Pen Pals Pt. 1
Characters/Pairing: Mohinder/Gabriel
Rating: PG13
Words:
Summary: When they are ten and eleven years old, respectively, Gabriel and Mohinder’s parents sign them up to have a pen pal. They keep it up much longer than anyone would have expected---through childhood, their teens, and into adulthood.
A/N: This story is for heroes_bigboom and is dedicated to levitatethis, who has always been a source of inspiration, and who gave me this plotbunny in particular.
EVEN MORE, HUGE, ENORMOUS, AMAZING THANKS to the ridiculously and fantabulously talented feyuca , who came up with the most adorably beautiful art for this story. I can't thank you enough for this perfection. Please, everyone check it out.
Amazing Art
“I have a surprise for you, sweetie!” Gabriel’s mother exclaimed one night during dinner.
“What is it?” he asked excitedly, thinking it would be dessert.
She jumped up from the table, and Gabriel’s dad shrugged at him, silently letting him know that he had no idea what was going on either. She returned a minute later with a stapled blue form. “Here you go!”
Gabriel adjusted his glasses and peered at the paper. At the top were written a lot of nonsense words and numbers in very short lines.
“Huh?” he asked, looking up at his mother.
“I got you a pen pal! Isn’t it great?” she gushed.
Disappointed, Gabriel continued reading, and indeed, it seemed as though the nonsense words were actually supposed to be someone’s name and address.
“What do I need a pen pal for?” Gabriel asked suspiciously.
His mother flailed her arms about as she explained, “It’s nice! You get to know people from around the world. It’s a way to expand your network.”
“‘Expand his network’, Virginia? He’s ten!” his father protested after seeing Gabriel’s crestfallen face.
“It’s never too early,” she chided coldly.
Gabriel knew what was going on. This wasn’t about anything he actually needed; this was just one of his mother’s random little ideas to make him feel like he should be different. It wasn’t enough to be well-behaved and get good grades in school. He needed to have a whole network, like a grown-up. Whenever she got one of her ideas like this, though, there was no talking her out of it.
“How did you find this… person?” Gabriel asked warily, wondering if ‘Mohinder’ was supposed to be a boy’s or girl’s name.
“There was a bulletin posted about it in Brooklyn Prep---”
“He doesn’t even go to Brooklyn Prep!” Thomas Gray raged. “What on earth were you doing snooping around there, Virginia?”
Straightening haughtily, she retorted, “Just because you can’t afford to send our boy to private school doesn’t mean he should be wholly disadvantaged.”
Gabriel wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears to stop his parents from fighting. Money was the worst.
“Anyway,” his mother continued after she and Gabriel’s father had finished a staring contest, “I wrote the number down and called to have some names sent for Gabriel.”
“Names?” Gabriel asked, aghast at the plural.
“Mmhmm. On the next page is the information for a little French girl who lives in Paris. Céline… I bet she’s so cute. And this Indian boy. It says here at the bottom that his father is a scientist.”
“I have to write to two people?” he whined. This was becoming more and more of a nightmare.
“Oh, but you’re such a clever boy, and so good at writing. I’m sure you can find a way to introduce yourself to both of them. Now, I want you to finish your dinner and then get to work on this.”
“But I have homework!”
“It won’t take long,” she trilled. Gabriel looked desperately at his father for back-up, but he could tell that he was trying to gear up to fight Virginia about something else, probably something more grown-up. Gabriel was on his own with this one.
Later that evening, as he sat at his desk and tried to think of a nice, simple way of introducing himself to these poor kids whom he guessed probably couldn’t read English well, Gabriel asked himself why he couldn’t just get ice cream after dinner like other boys.
***************************************************************
Dear Suresh,
My name is Gabriel. I am ten years old and am in the fifth grade. I live in New York City with my mom and dad, though I don’t live in the part with the really tall buildings.
The piece of paper my mom gave me says that you live in India. My mom says that I should write you because you’re looking for someone to practice your English with. What language do you speak when you aren’t learning English? I thought the British colonized it or something. What’s it like there? I’ve never heard of Madras, where you live. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I’m an only child, so I don’t have any.
It’s nice to meet you, and I’d like to learn more about you. Write back if you want to.
Gabriel
***************************************************************
“Mother, what is this?”
Mohinder came out of his room, gingerly holding an envelope by its corner. He encountered his mother in the hallway. She took the envelope out of his hands and looked at the address.
“It’s for you, my sweet. This is the first letter you’ve ever received, isn’t it?” she observed with a proud smile.
“For me? I don’t know anyone from…” He peered at the return address. “From Queens, New York.”
“Oh!” his mother exclaimed, as if just remembering something. “It must be from your new pen pal.”
“A pen pal? What is that?” Mohinder had already learned to curl his lip in disdain, a tick that his mother always said she wished she knew the origin of.
“I had never heard of it before either, my love, but there was a notice about it in the monthly packet from your school, and I signed you up. Children from your school and children from other nice schools write one another letters. It sounded like a charming idea. And, if you are to attend a British school as your father wants, you must perfect your English.”
“My English is perfectly fine,” Mohinder protested. He hated his parents’ constant criticism of his language skills. He always got the highest marks in his class in English---in every subject, really.
“School is one thing, but is it good enough to really live in? I am so afraid that you’ll feel left out with the other children if… when you go. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t make friends. Will you do this for me, please? Just write a letter back to…” She, too, peered at the return address. “To Gabriel. I’m sure he’s a nice boy.” She reached for his shoulder, massaging the space between his neck and his collarbone. Mohinder relaxed into her touch as he always did and gave in.
“Yes, mother,” he sighed, and told himself that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. This Gabriel probably wanted to write just as little as he did, and would fail to reply.
“Very good, dear. Now wash your hands and we’ll have dinner. I think I just heard your father come home.”
As Mohinder stood in front of the bathroom mirror, he thought about his parents’ aspirations for him. He had no interest in going to school in England, and didn’t know why his father insisted that getting accepted should be his main goal. He liked his town, he liked his school, he liked the small circle of playmates he had worked hard to acquire. Why must he give all of that up to go halfway around the world to where there were no mothers or fathers or anything familiar?
“Mohinder!” His father’s impatient call interrupted this reverie.
“I’m coming!” Mohinder called back.
Dinner that night was a strained affair, as it always was when Chandra deigned to come home in time for it. Mohinder’s mother tried to open conversation subject after conversation subject, and it took multiple attempts to get Chandra to loosen up. She tried to get Mohinder to tell his father about trying out for the afterschool cricket team, but his father only laughed at him.
“You? I doubt you could hit a ball if it hit you.”
It was horribly unfair. Mohinder had actually performed rather well in the try-outs. Chandra had no right to make such a statement. It wasn’t as if he’d ever come to see if Mohinder was talented or not.
It was one pin-prick too much for the week. Mohinder had secretly long held the mantra that the only acceptable way to shirk an unpleasant task was to leave it in order to pursue another unpleasant one. That was the only way he could escape his already overdeveloped sense of guilt.
“Mother, may I be excused?” he asked. He’d already gobbled his food and was only still there out of politeness. No one was allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished. “I have a lot of homework to do tonight, and I need to get started if I am to write back to Gabriel.”
“Write back?” Chandra asked before his wife had a chance to reply. “You’re a little young to be conducting a correspondence, aren’t you?”
“I arranged for Mohinder to have an American pen pal, Chandra. To help with his English,” Mohinder’s mother explained.
Chandra chewed. “I see. That’s a good idea, actually. Well, run along and write, then,” he said, and he actually sounded amused, if not even slightly impressed.
Mohinder jumped off his stool with a big grin that didn’t leave his face all the long way to his room. Conducting a correspondence. It did sound impressive and grown-up when put that way. He suddenly felt excited about the task.
However, upon reading the letter, the supercilious curl of disdain returned to Mohinder’s lip. It was all very well to write letters to an American, but this particular one appeared to be neither interesting nor intelligent, even taking into consideration the handicap that Gabriel was a year younger than Mohinder. For all that he was supposed to be practicing his English, Mohinder felt certain that his was more advanced that Gabriel’s, a native speaker. If this was all he would have to deal with, there should be no worry about how comfortable he would feel at school in England.
