Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  I bent to touch Ammamma’s feet in the gesture of respect Mother insisted I use for old people. Ammamma pulled me into a hug, and kept me awkwardly pressed against her in a long embrace. I could smell her distinctive combination of rosewater (which she used in prayer every morning) and Vicks VapoRub. She clutched her Vicks the way asthma patients clutch their inhaler. She had one with her on walks, in the car, in bed. Even in this premonsoon heat, she kept a shawl with her, a light wool one from her years in the north.

  I walked with her out of the ladies’ lounge back to my uncle. I asked her, “Wasn’t it a long trip? Why did you come?”

  Sanjay uncle said, “Maya, don’t sound so ungrateful. It’s been a very long day for Amma. We told her not to come, but she wanted to greet you.”

  “It’s nice of you, but you shouldn’t have, Ammamma.”

  “I just wanted so much to see you.” Ammamma caressed my cheek with her hand. Water trembled in her eyes.

  I felt embarrassed by how emotional she was. I remembered how when we were in this very airport three years ago, we all cried saying good-bye, including me. It seemed a long time ago. “There’ll be plenty of time, I’m here all summer, Ammamma.”

  “I know, I know, I’m just being silly.” She closed her eyes for a minute, and when she opened them, she’d made the tears go away. “We’ll have a wonderful summer, all of us.”

  “Would you like a cola or anything before we start back?” Sanjay uncle asked.

  “No, I’m fine. Except I want to go to the ladies’ room.”

  My uncle and grandmother looked concerned. “It won’t be Western-style here at the airport. Shall I take you into town to Supriya’s house or to the Taj hotel?” he said.

  “No, no, it’ll be fine. I’ve gone camping, I’ll be okay,” I said firmly.

  My grandmother said, “I’ll come with you then.”

  “No. Really.” But I let her walk with me into the ladies’ room, and speak Malayalam to the attendant to purchase some toilet paper for some coins, and then I went into a stall. It was dark and dank, and made me feel nauseated, but I was afraid 1 was getting my period and I just wanted to be prepared for the long ride home.

  “Are you all right?” my grandmother said loudly.

  “Yes, fine, I’ll be out in a second, Ammamma.”

  I came out and looked in the mirror to make sure I was all in order, that there were no lines you could see through my khaki pants. Ammamma, in her six yards of white starched linen over a starched white petticoat, looked serene standing there, far beyond bleeding at inopportune times. She was waiting for me holding a pitcher of water she had filled from a half-full bucket. I held out my hands and she poured water over them, and then offered me the palloo of her sari to dry my hands. I refused, not wanting to get her sari wet, I wasn’t so little anymore. She dug in her big black handbag and gave me a handkerchief to use.

  WE FOUND OUR driver, Ram, eating and gossiping at the row of toddy stalls next to the parking lot. He led us to the car, and we started the drive home. My uncle sat in the front with Ram, and I sat in the back with my grandmother.

  Ammamma said, “I brought pillows and a sheet if you want to sleep or lie down.”

  When I was small, Ammamma would also bring my nightgown and I would change in the car and sleep all the way home from the airport. She would make my dad scrunch together with my uncle and the driver in the front seat, and then I would lie with my head on her lap and my legs on my mother. I’d been up for two nights straight, leaving New York in the early evening Friday, and landing in Frankfurt the next morning. 1 landed in Bombay Saturday at midnight, waited out the night in the airport, and flew south from Bombay to Coimbatore at seven this morning.

  “That’s okay, I can wait to sleep when we get home.”

  “Are you sure?” my grandmother said, taking a pillow out of a canvas bag and smoothing a clean towel over it on her lap. “I brought a feather pillow that’s flat the way you like it.”

  “The ride is pretty long, three to four hours,” my uncle said. “Did your mother tell you we moved farther out of the city?”

  Mother had said Sanjay uncle had moved high up into the mountains last year when he had transferred to the tea division.

