If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar Page A

Sorab’s lack of guile seemed to disarm his father. “So, you’re admitting that you were on the streets instead of in college?” he said. Tehmina could hear the anger leaking out of his voice.
    â€œSure. But ask me why I was there, Daddy.” Without giving thema chance to reply, Sorab continued. “We were protesting Bombay University’s decision to rewrite the college curriculum. They want the whole country to be a fundamentalist Hindu nation—and they’re rewriting the history books to glorify the Hindu majority. They’re saying, if Pakistan can be an Islamic country, why can’t India be a Hindustan? Can you imagine, Dad? These people don’t believe in secularism—and they’re brainwashing us with all their false mumbo jumbo. It’s like the Muslims and the Parsis and the Catholics simply don’t exist.”
    â€œYah, without us Parsis to build it, their Bombay would still be a bunch of islands floating around in the sea,” Rustom growled. Tehmina marveled at how effortlessly her son had managed to defuse his father’s anger. As if he had sensed her relief, Rustom scowled at his son. “But that’s no excuse to interrupt your education with all this nonsense,” he said. “Best to leave all this agitation and protest to the professional troublemakers.”
    Sorab looked his father straight in the eye. “But, Daddy,” he said, “fighting for what you believe is part of my education, too. You are the one who taught me that.”
    Remembering that incident, Tehmina felt a pang of remorse. What had happened to that quietly resolute boy? What had happened to his clear-eyed way of seeing the world? She had thought that going to America would broaden Sorab’s horizons, would make him stand on the shoulders of his parents and see farther than they ever had. But instead, the opposite had happened. In some strange way, Sorab seemed to have shrunk and his world had narrowed. He seemed personally happier, yes, but—but maybe that was the whole problem. Living in this housing complex, where the layouts of many of the homes were identical and even the cars and the play swings in the backyards all looked the same, Sorab had traded a dull contentment for the intense passion of his boyhood. Tehmina didn’t getit—how could a boy who had grown up on the crowded, tumultuous streets of Bombay, who had jostled with the noisy crowds to catch a train to college, who had eaten pani puri and drunk sugarcane juice from roadside booths, who had witnessed the whole carnival of human experience—the millionaires, the lepers, the jewelry stores, the slum colonies—how could such a boy encase himself in a timid, clean, antiseptic world that was free from germs, bacteria, passion, human misery? Where even the straws were wrapped in plastic and people at gyms sprayed their seats each time they rose from a machine, as if human sweat was more dangerous than the chemicals they sprayed. (She knew, she had visited the gym in their housing colony.) And how did he expect his sixty-six-year-old mother to live in that world?
    The worst part was, there was no reaching Sorab. He had disappeared, like a snail in a shell. Over dinner the day of the run-in with Tara, for instance, she had tried to tell her son about how their neighbor had left the two boys alone at home, how she and Susan had taken them in. If Susan hadn’t been present, she might have confided in Sorab the fact that Susan had made it clear that she didn’t want any more interactions with the family next door, and how it broke Tehmina’s heart to think of those poor boys in that home. She may have even broached the subject of gathering up some of the books and toys Cookie had outgrown and presenting them to Josh and Jerome. But as it was, Sorab had listened for a few moments, nodded his head, rolled his eyes, and said, “Some people should never be parents in the