The sad thing? His parents, in their own way, had encouraged his talent. His father had typed and printed out his limericks when he was young, stowing these relics away in a Godrej to bring out for guests to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over. Years later, his economist mother had taken Chetan along on a work trip to the US and arranged a meeting with a shambolic English professor in Chicago. Chetan had applied to that college for his undergraduate degree and been admitted.
His parents had not wished for their son to pursue art as a career, but they had lit his path.
He had betrayed them.
Now, thanks to what Chetan had published, he and his parents were in trouble, and he was exiled from India. The exile was only mental: realistically, Chetan could take a plane home anytime. This was the difference between a previous generation’s experience abroad and his. In the 1980s – that period when his parents had briefly lived in Texas – you could be in love with your home country, besotted with your grandparents, nieces, and nephews – writing them letters every week – but you could only speak to them on the phone a couple of times a year. A trip, if it came, was momentous, an event long saved-for, built-toward. Whereas now, you could hate everyone at home, quarrel with them over email, be alienated and disowned, and still return three times a year.
A month after the fallout from his book, Chetan found himself on a flight to Mumbai. He was frightened.
At the airport, his parents received him with grave hugs, and later he lunched with them at a plastic table in their bedroom, so placed that you could watch cricket on the rackety TV as you ate. ‘So what?’ his father was asking, between tocks of a two-dimensional cricket ball. ‘What’s happened has happened. You must come and promote your book. Have you contacted your publisher here about an event?’
Chetan said he would do it.
‘Beta, don’t just keep looking into it,’ his father said.
His generous father! Chetan watched the graying man fork salad – cucumbers and carrots – onto his plate. His father was on a diet, as always, but it would be undone, Chetan knew, in the afternoon when he became ravenous and consumed biscuits and fistfuls of salted almonds, and then started casually insisting that the maid mix bhelpuri ‘for his son’.
Chetan’s mother was more circumspect. She asked Chetan about his flight, dragging a small comet of daal in a clockwise circle on her plate.
Chetan, half asleep from jetlag, foggily glanced out the barred window. Nothing had changed in this mildewed Bombay Deco tower full of his relatives. The driveway was still a long bat of stale, dried-up Cadbury’s from which great bites had been taken out. The tree outside the bedroom window spat its leaves in all directions, so you could barely glimpse the tinselly cars crammed underneath. The jaalid white wall along the driveway – the wall that he and his sister had delighted in kicking in as kids, watching the delicate fretwork crumble – had, like all the other common areas, never been repaired.
And over the next few days, meeting relatives, it was possible to feel that nothing had changed in the family either.
‘You write in such high English, beta, I could barely understand it,’ one of his chachis said, when he went to see her in her drawing room, a space she constantly reconfigured as an expression of her larger dissatisfactions. ‘But Chacha and I are very proud.’
An older cousin he met said she wanted Chetan to sign her book.
This was not the shouting or abuse he had expected. The explosions had happened in his absence – to his parents.
And, one night, when his mother sat with him on his bed – her appearance in his room always a harbinger of bad news – he learned that things had been worse than she’d let on over the phone.
At a family wedding, she said, she and Chetan’s father had been cornered by various relatives who had accused them of writing the book. ‘How could someone that young know such good English. Someone must have taught him, right?’ Nishant, a black sheep of the family, had marched up to Chetan’s mother, chicken bones falling off his plate, and declared that Chetan needed to publish an apology.
‘To whom?’ Chetan’s mother asked, playing dumb.
‘Didi, a columnist has said in a national paper that Chetan is writing about our family. That all these insulting characters are from our clan. So Didi, if, as you say, Chetan has not inputted any spurious material in the book, he must pen an open letter posthaste demanding an apology from the columnist.’
‘So the columnist should write the apology?’ his mother asked.
Chetan’s hand was inches from his mother’s on the bed, but he did not move it. He was thinking: how painful it must have been for her to be told that she hadn’t raised her son correctly . . .
But you did raise me the right way, Chetan wanted to say, that’s why I speak the truth.
Instead, his mother’s tears, her abject look, hardened something in him and he said, ‘You’re being too dramatic, Mama. They’re bad people. I had no choice but to write about them.’
But was that true? What he had written was fiction; and what had emerged in the book was a self-portrait refracted through the images of childhood. Now he had learned that these images didn’t belong solely to him. His sin was that of trespassing, of moving from a mixed socialist economy to a capitalist one. Of becoming a drone who zapped the natives.
He made a clucking irritable sound and went on, ‘Who cares what they think?’ Soon, he was delivering a lecture on bourgeois values.
His mother listened meekly as unripe pods of mulberry dropped from the tree outside.
Chetan returned to America early, eager to set the record straight with his family, with the world. But, upon landing and going to his office – he worked as an editor for a think tank periodical – the fight went out of him. What could he do from here? What was his future now? On the flight to New York he had tried making notes, even attempted an apology, but his hand had cramped and buzzed with static; and when he had risen to go to the bathroom, another Indian man, holding up his pinky as an explanation, had jumped him in the queue. Chetan had been too dazed to respond.
Later that week, at a restaurant, his girlfriend began coughing up blood. Chetan stood up quickly, shouting for the waiter: ‘Could you please bring a hanky? A hanky!’
He had meant a napkin, which is what the waiter brought. But then everything in his mind was jostled, in transit.
‘It’s just beets,’ his girlfriend said, eyeing him wearily with her heterochromic eyes – eyes that had once beguiled him, but which he now found disquieting. ‘I’m so happy you didn’t spend that extra week there,’ she said, wiping her mouth.
‘You were right about that,’ he said, meaninglessly. But the muscles in his neck were burning. He had carried the tension from that continent to this one.
The transfer of rage from one place to another: was that his real job?
The export-import of emotions?
A few days later, he called in sick at his day-job, showered, put on his only suit, and took the subway to a broad midtown building.
The façade of the building was marked by violent downward concrete striations. Inside, a woman behind a granite reception table asked him for the floor number and photographed him for a badge.
Chetan flew upwards in an elevator and pressed the button before it reached the top floor.
Following green carpeting through canyons of white cubicles, he came to a glass conference room, where a woman and a man, his editor and agent, were waiting for him.
A sheaf of paper lay on the table, labeled Untitled Sequel.
‘So, you’re still feeling good about delivering in twelve months?’ his editor asked.
‘Yes,’ Chetan said, his accent suddenl unplaceable. ‘Very much so.’
Image © Scott Web
