The Abundance: A Novel (26 page)

“First of all, chances are, it will never get famous. These things usually don’t, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. It’s just that we’ve got a chance here, enough of a chance that a publisher might gamble on it.” He points at his phone. “
That’s
what you’re seeing. Right there.”

“Yeah, but what if hundreds of complete strangers are suddenly talking about our private lives?”

“It is private,” I echo her. “It is all so
private
, Ronak.”

“Even if we did write about ourselves—”

“Mom’s written articles before.”

“We’re not putting Mom through this! I don’t care how much money they offer, this is a stupid idea!”

“Look, by the time this thing is even…” He doesn’t finish.

Mala crosses her arms and sits back. “Finish that sentence,” she challenges.

Ronak purses his lips. “You know, I try to be a part of this thing you two have, I try to be a part of it…”

“Finish that sentence.”

“I should have just let you two have this. I was stupid to try and be a part of it. This is your thing, Mala.”

“Finish. That. Sentence.”

Ronak swallows and shakes his head.

Abhi stands up. “Enough. We all need to separate.”

“What Ronak was about to say,” Mala says loudly, enjoying the kill, “is that by the time this thing is even published, Mom won’t—”

Ronak leaps off the couch. I stare for a moment in panic. “Ronak!” My cry misses his back. I hear his feet go rapidly up the stairs.

“Everyone relax, relax,” says Abhi in an even voice.

I feel prickles up my neck. Will my boy leave? Will he call a cab, get a rental car, drive home in the middle of the night? Or change his flight to tomorrow morning instead of Sunday? I should have defended him. Why didn’t I? He was trying to please me. I get off my couch. I step on a splayed novel as I race after him. Mala shouts, “Mom!” Abhi and Mala stay to either side of me. Abhi begs me to please, please calm down. I hurry past them to the stairs and lurch forward to climb, clumsily, like an animal long standing on its hind legs giving up the pretense. Palms and feet thud stair and stair. My movements have never been so narcotic-sloppy as now. Can he hear me? Might he think I have fallen? If he hears me, he doesn’t come out of his room. I call his name again. He had to have heard that. He doesn’t come. In his room, he is doing what I feared: kneeling beside his duffel bag and stuffing into it his dirty clothes.

I tumble to his side. My knee bumps the duffel bag askew. I pull his clothes out onto the floor and slam my hand on the bag. He shakes his head, his face calm, trying maybe to offset my wild-eyed stare.

Don’t you dare go
.
Not like this
. I don’t say that. I don’t have to.

I see Abhi in Ronak’s profile, except his eyes and eyebrows, where I see my mother. Such a face. My husband and my mother. Everything beautiful to me is preserved there young. I kiss his face. I begin on his cheek. I grab the stone of his expression and reclaim it with my lips.

He is so many people now, all of them so different from me, but there was a time when he was contained, whole, in me. I have this right. I keep kissing him. So hard I admit no space between us. My nose flattens on his temple, his forehead, his shower-wet hair. He flinches when I go too close to his eyes. He doesn’t jerk his head away, but he leans away from me a little. I hold him and keep claiming him. His hair is cold and smooth under my lips. I work around to his face. My hand goes to the back of his skull and cradles it, steadies it. I kiss him the way I used to when he was a toddler and I would pin his wrists together with one hand and cover his face. He would laugh and struggle, then grow more and more frustrated until the laugh became the beginnings of a cry. I would let him go just in time; his almost-cry would switch back to a laugh, and he would wait for me to do it again.

I kiss my son. But even as I do, and feel the sobs fluttering under my ribs, there’s part of me that thinks,
Why aren’t you crying, too? I am your mother and I am dying
. And the kissing becomes spiteful, interrogative.
What do I have to do? Doesn’t this love I am showing you override all quarrels?

So when he turns and holds my face to stop me, nodding, his eyes shut, murmuring, “Okay, okay, Mom, okay, okay,” it’s a vindication, a triumph. I rise up on my knees; he crouches on his. I am above him; I hold his head to my chest.

He submits, shaking in my arms. I have broken through to the old Ronak, which is to say, the young Ronak, weak as he once was, when I was all food and drink to him. When he would push away from his father and call to me. This is how powerful I used to be. When he got hurt and cried, I used to hold him. Like this, like now.

