The Two Krishnas (19 page)

They heard the tenant upstairs shuffling across the ceiling, the floorboards groaning. The toilet flushed and then his footsteps retraced back across and ended with the creaking of bedsprings. Outside, the world raged on—an older couple, embittered by the familiarity of a shared life, squabbled over what TV channel to watch, a child at play fell and wailed in pain as his mother tried frantically to calm him, still less than a block away a man sat by the curb, cocooning himself in the comfort of cheap whiskey that he swigged from a brown paper bag outside the liquor store. But inside this room, Atif and Rahul lay in a state of temporary grace, disconnected from the dramas of the outside world, their minds free to revisit cherished memories and to create new ones.

Atif hummed a tune that sounded vaguely familiar to Rahul and he looked at him.

“I don’t remember there being too many lovey-dovey moments between my parents,” Atif said. “But I do remember this one time.”

“Just one time?” Rahul laughed. “Sounds blissful.”

“Well, it wasn’t a regular love-fest but I have no doubt they cared about each other,” he said. It occurred to him that he was referring to them in the past tense, as if they were dead. “My dad’s favorite actor was Dev Anand.”

“Dev Anand?” Rahul asked and began imitating the actor’s youthful, gestural style of acting.

“Yeah. The Gregory Peck of India they called him, didn’t they?”

“They still do,” Rahul snorted. “What is he? Eighty? Ninety? And still going strong! You know, there was a time when he was responsible for some of the most significant pictures—
Taxi Driver, C.I.D., Hum Dono, Guide.
Of course, all this was way before your time.”

“I’ve seen some of them. But that one song in
Guide
—”

“Let me guess. ‘
Aaj phir jeene ki tamana hain?’”

“No, no, not that one. It was—‘
Tere mere sapne ab ek rang…’
know it?”

“Of course,” Rahul said and began to sing it:

Tere mere sapne ab ek rang hain

Jahan bhi le jaye rahen

Hum sang hain

Our dreams are now in the same color

Wherever the road may lead

I am with you.

“That’s the one! It was my mother’s favorite.” A classic of Indian cinema, the song was penned by Shailendra and sung by the late legendary playback singer Mohammed Rafi about a fated love affair that surmounts all, as bona fide Bollywood love stories always did. “My mother, she played this little 45 to death,” he continued. “You know the little ones, with the angel sitting oh, so seductively on the vinyl, a plume for a pen. Well, anyway, one day she found it all warped in the sun so you could no longer play it. She even tried to press down on the needle when it was playing but it was just impossible to keep it on course. Dev Anand sounded like he was—”

“Mohammed Rafi, you mean.”

“It was Dev Anand on screen!” Atif said, petulant. “Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, Dev Anand or Rafi sounded like he was on some kind of bad acid trip or something. She was literally in tears, over a record, can you imagine?”

“Couldn’t she just get another one?”

“Oh, but that’s not the point,” he said. “Anyway, that day my father went to her in the kitchen while she was cooking this lamb
yakhni
with whole black peppers. I can still smell it. She was wearing this deep yellow
salwar-kameez.
I don’t think they knew I was back from our neighbor’s. And I saw him tell her, ‘
Arre, record ki kya zarurat hain? Main hoon na.
Come
na
, I’ll sing for you.’ And he scooped her into his arms and sang to her, in an astonishingly good voice, so tenderly. She blushed, giggled, just ate it all up even as she tried to act coy.” He looked at Rahul wistfully. “I’d never seen her like that…so young, so alive.”

Rahul took him in his arms and began singing in a melodious baritone and Atif, moved to the verge of tears, joined in with fragments:

Tere mere dil ka, taiy thaa ek din milna

Jaise bahaar aane par

Taiy hain phool ka khilna

O mere jeewan saathi

Laakh manaa le duniya

Saath na yeh chootega

Aake mere haathon me

Haath na ye chootega

Our hearts were destined to meet

Just as the coming of a season

Heralds the blossoming of flowers

O my companion for life

Let the world try

Our bond will never break

Now that your hand is in mine

I will never let it go

But sometimes, right before Rahul had to leave, Atif found that he had lost him. Already taciturn by nature, he withdrew further inward and although physically present, he would appear worlds away, tormented. Atif, sharing the pain of separation, of the knowledge that the man he loved would bed down with someone else, tried at first to ignore Rahul’s dejection, but ended up asking.

“I don’t know how to do this. This going back and forth, one life to another,” he said. “It’s too hard.”

“But I thought you were happy here, with me.”

“I am. But then I have to go back. All this, it becomes a dream. I don’t know who I am, which one is real.”

He didn’t know that there were nights in Rahul’s life when he awoke as if he had been fighting with forces for hours, just struggling and exhausted. And although for a while he felt relieved, because when he awoke he appeared physically unscathed, Rahul knew that the wounds ran deeper, invisible to the eye, and that they would come again.

Atif pulled him close into his arms, stroked his hair. At such moments, witnessing Rahul’s suffering and at a loss for words, he wondered if he was supposed to hold on to him tighter or just let him go.

* * *

Back within the walls of a life prescribed by centuries of tradition, Rahul now sat in the darkness of the kitchen. It was past midnight and all that could be heard was the intermittent groan of the old refrigerator and the unusually loud ticking of a burnished gold clock above the stove.

He sat by the covered
thalis
of food that Pooja had left for him even though she had known he had dinner plans. It was like an offering she felt compelled to make at some altar; afraid of breaking from ritual and half-expecting he would still be hungry upon returning. The steel plate glinted from the distant light in the living room.

