“I DID NOT MISS MY PARENTS AT ALL,” UMA BEGAN. “WHEN I went away to college, I guess you could say I was heartless and self-centered, like many young people. My mother took it hard, but my father-”
Before she could continue the chronicle of her filial perfidies, there were noises above. Everyone cringed, but these were not the rumbles of an earthquake. There was a tapping and banging, a crash like furniture toppling over. They thought they heard engines revving, a door slammed shut.
“It’s people!” Tariq said. “Rescuers!” Everyone looked up, elation battling disbelief on their faces. They gripped one another’s arms. Mrs. Pritchett and Lily cupped their hands and yelled for help, and the others joined in. But there was no answer from above. The clangings grew quieter, as though receding. When a large chunk of plaster fell into the water, it scared them and they stopped shouting.
Tariq stood on the table, craning his neck. He wanted to see through the hole in the ceiling. But the angle wasn’t right. “I’m going to go to the other side of the partition,” he said, “climb on a chair or something, and figure out what’s going on.” He jumped down, splashing water in every direction.
“I’ll come with you,” Mangalam said, taking the flashlight. “We can tie a strip of cloth on a post and wave it through the hole.”
Mr. Pritchett, who had struggled into his pants, hurried after them. Uma, too, longed to follow, but Cameron was propped up against her good arm, and she didn’t want to move him.
“Warn them,” Cameron whispered. “There’s a dead body in the water-fell from upstairs when the ceiling collapsed.” She peered at him in shock. Until this moment, in accepting that she might perish, she had thought she understood what death meant, but it had only been an abstraction. This body, within fifty inescapable feet of where she was now, bloated and rubbery and beginning to decay, made death a touchable horror.
Cameron nudged her. “Don’t shout-people might panic. Go after them. I’ll be okay.”
“Go, I’ll watch him,” Malathi said from Cameron’s other side. Uma felt Malathi’s firm, bangled arm come around Cameron’s torso. She was humbled by Malathi’s calmness in the face of what they had just heard.
The thought of stepping into the water where the dead man lay filled Uma with revulsion, but Cameron was waiting. She climbed down gingerly but couldn’t stop herself from shuddering. She walked around the partition and stopped at the edge of the room. Mr. Pritchett was bent over, clearing debris from an area that lay directly under the gash of the collapsed ceiling. That, she guessed, would be where the dead man fell. She imagined the heavy drop. She hoped he had died before falling, that he didn’t have to drown in liquid blackness. Tariq and Mangalam were dragging a sofa through the water. They meant to stand it on its side. One of them would climb on it while the others steadied him.
“After I make some space here, we’ll need to find a rod to tie a cloth to,” Mr. Pritchett said. “Can you give me a hand?” He reached into the water.
“Stop!” Uma snapped. “Move away!” But it was too late. In the beam of the flashlight Mangalam aimed at her, she saw the shock on Mr. Pritchett’s face. The dark water splashed up as he let something heavy fall and backed away. She heard him retch and stumble in the dark. There was another splash. She gritted her teeth and hurried past the corpse toward him.
“I touched it,” Mr. Pritchett said to Uma, between heaves, as she tried to pull him up.
“Hush. It’s all right,” Uma said. She rubbed his back.
“What’s wrong?” Tariq called from the other end of the room. When she told him, he dropped his end of the sofa and cursed.
Among them, Mangalam seemed the least affected. He seemed calmer, if anything. Cameron’s decline had forced him to take up the responsibility that should have been his in the first place. “We can avoid that area,” he said. “Let’s set up the sofa here. It won’t give us as good a visibility, but it’ll do. We have to hurry. If someone’s up there, they’ll move away unless we let them know we’re trapped here. Mr. Pritchett, we need you to hold one side of the sofa. Uma, fetch that rod from near the wall.”
Thus rallied, they did what Mangalam said. Uma found that she was able to function if she kept her mind on the task at hand and didn’t think of the water flowing from the corpse toward her, contaminating her with deadness. In a few minutes, they upended the sofa. Tariq climbed on, lifted the rod as high as he could through the hole, and waved the makeshift flag vigorously. Uma trained the flashlight on the blue rag. When they shouted for help, the group in the other room joined them, like a Stygian chorus. Plaster fell again, but they continued. What did they have left to lose? There was a loud noise upstairs like an explosion. Then silence. When their throats grew raw and they were sure there were no further noises above, they gave up, one at a time. Some of them sobbed for a bit. Some sat wordlessly, devastated. To have been extended those minutes of hope only to have them snatched away was the cruelest cosmic joke, the final insult.
The batteries were dying. In the dimming glow of the flashlight, Uma saw her companions crumpled into themselves, avoiding one another’s eyes, hands balled by their sides or covering their faces. Mangalam brought forth a bottle with bourbon still in it and passed it around. A couple of people took desultory sips, but even such a conjuration didn’t perk them up much. It was getting harder to breathe. Uma remembered an old science lesson from middle school. Gas killed people by displacing oxygen, which was lighter. When enough gas settled in the basement, they would suffocate.
Too many problems, all beyond her solving. There was nothing to do but go on with her story.
WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR ME TO GO TO COLLEGE, I CHOSE A PLACE far from home, although I knew my parents would have preferred it otherwise. It wasn’t that I had a bad relationship with them, or that they were tyrannical, in the way Indian immigrant parents some times are. I was just eager to strike out on my own, without their protective presence. It never struck me that my presence might have been protective for them, too. The college I picked was in Texas: expensive and private, with a reputation that a parent could brag about. Still, the key lure for me was its distance from home.
My mother took my absence hard. Though she was a successful manager, fairly high up in her company, she defined herself mostly as a mother and homemaker and took more pride in a made-from-scratch Indian dinner than in acquiring a new customer. My first month of college, whenever my mother and I spoke on the phone, she would dissolve into tears while insisting I describe every detail of my day. My father admonished her to pull herself together. He kept his questions brief and basic-how was my health, was I able to keep up with the workload, did I need money-and he was satisfied with monosyllabic answers. He always ended his conversation with a joke about prospective boyfriends-mostly the same joke-while my mother remonstrated on the other line. I was thankful that my father was handling my departure so well. I admired his suavity. Up until this time I had been closer to my mother, but now I felt a subtle shift in allegiance.
The student population at the college was different from my high school but not drastically so. I loved the lush campus with its tropical foliage and old Southern elegance; the single dorm room that I could decorate as I wanted; the small literature symposiums where famous professors treated me as an adult, which, deep down, I wasn’t certain I was; the coffeehouses that remained open until two a.m. and where students held heated intellectual discussions; and the partying, which was available in hot, medium, or mild. My mother’s cautions must have rubbed off on me; the pleasures I chose were innocuous ones.