Darshan (44 page)

“It isn’t for me.”

“I’ll do it,” Livleen said.

“Easy for you,” Navpreet told her. “You have the least to give.”

“Don’t you care that this is hard for them?” Darshan asked.

“Don’t talk to me about what is hard for them,” she said angrily. “I know how hard things are for them, acting so miserable, all because of their own choices. You have had three years on your own when you did not once have to think about it. We never got a day without being reminded of what we owe them.”

“It is not a contest, Navpreet,” he said, trying to be gentle because he could see that she was genuinely upset.

She crossed her arms and kept her mouth tightly shut, staring straight ahead out the windshield with such aggravation in her pink cheeks and her turned-down eyebrows he thought she might actually cry.

~   ~   ~

 “You’re working too hard,” Elizabeth said, rubbing Darshan’s shoulders, straddling his back as he lay face down. She was wearing the ankle-length, halter dress he liked so much, her hair getting longer, brushing against his skin as she leaned into his body.

“I know,” he said sleepily, his cheek pressed against the pillow. “But once we get everyone situated, it will be much better.”

“You’ve been saying that for a while now. I hardly ever see you. It’s Stewart and me all the time. It’s not the same. We watched
Martin’s Laugh-In
without you yesterday, and it wasn’t that funny.”

He missed sleeping with her, the warm reassuring presence of her body beneath the covers. This was the first time in months he had not gone to 24th Street for the night. He had just come off the day shift and had only a few hours before the night one began. It was easier to stay near the hospital.

She was silent for a moment, and he could hear her breath in the stillness of her studio as she massaged him. “I’d like to meet them,” she said after a while. “Don’t you think it’s been enough time? It’s already November. I thought it would be fun to make them a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Her fingers were getting deep into his muscles. “I know,” he murmured. “It’s complicated. It’s too much.”

She bent, kissed his temple and continued massaging his shoulders, then worked her fingers down his spine. Closing his eyes, soon there was nothing at all, just a seamless, unnoticed shift from feeling her touch to a dreamless, weightless sleep.

~   ~   ~

“I think it’s you,” Elizabeth told Darshan, slopping mashed potatoes from a dish into a plastic container with a brisk, cold flick of her wrist. “Not them. I think they wouldn’t mind so much.”

He looked helplessly around at her studio, at the table and chairs she had borrowed from Stewart and crammed into the center of the room, the half-melted candles, the wine glasses, the cranberry sauce, and the untouched twenty-pound turkey centerpiece nestled in lettuce leaves. “I never told you they were coming,” he said.

“No, you didn’t. It’s my fault.” She locked a lid over the container and put the mashed potatoes in the fridge.

“I thought you had dinner at your mother’s.”

“Next year.”

“But I never told you—”

“I know.”

Trying to lighten the mood, he said, “There are too many of them anyway.”

“What?”

“Too many Toors. They wouldn’t have fit.”

When she did not smile, he tried kissing her cheek. She stiffened. Sighing, he quietly gathered up all the plates and utensils and put them in the cupboard while she refrigerated the rest of the food. They watched some television, sitting next to each other but not touching. When he left, she was sleeping.

“You are late,” Navpreet said when Darshan got home to 24th Street.

He breathed in deeply, the smell of the apartment reminding him of the main house at the lumber mill. It had been feeling more like home of late. Jai had fully settled the family in, covering the two beds in thick blankets, stocking the kitchen with plates, steel tumblers, and pots, and hanging photos and decorations. Everything smelled of washing and spices. The couch upholstery, the blankets, clothing, the walls themselves seemed to radiate the scent of Fiji.

“I am not late. You never asked me to take you anywhere.”

“And now I am late.”

Refusing to be baited, he smiled at her, then called to Jai down the hall.

“In here, beta,” his mother called from the kitchen.

“Sat sri akal, Bebe,” he said, joining her. “Where is Bapu?”

“Lying down. And Livleen went for a walk. You want some chai?”

“Just a quick cup,” he nodded as she pulled down a mug and strained the hot tea. “And one for Navpreet, too.”

He took both mugs into the living room and placed one on the table by his sister’s foot. He sat on his father’s hard chair, the only place, aside from the bed, where Manmohan could rest without too much pain.

She reached for her tea. “You are making me late,” she said again.

“It’s Thanksgiving. Everything is closed.” He blew into the steamy mug.

“I have plans.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Just give me a minute to sit. I need to sit here and drink my tea.”

She cautiously took a sip, grimacing as she burnt her tongue.

“I need you to take over my lab shift tomorrow,” he told her. He had recently begun working in Kaiser’s lab, learning the practical application of what he had been studying in school: hematology, microbiology, testing for glucose, cholesterol, drugs, and the condition of heart enzymes. Dr. Levi had been sad to see Darshan dropping shifts in pathology, but nonetheless wrote an impressive recommendation for a full-time job in the lab after graduation. “I could use one full night of sleep.”

“No,” she said. She had still not managed to make an impression on her bosses in the several months that she had been employed in the lab and was more than a little affronted by Dr. Levi’s high regard of her brother, as well as by Darshan’s easy rapport with her direct manager, Dr. Gerard. She had even gone so far as to accuse Darshan of sabotaging her future career in medicine when she saw the recommendation letter on his dresser.

He set his tea on the table. “It will give you an opportunity to work more closely with Gerard.”

She shrugged. “He likes me.”

“He doesn’t know you at all.”

“I spoke with him the other day.”

“How many more favors should I do for you before you help me once? What do any of us have to do for you to give even a little?”

“Did you know that I got accepted into Oxford?” she asked.

He shook his head.

She regarded him coolly. “I got accepted, but you were here so we
all
had to be here.”

In the silence of that moment, he saw that she was not simply refusing, but that she was enraged by his request, that she hated him for it.

A sudden and loud noise caused her to jump and scream. Darshan turned sharply toward the window at the sound of a collision down on the street, at the cacophony of metal slamming into metal. They both vaulted out of their seats, running to look.

“What was that?” Jai shouted from down the hall.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Darshan cried and bolted down the stairs and outside. His Falcon was shredded against the curb, the engine pressed up into the front window, the vinyl seats twisted and bent in a contorted tangle of chrome and metal paneling.

The driver of the van who had lost control and veered against the line of parked cars along 24th Street moaned and called for help, a cut above his eye bleeding badly.

“Can you get out?” Darshan asked, rushing over to him. He pried the van’s door open and took the man in his arms. “Let’s call someone.”

“How will I get anywhere now?” Navpreet shouted from the apartment above.

A crowd was gathering.

“Hey man,” the driver said groggily, holding a hand to his face as Darshan helped him stand. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

“Don’t worry,” Darshan said, the man’s arm draped around his shoulder. “No one has been seriously hurt. It is not a problem.”

But it was. There, shattered glass and crushed metal pushed right up onto the sidewalk, was the last vestige, the last memory of Darshan’s freedom, the last hope of flight.

Still Swallowed Whole

1970–1972

Family Tree

A massive open-jawed creature had come to Darshan in 1957, burrowing into his imagination, haunting him the whole of that year and far beyond, threatening to engulf him in its great cavernous gut. Death had manifested the creature, the death of a woman whom he had never met. She had known how dangerously close this monster loitered, tentacles extended ominously, brushing against the family, bringing enormous and calamitous consequences upon them all.

Sada Kaur’s existence, the discovery that Baba Singh once had a woman in his life, was a disquieting revelation for Darshan at the age of ten. His grandfather seemed far too remote for such intimacies, so rigid and uncompanionably aloof, which was likely the reason he had locked her away in India, to be unseen and unknown so that none of them would understand him to be only a man.

