The pretense breaks when the silence lasts too long.
“I’ve been keeping a diary,” Mala says quietly, looking at Ronak. All her anger is gone.
Ronak looks up from his bowl.
“I can make something out of that. For the book.”
“I already e-mailed them. It’s off.”
“Ronak…”
“You were right last night, I was being stupid. It’s off.”
“Who would want to read it anyway?”
“Yeah.”
Abhi clears his throat. “Does anyone want toast?”
Equilibrium is restored. I watch Ronak. I think what it was like for him back then. He grew up with darker skin and a strange name. He picked up how to talk and what to like and who to be, but he couldn’t pick up the right color skin. So he changed what he could, which happened to be everything on the inside. He watched and mimicked. He scavenged phrases off the television and the school bus, remembered, reused them: jeez-o-man, puhleese, suh-weet. We didn’t speak that way at home. Home was a bubble. His parents roamed safely inside it, a meek species, herbivorous and physically slight. No wonder our rage struck him as silly. A meek species. Thriving, yes, if thriving meant three cars and five bedrooms. But native? Never.
The toast jumps, and Abhi hooks it from its slot with a fork. He returns to the table.
Final warning. How often he gave those. But Ronak always knew the grounding would never be enforced, the car key never confiscated. How often Abhi’s scoldings switched direction. You coddle him! You protect him! He is your doing! I didn’t mind. I liked being responsible for as much of him as possible. There was so much I wasn’t responsible for: his speech, his walk, his taste in music. His taste, too, in food. I wanted more of Ronak in my name. If the flaws, then the flaws.
Mala. “What did Amber say about Thanksgiving?”
“It’s a go.”
I put my hand on his forearm in excitement. “She doesn’t mind?”
“Course not.”
“And her parents?” Mala asks.
“We’ve spent the past three Thanksgivings in Pitt. They’ve got nothing to complain about.”
“I’m doing the whole thing here.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“She knows there’s not going to be turkey, right?”
“Yeah. No bird.”
“Do the boys know?”
“They’re not crazy about turkey either.”
“But they are used to it. I mean, there’s tofurkey, but—”
“You can keep it Indian.”
“I’m going to use the cookbook.”
“You should print a copy out. Just to see how good it looks.”
“It’s not done yet.”
“I know, I’m just saying, it looked nice.”
“It’s not done yet.”
Mala is still working on the same three fingers of milk. What she takes aren’t sips. I suspect she tilts the glass just to let the milk touch her upper lip before setting it down again. It’s only a few months now that my arms have been thinner than hers. We never worry about how boys will turn out, do we? Not in the same way, not with the same intensity. But the daughters, the daughters we watch from the day they are born. Some families try to be traditional, dressing their girls in the full Arangetram getup, one set of fingers pinched, the other flared, bee and flower. The daughter a bird of paradise there in the Sears Portrait Studio. Traditional music, traditional dance—inoculation against the club scene and the college party with its filthy futons and red plastic cups. Some families are Bollywood: six chirpy film soundtracks in the dash’s six-CD changer, and tickets to the stage show dhamakas full of singers and stars fleeing the Mumbai summer. Some homes are Hindu, and when they buy the graduation Civic, they go to the temple to have a coconut broken on it. But some homes are nothing in particular. That was the home I gave Mala and Ronak. A nothing-in-particular home. Or do hand-carved elephants on the end tables count? But one thing all our families have in common: we watch the daughters.
* * *
Ronak leaves on Sunday morning. I prevail on him to take two granola bars, two apples, and a Ziploc full of chevda for his journey. I know he thinks it is silly to stock up for three and a half hours, especially when he will get soft drinks and pretzels on the flight, but I am not refused such things anymore. Mala is sweet and quiet; she volunteers to drive him to the airport. I wonder aloud to Abhi, after they are gone a few minutes, what they might be talking about.
“Who knows?” says Abhi. “Depends on whether she is feeling nasty or not.”
I am surprised to see him taking Ronak’s side. I am even more surprised at my own reaction. “What did you say?”
“Sometimes she gets nasty for no reason.”
“Mala? She’s sweet.”
“One moment she’s sweet, the next moment she’s mean and nasty. I think of poor Sachin when I see her like that.”
“Abhi, that is not fair to her.”
“You know her. Why are you defending her? You see the worst of her.”
“Who acts the same way all the time? Can’t she act out what she feels when she’s at home?”
“Mala acting however she feels is the problem. Ronak has at least straightened up in how he talks to us. Your daughter just says whatever comes into her mind.”
“Abhi!”
“You will see. You’ll say the wrong thing, and she’ll get nasty with you, too.”
I shake my head. “You’re wrong.” I pick my book off the floor and slam it on my lap.
