After everyone was seated and the car doors were locked, a nearly forgotten five-year-old cousin came running from among the thick brush, and chaos ensued until space was found for the child on someone’s lap. Ma closed the boot of the car, which held enough fresh-cooked food to feed the entire family three times over, then folded her ample frame with some difficulty into the backseat. Nikhil turned the key in the ignition and drove off, stirring up a cloud of dust through which the rest of the caravan would ceremoniously pass as they left the tiny village of Panchanagar and continued for two hours on unpaved roads to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmadabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat, India. Anil reached for the wristwatch Papa had given him as a parting gift. Its steel band gleamed, and its silver face was punctuated with indigo numbers and fluorescent hands. There were two dials: one set to the time here in Panchanagar, the other to the time in Dallas, Texas. Over ten hours separated his past and future homes, and it would take more than a full day in the air to traverse that distance. And yet, both measures of this journey seemed inconsequential in comparison to the lifetime he’d spent preparing for it.
LONG BEFORE this day, before he was the first person to leave his village, before he was the first in his family to attend university rather than farm the rice paddies covering their land, Anil was the first son born to his parents.
Jayant and Mina Patel had four more children—Nikhil, Kiran, Piya, and Chandu. Big families were a way of life in their community. The extended clan—still known by the name of Anil’s deceased great-grandfather, “Moti” (big brother) Patel—owned most of the land for more than ten kilometers in all directions from the Big House. Anil was the latest in the line of eldest sons, including Papa and his grandfather before him, and as such, the expectations of him had always been clear. One day, he would inherit his father’s role as leader of the clan, responsible for farm operations, financial support, and presiding over family disputes. As a boy, Anil had followed Papa into the fields each day, learning to cultivate rice from the paddies, harvest it most efficiently, dry it in the sun, and bundle it in jute sacks to take to the market.
Anil learned quickly, as his teachers pointed out when he began attending the local school. He was the first in his class to read, the first to memorize the math tables. Every day, he left school with a stack of books tethered in twine, which he swung between his thumb and forefinger, creating a deep red indentation he took pride in inspecting after the long walk home. After working with Papa in the fields, he read his schoolbooks late into the evening, borrowing the kerosene lantern that sat on the porch outside for nighttime visits to the latrine. Once, when he forgot to replace it before going to sleep, Nikhil tumbled down the front steps and sprained his ankle, but everyone agreed later that the injury had been for a good cause when Anil took top marks in mathematics. As Anil began to excel in his studies, Papa excused him from his farm duties and, by then, his brothers were old enough to compensate for his absence.
Ever since that day Papa returned with Maya from the clinic, he and Anil shared an unspoken understanding that his path would be different. They became conspirators in building Anil into someone who could venture beyond Panchanagar and its limited offerings. Anil pored over his science books, studying the human-anatomy figures depicted in them until he could name every organ, muscle, and bone. After he outgrew the resources at school, he sent away for science magazines and ordered the Atlas of Human Anatomy from Jaypee Brothers in Delhi. Whenever Chakroo, the family dog who slept and roamed outside, returned with a dead mouse or rabbit, Anil sat on the porch and carefully cut it open with the smallest knife he could pilfer from the kitchen while the cook napped. By age twelve, he’d given up countless cricket games after school, and lazy summer days. There in the village of Panchanagar, after generations of farmers, surrounded by nothing but agricultural fields, Anil prepared to one day become a doctor.
Only after he arrived at medical college in Ahmadabad did Anil understand the significance of this feat. His fellow students, from wealthy families in the cities, had been professionally tutored for years: their schools had biology labs with dissection specimens, they had shadowed their parents’ doctor friends in the hospital. All they saw in Anil was a village boy, making him acutely aware of his lack of sophistication in everything from computers to popular music. Anil kept to himself and spent all his time studying, eager to prove himself as capable as his classmates.
