“The Narayans,” by Akhil Sharma (2024)

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice. She’d come up to you at temple on Holi or Diwali and offer congratulations so heartfelt you’d feel as if it were the first time the day had ever been celebrated. We all liked her. She was an immigrant, too, but she didn’t seem to have jangled nerves the way we did. She cooked for many of us and regularly tried to refuse payment. “This is from my side,” she’d say. “A horse can’t be friends with grass,” we might answer.

Mr. Narayan we didn’t like. He was short and squat. He spoke roughly to his wife. He owned a television-repair shop and described himself as an engineer, even though he hadn’t finished high school. Our kids would go over to his house to see his children, and he’d play Ping-Pong with them. When he won, he’d crow about it. He got into stupid arguments with the kids, over facts like the world’s population. If someone showed him an almanac that proved he was wrong, he’d grumble about the ignorance of American authors. We’d see him smoking in his car in the driveway of the high school, as he waited for his children, a shower cap on his head because he was dyeing his hair.

The Narayans had two children. The daughter, Madhu, was fourteen, two years younger than her brother. Mr. Narayan wouldn’t let her sit on the front porch, where she might be seen. He also wouldn’t let her wear shorts. She wore jeans in gym class.

Nehali, who was the same age, told her mother about this.

“Poor girl,” Dr. Shukla said. “Why do you sound happy talking about it?”

“I’m not happy,” Nehali said. She was standing beside her mother as Dr. Shukla rolled dough for parathas. “Why shouldn’t I talk about it?”

“Religious people can be conservative.”

“Mr. Narayan isn’t religious.”

Dr. Shukla was another person we all liked. Although she ran a clinic on Oak Tree Road, she also made house calls. She addressed women as “elder sister,” even if they weren’t educated. She had a face that was kindly and square and so hairy that she appeared to have sideburns.

One day, Nehali came to her mother’s clinic after school. She was giddy, her eyes bright. “Madhu’s pregnant,” she announced, almost swaying in her excitement. “Vikas is the daddy.” Vikas was Madhu’s brother.

Dr. Shukla became confused. “How do you know?” she demanded in Hindi. She always spoke Hindi when scolding.

“The nurse told Madhu, and Madhu told the principal.”

“Did the principal tell you? Are you the principal’s beloved?”

Nehali looked at her mother. She felt it was wrong that her enthusiasm was being interfered with. Maybe her mother didn’t understand how interesting all this was.

“Does the principal hold your hand and ask how you are doing?”

Nehali didn’t answer.

“You don’t hear me? You hear things that no one is saying to you, but you don’t hear me?”

Madhu’s pregnancy was soon confirmed. All over town, we questioned our children. Had they ever been alone with Vikas? Had he ever touched them? We weren’t totally sure, though, that it was Vikas who had got Madhu pregnant. Some of us suspected Mr. Narayan. Anyone who wouldn’t let his daughter sit on the front porch and made her wear jeans in gym class had to have weird ideas about sex.

Mrs. Narayan began going to temple all the time. Whenever we were there, we’d see her. She’d lie face down on the wall-to-wall carpet, her arms stretched toward the idols of God Ram or Krishna-ji, her palms pressed together. We’d seen people who had cancer in their families do this. Those prostrated men and women had frightened us. Here was what life finally came to—being sick, or watching loved ones be sick. Seeing Mrs. Narayan, however, we felt a sense of indignation. There were so few Indians in Edison, New Jersey, in those days; we felt that each of us reflected well or badly on the others. The Narayans had stolen some piece of our self-respect.

We learned soon that Vikas was getting beaten at school. One morning, as he was going down a flight of stairs, a large group of white girls crowded him, tripped him, sent him tumbling as they punched him and clawed at his shirt and hair. This, we all felt, was not wrong. He was male, and he belonged to his family. Still, we worried. If such an attack could occur under just circ*mstances, surely it could happen unjustly, too. Had those girls felt free to beat him up because he was Indian? Would they do the same to our children?

Madhu was given an abortion, and two months later she was taken out of school and sent to India. This we understood as proof that Mr. Narayan was the one who had impregnated her. If it had been Vikas, his parents could have just kept him locked in his room at night.

When Dr. Shukla was a little girl, in India, her parents, like many middle-class people, had forbidden the servants from sitting on the furniture. When she’d see her parents sitting on a sofa while a servant girl not much older than she was squatted in a corner, her stomach hurt. She felt so bad once that she gave a servant girl stickers that could be scratched and sniffed. The scratch-and-sniffs were her favorite, and it had felt important to give the girl the very best thing she had.

