Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  There was Rupa, eighteen, an ayah for Brindha, “even though I’m ten,” Brindha said indignantly. For these summer months that Brindha was home from boarding schoool, Rupa had been brought to stay at the house. Brindha only pretended to object. She liked Rupa, and she had no other playmates here.

  The house displayed Indian oddities too, habits clung to beyond their original motivation. The refrigerator was in the dining room, the way it was in homes where the kitchen had a wood-fueled open fire that could damage electric appliances. But it had evolved into more of a cabinet than an appliance, and so it sat right next to the drink cart and the china hutch. And in the kitchen, where the shiny new mixers and beaters looked unused, there was a large mortar and pestle and pirate-size daggers lined up on the floor where Matthew and his boy would sit on their haunches and grind and cut and chop. Brindha said some servants were afraid of the appliances, some were forbidden to use them because they had broken other ones, but regardless, most still did everything the old way.

  The house was organized like a T, with the drawing room and dining room in the front area. On the left edge of the T were the two guest bedrooms and on the right were Brindha’s bedroom, Ammamma’s room, and my aunt and uncle’s. At the end of that hall was the kitchen, spilling over into a side yard where there was an outdoor kitchen that was essentially the front yard of Matthew’s little cottage.

  Brindha took me to my grandmother’s room, where my bags were lined up against the wall. Ammamma had just finished her bath and was putting oil in her hair. Brindha crouched and pounced on the bed and Ammamma smiled. To me, she said, “Do you want to put your things away? I’ve cleared out some drawers and half an armoire for you.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to be offered one of the guest rooms. Those were for company guests, or for my parents, but not for me. If you were single, and you were family, whether you were fifteen or thirty or fifty, you piled in with your cousins and siblings and grandparents, as long as everyone was the same sex. When there were lots of relatives over, during holidays or poojas, the men would sleep in the living room or on the porch. Women would sleep horizontally on the two double beds that were usually found pushed together in each room, with other cots and bedrolls and mats brought out for the younger girls. My cousins were unbothered sleeping on a thin blanket put over a straw mat on the floor, sometimes with a pillow, sometimes without, like it was no hardship at all; I would twist and turn all night.

  In my grandmother’s room, there were the expected two double beds pushed together, united under a king-size blue paisley bedcover. She sat on one side of the bed and brushed the oil through her hair, accumulating on her lap a little pile of hair that had fallen out. Ammamma once had very thick black hair, but now I caught frequent glimpses of scalp between the coils of gray hair, and only a rare glimpse of black, when she bowed her head to brush the underside section at the nape of her neck. The bath oil had a strong sweet smell, and there was the smell of the Vicks and the rosewater, and of the incense that was lit every morning and evening in front of the little shrine my grandmother kept in one corner of the room. There on the dresser were the English biscuit tins, adorned with distinguished royal cavalry, that my cousins from London brought on visits. They contained my grandmother’s medications, and when the lid to any of them was opened, there would be the musty and tart smell of vitamins and powdery prescriptions and ayurvedic ointments, and dried herb treatments.

  It would only be a matter of days before all of that permeated me, my hair, my clothes, my magazines and books.

  “Why don’t 1 sleep in Brindha’s room and keep her company? We only have a week together before she goes back to boarding school.”

  “The ayah sleeps in there with me. But we can let her go early, since this is my last week,” said Brindha.

  “Brindha hasn’t organized her things yet for school so I’m afraid her closets are a mess. Are you sure you don’t want to use all this space?” Ammamma opened the armoire doors. One whole side was bare and empty, the shelves had been newly lined with pretty paper. The other side was packed tight with my grandmother’s things, everything wedged precariously into place: more biscuit tins, blood pressure equipment still stored in its original now tattered box, skeins of wool in garish green and yellow, letters and papers rubberbanded together, a pile of prayer books with the bindings falling off, and then stacked on top of each other in folded squares, drab sari after drab sari. I felt the way I had felt when Bobby, my lab partner in chemistry last year, opened his mouth really wide to show me where he got his tooth pulled, and I saw red gums and a chipped tooth and fat silver fillings and a gaping hole, and I hadn’t asked to see any of it.

