No Country: A Novel (59 page)

“Let me take care of that hand,” I told Neel. “I’ll be right back.”

His grandfather had risen like a somnambulist and walked toward Baba’s desk, while I went upstairs to fetch Ammu’s first-aid box, which had gauze, antibiotic cream, and small scissors to tend to Neel’s hand.

When I picked up the familiar box, its touch transported me to a different time of skinned knees and scraped elbows and Ammu administering to me, speaking gently while Baba hovered over us. As I listened to the wooden creak and shift of the house, I grew aware of all that would never happen now: Ammu chatting on a Sunday morning with Neel and me, coffee cups steaming, the pages of the
New York Times
divided between us, and the sound of a child’s footsteps preceding Baba’s as they tromp in from the deck into the kitchen, laughing together, and in that magical film, I see Ammu leaning down to speak to the child holding my father’s hand.
My child
, I thought with a pang for his loss, waking abruptly from my reverie, marveling as if it were my own childhood memories, now transposed to this house.

Sinking weakly on the top step of the staircase, I leaned my head against the banister and closed my eyes to hear them again, but even as the sound of their voices and laughter faded away, the memory of their mirth fell like misty rain and soothed the ache within me, its unseen waters rising to obliterate the walls between time past and future. I felt a smile forming on my face. I heard Neel stirring in the kitchen and remembered why I had come up here.

I picked up the first-aid box from the stair beside me, wiping my wet face on my sleeve, and went down to tend to my man, the trace of my parents’ presence seeping into my day, sustaining me.

Taking out the ointment, bandage, and small scissors, I finished dressing Neel’s hand when it struck me that Mr. Aherne was still standing in front of the picture above Baba’s desk, studying the mansion that did not exist anymore. The semicircular porch, the pillared wings, the looming dome above it, and the large peepul tree in front with its innumerable leaves meticulously sketched in India ink. I could see his rapt face reflected on the glass pane of the picture, the lines of the house rising behind it like pentimento.

“You like the picture?” I asked him. “My grandfather Monimoy Mitra sketched it from memory after he became a refugee in Calcutta. That house was somewhere else.”

“I know the house well.” he said quietly, “And his name was not Monimoy,”

“Not Monimoy?” I looked up in surprise. “What do you mean?” I protested. “Of course I know my own grandfather’s name!”

I drew him to the other part of the wall, near the bookcase.

“See?” I pointed.

Here were the seven generations of my ancestors, which I had written in fifth grade with colored pencils on kraft paper that Baba got framed. Mr. Aherne stood peering at the chart.

“There is a mistake here, Devi,” Mr. Aherne said quietly, “did your father never tell you?” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “Ah, of course. Santimoy never told anyone. After all, he was told not to.”

“What?” I did not try to hide my skepticism.

“Yes, dear,” he said. “Your grandfather was Santimoy. His twin, Monimoy, died young.”

“No, no,” I interrupted, trying to clear up the confusion. “It was my father, Kush, who had a twin. My grandfather named him Laub—you know, after one of King Rama’s twin sons in the Ramayana. I don’t know if my uncle Laub was identical to my Baba. He was stillborn.”

“So Santimoy’s children were also twins?” Mr. Aherne sounded surprised. “I did not know that, of course.” Then he added, smiling at me, “Well, that does run in some families. But I do know for certain about Santimoy and Monimoy.”

It was a mystery that Robert Aherne would know so much about my family. “Aherne!” I exclaimed. My Baba had kept mumbling the name Aherne after I had asked him. He kept trying to remember details. “That name meant something to my father. You might have been neighbors in Calcutta?” I suggested, but he shook his head.

The clock struck ten. This was our noisy grandfather clock Ma had bought at some antiques shop in Cold Spring Harbor after they moved to this house. It only chimed at the hours it wanted—and poor Baba, try as he might, never could get it right. Sometimes it chimed only once a day, sometimes every hour of the night. It did not help Baba’s insomnia.

Mr. Aherne went on, unaware of the chimes. “Monimoy had died of cholera the very day I reached that house near Barisal. I
saw his body. I was a policeman then, undercover, working for a man called Tegart. Have you ever heard of him?”

I shook my head.

“He is in the history books. For the wrong reasons.” He sat silent for a moment. “I had been sent by Tegart to kill your grandfather.” I felt the shiver run down me, as Neel looked up sharply at his grandfather, pained and astonished.

Mr. Aherne saw my anxious look and shook his head. “We became friends instead. And Santimoy’s old grandfather, Ramkumar, nursed me back to life. I would otherwise have died of cholera. I can say I was reborn in that old house.”

