Siddharth hadn’t seen his father naked in a long while. The tufts of hair on his ass were totally white now, and his wrinkly penis seemed smaller than before. It was darker too, darker than any other part of his body. He shifted his eyes to the black lacquer nightstand that used to belong to Mohan Lal. It now contained Ms. Farber’s things — her reading glasses, a psychology journal, and a couple of orange bottles of pills. On top of his father’s dresser sat a stone statue of a blue Indian god playing a metal flute. He had never seen this statue before and wondered where it had come from.
Mohan Lal put on a fresh pair of underwear. He sat himself on the edge of his bed and began clipping his fingernails. Siddharth scrutinized the scar on his father’s chest, a hairless depression between his nipples that resembled a map of Florida. A few weeks ago, Mohan Lal had been trying to repair Ms. Farber’s busted dryer wearing nothing but an undershirt. She asked him how he had gotten that scar, and he told a story that Siddharth had never heard.
When Mohan Lal was just a baby, he had suffered from various respiratory problems. As a last resort, a Buddhist monk took Mohan Lal up into the mountains and performed surgery on his lungs. But the wound from the operation got infected, and it smelled so badly that Mohan Lal’s mother wouldn’t hold him. She didn’t hold him for an entire year.
When Mohan Lal finished his story, Ms. Farber said that nobody could be crueler than a person’s own parents. Mohan Lal insisted that it was no big deal, that it was wrong of Western psychologists to always blame the parents. The thing that really mattered, he said, was that he was still alive thanks to that monk.
Mohan Lal finished with his fingernails and put the nail cutter in a drawer. He threw on sweatpants, then a new pair of beige dress socks. “Son,” he said, “will you do your father a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Put some ointment on my back? Today it is very sore.”
Siddharth grabbed a blue plastic bottle from atop the cistern and squirted the gelatinous substance onto his fingers. It smelled like peppermint, only much stronger. He sat beside Mohan Lal and began applying the cool gunk to the skin of his back, which was soft and warm. Mohan Lal emitted little moans of relief. “Good boy,” he said. “I don’t know what I have done to deserve such a son.”
2. Communal Dinner
Siddharth was sitting on his bed drawing for the first time in a while, attempting a sketch of a Michigan basketball player taking a jump shot. He planned on turning it into a birthday card for Arjun. Mohan Lal was making a racket in the kitchen, preparing a huge Indian spread for Barry Uncle. The thought of daal and rice turned Siddharth’s stomach.
When Marc got home from football camp, he barged into the room and started rummaging through the closet.
Siddharth looked up from his drawing. “What’s the plan?”
“The plan?” said Marc. “The plan is, I’m sleeping at Andy’s.” He fished out a flask of Southern Comfort from one of Siddharth’s winter boots, and then a can of spray paint from inside a board game.
Siddharth had no idea that either of these things were in his closet. He said, “You’re kidding me — graffiti?”
Marc gave the can a rattle. “Nah, makes a good blowtorch.” He cocked his head to one side and cracked a smile. “You know what?”
“What?” said Siddharth, feeling hopeful.
“I got a bottle of Bacardi in there — up top, behind that old camera. I think it’ll do you some good.”
Soon Marc left with his mother, and Siddharth tried to return to his drawing. He wondered how he could make things go back to the way they were with him and Marc. When Marc had first gotten back from Florida, everything seemed fine. He’d even invited Siddharth to the mall one day and helped him pick out clothes, telling him what would be cool for junior high. After swearing him to secrecy, Marc confessed that his father’s girlfriend, Madeline, was pregnant.
“Congratulations,” said Siddharth.
“Congratulations? This is bad, Sidney. Very fucking bad.”
“Why?”
“Cuz Rachel and my dad — they’re past the point of no return.”
Once Marc’s grounding was officially over, he’d started spending all of his time with Andy Wurtzel, a fourteen-year-old from his junior high school. Marc invited Siddharth out a few times with them, but Siddharth couldn’t understand why Marc was so fond of Andy. The kid seemed dumb, and he looked like a bulldog.
When Andy and Marc were together, they talked about stupid things like football, or whether pussy tasted better in the morning or at night. The pair had a penchant for shoplifting, swiping clothes or compact discs or bottles of perfume that Marc later gave to Dinetta Luciani. Siddharth wished he could be more like them, but stealing made him nervous. When he tried to talk like them, the words got stuck in his throat, and he felt they could see right through him.
Sometimes Marc and Andy met up with kids who he suspected were drug dealers, like Corey Thompson, a grubby ninth grader who attended the South Haven branch of Eli Whitney, Siddharth’s future junior high. One day, Corey stole a Gamecocks cap from the mall, which he later planted on Siddharth’s head. He told him it fit like a glove and that he should keep it. Siddharth started wearing it every day, but he was always uneasy that someone might know it was stolen.
As he struggled to sketch the biceps of his basketball player, Mohan Lal knocked on the door.
“What?”
“Dinner,” said his father.
“I’m not hungry,” he lied.
“I made you something special. Come and eat.”
As usual, Siddharth ate his spaghetti and garlic bread on his three-legged Kashmiri table. Ms. Farber got home around seven thirty wearing a summer dress that made her breasts look bigger than they actually were. She said, “Siddharth, honey, how about putting some newspaper down? I just cleaned the carpet yesterday.”
Barry Uncle let himself in twenty minutes later. “Greetings, good evening!” he shouted. He shook Mohan Lal’s hand and then gave Ms. Farber a kiss on each cheek. “Rachel, you look especially lovely tonight. I still can’t figure out why you’re settling for my plump friend over there.”
She turned to Mohan Lal and winked at him, then pinched the sleeve of Barry Uncle’s burgundy shirt. “This color, Barry, it’s just so you.”
Siddharth snorted. Barry Uncle’s shirt was too shiny, and the sight of his chest hairs peeking through the open top buttons made him want to hurl. And as for Ms. Farber, she could be a real hypocrite sometimes. When Barry Uncle wasn’t around, she called him a chauvinist, or a know-it-all. But she kissed his ass in person, asking him all sorts of questions about Mohan Lal’s family, about India. Barry Uncle had told her about Mohan Lal’s big-shot brother, the one who bribed government ministers and slept with flight attendants. But she was more interested in family history. She once asked him if he had been a refugee, like Mohan Lal.
“Yes, indeed,” Barry Uncle responded. “You wouldn’t believe the things we saw — the things those Muslims did to our people.”
“Chief, you were in diapers,” said Mohan Lal.
“Boss, you may be the intellectual, but I have a photographic memory.” Barry Uncle grew serious. “And even a baby can remember what they did to Chacha-ji.”
“Enough,” said Mohan Lal. “Now’s not the time for such talk.”
* * *
Upon Mohan Lal’s suggestion, the adults seated themselves in the family room. Siddharth considered heading to the guest room, where Marc had set up a ten-inch TV that he’d salvaged from his father’s scrapyard, but there was no cable there, and he wasn’t in the mood to be alone.