The Leaving of Things (2 page)

“How do we settle this?” my father demanded. “Give me an address, phone.”

The officer exhaled noisily and produced a business card out of his shirt pocket.

My father snatched it. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I thought I reminded you,” my mother said now, a taste of scorn and defeat in her words. “Put the camera receipt with all immigration forms.” But my father was occupied with loading bags onto his cart. He was in no mood for this conversation. “I knew he was going to forget,” she said to herself, hoisting a second suitcase onto a cart, its wheels wobbly, the whole thing tipsy.

“What good is screaming about it going to do now?” my father shot back. He checked his watch and said we’d better get a move on if we wanted to make the Ahmedabad connection.

That’s right, I thought, think only of your connection, I thought. God forbid anything interfere with your precious plans.

We left the building and stepped into the subcontinental sauna of the June morning. I heard car horns—shrill and testy—as fleets of black-and-yellow Fiat taxis maneuvered like hyenas around the hippopotamus-sized Ambassador sedans. There was a wildness here, stewing in jungle heat.

We soon crammed into a taxi and sped off on our way to the domestic terminal.

It was 8 p.m. back home, Madison steeped in beautiful summer twilight. And Shannon, I thought of her hair now, the apple-y fragrance of it, and the creamy skin of her arms, the adventure of her lips. Did she have that Smiths song on the stereo? It was one of her favorites. The one where the singer pleads with his lover to believe him—he meant to be with her—but he’s just had a near-death experience, getting his brains kicked in. She doesn’t believe him, but he loves her anyway. What I loved was that brief, beautiful guitar at the end—swaggering, bruised, and tragic (it
spoke of me!). I could hear it now as we drove along, and, for a few seconds, I was with her, watching her dance to that song.

* *

Ahmedabad.

Pigeons racketed in the rafters, their droppings decorating the cement floor of the airport. Trunks and suitcases were piled up like a haphazard barricade next to the baggage chute. Passengers filed through, picked up what was theirs and proceeded to a barred gate behind which humans, pressed together, several deep, waited with anxious faces. The air wasn’t as muddy here as it was in Bombay, but I still had to work to breathe.

Right away, my father found what he was looking for. “Right there, right there,” he smiled, and pressed past the crowd toward a familiar face: my father’s younger brother, Hemant.

Hemant Uncle stood a couple of inches shorter than my father. Compactly built and copper-skinned (after a lifetime spent on the cricket field) with graying, sweptback hair and a cheerful face, he sauntered toward us in that trademark unhurried manner I remembered from my childhood. Kamala Auntie, his wife, stood at his side in a purple sari with lilies on it. Her face looked lean, lined, and aged, I thought, by a combination of years, dust, and sun. The little girl with them was new. Anjali, their daughter, seven years old now. I’d seen her only in photographs, heard about her in letters. In a pink frock, her hair in pigtails, her complexion a shade darker than mine, she came forward with a bouquet of flowers in plastic wrapping.

Anand and I passed through an opening in the gate. We kept behind our parents now in the midst of a joyous reunion. My mother had tears in her eyes. So did Kamala Auntie. Hemant Uncle and my father threw arms around each other’s shoulders, traded Gujarati familiarities, and began chatting as if they’d only been apart a couple of months, not eleven years.

“Go on, go on,” Kamala Auntie said. Shyly, Anjali handed me the bouquet of flowers. I took it from her hands, smiling and telling her thanks as warmly as I could. Hemant Uncle, a pleased smile on his face, fixed his eyes on me as if he were trying to size me up, to see in me the six-year-old boy who lingered in his memories.

Kamala Auntie brushed my hair back, her eyes wet. “I saw you when—” and she held out her palm about waist-high.

“Anand, you’re very thin,” Hemant Uncle said in a voice as deep as my father’s but more booming, more theatrical. He wrapped one of his stout hands around Anand’s shoulders.

“I thought in America, everyone is big and very strong. No?” Anand snickered, a little unsure, uncomfortable, and kept quiet. “Vikram, you too. Very thin. Here we’ll give you proper food.” He suggested an immediate diet of
dahi vada
and
bhelpuri
, which got him roaring with laughter. I tried to laugh along like a good sport—these were smiling, unsuspecting, goodhearted relatives, after all—but felt only an intense loathing at being here and a powerful desire to escape. Escape! How absurd. Where would you escape to, Vikram? There was no escaping now.

In front of the airport, rickshaw drivers smoking
bidis
milled among khaki-clad policemen carrying wooden
lathis
. Motor rickshaws buzzed up and down like a swarm of yellow jackets, and I remembered them instantly from my childhood—three-wheeled canopied contraptions with narrow backseats where passengers bunched together and, up front, a seat for a driver who steered the rickshaw using a handlebar.

Hemant Uncle rolled up in his green Fiat, which Anjali and my parents piled into along with most of the luggage. Kamala Auntie climbed into the rickshaw, and Anand and I followed with backpacks, a suitcase, and the flowers Anjali had handed me.

Kamala Auntie instructed the driver to follow the Fiat in front of us. The rickshaw growled and shuddered to life, and we began motoring through the sensory assault of scooter-truck-bicycle-and-bullock
-
cart traffic toward Ahmedabad.

Signs of the city gradually appeared—whitewashed storefronts open to the streets, signboards in Gujarati and English, men sitting in groups, smoking and talking, amid blocks of cement housing complexes. Bony cows lingered in corners, nosing through trash. And the trash—rotting food, plastic bags, and sodden newspaper—littered the roadside in abundance, scattered from dumpsters by the animals. Kamala Auntie tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see enormous macaques that had overrun what looked like an abandoned bungalow girded with bamboo scaffolding. The profusion of wildlife in the middle of a city was too bizarre, too ridiculous. It was also oddly embarrassing; I didn’t want to share any of this with my friends back home.

Anand and I exchanged looks of puzzlement, and that got Kamala Auntie emitting a kind of quick, high giggle. “It’s like zoo, no?”

I tried to smile back warmly, nodded.

“You will get used to,” she said.

I caught sight of a naked child—five or six years old—squatting over a dug-up hole in the ground. He squinted at me through the glare, his arms hanging off his knees, as he crouched there, shitting openly in the dirt. The child’s eyes followed me as we passed, his expression completely innocent, without a trace of shame. For him, it was just another afternoon, defecating in a hole on the side of the road.

Kamala Auntie’s words came back to me: “You will get used to.” Used to!
But I don’t want to get used to!
I just wanted to go home. But this was home now. And she was right. Terror swept over me.

We joined streams of gathering traffic and began passing over a bridge, a concrete bridge.

“Sabarmati River,” Kamala Auntie said, pointing.

But the Sabarmati wasn’t much of a river—more like an epic gash of cracked earth with a vein of brown coursing down the middle.

I wondered exactly where we were headed, how much farther we had to go. My father had mentioned something about a guesthouse, some place we’d be staying until the bungalow in Ahmedabad was ready, but I knew nothing else. Never even wanted to ask.

Now, in Gujarati with a few English phrases thrown in, Kamala Auntie filled us in: Last night, she, Anjali, and Hemant Uncle had driven in from Baroda (my father had arranged for the guesthouse key to be sent to them weeks ago). They had already checked out the guesthouse, bought groceries, refrigerated several bottles of boiled water, and had a meal cooked and waiting for us. They would stay with us for a couple of weeks while we settled in.

Wherever this guesthouse was, it was far—like boonies far. The city became sparser, and we were soon bumping along a two-lane, potholed road, bordered on both sides by dirt fields, food stalls, and hole-in-the-wall bazaars. Children played with kites, couples cut us off on scooters.

After a few minutes of lurching along this road, I noticed Hemant Uncle’s Fiat ahead of us veer to the side and stop. We rolled up behind it, and the rickshaw gurgled and came to rest.

In that heavenly second of silence, I could hear myself breathe.

I checked my watch: sunrise over Lake Monona right about now, quiet and clear, over the elms in Shannon’s backyard. I pictured Shannon in her bed, the green tank top, the freckled collarbone, the peek of her waist where the blanket covered her—

“
Chalo
,” Kamala Auntie said, stepping out of the rickshaw. “We are here.”

Next to the road was a red metal gate and, beyond it, a paved driveway. A row of trees overhung one side of the driveway and an apartment building stood on the other. Five or six apartments, steps leading up to each, lined the drive. From the Fiat, I saw my parents and Anjali emerge. Anand and I extracted ourselves from the rickshaw, hoisting up our backpacks, while Kamala Auntie paid the driver.

