For months before my first trip to India, Mom collected gifts for everyone that we would meet. Soft-bristled toothbrushes, bars of soap, and BIC pens that said “Made in America.” We went to Monroeville Mall every weekend. Radio Shack was giving away free beach balls, and we collected ten of them, one for every cousin, before the salespeople caught on. Mom bought cardboard canisters of Tang and Pringles, jars of peanut butter, packets of almonds, and bags of Hershey’s Miniatures. Slowly, our two-bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh filled up. Our closets burst with American paraphernalia.
Mom accounted for everyone: the children, the elderly, the neighbors, the maids, Chithappa’s receptionist, even Aunty’s sister, whom she’d never met. She wanted everyone to have a tiny piece of America. This was 1990, and I was nine years old. Though I was eager to travel, and to meet my cousin Padma, the gifts were perplexing. Why would someone want a pen, a bar of soap, a toothbrush?
“Because it’s from America,” Mom said. “Because it’s different. Because it’s better.”
For Aunty, we bought a shiny department-store watch made of braided metal, with rhinestones. For the baby she was pregnant with, we bought a yellow romper and a onesie that said “Little Peanut.” For Chithappa and Grandfather, there were disposable razors and white cotton undershirts.
For Padma, I picked out a white dress made of organza with a red satin sash around the waist. I ran my fingers through the layered petticoat. It reminded me of what Julie Andrews wore in Mary Poppins, my favorite movie. It was a dress that I myself would have loved to have.
“It will get dirty in India,” Mom said doubtfully, when I picked it out at Sears. “But okay.”
“She will love it,” I said, though I could not possibly have known. We had never met.
Dad drove Mom, two-year-old Divya, and me from Pittsburgh to New York, where he dropped us off at JFK International Airport. He would fly to India a week later, when work permitted. At the gate a large man, eager to change his seat assignment, knocked Divya in the head with his oversized duffel bag. She toppled over.
“Sorry,” he said, without stopping to look.
Mom, her mind on boarding passes and passports and cash in two currencies, simply reached her arm down and stood Divya back up. It was I who squatted to the ground to comfort my sister, despite my lukewarm feelings towards her. I offered her a tiny colored candy from the stash in the front zip of my backpack.
“Don’t cry,” I said. “Soon we’ll be with Padma.”
“Pad-ma,” she said.
“She’s our sister,” I said, repeating what Mom often said to me.
Also in my backpack was the white dress. Mom had put it in one of our large suitcases along with the other presents, but I had retrieved it.
“I want to keep it safe,” I said. Every so often, I checked on it.
I must have slept through most of the final leg of our journey, because before I knew it, we were at Madras Airport, searching for Chithappa. He was waiting just beyond the metal gate, among hundreds of others frantically waving to loved ones. I immediately saw a resemblance to Dad, in the way that he moved. I saw it in the way he bent to pick Divya up, with his right knee down and his left knee up. I saw it at the edges of his smile, in the way his lower lip popped slightly above his upper one. When he patted my head and then my cheek, I could smell the cool, fresh fragrance of his soap and wondered whether he washed his hands often because he was a dentist. Divya did not cry in his arms. Perhaps she saw the resemblance too, or felt it. Like Dad, Chithappa was tall and muscular. Both of them were athletes when they were younger. Chithappa was a basketball player, Dad a track star. They both had thick black hair. Chithappa had a dirt-colored birthmark on his right cheek. Divya reached out and touched it.
“Shall we go?” Chithappa asked me. “Padma is at home, and she cannot wait to play with you.”
He drove us to the house in his five-seater, a Maruti 1000. He had bought it just one month ago, he told us proudly. It was a bumpy, jolty ride, for two thrilling hours over unpaved roads. I sat in the back in awe, free of a seat belt, and aware for the first time that there existed a world of people that looked like me. The pigtailed schoolgirls in their white-and-blue uniforms had sun-bronzed skin and held hands as they walked. I wondered what Padma would be like.
Mom and Chithappa spoke in short conversations that felt unfinished, always using the formal neengo with one another, as if they were strangers.
“How is Ramya feeling?” Mom asked.
“This pregnancy is better than the last.”
They went through each relative, close and distant, in the same way. Mom never pressed for anything but basic information. Chithappa never offered more. How is Uncle’s health. How is Savitri’s college. Did Puneet find a job yet.
