When Rowena emerges, Sister Agnes is sitting on the sofa with Lizzie close beside her. Lizzie’s face is streaked with dried tears, tragic in its small way, thinks Rowena. She pauses in the doorway. Lizzie is showing Sister Agnes a picture she has drawn.
“You see? This is Mumma and Dadda and me. This is Grandma, this is you …” Rowena cannot see the paper but imagines the tall, jagged lines her daughter has used to draw Sister Agnes. The glasses would be rings around the dots of eyes. The strip of blue sky, the sun like a round yellow cheese. The red slashes of mouths. “This is Aunty Beryl and Uncle Ollo. This is our house.”
“A green house, just like this one!” says Sister Agnes. Rowena is amused; their house in the States is yellow.
“Yes, this is our house,” Lizzie says easily. “And see, here is my sister and my other sister and here is our baby.”
“So many sisters!”
“Her name is …” Lizzie thinks for a moment. “Diya!”
“I see! And what is this?”
“This is our coconut tree.”
“You know, when you were a tiny baby, too tiny to remember, you lived with me. And even then you liked trees.”
“What did I do?”
“You liked to see the leaves. Whenever you cried, we took you outside and held you up beneath the trees, right in the center of the branches, so you could look up at all the green.” Sister looked up from Lizzie’s dark bent head, saw Rowena, and smiled. Such a sweet smile, girlish despite the soft wrinkles, eyes shining behind her thick glasses.
“And then I stopped crying?”
“Yes, of course! Then you were happy.”
“What else?” asks Lizzie.
Rowena moves quickly away, before Lizzie looks up and sees her. She can hear Grace’s voice and Mark’s, knows she must rejoin the others quickly. But she slips down the back stairs to the garden. To the west, over the Arabian Sea, the horizon is stained orange and lavender. The east is pale but darkening. At the back of the property, the neat flower beds give way to a fecund tangle of plants. A few old fruit trees have survived. One cashew tree has a long, low limb that reminds her of the tree in Aunty Beryl’s yard. Rowena and the boys used to straddle it in a row, laughing and bumping shoulders and knees. They twisted and squirmed like a seven-headed caterpillar.
She is wearing slippers. The leather soles are thin and smooth, so she leaves them on the ground before she begins to climb. Beneath her feet the clay is rough and sandy-warm. She worries about her good black trousers scratching against the trunk as she pulls herself up. When she was a girl, one of the boys used to give her a boost, lacing his fingers into a stirrup, heaving her up.
Rowena sits on the branch, swings her legs through empty air. She misses her brothers, who are scattered all over the globe. One lives in Bangalore and will come to see her next week, but she wants something more: she wants the lot of them, and her cousins too, all together again on a single branch. When she tips her head back she sees leaves and more leaves, in layers that sift what is left of the light. The leaves are broad and thick and seem black in the twilight; the white chinks of sky shift like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. She thinks of Sister Agnes carrying Lizzie as a newborn, standing with her beneath a tree, and thinks this is what her daughter saw before she was her daughter: black leaves, white sky, tricks of light. She thinks of Sister Agnes walking other babies into the garden to gaze up through the branches, whether one of them might have been hers.
“Rowena!” Mark is calling. “Rowena! Where are you?”
She considers not answering. But she slides down from the branch, pushes her feet into her slippers. “Here.”
He appears, brows pulled tight as shoelaces. “What’s the matter with you? What are you doing out here?”
She shakes her head. She does not know how to begin. She has carried her secret too long. She knows how it will appear when it comes into the world now: distorted, grotesque in its scabrous layers. She had intended nothing so ugly.
“Someone from the police is on the phone for you — something about a guy who’s broken his legs? What the hell happened?”
When she starts to cry, it is not for the man in the white kurta but for what cannot be helped, for Kripa, for the brothers and sisters Lizzie will not have, for Mark and herself. She does not know how they have stumbled into such betrayals: Mark changing his mind after all they have endured and Rowena forging ahead without him.
“What is it?” Mark has taken hold of her arms and shakes her gently. “What’s happened?” Finally he puts his arms around her. “Calm down,” he says.
