After reading 'Lemon & Chili', Meghna Pant's heartbreaking fiction piece, one thing is certain - you will never think of 'Mall Rats' the same way again.

I couldn’t remember the last time my laughter had sounded like that. Or sounded at all.

I sat on the bed and looked around. Karan’s Yankees t-shirt that I had ironed for him earlier this morning lay discarded on the oak-paneled floor, as did his Nintendo console. My eyes caught the new poster that Karan had tacked on the blue wall. The man on the poster was John Cena and his muscles burst forth in angry spurts as if challenging infirmity. I contrasted his arms with mine; sixty-seven years old and creaking with jagged old irritations. I wondered if his glistening skin would ever look cratered like mine or if his eyes would ever quail under softness, as did my brown ones, jailed behind their bespectacled lenses.

A half-hour later, I heard Preeti go into the kitchen. After my wife Mary died, Preeti insisted on cooking alone, but she did so grudgingly – banging the pots and muttering under her breath. I would have preferred to help but did not dare to offer. I once made a meal before she got home from work and she refused to let anyone eat it, saying that an elderly man working in the kitchen reflected badly on the woman of the house.

I heard the cackle of mustard seeds roasting in the pan. My nose caught the whiff of cardamom and cloves. The fragrant smells brought back a memory, a long ago memory, a past beyond past. I was in my mother’s modest kitchen, where these sounds and smells had once swept through my senses like a symphony, as her caramel voice called, “Come for dinner, son.”

There were no invitations now, yet I was expected to be present precisely. I smelled fresh coriander. The meal was ready.
Pete was home. Father and son, we walked quietly to the table.
“This is delicious,” I said, as I said to Preeti every night. I knew she wouldn’t acknowledge the compliment and she didn’t.
“Yes it is, Preets. Please eat more, Dad,” said Pete, as he said every night. He pushed the dish containing lady fingers toward me and poured yellow lentils over the white rice on my plate.
I’d heard Preeti say the previous night in their bedroom, in what was clearly not a private complaint, “I make Indian food every night, not for us, but for him, because I know he doesn’t eat anything else. And yet he pushes the food around in his plate and wastes most of it.”

I knew they were both watching me, so I shoved a spoonful of rice and lentils into my mouth and swallowed, wondering how so much would go down my throat.

Jay’s voice chimed in, “Daddy, see. I beat grandpa again. Ate more than him.”

“So did I,” mimicked Karan, proudly.

Preeti dropped a tablespoon noisily on her plate and left the table.

The next morning, after walking Jay and Karan to Campbell Elementary School, I took a further twenty-minute walk to Menlo Park Mall, where I met my group of friends. All of us lived in Edison and spent the weekdays on sofas at the carpeted soft seating area outside Macy’s.

I had met this group by chance. Five years ago, after Mary’s death, I found that I had no one to really talk to. Pete worked long hours at his dental clinic in Trenton. Preeti was busy at her market research firm in Manhattan. I spent my days shuffling Jay and Karan to and from their school, but was otherwise alone at home. It left me feeling depleted to know that I’d had listeners only in the gibberish of my youth and not in the wisdom of old age.
One Monday, after dropping Jay and Karan to school, I decided that instead of going home I would get a cup of coffee at the nearby mall. It was what Jay called a “cheat treat,” since I’d have to use some of the daily twenty-dollar allowance Pete gave me for the children’s lunch. But, I hadn’t bought myself anything for months and needed to validate my worth.

As I was coming out of the Rainforest Café I noticed a group of five Indians in their sixties sitting outside Macy’s. They were playing cards and chatting. Their presence was so startling that I was unable to look away, yet – unsure of how to conduct myself around Indians – I didn’t approach them. I went back at the same time the next day, though, to see if they were still there, and continued to observe them from a distance. For three more days I did this, like a child window-shopping for the candy he wanted.

