We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (12 page)

But she was interrupted by one of the twins who came up to her, and said,

“Riya, can we see your book on the Spaceship?”

And Riya said, “Of course you can, just be careful,” and she went to the bookshelf to pull down the codex. She was just about to place it on a coffee table, when it slipped and fell with a thunk. Riya started picking it up, the codex turned to the pages with the visual representation of the code. Riya looked at the alien code; except that this time intuition washed over her, the code, the alien code was suddenly not so alien after all. The patterns were made with components that were the same as the seals from her mother’s trunk. It was clear now: the Spaceship was waiting for a response from the
Vaartas
but not just any
Vaarta
family. A particular
Vaarta
lineage. They were waiting for a response from her.

Droplet

Rahul Kanakia

The drive north from the airport took Subhir Joshi’s family through the rotting heart of California. From behind the wheel, his American-born father, Rajiv, pointed out boyhood landmarks, while Subhir’s mother, Priya, joined in with reminisces from their college days. But Subhir wasn’t paying attention to them. He was mesmerized by the “KEA”s and “T-RG-T”s that had been fading away and shedding letters for years, by the empty roads, by the entire overpasses that had been cordoned off or demolished, by the wasteland of miles where there were just the ghosts of towns. This was to be the land of Subhir’s exile.

At home, in Bangalore, millions of people would be on the streets by now. Even walking to the market took half an hour, not just because of the traffic, but because Subhir would be stopped three times by friends shouting from street corners, cars, and apartment windows. Those same friends had dutifully broadcast their congratulations at Subhir’s acceptance to one of America’s top universities, and then privately joked with him about “going to school amongst the ruins”. Subhir’s nostalgic father had responded to his son’s summer of protests by bringing him here two days early to sightsee with old friends.

“Aravind hasn’t seen you since you were a baby,” Subhir’s father said. “You know, your Thanksgiving breaks will be too short to fly all the way back to India. Maybe you could go and stay at his motel, like your mother used to.”

“No, I’ll come home,” Subhir said. “Maybe next time, the U.S. government won’t let me re-enter this country.” The immigration officials at SFO had spent an hour staring at Subhir’s student visa, and making dozens of calls from behind their glass partition, before stamping his passport without an explanation. The Alienation Acts were almost two decades old, but Americans still didn’t hesitate to use them against any foreigner who looked out of place.

His mother twisted in her seat. “
Baap re baap
, once when I arrived for the beginning of the term,” she said. “I was taken to a room and not allowed to leave. Your father’s father had to call some politician just to find me.”

The rental car passed into the parched golden hills of Northern California. Abandoned farmhouses and fields lined the sides of the highway, interspersed by flashes of dusty, boarded-up towns. They turned off the highway at the first sign for “Sinclair” and made two left turns, pulling to a stop in the near-empty parking lot of a motel owned by Rajiv’s childhood friend, Aravind Patel.

The Holi Inn looked like a setpiece from the Bollywood summer blockbuster of three years ago,
Cowboy Singh
. Subhir remembered the ending of the movie: The turbaned motel owner was sitting behind the front desk, loaded shotgun in hand, waiting for the sheriff to serve the eviction notice, when he looked up and saw the cross he’d put on the wall to ingratiate himself with the whites, the stupid sacrilegious cross that hadn’t even worked, and he took it down and smashed it again and again on the counter. After the mob finally burst in, the camera panned up from his body to the bullet-ridden portrait of Guru Nanak on the wall.

Subhir stared at the flaking tan paint of the Holi Inn. Had there been gunshots here? Had Aravind fought to keep his land? Had he signed his business over to a white patsy, some busboy or clerk, and kept the latter in line with gifts and threats? What did Aravind have to give up in order to be allowed to stay?

Aravind had loaded down the American desk clerk with their bags and then ushered Subhir’s family, past the “closed” sign barring the hotel’s restaurant, to a table. He’d bobbed his shiny white hat at them and told them to “Get yourselves comfortable,” and then disappeared into the kitchen.

“
Pappa
¸ why does Uncle speak that way?” Subhir said to his father.

