Quarantine: Stories (5 page)

Darnell wants to have a swim. I tell him I’d like to take a walk, to look at the town one last time.

Even as I leave the hotel and am standing across from the shop, I am not sure I will stop to see Carlone. His brothers are outside, sitting in their plastic chairs, but Carlone is not. I could walk right by.

Instead, I stop. The brothers smirk as I pass them and enter. Carlone is sitting behind a glass counter, arranging paintings. He behaves as though nothing has happened, as if I were just any other customer, stopping in casually.

We are alone. The brothers are outside.
Guarding the door,
I think. After a few minutes, one of the brothers brings us tea from the street. I sip, even though I don’t trust it. I never drink tea from street vendors. It isn’t safe.

Carlone removes several paintings from beneath the glass case and spreads them out before me. They look very much like the paintings Rajesh showed us the day before. In fact, there is even one exactly like the triptych Rajesh claimed was his original design: the three animals in front of the three palaces.

I ask Carlone which of the many pieces he himself has painted. He picks out several, haphazardly, without looking.

He quotes some prices, without my asking, multiplying the time by an hourly rate which is lower than Rajesh’s, scribbling down the calculations on a scrap of paper.

“I told you before, I am not going to buy.”

Carlone looks at me. He puts down the pencil and pushes the scrap paper aside.

“What is he to you: Darnell?”

“He is an old school friend.”

“I think he is more than your school friend.”

Before leaving America, Darnell and I read in
Lonely Planet
that homosexuality is illegal in India, punishable potentially by life in prison. Other travelers told us not to worry. They said, no one is ever prosecuted, especially tourists. I consider telling Carlone the truth.

“He is a very good school friend,” I finally say. My mother would approve of my discretion.
Why take chances?

Carlone looks like he is going to say something else. I get up and start walking toward the door. I think he is going to stop me, or maybe his brothers will out front, but no one does. When I turn around, I see Carlone calmly putting away the paintings beneath the glass.

R
ajesh has packaged the paintings well. They are sandwiched between cardboard, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, and secured with several layers of clear, heavy packaging tape. The shopping bag is from a toy store that bears the name and the image of Sai Baba, a beloved prophet from the turn of the century, who has been co-opted to hawk everything from stainless steel cookware to Internet services (Sai Baba Cyber Café!).

I hand Rajesh payment in an envelope from our hotel. I have written his name in beautiful calligraphy letters. But he doesn’t notice, or at least he doesn’t comment on it. I had made a special effort. I had wanted him to say, “Sid, I didn’t know. You are an artist, too.”

He opens the envelope right away and counts the money. I have written him a note on hotel letterhead: “Thank you for your beautiful paintings and for your friendship. Good luck in the future.”

“I like the way you have written this,” he says. “I can show this to other tourists. They will be impressed someone staying at such a fancy hotel has bought my paintings, and then they will want to buy, too.”

As he says this, he is already looking past us at some new people entering the café.

W
eeks later, back in America, after having traveled through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, after hiking to the Valley of Flowers in the Himalayas and visiting Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, after having stopped in London three days to break up the long return journey and to visit a friend, we finally open Rajesh’s package, which we have been carrying in our backpacks. We carefully cut away the heavy shipping tape.

It is empty. There are no paintings. There is nothing between the cardboard.

Darnell says, “Maybe he forgot,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe it, even as he says it.

A few days later, Darnell remembers about the French gallery with the website, the one Rajesh said featured some of his paintings. “Maybe we can find out something about Rajesh through the website.”

We can’t remember the name of the gallery, but we think we’ll find it if we type Rajesh’s information into a search engine. We include his name, the town, the word “artist.”

There is nothing about the French art gallery, but something else pops up, something called “Men of India.” The link takes us directly to a profile.

The text reads:

Name:
Rajesh

Age:
19

Height:
175 cm

Weight:
68 kg

Zodiac Sign:
Taurus

Interests:
Meeting people. Artist. Travel. Top and also bottom. Everything.

Where to find me:
German Café or Savage Garden

I remember Rajesh’s defense of the German owner, the fat man in the silk kurta with the handsome young Indian:
He is a nice man.

A photograph accompanies the profile. In it, Rajesh is wearing a pair of jeans, not the Diesel jeans, but another pair. This must have been before he acquired them.

