Part 10 (1/2)

*Why you are staring at food? It is not looking good?' says a voice to me. This voice, all the other noises, they start becoming distant till I am not able to listen to them any more.

All I can hear now are the voices from my past.

*I will cut open my stomach if I have to, but my son will go to America,' said Baba grimly.

Earlier that morning Biji's voice rang through the fields informing Baba and me that I had been accepted to study at *Ill-o-no' University. After I had topped the state and national exams, my junior college princ.i.p.al had entered my name in a government programme that granted a full scholars.h.i.+p to one below-poverty-line student per year to attend college in the US. My name had been selected this year.

*I don't want to go,' I said quietly, placing a plastic bucket below the leak from our kacchi chatt. There was so much for me to do in Charuri. The dung patties would be crisp the next week, ready to be taken to sell for fuel in the market. My sister Sarita's history exam was next week and I still had to teach her about Gandhiji's a.s.sa.s.sination. And I'd promised to help Baba in the harvest season. But my voice did not rise above the pounding rain.

I didn't get too concerned though and even slept soundly knowing that Baba did not have the twentythousand rupees needed for my airline ticket, clothes and books.

When I woke up the next morning at four a.m. to plough the fields, Baba was still sitting on the straw mat, looking at me.

*I will take a loan against the land,' he declared in a thin voice, as if the weight of the decision had sapped him of all strength. Our farmland was p.a.w.ned off that very day to the local moneylender, as was, I deemed, my life.

I left India at the age of seventeen, angry with my father for always pus.h.i.+ng me to be the man of the house; the man of the school; the man of the farms; and now, without his hand on my back, the man of the world.

I felt orphaned and exiled.

My anger frothed with humiliation on my first day in America. It coalesced into ambition: I would prove myself to America and to Baba.

My experiences became mine to keep, undeserving of Baba's rustic a.n.a.lysis. I switched my degree from agricultural to aeronautical engineering, abandoning the original plan to go back to India to expand our farm. The monthly letters from my parents took me months to answer. Because of the expense, we didn't speak on the phone, and later, when I could afford it, I rang them only once or twice a year, the surprise of the calls giving our conversations so much gravity that they became dull. I didn't seek their blessings before getting married or after having a son.

Over the years, I kept making excuses to avoid moving back or visiting-expensive tickets, demanding boss, son's exams or wife's sinus operation. I didn't invite my parents or sister to visit, ashamed of how they would look to my American wife, half-American child, American neighbours and American friends. The squalor I came from ensured that I didn't take my wife or son to India, despite their eagerness.

My parents did not persist either, as though their memory of me was enough for them. They told me that the farm was doing well-they bought buffaloes every few years and then an automatic tilling machine. When I offered to pay back the loan, Baba refused, saying it had already been repaid, and declined my offers to send money home, insisting that it was of no use to them.

*Brahma does not forgive the father who takes from his son,' he wrote.

Nothing that they did made me feel needed, and so I needed them less.

In the little correspondence I had with them, I exaggerated my life's grandeur and pace. I waited for my award-a word from Baba to say that I had proved my worth, that he was proud of me. It never came.

And it never would, for he died soon after, and a few weeks later, so did Biji. Sarita called-for the very first time-and begged me to come. I almost didn't go, cancelling my ticket twice, gripped by this premonition of dread. But, then I went, alone. And when I arrived in India it felt like I'd left nothing behind in America, as if my life had simply been on pause and all I had to do was resume it from where I'd last left it.

On reaching my childhood home, I saw thirty-eight years of change in one moment. It loomed before me, this house of hay, rope, mud and hope. Inhaling deeply, like I used to as a child, I tried to gather the familiar smell of animal manure and compost, but it was hot and airless, stinging my nostrils.

An old lemon and chilli thread hung in the porch. I remembered how Biji used to make a new one every week, running her threaded needle through three green chillies, a juicy lemon, and three more chillies. I used to watch the thread cavort in the wind, keeping the evil spirits out of our lives. But this one was beaten and withered, as if it had fought spirits for years. I touched it. It disintegrated in my hand.

