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Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Rahul Mehta

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91 pages

English

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Last week during one of our marathon telephone conversations my mother asked me which one of us, me or Frank, was the woman in our relationship. 'Neither of us, obviously,' I said. 'That's what makes us gay.' 'Very funny,' my mom said. 'Someone on Oprah said that often gay couples have one person who plays the man and the other who plays the woman. So I was wondering which you were.' 'Frank and I don't believe in hetero-normative gender roles,' I told her. I knew my mom didn't know what 'hetero-normative' meant, so I figured she'd drop it. 'So who does the cooking and cleaning?' she asked. I could have truthfully answered 'neither of us.' Instead I asked, 'Is that what you think womanhood is, Mom, cooking and cleaning?'Rahul Mehta's stories are inhabited by young, gay Indian men on the wrong side of the American dream: adrift in the world, in complicated relationships, and with uncertain futures. Here are lovers who go to a nightclub deciding to cheat on each other; a couple slowly breaking up while they holiday; a young man who can't stop himself from burning up all his money; another who reluctantly prepares his grandmother for her US citizenship test. In a voice that's bare and wry, edgy and tender, Rahul Mehta writes of desire and family ties with rare candor. This is an outstanding debut.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	02 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002539
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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QUARANTINE
QUARANTINE
RAHUL MEHTA

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2011
Copyright Rahul Mehta 2010
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B,
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002539
For sale in the Indian subcontinent only.
for my family-
my father, mother, and brother
for my grandparents,
in memoriam
and
for Robert

