The Leaving of Things (3 page)

“So!” Hemant Uncle boomed from the sofa. “How is jet lag?”

I told him I was better, a bit better.

On the table, next to a water bottle, steel tumbler, and container of spicy Indian snack mix, I noticed a loaf of bread and a carton of Amul butter. I got out two slices and put them in the toaster that sat at a small window in the wall between the dining table and the kitchen.

“Vikram,” my mother called from the kitchen, “is Anand awake?”

“Not really,” I said.

“That boy,” she groaned in Gujarati. “I’m going to have to go up there.”

“Hemant Uncle,” I asked, “is there a post office around here?”

“Post office?” he wondered aloud. He got up from the sofa, turned off the TV, and sauntered toward the dining
table, his hands in his pockets. “Not familiar with this area.”

“There is,” said Anjali, looking up from her drawing, in a haughty voice. “By the bus stand. I saw it when we went to the dispensary the other day.”

Hemant Uncle’s brows scrunched together. “Dispensary? Why the dispensary?”

Anjali shrugged. “I went with Mummi.”

Just then, Kamala Auntie entered from the back door, through the kitchen, with an armful of line-dried clothes. “We went for
bhabhi
,” she said, meaning my mother. “She was having some pain that I knew some medicine for. It’s nothing.”

“
Achcha
.” Hemant Uncle nodded thoughtfully.

The toaster clacked, and two half-jammed, half-burnt slices of toast shot out. I pulled them out and spread Amul butter on both. The bread here was dense, coarse as though sand grains had gotten mixed in with the flour, and the slices were only about half the size of the Wonder Bread I was used to.

The Amul butter made up for the bread, though. Fragrant with fresh cream, it tasted exactly as I remembered from Sunday mornings of childhood, when Hemant Uncle would bring home Amul butter and Italian bread from the specialty bakery.

My mother set a small steel cup of milk for me on the table and went upstairs to get Anand out of bed.

“How are things in Baroda?” I asked Hemant Uncle, taking a sip of the milk. “You’re at the State Bank, right?”

“Hmm,” he said, pushing away the coloring book he’d been absently flipping through. “State Bank since fifteen years. From Ahmedabad, I transferred to Baroda only five years back.”

“Are you still playing cricket?” I asked him.

He shook his head, laughing softly. “No. Now there is no time.”

“You used to play a lot back in college, didn’t you?”

“Right from my school days,” he said, reaching for the snack mix. “Then played on college team, even on State Bank team.” He ate the snack mix and wiped his hands free of crumbs. I couldn’t help but notice he was heavier now than I remembered; there was a thickness to his face and around his middle.

“Your uncle is sportsman,” came Kamala Auntie’s voice from the living room. She was folding the laundry, stacking the clothes in neat rows on the sofa.

“Vikram
bhai
, watch this,” Anjali said, leaping out of her chair. She asked her father if she could swing from his arm. Hemant Uncle obliged by extending an arm and letting his daughter swing from it with both hands. She giggled, and soon Hemant Uncle started laughing along with his daughter as he turned in half circles and she was lifted high on his arm, her legs swinging in midair.

I remembered how Hemant Uncle would play with me when I was a kid, and he would let me swing from his arm and launch me onto the living room couch as I pretended to be Hanuman from
The Ramayana
, leaping the mythical archipelago from India to Ceylon.

“Ready, Hemant?” my father called, hurrying downstairs.

Hemant Uncle settled Anjali onto the sofa. “Chalo!” he said. “Just waiting.” He reached for the tumbler and water bottle on the table, poured the tumbler half full, and gulped it down.

“Where are you off to?” Kamala Auntie asked.

“To Institute,” my father said. “Some paperwork there still to finish.” He snatched up his briefcase from the floor beside the TV.

Kamala Auntie and Hemant Uncle shared a few quick words, and my father shouted up the stairs that he’d be back in a couple of hours. “And Anand,” he ordered, “make sure you’re up and ready by then.” Then, he and Hemant Uncle shuffled out the door, and they were gone.

“Would you mind showing me the way to the post office later?” I asked Anjali.

“Hmm,” Anjali replied, taking up her position at the dining table with her coloring books. “
Cho-kus.
”

Upstairs in our room, Anand lay curled up, his back turned to my mother who sat at the edge of his bed. A tension hung in the room. I tried to steer clear of it as I stepped over to my bed and began straightening the sheets.

