Where Earth Meets Water Page 20

  “Is there an ex-boyfriend I should be worried about?” he’d joked.

  “No, no, it’s just...my family.” She’d grinned, looking down at the ground. “I can always call them back.”

  “Why don’t you answer? Speak to your parents. Please don’t avoid them because of me.”

  She’d nodded and forgotten the matter. But Karom hadn’t.

  So the next evening, they met in the main bar at the Algonquin Hotel, Karom as exuberant and seraphic as the couple in the weddings section and Gita looking and feeling sheepish.

  “Thought you were going to give us a miss, darling,” her father said, setting his martini down on the dark-paneled bar before kissing his eldest daughter high on her temple. “Waited until the absolute last minute to hang with your mum and dad, huh?”

  “Hi, baby girl.” Her mother grasped her wrists in both hands and smacked her noisily on both cheeks. “Thanks for gracing us with your presence.”

  “Okay, enough with the third degree, guys. Near, Myma, I’d like you to meet Karom.” Gita pushed the small of his back gently as she urged him forward. That morning, Gita had explained to Karom her pet names for her parents. “‘Father’ in Norwegian is far, you see,” she’d explained. “And I didn’t understand why I’d want my dad to be away from me. So I changed it to Near, and he couldn’t very well argue with that, could he? And when Maila was born, apparently I was very jealous and unwilling to share, so Amma became My-Amma, eventually shortened into Myma.”

  Karom was enveloped into the perfume in the air, the light touches on his forearm from Savita and the firm handshake and the hearty slaps on the back from Haakon. Her parents didn’t make a big deal about him, about his introduction. It was almost as if they had happened to run into one another at the bar moments before she met her parents, as if they were old friends from college. Except that Gita had gone to a women’s college and this was the man she was sleeping with.

  “How was the wedding?” Karom asked after they’d gone through formalities and first-stage niceties.

  “It was lovely, though I must say I’m rather tired of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” Savita said. “It’s the third wedding we’ve been to in a year there.” Karom looked over at Gita, his eyebrows raised. That look was incredulous. That look was an earmark for a later conversation.

  “Lots of your family and friends live in New York?”

  “Enough,” Haakon said. “But not enough to see our Geetar as much as we’d like.”

  “Da-ad,” Gita whined.

  “Oh, right, sorry. I’m supposed to pretend that I’m okay not seeing you very often. I’m supposed to say that it’s okay that my three daughters have chosen to live lives far, far away from us.”

  “Maila lives close by,” Gita said.

  “That doesn’t mean we ever see her,” Savita said. “So when are you two visiting us?”

  After some time, Karom excused himself to the bathroom. It’s important to note that the evening couldn’t have been more perfect. The four of them were settled at the curve of the historic bar, casual and comfortable. A few couples loitered in ball gowns and tuxedos from earlier engagements at debutante balls or confirmations or whatever it was the white elite did on a Sunday afternoon. The drinks were strong and perfect and Karom instantly loved Gita’s parents. They were warm, not overbearing; they were engaged, not insistent. They were just who he’d imagined Gita’s parents would be, right down to the very manner in which they dressed, Savita in a rich red wrap dress and her husband in a tan blazer and very undadlike jeans. But in the bathroom, where he waved aside the attendant as he offered him a towel the moment he walked in, he found a stall and sat directly down on the toilet without lowering his pants. He looked at his hands and felt the sinews and veins in his palms. He could feel his blood, his parents’ blood, his Bhopali blood, coursing underneath, the slight twitch of his pulse constant underneath his Rolex. His chest contracted and expanded as it should. All seemed natural and normal in this manner except that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t feel his breath, and he was gasping and gagging in an effort to regain control and then the bathroom attendant was knocking at the door, and Karom opened it but waved him off. The bathroom attendant took one look at him and raced into the bar, selecting the one person whose skin color resembled his.

