Stealing the Ambassador

by Sameer Parekh

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Caught between a father who thought success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who risked his life to guarantee such ideals in their homeland of India, twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is lost in a nation he has always called home and beckoned by the one his father left long ago. Stealing the Ambassador is a literary page-turner that blends the experiences of a first-generation Indian American with those of his immigrant father and revolutionary grandfather, their intertwined stories probing the balance between fiction and history, between old country and new, between fathers and sons. Following his father's sudden death, Rajiv finds himself alone and bewildered. As he attempts to reconstruct his father's life, he begins to better understand his own, and when he chances to meet a new Indian immigrant, eerily reminiscent of his own father, their uncanny interaction grants Rajiv insight into the euphoria that his father felt when he first arrived in the country and its gradual deterioration into frustrated estrangement. Events lead Rajiv to a reverse migration, back to the subcontinent of his father's birth. There he reconnects with his aged grandfather -- once a saboteur responsible for bombings in pre-Independence British India and now mysteriously destitute. Discovering the source of this impoverishment, Rajiv is awakened to a second understanding of his childhood hero, a reconsideration that illuminates the relationships between grandfather, father, and grandson while pointing to new definitions of bravery and familial loyalty. Stealing the Ambassador is a stunning debut from the young Sameer Parekh. In depicting the ways that families are at the source of both our frustration with and our loyalty to identity, Parekh sheds new light on the immigrant experience and on the complexity and power of family relations.

Release date: March 25, 2002

Publisher: Free Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

Chapter One

i.

In 1966 my father was born for a second time in this, his most recent life, baptized by a gentle and lazy January snowfall, flake after flake, a thousand perfect welcomes, he remembered aloud once, to a new country. When he woke the next day, snow covered the earth in swells and valleys of unbroken, unrelenting white, and my father thought, because he had, hours ago, been on a plane for the first time, if you could steal the clouds from the sky and spread them over the earth, neatly, evenly, this is what it would look like. To hear him tell it, before he'd ever seen a spring or summer or fall, he'd found a favorite season.

He mentioned his arrival to me once. I was eleven, sitting with my parents and my brother on folding chairs at the dinner table. "Oh, I liked it, that is for certain." My father's English was accented, a thick and general auditory reminder that his passport had once been Indian. To those more attuned to such nuances, his speech said northern, not southern, India, his grammar an obvious clue that his schooling had been Gujarati, not English medium. This night, like most nights, he jumped between the two. "This is not to say, of course, that the winter liked me. Think on it. I had only two suits when I came here. One blue, one gray, neither wool. And only one coat that was much too thin. Less than adequate."

As my father spoke, his right hand would tear at the roti and use it to collect subzi in an off-centered cone of bread and vegetable. This he'd dip into a bowl of daal, so the structure was moistened and flavored, and then feed himself. His left hand would gesticulate like a drunken butterfly, flapping, soaring then falling, attentive always to his story. I remember friends showing me they could pat their heads and rub their bellies at the same time and theirs seemed mean feats.

The immensity of that first winter overwhelmed him. With two suits and a coat he was always on the edge of cold, always aware that he was bothered. He supplemented money from his graduate student grant by working part-time at a small shoe store, nine to six on Saturday, twelve to five on Sunday, off the books. He alternated between his suits and hoped the knees of his pants didn't wear thin. Laughing, on another night, he said, "The craziness of Americans. Their whole day was make or break if they do or don't find the right shoes. They made me the responsible party." He folded his hands together and pressed them against his forehead in mock supplication. "Arre baba, it's not my fault. My job is to squat down, measure your feet, to stand up, to get your shoes, to put them on your feet, and then to package them all again when none suit you. This only. For manufacturing, this is not my department. Talk to Florsheim, sahib."

That next winter he used the money he'd saved to buy a coat, orange and down-filled, the pick of the Salvation Army's litter. Short and slight, the coat doubled half of him, making his torso seem a burden too large for his thin legs. He appeared, from a distance, to wobble as he walked down streets. He was warm, though, and he made it a point to roam about when wiser folk stayed indoors.