I glanced up. There he was on the chart, Ramkumar Mitra, my grandfather’s grandfather. My head was swimming in time, and Baba’s familiar study had become an unfamiliar terrain.

But what had also registered on my heart was Neel’s quick rise to protect me, even from anything his grandfather uttered. I understood he did not know how to mention my parents, yet wanted to comfort me. He was mine to lean on.

“What happened?” I asked Mr. Aherne. Neel sat beside me, holding my hand, listening.

Through the open door of my office, I watched Delahanty, our rookie officer, dealing with a codger who had walked in half an hour ago, snarling about his missing car. I was waiting for any radio dispatches that might relate to the Thanksgiving Day homicides. We were fanning out the search wider for anything unusual in the area—not a good omen, I knew from experience. The closer to the location of the crime we got the leads, the better. I needed to keep my ears to the ground, but had heard nothing yet.

The man walked over to the counter again as soon as the clock showed ten o’clock. He leaned on it, tapping on the wood impatiently, his face gray and unshaven, eyes red-rimmed. He reeked of stale liquor and impatience.

“Wait a half hour, you said, and a half hour it’s been, see,” he hissed. “I’ll talk to your boss. See, it’s ten now.”

“Take a seat like I said,” returned young Delahanty curtly. “Chief’s busy right now.”

“Yeah?” The man was unfazed. “Two days it’s gone missing—I
want someone to tell me something, for feck’s sake. I wanna see him right away, your Chief—whatsisname—yeah, Zulu.”

“Zuloff, Chief Zuloff,” said Delahanty.

“Zoo-whatever,” said the man. “My name’s Swint, Archie Swint. Car’s missing. Son’s made off with it,” adding under his breath, “sumuvabitch.” He scratched his cheek and examined his nails. “Heard anything yet?”

“About your son?”

“Feck my son. Just you find my car. Been two days now. I got my rights.”

Delahanty ignored him, rummaging through reports I told him to bring to me. I needed to see every last thing, anything at all, that happened in the last week. He followed me into my office and gave me a sheaf of papers. The clock edged on for another twenty minutes. I emerged, having reread the reports on that double homicide on Haddon for the hundredth time, and stood at my office door marked
No Admittance
. Delahanty was speaking on the phone, while Archie Swint fidgeted in his seat, his wife dozing beside him.

“Where’s it?” barked Archie Swint suddenly. His startled wife sat hugging herself, her eyes blinking uneasily under the fluorescent lamps. She flinched when her husband spoke, then slowly looked away, head lowered, clutching her bag to herself.

“Where?” rasped the man again. I turned my head to look at the man carefully.

“Car,” spat the man, pronouncing
a
as in
cat
, in his Upstate accent. “Where’s my damn
car
?”

“Keep a civil tongue,” I suggested. The man swiveled his glare at me, then crouched back, looking away, as if he had seen a larger dog. The woman shifted uneasily in her seat, drawing her knees together.

“What’s the report that just came in?” I asked Delahanty, under my breath as he rummaged through his papers.

“About the double homicide on Haddon?” he asked, looking up at me. “Nothing more so far, Chief.”

“That car,” I said.

“Oh yes, sir, came in this minute. Tony on patrol saw a blue car ditched pretty far into the woods—off the county road. He’s getting it towed. Maybe ten more minutes.”

“Here?” I asked Delahanty, and the young man nodded.

“Double-check if it’s his,” I told him.

“Plate numbers, sir?” Delahanty asked across the counter. The man stood up creakily, tugging at his baggy tartan shirt, adding under his breath, “About fecking time.”

“Plate?” asked Delahanty again, and the man spat out the number. His wife mumbled inaudibly.

“Being towed here any minute now,” Delahanty told him. “It’s pretty banged up. You’ll have to pay the tow truck.”

“Sumavabitch, I knew it,” Swint snarled at his wife and rushed for the door, leaving her behind. Delahanty called after him, “You’ll have to fill out this form, and I’ll need to see the registration.”

“She got all that, it’s in her name,” said Swint, gesturing backward with his thumb, as he barreled through the door, leaving it open behind him, letting in the chilly air. The woman stayed, lost in her thoughts.

“Ma’am,” the young officer called her. As she shuffled over to the counter, her handbag fell open. “Oh,” she said, bewildered and stooping, her scared eyes blue with hardly any lashes. The young man came around the counter and helped her pick up her things. “Thank you,” she kept muttering, “thank you, thank you . . .” A hair-snarled brush, a lidless lipstick, some soiled peppermints,
hairpins, a frayed change purse. She struggled to read his nametag.

