Balance of Fragile Things (13 page)

D
ays later, during breakfast, Papaji looked at the backyard, through the kitchen window from the comfort of the dining table.
His gaze had intent, as though sight itself was something he'd discovered only recently. He watched how the rain fell downward from heaven, as it usually did, but somehow the force of its landing seemed to pull the ground upward with each heavy drop. The raindrops' recoil splattered mud on the side of the house; gutters bloated with leaves and muck; muddy craters opened in the earth; grass became flooded rice fields; oak leaves not yet ready to fall spun across a large puddle in the backyard. Low areas under trees turned into seas, and bubbles rose to the surface and burst like translucent bombs.

His eyes meandered over the empty plates his daughter-in-law had placed on the table, and he hoped her
anddá
wouldn't be as hard and rubbery as the eggs that Tata, the cook, made for him in the flat in Delhi—those grayish-yellow balls of clay. Tata didn't know the first thing about food preparation, and in Papaji's mind he should have been either shot or relegated to the realm of tea preparation alone. Maija looked nothing like an Indian woman, with her wild hair and blue jeans. He wondered what Paul saw in her. But when she placed the perfectly jiggly eggs—like two cheerful breasts—in front of him, he couldn't help but purse his lips and offer a small nod.

It had been raining for five days straight since his arrival. He told the family that each day of rain represented a different member of the Singh household. No one seemed to understand what he meant, but they all nodded their heads and smiled at the breakfast table when he said this. He repeated his statement once more in his thick Punjabi accent, this time with his right pointer finger extended high above his scrambled eggs: “Each day is for
ik
person. Isabella has the first day, okay? Vic has the second and so on. My day is today.” Much to his delight, they responded with smiles of agreement. He would have a good time while he was here.

“But who will have tomorrow?” Isabella asked with scrambled eggs in her mouth.

“If it rains tomorrow and the next, we will have a visitor,” he said. And his American family seemed satisfied with this answer.

Home. So this was where his remaining family lived. Papaji had seen many homes, so many walls over his life, though he longed for only one home. That home, lost so very long ago during the great fissure that forced him south into India, was truly gone forever. It represented a time when the evil in the world was merely fiction in a cautionary tale, buried in a dusty book out of reach. Innocence, on some level, he'd left in the mortar between the walls, in the tiled floor, and with his family's worldly possessions. He'd left his innocence in the memories of his wife and first son, still pure before their journey. Home, home, home. His longing drove him, on occasion, mad. It became a phantom that haunted him like the ghost of a deceased loved one. It whispered in his ear and became embedded in his flesh.

Papaji was not comfortable in this house. He'd noticed Paul hadn't looked him in the eyes since he arrived. Not once. It had been a long time since he'd seen his son. He hoped that they would come together now, as they should have long ago. He'd imagined time and again as he planned this trip that they would talk about politics and India and farming, as they should have done when Paul was a child. Papaji had crafted scenes of their reunion that consisted of tears and apologies. Perhaps he dreamed this scenario so often that he thought it was a true possibility.

He hoped Paul would come around. Paul could be working too hard, or maybe he wasn't eating well, he thought. Perhaps it was depression from the rain that made him so angry. Papaji himself always experienced a bout of sadness during the annual monsoon downpour in India. The village celebrated when it began because it put an end to the dry season; young and old would run out into the pelting rain and let the shower clean the dust from their clothes. After a week of merciless rain, the roads would become flooded, mudslides would commence, and the same village would curse the skies for their inexorable fury. From dry to wet, content to misery, the interconnectivity between humankind and nature was evident to Papaji. Since he arrived, he had been looking forward to taking a short walk in the woods to get a closer look at the trees and the wildlife, but because of the constant downpour he could only stare at the few trees gathered in the backyard through the fogged-up windows. One of them would have to give: Paul, himself, or the weather.

It was dark all the time in Cobalt. What a sad place. The clouds seemed to push down closer and closer to the ground each day, leaving pockets of mist and fog in nooks and crevices around hills and curbs. It was an altogether messy sort of rain.

“Pea soup,
hánji
,” Paul said as he flicked an angry hand at the outside.