“If you really hate the idea of going to school here, don’t go,” I heard my mother say. “Go and be like those
rickshaw wallahs
. Is that what you want?”

Not a word from Anand. No sound to be heard but the cawing of crows outside. Abruptly, he whipped the sheet away, rolled over, and got up. Eyes downcast, mouth in a frown, he began to shuffle away. “None of my friends have to do this,” he said. “I hate this place.” He walked out, and we heard him slam the bathroom door.

My mother grabbed the bedsheet from my hands. “I’m washing this today. I’ll take care of it,” she said sharply. She stripped the fitted sheet from the mattress and tossed the pile of sheets onto the floor. From the corner of my eye, I could see her shaking her head—out of what? frustration? guilt?—as she turned to Anand’s bed and began pulling off the sheets.

“Do they have washing machines here?” I asked, if only to make conversation.

“Don’t know.” She gathered up all the sheets in her arms, adding, “I’m used to.” She left the room, and her feet faded away down the steps.
Used to.
Those words again. But laced with a faint trace of cynicism, of the fatalism I’d heard in her voice many times over years and years.

I went to the desk in the corner of the room, opened the drawer, took out the pad of paper I’d bought at the stationary shack down the road a day earlier, grabbed a pen, and sat down.

“To my love,” I began, then crumpled up the paper and tossed it aside. “Dear Shannon,” I wrote on a new sheet. “Three days into the great adventure in the subcontinent, and I’m finally getting around to writing you.” I went on to write about the journey across the world that ended in Ghatlodiya, about the sights and sounds and smells of the streets, and India’s late-June heat and humidity. I wrote about meeting my family and about the video camera being confiscated in Bombay. Throughout, I tried to keep my tone casual, off-the-cuff; I threw in a wry, sarcastic joke, the kind I knew she would appreciate. But the more I wrote, the heavier my heart felt and the more badly I wanted to be with her. The feeling got worse till I was afraid my heart might burst, and I’d spill onto the page the truth about how much I missed her, how I wanted more than anything to be back in Madison, in her room the way we used to, under her posters of New Order and The Clash, while the sun went down over Lake Monona.

But then I imagined what her response would be: “You’re really down right now, Vik, but it’s just a phase. This is a big move for you, and I think the sooner you get
into the spirit of this trip, the sooner you’ll start enjoying it.” Such a reply might only drive me farther away from her, and I didn’t want to risk that. I was also afraid that spilling my guts might freak her out and she would break up with me immediately. So I cut things short and signed off with “Love, Vik.”

As I sealed the letter in the envelope, Anand came in, just bathed, indifferently toweling his wet, tangled hair. He wore a clean short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks—his “school-visiting clothes,” I presumed. My brother had conceded. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

“Got anything to mail out?” I asked. “I’m going to walk over to the post office with Anjali.”

Anand scrubbed the towel against his head a few more times and threw it bunched-up on his bed. “No.” He dropped himself onto the edge of the bed, sighing deeply.

“Look,” I said, turning to face him, “everything’s going to be fine.”

“How do you know?” Anand didn’t look at me. He began biting his fingernails, picking at them—a longtime nervous habit of his.

“We missed out on summer vacation this year,” I said, “but they get a lot of vacations here. A lot more than back home. Think Diwali comes up in four months, and that’s a whole month off. The year will be over before we know it, and then we’ll figure out a way to get back.”

Anand mulled that over, glancing at the wall. Finally, he nodded. “What day is it?” he asked.

“Tuesday.”

He sighed again. “Brewers are off today.”

“Who do they play next?”

“Oakland.” Anand bent down, picked up a baseball magazine lying on the floor, and began poring through it.

“Coming with us to the post office?”

“I’ve got this school thing,” he said. “Might as well get it over with.” He looked up at me. “You think the kids here know anything about baseball?”

“Doubt it,” I said, trying a smile. “You’ll have to teach them everything you know.”

* *

The post office was a drab room fermented in damp heat. It reeked of that indescribable mix of soot, sweat, and Indian spice that I was now getting used to, an acrid sweetness that was repulsive and intoxicating at once. The place hummed with the chatter of locals and the whir of an oscillating fan positioned on a counter next to jars caked with brown glue.

