The Abundance: A Novel
Page 11
She, too, was intent on feeding everyone who came to her flat. And a flat of her own she insisted on having. The vast family house in Jamnagar had been sold years earlier to make room for the new India. Her building had started out a fresh pink, but one monsoon later, water damage wept gray down the walls. Television antennae came to bask and breed on the terraces like bold insects. In time these gave way to satellite dishes, which flowered and let down black tendrils. Every stairwell had its resident stray dog. The roads, I remember, were pavement one visit, potholes the next. Damp sarees waved surrender off balcony clotheslines.
By the time we sold it, our family house had gone rotten. The grounds between the road and the house had been taken over by a carpenter. This carpenter, known to my mother only as Motilal, had lived apart from his family for two years. He spent long stretches of time in town, sent money home, and periodically returned to his village to father one more barefoot child.
My mother, her spine already wilting to a curl, had done her widow’s shuffle from emptiness to emptiness. She called the carpenter to repair the legs of two chairs and a couch. Motilal saw the empty lawn and invited his family within the week, including his brother, his brother’s family, and his brother’s cows. One visit, I saw grass there; on my next, a year and a half later, the lawn was mud and dung. I closed the shutters in horror on a heifer’s glistening, wobbly-jowled chewing. Dung patties dotted the brick boundary.
How had this happened? The story made me flush with guilt. It was I who had complained how the short couch leg knocked against the floor. I could have stuck a book under it before I departed. Instead I had left my mother with the critique that smarted every time she passed the couch. And so she called Motilal to the house.
Indian law, either the letter or the practice, made it impossible for us to evict the carpenter and his clan now that they were installed. The same went for the lodgers to whom she had let the upstairs of the house. Their rent had not increased since 1966. A month’s milk cost them more than a month’s rent. Up there, it was essentially someone else’s house.
When the developer came to buy, each of these players—the carpenter on the lawn, the entrenched lodgers upstairs—had to be bargained with separately, as if they were owners. Both parties ended up negotiating a higher purchase price than we did. The negotiations stayed secret until after the signing. On that day, the lodger’s wife came downstairs for the first time in years. So, how much did they give you? She made the descent in spite of the ratty cartilage in her knees. It must have been quite painful for her, but that’s how badly she wanted to gloat.
My mother’s new flat came to us in a clause of the deal the developer offered us. It was worth about two lakhs in those days; the flat is worth more now that the street is more packed. The flat consisted of two rooms, a kitchen, and an occasionally backed-up latrine with mud flecks on its porcelain footpads. Ignominious lodgings for the widow of a London-educated barrister, but she insisted on living there, alone.
My mother seemed to expect this diminishment before the end. Her own father, also wealthy, had “gone mad” shortly after his last daughter was married. Details were never medically satisfying; it sounded, from her wide-eyed descriptions, like a schizophrenic break. But schizophrenia usually manifests itself by age thirty, and my grandfather was easily sixty when he stopped bathing and shaving, locked himself in an upstairs guest room, and every night harangued a resident lizard who only wished to sun beside his lamp.
Downstairs, meanwhile, a kind of slow-motion looting began. Over several weeks, distant relatives, family “friends,” servants, and eventually strangers picked out what they wanted. Figurines, fixtures, pieces of furniture—from the courtyard, they would shout, “Praful bhai! Can we have the radio?” or, if they didn’t know him personally, “Saheb! Can we have the curtains?” They would wait for his irascible shout, “Go on, take it, take everything, just get out of my ears!” Get out of my ears was not an idiomatic expression. His contemporaries took it for proof of madness, and hence unfitness to own so many beautiful things. Abhi claims the phrase might express a schizophrenic’s anguish at auditory hallucinations. There is no way to know.
The story made me fear for Ronak. Had I passed something down to him? I soon stopped worrying on that account. Ronak grew up shrewd and acquisitive from the beginning, the opposite of his mad great-grandfather. After my mother’s diminished last years, I feared for myself, that I, too, living out some family curse, might die impoverished in some way.
