Now that I’m probably not going anyplace, I, like Mr. Mangalam, have a confession to make. This is why I was so excited about going to India: Once I got there, I planned to leave Mr. Pritchett. I planned to dive into that roiling ocean of one billion people, all our karmas fitting together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and begin anew.
MRS. PRITCHETT’S ADMISSION FILLED UMA WITH A PRIMAL SORROW. They were about to die. It was now clear that the entire group believed this. The sorrow infiltrated her lungs. Ramon! she called in her mind. In answer, a memory came, a summer walk she and Ramon had taken in the hills. They had climbed up a trail of slippery orange gravel, impeded by picnic supplies. When they reached the top, the puckered golden skin of the bay stretched below them. They had spread a sheet on the narrow, bumpy ledge and eaten chutney sandwiches and oranges and densely sweet chocolate pan de huevos. Then they had held hands and watched the sky until the clouds turned purple.
Uma looked down on their intertwined fingers and was surprised to see that Ramon’s were as brown as hers. But this was not right. Ramon was lighter skinned. In this not-quite-a-memory, Uma’s eyes moved up his brown arm, his shoulders, and his neck, until they alighted on his face. She gasped because the man was not Ramon at all. He was Indian. His features shifted as she watched—now a mustache, now a pair of high cheekbones, now square-framed glasses over wide-set eyes—but his Indianness was never in question. Watching him, she realized what she must have guessed deep down when her mother had interrupted herself during their phone conversation. “Enough time for—” her mother had said. Now Uma was able to complete the sentence: “for us to introduce you to some nice Indian men.” Was this subterranean knowledge the reason she hadn’t told Ramon where she was coming today? Did she want to meet the nice Indian men her parents were even at this moment lining up for her?
Had she been only playing at love, all this time? Was that the kind of person she was?
LILY WAS TRYING TO WHISPER, BUT THEY ALL HEARD HER. “Gramma, do you think that woman was a ghost?”
The word hung in the air, papery. Uma thought she felt presences around them—not malevolent or sorrowful, but startled by their sudden weightless existence.
“I think yes,” Jiang said. “When I was young, I heard stories. Spirits that died in the place where you are, coming back to warn you.”
Lily said, “So many people must have died in this quake. Perhaps they can save us?”
MR. PRITCHETT SAT WITH HIS HEAD BOWED. HE WOULD NOT look at anyone. If it had been possible for him to go somewhere and never see any of the group again, he would have done so. But their world had shrunk to three desks. Hell is other people, Uma thought on his behalf.
It was completely dark now. Cameron had to switch on the flashlight again. For a moment it didn’t work. Had water leaked into it?
Give up Seva, said the voice inside his head, and I’ll fix the flash-light. Cameron ignored the voice. He shook the flashlight hard until it came on. He shone the beam around to check for problems. He trained the circle of light for an instant on the cubicle wall, beyond which the dead man lay in the water. Cameron’s chest hurt. But no more procrastination was possible.
15
When Cameron first met the holy man, he didn’t recognize him as such. Partly, he didn’t fit Cameron’s concept of holy men: no beads, no robes, no beatific expression on a bearded face. And partly, Cameron was distracted; it was the thirtieth anniversary—or as close to it as he could figure—of his son’s death, and with each passing year, the event weighed more heavily on him.
They were traveling on a crowded Muni. Cameron was on his way to the hospice where he volunteered one afternoon each week. So was the holy man, though Cameron did not know this. The man, whose name was Jeff, stood holding on to one of the bus handlebars, swaying as the vehicle made a wide turn. He was white, with pleasant, nondescript features; he wore jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. His head was shaved, but it was currently fashionable for men to shave their heads, so Cameron barely noticed it.
Cameron stared out a window, trying to occupy his mind with observation. The passing scenery was painfully familiar, so like the landscape of his childhood, the ugly streets he had labored to escape: storefronts with grills over the doors and windows, piles of garbage, men passed out in doorways. Dealers hung out on street corners, keeping an eye out for customers, or for cops. Even without opening the window, Cameron knew what it would smell like: rotting food, sour armpits, piss, marijuana, and the desperate hilarity of young men who waited for night. But when the doors hissed open, it was to let Cameron—and Jeff—out into sunshine and a happy burst of music and the not-unpleasant odor of Sesame Fried Chicken from Tang’s Carry Out. From across the years he could hear Imani’s voice, so clear that he had to sit down on the bus-stop bench and put his head in his hands: You already decided you going to leave, so you can’t see nothing good even if it up and smack you in the face.
Jeff paused to give him a concerned look. “You okay? Need some water?”
Cameron considered telling the stranger to mind his own business, but he held up a hand to indicate he was fine. When Jeff moved on, Cameron went back to thinking about Imani even though he didn’t want to. She was like a scab that he couldn’t help picking at.
