Where Earth Meets Water Page 11

After dinner Malina retreated to the apartment, saying that she wanted the boys to have some one-on-one time together.

  “It was very nice to meet you,” Karom said stiffly. “I trust I’ll see you for brunch tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” Malina said. “I didn’t mean to overstep my boundaries.” Karom shook his head with narrowed eyes, as if shaking away the evening and its memories.

  As Malina got into a taxi, Lloyd grabbed his arm. “What gives? What happened back there?”

  Karom snorted. “You told her, didn’t you, like it was something in passing, some way to make conversation? I can’t believe you, Lloyd.”

  “Told her what?”

  “About me and my family. It’s not exactly dinnertime conversation.” Lloyd opened his mouth to speak. Around them, swirls of club-goers were dawdling on the sidewalk, shouting to one another, hugging and texting simultaneously. He nodded his head toward the next street, and they ducked in the alleyway to talk. “You don’t just share that with anyone.”

  “Oh my God, Karom, she’s not just anyone. She’s my fiancée.”

  “Well, your fiancée just relegated my entire life into a dinnertime anecdote and made me feel about two inches tall. And to top it all off, she’s acting like she’s experienced the same thing. I am an unnatural phenomenon. Not once but twice. Twice. Did you tell your fiancée that? That I should be fucking studied for psycho-fucking-logical trauma? Go ahead. Tell her. Tell her so that she can put it in her empathetic pipe and smoke it.” Karom’s mouth was twitching, and his nostrils quivered and his hands shook as though stricken with palsy. At the end of his soliloquy, he stalked off toward the main road and got into a cab before Lloyd even opened his mouth to respond.

  The next morning, Karom showed up at their door with flowers for Malina and a bottle of Scotch for Lloyd: amends, he said when they called down through the buzzer to ask who it was. “It’s amends. I’m here to make them.”

  He held the offerings out to them as the door was opening, Malina standing next to Lloyd, his wiry frame supporting her gentle ballerina limbs. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid, and she smiled warmly at Karom through her lips, though her eyes remained tense. She had been crying all morning while Lloyd held her, hushing and rocking her and telling her that everything would be okay. She couldn’t believe that she’d created a rift like that between herself and Karom, Lloyd’s best friend. She couldn’t imagine starting off on the wrong foot. Lloyd had held her and told her that he didn’t like the way Karom had spoken to her, that he was going to have a strict talk with him about respect and understanding and acceptance. But Karom apologized, and then Malina apologized and then Lloyd acknowledged it all and then the rest of their weekend settled around them; Karom seemed to relax into their rhythm. They looked at pictures from college and discussed plans for the future. They talked about Gita and her assignments and Karom’s marathon in the fall. They talked about wedding plans and venues and where to go to dinner that night. By evening, the previous night’s venom had dissipated into the foggy San Franciscan air.

  Lloyd is whorl-ing farther and farther into the woods. He has to find Saul. He has to verify his presence. He has to confront him and then let him go. That is what you do with ghosts. He will do the same with Saul, that sylvan creature who has disappeared into the night. Suddenly, Lloyd has a thought that physically jerks him upright: What if Saul has been haunting Lloyd all this time? What if Saul has been the infiltrator, the perpetrator of Lloyd’s insides? What if Saul had caught Lloyd at a weak moment, possibly during those early-morning hours in Karom’s bed, when he’d crawled into an orifice and had settled there, festering and implanting this idea into the fissures in Lloyd’s brain? What if Lloyd is finally meeting Saul head-on now, after all these years of fighting with himself inside about who he might really be? Suddenly, Lloyd is grappling with a new opponent, of whom he hadn’t even been aware. This isn’t fair play, Lloyd thinks. That doesn’t put us on even ground. This isn’t a fair fight. But fair or not, Saul has to go. And Lloyd isn’t leaving these woods with him.

  Lloyd lowers himself onto a wet stump and holds his chin in his hands. Now he is haunted by two men, one real and one devised. This is the opposite of what he has come to the woods to do. Instead of exorcising one man, he has taken on another. He’s succeeded in inventing a specter. He’s losing his mind. The woods feel as if they are closing in on him, the damp leaves of the trees getting heavier with each drop of water that falls from the sky, the ground squelching under his heavy hiking boots that have barely been broken in. Lloyd is literally lost in the woods. He thinks about the bus that will take him back to the airport, which will arrive at the visitors’ center in forty minutes. If he doesn’t make that one, he will miss his flight home.

