Arjun shifts onto his right side. If he waits a moment he will have sufficient energy
to rock himself sideways and out of bed. But the energy doesn’t come. He waits.
Once it was easy to rock up, but now he has to use his body’s weight to ease himself
off the mattress. And he must take his time. Any small slip and he will slither off
completely and Sunila will panic and scream. Why couldn’t you call me for help? Why are
you so stubborn? Why can’t you just do something simple like wait for help? Then
prediction. You’ll have broken your hip/back/head.
thinks of Just Desserts. Just don’t think I’m going to visit you every day. Just don’t think I’
m transferred to her and he can stay in the background as the source of her bad luck.
me like this? or Why does this always happen to me? In this stage, the suffering is
transferred to her and he can stay in the background as the source of her bad luck.
As he has learned, it is better to wait. Most of the body’s cravings can be subdued,
as he learned even before he became sick.
It is difficult to remember that time. He was Thirty. Forty? No the first attack was
before then. He was thirty-six. So he was healthy until he was thirty-six. He marvels at
this other self whose body performed daily miracles; standing, turning, lifting, running
up the stairs two at a time.
And even further back, in the time of legend, he played Squash for the All-India
team. Who was this person who wore white shorts and ran after small rubber balls
with such speed and accuracy? Surely he was a superman in those days. He wonders
if those other squash players are also lying in bed and wondering where their bodies
went, wondering at which date the synaptic rush and response slowed and failed.
And even further back, there was his boyhood in India. How easily, fluidly he ran up
and down mountains, as though up were almost the same as down. How he jumped
over rocks, between rocks, balancing with his arms flung out, his body leaning this way
and that as the impetus carried him forward, forward.
In some faint responsive memory of movement, he moves his legs and finds he can
ease himself off the mattress. He holds on to the bedrail with both hands and steadies
himself as his feet touch the ground. He is sitting upright.
He smiles at the triumph; he can still get out of bed by himself, which means he can
still go to the bathroom by himself. Small victories. He can’t even brag to Rob, his
grandson. Rob is not only well past the stage of getting out of bed by himself but he
doesn’t even need a safety rail at night anymore.
Arjun realizes with humility that he is far behind his grandson, who is bounding
ahead into his future. That future won’t contain Arjun or his stories about tigers and
elephants, his descriptions of the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, his peanut and
monkey jokes.
He has become accustomed to letting go. He is no longer anxious to keep up with
Rob. Occasional accounts about his progress in school or on the football team are
enough. These days, visitors, particularly children, are exhausting and he feels an
overwhelming lassitude from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave.
He steadies himself as he takes the weight on his legs, both hands firmly on the
walker. Now to walk. The coordination that goes into walking is astonishing. He
pushes the right leg forward first and leans on the walker, then the left leg. It takes a
few steps to get into his shuffling rhythm and then he is on his way to the bathroom.
He takes his time, making sure the door is fully open, that he can sit with his walker
in front of him. How long has it been since he was so indignant about having to sit to
urinate? Now he is merely relieved to sit after the walk to the bathroom.
What importance he used to attribute to things that now seem so small: his
perfectly ironed shirts, the knife-like crease in his pants, the well-tailored jackets and
suits, his meticulously folded socks and underwear, his Kiwi-polished shoes, his leather
billfold. These details made him feel a little taller, a little better prepared to face the
hostile country he had moved to.
He remembers pushing Roxi aside so he could iron the shirts that Sunila wouldn’t.
Roxi had wanted him to read to her. Another time, Murad had nervously waited on the
stairs for something or another, but Arjun was polishing his shoes. Couldn’t the boy
see he was busy?
It was Roxi’s job to lay the table, but it was never done properly. He remembers
how he would have Roxi straighten knives, move glasses over an inch or two so they
were correctly aligned, re-fold the napkins.
Murad was responsible for washing the dishes while Roxi dried. Murad was
mournfully methodical. Roxi was careless, swiping at plates and rubbing handfuls of
silverware together in the towel and jumbling them into the drawer. How many times
did he have to order her back into the kitchen where she angrily re-dried plates and
pans, or sorted out the silverware drawer?
It all meant something but he can’t remember what that is. Some sense of
decorum, some sense of fitting in to the middle class neighborhood whose ideals he’s
never quite grasped.
