What You Call Winter Read online

  “I’ll just have a quick bath,” he called to his father.

  But he stayed at the window, reluctant to launch any new course of action. Beyond the compound walls, other commuters were making their way home. The new construction across the street was nearly finished, six stories high, thick-walled, built slap up to the road despite the zoning codes. The contractor was experimenting with color, and stripes of pink, beige, taupe had been hastily painted on one wall to test their effect. The workers had stopped for the evening and were tending cooking fires around the rubble heap where the car park would be. A woman with the tail of her sari tucked between her legs threw some rubbish in the street gutter.

  Toby heard Neelam return and the hiss of a gas flame. His beer was gone. Soon Michael would be home; soon dinner would be ready. He moved into the bathroom and switched on the hot-water heater, then examined himself in the mirror. His own face was never what he expected; he still carried an image of himself just on the edge of manhood. But here he was in the glass, middle-aged. His face had been a long, bony affair when he was a boy, all nose and jaw and Adam’s apple; now there was a heaviness beneath the eyes, more flesh to the cheeks. His forehead had always been high, his eyes large and wide-set. The lines at their corners sometimes made him seem tired. But his mustache was the same as ever. His hair was still thick, and he carefully blackened whatever went gray—an attempt to keep himself recognizable. It hardly seemed credible that he was nearing fifty.

  He had taken off his shirt when the phone began to ring. His father looked up from the desk as Toby hurried to pick it up. His sister, Regina, announced that she and her husband, George, would drop in after dinner.

  “Since when do you have to call? Just come.”

  “Listen, you, that isn’t all. Michael’s coming just now with Jean.”

  Instantly Toby felt both foolish and exposed — as though an actual person had caught him on the way to the bath.

  “She’s in town?”

  “Overnight. Tomorrow she goes to Bangalore. She had a drink with us, and Michael said he’d bring her over to say hello to Dad.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now! Go and put a decent shirt on.” Again Toby sensed his sister could see him: barefoot and bare-chested, a towel around his neck. By the time he realized she was only attending to his manners, he felt he was stumbling to keep up.

  “But hang on—how is she?”

  Regina paused, a rarity. “It’s so sad, isn’t it?” Without giving him time to answer, she instructed Toby to hurry up, get ready.

  Toby risked a quick bath, jumping in and rushing out, listening to hear if anyone had yet arrived. “Out in a minute, Dad! Just see if there’s wine.” He ran a rueful thumb over his chin; there was no time to shave. A hand-clap of cologne, his watch, the cross on its gold chain replaced around his neck. He chose a shirt Michael had brought for him, stiff green cotton, and tucked it carefully. His good slacks, a dark leather belt neatly buckled. He was still trim, still fit. His shoes were a bit scuffed, but he wiped them with the black-stained polish rag; perhaps it helped. Still no sign of them? It had been thirty minutes at least, and Regina and George lived just around the corner, on St. Peter Road. Where could they be?

  He ducked his head into the kitchen. “Neelam? You can put out some glasses. And a bowl of snacks—what do we have? Almonds?” Neelam was new to the household; Regina had found her four months ago. Toby rarely questioned his sister’s hand in such arrangements, but he experienced a pang of doubt when he met Neelam: a widow with wide-spaced knees and toes, short gray hair that bristled at her neck, and arms shrunken nearly to bone.

  “She’s strong enough for a broom and some cooking. And you can’t have a young woman around, a bachelor like you. It doesn’t look right.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. You never said anything about Manjari.” Manjari was younger, also unmarried, though promised to a boy in her village. She had left the family to take up a high-paid post as ayah for a family in Delhi.

  “Manjari was here ten years, and when she came I was still living downstairs. That is the difference. And another thing, sir: nobody thought you’d go on being a bachelor.” This was a common refrain and Toby had no interest in hearing more, so he welcomed Neelam without another word. She was given a small room near the lift bay and settled in with them well enough, Toby considered. Her cooking was adequate, her kitchen clean. At times he worried the work was too much for her; sometimes, in the evenings, she would stand very still before taking her next step, or sway with fatigue. But he had no wish to put her out of a job, so he kept quiet about these episodes to Regina.

  Once, when he helped Neelam remove a pile of wood and bricks from the compound wall, she told Toby about her son, who had gone to earn money in the Gulf. “Oorjit is his name. He is coming back to buy a house for us,” Neelam said. “He will marry when he comes back and have many sons. He has always been lucky.” Her voice sounded like something charred, her teeth pebbly, the color of ash. “He also helps me to carry,” she said when they had nearly finished, and Toby realized she had mentioned her son as a gesture of thanks.

  Now she appeared with a brass bowl of nuts. She was wearing a sari with one end tucked through her legs, Koli style, in a bright pink best suited to young girls and over-sweet candies. The tail of her sari, flicked over her shoulder, was wet and wrung—perhaps with washing up, Toby thought.

  “And wine, Neelam.” She had not attempted to make order of Michael’s photo project, but had pushed what she could to the center of the table to clear a space for the glasses, and as Toby uncorked the bottle she brought him, he glanced at a picture. Regina stood in her school jumper with a bow pricking up from a mass of curly hair; Michael, a stocky boy, clearly itching in his collar; Toby small beside them, a spindly support for the youngest, Louise, to lean against. She was barely walking, just a year, he guessed. Their mother died a few months later, and the last baby with her. But in this photo Louise already seemed motherless. Toby tucked it beneath a picture of his father in a suit and checked his watch. Nearly eight. Jean and Michael must have stopped off somewhere.

  Toby’s father emerged, unrolling his sleeves, to join Toby at the table. He saw the wineglasses and asked, “Someone’s coming?”

  “Jean Colaco. Kapur, that is. Jean Kapur.”

  “Really? She’s here?”

  At that moment Toby heard the tinny music of the lift as it jangled to their floor. He and his father waited, in an oddly formal silence, until Michael drew back its caged door, alone.

  “Hey! What a reception!”

  All that was taut in Toby went slack.

  “Where is Jean, then?” his father asked.

  “She wanted to pop over, but she was feeling too sleepy. She’s just come in last night—totally jet-lagged. I walked her back to Ruby’s place.” Ruby was one of Jean’s sisters, still in the neighborhood. “She’s coming back in a week or so — I’m sure she’ll stop in. So! Shall we have a glass of wine?”

  “You have,” Toby said. He went to the kitchen to pour himself another beer and tell Neelam not to delay dinner any longer; no one was coming.

  Alfred Fernandez ate in the old style, sweeping the fingers of his right hand from the plate to his mouth in quick, tidy motions. Toby and Michael used forks and knives, which Neelam laid out like stiffly posed couples in the middle of their plates.

  Michael had been heavyset as a child; now he was a jogger with a meaty face and solid chest. He ate in large bites, tearing bread into chunks and pushing food on top with a knife. “Terrible business, this thing with Jean’s husband. I knew it was his heart, but she told us he was in the kitchen making breakfast for the kids when it happened. He just collapsed, right in front of them. Dead by the time she ran downstairs. It must have been a massive attack.”

  Toby thought of her sons, whose ages he could not remember. Little fellows, the last time he’d seen them: two dark heads bent over their handheld video games. They wore matching shorts and sandals,
their hair neatly parted.

  His father shook his head. “He must have been young.”

  “My age exactly. Six months’ difference.”

  Neelam had made a fish curry. Toby felt a bone in his throat and took a bit of rice. “How did she seem?”

  “I don’t know. She was tired, of course. Can’t be easy to talk about this business, but I suppose the shock’s worn off by now.”

  His father considered, fingers poised over a last mouthful of wet rice. “She’s a strong girl. But she hasn’t any family nearby, does she?”

  “Not in Pennsylvania. Unless the husband’s people are there.”

