Gods Without Men

2008

For a moment Jaz thought he’d disappeared. But there he was by the pool, trailing poor bedraggled Bah behind him, standing like a little sentry over a sleazy-looking guy sacked out on one of the daybeds. Jaz hurried across the courtyard, careful not to slip on the wet tiles. Raj was at his most withdrawn, rocking slightly, his fists balled, his neck twisted around in the painful-looking S that always made him look like he was trying to bury his head in his armpit. The man lolled sideways, one skinny arm thrown out toward an empty tequila bottle that lay on its side on the concrete. He was dressed in tight bright clothes, like the hipster kids you saw cycling round Williamsburg. He seemed to be unconscious. The more Jaz saw, the less he liked: the straggly beard, the tattoo snaking up one side of his neck, the spots of blood on his pants; there was dirt in his hair, a film of it on his skin, as if he’d been rolling about on the ground. Just then he woke up. He looked startled to see the two of them beside him. Jaz tried to put a more neutral expression on his face.

“I’m so sorry. Was he bothering you?”

“Uh, no.” He had an accent. He rubbed his face and sat up straighter. “Just having a kip.” British. Maybe Australian.

“Come on, Raj.” Jaz spoke soothingly. “Mommy’s waiting.”

Raj didn’t move, just rocked a little harder. The guy leaned toward him, showing a mouthful of crooked teeth. “Awright, little man?” Of course Raj didn’t answer. The guy sat back again and looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun. Jaz caught the stink of stale sweat. Was he actually a motel guest? Maybe he’d just wandered in off the highway.

“Shy, your lad.”

Jaz didn’t want to get into the details of Raj’s condition with this character.

“Sure. He can be like that around strangers.”

“Right.”

“OK, son, let’s go. Come with Daddy.”

Raj made it hard. He wouldn’t give Jaz his hand, and when he was picked up he used all his most effective protest tactics, going alternately limp and rigid, squirming in Jaz’s grip like a fish.

“Stop it now. Come with Daddy. Daddy needs you to come along.”

The man watched them struggle. Jaz tried not to feel embarrassed. He’d never got used to this part of being Raj’s dad: the scenes, the way they were always the center of attention. They could never blend in, be a normal family. Lisa was tougher than him, but then of course she had to be: She was around the boy all day without a break. At least Jaz could leave, go to work.

Every weekday morning for four years Jaz had felt guilty. Guilty as he closed the front door and headed for the subway, guilty as he bought his Times at the newsstand; it was always such a relief to be away from Raj’s relentless tantrums. Lisa had a shitty deal and he knew it and she knew he knew, and that was the hairline crack in the bowl, the start of their trouble. Before Raj came along they’d been fine. A terrible thing for a father to think about his son, but it was true. Despite the craziness at the firm, the foul-mouthed traders, the pressure from Fenton to sign off on Bachman’s latest apocalyptic scheme, work was an oasis of tranquillity compared to what the child had waiting for him at home — the sinking feeling as he turned the key and called out hello and tried to judge from Lisa’s face and posture just how bad it had been for her that day. When he was born Raj wouldn’t feed. He hated to be picked up. Then, when he started teething, he ground at Lisa’s nipples like an animal. He transformed her. She became a weeping hollow-eyed version of herself, a wan creature in thick socks and sweatpants, her lovely long blond hair plastered to her scalp. This is not my son, Jaz caught himself thinking. My son would not do this to my beautiful wife.

Always the same routine. Putting his laptop bag down, trying to be helpful. Come on, I’ll do that, give him to me. Hearing about what new punishment Raj had devised, how unwilling he was to be cuddled or consoled. He’d sit on the impractical white couch where they’d once tried not to spill red wine — the couch now stained by spatters of puréed carrot — and absorb Lisa’s anger, sitting silently as she shouted at him. Because he was there. Because no one else would understand. Then he’d hold her as she cried, smelling her hair, its scent of milk and baby shit and that mysterious authoritarian note of licorice he’d come to hate, the smell of his son.

Raj wasn’t a normal baby. That had been obvious from the start. He didn’t sleep, just lay there in his newly bought crib in his newly painted nursery and screamed, full-throated continuous yelling, primal and fierce. He sounded so outraged at having to inhabit that brightly colored box with its mobiles and plush toys and mural of zoo animals. The worst of it was his refusal to let them calm him. It cut Lisa to the bone. Jaz, he flinched. I went to hold him and he flinched. He’d tell her it wasn’t her fault. She was a good mom, a great mom. He’d say those things and stroke her hair and she’d insist it was impossible. How could she be a good mom if her own baby was afraid of her? He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t used to that, to not having the answer.

