Where Earth Meets Water Read online

  “Their mothers and fathers are dead, and those who aren’t have asthma or mental problems. Young children are raising their even younger sisters and brothers. No one is fixing the situation. There has been a decades-long court case trying to bring justice to the survivors and the families who will continue living on there, but nothing has changed in years. No one is remedying the groundwater situation. No one is digging up the polluted earth. No one is facing the music. Every year, more and more children are born into that environment and nothing changes.

  “I donated a large sum of money to a children’s trust on that visit. It was everything I’d traveled with. I could always get more when I returned to Delhi. But I went there to learn, to understand, to try to help Karom. I want to be strong for him. I want to guide him. I know I can’t be his savior, but I want to do what I can. I thought going there would help me figure out how best to support him, how to show him how to get past this. I told him I would be his strength, and I will be and I want to be, but...having gone there, to have seen the lives ravaged, the living, waking dead, whose futures will never look forward, living like zombies... I see him do these things where he’s ‘testing the waters.’ Not suicidal, no, just brazen, cavalier, just challenging, teetering on the edge. And he does these things over and over and over and—it kills me to admit this—I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattle in his head and scream so loud that he never forgets the words, ‘Wake up! Wake the fuck up! You ridiculous, wallowing idiot! You have no idea how lucky you are!’”

  I sat back, panting. I’d started crying somewhere in the middle of my soliloquy and Dr. Rhodes handed me a box of tissues and smiled a tight little sad smile at me. She looked as if she wanted me to go on. But I was finished. I had said everything I needed to say—for now. She let the minutes tick by as I cleaned myself up and then sat back in the chair.

  “So he doesn’t know that you went on this trip,” she said. “Will you ever tell him?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, for one, he’d be furious that I did this without his knowledge and blessing, and two, I think he needs to see it for himself. I can’t convey the intensity of this place to him in words—”

  “You did a fine job just now.”

  “But that’s different. You’re just a listener—no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I mean, this is his life. This is all he knows about his heritage. He should see it firsthand. He should experience it. He should live it on his own. It shouldn’t be conveyed to him in a narrative that his girlfriend tells him after visiting for a few hours. He should go.”

  “You’d mentioned that you two are taking a trip to India this spring. Will you go to Bhopal?”

  “I won’t suggest it. But if he wants to go, I am completely supportive.”

  “Will he suggest it?”

  “Probably not. I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We made a deal on this trip, that we would avoid all seasides, which, if you’ve ever been to the coast in India, you would think was the worst deal ever. The sea is gorgeous, magical. I mean, coasts everywhere conjure romanticism. It’s sad not to experience them with someone you love. So I’m loath to even suggest that we go to Bhopal. You see what I’m dealing with here—avoidance.”

  “Maybe the seaside, the water association, is still fresh. Maybe it’s too soon to face that particular ghost. But this one might be different.”

  “That’s the other thing. The Bhopal disaster? When it happened, it was because of water. Water flooded the pipes and caused the gas explosion. His parents, his biological ones, didn’t even know it was water. They were likely suffocated slowly, this smog creeping toward them until they succumbed. And of course, you know what happened with the tsunami. So water essentially ruined Karom’s life. Twice.”

  Dr. Rhodes sat back, her eyebrows knotted, scribbling furiously.

  “Can I ask you? What do you write?”

  She looked up, startled. “Just notes. About cases or things that I want to remind myself of once you leave the office, things that I want to consider or review or think about before your next visit.”

  “You think about your patients between visits?” I asked.

  “Of course. It’s my homework. These issues don’t just dissipate once I step outside these walls. They’re always on my mind. That’s why I see a shrink of my own. Otherwise, I’d be completely burdened with other people’s problems.”

  “So what will you tell me?”

  “Well, it’s not my style to tell my patients what to do. I like to guide them, gauging what it seems like they are inclined toward doing in the first place. In your situation, I think for the strength of your relationship and moving forward, because to me it seems like this is one you see lasting for a long time, I think you realize that honesty is the best policy. Now, I know that isn’t an easy thing to say, much less carry out. But Karom should know not necessarily that you went to Bhopal without his blessing or even specifically about the newspaper article but that you feel this way, that as much as you want to help him, to be his strength, you have a strong opinion about the matter—that he is a lucky individual to have survived such an ordeal and that it’s creating a rift in your relationship.”

  “But it hasn’t, though. I’ve been really careful in that respect.”

  “Gita,” Dr. Rhodes said gently, “it will. It’s bound to. These feelings will become transparent sooner or later. So you’ll have to decide how you’ll want to deal with them.”

  I didn’t go to Karom’s place that night; I didn’t think I could face him. There were too many unspoken things, too many secrets I was keeping from him. For the first time in our relationship, even though I’d never once been tempted by another, I felt as though I were cheating on him, that I was having a sordid affair. I texted him that I was going to spend the night at my place to get some more clothes and things I needed and that I’d call him later. When I got home, I curled up into a ball on my bed, careful to rest my ankle separately. I had a large rent-controlled apartment on an unused block in the West Village. Somehow bar, restaurant and boutique owners had overlooked this section of the trendy neighborhood with its winding streets and charming brownstones. I knew that when Karom and I were ready to get married or move in together—I had told him that one wouldn’t happen without the certainty of the other—I would struggle with the idea of having to give this place up. I’d lived here ever since I moved to New York, inheriting it from a girl in my graduating class whose coloring and complexion I shared enough to pass as her sister.

