An Obedient Father (21 page)

I killed my hunger with water and went up to join them on the roof

The sun had set and the sky was stacked with colors. There was a deep red at the base along the horizon, a smoky orange above that, then a yellow, and a blue that faded into white. The roof was gray concrete and had several levels because of the uneven heights of the flat's rooms. Cords of tar ran across its surface from where cracks, over the years, had been sealed. Taller than some, lower than others, our roof merged into the roofs next door, which in turn connected to those near them. Asha was on the roof of my room swinging her arms in circles and rotating in place. She was wearing a blue shirt and red shorts. Anita stood below her, at the level of the common room, arms crossed beneath her breasts, and watched. I had the feeling I had lived this moment before.

Asha stopped turning when she saw me. "I can see America from here," she said. "There are buildings one hundred stories tall, and on the streets all the men wear pants and all the women wear dresses. No woman wears a sari."

"Can you see Kusum?" I asked.

"I'll check," Asha said, and began twirling again.

We watched her for a moment, and then I said, "Here is my new will," and offered Anita the thick manila envelope I had brought with me. "The flat is yours, and everything else is to be divided in half between you and Rajesh."

Anita took it, but there was no expression on her face. "What happens if Kusum challenges it?"

I shrugged. "All daughters have the right to demand an even share of whatever is left when their parents die. But why would she?"

"Kusum Mausiji is driving her car past trees," Asha called out.

Anita took the will out, unfolded it, and, after reading the first page, put it back in the envelope. I wondered if even this was enough to calm her.

"What are you doing for Mr. Gupta?"

"I'm his moneyman."

"What does that mean?"

"I collect money. I arrange cheap loans or property grants for schools. For his election, I am selling property we own."

" 'We' or the municipality?"

When Rajinder was alive, around Diwali, Anita used to give gifts of expensive watches and bolts of cloth which she said Rajinder had received as presents from people who wanted loans from the government. To sell schools was not the same as selling cheap loans; still, the disgust in her voice felt unfair. "Some land is empty. Some schools have maybe forty students. Getting rid of the schools makes the students find better schools."

"It's easy to say that what you are doing is not so bad."

"I am not saying that."

"Do you feel Hke a thief?"

"I feel like that with these schools because I am selling them so cheaply."

"Not real guilt, then?"

I reached up to touch my lips and Anita grabbed my hand. She must have thought I was going to slap her. She saw from my shock that this was wrong and, laughing sarcastically, said, "After eating a thousand mice, the cat goes on a haj."

Asha must have seen her mother's anger, because she started to cry. Anita noticed it first, and then, through her reaction, I did. Asha's face was completely wet. As soon as Anita saw Asha crying, she went to her and held her from behind. Asha tried pulling out of her embrace. Her sobs sounded like suppressed coughs. "What are you crying for?" Anita asked.

"You. I'm crying because of you."

"What have I done to you?"

"I'm crying because I'm going to die and I'll never have been happy. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and I think if I die before morning then nothing good will ever have happened to me." Saying this, Asha wailed and broke from Anita's grip. She ran two steps, then turned around to confront her mother.

"You're not going to die," Anita said. "You're going to live eighty more years."

"You're going to die, too," Asha sobbed.

"I'm not afraid."

Anita hugged Asha again, but she kept crying. After a while Anita began murmuring to her, "What do you want?" This set Asha shrieking.

A boy about Asha's age with a kite came out onto a long roof across the courtyard from us. He put the kite on the ground, jiggled it with the thread in his hand, and then jerked hard. As the kite was flung up, he let the thread flow through his fingers. He gave short, sharp tugs and with each almost immediately released more thread. The kite caught a breeze. I saw Asha focusing on the boy without stopping her crying. After several minutes, when the kite was high and steady, Asha became quiet, though occasional tears leaked from her eyes.

"Why did you cry?" Anita asked.

"We never do anything. We never go anywhere."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want something sweet with dinner."

"All right."

At this Asha gasped and began sobbing again.

"We can do anything you want," I said. Anita did not look at me, and pulled Asha tighter to her.

"I want an adventure," Asha said, looking up at her mother.