The doula told them it happened that way sometimes. Raj would calm down soon enough. All babies were different. All parenting experiences presented unique and rewarding challenges. Jaz didn’t think of Raj as a rewarding challenge. Those inhuman cries, like those of a fox or a cat; the feral horror he exhibited when Jaz brought his face up close. His mother had Punjabi village words for what Raj was, words Jaz forbade her to use in his house.

They wouldn’t sleep for days at a time. They didn’t go outside. By the front door stood a thousand-dollar stroller, unused, plastic wrap still sleeving the handles. All the images they’d had of their new life, walking in Prospect Park bundled up in scarves and hats, holding hands — a proper American family. They’d never even put him in the thing. Jaz extended his leave to a month. His boss sent technicians to install a VPN in the study: trading screens, a terminal connected to their trading engine. He’d sit upstairs, doing regressions on the latest cluster of datasets, and listen to the chaos downstairs. After two months they demanded he go back to the office. Lisa understood. Raj would be her job. It was a question of earning power. She looked like a ghost.

They got a nanny, of course. She came from an agency, very expensive. A Jamaican church lady called Alice, middle-aged and severe. She gave in her notice after three weeks. Elena was from Puerto Rico, young and curvy. She’d tune the kitchen radio to reggaeton stations and dance in front of the ironing board. Jana was a Slovak student. There was another one, a Dominican who left after a week. None of them lasted. Raj drove them all away.

That was how they lived for the first two years. Jaz had once been overturned white-water rafting. One minute he was clutching a paddle and squinting into the spray, the next he was spinning round underwater. That was what it felt like. The suddenness, the extremity. By the time Raj’s diagnosis came, it wasn’t a surprise. They took him to the pediatrician — a new pediatrician, the third — just before his second birthday. He tried a few simple questions, asked him to point to things, to pretend to make a call on a plastic toy phone. Soon enough Jaz was standing outside the clinic, oblivious to the December wind howling down Lexington Avenue, the Midtown traffic, the people shouldering past on the sidewalk. He was the father of an autistic child. What were the odds? He knew exactly. One in ten thousand in the seventies. Now down to one in a hundred and sixty-six. Jaz made his living building mathematical models to predict and trade on every kind of catastrophe. And now this: an event for which he had no charts, no time series. An entirely unhedged position.

In the glove compartment of their car was yet another packet from Jaz’s mom, just the same as all the others, on the envelope the shaky handwriting that wasn’t even her own — she couldn’t write in Punjabi or English — and inside a little wrap of kajal and a locket and a letter, written by his aunt Sukhwindermassi. It had all the usual crap in it, pleas for him to bring Raj home to Baltimore, to see an astrologer, to apply the black soot to Raj’s forehead and put the charm round his neck and find an exorcist to ward off the nazar, the evil eye that had fallen on the child and caused him to lose his mind.

Jaz’s pagal son, so shameful. A problem the family needed to solve, not out of any compassion for the boy, or even love for Jaz, but because of the dishonor it brought on the Matharu name. If the older generation had its way, the kid would be locked up in an attic somewhere, away from prying Punjabi eyes and wagging Punjabi tongues, all those aunties and uncles who knew in their heart of hearts that no good could come of what Jaz had done, the stain he’d put on the family izzat by marrying a white woman.

Of course Lisa understood something of the “cultural differences” (that glib dinner-party phrase) between her upbringing and his own, but she had no idea, not really, of the vast territories he had to straddle to keep both her and his family in his life. His mom and dad were straight out of Jalandhar, betrothed to each other at some improbably early age, their childhoods played out in small villages against a backdrop of wheat and yellow mustard fields. Three days after their wedding his dad set off for America to join Uncle Malkit, who’d made a life in East Baltimore. Together the two cousins worked in a body shop owned by a Pole called Lemansky. In their family legend Mr. Lemansky was a typical white boss, greedy and tyrannical, cheating Malkit and Manmeet out of overtime, mocking their religious observances and their faltering English. Jaz suspected that in reality he was no worse than the next guy, struggling, bemused by the changes in his neighborhood, by the dark-skinned men who were the only ones willing to work for the low wage he could afford to pay. After two years of car parts and engine oil, his dad left to work on a production line assembling power tools. Soon afterward, he sent for Mom, whose first experience of America was in a factory packing candy bars with hundreds of black women. She didn’t mix with them, sticking to her own coven of Punjabis at a corner table in the canteen. Jaz could picture them, their long braids tucked into hygienic hairnets, eating their carefully packed lunches of dal roti and warding off the new world and its kala people with acid remarks and superstition.

