Authors: Charles Benoit
Out of Order (21 page)
“Studio apartments?”
“No. We both lost our parents at an early age.”
The teacup and saucer rattled in Jason’s hands. “What?”
“My father died in an auto accident when I was sixteen. Five years later my mother was diagnosed with cancer and passed away later that year.”
“Wow. That’s rough,” Jason said, rushing through the words. “What about Sriram?”
“It was his mother who died first, I don’t know the cause. His father passed away during his last year at university. A heart attack, I believe.”
Jason set down his teacup and collapsed back in his chair. “Are you sure? I mean about Sriram’s mother being dead.”
“Coincidentally we both lost our mothers in the same year. I was twenty-one at the time, so Sriram would have been in primary school. Fourth, fifth grade perhaps. It came up quite accidentally one afternoon. Someone at BWS had recalled a football championship or some nonsense and Sriram mentioned that it was the same date his mother had died. Later that day we shared a pot of tea and told sons’ stories.” Piyush smiled again, a melancholy smile that seemed to fit.
“Did he have a sister? An aunt he was close to?”
“Here again we were alike. We were both only children, but where I had many aunties, Sriram often joked of a plague of bachelor uncles. He did have a wry sense of humor.”
“There has to be somebody. Sriram told me he was planning a trip to India for that holiday that’s coming up, the one with the saris.”
Piyush tilted his head and gave a slight frown. “Which holiday is this?”
“The one where sons give their mothers new saris. It’s coming up soon.”
“Sons give their mothers saris all the time, there is no set holiday for the gifting of saris.”
“So, as far as you know, there was no reason for Sriram to bring a sari to India?”
“Bringing a sari to India,” Piyush said, his slight smile returning, “would be like bringing coals to Newcastle.”
“But it could happen, right?”
Piyush shrugged his narrow shoulders. “There is no law forbidding it. But I must say it would be a rare sari indeed that would deserve such treatment.”
“Behold!” Manny said, pulling his Ambassador to the side of the road. “The international headquarters of Bangalore World Systems.”
Jason looked out the passenger window at the building and waited for the punch line, Manny slapping his leg, laughing, saying he was only kidding, driving on as he made more cracks at the poor building’s expense.
When he heard the engine cut off and then the ratcheting clicks of the parking brake, Jason realized it wasn’t meant to be a joke.
Dropped down on the edge of a sprouting farm field and surrounded by bent poles that should have supported a missing chain-link fence, the slate-gray concrete and cinder block building sat—with a slight lean to the right—in the chunky red earth.
It was hard not to stare and Jason felt himself first lean out of the passenger window, as if drawn in by curiosity, then pulling back, an instinctual response he obeyed without fighting. Squinting, he tried to envision the architect’s original concept.
He seemed to have started with a simple cube but, midway up the building’s façade, the architect veered from his original plan, adding half-moon balconies and bay windows, tentatively at first, then with a reckless passion that mocked the petty dictates of aesthetics and physics. The main entrance—once a grand two-story portal, now a gaping black cave—was not as far off center as the odd-sized windows made it appear, with those on the bottom two floors either broken or hacked out of the wall, the windows on the top stories still in place but crusted over with a protective layer of grime, a few propped open with a piece of wood or busted bits of plastic pipe. On the flat-tish roof, stubby cement pillars, bristling with rusting lengths of steel rebar, hinted at a still bolder, never-to-be-realized dream, one that, given the ambitious start, might have included flying buttresses and pointed spires.
“That’s a building,” Jason said without conviction. “It must have been rather….”
“Hideous?” Manny said. “Repugnant? An eyesore? An abomination?”
“I was going to say big,” Jason said, stepping out of the car, “but those are good, too.”
“Ah, but you should have seen the plans,” Manny said, his voice breathy and wistful. “They were far worse.”
