The Golden Son

  As he observed Mahesh’s frenetic activity in those first few days after the attack, Anil wondered if they each suffered guilt in inverse proportion to the physical injuries they’d sustained. Anil felt bad compared with Baldev, and Mahesh, without a scratch on him, was worse still. Anil thought of Amber and wondered how she was faring, but he couldn’t bring himself to go see her, couldn’t justify spending time away from Baldev’s bedside, dividing himself like that.

  When he finally went to her apartment a few days later, Amber opened the door, stepped into his arms, and began to cry. She couldn’t seem to stop crying. Anil held her tighter, trying to protect against the sobs that wracked her thin frame. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said, once she had composed herself slightly. “I have these nightmares, then I wake up and you’re not here.” She clutched his forearms. “God, I’ve missed you.” Anil walked her over to the couch and sat her down. Amber rested her chin on her knees, shuddering with halted breaths. “Momma says this just proves big cities are full of trouble. She wants me to move back home.”

  Anil waited to feel something in reaction to the idea of Amber leaving, but he was numb. “Maybe . . . maybe she’s right,” he said. “If you don’t feel safe.” With me, he didn’t say. If you don’t feel safe with me. He’d seen a different person in Amber the night of the attack. Under the fluorescent lights of the parking lot, the sunny woman he knew was replaced with a frail young girl. Anil felt responsible in some way for her transformation. Something had broken, in them and between them, and he was not sure it could be mended. He closed his eyes, trying to think of something to say, and felt her hand drop away from his arm.

  Amber began to cry again. “I wish everything could just go back to the way it was.”

  “How can it?” Anil whispered, his eyes watering. “How can things ever be the same?” They wept together, holding each other on the couch where they first made love, until their eyes and hearts were raw to the point of pain. “I want you to be happy, Amber. You deserve that.”

  Amber nodded, saying she wished the same for him.

  He kissed her tear-stained face for the last time.

  Then he left.

  FOR THE first few days afterward, Anil felt as if his ribcage had been hollowed out whenever he thought of Amber, gone from his life.

  The police came to the hospital and took statements. When Baldev regained consciousness, they asked if he wanted to press charges against Lee and Rudy, but he declined. Anil knew from the look in his eyes and by his nervous laugh that Baldev was scared. He knew it too because he had the same fear himself, of what could happen if he was caught in the parking lot at night, or went to check the mailboxes in the morning. Once Baldev was moved out of the ICU and onto a regular ward, Anil returned to work at the hospital. Some residents offered condolences and sympathetic looks, while the senior staff treated him with the same disregard as always, which Anil found oddly reassuring. Life at Parkview would go on as it always had, despite his world having been upended.

  Over the next several weeks, even as Baldev’s medical condition improved—as his lungs re-expanded and pulmonary function resumed—it was clear to Anil that something about his friend had changed. The mischievous glint in his eyes had been replaced with a certain heaviness, and even when he smiled at Anil’s weak jokes, there remained an underlying sorrow in his expression. Baldev would undergo surgery to repair the torn tendons in his shoulder, and to restore his patella to its former condition, but Anil did not know whether his friend would ever be the same again.

  He began a new rotation in the emergency room, which was mercifully busy and left him with little waking time at the end of the day to think about anything, including the loss of his first love. Eric Stern gave him interesting cases and asked Anil to present them to the attending on rounds. He spent as little time as possible at home, grabbing dinner at the hospital or at the diner with Charlie, who had finally stopped moonlighting as a gypsy cab driver now that his brother-in-law had secured a new job. Anil spent his infrequent days off with Mahesh, who distracted him with bootlegged copies of the latest Bollywood features. He became accustomed to sleeping alone again, but was always reminded of how empty his bed was when he woke in the morning. Whenever he felt a pang over Amber, he thought of Baldev’s pain and reminded himself that this was a punishment he deserved.