  “That’s right,” he said, “I couldn’t work for the tea division if I stayed down here near the city.” He said they lived ten minutes from the central tea factory he managed, and that twice a month he traveled around to check on the other tea properties in the region.

  “It’s even quieter up there than where Sanjay lived last time you came,” Ammamma said. “He needs to come all the way back down here to go to the bank or to the doctor.”

  “I’ve gotten used to the drive,” my uncle said. “At least near the top of the mountain, that last hour or two is much cooler. And today, because it’s a weekend, there won’t be trucks or buses in our way.”

  We were starting to climb the mountain, and there was a cracked wooden sign that said 65. My uncle said the British had carved the road right into the side of the mountain, and it had sixty-five hairpin bends. “You’ve probably never been on a road quite like this before.”

  “No,” I said. We soon hit our first one, and it was worse than those California highways in Hitchcock movies, where it seemed like the actors had been superglued to their seats so they didn’t fall out of the car. We slowly zigzagged our way up the face of a mountain. I felt dizzy looking out the window, seeing the trees growing sideways on the earth, the earth falling away from us as we turned each time. There were no seat belts in the car. I remembered learning from a movie in Driver’s Ed that in many Third World countries the steering wheels were still not collapsible, so that in an accident, the driver and the person sitting behind him (me) could be gored.

  I tried to ignore the signs counting the bends because it gave no comfort to know when they were coming, there was no way to prepare. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the seat in front of me.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to lie down,” Ammamma asked.

  I didn’t think that would make it any better. She took out a lime and made a cut in it with her teeth, releasing its strong soothing fragrance. She handed it to me and I held it under my nose to keep from getting sick. I used to throw up on long drives, so my mother routinely traveled with plastic bags in her purse. The last few years had been much better, except when we came to India where the cars were worse and the roads were worse, and you felt every bump. And that was even without hairpin bends.

  “Do you want to stop for some air?” my uncle said some time later, as we neared the sign for the thirty-ninth bend.

  My uncle and my grandmother and the driver looked anxious. I could feel something rising in my throat, but I willed it to go away. “I’ll be fine, we should just keep driving, so we get it over with.”

  Every time we returned to the States from trips to India, I was in heaven in the taxi home. A big American car, with good brakes, good shocks, leather cushions, and a real road, fully paved and sealed.

  My uncle tried a new and fairly transparent tactic to get us off the road without making me admit my carsickness. “Shall we stop and see the view, Maya? I think we’ll catch the sunset right now.”

  I went along with it and agreed to stop when we could find a wide enough part of the road. The car soon came to a blissful halt, hugging the mountain side of the road. We walked across to the other side, and my uncle led me onto a rock ledge that was jutting off the road. I sat down on the rock so I wouldn’t lose my balance looking out into the swirling tangle of wilderness.

  “It’s so nice there is still land that nobody owns,” I said, thinking of the fences and no-trespassing signs and gated communities back home.

  My uncle laughed. “This isn’t the frontier, Maya. It may look untamed to you, but all this land is owned, and constantly fought over.”

  He said there were some private landowners, and then the tea companies on the top of the mountain who kept trying to ex
aggerate their boundaries, and then the Indian government owned the rest of it. And all of it was a protected wildlife sanctuary.

  Sanjay uncle raised a thumb, then a forefinger, then an index finger as he enumerated, “You can’t hunt here whether or not it’s your land, and you can’t drain water from ponds even if they attract malarial mosquitoes, and you can’t carry any kind of natural product out of here without paying an excise tax on it at the bottom of the mountain.”

  “When the tea companies came, had anyone been up in these mountains before them?” I asked.

  “Well, 1 imagine we dispossessed the tribals here like everywhere else in India. They had no concept of ownership, they wandered and gathered food, and so the British and Indian tea companies ignored them altogether and measured out everything and created certificates saying who owned what and the tribals of course had no certificates to show for themselves.”

