He didn’t know how long he had slept but he woke up to the sound of voices. It was dark outside. He listened. He could hear Kavita, and then Rangi’s more muted tones. He thought he heard Rangi say, ‘I did what I could, Kavita, under the circumstances. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.’
‘How about consulting me for once?’ she said, louder. There were angry ceramic sounds as she slammed plates together and put them away. ‘How long have you known about this?’
He got out of bed, went up to the partially open door and stood just inside it.
‘Well, Peters & Weinstein were interested in the firm, that’s been happening for a few months. I must have mentioned it.’
‘And now the buyers want to get rid of you, after all these years? Just my karma. Why couldn’t you have been a doctor or something? We’d have never had to face such a thing!’
‘Your karma?’ Rangi said. ‘Why couldn’t you have been a doctor, if what you wanted was a job you couldn’t lose!’
‘Don’t you talk to me like that, I’m a patient. Plus, it’s not me out of a job, is it? It’s you!’
CLN walked into the dining room. He noticed Sunny’s door being shut silently from inside. The poor child, how often did he have to do that?
‘Appa,’ Kavita said, breaking down as soon as she saw him, ‘Rangi’s been fired!’
He looked from one to the other, not quite sure if he had understood right.
‘I’ve not been “fired”, as you put it,’ Rangi said. ‘I’ve accepted a severance package. It’s not the end of the world. I could probably use a sabbatical!’
‘You’re forty years old!’ she said. ‘This is no time for a sabbatical. You expect me to be the sole bread-winner in this family? That, too, when I’m a patient. Just when the doctor has asked me to take things easy.’
‘How are you a patient?’ Rangi said. He gripped the top of the chair in front of him so hard that his knuckles grew bloodless white.
‘You’re not a patient, my dear,’ CLN said. ‘There’s nothing the matter with you.’
‘Yeah, both of you gang up on me, why don’t you. I am a patient, I have chronic fatigue syndrome – not that you care!’ she said, crying some more.
‘Chronic self-love syndrome is more like it,’ Rangi muttered.
‘I heard that,’ she shouted, energized by self-pity.
‘Calm down, dear. It doesn’t help to get so excited. Think about Rangi for a minute,’ CLN said.
‘Appa, don’t side with him,’ she said. ‘He should have consulted me. It’s only right.’
‘But what if he didn’t have a choice, Kavita?’
His daughter stared at him.
‘I’m sure he’ll find something else soon, he has so much experience. He’ll get a job anywhere, you could even consider coming back home. Plenty of people are doing that nowadays.’
‘I didn’t have a choice, that’s what she isn’t able to get into that thick skull of hers! See, even your dad gets it.’ His son-in-law spat out the words with a ferocity only a spouse could conjure up.
‘Appa, you don’t know about America, you keep quiet. See how he’s talking to me!’
‘I’m not talking to you till you stop being hysterical,’ Rangi said, walking off.
CLN went into his grandson’s room. The boy was sitting so close to the edge of his bed that he was almost on the floor. He did not look up from the game he was playing on a cell phone.
‘Sunny,’ he said. He sat on the bed and put an arm around the boy.
‘What?’ he said, not looking up.
‘Don’t be upset, dear. There’s nothing to worry about. People lose jobs, you know. Then they get new ones. Sometimes even better ones.’
The boy looked up at him, then away. CLN smoothed the hair on his head. ‘You know, after I had taught at a school for a couple of years, I was asked to give extra marks to make someone’s son pass. I refused so they asked me to leave.’
Sunny looked up at him. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I waited for a few months,’ he said, continuing to stroke his grandson’s head. ‘There was an opening at another school, a really good one, which someone told me about. I got the job. You know, I worked there for forty years! Can you believe it? The best thing that happened to me was being fired. Truly.’
‘So Dad will get another job? I won’t have to quit school?’
‘Of course he will. And of course not! Whatever makes you think you’ll have to quit school? You can probably quit the music lessons if you like, though. You know, save your dad some money?’ He winked at Sunny, hoping this welcome thought would make the boy relax a little.
His grandson looked up at him.
‘Don’t worry,’ CLN said. ‘It’s natural for your parents to be a little upset. But you’ll see, everything will turn out fine. Trust your old Thaatha. You understand what I’m saying? Will I see you at dinnertime?’
The boy nodded.
As CLN walked out of the door, Sunny said, ‘Thanks, Thaatha.’
‘Oh, by the way, Sunny,’ he said, coming back into the room, ‘I’m thinking of going back home a little earlier than planned. I have a textbook project to attend to. I just wanted you to be the first to know.’
The boy paused, then nodded once or twice, went back to his game. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said without looking up.
‘Well, I’m going to learn how to send you email, then we can be in touch all the time!’ CLN said.
‘Okay, Thaatha.’
CLN went back to the dining room. Kavita was still at the table.
‘Appa, in this situation,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I can pay for your entire ticket here, I hope you understand.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘After all, Gopi is also your child, right? He can pay half the ticket, can’t he? I mean, you came here for a holiday. I don’t think we can afford the entire ticket now plus the medical insurance.’