* * *
The first day of one India visit, Abhi and I left our bags at his eldest brother’s house. Abhi’s mother, also a widow, rotated among her many sons, and she always timed the sojourn at her eldest son’s house to her youngest son’s arrival. My mother’s flat was within walking distance of my own brother’s house, but she lived by herself, as she insisted. We visited her the first evening for dinner even though we wanted to sleep.
We made sure she had been given a ground-floor flat to save her the ordeal of stairs. She left so rarely, though, we might have done well to stipulate a unit one floor up. That would have saved her—and us—the ordeal of rats. It seemed the rats didn’t notice her. They weren’t startled into corners as they were by other human footsteps. Maybe they were emboldened, knowing they dealt with an old widow. Like the vegetable sellers who rolled their carts to her window and demanded fifteen rupees for three tomatoes.
Mala and Ronak, sullen preteen and teen respectively, caught sight of a rat soon after they had touched their grandmother’s feet in greeting. My mother spoke only to me, commenting on how much they had grown since she saw them last. I thought back to a trip a half decade earlier—how ruddy she had been, how much more happy fat she had carried on the face and arms. As she was speaking, a rat cruised between some table legs and vanished into the kitchen.
Mala shuddered exaggeratedly; Ronak raised his eyebrows. They were having a conversation in body language about their revulsion.
“Take off your shoes,” I told them.
“But—”
“You take off your shoes here when you go to someone’s house.”
“Swear to God we just saw a rat, Mom,” said Ronak, in truculent American.
“It was huge,” added Mala.
“Ronak, Mala, take off your shoes,” said Abhi, removing his own with what looked like reluctance.
My mother was still speaking. I turned to her and leaned by her near-deaf ear. “I hope you didn’t make too much!”
“What?”
“I said I hope you didn’t make too much food! We just got off the plane!”
“Only the roti are left. I’ve done the dough. You can turn on the television. I’m making them fresh.”
I followed her into the kitchen. I noticed her soles, black from the floor. I noticed the fissures at her heels. Her onetime rope of coconut-oiled, gray-silver hair had evaporated into a bright white halo with a pinky-sized ponytail at the back. She had no idea I was behind her. The dough was on a steel thali with a bowl over it. I checked the front room. Mala and Ronak sat cross-legged on the swing, looking uneasily over the edges of it, the way castaways on a raft might check for sharks. Abhi unzipped and lifted the dusty cover off the television, wiped his fingers, tried the power button. Lines rolled diagonally across a Doordarshan broadcaster. The snow varied between squall and blizzard as he waltzed the antennae and Mala reported, “Better, worse, worse, better, worse…”
“Why don’t you try another channel?” said Ronak.
“There is no other channel.”
In the kitchen, a rat hurdled my mother’s hand as, squatting, she clicked the lighter on the stove. Two stainless steel bins sat on the stone floor beside her portable gas range. She was no bigger than the fire-engine-red kerosene canister in the far corner. I began to smell gas. The children would smell it soon, too. Finally: flame. She tuned it to a crisp ring. A brisk hand clipped the tawa onto the flame while her other hand uncovered the dough and set the bowl aside.
* * *
The same flat, six years later. The walls were darker with water damage. More stray dogs loafed on the stairwells. Maruti hatchbacks were scattered about now, not just Bajaj Chetaks. More laundry on the balconies, more traffic beyond the gate. The boys who once chalked wickets on the far wall had been sucked into their bedrooms, where they did math problems under cricket posters. The girls who had gone about in tight pigtails, wearing khaki school uniforms with maroon button-down sweaters in the winter, had graduated to jeans and kameez tops and the local Polytechnic. Abhi and I were at my mother’s again, our first day back home.