Mohinder sat down to write, chewing his pen as he tried to think of what to say.
***************************************************************
Dear Gabriel,
Thank you for your letter. Suresh is my surname last name, so you should call me Mohinder. I understand why you might have mixed them up, since both of them are fairly common names and you might not have realised which was which.
You say you live in New York City, but the envelope says that you live in a place called Queens. That does not make sense.
You told me very remarkably little about yourself. What are you interests and hobbies? I like to play soccer and tennis, although I am better at tennis. My father is a geneticist. That is a kind of biology. I think I would like to be one, too. I go to the International School of Madras, so I take many of my classes in English. Other than English, I speak Tamil, which is the language of this region of India. Being a large country, India is home to many native languages. I live in a bungalow with my mother and father. I have no brothers or sisters. Madras is a large city, but I don’t know if it is as big as than New York, which has a population of seven million.
I look forward to coresponding with you further.
Best regards,
Mohinder
***************************************************************
Although he was only ten years old, Gabriel’s parents had deemed him a good enough boy to no longer need a babysitter (although Gabriel suspected it was actually because babysitters were expensive). Since the beginning of the school year, he had been enjoying the glorious quiet of always being the first person home in the evenings. Sometimes he went to visit his father at the shop, but on most days, he had three hours to himself before his mother returned home from work, and then a few screechy hours of super-human patience with her until his father came home late from the work.
Almost two months had elapsed since Gabriel had penned his stupid letters. He’d cheated and written the same thing to both the Indian boy and the French girl, changing only the part where he asked them about themselves. Once finished and mailed, his mother had, predictably, forgotten all about it. So had Gabriel. Therefore, it was a surprise when one day, after trudging home from yet another uninspiring day at school and sorting through the day’s mail for his mother like he always did, he came across a battered envelope with exotic-looking stamps that was addressed to him.
Never one to break his routine even for the most interesting thing that had happened to him in weeks, Gabriel washed an apple and poured himself his habitual glass of milk before hopping up into one of the kitchen stools to read what this kid had sent him. He struggled to decipher the scrawling handwriting, but once he did, and then reread the letter a second time, he felt incredibly annoyed.
Gabriel felt like he’d been had. He’d tried so hard to be nice, to dumb it down and go easy on this poor foreign kid, only to get walloped by a flood of eloquence and look stupid by comparison. For someone who said he needed to work on his English, this Mohinder certainly had a flair for words of three syllables.
He decided to retaliate in kind. Two could play at this snotty game. Mohinder was clearly a know-it-all, and yet this provincial hick (Gabriel knew that Delhi and Bombay were the big cities to be from in India; he’d looked on the map and Madras was nowhere near them) didn’t even know about the concept of boroughs. Gabriel was no retard, and was offended to be treated like one.
Gabriel read the letter a third time and slipped it into his top desk drawer. He wouldn’t write back right away. Proving himself to this brat would require some real thought.
***************************************************************
Dear Mohinder,
It is good to hear from you again.
You asked about my interests. I don’t really like sports. The boys who are into sports here are usually pretty stupid. I play chess in an afterschool club. I’m very good at it, because I can always tell what moves people will be able to make. I also help my father sometimes with his work. He owns a business. He makes and repairs very expensive timepieces. He says I’m very good at it for a boy my age. I really like doing it because I like it when you have finally fixed it, and everything starts ticking again. It’s a good feeling to have finished a project and made something work again.
I looked Madras up in the Encyclopedia. It is bigger than New York. On the map, it looks like there is a beach nearby. Is that true? Is your school a special school? Why is it international?
Sincerely,
Gabriel
***************************************************************
Mohinder was miserable.
He’d always prided himself on not being a crybaby, but even now it was no comfort to know that he was one of the few first form boys not secretly sniveling in his bedroom and in the loos. It helped even less to have the House Master and Matron give him encouraging pats on the shoulder whenever they saw him. Everyone here was stiff, cold, and unfamiliar, just like the awful chill Mohinder felt in his bones all day long from the dampness that hung in the air like a wet washcloth. He missed the sunny sweatiness of Chennai, now halfway around the world. He missed his mother’s full and genuine smiles, comparing them with the thin-lipped pity he got from the grown-ups here. He missed being able to run around wherever he wanted without supervision instead of being herded like a lamb everywhere he went, as if he were some idiot five-year old. He missed having free roam of his palatial bungalow instead of living in these cramped and damp quarters, shared with a disaffected boy from Essex who never shut up about the vacation ranch in America that his parents had taken him to just before school.
Mohinder had received no such present before leaving. His father had made a huge fuss about what a privilege Mohinder had been granted by his admission here. He’d said that being sent away from home was the best thing that could happen to him, that perhaps (only perhaps) it would finally turn him into a man. He’d been told to ‘not to let us down and try to make us proud’, which only made Mohinder now unable to voice to his parents his fervent desire to go home. Not that he was sure he’d even be wanted back. Although his mother had shed copious tears during the weeks leading up to his departure, Mohinder’s father’s speeches were all delivered in such a cold tone, and failed to be accompanied by any kind of regret on Chandra’s part, that Mohinder could not shake the feeling that he was being sent away, not for his benefit, but for Chandra’s.
Grudgingly, he had to admit that in its own stonily intimidating way, the place had a grand kind of beauty about it. He also had to admit that that the classes here were much better than those at his old school. The classrooms were the only place where he forgot for a moment his unhappiness in a heady euphoria of intellectual stimulation that he’d never felt before.
However, so far, Mohinder had done a poor job of making friends. Tom, his roommate, had all but written Mohinder off upon learning that he’d never been skiing and wasn’t interested in heavy metal (Mohinder at first had thought Tom was talking about a new kind of smelting process). Other boys may have been more compatible, but so conscious was he of his foreignness that Mohinder came off as proud and stuck-up. Instead of trying to fit in, he became overly protective of his odd ways and possessions, as if daring the others to tease him. It all resulted in him sitting at the end of long tables in the dining hall, speaking little, and getting to know the other boys even less.
Mohinder had already called his parents twice since arriving, and Chandra had seemed almost irritated by the displays of homesickness, so Mohinder felt that he couldn’t very well call again so soon. Sitting alone in his draughty room, Mohinder searched desperately for some way to connect with something familiar. His eyes fell on the envelope of Gabriel’s most recent letter. Poking out from the middle of a pile of papers that he’d thrown in a backpack at home and plopped messily on the desk upon his arrival, it taunted him.
This was the first time he hadn’t written back immediately upon receiving it. The letter had caused him some internal struggle when it had arrived a few days before his departure. Much as he had dreaded leaving home, part of him was excited to be embarking on something so big and life-changing. He’d been torn between looking forward to this completely new start and wanting everything to stay the same. Somehow, the decision of what to do about his correspondence with Gabriel became caught up in what had seemed to Mohinder an all-or-nothing decision about the rest of his life.
They’d kept it up for two years now. What at first had seemed to continue solely out of some sort of unspoken pissing contest had mellowed into an odd but pleasant routine by which Mohinder marked the passage of time. Another reason for his delay this time was the knowledge that, now in England, their correspondence would no longer be subject to the vagaries of the Indian postal service. The familiar time gap would be cut dramatically, so he had time before Gabriel would be expecting to hear from him.
Mohinder had turned the mystery of the regular seven-week delay between Gabriel’s letters into a kind of scientific experiment. Judging by the post office’s time-stamped date on the envelope, it took three weeks for Gabriel’s letters to reach Mohinder in India. However, also judging by those same dates, it seemed as though it took another three weeks for Mohinder’s letters to arrive at Gabriel’s house in New York. It was either that, or, unlike Mohinder who always dropped everything to respond within a day or two---thoughts spewing forth unreservedly and unplanned---Gabriel waited a week before replying. Based on stray comments Gabriel had made, Mohinder leaned towards the latter theory.
