“You delivered breakfast to me yesterday,” I said, and reminded him of where I lived.
“No need to tell me, sir. You are the good man with the home that is comforting. Do you not ever visit the supermarket?” I heard shouting erupt behind him. The way Mr. Patel sounded when he yelled at Rajeev in the school parking lot. “A mixture,” Rajeev said to me all those years ago, “of Hindi, Marathi, and some pidgin English words, all of it like guns firing when my father is pissed with me.” I could translate the words shouted at Kartar without any problem.
“Apologies, sir. There is no need for supermarkets. None whatsoever. What may I bring to you?”
I gave him my order and then he asked me something strange. “Sir, do you have any siblings?” I said that I had a younger brother.
“I have no sibling,” Kartar said. “My mother says with great pleasure that she and the world can handle but a single one of me. You have a brother, so your mother must not say such a thing about you. I ask about your sibling because I could not feel him in your home. This brother of yours, is he the sheep?”
“The sheep?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, you know, the sheep, the one who lollygags around, always making trouble, never listening to his elders.”
“You mean the black sheep,” and for several awful moments I wanted to say, “Yes, yes, he is.” But could Eric be defined as the Manning black sheep when he was rich as Croesus?
He had begun calling late that summer and engaging me in long conversations, which he had never done before; our previous conversations had always been shorter and took place in his bedroom or mine, or out in the glen, when we both lived at home in Rhome, before I went off to college and he became who he was.
In our last one, just a few days before, he told me he was researching Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lived in a compound, a place of monasteries and stupas that Eric said were sacred monuments symbolizing enlightenment. Telling me that people stayed in Dharamshala for months on end, meditating, learning, making treks to all sorts of places imbued with healing properties. Telling me that people wrote letters to the Dalai Lama, hoping to be granted a private audience. And when I said, What’s this all about? Eric said, I’m thinking I want a new life. I’ve done this one, and even though I’ve done really well, I’m not sure it’s good for me. Don’t most of us wish we could start over again? People say they would beg, borrow, and steal to change their lives. I just have the cash to do such a thing in my own way.
Then he was talking logistics, that the flight to Delhi took fifteen hours, and from there, he would make his way to Dharamshala. Though most visitors apparently took a thirteen-hour bus ride, the option of an overnight train from Delhi to a place called Chakki Bank intrigued him.
Like that movie we saw, he said, about brothers in India on a train, reuniting with each other and searching for their runaway mother. The Darjeeling Limited, I said, and I wondered if he wanted me to go with him, and I went through a rapid analysis of what it would be like to be in India with the younger brother I sometimes loved and mostly loathed because of his genius and his wealth and his besting a world I could never be part of. He did not feel the break in my thoughts, was talking then about how he’d take the overnight train from Delhi to the Pathankot small railhead gauge station, and from there take another train up the Kangra valley. I had no idea what a small railhead gauge station was.
Then Eric was saying, This is what the Internet guides say, and he read, “The ascending trip takes no less than six hours up through a beautiful valley and one should expect delays. At Kangra, you will make your way to the station for the final leg of your trip, a bus to McLeod Ganj in Dharamshala.” Once there, I’ll be on foot the rest of the time, he said.
I think now that Eric saw coming the crash that would send him to rehab, was already working out his plans before that Oregon detour, considering heading to India to stay a week, a month, or a year. I was skeptical and impressed and envious that the brightest among us have all the options in the world, could undergo such radical transformation, and that those of us without such gifts, who would most benefit from a completely different existence, would never have such a chance.
I could have said Eric was the black sheep and Kartar wouldn’t have known the difference. Instead, I answered honestly.
“He’s not a black sheep, just functions very differently than the rest of us.”
And I felt a slow heat forming within me, about Eric’s limitless choices and mine narrowed down to nothing.
“You do as well, sir. Perhaps just more quietly,” Kartar said. “Sir, apologies, I am being summoned. I will see you within one hour, and I will pray that the rain has concluded by then. I look forward, sir.”
I set out cash on the kitchen counter, flopped on the couch, stared at the ceiling, and thought again about Eric and the second life he was thinking of beginning, and about Simon Tabor and what he had done to create new lives for himself, and how, despite my moderate success at Think Inc., I couldn’t figure out how to get this first life of mine started much at all, a flickering flame already gone out. Then I slept until the doorbell rang.
“Good late afternoon, sir,” Kartar said as he handed me my order. “Another long day of serious tumult.” We both looked to the windows where we could see the jackhammering rain.
“Is it really raining as hard as I think it is?” I asked.
“I cannot know how hard you think it is raining, sir. But yes is what I say to you. I say yes because when I stood inside Lucky Star, I thought it was raining a certain kind of hard. Yet, when my uncle Gupta and I ran to the car to bring this delicious food to you, it was raining much harder than I believed when I was still inside.”
I liked his explanation and I smiled at him and said, “Thanks for braving the weather again.”
“My pleasure, sir. It is an interesting puzzle, is it not? How something like rain can be different depending on where you are standing when you are considering it. Much like life, I think.”
I wondered if this kid was some kind of prodigal sage. In silence, we exchanged the chicken-scratched receipt for cash, and a tip he accepted this time without protest.
Then he said, “The principle applies to many things. I hope you do not find this strange, sir, but I have been meditating on your home since yesterday. To me, it is comforting, and yet when I paid you that compliment, I could see in your eyes that you were not sure if you agreed or disagreed. Sir, I will say it is like the rain. What matters is where one stands. From where I stand, this is a good home and you will do great things with your life in this place.”