The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  He aims a finger at himself, eyebrows raised in a question.

  “Come on, man. You have to be here every week anyway.”

  He shrugs without protest and puts on the costume over his clothes, stuffing a sofa cushion into the red shirt and tying the black plastic belt around himself. Dasher punches him in the pillow-stomach. Anurag looks at himself in the mirrored door of our prayer room and cracks up. “Yo, this is crazy, man! Ahahaha. Okay, I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  I’m in the living room watching a recording of the latest Gilmore Girls episode because I don’t have any friends who still live in Halifax. “Hey, Mom, guess what I’m watching?” She’s in the foyer, carrying a laundry basket at her hip.

  “Oh, Lorelai and daughter.” She puts down the basket and perches on the arm of the couch. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say the show’s real name.

  We used to watch Gilmore Girls together every Tuesday night, while my dad snoozed in an armchair. This was for the best. When he was awake, he asked a lot of questions and pointed out logical flaws, like the fact that Rory was accepted to both Harvard and Yale even though she was so insipid.

  My mom used to tell me we were like Lorelai and Rory—not only had one been in the womb of the other, but they were also best friends. “Yeah, not quite,” I’d respond. They were closer than clones. In comparison, my mom and I grew uncomfortable during the romantic scenes, the next-level Jess-and-Rory chemistry burning up the screen as my dad snored away. My mom has always been such a confusing mix of traditional and savvy and witty and prudish. I didn’t really value her sense of humour until I was in Baltimore, where I fell into the habit of texting her. Her messages are like Emily Dickinson poems, all dashes and unexpected capitalization. One time I sent her a photo of a Hindu artifact I’d tripped upon at the Walters Museum—a stone sculpture of Nandi, a decorated, watchful bull like the one outside my parents’ temple. She texted back: Where did they Steal Him from.

  “Did you have a childhood crush, Mom?” I ask her now, partly to tease her, but also because I just really want to know.

  “Oh no,” she says. “We didn’t have things like that.”

  “Like what? Human emotions?”

  “Ha ha ha.” She and my dad have this artificial ha-laugh they do when they don’t appreciate my jokes. I don’t know which one of them started it. “You know I’m getting old.” She’s in her mid-forties. “I don’t remember from so long ago. What is good for memory? Sudoku? Ginkgo biloba?”

  Savithri comes up behind my mother and puts her arm companionably around her. Doesn’t she have her own parents? My feet are stretched out on the sofa, but I move them to make room for her. In this episode of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Christopher are bickering. They have recently gotten married.

  “Well, we all knew that was a bad idea,” says my mom.

  On the screen, Luke and Christopher—Lorelai’s recurrent suitors—silently charge towards each other in the Stars Hollow square.

  “Why are these men fighting?” asks Savithri.

  “They’re in a love triangle,” I explain.

  “Has Lorelai been married before?” my mom wonders. Neither of us knows.

  “I’m never getting married,” says Savithri.

  My mom turns to her in alarm, her mouth beginning to form the question she doesn’t ask.

  “I have too many things I want to do,” Savithri adds firmly, eyes fixed on the TV. For a moment, I love her, if only because she has failed my mother in a way I haven’t yet.

  “But I sent you that boy’s photo.” My mom sounds injured.

  “I know, Aunty. Thank you so much for thinking of me, really. But I am not interested in finding a husband. Marriage just isn’t for me.” From the way this comes out—formal and succinct, and perhaps a little tired—I have a feeling this is a statement Savithri has made before.

  I see my mom working this out in her mind, preparing to protest, though she can’t. Savithri isn’t her daughter.

