“Satip. The pipe man.”
“Is he the one who put these pipes in? What’s the point of calling him? We can swab this up with some towels. Or Nee-lam can do it.”
Toby rubbed his face. “This is too much for Neelam, Michael.”
“What’s too much? Wiping the floor with towels? Never mind, you and I can manage.”
“Of course we can manage, but we still need someone to check the pipes. We can’t even turn on the water until we know what’s happened.”
“So his pipes cause a flood and you turn around and give him business?”
Toby stared at his brother. Michael’s face was grizzled, his hair flattened from sleep. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Son—”
“No, Dad. I can’t call a plumber when there’s a flood?” He shook his head. “What do you do in your house, Michael?”
“I don’t let the place go to pieces. I don’t stay out all hours with my friends like a bloody teenager.”
“I’m forty-six years old. You think you have the right to come into my house and tell me what to do?”
“This is not your house. This is Dad’s house!”
“That’s enough,” their father said firmly. “Michael, that’s enough. Toby, go and call Satip. Go.”
Toby turned in disgust and went.
He had not known what to say to his father when Jean announced her engagement. He had known for two days before he ventured to break the news. Even then he could not bring himself to mention Ranjit’s name.
“Jean has decided to stay in the States.”
They were at the dinner table.
His father paused. “Is it definite?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” he said finally. They ate for a time in silence. Toby imagined the way Jean’s voice would have carried them through such meals, how happy his father would have been with grandchildren at the table.
“What?”
“Maybe a friend. Sometimes in these matters, it’s better to think of a friend. Someone who will be a good companion. It’s so many years …” He spoke slowly but evenly. “The other way can be difficult.”
Toby did not know what to say.
“Not right away, of course. But maybe someday.”
Toby shrugged.
“I’m sorry, son,” his father said, as though he had been the one to fail them.
Some weeks later, Toby went to Colleen with his mother’s ring. She fingered it while he talked.
Then she looked up at him, eyes wide and frightened beneath thick dark brows. “What are you saying?”
“We could have a good life,” he told her. “I think we could be happy—”
“No.”
They both were quiet. She continued to turn the ring over in the palm of her hand as though it were a pebble, and he felt lodge in him a final disappointment. He thought she must feel the same way, because eventually, when she relinquished the ring, she told him she did not think she would ever marry.
Michael seemed to abandon any plan of swabbing and disappeared to Regina’s. Toby did not want to disturb Neelam, so he did what he could with rags and began to carry wet boxes to the garden. The sunlight was so bright that it seemed to buzz. The water had made pulp of his mother’s books and letters, and Toby’s arms ached with the strain. At first when he thought of Michael he wanted to thrash him, and then after a time he wanted simply to drop out of their arguments, to sit outside the circle of what they could not understand or explain. He found a photograph of his mother holding Regina and hung it on the line to dry.
He had brought down five loads when he heard a commotion at the construction site. Women were arguing. A few men’s voices joined the clamor, but Toby did not bother to look until someone began to wail. From his gate he could see a familiar figure in a bright pink sari, standing with a pack of angry workers around her. She swayed on her feet, and her wail turned into a stream of abuse.
“Neelam!”
She paid no attention; he did not think she had heard him. She had not stopped talking. Her son would come soon and then they would see, she was not alone in the world, her Oorjit would protect her, they would all be sorry, yes, every one of them. She spat on the ground and nearly fell.
Toby crossed the street to the construction site. Neelam’s sari and one side of her head were chalky with cement dust where she had lain. She had not troubled to brush herself off.
“You know this woman? Get her away from here,” a heavyset woman told him. A child advanced a few steps and she pulled him back against her waist. “You can see what state she’s in.”
A thin man in a lungi had picked up a handful of gravel. “Go on. Go!”
“My son will kill you!” Neelam screeched.
But Neelam had not screamed again, as Toby had feared.
“Neelam, it’s time to go.”
