The Leaving of Things (30 page)

Later on, sitting in Sridharan’s lecture, it occurred to me how sharply pungent with Indian spices that box had been. The delivery could cause the entire art department to smell like an Indian spice shop. You can leave India, I thought, but India never leaves you.

* *

During this time, my mother was able to resume something of her normal routine—handing in a list for the grocer to fill and deliver; running shirts, slacks, saris for
pressing; overseeing the garden; chopping vegetables in the mornings—okra, potatoes, eggplant—that Kamala Auntie would use to cook our dinner. It pleased me to come home and hear her voice in conversation with Kamala Auntie or Anand, but these interactions were short-lived. Once she’d seen to putting lunch on the table, she would retire to bed.

After putting dinner together, Kamala Auntie would phone Hemant Uncle at his State Bank office in Baroda. She would then watch the Gujarati serials that played over the local Doordharshan feed, about two hours’ worth. These tended to be crude productions, equivalent, I imagined, to the public-TV shows that Karl helped out on at WHA, only broader, louder, and peppered with laugh tracks. Anand complained to me that we needed a second TV while Kamala Auntie was here so he could play his Nintendo.

My father returned to reporting the goings-on at work. The institute had landed a government-funded astrophysics project ahead of the launch of an ISRO weather satellite scheduled for that fall. He relished the details: how they were computing the satellite’s launch trajectory, correcting for the effects of the sun’s gamma rays once it was in orbit, and the velocity they needed to ensure the satellite would travel in order to stay above the Earth. Anand found it intriguing too, his attention drifting from his plate to ask questions that eventually veered into more exotic topics: Was life possible on Venus? “No.” Mars? “No.” Neptune? “Impossible.” Could moon dust kill you if you ate it? “That … yes.”

I asked my father if he’d had any luck contacting the specialist in Bombay, the one the doctor had spoken to us about.

“We go at the beginning of next month,” he said, wrapping his fingers gently around my mother’s hand.

“And let’s put it behind us,” my mother sighed, “and move on. I’ve been away from you all too long.”

“We?” I said. “You mean we’re all going?”

My father pushed his plate away. “Of course. How else will you apply for your student visa? You will need to go the consulate yourself, you know, and present your application in person.”

“Student visa?” I feigned utter ignorance.

My father emptied the last of his dal from the steel bowl and cleared his throat. “How else will you get to Wisconsin?” he said.

I blinked. “How did you know about Wisconsin?” I turned my gaze to Anand.

“I told him,” Anand confessed with a mix of guilt and pride.

“You went into my desk and read the letter?”

“You told me it was nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know. For sure.”

After dinner, I stood with my father on the balcony as the University Road traffic passed back and forth, fretted with honking, the clashing of gears from buses, the puttering of the rickshaws. Headlights blinked on as the sky’s bands of pink and purple began to fade. Shadows darkened over the balcony. The wind shifted and, for a moment, carried the scent from the rose bushes below.

From the living room, I could hear
Die Hard
pounding from the TV. Anand had rented it again, a dubbed copy, from the corner paan shop. I heard Kamala Auntie speaking above the noise of machine guns, asking Anand who was shooting at whom and what was all that racket about.
Anand’s voice rose above the TV as he explained the plot to her point by point, and it stunned me how fluent Anand’s command of Gujarati had become. Eight months ago, he knew zilch. But listening to him now, I thought, this kid’s a genius.

“I knew you boys would one day go back to the States,” said my father, leaning against the parapet. “But I thought perhaps after college, for graduate school or something. I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

We stared out at the cricket grounds of the H.L. College of Commerce across University Road, thronged now with children, strolling families, and students playing pickup games of cricket.

“I didn’t think it would come up this soon either,” I said. “But”—I fumbled for the words—“for who I am … what I want to do, I feel I’m wasting my time here.” I told him about my recent visit to the N.I.D., the general feeling that I was spinning my wheels, that I didn’t think I could hold out another two years before I had any say in my future. “It’s just not my world,” I said, adding that I’d made a couple of friends at college, good friends, but this was about so much more. “I can’t help feeling … that I’m letting something slip away.”

