I Am an Executioner (15 page)

I did my work no fussing, I am very good in my job, and in the end of it, I looked up, believing Margaret already would be gone, maybe her eyes could not watch it, after all even Warden had left in the earliest so as not to look on it. But no, still she sat staring me so awful until finally she got up and walked away. Okay, why should it bother me?

All around me was dusty and silent, and to myself I wondered: Was my words still here? Where my words went? My dewy words. A moment in the ear, a moment in the brain, and then the brain became smashed. What is the effects of it, after all? It made me wonder the universe, even we was here many years, eating, sleeping, now one wife, now another. The bad things we have did and all the things our eyes have seed and all we have gone through. It heavied me, like that large pile of stones was piling on my insides. Even my big secret in her ear felt like a small-time.

And when the execution was over and done, and with the peon boys’ help I lifted out the poor broked-up girl and snapped her photo for the morning newses and boxed her, I went home solo, via the bus ride. Nobody thanked me my good job, as per the usual, never did it bother me, why should it? It is only a job not something unusual. Way I see it is, once I did it, then all of us have did it, all because of me, and that is thanks enough to get.

And when I got to home all dirty, Margaret was sitting there again, silent at the table, so downbeat like she had been wearying me and patienting me for one thousand years. “How long you plan to sit there like the only innocent one?” I asked to her. “You have seed me what my job has me capable, so what more does I have to do, to say to you?” Any case, I was hungry, I did not ache my head and worry. I cooked the potato bowl to eat it. “You want some potato bowl?” I heard myself voicing; she nodded, so I gave her from the potato bowl. We sat there eating. We didn’t talk nothing, and I wondered myself, what can I tell to her, who is always going to be there in the following days remembering it? I took bath, and even she would scream and fuss, I determined myself to sleep my own bed, because at long last I seed that in these times, each man must take for his own self some dignity, no one else is going to give to him. Any case, she made me some edge-space. And next morning and all the mornings in the thereafter, I am coming back to my good job. For all is said and done, what else is there for we to do? All is said and done, Margaret is my wife, and I am an executioner.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG THE NIGHT
before Thanksgiving, Savitri Veeraghavan was doing her best to forget that her husband, Ravi, lay dead on the living room floor. A pot of tomatoes and lentils and water was boiling, a simple dinner, and Savitri had put a stainless steel wok next to it on the stove, turned the heat to medium, and poured in a yellow pool of vegetable oil.

On the phone’s first ring, Savitri threw into the oil a handful of jeera, and the oil responded with its usual eager sizzle. On the second ring, she sprinkled in two teaspoons of mustard seeds, and the oil coughed and spat and spluttered so that even Savitri, prepared for just such an outburst, took a surprised step backward to avoid the burning spatter. Then the spice found its home in the oil and the heat, settling into a slow sizzle, and the smell of a meal well begun wafted out of the wok, over the kitchen, and into the living room, where Savitri’s husband’s cold nose failed to notice it.

She picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she asked.

“What?” the voice said bluntly.

Savitri recognized Poornima’s voice instantly. “Hi-yee,” Savitri
said in the weary singsong she reserved for her close friends. “What? Tell me.”

“What time you coming tomorrow?” asked Poornima.

What’s tomorrow? Savitri thought quickly. Poornima’s luncheon, that’s right. “I can come anytime. You tell me,” Savitri said.

“Come early,” said Poornima. “You can give me some help. Ravi and Radha can come later if they like.”

Savitri shook her head. “Radha won’t be here. She has so much work to do at college, all her activities.”

Poornima hmmed in surprise.

“Will your Arun be there?” Savitri asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Really,” said Savitri. “Just for the weekend? All the way from Harvard?”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” Poornima explained.

After Savitri hung up the phone, she thought, Thanksgiving! The way Poornima says it. As if it were our own holiday. Actually, it’s the one day our people
don’t
have any plans, and that’s why she’s having a party. Savitri threw into the wok six handfuls of chopped okra and stirred them around with a large metal spatula. Okra was Radha’s favorite, and Savitri tried to imagine Radha was coming home for the weekend, something reminding her to think only good things, only good things. Savitri pulled the back of her hand over her forehead, prickly with sweat, then rinsed her hands under the kitchen faucet.