She rests her forehead on his shoulder, breathing in a faint trace of sea salt. Grace must have dried this shirt on the line. In another minute or two, Rowena knows, she will have to make a beginning. They will have to go upstairs; perhaps the policeman will still be on the line. She will have to show Mark the application. But for now, she is trying to calm herself— she is thinking past all that to tomorrow evening. If Lizzie has had a good nap, Rowena will bring her out to this tree. They can look up at the leaves together. Rowena can tell her daughter about playing on such branches as a child, and then, if Lizzie likes, she can repeat what Sister Agnes has told them. When you were a tiny baby … Soon, after only a few tellings, it will sound as if Rowena had been there.
This Is Your Home Also
Once the train had gone and the stirring of paper and rubbish in its wake had subsided, Santa Clara Station was quiet. Naresh watched the lights of the train curling away toward Juhu. “That’s where I go,” his father said. Naresh felt his throat tighten, but he was eight, old enough to be of use, old enough to leave home. He did not cry. Outside the station, autoricks were parked three deep, their drivers asleep on the benches inside. Naresh followed his father as they twisted farther and farther into the neighborhood. Dogs with thin hindquarters sifted in and out of the darkness, and they all seemed the same dog—watchful, silent. “You help wherever you can,” his father told him. “Do what they say quietly. Listen to your grandfather. If they let you stay, they will give you things now and then, clothes and shoes. You can eat with your grandfather — he will have enough food.”
Naresh nodded. His father was a groundsman at a Juhu hotel; Naresh could not possibly stay with him. But Ashok had been with the Almeida family for three years, and it was decided that Naresh might have a chance in that household. He would be fed there, at least, and his family saved the cost of his food.
“You’ll live well there.”
One street tumbled into the next, and suddenly at a quiet turning was the street where Naresh would stay. He stared up at the Almeida house and tried to imagine its occupants while his father bent to wake a sleeping figure at the entrance to the compound. Naresh hung back. He had not seen his grandfather in over a year, the last time Ashok had made the three days’ journey back to their village.
But his grandfather fumbled to his feet, weeping with a joy so great that it seemed to throb in his bones and muscles. Ashok’s hands trembled as they held Naresh’s face, in just the way his mother’s hands had trembled when she said goodbye, and Naresh felt a wave of recognition. He would not be alone.
By daybreak Naresh’s father had gone. Naresh squatted next to his grandfather and tried not to look at the place in the road from which he had seen his father disappear. The house was large and square and blank-faced. Ashok tossed a hand in its direction. The family was all but gone, he explained in a low voice, the grown children scattered.
“Gone where?” Naresh whispered. The whole world seemed hushed.
“Gone here, gone there. People with money can go anywhere.”
Why would rich people need to leave their families? Naresh wondered. But he was less curious than convinced of their remoteness. “Who is here?”
The old parents only, Ashok told him. Memsahib and badasahib. And one son, Jude-sahib, who didn’t go. “That is better,” he added. “So few people here, who will mind if you’ve come?”
Naresh w
as sleepless, aching; he rubbed his eyes and listened to his grandfather’s voice without hearing the words. A woman lit a fire in the construction lot across the street, and it seemed to hold the morning’s only color. Everything behind it—the mounds of dirt and gravel, the figures just beginning to move about, the ruined garden—was blue and smoky. Naresh rocked on his heels and felt a small stone bite into his foot.
“They are nice enough people,” his grandfather was saying. His voice took on a tinge of complaint. “Like any others, always wanting this or that. What is good enough?”
Naresh said nothing. He did not want his grandfather to see he was afraid.
“And I am older now, growing tired … but you can help me, anh?” He rested his hand on the top of Naresh’s head and the boy felt its surprising weight. “I’m happy you’ve come, baba.” Ashok smiled at him fondly, and Naresh felt a rush of affection for him.
The sun broke through the haze, and all around him St. Hilary Road began to take shape. What had seemed like crude ideas of trees — flat branches against a flat white sky— blazed to life and depth. Leaves shifted in layers, light filled the spaces between. Crows called from one place, then another and another, new points on an emerging axis.