  Anil didn’t drive out to the lake for over a month, and when he finally did, he was surprised to find it populated with individual runners like him, dodging between baby strollers and avoiding bicyclists. The times he’d gone there with Amber, he’d somehow formed the impression it was all strolling couples, enjoying the private cloak of their love. He began to go to the lake every weekend, pushing himself to improve both his pace and endurance, finally making it all the way around the nine-mile perimeter. He no longer cared to imagine what was inside the beautiful houses that lined the path. When he ran, he focused on the pounding of his feet on the pavement and the beautiful rhythmic pumping of his lungs—the grace of his perfectly functioning body.

  Amber was gone, and Baldev lay broken in the hospital. All that was left for Anil was medicine, the one thing that had brought him here in the first place. He continued to work on his infectious disease project with Charlie, even as he was finalizing his proposal to take to Dr. Tanaka for a cardiology research study. It was crazy to undertake two research efforts during his residency, but Anil would not abandon Charlie, nor would he give up his dream. He would have to work twice as hard, and without Amber in his life, he now had the time to do so.

  PART III

  20

  NIRMALA WOKE IN AN EMPTY BED. THERE WAS A FOLDED SLIP of paper on Pradip’s pillow, and as on the day the phone rang with news of Leena, Nirmala felt a terrible sense of foreboding.

  She climbed out of bed and ran past the bedroom where Leena lay asleep, out of the house, and into the fields. The earth was still damp. The crops had been cut back so severely, it was possible to see quite a distance, but Nirmala ran up and down each row, calling his name—hoping, even as dread filled her chest and her calls turned to cries, that she would find him there.

  When she reached the far edge of their property, Nirmala stood, breathing heavily, looking back at their home. She turned and walked, more slowly now, toward the riverbank. It was the river that made their soil so rich and fertile for growing crops, the river from which they used to collect water years ago before the well was built. On hot days, her husband would take a dip in the river after a long day working in the fields, and she knew she would find him there now.

  As she drew closer, she saw him, dressed not in his field clothes but his good white kurta-pajama, the one he’d worn to Leena’s wedding. His body was floating in the middle of the river, bobbing peacefully like a piece of driftwood. Nirmala waded in to retrieve him, the layers of her sari forcing her to move slowly through the water.

  THREE MONTHS after returning to Panchanagar, Leena knelt in the same dirt she’d felt under her bare feet nearly every day of her life, staring at the pile of ash that used to be her father.

  “Just you and me now, little lamb.” Her mother used the pet name Leena had not heard in years. If only she could rewind the clock to that time, when her father used to hold her in his lap and her mother braided her hair and tied ribbons at the ends.

  Leena shut her eyes tightly against the final wisps of burning smoke. She had been worried about the odor, but it was the smoke that broke her, penetrating the crevices of her eyes, forming tears she could not stem once they had begun.

  After a final prayer, her mother scooped the warm ashes into a steel vessel. They had not called the priest to perform the rituals, nor any relatives to attend the cremation ceremony. It was only the two of them, and they would have to rebuild their life without the man who had been at the center of it.

  As a widow, her mother would be expected to withdraw from public life, to wear white and no jewelry or makeup. To be invisible. With a shock, Leena realized her mother h
ad already been living this way, ever since Leena had returned to Panchanagar. All her jewelry was long gone. There was no money for new saris, not even plain white cotton ones. They had been living in seclusion since Leena had left her husband, and now her mother had lost her spouse as well.

  As she mourned the loss of her father, Leena grew anxious about her and her mother’s ability to survive without him. They could not possibly do the farm work her father had done, and even if they could, their land had been yielding less and less as her father crowded it with more crops and eliminated fallow periods over the past year. Before his death, he had broken all his own principles about farming, as if his judgment had disintegrated before the rest of him. The land would come back if they tended it, but it might take years, and until then, Leena and her mother would have to find another way to support themselves.

