The Leaving of Things (27 page)

I hung up. The handset clunked back on the console, as heavy as deadweight.

“What’d he say?” Anand asked from the dining table.

“We wait.”

Do your studies. Carry on as usual. How was this consolation?

* *

After lunch, I studied a bit, but I couldn’t concentrate. I thumbed through the photography book again—I’d renewed it from the library four times now. I looked closely at the Stieglitz photograph of the immigrants on the ship, my eyes searching the faces. I wondered what became of each of these people, what were their separate fates upon reaching the far shore?

It wasn’t until the sky had darkened and the streetlights flickered on that Anand and I heard the Premier roll into the driveway, crunching across the gravel, and its engine silenced. The sound of fidgeting with the downstairs door echoed up the stairwell followed by the padding of a lone pair of footsteps. I went to the front doors, unbolted them, and let my father in.

“Did the cook show up?” he asked, entering. He seemed a bit dazed. His sleeves were rolled up and his shirt was half untucked.

“Who?”

“I had asked for the cook. He should have been here by now.” He sauntered down the hallway and peeked through the dining room into the kitchen. Shaking his head, he returned. “Okay. Guess we go out for dinner.”

“I can get some chai going if you like,” I offered.

“That would be good,” he said. “I’ll take a quick bath.”

“What’s going on?”

He exhaled. “Surgery went fine. She’s in recovery right now.” He paused, turning something over in his mind. “I’ll explain later.”

I added milk to water, sprinkled in chai masala and spoons of sugar and let the concoction steep on the small stove. You let it boil, the froth rising to the rim, took it off the burner, stirred the browning liquid so it settled, and set it back to steep again. You did this several times so that the flavor of the chai could concentrate. I strained the chai into three cups and set them on the dining-room table, along with the package of Parle-G biscuits.

My father sipped the chai quietly, his mind distant. He never even touched the biscuits. I was about to press him for information when he spoke up: “The appendix had burst so there was …”—he made vague circular movements with his hand—“a lot of cleanup to do. But while they were in there, they found one thing.”

My mind froze

“An abnormality,” he said. “On the uterus. They removed it, sent it to the lab.”

“What do you mean?”

He took off his glasses, his elbows against the edge of the table, fingers pressed against the bridge of his nose. He shut his eyes.

“Doctor will tell me more tomorrow,” he said. He put his glasses back on. “Nothing to worry about yet.”

I knew I was going to get nothing more out of him. I let my breathing even out. Let time flow again.

“Can we see her?” Anand asked.

“Not today. She’s sleeping mostly. Tomorrow we’ll go.”

The chair scraped loudly as I pushed away from the table. I stood, taking up the cup of chai, and left the room. I needed suddenly to be out on the balcony, out amid the pulse of traffic, the thrum of music, signs of life.

“We’ll have dinner at Havmor or something, Vikram,” my father said behind me. “Be ready.”

“Okay.” I didn’t want to tell him I had no appetite.

* *

It was a private clinic not far from our bungalow. The fluorescent tube lights cast an insufficient glow that gave the clinic a mortuary pall. Everything underlit: the gray walls of the tiny lobby, the wicker chairs, the cement floor. My father led us past the doctors skulking around in their white coats, their necks noosed with stethoscopes.

The tube light glowing above my mother’s bed only accentuated the shadows and made her room look only darker. The light hardly reached across the room to the half-closed door of the bathroom. From beyond the shuttered window came the bellow of rickshaw horns, the trill of bicycle bells, the roar of a passing bus—Ahmedabad’s evening madness infiltrating even here.

My mother lay very still under her sheets, eyes closed. I walked up to her. An IV coiled from a stand next to her bed into her forearm. I studied the drip-drip of a clear solution from a bag hooked atop the stand into the tube. Somehow, it made me glad to know it was there, either nourishing her or sedating her.

“How are you?”

She smirked and nodded her head weakly, drowsily. I had never seen my mother in such a state before. I bent down and kissed her on the forehead. I had never done that in my life, but at that moment, the four of us in that gloom, it seemed the right thing. The only thing. I turned and took a seat on a plastic chair next to the door.

