But will I be here next time you sweep in?
“And I’ll make Earl send you all Dad’s music — every scrap we find.”
A latch clicked; the French window had locked behind him.
The Distance Between Us
Fourth of July weekend e-mail: two rejections from academic journals, requests for revisions from another, four student assignments, seven Viagra solicitations, three days’ worth of newsfeeds from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the CBC.
A translation of Windows commands into Punjabi. Minni and Gagan will laugh when they read that. They’re asleep right now. Karan forwards it — Santa Barbara to New Delhi in seconds.
Google Alerts on the Guantánamo Bay prisoners. Sikh Coalition Bulletin: another Sikh man beaten up in New Jersey. Weekly digest from The Onion. And — a message from someone with an all-too-familiar last name. It’s highlighted in Karan’s inbox. His cursor floats over it.
Click.
Campus sounds outside his office blend into background. He rubs the back of his hand across his throat; it comes away damp.
This one didn’t take seconds — it’s been years in coming. Like the plate shift that sent a sixty-foot tsunami racing outwards from Indonesia to swallow a hundred and fifty thousand people. Now of all times, when suspicious looks at his turban and bearded brown face are becoming less frequent.
He pulls a deep breath into his lungs, slowly releases.
He should move the message to trash. He can’t send it to trash. Two teams tug a rope that passes through his chest.
He shouldn’t even think of replying. Could be entrapment: remember “special registration” that turned out to be a roundup? Twenty-four hundred men were deported. And remember the OSHA industrial safety meeting that turned out to be a Homeland Security roundup of illegal Latinos?
Sticky air hangs over his shoulders. He flicks on the table fan.
He expands the message to full screen and scrolls with tingling fingertips. He sends it to print. When it materializes, he carries it to the window. Reads it again.
Hi. Are you the Karanbir Singh who married Rita
Ginther on Jan 7, 1980? I’m her daughter. And
yours. I’m 23. Born in August 1982 after you guys
split. Mom kept tabs on you from Madison to
Montreal, Amsterdam, St. Louis and now Santa
Barbara. All I know is that you teach economics
at the university and come from India. Mom said
I should look you up if anything ever happened
to her. In case you care, she died three months
ago. Kidney failure. Am leaving tomorrow for
Los Angeles. So I googled you. Found a Wiki
entry about you too. Will be spending the July
Fourth weekend with my friend Ashley. Plan to
visit till Friday. I could come see you the week-
end after that.
Some mistake here. He doesn’t have a daughter. That marriage — a transaction, for god’s sake. Just a transaction. Rita was the capitalist selling Resident Alienhood, and he was buying because he panicked — well, he was paying almost double as an international student, was ineligible for student loans and still had a thesis to complete and defend. All she had to do was make it last two years till his INS interview. She had loans to pay, needed the money. And it was cheaper to live together.
Consenting adults.
Oh, what had he consented to? Making love with Rita was like sinking into heavy cream — but hadn’t he told her: no complications? She had assured him — the Pill, the foolproof Pill.
There was no daughter. No child, full stop.
Then how does this girl — woman — whoever she is — know his anniversary date? How come she’s born in August, eight months after Rita moved out?
He twirls the shade-pull, dims the room. The screen glows. The cursor blinks. The table fan spins like karma on steroids.
It’s signed Uma Ginther. Indian and German. Uma. Rita wouldn’t pick Uma to complement his ancestry. Named after Uma Thurman? No. The actress would have been about nine in ’82. If she is Rita’s, the Hindu goddess’s name reflects Rita’s New Agey side. Ginther — old German name obscuring the Greeks populating Rita’s mother’s family.
Two years older than him — Rita’d be only forty-eight now. Who must she be now? Serve her right if she were reborn black and poor in sub-Saharan Africa — might learn a thing or two about economics. But kidney failure. She didn’t deserve that.
