The Golden Son Page 8

  Next, the elder son spoke up, offering examples of how Leena didn’t treat his wife, Rekha, with respect. And Leena’s husband complained about the way she rubbed coconut balm on his feet only grudgingly. They had been deceived about the kind of girl they were getting in Leena, her father-in-law said. If they were now expected to train her in the basics of housekeeping and cooking, they would need to be compensated. Five hundred rupees a month.

  Nirmala covered her mouth to stifle a gasp. They were already scraping to get by after paying Leena’s dowry. She tried to make the sack of flour last longer by rolling smaller chapatis, and she hadn’t bought market vegetables in weeks. How could they possibly come up with another five hundred rupees a month for this man? Impossible.

  She saw the same awareness on Pradip’s face as he assured the men Leena would come around. His daughter was a good girl, he said, always helpful at home, and she would learn how to adjust to their ways. Just give it a little time, he pleaded. Nirmala heard the hint of desperation in his voice and hoped the other men couldn’t. We have a gift for you, he said to Leena’s father-in-law, something for your lovely wife, for all the guidance she’s giving our daughter. He lifted his chin toward Nirmala, who went and knelt by his chair, and he whispered for her to bring one of her gold wedding bangles. When she hesitated, he nudged her on, grinning like a rich man who owned a tree upon which gold bangles grew.

  While the men drank their tea, Nirmala went to the bedroom, opened the cupboard, and reached up to the highest shelf. She pulled down the cardboard box that held the few precious pieces of jewelry her parents had given her for her wedding. From another section of the cupboard, she took a white handkerchief she had just embroidered for Leena, pressed and folded into a small square. Nirmala wrapped the gold bangle in the handkerchief. If she could not be there to wipe her daughter’s tears, this would have to do.

  8

  THROUGH THE FOG OF SLEEP, ANIL BECAME AWARE OF THE phone ringing. The clock read 3:00 a.m. and he was due back at the hospital at eight. He fumbled for the phone next to his bed. “Hello?”

  “Anil?” came the faint male voice through the line, then louder, “Anil bhai?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “Bhai . . .” The voice, which Anil now recognized as Kiran’s, broke off into a muffled cry. There was a shuffling through the line as the phone changed hands.

  Anil sat up in bed and turned on the lamp, his eyes wide open, his pulse beating rapidly. “Kiran? What is it?”

  “Anil, Nikhil here.” Nikhil’s voice was clear. “Anil, listen. This morning, Papa . . .” Nikhil paused for what felt like minutes while Anil’s mind churned with the possibilities. “Papa’s gone, bhai. He passed this morning.”

  Anil’s heart thumped in his ears. His eyes focused in on the gold lettering on the tattered brown spine of the Physicians’ Desk Reference book on the windowsill until it became a blur. Finally, he blinked and the words came back into focus.

  “He was complaining of chest pain and breathing trouble after his nap. We did just as you told us—we put the nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue and took him straight away to the hospital. By the time we got there . . . they tried to save him, but the doctors said it was too late, bhai. He’s gone.” Nikhil’s voice caught and the receiver was muffled on the other end.

  Anil slowly opened his left hand, releasing the fistful of pillow he hadn’t realized he’d been clenching. He cleared his throat, strode toward the closet, and yanked open the accordion doors. “I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll go to the airport and see—”

  “Son?” His mother’s voice came through the line.

  “Ma?” Anil said, his voice cracking. His hand rested on the suitcase in his closet.

  “Listen to me, son. I don’t want you to worry about coming here right now. It will be difficult for you to leave, and we have so much family here. Your brothers will take care of the cremation rituals tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow?” Anil said. There was no way he could reach Panchanagar by then.

  “Beta, you know we can only keep the body a few hours at home. Already it’s very warm here. The pandit has chosen an auspicious time tomorrow morning. We had to make the arrangements, knowing you probably couldn’t come. Please, don’t stress yourself, son. You have so many worries already. We will keep the ashes until you come in the summer, and make a pilgrimage to the Ganges. Your father always wanted to see Varanasi.” Ma’s voice faded into the kind of long silence they rarely had during these expensive calls.

