“Enough!” Papa snapped. “Let her look at it!”
Tight-lipped, Vimal turned to her, keeping his back to his father and brother. The woman—a pediatric oncological nurse at Mount Sinai Queens—knelt and lifted his two shirts. Only Vimal could see her blink when she saw the eggplant-purple bruises, the butterfly bandage and the Betadine stains. She carefully examined the wound that the kimberlite splinter had made and probably realized that an ER doctor would have stitched the site. His mother didn’t know about Adeela but she would guess that Vimal’s reluctance to say anything about the treatment meant that he’d sought help from a non-Hindu friend (that he’d gone to a Muslim he was sleeping with wouldn’t enter into any dimension of her thoughts).
Mother looked up. Their eyes met. She lowered his shirt.
“Vimal is fine. Some minor bruises. That’s all. Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat.”
Chapter 26
The Lahori family ate traditionally perhaps three nights a week, and Western the rest. There was no set schedule as to which cuisine would be served by Mother on which days, though when Papa was at bowling—he was in a league and very good—she made her sons dishes like meat loaf or spaghetti or pizza or sometimes soup, salads and sandwiches. Tonight she had made roasted chicken, corn on the cob, creamed spinach dusted with nutmeg. The concession to Indian cuisine was naan bread but that was less sub-Asian than a staple at Food Bazaar and Whole Foods and any Korean deli within walking distance.
Who didn’t like naan?
Mother was a good cook, with an instinct for seasoning. Vimal loved her food.
Tonight, though, it was no surprise to him that he had no appetite.
The last thing he wanted to do was eat—no, the second-to-last thing he wanted to do was eat. Number one on the list was not talk about the robbery. Fortunately, it seemed that Papa sanctioned this protocol. When Mother began to ask about Mr. Patel’s sister and children and funeral and memorial service, her husband waved a hand to silence her. It seemed to Vimal that the trembling in the man’s fingers was worse.
How patient Mother is, Vimal thought, as he had hundreds of times. He wondered if she’d developed this quality from her work. He imagined she would have to be resilient and strong and steady, yet kind, with those under her care, as well as with their parents. And she would have to practice these qualities all day long; doctors came by sporadically, of course; nurses were constants in hospitals.
The conversation skipped about absurdly. Papa asked Sunny about a test in his biology class. He asked Vimal several times how he had cut the parallelogram. Why had he picked that shape? What adjustments had he made to the dop sticks?
Vimal demurred. He said he couldn’t recall. And this was not far from the truth. He was exhausted. And the horror of the past two days had made his heart and mind weary. Every few minutes the image of Mr. Patel’s feet, angling outward and pointed toward the dim ceiling of the shop, flared. Papa segued to Premier League and the UEFA Champions League as if he were out with his friends after a bowling tournament, sitting at Raga’s, over a Kingfisher. The Real Madrid game had been a nail-biter, he told his sons. And in another game, the striker from Man U had twisted and probably broken his ankle. Papa delivered this news, for some reason, with a wink.
Papa reminded Mother to collect a shirt of his from the tailor tomorrow. And complimented her, with sincerity, about the food this evening. He added that it was all right that it needed salt. Better to have to add it later than recook a meal that was oversalted. He smiled approvingly at her resourcefulness.
Vimal sighed. Papa didn’t notice.
When the meal was over and Mother cleared dishes, Papa gave a rare smile and asked an astonishing question: “Scrabble? Do we all want to play Scrabble?”
Vimal stared.
“What?” his father asked.
“I…don’t feel like playing a game.”
“No?”
“Vim?” his brother asked. Because Sunny would have felt Papa wanted him to. Sunny was often like the second wave of invading soldiers.
“Naw, not tonight.”
Papa nodded slowly. “Then what would you like to do?”
Looking into the man’s eyes, Vimal realized that the time had come. He was tired, he hurt, his plans had been blown apart like the stones he’d carried to Mr. Patel’s office.
“I’ll be downstairs in the workshop.” The inflection of this sentence made it a timid question.
Papa slowly nodded. “I’ll meet you.”
“I’ll be a minute. I want a thicker sweater.” Vimal rose and went upstairs. He found what he needed and then walked into the kitchen, to the basement door. He descended the steep stairs and went into the studio.
Here, nervous—actually nauseous—as he waited for his father, he sat on a bench. He was looking over one of his sculptures in progress. He was presently working on pieces in granite, nephrite jade, tiger’s eye, and celestial-blue lapis lazuli. In the corner of the room was a scaife turntable, similar to what he had polished the parallelogram on, and, on the wall, assorted dop sticks. Papa had been a talented, if uninspired, diamantaire himself and after he’d had to retire from the factory where he worked in the Diamond District, he’d continued to handle some jobs from home, here in the basement, for as long as he could. When he finally had gotten out of the cutting business altogether, Vimal had taken over the workshop to use as a sculptor studio.
This was where he could have spent every waking moment.
These rooms had begun life as an in-law quarters. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen with stove and half refrigerator. On the workbench, in what had been the sitting room, were carefully arranged tools and cartons containing rocks. There was a three-quarter-inch D pneumatic tool, hammers, cup chisels, bushing chisels, wedges and shims for cracking stone, ripper points, hand points. A set of diamond-encrusted blades for the rotary saw—similar to what he might have used for the parallelogram had he not opted for the laser. For the comfort of it he picked up his favorite hammer, four pounds, caressed the dented and scarred head.
Against one wall were cartons filled with a thousand Lahori artifacts, many from his father’s family’s harrowing flight from Kashmir to Surat in India and their less dramatic journey to the United States.
When taking a break from working on a piece, Vimal had spent time browsing through these cartons filled with the Lahori clan history, which he suspected his father had stowed there purposefully, to ignite within the boy a love of family tradition. Vimal hadn’t needed any prodding. He was fascinated to see pictures of his grandfather in a diamond factory in Surat. Sweaty, gritty, dark, the cutting room in which Dada sat was filled with maybe sixty or seventy employees, four to a scaife, bending forward with their dop sticks. The man had been in his twenties when the picture was taken and he alone, among the twenty or so looking at the photographer, was grinning. Most of the cutters seemed bewildered that someone wanted to record their monotonous chores.
Dada had eventually become one of the top cutters in Surat and thought he could do even better in New York. He used all the rupees he’d saved to bring his wife, young Deepro and his three brothers and two sisters, to America. The experience had not been a good one. Indians might have ruled the diamond business in Surat but it was the Jews in New York.
Little by little, though, they, and other Hindu cutters, had made inroads.
At his father’s insistence, Vimal had gone to his grandfather’s cutting shop on the top floor of a dimly lit, moldy building on 45th Street and sat beside him for hours watching the old man’s hands, curled around the dop, touching a diamond to the hypnotically spinning wheel.
It was there that the boy decided he was made to change stone into something else.