The Leaving of Things (12 page)

“But when?”

“I’ve got my ways,” he said coyly, nodding his head. “Your mother told me what all she needed, and I made the arrangements.”

I slid into a chair at the table. Anand and my father munched on Parle-G biscuits straight out of their wrappers and bowls of murmura, seasoned puffed rice. My mother brought out the teapot and cups and poured steaming chai. She sat down, raising her cup with both hands.

“How do you feel, Ma?” I asked.

“Much better.”

“It’s going to get easier,” my father said again. “Wait till everything arrives in a few days.”

“We should give the driver some food,” my mother said. She put together a plate of murmura and biscuits and poured a cup of chai and water in a steel tumbler.

“Vikram, would you mind going down and giving him?” my mother said.

The driver was reclining in the back seat of the Ambassador with a towel over his eyes, arms folded, when I found him.

I cleared my throat. “Hi,” I said, hoping he wasn’t sound asleep.

“Hm?” The driver removed the towel from his eyes, squinted at the food I’d brought out and smiled. He opened the passenger door and took the plate, cup, and tumbler I
was balancing in my hands. He set the plate and chai on the seat beside him and tipped the tumbler into his mouth, keeping it inches above his lips, and emptied it.

“Thank you.” He sounded so grateful and sincere. It made me feel sad for some reason.

On either side of our bungalow stood identical bungalows, only with better-tended grounds. Peepul trees towered between them, their leaves lying everywhere. There was something ghostly about this place, a peace that felt out of time, out of place.

I half-expected to see a sahib in his jodhpurs reclining under a canopy, sipping whiskey and polishing his elephant gun, while a turbaned servant fanned him. A shrill cawing cut the air, and I traced it to a peacock strutting across the roof of a storage shed next door. I’d never seen a peacock in real life before, and I marveled at its bearing, the royal blue of its neck and breast, the tiara-like crest and the sweeping green of its tail. The peacock bobbed its head in my direction for a moment, then, fluttering its wings, it dropped out of sight onto the far side of the shed.

I found a wooden box, about the size of a birdhouse, hung on a nail beside the bungalow’s entrance doors. The box had a mail slot along the top, a plastic see-through panel on the front and a tiny door that opened after you pulled a hasp on the side. Here it was. My mailbox. But it was more than a mailbox. It was my lifeline.

9

O
ur things arrived from Bombay. We unloaded boxes from the truck’s battered wood-framed bed and laid them out in heaps resembling barricades. Slowly, we fell to the task of unpacking and organizing. My parents got their kitchen appliances set up, the Hindi movie collection arranged next to the TV, VCR and stereo all set up and plugged into power transformers.

Soon enough, the others’ lives settled into a harmonious daily rhythm. Every morning, before I even dragged myself out of bed, Anand would be up and dressed in his school uniform. I could hear him and my mother in the kitchen before the put-putting rickshaw pulled up in the drive—the one assigned to transport him to and from school, along with a few other classmates who lived in the area. That made it a kind of rickshaw pool. The babbling of my brother’s rickshaw companions carried up over the balcony into the bedroom. “Anand!” one of them shouted. “Chalo, yaar!” Then I heard Anand rushing out of the house, followed soon by the whirring away of the rickshaw.
From my parents’ bedroom across the hall, I could hear my father tap-tapping away at his computer and, above that, the booming announcements of All India Radio interrupted by jingles for Lifebuoy, Raymond Shirts, or Thums Up cola. The same ones over and over again, every morning, every day.

My father hired a man to clean the floors and bathrooms. Grizzled, gaunt, and wearing round Coke-bottle glasses, he showed up cheerfully each morning with his rags, brushes, brooms, and bottles. Squatting on his haunches, he would move through the house and sweep with a short broom made up of thin, bunched-together shoots. Then he would splash bleach and water all over the bathroom before scrubbing it all down with a hard brush, sweeping all the tracked-in dirt into the drain in the middle of the floor.

There was also a cleaning girl. She was young, probably in her teens, and lived in the shantytown that sprawled along the road a few blocks west of us. She would come in the mornings, announcing herself with her bangles and her anklets, swishing by my room in her ankle-length skirt, her bright-colored, full-bosomed
choli
. Her nose and ears shimmered with jewelry. She would do the wash, hang it out on the line on the balcony, and, in the evenings, reappear to clean the dinner dishes. I couldn’t help but steal glances at her as I sat on the balcony on mornings before class, scanning the
Times of India
(for any item about or from America), as she leaned over the parapet to wring out the wash or as she hung clothes over the line, the cleavage of her choli fully in view. She couldn’t be more than nineteen, I guessed, and she was scorched bronze by the Gujarat sun, and she smelled of the dust of the shantytown. When
she spoke or smiled, her teeth shone stark white against her face.

