The Leaving of Things (6 page)

I could hear my parents in the kitchen, whispering to each other above the clink of utensils, the running of the tap. It seemed my father was finished with me—for now. I turned and trudged back up the stairs to my room.

I lay down and tried to calm my thoughts. Unfortunately, something in my stomach wouldn’t settle. It began to rise into my throat, right up the esophagus, and seemed like it would come exploding out. I sat back up, and the feeling receded back into my stomach. I stayed upright. I wasn’t going to take any chances.

From downstairs, I heard my mother’s voice raised once then my father’s raised in reply. The storm of statements and counterstatements thundered for a full hour. Then dead quiet. “You need to learn discipline,” were my father’s words. “You will learn it among your people.” What did that mean?

My father went back to Syracuse two days later, on a Monday. I stayed in my room most of that weekend, and we didn’t say a word to each other after our “chat” on Saturday.

That Monday, I was still hungover, but my shame and anger had settled down. It was in trig class that something suddenly clicked in my mind: I wasn’t going to let anything get past me anymore. I was going to master every class, every lesson. Ask questions, get a tutor, stay after school, do the assignments, write the papers. I wanted to prove to my father that his son wasn’t somebody to be ashamed of.

By the end of the fall, I was getting straight A’s. What I discovered was that when I applied myself to my schoolwork
and got rewarded with better grades, I started feeling more confident, and my social life got a boost. I became a better friend to Nate and Karl; I worked hard on our next film project together, which we shot and edited over Christmas break. The following spring, people invited me—
me
—to parties. These were smart, bright people—yearbook editors, photographers, actors, people who could play instruments—in whose friend circle I imagined I could never belong. Shannon and I saw more of each other, and we started dating—something else foreign and delightful to me—late in senior year. Of course, I mentioned none of this to my parents, who I thought of as traditional Indians. When it came to Shannon—the subject of girls in general—my policy was silence.

As the months passed, I actually began to contemplate a future beyond high school. I picked up applications from the counselor’s office, started flipping through them in the evenings, whipped up a couple of entrance essays. By that spring, I’d boosted my GPA, but it was still a hair’s-breadth short of the cut-off for Madison. Still, I had a shot at, say, Platteville or Whitewater. I could go there for a year, I thought, and transfer back to Madison where Nate and Karl were both going.

Then, one night in the middle of February, I answered a phone call from my father. It was unusually late for him to be calling. He asked to speak to my mother. She’d already gone to bed, so I had to wake her. It took her a while to pick up her bedroom phone, she was so discombobulated.

I was about to put my own phone down, but my father told me to stay on the line and then asked me to get my brother to pick up the extension downstairs in the kitchen.

With all of us now on the phone, my father told us he’d accepted a job, the project director position at some newly
founded, big-deal national space and physics research lab in Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad. India. There was a charge to his voice.

“They offered it to you?” my mother asked, sounding elated. “I thought they weren’t going to finalize anything for months.”

“Funding clearance was fast-tracked,” my father replied. “I just got off the phone with them. They offered me the job just now, officially.”

He went on to tell us that, at the end of the school year, we’d be packing up and moving back to India. That it would do us all some good, reconnecting with family and with our roots, and that it was a high-level post he’d been offered. He sounded like this was his big break, the one he’d been after for years.

I was glad he was so thrilled, but I felt myself shut down inside, go numb. From the familiar way my parents spoke about it, it was obvious that this job, the possibility of moving back to India, had been on their minds for a while now, the subject of many private conversations.

“How long?” I asked him.

“Long-term,” he told me. “It’s a permanent post, Vikram. We wrap up everything at the end of the school year, and then you can start college in Ahmedabad.”

“Long-term,” I heard myself say. “You mean we’re not coming back?”

“When do we come back?” Anand asked, his voice distant, confused.

“In the future, Anand, you may decide to come back,” my father said. “That’s up to you. But this job is long-term.”

