Where Earth Meets Water Read online

  I think it is this love that will carry you through the rest of your life; you have so much of it to give that the person you choose to spend yours with will help you through this, this idea of having been an orphan. I cannot imagine the pain and loneliness it might bring. I’ve scarcely been alone for more than a few hours at a time throughout my life. But you are far stronger than me, Karom. This gift you’ve been given, of resiliency and strength and love, is one that many take for granted. Please don’t you take it for granted, too. Please strive to allow it to take you to new heights and help others achieve it, too. We are so proud of you and we will love you forever.

  I think this exercise is over. Your mother and I have both agreed. We needed these pages to harness our demons and exorcise them. I think this long eternal letter will finally come to an end. The therapist was right: this was what we needed in order to come to grips with our decision not to divulge your past to you. But I want to close with something else that I learned from one of my aforementioned heroes, Mr. Satyajit Ray. In each and every one of his films, however dark and despairing they may be, there is always a light, a glimmer of hope, a warm collaborative spark that lets the audience know there’s a chance for optimism. There’s the birth at the end of a crisis, a loophole at the end of a scandal. So this is my Ray ending to you, in this letter, though it’s far less poetic than the master himself could make it. Everything will be all right, Karom, because this is your story, and we helped compose it. It will be all right because when there is love—the strong, burning love that we have for you—nothing else matters. We have taught you and coaxed you and know that above all, when all is said and done, excuse the final metaphor, but you are our Karom: striking, rebounding, resilient.

  Gita

  Newspaper mornings are sacred in our lives. For a few hours, there is nothing that can disturb us. We lie around in Karom’s home—never mine, for some reason—and flip back the pages, sip coffee and read about the world happening around us. Newspaper mornings are especially lovely during the fall and winter months, when it feels appropriate to hibernate and there’s no guilt to join the city for brunch or museum tours or beach days. It feels as though we’re zipped away in a hidden pocket where time stands still. Especially in the winter, I feel cocooned in this compartment of the world where I can pore over ink-stained pages with nothing to disturb me.

  It was during a newspaper morning that I achieved the crowning moment in my relationship with Karom. It’s the moment that every girl dreams of, when it’s just the two of you and the world seems as if it has stopped and your breath catches, and there’s nothing anyone can do to take away those special words: “Let’s go to India together.”

  It seemed to happen organically that day, though Karom and I had been dating for three years and I’d already broached the topic for two, only to be rebuffed each time. This time it coincided with the travel section and a spread on India’s hidden art enclaves. We used these sometimes to guide our travels, heading to Maine or New York’s wine country based on a well-written article. But there are a few things I would never do with Karom, like visit Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, go skiing or scuba diving, or take a cruise. But there was something different this time; I could sense it before we’d even scanned the articles on the front page. I opened the article up and held it up against my chest.

  “Look,” I said. “Have you heard of these? Small villages are becoming the tourist draw in India. Each one specializes in an art form and there’s a festival where you move from town to town enjoying and buying art. There are some pretty talented people.”

  “We should go.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed and folded the paper back as I reached for another section.

  “No, really. We should. Next year.”

  I looked at him skeptically. I had asked this of him so many times that I was used to being shot down. I wasn’t sure if he was teasing or feeling sorry for me. Likely the latter.

  “I have to get over myself. Seriously, let’s plan it.”

  I must have continued gaping at him in disbelief, because he kept nodding and finally came over and kissed me gently on the forehead.

  “I want to go with you,” he said softly.

  I knew that saying those words couldn’t have been easy for him. He hadn’t been to India in years, not since... I couldn’t imagine it. We had never suffered anything like that. My grandmother had arthritis; my great-aunt had cataracts. But there had never been anything drastic, anything so painful that robbed us of anything or anyone in an instant, something we could never get back.

  But he was also no fool. He knew as well as I what going to India meant for me, for him, for us. It was the next step, the seminal step, the semifinal step before we could get married. We had to receive the blessing of his country, his earth, his past, before we could consider a life together.

  “I have to start somewhere, right?” he asked. “And this month has been particularly brutal. We need to move on. Fresh start. Fresh view. Less moping.” December was always the most difficult month for Karom, being the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster as well as of the tsunami. For the past few years that we’d dated, we’d each taken the day off on December 3 to spend it doing something completely removed. Our first year we had stayed in and rented five movies and drunk bottle after bottle of Chianti. Last year we’d taken the Amtrak to Boston. This year in the biting cold we hiked Bear Mountain. Despite these trips, December left Karom particularly down and the sugary cheer of the holidays seemed to further compound his misery.

  I squeezed his arm as I said, “We’ll do just that.”

  But this February morning—yet another newspaper morning—I was relentless. “Come on, Karom. This isn’t going to work unless you cooperate. Write it down and pass it to me.” Karom sighed and ripped out a page from his notebook. He scratched something onto it with his pen, stopping once to flick it like a thermometer to make the ink flow. He folded it and slid it across the table. I grinned excitedly and clapped my hands, bouncing up and down on my throne of floor pillows before opening it.

