Trespassing (6 page)

A sixth, ‘Me!’

Seven, ‘His father, ehmak.’

And eight, ‘Look how his jealous mother keeps him all to herself!’

It was true. While they jerked and pinched her only child and hurled insults her way, Anu still held him, and now they were all entangled, resulting in a chorus of loud protests from small bodies in the arms of each aunt, small bodies with wills and suckers of their own. He fell headfirst into their lair.

‘Ay haay,’ shoved Anu. ‘Let the boy sit down at least.’

She gripped what little she could find of Daanish’s arm, disentangled it from the others, and with determined possessiveness, led him into the kitchen. The others followed like a school of squid. ‘Sit down, bete.’

Scowling at his aunts in black and the babies in their arms, Daanish pulled a chair up next to Anu. She emptied several plastic food containers into metal pots then lit the burners of the stove. His aunts continued making observations, their children still shrieked, but at least no one touched him.

‘I’m really not hungry Anu, just tired,’ he protested weakly. ‘You haven’t even told me how you are.’ She never shared. Just fussed.

‘What is there to tell? Allah has returned my son to me safely, even if He chose to take my husband.’

Her back was to him but he knew she was crying. Softly – tears never interfered with her work – but steadily.

How differently his father would have received him. In place of his mother’s flurry, a thick veil of smoke would infuse the air as he sucked one Dunhill after another. He’d ask what it was like there. Daanish would only select details that would tickle him: the ghostly reflection of an opossum on clear summer nights; pink-haired waitresses with pierced noses (the doctor would guffaw at this perversion of his most favored female accessory, the nose-pin); having a wisdom tooth extracted to lite music: ‘Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you’; children delightfully camouflaged for Halloween. Anu never absorbed curiosities.

She was saying, ‘I wanted so much to come to the airport but who would drive? Your one chacha has the flu and I didn’t want to trouble the other again. He went twice to the airport already but the flight kept getting delayed. We didn’t know – none of the airline people answered the phone. You must be so exhausted.’ She stopped abruptly. Tears stained her face. ‘How do you like the new table? I got it soon after you left. Your father never even noticed. You can have one just like it when you settle down.’

He frowned. Settle down?

‘Your father took too long to shed his restlessness. That’s why you had him for barely twenty-two years. If you do it earlier your family can see more of you. To settle down is to do the world a favor.’

‘Oh Anu.’

The doctor would call this
her
logic. He’d say it the way he said
her
blood. It was the subject of most of their fights, he having migrated from Hyderabad, she from Amritsar. She traced her ancestry hundreds of years back to the Caucasus. Hence her pristine white skin, which, to her dismay, Daanish
hadn’t inherited (though she consoled herself that darkness hardly mattered as much in a boy). The doctor said it was pathetic how people grasped at anything to prove they carried foreign blood. And since the foreigners – from the Central Asians to the Macedonians, Arabs and Turks – were conquerors, it was the half-teaspoon of conqueror’s blood that made people like Anu gloat over their pedigree. ‘Everyone here has a master-subjugator complex. No one takes pride in being a son or daughter of
this
soil,’ he snapped at her once, scooping up a mound of earth from the yard and throwing it back impatiently.

One week later, he was gone again, traveling across the seas, bringing back shells for Daanish.

Anu arranged several steaming dishes before him. Their rich cardamom and ghee scent on this early morning, after Daanish had traveled some seven thousand miles and been sleepless for nearly as many hours, gave him a headache of astounding symmetry. Commencing at the forehead, it cleaved his skull evenly in two, like a coconut shell. It was as if the two halves were trying to find the one-in-a-million combination that could fit them together again. He gazed in agony, first at the dishes, then his mother, then at a baby cousin who’d escaped from his mother, and raced toward him on all fours.

‘I’m tired,’ Daanish muttered again.

‘Boti!’ the child squealed. The mother, delighted by her young one’s forwardness, hurried to the table. Resting her wide hips on a cushioned chair that went
pish!
she proceeded to feed her child one of the dishes Daanish’s mother had set before him.