The next week, I went back to the mall with a plan. After school, I took my grandchildren to the Cold Stone Creamery for their “cheat treat.” Having bought them ice-cream I told them to sit on a bench opposite the group while I – still not confident – hovered around. It was Dave Pat – shortened from Devinder Patel – who chatted with the children and then came up to me, striking up a conversation: “We all noticed you last week. Why don’t you join us, yaar?”
Yaar – friend; a word that hadn’t been addressed to me in decades.

I sat with this group, which called itself the ‘Mall Rats,’ and sometimes, as I later found out, the ‘House Rats.’ I realized that we had a lot in common. Like me, they were lonely immigrants. Like me, most of them lived with their children – for reasons spanning from traditional to emotional to financial. Unlike me, they had kept in touch with India through an extensive social network of Indians, most of whom were now dead or infirmed. Basking in the pleasure of being heard, I realized that these people were what I needed, and so, every weekday after that, during the children’s school time, I would come to the mall.

As usual, I got to the mall before everyone else. As I walked in, I heard the familiar sounds: the cash register rang in the H&M store to my left, the hair dryer warmed up at the unisex salon where soon it would become a monotonous drone. I sat at our regular spot where, as always, the smell from The Candle Shoppe lingered as a pasty fixture. There was a light crowd – mostly teenagers and young mothers pushing baby strollers – which lend to a faint humming sound interspersed with the cantankerous cry of a baby or the guffaw of a rowdy teenager. By lunchtime, the mall would be bustling with scurrying office-goers, more teenagers, bored housewives and busy salespeople. We were lucky that being a little hard of hearing made the noise tolerable, or so we’d been sardonically told by Cindy – the security guard who manned our floor.

By the time the eateries were preparing for lunch, made obvious by the hurried clang of utensils in the food court a floor above us, most of the group had come in, one after another.

We were chatting when suddenly Mrs. Patel said, “Ah! We can have tea now. Divya is here.”

I smoothed my head as if it still had hair on it, a habit from the past.

Each week one person from the group brought us all tea. This week it was Mrs. Sen’s turn, which caused a minor inconvenience since she came only at twelve o’clock – later than all of us – after dropping her granddaughter to kindergarten.

“Hello-ji! Hello-ji!” said Mrs. Sen. She always added ‘ji’ when addressing people, saying it was a sign of respect in the Indian town from where she had come ten months ago. “Sorry I be late. Had to walk all the way to Kishore Mart to buy ginger and, as you see, roads here walk faster than me. Without ginger tea, Mr. Kumar-ji would not enjoy, no?”

She smiled at me through her dentures. She wasn’t wearing an ounce of makeup, which made her thin lips look naked and her peppery eyes vulnerable, as if unwilling to be sheathed from the brusqueness of the skin and sinew around. The only hint of color was on her patchily dyed gray-black hair, knotted at the nape of her neck.
I cleared my throat before replying, “I always enjoy your tea, Mrs. Sen.”

We took out our Styrofoam cups as Mrs. Sen rummaged through her bag and pulled out two thermos flasks.

“This is one with sugar,” she said, handing me a flask. “And this without sugar, Mr. Patel-ji,” she added, giving the second flask to Dave.

Dave took a long sip of the steaming milky tea and said, “Mrs. Sen, your tea reminds me of my mother’s. She used to make the best tea in the world.” His baritone voice enunciated on the words “best” and “mother” as if wringing the meaning out of them.

His wife, Mrs. Patel, looked up from her knitting, and said, “His diabetes has gone to his head. He never gives a compliment to anyone without mentioning his mother first.” Her sari, draped a little short around her portly frame, edged higher, and it was only thanks to the long cotton socks she wore – out of modesty, I concluded – that the skin on her legs remained hidden from view.

Dave said, “Another spontaneous combustion,” and went back to sipping his tea. We smiled conspiratorially at one another. They were the only couple left among us and their outbursts reminded us of our own spouse, dead and gone.

“Is that smell of curry coming from your bag, Mrs. Sen?” Raj Sharma simpered. He tightened the brown muffler around his spindly neck and zipped his black woolen jacket. It was summer but Raj found the mall’s air-conditioning too cold.

