But Uncle Sarath has been in America for so long that he has forgotten the rules. He steps out onto Galle Road, sinks into water up to his calves, and raises his face to the sun, which is breaking through the clouds. Then he does a sudden dance. People hurrying by with their umbrellas finally folded think he is making a joke, welcoming the brightness back. But when his face goes black, they realize that his slippers have been swept away and he has stepped on a live wire under the water.
There are frantic, panicked calls to America. Aunty Mallini cannot comprehend what is being said. Someone she barely remembers from her own wedding decades ago, her husband’s cousin he says he is, is sobbing and saying, “Sarath has died, Sarath is gone.” My mother calls me and tells me to come now, immediately. I call Dharshi’s phone but get no response. I take the train and my mother picks me up at the station, her face ravaged. We drive to the house that was our first home in America. There are people sitting in the living room. I push past them into Dharshi’s room. She is sitting cross-legged on the bed, her face perfectly wiped as if she is made of plastic. I go to her and she crumples. I had read this phrase before, but I had never seen it, the way a person’s body literally deflates under the rush of grief. I hold her in my arms for hours while she shakes, her face against my chest, her hands clawing the bedclothes.
From the next room we can hear Aunty Mallini raging, “Why did he go there? Back to that cursed place? Why? He should have stayed here. We were safe here.” My mother tries to comfort her, but there’s so little that can be said. We are again in a house bereft of men. We are again surrounded by haunted shadows and disbelief. How can two sisters lose their husbands to the rage of water? I am plunged back into those days after Thatha died. The same static hum has descended on this house. It sits eerie and everywhere in these rooms as I cook and clean and make sure these women are taken care of.
But whereas Dharshi’s family had swept in during our time of tragedy to offer us succor and taken us with them to the far, golden edge of the new world, now there is nowhere farther we can take them. The four of us, we are two widowed sisters and their fatherless girls. A coven of women left by their men.
*
I stay for a week. But then I can’t swallow it anymore. The house, the heaviness of female grief, the hum of loss that hangs so heavy in the air that it vibrates at its own frequency. This is the kind of grief I do not want to remember, do not want to enter, because I know that if I do, I will never leave this room of sorrow.
Every night I dream of my father climbing that curving tree in the rain, pausing at the top as if waiting to hear me call him back, and then dropping into the water. I had not seen his face after they pulled him out of the river. Amma had acquiesced on a closed casket, but I see his face now, bruised and torn and blue tinged over the brown, the destroyed unseeing eyes. I wake up shuddering in the dark. I remember what it is to lose a father, to feel unmoored in a great rushing stream one had never realized before rushed just under one’s feet. I remember what it is to be uprooted, in deep water, so that your feet are over your head, the feeling that they will never again settle peacefully on solid earth. I know there is nothing more I can say to Dharshi that will bring her quiet.
I tell her I’m leaving, going back to college. She lies on her bed next to mine and stares at the ceiling and says nothing. I pack slowly, waiting for her to ask me to stay just a few more days. I roll my few clothes into balls so I can stuff them in my bag. I heft the bag onto my shoulder. For a long moment I stand by the door. I memorize her face, her small body, her pale palms flopped away on the comforter like doves, the tears rolling slowly down the planes of her face. I know that I love her and that things will be forever different, and then I leave.
*
I go back to college, get wrapped up in the rhythm of it—classes, lectures, papers, all-nighters. But it all feels different now, more serious. I start studying harder. The difficult subjects, science and math, these are my solace. For the first time I consider medical school. It would make my mother happier than anything. Like every other South Asian of a certain generation, she worships those in the doctoring profession. I’ve never been able to figure out whether this cultural worship of doctors is due to the saving of lives or to the fat paychecks or to a combination of the two. Possibly it’s just a holdover from some other decade when medicine was a noble calling. In the end, I am practical. Med school will take too long, cost too much. Instead I decide on nursing. It’s practical and lucrative. I know that the sight of blood does not make me queasy, the secrets of the body do not frighten me. On the contrary, I am thrilled at the idea that the interior labyrinths will be revealed to me. This is all my desire now. I throw myself into schoolwork with a vengeance, nursing school in the cross hairs of my ambition.