He is beltless, shirtless, shoeless. He is leaning against a stone archway.

His hands are in his pockets, his arms straight and his elbows locked, so that his jeans are pushed deliberately low on his hips. The edge of his pubic hair is just visible.

He is smiling. It is an expression I have come to know: a smile that is not really a smile. He is squinting. The light is bright on his face.
Another day without rain.

I recognize the stone archway Rajesh is leaning against. It is the archway to the courtyard of his house, viewed from the street, the one we walked through when we visited him and he showed us his paintings. Through it, somewhere in the background, out of the camera’s view, are his sisters in the small, dark room with the large TV; his mother, bedridden, behind a closed door; his brother, bouncing a rubber ball, losing control of it periodically, running in and out of the frame of the photo.

I print the picture, along with the text that accompanies it, and put it in one of the frames I was saving for Rajesh’s paintings. In the other frame, I put the cartoon sketch Rajesh drew in my notebook that first day. The elephant.
Strength.
I hang both on our living room wall.

Soon afterward, we are having a friend over for dinner, a woman Darnell knows from work. She notices the pictures and spends a long time looking at them, wondering, perhaps why they are so prominently displayed: an ad from the Internet and an amateurish sketch. Finally, she asks, “What are these?” “Artifacts,” I say. “It’s a funny story.”

E
veryone told her this is what she should want, her children, her grandchildren, even her friends back in Bombay, whom her children only let her call once a month, international long-distance still being so expensive. When she told Mrs. Gupta (actually
Princess
Gupta, who lived in a lovely flat above the pricey pizza parlor on Marine Drive) that her children wanted her to take an exam to become a citizen, Mrs. Gupta clicked her tongue and said, “Ranjan,
darling
, just do what they say. At our age, what else can we do?”

Easy for Mrs. Gupta to say. She had money: enough to stay in Bombay even after her husband died. No need to burden her only child, a handsome cardiologist in Atlanta, married to a white woman, living in such a magnificent house that it was photographed by
Architectural Digest
(the son’s good taste, not his wife’s). So what if Mrs. Gupta had needed to rent her ground floor to a noisy pizza parlor? Three stories were too many for her. And if the noises were sometimes too loud, if the kids continued to stream in and out later and later, their coffers of black money from Mummy and Daddy deeper and deeper, well, then Mrs. Gupta could run the rumbling A/C and ceiling fans in the summer, and in the winter she could sleep with earplugs. Mrs. Gupta, Ranjan thought, had to admit her sacrifices were small.

For Ranjan Shah, things had not been so easy. Sure, she’d once had money, but her husband’s untimely death (he was just forty-seven) had ushered in an era of shrinking apartments, a smaller one every few years, until she was finally living in just one room and a bath, and then, one day, when Ranjan was in her eighties, even that was more than she could afford.

So her children, a daughter and three sons, brought her to America and passed her around like a hot potato: from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to Bethesda, Maryland, from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Wheeling, West Virginia. She spent exactly three months at each house, then it was time to board a plane or train to travel to the next. Since she spent the same three months at the same houses each year, she came to associate each one with a season. Even when she lost track of the days, she knew when it was time to switch houses by the colors of the leaves and the temperature of the air against her face.

R
anjan was at her second son’s house in Poughkeepsie when the World Trade Center was bombed. She was alone at home, watching the towers fall on the large, flat-panel television. She had lived through violent times—first, World War Two, then Partition—but something about seeing the destruction on such a large screen in the living room made it all seem so much more immediate and real, and she was frightened. She tried calling her son at his office, but when she lifted the receiver, she realized she had forgotten the number. She was forgetting a lot of things these days.

A few months later, her daughter, Swati, broached the subject of citizenship.

“Mummy, who knows what will happen in the next few years. Better you become a citizen. Then, no matter what happens, no one can make you leave.”

Ranjan couldn’t think of what could happen to make someone want to send her away.

“What does this mean,
citizen
?” Ranjan asked. Her English was not good. Her husband and children had spoken fluently, even in India, but Ranjan found she could never quite learn.

“We are all citizens here,” Swati said. “All your children, grandchildren. You must become a citizen, too. You want to stay here in America with us, don’t you?”

Ranjan nodded. She had nowhere else to go.

