At that time I was pretty ballistic myself, but now I don’t blame them too much. They’d tried hard to be good parents. They’d dedicated evenings and weekends to schlepping Mark around to his activities. They’d supported my sudden and expensive love affair with the flute. Most important, during all those years when we thought I wasn’t good at anything, they hadn’t nagged me about it. (For Asian parents, that’s as close to sainthood as you can get.) Now, it was as though they’d been handed a gold medal only to have it snatched away.
You can imagine the shouting matches. They took away my new flute and canceled my lessons. I retaliated by going back to black and putting on my eyebrow ring. Then they forgot about me because they got a call from Mark’s advisor. They didn’t discuss it with me, but by eavesdropping on their agitated conversation with Gramma, I gathered that Mark was failing his classes. I caught snippets of phrases: fallen into bad company, drinking habit, cutting class. Mark’s advisor had told them that this sometimes happens to kids from strict, traditional homes-they can’t handle the sudden freedom. I couldn’t fit my brother into a cliché like that. I was sure there was more behind his disaster. That weekend my stunned parents put a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign in their office window (the only other times they’d done that was when my mother went into labor) and left for Boston.
Monday morning I knew that if I had to sit through a day of meaningless chatter in class, it would drive me nuts, and I would do something everyone involved would regret. So I took my backpack and hurried like I was late for the school bus, but once I was out of Gramma’s sight, I went to the park. I’d packed Mark’s old flute, and I sat on my favorite bench behind the overgrown bottlebrushes and played the Moonlight Sonata and some nocturnes that seemed to suit my melancholy mood. When I got hungry, I ate the sandwiches I’d packed. Then I took a nap. When I woke up, I played my own melodies, closing my eyes and making things up as I went along.
I don’t know how long I played-my lips were hurting, but in a good way-when I felt hands on my face. I must have jumped a mile high and yelled loud enough to be heard across the park. When I opened my eyes, there was no one. I remembered Gramma’s stories about the spirits of the dead, and my hands started shaking. What if Mark had killed himself and his spirit had come to say good-bye? Then I saw the boy, hiding behind a bush. He must have run back there when I started screeching like a pterodactyl. I beckoned to him to come out, and when he did, I realized that he had Down syndrome. I’d seen Downies at the park a couple times, holding hands and walking, with an adult on either end. Maybe they came from a special school nearby. The boy-he was about ten years old-must have gotten separated from the group. He came up to me a bit nervously, but when I said I was sorry for scaring him, but he’d scared me, too, he told me he liked my music. I asked if he wanted to hear some more. He nodded and settled himself on the grass near my feet.
I started playing something sad that I’d heard in my head as I walked along the beach after my conversation with Mark. But as I made my way through it, I found out that it wasn’t sad all the way through. It had leaps and trills and a ribbon of joy that kept looping back. After a while, the other boys heard the music and wandered over and sat down, too. My boy (that’s how I thought of him) might have felt proprietary, because he scooted up and put his hand on my knee. He smelled like strawberry jam. I played the melody for a long time, discovering something new with each pass-through, and then it was time for us to go home.
UMA THOUGHT HER BRAIN WAS SLOWING FROM A LACK OF FRESH air. After Lily finished, she found herself thinking of her father-but shouldn’t she have remembered him right after Tariq talked about his Abbajan? Shouldn’t she now be considering how she had always wanted a sibling, and how for years she had held a grudge against her parents for having deprived her of a ready entertainment that all her friends possessed?
During his college days in India, her father had played guitar. He fancied Elvis and was considered by his classmates to be quite a singer. He had told Uma this when she was about twelve, and she had collapsed in giggles, unable to imagine him as a slick-haired performer. Incensed, he had enlisted her mother’s aid. She had corroborated his story, telling Uma that was one of the reasons why, when the matchmaker had come with a proposal from his family, she had agreed to see him.
“Your mother, now, she was very fashionable as a college student,” Uma’s dad had said, sneaking a hand around her mother’s ample waist as he spoke. “She wore go-go glasses and stiletto heels and sleeveless sari blouses, and sometimes she skipped class and went with her friends to Metro Cinema to see American movies. The day I came to see her, she had painted her nails deep pink to match her sari. If I hadn’t had that guitar, you’d still be a speck in God’s eye.”
Uma had been intrigued by the images. They seemed equally fantastic: herself floating around in God’s eye and her pink-nailed mother floating around Calcutta in go-go goggles, discarding suitors at will. She had watched her parents, him balding, her plump and matronly, dressed in department-store clothing, leaning into each other with satisfied expressions, and felt a sorrow for the glamorous young selves they had discarded.
Her parents, however, still had a few surprises up their polyester sleeves, one of which her father would reveal during her first semester of college.
THE NINE SURVIVORS ATE THE LAST OF THEIR FOOD AS SLOWLY as they could, hunched against the dropping temperature. The hole in the ceiling was making the room even colder. They held their chewy bars and apple slivers close to their mouths as though they were afraid the morsels might disappear along the way. Cameron didn’t distribute the food this time. From where he sat, his spine wilting against Uma’s good arm, he raised an eyebrow in query at Malathi and Mangalam, and they cut things into the right number of pieces and gave them out. Uma noted that there were more snacks now than she had originally counted. People must have taken things out of their secret stashes and put them in the pile when no one was watching. There were a small bag of carrot sticks, one whole-wheat roll, and three small white-chocolate truffles, quite delicious, that Mangalam dissected with extra care. But all was gone in a few mouthfuls.
Cameron was whispering instructions in Uma’s ear. She announced that they could use the facilities one last time. The water would have risen almost to the lip of the toilet bowl by now. (What would they use for a bathroom after this? she wondered.) Since the bathroom door could no longer be pushed shut, people would have to wait outside Mangalam’s office to allow the user privacy.
A few people struggled into their wet shoes and climbed off the table gingerly. Mr. Pritchett, Uma noticed, stood at the end of the line. Hadn’t he just gone? But he was so proper that maybe the possibility of having to pee into a pitcher-or whatever it was that they would be reduced to doing next-made him nervous.
Alongside her, Cameron had stiffened. He, too, was watching Mr. Pritchett. When he whispered to Uma, she held up her broken arm and called out, “Mr. Pritchett, please, could you come here for a moment?” How could she have forgotten those cigarette breaks?
Mr. Pritchett looked irritated, but he could hardly refuse a cripple, could he? When he came near them, Cameron stretched out his hand and said, “Your cigarettes and lighter.”
“You don’t trust me?” Mr. Pritchett said, his shoulders belligerent. “You think I’d be stupid enough to light up and endanger all of us?” Uma was about to call Tariq, who was dozing on the adjacent desk, but Mr. Pritchett said, “You’re wrong, you suspicious bastard!” and threw a gold lighter and a crushed pack of Dunhills down onto the desk. He marched (as much as one can march in freezing, calf-high water) back to the bathroom line.