The Golden Son
Leena put milk and water to boil on the stove and gestured for Anil to sit at the small table. It felt familiar to have him there—reminiscent of the many times her mother had fed them as children—but also strange to see his adult frame perched on the low stool. She wondered if the ways in which she’d changed were as obvious to him as his changes were to her.
“There must be a hundred pieces outside,” Anil said. “How long did that take you?”
Leena shrugged as she stirred tea leaves into the pot. “I’ve been preparing for the busy season. First Diwali, then weddings, then all the tourists come to town. Many of the vendors sell half their wares for the year in those couple of months. Some of the more experienced vendors—the shawl-wallah, the jeweler—they bring extra supplies and men with them in the morning and set up in different parts of the market, acting like different merchants, pretending to be competitors. Sometimes they cheat the tourists by setting a very high price and driving them to the other stall across the market, where they think they’re getting a better deal.” Leena placed two cups of tea on the table, along with two steel plates, each holding thepla and a dab of orange-colored pickle.
“I remember this.” Anil smiled. “Your mother’s sweet mango pickle.” He rolled up the savory flatbread and dipped it into the sweet, milky chai. “Mmm.”
Leena joined him at the table, reaching for the end of her sari to wrap around her shoulders. The tea was too hot to drink. She still made it as her father had liked it, boiled rapidly for a full minute at the end. Somehow, it felt like a betrayal to prepare it any other way.
“When I first started making pottery, I thought the monsoons were a terrible time,” Leena said. “It was impossible to build a fire under the ground to bake the clay. But I’ve learned this is the best time for me to spin pots. My clay stays moist for weeks, it’s more forgiving. If I make a mistake, I can just form it back into a lump and begin again the next day.” She heard herself rambling but continued on anyway. “By the end of the monsoons, when the soil is dry again, I’ll have over a hundred pots, and they bake more evenly all together underground.”
Anil cleared his throat. “Leena, I . . . I’m really sorry about your father.” He put his hands in his lap, then around the cup, then back on the table. “He was a good man.”
His hesitancy, the awkwardness of his movements made something rise within her, a bubbling of resentment toward everyone who hadn’t paid proper homage to her father. “Yes, he was,” she said with emphasis, as if she were disputing his statement rather than agreeing with it. “He was.” She stood and collected their empty plates.
“I still think of my father every day,” Anil said. “But it gets a little easier with time. It helps to have my family around, people who knew him and loved him like I did.”
Leena busied herself with the dishes, keeping her back to him, biting the inside of her lip to keep from speaking. What did he know of her grief, the grief she and her mother suffered alone—without the company of friends, without the solace of other family? Without all the people who would rather pretend they no longer existed than acknowledge the shame she’d brought on them?
Anil cleared his throat again. “What are those pieces over there?”
He was pointing to a corner of the drawing room barely visible from the kitchen doorway. It was easy to miss the shelf holding a dozen ceramic pieces, since the pale shade of dried clay matched the backdrop of the whitewashed walls. “Those?” Leena said. “Those are my mistakes.” She dried her hands on a towel and leaned against the sink.
A small smile tugged at the corner of Anil’s mouth. “C-c-can you show me?”
Leena hadn’t heard him stammer since they were children. She recalled the way he’d been teased in school, how quiet he’d been before he’d learned to overcome it. She took a long, deep breath before answering. “Yes.” She took another full breath in, then out, deliberately slowing down her speeech as she used to do. “Come.” She walked into the drawing room and knelt down in front of the shelf. Anil sank down to his knees next to her. There was barely enough space for the both of them, wedged as they were into the corner.
Leena had never shown these pieces to anyone. They were unfinished and unglazed, she explained. Most people preferred pottery when it was sturdy and colorful. “But I think it’s most beautiful at this stage.” Leena picked up a wide, shallow bowl and rested it on her knee. “It’s still porous like this—not really useful for anything, but you can see everything—the small swirl in the bottom where I began, and these lines going up the sides—those are my fingertips.” She traced a circle around the inner rim with her third finger, then tilted the bowl toward him. “Feel,” she said, and he did, moving his fingertips over the minute ridges formed by hers. “This bowl was perfectly round until I bumped the rim and it went oval.” Leena smiled and replaced the bowl on the shelf, where it sat unevenly, its base trembling for a few seconds before it came to rest. Other pieces were tilted, one had a jagged hole in the side, a few had collapsed in on themselves. “It’s more delicate in this form, more vulnerable.”
“What about this one?” Anil picked up a small drinking cup. “It looks perfect.”
“There’s a crack around the bottom,” Leena explained, turning it over to show him. “I didn’t notice until after it came out of the fire. It happens quite a lot as the pieces dry out: you can’t always see the cracks, but you can feel them with your fingers.” She took Anil’s finger and guided it around the base of the cup. After she let go, she still felt the touch of his skin like an electric current. “Sometimes I can repair a crack when the piece is wet, with a thin liquid mixture of water and clay. But before I learned that, I lost many pieces.” She held the drinking cup up and laughed. “I probably had a full set of these cracked cups, a dozen or more.”