But their neighbors are now used to them. They’ve been there for fifty years;
they’re the old-timers. He’s seen nearly all the houses on the street change owners at
one time or another.
Now they are the sweet old couple at number 4, Oriole Drive (Ah, bless). Sunila
greets everyone with a friendly smile and wave, invites them in, offers them tea, hands
out cookies to the children on their way home from school. She has achieved her
coveted position of being accepted. She is harmless and old.
Her high heels no longer strike static from the sidewalk as she busies to work and
back home again with carrier bags of groceries. The children are gone; there is no one
to scream at in the evenings. She can’t even scold him for long without becoming
breathless.
He used to laugh at her as she retreated to the kitchen coughing and angry. But
now he sees that this is how she stays alive; this is the vigor which allows her to
dress him, cook for him, wash him, help him to the bathroom in the day, turn the TV on
or off, fetch his photograph albums, take them away when they are too heavy to hold,
reach down books for him and re-shelve them when he can’t remember the page he
wants.
Now he becomes anxious if she coughs too much. He urges her to rest, to take
more time upstairs watching her soap operas on the bedroom TV.
Now that it is too late, he has come to love her. Even if he could find some
adequate language to tell her, she would dismiss him, would think he was trying to
manipulate her, would correct his syntax, would think he was becoming sentimental as
the old often do. She would never understand what it has taken for him to reach this
point.
It doesn’t matter. He loves her ignorance, her wide-ranging prejudices, her quick
judgment of other people, her feelings of inadequacy, her suspicion of those who she
feels are somehow ‘better’; her inability to follow a simple argument, her inability to
follow simple directions her instinctive dislike of anything artistic, including art. He loves
her sad walls of exclusion, including those exclude her from anything that might
demand a little understanding outside of the terrible moral code by which she
attempts, and often fails, to live.
In the early mornings, while he is meant to be asleep, she sits in the least
comfortable armchair near the gas fire, bent over her Bible. He is still amazed at her
conversion to Christianity. She claims is it her refuge and her strength. But, perhaps it
was only that the Hindu gods were too many, too confusing to remember, somehow
not quite respectable.
Her lips move over the verses which spell out her failure in stark formulaic King
James prose with its incomprehensible italics and emphatic pronouncements. Thou
shalt not.
But she shall, she does, she cannot help herself. And worse than her voice raised
against him, the words that ricochet out of her mouth, the fists clamped against her
sides, is that sudden recognition, I’ve done it again. I’ve done it again. And she abruptly
turns to the kitchen, to vent her despair on the clanging pans.
It is then he longs to tell her, I know you’re angry. It’s all right to be angry. She would
not believe him. It isn’t Christian to be angry. Even Christ, famously angry in the
temple, got over it.
Her anger has lasted all her life.
He doesn’t ask where it comes from. Does it matter? A spoiled child, she was given
everything her impoverished family could manage. He sometimes wonders about the
older sisters. Perhaps they resented her and that also fueled her anger. Perhaps she
just felt she didn’t get what she deserved.
So often, she has sighed after luxurious items, blaming him because she cannot
hold her head up since she doesn’t have a washer and dryer, convection oven, an Aga
stove, full central heating, silk velvet curtains, a nicer car.
No one else bought a Fiat, a Honda. She sneered at these bright, practical little
cars. When, by some strange combination of events he bought a BMW she was
thrilled. He was baffled to hear her refer to him to their church friends as her dear
Arjun. How quickly she adopted language and manners appropriate to one who owned
a BMW. She drove everywhere on errands, for visiting this poor old dear, that poor sick
lady. The elderly had never benefited so much from her Christian outreach.
He hated the car. It was too big, difficult to maneuver, costly to run and insure. She
backed it into a lamppost and then into another car, and their insurance soared. He
sold it as quickly as he could and immediately felt her deflate. He felt sorry for her,
quietly admitting to Mrs. Benson, “We’ve sold the car. Too many accidents, you know,”
as though the car led an independently willful life, rear-ending and colliding where it
would.
Mrs. Benson had nodded elegantly and immediately Arjun had seen how Sunila had
copied the gesture, the you know, the half-abstract air.
