Inheritance

by Indira Ganesan

“I need to take a walk,” said Richard, propelling me out of the door.

  “What am I going to do? She can’t possibly live here.”

  “She’s your mother,” I said.

  “Exactly. Being on different continents suited me just fine. A guru! She’ll probably organize Indo-Understanding weeks and Karma for Kleptomaniacs classes. You don’t know my mother—she needs to control everything.”

  Richard’s mother moved to the guru’s camp. We decided to check the guru out. Her name was Helen Koenig. “My God, a goyishe guru,” said Richard.

  She was conducting a class on Dynamic Meditation.

  “That’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?”

  “You’re getting hysterical.”

  “My mother is going to learn to meditate from a Nazi housewife from Duluth, and you think I’m getting hysterical?”

  The Dynamic Meditation camp was located on six acres that belonged to a former pilot. There were an assortment of buildings named “Earhart,” “Lindy,” and so on. We found a class being conducted at Wright House.

  Helen Koenig was a compact woman in her forties, with cropped red hair, dressed in a chartreuse sweatsuit with an om symbol painted on the front. She was leading the class through a series of calisthenics to Muzak based on Leonard Cohen songs (who, it was rumored, had a summer home on the island).

  “Empty your mind and let the energy flow in,” she said as the group began to sway. Then the group began to hum.

  “C’mon, people, don’t hum, om,” said Helen Koenig. “Droning doesn’t get you anywhere. Break through your restraints.”

  The group consisted of about twenty people, mostly foreigners, with a stray Indian or two. Soon, they lay down in a circle and began to meditate. “No sleeping!” Helen would cry at intervals, “Meditate!” Finally, everyone got up and sang “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Then they applauded and hugged one another.

  “Isn’t this wonderful?” gushed Richard’s mom. “I feel so vitalized. I’m getting in touch with my energy centers.” Richard just rolled his eyes.

  We walked over to Markham House and entered the gift shop—cafe. Displays of quartzes, crystals on strings, rainbow stickers, ashram beads, tarot cards, T-shirts, and perfumed oils were neatly laid out on tabletops. A vaporizer streamed negative ions into the air, while soft sitar music drifted from high-tech speakers. Everything was expensive.

  “The whole structure is wrong,” said Richard, to me, or just to the air. Richard’s mother told me about the different healing powers of crystals. She bought me a packet of stones to harmonize my inner child. We then joined Helen Koenig at the cafe. She had an oversized glass of wheat-grass juice in front of her. I ordered a tofu burger, and Richard selected a protein salad.

  “Are you interested in Yoga?” she asked us. Richard told her he had studied it for years.

  “An Indian instructor,” he told her. I saw that he’d hurt Helen Koenig’s feelings.

  “We try to accommodate all forms of Eastern exercise, along with supervised diet. I’ve opened a series of Dynamic Meditation centers in California and Rhode Island and one in Washington, and they all use local produce and adopt their own regimen. Rhode Islanders like to swim, so they swim daily at their center.”

  I wondered what Rhode Island was as I tucked into the food. The tofu burger was quite good, warm and tasty, with much coriander chutney. They seemed to eat well. In fact, I enjoyed the atmosphere of this exercise and spirituality camp. And I was fascinated with Richard’s mom, especially her clothes. The days passed. She wore a series of different-colored sweatsuits, with matching cloth caps and sneakers. Richard, however, seemed disconcerted by her appearance. “She used to wear business suits and clunky jewelry,” he told me when Harriet went off to change into an aqua outfit. I couldn’t tell which version of his mother he preferred.

  I guess Richard believed that Pi was his territory, that his mother was trespassing. Somehow, her interest in spirituality was also a trespass, as if all sorts of lines were being crossed. I couldn’t imagine my mother tracking me down if I went to the States. I couldn’t understand Richard’s embarrassment. Richard’s mother was determined to stay on the island. “This is driving me crazy,” he said to me.

  “I think she’s nice,” I said.

