The Narayans

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice. She’d come up to you at temple on Holi or Diwali and offer congratulations so heartfelt you’d feel as if it were the first time the day had ever been celebrated. We all liked her. She was an immigrant, too, but she didn’t seem to have jangled nerves the way we did. She cooked for many of us and regularly tried to refuse payment. “This is from my side,” she’d say. “A horse can’t be friends with grass,” we might answer.

Mr. Narayan we didn’t like. He was short and squat. He spoke roughly to his wife. He owned a television-repair shop and described himself as an engineer, even though he hadn’t finished high school. Our kids would go over to his house to see his children, and he’d play Ping-Pong with them. When he won, he’d crow about it. He got into stupid arguments with the kids, over facts like the world’s population. If someone showed him an almanac that proved he was wrong, he’d grumble about the ignorance of American authors. We’d see him smoking in his car in the driveway of the high school, as he waited for his children, a shower cap on his head because he was dyeing his hair.

The Narayans had two children. The daughter, Madhu, was fourteen, two years younger than her brother. Mr. Narayan wouldn’t let her sit on the front porch, where she might be seen. He also wouldn’t let her wear shorts. She wore jeans in gym class.

Nehali, who was the same age, told her mother about this.

“Poor girl,” Dr. Shukla said. “Why do you sound happy talking about it?”

“I’m not happy,” Nehali said. She was standing beside her mother as Dr. Shukla rolled dough for parathas. “Why shouldn’t I talk about it?”

“Religious people can be conservative.”

“Mr. Narayan isn’t religious.”

Dr. Shukla was another person we all liked. Although she ran a clinic on Oak Tree Road, she also made house calls. She addressed women as “elder sister,” even if they weren’t educated. She had a face that was kindly and square and so hairy that she appeared to have sideburns.

One day, Nehali came to her mother’s clinic after school. She was giddy, her eyes bright. “Madhu’s pregnant,” she announced, almost swaying in her excitement. “Vikas is the daddy.” Vikas was Madhu’s brother.

Dr. Shukla became confused. “How do you know?” she demanded in Hindi. She always spoke Hindi when scolding.

“The nurse told Madhu, and Madhu told the principal.”

“Did the principal tell you? Are you the principal’s beloved?”

Nehali looked at her mother. She felt it was wrong that her enthusiasm was being interfered with. Maybe her mother didn’t understand how interesting all this was.

“Does the principal hold your hand and ask how you are doing?”

Nehali didn’t answer.

“You don’t hear me? You hear things that no one is saying to you, but you don’t hear me?”

Madhu’s pregnancy was soon confirmed. All over town, we questioned our children. Had they ever been alone with Vikas? Had he ever touched them? We weren’t totally sure, though, that it was Vikas who had got Madhu pregnant. Some of us suspected Mr. Narayan. Anyone who wouldn’t let his daughter sit on the front porch and made her wear jeans in gym class had to have weird ideas about sex.

Mrs. Narayan began going to temple all the time. Whenever we were there, we’d see her. She’d lie face down on the wall-to-wall carpet, her arms stretched toward the idols of God Ram or Krishna-ji, her palms pressed together. We’d seen people who had cancer in their families do this. Those prostrated men and women had frightened us. Here was what life finally came to—being sick, or watching loved ones be sick. Seeing Mrs. Narayan, however, we felt a sense of indignation. There were so few Indians in Edison, New Jersey, in those days; we felt that each of us reflected well or badly on the others. The Narayans had stolen some piece of our self-respect.

We learned soon that Vikas was getting beaten at school. One morning, as he was going down a flight of stairs, a large group of white girls crowded him, tripped him, sent him tumbling as they punched him and clawed at his shirt and hair. This, we all felt, was not wrong. He was male, and he belonged to his family. Still, we worried. If such an attack could occur under just circumstances, surely it could happen unjustly, too. Had those girls felt free to beat him up because he was Indian? Would they do the same to our children?

Madhu was given an abortion, and two months later she was taken out of school and sent to India. This we understood as proof that Mr. Narayan was the one who had impregnated her. If it had been Vikas, his parents could have just kept him locked in his room at night.