They had both been in their senior year of high school when he met her at a party. He usually avoided the kind of parties his friends threw, with liquor and loud music and making out in the stairwell and fistfights or worse in the alley behind the apartments. They weren’t even his friends—just guys he happened to know because they went to school together or lived in the neighborhood. But on this day he had just sent off the last of his college applications and was feeling celebratory. And perhaps a bit nostalgic. Soon all this would be behind him. He was certain of getting into a good college. His grades were excellent; his recommendations enthusiastic; he was on the track team, and for the last couple of years, he had taken care to stay out of trouble. Following the advice of his biology teacher, who had become a mentor, he volunteered regularly at the local hospital. His counselor had declared that all these credentials, added to Cameron’s unfortunate background—impoverished, orphaned, first-generation college applicant—would probably snag him a scholarship. At first Cameron had resented the counselor’s patronizing manner. Like some second-rate prestidigitator, the counselor tried to turn the painful truths of Cameron’s existence into advantages. Cameron had wanted to say something cutting, to walk out of the man’s office, slamming the door behind him. But he had held on to his temper. If doing so helped him get where he needed to go, Cameron could put up with a little patronizing.
Cameron wanted to be a doctor. He guarded this fragile dream jealously, not confiding it to anyone except his biology teacher. His friends would ridicule it, and even his well-meaning, churchgoing aunt, with whom he had lived since his parents had died, would shake her head in warning and say, “Boy, you aimin’ above your station.” Blindsided by infatuation in the months following the party at which they had met, he had ventured to share his goal with Imani, but that turned out to be an error.
At the party, he’d had a couple of beers. When he first saw Imani being pushed into the middle of the room by a couple of other girls, he didn’t recognize her because she went to a different school. She resisted her friends, but when someone turned off the music, she squared her shoulders, stood tall, and began to sing. She was good, definitely, but not so exceptional in this community; almost every family had a member in a church choir. So what was it about this girl that captured his attention and his breath? Her hair was too nappy, her skin too dark. She looked good in the red sweater she wore over a black skirt—but several girls there looked better. Was it the passion with which she sang, eyes closed, leaning into the song? Or the song itself, the haunting, dragged out notes of “My Man He Don’t Love Me”? Cameron had never heard that song before; it would go deep into him, lodging like a guinea worm, emerging whenever it wanted to. It pulled him across the room to int
roduce himself to Imani, to offer to get her a drink, to listen with fascination to her chatter, though later he couldn’t remember what she had said. By the end of the party, he had—most uncharacteristically—exchanged phone numbers and set up a movie date for the next evening. Maybe that’s why the relationship was doomed from the first: the person Imani fell for wasn’t the real Cameron.
Their romance sped through winter into the beginnings of spring. He rushed to get his homework done before he went to his job at the grocery, where he was a stocker, so he could pick her up after her shift at Burger King. Sometimes on Friday nights they went to the movies or to a club. Mostly they spent hours in his beat-up Chevy, parked on a quiet street where they wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs or cops, talking or listening to music or singing along with the radio—or groping. Evenings when she knew her mother wouldn’t be home, they went to her apartment. He fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches and listened to her sing; she initiated him into the mysteries of the female body. Tangled together in bed afterward, he felt an easefulness that was foreign to him. Usually, he had to be constantly doing something, pushing himself. But at these times he felt he could lie there forever.
Then, as the oleanders began to bloom and the orioles started flying back north and universities began sending acceptance letters, Cameron and Imani’s relationship grew strained. After graduation, Imani was going to increase her hours at Burger King (her mother said it was time she helped with the rent) while she took classes part-time at the local community college. She couldn’t understand why Cameron couldn’t do something similar. The manager at the grocery liked him. Her friend Latisha, who worked one of the cash registers there, had informed her that he’d offered Cameron a position as assistant manager—with benefits. “In a couple years,” Imani told Cameron, “we be saving up some. Get our own place. Get married.” She offered him a shy smile. When Cameron said that he would find that kind of life stifling, she flinched as though he’d slapped her in the face. On the increasingly rare occasions when she sang, the blues tunes he had loved earlier seemed loaded with reproach: “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Lonely Grief.”
They argued almost every time they met. Imani would cry and invoke sayings from her grandmother, a Jamaican obeah woman; Cameron would feel guilty and attempt to console her. If they were at her apartment, they would end up in bed. On the day he learned that a prestigious private college had offered him admission and a sports scholarship, she came into the grocery to say hello. Exhilarated into garrulity, he told her his news. She called him an Oreo, speaking loud enough for his coworkers to hear and snigger. It was the last straw for him—that she would want to ruin the moment of his greatest achievement. When he took her out to the parking lot to tell her this was the end, she informed him that she was pregnant. He could see she was scared, but beneath the fear was a kind of triumph: now he would have to stay with her and take responsibility for the baby.
Cameron was furious—and terrified. The ghetto seemed to be closing in on him. He told her that he refused to be manipulated. He was going to college. If she thought she could stand in his way, she was mistaken. He recommended an abortion. He would scrape together the money to pay for it. He couldn’t do any more than that.
At the mention of abortion, she stopped crying and grew very quiet. “You want to kill our baby?” she asked. “It so important for you to get away from your people?”
