“Son … listen, son! There are some nice necklaces in the suitcase. Tell her to choose one from me.”
A few days later, before Jean had returned, Regina and George came to dinner. That weekend Regina was throwing one of her big bashes in honor of Colleen, who had settled in the States and was visiting Santa Clara.
Regina had come with a list. She needed to borrow various platters. “And tumblers for wine. Just reach up there, Toby.” She flapped around the kitchen like a large bright bird while Toby packed plates and glasses in paper. Neelam seemed even smaller than usual. She stood in a corner, watchful, unmoving, waiting for the bird to find its way out the window again.
“Will Jean be back in time for the party?”
“I don’t think so. I rang up Ruby and I think she comes a few days after. Anyway, I said we’ll do something with Jean later. A smaller group, maybe.”
Toby did not know how to hide his disappointment, or even why it was so acute. Regina was right; it was likely he would see Jean. But not in the way he had begun to imagine, with all the old gang around them and everyone their old selves again, a reprieve from all that had happened to leave them as they were now. He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, despite what he knew Michael would say about smoking in the kitchen.
“It will be good to see Colleen.” He spoke with more energy than he felt. “It’s too long since she’s come.”
“So strange she never married.”
“I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.”
“The two of you. Hopeless.” Regina poked her brother’s shoulder. “You’d be married in a snap if you bothered to ask anyone.”
“I’ve asked before.”
Regina’s face softened, but she spoke briskly. “All that is in the past. Children have been born and raised and turned out of the house since the last time you asked anyone.”
Toby made a point of exhaling near the open window. He could see the smoke curling away against the dark sky.
“Actually, there’s a girl coming to the party. Nice girl, very sweet. Neil’s cousin, I think. She’s been living in the Gulf, but she’s just been posted here.”
“Enough. Go and pester Michael.”
“He’s got a wife.” But she went, leaving Toby with Neelam. From the other room, where Michael’s photo project was still spread over the table, Toby heard his sister’s voice: “Oh, hell! What’s all this?”
Once she had gone the kitchen was still. Toby tapped his cigarette against the window railing. Eventually Neelam emerged from her corner to resume preparations for dinner.
“I’ll move all this later,” Toby told her, motioning to the boxes. “Are they in your way?”
She tipped her head from side to side, neither yes nor no.
“Toby, come and see!” He could hear Regina laughing, could hear Michael’s proud voice urging her to look at this or that. “There’s a funny one here of you and Colleen!” He waited one minute more, thinking of Jean, thinking of nights when he and Colleen used to share cigarettes, thinking it was good, very good, that his friend had come home, even for a short time.
They were engaged six months when Jean spoke of postponing the marriage. “You do understand, don’t you?” She caught Toby’s hand between both of hers and held it tightly.
She had won a fellowship for her first year of graduate work. After that, the doctoral program was fully funded.
He had known, of course, that she had applied to study in the States. But it had all seemed so remote: the chance of a scholarship that would transport her to a world he had seen only in glossy brochures. Tall stone buildings and brightly colored leaves. He had not found it possible to think of Jean in those pictures.
“You do understand?”
They were outdoors, sitting on a bench near the sea. It was evening and the tide was so far out that he could not see the waterline. Birds stalked across flat dark rocks, and near the seawall village children chased one another in small ragged circles. He could smell their mothers’ fires and the heavy stench of dried fish. He could not imagine what Jean would see or smell or hear, so far from home.
“Toby?”
He could hear how badly she wanted both to go and to reassure him. Still he would not look at her. A dim pink sun faded into the haze that hung above the horizon. One of the slum children wore a rough green woolen hat that tied around his chin, a long shirt that flapped around his knees, and no pants or shoes. He ran and ran as if he would never tire.
“I thought we’d be married next year. It’s a long time to wait.”
“It seems that way now, I know. But it won’t be forever.”
He thought of his life in the printing offices. He realized how small it seemed, a son sliding into his father’s business, and that Jean had never said so. Nor would she say now that she must go. She would only pick up his hand and hold it tightly. He wondered whether her mother would protest, how her father would greet this news. But it did not occur to Toby to refuse her.
After so many years, the idea that Jean would soon be in Santa Clara affected Toby more than he liked to admit. At work he was able to absorb himself, but at home he soon remembered both the electricity and the humiliation of waiting. Michael’s invitations to come along and have a jog — usually a point of irritation — now brought welcome distraction, and the brothers spent every evening at Sunset Park, pounding side by side around the red dirt track, not talking but breathing hard in a kind of unison.
The photos waited for them at home, a patchwork record of years that Toby didn’t care to contemplate. The day before the party, Michael spent all afternoon tapping nails into the walls and by evening, the apartment was suddenly populated by faded brown versions of them all: their youngest sister, Louise, hauled up on Regina’s hip; Michael and his cousin Stephen swaggering with cricket bats; Toby as a small boy, barefoot on a beach he could not remember.
