The years have mostly been kind to me. I have a decent job in Boston, a place to call home, a woman who literally saved my life, two beautiful kids, and a couple of decent people to that I can relate, acquaintances- I still have no one I call a friend. The years roll by, the seasons change, the calendar continues to flip over and the portrait of my life keeps getting filled with a new mosaic of events — and yet I keep coming back home to India — year after year…
In the four years since Hetali’s death, a lot has changed, and yet some things haven’t. The pond is still the same — covered in algae, surrounded by the statuesque banyan trees and the frogs still croak around. Sometimes I head there and just sit on the low stone bench for a while, surrounded by new vegetation that keeps growing all around. I keep telling myself this will end, that the odds have it that the people I love will stop dying so rapidly — that a phone call in the middle of the day or night will not always bring bad news.
In the midst of it all, I am trying to build a life for myself, but I am not making it easy for me either. My rage has been my ticket to survival. I have used it to complete an engineering degree in the top ten of my class and started to work on applying to colleges for my MBA too. It’s as if I want to prove a point to myself or someone — although what that exactly is still remains a mystery to me.
In the meanwhile, I have started to work in a small firm where I have made new acquaintances. A girl even has a crush on me and even though I secretly enjoy it, I find most women these days unappealing. It’s as if I compare them with something, and end up coming up short.
I stare at my computer screen sitting in my cubicle.
The phone rings. Usually, I turn off the ringer when I’m working, but today real life, or at least real history, is intruding.
It’s Shetty, a school friend’s father who is also a lawyer.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“There has been an incident and they want to meet you to get some more information about it”
“Am I in trouble?” I ask. I haven’t told my family anything about anything so far and this might break open that door.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “They just want to talk to you — find out if you know anything.”
“Why?”
“They won’t say, exactly. But let me ask you this. Do you know anything you want to tell me right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you have any idea about something that has recently happened to Deepak?”.
I don’t understand what he is talking about.
“No!” I blurt out. “Of course not!”
“Don’t get upset,” Shetty says in a soothing voice. “I just had to ask.”
The elevator door slides shut and my heart skips a beat, reminding me of the exact nature of the trouble I am in. Upstairs, in Shetty’s office, two cops are waiting for me.
“They’re in the next room,” he says.
“How do they seem?”
“Like cops,” he says as if that might provide me with a mental picture.
“Has Pakya been in touch with you?” Kadam asks.
“He and I talked a couple of years ago, but I haven’t spoken with him after that,” I say honestly.
“When was the last time?”
“About two years ago,” I repeat.
“Deepak is dead. He was killed last week. Someone slashed his throat”.
I gasp visibly.
“Do you have any idea who it could be?” he isn’t interested in my answer, but still goes through the motions.
Shetty interjects. “He is studying in Nasik now He has no clue where Prakash is.”
Kadam looks at his file for a while.
“It was a personal killing”, he finally says.
An hour later, I walk away feeling his eyes on my back.
“Have a nice day” he calls after me.
I stride through the room, out the front door of the office, and down the steps. I try to imagine Pakya in jail. Will they ever find him? Will they even want to find him? Will he be able to find his peace?
The questions and the scenarios; they flip quickly through my mind like flash cards. I walk faster until I practically break into a run. The man I had spent a good part of my days plotting revenge on had been killed, and I feel empty inside. I had always thought that if it ever happened I would feel a surge of sick joy or I might go spit on his dead body.
Instead, I feel nothing but relief.
The sun is unseasonably strong on graduation day. It beats against the yellow-and-green-striped tent pitched on the west lawn of AV college. The air is humid and still, and bees hover low to the ground. My hair is sticking to the back of my neck, and I feel sweat gathering in the creases behind my knees as I sit with the dozen other graduate students
The president of AV college Bhausaheb Thorat, a local politician is calling out my name and I rise, my shoes sinking into the soft, damp earth as I walk to the podium and shake his hand. There is a smattering of applause from the few people I know here.
An hour later, I throw my degree in the backpack and head back to the town. The bus driver is blaring Sai Nath — a devotional song on the tape deck. I keep the windows rolled down as the bus passes through two stops and merges onto the Nasik Solapur Highway. The sugarcane mill looks suspended across the Sangamner river, and corn caps sparkle in the midday sun. The curves of the western cane fields unfurl like stotic banners.
