The Abundance: A Novel Read online

  I look out the window. We drive in silence until the next red light. She brakes hard again.

  “Your daughter did everything right. Became a doctor, married Indian, had the babies.”

  I nod.

  “So next time, when you’re deciding which child’s face to cover with kisses, keep that in mind. I. Did. Everything. Right.”

  After her outburst, Mala is silent. After her silence, she is sweet.

  She asks me to direct her to the parking deck even though she knows how to get there. Her hands on my elbows are gentle as she raises me from the passenger seat. I can walk by myself, but she stays close and eventually holds my hand, like a little girl. She is repentant. I hold no grudge. How can I? When I have her grown-up little girl hand.

  She signs in and fills out the clipboard pages without asking about my medications or allergies. She knows all of them. I am here to have the fluid drawn off my belly. I know what to expect. I have had this done twice before. A gentle-voiced technologist in a teddy-bears-with-stethoscopes scrub top squirts clear jelly onto my domed abdomen and smears the jelly around with an ultrasound probe. The screen is mostly dark. The dark is the fluid that’s accumulated in me. It looks like a third pregnancy—my navel is like Mala’s now, an outie.

  A Sharpie makes a mark on the downcurve of the dome. The doctor, in a plain blue scrub-top over his shirt and tie, numbs up the Sharpie mark with a thin lidocaine needle whose sting dulls and keeps dulling until it becomes a little crater of numbness. I remember Ronak grinning after a dentist’s visit, tapping his face in fascination. Hey, Mom, my cheek is still dead! The small sting makes me oblivious to the big sting, the thicker needle sheathed in plastic that dives an inch into the fluid. The needle comes out while its tube sheath stays inside me. What emerges is not blood but a fluid that looks like apple juice. The nurse connects some plastic tubes to a vacuum jar. The yellow races along the tube and finally the jar begins to fill, noisily. The fluid, drawn out hard by the vacuum, froths. This is when I look away. Until then I feel fascination—look, that is my ascites, look, that needle is actually inside me—but when I hear the fluid rush out of me, the sound reminds me of a man urinating in a quiet house.

  Today is the first appointment when Mala has been present. She holds my hand the whole time. As soon as I lay my head back, no longer wanting to see what’s going on, she starts talking. Last time, the technologist, who had to stay to supervise the drainage (the doctor had left with a kind pat of my hand), talked about her dogs. I do not know what collies look like. Today I have Mala. Eager to make up for raising her voice in the car, she talks about Vivek and Shivani. Her voice is louder than the draining fluid, whose jet changes timbre as the jar fills. With her hand in mine, I don’t mind the gurney and tube light. My five-months-along belly deflates. The technologist, freed from the obligation to chat, turns her swivel stool and browses an old Good Housekeeping. She looks up when my tubing is ready to be switched to a new jar. Mala keeps talking until I am all drained away. A jar and a half total. The radiologist comes in, scribbles 1.5 L clear yellow ascites, and leaves. Without any prompting, Mala bends to kiss my hand. It is easy to forget her brief anger on the car ride over. I do just that.

  * * *

  On the way home, Mala takes a sudden turn into the supermarket without touching the brakes. An oncoming car speeds past us, horn blasting.

  “I need to get some things,” she murmurs, half to herself. “Can you come with me?”

  I am lighter now that the fluid is gone. I could walk beside her without help, but it is nice to feel our fingers lock. The supermarket doors part. It has been weeks since I have come here. Coriander bundles lie freshly misted from the nozzle. A man in a blue apron is stacking oranges. How did I ever take such a place for granted? It was an unacknowledged blessing, all these years, to be a short drive from such plenty. I have been fortunate to live so well.

  Mala is hurriedly bagging tomatoes, not checking their skins.

  “What are you doing, Mala? They will spoil. Your father is taking you to the airport in two hours.”

  “It doesn’t have to spoil.”

  “There’s no time to do anything.”

  “There’s time.” She pushes the cart as if to flee from me, haphazardly grabbing produce, no list in her mind.

  “What will I do with all this in the house? You see how I am now. I have no strength to cook by myself.”

  She refuses to slow down or face me. “We can make a month’s worth and freeze it. The food will keep for a long time if we freeze it. We can eat it later.”

  “But your flight—”

  “I’ll cancel my flight. I’ll call in sick.” She takes out her phone. “I have sick days. This is what they’re for.”

  I stop the cart with a hand.

  “We do not need this.” I return the zucchini to the shelf, the onions, the knuckled gingerroot. “Wait until Thanksgiving.”

  “That’s too far away.”

  I lift the bag of tomatoes. Only six, but they feel heavy. She follows me, the phone returned to her purse.

  “I am not going anywhere, Mala.”

  “Promise.”

  As if that were in my power. “Of course. I promise.”

  There. All the food has been returned. I leave the store the way I came to it, nothing in my hand but hers.

