Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories (19 page)

Gyan throws the box to the ground hoping it will break, like him, and then he too falls. This time no one picks him up. He lies down till he can hear nothing except the heavy breath of betrayal.

~

Parvati is in her kholi. Alone. She is singing. Packing, Gyan supposes, all the little things that she imagines she'll need in America. Hatred seizes him.

His unrequited love is so much more agonizing than his blindness.

Parvati has to be taught a lesson, Gyan thinks. I have to do something

And then he knows what he must do.

He listens for noises outside his door. There are none. So no one is in the veranda. He picks up the box from the ground, and walks across his kholi, over the threshold. He steps outside and crosses the veranda, which he has memorized in the wake of Parvati's footsteps, and reaches her door. He leans over, his hand searches for something and finds two rocks, holding down a sheet covering a trunk. He lifts one rock in his hand, spins around and throws it hard towards the chair next to the clothesline, where Dhoopwali Mai always sits. There is no sound. He's missed. He takes the second rock and does the same. It lands smack on the steel chair, bounces against it and then rattles like a skeleton. There is no other sound. Dhoopwali Mai is not sitting on that chair, not watching what he is about to do.

He turns around, facing the door again, the door that he has so often wanted to enter. It has never happened and now it never will.

The loss does not feel like it is only his.

Gyan bends and puts the box down on the floor outside Parvati's door. He turns and walks back to his kholi.

Sheel will be home soon, he knows, and will find the box. He will open it and see what he must see, what Gyan wants him to see.

Parvati will never be able to step out of the house again.

Is it a tragedy, what he's doing to her? Or what she has done to him? Or what the world has done to them both? He doesn't think so, for tragedy is an end in itself, an introduction to a new way of life, something to get used to. That's all.

Will she feel the same way? Probably not. But by then, forever crippled like him, she'll understand and they'll be joined together in eternal darkness.

THE BAILOUT

Elisa met Ram at a time when brown immigrants were considered cheap labour, willing to work double shifts and faulted only for their proclivity for smelly curries. It was only five years later, when America was buried in its own economic grave and brown immigrants became ‘jobstealers' and ‘terrorists' who continued making smelly curries, that colour became an issue between Ram and Elisa; specifically the colour of Elisa's MasterCard: Gold. By then they were married and planning to have two children, so Elisa dragged herself to their local gym where Ram was lifting twenty-pound dumb-bells, and confessed: ‘I've racked up thirty grand in credit card bills.'

Ram—who got dry skin in winter and never raised his voice—shouted: ‘Why, when I've been laid off and there are no jobs, do you act so irresponsibly?' Elisa cried. Later, restored to his calm self, he rocked her to sleep with endless questioning: what are we going to do, how will we get out of this, have I done something to bring this bad karma upon us?

Elisa didn't have a solution, but the next evening she came home from her job as a travel agent to find that Ram had made polenta gnocchi—her favourite dish—and a list of ‘exit strategies', a term he'd learned at the evening MBA classes he took twice a week. Once the meal was finished, Elisa leaned back in her chair—wasting, wasting, Ram grumbled looking at her plate—and they reviewed their options. No, she couldn't ask her brother in Houston for money, he was expecting his fourth child. Yes, Ram was going to stop eating beef, which had brought this bad karma upon them. No, they couldn't apply for bankruptcy—it was against his upbringing. No, she couldn't ask for a raise in this job market. No, he couldn't work as a janitor at the hospital—it was against his caste. What about her parents? No, her parents lived on social security, remember?

They had no options left; they'd have to downsize and move to that studio apartment building eighty miles away. Wait, what about his parents? His parents? Yes, they had money. No, he wouldn't ask them; they both knew that his parents' favours came with stipulations.

Yes—she brightened up—they would ask his parents, this was their only way out. She went up to Ram, slowly, using her sexy walk, opening her shoulder-length blonde hair, swaying her reedy arms for he was an arm-man, bending her knees so he could reach her. He would ask them, yes? No harm in that, yes? I thought you didn't like them, he moaned, his large nose, lips and eyes becoming puckered together in the middle of his face. She rubbed up against him: I'll do whatever it takes, whatever.

