The Abundance: A Novel (13 page)

Sachin’s lankiness gains grace under a burden. The unexpected muscles show in his thin arms. He takes the steps two at a time, Abhi’s books and journals stacked chin high. Moving, lifting, calling over to Abhi to ask where things should go, he is almost athletic. I haven’t seen this quality before. But maybe that is when the virility in that kind of good man comes out, when the family needs it. Mala goes to help move things out of the study, but Sachin and Abhi both tell her to keep me company in the family room, where I am with the children. I see her stop to watch Sachin spring up the stairs and down. She doesn’t drift back to me until she has watched him take the stairs a second time, arms full with an outdated PDR and a
Fundamentals of Neurology
and two thinner textbooks, both hardcover. She looks at him just to look at him.

Ronak is more muscular, but Ronak’s body comes from years of day’s-end workouts—with his weight-lifting gloves with cutoff fingertips and Velcro wrist wraps, slow hissing sets of curls while staring into the wall mirror, white cord of the headphones crossing his chest like a Brahmin’s thread. He didn’t give up those workouts, not even after the boys were born. Amber has that extra hour and a half every day to care for them alone. Because of his commute, Ronak ends up getting home about an hour before the boys’ bedtime. Part of that time goes for his shower, part for his dinner. Abhi and I saw firsthand how their days went. (Not even for his parents’ visit would Ronak break his fitness schedule; he was “in training,” he insisted, though for what he never said.) The boys were in pajamas by the time he dried his hands after dinner. At Amber’s order, they mustered on the couch to hear a story. The sun had almost set by then. The four of them yawned as the brave honeybees chased the bear all the way home.

Abhi wants to show me the “new bedroom” when it is done. I don’t want to see it. He behaves as though it is a gift, but my world has shrunken by a whole story, effectively halved. I think of that room as the study, and I call it that without intending to. Mala, too, when she asks Sachin about it, says,
Are you finished with the study? Can we go see it?

New bedroom
makes it sound like an addition or a renovation, not what it is—an upheaval. The guest bedroom is the study now, and the study is the master bedroom. What used to be the master bedroom is where the upheaval is most evident. It has been gutted of its bed and headboard. The rectangle of carpet, at once unfaded and thickly dusty, is strewn with paper debris and stray clothes and hair clips. I am too tired and disheartened by the look of the room to tidy and vacuum it. I see Sachin walking the vacuum cleaner up the stairs, holding it neatly off the floor, not even rolling it when he is level. “I’m going to get to this after dinner,” he promises. “It’s going to look spic-or-span.”

Mala, on another day, might have corrected that subtlest of errors, “It’s spic
and
, not spic
or
,” but today she lets it pass. We have made a quick lunch, nothing elaborate—I wanted to show Mala some recipes she could put together when short on time. She is buzzing with joy at working under me, and when the dishes turn out, she puts the food on fresh plates or in bowls, adds parsley or arranges tomato slices in a fan, and says, “Ha!” Part triumphant, part astonished that she’s triumphed. I know she is proud when she takes out her phone and snaps a picture of each dish. She presses some buttons afterward; I think she is sending the photos to Rachna.

After lunch, Sachin goes in the backyard with Vivek and Shivani. We see them through the window above the sink as we rinse and stack. It’s drowsy-sunny out and barely short-sleeves hot, but Mala insists on sunscreen, so Sachin sunscreens the children but not himself. Shivani sits on the deck facing out and bounces her heels on the wood. The kite sniffs wind and strains against its string, which Sachin keeps pinched. I bought that kite over a year ago. The shape is a broad triangle. Two large black dots stare out at me as if from butterfly wings, orange and black imitating the widespread monarch. Thick plastic and fat string soft on the fingers.

Sachin grew up in Ahmedabad where he is used to the spry, lean, dispensable diamond-kites sold on the streets, tissue-paper bodies on flexible balsa crosses. He is used to hot-pink kite string coated with glass dust. You need to wear a rubber finger-sleeve or tape wound twice around a hooked finger. That kite string could cut skin. Kite flying on Uttarayan is an air war between rival terraces. Sachin has a whole secret body of wartime knowledge. The salvage and refitting of downed kites. How to go slack when engaged, unspooling so your long sag of string saws through the attacker’s lifeline. Also when to go taut—the frantic arm-over-arm ingather until the kite stiffens and sweeps skyward, slicing. Here the kite will fight no duels. Sachin tests the ribbing anyway and eyes the knots to see if he needs to retie them.