There had been a kirtan at the main house to honor Sada Kaur’s passing, and seventeen years later Darshan recalled that day as if there was no gap in time between then and now, the hairy shell of the coconut in his palm, the coldness of the mud under his bottom when he sat next to Baba Singh under the house, the slight give of earth as he placed the coconut between them. He could not say why he had believed a coconut would be an appropriate means to express his condolence. From up in the tree, when he saw his grandfather slip away from the kirtan and settle against a stilt under the house, a sudden rush of compassion forced upward from his chest to constrict his throat, making his eyes sting with gratitude. He had experienced it before, though not with any thematic consistency: Livleen’s birth, the happiness of Diwali. And there had been episodes after: the afternoons he watched from his shack as Jai hung the clothing on the main house’s balcony rail to dry, the days his father had been too weak after electroshock therapy to walk unaided to the car, and on the night Mohan was cast out of the house.

“Life will swallow you whole, Darshan,” his grandfather had said that day, planting the first seed of apprehension. “That is what she knew; it is what she told all of us.” Picking up the coconut, he held it out, gauging its weight.

He wandered off soon after, and Darshan had seen him only once more. On the evening before his grandfather’s flight to India, Vikram visited the main house to summon Darshan, saying gently, “If you have a moment, your dada is waiting for you at the farm. He wants a word.” The request, which sounded so capitulating, so unpatriarchal, also had the upsetting quality of a warning.

Baba Singh’s home on the dairy farm was dark, humid like trapped tears. Bending low, his face close, his skin weak and weary, the old man asked his grandson, “You think I will see her again?”

Darshan’s insides twisted with fear. “Should I know?”

“I thought you would.”

“How?”

Baba Singh’s eyes had lost focus, as though he were no longer there in that room. “Because I feel like we have met once before.”

“Dada,” Darshan whispered, his body stiff with terror.

Closing his eyes, Baba Singh smiled weakly, a thin, fatigued smile. “Everything is okay,” he said then, turning away. “You can go.”

Slim legs pumping hard the entire two miles home, Darshan had fled, bruising his right foot because he lost one of his sandals in his haste to get to the safety of his coconut tree, horrified because he understood more than he had been willing to admit.

The sensation of being devoured had always remained with Darshan, a residual impression on his mind like the incandescent outline of an overexposed photo. And now, after so many years, he dreamt of the beast once more. When he woke to the shrill ring of the rotary phone and went to the living room to find Manmohan dropping the receiver gently into its cradle, he was not surprised by what came next. “My father is dead,” Manmohan told the family. “He was seventy-two. He was alone in that house. We should all be very sorry about it.” He slowly rose from his chair and retreated to his bed where he remained for nearly two days, sick and growing older.

~   ~   ~

Manmohan’s mood deteriorated following Baba Singh’s death. His usually quiet severity escalated to impatient and irrational outbursts made worse by the tedium in which his body forced him to live. He snapped cantankerously about the intermittent hot and cold water for his baths, the taste of the city air in his food, the parks that were not green or lush enough, the hills he could not climb and which therefore limited his exploration, the contempt on people’s faces as they stared at him on the streets. He demanded better doctors and medicines and more visits to the East Bay where the Indian population had begun to congeal. He hated the new Ford station wagon that Darshan had bought after graduating from San Francisco State, paid for with more overtime at the lab. When he dropped heavily into the front seat, lacquered wooden cane stretched between his legs, he complained that his body was cramped in the narrow seat and that the window crank was too stiff.

Darshan did his best to sympathize; however, his efforts so contemptuously disparaged, it was challenging to constantly deflect the criticisms, particularly when he had such industrious plans to manage the family’s welfare. He had purchased an apartment complex south of Market on Howard Street in his parents’ names with money he managed to save despite Livleen’s meager contribution and the fact that Navpreet had steadfastly refused to share. Darshan intended to rent out the six units in order to provide a steady income for his parents who were in no physical condition to work, and yet Manmohan refused to accept it.

“No,” his father said as Darshan drove the family to see the building. With a stiff forefinger he violently tapped the bank statement for the account his son had opened for his parents, then furiously held up the property deed. “You did not ask me. You put your mother’s name on everything. I have never done that. I have always taken care of her.”