  Anil sat back down on the bed, staring at the suitcase in his closet. He closed his eyes and saw the hot sun burning behind them, the sun that ripened mangos within a day at the Big House, the sun that would not be patient with his father’s body. He pictured himself going to Casper O’Brien for permission to leave, or trying to get a seat on one of the packed flights to India. His mother was right. He would not be there to light the cremation pyre for his father. Who would hold the blazing torch to the bed of branches upon which his father’s body would be placed? Nikhil or Kiran? Perhaps all three of his brothers together. Or would one of his uncles carry out the responsibility in Anil’s absence?

  After hanging up the phone, Anil walked over to his desk and opened the drawer, pulling it out as fully as the catch mechanism allowed. He rummaged through pens, paper clips, and scraps of paper, finding the boarding pass for his flight from Ahmadabad to Dallas the previous June and an envelope his mother had sent containing herb tablets to alleviate headaches. Then he heard it, rolling to the back of the drawer and bumping lightly into the edge. He reached back into the recess of the narrow drawer, scraping his knuckles on the metal runners inside. His fingers touched the smooth felt lining at the bottom of the piece, and he pulled it from the drawer.

  He had held this king countless times, yet he never failed to appreciate the beauty of its chiseled shape, the way the hand-carved tiny cross at the top was impossibly symmetrical. In the dim light of his room, the rosewood appeared almost black. Anil closed his palm tightly around the familiar shape and weight, and a vivid image of Papa rushed to his mind: sitting across the broad wooden table, his brow deeply creased in concentration, contemplating his next move.

  Anil had been eight years old when his father returned from his monthly trip into town with a chess set. Sitting at the table, they had deciphered the instructions together, learning the names of the pieces and how each moved around the board. They began to play together in the evening, staying up so late Ma would turn off all the lights except the one right above the table. He and Papa could play an entire game without more than a few words, stopping only at the end to dissect their respective strategies.

  “Anil jan,” Papa said one night. “Do you know where this game came from?”

  “You said a British traveler left it behind.” Anil studied the board, trying to save his rook from Papa’s advancing bishop.

  “Hmm, yes, that is true.” Papa chuckled. “But the game of chess, did you know it originated in India in the sixth century?”

  Anil dragged his eyes from the board to look up at Papa.

  “Yes, it’s true. As the tale goes, in ancient times there was a raj who loved to play games but was bored easily, so he asked a poor mathematician to invent a new game for him. The man returned with a game played on an eight by eight square board with two armies, each led by a king, where the object was to capture the enemy king. The raj was so delighted with this new game, he told the inventor to choose his own reward.” Papa took one of Anil’s pawns with his knight. “Do you know what he asked for?”

  Anil shook his head.

  “He asked for one grain of rice for the first square of the board, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third, and so on, doubling the number of rice grains for each square on the board.” Papa raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Ah yes, you think it doesn’t seem very wise, does it? That’s what the raj thought too, so he agreed quickly to the offer, thinking he was getting a good deal.”r />
  Anil turned his attention back to the board and slid his rook over to protect his king.

  “Anil jan, do you know how much rice that is?” Anil started some rudimentary counting on his fingers, but his father didn’t wait for his reply. “A heap of rice larger than Mount Everest. Over eighteen billion billion grains of rice. There was not enough rice in the whole kingdom to pay the inventor, so the raj had to hand his kingdom over to the poor mathematician, who became the new raj.” Papa smiled and moved his bishop within striking distance of Anil’s king.

  Another time, Anil had been close to winning until he made a careless move with his queen. He got angry when his father wouldn’t let him take back the move only moments after he’d seen his error. “You can’t do that, Anil,” Papa had said. “Not in chess and not in life. You can’t undo a mistake after it’s made. Choose wisely before you move.” Anil closed his fingers tightly over the dark rosewood piece. The other king, the light-colored sandalwood that Papa always played, had gone missing the summer before he left India.

