Читать книгу Where Earth Meets Water - Pia Padukone - Страница 8
ОглавлениеKarom
From the first morning that Karom awakes in Gita’s grandmother’s house, he can tell that their time in Delhi is going to be different from the rest of their trip. They arrive late at night from Agra, and as they drag their suitcases up to the second floor, Gita caresses the nameplate outside Ammama’s apartment lightly, leaving a small wake in the dust with her fingers. “Huh,” she says. “That’s new.” Kamini Pai, it reads. Before Karom has a chance to ask what she means, they are tumbling into the small flat, sandy from road silt and Indian rail travel, blinking under the fat fluorescent tube lights like a pair of bears emerging from a long winter’s hibernation. After formal introductions and sleepy smiles, they fall into bed, Karom in the living room, Gita in her grandmother’s room, surrendering to sleep miles away from any nettlesome insect buzzing or monotonous calls to prayer that echo through the compound. The night passes swiftly, gathering snatches of reality and combining them with fancy, translating and then siphoning them into their ears so that they dream vividly, solidly.
But then, in the early morning, in fact for each of the mornings for the six days they stay with Ammama in her small flat, a gong rings somewhere outside that sounds like a frying pan being hit with a metal spoon. Karom cautiously opens one eye to peer at his vintage Rolex, perched carefully on the chair he is using as a bedside table. Five forty-five. This is when Ammama pads into the sitting room, where Karom sleeps on the hard wooden pallet, his legs tangled in the threadbare sheets, his skin cool and clammy from nightly sweats. She presses a damp cloth on his forehead and he feigns sleep, unsure of how to react, rigidly aware of Gita asleep in the next room. She lowers herself onto the slate floor beside him with a towel under her knees. She swipes a line of vermilion across the hollow in her throat, directly in the center of her clavicle and, depending on how Karom is situated, mirrors the gesture on him. She closes her eyes, reopens them immediately to ensure that Karom is still sleeping, sucks in her breath and lets out a slew of Sanskrit. Karom yearns for the sweet, strong cold coffee that she places inches away from him—he can smell the chicory as the fan gathers the scent into the air—but is afraid that Ammama will see him awake and either make him participate in her ritual or scurry away in embarrassment.
He is touched that she has remembered his love for cold coffee, that it is a sacred thing in India. Back home in New York City, there is only iced coffee: simply ice dumped on top of coffee that becomes immediately diluted and insipid. Cold coffee is creamy, strong and pure. He waits until she finishes mumbling her indecipherable words, heaves herself to her feet and leaves the room. It is only once he hears the crescendo of the bucket being filled for her bath that he dares to reach for the drink, beads of sweat gathered around the base of the brass tumbler.
On their third day in Delhi, he tells Gita as they step out into the street and the blinding light of the premonsoon summer.
“She comes into my room in the mornings,” he says. “With a tray of perfectly ripe bananas, a glass of cold coffee and a cold compress that she puts on my forehead. She kneels down next to my bed and mutters under her voice. It’s hard to tell with the whirring of the fan, but I’m pretty sure she’s praying.”
“Get out,” Gita says, hitting him playfully on the chest, smiling broadly. “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Karom says, stepping over an open sewage grate. “I pretend to sleep. What else am I supposed to do?”
Gita chuckles.
“It’s not funny,” he says. “She’s so sweet, but the whole thing is incredibly awkward.”
“It’s only for three more days,” Gita says. “Hang in there. She’s a sweet old lady who’s attached to her rituals. I’m sure she’s only doing it out of love.”
The perfectly ripe bananas don’t escape Gita. She won’t eat a banana with even a spot of brown on it, and Ammama presumes this condition extends to Karom. But it irks Gita that each day, the only bananas that remain on the breakfast table are either the ones from the day before, which Ammama will eventually turn into halwa, or those that are still green and will leave a film on Gita’s tongue and a waxy taste in her mouth long after she’s eaten one.
“You’re not going to say anything to her?” Karom asks.
“What could I possibly say to her, Karom?” Gita responds. She is still thinking about the new nameplate outside the door. It’s the first time during all her years of traveling to India that she has seen her grandmother’s name proudly proclaiming her ownership of the apartment; previously it held her grandfather’s name, a grandfather she’s never met.
Karom knows there are some skeletons in Ammama’s dusty closet, unopened for years. Gita has danced around the details of Ammama’s past, but Karom understands that there is more to the old lady than even Gita is aware of. This became apparent when they originally discussed visiting India months before their trip.
“Visiting India,” Gita had said at brunch in New York, “involves seeing my family. There’s no way I could avoid it.”
“And I’m thrilled about it,” Karom had replied. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“It’s not that easy. Visiting together, like this, for the first time...” Gita struggled for words as her eyes flitted over Karom’s plate. “You know how people think over there.”
“Let them think,” Karom said, spearing a large bite of stuffed French toast onto his fork and holding it out to Gita. He knew that she would take it without a fight, that it was a naughty departure from the egg-white omelet that sat in front of her. He knew it would keep her quiet while she chewed, giving him time to take control of the conversation. But it was she who managed to reveal a new side of her family.
Karom cut up another square of his French toast as Gita was chewing, layering it onto his fork into levels until he could no longer see the tines. He held it dangerously close to Gita’s mouth, the cream cheese touching her lip. She looked at him and then the food, back and forth like a cross-eyed little girl.
“You’re such a tease,” she said, before taking the bread in one bite. “Ammama won’t judge us, though. She’s safe.”
“Safe?”
“Life was hard in India over there back then,” Gita proclaimed matter-of-factly, forking the remainder of his French toast onto her own plate, cutting and chewing between sentences.
“How do you mean?”
“Ammama is living proof of a marriage gone wrong. She’s lived alone most of her adult life. She’s what the rest of my family calls ‘a freethinker.’”