Beyond them were roof after roof, like steps which went up for a little while and then dropped. "We could walk across Delhi from roof to roof," I said. "I heard of one man who did that. He used ropes and ladders." I had no idea where the idea came from, but as soon as I said it, the idea's miraculous freedom captured me. Asha's face was startled into calm. I thought of climbing from our balcony to the squatters' roofs and crossing those to a building which faced the approach to the Old Clock Tower. From there, with the help of ladders placed across the narrow alleyways, we could literally walk across roofs to the Old Clock Tower. "We could see how far we can go."

"That's an adventure," Asha said, glancing at me.

"It isn't that dangerous," I said and, of course, realized that it was.

Anita sighed and kissed Asha's cheeks. The sigh was enough to end our fantasies. Asha stared at the boy with the kite. Anita looked at me, but I could not tell what she was thinking.

"There are other things," I said.

"Tomorrow we'll do something," Anita said into Asha's ear. Her voice was thoughtful.

"Let's go out tonight," I offered.

"Yes," Asha said.

After a moment's hesitation Anita said, "All right."

"Let's go to a movie," I suggested.

"Yes. Yes," Asha said, staring up at her mother.

Anita looked at me and then at Asha. "Yes," she repeated.

I started to buy things for Asha. Most nights I purchased a half Hter of milk and two Campa Colas and stirred them together with many spoonfuls of sugar. All three of us had contests of eating raisins and almonds. Asha was so thin that when she flexed her hands there was the eeriness of watching individual bones working. Sometimes I brought home coloring books and gave them to Anita to present to Asha. When I discovered that Asha liked stickers, I bought long rolls of them and had Anita hide them in Asha's pocket.

Kindness made me feel competent. When the electricity generators didn't appear at one of Mr. Gupta's rallies, I could imagine feeding Asha canned lychees and this somehow made me less unhappy with the moment. The van driver who blasted Mr. Gupta's slogans from loudspeakers crashed into an autorickshaw. I laughed as I told

Asha this, whereas earlier that day I had felt fear at the inept campaign we were waging.

The first time I met Asha at Rosary School, it was because I was passing near it and thought she might feel protected seeing my familiarity with Father Joseph. Father Joseph sent one peon for Asha and another for Campa Cola.

"Asha is a serious girl. Was she so serious before her father died?" he asked as we waited. I was on the sofa where I had sat and spat onto the carpet when I was extorting money from him. Remembering that made me feel I had power over Father Joseph. I slouched back at ease. Father Joseph was seated on a chair across from me with his legs crossed.

"She was always quiet, I think."

I was surprised that he would know her enough to have an opinion.

"She shouldn't bring her problems to school," he said.

Asha came in as I tried to interpret his words. She wore a blue shirt and a maroon skirt. Her maroon jacket was buttoned over a maroon sweater. When she saw me, her face sagged. She pressed the fingers of both hands over her mouth and keened.

"What happened?" Father Joseph asked.

The slight guilt I felt at being there without Anita's knowledge made me feel as if I had caused the tears. I went and knelt beside Asha. "Everything is all right," I said. She did not remove her hands. I put my arms around her. Asha cried more loudly. Father Joseph stood near us with his arms folded across his chest. "My little mango, you'll get salty crying."

"Mummy is all right?" Asha asked, gasping.

"Yes."

She surged around my neck. I lifted her up. "Mummy came to the school to tell me Daddy died." Asha continued crying and I continued holding her. It took ten or fifteen minutes before she calmed down.

"Have a cold drink," Father Joseph kept muttering. Asha drank the Campa and went back to her classes.

"She cries often in class," he said. "We send her to walk around the grounds. Sometimes she spends the whole day outside. The teacher goes out during recess and finds Asha asleep on the ground. As soon as she wakes, she starts crying again." Father Joseph said this with exasperation. "She has to leave her sadness at home."

I looked at him. He looked back into my eyes. This is his revenge, I thought. The room vanished and all I could see was his round face. Without realizing it, I had moved close to him. Father Joseph tilted back. He had a series of tiny white bubbles growing to the side of one nostril. "Asha's very sensitive," I whispered.

"Yes," he said, and speaking released some fear onto his face.

"Please take care of her."

I took Asha to a restaurant across the road and we ate ice cream. She said almost nothing, except when we were returning to school. "Don't tell Mummy," she asked.

"Why?"

"She'll be aiigry"

For a moment I wondered if Asha meant that Anita would be angry at me for coming. Then I understood she probably thought Anita would be angry at her. "Why would your mummy be angry?"

