The Two Krishnas (20 page)

“But you don’t drink.”

He sighed, too tired to engage in this. “Well, I do now. Is that okay with you?” Even in the dark, he could see that his son was disgusted but instead of becoming concerned, he found this mildly amusing considering Ajay had developed quite a reputation for being a rebel himself.

Ajay got up almost furiously, the chair grating across the linoleum, and Rahul strained back in surprise. Without another word, Ajay went to the refrigerator and searched for a tub of double fudge chocolate ice cream in the freezer, the only indulgence he allowed himself. His mind was racing. Suddenly it all made sense to him and it made him feel ill. His father’s absences, the drunken breath, his mother’s devastation. Earlier, the sight of his mother’s breakdown, the tears and hurt on her face, had transfixed him, but now he grew enraged at his father.

Rahul meanwhile appraised his son, now a tall and attractive young man. Even though in his youth Rahul had had more than his fair share of attention, something that had continued to a considerable degree as he had aged, it was as if Ajay, blessed further with his mother’s genes and his obsession with fitness, had reached a kind of pinnacle of physical beauty. He watched his son’s strong, expansive back with its well-defined musculature, his strong arms and the peculiar scar. He saw the smooth skin of his waxed chest glistening from the pearly light of the refrigerator.

In his son’s youthful bearing he was reminded suddenly of Atif and this brought about a stirring within him, the inappropriateness of which immediately made him cringe. That he could even feel such thing while looking at his son, that all of these emotions could reside in him simultaneously like feuding spirits inhabiting a house, appalled him. Perhaps it was better that he had been distanced from his son. His own confusion he could live with, but to besmirch his son in any way, he could not endure. Although he turned his eyes away from him, Ajay caught his stare, reading guilt into it.

“Is this why Mom was crying?”

“Crying? She was crying?” Rahul’s heart skipped a beat. In that fraction of a second, he wondered if she had found out, saw Pooja’s anguished face.

Ajay plunked down the tub of ice cream on the counter and looked his father dead in the eye. “Are you cheating on her?”

“What?” Rahul felt the room fall away from him so that it seemed like Ajay and he were floating in atmosphere.

“You heard me, Dad,’ he said, defiant. “Are you screwing around?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Ajay?”

“It’s a simple question.”

Rahul rose to his feet, reminding himself to take a deep breath so he could steady himself.
No, this couldn’t be.
How the hell could she possibly have found out? Had someone seen them? Had she found something?
Then something within him kicked in, an actor inhabiting a role, believing its truth. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Really? It’s past midnight, you’re plastered, Mom’s been crying—”

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” he held up his hand forbiddingly. “Last time I checked, I was still your father, okay, and I don’t remember being on any kind of curfew.”

“Okay, so just come clean.”

“Come clean!” Rahul flared up. “Do I need to remind you who the hell you’re talking to?”

“Maybe you should,” Ajay said, “because you know what? You sure as hell aren’t around enough for me to remember that.”

For the first time Rahul thought he was going to hit his son, uncertain if it was the truth in Ajay’s words and his corresponding guilt, or his son’s audacity that incensed him. Rahul, always slow to provocation, now stepped up to his son who was nearly his height. “That’s enough from you,” he said, his voice an ominous hiss. “I want you to stop this
bakwas
before you upset your mother.” He began to walk away.

“You don’t give a shit about her,” Ajay cried. “If you did she wouldn’t be in this state. I want to know who’s more important to you than Mom, why you’re fucking bailing out on us.”

He stopped in his tracks and slowly turned around. Ajay’s words cut through him like blades not because of the accusation but because of the pain that resonated in his broken voice, something Rahul had never heard before. He looked upon his son’s face, could see the glassiness in his eyes. It crushed Rahul to see Ajay this way and the anger sieved away. They had always been at a distance, like comrades on a battlefield, passengers on the same ferry, not as much father and son but offshoots of the same branch. Their relationship shared none of the intimacy Rahul had shared with his own father and it was not a gap Rahul had been happy with but one that he had accepted as a defect in his own personality. He never wanted Ajay to think that he didn’t care.

“I’m not going to let you do this to her,” Ajay said, shaking with rage.

“Rahul?” Pooja’s voice called from upstairs.
“Su thaye chhe?”

Placing a finger to his lips, Rahul signaled to his son that they should keep this between them and Ajay complied with his silence. “Nothing, Pooja,” he said over his shoulder. “Sorry we woke you up. Everything’s okay,
jaan
. Just go back to sleep. I’ll be up shortly.”

They both felt her lingering on the banister, wondering if she would come down. She didn’t. Rahul walked up to his son. He had always known of the power that his wife had on Ajay, that impenetrable bond from which Rahul himself had felt excluded and which, at one point, had made him feel resentful. But to see his son this way, gripped by such fury and hurt, gave him new insight into the depth of Ajay’s devotion to his mother, and this both surprised and concerned him.

“Is that what you really think?” he asked tenderly, his voice lowered to a whisper. “That I would abandon you? My own family?
Bevakuf
, you, your Mum, you’re my life. I could never, ever be without you. There is no other woman. None. Get it?” And somehow, making this about another
woman
gave Rahul conviction.

But Ajay looked at his father, unbelieving.

“I swear on Pooja,” he said then put his hand over Ajay’s head. “Upon you.”

Slowly, Ajay nodded. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, feeling awkward. Rahul cupped his son’s face in his hands, wanting more than anything in the world to hold him close, to protect him. That’s also when Rahul noticed the crescents of purple and black around Ajay’s right eye, unnoticeable in the dark until now. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, waving it off with his hand.

Rahul turned on the kitchen lights, came back to him. “Who were you fighting with? Has your mother seen this? Maybe this is why she—”

“It’s got nothing to do with this,” he remonstrated quickly, some of his anger springing back, and turned away from his father.