This was how you did it. Work hard; keep away from the blacks; remit money home for weddings, farm equipment, new brick-built houses whose second or even third stories would rise up over the fields to show the neighbors that such and such a family had a son in Amrika or U.K. Wherever in the world you happened to be, in London or New York or Vancouver or Singapore or Baltimore, Maryland — you really lived in Apna Punjab, an international franchise, a mustard field of the mind. All the great cities were just workhouses in which you toiled for dollars, their tall buildings and parks and art galleries less real than the sentimental desi phantasm you pulled round yourself like an electric blanket against the cold.

All the aunties worked at the same place as Jaz’s mom, except the ones who had jobs as cleaners at Johns Hopkins, or were on the line at the condom factory. The uncles drove taxis. By the time Jaz was born, the son his parents had prayed for after two disappointing daughters, the family had moved out to the country, near the Gurdwara, an anonymous storefront with curtains in the window and a hand-lettered sign on the door. This was the center of their social life, a round of shaadis and festivals; dozens of people squeezed into cramped apartments and row houses, sitting on the floor, singing kirtans. White sheets stretched over patterned carpets, garlanded pictures of the gurus in plastic gilt frames. As a small boy wearing a new kurta-pajama, straight out of the box and scratchy on the skin, Jaz never imagined there was any other world. Running his fingers along the crisscross cotton folds on his chest, he’d pick his way through ranks of chanting worshippers into kitchens full of frying smells and forests of silk-clad female legs that could be tugged at to produce henna-patterned hands that reached down to adjust his topknot or give him a morsel of food. A safe bubble for a cherished little boy. As he got older he saw that for all the mithai and cheek pinching, this bubble was also paranoid and fragile and small, sensitive to the slightest touch of the wider world, the appearance of a police officer or even the mailman at the door. His mom would shake her head, pull her dupatta over her face and call for the kids, the English speakers, to find out what the gora in the uniform wanted. Always the suspicion that he was there to take something away from them, some old-country memory of tax collectors, landlord’s thugs.

Jaz could never understand why his mom and dad were so scared. He lived his life in B-more, not the Punjab. He went to a school ruled by black kids, Americans, not the other blacks, the Somalis and French speakers who came from families as adrift in the country as his own. He spoke English, recited the pledge, knew the capitals of the fifty states. He met plenty of white kids, Americans and new immigrants from Slovakia and Poland and the Ukraine. He met Latinos. He and the other “Asians,” Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Iranians and Tamils, none numerous enough to form their own clique, counted for little in the school hierarchy, but even as a skinny brown kid with freakishly long hair, he felt American. He played baseball, not cricket. He listened to the top forty on his Walkman. He’d go to the park with his family and the big world would parade before them, the Frisbee throwers and joggers and sunbathers, the crazy old ladies and baggy-shirted skateboarders, all seeming so free and easy, sharing the open space. Meanwhile his mom and dad would be delineating their boundaries by laying down blankets, huddling with the children over tiffin carriers and Tupperware containers of food, too timid even to bring a radio.

But, Mom, why can’t I go? It’s just a rock concert, just music.

You have your studies, beta.

His studies. Always that. Luckily he was clever. Math and science were his subjects. He could make numbers do the things he wanted. And just as he could see the patterns in an exponential or a logarithm, he could see there were other kinds of life to be led than his, lives that involved going on foreign vacations, having piercings, keeping a pet dog or a garden or a boat in the marina, playing with your band on MTV, locking your bike outside the vegan coffee shop and necking with your dreadlocked girlfriend. In such a life you could meet gora girls with short skirts and long legs, who’d talk to you instead of holding their noses and pretending to be disgusted by the phantom odor of curry. For a while, these girls were the sole focus of his life, girls in his class, in the neighborhood. Becky and Cathy and Carrie and Leigh … There were insuperable barriers to becoming their friend, let alone sleeping with them. His geeky Asian-ness. His hair. Above all, his hair. By fifteen he’d swapped the topknot for a turban, but even then he had a carpet of soft down on his chin and long black wisps snaking along his jaw, a mess of unruly and undeniably childish growth that made the hormonal chaos of his adolescent skin look even worse. He was a monster, a pariah.

Some of the other Sikh boys did the unthinkable. They went to the barber. They endured their dads’ beatings, their moms’ tears. As if to taunt their more compliant brothers and cousins they began to spend hours in front of the mirror, shaving complicated fades and pencil-thin beards, teasing out fierce patterns of gelled spikes. They dressed like gangsters, smoked dope, drove their pimped-out rice-burner cars down to bhangra dances in D.C. They were the real Punjabi shers, the brave-hearts, always ready to go after the dirty black bandars walking on their block, the sick slut who dated white boys. Jaz couldn’t have copied them if he’d dared. He was a nerd, a mathlete. On the fridge in his parents’ kitchen was a yellowing photo of him, aged sixteen, standing behind his prizewinning statistics exhibit at the city science fair. He always noticed his eyes in that picture. Glazed, fixed on escape.

