The Leaving of Things (35 page)

“We get our information from above,” he laughed. Devasia said this was his last day in Ahmedabad. He’d be returning to Madras tomorrow till college started up again.

“Then it’s a good thing you stopped by,” I said. “Otherwise, who knows when we’d have met again.”

“We will meet one day surely.”

“You think so?”

“One day, I am sure.”

We strolled over to the mess hall. Only a smattering of students now. The aroma of rotis, vegetables, and dal wafted here as deliciously as ever. Devasia took his herculean helpings of everything on the menu. Pradeep had already eaten but took a plate of rice and yogurt anyway. I actually took a plate myself, a sampling of everything.

“But if I get sick,” I told Devasia, “I’m coming after you.”

I snapped pictures of us in the mess, with the servers who I’d seen each time I’d come here with Devasia. And then we said our goodbyes, making promises to keep in touch. Devasia, in his florid hand, wrote down his address at the hostel and in Madras too. “Come to South,” he said. “It’s much more beautiful than this Ahmedabad.”

“I will,” I said. “But don’t knock Ahmedabad. This is my town, you know.”

* *

An express letter came from Wisconsin. It explained about the scholarship. The art department liked the portfolio enough to offer to cover half my tuition. Along with the loan and whatever on-campus work I could get, my father and I figured we had things covered.

“I’m proud of both of you,” he told Anand and me after he finished reading the letter. We stood out on the balcony, watching the evening sun swell over the shopping complex and the endless and expanding tracts of cement housing colonies beyond. Anand swatted at pigeons just above us, roosting in the eaves, trying to distract them, and the traffic honked and rattled around the crossroads. From the dusty lot of the shopping complex, the “music truck” blared its repertoire of Bollywood show tunes while shoppers browsed the tables of music cassettes under its awning.

“And Anand, I know this has not been the easiest transition,” my father said. “Anand? Stop that, listen to me—” Anand turned his attention from the pigeons. “I know this has not been the easiest transition. But in spite of that, you’re doing better in Hindi and Sanskrit than even I was doing at your age.” He patted Anand on the back and told him how proud he was.

I agreed with him and asked Anand how he did it. His answer was matter-of-fact: “Once you figure out one language—say, Gujarati—it’s not too big a jump to figuring out Hindi and from there to Sanskrit. They’re all related, so ….” He shrugged. There was a strangely dismissive tone to his answer, as if he couldn’t be bothered with our baffled admiration and didn’t want to spend much time explaining his own genius. He turned his attention to the traffic, leaning his thin frame against his elbows on the parapet. “I still want to go back to America.”

“But so long as you’re in India,” my father smiled, “I want you to love it.” He turned around to address both of us. “I’m thinking of building a house in Gandhinagar. I’ve been looking at land there, and it’s much quieter and cleaner than the city. Close to the Institute. Your mother will like it.” He waved his hand at the plot of ground in front of our bungalow. “She’ll be able to garden properly there. Lots more land.”

“Am I going to have to switch schools again?” Anand asked.

“Not for another year, and only if you want to.” He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, plans for the home taking shape in his mind. My mother and he were going out for a walk, he told us, and he handed me back my letter. “Take care of that. That’ll be a souvenir one day.”

Anand and I stayed out on the balcony watching it grow dark, the flash and pulse of traffic. Swallows made graceful arcs in the open sky.

“So I guess you’re gone, huh?” Anand said. “You think you’ll ever come back?”

“Of course I’ll come back.”

“To visit?”

“To visit, but after college, who knows? I could come back or stay … don’t know.”

After a long pause, Anand said, “Yeah, but what about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re leaving, and that leaves me here.” He turned his head toward me. I sensed him staring at me. “No one here knows what we know.”

“Anand, I’m not leaving you. I’m just going away to school.” Anand nodded, leaning his back against the parapet, and nervously fidgeted with his fingers.

“Look,” I said, “you’ll be in ninth grade. In four years, you’ll be out of there too.”

“I don’t mean about four years from now. I’m talking about right now.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t given much thought to how Anand might react to my leaving. He always seemed so engrossed in one thing or another—his studies, video games, movies, baseball (or cricket, depending on his mood), and his friends. “It’s not terrible, is it, Anand?” I asked. “You seem to be getting along well here.”

“But they don’t know our life, what it used to be, how much it’s changed,” he said, the words rushing out. “Only you and I do. My friends are all right, but they think America is some big Disneyland. You know, like what they see in the movies. They don’t know America or what this has been like for me. And Pappa, he just wants this all to work out for Mummi and him, and that means America’s pretty much forgotten about here. Only you and I went through what we did.”

“You’re not forgotten about,” I said. “One thing I found out, what you want is what Pappa wants even though it may not always seem like it. And he’ll do whatever he can to back you up.” I stepped up next to him, propped my arms against the parapet. “It’s going to be fine. You’re going to have a great next four years. And after that, you can go wherever, do whatever you like.”

“Maybe I won’t even want to go to America anymore in four years.”

“You might not,” I said, “but that would mean something even better came along and took its place, right?”

Down at the gate, we noticed a rickshaw pull up. The rickshaw driver got out, unlatched the gate, swung it open,
and got back inside the rickshaw and puttered into the gravel drive, round the bend, disappearing around the corner to the downstairs doors. It couldn’t be Hemant Uncle; he’d have driven up from Baroda in his own car. Maybe Kamala Auntie was paying us another visit.

I unbolted the front doors and switched on the stairwell lights. As I descended the steps, I could hear the rickshaw motor idling and voices talking outside, near the front entrance. I threw on the outside light and opened the doors to see Devasia lifting a wooden box, about twice the size of a tackle box, from the rickshaw. Its brown veneer was flaked and chipped.

“Devasia?” I called. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a train?”

Devasia turned around, beamed his perfect teeth at me. “I am on my way.”

I stepped out, and we shook hands. “What’re you doing here?” I noticed suitcases filling every square inch of the rickshaw’s backseat except for the far corner where Devasia could perch. The driver, meanwhile, slumped in his seat, staring ahead idly, smoking his bidi.

“On my way to station,” Devasia said. “But before that, Pradeep wanted me to give you this.” He held out the brown case. I took it by the handle. The thing was heavy and looked like it had been dragged around for years, through mud, up and down mountains. “And here is a note from him,” he said, producing a folded slip of paper from the front pocket of his kurta.

“Thanks,” I said, asking if he had time to come upstairs, chat, meet my family.

“I would like that,” he said, “but I should be going. My train leaves in one hour.” He placed one foot inside the
rickshaw. “Hold on to my Madras address,” he said. “You are always welcome there. Also, send me some photos.”

“Will do,” I said, wishing him a safe journey. “I expect to see them framed and on display when I visit.”

“Promise.” He smiled, and in Hindi instructed the rickshaw driver to proceed. I watched the rickshaw putter away, its tiny headlamp bobbing like a giant firefly.

* *

Back upstairs, I unfolded Pradeep’s note:

Dearest Vikram,

I think you will get better use out of this than I am able. Please accept it as a token of my appreciation for your help settling difficulties with Vinod. I hope it is still in working order. It has not been used in many years.

I unlatched the top of the case. Anand stood beside me, as curious as I was. A whiff of mustiness spiced with cumin and turmeric hit us as soon as I opened the lid to find a film camera inside.

It was a bulky camera, industrial brown, molded out of thick plates of steel, with the words “Bell & Howell” on a tiny metal plate. I imagined you could crack a skull with it. It seemed indestructible. A turret in front with three lenses, fixed, of different sizes—like those eye-testing gizmos in the optometrist’s office—and next to the large turret, a smaller one, a miniature of the first, connected to a tube that ran
the length of the camera’s body ending at a tiny eyepiece. I flipped the camera over to find a metallic windup key edged with rust and nearly as wide as my palm. I turned the camera over in my hands then returned to the note:

I am at my family home in Bharuch and remembered only yesterday that we had this stored in a trunk for many years. My family is not using it so I hope it has found a home with you. This film camera used to belong to my late uncle who was a cameraman in Indian Army during 1960s. There are also a few old film rolls which, who knows, may still be usable. If not, I’m sure you can find more in States. I am sending it with Devasia to pass on to you.