‘You’re tired because you’re
hungry,’
Anu stressed, scowling at her sister-in-law.

Daanish’s other aunts drifted toward the food. Some of them sat, others stood, all picked at the various curries, kebabs, and tikkas for Daanish. They fed their children
generously, but never offered a word of praise. In the doctor’s presence, Daanish’s aunts had never so blatantly used Anu. The doctor had died without ever knowing his sisters. He’d died without knowing Daanish. He’d died. Slowly, and with a soft, defeated eye, Daanish began to eat. Anu dried her eyes, smiling gratefully.

When a faint yellow light washed the kitchen, he rose at last. The sun was rising. He gave his mother a tight hug. ‘I’m falling over with fatigue. Everything was delicious.’

She kissed and blessed him copiously. ‘Sleep well, jaan. There is all day tomorrow to answer me.’

Mounting the staircase Daanish scratched his head, wondering what the question was. He threw back the door to his room.

The interior was unrecognizable. Once a warm, moody beige, the walls were now a clinical white. So were the built-in bookshelves that replaced the rickety ones on which his father had placed books for him to read.

The doctor had never presented a gift in wrapping paper with a card. He left it where he believed it belonged. This often meant the discovery wasn’t made for days, even weeks. It was in response to this ‘game’ that Daanish developed a keen memory that gradually evolved into an urgent need for systematic tidiness that Becky termed ‘anal retentive’. By memorizing the exact position of every object in the house, including every book, Daanish could identify a new one. If he could see it, even if, as a child, he was too short to reach it, his father let him have it.

Anu knew nothing of this. When the doctor presented
her with gifts that popped up in plant pots, spice jars, lipstick tubes (a meter of resham so fine it fit in the finger-sized cylinder perfectly, so when Anu twirled it, out sprang the cloth, softly on her cheek, exactly as the doctor had envisioned), parandas and petticoats, Anu first gasped, then placed the surprise in a more suitable spot. She never strove to discover the impulse behind what she called her husband’s unsettled ways. But Daanish went along with his every fancy to the point where the father’s imagination became the son’s order. Anu, by changing the color of the walls and replacing the bookshelf, closet, floor lamp, even the bed, had changed for ever the order of things. Without knowing it, she’d eliminated the doctor’s presence from Daanish’s room. The one at college was more his own.

He dropped onto the new bed on which the lovely guipure bedcover Anu had made him years before was now a starched white sheet. When had she made the changes? Not after the death, that was barely four days ago. It would have been a breach of decorum. The family expected her to mourn, not pack or decorate. Then when? Why didn’t his father stop her if she’d done it during his lifetime?

His temples throbbed. The headache had lost its symmetry. He probed around his neck for knots.

Perhaps his father had never entered Daanish’s room while he was away. Perhaps it made him sad to be in it without him.

The new bed was no longer under the window, where he’d spent so many nights gazing up at the stars. It lay beside the new closet, and the landscape outside was mostly invisible. He saw only a patch of sky and an antenna from the roof of a house piercing it. The house was one of the four to have gone up in his absence. Barely ten inches from his window was the skeleton of yet another one.

He lay down, shoes still dangling on his feet. This mattress was soft; the old one had been firm. Every time he switched
position, the springs bounced. Finally, he lay on his back, arms stretched to still the movement.

He could hear his aunts puttering downstairs, covering the floors with sheets, piling siparahs on side-tables. Soon pages would rustle and the recitation would commence. He didn’t want to be a part of it; it wasn’t a part of his father. He had to find a way of braving the ensuing weeks.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. Were his father here the alarm clock would sound the BBC chime. A crow perched on the windowsill. It was large and gray-hooded. Our crows are bigger than American crows, he thought, eyelids drooping. They’re the only things we have that are bigger.

Four days earlier, she’d sat on his bed, fingers tracing the weave of the guipure bedcover sewn at the cove.

Once Daanish’s father had shown him life beneath the sea, it was hard for the child to surface again. Now, it was essential that all the images of his submarine life be removed from his room. Then he might return.