He got mittens, a scarf, and a hat. He learned the difference between slush and sleet, between wet and dry snow, about snowmen and toboggans. He bought a shovel, enjoying the banter with neighbors who were also awake early, clearing front steps and sidewalks. He decided that four inches of snow was the right amount, not too great an obstruction, significant enough to turn the city beautiful.

When he was done talking that night his left hand would have fallen to the table, exhausted, and his right might have reached for a glass of water. He'd drink in long swallows, his throat sliding up and down inside his neck like a hurried earthworm. When he'd finished, the glass would have been marked by the oil and ghee of my mother's cooking, pressed by the tips of my father's fingers into five patterns, unique the whole world over.

Twenty-five months after he came from India, my father graduated with a master's in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering and landed a job with a computer company in upstate New York. After a year with the company he flew home to India, in February 1969. My grandfather and grandmother had been inquiring and conducting interviews. When he arrived, my father chose my mother from the six options his parents offered. They spent an hour together, chaperoned, and my mother and father decided they were both agreeable to the match. They married three weeks later, in a ceremony surprisingly large given the time constraints involved.

After the wedding, the new couple, and my father's mother and father, and my father's younger brother, piled into a brand-new Ambassador with a driver and began a weeklong honeymoon, just the six of them. They visited Rajasthan, paying particular attention to temples along the way. At the end of the week my father flew back to America and returned to work. My mother lived with my father's family for the next four months, until her visa was ready and her packing done. In June she landed at JFK and my father picked her up, wondering what to say.

I was born six years later. Four years after that, they had my brother. Two months before that second birth, the three of us moved out of our one-bedroom apartment into a raised ranch, upstate, far enough from New York City that real estate prices were manageable. My father and mother shared one bedroom, my younger brother and I shared another, and it was the third room, the smallest of the three, nine by ten with an old green carpet and a small closet, through which my father's family, thirteen people in all, spread mattresses and blankets and pillows on the floor and arrived in a new country.

They came in two and threes, following my father to America. Some had always wanted to come; some came because they had failed in India. I was twelve when they started to arrive.

First came my father's older sister, my aunt and her husband. He was skinny, she was not. They both found work in the same strip mall, she at Bradlees, in cosmetics, he as a stock boy at Wal-Mart. Together, they made $9.25 an hour and worked eighty hours a week. When they got overtime they'd make time and a half, just about fourteen every hour, and treat themselves to ice cream at Baskin-Robbins before returning home. After dinner they would lose themselves in Hindi films, watching a life of wealth and power from which it seemed they were forever removed, to forget the day they had worked, that tomorrow, they would do the same.

They stayed with us for sixteen months. When they left, back to India to sell their house, their children came to live with us, two sons and a daughter. The two men moved into the spare bedroom and their sister passed the night on a sleeping bag in front of the television, downstairs. I watched shows over her sleeping body that year, the volume so low that I would have to concentrate, rebuilding dialogue from the indistinct contours of actors' voices.

When my aunt and uncle returned they moved in with their daughter to the living room. This is how we lived for the next nine months, the house always filled, growing like an overlush garden, thicker and denser with new lives and new clutter; more shoes at the front door, more towels in the bathroom, more praying, more incense, more coats, more toothbrushes, new brands of toothpaste, new newspapers, saris, bindis, till with this new weight, this mass of people, space and time were forced to warp.

The day assumed new cadences. The kitchen table could seat only six people, so the men and my brother and I would eat first, my mother and aunt and her daughter serving us. The men would talk among themselves, my brother and I would talk to each other, the women would feed us until we were full. Afterward, we'd leave the table to them, going downstairs to watch Dan Rather, my father explaining America, referring to the broadcast. When they'd eaten and cleaned the kitchen, the women would come sit with us and we'd all watch on television a pirated cassette rented from the Indian grocery store. By nine-thirty the set was off in deference to my uncle and aunt, tired and in need of sleep. Upstairs, my uncle's two sons would shower, one after the next, readying themselves for work on the night shift. Washing, they'd sing aloud, filmi songs, and their voices would carry, over the shower curtain and through the door, down the hall and into the bedroom my brother and I shared, the room where nightly my parents would sequester themselves with their children, resurrecting for a third of an hour the nuclear life they had grown accustomed to since arriving in America.