He felt badly for her, but couldn’t see why she tried so hard to be like them, the
British, with their coldness, their inability to speak their own language correctly, the
assumption of superiority where none existed.
As he shuffles his walker back into the living room where he can finally sit down on
his bed, he has the impression that someone else is in the room. Perhaps Sunila heard
the toilet flush and woke up.
He positions himself and sits and then says, “Did I wake you?”
“You might have done, you took that long, you stupid old git.” The voice is young,
male and cold. A flashlight is shone directly at his face. There is a crash and swearing
as the flashlight is dropped and a chair is overturned. He expects a blow to the head.
He expects that he must die now. He hopes he will have the chance to say that they
have very little money in the house, but to take whatever there is downstairs. There is
nothing upstairs. Perhaps he can save Sunila from this final shame of being humiliated
and hurt by a maniac child.
But the blow doesn’t arrive. There is heavy breathing and the voice says, “You’re
Indian, intcha?”
Arjun manages, “Yes, I am. Please take what we have down here. I can tell you
where it is.”
“I can’t take nothing from you, you old bhenchod.”
Arjun flinches at the language. Even now he cannot accustom himself to the casual
way that young people swear. And then he realizes the boy is Indian, hence the
swearing in Hindi. “Beta, don’t hurt us. Or, if you must, then hurt me. Leave her be.”
“Shut up. Don’t say anything.” A pause. “Maderchod.”
“Beta, please don’t swear.”
“Don’t call me son. I’m not your son.”
“I’m sorry.” Arjun tries to slow his breathing down before the panic attack starts.
“What the fuck am I meant to do now? I mean, I go to all the fucking trouble to
break into your bhenchod house and you’re fucking Indian.”
“Son, can we put the light on?”
“Oh, so you can see me and report me to the police, I suppose.”
“Who is going to believe a sick old man?”
“Oh yes. Rub it in. Not only can I not smash your maderchod head in and take your
money, I have to turn the light on so you can make a positive ID. Well, why not? Why
not just make the whole fucking evening complete?” There is patting and slapping as
the young boy feels his way around the room. More swearing as he contacts the sharp
edges of the credenza.
next page
to rock himself sideways and out of bed. But the energy doesn’t come. He waits.
Once it was easy to rock up, but now he has to use his body’s weight to ease himself
off the mattress. And he must take his time. Any small slip and he will slither off
completely and Sunila will panic and scream. Why couldn’t you call me for help? Why are
you so stubborn? Why can’t you just do something simple like wait for help? Then
prediction. You’ll have broken your hip/back/head.
thinks of Just Desserts. Just don’t think I’m going to visit you every day. Just don’t think I’
m transferred to her and he can stay in the background as the source of her bad luck.
me like this? or Why does this always happen to me? In this stage, the suffering is
transferred to her and he can stay in the background as the source of her bad luck.
As he has learned, it is better to wait. Most of the body’s cravings can be subdued,
as he learned even before he became sick.
It is difficult to remember that time. He was Thirty. Forty? No the first attack was
before then. He was thirty-six. So he was healthy until he was thirty-six. He marvels at
this other self whose body performed daily miracles; standing, turning, lifting, running
up the stairs two at a time.
And even further back, in the time of legend, he played Squash for the All-India
team. Who was this person who wore white shorts and ran after small rubber balls
with such speed and accuracy? Surely he was a superman in those days. He wonders
if those other squash players are also lying in bed and wondering where their bodies
went, wondering at which date the synaptic rush and response slowed and failed.
And even further back, there was his boyhood in India. How easily, fluidly he ran up
and down mountains, as though up were almost the same as down. How he jumped
over rocks, between rocks, balancing with his arms flung out, his body leaning this way
and that as the impetus carried him forward, forward.
In some faint responsive memory of movement, he moves his legs and finds he can
ease himself off the mattress. He holds on to the bedrail with both hands and steadies
himself as his feet touch the ground. He is sitting upright.
He smiles at the triumph; he can still get out of bed by himself, which means he can
still go to the bathroom by himself. Small victories. He can’t even brag to Rob, his
grandson. Rob is not only well past the stage of getting out of bed by himself but he
doesn’t even need a safety rail at night anymore.