Asha only looked ahead at the road we were crossing.

Perhaps we inherit the way we respond to grief the way we inherit height or skin color. The form of Asha's sorrows was so similar to how I had responded to my mother's death that almost instantly I loved her.

When I was young, the first sign of love was fear, the fear of appearing ridiculous or incompetent to some friend I had loved for a week or to the first prostitute or to Radha. The first sign of loving Asha was joy Instead of climbing onto a bus, I jumped on. The joy explained everything. The dirt field outside my office window existed as something Asha might perhaps see or whose dust might inspire some sentence in a conversation we had. I never believed I could harm her.

If I had told Anita that I was visiting Asha at her school, she would have forbidden it. But I wanted to help Asha and believed it was not possible to do so with Anita nearby. I began going to Rosary School during Asha's lunch hour.

Waiting for Asha in Father Joseph's office, even knowing that I would not touch her or harm her in any way, I still felt ashamed and even criminal. Walking away with her beyond the reach of the school windows, I had the feeling that hundreds of eyes were watching us. But I never asked Asha to keep anything secret from her mother. She must have sensed Anita's hostility toward me and acted on her own.

Usually we went across the road only to eat dosas or chole bat-uras. I would eat half of mine and Asha would eat her own and what part of mine I did not want. As we talked, Asha drained two or three bottles of cold drinks. Sometimes other students in Asha's class escaped from the school and appeared at the restaurant to spend their change on cold drinks. To win Asha protection and friendship from them, I paid for their drinks or ice cream. Often when I visited Asha, a dozen boys and girls appeared at the restaurant and asked, "Uncleji, will you buy us something?"

My love for Asha made me candid. "Remember when we went to Mr. Gupta's for the wedding reception?" Asha nodded as she chewed. "I asked you if your father used to buy you ice cream and you said no, but that you liked to imagine he did." Asha continued chewing, though now she looked down at her plate. "Why do you like to think that?"

Asha did not answer for a while. "I miss him," she said finally.

It was harder to go from there. "But why do you like imagining that?"

"I don't."

"Were you just saying it, then?" When Asha did not answer, I said, "Your principal says you cry in school." Asha remained quiet.

"I cried all the time when my mother died." The silence continued. "You know why little babies weep?"

Asha shook her head no.

"The little babies are missing their families from their past lives.

The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies. The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they'll forget."

Asha looked up. Her eyes were shiny. She took a sip of water.

Asha was full of perplexing guilts. Once she said, "Mummy thinks I'm a thief" This was so strange I laughed. We were in the dosa restaurant. "She follows me around." I thought Asha could be referring to how Anita tracked Asha and me when we were in the flat simultaneously. "I've stolen two things only in my life. One was a candy, the other was a pencil."

Making Asha laugh was often my goal. "You are too little to steal the refrigerator. That's the only thing worth robbing. How big are your pockets?" I made her stand and turn out the pockets in her skirt. Then I stood and asked, "Can I fit in them?" I walked around her and lifted one foot toward the pockets. "You can't get a mouse in those." Asha had started laughing loudly. I sat down. "Your mother is strange. She follows around the people she loves. When she was in higher secondary, she loved her home economics teacher. She loved her so much she found out where the teacher lived and walked circles around the block where the woman lived."

Asha also wanted to learn magic spells so that she could bring her father back. But she was so afraid of ghosts that she hated the dark.

"Why would a ghost be here instead of in America?" I asked. "You think a ghost wouldn't get bored watching you in Hindi class?"

The more lunches I had with Asha, the more certain I became that Asha's oddness might have been exaggerated by Rajinder's death but was not created by it.

"If you can see something in your head as clearly as in life, then what's the difference between that and life?" she once asked.

"Close your eyes and imagine being pinched," I said. She did. I kicked her leg.

"Oh," she answered. Asha had not considered this.

Because of her oddities and since I loved her, at first I thought

she might be a genius. Helping Asha with her schoolwork, I soon realized she was not. She was slow with math. Her spelling was terrible.

Among the things I hoped to offer Asha was an adult viewpoint of her thoughts. "You're not stupid. Everybody thinks he's stupid. Besides, you don't have to be smart. You only have to be smart enough. How much is seventeen plus thirteen?"

"Thirty"

"That's more than enough brains to be a doctor."

At another time Asha said, "I think I am bad."

"Why?"

