by Veena Rao
She strode to the living room. Of the many guests she had encountered on her way in, only a few remained; possibly a late afternoon lull in the flow of people. The television was on local English news, but no one was watching. She recognized one of the three boys who lounged on the sofa, Nina’s younger brother Nitin, an engineering student. The other two were probably distant relatives who lived in town and had come to hang out with Nitin. Aunty Nanda’s father-in-law, Nina and Nitin’s grandfather, sat on a sofa chair at the far end of the room, his face lost behind a copy of the Morning Herald.
Tara occupied the slatted teakwood easy chair opposite the TV. Her chest heaved; she could hear her labored breathing over the voice of the TV reporter who was yelling hysterically into the microphone about an income tax department raid at a police inspector’s home in Karkala. The repeated close-ups of the thick stacks of rupees discovered in the attic was so irritating that she wanted to stuff them into the screeching TV reporter’s mouth. A sob was building inside her, which she tried desperately to quell.
Daddy walked in when the news anchor had moved on to communal tensions in Kasaragod, where a public closing enforced by a local Hindu political outfit had been successful. She stood up in greeting, her hands clasped in front of her like an obedient schoolgirl. He patted her lightly on her shoulder. She noticed his slight stoop, at the way his shirt hung a bit too loose over his shoulders. His face drooped, bearing a sullen expression, but she saw no shock when his eyes fell upon her. Amma had obviously called and filled him in. He stood next to her for a few moments, eyes on the wall, as if struggling for words. For once, he didn’t know what to command her to do. His gaze moved to the other occupants of the room. The youngsters took turns greeting him.
She heard the rustle of paper. Aunty Nanda’s father-in-law had dropped it on the rug. He was now looking at her intently with magnified eyes from behind his convex glasses. His gray mustache twitched. When Daddy left the room to go upstairs to change, he finally spoke.
“When my younger sister ran away fifty years ago to marry a trader’s son, we performed her last rites.” His voice was loud, in the manner of one who is hard of hearing.
“Grandfather, times have changed.” She saw the shock on Nitin’s face, and was grateful for his instant reaction.
“From that day, she was dead to us.” Aunty Nanda’s father-in-law’s words burned her ears as she rushed up the stairs to her room. The slow, deliberate, loud words reverberated inside her head as she snapped her Delsey shut and dragged it down the stairs.
Chapter 27
The mud road with the gaping holes that wound up Morgan Hill was now paved, wide, and clean. There were no goats, no goat droppings. This was a different time and an urban place. The traditional tile-roofed homes were gone, replaced by concrete, modernity, and the demands of real estate. Four-storied apartments in pink, blue, and sea-green piled into each other, right up to the top of the hill. Only Shanti Nilaya remained, and the Pentecostal Church at the top of the hill.
Shanti Nilaya looked nothing like the house of Tara’s childhood. Daddy had renovated it several years before, adding a new frontage with large outer rooms where marble flooring had replaced red oxide, and an ornate front door with circular floral motifs carved in wood blocked the outside view. In the yard, only one mango tree and the twelve coconut palms remained, spurting in a sea of cement. The barn was empty; Amba, Appi, and their progeny long dead, now an abandoned outhouse where vestiges of the past lay piled in one corner.
The house was empty too, its original residents long gone. Uncle Anand had left first, twelve years earlier, simply walking out the front door one day and never returning. The search party that Daddy sent out to look for Uncle Anand, made up of employees from his showroom, was not successful in finding him this time. For a year, Grandmother Indira had waited for her younger son to return, walking up to the front gate every day. Then she had given up hope, and her own life. Grandfather Madhava had followed her two years later, his heart quietly stopping as he sat in his easy chair reading the day’s newspaper.
Tara had secluded herself at Shanti Nilaya for the past four days. Amma had tried tearfully to stop her from leaving, but Tara had insisted on the keys to Shanti Nilaya, repeating herself like a stuck tape recorder. Ultimately, it was Daddy who had handed over the keys to her and silently driven her to the house himself.
