One Amazing Thing Read online

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  The dark was full of women’s voices, keening in a language he did not know, so that at first he thought he was back in the war. The thought sucked the air from his lungs and left him choking. There was dirt on his tongue, shards under his fingertips. He smelled burning. He moved his hands over his face, over the uneven bones of his head, the stubble coming in already, the scar over his eyebrow that told him nothing. But when he touched the small, prickly stones in his ears, he remembered who he was.

  I am Cameron, he said to himself. With the words, the world as it was formed around him: piles of rubble, shapes that might be broken furniture. Some of the shapes moaned. The voices—no, it was only one voice—fell into an inexorable rhythm, repeating a name over and over. After a while he was able to think past the droning. He checked his pants pockets. The right one held his inhaler. He pulled it out and shook it carefully. There were maybe five doses left. He saw in his mind the tidy cabinet in his bathroom, the new bottle waiting on the second shelf. He pushed away regret and anger, which for him had always been mixed together, and focused on positiveness the way the holy man would have, if he’d been stuck here. If Cameron was careful, five doses could last him for days. They would be out of here long before that.

  His keys were in his left pocket. A mini-flashlight was strung through the chain. He stood and passed the pencil-thin ray over the room. A different part of his brain clicked into being, the part that weighed situations and decided what needed to be done. He welcomed it.

  One part of the ceiling had collapsed. People would have to be kept as far as possible from that area in case more followed. Some folks were huddled under furniture along a wall. They could remain there for the moment. He searched for flames. Nothing. His mind must have conjured the burning smell from memory. He sniffed for the acrid odor that would signal a broken gas pipe and was satisfied that there were none nearby. Somewhere he could hear water falling in an uneven rhythm, starting and stopping and starting again, but the floor was dry. There were two figures at the door that led to the passage, trying to pull it open.

  He sprang forward with a yell, shocking the weeper into silence. “Hey!” he shouted, though he knew noise was unsafe. “Stop! Don’t open it! That’s dangerous!” He sprinted as fast as he could through the rubble and grabbed their shoulders. The older man allowed himself to be pulled away, but the younger one flung him off with a curse and wrenched at the handle again.

  A splinter of rage jabbed Cameron’s chest, but he tried to keep his voice calm. “The door may be what’s holding up this part of the room. If you open it suddenly, something else might collapse. Also, there may be a pile of rubble pressing against the door from the outside. If it’s dislodged, who knows what could happen. We will try to open it—but we have to figure out how to do it right.”

  Something glistened on the young man’s cheekbone. In the inadequate light, Cameron couldn’t tell if it was blood or tears. But there was no mistaking the fury in his shoulders and arms, the lowered angle of his head. He came at Cameron, propelled by compressed fear. Cameron had seen men like him before. They could hurt you something serious. He stepped to the side and brought the edge of his hand down on the base of the man’s skull—but carefully. Such a blow could snap the neck vertebrae. The men he had faced elsewhere would have known to twist away, to block with an upraised elbow. But this boy—that’s how Cameron suddenly thought of him, a boy younger than his son would have been, had he lived—took the full force of the blow and fell facedown on the floor and stayed there. In the shadows someone whimpered, then stopped abruptly, as though a palm had been clapped over a mouth. Cameron massaged his hand. He was out of shape. He had let himself go intentionally, hoping never again to have to do things like what he had just done.

  “I’m sorry I had to hit him,” he called into the semidarkness. “He wouldn’t listen.” He repressed the urge to add, I am not a violent man. A declaration like that would only spook them further. He held up his hands to show that they held nothing except the minuscule flashlight. “Please don’t be afraid of me,” he said. He wanted to tell them what he’d seen in Mexico, where he’d gone to help after an earthquake in one of his attempts at expiation. People who had been too impatient and had tried to dig themselves out of the rubble often died as more debris collapsed on them, while people who had stayed put—sometimes without food and water for a week or more—were finally, miraculously rescued. But it was too much to try to explain, and the memory of all the mangled bodies he hadn’t been able to save were too painful. He merely said, “If he’d yanked that door open like he was aiming to, he could have killed us all.”