Moments, images reappear: two hundred and forty pounds encased in acres of luminescent pale skin. Pink doughy face with owlish glasses. Rita lifting rosettes from hot oil in the narrow kitchen at the International Students’ Center. His brown hand lightly touching hers as he helped her dust sugar over butterfly, pinwheel and star shapes. He remembers himself talking about crisp orange jalebis in India that would put those Norwegian rosettes to shame, telling her the name Rita is Indian — Sanskrit for cosmic order. Reciting a recipe for butter chicken he’d read in Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbook. The first unrelated woman whose hand he’d ever held.
What an idiot he was, mistaking culinary for cultural curiosity! Rita could have asked how he tied his turban, maybe sent him a card on a Gurpurb or Baisakhi day, or been a little curious about his relatives. Not Rita, before the wedding or after. She couldn’t picture him anywhere but here, adult and a-historical.
Her laugh — oh yes. A tremor passing across her Buddha-belly. Filled with indulgence at the beginning. “Oh, Karan-be-er!” she’d say — mispronouncing his name. And later, with exasperation, “Kar-an!” — the name that now represents him in America.
Karan returns to his desk, crosses his ankles, leans forward, lets the gel in his wrist rest cool his pulse.
Don’t reply, implore his mother’s eyes from her frame on his desk.
His fingers are poised between thought and word.
“Dear Ms. Ginther: I’m sorry but you must have found the wrong person. Like Ginther, Singh is a common name …”
No.
Tension sharpens to a knot in his back.
“Dear Uma Ginther, I’m afraid you are quite mistaken. Rita and I met at UW-Madison. We were married in 1980, divorced in 1982. She moved to Detroit. Never once did she mention a child.”
But then Rita wouldn’t, would she? Said she never wanted a husband for life. Even one who didn’t mind a Rubenesque woman and was as irresistible as Karan used to be. He’d believed her motives were pure — pure economics. But every woman must have a baby, na? Probably stopped taking her pills.
But fathers have duties! Most women drag men into court, sue for child support, garnish wages. Not Rita. She must have done okay. First in her family to move off the farm, a degree in industrial engineering, why wouldn’t she?
Don’t fathers have rights too? But Rita wouldn’t want to share her child; after two years of living with her, he wasn’t fooled by her softness. It surrounded a hard little heart.
What he could say: “Dear Ms. Uma Ginther, I’m afraid you are quite mistaken. Rita and I had what in the old days would be termed a marriage of convenience. We divorced after the required two years. I paid her in full. She moved back to Detroit. Never once did she mention a child. There must have been another man after me.”
He draws away. Such a reply cannot be written. Homeland Security or the FBI or the CIA could still be monitoring his email. They’d be only too happy to deport him. And campuswatch.org denounces more than professors of Middle Eastern Studies. He should know that, even if Homeland Security hadn’t “interviewed” him. And just a few weeks ago, lusting for tenure and spurred by the interview, he’d paid an attorney to apply for his change of status from resident alien to citizen. He mustn’t jeopardize that application.
A brown scent insinuates itself under his door. Scorched popcorn. He closes out of his e-mail program and heads to the faculty lounge down the hall.
It’s Thayne Grey, UCSB’s star history prof, almost setting
off the fire alarm again. An otherwise intelligent man. Never learns.
A cup of orange pekoe fortifies Karan. He returns reluctantly to the e-mail.
Why isn’t he more surprised by this contact? More certain that this girl, woman, female, whoever she is, is not his offspring? But the blood spinning his heart chakra says she is, the quickening in his breathing says yes, she is.
Think of it! A daughter. Someone of his blood on this continent, a member of his family who isn’t in the next country or hemisphere. Is she fat like Rita? Thin like him? Is she a natural blond, or dark-haired like him? Eyes? Dark — brown genes trump blue. She could have attached a photo. If she is his daughter, how might he explain her existence to his sisters? Gagan will look down her jewelled nose, then probe gently but relentlessly in her professional way. Minni will be voluble about the double standards he applies to his wrongdoings in contrast to hers.
He stops, rereads the e-mail.
“In case you care …” An implicit accusation. Indignation raises its head, offers a mute bark. Minni, Gagan, his mother — when she was alive. Always accusing him of not caring, forgetting how much he remitted each year. And this from a woman who might not even be his daughter, who doesn’t even know him.
