“Maybe he needs the money for an investment,” I said.
“Maybe someone wants him dead,” said Jayan.
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know he is no saint.” From his pocket Jayan pulled a strange piece of metal shaped as four connected loops. He slipped the loops through his fingers and faked a punch at my nose, grinning at my flinch. “This I found in his cabinet.” Jayan gazed at his fingers as if admiring a fine piece of jewelry. “I could give you a brand-new face with it.”
I tried but could not reconcile this steel-fisted father with the one I knew. This is the power of the drink: it can split a man into two different people, each a stranger to the other. The father I knew had never even lifted a hand to beat us, as if to do so were beneath him. His voice was warning enough: rich and deep and hollow. After he died I tried to remake his sound by murmuring into a rolled-up newspaper, until my mother finally grabbed the tube and smacked me senseless.
You see, I was his favorite. One morning he took me to the field and taught me how to guess that season’s yield: eye a square meter, count the plants, then take the average beads of rice per plant. It was only a guess, he said, for to farm was to surrender control, to suspect but never know. We used maths and omens and traced our fortunes among the stars but — he shrugged—“Some signs are misleading. And none are any use to you.”
“Why not?”
“You will grow into something greater than a farmer, my boy. Sure as calves become cows.”
There was such magic to his words, the way he pressed a finger like a wand to my chest.
Jayan, meanwhile, had his own aspirations. He helped on the farm from time to time but mostly retreated to some shady corner of town with his friends, strays and idlers we never met.
Raghu had spied my brother with a rough bunch at a shappe, trading Tamil over toddy and fish. I said nothing of this to my mother, who would have thrown a great thumping fit on account of the fish eating.
As for me I much preferred spending my school-free hours with Raghu on his father’s farm. Raghu’s father was day to my father’s night, two years older and temptation-proof. We called him Synthetic Achan (though not within earshot) due to his constant refrain: “Cola? What do you want to drink cola for? Cola is crawling with synthetics.” The same went for boxed juices, white sugar, candies, chocolate, and most every other good and delicious thing.
And yet I loved Synthetic Achan, for he was the same man every hour of every day, begun with a glass of warm milk and finished off with a thimble of toddy and two smacks of the tongue. (Toddy was the only spirit he would touch, as it came straight from the coconut.) He was careful with his money and his land, having inherited seven acres to my father’s six. At the end of each harvest he was rewarded with mountains of fragrant, golden, unmilled rice, which he stored in the shed. As children, Raghu and I would scramble up the mounds and slide down the sides until our legs itched from the husks. Itchy or not, this was the best time of my life.
But mine was a flimsy happiness, not the kind of happy that lasts.
The trouble began when my mother found a pouch of bullets in Jayan’s cabinet — thick and crude as if sawed from a steering rod — and thrust the pouch at my father. She felt it a father’s duty to straighten out a wayward son even if the father himself was wayward past hope.
That evening Jayan found my father waiting on the sit-out, sober for once. My mother and I hovered in the doorway.
“What are these for?” my father said, tossing the pouch of bullets at Jayan’s feet.
Jayan took his time adjusting the new watch around his wrist before bending to pocket the bullets. The watch was a Solex, poor cousin to the Rolex, but gold and fine all the same. “For making money.”
“Black money.”
“Least it’s mine.”
My mother gripped the doorway, all the heat gone from her voice. “Not here. Inside.”
But my father was already sailing down the steps on a wave of interrogation: Was it Jayan who had brought the gun into the house and was it Jayan who had been butchering elephants and God knew what else and was it Jayan who had so shamed his mother and father by becoming the one thing they had never dreamed he would be, a lowlife poacher, and in doing so, made them lowlives as well? Was it? Did Jayan have nothing to say for himself? Did he have a banana in his mouth?
Never before had my father spent so much breath on my brother. They had always been two lone wolves content to prowl their own sides of the mountain. Now Jayan’s lips trembled as if in fear or remorse, I could not tell.
Then he broke out laughing.
“Shamed you?” said Jayan. “Shamed you?”
“Stop laughing.”
“I used to think you were unlucky. Now I know you’re just stupid.”
In one swipe my father had him on the ground.
My mother ran to Jayan’s side, but he blocked her with his arm. His watch face caught a glimpse of moonlight. It looked suddenly huge to me, so wrong on his slim wrist.
For a terrible second, I thought Jayan would charge at my father. Instead my brother dealt a blow much worse: he looked at my father and said we all wished him dead.
The thought had crossed my own mind once or twice. Indeed I had imagined a fatherless life. Wouldn’t you, if you watched your father day by day destroy your mother and drink away your land, wouldn’t you once or twice imagine him resting in peace so you could honor what good memory of him remained and preserve what land and love were left?
Still Jayan should not have said it. To hear that truth out loud — it was a whipcrack to my heart.
My father tried to hide his hurt by spitting off to the side. But for a narrow moment his eyes met mine, and I saw the depths behind them, I saw how tired he was. Some men cannot master their many selves. My father was such a man, and he knew this just as he knew where his life would end.
One month later his body was pulled from a river. Bruises round the throat, a clump of his woolly beard torn out. My mother forbade us from speaking to the police for fear of reprisal, yet I could not rid the image from my mind — my father floating facedown on the water, all his hopes for me somewhere at the bottom.
Later I asked my brother, “You don’t miss him at all?”
Jayan considered the question for less than a second. “Do you miss having a car?”
“We never had a car.”
“That we did not.”
Jayan worked in the field till the sun striped his arms, till dirt gummed his nails and streaked his legs from standing calf-deep in mud. He followed my father’s right-hand man on morning rounds, learning how to sow seeds and replant the shoots stalk by tender stalk, to read the crop by its color and posture, when to feed nitrogen to sallow plants, when to set out magnesium cakes for the rats who sucked the juice from the base of a broken stalk. Whether by mistake or misfortune or a savage flock of doves, the first two plantings suffered. In the meantime, my brother kept up his side business.
He learned to read the crop, and I learned to read him. The day before a hunt, he was always glancing at the trees, listening for his omen, the woodpecker. If the woodpecker called from the east, I would glimpse my brother the next morning slipping past the house in his hunting uniform — green half pant and black T-shirt. If, the day after he returned from the forest, a blue Maruti drove up to the shed and my brother stuffed a fertilizer sack in the trunk, the hunt had gone well. If the driver haggled with my brother at length, Jayan would assume a foul mood for the rest of the day.
As a new policy my mother turned her gaze elsewhere, for she believed Jayan might abandon us forever if pressed too hard. I never shared her doubt, yet Jayan was Jayan, and he had his days. Some nights he drank with his feckless friends, and as the hours went on, he turned his frustrations onto the nearest bystander and came home fat lipped and dented. Easy to forget he was but twenty years old.