* * *
En route to Ammama’s house, they’d stopped at the Taj Mahal. Karom had wanted to spend the whole day at the mausoleum, watching the arc of the sun travel over the domed eggshell marble. He’d read a National Geographic article about how the sun changes the color of the marble depending on its angle throughout the day. The photos displayed the dome over twenty-four hours: pink, prenatal and shy in the dawn hours, citrine-yellow at midmorning, blinding white at high noon. It appeared as a completely different structure each moment, and Karom loved the unpredictability of it. The same ubiquitous structure that the world knew so intimately displayed so many different personalities. Had Shah Jahan meant to capture his beloved wife’s multifaceted character? Her casual morning softness, her dour depression at having lost seven of her children, while constantly displaying the fierce, unfailing love she had for her husband? What made the Taj so emotional, changing over the course of the day depending on its mood? How had this feat been accomplished so many hundreds of years ago, when just the building of an edifice of this size had seemed impossible? Karom couldn’t wait to watch its metamorphosis right before his very eyes.
But the train to Agra hadn’t shown, and the Jaipur station from which they were departing had been overflowing with passengers, occupying all the benches or peering uselessly into the distance over the tracks. Karom watched Gita approach a tour guide who was playing games on his cell phone. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and spoke to him for a few minutes before she returned to Karom and told him about the strike.
“I saw an STD booth over there,” he said. “I’m going to call Lloyd. I’d forgotten that he’s leaving for his bachelor party one of these days. I hope I can catch him.” She watched him lope off toward the dusty shack set back from the railroad platform, where he opened a glass door and slid inside.
* * *
When he returned, the two of them sat on the platform, leaning their backs against one another for support, summoning the strength for the wait that loomed ahead. Karom unhooked his watch and reread the inscription on the underside of the face. It felt like a brand-new gift each time.
Together we learn there’s nothing like time.
The strength he drew from this little mantra had made it possible to get through grueling days of struggling with the right word for a headline at the advertising agency where he worked, made it a little easier to stomach shelling out three figures for underwhelming plays and frustrating tiffs that he and Gita always managed to spark just before bedtime. The words rolled over in his mind and across his tongue when he needed something to concentrate on, while he was training for his first road race, and then a 10K, and then a full marathon. And during those moments, when he had to stop and check his patient pulse, when he could feel it bleating slowly but capably under the thin skin of his under-wrist, he repeated these words to himself.
Karom looked down at the platform beneath him, spackled red with paan spit. He traced one of the spatters with the toe of his sandal. Animals on safari, he thought. There’s the elephant trunk, holding on to a hippo’s tail, an alligator? No, a gecko, one of the household varieties that Gita screamed at until I chased it out of our tent in Jaisalmer.
Back home, in the subways of New York City, Karom liked to peer over the edge of the platform into the depths of the tunnels, waiting diligently for that crescent of light to appear reflected on the sheen of the tracks, holding until the headlights finally appeared and the silver cars careened into the station. At times, when the tunnel was long without any hidden curves, he could see the train’s headlights a full station away. He could watch it amble down the stretch toward him, teasing him with its proximity. But most of the time, the delightful snatch of light wouldn’t give itself away until the last minute, when it came peeking around the bend. Karom loved this dance with the train but simultaneously worried himself over how long it would take to appear. Most nights, when service was delayed or curtailed, he paced back and forth, his ears perking up at the faintest of rumblings, which sent him scurrying to perch his toes over the perimeter of yellow paint that warned passengers not to cross this line.
Once, the transit police who were loitering up and down the platform had approached him as he peered down the tunnel. “Sir,” the officer had said. “I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the platform edge. It’s for your own safety.”
When they’d first taken the subway together years before, Karom’s platform behavior had made Gita nervous.
“You stand so close to the edge,” she’d said, tugging at his hand. “Please come back.”
“It’s just a game,” Karom had said. “I lean over until I have to lean back.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
People lived in those tunnels, in the dank recesses, venturing out only to forage for food. Mole people, as he had heard them referred to, though he thought this term disrespectful and embarrassing. He couldn’t imagine living that far underground, though he’d read that the tunnels spread so far below the surface of pavement that it was possible to venture seven or eight stories deep. He had joked to Gita that one day real estate would be at such a premium that well-appointed condos with marble countertops and bamboo floors would have no choice but to spread to the netherworld that lay beneath them. Doormen would stand at attention at the mouths of stairwells that meandered far below the sidewalk, and the former valuable measurement of natural light would be replaced by mold-repellant abilities.
“Just wait,” Karom had said, “until the most sought-after apartments are those that are farther below the surface. Humans always need one-upmanship.”
After two hours of waiting on the Jaipur station platform, Karom stood up suddenly. Gita turned the page of her guidebook and shifted her position without looking up. Karom walked gingerly over the bodies sprawled across the platform napping, through a group of children playing a hand-clapping game and knelt at the platform edge. He sat down, his legs dangling over. A group of men playing cards and puffing on strong clove-scented cigarettes eyed him from the shadows of a snack cart’s canopy. Dust motes swirled in the early-afternoon sun and the slightest breeze lifted a piece of hair off Karom’s forehead and swung it over his eye.
In an instant he had jumped down to the tracks. He glanced around, the walls of the platform looming up around him like a cave. He couldn’t see the passengers from here, only sky and the great expanse of the tracks in the distance, far away, leading to Agra. Karom stood with both feet on one of the rails, the cool metal cutting through the inadequate rubber of his sandals and massaging the sore arches of his feet. He walked, holding his arms out balancing himself, pretending there was a book upon his head. On the seventeen-hour flight from New York to Bombay, Karom had watched a documentary on Philippe Petit, the daredevil tightrope walker who’d walked between the World Trade Towers and lived to tell the tale. Karom bent his feet to span across the track like Petit, a make-believe balancing pole in his hands as he walked forward.
He’d walked to the outskirts of the train station on the tracks like this when he heard Gita’s scream. Swiveling around, he tipped off the tracks. As he righted his balance, he saw the card-playing men in the distance watching him, squatting at the edge of the platform. He saw the children hovering on the edge, holding hands tightly. And he saw Gita, looking as though she was about to launch herself over the edge but being restrained by three hefty women in Punjabi suits.
