And Laughter Fell From the Sky (15 page)

It was Sunday evening, and Rasika’s parents had gone up to Cleveland for dinner and card playing with Deepti Auntie and Balu Uncle. Rasika had managed to stay home by pleading tiredness. Pramod was at his apartment. She was alone in her room. Since Abhay had left, she’d been staying home as much as possible, to avoid getting tempted into any risky behavior.

The sky was growing dim outside her curtains. She’d been lying on her bed all afternoon, half-dozing. She didn’t feel like doing anything. Her head throbbed. She’d been trying to ignore it, but finally the pain grew strong enough that she crawled off the bed, found some pain pills in the hall bathroom, and swallowed them.

Entering her room again, she decided to turn on the light and do something to distract herself until the pain subsided. She sat on the carpet in front of the low white bookshelf beside her bed. There were no books on these shelves. Instead, they displayed items from the various collections she had kept since she was a child. When she lived in India, she had begun collecting photos of female Bollywood stars. Although her mother would not let her see any of the movies, considering them too mature for a seven- or eight-year-old, Rasika had been intimately familiar with the actresses’ names and pictures.

Once they moved to the United States, she had used scissors and far too much glue to make a collage of these photos, which was propped on a lower shelf of the bookshelf. She picked it up. The cardboard backing had yellowed over the years. The photos, so familiar, were stiff with glue. She shook dust off the collage and gazed again on the perky nose and oval face of Sridevi; the snub-nosed, round-cheeked face of Smita Patil; the large, toothy smile of Madhuri Dixit; the green eyes and shapely mouth of Mandakini. She was never interested in collecting photos of the male actors, although she remembered her mother and aunts swooning over the handsome features of Amitabh Bachchan. Who cared about men? It was the women she’d wanted to imitate. Her favorite actress, the one she considered most beautiful and elegant, was Rekha, whose photo was in the very center of the collage, larger than the others. Rekha had fair skin, full lips, and high cheekbones. Her thick black hair flowed loose on either side of her heart-shaped face, and she wore a peach-colored sari.

Although Rasika grew to realize, as she got older, that these actresses’ lives were often sordid or tragic, she preferred to still think about the fantasy lives implied by these beautiful photos. She wanted the glamorous, perfect, happily-ever-after life that should have accompanied such beautiful women.

She used to have a large framed photo of Princess Diana, with a small tiara on her fluffy hair, but that story grew so sad that Rasika could no longer pretend that there was a happy life associated with the picture. So she had thrown the picture away and given the empty frame to her mother.

As she looked at the photos in her hand, she wondered suddenly how Abhay would react if he saw this collage, which she had saved so carefully over the years. He’d probably think it was silly. He’d say she was chasing after a fantasy. And maybe she was. If she walked around an American street dressed like these Bollywood stars, with her midriff exposed and a kumkum on her forehead, she wouldn’t look elegant and sophisticated. She’d just look weird. Yet if she walked around Kent dressed in a classic style like Jackie Onassis, she’d still look slightly out of place because of her dusky skin. Sometimes she felt it was impossible for her to be the sophisticated person she aspired to, because she just didn’t fit anywhere, as Abhay had pointed out.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to worry about his thoughts anymore, because he was out of her life. She crawled over to her dresser, pulled out an old T-shirt, and used it to wipe the dust off the bottom bookcase shelf, lifting and replacing other trinkets as she did so: little plastic statues of Krishna and Lakshmi, and Indian folk dolls dressed up to dance. She set the collage back in its place.

The upper shelves were filled with her collection of Beanie Babies. Even in high school and college, she had been interested in collecting Beanie Babies. She remembered spending hours as a teen arranging and rearranging these toys. She had so many that the majority of them were in a box in a corner of her closet. Only her favorites lived on the shelf. Most of them were pink, since pink was always her favorite color.