Of all her children’s houses, Ranjan enjoyed Swati’s best, even though she felt that it was inappropriate for a mother to live with her daughter, even for part of the year—especially with so many sons available.

Most of her grandchildren were grown: in college or off in the world making lives of their own. All her children worked, as did their spouses. Ranjan found herself alone most days in large, drafty houses with big-screen televisions, and multiple remote controls she could never remember how to work.

Once, she was blamed for spoiling a flat-panel television, the very same television on which she’d watched the towers fall. Her second son and his wife returned home one night and the picture was all snow. Her son and his wife stood in front of the television, and the wife shook her head and said, “Your mother must have done something.” Much later, after they sent the television to the manufacturer, they found out the damage was caused by a power surge. No one apologized to Ranjan.

She rarely left the house, except sometimes in the early evenings when she’d wander along the streets of the subdevelopment, without fear she’d get lost, since all the streets led in circles.

In Swati’s house, at least in the last couple of years, she had company. Swati’s son, Pradeep, had been home. When he first finished college, he had needed somewhere to stay while he looked for a job. “A couple of months,” he had said. But a couple of months turned into a year and a year into two, and now he was home a second fall with no immediate prospects of leaving.

Ranjan knew it was unbecoming for a healthy, grown man to be home all day, to not be working. She thought he must either be lazy or a little stupid. She was ashamed. But she was happy for the company.

Pradeep’s Hindi was no better than his grandmother’s English, much worse in fact, but they found a pidgin language in which to communicate, and what they couldn’t find words for, they managed to communicate in gestures. Pradeep became so used to the pidgin language that sometimes he would forget and try to speak it with his parents or, worse, his friend, Mike, who would have to remind him, “I
do
speak English as a first language.”

Ranjan told her grandson rambling stories about his family, his mother and uncles, their mischievous pasts (his mother accidentally burnt down her dorm!), even stories about her own childhood, the daughter of a diamond merchant in a remote province in the north. At first, Pradeep seemed interested in these stories. He even said one day he’d put them all in a book. This scared Ranjan and for a while afterward she stopped telling him stories. But eventually her need for human interaction overcame her sense of familial modesty.

After a while, Pradeep began to lose interest in his grandmother’s stories, and eventually he stopped coming to sit beside her on the living-room sofa. Instead, he rose late and spent long afternoons in front of the computer playing video games or idly surfing the Internet, and when his grandmother came to see him and put her thin hand on his shoulder, he said in as nice a voice as he could manage, “Nani, please leave me alone. I’m working.”

N
o one thought it would be easy for her to pass the citizenship exam, least of all Ranjan. Swati told Pradeep that he could earn his keep by helping his grandmother prepare. So eight weeks before she was scheduled to appear for the exam, Pradeep started to prep her. Her days were organized around the exam.

On the wall at the foot of her bed, Pradeep hung an American flag, large enough that it occupied most of the wall. He wanted it to be the first thing she saw when she woke and the last thing before she went to sleep. On the wall above her dresser, he taped a portrait of George W. Bush. On the other wall, he put up a poster listing all the presidents, including their pictures and names and dates of service, in writing too small for Ranjan to read, even with her glasses.

He bought her a CD-alarm clock, which he placed on the night table, and set it so that each morning at seven a.m. it would play the national anthem. It was sung by a skinny black woman Pradeep had pointed out once on the television. “This is Whitney Houston,” he had said. “In America, she is a big star.” Ranjan didn’t like her or her singing style. Too many vocal flourishes, as though the notes were flowers and she were a butterfly unable to settle. Ranjan preferred Lata Mangeshwar, queen of Hindi film music, twice as old as the black woman on TV, and plump, not skinny, a microphone in one hand and a hill of sweetmeats in the other. Her voice was smooth, not fickle. To Ranjan,
this
was a singer,
this
was a woman.

Each morning, after Ranjan woke and had her tea from the American presidents mug Pradeep had bought her, she would watch thirty minutes of a video titled “So You Want to Be a U.S. Citizen?” Pradeep would set up the DVD for her and sit with her on the living-room sofa. The total series was six hours long, so every two weeks Pradeep would repeat the series; by the end of two months Ranjan had seen the whole series four times, some episodes even more. Still, each viewing may as well have been the first, for all Ranjan could remember. Even the next day she often couldn’t recall what she had watched the day before.