As the cool water ran through her fingers, Savitri felt fear creep into her lungs like smoke. She was forgetting something. Something beyond the kitchen door, something worse to think of even than Radha’s not coming home, and Savitri’s arms trembled as she lifted the wok in both towel-wrapped hands and poured the simmering okra into the pot, now boiling, of tomatoes and lentils. She covered the pot, turned off the heat, washed
her hands carefully once more and dried them, and walked into the living room.

It was still there. It lay on the floor, bent at the waist so it was cocked into a V. He looked so uncomfortable (but that wasn’t the right word) twisted there on his side. He had fallen just short of the brown plaid sofa where his bottom and hers had worn two threadbare, distanced indentations. He wore a plain gray blazer and green polyester-blend trousers grown shiny from wear. Ravi’s left arm was pinned under his torso, his right arm was flung backward as though he were winding up to bowl in a cricket match, his fingers curled fiercely around an absent ball.

Savitri took two steps closer. She became aware of a faintly acidic smell. Ravi’s black eyes were open, focused at some indeterminate point. She noticed, trailing from the corner of the frozen grimace of his mouth, a trickle of mealy yellow liquid that was drying into a crust on his cheek. She smelled it, too, and she covered her mouth with her hand to fight down her revulsion. This was Ravi’s final meal, she thought. The pizza he must have had at lunch, two slices with olives, onions, and red chili flakes, eaten alone and in a hurry.

Savitri looked up and away. Certainly it was terrible for him to have died so young, she thought, before his daughter had even finished college or started a family. But was it Savitri’s fault? She couldn’t take all of the blame. After all, he was such a simple-minded man, frustratingly so, and stubborn. But hadn’t this also been his virtue? Hadn’t his family always been the first and only thing in his heart? Savitri pictured him sitting at his desk at seven in the evening, reconciling numbers, earning money he would never spend on himself. And now for it all to end like this, on the floor. Savitri looked down again and saw that she was anointing her husband’s body with a drizzle of tears.

Savitri’s husband, Ravi, died after picking her up from work. She had been among only a few of her colleagues who volunteered
to stay late with Phillip, her boss, before the long weekend. Savitri had no special plans for the holiday, and besides, she enjoyed her job. “Phillip is perfectly happy to drop me at home afterward,” she had told her husband.

“I don’t like you taking rides with strangers,” Ravi had replied.

When she reminded him that Phillip wasn’t a stranger, Ravi revised himself. “There’s no need to ask other people for rides,” he said. He had said this before, but Savitri knew that it was not “other people” Ravi objected to. It was people like Phillip, with his big-toothed smile, his American confidence. The way he took people easily into his trust, speaking to them with jocular familiarity, presuming some common language that Ravi was not privy to. In Phillip’s presence, her husband felt very small. She saw it in the way Ravi folded his hands over his stomach and smiled mawkishly, nodding along to everything Phillip said.

But Savitri didn’t push the issue. She treated the subject delicately. She agreed to let Ravi wait outside her office in his white Tercel as she sat inside at her workstation in her blue face mask and rubber gloves, applying a delicate tweezer to the circuit boards she tested and assembled, blue to white, white to yellow, yellow to red. It was not as easy as it sounded, no, not nearly, and Savitri had a steady hand. What’s more, she could hold her own among the Phillips of the world.

“Go home,” Phillip had told her, standing over her in his white lab coat. “Your husband is outside. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Go home.”

“My husband will wait,” said Savitri, looking up, smiling behind her mask. She couldn’t ask for a nicer boss, and so handsome. Almost every day he complimented Savitri on her work. She wanted to take him home and cook for him. If only he were Indian, she would have introduced him to her Radha.

When she finally came out, Ravi had been difficult. “Been waiting an hour,” he said. “My neck is hurting, my stomach is hurting.”

“Who asked you to wait, then?” Savitri said, her annoyance overlapping and indistinguishable from her concern. “And with the heater off just to save gas. No wonder you’re getting sick.” She reached over to touch his forehead. “You should have gone home and taken rest. I told you I would get a ride.”