I am careful all day, wishing dearly we might prove Abhi wrong. And we do. Mala exhumes a dusty box of checkers from the basement, and the serrations are still crisp around the pieces. They come alive after more than a decade. We start bringing up all the old board games, Monopoly, Clue, Aggravation. Remember how Ronak used to throw a tantrum if he lost? Operation, after a pair of fresh Duracells, is still operational, its red-nosed pudgy patient still staring up in faint panic. I take the tweezers and extract his Wish Bone, his Broken Heart, his Writer’s Cramp. I end up beating a surgeon trained in ossicular reconstruction. The new Wii is upstairs, but Mala and I prefer these diversions. Risk, Parcheesi, Hungry Hippos. We play and play.
* * *
That night she is typing again, and I am sleepless. I do not want water, but I use the excuse to come out. She closes her screen as she turns to me. I take it as an invitation to sit. She pulls her mug of hot chocolate close and wraps her fingers around it. The heat must hurt her hands, but she doesn’t show any sign of pain.
“What were you writing, Mala?”
“Nothing.” Then, realizing how this sounds evasive, she adds, “Just answering e-mails.”
I nod. It is not long before she tells me what she has been thinking about.
“There were those months,” she says, “when you and Dad were taking care of Ma and Ba.”
“It was strange. It happened at the same time.”
“You were taking care of your mothers.”
“Yes.”
“Where was I?”
“You were in school, Mala.”
“No, I mean, what was I doing?”
“School. It was a busy time.”
She shakes her head. “Why wasn’t I there? Where was Ronak?” She is shaking her head and staring through the steam of her drink. “They were my grandmothers. They were dying.”
“You were busy.”
“With what?”
“They were in India, Mala. There was nothing you could do.”
“I don’t think I even cried.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe I could tell her the truth and say I had never imagined her crying. Or would that make her feel worse?
“It was my grandmother, and I found out, and … you called me, remember?”
“You were sweet to me. You were very sweet.”
“I consoled you.”
“You did. You said such sweet things to me. I still remember.”
“You hadn’t been to India in years. You hadn’t seen them for years.”
“How is that okay? That my own grandmothers died within a few months of each other, and I didn’t cry?”
She sets the mug on the table but doesn’t take her hands away.
“I feel like, like I’ve done this horrible thing in my past…”
“Ma and Ba were proud of you. They would ask about you.”
“… And I didn’t know it until now.”
“We showed them photos.”
“For God’s sake, where was I?”
Her hands slide away from the mug. They are shaking. I reach and steady them in mine, and the heat in her palms is sharp and startling and does not fade. We stay like this for a while. But my hands do not wholly calm her. After her next sip, she says, more steadily, “I guess they were kind of unreal to me.”
“They were so far away.”
“It’s no excuse.”
“It’s partly our fault. Your father and I should have made sure you saw everyone more. How many times did you even see them face-to-face?”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just that they were unreal to me.”
I do not know what the young mean when they say this word, real. I remember overhearing Ronak once, right after he got engaged, on the phone with his old high school friend Philip. The problem with that city is, none of those women are real. Amber is just real in a way they aren’t. I know it is good to be real. I want to be real. I ask her, “Am I unreal?”
“How could you possibly be unreal to me, Mom?”
“I feel unreal sometimes.”
“You’re more real to me right now than my job or even my husband and kids. It’s been that way for months.”
“No. Don’t say that. It’s not right.”
“You are all I think about. Coming back here and being with you.”
“Mala, Mala, do not get too deeply … I am not permanent. They are permanent.”
“It’s too late for that, Mom.”
“Focus on them.”
“You went to India for months to be by your mother. This is the same thing.”
“You were out of the house by then. You were grown.”
“I should have gone there with you. That was my grandmother. And if not for her sake then at least for yours. I should have gone.”
She takes a sip of her hot chocolate. I can tell it has lost its taste for her. It is just heat now, and fading. She slides the mug away.
“Remember what Ronak said about us writing our story?”
I remember what she said just yesterday. No one would want to read it anyway. I shake my head and sit back. “He doesn’t understand. It would be so embarrassing.”
“So what, we fight sometimes. Everyone fights sometimes.”
I point at the shut laptop. “Is that what you were doing? Writing about us?”
“No. I was just writing some things for myself. To myself. Abstract stuff.”
“What were you writing? About Ma?”
“No.”
“About me?”
“I was just thinking. Nothing specific, just ideas. What if someone wrote someone else’s life, from that person’s perspective?”
“Like a biography?”
“More like an autobiography.”
“But isn’t an autobiography written by the person?”
“That’s what this would be. The writer would try to see everything as her subject sees it. Everything. Even herself.”
“Like in a novel?”
“Like, imagine me writing our story. I’d talk about us, only I’d be doing it from your perspective. Not mine.”
“To do that you would have to get inside my head. That would be embarrassing!”
“No. It wouldn’t, not at all.”
I glance at her laptop. “You aren’t going to write about me, are you?”
“When do I ever write anything?”
“Your essay won first place. Remember, when you wrote about Martin Luther King? Did you forget?”
“Mom.” Mala laughs. “That was in eighth grade!”
“It was a beautiful essay. I still have it in a folder. You wrote so many stories in high school.”
