The Leaving of Things (21 page)

It was now a matter of waiting out the month before Christmas break, when we were planning to visit my mother’s older brother, Dharmanshu Uncle, in New Delhi. He had lived there twenty-seven years, working as a civil engineer for the city, alone since his wife died when I was still a child. His son had grown up now and left India for a new life in London four years ago. All I remembered of Dharmanshu Uncle was his beard, which used to terrify
me as a child, and his penetrating eyes, like black marbles set behind his large spectacles. For eleven years, aerograms had been the only mode of communication between my mother and Dharmanshu Uncle; in the weeks before our visit, she talked often of her anxiousness to see him.

I renewed my photography book again and again from the library. I studied the photographs—a Depression-blighted mother, surrounded by her children; a skeletal tree dwarfed by the towering Flatiron, shrouded in fog, in turn-of-the-century New York City; anxious faces of immigrants crammed together in the steerage of a trans-Atlantic steamship. The pictures spoke of suffering or loneliness, but to me they were thrilling glimpses of home, as much as the photographs of DiMaggio knocking another one into the stands, of surfers and girls—the most beautiful girls in the world—glistening on Venice Beach in 1959. Lying in bed in the afternoons with my headphones on, I pored over the book, listening to R.E.M.’s “Little America,” “Letter Never Sent,” “Pilgrimage,” and
Murmur
,
Chronic Town
,
Fables of the Reconstruction
, those echoes of the America I’d come to love—ever-searching, authentic, almost rootsy; it connected me with a world I cherished, with an identity I’d only begun to create.

After Anand finished his homework, the bungalow echoed with the electronic cheeps and chimes from the Nintendo in the living room. At the end of Diwali break, my father had bought him the game system. Now and then, his friend Jyoti, fat and loud, came by, and they played together till my father came home. The video game drove my mother nuts. She raced from the kitchen into the living room, first demanding them to turn down the volume and eventually to turn off the game. “Enough is enough,” she proclaimed, the rolling pin in her hand. “Read book.” She
used to yell the same things at him in America. How little some things changed.

My father hired a pair of gardeners to clean out the weeds and scrub in front of the bungalow. Leaving for classes, I would find them—strips of cloth wrapped around their heads, moving about on bare legs, digging up the undergrowth, piling it into wheelbarrows. Then they worked the dirt with hoes and arranged the ground into rows for planting. A week later, returning home from Xavier’s, I found the first sprouts peeking out of the dirt as the groundskeeper moved along the rows with a watering can. They planted rose bushes, marigolds, vegetables. My mother watched them from the balcony. She loved watching the garden come to life. It soothed her, she said.

In the library between classes one day, I was skimming through the
Times of India
at the reading stand when I heard Priya: “You sure like R.E.M.”

“Haven’t seen you around much,” I said. It was true; for weeks, my only interaction with Priya had been brushes before or after our Victorian lit or the French class. These were short hellos or her asking me to clear up a point in Sridharan’s or Varma’s lecture. Then she would pull away with Manju and Hannah, usually to the canteen.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you thanks again for the mix.” She nodded nervously and took a deep breath. Priya’s kohl-lined eyes looked tired, either from lack of sleep or, I thought, from crying. Her hair fell to either side of her face, strands tucked behind the ears to keep them out of her eyes. She wore a bindi today, a slender red mark on her forehead, and no jeans but a crumpled black skirt that fell below her knees with some flowery patterns along the hem.

“Are you okay?” I asked, without even thinking. As unkempt as she appeared today, her prettiness still struck me.

Priya chuckled, slightly embarrassed by my question, and said, “Uh … y-yeah. Just been dealing with stuff with my dad. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Arms folded, she leaned against the stand.

I nodded vaguely and sensed an awkward silence between us. Afraid she’d take that as a sign to walk away, I abruptly asked, “When?” She raised her face to me, somewhat surprised. “You don’t talk to me here,” I said. “You don’t want to see me outside of here. When were you planning to tell me anything?”

She exhaled then said in a low voice, “Remember that night when we met up for ice cream, and you were telling me about choices? And how you wished you all had the choices I had? Go where I want, when I want?”

“What about it?” I said, a bit on my guard.