  “That sounds like us and the Native Americans,” I said. Not us, my mother would have said, them, the Americans, the locals. When I did a project on Rosa Parks for Black History Month, she had said, “You needn’t feel guilty for American history, you had no part in it.” I would make sure to tell her when I went back, there was plenty to feel guilty about in India, too.

  Sanjay uncle said, “Yes, well, it’s what most people who settled did to people who wandered. It’s no different here. Are you ready to get going?”

  We walked back to the car. Ram was standing off to the side chewing paan leaves and tobacco and spitting red streaks against the side of the mountain. When he saw my uncle coming, he spat out the last of it, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and came back to the car. My grandmother was bent over the open trunk. Hearing us, she turned around, and the tiffin boxes in her hands caught the sun and flashed like mirrors. She opened one to show me whipped yogurt with rice and herbs, and another that had idli, steamed cakes made of rice and lentils, and sambar, a lentil soup. The inner compartment within the box had coconut chutney for the idli, wrapped inside a folded up banana leaf. My grandmother always carted food with her in case I needed it. Like a mother packing for an infant, lugging around tinned carrots and applesauce and powdered milk, my grandmother continued to try to predict and meet my needs. When we came in the summers, there wasn’t time to build immunity to local diseases, so it was easy to get sick. My parents retained some immunity from having lived in India for so long before migrating, but 1 had lost whatever native hardiness I might have once had. On several trips, I had spent days in bed sick to my stomach, and so we tried to be as careful as possible. I knew the rules by heart. No fruit or vegetables with permeable skin (that meant no grapes, no tomatoes, no berries of any sort), no fish during the monsoon, no shellfish ever, no untreated water, no food purchased at roadside stalls because of the flies and the heat, no unknown restaurants because of potentially unsanitary kitchens. At festivals and wedding feasts, too, there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. I could remember dancing in floorlength silk pavadas at holiday parties and coming out to the car to perch on the backseat and eat my dinner out of Ammamma’s tiffin boxes. She cooked spicy and delicate dishes at her house, but when we were out, she brought comfort food, food that wouldn’t spoil in the heat and was not messy, food that was not rich but would feel substantial, sustaining.

  “I can wait till we get to the house,” my uncle said. “Reema is arranging for a special meal.”

  “I can wait too, then,” I said.

  “Eat something, just a little,” my grandmother urged. “You’ve had a long flight.”

  “Yes, eat something,” my uncle said. “Even when we get home, we won’t eat right away.”

  My grandmother handed the open tiffin boxes to my uncle to hold while she took out a bottle of boiled water for washing our hands. I felt self-conscious eating with my hands at the beginning of each trip, since we didn’t eat like that at home. I remembered my math teacher, Mr. Chen, who had brought in Chinese food for the Chinese New Year, teaching us to eat with chopsticks. He had said, at first you think the only objective is to get the food to your mouth by whatever mode available, but then you realize that the mode is an artful end in itself. In India, it was like that, too—watch an Indian bride at her wedding feast, and she will, in all of her gold and silk and brocade and mehndi, eat gracefully with her hands, knowing that it is part of how one takes the measure of her.

  Yogurt-rice was easy, the rice sticks together because of the yogurt, and I could roll it into a little ball with the tips of my fingers, so that only the top two-thirds of each finger ever touched the food. Idli-sambar was also easy to handle (one of the reasons it was ideal tiffin box food)—the idli was highly absorbent of the sambar, so I could simply dip and soak, dip and soak. What was much harder was rassam, a clear broth, or payasam, a dessert pudding. At a regular dinner, these soups and puddings might be served in a cup alongside the plate. But at any kind of feast or religious day, food was served on banana leaves, so it was trickier. First I had to manage to keep the lentil soup in the center of the leaf. With whatever rice I had left, I made a mound and put the sambar in the center of it, pretending that I was pouring lava back into the center of a volcano. But payasam was served at the end of the meal, on an empty leaf, sometimes two or three kinds. There was no way to shore up pudding, no sandbags, no dikes, no sources of support. Here the key was speed and angle, the same things I’d consider for an ice cream cone. Tilting the surface of the banana leaf to slope toward me, I kept stemming the tide before it flowed to the bottom lip of the leaf and onto the table or floor. I made my hand into a little scooper and held-the fingers very tightly together and half threw it into my mouth, half slurped it from my hand. From time to time, so that pudding didn’t run down my arm, it was acceptable to lick the lower portion of the hand from wrist to pinkie. Most times, I refused payasam when it was offered to me. Even if I didn’t find it too sweet, it betrayed the limits of my skill.