  “Poor child.” He glanced toward the kitchen. “See if the girl has more fish there.”

  He always spoke to Neelam through Toby, in the same way that he had once deferred to his wife and then to his daughters in matters of the kitchen. But Neelam didn’t wait for Toby to put the question to her; she got up from the kitchen floor and offered the platter of fish to Toby’s father, who examined each piece before he picked one. When he tipped his head in acknowledgment, she turned toward Toby. Her eyes were red and tired.

  “Give Michael another helping, and then you take what you want,” he told her. “Go and eat.” She did not smile, but her head drooped and he sensed her relief. Michael had begun to discuss his plans for the photographs with alarming energy, and Toby found he too was relieved to think of Neelam moving toward the end of her day—and to think of the day itself nearly ended.

  Toby’s bed was in the front of the flat, and he found himself staring out into the darkness toward where Jean once had lived. He could dimly see the shape of the new flat building. Balconies without rails jutted out like ledges, and on the roof steel wires bristled through concrete posts.

  Toby turned from the window and tried to put Jean out of his mind, though he often thought of her before sleep. Over the years the sharpness of such thoughts had gentled, from pain to longing to a kind of wonder about the life he might have lived. He was no longer kept awake by these questions, but he returned to them at night, a habit he could not name except to suppose he still missed her.

  Twenty-four years before, they had been engaged, both families in favor of the match. Toby knew Jean’s parents had approved; he was a neighbor, practically part of the family already, with a good place in a solid Bombay business — and he would take their daughter no farther than across the road. It was the life everyone had wanted for them, the life Toby had wanted.

  Jean grew up playing with Toby’s sisters, and as they grew older they were all in the same gang of friends. Then in their second year of university, Toby asked Jean to a New Year’s party. He had meant nothing significant by the invitation. He usually teamed up with their friend Colleen for dances, but she would be out of town and everyone must go in some pair or other. But instead of laughing and nodding, instead of teasing him or slinging an arm around his shoulder, Jean blushed and let her gaze fall to her hands.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Years later, Toby was humiliated to recall that this—the merest suggestion of interest — had been enough to change the way he saw her. Could all that had followed have hinged on so little? When she looked up again, a glance both more brave and more timid than he had encountered from a girl before, he felt immersed in something new and perilous.

  That was the first night he had gone home and lain awake thinking about Jean, not beautiful but striking, with strong dark brows and eyes the color of river water, not quite brown nor gray nor green. She resembled her father, and then all at once she resembled no one at all. Within a matter of days, Toby could not remember what it had been like to look at her before. The change was as wholly transforming as a landscape flooded, and in her presence he felt both the shock of buoyancy and the danger of being swept away.

  What would have happened if he had not seen her blush? If in that instant he had looked away, would he still have loved her? Perhaps the idea would never have occurred to him; perhaps nothing would have come to light if Colleen had been in town — and Toby would have gone on happily as he was. There were nights when he believed that he and Jean were inevitable, a secret she knew first but one he was bound to discover. There were other nights, long and bitter, when he decided that what angered him most was not what she had ended but what with a silly blush, a reckless blush, she’d so carelessly begun.

  Two days later, Toby was enlisted to help bring the ladder up from a ground-floor storage bay. It was too big for the lift, so they had to carry it up four flights of stairs, swinging around corners and landings until at last it was set up in the back bedroom. Large metal shelves lined three walls, with cartons, trunks, and old suitcases stacked to the ceiling.

  “We should take them all down,” said Michael. “They’re just collecting dust up here.” He stepped up another rung. “This is disgusting. You should clean this once a year at least.”

  Toby said nothing. Such instructions were a feature of Michael’s visits. He sailed into town on a wave of zeal and duty, hunting out whatever Toby had failed to do and tackling it with a self-righteous vigor that was all a bit fishy, Toby felt, since Michael came only when it suited him and then required Toby to leave work early to hold the ladder.

