Where Earth Meets Water Page 12
But the truth is that I’ve never lied to you about this either; I just never told you the complete truth. I suppose the way I have justified it to myself is that I tell myself that you never really asked. But why would you ask this? As a child, you assume it, just as you assume there will be money under your pillow the morning after you lose a tooth.
There are so many reasons that we weren’t forthright with you about this one. One is that I know there will be anger—your anger. It will come silently at first, simmering at the top like a pot of water for tea or spaghetti. But then it will boil over, and I won’t know how to contain it. This aspect of you is something I haven’t learned completely yet, partially because your anger has come so rarely yet so fairly; I have never been taken aback by your ire. You anger only when the worst has struck, when nothing else can be done, when it’s a last resort. When you were a child, you would awaken in your crib and stare at the ceiling, knowing that we too would be asleep. You’d entertain yourself—I watched silently one morning from my bed when we first brought you home. You’d create patterns in the air with your finger, puff your breath out in front of you to watch the fringe of your hair dance and then finally pull yourself to a stand holding the rungs of the crib. You’d watch Dad and me carefully—I lay back with my eyes mostly closed so you couldn’t see—pass your gaze over us and verify that we were asleep. You would accept this and turn back to your crib and try to sleep once again but it would fail you. I didn’t understand how you had this sixth sense to you, as if you knew how to behave, like an adult. How had you somehow been taught this inherent patience, this benevolence that could barely translate to adults and the people I encountered on the streets every day? But after some time, after you felt you’d waited enough, the whimpering would begin, softly enough that at times we could barely hear it. And then you would erupt. But you had been holding back for so long that I couldn’t blame you for your rage at not being picked up out of the crib or held and comforted.
* * *
I never thought I would be this person—this person whose previous life was all but erased to distant memory after a child came into my life. Your mother and I would always poke fun at our friends behind their backs when they had children. It was as if there were nothing else in their worlds anymore. Days at the beach with nothing else but a blanket, a six-pack of beer and a Frisbee didn’t exist anymore. They were replaced by days at the beach with water wings and baby food and gargantuan diaper bags that eclipsed your view of the rolling waves. Everything became a world that revolved around nap times and feeding times. Spending time with our friends started to feel like constantly being at the zoo. Gradually, as you’ll learn when the time comes for you and your friends to have children, you start to back away into your own personal space and become an inclusive family. Of course, you still go out and spend time with your friends but the priorities change and diaper changes really matter more than birthday parties, as we learned on my forty-fifth birthday, when we looked around the table and it was just Mom and Ravi Uncle who cheered me on as I blew out my candles. All the other parents were settling their kids in for naps or feeding them or changing them or had left before we’d served cake because their child needed to “stick to his routine.” Of course, we scoffed and passed it off as “More cake for us,” but it was clear what was happening in our world. So it is much to my chagrin that when I look back at our lives in New York before you entered our world, it’s very difficult to remember those moments pre-Karom.
Once you were here, it was as if the memory board had been wiped clean. Everything did revolve around you: Had you eaten, had you slept, had you learned a new English word each day? Once you turned five, our goals surpassed toilet training to helping you integrate into an American world so you wouldn’t feel like the odd one out in kindergarten. It happened by accident. I’d come back into the kitchen one morning from answering the phone to find you sitting there with a bowl of upturned cereal, a trail of milk dripping its way across our faulty slanted floor and a grin on your face.
“Oh, Karom,” I sighed. “What a mess.”
“Mess,” you whispered almost under your breath. You’d gotten over your shyness for the most part by then, but it must have been the English word that made you self-conscious. You’d heard Mom and me speak in English for a few months by then, but it was when you repeated that word so softly, so hesitantly, that we realized we’d done you a disservice by not coaxing you to learn more and more each day. Then it became our mission: we bought a word-a-day calendar for kids, and although it was really made for second graders and you were only five at the time, we figured it might give you a head start into the competitive world of New York City public schools. Each morning, we sat at the kitchen table with you before kindergarten. We started basic with the numbers, the letters, and then moved on to the things we thought you’d need to know while we were at work and you were at day care: bathroom, toilet, hungry, parents, the subtlety between want and need. It became our one mission a day and we would test you on it as we tucked you into bed, where we learned truly what a charmer you were even as a young child who barely spoke much English.
“What do you want tonight, Karom?”
“Story.”
“What do you need tonight?”
“Kiss.”