In the morning, Ronak is on the treadmill in the basement. I hear the belt’s unlubricated whine and the thump of decade-old tennis shoes he salvaged from the garage closet. He needs clothes. I go upstairs and lay out clothes for him the way I used to: a running T-shirt that used to be baggy when he was younger, briefs from the drawer, a pair of Abhi’s bright green scrub bottoms. Mala is waiting at the table nursing the half glass of cold skim that is her breakfast. Abhi joins us, and we eat in silence. Finally Ronak makes it down after a quick shower, his cheeks flushed with the workout, which he started at five in the morning. He must have woken up and been unable to fall back asleep.

“Look,” I greet Ronak, “all four of us. Like old times.”

I try to ignore the arguments and tears of last night. I fell asleep with my cheek on his cold wet hair. He must have carried me downstairs to my bed. I do not remember.

Ronak opens a cereal box. I have set out a bowl and spoon for him.

All four of us. There is sweetness when both families are here, but I cannot focus. Now I can focus. The sweetness is different, from an earlier time, Ronak and Mala still in high school, especially with Ronak in his old running shirt.
I Run Therefore I Am.

They pretend. Maybe Abhi told them to, for my sake.

“How’s Shivani liking Montessori?”

“She really looks forward to it. I thought it was going to be bad.”

“No tears?”

“No tears.”

The carpet brightens. The blinds rise, and it is a sunnier morning. The breakfast table is populated with the English muffins I used to buy back then and the glazed strawberry Pop-Tarts Ronak liked. Abhi reads a real newspaper instead of his iPad.

Abhi peels a grapefruit. “Did that new partner join, Mala?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“You said she was plastics?”

“No. Peds.”

“You said she was Indian, right?”

“No.”

“Wasn’t her name Ramalingam or something?”

“That’s her last name. Her first name is Jocelyn.”

“Having a peds specialist will bring all kinds of new business to the practice.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Sinuses and whatnot.”

“Yeah.”

The fat returns to my face, my arms, my hands. The ring does not spin so easily on my finger. We had different couches then, but they were in the same places. The past is not all idyll. There—that is where Ronak sat while Abhi scolded,
You are absolutely not allowed to drink; this is the final warning; no one in this family has ever been a drunkard!
That word,
drunkard—
Abhi had no idea it wasn’t in use. Cut off that last syllable and it was just
drunk
, the right word. Keep that last syllable, and it spoke of an English-medium secondary school in India. His rage antiquated itself in the saying.

The pretense breaks when the silence lasts too long.

“I’ve been keeping a diary,” Mala says quietly, looking at Ronak. All her anger is gone.

Ronak looks up from his bowl.

“I can make something out of that. For the book.”

“I already e-mailed them. It’s off.”

“Ronak…”

“You were right last night, I was being stupid. It’s off.”

“Who would want to read it anyway?”

“Yeah.”

Abhi clears his throat. “Does anyone want toast?”

Equilibrium is restored. I watch Ronak. I think what it was like for him back then. He grew up with darker skin and a strange name. He picked up how to talk and what to like and who to be, but he couldn’t pick up the right color skin. So he changed what he could, which happened to be everything on the inside. He watched and mimicked. He scavenged phrases off the television and the school bus, remembered, reused them:
jeez-o-man
,
puhleese, suh-weet.
We didn’t speak that way at home. Home was a bubble. His parents roamed safely inside it, a meek species, herbivorous and physically slight. No wonder our rage struck him as silly. A meek species. Thriving, yes, if thriving meant three cars and five bedrooms. But native? Never.

The toast jumps, and Abhi hooks it from its slot with a fork. He returns to the table.

Final warning.
How often he gave those. But Ronak always knew the grounding would never be enforced, the car key never confiscated. How often Abhi’s scoldings switched direction.
You coddle him! You protect him! He is your doing!
I didn’t mind. I liked being responsible for as much of him as possible. There was so much I wasn’t responsible for: his speech, his walk, his taste in music. His taste, too, in food. I wanted more of Ronak in my name. If the flaws, then the flaws.

Mala. “What did Amber say about Thanksgiving?”

“It’s a go.”