“Is it Juhu?” Michael peered closely, as though an examination of the grainy sand and sea would reveal some distinguishing mark.
“It may be,” his father said. “You’ve worked very hard, Michael.”
“Nothing, Dad, nothing at all! Happy to do it.” But Toby could see his brother was pleased. They moved on to a packed shot of cousins, all crowded shoulder to shoulder. Toby noticed his mother appeared only in her wedding photo, their father standing carefully beside her. Hanging nearby were wedding pictures of Michael with Sabine and Regina with George.
“What’s happened to all the pictures of Mum?”
Michael shrugged. He never spoke much about their mother; it was clear he could not see the point of dwelling on such things. “I’ve put some back in boxes.”
Toby had lost his appetite for pictures and with a pang remembered Neelam. She was waiting in the kitchen, hunched on a low stool and chewing the tail of her sari. She looked up when Toby entered and pulled the tip of fabric from her mouth. It lay on her shoulder, wet and wrinkled, distracting him.
“You can bring the food,” he told her. She pushed herself up from the stool with difficulty and walked as though ready to drop.
“We shouldn’t have been so late tonight. Tomorrow you must sleep. Don’t get up to make Dad’s tea.”
He had hoped for evidence of relief or gratitude, but Neelam offered neither. The skin around her eyes was slack and swollen, the eyes small and numb inside their pockets of flesh. Toby turned away from her with the uncomfortable feeling that he could not make himself understood in his own home, and called the others to the table.
Twenty months after she left for America, Jean phoned to tell Toby of her engagement. “His name is Ranjit,” she said.
It was shortly after dawn. Toby had stumbled out of bed to answer the phone; he had not had his cup of tea yet. He stood at the table where the phone was kept, rubbing his forehead.
It had happened so quickly, she told him. She hadn’t expected it.
“What time is it?” he asked suddenly. “There, where you are. What time is it?”
For the first time she hesitated. “It’s early evening. Eight o’clock, thereabouts. I wanted to call when I was sure you’d be there. I don’t know when you leave for work.”
“There’s static on the line,” he told her. “It’s not a very good connection.” Perhaps she would hang up and call back. They would start again.
“I can hear you. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“So I’m—we’ll be married in the spring.”
“You’re marrying him?” He began to grasp what he was being told. “How can you — I don’t —”
“It’s only just happened. I mean, he’s only just asked …”
A ring, she mentioned. A picnic. A rainstorm. A mother, his mother. Toby could not remember the name.
“What was his name? Tell me the name again,” he said stupidly.
Ranjit. Ranjit’s mother. Ranjit’s mother who was sick and could not travel. So they would marry there, Jean said, and they’d visit Bombay soon after. He was Hindu, but they’d hold a prayer service in St. Anthony’s.
She would be staying in America, he suddenly understood.
“You were coming back. You were going to get your degree and come back.”
“I know, but …” She had been homesick, she had made friends with a boy in her program whose family had moved to the States from Delhi. Ranjit’s mother had cooked for her. It had all tumbled ahead so quickly.
He shook his head. A hand in his hair. He shook his head again. “But what about us?”
“I didn’t expect this.” She rushed on, nervous. “But I’ll be here so long, we couldn’t really think that would last, right? I mean, I’ve changed. And you too, you’ve changed.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Of course you have—”
“I haven’t. I haven’t. I love you.”
She paused, and for one desperate moment he thought that now something would be done about the whole sorry mess. Something would be put right.
“No, no, you don’t. You really don’t. You’re just fond of me.”
He had not known how to protest or what the point of such argument would be. She had sent his mother’s ring home through a friend, Ranjit’s friend. He could pick it up from her parents. “I see,” he said and felt breathless, as if he had turned hollow and there was not air enough in the room to fill what had deflated. “But —” A moment later, because it no longer mattered what he said, he told her he had to go.
It sometimes seemed to Toby that his life turned out the way it had from a failure of imagination. He had lacked sufficient vision; he had not dreamt clearly enough for even those things he desired most to materialize. He sensed that other people, his friends, had envisioned their futures with a definition that bordered on will. They had seen themselves with husbands or wives, had seen houses, plum jobs, children. Nothing had turned out exactly as they imagined, of course. And many had gone. To England or Canada or the States, to the Gulf or Australia. Whole families slipped away to other parts of the globe, wives following husbands, brothers following sisters, elderly parents persuaded to live in suburbs with grandchildren, shopping malls, washing machines.
