“This is what happens when you’re raised in the only Communist state within a capitalist country. You take care of your own interests, but you feel guilt for it.” My aunt directed this at me, as if my uncle were not there, but it must have been for his benefit, since I hardly knew what she was talking about.
My cousin, Brindha, had been quiet in her corner till now. “Please, no fighting, no fighting, Amma.”
My aunt looked at her with surprise. “That’s not fighting, it’s just disagreeing.”
“But if you keep disagreeing, then Achan will divorce you.”
“Brindha, do you even know what you are saying? How can you say such things?” my uncle said, turning around fully in his seat.
She retreated into her corner. “That’s why Chitra and Padma are at Helena’s—because their parents are having a divorce. And also Reshma, her parents are divorced, her father lives in Dubai now and her mother lives in Madras and she’s an actress.”
“1 knew we shouldn’t send Brindha there. Helena’s may be old and prestigious, but a lot of the girls there do not have good families. What good family would send their daughter away for her whole childhood?” my aunt said to my uncle.
“That’s not true, Reema, many good families send their daughters to boarding school, many of my colleagues, everyone at the head office. Some of the families perhaps are too modern or have too much money, but most are good children, good families.”
“Stop fighting, stop fighting.” Brindha covered her ears.
My aunt took Brindha’s hands down from her ears and she kissed each palm. “We’re not fighting and we’re not divorcing. Everything is okay, you know that, don’t you?”
My uncle reached over to the back and mussed Brindha’s hair. “And you know this is just for a few years and then we’ll move, okay? “
“Couldn’t I just not go to school for a year? I’ll learn fast and catch up next year?”
Sanjay uncle shook his head. “In a few years, we’ll be together again. Don’t make this hard for your Amma, she will be sad if you’re sad at school like last year.”
Brindha unwound the upper part of her mother’s sari, and put it over her own head, shade against the sun piercing her window. From under her little cloak, she said, “You know Maya’s parents are getting a divorce.”
“That’s not true,” I said hotly.
She said, “I read it in your letter you were sending yesterday.”
I had been writing to my best friend Jennifer from high school, who I told almost everything to. I hadn’t written that they were getting a divorce, just that I worried sometimes that they would.
“You shouldn’t have been reading Maya’s mail,” Reema auntie said to Brindha.
My uncle looked at me. “Is something wrong at home, Maya?”
I glared at my cousin, who was still faceless under my aunt’s sari. “Nothing is wrong, everything is like always.”
Reema auntie said, “Don’t pry, Sanjay. She would tell us if she had something to tell.”
Sanjay uncle said, “Maya, you would tell us, wouldn’t you? There isn’t anything you want to tell us right now?”
“No. Nothing. No.”
My aunt squeezed my hand, and I looked away, trying to make my pulse normalize. I knew they asked because they loved me and they were concerned, but I didn’t want to be pitied. Already, Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie were so delicate about my mother, they knew things were difficult, and I was used to that. I didn’t talk much about it, but I didn’t try to hide it. Sometimes I thought Sanjay uncle knew more than he let on; maybe he just knew intuitively because it was his sister.
I was glad Brindha was going to school, now no one would poke around in my belongings and go through my letters. A letter from Jennifer was waiting for me when I arrived. I wondered what she had read of my letter to Jennifer. My aunt had given me blue aerograms to write on, and told me to give the letters to my uncle, who could mail them at the factory. I had taken a thin onionskin piece of paper out of Brindha’s writing tablet and written a note to Steve that I had slipped in the aerogram envelope to Jennifer so I didn’t have to give my uncle an envelope with Steve’s name on it. Steve was Jennifer’s boyfriend’s best friend, besides being my sometime boyfriend. I wasn’t always sure how I felt about him when we were at home, but while I was here, it was nice to hear from Jennifer’s letter that Steve missed me. It was nice to be missed, and it was nice to think about someone as being yours, a part of your life that was all your own. He didn’t understand some things about the way my family was, like why he couldn’t call in the evenings when my parents were home, or why I could never go to his family’s beach house unless Jennifer was going to be there too. He didn’t understand why I had said he couldn’t write me in India, but I think on this point he was secretly relieved to be able to just give Jennifer messages and not have to write things himself. It made him nervous how much time I spent writing and reading. Once at his beach house he grabbed the novel I was reading out of my hands and said he wouldn’t give it back till I went swimming with him. I didn’t go swimming, and we didn’t talk for the whole afternoon, and finally he sullenly threw the novel back onto my beach towel.
