The Leaving of Things (34 page)

“Vinod, what is all this tamasha—?” It was his mother again, appearing in the doorway. She gasped when she saw the drama unfolding, and that instant, Vinod drew away the knife. “Oh
bhagwan
, what is happening?” Flailing her arms, she screamed, “I’m calling your brother. I cannot handle you anymore!” She turned and retreated into the apartment.

“It’s nothing, Ma, calm down,” he shouted back. It was now or never, I figured, so I lunged forward and grabbed the satchel out of his hand and began backing off the patio. As I did, Vinod made a leap for me then stumbled as his foot caught on the leg of one of the lawn chairs.

I turned and stepped off the patio when I heard him shout, “Hey! Bhai, where you are going with my
rupiya
?”
In Gujarati, he went on, “Hey, he’s got my rupiya!” and I saw he was trying to appeal to the group of onlookers across the lane.

Vinod stared at me, stunned, on his knees. Then, pointing at me, he called to the onlookers again, “Hey, he took my cash. Take hold of him!”

I began walking up the lane, back toward where I had left my Luna. The onlookers simply stared at me as Vinod pleaded. No one made any effort to intervene.

“Hey, American! You want trouble?” That wasn’t Vinod’s voice. I looked up to see the boy up on the balcony, the one whom I’d seen earlier watching us, eclipsed by a jag of sunlight. For a flash, I saw him sneer. Then something like an asteroid collided against my forehead, above my right eye. A thud shattered in my ears, the slap of rock against skull, and I fell backward.

I heard a woman scream, a man call out, saw the boy duck out of view no sooner than I hit the earth on my knees. I felt the stony earth against my back. The balconied sky got blocked from view by my own blood-webbed fingers, the thump and stagger of feet, the occlusion of the blood, and my own dirt-smudged hands. Faces hovered over me, expressions of horror. In seconds, though, the clamor faded and my pupils slid out of sync. I entered blackness.

25

T
he tug of thread, the itch of skin pulled taut as thread glided through the suture. I opened my eyes. My head on a pillow, my body flat on a cot.

How’d I get in here? Where was I? What day was it?

A man’s face, paunchy, a flat nose and tiny eyes came into view. He smiled pleasantly as his hands worked the thread back and forth over the right side of my head.

“It is okay now,” he said. “You were needing seven, eight stitches. Very deep. But don’t worry. It’s all fine now.” His tone was businesslike, as if he were giving me the price of produce at the market. He smelled of Ahmedabad, the dust and sweat, of paan masala mixed with a trace of cologne.

I heard concerned voices in the small blue-painted room. A ceiling fan whirred above me. Pictures of Krishna and a Ganesha figurine sat in a niche in the wall. A Hindu devotional calendar hung next to it. Above the niche, high on the wall, hung a picture of a middle-aged man, garlanded. Some dead relative, no doubt.

“Do not move too much.” He cut the thread, dabbed iodine—cool to the forehead—and taped on the gauze.

Incense burning. The redolence of Gujarati cooking, the clank of kitchen utensils.

“Where am I?” I groaned. No sooner had I asked than Vinod came into view. His eyes were bleary, bloodshot. He carried a tray with a steel cup of water. He put the tray down and slumped into a chair.

The man rose from the cot, scooping up a metal pan with scissors, thread, gauze, and dark bottles.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Vinod in his chair, head bowed, hands covering his face.

“Quite a deep cut,” the man said. He wore a dark green safari shirt with a pen in the breast pocket. He extended his hand, I shook it. “I am Dr. Arvind Deshpande. You are in our flat. I am … I am his older brother.” He gestured at Vinod and sighed. He said I had no sign of a concussion and asked if I had a headache.

“Just where the rock hit me,” I said, sitting up. “I’m glad you’re a doctor. Don’t know what I’d have done.” I touched the gauzed-up wound. It felt tender. The wound bit at my nerves where I touched.

“Dentist actually,” Dr. Deshpande said. “In two weeks, you go to clinic and get the stitches removed, hm?” He cocked his head at me, waited for my reply.

“Two weeks,” I said. “Okay.”

The older woman in the yellow sari—Vinod’s mother—entered the room. In Gujarati, she asked if I needed anything.

“Just water,” I said and took the cup that Vinod had set down on a small square stand beside the cot. I sipped it.

“Okay?” the brother asked, palms upraised.

“Yes, thank you.”