I put my hand on his forearm in excitement. “She doesn’t mind?”

“Course not.”

“And her parents?” Mala asks.

“We’ve spent the past three Thanksgivings in Pitt. They’ve got nothing to complain about.”

“I’m doing the whole thing here.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“She knows there’s not going to be turkey, right?”

“Yeah. No bird.”

“Do the boys know?”

“They’re not crazy about turkey either.”

“But they are used to it. I mean, there’s tofurkey, but—”

“You can keep it Indian.”

“I’m going to use the cookbook.”

“You should print a copy out. Just to see how good it looks.”

“It’s not done yet.”

“I know, I’m just saying, it looked nice.”

“It’s not done yet.”

Mala is still working on the same three fingers of milk. What she takes aren’t sips. I suspect she tilts the glass just to let the milk touch her upper lip before setting it down again. It’s only a few months now that my arms have been thinner than hers. We never worry about how boys will turn out, do we? Not in the same way, not with the same intensity. But the daughters, the daughters we watch from the day they are born. Some families try to be traditional, dressing their girls in the full Arangetram getup, one set of fingers pinched, the other flared, bee and flower. The daughter a bird of paradise there in the Sears Portrait Studio. Traditional music, traditional dance—inoculation against the club scene and the college party with its filthy futons and red plastic cups. Some families are Bollywood: six chirpy film soundtracks in the dash’s six-CD changer, and tickets to the stage show dhamakas full of singers and stars fleeing the Mumbai summer. Some homes are Hindu, and when they buy the graduation Civic, they go to the temple to have a coconut broken on it. But some homes are nothing in particular. That was the home I gave Mala and Ronak. A nothing-in-particular home. Or do hand-carved elephants on the end tables count? But one thing all our families have in common: we watch the daughters.

*   *   *

Ronak leaves on Sunday morning. I prevail on him to take two granola bars, two apples, and a Ziploc full of chevda for his journey. I know he thinks it is silly to stock up for three and a half hours, especially when he will get soft drinks and pretzels on the flight, but I am not refused such things anymore. Mala is sweet and quiet; she volunteers to drive him to the airport. I wonder aloud to Abhi, after they are gone a few minutes, what they might be talking about.

“Who knows?” says Abhi. “Depends on whether she is feeling nasty or not.”

I am surprised to see him taking Ronak’s side. I am even more surprised at my own reaction. “What did you say?”

“Sometimes she gets nasty for no reason.”

“Mala? She’s sweet.”

“One moment she’s sweet, the next moment she’s mean and nasty. I think of poor Sachin when I see her like that.”

“Abhi, that is not fair to her.”

“You know her. Why are you defending her?
You
see the worst of her.”

“Who acts the same way all the time? Can’t she act out what she feels when she’s at home?”

“Mala acting however she feels is the problem. Ronak has at least straightened up in how he talks to us. Your daughter just says whatever comes into her mind.”

“Abhi!”

“You will see. You’ll say the wrong thing, and she’ll get nasty with you, too.”

I shake my head. “You’re wrong.” I pick my book off the floor and slam it on my lap.

I am careful all day, wishing dearly we might prove Abhi wrong. And we do. Mala exhumes a dusty box of checkers from the basement, and the serrations are still crisp around the pieces. They come alive after more than a decade. We start bringing up all the old board games, Monopoly, Clue, Aggravation. Remember how Ronak used to throw a tantrum if he lost? Operation, after a pair of fresh Duracells, is still operational, its red-nosed pudgy patient still staring up in faint panic. I take the tweezers and extract his Wish Bone, his Broken Heart, his Writer’s Cramp. I end up beating a surgeon trained in ossicular reconstruction. The new Wii is upstairs, but Mala and I prefer these diversions. Risk, Parcheesi, Hungry Hippos. We play and play.

*   *   *

That night she is typing again, and I am sleepless. I do not want water, but I use the excuse to come out. She closes her screen as she turns to me. I take it as an invitation to sit. She pulls her mug of hot chocolate close and wraps her fingers around it. The heat must hurt her hands, but she doesn’t show any sign of pain.

“What were you writing, Mala?”

“Nothing.” Then, realizing how this sounds evasive, she adds, “Just answering e-mails.”