Don't Let Him Know (27 page)

Even with his eyes shut he could see the entry.

Amit arrived. Rajeev and his mother visited. Brought fruit and Coca-Cola
. (She called all dark colas Coca-Cola without differentiation.)
Calls from Bela, Shobha, Mr Sanyal.

After she was done she turned off the lamp and lay down. ‘Are you tired?’ she asked.

‘Hmmm,’ he mumbled as if he was half asleep. The moonlight slanted through the windows, illuminating the empty space between them. When he was a boy that was the space he would sleep in.

Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up with a start. Romola was asleep, snoring gently. Amit lay awake staring at the ceiling. Even in the dark he could make out the tendrils of long cobwebs swaying gently from the corners like seaweed. He wanted to get up and pee but he was afraid he would wake Romola up. He carefully pulled his watch out from under the pillow. 4:30 PM the green letters blinked at him. It was still on California time. He lay there as still as he could, his eyes shut, trying to will himself back to sleep. In the silence of the slumbering house, the only sound he could hear was the tch-tch clucking of the lizard. But the house still hummed in a way it never did in California. Even in sleep the city seemed full of people. He could imagine them asleep all around him, in the neighbouring flats and houses. A city humming with sleeping people. Or perhaps, he thought as he waited for the first pale flush of dawn and the cries of the vegetable sellers, perhaps it’s just a noisy refrigerator.

‘You know I slept through the night without taking a sleeping pill,’ Romola told him the next morning as they had breakfast together. ‘It’s the first night since your father . . .’

Amit said nothing as he buttered his toast.

‘It’s funny. I never thought I would miss him so much. It’s not like he was a great talker. But I guess one gets used to a person in one’s life, no matter what.’

‘Ma,’ Amit suddenly changed the subject. ‘Do you get Diet Coke here? Maybe it’s called Coca-Cola Light?’

‘What’s that? I’ve never seen it,’ she replied pouring out his tea. ‘Are you on diet-shiet? Is that why you’re so thin?’

‘I don’t know, June. I don’t know if I can do this,’ he said when he called June to let her know he’d reached India safely. He dropped his voice, after glancing around him. ‘I can’t imagine my mother living with us in San Francisco. I don’t know what I’d do with her.’

‘You could try it for a little while,’ June replied reasonably. ‘It doesn’t have to be for ever.’

I am sleeping in her bedroom, on her bed. I don’t know how long I can do this. Am I weird to feel like this?

‘It’s hard enough with the two of us. Imagine her in there as well.’

‘We could find a bigger place if we had to,’ June replied.

‘She won’t even let me go buy Diet Coke. She says we have a big bottle of Pepsi sitting in the refrigerator.’

‘What are you going on about?’ June sounded puzzled. ‘Why don’t you go buy yourself some Diet Coke, for heaven’s sake?’

But there just seemed to be no time to do anything on his own. There was a constant stream of visitors stopping by with boxes of sweets and bags of fruit. Each asked for the details and Amit marvelled at how calmly Romola shared the story with them. Avinash had come back from a walk. He had said he was feeling warm and had taken off his sweater and said he was going to take a shower. Be careful, don’t catch a chill now, she had said. Then he said he’d lie down a bit before taking a shower. Amit listened silently, treading and re-treading the now familiar lines. It was almost, he thought, as if he’d been there.

Eventually they’d turn to him. ‘How is San Francisco?’ they would ask. ‘Thinking of settling down? Will you come back?’ And finally the question he kept dreading. ‘What about your mother? What are you thinking of doing with her?’

Romola sat in the room as if they were talking about an entirely different person, or a piece of furniture, an antique couch too large for a modern apartment.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Amit was non-committal. ‘We’ll see what is most practical. There is this house here.’

‘Well we could always sell it if we need to,’ said Romola suddenly. ‘It feels strange here without your father anyway. So empty.’

Amit stared at her in surprise.‘I’ll be at work all day. And you’ve never liked America very much,’ he retorted.

‘Aah, but she would have you,’ Asha-mashi jumped in. ‘It’ll keep her busy, cooking for you. Otherwise I know what you bachelor boys eat – boiled eggs, sandwiches and Maggi noodles.’

