SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. Where before Aparna refused to step out of bed, she now goes for walks, shuffling in badly fitting foam hospital slippers alongside a nurse who pushes her IV machine. Where she barely endured with indifference the quick swipe of a washcloth, now she wants to be helped to the bathroom so she can wash her face properly. She asks a delighted Umesh to bring her makeup bag, and each morning with unsteady fingers she applies lipstick and eyeliner and rubs jasmine oil behind her earlobes. When Umesh holds her hands in his and tells her how beautiful she looks, how thankful he is that she’s taken such a turn for the better, she smiles distractedly. One night when he kisses her before leaving, murmuring how lonely it is in bed, she finds herself imagining that it is Byron who says this. And thus she is forced to admit to herself the motivation for her improvement.
Byron’s visits to her are brief and irregular, sandwiched between surgeries and other, sicker patients. She waits for him with an eagerness that she recognizes as excessive. She does not touch him again, but against her will she finds herself fantasizing about it—and worse. This is humiliating, particularly since he seems to feel nothing but professional interest toward her as he examines her stitches and compliments her on her recovery process.
Aparna tells herself she’s behaving stupidly. She’s degenerating into a stereotype, the female patient infatuated with her doctor. Surely she’s more intelligent than that? She thinks she catches an amused look, once or twice, in a nurse’s eye. Stop it! she commands herself. Yet there she is next morning, sitting up in bed lipsticked and ready, trying to comb the knots out of her hair, which she has made the nurse shampoo for her. When the curtain moves, she looks up with her sultriest smile. But it is only Umesh, who wanted to surprise her on his way to work with a bouquet of irises from their garden, and who is baffled by the sulky monosyllables with which she answers him.
* * *
IT’S BYRON’S IDEA to bring the baby back. Aparna is reluctant and scared. She blurts out that the previous visit was a disaster, though she cannot bear to share its painful details even with him.
“Try it one more time,” he says. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Try it for me.”
This time it’s a lot better, once she gets over how big Aashish has grown. He looks nothing like the tiny, swaddled baby she’s held on to so tightly inside her head. He doesn’t recognize her at all. But that’s almost a relief, because now she doesn’t have to behave like a mother—she’s not sure she’d know how to, after all this time. It’s okay for her to be, instead, her awkward, prickly self.
But Aashish has a way of deprickling her. Maybe it’s his willingness to be amused by the finger games she invents. He likes it when she brings her face close to his and makes strange noises. When she runs out of noises to make, he watches her unblinkingly—“as though my face were the most interesting thing in the universe,” she says in laughing amazement to Umesh.
That intent, considering gaze, that looking out at the world with a pure and complete attention. She is delighted and humbled by it. She, too, wants to learn it. And if (as she fears) she’s too old for that, then she wants to be close to her son and learn it through him. So she practices over and over with the breath-blower the nurses have given her, the little balls inside plastic tubes which are supposed to strengthen her lungs. She forces herself to walk a little farther down the corridor each day. She even tries the visualization exercises in the book one of her friends brought, shutting her eyes and willing herself to feel her body glowing with disks of light. She still makes up her face every morning for Byron, still enjoys seeing him. But sometimes as they talk, she finds her mind straying. Those footsteps outside, could that be Umesh, bringing Aashish a little earlier today?
MIRACULOUSLY, THE DAY of her discharge arrives. The nurses make a special occasion of it, chipping in to buy her a baby outfit and a pair of hand puppets. They blow on noisemakers and clap as they wheel her down the corridor for the last time. From the back of the car, she waves at them with one hand as she holds tight to Aashish’s car seat with the other. When the car turns the corner, she realizes that she is crying.
Byron came in that morning for a final checkup and pronounced her cured. This isn’t exactly true. She still finds it tiring to walk the length of the corridor and back. She has to lower herself into a chair with aggravating slowness. Though she longs for a nice chili curry, she has been placed on a strict diet: interminable wastelands of applesauce and white bread loom ahead of her. Still, her heart leaped like a fish that had been tossed back into the lake.