  The week after her father’s death, Leena and her mother made a trip to the town market with the last of their harvested crops. When everything had been sold, the last customer, a rich Memsahib, asked Leena if she could buy her empty basket to carry home her vegetables. The next morning, Leena collected armfuls of damp reeds from the fields and sat down to weave more baskets. Within a week, Leena had finished eight baskets, and when she and her mother returned to the market, to Leena’s astonishment, they sold every last one: to students balancing books on their bicycles, customers at the market who bought more than their arms could carry, even a flower vendor to carry her garlands. Leena and her mother came home with over three hundred rupees, and had a feast of five-vegetable curry to celebrate. The next morning, Leena showed her mother how to weave and they began to work together, making and selling baskets.

  Their good fortune continued for several months. Leena and her mother were earning a decent living. They could afford to keep their kitchen stocked with grains and lentils, to buy fresh vegetables each time they visited the market and new sandals to replace their worn ones. Their newfound self-sufficiency continued until Leena began to notice more women coming to the market with baskets for sale, and prices began to fall. Weaving baskets was a tradition in some villages, with whole families working together to produce hundreds of baskets every month. Leena could not keep up with them, especially with her mother’s failing eyesight, and soon the disquiet about their future set in again.

  Around the corner from the market, a few hundred paces from where they sold their baskets, was an alleyway between two tenement buildings. The ground-floor windows of each building were framed with colorful curtains. Women in garishly bright saris and heavy makeup could be seen sitting inside the windows. As evening fell, the women migrated outside—standing in the doorways, leaning against walls. The first time Leena happened upon the alley, she didn’t understand what it was. She was intrigued by those women—mocking each other across the alleyway, allowing their saris to fall shamelessly from their shoulders, using the kind of language she’d heard only from men. A bald man with missing teeth sat on a stool outside and called out to her, trying to grab at her clothing as she walked by. Leena ran all the way back to the market. She didn’t tell her mother what she’d seen, but Leena found herself wondering afterward how much those women earned.

  ONE DAY at the market, Leena saw an old woman selling clay pots. They were simple and sturdy but very small—the size of the diyas used to light a single oil flame at Diwali. Leena asked the woman why she was selling diya pots when Diwali was long over.

  The old woman smiled. “This is all I can make with my stiff fingers, child. Years ago, I used to make enormous vessels”—she illustrated by holding her frail arms into a wide circle—“huge pots to store dry grains and lentils after the harvest, to keep water cool in the summer. But I cannot do it any longer with this pain.” She held up her gnarled hands.

  When Leena told her they had come from Panchanagar, the old woman’s eyes brightened. “You are near the river,” she said. “Your clay should be very fine.” She told Leena how to dig for it, two hands below the surface of the earth. “Cover it with damp burlap. Keep it wet or you will lose your chance to shape it. Water keeps the clay like a young child, while the sun makes him into an old man.” Leena’s mother thought the old woman might be weak in the head, but her voice was strong and her meaning clear.

  The next morning, Leena went to the banks of the river and dug into the soil until she reached the hard-packed clay. Burrowing her fingers below the cool surface, Leena felt like a child again, though it took great strength to pry the clay from the earth bed where it rested. She collected enough to fill the small steel urn they used to make yogurt—three or four handfuls.

  Leena neglected her duties for the rest of the day. She sat outside with the urn of clay and a vessel of water and played like a schoolgirl—kneading the clay, rolling and shaping it with her hands. It was the end of the day before she noticed the clothes were still hanging on the line and her mother had cooked the entire evening meal herself. Leena felt guilty, but her mother pushed her out of the kitchen, saying she was happy to see her daughter smiling again.

  Over the next few days, Leena discovered how many ways there were to shape clay using only her two hands. As the old woman had told her, she had to add plenty of water to coax it to softness—but not too much or the clay became sticky and uncooperative. Leena pressed it into a ball and then rolled it between her palms until it was perfectly round and smooth, like the shiny seed of a chickoo. She held it loosely between her flattened fingers and moved them back and forth until small clay ropes formed, the length of her hand, then of her forearm and even longer. Leena coiled the ropes around and around, like a cobra, and formed a drinking cup. The next day, she borrowed the wooden pin they used to make chapatis and rolled out some more clay. From the large, smooth clay sheet, she cut out a circle to form the base of a pot, and a long rectangle to form the sides, using water to join the various pieces together.

