And Laughter Fell From the Sky (18 page)

“You’ll find another guy,” Rasika consoled.

“I’m going to find lots of other guys. I’m never going to limit myself to just one. Guys are for having fun with. They’re not for living with.” Jill tossed her comb onto the side table. “I’ll make my own money, live my own way, do my own thing, and pick up whatever man I want.”

Jill’s robe had become loose, and Rasika could see a bright blue sports bra with red trim. She said, “You look like Wonder Woman in that bra.”

Jill cast off her robe and planted her feet apart on the empty carpet in front of the sofa. Her panties were also bright blue. “I am Wonder Woman!” She flung her arms out.

Rasika tried to laugh and managed a stiff smile. “I wish I could be Wonder Woman,” she said, a bit sadly.

“Well, why can’t you? We’ll be twin Wonder Women. It’ll be great! You can get an apartment just like mine, and we’ll entice men to do our bidding.”

Rasika knew Jill had never really understood family ties. Jill’s father had abandoned the family when she was a small child. Jill had never seen him again. Her mother had remarried, and then divorced, and now lived alone nearby. Jill had no siblings and no cousins, at least none whom she cared to keep in touch with. Jill would never make life decisions based on whether or not her relatives would approve.

Jill picked up her robe, put it on, and sat down. “Rasika, you’re disappearing. You’re wearing a tan shirt and brown pants. It’s like camouflage. You hardly smile. You look like you’re about to go to sleep.”

“I’m OK.” She sat up straighter and made an effort to open her eyes wider.

“How about we run away together? We can quit our jobs, take all our savings, and go somewhere new. Someplace exciting. We’ll get jobs and start over. How about Hawaii? Or Miami? I want to go where I can live in my bathing suit. I only stayed in Ohio because I was in a serious relationship. Now I’m free. So what do you say?”

Rasika smiled. “You know I can’t.”

“What’s stopping you? We’re not kids anymore. You’re not going to get grounded if you do something your parents don’t approve of. You’re not going to have your allowance taken away. Why are you still trying to please them?”

“Because, Jill. They’re my parents. You don’t understand. My dad’s so happy about this marriage. He’s been walking around whistling. He never whistles. He said now he doesn’t have to worry about disappointing his mother.”

“His mother? Your grandmother?”

“Yeah. She never wanted him to live in this country. He’s her youngest child. After medical school in India, he came to the U.S. against her wishes. She kept asking him to come home and get married. She was so afraid he’d marry a foreigner. So finally, after he turned thirty, he did go home and agree to get married.”

“I can’t believe your mother agreed to have an arranged marriage. She’s so modern, so classy.”

“Everyone had arranged marriages back then, Jill. Most people in India still do.”

“Your mom’s really educated, isn’t she? I mean, she used to work at a college, right?”

“She has a master’s degree in biology. There are only girls in her family, and her father wanted all of them to be well educated.”

“So they got married, and they lived in India for a long time, right? Because, you were born there. Did she work in India? I don’t remember if you ever told me that.” Jill was sitting with her elbows on her knees and a puzzled dent on her forehead.

Rasika took a sip of coffee and tried to be as clear as she could. “After my mom got married, she pretty much had me and my brother right away. My dad tried to settle down in India, but he got so upset about the dirty condition of the hospitals in India, the lack of equipment, and the corruption. So he came back to the U.S., and my mother raised us in India for a while, and she didn’t work then. And when we all came here, she worked for a while as a temporary lecturer at Akron U.”

“That’s right! I remember that! Why’d she quit?”

“I think the low status of the job got to her. She didn’t feel like she had to do that kind of work, when she was a mother and a wife of a doctor. So she never really worked after that.”

“It’s hard for me to understand someone like your mother. She’s so educated, but she had an arranged marriage. Do you think your parents were in love when they got married?”

“That’s not the point, Jill. No one expected them to be in love.”

“Do they love each other now?”

“Of course. They’re married. They’re my parents.”

