Darshan (54 page)

So long ago. Darshan regarded his hands, discerning a trace of wrinkles forming on the back, so many lifetimes removed from his childhood, from that day of his first and only ride. He raised his head and gazed before him at the sickroom in which Junker Singh now lay, patiently waiting for death.

Beside him Manmohan stood, afflicted by an animal fear. The mechanic’s wife had lit incense from a local Turkish shop. The smell infused the hallway. Downstairs, a loop of a kirtan played on the tape deck, the volume low, the priest’s chanting voice somber.

“He was not always fat,” Manmohan muttered tightly, hunched over, eyes cowled. “He was thin and flat, rode his bike like a dancer.” He retreated from the door, giving ground to his dread.

Jai slipped her hand into her husband’s, murmuring softly to him. Manmohan listened to her, but his face sagged with remorse and still he did not move.

“He asked for you, Bapu,” Darshan said gently, taking his father’s arm, feeling the seventy-seven-year-old bones beneath the flannel coat.

“He thinks he knows what is coming,” Manmohan replied irritably, looking helplessly at the bedroom door. “He always thinks he knows everything.”

Darshan turned the knob, and Manmohan exhaled, readying himself.

There were no shades or curtains on the windows, only several holes in the sheetrock where a set of blinds had once been screwed in. The room was bright with direct sunlight, casting Junker Singh’s body, slightly thinner now, in a pastel hue of yellow-white. The mechanic gazed contentedly outside at the thick cotton clouds, at the lime green of the tree leaves. The room had been recently aired and smelled fresh. Several pill bottles were lined tidily next to a glass of water on the nightstand. The old man smiled when the Toors entered, squinting against the sun.

Manmohan’s demeanor changed. Gathering courage, he bent to kiss his friend’s forehead.

Junker Singh lightly traced the tips of his fingers over his brow where Manmohan’s lips had brushed the skin. “You are becoming too indulgent,” the mechanic said, his voice no longer booming, but still powerful in its undercurrent.

“Nothing is ever serious,” Manmohan said. A crack of a smile broke through his stonily pursed lips.

“That is precisely it,” Junker Singh replied, also smiling. He then looked beyond his friend at Jai.

“We will come again next week,” she told him.

“Yes, I would like that.”

She nodded, refusing to cry, taking Manmohan’s arm and leading him out of the room.

Junker Singh lifted his age-spotted hand to point at some coins on his bedside table. “Give those to Sonya and Anand,” he told Darshan.

“They will say they are too old for coins,” Darshan replied in amusement.

Unruffled, the mechanic lowered his hand onto the duvet. “We both know they are not.”

Darshan laughed softly, then covered his mouth in apology.

Junker Singh grinned, a bit drowsily. “Do not worry so much, boy. You should always laugh. If it were you down here, I would be laughing.”

Smiling, Darshan gathered the coins. “Do you remember that bike?” he asked. “The one I rode?”

The mechanic chuckled, eyelids drooping. “I remember everything.”

It was all he said. Tired, he fell asleep, the rise and fall of his chest calm and steady, like an idling engine waiting for the kick of the throttle that would hurl it down the jungle road. Later that evening Junker Singh died in his sleep, his face toward the sliver of moonlight that cut through the glass of his un-curtained window.

~   ~   ~

The garden moved. Worms shifted through the soil, burrowing small holes. Creaks and rustles came from the trees. An apple fell, thudding to the earth. Birds broke from the branches, a flurry of wings, a crash of leaves. The Saturday morning air in Berkeley was bitter, but fresh and calm as the sun peered over the hill beyond the house, promising a day of warmth. Sitting in the shade on a wooden bench along the stucco wall of his parents’ house, Darshan shivered as the line of sun inched across the cement patio.

The sliding screen door scraped along its tracks as Manmohan shoved it aside with his cane. He glanced sidelong at his son as he came outside, securing the screen shut against flies. “You are here early today,” he said, unraveling the watering hose.

“Fence needs mending,” Darshan replied.

“And the others?”

“Elizabeth took Sonya and Anand to see Victoria.”

Manmohan twisted the knob on the faucet and swung the hose around, using his thumb to partially stopper the water, generating a spray that he waved over the strawberries. “Sonya tells me she wants to write a book.” He seemed to find the notion deeply gratifying.

