Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

"Yes! Yes! This is what Anita's done."

"How is this Anita's fault?" Kusum asked, avoiding Ben's surprised, inquisitive glance.

"Everything had been quiet for twenty years when she started this."

"How have you helped?" Ben asked softly.

"You don't know my worries," Rajesh said. "Everybody thinks I have plenty of money, but I don't."

Ben waited a moment. "I ask only because it seems Anita and Asha have so little."

Rajesh looked out at the gallery and the blue sky. "I might let her live with me."

Kusum felt relieved that Ben had not asked her how she had helped her sister. She too stared out the door.

"Did you ever get Ma's saris?" Rajesh asked.

"No." She had never even thought of inheriting anything from her mother.

"Pitaji told Anita to divide up Ma's saris between you and her."

She knew Rajesh wanted her to be angry at Anita. Kusum wondered if she would have felt guilt without years of Ben's steady goodness as an example. What would Ben think if he could read her thoughts?

She said to Ben, "I'll go help Anita with the tea. She works hard."

The next morning Kusum kept trying to wake, but her eyes would only open a minute or two and then sleep reclaimed her. In her dreams she heard a whapping sound, and it was this sound that woke her at last and drew her to the door of the living room. Carolyn and Asha were beating the sofa with broom handles. First one hit; the sofa puffed dust several feet high; they laughed; then the other lashed. They were covered in sweat and grime. Carolyn was wearing the dress that she was supposed to have on when they went to see the relatives who had raised Kusum. Kusum felt her hand curving to grab Asha. Asha should have noticed Carolyn's dress and not let her play this ridiculous violent game.

When angry, Kusum tried to be especially sweet. "Baby, come here and kiss me." Saying this was enough to calm her. Carolyn walked to her and kissed the chin Kusum thrust forward and then the nose she tilted down. Asha briefly regarded the kissing and returned to thrashing the sofa. "You might tear the cover," Kusum said to her.

"Why should I care," Asha answered, looking over her shoulder. "I am going to America."

Kusum wondered if Asha was crazy. Even a child knows to hide

the most blatantly selfish parts of herself. "You might not go," Kusum said, and struggling, forcing herself, continued, "I don't know if I want to bring you."

Asha did not turn around. She kept beating the sofa. She raised her arms far behind her back and whirred down as long a portion of the broom's handle as possible. "I'll begin shouting at the airport that I'm your daughter and you're leaving me behind. I can cry any time I want. You want to see me cry?

"I'm joking, Mausiji," Asha said as Kusum left the living room.

In the kitchen Kusum found Ben photographing Anita. Anita was frying chiwra and Ben kept making her move back and forth because of the sunlight and the waves of heat from the oil. It was probably years since Anita was last photographed, and she followed his directions eagerly.

Kusum bathed quickly, and soon they were out of the flat and on their way to Bittu Mamaji's house, where Kusum had grown up.

The houses are taller in Sohan Ganj than in the Old Vegetable Market, and this makes the alleys shadowy, so that they seem narrower. The side streets were noisy and crowded in a way Kusum's memory had left out. Some of her memories had even been addled. The shop whose owner she used to defeat regularly at cards was nowhere near the bottom of a sloping alley. And there were things she had completely forgotten. Badly maimed cows were everywhere. They passed a calf that had had one of its hooves pulped, so that a leg ended in a long dark flap of skin. The calf was hobbling toward a pile of garbage in such stunned fly-specked misery that Ben picked up Carolyn to keep her from the vision.

Kusum and Ben carried plastic bags full of gifts. They had wrapped the presents, although most were specifically requested.

"Where did you play?" Carolyn asked.

"All over. We were told to stay in one or two alleys, but, of course, we didn't. I knew every building."

"Did you play with Aunt Anita?"

"We lived apart. I didn't see her much."

"Did she live far away?"

"No." It was only a ten-minute walk from where Anita had grown up and where she had. At this idea Kusum thought, I am no worse than most people. I am good for even coming to India and thinking of adopting Asha.

They came to Bittu Mamaji's house. It was so narrow that a scooter parked in front covered half its length. There was a water pump across the street. "I remember when we got running water. Till then I used to be the one who carried the buckets for the entire house. That pump is where I got my bad back." Kusum laughed then, because she did not want to sound self-pitying. The stone steps up to the first story where Bittu Mamaji lived had grown beveled over generations. "My buckets did that," she said, and laughed again.

Rohit was the first to see them. "Hello," he shouted, and led them into Bittu Mamaji's rooms. Vibha came out of a back room at his shout. "Kusum, sister," he said, and shook Ben's hand. Then he lifted Carolyn and said, "You're the one in the photos." They moved into Bittu Mamaji's rooms.

Bittu Mamaji appeared, putting on a shirt. He had sandalwood paste smeared on his forehead and was a round head on a round body. Sharmila followed him. Soon they were all sitting in the main room drinking tea. The bags of gifts were placed in a line against a wall and nobody mentioned them for a while.

The talk first scratched across the details of life in America. Was Morris Plains near enough to Jersey City for Kusum to deliver a rose to a friend of Bittu Mamaji's. "I could, if you wanted, Mamaji. But it's not nearby." Kusum had never liked Bittu. She had thought he was lazy and so had no right to the condescending voice he had always used. But for some reason she now wanted to please him. She wanted Bittu Mamaji to admire her.

"Have you seen an Indian rose?" Bittu Mamaji asked Carolyn.

No, she shook her head.

"We'll show you that. Yes, Rohit?"

"Yes."

"Come sit beside me," Bittu said to Carolyn, and she joined him on the bed. "We'll show you Indian clouds. We'll show you some Indian birds."

"So now you are a full believer in the BJP," Kusum said.

"I love my country. Yes," he replied quickly. "I would never leave where I was born."

"Why is Sonia Gandhi running for Parliament?" Ben asked.

"Some files about her husband's bribery are about to be released and she wants to stop that," Bittu Mamaji answered, his voice soft and polite before the family's son-in-law. "And this way she keeps enough power to let her daughter run for office later if Priyanka wants to."

Relatives began arriving. Among them was Koko Naniji, Kusum's grandfather's sister, the woman in the family Kusum liked most. Koko Naniji was well past eighty, with a deeply pockmarked face. "Namaste, daughter," she said, and squatted easily in one corner. She believed chairs made you sick.

"Namaste," Kusum answered. "Carolyn, go touch Koko Naniji's feet." Koko Naniji's smile broadened. Because Koko Naniji was so old, as far back as Kusum could remember she had always been more of the bully than the victim. She occupied a large room on the ground floor of the house Bittu Mamaji lived in. Periodically family members tried taking over the room. Once, when she was away on a pilgrimage, a nephew and his wife had been moved into her room. Upon returning and discovering this and finding that her demands that the room be returned to her were being ignored, she took a stick and broke everything that could be shattered in the room. Then she went out on the street and began shouting that her family was making her homeless and that she needed a place to sleep. All those years of authority had made Koko Naniji's craziness seem amiable.