  “She is so … so …” As he struggled to find the word, I found my attention wandering. I had seen less of him before his mother’s arrival, and I was beginning to think that I didn’t know him well at all.

  In fact, Richard had seemed very different to me for the past week or so. Still, I was unprepared when he spoke again.

  “Sonil, I have to tell you something.”

  I’d already noticed that when people say they have to tell you something instead of just telling you, it’s bound to be bad news.

  “What?”

  “I’m leaving for Ethiopia.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t stay here. The vibrations are all wrong. I think I can do better work there. I can’t take this.”

  “What do you mean? What about your students? What about me?”

  “I’ve got to get away.”

  “I think you’re overreacting.”

  “I’ll be back in August.”

  “But that’s two months away!”

  “Yeah, so it won’t be long.”

  “Two months!” I cried. Didn’t he realize how long that was? I might be gone before he returned.

  “I might be gone before you return!”

  “We can still be friends.”

  Fifteen

  What was I to do with my Richardless days? I began to take walks, passionate nature hikes to untie myself from him. I pretended I was in a Jane Austen novel, but no Darcy appeared to quell my emotions. I wrote furious poetry. I took to sighting birds and noting them in a book. Saw: one parrot, rose-ringed, yellow-beaked. Saw: three ravens, nearly big as sheep. Saw: a bunch of seagulls, an air full of sparrows.

  “I got his note, yes,” said Richard’s mother, munching on a carrot. She ushered me into her dormitory.

  “We are both of us restless spirits. When Richard moved to India, I decided to move to California. I said goodbye to all my New York friends, who thought I was crazy, and sold most of my things. I tied a trailer to the back of an old car and rode westward like a pioneer. In California, I was introduced to the suburbs. Bicycles scattered over the lawns. The paper delivered daily by a boy saving up for a deluxe skateboard, maybe college. Garbage collected twice a week, not to mention curbside recycling. I bought a house, got cable, settled in. But before that, I stopped in Kansas City for a week.

  “In Kansas City I had met a man, a farmer. He sold flowering shrubs at a very fair price and lived off his soybean produce. His father had been a farmer and his father before him. He had a history that my husband didn’t have, that I barely had. He was uglier than my husband, but I liked him more for it. But he was married, and I was divorced and on my way to California. My last night there he took me to a dance hall in a town called River and slow-danced with me. That was the most intimate we ever got. Seven years later his wife died, and he wrote to me. But I had moved on.”

  Richard’s mother paused, not looking at me anymore.

  “But you could go back,” I said. Richard’s mother just smiled and looked wistful.

  “Young love is difficult,” she said.

  This family spoke in puzzles and was destined for sadness, I thought.

  I was going to Radcliffe, by God. I was going to become a zoologist. And if the admissions personnel were to inquire if I ever had any other loves besides animals, I would resolutely say “No.” There would be no Richard in my life. But I was afraid they would somehow know I had had a lover. They would deny me entrance. I would be stuck in Madras. No one would ever marry me, not because of my mother’s reputation, but because somehow my love for Richard would be found out.

  I told Maria that Richard had left. She hugged me fiercely, and I had a feeling she already knew. I began to sob on h
er shoulder, great sobs for myself. Why did he have to go away? Why did he leave me? What had I done? Maria soothed me but she could not help me. When I had worn myself of tears, she made us some tea and spoke of Richard.

  “He had a roommate in college who was Indian, did he ever tell you that? This Indian boy would make paranthas and dahl and fed the two of them all winter. He told Richard stories about Cochin, his sister who was the beauty in the family, his two older brothers who were indifferent and glum. That was how India wove its spell over him.”

  “India doesn’t weave spells,” I said, indignantly. “It’s the West that’s the spell-weaver, the enchanter, enticing us with Coca-Cola and television.”

