The Leaving of Things (22 page)

I caught as much as I could with the click of the shutter. The frame advance wheezed and locked: end of roll. I lifted the tiny winch and began rolling the film back onto its spool, wondering whether and how any of the shots would turn out.

“Chalo, Vikram.” My father poked his head out of our compartment. “Eat something. We’ll be there soon.”

Anand slept on the upper bunk, his back to the wall.

A steward must have come by already; there was chai steaming from a teapot, ceramic cups on a tray, and a variety of small pastries, sweet and savory, on a square steel plate. My father proceeded to pour the chai into the cups.

“Wake him up,” he told my mother, “otherwise, we’ll leave him here only.” He turned to Anand, and, in a show of fatherly authority, commanded, “Anand, get up now! Time to eat. That’s it!”

Leisurely, Anand rolled onto his back and propped up on his elbows, surveying the food. “We almost there?” he asked groggily.

He climbed down, wearing his striped flannel pajamas, the first time he’d had to wear them since our arrival in India. My mother handed him his toothbrush and toothpaste as he slid open the door and slipped away.

“Like a mule, that boy,” my father said. “Never met anyone so stubborn. Reminds me of me.” He shook his head, chuckling, and my mother smirked.

I sniffed the pastry and began eating it as my father poured me a cup of chai. “You want anything else?” he asked. “They’ve got a breakfast menu.
Parathas
, omelet, anything?”

“It’s okay, thanks.” I sipped the hot, sugary chai.

A wide road with multiple lanes came into view as we passed over a short bridge. Traffic had neatly ordered itself inside the lanes. Colonies of concrete bungalows, a redbrick multistory shopping complex, girded with yellow railings, bordered the road.

“See the roads here,” he pointed out the window as we passed into New Delhi.

I marveled at the glimpse of orderly traffic. “I had no idea they could have such a thing here,” I said. “Ahmedabad is the exact opposite.”

The clack-clack of the train slowed down now as we approached the station. A grainy mist covered everything, a kind of fog I’d never seen.

Dharmanshu Uncle met us outside the train. A stout-looking man of medium height, a tad taller than my father, he wore dark spectacles and his hair was a thick, silvery mane. A silvery moustache remained of the beard he once had. He greeted us in the same noble baritone I could still hear in my mind from years back. My mother hugged him for a long time, tears gathering in her eyes. He and my father shook hands warmly. Wasn’t Dharmanshu Uncle cold? He wore his overcoat unbuttoned, beneath it only a shirt, and a scarf that hung uselessly around his neck.

“Anand, good to finally meet you,” he said.

Shyly, Anand extended his hand. Dharmanshu Uncle took it and slapped Anand jovially on the back. “Welcome, welcome,” Dharmanshu Uncle said. “There’s much I want to know about your life. How you are getting along here and all?”

Anand nodded, “Yeah.”

“He’s doing quite marvelously,” my father said, glancing back at Anand.

“Atcha! Very good,” Dharmanshu Uncle declared. “I know India must be challenge.” Taking a look at us, he burst into laughter, a powerful boom from his barrel chest, and took the suitcase from my mother’s hands.

It was biting cold, far colder than Ahmedabad this time of year. A patina of sunlight, filtering through the glass panes of the roof, cast thin, cold angles across the general
grayness. I reached into my backpack and threw on my jacket.

Dharmanshu Uncle turned toward me. “Grown up now,” he said, smiling. “How long it’s been since you were last here? Ten years?”

“Eleven,” my mother replied. “Yes, he looks more and more like you every day.” She asked me, “Do you remember him at all?”

I told them I remembered the beard and that he had a son, older than me by a few years.

“Dilip, yes.” Dharmanshu Uncle nodded his head. “He just finished his MBA in London. Now he’s doing consultancy for one firm there.”

“Always a brilliant boy,” my father said, more to me than the others. “He was tops in his class right from”—he held out his palm at waist length—“when he was a boy.”

“To me, he will always be that boy,” my mother said. “I remember babysitting him, when you and Alka used to go out together.”

We walked from the platform through the great cement-gray station and out into a crush of traffic. Taxi and rickshaw drivers in knit caps, sweaters, some smoking bidis, waited outside their vehicles, chattering with each other, beckoning travelers now and then as they passed by. We made for Dharmanshu Uncle’s black Fiat, loaded our suitcases, and motored away into the roundabout fronting the station.