As we left the city farther behind, there were fewer cars and more buses and scooters. Cows with painted horns held up the traffic. A family of wild boars, led by their dark-snouted mother, trotted by. Chithappa came to a complete stop to let them cross. The car behind him honked and tried to overtake us.
“People here are barbarians,” he said. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel, but did not honk his own horn.
When we arrived at the house, Padma was waiting on the front porch. On her forehead there was a small, round red bottu. Her hair was pulled back into two tight braids. Though I had been desperate to see her, in that moment I was overcome with shyness. Behind her stood Aunty, smiling, her cheeks round, her belly a watermelon visible through her flamingo-colored sari. Grandfather stood next to her.
“Go on,” Grandfather said to me. “You’re sisters.” As if it were that easy.
Padma unfurled a woven grass mat on the floor of her bedroom, and we sat on it, side by side. She told me about the horse races Chithappa took her to in Guindy. He was going to win a lot of money there someday, but she was not allowed to talk to Aunty or Grandfather about it. He would win so much that they would be able to move to America, she said. I did not know what a horse race was exactly, but I imagined that it was like the Olympics, for horses. Padma had never seen the Olympics on television.
“What’s your favorite My Little Pony?” I asked.
She stared at me, baffled. To cut the awkwardness, I ran to my backpack and got the dress.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked. I handed it to Padma.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.
Later, I gave her a caramel chocolate that I had saved from the airplane, and a bendy, flexible giraffe the flight attendants had handed out to all the children. She bent the giraffe’s legs around the softened chocolate. The caramel oozed out onto the giraffe’s backside. The result was unmistakable. We laughed until we shrieked, prompting Mom to stick her head into the room and say, “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Now go away.”
“I have a collection of animals,” Padma said. She pulled a metal chest out from under her bed and opened it. Her collection included an elephant, a parrot, a turtle, and a duck with a spring in its neck that allowed it to nod back and forth. The animals were all made of wood and they were unpainted.
She handed me a thumb-sized caterpillar.
“For you.”
From then on, we were inseparable. The adults were right. We were sisters.
The day Dad arrived, all of us crammed into Chithappa’s five-seater and drove to Madhav’s Great Kulfi Shop. Chithappa bought each of us a creamy kulfi popsicle, filled with chopped pistachios. Mom muttered something about the water not being clean, but it was too late. I was licking my popsicle enthusiastically.
“I love it, Chithappa,” I said.
“I hear that in America there are ice cream shops with hundreds of flavors,” he said. “Is it true?”
“Hundreds,” I said. “Come visit.”
“Yes, do,” Dad said. “A visa will be difficult, though. And there is the cost. But maybe one day. Who knows?”
“Chithappa might win a race,” I said.
Padma glared at me.
“I told you not to say anything,” she whispered.
On the drive home, Chithappa beeped his horn at people on the streets. Thin, wiry men wearing lungis and women in flowery saris were in deep conversation as he struggled to steer his Maruti through the narrow streets.
“Damn villagers,” he said.
When Dad said that we were villagers too, Chithappa laughed.
“Maybe me,” he said. “But you, brother, left long ago.”
In America, our family referred to “the house” in India, as if it were a single unit. In reality they were two: The houses were connected through an internal hallway, but each side had its own entrance and porch, its own kitchen and bathroom. Padma and her parents lived on one side, clean and organized because of Aunty’s efforts. Grandfather lived on the other, with stacks of old issues of The Hindu, piles of books and ashtrays on every surface.
Grandfather spent most of his time in his house, and went to Padma’s only for meals. I remember his shock of white hair and his eyes, cloudy from cataracts. Though he used a walking stick, his body was muscled, remnants of his training as an officer in the Indian Army. Every morning, he drank milky coffee and ate biscuits on his front porch, delivered by the local canteen. He read the newspaper and checked the obituaries for names of friends. Then he showered and took a long walk around the neighborhood before coming to Padma’s house for steaming idlis and hot sambar. In the afternoons, his friends dropped by and they sat on the front porch on rocking chairs, chatting for hours.
Grandfather was kind to Padma and me. When we ran to him, he opened the tin of chocolate crème cookies he kept in his cupboard and handed us two each.
But with our parents, he was stern and distant. Mom tidied up his side of the house and supervised the maid, but like Aunty had discovered long ago, it was an impossible task. The house returned to its messy state almost immediately. Messy, it was at equilibrium. Clean, it was in a state of unrest.
