Our Country Friends(11)

“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” said his driver, but Vinod knew their exact point in the journey, the car suspended above the river, leaving the continent proper in the rearview. He looked behind him to catch the very last light of the day. It was like putting on a new pair of glasses. Green grass, gray sky turning deep blue around the horizon, a screen of unblemished purple mountains. If this was all a computer simulation, then it was a very good one. Someone, something, in some interstellar version of Bangalore, had really poured its all into this construct.

Vinod had memorized the Declaration of Independence in third grade to prove to the nativist school bullies how much he belonged here. In the last two weeks, as people started to die in earnest, as he understood the gravity of what was about to happen to him and to others, and when in the course of human events it became necessary for one person to dissolve, Vinod thought he could be that person. He accepted his friend’s invitation to visit the countryside as a chance at dissolution, not so much into the usual alcohol and mild drugs, but into the stories he shared with the others. And if it came to it, he had papers at the bottom of his luggage, notarized papers, which would prepare him for any eventuality.

    Now, despite Senderovsky’s jerky driving, he fell asleep, dreaming of his father’s Buick and all the places it had tried to go. Senderovsky watched Vinod sleeping in the back seat, his face pressed deep into the tinted Swedish glass, and he could not escape the strength of his own feelings, the untinted brightness of his love. Uncharacteristically, he slowed down to let the moment take.





4


Vinod stood by the garage while Sasha rolled out his suitcases. A city boy from birth (Ahmedabad, 1972), Vinod did not know which components made the air sweet, didn’t know what a passing storm could do to the senses. “I’m sorry about all those dead branches,” Senderovsky said. “I’m trying to muster a posse to clean them up.”

Vinod had no idea what he was talking about. He looked up at the main house, at the lit kitchen, and saw two figures moving about, one auburn haired, the other dark. It must have been her. He laughed to himself. All those novels he had read, and the one he had written, and still there was no way to summarize the eternal feelings of unrequited love. “You really are a bhenchod,” Senderovsky had told him on a grisly, condom-strewn pier back in the city, back in 1991, when he had first confessed his love for their sisterly mutual friend. But now the need for phantom caresses (and worse) had passed. He just wanted to talk to her, to ask her how she was at this late hour.

They skirted around the kitchen, past the covered porch, but Vinod did not run inside to greet her, even as he heard her nasally voice (something about the virtues of Napa cabbage versus the kind Russians liked), was touched by its workaday lack of melody or magic. He wanted to savor his aloneness just a bit longer. He was staying at his usual place, the Lullaby Cottage, its walls decorated by the lullabies Senderovsky’s friends recounted from their childhoods, as rendered in bright cursive by a notable (and notably cruel) British artist who had since fallen from favor. Senderovsky had written the introduction of a catalog for an exhibition the artist had made out of cork and dismembered ants, and the artist had painted the Lullaby Cottage in return.

    Vinod looked to his own Gujarati contribution written directly above the headboard in saffron Devanagari script.

    He wanders around and then I go searching for him.

Somebody saw him go into the flower-bushes.

Now let us trim the bushes and bring him back home.

Sleep, my baby, sleep.

My baby loves to swing in his crib.



“I think you can catch a snooze before dinner,” Senderovsky said, snapping open a luggage rack and hoisting the luggage over its woven ribs, beads of sweat on his forehead, winded by the small task. “You’ve missed our hotel’s turndown service, I’m afraid.”

“If only you were capable of turning me down.”

“Sorry?”

Vinod smiled with the yellowed stubs of his former smoker’s teeth. “I just wanted to thank you for this stay. I’ll thank Masha later.”

“I’m just sad we didn’t have you over last summer.”

“I’m not keeping score. And I’m honored to be among the anointed at a time like this.”

“Everyone’s over the moon that you’re here.”

“Everyone? I had a bit of a run-in with our brilliant friend.”

Senderovsky noticed Vinod looking away as he spoke. His love for Karen brought to the landowner’s mind an old Soviet saying, apropos of the Great Patriotic War against the Fritzes, as the advancing Germans were called: No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.

“So she got angry at one of us on the phone,” Senderovsky said. “What else is new? I think I spent all of the nineties being yelled at by her. At least once she got her nights and weekends plan.”

“It was my fault. I should have just accepted her help.”

“I think being rich is hard for her,” Senderovsky said. “If I had that kind of money, I’d probably just get gout and die the next day.”

“I was expecting you to say, ‘She’s worried about you.’?”

    “Should she be?”

Vinod looked at him with his politely extinguished eyes. “No.”