Where Earth Meets Water Page 13

  There was a huge backlash: protests and sit-ins and strikes. As soon as the area was considered safe again, the living and the ill now stormed the streets, demanding that the CEO of Union Carbide pay for the havoc he’d created and provide for the remaining affected families. And everyone was affected. Cancer, tumor necrosis, lung failure, stillborns, birth defects—no one was spared. Those lucky enough to be spared were shuttled to the very outskirts of the disaster, where tents and other makeshift shelters were erected, but there was a dearth in the number of doctors and nurses and relief workers who came to their aid.

  The Indian government got involved, but everyone accused them of siding with the company, who up until this point had been employing a vast number of Indians and pumping revenue into the system. But Indians were no longer hoodwinked; they demanded justice. The case went on for years. In fact, it’s still going on. UCC has nearly been exonerated and the successor and victims continue to pass down their ailments through their children and grandchildren. This is in their blood now, the chemical residue, this anathema. But it’s not in yours.

  Once it was official—once we’d signed all the papers and made copies for our files and pages had been stamped and signatures notarized—the staff left us in the room we’d been in for hours before they led you in. You tottered in holding the social worker’s hand, wearing shabby chappals and exploring our faces with those huge eyes that were calm but wary. The social worker put your little hand in Mom’s before stepping away and silently closing the door behind her. All that morning, we’d been aching to leave that chilled, mildewed room, but there was a force field in the room that pulled us together, that urged us to stay. I pulled up a plastic chair next to Mom’s and she pulled you onto her lap and rocked you back and forth, tears spilling from her eyes into your uncombed hair, and there, for the first time since I’d laid eyes upon your mother in that screening studio years before, I felt complete.

  Your mother would have been content to admire you for the rest of the day in that room, but I was firmly rational: we had to ensure that before we did anything else, you were safe. So that afternoon itself, we handed you over to masked doctors who took you into sterilized rooms and made you cough. They made you open your eyes wide, as well as your little pink mouth. They listened to your heart and let you listen, too, and you giggled with the thump of your chest resounding in your ears. They tested your reflexes; they drew blood. They counted your white blood cells and your red. They took X-rays and bone density and scraped the inside of your cheek. In the beginning it was all a game.

  “Look, look, let’s see what we can find inside our mouths. Want to see it under a microscope?” Initially, the doctors cooperated with our games, but with the increasing number of tests and incoming patients, they became methodical and serious. I perfected my number of funny faces and voices and became a one-man cartoon show. Your mother crafted sock puppets to entertain you in the waiting rooms. Finally, finally, when you had been searched and searched and they had found nothing, and they told us that you were certifiably 100 percent healthy and that no chemical traces had been left on you, we took you home. We were overjoyed. I wonder, do you remember? You spoke Hindi first, chaste, beautiful Hindi, and your mother and I prattled to you nonstop in this language that we hadn’t used in eight years.

  We stopped for ice cream at the side of the road before the long drive back to Bombay. I was worried about sanitation, but your mother reminded me that we had long been eating these things and that you were raised on them. We bought you a Feast stick and a Thums Up and you sat there happily on a bench in the dust, with caramel across your cheek and your hands sticky with cola. There was a board on a lone table next to the snack stand, and a small pile of wooden coins, some plain and some painted black. I positioned them in a circle in the center of the board and you crept up beside me and watched as I flicked the striker into the center and all the pieces dispersed. I had even managed to get one in, and you were tickled pink. You handed me the remnants of your ice cream and strained your neck to see more closely. I shot the striker again and got another one in and you climbed up on the bench next to me. I struck and scored. You put your arm out tentatively, shyly, but almost as quickly snapped it back into your body. I reached over and put you on my lap and did it again, landing the queen nicely in a pocket, even without the gentle ricochet against the back wall.

  “Now,” I whispered in Hindi, “we have to follow that up.” I aimed carefully, wanting so badly to please you, to win you over, but I missed. I removed the queen from the pocket and put it back in the center of the board. You looked at me quizzically.

  “See,” I said, “if you don’t follow the queen up with another win, you have to put her back. She needs support. You can’t just take her away—you have to sacrifice another.” You nodded solemnly and I took another shot, this time sideways, using my thumb’s force against my forefinger, and I got her in. And it was at that moment that I felt your tiny tensed body, constantly thrumming with nervous energy from the moment we met you—even while you slept—finally relax. I felt your warm back against my chest and your small head, dusty from the side of the road, loll against my shoulder. That lean meant trust. That lean meant more to me than any hug or squeeze you have ever given me since. Up until then you could have been any child. But at that dusty rest stop, when you were healthy and leaned back into me, when you were pulsing with sugar and laughter and joy, you were our child then and there. You became our Karom.