  With my place, I’d utilized a “Buy what you love—that way it will all fit together” approach. So it was hodgepodge to some extent, but I am essentially hodgepodge, so it worked. There were vintage shellacked teapots that adorned the top shelves in the kitchen, in strange ’70s-style colors like avocado and tangerine. I had a heavy polished-oak table with knots and wood blemishes that I’d found in a Brooklyn flea market held in a schoolyard. My dishes were all random—some white china, some bone china, some IKEA remnants from when I’d first arrived that I couldn’t bear to part with. I had a fat olive-green armchair in the living room that looked as though it belonged in a smoking lounge. I had a pale lemon couch on which I’d spilled red wine on numerous occasions, so much that after a few more drunken mishaps it would look like a paisley pattern across the cushions. The walls I’d left white, mostly because my little office was so dark that I wanted a severe contrast between the two spaces. I loved my home, so it was a shame that we spent so much more time at Karom’s place than mine.

  I lay there remembering a trip to an art gallery we’d taken together. It was tucked into a nook of a Chinatown street where the neighboring stores held freshly gutted chickens and ducks and pork loins, all held up by thick silv
er meat hooks. We’d read about the exhibit in Time Out: it was an interactive homage to memory and the past. We were buzzed through the unmarked black door, through which we entered a long room with a high exposed ceiling. A woman who could only have been a model wordlessly pointed us at the first piece: mirrors welded together at the sides so that they formed a rectangle. In order to view the piece, you had to duck underneath so that the mirrors surrounded you like a room. You stared back at yourself from all angles: north, south, east and west, as I said. Or as Karom interpreted, past, present, future and the unknown. We made our way around the room on our own, but I noticed when Karom stopped at what appeared to be a large dining table. I stepped quietly behind him to observe this piece. At one end of the table, there was a box with a jumble of old black-and-white pictures, some faded and watermarked. There was a collection of the photos on the table itself, and next to it a shredder, fresh with curls of paper. There were three places set at the table, and if you looked carefully under all the photo and shredder paraphernalia, you could glimpse a fourth setting.

  “You’re supposed to interact with it,” the gallery girl said. Karom picked up a photo from the top of the box and stared at the image, a large woman sitting on the steps of a brownstone with a tiny lapdog perched on her knee. He picked up another: a family photo with generations spread across the panoramic page, their expressions frozen in time. The patriarch of the family sat square in the middle, holding a silver-tipped cane. He was the only one smiling; the others stared straight into the camera, challengingly. “You’re supposed to shred them,” the girl said.

  “Why?” Karom asked.

  “It’s supposed to represent forgetting and the past. The artist wanted visitors to interact with the piece, consider each photo and then banish it to memory. Go ahead.”

  Karom held both photos in two hands, looking from one to the other. He put them both down on the table and picked up two more, looked at them and put them down. He looked through the whole pile that way until his fingers brushed against the bottom of the box. The girl had crept back to her perch behind the desk at this time and was impatiently flicking through Facebook. From where I stood behind Karom, I could see photos of her friends glamorously holding champagne flutes and dancing together, their makeup pristine and their dresses designer. Karom continued to sift through the photos until finally he turned around and spoke to me as though he’d known I was there all along. “I can’t,” he whispered, teary eyed. “I can’t destroy them. They are someone’s memories. I can’t relegate them into the Dumpster.” I nodded and he walked past me through the unmarked black door. I stood and surveyed the table, where he’d placed the photos in unintelligible piles before scooping them up and replacing them all in the box. As I walked out, I thanked the girl at the desk.

  “Interesting,” she said. “You can tell a lot about people when they can’t shred those. Your boyfriend is sentimental.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Back on the street, Karom had been leaning against the metal grate of an unopened butcher shop. I’d held my hand out to him, but he’d held something else out to me. It was a photo of a small boy and his older sister. She was holding his hand as though she had been told to, and the boy was smiling sweetly at the camera.

  “Look,” he’d said. “I saved one.”

  I considered what Dr. Rhodes had said, turned it over and over in my mind. Up until now, I’d managed to keep him close to me. I’d also managed to keep my feelings toward his “fate testing” a secret. His tests rattled me; they made my blood run cold and my heart race, but as soon as I held him, it was all over. But I saw her point; even though the events had slowed down this year—there had been only seven so far and we were already in March—I knew this feeling would somehow manifest itself in me and erupt to the surface. I wondered if I could keep it inside me, at least until we traveled to India together. I wondered if I would break down and show him the article, if he would follow up on it. I wondered if he would insist on traveling to Bhopal and tracking these people or other people down. I wondered if I had the strength in me to continue to be his.