* * *
In those days, those early days when we were just getting on our feet, we cut corners. We didn’t always live in this beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. In the early days it was Kew Gardens, it was Middle Village, it was tiny apartments in vast nameless apartment blocks without soul, without charm. But it was what we could afford; it was the sacrifice we told ourselves we would make for the long run. When we moved to New York from Bombay, I’d struck a deal with your father that we would do it on the condition that we wouldn’t settle in those ghettos of Indians I’d heard about: the ones in Edison and Jackson Heights and Flushing where people settle into communities complete with the same groceries they could have found down on Peddar Road, where they could probably have benefited from the same English lesson we gave you each morning. “I’m moving to America,” I’d told Dad. “I’m not moving to some foreign form of India. If we’re leaving, we’re leaving. I want to live with the New Yorkers once we get on our feet. Deal?” We’d shaken on it, but it took us a little longer than expected before we headed west from the industrial-sized apartment communities and were able to put a down payment on our brownstone. Those were difficult days before Dad and Ravi got Cutting Room onto its feet. They were working late nights to make their dream of launching their own film-editing company come true, but as it was taking longer than we had expected, I was supporting our two-person family with the little I made from Tiger Translations. We ate a lot of fifty-cent meals: back then you could get a carton of cold sesame noodles from the Chinese carts on Main Street for fifty cents, two of which would feed us for an evening. We had fifty-cent pizza and fish and chips at the fast-food place on the corner on Fifty Cent Fridays. Fifty cents was the magic number. It was astounding what you could get for that amount of money back then. Fifty cents kept us alive for a long time.
It was during that time that I discovered the thrift stores. There was a row of them on Thirty-Seventh Avenue that I would walk past on my way to the 7 train. For the longest time, I avoided them. Back home in Bombay, we never bought things secondhand. Those were the things you gave to the kabadi wala, the junk man who came to your door to take anything deemed not biodegradable that he would try to mend or repurpose and sell again to a lower class. I hadn’t ever even seen a secondhand store in Bombay, much less set foot into one. My parents would have considered themselves failures had I ever bought something “vintage.” But once I overcame my nerves and my pride, it was these stores that outfitted our home so that we didn’t have to sit and eat our fifty-cent pizza off the floor. Once I got over myself and passed the threshold into one that first morning, everything changed for me. These stores
became more valuable than the places where you paid double to get essentially the same thing, just with a little less wear to it. But who cared, right? I could throw a slipcover on that perfectly good divan, which would give your father hours of endless joy as he reclined on it watching the evening news. I bought piles and piles of books from these shops, classics and bestsellers that I couldn’t bring myself to purchase at full price from the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue. Cast-iron pots and pans were actually better bought used, as they had already been treated and scratched and were perfectly poised to simmer on a stove holding a slow-cooked roast for hours. Visiting these stores became like a treasure hunt: you never knew what you were going to find. Granted, most of the stuff was junk, so you had to be truly discerning in order to find those one or two items that would be worth bringing into your home. Even once we hit it big and Dad became a partner in Cutting Room and started bringing home all those awards, even then, I realized I couldn’t break my ties with the thrift stores. They were a part of me now. They had humbled me and forced me to recognize my lot in life when we’d first moved to this country. So even once we moved to our brownstone in the Heights, I’d continue to take you there so that you’d appreciate them, too.
In the beginning the concept was strange to you. Why were all these used items stored in this place? Who would buy them and take them away? And the most important question to you: Whom had they belonged to? The first time we stepped into the Goodwill on Atlantic, that was all you could grasp.
You pointed to a yellow leathery ottoman creased with age but that would clean up nicely with some polishing and asked, “Who?” At first I thought you were assigning characterizations to the furniture, like in Beauty and the Beast, so I just said, “Ottoman,” to teach you the word and continued toward the kitchenware section. But you tugged at my dress and pointed to the ottoman again.
“Who?”
“Not who, Karom. What.” But you pressed on.
“Who?”
I knelt down to you. “Baby, I don’t understand you. What are you asking me?”
“Who was?”
I got it then. You wanted to know to whom that had belonged. This was the part that made me a little squeamish, I’ll admit. Part of getting comfortable with the idea of buying secondhand items was pretending that they hadn’t belonged to someone in the first place. I didn’t want to think about what had been cooked in our cast-irons even though I had scrubbed them until they shone. I didn’t want to know who had reclined on the divan before your father, who had wound the grandfather clock’s hands before we had, who had eaten off our plates and sipped wine out of our goblets. In my mind, when I’d washed things upon their entry to our home, they were purified, like a child damp from baptism and brand-new to us. But I also didn’t want to confuse you. I wanted you to know that these were in fact secondhand objects, that they had belonged to someone who didn’t need them anymore and therefore had brought them here for someone else’s use.
“I don’t know whose this was,” I’d said. “I think maybe we can make up a story, though. Would you like to do that?” You walked over to the ottoman and gently caressed it as if it were a living thing. Your little fingers were so knowing, so wise. At times when you were small, I felt like you were the incarnation of a monk, the next Dalai Lama. You touched the wooden legs one by one and then turned to me.