  * * *

  With my mom’s sewing machine and a few yards of soft camel-coloured fleece I buy on discount at Fabricville, I sew eight smocks, and eight pairs of reindeer antlers for the kids to wear like headbands. In the collection of old costumes, I find Rudolph a red sponge nose. From the neighbour’s yard, I scavenge a cardboard microwave box while it’s only slightly damp from the snow, then cut off the top and bottom and shape it into a sleigh. I add a curlicued base using extra pieces of cardboard. The plan is for Anurag to wear the box-sleigh over his costume, so it appears as though he’s sitting in it. I paint the whole thing red and gold, then add two long ribbons at the front to tie to the reindeers’ wrists, to keep them in formation as they “pull” Santa along.

  One night after dinner, I’m trimming the last thread on the eighth pair of antlers while Savithri and my mom rehearse their piece for the show in the living room. I can hear my mom tapping out the rhythm with her palm on her lap and humming a few bars—or whatever bars are called in Carnatic music. Savithri’s feet are light on the hardwood. Then they stop and discuss. “I think we should try that part again,” suggests Savithri. They repeat the section. Then stop and discuss again. This goes on for hours.

  Later, I hear Savithri call out. “Nina? Uncle? Please come join us for one minute?”

  My dad comes over from the kitchen where he was secretly eating peanuts straight from the cupboard. When we go into the living room, Savithri is flushed and winded, in tights and a cotton tunic, strands of hair coming loose from her ponytail. She’s pulling wrapped gifts out of a tote bag. “I know it isn’t Christmas just yet, but I have something for you all.”

  “Oh, no,” says my mom. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Why did you do that?” asks my dad.

  Over the past two decades, my family has phased out Christmas. A photo in our 1986 album shows stockings hung on the mantel, and my dad in a Santa costume, holding up an unsuspecting two-year-old me. At some point I got old enough to realize that Santa wasn’t an Indian immigrant. It was around the time we decided stockings were nonsense—just whose enormous socks were these supposed to be? And then the tree stopped working. A branch went missing so we had to turn that side to the wall. We had inherited the tree from an uncle, and it was the plastic kind with a base and trunk that you needed an engineering degree to assemble.

  Then we ran out of gift ideas. We already had too much stuff. I’d buy my parents tickets to a show at Neptune, but they preferred the lazy home-theatre experience. My mom would go to Bayers Lake and gift me blouses with wide arms and big flower prints and bizarre cut-outs—maybe it was cruise wear? “We don’t really need anything…” one of us would say, thinking of the trash heap of last year’s Christmas.

  Savithri presents my mom with a membership to an Indian music streaming site, handing her the log-in info she’s printed inside a glittering card. “It’s popular in India now,” she tells her. For my dad, she produces a wrapped item in an odd shape. He unwraps it shyly, revealing a megaphone. “To grab everyone’s attention in the temple.”

  “Thank you soo soo much, Savithri!” my dad announces into the megaphone.

  Then she takes out one last gift from the bag. It’s for me.

  “Oh, you didn’t have to…” She passes me a small cream-coloured box. Inside, there’s a silver pen, cushioned in black velvet. On the side of the pen, my name is engraved in delicate script.

  “I hope it’s the right thing. I heard you’re a writer.”

  I examine her voice for sarcasm, but there isn’t any. “Oh, that was just…I’m not…”

  My parents look away and fidget with their gifts, while Savithri smiles hopefully at me.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say to her. It’s a pen for someone with dreams. I hold it in writing position. It’s almost weightless.

  * * *

  With only days until our performance,
Anurag comes to rehearsal and hands me a CD. It has Jingle Bells Sharpied on it in boyish print. “Try this version,” he says. When I press play on the CD player, there’s a tearing sound.

  “What is this?”

  “Just shut up and listen for a sec.”

  It’s Bing Crosby’s “Jingle Bells,” but slower, with new gaps in the music. Spliced in are the background instrumentals from “Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh,” from 1942: A Love Story, an iconic Indian song and a favourite among the temple gang. The movie came out in 1994, but the song feels older—it’s gentle and bright, innocent and wistful, with humble instrumentation. Anurag’s mix never reaches the lyrics, and if you know the original song, this creates an almost unbearable feeling of waiting.