Six years of medical college had taken him away from home, and not only physically; it had given him a taste of another world. The medical library was filled with entire sections dedicated to subjects that garnered a mere chapter in Anil’s rudimentary textbook. The city of Ahmadabad bustled with ten thousand times the population of his village. It was this taste of the world that lingered in Anil’s mouth like the residual flavor of sweet paan and enticed him to seek out a coveted medical residency in America. His professors cautioned him it would be nearly impossible for a foreign student to win a spot at a major urban hospital center, but Anil forged ahead with his applications. In the end, only three students in his class received residency offers outside India: two were going to England and Singapore, and Anil was accepted by Parkview Hospital in Dallas, one of the busiest hospitals in the United States.
“I don’t know how you’ll manage there all alone.” Ma’s words jarred Anil back to the present. “No one to cook for you, no one to take care of you. They say the food is terrible—bland and boring and so much meat.” She spat out the offensive word as if it were the actual thing. “You’ll be thin as a branch when you come back, and then how will we find you a good wife?”
Piya clucked her tongue. “Ma, stop nagging him to death about marriage, will you?”
Anil smiled, grateful his little sister had insisted on coming along despite her propensity to get sick on long car trips. Ma blinked a few times at Piya, as though trying to recognize her daughter. “What nonsense.” She shook her head. “Son, I put some tulsi leaves and ground turmeric in the brown trunk. The turmeric will keep you well, if you take it every day. Cough, cold, stomach problems, headaches, joint pain—turmeric cures all of it. Why do you think I’m still free of arthritis, when my poor mother could barely use her hands?”
“Ma, you’re too young for arthritis,” Anil said. She was eight years younger than Papa, her only sign of aging a slight graying at her temples.
Ma gazed out the window, her mind clearly on her deceased mother more than on the children beside her. After a few minutes, she turned back to Anil. “And, son, please.” She pressed her palms together, eyes solemn. “Don’t forget your prayers every morning. God is the only one who can protect you over there.”
“Yes, Ma.” Don’t forget to write every week—call when you can—don’t trust anybody—be careful—don’t touch meat or alcohol—and come back as soon as you can. Anil silently ran through the mantras Ma had been instilling in him for months, before remembering he would soon be far enough away to stop hearing her voice altogether.
“You can do anything you want, Anil, anything,” Ma had lamented when he’d announced his decision to do his residency in Dallas. “You’re so smart, so talented. Any hospital in Gujarat would be happy to have you. Why must you go so far away?”
Ma believed every step Anil took away from Panchanagar was temporary; she assumed a connection with home he no longer felt. But the problem with planting seeds, as the son of a farmer well knew, was that you couldn’t always be sure where or how they would grow. Sometimes they would mutate or cross-fertilize, blown by the winds from one field to the next. A year from now, after the successful completion of his internship, Anil would stay on in America to complete a two-year residency in internal medicine, during which time he would choose his specialty for further training. By then, Ma would be used to Anil’s distance and not be as distraught at the prospect of his leaving for good.
Parkview—the idyllic name conjured visions of rolling grassy hills, the state-of-the-art hos
pital nestled among acres of trees and flowers. There, it would not matter what Anil’s last name was, what caste he came from, that his family were farmers, or how many people he bribed. In America, he could make his own way, build his own reputation. He would no longer be known as the eldest son of Jayant and Mina, or as the village boy. His colleagues would know him only as Anil Patel, and success or failure would belong to him alone.
Now, as the family caravan rolled up to the airport, Anil pushed aside any whispers of trepidation about leaving behind everything he’d known. He wanted only to look forward: past the large ceremonial meal he would share at the airport, past the many group photographs for which he’d have to pose, past the endless night sky into which he would fly toward his new life in America.