So maybe he had hurt Rita, but Rita could survive. If nothing else, he’d given her reason to tell her anti-male jokes for a few more years. And now this child born of Rita’s maternal longing, like Ganesh to Parvati.
At some point, he must have stepped over the threshold that permitted him to be guilt-free about that marriage, so American is he. It made him a legal resident. Which is more than many in California can say.
American enough to go on TV and tell all about it? American enough to meet his long-lost daughter on Oprah? Not that American. Contrary to textbook economic models, all transactions are not equal. Suppose it were drugs — Rita would be forgiven for buying, but a brown man would never be forgiven for selling. And similarly, she’d be forgiven for selling herself in marriage, but a brown man would never be forgiven for buying himself a green card.
What to do? His brain clicks into high gear, throbs against his skull. At least the girl has given him a few days notice. Hai Rabba! — what if she’d just waltzed in, asking anyone to direct her to his office?
They say when a tsunami hits, you either disappear, survive or die. Can he disappear? As of last December, one can’t even apply for asylum in Canada anymore.
What is he thinking! Walking out of his well-built life because a girl of twenty-three wants to visit?
It’s taken twenty-five years of withstanding ignorance and prejudice, starting from long before it was cool to be Indian in Silicon Valley, to gain this office in North Hall with this window, this computer, these shelves groaning with books, this inbox full of scholarly papers and assignments. He isn’t the next Amartya Sen, but it is possible he’s changed some perspectives in the US-centric West by working within the English-speaking educational establishment.
And he has commitments here, assumed like an elephant takes on lading. Classes, committees, upcoming conferences, research papers, a new home. A mortgage. And he is beholden to moneylenders, just as he could be in India. And at the same interest rate, twenty-seven percent, from charging two weddings and associated dowries on credit cards. Expensive Delhi weddings, first for Gagan, then for Minni. Almost paid down after fifteen years, but still — commitments.
A wife might demand and deserve explanations, but uncles, aunts and cousins in Delhi gave up introducing Karan to eligible “girls” on his annual trips once his mother passed away, the tacit assumption that he would now dedicate his life to supporting them. Gagan said apologetically once that his divorce had lowered his value on the marriage market, and couldn’t he have just kept quiet about it? Might be different now. Many school friends in Delhi have divorced and some have remarried.
But something in him turned away after the two-year marriage, became irretrievable. An empty space that scarcely bothers him, except when his mind collides with it and retreats. Other men may be curious about interior unknowns, but one person is too small a sample size. Ergo, he does not use himself as fodder for analysis.
In lieu of a wife, Karan has Adela, his bi-weekly housekeeper. And he has had women friends over the years, the kind who cannot resist cooking and caring for a single man and expect a professor to be absent-minded. He’s slept with a few — maybe twenty-two — but he’s not counting. Sex is much like healthy exercise in California. His only rule: no students. No career complications.
Outside his window lies an emerald lawn, an unwrinkled sky, students rollerblading down palm-shaded walks, each carrying a backpack. Summer flowers, leaves turning mirror faces to the sun. And out of sight, though resident in consciousness, the graceful curve of Goleta Beach, the silver glint of the infinite Pacific.
Santa Barbara, his American Riviera city.
The publication of his first un-co-authored textbook earned him the offer of a three-year contract here, and he leapt at it like a migrant farm worker at the gates of a corporate plantation. Each year he must write and publish articles with titles like “Non-Parametric Efficiency Analysis under Uncertainty” and fill them with windy prose and formulas to justify his existence to the dean.
Dean Bradnock. Seated behind a very wide desk, light flashing off reading glasses. Bradnock, who counselled Karan to call in and register with Homeland Security, “since you’re not an illegal.” Bradnock saying, “You don’t have anything to worry about — right?”
Nothing to worry about but scandal. What a Victorian word.
If Bradnock senses the smallest shadow of illegality, he will “err on the side of safety” again. He’ll “suggest” a leave of absence. And there’ll be no guarantee he’ll renew Karan’s contract — or health insurance.
