Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  Ammamma spoke for the first time at dinner. “It’s not a curse, it’s a blessing that Indira died rather than see what happened to Rajiv. No mother wants to outlive her child.” She gathered some empty dishes and shuffled off toward the kitchen.

  Brindha said, “You’re so lucky, Maya, you’ve seen more of the pictures than we have—they’ll only show a couple pictures on the television. Did they show you the fire and the explosion? Was there blood?”

  Reema auntie shook her head, as if she were shaking off a daydream. She said, “You mustn’t go on talking like this, Brindha. This is not one of your mystery novels or action movies. Let’s leave it to the police and not sit here conjecturing about it.” She got up to tell Matthew to clear the table.

  “And one other thing.” Sanjay uncle touched Reema auntie’s wrist to make her pause for a minute. “Don’t talk about these things around the servants or when guests are in the house. There are a few other out-of-staters like us, but most everybody around here is Tamil. Even though everyone is denouncing the murder, we can’t really know who is a Tiger sympathizer deep down. It is wiser to assume that anybody could be until this is all over.”

  Ammamma had Matthew bring out mango and pomegranate for dessert, Technicolor orange and red. Usually, there was no dessert, sweet things were eaten at teatime, not at night. But I loved mango, and she did not want me to have to wait until tomorrow.

  We finished eating. The lights had already dimmed because the electric company lowered electricity transmitted to each home when the usage was highest to avoid power outages. My aunt brought an oil lamp to put in the drawing room so my uncle could read the newspapers. Brindha took another oil lamp with her to her room where she and Rupa were trying to empty out a few more drawers for me.

  “Can Matthew heat some water for a bath?” I asked.

  “It’s cool this late at night, you may catch a cold, don’t you think?” my aunt said.

  “I won’t be cold, you forget what I’m used to,” I said. “I have to have a bath after all this travel.”

  “But still, the climate change is sudden, and then to go to sleep with wet hair,” my grandmother said anxiously. “It can’t be a good idea.”

  “Just tell Matthew to put on a lot of hot water, and I’ll make my bath warm enough. Don’t worry.”

  Ammamma still looked doubtful. “Make sure you dry your hair well. And be careful, the floors get slippery. Take an oil lamp in case the electricity goes.”

  Matthew brought a big bucket of boiling water to the bathroom off the hall from Brindha’s room. I didn’t want to ask Matthew because I was too embarrassed, but I called Rupa to come in the bathroom with me and look for insects. She had just stretched out on her floormat to sleep, but she jumped up right away, smoothed her petticoat down over her legs, and came to the bathroom. We shone a flashlight in the corners, and two lizards quickly crawled out of sight. There was one large brown-back beetle, and Rupa hit it with a straw broom and when it fell so its underside was exposed, she crushed it, folded it up in newspaper and took it away.

  I TOOK OFF the salwar pants and then the kameez top and then my bra and panties and divided them up among the hooks on the wall. I was glad my period had hardly started, just a few spots, hopefully I would sleep easily tonight and the cramps would only come tomorrow. Mist was still coming off the bucket of hot water. I turned the tap on (cold water came through the taps but not hot water) and ran cold water in a smaller mixing bucket. I scooped a few pitchers of the hot water into the mixing bucket until it was the right temperature. I poured water over my head, and it bounced off my shoulders and splashed against the walls, on the floor. I poured more slowly, there was less splashing, and water sluiced all the way down my legs. I had brought shampoo/conditioner from my hair salon, and when I squeezed some out in my hand, it had that familiar clean apple smell. I preferred separate shampoo and conditioner, sometimes 1 even shampooed twice and then conditioned for three to five minutes like they suggested on the bottle. But in India, I bathed quickly, in the fewest steps possible. The hot water brought from the kitchen never stayed hot for long, and there was never enough light: the black stone floor and the dark cement walls overwhelmed the dim overhead bulb and the modest porthole-size window. Waterbugs and beetles and mosquitoes—on the last trip, I’d even seen a watersnake in a bathroom—found this the most alluring part of the house. I let the shampoo soak into my hair, smoothing the hair back from my face so it wouldn’t get in my eyes.