I wished I had my video camera with me, even though that might’ve attracted too much attention. I imagined running off a few shots of the moldy, peeling walls on which a “Don’t Spit” sign was painted, the men in short sleeves, clasping zippered satchels in their thin hands, a few of them with bidis poking out of wrinkled mouths. Stumps of bidis and bits of paper littered the room. The deeper I entered, the more out of place I felt.

My brown skin wasn’t enough to ensure that I blended in; there was too much that gave me away as an outsider. I didn’t have the bristly moustache, for one thing, that many of the young men here sported, and I didn’t dress like the men here, with their short sleeves, slacks, slippers, or loafers. I didn’t pomade my hair and comb it in that severe
part. (Top to toe, the men here were trapped in some 1950s time warp, to be honest.) And as thin as I was, eleven years of pizzas and McDonald’s had given my face a filled-out appearance unlike the locals here, raised on
rotis
, rice, and lentils. Everywhere I went I stood out about as much as a white-skinned tourist who’d lost his way.

Anjali led me to a grilled window where a clerk weighed my mail and sold me stamps along with a dozen postcards. I put the postcards in the pocket of my shorts as Anjali guided me back to the counter where I began fixing the stamps onto the envelope using the brush from the glue bottle. The bristles of the brush had hardened into a solid chunk, and it was like using a flat stick.

“Oh-ho, America!” came a voice behind me, and I became aware of a hand fingering the fabric of my shorts—a pair of white cottons with “Wisconsin” in large red letters along the side. “Hey!” I said, swatting the fingers away and stepping aside to find a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, backing away from me.

He grinned, a hand at his hip, and, in Gujarati, asked if I could spare him some money. But his tone wasn’t pleading. It was wry, almost derisive, too much so for a kid his age. “How about it, boss? You got something extra for me?”

Then Anjali shouted at him, waving a finger toward the door. “
Jao! Hutt!
”

The kid, still grinning, gestured back at her with a flat, upturned palm. “
Wah-re-wah
,” he chortled, “a little girl talking that way, you should get a good
phadda-phut
,” and he mimed a slap and backslap, then took to his heels out the door. A few men glanced in our direction, indifferent.

“What was that about?” I asked Anjali.

“No school,” she replied in Gujarati. “So they do that only, making mischief.”

In bold letters, I wrote “AIR MAIL” on the envelope. The black ballpoint smudged and leaked, but the words were clear enough. I started to put the pen away then hesitated. Turning over the envelope, I hastily scribbled on the seal: “Miss You,” keeping my back turned so that Anjali wouldn’t see. I handed the envelope to the clerk who pounded dirty, illegible stamp marks all over it. And as he tossed it onto a pile of grubby aerograms, I got the same feeling as when I’d turned over my video camera to the customs agent in Bombay. It was this lonely, slightly terrified feeling, and I felt sorry for my letter, lying in that sad pile, left to the mercy of this miserable place.

The heat felt heavy on our heads as we walked back to the guesthouse, but then a breeze kicked up. And the sun, for a moment, got clouded over as a rush of wind swooped in from behind us. Dust sailed across the road, and a paper kite that a group of kids had been struggling to lift suddenly took off. It lifted as high as the upper stories of the apartment block to the cheering of the children who now ran along on bare legs, tugging and lifting at the line as the kite fluttered far above.

“Monsoon’s here,” Anjali said, squinting upward, shielding her eyes. Thunderheads had reared up in the western sky, a whole army of them. We picked up our pace. I didn’t want to get the postcards soaked. More than that, though, I was beginning to feel naked out there in the open gaze: the outsider in his American clothes.

* *

Back in my room, I sat at the desk and wrote out the postcards. Every now and then, I’d prop myself on my elbows and watch the frenzy of rain out the window. Rapidly, over the course of the afternoon, rain clouds shrouded the sky, and the wind muted out the clank and clatter of the street. Earlier, I’d noticed how still the world got just before the monsoon broke; the children had all run inside, the men disappeared inside their shops or scootered off home.

The rain riddled the baked earth. I made a viewfinder of my hands—the palms touching at right angles—and panned across all I saw. The muddied pockmarks of animal tracks. The corrugated rooftops of the shops peppered with raindrops, everything dripping and gleaming.