Her eyes were murky and bloodshot, narrowed in anger like a wild boar’s, and then she seemed to see Toby for the first time. “Oorjit,” she said to him. “My son is coming.” She stumbled, as if rage alone had been holding her up, and he took her by the arm and led her home.
Two nights later Jean came to see them. She had aged since he’d seen her. Her hair was cut short and she did not color it. She had put on weight. But her face was unlined, her skin soft when he kissed her. She wore a long skirt and leather sandals.
Her sons were staying with Ranjit’s family, she told him. They couldn’t miss school. But she had wanted to come back for a few weeks.
“It’s good to come home,” Toby’s father said firmly. He sat next to Toby on the sofa. The pipes were being replaced, so they had both gone to Regina’s to bathe and had returned with damp hair, clean clothes. Toby worried that they seemed like a matched set, with only a short span of years separating them—that Jean might too easily see what Toby would become.
“Yes, Uncle, you’re right.” She smiled and Toby was struck by a new gentleness in her, both sad and tired.
“I’m sorry about Ranjit,” Toby said, and she thanked him.
“These things are difficult.” Toby’s father cleared his throat. “Terrible. But then you go forward. And you have your sons, that is the important thing. All these difficulties —” he flicked a hand through the air, his wrist thin and fragile — “they come and come. But children are the reward.” He did not look at Toby; he spoke as though Toby weren’t in the room.
“Thank you, Uncle,” Jean said. Toby saw her eyes fill with tears, though she tried to smile. “Actually, my parents are trying to convince me to come back to stay. But there’s the house, the boys are in school … Dev wants to be a doctor. He wants to go to Cornell.”
They spoke of her family, of the party she had missed. A few minutes later his father got up to kiss Jean. “Good night,” he said tenderly, reminding Toby of what his father had lost when Jean didn’t come back.
Jean stood, looking after him, and then she turned to Toby. “Your father looks good. Tired, maybe.”
“It’s been a crazy week.” Toby told the story of the flood. He told it the way Regina might tell it at a party months later, as though it had all been funny, the brothers and the pool of water, the sleeping servant, Satip and the promised new pump. He did not mention Neelam. He did not mention the packet of letters his father slipped from the waterlogged boxes of his mother’s belongings, though they must have been illegible. He did not mention Michael, who had come from Regina’s
at sunset to suggest a jog.
“I’ve taken up running,” Toby told her.
“Good for you.”
When she had finished her drink, Toby walked Jean to the gate.
“Oh, God, all this construction! It doesn’t seem real.” She looked across to the site where her family’s house had stood eight months before. The workers had retreated into makeshift shelters around the property, and Toby thought of Neelam, asleep in her room. Michael had objected to keeping her on, but Toby had insisted. Where else could she go? And anyway, he was fond of her. She would stay until the priests at St. Anthony’s had found a clinic to accept her.
“I still can’t believe the house is gone.” Jean stared at the flat building. “I know Dad had to do it, but don’t you hate this? Don’t you hate looking at it?”
Toby didn’t mind terribly, but he knew it wasn’t the moment to say so. For the first time he realized he had not thought to follow Jean. She had gone and he had stayed; he had chosen India. It had never before occurred to him to think in such terms. He had barely noticed the choices he had made or that they were choices at all; one thing seemed to lead to the next and he had fallen into a life that had not seemed to require much vision. But perhaps he had seen what he needed.
“I miss the garden,” Jean said. “I miss all the gardens. And all the trees … Do you remember the day Stephen told us there was a cobra in the brush pile? You went dead pale. Mummy thought you would faint.”
That was something Toby didn’t remember. “Are you sure that was me?”
But he let Jean tell him the story and then he kissed her good-bye and promised to see her again, once more at least, before she had to go.
