The Leaving of Things (26 page)

“Let’s go, Manju,” Hannah said, touching Manju’s elbow, but Manju swiped her arm away and glared at me.

“No, she did not. Her fiancé found out about her running around with other boys and called off the wedding.”

This was turning into one of those overblown Doordarshan soap operas my mother watched in the evenings. I was stunned. “Who told him?” I gave Manju an accusing glance.

“Priya did so herself,” she said brusquely. “She wanted to be honest with him.” She took a step toward me. “And if you don’t like our culture, why don’t you get out of here? We don’t want any of you Indians here thinking you’re so superior because you lived in America. Just get out of here.” She turned away and disappeared into the rabble of the canteen, talking heatedly with Hannah.

* *

I finished recording lecture notes into Pradeep’s tape recorder—Sridharan’s lecture that day concerned “the major characteristics and practitioners of pre-Raphaelite poetry.”

The lecture had been a grueling exercise in staying awake. But I managed, driven by my determination to take thorough notes for Pradeep. I hit “stop” and, seeing the tape was full, ejected it from the recorder.

“Thank you, Vikram bhai,” Pradeep said, taking the cassette from me. “Very helpful, yaar, very helpful.” He sat at the edge of his dorm-room cot, his shades covering his eyes, his ever-genial smile on his face. I said no problem, put my notebook back in my bag. After my run-in with Manju, I felt the urge to get the hell off campus.

“So you had fine time in Delhi?” Pradeep asked.

He had asked me that question before, and as before, I said I did and that I’d taken a lot of pictures.

“I spent my Christmas break performing in one function after another,” Pradeep said, rising from the cot. He took up his walking stick and followed after me as I started for the door.

“That’s really awesome, Pradeep. Your future’s taking off,” I said.

“But I’m so much busy nowadays,” he said.

I stopped and touched Pradeep’s shoulder. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

“I’m so busy nowadays I really must take care not to get too lost in my engagements”—he shook the tape in his hand—“and study all these notes you and Devasia are providing.” I got the feeling Pradeep was trying to stall me. As I stood at the door, I saw him reach an arm out for me. I took the cue.

“What is it?” I stepped toward him.

“Vikram”—his voice became a half-whisper—“did something happen between you and Priya? I do not mean to intrude, you see, but I don’t like gossip. Especially concerning my own friends.”

I told him Priya and I had “gotten close,” left it at that, and said nothing about my chat with D’Souza.

Pradeep nodded thoughtfully. “I did not know she was planning on marriage, bhai,” he said.

“She wasn’t,” I said. “But her father was.”

“She is only eighteen, I think so. Why now?” He swung his stick around and made for the metal cabinet that stood on the wall opposite his cot.

“Not sure,” I said. “Either she really did fall for this guy, or her father put her up to it. Anyway, I guess she didn’t go through with it. Hence, all the gossip.”

“Achcha,” Pradeep muttered. Then, his head tilting slightly away from me, he beckoned me over to him with a swing of his stick. Pradeep leaned sideways toward me and asked confidentially, “You think she is … in love … with you?”

I laughed, shaking my head, stepping away, relieved Pradeep couldn’t see because he would’ve seen me flush, get fidgety and embarrassed. “Maybe … maybe she felt like we had something in common. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think so.”

Pradeep turned the handle of the cabinet and jerked open the metal doors. He placed the cassette on a stack of them on a shelf at shoulder level. Then his hand switched over to a stack of brand-new cassettes, still in their wrappers, sitting beside the used ones. He grabbed the top one. “For months,” he said, “I felt something was not right.
Priya
sounded
happy, but it was obvious she was not. I am surprised that her friends didn’t see it.”

“She didn’t talk much about it,” I said. “She always seemed so sure of herself.”

Pradeep considered my words for a second, smiled. “Then you were not listening.”

A knock sounded at the door, and Devasia appeared, his notebook and a pocket-sized Macmillan edition of
The Way of the World
in hand. He strode in, sharp-featured and shiny-haired in his kurta and slippers. “Happy New Year.” He smiled, shaking my hand. Pradeep held out to him the new cassette, telling Devasia to use it for his dictation, when I noticed what looked like a box upholstered in red velvet with a worn gold clasp sitting on the floor of the opened cabinet. A sturdy padlock hung from the clasp.