Although Manny had driven most of the way with the gas pedal pressed to the frayed carpet, the ride from Bangalore had taken almost two hours, half the time spent in complex flanking maneuvers and back-tracking shortcuts that Manny insisted were the only way to avoid rush-hour gridlock. “It was not always like this,” Manny had said as he clipped the bumper of an auto-rickshaw during an illegal u-turn. “When I was a child, Bangalore was still a sleepy little place—we played cricket in the streets and on Sunday you could hear the bells of the Catholic church across town. Then the computer boom came and suddenly it seemed that the whole world was moving in. My father has not driven in years and has stopped going to the temple because the walk is too dangerous for a pedestrian.” He checked his rearview mirror as he crossed four lanes, his directional still blinking from two turns back. “Then there is the pollution and the crime and beggars…I suppose there is a price to pay for progress.”
Twenty minutes outside the city limits, the price went up.
It started with a few scattered lean-tos—shipping crates roofed in blue plastic sheets, held in place with head-sized rocks and twisted car parts—propped up along both sides of the highway, the lean-tos growing, becoming shacks, the distance between them closing as they drove on until there was no space left at all. Hard-packed dirt roads sloped up to the asphalt highways, creating impromptu intersections that cut a gash into the side of the slum, revealing a hellish maze of shattered plywood, mud bricks, stacked tires and dirt mounds, miles of flapping blue roofs diffusing the thin smoke trails from ten thousand cooking fires.
Standing in the dark doorways, in small pockets on the side of the road, hunched down in front of dung-fired ovens, poking at the trash heaps with a short stick, or, backs turned to traffic, pissing down the side of the embankment, the citizens of the community found a way to make it through another day.
Few of the men bothered to look up as the car sped past. Walking, heads down, nowhere to go, going anyway, busy watching the dust rise up as they shuffled along. A group of twenty-year-olds, barefoot, kicked a lopsided soccer ball up and down a back alley, too young and cocksure to know that they were already middle aged. Toothless old men in once-white dhotis and the thin remnants of button-down shirts sat tall in front of their scrap wood homes, the reward for a lifetime of labor.
Against a backdrop of lifeless browns and greasy shades of gray, the washed-out hues of the worn and patched saris glowed. Unlike the cities, where stylish women wore their ornate pallu tossed over their right shoulders, the tail end draping to mid thigh, the women here used the final yard of fabric as an ever-present veil, protection from the sun and the curious stares of strangers. None of the women wore the two-piece
shalwar kamiz
, and Jason remembered Laxmi’s sermon, fashion a reflection of tradition and control.
And there were children everywhere, the youngest ones naked, the others dressed in filthy rags, playing inches from the speeding traffic, matted hair and dirty faces offset by model-bright smiles, laughing at everything, the bliss of ignorance making theirs the best life imaginable.
From the moment he had ridden off in the auto-rickshaw with Rachel, Jason had been trying to comprehend the poverty he saw everywhere he looked. From the trendy streets of Mumbai, flush with its Bollywood billions, to the manicured parks in Bangalore, to the tourist-heavy resort beaches on the coast, destitution and despair were always there, the beggars and the squalid shacks just part of the landscape. But here, the slum already two miles long and stretching down the road as far as he could see, the poverty was no longer part of the landscape, it was the landscape, impossible to ignore.
“Why doesn’t somebody do something about this?”
“What do you suggest?”
“Tear down these shacks for a start,” Jason said. “Build them something decent to live in. Get those kids in school, maybe tell the adults to stop having so many kids.”
“My god, we never
thought
of that,” Manny said, slapping his forehead with the base of his palm. “You are a genius. We shall get this cleaned up in no time now.
“I don’t mean to be sarcastic,” Manny continued, “but if the answers were simple this wouldn’t exist.” He waved his flabby arm to take in both sides of the road. “Not here in India, not anywhere in the world. I know you will find this hard to believe, my friend, but we are trying. India is a young nation with a noble past and, I am certain, a great future. As bad as this is.” He waved his arm a second time. “As awful as it is, it is better than it was. Give us time.”
They rode on in silence, the densely packed shacks transforming back to a wall of lean-tos, gaps appearing, growing longer until all that was left of the shantytown were isolated camps and lone squatters. And an image that he knew he could never shake. The sun was low on the horizon when the silhouette of the international headquarters of Bangalore World Systems rose into view.