We Think of You Every Day
At first letters from Simon came two or three times a week. The morning postman, who was stout, preferred not to climb the steps to put his deliveries directly into the hands of the waiting Almeidas. Instead he called up from the gate each day until someone from the house came down to meet him. Though Essie had complained about such laziness (and at Christmas made a point of giving a more generous tip to the afternoon postman), going down to collect the mail had become a fixture in her daily routine. She stopped whatever she was doing — folding the washing or scrubbing the carrots — and wiped her hands on her skirt, and shook her head at Lila, the kitchen girl, who had long since stopped offering to fetch the mail herself. If the baby was awake, he went bouncing down on his mother’s hip to meet the postman too, and when Essie came up again with a heavier step, the baby’s arms around her neck and a thatch of mail in one hand, she could be heard grumbling about fat men who could do with a bit of stair climbing instead of expecting heaven and earth to come to them. Lila suspected that Essie guarded this task so jealously—and towed Jude along—because she was determined that the postman should see firsthand the inconvenience he caused. Essie even put off her marketing until he had come.
When she had brought the mail upstairs, the baby, who was three, was released to run in circles around the chairs and table, and before anything else—before resuming her work with the laundry or vegetables, before setting out to market at last — Essie sifted through her letters. Lila had learned never to interrupt her. Letters for her husband, Francis, were kept aside, unless they were business matters that Essie intended to discuss with him, or from mutual acquaintances who surely intended Essie to have their news as well, or represented any kind of mystery, which she could not resist. Bills, invitations, notes from cousins, aunts, her brother in Coimbatore — she flicked through them without stopping, pausing only when she found something from her elder son, Simon. Usually this was addressed to Essie and Francis, and she took it at once into her own custody. Occasionally Simon sent notes to his older sister, Marian, who was twelve, but Essie did not believe in secrets between mother and daughter and kept these as well.
She did not have time to open these letters right away. In another hour the tiffin-wallah would arrive to pick up Francis’s meal; two hours later, at midday, Marian would come home from school to eat. Essie folded her son’s letters carefully into the crocheted bag with drawstring handles where she kept her prayer cards and rosary. She tucked the bag beneath her pillow or in a corner of her cupboard, someplace where a small treasure might be stowed, until a lull in the afternoon when she had leisure to read and answer it.
Only when the mail had been sorted did her day resume: wet bedsheets, heavy as canvas, flung over the lines to dry; her stained blade against the carrot; the baby’s sticky fingers leaving marks on the chair; and the trip to the market, where the best fish would have already gone.
That was during Simon’s first term at St. Stanislaus School for Boys in Mysore, where he began to board when he was eleven. The school was an offshoot of St. Stanislaus Seminary, intended to educate boys who would go on to the priesthood, and it was a point of family pride that Simon had been selected. “Actually, he’s won a scholarship,” Essie did not mind telling the mothers of less-fortunate sons. Her husband’s sister, who lived across the street, had a son nearly Simon’s age who seemed chiefly interested in bugs. Little Michael Fernandez, born only a week before Simon, with nice fat legs that Essie had envied all the long, worrying months when Simon seemed unable to put on weight, had grown into a sluggish boy. She could put all that behind her now; she could walk to church imagining the way her pride would multiply, like the fish and the loaves, on the day when Simon took Holy Orders. She could shake her head with a modest smile when other mothers congratulated her. “God has been very good to us.”
In fact, Simon’s marks were well above average but not outstanding. His admission was largely Essie’s achievement, the result of a long and vigorous campaign. Within Santa Clara, seven parishes flourished in a grid of streets named for saints and martyrs, and Essie had thrown herself into the workings of St. Jerome. She taught Communion classes, served on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Council, and also on committees for church improvement and charitable outreach. She had cajoled her husband to pull whatever strings he could to secure support for Simon from his university contacts, and she had begged recommendations from the priests. One day she took Simon to town, his hair combed back sharply, his face scrubbed clean of any expression but acquiescence, to meet Bishop Percival Fonseca, who agreed to write a letter on the boy’s behalf. She herself had kept up a tireless correspondence with the priests of St. Stanislaus, some of whom she had befriended when family matters took her to Mysore. For three years she had shaved what she could from the household budget to spend on Simon’s tutoring, after-school sessions in Latin and religious history to prepare him for the rigors of the pre-seminary program. The news of his acceptance had rung through her with the power of a great cathedral bell toll, solemn and magnificent. She sat, trembling, felled by it. Simon would be a priest, respected, secure. His future was assured.
