Or had he simply succumbed to life in the West, traded his jeans for an Armani suit, paid his bills, let his photography languish, come to his senses? Had he known that there were no real love stories in the world and that to contemplate happiness was to invite pain? Did he seal his heart and airbrush her from his life?
Who was the cruelest of my mother’s lovers?
Twenty-one
My family was something precious, like jewelry, like a necklace you never take off. My family was deep as a rose, true as any tree. As my mother spoke to me that day, my laryngitis abated, and I felt that I knew something, just as I had always yearned. But I was so shocked and overcome with all that had happened to me, I began to yawn, and my throat began to hurt a little, and I began to think of cold fruit juice or ice cream and merely smiled at my mother to thank her. She let me rest. I recovered rapidly.
After all the ceremonies were over, after all the guests had left, when the house was once again empty and we were four, not five, but just four, we began to make plans.
When my grandmother died, my great-uncle played the veena for nine days in a row. He had been devoted to her. She had once convinced my grandfather to open a gallery for him. My grandfather planned while my great-uncle painted. For days, they were confident of success. But my great-uncle felt the lure of opium once too often, and my grandfather fought with him. My grandfather vowed never to have anything to do with him again. My grandmother pleaded his cause but to no avail. My great-uncle left town to study with a veena master. My grandfather died on a mountain when I was three years old. My great-uncle returned for his funeral and stayed. He would remain now, as would my mother.
Jani was returning to the convent. “I’m not saying I’ll never get married, but I want to go, to finish what I started. I’ve found a kind of peace there that I haven’t had since Asha died,” she said.
“How long has she been—since she died?”
“Four months ago. Her mother wrote me. She had lymph cancer that was detected too late. All winter she thought she just had a cold and never bothered to see a doctor.… So I want to go back to the nuns.”
“What about studies?”
“I’ll manage without. Maybe I’ll join you in your America and finish there. I won’t stay away too long,” she promised me. I felt she was teasing me, pretending that America was as easy to get to as Bombay.
We spoke of Grandmother. To my surprise, I learned that Jani felt responsible for her demise, in a small way.
“If only I had stayed at home and agreed to marriage, she could have gone in peace. I worried her needlessly. I gave her much cause for pain.” She paused. “Going to the convent was perhaps a mistake then. To go there now seems infinitely correct.”
“I could have paid more attention to Grandmother, not been so distracted,” I said.
“You are too young, and anyway that American took advantage of you.”
“No, he didn’t, Jani. I liked him too much, beyond reason.”
“Reason seems to be rarely involved in love.”
Jani began to pack.
“I still want to examine this cloistered life. We all of us live in cloisters,” said Jani before tossing her cashmere shawl into her bag.
“Hey, how come you are taking pretty clothes to the convent? Jani, what’s going on?”
She laughed and said airily, “I don’t have a secret life, Sonil. I’m taking my shawl because the nights are sometimes cold.”
I would go back to Madras. My mother and my great-uncle would manage in the house, with Vasanti to help and Kirti, as well. My mother would take care of the garden; my great-uncle would take less opium.
Twenty-two
A few weeks later Richard returned. He rang me up, and my mother wordlessly handed me the receiver. He said he and Maria were having lunch together, and asked if I wanted to join them.
I biked over to the restaurant they had chosen. I wasn’t sure what it would be like seeing him, and my heart was skipping like a jump rope. I told myself it didn’t matter at all; I had already said goodbye. Still, when I saw him, I ran into his arms and hugged him. He was tanner, but seemed shorter. Maria looked the same as ever. We sat down to a Sri Lankan meal of milk rice and curried vegetables, everything appealing and tasty and in small portions. I told them about Grandmother, and Maria hugged me. Richard spoke of Ethiopia. He’d had a hard time until his mother abandoned Helen Koenig and joined him at a cooperative farm. Together, they worked with Red Cross volunteers. Richard was going back to Ethiopia; his mother was returning to New York, spiritually content.
I spoke of Radcliffe; I spoke of zoology. I spoke until I got bored and longed to go home.
Love is funny. Every man I have loved since Richard has been a kind of protest, a defiant gesture against loneliness and isolation. Was I merely that kind of distraction for him, some way to buy time? I can’t make up my mind. Ten years after he left me, he married a girl from Kerala and now has three children. We don’t keep in touch. Once he was in the same city as me and telephoned. He had gotten my number from Maria, still on Pi. His voice was like an evocation of the past, but I didn’t want to see him. I had erased him from my life in the manner I suppose my mother had erased my father. I had ceased to remember how he smelled or how my head fit on his shoulder. I had stopped lighting the candle that kept his presence alive; the altar was cold.