“So you think that’ll happen to you, too? You’ll get married to this person, and then later on, you’ll love him?”

Rasika closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about her parents’ relationship. That had nothing to do with her own marriage. “I like him already.”

“Well, it’s your tradition.” Jill sat back and waved her hand in the air. “If you understand it, I guess that’s good enough for me.”

“The way we’re doing it is really quite modern, Jill. If you want tradition, my dad’s mother is very traditional. She only went to school through eighth grade, and she got married at fourteen. She wasn’t even allowed to see her husband before they got married.”

“God. I never knew that.”

“I guess I never told you much about my family in India.”

“I remember hearing about your cousins, but you never told me about your grandmother, that’s for sure.”

“All my grandmother’s other children stayed in India; my dad is the only one who left. She doesn’t want her grandchildren marrying foreigners. So now, my dad feels like he’ll be satisfying her, because I won’t be marrying a foreigner.”

“Well, this guy might not be a foreigner to your grandmother, but isn’t he sort of a stranger to you? I remember when you started third grade. You had just come from India. You were Indian then. Now you’re American.”

“To my parents, I’m still one hundred percent Indian.”

“You’ve been so good, Rasika. You’ve always tried so hard to please your parents. You live at home, you don’t stay out late, you help your mother when she has parties.”

“But I have this whole secret life that I feel really awful about.”

“Your parents can’t expect to know about your sex life.”

“I’m not supposed to have a sex life at all, Jill. The life of an unmarried Indian woman should be a completely open book.”

“That’s crazy. Does anyone actually manage to live like that?”

“I’m sure my cousins do.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Girls are a lot more supervised in India.”

“So you’ve had a few flings. That’s nothing.”

“More than a few flings.”

Jill’s eyebrows went up. “What’re you hiding from me?”

Rasika shook her head. Jill knew about almost all of Rasika’s encounters. For Jill, what seemed like “a few” seemed to Rasika a never-ending, revolving list of sins and transgressions. “I’m ashamed of the way I’ve acted, Jill. My parents see things differently. Even if it had been only one man, my parents would think I was a whore.”

“Come on, Rasika. You’re twenty-five! What do they expect?”

“They expect me to have an arranged marriage to someone they pick out.”

“Are you agreeing to marry this guy just to please your grandmother?”

“This is the way we do things in our family, and I want to fit in.”

“What about your cousins in North Carolina? Have they gone off to India for arranged marriages?”

“All my cousins on my dad’s side have had arranged marriages. They’re all in India and all older than me. I’m the oldest cousin on my mom’s side. No one else is married yet. I’m supposed to set the good example.”

“So, the pressure’s on.”

Rasika had already received congratulatory phone calls from some of her aunts and uncles, and the praise felt good. “You are doing the right thing,” Ahalya Auntie had told her from North Carolina. “Happiness comes from obeying your parents.”

“What if you left with me?” Jill persisted. “What would happen then?”

“How, Jill? What would I do with my car? What about all my things? I can’t just abandon my clothes, and my bedroom furniture.”

“Why not? They have clothes in Hawaii. They have furniture wherever we’ll go.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“I can’t, Jill. You don’t know my parents; they’ll track me down. They’ll fly out to see me. My mother will cry. My father—I can’t even imagine what he’d do. He’d be so disappointed in me. Maybe he’d fall ill from the stress of it all. And then all the relatives will find out about it, and they’ll feel sorry for my parents.”

“What about your brother? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend? Aren’t your parents worried about that?”

Pramod had been dating a fellow student, Hannah, for the past several months. Rasika had met them for dinner once. She was a thin, intense white woman who seemed to study a lot. “My parents don’t know about her. Anyway, once Pramod is finished with his education, I guess they’ll work on finding a girl for him, too.”

“You think he’ll go for it?”

Rasika shrugged. “He’s going to be a doctor. They’re really happy about that. My dad wanted someone to follow in his footsteps, and it clearly wasn’t going to be me. So, if Pramod wanted to marry someone of his own choice . . . I don’t know . . . my parents might get over it.”