Vivek waits with the kite held in front of him; it is broader than his boy chest. The leaves stir, and the kite leaps out of Vivek’s hands. Sachin pulls twice, and the kite strains a foot high, a foot higher, then takes a hairpin dive to the ground.They try again. This time, the kite boards a fuller, higher wind. Sachin feeds it string. Vivek and Shivani run to his side, as if they can judge the kite’s true height only from its flyer’s perspective. Their father waits out some of the kite’s friskiness, shortening the leash or giving it some play as needed. At last he tames it. A steady interval of flight. He brings the string down to Vivek. He shows both children how to hold the hand, index finger crooked to rest the line, the other fingers curled. They each raise a hand to mimic his gesture. Sachin nods. Vivek holds the kite for a spell, then Shivani. Son passes the string to daughter as carefully as candlelight poured wick to wick.

I was Shivani’s age when my father died. I do not remember him except by the smell of mothballs. Two large metal trunks housed his clothes and effects. I used to steal upstairs to look at the clothes. I didn’t cry. He died when I was two years old, so I didn’t know him enough to mourn him. His shirts and socks seemed far more immediate than his unreachably high portrait, black-and-white and garlanded. Later, when I learned to sew, I restored the cuff button to a white dress shirt. (I’d noticed it missing as a seven-year-old and had not forgotten.) My mother never knew I visited this shrine of his effects until, by chance, in his less-often-explored trunk of books and papers (legal documents, a Victorian-era
The Tempest
, the Gujarati novels of K. M. Munshi), I found a yellowed diary. As a girl, I had been drawn to the glasses case in that trunk. I would hold those huge plates over my face and hope that someday my eyes would weaken to match his. As an adolescent, I realized that the true treasures might be among the books and papers, and sure enough I found the diary.

My hands started shaking as soon as I saw handwriting. What would I learn? Would he talk about my relatives? Would I read about myself? Would he record his delight at having one of each, a boy and a girl? Or would he write about the new infant screaming in the night, disturbing him at his work? I dreaded to know. I longed to know. Would he reveal himself too completely, flaws and all? I worried for my fantasy of him. I clicked the trunk shut and smuggled the diary to my room. And, by the dying window light, could not read a word of it.

It wasn’t Gujarati. It wasn’t English. The jigs and dots made me think of legal shorthand. Most of the pages were blank. He had written on only the first twenty-one. I spent a few days with the book, checking each page for a key to the code. I dwelled on his three drawings—a human head on the sixth page, a pair of sandals on the seventh, a bicycle on the eighteenth—as if they were mystical symbols. Finally I confessed to my mother how I had been rummaging. (I made it sound like this was my first time.) She didn’t seem surprised. I begged her to decipher the diary for me.

“I can’t read it,” she said. “It is in Farsi.”

I looked down at the diary with renewed fascination. “Why did he write it in Farsi?”

“To keep it hidden should it ever be found.” She shrugged. “He never spoke it. Maybe he wanted to stay in practice.”

She did not take the diary from me or tell me to put it back. So I kept it on my desk among my textbooks. I was in the tenth standard, preparing for the SSC exam on which my future depended. This was the exam that put my name boldfaced in the newspaper and eased my admission to medical school. I thought my father’s diary, even then, a talisman. After my exams, I promised myself, I would learn Farsi and translate his words. Farsi: a natural choice for the language of a diary. His fellow Brahmins didn’t care to learn it anymore; now that Britain ruled, they learned English. I would learn it. I would master it.

After the exam, though, I was too exhausted to take up a fresh intellectual project. My course loads didn’t get any lighter the next year. Chores busied my weekends and vacations—I was a daughter first in my mother’s house, and I had to make up for the months I had spent studying.