“Karom! Get off the tracks! Come back!” she shouted. Karom put his hand up in acknowledgment, but just as he did so, he felt a faint rumbling underneath the balls of his feet. He turned around and began a slow march back toward the station, putting one foot in front of the other on the metal track.
“Come back to the platform. Please!” Gita shouted. He could see her face was stained by tears, her voice strained with panic. His rubber sandals slipped against the shiny metal, and the approaching vibration tickled his feet. He was at the station and had hoisted himself up onto the platform on his own before the Punjabi women released a sobbing Gita into his arms. He held her tightly and buried his nose in her hair.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby. I’m okay. See? It was just a walk. Nothing happened. It was just the game.” He let her cry in his arms until she quieted and spread out across their backpacks to nap.
They didn’t say anything further to one another until they boarded a train two more hours later. As she climbed the stairs into their car, Gita put her hand up and smiled at the tour guide. “This wait is nothing,” he called back. “Very short. Very lucky.”
They reached the Taj just moments before sunset, to the sights and sounds of children screeching, parents strolling across the manicured lawn, tourists adjusting one another’s hands for the perfect pose in front of the reflecting pool, others showing security guards how to operate elaborate cameras. The Taj was a deep aubergine, the setting sun glancing off the Yamuna River at a distance and cloaking the grounds and the shrine in darkness. They took a quick round, wandering through the arched doorways in their bare feet, marveling at the intricate inlaid stonework, tracing their toes over the perfectly symmetrical marble, and stood solemnly before the mausoleum before they realized they’d forgotten to take any pictures. The Taj was dark by then, lit only by eight floodlights where moths savagely attacked the bulbs.
“No pictures,” Gita said sadly. “How will we ever remember that we were here?” They were stationed directly in front of the Taj, in front of the bench that thousands upon thousands of tourists sat on every day, with a perfectly cruel vantage point of the structure in front of them. Karom slipped his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. With his other hand, he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. He read:
“Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs,
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made,
To display thereby the creator’s glory!”
“It’s what Shah Jahan said about the Taj,” Karom said, folding the paper back into his pocket. Gita closed her eyes and leaned against him. He wanted to comfort her, but he too felt let down. Nothing had happened. There had been no revelations.
Karom had been sure that he would leave the Taj Mahal with a deeper understanding of the world, of colors, of light, of love. He was sure that something magical would transform them, would transform him, the way he saw the world. He had placed too high an expectation on the Taj Mahal. After all, it was just a building. But it was a building that was homage to love, homage to the departed. He’d wondered if he would catch a glimpse of the past here, if he might tap into the spirit of the palace, the serenity of the courtyards. He’d wondered if, like a sinner, he too might be absolved, washed pure and clean, and set into the streets refreshed. He’d wondered if he might put lingering ghosts to bed and feel, for the first time, at ease with himself and finally, finally have the strength to put the game to rest.
Finally, Karom took her hand, pulling her back outside the gates into a world of hawkers offering prayer beads, postcards and miniature hand-carved wooden replicas of the great shrine.
On the rickshaw ride back to the train station, they quietly held one another’s hands. When their eyes met at a traffic light, Gita looked at Karom for a beat too long, causing him to snap, “I’m fine. I told you I’m fine,” and pull his hand away from hers. Gita felt suddenly vulnerable sitting in the rickshaw as it inched along the crowded streets. On either side, beggars and street vendors thrust their hands into the open sides of the vehicle, offering open empty palms or rickety plastic toys for sale. At that moment she couldn’t find solace even in the man who sat next to her; it was how she’d felt the first time she’d experienced one of his close shaves firsthand.
The previous summer, the two had been on a road trip to Maine, where they’d stopped in Portland, lingering over a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and yogurt, crawling through the Marina district in their rented convertible so Gita could hop out and use her Pantone matcher to capture the vibrant colors of the homes along the water. Her travels heavily influenced her work in her interior design studio: swaths of curtains that curled around window edges like the Caribbean Sea and mosaic patios reminiscent of the shelled precipices in Santorini. She’d once re-created a tiled wall in an open-plan bathroom based on the textures and tones of a spice display she’d seen in Essaouira.
Karom sped while Gita sat with her face directly in front of the air-conditioning vent. “I like the smell of it,” she said when he looked at her quizzically. “It’s the smell of cold.”
They were on the way to Archer’s Rock, the famous boulder that jutted out over the sea where families picnicked and sunbathed. “‘This rocky edifice may be the last bastion of the unsullied natural vantage point,’” Gita read from the National Geographic app on her iPhone. “‘Everything else has been filed down, shaved away, taking with it the history and fossilized evolutionary proof of our lives.’ Oh, Kar, we have to go there.”
By the time their car pulled up to visitors’ parking, ambulances and police tape had cordoned off the graveled lot. Scuba tanks were stacked together in a pile near one of the medical vans, and medics scurried about, stricken, possessed, mumbling into walkie-talkies.
“Park’s closed, sir,” a ranger said, directing their car. “Please turn around and go back the way you came.” Karom couldn’t believe that the ranger wore a hat just like on Yogi Bear. He spoke to the absurdly flat brim.
“What happened?”
“Wave.”
Karom hesitantly put his hand up and looked around before he realized that the ranger wasn’t instructing him to gesture to anyone. He put the car in reverse. While Karom fiddled with the AM radio to find a local channel, Gita plugged in the address of their hotel into the GPS that would lead them out of the park and back toward the highway.
“Tragedy struck at Acadia National Park today as a giant wave crashed over Archer’s Rock, claiming the lives of dozens of hikers and picnickers. Body count is still unknown as medics and scuba divers continue to comb the rocky coast to recover up to 50 park visitors who are expected to have been on the rock. Accounts confirm that a rogue wave such as this one hasn’t struck the area in nearly 40 years, the last similar tragedy occurring in 1971.”
The trees rushed by them, faster and faster, a blur of green in ascending brightness past their windows. They flew by the distinct odor of skunk and a tiny manicured graveyard, past which Gita held her breath. The two-way road was narrow and Gita was glad that Karom was driving. She felt nervous driving in situations where the car might graze against the side of another. She panicked easily in tunnels.
