Where Earth Meets Water Page 19

  According to their will, it all came to him: the house, everything in it, his father’s share of Cutting Room, all the accounts. Jack had traveled up to Boston to witness Karom’s signature on the bottom of all the papers and had given him copies, so when Karom started searching, he wasn’t sure what it was he was after. He found his mother’s jewelry locked in a safe in the crawl space above their bedroom. She’d wrapped it all lovingly in pieces of tissue and tucked it carefully into an ancient suitcase with tabbed locks like pinball-machine flippers. He took each piece out and laid it across the bed, where it looked dull and unimpressive: small pearls that dangled precariously from yellow gold, diamonds that needed polishing, pieces of jewelry that because he’d never seen his mother wear them before seemed foreign, which made his mother seem even more foreign to him than ever before. He found reels in the bottom of his father’s closet, reels shot on 8 mm film, boxed cartridges he couldn’t imagine even beginning to watch, a whole box of negatives that he began to hold up to the pale light that streamed past the opaque curtains in his parents’ bedroom one at a time.

  He considered the things he’d lost throughout his life: a bag of marbles, disappearing one by one until the mesh sack lay empty and forlorn; random playing cards until the deck became useless and impossible to play with; his collection of baseball cards, dog-eared and bent, which he’d silently written off once a family friend told him they were only valuable if they remained in their original form, whole, crisp and without fingerprints. Of all the things he’d lost, the one he wished he still owned was a photograph of himself as a young adult, holding a large tilefish from end to end as if it were a centerfold, grinning widely. This was before the advent of digitized film, so every photo captured was a live element and you had to care for the negatives as much as the film roll itself.

  “Your smile is as wide as the fish,” Mohan had said to him on that trip. His father had taken him to New Hampshire, where they had fished in the ocean together, his mother packing egg sandwiches without mayonnaise lest they fester in the sun. His favorite part of the trip was before the actual time when they set out in the little boat with the lopsided rudder, with Karom rowing with one oar as his father steered the crank handle. Tide was low and he had borrowed waders from the owner of the lodge they were staying at and bounced down to the water’s edge, where the silt and mud were layers thick, to pull fat juicy earth crawlers from where they were poking out of the sludge, halfway basking in the sun. He held them up to the sun, wriggling and disturbed from their slumber, before placing them together in the bucket that would accompany their trip. They used makeshift pulleys instead of rods, paddles with strong fishing twine wrapped around them with a lead weight at the bottom onto which a fat worm would be figure-eighted and then lowered into the salty depths below. When he felt resistance, Karom wound the wire back onto the paddle by turning it toward himself, as you would a yo-yo after flubbing a trick. And that feeling, of a live fresh jerky fish thrashing about at the end of the wire, was the pure glee that Karom felt at the end of the long day baking in the heat. Toward the evening, as the sun dipped below the waterline, Karom put on his father’s sweater, his arms engulfed in the sleeves, and held up his fish triumphantly on land, stretching it like a smile. That picture of him with the sun in his eyes, his baseball hat slung down low so that he had to tilt his head back to see the camera, and the wet, finally still fish between his fingers, had been one of his prized possessions. And over the years, since it hadn’t been trapped in an album or behind a plastic frame, it had been lost forever. This was the first thing he thought when he saw the slippery pile of negatives at the bottom of his father’s closet. Later, he would tape the box shut with heavy silver packing tape and carry it with him to Boston, and then back to New York to his rented apartment above Central Park, as far away from the Brooklyn Heights brownstone as was comfortable.

  He found abandoned wallets that had never been disposed of, creases scarred deep into the leather. He found old ID cards and passports with pictures of people he barely knew: his father with a thin mustache that barely covered his philtrum, his mother with long thick plaits like a Native American, his father with oversize square glasses that consumed his face so that Karom had to peer closely to make sure it was the same man.

