The Royal Abduls Page 2

  Later that week, after setting up the sequencer with the latest samples from the site in Europe, she went to Tallin’s office. She leaned against the office door and tapped twice.

  “Chris,” she said, “you like cricket, don’t you?”

  His gray eyes rose from his papers, and he seemed to count to ten.

  “I do not,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  She did not want to go away empty-handed, so she swallowed and tried again. She did, after all, have ninety minutes before the machine would spit out results.

  “But do you know people who do? My nephew wants to see a match. I’ve no idea where to take him, and I thought maybe you would know because . . .”

  “Because I’m British?” He finished the sentence for her. He let his eyes run down her body while he thought about it, and she thanked God for the long shirt that hid her breasts, which were just big enough to draw a gaze but disappointing when it came to fancy dress. Besides, she knew that Chris wasn’t actually interested in her; it was just habit that he looked her over.

  “I’ll ask around,” he said, with a nod that told her she was dismissed.

  “Great!” She left and went to her office. Door closed, she lit a cigarette and smoked it straight through, trying at the same time to envision a happy place, a place without entitled scientists, a place where nephews did not suddenly and without warning acquire the accents of their forebears, a place where animals openly displayed their genetic eccentricities without the aid of machines. And then she coughed and put the cigarette out.

  An annual evolutionary genetics conference was approaching, and Chris had decided they should submit a report on the initial findings of the hybrid zone project. She had spent her first few weeks at the lab reading through past articles, trying to summon a love for grasshoppers and wishing the work contained fewer tables of genetic data and more observation of actual grasshopper behavior, whatever that was.

  Chris had assigned the task of writing the report to Amina, though all their names would appear beneath his on the abstract. He said this would help to catch her up with the work that had gone on before her arrival.

  The report, as it turned out, was to be submitted to the committee on the Monday just after her weekend with Omar. She needed to make progress before then.

  She was staring at her computer in a state of paralysis-inducing anxiety when she heard a knock at her door. She almost jumped out of her skin; her office usually remained a sanctuary fit for a monk under a silence vow.

  “Yeah?” she called.

  “Hi, it’s Anjali, Chris’s assistant?”

  “The door’s open.”

  Anjali walked in. Amina hadn’t spoken a word to her since her arrival in the department, but she knew that she hated her; Amina had spent her life losing to girls who looked like Anjali, even—especially—in science. She had long black hair that she wore in pigtails or on top of her head in a chic twist, long eyes, and full, pouty lips. Today she wore a thin tank top and low-rider jeans fitted over slim, perfect hips. Amina knew Anjali was smart enough to be here, but how could she be stupid enough to be sleeping with Chris? Or was that smart, too?

  “What can I help you with?” Amina smiled brightly and tucked a strand of chin-length hair behind her ear. It immediately came loose and knocked against her cheek.

  Anjali sat down at the chair in front of her desk without invitation. “Chris said you were asking about cricket games?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, my brother plays. There’s a test match going on in a couple of weeks, if you’d like to come. I wrote all the info down here, okay?” Anjali placed a piece of paper on the top of Amina’s desk, covering up the Journal of Modern Zoology.

  “It’s my nephew, actually, who wants to go. Not me.”

  “Does he know how it’s played?”

  “No. Neither do I, actually.” Amina resented presenting a weakness, but it was true.

  Anjali stood, pulling her jeans up to her hip bones as she rose. “It’s pretty complicated, but I’ll be there Sunday afternoon. Look for me, and I’ll explain the basics.”

  “Thanks,” Amina managed to say.

  Anjali turned just as she reached the door. “I’m glad you’re working here, by the way. It’s good to have another desi around.”

  Anjali exited and Amina reached for her cigarettes. The problem with you, pretty girl, she lectured in her head, is that when you use your looks to get what you want, you make it harder for all of us. She’d seen it in college and then in graduate school, the lovelies like Anjali getting all the attention from their emotionally underdeveloped male professors. And then she’d had to leave her own advisor after he made a pass at her. She’d done so without hesitation and had paid the price in opportunity.

  Solidarity with those who played the game was not something Amina was willing to give.

  3.

  A couple of weeks later, Amina arrived at Omar’s private school a few minutes early for her presentation. She stood at the door in the back of the classroom, pushing her hair off the hot back of her neck while the teacher finished her lesson on democratic principles. Amina had first put on jeans, then traded them for khakis, but they were too loose to look actually professional, and she had already sweated through her button-up.

  The school was a fairly exclusive one, the opposite of the scruffy public schools she and Omar’s father had attended. Omar’s classroom was bright and neat and new, and the students sat in groups rather than rows.

  “Who exactly gets to vote in a democracy?” the teacher asked. Omar raised his hand from a front table, his eyes bigger than ever, his chin raised in eagerness. To Amina’s astonishment, he answered using a heavily applied Indian accent.

  “It is depending,” he began, “on which period in history we are speaking of.”

  Amina peered at him. He was second generation, born in America with a white mother and a father who had never spoken with an ethnic inflection in his life. Omar was speaking like his grandparents, like Amina’s parents, like a real, bona fide, not raised in the States or maybe even just recently arrived, Indian. Actually, it seemed a little exaggerated, like Apu from The Simpsons.

  “At first, women,” he continued, “were not being allowed to vote at all.” Amina could barely keep her mouth from dropping open. When she had left the East Coast for graduate school, Omar had been a baby. She’d returned to find him turned into a husky, doe eyed, pre-adolescent, and now there was this.

  Two boys in the back nudged each other and suppressed giggles—Amina heard one of them whisper to the other: “no towel-heads either.” Amina gave them a dark look. School, apparently, hadn’t changed much since she’d left it; only the epithets had been varied. She forced herself to wait in silence until the teacher had ended her lesson and called her to the front of the room.

  “Well,” Amina began, surveying her audience of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Omar looked to be the only Indian kid and one of only a few nonwhite kids in a shiny, immaculate-looking group. No snotty noses here. She pulled a little at the hem of her stretchy T-shirt and wished she was somewhere else, or that at the very least she had inherited a fragment of her mother’s innate poise. Instead she continued with forced charm.

  “It’s great to be here. Today I’m going to tell you about my work as an evolutionary biologist—”

  “Excuse me,” a blond girl in a sparkled butterfly shirt interrupted. “Why don’t you talk like Omar?”

  Amina paused. “The question is,” she finally said, “why doesn’t Omar talk like me?” She looked over at the teacher, who looked back at her with a nervous giggle; she would be no help.

  “Anyway.” Amina cleared her throat. “My dissertation was on a type of moth that lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. I spent two years studying them—”

  Sparkle butterfly raised her hand again.

  “Is it true,” she asked, “that in India rubies are bigger than apples?”

  This time A
mina looked at Omar, who had the decency to look ashamed.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “And today we are going to talk about moths.”

  The girl batted her eyelashes at Omar, and the boys in the back of the class snickered again. Amina launched into an explanation of evolutionary biology and tried to ignore everything else. After all, she told herself, she was lucky not to live in Kansas, where evolution was considered a crackpot theory and rational inquiry a punishable heresy.

  After her presentation, Amina waited around for the finish of the school day so she could take Omar home with her. As a first-year postdoc, she didn’t yet feel like a proper representative of science, and she was pretty sure her presentation had been less than inspirational. She wandered the school halls with a mixture of nostalgia and nausea. She hadn’t fared any better in public school in Ohio than Omar seemed to be faring as a privileged kid in cosmopolitan DC. The difference seemed to be that while she had always resented being the odd one out, the brown, brainy kid, Omar was exoticizing his own self, and this she did not like to see.

  Looking around for distraction, Amina found a display of student-made posters: “My Family,” they all sang at the top. Students had created portraits out of collage elements, cut-and-paste combined with drawings. She looked for Omar’s and found it in the bottom right corner. His poster featured his father wearing a turban and loincloth—clearly Gandhi—and his mother as Princess Di in white salwar kameez. Omar had drawn himself wearing jodhpur pants and a tiger-striped T-shirt and carrying a knife that looked precisely like the one she had seen in his room, the one she’d originally given to Mo. “The Royal Abduls: An Indian Dynasty,” it read along the bottom.

  Oh dear, she thought. She wondered if Mo knew. He’d had his own Indian-royal-fantasy phase, mostly centered around building model palaces the likes of which their ancestors would never have come near. It had been his one acknowledgment that he was Indian, or at least the only one she could remember.

  At 2:55, a bell rang, and Amina headed back to Omar’s room with relief. The students came out all in a rush at first, in a steady line. When she didn’t see Omar emerge, she pushed past the last of them and went into the room. He was there, with the blond butterfly girl, and he seemed to be promising her jewels from his ancient princedom in the far north of India. And his accent was on:

  “The color is unbelievable, red as blood, and when you look at it really hard you can see the lives of the previous owners. It is cursed! All of the owners have come to terrible ends.”

  “Terrible?” Little Blondie breathed.

  “Omar!” Amina said. “Time to go.”

  He followed her obediently as she led him out of the school at a double-quick pace. As they overtook some of his classmates jostling each other in the hall, she noted that not one said hello to him, nor even took note of his presence. They didn’t acknowledge their recently deposed guest speaker either, but it was Omar she felt for; she knew how to be an outsider, but clearly Omar did not.

  When they got into the car, she waited a few seconds after putting on her seatbelt, trying to think of what to say.

  “Why do you talk about India so much in school, Omar?” she finally said. She didn’t even know how to begin with the accent.

  He shrugged.

  “Did you learn those things from your mom and dad?”

  He finally looked up at her with beseeching eyes. “No, they never tell me anything.” His accent was American again. “Maybe you could? Because you’ve been to India?”

  She nodded, as if this made sense; she’d been to India once, after college, to the wedding of a former roommate that was held in Delhi. She had seen almost nothing outside of Tara’s house and an endless mob of strangers; she had felt invisible, untethered and gilded stiff in her borrowed sari.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “In the meantime, try not to make things up, okay?”

  He nodded with downcast eyes, and she pulled out of the parking space and started for home.

  The drive from the school to Amina’s apartment was short and silent. When they arrived, she gave him a brief tour of her three rooms. She had cleaned the bathroom and hidden her cigarettes and ashtrays and tried to buy food he might like. She left her computer out in the living room because the grasshopper report for the annual meetings was due on Monday and she still hadn’t finished it; she had spent the last days cursing her luck—or Chris’s intent—and making little progress with the actual writing.

  Why had she agreed to be entrusted with a child? Amina’s work was with insects, and that was no coincidence. She hated the way adults became willfully naive around children—cooing and pampering, plying them with sugar and indulging them, in utter indifference to the obvious knowledge that the world was a feral, hostile place.

  Still, though she wasn’t becoming a nurturer overnight, Amina was trying. It was in a way too bad that she wouldn’t be able to take him to the cricket game, because she knew that, at least, was something Omar really wanted. But Amina had to finish the report, which expanded in scope every time she gave a draft to Chris for feedback. She didn’t want to see Anjali anyway, and Omar would be better off with a friend his own age.

  Marcy called from the Keys just around the time Amina’s house tour came to an anticlimactic end. Marcy talked to Omar for approximately two minutes, with Omar responding in monosyllables to her questions, and then he moved to the TV while Amina took the phone to her bedroom.

  “So everything’s going okay?” Marcy asked Amina again.

  “Yep. So far nothing’s broken and nobody’s crying.” When Marcy didn’t say anything, she changed tack. “How is Florida?”

  They chatted for a few minutes, and then Amina finally decided to ask. “Have you noticed anything about Omar’s, umm, speaking voice?”

  “Oh my God! Is his voice changing? But he’s so young—”

  “No, no, Marcy. No. I mean, you’ve noticed the accent, right?”

  “What do you mean, an accent? Like a northeastern accent? Like cah instead of car? Or southern?” Marcy sounded horrified; she herself had eradicated all traces of a southern accent in the first year her family had lived in Ohio.

  “Never mind, I’m probably imagining it.” Amina wondered if it was his school voice, and if so, how long that had been the case.

  Amina hung up the phone and then she and Omar sat for a few minutes in silence. She’d hardly spent any time with children, ever, or at least not since she’d been one. In graduate school, those with and without kids achieved a natural separation, born out of different sleeping schedules and financial obligations and potential for emergency. The people with kids were strangers to her; she had not been able to imagine herself as one of them. Matt thought this a terrible fault. Unforgivable, actually. When he’d said he wouldn’t move with her, she hadn’t fought him. She had thought that she loved him, but some part of her must have wanted to be free.

  And now what to do? A movie would be fine, but they only lasted two hours. She could take him out to eat, maybe for Mexican or Ethiopian or something. Or Indian!

  She congratulated herself on the idea and phoned for reservations at the Cheetah and Monkey, a place she’d been to when she first arrived. She could explain to Omar to say masala, not curry, and how to pick up food with just naan and your hand, and how in India, a pickle wasn’t made of cucumber; instead of talking nonsense, she would teach him something that his parents and grandparents hadn’t bothered to.

  Omar still hadn’t said anything. There were two hours before dinner. She didn’t have an extra room, just a futon in the living room, so she couldn’t even send him away to read or do homework. Instead, she turned on the TV.

  “Do you like CNN?” she asked, and he gave what seemed a genuine nod. They watched a program on terrorism in Indonesia and ate potato chips; she decided it was a success.

  4.

  Amina’s first experience at the Cheetah and Monkey had not been a good one. It was her first week in DC, and she was far f
rom adjusted to the weather, her apartment, or the myriad complexities of postdoc life. The lab received the first installment of the National Science Foundation grant award, some of the money for which had gone to hire Amina, and they all went out to dinner to celebrate. Amina accepted the invitation with a little distaste because she didn’t like to be the only woman in a group.

  The restaurant was dark and slightly overheated, filled with tchotchkes. Everyone ordered drinks, and she sipped at red wine cautiously. Her boss was seated on the other side of the large round table, where he held forth on the virtues of their lab, the righteousness of their award, and the surety of Nobel Prizes, chairmanships, and a permanent flow of generous grant money for them all.

  Her work in graduate school, as she had explained to Omar’s class, was on a moth hybrid zone, a geographical area where interspecies breeding took place, counteracting the general rule that separate species could not mate.

  The lab she had now joined was a prestigious one, and she had been gratified by the job offer when it came. Her dissertation had confirmed the fact—suspected since the discovery of the site a century before by pioneering scientist Walter Sweadner—that unusual social behavior by certain groups of moths was due not just to environmental conditions but also to the fact of cross-species mating. Hybrids, which her lab in California had proven to be so through exhaustive DNA testing, were displaying abnormal behavior; in other words, hybrid DNA led to hybrid social structures. In her research she had tried to establish that specific social patterns came as a result of the region being a long-standing, stable hybrid zone.

  The lab in DC focused not on moths but on a species of grasshopper in a mountain range of western Europe. It was the perfect post for her, allowing her to demonstrate that her expertise was transferable across field sites, that there was work to do all over the world. But she had been sorry to leave her previous project and hand it over to the next generation of graduate students and postdocs; her new job focused more on indexing—on models and spreadsheets—than on actual behavior.