Ronak and Mala didn’t join us on that trip. Their lives had locked onto the rails of higher education and, soon afterward, their professions. They had no good reasons not to come, but they did have good excuses. It was easy for us, too, to say they had “no time,” although Mala had three weeks between high school graduation and her unpaid research spot in a neurologist’s lab. Ronak had called me— spring break at South Padre, winter break at Snowmass, always my phone—to clear a weeklong hiking trip to Arizona, followed by a road trip “just up to Nevada,” as if he were independently wealthy. (Nevada. He didn’t use the word Vegas.)
Abhi and I no longer pressed the children to accompany us on our India trips, which we had begun to make yearly as our mothers grew older. We felt that love of motherland could not—must not—be forced. Mala did, once, show interest in India, when a friend named Sarah got her excited about a nonprofit. But Sarah ended up not going. In any case, Sarah’s nonprofit had fixated on vaccinating Bihar, which was far from our relatives. Bihar was a dangerous place, no better than Africa. Later we, or at least I, realized what should have been obvious: India was never their motherland anyway. It seems silly, in retrospect, that I grasped this so suddenly, crushingly, like the answer to a test question hours after I had missed it.
In my mother’s flat, as always, we ate our obligatory first-night-in-India meal. I was almost glad Mala and Ronak were not there to see the flat or their grandmother. My own grandchildren weren’t born yet, but I thought to myself, Will I come to seem this way to my grandchildren? Will I give off musty grandmother-odors and offer crème-filled biscuits of questionable age? Will they look at their dishes and wonder about my hygiene? Maybe I was already on my way. Mala and Ronak, when they visited, had taken to commenting how the house was getting old. They found what they looked for: the family room needed new carpet, the guest bathroom, new tile. I had not seen these things until they pointed them out. I defended the house’s decay in their presence—but got estimates after they left.
My mother ate only after we had finished. She had to be free while we ate so she could monitor our progress and interrupt it with the customary insistent offers and, in Abhi’s case, the uninvited ladle. When she did sit down to eat, she tucked her food to one side of her mouth and only chewed on that side. Abhi and I both noticed.
“Do you have a penlight?” Abhi asked me after she had finished.
I had one in my purse. I examined her; I was better at these everyday medical problems than Abhi, who had forgotten most of his medical knowledge outside neurology. If Abhi saw someone walking on a sprained ankle, his first thought was Friedreich’s ataxia. I tweezed the splinters and iodined the scrapes of Mala’s jungle-book childhood. I sat my mother down, pointed at her cheek, and asked, “Do your teeth hurt?”
She turned her ear to me.
“Why were you eating on one side? Do your teeth hurt?”
As soon as she heard the question, she sat back. “Oh, that. I bit my cheek, that’s all.”
I clicked on the penlight. “Let me see.”
“Why do you want to look in my mouth?”
She was always resistant. She didn’t wear a hearing aid for the same reason. Abhi brought his face near my shoulder. “Let her check your mouth, Ma.”
“I see Arvind bhai twice a year. He said it was nothing.”
Arvind bhai was her doctor; according to my brother, her last checkup had been in November of the prior year. “Ma, how long have you had this?”
“A long time, a long time. He says I bite my cheek in my sleep.”
“Let me see.”
She dropped her dentures into her hand and tilted her head back. Loose neck skin stretched translucent over the flutter of her neck veins, then crinkled again when she opened her mouth. The old fluorescent tube overhead flowed right to left with fine ripples of flicker. Her face was bleached by its surgical light. With two fingers I lifted her upper lip clear of the gums. The motion stung then soothed a forgotten hangnail. I did not need the penlight to see. I drew away my hands and looked at Abhi. My mother stared patiently at the ceiling. Abhi nodded. Under the clockwise ceiling fan, my wet fingertips went cold.
* * *
I might have foreseen it. I often feared for her, but what I expected was a stroke or heart attack or broken hip. The habit—a smear of tobacco paste inside the cheek, every evening, for decades—was something I had thought harmless. Or maybe not harmless, but the least of many risks. She was so far along in years, why break her one vice?