  “I’m sure Brindha and I can manage, Ammamma.”

  “I’m good at sharing, remember,” Brindha said to Ammamma. “I know I’m not neat all the time, but when I ask for you or Amma to come sleep over I make everything nice, don’t I?”

  She turned to me. “Not because I’m scared or anything, I just like to have them over for a little slumber party sometimes. The ayah is too tired to stay up late with me.”

  “I’ll stay up late with you, I promise,” I said.

  “What do we do about mosquito nets for Maya?"Brindha asked Ammamma.

  “I hope the mosquitoes aren’t as bad as last time,” I said. I’d gone home last time with lots of battle scars. Mosquitoes seemed to like foreign goods, my uncle had said. They liked imports better than Made in India, he joked. My cousins and my grandmother and everyone except newborns slept without netting, and somehow they never got more than an occasional bite. I had slept under mosquito nets every night, but was sufficiently tortured during dinner, teatime, early evening walks.

  “I’m not sure the mosquitoes will be any kinder to you,” Ammamma said. “The trouble is, only this room has bed-posts to hang the netting from.”

  “I have bug spray with me, 1 can use that.” Anyway, I didn’t want everyone having to bother to put the nets up for me every night and take them down every morning. I didn’t want so much fuss this summer; I just wanted to be able to do things for myself.

  Brindha and I each started tugging at a suitcase to drag over to her room. Matthew was walking down the hall, and saw us, and called the ayah Rupa to come. He tried to take the suitcase I was struggling with, but I didn’t want to let him, so together we half-carried and half-pushed it into Brindha’s room. I had forgotten how to act around servants.

  Brindha freely relinquished the other suitcase to Rupa, and walked into our room, my sweater caped over her shoulders, my pocketbook swinging jauntily on one arm. Brindha announced, “I told her not to feel jealous. She can have you all to herself in just a week.”

  “Ammamma’s not jealous, don’t be silly,” I said.

  “Well, not jealous, but lonely, then. Since I have to go back to school, I’m glad you’ll be here with her. She doesn’t like to go to society things so she’s alone a lot unless there’s kids around.”

  “Society things?”

  “You know, that stuff Amma and Achan go to. Teas at the club, and tournaments, and weddings and stuff. I don’t like all that. Do you?”

  “Well, sometimes it’s fun to get dressed up and meet people.”

  “Only cricket matches, those are the only fun ones. Do you like these cricket posters on my wall—I know you don’t know the players, but just from these posters, which one’s your favorite? I have movie posters too, Amma and Achan don’t know I have them, but I can show them to you if you don’t tell.”

  “Why won’t they let you have movie posters?”

  Brindha rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a bunch of photo clippings. “Amma says the new Bombay movies are cheap—they don’t let me watch them.”

  “How do you know the actors if you’ve never seen the movies?”

  “I’ve seen pictures of them in the magazines and read about them, and some of the girls at school are allowed to watch anything, so they tell us what happens in all the new movies. When I’
m home, Rupa tells me, she loves movies, too.”

  Rupa had been rearranging Brindha’s clothes to make room for me. She looked up when she heard her name mentioned. Brindha took one of the movie star pictures to her, and Rupa smiled and said something in Tamil. Brindha translated for me, “This one, Rukmini, she just got fired from a movie because she pushed another actress overboard off a cruiseship.” Rupa fingered the pictures lovingly, carefully, as if they were delicate Moghul miniatures, or illuminated manuscripts.

  Brindha said something in Tamil to Rupa, and Rupa’s hands rose up to cover her face, the movie photos fluttering to the floor. She quickly knelt to gather them up, and Brindha helped her collect them. Brindha came over to me and whispered, “I told Rupa we don’t need her anymore, but she needs this money, she only has her older brothers to look out for her and they’re always getting into trouble. Amma will wonder why we should keep an ayah on now that you’re here, but I’ll just say that you didn’t want to play my baby games, like Snakes and Ladders, okay?”