  Silence pressed upon him, unconvinced, unforgiving. Finally, from underneath a chair, a woman’s voice asked, “So did you kill him instead?”

  Cameron let out the breath he’d been holding unawares and said, “Not at all! He’s stirring already. See for yourself. You can come out from under your chair. It seems safe enough.”

  “I can’t move too well,” the woman said. “I think I’ve broken my arm. Can you help me?”

  He felt a loosening in his shoulder blades at the last words, the corners of his mouth quirking up. Who would have thought he would find anything to smile about in a time like this? He stepped forward.

  “I’ll sure give it a try,” he said.

  MALATHI GRIPPED THE EDGE OF THE CUSTOMER-SERVICE COUNTER with her left hand, carefully avoiding the broken glass that littered it, and raised herself surreptitiously off the floor, just enough to check on what the black man was doing. She needed to fix her sari, which had fallen off her shoulder, but her right hand was pressed tightly against her mouth, mashing her lips against her teeth, and she dared not relax it. Because then she wouldn’t be able to keep in the cry that was also a supplication—Krishna Krishna Krishna—but most of all a prayer for forgiveness, for she might have been the reason the earthquake had happened. And if the black man heard her, he might decide to turn around and walk toward her. Who knew what he would do then?

  When her relatives in India—aunties, grandmothers, spinster cousins—heard that she was coming to America, they had shuddered—with horror or envy, Malathi wasn’t sure which—and warned her to stay away from black men, who were dangerous. (And they had been right, hadn’t they? Look how he ran up to the door and attacked that poor Indian boy, who was half his size. For the moment Malathi forgot that the auntie brigade, ecumenical in their distrust of the male species, had gone on to caution her to stay away from white men, who were lecherous, and Indian American men, who were sly.)

  No one, however, had thought to caution her about earthquakes. Where she came from, when people said America, many images flashed in their heads. But an earthquake was not one of them.

  Malathi had followed the aunties’ advice—partly because there was not much opportunity to do otherwise, and partly because she had other plans. She shared a tiny apartment with three other women who had been hired by the consulate and brought over from India around the same time. They spent all their spare time together, riding the bus to work and parting only at the elevator (the others worked upstairs in Tourism), walking to Patel Brothers Spice House to buy sambar powder and avakaya pickle, watching Bollywood movies on a secondhand DVD player, oiling one another’s hair at night as they discussed hopes and plans. The other women wanted to get married. From their salaries, which had sounded lavish when translated into rupees but were meager when you had to pay for everything in dollars, they put money aside each month for their dowries, for even though dowries had been officially banned in India, everyone knew that without one you had no chance of landing a halfway decent man.

  But Malathi, who had noted how her two sisters were ordered around by their husbands, had no intention of following in their foolish footsteps. She had set her heart on something different. When she had saved enough money, she was going back—though not to her hometown of Coimbatore—to open a beauty shop. At night she clutched her lumpy pillow, closed her eyes, and was t
ransported to it: the brass bells on the double doors (curtained for privacy) that tinkled as clients came in, the deliciously air-conditioned room walled with shining mirrors, the aproned employees who greeted her with polite, folded hands, the capacious swivel chairs where women could get their eyebrows threaded or their hair put up in elaborate lacquered buns for weddings or relax while their faces were massaged with a soothing yogurt and sandalwood paste.

  Then Mr. Mangalam had arrived at the visa office and derailed her.