It fit with Mohinder’s image of Gabriel; everything about his faraway correspondent suggested a fastidiousness of spirit equal to Mohinder’s own, a fastidiousness he had yet to find in anyone else his age. His handwriting was neat and small, unlike Mohinder’s dreadful scrawl, and there were no cross-outs or misspellings, as though Gabriel drafted and then rewrote all of his letters to make them perfect. Even the stamps were affixed to the envelopes at improbably perfect right angles. All of these little clues matched the thoughtful precision of the content of Gabriel’s letters. Long gone were the days when Mohinder found Gabriel dull, immature, and uninformed.
The very passage of time that Mohinder so enjoyed marking with the letters was ironically sustained by never actually acknowledging time itself. Because of the month-long delay, Gabriel and Mohinder had slowly formed a tacit understanding not to talk about mundane daily happenings or worries that could become dated by the time the letter reached its destination.
Mohinder enjoyed deciphering these peripheral clues and adding them to the hazy non-image he carried in his head of his… at this point, he wasn’t sure what to call Gabriel. Was he still simply his English-assisting pen-pal? If that was all, Mohinder would have stopped this time-wasting nonsense years ago. But was it possible to call someone he’d never actually met a friend? Perhaps not, but at this moment, surrounded by strangers and in a strange land, Gabriel was the closest thing to a friend that Mohinder had, and writing him a letter might be the closest he could get to recreating some of the pattern of his old life.
And so, sitting in his little dorm room, Mohinder stared at the letter and the comforting decision to continue writing to Gabriel all but made itself. It was with an excited sense of responsibility that he realized that he’d be mailing this letter himself, instead of asking his mother to do it for him. In a small way, it was an opportunity to rebel against the endless herding he was subjected to at school and do something for himself.
This would achieve a lot of goals, all at once. And so, Mohinder picked up his pen and began chewing it, deep in thought.
***************************************************************
Dear Gabriel,
I’m writing you from my new desk in my new room at my new school. We both live in fully English-speaking countries now!
It is very impressive here, though. The buildings are grand, the boys are smart, and the teachers very knowledgable. There is everything to like. Today we had a grand assembly.
My roommate just got back from a vacation in America. Some place where people ride horses in Wyoming. Have you ever heard of anything like that? He says it’s tops. I think a vacation to New York sounds infinitely more interesting. Now that I’ve been in England for a few days, I’ve found myself wondering what the differences are between here and where you live. I suppose neither of us will ever quite know for sure until one of us has seen the other’s new home.
Rereading your letter reminded me of home...
***************************************************************
Only one thing had changed for Gabriel over the years, and that was the absence of his father. Thomas Gray had failed to return home one night when Gabriel was fifteen years old, and after a few hours spent trying to control his mother’s hysterical worry (she was convinced that he’d been axe-murdered, as if anyone got axe-murdered these days under Giuliani), Gabriel took a late-night taxi to the shop to see if maybe the phone in the shop had stopped working. All he’d found was a large envelope addressed to him containing the keys to the place, some insurance policies for him and his mother, and a letter full of apologies.
Gabriel’s heart broke that night. However, a year later, Gabriel’s day-to-day life remained about the same as it had ever been. One day, however, he received a nasty shock. Gabriel had never done well with sudden interruptions to his routine, and so to first find no mail in the mailbox and then two minutes later to open the apartment door and see that his mother had come home before him, was unwelcome in the extreme.
“Gabey, you’re home!” she waved, already brewing tea in her dressing gown and slippers at five in the afternoon.
“What are you doing home so early?” he asked as kindly as he could to hide how peeved he was.
“My sciatica was killing me, so I came home early.” Mrs. Gray was starting to become something of a hypochondriac, and complained about a different ailment every day. As far as Gabriel could tell, there was nothing actually wrong with her, but she was so desperate to have something to talk about that she wanted to believe that she was dying.
“Oh, well, you should probably lie down if you want it to go away,” Gabriel suggested practically, but she’d already moved on to the next topic.
“I picked up the mail,” she gushed, as if it was a superhuman achievement, “and I saw this. It’s for you. What is it?” She waved a battered-looking envelope and Gabriel felt as though he was going to choke on his heart.
“It’s nothing, mom,” he said quickly, reaching her in two long, strides of his tall, gangly body to snatch it out of her hands.
“Is my little boy keeping secrets from his mommy?” she pouted, genuinely hurt, and inside, Gabriel wanted to scream for a variety of reasons, not least because sixteen-year-old boys were too old to have ‘mommies’.
It wasn’t a secret as such. Rather, Gabriel simply preferred to keep his correspondence with Mohinder to himself. Although technically, his mother had been the one to set it in motion, it was the only thing he did that Gabriel felt was his, his own special thing, and he didn’t want her sullying it with stupid questions and grating nagging. The fact that he always picked up the mail, and had long been old enough to pay for the stamps out of his allowance had allowed something that didn’t necessarily have to be a secret to become one.
Those other kids, so long ago now that their names were forgotten, had never written back, but Mohinder always did. Sometimes, jealously, he wondered if Mohinder had other people he wrote to, if Gabriel was just one of a pack. Gabriel didn’t. Never having been to summer camp, he had no other friends in different parts of the country or the world with whom he needed to keep in touch. Mohinder’s letters, especially now since his father had left, were a bright spot that always seemed to come just in time to cheer him up from a day that was bad in one way or another.
And now, Gabriel’s mother had found out and he was terrified that it would all be spoiled. He prayed that he could get this over with and have her forget again.
“It’s just a letter,” he said.
“But who is it from?” she persisted.
Gabriel sighed. “Remember years ago when you got me a pen pal in India?”
Gabriel hated the way his mother sucked on her fingers when she was trying to remember something. “Yes! I remember now. A boy… his parents were… lawyers, right?”
“Scientist. His father is a scientist,” Gabriel mumbled, already feeling himself turning red.
“But this letter is from England,” she pointed out.
Gabriel shuffled into his room to put his bag down and secure the envelope in his top desk drawer, like he always did. “Yeah, he goes to boarding school in England now,” he called before coming back into the living room.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” she asked.
“Later. After I’ve had my snack,” he replied. She didn’t realize she was standing in his way to the fridge.
“How wonderful that you’ve kept it up. I had no idea, sweetie. I want to hear all about it. Is he a nice boy?”
Gabriel knew well enough that by ‘nice boy’ his mother invariably meant ‘smart and polite’. She asked it about every person he ever mentioned.
“Yes, he’s a very nice boy,” he confessed truthfully while pouring himself a glass of milk and grabbing an apple. He needed his snack more than usual today in order to gear up for the mortifying barrage that was about to come.
The questions rolled out like an avalanche, and Gabriel knew that he had been right to fear the worst. “What’s he like? What do you talk about? What does he look like? Is he as handsome as you? No, of course not, no one’s as handsome as my boy,” she said in a sing-song voice that might as well have been to herself as to Gabriel. She came over and kissed him on the brow for no reason.
Gabriel pulled away. “How should I know? I’ve never met him.”
“Hasn’t he sent you a picture?”
“No. Why should he? I’ve never sent him one, either. I don’t care what he looks like,” he lied. “What are you trying to do, set us up?” he (sort-of) joked.
The scarily unconscious insinuation went right over her head. “No,” she said questioningly and with perfect seriousness. “He’s a boy. Boys can’t be set up with other boys. Don’t be silly. Now, let me go find a picture of you to send him.”
“Mom…” Gabriel begged, but it was too late. She was already rummaging through the photo drawer.
Gabriel gulped his milk to hide his blushing discomfort. She’d hit on a sore spot, one that bothered him incessantly. He did care what Mohinder looked like. In fact, he cared desperately, and he didn’t know why. He found himself scrutinizing every Indian person he saw on the street---especially the boys his age---looking at how they were put together and listening to their accents. He’d come to the conclusion that they were either unspeakably good-looking, or else not at all. Gabriel couldn’t decide which camp Mohinder fell into, or should fall into in his imagination. On the one hand, if he were one of the unspeakably good-looking ones, that would leave the horribly awkward-looking Gabriel feeling even more insecure about his appearance. But on the other hand, if Mohinder turned out to be one of the bland-looking ones, Gabriel would be disappointed to find that his friend was anything other the perfect person he’d built up in his mind.