“The land had belonged to an uncle,” Manny said as they unloaded coolers and cooking supplies from the boxy trunk. “A small parcel, too little to farm, but we had to keep it in the family anyway. It is my name on the lease and now the whole ruinous structure is mine.”
“Couldn’t you tear it down, build something new here? Maybe lease it to a small-time local farmer?” Jason paused. “I know, I know,” he said when Manny stopped to look at him, his eyes rolling up under his thick brow. “You never thought of it before.”
Manny smiled. “You are a quick learner. Now let us see how quickly you master Indian cuisine.” He handed Jason an open-topped cardboard box that held a blackened cook stove. “Careful you do not soil your shirt—that contraption leaks kerosene like a sieve but it makes the finest
iggaru royya
you will ever taste.
“There used to be doors here,” Manny said panting as they stepped through the two-story entranceway. His shirt was already soaked in sweat and by his heavy breathing, Jason knew the walk from the car was more exercise than the fat man was used to. He set down the cooler he was carrying and took a seat on the top, the sturdy plastic sides bowing. He waved his hand indicating that Jason should set down the box and rest before they tried climbing the stairs. “The building was never finished, we worked out of a few rooms upstairs. Those were done. The rest didn’t look much different than it does now. There were windows and doors and railings for the stairs. Plumbing and electricity, of course. All of that was stripped out within days of our closing up shop, no doubt by the residents of the village we passed.”
In the gathering darkness, Jason could make out the places on the wall where missing couplings had held long-gone light switches, recessed channels that had guided now looted pipes and tin air ducts. Scattered about the room, plastic bags and loose sheets of paper collected against interior walls and cement supports, mixed in with the shifting dunes of dust and dirt that edged in through the open doorway. A grand staircase filled the center of the space, the concrete flights connecting the floors, hanging free from the walls, a dark, room-sized shaft that rose four flights, topped with the frame of a missing skylight. Jason looked up at the dangling remnants of the ceiling lights, trying to imagine the floor plan, and didn’t notice when the man with the gun entered the room.
It was a shotgun and the old man held it low on his hip, keeping his eyes on Jason as he stepped into the room. He wore khaki shorts and a shirt that was several shades lighter, but his feet were bare. Manny was busy wiping his forehead with a terrycloth rag when he saw the man and his gun.
“
Chacaji
,” Manny said, struggling to his feet. The old man lowered the gun and his head, stepping down to touch the tops of Manny’s feet. Manny held out his hand, trying to prevent the gesture of respect, speaking to the man in Hindi, his voice kind and soft, his eyes and smile wide. “This is Mr. Chaudhrythe, the security guard. He has been with my family since before I was born.” Jason shook the bony hand, the man’s calloused skin leather-tough. “He is more like family than some of my family,” Manny said and turned to speak to the guard. By their tones Jason knew that it was not a relationship based on employment.
“I told him we were having a gathering and invited him up. He says no thank you, but I’ll be sure to bring him down a plate later.”
The two men shook hands again, Manny insisting that he could carry the cooler without help, and they mounted the first flight of stairs as Mr. Chaudhrythe took his place back in the shadows.
“That was Attar’s office over there by the open window. Mine was near that empty Thumbs Up bottle,” Manny said, bent low over the kerosene lamp, pointing backwards with the tip of a screwdriver. “Sriram’s office was down the hall.” He gestured with the flat of his hand to indicate where a passageway once ran. “And across from Sriram was Narvin. Ketan had that window that looked out over the road and right about here would have been where old Piyush sat.” With an airy hiss and a puff of inky smoke, the kerosene lamp came to life, casting hard-edged shadows around the open space. Other than a dozen support columns and mounds of trash, the floor was empty.
“What about Amrish Sharma?” Jason asked. “Taco?”
Manny looked back over the room. “There. Near the stairs.”
“It was crowded up here.”
“It was the only floor that was done. But, oh, did we have grand plans for this building.”