Not that my mother was stern or resentful. She herself had never gone past the seventh standard. Girls didn’t take the SSC back then; they got married around that time, usually to men twenty or so years older. That was what happened with my mother. The shift in destinies between her and me was much more drastic than the one between me and Mala, even allowing for the difference in countries. During the school year, I did not help her cook. I had to study. She understood. She put no housework obligation on me. But for the rest of the year, I put the obligation on myself. I was like that. I am still like that.

When it came to Mala doing chores and learning to cook, I stayed hands off, just as my mother had with me. I trusted a good daughter would in time take on responsibilities. If she doesn’t, the lineage breaks. An oral wisdom is lost—this book of women, this fifth Veda that guides the rice-offering, the milk-offering, the ritual oblation. The Agni is in us. The Agni is hunger.

I knew medical Latin would postpone Farsi forever. The summer after my SSC, I showed the diary to a local university professor, M. N. Ali, a very old gentleman in a blue Mussulman topi. Within the week, he dropped the translation off personally. Twenty-one pages handwritten became three, typed.

I wish I still had them. I would have transcribed them here complete. How did I let the diary and the translation leave my possession? To look away from such a thing, even for a moment, is to leave it sitting on a train platform. The move to college, exams, marriage, the move to America, the first child, the second child, some hectic India visits house-to-house-to-house, the family property sold, its treasure-trove trunks scattered … I feel I’ve ridden a single gust of wind to this far place and this late date. The swept-up papers are still settling.

My father had written about one incident in 1937. He had gone to seek treatment for tuberculosis in Bombay. He had cousins there. I don’t know my father’s relatives very well, and apparently neither did he. He was blood, though, and blood obliged them to put him up. Already the house was very full, the whole clan living under the patriarch’s roof, sons and sons’ wives and sons’ children. There was a new baby in the house, and their guest was always coughing. The TB had advanced, he wrote, to three bloody handkerchiefs a day. He volunteered to limit himself to the open-air porch, where he could sit on the swing. The number of sandals dwindled in the mornings and swelled come evening, low tide and high. This accounted for the doodle he’d made of sandals.

In spite of the cold nights and mosquitoes, he slept on the swing so he could cough in peace. The milkman parked his bicycle and awoke him before dawn.

My father was not happy in Bombay. He took down the things his hosts whispered in the kitchen. The men would not talk to him for more than a minute or so at a time. Educated people had an idea of how tuberculosis spread by then; he suspected they were holding their breath the whole time. When he offered to go to a hotel, though, they wouldn’t let him; he had to stay, they pleaded, this was his home, how could they let him go anywhere else? They feared the shame, he knew, of sending him off to a hotel. Word would spread: Madanbhai came to their house sick, and they wouldn’t give him a bed. He was stuck there, fortunately only for three days.

I was not yet born. I was five months in the future. He wrote about the infant in the house, and that led him to think of me. He knew he would have to keep himself isolated from his newborn child. The doctors were recommending a high-altitude sanatorium near Mount Abu. (Streptomycin wasn’t discovered yet; he just missed it.) I imagine him writing the words. His right leg pushes the swing while he rests the diary on his left knee. A spotted handkerchief peeks from his pocket.

The face he drew on page six was a self-portrait. He showed the eyes shut.

*   *   *

My imaginary memories are of my father as a young man. My real memories are of my mother. She is old in almost all of them. As I get closer to the age when she passed away, I realize how much like her I am. Mala and Ronak always loved to point out the similarities. We made the same hand gestures when we got excited. Our smiles were the same. There were a half-dozen other mannerisms I thought were just my mother’s until my children pointed them out in me.

She, too, was intent on feeding everyone who came to her flat. And a flat of her own she insisted on having. The vast family house in Jamnagar had been sold years earlier to make room for the new India. Her building had started out a fresh pink, but one monsoon later, water damage wept gray down the walls. Television antennae came to bask and breed on the terraces like bold insects. In time these gave way to satellite dishes, which flowered and let down black tendrils. Every stairwell had its resident stray dog. The roads, I remember, were pavement one visit, potholes the next. Damp sarees waved surrender off balcony clotheslines.

By the time we sold it, our family house had gone rotten. The grounds between the road and the house had been taken over by a carpenter. This carpenter, known to my mother only as Motilal, had lived apart from his family for two years. He spent long stretches of time in town, sent money home, and periodically returned to his village to father one more barefoot child.