Her emotions had been volatile when she first came here. The first evening, she sat on the top step leading to the house and cried loudly, not caring who heard her in the neighborhood. She now understood what Uncle Anand meant when he said all those years ago: They worry more when I am around, because I bring them shame.
The first time Uncle Anand disappeared was the day Tara turned ten. But her birthday had been forgotten amid the anxiety of looking for Uncle Anand. It had taken the search party organized by Grandfather Madhava three days to locate him—unkempt, mumbling to himself in the courtyard of the ancient Kadri temple. He hadn’t resisted being bundled into Hammaba’s waiting rickshaw and taken straight to the mental ward of Father Muller’s Hospital for recovery. Days later, the real Uncle Anand—the gentle kernel of the broken shell—had come home. His sanity, a brief spell, was a respite for everyone at home.
“Why did you leave, Uncle Anand?” Tara asked him one evening, as they walked to the Beary store like old times.
“I was tired of this prison.” He bunched and raised his eyebrows every so often, as if to shake off dark thoughts.
“But you had everyone worried.”
“They worry more when I am around, because I bring them shame.”
Uncle Anand hummed softly, a song from the movie, Anand.
Kahin door jab din dhal jaye
Sanjh ki dulhan badan churaye
Chupke se aaye. . . .
As the sun sets somewhere far away,
Evening steals in, like a shy bride.
There was a melancholy note to Uncle Anand’s voice as he sang, and when he mumbled to himself on their way back from the Beary store, “When the mind is in shackles, one is truly alone.”
She was alone again in the prison of her childhood, a restless ache permeating her being. She had forgotten the power her relatives had over her feelings.
Every morning, she dusted the minimal furniture—a blue upholstered couch and padded wicker chairs in the living room, the old dining table and chairs, and a couple of teakwood beds that had withstood the test of time. Gangamma, the maid Amma sent to clean Shanti Nilaya every day, swept and mopped the floor on her haunches, her handloom sari hitched high, the end of its pleats looped between her legs and tucked into her waist at the back.
Around eleven o’clock, Tara headed to the modern kitchen and cooked lunch with the supplies Gangamma had bought from the neighborhood store. She cut okra into roundels to sauté with cumin, turmeric, and chili powder; sliced eggplants and white radishes for the sambhar. She got the rice and lentils going in the pressure cooker. She ate alone at the bare old dining room table. At night, she slept in a room in the old part of the house, where she had once rocked her baby brother to sleep. Her single bed was hard and creaked all night as she tossed about awake. Tara’s childhood room upstairs was now just an attic where they stored old furniture.
She ventured out every day. The first day, she had walked up to the Pentecostal Church, and then beyond it to the spot where a water station, once upon a time, had provided water to the neighborhood. Now, a small, blue-painted shrine to Lord Hanuman stood in its place, a bell chiming every once in a while; rickshaws parked opposite the road, waiting for commuters. She thought of the sixteen-year-old boy who had stood at the spot and said goodbye to her several sunsets ago. She imagined his teenage breath on her face. She often remembered him like this these days; that brief period when her life had shone the brightest in this very house. She pictured him peering through the blue narrow gates, looking for her after she had moved out to another part of town; the deep impression she had left on him. Her heart ached f
or him every minute.
She passed the Saldanha Villa each time she went into town in a rickshaw. Every time, her heart beat in her throat as she turned her neck to catch a glimpse of the house where she had first met Cyrus a quarter-century before. The house was now hidden from the road, thanks to the monstrous blue-faced, four-story apartment building that had sprung up right in front of it.
The day after her arrival, she had visited the ninth-century Mangaladevi temple, a shrine for goddess Mangala Devi after whom the city was named, which was teeming with people even during the day. She had only one memory of the temple: of standing with the crowds with Uncle Anand at the edge of the road leading up to the temple on Mahanavami, the ninth day of the ten-day Dassera festival. A merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. A vendor selling colorful jujubes. A festive chariot pulled with thick, heavy ropes through the streets. Craning her neck for a glimpse of the goddess who was in the chariot. Her hands folded in prayer; her lips uttering the words: Oh Goddess, please take Amma, Vijay, and me to Dubai.