“Wouldn’t they get over it with you, too? Eventually?”

“I’m the only daughter. I’m the oldest. I have to do this.”

“Well, I still don’t get it.”

Jill couldn’t understand. Rasika was reluctant to even articulate her fear that if she, her father’s beloved daughter, were to align herself with someone her parents didn’t approve of, her father would no longer be able to love her.

Chapter 10

A
bhay stopped by Kianga’s house occasionally after work. He knew that in order to quiet his constant thoughts of Rasika he had to keep himself busy and occupied with other people. Alone, he started to brood about Rasika.

He didn’t have many friends in Portland yet. His coworkers at the bookstore already had their own partners and friends. And his work with Justin Time was mostly solitary. Justin wasn’t always present. Abhay spent what seemed like hours alone in Justin’s dim apartment. He summarized articles and books, and added them to the online database he had created. He felt like a centipede, crawling among the tomes of paper.

The work was frustrating, mostly. Everything he read pointed to the fact that Justin was right, yet Abhay wasn’t sure that compiling all this information was really going to convince anyone to do anything. Justin promised that, soon, they would start working on events and publicity.

Kianga and Ellen always seemed happy to see him. He couldn’t quite figure out the situation at their house. There were often several other people around, and some of them seemed to live in various rooms of the house.

One Tuesday evening in late October, he went over to help Kianga carve her pumpkins. Abhay’s job was to cut out the stems and scoop out the seeds, and to haul the pumpkins outside after Kianga finished carving. Kianga had a set of special, thin knives, and she took the pumpkins very seriously, drawing her designs on the orange globes first before cutting. Her pumpkin faces were beautiful and ethereal, full of swirling eyebrows and smiles. They created a row on either side of the driveway. Kianga planned to put the candles in the next day—Halloween.

They ordered in Chinese food for dinner. Abhay walked to the corner store to get some beer. After dinner, Ellen went to her room, and Kianga gave Abhay an intimate glance with her beautiful, cool eyes, and invited him out to the backyard, where there was a hammock on the tiny back patio. They lay side by side on the swinging hammock in the chilly night. Abhay could still smell the sweet vegetably scent of pumpkin on his hands.

“How’s it going with Justin?” Kianga asked.

“Okay, I guess. I can see this work is really important, and I’m the only one doing it in the entire world, as far as I can tell.” Abhay felt something soft and fluffy on his chest. He held it up.

“What’s that?” Kianga asked.

“A dust bunny. I think. Sometimes I feel like I’m turning into dust, working in that messy apartment.” He dropped the fluff over the side of the hammock.

“Justin’s always been kind of a pack rat. We had him keep our records for the Green Party, because we knew he’d never get rid of anything.” She laughed. “Maybe you can clean up the place for him.”

“He doesn’t want me messing with his stuff. He’s really particular about it.”

“I was afraid of that. I was hoping this organization would bring him out of his shell.”

“I don’t think he wants to come out of his shell,” Abhay said.

“Well, don’t give up yet. I’ve always thought he had interesting ideas. I think he just needs someone to help him connect his ideas to the real world.”

“He does have good ideas,” Abhay agreed.

The traffic from the freeway had died down somewhat and was less apparent in the back of the house. Abhay wondered why Kianga was so interested in helping Justin. He was quite a bit older than she, and somewhat musty smelling. He couldn’t imagine she had romantic ideas about him.

After several moments, Kianga reached for his fingers and held them lightly. “Do you want to tell me about your parents? And your childhood?”

“I’ll tell you if you care.”

“I do. I’m always interested in knowing where my friends come from.”

As they swayed in the hammock, he told her about how his father had gotten his Ph.D. in the United States and had then gone back to India to marry his mother. He told her about living in a little dying rural town near Kent, and how he had run with a pack of other kids who lived in the same town-house complex. “It was great,” he recalled. “There were these woods surrounding the town houses, and we’d explore in there, and pick wild blueberries. There was this little muddy pond we’d go to. We skipped rocks and caught toads. In the summer we’d go into whoever’s house was nearby, and make sandwiches, and eat our lunches outside. My parents never knew anything about this. Dad was too busy with work to pay attention to what I did, and Mom was too busy with housework and my baby sister, I guess.”