Gabriel knew that he shouldn’t be so invested in Mohinder’s appearance, knew that it shouldn’t matter at all. It was counter to everything that made what they had so special and important. And yet, Gabriel couldn’t help himself. He sat up at nights wondering about it.
“Is he coming to visit?” his mother asked, still looking for a good picture of him. Gabriel thought unhappily to himself that with such an impossible task, she’d be there all night.
“I told you, he goes to school. In England. He can’t visit,” he answered, on the edge of exasperation. She’d hit on another inexplicable sore spot. She had a knack for that.
“But there’s summer time…”
“He goes home for the summer. To India, where he’s from,” Gabriel explained. “And anyway, it isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t like what?” his mother asked absent-mindedly.
“Like…” The problem was that Gabriel didn’t know how to answer. Like the kind of friendship where they hung out and did regular things. Like Gabriel was confident Mohinder would still like him if they met in person. Like Mohinder would ever want to visit Gabriel’s ramshackle apartment and drab neighborhood and nutty mother. Like Gabriel would ever want that embarrassment. It was clear from reading between the lines that Mohinder was rich, really rich, and that all of his friends---not just at boarding school, but even back in India, where Gabriel’s social studies teacher had said that you were either really really poor or really really rich---were just as well-off. His mother didn’t even have to work, and Mohinder had made enough mention of the super sweet presents he’d gotten for his birthdays over the years for Gabriel to have formed a pretty good picture of his home life. Not that Mohinder was snotty about it, not at all. But Gabriel could tell, with repressed bitterness, that Mohinder simply had little idea of what it was like to be in the middle.
Gabriel hid his inadequacies behind brainy bravado, proving to Mohinder, but more importantly to himself, that he was above the mediocrity of the rest of his life. That’s what made this so special, that’s what he clung to in this relationship. In Mohinder, Gabriel had found someone who took him seriously. In writing to Mohinder, he somehow felt like he could escape and be his best self, the incredible person he wanted to be and knew he could be, without being thwarted by the banalities of his everyday existence. With Mohinder, there was no everyday life. It was freeing like nothing else, and now here was his mother, trying to horn her way into his secret world.
She was humming to herself, not caring that Gabriel hadn’t answered her question. Saying ‘ah-ha!’ and pulling a photo out of an envelope she triumphantly said, “Here’s such a good one of you. From last summer, remember? You look so handsome. This is the one you should send to… what’s his name again?”
“Mohinder. And I already told you that I’m not sending him a photo,” Gabriel pleaded.
“Please? For mommy?” she begged.
“Sure. Whatever.” Gabriel finally gave in and took it, aware that it was the only way to get her off his back, but he had no intention of actually sending it. He’d hide it away in a drawer and she’d soon forget all about it, just as she’d forgotten all about Mohinder after that first letter had been mailed. Hunched over and depressed, he shuffled into his room.
“Are you going to write to him now?” his mother whined behind him.
“No, I usually wait,” Gabriel replied.
“Why? Why don’t you do it right away? It’s rude not to reply to letters right away,” she nagged.
“That… that’s just not how I do it,” Gabriel sighed, knowing she’d never understand, and asking himself why he even bothered trying. “Mom, I have a lot of homework to do. Can I have some quiet time until dinner?”
“Ok! Studies always come first,” she sing-songed.
With a whimper of relief, Gabriel shut the door to his bedroom and sat down at the desk that, at six-foot four, he’d long outgrown. Carefully, he sliced open the envelope with one of his father’s old letter-openers. He felt a familiar surge of excitement. It was thrilling, getting these snippets of Mohinder’s far-away and independent existence. He’d read between the lines over the years, understood that Mohinder felt unwanted by his father and that he’d been sent away to school as some sort of mysterious punishment, but being sent away to a school that sounded like something out of a movie was preferable to being abandoned by one’s father and smothered by one’s mother---at least that’s what Gabriel thought.
Not that he’d told Mohinder anything about his father leaving. It would have been mortifying beyond belief to admit to Mohinder that Gabriel and his life were really that pathetic and low-class. All the same, it was an omission that nagged at him; if Gabriel was hiding something as huge as his father’s abandonment, how close were they really? What if Mohinder was hiding something as big as that from him? Gabriel couldn’t bear to think about it.
He pulled the bulleted list of points he’d been collecting since he last wrote Mohinder out of his school binder where he had kept it carefully folded and hidden in one of the flap pockets. He usually started a new list as soon as he mailed off a letter, preparing himself and not wanting to forget any good ideas that came to him at random. He knew he wouldn’t start writing for another couple of days, and then he’d perfect it over the next five---a schedule he had randomly imposed upon himself since the very beginning and continued to keep---but he liked to check immediately upon reading Mohinder’s letter that all of the points were still appropriate in a reply. Any that wouldn’t fit based on what Mohinder had written, he crossed out.
Everything except the bit about the science fair seemed alright. With a secret smile, Gabriel folded his list and slipped it back into his binder before settling down to do some homework.
However, Gabriel’s mother’s nagging had seeped into his brain, because as he did his homework that evening, Gabriel found himself thinking even more obsessively than usual about what Mohinder might look like. He knew it was sick and dangerous. He shouldn’t be thinking that way about boys. It was wrong and a sin. The self-analytical part of him knew that he was projecting all sorts of disparate wants and desires and confusions onto the semi-imaginary figure of Mohinder, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted him, wanted him even more because he was semi-imaginary. He woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, panting and hard and frustrated, from a dream about Mohinder---sometimes with a face, sometimes without, sometimes in shadow, sometimes innocent, sometimes more sinful than anything his mother had ever told him about. He knew he should force himself to stop, to control it, to remind himself that it was madness to want something like this, but he simply couldn’t give up the one unblemished dream he had left.
***************************************************************
Dear Mohinder,
It’s been a quiet couple of months. I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment. Have you read it in school yet? It’s about a guy who wants to prove to himself that he’s above it all and kills an old lady, and then accidentally another one… sort of. It’s really interesting, and I like the idea that maybe there are special people who have the right to do whatever they want. I don’t know if I could ever do it, but I can see his thinking. I’m only halfway through, so I don’t know what happens yet. You should read it and tell me what you think.
I started school again last month. Junior year is just as underwhelming as sophomore year was. I know I’ve said it before, but you’re so lucky to love your school. You have no idea how badly I wish I could go to Harrow, too. That would be fun, right?
A funny thing happened this week. My mother saw your letter and asked me about you. She was the one who got me to write you in the first place, do you remember? But she forgot all about it. She forgets a lot of stuff. Anyway, she was asking about you, and I realized that although I feel like I know you really well and have ‘talked’ to you a lot for years, I’ve never had to talk about you. It weirdly made me feel like you were more real. Does that make sense? Anyway, I started thinking about what that means---to be ‘real’ to another person. I know about things that you like and things that you think, but I don’t really know what you’re like. What I mean to say is, I don’t know what you’re like with your other friends, if you’re a morning person, or if your hands get really cold like mine do or what color your hair is. I don’t even know if I want to know these things, but talking to my mom about you made me think about it. What do you think?
We took a big class field trip to Washington DC two weeks ago. People were acting like idiots, thinking only about hooking up and stuff, and they weren’t paying attention to the really interesting things that we saw. I’d never been to DC before. The Smithsonian museum was really cool. They have a lot of airplanes and other mechanical stuff. I really like machinery. I think it would be cool to invent something that would change the world, something on the level of the train or the car or the airplane, you know? I guess in that way, we’re alike. We both like science, but different branches of it.
I guess you’ve just started school, since you usually seem to start almost a month after I do. It’s your last year, right? I can’t believe you’re going to have to apply to college and everything. I’m sure you’ll get in anywhere you apply. What university has the best genetics program? You should think about applying to schools in the US, you know. There are a lot of good science programs here. If you want to ask me about them, I can do some research… Just let me know.