Karom pressed the button to clean the windshield, the blades scraping dully against the already clean glass. Gita pressed the window down and a small spray of window cleaner struck her cheekbone. Karom pulled the car to the side of the road, though there was no shoulder there. He leaned down to the steering wheel and rested his forehead in the center of the wheel, little bleeps emitting sporadically from the horn like a suffering goat.
“Karom,” Gita said, rubbing his ear. “It’s not the same thing. Look at me, baby.” He didn’t move.
“Baby, look at me. It’s a completely different situation, okay? I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You’re fine. You’re safe. I’m here.” She grabbed his head, the hair in the back where it had grown long and scraggly, and pushed it into her shoulder. She could feel him slowly disintegrate against her body, his long sobs penetrating through her thin windbreaker, his breath forcing muffled gasps and soggy exhalations. They sat there like that, allowing cars to whiz by their window, first a few at a time and then the ambulance they had seen in the parking lot, an underwater detection van and then another slew of cars. It became dark in the trees before Gita finally tapped his leg and Karom moved away, averting his face in the embarrassing dance of drying his tearstained face.
They traded places; Gita slid into the driver’s seat, put the car into drive and navigated the rest of the way to their budget hotel while Karom leaned back in his seat, one arm swung over his eyes to shield them from the glow of the dashboard.
* * *
In the rickshaw, Gita forced herself to remember that while their trip to Agra had been uneventful, without epiphany or excitement, that was what had made it a success. She forced her hand back into his and snuggled against him, turning her back to the beggars and hawkers in the road.
* * *
“Hang on,” Gita says now, as they sidestep two dogs sleeping in the middle of the lane. “When Ammama prays, is it in Hindi? English?”
“Definitely not English,” Karom says. “But she says my name. Repeatedly.”
“May-be,” Gita singsongs, pressing her body against him, “she’s praying for you to propose to me.”
“Ha.” Karom steps slightly away from her as they pass through the gates of Ammama’s compound.
“Oh, get over it,” she exclaims, grabbing his hand.
Karom stiffens. “Not here, Gita.”
“Of course here,” Gita insists. “It’s the birthplace of the Kama Sutra. Romance was practically invented here.”
But there is a sense of decorum in India, regardless of the historical ramifications of one dusty volume of intimate positions that sex shops like to pass off as exotic and sensual. Karom understands that the things that they take for granted back home in New York can never be accepted in this land so easily. The idea of boyfriends and girlfriends and dating, of sleeping in the same bed, even of traveling together, are all acts that had he grown up here, he himself might have frowned upon.
On their first night in Ammama’s flat, Karom had reverently touched her feet as he knew she would appreciate and asked, “Where will I be sleeping?” and then “Where will Gita be sleeping?” before placing their backpacks in the appropriate rooms: Gita sharing her grandmother’s double bed, Karom on the wooden pallet in the sitting room. He wondered if Gita asked her grandmother if she could sleep in the bed away from the door or away from the window, whichever it was that she was most worried about. Most women had a side of the bed, the right or left, but for Gita it was the side that she felt least vulnerable in. If they stayed in a hotel room, it was the side farthest away from the door; if they were on the ground floor in a room with garden access, it was where Gita felt intruders would be least likely to enter.
“It’s because if someone were to break in, I wouldn’t be the first thing they’d see,” she’d explained to Karom.
“But I would,” he’d snorted. “And I’d be the one they mauled or kidnapped or beat up. That’s okay with you?”
“No...you would protect me,” Gita had said. “My big strong man.”
He’d shaken his head. It was a stupid argument, but still he couldn’t help feeling slighted by her selfishness. He wondered if Gita was okay with her grandmother falling victim to hypothetical marauders in her second-floor flat in the suburban residential colony in East Delhi.
* * *
When they return to the flat later, after a long afternoon of shopping, Karom steps hesitantly through the door. But Ammama isn’t focused on him; she tells Gita that she has something to show her. While Gita slips behind the curtain that serves as the door to Ammama’s room, Karom busies himself with taking his purchases out of the bags and laying them out on the sofa: Calvin Klein shirts, a Kenneth Cole suit, all gathered at severely discounted prices. He holds up a shirt and breathes it in. It is so reassuring how much the fabric smells like India, like the mustiness of cardamom and mustard and mothballs all in one. He hears jingles and snaps and coos and sighs before Ammama slides the curtain open and beckons shyly at him. Karom follows her into the bedroom.
The bedroom is dimly lit: Ammama has drawn the curtains against prying eyes and sunlight is poking in at the corners of the windows. Gita is sitting on the bed with what appears to be a heap of gold in front of her. She sorts through it, trying on a large chandelier earring with curlicues and licks of rubies in her right ear while an enormous jade hoop perches perkily in her left nostril.
“Wow,” Karom breathes. “What is all this?”
“My trousseau,” Ammama says, pushing aside some of the tissues that had protectively padded the jewelry. “I want Gita to choose something. Help her decide.”
Karom sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. He picks up a string of pearls and lets them slide through his fingers. Gita is wrapping a thick yellow-gold necklace with braided chains around her neck.
“Close this?” She turns around and Karom snaps the clasp at the nape of her neck. “What do you think?”
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s all so delicately elaborate.”
“You have first pick and then your sisters can choose when they come next,” Ammama says, taking a step toward the door. “Take your time. I’ll make tea.”
“Her family must have spent years collecting all this. Imagine how long it took to put it together,” Karom whispers.
“Here, I need help with this headpiece.” Gita aligns an emerald stone that glistens like a giant waterdrop in the center of her forehead, glancing in the mirror to make sure that the chain falls neatly into the parting of her hair. “What do you think?”
“It seems so sad to break up the set that symbolizes the start of her new life as a bride. But I guess she’s passing on the legacy.”
“Trust me, she doesn’t want the memories. They’re not happy ones. Besides, I’m here, Karom. She wants me to have something. What do you think of these?” Solid gold bangles cuff her wrists, glinting in the dim light.