He told her about the move to Kent when he was twelve, how he had trouble making friends in junior high school, how he had developed a crush on a beautiful girl, much taller than he, and how other kids had somehow found out about it and teased him the entire year.

“Hm.” Kianga pressed his fingers in sympathy.

He looked up at the dark gray sky through the branches of a tree. There were lights all around them, from living room windows and yard lamps, and he could see Kianga’s face glowing in the dimness. He told her about all the silent family dinners he had endured, about his trouble deciding on a college major, about living at Rising Star. He turned his head against the rough ropes of the hammock to see her smiling gently on him, and he felt she could see right into him.

“Do you still keep in touch with any of the folks from the commune?” Kianga asked.

“No,” he said. “I had a bad experience there with a woman that I’m trying to forget about. And it’s hard to correspond privately with anyone at Rising Star. No one has their own personal phone or e-mail address, and the mail is sorted centrally, so if I contact anyone, the entire community’ll know.”

“Don’t you miss that lifestyle?”

He thought about this. “When I first got there, I was so full of hope. So sure it was the right thing for me. I think I miss that feeling more than anything. By the time I left I was sick of the place.”

When a member left, it was never a happy occasion at the community, never a time for a party or sharing food or dancing. He had packed on his own, the treasurer had solemnly handed him $100 in exit cash, and the woman in charge of the communal cars had driven him to the bus station. And that was that.

“In fact, now that I’m telling you about my childhood, I’m realizing something,” Abhay said. “I’m wondering if my quest to live in a commune was an attempt to recapture something from my childhood.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I had this wonderful communal experience as a child, sharing food, sharing adventures. And when that all ended, I was shoved into an environment where my vulnerabilities were exposed and mocked. So I wonder if through the commune I was trying to get back to that happy time of my childhood.”

“I think you’re overanalyzing,” Kianga said. “Communal living makes sense: it’s cheaper and it’s more energy efficient. There doesn’t have to be any deep psychological reason for it. Isn’t that how people in India live, in families all together?”

He thought about his summer trips to Bangalore as a child. “Yeah, I guess I never realized that. My grandparents and my uncle and his family all lived in the same house, and when we went it was like a party every day. I remember one time sleeping with a whole bunch of cousins on the floor of the living room. I was maybe seven or eight, and the house was full of people. Relatives had come to Bangalore for someone’s wedding—I can’t remember whose—and it was like a big slumber party. My cousins and I ran around the house and yard, playing hide-and-seek, marbles, cricket.”

“So maybe communal living reminds you of the way your family in India lives.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I never thought of that until just now. And out there in Ohio, we’ve been all by ourselves.”

“When were you in India last?”

“It’s been years. As I got older I found it boring to spend my entire summer in Bangalore. I couldn’t ride my bike because there was too much traffic, and there weren’t any public libraries, and my cousins were usually at school all day when we went because their school vacations were different. My parents and my sister went when I was seventeen, and I just stayed home.”

A nearby light was shut off, and he and Kianga were now lying in a pleasant grayness. She rolled onto her side, lifted an arm, and let it drift down onto his chest, where it lay warm and solid. He stroked her forearm, and soon was stroking more of her. He was melding into her warm body, and his breath was mixing with hers. He was part of the night air, part of the hammock, part of her, and she was part of him.

The next morning he woke up alone in Kianga’s bedroom. She had a loft bed. He sat up and looked down at the room below, at her desk near the window with its stack of textbooks, a few large crystals, and a potted plant trailing dark green leaves. The closed white curtains let the sunlight in. The flowered dress she had worn yesterday was on the carpet below him. She had let it fall from the loft bed last night. He remembered its softness, and liked seeing it lie there in disarray. The room smelled faintly of incense, sweeter and different from what his mother used at home during her pooja. He smiled to himself. Kianga was definitely the type of woman to fit his life. How could he have possibly gotten so attached to Rasika, who was completely unlike him?