  I like her sharp tongue. My expression fell.

  “Really? This is why you love me?”

  Karom sipped his coffee.

  “Amongst other things, yes. But it’s a big one.”

  “Wow, that’s romantic.”

  “It is, actually.”

  I shook my head, smiling. “Explain to me why this is romantic.”

  “Because you’re a wild card. Because you’re brazen. Because you always speak your mind and I want to hear more, I want to hear the truth, because my whole life everything has been sugarcoated. No one has ever really given it to me before.”

  “So it’s honesty.”

  “It’s more than honesty. It’s wittiness, it’s gall. It’s just what I said on the paper. It’s your sharp tongue. Which is good for more than just the truth.” Karom smiled wickedly, making me blush. His coffee table had been transformed into a café, with sections of the newspaper draped across it and Venn-diagrammed coffee rings pressed upon the wood. I had been reading an article about the tie between honesty and solidity of relationships. It was the brutally honest ones that survived, while the couples that fed one another lip service for their romantic souls were the ones that failed to last. The article asked the couple to do an exercise—a brutally honest one—where you wrote down three things you loved about your partner on a piece of paper and passed it to them, thereby removing any chance of shyness or reservation at telling them the truth.

  “My turn,” Karom said, resettling his spidery legs under the table. He pushed the notebook across to me. I tore a scrap of paper out and passed it to him.

  “I did mine while you were in the bathroom.”

  You tame me.

  You keep me on my toes.

  Your long legs.

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” Karom said.
“I want the real ones. Brutal honesty, right?”

  “I am being brutally honest. I think you’re the first man who’s ever put me in my place, whether it’s been through gentle prodding or genuine honesty. I’ve always run so wild, and while I don’t think I’ll settle down, you help ground me. ‘You keep me on my toes’—well, you know that one. While I can’t say I love all of this particular aspect, it certainly keeps our relationship fresh and alive and it reminds me of how much I care about you, with every stunt you pull.” I reached over the table and poked him. Karom grinned cheekily back.

  “And the last?”

  “Your legs. They’re hot. They’re super long and muscular and I love that you unabashedly take a step for every two of mine and don’t stop to wait for me at street corners, because you know I’ll be right in step with you.”

  Karom smiled shyly. He took a long sip of his coffee before coming around the table and nestled onto some throw pillows, leaning into me.

  “Oh no, you’re not off the hook so easily. Let’s have them.” I sat back and looked at the notebook paper.

  “I can tell you what I don’t love, Miss Bossy.”

  “Come on. Three things, Kar.”

  Even though you try to hide it, you’re the most loving person I know.

  “I hide my love? Really? That’s not good.”

  “Geets, come on. You try to be this strong, sassy woman, but at the end of the day, you’re just a big love bug. You can’t help it—you just can’t hide it. It pours out of you. It’s infectious.”

  I smiled despite myself. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “Of course it’s good. It’s stellar.”

  “Last one, and I promise we’re done. Until stage two.”

  Karom groaned. “What’s stage two?”

  “Next week.”

  You are my strength. This one didn’t require explanation. I flicked my tongue over my lips and turned to him, carefully searching his face. His light brown eyes were calm but hungry. I could smell a rawness emanating between us. I reached back behind him and pulled his shirt over his head. He dove greedily for the cleft between my breasts and then for the soft, moist pillows of my lips. Sections of the paper were flung aside as we grasped for fingers, hair, backs of necks and hollows in clavicles.

  Later, when we showered together, he traced his fingers over the newsprint etched into my skin where I’d sweat and the relationship story had imprinted onto the backs of my thighs.

  The afternoon was bitingly cold; we didn’t step out of the house except to dash across the street to the deli for milk when we neared the bottom of our pot of coffee. When Karom slipped his shoes on, I wrapped a scarf around his neck before closing the door behind him. I stood by the window, waiting for him to reappear on the sidewalk below. From above, he still seemed capable, not like a tiny ant scurrying about like the other pedestrians alongside him. He stood suspended on the sidewalk, hovering over the street as cars whooshed past.

  “Wait, baby. Wait and look. Wait and look. Wait. Then look,” I murmured.

  As prompted, Karom looked one way and then the other before crossing the street, his uncovered hands stuck into his armpits. He’d read somewhere that it was the warmest part of the body, and once when we were standing outside a long line in the East Village last winter to see a performance artist, he taught me how to put my fingertips in the hollows of my underarms. I’d felt silly, standing there among the hip, well-dressed crowd, but I had to admit that it worked. I could see white clouds puffing in front of him now, cotton-candy clouds of cold. When he emerged from the store carrying the half gallon of milk, he glanced back across the street both ways again before crossing the street. Just before entering his apartment building, he looked up at the window where I stood watching and held the jug up victoriously.