  Malathi’s roommates agreed that Mr. Mangalam was the best-looking man at the consulate. With his swashbuckling mustache, designer sunglasses, and a surprisingly disarming smile, he looked much younger than his age (which, Malathi had surreptitiously dipped into his file to discover, was forty-five). He was the only middle-aged man she knew without a paunch and ear hairs. But alas, these gifts that Nature had heaped on Mr. Mangalam were of no use to her, because there already existed a Mrs. Mangalam, smiling elegantly from the framed photo on his desk. (The photo frames had been provided by the consulate to all its officers, with strict instructions to fill and display them. It would make the Americans who came to the office feel more comfortable, they were told, since Americans believed that the presence of a smiling family on a man’s table was proof of his moral stability.)

  Malathi, a practical young woman, had decided to write Mr. Mangalam off. This, however, turned out to be harder than she had expected, for he seemed to have taken a liking to her. Malathi, who harbored no illusions about her looks (dark skin, round cheeks, snub nose) was mystified by this development. But there it was. He smiled at her as he passed by the customer-service window in the morning. The days it was her turn to brew tea for the office, he praised the taste and asked for an extra cup. When, to celebrate Tamil New Year, he brought in a box of Maisoorpak, it was to her he offered the first diamond-shaped sweet. On occasions when she stepped into his office to consult him about an applicant’s papers, he requested her to sit, as polite as though she were a client. Sometimes he asked how she was planning to spend the weekend. When she said she had no plans, he looked wistful, as though he would have liked to invite her to go someplace with him—the Naz 8 Cinema, maybe, where the latest Shahrukh Khan mega-hit was playing, or Madras Mahal, which made the crispiest dosas but was too expensive for her to afford.

  Could anyone blame her, then, for visiting his office a little more often than was necessary? For accepting, once in a while, a spoonful of the silvered betel nuts he kept in his top drawer? For listening when he told her how lonely he was, so far from home, just like herself? For allowing his fingers to close over hers when she handed him a form? In idle moments it was her habit to doodle on scraps of paper. One day she found herself writing, amid vines and floral flourishes, Malathi Mangalam. It was schoolgirlish. Dangerous. Symptomatic of an inner tectonic shift that disconcerted her. She tore the paper into tiny pieces and threw them away. Still, she couldn’t help but think the syllables had a fine ring, and sometimes at night, instead of visualizing her beloved beauty shop, she whispered them into her pillow.

  Today, Mr. Mangalam had pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

  Malathi had to admit that the action, though it surprised her, was not totally unexpected. Hadn’t he, just yesterday, placed in her palm a small golden cardboard box? She had opened it to find four white chocolates, each shaped like a shell and tucked into its own nest. Try one, he urged. When she shook her head bashfully, he took one out, ran it over her lips, and pushed it into her mouth. The crust had been crunchy, but the inside—it was the softest, sweetest thing she’d ever tasted. Guilt and elation had filled her throat as she swallowed it.

  That same guilty elation had made her scalp tingle as he pressed his lips against her mouth. If he had groped or grabbed, she would have pushed him away. But he was gentle; he murmured respectfully as he nuzzled her ear. (Oh, how deliciously his mustache tickled her cheek!) Though Malathi had never been kissed before, thanks to the romantic movies she’d grown up on, she knew what to do. She lowered shy eyes and leaned into his chest, letting her lips brush his jaw even as a worrisome thought pricked her: by dallying with a married man, she was piling up bad karma. When he drew in his breath with a little shudder, a strange power surged through her. But then her glance fell on Mrs. Mangalam’s photo, which sat next to a small sandalwood statue of Lord Ganapathi. For the first time she noticed that Mrs. Mangalam’s shoulder-length hair was exquisitely styled—obviously from a tiptop-quality beauty salon. She displayed on her right hand (which was artfully positioned under her chin) three beautiful diamond rings. Had the man whose face was currently buried in Malathi’s throat given them to her? Mrs. Mangalam smiled sanguinely at Malathi—sanguinely, and with some pity. The smile indicated two things: first, that she was the kind of woman Malathi could never hope to become; and second, that no matter what follies her husband was indulging in right now, ultimately he would return to her.

