Uncle Anand’s stories made Tara forget the day spent among fifty-three other girls she did not talk to, the fat black widow spiders in the bathroom, the lizards that watched without blinking from the ceiling beams. They made her forget the day she had spent in a quiet square shoe room with a doll whose golden hair and violet eyes had made happiness seem so real, yet so fleeting.
“It was only a doll. Plastic shell and empty inside,” Uncle Anand told her, every now and then. “Did you put your ear to her plastic chest? If you had, you would have known. Dolls have no heart; they cannot love you back. Only living things can.”
In August, when Tara’s little brother arrived, she made sure he had a heart. She put her ear to the baby’s chest and concentrated until she felt the faint human thump-thump. He looked like a fragile doll, swaddled in soft, white voile, asleep in the hospital crib next to Amma’s green metal bed. Round, red face. Eyes tightly closed. Tara looked at him in wonderment. She couldn’t imagine this little creature had been in her mother’s stomach so many months, and she wasn’t fully aware of his existence, at least not as a human of flesh and blood—with a heart that could love back.
“Amma, did he really come out of your stomach?” she asked.
Amma laughed. “Of course, Tara, I carried him in my belly for nine months, just like I carried you.”
Tara couldn’t imagine living in a dark belly for nine long months, curled up, constricted, unable to move around, alone. She certainly wouldn’t want to go back in there. She looked at the baby again. She was glad he was out in the world, out of darkness, out of solitude.
Tara stroked the baby’s soft cheek. He was magical. She felt a surge of love. Uncle Anand didn’t tell her this, but this love was a new feeling, quite different from what she had felt for Pinky. This was a love with no sense of ownership, no neediness. “You are my brother,” she declared to him proudly.
The resentment had come later—little bouts of dark emotion that Tara had tried all her life to shake off, get over, bury.
Last night Vijay had called again, his second call since her arrival in Atlanta. Sanjay had picked up. Tara’s ears had perked up when he said, “Hey, Vijay. What’s up, man?” She had taken the receiver from Sanjay eagerly.
“How are you? Do you like Atlanta? Is he treating you well?”
She had held on to Vijay’s familiar voice, savoring the known in an unfamiliar world. “I am fine,” she had said in a low voice, hoping Sanjay hadn’t heard Vijay’s last question.
Vijay said he would pay her a visit at the first opportunity.
“Come soon,” she had implored.
California was at the other end of the US, he had reminded her. They even had a three-hour time difference between them. “I’ll have to wait for the next long weekend.”
“I’ll be waiting for the next long weekend.”
“I’ll call often,” he had promised.
Chapter 5
Tara double-checked to make sure the front door was locked. She made her way down the flight of steps, walked on the sidewalk past the soft cream siding and red brick apartment buildings with sloping black shingled roofs. The sidewalk took her, in wavelike fashion, to the tall, wrought iron, main gates. She took the little pedestrian gate beside it, and found herself outside, on a side street of Atlanta.
She stood by the gate, contemplating which way to turn. One side led to the main road just a short distance away, where the traffic was heavy. The other side seemed to stretch on as far as the eye could see.
West Hill Baptist Church loomed right opposite the road, its red bricks radiating warmth, but it was still a very foreign-looking structure. She turned to the right and walked down the road, passing the little red-brick-fronted homes she had seen from her balcony. They were just as interesting up close: the green lawns, the flower bushes, the closed doors and glass windows. She slowed down when she passed the picture book white house with the neat little garden. A squirrel scampered across the grass and disappeared into a bush; a dog barked from the backyard, shrill and excited, but no human was in sight. Not here, nor outside any other home, or on the sidewalk.
So, this is America, she thought. Not a soul in sight. Where are all the people?
The only people she passed by were those she did not see, or barely caught a glimpse of, because they were in the cars that whizzed past on the two-lane street.
She had walked about ten minutes when she came to a major intersection. Crossing the busy road seemed too scary a task. She turned around and started to walk back, sweat beads glistening on her forehead. She had not imagined America as being hot in summer. She would have to start earlier tomorrow.
The walk back home involved an uphill segment. Tara panted a little from the heat and wiped her brow on her sleeve. Sensing the hum of a motor close to her, instinctively, she looked over her shoulder. A car had slowed down, a yellow taxi with a white hood. The driver had a broad grin on his face, his teeth exposed, stark white against his chocolate skin.
He held a card in his hand, which he had stretched out in Tara’s direction through the open window.
“Miss, if you ever need me,” he said in a foreign accent.
She looked away and increased her pace. Did she hear him jeer? Her heart raced. Was he following her? She looked back after a while. He was gone.
Tara half ran until she was back in the safety of the apartment. The pounding in her chest took a while to subside. She was so thirsty, she thought she would choke. The clock on the microwave said ten thirty in the morning. Countries north of the hemisphere could get hot too, she had learned. She gulped a tall glass of chilled water, then another, and finally it dawned upon her. The taxi driver was only trying to score a customer, and she had been a stupid scaredy-cat.
“Are you from the bush country? From some tiny, godforsaken hamlet?” she mimicked Sanjay, and then in her regular voice said, “Yes, yes, I am from the same godforsaken hamlet that you come from, you fake American.”
She slipped behind the computer in the study. “Open sesame,” she murmured as she typed in “lizsan” on the keyboard. Lizsan, what did it even mean? she wondered. Why not something that made sense, like lizard, or lizclaiborne? The desktop appeared. She surfed the Internet for the next two hours. She checked out the Indian news websites, played some Hindi songs on a live streaming website, checked her Hotmail twice. She had no new emails. She looked to see if any of her contacts were on MSN messenger. Only Sharat, her colleague at the Morning Herald appeared online, and she wasn’t going to chat with him. She allowed her mind to wander. She wondered how prison inmates in isolation must feel, the walls eating into their mind each day. She typed in “prisoners in isolation” on Yahoo. The search took her to an article on solitary confinement and the effects of this cruel, inhuman punishment on the human mind. She shuddered.
She was beginning to feel a little hungry, but she decided that a shower was in order first. Water always had a calming effect on her. Besides, the walk had been sweat inducing; she felt dirty and smelly. She stood under the shower for the longest time possible, allowing the warm water to percolate into her body and permeate her being. She turned her face up and allowed the water stream to douse her face. She hummed softly, a Hindi song from the biggest Bollywood hit of the year so far: