Aerogrammes (10 page)

“I lived right around the corner!” May said. “I remember your commercial. The one with the talking ear of corn?” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Who listens to customers?”

“He was a paid actor. My cousin. But I paid him.”

“What kind of name is Panicker? Are you Indian?”

“Yes.”

Her hands shimmied in the air, a reaction he had never before received. “I wasn’t sure because your skin is so pale. You could pass for Arab or Italian or Syrian or Egyptian …” Listing other pale-skinned nationalities, she unlocked her door. “Do you have a minute? I have a question for you.”

He followed her into her studio. On one yellow wall hung a trio of gold frames, a fruit floating in each: apple, orange, and pear. Someone else must have hung the frames; they were too high for her to reach. Beneath these was a small breakfast table, tiled in cobalt blue, and a rocking chair in the corner
with a quilt thrown over the back. She gestured to the rocking chair; he settled carefully into it.

“You have family coming today?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“No, no kids for me.” May opened the top drawer of her dresser and pushed some items aside until she surfaced with an open aerogramme. “Hah! Here it is.” She offered it to him with both hands.

Mr. Panicker had always loved the slick texture of an aerogramme between his fingers. He remembered plucking them from his old mailbox, squinting and turning each one around and around like a kaleidoscope, as there were always more messages that his mother had crammed up and across the margins. In this one, the print was large and earnestly etched, wasting vast margins of blue on every side.

“Is this a girl or a boy?” she asked. “The name at the bottom.”

“Boy,” he said.

“Are you sure? Because he’s my Street Angel now, and they
said they’d send a picture but they didn’t and it’d be nice to be sure.”

“Definitely boy.”

She brought the aerogramme close to her face, as if its nearness could prove him right. “You can adopt a Street Angel from just about any third world country, you know. I requested India.” She took a step toward him. He leaned back in the rocking chair, cornered by her curiosity. “What’s Bombay like?”

“Bombay? Dirty.”

“Dirty? That’s all?”

He’d never been outside the airport in Bombay, only remembered his plane touching down, the tarp and tin sheeting of slums reeling like a filmstrip past his window. “Bombay, I don’t know very much. I am from Kerala, much south of there. It’s a beautiful place. Coconut trees, paddy fields. God’s own country, they call it.” She still looked vaguely disappointed. He felt like a travel agent, unable to sustain her interest.

“Is it close to Bombay?”

He told her to hold on a moment, springing up from the rocking chair so quickly that he had to steady himself on the armrests.

Minutes later, he returned with a map, which he unfolded on her bed. He pointed out the sliver of land called Kerala, barely the size of a nail clipping. They spoke Malayalam, he said, like him. Cricket was a more sophisticated form of baseball, with slimmer players in prim sweater vests. In Bombay, the boy most likely swam in the sea, not a swimming pool.

“But isn’t the water polluted?” she asked.

He rolled up the map like a sacred scroll. “Our people have excellent immune systems.”

•

May began a habit of stopping by Mr. Panicker’s room before every meal and accompanying him to the cafeteria, where they sat with people she knew. Mr. Panicker tried to engage in small talk, though his attention often swayed to the window, where mango-colored leaves were beginning to shiver against their branches. Mealtime provided him with some daily distraction, but still there was the grit he could not ignore, the dusty blinds like lengths of bone-gray ribs, the potent smell of detergent in the pillowcases.

Before his mind could wander too far, May would guide him back into the conversation with a question. He was grateful to her because he had never excelled at making his presence known among groups of people. Sometimes the accumulation of his silence seemed to heap upon him, as slowly as snow, until he felt he could no longer be seen.

Mr. Panicker was far more at ease when they were alone. She had consulted him for her response to the first aerogramme, and on his recommendation, she had asked Satyanand what he thought of the cricket star Sachin Tendulkar. When Satyanand’s second aerogramme arrived, she brought it directly to Mr. Panicker.

“What’s a
chappal
?” May asked.