Arjun realizes with humility that he is far behind his grandson, who is bounding
ahead into his future. That future won’t contain Arjun or his stories about tigers and
elephants, his descriptions of the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, his peanut and
monkey jokes.
He has become accustomed to letting go. He is no longer anxious to keep up with
Rob. Occasional accounts about his progress in school or on the football team are
enough. These days, visitors, particularly children, are exhausting and he feels an
overwhelming lassitude from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave.
He steadies himself as he takes the weight on his legs, both hands firmly on the
walker. Now to walk. The coordination that goes into walking is astonishing. He
pushes the right leg forward first and leans on the walker, then the left leg. It takes a
few steps to get into his shuffling rhythm and then he is on his way to the bathroom.
He takes his time, making sure the door is fully open, that he can sit with his walker
in front of him. How long has it been since he was so indignant about having to sit to
urinate? Now he is merely relieved to sit after the walk to the bathroom.
What importance he used to attribute to things that now seem so small: his
perfectly ironed shirts, the knife-like crease in his pants, the well-tailored jackets and
suits, his meticulously folded socks and underwear, his Kiwi-polished shoes, his leather
billfold. These details made him feel a little taller, a little better prepared to face the
hostile country he had moved to.
He remembers pushing Roxi aside so he could iron the shirts that Sunila wouldn’t.
Roxi had wanted him to read to her. Another time, Murad had nervously waited on the
stairs for something or another, but Arjun was polishing his shoes. Couldn’t the boy
see he was busy?
It was Roxi’s job to lay the table, but it was never done properly. He remembers
how he would have Roxi straighten knives, move glasses over an inch or two so they
were correctly aligned, re-fold the napkins.
Murad was responsible for washing the dishes while Roxi dried. Murad was
mournfully methodical. Roxi was careless, swiping at plates and rubbing handfuls of
silverware together in the towel and jumbling them into the drawer. How many times
did he have to order her back into the kitchen where she angrily re-dried plates and
pans, or sorted out the silverware drawer?
It all meant something but he can’t remember what that is. Some sense of
decorum, some sense of fitting in to the middle class neighborhood whose ideals he’s
never quite grasped.
But their neighbors are now used to them. They’ve been there for fifty years;
they’re the old-timers. He’s seen nearly all the houses on the street change owners at
one time or another.
Now they are the sweet old couple at number 4, Oriole Drive (Ah, bless). Sunila
greets everyone with a friendly smile and wave, invites them in, offers them tea, hands
out cookies to the children on their way home from school. She has achieved her
coveted position of being accepted. She is harmless and old.
Her high heels no longer strike static from the sidewalk as she busies to work and
back home again with carrier bags of groceries. The children are gone; there is no one
to scream at in the evenings. She can’t even scold him for long without becoming
breathless.
He used to laugh at her as she retreated to the kitchen coughing and angry. But
now he sees that this is how she stays alive; this is the vigor which allows her to
dress him, cook for him, wash him, help him to the bathroom in the day, turn the TV on
or off, fetch his photograph albums, take them away when they are too heavy to hold,
reach down books for him and re-shelve them when he can’t remember the page he
wants.
Now he becomes anxious if she coughs too much. He urges her to rest, to take
more time upstairs watching her soap operas on the bedroom TV.
Now that it is too late, he has come to love her. Even if he could find some
adequate language to tell her, she would dismiss him, would think he was trying to
manipulate her, would correct his syntax, would think he was becoming sentimental as
the old often do. She would never understand what it has taken for him to reach this
point.
It doesn’t matter. He loves her ignorance, her wide-ranging prejudices, her quick
judgment of other people, her feelings of inadequacy, her suspicion of those who she
feels are somehow ‘better’; her inability to follow a simple argument, her inability to
follow simple directions her instinctive dislike of anything artistic, including art. He loves
her sad walls of exclusion, including those exclude her from anything that might
demand a little understanding outside of the terrible moral code by which she
attempts, and often fails, to live.
In the early mornings, while he is meant to be asleep, she sits in the least
comfortable armchair near the gas fire, bent over her Bible. He is still amazed at her
conversion to Christianity. She claims is it her refuge and her strength. But, perhaps it
was only that the Hindu gods were too many, too confusing to remember, somehow
not quite respectable.
Her lips move over the verses which spell out her failure in stark formulaic King
James prose with its incomprehensible italics and emphatic pronouncements. Thou
shalt not.