Everyone had heard of MIT. Uncle Daljit had even visited the campus on some kind of tour. It was A-number-one, the best. Of course Jaz would need a scholarship, but his teachers said that wasn’t impossible. He was an exceptional student, gifted. How good that sounded in his parents’ ears. Our gifted son. So it was decided: Jaz would try for MIT. The household organized itself round the mission. The television was muted. Meals were brought up on a tray. His mother and sisters moved around like ground technicians on an immigrant moon shot. He was too self-absorbed to wonder why similar weight had never been put on the ambitions of his sisters. What had Seetal dreamed of before the hospital laundry? Or Uma, who packed chocolate bars alongside their mom? Both girls had been married by the age of twenty-one. No scholarships for them, just Uncles Amardeep and Baldev.

He worked obsessively. On the physical level, energy and matter were tractable; unlike higher-order phenomena such as girls, their difficulties could be tamed by formulae. His SAT scores were exceptional, and one day he found himself walking across the MIT campus wearing a wide batik tie and one of Uncle Malkit’s old suits, expertly altered by Seetal so it had looked, to the tastemakers on the family couch, quite stylish. Whether it was his manic determination or his impeccable minority credentials, the admissions board was impressed, and amid family rejoicing, he was offered a full scholarship, on condition he maintained his academic performance. The eagle had landed.

One September morning, with his waist-length hair wrapped in a bright pink turban, a garland round his neck and a tikka mark on his forehead, he was taken to the station in his uncle Inderpal’s cab and put on the train to his new life. His mother was already putting the word out for a bride.

In Cambridge, the first thing he did — before looking for his dorm, before registering for classes — was find a barber. He was determined that his student ID would have a new person on it, the one who lay in bed that first night running his fingers over his buzz-cut bristles, feeling the unfamiliar shape of his skull and trying not to cry. The next day he falteringly began to invent a different character, more suitable than Jaswinder Singh Matharu to inhabit the domes and towers of a university campus. As Jaz — no family name — he avoided the desi scene, stayed away from the speed-dating, the cultural societies — anything that might remind him of the shame he was trying to outrun. His roommate Marty took it upon himself to introduce him to activities he’d previously seen only in the teen comedies he’d rented back home in Baltimore. Together they shotgunned beer, smoked pot and went to rowdy parties where people dressed up in bedsheets or bathing suits and groped one another in upstairs bedrooms. At one of these parties Jaz lost his virginity to a girl called Amber, who was just like the goris he’d always dreamed about, except paralytically drunk on Red Bull and vodka. Afterward he thought he was in love and followed her around for a couple of weeks, until she told him to stop, explaining that what they’d done was a “onetime thing.” He asked Marty what this meant. Nothing good, bro, was the answer. Jaz told himself she was nothing but a gandi rundi, a filthy whore like all white girls.

In this way, most of his first semester passed before he had to face his parents and show the Punjabi world what he’d done. His cousin Jatinder was getting married in Philadelphia. He had to attend. No excuses. At least, he told himself, it would get the whole thing over with in one shot. His arrival at the reception, held in a banquet room at a hotel, was dramatic. Uncle Malkit, taking a call outside, didn’t recognize him at first. When Jaz said hello, Uncle Malkit’s eyes widened. His parents were literally speechless. Instead of hugging him, his mom held him at arm’s length, a stricken expression on her face. His father wouldn’t even shake his hand. Later, he followed Jaz into a restroom and grabbed his collar, his face contorted with anguish. For a long time he struggled for words. Jaz wondered when he was going to hit him. “You look like a thug,” he whimpered, then let him go.

His sister’s husband, Baldev, was deputized to give him the lecture. He hoped Jaz was happy. He hoped it felt good spitting in the faces of his parents, who’d slaved every day, who’d made such sacrifices. So proud of him, but the minute he left home he’d thrown away his religion. He was a grown man; it was his decision. Baldev understood how hard it was to keep to one’s culture, especially in this maderchod Amrika. But couldn’t Jaz see how cruel he was being? He’d killed something inside his maa; he’d trampled on his father’s honor. How could the old man hold his face up in the community now that his son was no better than those black gaandus who ran around behaving like monkeys, fighting and making trouble? Jaz muttered something about finding his own path, a phrase much on his mind at the time.

