“And Shiva, for Shiva,” she said, naming the child with the circular hole in his scalp, the last to breathe, the child she had labored over, a child all but dead until she had invoked Lord Shiva's name, at which point he took his first gasp.
“Yes, Marion and Shiva.”
She tacked on “Praise” to both names, after their mother.
And finally, reluctantly, almost as an afterthought, but because you cannot escape your destiny, and so that he wouldn't walk away scot-free, she added our surname, the name of the man who had left the room: Stone.
PART TWO
When a pole goes into a hole
it creates another soul
which is either a pole
or a hole
Newton's Fourth Law of Motion (as taught by the Mighty Se nior Sirs of Madras Christian College during the initiation/ ragging of A. Ghosh, Junior Pisser Kataan, Batch of 1938, St. Thomas Hall, D Block, Tambaram, Madras)
11. Bedside Language and Bedroom Language
ON THE MORNING of the twins’ birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.
Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepatitis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the e at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.
THE MORNINGS were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.
At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out, Hema, let's get married. But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.
“Fool!” she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. “How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride for you, I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed.”
Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.
If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo … “Go ahead! What do I care?” he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. “But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?” That led him to picture a bovine penis; he groaned.
This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.
From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. “For the sake of God, be gentle!” he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini—all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the getta? (In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.
He drew the blanket over his head as Almaz stagger-stepped to the bathroom, hefting the steaming cauldron. “Banya skin!” she muttered in Amharic. Amharic was all she ever spoke, though Ghosh suspected she understood more English than she let on. After emptying the cauldron into the bathtub, she finished the thought: “It must be so sickly to require washing every day. What misfortune the getta doesn't have habesha skin. It would stay clean without the need for all this scrubbing.”
No doubt Almaz had been to church this morning. When Ghosh first came to Ethiopia, as he walked down Menelik Street, a woman across the road stopped and bowed to him and he waved back. Only later did he realize that her gesture was aimed at the church across the way. Pedestrians bobbed before a church, kissing the church wall thrice and crossing themselves before going on. If they'd been chaste, they might enter. Otherwise they stayed on the other side of the street.
Almaz was tall with oak-colored skin and a shield-shaped face. Her oval eyes sloped down to the bridge of her nose, giving her a sultry, inviting gaze. Her square chin contradicted that message, and this hint of androgyny brought her admiring looks. She had large but shapely hands, wide hips, and buttocks that formed a broad ledge on which Ghosh believed he could balance a cup and saucer.
She was twenty-six when she came to Missing with labor pains, nine months pregnant, her cheeks flushed with pride because this baby she would carry to term, unlike all the others that had failed to take root in her womb. In the prenatal clinic visits, nursing students had twice recorded FHSH (Fetal Heart Sounds Heard) in the chart. But on the day of her putative labor, Hema heard only silence. Hema's exam revealed that the “baby” was a giant fibroid of the uterus and the FHSH nothing but a rattle in a probationer's brain.
Almaz refused to accept the diagnosis. “Look,” she said, fishing out an engorged breast and squeezing forth a jet of milk. “Could a tit do that if there were no child to feed?” Yes, a tit could do that and more if its owner believed. It took three more months with no true signs of labor and an X-ray that showed no baby's skull, no spine, for Almaz to concede. At the surgery, which she at last agreed to, Hema had to remove both the fibroid and the uterus which it had swallowed. In the town of Sabatha they still waited for Almaz to return with the baby. But Almaz couldn't bear to go back. She stayed on and became one of the Missing People.