Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift of Duran Duran: Chapter 1

Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift
of Duran Duran: Chapter 1
by Dileep Rao

They moved to the northeastern corner of Nebraska in 1975, just where the border turned ragged as the cornhusking state lay cousined against Iowa. The tiny town of Hartington appeared suddenly on state highway 57, just as it ran into highway 81.

In a town of a thousand, their small yellow house sat on a verdant hill, back some hundred feet from the newly paved road that led to their part of the town. Beside their modest property was the Turner farm, one hundred thirty-five acres of corn under contract to an agricultural corporation. Across the road was a small wheat farm, run by a close-knit family that went by the Swiss name of Ross. Its large silos towered up and sometimes cut the sunset by two minutes.

They were, as they moved their few belongings into the yellow house on Dewhurst lane, the first Indians anyone here had ever seen. Harish was forty-five, short, stout, and smiled often. He had a thick and well-trimmed mustache that resembled a dark, inverted toothbrush. Hartington was the seat of Cedar County, and as such, it was the first to flaunt the latest technology. In the early part of the year the County board upgraded its aging electrics works with a new power plant. Harish was hired as head engineer.

His wife was a thin woman, astoundingly so: her limbs were slender and brown, thinner, it seemed, than the thick braid that fell down her back and a defiance of gravity. Within a week of their arrival, she took a job at the local school as a teacher of mathematics, her Ph.D. the first the town had ever seen. The principal quizzed her on evolution and said, firmly, “We don’t subscribe to that philosophy here.” She blinked and said it was an unlikely topic to come up in an algebra, geometry or calculus class.

Their son, Ajay, was seven when they arrived. His legs and arms were his mother’s, he appeared a spindly child of nearly marionette proportions. And if so, the strings were held tightly in the hands of his nearly-always beaming father. The first Monday they were in town, he drove his car to the local public school that served K-12. Ajay watched his mother disappear into the faculty lounge as his father marched him toward the offices.

Fifteen minutes later his father led him firmly by the hand past a pathetic sparsely booked room that passed for the library, down a tiled hallway and into a doorway marked Mrs. Babbitch, 2nd grade.

Mrs. Babbitch, a rotund woman whose glasses could not stay on the imperial slope of her nose, stopped in mid cursive on the chalk board and smiled at the two figures standing in the doorway. Harish placed his hands on his sons shoulders and promptly destroyed his life. “This is Ajay, he loves math and science,” dooming him to pugilistic confrontations he was ill equipped to survive and officially lodging him firmly at the bottom of the totem pole, a position he was not unsure he deserved.

In the spring 1976, Ajay began begging his parents to take him to T-ball tryouts. He walked around the house, tossing a baseball to himself, scraping the cottage cheese ceiling off from time to time, provoking his mother and irritating his eye as the white crumbs found their way under his lids. His father resolutely refused. “I don’t have time for such things,” he said, ending his involvement. So it came to pass that on a Saturday morning in early spring, Adarsh marched her son down the lane to the ballpark.

His mother bought him a set of athletic sweats, age eight. The pants accordioned down around his ankles. The jacket swaddled him and he removed it the moment he arrived at the park.

Adarsh stood nervously, her arm on the chain link fence that marked the dugout. He stood in a row, holding the bat he was given. Its weight was enormous, though this wasn’t uniquely his problem. The swings each child took were so mighty, they might have crushed the ball into left field or a skull had it come anywhere near the small white sphere that was perched safely on the rubber T.

At home, Harish came to meet them in the doorway. “What happened, they didn’t take you, right?” Ajay marched straight to his room, the door slamming its affirmitive.

Adarsh took two cups of rice from the enormous burlap sack and washed it three times before setting it to cook. “What? What do you want me to do? I don’t know such things, I’m not a street person.”

She cut tomatoes into sections and began to set the pressure cooker to work. Harish lingered in the kitchen, his arms crossed. He reached onto her cutting board, snatched up a piece of tomato and popped it into his mouth. “I’ll ask the fellows at work.” With that he disappeared into the den to watch a re-run of Mannix.

The following evening, as Harish pulled his shining Datsun Nissan Sentra to a halt, he emerged and went around back to the trunk. From its depths he hauled an old, bald tire. He looked at his small house, Ajay’s face pressed up to the glass. He beckoned him outdoors, as the day’s light was dying.

Taking a length of rope, he hung the tire from a limb of the only tree that graced their front yard, a craning poplar that looked to have seen the civil war.

“Is that a swing? I’m too old for a swing.”

“I am told, if you can learn to throw the ball through this tire, in time they will take you on the baseballs team.”

He looked at Ajay pleased and then left to go inside the house. Ajay stood across from the tire. It seemed easy enough. He fetched his glove and ball as the dim light barely held the tire in view. He threw the ball with a hesitant, graceless arc of his arm. The ball bounced off the tire, transferring just enough momentum to jostle it, and set it swinging. Darkness began to close.

Ajay fetched the ball and thought of Jason Harton, one of a set of quadruplets in his school, blind from birth. Ajay had once watched him shoot baskets, firing the ball again and again, gauging from the snap of the net whether the shot was good. He had watched him shoot as the sun sailed high overhead and sank. And then he kept shooting in utter darkness. This is Arjuna’s curiosity, his dedication. He thought it useless to begin now, but what would it mean to pursue that?

The lone street lamp some hundred feet away came on with a faint high buzz and Ajay went in for the night.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.