Blue Boy by Satyal Rakesh

Author:Satyal, Rakesh [Satyal, Rakesh]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp
Published: 2009-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chai for Two (and Two for Chai)

My parents spend their time at home as if they can’t stand each other’s presence but as if long ago, during their wedding, right after they tied their sashes together and walked around a fire, they signed a pact that physically bound them to each other. While I sit on the couch in the shorts and T-shirt I used as pajamas last night, eating masala-spiced Chex Mix and watching CNN on our monstrous TV, I notice that they move in a give-and-take manner that contrasts with their verbal spats. My mother will get up from the loveseat to make some chai, and when she does so, my father will get up from the kitchen table, where he’s peeled a grapefruit and left a pile of citrus skin, and push back in the recliner. After making the tea, my mother pours three cups—very little milk and no sugar for herself, very little milk and two sugars for my father, and a lot of milk and a lot of sugar for me—gives me mine first and then offers a cup to my sprawled father, who takes the small china cylinder without looking at her. The zaniness of it is the silence, the pure silence, the unmeeting of eyes, the carelessness of the heat that passes between them.

In the Urdu quewwali songs that my father likes to play on our stereo, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sing-shouts stories about women with hands as hot as fire, women whose softest touch can render a man aflame. Although my mother is the one who translates these songs for me, there seems to be no such fire left in her hands. Even in restaurants, waiters say something when they serve you, you acknowledge their presence with a polite, if barely audible, thank you. They don’t just present you with something amid a cloud of impenetrable nothingness, you don’t just take their food and turn away, without a word. Yet the decorum here seems delicately calibrated, the way in which she comes up from the basement while he steps outside with a glass of lassi, in which he goes upstairs for a nap and she comes downstairs for a snack, in which he settles into his office and rustles papers while she unwraps the ball of curdled, milky sourness that will be tomorrow’s paneer. This all seems fragile yet impressive, the result of years of normal Indian being. When, I wonder, did my mother stop being my father’s Radha?

As I’ve mentioned, silence has never been my bag. As smooth as my parents’ cool interaction may be, the silence of it gives me only one option: to think of a companion who would not allow such a silence. I sit on the couch and watch Wolf Blitzer and wonder what it would be like to live with a man like him. Wolf: his eloquence, his style, his wit—they are so undeniably un-Ohioan, and these qualities—the lilt of Wolf’s voice, the poetic phrases he

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