“They’re nice. I’m going to...” Karom nods toward the doorway and slides off the bed. In the kitchen, Ammama is pouring tea into the Bodum pot Karom has brought her. Her hand shakes a bit as the last drop fills the strainer. “I hope you like the teapot. Gita told me how much you like your tea. ‘Once in the a.m., once in the p.m. and once before R.E.M.’ Right?” Gita had also told him that Ammama would trot it out while they were there and then rewrap it in its original box and place it in the back of a cupboard until visitors came.
“It’s beautiful. You shouldn’t have wasted so much money,” Ammama says. Karom places the pot on a tray along with the small ceramic box of sugar and a matching pitcher of milk. Gita appears at the doorway, wearing a heavy yellow-gold necklace. It droops down nearly to her midriff, rubies and emeralds twinkling brazenly. The inner strands are unpolished grayish oblong seeds rather than the now seemingly artificial perfect globes of pearls Karom has seen the ladies wear with Chanel suits on the Upper East Side. Gita doesn’t look very comfortable, but she sticks her chest out and says, “I want this one.”
“I wore that on my wedding day,” Ammama says, smiling. “Beautiful choice. If you’re sure, I’ll take the rest back to the safe-deposit box at the bank.”
They sit in the living room, the overhead ceiling fan making wide, useless circles as the tea cools. Karom nibbles absently on a stale biscuit.
“You’ve left your visits until the last minute,” Ammama says. Gita looks down shiftily and traces a pattern on the stone floor with her toe. “I only hope it’s convenient for your great-aunts and uncles that you come tonight.”
“You’ll come with us, right, Ammama?” Gita asks shyly. “It’ll be fun.” Gita has obligations, she’s told Karom. To see family members who remember her better than she knows them, but these visits make them so happy and they make Ammama happy, too.
“I’ll make an early dinner and we can call a rick to take us. I missed my nap today,” Ammama says, her eyes twinkling. “I hope I won’t be too cranky.”
* * *
The evening is crisper than the previous days have been. Karom borrows a pale blue sweater from the empty closet that once belonged to Gita’s grandfather. He puts his arms through the sweater sleeves and his nose to the fabric.
“Why do clothes in India always smell like this?” he asks. “It’s so reassuring, such a comforting scent.”
“Probably because all the dhobis use the same detergent,” Gita says sarcastically. “And let the clothing dry in the air to pick up the subtle undertones of coconut trees and cow dung.”
Ammama sits by the door in the sitting room. Karom doesn’t understand the name for this room; no such place exists in Western-style homes. It is a room for receiving, for watching, for preparing, but never simply for sitting. It is the first time he has seen anyone be still in this room since his arrival.
Ammama is wearing a dark maroon sari with a paisley border. The previous summer, she distributed all her bright saris and those with gold or silver thread to the twin neighbor girls upstairs. They are both in their forties, living with their parents. One of them was married, but on her wedding night, her husband raised his hand to her and she retaliated, striking him on the bridge of his nose. Stunned, he told her to pack her things and go, and she responded in kind, returning to the flat upstairs. At least, that’s what Ammama has heard.
Gita told Karom about a ritual she loved as a child, first arriving at Ammama’s flat in the summers, tearing open her wardrobe door, running her hands across the yards and yards of silk, brocade and crepe-de-Chine saris, burying her head into the fabric to breathe in that familiar smell of India and begging Ammama to take out “this one. This one is my favorite.” Gita’s allegiances changed each time she visited, her tastes maturing and then reverting as trends came and went. In her tomboy years, she chose only the blues and reds, and when she finally embraced her girlhood, she lovingly pulled out more pinks and purples. Upon arriving at the flat a few days ago, Gita had flung open the wardrobe door and cried out softly as she sank back onto Ammama’s bed.
“They’re gone,” Gita said. “What happened?”
“I’m too old. I can’t wear those bright-bright things now,” Ammama replied. “And the zari work was too fine—I couldn’t iron them constantly. So I gave the whole lot to the girls upstairs. They needed some color in their lives.” Gita twisted her mouth, saddened by the gaping holes between the lonely, dismal saris that remained. But you need some color in your life, she thought.
Ammama’s apartment building is set back in the compound, and the motorized auto-rickshaws buzz about like flies only in the main road. Karom goes to fetch one while Ammama walks carefully behind, holding her cane in one hand and Gita’s forearm in the other. Gita can see Karom in the distance with his arm up in the road as the little black rickshaws scurry past him.
“I like him, Gita. I really like him.” Gita holds Ammama’s hand as they take dainty steps together. “Do you think you’ll marry?”
“I hope so, Ammama,” Gita says, looking down into Ammama’s eyes. “I really hope he gets things together. I really hope he can move beyond his past. Because I love him, I really do. And I think we could be happy together.”
“Give it time, child,” Ammama says. “Not everything happens overnight.”
“It’s been years, though,” Gita sighs. “And he’s taking such baby steps that I worry he’ll never—” She stops and looks up toward him. He is standing too far into the road, extending his arm out as if he were hailing a cab on Broadway. He is getting impatient, pushing the hair out of his eyes and wiping his brow on his shoulder. He takes one more step into the road as an angry rickshaw driver shouts at him, gesticulating wildly. Panic rises and jets out of Gita’s nostrils.
“Ammama, wait here.” Gita props Ammama against a low-lying parapet. Gita takes off at a gallop. It seems so filmic, her hair bouncing and her shawl flying behind her, as if she is running in slow motion to catch up to the man she loves. But as she approaches him, she catches hold of his wrist and swings him back into the ditch that follows the sidewalk along Ammama’s lane. Angry shouts erupt around them, rickshaws nestling close together like black beetles attacking a crumb to allow them through.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gita asks, panting.
“Getting a rickshaw. What does it look like? Gita, let go. That hurts.”
“You’re standing in the middle of the road and you know it. This isn’t Manhattan, where the cabs will actually stop. This is Delhi, Karom. People die.”
