The Two Krishnas (35 page)

By the time Ajay ambled downstairs in his flannel shorts, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, she had managed to pull herself together. Now more than ever, she needed to keep herself occupied, action being an antidote to thought, but finding nothing that needed tending to—the last order for The Banyan had been delivered just a couple of days ago and there were no other orders to fill—she sat at the bare teak dining room table and leafed through an old copy of
India Currents
. She tried to look engrossed in an article about the outsourcing of so many U.S. jobs to India. She studied the black and white photograph of a room full of Indian men and women strapped to their headsets somewhere in Delhi appearing rapt in servicing Americans. They no longer had to leave their countries to spoor opportunities in a new, alien world. Instead opportunity had jumped on the bandwidth and globetrotted to them instead. In its own personally recondite way, this validated her feelings that America was no longer a land of opportunity; those who had found a way to resist its lure had, ultimately, turned out ahead.

To invite more distraction, she brought the TV set alive with the remote control. An unscheduled episode of Oprah, on how to get a handle on credit card bills, bounded upon the screen. Women were confessing unashamedly to vulgar levels of squandering as the audience oohed and aahed away. She imagined herself being on such a candid show, crying her heart out in front of millions of people about a sinning husband, and was convinced that nobody could beat Americans at turning dirty laundry into framed canvasses.

“So, what’s up with Dad? Didn’t see him last night,” Ajay said, pulling out the accouterments of a fruit smoothie from the refrigerator and placing them next to the shining metallic blender in the kitchen that Pooja would later clean. “Is he out of town again?”

She looked up from her magazine, directing her gaze at the TV set. How must he have spent the night? Would he have slept soundly while her world had turned upside down? Or would he have called that boy over, relieved to have found a way out?

Now a heavy-set Caucasian woman was crying profusely on the TV, her face flushed red, and a suited woman with very short, cropped hair, who appeared to be an advisor of some sort was intently talking her through her reasons for her recklessness.
Maybe,
thought Pooja,
it would be easier just to tell Ajay right now. He is going to find out sooner or later.

“Yes, yes, you are the observant one now, aren’t you?”

“Jeez! Just asking.”

“Suddenly you are all worried about us when half the time you are not here yourself.”

“Oh, not that again!” he groaned, filling up the beaker.

She rose and walked into the sunlit kitchen past her son. She walked through its long space, feeling the phantoms of the night before. It was only now that it occurred to her that while Rahul and she had been sparring, she hadn’t cared much whether Sonali had been able to hear or see them from across the way. Suddenly she regretted the way she had treated Sonali, considering the unpleasant responsibility she had taken upon herself to reveal everything. She could feel Ajay’s eyes on her and she tried to guard hers away from him. From a cabinet she lifted out the oversized tub of protein powder she knew he would need for his shake and silently placed it next to him on the counter.

“Thanks,” he said, keeping his eyes on her. His head was reeling with thoughts because he could sense the palpable change in his mother’s demeanor. For as long as he could remember, there had been nothing remotely extraordinary or exciting about his parents. While his friends at school had endured domestic upheavals through trial separations and messy divorces, he had not witnessed a single spat between them. They had been the quintessential Indian immigrant parents—hardworking, faithful, loyal to the skies of their citizenry, ultimately committed to growing old together and seeing their children settled to repeat the same cycle. His father was a banker and his mother a homemaker, for Christ’s sake, how much more conventional could things get?

She was definitely hiding something from him and now the thought that maybe he was right all along, that his father was indeed not only betraying his mother, but lying to him also, both crushed and inflamed him.

“So, is everything okay?” he asked, his finger poised on the blender’s button.

She glanced at him.

“Dad, I mean. He didn’t mention—”

“Just for a few days, he will be gone, nothing to worry about.”

He pressed the button, a whizzing sound filling the room. Pooja took her seat at the table once again, reducing the volume on the TV but allowing the anguished, spendthrift women to stay on. Muted, she could now see their mouths move but was able to fill in the words and personalize their grievances:
my husband is cheating on me! My husband of twenty-one years has fallen to the most shameful of perversions. My husband, for whom I have given up everything, has given me up for another man. Everything is wrong. I want to die.

I can explain a few nights
, Pooja thought,
but what will I do about all the nights after that? He is not coming back and Ajay will ask questions.
Then anger seized Pooja:
why do I have to do this alone? Once again, I’m supposed to be the strong one. When is it my turn to be rescued from all this? And who will do it?
She looked at Ajay who, even as the blender churned away at full speed, was looking intently at her, as if expecting something. There was no place to hide. Rahul had already taken the easy way out.

“Come,” she said to him and pointed at Rahul’s chair to the left of her, at the head of the table. “Let’s talk.”

He made out her words over the noise and immediately his face fell. He silenced the blender with the push of a button and approached the table, reflecting the pain on his mother’s face with some of his own. As he stood by the chair, almost afraid to sit, Pooja looked up at her lithe, sculpted son, beholding him with the kind of prohibited, primordial lust that was a complex part of all maternal devotion. She saw in him Rahul and herself fused together, the best of them, a kind of physical perfection that was irrefutable—not the projection of maternal bias but pure aesthetic appreciation. And although she saw Rahul in Ajay—in his deep eyes, the strong jaw—Pooja preferred to think that she had created him independently of Rahul, as if his seed had meant nothing in the end and that he had been given to her by the gods as a reward for the sacrifices she had made when leaving Kenya. She wanted to protect him from all this now, to keep the world he had grown up in intact, but she was powerless to do so without Rahul.

