Small Days and Nights Read online

  *

  Our lives began to move in different directions after that night. I was growing up despite my grievances against adulthood, and the changes within me were a kind of smothering, like driving down the ghats every summer to visit family I desperately wanted to love but didn’t.

  I still feel it whenever I come down those hills. That suffocation in my throat, the air, thick and red. A 7,000-foot descent. Always the same song in my head. She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes … She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes … She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes … Singing ay ay yippee yippee ay.

  I am by the window, peeling off the layers of clothes to make space for humidity, for summer. The change is like a sloughing off. Out come my toes from socks and shoes. Off comes my jumper and scarf. Underneath, the skin behind my neck is already soft with sweat. Two hours of curves and hairpin bends. Sometimes the taxi driver takes the corners too fast and there’s a stirring in my belly that claws up my throat. Slow down, mister, I say, and the driver turns around and grins slavishly. But five minutes later he’s off like the Road Runner again.

  The rise of nausea and the subsiding. Again and again and again. And just when I think I can’t bear it any more, we’re hitting the base of the Palani Hills, riding the flat of the plains, bumping along ragtag villages where chickens and children are constantly racing across the road lined with corpulent teak trees with black-and-white painted bands around their trunks. Paddy fields glimmer like swimming pools at the base of brown hills. Lorries and buses barrel down the highway with muscular headlights and horns. A warm, soupy breeze begins to blow softly through the window.

  We are cheating death, all the time, passing one overcrowded town, then another, and another. The litany of village names buzzing in my ears like flies with a hundred lives – Kanakkanpatti, Oddanchatram, Batlagundu, Palakkanuthu. Neon boards flash with the faces of film stars, advertising beauty salons and eateries. The cows that congregate around rubbish bins are skinny, with coats of dust. Shops line the narrow streets. Tiny cubbyholes where you can buy birthday cake frocks and plastic cricket bats, brass pots and toilet scrubbers. Shit and spit. Everywhere, shit and spit and jasmine and marigold. And somewhere in the distance, the sea.

  7

  In those early days of discovering my sister, I kept looking back to scenes of my life, hoping for clues, openings where she could walk through. But we will never sit in a room with our parents as a complete family. We will never know what those rhythms might have been. Our childhoods are consigned to a kind of captivity, forced to exist in two compartments separate from one another.

  The irreversibility of having a child. This is what I think about as I watch Lucia, trying to learn her ways.

  Teacher had already told me that Lucia loves cornflakes. That she loves Coca-Cola, chicken fried rice, finger chips, mutton fry, vanilla ice cream, car rides, train rides, horse rides, bike rides, Tom and Jerry, Shivaji Ganesan, the colour pink, afternoon naps, going to the doctor, swimming pools, merry-go-rounds, stuffed animals, parties, cinemas, dancing.

  I was learning that Lucia also loved to lie like a crab on her back, moving her arms and legs up and down rhythmically, her blouse sometimes rising to show the soft mound of her belly. That she was double-jointed and could hook both ankles around her neck and swing from side to side like a pendulum. That when she got into her singing mood she could rock and sing operatic gibberish for hours.

  Her hands were like two pats of butter. They were my father’s hands – soft and stubby, the right forefinger shorter than the left because she jammed it in a door when she was ten. Sometimes she would slip the tips of her fingers into her panties and graze herself against the mattress.

  I cried every day when Lucia came to live with me. Shameful crying, done in bouts on the floor of my bedroom. I had expected to feel less estranged from the world, but Lucia brought heaviness. She was a big girl and she occupied the house in a way that was neither timid nor hushed. At nights I had imaginary conversations with my dead mother. Mostly, me ranting at her: ‘Don’t think I don’t know why you hurried off to die. Don’t think baking bread for a group of imbeciles once a week condones anything. You abandon your child and have the guts to tell me that I’m a selfish person?’ Once, I even whispered my exit plan, which began to seem more and more like an inevitability with the sea beating at the shore and the wind gusting through the house. ‘Barbiturates, Mother. What do you think about that? Barbiturates for the both of us.’

