B009Y4I4QU EBOK (12 page)

O
n the Interstate 70 from Denver to Snowmass, Anita’s daughter Kristiana asks me what a ghost town is. Her question startles me. For this is how it used to be. Me answering their questions, explaining things to her and Vik. About dung beetles and ant colonies, about capital cities and the rings around Saturn, about duck-billed dinosaurs. Sometimes I’d throw in a silly story to make them laugh. “When I was little, my friend in Sri Lanka ate the ants on her bottle of Orange Crush saying they were full of vitamin C. And they didn’t bite her tongue.” “Did she eat a whole ant colony?” “No, just half of one, I think.” But now when Kristiana asks me about Colorado ghost towns, I offer only a stilted sentence. How can I answer her questions when Vik is not here? When Vik is not here to savor my replies or frown in distrust. How can I bring myself to tell her what I would have told them both? If Vik were here, they would have stories of the gold rush and prospectors, of exploding rocks and of railroads, of blasting tunnels in the mountains to find silver ore.

They were like siblings, Kristiana, her sister, and
my boys. The familiarity, the ease, the irritation, the fury, it was all there. Our families had been neighbors in London since Kristiana and Vikram were six months old. Alexandra and Malli didn’t know a world without each other. And over the years, through combat and cooperation, the older two and the younger two became more and more alike, their interests and personalities calibrating to such an extent.

I can see us all on a Friday night. Anita, Agi, Steve, and I are in our kitchen. The table is scattered with bottles of red wine, the smell of the garlic and rosemary that Steve has stuffed into a leg of lamb escapes from the oven, and Abbey Lincoln’s “When the Lights Go on Again” warms us. In the playroom, Vik is reading to Kristiana from
A Field Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka
by G. M. Henry, his latest obsession. Sweet-natured as always, she tries to be eager about wingspans and the nesting habits of some obscure bird. The younger duo make regular trips to the toilet, taking turns to crouch and peer while the other does a wee. Their faces are thickly painted with crayons. An overturned sofa is a castle. And as the evening progresses, our conversations in the kitchen are interrupted by the sounds of our children’s mayhem. But the wine is so good that not one of us wants to emerge from our mild stupor to investigate.

And now I am in a trance, traveling in the Colorado Rockies with Anita, Agi, and these girls who
are so infused with my boys. Expressions, gestures, mannerisms, pronouncements all overwhelm me, coming at me fast, each a reflection of Vik and Mal. I want to avert my eyes, but I furtively seek them out, hungry for every one. Alexandra watches television, resting her chin on her fists in concentration. That’s just how Malli would sit, and he would glower at me if I entered the room.
Leave me alone
. Now I see the four of them, rapt in an afternoon TV program, a blue bowl with tangerine pips balancing on the arm of our red sofa.

My mind fumbles. They should all be here. Vik and Malli should have gone skiing with the girls. The boys’ faces should now be flushed from the sun and the wind and from jumping in and out of the hot tub. The four children would often bathe together in Anita’s oversize bath, elbowing each other for a bit more space, soap bubbles popping on their cheeks. I can see it as if it’s happening now. I want to lift Malli out of the tub and smell crayons on his face.

When the girls speak, my heart listens in fear of being blown apart by the knowledge of what would have been. When I project on my own what the boys would be doing now, my thoughts can be as nebulous as I want them to be. Not so with the girls’ chatter, no fog to veil what they say.

One evening we talk a lot about Vik and Malli. We recall amusing incidents. The girls’ faces shine as
they speak of how Vik wanted a crow as a pet. I tell them about the three pet terrapins the boys had in Colombo. Malli named one of them Rover because what he really wanted was a dog. And when the terrapins got sick and died, I tell them, Steve and I worried that the boys would be sad, but Vikram fed the dead terrapins to the crows. Vik was so funny, says Alexi. And as her blue eyes flash in remembering, I am made acutely aware that so much of Vik and Malli still remains embedded in these girls. So how can I now want to escape from them? How can I shield my eyes and ears from them, even as they unwittingly send piercing bits of shrapnel my way? It all ended so impossibly for them, too. We went to Sri Lanka for Christmas, as usual, and never returned. Vikram is a good swimmer, he will swim through the wave, Kristiana kept saying in those bewildering early days. That was also when she began bouts of burping, loud and deliberate, something she never did before. It was our Vik who was the maestro of earsplitting burps. It’s like she took on Vikram’s spirit, Anita told me later. The more annoying bits of it, at least.

