Oleander Girl (40 page)

The van’s to his side now, getting ready to pound him. I’ll take you with me, you son of a pig. He smashes into the van as hard as he can and feels the impact go through his spine. Then he’s weightless, airborne. It’s like flying. No, it’s like being dead. He gropes for the mobile. Come on, A.A., you can do it, press the 1. His fingers clench. His head strikes the dashboard. All turns black.

T
hat seat in the front-left corner,” Rob Lacey says, pointing, “was—for some reason I never understood—your mother’s favorite. She’d come in early so she could claim it. And where we’re standing in the corridor right now, this is where I used to wait for her to get done with class. I’m afraid I was a terrible distraction. She’d complain later that she missed half the lecture because she kept glancing at me and trying not to smile. But she was a terrible distraction, too. Some days I wouldn’t even go to my classes—my university was all the way across the bay, in San Francisco—because I couldn’t bear to be away from her for so long.”

I peer through the oblong of glass into the room, where a lecture is in progress. The wooden desk-chairs are old and gouged. I long to sit in the chair my father has pointed out, to place my hands where my mother’s had been, to learn through osmosis what she would have taught me had she lived. Ironically, I’d walked through this very building a few days ago. But it had no more meaning than when one leafs through a book in a foreign language, intrigued by the strange shapes but mostly frustrated. Now I had a translator, and it made all the difference. I want to tell my father this, but I’m still shy with him, although I’m beginning to like him a great deal. Perhaps too much, considering we haven’t yet discussed the future.

When he called me back on the beach, he’d said, calmly, “You shouldn’t hang up
on people like that. Your mother used to do the same thing when she got mad at me. Where are you staying? I’ll fly out tomorrow to meet you.”

Vic and I picked him up him from the airport yesterday evening and took him to our motel—he’d opted to stay there, though surely he could afford fancier lodgings—and then on to Mystic City. Sid, a tall, thin man with an earring and a shaved head, shook my father’s hand and welcomed me with a hug and a knowing grin:
So you’re the one!
He settled us in a quiet corner with drinks and steered a protesting Vic away.

Alone with this man, my father, I felt excruciatingly awkward, a gangly teenager again. Under the pretext of sipping my drink I glanced at him from under my eyelashes. He looked older than in the photo, his hair grayer than I had expected. Twice he ran his hands over it and said, “Damn! If someone had told me yesterday morning that I’d be sitting today with a daughter I didn’t even know I had!” His skin was, indeed, light. He had big, beat-up knuckles. Did that mean he liked working with his hands? There was so much I needed to know about him, and so little time. In two days he’d have to return to his other life, where people continued their activities in blithe ignorance of my existence.

We spoke stiltedly, courting each other with little, likable pieces of ourselves, delaying our difficult questions, our subterranean, complicated truths. By unspoken consent, we turned off our cell phones, not wanting anything to encroach upon our brief moment together. He handed me an envelope full of old photos: my mother outside a tall, domed building, mock-curtsying in a bright, frilly skirt; laughing in an apron in a tiny kitchen, flour dusting her cheek; looking doubtful under a sign that promised her a happy birthday; and finally, thinner and sadder, with shadows in her eyes, cradling her curved belly.

“You can have them. I made copies.”

I wanted to laugh and weep, both at once. I remembered Mariner’s apartment, my hunger for a single glimpse of my mother’s lost life that had nearly led me to disaster. And now, unlooked-for, this treasure trove! The universe had a strange sense of humor.

We walk across campus to the domed building I had seen in one of the photos.

“This is the International House, where we met, in this hall, at a folk-dance class. She was standing right here.”

I imagine her in a red, frilled dress, a world of anticipation in her eyes.

“It was a difficult time in my life. I’d recently switched majors from engineering to history, which upset my family. They’d worked hard to put me through college, and they felt I was reneging on an unspoken contract. They were particularly displeased with my area, ancient civilizations, not even something meaningful like African-American history. I was going through a lot of soul-searching, a lot of guilt. I’d never have come here—I’m a terrible dancer—if a friend hadn’t forced me because she thought I needed cheering up. Your mother wasn’t that great a dancer, either, thank God—because otherwise I’d have been too intimidated to approach her. What I liked about her right away was that she was enthusiastic and unafraid, laughing at herself when she messed up. She had a mass of beautiful hair that flowed all the way down her back. Later she told me she’d never cut it—it was a family tradition. I kind of thought you’d have long hair, too.”

He looks at me for a moment, and I return the gaze. I want to tell him how much I’ve given up to find him, but that’s a story for another time.

“I kept going back to that class because of her. I’d maneuver my way around the room so I could be her partner. We started talking. She wanted to know where I came from, what I liked to do, what books I read. She had a genuine interest in people, your mother. And she was arrow-straight. When I asked her out, she told me right away we could only be friends. She explained the promise she’d made. When love ambushed her, she fought it every step of the way. But finally she had to call your grandfather. We both knew by then that it would be wrong for her to marry someone else.”

My father breaks off, unwilling to enter that dark wood yet. Instead, he takes me to the building where they lived.

We walk down Telegraph, past vendors and street people and leftover hippies, secondhand clothing stores jostling for space beside upscale eateries, and turn into a narrow street. The building is dilapidated, its stucco a disheartening, crumbly gray.