  Some days I feel the sadness build. Other days it blindsides me. It is different from what I felt in America – that large, one-size-fits-all American loneliness.

  When my new friends ask about my life there, I tell them about those first months. The fall of 1996. Those North Carolina skies. Walking up Selwyn Avenue to the A&P to buy microwavable Uncle Ben’s Rice. Heaps of yellow and orange leaves clustered along the streets as if it were a movie set. The lines all clean and straight. The houses, gigantic and gateless.

  America fills you out, exerts her homogeneous hunger upon you, making it so that no matter how much you have, you always want more. I grew stout in America on a diet of French fries, Budweisers, brownies and ranch dressing. Within a year I went from being a raw-boned teenager to a chunky amoeba of an adult with a muffin top and endangered clavicles.

  I tell them about my job at the cafeteria, and about Ms Betty, the cafeteria supervisor – a pint-sized black lady with the heart of a Cadillac. It was Ms Betty who saved me on those never-ending North Carolina evenings when the skies grew ragged with pink, and everything that was young and flourishing seemed to be outside, just out of reach – under the shade of dogwood and sugarberries, in the quad where sorority sisters exchanged whispers and lacrosse players stretched out like cheetahs on waterproof blankets spread upon grass of such perfect height and prickle, it made me untenably sad.

  ‘You ain’t gonna find what you is looking for out there,’ Ms Betty used to say, every time she caught me gaping through the glass doors of the Students’ Centre.

  ‘You ain’t gonna find it in your friends nor your fine boyfriend neither. You blind, is what.’

  She was right. After all, what kind of crazy person moves from one country’s deep south to another country’s deeper south?

  North Carolina. North Dakota. None of it had conjured up any particular picture as I sat in my bay window in Mahalakshmi with college forms and SAT tutorials, dreaming my getaway. It was where Blake Henderson was going and where I would follow. Perhaps I’d been inducted long before meeting Blake. Back in Madras, with Moses Paulraj and his American-anthem-singing car penetrating every early-morning dream. Perhaps it was the reason why I went with Blake in the first place, because I knew that America would be big enough and lonely enough to accommodate me.

  When I finally arrived in America I had not been prepared to feel so poor. I had not understood how it would make me cling to Blake, who visited me in Charlotte every weekend from Chapel Hill, taking me out to Burger King for big Whoppers – the two of us chewing on that cheap food, bristling in the glee of our independence. And later, gliding through the shiny corridors of South Park Mall, dragging our greasy fingers through all those racks of beautiful clothes. I hadn’t realised there had been so much want in me.

  I remember once, at the top of Tanglewood Lane in Myers Park, Blake had just picked me up from a babysitting job. We were putting our seatbelts on, getting ready to drive to Freedom Park, when there was a knock against the glass. An old woman with huge rheumy eyes and a straggly grey bob leaned in to peer at us. I lowered the glass.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Are you running out of people?’ she said. She was looking at us in a hard, mean way. Not like a confused little old lady. ‘Have you never lost anyone, then? You never missed someone by mistake?’

  We just blinked at her.

  ‘Well?’ the old lady asked. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Are you missing someone, ma’am?’ Blake finall
y asked.

  And suddenly, her face softened. ‘Yes. My husband. He’s going to be angry at me, that’s for sure.’

  I wanted to ask the lady, who are you? Are you lost? Should we call someone? But I just stared at her, dumb, speechless. Finally we left her there, saying, ‘Okay now, you have a good day,’ and she looked at us, angry again, disgusted. ‘Yes, I’ll try.’

  After freshman year I moved out of the dorm to share an apartment with an Ethiopian girl, Misrak, who, when she grew homesick, sat in bed and gnawed on doughy rings of injera. We were reading Brave New World together and listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Every Wednesday we hit the nightclubs with our fake IDs. We’d stand on wooden boxes in cheap black dresses and shake and move, thinking, Yes sir, here we are in America.