  When Leena went back to the river to find more clay, she learned to dig deeper into the ground until she reached the purest clay, from which she could stretch out a ribbon the length of her smallest finger. She was so enraptured with this cold dark clay from beneath the earth. There it had always been, beneath their feet, their home, their crops, and their roads. The old woman had been right: the best clay was near the river, where the soil was rich, in the shade of the banana trees, where the rains accumulated and the sun did not parch the ground.

  The next time she and her mother went into town, Leena brought the drinking cup she’d made of coils, and the flat-bottomed pot she’d rolled like a chapati. When she showed them to the old woman at the market, the woman smiled. “My dear,” she said, “you haven’t yet learned the real secret of clay.”

  “Secret?” Leena thought she’d already learned the power of transforming a hard lump into something useful with only her hands, water, and the sun.

  “Yes,” the woman said, “the magic of spinning your clay on a wheel.”

  Leena listened as the old woman told her what to do. After returning to Panchanagar, she found an old wagon wheel and rubbed it all over with a stone until its surface was smooth. She took a flat steel lid from one of the kitchen pots and secured it to the center of the wheel to create a seat for the clay. She applied cooking oil to the long axle so the wheel could spin freely, and buried the axle deep into the earth. It took some time to position the wheel so it was level. Then she used a long stick between the spokes as a handle to get the wheel spinning quickly. Only once Leena had practiced this quite a bit and could keep the wheel spinning for a few minutes on its own did she place a lump of clay in the center. She spun the wheel so it was going very fast, and sprinkled some water onto the clay.

  The moment her two hands touched the misshapen lump, Leena felt the truth of the old woman’s words. When she closed her palms over the clay, the bumps and imperfections seemed to melt away. With more water and her thumbs pressed firmly into the top of the smooth mound, she created a well in the center. Another sprinkle, one palm placed inside the well, ano
ther outside, and she widened the well to make its walls stand up straight.

  As the wheel slowed down, the magical feeling started to slip away. The clay shape began to show its imperfections. Leena spun the wheel again with the stick, applied more water to her hands, then placed her fingertips on either side of the base of the clay. She moved her fingers up the side, slowly and very gently. The structure was vulnerable now, its walls less than a finger’s width. Before Leena knew what had happened, her fingertip had torn a hole in the wall of the pot. It wobbled and fell onto itself, still spinning, looking like a hunchbacked man.

  Over the next several weeks, Leena continued learning how to work with the clay. It was a process that began violently: to remove the air bubbles, she had to knead the clay with force and slam it down repeatedly on the terrace. It took all the strength she had in her arms, and her shoulders ached the next day, but Leena took great satisfaction in the sheer aggression of it. But once the clay began to take shape, it required a progressively lighter hand, only the softest touch of a single finger was necessary to even out the thin upper rim of her piece.

  Leena learned how to change the strength in her hands, how to adjust for the feel of the spinning clay. The true magic of the pottery wheel was in its power and speed—with it, she could make smooth, beautiful pieces in a few minutes, but could also ruin one in seconds. One moment of lapsed concentration, the wrong angle with her wrist, a slip of her finger and it was gone. Clay might be forgiving, but the pottery wheel was not.

  Some days, she used the other techniques of rolling the clay, or coiling ropes to make vessels, but Leena made her best creations spinning on the wheel. Inside the house, she kept an entire shelf lined with wobbly and misshapen pots from the early days when she was first learning to use the pottery wheel, but also from those days she lost focus. Others might consider them ugly or useless, but Leena liked to keep them as a reminder of what she’d learned.