“A kind of sandal. Or flip-flops.”

“Maybe you should stop this Street Angel business,” said Mr. Panicker. “It could be a trick.”

She held the letter to her chest. “Where did you get that idea?”

“What kind of Indian boy doesn’t know Tendulkar?”

Her eyes flitted over the letter with affection. “My boy.”

Watching her, Mr. Panicker remained silent. It didn’t seem so wrong at the time, the way her fingers were breezing back and forth across the writing. She deserved that moment of peace, and he wanted to preserve it for her, if he could, in return for all the small ways she had thus far preserved him.

By the end of the month, Sunit began calling Mr. Panicker again, bearing better, if not good, news. Mr. Panicker could hear the fraying hope in Sunit’s voice as he explained how his manager was passing the script to someone else and then someone else; it was widely described as “hot.”

“Sounds like a game of Hot Potato,” said Mr. Panicker.

Sunit paused, then forced a chuckle. “Yeah, it’s good to keep a sense of humor about these things in case, well …” He paused. “So anyway, if you really can’t handle it at Renaissance Gardens, then we’ll move you up to New York, I guess. Once I get this thing sold.”

“But don’t sign a lease or anything, not until I get there. It should be a place big enough for both of us. I have my savings, so we can manage it.”

“We, like you and me? Roommates?”

“Who else would I mean?”

“I was thinking of two separate apartments. Maybe in the same neighborhood or something. I need some space, Dad.”

“Space is overrated in this country.”

“We’ll see, okay? Let’s just cross that bridge later.”

“Oh, whatever,” Mr. Panicker said, angry that he could not say what plagued him: that he would die soon. This he knew, just as he’d known it at the top of the basement stairs with that one light-headed step, the ground he had walked for seventy-six years disappearing from under his feet.

May read aloud the next two aerogrammes as Mr. Panicker sat in the rocking chair, poised like a director with his hands in steepled prayer, his ankle perched on his knee. Each letter contained a troubling inconsistency. Satyanand Satyanarayana had no opinions on Bollywood stars; twice he referred to Shah Rukh Khan as a “she.”

Despite his doubts, Mr. Panicker delighted in elaborating upon every letter May received. He described Satyanand’s possible route to school, how he and his friends would have to wend through the crush of taxis and rickshaws and fling themselves onto the train—the older boys hanging out the doorway if they were so bold—and how the rushing wind would dry his washed hair cold and crisp.

He spoke of his own son only when she asked him how Sunit was doing. “Sunit is Sunit,” Mr. Panicker said, before changing the subject. Eventually she learned to stop asking.

He would have been happy to limit his social circle to her alone, but May begged him to attend the Fall Sock Hop. It was held in the dreaded rec room, site of Wii Wednesdays and Film Noir Fridays, by a troop of local Boy Scouts. A news crew arrived to tape the event; one lady told the camera, “It’s just so lovely to have young people with us. The girls never have enough partners to go around.”

Mr. Panicker hid behind the punch bowl until May hooked
her arm through his and steered him onto the floor. The Boy Scouts held their ladies at arm’s length, shifting their gazes around the room, avoiding one another’s eyes. None of the ladies seemed to care. They rocked and swayed to the crooning music, chins raised, eyes cloudy with pleasure and memory.

Mr. Panicker held May’s hands in front of him, as if gripping the reins of a horse. Instead of risking any leg movement, he stayed in place, bending his knees according to his own erratic rhythm. Eventually he was lulled by the scent of baby powder on her skin, the rise and fall of the music. He twirled her under his arm. Later, May got him to admit that he was enjoying himself, even if he had abstained from the conga line.

A breeze swept through Mr. Panicker’s lungs while he walked around the courtyard. It was early in the day, the clouds pink-bellied and young; dry leaves swirled in midair like shoaling fish. Today was Mercy’s birthday.