In the afternoons, when Marian had gone back to school and the baby slept, when the kitchen might be quiet for an hour, Essie read his latest letter. When she was finished, instead of closing her eyes herself, she sat in the front room to answer him. For as long as she could spare, she wrote, her shoulders rounded, her head bent, her pen moving ravenously across the page. Six, eight, ten sheets might be swallowed up at a sitting. She stopped only when she was interrupted by the arrival of the afternoon post. This postman knew to come right up the stairs to the landing. Sometimes she kept him waiting while a last urgent sentence spun from her pen, trailing up the margin if she had run out of space. “Much love,” she murmured, “Mummy.” One minute, one minute only, she assured the postman while she hurriedly addressed the envelope. She snatched a stamp from the little table where she kept her notepaper, a bird’s nest of clutter that one day soon she meant to clear, and finally let the letter go.
In the evenings, after supper was finished and the baby put down, Essie made a point of sharing Simon’s letters. Sometimes she passed them to Francis or Marian, so they could see for themselves the spiky handwriting, rising up like the po
ints of a fence from sharp hand-ruled lines. These were mostly composed in supervised sessions, in times set aside for the boys to write home, and the Simon of these letters did not sound to Marian like the brother she missed. There was nothing about cricket or football or checkers, nothing about the way they used to signal each other through the open door between their rooms after they’d been put to bed. This Simon reported that Father Ivo was coaching him in Latin. His schoolwork was difficult, but he was trying to keep up. He wrote about the dormitories, the way the boys were taught to keep their beds and cupboards, the medicine he had been made to swallow when he was feverish. Marian caught a glimpse of the brother she knew when he sent a message to Lila that he missed her chapatis, but in most of these letters, he seemed farther away even than Mysore: a twenty-four-hour trip by train, with a gulf of several months before his first visit home.
Francis did not like to make a show of clinging to his son’s letters, as Essie did. But he put on his reading glasses and inspected those specimens that came his way. “He needs help with Latin?”
“He’s had a late start. Other boys in his class have been at St. Stanislaus’s for two, three years already. Simon will have to work harder than the others at first.”
Francis did not like the idea of his son at a disadvantage. “I’ll write to the head and explain the matter.”
Essie clicked her tongue. “Don’t make trouble, Frank! The school is aware — already they’re helping him. And I’ve written to all his teachers.”
On other nights, she scanned the letters and read only bits aloud. “Most of the other boys seem friendly enough.” She bit her lip. “Of course, most of them already know each other. Simon is new to them; it may take some time before he feels comfortable. Poor fellow, he’s feeling homesick.” She tried to smile at her daughter. “Write him a note, my girl. He says he misses you.”
Marian had trouble knowing how to respond to this. She knew, of course, that her brother missed her; she knew it without being told. She and Simon were only a year apart; they had never been separated for more than a few days. But she never imagined that the words themselves—which seemed to belong to aunts and grandparents—would pass between them. When Simon used to tease her too badly, Marian grew very quiet until he left off. When their mother was ill — all the strange, sharp days after the twins were born and one did not live — Simon and Marian spent hours in a dusty corner of the veranda discussing the names of imaginary horses, the places they would go if their father bought a car, the ways they would spend a lakh. Simon, she knew, would buy a drum set, a motorcycle, a house with its own cricket pitch. “Good-bye,” he said briefly when it came time for him to leave, though Marian could feel him trembling when she hugged him.