But she shall, she does, she cannot help herself. And worse than her voice raised
against him, the words that ricochet out of her mouth, the fists clamped against her
sides, is that sudden recognition, I’ve done it again. I’ve done it again. And she abruptly
turns to the kitchen, to vent her despair on the clanging pans.
It is then he longs to tell her, I know you’re angry. It’s all right to be angry. She would
not believe him. It isn’t Christian to be angry. Even Christ, famously angry in the
temple, got over it.
Her anger has lasted all her life.
He doesn’t ask where it comes from. Does it matter? A spoiled child, she was given
everything her impoverished family could manage. He sometimes wonders about the
older sisters. Perhaps they resented her and that also fueled her anger. Perhaps she
just felt she didn’t get what she deserved.
So often, she has sighed after luxurious items, blaming him because she cannot
hold her head up since she doesn’t have a washer and dryer, convection oven, an Aga
stove, full central heating, silk velvet curtains, a nicer car.
No one else bought a Fiat, a Honda. She sneered at these bright, practical little
cars. When, by some strange combination of events he bought a BMW she was
thrilled. He was baffled to hear her refer to him to their church friends as her dear
Arjun. How quickly she adopted language and manners appropriate to one who owned
a BMW. She drove everywhere on errands, for visiting this poor old dear, that poor sick
lady. The elderly had never benefited so much from her Christian outreach.
He hated the car. It was too big, difficult to maneuver, costly to run and insure. She
backed it into a lamppost and then into another car, and their insurance soared. He
sold it as quickly as he could and immediately felt her deflate. He felt sorry for her,
quietly admitting to Mrs. Benson, “We’ve sold the car. Too many accidents, you know,”
as though the car led an independently willful life, rear-ending and colliding where it
would.
Mrs. Benson had nodded elegantly and immediately Arjun had seen how Sunila had
copied the gesture, the you know, the half-abstract air.
He felt badly for her, but couldn’t see why she tried so hard to be like them, the
British, with their coldness, their inability to speak their own language correctly, the
assumption of superiority where none existed.
As he shuffles his walker back into the living room where he can finally sit down on
his bed, he has the impression that someone else is in the room. Perhaps Sunila heard
the toilet flush and woke up.
He positions himself and sits and then says, “Did I wake you?”
“You might have done, you took that long, you stupid old git.” The voice is young,
male and cold. A flashlight is shone directly at his face. There is a crash and swearing
as the flashlight is dropped and a chair is overturned. He expects a blow to the head.
He expects that he must die now. He hopes he will have the chance to say that they
have very little money in the house, but to take whatever there is downstairs. There is
nothing upstairs. Perhaps he can save Sunila from this final shame of being humiliated
and hurt by a maniac child.
But the blow doesn’t arrive. There is heavy breathing and the voice says, “You’re
Indian, intcha?”
Arjun manages, “Yes, I am. Please take what we have down here. I can tell you
where it is.”
“I can’t take nothing from you, you old bhenchod.”
Arjun flinches at the language. Even now he cannot accustom himself to the casual
way that young people swear. And then he realizes the boy is Indian, hence the
swearing in Hindi. “Beta, don’t hurt us. Or, if you must, then hurt me. Leave her be.”
“Shut up. Don’t say anything.” A pause. “Maderchod.”
“Beta, please don’t swear.”
“Don’t call me son. I’m not your son.”
“I’m sorry.” Arjun tries to slow his breathing down before the panic attack starts.
“What the fuck am I meant to do now? I mean, I go to all the fucking trouble to
break into your bhenchod house and you’re fucking Indian.”
“Son, can we put the light on?”
“Oh, so you can see me and report me to the police, I suppose.”
“Who is going to believe a sick old man?”
“Oh yes. Rub it in. Not only can I not smash your maderchod head in and take your
money, I have to turn the light on so you can make a positive ID. Well, why not? Why
not just make the whole fucking evening complete?” There is patting and slapping as
the young boy feels his way around the room. More swearing as he contacts the sharp
edges of the credenza.
next page
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal winter 2008 fiction
hunger and thirst by Sandra Hunter
hunger and thirst by Sandra Hunter
avi dancing by tamar factor