Navin picked up his younger brother where he sat playing with blocks on the ground, threw him over his shoulder, and took him for a walk. They lived in fresh air, and the boy did not get enough.
I, Rati, do not want to marry the boy my father has selected. He is shorter than me, with the body of a baboon, the eyes of an owl.
Prasad was very, very old and he had a story to tell his family that would alter the way they saw the world.
Feni’s name meant sweet but she wasn’t.
Iti and Ibha were sick of praying to Buddha.
My mother chants when she wakes up, when she prepares lunch and dinner, when she is alone in her bed. The father I never knew, I think he’s in her chants.
Qasam is going to storm out of this fucking valley and get somewhere good.
Wimal hid in the fort and knew she was going to die. She could hear the man sliding back the thing of his gun, the bullet dropping wherever it needed to go.
Het, Haan, and Omu have been friends since they were children. They played games together and slept in each other’s beds, and used each other’s mothers for love when their own wouldn’t do, or was dead.
She puts the stories aside, feels she has chosen well. Paloma Rosen awaits. Since Joan’s trip to Masrur with Eric, she and Paloma have been in picturesque Italian towns, a side-trip to Croatia, where they toured a stonecutters’ school and Paloma briefly considered renting a weathered stone house overlooking the harbor, but decided against it, kept to her plan.
Theo Tesh Park is in Joan’s mind all at once, suddenly fully developed, wanting the chance to start to tell his own tale. Perhaps thinking of Eric and Daniel has made Theo Tesh Park so insistent right this minute, or maybe the stories she has chosen for Darpan’s writing class set him loose. Whatever the reason, she clears off her pine desk, leaves only the barley tea, flips through her notebook remembering all the things she thought and wrote about weeks ago, then, fingers on the laptop keys, she lets Theo take over.
Theo Tesh Park is not his real name. The name he wore in his turbulent boyhood, through the losses of his teen years, is embossed on an old Sears card hidden in his wallet, used once when he was ten and his mother had disappeared again on another drugged bender, and his grandmother, his sobo Chiyo, did not drive, and Poppy, his older sister by three years could not drive, and he had in his closet only ripped jeans and T-shirts he had outgrown, and school was starting the next day. He had taken the local bus by himself to the store, already figuring out he would need to do everything in his life on his own. Trashing the Sears card would eliminate the last shred of evidence that once he was called Emilio Inari Andramu?o, but it resists when he tries, a talisman against his past.
Despite all the changes he has made in his life, he still thinks of himself as a boy from Steinbeck land, living nearly as hard as some of his characters. In high school, when his English teacher saw him reading Steinbeck’s books, she had said, Good for you, Emilio. You’ll find that the prose is supple and muscular, that he has extraordinary empathy for ordinary people, those who have been marginalized and dispossessed. He didn’t know then that Mrs. Abbott saw him as one of the marginalized and dispossessed, and even when he did, he kept reading Steinbeck, and Salinas was still the salad bowl of the world, with its farms of strawberries, tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, and celery, manned by small and sweaty men and women and children, he nearly the same brown shade as them, but they were even more downtrodden, because at least Theo stayed in one place year-round. But that didn’t alter the truth that Mrs. Abbott was right, about his own general marginalization and dispossession, even in his own home, such as it was, blast any amen to that. The place that had been home for a long time was a rotting bungalow in poorest Hebbron Heights, but the faintest of memories remained in his head, of his early years, maybe until he was five, when his father was still around, and he, and Poppy, and their father, and their mother, and Sobo Chiyo all lived in the rich section of Salinas, in a splendid house he sort of remembered.
Three years ago, on his nineteenth birthday, he was inside the Salinas Amtrak Station, counting his bucks. He wanted Amtrak, but could only afford to cross the country Greyhound-slow. With the ticket clutched in his hand, he focused upon the amorphous plans for his future, let go right then of the notion of familial resurrection. His sobo Chiyo was dead, he had written off his stringy, strung-out mother, unzipping men’s pants before he’d even hightailed it out of the bungalow, all for whatever crystal she might be handed in some teensy plastic bag, and he had given up hope by then that Poppy would reappear.
His sister had skipped out of his life one day, telling him she was heading to the Pacific Ocean with a few friends for a day at the beach. The Pacific was just eight miles from home, though neither of them had been, not once in their lives, but Poppy didn’t find the ocean, or she had never intended to make her way to the beach, instead she sent him a single postcard that said: EIA—I’m hanging with a group in the great Mojave, off I-40. They’re gonna turn the desert into an agricultural oasis, and you know I’ve got a great green thumb. He knew no such thing about her, had never seen her raise a thing, and when he Google-mapped Mojave and I-40, there wasn’t a house or a gas station or a restaurant in any direction for hundreds of miles, just sprawling desert with a complete lack of access to water, and he’d wondered what the hell she was doing. Salinas was a town more than 99 percent dry land, its water calculated at a mere 0.16 percent, but the Mojave was a place even drier and more inhospitable. He didn’t understand whether that had been her plan all along, or whether she’d gotten herself caught up in something, sometimes those sorts of things happened to Poppy.