  There were things I hadn’t been prepared for in America, like counting dimes to buy rancid bean burritos from Taco Bell, the melancholy of a Wal-Mart store at 2 a.m., reverse-wearing underwear. All the sprawl and waste and marvel of American life.

  And when I say American life, I mean the lives of the rich bankers in the neighbourhood around the college where Misrak and I folded laundry and pulled boogers out of their kids’ noses for five bucks an hour.

  Street after street of mansion and lawn, each competing in bigness, each with its own overfed Labrador unencumbered by a single blood-sucking tick, stunned into dumb submission by an invisible electric fence.

  And this abundance of gleaming created something sick in me – not a yearning for home exactly, but the imprint of a lost, forgotten thing, and I knew if I wanted to catch that lost thing I would have to leave America.

  In hindsight, I could say it was Lucia. That I had always been carrying around this sense of loss in me. But in those days I went searching for other things – in the face of the old man fumbling around for treasures among the bric-a-brac of the Dollar Store, or the immigrant woman trawling through the aisles of Food Lion, fondling all the fruits and vegetables in search of the fattest and the sweetest. I’d think of that poor, helpless woman in Myers Park looking for all the missing people in her life, and it seemed to me that in every corner of America there was someone growing sick with loneliness. And all that started up a mad swirling inside me of what I can only describe as grief. I don’t know whether it had anything to do with being poor, or lonely, or America itself, but it had nothing to do with missing my parents.

  It was as if my entire life before hadn’t been real. Those had just been days of waiting and filling time before the real thing could begin.

  But sitting with Misrak on the mattresses of our one-bedroom apartment, smoking late into the night, talking about everything from Kantian ethics to the glories of a deplumed cunt – that was life.

  Listening to Nusrat, who was the soundtrack of all our days. Something in his voice scoured every nameless emotion from inside our bodies and gave it a name. He was all curvatures of sound, a spray of fine-grained grit against the face, sex and god in the same room. And we never tired of him. Misrak would get up and dance, wriggling her shoulders up and down, all frenzied and primal, and I’d spare a thought for Papi, who would have called her a watussi, for sure. I’d spear the walls with a broom, whirling and screaming, ‘Alive? Are you feeling alive, motherfuckers?’ to the neighbours, who always wanted us to keep things down.

  The walls were so thin and we were so young. And I know that every one of those nights we spent in number 161 Woodland Apartments, we were shining beings. Those were moments of pure living. We were sonias – long-haired, full-bodied believers in whatever it is that was starting.

  I feel so far away from that now, from the beauty and closeness of those days. Who can I speak to in this wilderness? Not Lucia, with our single-sentence conversations. Not Mallika, with my rickety, broken-down Tamil. Not the dogs.

  I miss the clarity of American roads. I think of them when I’m faced with acres of landfill emitting poisonous smoke, kilometres of road without a single rubbish bin, plastic clogging up the canals and lakes, all the disfiguring of what could be pristine. I think of the many road trips we made in Misrak’s Cherry Red, and I feel nostalgic for a country that allows everybody to have everything if they want it.

  Those journeys have layered themselves one on top of each other. New York, Washington DC, Charleston. The car’s air conditioner was always in a state of disrepair, so we travelled with the windows down and hot air rushing in. ‘Turn it up, turn it up,’ Misrak would say, if the radio played Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ or Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’. Those were our anthems. She would take off her top and fling it in the back seat, look straight ahead in a lacy bra, with one hand on the steering wheel and a cigarette in her mouth. Passing truck drivers would toot their horns. ‘What are you doing?’ I said, the first time she did it. But soon I was doing it too. Whipping off my shirt like a stripper, laughing as those men tooted their horns. Third-world Thelma and Louise. This is what being with Misrak made me feel.

  Only once we travelled with our boyfriends. Spring break 1995.

  We decided in Athens, the diner we went to on the corner of Independence Boulevard and East 4th. It used to be open 24/7, and it’s where you’d find Misrak and me at the end of a long night, in our corner booth, leaning our imminent hangovers into red Rexine seat backs.

