Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

I got back to Aunt Lini’s within the hour. She was in her kitchen charring an eggplant. “I’m making a special bharta for you,” she said, clapping a hand over the receiver. She was putting the screws on some poor Sikh, judging from the stream of coarse Punjabi I heard as I tore through the kitchen. She shouted after me, “Your Ma’ll be working late tonight.” More guilt, more Columbia, more engineering.

I didn’t thank Aunt Lini for being so thoughtful, and I didn’t complain about Ma not being home for me. I was in a towering rage with Rosie and with everyone who ever slobbered over her picture.

“Take your shoes off in the hall,” Lini shouted. “You know the rules.”

I was in the mood to break rules. For the first time I could remember, I wasn’t afraid of Danny Sahib. I wanted to liberate Rosie, and myself. From the hall stand I grabbed the biggest, sturdiest, wood-handled umbrella — gentlemen callers were always leaving behind souvenirs — and in my greasy high-tops I clumped up the stairs two at a time and kicked open the door to Rosie’s room.

Rosie lay in bed, smoking. She’d propped a new fan on her pillow, near her face. She sipped her gin and lime. So , I thought in my fit of mad jealousy, he’s bought her a fan. And now suddenly she likes limes. Damn him, damn him. She won’t want me and my newspapers, she won’t want my lemons. I wouldn’t have cared if Danny and half the bachelors in Queens were huddled around that bed. I was so pumped up with the enormity of love that I beat the mattress in the absence of rivals. Whack! Whack! Whack! went the stolen umbrella, and Rosie bent her legs delicately to get them out of the way. The fan teetered off the pillow and lay there beside her on the wilted, flopping bed, blowing hot air at the ceiling. She held her drink up tight against her nose and lips and stared at me around the glass.

“So, you want me, do you?” she said.

Slowly, she moved the flimsy little fan, then let it drop. I knelt on the floor with my head on the pillow that had pressed into her body, smelling flowers I would never see in Flushing and feeling the tug on my shoulder that meant I should come up to bed and for the first time I felt my life was going to be A-Okay.

ONE March midafternoon in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, Mr. N. K. S. Venkatesan, a forty-nine-year-old schoolteacher who should have been inside a St. Joseph’s Collegiate classroom explicating Arnold’s “The Buried Life” found himself instead at a barricaded intersection, axe in hand and shouting rude slogans at a truckload of soldiers.

Mr. Venkatesan was not a political man. In his neighborhood he was the only householder who hadn’t contributed, not even a rupee, to the Tamil Boys’ Sporting Association, which everyone knew wasn’t a cricket club so much as a recruiting center for the Liberation Tigers. And at St. Joe’s, he hadn’t signed the staff petition abhorring the arrest at a peaceful anti-Buddhist demonstration of Dr. Pillai, the mathematics teacher. Venkatesan had rather enjoyed talking about fractals with Dr. Pillai, but he disapproved of men with family responsibilities sticking their heads between billy clubs as though they were still fighting the British for independence.

Fractals claimed to predict, mathematically, chaos and apparent randomness. Such an endeavor, if possible, struck Mr. Venkatesan as a virtually holy quest, closer to the spirit of religion than of science. What had once been Ceylon was now Sri Lanka.

Mr. Venkatesan, like Dr. Pillai, had a large family to look after: he had parents, one set of grandparents, an aunt who hadn’t been quite right in the head since four of her five boys had signed up with the Tigers, and three much younger, unmarried sisters. They lived with him in a three-room flat above a variety store. It was to protect his youngest sister (a large, docile girl who, before she got herself mixed up with the Sporting Association, used to embroider napkin-and-tablecloth sets and sell them to a middleman for export to fancy shops in Canada) that he was marching that afternoon with two hundred baby-faced protesters.

Axe under arm — he held the weapon as he might an umbrella — Mr. Venkatesan and his sister and a frail boy with a bushy moustache on whom his sister appeared to have a crush, drifted past looted stores and charred vehicles. In the center of the intersection, a middle-aged leader in camouflage fatigues and a black beret stood on the roof of a van without tires, and was about to set fire to the national flag with what looked to Mr. Venkatesan very much like a Zippo lighter.

“Sir, you have to get in the mood,” said his sister’s boyfriend. The moustache entirely covered his mouth. Mr. Venkatesan had the uncanny sensation of being addressed by a thatch of undulating bristles. “You have to let yourself go, sir.”

This wasn’t advice; this was admonition. Around Mr. Venkatesan swirled dozens of hyper kinetic boys in white shirts, holding bricks. Fat girls in summer frocks held placards aloft. His sister sucked on an ice cream bar. Every protester seemed to twinkle with fun. He didn’t know how to have fun, that was the trouble. Even as an adolescent he’d battened down all passion; while other students had slipped love notes into expectant palms, he’d studied, he’d passed exams. Dutifulness had turned him into a pariah.

“Don’t think you chaps invented civil disobedience!”

He lectured the boyfriend on how his generation — meaning that technically, he’d been alive though hardly self-conscious — had cowed the British Empire. The truth was that the one time the police had raided the Venkatesans’ flat — he’d been four, but he’d been taught anti-British phrases like “the salt march” and “satyagraha” by a cousin ten years older — he had saluted the superintendant smartly even as constables squeezed his cousin’s wrists into handcuffs. That cousin was now in San Jose, California, minting lakhs and lakhs of dollars in computer software.

The boyfriend, still smiling awkwardly, moved away from Mr. Venkatesan’s sister. His buddies, Tigers in berets, were clustered around a vendor of spicy fritters.

“Wait!” the sister pleaded, her face puffy with held-back tears.

“What do you see in that callow, good-for-nothing bloke?” Mr. Venkatesan asked.

“Please, please leave me alone,” his sister screamed. “Please let me do what I want.”

What if he were to do what he wanted! Twenty years ago when he’d had the chance, he should have applied for a Commonwealth Scholarship. He should have immured himself in a leafy dormitory in Oxford. Now it was too late. He’d have studied law. Maybe he’d have married an English girl and loitered abroad. But both parents had died, his sisters were mere toddlers, and he was obliged to take the lowest, meanest teaching job in the city.

“I want to die,” his sister sobbed beside him.

“Shut up, you foolish girl.”

The ferocity of her passion for the worthless boy, who was, just then, biting into a greasy potato fritter, shocked him. He had patronized her when she had been a plain, pliant girl squinting at embroidered birds and flowers. But now something harsh and womanly seemed to be happening inside her.

“Forget those chaps. They’re nothing but troublemakers.” To impress her, he tapped a foot to the beat of a slogan bellowing out of loudspeakers.

Though soldiers were starting to hustle demonstrators into double-parked paddy wagons, the intersection had taken on the gaudiness of a village fair. A white-haired vendor darted from police jeep to jeep hawking peanuts in paper cones. Boys who had drunk too much tea or soda relieved themselves freely into poster-clogged gutters. A dozen feet up the road a housewife with a baby on her hip lobbed stones into storefronts. A band of beggars staggered out of an electronics store with a radio and a television. No reason not to get in the mood.