He didn’t bother to discover what she had made. Whatever it was, he knew with indifference, would be tasty, prepared with the utmost precision. She was so reliable, beyond reproach, exhaustively impeccable. It was impossible for her to even botch a meal once in a while. How does one measure up to such a woman? Infallibility eventually grew oppressive, reminding the recipients that they could never be as pious or truly deserving of such devotion.

Rahul surveyed the room as if for the first time. Wisdom dictates that you should cultivate a sense of self intrinsically instead of from possessions but in reality who could extricate himself from his belongings? He thought of his mother with some difficulty, saw her smiling face, stroking his young face as her glass bangles clinked, and telling him in the words of the greatest sages that the world around us was just
maya
and that one must learn to live in the world without becoming of the world. Then he saw his boisterous father in the signature safari suits he wore, clutching a heavy crystal glass of his umpteenth peg of whiskey and ice, intercepting: “
Aare, iski baton me mat anaa
. Don’t listen to her. She doesn’t remember any
maya-baya
when she’s draining the bank account to buy more jewelry at Premchand’s.” His heart felt heavy in his chest and he dissolved the image in a deep sigh. Never had two people been more unlike one another and never had he known a more loving, suitably balanced pair.

We brand ourselves on our walls, onto the furniture, in pictures, in the dust and air of rooms,
thought Rahul.
A little energy is deposited into everything we touch and everywhere we delve. Everything material becomes evidence of experience, an extension of who we are.

The microwave and the yards of crockery reminded him of the time Pooja and he went to Sears as she was setting up her catering business; of the bank’s Christmas party where Pooja, trapped into compulsory sociability, had been introduced to his customer, Charlie Ackerman, with whom Pooja had so much in common that in no time they had moved on from Hinduism to her agreeing to test out a catering arrangement for him. Who would have known a chance meeting would lead to all this for her? He could still see her excitedly introducing Charlie to him and how skeptical he had been about the whole affair.

“
Arre,
Poo, he’s probably drunk or something,” he had told her later as they drove home. “You know how people get a party. Let’s just wait and see.”

Pooja had felt chafed by his remark but went on to agree with him as she always did: “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I shouldn’t get so excited about such things,
na?
It does seem a little strange. And besides, what do I know about this catering-fatering? But, my God, he does seem to know a lot about our culture!”

“Hanh, hanh
, but this is the classic problem. About their own culture they know nothing but with other peoples’ culture they’re Einsteins.”

But Charlie had turned out to be more than some inebriated
gora
paying lip service to their enterprise over too much bourbon. And it had been so much simpler than they had anticipated. Provided Pooja only made baked goods for The Banyan (keeping the curries and more elaborate fare more discreet and on a private basis), the law didn’t require that she apply for a license or have a separate kitchen, only that the ingredients be kept separately. Rahul had helped her apply for the insurance and Charlie had also helped to set up a little workspace in the back of The Banyan where she could label the food, although she always accomplished all this at home.

His eyes continued surveying and paused at a family picture on the wall. It recalled not just the Diwali festival of several years ago—Pooja so much younger, breathtakingly beautiful, and Ajay, pudgier and full of laughter instead of the brooding teenager he had become—but also the painstaking frame selection process at some store on Lincoln Boulevard (she had wanted the matting to match the powder blue color of his shirt). Even the VCR, an old Panasonic flashing its digitized clock, silently screaming its disconnect with real time, recalled the frustration of figuring out the programmer and the hundreds of Bollywood films they’d seen on it. Take away these walls, the inanimate objects within them and who do we become?

He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and he looked up to see Ajay entering the kitchen wearing only his flannel pajama bottoms.

“Papa?”

“Hey, Ajay,” Rahul said, suddenly aware his eyes had filled up and wiping them deftly before they gave him away. “What are you doing up?”

“Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

“I don’t know. Just walked in. Come, sit,” he said, slouched uncharacteristically. He pushed a chair out with his leg. “Just, please leave the lights off, will you?”

Ajay hesitated momentarily, thinking it a strange request to keep them engulfed in darkness, and sat across from his father.

“Can’t sleep?” Rahul asked, suddenly reminded of the nights Ajay kept them up wailing as a baby. Such powerful lungs, they used to joke. Maybe he would grow up to be a
Qawalli
singer. He had never had the chance to attend to his son’s fierce cries as an infant; Pooja had leapt out of bed like a soldier on a battlefield to minister to him. Now he wished she had let him. Or that he had insisted. He longed to cradle the little baby that fit on his forearm, circling his little fingers around his own. “Everything okay?”

Ajay looked away, shrugged.

“Well?”

He looked back at his father, eyes gleaming in the dark. “What’s going on with Mom?”

Rahul tensed up. “What do you mean?”

Ajay paused, not as much for effect as to permit his father to acknowledge his culpability. But when Rahul remained perplexed, he sighed, impatient.

“Ajay, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What is it? What’s wrong with her?” he asked, leaning forward and touching his shoulder. “Is she unwell?”

Ajay sniffed, grimaced. “Are you—you’re drunk!” He said incredulously, pulling back.

“No, I’m not drunk,” he laughed nervously, sitting back. “What kind of a thing is that to say?”

“I can smell it!”

“Not that I have to answer to you but it was, you know, a couple of glasses of wine with some clients, that’s all.”