‘I don’t think she needs to come all the way to San Francisco to cook for me,’ Amit replied with a little smile.

‘No, no – it’s family,’ Asha-mashi swept his arguments aside, her bangles jangling. ‘You are all she has now. You know that. Just the other day I came by and she was polishing all your old school medals.’

‘Those old medals?’ Amit looked at his mother. ‘I didn’t even know we still have them.’

Amit had a vision of his mother carrying his ancient English grammar and drawing medals all the way to America. He imagined her sitting in his apartment in San Francisco with a little kitchen towel polishing those discoloured medals. One of them, he remembered with a twinge of guilt, had been for good conduct.

He had always been a good boy. He had done everything that was expected of him – never one for cigarettes and beers and black-market porn like his school friends. Even Rajeev would sneak out of his house to smoke Wills Filter cigarettes in the park. Amit would hang out with him but when Rajeev offered him a cigarette he’d just shake his head. ‘Afraid your mother will find out?’ Rajeev would say mockingly, blowing out a cloud of smoke. ‘You are such a good boy, Amit.’

The maid came into the room with a glass of Pepsi and some sweets on a plate for Asha-mashi.

‘Please have some,’ said Romola.

‘No sweets, no no,’ protested Asha automatically. ‘I have to go home and have lunch anyway. Your brother-in-law is home today and is waiting for me.’

‘At least have the Coca-Cola’ insisted Romola. ‘Something cold—’

‘Oh no,’ Asha-mashi shook her head vigorously. ‘I can’t drink all this Coca-Cola. Makes me burp too much. Here, Amit, you have it. You are the American after all.’

Why don’t Indians drink their sodas with ice even in America? One Coke, no ice please. Just water, no ice please. I want Diet Coke from a soda fountain in a gas station. I want to fill a paper cup with a small avalanche of ice and then press the Diet Coke button. I want to fill it to the brim. Wait for the bubbles to slowly die down and then fill it up again until it overflows. Not like here. Where the soda machine is out of reach behind the counter. And an old man fills a small plastic cup with miserly exactitude before handing it over.

Amit sipped his soda. Just as he had expected, it was refrigerator-cold but flat.

‘My grandson wants Coca-Cola all the time,’ Asha-mashi burbled on.

The phone rang and Amit left the room to answer it. When he walked back he heard them still talking about the house. He paused near the door listening to his mother.

‘If I had my way I’d say, Amit, come back here, find a job, and move back,’ Romola was saying. ‘But I know that’s not possible. You can’t just drop everything and come back because your mother is alone. I know that. We’ll just have to do what’s feasible.’

‘Your Amit has always been a good boy. He will do the right thing.’

‘I never liked America but perhaps now I wouldn’t mind it. To be closer to him.’ He could hear the smile in Romola’s voice. ‘Sometimes I feel he has gone so far away. It’s good to have him home.’

Amit cleared his throat and walked into the room. The women stopped talking and looked at him, still smiling. ‘Who was that on the phone?’ asked his mother.

‘No one,’ said Amit. ‘Wrong number.’ He didn’t know why he lied. It was Rajeev calling to say he was coming over to discuss whether to serve samosas and sweets or just sweets at the funeral. Somehow Amit didn’t feel like talking about it.

‘Ma,’ he said casually. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’

‘Walk? Now? Why? It’s almost lunchtime,’ protested Romola automatically. ‘Have you had your bath?’

‘No,’ said Amit as calmly as he could. ‘I’ll be back soon. I just need to get some fresh air.’ His ears were ringing and he felt as if his knees might buckle under him if he had to speak another word.

I need personal space. Oh my God, listen to me. Personal space and Diet Coke. How much more American can I get?

As soon as he walked outside, though, his spirits lifted. It was a clear winter morning, the sunlight buttery around him. He walked down the street to the market at the end of the road and with every step he took it seemed as if the ringing noise in his ears started to recede, replaced by an old, familiar clamour: crows, bicycles bells, vendors.