The house seemed to be empty. The front door stood open. I stepped inside. My home had aged faster than I had. While it had never been well furnished, now it was threadbare, with a charpai, a kerosene stove, a broken plastic chair, and some empty utensils. The paint on the wall was peeling. Nothing adorned these walls save for a tattered poster of a G.o.d and the only photo of me with Karen and Rahul that I had sent to my parents, almost fifteen years back. The photo was wrapped in cellophane, probably to preserve it.

The heat in the house stifled me; I unknotted my tie and wished I hadn't worn a suit.

I heard a soft voice behind me say in Pahari, *Welcome home, brother.'

I turned around slowly, taking a moment to let the words form. It was my sister, Sarita; wizened and unsmiling. She had always carried an air of contained sensibility; now she looked plagued by it.

*What happened to you?' I asked, shocked.

*I am unable to smile, brother, but I am happy to see you,' she replied in rasps, tears forming in her eyes. I went over and hugged her, needing just one arm to wrap around her body.

*I called you here to show you the truth,' she said.

I had seen it before she even told me. Yet, I listened to the price my family paid for my education.

Baba didn't antic.i.p.ate that I wouldn't return or that the errant monsoons would yield low crops for years. The high-interest loan acc.u.mulated, forcing him to forfeit our farmland to the moneylender. Left with no livelihood, he took up any job that came his way-carpentry, labour, plumbing-and Biji sold their belongings, one by one. They took to eating one meal a day, living-sometimes for days on end-only on wild grains, and later in their lives-when Baba became too old to work-they ate only boiled seeds of wild gra.s.s and fungus-ridden mango kernel. Sarita's facial muscles became weak and she was unable to marry well; her husband, now dead, had been a poor widower, three times her age, with children older than her. The marriage had saved her from starvation but nothing could save my parents. My father developed an acute digestive problem and couldn't eat for weeks before his death, and my mother died of dysentery.

*Why didn't anyone tell me all this? I could have helped. I could have come back,' I cried out-my guilt lay open like a corpse.

*Great pain cannot be expressed in the simple economy of words, Bhaiya. Baba was a proud man, so proud that even in the end he refused to admit that he was starving. He thought you'd be ashamed of him. And he didn't let anyone tell you. You'd come back if we told you, he knew, come back to nothing. Maybe, it was all an excuse, and he wanted to protect you, and maybe himself, from what he had become. A proud man's poverty is his bane, isn't it?'

I couldn't speak for what seemed as long as the time I'd been away from this home.

*I was such a bad son. You all must've hated me,' I finally said, more as a conclusion than a question.

*You were Baba's wish come true. How could we hate you?'

*So Baba'-I took a sharp breath in-*was proud of me?'

*More and more, every day.'

I cried out, in spite of myself. My sister walked up to me and laid her head against my heart.

*You will have to learn to forgive yourself.'

I never did.

I came back to the US and searched the attic for my family's old letters: they smelled earthy and full of love, and I lay among them, as if they were Baba and Biji's last embrace. An embrace I had never been able to relay; such was my love, tarnished by ego and pride. How foolish I had been-how petty and selfish-to have let my family go.

My shame became a vantage point from which I looked down upon my life. The success that defined my house, my car and pantry seemed like a sham. Every bite of food I tried to eat reminded me of what I'd deprived my parents. I thought of the sunken shoulder blades that held my sister's body together, and searched desperately, unsuccessfully, in the mirror for my own.

I took four hundred dollars-equivalent to the loan Baba had taken-and burned the notes. I put the remains in a copper urn and dispersed them in the Hudson; the ashes of family, of strife, and of tallying up your life's score and realizing that you came to naught.

I look down at the food Mrs Gupta has laid in front of me now, reminiscent of the last meal I had with my parents; a feast in my honour, fed to me with my mother's hands, with my Baba sitting beside me-not eating. Slung across his shoulder is a white cotton cloth with which he alternately dabs his tears and covers his laughing mouth. *Can you believe a poor farmer's son is going to America?' he says every other minute. *I can't explain how happy I am, for great joy cannot be expressed in the simple economy of words, can it, son?'

Mrs Gupta's voice wails through my reverie. *See this. I make it myself. Hear everyone in your village has this, no?'

I look at her hand. In it is a lemon and chilli thread.

THE MESSAGE.

Tanya is regretting her promise to take her son Maneesh to Kaizad's house.