Oleander Girl (20 page)

To my dismay, Mitra pulls up another chair and sits beside me, peering with far too much interest at the computer screen.

Perhaps to make up for his earlier lapse, Mr. Desai launches immediately into business.

“As you know, we’re handicapped by our lack of information about the subject. Still, I’ve located a couple of promising leads.” He points to the computer screen.

My pulse speeds up. The blue screen with lines and lines of text on it makes the prospect of finding my father more real than ever before, and I am newly afraid. But I also need to get Mitra out of the room.

“There are also some possible sources that will have to be questioned over the phone. That’s where you come in. But first I need to get a few more details about your mother—”

Mitra’s posture is still and intent. Panicked, I blurt out, “Can we discuss this in private, please?”

The words come out louder than I intend. Everyone stares. Then Mr. Desai motions with his chin to his nephew, who raises an ironic eyebrow and goes through a side door into another room. Mitra stands up with a sudden, offended motion, pushing his chair back so hard it almost topples.

“We’ll be done in an hour or so,” Mr. Desai says, his tone placating. “If you’ll wait next door, Vic can get you some—”

“I’m going to leave, since Miss Roy obviously doesn’t want me to be here. I have many other responsibilities, I’d like you to know.”

I hadn’t expected such an extreme response. I stare as he stalks to the door.

“Wait a minute!” Desai exclaims. “She can’t go back to your place alone after dark. You know this area.”

I’m worried, but I refuse to beg Mitra to stay. “I’ll manage,” I say with more confidence than I feel. “Please go ahead and take care of your business.”

After Mitra leaves, Desai purses his lips in a silent whistle. “He certainly took it personal. Hopefully he’ll get over it soon.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude to Mr. Mitra or your nephew, but this is a confidential matter. My fiancé’s family is particularly concerned to keep it—”

Desai raises his hands to halt my excuses. “You have every right to privacy in a matter as delicate as this. It was my fault for not taking precautions. But when Mitra called for directions, he implied that he was a friend of the family and already knew what was going on. As for my nephew—you needn’t be concerned about him. The rascal has a thick skin—thicker than is good for him! I’ll ask him to give you a ride home, so don’t worry about that, either.”

This small generosity—the first since I arrived in this country—pushes me perilously close to tears. But Mr. Desai is discreet as well as kind. He rummages busily in his file cabinet until I’ve recovered enough to continue with business.

Someone is knocking loudly at Rajat’s door and won’t go away. The noise pounds his skull like a jackhammer. The door swings open, even though he hasn’t given permission. He glares at the intruder. It is Subroto, the foreman. Rajat is about to reprimand him when he notices how distraught Subroto is. Rajat has never seen him this way, half his shirt hanging out, hands shaking.

“Babu, come quickly! A fight has broken out on the packing floor.”

Rajat has never faced a problem like this. His job is to take care of accounts and handle customers. His father is the one who deals with the workers. But right now his father is in a remote village in Medinipur. Rajat runs with Subroto all the way to the packing area, trying vainly to remember if his father had ever mentioned a fight at the warehouse. He sees packing tables turned over, the floor littered with shards of earthenware and splinters of wood. The workstations have been abandoned, and a crowd mills around in the middle of the hall. Some of them see him, and a shout goes through the crowd.

“Rajat-babu is here! Babu is here!”

Faces turn toward him, men old enough to be his father, lined and work-worn, but filled with innocent hope, as though he were their savior. They don’t know that he has no idea how to handle such a situation. A panicked nausea swirls inside him. But he knows that the first step is to get to the fight, which, from the yelling and thumping, is still going strong. He begins to push his way through the crowd, which parts for him like the Red Sea so that in a few moments—too soon—he is at the epicenter, the floor under his feet horrifyingly sticky with blood.