  The Dove soap in my travel soapdish was already softening like chocolate in the heat. I scrubbed hard everywhere to get the airplane air and the teahill dust out. If I scrubbed hard enough, I hoped I would peel away that layer of Americanness that made me feel clumsy and conspicuous here; I wanted to unearth that other person who had felt at home here and known how to fit in. Now more than on earlier trips, I felt how hard and how exhausting it was to translate, even though we were all speaking English. There were so many ways of being and expressing myself that I had to leave behind, and so many I had to relearn.

  Then more water, my eyes shut tight, pouring so that the water and shampoo coursed behind me, a foaming trail snaking across the floor toward the drain in the corner. A few more rinses over my back, my chest, and soap bubbles were also rushing toward the drain, and as the trail of water got clearer again, I turned the bucket over, and poured the last of the water on my ankles and feet. 1 wrung the water out of my hair as much as I could and then took the thorthu and pressed it against my face. The thorthu was instantly soaked, 1 could feel the weave in the sheet like thin burlap. I rubbed down with the sheet, realizing I was still slick with soap in parts, but not caring. I put a fresh salwar kameez on to sleep in, a dark blue one that was big and loose so it didn’t show anything and I didn’t have to wear a bra. Even before I stepped out of the bathroom, I started to feel sticky again under my arms and around my stomach where the pants drew tight. My hair was wet against my back, the only cool part of me, and I left it like that, so the water could seep down my spine all night.

  Brindha was already sleeping, curled up on one side of the bed. I put her oil lamp out and then mine. Rupa’s sleeping form, coverless on her floormat, lay between me and my side of the bed. I remembered for a fleeting second the old superstition about how if you stepped over someone you would stop her from growing. But crawling around Brindha was too much trouble, so I leapt over Rupa and slipped into bed. I had forgotten to take out the insect repellent in my luggage. I pulled the sheet loosely over my head, hoping the mosquitoes wouldn’t find out that foreign blood was so close at hand.

  CHAPTER TWO

  School Days

  MY LINGERING JET lag made it seem natural to be up at 3 a.m. But everyone else was awake too and acting like it was not the middle of the night. Brindha was going to boarding school today, which meant three hours down our mountain and then four hours up another mountain to reach St. Helena’s in Ooty.

  My uncle was sitting with the driver at the table on the verandah. Soft lamplight shone on large tattered maps. I went out and looked over his shoulder. These maps were like high-school geography maps, colored with patterns to show terrain, mountains and lakes, and desert, but no villages or roads. My uncle said there were no maps for places we lived, at least not ones that were of any use. He was drawing with pencil on the maps, and the driver was nodding. The driver knew the way down our mountain and also the way up to Ooty, but what he didn’t know were the places we might stop on the way: gas stations and tea shops and a four-star hotel in the one real city we would pass through and friends’ homes and company people (my uncle had told the company guesthouses to expect us).

  I wondered sometimes how long our trips would be without any stops, but we had never made them that way. Long drives, to weddings and airports and beach outings, all required a similar sequence of stops, our own Underground Railroad, my uncle called it. Some were required for the trip at hand, a place to have lunch, a place to use the bathroom, a place right before goi
ng to a temple to have a bath, a place right before we arrived at a wedding hall to change into wedding clothes. Other stops—brief ones—were to promise that though we hadn’t stopped there to lunch or to bathe or to change this time, that we would next time, that they had not been forgotten. Then there were elderly relatives to see, not to take hospitality from, but to receive blessings from and hear stories from and to show them how much you’ve grown and the new bangles you’ve gotten.

  My aunt was in the kitchen, she did not want the servants cooking Brindha’s last meal. She had made lemon rice and tamarind jelly and aapam, which are pancakes made out of rice flour with a thick lump of batter at the center and then crepelike at the edges, and stew made from beans that had been soaked and sprouted for two days. She set the table with ornate dinner china, since those were the only dishes in the hutch in the dining room. All the everyday things were out back in the cooking shed by the servants’ quarters where everyone was still asleep.

