Stealing the Ambassador: A Novel

Book by Parekh Sameer

Chapter One

i.

In 1966 my father was born for a second time in this, his most recent life, baptized by a gentle and lazy January snowfall, flake after flake, a thousand perfect welcomes, he remembered aloud once, to a new country. When he woke the next day, snow covered the earth in swells and valleys of unbroken, unrelenting white, and my father thought, because he had, hours ago, been on a plane for the first time, if you could steal the clouds from the sky and spread them over the earth, neatly, evenly, this is what it would look like. To hear him tell it, before he'd ever seen a spring or summer or fall, he'd found a favorite season.

He mentioned his arrival to me once. I was eleven, sitting with my parents and my brother on folding chairs at the dinner table. "Oh, I liked it, that is for certain." My father's English was accented, a thick and general auditory reminder that his passport had once been Indian. To those more attuned to such nuances, his speech said northern, not southern, India, his grammar an obvious clue that his schooling had been Gujarati, not English medium. This night, like most nights, he jumped between the two. "This is not to say, of course, that the winter liked me. Think on it. I had only two suits when I came here. One blue, one gray, neither wool. And only one coat that was much too thin. Less than adequate."

As my father spoke, his right hand would tear at the roti and use it to collect subzi in an off-centered cone of bread and vegetable. This he'd dip into a bowl of daal, so the structure was moistened and flavored, and then feed himself. His left hand would gesticulate like a drunken butterfly, flapping, soaring then falling, attentive always to his story. I remember friends showing me they could pat their heads and rub their bellies at the same time and theirs seemed mean feats.

The immensity of that first winter overwhelmed him. With two suits and a coat he was always on the edge of cold, always aware that he was bothered. He supplemented money from his graduate student grant by working part-time at a small shoe store, nine to six on Saturday, twelve to five on Sunday, off the books. He alternated between his suits and hoped the knees of his pants didn't wear thin. Laughing, on another night, he said, "The craziness of Americans. Their whole day was make or break if they do or don't find the right shoes. They made me the responsible party." He folded his hands together and pressed them against his forehead in mock supplication. "Arre baba, it's not my fault. My job is to squat down, measure your feet, to stand up, to get your shoes, to put them on your feet, and then to package them all again when none suit you. This only. For manufacturing, this is not my department. Talk to Florsheim, sahib."

That next winter he used the money he'd saved to buy a coat, orange and down-filled, the pick of the Salvation Army's litter. Short and slight, the coat doubled half of him, making his torso seem a burden too large for his thin legs. He appeared, from a distance, to wobble as he walked down streets. He was warm, though, and he made it a point to roam about when wiser folk stayed indoors.

He got mittens, a scarf, and a hat. He learned the difference between slush and sleet, between wet and dry snow, about snowmen and toboggans. He bought a shovel, enjoying the banter with neighbors who were also awake early, clearing front steps and sidewalks. He decided that four inches of snow was the right amount, not too great an obstruction, significant enough to turn the city beautiful.

When he was done talking that night his left hand would have fallen to the table, exhausted, and his right might have reached for a glass of water. He'd drink in long swallows, his throat sliding up and down inside his neck like a hurried earthworm. When he'd finished, the glass would have been marked by the oil and ghee of my mother's cooking, pressed by the tips of my father's fingers into five patterns, unique the whole world over.

Twenty-five months after he came from India, my father graduated with a master's in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering and landed a job with a computer company in upstate New York. After a year with the company he flew home to India, in February 1969. My grandfather and grandmother had been inquiring and conducting interviews. When he arrived, my father chose my mother from the six options his parents offered. They spent an hour together, chaperoned, and my mother and father decided they were both agreeable to the match. They married three weeks later, in a ceremony surprisingly large given the time constraints involved.

After the wedding, the new couple, and my father's mother and father, and my father's younger brother, piled into a brand-new Ambassador with a driver and began a weeklong honeymoon, just the six of them. They visited Rajasthan, paying particular attention to temples along the way. At the end of the week my father flew back to America and returned to work. My mother lived with my father's family for the next four months, until her visa was ready and her packing done. In June she landed at JFK and my father picked her up, wondering what to say.