She couldn’t help it. Every day when Pradeep started the video, she fully intended to pay attention. She knew that her children were counting on her. But within minutes of the start of the video, after the blond hostess had introduced the day’s lesson, smiling with teeth whiter than Ranjan had ever seen on a real human being, Ranjan had drifted elsewhere. Her mind had traveled oceans and decades. She wondered if she had remembered to pay the doodh wallah, if the dhobi had brought back her husband’s shirts. She wondered if the cylinder had enough gas to last until Diwali or would she need to call for a new one. Had Swati remembered all her books for school and had she put her hair in plaits properly? Sometimes Ranjan would catch herself; she would try to focus on the woman with the teeth. But these English words, to Ranjan, were empty.

In the afternoons, Pradeep wanted his grandmother to practice her English. It was one of the requirements of the exam. He asked her to read aloud from the day’s newspaper. Ranjan would stumble through the columns, skipping words and sentences as though the omissions made no difference to the meaning of the reports. Sometimes, when she was really struggling, she would invent whole sections, and the world became a place of creation. Pradeep, of course, instantly knew when his grandmother was improvising, because her voice would become animated and the words elementary. He usually stopped her right away and said, “Nani, read properly what’s on the page.” But sometimes he would let her go on. Secretly he enjoyed it, the fantastic world his grandmother created, in which everyone was fed and all conflicts ended amicably. The world she created was full of happy endings.

At night, Ranjan returned to her room and looked at the posters on the walls, the stiff American presidents with their squared-off jaws and tight collars. In her room in Bombay, Ranjan had hung garlanded pictures of Rama, Sita, and Ganesha.

In fact, her room in Swati’s house could barely be called hers at all. She was in each of her rooms in each of her children’s houses only a fourth of the year, and the other nine months, after she left, the rooms slowly returned to their former functions—bill paying, ironing, storage for items that belonged nowhere else—until it was time for her to return. The room where she slept in Swati’s house was where Pradeep kept his weights and lifting bench when she was gone.

When Ranjan moved to another house, she had nothing to leave behind in her rooms. A lifetime of items purchased and collected and hoarded had been dispersed among living relations or sold off with her succession of shrinking flats. Now, all she owned were two suitcases, one big and one small—filled with plain cotton saris and medications prescribed by her first son or her second son’s wife or Princess Gupta’s handsome son in Atlanta—which followed her from house to house.

Ranjan missed the ring of jangling keys, which, for decades, had hung from her petticoat: keys for every door in every flat, every cupboard, all of which had to be locked against unscrupulous servants; even the drawers holding scrap paper and string had to be secured. When she first came to America, Ranjan would absentmindedly pat her hip and be surprised at the missing key ring. In America, cupboards didn’t have locks. It made Ranjan nervous. She imagined if no one were home, the items might, of their own volition, simply float away.

T
he day before the exam, Pradeep brought Ranjan a gift. “For you to wear,” he said, and pulled the clothes from the rustling Wal-Mart bag. He handed the dress to Ranjan and she fingered the fabric. “Denim,” Pradeep said. “It’s what all Americans wear. Let’s see it on.”

Ranjan held the dress against her body. She hadn’t worn a dress since she was a small girl, since she had become old enough to wear saris. She even wore saris to bed. The dress reminded her of nothing more than the thin gowns she was asked to wear in the doctors’ offices. It would make her look naked.

“Shabash!” Pradeep shouted, making an effort to use the Hindi word. “It looks great. Just the right size. Put it on.”

“No, no,” Ranjan said. “I am tired now. Let me wear it tomorrow only.”

“OK,” Pradeep said. “There’s a shirt, too.” He handed her a white turtleneck to wear under the dress.

“Sleep well,” he said. “Tomorrow’s a big day.” Then he shut the door and left.

Ranjan folded the white turtleneck and put it carefully on the chair next to her bed. She didn’t know if the dress should be folded or hung, and she fumbled with a hanger before folding the dress, too.

She’d taken to talking to George W. Bush the way she occasionally talked to the picture of Rama in her Bombay flat. He told her not to worry about the exam, she’d do just fine. The other presidents, from their small photos and in their small voices, concurred.