Aerogrammes (11 page)

“Leanne,” May agreed, nodding. “Sit, Hari, sit.”

Mr. Panicker lowered himself into the rocking chair but declined when Leanne offered him his pick from a box of Constant Comment teas. He considered tea bags and tea to be two different things.

“At least have a muffin,” Leanne said, nodding at the white paper bag on the blue tiled table. For a stranger from church, she seemed oddly at home in her surroundings, one leg folded beneath her on the bed. She would have been pretty, perhaps, if not for the downturned slant of her lips.

“You and May belong to the same church?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Um …,” Leanne said, arranging the apple slices on a plastic plate. She glanced at May, who was rummaging through her dresser drawer, then shrugged. “I was baptized at her church. Haven’t been since.”

Mr. Panicker hesitated, confused, before May cut in: “I was just telling her about Satyanand.” May pulled out a small packet of aerogrammes, secured with a rubber band, and happily fanned them at Leanne as if they were a stack of bills. “See? Look how many.”

“I know,” Leanne said, a humoring lilt to her voice. “You told me.”

“I can’t wait to show him,” May said.

“Show me what?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Not you. My son.”

“I thought you have no children.” Mr. Panicker sat forward, trying to understand. He looked at Leanne, who was also staring at May, though with less bewilderment, as if waiting for her to complete her sentence. May, meanwhile, was carefully depositing the stack of aerogrammes into her dresser drawer. “Who is this son?”

“Satyanand Satyanarayana.” May uttered his name with nearly perfect pronunciation. She pushed the drawer shut and straightened the lacy runner draped across the top. “He’s coming to visit. All the way from Bombay.”

May went on about Satyanand with a distant, feverish look in her eye, mulling over what the boy might like to eat or see or do once he got here. Leanne listened placidly. Time and again, Mr. Panicker asked where May had gotten this idea, but she brushed off all his questions, concerned only with her own. “Do you think he’s vegetarian?” she asked him, at which point Mr. Panicker stood up, flustered and queasy, and excused himself from the room. He had lost his appetite.

Ten minutes later, Leanne knocked on his door. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Panicker, but would you mind walking me to my car?”

Only once they stepped outside did Leanne explain that she was May’s grandniece. She worked at Baptist East as a nurse. He noted her height, a few inches taller than him, and wondered if this was the woman who had hung the framed fruit on May’s wall.

Leanne didn’t seem bothered by the news of May’s “son.” The year before, May had suffered a stroke, and ever since then, the delusions came and went. “A few months ago, she
thought her bedroom was her office. She wouldn’t see me unless I called and made an appointment. She got mad if I wore jeans.”

“Maybe she has had another stroke,” Mr. Panicker said. “Maybe that is why she’s talking like this.”

Leanne shook her head. “I had her squeeze my fingers. Her grip was fine, so that’s a good sign.”

“Good,” he repeated. He watched his reflection in the window of her car, nodding.

“Good as it gets.” Leanne smiled at him, heavily.

“Here, let me give you my info,” she said, and began digging through her purse for a pen and paper. “I’d really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on her. Just let me know if she’s acting funny? Or funnier than usual, I guess.”

“I will not be here very much longer,” he said. “This was to be a temporary stay for me.”

“Oh.” Leanne looked up. “Oh, good for you.”

“But write it anyway. In case.”

After she handed the paper over, Mr. Panicker brought it close to his face, making sure he could read all the numbers before he bid her good-bye.

All day long, Mr. Panicker avoided May’s room. After lunch, he began to pack. He balled his socks and ordered them along the northern border of his suitcase, black, gray, black, blue, a mindless industry that freed him from his present and released him to his fruit-market days, arranging and rearranging boxes of fruit. They could have been clementines, these socks, if he ignored the rip of static between them, if he closed his eyes and thought himself back to the pine-green awning of Panicker’s Produce on Chenoweth Lane, balancing tangelo against grapefruit, building pyramids and ziggurats
as artful as the fruit market displays he’d known as a boy.

