Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“Yeah, we’ve been talking for a few days,” Sunit said. “I told her we’d hire someone to stop by every day, and she said she’d love for you to have the room next to Biju and Binoy.”

Mr. Panicker cringed at the memory of the greasy doorknobs in Preeti’s house, Biju and Binoy’s hair gel traveling from their spiny coifs to their hands, to the doorknobs, to Mr. Panicker’s hands and wherever else.

“But how close are you to Queens?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Like forty-five minutes.”

“You’ll visit?”

“Of course, Dad. When I have the time.”

“I can’t talk to those boys. They have no sense.”

“Dad, I’m at Preeti Auntie’s place right now.”

Preeti picked up another phone in the house. “What is there to argue? You’ll live next to Biju-Binoy.”

“Aha, Preeti! I just mean I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Disturb, what disturb?” she said. “It disturbs me to care for family?” He pictured her with her telephone jammed under her chin as she arranged the items in her refrigerator just so, according to a system Mr. Panicker did not care to learn. “You’re starting to talk like the velumbin you live with.”

Mr. Panicker knocked on May’s door for breakfast only to find that she had a visitor, a plain young woman sitting at the foot of the bed. She wore blue hospital scrubs, her hair knotted at the base of her neck. She was slicing an apple in her palm, a napkin spread across her knee.

Mr. Panicker offered to leave, but May, who had answered the door, waved him into the room. “See, look, Hari, this nice girl from church brought tea.”

“Hi, I’m Leanne,” the woman said, waving hello with her paring knife.

“Leanne,” May agreed, nodding. “Sit, Hari, sit.”

Mr. Panicker lowered himself into the rocking chair but declined when Leanne offered him his pick from a box of Constant Comment teas. He considered tea bags and tea to be two different things.

“At least have a muffin,” Leanne said, nodding at the white paper bag on the blue tiled table. For a stranger from church, she seemed oddly at home in her surroundings, one leg folded beneath her on the bed. She would have been pretty, perhaps, if not for the downturned slant of her lips.

“You and May belong to the same church?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Um …,” Leanne said, arranging the apple slices on a plastic plate. She glanced at May, who was rummaging through her dresser drawer, then shrugged. “I was baptized at her church. Haven’t been since.”

Mr. Panicker hesitated, confused, before May cut in: “I was just telling her about Satyanand.” May pulled out a small packet of aerogrammes, secured with a rubber band, and happily fanned them at Leanne as if they were a stack of bills. “See? Look how many.”

“I know,” Leanne said, a humoring lilt to her voice. “You told me.”

“I can’t wait to show him,” May said.

“Show me what?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“Not you. My son.”

“I thought you have no children.” Mr. Panicker sat forward, trying to understand. He looked at Leanne, who was also staring at May, though with less bewilderment, as if waiting for her to complete her sentence. May, meanwhile, was carefully depositing the stack of aerogrammes into her dresser drawer. “Who is this son?”

“Satyanand Satyanarayana.” May uttered his name with nearly perfect pronunciation. She pushed the drawer shut and straightened the lacy runner draped across the top. “He’s coming to visit. All the way from Bombay.”

May went on about Satyanand with a distant, feverish look in her eye, mulling over what the boy might like to eat or see or do once he got here. Leanne listened placidly. Time and again, Mr. Panicker asked where May had gotten this idea, but she brushed off all his questions, concerned only with her own. “Do you think he’s vegetarian?” she asked him, at which point Mr. Panicker stood up, flustered and queasy, and excused himself from the room. He had lost his appetite.

Ten minutes later, Leanne knocked on his door. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Panicker, but would you mind walking me to my car?”

Only once they stepped outside did Leanne explain that she was May’s grandniece. She worked at Baptist East as a nurse. He noted her height, a few inches taller than him, and wondered if this was the woman who had hung the framed fruit on May’s wall.

Leanne didn’t seem bothered by the news of May’s “son.” The year before, May had suffered a stroke, and ever since then, the delusions came and went. “A few months ago, she thought her bedroom was her office. She wouldn’t see me unless I called and made an appointment. She got mad if I wore jeans.”

“Maybe she has had another stroke,” Mr. Panicker said. “Maybe that is why she’s talking like this.”

Leanne shook her head. “I had her squeeze my fingers. Her grip was fine, so that’s a good sign.”

“Good,” he repeated. He watched his reflection in the window of her car, nodding.

“Good as it gets.” Leanne smiled at him, heavily.

“Here, let me give you my info,” she said, and began digging through her purse for a pen and paper. “I’d really appreciate it if you could keep an eye on her. Just let me know if she’s acting funny? Or funnier than usual, I guess.”

“I will not be here very much longer,” he said. “This was to be a temporary stay for me.”

“Oh.” Leanne looked up. “Oh, good for you.”

“But write it anyway. In case.”

After she handed the paper over, Mr. Panicker brought it close to his face, making sure he could read all the numbers before he bid her good-bye.

All day long, Mr. Panicker avoided May’s room. After lunch, he began to pack. He balled his socks and ordered them along the northern border of his suitcase, black, gray, black, blue, a mindless industry that freed him from his present and released him to his fruit-market days, arranging and rearranging boxes of fruit. They could have been clementines, these socks, if he ignored the rip of static between them, if he closed his eyes and thought himself back to the pine-green awning of Panicker’s Produce on Chenoweth Lane, balancing tangelo against grapefruit, building pyramids and ziggurats as artful as the fruit market displays he’d known as a boy.

For years, Sunit had helped out at the store, until he entered high school and began losing all patience with customers. Once, when Mr. Panicker was ringing up a customer, Sunit beside him, clicking the price gun over a crate of bagged snacks, the customer looked at Sunit when asking for directions to the interstate. “Ask him,” Sunit said, tilting his head at Mr. Panicker between clicks. “He knows English.”

“No, the customer isn’t king,” Sunit said later, when Mr. Panicker scolded him. Mr. Panicker didn’t know when that note of condescension had entered his son’s voice, but after he left for college, it only hardened. If Mr. Panicker shared his opinion on Sunit’s choice of studies, Sunit returned with terms like “entrenched” and “model minority,” talking about Mr. Panicker’s brain as if it were a tangle of ill-connected wires that only he could unravel.

Even now, Sunit thought he understood everything of Mr. Panicker’s life, though he knew nothing of sitting in the fading light of a foreign room, running a finger over a tiny hole in the wall where someone must have tacked up a photo of loved ones, someone who was here at one time, and now was not. His son was ignorant of that hollow feeling. Mr. Panicker hoped he would remain so forever.

Before dinner, Mr. Panicker made himself knock on May’s door, to see if she wanted to join him. There he would tell her that he would soon be leaving.