“What’s with the treasure chest?” I asked.

“Treasure chest?” Pradeep pondered my words and turned toward me. “Oh-ho! You mean—” he tapped the box with his stick and lowered his voice. “For winning that Diwali contest, I got trophy, of course, but on top of that, they gave me cash prize. Three thousand rupees.”

Devasia and I replied with cries of “fantastic” and “wonderful.”

Pradeep clanged shut the cabinet door. “But we must be, how do you say, discreet.” He tapped his nose with his index finger and held out his palm in a gesture for us to keep things under wraps.

Devasia asked why Pradeep didn’t just deposit the money. “There’s a Bank of Baroda here,” he waved his hand toward the college building where the Bank of Baroda did indeed have a tiny branch on the second floor.

“This is only temporary, yaar,” Pradeep assured us. He said his cousin would be visiting in the next couple of weeks, and he planned to hand the money over to him as soon as he arrived.

“Why your cousin?” I asked.

“He is living in Bombay, you see,” Pradeep explained, “and this coming summer, he’s planning to book one recording session for me in studio there. He knows few friends in music business, so I am hoping … we will see now.”

“Nothing to see,” Devasia said, beaming. “You will be most popular singer in India.”

“A Bollywood recording star right here,” I said.

Pradeep chuckled, a bit shyly and incredulously. Devasia went over to the desk at the far end of the room to get started on the dictation. We waved goodbye as I walked for the door, and Pradeep followed close behind.

“Priya is a smart girl,” he said to me privately. “Independent. Whatever she has done, wherever she has gone, she is happy. I feel that.” I stepped out the door, into the veranda. “She was not happy here,” he added. “Even
I
could see that.” He laughed softly.

“I just wonder how she’s doing, that’s all.”

Pradeep lingered at the doorway. He tapped his stick a few times against the floor. “I think,” he said, “you will hear from her again.” And though his eyes were masked by his shades, I could tell there was a coy twinkle in them.

I told Pradeep congratulations on his success and hurried off campus.

19

M
y father bought an off-white Premier, an upgraded version of the classic Fiats that Hemant Uncle and Dharmanshu Uncle owned. He drove it home from a showroom in Paldi one Sunday afternoon. We went downstairs, stood around it, and I had to admit it looked stylish, like one of those boxy European sedans I’d seen in German or Italian movies.

“So what do you think?” he beamed. “You like it? Now we can drive to Baroda whenever we want and visit Hemant Uncle. I’ll teach you and your mother how to drive, and you can go wherever.”

The exterior shone like a trophy; the light-brown leather interior had that factory-direct smell; the dashboard, the gear-stick, everything glossy, untouched. “It’s really something,” I said. I thought of Ahmedabad’s traffic—a stock car rally, a zoo, and an open-air market all mashed together—and knew the Premier wouldn’t stay so squeaky clean for long.

“What do you think?” my father asked as Anand peeked inside.

“Does it have AC?”

“It’s got everything,” my father said, snapping his fingers. “Get in everyone. We’ll go for a drive.”

My mother brought out a tiny canister of vermillion powder, mixed it with water in a silver tray so it turned into a dab of paste, then dipped her finger into it and inscribed a swastika on the hood of the car. She had done the same thing in America when my father had bought our Ford Escort hatchback. But within a couple of days, as surreptitiously as I could, I wiped the swastika off the hood of that Ford. I had hoped my mother would think it was the wind that rubbed off the symbol.

“Here,” my mother now told me, “you will not need to rub off
swasteek
.”

“I didn’t rub it off—” I began, then switched gears. “Okay. I did. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “In America, they think swasteek means something bad.”

“I just didn’t want our neighbors to think we were Nazis.”

“It is a holy symbol actually,” my father said solemnly, opening the driver-side door. “Chalo, let’s go.” He unlocked the door for Anand, who promptly jumped into the front seat.

“Backseat, backseat,” my father reprimanded, laughing.