  “We can sort through them and get rid of what we don’t need.”

  “You can’t just start throwing out Dad’s things.”

  “These are family things.” Michael coughed. “Here — here are the albums. Careful, they’re heavy. I’m telling you, this is just unhealthy. You’re living in filth.”

  “I’m living down here.”

  “But seriously, when’s the last time you cleaned out these shelves? You should do more to keep the place up.”

  “I do work, you know. I have a business to run.” Toby looked at his elder brother, who had climbed to nearly the top of the ladder. To grub around with dirty boxes Michael wore stiff dark jeans with a braided belt, a button-down shirt that strained over the packed flesh of his stomach and chest, and brown loafers with leather tassels. Michael had left India when Toby was still at university; he had landed a job with an international food company that was expanding into Asian markets. He had gone first to Germany, where he met his wife, and then to a post in the States. It had been years since Toby had visited. He remembered quite clearly the carpeted rooms; the table laid, bright and glassy, for the inevitable dinner party; the strong black coffee his sister-in-law brewed every morning and the dark lipstick stains she left on her mug. But these glimpses left him unable to fully envision the life Michael and Sabine conducted. Did his brother climb ladders in his town house? Were there boxes? Dust?

  “Do you ever see Jean? In the States, I mean?”

  “Jean? No, not really. A wedding once. She’s outside Philadelphia and we don’t get out of D.C. much. Why?”

  “You’re both over there, that’s all.”

  “It’s a big country, Toby.”

  Michael spoke with an amused superiority that made Toby want to shake the ladder. “I’m meeting people in a few minutes,” he said. “How many photos do you need anyway? You could cover every wall in the place.”

  “I want to choose the best ones. Where are you going?”

  “Choir practice. And then some of us are going to Regina and George’s.”

  “So who cares if you’re late? You see them all the time. I’m here only for another two weeks. There, that’s the last of them. I give up — I can hardly breathe. Hold it steady now.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “We’ll have to give all these shelves a good dusting.” Michael had reached the ground; he brushed off his sleeves and legs. “Maybe Neelam can do it.”

  “You want to send Neelam up a ladder?”

  “No, no, she can do the lower shelves. We’ll have to do the rest. Nothing to it.” Michael clapped him on the shoulder. “My brother, the bachelor,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll get this place in order before I go.”

  Two months after Toby and Jean receiv
ed their degrees, Toby asked his father where his mother’s gold was kept. He had taken up his post in the business with his father and uncle. Fernandez Printing was a hive of rooms on the ground floor of a small building, its outer walls blackened with dust and street fumes. Toby didn’t speak until they had gone inside. A boy of fourteen or fifteen leaned near the doorstep, waiting to bring them tea.

  “I’m asking Jean to marry me.” The words had more force than he’d intended, and it occurred to him that he should be asking his father’s permission instead of announcing his intentions. Surely it would have happened in such a way if his mother had been alive to consult. They would have conducted themselves as families do. But he had spoken; there was no point in trying to go back over it.

  “Yes,” his father said. “It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”

  “Well, now I’m settled here …”

  His father nodded. They had reached the office he shared with Toby’s uncle, and he paused in the doorway. The rings were kept in a suitcase, he told Toby, with all his mother’s jewelry. It had a lock, and he had added a padlock as well. “Tonight I can give you the key.”

  Toby struggled to say something that would end this exchange properly. “It’s good of you, Dad. Thank you.”

  “You can give Regina the key once you’ve found a ring. There are other things in the suitcase. Bangles, whatnot. Let her take what she wants and keep the rest for Louise.” He cleared this throat. “I wonder where your uncle is?”

  “I don’t know,” Toby said.

  A week later, he told his father Jean had said yes. Toby’s father looked down with a smile that was at once shy and elated, as though his joy was too powerful to risk a direct gaze. He kissed Toby fiercely on the cheek and hugged him for longer than Toby knew how to be in such an embrace.