A week after the funeral, she lamented, “I should have known.”
“What do you mean?”
She palmed her face and sobbed. I put my hand on her shoulder, wishing I could contain the shudders moving through her. “His father died of cardiac arrest when he was in his late sixties. I should have forced him to go on that Alaska cruise we’d always meant to take. He’d say ‘later.’ Or ‘soon.’ I should have known there wasn’t going to be much more time.”
A month after that, she listed the Edison house and bought her East 38th Street condo.
Our stroll is turning into a power walk along the river. I pause, realizing I’ve been whinging about my upcoming trip for much of it.
“I guess this is a first world problem,” I mutter proactively. My mother recently learned the phrase at the food bank where she volunteers and now peppers our conversations with it.
“Well, yes, sure. But I can see why you’re nervous to go away for eight months! I would find it difficult to be in India for that long. Short visits — three to four weeks — are nice, but I’ve always been happy to get home. Back to my routines.”
Mom, Dad, and I would travel every three years, for three weeks, our visits from mid-December to the first week of January. We were so regular that relatives could plan weddings around our vacations. My paternal grandfather died the day after Christmas the year I turned thirteen, and my cousins later joked that he’d scheduled his heart attack and subsequent demise so we could attend the burial.
“Yeah.” I use the bottom of my T-shirt to wipe my brow. I’m winded, but my retiree mother looks fine.
“The only time we went longer was that first trip back, when you were small. We were there all of July and then you stayed in August. Remember? The weather was horrible! So we switched to winter visits after that.”
“I do remember how hot it was! Didn’t I get sick a lot that trip?” My skin prickles with the memory. I pause under an elm’s canopy to cool myself.
“Yes, I think so.” She gazes up at the green leaves above us. “But not at the beginning. I think you got a stomach bug toward the end of the trip, after we left.”
I nod, the recollection seeming true, yet I don’t really remember. I resume our walk, this time at a slower pace.
“Well, the university has been gracious to let Murtuza teach his course off their usual schedule — starting in September instead of July.”
“They know non-locals can’t cope with monsoons. The locals barely can manage it.” She grimaces, perhaps remembering when she was one.
“You never want to live there again?” When I was a child, she and Dad had occasionally talked of retiring in India.
“Never. What would I do there?” She gestures at the river, as though to say, I have all this. I don’t know what she means but sense not to ask.
“I’m going to be bored, aren’t I?” When I first began planning the trip, it seemed a perfect transition from teaching to my consulting. However, I’ve grown accustomed to a manic eight-to-three-thirty schedule, followed by three hours of marking after dinner, ten months each year, for the past dozen years. Now that I’ve rested for six weeks and know I never have to go back, I wonder how I’ll deal with eight months of downtime.
“You do like to be busy.” She shoots me a knowing look. “Perhaps you can start the consulting work early, from Mumbai? It will give you some income while you’re away, no?”
“We’re all right financially.” I remind her that we used my part of Dad’s inheritance to pay down the mortgage, and she nods, looks away. I change the subject. “And Lenore says she won’t need me for her new gig until April. It’s a contract to review the state’s home-schooling policies. For now, she just wants me to get familiar with them, which I’ve had to do, anyway, because I’ll be homeschooling Zee in India.”
“Won’t that fill your days, then?”
“Sort of. From what I’ve read, it’s much less effort with one child than a classroom. I’ll give her projects and assignments, and supervise her through them.”
“Well, what about you? Why not have your own project? Your MA was in history. You used to love research. I always wondered why you didn’t do a PhD instead of becoming a teacher. Remember that thesis you wrote?” She’s referring to my study of nineteenth-century Indian immigration to North America.
“Uh-huh.” I bristle at her elitism. We’d argued when I’d applied to teacher’s college. You’ll have so much more money and status as a professor, she’d insisted.
“What I mean is that you could create your own research study while you are there.” She backpedals, “You’ve always been curious about family history, no? Why not record it? I doubt anyone has.”
Her suggestion gives me pause. I once considered doing an oral history with my grandparents, but I abandoned the idea after they passed.
“That could be a possibility.” The idea makes my heart beat faster, and I realize that I’m two steps ahead of my mother. I slow my stride.
“And you know we have a patriarch — my father’s grandfather, my great-grandfather.” She looks at the cloudless sky, calculating, “Your great-great-grandfather. What was his name? Everyone talks about his legacy, how he went from poverty to creating charities and an educational fund for future generations. I applied to it for a loan for my education.”
“Really?”
“Yes! His name was Abdoolally, I think. Self-taught man, didn’t go to school. Had four wives.”
“At the same time? A polygamist?”
“No!” She slaps my arm. “I think each one died and then he remarried as a widower. I’m not sure, but I think there was a rumour that he might have divorced one of them, too, which would have been highly unusual for his time. Ask your Tasnim Maasi. And your father’s uncle, Abbas Kaaka, has begun keeping a family tree. Your dad’s side is also somehow related to Abdoolally.”
“Everyone in our family is somehow related to one another.” I laugh and she does, too. My parents are second cousins. Murtuza and I figured out that we are fourth cousins, twice removed.
We pause to look out over the water, then backtrack. We are too breathless and hot for conversation, but my mind is moving lightning-quick as I plan the first few steps of my research project.
FOUR
January 1866, South Bombay
Eleven-year old Abdoolally huddled under the yellow glow of a streetlamp, his index finger pacing his laboured reading.
“The lion … lives … in the … jungle,” he whispered. “His … ro … roar is … loud.”
An elderly fruit-seller trudged by with an empty wooden cart pulled by a weary bullock. Just in time, Abdoolally wrapped his legs around the post to avoid a heavy hoof landing on his toe. A fly, one of the bullock’s many winged passengers, hopped onto his hand and then onto the Hindi primary reader he had “borrowed” from Sunil, the nine-year-old boy of the family for whom he worked. He told his mother it was gift. Did she believe the lie?
Thinking of her, it seemed, could summon her. He looked up and saw her face framed in the window of the third-floor room they shared with another widow and her three young children. She fanned herself with her orna; despite the evening’s cool, the day’s heat lingered in the room. He waved to her and pleaded, “Five more minutes, Mummy.”