I was born six years later. Four years after that, they had my brother. Two months before that second birth, the three of us moved out of our one-bedroom apartment into a raised ranch, upstate, far enough from New York City that real estate prices were manageable. My father and mother shared one bedroom, my younger brother and I shared another, and it was the third room, the smallest of the three, nine by ten with an old green carpet and a small closet, through which my father's family, thirteen people in all, spread mattresses and blankets and pillows on the floor and arrived in a new country.

They came in two and threes, following my father to America. Some had always wanted to come; some came because they had failed in India. I was twelve when they started to arrive.

First came my father's older sister, my aunt and her husband. He was skinny, she was not. They both found work in the same strip mall, she at Bradlees, in cosmetics, he as a stock boy at Wal-Mart. Together, they made $9.25 an hour and worked eighty hours a week. When they got overtime they'd make time and a half, just about fourteen every hour, and treat themselves to ice cream at Baskin-Robbins before returning home. After dinner they would lose themselves in Hindi films, watching a life of wealth and power from which it seemed they were forever removed, to forget the day they had worked, that tomorrow, they would do the same.

They stayed with us for sixteen months. When they left, back to India to sell their house, their children came to live with us, two sons and a daughter. The two men moved into the spare bedroom and their sister passed the night on a sleeping bag in front of the television, downstairs. I watched shows over her sleeping body that year, the volume so low that I would have to concentrate, rebuilding dialogue from the indistinct contours of actors' voices.

When my aunt and uncle returned they moved in with their daughter to the living room. This is how we lived for the next nine months, the house always filled, growing like an overlush garden, thicker and denser with new lives and new clutter; more shoes at the front door, more towels in the bathroom, more praying, more incense, more coats, more toothbrushes, new brands of toothpaste, new newspapers, saris, bindis, till with this new weight, this mass of people, space and time were forced to warp.

The day assumed new cadences. The kitchen table could seat only six people, so the men and my brother and I would eat first, my mother and aunt and her daughter serving us. The men would talk among themselves, my brother and I would talk to each other, the women would feed us until we were full. Afterward, we'd leave the table to them, going downstairs to watch Dan Rather, my father explaining America, referring to the broadcast. When they'd eaten and cleaned the kitchen, the women would come sit with us and we'd all watch on television a pirated cassette rented from the Indian grocery store. By nine-thirty the set was off in deference to my uncle and aunt, tired and in need of sleep. Upstairs, my uncle's two sons would shower, one after the next, readying themselves for work on the night shift. Washing, they'd sing aloud, filmi songs, and their voices would carry, over the shower curtain and through the door, down the hall and into the bedroom my brother and I shared, the room where nightly my parents would sequester themselves with their children, resurrecting for a third of an hour the nuclear life they had grown accustomed to since arriving in America.

Waking, again the house was full. My cousins would return from work and eat a meal in the kitchen. My brother and I would get ready for school; my parents, my aunt and uncle and their daughter, would get ready for work. Everyone took lukewarm showers and ate bowls of cereal and despite the rush it seemed that we were all always late.

They moved out, to a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. Four months later two more people came, my father's younger brother and his wife. They moved, after half a year, to Jackson Heights. After them came five more: two of my father's nephews for eight months; afterward, an older brother and his wife for a little longer; finally, a niece who stayed for four months, until she was arranged to marry a man from Michigan. Five months after the house emptied I left for college. Four years later I finished and began studying to be a doctor. It was during my first semester in medical school that my father had a heart attack, shoveling snow from the driveway of the house he'd bought in seventy-nine.

My mother drove my father to the hospital, snow be damned. When he'd stabilized and was assigned to the cardiac care unit, my mother sat by his bed, holding her husband's hand as he woke and slept in ten-minute cycles. She left briefly to buy herself a cup of coffee. When she returned she wasn't allowed back into his room. From the hallway, through the glass, she watched, as though it were a silent movie, a cast of stolid doctors and pretty nurses flurry around my father. They slowed and finally stopped and where you might expect the movie to have spliced in a screen of printed dialogue, a white coat opened the door to let my mother know her husband was dead.

