The Abundance: A Novel Page 6

  Within two years (he had introduced the girlfriend so he could make her his fiancée), Ronak and Amber had their wedding, or more accurately, weddings: the morning at their small church on a downtown street corner, close to boxy houses and a taqueria. I had never been inside one of these churches before, not in America. It looked exactly like the ones Abhi and I had seen on vacation in Switzerland and Austria; the builders had reproduced the darkness, the stained-glass windows, the organ pipes up front. I had thought such artistic churches existed only in Europe, but we had one just down the highway, with old Dodges and Fords in the parking lot behind it. We walked down the aisle to our places in the pew, as we had been instructed. Everyone twisted in their seats to look at us. The whole wedding took place in a funereal hush; no one behind us talked.

  That afternoon, we changed our clothes and had the Hindu ceremony in a Hyatt ballroom where a mandap and wooden thrones had been set up. Red silks, marigolds in a stainless steel thali, Christmas lights spiraling up the columns, the pandit’s half-mumbled Sanskrit like the droning of an engine; and the audience free to turn and shake hands with an old friend, to follow a bolting two-year-old into the lobby, to chat.

  I had made a trip to India with Amber’s measurements written on a chit of paper. I chose the darkest red that was not yet maroon and, for the reception, the darkest blue that was not yet purple. In Ahmedabad, I went to fetch my mother-in-law’s old jewelry sets from a State Bank of India safe, for which Abhi had vouchsafed me the key. He had kept the key inside a deposit envelope, a length of coarse twine for the key chain. I was very careful with that key and tucked it in with my passport. During the journey, I checked on it every time I checked on my passport. The key, especially with that twine, promised me access to the past, to our deceased mothers. It was time to hand those sets over to my daughter-in-law, just as Abhi’s mother had given them to me.

  Brittle, faded velvet cases; their hinges resisted at first, and then, recognizing me, gave way all at once. Inside, the sets were as fragrant as old books. The gold was a deep yellow, and the work was in a busy older style, thick loops of chain and tiny dangling bell-beads. I tried to imagine the necklace resting on Amber. It would be only for a moment, the pose, the smile, the press of a button. I would not expect or even want her to wear this weight to the ceremony. After the photograph, this set would be hers to store away. Would she think it was gaudy, overdone? Even if she disliked it, she would never say so. Or maybe she would be indifferent. She would have no way to distinguish it from the bangles on her wrists or the bodice I laced up her back. No, Amber would take her cue from me; if I told her what the jewelry was, if I spoke of its history first, she would say it was “beautiful.” She would offer praise without comprehension, praise for my sake.

  I returned the jewelry to the safe and buried the key in my purse. Outside the bank, though, I saw a billboard with a giant watch on it, and I changed my mind. I took off my watch, put it in my purse, and went back inside the bank. I told the clerk I had forgotten my watch inside the safe, where I had left it while trying on some old bracelets. Tick, tick: the future is stronger than the past. Would things have been any different if Ronak had married an Indian girl? Raised here, raised there—girls were different now. Abhi and I came from an India that did not exist anymore. We had sold my own father’s house in Jamnagar to make room for a multiplex. I put my watch back on, and I brought the sets to America.

  * * *

  The afternoon of the wedding, when Mala and I helped her get ready, I told Amber about the necklace and bracelets. She said they were “beautiful, just beautiful,” as I knew she would. Mala had a digital camera, and I looked over her shoulder at each new image of Amber wearing the set. When I went around to take the necklace off, her hand rose protectively to the heavy gold resting on her chest. “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “I’m taking it off, of course. You wouldn’t want to wear this to the ceremony.”

  “Why not? Didn’t you say it belonged to Roan’s grandmother?”

  “I did.”

  “Am I allowed to wear it?”

  I looked at Mala.

  “You can wear it, if you want to,” said Mala. “It’s not really the style anymore, Amber.”

  “Neither were the earrings I wore in church this morning. Those were my great-grandmother’s opals. She wore them at her own wedding back in Germany.”

  Mala frowned. “It looks uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not uncomfortable.”