My father leaned over my mother’s bed as if she were trying to tell him something. A moment later, the door handle turned, and the doctor, a woman, entered. She looked to be in her mid-fifties and wore owlish glasses, a red bindi, and a sari under her white coat. She looked slightly overworked, worn out now at the end of the day.

“Kem cho?”
she asked gently, though I wasn’t sure to whom.

“She is doing okay,” my father said, straightening up, “but she wanted to tell the staff there is a rat in this room.”

The doctor looked unfazed, nodded. “We have had such a problem in past. I will tell the attendant.”

My mother’s face scrunched up momentarily then relaxed.

“Do you need more painkiller?” my father asked.

“This is normal,” the doctor said with a confident toss of her head. “There will be some periodic pain, but it will go away by tomorrow. Best not to overmedicate.” She checked my mother’s pulse against her watch and noted it on a chart. She checked her pupils. A nurse, just a young girl with frazzled ponytailed hair in a salwaar kameez who could have been a Xavier’s undergrad, walked in on brisk feet. She took my mother’s temperature.

“Ninety-eight-two,” she whispered to the doctor, somewhat shyly.

A knock sounded at the door, and a thin man loped in on flip-flops. I couldn’t tell if he worked here or had just wandered in from the vegetable stand across the road.

“There is a rat here,” the doctor informed him. “See to it.”

The attendant acknowledged her by bobbing his head from side to side and went back out.

“Pulse, temperature, recovery is all fine,” the doctor said. There was a pleasing forthrightness that comforted me. She could easily have been a housewife in any Gujarati home were it not for the fact that she had ambition, that she challenged the norm and had risen to become a surgeon. I wanted her to care well for my mother. I wanted to be proud of her.

“So let us talk,” she said to my father and slowly closed the door.

* *

It was the size of a child’s fist what they had removed. A growth on the uterus. They had also drawn a lot of blood for tests. Tests and more tests. Two days later, February arrived, and my mother was still at the clinic, gaining her strength either to resume her future or to gear up for another battle. I wondered if she knew as much.

The cook my father had arranged for finally showed up. For the next few days, he’d arrive late in the afternoon and throw dinner together. He cooked us rotis, dal, mixed vegetables, rice. It was strange to eat food prepared in your own kitchen by a complete stranger—by someone who made his living cooking for strangers. It was digestible, I thought. Too oily, my father said, but it would have to do. The cleaning girl came in the mornings, washed and hung our laundry, cleaned the floors. In the evenings, she returned to wash our dinner dishes. And each morning as
I left for classes, I passed the groundskeeper watering and clipping, his duties unaffected, his thoughts untouched.

I could hardly keep my focus in class. There, as the ceiling fans whirred, students yawned, and the lecturers droned, I kept my eyes on my notebook, and I wrote pages and pages of driveling notes, if only to keep my pen busy, my mind distracted. Other than Devasia and Pradeep, I kept my own company. I found consolation in the library, browsing the
Time
magazines or picking through the shelf of Hemingway, Steinbeck and the other signals from America, still beaming faint voices from the shelves underground.

Anand and I got home one afternoon to find Kamala Auntie emerging from a rickshaw with luggage. She paid the driver as Anand and I each took up a suitcase.

As we hauled the bags through the front doors, I noticed out of the corner of my eye an envelope in the mailbox. I undid the hasp, took out a small postcard—the standard-issue kind from the Indian postal service, cream-colored, scribbled in Hindi, addressed to my mother—along with an envelope. The envelope was to me, from the University of Wisconsin.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I told Kamala Auntie in Gujarati. Her being here, it felt like a reunion with an old ally. A sign that our numbers were not lost.

She smiled, “Everything will be all right. When I found out your pappa hired a cook, I said no way and went straight to train station. I won’t have them eating food cooked by some stranger’s hands.”

We jostled with the suitcases through the narrow entry doors and up the stairs.

“How is your mummi?” Her voice echoed off the stairwell. “Any news?”

“Pappa hasn’t told us anything yet,” I said.

Anand and I set the suitcases in the hallway. I handed Anand the postcard. “What does this say?” I asked him.