He started saying that the mess he saw every day around him was not his people, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get away. All around him young men were enlisting in the army, being shipped to the jungles of Vietnam. But she was wringing her hands. No, she was making some kind of a complicated design in the air with her fingers. Was Imani putting some kind of voodoo on him? He shook off the ridiculous idea.
“It do you no good,” she said. “No matter where you run, you be ending with ashes in your mouth.” She walked across the parking lot. He considered hurrying after her, grabbing her by the hand, saying he was sorry. But that would reopen the coffin of their relationship, and he didn’t have the energy to go through the ups and downs of the last months again. She would probably come running to him soon enough—for the money, if nothing else.
Over the next weeks he waited—at first with trepidation, then with concern, then with a strange disappointment—for her to make contact. She didn’t. One day Latisha cornered him in the canned foods aisle and told him Imani had had an abortion the week before. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Latisha—whom he didn’t like—if Imani was okay. Instead he inquired if Imani needed money—could Latisha ask her? Latisha gave him a hard look and walked off. Cameron felt terrible, but the rush of getting ready for college didn’t allow him time to dwell on the whole complicated mess.
REMINISCING ON THE BUS STOP BENCH HAD MADE CAMERON late, and this annoyed him. He jogged the last few blocks (though jogging through this kind of exhaust-laden air sometimes brought on his asthma) and arrived at the hospice sweaty. The sweat wouldn’t matter too much since he worked in the garden.
When he had started volunteering, they had tried him with the inmates (that’s how he thought of the patients, prisoners with a life sentence). He sat with them, read to them, adjusted pillows. But watching the seemingly interminable process of dying made him nervous and snappy, and after a couple of incidents the management had asked if he could do something with the barren strip of land behind the building. Now the Pacifica Hospice Care boasted a garden, lush with lavender and daylilies, where patients could be wheeled in to watch the hummingbirds flit around brightly colored hanging feeders.
As he hurried down the passage to the back, where gardening supplies were kept, Cameron was surprised to see Jeff emerging from a patient’s room. Jeff tried to engage Cameron in conversation, but Cameron sidestepped him with a curt hello. When, a half hour later, he saw Jeff wander into his garden (that’s how Cameron thought of it), Cameron felt a frisson of annoyance. Was the man following him? Cameron turned his back on the intruder and went on planting sweet alyssum. But Jeff sat on a bench peaceably, ate a sandwich, and watched the clouds. When he finished eating, he sat very still with his eyes closed. After an hour, he left quietly. Cameron, intrigued by the stillness, made some inquiries and learned that Jeff was a lay Buddhist priest. The management had asked him to come in and minister to their Buddhist patients.
In the following weeks, Cameron saw Jeff every time he came into the hospice. Jeff ate his lunch in the garden and meditated there. He always gave Cameron a friendly nod but made no further attempts to talk. (Cameron was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment at this.) One day, Jeff didn’t eat but sat rubbing his eyes tiredly until Cameron couldn’t stand the suspense and asked what was wrong.
“Louie died,” Jeff said.
Cameron suggested that maybe that was a good thing. Louie, a skeletal young man with AIDS, had been suffering for months.
“He was so afraid of death,” Jeff said. He punched the bench in frustration. “Nothing I said could comfort him.”
Cameron abandoned his weeding and sat beside Jeff on the bench. That was how their friendship began.
TO HIS BITTER ASTONISHMENT, CAMERON DID NOT DO WELL IN college. First, he developed severe allergies that deepened into asthma. It could have been from moving to a different part of the country, but he couldn’t help thinking of it as punishment. The Bricanyl cleared up his breathing at first, but soon he had to increase his dosage for it to work. It felt like he was moving underwater. He couldn’t perform as well as before. Imani’s words echoed in his bones: no matter where you run. The coach kept him on for the year, but his scholarship wasn’t renewed. His brain, too, felt submerged. He sat for hours with textbooks that seemed to have been written in a foreign language. In class, where he was often the only black student, he fell dull and unprepared. The privileged kids with their smart answers intimidated him into silence, which his teachers took as indifference. Outside of class his touchiness pushed away the few students who tried to befriend him. By
the time he understood that he should have gone to a large state college where there would have been more of “his people,” his grades had plummeted and he had no money. Ashamed to write to his biology teacher, who might have given him better advice, he quit school. Keeping his health issues secret, he joined the army—and was plummeted into the last desperate days of the Vietnam War.
CAMERON BEGAN TO SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF HIS FREE TIME with Jeff. Jeff had a small apartment in the Mission District and taught Comparative Religion at a local college. He also volunteered at a small Tibetan monastery, helping with everything from paperwork to fixing leaks to chauffeuring the monks, who had fled from Tibet to a small Himalayan village before arriving here. Some days, Jeff cooked, odd dishes with flat noodles and tofu and seaweed, or mushrooms that plumped up when you soaked them in water, dishes that Cameron was distrustful of at first but grew to like. Jeff was no saint; he tended to impatience and took it hard when things didn’t go the way he wanted them to. But Cameron admired the quickness with which he was able to return to cheerfulness.