  * * *

  A blind woman brought you in. You clung to her and wouldn’t let go. But she couldn’t have fed you even if she could have seen. The river was polluted; the livestock was dead; the fields had wilted and died. This was your only hope. They say you didn’t say a word after she left. We found out later that both your mother and father worked at the plant, your mother in packaging and your father in the underbelly of the operation, scrubbing and replacing pipes. He might have even had some insight into what happened that night. We don’t know what happened to them; they might have perished in the accident, or they might have survived, becoming so severely disfigured and disoriented that they couldn’t remember where they came from. They could have been unrecognizable. Nevertheless, they had the foresight—and the poverty—to situate you and their home miles from the plant. They walked three miles each morning to a rattling bus that was overcrowded with livestock and people that took them another twenty miles to their jobs each morning. The blind woman looked after you while your parents worked each day. She earned her living by caring for the children in the village. She had her meal at a different home each night, and afterward, each night, someone led her home by the hand and helped her unlock her small one-roomed hut. She was blind, but she had raised you into something else. You were so well behaved, so incredibly curious but never mischievous. I wondered who this woman was and the power she had to control even those she couldn’t see.

  In those early days, you took to me and your dad like you had been with us all along. I’d had nightmares of having to win you over, of having to ply you with sweets and toys and do all the things they said not to do in the parenting books. I wanted you to be unequivocally ours. And you were. It was as if you understood that the situation demanded practicalities rather than emotion; your parents were gone and you couldn’t take care of yourself, so we were your new parents. You were a mature grown-up in a two-year-old body. You started to call us Papa and Mama shortly after we took you home and then Mom and Dad when school began, lest you be different from any of your schoolmates. You were meant to be our son.

  We hadn’t wanted to hide this from you, ever. But because of the situation, because of the urgent nature of the way you came into our lives, we didn’t want to have to educate you about what had happened when so many other people were trying to erase it from their memories or simply couldn’t remember it because the poison had clouded their minds, rendering them incapable of thought or coherent speech. We wanted to mo
ve on. We wanted you to feel like ours. We wanted you never to feel as though you’d been abandoned or forgotten or were an outsider.

  We did it to protect you, never to hurt you. We wanted you to be safe and secure with who you are and who you have always been. That day at the side of the road, the one that your dad referenced, was the first day of your life, as far as we were concerned. And from then on, we were going to stop at nothing to give you everything you needed.

  * * *

  I keep telling myself that if you find out, you’ll understand why we didn’t tell you. You’d been through so much, we wanted to keep you safe from all those ghosts. At some point, you’d forgive us and understand the power of secrets, how some secrets can keep you safe, bundled away from the raw, biting truth, from the gas leaks and deformities of Bhopal, your hometown. Maybe you’ll go back there someday and see the ravages painted across the faces of those less fortunate than you. You’ll see the memorial erected to commemorate the fallen, the sick, the injured and the penniless who couldn’t support themselves after their households suffered losses far worse than we could ever imagine. Most of all, though, I hope you’ll see the binding, unconditional love that your mother and I have for you. You are our own, Karom. We wanted nothing more than a normal life for you.

  * * *

  I won’t apologize at this point, because I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all that the news report we watched that night was enough to spur us into action and call the Red Cross to see if there was anything we could do to help. Neither of us have ancestry in Bhopal, but this disaster was too close to home to ignore it. We both felt the urgency like an itch, and sending money wouldn’t be enough. I thought then, as the camera panned the scene, of those left behind, the sick, the tortured, the abandoned. It wasn’t martyrdom; it was need. We needed to help, and people needed us. It was a symbiotic relationship and we scratched one another’s backs. We called multiple agencies, but no one was taking in orphans from Bhopal, not just yet. It was too soon; mothers might still be about, lost in the mess of bureaucracy or mayhem. We called and called until finally a client of your father’s who had been filming in Madhya Pradesh gave him a card with a direct contact for a woman who was running child-support services in the area. We called her and she told us to call back in a month’s time, when everything was sorted. A month and a week later, we were on a plane to meet you.

  I’m not sorry for finding you on that bed, eyes like silver dollars staring up at me, watching my every move, down to the rustle of my sari, the metallic clanking of my earrings. I fell in love with you then, with your dark skin that would match mine; no one would know I hadn’t birthed you. I fell in love with the thatch of hair that fell across your face; I knew I wouldn’t ever allow a barber to cut it until it was absolutely necessary. Your tiny fingers that held the pen we gave you to distract you while we signed papers and papers and papers.

  I’m not sorry you entered our lives with such an easy rhythm, like the entrance of an instrument to a symphony, one that harmonizes and syncopates with the surrounding elements. You fit so naturally; it was so difficult to believe you weren’t ours. Initially, even, the grocers and neighbors were shocked that they hadn’t seen our child up until now.

  “Where have you been hiding him?”

  “What a beautiful boy, such eyes like saucers.”

  “He looks just like you.”