“Leave it,” Grandfather said to Mom, when he found her sorting papers in the living room one day.
“There’s an electric bill here from five years ago,” she said.
“Leave it,” he said again, his voice gruff. He pulled the bill out of her hand.
Once, Padma and I went into Grandfather’s cupboards in search of crème cookies and found a small album, full of pictures from his days as an army man. There was a black-and-white photo of him in Cairo, with a British officer. He and the other officer had their arms around the bare waist of a belly dancer wearing a sequined bra and silver belts.
We showed it to Aunty, who stared at it for a moment.
“Put it back where you found it,” she said.
Instead, we took it to Grandfather.
“My friend Captain James Greene. Good man,” he said, squinting at the photo. “Good man. And Egypt was beautiful.”
Across the street from the two houses was Chithappa’s dental clinic. In Pittsburgh, my father drove forty-five minutes from our apartment in Monroeville to the Alcoa building in New Kensington, where he worked as an engineer. It was a novelty to me that Chithappa had only to walk across the street. Each morning, he saw patients until lunchtime. Then he came home to eat and nap. After his afternoon tea, he returned to the clinic and remained there until late in the evening.
Padma and I often played chess together while sitting on the wide wall that separated Chithappa’s clinic from the street. I had brought a travel-size electronic chess set with me from America, something I persuaded Dad to buy on one of our excursions to Radio Shack. As we played, we watched patients go in and out of the clinic, and we tried to guess their dental ailments.
One day, while we sat and played chess, Padma brought up the horse races again.
“You made Amma and Appa fight,” she said, her tone even and quiet. “I told you not to talk about it. Please don’t do it again.”
Every night, my parents, Divya, and I slept on Grandfather’s side of the house. Aunty had offered to let us stay on their side, but staying with Grandfather was the right thing to do, my parents said.
The night was the only time my parents had privacy from the rest of the family. Mom and I shared a bed. Dad and Divya slept on the floor, on a mattress that Aunty lent us. Divya fell asleep quickly, but I lay awake for long hours with my eyes closed, fighting the urge to scratch my mosquito bites so that I could eavesdrop unnoticed.
Mom complained to Dad about the uncomfortable living situation, the strange coldness between Aunty and Chithappa, and Grandfather’s impossible messiness. Dad listened patiently, aware that unloading on him was the only way Mom could survive another day in her in-laws’ home. She wanted nothing more than to go to our next destination, her parents’ place, in a city farther south.
One night, from his mattress on the ground, Dad had something to say.
“Rajan’s dental practice is not doing well,” he said. “He’s been borrowing money from Appa.”
“I’m not surprised,” Mom said.
Chithappa was drinking too much, too often, Dad said. “Ramya is threatening to leave him.”
At this, Mom, whose back was towards Dad, turned around and gasped. I felt the blanket and her warmth pull away from me.
The next night, Dad came back with more stories: Two months ago, Aunty had quietly moved her wedding jewelry to her parents’ house. After discovering this, Grandfather had threatened to throw her and her belongings out unless she brought it back.
“It was part of your dowry,” Grandfather had told her. “It stays where you stay.”
I began to roam the house obsessively while Padma was at school. I had no playmate but Divya, for whom I had little patience, so I listened in on adult conversations, sliding into rooms quietly, pretending to busy myself with pencil and paper.
Once, I heard Dad and Chithappa talking. They were sitting on the wall by the clinic, where Padma and I liked to play chess. Though both of them were tall, their feet did not reach the ground. I found this comical, that two towering men could look like little boys with their feet dangling. I sketched their hanging legs into a notebook.
“Careful about your health,” I heard Dad say. “A doctor really shouldn’t be such a bad patient.”
Chithappa did not put his cigarette out.
Another time, bouncing around the beach ball we gifted to Padma, I went through the entryway that connected Grandfather’s house to Padma’s, delighted by the ball’s response to the hard concrete floors and the high ceilings.
Aunty was at the dining table, cooling hot tea between two stainless-steel tumblers, pouring the long, milky brown strands back and forth. She did this so swiftly that I feared a strand might break and splatter across her pregnant belly and onto the floor. I stopped my ball in action to watch her.
“I will take Padma and leave. This time, I am not joking,” I heard her say.
“It’s nothing,” Chithappa said. “It means nothing.”
Chithappa saw me first. “Come, Taruni,” he said. “Sit. Aunty will make you Horlicks.”