His wife had never wanted any fuss made on her behalf. Mercy was tidy, brisk, uncomplaining, always the first to finish her meal before urging Sunit to eat up, eat fast, as if talking were a waste of time. She rarely disclosed her own preferences to Mr. Panicker, whether they were discussing a school for Sunit or a television program to watch. She always deferred to Mr. Panicker with “Whatever you like.” After a while, he stopped asking her opinion.

Once, for her birthday, he surprised her with a gift delivered to their home: a double-mattressed DreamSupreme, as wide as twice his wingspan, with pillows fat and sugar white. It filled their bedroom, and for once, Mercy smiled and said, yes, she liked it. For two more years, he and his wife slept soundly, a whole wingspan of space between them, until she fled the
DreamSupreme for Sunit’s math teacher, and whatever banana peel of a cot a math teacher might have to offer.

Sunit was only seven when they moved to America. Back then, Mr. Panicker told the boy to sleep in his own bed, and though the darkness seemed smothering, the hallways choked with shadow, Sunit agreed to sleep alone. But on some mornings, fresh from another drowning dream, Mr. Panicker would roll over to see his son, a snoring resolute curl on the other side of the bed. Always Sunit avoided his father on those days, ashamed perhaps, though Mr. Panicker never mentioned it. Nor did he mention how every morning was a trial, and sometimes it was simply the weight of Sunit’s presence that gave Mr. Panicker the strength to rise.

When Mr. Panicker returned to his room, he found a pink slip on his door with the heading
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
. Sunit’s name was scribbled below this, and a check mark was leaping out of the small box next to
URGENT
.

Mr. Panicker dialed the numbers, gripped the phone with both hands.

“Dad?” Sunit answered.

“What happened? Tell me.”

“No, it’s good news—I got an offer! I got an offer from Two Tigers, the company I was telling you about, the guys who produced the road-trip movie with the lesbian and the arranged marriage? The woman who played the lesbian read it and she wants to costar.”

“Is there a lesbian in your story?”

“What? No. I just got the call from my manager, so I don’t know much yet, but I think like thirty thousand. It’s called an option. I’m
optioning
my script.”

“Now what? What does this mean?”

“It means,” Sunit said, with the enthusiasm of a game-show host, “you should come to New York!”

Mr. Panicker was sure that Sunit had no idea when or how this grand prize would be awarded.

“I already spoke to Preeti Auntie,” Sunit said. “She wants you to come live with her in Queens.”

“You called Preeti?”

“Yeah, we’ve been talking for a few days,” Sunit said. “I told her we’d hire someone to stop by every day, and she said she’d love for you to have the room next to Biju and Binoy.”

Mr. Panicker cringed at the memory of the greasy doorknobs in Preeti’s house, Biju and Binoy’s hair gel traveling from their spiny coifs to their hands, to the doorknobs, to Mr. Panicker’s hands and wherever else.

“But how close are you to Queens?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Like forty-five minutes.”

“You’ll visit?”

“Of course, Dad. When I have the time.”

“I can’t talk to those boys. They have no sense.”

“Dad, I’m at Preeti Auntie’s place right now.”

Preeti picked up another phone in the house. “What is there to argue? You’ll live next to Biju-Binoy.”

“Aha, Preeti! I just mean I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Disturb, what disturb?” she said. “It disturbs me to care for family?” He pictured her with her telephone jammed under her chin as she arranged the items in her refrigerator just so, according to a system Mr. Panicker did not care to learn. “You’re starting to talk like the
velumbin
you live with.”

Mr. Panicker knocked on May’s door for breakfast only to find that she had a visitor, a plain young woman sitting at the foot of the bed. She wore blue hospital scrubs, her hair knotted
at the base of her neck. She was slicing an apple in her palm, a napkin spread across her knee.

Mr. Panicker offered to leave, but May, who had answered the door, waved him into the room. “See, look, Hari, this nice girl from church brought tea.”

“Hi, I’m Leanne,” the woman said, waving hello with her paring knife.