He scanned it front and back, eyes intent. “It’s from Dharmanshu Uncle.” His lips formed the words as he read. “Just asking how Ma is doing and to keep him posted.”

In the dining room, Kamala Auntie spoke on the phone with Hemant Uncle in Baroda. She briefed him on the food she’d left in the fridge for him to heat up for dinner, and she sternly warned Anjali that she’d better stick to her studies and how she wasn’t so happy with her marks lately. “I don’t care,” she said into the phone, “let her think of that the next time she decides to lie to me then I find out she failed the exam.” The Gujarati words were like nails driven into the phone. “That girl,” I heard her shout, “she should have been a boy. All the time, cricket, cricket, cricket. And she doesn’t study.”

I went to my room with the envelope from Wisconsin. It felt thick. If they were just writing to reject you, I thought, why bother with such a thick letter? Maybe it was something else, totally unrelated to admissions, a brochure about housing or something equally irritating and irrelevant.

I fanned the envelope, pacing between my desk and the bed. Finally, I tore open the seal inch by inch with a finger. Blocking out the noises of doubt in my mind, I fished out the papers inside and began shuffling through them. My eyes scanned what looked like a student visa application. What was that doing in here? Then I reshuffled the papers, turned it all right side up and braced myself as I began to read the first words of a letter telling me I’d gotten in.

Elated! Disbelieving! I got up. I sat down. I got the urge to rush out into the hallway to cry out at the top of my lungs that I’d gotten in. I had won.

It did feel like I had won something. That day I won a bet I had made with myself. A bet I’d made with all my inner self-doubters.

But no sooner had the celebration welled up in my heart than it was all smothered out. Something wasn’t right. This victory felt strange, wrong. A false celebration. The letter I held in my hand was the golden key, and it had opened a golden new path for me. The path I wanted and was now mine to take. I thought of my mother at the clinic that very moment.

Could I even go down that path now? Did I even want to? I supposed this is what it felt like to have the best of things happen at the worst of times.

20

M
y father returned after sundown, straight from the clinic. Kamala Auntie had prepared food for us. We all sat at the table, our plates before us, and listened. The news was not good. The cells in the mass indicated cancer. More results were pending. We would know more as they came in. The doctor could then determine a strategy, my father said. His tone was even, almost matter-of-fact. He finished his dinner quickly, and we all cleared the table so that we could go to the clinic. Whether she was sleeping or awake didn’t matter. We wanted to see her.

“Does she know?” I asked.

My father nodded. “The doctor wanted us to wait till we knew the full results. But I didn’t want her to be in the dark.” He sighed deeply. “She’s knows. If she didn’t, she could well guess, I am sure.”

“How did she take it?” I asked.

“Better than I thought,” he said. “Your mother’s a strong woman.”

“I know she is,” I said.

“Always been that way. All those years of uncertainty till now,” he said, shaking his head, half admiringly, half regretfully.

At the clinic, none of us brought up the tumor. It hovered in the space above us, a toxic cloud, weighing down our minds.

My mother did say the pain was less, and they had removed the rat from the room. Still, her voice was weak, and she spoke little. It sapped her strength to speak. From where I sat by the door, her voice sounded gossamer-frail.

Kamala Auntie stood at the foot of the bed, told her there was nothing to worry about. She could take care of things back home till she was feeling better.

“Has the doctor come around?” my father asked. He clutched the metal railing at the foot of the bed. “How’ve you been eating here?”

She said the doctor had come by a couple of times. “Said temperature was normal, BP normal. They gave me dal, rice, yogurt.” She stopped to catch her breath. She winced.

“Still the pain?”

“
Thodu thodu
,” she replied, sounding muffled, as if she were speaking from the other side of a wall. “But you know …?” She paused and shifted in her bed. Kamala Auntie stepped around and adjusted the pillows under her head. “She says not much,” my mother said. “The doctor. Always looks at chart. Hardly answers my questions.”

My father told her not to speak too much. Told her be good, get her rest, and she would be going home very soon. Anand stood opposite my father. He mumbled a question, and my father said something in reply. Kamala Auntie added something to it. Anand nodded, biting his
fingernails. Words and voices floated, unintelligibly, in the grainy half-light.