  Mohan and Rana Seth

  February 12, 1988

  Dear Karom,

  Your mother and I have talked, argued and deliberated over this letter for a long time. I think it’s silly, writing a letter that we’ll never send. But our social worker suggested a therapist—another introduction into our lives that I’ve been grappling with—and he suggested that we do this in order to adjust. In fact, I’m not sure how I will adjust to these New Agey exercises, but I hope it will help in the long run. The therapist has suggested that we write this letter constantly, in tandem, and without self-censorship or limitation. I’ll comply, because it’s easier than going to a stranger’s office and spilling your guts. This, I think, is the lesser of two evils.

  Your mother found a book in the library the other day and wordlessly handed it to me. I was sitting at the dining table, pondering a piece of toast as I turned it over carefully in my hand. She set it down on the table and continued on into the nursery, where you were still sleeping. I picked it up and skimmed the back. It was a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diary, likely an attempt to prove that keeping a diary is no shame, when one of America’s foremost writers had one. But in fact, this was no ordinary diary: it was a transcription of a marital diary kept by both Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne that they began together from the moment they were united in holy matrimony. These were interactive documents, intentionally designed so one could understand what the other was feeling, thinking. They read one another’s contributions and built a joint narrative of their daily lives. “A rainy day—a rainy day—and I do verily believe there is no sunshine in this world, except what beams from my wife’s eyes,” Hawthorne wrote shortly after they wed. “We have been living in eternity, ever since we came to this old Manse....It is good to live as though this world were heaven.”

  No doubt Sophia read this and responded with her own joyous words: “I feel new as the Earth which is just born again—I rejoice that I am, because I am his, wholly, unreservedly his.” The book was filled with glorious exultations of their love for one another, beautiful unabashed declarations describing their love as mighty and shielding against a harsh New England winter. At first, I felt embarrassed reading some of these entries, the effervescent flow of words, the saccharine showiness. I felt like an intruder in their private exchange. But it also made me regret that your mother and I hadn’t kept a joint diary from the start of our lives, to document—if for nobody else but ourselves—how we began together, how we fought, how we continued together....

  Reading their first words together as a naive couple made me want to tell our story from the start so that your mother can understand how I felt about her on our very first encounter. How I still feel today.

  As you know, your mother and I met on a film set. Nothing fancy—an ad for Nutria face cream. I was the director of the advertisement, desperate to get into something big, even direct my own short, to break into something that might define me cinematically. I’d worked as a stagehand on commercials in the past during college as a way to make money, but it was a new thing, especially in India. I hadn’t been allowed to attend film school, so
all the skills I learned on set, as my first-year biology classes weren’t going to afford me any insight into this foreign, enticing world. Over the years, I’ll make you watch a number of Satyajit Ray and Dharma Sen movies and you won’t be able to argue that you haven’t become a better man for it. In fact, in this no-sending letter-writing medium, you won’t even have a chance to argue back. Perhaps this therapist is onto something.

  You’ll see in Sen’s movie Count Your Courage, when the platoon leader has to tell the shepherd about the land mines and he can’t, that he just finds himself stumbling over the words. And he knows that the longer he waits to tell him, the harder it’ll be. It’s a matter of life and death, and the burden will grow greater and greater on the platoon leader’s conscience. That’s how I feel right now. That unless I tell you, far away from the pages of this letter, I’m going to regret it later. But it’s a decision that your mother and I made and it’s one we can’t get away from, because we have already lied to everyone: your grandparents, our friends, our colleagues.

  It was the late, great Mr. Ray who taught me something about film that no other filmmaker ever could: the importance of suspense. It isn’t inherent in his movies, and Ray is no Hitchcock, but there is an element of suspense that, if you look closely, drives each and every story. If you watch The Apu Trilogy knowing this, you’ll see what I mean. So I took this lesson and walked onto the set of Nutria face cream. Suspense. I know you’re wondering how I could turn an ad for face cream suspenseful. I’ll tell you.