The sides of their little market street were piled high with winter vegetables – stubby carrots and cabbages and cauliflowers, some no bigger than a clenched fist, others as large as footballs. Women sold them squatting on the pavements, their saris hitched up around their knees, silver blades flashing in the sun like steely minnows as they lopped off the leaves and threw them casually into the gutter. As if on cue, an old cow appeared, more grimy brown than white, its ribs showing, and began chewing the leaves. No one paid it any attention. Amit just stood in the middle of the street staring at it all with a half-smile.

‘Ei,’ yelled the cauliflower-woman smacking the cow’s nose when it nudged too close to her pile of vegetables. The cow barely moved half an inch, tail flicking idly, as it went back to the discarded leaves. Amit smiled at the cow, feeling, for the first time since he had arrived, that he was really home, that things hadn’t changed so irrevocably in his life, leaving him stranded without a compass.

‘Do you need a cauliflower?’ said the woman seeing him staring. ‘These are from my village, from my own soil. Not those big ones they grow on the sewage dumps of Dhapa.’

Amit shook his head. The woman shrugged and dismissed him. A boy weaving through the street on his bicycle yelled at him, ‘Dada, watch out. This isn’t your uncle’s road.’ Amit, startled out of his reverie, laughed and stepped aside.

In front of him he could see the old corner cigarette and paan store. It still looked the same – a cramped cubbyhole of a store, just big enough for one man to crouch in. But even that had a touch of something new – a garland of Frito Lays now hung from the ceiling. There was a picture of an Indian film star on the little packets with flavours he’d never heard of – Bindaas Bhel, Mast Masala, Tangy Treat, even something called American Cream and Onion. Amit suddenly felt hungry as he looked at the packets – red, green, blue, shiny with salty promise.

He wondered which one he should get. He felt almostguilty, as if he was personally turning India into a fast-food nation. June had once brought home a book from the library that was all about how economic globalization was making multinational corporations the new colonial masters.

But he felt an irresistible urge to try some Bindaas Bhel. ‘Can I have that, please?’ he said gesturing at the orange packet.

The man behind the counter peered down at him from his little perch and said, ‘Oh, Amit? When did you come back? So sorry to hear about your father. Such a gentleman – I’d see him go to market every day in his white shirt and with a shopping bag.’

Amit flushed guiltily, as if he had been caught violating some obscure rule of mourning, buying Bindaas Bhel potato chips. He couldn’t remember the paan-wallah’s name. He didn’t know if he’d ever known his name. The man had always been Paan-babu. Rajeev had bought his first clandestine cigarette from him, a single cigarette he had lit with the long coconut fibre rope with its glowing fiery end tied to a post next to the store. He’d stand there in the corner, next to the store, puffing urgently at his cigarette before they went home to their good-boy lives. ‘Have some paan masala,’ Paan-babu would tell them, grinning knowingly, his teeth stained dark red. ‘It will hide the smell.’

But that was years ago. Amit hadn’t known that the paan-wallah even knew which house he lived in. He wished he could just pay for his chips and leave. But the man, now balder and fatter, his droopy moustache streaked with silver, was in a chatty mood.

‘Would you like a paan?’ he offered as he took one of the glossy dark heart-shaped leaves and smeared white lime-paste on it.

‘No,’ Amit shook his head. ‘Just the chips.’

‘The American chips, eh?’ the man chuckled. ‘All the kids love them. They see them on TV, no? So when did you come? How is your mother? Is she going back with you?’

‘Umm, I don’t know,’ Amit muttered. ‘Not yet. Probably.’

‘Well, it will be hard for her to be alone. But we’ll all be here, don’t worry,’ the man said earnestly. ‘But how will she manage that house?’

Amit wondered if he could suddenly just pretend he’d forgotten an important phone call and turn and run. Instead he carefully pulled off one Frito Lay packet and handed it wordlessly to the man.

‘You know,’ said the man leaning forward confidentially. ‘My brother-in-law is a promoter. Very good business he is doing these days. They tear down these old houses and turn them into flats. Just like that. Everyone’s happy. You get half the flats. Keep one, sell the others if you want. He does the same. Everyone makes a little money.’