And Laughter Fell From the Sky (30 page)

Finally he asked in Tamil, “What is it, dear?”

She felt faint and nauseated, but she gulped down some air, sat up straight, and squared her shoulders. She had to do this. “I came here—Subhash—I know he would like to marry me,” she blurted out. “And it is fine with me now.”

Balu Uncle grasped the ankle of his top leg and leaned back against the wall. His gaze rested on her face for several moments before wandering up the wall behind her. “We have heard about what happened,” he said finally. “This morning your father called us.”

She waited for him to go on. Somewhere in the house, a toilet flushed with a gurgle and whoosh of water.

“A few days ago we arranged Subhash’s marriage with a girl raised in India,” Balu Uncle said. “We realized it would be best for him to marry someone with good values—the values of our family.”

Good values. She had
better
values than Subhash and his family, because she also had grace, beauty, and appropriateness. But now she couldn’t say any of this. She wouldn’t stoop to defend herself.

“Did you come here on your own?” Uncle asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

“No one brought you?”

She shook her head.

“They should not be allowing you to go about on your own,” he murmured.

She stood up and saw black, as the blood drained from her head suddenly. She put a hand on the chair to steady herself. She felt sick to her stomach. In a moment her head cleared, her vision returned. “I’ll go now,” she said.

“Your father has been so good to us.” He shook his head slowly, and patted his forehead with the cloth folded over his shoulder. “He helped us come to your country. He loaned me the money for our business. Subhash always liked you. He wanted to marry you, but we discouraged him. At that time, we did not think our son was good enough for you. We thought, how can we ask for the hand of a girl whose father is so wealthy, and has already been so generous? But now—I don’t know what will happen to you. I feel very bad for your father.” Balu Uncle’s mouth twisted with pity.

He felt bad for her father. Did no one care about her any longer? She found her sandals and opened the door.

“Let me send someone with you.” Balu Uncle stood up. “My brother’s son can take you home on his motorbike.”

“No.” She opened the door. “I’m leaving now.” She stepped out the door and shut it behind her before Balu Uncle could make any other arrangements.

She had failed. She had failed herself, and she had failed Abhay. She could no longer go home and expect to be a respected part of the family. She could no longer face Abhay. She walked a block to the nearest main road, hailed another autorickshaw, climbed in, and shouted out the first destination that came to her mind: “Commercial Street.” The autorickshaw started grinding and weaving through the traffic.

Abhay waited at home for several hours, but Rasika didn’t call. He hesitated to call her cell phone. He didn’t want to bother her during her important mission. He tried to assume that everything was fine, since she didn’t show up at his place again. He knew how these blow-ups went. He’d certainly experienced enough of them at his own house. Her parents would rage for a while, and then they’d calm down, look at the situation realistically, and see that things weren’t so bad.

After lunch, instead of waiting at home by the phone, he thought he’d take a walk to the Internet place and send her an e-mail. That way, she could answer whenever she got a chance.

He settled into the plastic chair in the tiny computer room and opened his e-mail. Right away, he saw a message from Dr. Ben-Aharon, his former professor at Kent State. He was nervous to open it. Would Dr. Ben-Aharon tell Abhay that he had no hope of getting into graduate school?

Abhay composed a short message to Rasika expressing his concern and inviting her to call him soon. Then he looked at a message from his mother, a long complaint having to do with Seema, the fact that she was planning to go on a trip with her boyfriend (they were driving up to Cleveland for New Year’s Eve), and how upset Abhay’s father was. Abhay didn’t know what to say to his mother, so he closed that message. He’d think of something later. He wrote a short note of support to Seema.

He went through and deleted the spam: investment opportunities, stuff from the alumni association at his college, sales pitches from office supply stores, advertisements for cheap drugs. He filled out his name and address in a petition from a pro-Tibet group.