Jason helped Manny lift the soot-covered stove out of the cardboard box, setting it on the cement floor, moving the lamp far to the side when he saw how much kerosene they had already spilled. After prying the caps off a pair of Kingfishers with the ancient bottle opener built into the side of the cooler, Jason unloaded the small, covered aluminum pots and knock-off Tupperware containers that held the evening’s feast, Manny arranging his supplies to both sides of the stove, thinking through the meal before lighting the stove.
“You may not have guessed it by looking at me,” Manny said, his back to Jason as he opened a box of kitchen matches, his cell phone dropping out of his shirt pocket to clatter on top of the stove, “but I am fond of eating. Regrettably my wife is not a good cook. Since the day we were married I have had to fend for myself lest I waste away.”
“How about your mother, was she a good cook?”
“Oh wonderful, truly wonderful. And that is not just a son’s boasts. Everyone who ate at my home said as much. Hold this for me please?” he said, handing Jason his cell phone over his shoulder. “My amma’s
pakki biryani
was so delicious the brass statute of Ganesh would get up from the kitchen shrine and join us at the table, shoveling in great mouthfuls with his trunk. This is the truth, so help me.” He placed a hand on his sloping chest and rolled his eyes heavenward.
“Speaking of mothers,” Jason said, pocketing the cell phone, pausing to pull down a long swig of beer, sure now that Manny was listening, “Piyush came to see me at the hotel this morning.” He paused again, watching Manny’s back as he struggled to light the stove, snapping the matchsticks with his jerky movement. “He says Sriram’s mother doesn’t live in Ooty.”
“Its proper name is Uthagamanadalam.”
“She’s dead, Manny. She died when you were just kids and you knew it.”
Manny rolled the matchstick between his fingers for a moment before striking it alongside of the box, sparking a small flame. He cupped his hand around the match head, lowering it down to the stove’s burner, a ring of blue flame springing up. He tossed the box of matches down near the cooler, then pushed his hands down on his thighs as he stood, grunting, letting his round shoulders sag as he turned to face Jason. “I suppose I should explain.”
Sharp clapping erupted from the floor below them, falling in sync, beating out a fast rhythm. “We are the men of Tappa Tappa Kega,” a pair of voices boomed off key. “We want a beer so shake-a leg-a leg-a!” Their heavy footfalls timed with their claps, Attar Singh and Ravi Mutry bounded up the open stairwell, two steps at a time, dropping down on one knee, arms outstretched for a big “Ta-da!” finish, Ravi’s leather shoulder bag swinging as they held their pose.
“Watch that stairwell, you lunatics,” Manny shouted, laughing, breaking into rapid applause, nudging Jason’s elbow until he joined in, saying out of the side of his mouth, “Remember, this was a surprise.”
Attar and Ravi helped each other to their feet, Attar laughing, wiping away tears, Ravi’s laugh hesitant and embarrassed. Both men had seemed so formal when he first met them, making their frat-house entrance all the more unexpected. Tall and thin, Attar seemed less imposing than Jason remembered, a heartbeat later remembering also Attar’s fiery outburst on the road to the Amber Palace. Dressed in a ubiquitous button-down white shirt, synthetic khakis and sandals, he looked like a hundred million other Indian men his age.
The last time Jason had seen Ravi had been at Sriram’s memorial service in one of the meeting rooms at Raj-Tech. Now, instead of his designer suit, Ravi wore a crisp pair of dress pants and an expensive logo-less polo shirt, a gold-trimmed shoulder bag serving as a casual attaché case. He looked younger, less corporate, yet still uncomfortable with Manny’s bear hug embrace and two-cheek kiss greeting.
“I bet you thought you had seen the last of me,” Attar said, patting Jason on the back.
“You don’t know how surprised I am. I’m learning that Manny here is good at keeping secrets.”
“I’m just glad I was able to get away from the office,” Ravi said, shaking Jason’s hand. “It’s good to see you again. You’re a bit thinner and it’s hard to tell in this light but you look tanned. I guess you’re surviving India all right.”
