The Abundance by Amit Majmudar

Author:Amit Majmudar
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780805096583
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2013-03-05T08:00:00+00:00

At night, after everyone is asleep, Mala opens her laptop and sits in the glow. She starts to type, rapidly, as everyone of her generation does. It sounds like a small private rainfall. Our house has high ceilings and hardwood floors. Her key strokes echo. I can hear her from the study, where I am sleeping for the first time tonight. Maybe she is writing an e-mail to Ronak, giving him an update. Does he care to be told of anything but the big changes?

The ceiling of my days has been lowered by one flight. I wasn’t looking forward to sleeping here. I regretted the night winding down. Sachin, who had made our cheeks ache with Gujarati jokes, put away the pistachio ice cream, and Mala rinsed the bowls and spoons. They went upstairs. Abhi and I went to the study.

Its dimensions felt wholly strange in the darkness. Twenty minutes into my sleeplessness, I whispered to Abhi, “I didn’t want you to give up your study.”

There was no need to check if he was awake. I had my head on his shoulder, and I could sense his body’s tense wakefulness. “I haven’t given up my study,” he said. “I just moved my study upstairs.”

“That room is half the size.”

“I didn’t use most of the room I had in here. It was empty space.”

“It wasn’t. It was space for you to think.”

“This is the room I think in,” he said, tapping on his head. “Besides, we were going to turn this room into a first-floor guest room, remember? If Ma or Ba had come to live with us, I would have transferred upstairs anyway.”

“We talked about that years ago.”

“So?”

I shook my head. “This has been your study for years, Abhi.”

“I like it up there.”

I lifted my head and looked at his face to see if he was lying. I can tell when he is lying; he does it to spare me sometimes. Like: Of course they processed it wrong, they’re going to pay for that scan in full. He looked as if he meant it, but I could only see his profile by the flame-shaped night-light.

“The window upstairs, it looks out over the back. Just yesterday, I saw the neighbor’s grandchildren on their trampoline.”

I nodded.

“I think I’m going to sneak out to their trampoline one warm night and do some jumps.”

I smiled. He yawned.

“Let’s go to sleep, okay?”

Abhi, arm across my stomach, is pretending to sleep right now, here in the room where he used to come alive. He has started lingering until I fall asleep. His mind stays awake. He leaves when I steady my breathing for a minute straight. I have told him he can go right away, he doesn’t need to lie next to me, but he says he wants to. He enjoys getting more rest, he says, he’s fresher during the day. But I know he doesn’t care about being groggy during the workday so long as his nights in the study have him at peak alertness. He can prescribe Sinemet or check a Babinski reflex on two hours of sleep or fewer.

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