  We washed out the tiffin boxes, stored them in Ammamma’s upright jute bag, and closed the trunk. “Shall we?” my uncle said, gesturing the driver onwards. “Only thirty-eight hairpins to go.”

  WE LEFT THE hairpin bends behind, and we were in tea country. The tea hills were as benign as they sounded, slope after graceful slope of verdant green clustered on the top of the mountain. The sun was sinking; it was like a full moon in its tight hard circle of light. No halo, no heat anymore. When we were on the last hill before our house, my uncle flashed his headlights. From the house they would be able to watch our progress over this sister hill, and then we would dip into a small valley and come up on our hill. They would see us coming and know to be ready. No other cars used this stretch of road. The nearest house was on the next tea estate over, about five miles, or two hills, away, in a different direction than the one from which we came. I had seen maybe five or six cars total since we came up the mountain, and not one residence of any sort. My uncle said houses up here did not announce themselves. Unlike city houses that crowded around the road and each other for comfort, the houses here were nestled deep into the woods and the teabushes.

  We took a little path that veered off the road we had been on for hours. It looked like we were heading straight into brush. But we came to a double-gated entrance, and an old man and a young boy ran down the drive to swing open the gates for the car to pass. The boy climbed onto the gate itself, swung in and out on it, and jumped down. Two more servants clung shyly to the railings on the verandah. We drove under the carport, and there was my cousin Brindha, a dog captive in her arms, and my aunt Reema. Then there was the bustle of saying hello, and taking my bags out of the car, and unpacking household sundries my uncle had bought in Coimbatore, and setting up a cot in the carport for the driver, who would stay the night and take a morning bus down to wherever he lived.

  Brindha introduced me to her dog, Boli, a yappy white Pomeranian. She introduced me to the house too, opening up closet doors, peeking over the edge of the well. It was an old British house, with British oddities. A f
ireplace in every room, for the rainy season, as if the rains were like English rain and gave chills. When the rains arrived, they punctuated and relieved the hottest days of the year. Brindha said the fireplace came in handy in the guest room, where clothes were hung to dry because during the rainy season it was so humid it was hard to get them to dry by themselves. A cotton shirt could take three days to dry and a terrycloth towel five, so they saved the towels for guests and used thorthus (not towels at all but thin cotton-weave sheets) for everyday. The house also had closed eaves, which helped keep the insects out, but put a lot of pressure on the roof when it rained because there was no natural way to drain save for one overburdened gutter. And the glass windowpanes lacked the benefits of the traditional slatted shutters in controlling the shade, directing the breeze, and creating airflow through the house.

  Then there was the lawn, which I had never seen in southern India before. Most people had a tidily swept yard, with a few bushes here and there, or if they had a fancy house there would be lots of gardens and trees and bushes and groundcover. Here, there was a big garden on the side of the house, but the front was taken up by an expanse of lawn. Brindha said it looked like a ricefield in the rainy season, swollen and swampy, full of leeches. And in the dry season, it was scorched and gray and brown and no one walked there because there was no shade. The gardener made valiant efforts to keep it looking presentable year-round, and in the two temperate months of the year, he was moderately successful.

  There was a gardener who came every day, Brindha told me, and a woman, Vasani, who cleaned house. There was Matthew, the cook, and his son, Sunil, who attended the village school but also worked in the kitchen. They lived out back in a little cottage behind the house. When there were guests from the office, then Matthew brought his wife up the mountain and they acted as waitstaff.