  Despite the change, the kids’ steps fall easily into the new music, as though Anurag built their delays into it, leaving time for their legs to jiggle into place.

  “Holy crap, Anurag! Are you some kind of DJ mixologist?” I don’t know what the terminology is.

  “I dabble,” he says.

  “This is so good!” I high-five him and he tips his baseball cap at me.

  * * *

  On the night of the show, the results of the God Drawing Contest decorate the temple’s entryway. The drawings’ proportions are all a little off—a wonky forehead; a goddess eye looking askance—giving the entryway a haunted house effect. It’d be a fun joke to bring a date to the temple at night and then leave him there.

  “Jingle Bells” is a hit. “Christmas with Indian spice” is one uncle’s glowing review. The kids move slightly out of sync, skipping like a record, in the most hilarious and endearing way. They frolic through propped-up cardboard evergreens, on which I’ve draped string lights and tinsel I found in storage near our family’s defunct Christmas tree. They dance past artificial snow I made out of big billows of cotton harvested from the bodies of my old stuffed animals. Anurag is unrecognizable with a fake white beard. He even made his own fake eyebrows out of white felt. When the kids run off the stage, I give each one a three-pack of Ferrero Rocher, to compensate for the magnets they’ll receive at the end when the participants are called up during the meandering Vote of Thanks.

  Savithri’s dance is last. I sit amidst a gaggle of children still wearing their antlers, uncrinkling the gold foil to inhale their chocolates. My mom sits on a small carpet at the side of the stage next to three musicians playing mridangam, veena, and flute. The temple hall is dark and hushed as she begins to sing into a microphone, keeping time with her hand on her leg. A spotlight follows Savithri as she enters and takes deliberate steps to the centre of the stage. Each of her movements holds distinct clarity and control, and each step matches exactly the pace of my mother’s palm. Savithri is poised, flawless, sweating from exertion. Even as her dancing seems effortless, you can see how hard she has worked.

  * * *

  My dad drives Savithri to the airport. She waves at me and my mom from the car window and then she’s gone. Christmas Day comes and goes, uncelebrated in our house. I line up some tutoring jobs by emailing a flyer to the parents of my reindeer.

  After Christmas, Anurag texts me an invitation to see a band he’s in with some college kids. The venue is an unmarked building not far from the Commons, and inside it resembles a murderer’s studio apartment, with painted-out windows, next to which the band sets up. There’s some seating—a sunken couch in front and a scattering of mismatched chairs. The rest is standing room. It’s hot in the small space. I hold my jacket and scarf in my armpit. The room is smoky, like maybe dry ice is hidden somewhere behind an amp.

  Anurag stands by the bar, beside stacks of red plastic cups. “Are you old enough to be in here?” I ask him.

  “Relax,” he says. “Be cool.”

  The crowd is barely college-age. Blasé youths sport piercings, half-shaved heads, and first tries at facial hair. They wear ill-fitting clothing that fails to hide their attractiveness. There’s one set of parents who are so excited to be there they buy me a drink.

  Anurag nods at someone across the room and then heads over to the drums.

  A guy with scene hair, one of the band members, gives a quirky and philosophical introduction. “We’re observers. Pattern-makers.” He pays homage to the band’s wealth of musical influences, listing names I am not hip enough to recognize. He refers to himself as a “rhythm scientist” and I’m like, hang on, can you just call yourself a scientist?

  I visited the band’s website earlier, thinking I could acquaint myself with their music to appear less like a neophyte. But the clips I listened to were atonal and arrhythmic. I didn’t get it at all. At the start, I thought the band was tuning or warming up, but it turned out that was part of the song. The music begins like this now, a mess of tones, manic and chromatic. You can only tell it’s moving forward by the volume, which gets gradually louder.

  It’s a gentle crowd. Most stand almost still, good-naturedly bobbing their heads. One guy wearing a bike helmet flails his arms with abandon.

