A Guardian and a Thief

by Megha Majumdar

She knew plenty about America. Who didn’t, given Hollywood? It was a country of grocery stores as large as aircraft hangars, stocked with waxed fruit and misted vegetables and canned legumes from floor to ceiling. It was a country of breathable air and potable water, and, despite a history of attempts to cultivate a poorly educated electorate, functioning schools and tenacious thinkers. It was a country of encompassing hope, sustained by the people despite the peddlers of fear and pursuers of gain who wore the ill-fitting costumes of political representation. It was a country of opportunity for her child.

“The best philosopher, don’t you know, is the one who laughs, and makes others laugh. This city will survive because it is full of such street corner philosophers. They understand that laughing is the most truthful way of approaching life.”

This was the city he believed in, the city in which knowing somebody once was knowing them forever. The city in which knowing somebody meant laying claim to their time, and expecting them to lay claim to one’s own time. Everything beautiful, and everything useful, about the city could be found in these relationships of dependence—with one’s barber, one’s rickshaw driver, one’s editor, one’s neighbor. How had Dadu forgotten that?

Away from his parents and his brother, he could be anybody. He could be, temporarily, free of his wrongs, and free of his guilt. He did not have to cower in shame. He could be prideful, or harsh, or aloof, or a person others listened to. Upon those others he could release the anger he had for himself.

Perhaps the true adventure was not only in seeing the world but also in seeing the versions of one’s own self that the journey revealed.

Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain.

It was up to him to secure the meaning of the kind of work that existed not for investment potential but only for the eye’s momentary pleasure, only for the mind’s door to be left, for a small while, ajar. What was the value of that?

What was this new variety of cruelty? What remained after the bonds between city dwellers were severed? But even in the feeling of injury, Dadu knew he wasn’t being truthful to himself. He knew exactly what that cruelty was. By accepting what his daughter had brought home from the shelter, he, too, had enacted it upon others.

Ma felt something resembling relief. Here he was, the blackmailer, the crook. Now they could stop fearing the scratch on the windowpane, the shuffle of feet outside the door, the creak of the hinges.

Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived. On this day, hope lived in the delivery of gold to a man who might be a scammer, and, perhaps, hope lived also in opening the doors to a thief.

Now, on the bed, Dadu felt he was on that bus once more, freed of all his selves—no longer father, no longer husband, no longer son or grandfather, only a stranger on a bus in the city, his face to the window.

“I might leave myself one of these days, you know,” he mused. “But I have the strangest fear that the forger cannot forge his own papers.”

The pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound. Didn’t they understand that? Didn’t they understand that he wanted every opportunity to examine the wound?

Ma cared not a bit about square footage. She cared about seeing her husband’s shoes by the door, his face in the morning, feeling the warmth of his arms around her at the end of the day, after Mishti fell asleep.

But though Ma anticipated—and had anticipated, for months—the moment of arriving in America and seeing her husband again, there was an opacity to the fated reconciliation, too. She had heard of families who had experienced disunity instead of loving reunion, demeanors prickly from separation, marriages shredded from the necessity of months apart. Had these months of absence made them soft toward each other, or sore?

The world was never a dire place, Dadu had said when Ma had shared with him, years ago, that she was not certain she wanted to have a child in a drowning city. The world was never a dire place. Even in difficult times, there was beauty; there was joy; there was laughter.