  I was tickled pink at that one. I still think we look alike, somehow, like people who have lived together long enough that their features begin to mimic each other’s. I told myself that it was our dark skin that made us fated toward one another; it was my dark skin that had fated me to your father. My dark, “complicated” skin, as he calls it, destined me for him. And so you would resemble me, if only superficially. That’s truly enough for people who want to believe what you tell them.

  We told anyone who asked that you are our son, that you were born here in Queens but we’d taken you back to India to your grandparents, who had been caring for you while our work schedules couldn’t allow us to give you the attention you deserved. We told our friends that the pain of having you away from us was too much to bear and this was why we hadn’t told anyone about you. But you soon became a favorite at the studio and I brought you to my office for the Halloween parties and the Fourth of July events they had for children and families.

  You were so observant, pointing out the sparkles in the sidewalk as though they were magic. I hadn’t the heart to tell you that they were part of the abrasive grit of the cement poured there so that people could see the contours of the pavement and not slip. I let you believe that the slivers were magic, and you used to wish upon the shimmering squares as though they would bring you luck. You would crane your neck up toward the buildings that spiraled up out of the ground, from where they were rooted in the underworld. You would squint to see the very tops of them and you would question why you couldn’t when we were standing right underneath. I told you that we had to be standing some distance away, and you asked, in Hindi at the time, “Why do you have to be far away to see something that’s right in front of you?”

  “Because your eye can’t take it all in. It’s too big,” I told you. You didn’t accept this answer and you asked your father the same question even though he gave you the same answer when you saw him that evening. You were entranced somehow by the dollar-coin-sized black splotches on the pavement, your eyes flickering from one to the other as we rolled over them in your stroller. Years later you would come to learn that they were pieces of chewing gum rejected by people years before and then stomped upon until they’d lost all trace of former texture or color. You didn’t understand and you continued to point at them, a strained expression on your small face. You wanted to know the names of things, in Hindi first and then in English as you grew older and understood that there was more than one way of speaking. Somewhere in your keen sense of understanding, you grew to accept the fact that there was a divide between the things that your father and I could say to you and even Ravi Uncle and the things we could say to the people on the street or in the shops we frequented, who knelt down to peer into your stroller to see eye to eye, or peered over the counter to catch a glimpse of you and say hello. You grew shy with these English speakers, until one day you grew brazen enough to say the one English word you had learned with gusto, orange juice, and somehow that became your default greeting. When I left you at your nursery school for the first time, I explained to the women in charge that you were still picking up the nuances of English and not to continually hand you juice boxes each time you opened your mouth. This was before Dad and I started with our vocabulary games, but within a few weeks of interaction with the other children, you were chattering happily away and orange juice was abandoned from your repertoire, unless, of course, you truly wanted orange juice.

  Words for you became magic, just like those shimmers in the sidewalk. When you learned a new one, you held it in your mouth, saying it quietly to yourself and then gradually louder and louder until you somehow connected how to properly use it. It was as if your mouth were brimming with marbles, like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady until she could learn proper pronunciation and diction. Naming things was essential to you, just as it was for us when you entered our lives.

  The blind woman had called you Tej. The agency had called you Madhav. You responded to neither, to nothing, really, until Dad showed you how to play carom and then suddenly, immediately, you were Karom. I was hesitant at first to name you after a game. It seemed trivial and flippant, especially after all you’d been through and all we’d been through to find you. But Karom, well, carom really, means to ricochet, to rebound. And that’s what you did. You were resilient against all the odds and you reentered this new life with simplicity and ease. You fit. You were natural. You were ours.

  * * *

  So this is our lie, or as I once told you when we were planning Mom’s surprise party all those years
ago, it’s our half-truth. It’s finally complete. It’s something we’ll never voluntarily tell you, in fear that it would hurt you more than it would help. You’ve already lost one set of parents, one family, beating hearts that once synced with yours in the tiny hut you shared with them on the outskirts of Bhopal’s borderlines. What’s the sense in taking them away from you again?

  If the truth ever comes out to you—which I pray it won’t—I hope you will have found someone to help you through this, someone you can lean on for her—or his; I don’t want to be presumptuous—strength. You will love your partner unconditionally. I know this because you love us unconditionally. Those different forms of love that sprouted from you over the years, unbeknownst even to yourself, I’m sure, were my favorite parts of your childhood. Of course you had love for myself and your mother, which you gave to us almost immediately, and we wondered what we had done to deserve it. There was the love you showed when you saw a hobo huddled in a doorway or trudging through a train car. You would turn to me or Mom and beseech us with your large soulful eyes and we would pass over the snack we had in the stroller for you for after the park or the museum or the movie. There was the love you taught me when Ravi screwed up our finances and we had to eat the cost of a large percentage of films. You taught me forgiveness; you asked me what Ravi Uncle had done, and when I told you, beating my fist into the couch, you told me that I had to forgive him because that’s what friends do. At first, I ignored you, but after you stepped back into your room to do your homework or sneak video games, I picked up the phone and told Ravi I’d received some sound advice from a wise man.