They called his mother in India using a Reliance calling card that had nine-and-a-half minutes of talk time left. Five of those minutes were spent on protocol, Bibiji asked Elisa about Ram: was he fine, gargling with neem twigs for his sinus, sleeping before ten for his dark circles, and, since ‘Indians need Indian food like Americans need vitamins', was Elisa making dal makhani and butter chicken for him? Elisa didn't make her usual pistol-hand-in-mouth or knife-stab-in-chest gestures; she answered with yeses, sincerely and untruthfully. When there was a pause, indicating Elisa's turn to fill the conversation with banal questions, she asked if Babuji still had to wrap the towel around his neck before eating, was the mobility of his left arm better, was his tongue continuing to roll to the back of his mouth while sleeping? Bibiji answered in monosyllables, her husband's stroke didn't warrant talk time. Ram then briefed Bibiji on their situation, loyally taking equal blame for their debt. Only sixty seconds were left when he finished. This was not a conversation they could come back to, so he got straight to the point: can you bail us out? At fifty seconds Bibiji paused, at forty-five she said she'd ask Babuji, at forty she said yes. By the time the line got disconnected for lack of credit, they'd made an arrangement: Bibiji and Babuji would come to America and live with Ram and Elisa for a year (since Babuji needed fresh air—not to be found in Faridabad), and, in turn, they would transfer thirty thousand dollars through Western Union to them.

Later, when Elisa thought about it, she supposed it was
her
fault, having brought this upon them. It was her habit to act in haste. She saved any problem, any serious business (even marriage), from deep thought or planning. All that weighed her down, gave her a headache, made her feel fat even. ‘But once you're in a financial hole,' she read in
The Economist
—while waiting in the lobby of Amway where she'd applied for a second job—‘you stand to lose perspective.'

Elisa came home from work on the day of her in-laws' arrival to find Bibiji in the kitchen, surrounded by bowls of cumin seeds, mango powder, lemon juice, coriander, and karela. But dinner wasn't ready, as it usually was when Ram cooked. Bibiji greeted her: ‘It is not a man's job to cook for his wife.' Ram interrupted, ‘I don't mind,' but Bibiji looked at him like he'd broken her heart. Elisa was tempted to yank out Bibiji's plait, which extended like a thin snake till her hips, but she remembered the thirty thousand dollars they hadn't yet received (Western Union too expensive, Bibiji complained). So—under Bibiji's instructions and scrutiny—she went to work in the kitchen for the first time since Ram had lost his job: scraping the karela, slitting it and removing the seeds, coughing as Bibiji added hing to the tadka.

Bibiji realized that Elisa didn't know how to cook, not even dal or roti, so over the next five weeks she assigned her menial duties: feeding Babuji red and white and yellow tablets every two hours, sewing buttons on Ram's shirts, boiling hot milk with turmeric for the men, before they went to bed. Get the arthritis medicine from
my
bathroom, Bibiji demanded. Elisa went to the bathroom and gasped when she saw seven glass bottles filled with mud-coloured liquid on the windowsill. ‘Urine, yes,' Bibiji admitted, dabbing some on the white kitchen cloth and tying it around her knees. ‘This helps the joints.' She began to crawl on the ground on all fours; like a crab, Elisa thought, and knew that she'd never walk barefoot around the house again. ‘Don't make a face,' Bibiji said. ‘It's hard to love what isn't yours.'

Yet, no money came. It's on its way by cheque from India, Bibiji said, her voice thin and not used to being questioned. Elisa and Ram opened their mailbox twice, thrice, and even four times a day for a cheque that should've arrived long ago.

Then, on a day like all others, Elisa came home after spending ten hours booking winter vacation packages for demanding housewives, and another two hours coldcalling working mothers for a free sample of Amway's new cuticle lotion. All she wanted to do was sit in front of the TV and watch 30
Rock
with a frozen dinner on her lap. But with Bibiji in the house, Elisa had to head straight to the kitchen. While blanching the spinach and cutting the potatoes into exact inch-long slices, she registered only Bibiji's patronizing tone: a husband is not to be called by his first name, and your husband's name is not Ram, but Rameshwaran, Raa-may-shwaa-run. Elisa took a long deep breath; Ram was at his MBA class so there was no escaping this. The steam from the potatoes frying in mustard oil prickled her day's fatigue, her anger, her throbbing feet. When she finally came out of the kitchen, she made up her mind to tell Ram that this was not working, screw the money, they'd move to that studio and never want anything, not even children.

