To get from the airplane to the Bombay airport, I had to take a tarmac bus. We made the drive over and stopped at the airport’s glass doors only to find that the bus door was stuck shut. Inside the bus, everyone crowded forward to see what was happening, and it became hard to breathe. The crowd also made it difficult for the two men hunched in the bus’ entryway trying to unstick the door. They didn’t have much room.
By now I was sweating and staring at the woman’s ponytail in front of me. It was the only place I could look. Her hair was held by a black scrunchie that looked like a flower made out of human hair. After about ten minutes a cry went up. The men yelled something to the driver, and he began driving the path back to the plane. When we reached it, four men crowded around the outside of the bus with some large tool. I couldn’t identify it because I still had little room in which to move. They managed to unstick the door, and we drove back to the airport with it open. Now everyone pushed to the rear of the bus so no one would fall out.
I went to Bombay primarily because it was Diwali, and my cousin Raghavendra would be home from boarding school. But there was another reason. My grandfather is turning 90 soon. It is not clear what the exact date of his birth is, as we are celebrating it several times over the next few months. One of the explanations floated to me on our extravagance is that my grandfather prefers it this way. He will receive many shirts over the course of his birthday year, and he loves shirts.
His love for shirts is not equal. He prefers worn ones. If he spots a particularly good one on any one of us, he pulls its sleeve with his fingers and says, “You must condemn this to me.”
That means we should give it to him, but we rarely do.
Thatha received two shirts this Diwali – one, a bright yellow khadi cotton number from Chickappa and Neelambari Aunty, and the other, an exact copy in white with candy red stripes from me. I don’t know what Athe and Manohar Uncle had for him, but I don’t think it was a shirt.
He complained to me about not being given more. His daughter-in-law and daughter should have presented him with their own gifts, rather than claimed their husband’s. And Raghav, the youngest grandchild, surely had the means by now to produce something of his own.
For his part, he gave us all equivalent amounts of money to spend as we wished.
I gave books to everyone but Thatha. Collections of poetry and novels went to my uncles and aunts. For Raghav, I selected Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, specifically because it is sad.
Raghav has embraced sadness in his final years of high school. To him, it is more profound than happiness, which he calls “jingoistic." He has a bright and shiny face, but when he points out the Joseph Conrad quotation he neatly penned onto a sheet of paper in the dining room, he does it with tragedy in his eyes.
At lunch he brought up the phrase, “cellar door,” which – as it goes in Raghav’s latest favorite movie, Donnie Darko – is one of the most pleasing sets of words in the language. My uncle considered it for awhile, rolling the consonants on his tongue, and then said the whole thing was foolish.
Given Raghav’s current tastes, I recommended we watch Fight Club.
“It’s a very American college movie,” I told Raghav, who is preparing applications to U.S. schools.
At one of the darkest points, Ed Norton is shaking awake his delusion and searching the country for his other self. He encounters a bartender with a chemical burn. Raghav and I held our breath. Thatha stuck his head through the door.
It was 2 AM by then. We were in the room beside Thatha’s, but that probably wasn’t what woke him, as the walls are fairly thick. More likely he had gone to the bathroom and noticed the noise on his way back.
I went to the door.“Hi Thatha,” I said.
He encircled my wrist with his fingers.
“Why are you still up?” he asked.
“Just watching a movie,” I said.
“You must be punished,” he said. “Ramji has sent an email punishing you.”
Then he shuffled away.