She circumambulated clockwise around the granite central shrine with the crowd, like the moon around the earth, the planets around the sun. There was something calming about being invisible in the crowd, simply following a pattern. She finally understood why she, a nonbeliever, was at the temple. She perceived the same reason on the faces of the devout nameless people around her. She, like the others, had come seeking hope. Even when had she lost faith, she had not lost hope—the life energy, the center of every existence.
The next afternoon, she had hired a rickshaw to take her to the famed St. Aloysius College Chapel on Lighthouse Hill because that was the only touristy place that came to her mind. She sat in the pew along with a group of Hindi-speaking tourists, and spent time studying the beautiful frescoes that covered every inch of its walls and ceiling. A large sign outside said the chapel had been painted by the world-renowned Italian Jesuit, Antonio Moscheni between 1899 and 1901. She had forgotten Father Moscheni’s name, and his works of art looked impressive, as if a part of Vatican City had been ensconced in Mangalore; and she wondered why this stunning edifice of local history had never blown her away before. A zealous warden came in and started asking her questions.
“Where are you from?”
“I am local,” she mumbled.
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“I don’t live here anymore.”
“Your husband didn’t come with you?”
She shuffled out of the chapel without responding to the warden’s last question. She walked to Hampanakatta, the commercial center of the city. Her throat was parched, and on a whim, she made her way to Ideal Ice Cream Parlor. She ordered gadbad, their famous signature ice-cream sundae, and was glad when the server brought it to her table. It was awkward to just sit when people were turning around to look at her. She wasn’t dressed any differently, a white handloom kurta over blue jeans. It was probably the fact that she was sitting alone in a place that was teeming with people. In a culture where personal space was still an alien concept, you were never alone except when you died. Or if your parents abandoned you in a crumbling old house with a schizophrenic uncle and elderly grandparents. She wondered why she felt such a deep disconnect with her hometown, like a tourist exploring a new place. Was it because she had left her heart behind in Atlanta?
She savored the ice cream, the creamy strawberry and vanilla flavors, the jelly mingling on her tongue. This was a taste her palette remembered. Cyrus loved gadbad ice cream, too. Like most Mangaloreans, they had found it a topic worthy of discussion. She closed her eyes. It was four days since she had left, and she was halfway around the world eating ice cream alone. She imagined his dispassionate face at the airport. She imagined him driving back to Munmun, and Munmun enveloping him in her arms. She felt the jelly and fruity flavors of the sundae rush back into her throat, tasting sour this time. She gulped down cold water, paid the bill in a hurry, and scurried out of the tiny ice cream parlor.
On day four, because she could not think of a place to visit, she decided to explore her old neighborhood. She set out early in the evening, walking down the hill to the T-junction. Where the roads met, she made a left turn and kept walking, trailing her shadow, the way she used to follow Uncle Anand. The neighborhood had changed so much in eight years. More people on the road, more apartment buildings, a brand-new dental school in a four-story, white structure. Where the Beary store once stood was Hasan’s Supermarket, with glass doors that were fogged up from the air-conditioning inside and the humidity outside. She turned back at the end of the road and made her way home. Tomorrow, she would return with her wallet to do a bit of grocery shopping at Hasan’s Supermarket. She was curious to see what it looked like from the inside.
Halfway between the T-junction and Shanti Nilaya, she heard rapping, knuckles on glass, and then her name being called. She looked up to her left, in the direction of the sound. A bright face in hijab smiled down at her from behind the grilles of a third-floor window.
“Me, Zeenat,” the face said in English, loudly enough that she could hear. “Remember me?”
The tiny but modern kitchen was stuffy and smelled of warm roasted chickpea flour, ghee, and cardamom. The counter was overflowing with pots and pans. An aluminum rack above the counter was stacked with stainless steel plates, glasses, and bowls. Zeenat was cutting a giant-sized aluminum pan of freshly set Mysore pak into rectangles. She picked two rectangles from the edge of the pan and put them in a stainless steel bowl. She put the bowl in front of Tara, who sat at a brown-and-white, floral-patterned, Formica-topped dining table that was pushed toward the wall to save space.