  “You’re sure you want to wear that for two hours?”

  “If I’m allowed to wear it, I want to wear it,” Amber said. She pressed both hands to the necklace, last night’s mehndi dark on her skin, a brown that glowed orange. The bracelets slid noisily down her arms. “This can be my something old.”

  I like to take refuge with Sachin and Shivani. The enclave of the chaise longue feels like a clearing. Father and daughter. Both, I feel, harmless, without darkness or cruelty, even of the domestic kind. If Mala could see this quality in Sachin, as I do, maybe she might love him for that. But harmlessness wasn’t something women of her generation could love in a man.

  A girl with her saree pulled low over her forehead, though, surrounded by relatives, being shown a potential husband over tea—such a girl might feel attracted to harmlessness. She would see whether her suitor looked capable of cruelty. What to watch for, in an interview that short? A certain thinness of the upper lip. Thick forearms, thick fingers. A rough way of setting the teacup back on the saucer.

  My own yes to Abhi had been based, in part, on his slender fingers and receding hairline. Such a man, I had thought, will let me visit my mother and father. A similar conviction—he will be kind—had made me want Sachin for Mala.

  I sit at the foot of the chaise, and Sachin moves his feet in their droopy white socks to the side. Shivani isn’t saying the animals by name yet, but she does point to orca, dolphin, walrus, and penguin as Sachin names them. He looks at me, raises his eyebrows, and points at the book to ask if I want to take over, but I shake my head and let them continue. I like the sight of them together. A turn of the long, glossy cardboard panel: tiger, gorilla, rhinoceros, elephant.

  I begin pretending I am not there. I witness this scene as a ghost, unable to alter it. My presence does not change their awareness. I don’t even dimple the chaise cushion. This doesn’t sadden me. It is a pleasing fantasy, the kind some people have of fame or heaven.

  Abhi and I noticed, from the start, how much closer Mala is to her son. Shivani came second, after Mala’s love for Sachin, perhaps, had cooled. Or maybe she felt no sense of discovery with this second child, seeing only the familiar chores. Mala would deny favoritism; she would be devastated, and then enraged, if she found out Abhi and I murmur this to ourselves. But the difference shows. Maybe she allows it unconsciously, but Sachin is always handling Shivani. He does it well. He is quick with diapers. It pleases me to see him clip the tiny ankles, raise the buttocks off the changing pad, slide the diaper under, and spread its crinkled fringe with a deft finger-splay; then fold up, wrap from the sides, and blow a raspberry on her chest for the finale.

  Just one generation ago, this simply did not happen. In India, you didn’t need the man to help. You had mother, mother-in-law, sisters, cousins, grown nieces to share the shushing and cradling. For keeping the house clean, there was always a mute and serviceable bai who swung a wet gray rag over the floor tiles, fifty rupees a month and the gift of two old sarees on Diwali. Somehow, in India, you could leave a child to itself a little more confidently. In retrospect, this doesn’t make sense—the insects were more dangerous, and the outlets were uncovered. Still, collective watchfulness substituted for constant supervision. In America, in a small, resident’s apartment, the constellation of females vanished, but the husband did not register the tasks to be done. The aristocratic idleness of the Indian father came over on the same plane as the Indian husband’s entitlement to a hot meal. Even with a man like Abhi. I never expected
him to crook Ronak over a forearm and rinse—and he never did. To Sachin’s generation this came naturally.

  I make myself small and dwell in Shivani’s presence for a while. My storm shelter. I am happy here. She has no idea of mortality, and so, in a sense, no mortality, there in her father’s lap.

  Already—beetle, bumblebee, earthworm, spider—words are getting attached to things. In a few years, words will proliferate and swarm and carry off the pictures in the books she reads, black ants hauling off the butterfly. Eventually just words will be left. The things themselves will have been devoured. What a loss! All creation. To be stuck reading instead of looking. But for now, Shivani is the first human being all over again.