Waking, again the house was full. My cousins would return from work and eat a meal in the kitchen. My brother and I would get ready for school; my parents, my aunt and uncle and their daughter, would get ready for work. Everyone took lukewarm showers and ate bowls of cereal and despite the rush it seemed that we were all always late.

They moved out, to a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. Four months later two more people came, my father's younger brother and his wife. They moved, after half a year, to Jackson Heights. After them came five more: two of my father's nephews for eight months; afterward, an older brother and his wife for a little longer; finally, a niece who stayed for four months, until she was arranged to marry a man from Michigan. Five months after the house emptied I left for college. Four years later I finished and began studying to be a doctor. It was during my first semester in medical school that my father had a heart attack, shoveling snow from the driveway of the house he'd bought in seventy-nine.

My mother drove my father to the hospital, snow be damned. When he'd stabilized and was assigned to the cardiac care unit, my mother sat by his bed, holding her husband's hand as he woke and slept in ten-minute cycles. She left briefly to buy herself a cup of coffee. When she returned she wasn't allowed back into his room. From the hallway, through the glass, she watched, as though it were a silent movie, a cast of stolid doctors and pretty nurses flurry around my father. They slowed and finally stopped and where you might expect the movie to have spliced in a screen of printed dialogue, a white coat opened the door to let my mother know her husband was dead.

Her own father died before I was born, two years after she married. My keenest impression of the person he was comes from my mother's recollection of events at the end of her seventeenth year. She was a senior in high school at an all-girls academy, second in a class of two hundred, when she decided to take the entrance examination for medical school. My mother asked for her parents' permission. Initially reluctant, they acquiesced and through the following four months she studied for the exam. On the evening prior my grandmother arranged for a puja. My mother prayed intently, first for her family's well-being and, afterward, to pass the exam.

Three hundred boys and thirty girls took the statewide test in a too warm auditorium at a local college. In years past, with similar numbers taking the examination, four people were offered admission. My mother sat with the girls in the front two rows of the auditorium. Behind them two rows were left empty and behind these two rows the boys filled what space remained. The exams were distributed and the room collapsed to the smell of sweat and the sound of pen on paper. The test lasted six hours. At its end my mother avoided her friends and hurriedly commandeered a cycle rickshaw to take her home. She cried intermittently through the night, embarrassed and devastated by how poorly she knew she had done. She applied, the next day, for a place in the Bachelor of Commerce class entering the following year. Time passed. She was admitted. Her family convinced her that events had worked out for the best, because now she could stay at home while attending college.

Two months later my mother fell ill with malaria. Her temperature peaked every third day, approaching one hundred and five degrees each time, and in the days between the fever spikes my mother would lie in bed and anticipate feeling much worse. She imbibed quinine. Three days after the fever finally broke, word arrived that the results had been posted for the medical school entrance exam. She begged her father not to check her score but my grandfather insisted to his debilitated daughter that it was best to confront one's failures head-on. He sent a man from his office to get the grade. Later that evening, when my grandfather returned from work, curiosity had gotten the better of my mother and she asked him for the score. Her father, his face tight and serious, told his daughter the results were not good, that in this case, it was better not to know.

My mother understood her failure must be severe. No one mentioned the examination again. She entered college that August and graduated in three years, in the first division, thoroughly uninterested by her course work. Six months after her graduation she and my father were married and four months after this she came to America to be his wife.

After her first year in America, her father got sick, but not so seriously, she supposed. She called home to speak to him and there was nothing in his voice, she'd recall later, that indicated that he might be about to die. They exchanged pleasantries and gossip till she said good-bye.

"A moment, please," her father said.

"Yes," said my mother.

A moment passed. "Are you happy in America?"

"I am happy," my mother answered, reflexively at first, and then again, with the same words, in a more considered fashion.