  Karom

  Karom remembered the day he found the letters the way he remembered the fire in grade school: like a patchwork. It came in broken squares to him, whole hours of the encounter disappearing into the ether. Other moments blazed up in his memory, singeing the periphery until he forced himself to believe, to unearth the tattered pages from their hiding place in a mundane khaki folder and grip them, dog-eared and palpable. These pages were the only connection, the only evidence to support third-degree life burns and irreparable damage. He had to administer a life-saving technique to himself, searching his wan face in the surreal light of his mother’s backlit makeup mirror, demanding of himself, “Karom, you are okay. Are you okay? Can you breathe? You can breathe.”

  In the third grade, his school had had to evacuate when a student had been insouciantly striking matches and throwing them into the sink with the bathroom pass shoved into the back pocket of his jeans. The red heads of the matches sizzled out demurely in the sink until the child got bored of this game and began tossing them into the wastepaper basket, slowly, tediously, until a blaze sparked once he’d returned to his seat in the third row to finish his column of sums.

  Students were rushed down the narrow staircases two by two and herded onto the sidewalks, where Karom stood watching licks of orange and red poking out of the third-floor bathroom, threatening to spread. The firemen came, kitted and courageous, smiling tightly at the children before they leaped into the building and others unfurled a giant ladder from the back of the truck, stretching into the tiny window that had by then shattered, spraying slivers of glass into the branches of the trees that normally scratched at the sill during storms and gusty days.

  Just like this, Karom only remembered that day in parts: the moment when he deliberated over hooking his backpack over his shoulders while his classmates filed out silently; the fireman who looked at him with his cool steely-gray eyes before clambering up the ladder with the hose thrown over his shoulder as if he were holding his towel on his way to have a shower; the screams and cries from students who realized that the class garter snake, Noname—thus christened because the students couldn’t agree on a name but pronounced “No-nah-me” so as to sound Asian inspired—was trapped in her glass tank and would soon be consumed by the smoke. He remembered being shepherded into the outdoor yard, where the teacher made them line up alphabetically and then by height order and then by age order in an effort to distract them from the mayhem. He remembered returning to the classroom the next day, once the fire had been contained, but so much water had flooded the corridors, peeling the paint away from the wall, and paper towels had been bunched up, creating a papier-mâché moat leading down the hall. Noname wasn’t in her cage or the classroom, nor had she been found anywhere else in the school. Karom’s classmates put up posters all over, in the cafeteria, in the bathrooms, beseeching other students to thoroughly inspect all toilets before flushing, all sinks to look for that telltale sign of the small flickering tongue as it might dance forth from a faucet, to search behind bookshelves, inside desks, in arts-and-crafts closets, but the snake had never turned up.

  Similarly, years later he remembered only select moments of the day he finally returned to his family’s home in Brooklyn Heights for the first time since the tsunami. He had gone on his own, eschewing the trip to Myrtle Beach with his friends in order to sort through various papers and items that needed dealing with, though they had offered to accompany him. “You shouldn’t be alone when you go back for the first time,” they’d said. “It’s a lot to handle.” But Karom hadn’t wanted them to sacrifice their spring breaks, their senior year, their free time. “No, thank you,” he’d said. “There’s a lot to do and it will go a lot faster and efficiently if I just swoop in there, get the job done and get out.” Like that fire, he remembered back to
the afternoon he discovered the sheaves of papers that outlined his life, his past, himself. Jack Howard, his parents’ lawyer, had been gently urging him to return home a few weekends before so that everything didn’t all crash down around him at the same time: the echoing town house, the seemingly just-made bed, the brown dried petals settled around a vase holding water as brown as pond scum, where the stems of the flowers were still submerged, smelling putrid and deathly. In the fridge, food had decayed for so long that a thick layer of green or pink or white fuzz grew over everything, rendering it unidentifiable and foreign. The milk in the carton was heavy with chunks. The entire kitchen smelled stale with abandonment.

  He began to listen to the crowded answering machine. At first, telemarketers from December in the few days after his parents had left. Then friends who were calling concerned once they’d heard the news. And then finally, mourners called the house with their wavering voices and undulating sympathy, at which point Karom hit the delete button and the machine went silent. There was unopened mail piled in the vestibule, heaps of it together. Bills, magazines, charity letters, packages of film reels, in one a small trophy that his father had earned at a film gala for editing a fifteen-minute short of the life story of Charlie Chaplin’s dog. Karom opened letters addressed to his parents from their friends across the state, Christmas cards and ultimately, on top, a layer of sympathy cards. His parents’ friends didn’t know his address at college, so they’d all sent reams of outreach to his home in Brooklyn. He stacked them all according to theme: Outstanding Bills, Now-Irrelevant Bills, Regular Correspondence, Sympathy Correspondence, Charity, Magazines, Junk. He dealt with it all, throwing out garbage, unplugging devices that no longer needed power, deliberating before doing three loads of laundry that lay lumped despairingly in the hamper, because it still smelled faintly of their sweat, their grime, their cells.