She folded the bedcover into a small square, then spread a new cloth from the market in its place. Then she began emptying his cupboards, removing all his shells and shell boxes. Along the way, she paused to marvel at the careful system with which he organized the pieces. Labels drawn in purple ink recorded where each had been found and when. Sometimes he’d even noted particulars about the shell’s life or collector’s value. The best ones were in the left drawer because, he’d explained, left-handed shells were a rarity. He had only four in his entire collection of nearly three hundred.

She picked up a box the doctor had brought back from a trip to the Philippines. It was the only gift he’d ever placed
directly in his son’s hands. He’d been too excited to wait for Daanish to find it. The child had stared into his father’s eyes, exactly like his own, and both pairs of hands had trembled. The box was of finely chiseled, green soapstone but the child had only partially registered its beauty. He’d pulled back the gold seahorse clasp and beamed, stupefied and delirious, at the chambered nautilus inside. That was what the doctor had called it. He’d said it was left-handed and that he’d never even heard of anyone finding a leftie nautilus. But there it was, perfectly intact. The doctor had dabbed it with mineral oil to preserve the pearly coat.

Anu examined the spiraling beauty. It shimmered on the cream-colored cushion in the box, alive even in death. Underneath was the note, written in the smart, controlled handwriting of Daanish the thirteen-year-old:
December ‘83, on Aba’s return from the Pacific. Called chambered nautilus because it has many rooms inside. Aba says its brain is very developed, it has three hearts, and its blood is blue. He knows because he’s a doctor. It’s 180 million years old, as old as a dinosaur. What a find!

Also on the cushion was a close relative of the nautilus, an argonaut. Anu clearly remembered the day Daanish had found it at the cove.

She tucked the slip of paper back into the box and put it on top of the pile in her arms. From downstairs, the doctor called. He was dying, and there were things he wanted to get off his chest first. She’d heard enough already. Once, perhaps, she would have heard it all. But gone were the days when she would have worn his confessions like a string around her neck. She put the heap of boxes down on the floor. Then she lay on the new bed and spread the guipure lace around her, remembering the cove.

It was shaped like the round neck of a kameez, some forty feet across. The right shoulder was a cluster of enormous
rocks, the first of which Daanish called the shoulder-boulder. When he and his father swam, Anu hoisted herself upon it. Around her spilled yarns of the guipure lace she turned into tablecloths, curtains, and more.

She began the bedcover on a chilly early morning in November as Daanish waded into the sea, shivering. The water was cold and composed. She’d tested it while they cleaned their snorkels. An aquamarine shawl enveloped her shoulders. She’d worn her hair long in those days, and left it loose, though it would take hours to disentangle later. The doctor liked it that way. He’d drape it over her shoulder, then gaze at her profile from the water. He preferred her left side, the one that wore the ruby nose-pin he’d given, not given but hidden, at the bottom of a perfume bottle. When it was noticed, she’d not known what to do: empty the bottle and risk splashing drops of the expensive scent, or wait till it had finished? She ended up pouring Chanel into a jar, retrieving the ruby, then pouring it back, spilling his money all over her dressing table and sneezing uncontrollably.

The shoulder-boulder was naturally pitted to seat her. The doctor hollered for her to come in with him, but she flatly refused to wear a bathing suit. He taunted her modesty because he knew she’d never give it up. If she were the changing type, he would not have married her.

The bedcover in her lap was taking a surprising turn. Patterns unplanned emerged and she obliged by seeing them through. When Daanish kicked around the boulder, heading for the deeper sea, he waved. She waved back. What would he see? For a moment, it pained that she’d never know. But this was nothing new. Her husband often left for voyages to the bigger ocean, where she’d seen islands peppering the globe in his study, and young girls dressed in flowers peppering his photos. He was always irritable upon his return. Once she asked Daanish to ask him why. The son reported cheerfully, ‘He says I’ll understand when I grow up,
something about falling into the trap of comparison.’ But she always felt his frustration had something to do with the photos.

One day, he’d send her son to one of those dots on the globe. She prayed for him to return untransformed. Like her, he should not be the changing type.