She caught a look of sadness drift across his face. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “having to throw away such beauty.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want to. The first few times I found a cracked piece, I tried to apply a thick paint all over and bake it again, but the crack grew bigger from the heat and pressure of the second baking. Then it was really of no use. Or if I dropped it, it would break along that line, even if it was invisible. You can never fix it completely. Clay has a memory. Once it’s scarred, the heat helps it remember. It’s always the weakest point, where there’s been a fracture.”
Anil was watching her intently as she spoke. “Same with people,” he said, returning the cup to the shelf. His eyes were glistening as he began to speak; words poured out without his pausing for breath or to see her reaction. He told her the story of his friend, the men who had attacked him and how he could not stop them, the ambulance, the emergency room, and how his friend now lay in a recovery room, healing but still broken. Anil’s voice cracked as he spoke. When he finished, she sat with him in silence for several moments, a stillness interrupted only by bird calls and the rustling of leaves outside.
“It must be hard for you over there,” Leena said.
Anil nodded, and they sat without speaking for a few moments longer. “Sometimes it is. But other things are . . . incredible. They have more advanced equipment on the ambulance than in the entire hospital here. The homes are new and beautiful, with electric appliances in the kitchen, and they have these huge indoor shopping centers. Look.” He pulled a small white square out of his pocket and held it up between two fingers. “This holds ten thousand songs.”
Leena watched him as he spoke about the musical gadget, noting the tousle of wavy hair, the boyish smile, the small dimple in his chin she didn’t recognize. As heat rose to her face, Leena turned away and began replacing the imperfect pottery pieces on the shelves.
“There’s an arbitration meeting tomorrow,” Anil said.
Leena reached for the end of her long braid and twisted the tail of it around her finger. “I know. My cousin Brinda and her husband will be there.”
“So you’re coming?”
Maybe she
imagined it on his face, a slight smile. Leena shook her head. “No, I think it should be a private matter when a married couple discusses their problems, not for everyone to hear.”
“Then why are they coming?” Anil looked slightly annoyed.
“What other choice does she have? There is no court around here, no police.” Leena’s voice rose in pitch. “Her in-laws won’t hear a bad word against their son, her parents don’t want to make trouble. It’s good she has someone who can listen to both sides. But I don’t think it’s right for others to watch.” She smoothed out her sari against her legs. “I . . .”
“What?” Anil asked.
Leena shook her head, keeping her eyes focused on the golden line at the edge of her sari, how perfect and unblemished it was. Why open up her wounds, why expose them, now, to him? And yet, in the space of Anil’s own brokenness, Leena felt some shelter, some relief from the isolation that had engulfed her in the past several months.
Anil touched her wrist lightly, and again she felt the spark. “Tell me.”
Leena dropped her gaze, willing herself not to care about his reaction. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. When I was married, I wouldn’t have wanted to discuss my problems in front of others.” She didn’t know how much he knew, what Piya might have told him. “My marriage did not turn out as I expected. There . . . there was no resolution, except to leave.” She compelled herself to look up at his face, expecting to see pity or perhaps scorn, but his expression betrayed neither. Anil held her gaze but said nothing. She smiled at him a little, and he smiled back. The edge of Leena’s foot began to tingle, then her ankle. She tried to move it discreetly beneath her sari, not wanting to disturb their position on the floor of the drawing room, cramped between the shelf of ceramic pieces and the chairs. Anil shifted his position to accommodate her, and something clattered onto the stone floor. Leena leaned over to pick up the wooden piece rolling on the floor.
Anil put his hand to his pocket. “Oh.”
Leena inspected the piece closely, turning it around between her fingers. It was a rich shade of brown, carved from mahogany or rosewood. “It’s from a game, no?” She moved to stretch her legs and stand up, and he followed.
“Chess. I used to play with my father.” He described how the game worked, how capturing the opponent’s king was the goal. “I lost the other king piece, the sandalwood one that was Papa’s. We always played the same colors. I took this one to America, hoping I could find a matching piece.”
“You won’t find it.” Leena handed it back to him. “It’s one of a kind, carved by hand.”
AS HE left the house, Anil slipped the chess piece back into his pocket and tightened his grip around it. It struck him as a cruel thing for her to say, but she was probably right. It seemed absurd, now that he’d said it out loud, that he’d been carrying the piece around for so long.
Anil walked back up the lane and crossed the fields. As he stood on one edge of the gully that ran between the Big House and Leena’s family home, he was surprised by how much smaller it was than he remembered. The small valley had been formed over the years when the monsoon rains forged the path through the land. As kids, they’d lain down at the top of one hill, arms flat against their sides, and took turns rolling down, seeing how far up the other side they could get. In the monsoon season, it was their unspoken practice to run from their homes at the sign of the first big rain and meet at the gully, which made for an excellent splash pool when filled with water.