CONTENTS
Quarantine
Floating
Ten Thousand Years
The Better Person
The Cure
What We Mean
Yours
A Better Life
Citizen
QUARANTINE
Y OU WILL ONLY SEE HIM the way he is, not the way he was.
Jeremy and I have rented a car and are driving to my parents house. He has never been to West Virginia. All week he has been looking forward to seeing the house where I grew up, my yearbooks, the wood paneling in the living room where I chipped my tooth, the place by the river where I drank with friends. He is annoyed that I am talking about Bapuji again.
Don t you think I know by now how you feel about your grandfather? he asks.
Yes, but I am warning you. When you see him, you will feel sorry for him. You will forget all the stories I ve told you.
I won t forget.
You won t believe me.
It is late by the time we reach the house. My parents hug me at the door. They tell Jeremy how much they enjoyed meeting him in New York last year. They are awkward. They half hug him, half shake his hand. They are still not used to their son dating men.
Make yourself at home, my mom says to Jeremy.
Bapuji is in the living room, my dad says to me.
We remove our shoes and go inside. Bapuji is sitting in a swivel chair. The lamp next to the chair is switched off. In the dim light it is difficult to see him, but when he stands up and comes closer, I see how loose his face is, the deep dark eye sockets and sharp cheekbones, the thin lips-oval and open, as if it is too much effort to close them or smile.
I bend down to touch his feet. The seams on his slippers are fraying, and his bare ankles are crinkled like brown paper bags. He lays his palm on my head and says, Jai Sri Krishna . Then I stand and he hugs me, my body limp.
This is my friend Jeremy, I say.
Jeremy nods and Bapuji nods back.
Last week when I called my mom to discuss the plans for our trip, she said it was better not to tell Bapuji that Jeremy is my boyfriend. There is no way he could understand, she said.
My mother warms up some food and, even though they are leftovers, Jeremy and I are happy to have home-cooked Indian food, to be eating something other than spaghetti and microwave burritos. After dinner, my mom tells us we can make our beds in the basement. She and I spoke about this on the phone, too. She said we shouldn t sleep in the guest room because there is only a double bed there, and it will be obvious we are sleeping together. Better we set up camp in the basement where there is a double bed and a single bed and a couch. She said camp like we are children and it is summer vacation. She hands us pillows and several sheets of all different sizes and says she is going to sleep.
I make the double bed for Jeremy and the single bed for myself. Jeremy suggests we both sleep in the double bed and that we can mess up the single bed to make it look like one of us slept there.
I don t think it s a good idea, I say. What if we sleep late, and someone comes down and sees us?
As we are falling asleep, Jeremy asks, Why did you touch your grandfather s feet?
It s a sign of respect.
I know, but you don t respect him.
I respect my father.
You didn t touch his feet.
Don t be funny, I say. He is Americanized, he doesn t expect such formalities. But if I didn t do pranaam, it would hurt my grandfather s feelings, and that would hurt my father s feelings. A few seconds later I add, It s tradition. It doesn t really mean anything.
Yeah, tradition, Jeremy says, sighing, sleepy-voiced.
A few minutes later, I hear him snoring from across the room.
Whenever I see my grandfather, I have to touch his feet twice, once when I first arrive and again as I am leaving. Each time I hold my breath and pretend I am bending over for some other reason, like to pick up something or to stretch my hamstrings. He always gives me money when I leave, just after I touch his feet. I never know what to do with it. I don t want to accept it, but I can t refuse. Once I burned the money over my kitchen sink. Another time I bought drinks for my friends. Once I actually needed it to pay rent. But it didn t feel right. It was dirty, like a bribe. Now, as I try to sleep, I toss and readjust, trying to get comfortable. I am not used to sleeping alone. I don t know what to do with my body without Jeremy s arms around me.
The basement where we are sleeping is where my grandfather lived when he first came to America. I was ten then, and Asha was eight. Bapuji came a few months after his wife, Motiba, died. At first he tried to live on his own in India, but he found it too difficult. He couldn t take care of himself, didn t even know how to make tea. He shouted so much that whenever he hired new servants they would quit within a couple days. In the end, my father took it upon himself to bring Bapuji to America. As the eldest of five brothers and sisters, he thought it was his responsibility to take care of Bapuji, which, I quickly learned, really meant it was my mother s responsibility.
My mom says Bapuji wanted to live in the basement because the spare bedroom upstairs was too small and he needed more room. After I left for college he moved upstairs into my old bedroom, which is bigger.
When Asha and I were young, we d hardly ever go all the way into the basement. We d only go part-way down the stairs and hang on the railing like monkeys, and spy. The basement smelled of Indian spices and Bengay. Bapuji made my mom hand-wash all his clothes, because he said the washing machine was too hard on Indian cloth and stitching. He didn t like the smell of American detergents. He made her scrub his clothes in a plastic bucket with sandalwood soap and hang them to dry on clotheslines he strung across the room. He tacked posters of Krishna and Srinaji to the walls, and he played bhajans on a cheap black cassette recorder that distorted the sound, making it tinny and hollow, as though it were coming from far away. Asha and I called the basement Little India and my grandfather the Little Indian.
Those early years in a new country were difficult for him. He barely spoke English, and there were no other Indian families in our community. He couldn t drive, and our housing development wasn t within walking distance of anything. He wasn t used to the cold. Even in the house he would have to bundle up with layers of sweaters and blankets and sit in front of a space heater. Now and then my parents would try to take him to the mall or the park, but there was nothing he wanted to buy and he claimed the Americans looked at him funny in is his dhoti and Nehru cap.
But if it was hard for him, he made it equally hard for everyone else, especially my mom. She took a couple of months leave from her job in order to help Bapuji settle in. He made demands, and as far as he was concerned she couldn t do anything right. He wanted her to make special meals according to a menu he would dictate to her each morning. He insisted my parents add a bathtub to the basement bathroom, even though they couldn t afford it and there was already a standing shower. He would call my father s brothers and sisters and tell them that his daughter-in-law was abusing him, that she was lazy and disrespectful, and a bad housekeeper. He would say his son shouldn t have married her. When my mother was cooking in the kitchen, he would sit at the table and say, This isn t how Motiba made it.
Years later, my grandfather even claimed my mother was trying to kill him. Bapuji was a hypochondriac, always complaining about his health, aches in his joints, a bad back, difficulty breathing. He had started complaining about chest pains. My mom was sure it was heartburn. She said she had seen him sneaking cookies and potato chips from the kitchen cupboard late at night. She said he should stop eating junk food and then see how he felt in a couple weeks. But Bapuji called everyone, my aunts and uncles, even relatives in India, saying his daughter-in-law was refusing to let him see a doctor because she wanted him dead.
When my mother told Asha and me that Bapuji claimed she was trying to kill him through neglect, I said, If only it were so easy.
You shouldn t joke like that, my mom said.
But then I looked at Asha and Asha looked at me and we both started laughing, and my mother laughed, too.
My mother and father often argued about Bapuji, never in front of us, but we could hear them shouting in their bedroom. Sometimes they d go for a drive, or sit in the car in the driveway. Once after a tense dinner during which my mother served Bapuji rice and daal and Bapuji looked at the plate, dumped all the food in the garbage, and went to the basement, my mother took my father on to the back porch. Asha and I peeked through the window blinds. It was winter, and my parents hadn t put on their coats. We couldn t hear what they were saying, but they were pointing and pacing and when they spoke their words materialized as clouds.
On th