  From that memory flowed another, of puddling the rice paddies with his father: wading through shin-deep water, an extra step Papa insisted upon to ensure optimal growing conditions for the rice. Then came a vision of Papa looking old and fatigued, the day Anil had left Panchanagar. He reached to remember their last conversation on the phone. Anil found himself growing numb, unable to shed a single tear. Then, remembering how Papa serenaded Ma when she cooked his favorite dishes, terribly out of tune until she chased him out of the kitchen with a rolling pin, Anil laughed out loud, which in turn led to uncontrolled sobbing.

  The first signs of trouble had appeared during Anil’s last year of medical college—Papa had temporary episodes of chest pain and shortness of breath when he walked up the hills around their land. By then, Anil had known enough to recognize the possible symptoms of angina. Papa insisted he was fine but, as a precaution, Anil brought home baby aspirin, beta-blockers, and nitroglycerin, and showed Ma how to administer each of them. He had been planning to take Papa to Ahmadabad for a full workup when he returned home this summer. A stress test to determine if there were reversible areas of ischemia. A blood test to see if he had high cholesterol that could be treated with a statin, one small pill for pennies a day.

  At some point, Anil must have fallen asleep, since he awoke to the blare of his alarm clock, always set at the highest volume. When he opened his eyes, he was dazed for a moment, his mind empty. The first thing in his field of vision was the watch Papa had given him, and he remembered everything in a rush. His raw eyes stung as he tried to focus in on the dials. It was six thirty in the evening in Panchanagar, where his family was preparing for the cremation ceremony. But in Dallas, it was seven o’clock in the morning and time for him to return to the hospital.

  Anil sat at his desk with an untouched bowl of cereal next to him and counted the days on the calendar he’d pulled off his door. Nine days since he’d heard his father’s voice, had disregarded the strain he noticed through the phone line. Two hundred and one days since he’d left Panchanagar, since he’d perched on the edge of Papa’s bed and felt the long narrow bones of his hands. One hundred and fifty-nine of those days he’d spent working inside Parkview. During that time, he’d treated over a thousand patients, yet all the while he was thousands of miles away from the one patient who had needed him most.

  Anil had not been there to save Papa, nor would he be able to perform the rites of cremation, his most sacred duty as his father’s eldest son. But he could not stay away now. And he could not step foot back into that hospital, regardless of the consequences. Interns were not permitted to change their schedules, they were not allowed to take leave without authorization. All of this had been clearly spelled out at orientation. And yet Anil didn’t give a damn when he picked up the phone to book his flight.

  LATE THAT night, Anil inched his way down the aisle of the jumbo jet, blocked in front by an elderly woman wearing a green batik sari and nudged from behind by an impatient father holding a baby with gold-studded earlobes. As other passengers fretted about finding space in the overhead bins or their proximity to the lavatory, Anil stashed his backpack under his seat, pushed off his shoes, and stared out the window. Phosphorescent rows of white lights spelled out a runway in the distance, where an airplane glided silently toward the ground. He would be in India in less than one day. It seemed like a nominal amount of time to traverse the globe and land in a different world, but in the past year, Anil had learned how long one day could be.

  One day was long enough for a stable patient to sustain cardiac arrest and be pronounced dead while his wife dashed home to change her clothes for the first time in days. It was long enough for Anil to go from feeling energized at the start of a new shift to completely drained, reaching into the foggy recesses of his mind for basic mnemonic devices learned at medical college. Long enough for Calhoun’s aneurysm to rupture and slowly kill him from the inside, while Anil missed the signs. And some days were long enough to leave him questioning why he’d ever believed he could become a doctor.

  Anil unfolded the acrylic blanket and pulled it up to his chin to ward off the chill penetrating the oval airplane window. He would have to face the absence of his father, feel the void left by him everywhere: the empty rocking chair, the table where they’d played chess, the bed where Papa had suffered his fatal heart attack. Anil closed his eyes, not wanting to see any of those familiar places vacated.

