Such a Perfect Family, page 12
Five minutes later, and the original cabdriver had customers in his vehicle and was away, while I was still standing there.
A tic beginning in my jaw, I dug out my phone and called the rental car company. Sweat dripped down my neck, the breeze not enough to counter the heaviness of my jeans or the weight of the humidity.
Los Angeles heat was as dry as the Mojave, my body unprepared for the water in the air here.
“Sorry, sorry,” the owner said, his voice languid. “Car’s on the way. Only ten minutes. Island time, eh.”
Grinding my teeth, I confirmed the registration number and description of the vehicle so I could spot it as it pulled in, and was thankful that at least they’d given me the four-wheel drive I’d asked for when I’d booked over the phone from Auckland Airport.
When the rental did finally arrive—a good twenty minutes later—it proved to be far less shiny and new than implied, and the air-conditioning was broken, but it drove well enough, which was all I needed. In the interim, I’d managed to grab a sandwich, a banana, and an ice-cold Coke, as well as a paper map; now I threw everything but the Coke onto the passenger seat after placing my duffel on the passenger floorboard.
Then, my drink secured in the cup holder, I headed out.
I still had a three-hour drive ahead of me. The distance to travel itself wasn’t far, but Diya had described gravel roads and dirt tracks when she’d shown me a map of where her family had lived before they moved to Nadi so her parents could work in the hospital there, some years prior to their shift to New Zealand.
“Beautiful, beautiful place,” she’d said, “but getting there is a nightmare, especially if it’s been raining.”
That map had gone up in flames, but I remembered enough to get myself pointed in the right direction out of the airport. Once I reached the general vicinity, I’d have to ask the locals and hope. The heavens opened up right then, blurring the sugarcane fields interspersed with tin-roofed houses, many with bougainvillea running riot in brilliant splashes of pink and purple.
The rain was gentle rather than torrential, but it did cool down the world to a bearable temperature. Coconut palms waved in the breeze, papaya trees with their unripe green fruit tucked close to the top stood sentinel beside homes, and I could see hibiscus blooms growing wild, all of it against a backdrop of mountains everywhere I looked, the landscape an undulating beauty of lush green broken up by bursts of wild color.
It was paradise.
My jaw ached from how hard I was clenching it.
An hour into it—along a smooth sealed road—and after the rain had passed as if it had never come, I pulled over in front of a decrepit-looking shop with a faded Fanta sign in the window, and a front path bordered by what might’ve been zinnias.
Against the sun-bleached shop, all its signage long faded, the zinnias were bursts of intense pigment that made me glad I was wearing sunglasses.
But I slid them off the second I entered the cool semidarkness of the shop. The proprietor had covered over the windows with signage that faced outward, blocking the sun. No AC, but a ceiling fan spun lazily overhead.
The combination worked surprisingly well, the inside of the shop cool enough to be comfortable even for me.
The owner was seated behind a screen of iron bars, the cigarettes and the cash register behind him. Despite the bars, which reminded me of certain parts of LA, he shot me a friendly smile. Around my age, he was Indo-Fijian, his skin dark and his short-sleeved shirt a pale blue. When he opened his mouth and spoke, I recognized the words but couldn’t respond to them.
“Sorry,” I said. “English?”
“Yes, I speak English.” His expression remained cheerful. “Grow up overseas?”
“Yes,” I said, because it was simpler to allow him to believe that than to explain that I had no connection to this nation or its people beyond my love for Diya.
The shopkeeper nodded. “What do you need?”
“Directions,” I said, and expected to be told to buy something in return, but the man was happy to help me out.
“The Prasad place?” he said at one point, after I indicated the general area of Diya’s family home.
I stared at him.
He laughed. “My cousin-brother’s uncle Ravi is the caretaker there. It’s easy to find. Just follow this way.”
Taking out a piece of paper, he sketched a map on it that had such landmarks as “the coconut tree that split in two in the big cyclone” and “Ali’s old house before he built his new one in town—it has grass growing through the windows” and “the river bridge with blue arches.”
“How long from here?” I asked. “I was told about three hours from the airport.”
He made a face while looking in the direction of the rectangle of light that was the open front door. “With the rain before…the tracks might be muddy. So, yes, I would say two more hours.”
Two more hours until I might have some semblance of an answer as to why Diya had gasped out her dead sibling’s name in what might well have been her last conscious moments on this earth.
Chapter 26
Susanne
Susanne turned in bed to watch her young lover on the carpeted floor beside it.
He was doing push-ups while clad in just his boxers, giving her a lovely view of his rather delicious musculature. He’d turned twenty a week earlier, and last night had been their private celebration—she wasn’t gauche enough to flaunt him to her social circle even if he was so pretty.
The signet ring she’d gifted him sat on the bedside table, beside the new phone she’d bought him only a couple of months after she’d first asked him to join her for coffee. It had been a year now, and she knew full well that she was what the younger generation called a sugar mama. She had no argument with the arrangement—he was, after all, definitely keeping up his end of the bargain.
