Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  Copyright © 2001 by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vijayaraghavan, Vineeta 1972-

  Motherland : a novel / Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56947-283-5

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Americans—India—

  Tamil Nadu—Fiction. 3. Tamil Nadu (India)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.I345 M68 2001

  813’.6—dc21 00-041011

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  CHAPTER ONE: Migration

  CHAPTER TWO: School Days

  CHAPTER THREE: Secret Garden

  CHAPTER FOUR: The British Are Coming

  CHAPTER FIVE: Solitude

  CHAPTER SIX: The Lying In

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Harvest

  CHAPTER EIGHT: In Hospital

  CHAPTER NINE: Karma

  To Divya and Kavita

  With deep gratitude, I thank

  My mother, who is NOT the mother in this book,

  for a love that knows no bounds.

  My father, for his infinite patience and generosity.

  Sandra, for nurturing this novel from its earliest glimmers.

  Emma Sweeney and Melanie Fleishman for

  their enthusiastic and expert guidance.

  Carolyn Rendell, Amanda Schaffer, Ali Kincaid, David Kurnick,

  Phoebe Hyde, Beth McFadden, and Hiran Cantu for

  reading drafts and offering priceless criticism and support.

  Dhanyammai, Rajanammavan, Divya, Valliamma, Vallachin,

  Nisha and Biju for my home at the other end of the world.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Migration

  I WAS SHIPPED off to India that summer because of the death of a deer. There were deer crossing signs all along the Cross-Westchester Expressway, but this one came out of nowhere. The car was totaled, and when the police came they told us not to feel bad about the deer, it was an aged old thing, and it had died quickly. They helped us get the car off the highway and called our parents, and waited with us for a towtruck. Then they arrested Steve for driving under the influence.

  Steve had only had a few beers at his brother’s house earlier that evening; I’d had only half of one beer because they’d just put the six-packs in the refrigerator and they were still too warm for my taste. So I hadn’t been the one drinking, and I wasn’t the one who killed the deer. I hadn’t really done anything wrong, but 1 was the one being sent away for the summer. My mother wasn’t interested in the details. She was only interested in confirming why she shouldn’t like Steve, and why I should be separated from what she called, in a piercing voice in the car on the way home from the police station, my “frat-boy boyfriend.” Steve wasn’t in a fraternity, he was still in high school, and he would never join a fraternity when he went to college. I wouldn’t have liked Steve if he drank a lot at parties, or at football games, or if he drank because he was happy and having fun. Steve drank because he was sad, and I understood that. Sadness had a home in me, too.

  DUST WHITED OUT the view as the plane’s wheels skidded beyond the undersize tarmac runway into dirt. When my window cleared, I could see men running straight for us pushing rickety staircases on rollers like they were moving props for a play. There was no control tower, just a short, squat terminal building next to the airfield. I had a lot of hand luggage, mostly gifts my mother sent with me, electronic appliances that would have been stolen if I had put them in my suitcases: a CD Walkman, a battery-operated egg beater, components for my uncle’s satellite dish, high-power camera lenses. And two cartons of Camels I had bought, at my father’s instruction, in the duty-free shop in Frankfurt during the layover yesterday morning. I had never bought cigarettes legally before. 1 had felt conspicuous standing in front of the cashier, but, unblinking, she took my dollars and gave me a handful of Deutschemarks as change

  I gathered together my packages, hoping that my uncle might board the plane to help me carry everything. Last time we had come to India, three years ago, he and my aunt came right onto the aircraft, along with my father’s old classmate who ran the airport.

  I waited until most of the people had filed past me off the plane, but my uncle was nowhere to be seen. I pretended to be younger, and confused about airports, and a steward grabbed my belongings and escorted me across the airfield toward the terminal. He was short but muscular, and, like everyone else on the government-owned airline, wore a black armband to mourn the former prime minister’s death. The heat hovered over the ground in those shimmery waves I’d seen on car commercials. As we walked closer to the terminal, hundreds of people were hanging over the two balconies, one on the second floor and one on the roof, yelling names and greetings. Only villagers who had never seen a plane land before were willing to stand out there in the sun. Since my uncle would not be there, I didn’t even bother to look up.

  The steward deposited me in the line for passport control for noncitizens, and then he scooted off in the direction of the very short lines for citizens. I half pulled, half kicked my bags forward through the slow-moving line, until I faced a passport officer across a grubby glass divider.

  The officer asked me something I couldn’t understand. It must have been in Tamil, but now he tried again, this time in Malayalam, “How long a stay?” The airport was in the state of Tamil Nadu, but it was on the border of Kerala, so as many Malayalam speakers traveled through it as Tamil speakers.

  “Three months,” I answered in English. I could understand Malayalam but I wasn’t comfortable speaking it.

  He looked at my passport picture and then at me, at my picture again, and then at me.

  “I wear contacts now,” I explained, pointing to the big glasses on the little face in the photo.

  He asked, “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re not here, I came by myself.”

  He said, “You are fifteen and they sent you by yourself?”