The brother tipped his head once to the side, smiled. “Okay.” He turned and spoke to his mother. “Chalo, to the kitchen.”

They went away. Vinod did not look up, his face buried in his hands. He began to shake his head and wouldn’t stop. When he raised his face, his eyes looked worn out from tears. “I am sorry, Vikram. So sorry. I did not know that boy would do that.”

“You with your knife and him with his rocks. What is he? Your personal hit man or something?”

Vinod turned away, smirked. “That knife, that was only to scare you, I would never—I am so sorry.” He broke off, choking back tears, then continued, “And that boy Raju is thinking I am some hero. So he comes to defend me. He ran away. Scared, I think so.” He sniffed. “I am no hero.” He hung his head. His breath came in sniffs and gasps. “I am sorry, truly sorry.”

My eyes turned to the picture on the wall, a black and white portrait wreathed in a marigold garland. The man’s expression had a military sternness. He wore a tie and a starched white shirt, clasped his hands in front of him, and looked off at an angle from the camera. I asked who he was.

“My father,” Vinod answered. “Died five years back.” Vinod turned his eyes away, gazed off through the kitchen onto the patio at the gathering evening. Nervously, he rubbed his palms together. “Ever since,” he said, “I am … feeling a bit stuck.”

“I know the feeling.”

Vinod kept his face in the direction of the kitchen, but his eyes shifted toward me. I noticed a tentative smile on his face. “You are stuck also, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was. For a long time.” But then I thought about my photography and the college application, the constant studying and the scholarship. “It’s a rotten feeling. But it lasts only as long as we let it, I guess. If we really want, we can get ourselves unstuck. It’s possible.”

“I don’t think so I will get to such a point. In jail perhaps, but …” he trailed off, and the bitterness in his eyes finished his words for him.

“You’ll get it together, Vinod. And I doubt it’ll be in jail,” I said, smiling. I got off the cot unsteadily, keeping my hand over the bandaging. “We just get to a point where we want to cut out all the BS, you know? I think, ultimately, we want to fix things up so we can at least live with ourselves. And maybe even be proud of ourselves, you know?”

“Proud of myself.” He considered those words for a moment. “I’m finding that difficult these days.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “I know that feeling too. Take it as a sign. You’re ready for change.”

Vinod got to his feet. From his pocket, he produced Pradeep’s money—three thousand rupees—folded and bound with a rubber band. He handed it to me.

“Why don’t
you
give it back to him?” I said.

He lowered his eyes, staring down at the pebbled tiles of the floor. Gradually, he drew back his hand and nodded. “I only hope he will forgive.”

“He will,” I said, “or I don’t know Pradeep.”

* *

Before we parted ways, Vinod offered to fill up the tank in the Luna.

“There’s a gas station in Ghatlodiya?” I joked. With no money in my pocket, I took him up on it.

On our way out through the patio, I asked Vinod about the Harley motorcycle in the corner. He told me he’d gotten it two years ago from the father of a friend of his at Xavier’s—a friend who’d since graduated. The father had brought the motorcycle back from the States after his graduate studies in the ’70s, and it had since fallen into disrepair. The bike, Vinod said, was a 1975 Aermacchi Harley and, “just junk when he gave it to me. It did not run. I had to take apart and bring back here on rickshaw or in bus, all the way from Navarangpura.” He laughed at the memory. “Needed umpteen parts, clutch, gearbox, and you cannot get parts for this bike in India, so I have to … improvise.”

I shook my head, impressed by his efforts. “And when you’re finished, you’ll have your dream motorcycle, eh?” I pointed to his Harley T-shirt, now sweaty and dust-streaked. “You’ve been working on it this whole time, and we never knew it?”

“Not whole time,” Vinod admitted. “I used to spend a lot of time with that bike, but in the last few months,” the sides of his mouth turned down, “not so much.” Then he shrugged, “Eh, it’s just hobby anyway. Nothing to mention as such.”

“Nothing to mention? Dude, this is impressive stuff.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.”

“But how impressive would it be to finish? And be riding around India on that bike?”

Vinod smiled under his moustache, and his face beamed. “It may happen. It will happen.”

* *

I picked up my Leaving Certificate from Rajkumar the following day. He asked about the bandage on my head, and I told him I’d gotten mixed up in a local riot. He tsked a few times and rummaged through the final exams mark sheets stacked beside him on the counter. Rajkumar finally found mine and pulled it from the stack. He glanced at it, scrunching his nose, and handed it to me. “But your father was so bright,” he said, his face putting on a look of mock-pity. “Such a pity.”

