Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

She had left her door slightly ajar. He nudged it open to find her hunched in her chair, frantic and flipping the petal-thin pages of her Bible. In her lap lay a pile of newspaper clippings, cards, pictures of saints, and all matter of memorabilia valuable only to her. She rubbed her hands together, her eyes flying about the room until her gaze landed on him.

“I lost them,” she said. “I lost his letters.”

“Whose?”

“What kind of a …” She clapped her hands to her mouth and began to whimper. “What kind of mother am I?”

“Did you look in your dresser?” Mr. Panicker asked.

“You look. Maybe I missed them.” She hurried to her closet, but he hesitated. “Well, look, goddammit!”

He opened the drawer to a weedy tangle of graying brassieres and poked through them halfheartedly. She pulled an empty hat box from a shelf and dropped it behind her, then disappeared farther into the closet, her head bobbing among sweaters, a beaded blouse he had never seen her wear.

“Did you find it?” he asked.

She emerged empty-handed, murmuring a breathless prayer not unlike a nursery rhyme. She continued chanting while she turned her Bible upside down and shook it as violently as she could, though only a holiday card fell to the floor. “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please look around, my son has been lost and cannot be found—”

Mr. Panicker tried to gently pry the Bible from her fingers, but she yanked it back with a force he hadn’t expected.

“What do you know about it?” she said, the Bible splayed against her chest. “You don’t know a thing!”

“I do know. I have a son.”

“Son.” She snorted. “No one’s ever seen him around here.”

He stared at her.

Gradually, her eyes softened and grew full. She sat down in her chair and searched the ceiling and walls, the windowsill, the paintings of bright, blank fruit.

“Stay here,” he said. “I will show you.”

•

Back in his room, Mr. Panicker rummaged through one of his suitcases, thumbed through papers, tossed books aside, rifled through shirts and pants. He found it in his dresser drawer, tucked inside a black address book: the photograph of Sunit in his school uniform — white dress shirt, navy shorts, backpack, chappals . His oil-slick hair had been combed into two distinct sections, one smaller than the other, a style that emphasized the gravity in his coal-black eyes. This, Mr. Panicker would tell her, was a real son, not a boy who existed only in letters.

And yet, her words, almost an accusation: No one’s ever seen him .

He flipped farther through his address book in search of an adult picture of Sunit, but he discovered only more baby pictures. He had brought no pictures of Sunit as a man.

In the second drawer, beneath his sweaters, Mr. Panicker found a thick block of paper, secured with three shiny gold tacks. It was Sunit’s ninety-page script, which he had said was “totally not autobiographical,” though the cover page read, “An Indian-American man struggles against his overbearing single father.” Here the script had remained for weeks, buried and unread. Mr. Panicker pulled the sweaters back over it.

He returned with the photograph and found May still seated, now wearing her glasses, staring at a fixed point out the window. He hovered in the doorway for a moment, unsure of himself. Their fight seemed far from her mind.

“See this,” he said, and extended to her the photograph. She pulled her gaze from the window and looked down at his hand. He raised the photograph to her face, which remained blank, until she surprised him with a tiny, breathless cry.

“Satyanand,” she breathed, and took the picture with both hands.

“Sunit,” he corrected her.

“Satyanand,” she said in the same drifting voice. “He looks sad.”

Staring at the photo, Mr. Panicker remembered that he was the one responsible for his son’s hairstyle. Usually, his wife combed Sunit’s hair, but she had left them a few days before. Mr. Panicker recalled crouching over Sunit, moving the comb all too gently across his scalp. “Is this the right way?” Mr. Panicker had asked. In response, Sunit had looked in the mirror with the same expression he gave in the photo: neither approving nor disapproving but detached, set adrift.

After a time, Mr. Panicker said, “Sunit hated having his picture taken. He could never stay still.”

“Satyanand,” she corrected him, with the insistence of a child.

He looked more closely at the photograph and tried to remember that day, those days, the sense of coming ruin. In the months prior, Mercy had suffered from an edgy restlessness, one eye always on the window. Like mother, like son. Sunit would never visit him in Queens, and Mr. Panicker could not bear another slow abandonment.

“Satyanand Satyanarayana,” May said to him, slowly, teaching him how to form the words.

Mr. Panicker nodded, repeating after her. “Satyanand.”

She smiled, enchanted by the name settling like dust over the picture, and touched her forefinger to the boy’s face, drawing from this some strength. They spent minutes like this without a word, and for Mr. Panicker, for now, this was enough.

• •

My grandfather believed that the guest bathroom drain was a portal for time travel. I didn’t mind his beliefs until they intruded on my social life, what little I had. My friend Newt and I were playing slapball against the side of my house — I was up to a record sixty-seven slaps — when my grandfather came outside and yelled at me in Malayalam for leaving a clot of my long hair in the bathtub drain, thereby blocking his route. His mundu was tied up like a miniskirt, wet scribbles of hair against his spindly calves. After calling me a “twit,” my grandfather stormed back inside, leaving Newt to stare at me with a dispiriting combination of pity and shock.

“Did he call you a tit?” Newt asked.

“A twit. He’s my grandfather,” I added, as if that would explain things.

“He kinda seems like a jerk.”

My grandfather wore house slippers with pom-poms at the toes. He could slice and deseed an apple in the palm of his hand. He believed that he was trapped somewhere in 1929, with the nine-year-old version of his wife, Ammu. He believed, without a doubt, that I was Ammu.

I could explain to Newt the firm but illogical architecture of my grandfather’s delusions or I could stop inviting him to my house. So that was it for Newt and me.

In his absence, I played Barbie by myself, which wasn’t as much fun without Newt and his Peaches n’ Cream Barbie or Winter Wonderland Barbie, both of which he had borrowed from his older sister. My Barbie wore a gingham skirt and a saggy swimsuit that kept slipping down her chest in the middle of a conversation. My mom reminded me, often, that I was getting too old to play with dolls, being two months away from ten, but Newt was ten and he disagreed. He had even offered to steal one from his sister for me, a Ken. That was before he called my grandfather a jerk.

My mom would never buy me a Ken. I didn’t even ask; it would’ve been too embarrassing to confess that I wanted my dolls to get romantic when I myself wasn’t supposed to get romantic for another fifteen years. All I had left was a mannish knockoff of Barbie named Madge. Madge had big, flat feet and a chest like an afterthought, small and undefined. I chopped off her hair and knocked their heads together, but there were certain leaps that even my imagination just refused to make.

Two days after he chewed me out, my grandfather tried to make peace. We’d been through this before. I would be sitting in my room, racing through my homework to watch the TV shows everyone at school would be quoting the next day. My grandfather would wander in without a greeting, surveying my walls — the church calendar my mom had taped up, the poster of Jordan dunking with his tongue out. My grandfather had a quiet way of moving from room to room of our house, his hands behind his back, like a tourist observing the natives from a clinical distance.