Until next time,
Gabriel
On to Part 2...
Rating: PG13
Words:
Summary: When they are ten and eleven years old, respectively, Gabriel and Mohinder’s parents sign them up to have a pen pal. They keep it up much longer than anyone would have expected---through childhood, their teens, and into adulthood.
A/N: This story is for heroes_bigboom and is dedicated to levitatethis, who has always been a source of inspiration, and who gave me this plotbunny in particular.
EVEN MORE, HUGE, ENORMOUS, AMAZING THANKS to the ridiculously and fantabulously talented feyuca , who came up with the most adorably beautiful art for this story. I can't thank you enough for this perfection. Please, everyone check it out.
Amazing Art
“I have a surprise for you, sweetie!” Gabriel’s mother exclaimed one night during dinner.
“What is it?” he asked excitedly, thinking it would be dessert.
She jumped up from the table, and Gabriel’s dad shrugged at him, silently letting him know that he had no idea what was going on either. She returned a minute later with a stapled blue form. “Here you go!”
Gabriel adjusted his glasses and peered at the paper. At the top were written a lot of nonsense words and numbers in very short lines.
“Huh?” he asked, looking up at his mother.
“I got you a pen pal! Isn’t it great?” she gushed.
Disappointed, Gabriel continued reading, and indeed, it seemed as though the nonsense words were actually supposed to be someone’s name and address.
“What do I need a pen pal for?” Gabriel asked suspiciously.
His mother flailed her arms about as she explained, “It’s nice! You get to know people from around the world. It’s a way to expand your network.”
“‘Expand his network’, Virginia? He’s ten!” his father protested after seeing Gabriel’s crestfallen face.
“It’s never too early,” she chided coldly.
Gabriel knew what was going on. This wasn’t about anything he actually needed; this was just one of his mother’s random little ideas to make him feel like he should be different. It wasn’t enough to be well-behaved and get good grades in school. He needed to have a whole network, like a grown-up. Whenever she got one of her ideas like this, though, there was no talking her out of it.
“How did you find this… person?” Gabriel asked warily, wondering if ‘Mohinder’ was supposed to be a boy’s or girl’s name.
“There was a bulletin posted about it in Brooklyn Prep---”
“He doesn’t even go to Brooklyn Prep!” Thomas Gray raged. “What on earth were you doing snooping around there, Virginia?”
Straightening haughtily, she retorted, “Just because you can’t afford to send our boy to private school doesn’t mean he should be wholly disadvantaged.”
Gabriel wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears to stop his parents from fighting. Money was the worst.
“Anyway,” his mother continued after she and Gabriel’s father had finished a staring contest, “I wrote the number down and called to have some names sent for Gabriel.”
“Names?” Gabriel asked, aghast at the plural.
“Mmhmm. On the next page is the information for a little French girl who lives in Paris. Céline… I bet she’s so cute. And this Indian boy. It says here at the bottom that his father is a scientist.”
“I have to write to two people?” he whined. This was becoming more and more of a nightmare.
“Oh, but you’re such a clever boy, and so good at writing. I’m sure you can find a way to introduce yourself to both of them. Now, I want you to finish your dinner and then get to work on this.”
“But I have homework!”
“It won’t take long,” she trilled. Gabriel looked desperately at his father for back-up, but he could tell that he was trying to gear up to fight Virginia about something else, probably something more grown-up. Gabriel was on his own with this one.
Later that evening, as he sat at his desk and tried to think of a nice, simple way of introducing himself to these poor kids whom he guessed probably couldn’t read English well, Gabriel asked himself why he couldn’t just get ice cream after dinner like other boys.
***************************************************************
Dear Suresh,
My name is Gabriel. I am ten years old and am in the fifth grade. I live in New York City with my mom and dad, though I don’t live in the part with the really tall buildings.
The piece of paper my mom gave me says that you live in India. My mom says that I should write you because you’re looking for someone to practice your English with. What language do you speak when you aren’t learning English? I thought the British colonized it or something. What’s it like there? I’ve never heard of Madras, where you live. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I’m an only child, so I don’t have any.
It’s nice to meet you, and I’d like to learn more about you. Write back if you want to.
Gabriel
***************************************************************
“Mother, what is this?”
Mohinder came out of his room, gingerly holding an envelope by its corner. He encountered his mother in the hallway. She took the envelope out of his hands and looked at the address.
“It’s for you, my sweet. This is the first letter you’ve ever received, isn’t it?” she observed with a proud smile.
“For me? I don’t know anyone from…” He peered at the return address. “From Queens, New York.”
“Oh!” his mother exclaimed, as if just remembering something. “It must be from your new pen pal.”
“A pen pal? What is that?” Mohinder had already learned to curl his lip in disdain, a tick that his mother always said she wished she knew the origin of.
“I had never heard of it before either, my love, but there was a notice about it in the monthly packet from your school, and I signed you up. Children from your school and children from other nice schools write one another letters. It sounded like a charming idea. And, if you are to attend a British school as your father wants, you must perfect your English.”
“My English is perfectly fine,” Mohinder protested. He hated his parents’ constant criticism of his language skills. He always got the highest marks in his class in English---in every subject, really.
“School is one thing, but is it good enough to really live in? I am so afraid that you’ll feel left out with the other children if… when you go. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t make friends. Will you do this for me, please? Just write a letter back to…” She, too, peered at the return address. “To Gabriel. I’m sure he’s a nice boy.” She reached for his shoulder, massaging the space between his neck and his collarbone. Mohinder relaxed into her touch as he always did and gave in.
“Yes, mother,” he sighed, and told himself that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. This Gabriel probably wanted to write just as little as he did, and would fail to reply.
“Very good, dear. Now wash your hands and we’ll have dinner. I think I just heard your father come home.”
As Mohinder stood in front of the bathroom mirror, he thought about his parents’ aspirations for him. He had no interest in going to school in England, and didn’t know why his father insisted that getting accepted should be his main goal. He liked his town, he liked his school, he liked the small circle of playmates he had worked hard to acquire. Why must he give all of that up to go halfway around the world to where there were no mothers or fathers or anything familiar?
“Mohinder!” His father’s impatient call interrupted this reverie.
“I’m coming!” Mohinder called back.
Dinner that night was a strained affair, as it always was when Chandra deigned to come home in time for it. Mohinder’s mother tried to open conversation subject after conversation subject, and it took multiple attempts to get Chandra to loosen up. She tried to get Mohinder to tell his father about trying out for the afterschool cricket team, but his father only laughed at him.
“You? I doubt you could hit a ball if it hit you.”
It was horribly unfair. Mohinder had actually performed rather well in the try-outs. Chandra had no right to make such a statement. It wasn’t as if he’d ever come to see if Mohinder was talented or not.
It was one pin-prick too much for the week. Mohinder had secretly long held the mantra that the only acceptable way to shirk an unpleasant task was to leave it in order to pursue another unpleasant one. That was the only way he could escape his already overdeveloped sense of guilt.
“Mother, may I be excused?” he asked. He’d already gobbled his food and was only still there out of politeness. No one was allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished. “I have a lot of homework to do tonight, and I need to get started if I am to write back to Gabriel.”
“Write back?” Chandra asked before his wife had a chance to reply. “You’re a little young to be conducting a correspondence, aren’t you?”
“I arranged for Mohinder to have an American pen pal, Chandra. To help with his English,” Mohinder’s mother explained.
Chandra chewed. “I see. That’s a good idea, actually. Well, run along and write, then,” he said, and he actually sounded amused, if not even slightly impressed.
Mohinder jumped off his stool with a big grin that didn’t leave his face all the long way to his room. Conducting a correspondence. It did sound impressive and grown-up when put that way. He suddenly felt excited about the task.
However, upon reading the letter, the supercilious curl of disdain returned to Mohinder’s lip. It was all very well to write letters to an American, but this particular one appeared to be neither interesting nor intelligent, even taking into consideration the handicap that Gabriel was a year younger than Mohinder. For all that he was supposed to be practicing his English, Mohinder felt certain that his was more advanced that Gabriel’s, a native speaker. If this was all he would have to deal with, there should be no worry about how comfortable he would feel at school in England.