She felt sorry for him and was able to understand why he had turned out to be so different. Ajay had been deprived, through no fault of his own, of a proper upbringing. Together, they had deprived him of his own birthright—a history, a past, the truth—all locked away in a box that Pooja hid in her closet. There were no black and white photographs of the generations past where he could detect resemblances, no grandparents on whose laps he could be coddled while being treated to godly myths and heroic ancestral stories, and there were no siblings (even though Rahul and she had tried) to cure the isolation of an only child. Ajay had not been brought up in a country where most people—especially his friends—looked like him and spoke his language. He was an outsider, even more so than Rahul and she had been as Asians in Kenya.

How could they now be surprised if, in the end, he had chosen to doff these values, to defy tradition? Perhaps if there was any advantage to Ajay’s acclimation to the West, his American way of thinking, it would be that his notions of a relationship would be different from that of his parents and grandparents, she thought. It would make a separation between his parents conceivable, although painful.

“Sit, please, darling,” she said.

“Did I do something?” he suddenly asked, sensing now that there must be more behind his father’s absence, that perhaps they had had a disagreement over him.

She gave a short, unexpected laugh. “No! Of course not. No, darling. Sit here,” she said and leaned over to push the chair out, but he quickly helped her with this, sitting gingerly in his father’s chair and rubbing his hands together anxiously. She tried to smile gently and said, “You know,
beta,
when people have been married for as long as your father and I have, things happen, you know?” she began tentatively. But his stare was resistant, hard, as unyielding as she had ever seen it and she suddenly wished she hadn’t attempted to do this by herself, or at least not just yet. Pooja felt nervous, was afraid that something in him would combust. “Your father and I, we are taking some time to think about things, you know, it’s nothing for you to be worried about or anything. Nothing serious, we still love you very much—”

He grunted.

“There is no reason for you to be worried, darling.”

“Who is she?” he asked.

She looked at him, confused, then caught his meaning. “No one! There’s no one, Ajay. It isn’t anything like that.”

“You’re lying to me—”

“No, no, I’m not. I told you,” she persisted. “We just need some time. Who said anything about…another person?”

“Isn’t that the reason you were crying?” he said, pointing at the couch. “You found out something, you must have! And now you’re lying. Just to protect him. I can’t believe this shit!”

Yes, go, confront him! Make him see what he is putting us through, that bastard! He should feel ashamed of what he is doing to us. He has dishonored me, you, all of us. Maybe you can bring him back.
“Ajay, please…” she was unable to summon the words and put her hand on his instead. Although she meant for her grasp to be firm, reassuring, her hand was trembling.

“I’m not going to let this happen,” he said, yanking his hand away, jumping up.

“Ajay, please, won’t you listen to me? It’s not at all what you’re thinking, I’m telling you.”
No, it’s much worse, much worse.

“Where the hell is he? I’d like to talk to him myself.” He reached out for the phone lying on the side of the dining room table but she grabbed his hand again.

“Please, for my sake, don’t!” she begged, rising to her feet. “He’ll be gone for a couple of days but you can talk to him when he gets back. I just wish you wouldn’t act this way, Ajay. Oh, God, why did I have to say anything?”

Seeing her distress, Ajay tempered himself. “Mom. Just tell the truth, okay?”

“But I am,
beta.
Everything’s going to work out.” He looked at her skeptically, waiting for her face to betray her but she remained resolute, forcing a smile through voices screaming in her head. He squeezed her hand, trying to imbue her with strength. “I’m fine, don’t you worry. Your father and I love you very much, nothing changes that. And that’s the truth.”

“Yeah, but don’t you love each other anymore?”

“Until the day we die,” she said, choking down the tears.

* * *

They had never been confidants but when Pooja, unable to sustain her grief, had called Charlie, he had responded like a concerned parent and asked her to come right away. In many ways, he reminded Pooja of her own father, perhaps because both shared such a prodigious appetite for knowledge and had volumes to say about practically anything under the sun.

When she walked into The Banyan in the middle of the afternoon, devastation was etched upon her face and Charlie grew agitated with concern upon seeing her so unhinged. He immediately asked Magda to ensure they were left undisturbed and shepherded her through the students traipsing around classes and into the back office where he closed the door behind them. Pooja took the chair by the window, which was already beginning to feel like her regular seat, but even here the soothing sounds of the burbling fountain and chirping birds failed her. Everything that was comforting and beautiful was happening in a world outside of hers. Her own pain was so deep, so expansive, that it cocooned her, the trappings of solace just a distant reverberation in another realm. Pooja noticed again the Anaïs Nin quote framed on Charlie’s wall and she tightened her fists.
Don’t want to blossom,
she thought.
Just want things to remain the same, to go back to the way they were.

“So, how about some tea, love?” he asked. She shook her head but he insisted, “Yes, yes, some tea. Let’s fetch you some tea. With lemon? Or some honey?”

She shrugged, disinterested, and Charlie disappeared from the office. She sat in silence, looking out at the white statues committed to grace in their various
asanas
in the lush greenery. On a concrete bench under a shading tree, her eyes found a young couple picking at a muffin and talking intimately, shafts of sunlight veining through the branches and casting a warm, divine aureole over them. She smiled ruefully. Were such moments behind her now? Lost forever?

Charlie returned with a steaming cup of fennel tea and a large wrapped oatmeal cookie, which he laid on an ornately inlaid wooden stool beside her. “Got it from Kashmir, that one,” he said of the furniture, trying to ease the tension. She managed a weak smile. He stood across from her, leaning against his messy desk, and waited for her to say something.

“So, is Magda your daughter?” she asked, taking him by surprise and still looking out at the blissful couple in the garden.

“Magda?” he laughed. “No, no, love. But she very well could be, don’t you think? She
is
The Banyan, runs the whole bloody place. Makes me wonder what I’m hanging around here for. Why do you ask?”