Finally, he opened the message from Dr. Ben-Aharon, scanned it, and let out a long breath. His professor had written a warm reply urging Abhay to apply to the best sociology and anthropology graduate programs, and had provided a list of such schools. “There is quite a bit of overlap between sociology and anthropology. If I were you, I’d take a look at each school and see which one offers you the closest match to what you want to do. Given your outstanding senior honors thesis at Kent State, and the fact that you have, in effect, conducted personal field research, you would be an ideal candidate for graduate school.” Dr. Ben-Aharon went on to express his eagerness to write letters of recommendation for Abhay.

In one small part of his mind, Abhay was telling himself that he didn’t really want to be a professor. He always thought he’d do something more unique with his life. His father was a professor, after all. Lots of people were professors. Abhay didn’t want to grow rigid and jaded and resigned, as he’d seen so many people become once they’d settled into their careers.

Yet as Abhay sat there, rereading the e-mail, he felt an enormous knot in his forehead untie itself. He felt the clenching in his stomach unravel. He felt his heart blossom with love for everything around him: the photos of Ganesha and Lakshmi observing him benevolently from the shelf next to his computer; bright sunshine pouring through the window, and the steel plates and cups rattling at the outdoor café next door.

He didn’t want to reply to Dr. Ben-Aharon yet. He was too full of emotion. He signed off from the computer, paid his fifteen rupees, and walked out onto the hot street again.

The nearby shopping district was crawling with customers as usual. As he approached a fruit stall, he saw the barefooted proprietor, one foot propped on the bottom tier of his display, catching papayas tossed to him from the back of a truck parked at the curb. After receiving each papaya, the man arranged it on an upper tier of the display, and turned to catch the next. Abhay watched as the driver tossed and the fruit man caught maybe fifty large papayas and arranged them in neat rows. Abhay kept expecting at least one of the melon-size fruits to end up in an orange and black splatter on the sidewalk, yet none did. The two men had a steady rhythm, tossing the weighty fruit across the sidewalk despite the people milling around.

Abhay felt astonished. None of the other customers seemed to take any notice, and probably this same scene, this same miracle, repeated itself at fruit stalls all over India. This fruit vendor was happy with his life, tending his little stall day after day, catching fruits, arranging them in beautiful rows and pyramids, haggling over prices.

Abhay walked past a store that sold batteries and plugs, past glass cases displaying trays of white, pink, and silver sweets. People worked in all of these places and were apparently happy with their lives, and Abhay was going to join them. He was going to be happy with his life. He was going to choose one path now and leave the others behind because, after all, there would be passages up ahead, leading out from that first path, and he would never encounter those further ways unless he started forward.

Abhay rotated his shoulder—the pain was gone. He lifted his arms and tilted his head back and forth. He had a full range of motion.

He strolled past a sewing machine on the sidewalk, powered by the thin dark foot of the man who sat behind it. A plump woman was settled on the granite slab of sidewalk next to the machine, ripping the seam out of a piece of clothing. A metal cabinet behind them apparently held all their supplies. As Abhay passed, he heard the man humming while he worked.

Toward evening, he made his way back to his grandmother’s house. His aunt let him in and whispered, “Someone is here to see you.”

Rasika. She’d come back to him.

When he entered the living room he saw not Rasika, but her brother Pramod, who stood up and held out a hand. Abhay hadn’t seen Pramod in months—probably not since Amisha Menon’s reception—and hadn’t really talked to him in years. Pramod looked solemn and asked if there were any private place to talk. It would be getting dark soon, so the walled garden would be closing. Abhay suggested a restaurant. Pramod shook his head. “I don’t feel like being in public.”

There was no private place in the house or in the yard. Abhay led Pramod outside the gate, where they stood under the glaring streetlight as cars and autorickshaws and buses rumbled and honked and rattled past.

“Is Rasika OK?” Abhay asked over the jangle of traffic.

“No.” Pramod rubbed a hand over his face. “She’s had an accident. It’s a miracle we even found her. She fell out of an autorickshaw near Commercial Street. She banged her head on the sidewalk”—Pramod knocked his knuckles against the side of his head to indicate the site of injury—“and became unconscious.”

