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“This is not America,” my father yelled, chewing tobacco and betel nut, raising his chin to keep it from spilling. “Or Russia, or Ja-Japan, or…” he paused to remember more countries, “or German, or Bombay!”

“Germany not German,” Nita chimed in as if it were her moral duty to correct her father’s geography, “and Bombay’s a city, baba, and its called Mumbai now.” She sat on the floor, with her chin resting on her knees.

“Thank you.” Baba smiled mockingly. He raised his chin again. “This is India. This is how it has always been, you cannot change it.” I caught Nita nodding slightly, her hair in pig-tails.

She sat on the floor because baba was sitting in one chair and I was sitting in the other. We had a third one, but Mala, who lives upstairs, borrowed it one day, reasoning that her son had returned from Dubai after four years, and it would be rude to make him sit on a mat. It turned out that he was taken somewhere near Muscat and was paid in peanuts. The return journey had cost everything he had earned, plus debt. I had to convince my mother not to wage war upstairs; the staircase was too narrow for any chaos.

“But what does that have anything to do with Simi and me?

Didn’t you tell me that she seemed like a good girl? Ma met her recently, didn’t you ma?”

She continued chopping the beans, not even looking at me. I talked on her behalf, “Simi helped her carry the bags of flour from the mill, and it doesn’t matter, really, if she seems good to you; I like her, she likes me, we’ve been together for six years now. And now she’s got…”

“You’re not allowed to love anyone you want as long as you’re under my roof. Beta, you’re always under a roof here.”

I shook my head, perplexed. He got up to spit but hit the back of his head on the shelf.

“Damn it! The shelf’s too big, it needs to be changed!”

“The roof’s too low,” ma spoke matter-of-factly, pointing at the roof with her knife.

Nita was absorbed in screen light and swiping. The phone had seen its days: buried under a sack of cement at a construction site baba used to work at, dropped in a stew when ma got frustrated with its rebellious camera. It has been hers ever since as she wanted a phone because all the kids in her class had one.

I had entered the house resolute. It was now or never, I told myself.

I approached my mother first, offering to cut up the beans for her. She refused. At first, all this had been a tiring affair but then she got used to it, and without having anything else to do, she accepted the curse as her sacred right. She got irritated whenever Nita tried to help her dry clothes, or mop the house, or iron baba’s shirts, but I thought she did this because she did not want her daughter to accept chopping beans as her sacred right too.

***

“We need to sort this out. You talk to yours and I’ll talk to mine.” Simi had told me earlier that day. She had got a job at the pharmacy but there was barely any joy. We looked over our shoulders as we held hands.

“Bye Arjun,” she said. I did not reply, she never called me by my full name. It was always ajju. Today it was Arjun. A sudden wind picked up her long hair and tossed it in the air as she walked back. She looked like an angry goddess stuck in a world of organized stupidity.

A gale smashed my face, and I thought it was the same that had touched her, because it was chilly. I stiffened as a figure hovered behind me. The tears had made my vision clearer and distorted at the same time. I jumped off the grass and saw a little figure slowly walking towards me. I reeled in horror. It was a child, who looked so much like Simi as she walked back. The face was covered by long hair but she was not turned back, instead, she was walking towards me. You’ve been watching too many movies, I told myself, and your heart is not in the right place either.

I motivated myself about talking to my family, filling resolution in my heart like a tangible substance. Another sudden wind swirled and the child’s hair pricked up like gnarly snakes snapping for freedom. I ran away as fast as I could.

***

Time passed, and we never repeated a long conversation. It was a few words here and there, often irrelevant. Whenever I mentioned Simi, baba changed the topic to Nita, and how I was being a bad influence on her.

I had taken up smoking and started drinking, all in the duration of a few bad months. I met a drunkard sometimes who preached about non-violence, but it was lost on me as he did so to an electric pole.

Simi giggled when I told her about it, “A drunkard preaching non-violence to a pole! I know too many people who fit that exact description!” She couldn’t control herself, rolling on the grass of the same park we always met in. I made an annoyed face, her giggle reduced, then I smiled playfully but it could not revive her mirth; my smile died too.

She had left the job at the pharmacy and was going to Bangalore on the recommendation of a friend. She told her parents that the pharmacy was “too much work for too less pay” but she told me it was the boss who nagged her. I kept looking around the park, expecting the specter, or was that just a naughty child, or just a whim of my imagination…

“Are you also...” I stammered. “Are you also haunted?”

“A demon. This is all one big demon,” she said wistfully.

It was monsoon when I got a good job but before that we reinforced the windows so that rainwater would not flood the house. A slimy shower was not a rare occasion in the neighborhood. The job was accounting for a Gujarati textile business but the main reason for employing me was that I could speak decent English. It was in the city, not too far from here but too expensive and tedious to commute daily.

The business succumbed to the falling economy and I was sent back in a couple of months. I did odd-jobs here and there, but it was never enough. As soon as I returned from the city, I found baba limping around the house with a cast around his leg. “He is not going to work anymore at this age.” Ma sputtered out an explanation. Nita had a single ponytail now and a secret boyfriend. Things had changed, but not enough.

I would often go and sit in the park alone, perversely waiting to be haunted by the girl. Simi would join me, sometimes once a month, other times after a gap of six. She was earning enough for the two of us.

“Why can’t everyone think like us, Simi?

I don’t understand why we act like slaves to them. I don’t understand why they don’t understand,” I buried my face in my hands. She never asked many questions or gave many answers but she put a hand around my back. People pointed at us from behind, I could sense it.

