Papa reminded Mother to collect a shirt of his from the tailor tomorrow. And complimented her, with sincerity, about the food this evening. He added that it was all right that it needed salt. Better to have to add it later than recook a meal that was oversalted. He smiled approvingly at her resourcefulness.
Vimal sighed. Papa didn’t notice.
When the meal was over and Mother cleared dishes, Papa gave a rare smile and asked an astonishing question: “Scrabble? Do we all want to play Scrabble?”
Vimal stared.
“What?” his father asked.
“I... don’t feel like playing a game.”
“No?”
“Vim?” his brother asked. Because Sunny would have felt Papa wanted him to. Sunny was often like the second wave of invading soldiers.
“Naw, not tonight.”
Papa nodded slowly. “Then what would you like to do?”
Looking into the man’s eyes, Vimal realized that the time had come. He was tired, he hurt, his plans had been blown apart like the stones he’d carried to Mr. Patel’s office.
“I’ll be downstairs in the workshop.” The inflection of this sentence made it a timid question.
Papa slowly nodded. “I’ll meet you.”
“I’ll be a minute. I want a thicker sweater.” Vimal rose and went upstairs. He found what he needed and then walked into the kitchen, to the basement door. He descended the steep stairs and went into the studio.
Here, nervous — actually nauseous — as he waited for his father, he sat on a bench. He was looking over one of his sculptures in progress. He was presently working on pieces in granite, nephrite jade, tiger’s eye, and celestial-blue lapis lazuli. In the corner of the room was a scaife turntable, similar to what he had polished the parallelogram on, and, on the wall, assorted dop sticks. Papa had been a talented, if uninspired, diamantaire himself and after he’d had to retire from the factory where he worked in the Diamond District, he’d continued to handle some jobs from home, here in the basement, for as long as he could. When he finally had gotten out of the cutting business altogether, Vimal had taken over the workshop to use as a sculptor studio.
This was where he could have spent every waking moment.
These rooms had begun life as an in-law quarters. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen with stove and half refrigerator. On the workbench, in what had been the sitting room, were carefully arranged tools and cartons containing rocks. There was a three-quarter-inch D pneumatic tool, hammers, cup chisels, bushing chisels, wedges and shims for cracking stone, ripper points, hand points. A set of diamond-encrusted blades for the rotary saw — similar to what he might have used for the parallelogram had he not opted for the laser. For the comfort of it he picked up his favorite hammer, four pounds, caressed the dented and scarred head.
Against one wall were cartons filled with a thousand Lahori artifacts, many from his father’s family’s harrowing flight from Kashmir to Surat in India and their less dramatic journey to the United States.
When taking a break from working on a piece, Vimal had spent time browsing through these cartons filled with the Lahori clan history, which he suspected his father had stowed there purposefully, to ignite within the boy a love of family tradition. Vimal hadn’t needed any prodding. He was fascinated to see pictures of his grandfather in a diamond factory in Surat. Sweaty, gritty, dark, the cutting room in which Dada sat was filled with maybe sixty or seventy employees, four to a scaife, bending forward with their dop sticks. The man had been in his twenties when the picture was taken and he alone, among the twenty or so looking at the photographer, was grinning. Most of the cutters seemed bewildered that someone wanted to record their monotonous chores.
Dada had eventually become one of the top cutters in Surat and thought he could do even better in New York. He used all the rupees he’d saved to bring his wife, young Deepro and his three brothers and two sisters, to America. The experience had not been a good one. Indians might have ruled the diamond business in Surat but it was the Jews in New York.
Little by little, though, they, and other Hindu cutters, had made inroads.
At his father’s insistence, Vimal had gone to his grandfather’s cutting shop on the top floor of a dimly lit, moldy building on 45th Street and sat beside him for hours watching the old man’s hands, curled around the dop, touching a diamond to the hypnotically spinning wheel.
It was there that the boy decided he was made to change stone into something else.
Though not exactly as his father had in mind.
What would Dada have thought about Vimal’s desire to abandon the world of cutting diamonds and become a sculptor? He had a sense that Grandfather wouldn’t have minded very much. After all, the man had taken a chance — the extraordinary leap of bringing his whole family to a new and possibly hostile country.
Vimal’s mother’s ancestry was less well documented, not because Papa wasn’t inclined to retain a woman’s history (well, not entirely) but because she was sixth-generation American, and the ancestors had come from New Delhi — the forty-million-plus National Capital Region, a very, very different place from Kashmir. Mother was thoroughly Westernized. Her ancestry was potluck, a bit of this, a bit of that. Her family’s roots included mixed marriages, divorces, a gay union or two. All this added up, within her, to an appreciation of — rather than devotion to — Hindu culture, and the assumption of a quiet, though not fundamentally subservient, role in her marriage.
Vimal now turned on his work lamp over the bench. He closely studied the piece he’d been working on. It was simple, carved from a rich piece of off-white marble from Venezuela: a wave of water at its apogee about to crest and fall down upon itself. He’d grown fascinated recently with the idea of representing the texture and motion of non-stone in stone: wood, steam, hair, and — as with this piece — water. He wanted to do water because Michelangelo had skimped on the waves when he’d carved his reclining Poseidon. Vimal hoped to one-up the master.
Wasn’t that an example of a mortal’s hubris, which brought the wrath of the gods down upon him?
Come on, he thought, looking up at the ceiling. Let’s get this over with. His heart was pounding and his knee bobbed from nerves. He found himself playing with his bracelet and then felt stunned he was still wearing it. Had Father seen? He pulled it off and put it in his pocket.
Now he was hearing the footsteps on the stairs and knew it was time to “have words,” as Dada used to say. A delicate euphemism for an argument. The look that passed between his father and himself upstairs made clear that, while a man-to-man talk wasn’t possible, a man-to-son talk was... and it was long overdue.
His father appeared in the studio. He sat on a stool. Vimal set the hammer down.
Papa wasted no time. “You wanted to say something.”
“We dance around the subject.”
Because you lose your temper and can’t stand anyone disagreeing with you. Which, of course, he did not verbalize.
“Subject?”
“Yes, Papa. But we need to address it.”
“What does this mean ‘address’?”
His father had come to America when he was two. He read two American newspapers a day, cover to cover, and got his news from Public Broadcasting, in addition to Indian sources. He knew what the word meant.