“Come back to bed, darling.” Her body sighed with need. You’d think at her age, it’d be quieting down, but it turned out that she’d never gotten to full revs with her dear husband.
This was all an entirely new experience.
A sharp grin from the twenty-year-old who was currently holding a plank without effort. “I have to maintain my strength to keep up with you.”
Chuckling—and pleased by the charming comment—she let him finish his workout while she sat up in bed and considered whether to buy him that vehicle he had his eye on. Perhaps in six months’ time. She was having fun, and so was he. No need to overdose when they could stretch it out.
She’d be seventy in two more years. God. Perhaps she might lose the itch by then, and he’d surely have moved on. Could be she’d give the vehicle to him as a parting gift, a shiny trophy for him to drive around in—she’d enjoy imagining him so handsome and young and suited to the fast car.
“How are your studies going?” That was another thing she liked about Tavish—he was very, very clever. Studying business and finance, and not just studying, but interested. And that made him interesting. He could talk investments with her over breakfast, and pump her to orgasm at night.
Truly, he’d be her perfect man if only he wasn’t almost five decades her junior.
“Aced the latest exams.” He bounced to his feet. “I’m a bit bored, to be honest, but I need to have these credits to get the kind of job I want.”
She also loved that he had all these plans, young Tavish Advani; he might enjoy having a woman spoil him, but he was planning to become a man who could spoil himself. Some younger woman would one day find herself with a very successful and driven husband. “With an eye to setting up your own investment firm down the road?”
Another one of those wide grins before he prowled over the bedspread toward her, strong and gorgeous and aroused. “Of course, Susanne with an s. You know I play to win.”
Smiling, she let him lower her to her back, and was proud that she’d kept herself toned and fit enough that he had no trouble with the physical aspect of things. If she’d been a more emotional type of woman, she might have made the mistake of falling in love with him. But she wasn’t a stupid girl.
Still…it was nice to pretend even as she faced her own mortality in the mirror every day. And especially this week, when her left leg was giving her enough pain to make life irritating.
His hand on there, massaging gently even as he put his mouth to her breast.
A little more, Susanne thought as her back arched, just a little more of him and of life, of youth.
Chapter 27
Any dust that had coated the road before the rain was gone, everything fresh and shiny. A small Fijian boy wearing blue shorts and a green T-shirt waved at me as I passed a village. I saw him race across the road in my rearview mirror, to retrieve a ball that he’d kicked to the other side.
No other cars even in the far distance, the road empty but for the two of us.
I turned the corner…and there was the tree split in the middle. As instructed, I took that exit off the main road. And kept on following the shopkeeper’s instructions as the landscape became ever more green and rural.
I hit the gravel road fifteen minutes into it, but the car hugged it with ease, no hint of a wobble. I was suddenly glad it wasn’t as shiny and new as advertised. It meant any fresh dents caused by stones flying up wouldn’t be noticeable even on close inspection.
Around me, I saw only crops I couldn’t identify, interspersed with patches of verdant forest.
No houses or people.
When I did eventually stop, it was because I was getting a spinal adjustment from the potholed and bumpy road and needed to stretch out my back. Unclipping my seat belt, I pushed open the door to get out. The air felt cooler than it had by the shop, all that green cutting down on the heat.
A small and scuffed-up blue truck loaded with what looked to be freshly cut taro—a root vegetable to which Diya had introduced me—rumbled over from the other direction while I was stretching, and stopped right beside me. The man who leaned out was Fijian, somewhere in his twenties, his hair tight curls buzzed close to his skull, his skin bronzed, and his T-shirt a faded gray.
“You break down, brother?” he asked. “Gonna be dark soon. I’ll give you a lift home.”
“No, car’s fine. My back just needed a rest from the road.”
His laugh was huge and warm. “You should drive this truck, man—thing is twenty years old. It’s all bump, bump, bump.” But from his grin, he didn’t much care. “You American?”
“Accent that obvious?”
Another grin. “Where you going?” he asked with a bluntness that would never fly in a city but was likely expected in a place this small and rural.
“The Prasad place,” I said, using the same verbiage as the man in the shop.
The truck driver frowned for a minute. “Ah, right, big place by the water. Nice, man, nice.” Lifting his hand, he said, “Got to get these ready for the morning market.”
Big place by the water.
It could’ve described the home that had gone up in flames. The Prasads re-creating the home they hadn’t been able to let go of even after so many years in another country? Because of Ani? Was she buried here?
I frowned. No, that couldn’t be it. The family preferred cremation. I knew that because Diya and I had found it morbid that it was in the boilerplate wills we’d signed, each of us having to put down what we’d prefer when the time came.
“We don’t bury our dead,” Diya had said, her gaze pensive. “The idea of being buried underground in a small box…” She’d shuddered. “I’d far rather burn up and be done with it.”
The comment haunted me.
Jumping back into the car, I continued on.
Thirty minutes later, right when I thought I must’ve passed it already, I saw the top of a large house just emerging from the thick green foliage in which it nestled. I spotted banana palms, along with flowering vines and a tree with huge glossy green leaves, among many others.