When Dr. Shukla was a little girl, in India, her parents, like many middle-class people, had forbidden the servants from sitting on the furniture. When she’d see her parents sitting on a sofa while a servant girl not much older than she was squatted in a corner, her stomach hurt. She felt so bad once that she gave a servant girl stickers that could be scratched and sniffed. The scratch-and-sniffs were her favorite, and it had felt important to give the girl the very best thing she had.

That guilty awareness of her own good fortune had always made her tender toward women from poorer backgrounds. While the rest of us now felt that the entire Narayan family was wretched and should be excluded and forgotten, Dr. Shukla actually imagined the nightmare that must have been the Narayan household: the frightened Madhu, Vikas living under a shadow of unspeakable and most likely unjustified blame, the gray ranch house standing in the flat light of the afternoon. And although she believed that Mr. Narayan was wicked, one of those monstrous men India was full of, she also blamed Mrs. Narayan, since she must have known and chosen to ignore and deny.

After Madhu was sent to India, Mrs. Narayan vanished for a while. We didn’t see her at temple; we didn’t see her at the Indian grocery store, renting videotapes. Vikas we heard about. At school, he had to eat lunch in a classroom by himself. This was for his own protection.

One evening, Dr. Shukla drove home from her clinic, Nehali in the passenger seat. Pulling into her driveway, she saw Mrs. Narayan’s silver station wagon and Mrs. Narayan beside it. Mrs. Narayan looked nervous, her face tense and drawn. Nehali twitched under her seat belt, wondering what story she would be able to unfold to her friends at school.

Dr. Shukla turned to her. “You speak about this and I’ll beat you like a nail.”

They got out of the car.

Mrs. Narayan waited for Nehali to go inside.

“Shukla sister, I can’t breathe.”

“In reality?”

“I take two steps and get out of breath.”

“Come.”

In the kitchen, Dr. Shukla took Mrs. Narayan’s blood pressure. She had Mrs. Narayan take deep breaths while she held a stethoscope to her back. She felt uncomfortable with her hand on Mrs. Narayan’s shoulder, as if touching her suggested acceptance.

“Madhu didn’t tell me anything.”

Dr. Shukla felt revulsion.

“How are you sleeping?”

“I’m scared to sleep.”

Mrs. Narayan began coming to Dr. Shukla’s house every few weeks. She’d arrive in the evening and Dr. Shukla would check her blood pressure, talk to her. Mrs. Narayan would stay as Dr. Shukla began cooking dinner. She’d linger even after Mr. Shukla came home. Only when the family sat down to dinner would she depart.

Once, Dr. Shukla told Mrs. Narayan that she should come to the clinic. Mrs. Narayan demurred. “When people look at me, I feel I’m being scalded.”

One of the reasons that people had hired Mrs. Narayan as a cook was that she was Brahman, so we didn’t have to think about what fingers had touched the food that we had in our mouths. When we tried to swallow her food now, the masticated globs seemed to dangle down our throats from a long hair.

Mrs. Narayan got a job at Kmart. Mrs. Bilwakesh, a real-estate agent, went to the store and spoke to a supervisor. Mrs. Narayan was let go. This, we felt, was too much. To take away someone’s ability to earn a living seemed evil.

Time passed, months and years. The big change came with the opening of Hilltop Estates. Before Hilltop, the only Indians who had lived in Edison were those who could afford to buy or rent a house. Now Indians who couldn’t buy a car were seen walking along the sides of roads. Rusty splatters of betel nut appeared on sidewalks near gas stations. At J. P. Stevens High School and John Adams Middle School, there were boys and girls who couldn’t speak English and wore coats that were too large for them, passed down from relatives. Before, if you wanted garlands for prayers, you bought flowers and used a needle and thread to make your own. Now you went to an apartment in Hilltop, where three old women sat on a floor surrounded by mounds of marigolds. There was also an apartment full of freezers, where you could buy smuggled Bengali fish.

If Madhu’s pregnancy had been discovered after Hilltop opened, people wouldn’t have cared as much. After Hilltop, there were so many Indians that there wasn’t the same feeling that one family reflected on the rest. Mrs. Narayan might also have felt less isolated. She could have befriended the families that came to Hilltop, many of whom had chaotic stories of their own.