“On this side is a school.” His grandfather pointed. “Someone tore down the house opposite, and soon there will be a new flat building. On the other side is a house with no watchman.” He grunted in disapproval.
Naresh stood, stretching his cramped legs, and surveyed the compound. Tied to the veranda post were two sleeping dogs; Ashok’s small shelter of palms and burlap stood at the back of the garden; and in a corner lay a scuffed white ball. A football, the kind Naresh had seen but never kicked before.
“Whose is that?” He pointed, his voice rising in excitement.
But his grandfather put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “That is memsahib’s,” he said. “We give all the balls to her.” Perhaps he saw the boy’s disappointment, because he smiled kindly. “You can give her this one yourself. She’ll like that, baba. She will let you stay.”
“He cannot stay.” Memsahib straightened the folds of her sari. Her braid was long and wiry, her face set. She was much older than Naresh’s mother, and the dark flesh of her belly was soft and puckered. “What is this? I’m not running a hotel, I’m not running a school for boys.”
“But the father has gone to Juhu,” Ashok explained. “There is no one to take him away.”
“That is not for me to worry about! What business do you have, bringing a boy here without asking leave?”
Ashok rolled his head as a man with drooping shoulders came out to the veranda. He squatted to greet the dogs, who were tied to the porch and whined for attention.
“Jude-sahib, see baba here!” Ashok appealed to him.
Memsahib sniffed. “Don’t go looking to him for soft treatment! I am talking to you!”
Naresh understood some English, but not enough to follow the drifts and swerves of their conversation. He watched Jude-sahib, whose round face and mustache reminded him of his father’s, and waited to see what memsahib would make of him. When she turned to face Naresh, he felt as if she could see all there was to know about him. He clutched the ball he had found in the garden close to his chest.
Finally she sighed. “For a few days, no more, he can stay and work. But see, I haven’t hired two for one post. In two days, maybe three, he is going. You tell your son in Juhu. Here —” She turned suddenly to Naresh. “You can give that to me.”
Naresh surrendered the ball, wondering what she would do with it. In his village the boys played cricket with sticks, football with green coconuts. He imagined the feeling of kicking this ball, its straight, soaring path. Coconuts always bumped off to the side.
But memsahib neither kicked the ball nor threw it. She only returned to the house, carrying it like a parcel.
Ashok put a hand on Naresh’s shoulder, as if to steer him away, but Jude-sahib called down to the boy, “What is your name?”
Naresh backed into his grandfather’s legs.
“Come, tell me!”
“Naresh.”
“Naresh,” Jude-sahib repeated. Then in Hindi: “My father is sleeping. He is old and tired. You must be careful not to bother him, understand? Even when he is awake. Otherwise you’ll get a shout.”
Naresh nodded.
“Mmm.” Jude-sahib glanced briefly at Ashok, then returned his attention to the boy. “Will you like being a guardsman?”
Naresh did not know what to say. He smiled shyly and cocked his head, turning a toe in the dirt. “It’s an important job, you know.”
He hesitated. Then suddenly: “I am working, my father is working, my grandfather is working,” he said in a high, piping voice. “All working.” He stood up straighter.
The boy beamed. He would not disappoint Jude-sahib, whose soft eyes and grave manner held him spellbound.
“Go on, then. But mind the dogs. They’ll snap until they know you.”
For the first few weeks, homesick and ashamed to confess it, Naresh stayed close to his grandfather. Ashok sat in a chair near the gate, beneath a stand of bamboo trees that creaked in the wind. When anyone needed to be let in or out, he began the long business of straightening his limbs and hobbling forward. Naresh soon got into the habit of jumping up himself.
“This is how you help, is it? Two doing half a job,” memsahib said when a week had gone by. “Where is this boy’s father, Ashok? What have I told you? He is going, this one. Or I’m keeping him and you are going.” But then she gave Naresh her bags from the market to carry, the heavy burlap sack of potatoes or the thin plastic bag that cut into the flesh of her wrist. “Po-ta-to,” she said in English. Then in Hindi: “You know the word? Say it with me. Po-ta-to.”
“Potato,” said Naresh.