My grandfather grunted affirmatively. "Your husband, he is a good husband?"

"Really, Papa," she said, embarrassed.

"Is he?"

"He is good," my mother replied.

She waited again for him to say good-bye. Instead he said nothing and my mother, fearing the line had been disconnected, called "Hello" twice, loudly, into the receiver. My grandfather, his voice delayed, tinny and echoing on the overseas line, said, "You were admitted to medical school. You placed third on the exam. I was proud of you. I decided, however, that you were too sickly to go away to school. Also, I did not think it made sense to educate a girl in that manner. I thought I may have been wrong. But you are happy now, yes? I do not feel I made such a bad decision. I hope that you will feel the same. Beti, you cannot change a part of who you are now without changing the whole."

My mother said nothing, weighing the betrayal, twelve thousand miles away and five years removed. "Thank you, Papa," my mother said flatly. Her father waited, trying to gauge the sincerity of her statement. He said good-bye and hung up. They exchanged aerograms dutifully and spoke once again, in taut phrases and long, heavy pauses, before he died.

It is the instinct toward self-preservation that allows me to rationalize his action. Without him there would be no me and my mother would have been part of some other whole. But though I accommodate this deceit, man that he might have been, my mother's father is forever framed for me by this one choice.

My father, to his credit, was incensed by the whole affair and in the months before her father's death pushed my mother to apply to medical school in the States. My mother understood, however, that she didn't have the degree, or the language skills, or the money to go to school, at least not in America. Despite herself she came to advocate her father's decision. Perhaps it was in deference to his memory; more likely, I think, it was because she recognized that to do otherwise would make my father feel like the flat tire that had waylaid her on the road to more exciting times, and he was, after all, her husband.

I don't know what my parents were like when they married. In the photo albums, they seem alive in the thrill of each other's company, and even in those few pictures where one or the other is alone, reading or walking, happiness seems implicit in their carriage and the light in the space around them. It may be that this sort of photo is unavoidable, that at every marriage's onset, it is easy to get the good picture. The world is before them and who might say to the two in the photo that theirs will not be a union for the ages, that their children will not be splendid, that money and happiness are not guaranteed.

Even still, the photos surprise me, because as a child raised in a country that, despite its own troubles managing the institution, marvels skeptically at the notion of an arranged marriage, it was impossible that my parents would not seem slightly suspicious. The dynamics of such a union seemed fraught with potential for mishap. Once you've been married, what next? What do you talk about, what do you want to tell each other? Are trust and affection immediate, like an orphan reunited with his long-lost mother? If not, when does it come, how does one wait?

Though theirs was an arranged marriage it was in many ways an atypical Indian marriage for the time. My parents were alone from the time my mother arrived in the country. They could be private, angry and amorous, silly and intimate, in ways in which their lives in India would not have allowed. I think sometimes that it was these opportunities as much as it was the simple accident of their wedlock that made the photographs luminous.

A stranger probably took my favorite picture of them. They are on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, which is a distant but distinct blue-green figure in the photo. They are standing, leaning lightly against a white railing, New York Harbor and a summer sky in the background. The wind is blowing wisps of my mother's hair across her face, along her forehead and cheeks. She is wearing sunglasses, the kind Jackie Kennedy wore, and, slight and regally beautiful, she looks very much like an Indian Audrey Hepburn. Kissing her temple and smiling is my father, his nose pressed lightly into the side of her head, the frames of his glasses almost in profile. On either side of them are two white couples, dressed much like my parents, looking at the both of them, smiling approvingly. The rest of the boat is entirely unconcerned.

