“You see?” Ashok had told him triumphantly when Naresh showed him the ball. “You see how it happens. Now they are giving you things. You will stay.” Naresh had smiled shyly, thinking first of his mother but then of his father, working. His grandfather, working. You are a good guardsman.
In the darkness, the yellow flecks of his ball seemed white and starlike. Again and again, Naresh bounced and caught it, bounced and caught it. He found the rhythm soothing.
But a sudden thud startled him. Birds rose up from the trees and Naresh’s ball slipped through his fingers. What could the Hindu boys be doing at such an hour? The school was locked each evening. By dusk the street belonged once again to its residents. By midnight silence hung over the school building like a drop cloth.
After a moment the birds resettled in the trees where Naresh could not see them. All was calm again. He groped for his ball and recovered it just as another thud sounded. Then three dull thumps and the birds clouded up again like dust from a whisk broom. Through the entrance to the hut Naresh saw his grandfather stir briefly, tucking one foot beneath the other. Even in sleep Ashok kept one arm across his face to ward off mosquitoes, which gave him the look of someone hoping to shut out the world for a few minutes longer. Naresh decided not to wake him. But he put his ball beneath a corner of the old man’s mat for safekeeping and walked softly through the garden to investigate.
The moon was thin-shaven. It did not give much light, but Naresh’s eyes were well adjusted to darkness, and he moved quickly around the front of the house. The tops of the palms were dense brushes against the sky, and the wall was clotted with vines and bushes. Behind it the school rose, huge and still. Naresh stared in bewilderment, as if he expected something to appear in the grainy darkness of the games court. It was difficult to imagine anything animate, anything lit, anything as crowded as a school for Hindu boys; the world in daylight was a far-off place and hardly to be believed. In this landscape there were only the sounds the boy had heard, and even they began to seem hollow and foolish as he faced the empty building. It was a cat jumping, he thought, or a falling coconut. And then a ball smacked to the ground. There on the second-story landing, high above the garden wall, was a thin, dark figure.
Naresh knew him at once. He saw the shaking arms, the crooked legs. He saw how slowly the figure stooped and rose again, ball in hand. He knew that badasahib was aiming for the games court because it was what Naresh longed to do himself, and he knew that badasahib had not yet succeeded because his shoulders drooped with each missed shot. He knew that even though badasahib had not gone to the gymkhana, the air would taste of whiskey if he climbed the steps to the landing. So he stayed where he was, in the cool, gray garden, and watched the balls come down in twos and threes. One bounced sharply off the root of a tree. A flat one thudded to earth and did not move. A small one careened toward Jude-sahib’s motorcycle, and Naresh kicked it aside. Four more balls, and then silence. Naresh waited for the barrage to resume, but a minute passed and then another. He crept to the foot of the stairs and saw that badasahib had gone, leaving a single ball behind. It rolled lazily to the railing, bumped, and trickled back across the landing. Naresh could see it lolling at the top of the stairs, white and moonish, and he felt the pull of it as something he could not resist.
His feet made no sound on the weathered wood steps, and he had nearly reached the landing when he heard badasahib’s scratching progress across the floor. Naresh pressed himself against the wall of the house just as the old man reappeared. His breath was a streak of something iron-hard in the soft night air, and his hand was wrapped tightly around a glass. Ice knocked against it with faint brittle sounds, as if tiny unseen things were breaking. Badasahib finished his drink and reached for the ball.
The night was so still that Naresh heard the whine of a mosquito darting near and away, near and away. The boy felt a swelling in his chest as he looked at badasahib, his trembling legs, his spidery arms, and he was consumed with a fierce and angry pity. Let the ball fly over, let the ball fly over. He felt he would be furious with everyone if the shot didn’t make it, with memsahib and his sleeping grandfather and even badasahib himself—when suddenly badasahib lifted the ball high in one hand and heaved it toward the school. The boy started forward with a soft cry, and then it was over, a wobbly throw that hit the side of the building well below the games court wall. It rebounded, thump, into the Almeidas’ garden.
There was no time to run and hide. Naresh and badasahib faced each other. The old man’s eyes were dark and glinting, oily with drink, but Naresh was neither frightened nor angry. His limbs felt slack and heavy, and he wanted to sit. He wanted both of them to sit. It pained him to see badasahib’s legs, stiff and crooked and frail. One clawlike hand gripped the railing and the old man swayed, braced upright more than standing. He stared at Naresh with an expression the boy could not entirely understand, a dull bewilderment. Then his shoulders sagged. His gaze dropped. He turned slowly and went back into the house.