Unsettled, Darshan flipped a metal bucket upside down and propped his feet on it. “She is sixteen,” he replied, as if her age justified his displeasure with the idea.

Manmohan dropped the hose, which continued to run in the mud. He did not respond. Using his cane, he shook a branch of his almond tree. A number of pods fell, splattering in the saturated soil.

“The world requires something different of her,” Darshan continued, trying to explain. “Something more sensible.”

Manmohan gestured toward the almonds. “Not a good crop this year.”

Removing his feet from the bucket, Darshan brought the pail to the edge of the patio to gather the nuts. He settled them carefully at the bottom.

“In Fiji I grew cucumbers,” Manmohan said, turning away from the tree. He shuffled slowly toward the bench, sitting with tired relief, his eyes closing momentarily as his muscles settled into position. “At the old house.”

Darshan wiped his muddy fingers on his trousers, waiting for his father to continue.

The old man scratched a mosquito bite on his wrist. He was quiet for a time, then reached out a hand. Darshan placed several almonds on his palm.

“You remind me so much of someone,” Manmohan said quietly. He peeled open a pod and removed a soft, white almond. He gazed at it for a moment, then placed it on his tongue, chewed slowly.

“Bapu,” Darshan said, sitting beside his father, believing that he understood. “We all miss Junker Uncle.”

Manmohan flinched slightly as if he had been wrenched out of a dream. The sun inched its way over the toes of their sneakered feet. The birds continued to chatter, to flit from branch to branch. “Let that girl of yours be,” he said, his voice now gruff, cantankerous. “Whatever intellect you have came from books. It has to start somewhere. Let it begin with her.”

~   ~   ~

Darshan loosened his tie to let the sweaty skin of his neck breathe. The emergency room lights were an angry, white glare. A stack of unfinished paperwork lay on his desk in his office down in the lab. He had rushed away after receiving the panicked call from his mother. He checked his watch. He had found it not long ago, forgotten in a box where he had put it some years before. Manmohan’s watch. Although it no longer worked he pressed it to his ear, listening, waiting.

A gurney finally pushed through from outside, his father so small on the wheeled stretcher, surrounded by the bustling emergency crew, mouth and nose swallowed by an oxygen mask. Jai scurried after, her eyes wide and bloodshot, her chuni dragging on the ground. She had discovered Manmohan facedown on the floor next to his bed, staring paralyzed and helpless at the cream-colored fibers of their carpet, guttural noises coming from the back of his throat as he tried to call for help.

A stroke.

~   ~   ~

It had happened on a Wednesday, or so Darshan thought. He was not entirely certain. Isolating the day gave him a sense of order, calmed his groping, rattled mind. “What would you like to do?” the doctors had asked him, friends of his from the hospital. “There will come a time—soon—when his body will stop and the machines will do all the work for him,” they said. “When that time comes,
what would you like us to do?
”

“Keep him alive,” Navpreet said when Darshan reported the news to the family. They had gathered in Manmohan and Jai’s living room. It was hot, the day unseasonably warm. A desert-like air smelling of rotting pomegranate filtered through the sliding screen door. “I am a doctor,” she insisted. “There are options. I know the data.”

Livleen stayed silent, focusing her attention outside where the garden sweltered under the sun, where the tree leaves curled inward, desperate for shade.

“Yes, keep him alive,” Mohan agreed. Someone had called him to that meeting, had invited him to participate. He paced, tyrannically shuffling his fat paunch about the room in a show of renewed clout, the eldest able-bodied male. “Bapu would want to stay alive.”

Darshan listened to them mull over the predicament, his attention weakening as he followed Livleen’s gaze toward the garden. What would you like us to do? The doctors would not ask Livleen or Mohan, who had no authority to make such a decision. They had already approached Jai, who had indicated she was incapable of determining the fate of the person who had always directed hers. They would not even ask Navpreet, because although they worked with her, they did not know her well enough despite—or because of—her many spurious attempts to endear herself to them, not taking well to her brusque manner with patients, her inhospitable superiority in matters of medicine. There was only him.

“Sit. Please,” Darshan asked his brother, fatigued, needled by the pacing, by the attempt to assert himself as family head after years of being the deplorable son who had roused so much hostility.

Mohan had gone to the hospital just after the stroke, had entered the room, disturbing the reverent quiet during Darshan’s watch.