  “Well, maybe all nations are magicians. Maybe the media are magicians. But whatever it was, Richard began to dream of India. He thought it would cure him of his terrible disappointment with life, I think he found in you an extension of his dreams, India as a young girl, India as innocence, intelligence, and wit. And I think when his mother came here, he saw that he didn’t have solitary possession of India, that his mother sought claim on his fantasy. So he left. I think his leaving is irresponsible. Remember he is leaving his mother as well as you. He has not yet grown up.”

  But even as she spoke thus, I began to think of his eyes and his hair and all the things I loved about him and his special tenderness toward me. I heard what Maria said but my thoughts were too distracted. I thought of his voice and his breath and the smell of his clothes, and I felt I could die right then and there, I had had something so beautiful in him. But then I guessed that I was succumbing to obsession, and it was all his fault. And my mother’s fault—for wasn’t it she from whom I’d inherited this passion? I had become as wanton as she was. I started to cry again, and Maria handed me a handkerchief and hugged me again.

  I went to the temple thinking that perhaps Jani was on the right track, that perhaps religion was the answer for a disquieted mind. There was a group who sat next to me on the bus that also got off when I did, and it turned out that they, too, were going to the temple. The temple in our town was a famous one, built in A.D. 325. It featured a highly refined sculptural base depicting the entire story of the Ramayana and a legion of gods and goddesses on the remaining facades, I washed my hands at the tap and removed my sandals and went in. My group consisted of a widowed grandmother, her daughter or daughter-in-law, who had an infant in her arms, and two chattering ten-year-old girls, I applied a red dot to my forehead at the entrance.

  What I best liked about this temple was the host of smells emanating from every corner. It was a mixture of incense oil, stone, and something else which I can only describe as godly presence. It was bewitching and always swept me into my better nature. I became more thoughtful, more full, somehow, tranquil and expansive. My group was doing a special puja, and I watched as they gave coconuts and bananas and flowers to the priest. He placed their offerings at the feet of the principal figure, praying aloud in Sanskrit and tearing up the flowers to scatter at the feet of the lesser deities. Then the camphor lamp was passed around, and I touched its warmth and then my eyes. The priest gave me a yellow chrysanthemum and handed my group their coconuts and fruit, now blessed.

  This temple featured a small shrine for Sita, an avatar of Laxshmi; here she was depicted as a thoughtful companion to Rama, wife of the avatar of Vishnu and hero of the epic. Sita followed her husband into the forest for fourteen years of exile and was abducted by the evil Ravana. Captive in his garden, but untouched because she was a goddess, she awaited rescue. When Rama finally reclaimed her as well as his kingdom, the people muttered that Sita was impure, having been separated from her husband and living in another man’s home. Required to take a test for purity, Sita walked through fire. But once her innocence was proved, her eyes blazed with anger at the injustice done to her, and she returned to the earth from which she’d sprung, leaving Rama.

  I stood before the shrine to pray. I prayed for my grandmother’s good health, and Jani’s, and I prayed for the welfare of my cousins and my aunts. Finally, I asked the goddess for extra strength to see my mother as she truly was and to help me get over Richard’s absence. I prayed for forgiveness from the goddess, and I asked for a boon: to make my judgment clearer. I bowed before the goddess and then took a walk all around the temple.

  I met my group as they collected their sandals. The girls were giggling, and the mother looked annoyed and the grandmother impatient. They went to a vendor and got sugarcane to munch on. I felt thirsty and unthinkingly drank from the tap. I was not ever to drink outside water, but I had forgotten. Immediately I wondered if I’d get sick, and I said an extra prayer to let this not come to pass.

  I fed a banana to the elephant outside and took the bus home.

  “What, my girl, you’ve been to the temple without anyone knowing?” asked my astonished grandmother. I nodded, feeling tired and a bit dizzy.

  “I’m hungry. Can I have lunch?”

  “We’ve eaten. I’ll get the cook to get you something. My God, this child went to the temple by herself! Come here! What were you thinking of?”

  My grandmother hugged me to her bosom, and I breathed in the odor of her sari and her comfortable presence. She fetched me a plate of rotis and sweet potato. I ate quickly and still felt faintly ill.

