Free Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra Page A

people.
    Outside, the sky was graying. I walked across the Scripps lawns toward Pomona. A black German shepherd with a blue bandanna
     around his neck ran up to me and I sat down and rubbed his face, enjoying the warm panting breath on my face. I ran my fingers
     through the thick hair on his stomach, and he squirmed and reached up and licked my face, pushing me over. We lay happily
     on the grass laughing at each other and I realized it had been a long time since I had touched an animal. I got up, and he
     followed me for a moment and then veered off, running easily through the water arcing up from the sprinklers.
    In the lounge the phone was off the hook. I picked up the receiver and laid it back in the cradle. There was a note on my
     door: “The phone’s been ringing every ten minutes and it’s somebody with a foreign accent.” I went back out to the lounge
     and sat by the phone. The wall in front of me went from gray to orange and I felt heat spread across my neck. The phone rang,
     and I picked it up. An operator asked for me, fuzzy and distant, and then my father cleared his throat.
    “Abhay.”
    “Yes, Pa.”
    “Abhay, your grandfather, he passed away yesterday.”
    I could hear birds far away, muffled by the door and the glass and the concrete.
    “Abhay?”
    “Yes, Pa.”
    “I’m going there tomorrow for the… He was in hospital with the old heart trouble. They said he was sleeping and then he seemed
     to wake up for a minute.”
    We were silent for a moment, and I could hear him breathing and I imagined the signal flashing up from land into space and
     bouncing off metal and then miles of space again until finally I could hear it.
    “Pa.”
    “Yes?”
    “Uh… I…”
    “Yes. Listen, I’ll call you again soon.”
    “Okay.”
    “Right.”
    “Tell Ma I’m okay.”
    “Yes.”
    I went outside and sat on the stairs and the sun sparked at me through the sprinkler sprays. I was feeling nothing and knew
     it would come later. I tried to remember my grandfather’s face but could think only of his cupboard full of dusty medical
     books and homeopathic medicines. My father’s father had been trained to be a lawyer but preferred to spend his time studying
     tattered old books and dispensing sweet white medicines to people who didn’t trust the doctors with regular modern degrees
     or couldn’t afford them. When I was very young we’d go to visit him in his old, old house, and I’d play chess with him, old
     Indian rules, and then there would be a knock at the door and he’d go away and I’d see a thin face, anxious and sometimes
     in pain, and my grandfather would scoop up thousands of little white balls in a glass vial and carry it carefully to the door
     and bring back some little white balls for my waiting mouth and he’d sprinkle them on my tongue, laughing his toothless clown’s
     laugh. When I grew older he began to ask me when I was going to have my upnayana ceremony and be able to wear my sacred thread
     and become one of the twice-born, but I’d been to school in the meantime and had learned about the evils of the caste system,
     so we didn’t play chess anymore. Just before I left for the States we went to visit him, and I spent most of that week up
     on the roof, reading and watching the kites weave in the sky. My mother came up and sat on the bed next to me and said he’s
     getting old and you’re going away and he worries, you know, you are the oldest son, he really worries, you could do it just
     for the old man; and for a moment I remembered the way his fingernails clicked against my teeth when he put the sweetness
     in my mouth and the innocence of his smile but I shook my head and went back to my book, and now I wondered what he’d thought
     of in that last moment of wakefulness.
    The water stopped. I still couldn’t feel anything.
    In the slanting yellow light of early morning Mount Baldy looked closer than it really was, as if you could easily walk into
     the shallow dark