Perhaps this Uma girl doesn’t know there was a green card deal.
She must know. Rita never let Karan forget it for a single day of that marriage.
The real question: is Uma a benign or retributive being? And if she is some vengeful churail, can she be propitiated? At what price?
Karan worries all of Tuesday, even as he draws demand and supply curves showing summer students that billion-dollar-a-day farm subsidies in developed countries enforce the poverty of millions elsewhere, even while watching Dr. Sanjay Gupta reporting on CNN, even while listening to an hour-long public radio program about successful Indo-Americans.
On Wednesday, Karan hears himself explaining to students that, by “invisible hand,” Adam Smith meant to describe the outcome of buyer and seller relationships. The term, he tells them, wasn’t a coded reference to some god-like hand meddling in human affairs. But he’s not convincing them — or himself, really.
Worry expands in all directions till evening, when Karan loses his weekly squash game with Nadir.
On Thursday, Karan wanders into the faculty lounge where the foul smell of popcorn lingers. And there is Thayne with Dean Bradnock, paging through a pocket brag-book of photos. He waves Karan over to see: here he is marching down State Street in the Fourth of July parade last weekend, carrying the black POW-MIA flag before the Vietnam Veterans banner.
And here’s a photo of Thayne’s long-unknown half-Vietnamese son, now thirty-five years old. Karan gazes at the photo, taken in Ho Chi Minh City last year — the young man poses astride a scooter. The woman in long white opera gloves riding pillion is the prof’s daughter-in-law. Thayne found out he has two grandchildren — see, here are their photos.
Dean Bradnock is admiring.
“If we never met,” says Thayne, “I’d still be wondering what he’s like, you know?”
Karan returns to his desk. What is this Uma like? Who is she like? He fires up his e-mail and hits Reply. He replies contrary to all his drafts. A reply that introduces himself and becomes an invitation.
On the climb between the university and his home, Karan’s white Toyota groans beneath the weight of its rust. He’ll buy a Jeep Cherokee when he’s
more settled. Solidly American, somewhat reminiscent of a Mahindra Jeep in Punjab, and it won’t outshine the dean’s Volvo.
Alongside the road, the ocean extends and recoils along the shore. Per MapQuest, the ocean is south, even though he feels as if it should be west. Or something like that — directions are not his strong suit, and he hasn’t lived in this neighbourhood long enough to auto-pilot home.
Joggers. A cyclist. Each with the sun-drenched insouciance of the native Californian; they seem to know exactly where they are going.
Friday evening, now. The girl is arriving tomorrow. He turns on the radio, finds KCLU. Lakshmi Singh reports, “Bombs exploded yesterday in three subway stations and on a bus in London.” Casualties … the death toll so far stands at thirty-four. Suicide bombers are suspected. Terrible. “Barbaric,” says a politician. “The civilized world will not stand for this,” says another.
Thank you Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, Bible-waving evangelists waiting for the Rapture, and car-makers whose SUVs guzzle Middle Eastern oil. And, it must be admitted, even people like himself — anyone who drives at all. Will Prime Minister Blair bomb some other country or treat it as a crime? The British have a few centuries of experience in putting down dissent — Indian freedom fighters, the IRA. They’ll deal with it more sensibly than Bush dealt with 9/11.
Karan turns the radio off.
Receipts, Twix wrappers, unpaid parking tickets. Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu audiocassettes, napkins, travel mugs without lids — he really should clean up his car and pay his tickets before the girl — Uma — arrives. If she does. He’d bought her Amtrak ticket online rather than send her money. He couldn’t bring himself to ask for a photo, either. She’d seen his picture posted on the university web site — hard to miss. Only faculty member with turban and beard.
The house isn’t new, but it’s freshly painted, tangible evidence of the advance for Economics: Basic Relationships in the Twenty-First Century, by Karanbir Singh. Better than his old studio apartment. And, thanks to Vaheguruji, a good word from the dean, and a preferential mortgage rate for faculty, the monthly auto-deduction from his account is only sixty cents more than his former rent check.