Pallid and gray, folding his sunglasses away in his shirt pocket, Mohan tentatively approached the bed. Unable to speak or move, Manmohan was forced to stare up at the ceiling. The room smelled thickly of antiseptic cleaner. Machines hummed and beeped.

“He is weak,” Darshan told his brother. “Do not upset him.”

“Bapu,” Mohan breathed. “Bapu, it is Mohan.”

Manmohan averted his eyes.

“What can I do, Bapu? Please, let me do something.”

The old man whispered faintly. Mohan bent, listening hard, a fragile hope softening his face.

“No,” Manmohan said more audibly. Voice cracked and parched, he again repeated himself. “No.”

Agitated, the old man closed his eyes, moisture brimming at his lash line. Without thinking Darshan placed his warm palm on the crown of his father’s turban-less head to protect the soft, cold skin, feeling somehow responsible.

Mohan had begun to quietly weep, murmuring over and over, “I will do anything. I will do anything,” until Darshan led him out of the room, forcing him to leave.

Looking at his siblings now—at Navpreet fanning herself in the hot room, at Livleen sitting stiffly, sweat at her brow, at Mohan who had stopped pacing to grudgingly lean against the open sliding glass door—Darshan locked eyes with each of them, full of angst.

“I do not want him to suffer pain, or shame,” Jai finally said, standing, closing the discussion. She approached Darshan, placed an affectionate arm around his waist. So short next to him, he found himself pulling her head close to his chest like he often did with Sonya.

From where she sat on the sofa, Navpreet glared at him with outrage.

~   ~   ~

“It’s time,” the physician said across the line as Darshan held the receiver to his ear.

The bedroom was dark. The clock read 2:57. Heart beating, he switched on his night-table lamp.

“We need a decision.”

Reaching out across the mattress for Elizabeth, Darshan placed a hand on her back, glad the ringing had not startled her awake. She stirred slightly, then stilled.

“Nothing,” he said into the phone. “Just let him go.”

~   ~   ~

He strummed his fingers on the ship-hatch table, a relic from the Lion of India now repurposed in his parents’ kitchen, its heavy iron legs settled into indentations in the linoleum. The lacquered surface was scratched, beginning to yellow at the edges where cracks had formed. A bowl of plums sat in the center, the fruit overripe. He palmed one, the skin delicate, the meat beneath tender. Pressing his thumb into the fruit, the skin caved, and a trickle of juice ran down the side of his hand, dripping off his wrist and onto the table. His family wordlessly watched him. Across from him Navpreet frowned, and Taran, next to Livleen, shook his head in disgust.

Elizabeth reached behind her for a spool of paper towels on the counter. She tore off a perforated section, folded it in half and wiped away the juice from both the table and Darshan’s hand. She took the plum from him, used her fingers to tear it in half and pry out the pit. She folded a clean paper towel and put the halves on it, then slid it over to Jai. Absently, Jai lifted a half to her mouth and sucked some of the juice. She wearily dropped the plum back onto the napkin and turned her stony gaze upon Mohan, who was leaning against the refrigerator.

“There is no point to this,” Navpreet said, backing out her chair, threatening to stalk off.

“We will fly his ashes back to Barapind,” Mohan said decisively. “Open a school in his name.”

At this sudden proposal, Navpreet remained seated. Slowly she pulled her chair closer to the table.

Seemingly taken with the idea, Taran deferentially nodded his approval. Livleen, face drawn and sunken from lack of sleep, passively laced her fingers together in her lap.

Jai looked down at the mutilated plum in front of her. “Why?” she asked quietly, her voice flat.

“Because education was important to him,” Mohan replied with a hint of censure.

She tensed, turning to him.

Chastened, he scowled with embarrassment. “He was my father. It is my duty to make this decision.”

With a bleak, unblinking stare, she said evenly, “Darshan will get the ashes. He will make the arrangements.”

Navpreet stood abruptly, her wooden chair falling backward, hitting the linoleum with a dull, heavy blow. She glanced around the table, affronted, the grey hairs at the roots close to her temples more visible under the kitchen light. She took a breath, put her hands to her abdomen as if trying to bridle her rage. “I am a doctor,” she said. “I could have saved him. We,” she pointed to Livleen and Mohan, “wanted to save him. We should now at least be allowed to properly voice how best to put him to rest.”