“I untied my sari for your father, and I gave him a beautiful son,” Shakti said, “and he told me there is no other woman for him. What else is a marriage but that?”
Anil was in California and she was back home in Malaysia, halfway around the world, but her soft, clear, curiously young voice sounded as if she was standing right in front of him. He could practically smell the scented hair-oil she used. With everybody else, international phone calls meant static crackling or crossed connections; for Shakti transmission was crystal clear.
He said, shortly, “I don’t mind being a bastard.” There was no point in talking about his father. Anil had made himself into an engineer. A scientist. With an academic pedigree &mdash Princeton, Stanford, B.S., M.S. PhD, post-doc &mdash as immaculate as his birth was not.
His mother said, “You are a great man’s only son.”
Anil wondered if Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs and the Woz and Bill Gates ever had to have conversations about whether their parents were married or not. Nobody could have loved their mother more, but he had other things to think about. The Google guys were fellow students from his Stanford days, in fact several years his junior. Google had just gone public. He was on that same path: a dotcom millionaire-to-be, new man for the coming new millennium, techno whiz-kid in designer sunglasses and old blue jeans and new, new jacket. Loaded with expensive electronic toys. Cool. Connected.
His mother’s voice cut into this daydream. “Your father doesn’t forget us.”
It was on the tip of Anil’s tongue to ask, then, why had his doctor father sat comfortably in Kuala Lumpur and left Anil and his mother to live with her father on a rubber estate labor lines? The place haunted Anil in his dreams, the long, low, tin-roofed buildings partitioned into tiny, one-room dwellings for the rubber tapper families. No air. Practically no hope.
But there was his mother, in his ear, telling him, “We are married in our hearts, your father and I. Everything what he is thinking, I know.”
She was in a world of her own. With some difficulty Anil took a deep breath, and said, as gently as he could, “Yes, Amah.” No point in disturbing her fool’s paradise; she was happy, in her way.
A voice said, behind him &mdash in broad, low-class Tamil, using words in a way he hadn’t heard since his rubber-estate days &mdash “You’re the one who’s the fool. Coconut head.” For a moment, Anil thought he was imagining things. Nobody else was in his apartment; served him right for letting himself think of the labor lines.
“She’s not happy.” It was a real voice.
Anil turned.
There was something materializing across his living room, in the middle of all the litter of books and papers and electronics. A hazy image, like an out-of-focus snapshot. Anil said softly, “I’m going mad.” He was looking at himself as a schoolboy. Too short trousers, skinny arms and legs full of mosquito bites and black and blue marks from getting beaten up, large, heavy-lidded eyes that from time to time opened wide and shot fire at the world.
Anil said, staring at the thing in front of him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
It said &mdash himself, his ghost, whatever it was &mdash ...