The Abundance: A Novel (3 page)

“When has he listened to me? He doesn’t pick up his phone when he sees it’s me.”

“You call him and invite him. I will, too.”

“You’re going to exhaust yourself getting ready for it. I know. This is no time for that kind of hard work.”

I shook my head. “I have to get a few things.”

“Give me a list.”

“There are things only I’ll know how to get.”

“I’ll ask.”

I stood up. “You’re acting like I can’t walk. You’re acting like I’m already bedridden.”

“All right. All right.”

I could tell from his eyes he was afraid he had offended me. The last thing I wanted was for him to watch himself around me, or to swallow his benign Gujarati puns and jokes, to give up his weekend swims and his nightly retreats to the study. I didn’t want him to alter our routine as a couple, in however minor a detail. But he would, wouldn’t he? The change had already found its way between us.

I stood and held his head and shoulders to my stomach, the way I had once, long ago, when I felt our first child kick.

*   *   *

The second pregnancy is supposed to be easier to carry and easier to drop, but that wasn’t the case for me. Ronak was easy. Mala kicked me awake in the last trimester. She took an eternity parting from me. In the end they had to cut me open and cut her from me.

Mala, the second born, had been strangely fearless, unlike our expectations of a daughter. Pictures show her wild-eyed, shirtless, barefoot. Wild-haired, too—she pulled out her hair bands, unraveled the careful braids I gave her. You would think I was a neglectful mother. In pictures she looks almost feral, crouched atop our old coffee table or the hood of our car. Me in a saree, Abhi with his black hair, Ronak close to my hip, a shy five. And Mala, two years younger, always apart, always in some spring-loaded pose. The most memorable snapshot (Where is it now? Where have I saved it?) is the one where Abhi caught her jumping off a fence. The pink clip sits askew in her messy black hair, her mouth is open, her arms wide, her eyebrows high; the maroon velvet birthday-party frock has fluttered up to show her skinny calves as she braces for the landing. Had we tamed that tomboy? And if we had, why?

I could not reconcile that Mala with the woman who, at twenty-nine, undernourished from a resident’s life, said she was scared she would never find someone to love. A girl like Mala—beautiful, successful. The men her age had done their playing, she sobbed, the men had dated around, and now they were marrying twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-olds. She would soon be thirty and the pool kept getting smaller. Who was left?

Mala had waited until Abhi left for work, and then she broke. She had said nothing of her despair before. He must have broken it off with her. I have no name, just
he
. Who, she never told me. Maybe an American boy. Virile, athletic, hairless on the back and chest. Had she worked to impress him? Had she studied his favorite movies so she could talk about them? Had she made him agree never to call her at home? Had he introduced her to his parents—“my girlfriend,” nothing momentous, the father waving hello from behind his computer—and never understood why she wouldn’t do the same? Or had they pretended for as long as they could, growing closer, wearing each other’s T-shirts sometimes, sleeping in each other’s dorm rooms when a roommate went home for the weekend—everything shared except this fenced-off part of her?

“You can make your phone calls now,” she had said, giving us the go-ahead to send inquiries about marriageable boys. (Twenty-nine was her cutoff, but still we called them “boys.” A “boy” for our “girl.”) Had there been resentment in her voice?
Go, have your fun, do the thing you’ve always wanted to do.
Even so, how wrong of me to treasure her resignation. To rejoice as I hugged her and stroked her arm.

*   *   *

My fingers could touch in a ring around her arm, above the elbow no less. I thought she was “picky,” I called her “picky”—until the ninth grade, when she collapsed during track practice. (Ronak ran track, so Mala had to run track.) I drove to school to find her looking sheepish, a scrape on her forehead of shallow parallel red lines, an ice pack to her cheek and ear. Apparently she had been crouching at the starting line when she blacked out. A few tall, broad-shouldered blond girls and a compact, exquisitely formed black girl were sitting beside her on the bleachers. I had seen Mala go running with these girls, their ponytails bouncing in synchrony. Two sets of two on the sidewalk, Mala just behind them and alone. The black girl was named Shaunte, which came, I assumed, from Shanti. Her legs and arms were so taut the flesh on them wouldn’t pinch, her calves were two sleek vases, her arms faintly muscled, but she still looked healthy. Part of it was her eyes, which were not set deep in her face, but rather on a plane with her forehead. Mala looked at me, and her eyes were sunk in dark holes. She had a layer of softness on her thighs, girl fat, normal Indian girl flesh, but her skin had no luster. I saw, for the first time, that she had been starving herself. Yet the starving had shrunk only her torso, which was wasting away atop a woman’s hips, the hips she inherited from me. Her friends had gotten her to suck on a straw without interest. “She got hypoglycemic,” they said confidently. I drew the ice pack away to check Mala’s ear and cheek, then guided it back. Mala handed me the juice box to let me inspect her scraped palm. I didn’t know how long she had been sipping, but the juice box was still heavy.