“Well,” she sighed, “my life’s not quite as carefree as you might think. The last couple of weeks reminded me my choices are … way more black and white than I ever thought.” Her eyes fluttered and turned to look out the window. “But you were right about one thing,” she added.

“What about?”

“The early Police stuff,” she said. “
So
much better than the later stuff,” she said, lightly laughing, mostly to humor me. “I’m meeting Manju here in a few minutes, so I’ll catch you later.” She pushed away from the reading stand and began walking away.

“Wait,” I said pleadingly. But she either didn’t hear me or pretended not to. I watched as she continued toward the study tables and sat down to her notebooks. She kept her back to me, opening one of the notebooks. She stared at it
for a minute or so before I saw her draw back in her chair and hide her face in her hands. Manju hadn’t arrived yet, so I took this window of opportunity to approach her.

“You can’t be all cryptic with me and walk away,” I whispered to her. “What happened the last couple of weeks? All that talk about your dad, what’s it about?”

She put on an untroubled air, looked around to be sure we weren’t attracting attention, then took out a ballpoint pen and wrote “Downstairs” in a page of her notebook. Then she got up and went casually over to the checkout counter and began searching the rack of magazines behind the counter, ignoring me altogether. I watched her for a few seconds, her slender figure still discernible through the folds of her blouse and her skirt as she stood with her palms propped on the edge of the counter, the heel of one foot turned over the curve of the other.

I went through the door on one side of the checkout counter, down the now-familiar steps into the dim-lit catacomb of the lower stacks. It was vacant as usual; few students bothered to come down here. I wondered how long she would be and why she was being so secretive. On the side of one of the shelves, I read “British and American Literature” on a crimped, yellowing label.

I checked the doorway. No sign of Priya yet. So I turned into the aisle, my eyes roving the rows and rows of spines for a literary sign of America. Galsworthy, Eliot, Hopkins, Shaw, Wordsworth—all stodgy British writers we’d covered in class. Then, toward the middle of the row, along the bottom two shelves, I made a discovery—names that echoed like those of my own ancestors: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, O’Neill, Hemingway, Steinbeck—names I’d come across in high school, either in classroom syllabi or in
conversations with Shannon, names I’d avoided like mono or stomach flu in high school but which now warmed over me like the summer sun. I crouched down and began scanning the books more closely when a shadow fell over the half light from behind me. I turned and stood to face Priya.

“I’m getting married,” she said.

“What?” I said, disbelieving, laughing tentatively. “You’re only eighteen. How could you be getting married?”

“My father’s arranged the whole thing. It’s this guy from New York. He just got his MBA from Columbia. He’s 25 and going to work for this investment something or other …” She trailed off as if she were absolutely uninterested in the details, weary of rehashing it all again.

“How do you know him?” I asked carefully. The words themselves felt icy.

“My dad got us in touch last summer before college started. He came out here so we could meet.” She lowered her gaze. “And I told my dad yes.”

My mind stumbled around in this maze she’d dropped me in. “Why—? When?”

At least from her appearance, Priya seemed more or less composed, in control. “He’s coming here over New Year’s, and the wedding will be right after that.”

“But how … ?” I could only stand there and stare at her blankly. “Do you even know him?”

She arched an eyebrow, one side of her mouth turned down in a sneer. “I suppose.” She sighed, turned her face away. “Anyway, he seems smart, nice enough. Handsome. It’s a way out.”

I pretended not to hear “handsome” but felt diminished immediately. “I didn’t realize you wanted out of India so bad.”

“It’s not India,” she said. “It’s just … a way out.”

“A way out of what?”

She didn’t answer. I thought she’d walk away from me again, turn on her heels and go back upstairs. But she stayed, her eyes fixed straight ahead on the spines of books.

“I don’t want you to go.” It was the most intimate thing I had said to anyone in months.

Priya’s eyes looked watery, and holding her gaze upward, she wiped at them.

“You’re going right away?” I asked, feeling absurd even asking such a question.

“After April probably. When the year ends. My father wants me to finish college in the States anyway.” She seemed emotionless and there was a resignation to her words, and it was all hard to take.

I stared at the ground, down at emptiness and my future as gray as the floor, and exhaled deeply to get myself breathing again.

“Thought you’d be happy, Vik,” Priya said and, laughing, added, “or jealous, ’cause I’ll be going back to the States.”