Byron held out his hand. She touched it lightly. It was the first time she was touching him since the afternoon he told her how he’d saved her life. She wanted to say something to him about that, about love. But he was telling her he hoped to see her in his office in a week’s time, telling her to call his secretary, telling her to watch that diet. He filled up the space between them with mundaneness. When he stopped, she didn’t have anything left to say.
QUICK AND SLIM in a black T-shirt and shorts, Aparna moves through the children’s section of Macy’s, picking up items for Aashish’s first birthday. In her cart, in addition to goody-bag gifts for the children she has invited, is a large purple Barney, Aashish’s favorite TV character, and a red silk kite in the shape of a fish. She has worked hard to gain back her pre-pregnancy body and has, her friends claim enviously, even more energy than before. There’s a new impatience about her, too. At times it makes them uneasy. Get to the point, it seems to say. You don’t have as much time as you think.
Aparna has managed to forget most of what she wanted to forget about her illness. There are a few things. She’ll drive a mile out of her way so she doesn’t have to pass the squat gray building where she spent a month of her life. She can’t stand certain colors—cheery yellow, innocuous peach, cute pink. A particular hour of evening, when shadows the color of bruises cluster under windowsills, makes her stomach clench with anxiety. But she chalks these up as minor costs.
She flings a wave of dark hair over her shoulder and makes for the cash register, a beautiful woman with such confident eyes that people would never guess what she’s been through. At that moment she sees Dr. Michaels. He, too, is heading toward the cashier with something bunched up in his hand—a pullover, she thinks, but she is light-headed with an anguish she thought she had done with, and thus not sure.
She never did go back to see him. She told Umesh it was too painful, all those negative associations. Did he suspect other reasons? If so, he didn’t bring them up. There was a wary gentleness to how he handled her requests in those first days, as though she were a glass window. Any refusal would be a rock thrown into it. Thankfully, she thinks with a smile, recalling their energetic arguments about the birthday party, that didn’t last too long.
Aparna’s first impulse is to duck behind the enormous display of floral bedsheets across the way. But that would be cowardly. Besides, Dr. Michaels has spotted her already and walks up to her with his head slightly cocked, as though he isn’t quite sure that she’s who she is. She’s afraid he’ll be accusing or, worse still, sentimental, but he only puts out the hand she knows so intimately—the way we know objects out of our childhood, or our dreams—and touches her on the elbow.
“I’m so glad to see you,” he says. “How have you been? And your baby? A boy, wasn’t it?”
Aparna struggles to find an intelligent answer. But that touch—it disturbs her, bringing back that long-ago afternoon, her hand on his sun-tinted cheek. The embarrassment she had not felt then floods her face. Then she notices how he’s looking at her. Her strong, slender legs, the sheen in her newly washed hair—he gazes at them with the marveling eyes of someone who lives each day with bodies broken by disease.
She feels a rush inside her, but it is different from the clutching, shameful emotion she felt toward him in the hospital. It dizzies her. When she looks up, everything—his face, the bedsheet display, the ceiling of Macy’s—is tinged with a tender gold. She wa
nts to tell him that he will always be unique in her life, the man who opened her up and touched the innermost crevices of her body. Who traveled with her, Orpheus-like, the dusky alleyway between life and death.
“I’d love to hear all your news,” Dr. Michaels is saying. “Do you have time for coffee?” He’s holding her hand in a proprietorial fashion. As though she were still in the hospital, and he still in charge, thinks Aparna with slight annoyance. The look in his eyes has changed, and is easier to read. Once she had sat up in her sickbed, rubbing lipstick into cracked lips, darkening sunken eyes with shaky fingers, longing for such a look from him. Now it fills her with sadness because it reveals him to be no different from other men.
Aparna has time. The party isn’t until next week, and being a compulsive planner she has already organized the major details. Aashish, who is at the house of a friend with whom she exchanges child care twice a week, doesn’t need to be picked up until afternoon. But she whispers an apology and frees her hand from Dr. Michaels’s.