Papaji peered down at the soil through the thick, double-paned glass. This American earth wasn't made for the monsoon. It was not sturdy or porous enough. The soil flipped and flopped like over-whipped egg whites and deflated and farted when the air ran out of it. Papaji's Indian earth was different, stronger. Sure, their floods and torrential storms sunk their cities and villages, but they always rose again like a forgotten Atlantis. Here in Cobalt, the streets and drains didn't suck the water; they seemed to pour the water back into the streets with garbage from underneath. He'd seen this phenomenon through the front window in the living room. The drain on Peregrine Court was coughing up murky waters like an old man clearing his lungs. The concrete might cave in, and the trees might lift up and out of the ground on their own and walk away, roots in tow. Over-watered land with no irrigation and a town on the verge of being swallowed by its own bowels—what civil engineer built this place? No care for details, no planning for the future. Whoever it was, he was a
goonda
and should be run out of town with nothing but his under
kaccha
.

“A monsoon so late?” he asked. He used a pencil he'd found next to the kitchen computer to scratch his scalp under his white turban. Vic began to explain the differences between this rainstorm and the monsoon Papaji was familiar with in the Punjab, but in the middle of his treatise, he stopped talking altogether. Papaji caught sight of Paul's clenched jaw and squinting eyes.

“If your
puttar
wants to tell me how the world works, that's fine, Ikpaul.” He glared at Paul.

“He's a smart boy, Papaji.” Paul looked down at his plate.

“If he takes after you, I think not,” Papaji mumbled and turned away from his son. He felt terrible the moment the words exited his mouth. Though Papaji tried to be civil, he found it difficult to change his old ways. He'd hated what his son represented for so long that he'd forgotten what it was like to see him as a person.

In Papaji's mind, there was an ongoing discussion: a
here
and a
there
.
Here
things were new and strange. He looked forward to viewing the American soaps like
The Young and the Restless
and
General Hospital
; they came highly recommended by his cousin. He liked the voice of Tanya Earhart, Channel 9's meteorologist. He hoped to find out why Paul came and stayed in America. And he was somewhat cheerful about the possibility that he would be under the care of a good doctor soon for his leg and foot pain.

There
, on the other hand—in India—life was familiar. The noises, smells, and overall congestion set him at ease. But the flat that stored all the Singh family's aging relatives, from Uncle Chand, whose stomach problems left a foul odor surrounding him, to Massy Sukminder, whose joints were almost completely locked straight, made him feel old. He wasn't dying like they were; he just had an old injury. His foot and leg throbbed daily. Shocking pain shot up and down his limbs with lightning precision. His son rather than his daughter would help. Girls left home to worry about their husband's relatives, but sons were always there for their fathers. Paul: his American son. He looked at Paul and his family. Even though they were Americanized and half-Latvian and mostly wore glasses, they looked like a good family.

Paul turned the TV on. The small box in plastic wood paneling sat on a lazy Susan so it could turn toward the living room or kitchen. The morning news was on, and weather forecasters were having a ball with their time in the limelight—the only ones who were giddy about the gloom. Tanya Earhart, the heart-faced meteorologist, set aside a few more minutes during every hourly newscast to update the quantity of rainfall. There were three inches so far. Tanya made good use of her extra time to teach the public some meteorological vocabulary.
Virga
, they all learned, was the term for rain that falls and evaporates before it lands. Papaji had seen virga many times but never knew the word for the streaks of clouds that hung halfway across the sky. Papaji watched very closely when Tanya spoke. Her long hair was teased for height, her lips glossy like two rows of pomegranate seeds. He felt that learning English was important, so he repeated the word under his breath,
veergha
, and made a note to attempt to use the word sometime in the near future.

After breakfast he moved to a love seat in the living room, where he sipped his small cup of tea and nibbled on a cheese puff. His feet, bare and calloused, sat atop a pouf while he waited for the package to arrive with his life savings. He had bundled the rupees and a few other important things, wrapped them in plastic, and placed the bundle in a small box, also wrapped in brown paper and secured with almost an entire roll of packaging tape. He'd insured the package and sent it with the highest priority the post office in India offered, which was the speed post international rate.