  He found papers, so many, many papers. He wasn’t sure how important they all were, so he kept them all and separated them into piles: Cutting Room Productions, Tiger Translations, House Stuff, Travel Stuff, Medical Stuff, Karom Stuff. He didn’t think he’d be hungry at any point; he thought the grief might consume him instead of him wanting to consume. But by midafternoon on that very first day, he dialed the local pizza place by heart and ate a whole pie, grease fingered, gingerly picking at the pool of papers he’d created in the middle of the bedroom.

  Finally, with the mouth of every drawer in the room gaping open soundlessly, Karom knew he had only his parents’ bedside drawers left. Bedside drawers were sacred, not to mention that Karom didn’t want to know what his parents needed just before they nodded off or just after they awakened in the early-morning hours. He braced himself for the worst: condoms, lubricant, handcuffs? But his mother’s side held only a few chosen items: the mouthguard her dentist made her wear when she began grinding down her molars, the silk sleep mask Karom had bought for her birthday, a few pens and a blank notepad, and earplugs. His father’s held eleven AA batteries, a small point-and-shoot camera with a blank memory card, and numerous adapters and chargers tangled together in a chaotic knot. Karom removed them and began to extricate them from one another. He needed some time to assess his next move. Since he’d arrived at home that morning, he’d been constantly moving, arranging, throwing out, cleaning, but as soon as he finished untangling the cords, he reached back into the drawer, where his hand brushed against a stack of papers that he pulled out without further thought. The papers were mismatched, held together by a binder clip. There were pages from hotel-room stationery, some torn from a spiral notebook. Others were notes on blank computer paper, on tracing paper, on Cutting Room stationery. Some were Post-it Notes, one on the back of a coloring-book page that hadn’t been colored in. But it was all his parents’ handwriting, first his father’s, then his mother’s, then his father’s again. Over and over. Pages and pages. Numbered and placed in order.

  “Dear Karom,” it began. He sat down for the first time and began to read, and with that, the rest of the day passed out from under him. It was nightfall when he set the pages down with shaking hands and placed them a few feet away from him so he could observe them like a live animal. It was a letter, a lifelong letter to him from his parents that they’d never been meaning to send. It was a catharsis, an atoning of the sins, a bleaching of the past. It was a way for his parents to live with themselves, with each other, while Karom remained an outsider, completely ignorant of the truth. Before he felt anything, before he got angry or sad or confused, before he felt any of that, he simply could barely believe it. He couldn’t believe that these words had been right under his nose for his entire life, right in his father’s bedside-table drawer. It was as if his father believed that Karom would never pry into his parents’ private lives, but what if he needed batteries—or a camera? It was right there, mocking him, a silent parody of his life. And he couldn’t understand the connections: he looked like his mother. He had her strong aquiline nose and her dark labyrinthine coloring. He had his father’s hands, long tapered fingers at the ends of palms thick as slabs of steak. If he had discovered this while his parents were in the room, instinctively, he would have looked at himself in their faces like in a mirror, as if to prove this letter wrong. Immediately, he would have aligned his hand next to his mother’s like paint swatches, the color matching perfectly so that you almost couldn’t tell where one pigment ended and the other began. He would have made her stand straight in profile, erect as a soldier, so that he could bring his nose in line with hers. He would have made his father raise his hand into the air and
brought his own against it, silently measuring the space between the finger segments and taking in his father’s knobby knuckles, which Karom had resigned himself to having to inherit one day.

  But now even that word lost its meaning. He could inherit things—money, property, shares, jewelry—but never cheekbones, creativity, DNA, athletic skill. His parents couldn’t pass anything down; it ended with them. There had never been a product of their love, an end result of their coupling, an idea generated by the two of them, other than this other vessel of a boy from Bhopal into which they’d poured their lives and to which they’d dedicated themselves.