“Maybe at another time, then?” he says. “That might be better—some afternoon when we aren’t rushed. For lunch, or maybe drinks? We could go up to San Francisco . . .” He takes out a card, writes a number on the back. “My cell phone,” he says. “Call me . . . ?”
She takes the card and inclines her head slightly. It is a gesture not of assent—as he takes it to be, she can tell by his pleased, boyish grin—but of acceptance. The acceptance of frailty—hers and his, their different, inevitable frailties. She will never tell him—or anyone—about how, just a moment ago, everything was touched with gold. Some things can’t be spoken. The body alone knows them. It holds them patiently, in its silent, intelligent cells, until you are ready to see.
When, with a jaunty wave, Dr. Michaels turns the corner, she drops his card—but gently—into a garbage can. At the cash register, laying her purchases on the counter, she closes her eyes for a moment. What, then, are we to do? No answers come. Only an image: a hillside brown as a lion’s skin, her husband running with a spool, her son yelling his excitement as she releases the kite. The fabric unfurling above them into the brief, vivid shape of human joy.
THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN
THROUGH THE YEARS of my childhood when there wasn’t much else to hold on to, I had a fantasy. Those rum-scented evenings when Father’s slurred yells slammed into the peeling walls of wherever we were living at the moment, I would lie wedged behind a sofa or under a bed, and close my eyes and slide into it. Sometimes my brother lay there also, curled tight against me, sucking his thumb, although Mother had told him he was too old to be doing that. The knobs of his spine would push into my chest; his heart would thud against my palm like the hooves of a runaway horse—like my own heart, so that after a while I couldn’t tell the two apart. Maybe that’s how he, too, became part of the fantasy.
Our family moved a lot those days, flurried migrations that took us from rooming house to dingier rooming house as my father lost one job after another. He always managed to find a new one because he was a skilled machinist—perhaps that was part of his trouble, knowing that he would. But each job was a little worse than the previous one, a small movement down the spiral that our life had turned into. We never spoke of it—we were not a family much given to discussion. But we saw it in our mother’s face, the way she sometimes broke off in the middle of a sentence and stared out the window, forgetting that my brother and I were waiting.
We children learned some skills of our own as we traveled through the small hot factory towns of north India that after a while blurred into a single oily smell, a grimy dust that stung the nostrils. We knew how to be almost invisible as we sat on the last bench in class, not knowing the answers because we had missed the previous lessons or didn’t have the books. Or as we sat in the far corner of the canteen at lunchtime because we didn’t want anyone to see the rolled brown rutis Mother packed for us in old paper. We looked longingly—but sidewise, so no one would guess—at the starched uniforms of the others, their tiffin boxes filled with sandwiches made from store-bought bread so white it dazzled the eye. Each time they laughed, we flinched, pulling the edge of a skirt over a bruised thigh, a shirtsleeve over discolored finger marks left on a forearm. Were they talking about us—how Mother had asked the sabji-wallah for credit, how Father had to be helped home from the toddy shop last payday? How long before they learned of the noises that sometimes exploded from our flat at night? We learned to arrange our hair so that the pink ridges of a forehead scar would hardly show. To look casually into the middle distance, as though we didn’t notice the curious eyes. To not think of the futile, scattered trailings we had left behind: a book of fairy tales, a stray yellow dog we used to feed, a mango tree perfect for climbing, the few friendships formed before we knew better.
We. That was how I thought of my brother in those days, as though he were as much a part of me as my arm or leg. Indispensable, to be protected instinctively, like one shields the face from a blow, but not something one thinks about. It never occurred to me as he followed me around in silence (he was not a talkative boy) that he might feel differently about our life—that knotted, misshapen thing, like a fracture healed wrong—which I accepted because it was what I’d always known. Perhaps that was my first mistake.
The year I was eleven and my brother eight, we ended up in Duligarh, an Assam oil town as sagging and discolored as a cardboard box left to rot in the rain. It was a town of many toddy shops, all of which my father would soon discover. A town where credit was difficult to get, where from the first people looked at us with faces like closed fists. I didn’t blame them. We were a far cry from the model families displayed on the family-planning posters the municipal office had put up all over town.
