An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma Page B

put a hand against the wall for support.
    Weeping was comforting. A part of me reasoned that because I was crying and penitent, God could not have let Anita see what I was doing. Besides, if God allowed the discovery, who would be helped? Whatever happened, Anita needed to stay with me because she had no money. Her poverty should keep her from confronting me. Then I noticed how my mind was working, and shame filled me.

    I thought of Asha speaking in Urdu when she thanked me for the badminton rackets, and I cringed at what I had done with someone so small.
    From the shame came the idea of going to my village and finding the pundit to make sure he was in Delhi tomorrow This way Radha would be prayed for by someone who knew her. I would be doing something good and God would protect me because of this. Going to Beri also meant one day of not having to see Anita.
    Misery often makes me want to look away from the present and leads me to nostalgia. As I swallowed my heart medicine in the blue dark of the common room, I imagined walking through Beri's sugarcane fields and sitting beneath a mango tree. I wanted to be a child again, with the future a wide, still river in the afternoon.
    When I passed through Anita and Asha's bedroom on my way out of the flat, I heard one of them roll over. The room was completely dark and I could not see who had turned and whether either was awake. The door chain clacked as I unhooked it, but no one spoke.
    The dark sky was beginning to fade in streaks, and night's mildness was still in the air. I found a bicycle rickshaw where the Malka Ganj and Ghanta Ghar roads meet in a V. The streets to the Inter-State Bus Terminal were mostly empty. A few old men were out for strolls, and there was an occasional mysterious person: a woman dressed for a party talking with herself on the sidewalk: "Don't worry about me. I'm a queen. I'm a governor"; or a teenage boy with a suitcase, barefoot and walking with his head tilted up and a rag to his nose to stanch a nosebleed. But mostly there was just the creak of the rickshaw as the driver's feet slowly rose and fell on the pedals.
    When I settled back in the seat, memories of my childhood came to me. I remembered that when my mother and I waited by the side of the road for a bus, I would tell my mother to move back, not because I was worried about her safety, but because this was one of the few ways I had to show my love. The sense of loss for the boy I once was made shame settle in my chest Uke a clot. Asha was so small that if one looked at only her hand or foot, it seemed unreal.
    The bus terminal was roaring with the enormous noise of thousands of people arriving and departing and of the buses which brought them and took them away. There were villagers; there were men and women dressed in pants and shirts; there were foreigners. There were carts selling everything from pieces of fresh coconut, to water and lemonade, to hot food, to plastic toys. There was such a sense of energy that everything appeared possible. All this confirmed the rightness of my decision to go in search of the pundit.
    Beneath the heaviness in my chest, I felt a pulse of excitement.
    I found the Haryana Roadways ticket booth and bought a ticket to Beri. The bus was parked in a corner of the compound that surrounds the ISBT I stepped over suitcases and small bundles to move down the aisle toward a window seat in the back. The seat was torn, and straw showed through the rips in the green plastic. My belly almost touched the seat in front of me. The bus smelled of manure and sweat and rang with the quick dialects of the villagers who filled it. A wedding party of red-turbaned men sat singing in the front.
    My mind hurtled from one thought to the other. There was my shame, my eagerness for the trip, and now that I was in the bus, a worry that in Beri I would meet one of my brothers or their children, whom I had not seen for five years, since we quarreled over a piece of land my father left us.