I am off for Bombay for remainder of vacation and shall send you copy of my recordings when all is complete. Wishing you much success in your future, Vikram bhai. Please write at your earliest.

Best wishes,

Pradeep

“Check it out,” Anand said. He pulled out three cases of square black plastic. Masking tape sealed their lids shut. I peeled open the tape and pried open one of the cases. Inside, a film roll—the acetate shone in the room’s white light—within a black metal spool. Quickly, I snapped shut the lid.

“What was that?” Anand asked. “Is it old?”

“Film,” I said. “Probably.”

From the bottom of the brown case, Anand pulled out a booklet, stained and dusty. “Man, this looks ancient,” he said. “Is it from a museum?”

I blew a film of dust off the booklet and wiped it clean before I leafed through it. It was the camera’s instruction manual, and it looked at least thirty years old. “It might have a bit of kick left before it’s time for the museum,” I said.

I needed to be frugal with the film rolls. The next day, I managed to get one of them threaded inside the magazine, using the diagram in the booklet. I didn’t dare press the button till I knew what all the dials and levers and the settings and the different lenses did. Anand lost patience with me after a while and went over to his friend Jyoti’s house to play Nintendo.

Finally, I just couldn’t resist. I had to shoot some footage and listen to the film whir inside the camera. Through the eyepiece, I framed my mother, her hands actually, as she sifted through grains of rice out on the balcony. It wasn’t a soft gliding sound, as I’d hoped, but an angry stuttering: the film had jammed in the gate. I went back to my room, tried rethreading it till the film whirred softly through the magazine. That sounded right.

I went down to the garden, ran off close-ups of the flowering shrubs, the textures and elliptical designs left by the tire tracks in the drive. I roamed the H.L. College cricket grounds—got off shots of the wickets, the sunburned pitch, the shady neems that lined the field’s far side. Then I went out under the peepul at the center of the crossroads. I’d looked out at this spot of ground every day from our balcony and couldn’t believe this was the first time I was standing in it. Farmers in white turbans and tunics took shelter from the heat here, sitting or lying on the floor of their wooden carts. Their bullocks dozed against the great tree roots. The farmers smiled as I framed them and went back to sleep as I bopped from angle to angle, aiming the camera lens up at the gnarled, sun-flickering tree branches,
at the Fellini-esque circus of scooters and rickshaws, and at flies diving like kamikazes at the bulls’ ears.

As inconspicuously as I could, I got at something I’d been framing in my mind for months: the cleaning girl’s copper-dark hands against the shimmer of her bangles, her sun-scorched face upturned as she hung the wash on the line, the swirl of her skirt as she moved through the bungalow.

Dharmanshu Uncle sent us a postcard, asking after us, and to apologize for our summer tour of the northeast not panning out—the one he’d proposed during our Christmas visit. He said a roadworks project had stalled, and he had to postpone taking time off for his vacation till June. He’d been thinking about my mother’s suggestion, though, to visit Dilip in London finally. I wrote him back immediately to tell him my plans to return to the States. But more than that, to express to him how glad I was he’d decided to visit Dilip, to see a bit of the world after meaning to for so long. I was sorry our excursion to Sikkim and Darjeeling had to be put off, I said. Still, I couldn’t pass up the photographs from a trip like that, so let’s put it on our agenda. Let’s make it soon, I said, because time has a way of getting away from us.

At the end of May, the cleaning girl suddenly went away. My mother said she’d gone back to her village in northwestern Gujarat. I asked her if she’d gotten married, maybe to that man I’d seen her with in the stairwell so many times.

“No, he was a drunk, they found out,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I knew he wasn’t right for her.”

The girl had been vague about her going away. A match had been found was all she would say, and she needed to leave the city. We never saw her again.

* *

I got the stitches from my forehead removed at a clinic just across Nehru Bridge, not too far from that lunatic asylum of a college where I took my final exams. In the side mirror of a parked scooter, I checked the scar the rock had left. It seared two inches up the right side of my forehead, with small dots where the thread had pulled through. Quite the war wound, I thought.