I sniffed too and caught a familiar smell that I was unable to place.
“These are smell of some readymade curry I bought,” Mrs. Sen said, giving me a sidelong glance. Three days back, in an excited voice, she had told me that she would be making a special lunch for me today. That was probably what her big bag contained.

“Shiney used to love curry, especially shrimp curry,” said Dave quietly; adjusting the cushion he was sitting on. Due to the slow onset of rheumatoid arthritis it was becoming difficult for him to sit on the sofa the whole day. A Victorian walking stick with a gilded spire, a gift from us, lay to his right.

The prior month, a former group member – Shiney – whom I had never met, had succumbed to a stroke. He had been Dave’s neighbor when he lived with his son and daughter-in-law. For fifteen years he looked after his grandchildren. Once they grew up, Shiney was told to move out. His son wanted ‘space.’ Scared of old-age homes – which we associated with a sterilized walk to the guillotine – Shiney rented a small studio apartment where he lived alone, slept alone and ate alone. He came to the mall irregularly after that, and then not at all. In his last years he barely spoke, saying he had spent so long talking only about his children and grandchildren that he had nothing left to say.

We all shut our eyes and muttered a little prayer for Shiney, but I felt nothing. Death had become so predictable a state that I had neither the youthful reverence for it nor the middle-age fear.
Though my tears were too jaded to perform, I noticed that Raj’s eyes had filled up. He was unlocking a Ziploc bag containing pink, white and brown tablets. After having watched his wife die slowly from cancer, Raj regarded his body with dizzying alertness, like a nervous first-time parent scrutinizing their newborn. I felt sorry for him, for death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us.

“I told Shiney to walk out of the house with his right foot first. I reminded him that we Indians change everything about ourselves in this country, except our beliefs,” said Dave.

I listened carefully. Dave was, after all, the lucky one among us. He lived with his son, who had become grateful, attentive and respectful after Dave took him in, helping him recover from his wife’s untimely death in a car accident.

Dave continued, his breath heavy, “I told Shiney: ‘Even in Rome, do as the Americans do.’ Develop interests outside your children. Look at my American neighbors, Steve and Karen. They didn’t orbit their life and money around their children. Now in their old age, they are living in style, riding their Harley on Monday afternoons. I wish Shiney had listened. For I know it wasn’t the stroke that killed him. It was loneliness.”

Dave’s eyes became wet. Mrs. Patel wiped his fogged glasses and put them back on him.

We were all startled by a flash. We turned around to see three teenagers. One of them had a cell phone. He was using it to take a picture of us.

“Don’t stare. It will only encourage them,” Mrs. Patel hissed to Mrs. Sen. She had a point. Sitting in the mall day-after-day like mannequins on public display, we had become objects of ridicule, especially in the easy black and white judgment of the young. So we tried to stay as invisible here as we did in our homes.

At the same time, I knew it was difficult for Mrs. Sen to let go of her Indian ways. On her husband’s death anniversary, she had come to the mall early and confessed to me how miserable she was. Life in India had become difficult for her as a widow; she received no respect or rights. Her son had invited her to live with him, so she came to the US, only to end up a caretaker of her three-year-old granddaughter and the house. “I didn’t have lot in India, but here I am just a maid,” she said. She had come from a household of eleven people and was shocked at the time she was expected to spend alone at her son’s house. She cried, “I ache to hear knock of an unannounced visitor on my door.”

I felt protective of Mrs. Sen for it was not easy being part of the immigrant story, where the wins were fickle and the failures overstated. I remembered how difficult it had been for me to become a successful immigrant – a person greater than oneself.

After landing in America for the first time, fifty-years back, I’d skittishly hailed a taxi to the Illinois University campus; a ride that would cost my family half-a-month’s income. On reaching the dorm, I’d hurriedly pulled out my bags. It was only when the taxi had pulled out of the driveway that I realized I’d forgotten to take out my fifth bag. I lodged a complaint with the campus police.
“I put the bags in the dicky and left one of them there,” I said.
“You left one of your bags in the what, Sir?”
“In the dicky.”
“In the what, Sir?”
“In the back of the taxi. Where you put your bags,” I shouted, not believing their idiocy.
“You mean to say that you left a bag in the trunk of the cab, Sir?”