Kristiana has a stomachache and is asleep on my lap. Vikram would sleep on me like this, the weight sinking into me, the intermittent wriggling to get comfortable. This could be Vik. A strand of hair falls across her face, and I push it back. Her hair is not drenched in sweat. Vik always sweated when he slept
on my lap. And now as I sit here and look out at the snow peaks of the Rockies glowing in the lowering sun, the refrain
Vikram will never sleep on my lap
cinders me. Kristiana stirs, clutches her stomach, and whimpers a little. I run my fingers through her hair to keep her asleep until the Calpol makes her tummy ache better, exactly as I would do with Vikram.

LONDON
, 2009

T
he blackout blinds in the boys’ bedroom never really did their job. They wouldn’t pull all the way down, so in the summer the light came in way too early. A strip of sun stole across the carpet and lit up an open book or made one of yesterday’s green socks glow. That was all it took to stir Vik. In an instant he’d be at the window, telling his brother to wake up quick, the foxes might be in the garden. I’d give up trying to sleep through their shouts of “Fox! Fox!” and stagger downstairs to free them into the glorious morning. Those faulty blinds meant hours of fun before school. Five summers ago, that was, yet it seems like no time at all.

Each time I return to our home, I am nervous. Maybe it’s best to go another time, I tell myself. How can I even glimpse the intolerably fresh green outside?

The garden bulges with early summer, now as it did then. Late-evening shadows darken the grass. Rosebushes flicker in the smattering of last light that leaks through next door’s willow. Two plump robins drift across the lawn to swing on the honeysuckle, so tame they almost flick my arm. I spot a purple manta ray. Malli would skip along this flowerbed with armfuls of plastic ocean life. Steve
and Vik would sit under the apple trees and eat sardines on toast. Five summers without them in this garden.

But it’s different, my visit to our home this time. When I returned previously, I could endure only cautious glances at my family. I looked now and again but mostly wanted to keep them a blur. Now I can hardly take my eyes off them, quite unlike when they were alive. So I investigate, constantly. I am rediscovering them, almost. I amass details of them, and us.

These five years I’ve been so fearful of details. The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I’ve told myself. But now increasingly I don’t tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less.

This house sparks and almost still chimes with them.

On a counter in the kitchen there are a couple of CDs, out of their covers. In those last months, Steve played these for the boys, music from his youth. Vik would jump up and down gracelessly to “Our House” by Madness. The three of them would belt out Ian Dury’s “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”—yelling the words “ ‘It’s nice to be a lunatic, hit me!’ ” That energy, I can retrieve it now. It still crackles within these walls.

An old shoebox lets out the smell of Sunday evenings.
It’s Steve’s shoe-polishing box. I rummage in it. Together with the polishes and the brushes, there is the rag he used for that final buff, the same one he’d had for years and years. He’d sit on the stairs on a Sunday evening and shine his shoes and the boys’. I hold that rag to my nose, and it still smells of the start to our week. My face is wet with crying. Yet how welcome, this old rag that tells me it was true, our life.

This is my worst day of life
. These words are written in Vik’s handwriting on the sofa in the playroom. I’m taken aback. I’ve never seen this. Not before the wave or after. Why did he write it? Something I did? A playground fight that upset him and I ignored? Then I see some football scores he’s written on the arm of the sofa—Liverpool lost. For some moments I’m relieved. But then, how much I want to console him, and I am helpless.

In these past years, I’ve pushed away thoughts of my children’s everyday hurts and fears, suggestions of their frailty and tenderness. It’s easier to remember my boys with humor or to recall their cheek. But now as I dare to peer more closely at them, they emerge more whole.

For years I’ve told myself it’s pointless to cherish my children’s personalities and their passions, for they are now dead. But here in our home I am surrounded by proof of it all. I unlock my mind a little and allow myself to know the wonder of them.