  That smile had made Malathi untangle herself from Mr. Mangalam. When he bowed over her hand to plant a kiss on the inside of her wrist, she had snatched her hand back. Ignoring his queries as to what was wrong, she had fixed her sari and her expression and hurried out of the office.

  Before she had taken ten steps, the wheel of karma began rolling, and retribution struck in the form of the earthquake.

  IN THE SPARSE GLOW OF THE MINI-FLASHLIGHT, MALATHI SAW the black man holding someone by the elbow, pulling her to the center of the room. It was the Indian girl—though could one really call her Indian, brought up as she had clearly been in decadent Western ways? From the first, Malathi had disliked her because of her hip-hugging jeans, the thick college book she carried, as if to advertise her intelligence, and her American impatience. But now when the man grasped her arm and the girl gave a yelp of pain, Malathi couldn’t stop herself from sending out an answering cry. She regretted it immediately, because the man let go of the girl and started walking toward her. She ducked under the counter, though without much hope. The glass that normally sequestered her from the people who came into the visa office had shattered in the quake. It would be easy for him to lean over and grab her.

  The man did lean over the counter, though he did not reach for her. He was saying something, but panic had siphoned away her English. He repeated the words more slowly. The syllables ricocheted around in her head, unintelligible. She shut her eyes and tried to imagine the beauty shop, with herself safe in its calm center. But the floor rose up, the mirrors cracked and fell from the walls, and the ground was full of shards like those under her hands.

  Behind her she heard Mr. Mangalam’s door open. Glass crunched under his unsteady shoes as he walked toward her and the black man. Though she had not premeditated it, she found herself flinging herself at him and pummeling his chest, crying out in Tamil, “It’s our fault! It’s our fault! We made this happen!”

  When the earthquake had hit, Mr. Mangalam had ducked underneath his desk. Subsequently, the desk had slid to the other end of the room, trapping him against a wall. He had pushed and kicked for several minutes before managing to extricate himself. When he rose to his feet, disconcerted by how badly his hands were shaking, his eyes had fallen on his prize possession—no, not the photo, which lay on the carpet smiling with sly triumph, but the sandalwood Ganapathi that his mother had given him—to remove all obstacles from your path—when he had left home for college. The desk in its journey across the room had dislodged the deity and crushed it against the wall. He had felt a dreadful hollowness, as though someone had scooped out his insides. He, too, had been brought up with a belief in karma. Accusations similar to what Malathi was currently sobbing against his shirtfront had swirled like a miasma through his brain. No matter how resolutely he pushed them away as superstition, wisps kept coming back, weakening him.

  Mr. Mangalam did not have any prior experience of earthquakes. He had, however, dealt with hysterical women before. He took hold of Malathi’s shoulders and shook her until she fell silent. “Don’t
be stupid,” he told her in Tamil, using the icy tone that had worked well in past situations. “It was an earthquake. Earthquakes have nothing to do with people.” In English he added, “Pull yourself together and listen to what this gentleman is asking you.”

  Cameron didn’t like how the officer had shaken the woman and wanted to say something about it, but there were more pressing issues. “Do you have a first-aid kit?” he asked again, enunciating the words as clearly as he could. “A flashlight? How about a radio with batteries? Tylenol? Is the phone working?”

  “I checked the phone in my office,” Mr. Mangalam said. “The line’s dead.” He repeated the other items for Malathi, substituting terms she would be familiar with—torch, Anacin, medicine box—until she nodded uncertainly and wandered off into the shadowy recesses of the office.

  Dazed as she seemed, Cameron didn’t expect much from her. But in a few minutes he saw a bobbing circle of light moving toward him. She placed the flashlight on the countertop, along with a plastic Walmart bag that held two batteries and a white metal box painted with a large, red cross. Inside he found alcohol swabs, a few Band-Aids, a bottle of aspirin, some cold medication, a tube of antiseptic ointment, and a container of dental floss. It was better than nothing, though not by much.