Luckily for Rajat, Subroto’s second-in-command, Abinash, the burly assistant foreman, has things almost under control. Under his direction, workers have separated the three men who must have been the perpetrators. They yell curses at each other, all of them bleeding—heavily, it seems to Rajat’s inexperienced eyes—one from a head wound, one from a slashed arm. The third looks as if his nose might be broken. Rajat knows their faces, though not their names. He does not recall having had trouble with them before. Or with anyone else. The Boses’ workers are paid at a higher-than-average rate; tea and snacks are provided to them free of charge from the canteen; each year, their families are gifted with new clothing. Why then, suddenly, this?

Rajat swallows the bile that floods his mouth and tells Subroto to phone for an ambulance. He yells for someone to run and get the first-aid box. But no one remembers where it’s stored, so Rajat must ask Abinash to cut up one of the expensive embroidered bedspreads from Assam into strips. The tea boy runs to fetch a kettle of hot water. In this way the injured men are patched up as well as possible. As they wait for the ambulance, Rajat tries to piece together, from a chorus of contradictory voices, what has occurred.

The packing room had a radio, usually tuned to upbeat Bollywood songs—the men liked to listen to these as they worked, and sing along, too. Subroto monitored the radio and changed the station as necessary. But today he had gone to the toilet when the music program was interrupted by a news bulletin: Just when the authorities were hoping the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat were at an end, another outbreak had occurred in Ahmedabad. The announcer described some of the
atrocities. One of the men on the floor, an older Hindu, had made a remark about Mussulmans always causing trouble, ever since Partition. The man working next to him, a Muslim, had taken strong objection and reminded him that the Hindus had torched Gulburg just a few weeks back. Voices had risen, tempers had overheated, words had been slung back and forth until a last incendiary one had come up: Godhra. With that, the men—some of whom had worked side by side for decades—had begun to shove and punch one another. A Muslim pushed a Hindu, who fell backward, cracking his head on the concrete. The sight of the blood drove the Hindus wild. Several of them rushed the Mussulman, punching and yelling, breaking his nose and throwing him down, oblivious of the foremen, who were ordering them to stop. What happened next was not clear, but at some point one of the Muslims had taken a box cutter and slashed at a Hindu, slicing open his forearm.

Just as the ambulance’s keening announces its arrival, Rajat’s cell phone rings. It is a collect call from Korobi, at this, the worst of times! He whispers that he will call her back as soon as he can. Yes, he knows it is late in the United States, and, yes, he understands that she doesn’t want him to disturb the Mitras. But he’s in the middle of an emergency. No, he isn’t hurt, but he can’t talk now. He puts the phone away, feeling angry and afraid and churlish. His headache is worse. He’ll have to take another dose of aspirin as soon as he gets back to his office.

The injured men are taken to an emergency clinic, and now Rajat must make some difficult decisions. Certain individuals must be punished, others reassured. A significant amount of inventory has been ruined, including some expensive terra-cotta statues, and appropriate people must be fined. It must be done right, so the workers see that he is both just and firm. But how to achieve this tricky balance? Rajat doesn’t know. So he sends the men off for an early lunch and asks the managers to meet him in his office in half an hour. Meanwhile, he tries to contact his father. But Mr. Bose must be in a village without mobile access; he doesn’t answer. Rajat doesn’t want to call his mother, who will ask a million frantic questions. Though generally levelheaded, she tends to panic if she thinks her children are in danger. She might insist on coming over, and he isn’t up
to handling her right now. There’s no way around it. He’ll have to take on the role of leader.

When Subroto and Abinash come to his office, Rajat tells them this must never occur again. To that end, they’ll have to change the way things are done on the floor. Hindus and Muslims must be separated into different areas and given different tasks. Abinash nods, but Subroto is hesitant. He points out that they will have to reorganize the entire work area, moving around machines and workstations. It will be complicated. Not only will they lose days’ worth of work and money, but the men will not like it. They’ve become used to doing certain tasks. Each one has his expertise—unpacking, cleaning, polishing, touching up paint, loading. They’ll resist learning new skills. They’ll resist working with new people. Some of them have been with the same teammates for years. Subroto is confident that today’s incident is an isolated one. The management shouldn’t overreact. Abinash and he will make sure it doesn’t occur again. They’ll monitor the radio more carefully, maybe bring in a CD player with movie songs. Subroto does have one suggestion: Perhaps Rajat-babu can hire another supervisor—a Muslim one this time? There’s a good man, Faizal, whom they can talk to.