My mother said something. I wasn’t paying attention. Then I heard my father say, “Vikram, I want to assure you
and Anand on this point. Your education will not suffer. There are many good colleges there—science, commerce, even a design school that’s one of the best, depending on what you want to study. And for Anand, very good private schools. I’ll arrange everything.”

“Did they say about housing?” my mother asked.

“Bungalow right there in Navarangpura, central Ahmedabad. Close to schools, market, and we should also have car and driver, everything provided.”

A shadow fell over me as my father talked. It loomed over the months and the years ahead. It was as if someone took an oil painting, still unfinished, the artist still perfecting his brush strokes, and dumped a can of black paint over it, smeared fingers across it.

While my parents’ voices droned over the line, I put down the receiver and sat back at my desk. I had the feeling of being on the verge of something. A chasm.

And I felt sick staring down into it.

5

S
ooner or later, the moment had to come to sign up for college.

My father and I pulled up in a motor rickshaw in front of the drab cement building with the words “St. Xavier’s College of Arts & Science”—written in English and Gujarati—across the front of it. Clusters of students milled about the college’s front gate.

With a folder containing my high-school transcript and grade reports in one hand, I followed my father out of the rickshaw, breathing in the smell of rain-washed asphalt and kerosene.

I took in a view of the place, the place I would have to call college from now on—a cheerless gray building edged with greenery, streaked with soot and mildew.

Off to one side of the building stood a large shed where bicycles and scooters hunched together, sheltered from the dark, brewing sky. Hero Honda motorcycles and Marutis—tiny hatchbacks that I’d seen competing for road
space around the city—clustered together in front of the shed.

We weaved past a few students through the front gate and followed a gravelly path toward the college building. Our feet crunched against the earth as we stepped carefully over tire tracks shining with brown water.

Boys in slacks and short-sleeve shirts lingered together, a few in flip-flops, their hair pomaded. The girls flowed by in twos and threes with long black hair pigtailed or braided, all chattering in their salwaar kameez dresses, gold and purple. Long sheer scarves trailed like streamers from their shoulders. Would Nate or Karl think any of them were pretty?

Up a few steps, we entered the mouth of the building—an open entranceway leading into a lobby lit only by the in-pouring daylight. It echoed with the sounds of students, gathered in front of glassed-in cases on either side of the lobby. The cases contained message boards pinned up with various typed or handwritten lists, a shelf of plaques and trophies.

At the other end of the lobby, we climbed a wide set of steps up to the building’s upper floor and made for a door with “COLLEGE OFFICE” printed on a shingle above it.

The college office was a large bullpen where clerks milled about the aging furniture and filing cabinets piled high with paperwork, everything withered and flyblown. The scent of sandalwood and coconut oil laced with sweat wafted in lazy drafts under ceiling fans. In a meek, lilting voice, a student at the front desk was making an effort to explain something to a small clerk, fortyish, with graying, severely parted hair. The clerk had a ferret-like face and wore a pair of oversized, gold-rimmed glasses.

Along the nearest wall was a lineup of photographs—a kind of hall of fame of college principals. I scanned the photos till I came to the last one, a color photo of the current principal. The photo showed a pair of pig eyes obscured by dark spectacles, a downturned mouth tucked between thick jowls, the whole head topped by silvery hair greased and groomed. “Father D’Souza” read the label below his picture.

As I stared into D’Souza’s pig eyes, I heard the ferret-faced clerk shout at the student, “So tell your story to the principal, go on!” The clerks in the office momentarily froze and fell silent. “I asked if you have receipt, but you don’t, so why are you here? Go on, go away!” The student turned, chastened, and slouched away out of the office.

We stepped up to the desk, but Ferret-face didn’t acknowledge us.

My father cleared his throat and said hello.

“
Bolo
!” said Ferret-face, rearranging papers on his desk.

“Vikram,” my father said, pointing to the folder in my hand. I placed it on the desk. As my father explained our situation and that he wanted to get me registered at the college, Ferret-face thumbed through my grade reports, my transcript. His eyes peered beadily from behind his metal frames.

“What’s all this?” Ferret-face muttered, in Gujarati, examining a piece of paper. He asked if it was the transcript.