My father turned to me, arms folded, nodding. I felt the need to explain somehow, to rationalize this feeling. “At first,” I said, “applying to the school was just something to kill the monotony. To see if I could even get in. It kept me going.”

“But now that you’re in,” my father replied, “you need to do all you can to see it through, no?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “With Mummi’s health the way it is … I feel like …” A valve turned, shutting off the words. I couldn’t bring myself to say them.

Across the road, a Hindi pop tune blasted from the speakers of the truck parked in the shopping complex. The noise aggravated the senses—a chirrupy voice bouncing above a crazy arabesque of tablas, trumpets, a flamenco guitar. One by one, the streetlights blinkered on.

“I don’t want to not be here,” I tried, ‘if something happens to her.”

“Your mother’s health should not be an issue. You can’t let what is unknown run your life, can you?” He was obscured now in the lengthening dark, the skittering of headlights. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “When I myself left for America, my father said to me one thing: ‘Do not come back until you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do. No matter what happens.’”

“Was that the promise?” I asked him, remembering Hemant Uncle’s words.

“Hmm?” He gave me a quick, curious look. “Yes,” he nodded pensively. “He made me promise. He knew, of course. He knew he was not going to live much longer. He was already in poor health by then. Deep down, I think we both knew. But he made me promise. And as difficult as it was for me, especially after I got the telegram that he was gone, I stuck it out. I knew no one. I was just a new student up there in New York. And you, Anand, your mother hadn’t left for America yet. I had maybe a hundred dollars. Yet somehow I got through.”

I thought about that, my father alone, a student just beginning his studies at Cornell. Feeling cut off. And I thought more about my conversation with Hemant Uncle that past Diwali, how angry and bitter I’d then felt toward my father, and Hemant Uncle’s words to me. “He thinks you’re a brave man,” I told my father now. “Hemant Uncle. He really admires you.”

My father smiled. “It’s not a question of brave or not. It’s just … see …” He held out his palms. “Every opportunity is a dividing line. Here, you have things as they are.” He raised one palm then the other. “And here, things as they can be.” His palms were but vaguely discernible shapes in the dark. “You choose if want to commit to stepping over the line, easy as that really.”

I filled him in on the visa form I’d received and about my gambit with the art department.

“Can’t hurt to try to get some money out of them,” he said with the skepticism of a jaded gambler. He told me he had money back in the States, at our bank in Madison. Over the past few years, he had begun saving, whatever he could put aside, for the possibility that Anand and I might one day need it. But at this point, it wouldn’t cover more than a year of tuition, so he had put in for a loan. Enough, he told me, to see me through undergrad studies (and paying out-of-state tuition at that). That had to be a monster of a loan, I thought.

This was sounding outlandish to me again, a selfish scheme on my part that would set my parents back way too much. I told him I was sorry. I’d see my way through another two years, but this was all getting out of hand. As I said it, though, I felt a wrenching, a resistance from deep within. I couldn’t go back now, not against myself.

“Money or time, it’s going to cost one or the other,” my father said. “Which is more precious to you—money or time?”

I said all right, fine. “But I
will
pay back the loan, whatever it is, down the road. You need to let me do that.”

My father laughed, but it was the laugh of a father. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

The Hindi song from the speakers across the road rose in a smash of tablas and trumpets, the whooping of singers, then a narrow bridge of silence before the next track.

“When will you know?” I asked. “About the loan?”

“Before Bombay, I should think.”

The living room doors opened, and my mother’s silhouette appeared, edged against the wash of interior light, the blaze of guns from the TV. She stepped onto the balcony and slipped out toward us. Leaning over the parapet, she peered down at the garden.

“Nice how you can smell the roses from up here, no?” She turned to me, reached up, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and touched my shoulder. “So, you’re leaving us?”

I put my arm around her. I could think of no gesture, no words that could express the inner breaking I felt, that contradiction of loss and optimism. And I realized that there is a gratitude that cannot be articulated. No words I knew, and no picture I could ever make could be equal to it. It was a gratitude you spent your whole life trying to live up to—you tried in the choices you made, the paths you took. You tried in the sum total of your actions. This, I sensed, was a rare kind of gratitude. It made me feel like a small child.