Mohinder sat down to write, chewing his pen as he tried to think of what to say.
***************************************************************
Dear Gabriel,
Thank you for your letter. Suresh is my surname last name, so you should call me Mohinder. I understand why you might have mixed them up, since both of them are fairly common names and you might not have realised which was which.
You say you live in New York City, but the envelope says that you live in a place called Queens. That does not make sense.
You told me very remarkably little about yourself. What are you interests and hobbies? I like to play soccer and tennis, although I am better at tennis. My father is a geneticist. That is a kind of biology. I think I would like to be one, too. I go to the International School of Madras, so I take many of my classes in English. Other than English, I speak Tamil, which is the language of this region of India. Being a large country, India is home to many native languages. I live in a bungalow with my mother and father. I have no brothers or sisters. Madras is a large city, but I don’t know if it is as big as than New York, which has a population of seven million.
I look forward to coresponding with you further.
Best regards,
Mohinder
***************************************************************
Although he was only ten years old, Gabriel’s parents had deemed him a good enough boy to no longer need a babysitter (although Gabriel suspected it was actually because babysitters were expensive). Since the beginning of the school year, he had been enjoying the glorious quiet of always being the first person home in the evenings. Sometimes he went to visit his father at the shop, but on most days, he had three hours to himself before his mother returned home from work, and then a few screechy hours of super-human patience with her until his father came home late from the work.
Almost two months had elapsed since Gabriel had penned his stupid letters. He’d cheated and written the same thing to both the Indian boy and the French girl, changing only the part where he asked them about themselves. Once finished and mailed, his mother had, predictably, forgotten all about it. So had Gabriel. Therefore, it was a surprise when one day, after trudging home from yet another uninspiring day at school and sorting through the day’s mail for his mother like he always did, he came across a battered envelope with exotic-looking stamps that was addressed to him.
Never one to break his routine even for the most interesting thing that had happened to him in weeks, Gabriel washed an apple and poured himself his habitual glass of milk before hopping up into one of the kitchen stools to read what this kid had sent him. He struggled to decipher the scrawling handwriting, but once he did, and then reread the letter a second time, he felt incredibly annoyed.
Gabriel felt like he’d been had. He’d tried so hard to be nice, to dumb it down and go easy on this poor foreign kid, only to get walloped by a flood of eloquence and look stupid by comparison. For someone who said he needed to work on his English, this Mohinder certainly had a flair for words of three syllables.
He decided to retaliate in kind. Two could play at this snotty game. Mohinder was clearly a know-it-all, and yet this provincial hick (Gabriel knew that Delhi and Bombay were the big cities to be from in India; he’d looked on the map and Madras was nowhere near them) didn’t even know about the concept of boroughs. Gabriel was no retard, and was offended to be treated like one.
Gabriel read the letter a third time and slipped it into his top desk drawer. He wouldn’t write back right away. Proving himself to this brat would require some real thought.
***************************************************************
Dear Mohinder,
It is good to hear from you again.
You asked about my interests. I don’t really like sports. The boys who are into sports here are usually pretty stupid. I play chess in an afterschool club. I’m very good at it, because I can always tell what moves people will be able to make. I also help my father sometimes with his work. He owns a business. He makes and repairs very expensive timepieces. He says I’m very good at it for a boy my age. I really like doing it because I like it when you have finally fixed it, and everything starts ticking again. It’s a good feeling to have finished a project and made something work again.
I looked Madras up in the Encyclopedia. It is bigger than New York. On the map, it looks like there is a beach nearby. Is that true? Is your school a special school? Why is it international?
Sincerely,
Gabriel
***************************************************************
Mohinder was miserable.
He’d always prided himself on not being a crybaby, but even now it was no comfort to know that he was one of the few first form boys not secretly sniveling in his bedroom and in the loos. It helped even less to have the House Master and Matron give him encouraging pats on the shoulder whenever they saw him. Everyone here was stiff, cold, and unfamiliar, just like the awful chill Mohinder felt in his bones all day long from the dampness that hung in the air like a wet washcloth. He missed the sunny sweatiness of Chennai, now halfway around the world. He missed his mother’s full and genuine smiles, comparing them with the thin-lipped pity he got from the grown-ups here. He missed being able to run around wherever he wanted without supervision instead of being herded like a lamb everywhere he went, as if he were some idiot five-year old. He missed having free roam of his palatial bungalow instead of living in these cramped and damp quarters, shared with a disaffected boy from Essex who never shut up about the vacation ranch in America that his parents had taken him to just before school.
Mohinder had received no such present before leaving. His father had made a huge fuss about what a privilege Mohinder had been granted by his admission here. He’d said that being sent away from home was the best thing that could happen to him, that perhaps (only perhaps) it would finally turn him into a man. He’d been told to ‘not to let us down and try to make us proud’, which only made Mohinder now unable to voice to his parents his fervent desire to go home. Not that he was sure he’d even be wanted back. Although his mother had shed copious tears during the weeks leading up to his departure, Mohinder’s father’s speeches were all delivered in such a cold tone, and failed to be accompanied by any kind of regret on Chandra’s part, that Mohinder could not shake the feeling that he was being sent away, not for his benefit, but for Chandra’s.
Grudgingly, he had to admit that in its own stonily intimidating way, the place had a grand kind of beauty about it. He also had to admit that that the classes here were much better than those at his old school. The classrooms were the only place where he forgot for a moment his unhappiness in a heady euphoria of intellectual stimulation that he’d never felt before.
However, so far, Mohinder had done a poor job of making friends. Tom, his roommate, had all but written Mohinder off upon learning that he’d never been skiing and wasn’t interested in heavy metal (Mohinder at first had thought Tom was talking about a new kind of smelting process). Other boys may have been more compatible, but so conscious was he of his foreignness that Mohinder came off as proud and stuck-up. Instead of trying to fit in, he became overly protective of his odd ways and possessions, as if daring the others to tease him. It all resulted in him sitting at the end of long tables in the dining hall, speaking little, and getting to know the other boys even less.
Mohinder had already called his parents twice since arriving, and Chandra had seemed almost irritated by the displays of homesickness, so Mohinder felt that he couldn’t very well call again so soon. Sitting alone in his draughty room, Mohinder searched desperately for some way to connect with something familiar. His eyes fell on the envelope of Gabriel’s most recent letter. Poking out from the middle of a pile of papers that he’d thrown in a backpack at home and plopped messily on the desk upon his arrival, it taunted him.
This was the first time he hadn’t written back immediately upon receiving it. The letter had caused him some internal struggle when it had arrived a few days before his departure. Much as he had dreaded leaving home, part of him was excited to be embarking on something so big and life-changing. He’d been torn between looking forward to this completely new start and wanting everything to stay the same. Somehow, the decision of what to do about his correspondence with Gabriel became caught up in what had seemed to Mohinder an all-or-nothing decision about the rest of his life.
They’d kept it up for two years now. What at first had seemed to continue solely out of some sort of unspoken pissing contest had mellowed into an odd but pleasant routine by which Mohinder marked the passage of time. Another reason for his delay this time was the knowledge that, now in England, their correspondence would no longer be subject to the vagaries of the Indian postal service. The familiar time gap would be cut dramatically, so he had time before Gabriel would be expecting to hear from him.
Mohinder had turned the mystery of the regular seven-week delay between Gabriel’s letters into a kind of scientific experiment. Judging by the post office’s time-stamped date on the envelope, it took three weeks for Gabriel’s letters to reach Mohinder in India. However, also judging by those same dates, it seemed as though it took another three weeks for Mohinder’s letters to arrive at Gabriel’s house in New York. It was either that, or, unlike Mohinder who always dropped everything to respond within a day or two---thoughts spewing forth unreservedly and unplanned---Gabriel waited a week before replying. Based on stray comments Gabriel had made, Mohinder leaned towards the latter theory.