  Thanksgiving. I am thankful I am here to give thanks.

  I used to hate this tradition when I first came here. I shuddered to imagine so much meat being eaten in so many houses all at once. Hundreds of thousands of turkeys. An annual apocalypse for the species. Gobble gobble everywhere struck me then as macabre black humor. But you get desensitized over enough years. And now I can see it as a holiday for eating gratefully, and I am thankful I am here. My doctors did not think I would see it.

  See it I do, and ravenously. I am quiet in my chair. But I watch as the people I love fill my house. Ronak, Mala, and their families. Sachin’s parents have come from India to help him and Mala take care of the children. They allow Mala to spend more time here. His mother is healthy, stout, industrious. She is patient with Shivani’s eating, right hand holding the bunched roti until her granddaughter’s mouth opens. Vivek has picked up snippets of Gujarati. She will speak nothing else with him. Sachin inherited his height and thinness from his gentlemanly father, who reads biographies on a wafer-thin reader, Sachin’s gift. They have been at our house the past week. Sachin’s father is very talkative, like his son, and he sits beside me and reports what he is learning about Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, Mussolini.

  Thanksgiving. The house smells like I have been cooking. But I have not entered the kitchen. It is all Mala. She is riding without my hand on the bicycle seat. I breathe in the crackle of cumin and fennel seeds in oil and I think, That is my hand.

  Mala makes everything, but not without help. Amber, her sleeves rolled up, wears the matching apron Mala gave me. Mixing bowls, cutting boards, both of my blenders, stray clutches of coriander, knobs and nubs of ginger, dark green strips of cucumber skin that smell like the cold, a large stainless steel bowl where dough awaits the kneading—I imagine the preparations colonizing the counter, the kitchen island, the dining table. Sachin’s mother offers her able hands, but her handwriting would be different; the girls insist they have to prepare all the food, and by the book, so that I might do it through them.

  I am here to see it all. Ronak shows Sachin his new camera, the two men leaning forward, the screen held glowing between their knees. The light on their faces changes subtly as he clicks through the camera’s settings. The boys upstairs shout over a match point on the Wii. The playroom has spilled downstairs. Toys cover the floor, but no one minds. Here in the living room, Raj and Shivani decide they want the same Thomas the Tank Engine neither of them cared about for the three past visits. Sachin’s father raises it high and lifts a finger at their screaming. In time, they move on to other toys. Sachin’s mother sits with me. We each hold a half-peeled banana, coaxing Shivani or Raj over
for a bite. She talks about births, graduations, and the marriages of rich men’s daughters in Mumbai graced by this or that aging film star; engagements broken off, fallings-out between elderly brothers, houses sold to the hungry new builders of a hungry new India. On the television I see storms on the coast and gunfire in the desert. I have the weight of my granddaughter in my lap. She turns the pages of a book and tells me, at length, what is happening to the bear, the tiger, the donkey. Hours pass, and the table is set. Mala, undoing her apron, calls everyone to eat. She goes upstairs to round up all our boys.

  Everyone waits until I come in on Ronak’s arm. Amber is holding my plate. Mala stands beside me. You fill it, I whisper to her. I point, and she fills. Though it is her hand, I am the one who inaugurates each dish, breaks the carefully garnished surfaces. This is the first plate. I take everything so I can taste everything. Not much; I do not have the appetite or tolerance. She rakes the palak paneer to bare the corners of braised tofu, which we use instead of paneer cubes. Each sweep unearths more steam. The dahi waits in three stainless steel dishes, smooth planes, cold and white. We make dahi using 1 percent milk—some might find it not quite heavy enough, but we like that airy feel. We like the way a bowl of it doesn’t weigh in the stomach. Mala made this dahi from the cultures I gave her. She spoons a tiny clump of shredded jalapeño, set aside in its own small glass bowl—Sachin’s father is known to love heat.

  At last, after Mala lays a brittle round of papad atop the rice, rotli, palak paneer, chole, bhartha, after she pours the dahl in a separate bowl, Ronak guides me to a chair and Abhi brings a glass of water. The full plate, full bowl, full glass are set before me. For a time, while everyone else takes their food, I sit before mine, motionless. When they are all seated, I take my first bite. Mala urges her family, making sure they take enough, promising them there is more.

  Dinner started very late. No one is holding the children to their bedtimes tonight. Abhi and Sachin bring out ice cream from the garage freezer, five boxes faintly ghosted with frost. Abhi sets up at the half-cleared table between a stack of bowls and a stack of spoons and scrapes, digs, finally stabs in vain. Sachin suggests microwaving them and takes a box of pistachio because that is my favorite. Soon his scoop sinks easily along the edge. Mala takes the bowl and kneels beside my chair, a spoonful held out for me. Open wide, she whispers. I open. Ronak hurries to a good angle, kneels, and takes a photograph as I close my mouth. Everyone claps, even the children. I smile. For a moment it feels like my birthday. Mala’s eyes were closed in the picture; we restage it with an empty spoon.

