“Totally.” Siddharth wished he hadn’t said anything at all. He didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about his father. “Hey, what happened with Jeanette?”
“Yo, that bitch is off the hook.”
After listening to the story of Luca’s latest fight with his girlfriend, Siddharth felt calmer. He buried his face in his pillow and decided to wait for someone to come check on him. If Ms. Farber came knocking, he would forgive her. If she didn’t, he would show her. He would show both of them. He would tell his brother how freakish they’d become.
Twenty minutes later, the sound of footsteps made him hopeful, but there was no ensuing knock. If Arjun were still home, he definitely would have knocked by now. His mother would definitely have knocked.
He wondered if Arjun and his girlfriend were having sex, or if she’d ever given him a blow job. No, probably not. She was a Pakistani, and though Pakistanis were the archenemies of Indians, they were probably just as prude. He wondered how it must feel to eat dinner with a girl after she’d sucked your dick. Was it strange to see her lips on a piece of pizza knowing where they’d been?
He thought about his brother. Mohan Lal’s news would definitely anger Arjun, who would probably get into a fight with their father, or at least say something mean to him. A couple of years ago, Arjun had predicted that this would happen. Maybe he had been right about other things too. Maybe their father was a closed-minded bigot. Selfish. After all, he had quit his job without even considering his sons. He was choosing to remain with a fool like Ms. Farber.
It was as if Mohan Lal was afraid of her. He let her decide what they watched and what they ate. He listened to each word of her advice about his manuscript, even though she didn’t have the slightest clue about India. And she was making him get a five-hundred-dollar suit for Atlantic City, something the old Mohan Lal would have thought was ridiculous. Even Marc had commented on Mohan Lal’s sheepishness. He said that Mohan Lal needed to grow a pair — that Rachel needed a man who knew how to handle her.
Eventually, Siddharth fell into a deep sleep, and when he next glanced at his clock, it was 3:14 a.m. To his left lay Marc, under the covers and snoring. Siddharth had fallen asleep in his cargo pants, and he was still wearing socks. No one had woken him up or wondered if he was hungry. What a skank, he thought. She’s a skank, and he’s a fucking asshole.
He fell asleep again and had strange, vivid dreams.
He dreamed that he was riding his bicycle through the streets of South Haven. It was an old bike from when he was six, with only a single training wheel. He was trying to get to the hospital to see his father but kept getting lost. He was on a street that resembled Boston Post Road, but among the strip malls and chain restaurants were Indian men hawking vegetables, yelling that they had the greenest peas in town. He overtook a dirty Indian beggar, who had no legs and was navigating the road in a tiny wooden cart, like the one Eddie Murphy uses at the beginning of Trading Places. A car pulled up beside Siddharth. It was Mrs. Peroti; she asked where he was going.
“To the hospital,” he said.
“The BJP hospital?”
He nodded.
She told him to put his bike in the back. “We can take 95,” she said. “I’ll get you there in a jiffy.”
7. February Vacation
The first weekend of February vacation was boring. Marc was around since his father had gone to Syracuse, where his girlfriend would have their baby, but Marc remained holed up in Siddharth’s bedroom most of the time, talking on the phone. Sometimes he read a Polish Holocaust novel or listened to hip-hop, but he didn’t utter more than twenty words. Siddharth didn’t care anymore. He no longer needed Marc. His real brother was finally coming home.
This year, Arjun’s break coincided with Siddharth’s February vacation, and Arjun planned on borrowing a car from a friend and driving all the way from Michigan. He would leave Ann Arbor early Monday morning and drop off his housemate in Pennsylvania. He planned on making it to South Haven by dinnertime. The five of them would spend the next few days together, and on Friday, Mohan Lal and Ms. Farber would leave for Atlantic City. They would return home on Sunday night, and Arjun would set out for Michigan the following morning.
The night before Arjun’s scheduled arrival, Siddharth lay awake making plans for his visit. They would see movies together; they would go to the mall or just drive around. He had a feeling that this time Arjun would finally see the truth about Ms. Farber — that she was totally fucked up. She was constantly nagging her son and putting him down. She had even hit Marc, which meant that one day she would probably hit Siddharth.
And look what she had done to their father: Mohan Lal had fallen apart in her company. Just the other day, Siddharth woke up and found his father asleep at the kitchen table. His head was resting on his hairy arms, and his India manuscript was beside him, marked up with zillions of red squiggles. He hadn’t dyed his hair in a while, which made him look particularly old, as did the uneven patches of gray stubble sprouting from his cheeks. He woke up with a start, then declared that he needed to say something.
“I’m late,” said Siddharth.
“Just listen a second,” said Mohan Lal.
“I’m listening.”
Mohan Lal sighed. “Son, listen up carefully. Do whatever you want in life. Become a lawyer, a banker, a doctor. But whatever you choose, don’t turn out like your old man.”
Siddharth knew what his father wanted him to say — that Mohan Lal was brilliant, the greatest father in the world. This was their old song and dance. But he left the house without uttering a word.
Arjun would know how to handle their father. He would tell him to get more sleep, to apologize to the dean and get his job back. Since Mohan Lal had quit, Siddharth had begun to worry about the family’s financial situation. If they ran out of money, he feared, they would have to move to a poorer town, or a city like New Haven. He imagined them living in a scruffy Victorian with old-fashioned radiators, or worse still, a grimy, multistoried apartment complex. He would have to go to some inner-city school where the students were crack babies or gave birth to crack babies — a school where the kids’ parents collected welfare and carjacked Yalies.
He comforted himself with the knowledge that Ms. Farber had a big empty house in which all of them could comfortably fit. But if they moved in with her, she would have won. Other times, he imagined the riches that would pour in from his father’s book. Authors like John Grisham made tons of money. Maybe once Mohan Lal got published, they would be set for life. That’s what Barry Uncle thought; Ms. Farber thought so too.
Siddharth woke up out of pure excitement on Monday morning. He got up and made sure the guest room was ready for his brother, placing back issues of Marc’s music magazines on the nightstand and a clean towel on the dresser. Recently, he had found a three-by-five picture of him and Arjun with their mother’s family, which had been taken outside of their grandfather’s Chandigarh home. Siddharth leaned it against a white bottle of aftershave that had been sitting there for as long as he could remember.
It started snowing around ten a.m., and two hours later Arjun called to say that the roads were getting dicey. He would spend the night in Pennsylvania and make it to South Haven the next afternoon. Siddharth slammed down the phone, wondering if his brother was lying. He wondered if Arjun was still under the fucking sheets with his Pakistani girlfriend.
The next morning, four or five inches of fresh powder covered the cars, and a slender crest of ice lined the telephone wires. His brother pulled into the driveway around eleven. By the time Siddharth reached the front door, Arjun was already inside, giving Ms. Farber a tight hug. Arjun said, “Rachel, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but have you been working out?”