Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

“More mistakes, you mean,” I say.

“Police matters are not in my hands,” she answers.

“Nothing I can do will make any difference,” I say. “We must all grieve in our own way.”

“But you are coping very well. All the people said, Mrs. Bhave is the strongest person of all. Perhaps if the others could see you, talk with you, it would help them.”

“By the standards of the people you call hysterical, I am behaving very oddly and very badly, Miss Templeton.” I want to say to her, I wish I could scream, starve, walk into Lake Ontario, jump from a bridge. “They would not see me as a model. I do not see myself as a model.”

I am a freak. No one who has ever known me would think of me reacting this way. This terrible calm will not go away.

She asks me if she may call again, after I get back from a long trip that we all must make. “Of course,” I say. “Feel free to call, anytime.”

Four days later, I find Kusum squatting on a rock overlooking a bay in Ireland. It isn’t a big rock, but it juts sharply out over water. This is as close as we’ll ever get to them. June breezes balloon out her sari and unpin her knee-length hair. She has the bewildered look of a sea creature whom the tides have stranded.

It’s been one hundred hours since Kusum came stumbling and screaming across my lawn. Waiting around the hospital, we’ve heard many stories. The police, the diplomats, they tell us things thinking that we’re strong, that knowledge is helpful to the grieving, and maybe it is. Some, I know, prefer ignorance, or their own versions. The plane broke into two, they say. Unconsciousness was instantaneous. No one suffered. My boys must have just finished their breakfasts. They loved eating on planes, they loved the smallness of plates, knives, and forks. Last year they saved the airline salt and pepper shakers. Half an hour more and they would have made it to Heathrow.

Kusum says that we can’t escape our fate. She says that all those people — our husbands, my boys, her girl with the nightingale voice, all those Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Parsis, and atheists on that plane — were fated to die together off this beautiful bay. She learned this from a swami in Toronto.

I have my Valium.

Six of us “relatives”—two widows and four widowers — choose to spend the day today by the waters instead of sitting in a hospital room and scanning photographs of the dead. That’s what they call us now: relatives. I’ve looked through twenty-seven photos in two days. They’re very kind to us, the Irish are very understanding. Sometimes understanding means freeing a tourist bus for this trip to the bay, so we can pretend to spy our loved ones through the glassiness of waves or in sunspeckled cloud shapes.

I could die here, too, and be content.

“What is that, out there?” She’s standing and flapping her hands and for a moment I see a head shape bobbing in the waves. She’s standing in the water, I, on the boulder. The tide is low, and a round, black, head-sized rock has just risen from the waves. She returns, her sari end dripping and ruined and her face is a twisted remnant of hope, the way mine was a hundred hours ago, still laughing but inwardly knowing that nothing but the ultimate tragedy could bring two women together at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. I watch her face sag into blankness.

“That water felt warm, Shaila,” she says at length.

“You can’t,” I say. “We have to wait for our turn to come.”

I haven’t eaten in four days, haven’t brushed my teeth.

“I know,” she says. “I tell myself I have no right to grieve. They are in a better place than we are. My swami says I should be thrilled for them. My swami says depression is a sign of our selfishness.”

Maybe I’m selfish. Selfishly I break away from Kusum and run, sandals slapping against stones, to the water’s edge. What if my boys aren’t lying pinned under the debris? What if they aren’t stuck a mile below that innocent blue chop? What if, given the strong currents. …

Now I’ve ruined my sari, one of my best. Kusum has joined me, knee-deep in water that feels to me like a swimming pool. I could settle in the water, and my husband would take my hand and the boys would slap water in my face just to see me scream.

“Do you remember what good swimmers my boys were, Kusum?”

“I saw the medals,” she says.

One of the widowers, Dr. Ranganathan from Montreal, walks out to us, carrying his shoes in one hand. He’s an electrical engineer. Someone at the hotel mentioned his work is famous around the world, something about the place where physics and electricity come together. He has lost a huge family, something indescribable. “With some luck,” Dr. Ranganathan suggests to me, “a good swimmer could make it safely to some island. It is quite possible that there may be many, many microscopic islets scattered around.”

“You’re not just saying that?” I tell Dr. Ranganathan about Vinod, my elder son. Last year he took diving as well.

“It’s a parent’s duty to hope,” he says. “It is foolish to rule out possibilities that have not been tested. I myself have not surrendered hope.”

Kusum is sobbing once again. “Dear lady,” he says, laying his free hand on her arm, and she calms down.

“Vinod is how old?” he asks me. He’s very careful, as we all are. Is , not was.

“Fourteen. Yesterday he was fourteen. His father and uncle were going to take him down to the Taj and give him a big birthday party. I couldn’t go with them because I couldn’t get two weeks off from my stupid job in June.” I process bills for a travel agent. June is a big travel month.

Dr. Ranganathan whips the pockets of his suit jacket inside out. Squashed roses, in darkening shades of pink, float on the water. He tore the roses off creepers in somebody’s garden. He didn’t ask anyone if he could pluck the roses, but now there’s been an article about it in the local papers. When you see an Indian person, it says, please give him or her flowers.

“A strong youth of fourteen,” he says, “can very likely pull to safety a younger one.”

My sons, though four years apart, were very close. Vinod wouldn’t let Mithun drown. Electrical engineering , I think, foolishly perhaps: this man knows important secrets of the universe, things closed to me. Relief spins me lightheaded. No wonder my boys’ photographs haven’t turned up in the gallery of photos of the recovered dead. “Such pretty roses,” I say.

“My wife loved pink roses. Every Friday I had to bring a bunch home. I used to say, Why? After twenty odd years of marriage you’re still needing proof positive of my love?” He has identified his wife and three of his children. Then others from Montreal, the lucky ones, intact families with no survivors. He chuckles as he wades back to shore. Then he swings around to ask me a question. “Mrs. Bhave, you are wanting to throw in some roses for your loved ones? I have two big ones left.”

But I have other things to float: Vinod’s pocket calculator; a half-painted model B-52 for my Mithun. They’d want them on their island. And for my husband? For him I let fall into the calm, glassy waters a poem I wrote in the hospital yesterday. Finally he’ll know my feelings for him.

“Don’t tumble, the rocks are slippery,” Dr. Ranganathan cautions. He holds out a hand for me to grab.

Then it’s time to get back on the bus, time to rush back to our waiting posts on hospital benches.

Kusum is one of the lucky ones. The lucky ones flew here, identified in multiplicate their loved ones, then will fly to India with the bodies for proper ceremonies. Satish is one of the few males who surfaced. The photos of faces we saw on the walls in an office at Heathrow and here in the hospital are mostly of women. Women have more body fat, a nun said to me matter-of-factly. They float better.