Her headache was gone now. The sky was dark outside her window. She felt suddenly energized. She decided to go downstairs and make a batch of cookies. When she was in sixth grade, she used to love making a mint and chocolate cookie that involved two layers of dough, a light color and a chocolate color, rolled up together and sliced. She’d learned to make the cookies at a Girl Scout meeting. She hadn’t baked those in a long time. Her father used to love those spiral cookies.

She found the recipe—a butter-stained, photocopied page tucked into her mother’s almost untouched copy of
Joy of Cooking
. Amma rarely fixed Western food, and used the cookbook only for an occasional cake or pan of brownies. Rasika drove to the store for ingredients. In the kitchen again, she set out flour, butter, sugar, eggs, cocoa powder, and mint flavoring. She felt happy to be mixing and rolling. She wondered if she ought to learn to sew, or make lace, or get involved with stenciling, or something. Her problem, perhaps, was simply that she lacked a hobby, now that she had stopped collecting Beanie Babies.

After work the next day Abhay returned to his apartment, which he shared with another guy who seemed to spend most of his time at his girlfriend’s place, heated up some minestrone soup from a can, ate handfuls of cheese crackers out of the box, drank a glass of milk, and biked over to Kianga’s place. He was a bit early. The sun was descending behind Kianga’s house, but the sky was still light.

Kianga sat in a lawn chair in the tiny front yard, with a heavy book open on her lap and a highlighter in her hand. She was concentrating so hard, she didn’t notice him as he locked his bike and walked up to her.

“Hi,” he said.

She looked up, startled. Then her face grew rosy and she smiled. “Abhay! I’m so glad you’re here!”

He was surprised she could pronounce his name, after only hearing it once. She was very pretty, with her cheerful smile and blue-green eyes.

She closed her book and stood up. “I’ll get another chair.”

“No, let me.” He put out his hands, as if to prevent her from exerting herself on his behalf.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.” She was wearing jeans shorts and a sleeveless top, and her limbs were long and fit. She trotted up the stairs into the house. In a moment she came back down with another lawn chair. “Ellen’s inside,” she explained as she unfolded the chair and sat down. “She can’t study outside. She says it’s too distracting.” Kianga had to shout over the noise of the traffic from the freeway. “Listen, the guy I wanted you to meet tonight couldn’t show up. But he says you should come by his office tomorrow for an interview.”

Abhay sat down in the chair she had vacated. “What kind of job is it?”

“My friend Justin is using inheritance money to start a new environmental organization in town. I know him from Green Party meetings. He’s a good guy. Really intellectual. You reminded me of him, so I thought you two might be a good match. He needs help with just about everything. You’ll get to learn all about running a nonprofit organization.”

This was starting to sound good—better than he’d expected. “What’s the organization?”

“It’s called HOPE. It stands for Humans Off of Planet Earth. It’s a population organization. He asks people to sign voluntary pledges to get sterilized. The idea is, humans need to stop taking over the planet.”

Abhay laughed. “It sounds kind of ridiculous.”

“I thought so, too, at first. But I can see the appeal of something like this. The organization takes a logical point to an extreme, and that can be helpful sometimes to wake people up and help them consider all their choices. Childlessness is certainly a valid environmental choice, although personally, I think humans are part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

“The plan of existence.” She held out her hand, palm up, and waved it in a slow arc in front of her. “God has put us on this earth for some reason. Or if you’re not comfortable with the word
God
, think of it this way. Humans evolved on Earth for a reason. Mother Nature created us. Life created us. We’re here.”

“God didn’t ask us to destroy things,” he said. “Mother Nature can’t be happy that humans are polluting the water and air, and burying nuclear waste in the earth. Even most humans didn’t ask for so much of Earth to be paved. It was a few industrialists who made those decisions for all of us.”

“I knew you’d be great for this job! You totally get it. Justin will love you. Listen, I’ve just got to finish this chapter before rehearsal.”