My father turned up the hasp on top of the red gate, and it squeaked open. Hemant Uncle pulled the Fiat into the driveway.

I approached my father and asked, “Where are we?”

“Ghatlodiya,” my father replied, already walking back to the Fiat so that he could begin to pull out suitcases.

Ghatlodiya. What an awful name. It spoke of all the backwater villages in this backwater country, far removed from the world.

The rickshaw that had brought us here fired up again. The driver wheeled it around, and soon he was puttering back the way we’d just come, toward the sun dropping now behind the sheds and shacks bordering the road.

Soon, he faded from view, lost in the orange scrim of dust and humanity and traffic. In a way, that rickshaw driver was my last link to America, the last piece of the journey that had brought me here. My heart ached to see him go.

I couldn’t picture Shannon here, nor Nate nor Karl, nor anyone from back home for that matter. Again, the thought of sharing this with any of them—this
part
of me—embarrassed me.

Soon it would be my first night in India. And I was still having trouble breathing: smoky, muggy, dung-scented, this was the air I’d better get used to. I wanted to breathe in the fragrance of the flowers Anjali had given me, then realized I’d forgotten them in the rickshaw.

3

W
aking up was a nightmare. As if life had played the dirtiest of tricks on me. I’d be dreaming the same things I did when I was in America. But then I’d wake and reality was like a hand reaching in for my soul and strangling it. And my soul would instantly collapse and fall away … And I could feel its fall all the way to the bottom of my heart. It was like that for several weeks but worst on those first days: that horrific sense of exile.

Anand and I would wake to a monsoon torpor, disoriented from jet lag, achy, bleary-eyed, and the heat slouching over everything by 8 a.m. like a swamp animal. We’d take a look around: the whitewashed cement walls; the pale, flecked tiles on the floor; the ceiling fan squeaking as it spun; and the noise of utensils from the kitchen downstairs. From downstairs too came raised voices, all of which seemed so unreal to me: Hemant Uncle joking with Anjali or my mother asking Kamala Auntie a question.
Who were these people?
Through an open window, I would see an unfamiliar crumbled roadside, rundown
storefronts, the sump behind the guesthouse, and a cow browsing for scraps.

One morning, we heard a knock at the door, a quick rap that I recognized as my father’s. “Anand,” he called, opening the door, “be ready, okay? We’ll pay a visit to a couple of schools this afternoon.”

Anand turned over and pulled a pillow over his head.

“Be ready, huh?” my father repeated, then, leaving the door open, walked back down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.

“I’m not going,” he said in a muffled voice beneath the pillow. “I don’t want to go.”

I checked my watch, and, almost automatically, I began rolling the hours back in my head, trying to make the India-Madison time jump. But I stopped myself. I didn’t feel like bumming myself out first thing in the morning. I crawled out of bed.

“I hate this place,” I heard Anand say. “I’m not going.”

Summer break had just started back home, but here schools were starting up again. Anand and I had a couple of weeks to snap out of our jet-lagged funk and get into the swing of … whatever
this
was going to be.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said.

The guesthouse, thankfully, had Western-style toilets and sinks, one upstairs and one down. The bathrooms were Indian otherwise: no bathtub, just an undefined area marked by a drain, a spigot for running water, and, above that, a handheld showerhead attached to a tiny water heater. It made for a continuously wet floor that got dirty easily as people came and went, tracking their bare feet in and out. I picked my way to the sink and brushed my teeth.

My stomach hurt. I felt hopeless. No matter. Today I would write Shannon a letter. I would write it and get it mailed before the post office closed. And while I was at it, I’d get a bunch of postcards too to send to Nate, Karl and a few others to whom I’d made—and gotten—promises to stay in touch.

Downstairs consisted of the kitchen and one large room divided into dining and living spaces. Hemant Uncle sat at a sofa, focused on the Gujarati-language morning news on the TV while Anjali hunched over the dining table with the crayons and the Disney coloring books my parents had given her. Perched over a book, her knees planted on a chair, she carefully worked in the colors that lay scattered next to her. Anjali also loved the chewing gum, the Bic pens and the Jif peanut butter my parents had brought.