  My grandmother was re-ironing Brindha’s uniforms one more time, as there would be inspection at St. Helena’s this afternoon. She squinted at a list as she packed Brindha’s bag, tallying how many shirts, how many socks, how many petticoats, how many hairpins Brindha was allowed to bring. Ammamma looked up from her list to ask me to find Brindha and try to cheer her up.

  Brindha was slumped dejectedly on a bench in the garden. She had brought her dog out there to say good-bye, but Boli had gone back to sleep at her feet. He would understand only when he heard the car start up, and mourn when it was too late.

  Brindha looked up at me, shining a flashlight in my eyes. “Would you like one?” she asked. She beamed the flashlight down on her lap to reveal a Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates I had brought for my aunt. I had brought Three Musketeers and Snickers bars for Brindha, but the Sampler boxes were for my aunt to serve to guests. Brindha had eaten through most of the top tray of chocolates, though some she had chewed halfway and retired back to the box, revealing hearts of caramel or vanilla nougat or syrupy cherry. I picked up the box cover to show her the inside panel that listed the types of chocolate in the box and picked out a chocolate cream-filled one. Brindha was amazed by this directory; it was like being handed the answers for a test in advance. I told her how 1 used to hide the box top and try to guess the fillings based on close observation of the ridges where a walnut or almond might betray itself, or the sticky red drop of liqueur oozing from another, or the dense compactness of the chocolates that tricked you by having no center, they were just solid right through.

  My aunt would be looking for us for breakfast. I told Brindha we should go inside.

  Brindha refused, “I’m not hungry. It’s three thirty in the morning.”

  “You were hungry enough for chocolate.”

  “That’s different.” She looked at me balefully, like I should have known that. I should have known that.

  “How about helping me find something nice to wear for when I meet your friends?” I said.

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve told me about Gita and that cricketer’s daughter, and the girl with the dyed brown hair.”

  “I don’t like any of them. I don’t want to go to school.” Brindha nudged Boli with her foot, and he opened his eyes, raised himself on his forepaws, licked her out-stretched hand a few times, and then retired back into sleep.

  “I thought you liked Helena’s.”

  “I just say I like Helena’s because Amma and Achan need me to go there. Achan has to stay here for his job for some years and there is no school here. He promised at his next posting, there’ll be a good school there and I won’t have to go away.”

  Brindha had been full of chatter since I’d arrived about Helena’s this and Helena’s that. “Aren’t they nice to you there?”

  Brindha was impatient with me. “Who cares if they’re nice? Would you want to leave your mother and father? Not now, but when you were like me?”

  By “like me,” she meant ten years old and in the fourth grade. She meant being tucked in every night and having the closets checked for monsters once in a while. I didn’t tell Brindha that living with my mother and father had been my boarding school, leaving my grandmother and the safe place I knew for a place that had cold dark nights, many closets, and strange, stiff guardians. The other kids at school in America had been pink and blond and fast with everything. My English had felt slow and I had had such an accent. I hadn’t known what the teachers wanted from me. And Mother didn’t help, she kept telling me 1 was doing things wrong. I went home with other kids’ parents from school without waiting for the daycare bus, or 1 lost my milk money on the playground. I hadn’t known how anything worked. I didn’t tell Brindha that by her age I had wished that I could go to boarding school, where everyone was parentless, and therefore somehow on equal footing.

  “Do Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie know you don’t like it? Maybe they can find something else.”

  “There is nothing else, this is where the girls from our set go. At least I’m lucky I’m a girl, the fifth- and sixth-graders don’t bully us like Akash says they do at St. Patrick’s Boys.”

  “They wouldn’t want you to stay at a school you don’t like. Maybe you should tell them again.”

  Brindha put her hand in my hand. “Nothing will change. It’s okay, Maya, I do like that girl with the dyed brown hair, and some others. Let’s go to breakfast before Amma thinks we’re lost.”

