Darshan (42 page)

“They might not like it at first, but I’m sure they love you, and that’s more important,” she said. “What else is there?”

“Well, there’s you. You aren’t Indian.”

“I believe that’s fairly apparent.”

“You know what I mean.”

She gave him a sideways smile.

“It’s like Colleen,” he said. “Your sister does not like me much.”

“That’s because she thinks you’re a playboy.” Elizabeth laughed, like the idea was ridiculous. “She doesn’t know you like I do.”

“It might also be because I am different and the whole other reason is just an excuse.”

“I don’t know, Darshan. You’d have to ask her that.”

“I just don’t want to disappoint my father.”

“Dating me is a disappointment?” She was not angry yet, but he could see the warmth toward him dimming.

“Indians don’t date non-Indians.”

Her face darkened. “So you have enough guts to suggest my sister is a racist, but you won’t challenge that same kind of crap if it’s coming from your family?”

“It isn’t the same. This is cultural.”

“I see,” she said stiffly.

“You knew that. We talked about it.”

The hardness in her face softened into hopelessness. “Well, my mom likes you,” she said a little futilely.

He put his arm around her shoulder and she leaned in. Something about the way she sunk so willingly into him, the way her hair smelled like herbal tea, made him want to stop talking, to just enjoy her. He did not expect to like her so completely. Sometimes, because of her, he was more at home in San Francisco than he had ever been in Fiji. It was true that he often missed his high school classmates, the lazy afternoons at the beach doing his homework in the Falcon, or building things with Junker Singh. But life in Fiji had been full of unspoken and severe expectation, and the very real threat of being cast out if he did not obey. Here, with her, every second was without condition, and every part of it that differed from the islands—the big cars and wide lanes, the millions of people, concerts, and road trips—became home. And yet it was also dishonest and dishonorable.

“I remember a time in Fiji,” he told Elizabeth. “I was maybe twelve. It was after school, and I was in Suva. I wanted a frozen juice stick so I bought one and went outside to wait for the bus to take me to my father’s lumber mill. Just as I opened the wrapper, I saw him down the street walking toward me. He must have been in the city on business. As soon as I saw him I panicked. I thought that if he caught me with the juice stick I would get in trouble because I hadn’t asked him if it was okay to have one. So I threw it under the bench. But he saw me. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked and went inside and bought me another one.”

“I don’t understand,” Elizabeth said.

“It always surprised me when he was nice to me, when he wasn’t angry. I was waiting for his anger all the time. I still am. One day he will hate me for something.” He sighed. “My father will not understand you. He cannot assess your value because he does not know what village you are from, who your relatives are, what kind of name you have in the community. You do not even
have
a community. He will not understand how I could have accepted this.”

Elizabeth moved over, no longer snuggling next to him. The bus squeaked to a stop. Several passengers boarded. As the bus pulled away, he wished she would come closer again, but she did not. She was staring at the glass, her expression flat and lifeless. He was not sure if she was watching the buildings go by outside, or if she was observing his reflection as he endeavored hard not to appear ashamed and embarrassed, for himself and also for his father.

~   ~   ~

In the months before August, Darshan requested as many overtime shifts as he could manage between classes. Pathology had always been largely understaffed and Dr. Levi welcomed the additional support. “It’s horrible,” he said. “People keep dying and you and I are the only ones to pick up the pieces, quite literally.”

It concerned Darshan that he had no clear sense of how much money Manmohan would bring. By Fiji standards the Toors had been relatively wealthy, but that wealth meant little in the Unites States. He had learned this after his first two months in San Francisco when the five-hundred dollars his father had given him had disappeared on the most basic of necessities.

Every dime Darshan earned after receiving the brief letter from Manmohan went directly into a savings account for his family’s arrival, and every free second was spent in the morgue. Concerts at the Fillmore, strolls with Elizabeth through Golden Gate Park, learning how to play baseball with Stewart, or weekend trips to Yosemite: these were the activities that defined a San Francisco he had once visited but had since left, one that existed in a parallel dimension, where he could see an alternate him laughing and carefree, but in which this Darshan could no longer participate. Manmohan’s letter had thrust him into a San Francisco that more resembled the lumber mill in Fiji, a place of responsibility and obligation.