  I nodded. Brindha went back to Rupa’s side, and told her the new plan. Rupa’s face lifted, and she put her hands together and bowed in gratitude. Brindha, pleased that Rupa was no longer upset, pressed the movie pictures back into her hands and they chattered more about Rukmini.

  I stared at the cricketers on her wall, posed like movie stars themselves, wearing flirty smiles and jeans or leather jackets. Except some of the cricketers were dark, and Indian movie stars were usually light-skinned, especially the women, often with light eyes, hazel or green. The only way I could tell they were not straight out of Tigerbeat was because they all had black hair, and they were not pencil-thin like teen idols in America.

  A bell rang out from another part of the house, a trilling like the bell on my old bicycle with the pink banana seat.

  Brindha said, “That’s Matthew saying dinner is ready. He thinks it’s the proper way because that’s what Anglos like. Amma keeps trying to get him to stop.”

  “I guess I’ll unpack later. Is there something for me to change into for now?”

  “Amma left some salwar kameezes out on her bed for you to choose from. I’ll go tell Matthew you’re coming in a couple minutes. Don’t forget to cut your nails before you come,” Brindha said as she left the room.

  Ammamma hadn’t said anything earlier, but Brindha was not going to let me get away with anything she couldn’t get away with. It was considered unattractive to have long nails on your right hand because food got under them when you were eating. Older women kept their fingernails uniformly short, without nail polish or jewelry. Girls my age often had long nails and nail polish and friendship rings and even little diamonds glued on their nails but only on their left hand, the right one was left completely plain. No one minded the lack of symmetry, but it seemed as weird to me as wearing eyeshadow on one eye and not the other. I filed and trimmed down the nails on both hands.

  I went into my aunt and uncle’s bedroom and took a couple salwar sets from the bed. Returning to Brindha’s room, I bolted shut the door and took off my clothes. My khakis were crumpled and dusty from the long car trip, and my light cotton sweater had lost its shape because I’d balled it up into a pillow on the international flight. I left everything on the floor near the door so the servants would know to take it for washing. I wouldn’t wear those clothes for the rest of the trip. Younger girls wore skirts, but everyone my age wore the pajamalike salwar kameezes every day. I had brought a few dresses and jeans from home, in case we went to a city or a hotel for a few days where I could wear American clothes, but otherwise, they stayed in the suitcase. I felt like a nun relinquishing my street clothes for a habit. Salwar kameezes were nice enough, some were colorful and pretty, but I didn’t look like myself when I looked in the mirror.

  I noticed a slight movement in the mirror and turned around. Rupa was crouched in the corner next to the bureau facing the wall. I went over to her and tapped her on the shoulder and she stood up, blushing. She had still been in the room, looking at the movie pictures when I’d come in and started undressing, and she hadn’t known what to do. She seemed afraid that I was angry, and I shook my head vigorously, to let her know 1 wasn’t. She dropped the movie pictures on the bed, and scurried out of the room.

  “Look, Maya, Amma even has VIP curry for you,” Brindha said as I took my chair at the dinner table.

  “What’s VIP curry?”

  Reema auntie laughed. “It’s a mutton curry. I don’t serve it all the time but it’s one of Brindha’s favorite dishes.”

  “Amma only serves it when Very Important guests are coming, even though I wish we could have it every day. It has mutton, and eggs, and it’s nice and spicy.”

  “If you want it again before you leave next week, tell me, Brindha, and I’ll bring some good mutton from the city,” Sanjay uncle said.