  After the book is finished, I give her my finger, and we walk together, kitchen, dining room, hallway, back to the family room. It is nice to have her to myself for a while. The circuit of the house becomes a scenic trail where I look up at things from her vantage. I stop her by a photo collage on the wall and lift her. Early pictures, more recent ones. Mala is in at least seven of the ten. I ask Shivani, Where’s Mommy? And she points, without hesitating, at the black-and-white photograph of my wedding ceremony, at me in my nose ring and thin gold side chain, little mehndi dots above my eyebrows, my girl face small behind the garlands.

  * * *

  Was there really just a year between that picture and New York City?

  Abhi had just started hating his Internal Medicine residency (he would switch to Neurology that July) when I came over from India, six months pregnant with Ronak. We were still strangers then. The training programs had no work-hours restrictions. Mala, two decades later, would just miss the law limiting the workweek to eighty hours. As a new attending physician, she would see her own residents, including the senior ones just a year below her, get each other out before noon, postcall. Mercy, she realized in outrage, had been possible all along. Abhi, in those days, would go forty-eight hours straight sometimes—fourth floor, down to the Emergency department, sixth floor, fourth floor again, Emergency department again, the pages clustering, beeps interrupting one another, the operator’s cigarette-coarse voice mispronouncing his name on the overhead speakers. At each stop, he would lay two fingers in a limp palm and ask the patient to squeeze, or float his pen side to side across a fixed stare. Click, penlight in the left eye, penlight in the right eye, click. Then off to scribble a note, the phone crooked in his ear, ordering insulin in response to bed 327a’s blood sugar.

  In our apartment, alone, I sang to Ronak. I kept my hands on the dome of us to complete a circuit. I imagined the water inside me shivering with my voice. I thought religious songs would make him a good child, even though I was never very religious. From medical school (still fresh then), I knew when the ears canalized. I imagined the intermediaries. Protozoan, fish, salamander: A half-dozen halflings passed through like past lives until the gills sealed and the vertebrae notched. An outsize skull trailed a torso like the radicle of a sprouted chickpea. At last the eyes glazed with eyelids. At last the fingers lost their webs. Two cells had frothed into a boy. Embryology was probably the closest I have come to feeling a religious tremor. The problem is, you can’t sing it. So I sang the old bhajans in the old language. I thought such songs would make him a good boy and a good man. Pious, even. Sound doesn’t travel well through water.

  Months later, my bare still-swollen foot rocking Ronak’s cradle, I was studying for the exam that foreign medical graduates had to take. I should have waited a year. But he didn’t sleep the night through until he was three anyway. I would cup him to my breast, left thigh bobbing him, while on the other thigh I laid a textbook. He would fight it. He would crush his eyes and turn away in anguish, then, without warning, open his mouth and grope with his whole face in my direction. I swear he sensed my distraction and would not tolerate it. His mouth accepted me only when I curled over him and whispered. Rise a few degrees, turn to the book, and he broke the seal and wailed.

  I went to the exam the first time with spit-up stains on my shoulder and no pencils. I kept thinking of the Latino woman who was babysitting him for those hours: she ran a day care in her living room, the television always on, six contagious older boys with cheese puff fingertips and Kool-Aid lips, all six infected with the same rhinovirus and using their sleeves. They were all delighted to see the baby. I was late. I had to go. She wished me luck and settled Ronak against her giant bosom and sat down in front of the television as the older boys gathered.

  Ronak’s cold over the next two weeks prevented me from dwelling very long on the examination results. The cold got better, briefly, then worsened again, became a pneumonia, and got him admitted to the hospital for intravenous antibiotics. I received the letter late on a Tuesday night. Abhi, done with his shift, came to the Pediatric floor, set his white coat on the rocking chair, and sent me home to shower and cook (we lived in walking distance from the hospital). How distracted I must have been! I forgot to check the mail until, done cooking and packing dinner for me and Abhi, I passed the boxes. I set down the brown grocery bag full of containers and unlocked ours. The box was stuffed with several days’ junk mail, a tattered blue aerogram from India, and the envelope.