One of these posters was pasted on the back wall of our school. I remember it perfectly from all the afternoons I stood there looking up until my neck ached. My fantasy fed on that poster through those sweat-studded afternoons, spreading its insidious roots, leading me to my other errors.
In the poster, a young couple held hands and smiled into each other’s eyes while a boy and girl played tag around them. The man carried a shiny leather briefcase. The woman’s gold chain sparkled in the sun, and the edge of her pink sari lifted in the breeze. The children wore real leather Bata shoes, the kind I’d seen in the store window in Lal Bahadur Market, spit-shined to a mirror polish. We Two, Our Two, declared the poster, as though it were the mantra for a happy life. We Two, Our Two. Where then had our parents gone wrong?
Sometimes I stood watching until the sky changed to the dull yellow of late afternoon and my brother tugged at my arm in exasperation. Let’s go, Didi, I’m hungry. Why do you like to waste your time staring at that silly picture? He wanted, instead, to be shaking down ripe guavas from the trees on the edge of the orchard across the street. People shouldn’t plant their trees along the public road if they don’t want anyone to pick the fruit, he said, thrusting out his chin, when I protested.
Sometimes we missed the bus because of that poster and had to walk home, trudging through the heat, our clothes sticking to our skin, our books getting heavier, all the way past the edge of town. Walking through the bazaar I would feel the shopkeepers’ unsmiling eyes on us, a lanky girl with hair pulled back in two tight, careful braids, a juice-stained boy with his wrists sticking out of a shirt he’d outgrown, striding impatiently ahead of his sister. Did they connect us with our parents—that woman who came down to the bazaar at the end of the day, moving among the dull-scaled fish and shriveled beans, her beautiful face like a parched oleander, that man who held his body with brilliant belligerence like a boxer who knew that the key to his survival was to trust no one? Did they compare us to the family on the poster?
IN ASSAM WE lived in an old British bungalow which we children loved. It was the first real house we’d lived in, a long, low structure built for some forgotten purpose outside of town. It was inconveniently far from everything (it took Father an hour to bike to the factory whe
re he tested drilling equipment), but the rent was cheap and there were no prying neighbors. If it was lonely for Mother all day when we were gone, she didn’t complain. Perhaps she was glad to have the time to herself. Only occasionally would she grumble that the house was falling apart on us.
And it was. Perhaps in sympathy with some other, invisible disintegration, flakes of falling plaster coated everything like giant dandruff. The windows would not shut properly, so that malevolent-looking insects with burnished stings wandered in at will. The roof leaked and when it rained, which was often, we had to make our way around strategically placed buckets.
But we children thought it was perfect—the wooden porch where we played marbles, the claw-footed bathtub where Mother would pour steaming water for our baths, the spear-shaped grilles at the windows that made us feel as if we were living in a medieval fortress.
Best of all we loved the servant’s quarter, a small cottage set far back into the bamboo grove that grew behind the house. My brother and I were the first to discover it. When we told Mother, she gave an unusually bitter laugh. A servant’s quarter for us! she said, the corners of her mouth turning downward. What a joke! For a while she kept asking Father to see if he could rent it out to one of the factory watchmen. But nothing ever came of that. Perhaps we were too far from the factory. Perhaps Father, who wasn’t the type to go around asking, never mentioned it to anyone. My brother believed it was because he and I had prayed so hard for it to stay empty.
The cottage was dim and cool even in the brassy Assam afternoons because it sat under a huge tree of a kind I’d never seen before, with large round leaves like upturned palms. Spiderwebs hung from its ceilings, intelligently angled to enmesh intruders, and in the far room we discovered a trapdoor that blended almost perfectly into the wooden flooring. Underneath was a small space with a packed dirt floor, just right for a make-believe prison or an underground cave. We told no one of it, and never used it ourselves. It was enough to know it was there. Instead, we dusted off a rope cot that was in the corner and dragged it over the trapdoor to hide it. Then we smuggled an old sheet from the house. In the afternoons when we got back from school we lay on the cot in the half-dark and I told my brother stories.