Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

In the lounge the phone was off the hook. I picked up the receiver and laid it back in the cradle. There was a note on my door: “The phone’s been ringing every ten minutes and it’s somebody with a foreign accent.” I went back out to the lounge and sat by the phone. The wall in front of me went from gray to orange and I felt heat spread across my neck. The phone rang, and I picked it up. An operator asked for me, fuzzy and distant, and then my father cleared his throat.

“Abhay.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Abhay, your grandfather, he passed away yesterday.”

I could hear birds far away, muffled by the door and the glass and the concrete.

“Abhay?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“I’m going there tomorrow for the… He was in hospital with the old heart trouble. They said he was sleeping and then he seemed to wake up for a minute.”

We were silent for a moment, and I could hear him breathing and I imagined the signal flashing up from land into space and bouncing off metal and then miles of space again until finally I could hear it.

“Pa.”

“Yes?”

“Uh… I…”

“Yes. Listen, I’ll call you again soon.”

“Okay.”

“Right.”

“Tell Ma I’m okay.”

“Yes.”

I went outside and sat on the stairs and the sun sparked at me through the sprinkler sprays. I was feeling nothing and knew it would come later. I tried to remember my grandfather’s face but could think only of his cupboard full of dusty medical books and homeopathic medicines. My father’s father had been trained to be a lawyer but preferred to spend his time studying tattered old books and dispensing sweet white medicines to people who didn’t trust the doctors with regular modern degrees or couldn’t afford them. When I was very young we’d go to visit him in his old, old house, and I’d play chess with him, old Indian rules, and then there would be a knock at the door and he’d go away and I’d see a thin face, anxious and sometimes in pain, and my grandfather would scoop up thousands of little white balls in a glass vial and carry it carefully to the door and bring back some little white balls for my waiting mouth and he’d sprinkle them on my tongue, laughing his toothless clown’s laugh. When I grew older he began to ask me when I was going to have my upnayana ceremony and be able to wear my sacred thread and become one of the twice-born, but I’d been to school in the meantime and had learned about the evils of the caste system, so we didn’t play chess anymore. Just before I left for the States we went to visit him, and I spent most of that week up on the roof, reading and watching the kites weave in the sky. My mother came up and sat on the bed next to me and said he’s getting old and you’re going away and he worries, you know, you are the oldest son, he really worries, you could do it just for the old man; and for a moment I remembered the way his fingernails clicked against my teeth when he put the sweetness in my mouth and the innocence of his smile but I shook my head and went back to my book, and now I wondered what he’d thought of in that last moment of wakefulness.

The water stopped. I still couldn’t feel anything.

In the slanting yellow light of early morning Mount Baldy looked closer than it really was, as if you could easily walk into the shallow dark gullies on its slopes, if you wanted to. I was still sitting on the steps when people started leaving for their first classes, and they stared at me curiously in passing, not saying anything. They were used to finding me asleep in the lounges or on the patch of grass outside, but I was, I suppose, especially ragged that morning. I pushed myself up and went back into the dorm, picking up my neighbor’s copy of the New York Times on the way. I sat in the lounge, next to the phone, because he didn’t like his paper disappearing, and read a front-page article about students marching in Beijing, raising slogans about freedom. In the Brazilian jungle, Catholics from New York were quarreling with evangelists from Texas about which was worse: frightening tribal Indians into conversion with sermons about hellfire and damnation or persuading them gently with lessons on agriculture. On the editorial page, under the headline “In India, Some Things Are More Important than Time,” somebody named Krause complained about the thirty minutes and assorted forms it took him to get a taxi at Bombay International Airport and about the basic inefficiency of Indian methods of producing television sets under protective tariffs. “Some things should be more important than self-sufficiency,” he said. On another page, the chief correspondent of the paper’s New Delhi bureau had an article about a holiday he had taken in Darjeeling and the hotel he had stayed in, which was, he said, “full of the charm of the British Raj.” This, I swear, was the New York Times the morning after my grandfather died, and as I sat there I felt as if I was in a film, and that I was expected to react somehow, but my head was pounding and I couldn’t decide whether this was ironical or absurd or something else or anything at all, so I went into the bathroom and brushed from my mouth the accumulated bitterness of the night.

This feeling of being in a film hung over me even later, when I sat at the back of a classroom and listened to a fellow named Lin talk about Asian revolutions. The British, he was saying, changed India for the better with their efficient railroads and efficient administration and so on, and for a moment I felt that I should be saying something, but then, sensing my face flush, full, somehow, of the realization that whatever I said wouldn’t make any sense, would sound crazy, I opened a notebook and doodled instead, and at the end of the period I found that I had drawn birds and airplanes soaring across the page.

Outside, the smog had moved in like a curtain and Baldy was invisible. I could feel my eyes stinging, and the acrid tickling moved slowly across my nostrils and into the back of my throat. Kate swung around a corner, laden with books. She snapped the hair out of her face with a quick jerk of her head.

“I have to be in class in three and a half minutes.” She didn’t smile.

“Okay. Talk to you later.”

I stood there for a moment, stretching, watching her white skirt move on the back of finely muscled calves as she tip-tapped away with quick, little steps. Back at New Dorm, in the lounge, I sat and listened to the Talking Heads echo in the courtyard outside: “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa, fa, fa, fa; fa, fa, fa, fa fa fa.” There was a torn newspaper under my foot, and a tank platoon ploughed through a field on the front page. The door opened in and Tom walked in, wearing silver-rimmed glasses with mirrored lenses. Again, I felt like I was in a film, and I liked it less and less, that feeling, I mean.

“What’s up, buddy?” He sat down next to me. “You look like you dropped down a cliff. What’s the matter, hungover?”

“No,” I said, again unable to talk about Babuji, and so I pointed at the newspaper. “It’s just geo-fucking-politics. Gets me down.”

“You’re not supposed to talk about it,” he said, thumping me repeatedly on the back, just below the neck. “No, no, no, no. Very passé, Abhay. It’s much better just to say it’s angst. Everyone will understand.”

“Right. Yeah. Let me wear those.” I put on his glasses.

“Let’s go see what Lawrence is up to.”

So I sat in my booth and Lawrence went looking for whatever he was looking for across the burning desert. After the movie was over and I had put away the reels I was exhausted, drawn out like a string. I told Tom this.

“You’re just susceptible to depression today, asshole,” he said. “Or actually the last few days. Listen, let’s go into town. Somebody’s playing at Parachute. It’s a bummer being around you when you’re like this. Got to get you up again.”