Vikas graduated from high school. He went to Georgia Tech to study engineering. After he had been there for one semester, Mr. Narayan emptied all the bank accounts, sold his shop, took out a second mortgage on the house, and returned to his town in India. We learned this from Mrs. Bilwakesh and from Mr. Narayan’s brother-in-law, who lived in Philadelphia but had a friend in Edison.

Mr. Narayan had always wanted to be rich. He had always wanted to be important, to listen to people while standing half turned away, as if the person speaking weren’t worth his full attention.

Mr. Narayan’s town in India had eight thousand people. There was one main road with shops, and then branching lanes with houses facing sugarcane fields. In the afternoon, you could hear the crickets, even if you closed the windows.

Mr. Narayan began to lend money. People would visit his house, and he’d sit on his veranda and talk with them. Some of the loans were for only twenty-four hours. Mostly, the people he lent to had collateral—tractors, water pumps, scooters, generators. He’d pick these things up in the evening so that his debtors wouldn’t be tempted to sell them overnight. Mornings, farmers appeared at the gate of his house, to pay him back and collect the tractor or the generator.

Mr. Narayan didn’t take risks. If someone missed a payment, he took the collateral to Ahemdabad and sold it that same day. He hired hoodlums to go with him in the evenings. He did all the right things, including bribing the police.

Mr. Narayan had several servant girls. When he took his afternoon nap, he’d make them massage him, and often he’d pull one of them onto the bed. Because Mr. Narayan had been back in the town for only a short time, the girls’ parents didn’t know if the police had strong ties with him, or if they might be able to enlist the police’s help in getting some money out of Mr. Narayan for what he was doing. As everyone knows, for a moneylending business to succeed, several family members need to be involved. That way, if one person is arrested, the others can keep the business going. It is the interruption of business—the moment that people begin to think they can avoid paying—that destroys a moneylender. When the parents approached the police, the police reasoned that, since Mr. Narayan didn’t have brothers to keep the business going, he’d be forced to pay up quickly—money from which they could extract their share before passing the rest on to the parents of his victims.

Mr. Narayan was arrested and beaten, made to squat in a corner holding his earlobes. Then, instead of refusing to pay a bribe, he paid. He returned home. The air-conditioners in his windows were gone, and the windows looked like gouged eyes. The doors to all the rooms were open. The servant girls had taken shits on the bed, the sofas, on top of the dining table.

A few days later, he was arrested again. This time, he didn’t pay a bribe and was kept locked up for five days. When he got out, nobody would give him collateral or repay the money he had lent.

Mr. Narayan stopped lending money. A few months after all this occurred, a constable came to Mr. Narayan’s house and suggested that he start lending again. This time, he was told, the police wouldn’t try to shake him down. The regular bribes would suffice.

When Mr. Narayan died, what we heard was that he’d had a surgery and had been told not to eat radishes afterward but had done so anyway. What seems more likely is that the police beat him, then released him to die of his injuries at home.

Our first thought was: Thank God we didn’t live in India, where such things occurred. We weren’t surprised, though. Someone who molests his own daughter is bound to molest other girls. Also, if one begins doing criminal activities, one is likely to have to deal with criminals.

Mr. Narayan’s sister wanted to organize prayers for his passing. Neither Vikas nor Mrs. Narayan would participate, and the prayer ceremony got delayed again and again, until his sister gave up on the idea. When we realized there were going to be no rites, we felt a shiver of fear—that we, too, could die and have no rites.

Time passed. New people kept coming from India. Most of them were young, and so they made us aware that we were no longer young. These new immigrants brought with them a more modern India, an India where there was cable TV and a fashion channel, which was basically a way to watch attractive women saunter down runways all day long.

In the mall, we saw Indian men wearing shorts. At parties, women took sips of beer. Even in Brahman households, you might find a buffet where both vegetarian and nonvegetarian food was offered. We who had been in America longer felt that these young people were in some ways more American than we were. Of course, those were the fortunate ones, who had come as graduate students or young professionals, not the ones who settled in Hilltop or the small, decrepit houses in Iselin.

