Red Earth and Pouring Rain (8 page)

So Abhay paced up and down, and I hugged myself and massaged my arms. Again Yama called out to me: ‘Listen, Sanjay, a bit
of friendly advice. You’re too attached to what-actually-happened. I recognized too much of what you told. You should be really
going crazy, you know, twist your material inside out. Have fun with it.’

I had my own reasons for being attached to what-actually-happened, but I was in pain and in no mood to start explaining myself
to this overgrown green idiot who reminded me of the villains from some of the worst melodramas that (in a long-ago life)
my father and uncle ever wrote. So I snarled at him, a monkey growl that startled two boys who were sidling in through the
door. They looked like brothers, maybe nine and ten, and they both wore strange caps with the bills pulled back over their
necks, and loose white shirts with lettering on them, one that said ‘Cowboys’ and the other ‘LA.’ They glanced at me and then
scuttled over eagerly to Abhay.

’Abhay Bhaiya,’ the older one said. ‘Did you bring back a video camera?’

‘What?’ Abhay said.

‘Did you see any rock concerts?’ the younger one said.

‘What kind of car did you have?’

‘Did you buy a house?’

‘Does it have a swimming pool?’

‘Why did you come back?’

‘Where?’ Abhay said.

‘Here,’ they said, both together.

Abhay shrugged, a look of confusion on his face.

‘Were you happy there?’ the younger boy said.

‘What?’

‘Happy’

Abhay’s face was blank, as if it had been wiped clean of sorrow, or joy. Then Saira came in, saw the two boys, collared them
and had the both of them out of the door in a moment.

The little one called decisively through the doorway, even as it closed: ‘You were happy there.’

Abhay looked after him. ‘Happy?’ he said.

Then he began to type.

ONE EVENING
at the beginning of my senior year I was rewinding the second reel of
Lawrence of Arabia
when my friend Tom came into the projectionist’s booth playing with his dark glasses. He had a sort of nervous habit with
his glasses.

“Come on, effendi,” he said. “Time to go to great oasis.”

I was the work-study projectionist and he managed the student film series. I had known him for three years, and we liked the
same movies. He was talking about the Wednesday night party in the Alpha Gamma frat house, which we never missed.

“Lead on,” I said. “Lead on.”

So Tom and I came down the stairs into the basement room, which smelled of decade-old layers of beer and sometimes piss and
always grass. We pushed through the brothers and got a beer and then found our favorite spot, where we could watch people
pushing through the door.

“They’re here,” Tom said.

“Who?”

“Freshwomen alert. Here they come.”

I turned my head, and they were already past me.

“Go get one, bud,” Tom said.

“There’s only one way out of here,” I said. There had been a glimpse of a face half-turned toward me. So we waited and drank
a couple more
beers and talked about Lawrence. The one in the movie, I mean, not the real one. The music suddenly got louder, and it was
Echo and the Bunny-men doing “The Cutter.”

Just as the song ended I saw them coming back.

“What should I try?” I said.

“Which one?” Tom said, leaning closer to me.

“In black. Red hair.”

“Angst, baby. Be crazy but cool.”

So when she was beside me, looking down and trying not to spill her beer, I leaned over and said, into her ear: “Elvis has
not
left the building.”

She laughed. We introduced ourselves: she was Amanda James, Scripps freshman from Houston, Texas. Tom and I laughed at that
and teased her about being from Houston and the soft southern twang in her voice. Then Tom, maybe noticing something, maybe
the way I was looking at her, disappeared discreetly, and Amanda and I stood there looking at each other silently.

“They met in Los Angeles,” she said, smiling.

“What?”

“They met in Los Angeles,” she said, “at a party while Echo and the Bunnymen throbbed in the background.”

“Feeling the cocaine rush through his brain,” I went on, “he wondered if he had seen her before. In New York at the Palladium
or in L.A. at Parachute. Then he realized it didn’t matter.”

“And then she —” Amanda stopped suddenly, and then asked: “Where are you from?”

“India.”