“Old man with a dog,” you said by way of introduction.
“Oh?” I asked, playing along. “And what’s the dog’s name?”
“Buster.” I laughed out loud then because I’d just started reading you Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers and Dog. And like that, little by little, you began walking around the rest of the store assigning backgrounds and stories to each of the items. You were entertaining not only to me but to the other shoppers as you tapped a piece of furniture or a scarf or coat and told the story of how it found itself here. Everything had a history to you; everything had a reason for belonging to someone. It was another reason that I have always felt that you have a very old soul, that you can see deeper into a situation than most. I wonder if this is a trait you’ll always carry with you as you grow. I wonder if you’ll always create a history for everything you see and touch and interact with. It would explain so much about who you are.
I loved those days with you. Dad doesn’t love the thrift stores like I do. He gets impatient; he’s more of a “run in and get what you want” kind of shopper, whereas I like to browse. He and I epitomize the ideas of need and want. Shopping is painful for him, whereas it’s a release for me. So you and I had plenty of quality time together while we were shopping.
It wasn’t that Dad or I ever needed a child; we have always had a solid relationship, and for many years, we were completely happy just the two of us. Of course we had times where we were easily frustrated, snapping at the slightest thing, overworked, overtired, overtaxed. But mostly, somehow we came home and fell into one another as though there was no other way. Even on those nights where the fight seeped out from us as though from a strainer, we found a bypass and circuitously made our way around the argument, watching it nervously as it became a speck on the horizon behind us. We had a good life, creating our home, making dinner, trying so hard to see into the future. We were married for only a few years before we began to think about children. We talked about it, and we both wanted them, but it was just as our careers were beginning to peak. If it happened, it happened. If not, there was always next year. I knew I could do this for only so long, but I tried my best to stay focused on my job so that we could provide for a little one, whenever that might be. But then one night, as we sat watching the news with our plates on our laps and glasses of wine on the floor next to the couch, your father and I looked at one another and we knew. The time had come to bring a child into our lives.
* * *
There’s this thing that happened. It’s called the Bhopal disaster. It was one of the worst industrial disasters of all time. At the Union Carbide pesticide plant in December 1984, a chemical leak killed over two thousand people immediately and the backwash continued to kill over three thousand in the ensuing days. Some reports state that as many as fifteen thousand people died altogether. The gas cloud continued out of the factory and into the town, where it consumed the lives of thousands of people. People were startled by the odor, awakened by their own vomiting, unaware of what had caught in their throats, behind their larynxes, within their esophagi. The moment they could move, they did, running away from the plant as fast as they could. Those who ran inhaled more than those who had a vehicle to ride. It resulted in illnesses, in crystallized organs that appeared frozen midbreath. Eyes burned; victims cried toxic waste for days; a river of sputum gurgled in the street. Short people and children inhaled more, as the fumes nestled closer to the ground and hung there like a shroud over the entire city.
It was a huge conspiracy theory; apparently there had been safety issues with the plant all along but foremen refused to report it or stop work in order to maintain productivity. There had been gas leaks and explosions leading up to this catastrophe that had been covered up and the work went on without fail each day, every day. Mothers were childless; husbands were wifeless; children were orphaned almost immediately.
What had happened was water. The simplest element had crept into one of the main pipes, raising the pressure in the tanks and reacting with the already toxic chemicals and imploding the tank from the inside. From there, a ripple effect occurred, as all the tanks and pipes were interconnected within the factory, and the easterly winds carried the gas swiftly into the city, where sleeping bodies lay oblivious to anything.
The factory had employed a large percentage of those who lived outside its gates. There were makeshift chawls and shantytowns devoted solely to the workers who tended to the chemicals, cleaned the pipes methodically, and undercut the safety measures that should have been enforced each and every day at this throbbing powde
r keg that erupted that night. When it was safe for workers to enter the area with insectlike gas masks, there was no point; the damage had been done, and all the health authorities, the Red Cross and the UN could do was pick the bodies off the ground like pieces of litter.
When the cameras swept across the charred gray land, it was a holocaust. Your mother and I watched the scenes on CNN in horror. I felt her break down beside me and I held her tight as she sobbed. We watched as thousands of fish bobbed on the surface of the Betwa River, killed instantly as the poison entered their gills. Over a few hours, the leaves on all the trees had turned yellow and brittle and fell off at the slightest breeze. Bloated animal carcasses from the farms and fields surrounding were cremated alongside the hundreds, thousands of dead. There was nothing; it felt surreal that a hunk of the middle of India was silenced in a few mere hours by chemicals, by oversight, by greed.