  Now the music nearly falls together but not quite; it’s three time signatures at once, with syncopated rhythms, the string instruments tautly ruminating like the musical equivalent of anxiety. I watch the girl at the xylophone throwing around her mallets in a method that looks random but must be practised, the violinist refusing to release her note, the keyboard player leaning into the sustain pedal like he’s urging it forward, and Anurag, drumsticks in hand, paused, waiting for the beat to land.

  When it does, it’s a cathartic crash. The music picks up speed, while the musicians nod and jerk their heads, eyes pressed shut in trance-like concentration. A drumstick flies out of Anurag’s hand and he just grabs another and keeps playing. The sound is overwhelming, the percussion replacing my pulse and knocking me out of joint, the hi-hat shimmering in my chest. I’m not here anymore. I’m plucked out of this room and dropped back into Baltimore.

  The night of one of my many panicked phone calls home. House centipedes scrambling across my ceiling. Roaches crawling in my bed. I kept thinking I felt their legs on me. Attending class and then avoiding my apartment by going to the library and trying to read all the Faulkner I’d been assigned—why was there so much Faulkner? The more books I read, the more books there were left to read. When the library closed, I’d go back to my place and then watch three hours of whatever I could find for free online, the room lit like a stadium in Texas. I got into this habit of phoning my parents to occupy my brain. It started out as complaining—about roaches, about how lonely I was. I could hear their impatience, the weary anticipation in their voices—they were at work; they had guests over. These were long phone calls, twice a day, and then three times, and then four, and then in the middle of the night—it was an hour later in Halifax, but sometimes I was too afraid to sleep, and I knew they would always answer the phone. They took shifts. Soon I was crying so hard it turned into screaming. We had the kinds of conversations we never have in person, because it is too much to look into somebody’s face and watch them breaking down.

  “Be brave,” my dad would say, over and over.

  “What does that mean—be brave,” I spat, during that last phone call. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  He booked the flight and paid for it. A week later, I flew home. I cried messily in the airport, in front of strangers, and as the plane lifted off, I already knew I would regret giving up so easily.

  * * *

  After New Year’s, my dad comes to my room to talk to me. “I have made a plan,” he says. “You will go back to school and finish your degree. You can still go back. The classes haven’t started yet, right? You can still go back, no problem. I have made a call to a couple we know there, just an hour outside of Baltimore. You can stay with them, no problem.”

  “I can’t,” I tell him.

  “No, listen to me. I can even come with you. I will take time from work and stay there until you are comfortable.” />
  It’s true; it has only been six weeks. I haven’t missed much at all aside from end-of-term parties and the winter break. My grades were fine. My partly completed thesis is still right there in my suitcase.

  “I can’t go back. It’s too late. I already told them I was leaving.”

  Before I left, I’d notified my advisor, submitted a statement of my intent to withdraw, and filled out forms with the registrar. I dropped out in a responsible and official way. And I signed away my funding. I can’t get it back.

  After I explain this to him, my dad sits down at the edge of my bed, thinking. I imagine his hair turning whiter in front of me as his mind churns for a solution; then I watch his body deflate. In Halifax, the snow is still falling, building its cold, quiet weight, insulating our house from sound.

  “It’s important to finish what we started. I should have…” He can’t look me in the eye. “It is my fault,” he says. “I wish I had told you to stay there.”

  You Are Loved by Me

  ALWAYS KEEP A DESK between you and your student. Always leave the door open when you’re alone with a student. Never hug a student. Never even think about touching a student.

  That’s about all I remember from teachers college—that and wondering if these rules have always been taught. None of my training seems of any use to me now, as I’m delivering a spiel about plagiarism, at the very start of my first day as a real teacher. To the fresh group of Grade 9s in front of me, I say, “So my friend was telling me about this time he was teaching a class and a student of his turned in a short story.” I actually read about this on an internet forum, but I’d like to give the impression of having a rich social life. “The story has some typos, but it’s decent writing. The protagonist has a wooden leg—that’s an interesting detail, right?”