“Oh.” After a long pause: “Are you a Brahmin?”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“Nothing.”

She looked away, and then another girl tapped her on the arm. They whispered to each other.

To me: “I have to go.”

“Why?”

“I’m here with the other girls on my floor,” she said, “and they want to leave.”

“You don’t have to go with them.”

“We’re going to hate each other soon anyway. I should be nice and loyal for a while.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“Okay.”

I pushed through the crowd, nodding at people, looking for Tom. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Hey. Abhay.” Kate was blond, beautiful in a kind of distant sculptured manner. We had slept together during our sophomore
year, and still did sometimes, although we didn’t need to be as drunk as we used to be and didn’t hold on to each other as
hard as we used to. That night she was dressed in a white sweater and looked like she was out of some purposely muted black-and-white
picture from a fashion magazine.

“Katie.”

She smiled. “How’re you doing, Abi?”

I shrugged and smiled, and she moved closer to me, and I had to get my beer out of the way and we put our arms around each
other’s waist and we stood for a while. People pushed past us. Her hair was fresh, fine. I liked to touch it.

When I came up out of the frat room a bunch of the brothers were hauling a large plaster statue of somebody vaguely Oriental
seated in the lotus position toward the staircase. I stopped and listened as they argued. Finally they left the statue at
the top of the stairs and went down to get a beer. I went home to New Dorm, my feet scraping over the concrete, and let myself
in.

I lay on my bed and peered at the pictures on the wall, darkened and indistinct in the silver light of the streetlight outside
my window. Then I sat up and tried to unclench my jaw but couldn’t without having the muscles on my face flutter. I went out
and down and back to the frat room. Echo and the Bunnymen were still doing “The Cutter.” Somebody really liked that song.
I saw Kate talking to a girl I didn’t know, and I walked up behind her and laid my face on the back of her shoulder, rubbing
my nose across the smooth furriness of her sweater. She reached back, without turning to look, and began to rub my neck. “Spare
us the cutter,” said Echo and his Bunnymen.

When I woke up, my legs were under Kate’s. She twitched suddenly and made a small sound at the back of her throat. I pulled
my legs from under her and touched her hair and felt a slight sting in my fingertips
and she turned to me, still asleep. After a while I let go of her and got out of bed. As I put on my clothes I could see pictures
of her on a closet door, Kate with her mother, Kate at high school with friends, Kate with her horse, Kate in Paris with a
boyfriend, Kate with various red-faced white-haired people.

Outside, the sky was graying. I walked across the Scripps lawns toward Pomona. A black German shepherd with a blue bandanna
around his neck ran up to me and I sat down and rubbed his face, enjoying the warm panting breath on my face. I ran my fingers
through the thick hair on his stomach, and he squirmed and reached up and licked my face, pushing me over. We lay happily
on the grass laughing at each other and I realized it had been a long time since I had touched an animal. I got up, and he
followed me for a moment and then veered off, running easily through the water arcing up from the sprinklers.

In the lounge the phone was off the hook. I picked up the receiver and laid it back in the cradle. There was a note on my
door: “The phone’s been ringing every ten minutes and it’s somebody with a foreign accent.” I went back out to the lounge
and sat by the phone. The wall in front of me went from gray to orange and I felt heat spread across my neck. The phone rang,
and I picked it up. An operator asked for me, fuzzy and distant, and then my father cleared his throat.

“Abhay.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Abhay, your grandfather, he passed away yesterday.”

I could hear birds far away, muffled by the door and the glass and the concrete.

“Abhay?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“I’m going there tomorrow for the… He was in hospital with the old heart trouble. They said he was sleeping and then he seemed
to wake up for a minute.”

We were silent for a moment, and I could hear him breathing and I imagined the signal flashing up from land into space and
bouncing off metal and then miles of space again until finally I could hear it.

“Pa.”

“Yes?”

“Uh… I…”

“Yes. Listen, I’ll call you again soon.”

“Okay.”

“Right.”

“Tell Ma I’m okay.”

“Yes.”

