Sometimes people write these things in a book. I have so much trouble answering the questions I am asked, maybe I should write a book. That would give me distance. Everyone’s eyes would be on the words, not on me. I could hand over a copy and say, “It’s all in there. Read it later. Talk to me about something else for a while.”

I would still hold some things back: how many injections, how many pills. The brooch and earrings on the oncologist’s nurse practitioner, her face smeared flawless with foundation that contrasts with the aged, big-ringed hands that take down my answers. The oncologist showing me and Abhi the scrolling images of an abdomen scan, pointing out exactly what is new and what has grown.

Whoever read it would think, in frustration, where is it? Where has it spread? How long do you have?

I would have my answer ready, if I chose to answer. This is not a book about dying. This is a book about life.

Milind Shah used to invite us to the karaoke parties at his house. I was no singer, and no amount of polite clamor could stir me from the couch. I would sip Diet Sprite and eat salted cashews from the crystal bowl. Couple after couple would insert their CDs and present what they had rehearsed. Abhi had a good singing voice—Milind and the other couples would never accept a no from him. Besides, it was proper for at least one member of a couple to perform.

Abhi hated these parties, but Milind—Mel—ranked extremely high in the hospital administration. (Back then he was chief medical officer; recently he has risen even higher.) We had to go. Abhi never attended things he didn’t want to attend, except these karaoke parties. On the drive there, I would try to console him. “There’s actually no audience at all,” I said, “except me, because I’m not there to sing. Everyone else is a singer, which means they are either nervous about their performance, or they’re up there, singing. Or they’re wondering how they just sounded. Really, you could be singing in the shower.”

This didn’t keep Abhi from his ice-cube-crunching irritation—interrupted, I confess to my amusement, when he had to get up and sing some benign old Mukesh song. Abhi’s voice sounded best when he sang Mukesh.

Kal khel mein

Hum ho na ho

Gardish mein taare

Rahenge sadaa

“Tomorrow I may or may not still be in the game, but the stars in the heavens will remain forever…” Abhi’s resentment would fixate on Milind-Mel, who enjoyed his karaoke parties immensely and expressed his good mood with lively, crowd-pleasing Kishore Kumar songs. At the end of each evening he would turn serious and sing a long, classical geet, during which he would roll his head wildly to match the intensity of his alaaps.

“That? That’s just amateur humming,” he would say afterward, collecting the compliments. “By the way, Kishore Kumar wasn’t classically trained either, you know. Manna Dey, Yesudas, the other classical singers—they looked down on him. But he had a natural command of the ragas. It was in his blood.”

Over dinner, when Milind presided, the men’s conversation would turn to investments, the market, bonds, Treasury bills, inflation rates, what the Fed was going to do. They asked Abhi’s opinion. With Ronak working in Manhattan, Abhi must have some kind of insider knowledge, yes? Abhi always disappointed them. They could not believe his utter disinterest. They thought he must be holding back the tips he got from Ronak and secretly making a killing in the market.

How alike they all looked, sitting under the chandelier. Balding, prosperous Indian physicians in late middle age, polo shirts, khaki shorts, the children grown and off living distant lives. Identical. No indication, on the surface, of Abhi’s secret life, of his abstract breathtaking inner world, where mathematics had the same relationship to money as poetry did to news.

Abhi ran into Milind in the doctor’s lounge the day he heard about my diagnosis. Milind expressed his shock and such while continuing to smear cream cheese on his bagel. While Abhi gave him the details—when we found out, what the prognosis was, what the scans were showing—Milind bit into his bagel and kept nodding with cream cheese at the corners of his mouth. “He must have been catching a quick breakfast, Abhi,” I said in Milind’s defense. “He must have had patients to see.”

But Abhi was full of indignation he hadn’t been able to express at the time. He described in detail Milind’s breakfast. “Then
Mel
asks me whether there are any clinical trials. And right away looks down to choose a banana. I am still answering, and he starts
peeling
it.”