It fit with Mohinder’s image of Gabriel; everything about his faraway correspondent suggested a fastidiousness of spirit equal to Mohinder’s own, a fastidiousness he had yet to find in anyone else his age. His handwriting was neat and small, unlike Mohinder’s dreadful scrawl, and there were no cross-outs or misspellings, as though Gabriel drafted and then rewrote all of his letters to make them perfect. Even the stamps were affixed to the envelopes at improbably perfect right angles. All of these little clues matched the thoughtful precision of the content of Gabriel’s letters. Long gone were the days when Mohinder found Gabriel dull, immature, and uninformed.
The very passage of time that Mohinder so enjoyed marking with the letters was ironically sustained by never actually acknowledging time itself. Because of the month-long delay, Gabriel and Mohinder had slowly formed a tacit understanding not to talk about mundane daily happenings or worries that could become dated by the time the letter reached its destination.
Mohinder enjoyed deciphering these peripheral clues and adding them to the hazy non-image he carried in his head of his… at this point, he wasn’t sure what to call Gabriel. Was he still simply his English-assisting pen-pal? If that was all, Mohinder would have stopped this time-wasting nonsense years ago. But was it possible to call someone he’d never actually met a friend? Perhaps not, but at this moment, surrounded by strangers and in a strange land, Gabriel was the closest thing to a friend that Mohinder had, and writing him a letter might be the closest he could get to recreating some of the pattern of his old life.
And so, sitting in his little dorm room, Mohinder stared at the letter and the comforting decision to continue writing to Gabriel all but made itself. It was with an excited sense of responsibility that he realized that he’d be mailing this letter himself, instead of asking his mother to do it for him. In a small way, it was an opportunity to rebel against the endless herding he was subjected to at school and do something for himself.
This would achieve a lot of goals, all at once. And so, Mohinder picked up his pen and began chewing it, deep in thought.
***************************************************************
Dear Gabriel,
I’m writing you from my new desk in my new room at my new school. We both live in fully English-speaking countries now!
It is very impressive here, though. The buildings are grand, the boys are smart, and the teachers very knowledgable. There is everything to like. Today we had a grand assembly.
My roommate just got back from a vacation in America. Some place where people ride horses in Wyoming. Have you ever heard of anything like that? He says it’s tops. I think a vacation to New York sounds infinitely more interesting. Now that I’ve been in England for a few days, I’ve found myself wondering what the differences are between here and where you live. I suppose neither of us will ever quite know for sure until one of us has seen the other’s new home.
Rereading your letter reminded me of home...
***************************************************************
Only one thing had changed for Gabriel over the years, and that was the absence of his father. Thomas Gray had failed to return home one night when Gabriel was fifteen years old, and after a few hours spent trying to control his mother’s hysterical worry (she was convinced that he’d been axe-murdered, as if anyone got axe-murdered these days under Giuliani), Gabriel took a late-night taxi to the shop to see if maybe the phone in the shop had stopped working. All he’d found was a large envelope addressed to him containing the keys to the place, some insurance policies for him and his mother, and a letter full of apologies.
Gabriel’s heart broke that night. However, a year later, Gabriel’s day-to-day life remained about the same as it had ever been. One day, however, he received a nasty shock. Gabriel had never done well with sudden interruptions to his routine, and so to first find no mail in the mailbox and then two minutes later to open the apartment door and see that his mother had come home before him, was unwelcome in the extreme.
“Gabey, you’re home!” she waved, already brewing tea in her dressing gown and slippers at five in the afternoon.
“What are you doing home so early?” he asked as kindly as he could to hide how peeved he was.
“My sciatica was killing me, so I came home early.” Mrs. Gray was starting to become something of a hypochondriac, and complained about a different ailment every day. As far as Gabriel could tell, there was nothing actually wrong with her, but she was so desperate to have something to talk about that she wanted to believe that she was dying.
“Oh, well, you should probably lie down if you want it to go away,” Gabriel suggested practically, but she’d already moved on to the next topic.
“I picked up the mail,” she gushed, as if it was a superhuman achievement, “and I saw this. It’s for you. What is it?” She waved a battered-looking envelope and Gabriel felt as though he was going to choke on his heart.
“It’s nothing, mom,” he said quickly, reaching her in two long, strides of his tall, gangly body to snatch it out of her hands.
“Is my little boy keeping secrets from his mommy?” she pouted, genuinely hurt, and inside, Gabriel wanted to scream for a variety of reasons, not least because sixteen-year-old boys were too old to have ‘mommies’.
It wasn’t a secret as such. Rather, Gabriel simply preferred to keep his correspondence with Mohinder to himself. Although technically, his mother had been the one to set it in motion, it was the only thing he did that Gabriel felt was his, his own special thing, and he didn’t want her sullying it with stupid questions and grating nagging. The fact that he always picked up the mail, and had long been old enough to pay for the stamps out of his allowance had allowed something that didn’t necessarily have to be a secret to become one.
Those other kids, so long ago now that their names were forgotten, had never written back, but Mohinder always did. Sometimes, jealously, he wondered if Mohinder had other people he wrote to, if Gabriel was just one of a pack. Gabriel didn’t. Never having been to summer camp, he had no other friends in different parts of the country or the world with whom he needed to keep in touch. Mohinder’s letters, especially now since his father had left, were a bright spot that always seemed to come just in time to cheer him up from a day that was bad in one way or another.
And now, Gabriel’s mother had found out and he was terrified that it would all be spoiled. He prayed that he could get this over with and have her forget again.
“It’s just a letter,” he said.
“But who is it from?” she persisted.
Gabriel sighed. “Remember years ago when you got me a pen pal in India?”
Gabriel hated the way his mother sucked on her fingers when she was trying to remember something. “Yes! I remember now. A boy… his parents were… lawyers, right?”
“Scientist. His father is a scientist,” Gabriel mumbled, already feeling himself turning red.
“But this letter is from England,” she pointed out.
Gabriel shuffled into his room to put his bag down and secure the envelope in his top desk drawer, like he always did. “Yeah, he goes to boarding school in England now,” he called before coming back into the living room.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” she asked.
“Later. After I’ve had my snack,” he replied. She didn’t realize she was standing in his way to the fridge.
“How wonderful that you’ve kept it up. I had no idea, sweetie. I want to hear all about it. Is he a nice boy?”
Gabriel knew well enough that by ‘nice boy’ his mother invariably meant ‘smart and polite’. She asked it about every person he ever mentioned.
“Yes, he’s a very nice boy,” he confessed truthfully while pouring himself a glass of milk and grabbing an apple. He needed his snack more than usual today in order to gear up for the mortifying barrage that was about to come.
The questions rolled out like an avalanche, and Gabriel knew that he had been right to fear the worst. “What’s he like? What do you talk about? What does he look like? Is he as handsome as you? No, of course not, no one’s as handsome as my boy,” she said in a sing-song voice that might as well have been to herself as to Gabriel. She came over and kissed him on the brow for no reason.
Gabriel pulled away. “How should I know? I’ve never met him.”
“Hasn’t he sent you a picture?”
“No. Why should he? I’ve never sent him one, either. I don’t care what he looks like,” he lied. “What are you trying to do, set us up?” he (sort-of) joked.
The scarily unconscious insinuation went right over her head. “No,” she said questioningly and with perfect seriousness. “He’s a boy. Boys can’t be set up with other boys. Don’t be silly. Now, let me go find a picture of you to send him.”
“Mom…” Gabriel begged, but it was too late. She was already rummaging through the photo drawer.
Gabriel gulped his milk to hide his blushing discomfort. She’d hit on a sore spot, one that bothered him incessantly. He did care what Mohinder looked like. In fact, he cared desperately, and he didn’t know why. He found himself scrutinizing every Indian person he saw on the street---especially the boys his age---looking at how they were put together and listening to their accents. He’d come to the conclusion that they were either unspeakably good-looking, or else not at all. Gabriel couldn’t decide which camp Mohinder fell into, or should fall into in his imagination. On the one hand, if he were one of the unspeakably good-looking ones, that would leave the horribly awkward-looking Gabriel feeling even more insecure about his appearance. But on the other hand, if Mohinder turned out to be one of the bland-looking ones, Gabriel would be disappointed to find that his friend was anything other the perfect person he’d built up in his mind.