Instead of getting off the highway at Sangamner, I keep going. The bus is headed to Shirdi, a famous temple for a Muslim Hindu saint who espouses the values of trust and patience. Trust in who and patience for what? — I have no idea at that time, and yet instead of the ten-minute journey back to my dorm room, I end up traveling for three hours. I just don’t want to go back to that room just yet.
I don’t know where I am going till I am halfway there.
Back home in Bombay, I go back to KEM hospital to see Maya. She is standing outside her office, chatting with some of the patients’ relatives. I wonder if she has any idea of the hand she has had in changing my life for the better.
My savior ambles over and gives me a big hug and holds my face between her palms, one of her signature trademarks.
“You did it,” she whispers. “Now you just have to keep doing it.” She says it to me as if it were an anagram - a message it will take me a lifetime to decipher: doing it and keeping on doing it are two different things. I will never be out of the woods.
“My handsome boy,” she announces holding me at arm’s length.
I try to smile and hug her warmly. I feel the bones of her back and the new strength in her arms. I am her rare success story, and the least I can do is spend the rest of my life trying to let her win , be just that. What she probably doesn’t realize is that I have survived for her so far — and only now am I beginning to survive for myself.
“Gotta go,” I mumble. I know I should stick around and let her soak with motherly pride in her success, but I just can’t stand there another minute. She reminds me of things I want to forget.
“Have lunch with me, kiddo,” she says.
Every year, I come to India. It’s almost like an obsessive habit bordering on compulsion. I visit long-lost relatives, eat spicy chinese fare from street stalls, and shop for Indian wares to take back to the US. Every year, I go to Pune to visit my in-laws. Every year, I take the train to go to Navsari- my mother’s hometown, where we sit in a small shop called Kolahs and eat butterscotch ice cream. Every year.
And every year while Ana is busy packing her bags to go back to the USA, while my sister is busy taking the kids to Poptates for sizzlers and brownies, while my mother is busy visiting the temples, I sneak away from home quietly during one of those afternoons when nobody is watching. I walk down to the Parel railway station, take the crowded evening commuter local train to Andheri, climb on bus # 251, get off at Dhake colony bus stop and walk the remainder of the lane weaving my way through bored college students hanging around in the evening. The entire area around the college has changed. The old structure is now a multi-facility building. The cafeteria is sparkling and even accepts GPay. The lab is now a modern three-storey library of sorts. I walk my way around the building, behind the small mud path, bending under the overgrown tree branches until I reach a familiar place — a place I know so well that I walk through it freely even in my nightmares. I am no longer a spouse, a brother, a son, or a father. I am none of those things. I am just a twenty-year-old lonely boy visiting the one place that he dreaded to visit the most, alone — Without the one person that should have been there.
There are rumors of wild dogs who roam the pond. I usually carry a stick when I visit, but today, I am empty-handed. I walk around the path as close as I can, unhook the fence chain, and walk the rest of the way softly until I reach the foot of the big banyan tree. Years have gone by. Every year I am afraid of visiting here and yet I come. This fear that is masqueraded as indifference or even laziness, but deep down, I know it is so much more than that.
My knees sink into the wet ground as I kneel. I know she’s not here. Here, there is only a smattering of her ashes that’s long washed away. But still, I can talk to her in this place without second-guessing myself, without wondering if she really hears me.
“I wrote a book and you do show up in some parts of it, Hetali,” I whisper to the ground.
No kidding, I can almost hear her say.
“I got my CFA certification last year.”
Damnnnnn, How about that? — I hear a giggle.
“I haven’t met Mitali since you went away. ”
I understand — Her voice is somber now.
The sun is hot against the back of my bowed head, and my jeans-clad knees are damp and grass-stained. I am surrounded by the remains of her skin and bones somewhere here, deep in the bowels of Bombay, with the monorail rumbling overhead.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I should have been there for you…”
Silence. I have lost her voice, and her face is fading from my memory — slowly, like an old yellow creased photograph. A bird chirps on the tree behind me. I stand up, brush myself off, and look around. There is a white jasmine flower fallen under the tree. I pick it up and place it close to the water and watch it float away.
I turn and head back home.
