Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

Perhaps my unhappiness began to ease, because I started to appreciate how lucky I was to have reconciled with my brothers so easily. Or perhaps my mood changed simply because of the strange beauty of what I was seeing. But it took nearly an hour to pass the construction site, and during that hour, as I waited and watched the road being dragged up the hill, I began to believe that my life could be changed in inches, even by accident, the way my brother and I had been reconciled.

The bus shuddered as it went off the highway and onto the slope edging it. When it tried clambering back onto the road, the wheels

kept sliding and suitcases and boxes raced down the aisles. I covered my ears against the engine's noise. With a lurch, the bus pushed itself back on the highway. It stood shivering for a moment with the incomplete road on one side and the dark fields on the other. And then again the engine's roar pushed the silence of the night ahead of us.

FOUR.

1

woke to a knock at my door. The room was dark, the air warm and overused. As I rose, I was afraid. Yet I now believed that Anita suspected nothing. This certainty had arrived in the middle of the night. Perhaps it came simply from the fact that thirty-some hours had passed since Mr. Gupta's party. Also, when I returned home, the door of the flat was unchained, as I had left it, and Anita was lying beside Asha. My feeling that time had not passed also made my reason for fleeing Delhi dreamlike. Nonetheless, I was afraid. There was another volley of raps, then Anita asked, "What about the pundit?"

To have her speak of something other than Asha was comforting. The squatter colony was silent, so I wondered what time it was. "I'll go find him," I said. Anita did not respond. I sat at the edge of my cot. Only a little light was slipping beneath the door, which meant

the sun had not yet risen. I thought of the road being dragged up the hill. It made me feel determined.

"Rajiv Gandhi was murdered," Anita said. At first I thought she was speaking metaphorically, that there had been some scandal which had destroyed his chances for reelection. "The city is closed. The radio says there might be riots." The news must not have spread by the time I reached home, otherwise getting to Delhi would have been more difficult.

I got up and opened the door. Anita held out a folded newspaper to me. Her lips drooped in a child's caricature of sadness, but her eyes were expressionless. The white sari and lugubrious face made her look like a symbol of woe. The common room was dark. The door to the balcony and the kitchen windows were shut and bolted in preparation for riots. The light pressing through them revealed that it was early morning.

"Show me." I still could not believe her words. Unlike the time before his mother's death, when the military invaded the Sikhs' Golden Temple and every week terrorists were pulling buses off the road and shooting the passengers, or bombs were going off almost once a day, there had been no violence lately. I took the paper from her. I saw the headline rajiv gandhi killed and still thought it was a mistake.

Beneath the headline were two large photographs. One was a videotape image of a woman surrounded by a crowd and taken from some distance. The image had been blown up so many times that it would have been difficult to guess the woman's gender without the caption. The other photo was a publicity picture of Rajiv Gandhi facing slightly away from the camera and looking up. The front page was devoted to the assassination. Gandhi's speech in Tamil Nadu was the same as any of the dozens of speeches he had given in preparation for the election. The only difference was that a woman just five feet tall and strapped with dynamite had come up to him as he walked toward the stage. She put a garland around his neck and detonated herself No group had taken credit yet, and everyone—

the Sikhs, the Pakistanis, the CIA, the Tamil Tigers — was under suspicion.

During the minutes it took me to glance through the articles, Anita stared at me from a meter away. I wondered if she needed to be comforted. Her lips continued to sag. "The world is not what it was yesterday," I said, wanting to let her know her experience was shared. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, a Nehru was not at the center of power. Rajiv Gandhi's wife was Italian and his children were too young to assume control. The sense of strangeness at no longer having a Nehru ready to rule was the same as approaching a familiar place through an alley I had never used before. Was this also the world? "Don't worry. There won't be riots. People didn't like Rajiv Gandhi the way they did his mother." Then I noticed I was holding a newspaper which should not have been delivered on such a day and asked, "Did you go out?"

"To get milk." Before I could respond to the oddity of this, Anita said, "Mr. Gupta's party," and paused. Mr. Gupta belonged to the Congress Party, I thought. The moment between the surge of fear and my heartbeat leaping was like car gears grinding when the speeds are switched too quickly The fear made everything on either side of me vanish. All I could see was Anita. "You were drunk," she said, and halted again. Her lips stayed curved down. "I don't want…" she said.

When she stopped this time, my fear set me babbling. "I was drunk. Everybody at the party was drunk. I was so drunk I was stepping on my own feet. You get old and a little bit of liquor makes you crazy." I kept talking so that Anita would not have time to say something which could not be taken back. "I won't drink again. It was the first time I'd drunk in a year and a half" As I spoke, I willed Anita to think. If I say any more, where will I sleep, who will feed me?

"I would kill Asha. ." she said, interrupting me. Her voice was thin and shaking.

"Even as a joke…" I said.

"I'm not joking," Anita answered. She raised her hand and pointed a finger at me. She shook it. "I would kill you."

"Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry." My voice stayed low and calm as I repeated this.

"I can't go anywhere. I have no other home."

"Don't worry" Anita tried saying more, but I kept interrupting. "I'll take care of you. You're my daughter."

Asha stepped out of the bathroom. She noticed the way Anita and I were looking at each other and halted just before the bathroom door. Draped over an arm was a freshly washed shirt and underpants. Anita watched Asha and me for a moment. Then she took the laundry from Asha and hung it over a clothesline she had strung along one side of the common room. Anita returned to the kitchen.

Asha tried catching my eye, and the possibility of Anita seeing this scared me. "I'll go to the temple," I said. I thought, I can take all my money and all the money I've collected for Congress and vanish.

The sky was bright and cool. For May the weather was mild. The entrance to the squatter colony was blocked by a pile of sandbags. The doors were guarded by a neighbor, a young man with an enormous and ancient gun. "My grandfather killed a lion with this," he said. He shut the doors behind me as soon as I stepped into the alley. The piece of road I could see from the alleyway was empty of traffic. Shops had their grilles pulled down over their fronts. Rajiv Gandhi's death would have closed the banks, too, I realized. The ordinariness of this detail reminded me of my nature. I did not have the stamina to disappear.

A rickshaw driver sat in his vehicle at the mouth of the alley, smoking a bidi and regarding the thoroughfare. I came up to him and stopped. The roofs on both sides of the street were completely lined with men, women, and children waiting to see what would happen. I thought of floods I have seen during which everyone in a town is forced to live on a roof But the road was empty. I did not know whether a curfew had been declared, but even without one, few people would take the risk of going out. I wondered at Anita's having left the flat.