“It
is
a pity,” I said. “With marks like these, I may end up like you. See you around.”

Father D’Souza stamped the certificate with the college seal and signed it. He didn’t say a word to me, just sat hunched at his desk as he stamped the certificate and passed it back to me with a quickly worded “good luck.” He then took up a sheaf of papers and began stamping away some more. I wondered if he was happy to be getting rid of me, the American interloper. I wanted to tell him, “I’m sorry I made out with a girl in your library. But it really was the most fun I had all year,” and see what he would do. But I settled for, “Thank you, Father,” and made my exit.

* *

Pradeep was in his room, all smiles, and greeted me. He wasn’t wearing his customary sunglasses today, and it was strange seeing him without them. His eyes weren’t clouded-over the way I’d imagined but were dark and clear. His irises roved side to side, turned up along the upper rim of his eye sockets. Pradeep told me Vinod had stopped by that morning and returned the money. Vinod had told him everything that had happened, right down to the rock-to-the-head finale.

“How is it looking?” he asked.

“Check it out yourself.” I leaned forward, and he felt around the gauze bandaging.

I flinched. “Ouch.”

“Sorry, bhai.”

“Just kidding.”

“And, Vikram, you must have forgot this.”

He went across the room, his arms feeling for the edge of his desk under the window. From the desk, he picked up my camera.

“There it is,” I said, taking the camera from him. In all the commotion of finding Pradeep’s room broken into, I’d left it here and forgotten about it. I thought of the events of the previous day and my conversation with Vinod. “In all this,” I said, “I guess I feel worst for Vinod.”

“I do as well,” Pradeep said. He opened a desk drawer and began running his fingers over the contents. “I am having trouble finding my glasses today. Ah, here,” his fingers fished out his glasses, and he put them on. It struck me how, until I had seen him without his glasses, I hardly ever noticed his blindness. He lived beyond the handicap, above it. He had defeated it, and he welcomed the rest of us, while we were in his company, to share in that victory with him.

“When he returned the money, I was angry,” Pradeep said. “But not at him. Angry that it had gotten so bad that he felt he needed to steal it.”

“None of us could have suspected,” I said. I asked if he knew about Vinod trying to rebuild the Harley motorcycle.

“Oh-ho?” Pradeep sounded surprised. “He never told me!”

“It’s a big project,” I said, filling him in on how he’d taken the bike apart, transported it, reassembled the thing, and was now trying to bring it back to life.

“Brilliant,” Pradeep remarked.

“Wonder why he never even told
you
about it.”

Pradeep grabbed his stick leaning against his cot. “Maybe he was feeling embarrassed by it, I don’t know.” He stood there, thoughtfully, tapping the stick on the floor. I lined Pradeep up in the viewfinder of the camera and snapped a photo. “You said so yourself, no? The system is not kind to you if you function outside its rules.”

“If I did, you just said it better,” I said. “Pradeep, one question, though. I take it Vinod also lied about studying at all those schools in America?”

“He is having an uncle in New York,” Pradeep answered, his tone now solemn, almost secretive, “who he visited once after his father passed. Uncle paid for his ticket and all. But I think Vinod tried to stay longer there, illegally you see. His uncle could not find him. Then Vinod called from Florida after six weeks. It was a big tamasha, yaar. He got kicked out, his uncle paid fine or some such to immigration people, and I don’t think so he gets on well with his family.”

A knock sounded at the door, and Devasia craned his head in.

“Pradeep,” he began, “you have spoken with Vikram.” Then seeing I was there, bandaging and all, his eyes went wide. “My god!”

“It’s okay,” I told Devasia. “Glad you’re both here now,” and that’s when I caught them up on my American news.

“So it is official. You will not be with us,” Devasia sighed. “I had no idea you had even applied.”

“It was a lark,” I said. “A long shot.”

“Not lark,” Devasia countered. “Faith. It took faith to do it, no?”

For old times’ sake, I wanted to contradict him, tell him faith had nothing to do with it, that what got me the admission, the scholarship, the visa was a hundred percent pure luck. But then I wondered what it was that had gotten me this far, if not faith—faith in myself. “Damnit,” I replied. “You holy men are always right. How do you do it?”