To have to wait a whole weekend to find out if I was still breathing or if someone in their own merry thoughtless random way had reached into my guts and ripped it out, was proving to be more difficult than I had imagined. May be everything that happened did not have a purpose, a meaning. May be the world isn’t ruled by a series of perfectly orchestrated events, all of them making perfect sense in the long run. Or maybe it was an alternate reality game with someone playing a cosmic version of World of Warcraft in Second Life, gleefully killing us off as mere characters in their ‘game’, for fun. Pretty gory thoughts over coffee on a Saturday morning, I must admit. The house was in a mess. Sonia had not been over for over a week and I hardly entertained anymore. There wasn’t any point in cleaning just for myself. I was happy to plonk myself in front of the television in the living room, on the carpet and surround myself with everything I needed in a big circle.
It was almost noon. I had been watching Conan’s last Late Night telecast till well after midnight. It was clear he had been crying. The spring in his initial jump as he entered was missing and the lack of impish fun in his face, as he did his invisible string dance, was visible. It only made me all the more depressed. No Conan anymore to cheer me up anymore. Countless reruns of Seinfeld and Frasier made me laugh as well. And I badly needed to laugh, forget what was seemingly crumbling around me. I especially loved Frasier, a particularly snooty sort of sitcom that sadly did not have many takers in their final seasons. The playful banter between Frasier and his Dad reminded me of my own Dad. As I sat here, my mind in overdrive on what to do, I was reminded of the fact that Frasier comes back to Seattle to start his life afresh and has his Dad move in with him, a social anathema in today’s American life. What also reminded me of Dad was the fact that even though Frasier and Martin were as different as chalk and cheese, the values they shared, more than blood, bound them together.
And I wasn’t even that different from Dad. Growing up maybe I may have believed that I was different. May be I had believed what I did with my life would be nothing like his. But even then I never rebelled in the traditional sense. I had never experimented with drugs or even smoked. Never answered back, treated him with more respect than is customary, even by Indian norms. I did not do any of those things just because that was the Indian way. I did it because I loved and respected him more than any other person alive. After Mom, who had been a center of my sister and my lives till then, passed away, Dad was the one who played those dual roles. He never questioned, never judged, just loved and supported us unconditionally, which made me question ever more the choices I had made in life. I moved to Princeton six years back for a temporary year long internship in Merrill Lynch and never looked back at what I had left behind. What had once been a new experience to try and then go back to my own dreams of entrepreneurship in India was blinded by the American dream.
Sonia had joined with a group of new interns a couple of years later. She was assigned to my group and being the only one from India, we gradually got to talking, mostly initiated by her, exchanging notes about experiences living here, family in India and sometimes even about work. At this point I do feel I must confess that I am not a people person. Far from it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of people, not just being with them. One could attribute this to a combination of a dash of social ineptitude, a sprinkling of fear of public speaking and huge dollops of snarkiness and tendency for snappish comments. I always felt people who knew me would translate my grumpy manner as just my manner of speaking and conclude of course that I meant well. This of course hardly turned out to be true and I had few friends, which was just as well. I was happy with my small group of close friends, some I had grown up with in India, and some I had met living here in Princeton, friends that I truly cherished. In time Sonia had become one of them.
As I stumbled up to get another cup of coffee, I thought may be I should call her. Sonia had called last night, but I hadn’t felt like answering. May be she was worried. But then I thought if she had been really worried she should have come home. Nevertheless I called her, out of a feeling of responsibility perhaps, but she wasn’t there, and I rather one sided tête-à-tête with her voicemail, as I was beginning to get accustomed to lately. I left a syrupy and decidedly forced merry little message.
“Guess I missed you, call me back. I’m up now.”
In a few months after she joined the company we became much closer. She did not share my antipathy towards other human beings, and she was a person who I could talk to for hours, and who even found my overly dry sense of humor funny. We were not even sure when we fell in love exactly, or who proposed to whom, if anything such thing ever happened. I don’t think either one had thought this through too much. These were the heady days of the Wall Street boom and everything was a blur. We bought this house in Lawrence together and moved in a little more than a year ago. Though it had been a big investment for us, the inborn Indian financial conservatism in us had kept us in check. We had been modest in our choice and decided on a house well within our means. Being in the industry we were well aware, even then, of the mindless risks being taken, the pure unalloyed display of greed being played out in the real estate market, by both ends of the spectrum, seller and buyer alike. But we had decided to be safe. The house was not quite in Princeton, but a short drive to both our office and her folks place in the Princeton borough. It had been a little risky though because my green card was not yet through and also because it meant a long term commitment to our relationship, something I was increasingly worried about. It wasn’t like it was an issue we had ever spoken about, but lately I had been getting this nagging feeling in my head that Sonia was not quite there, she was not ready. I wonder if she had that feeling about me as well. I never had the courage to ask.
Sonia had been born in India as well, but she moved here a long time back when her Dad started teaching at Princeton. So in a way she was very different from me, having grown up and studied here. Her parents had changed too over the years. They believed more in the social melting pot more than in their Indian roots. They had raised her to be a totally American teenager, responsible, independent and very pragmatic, all the positives, somehow at the same time managing to shield her from the many pitfalls of the American growing up experience. I on the other hand had my feet on both horses. I grew up in India on a steady diet of western films, television and literature. I abhorred some of the social mores, the petty narrow outlook, and the caste and class tussle I saw growing up. I longed for a far more open and progressive society. Having lived here for six years I realized the America of the Hollywood blockbusters was not the real American suburbia either. My own intrinsic values tugged me homewards as well. But even as I got pulled in both directions, as I tried to straddle and balance both worlds, I didn’t believe I could take my feet off either one of the horses, even at the risk of being torn apart. Sonia had no such dilemmas. Perhaps that explained my nagging fear. I loved Sonia even though I felt deep down may be she thought we were too different. I fervently believed that we are supposed to embrace our differences and I whole heartedly embraced ours. But what going through her mind, that I could not read.