Anand moved to the backseat, making room for my mother. She had not protested the car purchase. She had blessed it instead. I watched her in the front seat, chatting with my father.

“Vikram, get in!” he shouted.

I was happy for her, completely happy that her holy symbol could remain without qualification on the hood of our new car and guide us forward.

* *

While the mornings were still cool, I decided to get some exercise. Before classes, I went out jogging. I’d jog east from the bungalow along University Road, while the traffic was still light and there were fewer vendors out wheeling their wooden carts around. I jogged past the Indian Oil station and the shantytown where I observed the women washing clothes in buckets, dusting the narrow lanes between mud homes while half-dressed kids scampered with stray dogs and men lay on charpoys smoking bidis. I circled the perimeter of the shanty and took a back road that took me home, past a line of produce stands and shacks.

After jogging, I went out to the balcony, did my sit-ups and push-ups on the stone tiles still cool from the night. I sat out there, flipping through the
Times of India
, reading stories about Rajiv Gandhi and the Bofors scandal, the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan civil war, and any bits of news from America I could scrounge up before I went inside to eat breakfast. That’s when I began to notice my mother skipping her meals or taking unusually small portions. “I’m not having much appetite these days,” she would say.

One by one, I checked out books by the American writers from the narrow shelf space they occupied in the lower stacks. A couple of times a week, I’d sneak down there and find something new to read. Steinbeck at first, his stories about Cannery Row and the migrants and itinerants of northern California, and Hemingway’s determined Cuban
fisherman rowing farther out than he ever had. I switched to the plays—volumes of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams. All were windows opening to America—their every line hummed with the energy of American life—and the words comforted me when I could take the time to read them. I felt a kinship with every soul in these pages, and they became my companions in the long, heat-blinded slog from one Ahmedabad afternoon to the next.

One evening after dinner, I started
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and I got so drawn in by the romance of New Orleans—delicious with jazz, alive with the strife of lowerclass American immigrant life, with loud men at poker tables, lovers in cluttered rooms divided only by beaded curtains, the air sweetened with mint juleps and cigar smoke and New Orleans sweat—that I read it all through in one sitting. I thought I’d discovered America’s beating heart, and strangely enough, I felt turned on by the deluded yet wildly erotic Blanche DuBois, so fragile and dangerous. Lies and dementia and all, I still fell in love with her. And when I finished, I flipped back and reread the passages that had struck me. It was past midnight when I put the book away, turned over, and gave in to sleep, hoping I would dream the scenes.

In the middle of that night, my father woke me up. I saw his figure stark against the hallway light as he leaned into the room.

“Vikram, I’m taking your mother to the clinic,” came his words.

“What happened?”

“She’s having some pains. We’re going to check it out.”

Anand lay on the cot on the other side of the room, still sleeping.

“Look after things till I get back,” he said.

“All right.”

I heard my parents’ voices muffled in the deep night.

I heard nothing from my father the next morning, and I went to my lectures as usual. Afterward, I picked Anand up at his school. On the way home, I stopped by the photomat at the shopping plaza, picked up my pictures from Delhi, and bought a couple more rolls of film.

As we pulled into our bungalow driveway, the ground-skeeper was working his way along the rosebushes with a watering can. Inside the bungalow, we could hear the bathroom cleaner, his bottles clinking and his brushes scrubbing behind the bathroom door. The cleaning girl was gone, her work done for the day: clothes and sheets swayed on the line on the balcony. But there was no sign of my father, no message. I heated up leftovers for my brother and me, and as we ate, the phone rang—the shrill double-ring:
trrrnngg-trrrnng!

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“Vikram? It’s Pappa. I’m calling from clinic.”

“Where?”

“In Navarangpura. Okay, so, your ma needs to have surgery. It’s her appendix, doctor says. Needs to come out.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “And that’s all it was?”

“Well, it got septic. And apparently, last night it burst.”

Septic … burst
. The words invited feelings of disaster.

“And they need to go in and take care of it.”

“When?”

“They’re taking her in now.”

“Where are you? Can we come there?”

“Hang out there. I’ll drop by at home later on. Just do your studies, carry on as usual.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll see you later.”