"I think if Mummy died, I would be an orphan and everybody would feel sorry for me and I would like that."

"People think anything. That's all right. It's good to think. Even strange thoughts. When I was your age I used to think I would sail a ship alone to England and steal back all the things the British had taken from India. I had never been on a boat in my life. I thought all the jewels and gold they had taken were in one room in a palace and I used to worry how I would be able to carry all these things to the boat by myself Sometimes I thought I would be caught and killed and become famous."

"But I don't like Mummy. That's why I don't mind being an orphan."

"Did you like me six months ago?" Asha laughed at this, and I felt bad that she had not liked me six months ago.

One week I went to see her four times. I went because I cared for Asha and helping her was an easy task that made me feel good about my generosity. But the idea of wanting to see Asha, remembering that I had rubbed my penis against her back, made me anxious, and the next week I did not go at all.

I also began talking more with Anita. Each night I confessed my political sins. These recountings began because I once returned home and found something intimidating in Anita's sullen-

ness as she mended a sleeve of Asha's school jacket. Sensing her lurking anger I decided to deflect it and told her what crimes I had committed that day on Mr. Gupta's behalf. I thought that providing her with something to rage about openly would be a way to keep us from the topic of what I had done to her.

My confession usually occurred in the living room, after the English news. I would sit alone on the sofa beneath the fluorescent tube light. Anita and Asha sat across from me on the love seats. Sometimes I confessed in the common room with all of us sitting on the floor. And at least twice I did so on the roof, where Anita and Asha slept because it was June and load shedding meant there might be no electricity and no turning ceiling fans for fourteen or twenty hours at a time.

"I went to a hotel this afternoon," I might begin, as if reciting a list of facts. If I started with anything more complicated than a fact, I became nervous. "The Oberoi. A five-star. Mr. Bajwa was already there, waiting in a room."

"How did you know which room?" At the beginning of my confession, Anita was also anxious, and this manifested itself in interrogation which appeared intended to catch me in a lie. I did not mind being questioned, since it allowed me to show I was hiding nothing.

"I asked for the hotel manager's party, because rooms and meals given out free are budgeted under the hotel manager's name." I looked at Anita to see if she had more questions. "The Oberoi doesn't let autorickshaws enter the driveway, only taxis, so I had to get out in front of the hotel and walk up the driveway, which is sloped. The lobby is four or five times bigger than this flat. It's sealed on one side with glass and you can see their swimming pool."

"How big is a swimming pool?" Asha asked.

"As large as our entire compound." I think Asha was allowed to witness these confessions because Anita wanted her to dislike me. But I met Asha often enough during her school lunch hour that I think she saw those nightly confessions as part of a larger conversation.

"It is full to the top with water?"

"Yes."

"Is it as deep as the compound's buildings are tall?"

"No. Maybe three or four meters deep."

"How many people were in it?" Confessions for Asha, despite her mimicking her mother's serious expression, appeared as much travelogue as anything else.

"Two or three."

"See the waste," Anita said to Asha. "Your people," she then accused me. Asha nodded. I wondered how she felt at keeping our lunch meetings secret and whether some part of her enjoyed lying to her mother.

Although I did not mind being questioned, I was afraid of accusations where fair condemnation of my corruption was conflated with something I had never come close to doing. I took bribes, but nearly all went to Mr. Gupta. I could not afford water in bottles, let alone the Oberoi and its swimming pool. "I've seen, I think, seven swimming pools in my life," I said. I waited for this information to be absorbed and then continued.

"The room was no bigger than this living room. It was very cold and it had a sealed smell, perhaps because of the air-conditioning. The curtains were drawn so that the light was dim. There was a view of a road. There was a bathroom to the left, near the door. There were two beds. Mr Bajwa was lying on one, drinking whiskey and watching TV. He was the only one there. His beard hid his kurta buttons and he had his dagger on, but he was wearing black office shoes. Mr. Bajwa had arranged for property developers to see what we were selling to increase interest." Anita made a noise as if she had caught me at something. "I think he also wanted to show off before the people who had ignored him when he was in trouble. Mr. Bajwa spent a long time arranging the grandest hotel possible for the meeting. A little after I arrived, Mr. Mittal and his brother came. His brother looks just like him. Then Mr. Verma and Mr. Satchu came together. Mr. Poon and Mr. Rajan followed."