During a malaria outbreak in their area, Anil’s parents wouldn’t permit their children to romp around in pools of water where mosquitoes might gather. Anil remembered being ten or eleven years old, standing with his forehead pressed against the window, watching the torrential downpour and thinking it was the single most unfair pronouncement his parents could make. Three children died that year, including one infant. Anil never knew whether Leena had been allowed to play in the rains or not, whether she had waited there for him.
How had he and Leena ended up so far apart, after starting in the same place? He tried to make sense of the tangle of emotions rising within him, things he hadn’t felt before, with Amber or anyone else.
“THERE YOU are!” Piya was waiting on the porch when he returned. “I’ve been out here for ages looking for you. Ma’s got lunch ready. God, brother, I can barely recognize you at a distance. Look at you, with your cool hairstyle, your fancy clothes.”
Anil brushed a hand through his hair, which had grown longer than normal during the turmoil of the last few months. He glanced down at the electric blue athletic gear he’d worn this morning with the intention of going for a run and realized it was even worse than Mahesh had claimed. Not only was it impossible to truly belong in America, but he didn’t fit in here anymore either. He was a dweller of two lands, accepted by none.
THE UNBOUND MARRIAGE
THE NEXT MORNING, MA WOKE ANIL HOURS BEFORE THE ARBITRATION session was to begin. She had become very particular about the rituals beforehand: allowing enough time for everyone in the house to take a purifying bath and do a puja together, ensuring Anil ate a proper meal with plenty of carrots and beets to sharpen his brain. There were a great many people coming today, Ma warned him, and the meeting would probably take several hours.
Throughout the morning discussions, the servant brought Anil fresh tea, and although he was already alert and no longer hungry, Anil kept a cup nearby to sip on. It gave him something to do while he listened to the argument between two neighbors over noisy chickens, followed by an uncle and nephew fighting over a new litter of goats. As he jotted down notes in his book, he came to notice that most of the disputes followed a pattern.
Many were about the division of resources: plots of land, the family home, a parental inheritance. In these cases, it was important for everyone to feel as if they were being treated fairly. The key was to identify something one party valued more than the other, and use that as a basis for dividing the property or, as Papa had often done, to find a creative solution. Anil was pleased about resolving one of the morning’s disputes between two daughters over their late mother’s diamond flower earrings, the ones she’d worn every day. He suggested they take the earrings to a jeweler and have them made into two pendants, which each daughter could wear on a chain near her heart, a daily reminder of their mother’s love.
Other people came with interpersonal disagreements: between parent and child, husband and wife, siblings and neighbors. The incidence of quarrels among in-laws alone was enough to warn anyone off marriage for good. Anil always knew he was dealing with one of these disputes when the parties came to him for one issue, then raised complaints from several years, even decades, ago. A man in his twenties lashed out at his elder brother for failing to defend him on the cricket pitch when they’d been children. An elderly woman held a grudge against her daughter-in-law for not preparing a sufficiently elaborate meal after the wedding, twenty-some years earlier. How could people remember such things?
With his own memory limited to what he needed to know for current patients, Anil found this type of enduring recall remarkable. These arguments were rife with hurt feelings and deeply rooted emotion, and Anil had learned it was important to keep the discussion respectful and calm. He had to make sure each person felt truly heard by the other. When this transpired, there was usually enough latent love in the relationship for some reconciliation. Not all wounds could be mended, of course, and in those cases, Anil prescribed a way for the parties to get some distance from each other. He saw how feelings between people could easily shift from affection to spite, and was reminded of his conversation with Nikhil on the porch the previous day.
Finally, there were disputes arising from the recommendation of another counselor: the local astrologer, the ayurvedic doctor, or even the vastu shastra expert who advised people on how to arrange their homes in positive alignment with the universe’s energy. These were the arbitrations Anil found the most intolerable; it was difficult to argue against some eth
ereal thing that had no factual basis. How he wanted to shake these people who sat before him, convinced that a case of arthritis had been caused by a northeastern-facing bedroom, or that diabetes could be treated effectively with bitter melon. It wasn’t spiritual faith to which Anil was opposed—he’d seen such belief help people in the hospital, bringing them comfort when science had failed—it was superstition. He resented having to debate an argument when its inherent defect was so evident.
Two hours of arbitrations passed, and Anil was beginning to tire when the next group sat down at the long table. A buzz of whispers rose in the room as a young woman, her sari wrapped around her shoulders, sat on one side of the table, three men of varying ages by her side. On the other side was a young man, who stared down at the table, with an older couple next to him.
Anil assumed, from the way they avoided each other’s eyes, it was the young woman and man who were in dispute. One of the three men spoke up first, introducing himself and the others as the father and brothers of the young woman. Anil watched her face as her brother spoke. She met Anil’s eyes and held them. “What is your name?” he asked her, interrupting her brother.
“Brinda,” she said in a clear voice.
Anil turned to the young man, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. “And you?”
“Sanjay,” he answered.
Anil laid his palms down on the table and spoke to the crowd gathered in the room. “Since it is almost midday, let us take a break for lunch and rest, and we will return here in two hours’ time.” He looked at his watch. “Two o’clock, okay?” He pushed the heavy chair back from the table and stood up.