“
Hai Ram
¸” Subhir’s mother said, “even your father once spoke like that, before university cured him of it. His friends at Stanford used to make such fun of him. But Uncle never left Sinclair district. There was no reason for him to change.”

“I can see that,” Subhir said. License plates from what looked like all fifty-one states hung on the walls, over a full mural—depicting the length of “Highway 66”—that stretched across all four walls. Aravind exited from a door just below Santa Monica, trailed by a young Indian woman in a red uniform shirt who was balancing a large tray.

“Sit, sit,” Aravind said to her. “I told you to let Teresa bring the food.”

“You wanted me back for the summer,” she said. “If I’m here, I’m working. I won’t let them say I’m just a lazy quota brat.”

She smiled at the table. Her nose stud and hennaed arms struck Subhir as curiously old-fashioned, like she’d modeled herself on his mother’s mother.

“Chicken enchiladas for you, Mr. Joshi. My dad insisted that you’d be hungering for Mexican food. But I have
samosas
,
aloo tikki
,
papri chaat
,
bhel puri
, and
pani puri
for the real Gujuratis.”

“My daughter Nisha,” Aravind said, “has spent the last three summer breaks teaching our Mexican cook how to whip up Gujarati snacks.”

“This table looks like a
chaat
-stand,” Subhir’s mother said, nodding. “Are you in attendance at Stanford as well?”

“Wouldn’t I wish!” Aravind said. “She’s been studying computer science at IIT-Bombay. Took the entrance exam without my knowing. I said, ‘the world has enough sliderules. All they’ll teach you is how to cram for tests and take orders.’ Told her to take Yale up on their offer. Or, hell, Berkeley woulda been even better. Major in English and minor in raising Cain. But she ignored me, as usual.”

Nisha rolled her eyes. “Six of the world’s twenty richest men went to IITs. Even the ranchhands who get trashed in here every Saturday know IITB is the best engineering school in the world. But he wouldn’t even take me to visit.”

It was Subhir’s turn to roll his eyes. Of course she’d gotten into the Indian Institute of Technology. With the quotas for Diasporic Indians, any Brit or American or Australian who got a score above the minimum cutoff could get in, while Subhir—who’d scored in the top decile—had failed to secure a spot. Twice.

She took a seat next to her father, who belatedly said, “Not that computer science has to get in the way of having a little fun, Subhir. Especially at Stanford. Your folks met in that department, after all. I remember the first time your dad brought Priya home. I had to make all the beds for a week while my mom whipped up feasts for them. She was convinced your mom had to be
really
homesick if she’d settled for Ray here.”

The table drifted into nostalgic remembrances for the better part of an hour as Nisha poured the whiskey and Subhir stared at the walls. He noticed that all three of them were careful to keep it light, and avoid the topic of his family’s final expulsion. Finally, his mother visibly yawned, and the table stood up.

“Have you all seen the old homestead yet?” Aravind said. “The Koreskys—the folks who tried to farm it after you all left—finally packed it in. Place is abandoned now, but lots of it is still standing. We can take the kids tomorrow. They’ll get a kick out of it.”

“Do you remember this at all?” Subhir’s father said.

Their car was parked on the overgrown grass at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch. Nisha and Aravind had retreated towards it, leaving the visitors amongst the wreckage. Subhir and his mother were sitting on the steps to the bungalow’s cracking front porch. To their right, the rusting hulk of some sort of farm vehicle was sitting in front of a barn that had fallen in on itself. The next closest building was a silo in the distance, no more than a thumbnail tall.

“Though there would have been more trees when you were a baby,” his father said. “And when I was your age, all of this was orchards.”

Now there wasn’t a tree in sight. The grass had colonized these gently rolling hills where Subhir’s grandparents had struggled to eke a living from some of the richest, most fertile land in the world. But the summer droughts kept getting longer. And the water demands from fishermen, ecologists, and the thirsty cities of Southern California kept growing. And every year, his grandparents had to let more of their almond trees die, and let more of this golden poison reclaim the land.

