“I’m happy.”
“You have everything you need. No hunger, no worry. You’re surrounded by nature.”
“I think about my mother sometimes.”
Daddy sighs. “It’s normal,” he says.
“Sometimes I dream about her.”
“Your mother wanted you to work.”
“Sometimes I think of going back there after.”
“After what?”
“After you’re done with me. I want to go back there and be a big man.”
“You do?”
“When I’m older.”
“I feel bad that you want to leave.”
“I won’t leave,” Ajay says.
They emerge from the woods and begin walking the short distance home along the road.
“Let’s make a deal,” Daddy says, his tone affectionate. “One day soon I’ll tell you everything I know about your mother and your village. And then you can decide for yourself if you want to leave. OK?”
“OK.”
“You understand no one is keeping you here against your will.”
They walk on. The sky changes in the valley.
The glaciers toward Ladakh are melting.
“When will that be?” Ajay asks. “When will you tell me everything?”
Daddy frowns at the clouds.
“Let’s say next year, when you turn sixteen.”
* * *
—
Daddy dies a few months later, his Mahindra Armada colliding with a local bus late one night on a blind corner on the Bhuntar-Manikaran road. Twenty-six people perish. The driver was using an over-the-counter amphetamine; the conductor was the same age as Ajay.
Daddy’s body is found the next day, sixty feet below the wreckage, cradled in the branches of a tree, soaked by rain, his bowels unspooled like a cassette tape in the gorge.
Ajay, all but forgotten in the outpouring of grief, takes refuge at the farm that day, tending to the animals, bringing down the milk, and slips down to his room at night only to sleep. The death, the cremation bring back frightening dreams. As soon as the final prayer ceremony takes place, four days after the crash, distraught Mummy is taken by her family back to her native place in another valley six hours away. Ajay watches as she’s led to the car, driven away. He stands next to the window and reaches out to her, and she sees him but she doesn’t speak or make a sign.
Then she’s gone. The farm workers return to the farm and he’s left alone in that house. He’s been alone in the house many times before, but never like this, never without instructions, never without a horizon in sight. He builds a fire again, and when it’s roaring, he begins to boil and skim milk. Then he cuts vegetables for a dinner that no one will eat. When all the dishes are done, sitting on the table with two place mats ready, he takes his metal tray and sits on the floor, eating his portion in silence. After dinner, after he’s washed up, he takes a few tentative steps into the private section of the house, Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. He stands in the room, staring at the bed, the stuffed toys on Mummy’s cabinet, the ticking clock on Daddy’s desk. Finally he climbs on their bed, on Mummy’s side, and curls up, smelling the pillow, hugging it, falling asleep. He wants to ask her so many things. He wants to ask about his mother’s bank, the account number, where the branch can be found.
In the morning he wakes to find a man standing over him. He jumps in fright as he opens his eyes, scrambles to the corner of the room, head bowed.
“Dirty fellow,” the man says. “Get out. Don’t you have any shame?”
It’s a relative of Daddy’s come to take over the house and farm. He has brought his own boys.
Ajay is sent out into the main room. He stands dumbly between the kitchen and the stove, arms hanging limp. Things are already being shifted. The order he has helped to create, practiced and performed over the years, is being dismantled. The house already sounds wrong, it looks wrong, it’s already no longer stable. He is told he has one hour to clear out.
“I can help,” Ajay blurts out.
“I don’t need help,” the man replies.
“I’ll work for free.”
The man laughs bitterly. “You already do.”
He’s so desperate, he doesn’t move. Hoping that might be an assent.
“What are you waiting for?” the man shouts, raising his hand in the air the way you wave off a stray dog.
“But where should I go?”
“What do I care? Go home.”
* * *
—
It’s April 1999. He has no papers, no identity card, no formal education, no wages, no security, only a few possessions: a wind-up duck, a collection of used matchboxes, his wits, his spattering of languages, his skill at serving a master. He climbs up to the farm and speaks words of good-bye to the cattle, allows their hot, soft tongues to wrap around his fingers, their nostrils and eyes flaring in pleasure and recognition. He has helped birth some of the cows. He has seen others die. When he comes down to the house, the furniture is already being rearranged; the rooms are being stripped of Mummy’s things, which are to be sent away. There are other boys performing chores in ways he finds lacking. He waits for a quiet moment and takes his plate and his bowl from the kitchen and places them in a jute sack and steals his favorite kitchen knife, then runs down to his room and unlocks it and gathers the tips he has saved over the years, hidden deep in the clutter, in secret spaces, wrapped in several plastic bags against the damp. It’s just under five thousand rupees, a fortune to be savored until this day, now a source of fear. When he leaves, carrying everything he owns in that one small sack, he locks the door behind him, then walks to the edge of the property. He stands on the lower wall, looking down over the valley and the river, down onto the field next door, takes his pants down and pisses toward the river, and when he’s done, guessing he’s being watched by the new residents of the house, he tosses his room key as hard as he can into the long, lush grass of the neighboring property.