In July he found an apartment on 24th Street in the Mission District big enough to accommodate his parents, his sisters, and himself. The rent was appealing, but the unit was littered with broken and abandoned furniture. It was covered in the previous tenant’s moldy food and garbage, and dried, flattened mouse droppings were ground into the floorboards.

“This is disgusting, man,” Stewart said, pinching his nose closed. “You sure you want to bring your parents here?” He was wearing old sweat pants that hung long and loose on his tall body.

“The landlord gave me twenty-five dollars off the rent if we clean it ourselves and keep the trash area at the side of the building tidy,” Darshan said. “It won’t be so bad once it’s clean. And we can repair a lot of this furniture.”

“If you say so. I’ll get the tools,” his friend said, descending the creaky stairs.

“We should let in some air,” Elizabeth suggested, leaning into the frame of the bay window to shove open the windows in the living room, the brightest, most open area of the apartment. The shape of her body in the light was silhouetted through the hospital scrubs she was wearing. A gust of wind whistled through the screens.

He went down the hallway that stretched away from the street toward the two bedrooms, the kitchen, and the bathroom in the rear, opening all of the windows. When he returned to the living room, Elizabeth was gazing outside down to the street. She loved to people watch. He imagined it was quite different from up high, the people below smaller and more vulnerable. He thought that it might be possible to really truly see a person like that, without getting tangled in all the personal drama that always got in the way up close.

She gathered her hair at the back of her neck, twisted it, and pinned it up with a large clip. Turning toward him, she smiled, absently brushing away her bangs. He looked away because he knew the smile was forced. They had argued that morning.

“Do you want to come?” he had asked her over a cup of coffee. “I could use some help.”

“Not really.”

Swallowing a sip, he frowned, puzzled by her mood. “Did you make other plans?”

“No.”

“Is something wrong?”

She opened a book. “I just don’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not important to me. We finally have a day off, and you want me to spend it cleaning rat shit for your parents who I’m not allowed to meet.”

He dumped the rest of his coffee in the sink, shaking his head. “Can’t you be a little patient with me?”

She looked at him, sighing in resignation and slamming her book shut. Standing, she wiggled out of her nightgown. Searching in her closet for an old pair of scrubs, she pulled them out and gave him a withering look as if to say,
Fine, I’ll go.
Whipping the pants in the air with a snap to unfold them, she pointed at her portable stereo. “At least grab that,” she had told him.

Now, as she stood by the window, looking at him expectantly, his mood lightened at the thought of the radio, and he ran down to get it from Stewart’s truck, setting it in the hallway near an outlet and flipping it on before they began working.

Junker Singh’s toolkit had been very useful over the last three years, both for minor repairs at his boarding room and at Elizabeth’s, but the job ahead of them required something more serious. So with tools Darshan had purchased at the corner hardware store, the three of them labored hard during the following weeks, repairing the heating unit, mending pipes, changing light switches, scrubbing the floors, and restoring whatever abandoned furniture they were able to salvage. Darshan’s spirits were low while they worked. So absorbed with every detail of the apartment, terrified that nothing would be good enough, nothing perfect enough to balance out his father’s fury, he had to force smiles whenever Elizabeth and Stewart sang stupidly to The Temptation’s “I Can’t Get Next to You,” their paintbrushes sloshing white flecks onto the sheetrock and splattering the stereo as they mocked each other.

“Is that how they taught you to sing in the convent?” Stewart had asked her once, accusing her of being off-key.

“Listen to yourself,” she retorted. “Maybe the nuns could teach you something.”

“I wouldn’t mind a bit, being surrounded by all those holy women.”

“Why don’t you ever sing?” Elizabeth asked Darshan. “I’ve never heard you sing before.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he had told her, trying to sound playful despite his somber mood.