“Thanks for setting Rachel and me up in the hotel. I didn’t know what we were going to do,” Jason said, kicking himself as the words came out, knowing what was coming next.
“Hey, speaking of Rachel, where is that lovely bride of yours?” Attar said, taking the open beers Manny held out for them, handing one to Ravi.
“I didn’t know you two were married,” Ravi said.
“Oh yes. Quite an attractive woman, totally dotty over this fellow.” Attar gave Jason a playful punch in the arm.
Jason ran his thumbnail through the flimsy beer label, hoping the moment would pass.
“He has not mentioned a
thing
about a wife,” Manny said. “Is she here in Bangalore? You should have said something, we have plenty of food.”
Jason puffed out his cheeks and sighed. “There’s something I ought to clear up about Rachel. It’s kind of hard to explain, but, well, Rachel’s…she’s…she’s sorta….”
“Always freakin’ late,” Rachel said, jogging up the last few steps of the dark stairwell.
Jason spun around, his mouth open, his heart stopping as he watched her approach. She had on the same baggy pair of cargo pants she had worn most of the trip, the ones that rode low on her narrow hips and dipped far below her navel. The oversized tee shirt—pulled tight and knotted to the side—was new, the silkscreen outline of an old-style train still shiny, the short sleeves rolled up past a faint tan line just below her shoulders. She carried an empty beer bottle and with her free hand she brushed her hair out of her face, revealing her sparkling eyes and contagious smile. It was only then that he noticed Narvin a few steps behind, carrying the backpack.
“I found this bum on the side of the road,” she said, jerking a thumb back at the Bollywood executive. “He claims he knows you guys.”
A cheer went up and Manny pushed past Jason to join Ravi and Attar, bear hugging their old friend, dangerously close to the black hole in the floor that plunged four stories down past the concrete steps. The shouts and hugs turned to backslaps and calls for more beer, the yellow-white light of the kerosene lamp giving the whole scene a waxy pallor.
Jason’s head was still spinning when Rachel walked over and slid her arm around his, kissing him on the cheek, the others too excited to notice.
“You look surprised,” she said, clicking his beer with her empty. “I told you I’d be here.” Jason closed his mouth, opening it again to speak, trying again, nothing coming out.
“Don’t tell me you lost your tongue,” Rachel said, stepping towards the cooler. “That’s one of the main reasons I came back.” She felt around the ice-less cooler for the coldest beers, pulling out two with one hand, popping the tops with a couple of quick wrist flicks. Twenty feet away the reunion was going well, a rush of speedy questions and short answers as they recapped the past ten years of their lives, interspaced with loud laughs, do-you-remember-whens and what-ever-happened-tos, Manny and Attar doing most of the talking, Narvin and Ravi sidestepping comments about fame and success.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” Jason said, not sure yet how to feel.
“Don’t be silly. I left you a note.”
“All it said was that Narvin had made you an offer that you couldn’t resist.”
Rachel shook her head. “No, I’m sure I told you I was coming back. I wouldn’t be that rude.”
Jason sipped his beer, tempted to pull out his wallet and show her the note he had kept, instead letting the feeling pass. He watched as she chugged a third of the Kingfisher lager, stopping in mid swallow when he asked her about Narvin’s offer.
“Oh my god, you can’t
believe
what we did.”
“Do I want to hear this?”
“There’s a train that runs near here—a
steam
train, Jason, an honest to god, coal-fired, whistle-blowing steam train.” She grabbed at his arm as she spoke, her grip tight and her nails sharp. “One of these Indian Heritage things—narrow gauge, four six two carriage with a bogie tender. I
swear
it’s a mid-20s Stoke-on-Trent engine, but the cars are new, Indian made, probably up in Calcutta. Narvin—he’s freakin’ amazing—he arranged it so I could ride up in the engine—I mean, that’s
definitely
against the rules. There were butterfly doors on the firebox and they let me stoke the coals. Oh my god it was better than sex.”
Jason watched her as she spoke, one hand gesturing as if to pull the words out faster, the other waving the beer till white foam oozed down the long glass neck. The way her eyes lit up, how her cheeks seemed ready to burst, unable to hold in her smile, her passion electric, his skin tingling when she touched his arm.