  Suddenly, it all made sense. When he’d befriended Jian-Quan, a Chinese boy who’d been adopted by a Jewish couple, his parents had exchanged knowing glances when they walked into the dining room to see them quizzing one another in advanced chemistry. He should have known that look meant “Is this too close to home? We are playing with fire, spouse.” When his parents had suggested that Annie wasn’t an appropriate choice for the movies, and perhaps he’d like to see E.T. instead. Looking back, he could even sense a flicker of unease when he’d had to create a family tree in the fourth grade. But those moments remained far away in the past and he was alone in his familial home in Brooklyn Heights, alone with the papers with his mother’s loopy words and his father’s tiny scrawl, as if Mohan had been destined for medicine and the illegible prescription-pad handwriting that befell physicians. He’d read the more than fifty pages that comprised the letter over the course of the spring break week, locking himself in their home, wondering how it was that it had been kept a secret until now. Not even the emotional aspect of it, and how could his parents hide this from him, but the logistical one: how could this life be wrapped up so symmetrically, snipped of loose ends, pressed so it lay flat, and simply shoved into a drawer underneath his nose, but out of presence, out of necessity. Out of love? The way the letter looked, it certainly seemed so. And it was something he would have to reconcile himself with over the course of many, many years. Not to mention that he couldn’t invoke the memory of his parents as liars but as two people who had cared so deeply and entrenched themselves so fully into his life that there was no seam where their blood ended and his began; you couldn’t tell the difference. He was a Seth and he didn’t want to dig or explore or make even a single phone call that might change that.

  So he packed up the sheaf of papers, the unsent letter to him, the box of negatives and returned to college with them. He placed the letter in a corner of his desk along with his other research and thesis materials as though he had been extremely diligent on his latest trip to the library. Lloyd had looked at the stack every day; it was in his line of vision as he sat at his own desk and considered words or equations or philosophies. He became curious about the pile, searching it from a distance with his eyes, knowing that it was something with which Karom had returned from the hallowed house in Brooklyn but not wanting to unearth any piece of Karom that might fold under the emotional weight of what those papers signified. Once, when Karom was out at class, Lloyd finally ventured across the room and began reading the top page. He was nearly at the bottom when he heard the click of the door behind him and suddenly Karom was in the room. Lloyd pounced away from the letter as though it had come alive and were snapping its jaws in his hands. Karom walked over to the desk and put his hand on the top sheet. Lloyd had returned to his desk and propped a heavy tome in the space between them, but Karom had already seen. He picked up the stack and extended it to Lloyd.

  “You should finish,” Karom said, as if he were loaning out a paperback. “It’s pretty compelling.”

  Lloyd shook his head. “I’m sorry, Karom. I didn’t mean to go through your stuff. I didn’t mean to violate your pri—”

  “I’m not mad. Here.”

  “It’s just that you’ve been so quiet about things since you got back from your house.”

  Karom lowered the papers. “It’s not my house. It’s my home.”

  “Right. Sorry. But we’re all worried about you. We’re concerned. I’m concerned.”

  “Well, this will explain some of it. I’m serious. Read it. I’ll wait.” Karom dropped the papers over the open book on Lloyd’s desk and walked to his bed. He lay back with his arms supporting his head, listening for every rustle of a turning page or for Lloyd’s breathing to change. By the time Lloyd had finished, the room was tented in darkness. The only light in the room was the circle from Lloyd’s bedside lamp. Friends had knocked on the door as the dinner hour approached, but the two had ignored it. Finally, Karom heard Lloyd snap the binder clip back into place before he sat up and swung his legs onto the floor. During the Myrtle Beach trip, Lloyd had managed to sear his skin in the sun so that it had become red and raw, and it had peeled a few weeks ago. It had finally come back to his normal skin tone, but now Lloyd was again a bright red almost as riotous as his skin had been blistered on the beach. Water danced in his eyes and dribbled at his chin, and his face was snaked with vestiges of salt where the tears had dried and left behind pallid ghosts. His hands shook, nestling the papers gently as though they could be soothed by the touch. He turned to meet Karom’s eyes and stood.