“Why don’t you come back when Padma is here,” Aunty said. “She has tuition today and will be home late.”
Another time, I heard Grandfather talking to Dad, complaining about unpaid loans. They were each holding a section of the newspaper, but not reading it.
“So much drinking,” Grandfather said.
“You drink too,” Dad said. “You always have.”
“I’m an army man. I know how to drink.”
“Is there something else he needs help with? Have you asked?”
Grandfather straightened his back and put the newspaper down, looking at my father.
“If you were here, then you might know. You are not here.”
When Padma came home from school, the matters of adults were no longer my concern. It was time to play. Together, we drank cups of hot milk mixed with sugar and Horlicks. I thought of telling her what I saw and heard, but having already made a mistake with the horse races, I kept quiet. Most afternoons, we ran around outside and collected rocks. We sat cross-legged on the dirt and made designs with them, stacking some of them and making circles with others.
“Maybe the sprites will visit,” she said one day.
It took me a moment.
“Oh, little fairies?” I said.
Then we made stick beds for the toads that came out when it rained.
When we were tired, we went inside and Aunty served us glasses of cold mango juice. Every day, we played chess.
One day, Chithappa took us all to the circus, where we sat in the bleachers and watched midgets juggle, and a family of elephants walk in figure eights. My parents had taken us to a Ringling Brothers show once, but the circus in India seemed more daring. It was less polished and more outrageous.
My father shouted out loud when a clown walked out with three tigers that jumped through hoops.
“Unbelievable,” he said disapprovingly.
Slender trapeze artists did flips across a tightrope, their eyes and skin tone more Asiatic than anyone sitting in the audience.
“Cheap labor from Nepal,” Chithappa said.
“They look malnourished,” Dad said. “And damn unsafe. Does this circus take care of its people.”
“Can’t you have some fun?” Chithappa said.
“Yes,” I said, “it is fun.”
Chithappa pinched my cheek.
“Taruni, do you know Chithappa means Small Appa? Small Father? You want something my brother won’t get you, come to me.”
“Okay,” I said. More clowns marched by. I turned to Padma. “I love the drumrolls.” She took my hand in hers.
During intermission, Chithappa bought each of us a newspaper cone filled with spicy peanuts. When Padma dropped her entire cone and started crying, Chithappa bought her another.
“Watch yours, Taruni,” Dad said to me. “You won’t get another one if it falls.”
The next day, while Padma was in school, I jumped rope in the garden. At lunchtime, Aunty asked me to walk across the street to Chithappa’s dental clinic and tell him to come home for lunch. He usually came back before lunch, hungry and ready to eat. But that day, he did not materialize.
I waited for a rickshaw to pass, and ran across the street to the clinic.
The front door was ajar. I pushed it open and entered the waiting room. The two rows of benches were empty. The receptionist was not there. The door to the examination room was closed. Inside, I heard movement. A shuffling.
“Chithappa?”
There was silence and then another quick shuffle. The scratch of a chair being pulled out or maybe being pushed in. I opened the examination room door.
This is what I remember: They were both standing. Her sari had orange flowers on it. The armpits of her blouse were damp. Her red bottu was smeared. Her long black braid hung to her waist. Chithappa’s blue shirt was buttoned incorrectly and the top three buttons were not fastened at all. This made visible something I had never seen before—a dirt-colored birthmark on his chest, just like the one on his face.
The woman kept her face pointed downwards, but I recognized her. She was the daughter of Grandfather’s friend, a schoolteacher who had once given me a notebook and a box of Nataraj colored pencils.
“Taruni,” Chithappa said, his voice serious but not stern. “You must knock before entering. Why did you come? Go home.”
I ran back to the house, crossing the street without looking both ways. A gang of schoolboys on bicycles almost hit me. They rang their bells furiously.
“Imbecile,” one said.
“Crossing the street like a water buffalo,” yelled another.
When I reached the house, I ran straight to Grandfather, and he gave me two crème biscuits.
“What happened? You look scared.”
I ate the biscuits and fled again, this time to Padma’s room, and hid under her bed sheet until she came home from school. “Stomachache,” I said, when Aunty asked me why I did not want lunch.
“Poor thing. This is what happens to all foreigners when they come to India.”
She patted me, pulled the sheet up to my neck, and left.
That evening, our last one before we went on to visit Mom’s family, Dad suggested we try a new eatery in town that served pizza.