But for years I saw his face in the faces of strangers on the street. He had imprinted me, and I was attracted to men like him for a long time. Once, I had read, there was a whooping crane that had been brought up in captivity. When it was time for her to breed, she rejected all the male cranes who came to call on her. Instead, she flirted with the man who had fed her from birth. In the name of science, this man courted her, hunted earthworms for her, and danced for her, as well, to ready her mating phase. Duly, she was artificially inseminated, but she believed the father to be a six-foot man in jeans.
Hearts have no sense; we love what we love.
About the time of Richard’s marriage, Jani wrote to me. She had met the mad preacher and consented to give birth to his child. She hadn’t given up women, but somehow his skewed religion appealed to her, and she became involved. If she found him sexy, I never knew. The baby wasn’t Jesus, of course, but then perhaps all babies are born in the image of God. Perhaps the spirit of the Divine inhabits every child. Certainly that is what our family thought, giving children allowance to help themselves to offerings meant for the gods. Go to an Indian concert, and you will see children running amok in the aisles, climbing onto the stage, the parents not minding. Children were innocent, sacred and privileged. Jani had the baby, and they named him Dove, which means peace bird, or “where is” in Italian, and “a smoky dark color,” as well. The preacher lives with Jani, but has his own lover, as does Jani. I think they are happier than most. I think of them passing quiet evenings together—quiet since both were not given to talking. Perhaps he stopped smoking ganja, perhaps he had cut his hair and was less mad. I could imagine the two of them putting on a Dylan album and dancing with their child.
I have not yet found my true love, and sometimes doubt that I will. I can imagine living in a cabin in the wilderness with two large dogs for companions. I do not long to share my life with someone else anymore. Love has failed so many people I know. The poet writes of this often. She says love is like a golden blossom that sprouts at the footfall of Buddha, sprung from pure joy and adoration. But the beloved walks away without a glance. It seems the moment we meet someone, we are preparing to depart from him, just as our every breath brings us closer to death.
Should I never have loved? Should I have saved my heart? Maybe, yet what good would it have done me? I might never have known the rapture of sadness, as the poet says, the heights of despair, the ecstasy of agony. You can never escape one for the other. But I am not a philosopher, and I cannot make rules for the way to live my life. I am not that strong. Every time I swear never to fall in love again, my head is turned by t
he sight of a pretty face. My heart again fills with song, readying for heartbreak. Often I spend more time in recovery from love lost than in love itself. It is distraction and selfishness, but sometimes it is all I have.
After I left the island, I threw myself into my studies. Taking exams always terrified me. I would arrive very early and sit in an exam hall while the proctors walked through the aisles, grimly handing out exam booklets. Soon, all would be quiet, except for the shuffling sound of feet skimming the floor in rhythmic agitation and the ticking of the clock. As always, I would lose myself in the test questions, busy with my pen, writing an essay.
My pre-college teachers believed in long, complex questions that required long and complex answers. Three hours would fly past as we addressed ourselves to history or science, reimagining experiments carried out in labs, the combinations of chemicals. Sometimes the answer was in the question itself, and sometimes the answer would only present itself in the writing.
I also read at home and went to the movies with my aunts and cousins. I even began to play cricket, since one of my younger cousins wanted to practice. I learned to swing my bat with a minimum of effort and learned to bowl properly.
My mother visited me every several weeks. It seemed to do her good to get off the island and see Madras. There were still many things unspoken between us, but I was learning that she was a complex person, and oddly shy as well. The effort of raising her daughters had been too great for her, so she gave us away to those who could. She tried to repair the damage she had done by listening to my sisters and downplaying her extravagance with perfume and such. She treated us to tea at the Taj Hotel and got idlis from Woodlands in the mornings. Sometimes she and I would walk on the beach, not talking, but comfortable.
Eventually, I did pass the big qualifying exam and went on to gain admission at Radcliffe. It was colder than I expected, and there were so many things to learn at once, but I bundled up and settled in after the first year. I studied hard, wanting to justify my voyage overseas. When I felt I could not study anymore, I thought of my grandmother and how proud she might be of my achievements. I declared zoology as my major.