“Come here, let me take a look at it.” He went to the freezer where he ejected ice cubes from a plastic blue tray. He balled them up in a paper towel and brought the compress to Ajay’s eye.

“Mom already did this,” he said, squinting from the pain.

“Yeah, yeah, fine. Now it’s your father’s turn.”

They stood in the kitchen for a few moments and the intimacy of the moment wasn’t lost on either one of them. Rahul couldn’t remember the last time he had been there for Ajay. Attending to him now felt like long awaited recompense. The young man in front of him, while unable to fit onto his arm, be lifted in the air or swung around, became his little boy again.

“How did this happen? Fighting over some girl or something?”

Ajay hesitated. Rahul paused, looked at him insistently.

“Some guy,” Ajay grunted. “He came on to me. I know, can you believe that shit?”

Rahul froze, his hand suspended inches away from the bruise.

“Look, seriously, I don’t want to talk about it,” Ajay said, embarrassed, pulling his father’s hand back to his eye. “Don’t stop now, Dad, that feels good. Anyway, don’t worry, he’s going to think twice before pulling that shit again.”

Rahul withdrew, breaking away from his son’s grasp, the ice pack now heavy.

“Dad?”

Rahul turned away, dumped the ice pack into the sink. “It’s been a long day, Ajay. I’m tired, really tired. Drunk, as you said,” he managed a conciliatory smile but was unable to look at his son. He began to walk out of the kitchen.

“Dad, you alright?”

Rahul paused, nodded, but didn’t turn around to meet his eyes.

“Sure?”

“Yeah…”

Ajay walked up to him. He put his hand on Rahul’s shoulder and faced him. “Look, I thought that since Mom’s been, you know, down and all, maybe this weekend we could all spend some time together. We could take her to Little India or something. Catch one of those silly Bollywood movies, do some shopping. Spend some of your hard-earned cash.”

Rahul nodded, extruded another tenuous smile.

“Cool,” Ajay said and hugged his father as if reclaiming something. For a few moments, Rahul held his son, felt the hard musculature of his flesh and blood, but then something within him contracted, hid, and he released Ajay. Without another word, Rahul turned around and climbed the staircase up to where Pooja waited, the ground undulating beneath his feet.

* * *

It’s not that Ajay was embarrassed of his heritage but that he simply could not relate to being Indian. It was as if a fanatically devoted mother and an atheist father had left him lost somewhere in the middle so that he found it easier to get his answers from somewhere else, in a mythology and culture that belonged to neither one of them.

Unlike his parents who, while not having lived in India or having even spoken of their past in Africa, had managed to preserve at least some of the Indic, like an infant brought across the oceans, he was born in America, in the bosom of what the world still perceived as a bastion of freedom. He took this freedom for granted, never feeling like an outsider. He saw himself as one of the rightfully-fitting, colorful threads in the tapestry of Los Angeles where Latinos, Asians, Jews, African-Americans all weaved into each other with just the occasional tangle.

At school and in his social interactions, Ajay had little patience for Indians of his generation who droned on interminably about prejudice and threw around words like “displacement” and “diaspora” to somehow explain their own lack of adaptability and social ineptitude. He never felt compelled to find others under the united political identity of a “desi” just because someone’s family hailed from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh. Who cares? There was a reason their families had left that world behind and come to America, so why now were they so determined to find a way back? Ajay welcomed the erasure of such markers, felt comfortable in the loss of identity through integration. He found, due in part to his exceedingly good looks and powerful presence, that he could fit into diverse circles. Most of his friends were non-Indians and he almost always dated the white girls who frequently mistook him for Mexican or Spanish. He was fine with that also. He spoke near-perfect Spanish.

Like so many American-born Indians, he felt more comfortable with English than Hindi or Gujarati; he found more affinity with R&B and rap than
filmi
music, with Hollywood than Bollywood; he chose Tupac over Lata Mangeshkar and Facebook over desiclub.com. A girl he had once dated told him that one dreams in the language of their soul. Ajay had never heard a word of his mother’s Gujarati or his father’s Hindi in his dreams.

He was familiar with the pantheon of mythic gods and goddesses, even had a favorite or two, but unlike his mother could never make the leap into thinking that a blue-skinned flutist actually had lived in Vrindavan and continued even today to tune in to their problems from some heavenly abode as soon as the incense was lit and cymbals came clashing; or that Shiva, after neglecting Parvati, who had once immolated herself to uphold his dignity and reincarnated just to be with him again, had returned from hundreds of years in meditation just to behead his own son and then to bring him back to life with the head of an elephant! In this way, he was more like his father who at one time in his life must have believed in a higher power, but had since decided to pass on the romanticism of religion that his mother more than compensated for, as if she also had to appease the gods for their irreverence.

* * *

Tonight Pooja would invoke rain, beseech the half-human, half-snake
nagas,
guardians of rain upon whom Vishnu slept and dreamt up the entire universe, under whose hood the Buddha meditated protectively, to end the drought in their marriage.

Emboldened by Ajay’s fight at the gym, she was realizing more and more that they had paid an exceedingly heavy price for living in this country with its strange mores and liberties. She was not one to adopt the attitude of other immigrants who bemoaned the alienation of a new world, as if in doing so they somehow maintained a loyalty to the past they had abandoned. But hard as she tried, there was no denying that she was losing her son and her husband. She was wondering more and more if they might have been better off in Kenya.

But from the countless hopefuls, they had been the ones to win the U.S. visa lottery. After Rahul’s family had been wiped out, there had been even less reason to stay in the country in which they had been born but which no longer wanted them. She had stood by him and together they had renounced Kenya. She had followed, obedient, unquestioning, just like Draupadi had followed the Pandavas, like Sita had followed Raam into exile.