  The casting director had culled down the talent pool and selected a girl who would show up at the shoot that morning. She should have been in Makeup hours before I got on the set, prepping her lines, memorizing her marks.

  “Do you want to meet the talent?” I was asked moments after appearing on the set.

  I told them no. I wandered around, finding fault with things—having stagehands erase scuff marks from the floor, adjusting cameras, toying with lighting. I looked through the wardrobe and vetoed half the clothes on the line, settling on the simplest sari, with no border.

  “Sir, she’s just finished with hair and makeup. Do you want to check her before we send her to Wardrobe?” I shook my head and kept up my time-wasting charade. All things I needed to do, but certainly I needed to meet the talent in order to determine lighting and wardrobe. In fact, I refused to meet the girl until fifteen minutes before we began rolling tape. I was thinking about everything but the focus of the scene. And that’s when your mother emerged from the dressing room, poised and confident, holding out her hand to me.

  The girl was completely wrong. She was dark, she was complicated; an incomplete story was written behind her face, which was more intense and bewitching than anything I’d seen before. She had fierce, inquiring eyes and a mouth that twitched before she asked a question.

  She was unlike any model I’d ever worked with. There was nothing nondescript about her, which had been the casting call: “Tall, slim, pretty girl with a clear fair complexion. The face cream should be the true star.”

  I took one look at her and I knew I couldn’t work with her. I’d be doing myself a disservice as a director if I kept her, because she wasn’t what the client was looking for at all. I dialed the casting director but then regretted it immediately. How was I going to explain to him that I couldn’t work with this girl because her face was “complicated”?

  “Look here, Rajeet. What are you playing at?”

  “How’s it going, Mohan, boss? How’s the talent? Rana’s not bad, eh?”

  “She’s totally wrong. She’s too dark, with intense eyes. We needed a light-skinned pretty young thing, someone a little reticent. This girl looks like she could rip my balls out from under me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, boss. I thought she was pretty good. But dark is no good. Perhaps I need to change the lighting out in my office. Can you slap a few more layers of powder on her? I can’t change her at this point. Your set is eating up rupees by the minute.”

  I hung up the phone and stalked back to the set, where your mother was standing by the sink in which she would wash her face countless times in the next few hours.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked me. “Shouldn’t we begin?” I rubbed my eyes and that’s when it struck me. That’s when I knew that I was completely taken—smitten—by this dark, charming girl with the alluring features.

  There were a few girls before your mother, but I struggle with remembering even their faces as I write this. There was not one forgettable thing about your mother, though, to the point where she would leave a memento of herself on my person every time I saw her. I would return home and find a lacy handkerchief with her embroidered initials mysteriously stuffed into my pocket. She’d slip a small silver tube into my briefcase, complete with lip marks creased onto the color so that I’d realize I was in possession of something that had been so close to her mouth. I carried her lipstick around for a month before a colleague reached into my bag to borrow a pen, handed me the lipstick and cuffed me on the shoulder for being such a rascal. She certainly wanted to announce her arrival onto the scene—our scene. But there was no need for this. I was already taken by the wrong girl on the set. I didn’t want her for the commercial; I wanted her for my life.

  Not only is your mother a beauty, she’s incredibly wily. She knew exactly what she was doing, using the Hawthornes as a point when she handed me this book. She knew that using a historical writer as a pawn would get me to tap into my feelings. It did.

  But there is one thing that still plagues me: the Hawthornes’ letters were written to be private, meant only for one another’s eyes and hearts and emotions. This quote sums it up perfectly: “We are happier than we then knew, or perhaps than we now know, for who can tell what is to come?” They had no idea that hundreds of years later, these secret words and sentiments would be published and bound, distributed for everyone to read their private disclosures to one another. Not to mention that later, when they were blessed with children, the kids too added drawings to the pages of their parents’ notebooks, transforming the marriage diary into a family affair, which is something I don’t want. I don’t want these diaries found by anyone—not an editor or a publisher, and certainly not by you. I don’t want you adding to these pages, much less reading them. This is something I want your mother to know loud and clear. That this is my first concern in writing them.