Another picture, taken by a friend of my father's, is a close second. There were two students, Gujarati like he was, who had completed engineering degrees in the States and with whom my father became close. My father was the first of the three to marry, and in pictures from her first years in the States, my mother is often framed with my father and his friends, the neighborhood tomboy. In this particular picture, the two friends are implied, one as the picture taker, the other a leg and arm along the left edge of the photo. My father and mother are in the picture's center, sitting in the snow, trying to attach chains onto the tires of a white car that must have been their first. My father is sitting cross-legged, looking confused but smiling slightly, the chains lying in his lap, his hands trying to fit part of the tangle over the tire. He is in a long gray overcoat, without a hat, black leather gloves on his hands. My mother is sitting next to him in a blue coat and a blue hat. She is laughing, pointing, her hands gloveless, to a spot on the tire where she presumably thought the apparatus attached. The picture appeals to me because though my father looks confused, he doesn't seem disappointed, only amateurish. The scene seems hopeful, with the excitement of a winter trip to somewhere building, not dissipating. My mother's joy is obvious, a burst of exuberance on her face.

In the year before his death, my father had ceased viewing obstacles as anything less than an affront. He seemed to be fed up with it all, annoyed to frustration that more often than he liked, he couldn't get the chains onto those damned tires. He'd rage about the people at work, about the people in town, about the country in general, about the country in descriptive particulars. He'd wonder aloud about returning to India.

After my father's cremation, relatives stayed on, some for weeks, as if their old rooms needed filling. To close each day, they sang bhajans, desperate, perfected appeals to God. Receding into night, the house rang with the sounds of their devotion, and we slept on the warm and raspy vibrations of the harmonium's last note.

But I didn't rest well. I ranged back and forth between sleep and wakefulness, stopping occasionally, en route from one to the other, in a neither-here-nor-there stupor that felt heavy and alcoholic. At some point, during each of these episodes, my father, one, then five, then ten days dead, sat down on my bed. A younger man, twenty pounds lighter, his hair was trimmed into a shined shock of black. He was in a suit, dark gray and smart, and he had on a thin black tie and black horn-rimmed glasses. His face was fresh, his eyes were bright. He'd sit there and I'd lay there, the room frozen more still and brittle than the winter world outside, till he reached down for his suitcase, and was off, out the door.

My father talked of India increasingly as he aged, but was still more excited by Super Bowl parties than by navratri garbas, and though most years he took the train into the city on the Fourth, he could never be convinced to attend the India Day parade. He was twenty-four, a year older than I am now, when he arrived in America. Thirty years later, in November 1998, he was caught in some confused middle; dead of a vegetarian diet that wasn't the least bit healthy, dead in a funeral home in upstate New York, on Washington Street, surrounded by a hundred Indian faces.

We hardly talked in the years preceding his death. We'd try to converse, feeling there was a form to be followed and that fathers and sons ought not be so silent together but, despite our efforts, we were peculiar reagents that produced a collective fizzle, our conversations abortive. I disagreed with him about most things; he wondered how I could think the way I did. In the way a person progresses from a cigarette on weekends to a few cigarettes during the week till all at once he can't remember a time, not so clearly, in any case, when he wasn't a smoker, my father and I learned in increments to be silent, each failure making the next conversation more difficult, until the very notion that we might have anything at all to talk about seemed an idea belonging to our past.

ii.

My mother is small and thin and besides the creep of gray over her head, she does not look so different from the pictures of her taken before I was born. She is mild and slow to anger. She is curious but she is cautious in her curiosity. She moderates her expressions, her smiles and her frowns, when she senses someone watching. When, early in the morning, six days after my father died, I walked into the kitchen, she was lost in some private thought and, missing my approach, I caught her face unrestrained and happy.

"Morning, Mom."

"Good morning, beta," she said.

"What were you thinking?"

"Oh, about your father."

"About what?"

"I was remembering that, after my marriage, I would wake in the night, trying to remember my husband's face."

My mother was dressed that morning in a long white cotton nightgown, flowers on the fabric multicolored and minute, faded, too, into a blurry softness by the aggression of rinse and soap and spin. She had a robe on over the gown, heavy and blue, that she had cinched round her waist. She looked, for most of the week after my father's death, antique and worn. Her clothing seemed a protective wrap, to dull jostles from her world before they disturbed her.

"You should understand," she said, continuing, "it is not easy being a new wife. Your father was in America and I was living with his family, my new family. In those days, before we had all come to America, we were seventeen people.