The foliage was so dense that all I could see of the house was the tip of the roof even as I came closer and closer…and that was when I realized why the shop owner hadn’t told me to turn off at a certain point. Diya’s family home was right at the end of the road, only the ocean beyond it on the far side.
I felt cobblestones under me as I brought the vehicle to a stop in a front yard draped in the thick shadows of early evening, and when I stepped out, I saw that the grass had been kept under control.
By that caretaker? The cousin-brother something?
The two-story house, while free of the encroachment of what felt like a forest now that I stood inside it, was shuttered and silent and in urgent need of maintenance. Large flakes of paint had come off the frontage, while mold grew on the upper level.
The tropical environment might’ve done even more damage over the years if the building hadn’t been formed of concrete—I’d seen a couple of similar structures on my drive, houses far more stable than the dwellings of rickety wood and corrugated iron that dominated the rural landscape.
This was a rich person’s house.
The entire property was also a haven of cool, the tropical heat ameliorated by both the plantings and the breeze coming off what I knew to be a secluded beach behind the house. Not visible from ground level as with the Lake Tarawera property, but only a short walk through the foliage.
Despite its beauty, however, this place felt desolate, a ruin in the making.
“Hello!”
Heart kicking at the sudden interruption, I looked over to my right—to see a skinny Indo-Fijian man with hair so flawlessly deep brown that it had to be dyed, and a matching pencil mustache. He’d come from somewhere beyond the banana palms to the left and wore a short-sleeved tan shirt with what might’ve been Fijian tapa prints on it, jeans, and flip-flops.
His thinness accentuated his wrinkles, but he wasn’t that old. Forty-five maybe.
And unlike me, he seemed perfectly comfortable in jeans.
“Hi.” I held out my hand. “Are you Ravi? I think I met a relative of yours over at the store about two hours from here?”
“Oh yes, yes.” He pumped my hand. “I saw him at Kushma’s niece’s wedding just last weekend.”
I had no idea who Kushma was, but smiled politely. “I’m Tavish Advani,” I began, preparing to explain my link to Diya.
But the man’s face lit up, and, wrapping his free hand around our already clasped hands, he pumped even harder. “Namaskaram, Mr. Tavish! You are the businessman from America!” His speech was a seamless mix of Hindi and English that I had to focus to understand. “We heard Diya beta got engaged!” His face fell as fast, his hands breaking away. “Is she…”
So, the news of the fire and the deaths had reached this isolated place. “She’s in the hospital,” I said. “Shumi as well.”
He shook his head, eyes looking down. “So sad. The crime is terrible these days.”
I didn’t say anything to that. “I came to get something from here. I thought…for the funerals—an important piece of the family’s past.” I’d thought about what to say, decided to leave it open-ended because surely there had to be something.
He made the slightly nasal ha sound that meant yes. “I know the one you mean,” he added, linking my vague description to the specific. “Dr. Sarita never took it with her the times she visited. Leaving a part of herself to watch over baby Ani. But yes, you should take it for the funerals. It was her mother’s, you know.”
I couldn’t believe he’d just handed me such a brilliant opening. “I don’t know too much about Ani. She was a sister who died young?”
“Cousin-sister,” the caretaker explained, hyphenating cousin the same way the shopkeeper had done—the usage was one I’d heard before; it was cultural, cousins addressed the same way as siblings except when clarifying the relationship to others.
“I was working in Suva then,” Ravi elaborated, “but baby Ani’s parents died in a car crash. Terrible, just terrible. So young, both of them. Hitesh was Dr. Rajesh’s only brother, and so of course Dr. Rajesh and Dr. Sarita were going to look after baby Ani.”
He turned, began to walk up the stairs to the covered porch of the house. “Come, I have the key—I always keep it with me when I do my evening stroll, sometimes just go in and walk around, make sure everything is tip-top. You staying here? We keep it clean.”
“If you think it’ll be all right? I’m only here two nights.”
The caretaker shook his head again. “So sad. House is too big for one person. We can put our boys in one room for the night so you can have a bed.”
“Thanks,” I said, having the feeling the offer was sincere. “But it might be nice for me to stay here. I can tell Diya about it when I go back…maybe it would help her wake up.” My throat choked up, the last words barely audible.
Ravi blinked rapidly before clearing his own throat. “I’ll ask my wife to make you dinner, bring it over. You okay with spicy? Kushma likes using spice, but she leaves it out for her friend from Australia, so no problem if you don’t like it. She can make the recipe a different way.”
“No, I love it.”
Taking an old-fashioned iron key from his pocket even as I spoke, Ravi put it into the lock, turned. “Some caretakers, they just don’t do the work. They know the owner maybe won’t come back for years.
“But the doctors are a good family—they pay us well to be here full-time, and even pay our kids’ school fees every year and buy their textbooks, their uniforms, all they need for school. Dr. Sarita always says education is the key to a bright future. We take very good care of everything.”
He tapped the outside wall. “I told them, it needs paint, but they wanted to have a look personally, decide what to do—but they’re so busy it’s been two years since I told them and they haven’t managed to come here.”