In India heavy steel suitcases were called trunks. “No, no. Not a trunk. It was only a bag.”

I saw the two policemen exchange a look. Then it struck me: I was making a fool of myself.

I was mortified and right there I made a vow to reinvent myself – as per the deportment of my prodigy – and become exceptional.

The first thing I did on opening my controversial bag was to throw out a lemon and chili thread that my mother had made to protect me from evil. Then I worked on my English – a matter of pride in my village – and learned to speak American English; using ‘elevator’ instead of ‘lift’ and ‘peppers’ instead of ‘capsicums.’ With a lot of practice, which included watching scores of Hollywood movies, I developed a slightly nasal twang. I went to American parties and dated American girls. It was against my religion but I ate beef in burgers and steaks. I wore jeans and t-shirts; my Indian clothes were slowly discarded, as were invitations to join the Indian chess club or go for a buffet lunch with Indians. After a few years, I married an American woman and raised our son as an American.

I became obsessed with wringing the best out of America. My cultural arduousness slipped into daily life and I began to ambition each moment to avoid mistakes; I made sure that I didn’t nick my chin while shaving, reached the office on time, presented my boss with a thoughtful Christmas gift, put my son in a private school and kissed my wife goodnight.

Life kept pushing forward like a line of tumbling dominoes; I was afraid that if I paused to look back, I’d stumble, and my future would scatter away while my past would fall upon me, suffocating me in a heap.

A heavy practicality set into my life; I slotted everything as convenient or inconvenient. If I longed for my mother’s embrace or was hit by a wave of nostalgia for India, the emotion was treated as excessive and ignored as inconvenient. My wife and son, too, pecked on the piecemeal of emotions I could afford – sudden bursts of affection, a spontaneous picnic at Hunter Mountain or a surprise trip to Disneyland.

And then, my parents died.

I hadn’t seen them since leaving India, thirty-eight years ago. My father had been the source of my ambition, and without him, I felt adrift, like a ship that sets sail to the world only to find it has nowhere to dock.

I turned to the only family I had at hand, Mary and Pete. On finding the love they’d craved at their disposition Mary was pleased while Pete was curious and confused.

I became the contradiction of my own orderly life. I stopped poker night with the guys. I turned down the promotion to President of Operations at Delta, where I worked. I sold off my stock options and gave the money to a hunger charity. When Mary made my favorite lamb roast, I asked for curry.

Mary soon grew concerned. I overheard her tell Pete, “I understand that his parents’ death has made him feel the need for family. But I don’t understand the rest. He’s lost fifteen pounds since he got back from India two years ago. He looks lost, unhappy. I’ve never seen him like this.”

My vulnerability enhanced the habit of capitulation in Mary. She crammed our kitchen shelves with Indian recipes and spices. She hinted but didn’t persist that I go to a doctor or psychiatrist. Learning that she had high blood pressure, she made Pete promise to look after me. When Pete married an Indian girl raised in the US like him, and I suggested we live together as a joint family – a common practice in India – Mary, though appalled, agreed, saying she knew that I wanted to revel more in family life.

Pete did not agree, making his case for independence and privacy. But I was determined. I sold my home in Long Island and bought a three-bedroom apartment on Oak Avenue in Metuchen, which was closer to Preeti and Pete’s workplace. I opened a joint bank account in all our names, where I pooled my savings and social security checks, luring the struggling newlyweds with the ‘money-for-all’ hook. When Preeti quit her job to take care of her newborn, I pitched Mary and my services as babysitters, which, if we lived together, would allow Preeti to go back to work. I promised to gift Pete my last treasure – an Audi A6 – which he could drive to work.

“You can’t buy love, Sunny,” Mary said to me gently.

But I had to speak in the language I had taught my child. I had made my son ambitious. He was ambitious for my love. He was ambitious for my generosity. So I used both.

After three years – the year I retired – we all moved in together. For Pete and Preeti it was a pragmatic short-term decision; to live rent-free for a couple of years and grow their savings.
Mary warned me, “This may not turn out as you expect.”