It reminded me that, above and beyond everything, I was their son. The feeling infiltrated the nerves and the blood and got me a bit jittery as I let it sink in. And as scary and overwhelming as the feeling was, I welcomed it and wanted to be equal to it.

* *

We heard nothing more from Wisconsin before we left for Bombay. My father did hear from the bank. They had approved half the amount he had applied for. Anyway, we put together my visa application, along with my admissions letter, passport, my father’s bank statements, and loan letter. We figured we had enough ammo to forge ahead.

In Bombay, I felt myself in the presence of a metropolis that owed nothing to the rest of India. It lay sprawled on the Arabian Sea, a massive, glittering sea creature made out of soot, steel, asphalt, and sweat, stretching its tentacles of train tracks and roadways into the Indian coastline. The city sent out energy waves in all directions, from every seaside Victorian cupola and modern-day high-rise that studded Marine Drive. We walked along the drive, and I could feel Bombay’s warm breath in the sea air. The hotels and office buildings were its organs pulsing with white light, electrical currents in its veins. Its neurons and pulsations registered in the call of vendors and revelers on Chowpatty Beach, the roaring of the beaten-in red double-deckers, the drone of the hornet-like taxis, the clip-clop of horse-drawn buggies, the flower sellers who worked and slept on the street corner. In the evenings, we maneuvered past the bodies of migrants camped on the pavement, wrapped in and surrounded by everything they owned, as we headed back to our hotel on Marine Drive. It was a cramped room for the four of us, but it was clean. The leaky bathtub pooled water all over the bathroom floor, but at least we weren’t sleeping on the pavement under the shadow of high-rises and storefronts like the many we’d just seen outside. Plus we were near both the hospital and the consulate, the twin purposes of our visit.

We spent our first couple of days in the lobby of the Breach Candy Hospital while my mother underwent the tests that the specialist had ordered. I saw this specialist briefly when we went up to meet him at his office on one of the hospital’s upper floors. He was a small, genial man with eyes as gentle as the tone in which he addressed us. I supposed he knew how to put his patients at ease, and that gave me comfort. Soon after we introduced ourselves, though, my father asked Anand and me to wait down in the lobby.

We sat through the afternoons on cushioned black chairs alongside an anxious mother—a Muslim woman, I guessed, with a sheer veil pulled over her head, who tried to keep her bored child from getting crabby. The lobby sweeper swept, the orderlies in their shirtsleeves sauntered past, and now and then, the intercom itched with a gravelly voice paging one doctor or another. The unsettling smell of sweat and pharmaceuticals hung in the air.

We kept our attention on our books. Anand’s finals and mine were coming up at the end of the month, and the only way to see our way through this—all of this—was to plow through it like hacking through the jungle with machetes toward signs of daylight on the far side.

At the end of the second day, my mother looked tired, but at least she was in good spirits. She told us it was more of the same—a sonogram, biopsy, blood tests—along with another CT scan “just to be safe,” the specialist had said. She said it would be a couple of days before the results came back, and she had to see the specialist again.

“Crap,” I said, “not more waiting.”

“He’s a good man, though,” my father said. “At least there’s that.”

My father took us around his old stomping grounds—the restaurant where he used to eat lunch when he was an IIT student back in the late ’60s. It was a low-ceilinged hall, strictly working-class, much like the Xavier’s mess hall. Servers rushed around with rotis, vegetables, and dal in tin pots, making sure everyone’s plates were full. We hired a driver who took us around winding Malabar Hill, lined thick with trees, past shady colonial bungalows, the addresses of the moneyed, a stark contrast to the city’s teeming open-air markets, all jostling warrens of trade and traffic, where I couldn’t take pictures fast enough of flower stalls, fabric shops, hole-in-the-wall record shops, anything that flitted past the window of my camera. The Gateway of India seemed to me a gorgeous monstrosity of volcanic rock, a sea god’s throne lifted straight out of the Arabian Sea. It had none of the subtlety of the Taj, but it was impressive still in all its blunt, imperial features—thick-shouldered, with muscular columns on either side of a Mughal-style archway, topped by turrets that decorated the Gateway like epaulets on an admiral’s shoulders.