Gabriel knew that he shouldn’t be so invested in Mohinder’s appearance, knew that it shouldn’t matter at all. It was counter to everything that made what they had so special and important. And yet, Gabriel couldn’t help himself. He sat up at nights wondering about it.
“Is he coming to visit?” his mother asked, still looking for a good picture of him. Gabriel thought unhappily to himself that with such an impossible task, she’d be there all night.
“I told you, he goes to school. In England. He can’t visit,” he answered, on the edge of exasperation. She’d hit on another inexplicable sore spot. She had a knack for that.
“But there’s summer time…”
“He goes home for the summer. To India, where he’s from,” Gabriel explained. “And anyway, it isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t like what?” his mother asked absent-mindedly.
“Like…” The problem was that Gabriel didn’t know how to answer. Like the kind of friendship where they hung out and did regular things. Like Gabriel was confident Mohinder would still like him if they met in person. Like Mohinder would ever want to visit Gabriel’s ramshackle apartment and drab neighborhood and nutty mother. Like Gabriel would ever want that embarrassment. It was clear from reading between the lines that Mohinder was rich, really rich, and that all of his friends---not just at boarding school, but even back in India, where Gabriel’s social studies teacher had said that you were either really really poor or really really rich---were just as well-off. His mother didn’t even have to work, and Mohinder had made enough mention of the super sweet presents he’d gotten for his birthdays over the years for Gabriel to have formed a pretty good picture of his home life. Not that Mohinder was snotty about it, not at all. But Gabriel could tell, with repressed bitterness, that Mohinder simply had little idea of what it was like to be in the middle.
Gabriel hid his inadequacies behind brainy bravado, proving to Mohinder, but more importantly to himself, that he was above the mediocrity of the rest of his life. That’s what made this so special, that’s what he clung to in this relationship. In Mohinder, Gabriel had found someone who took him seriously. In writing to Mohinder, he somehow felt like he could escape and be his best self, the incredible person he wanted to be and knew he could be, without being thwarted by the banalities of his everyday existence. With Mohinder, there was no everyday life. It was freeing like nothing else, and now here was his mother, trying to horn her way into his secret world.
She was humming to herself, not caring that Gabriel hadn’t answered her question. Saying ‘ah-ha!’ and pulling a photo out of an envelope she triumphantly said, “Here’s such a good one of you. From last summer, remember? You look so handsome. This is the one you should send to… what’s his name again?”
“Mohinder. And I already told you that I’m not sending him a photo,” Gabriel pleaded.
“Please? For mommy?” she begged.
“Sure. Whatever.” Gabriel finally gave in and took it, aware that it was the only way to get her off his back, but he had no intention of actually sending it. He’d hide it away in a drawer and she’d soon forget all about it, just as she’d forgotten all about Mohinder after that first letter had been mailed. Hunched over and depressed, he shuffled into his room.
“Are you going to write to him now?” his mother whined behind him.
“No, I usually wait,” Gabriel replied.
“Why? Why don’t you do it right away? It’s rude not to reply to letters right away,” she nagged.
“That… that’s just not how I do it,” Gabriel sighed, knowing she’d never understand, and asking himself why he even bothered trying. “Mom, I have a lot of homework to do. Can I have some quiet time until dinner?”
“Ok! Studies always come first,” she sing-songed.
With a whimper of relief, Gabriel shut the door to his bedroom and sat down at the desk that, at six-foot four, he’d long outgrown. Carefully, he sliced open the envelope with one of his father’s old letter-openers. He felt a familiar surge of excitement. It was thrilling, getting these snippets of Mohinder’s far-away and independent existence. He’d read between the lines over the years, understood that Mohinder felt unwanted by his father and that he’d been sent away to school as some sort of mysterious punishment, but being sent away to a school that sounded like something out of a movie was preferable to being abandoned by one’s father and smothered by one’s mother---at least that’s what Gabriel thought.
Not that he’d told Mohinder anything about his father leaving. It would have been mortifying beyond belief to admit to Mohinder that Gabriel and his life were really that pathetic and low-class. All the same, it was an omission that nagged at him; if Gabriel was hiding something as huge as his father’s abandonment, how close were they really? What if Mohinder was hiding something as big as that from him? Gabriel couldn’t bear to think about it.
He pulled the bulleted list of points he’d been collecting since he last wrote Mohinder out of his school binder where he had kept it carefully folded and hidden in one of the flap pockets. He usually started a new list as soon as he mailed off a letter, preparing himself and not wanting to forget any good ideas that came to him at random. He knew he wouldn’t start writing for another couple of days, and then he’d perfect it over the next five---a schedule he had randomly imposed upon himself since the very beginning and continued to keep---but he liked to check immediately upon reading Mohinder’s letter that all of the points were still appropriate in a reply. Any that wouldn’t fit based on what Mohinder had written, he crossed out.
Everything except the bit about the science fair seemed alright. With a secret smile, Gabriel folded his list and slipped it back into his binder before settling down to do some homework.
However, Gabriel’s mother’s nagging had seeped into his brain, because as he did his homework that evening, Gabriel found himself thinking even more obsessively than usual about what Mohinder might look like. He knew it was sick and dangerous. He shouldn’t be thinking that way about boys. It was wrong and a sin. The self-analytical part of him knew that he was projecting all sorts of disparate wants and desires and confusions onto the semi-imaginary figure of Mohinder, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted him, wanted him even more because he was semi-imaginary. He woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, panting and hard and frustrated, from a dream about Mohinder---sometimes with a face, sometimes without, sometimes in shadow, sometimes innocent, sometimes more sinful than anything his mother had ever told him about. He knew he should force himself to stop, to control it, to remind himself that it was madness to want something like this, but he simply couldn’t give up the one unblemished dream he had left.
***************************************************************
Dear Mohinder,
It’s been a quiet couple of months. I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment. Have you read it in school yet? It’s about a guy who wants to prove to himself that he’s above it all and kills an old lady, and then accidentally another one… sort of. It’s really interesting, and I like the idea that maybe there are special people who have the right to do whatever they want. I don’t know if I could ever do it, but I can see his thinking. I’m only halfway through, so I don’t know what happens yet. You should read it and tell me what you think.
I started school again last month. Junior year is just as underwhelming as sophomore year was. I know I’ve said it before, but you’re so lucky to love your school. You have no idea how badly I wish I could go to Harrow, too. That would be fun, right?
A funny thing happened this week. My mother saw your letter and asked me about you. She was the one who got me to write you in the first place, do you remember? But she forgot all about it. She forgets a lot of stuff. Anyway, she was asking about you, and I realized that although I feel like I know you really well and have ‘talked’ to you a lot for years, I’ve never had to talk about you. It weirdly made me feel like you were more real. Does that make sense? Anyway, I started thinking about what that means---to be ‘real’ to another person. I know about things that you like and things that you think, but I don’t really know what you’re like. What I mean to say is, I don’t know what you’re like with your other friends, if you’re a morning person, or if your hands get really cold like mine do or what color your hair is. I don’t even know if I want to know these things, but talking to my mom about you made me think about it. What do you think?
We took a big class field trip to Washington DC two weeks ago. People were acting like idiots, thinking only about hooking up and stuff, and they weren’t paying attention to the really interesting things that we saw. I’d never been to DC before. The Smithsonian museum was really cool. They have a lot of airplanes and other mechanical stuff. I really like machinery. I think it would be cool to invent something that would change the world, something on the level of the train or the car or the airplane, you know? I guess in that way, we’re alike. We both like science, but different branches of it.
I guess you’ve just started school, since you usually seem to start almost a month after I do. It’s your last year, right? I can’t believe you’re going to have to apply to college and everything. I’m sure you’ll get in anywhere you apply. What university has the best genetics program? You should think about applying to schools in the US, you know. There are a lot of good science programs here. If you want to ask me about them, I can do some research… Just let me know.
Until next time,
Gabriel
On to Part 2...