Madhu was thirty-one when she returned to Edison. She was tall and wide-shouldered and had her father’s round face. She had lived longer in India than in America, and she had the metallic smell of poor Indians, of people who live without enough water to wash their clothes properly. She was married but childless, we knew, having lost a son to pneumonia when he was six.

Before Madhu’s arrival, Mrs. Narayan went to the families she kept in touch with and asked if they could invite Madhu to lunch or dinner and give her gifts—“something nice.”

By then, Dr. Shukla was no longer disgusted by Mrs. Narayan. After all, how would she herself have behaved if she were uneducated and had been beaten for years?

Mrs. Narayan and Madhu came for lunch. It was a bright, hot day. They entered through the back door, into the laundry room. Madhu, lifting her feet, peeled back the Velcro straps of her thick rubber sandals. Nehali was standing with her mother in the doorway to the kitchen. Nehali was a doctor now. She felt protective of Madhu. She didn’t know what to say that would not evoke the past. “Do you remember me?”

Madhu nodded.

“You are married,” Dr. Shukla said.

“That is not good news,” Madhu said.

“Ahh.”

“At first, his parents locked me in a room whenever they left the house.”

Mrs. Narayan had been smiling and nodding. She kept doing so.

In the kitchen, there were pots on the stove and stacks of puris, wrapped in aluminum foil, on plates.

“Can I wash my hands?” Madhu asked.

Nehali took her to the bathroom. By the sink were plastic steps for Nehali’s daughter to climb to wash her hands. Madhu’s son had not been able to reach the sink, and so he would squat by the drain beneath the sink and Madhu would pour a mug of water on his hands as he rubbed them.

Madhu washed her hands and went to the dining table in the kitchen.

“Nehali did most of the cooking,” Dr. Shukla boasted.

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Narayan said.

“How is it to be back?” Nehali asked.

Everybody was seated now. Madhu looked at Nehali and Dr. Shukla and then at her plate. Tears slid down her cheeks.

“You don’t have to speak, daughter,” Dr. Shukla said.

“Just eat. Just eat,” Mrs. Narayan said.

They were all silent for a while. The house smelled of summer heat.

“Do you want to go to New York?” Nehali asked.

Madhu wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“She is a wonderful girl,” Mrs. Narayan said.

“What does her husband do?” Dr. Shukla asked.

“He repairs tires.”

The lunch went this way, with Madhu silent and both Dr. Shukla and Nehali trying to welcome her.

At the end of the meal, with the bowls and plates still on the table, Dr. Shukla went to another room and brought out presents. On one large rectangular box there was a picture of an oval-shaped radio and CD player. The other box was small and gray.

“Look at how nice Nehali and Dr. Shukla are,” Mrs. Narayan said.

Madhu opened the gray box to discover a thin gold chain.

“The necklace is from Nehali,” Dr. Shukla said.

Madhu didn’t speak.

“Can’t you say thank you?” Mrs. Narayan said, in a joking tone.

Madhu kept looking down. She had her hands in her lap, her fingers entwined.

“I can take you to New York if you want,” Nehali said.

Madhu looked across the table and fingered a white ceramic bowl of yogurt.

“We can go on a Sunday or one evening.”

Madhu picked up the bowl and emptied it onto Mrs. Narayan’s head. Mrs. Narayan’s shoulders went up. After a moment, she began patting her head with the paper napkin that she had been using to wipe her hands. Nobody said anything. Then Madhu reached for another bowl. “Hey, hey,” Dr. Shukla said, grabbing Madhu’s wrist.

Madhu remained in America. We saw her at Foodtown and Patel Brothers and sometimes walking around the lake in Roosevelt Park. Often, we saw her fighting with her mother, screaming at the top of her voice while Mrs. Narayan stood there looking embarrassed. Once, their neighbors called the police on them.

A few months after she returned to America, Madhu visited us one by one and asked if she could mow our lawns. She said that she had applied to work as a bank cashier, but even if she got the job she wouldn’t be able to earn enough, since she hadn’t finished high school. Her request flustered us, and we said yes.

Now, on weekend afternoons, we saw Madhu all over town, mowing lawns. She’d be leaning forward, pushing the roaring mower, a trail of shorter grass forming behind her. High above her was the blue sky, and a few hundred feet away the afternoon was peaceful. All around her, though, was immense noise. ♦