She looked at the kitchen clock, which Ram and she had stolen from a Panda Express as a gag, and the two Hello Kitty fingers pointed to a pink nine-thirty. She wondered why Ram was late, but was too tired to give it further thought.

A minute later, when the police came to the front door to inform her that they'd found a drowned brown man's body on Park Beach, this fatigue shielded her from the shock of her life somersaulting. The overriding emotion she felt was of being very drunk, as though she'd fallen into a drum of vodka, for she could talk and move, but the voice and movements weren't hers. She didn't understand why Bibiji fell so swiftly to the ground that her long plait shot up above her head in the shape of a big O. Her hands didn't shake when the police handed her Ram's driving licence. The next day she was even able to read an article in the
Star Tribune
about the town's twenty-person Indian community insisting that Ram was murdered because he was brown. She found herself agreeing with the reporter that nobody cared; people had just voted for a black President—they weren't willing to feel guilty about the fate of an unemployed brown man in an obscure town in Nebraska. It didn't strike her that she was reading about her own husband, her own Ram.

Ram's death, like Ram, tried to ease into her life politely, but people wouldn't let it. They kept calling and dropping in. Her family came, and when she told them to go away—for their presence reminded her of Ram's absence—they just looked at her sadly, hugged her and cried for her. Her boss Martha insisted she take time off for mourning, and Elisa told her she didn't need any of that; she needed Ram. It was only after the cremation, when Bibiji didn't ask her to get Babuji's medicine or nag her about being childless at thirty, that Elisa realized Ram had left her forever.

So Elisa lay down on her bed and didn't get up. She felt her mother's long caress. She opened her eyes and saw her father's blue eyes looking at her. During the afternoon, there were squeals from children, her nephews and nieces, erupting loudly and then smouldering when an adult told them to shut up. Aunt Elisa was not well. She saw peonies on her bedside, her mother's favourites. At some point she heard loud voices, her Mother's and Bibiji's, as if they were in a shouting competition. Then, mother was gone. She knew this not because her mother said goodbye, but, just like with Ram, her loving hand ceased to stroke her at night.

She knew she slept, dreamed horrible dreams. Sometimes, she sat up sweating—remembering Ram, his body blue and swollen like when she'd seen it—and a hand patted her head awkwardly and tucked her under the blanket. She didn't remember eating but there was curry on her bedside whenever she woke up and she remembered being full. Then, she remembered taking a blade to her wrist, there was blood, and she was in the middle of it, flailing her red arm up and down, till a pair of rough, strong hands—which could only belong to Bibiji—reached over and stopped her.

One day she saw her bedridden father-in-law standing at the foot of her bed. The room she was in was clean with white sheets and white walls and white tiles. I knew we'd meet in heaven, she said to him. There was a laugh and he said, ‘This is a hospital.' Then he was gone.

She woke up with the realization that life had finally caught up with her. She'd reached its ultimate destination and there were no trains to take her to another point of departure. She tried to shake off the feeling but it didn't go away. Ram too receded into a sentimental recollection of events and habits, no longer a loss but a memory. She took out his clothes, his belts, his wallets, his shoes, his airplane models with the chipped red paint, and she heaped them into a pile in her backyard. She set them on fire. She felt hysterical; she felt a release. Then she was laughing; for wasn't it ironic that she was burning his things the way his body had been burned after his death. Fire to fire, dust to dust, or something like that, she sang. She saw Bibiji standing on the porch, holding the ledge as if steadying herself against the shock of what she was seeing. Elisa stared at her and laughed more, and more.

She went back to work the next day, clean, sober, sane. She asked Martha cheerfully, ‘Am I fired?' Martha smiled, in the same fearful way that she did at her autistic son, and told Elisa she'd been gone only three weeks and her mother-in-law had kept Martha updated on her progress. ‘Welcome back!' Martha added. Elisa laughed, knowing she'd never believe anyone again, for Bibiji couldn't have done that and she hadn't been away for just three weeks, she'd been gone six months. It was the eighth of November, and Ram died on … it had been at least six months.