“Vikram,” Dharmanshu Uncle called from the driver’s seat, “I can remember you as a baby.”

“Mango syrup, mango syrup,” my mother said. “Do you remember?” She turned from the front seat to me, seated between Anand and my father, and pointed at
Dharmanshu Uncle. “He used to put mango syrup on your cheeks, on your forehead, and we all used to lick it off of your face. You were so cute.”

I felt slightly embarrassed, my father sitting there listening to this; I felt no longer myself but another person, a projection of the baby they remembered. “I can only remember the beard,” I said.

“It used to scare you,” my mother said. “When Dharmanshu Uncle would come near, you’d start screaming.”

That got Dharmanshu Uncle laughing again, nodding at the memory.

We drove through a shopping district—sari shops, tea and juice stalls, men’s tailoring, the offices of Citibank and British Airways—and into a district of housing colonies, wending around scooters and street children, the occasional congregation of cows. We turned onto a narrow gray lane lined with doorways and cluttered with bicycles and motorbikes. Dharmanshu Uncle pulled over to the side, and we all got out. The shouts of children playing could be heard from one of the flats above us, their voices tinkling like wind chimes in the air.

We lugged our baggage into a narrow room, simple, small, and cold. The paint job seemed only half-finished; a swath of blue covered the upper portion of the living room and the dining area beyond. The rest was whitewashed, smudged hastily with plaster. The bathroom, about as roomy as a phone booth, was of the Indian variety: a pear-shaped pit, a bucket, and a tap. There was a definite air of neglect about the place, and I began to wonder where Dharmanshu Uncle had been putting his civil engineer’s salary all these years.

On one wall hung a framed photograph of Alka Auntie, wreathed in garlands as if she were wearing a high collar of
marigolds. I knew her only from a small photo, perhaps two-by-three inches, taken in the late-’60s, just before her death. The photograph showed her and my mother sitting on a bench at the Taj Mahal, both smiling together like the closest of sisters, with Dilip, an infant resembling a large potato with curls of dark hair, yawning on Alka Auntie’s lap.

* *

As we ate, the cook—a short, grizzled man in a white undershirt, pyjama pants and flip-flops—appeared from the kitchen to provide a steady supply of hot rotis. Dharmanshu Uncle gave the cook dinner instructions at one point and joked with him about repeatedly showing up late, at which the cook laughed shyly, nodded, and shuffled away. Mostly Dharmanshu Uncle’s attention kept to the conversation, as he and my parents talked—about my father’s job and about the difficulties of our peripatetic life in America, and, likewise, the difficulties of moving back to India.

I’d taken a seat next to Dharmanshu Uncle. Though my attention occasionally strayed to a Hindi soap opera that blared from the TV in the living room, I couldn’t help notice how restless he was. As he listened, his knees fidgeted, and he would compulsively brush his sleeve with his hand as if there were crumbs there or pick at his collar or at crumbs near his plate. These actions seemed mostly a way of keeping his mind occupied and distracted while he carried on the conversation. But distracted from what, I wondered. Sometimes he interrupted my father to ask a question with pressing urgency—a point of minor detail—or
to make a joke. It wasn’t as if he’d disappeared into his own world; Dharmanshu Uncle was very much present, he absorbed everything my parents said, and his observations about our adjusting to Indian life were keen and sensitive. But I sensed a nervous energy at his core, palpable in his every intake of breath.

Dharmanshu Uncle asked Anand and me about our schooling in America, what sorts of classes we took, the subjects we liked. He asked about American TV and cars and shopping malls. He said he wished he could buy a Ford in India and lamented the country’s protectionist politics. He said the government was corrupt and useless and succeeded only in making life difficult for everyone, and if you had a shred of ambition, it was best to get out of the country.

Even as a government employee himself, he had no qualms about lambasting the
babus
. Almost every engineering project he had supervised had gotten whittled to a fraction of its original scale because, he said, “one or another of these bloody bastards—bureaucrat, policeman, some local
goondah
—everyone is taking baksheesh. And, along the way, all my work had to become simpler and smaller. A four-lane highway becomes two-lane after bribes are taken. The quality of concrete to make one bridge becomes degraded. Drainage pipes are poor quality because it’s all that can be afforded after payoffs. All kinds of mischief.”