“Delahanty, ma’am, Bill Delahanty,” he said to her.

“Why, Billy’s my son’s name too!” Her lipstick had seeped into the fissures around her smiling lips. Officer Delahanty felt protective of her. “He the one took your car?”

“Yes,” she said, dropping her gaze. “He asked us, didn’t he? It’s not like you think.”

“I’ll just need you to fill out this form, Mrs. Swint,” he said gently, helping her put everything back in her handbag. “And, yeah, I’ll need your registration. Is it in the car?”

“What?” She looked up vaguely.

“Your car registration, ma’am,” he reminded her. “You need to fill this out.”

“Oh yes, yes, I have it here,” she said, fishing it out after a while. “I forgot my reading glasses. I won’t be able to write,” she confessed humbly.

“Can you sign without them?” asked Delahanty.

“Oh yes, yes,” she said eagerly, “I can also read most of it if I hold the paper like so,” she added, holding it at arm’s length.

“That’s good,” said Delahanty, smiling back. “You tell me the details and I’ll fill it out, okay? Then you sign it, and we’re done.”

She nodded and handed him the form. Officer Delahanty noticed that her fingers were swollen, and her rings, a thin wedding band and a beautiful solitaire diamond ring, looked embedded.

“Lovely ring, ma’am,” he said, companionably.

“Eh?” she said, momentarily confused, then added animatedly, “Oh yes, that’s my grandmother’s ring. It has her and Grandpa’s names inscribed inside. I never saw Grandpa, but Grandma left me her ring when she passed on.” Officer Delahanty went on filling
out the form, and she answered him absently, looking at her ring.

“There’s a mistake here, ma’am,” said Delahanty, looking at Mrs. Swint’s car registration. “The address on this doesn’t match the one you gave earlier.”

“What?” she repeated, “what address?” growing flustered at being brought back to the present.

“You said 166 Haddon Lane, but it says different here on your registration.”

I listened, still as a hunter who has heard a rustle.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Swint sadly. “I’m sorry. I got to thinking of the ring and the house Daddy left me, didn’t I? We used to live there. My son, Billy, loved it. It had a tree with lovely flowers in the backyard. And rhododendrons. He’s a good boy. I have his picture from high school, I do,” she said, fumbling about and finding it in her bag. She handed it to Officer Delahanty. “His name is Billy too,” she repeated, smiling at him.

“Where does he live, Mrs. Swint?” I asked. Officer Delahanty looked quizzically at me. He had no idea that I had been listening. She had become pensive.

“Ma’am, where is your son, Billy?” I asked again.

Mrs. Swint looked close to tears, her face pale with shame. “I—I d-don’t know.”

She signed the papers like a blind person and proceeded to leave. Officer Delahanty caught up with her at the door, giving her a copy of what she had signed. She put it in her bag without glancing at it. It hung open again, its clasp undone. She clutched at the banister and began to step down gingerly, one step at a time.

“One sixty-six Haddon Lane,” I whispered to myself, picking
up the creased photograph from the table; I had not returned it. “Where are you right now, Billy Swint?” I thought, before I put it in my pocket.

I was in a trout stream now, knowing I was about to reel in the line.

In the study, the light from the open window caught the picture of the old mansion sideways, and reflected on it, I could see the outline of Mr. Aherne’s thoughtful face over the the India-ink lines and painted pillars of that long-ago house in Barisal, in a land abandoned by my grandfather, whose real name I had now come to know.

I wondered now if my father thought often about his dead sibling, Laub, whom we had never discussed, though I knew about him. There was so much about the past, about my own parents, I did not know, about all that broke or shaped my family.

Mr. Aherne’s old leather suitcase lay open at his feet. I could imagine him packing it carefully by himself in another old house, in Calcutta. I had a feeling that these were the only clothes he owned. I could see his neatly folded shirts, alongside two carefullly rolled ties, and underneath, three silver-framed pictures. One was his own wedding photograph, black-and-white, which he handed to me when he saw me looking. He had his arms around his wife.
They were both smiling into the camera, she in a sari, standing outside the marriage registrar’s office, the sign visible. The second picture, in color, showed Neel’s mother when she was about ten, all three sitting under a multicolored umbrella. Behind them sparkled the sea. I noticed the strong family resemblance between the father and the young daughter—and Neel—and wondered for the first time whom my child would resemble.