“You keep that stuff?”
“I do. I keep all of your things from that time.”
“Where are they? In the basement?”
“No. Upstairs.”
“Can we see it sometime?”
“Why not now?”
She helps me upstairs. Mala stops outside the walk-in closet. I realize it is where I first broke the news. This spot in the house retains the trauma for her. I take her hand and lead her inside. I find the boxes and pull them out. Her old zigzag coloring-book pages are talismans of innocence. I have not saved everything, but I have saved a lot. I show her a red pen “A+!!!” atop a geography quiz, a paper-clipped stack of report cards, ecstatic scribbles in Teacher Comments sections, Perfect Attendance certificates, art class fingerpaints on a paper plate, a Thanksgiving turkey made out of fanned popsicle sticks, and finally her old book reports and essays in outsize cursive. I have them in plastic slipcovers. We pass them back and forth, reading choice sentences aloud and laughing.
* * *
That night makes me forget. I can still say too much, ask too much. Mala came on Friday night, so she arranged for Monday off. She is there to drive me to my appointment. We are silent for much of the ride, groggy from having stayed up so late. Finally I ask her.
“So you keep a diary?”
“What?” A defensive reflex. “Yeah,” she says, more quietly. She keeps her eyes on the road.
“Do you use one of those blank books?”
She shakes her head. “The computer.”
“Was that what I saw you writing last night?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not safe, is it? Anyone could click on it.”
“You can lock files. You can hide files. There are things you can do.”
“Do you write in it every day?”
“No time.”
“When did you start writing it?”
“I don’t know. College. I write off and on.”
“Do you write about me?”
“Good things, Mom. Don’t worry.”
“Then can I read it?”
“No, Mom, you can’t read it. It’s private.”
“But you told Ronak you would make it the story part of the cookbook.”
“That’s not happening, remember?”
“I know.”
“We decided not to.”
“Right.”
She checks my face and turns back to the road. “Did Ronak say anything more to you about it?”
“No.”
“When you were holding him?”
“No.”
“You sound like you don’t mind the idea anymore.”
“It was a bad idea. We are not like that. We do not talk about ourselves in public.”
“That’s what I thought. Then why are you bringing up my diary?”
“Why? Mala, I am your mother. I am curious what you think, what you feel.”
“I tell you what I think. Even if you and Dad don’t always want to hear it.”
“I want to know about you.”
“What about me? You know everything.”
I pause. What point is there in being dishonest now? We have never been this close. We have never been this open. “I want to know about you before Sachin.”
She looks at me through the corner of her eye. “You mean my love life?”
“Yes,” I say softly—and then the shame of my admission comes over me. I try to make her understand. “It is none of my business, I know. But it is such a big part of someone. With Ronak, at least—”
“You think I’m keeping secrets.”
I say nothing.
“Your son is the one with secrets. But he gets covered in kisses. I can do everything right, and
you’ll invent things I did wrong.”
“Not wrong. Nothing is wrong. But if you had someone, if my own daughter loved someone, I can’t imagine never knowing.”
“Mom—”
“It is all over. You are happily married now. Why is it so hard to open up to me? Do you think I will judge you? After all this time, when you have two beautiful children?”
Mala shakes her head. Three times she taps the bowed-back curve of her palm on the steering wheel. Very lightly; it is not anger, it is annoyance. I should have stayed quiet.
“You want the dirt on me, Mom?”
“Don’t say dirt. It is not dirt.”
“Here’s the dirt. There was no one. All through high school, all through college, all through med school, residency, everything. I don’t attract men. And if anyone ever showed interest, he would hang around me a while, and either I wouldn’t like him, or he wouldn’t like me, and that was the end of the great forbidden romance, every time.”
Her voice shakes toward the end. She is telling me the truth. I flush.
“I’m not even sure, Mom, what kind of shame I’d have preferred. The shame of having had some guy in secret, which would be shame in front of you and Dad and all our India relatives, and, I guess, God, or this shame of never having had an actual boyfriend. Never having bowled a guy over with my looks or my personality or my anything.”
“What about Sachin?”
“I love Sachin.”
“He is the one you bowled over. He is the one.”
“Speaking of shame—”
“How can you be ashamed of such a wonderful husband?”
“I am not ashamed of him!” Her voice has risen in volume. Red light. She brakes a little too roughly. “It’s just that I … I actually did the arranged marriage thing. Me alone out of all my friends. I mean, even my cousins in India are doing love marriages. But me, I married the guy my parents found for me.”
“What is wrong with that?”
“Exact same caste, from the exact same part of India, with my parents knowing his parents from way back. The whole arranged marriage thing, which I had so many problems with since I was a kid—that whole system turned out to be set up for people like me. I would have never thought that growing up. Never. You want to know my secret? My secret is, I really am this person through and through. My past really is me taking exams and me renting romantic comedies. Are you happy? Is that secret dirty enough for you?”
The Abundance: A Novel Page 21