When he had gone, Naresh put the empty glass on the step. He left the balls where they’d fallen, like coconuts shaken down in a storm. That night, he slept in the hut with his grandfather.
The next day he was sent back to his village. Memsahib believed he had thrown the balls. “What are you thinking about, coming into the house at night, taking what you like without asking anyone? What is the meaning of this?” Naresh did not deny it, even to his grandfather. Ashok was grave and stricken, but he did not protest when memsahib announced the boy must go. “I am not waiting for any father from Juhu, anh? Today he goes. You will take him.” Badasahib kept to his bed.
“It was wrong to go inside the house,” Jude-sahib told Naresh, looking worried.
“I’ll speak to her. She’ll change her mind.” Naresh shrugged.
“You are a good guardsman.” He lifted the boy’s chin with two fingers.
But Naresh didn’t mind his punishment, or even the strange new feeling that only he knew what had really happened to him. Even badasahib did not know all of it. He thought perhaps that it would always be so, that the world he’d imagined as common and shared was different for every man, for badasahib and his grandfather and every one of the Hindu boys. The idea made him feel lonely and powerful, and so he hoarded the secret of badasahib at the top of the landing. It struck him as a different sort of thing to be guarded.
And he was relieved to be going home. He was tired and he missed his mother.
Naresh kept the ball that Jude-sahib had given him and took it to his village. He and the other children played with it in a scrub field. It was too big for cricket, but they tried to bowl on the uneven ground. They dribbled it with their bare feet in football matches. They played a game in which one child tossed the ball high into the air, and the others scattered as far as they could — until the ball was caught and they stopped dead, laughing, panting, rooted to their spots, looking all around them to see who had run the farthest.
It was a game he remembered long after the ball was lost and memsahib brought him back to the Almeida household. School, she taught him. Training. Trade. Jude-sahib had shaved off his mustache, and his face seemed naked and fleshy without it.
By then badasahib had collapsed. On the rare occasions when Naresh encountered him, the old man stared at him blankly. Once he wandered into the garden wearing his pajamas and Naresh found him sleeping in the flower bed. He helped him to his feet and brushed the dirt from his clothes before taking him upstairs. Badasahib clutched his hand. “Simon?” he asked. “Simon? Is that you, Simon?” Naresh thought of his grandfather, a hand pressed to the place in his hip that pained him; he thought of his father walking blank-faced on the twisting streets. He took badasahib by the arm and nodded. Yes, yes, Simon. One of badasahib’s family who had gone, Naresh realized, and who would not be coming back.
Acknowledgments
I’ve enjoyed the chance to work with extraordinary writers and teachers whose support and
example are a constant help. Many thanks to Robert Cox, William Pritchard, Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter, Jan Sanders, David Turner, Hollis Seamon, Louis Edwards, Michael White, Rob Nixon, Magda Bogin, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Maureen Howard, and especially Caryl Phillips. The writing course I took with Helen von Schmidt was invaluable, but I am even more fortunate to have known her joy of reading — and her fine taste in writing—my whole life.
Thanks to my colleagues in workshops and writing groups, many of whom have gone on to write books I admire. Dave King, above all, found the time to read several versions of these stories, and his enthusiasm has been nothing short of a gift. I am also indebted to the American School of Classical Studies in Corinth and its director, Guy Sanders, for giving me such a remarkable place to write each autumn (and such excellent company).
I’m very grateful to Carol Janeway, who has been a wonderful editor in every way, as well as to Lauren LeBlanc and the rest of the team at Knopf. Thanks to Amy Berkower for all her support, and to Genevieve Gagne-Hawes and Michael Mejias of Writers House. My thanks to W. David Foster and Douglas Mason for their expertise, and to my coworkers in Newport and New Orleans.
My greatest thanks go to my family and friends for their encouragement — especially to my parents; my brother, Chris; and my sister, Radhika, my first and best reader. A world of thanks to Drew, whose patience and faith seem limitless, and to H., who gave me the ending to at least one story.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nalini Jones was born in Newport, Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Ontario Review and Creative Nonfiction online, among others. She is a Stanford Calderwood Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and has recently taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York and Fairfield University in Connecticut.
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2007 by Nalini Jones
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Some of the stories in this collection have been previously published in different form in the following: “What You Call Winter” in Glimmer Train Stories (Spring 2004); “This is Your Home Also” in Dogwood (Spring 2003); “In the Garden” in Ontario Review (Spring 2002).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Nalini, [date]
What you call winter: stories / by Nalini Jones. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Borzoi book)
eISBN: 978-0-307-54919-8
1. India—Fiction. 2. Catholics—India—Fiction.
3. Intergenerational relations—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.06275W47 2007
813′.6—dc22 2007001464
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