Rajat shakes his head. He can’t pull his mind from the blood on the floor, that unreal red on his shoes, sticky and slippery at the same time. It nauseates him all over again.

“I don’t want to take chances. Just separate the men. Also, I want you to make a list of all the people who were involved in the fight. Fine them a day’s pay. And the man who slashed open the other one’s arm—fire him.”

Now both Subroto and Abinash exchange uneasy glances.

“Babu,” Abinash says, “it’s hard to tell who was in the fight, and who wasn’t. It was all mixed up in there. And the man who used the box cutter, Alauddin Miah, he’s been with us a long time. He’s high up in the union and has a lot of influence on the Muslim workers. It might cause trouble if we fire him.”

“He’s a good employee,” Subroto adds. “Never done anything like this before. They were beating up his nephew, broke his nose, maybe that’s why he went crazy.”

“Whatever the cause,” Rajat says, “he attacked a man with a weapon that could have killed him. What if he
had
? Can you imagine the trouble we’d be in now if a man had been murdered in our building—especially a Hindu?” Rajat thinks of his parents’ tenuous relationship with Mr. Bhattacharya and shudders. “How can we allow something like that to pass without serious punishment?”

“Please, maybe you should check with barababu first?”

Rajat sighs in frustration. “I can’t reach him. We can’t put off our decision for too long, otherwise it’ll send the message that the management is weak.”

“Couldn’t you wait until next week? He’ll be back by then. He can talk to the men. Most of them were hired by him. They’ll surely listen to him.”

The headache is worse now, slicing through Rajat’s brain like a buzz saw. Even though he, too, has been longing for his father to take care of this mess that’s been shoved at him, he is suddenly furious.

“Barababu left me in charge. Are you saying I’m not capable of handling this problem? That I don’t know how to talk to the men?”

“No, Rajat-babu,” the managers stammer.

“Then do what I said. Go on!”

When the door closes behind them, he kicks off his shoes—he can’t bear their touch on his feet—and goes to the small bathroom attached to his office and splashes water on his face. How he would love to go home and lie down. But he can’t. He’s in charge. He has to prove—maybe more to himself than anyone else—that he’s capable of leadership. He considers trying his father’s number one more time, but after a brief look at the clock—it’s past midnight in New York—he calls Mitra’s home.

Korobi picks up the phone on the first ring, thank heaven! She must have been sitting by the phone, waiting on his call. He pictures her running her fingers through those unruly curls he so loves, dead tired but forcing herself to stay awake because she can’t let another day pass without talking to him. The inky surge of anger inside him recedes. Its place is taken by fear and loneliness, and though he hadn’t intended to, he finds himself telling Cara everything that happened at the warehouse.

“Oh, Rajat! That’s a horrifying load to be thrust upon you!”

He relaxes a little. Her sympathy is like fresh air blowing down a mine shaft. But then she adds, “I hope you can get in touch with Papa quickly and get some advice.”

Does she, too, doubt his ability? Angrily, he notices that her voice, far and muted, is not as distressed as he would like. And was that a yawn? Their worlds have split apart already, she in a land of night while he is in daytime, each unable to truly gauge the other’s suffering heart. He is reminded of an eerie tale out of his childhood, a prince and a princess who were kept captive in an enchanted palace. The curse laid on them was that whenever one was awake, the other would be asleep. Although they fell in love gazing at each other, they could never convey how they felt, nor understand what the other was going through. That story had a happy ending, thanks to a pair of matchmaking genies. But where are the genies that will travel the dusty distance that stretches between Rajat and Cara?