  I remembered the water from the tap but couldn’t begin to tell my grandmother anything.

  The next day I awoke crying. I had lost Richard, I had no mother to speak of, and I had probably caught hepatitis from the temple tap water. I got up, sneaked out, and took the bus to see Maria again. On the way, a man with a sad face stared at me and moved next to my seat. My inner antennae went up like an ant’s that senses something amiss, while my mind told me not to be paranoid. The man began to mumble and leaned against me. I shoved him aside and found another seat. In panic, I wondered if because I had slept with Richard it meant that I was now sending a signal to random males that I was available for anything. The man continued to press against me in my mind, and I despaired at being female, at being on a bus, and of making love long before I was old enough to appreciate the consequences.

  “Sonil,” said Maria when I was seated on her sofa, “we search for love all our lives just as we search for family all the time. And whenever we take on anyone as a friend, we also take on their families and their history. This does not have to be a bad thing. It broadens our sense of self. Letting Richard into your life was not a sin. In fact, nothing is good or bad, and we don’t really need to judge at all …”

  Again I drifted off and looked at her bungalow. It seemed nice, with its heavy brocade drapes and trailing plants hung from the ceiling. The light was good and her furniture, dark mahogany, Raj style, looked settled. I liked her cushions made from pallus, the richly embroidered borders of saris. Maybe someday if I had my own apartment, I could live well and have people to visit. Maybe I could keep a lover or keep a dog. I wondered if I would need a lot of money for such a life

  “… In America, if you have a heartbreak you can tap into a network of female sympathizers, women who will listen to your problems about men and offer solutions. Even girls your age discuss such things. There are magazines that cater to this sort of trouble, with questions and answers about boyfriend problems, quizzes on compatibility. It’s quite an industry. Indian girls must talk about these things, too.”

  I supposed girls my age rhapsodized over film stars or a cricket player, occasionally a cousin or a brother’s friend. But marriage at a suitable age was always the target, always an aim, an outcome that restricted behavior somewhat. Of course, there were stories of girls sneaking off from college to meet their beaus, kissing at train stations, but the large majority of my classmates would acquiesce to arranged marriages and start families within three years of the wedding.

  But what if no one ever loved me again, or if I never loved anyone again? Would I be as unlucky in love as my mother? I felt doomed.

  “I wouldn’t worry about all those things, Sonil. I wou
ld forgive myself for being in love with Richard and move on. You have so much life ahead of you, my God, so much to explore and accomplish.”

  But I couldn’t see past Richard. I desperately wanted him next to me, immediately, always. I said goodbye to Maria and turned toward home, but then changed my mind and went into a cafe.

  I thought about animals and their capacity for change, how species evolved one after another, left and right, front and back. I thought about continual reproduction, and what that meant in terms of survival. And I began to think of the ability to abstain from love as a peculiarly human trait. But then, that couldn’t be true, I thought; surely there were earthworms that were monkish in their habits?

  Why didn’t I abstain? Why didn’t my mother? Why could she not follow the proper path of widowhood? Why couldn’t she remain content with who she was? What was so bad in being a proper widow? “A widow is nothing in our society. Unable to remarry, unable to entertain, always an eyesore, a begrudged extra plate,” one of my teachers had lectured in class. But was that always the case? Why did she need to entertain anyway?

  Now, knowing Richard, I saw how sweet it was to lie with someone. Still, could she not hold off? Of course, I wouldn’t have been born if she had held off, if she had remained satisfied with her life. I think dissatisfaction makes us impatient with the slow pace of natural progression, propels us forward. Of course, this dissatisfaction could be good … Survival might depend upon it. But maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t been born.

  “Hey, professor, what are you thinking?”

  It must be my fate to be accosted in cafes. I looked up. It was C.P.’s cousin who liked cricket.

  “Nothing,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I just finished a game. The boys here are not bad.”

  “I’m sorry about C.P.,” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  “Did she really go off to a convent?” he said, admiringly.

  I nodded.

  “Wow.”