  * * *

  Before your father gets all carried away with his dramatic flair, I want to interject with my motivations for this letter. It wasn’t that I ever wanted to hide anything from you. I didn’t. Ever. But we wanted you to grow up naturally, normally, without hesitation or question. And that was more important than the concern we had over hiding information.

  You’re going through a hard time right now in your school. You aren’t telling me, but I can see it in the bruised circles under your eyes. You aren’t sleeping or eating properly. You smile at me and you tell me everything is okay. I’ve spoken to your teacher but she says that she hasn’t seen any signs of bullying and that you’re actually a very well-adjusted boy in class, producing drawings and learning your letters at the same speed as everyone else. I have no doubt that you’re performing well in school, but that’s also my concern—that you’re putting on an act that’s throwing Appa and me for a loop. I hope you’ll confide in me soon. I hope you’re all right, that these are just growing pains.

  Second, I didn’t mean to “trick” your father with that diary; it was meant just to show how powerful a diary can be. It can help people profess their deepest secrets, even ones they don’t realize they have. I have never felt as though he hadn’t shared his true feelings for me, even from the start, but sometimes without the pressure of having to speak to a face, to a live breathing person who can easily respond, writing can help break down that barrier of intimidation and truly allow people to speak their minds. I am hoping that w
e communicate here what might not be divulged during numerous useless sessions with a therapist, while we sit there staring at one another, listening to the torturous ticks of the clock go by, growing noisier and noisier in the echoes of our ears. I want truth, purity of truth and courage to speak our minds. That is why the forum of our therapy is on paper and not in a shrink’s office.

  As for the fear of having this diary found and published—well, I can’t say what happens after I leave this earth, but I will do all I can to keep it from getting into your hands, even though it is written and addressed to you. That too was done intentionally, even though only your father and I will ever be reading it. And this too is to help us cross that barrier of intimidation. Perhaps telling the truth will be easier or we can similarly trick ourselves into telling the “you” in this letter the truth instead of having to tell the real you the truth.

  I find myself wondering so much about your life. I wonder about the future, what you’ll be doing. What you’ll look like. Who will you look like? Who will you be with? Will you love? Will you be loved? I’ve thought about all these things already, Karom, and you’re still my little boy. I can’t help it. You’re my life.

  I see you chuckle to yourself as you always do when you catch me eating fruit with salt, unable to abandon my “Indian ways.” You also laugh when I put spicy pickle on spaghetti or massage my hair with coconut oil on the weekends. I wonder if you too will inherently pick up these habits, as they are the habits you were born with. As a bird knows how to fly or a tiger cub knows how to hunt. I wonder if one day, as your fork is traveling to your mouth holding strands of noodles covered with achar, you will stop to realize what you are doing, if you will remember me, if you will consider yourself truly your mother’s son.

  Though you’ll never see this letter, I have been wondering how you might respond if you ever found it. I’ve never lied to you, Karom. I’ve always told you everything when you asked. When you asked where babies come from at the tender age of five, I sat you down and explained it all, making my own crude drawings in crayon to demonstrate anatomy. For weeks afterward you would take the drawings out from where you’d rescued them from the trash and pore over them. You’d tell everyone what you had learned—at the grocery store, at preschool... I was mortified until one day we were out having lunch at Shanghai Garden and you told Mr. Wong as we were ordering soup dumplings. Mr. Wong’s almond-shaped eyes got larger and larger as you narrated your story. I tried interrupting you, but your father shook his head and said quietly to let you go on, so you did. And by the time it was over, your father was doubled over with laughter, tears leaking out from the corners of his eyes as Mr. Wong hurried to the back to put in our order and likely try to find another waiter for our table. I couldn’t help but laugh then, too. And when you asked why you couldn’t have a birthday at Great Adventure like your friend Joshua in the fifth grade, I never made up some cockamamy story about us not wanting to take the responsibility for ten kids in New Jersey let loose in a theme park. I calmly sat you down and told you that we just couldn’t afford it right now, that things were tough at Dad’s work and that I had lost an account with my office, and we would just have to make it up the following year. And you understood perfectly; in fact, you tried to return your allowance for the next three weeks, until we promised you that the five dollars you received each week wasn’t hurting our finances.