I went outside and sat on the stairs and the sun sparked at me through the sprinkler sprays. I was feeling nothing and knew
it would come later. I tried to remember my grandfather’s face but could think only of his cupboard full of dusty medical
books and homeopathic medicines. My father’s father had been trained to be a lawyer but preferred to spend his time studying
tattered old books and dispensing sweet white medicines to people who didn’t trust the doctors with regular modern degrees
or couldn’t afford them. When I was very young we’d go to visit him in his old, old house, and I’d play chess with him, old
Indian rules, and then there would be a knock at the door and he’d go away and I’d see a thin face, anxious and sometimes
in pain, and my grandfather would scoop up thousands of little white balls in a glass vial and carry it carefully to the door
and bring back some little white balls for my waiting mouth and he’d sprinkle them on my tongue, laughing his toothless clown’s
laugh. When I grew older he began to ask me when I was going to have my upnayana ceremony and be able to wear my sacred thread
and become one of the twice-born, but I’d been to school in the meantime and had learned about the evils of the caste system,
so we didn’t play chess anymore. Just before I left for the States we went to visit him, and I spent most of that week up
on the roof, reading and watching the kites weave in the sky. My mother came up and sat on the bed next to me and said he’s
getting old and you’re going away and he worries, you know, you are the oldest son, he really worries, you could do it just
for the old man; and for a moment I remembered the way his fingernails clicked against my teeth when he put the sweetness
in my mouth and the innocence of his smile but I shook my head and went back to my book, and now I wondered what he’d thought
of in that last moment of wakefulness.

The water stopped. I still couldn’t feel anything.

In the slanting yellow light of early morning Mount Baldy looked closer than it really was, as if you could easily walk into
the shallow dark gullies on its slopes, if you wanted to. I was still sitting on the steps
when people started leaving for their first classes, and they stared at me curiously in passing, not saying anything. They
were used to finding me asleep in the lounges or on the patch of grass outside, but I was, I suppose, especially ragged that
morning. I pushed myself up and went back into the dorm, picking up my neighbor’s copy of the
New York Times
on the way. I sat in the lounge, next to the phone, because he didn’t like his paper disappearing, and read a front-page
article about students marching in Beijing, raising slogans about freedom. In the Brazilian jungle, Catholics from New York
were quarreling with evangelists from Texas about which was worse: frightening tribal Indians into conversion with sermons
about hellfire and damnation or persuading them gently with lessons on agriculture. On the editorial page, under the headline
“In India, Some Things Are More Important than Time,” somebody named Krause complained about the thirty minutes and assorted
forms it took him to get a taxi at Bombay International Airport and about the basic inefficiency of Indian methods of producing
television sets under protective tariffs. “Some things should be more important than self-sufficiency,” he said. On another
page, the chief correspondent of the paper’s New Delhi bureau had an article about a holiday he had taken in Darjeeling and
the hotel he had stayed in, which was, he said, “full of the charm of the British Raj.” This, I swear, was the
New York Times
the morning after my grandfather died, and as I sat there I felt as if I was in a film, and that I was expected to react
somehow, but my head was pounding and I couldn’t decide whether this was ironical or absurd or something else or anything
at all, so I went into the bathroom and brushed from my mouth the accumulated bitterness of the night.

This feeling of being in a film hung over me even later, when I sat at the back of a classroom and listened to a fellow named
Lin talk about Asian revolutions. The British, he was saying, changed India for the better with their efficient railroads
and efficient administration and so on, and for a moment I felt that I should be saying something, but then, sensing my face
flush, full, somehow, of the realization that whatever I said wouldn’t make any sense, would sound crazy, I opened a notebook
and doodled instead, and at the end of the period I found that I had drawn birds and airplanes soaring across the page.

Outside, the smog had moved in like a curtain and Baldy was invisible. I could feel my eyes stinging, and the acrid tickling
moved slowly
across my nostrils and into the back of my throat. Kate swung around a corner, laden with books. She snapped the hair out
of her face with a quick jerk of her head.

“I have to be in class in three and a half minutes.” She didn’t smile.