Years later, when Mala became an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, she dealt with this exact lesion, squamous cell carcinoma. Her patients were work-boot-wearing, country-music men who swore by Skoal and once-pretty barflies whose lungs had gone to smoker’s fishnet. How unlike that small, holy woman! Yet my mother shared their coarse addiction. The girl who came to sweep her floor passed a paanwallah on her way. A clutch of one-rupee notes bought my mother her monthly tin of tobacco.
Mala grew up to carve out halves of tongues and olive-sized neck lymph nodes; I doubt my mother’s cancer had any bearing on my daughter’s choice of specialty. Though I do know she tapped the story for admissions essays and residency interviews. So tell us, why ENT? It supplied a personal angle.
Abhi and I had taken that India trip to care for Abhi’s mother, who had suffered a small stroke. Instead we split up, Abhi staying with his mother, me handling my mother’s clinic visits. She demanded that we go to Arvind bhai first—partly out of social propriety (he was my third cousin), partly because she believed in him. Arvind bhai, unrepentant, nodded sagely and told me she had been biting her cheek in her sleep, he had told her to stop, but she hadn’t stopped, and now look. This was Indian medicine, where doctors were infallible even when they were wrong. I got the name of a specialist, who confirmed what I already knew: even if she had been younger and healthier, the lesion itself was inoperably deep, inoperably spread out. There was nothing I could do.
I did everything anyway. Abhi and I didn’t meet for days at a time. I slept in my mother’s flat—lay there the whole skittering, cricket-loud night. I saw Ronak and Mala’s logic in preferring the flat board of the swing: it had no legs in contact with the ground, so there was less chance of a cockroach adventuring over you. I tried to ignore the midnight circus of her rats—the scrape of a thali, the tumble of a pot …
Once I shook my mother awake at two in the morning and demanded we stay at my brother’s. She said no. “I want to stay in my house,” she insisted. What house, her house was sold years ago, this was just a flat in the city. She said it was her house and that she had kept everything running these past years all by herself. She laid her arm over her eyes. A small mound in a white saree, but stubborn as a mountain. She wasn’t going to move, so neither could
I.
I shouldn’t have asked, knowing her stubbornness. I had always urged her to come stay in America. I still see fantasies of that alternate life for her, that alternate death. On my first visits home, I used to beg her to let me book a plane ticket. The Western Lands felt magical and healing. If I could just get her there, I imagined, her hair might thicken and darken, her cheeks might fill out. I had seen them for myself, those grandmothers who came over. She could have been one of them: an old maaji in sneakers, brown cardigan over the saree, strolling past Bath & Body Works, the Gap for Kids, the food court. Bespectacled and otherworldly but covered by Medicare, paramedics never more than five minutes away. I fantasized about seeing her peel the stickers off Chiquita bananas—gigantic, yes, but not as sweet as Indian ones, she would declare. I could picture her sipping milky, cardamom-flecked tea, her Ritz crackers and chevda on a separate saucer. She would have had her own room on the ground floor—I imagined it sometimes when I went into Abhi’s study: at once neater and dirtier than the rest of the house, a little patch of India, smelling of her, smelling of India, Parachute coconut oil in the blue plastic bottle, ayurvedic turmeric, mothballs, that luggage scent that never went away, her own stale body odor, gods and kumkum in the corner, a tiny incense stand (silver, blackish with collected ash), the hexagon of sandalwood incense sticks from the Indian grocer, pills for hypertension on the nightstand, cotton balls to stuff in her ears come winter, a quilt in a square at the foot of her bed. She would have folded clothes, she would have sliced zucchini for me, she would have watched the children and perhaps taught them more Gujarati than I was able to. I would have brought her bhajans, Ramayana recitations, Sanskrit stotras intoned with the ocean in the background. At first cassette tapes, then CDs, finally an iPod with everything on it.