  When it is time to go to bed, Abhi joins me as usual. He waits. I feel my breathing steady. I feel my breathing slow. I know not to expect much more. This night would be a good night.

  * * *

  I close my eyes. It is still night, but summer. I go upstairs to Abhi in his study. The door leaks the brightness behind it. I push it open the rest of the way. Abhi sits before an open window. The room is hot and full of the cricket-loud midnight. It smells of the outdoors. Four houses down, a patio light is on, but at this hour all the backyards are empty. The light in the room makes it harder to see outside. Abhi’s notebooks are on the desk, but he isn’t working. His pencil taps idly on his chin when I peek in.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I was feeling good. I thought I would come visit.”

  “You couldn’t sleep?”

  I point at the window. “People can see you from outside.”

  He shrugs. “They can see the top of my shiny head.”

  Abhi holds his arms out. I look through our lit window as he presses his cheek to my fluid-swollen stomach, as though he were a new father feeling for a kick. Seen from out there, we could be a color photograph inside a frame.

  “You’re feeling better?”

  “I am.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Follow me.”

  He leads me downstairs and through the backyard door. Our patio light comes on. Specks, burned out, fleck the glass. Wings have collected like sere leaves around the base of the bulb.

  “A walk? At midnight?”

  “Better than a walk.”

  I stop at the top of the deck steps. He stands on the lawn.

  “Come on.”

  “Where are we going? We need shoes.”

  “Forget shoes.”

  “Slippers, then. I’ll go in and get them.”

  “Come on,” he says impatiently, taking my hand.

  I step onto the ticklish grass. Abhi scoops me up—I have a girl’s weight, near nothing—and walks me into the dark, across our backyard, and into the neighbor’s and across.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper.

  “Those kids jump all day. I see them having the time of their lives.”

  The trampoline has black netting around it.

  “Shhh!” I whisper. “Abhi! Put me down!”

  He slides me through a part in the netting. The trampoline surface is taut and finely crosshatched under my palm. He clambers onto it behind me and stands unsteadily. The surface slopes toward him.

  “This is going to break.”

  He begins to bob in place. “You should see their daughter.” He throws his elbows out and puffs his cheeks.

  “Abhi!”

  “Stand up.”

  He puts his hands under my arms and draws me to my feet. He bobs higher, his own feet still on the surface, while I go up and down passively, my hands in his.

  “Abhi, let’s leave.”

  He stops bobbing.

  “Is this making you nauseous? You feel okay?”

  I realize how much I don’t want him to stop. “I am fine,” I say. “But what if they see us?”

  He starts bobbing again, grinning again. “Jump.”

  He lets go of my hands. The trampoline is bigger than it seems from the window. There is a lot of room. A few steps away from him, only a vague pulse transmits. I bend my knees and crouch and straighten, starting my own rhythm, half expecting a light to come on.

  “Jump!”

  His feet leave the trampoline.

  “Jump!”

  I try. I feel inside me a skyward lurch, but I shy at the last instant.

  “Jump!”

  I look up at the night sky. I try again. And that is when the moon drops, and I float bodiless above the earth’s turning.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Authors aren’t granted much insight into their own work, but it seems to me that I write my novels out of fears I cannot overcome in any other way. My first novel sprang, in retrospect, from fear for my sons, the fear of some danger from which I would not be able to protect them. This novel, even though it is written from the perspective of the mother of a family, gives form to my fear of losing a parent.

  Thankfully, very little in this story is autobiographical. The main part that is drawn from life, although altered in various ways, concerns my parents’ return to India to care for their mothers, who fell gravely ill at the same time. I would like to thank my mother and father first, for everything. Here’s to many more years together.

  My wife, Ami, and my twins, Shiv and Savya; my sister, Shilpa; my brother-in-law, Devo; my nephew, Shail; my nieces, Keya and Lekha—the love goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway.

  Riva Hocherman of Metropolitan Books, who also edited Partitions, challenged and improved the manuscript, saving me from myself sometimes. I am in continued debt to my agent, Georges Borchardt, and his assistant, Samantha Shea, who have supported both my fiction and my poetry.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AMIT MAJMUDAR is the author of Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2012. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.

  ALSO BY AMIT MAJMUDAR

  Partitions

  Metropol
itan Books

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  Metropolitan Books® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2013 by Amit Majmudar

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Majmudar, Amit.

  The abundance: a novel / Amit Majmudar. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9658-3

  1. East Indian Americans—Fiction. 2. Children of immigrants—Family relationships—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A3536A66 2013

  813'.6—dc23 2012027368

  First Edition 2013

  eISBN 9780805096590

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.