*   *   *

When Mala told me to start looking into a marriage partner, I was too thrilled to speculate why she had reached this point. I had been given the go-ahead. She wanted my help. During her early twenties, I had sometimes suggested this or that friend’s son, and she would snap at me or, if she was in a good mood, roll her eyes. “You and Dad had an arranged marriage that worked out, but you’re lucky. That’s not the rule,” she would say. My answer was that arranged marriages had a lower divorce rate than love marriages. She countered that couples who could be forced by their parents to marry were also the sort to force themselves to stay together. I would say no one was forcing her, just as no one forced me; we only wanted her to meet this boy, whose family we knew very well. I probably
was
forced back then, she would say, I just didn’t know I was being forced. “Then forcing me to marry your father was the greatest gift my mother ever gave me,” I would tell her. We would go back and forth like children after that. “That wasn’t what I meant.” “That
was
what you meant.” No it wasn’t, yes it was—she would clench her fists in frustration, close her eyes, and, in a quiet voice, declare she couldn’t have a conversation with me. That would begin a silence we both maintained for altogether too long.

But at last, I thought, she was willing. She had come around late, which made my job harder, but it was welcome work and something new to do. I called India, I called California, I called New Jersey and Chicago. Grandmothers were my best resource—even if their grandchildren were married, they always had a nephew’s son in Baroda or Jamnagar. I tracked every youngish man at the weddings of other people’s children, checking for a ring, checking whether he placed his hand in the small of a woman’s back or brought someone a drink. A receding hairline and a thick watch suggested a professional—such boys drew my attention. I made unsubtle inquiries. I traded e-mails, I sent and received biodata, the standard JPEG and Word file with which we advertised our aging children (some mothers, I suspect, without their sons’ knowledge). Age, caste, job and education, hobbies: year, make, model, maintenance history.

My picture showed Mala at twenty-four, but the fudging was customary. It was the same photo she had posted when she tried an online Indian dating site. About that experience she had told me with a mixture of horror, self-pity, and mirth. Because she had failed to click on a box of some sort, her profile had been made public. That night, within hours, her cell phone came alive. Men in India and the United Kingdom called to woo her without understanding the time difference. Men across the world desperately wished to meet her—she, being a doctor, could provide airfare, yes? Men in the States with student visas, men who attended obscure community colleges in Indiana, Minnesota, Connecticut, four bachelors to an apartment. She turned her phone off in horror and collected seven messages by the time her alarm clock went off. Later, she got callers who sounded like they had been born in America. They were the nervous ones. “The fobs were never nervous,” she said. They were blissfully free of insight.

I worried about her meeting them in person. No knowledge of the family meant no safeguard. A lot of the profiles, Mala told me, were posted by the parents themselves. She could tell from the grammatical mistakes and the British spelling for
colour
—as well as the list of Indian dishes the boy enjoyed.

One caller had something in his voice that she responded to—the faintest trace of an Indian accent, the way his
v
softened into a
w
—he had come to America at eleven. They talked twice more, asking questions about their lives and plans, but it went nowhere “We had nothing to talk about,” Mala said, shrugging, “but who we were.”

I laughed when she made fun of fobs and their accents. She imitated her callers vivaciously, viciously. Yet hadn’t Abhi and I been like that only three decades ago? Had we appeared to Americans as that inept, that silly?

I knew I had best avoid showing her boys too recently arrived from India, or worse, still in India. We would have gotten along with such a boy, I imagine. He would have made a good son-in-law. But Mala would not have respected him as a man, I could tell. I was heartened that she had been open to a boy who had come over young and, during his teens at least, had grown up here. Soon after our conversation, I invited Sachin to meet her.