“Let’s go away!” I suggested, with a sudden vigor that surprised her. “I’ll find some work; there must be some tiny work in a big city.”

“What’s the point of it? Will you just abandon your family in a house that floods every monsoon?”

We did not ever meet in the park again. First, because she had moved to Mumbai, rising in her position exponentially, giving her little to no time to make casual visits, and secondly, because the park had burned down.

Some blamed it on a religious squad, others on the naughty boys from the slum. Baba told me it must the gods of fire, being tired of all the obscene things lovers did there. I had one more culprit in my mind: the specter girl who walked towards me after Simi said Arjun for the first time.

The businessman who I worked for had recommended me to a friend of his in Pune, telling him that if it was not for me his business would have closed shop months ago. Pune was beautiful, parties in the city, trees lined along the highway, hill stations a bus-ride away for a weekend retreat, good money, and people did not judge as much.

I transferred to a branch of my company that had recently opened up in the city near my home. The first time I took my mother to my office, she was awestruck. As the elevator went up, she squeaked childishly. She looked like a girl again, full of dreams. “I wish I could press a button and our house would go up up up!”

The lights went out, “Maa!” I screamed and stumbled around in the dark. The elevator staggered, and rotated, and spun around like a furious dark galaxy. A flame burst suddenly, someone was burning. Was it the girl… was it… it screamed at the top of its lungs. I could go nowhere. The elevator shrunk. She was getting closer now, her flames lapping at me like chained snakes.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” I thought I yelled, but when I opened my eyes we were still in the elevator.

“I wish I could press a button and our house would go up up up!” Ma spoke. I felt that no time had passed, or all that time passed only in my head. I was relieved.

“Soon,” I answered, and she thought I was joking. We bought Mala’s house after a month. She had left us our chair with a thank-you note. We lived above the ground now and all four of us had a chair of our own. I bought a brand new phone for Nita’s birthday and she wore her hair in pig-tails for a day. She knew I liked it that way. It reminded me that all the hard work has been worth it.

The park had been restored, like a phoenix, I thought, even though I was uneasy that day. Returning by train from a conference in Ahmadabad on the current economic situation and the importance of penetrating the smaller markets, I got a call from my boss telling me how pleased he was by my performance. Somewhere during the night, as the train crossed the state border and entered Maharashtra, my head ached again. Just like in the elevator, an unmistakably familiar heat. I looked out of the windows: water water water!

The train felt like it was piercing through an ocean of grime, viscous and thick. It soaked my coach and water flooded inside. I climbed to the upper birth but the water kept rising, was it water… I couldn’t breathe, at all. I saw a boat, a snake-boat like the ones fishermen used. A vague figure stood upright. It was not her. This was taller, and older, had a flashlight in its hand, shining it on my helpless face. ‘Are you all alright?’ it seemed to ask and extended a hand towards me.

Somebody shook me awake and I was in a stupor for some time. I took my bag, washed up and got off at my station, stopping by the park which had risen like a phoenix. Simi called me that night. Her company had opened up a branch in the city as well and she was being made the managing director.

It was monsoon. Simi was bringing her parents to the house. “The D’Souzas would be here any moment!” Baba screamed, upping his tempo on the chop-board. “Do not go keeping chewing when they are here, chow chow,” Ma laughed. A cloth was spread over the table and there were enough chairs. Even Nita looked happy. Ma busied herself in taking the creases out of the curtains and placing the little trinkets on the shelf as if they were too shy to be too close together, and baba invested all his attention on chopping the best beans that had ever been chopped.

As soon as they entered, everyone had a smile. Simi looked exactly like her mother. The families got together, and I smiled at Simi sitting across the table. Ma was narrating the story behind the framed photographs on the shelf, and Mrs. D’Souza was absorbed. She nearly jumped when she came across a photo of Simi, awkwardly posing in a school uniform. Class nine, when we first met and you called me Ajju, I told Simi when she asked me later, blushing. Afterward, we went to the park.

“I’m glad that they restored the Park,” Simi commented, with a blade of grass in her hands. She leaned her head on my shoulder; I pushed it away and leaned my head on her shoulder instead. She laughed and shoved the grass into my mouth. I chased her around like a schoolboy, still spitting out the grass. It was an earthy taste.

“It’s wonderful that things happened the way they have,” I commented once we sat down tired of childish games but ready to repeat it again. “It’s wonderful that we had made things happen the way they have,” she added.

“What if…” I started.

“The what-if demon,” she giggled, “What if this, what if that.”

She poked me as I became more serious.

“What if our families had never changed? Both of us: depressed and distant. You’d be preaching non-violence to the pole, completely drunk. I would have married some guy that someone suggested to my parents and then I’d have a child who’d look just like me. She’d have walked towards you, her hair as long as mine, when you sat alone, smoking in the park.

What if I continued to work at the pharmacy, ignoring everything, accepting it as fate? We would have met daily at the park and then one day it would catch fire. I would catch fire and you would walk away from me, unable to bear the heat.

What if we had run away? In the monsoon, our house would have flooded and everyone would be drowning, screaming for help, gasping for breath. Maybe a rescue team would have reached them with extended arms, maybe not.”

I brooded in silence, gathering memories as if they were a tangible thing.

“What if all the possibilities were right there, haunting us?

We braved through it, made sacrifices, worked harder and here we are.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what happened, maybe not.”

We leaned into each other, blocking the view of anything else that did not matter.