“Eat. Very tasty,” she said in English.
The fairy of Tara’s childhood now had an ample middle-age spread that showed through the thin cotton fabric of her kameez. The moon face was fleshier but had lost its symmetry; her mouth twisted to one side, the result of a brain surgery to remove a benign tumor when she was eighteen. The disfigurement had cost her her chances of winning a prince, because her face and fair skin were supposed to have been her lottery ticket. She had married a local Beary, a grocery store owner who had died only months into their marriage. Her older sisters had tried to help her out, inviting her to stay with them, but she didn’t get along with them. Zeenat had returned to her father’s house and continued living there even after his death in 1998. A few years ago, a builder had approached the Beary compound with an offer that nobody could refuse. Now, she had two apartments in the building; one she lived in and the other she rented out. Tara knew most of Zeenat’s tragic backstory. The last bit about the two apartments she had learned from Amma during her visit to Atlanta.
The Mysore pak was warm and melted in Tara’s mouth. “This is very good,” she said in Kannada, licking the rich ghee off her fingers. Zeenat’s lopsided smile lit her eyes. “All for catering business,” she said in English.
“You run a catering business?”
Zeenat switched to Kannada; she had exhausted her stock of English words. Her voice had an operatic quality to it, changing pitch often. She said the catering business she ran out of her kitchen was in its fifth year. She had started off cooking for families she knew in the neighborhood, but her business had grown through word of mouth. The Mysore pak was part of a contract from a wedding party at Second Bridge that included halwa and banana chips also.
“My halwa is better than Taj Mahal Bakery halwa. Come back in the morning. I’ll let you taste it,” she said.
Tara returned in the morning, drawn as much by Zeenat’s face—bright, sparkly, happy—as by the promise of authentic Mangalorean halwa.
Zeenat was just getting started in the kitchen, which was now cooler and brighter, with the sunlight glinting on the pots and pans. Tara watched, enchanted, as the fairy sifted the flour into a large plastic pan, boiled sugar to a one-thread consistency in a thick-bottomed cast-iron wok, slowly stirred the flour, and later the ghee, into the bubbling syrup. She watched as Zeenat’s face turned from
deep concentration to joy the fifth time she tested, between her thumb and forefinger, a small blob of the thickened, golden-brown mixture that she had plopped on a stainless steel plate. “Done,” she said, triumphantly, as she proceeded to add ghee-fried cashew nuts and powdered cardamom to the mix.
Tara tasted a square of halwa after it had cooled and complimented Zeenat on its authentic taste.
“When I cook, I forget everything else,” Zeenat said, a little grandly, laughing.
Chapter 28
Zeenat paid her a visit the next afternoon, dressed in a simple cotton salwar kameez, the dupatta loosely covering her head and wrapped around her upper body, carrying a stainless steel bowl with two golden mithai laddoos. She watched, mirth in her eyes, face resting on her cupped hand, as Tara ate them both and licked her fingers. The laddoos were a bribe, she said, to hear about life in America. What kind of food do Americans eat? Why do Americans love guns so much? Do all women drive cars? Do they have the freedom to live as they wish?
Tara fed Zeenat’s curiosity about life in America. Her own six failed attempts at passing the driving test. Her friendships with Ruth, Dottie, and Alyona, learning to enjoy southern and international foods with them. Hearing about the Virginia Tech shootings in a hotel room in Las Vegas where she had accompanied Cyrus for a convention; their shock and sorrow at the senseless loss of thirty-three lives. Yes, women had freedom, but perhaps not as much freedom as American men, she said. For this answer alone, she did not attach a personal story.
“You love America more or India?” Zeenat wagged a finger at her, laughing, warning her not to attempt a politically correct answer. “Tell me the truth.”
“I love America as much as I love India.”