  “Please, miss,” he implored Savita. “Your son, he’s—” Gita looked at him, her eyes wide, and placed a hand on Savita’s forearm, the same reassuring touch Savita had herself placed on Karom’s. She raced after the attendant’s receding back downstairs to the men’s room, where she found Karom sunk on the floor in an open stall with his head between his hands. When he heard the click of her heels against the tile, he paused to look up and began crying all over again. Gita sank down next to him, pretzeling her arm under his leg and holding him upright. She breathed into the cavity under his arm, taking in the cleanliness of the floor and how comfortable she felt upon it. The attendant had been watching them for signs of an emergency, but the intimate gesture made him feel as though he was intruding, so he placed a Cleaning in Progress sign at the front door of the men’s room and stood on guard next to it.

  “Breathe, Karom, breathe. Breathe, baby.” He obligingly took some large mouthfuls of air and sank into her body.

  “Was it too soon?”

  He nodded, his head in his arms. They sat like that together in silence, intertwined so that you could barely tell where one body started and the other ended. Gita sat with him until Karom was ready to stand up, be walked delicately to the front door of the hotel and be put in a cab. Gita returned to her parents alone.

  “Is everything all right?” Savita sat up, alarmed. “Is he okay? Should we go to him?”

  “He’s fine, Ma. He just needs some time and to lie down. He took a cab home. We can meet another time.”

  “Maybe you should go to him, Geets.”

  “Honestly, he’ll be fine. He just needs to be alone. He’ll feel better if we all just stay here and have a nice time.” Which they tried to do, but the Manhattans and white wines tasted sour with the heavy cloud hanging over the evening. It was the next morning that Karom called her parents once they’d flown back to Columbus, apologizing and demanding that he make it up to them.

  “Nonsense,” Savita said. “The important thing is that you’re all right. And there will be plenty more occasions for us to spend time together. And, Karom, please let us know if there is anything we can do to help. Anything.” He thanked her and promised he would.

  It was also the next morning that Karom called in sick, dug under his bed and retrieved the brown cardboard box that he’d taped shut with silver packing tape years before. He used a scissor to slice it open and looked at all the shiny brown strips inside. Before he could rethink it, he scooped the whole thing up and took it down the street to the one-hour film place. The development would take more than an hour, of course, with the volume of film in the box, but Karom sat there like an anxious father pacing the steps outside a delivery room, stalking about the small space, cracking his knuckles and watching the curly-haired film man as he fed the negatives one by one into the mouth of the behemoth processor behind the counter. After three hours, there were stacks and stacks of photos. They had accumulated throughout the afternoon, piling up on the counter like a multiturreted castle. Karom hadn’t looked at them as they emerged. He’d simply stood a few feet away from it all respectfully, his hands clasped behind his back as the counter boy boxed them up in a fresh cardboard box and sealed it.

  “One thousand sixty-four four-by-sixes,” he said. “That’s $266.”

  Karom paid and lifted the box from the bottom. The weight was staggering—the negatives had tripled in size and area with processing—and he hailed a cab on the sidewalk as soon as he got outside.

  Karom’s key chain resembled that of a janitor. He had three keys for his apartment, his
bike-lock key and the key to his office, and he had never been able to remove his family-home keys from the ring. They traveled with him everywhere he went—the two keys that opened the first door into the brownstone, where the mail was pushed through a slot, the one for the second door with its opaque window glass and then the last two keys for their final door, which led into the foyer. The house had stood intact after he’d finished college and moved out completely. He couldn’t imagine living there with its echoing hallways and empty floorboards, nor could he stand to sell. I’ll get over it someday, he’d told himself practically, and by then property values will have gone up and I’ll have a family and we’ll redecorate and refurbish, and while the bones will be the same, it won’t be the same place I grew up. It won’t be the same place they lived for all those years. But at the same time, it will. The house had been paid off gradually over the years by his parents, and when Karom had sold the share in Cutting Room, it had helped to pay off the remaining mortgage so that Karom was no longer beholden. He was a homeowner, though he hadn’t been back since his final visit, when he’d spent those two lonely nights there after college removing the last of his clothes and belongings before he moved to the apartment he’d been in since in Harlem.