“My treat,” he said.
“Not a good idea,” Mom said. “Taruni has had stomach pain all day.”
“It’s our last day,” my father said. He waved his hand. “Besides, she looks fine to me.”
The restaurant had too many fluorescent lights. The walls were painted a red-checkered pattern more fitting for a tablecloth. And, in spite of the bright lights, the place felt dingy. The floors were sticky and the booths had torn spots with filthy cotton sticking out. Most disappointing, though, was the pizza itself, composed of buns slathered with ketchup and sprinkled with Amul cheese.
“How do you like it, Taruni?” Chithappa asked.
I did not answer him and instead poked at my food with my finger.
“Your uncle asked you a question,” Mom said, clearly irritated by my silence.
“I didn’t like it much either,” Aunty said. “Don’t worry. A little rest and you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
When we returned to the house, Padma brought me the wooden parrot from her metal chest, wrapped in a handkerchief embroidered with my initials.
“I asked Amma to stitch your whole name on it, but she didn’t have time,” Padma said.
“I saw a lady in the clinic with Chithappa yesterday,” I told her. I couldn’t keep it to myself.
“Receptionist Aunty?”
“No,” I said. “Colored Pencil Aunty.”
“She is a patient,” Padma said.
“He wasn’t wearing his doctor’s coat,” I said. “His shirt was unbuttoned.”
Padma was staring at me, and it felt like some sort of face-off. I did not know what to make of what I had seen in the clinic, but it was clear to me that it was something strange, something not quite right, something I had to tell her.
“Just don’t tell anyone else,” she said.
“What about our mothers?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered. “I’m just waiting for Appa to win at the races, so we can all come to America. That’s his plan. Then you and I will be together.”
“My mom says I should tell her everything.”
“Well, Amma says all of you have forgotten how to live in India,” Padma said. “Who brings a white dress here? How will we keep it clean, with all the dust?”
“I have never lived in India,” I said. I could barely utter the words.
For years, my parents were unwilling to buy a plane ticket to go anywhere except India. But the year I turned fourteen, they splurged. We lived, by then, in a simple but comfortable house of our own in a nice suburb of Pittsburgh, with a flat driveway my mother appreciated. Many of our family friends had already done the “California thing,” and my parents decided it was time for us to do it too. I claimed I was too old for Disneyland, but when the time came, I packed my suitcase as eagerly as my little sister.
We went to Disneyland first. Our favorite ride was It’s a Small World After All, and afterwards Divya and I sang the song over and over as we ate warm, sticky funnel cake dusted with powdered sugar. Another day, we visited Santa Monica and Surfrider Beach. Then Hollywood and, at Dad’s insistence, Griffith Observatory, where he was pleased that the clear night sky allowed us to see Jupiter. We drove up the coast towards San Francisco, stopping along the way for fish tacos and horchatas at a seaside joint in Santa Barbara. As I bit into grilled mahi-mahi at the taco place, I thought of Padma.
“Can we visit them?” I asked.
Aunty had not stayed in touch with us after she left Chithappa and moved to California. We knew a few things from our phone calls to Chithappa and Grandfather: Padma was a good student. She played the violin and soccer. Aunty and the kids became United States citizens. My memory of them was from half my short lifetime ago, and I had never even met Padma’s little sister. I could not imagine Padma in the body of a teenager, though I was one myself and knew well the awkwardness of all the changes, the curves and sweat and moods. Was she quiet and studious? Fun and outgoing? Forlorn? Long-haired? Thin eyebrows or bushy ones? I had no idea. We’d seen no pictures.
No matter what, I was sure that Padma missed Chithappa. If I were far away from my father, I would miss him. I thought this, even as Dad shook his head at me.
“No, we can’t visit them. We have not spoken to them for years.”
“She’s my sister,” I said. “That’s what you guys told me.”
“Who’s your sister?” Divya asked, alarmed.
“Padma is your cousin,” Mom said to Divya. “Sometimes we say ‘cousin sister.’” Then she turned to me. “Don’t call us ‘you guys.’ We are your parents.”
“She lives in California?” Divya asked. “This California? The one we are in?”
“Well,” Dad said.
To him, Padma did not live in California. She was as frozen in time to him as she was to me, a little niece who still lived with her father—his flawed but beloved brother—in India, in a home that was not broken. Dad hated Aunty for taking the girls away from Chithappa, for abandoning her husband to rot in his own waste.
