Don't Let Him Know (18 page)

‘That’s my business – what I throw, when I throw. Who are you to decide for me?’ said Meena-pishi.

‘Do you know how much one of these lipsticks costs? And now you embarrass me more by taking Amit’s watch,’ said Romola.

‘I did not steal his watch,’ Durga was close to tears. ‘Tell her, Amit, I didn’t steal anything.’

But Amit just stood there, unable to utter a single word.

Romola’s voice rose higher and higher. ‘I trusted you with the house. I trusted you with my keys. I trusted you with this boy.’

‘But, Bouma,’ pleaded Mangala, ‘I swear my Durga did not take the watch. She would not do such a thing.’

Romola was unmoved. ‘Today a lipstick, tomorrow a watch. I knew that all that money Meena kept giving her for every little thing would go to her head. Don’t think I didn’t know about the money.’ Meena-pishi now went up to Durga and shook her by the arm. ‘Tell me what else did you take?’

‘I swear on God, nothing,’ said Durga.

‘Liar,’ Meena-pishi cried, shaking her even harder.

Durga started to cry. Mangala came forward and said, ‘Let her go.’ She tried to pull Durga towards her. Meena raised her hand to slap Durga. But Mangala grabbed it saying ‘No!’

Amit’s aunt slowly dropped her hand looking stunned.

Mangala looked at Romola and said, ‘I have worked here from before you came into this house as a bride. I’ve taken care of your grandmother-in-law like my own mother. I’ve emptied your mother-in-law’s bed pan.’ She turned to Meena and said tearfully, ‘Tell her, have I ever taken a thing that was not mine? You can’t slap my granddaughter. For a couple of old thrown-away lipsticks. Enough. We are leaving. Start packing your things,’ she told Durga sharply. ‘And make sure you show the mistress every little scrap you take.’

Romola looked thunderstruck. She clapped her hand over her mouth as if she wanted to throw up. Then abruptly she turned on her heel and left the room. Meena stood for a minute in the little room and then left as well. Amit stared back at the room – Durga was still standing near the bed, her face streaked with tears. Mangala glared at her and said, ‘What are you standing there for? You good-for-nothing girl. What more misery do you have in store for me? Go pack – you will end up making us beggars on the street. Don’t you know your place? Who told you to pick through their rubbish?’

Mangala left that very night. She went with that same battered suitcase that was in the room. She came to say goodbye before she left. Amit was sitting quietly next to his father trying to read an Enid Blyton adventure but the words seemed to float in front of him without any meaning. His mother had said she had a headache, turned down the lights and gone to bed. Meena-pishi had also said she did not want dinner and had retired early.

Avinash said, ‘I am so sorry, Mangala. Look, I am sure your Bouma will calm down by the morning. You don’t have to go. This is not your fault.’

Mangala shook her head. ‘It is my fault. I did not keep that girl on a tight leash. I let her watch too much TV. It went to her head.’

Avinash opened his wallet and took out some money. ‘Please take this, Mangala,’ he said. ‘You will need it.’

‘No, no,’ said Mangala backing away. ‘I don’t want any money. Bouma has given me my salary. I just wanted to say I don’t think Durga would steal the boy’s watch. She is a foolish girl – but she is not a thief.’

‘I believe you,’ said Avinash. ‘But please take some money. Where will you go at this time of the night?’

‘I’ll stay with my brother tonight. Tomorrow we will see. But don’t worry. Someone somewhere always needs a maid.’ With that, Mangala touched Amit on the head and said, ‘All right, little one, I’m leaving. You be a good boy.’

Amit shrank from her touch and pulled his knees up to his chin. He wanted to say something but not a word came out of him. He tried to say he would miss Durga. He tried to say, ‘Don’t go.’ But instead he just stared at the floor. When he looked up Mangala was gone. Durga did not come to say goodbye.

