One Amazing Thing

ocean of one billion people, all our karmas fitting together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and begin anew.

MRS. PRITCHETT’S ADMISSION FILLED UMA WITH A PRIMAL SORROW. They were about to die. It was now clear that the entire group believed this. The sorrow infiltrated her lungs. Ramon! she called in er mind. In answer, a memory came, a summer walk she and Ramon had taken in the hills. They had climbed up a trail of slippery orange gravel, impeded by picnic supplies. When they reached the top, the puckered golden skin of the bay stretched below them. They had spread a sheet on the narrow, bumpy ledge and eaten chutney sandwiches and oranges and densely sweet chocolate pan de huevos. Then they had held hands and watched the sky until the clouds turned purple.

Uma looked down on their intertwined fingers and was surprised to see that Ramon’s were as brown as hers. But this was not right. Ramon was lighter skinned. In this not-quite-a-memory, Uma’s eyes moved up his brown arm, his shoulders, and his neck, until they alighted on his face. She gasped because the man was not Ramon at all. He was Indian. His features shifted as she watched-now a mustache, now a pair of high cheekbones, now square-framed glasses over wide-set eyes-but his Indianness was never in question. Watching him, she realized what she must have guessed deep down when her mother had interrupted herself during their phone conversation. “Enough time for-” her mother had said. Now Uma was able to complete the sentence: “for us to introduce you to some nice Indian men.” Was this subterranean knowledge the reason she hadn’t told Ramon where she was coming today? Did she want to meet the nice Indian men her parents were even at this moment lining up for her?

Had she been only playing at love, all this time? Was that the kind of person she was?

LILY WAS TRYING TO WHISPER, BUT THEY ALL HEARD HER. “Gramma, do you think that woman was a ghost?”

The word hung in the air, papery. Uma thought she felt presences around them-not malevolent or sorrowful, but startled by their sudden weightless existence.

“I think yes,” Jiang said. “When I was young, I heard stories. Spirits that died in the place where you are, coming back to warn you.”

Lily said, “So many people must have died in this quake. Perhaps they can save us?”

MR. PRITCHETT SAT WITH HIS HEAD BOWED. HE WOULD NOT look at anyone. If it had been possible for him to go somewhere and never see any of the group again, he would have done so. But their world had shrunk to three desks. Hell is other people, Uma thought on his behalf.

It was completely dark now. Cameron had to switch on the flashlight again. For a moment it didn’t work. Had water leaked into it?

Give up Seva, said the voice inside his head, and I’ll fix the flash- light. Cameron ignored the voice. He shook the flashlight hard until it came on. He shone the beam around to check for problems. He trained the circle of light for an instant on the cubicle wall, beyond which the dead man lay in the water. Cameron’s chest hurt. But no more procrastination was possible.

15

When Cameron first met the holy man, he didn’t recognize him as such. Partly, he didn’t fit Cameron’s concept of holy men: no beads, no robes, no beatific expression on a bearded face. And partly, Cameron was distracted; it was the thirtieth anniversary-or as close to it as he could figure-of his son’s death, and with each passing year, the event weighed more heavily on him.

They were traveling on a crowded Muni. Cameron was on his way to the hospice where he volunteered one afternoon each week. So was the holy man, though Cameron did not know this. The man, whose name was Jeff, stood holding on to one of the bus handlebars, swaying as the vehicle made a wide turn. He was white, with pleasant, nondescript features; he wore jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. His head was shaved, but it was currently fashionable for men to shave their heads, so Cameron barely noticed it.

Cameron stared out a window, trying to occupy his mind with observation. The passing scenery was painfully familiar, so like the landscape of his childhood, the ugly streets he had labored to escape: storefronts with grills over the doors and windows, piles of garbage, men passed out in doorways. Dealers hung out on street corners, keeping an eye out for customers, or for cops. Even without opening the window, Cameron knew what it would smell like: rotting food, sour armpits, piss, marijuana, and the desperate hilarity of young men who waited for night. But when the doors hissed open, it was to let Cameron-and Jeff-out into sunshine and a happy burst of music and the not-unpleasant odor of Sesame Fried Chicken from Tang’s Carry Out. From across the years he could hear Imani’s voice, so clear that he had to sit down on the bus-stop bench and put his head in his hands: You already decided you going to leave, so you can’t see nothing good even if it up and smack you in the face.

Jeff paused to give him a concerned look. “You okay? Need some water?”

Cameron considered telling the stranger to mind his own business, but he held up a hand to indicate he was fine. When Jeff moved on, Cameron went back to thinking about Imani even though he didn’t want to. She was like a scab that he couldn’t help picking at.

They had both been in their senior year of high school when he met her at a party. He usually avoided the kind of parties his friends threw, with liquor and loud music and making out in the stairwell and fistfights or worse in the alley behind the apartments. They weren’t even his friends-just guys he happened to know because they went to school together or lived in the neighborhood. But on this day he had just sent off the last of his college applications and was feeling celebratory. And perhaps a bit nostalgic. Soon all this would be behind him. He was certain of getting into a good college. His grades were excellent; his recommendations enthusiastic; he was on the track team, and for the last couple of years, he had taken care to stay out of trouble. Following the advice of his biology teacher, who had become a mentor, he volunteered regularly at the local hospital. His counselor had declared that all these credentials, added to Cameron’s unfortunate background-impoverished, orphaned, first- generation college applicant-would probably snag him a scholarship. At first Cameron had resented the counselor’s patronizing manner. Like some second-rate prestidigitator, the counselor tried to turn the painful truths of Cameron’s existence into advantages. Cameron had wanted to say something cutting, to walk out of the man’s office, slamming the door behind him. But he had held on to his temper. If doing so helped him get where he needed to go, Cameron could put up with a little patronizing.

Cameron wanted to be a doctor. He guarded this fragile dream jealously, not confiding it to anyone except his biology teacher. His friends would ridicule it, and even his well-meaning, churchgoing aunt, with whom he had lived since his parents had died, would shake her head in warning and say, “Boy, you aimin’ above your station.” Blindsided by infatuation in the months following the party at which they had met, he had ventured to share his goal with Imani, but that turned out to be an error.

At the party, he’d had a couple of beers. When he first saw Imani being pushed into the middle of the room by a couple of other girls, he didn’t recognize her because she went to a different school. She resisted her friends, but when someone turned off the music, she squared her shoulders, stood tall, and began to sing. She was good, definitely, but not so exceptional in this community; almost every family had a member in a church choir. So what was it about this girl that captured his attention and his breath? Her hair was too nappy, her skin too dark. She looked good in the red sweater she wore over a black skirt-but several girls there looked better. Was it the passion with which she sang, eyes closed, leaning into the song? Or the song itself, the haunting, dragged out notes of “My Man He Don’t Love Me”? Cameron had never heard that song before; it would go deep into him, lodging like a guinea worm, emerging whenever it wanted to. It pulled him across the room to introduce himself to Imani, to offer to get her a drink, to listen with fascination to her chatter, though later he couldn’t remember what she had said. By the end of the party, he had-most uncharacteristically-exchanged phone numbers and set up a movie date for the next evening. Maybe that’s why the relationship was doomed from the first: the person Imani fell for wasn’t the real Cameron.

Their romance sped through winter into the beginnings of spring. He rushed to get his homework done before