SEVERAL HOURS later, as he sat on an airplane for the first time in his life, his homeland drifting away beneath him, Anil found his mind returning to the events of the day, to his chance encounter with Leena. She had been his constant companion in the years before his studies drove him indoors. They had hidden from each other in fields of tall sugarcane, careful not to rustle a wayward stalk and reveal themselves. Leena was brave, the only one not to leap back when they came upon a family of snakes in the bushes while pretending to search for tigers. She’d been the first to challenge Anil to climb a coconut tree, using the callused soles of her feet to scramble up the narrow trunk. The first time Anil had tried it, he’d fallen on his shoulder, making his handwriting exercises difficult for weeks afterward. It was likely a torn rotator cuff, he realized later, but he’d brushed it off at the time, embarrassed to have been shown up by a girl.
One day, when just the two of them had been playing outside, Anil pulled his hand from his pocket. “Look,” he said, unfurling his fingers to reveal two thin beedis in his palm. They were so crooked and dark, they could almost be mistaken for twigs, but Leena recognized them right away.
She peered closer. “Where did you get them?” she asked in a whisper, though they were alone outside, with no risk of being overheard. It was late afternoon, that time of day when men were wrapping up their work in the fields. The women were busy preparing the evening meal and wanted children out of the way. School was finished, and no one would be looking for them for at least another hour, when dusk set in. The illicit nature of what they were doing hung in the thick, sweet, humid air between them.
“From my uncle’s house. My father sent me to deliver an envelope, but there was no one in the house. I saw the box sitting by his chair, with the lid open. There were so many, he’ll never notice.” Anil had been so scared of getting caught, he’d jammed the hand-rolled cigarettes into the bottom of his pocket and not taken them out until now. All day as he sat in school he’d been simmering with anticipation for the moment he could show her. “Do you . . . Have you . . . ?”
“No! Never.” Leena pulled back. After a moment, she whispered, “Have you?”
Anil was surprised. Couldn’t she see right through him? “No,but . . .” He repeated what he’d heard from one of the boys at school. “I’ve heard it can help you see figures in the clouds, and hear the flute music of Krishna.”
Leena’s eyes grew wider. Slowly, her lips parted into a smile and revealed the space between her teeth. Other kids sometimes teased her for this flaw but Anil had always liked it. He knew he’d got a real smile out of her when he caught a glimpse of that space.
Anil knew what she would say even before he asked. “Do you want to try it?”
They sat cross-legged facing each other in the bottom of the gully that roughly marked the property line between the many hectares of Patel family land and Leena’s family’s small plot, one of several that bordered the Patels’. After Anil lit the beedis and handed one to her, Leena took a small puff and immediately began to cough. Anil did the same after taking a puff of his. They both began to laugh, as they had trouble keeping their balance while holding on to the small cigarettes.
Leena tried again, taking a second drag and blowing it out cleanly this time. There was a shine in her eyes. Anil tried again, slowing down his inhale and controlling his exhale, until he too could smoke without coughing. The glow of the red embers on the end on the beedis danced before Anil’s eyes. The images at the edge of his vision, the banana trees and waving tall grasses, blurred a little and he began to feel dizzy. Was Leena feeling the same effects? The ground was calling to him, and Anil lay down on his back. Leena lay down beside him and for several moments they watched the sky, the clouds drifting by.
“My father would kill me if he found me smoking this,” Leena murmured, her voice soft.
“My mother would kill me,” Anil said, referring not only to the cigarette but also to Leena’s presence. “It doesn’t look good,” Ma had said a few weeks earlier. “You’re not a little boy anymore, Anil. You can’t run around playing with girls at your age.” He had recently turned fourteen. Leena was almost twelve. She had not yet developed breasts, like some of the girls at school had. Girls and boys had been separated into different classrooms a few years earlier, a practice intended to enable both groups to focus on their studies but which had the opposite effect. The boys in Anil’s class seemed to think of nothing other than girls, passing notes and explicit pictures in the classroom when the teacher’s back was turned, sharing stories outside in the schoolyard. And, as Anil’s mother never let him forget, the Patels held an important role in the community and shouldn’t be socializing with a modest family like Leena’s.