“Can’t anyone call them on it?” I asked. “This is a free country, isn’t it? There’s freedom of the press here—”

“Now and then, people do, but it comes to nothing.” He wiped at the corner of the table with his thumb and shifted in his chair. “But if you are close to government as I am, there is risk, you see.”

“You say something,” my father tsked, “and you’re transferred to some backwater.”

“You mean like Ghatlodiya?” Anand said.

My father emitted either a quick laugh or a hiccup, I couldn’t tell. “Exactly!”

“Or,” Dharmanshu Uncle said, “you are dead.” The table fell silent. “I do remember a case, long time back, of a colleague who was found murdered. Right there on the railway track.”

“Really?” Anand asked, his eyes bugging from his head. “Was he decapitated?”

“Body was found one night in Gurgaon.” Dharmanshu Uncle smiled with an ironic wave of his hand. “Police said it was suicide.” Then, pithily, he added, “It was not suicide. I don’t think so.” He sniffed. “In India, corruption is harder to erase than caste. It is not going anywhere. Corruption
is
caste,” he added, “and vice versa.”

My father nodded thoughtfully, scooping rice and dal together on his plate with his fingers. “Could be,” he said, and that was all. His reluctance to sympathize with Dharmanshu Uncle disappointed me. Was he so complacent? So unwilling to admit the baser truths of life in India? It irritated me.

“Sometimes,” Dharmanshu Uncle went on, twining his fingers together and looking out over the table, “I’ve thought it best if India was bombed”—he swiped a palm in a gesture of cancellation—“back to nothing. Get rid of all the politicians and Hindu-Muslim zealots, wipe out all trace of this mess we have made these past thousand years. That’s the only hope India has if it’s going to have future.” He chortled to himself. “Start from scratch. Too hopeless now the way it is.” He resumed eating.

My father took up a cup of buttermilk next to his plate and swirled it in his hand. “Maybe,” he said. That was all.

What a violent thing to wish for, I thought, and I admired Dharmanshu Uncle for it. Here was an anger I could relate to. Could we start with bombing Xavier’s College? I wanted to ask.

* *

That week, Dharmanshu Uncle showed us around New Delhi. The government buildings along the stately Rajpath, the embassies, Parliament, Red Fort. The streets were wide, clean, the structures imperial in their symmetry. Predictable, their function preceding the imagination. In Old Delhi, though, came a rush of photographs: The pigeon-crowded terrace of the Jama Masjid where schoolchildren flitted among worshippers and tourists; the alleyways, snared overhead by telephone wires, where college students in maroon sweaters, hoisting backpacks, tried to navigate a barricade of scooters, a cow, a telephone stand, and Muslim shopkeepers in their traditional kaftans and skullcaps. Postcard and trinket vendors, beggar-children, closed in on all sides; we hurried through, but I couldn’t help snap photos of the excited faces, the tangle of hands soliciting, pleading, grasping.

17

T
he morning after Christmas, we waited at a corner along the Rajpath where a coach en route to the Taj Mahal in Agra stopped daily to pick up tourists. Traffic was scant along the Rajpath; Parliament and most businesses were still on holiday. Bundled in scarves and jackets against the chill, we waited along the wide, smooth avenue, where the red sand native to this region was raked smooth and flat.

I lifted my camera and, through the viewfinder, found the spectral arch of India Gate on the far end of the road. In the morning fog, it seemed as lost and lonely as the World War I dead it was meant to commemorate. The coach finally arrived, and by then enough tourists—mostly Indian couples and families—had congregated on the corner to fill most of the seats.

Dharmanshu Uncle and I sat together, my parents across the aisle from us. Anand sat in the row ahead of them, his headphones on, listening to R.E.M. tapes. I could see him gently bobbing his head, half asleep, half listening to the music.

The coach wended through the ghostly avenues of the city. How odd it was to see Indian streets so subdued and silent, almost as if we’d landed in a parallel India. The street’s only inhabitants were those who lived on them or in the shanties or at the chai stalls where men sat together, clad in threadbare sweaters, some with knit caps or cloth bound about their heads against the chill.

I wondered how Karl and Nate had spent Christmas. Had Karl gotten the new word processor he’d wanted for writing screenplays? He probably had. And Nate usually splurged all his Christmas money on Pogues and Ramones cassettes, Monty Python, James Bond, and
The Prisoner
videos. I wondered if he would be trolling State Street today, hitting every record store from the Capitol Square down to Lake Street, the Christmas lights spangling the bare trees and the frosted glass of storefronts.