After Jatinder’s wedding, he threw himself into guilt-ridden study. He stopped going to parties, abstained from drinking and, apart from his weekly trips to the barber, tried to go back to being the good Sikh boy who appreciated his parents’ sacrifice. His mother eventually broke the silence, phoning him to ask if he was coming back for the vacation. No, he told her. He had work to do. He promised to see the family as much as his studies permitted, but for the next couple of years his visits were few and far between.

Marty, never the most sensitive of souls, didn’t really understand the change in his party apprentice. He and Jaz grew apart. In his second year Jaz found different friends. He read European novels and bought a lava lamp. Day and night, he wore a pair of John Lennon glasses with purple lenses. He’d sit under a tree, pretending to read, desperately hoping to be distracted. In this way, he met his first real girlfriend, a gothy biology major called Lynsey who seemed to accept him as a tortured intellectual. They were together almost two years. The simple things they did — going camping, eating in restaurants — convinced Jaz there really was something worthwhile about the larger America, something richer than his hormonal fantasies.

The family found the new Jaz hard to understand. He was dimly aware he made everyone uncomfortable by reading The New York Times at the breakfast table, commenting acidly on Bill Clinton or Bosnia. If he’d been able to put it into words, he would have said he was trying to broaden their horizons. One summer he worked double shifts in his cousin Madan’s convenience store, then got a passport and went to Europe with friends. When he came back, he drove home, and without thinking went downtown to a deli, bought a few things and stashed them in his mom’s fridge. It wasn’t just the strange food (a Camembert and some sliced mortadella) that outraged her; it was the invasion of her space, the implicit criticism of her mothering. Her son was in her house: It was her job to feed him. Jaz was angry that she threw his stuff in the trash. Then he remembered where he was. Even heating a can of beans would have been a provocation.

He had his vacation pictures developed and showed his dad the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate. He expected him to be interested, or at least proud that his son had visited such exotic places. He tried to make him laugh by repeating some mildly spicy Italian phrases he’d learned in Naples, but the old man just looked dejected. At the time Jaz interpreted it as disapproval. Later he realized it was a kind of mourning; he was sad because he couldn’t connect himself with this image of his smiling crop-haired son, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, clinking glasses with sunburned white boys over plates of steak frites.

Lynsey broke up with him. She wanted, she said, to be part of his life, but he kept shutting her out. He tried to tell her it wasn’t like that. How could he explain the impossibility of taking a gori back home, let alone introducing one as his girlfriend? None of his friends had met his parents. The few times his mom and dad made the trip up to MIT, he hustled them off campus as fast as possible. He endured a torturous lunch and took them to see the sights in a rental car. They were polite and attentive, but the feeling of relief when it came time for them to leave was obviously mutual.

And so his compartmentalized life continued. He stayed at MIT for grad school, partly because it deferred the moment when he’d have to choose a career. He’d always been more interested in theory than experiment, and his adviser steered him toward the field of quantum probability, where he worked on reconciling competing mathematical descriptions of the physical world, attempting to understand life at a scale where precision dissolved into indeterminacy.

As if, back then, he had any idea of what indeterminacy really meant.

The boy was now four. He didn’t speak. He didn’t make eye contact. He wasn’t toilet trained. And Jaz was wrestling with him by the swimming pool in a cheap motel, the kind of place they were condemned to stay in because even though they had money, money Jaz wanted to use to give his family the best of everything, the romantic inns he and Lisa knew from the old days wouldn’t put up with the disruption. It was always the same. Calls from the front desk; the discreet suggestion that they find somewhere more child-friendly. They’d tried it on the way from LAX. A junior manager had knocked on the door of the room. Was everything OK? She was sorry to intrude but there’d been a complaint from another guest.

Some vacation. Raj kept them up all night. At five a.m., since they were both awake and angry, they’d decided to leave. They’d driven on until they saw the sign from the highway. Drop Inn. Vacancy. It was mid-morning. They’d had no breakfast. Jaz didn’t think they could make it any farther. He figured that in a place like this no one would look down their noses. The woman at the desk was polite enough. She probably saw and heard worse on a regular basis. As a precaution, he took the two rooms at the end of the block: one for the family and the one next door for insulation. No one should have to endure the sound of his son through thin walls.

“Come on, Raj. Let’s help Mommy unpack.”

He picked him up and slung him under one arm like a parcel. Raj began to scream properly, the full amplified monotone. For a moment Jaz fantasized about throwing him into the pool, watching him sink to the bottom. His angry face disappearing under the rippling water, the silence afterward.