The next morning Amit took his Lego container and ran up to the roof. He looked around to make sure no one saw him. Then he carefully reached inside and brought out the watch. Mickey’s hands were stuck at 10.45, its face cracked. He knew he should not have worn it in the shower. But it had said ‘Water Resistant’. And he just had to test it. How was he to know he was going to slip and fall? That the watch would go spinning out of his hand and land with a sharp crack on the wet floor? He remembered standing there, wet and naked, shaking the watch. But it was dead, stuck for ever at 10.45.

He picked it up and slowly walked to the edge of the roof. He looked around again to see if anybody was looking. Then he threw the watch as hard as he could. He watched it sail up into the air, higher and higher, and then curve down towards the street, past the old kadam tree, past the television antenna above the tea-shop, past the crows sitting on the windowsill of the red house next door and into the garbage dump. A crow sitting on the garbage heap jumped up cawing loudly. But in a minute it was back again pecking at the rubbish.

VIII

White Christmas

The forecast, said the weatherman, was 60 per cent chance of snow. ‘My goodness,’ said Amit’s mother on a crackling phone line from Calcutta. ‘You will have a white Christmas. We once had that when your father and I were in America. Oof, how cold it was. Over here it’s still so warm. We haven’t even had a chance to use the heavy quilts. Your father says it’s global warming.’

‘How is Baba?’ said Amit cradling the phone with his shoulder as he tried to put on his socks. The heater was sputtering as usual filling his room with a musty mildewy smell. His feet felt cold in the early morning chill in spite of the carpet on the floor. The house was quiet. His roommate had gone home to Iowa for Christmas. Outside it was not snowing yet. But the sky was overcast and leaden, pressing down on the deserted little university town.

‘Today morning,’ continued his mother as if she had not heard him, ‘I met Mrs Basu at Christmas lunch at the Club. And she said, “Mrs Mitra you sent your Amit to America. I think you should get him married quickly. Just the other day my sister-in-law’s brother wrote from Texas saying he’s getting married to some American girl. And such a fine boy too – never stood second in his life. First-class first in physics. And now his mother cries all day.”’

Romola laughed nervously and paused. That was Amit’s signal to reassure her that he would protect the family honour against evil, gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, home-wrecking, disrespectful American women. He imagined them waiting at JFK airport in New York and LAX and O’Hare – hordes of buxom blondes in tight shorts and skimpy tops ready to snap up naive, god-fearing, rice-eating Indian boys as they stepped off the plane.

Unable to extract any reassurance, his mother went on. ‘Why, look at your uncle Shobhan’s son. He went to America just like you and then came back after four years and married that nice Radha.’

‘Just like Baba came back to India to get married to you. I know, I know. But anyway, you always said Radha was fat and dark,’ Amit quipped, rummaging in the pile of clothes at the foot of his bed for a sweater. ‘At least if I married an American girl you would have nice, fair grandchildren. All pink with red cheeks, maybe blue eyes,’ he said teasing her.

‘Don’t joke,’ said his mother fiercely. ‘It’s not like I’ve not been to America. They are different. Very friendly, but different. These white people don’t have the same sense of family that we do.’

‘But who said that if I married an American she’d have to be white?’ said Amit grinning into the telephone. ‘She could be Chinese or Mexican or black too.’

‘Black!’ His mother was speechless for a second. Amit knew she was imagining grandchildren who looked like they had walked out of
The Color Purple
with braided hair. Then she abruptly swerved the course of the conversation. ‘What are you going to do for Christmas?’

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Amit. ‘Everyone’s gone. Campus is pretty quiet. Everything seems closed.’

‘I wish you could have afforded to come home. I worry about you all alone there in the cold. Be careful, remember to take a scarf with you. And wear a cap.’

When Amit had first reached Binghamton, it was still summer and everything was warm and green. Sometimes on a hot September afternoon, he would hear the little children across the street shrieking as their father sprayed them with a hosepipe. He could see their yard from his window. They had put up a plastic snowman in front of the house. Perhaps tonight, he thought, they’d have a real snowman with a carrot for a nose and an old black hat. He did not know them but their mother would smile and say, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ when they ran into each other on the street. But Amit had learned that they really didn’t mean it.