“Yes,” I said. “She lives in this California.”
“Then we should find her,” Divya declared.
After a long day that included a ride on a San Francisco trolley car that broke down, a visit to Fisherman’s Wharf, and a stroll through Ghirardelli Square, where Divya cried over spilled hot chocolate, my parents argued in the hotel. We were staying at a Holiday Inn close to the airport, where the rates were lower than they were downtown, and continental breakfast was included.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Dad said.
“For whom? You? Him? These children did nothing wrong.”
“You are not listening to me.”
“This is not for you.”
I overheard the whole thing: Mom kept asking. Dad kept saying no. Each time, though, he sounded less resolute.
We drove to Padma’s place on our last day in California, a Saturday. That morning in the hotel, Dad opened the small memo pad he kept in his shirt pocket, in which he wrote his contacts. He found Aunty’s number. No one picked up, and there was no answering machine.
“Maybe they are traveling,” he said, clearly relieved. “Shall we spend the day in Sausalito instead? The guidebook suggests an ice cream shop by the water.”
Mom saw my downcast face and said, “We’ve done enough sightseeing. Let’s drive there and knock on the door. Take a chance.”
Their place was on Baywood Lane, in Hercules, California. We looked at the large Rand McNally Atlas that Dad had brought with him from Pittsburgh. I measured the distance from our hotel to Hercules with my pinkie nail. It was thirty miles away.
When we reached Hercules, we asked for directions at a gas station. Baywood Lane was a narrow street where the houses were tightly packed. We parked in front of the duplex marked with Padma’s address. Across the street were some wild-looking bushes, and behind them, train tracks.
“Trains,” Mom said. “Must get loud.”
Dad said that he would knock first. But before either of my parents could protest, I got out of the car and followed him.
The girl who opened the door was not immediately recognizable to me, though I knew it must be her. She was wearing jeans and an oversized T-shirt that came down to her knees, and glasses with light red plastic frames. Her hair was pulled into a sloppy high ponytail. She was the same height as me, but a little leaner and her hair was curlier than I remembered. She had a wooden cooking spoon in her hand and I could smell a mixture of ginger, garlic, and onion in the house. It was the same smell that stuck to my clothing after Mom made Indian food.
It was a small place. I could tell just from what was visible over her shoulder. The living room was cramped. There were two identical blue love seats, their covers velvety, and a single fish-patterned armchair. Just beyond the living room, I saw a light oak dining table and four chairs. There was an open textbook on it and a green binder.
“Yes?” Padma said.
“It’s me. Periappa,” Dad said. “And Taruni. You remember Taruni.”
Padma passed the wooden spoon from her right hand to her left. She looked at my father as if she did not know him. But she did. Otherwise, she would have shut that door. I heard small, fast footsteps come through the house and a little girl joined her. Chithappa in miniature, and with pigtails. She even had a small dirt-colored birthmark on her chin.
“My God,” Dad said. I could feel the heft of his breath when he said the words.
“Who are they?” the little girl asked.
“Nobody,” Padma said. “Go inside and I’ll come.”
Padma looked at Dad.
“My mother is at work. I am not supposed to open the door while she’s gone. You should go now.”
“Padma, it’s Taruni. Your sister,” Dad said. “I’m your uncle.”
Dad leaned towards Padma, and she took a step back and held the doorknob, as if she might close it on us any second.
“My mother is not here,” she said. “And I have only one sister.”
She did not shut the door. She just stood there waiting with that wooden spoon in her hand, watching Dad’s discomfort. I could not bear it.
“Let’s go,” I said. I took his hand. “Let’s just go.”
We did not speak on the way to the airport. Somehow, even Divya knew to keep quiet. Mom put her hand out for Dad to hold, and eventually he took his right hand off the wheel and put his hand in hers.
“Sorry,” I pictured Mom saying later that night, when they were alone in their bedroom, back in Pittsburgh. “I should not have made you do it.”
Sorry, I wanted to say.
After we checked in, Dad took us to the Baskin-Robbins at the airport and bought Divya and me ice cream. When Divya dropped her cup on the carpet by the gate, he squatted to the ground, wiped it clean with napkins, and picked her up.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll get you another one.”
I sat next to Mom and watched Dad as he stood in line at Baskin-Robbins again, still carrying Divya. I dipped my pink plastic spoon into my ice cream and brought it to my mouth. I kept eating even though I didn’t want to. It was cold and sweet and creamy, everything ice cream should be, and yet it tasted like nothing at all.