“Stop being so melodramatic, Gita. No one’s filming right now.”
“No, you stop it, Karom.” Tears prick the edges of Gita’s eyes as their voices rise to be heard with the thrumming and honking of the vehicles that speed by. “This is neither the time nor the place. Please don’t do this. Not now.” A honking interrupts them. Ammama pokes her head out of a rickshaw that pulls up alongside them.
“Found one,” Ammama says. “Come on, get in.” Gita climbs up on the other side of her grandmother and Karom piles in the opening closest to him, his long, spidery legs nestling against the back of the driver’s seat. As the rickshaw speeds by on the newly paved highway, though they are landlocked and miles from the ocean, somehow the air fills their nostrils with the tangy, briny scent of the sea.
* * *
In December 2004 his family had gathered on Poompuhar Beach: a reunion. Karom had final exams in Boston and his parents were adamant that he see the semester through. His friends had all finished their finals and started packing up for Christmas break, but Karom was enrolled in a few master’s classes that ended later than the undergraduate program.
“I can take makeup exams,” he’d complained. “Besides, I’m graduating next semester. All the important stuff is over. This is the first time I am going to see all my cousins together. And Naani and Nana and Ajja and Ajji will be so upset I can’t come.”
“They’ll be upset that you are shirking your studies,” his father had said. “You can join us after the exams are over.”
There were games, snacks, many opportunities to get to know one another over the course of two days. Some members of the family were traveling thousands of miles to meet one another, some for the first time, some after a long time. Karom imagined them as he sat with his head against the frozen window, snow melting softly in the courtyard of the library. Now they were probably having strong hot South Indian coffee. Now they were probably telling stories of his parents as youngsters, of their sweet but short courtship when he had wooed and won her. Now they were probably singing folk songs that would only—could only—be passed down by his generation, and if he wasn’t there to learn them, who would bring them to America? Now they were probably sitting on the beach, under colorful tents they’d have rented to stave off the relentless sun. Karom followed them in his mind, fabricating their activities, picturing their smiles. When he packed up his laptop case and closed the door to his dorm room, ready to jump into the cab that would take him to Logan Airport, he thought his heart might burst.
Unlike most of his friends, who would joke about the tribulations of forced holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Karom enjoyed spending time with his family. This included his wise father, who had been the director on a television commercial starring his ageless, timeless, classically beautiful mother. And of course his mother, who doled out advice the way other mothers pass out homemade cookies. His cousins, whom he’d met piecemeal over the years, and their parents—his aunts and uncles whose stories his own parents had regaled him with for years and years and whose reputations spread far and wide from silly to sober—equally amused him. Both sets of grandparents, whom he saw dutifully every two years, servants his parents had grown up with, vendors who knew more about him than he would ever know about them. All of these people made up a life that was separate from the snowy, blanketed college he was leaving now, forlorn and empty, devoid of true familial love even when the campus was full.
The cabdriver was talkative, which surprised Karom. He thought he’d have to combat surliness and tip heavily for a fare on Christmas Day.
“Where you headed? Your family doesn’t mind you’re missing Christmas?”
“India. We’re not Christian,” Karom said, hugging his backpack to his chest.
“India? Is that safe? You hear about that storm?”
“You must mean the monsoons. They happen in the summer all the time. They’re used to them over there.”
“No, not a storm,” the cabdriver said, shaking his head. He leaned over and turned on the radio. “It’s this freak wave. It’s biblical.”
During the ride to Logan, the cab was filled with snatches of dialogue, screaming, shouting, sobbing, as various news reports filled in the current events of a rogue wave that had been triggered by underwater earthquakes, badly affecting parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India.
“That’s enough,” Karom said at the sight of the exit ramp to the airport. “Please turn it off.” He paid the driver and stood on the sidewalk as trolleys and rolling suitcases maneuvered around him, punching buttons on his cell phone and hearing the Tamil operator prattle back hopelessly to him. There was nothing to do but stick to the plan to fly to Kanyakumari, where he would meet his parents and grandparents to witness one of the most breathtaking sunrises in the world at the very tip of the country, where the Indian Ocean met the Gulf of Mannar and the Arabian Sea. Except that all flights to India were stalled without further information of conditions there. The coastal states were in emergency: no one was going in and it was unclear who was still alive. Karom spent Christmas Day shuttling from the internet café in the airport to the gummy carpeted floor of Gate 17, where he sat slumped, tapping away at his cell phone.
Hours later he peeled himself up and took a bus and then the T and then walked the seven long blocks back to his dorm. The brittle leaves that still hung on the trees chattered together in a ghostly whisper as the wind swept through them. There was something beautiful about the snow that had settled there in his absence. It glistened cleanly, the crystals twinkling in the crisp morning. Karom felt bad making a path to his doorway, where he let himself into his room and opened the blinds where the sun glanced off the snow mounds, blinding him momentarily. His dorm-room phone blinked red with anticipation and he dropped his bundles, even his precious laptop, in a heap on the floor and jabbed the button. A muffled, weary voice filled the room.
“Karom, I’ve been trying your mobile, but it doesn’t seem to be connecting. This is Kishan Ramchand, your naana and naani’s neighbor in Cubbon Park. We live upstairs? I think you were meant to land just now, but I’m hoping to catch you. Karom, there was this huge wave yesterday that pretty much obliterated most of the southern and western coasts of India, particularly Tamil Nadu. Obviously, you know that’s where the festivities were being held, and nobody’s been able to get ahold of anyone from the party. We’re trying desperately, but as you can imagine, a lot of phone lines are down and it’s been impossible to connect with the hotel or anyone’s mobiles. Auntie and I are praying really hard here at home, but we’re not sure what’s happening. If by some miracle, you haven’t left already, please stay put. It’s a rather dangerous situation right now. Take my number and call.”
His entire family. All together. On one beach.
Karom listened to the message once again before he wrote the number down shakily. Then he opened the covers on his tightly made bed and got in. It was three days before he got out again. On the third day, he reached for his cell phone and dialed Kishan’s number.