‘You just say “Doing good. How are you?” and keep walking,’ Satish had told him. Satish was the president of the Indian Students’ Union on campus and, having already been in Binghamton for over two years while he did his PhD in Electrical Engineering, he was Amit’s authority on all things American, like health insurance, bars and race.

In Binghamton the highway neatly split the town. ‘On the east side the rents are cheaper,’ Satish had informed him days after he arrived in Binghamton, ‘but that’s also where most of the
kallus
– the blackies – live. So it’s not too safe.’ Amit, fierce opponent of apartheid and admirer of Dr Martin Luther King, meekly let the racist slur pass as he made his home on the west side of town.

He thought Satish was kind of a boor but in the early days, when bouts of homesickness would wash over him, Amit craved familiarity. He liked the way Satish’s apartment smelled of frying onions and cumin and Basmati rice, his CDs of Hindi film songs. He suddenly wished Satish was around but almost everyone he knew had left town for Christmas.

It was after five and already getting dark when he finally stepped out of his apartment to look for some food. The cold was stinging and immediately made his nose water. Amit stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, hunched his shoulders and started walking towards the main street.

It was his first Christmas in America and the stillness was startling. It was as if aliens had swooped down and sucked all life out of the town leaving behind only empty houses trimmed with twinkling lights and lampposts festooned in red and white candy stripes.

A black lady, muffled up in a purple coat, was out walking her dog. The little terrier had on a festive red and green coat. The woman nodded to him as he passed by. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.

Amit nodded and said automatically, ‘You too.’ He remembered his conversation with his mother and grinned. He had once put up a poster of Tina Turner in his bedroom but to be honest he rarely found black women physically attractive. Sure, he enjoyed watching Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston on MTV but it was the brunette from
Friends
he really fancied.

Amit would have bristled if someone had called him a racist. After all, when he was fourteen, he had, in a voice quivering with emotion, recited Martin Luther King’s ‘I Had a Dream’ at the school elocution contest. He remembered watching
The Color Purple
on television and weeping when the sisters finally went running across the field to each other like long-lost siblings from some Hindi movie. But physically black women did nothing for him. ‘It’s not about race,’ he reassured himself. ‘They are just not my type.’

Black men in Binghamton drove huge ramshackle gas-guzzling American cars blaring the most god-awful rap music. Amit didn’t like the music, he didn’t like the aggressive bristle of their flat-tops and he didn’t like to look in their eyes. There was a guarded watchfulness in them that unnerved him. ‘When you see a group of black guys hanging out in front of a liquor store or something, just cross the street and walk on the other side,’ Satish had advised him. Amit muttered something about stereotypes but Satish cut him off. ‘
Arrey yaar
, screw stereotypes. When it’s one in the morning and you’re coming home from the lab and they’ve been standing around drinking, you don’t want to take any chances.’

But on Christmas day even the little corner liquor store was closed. The sign still glowed, beckoning warmly in the gathering dark, but the store was locked. A handwritten sign was pasted on the door. ‘Will open at 8 a.m. on Dec. 26. We wish our customers a Merry Christmas’ it said in crooked blue letters. A Korean family owned the store. Amit wondered if they celebrated Christmas – if they were sitting around a warm apartment somewhere waiting for the turkey to finish roasting.

By the time he reached Main Street, he had not passed a single store that was open. Even the twenty-four-hour supermarket was closed, its massive parking lot desolate except for one rusty Chevrolet. Plastic shopping bags blew along the concrete like tumbleweed.

Amit realized he had no dinner at home. ‘Shit,’ he thought. ‘I might have to just go home and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’ All week Main Street had been bustling, the store windows painted with wreaths and holly, Christmas sales signs everywhere. Sometimes Amit liked to sit at the cafe with his latte watching people shopping, their laughter echoing down the street. Though he had nowhere to go and no one to buy Christmas presents for, he didn’t mind. He felt snug and comfortable, cocooned in the warmth of an approaching Christmas. Now it was all gone, packed away and out of sight. The stores were still lit up but nothing stirred anywhere. The twinkling lights and pine wreaths looked mournfully at him.