Chapter One
i. In 1966 my father was born for a second time in this, his most recent life, baptized by a gentle and lazy January snowfall, flake after flake, a thousand perfect welcomes, he remembered aloud once, to a new country. When he woke the next day, snow covered the earth in swells and valleys of unbroken, unrelenting white, and my father thought, because he had, hours ago, been on a plane for the first time, if you could steal the clouds from the sky and spread them over the earth, neatly, evenly, this is what it would look like. To hear him tell it, before he'd ever seen a spring or summer or fall, he'd found a favorite season.
He mentioned his arrival to me once. I was eleven, sitting with my parents and my brother on folding chairs at the dinner table. "Oh, I liked it, that is for certain." My father's English was accented, a thick and general auditory reminder that his passport had once been Indian. To those more attuned to such nuances, his speech said northern, not southern, India, his grammar an obvious clue that his schooling had been Gujarati, not English medium. This night, like most nights, he jumped between the two. "This is not to say, of course, that the winter liked me. Think on it. I had only two suits when I came here. One blue, one gray, neither wool. And only one coat that was much too thin. Less than adequate."
As my father spoke, his right hand would tear at the roti and use it to collect subzi in an off-centered cone of bread and vegetable. This he'd dip into a bowl of daal, so the structure was moistened and flavored, and then feed himself. His left hand would gesticulate like a drunken butterfly, flapping, soaring then falling, attentive always to his story. I remember friends showing me they could pat their heads and rub their bellies at the same time and theirs seemed mean feats.
The immensity of that first winter overwhelmed him. With two suits and a coat he was always on the edge of cold, always aware that he was bothered. He supplemented money from his graduate student grant by working part-time at a small shoe store, nine to six on Saturday, twelve to five on Sunday, off the books. He alternated between his suits and hoped the knees of his pants didn't wear thin. Laughing, on another night, he said, "The craziness of Americans. Their whole day was make or break if they do or don't find the right shoes. They made me the responsible party." He folded his hands together and pressed them against his forehead in mock supplication. "Arre baba, it's not my fault. My job is to squat down, measure your feet, to stand up, to get your shoes, to put them on your feet, and then to package them all again when none suit you. This only. For manufacturing, this is not my department. Talk to Florsheim, sahib."
That next winter he used the money he'd saved to buy a coat, orange and down-filled, the pick of the Salvation Army's litter. Short and slight, the coat doubled half of him, making his torso seem a burden too large for his thin legs. He appeared, from a distance, to wobble as he walked down streets. He was warm, though, and he made it a point to roam about when wiser folk stayed indoors.
He got mittens, a scarf, and a hat. He learned the difference between slush and sleet, between wet and dry snow, about snowmen and toboggans. He bought a shovel, enjoying the banter with neighbors who were also awake early, clearing front steps and sidewalks. He decided that four inches of snow was the right amount, not too great an obstruction, significant enough to turn the city beautiful.
When he was done talking that night his left hand would have fallen to the table, exhausted, and his right might have reached for a glass of water. He'd drink in long swallows, his throat sliding up and down inside his neck like a hurried earthworm. When he'd finished, the glass would have been marked by the oil and ghee of my mother's cooking, pressed by the tips of my father's fingers into five patterns, unique the whole world over.
Twenty-five months after he came from India, my father graduated with a master's in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering and landed a job with a computer company in upstate New York. After a year with the company he flew home to India, in February 1969. My grandfather and grandmother had been inquiring and conducting interviews. When he arrived, my father chose my mother from the six options his parents offered. They spent an hour together, chaperoned, and my mother and father decided they were both agreeable to the match. They married three weeks later, in a ceremony surprisingly large given the time constraints involved.
After the wedding, the new couple, and my father's mother and father, and my father's younger brother, piled into a brand-new Ambassador with a driver and began a weeklong honeymoon, just the six of them. They visited Rajasthan, paying particular attention to temples along the way. At the end of the week my father flew back to America and returned to work. My mother lived with my father's family for the next four months, until her visa was ready and her packing done. In June she landed at JFK and my father picked her up, wondering what to say.
I was born six years later. Four years after that, they had my brother. Two months before that second birth, the three of us moved out of our one-bedroom apartment into a raised ranch, upstate, far enough from New York City that real estate prices were manageable. My father and mother shared one bedroom, my younger brother and I shared another, and it was the third room, the smallest of the three, nine by ten with an old green carpet and a small closet, through which my father's family, thirteen people in all, spread mattresses and blankets and pillows on the floor and arrived in a new country.
They came in two and threes, following my father to America. Some had always wanted to come; some came because they had failed in India. I was twelve when they started to arrive.
First came my father's older sister, my aunt and her husband. He was skinny, she was not. They both found work in the same strip mall, she at Bradlees, in cosmetics, he as a stock boy at Wal-Mart. Together, they made $9.25 an hour and worked eighty hours a week. When they got overtime they'd make time and a half, just about fourteen every hour, and treat themselves to ice cream at Baskin-Robbins before returning home. After dinner they would lose themselves in Hindi films, watching a life of wealth and power from which it seemed they were forever removed, to forget the day they had worked, that tomorrow, they would do the same.
They stayed with us for sixteen months. When they left, back to India to sell their house, their children came to live with us, two sons and a daughter. The two men moved into the spare bedroom and their sister passed the night on a sleeping bag in front of the television, downstairs. I watched shows over her sleeping body that year, the volume so low that I would have to concentrate, rebuilding dialogue from the indistinct contours of actors' voices.
When my aunt and uncle returned they moved in with their daughter to the living room. This is how we lived for the next nine months, the house always filled, growing like an overlush garden, thicker and denser with new lives and new clutter; more shoes at the front door, more towels in the bathroom, more praying, more incense, more coats, more toothbrushes, new brands of toothpaste, new newspapers, saris, bindis, till with this new weight, this mass of people, space and time were forced to warp.
The day assumed new cadences. The kitchen table could seat only six people, so the men and my brother and I would eat first, my mother and aunt and her daughter serving us. The men would talk among themselves, my brother and I would talk to each othe