I kicked at the underside of the shelf. “Jealous, yes. But not because you’re going back.” My breath tightened. I soldiered on anyway. “But who you’re going back to.” Even in the dull yellow light, her face glowed, her hair parted evenly, falling on her lovely shoulders, her black irises giving away nothing. Why was she here now, with me? Why here, in this musty room, to tell me this?

“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said.

“I should go now,” she said.

A shuffling of feet. But instead of moving away from me, she took a step toward me, and I toward her, making to follow behind her hair, her shoulders, the sway of her skirt. Then a pressing of hands as my body brushed past hers.

Who went for whom, I couldn’t tell. Only a flash in the mind, a burst of fire. I was aware only of the warmth of her mouth, kissing her in the secretiveness of that dim room, every second that I could; of the scent of her perfume, whatever it was, entering my senses sweetly faint and mixed with sweat and cardamom; how her body felt smaller and suppler in my hands than I had imagined. She kissed hesitantly, unsure at first; then again, so did I, every capillary on our skin trembling; then she swept in at me, on me, once, and I returned it, hair matting our mouths, not minding because the softness of her mouth against mine made me wish we could keep on and forget whether anyone was there; the thin cotton texture of her shirt below her breasts, only a hint did I get of her skin, her waist, with two nervous fingers. She did return my eagerness, if only for that moment, I sensed that much, but when I wanted more, I heard a gasp. Priya pulled away, a scent of her hair under my nose, before the thudding of feet sounded on the stairs.

Priya, flustered now, leaned her head into the aisle, her eyes on the door. She let go of her breath, her eyes closed, her body caved ever so slightly, as if a fear had been realized.

“Manju,” she whispered to me.

“She see us?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t care who saw us,” I said, reaching for her hand, feeling righteous now. “Forget about her.”

She stepped away, exposed in the aisle then tentatively walked toward me. She did not reach for me but looked at me, a pitying look I did not understand. Then she backed away from me and disappeared. I heard her steps echo up the stairs like the thunder trailing before the sky settles and the storm moves on.

16

F
og blanketed the wintry fields out the train windows. It was the last stretch of our overnight journey from Ahmedabad to New Delhi. My father had bought us a full berth, first class, but I had spent much of the ride out in the passageway in my sweater and scarf, leaning against the open entrance to the car with my Walkman and headphones. I thought of Priya and what she was doing just then. Was her home garlanded with marigolds and festive with visitors? I imagined her father dominating a household full of guests in saris and kurtas. Traditional Hindu marriage music snaking the air, sinuous and insinuating. Was she in a crimson wedding sari, her hands decorated with blood-red henna, the color of her lips? I wished for her lips but pushed that thought away, almost resentfully. She was gone. As distant as America.

America. December now in Madison. Snow powdering the branches, slushing along the edges of Whitney Way, University Avenue, the gray tufts of smoke from the stacks of the power plant near campus. I thought of the
decorated shopping centers, the snow-freshened air, the glistening lights strung up on bare trees on State Street and around the perimeter of Capitol Square to make a twinkling wreath of it all and the white-marble dome at its center. I wondered if Nate and Karl were in Madison over Christmas break and who Shannon was spending it with. A new boyfriend? Sooner or later, there would be a new boyfriend. It was inevitable. Here I was, ten thousand miles away, so why was I letting it bother me? I missed her, no question. I missed her graceful, freckled shoulder blade and the swerve of her waist and her mouth that often tasted of Doublemint when we should’ve been studying. Now, all paths diverged, and I was left with a train as it sped farther and farther into the Indian heartland and that feeling of distance between Shannon and me loomed again in the universe of my mind. Everyone blasted into separate ways, fiery flakes scattering in the night.

I had my camera at least. And I snapped photos of the bracing fields as we passed. Farmers crossed the grayness, two by two, wrapped in shawls. It was desolate country, dotted with occasional settlements, the outermost satellites of Delhi. I sighted the signposts at small whitewashed stations, bearing in black letters the undecipherable names of these far-flung places, and the gray-cloaked and narrow lanes that ran in and out of random towns before the view morphed back into farmland—farmland peppered with tumbledown sheds and ancient field implements, all overseen by blackbirds.