  That afternoon the cab pulled up on the small side street where each brownstone hugged the next. At first, Karom felt disoriented and he had trouble spotting his home; they all seemed so similar. But as soon as he hauled the box onto his shoulder and jingled the keys out of his pocket, he raised the gate hinge open with his knee, slid it open with his hip, as he’d done so many times when he came home with his hands full, and closed it all in the same familiar motion. He walked up the stairs without being able to see—the box blocked his sight—counting the steps. Nine. The keys slid in noiselessly and it was only once he stood in the foyer, looking about dazedly, that he waited for himself to react. But he didn’t. There was no breakdown, nor were there any tears, nor did he even find his knees wobbling so that he had to sink to the floor. He simply closed the door behind him and moved into the living room, all brisk, all business, held his breath to a cloud of dust that raised around him as he sat down, and pulled the tape off the box with one quick motion.

  It seemed only fair for Karom to come here to open this box. It was its genesis, after all. But he felt oddly at ease in this house. It made the same sounds as when he’d stayed home sick from school, though there was no gurgling of pipes behind walls or clanging of radiators, as the water and heat had been turned off years ago. There was a man who did handiwork on their street, mostly watering the sidewalk to scrape off dog poo, shoveling snow when it piled up in winter, moving cars when they needed to be parked on the alternate side of the street. Karom paid him to look in on the house from time to time, nothing serious, just make sure there were no break-ins or weather damage, no leakage from the adjoining homes, no infestations. The house was like an older relative: you checked in from time to time but it didn’t need constant monitoring.

  Once he’d told Gita the whole story, he could see it working through her mind: Why doesn’t he live there now? It’s such a huge place. Will we ever live there together? What’s to become of it? She’d asked him the address and he knew she had gone to look from the outside, staring up at the eaves, where ivy was meandering around the shuttered windows, threatening to overtake. He could imagine the gate whining as she pulled it open, as though it had been disturbed after all these years. She’d sat there imagining Karom as he walked through the gate on his skinny preteen legs, as he’d snuck in a girl and a six-pack in high school. She’d imagined his parents, his mother with her dark complexion stepping elegantly out of a cab, his father as he came home, disheveled and excited from a new development at work. She’d imagined the hum of the house when they were all in it, talking, moving, eating, drinking. But she’d never asked to return with him, and she never would.

  His mouth itched from the dust settled all around him and he sneezed three or four times before fishing out a surgical mask from under the sink and slipping the elastic over his ears. His father would wear these while painting a wall or taking out the trash to shield his nose from noxious fumes. Karom caught sight of himself in the hall mirror. With his mouth and nose covered, he realized that his forehead and the shape of his eyes were things that didn’t belong to either of his parents.

  The photos were shiny, slippery between his hands, which were shaking imperceptibly. He took out a stack and held them against his chest before he flipped one down from the bottom of the pile. This was a river, a yellow-and-brown rushing river, wide as you could imagine, rushing so fast you could imagine the spray as you stood on its banks. There was a bank on the other side, but this picture was taken to convey the immensity, the vastness, of this body of water. The next image proved the previous one wrong. This was of the same body of water, but it was zoomed out so that he could see that the “river” was merely a ditch through which groundwater had surfaced. There was strength in the water, but the image had been shot in a manner that reminded him of his father’s point about suspense. Why had he shot this insignificant stream as though it were a larger waterway? He put it on the couch next to him. The next was a path, a narrow pebbled path that led to a small hut on its far side, but the picture was taken from the angle of the walker approaching the hut so that you could see every stone, each spot you might place your foot along the way. The path had clearly been constructed by hand, without cement or aid of machinery to bind it; it was simply a collection of pebbles piled in a row and patted down so that it was walkable. The next was of a tree; so close was the camera lens to its leaves and branches that you couldn’t see the sky or the ground behind it. Karom recognized this as a neem tree, as one grew in his grandparents’ backyard in Bombay. He recognized the narrow, spiky leaves that grew like torpedoes and the tiny white flowers that he’d collected in his shirt as a child as they spiraled to the ground. The next was a yellow wooden sign that staggered the words Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity horizontally but highlighted one letter out of each word vertically to create the word Indian. He flipped through them faster and faster. Abandoned soda bottles, garbage collected by the side of the road, but Indian garbage—this much was clear. It was Indian plastic, no unnecessary packaging or waste. The soda bottles had been reused so many times that the creases in them meant that the liquid inside leaked out through plastic pores when the bottles were filled. A bald cricket ball, a crinkly potato-chip bag.

