Alice said, “Look at the shadow on the ground, Daddy. We’re a giant.”
On the other side of the interstate, he flagged down one of the cabs driving by, which he knew rarely stopped near the police station. The cabdriver looked him over, as if debating whether criminals gave kids rides on their shoulders. Michael glanced back at the detective in the white Mercury and then helped Alice into the cab. The wind kicked up, swirling dust and sand, and Michael stumbled into the backseat, nearly blinded.
Michael was twelve, Andrew fifteen.
Their mom taught English at the community college. Student essays were always piled on her desk in the den. She called the students her other babies. Freaks, Andrew and Michael said. Towelheads. Jasbeer Mowat was one. “You want mo wat?” Michael kept saying until their mom got mad. “These folks haven’t been given everything like you two,” she’d snapped. Once in a while she would read a good essay to them. A fifty-year-old woman wrote about going to the doctor for some tests and finding out she had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in her uterus. Afterward, the woman went home and prepared her husband and kids for the worst. But when she went back for more tests, they found out the tumor was a baby instead. “What kind of idiot doesn’t know they’re pregnant?” Andrew had said, grinning at Michael. She’d tossed the essay down, glared at him, said he’d missed the point, and besides, what did he know, had he ever been pregnant?
But the best essay Michael stole. He stashed it in the air vent beside his bed. He took some shitty ones too, so it wouldn’t look suspicious. Their mom pulled her hair out looking for them. One night, after he’d gotten back from smoking weed and watching Comedy Central at a friend’s house, he’d gone straight to his room, pulled the essay from the vent, and held it under the lamp, its edges brown-smudged from his fingers.
Videsh Deshmuke
English 1310
Personal Narrative
Prof. Kay Greer
Delta Crash
My wife Madya and I were returning from my father’s burial ceremony in India. On the plane, I was thinking of how the last meal I prepared for my father—Emperor’s Saffron Chicken—was not up to his standards. “A little dry for me,” the old bastard said. “And the chutney too lemony.” To think how this bothered me then. I wanted so badly to make up to the dead.
On the plane, I remember my wife’s head turned toward the window. She was suffering from homesickness already. Her short, modern hair and capped teeth made everyone in my family look a second time. Is this you after all, Madya? their glances said. She did not fit anymore. And because of this, we grieved together. I for my father, she for her old life. It was not that she hated our new life, the life of the Indian restaurant we ran together. It was that she could never taste the other life in the same way.
The night after my father’s burial, I lay on the bed in the dark, weeping. She came and sat beside me and ran her fingernails through my hair for a very long time. She sang a song to me in Hindi. Her skin smelled of tea leaves.
On our flight back to Dallas, I remember the many swimming pools below, winking in the sun. Then the plane dropped beneath us, too sudden. Madya grabbed my hand. The oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. There was an explosion. Blue flame rolled down the aisle, like some child’s enormous lost ball. Then the world was torn in two.
I was strapped in my seat, sitting in a great field. Sirens were screaming. In my nose, the odor of fuel and something I could not name. Clothing was scattered on the ground. Above, I saw blue sky, darkness, blue sky again. Smoke was coming from a dark, crushed shape in the distance. I felt its heat. I knew the shape was part of our plane. Impossible thoughts whirled in my head. I was outside what a moment before I had been inside. My eyes closed. I still felt Madya’s hand in mine. Then I saw my father across the field, hobbling on his bad ankles. He was wearing his white chef’s smock and hat. He came to me. “You are certainly lucky,” he said in Hindi, patting my shoulder. “A big bird crashes like that and you end up sitting here as though you were watching a movie.”
“Father, is Madya still holding my hand?” I asked. He did not answer. He then told me a story. One evening he was cooking at the restaurant and stepped into the dining room. He saw the customers eating his chicken kabobs and curried lamb. He felt satisfied. Then it occurred to him that just as he had prepared their food, they, in turn, were being prepared for Shiva’s terrible appetite. That one day Shiva would lift them up, eat them like nan.
“Is Madya holding my hand?” I asked again.
“We worry over each other, the living and the dead,” my father said, looking thoughtful.
“It is not enough. I need her hand,” I said.