  It was Misrak who wanted to go to Myrtle Beach. Four years in America, with graduation looming, and she still hadn’t taken a proper break. Always sleeping on Ethiopian couches on cheap road trips or tagging along as a nanny with a white family to go on holiday with other white families. ‘I want to stay in a proper hotel and have fun!’ she said. ‘Come on. Don’t you think Chichi is ready for it?’

  Chichi had burst onto the scene a few months earlier at a party, where he had impressed Misrak with his agile shoulders and silver Maserati. He was studying pre-med at Chapel Hill and had so far proven that few things had the potential to animate him: the sight of Misrak’s chest was one; a series of cocktails, preferably Long Island Iced Teas, was another.

  I remember him sitting in the back of Blake’s car, staring glumly out of the window at the parade of flowering trees down I-74. Everywhere – bullets of colour. An upheaval of brown, like skin turned inside out to expose festering wounds of purple and pink. All those flowering trees, the names of which could compete only with the names of the seemingly make-believe towns we were passing through. Darlington, McBee, Monroe, crape myrtle, magnolia, redbud. Perfect little explosions.

  In Myrtle Beach I found out more about Chichi. That he was an Eritrean; that he’d been taking care of his mother and sisters ever since his father deposited them in the United States in 1986. That he had drive – not immigrant drive, which was shabby and somewhat sycophantic, but entitlement drive, the same kind of drive Blake had.

  Misrak and Chichi fought constantly in Myrtle Beach. They may have spoken the same language, but they came from different sides of a disputed border. When we came home to Woodland Apartments she said, ‘It’s never going to work with us. I just don’t see it.’ And just like that, Chichi of the agile shoulders and silver Maserati was out.

  I too should have seen clearly the incompatibility of our spirits. Blake and I, holding hands, walking along the scummy seashore. Him thinking that we were moving atop some giant swell of togetherness in a cheesy Richard Bach kind of way, calling me Ducky, saying things like, ‘You and I aren’t going to be one of those couples who fight or have secrets,’ and me hating it, hating him for not realising that I hated him. Hating my dearest friend because she knew exactly what she was and what she couldn’t abide, whereas I, whose life had been constructed from all manner of flimsy things – I was malleable.

  I would have a moment of clarity in Myrtle Beach, of understanding why I didn’t belong in America. All those orange umbrellas dotting the beach, and the grease of so many baking bodies slathered in tanning oil. The combined exhalation of all that burning fat.

  It reminded me of Jesolo, the seaside of my father’s childhood – a blea
k port town on the Adriatic.

  He took us once. I must have been twelve or thirteen. My mother spent most of her time cowering in the shade with an outsized hat and socks on her hands, complaining, ‘I’m already brown, Giacinto! Brown people don’t want to get browner.’

  Around us the heave of summer. Barrel-chested men in Speedos and mamas with flaccid biceps beckoning to their beloved Giorgios and Ludovicos to come and eat their panini alla porchetta.

  Day after day, the same routine. To the beach by nine – flip and roast, flip and roast – riposino, swim, walk, dinner, sleep, repeat.

  I remember gawking at all the flesh – the women in bikinis, so filled out and unabashed. My mother, by contrast, swaddled in towels like a bloody Bedouin. I longed to own my body like those women did, even if their pasta paunches pushed over their waists, and their cylindrical thighs shook with cellulite.

  How old was I when I had the courage to buy my first bikini? I know I didn’t have one in Myrtle Beach, because I remember watching Misrak emerge from the cabana and taking in the wonder of her quietly along with Blake and Chichi. That she could transform two bits of red nylon – some cheap thing she’d bought on sale without even trying on – two bits of triangle and string, and still look like one of those characters from Baywatch, bounding gloriously down the beach. That she had made no particular effort to look that way, unlike all the other girls with their patiently honed midriffs and manufactured thigh gaps.

  It would take years before I had the courage to step out in a two-piece, always making sure to lift my thighs in photographs so they wouldn’t look like bags of cement. By then, Misrak had found Jake, a boy from the Midwest, to marry. He contained her fire, softened it, gave her three kids and a white picket fence.