"Everyone was nice, I'm not saying anybody was not nice. But I was trying to remember who liked their tea strong, who liked their roti crisp, where all the things were kept, what work needed to be done. I didn't have the time to think on your father."

It was still dark outside. On the panes of the window, behind the plants that sat on the sill behind the kitchen sink, on those plates of glass, crystal fronds of frost had grown overnight, sharp and jagged, new life, almost. My mother made as though to scratch at them, but they were outside and she was inside. She tapped on the window and the arbor remained adherent. My mother shrugged.

"I knew his face, of course. We had wedding photos. But when I would think about him at night, something would happen. His nose would grow or his ears would grow, or he would have a beard. Something. I would try with my mind to give his face that right shape, to give him a shave if that is what he needed. Then, as soon as I fixed one thing, before everything was back to normal, something else would go wrong. I knew what he should look like, but I couldn't imagine him in the right way. I thought it was my failure."

She shook her head, amused at the thought. "What a headache I gave to myself!"

My mother is not a cosmopolitan Indian woman. There are women, her age, Indian, who were raised in those households where worlds of alternate possibility existed for girls. Having missed her shot at medical school, though, my mother was given no option but to locate her aspirations around her family. She stayed at home until I was fourteen and my brother was ten, working part-time as a bookkeeper out of her bedroom, because she felt that a mother's place was, should be, with her children.

It's not so hard to imagine her as a much younger woman, newly arrived in my grandfather's house, practicing her wifely chores so diligently that her husband, newly met, waiting on the other side of the world, was relegated to foggy obscurity. It is even less surprising that almost thirty years removed from the event, it seems to her like a story that involves an altogether different person in a life that, though familiar, can scarcely be believed.

On her first day in this country, my mother met Red Holtzmann, then the coach of the soon-to-be-world-championship New York Knicks. Neither she nor my father discovered this until the next year, 1970, when watching, halfheartedly, the television, they recognized the person on the screen as the man who had taught my mother to eat pizza.

My mother had flown into New York during the early summer of 1969. Too nervous to eat on the plane, she was ravenous by the time she arrived in America. My father, excited to welcome his bride, anxious as well, began to talk and explicate as soon as my mother landed, perhaps to orient her, maybe to settle himself. My mother nodded her head and kept quiet, responding when she was asked a question, unsure of how much detail her husband desired, unsure of what she should and shouldn't be saying. It was not until they had almost reached home that my father asked my mother if she was hungry.

He took her to Frank's Pizzeria and found it closed at four in the afternoon, too late for lunch, too early for dinner. But pressing his face to the glass, he sensed some movement inside and knocked on the window. Frank, big and round, hair on his arms but not on his head, opened the front door and, recognizing my father, said, "What can I do for you, Vasant? It's a little early for dinner, don't you think?"

"This is my wife," said my father, and as Frank turned to my mother she took a step backward. "She has just come from India and she is hungry."

Frank extended his hand, and my father took hold of my mother's forearm and placed it in his friend's callused paw. Frank smiled at my mother and said softly and slowly, "Well, little lady, let's see if I can't make you something that you'll like."

My father said, "Thank you," and the three of them stepped inside.

I'd often wonder what it was about my mother that drew my father to her. His choice, of course, was not made at random: his parents had offered him six options. Still, he could have chosen five other women. Perhaps he picked my mother because she was attractive. I say this objectively -- my father was less handsome than my mother was pretty. "Beauty and the beast," he'd say when he looked with us at old photographs. She'd protest, but there was some truth in what my father said, we all recognized this, especially my brother and I, who looked more like our father than we hoped to.

But my father would have understood that this was not a decision to be lightly taken. He would spend the rest of his life with this woman. He might have recognized, through whatever conversation he had with her, that this was someone who was his match, as acute as he was forgetful, as neat as he was messy. It's possible that this was evident at their meeting, but maybe not. Maybe they grew to complement each other later, my father realizing he could be dissolute with his memory because his wife would keep the trains running on time, my mother's temper growing moderate as my father's grew labile.

My dad was probably concerned with his household. He would have wanted a wife who could raise children and cook and clean. But then, none of the six women my father met would have f