I didn’t like how Jennifer and her boyfriend would sometimes disappear on purpose to leave the two of us alone. I liked Steve, but I partly liked him because the four of us had fun together. It felt awkward sometimes when it was just us. And when it was just us, I was more nervous about doing something wrong, about feeling wrong. Everything we did was wrong by my parents’ standards, they would have been mortified if they had ever even seen us kiss or hold hands, but I already made distinctions between my parents’ standards and my own. I didn’t want to be one of those Indians who lived in America without ever adapting to it. But the problem was, once my standards didn’t come from my parents, then where did they come from? And if you didn’t keep up to your own standards, then who punished you or told you they were disappointed and made you want to be a better person? I didn’t want to be like Jennifer’s family either, who let her boyfriend sleep over some weekends; her mother said it was better than having them out in parked cars. There was something tasteless to me about reading the Sunday papers over breakfast in your pajamas with your mom and dad and your high-school boyfriend.
Even though arranged marriages seemed strange, some things about it sounded nice. My mother often talked about her time in school and college, saying, “I had the rest of my life for being a couple, those years were for friendships.” She had best friends from childhood, and best friends from high school, and best friends from college, and she still heard from them, from Canada and Kuwait, and Dallas, and all over India. In her school, friends never stopped talking to you because they had a new boyfriend, and they never tried to steal your boyfriend, or use you to go to a party to meet someone and leave you to figure out how to get home by yourself.
We knew other Indian families in New York, and there were some Indians in my school. It was different for some of them because they were from big cities, like Bombay and Delhi, where things were modern now, and their cousins dated and went to bars and things. But not in the south, where my family was from. What I liked better about the south, even if other people said it was a backward place, was that at least it was fair to everyone. In Bombay and Delhi, they said you could date, but then many boys still had an arranged marriage when it was time, and they usually didn’t want to marry girls who had dated around. And also, there were dowries in many marriages there, so even if girls thought they were being independent by dating, they were still going to need their parents to spend a lot of money for them to marry well. In our families, we didn’t have any dowries, and dating was equally discouraged for boys as for girls. I was hoping Brindha hadn’t read the whole letter.
“Who’s Steve?” Brindha piped up after a while. She wasn’t trying to cause trouble on purpose, but she was doing a good job. She just wanted to know things, and she knew her only chance was while her parents we
re there, otherwise I would ignore her questions.
“Jennifer’s brother,” I lied. Brothers were the only kind of boys it was okay to be seen with. Or cousins. 1 tried to change the subject. “Did you finish your summer assignments for school?”
“Yes, Brindha, have you finished?” Reema auntie said. “Why don’t I check your math problems to see how many are correct?”
Brindha grumbled and pulled out her knapsack, and took out some papers with crumpled edges.
“You should keep these papers in those nice folders Achan brought you from his office,” Reema auntie said.
“But the folders are plain white and say “high grade tea” on them. The other girls have pretty ones their fathers bring from Singapore, even ones with pictures of Barbie on them.”
“If someone we know is going to Singapore, we can try to get you some of those, but for now you have to make do. 1 think Achan’s folders are quite nice, 1 use them in the house for filing letters and bills.”
“Achan, why can’t you work in something exciting, like movies or video games? Then we could go to Singapore and all over.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” my uncle said wearily.