But whatever eventually happened to them, Toby knew his friends had begun with the idea that a particular life was waiting for each of them. They sat in somebody’s garden, young and fearless and certain, talking politics and a bright new India, falling in love with one another and dreaming futures they could name. They seized them the way they grasped the necks of bottles, and they tipped their heads and drank. For a time, Toby waited to catch up, and then slowly came the idea that he never would. Something sharp in them was, in his own nature, blunt. He could feel it even as a young man, even when Jean was by his side, sitting among them in a garden lit with lanterns and listening as one quick voice replaced another.
“What do you think, Toby?” (It might have been anything—women’s rights, the cut of a new suit.)
“I think I’d better have another.” Appreciative laughter. He hadn’t a strong singing voice or charm or looks, but he was easygoing and loyal — a sweet fellow, Colleen called him — a general favorite. He held his own.
Toby always stayed to the end of such gatherings, nights that felt so much like this one, twenty-odd years later. Regina was badgering someone to join the tutoring program she ran at St. Anthony’s for children in nearby slums. A couple of others were telling filthy jokes. Some of the women were clearing the food away, with George presiding over the sink, a dish towel that someone had tucked in the back of his pants hanging down like a tail. Five or six people were talking politics. Michael had left a few minutes before, hinting that it was late and Toby should do the same. But Toby wandered back toward Colleen, who was stretched out in a lounge chair looking rumpled and girlish, her shoes kicked off and her hair pulled back with a wide band, the kind she used to wear when they were young. She drew in her legs so he could sit at the foot of her chair.
“You’re the life of the party, Tobes.”
“Yes,” he said firmly, raising his glass high and making her laugh. It occurred to him that the home he’d tried to envision all those years ago, the children he’d idly imagined, were phantoms. He could scatter them with another swallow. It was his memories that felt real, and this garden, his friends, the glass in his hand, the cigarette smoke. He drew it in slowly, filling his lungs, and offered the cigarette to Colleen, who took it. The sharpness in his chest might have been longing but not for anything that needed chasing after. He wanted another round of songs; he wanted Colleen to sit back down again.
“I’m just helping clear. You stay put, lazybones.” She looked up and saw Neil’s cousin, whose name Toby couldn’t remember. “Here, come and sit. This fellow’s perfectly happy on the floor.” Toby grinned.
“Why not?” He patted the chair in extravagant welcome until the other girl had joined him.
Or not quite a girl anymore. She laughed and joked like a girl, she tapped his shoulder and flirted rather sweetly, she let her hand rest on his arm while she told the story of taking her little nephew on his first flight; she worked for an airline. But her hair was beginning to gray and the skin of her hands strained at the tendons. Her lipstick had faded so that her mouth seemed cracked with fine, dark lines. Even when she smiled, even in the dark, she did not quite seem youthful. None of them were young anymore. Their houses were real, their children off at parties, as old as he had been when he first thought of Jean. Toby rocked his chair back on two legs and the garden tilted. Black, with streaks of green where the torches spilled light against foliage. He watched swirls of cigarette smoke, lacy, slow-turning. Beneath it he smelled the lush scents of flowers. All the voices and laughter slid together and he smiled. “What’s so funny, Toby?” The girl put an arm around his shoulder. “Toby’s keeping secrets over here!”
“No, no,” he protested thickly.
“Better give it u
p, man. She’ll get it out of you before long.”
“I have no secrets,” he said. He thought a bit longer. “Well, maybe just one.”
The girl at his side who was no longer a girl took his glass away. “That’s it for you,” she said gaily. Someone started singing and he joined in, words and notes so familiar that he did not need to think, and when they had gone through all their favorite songs, George and Regina and the girl, whose name was Violet, pulled him to his feet — “Come on now, up you go”—and made sure he reached home.
Toby was shaken from sleep early the next morning. “Son. Son, get up. Get up. Something’s happened.”
The light was still pale and watery outside his window. His mouth tasted of ash, his head felt like something he would have to pick up with his hands. “In a minute,” he told his father.
“Now, son. Come on.”
When he was finally roused, he followed his father to the storeroom. A pipe leading to the hot-water tank had sprung a leak. A large patch of plaster near the ceiling was soaked and water had gushed from a hole in the wall onto the highest shelf. Old cardboard boxes were sodden and dripping. Already a puddle covered much of the floor.
“What the hell!” Michael had awakened and stood in the doorway. “What is this?”
“It must be the pipes. Or the water heater may need replacing. Anyway, we must call that fellow, what’s his name?”
Michael touched the toe of his slipper to the water. “First we should get Neelam. We need some towels. Thank God I took out the good photos, no? They’d be gone otherwise.”
Toby stared at the wrecked cartons, thinking of the photos Michael had not wanted.
“Go and call, son. See if he can come.”
Toby’s head felt as if cement was hardening behind his eyes. “Right.”
But Michael frowned. “Who’s this guy you’re calling?”