“I can tolerate anything as long as I’m with family,” I’d replied determinedly, unaware that the time would soon come when I would have to uphold my words.

The first year of retirement, which is tough for most, was pleasant for me. Mary pampered the grandchildren and me. Preeti and Pete were affable and appreciative.

It was only after Mary’s heart attack two years later, when the co-dependency changed into something potentially permanent, that all our attitudes shifted.

Preeti became resentful. She bristled when we crossed in the corridor. Her pinched face carried a look of bitter perseverance; so I understood why Karan pushed more and more for the lion’s portion of the queen bed we shared.

Pete honored his promise to his beloved dead mother but took the oblique approach, as would any man walking the tightrope between his wife and father. Yet, I was grateful to Pete; he was a better absentee son to me than I had been an absentee father to him.

I grew terrified, imagining that I’d have to live and die without family, like my parents did. After all, Jay and Karan were growing up fast; already ten and seven years old, and Pete’s dental practice had picked up; he would soon be able to afford his own house. I had to give them no cause for grievances.

So I took Jay and Karan to school, swim lessons and soccer practice. I made them grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta when their mother wasn’t home. I nursed them through falls and fevers. I babysat them when Preeti and Pete went to dinner and movies on Saturday nights. I did all the things I hadn’t had time to do for my own son.
I relegated myself to the background, too, like an uninvited guest in my own house. I came out of my room only at mealtimes. I showered after everyone else. On weekends I went for long walks alone. I didn’t touch a cent from the joint account, limiting my needs to whatever Pete offered. I took no offense when Pete – who had grown up seeking my advice on everything – informed me that he had bought a new couch and a bigger clinic. I didn’t fuss that Preeti wore a diamond ring instead of a mangalsutra, the mark of an Indian married woman; its status reduced to lying among Mary’s other jewelry in Preeti’s dresser drawer. I didn’t balk when my grandchildren called me ‘grandpa’ instead of Dadaji, a father’s father according to Hindu custom, even though I felt that without this distinction, they would forget me after I died, just as they had their ‘grandma.’

I quietly watched Pete’s daily failures as he had once watched mine. I saw him make the same mistakes with his sons as I had made with him – already smothering them with his ambition.

Remember son, was all I said to Pete, every man ends in his own family.

The tea in my cup had gone cold.

Mrs. Sen rubbed her nose and said, “I’m going to the toilet.”
Mrs. Patel corrected her, “Divya, you must say, ‘I’m going to the ladies room, please excuse me.’”

“Yes; please excuse,” said Mrs. Sen.

I watched as Mrs. Sen tentatively stepped on to the escalator, where her bag covered half the stair while she covered the other half, and realized that she was the closest thing to India I had.

The owner of the jewelry kiosk in front of us packed away her wares and locked them up. It must be lunchtime. I waved to her. She gave me a tight smile. I had never bought anything from her.

Seeing her was a cue for everyone else to go home for lunch; being frugal we never ate at the mall. My house was a forty-minute walk from the mall so I skipped lunch altogether. Mrs. Sen didn’t approve of this habit which is why she wanted to make today different.

After the group left, I went to the food court; an extra precaution Mrs. Sen had thought of, since no one we knew went there. If anyone from the group suspected anything they didn’t ask. Friendship was deliberate and measured at our age, for its deceptions, intrusions and judgments only fooled the young, not the old.

Mrs. Sen sat at the edge of a chair opening a steel tiffin carrier stacked with four boxes – a contraption I hadn’t seen in half a century. People carrying food trays chose to sit away from her table.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sen. You really didn’t have to do all this,” I said as I approached her.

“Please, no formal,” she said. Her face was flushed; this was only the second time we were alone. She added, “I didn’t got chance to say thank you. You so very kindly listen to me last time. It is difficult, no, to talk openly in front of so much people.”

She took out the boxes one by one.