Anil’s head was buzzing, a pleasant hum that made him feel as if someone were singing softly in his ear. His beedi had burned down almost to the end. He took one last puff and mashed it into the grassy hillside with his fingers. Leena’s beedi was also gone, and she was holding her open palm up above her, tracing the outline of a cloud with her forefinger. He stole a glance at her profile, the soft curve of her nose, the sharp angle of her chin, the glint of yellow gold against her dark earlobe. She was not beautiful in a conventional way, like Bollywood stars with their rounded hips and plump lips, the kind of photos boys at school hid in their books. If pressed, Anil would not be able to explain what he found so attractive about Leena. But he loved looking at her, and when they were not together, he recreated her features in his mind, always starting with her mouth.
With the music humming in his ears and the fluffy white clouds floating overhead, Anil allowed himself to reach his hand up toward Leena’s open palm. Neither of them looked at the other as their hands touched, intertwined, and drifted back down to the ground between their bodies, Anil’s hand atop Leena’s. Anil found himself counting beats in his head, trying to control the quickening pace of his breath. He wanted desperately to lean over and kiss her. Instead he kept counting, ever conscious of the feel of her hand beneath his.
He had counted to thirty-eight when he heard the noise. At first it sounded like the rustling of stalks in the fields, but the noises grew louder and closer, and shaped themselves into human voices. Anil stopped counting. Leena’s body tensed beside him. What if it was her parents looking for her? What if it was his?
The gully was deep enough that you could only see across, not into, it when standing on either bank at a distance. One would have to walk up to the very edge to see if anyone was hiding in the basin. For this reason, it was Anil’s favorite spot in hide-and-seek, but it only worked if he stayed perfectly still in the bottom of the gully, even as voices of the children looking for him echoed through the rolling fields around him. Now, a male voice, too deep and angry to belong to either of their fathers, grew closer and more pronounced. Leena began to sit up, but Anil closed his hand tightly around hers and pulled her back down. They turned their faces to each other and kept their eyes locked as the sounds grew louder. Grunts. Panting. A weak female voice, speaking unintelligibly. The male voice, louder again. Rustling. More grunting.
When it became apparent that these people had not come to search for them and, in fact, were not aware of their presence at all, Anil nodded to Leena. Sl
owly, they both sat up and peered over the bank of the gully, then froze, shocked. Not ten meters away, a man’s bare buttocks were in full view as he moved back and forth violently on top of a woman.
It took a moment for Anil to recognize the man, one of the smaller landowners from nearby, not part of the Patel clan. He did not know the man’s name, but Anil had seen his wife—and she was not this woman. From the simple cotton sari draped over her head and shoulders, and the dark skin of her bare legs, it was clear she was a servant. The man’s loincloth had been thrown hastily aside and lay on the ground.
Anil and Leena sat unmoving and soundless, yet when the servant woman turned her head to the side, her gaze fell upon them. There was a vacant, haunting look in her eyes. Leena put her hand on Anil’s forearm and he understood her meaning at once: run.
They stood at the same time, but a sharp knife of pain radiated from Anil’s right foot up through his calf and thigh. He cried out and fell back to the ground, where a swarm of bees encircled his leg.
The man looked up and caught Leena standing there. “What are you doing? Bastard child! I’ll kill you!”
Anil watched helplessly, holding his throbbing foot, and fumbled for his specs, which had fallen on the ground. The man stood up, unclothed from the waist down, and began to run toward them. Leena darted forward and picked up the loincloth. She held the cloth up in the air and jutted her chin out, daring him to come closer. The man stopped. Behind him, the servant woman stood up, covered herself with her sari, and hurried off in the opposite direction through the fields.
Anil could see at least three stingers protruding from his foot. He forced himself to calm his breathing and pluck them out carefully, aware of the sound of Leena’s heavy breathing and the man’s shouts. After pulling out the last stinger, he stood up, putting as little weight as possible on his hurt foot. He took Leena’s elbow. She flung the loincloth into the air and they sprinted away, the man’s shouts receding behind them.