He climbed down from the loft and put on his clothes. He needed to get back to his place to get ready for work. This morning he had a meeting with Justin, and in the afternoon he had a shift at the bookstore. And in the evening, perhaps he’d be back here, making dinner with Kianga, swaying in the hammock again, eventually drifting to her room.

In the hallway, he almost ran into Ellen as she exited the bathroom. She was holding her toothbrush and towel. “Hi!” he said cheerfully.

“Sorry.” She darted around him, peering at the floor. He was a little taken aback at her unfriendliness.

He finished in the bathroom and floated down the hall to look for Kianga. He imagined wrapping his arms around her and continuing their blissful connection of the night before.

In the kitchen, Kianga was at the stove, stirring a pot of something. She called, without turning around to face him, “You want raisins?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “What’re you making?” And through the window above the sink he heard a male voice say, “Yeah.”

Kianga turned to Abhay and smiled. Preview stepped through the back door, holding a cucumber and a bell pepper. He nodded to Abhay, washed the vegetables at the sink, and started slicing them at the island counter.

Abhay felt useless standing in the middle of the kitchen. He’d thought he was going to gaze into Kianga’s eyes while they ate a private breakfast.

“You got here early,” Abhay said as Preview arranged cucumber slices on a plate.

“I live here.” Preview scratched his head of matted hair.

Kianga was spooning oatmeal with raisins into four bowls. “Abhay, go ahead and put on some water for tea,” she instructed. He thought about walking out the door, but he had to eat breakfast anyway. He just needed to be cool about the situation—whatever it was. He strolled over to the sink and filled the teapot. By this time Ellen was in the kitchen. She stood on a stool next to him, took several boxes of tea bags out from a high cabinet, and set them on the counter. After he turned on the stove he picked up the boxes of tea bags and took them into the dining room. Ellen was setting out spoons next to the bowls of oatmeal. “Would you bring the honey?” Ellen asked softly. “It’s next to the stove.” He found a jar of honey and a spoon and brought them out.

Then, not knowing what else to do, he stood near the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. Preview set out bottles of olive oil, vinegar, and herbs on the counter in front of him.

“So, Preview,” Abhay said. “What do you do for work?”

“Well, right now I’m kinda between jobs.” He splashed olive oil and vinegar into an empty jelly jar. “Kianga got me a temporary gig helping a disabled woman who’s making this film about disabled street performers. I carry her equipment and help set it up.” He added generous pinches of herbs with his fingers, capped the jelly jar, and shook it vigorously.

Kianga came in the back door holding stems of bright red tubular flowers, which she set into a drinking glass filled with water and brought into the dining room. “I needed to thin these plants anyway,” she explained to Abhay. “They grow like crazy. The hummingbirds love them.”

Preview set his plate of vegetables, drizzled with dressing, on the table. Abhay thought about slipping out without eating, and perhaps never coming back to this house again. Ellen smiled at him and said, “Come and sit down.” So he sat next to Ellen and across from Preview, who was next to Kianga. Preview laid a hand on Kianga’s bare shoulder and massaged it carefully. Kianga and Preview exchanged a long glance. Abhay noticed Ellen gazing at him in the same way. He gobbled down his oatmeal as fast as he could.

Abhay stayed away from Kianga’s place for the rest of the week. On Friday evening he went with his roommate, Victor, and Victor’s girlfriend, Tiffany, to see a movie called
Sicko,
about everything wrong with the American health care system.

“Our country’s going to hell,” Victor said when they exited the theater. He had his arms around Tiffany, and she was nuzzling his neck. “Canada’s got a way better system than we have, so does France, even Cuba’s better off than us. Those governments take care of their people. We spend our money on wars and shipping arms to dictators.” Victor gave Tiffany a sloppy kiss. Abhay looked away.