  We dined beside Ronak’s hospital crib. The IV dripped noiselessly in the monitor’s green glow. I did not know which catastrophe to focus on, Ronak’s pneumonia or my envelope. I sent my thoughts to one as refuge from the other. I felt guilty for feeling shame more keenly than worry.

  I could not tell Abhi. I had never failed anything before. How did people phrase such news? How, after saying it out loud, did they bear being gazed upon?

  I was to stay the night in Ronak’s room. Abhi was covering the adult intensive care unit, which meant a 4:30 AM wake-up. As he gathered his white coat, I rushed to embrace him and slipped the envelope into his already cluttered pocket. He was very sensitive to changes in me, even though we did not know each other very well yet. He put a finger under my chin, lifted my face, examined my eyes. Would he figure it out? Would he tell, from my face, that I was not really the smart person he thought I was?

  “Ronak is going to recover,” he said. “He’s a strong boy.”

  I nodded and began to cry. I was never sure what I was crying about: The results? Ronak’s illness being a direct result of my leaving him to take the exam and pursue my ambition? Or the realization I was thinking about the trivial thing while Abhi gave me credit for thinking about the life-and-death one?

  I cried a long time. It held him up. I remembered his shift the next morning and forced myself to stop. Then, as he was getting up to go a second time, I thought to myself: What if he finds it at some inopportune time? What if he is in an elevator with his superiors, and the envelope drops as he pulls out his notes on the next patient? What if someone sees the score and thinks it’s his? I stuck my hand in his pocket to take the envelope back. I was clumsy. He looked down in surprise and brought out the envelope. I fell back into my chair. He opened the letter. I could not look up. Ronak awoke and began to cry. I hurried to his crib and rubbed his head and shushed him. Abhi pressed himself to my side and kissed the top of my head. A chain of consolation. He stayed up talking me through things until well past midnight. By then it made sense to stay. We crowded onto the one couch. He smelled of my food, and under that of coffee, evaporated cologne, stale stress. Forced flush, we breathed each other in, and finally we kissed, my mouth for the first time opening to his tongue.

  * * *

  The full shock and shame waited until Ronak’s recovery. Abhi would come home and could tell from my eyes that I had been crying. He insisted he wouldn’t have been able to do it either if he had had to care for a newborn. He sat for the exam, he said, after two straight months of loneliness, the apartment empty and the country strange. What had he done but study?

  I was not so charitable. I blamed myself, not motherhood. Hadn’t I always suspected it? In medical school it had been that way—the boys playing cricket, laughing aloud in groups of two or three even on
exam mornings—me and my friends the studious, nervous girls, whose notes were far neater and color-coded, but whose scores were never quite as high. It felt like a law of nature back then, in India. As girls, we were doing something against the order of things; naturally we did it with more effort, less well.

  Yet Ronak, who inherited all Abhi’s intelligence, had been third in his high school class. Both the valedictorian and salutatorian had been girls. I wondered at the conviction we girl students had back then—the conviction that we were lucky to pass. Was it the perception of us that had changed our self-perception? Were my male classmates ever “naturally” smarter? Or had their superiority, like any myth, become true by being universally believed—and shaped our scores accordingly?

  I took the exam again the next year. The first time, I fell just below the cutoff. The second time I wasn’t even close. I’d had the whole year to go over the material. But the information had a strangely old feel. Not old as in familiar, but old like Scotch Tape that had lost its stickiness. I pressed my mind to those pages but nothing clung. Ronak was no easier to care for, either—twenty-two days before the exam date, he decided to start crawling. But the real factor was lack of confidence. I went in knowing I would do worse than before. My memory’s hands were shaking. They dropped everything.

  For long afterward, Abhi used to encourage me back into medicine. Ronak was older now. I would have time. Things would turn out better. The old information would come back; the new information he would help me with. I put it off. Mala was born. I couldn’t possibly take the exam then—the conditions were even less favorable. More time passed. I wouldn’t just be retaking the exam. I would have to do whole years of residency with two children at home, hurry floor to floor with note cards in my pocket—hemoglobin and hematocrit, chest x-ray in AM, grand rounds, afternoons at clinic—impossible, I told myself. Impossible.