“Uncle? It’s Karom.”
“Thank God, child. You’re okay. Where have you been?”
“College. My flight was canceled. Any news?”
“It’s not looking good. They’re reporting that phone and power lines have been restored at this point, as well as cell networks. If we—if we haven’t heard from them by now...”
“Look, you never know. What can I do? Should I come?”
“There’s nothing anyone can do at this point.” Karom heard Kishan slowly breaking down. A tear traveled down the bridge of Karom’s nose and plopped onto the worn wooden floorboard. The room was freezing—the heat had been turned off for the break, though Karom didn’t notice it at all. “And your parents were there,” Kishan wailed.
“They are there,” Karom said, wiping his face on the back of his hand. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Call me if you hear anything. On my cell. My mobile.”
Karom sat up in bed, staring at the wall as if in a trance. Suddenly, he broke off and opened his roommate’s closet. In here Lloyd kept a small pantry alongside his perfectly pressed cardigans and corduroy jackets. Karom wasn’t sure why Lloyd hid the snacks, as Karom had never deigned to take anything of Lloyd’s without asking—until now. There were saltines, granola bars, a large package of chocolate-covered mints and a fresh jar of peanut butter. Karom twisted the top off the peanut butter and pulled a gob of it onto his finger. He closed his lips over it, the sweetness making his mouth water and jerking tears to his eyes. He blinked the tears back and stuck his finger in again and again. His mouth was sticky and he ran his tongue over his teeth. What was that word? The word that when he heard it pulled gently on his stomach, in his throat, at the tips of his fingernails, making him think that it would never be him. It couldn’t be him.
It would be six hours before Karom logged on to his computer, searching for answers, looking up death tolls on the Indian Red Cross website, manning live streams for four different news sites at once, cross-referencing emails and then seeing his parents’ names in ghostly letters upon a list of those found fatally wounded or dead. And then his grandparents. All four of them. And then a whole column, a page of his surname over and over:
Rana Seth.
Mohan Seth.
Akansha Seth.
Preeti Seth.
Madhu Seth.
Shankar Seth.
Seth.
Seth.
Seth.
Seth.
It was another two hours before he remembered the word: orphan. Thereafter, until Lloyd and the other students returned to campus, everything was broken up into increments of time: sixteen hours before Kishan called to confirm that everyone at the reunion was reported officially missing. Dead. Twenty-two hours before Karom dry-heaved repeatedly from hunger. Thirty-six hours before his contact lenses automatically peeled themselves away from his pupils—raw from the dry, airless room—and curled up on the desk where he sat staring at his laptop, his only beacon and companion, which rang in the New Year in front of him. Ninety-six hours before he methodically and carefully deleted all the emails from friends inquiring if his family was okay and saying that they were praying for them and was there anything anyone could do and please don’t hesitate to ask. Three months before a courier rapped on his door with a delivery from Kishan wrapped in brown paper and padded with cotton wads.
A gold Rolex with a black alligator band sat nestled within the padding. The face was weathered and scratched just to the right of the crown and there were a few bits of sand wedged between the glass face and the golden hinges. A small note accompanied it.
Karom—
This was among the belongings in the safe in Naana and Naani’s room. There wasn’t much else—their passports and some bundles of rupees. Your parents’ room held their passports and some money, as well. The passports and money are being held for administrative and tracking purposes. I’ll make sure to have them sent to you as soon as possible. I wanted you to have something of meaning, and as you know, this was the watch that your naani gave your naana on their wedding night. I hope it serves as something—a memory, a wish, a light.
All my best,
Kishan Uncle
Together we learn there’s nothing like time. Karom was sure that it was the first of Naani’s many gestures to her new husband that everything would be okay, that even if nothing made sense in their early days as strangers to one another, the years would prove themselves stronger than unfamiliarity, that they would take this journey together, learning about one another and stumbling and catching one another and learning every step of the way. Naani was always the reassuring one; her husband would flurry about worrying if the plane would lose their luggage, or whether they would run out of vegetarian meals, or if they hadn’t packed enough warm clothing for the beach.
Karom had put the watch on immediately, and unless he was bathing or sleeping or going through the security line at the airport, he never took it off. He would wear it as a constant reminder of all that he had lost, his whole family all at once, wham bam, in an instant, like the second hand that ticked on his wrist.
* * *
On the morning of their departure from Delhi, Ammama tiptoes into the sitting room, where Karom is holding his watch between his fingers, studying its slightly scarred face. Ammama stops and smiles shyly, looking down at the tray as if to show Karom what she has brought him. He motions to her to sit down next to him.
“Come,” he whispers. She sits awkwardly on the bed next to him, pulling her tiny feet underneath her and adjusting her sari. The tray of bananas and cold coffee sits between them, but on this morning, there is also a thick book. Karom peels a banana and hands it to her. She shakes her head shyly. Karom urges, “Please.” She nibbles at the tiny fruit and Karom peels another for himself. So much sweeter than the huge bland ones we get back home, Karom thinks.
“What do you say to me?” he asks. “Are you praying?” Ammama colors and looks down at the floor.
“I thought you were asleep,” she says.
“I’m an early riser,” Karom says. “Please tell me.”
“It’s nothing, really. Just an old lady’s superstitions.”
“Please.” He takes her banana peel and places it with his alongside the book on the tray. He turns to face her. Ammama looks at him and purses her mouth.
“You mustn’t be cross with Gita for telling me. She tells me that you like to tempt fate. That you call it your game. Is that right?” Karom looks down, embarrassed. “Fate isn’t an easy thing to play with. Once it decides to shift in one direction, the gusts keep on blowing, and it’s out of your hands. You have to take care of one another, don’t you?” He nods. “But I know there is something over you. An omen.”
“An omen?”
Ammama nods solemnly.
“What kind of omen? Because I’ve been pretty lucky.” He tells her about Acadia and the tidal wave that he and Gita narrowly missed. He tells her about 9/11, how he’d feigned illness on the morning that his class was to visit a news studio in Tower 1 because he hadn’t finished a paper on Howards End, how instead he’d stayed home watching the news, stricken, while the first tower came crumbling down like a stale cracker.