  These were my favorite days: just me, Karom, the newspaper and coffee, the perfect four-way relationship. With Karom in the kitchen frothing milk for another of his specialty lattes, the apartment buzzing with the warmth of the space heaters, and the features section. I have always saved the best for last. Even during meals, I selectively place the crispiest fries on the side of my plate, or the pickled radish, or the chocolate-covered almonds. A few years ago I had dated a man, a fast eater who would plow through his food and then watch me expectantly as I daintily made my way through mine. As though conversation would distract me, he would dive straight into the spoils at the side of my plate, the ones I had been reserving until the very last bite. At first, I was touched that he did this, that he was comfortable enough to eat off my plate, but gradually I grew past this and it morphed into resentment and then anger, until one day I finally slapped his hand as it reached for the fried curly parsley that had adorned my salmon-skin roll. That this was a deal breaker was one of the first things I’d told Karom upon meeting him, and Karom had never tried his hand at swiping off my plate.

  He even knew to leave me to the features section. He would read it after I’d been through it once, the pages folded back and forth and forward like origami. The features section sat crisply in front of me, except where we had rolled and perspired on it, some of the inky sentences leaking together into illegible sentences. The first page mentioned the Tiger Mother, which I rolled back in disgust. How could a woman—a mother—so proudly state that she had done these things to her own children: kept ice cream and sleepovers at arm’s length and made them practice the piano though they had to use the bathroom, their tights moist with pee from having to hold it for hours at a time. This wouldn’t be part of my Sunday.

  There was a review of a Dharma Sen film festival at the Modern. I’d show that to Karom when I finished with the paper. He loved Dharma Sen.

  The inside story made me suck in my breath. In fact, I nearly forgot to breathe until Karom nudged me with the coffee mug and I took it without looking at him, my eyes silently sipping at the words in front of me.

  I read it until there was nothing more to read, and even then I folded the paper back and looked for an addendum or a continuation of the story. It couldn’t possibly be over, could it? Those seven hundred words weren’t nearly enough to satisfy. There had to be more. This article was, no doubt, a political piece masked as a feature so as to garner sympathy from those who weren’t into the front page, but I knew what they were doing. I was a newspaper scientist, a news junkie. I could see right through this journalistic ruse.

  A couple, now in their early fifties, had suddenly begun the hunt for their son. They had lost him years ago during a tragic event, the thirtieth anniversary of which was coming up in a few years. The event had happened and everyone had fled for their lives, accounting for fingers and toes, desperately searching for familiar faces in the cloud of gas. This was no atom bomb but another human-made disaster that could have easily been diverted. This was Bhopal.

  The couple had been rescued by the Red Cross not long after the plant went up in fumes and had spent days mummified in bandages. The shock rendered them barely capable of identifying themselves, let alone one another. They reunited after years; she healed and became a nurse’s aide in a town outside Bhopal and he returned to the plant to help rebuild the city. The scars on both their faces rendered them impossible to identify to their remaining friends and family members lucky enough to have endured, so they’d practically lived alongside one another in adjoining hamlets until one day the woman recognized her husband’s voice at a tea stall on the edge of town.

  “I had given up on him,” she said in translation. “In my mind, he could have been anything. He could have moved to America. He could have become a rich businessman. He could have done anything but have continued to live in this town and toil away. He could have done anything but survive this disaster.”

  “For days after the disaster, I saw her face everywhere,” the man said, also in translation. “Even when I knew I was speaking to someone else, the face
would morph into hers and I would find myself clutching at their elbow, begging her to come home with me.” The couple found each other several years ago and had since attracted the attentions of a few NGOs and adoption agencies, who have committed themselves to the efforts to find their missing son, a toddler at the time, who never surfaced after the chaos of the Bhopal disaster.

  “We have heard of many families reuniting after the tragedy,” the man said in the article. “They found one another right afterward. Some had to wait months as they healed in the hospital. Some had to wait years because they didn’t look like they used to. No one recognized them. At this point, we are old and our son must be grown. He must be married. But he must also be here somewhere. We must find him. And we must become a family once again.”

  The photo of the two of them entranced me for what must have seemed like hours to Karom. The man was old and wizened. The scars stretching across his face reminded me of the Joker from Batman, as if he was constantly smiling or grimacing; which was it? And his wife had turned her head from the camera at the last minute so that I could only make out her profile with her long hooked nose and the divots in her face where she’d been scarred by the chemicals. I couldn’t tell if these people looked like Karom. I couldn’t tell if they were looking for him.

  I could sense Karom glance at me from time to time as he folded his pages back or stretched his legs out. He poked me with his toe and I smiled slightly to acknowledge him, but I couldn’t give him more than that. At two-thirty I folded the page I’d read and reread for the past twenty minutes under my arm. I gathered my coffee mugs and ran water over them in the sink. In Karom’s room he had allotted me a whole dresser to myself, and this was where I kept odds and ends, work clothes, exercise clothes. I even had a winter outfit here from the last blizzard, when we’d called in sick and gone sledding in Central Park. I stuck the newspaper in between a bundle of socks and buried it deep. Then I pulled on my running tights and a moisture-wicking shirt and cap.