I joined an Indian Association and even went to the Indian temple on occasion. At first I spent all my time studying, but then I fell in with a group of international students. We spent Sunday afternoons making fun of the MIT engineers and drinking cappuccinos and reading fashion magazines. I found I could be as shallow as the best of them. My taste for rock and roll grew, but nostalgia for the father I had mythologized made me listen to country music as well. One night after dancing too much, I stumbled into a tattoo parlor—it was just a room in someone’s house—and got a small OM needled onto my ankle.
I traveled cross-country in a Ford Escort with some friends and looked up my father. He lived in Missouri, somewhere on the outskirts of Kansas City. I spent a weekend calling up all the Donaldsons in the state after I wormed his name and residence from my mother. She was appalled that I wanted to call him, but I told her that she owed me. I didn’t tell her, of course, that I was going to try to visit.
He wasn’t a cowboy, but he had on a plaid shirt that first day. He also had a big black Labrador named Shirley, and together we took her for a walk. My father was still a photographer and worked long hours in the darkroom. He hadn’t married but was not that interested in hearing about my mother.
I told him a little about myself. I guess I liked him, but he was hard to fathom. I looked at his photographs and some caught my eye. One entitled “Goan Spring” pictured a young girl, head thrown back and laughing, holding a sprig of fresh, bright green peanuts, her smile wide, and I liked her instantly. Another featured a round man, also from India, talking animatedly to a patron in his shop. In the background was a light-bearded man who reminded me of Richard. I asked my father the date of the photograph.
“Nineteen eighty-four,” he replied.
“Eighty-four?”
“Yes … spring, I think,” he said, busy with his chemical processing.
“You were in India so recently?”
“Yes … what … oh. Yeah, I guess you were there. Well. I couldn’t really visit. Your mother made that very clear, early on.”
“What do you mean?”
“After I left your mother, it took a year for me to put everything in order. My daughter never really quit drugs, but she did enter a program. My son resented me and considered me the cause of everything wrong in his and his sister’s lives. I offered to help, to let him move in with me, to pay for college. He joined the army and never wrote. I missed your mother but never wrote. I couldn’t. I wanted to fix things and return to her. Maybe I wasn’t ready to give myself absolutely to her and wanted to see if I could make it alone. But all I could do was think of her. So I decided my children weren’t being helped by my presence and that I had a right to love. But your mother disagreed. She felt I couldn’t abandon my children.”
“My mother said that?”
“Something to that effect.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I begged her to come to the States, to bring your sisters, but she refused. She never told me there was another child. I heard about you years later, through a mutual friend. By then, I let things be. It seemed senseless to try and patch things up.”
By this time, I was learning to ride over whatever astonishing disclosures my family habitually provided for me. How could she deny him in her life? Perhaps the same way she had denied me. I guess she had been wounded, but weren’t we all wounded?
“You know,” he said, “she was always the subject of gossip. You might have heard some … out-of-proportion stories. She’s an independent woman, fearless, and it makes people suspicious. I think people like to think she’s wanton, having enormous appetites.” He smiled. “She is not as people might say.”
“I think she had a lot of … male friends,” I said.
“She attracts men. She likes to take long walks by herself. Her absences probably give rise to rumor.”
I didn’t want to say that I had believed them, too. I continued to look at more pictures. He was talented, my father, but not famous. Perhaps he still loved my mother in the way I loved Richard, maybe even more. I had to stop trying to figure them out; they were changeable and in motion. I had thought for so long that they defined me, that I would be a repetition of them. I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I had imagined. My family is ingrained in my actions; they are uppermost in my mind. Yet there are parts of me that are nothing like them; I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother. I am not destined to walk in her shadow. Yet a shard of her exists in everything I do, in the way I look at men, in the way I view my life. My grandmother is in my heart, a mandala I never part with, and my mother is the necklace I never take off. My father, my father is a hat, protecting me from sun and rain, but a hat I can lift off at will.
I returned to the photographs. There were some from Sri Lanka, from Tibet and Nepal. A few from Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan, and China. Several from Alaska. In an album, I came across his American series and there were the prairies I had dreamed about, gently tinted in a violet wash. Here was a California coast, a slice of Chicago, a meditation on a lake in Minnesota. And there was Boston, my new home, taken in winter, snow clinging to the steps, beckoning me back.
Inheritance Page 13