“She’s quite something,” I told Pradeep, the blind student, one day before the start of Sridharan’s lecture.

“Vikram bhai,” he said grinning mischievously, “I thought you were already having girlfriend, no?” He shifted on the bench, too giddy to sit still. “Now you must ask yourself,” he leaned toward me, his hand on my arm, a brotherly warmth between us, “is it worth to drop your American girl for this village beauty? If so, count on me, eh, bhai? I myself will sing at your marriage function!” He laughed convulsively, his shades nearly falling off his face.

“I just wanted to describe her to you.”

“And you’ve done wonderful job, bhai.”

“Because around here,” I said, “it seems that men don’t really chat up women, do they? I mean, the guys are happy to just stand around and stare at them.”

“It is the great tragedy of our nation. See here in this lecture hall,” he whispered. “Boys are on one side, girls on other side. You don’t have to
see
to see that. We want to mingle, but it’s the tragedy of our culture, you see. It forbids that.”

“Why such a long face, Pradeep?” The American voice again, the words like waterfalls in paradise. I sat up. There she was, today in a brown kurta top and jeans, hair flowing to her shoulders. At her heels, that tagalong friend of hers, with her overeager smile, dressed today in a lime-green salwaar kameez patterned with flowers.

“Priya, Priya, Priya,” Pradeep said. “My dost Vik and I were only discussing you girls. That’s why long face.”

“So predictable.” She began to walk toward her side of the lecture hall, her notebook pressed to her chest. “That’s
all boys ever talk about, isn’t it?” Her eyes moved from Pradeep to me.

“What else is there?” I said, smiling. Were my words too forward? I hoped I hadn’t embarrassed her. Feeling somewhat embarrassed myself, I extended my hand and gave her my name. Tentatively, shyly, she took my hand and asked me where in the States I’d moved from.

“The Midwest,” I said. “Wisconsin.”

She said she didn’t know the Midwest too well. Her home had been in Massachusetts. “Boston. But I moved back three years ago.”

“It doesn’t sound like it’s been three years,” I said.

She smiled. “You don’t lose the accent if you don’t want to.” As she turned to walk away, I noticed she wore a tiny gold stud in her nose—a traditional Indian touch—and the paradox of that and her American accent together in one package excited me. I watched her go, but I couldn’t help noticing that her friend paid particular attention to me, unable to suppress her smile, holding her stare a second too long.

Priya drifted away toward her side of the hall when, suddenly, she became obscured from my view by a black T-shirt. “Side, boss,” came a gruff voice.

I looked up to discover Harley-Davidson in the aisle, wanting to slide in next to Pradeep and me on the bench.

Sridharan entered the classroom, and the whole class was on its feet. He leapt onto the dais. With his typically haughty disregard, he gestured for us to sit down—the emperor before his subjects—and went about arranging his things on the table.

I got up with the intention of moving back to my customary spot, behind Devasia a few rows back. Harley slid past
me onto the bench next to Pradeep. “Sit down, yaar,” he whispered to me. “If you are Pradeep’s friend, you are mine also.”

I obliged and sat at the end of the bench, on the aisle. Harley leaned over—he smelled of cheap cologne—and stuck a hand in my face. “Vinod,” he said. The moustache, the pompadour, the gold necklace: He was a mash-up of
Saturday Night Fever
and
Magnum, P.I.
, a John Travolta-Tom Selleck DNA accident. We shook hands.

“She’s nice, no?” he said in a low, sly tone. He stared off in Priya’s direction then back at me, waiting for my response, so I humored him with a nod and a smile.

“She likes you,” he said. The remark caught me off guard. I couldn’t tell if he was putting me on, and I didn’t like it. “I’m not kidding you, yaar. She and her girlfriends were discussing you in canteen. I think she is liking you—”

“Mr. Deshpande!” Sridharan stepped toward the front of the dais. “Unless you or Mr. Mistry have anything to add on the subject of realism in late Victorian drama, I advise you to keep your mouths shut.”

“Yes, sir,” Vinod muttered.