That guilty awareness of her own good fortune had always made her tender toward women from poorer backgrounds. While the rest of us now felt that the entire Narayan family was wretched and should be excluded and forgotten, Dr. Shukla actually imagined the nightmare that must have been the Narayan household: the frightened Madhu, Vikas living under a shadow of unspeakable and most likely unjustified blame, the gray ranch house standing in the flat light of the afternoon. And although she believed that Mr. Narayan was wicked, one of those monstrous men India was full of, she also blamed Mrs. Narayan, since she must have known and chosen to ignore and deny.

After Madhu was sent to India, Mrs. Narayan vanished for a while. We didn’t see her at temple; we didn’t see her at the Indian grocery store, renting videotapes. Vikas we heard about. At school, he had to eat lunch in a classroom by himself. This was for his own protection.

One evening, Dr. Shukla drove home from her clinic, Nehali in the passenger seat. Pulling into her driveway, she saw Mrs. Narayan’s silver station wagon and Mrs. Narayan beside it. Mrs. Narayan looked nervous, her face tense and drawn. Nehali twitched under her seat belt, wondering what story she would be able to unfold to her friends at school.

Dr. Shukla turned to her. “You speak about this and I’ll beat you like a nail.”

They got out of the car.

Mrs. Narayan waited for Nehali to go inside.

“Shukla sister, I can’t breathe.”

“In reality?”

“I take two steps and get out of breath.”

“Come.”

In the kitchen, Dr. Shukla took Mrs. Narayan’s blood pressure. She had Mrs. Narayan take deep breaths while she held a stethoscope to her back. She felt uncomfortable with her hand on Mrs. Narayan’s shoulder, as if touching her suggested acceptance.

“Madhu didn’t tell me anything.”

Dr. Shukla felt revulsion.

“How are you sleeping?”

“I’m scared to sleep.”

Mrs. Narayan began coming to Dr. Shukla’s house every few weeks. She’d arrive in the evening and Dr. Shukla would check her blood pressure, talk to her. Mrs. Narayan would stay as Dr. Shukla began cooking dinner. She’d linger even after Mr. Shukla came home. Only when the family sat down to dinner would she depart.

Once, Dr. Shukla told Mrs. Narayan that she should come to the clinic. Mrs. Narayan demurred. “When people look at me, I feel I’m being scalded.”

One of the reasons that people had hired Mrs. Narayan as a cook was that she was Brahman, so we didn’t have to think about what fingers had touched the food that we had in our mouths. When we tried to swallow her food now, the masticated globs seemed to dangle down our throats from a long hair.

Mrs. Narayan got a job at Kmart. Mrs. Bilwakesh, a real-estate agent, went to the store and spoke to a supervisor. Mrs. Narayan was let go. This, we felt, was too much. To take away someone’s ability to earn a living seemed evil.

Time passed, months and years. The big change came with the opening of Hilltop Estates. Before Hilltop, the only Indians who had lived in Edison were those who could afford to buy or rent a house. Now Indians who couldn’t buy a car were seen walking along the sides of roads. Rusty splatters of betel nut appeared on sidewalks near gas stations. At J.P. Stevens High School and John Adams Middle School, there were boys and girls who couldn’t speak English and wore coats that were too large for them, passed down from relatives. Before, if you wanted garlands for prayers, you bought flowers and used a needle and thread to make your own. Now you went to an apartment in Hilltop, where three old women sat on a floor surrounded by mounds of marigolds. There was also an apartment full of freezers, where you could buy smuggled Bengali fish.

If Madhu’s pregnancy had been discovered after Hilltop opened, people wouldn’t have cared as much. After Hilltop, there were so many Indians that there wasn’t the same feeling that one family reflected on the rest. Mrs. Narayan might also have felt less isolated. She could have befriended the families that came to Hilltop, many of whom had chaotic stories of their own.

Vikas graduated from high school. He went to Georgia Tech to study engineering. After he had been there for one semester, Mr. Narayan emptied all the bank accounts, sold his shop, took out a second mortgage on the house, and returned to his town in India. We learned this from Mrs. Bilwakesh and from Mr. Narayan’s brother-in-law, who lived in Philadelphia but had a friend in Edison.

Mr. Narayan had always wanted to be rich. He had always wanted to be important, to listen to people while standing half turned away, as if the person speaking weren’t worth his full attention.

Mr. Narayan’s town in India had eight thousand people. There was one main road with shops, and then branching lanes with houses facing sugarcane fields. In the afternoon, you could hear the crickets, even if you closed the windows.

Mr. Narayan began to lend money. People would visit his house, and he’d sit on his veranda and talk with them. Some of the loans were for only twenty-four hours. Mostly, the people he lent to had collateral—tractors, water pumps, scooters, generators. He’d pick these things up in the evening so that his debtors wouldn’t be tempted to sell them overnight. Mornings, farmers appeared at the gate of his house, to pay him back and collect the tractor or the generator.