  He seemed to think my parents had shown poor judgment. “In America, I always get around by myself,” I said. He shook his head, stamped my passport, and let me through.

  My last resort to avoid this India trip had been to appeal separately to my father. I told him how I wanted to get a summer job, in a dentist’s office or at the mall, and see my friends, and swim a lot. I told him half of what I earned I would save for college and we could even try a curfew again.

  I could almost see my father and me being friends when my mother was out of town on her frequent business trips. She worked for a commercial real-estate firm, and she spent a lot of time in Canada coaxing companies to come down here and build office parks. When she was away, my dad, who ran his own leather goods company, played single parent. I would try to get him to come around to my views on Mother, and he’d listen quietly as I described how she had embarrassed me at the PTA meeting or how she had forgotten to pick me up from swim practice. But then she would come back from her business trip. He would light up when he heard the airport limo purring on the driveway, he’d run out to help her with her luggage, forgetting to wear his coat, or even shoes one time.

  So I didn’t ask him right away to try to renegotiate this India trip, but waited until the summer got closer. And he actually took my side, he actually said, “I don’t think this is the right way to handle Maya"—this was not said in front of me, but I overheard it like I overheard many things, by hanging around doorways and corners. This was followed by days of tense and terse dinnertable conversations, and seeing my mother carrying pillows and
blankets to her home office. It made me a little nervous—it was one thing wanting my father unglued from her but I didn’t want them having problems over me.

  My father broached it one last time with her while they were weeding the garden, which resulted in another night of pillows and blankets being carried up and down stairs, closet doors slamming. My mother thought spending time with her relatives might teach me to remember where we had come from. My father thought where we had come from wasn’t as important as dealing with where we were now. He explained this to me with his shoulders hunched in defeat. Seeing him like that, I started to feel like going to India might be better than staying around to watch everything crumble.

  I STACKED MY hand luggage on a cart with screeching unoiled wheels and pushed toward the luggage carousel. The carousel creaked as it started (was there no WD40 in all of India?), and one bag would emerge, make an entire rotation, and disappear into the loading area and then roll out again joined by just one more bag each time. My suitcases were beaten up and dusty, as though they had arrived on the back of a mule rather than in the hold of a jet. I hauled them onto the cart, rearranged everything so the weight was balanced, and put the two cartons of Camels right on top where I could keep one hand on them while steering. I headed for the customs area, where I waited on line behind people from the Dubai flight who were importing laundry machines and VCRs and bars of gold.

  The customs people peered at my bags gruffly and squinted over my embarkation card stamped United States of America. It was always easier to get into India than it was getting back into America. In India, my father said, customs officials were only concerned with being well paid for their troubles; in America, they were concerned with preserving the sterilized sanctity of the country. My mother said American customs officials made INS officials look friendly. Invariably, at JFK airport, a customs officer would open all five of our suitcases, pull out a jar of hog-plum pickle, and hold it up like it was a science exhibit of sheep organs. He would extract a package of murku and bang it against a table till it crumbled to verify that its wiry shape didn’t come from pouring the batter over gold or silver. Lately, with so many more Indian immigrants going back and forth, some officials had adopted a sophisticated weariness. “Is this tapioca dried or smoked? Because if it’s dried, you’re leaving it with me.” I wondered if at the end of the day they divided all the loot, and someone went home to Staten Island to eat my grandmother’s plaintain chips in front of Monday Night Football.

  The Indian customs people finally waved me through, and I saw the exit gate just ahead. But four men, dressed in black, all with mustaches, stepped out in front of me. I stopped the cart short to keep from ramming into them.

  “Your passport.”

  I hesitated. “But I already went through passport control.”

  The man snickered, as one of his colleagues elbowed him and said, “Do we look like passport control?”

  I noticed the sleek black boots, the shiny handguns in their holsters. Two of them had rifles as well as handguns, radios, and walkie-talkies on their belts. They looked like they were in a James Bond movie, an old one.

  “We’re with intelligence; step over here,” another one of them said, and steered my luggage cart toward a heavy steel door on the side. I followed my cart into the room. They turned on overhead lights and I squinted for a few minutes in the glare. Half of one wall was covered with brown flypaper on which hundreds of iridescent winged beetles had met their end. As the door swung shut, I wondered if the room was soundproof. The four men seated themselves, their big lumbering bodies cramped together on one side of a table. I sat across from them, my back perfectly straight, pressed against the unvarnished wooden chair. One of their legs bumped mine under the table, and I pulled back, locking my ankles together under my chair. The sharp fluorescent light made their mustaches look scraggly and revealed that their seemingly cleanshaven chins were pocked with stunted bristles.

  They took my passport and flipped through the pages.

  “The former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated three weeks ago in this state. You must be aware of this?”

  I nodded. There had been a flurry of last-minute phone calls between my mother and her brother here and he had said that I should still come, that there were no riots or anything, everything was returning to normal.

  “Did anyone in Bombay airport ask you to deliver any letters or packages?”

  I said no.