The evening before
The Oreana
was scheduled to dock, after they put away all the tools and locked up the apartment, Elizabeth and Stewart were also finally struck by the reality of what was coming next. Quiet now, they were no longer laughing, no longer cracking jokes. The three of them went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner, subdued and downcast.

“So we’re probably not going to see much of you after this,” Stewart said to his friend.

Darshan sipped his water. “Maybe just at first,” he replied as the waiter set down their platters of carne asada.

“You really won’t say a word about her to your folks?”

“Stewart,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head and squeezing a lime over her meat.

Darshan pushed his plate aside, not hungry.

“All right, there’s no need to get tense,” Stewart said, reaching for some napkins. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

Elizabeth took a small bite of her food.

Darshan jabbed his fork into his carne asada. Ever since he could remember, he had always believed that family should be the utmost priority, that fathers deserved absolute devotion. Until now, that fundamental faith had never been challenged. He had never been faced with a choice between the Toors and someone else. He had not known such a choice was possible, and most times the notion of family was carved so deeply into him, it did not seem like a choice at all. Keeping his eyes on his food because he could not look at her, keenly aware that Elizabeth was doing the same, he already knew—if it really came down to it—who he would choose.

~   ~   ~

The Oreana
loomed large on the waterfront. The massive steel ocean liner groaned against the dock, casting a shadow across the parking lot where a flurry of disembarked passengers embraced loved ones and lugged their baggage to their cars. Darshan regarded the ship with foreboding, also aware of the city behind him, that daunting stretch of homes and offices, of city streets and big cars, of highways and land that continued on eastward for over three-thousand miles, where life was lived so differently from the closed colonial community of Fiji.

Stewart clutched Darshan’s shoulder in awe. “Check out the hairy size of that boat,” he said.

“Do you see them?” Darshan asked.

“What am I looking for?”

“Turbans.”

Stewart pointed over the many heads flooding off the gangplank, and the two friends slowly made their way through. The crowd thinned near the ship as the last of the passengers stepped down. Before leaving, several men in turbans waved at a man standing alone at the foot of the gangplank, and Darshan realized it was his father. Manmohan was surrounded by a number of suitcases and trunks. He gestured towards the men, then gazed toward the end of the docks at the horizon on the Pacific Ocean.

Darshan stopped, surprised and pained. He opened his mouth to speak, but he had no words for this man who was so hunched over, his head peeking out turtle-like from the shell of his body that was still big but no longer strong, leaning so heavily on a cane. At fifty-three years old, Manmohan’s beard was now almost entirely white, the darker hairs scant, as though someone had taken a pencil and drawn them in to defiantly suggest there was still some youth remaining. He wore a warm flannel beneath his button-up coat, a thick scarf that exaggerated the strange forward thrust of his neck, and trousers that were too big for him. Slowly he turned, eyes alighting in recognition at the sight of his son.

Darshan rushed quickly over to hide the shock he knew was written on his face. He wrapped his arms awkwardly around his father’s shoulders.

“Darshan!” Jai cried, struggling with a suitcase as she made her way down the gangplank. She dropped the bag to embrace him. She was a tinge grayer along her temples, and there were more lines around her mouth. She was familiarly dressed in her usual salwaar kameez, her chuni drawn around her neck, another thicker shawl for warmth wrapped about her shoulders.

She released him, pushing him arms-length away to assess him. “Your hair,” she whispered, covering her mouth, scandalized.

Darshan self-consciously touched the top of his head, his face growing warm with shame. “It was necessary.” He glanced at his father, fear choking his throat. The bags under Manmohan’s eyes made him seem menacing and unforgiving. His father made no comment.

Through the portal, Navpreet and Livleen stepped onto the gangplank, each holding a piece of luggage. At nineteen and seventeen, they were so unlike the little girls Darshan remembered.

“The king himself,” Navpreet said, walking down the plank. She had made an ardent attempt to look American, wearing a cardigan and custom-made suede skirt, a wide headband in her hair like those modeled in the magazines Elizabeth sometimes flipped through on weekends. She glanced at Manmohan, then back at Darshan. “Nice haircut,” she said.