“Do you think so? Then what is this game nonsense?”
It’s Karom’s turn to color. “It’s just my way of feeling alive. I can’t— I don’t have an explanation. It’s how I’ve conditioned myself, I suppose. To understand why I’m still...why I don’t...why I can’t...what’s keeping me from...” He trails off and looks down at his hands sitting uselessly in his lap. “But what do you see? How can you tell?”
“I suppose the same way, I can’t explain the feeling I had about you from the moment you walked through the door. But I knew it was there the moment I heard you whimpering and tossing about at night.”
“I’m still doing that, huh?” Karom bites his lip. “Is this something that will hurt me? Omens don’t have to be bad, you know. Are you praying to get rid of the omen?”
“I suppose I am. I am praying for you to win the game. I want you to win. Just like Gita, I want the game to end.”
Karom looks down sheepishly.
She reaches for the tray and picks up the book, weighing it carefully between her two hands.
“This is mine. I want you to have it.” Karom looks at the cover, his eyes wide with surprise.
“You—you wrote this?”
“It’s being released this Friday. Read it, and let me know what you think. I suppose it’s my form of sealing fate away in a place it can’t hurt me.”
Karom’s eyebrows knit together.
Ammama smiles. “You’ll see. I have only two copies, and I will give the other one to Gita before you leave.”
“Thank you,” he whispers. “I didn’t even know you were a writer. Gita didn’t mention...” He looks at the book again before slipping it into his backpack. “I’m honored.”
Gita appears now around the corner of the living room, wearing rumpled boxer shorts and a tank top. Even in the cloistered morning air, her nipples stand at attention and Karom looks down, embarrassed. She is wearing the neckpiece Ammama has given her and she pulls her hair out from where it is tucked under her camisole strap and braids it to the side.
“What are you guys doing?” She yawns, leaning against the doorway.
“You didn’t sleep with that on, did you?” Karom asks.
“Of course not. I just felt like wearing it now,” Gita says, twirling one of the fat golden ropes around her finger.
“It’s rather special to be wearing around the house,” Karom says. “Put it away. It’s delicate.”
“I’ll get breakfast started. You’ll have to leave for the airport shortly after your baths,” Ammama says, getting up.
“How much do you think this is worth?” Gita asks when Karom is alone with her in the living room.
“I have no idea. But aside from the price of the stones and the gold itself, I’m sure the antique design and the craftsmanship are worth a lot.”
“I was thinking about selling it,” Gita whispers, her eyes shining in the morning light. “It’s gotta be worth hundreds, maybe even a thousand. And then we can go to Argentina over Christmas.”
“Are you insane?” Karom nearly shouts. His anger seems to reflect off the walls of the small apartment. He feels his temple pulsing, though in the rest of his body, it feels as if his blood has actually run cold and stopped midcourse in his veins. “Gita, that’s your grandmother’s wedding necklace. She would never have gifted it to you if she knew you were going to sell it. It has to remain in the family.”
“Well, too bad you’re not in mine. ’Cause then you could save it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.” Gita sticks her chin out in a manner that would normally have made Karom tackle her onto the bed and initiate hours of intimacy, had they been in his bedroom back in New York, but now it just provokes him. “Besides, Karom, we can’t all hold on to the past like a narcotic. There are things that link us to our dark memories and don’t let us move on. This necklace is a prime example. It’s tainted.”
“Tainted,” Karom repeats.
Gita grits her teeth as she leans in, whispering toward him. “Yes, tainted. It’s my grandmother’s wedding jewelry. The groom fled this ship thirty years ago and treated her like dirt while he was here. Yes, let’s hold on to this blissful symbol of their awful marriage forever.”
Ammama sticks her head in the doorway. “Would you like Indian breakfast today or something light, like toast? Either is perfectly convenient.”
“Toast,” Karom says, just as Gita says, “Dosas.”
“One of each,” Ammama says, turning back toward the kitchen.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Gita says. “I have to finish packing.” She takes the necklace off and returns to the room she has been sharing with her grandmother. Karom has already finished packing. He is a meticulous planner and has learned to pack from a flight-attendant friend who showed him how to roll T-shirts and tuck underwear into his shoes. His toiletries are stowed in the plastic compartment at the top of his bag, the tube of toothpaste curled up evenly like a scorpion’s tail, ensuring that every inch of space is being utilized. His socks are balled into spheres, and his belts snaked around the perimeter, encasing all his clothes in a tight bundle. The hard shell of his maroon suitcase is streaked with dust, the way it always happens only in India. Dust gets in everywhere, no matter that Karom unzips his bag for only a few hurried minutes each day: in the morning before his bath and in the evening before bed. Dust is caked between the grooved wheels, and he wipes the plastic with a wet towel, where it spreads and nestles into the suitcase’s zippered teeth. He can hear Gita’s version of packing in the next room: unfolded clothes tossed into her gaping Tumi—unwashed ones stuffed into a plastic Fabindia bag—and her huffs and squats as she clambers on top to zip it. Karom sits down on what has been his bed for the past four nights. He turns his wrist upside down and examines the fine hairs that grow where the white of the underside of his arm meets the tan line that has grown deeper during their vacation. His watch ticks reassuringly away. If they leave within the hour, they will make their flight with no problems.
Karom takes the watch off now, weighing it in the center of his palm. The skin underneath his watch is white and moist and gives off a peppery odor. The spicy scents of coconut and lentils waft down the corridor. He can hear Gita as she pads into the kitchen and muffled conversation as she sets the table. The watchstrap is fraying, but in a charming antique way. He rotates the dial, watching the hands spin freely. He picks up the flat pillow and the three sheets that are folded on his pallet bed, and for an instant, he considers leaving the watch on top of the pile. Instead he slaps it back onto his wrist and pulls it tight through the loopholes before pulling his sleeve to cover the face. Karom fluffs the pillow and places it on top of the pile before picking up his suitcase and rolling it into the hallway.