  Karom nodded, continued nodding. “Let’s just go to dinner. Come on.” He opened the door and held it, waiting for his roommate.

  * * *

  There were times when thoughts would infiltrate Karom’s mind, thoughts that he knew he shouldn’t entertain but that he allowed to dance around his brain and then finally let rest like congealed soup. There was the time his Morals and Ethics class watched Sophie’s Choice and for the rest of the semester, Karom found his mind going back and forth to the same question that the heroine in the movie was asked: What if he could have saved one of his parents? Which would he have chosen? It was a disgusting, awful question and one that he wished he hadn’t ever imagined, but once it was there, he couldn’t help but wonder. On the one hand, his mother had always been there for him, literally during the days when he had first arrived in New York with them, teaching him English and worrying over his own worry in his eyes. On the other, his father had raised him with as much love and affection as any mother might, kissing him constantly, breaking down the gender roles that were so steadfast in this society. His father had taught him so much about life and friendship and love. He rejoiced in the fact that he had never made a decision about the awful choice he had set himself in his mind, that he knew he would never be able to choose between his parents, but still the question haunted him until he handed in his final paper and the Morals and Ethics class was over.

  But then he found himself thinking dark thoughts again when he read shortly after the tsunami that they were conducting DNA testing in Austria in order to specifically identify the victims who hadn’t been claimed. If you were a relative of someone who had gone missing during the tragedy, you had to call the University of Innsbruck, send them your loved one’s medical records and they would let you know once they found a DNA match. But what would be the point? he asked himself over and over again. So he could have official, physical proof that they were all dead? So that he could frame the papers in his living room and be reminded every day? No, he told himself, this was folly. That would be self-inflicted punishment.

  The Times had printed an article about victims’ personal effects being distributed back to their families—clothes mildewed and damp, books that had been submerged underwater for days and then dried, so their brittle pages fell apart at the slightest touch, decaying toiletries, waterlogged stuffed animals. Karom never bothered to inquire what had been found from his family. He had what he needed: his watch and the box of negatives that he’d ferreted away all those years ago and then never touched. It had lurked in the recesses under Karom’s bed, that nebulous dark underbelly where abandoned socks were flung unknowingly and dust bunnies grew to excessive proportions. It wasn’t until six years later, to be exact, that the box surfaced.

 
One morning nearly a year after they’d met, Gita sat on the floor surrounded by soft crests of the newspaper, one leg outstretched diagonally to the side as she leaned forward on one elbow and read an article.

  “Look,” she’d said. “They’re in the wedding section.” She turned the paper around and pointed to a beatific couple, flawlessly interracial, in their professional engagement photo.

  “Who’s this?” Karom asked, taking the paper from her.

  “My parents’ friend’s daughter. She’s getting married today. To that guy.”

  “How come your parents weren’t invited?”

  “They were. They’re here. Or not here but at the Botanic Garden. At the wedding.”

  “What? They’re here? In the city? Why aren’t we meeting them?” Karom asked. With each question, his voice had gotten increasingly higher-pitched until he crescendoed to a halt.

  “Well, um, I’m meeting them tomorrow. I didn’t know... I wasn’t sure. If it was too early,” she said, lining up her other leg parallel to the first. “I didn’t know if you’d feel pressured or all ‘scree-scree-scree crazy girlfriend.’” She pantomimed holding a knife and stabbing it in the air.

  “Gita, it’s your family. You’re ridiculous. Call them now. Tell them we are meeting them for a drink. We are meeting them for a drink. You’re crazy.”

  “Okay, okay. Just remember later on that you’re the one who requested this.” She reached for his cell phone where it was plugged in and dialed.

  Gita had always made it quite clear that she would never thrust her parents upon him. Parents were a gray area, a tricky topic between them, something that Gita had initially danced around during the early stages of their relationship. In fact, she’d consistently changed the topic whenever they called; she’d pressed the ignore button on her phone and called them back later, out of Karom’s earshot. But finally, he’d asked her who it was that she was avoiding.