  Brindha lifted the sleeping dog and we headed for the house.

  WE WERE READY to leave. Brindha gave Ammamma a kiss and hugged her around her waist. Ammamma took the palloo end of her white sari and dabbed the back of Brindha’s neck, which was still wet from her bath. Brindha brought Boli over to Ammamma and kissed him good-bye and as she embraced him, she put a collar around his neck. Ammamma got a firm grip on his collar and crouched over him in the driveway. The driver started up the car, Boli’s ears pointed up and he arched. Ammamma held on to him tightly, her white sari getting spattered as Boli kicked up mud and tried to get himself loose, and we backed out of the carport and out the driveway. Just as we turned onto the road, our headlights swung over a slim dark figure. Rupa was walking to meet a bus that would take her down the mountain and back home to her village. This was Rupa’s last day, there was no more work for her here. Brindha waved wildly from her open window, and Rupa, who could not wave because her hands suppported an ungainly bundle of all her belongings, smiled back.

  WE DROVE IN silence for some time, not quite sure if we were awake or asleep, not quite sure if it was night or day. My uncle sat in front next to the driver, and my aunt sat in the back in the middle so that my cousin and I could each get a window. Brindha first asked to ride shotgun, but she was not allowed in the front seat with the driver. On short drives to the nearby village to get candy or some buttons for sewing, Brindha and I were allowed to go alone with the household driver Ram, and sometimes she would clamber over into the front seat once we were out of view of the house. But this driver today was some assistant at the tea factory just hired for the day who my uncle said he had never used before, so Brindha had slim chance of talking her way into the front seat. Part of the reason Sanjay uncle was coming with us until we reached Coimbatore was so that he could watch the driver, make sure he drove carefully, and treated us respectfully. It might be different after my uncle left, but at least his presence now enforced some degree of accountability, made literal the fact that a man protected our household.

  Brindha said we had to take turns being on watch for the police, and she would go first. She said they might come after us because we had tinted windows on our car. The police had put out an order that until Subha and Sivarasan were caught, no one could drive in Tamil Nadu with tinted windows. But Sanjay uncle said that it was too much trouble to get the windows changed, and the sun would fry us alive. It was still dark, there wasn’t anyone on the road, let alone a police ambush. Brindha fell asleep half an hour into her watch.r />
  Sanjay uncle said this was the perfect time of day to see wildlife, but I was too tired to pay much attention to his tour-guiding. After an hour or so, the sun came up, and there were fewer small creatures to avoid on the road as they receded into woods, replaced by the big creatures of the day: buses and lorries charged up at us around blind corners. Since there had been so few cars on the road on the way home from the airport, I had not noticed that there was really only one lane. Each time a lorry came by, hurling black smoke into our car as we pulled to the side to let it narrowly pass us, I erupted in fits of coughing. My aunt took out a handkerchief from her bag and doused it with water (we had four bottles of boiled water to see us through the morning) and handed it to me to put over my nose and mouth. 1 wiped my eyes with it first, leaving black marks that looked like mascara on the starched white cloth, but I was wearing no makeup, the smudges were all dirt and soot. I held the cloth over my mouth.

  Sanjay uncle glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “You’ve got American lungs now. The emissions standards are lax here; it’s too expensive to burn fuel as cleanly as you do in America.”

  Another bus loomed on the horizon, ready to play chicken.

  “Why do they come right at us without even slowing down?” I asked. “It’s like we don’t have a right to be on the road.”

  “We don’t, really,” Sanjay uncle said mildly. “Those buses are for workers coming up to the tea estates for day labor, and the lorries are bringing supplies and equipment in and tea product out. Fuel and road are both rare resources here, and buses and lorries are more efficient than we are in a private car.”

  “Stop lecturing,” Reema auntie said. “You would never let us go by bus, even if we were somehow possessed with that desire.”

  “Correct.” My uncle sighed. “So we choose, and choose to live with, the luxury of our inefficiency.”