  The next stack was of people, dark, angry people, shouting. His father had gotten close to their faces or used an extreme telephoto lens to click pictures that saw into their mouths. This man was missing most of his teeth but his fierce expression certainly didn’t make him appear demure. There was a fire in his eyes, in his red bloodshot eyes that traveled out of the photograph and made the hair on Karom’s arms stand up. The next image was of a sea of signs, homemade signs painted on posterboard and nailed to wooden poles.

  We Can’t Abide Union Carbide.

  Warren Anderson: Clean Up Your Mess.

  Meera, Age 2. On this one there was a blown-up image of a small child smiling toothlessly.

  There was a tall burning effigy that looked like a scarecrow that dozens of people were milling about, throwing twigs and sticks on top of. There was a vast brown field where the remaining grass looked burned and grew in sparse patches like a prepubescent attempt at growing facial hair. There were handkerchiefs knotted together in a ring around a tree. Mothers nestled in doorways clutching their remaining children, their only valuables. Tall girders behind concrete walls, tanks with indecipherable graffiti. Piles of blankets, piles of branches, piles of ashes.

  Karom retrieved a roll of masking tape from the drawer in the kitchen where it had always been kept. He taped all of the pictures up on the wall of the living room that faced him now, and when he ran out of room, he continued on the second wall and then the third, the images of Bhopal in the aft
ermath of the disaster spilling across corners and covering paintings already layered in a thin cover of dust. Then he stood back and took it all in, turning his body slowly at first and then faster and faster so that he could see them all; they came in a blur to him, snatches of light, meaning and film. Finally, when his balance couldn’t hold him upright anymore, he collapsed in the center of the plush carpet in a cloud of dust, where he held his head up and the snapshots of what could have been spun gently around him.

  * * *

  Years later, as Karom and Gita board their return flight from Delhi to New York City, those photographs fill his mind. They have, in fact, filled his mind from time to time during their few weeks in India, Bhopal sitting blithely in the middle of the country like a siren. For the past two weeks, I’ve been the closest I’ve ever physically been to my birthplace, he thinks to himself now. The closest I’ve ever been to Bhopal since I found the letter that changed everything. But the photographs that presumably still hang on the living-room wall in his childhood home in Brooklyn Heights are the ties that Karom has to the city. He thinks of them now and tries to remember the contents of each one. They are the sole connection he feels to the place. Perhaps he will summon the strength to visit Bhopal one day in the future. But he knows it inherently through the pictures that his father took all those years ago when his parents came to Bhopal to retrieve him. He has seen Bhopal through his father’s eyes. And for now, that’s the closest he needs to get.

  On their flight Karom and Gita are issued seats rows apart from one another on the full flight. Though they try to negotiate seat changes, no one wants either the middle or window seat when they are traveling with children, as nearly everyone besides them on the plane appears to be.

  “It’s okay,” Karom says, squeezing her shoulder. “You’re going to sleep the whole way anyway and I’ll just annoy you with my fidgeting. I’ll come visit you from time to time.” Secretly, he is pleased to have some time to himself. For the past two weeks, it has been him and Gita constantly, and while he loves having her at his side, with their knees pressed together in the backseat of auto-rickshaws and on long pendulous train rides, he wants to reflect on his time in India, the time he has given himself to heal, to repent, to forgive. It is the first time during their trip that he will be able to consider it all: the swaying camel rides in the Thar Desert, the hot, dusty wind at the top of the Qutb Minar, the baying of doleful dogs as they settled into their beds each and every night.