After leaving her the voicemail I still kept staring into the phone as if staring into the abyss, that I knew was out there. I was staring at it in the face. It was waiting to swallow me. My future had been decided and there was not a thing that I could do about it. The decision had been made and at ten in the morning on Monday my fate would be declared. I had driven home on Friday in a quiet state of panic. Even as I was eerily calm outside, picking up some Greek takeout and groceries, my mind was doing a million permutations a nanosecond. Sonia had moved a year back to a management consulting company and would not be affected by this at all. We had known about the impending gloom for some time and despite our arguments I had remained faithful to my job.
I had been seduced by the greatest seductress of our times. The American Dream. I was now used to luxuries that this country and my job allowed me to have. Numerous holidays around the world to exotic locations every year, as opposed to toiling away in India for may be a holiday in Goa or the Maldives every other year, a big house instead of dingy apartments, Broadway musicals instead of the latest Bollywood flick in a local multiplex. India had made rapid strides in the last decade, and had tried to ape many aspects of the American life, even while being surrounded by abject poverty seeping through even its mega metropolises. I knew this was shallow, maybe a hedonistic and materialistic outlook. But this was the life I had grown accustomed to. What made my superficial existence even more pathetic in my mind was that I was desperately clutching this existence in this land thousands of miles away from my Dad, in a way abandoning him. He was still able and preferred taking care of himself. But my ingrained values again nudged up against my heart. In India, I knew we were supposed to take care of our elders, values that are pounded into you, values that have a habit of sneaking up on you, impossible to dismiss, rearing its head, taunting you all the time.
When Merrill Lynch got acquired and snatched from the jaws of the oblivion we all breathed a sigh of relief, but we knew we could not breathe too easy. Changes were imminent. Over the last few weeks there were a flurry of assessments, interviews, evaluations, discussions and meetings. All to decide who would survive, may be till then next downturn and who would need to pack up and join the throngs of the Wall Street types wandering the by lanes of corporate America. I was sure in a year every one of them would bounce back. But I did not have that luxury. I was not an American citizen, and without a green card my visa did not allow me to work for any other company. Monday morning I would know my fate and I awaited the fateful hour with a sense of doom. Mr. Jeffrey was not a bad manager, and I had worked with him for over three years. But he was not in control anymore. No one was. The decisions would be sweeping, there would not be the luxury to consider the value of each employee who had toiled for the company for long years. We would be like a pile of fall leaves blown away by an icy wintry breeze. It would be difficult for Mr. Jeffrey as well. He did not have heart to face so many of us and do what he was being forced to do, or may be he had just chickened out. He had asked us to call Linda first thing Monday and she would be the purveyor of our fate. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do anything after Monday. What would I do when she told me? What would my next step be? It felt like the last weekend of my life.
Sonia had lately been staying quite often at her parents’ house. Initially it was because her mother had been unwell, but over the last couple of months she stayed over frequently even though her mother was fine. I sensed a distance growing, but never sure if it was all in my own mind. As I reheated the leftover lamb shanks from last night I wondered if she went to this, our favorite restaurant, without me. When she wasn’t around I had switched to take outs and ready to eat meals. I piled all of the leftovers on a large bowl and moved back to the center of my pile in the living room and switched on the television. For a minute as I was worried that she would be mad at the state of the house. Or maybe she would never be back after Monday. I imagined Sonia and her parents hunched over scheming against me, ready to get me deported once I get fired and take over the house. Surely a suitor for their daughter, who could not hold on to a job and could be deported from the country, could not possibly have their respect. Maybe Sonia would stick up for me initially, but her Mom and Dad would wear her down with their arguments, and she would eventually surrender. “Stop it”, I told myself, no one could be so petty. I knew it was senseless but it was as if my mind did the worrying of its own free will. Even my mind didn’t need me anymore. I was inconsequential.
It wasn’t as if the alternative was that bad. I had spent most of my life in India. My whole family was in India. Dad was in India. I would sure manage to more than survive in India. No way did this represent the end of my life. May be it would not be bad at all. Yes I would have to pick up the pieces, but I could probably do it. Was this worth getting so worked up over, I wondered. But maybe it was because I loved Sonia. I loved the life we had built together. As I sat with my food untouched before me, I wished nothing would change. I did not know what lay before me, the future seemed dark and hazy. Maybe I had the strength to handle everything that came my way or maybe I would be reduced to a crumbling nervous wreck. I was reminded of the irony that in the end Frasier too ventures into the unknown, the undefined and moves away from Seattle, to pursue his true love and may be build a new life. Would I have to make the same difficult decisions? What did I need to pursue? What was the path to my happiness? Would I lose everything I had built here? Would I even have the choice? I did not know.
“Mr. Jeffrey’s office” Linda robotically said as she answered my call on Monday. “Hey Linda, it’s me. I believe you have something for me.”
“Yes, hold on” she said, with barely feigned boredom.
And then she put me hold. At the other end the phone made a static sound and then went blank for several seconds. “Hello”, I said, expecting someone to answer and pronounce the verdict on my life, but then the static sound beeped again. I was still sitting in my circle of shame in front of the television while the interplay of beeps and silences tricked me a few more times. I wished the infernal beeping would stop and Linda would just end my life right there.
Maybe I was being overly melodramatic, or maybe it was a seminal moment in my life. Maybe I would withstand everything or maybe nothing at all. But right at this moment what I could not withstand anymore was the wait.
