Chapter Eight
For the sixteen hours that Paresh Singh was in the air, he dreamed of Gicky.
Short spurts of sleep, short spurts of dreams. He began at the beginning, some sixty years earlier, with a young woman standing barefoot in the kitchen of the house in Delhi, trying to work the percolator. Can I help you? he had asked, in Hindi, startling her and causing her to drop the carafe of water in her hands. It shattered on the cold clay floor, and she bent to gather the broken pieces. When she stood up again, there were tears in her eyes. He gently wiped an errant droplet on her freckled cheek with the back of his hand. It wasn’t a conscious decision to do so—to touch the face of the American woman standing in the kitchen of the house where he worked—but it was as if his hand were no longer controlled by his brain, but by his heart.
Now, on the airplane, in between babies’ cries and bites of inferior airline dosas, Paresh dreamed of the first time Gicky painted him on the roof of the sprawling haveli he helped manage. The job, which had been sold to him by his father as an internship with India’s greatest modern architect, was in truth a gig as a glorified groundskeeper. It was fine by him. He was happiest among nature—until he met Gicky, that is. After that he was happiest with her. He remembered how she coaxed him, a shy young man at the time, to pose for her. How after just a few strokes on her canvas, they were in each other’s arms, making love in the morning light to a chorus of birds singing and peacocks meowing, as they do.
He remembered the year they tried to make a go of it back in the States. How cold it was in New York City. The chill had stayed with him for months after they had given up and parted ways, temporarily at first, but if neither were lying to themself, more permanently. And how it truly became permanent when his father had a heart attack and Paresh was called on to return to the family real estate business. After that it was just stolen weekends, a layover in Mumbai, a week here or there in Goa, and, more consistently as they got older, a couple of weeks in July on Fire Island.
By the time the pilot announced their descent into JFK airport, Paresh had completed their journey together in his mind. He remembered her last words to him, a call in the middle of the night from her hospice bed.
“Your love has meant more to me than anything else in my life. I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Anything,” he had responded.
Paresh rode the ferry to Fire Island, he imagined, for the last time. His heart sank when he looked to the shore, noting the absence of his love, who had always been waiting for him there, as if he had never left. He wondered where he would be if he had never left all of those years ago. If he had defied his father’s wishes and acclimated to a city, and a world, he didn’t quite understand how to navigate. Would he have returned home, now, at his age, to his beloved India, or would his life have remained here? He rarely left his present thoughts as he had during this journey, and the sinking feeling he had in his gut reminded him why that was. He recited a mantra that had been kidnapped by Hallmark cards and wooden painted signs, reminding himself: Be present.
Paresh arrived at the house very early Saturday morning and stood quietly at the front door until he heard stirring inside. Only then did he knock. A young woman answered it and took his breath away with her wavy brown hair and olive freckled skin. It could have been Gicky forty years before.