He stayed calm. ‘Don’t worry about the ticket. It’s been paid for already, I’ll take care of it.’ He remembered his nephew and travel agent Vishwam’s sarcastic enquiry: ‘Why, Kavita doesn’t have a credit card, is it? Adhode katlamillay!’
‘No, I’ll pay for half, as I said. I’ll transfer the money to Gopi,’ she said.
‘I was thinking. Maybe it’s better for me to cut short my visit. I don’t want to add to your expenses,’ he said.
She was silent.
Rangi came back. ‘What expense are you, Uncle? I think you should finish your holiday. Now I’ll have plenty of time to take you around everywhere!’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said. ‘Take everything as a joke, why don’t you!’
‘What do you want him to do, Kavita? Weep? Don’t you think this is far harder on Rangi than it is on you?’ he said.
‘How is it harder on him? It’s I who will have to bear the burden of things! God knows how many months it will be before he finds something else!’
‘Enough,’ Rangi said. ‘I want you to shut up now. If nothing works, we can always go back home, like your father said. That’s an option, too.’
Kavita said nothing.
‘This is probably not the best time to tell you,’ CLN said after a few minutes. ‘But my friend at the library, Anne, offered to take me to Chicago tomorrow morning to have a look around. I’ve said yes.’
‘Who are all these women you know suddenly, Appa – Tara, Anne, god knows who else?’ Kavita burst out.
‘I’m not sure I care for your tone, Kavita,’ he said.
She shut up, like a reprimanded student.
Rangi said, ‘You leave your father alone. Have fun, Uncle. Do you have some cash on you for lunch and stuff? If you decide to stay back, I’m free too!’
As arranged, Anne picked him up from the house at about ten o’clock. It was a sunny morning but she had warned him to dress warm and bring a jacket along. Chicago had a well-known reputation for being windy. Or was that about gasbag politicians?
As they drove through Riverside to get to the highway, he saw that people had put up flags outside their houses, happy to be rid of a long, grey, snowy winter in favour of fresh spring colours – new leaves, blooming trees, blue skies. The flags had cheerful themes – flowers, humming birds, ladybirds, butterflies. Some had slogans: ‘Bee Happy’, ‘Welcome, Spring’. When they got to the highway, 290-E, the signposts said, the small-town atmosphere gave way to a more bleak industrial landscape, with a broad straight road with several lanes, fast-moving traffic and ‘Exits’ marked everywhere. It seemed there were no towns or cities on the highway, one had to take the correct exit to get to them. What happened if one missed the exit? Miles of driving to get back on track, Anne said. It all seemed very convoluted.
It would take them about an hour or longer to get there, she said, there was a lot of construction activity going on. They stopped at tollbooths, passed exits to places like Naperville, Downers Grove, Oak Park. At one place, he noticed the highway was named for Dwight D. Eisenhower. I like Ike. And what was the other one? ‘Oh, yes, “I like Adlai madly”!’
‘What?’ said Anne, amused. ‘Did you really say “I like Adlai madly”?’
He laughed, realizing he had spoken aloud. ‘Yes, I was remembering the campaigns from the fifties. Wasn’t Adlai Stevenson from around here?’
‘Yes, very good, Democrat, from Chicago,’ she said. ‘He was governor of Illinois at one point, I think. Lost both times to Ike.’
The traffic and the urban maze got denser as they drove east, closer and closer to Chicago, the looming skyline acting as navigator. On the other side was Lake Michigan, he knew from the map he had looked at in Sunny’s room.
Anne looked at the time. ‘So let’s do lunch, then we could go up Sears Tower, you get great views. If there’s time, maybe a museum. Or we could just drive along the lake shore.’
He was happy to be out and with someone friendly. He would pay for lunch and half the fuel, if she let him; Rangi had given him pocket money.
The city was vertical, held together by the elevated train system (the El, she called it) that looped around it. They could only move slowly through it, its bowels clogged with traffic.
At lunch, he told her he was going back, keeping details to a minimum. She looked at him, seemed about to say something, then was quiet. He felt a shift in the mood. When they walked on Jackson Boulevard after parking the car, the air felt cold and dry. He pulled his jacket closer around him, put his hands into the pockets. Up ahead were the nine square tube-like structures that made up the Tower. Apparently, a man in a Spiderman suit had once climbed them using suction cups. ‘When he got to the top, he was arrested for trespassing, they couldn’t figure out what to charge him with!’ she said, shaking her head.
He felt somewhat winded when they emerged after a minute in the elevator onto the deck 103 floors up in the sky. He wondered whether it was just his head but the tower seemed to sway a little in the sudden strong winds gusting against it. Anne held his arm, steadying him. ‘What do you expect, you’re on top of the world!’ she said, laughing, leading him to the windows.
When he looked out, he could see the great living map of the city below them, and beyond the vast shimmering lake, and across the endless plains of Illinois. ‘Four states,’ she said, forgetting that she was still holding his arm. ‘Illinois, of which this is the highest point, and across the lake, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. Isn’t it magnificent!’
Without thinking, he covered her hand on his arm with his hand and pressed it. They stayed like that, looking out in silence. There he was, really on top of the world, with nothing – no one – to hold him back. He felt his heart was going to unmoor with lightness and freedom.