Until, finally, they’d stood out here and watched the water district dam up their sluices. Even after three decades, the dotheads who owned “the Johnsons’ plot” were still foreigners. And foreigners had been the first to lose their water rights. That night, they’d packed a few bags and left the rest for the tax assessors. When Subhir’s father heard about the court order, he’d left his Silicon Valley job and gone with his wife and newborn son to Bangalore to found a software startup. Subhir’s grandparents eventually moved back to India. Even now, they refused to talk about the long evening of their stay in this foreign land.

Subhir’s mother was stroking the wood of the porch. “Remember Memorial Day weekend?” she said. She looked up at his father. “We sat out here until dawn, while your mother peered down every fifteen minutes. She stayed up all night too, and fell asleep at the breakfast table.”

Subhir stepped up onto the porch. He twisted the knob of the front door and felt something crack inside the mechanism. He took a step back, but no one else had heard. The door creaked open. A short hall led into the living room, where three wooden chairs were still arranged around a plastic folding table; the house smelled clean, like rain and wind, even though the fixtures were thick with mold. Subhir grazed a hand over the pile of pulpy boxes left next to the door. He lost any hope of remembering something. Too much had happened since he’d last crawled through this hallway. The place reeked of a hasty exit: a family packing, resentfully, under the eyes of the sheriff’s deputies.

“This is yours, you know,” Nisha said. She’d wandered in behind him. “Your dad had my dad buy it at the tax auction three years ago. He swung up from the Bay Area last year and visited it.”

Subhir laughed. “He got it back the same way he lost it.”

“How do you figure?” Nisha said.

“I mean, when my grandparents left, it must have been sold off at a tax auction too.”

“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know what happened to the lands,” she said. “Maybe they did just abandon it. Place wouldn’t have been very valuable with the water rights sold off.”

“With the rights taken away, you mean. Under the Alienation Acts.”

“What? Your grandparents weren’t aliens; they were naturalized citizens. None of that applied to them. But they sold out to a water district in So-Cal. And not just for a year or two, but permanently. Back then, it was a huge deal for the biggest shareholder in the Sinclair County Irrigation District to sell his allocation. Folks broke their windows, cut their fences, even welded their sluices shut…they left in the middle of the night, after getting death threats. My dad refused to speak to your dad for ten years.”

“That’s not true,” Subhir said. “My grandparents loved America. They were driven out.”

“Not for being foreign. For having a son who could see what everyone else couldn’t,” Nisha said. “The rains were failing; the San Joaquin river was a ghost of what it used to be. People still thought the Sacramento would flow forever, but your dad could see that the southern water districts were just waiting to make a grab. He negotiated the deal during his last year in grad school.”

“My father would never have sold out his—”

Nisha said, “What does it matter? History proved him right. All the other farmers, they were just slow off the mark. They got wiped out during the reallocation. Nowadays, you can’t win a poker game without ending up with a fistful of worthless, superseded water rights. But your dad, he turned that money into capital, and built a business that’s lasted a lot longer than this farm would have.”

Un-American. Profiteer. Parasite. Those slurs—leveled against all the foreigners—had brought tears to his father’s eyes when he told stories about his last years in America. Tears of shame, Subhir realized.

“That’s all history,” Nisha said. “But your dad thinks he can make it right. My dad owns two million acre-feet of superseded rights that he picked up for next to nothing. They want to use your dad’s money to go to court and get those rights reinstated, like the vineyards in Napa did. This trip was supposed to, you know, ease you all into the plan.”

Subhir’s father came in. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you the creek.” His accent was resurfacing. He’d pronounced it “crick”.

“Why did you tell me this land was stolen from us?” Subhir said.

“We were…what have you been telling him?” his father said.

“I just…” Nisha retreated back into the living room as Subhir stepped forward.

“You chose to leave,” Subhir said. “Why force me to come back?”

Subhir’s father turned around and marched out of the house. “Dammit Aravind,” he said. “What’ve you been telling her about me?”

Subhir and Nisha edged towards the door, and saw Subhir’s father confront Aravind out by the car.

“Shit,” Aravind said. He’d taken off his hat, and now he was twisting at the brim. “I don’t know what she said. Anyway, that’s all in the past. I’m just glad you decided to make it right. Took you long enough.”