by Alka Khushalani

We got our green cards two months after my father died. My mother decided we would move to the States anyway – she, my sister and me – though she was advised against it by just about everyone we knew. It was 1978. I was eight, my sister was eleven. My mother was starting a medical residency at a hospital in Detroit when we found ourselves a one-bedroom at the Oakland Mall Apartments, a flat sprawl of two-story structures built around a fenced in pool. Each building in the complex was identical to the others, red brick on the bottom with black shingles on top. Neatly trimmed hedges flanked the front doors; and brass mailboxes lined the entryways. We took it as a good omen that when we first walked in we saw on the third mailbox from the left, MAKHIJA. A Sindhi name, like ours.

We moved into the ground floor unit with a view of the pool at the end of the summer. We arrived with four V.I.P. hard-sider suitcases. My mother bought a pullout couch with big brown and orange flowers,a dinette set and two single beds, but it was difficult to get comfortable. The mustard color wall-to-wall carpet bore the strange odors of previous tenants. The apartment was always hot. The windows would seal shut in the summer and the thin plywood doors to the bedroom and bathroom would stick in their latches in the winter. In every way, the place paled in comparison to the home we had left behind, a rambling three bedroom with a swing in the living room and cool marble underfoot, where we had been a family of four. But we settled in and began to find our way around our new schools, new city, new life, all while keeping our eyes peeled for our upstairs neighbors, the Makhijas, who never seemed to come in or go out when we did.

We had lived there for almost a year when two of my aunts from India came to visit. As we pulled their suitcases into the narrow, overheated foyer, one of them tapped at the mailboxes and said to my mother, “Arre, you didn’t tell us about these Makhijas.”

We explained we had never met them, a very strange circumstance given that our front window faced the path leading up to the entrance of the building, and we were home when we weren’t at school and my mother was up at all hours that first year. Every fourth day she stretched out on the couch in the afternoon and awoke for a night call at the hospital while my sister and I slept in our beds. Even if all of those Makhijas worked the third shift in one of the auto plants downtown, somebody should have seen them.

The younger of my aunts said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get to the bottom of this. I’ll find out what’s what.”

The next morning she dragged a chair from the dining table over to the window, watching even as she read, and later cut vegetables. She kept her eyes trained outside on the front door the next day too, and the next. “They’re probably spending a few months back home,” my mother offered. By now my mother had met some Indian doctors at work, a couple of them single moms, like her. She would have lunch with them in the hospital cafeteria during the week, and we had started going to their houses on the weekend. My sister and I had struck up tentative friendships with their children, spending hours in their rooms, not quite sharing secrets, but not quite strangers, either. We were all much less lonely than we were when we arrived, and our interest in the Makhijas was on the wane.

But my aunts persisisted. “You need your own people near you,” said the younger one.

“What if you get stuck at work? What if the girls get locked out and you’re not home? You’re going to give your duplicate key to an American?” asked the older.

Finally they decided it was best to go upstairs and knock on the Makhijas’ door without further delay. We dressed quickly but formally. I wore my only skirt with a flowered peasant blouse and stole a spray of my sister’s perfume. In my hands I held a stainless steel bowl covered in plastic wrap, filled with mitai from a box in our fridge.

It was a little before noon on a Saturday when our group made its way to the stairs leading to the second level of the apartment building. The hallway, the air perpetually heavy with the smell of cooked cabbage, was silent. None of us spoke. My sister and I lead the way, stopping just outside the door with the letter E above its peephole. My younger aunt stepped forward and knocked. At first there was nothing. Then she knocked again, louder this time, with an open hand, and I heard a rustling from inside. “There’s somebody in there!” I whispered.

Now both my aunts knocked harder, one of them calling, “Hello? Hello? Makhija?”

The door jerked open. He squinted at us through cloudy, sleep-filled eyes. He had a mustache, his lips were dark and chapped. There was a patch of dried skin on his left cheek. We all stepped back, except my mother, who extended her hand, “Mr. Makhija? We live downstairs. We’re also Sindhi.”

He leaned out a bit and shook my mother’s hand reluctantly. Two gold chains swayed together at his neck. “I wonder that we’ve never seen you or your family, Mr. Makhija. We’ve lived here a year,” my mother went on in Sindhi.

He replied in English, “There’s no family. I’m here by myself.”

“Oh,” my aunts said together.

“How long have you been here?” my mother asked.

“Harry! Harry, where’d you run off to?” The door opened wider to frame a woman with wild blonde hair and long, bare legs along side our Indian neighbor, who we could now see wore tight black underwear below his sleeveless t-shirt. “Hello,” the woman said, as though we were a pleasant surprise. She dwarfed him and us. Draping a thin arm over his shoulders she asked, “Are you going to introduce me?”

“Oh no, no,” my older aunt chimed in. “We were just going. It was very nice to meet Mr. Makhija – and your friend.”

With that, we turned back toward the stairs, all of us taking short, brisk steps, the steel bowl still in my hands. We could hear the woman’s voice behind us before the door to apartment E closed once again. Wanna get some breakfast?

As my mother opened the door to our apartment, she snapped her fingers. “I forgot! I forgot to give Harry the key. I forgot to tell him to look out for my daughters. He looked like he would take very good care of them, what do you think?” My aunts pushed her inside.

We were all unusually quiet that afternoon, each of us replaying the scene in our minds, turning it this way and that. “How did he get a name like Harry?” my sister asked suddenly, looking up from one of the romance novels she was always reading.

“He was probably born a Harish or Harshad and decided to change it once he came to America,” said my older aunt.

“That’s the problem with a melting pot, yaar,” said the younger from her chair, facing the window.

I saw Mr. Makhija just once after that day. It was Spring, and I was outside, turning cartwheels with my new best friend Jenny on the long stretch of grass behind our apartment. He came out the back door. This time there was a tall brunette at his side. I stood holding my breath, my heart loud in my chest, watching them walk to a maroon Cutlass Sierra in the parking lot beyond the next set of buildings. As they drove away, I realized why we never saw Mr. Makhija. He didn’t use the front door.

Alka Khushalani lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.