Papaji's exercise was a slow walk to the mailbox on the sidewalk, twenty feet or so from the house. He opened an umbrella, wrapped himself in his brown wool cardigan, slid on his worn leather sandals, and shuffled to the curb. He leaned to the left ever so slightly to keep his weight lifted from his aching limb. He opened the aluminum mailbox and brought in the bills, junk mail, and some important-looking notices from the Publishers Clearing House and left them in the catchall in the foyer.

It was probably the humid air that made his joints swell like small balloons, but still he tried to smile when Maija brought him another cup of tea with two aspirin
tink-tinking
on the side of the saucer. The sky continued to threaten to downpour. If it wasn't raining, it was about to; if it finished raining, the sky would sigh relief and expose a grayish blue. The sun and all its effects were just becoming memories tucked away in a different dimension.

As Papaji sipped his tea, Vic sat beside him. Papaji looked at him closely and saw his fairly new clothes, sneakers, and jacket and thought how expensive these clothes must have been.

“Things are easy here, for you all, I mean. No farm, everything inside, safe, secure.”

“Did you need a shotgun? I mean, for protection and stuff?” Vic asked with wide eyes.

The old man sat deeper into the couch. “In the Punjab you needed to be ready for, what's the word?
Dacoits
and
budmash
.”

“What's that?”

“They rob you in your sleep and kidnap the women. Very bad men,
bahut kharáb
.”

“Thieves? Did you learn how to fight, Papaji?

“Yes, we had to protect ourselves.”

“Was there a
da
—?”

“
Dacoit
.”

“Was there a
dacoit
in your village?”

“Not just any
dacoit
—the most terrible in all the land. His name was Harzarah Singh. Some said when he was very young he drank the blood of a viper and filled with evil. I just think it was greed, and he was
págal
, crazy.” Papaji wound his pointer finger at his temple. “But even Harzarah Singh could not rival the chaos that came with the Partition. It claimed even the sharpest men.”

Papaji took another sip of tea. “See, I grew up there,
potrá,
my father moved to Rawalpindi before I was born, and Bebbeji's family was from the area. It wasn't easy to just go go go. That's why I stayed. No one knew if this, this Partition, would come or if we could return once India was separated from Pakistan. I couldn't leave our home unprotected. I sent Bebbeji and Kamal to the village long before. There they met with other family members who also were going to rebuild. I stayed alone.”

He put down his tea. “I locked up the valuables we had in one room. We gathered, the ones who stayed, and watched over each other. My friend and neighbor, Aaqib, said he would watch over the house and told me to go. But I couldn't.”

“Why did you have to go? Why didn't he?”

“That,
potrá
, is a good question. The one country was divided into two: one for Muslims, the other for Hindus and Sikhs and whoever else. The politicians, you know. So, everyone was instructed that there was a date when this change of the border would be made. Some left long before to avoid any difficulty. Your grandmother. The rest were left to fend for themselves. One can't imagine the poison in people, until such a thing...”

Papaji's mind wandered as he struggled to find the words. In the winter of 1946, he'd packed up his wife, Anjana, and son Kamal, and sent them with one bullock and as much wheat flour as it could carry along with a few other Sikh families heading south toward Amritsar. He'd watched Anjana walk over the hill with Kamal in her arms until he couldn't see them anymore. From there, he'd expected them to continue onto a Punjab village outside of Jullundur, their ancestral land. There was no telling what trouble they would encounter along the way. He had to trust the men of the other families, who were like brothers and uncles to him, to protect his wife and son in his absence. He had to have faith that they would be allowed back into their family's village. Papaji's father's family had moved from Punjab to the rural village north of Rawalpindi when they had received the land at a good price from the British. The land, it turned out, was more difficult to cultivate than promised. But in the end, it was a fine village with strong and intelligent people, and the wheat, with a little encouragement, sprouted from the ground every year. His father and mother had both passed away from typhoid fever, and his other relatives remained in Southern Punjab. That had left Papaji as the sole inheritor of the land on which he was standing. But what good was this land without his wife and son? His gaze had followed the horizon as far as the next mountain.