“This is food from your region in India. You from Haral village, no, in Punjab? I have friend of friend’s sister, from Haral, who gave me recipe on phone.”
She opened a box containing yogurt-based kidney beans. “I hope this reminding you of your mummy-ji’s cooking. Maybe, if I am so lucky, your wife-ji’s cooking. I think how sweet, probably since wife-ji die he has not eat properly. So I thought this make you feel good hunger.”

This time I identified the sweet and sour smell before she opened the next box. It used to be my favorite dish – khatta – made of jaggery and tamarind. The dessert box, holding sweet rice mixed with raisins, pistachios and saffron, presented itself shortly. The smell and sight of this food seemed to embalm me, taking me slowly away to my past.

“It took much time. Each dish have twenty spices, but I think it taste okay,” she was saying.

There was a rumble of sounds in the food court yet I heard one after another become distinct. A baby cried in the distance. Someone ordered a chicken burrito. A cash register clanged.

“Why you are staring at food? It is not looking good?”

Voices from the past grew louder as Mrs. Sen’s became distant.

“I will cut open my stomach if I have to, but my son will go to America,” said father grimly.

Earlier that morning mother’s voice rang through the fields informing father and me that I had been accepted to study at “Ill-o-no” university. After I had topped the state and nationwide exams, my high school principal had put my name on a government program that doled out full scholarships to students to attend college in the US.

“I don’t want to go,” I said quietly, placing an old plastic bucket below the leak on the hay roof. There was so much for me to do in my village in North India. The dung patties would be crisp next week, ready to be taken to sell for fuel in the market. I had to tutor my sister, Sarita, about Gandhi’s assassination for her upcoming history exam and I had promised to help mother in the harvest season. But my voice did not rise above the bleating rain.
I didn’t get too concerned though and even slept deeply, knowing that father did not have the twenty-thousand-rupees needed for my airline ticket, clothes and books.

The next morning when I woke up, as usual at 4 a.m. to plough the fields, father was still sitting on the straw mat in the lotus position, looking at me.

“I will take a loan against the land,” he declared in a thin voice, as if the weight of the decision had sapped him of all strength. Our one-acre farmland was pawned that very day to the local moneylender, as was, I deemed, my life.

I left India at the age of seventeen, begrudging father for always pushing me to be the man of the house; the man of the school; the man of the farms; and now, without his hand on my back, the man of the world.

I felt orphaned and exiled.

My anger frothed with humiliation on my first day in America. It coalesced into ambition; I would prove myself to America and my father. I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence.

My experiences became mine to keep, undeserving of father’s rustic analysis. I switched my degree from agricultural to aeronautical engineering, abandoning the original plan to go back to India to expand our farming business. The monthly letters from my parents took me months to answer. Because of the expense, we didn’t speak on the phone, and later, when I could afford it, I called them only once or twice a year, the surprise of it taking all depth out of our conversations. I didn’t seek their blessings before getting married or after having a son.

Over the years, excuses to avoid moving back or visit flew forth from me – expensive tickets, demanding boss, son’s exams or wife’s sinus operation. I didn’t invite my parents or sister to visit, ashamed of how they would look to my American wife, half-American child, American neighbors and American friends. I didn’t take my wife or son to India, in spite of their willingness, ashamed of the squalor I came from.

My parents did not persist either, as though my memory was enough. They told me that the farm was doing well – they bought buffaloes every few years and an automated tilling machine. When I offered to pay back the loan, father refused, saying it had already been repaid, and declined my offers to send home money, insisting it was of no use to them.

“The God of Creation does not forgive the father who takes from his son,” he wrote.

Nothing that they did made me feel needed, and so I needed them less.

In the little correspondence I had with them, I exaggerated my life’s grandeur and pace. I kept waiting for my award that I had paid my dues and proved my worth; but never did father say that he was proud of me.

And he never would; for he died, and a few weeks later, so did mother. Sarita called – for the very first time – and begged me to come. I almost didn’t go, canceling my ticket twice, compelled by this premonition of dread and foreboding. But, then I went, alone, as if I’d left nothing behind in America.

On reaching my childhood home, I saw thirty-eight years of change in one moment. I felt as if I’d walked from one dream into another, r