Mom looked at me and pushed back the loose strands of hair falling over my eyes. She did that often when I was younger, annoyed by my refusal to use barrettes. But now there was no sign of irritation on her face.
“Leave it if you don’t like it,” she said. “You don’t have to eat it.”
I saw Chithappa just months before he died, when I made my first solo trip to India, right after college. He had a deep cough and still smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, as evidenced by the ashtrays on his porch, by his bedside, and on the coffee table. Empty bottles of Kingfisher and Johnnie Walker lined the floor in the kitchen. Grandfather had passed away three years earlier, so the other side of the house was dark, empty, and locked up.
I spent an evening with Chithappa. As he closed up the clinic for the night, I asked about Padma. He said that she was fine. They still called him to keep him informed. She would be graduating soon from UCLA, and applying to medical school. I didn’t know what to talk to him about, so I told him about my happy memories of her, in excruciating detail. How we collected and laid sticks in the back garden. How we played chess and jumped rope.
He and I sat on the wall outside the clinic, our feet dangling.
“I always thought I was too good for this town,” he said. “I wanted to go somewhere better.”
He gestured towards the house, just across the street.
“Now I’m the only one here.”
He coughed. His arms and legs still looked strong, but his sagging gut mocked that strength. I was concerned for his health, but had no idea how close to death he was.
“I made some mistakes,” he said. “Boredom was at fault.”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Boredom is a thief. It steals our time and leaves us with nothing.”
He looked straight ahead as he spoke, right at the house. I understood then that what my uncle had wanted was everything my father had gotten. It was cruel, unfair, for fate to give two brothers such different lives. Chithappa had managed a cheap joyride, but my father had the real adventure.
Chithappa looked at me and gave me a small, sad smile.
A lady selling flowers walked towards the gate.
“Mali, mali, kanagapuram,” she said, announcing the varieties she was carrying. Her basket had garlands of white and orange flowers in it, coiled like snakes.
“Buy some for your daughter,” she said.
“I will,” Chithappa said. He opened the front gate. He held his cigarette in his left hand, and with his right, gave her a ten-rupee note. She snapped a strand off the coil of jasmine and handed it to me.
My hair was short then, so I could not pin the flowers in, but I brought them to my nose and inhaled.
“Padma loved these,” I said.
“Did she?” he asked.
I looked at him, at his sorrowful face, and I had an idea. Perhaps it was inspired by Dad, who never told Chithappa about the day we met Padma in California, the day she had humiliated us. “What is the point?” Dad reasoned. It would hurt his brother too much.
“Padma loves buttered bread and hot cups of Horlicks,” I said. “Her hair is short like mine.” I pointed to my earlobe. “She wears gold studs, just like these. What else would you like to know?”
“Does she read?”
“She loves to read,” I said. “She reads outside in the sunshine on Sunday mornings. Twice a week, she goes for long runs, and her favorite subjects are biology and history.”
“She loves ice cream,” Chithappa said, looking at me, his eyes in search, it seemed, of both the past and the future, even if he knew it was my own invention. In him I saw her and my father both. Maybe in me he saw my father and her.
“She loves ice cream,” I repeated.
“Her father misses her,” he said.
“She misses her father.”
For dinner, Chithappa drove me to Star Biryani Hotel, and we ate piles of spicy chicken rice with yogurt. On the way, he played old Hindi love songs in the car. His favorite was from a movie called Aradhana.
“Something about the moon, something about the sun?” I asked. I had taken one semester of Hindi in college. “I can’t make sense of the rest.”
“You are my moon. You are my sun,” he said. He looked at me. “It is not a song between lovers. It’s a mother singing to a child.”
When we returned to his house, we didn’t go inside. Instead, we sat on the wall by the clinic until it grew dark and the last of the schoolboys playing outside went in for the night.
Chithappa hummed a Carnatic song. I hummed it along with him. I knew it well. Dad hummed the same song when he read the newspaper in the mornings. He and Chithappa had studied Carnatic music as boys, from a famous singer who gave lessons in exchange for glasses of whisky with Grandfather.
After Chithappa and I finished humming the song, I turned towards him. I was about to speak, but I saw that his eyes were closed, so I kept my thought to myself. Padma knows this song. She lies in bed with her feet crossed at the ankles, and hums it too.