  ANIL EXPECTED one of his brothers to be waiting for him at the airport in Ahmadabad, but his throat tightened at the sight of his mother, transformed into a widow by her stark white sari, standing next to Nikhil. When he leaned down to touch her feet in respect, she caught him by the shoulders and embraced him tightly, then placed her palms against his cheeks, rough with two days’ stubble. Anil regretted not cleaning himself up before boarding the plane. He’d become neglectful about his appearance the past several months—forgetting to brush his hair and wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes.

  Nikhil took his suitcase and Ma held his arm as they walked to the car. She seemed to have aged ten years since he’d left last summer. Ma had never looked like this, not even the year drought had cut their harvests down to a trickle. For three months that year, she’d fed the children first, then Papa, and herself last, one modest meal in the evening.

  “It’s good you came, bhai,” Nikhil said as he stowed the suitcase in the boot. “We knew you would, even though she said not to.” He nodded toward their mother, who had settled herself into the car. “It means a lot to her.”

  As soon as they pulled up the winding dirt road leading to the Big House, Anil sensed something was different. The towering coconut trees lining the road had bicycles propped up against them. Several cars, rather than the usual one or two, were parked in the dusty clearing before the house. And even before the Big House came into view, he glimpsed numerous yellow flames flickering around its perimeter. Anil rolled down the window: dozens of people lined the front porch, holding candles and lanterns at three o’clock in the morning. A wave of shame swept over Anil as he realized his family had waited up to welcome him home.

  After greeting dozens of relatives, Anil retired to his room, where the servant had already unpacked his suitcase. “Shall I draw a bucket of hot water for a bath, Anil Sahib?”

  The servant had addressed him with the term of respect formerly reserved for his father, and Anil felt an unexpected twinge. “No, I’ll wait until morning.” The servant wobbled his head, as if Anil’s response had no impact on him either way. Anil had been chided for making this same gesture on rounds. Yes or no, Patel, an attending had demanded. If only he could feel as indifferent as the servant, who now closed the door quietly behind him.

  Anil walked over to the window and cranked it open, hearing the familiar squeal of scraping metal. His diploma from medical college had been framed and mounted over the chest of drawers, no doubt by his mother. He touched it and found the glass clean, free of th
e layer of fine dust that accumulated on surfaces here every day.

  One item remained on top of the bureau. The chess set looked strangely democratic without its two kings as visual peaks. Anil unzipped the small pouch of his backpack, pulled out the rosewood king, and placed it on the pale wood square where it belonged. He looked at his pieces, mapped out a few moves in his mind, then on the board. He moved his pawn, followed by his rook. His father would have responded with his knight. Underrated, very powerful, Papa used to say about his favorite piece. Anil placed his finger on top of the knight. A dull ache radiated through his chest and began tightening his throat. He turned away from the chess set without resetting the board.

  Anil climbed under the gauzy mosquito net draped over the bed and listened to the rhythmic squeaking of the overhead fan. The chirping of the crickets and the earthy smell of the air wafting in through the open window were as deeply familiar as the sense of obligation he felt here. That night, Anil dreamed he was running up and down the corridors of the hospital, unable to find the room to which he’d been paged. When he found himself at the dead end of a hallway, he woke up, drenched in sweat, his heart racing.

  MA CONSULTED with the astrologer to find an auspicious date to travel to the Ganges to scatter Papa’s ashes, and Anil booked his return flight accordingly. Until then, his days were occupied with receiving relatives and friends who came to pay respects, and eating meals so elaborate that one ran into the next. After having subsisted on a meager diet of cheese pizza and sandwiches from Parkview’s cafeteria, Anil’s appetite now barely had a chance to recover between meals.

  Anil was not prepared for the steady stream of questions from his family and visitors. When they weren’t satisfied with his curt responses, he finally gave the answers they wanted to hear: he told them about how advanced the hospital was, the wise and kind doctors who taught him, the grateful patients. He described the world he’d expected to find when he left Panchanagar, the one that now barely existed in his mind. Each time he repeated the varnished account of his life in America, it became a little easier.