“And then—you won’t believe this. Guess who I had dinner with?”
“Narvin?”
“Noooo,” she said, frustration at his stupidity dragging the word out, making her hand shake. “V. F.
Mulla
.” She waited, wide-eyed, for Jason’s reaction, her frustration building as his shoulders rose in a gentle shrug. “
Steam Trains of the Twentieth Century
?
The History of the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works
?”
“Sorry. I’m more of a Stephen King kind of guy.”
“The man wrote the book on the ES Class. And the work he did with S.V. Joshi….” Her words trailed off, hinting at greatness.
“Must have been a long dinner.”
“The dinner was just a couple hours,” she said, his sarcasm bouncing off. “The
parties
….Speaking of which, if I don’t eat soon I’m going to have a killer hangover.” She turned to the four men by the stairs. “Hey, who’s the cook in the crowd?” she shouted loud enough to be heard over their chatter. “And none of this ‘woman’s work’ nonsense. Trust me, you don’t want me anywhere near the stove.”
***
“I’ll take my coffee like we used to make it for the headmaster,” Narvin said, leaning back on the cinder blocks he used as a seat.
“Then hot, black and bitter it shall be,” Manny said, turning the flame up under the large brass kettle. “Just like that man’s soul. Remember how upset he would get if your tie did not exactly touch the top of your belt buckle?
Mister
Kumar,” Manny shouted, dropping his voice to an authoritative bass, “kindly bring that
embarrassment
of a tie
and
your straight edge to my office
post haste
.”
“I thought my knuckles would never recover.” Narvin flexed his hands, cringing at the memory.
“Indian public schools are rather strict,” Attar said, footnoting the conversation for the others. “And there was always an exam to sit. Math, science, geography, history, English…and not that American English.
Proper
English.”
“I’ll have you know I aced my SATs,” Ravi said, rising to the schoolyard challenge.
“It’s American English,” Jason said, the words coming out slowly as he remembered the downloaded monologue on language and the dozens of words in the emails he had circled early that morning in his hotel room. “If you grew up in the States that’s how you learned to spell.”
“That King’s English crap, with those extra letters stuck in there?” Ravi said to Rachel.
“I’m Canadian. Sounds right to me.”
“That’s because you don’t know how to spell, either,” Ravi said, adding a slight smile as he leaned toward Jason. “I guess we’re the only two who got a good education.”
“That’s a wafty crank of a coincidence,” Jason said, looking out into a dark corner, the monotone words trailing off as he spoke.
“Remember the time the headmaster caught you cribbing for that exam?” Manny’s shoulders shook as Narvin buried his face in his hands.
“God, that was awful. He called my parents, you know. Oh, I paid for that one. And the man was quite unfair. I was blamed for everything but the Fall of Rome but he would let Sriram get away with murder.” He started to laugh, stopping when he realized his mistake. Huddled around the cook stove, its circular flame standing in for a campfire, they were quiet for the first time since they arrived.
“Good dinner, Manny,” Rachel said after a long minute, the others jumping in, quick to agree.
With a rumbling cough, Manny cleared his throat. “It was my first day at the new school. Third grade. Miss Pandya’s class. I was scared so badly my knees were shaking. Me in my short pants, my hair pasted down with a handful of palm oil. Sriram was the first one in that class to speak with me.”
“That’s sweet that you remember,” Rachel said.
“How could I forget? He said give me your lunch tiffin or I shall throttle you.” Manny laughed loudly as he spoke. “Oh that man. From that moment on we were fast friends.”
“We used to try to sneak into the theater for the Saturday matinee,” Narvin said. “They caught us every damn week.”
“I met Sriram when we were working towards our Masters in Bangalore, but the boy was still evident in the man.” Attar’s smile grew as he spoke. “He was mad over cricket and I never knew anyone who enjoyed sweets as much.”
Manny gave Attar a comic double take, looking down at his protruding stomach then back up at Attar, drawing howls of beer-heightened laughter.