Abhay felt as if his own head had been smashed. He pressed his hands to the sides of his head. “Oh my god. How did you find her?”

“A street vendor saw the whole thing. Someone tried to contact an ambulance, but the ambulance services are private, and I don’t know how they can even get through the traffic. So this street vendor flagged down a car, and the driver of that car took her to a nearby hospital. This man looked through Rasika’s purse, found her cell phone, and saw our phone number. He called us.”

His head throbbed in response to Rasika’s injury. “I didn’t know—”

“She left the house this morning,” Pramod shouted over the traffic. “My mother was having one of her usual fits, and Rasika left. We figured she’d be back, so when she didn’t return in a few hours, we tried calling her. There was no answer. Then my mother sent me out to look for her. How do you find one person in this gigantic maze of a city?”

“She came to see me this morning.” Abhay still clutched his head. “We talked. I thought I had convinced her to go home and face her parents.” He put his hands down. “I didn’t know she was so distraught when she left. I should have—”

“Yuvan’s brother came over today and showed us the photo of you and Rasika. I didn’t know you were even in India. I contacted your parents in Ohio and found out where you were staying. My cousin is telling everyone that Rasika had a relationship with you and that she’s in love with you.”

“I do love her.” A particularly noisy truck rattled past. Abhay stepped closer to Pramod to be heard. “And, I believe she loves me. I came to India to see her. We ran into each other on MG Road one day. She asked me to meet her at Lalbagh. Mayuri was going to see her boyfriend there, and they wanted another man around.”

“I suspected Mayuri had something to hide.” Pramod scowled.

“Where is Rasika now?” Abhay asked. “What hospital?”

“We transferred her to Aarogya Hospital, which is one of the best in the city. People from the U.S. come there for surgery. I’ve been very impressed.”

“Is she going to be OK?”

Pramod shook his head slowly. “It’s hard to tell. The problem is, she was unattended for maybe an hour or more. With brain injuries, it’s important to get treatment right away.” Pramod’s face had taken on a look of professional competence. “As I said, I’ve been very impressed with the hospital,” Pramod continued. “They controlled the brain swelling; they got her a CT scan and an MRI. Right now she’s awake, which is a good sign, and she sometimes responds to commands. She knows her own name, and she seems to recognize us, at least part of the time. So far she hasn’t been speaking much at all, which my father’s really worried about.”

“I need to see her.”

“It’s too late now.”

“Tomorrow—”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. My mother doesn’t leave Rasika’s side, and we’re having a hard enough time keeping Amma calm. If you show up, who knows what she’ll do.”

The traffic screeched and rumbled past. Across the street, a plump woman wearing a blue sari and carrying a briefcase inserted herself into the mix and calmly walked toward them, as cars and autos and scooters veered past her.

“I need to get back,” Pramod said.

Abhay stood with Pramod until he flagged down an autorickshaw. Abhay felt nauseated. After Pramod left, Abhay lay on his bed in the darkness. Through the open window a temple bell clanged, over and over, above the rumble of traffic. His heart was beating so hard that it felt like the bell was resounding inside his chest.

How had Rasika fallen out of the autorickshaw? Although the autos had open sides, once you were seated inside you were fairly well enclosed. Had she actually—jumped out? Or maybe she had changed her mind about where she was going and tried to get out of the moving autorickshaw? Drivers sometimes didn’t pay much attention to whether their passengers were fully out or in before they jerked up their starting handle and rattled off.

As everyone went to bed and the house quieted down, Abhay’s mind continued to turn the situation over and over.

The next morning, Abhay couldn’t decide what to do with himself. He wanted to see Rasika, yet he didn’t want to cause more trouble for her. He didn’t know how to reach Pramod. He made his way back to the little secluded garden where he’d had his last conversation with Rasika. The garden was deserted. He stood near the bench where she had sat. Should he have agreed to marry her on the spot? It was only yesterday morning. It seemed like a lifetime ago.