  Mutton and eggs were the last things I felt like eating after traveling for three days on three flights. There was also chicken curry, and green banana curry and cabbage with grated coconut and fried okra. And tamarind chutney and lime pickle and salt mango and peppered papadum. But nothing tasted quite the way I liked it. This was because Ammamma had been out all day, so the cooking had been left to the cook. Reema auntie had guided his hand, but this was Matthew’s cooking, and therefore, Matthew’s palate. He had been liberal with the chilis, and the clarified butter and the coconut. Everything was as heavy as North Indian restaurant food. I looked with envy at my grandmother, eating her plate of kanjivellum, rice served in its own water, with cucumber steamed till it softened and then sauteed with mustard seeds. Old people were allowed to be ascetic in their ways without offending anybody. Many grandmothers were like my grandmother, fasting one or two days a week, and at every evening meal, only eating rice and water and maybe one pickle or one vegetable. But all this food had been cooked for me. I tried my best to make my way through it.

  “I hope nothing’s too hot for you?” my aunt said.

  Everything was. I kept adding yogurt to dilute the heat as much as possible. I remembered when Ammamma used to rinse off my food: chicken, vegetables, even pickle, she would run water over it to take away the sting, and then she would put it back on a stainless-steel thali plate held over the open flame to make everything warm again.

  “Maybe I can learn to cook some things this summer,” I said.

  “You don’t want to spend any time in that hot kitchen,” Reema auntie said. “And you would distract Matthew—he’s always looking for excuses to be slow. But I do have to make a cake this week. We’re having friends over to say good-bye to Brindha before she goes back to school. You can help me if you want, I was thinking maybe angelfood cake?”

  Angelfood cake I could make at home; I’d been making it since I was eight when 1 got a Barbie baking oven at Christmas. I wanted to make something difficult, the things my aunt and grandmother knew how to cook that my mother could never seem to duplicate well enough in New York. Mother insisted it was because we couldn’t get the same vegetables, although at the Korean grocery store, we could get small eggplant and foot-long string beans that were almost like the Indian kind. For some others there truly wasn’t any substitute. But it was really because my mother did what she wanted in the kitchen, she didn’t pay much attention to Ammamma’s recipes. Now that my dad was doing so much of the cooking, I thought if I could just write down the way it was done here, he wouldn’t mind following the instructions. He tried a lot harder to make me happy than Mother did.

  “Did you see any Black Cat Commandos at the airport?” Brindha asked.

  “No, just the regular policemen standing around,” Sanjay uncle said.

  “I think I saw them,” I said. I told them about the men in black and their questions and photographs.

  Brindha said excitedly, “Achan, she’s seen the pictures of Dhanu and Subha and everyone.” Even Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle looked excited.

  Sanjay uncle asked me to describe the people in the photos and he identified some
of them. The dark-skinned girl with slightly protruding teeth and two braids, that was Dhanu, the suicide bomber, who had worn plastic explosives strapped to her body that blew up both her and Rajiv Gandhi and a dozen bystanders. “The chief masterminds,” as Sanjay uncle put it, of the assassination, were suspected to be a man named Sivarasan, and a twenty-two-year-old woman named Subha, who was his second in command as well as his “woman companion” ("his lover,” Reema auntie clarified, as Sanjay uncle blushed). They were being hunted all over the state.

  “Subha’s the fair one, and Sivarasan is the one with the weird eyes, didn’t you notice?” Brindha prodded me. Sivarasan, she said, had one glass eye, because he had lost the other eye on an earlier terrorist mission. I looked at my uncle to see whether she was just making this up to be dramatic.

  “It’s true,” my uncle confirmed, “he’s called the One-eyed Jack.”

  Reema auntie said that the One-eyed Jack was a leader of the Liberation Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka. Even though national government politicians like Rajiv Gandhi were against it, many ethnic Tamils in Tamil Nadu state supported the Sri Lankan Tamil cause. The Tigers knew they could come here to hide out and use the hospitals, to buy weapons and other provisions, and to plot and carry out an assassination. But this time the Indian government swore they would bring the Tigers to justice.

  Brindha said, “Achan, tell her about the death vows.”

  Sanjay uncle explained that the Tamil Tigers were known to take vows to commit suicide if they faced arrest. Each of them carried a cyanide capsule expressly for that purpose.

  Reema auntie said, “There must be a curse on that family. Nehru had a good long life, but to have his daughter assassinated, and now her son too …”