“Ugly as sin, isn’t it? It looked just like this even then. We had that tiny
studio on the top floor, in the corner, see? It was cheap because the elevator didn’t work. We were dirt-poor. Your grandfather had cut your mother off. Her scholarship covered her school expenses, but not much more. I didn’t feel I could ask my family for help. They weren’t well-off, and besides, they weren’t pleased about us getting together, either. They thought—”

He breaks off, a pained look on his face.

“I worked a couple of part-time jobs and Anu tutored. That’s how we managed to make ends meet. We had one secondhand mattress and one dining table with mismatched chairs that we used for eating and studying, both. Though we had no nursery for you, we were so excited for you to be born. I’d never been happier than I was there. Or sadder, when I received news from your grandfather that she had died, that you both had died. It seemed impossible that so much joy could vanish so quickly.”

I wonder about his journey from grief to acceptance, to his present life with his new family that I’m jealous of. I wonder if my mother had been equally happy in that apartment. On the scales of joy, could even the best husband equal the weight of everyone you’d loved as far back as you could remember? But the gulf between 26 Tarak Prasad Roy Road and this building is so wide, perhaps joy meant something else here.

But then I think back to the note I’d found. My mother
had
been equally happy with him, even if that happiness was tinged with loss. Sometimes we appreciate something more because of the price we’ve had to pay for it. I consider showing him the letter, but I’m not ready, not yet, to share the one piece of her that I hold.

“She was a terrible cook, your mother. I’m the one who fixed dinner—I even learned some Indian dishes because she’d get homesick for them. But she made the best tea. We’d drink it in bed while we read each other snippets of what we were studying. Anu had a way of looking into you, of giving you her complete attention, that made you want to be the best person you could be. She’s the one who turned me on to poetry. I’ve kept a couple of her favorite anthologies. When I read certain poems in there, I hear her voice. Sometimes we’d just sit quietly, gazing at this jacaranda tree. That’s the best kind of silent, when you’re with someone you love so much that you don’t need to talk to them. And she loved
flowers. It bothered her to be shut up in a small apartment. Her dream was to move to a little place with a patio—that’s the best we could imagine in those times—and get some oleanders in pots. Now I have a half acre where I’ve planted row upon row of oleanders. I had a struggle with my wife about those. She was scared that the kids, who were little then, might put the poisonous leaves in their mouths.”

“Did she know why you planted them?”

He looks down. “Selena doesn’t know about your mother. When I met her, about two years after Anu died, I wasn’t ready to rake up those painful memories again. I thought, ‘Let some time pass; then I’ll tell her.’ And one day it was too late.”

Is he going to tell her about me? That’s another question I can’t ask.

He says he must show me one final place, so we take the bus up the hill. On the way he describes his long-ago trip to India: how shell-shocked he was in the hot confusion of Kolkata, how Bimal Roy met him in the hotel lobby with the two death certificates and an urn of ashes. When Lacey asked how my mother died, Bimal Roy had turned on him in fury. It’s because of you they’re both dead, he said. He asked Rob Lacey never to contact them again.

I wait for rage at my grandfather to wash over me, but there is only sadness. What he did, it was because of love. Isn’t that why most people do what they do? Out of their mistaken notions of love, their fear of its loss?

We disembark, and suddenly we’re in the midst of roses, a multicolored, flowering amphitheater on the hillside. My father takes my arm as we descend to the trellises heavy with yellow blossoms. It’s the first time he has touched me. I clasp his hand as a child might. How many times have I longed for this! He limps a little. Will we ever know the injuries that lie in our pasts?

“The Rose Garden was special to Anu. This is where we made our vows to each other.”

“You got married here?”

He hesitates. His face flushes, then pales. He squares his shoulders. “Your mother and I were never married.”

For a moment, the words hover in the air between us, meaningless.
Then I stare at him, aghast. “I’m illegitimate?” I whisper. Now it makes sense, why Desai was having such a hard time finding wedding records. “I’m a—bastard?”

He winces at the word but forces himself to meet my eyes. “I begged her, again and again. Especially when she became pregnant, which we hadn’t planned on. But my asking only made her more upset. She took the promise she’d made in the temple—that she wouldn’t marry against her father’s wishes—very seriously. I couldn’t understand it, but there it was. That was one of the reasons she went to India—to ask her father to release her from her promise so we could marry before you were born.”

The air is cloying, burdened with the scent of too many roses. I can’t come to terms with this new, shameful me. I feel a great, dizzying anger toward my parents, that they should have marked me like this. I don’t know a single person among all my friends, relatives, acquaintances, even servants, who is outcast in this way. I envision myself telling Rajat of this stigma. The news traveling to Papa and Maman. To Bhattacharya. I can’t even imagine the fallout from that.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his face stricken. He comes toward me, but I back away.

“Please. I need to be alone.” Something of the horror I feel must be in my face because it stops him short.

In my motel room, I’m unable to remain still. I turn on my cell phone. Two messages from the Boses’ apartment. But how can I talk to Rajat while this new information burns inside me like a disease? The last number is Vic’s. I would ignore that, too, but he’ll keep calling. I dial his number and, thankfully, get a recording. I leave a message saying that my father and I had a long talk, and that I’m absorbing all the things I’ve learned. Please, I end, don’t call me again tonight. I need to think things through.