  “Did you see any of these people in Bombay airport?” The questioner spread a sheaf of photos on the table. There were three young girls in one photo. Another photo was of a man in a long white kurta scribbling in a reporter’s notebook and a girl dressed in orange with two braids as thick as Pippi Longstocking’s. Many of the photos showed a girl with black glossy hair framing high cheekbones and a coy mouth. The last photo they showed me of her was blurry, she was in motion turning away from the camera and shielding her face. On the ground near her, just lying there, was an arm. It was dark enough in the picture that you could believe a body was at the other end of that arm, but if you looked closely, there was only the arm.

  I looked away. One of them came around to my side of the table. Leaning over me, his elbows weighing on my shoulders, he held two pictures right in front of my face so that there was nowhere else to look. There was the girl and the arm, and then a photo of a girl lying faceup on the ground, next to a single bright white sneaker splotched with red.

  They were watching for a reaction, and I tried not to give them the satisfaction of seeing me frightened or repulsed by the blood and the bodies. It’s face paint, I repeated to myself, it’s face paint, like when I helped my friend Jennifer get dressed as a vampire victim for Halloween.

  “Are you sure?” the man behind me said again.

  “Young girls are the best criminals,” he said. “You know why?”

  I said no.

  “Because you all look innocent.” His emphasis on the word “look” was insinuating.

  The power went out, and we were swathed in darkness.

  It was better in the dark, my surroundings lost the coldly efficient feel of an interrogation room. One man was appointed to hold the door open so that light flooded in from the hall. I felt braver, an escape route within sight.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. We ask the questions,” he said. He looked at me in his smug way, and I looked at the floor, fighting the urge to say, if I knew anything, why would I tell you?

  “Let her go,” another one said. He threw my passport on top of my luggage and shoved the cart away from him. I wheeled it out of the room.

  I walked through the exit gate. There were people everywhere. People trying to take hold of my luggage cart, people offering rides in their taxis, people selling tea, people selling coconut water, people selling handmade carpets. People asking if I knew whether the Jakarta or London flight had landed, people asking me my name, people asking for money. People staring at my American clothes, people, crippled, sitting on the sidewalk reaching out to touch me, people jostling me to try unsuccessfully to get into the one-way doors I had just passed through. I felt the heat all over again, felt the wetness down my back. Panic struck me for a moment—if my uncle wasn’t there I had to find my way back into the terminal, figure out where a call center was, how to change money, submit an order for the operator to dial the number, try to make myself heard on one of those crackly receivers. And where could I stand and wait for him with all my bags?

  “MAYA.” SANJAY UNCLE made his way easily through the crowds, shaking keys held up over his head. He looked so much like my mother, with his high arched eyebrows and uniformly delicate features except for large, slighdy comical ears. My mother hid hers by tucking tendrils of hair around them, but my uncle’s fast-receding hairline left his entirely exposed. I was glad my ears had come from my father’s side. Sanjay uncle kissed me on the cheek, and tried to pick me up and swing me around like he used to. But I was
heavier, and so was he; my feet barely lifted up off the ground before he let me down. He laughed, rubbing his shoulders, saying, “You’re not so little anymore.” He took charge of the cart, and in Malayalam, told people we want no services, please move, please move.

  He shook the keys at the curbside, and his car pulled up next to us. The driver unlocked the trunk and started arranging my bags. My uncle clasped my hand and said, “Your aunt didn’t come because she’s making sure the servants make a nice dinner for tonight. But come see who’s waiting for you in the lounge.” I wondered if it was his daughter Brindha or maybe my other cousin Supriya. They were both younger than me, but last time I was here, we ran around in the hills and swam in the waterfalls, and stayed up late talking and doing each other’s hair. We walked to a side entrance, and then my uncle stopped and pushed me ahead. There was a sign that said LADIES LOUNGE—WAITING AREA and then in smaller print below, it repeated, “ONLY FOR LADIES.” I opened the door, and felt a welcome breeze from the weak, but noisy, air conditioning.

  Then I saw my grandmother walk toward me. Ammamma was all in white, as she had been since my grandfather died twenty years ago, though I have seen photos of her wearing a purple-flowered sari at my parents’ wedding. She shuffled slowly in my direction, her chappals scraping against the rough stone floor, smiling. She looked older. Her face looked more tired, more sagging, and her glasses were thicker in their black square frames. Her gray hair was knotted in a smooth bun at her neck. I knew from memory that there would be a few extra hairpins stuck in the seam of her blouse, for any necessary replacement or repair.

  This was the longest I’d gone without seeing my grandmother. When I was born, I stayed with her for four years until my parents sent for me to come to New York. I used to call her Amma, at first because I couldn’t manage to enunciate the whole word Ammamma, and then because I really thought she was my mother. It took a long time in New York to figure out the difference, to understand the hurt look in my mother’s eyes. Until three years ago, I’d returned every summer for the whole summer, usually with my parents flying over for two weeks at the beginning or the end. But then there had been summer programs, our swim club in town, sleep-away camp with my friends. And now I was embarrassed by the neediness I’d shown all those summers, rushing back here to Ammamma. I didn’t want them feeling sorry for me the way they had, sensing how motherless I was even though I lived with my mother.