Turning the car toward the freeway entrance ramp, Ravi said, “Don’t worry about me. Look at that traffic. Would have been fine if you came out when you said you would.”

They stopped at Kroger to pick up milk for the next morning’s coffee.

“I’ll come later by myself and get it,” Savitri told her husband.

“No need,” he said. “We’re here now. It takes two minutes.”

Ravi idled the car by the curb as Savitri went inside, took a minute to survey the produce, and picked up the milk. The store was crowded with holiday shoppers, and when Savitri finally got to the checkout counter, the boy bagging groceries produced a whole turkey from underneath the counter and slid it into her bag, next to the milk.

“What’s this?” Savitri asked, aghast. She and her husband were Brahmins, lifelong, neurotic vegetarians.

“It’s free,” said the boy. “A gift for Kroger cardholders.”

Savitri couldn’t stomach the idea of the cold, slick turkey touching her milk and was about to ask the boy to take it back. But then she thought better of it. She could give it away, maybe as a Christmas gift for some American in the office. “Please put it in a separate bag,” she asked the boy, and she carried the two bags gingerly out of the store.

“What did you buy?” Ravi asked her.

“Just milk,” she said.

“Took you that long?”

“Yes, took me that long,” Savitri replied. “I can’t jump ahead in the line, can I? If you are not feeling right, then why did you bother to pick me up? If you are in a rush, you should have let Phillip drop me.”

This only made Ravi angry again. “Why should you go about taking rides from people when I am here? As long as I am here, what is the need?”

And then a thought skittered across Savitri’s mind like a stone across water: What if you weren’t here? Would it be so bad? No more arguments on the ride home. No more of your fussy demands, unrealistic expectations, strange insecurities. I could live without you to monitor everything, I could live as I alone wanted.

These musings, Savitri now insisted to herself, were born of her momentary annoyance, but they were also, on some level, serious questions. Ravi was forty-nine. He didn’t eat right, didn’t exercise, was susceptible to long hours of simmering ill temper. What if he kicked the bucket?

Then a voice must have spoken, lost in the wind or buried in the putterings of the car’s engine, Savitri would believe later:

Fifteen minutes later, as they pulled into their subdivision, he had said her name in a strange way, as if just her name were an urgent question he expected her to answer, or a disbelieving accusation: “Savitri?” She didn’t turn to him but continued to stare stubbornly out of the passenger window, waiting for him to continue. He hadn’t, so she simply ignored him.

They turned into their driveway. The electric garage door opened with grinding, excruciating slowness. Then, halfway inside the garage, halfway out, the car jerked to a stop. Savitri turned and saw her husband’s face stuck in an exaggerated grimace. She called his name but he didn’t answer, emitting instead a strained, spittly whistle. Savitri told her husband to stop it, to finish parking the car and to stop his stupid games. When still he didn’t respond, she herself put the gear into park. Ravi’s face was pale. With great effort, he lifted his hands off the steering wheel and stepped unsteadily out of the driver’s side door, leaning
on Savitri so heavily that he left a bruise on her shoulder. Savitri helped him into the living room, but then his wheezing and gasping stopped with an audible finality, and she could hold him no longer, and onto the floor he slumped. His body jerked in short spasms, his face turned purple, and then he was still.

Long ago, when Savitri was a child, she had, within hearing distance of her parents, told her little brother that she wished God would smash his face to a pulp. That very day, crossing the street on his way home from school, her brother had been knocked flat by a bicycle rickshaw, losing consciousness for several seconds and earning a minor laceration on his forehead. Savitri’s mother had been furious. She dragged a tearful Savitri by the ear and made her bow down a hundred and one times before the family altar. “Stupid,” her mother had screamed at her then. “Don’t you see? The asura ganas uttered
Asthu
to your wish.”

The asura ganas, Savitri was told, are small demons in the air all around us. Bastard cousins of the gods, they mutter at odd intervals
Asthu, asthu
, a powerful word in their ancient language. Whatever a person is thinking or saying at a given moment becomes reality if at the same moment the demons happen to utter that magical word.