For years, Sunit had helped out at the store, until he entered high school and began losing all patience with customers. Once, when Mr. Panicker was ringing up a customer, Sunit beside him, clicking the price gun over a crate of bagged snacks, the customer looked at Sunit when asking for directions to the interstate. “Ask him,” Sunit said, tilting his head at Mr. Panicker between clicks. “He knows English.”

“No, the customer
isn’t
king,” Sunit said later, when Mr. Panicker scolded him. Mr. Panicker didn’t know when that note of condescension had entered his son’s voice, but after he left for college, it only hardened. If Mr. Panicker shared his opinion on Sunit’s choice of studies, Sunit returned with terms like “entrenched” and “model minority,” talking about Mr. Panicker’s brain as if it were a tangle of ill-connected wires that only he could unravel.

Even now, Sunit thought he understood everything of Mr. Panicker’s life, though he knew nothing of sitting in the fading light of a foreign room, running a finger over a tiny hole in the wall where someone must have tacked up a photo of loved ones, someone who was here at one time, and now was not. His son was ignorant of that hollow feeling. Mr. Panicker hoped he would remain so forever.

Before dinner, Mr. Panicker made himself knock on May’s door, to see if she wanted to join him. There he would tell her that he would soon be leaving.

She had left her door slightly ajar. He nudged it open to find her hunched in her chair, frantic and flipping the petal-thin pages of her Bible. In her lap lay a pile of newspaper clippings, cards, pictures of saints, and all matter of memorabilia valuable
only to her. She rubbed her hands together, her eyes flying about the room until her gaze landed on him.

“I lost them,” she said. “I lost his letters.”

“Whose?”

“What kind of a …” She clapped her hands to her mouth and began to whimper. “What kind of mother am I?”

“Did you look in your dresser?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“You look. Maybe I missed them.” She hurried to her closet, but he hesitated. “Well, look, goddammit!”

He opened the drawer to a weedy tangle of graying brassieres and poked through them halfheartedly. She pulled an empty hat box from a shelf and dropped it behind her, then disappeared farther into the closet, her head bobbing among sweaters, a beaded blouse he had never seen her wear.

“Did you find it?” he asked.

She emerged empty-handed, murmuring a breathless prayer not unlike a nursery rhyme. She continued chanting while she turned her Bible upside down and shook it as violently as she could, though only a holiday card fell to the floor. “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please look around, my son has been lost and cannot be found—”

Mr. Panicker tried to gently pry the Bible from her fingers, but she yanked it back with a force he hadn’t expected.

“What do you know about it?” she said, the Bible splayed against her chest. “You don’t know a thing!”

“I do know. I have a son.”

“Son.” She snorted. “No one’s ever seen him around here.”

He stared at her.

Gradually, her eyes softened and grew full. She sat down in her chair and searched the ceiling and walls, the windowsill, the paintings of bright, blank fruit.

“Stay here,” he said. “I will show you.”

•

Back in his room, Mr. Panicker rummaged through one of his suitcases, thumbed through papers, tossed books aside, rifled through shirts and pants. He found it in his dresser drawer, tucked inside a black address book: the photograph of Sunit in his school uniform—white dress shirt, navy shorts, backpack,
chappals
. His oil-slick hair had been combed into two distinct sections, one smaller than the other, a style that emphasized the gravity in his coal-black eyes. This, Mr. Panicker would tell her, was a real son, not a boy who existed only in letters.

And yet, her words, almost an accusation:
No one’s ever seen him
.

He flipped farther through his address book in search of an adult picture of Sunit, but he discovered only more baby pictures. He had brought no pictures of Sunit as a man.

In the second drawer, beneath his sweaters, Mr. Panicker found a thick block of paper, secured with three shiny gold tacks. It was Sunit’s ninety-page script, which he had said was “totally not autobiographical,” though the cover page read, “An Indian-American man struggles against his overbearing single father.” Here the script had remained for weeks, buried and unread. Mr. Panicker pulled the sweaters back over it.

He returned with the photograph and found May still seated, now wearing her glasses, staring at a fixed point out the window. He hovered in the doorway for a moment, unsure of himself. Their fight seemed far from her mind.

“See this,” he said, and extended to her the photograph. She pulled her gaze from the window and looked down at his hand. He raised the photograph to her face, which remained blank, until she surprised him with a tiny, breathless cry.