Our friends often remarked that our boys were remarkably focused on what enthused them, almost unusually so for their ages. I sometimes wished Malli could be distracted from his theatrics, so he might learn to spell. Everything in our living room—a brocade throw, a carved wooden window frame from Nepal, a brass cobra—was a prop for the “shows” he plotted and fervently rehearsed. That fantasy world he moved in. With his collection of puppets and his swirl of costumes, he was constantly morphing a new story into being. His imaginings were often curious. In our study I find a typically toddler painting of blue and brown blotches. Malli did this when he was about three. “Nice, nice, Mal. What is it?” I asked him then, distractedly. “A man who lost his hands in a puddle,” he replied, not stopping to think.

Steve and I encouraged our son’s meanderings, defending him when his teacher complained that he held up the science lesson by insisting that cars were alive. But I worried about Malli’s five-year-old cunning the day he deliberately tripped his brother up on the street. I wasn’t there, our nanny described what happened, and Vik had a gash on his head. “And the police saw you doing this and called me to complain,” I scolded, taking my own story too far now. He believed me but was undaunted. “They didn’t say what time it happened, did they? They didn’t say what color the two boys were, maybe the
boys were white, some other boys.” “Will he be a criminal or a judge?” I later asked Steve.

Their promise, my children’s possibilities, still linger in our home.

Everywhere in this house are sheets of A4 filled with Vik’s calculations, all sorts. Vik was quite astonishingly quick. I sit on our bed and remember those hours before bedtime when he would be beside me, intent on some math problem he’d pestered me for. The boy grasped concepts effortlessly, and Steve and I had to keep him curious. He’d recite to us minutiae about some aspect of the natural world he was fanatical about. He inhaled information about whatever creature stirred him, and often it seemed he became one with them. When he was younger, he’d stand in front of the brachiosaurus skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London (that place was our second home, Vik could walk through it blindfolded), his neck stretching out, his body contorting, as he fused with the giant sauropod. More recently, I’d noticed how he watched eagles, easing into their glide, the raptor’s eyes in his.

Vik and I would lie together on his bed and chat, in that calm half-hour before his bedtime. His eyes would be afire as he told me about the theater group that had visited his school that day, everyone in his class took part in
The Tempest
, it was brilliant, he was Prospero. Or I’d flick through his cricket magazine and say, “Wow, he’s handsome,” at a photo of
Rahul Dravid. “Aw, who do you love, Mum, Dad or Dravid?” he’d admonish me, quick to look out for Steve, the king of dads. Now I sit alone on the same bed, and our easy companionship, Vik’s and mine, returns with such exactness. I can see him, rolling up his pajamas to carefully peel away a scab on his knee. And I don’t insist myself back to reality as I usually do. Maybe it is not so overwhelming after all, to dissolve the divide between now and then.

But this does make me mad with wanting them. I let myself miss them more unreservedly now, at times at least. I rein in my yearning less. So I lie under the apple trees at the foot of our garden, on a mat still flecked with our picnics, and look up at two empty bird feeders that Steve once tied to the branches. And I want more than anything to hear my boys natter on a Saturday morning as they fill those feeders with “birdie nuts.”

Maybe yearning for them more freely gives me some relief. When I tried to tame my ache for them, especially here in this house, it didn’t ease my pain. On my earlier visits here, in the evenings especially, their absence came bounding at me off walls and trees, the desolation clobbered me. There is a difference now. Their absence is not so heavy, not so leaden, it seems. I sleep wearing Steve’s sarong, and I remember trying to inch away from him as he insisted on sleeping wrapped up in me. And how badly I still want that. Yet I am warmed by this
knowing and this wanting. It helps me to better tolerate the bareness of our bed.

By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured. I am also less confused. I don’t constantly ask,
Was I their mother?
How can so much of my life not even seem like mine?

I can recover myself better when I dare let in their light.

There are red pen marks rising up a wall in our living room where Steve and I would measure the boys’ heights. I see those inexact squiggles and instantly lean right back into who I was. I know it was me who settled those squabbles about who had grown the most. I know it was me who scolded Malli for standing on tiptoe to be taller, his heels right up on those slightly peeling skirting boards on that wall. And yes, it was me who’d tell Vik that it was silly to drink half a pint of milk just before I measured him—you won’t get instantly taller, now will you? And without thinking I lightly kiss those red Biro marks just as I would the tops of their heads. Then I slump to the floor with my back against that wall.