*   *   *

While Abhi took Shailesh and Henna back to the airport, I went to the supermarket and stocked up for Mala’s visit. I kept moving. I set chickpeas to soak and Osterized the mint leaves for chutney until they tasted as bright as their green color. I rinsed the blades and ground some walnuts for dessert that evening—a roar as loud as a construction site. I felt better making that noise to fill the house. It scattered the blackbirds off my nerves a while.

It was not yet time for Mala’s dutiful daily call, and for that I was glad. I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t let the shock slip, or reveal it in my pauses or my tone. I made my first call to Ronak’s cell.
Hey, this is Ron, leave me a message, thanks.
Brusque, unwelcoming. I left no message. He would see the missed call—maybe he had already seen it and silenced the ringer. Left to himself, he would return it later in the week. I planned to try him more than once.
Hey, this is Ron
. We hadn’t named him Ronak with a mind to its American abbreviation. We had kept to easy, two-syllable names for both children precisely to prevent that. “Ron” made things easier, of course, in his line of work. Amber mingled the two versions: she called him
Roan
. A horse whose dark hair is interspersed with white.

I had shortened Abhi’s name from Abhishek, but not to something American. (At least “Ron” had some logic: we knew a Vrijesh once who did business as Mike.) I liked Abhi’s shortened name more.
Abhishek
means the bathing of an idol.
Abhi
means
now
—in both English senses,
the present moment
and
immediately
. I valued, more than ever, the urgency and the short-term focus of that name. Naming the one I loved, I said how long I would have him.

When Abhi got home that day, the rice cooker’s light had blinked off, and the rotli dough held the smooth divots where my fingertips had tested it. I loved working little rips of dough into balls. The palms were held parallel, circling each other, a few ounces of softness between them. The rolling got easier until there was no friction at all. Then the dough was worked smooth and flat by the pin. The dough seems heavy compared to the rotli itself, bright with brown pocks, steam-swelled. I had the stovetop fan going and didn’t hear Abhi come in. He still had his coat on.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“How is the pain? I didn’t ask you this morning. Did you take those pills they gave you?”

“I’m not in any pain. I’ll take the pills if I am.”

“I’m worried you won’t.”

I looked down into the black round of the tawa. “Are you ready to eat?”

“I talked to Ronak.”

“I called him earlier today. I got a message.”

“I was persistent.”

“How many times did you call him?”

“He picked up on the fourth call.”

“Four calls? He will suspect something is wrong.”

“He didn’t sound like he did.”

“What did he say?”

“He said they’re going to his in-laws for Christmas, as they do every year.”

“You told him we wanted the twenty-sixth, right? After Christmas? Even the twenty-seventh would do. Mala will still be here.”

Abhi unzipped his coat and turned from me, sliding it off his shoulders. “I wouldn’t count on him.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“He said he would check with Amber.”

“Maybe I should talk to Amber.”

“She picks up her phone, at least.”

He left to hang his coat. I was used to this bitter abdication in matters pertaining to Ronak. Abhi felt he had no control. In earlier years, he used to raise his voice because he still believed shouting might accomplish something. He would shout, always in English, at Ronak’s closed door or closed stare. The reproach would start with phrases like
how dare you
or
by what right
. Sometimes he would repeat the words
I am your father
, as if that settled things. He was appealing to bygone rules of hierarchy and submission. How late Ronak came home on weeknights, his social drinking, the never-acknowledged but never-denied girlfriends or (Ronak’s phrase) friends-who-happened-to-be-girls—in America, this was normal teenage behavior, as natural as any physiological change. In Ronak’s case, it was harmless: he was too keenly self-interested to do anything that would give him a record. No matter how late he stayed out, we never got a call from the police, unlike some parents we knew. And he used this as a counterargument:
Have you ever gotten a phone call? Ever?
As if we ought to praise his moderation. In those years, the voice deepened, the height increased, the tongue grew cutting. All to be expected. Yet in India, we never saw such things.
Who are you to tell me, Dad?
We had never spoken that way. No stranger had to remind us,
I am your father.