“Satyanand,” she breathed, and took the picture with both hands.

“Sunit,” he corrected her.

“Satyanand,” she said in the same drifting voice. “He looks sad.”

Staring at the photo, Mr. Panicker remembered that he was the one responsible for his son’s hairstyle. Usually, his wife combed Sunit’s hair, but she had left them a few days before. Mr. Panicker recalled crouching over Sunit, moving the comb all too gently across his scalp. “Is this the right way?” Mr. Panicker had asked. In response, Sunit had looked in the mirror with the same expression he gave in the photo: neither approving nor disapproving but detached, set adrift.

After a time, Mr. Panicker said, “Sunit hated having his picture taken. He could never stay still.”

“Satyanand,” she corrected him, with the insistence of a child.

He looked more closely at the photograph and tried to remember that day, those days, the sense of coming ruin. In the months prior, Mercy had suffered from an edgy restlessness, one eye always on the window. Like mother, like son. Sunit would never visit him in Queens, and Mr. Panicker could not bear another slow abandonment.

“Satyanand Satyanarayana,” May said to him, slowly, teaching him how to form the words.

Mr. Panicker nodded, repeating after her. “Satyanand.”

She smiled, enchanted by the name settling like dust over the picture, and touched her forefinger to the boy’s face, drawing from this some strength. They spent minutes like this without a word, and for Mr. Panicker, for now, this was enough.

My grandfather believed that the guest bathroom drain was a portal for time travel. I didn’t mind his beliefs until they intruded on my social life, what little I had. My friend Newt and I were playing slapball against the side of my house—I was up to a record sixty-seven slaps—when my grandfather came outside and yelled at me in Malayalam for leaving a clot of my long hair in the bathtub drain, thereby blocking his route. His
mundu
was tied up like a miniskirt, wet scribbles of hair against his spindly calves. After calling me a “twit,” my grandfather stormed back inside, leaving Newt to stare at me with a dispiriting combination of pity and shock.

“Did he call you a tit?” Newt asked.

“A twit. He’s my grandfather,” I added, as if that would explain things.

“He kinda seems like a jerk.”

My grandfather wore house slippers with pom-poms at the toes. He could slice and deseed an apple in the palm of his
hand. He believed that he was trapped somewhere in 1929, with the nine-year-old version of his wife, Ammu. He believed, without a doubt, that I was Ammu.

I could explain to Newt the firm but illogical architecture of my grandfather’s delusions or I could stop inviting him to my house. So that was it for Newt and me.

In his absence, I played Barbie by myself, which wasn’t as much fun without Newt and his Peaches n’ Cream Barbie or Winter Wonderland Barbie, both of which he had borrowed from his older sister. My Barbie wore a gingham skirt and a saggy swimsuit that kept slipping down her chest in the middle of a conversation. My mom reminded me, often, that I was getting too old to play with dolls, being two months away from ten, but Newt was ten and he disagreed. He had even offered to steal one from his sister for me, a Ken. That was before he called my grandfather a jerk.

My mom would never buy me a Ken. I didn’t even ask; it would’ve been too embarrassing to confess that I wanted my dolls to get romantic when I myself wasn’t supposed to get romantic for another fifteen years. All I had left was a mannish knockoff of Barbie named Madge. Madge had big, flat feet and a chest like an afterthought, small and undefined. I chopped off her hair and knocked their heads together, but there were certain leaps that even my imagination just refused to make.

Two days after he chewed me out, my grandfather tried to make peace. We’d been through this before. I would be sitting in my room, racing through my homework to watch the TV shows everyone at school would be quoting the next day. My grandfather would wander in without a greeting, surveying
my walls—the church calendar my mom had taped up, the poster of Jordan dunking with his tongue out. My grandfather had a quiet way of moving from room to room of our house, his hands behind his back, like a tourist observing the natives from a clinical distance.

This time, though, I was more than usually peeved and didn’t look up from my vocab list when he stood beside me. He was wearing a fresh
mundu
, which now fell to his ankles, and over this, my mother’s satin lavender robe, because satin, he said, made him feel expensive.

“Ammu,” he said, “I cleaned the drain.”

“Good.”