Abhay sat silently while Kianga read. The sky was starting to dim. He shifted his chair so he faced away from the highway, and looked over the tops of the houses to the wispy clouds drifting slowly across the sky. After several minutes, a long-haired guy with a guitar case slung over his back walked up the sidewalk and over the lawn to where they were sitting. “Hey, cutie,” he said, and leaned over to kiss Kianga on the lips. This must be her boyfriend.

“Abhay, this is Preview,” Kianga said.

“Preview?” Abhay must have looked puzzled because the guy said, “I made it up to remind myself you always have another chance. Even this life isn’t the final life. So if I think of my whole life as a preview, it helps keep me cool.” He smoothed the air with a flattened hand.

Preview’s long brown hair was matted in places. It didn’t look like he’d combed it in ages. Perhaps he was in the middle of an attempt to create dreadlocks.

“We met Abhay at the fountain yesterday.” Kianga stood up and folded her chair. Abhay did the same, and they all went inside, where several stools had been set up in the living room. Preview perched on a stool, balanced his guitar on his thigh, and started strumming. A man arrived with a set of bongo drums draped around his neck. He was brown, with short stubs of hair all over his head. He kissed Kianga, who was sitting on a stool shuffling through pages of music.

Abhay backed away. He felt like a fifth wheel. He wondered if Kianga invited all men to kiss her. Ellen appeared behind him and whispered, “Sit down here.” She had set up two chairs in the dining room, so they could look into the living room and be out of the way.

The rehearsal was irritating. Kianga and the two guys seemed unsure about whether they were a folk group, a reggae group, or a rock-and-roll band. Kianga had a beautiful voice: clear, true to the note, and unaffected. But her melodies were often drowned out by frantic drumming or guitar riffs.

Every so often Abhay glanced at Ellen, and noticed her gaze on him. She smiled, and he smiled back. As the sky grew dark outside the windows, Abhay wondered what this job with HOPE would be like.

The next day, during his lunch break from the bookstore, he rode his bike west, crossing over Interstate 405. The address turned out to be an old apartment building. Abhay wondered if he was in the wrong place, but he locked his bike, changed his shirt so he wouldn’t be too sweaty, climbed the stairs, and rang the doorbell.

A white man in his forties or fifties, slim and bald, opened the door. His face was creased, as though it had been folded up for a long while. He neither smiled nor held out a hand. “I’m Justin Time,” he said. “Come on in.”

Justin Time. Was the man serious?

Messy stacks of papers covered every available surface: a large round table in the middle of the room, a lone filing cabinet, smaller tables lining the walls, and the floor. Not what Abhay expected from an innovative, new environmental group.

“As you can see, I need a lot of help. Sit down here.” Justin moved a stack of papers off a chair. “What we’re doing now is cataloging the damage that has been done to Earth because of the human population explosion. There is so much information out there, and people are just blind to it. Blind.”

Abhay nodded. “I agree.” He was glad to meet someone in alignment with his own point of view. A large cobweb hung in the corner near the window, which let in a bit of light around the closed venetian blinds. He tried to push away the suspicion that Justin was not quite all there mentally. Maybe he was merely a bit eccentric.

“I’ve been collecting policy proposals, newspaper articles, magazine articles for years. And now I’m ready to launch my organization. My goal is to persuade all the males of our species to undergo a voluntary vasectomy. Women are included, too, but mainly I focus on men, because one man can do a lot of damage. Once people realize the destruction we’re causing, I think this solution will become self-evident.” Justin had a strange, clipped way of talking, and he didn’t seem to like making eye contact. “Anyway, I thought I’d start you off with this.” He lifted a stack of booklets from his side of the table and handed them to Abhay. “This organization does a book every year of planetary health indicators. Every one of the negative indicators can be tied directly to humans overrunning the planet. I want you to look through these and figure out how to organize it for the Web site.”

Abhay realized this wasn’t an interview. He had apparently already been hired.

“I’ll pay you in cash at the end of every week,” Justin said. “I don’t see that we need to get the government involved with this—do you?” Justin raised an eyebrow at him.