Her own father died before I was born, two years after she married. My keenest impression of the person he was comes from my mother's recollection of events at the end of her seventeenth year. She was a senior in high school at an all-girls academy, second in a class of two hundred, when she decided to take the entrance examination for medical school. My mother asked for her parents' permission. Initially reluctant, they acquiesced and through the following four months she studied for the exam. On the evening prior my grandmother arranged for a puja. My mother prayed intently, first for her family's well-being and, afterward, to pass the exam.

Three hundred boys and thirty girls took the statewide test in a too warm auditorium at a local college. In years past, with similar numbers taking the examination, four people were offered admission. My mother sat with the girls in the front two rows of the auditorium. Behind them two rows were left empty and behind these two rows the boys filled what space remained. The exams were distributed and the room collapsed to the smell of sweat and the sound of pen on paper. The test lasted six hours. At its end my mother avoided her friends and hurriedly commandeered a cycle rickshaw to take her home. She cried intermittently through the night, embarrassed and devastated by how poorly she knew she had done. She applied, the next day, for a place in the Bachelor of Commerce class entering the following year. Time passed. She was admitted. Her family convinced her that events had worked out for the best, because now she could stay at home while attending college.

Two months later my mother fell ill with malaria. Her temperature peaked every third day, approaching one hundred and five degrees each time, and in the days between the fever spikes my mother would lie in bed and anticipate feeling much worse. She imbibed quinine. Three days after the fever finally broke, word arrived that the results had been posted for the medical school entrance exam. She begged her father not to check her score but my grandfather insisted to his debilitated daughter that it was best to confront one's failures head-on. He sent a man from his office to get the grade. Later that evening, when my grandfather returned from work, curiosity had gotten the better of my mother and she asked him for the score. Her father, his face tight and serious, told his daughter the results were not good, that in this case, it was better not to know.

My mother understood her failure must be severe. No one mentioned the examination again. She entered college that August and graduated in three years, in the first division, thoroughly uninterested by her course work. Six months after her graduation she and my father were married and four months after this she came to America to be his wife.

After her first year in America, her father got sick, but not so seriously, she supposed. She called home to speak to him and there was nothing in his voice, she'd recall later, that indicated that he might be about to die. They exchanged pleasantries and gossip till she said good-bye.

"A moment, please," her father said.

"Yes," said my mother.

A moment passed. "Are you happy in America?"

"I am happy," my mother answered, reflexively at first, and then again, with the same words, in a more considered fashion.

My grandfather grunted affirmatively. "Your husband, he is a good husband?"

"Really, Papa," she said, embarrassed.

"Is he?"

"He is good," my mother replied.

She waited again for him to say good-bye. Instead he said nothing and my mother, fearing the line had been disconnected, called "Hello" twice, loudly, into the receiver. My grandfather, his voice delayed, tinny and echoing on the overseas line, said, "You were admitted to medical school. You placed third on the exam. I was proud of you. I decided, however, that you were too sickly to go away to school. Also, I did not think it made sense to educate a girl in that manner. I thought I may have been wrong. But you are happy now, yes? I do not feel I made such a bad decision. I hope that you will feel the same. Beti, you cannot change a part of who you are now without changing the whole."

My mother said nothing, weighing the betrayal, twelve thousand miles away and five years removed. "Thank you, Papa," my mother said flatly. Her father waited, trying to gauge the sincerity of her statement. He said good-bye and hung up. They exchanged aerograms dutifully and spoke once again, in taut phrases and long, heavy pauses, before he died.

It is the instinct toward self-preservation that allows me to rationalize his action. Without him there would be no me and my mother would have been part of some other whole. But though I accommodate this deceit, man that he might have been, my mother's father is forever framed for me by this one choice.

My father, to his credit, was incensed by the whole affair and in the months before her father's death pushed my mother to apply to medical school in the States. My mother understood, however, that she didn't have the degree, or the language skills, or the money to go to school, at least not in America. Despite herself she came to advocate her father's decision...