Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

None of his students could believe he’d come back voluntarily. They asked him about it again and again. How could he tell them that he’d missed his bedroom? He had felt that if he could just get back there -the dark wood floor, the brick walls of books, the ancient rolltop desk from Chor Bazaar-something would fall back into place, not inside him but in front of him, like the lengths of replacement track you sometimes saw them fitting at night on dark sections of the Western Railway commuter line.

He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes sitting alone in his room there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly-that life, his life, was rolling away outside.

“But why did you wait three years?” his mother asked. “Why didn’t you come home right away?”

When he thought about it now, he was surprised that it had taken only three years to extract himself from graduate school. He counted it among the more efficient periods of his life so far.

He saw Julia twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One afternoon when his mother was hosting a bridge tournament, he went to her house for the first time. A servant showed him into her room and purposefully shut the door, as if he’d had instructions not to disturb them. It was only four o’clock but the blinds were drawn. The lights were on and the door to her bathroom was closed; he could hear the tap running. Zubin sat at a small, varnished desk. He might have been in any girl's room in America: stacks of magazines on the bookshelf, tacked-up posters of bands he didn’t know, shoes scattered across a pink rag rug and pieces of pastel-colored clothing crumpled in with the sheets on the bed. A pair of jeans was on the floor where she’d stepped out of them, and the denim held her shape: open, round and paler on the inside of the fabric.

Both doors opened at once. Zubin didn’t know whether to look at the barefoot girl coming out of the bathroom, or the massive, bearded white man who had appeared from the hall.

“Hi, Daddy,” Julia said. “This is Zubin, my tutor.”

“We spoke on the phone, sir,” said Zubin, getting up.

Julia's father shook hands as if it were a quaint custom Zubin had insisted on. He sat down on his daughter's bed, and the springs protested. He looked at Zubin.

“What are you working on today?”

“Dad.”

“Yes.”

“He just got here.”

Julia's father held up one hand in defense. “I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t get into college. Then you could just stay here.”

Julia rolled her eyes, a habit that struck Zubin as particularly American.

“We’ll start working on her essay today.” Zubin turned to Julia: “Did you do a draft?” He’d asked her the same thing twice a week for the past three, and he knew what the answer would be. He wouldn’t have put her on the spot if he hadn’t been so nervous himself. But Julia surprised him: “I just finished.”

“What did you write about?” her father asked eagerly.

“The difficulties of being from a broken home.”

“Very interesting,” he said, without missing a beat.

“I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I try,” he said casually, as if this were the kind of conversation they had all the time. “So maybe we don’t even need Zubin-if you’ve already written your essay?”

Julia shook her head: “It isn’t good.”

Zubin felt he should say something. “The new format of the SAT places much greater emphasis on writing skills.” He felt like an idiot.

Julia's father considered Zubin. “You do this full-time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you always want to be a teacher?”

“I wanted to be a poet,” Zubin said. He could feel himself blushing but mostly he was surprised that he had told these two strangers something he hadn’t even told his parents.

“Do you write poems now?”

“Sometimes,” Zubin said.

“There are some good Marathi poets, aren’t there?”

“That's not what I’m interested in.” Zubin thought he’d spoken too forcefully, but it didn’t seem to bother Julia's father.

“I’ll leave you two to work now. If you want, come to dinner sometime-our cook makes terrible Continental food, because my daughter won’t eat Indian.”

Zubin smiled. “That sounds good-thank you, sir.”

“Mark,” Julia's father said, closing the door gently behind him.

“Your dad seems cool.”

Julia was gathering up all of her clothes furiously from the bed and the floor. She opened her closet door-a light went on automatically-and threw them inside. Then she slammed it. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong.

“Do you want me to take a look at what you have?”

“What?”

“Of the essay.”

“I didn’t write an essay.”

“You said-”

Julia laughed. “Yeah.”

“How do you expect to get into Berkeley?”

“You’re going to write it.”

“I don’t do that.” He sounded prim.

“I’ll pay you.”

Zubin got up. “I think we’re finished.”

She took her hair out of the band and redid it, her arms above her head. He couldn’t see any difference when she finished. “A hundred dollars.”

“Why do you want me to write your essay?”

Suddenly Julia sank down onto the floor, hugging her knees. “I have to get out of here.”

“You said that before.” He wasn’t falling for the melodrama. “I’ll help you do it yourself.”

“A thousand. On top of the regular fee.”

Zubin stared. “Where are you going to get that much money?”

“Half a lakh.”

“That calculation even I could have managed,” Zubin said, but she wasn’t paying attention. She picked up a magazine off her night table, and flopped down on the bed. He had the feeling that she was giving him time to consider her offer and he found himself-in that sealed-off corner of his brain where these things happen-considering it.

With $200 a week, plus the $1,000 bonus, he easily could stop all the tutoring except Julia’s. And with all of that time, there would be no excuse not to finish his manuscript. There were some prizes for first collections in England and America; they didn’t pay a lot, but they published your book. Artists, he thought, did all kinds of things for their work. They made every kind of sacrifice-financial, personal, moral-so as not to compromise the only thing that was truly important.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Zubin said.

Julia looked bored.

“You try it first. If you get really stuck-then maybe. And I’ll help you think of the idea.”

“They give you the idea,” she said. “Remember?”

“I’ll take you to a couple of places. We’ll see which one strikes you.” This, he told himself, was hands-on education. Thanks to him, Julia would finally see the city where she had been living for nearly a year.

“Great,” said Julia sarcastically. “Can we go to Elephanta?”

“Better than Elephanta.”

“To the Gateway of India? Will you buy me one of those big, spotted balloons?”

“Just wait,” said Zubin. “There's some stuff you don’t know about yet.”

They walked from his house past the Hanging Garden, to the small vegetable market in the lane above the Walkeshwar Temple. They went down a flight of uneven steps, past small, open electronic shops where men clustered around televisions waiting for the cricket scores. The path wound between low houses, painted pink or green, a primary school and a tiny, white temple with a marble courtyard and a black nandi draped in marigolds. Two vegetable vendors moved to the side to let them pass, swiveling their heads to look, each with one hand lightly poised on the flat basket balanced on her head. Inside the baskets, arranged in an elegant multicolored whorl, were eggplants, mint, tomatoes, Chinese lettuces, okra, and the smooth white pumpkins called dudhi. Further on a poster man had laid out his wares on a frayed, blue tarpaulin: the usual movie stars and glossy deities, plus kittens, puppies and an enormous white baby, in a diaper and pink headband. Across the bottom of a composite photo- an English cottage superimposed on a Thai beach, in the shadow of Swiss mountains dusted with yellow and purple wildflowers and bisected by a torrential Amazonian waterfall-were the words, Home is where. When you go there, they have to let you in. Punctuation aside, it was difficult for Zubin to imagine a more depressing sentiment.