Reema auntie said, “Brindha, Achan has a very good job, you see all the people who come to ask him to advise on their tea factories? And his company is happy he took this post, and he is making our factory very productive. You should be proud of him.”
“Yes, Amma,” Brindha said, her head down. “I’m sorry I say rude things.”
I watched Brindha interact with her parents the way an ethnographer might, taking mental notes, charting their moments of tension and contentment. There was a naturalness to their rhythms of discussing and resolving, one giving in one time, another the next time. Discord never rose to the level where there were chasms created that no one knew how to bridge.
I knew in my own family, I was not particularly good at being the conciliatory one. But I couldn’t help it. I often felt I had gotten past resenting my mother for the four years I’d been left in India. I pretended we’d been apart for the reasons other children are, because of hardship or poverty, because we were refugees or there was a war or a potato famine. Any of these were more appealing than what seemed to be the truth, which was that my parents had a plentiful life without room for me in it, at least not right away. But even when I convinced myself that those were old grudges to hold on to, new ones cropped up. I resented my mother not only for the four years she chose not to be a parent but for the following ten years during which she was a reluctant one.
Mother traveled a lot, which was fine by me because she didn’t know how to talk to me even when she was home. She had no sense of how to make me feel better when I was lonely or sad or sick. I watched Reema auntie, who was so natural at soothing Brindha, and felt that my mother lacked those primal instincts that told you how to read your children, how to teach them, reproach them, and hold them. Instead, in our house, there was the strained formality and the occasional shrillness of separate and self-conscious people acting out a pale imitation of family.
The road had widened into two lanes, but now there were four cars abreast and a herd of oxen pressing forward. We had reached Coimbatore, and the car crawled along the main strip of downtown office buildings, until my uncle said to stop. The air was dense with grit, and I smelled gasoline and diesel on the roads. The driver and Sanjay uncle got out of the car, and my aunt also got out to help get packages from the back of the car, and to talk to Sanjay uncle at the roadside. They would never kiss in front of everyone, but he touched her arm fleetingly, jostling her bangles as they talked. He would be back home in three days. He ducked into the backseat of the car to give us both hugs, and to say to Brindha, “Now, please, try to be happy there this year. We will write you every week as usual, and come for the Visitors’ Weekend in two months’ time. Think of your mother, Brindha, and don’t cry today, okay?”
“I wasn’t going to cry,” she said in a small voice. “I promised already.”
“Say hi to Old Granny for me, will you?”
Brindha made a face. Old Granny was Miss Granville, who had been headmistress at Helena’s forever, people said, at least a century or two. Everyone mocked her behind her back, but everyone was a little intimidated, even the parents.
Reema auntie got back in the car on my side, so I was now squashed in the middle. I looked at the empty front seat longingly, with its wide open window, but knew asking would be pointless.
“So, Brindha, shall we go to Aruna’s for lunch, or shall we go to Shantha’s or to a hotel?” Reema auntie asked.
“What about that dosa stand that Achan always takes us to?”
“We can’t go there with Maya, it’s too much of a local place, it could make her sick.”
“But you told us it was clean there even though they serve so many drivers and clerks.”
“Brindha,” my aunt lowered her voice and switched into Malayalam, “this driver knows some English, so don’t just blurt out such impolite things.”
“Okay.” Brindha shrugged. “Then let’s go to Aruna auntie’s, she serves better food than Shantha auntie.”
“Besides,” Brindha said to me, “Shantha auntie wants to send her daughter to Helena’s, so she pesters me with questions and I have to pretend I have a lot of friends and everything.”
Aruna auntie is Reema auntie’s oldest sister’s husband’s sister. In our family, that’s still a close relation. Somewhere in my suitcase with all the other things my mother stuffed in there is a gift set from Estee Lauder or an embroidered hand towel set with a tag addressed to her.
“That’s okay,” Reema auntie said. “You can bring it next time we come down, or Sanjay can bring it to her.”