“Take it up to the kitchen. Up. Up. Kitchen.”
“Keetchen,” said Naresh. He climbed the back stairs, which led to the kitchen, and gave the bag to Patty, the servant. It was the one room of the house where he was permitted, and sometimes he stayed to watch her as she made the masala. The sound of the grinding stone reminded him of his mother. When Patty chopped onions, he could feel his eyes filling, and it was a relief to cry.
But in the dim, whitish mornings, when Jude-sahib went to town in his car, Naresh opened and shut the gate for him. The smell of petrol lingered in the still air for a few moments — a sharp, busy smell, the smell of important doings — and as Jude-sahib drove away he sounded the horn especially for Naresh. He befriended the dogs, who strained on their leads to greet him when he passed. Even badasahib seemed to grow accustomed to Naresh’s presence. He was a thin old man with the fierce eyes and scratching walk of a rooster. He spent his days at the gymkhana, and although he didn’t nod or smile when he encountered the boy at the gate, he pulled Naresh aside from time to time.
“You there! Naresh, is it?” He fumbled in his pocket. “Take, take quickly.” He pressed a few bills and a slip of paper with writing into Naresh’s hand. “Give this to the man. One bottle only. And bring it to me here, in the garden, you understand? Not upstairs.”
As the weeks passed, Naresh brought back two bottles, a third, a fourth … too timid to refuse the old man even though he knew what would happen. Whenever badasahib stayed too late at the gymkhana, Naresh was sent to follow him home—a quiet arrangement between Ashok and Jude-sahib.
“Go quietly,” Ashok told him. “Otherwise he will see you and be angry. And if he falls, you come running here and tell Jude-sahib, yes?”
Jude-sahib did not smile or speak, only watched Naresh with a seriousness that filled the boy with pride.
“Jude-sahib only. Never memsahib. You understand?” Ashok pressed.
Naresh tipped his head back and forth, yes.
So on certain nights, at a word from Ashok or a sharp glance from Jude-sahib, Naresh left the Almei
da compound. The dark streets reminded him of the night his father had brought him from the station, and the boy was pleased to think he had learned his way around the neighborhood. Even late at night, men and women hurried this way and that, intent on errands of their own. They made little noise — small disturbances of slippers against pavement or one trouser leg against another — and then, each with a brief, opaque glance, they were gone. Naresh wondered to where. He felt connected to them, all on the same brownish streets, beneath the same patch of sky.
Outside the gymkhana gate, he crouched beneath a clump of bougainvillea and waited. Often he waited a long time and his thoughts floated back home. What would his mother think of him, entrusted with such a job? What would she say when he gave her his earnings? When badasahib emerged, the boy trailed behind him. On some nights, curling beneath the scents of gardens, Naresh could smell the whiskey on the old man’s breath. It leaked from his skin in a hot, sour cloud, and on those occasions badasahib walked so slowly that Naresh found it difficult to keep any distance between them.
Yet with all of this, Naresh’s favorite task was collecting the balls that fell into the garden. The discovery of the football, he soon realized, was a regular occurrence. Every day balls flew over from the Hindu school next door, where a new games court left the Almeida house exposed to regular abuse. There had been incidents of broken windows, roof tiles brought down, and gutter pipes damaged. The wall of the house was pockmarked, and the garden had a gap-toothed look where flowers had been crushed.
Memsahib wrote letters and registered municipal complaints. She scolded the miscreants from the outdoor stair landing, which faced the games court and which she began to treat as a kind of pulpit. She even appealed to the parish priests, arguing that since the neighborhood had long been home to East Indian Catholics — Indians converted by the Portuguese centuries before—they must use their influence with the head of the Hindu school.
Some days later, two priests came to the house with a Hindu schoolmaster and three young boys, fresh and sweet in spotless uniforms. Naresh came up the back stairs and listened to their meeting from the kitchen. With priests in the next room, Patty was too harried for their usual chat, but she told Naresh to sit quietly in a corner and she would give him what she could when the priests had gone. She was Catholic like the Almeidas, from a village in the south, and when she spoke of priests her eyes grew large, as if the word itself were holy.