I shifted and straightened up in my seat. A low chuckling rippled across the hall.

By now, I was used to the strenuous note-taking and would fill several pages, almost half my notebooks, trying to take down Sridharan’s prattling word for word. My hand and wrist felt stiff and sore afterward.

Before wrapping up his lecture, Sridharan announced that our midterm exams had been scheduled for the week before Diwali, mid-October. “If I were you,” he cautioned, “I would start practicing with your essays now.”

Concerned murmurs filled the air above the shuffling of notebooks and the rising of feet. We made our way
into the corridor—Pradeep tap-tapping with his stick and Vinod guiding him with a hand at his elbow.

Once outside, I wanted to say goodbye and head for the library (my usual retreat between classes), when Priya and her friend happened by. Suddenly, her friend broke away and asked us, with dramatic effort, if we cared to go to the canteen with them for cold drinks. She beamed at me eagerly and with a palpable nervousness. Priya, on the other hand, seemed content to stand by, hardly looking my way, while we made up our minds.

Pradeep said no, that now was his rehearsal time. “I must go upstairs,” he said. “We are using a vacant hall on top floor.”

“Do you need someone to come with you, Pradeep?” Priya asked.

“I will be all right,” Pradeep assured us.

“What do you rehearse?” I asked.

“I am singer,” he told me. “Classical mostly, but also Hindi pop songs.
Filmi
music from ’50s, ’60s. At the moment, I am rehearsing for the big Diwali function. You
have
to attend, yaar.”

“Uh,” I mumbled, “sure.”

“This guy is practicing like mad, yaar,” Vinod said boastfully.

“How is it going?” I asked.

“It is …” Pradeep searched for the word. “Satisfactory.”

“Satisfactory nothing.” Vinod threw an arm around Pradeep’s shoulder, a tad roughly, and Pradeep flinched. “This guy is spectacular. He’s going to be number one in whole India. Number-one playback singer in Bollywood. You wait for the Diwali talent show, Vikram bhai. Then you will see this
pandit’s
talent.”

Pradeep chuckled, shy and flustered. “Maybe, maybe.”

“Well,” Priya seemed put off by Vinod, “we’ll see you around.”

“At canteen?” tried her friend again, a last plea before the two went their way.

We nodded and waved goodbye.

“Maybe, maybe. No maybe, yaar,” Vinod’s arm encircled Pradeep’s neck like a yoke. “We have deal, no? We have deal!” He grinned at me and, gripping Pradeep, gave him a shaking. “I’m going to be this guy’s manager.”

Pradeep chuckled some more—“Sure, sure”—and separated himself from Vinod. He said goodbye, then slowly tap-tapped his way toward the end of the corridor.

Devasia appeared, taking cautious, deliberate steps from the lecture hall. I asked if he cared to join us for a cold drink in the canteen. He wore a sour look that morning and the usual luster in his eyes had dimmed.

“I am going back to hostel.” He shook his head and made circling motions over his stomach. “Canteen food is not agreeing.”

“Ouch,” was all I could think of to say. For a moment, the pains of sympathy stirred in my own gut as Devasia shambled away across the quad to his room and, surely, to the sanctuaries of cot and toilet.

“Problem is they are not boiling the water in the mess hall,” Vinod informed me as we crossed the courtyard. “So you are drinking filth along with the water. What do you expect in that case?”

“You don’t have tell me twice.” But I was barely paying any attention to him. All I could think of was Priya and the possibility that there was any hint of truth to what Vinod told me back in the lecture hall. I only wanted to speak to
her, to speak with any girl I found halfway interesting and attractive, who didn’t keep to her own sex.

Vinod asked me the standard questions about America and why I had moved. Then he told me he used to live in America too.

“In Florida,” he said with affected nonchalance. “Six months there, a year also in San Diego and after that NYU.” He said he went over to get his B.A., but he lost interest in his studies and decided to come back. “After I finish here, I’ll push off again,” he said. “London, New York. Not sure yet. I’ve got uncles in both places, waiting for me to come back. After graduation, I’m gone. I can’t stay in this
kachurputti
place.”

We entered the canteen—a small gray room with small tables and large windows that overlooked the quad—throbbing with students, gossiping, laughing. Someone waved us over; it was Priya’s friend. They were all seated, four or five of them, at a table. Cola bottles everywhere. I felt Vinod’s hand at my back urging me forward, and we pushed on for the table.