Aruna auntie used to be a famous classical dancer, she had even been on Doordarshan, the national TV channel. Now she was on the fat side and had four kids, but after lunch Brindha made her show us all of her fiercest expressions, of the temperamental goddess Kali and the snake god Naga and of the evil Kaurava brother Duryodhana. Auntie still moved with stealth and grace when she danced despite all her extra pounds. She could even enlist her plump cheeks to quiver with a demon god’s fury.
“Reema tells me you used to dance also, Maya,” Aruna auntie said.
“Yes, Maya studied with guru Padmanabhan near her grandmother’s house for five summers in a row,” Reema auntie said.
“You’re lucky to have studied with Padmanabhan, he’s one of our best,” Aruna auntie said. “Will you be having an arangetram, then?” An arangetram was a graduation ceremony to exhibit a certain level of mastery in dance.
“We all hoped she would,” Reema auntie said, “Her mother even found her an instructor in New York to supplement Padmanabhan’s instruction. But Maya wanted to stop dancing a few years ago.”
“I didn’t have time because I had other activities,” I said.
“Activities? What activities?” Aruna auntie said.
I told her that I wrote for the school newspaper and I did babysitting and I was on the swim team.
“But this is part of your culture, “Aruna auntie said. “You should at least keep up practicing what you had learned.”
“I really don’t remember much,” I said. I liked dancing when I first started and it was about counting out the beats and learning the steps, the intricate footwork, the poses on bended knee. Then my teacher began telling me the best dancing was not athletic, it was expressive. But expressive of what? I had never felt tied to the meaning, I couldn’t make my face express things I wasn’t feeling. I knew the stories the dances told, about gods and ancient legends, my grandmother had taught them to me, but Kali and Rama had lost their relevance to my present life, they were as remote as Peter Pan and his shadow.
“Aruna auntie, do the Naga pose again. I want to copy you,” Brindha said, standing behind Aruna auntie.
Aruna auntie gathered herself upon one leg, narrowing her eyes to those of a serpent god, and using her arms to create
a large ominous hood over herself. Brindha imitated her, drawing her mouth small and mean. But she lost her balance after a couple of seconds and collapsed giggling to the floor.
“I’m going to do that at school the next time the girls say something rude. It looks scary enough they might think I’ve put a curse on them,” she said.
“Brindha, don’t say such things,” Reema auntie said, tucking Brindha’s hair back into some kind of order. “You have to start out the school year thinking positively.”
“Speaking of school, I took the children to temple on their first day of school last week, and we still have some prasadam. Let me bring it for you,” Aruna auntie said.
“We probably should have gone today, too,” Reema auntie said.
“There’s a Vishnu temple not far from here, if you want to go now,” Aruna auntie said, unfolding a banana leaf tied up in string. Inside was a sweet sticky crush of sugar and raisins and lentils. She put some in my hand ("right hand, right hand,” she murmured when I unthinkingly extended my left) and then in Brindha’s and Reema auntie’s. Aruna auntie herself had a bit, then licked the last of the stickiness from her palm.
“I don’t think we have time,” Reema auntie said. “We’re making the drive back tonight, so I don’t want it to get late.”
“Shall I give you some tea in a thermos or are you stopping again?” Aruna auntie asked.
“We are stopping for tea in Ooty, so Brindha can change into her uniform there. But thank you,” Reema auntie said.
We got back in the car and Reema auntie sat in the front with the driver so Brindha and I could lie down together in the back and sleep for awhile to make the time go faster.
When I sat up again and looked out, everything was green and lush. We’d already gone through the first set of hairpin bends climbing Ooty, my aunt said. And while this summit was higher than the one we lived on, the roads were not carved as steeply or as narrowly. Also, it was cooler up here, chilly even. There was tall grass and soft curves of meadow near the road.
“Stop, stop,” Brindha screamed. She was peering out the window on her side.
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