“Says so, doesn’t it?” my father replied, pointing to the top of the page. “Grades and classes all listed.”

I leaned over and pointed them out. “Right here—”

Ferret-face nodded, agitated. “But where is GPA?” he asked.

I pointed out my GPA on the transcript.

“This is not first class,” he said and picked at his teeth with a finger. “This is below first class. It is second class. For Xavier’s, all students must enter with first class.”

Fumbling with Gujarati words, I told him to take a look at all the A’s on my senior-year grade reports. Surely, those grades were not second class—

“But here it is saying less than first class.” Ferret-face tapped the transcript with the back of his hand. “I cannot give admission. Unless,” the clerk now lowered his voice, and his tone became as slithery as a basket of snakes, “you want to pay higher fee, right now, to me. Cash only. Then, of course, I would consider—”

My father set his briefcase on the desk so that it thumped hard. “Listen, I have a history here and myself did my B.Sc. here. I know Xavier’s, and this boy’s grades are absolutely fine.” He propped an arm on the edge of the desk and leaned forward. “My company does business with the government, and I’ve got a meeting this afternoon at the education ministry. How would you like it if I told them about your suggestion?”

The clerk shot to his feet, snatching up the transcript, his jaw taut and his bony cheeks shining with sweat. His tone became defensive: “I am doing my job only. Where would Xavier’s be if simply I let in every applicant, Mister … uh,” he glanced down at the name on the transcript, then, after a pause, asked, “Mistry?” He peered back at my father. “Eh! You say you got your B.Sc. here? I am B.Sc. also. ’68!” After a pause, Ferret-face asked, “You’re not Rahul Mistry, are you?”

“Do we know each other?”

“Harish Rajkumar,” the clerk said cheerfully, extending his hand.

“Harish Rajkumar,” my father repeated blankly.

“Harish,
yaar
. Third-year physics. I was playing on cricket team with your younger brother, Hemant-bhai.” He offered his hand again.

My father took it tentatively, smiled, and shook his hand. “Oh, Harish, right, right. That was a long time ago, yaar. Sure, now I remember. The cricket games, right here in the athletic field.”

Harish Rajkumar grinned. His teeth were grimy, brownish nubs. “His brother was the real star player at Xavier’s, huh?” Rajkumar said to me, grinning even wider, as if he were relating a bit of folk myth. “How is Hemant bhai these days? We haven’t met. He’s at the State Bank, no?”

The two of them went on like that, catching up on old times.

I picked my folder off the desk and wondered if my father was embarrassed having a son who was second class. He had to be. Even here, in Ahmedabad, India, I was still second class.

“Fill out and bring back to me,” Rajkumar finally said, handing me two sheets and a paperbound booklet whose cover read “ST. XAVIER’S COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCE SYLLABUS” in crude typescript.

The syllabus seemed to have been written for a defunct boarding school from colonial times. There were courses in Victorian literature, Restoration comedy, romantic poetry, the sort of musty stuff I imagined ancient men in frock coats reading in front of ornate fireplaces.

I filled out the forms, picking English as my major and handed them back to Rajkumar while my father counted out the cash for registration. Rajkumar scanned the form
and passed it back to me. “You must put down foreign language.”

“What are my choices?” I asked.

“Sanskrit.”

He may as well have said Eskimo.

“If not Sanskrit, then Pali, Farsi, Hindi,” Rajkumar said, showing his teeth again.

I tried to explain to him that I’d never taken Sanskrit before, knew nothing of it, and asked if there was also a beginner’s course in it or something I could take instead.

Rajkumar took off his glasses and wiped at them carefully with his shirt, shaking his head ponderously. After he put his glasses back on (they looked as dirty as before), he continued, “There is also French.”

French?
Did he say French?
That I could handle. “French,” I said.

Rajkumar shut his eyes and cocked his head, the way I’d seen Indians do to indicate acknowledgement. He scribbled “French” on the form.

My father paid the registration fee.

“Give my regards to Hemant bhai,” Rajkumar said, saluting with the hand in which he clutched the cash.