Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

Radha and Anita started sleeping in the same room. A few weeks after she discovered me, Radha sent Kusum to live with her mother, saying to her mother that she did not feel capable of taking care of three children. Radha offered no excuse to me.

I stopped drinking. For a long time I did not fight with Radha or even raise my voice in anger. If I started to speak loudly, my voice grew hushed on its own. For a while I went to temple every day.

Radha never again mentioned what had happened with Anita. But in the first few years after I was caught, every time she became angry at me I felt shame and fear shoot through my blood. Anita behaved as if she had completely forgotten what I did. I was glad when we moved out of the house where everything

An Obedient Father loi

had occurred, because I thought it would hasten the process of erasure.

In two or three years I was going to saloons again. I would drink and cry as always, but I tried not to seek anyone's pity when I got home. Radha and I fought, though not as much. I returned to the brothels. I went to them until my heart attack, but I never had sex with someone younger than sixteen, and I never touched Anita again.

We drove past a large whitewashed rock which read 5 beri KM in black paint. Fields stretched into the distance on either side. Some of the land had been tilled in preparation for planting, and the overturned soil was black. Other fields were a crumbling brown. The sun was directly overhead. I could feel the heat, but it was as if I were generating cold.

After Radha caught me, twenty years passed, and in her forties, she lost her faith in God. Becoming an atheist made her bitter. She grew so thin that the skin on her arms and face hung in folds. My weight increased till the width of my shirts matched the width of my cot. The more years Indira Gandhi spent in office, the more my income grew, for more and more things fell under the government's aegis and we civil servants were the gatekeepers. I bought a toaster, a blender, a refrigerator, and a television. Anita went through higher secondary and into college. She grew up shy and easily panicked, but there was nothing that marked her as damaged. Rajesh completed a Ph.D. in Hindi and then could not find any position as a teacher. Kusum won a government award for her Ph.D. on peanut plants and went to Canada, then America.

The bus stopped at the edge of Beri, in front of a large dirt yard which had an unpainted cinder-block restaurant and automobile repair shop at its back. "We'll be here half an hour," the driver called, and hurried off the bus. He went to a wall and uri-

nated against it. A short young man in a red raw-silk shirt tucked carefully into creased black pants came out of the restaurant toward the bus. "Time to worship your stomach!" he shouted. "Samosas, roti-subji, sweets! Come eat! Come eat!" The bus emptied.

The young man told me where the ice-cream factory was. It had been five years since I was last in Beri, and the water pump and ration store he described on the way had not been there when I was last in town. I had hoped for nostalgia, but being in Beri made me feel nothing special.

Even several streets from the ice-cream factory I could hear the beat of a drum. The factory was on a cracked and pitted dirt road, with tilled fields on one side and single- and double-story houses along the other. In front of the factory, a man had a bear with a rope around his neck. A boy stood nearby playing a drum strapped to his chest. The bear was on his feet and walked swaying, like a drunk.

The factory was squeezed between two houses, and because its fa9ade was no wider than an ordinary shop's, the only indication that it was a factory was the Toyota ice cream painted in blue above the entrance and the whirring and splashing sounds coming from inside. As I came up the road, I saw a crowd of forty or fifty people, mostly dark peasant women with heavy silver bands around their ankles and children with bone-thin legs, standing in a ragged line in the fields just beyond the edge of the road. These were the poor of Beri. A smaller and better-dressed crowd stood on the road in front of the factory, eating ice cream off leaf plates with small flat spoon-shaped paddles of wood. In the shade of the factory a table held leaf plates of dissolving ice cream. To keep the crowd from raiding the ice cream, the road was patrolled by three men with bamboo staffs.

I was about forty feet from the factory when the pundit stepped out of its doorway. I immediately recognized his thick wrestler's body and buck teeth. He was holding a leaf plate so heavy with food that he had to keep both hands beneath it. Right behind him, talking, and also carrying a plate of food, came my brother Krishna. I

was so startled I stopped in the middle of the road. Krishna was still thin and wrinkled, with a thin mustache. I moved into the fields, hoping to hide in the crowd until I found a way to speak to the pundit alone. I wondered what the pundit would think of my coming to Beri and not attempting to see my brothers.

Perhaps a third of the children in the crowd had the swollen bellies of starvation. Most seemed to be seven or eight years old, although they may have been older. Some of them were naked except for shirts or blouses held closed by one or two buttons. As I left the road and entered the crowd, a starving boy with a shaved head and ringworm scars on his scalp burst toward the ice-cream table. He kept a hand on his belly while running, as if he were balancing a pot of water. He traveled two or three meters before one of the patrolmen took a half step toward him and swung his staff It was as if the dry whir of the swing, not the blow, sent the boy rolling along the dirt road. People from the crowd along the road cursed the patrolman. The drum was beaten faster and the bear shuffled faster. The patrolman turned his back on the crowd and walked away.

The boy lay on the ground for several minutes. He must have been there without his mother or family, because nobody tried to help him. He got up and, hunched almost in half, went through the crowd and several meters into the field. He lay down on his back in the dirt. I went up to him. His eyes were shut. He was so thin and gray with dust that he looked like a squirrel. My heart was racing and my hands felt icy. Perhaps because of all the remembering and Asha and seeing my brother among the guarded, I felt as if I had hit the boy. I wanted to cry at what I had done. "Take this," I said, crouching down and pressing twenty rupees into one of his hands. He opened his eyes, saw the money, but did not appear to recognize it.

As I stood, I suddenly became dizzy. I lurched to one side and, while moving, vomited. The vomit felt cold in my mouth and was almost clear. I leaned down and stood with my legs apart and my

hands on my knees. Some of the vomit splattered my shoes. The ground rose and fell as if it were breathing. My heart was racing so fast that I became frightened of another heart attack. I shivered and threw up once more. From the noises around me, I realized that the crowd had begun to notice me. After several minutes I began to make my way back to the road, but my knees gave and I fell. I was looking at two lumps of dirt with hay and dried leaves embedded in them, then I drifted into a bright haze.

K man gripped my underarms and another grabbed my

/X^ankles. "Heatstroke," I heard, and then as I was slowly lifted: "He's worth two men," someone said, grunting, and people laughed. We entered the crowd along the road. A woman said, "Feed him ice cream." There was more laughter, but before it had time to die, another woman suggested, "Take him into the factory. It's cold there." "Into the factory," repeated a man. Suddenly several pairs of hands were pulling me up. "Ice cream. Ice cream," I heard.

As the five or six men, women, and children who were carrying me passed the dancing bear, it jerked forward and nudged a young boy who was pretending to buoy me with one hand. The boy jumped back, screaming. The people carrying me stopped to watch him hop in place and howl. I laughed, but no sound came out.