Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  In India, you only went to a nursery if you had no friends. Usually, you just took cuttings from everyone’s garden. In America, everyone’s plants were so small and frail, you dared not ask for cuttings. Except we had grown our curry plant strong enough that my mother was proud to offer cuttings, and people would take plastic sandwich bags with a root and a stem back home to Boston and Chicago and Toronto, where they anxiously abided by my mother’s stern instructions as to special light and special food and special soil.

  So my aunt’s garden had unnaturally created things I didn’t recognize, and some that I did: hibiscus, bougainvillea, hydrangea, nasturtiums, foxglove, sweet william, delphinium, jacaranda. Loads of water hyacinths and a few lotuses in the artificial pond, and trellises sagging under the weight of tea roses. And exuberant yellow flowers that a doctor had brought from South Africa a hundred years ago and grafted onto the tree at the far corner where they declared blooming domination over their host. And jasmine everywhere—like our cherry tomatoes at home, it just insinuated itself in every bare patch of dirt.

  Jasmine was what South Indian girls smelted like—not soap or spice or perfume, but the heavy honey smell of jasmine, threaded into long necklaces and wound through freshly braided hair in the morning. My hair wasn’t long enough for a braid, so my aunt would clip a few stems behind my ear, but it looked silly like that. I usually pulled them off once I was out of her sight.

  The special triple-bud jasmine was what my aunt wanted me to wear to the annual dance at the country club. “This will be your chance to meet everyone,” my aunt said. She said this as if there hadn’t been a steady inflow of my uncle’s colleagues and friends and local officials whose presence at our home was eventually less notable than their absence.

  “I’m still not that close to anyone up here. So it’ll be nice to have someone to go with,” my aunt said.

  “Isn’t Sanjay uncle coming?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “But then you’re not going alone anyway,” I said.

  “Well no, but the men will be with the men,” she said. I didn’t know what that meant.

  The dance was on the coming Friday. “Isn’t that Ammamma’s birthday?” Some birthday cards had arrived for Ammamma in the mail yesterday and today.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Reema auntie said.

  “Shouldn’t we do something to celebrate her birthday then?”

  “There’s nothing to celebrate about turning seventy-one. Cakes and candles are for children, and for special, auspicious years. The only special year Ammamma has ahead of her is eighty-four, when she’s lived for one thousand moons. Then we’ll have a big feast. But that’s not for a long time.”

  “So you think she won’t mind on her birthday coming along to this country club thing?” I said.

  “She’s not coming to the club, Maya. There will be dancing, and loud music, not anything your grandmother will want to sit through.”

  “But we can’t leave her at home and go out on her birthday,” I said doubtfully.

  “It’ll be fine with her; you can go ask her if you want.”

  It was true, she didn’t want to go, and she didn’t seem bothered that we were going. “You’ll have a nice time,” my grandmother said. “Your aunt and uncle want you to meet their friends—they want to show off their smart, pretty American niece. “

  “Everyone has an American niece these days,” I said. There was a time when having a relative in America was a big deal, it meant you had a direct representative on the frontlines of the gold rush.

  “It’s not because you’re American,” my grandmother said. “It’s because you’re still ours.”

  I felt bad making plans on Ammamma’s birthday—she certainly honored mine every year, not just special years. I was starting to feel, reluctantly, that I should back out from the dance. Then we received a telegram that my aunt’s youngest sister had given birth.

  “It’s her fourth boy,” my aunt said. “I’m sure she’s so disappointed.”

  “Maybe they’ll have a girl next,” I said.

  “No,” my aunt said. “She’s going to have a surgery now so that this is her last one. But she had hoped it would be a girl.”

  “When Brindha was born, had you wanted a girl or a boy?” I asked.

  “Oh, a girl, absolutely,” my aunt said. “In our Nair families, you want girls. Girls keep the family together and they keep the family name going.”

  “So when do we get to see auntie’s new baby?”

  “You can go see them in a few weeks if you’d like. I’m going to go see her now, because the baby came early and needs a lot of care, she asked me to come so she doesn’t have to manage with only her mother-in-law and the ayah.”

  “You’re going to leave now?”

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll go with the driver down to the city, and then catch a train, maybe book a sleeper compartment.” She was lost in thought.

  “So I guess we’re not going to the dance, then?” I said. I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

  “Sanjay can’t possibly miss that; it’s a big company affair. And how lucky that you’re here, at least he still has an escort.”

  “I’d been thinking that Ammamma—”

  “Ammamma must take some photos when you and Sanjay are all dressed up. We can send them to your parents, too.”

  The point at which it was still possible to back out had passed. At the very least, I would tell Ammamma to wait up for us, and when we came back from the country club, we would have a small birthday celebration. Even if it was late and it was just me and my uncle and Ammamma, I would sit with her and tell her about everything at the party and repeat myself if she asked and be very patient.

  My aunt wanted to make sure everything was arranged before she left, so she laid out dozens of her saris and salwar kameezes on her bed, and I modeled one after another. I didn’t have many sari blouses, so that limited my sari options.

  “We’ll have to get more blouses made for you this summer. I’ll let the tailor know,” my aunt said. “Try this sari on, I think it will match that blue blouse you have.”

  Having dressed me in six yards of blue and gray shot silk, my aunt seemed, finally, satisfied. Then she changed her mind. She asked me to take out my things from home so she could look through them.

  We settled on my black dress with a cream colored border at the neck and hem, with strappy black sandals of my aunt’s. Reema auntie was happier with this. “You don’t look natural enough in a sari.”

  “Mother never lets me wear black to Indian functions at home. She says it’s morbid.” A few times, my mother had brought home her idea of proper, perky dresses from Bloomingdale’s. They always had a little bow at the back of the waist: I made her return them. Inevitably, I gave in and wore salwar kameezes to most family parties rather than listen to my mother disparage my clothes.

  Reema auntie laughed. “The older people may say it’s morbid, but the ladies at the club read fashion magazines, they know the modern styles.”

  Reema auntie took out box after box of jewelry from a safe under her bed. She gave me a set of gold jumki earrings and a gold choker with a teardrop pendant. I hoped she couldn’t see Steve’s necklace under my dress collar, because she would want me to take it off. She slipped my American gold rings—14K yellow gold rather than 22K Indian red gold—off my fingers, saying, “Better to wear nothing than to wear something too plain.”

  Her words stayed with me as my French-doored entrance, into the club rooms. There were lots of candles, everyone glowed and glittered in the hazy light. How could my aunt have let me go in there with this shapeless dress on surrounded by ladies in beautiful filmy chiffon things? And yet I could hardly have attracted more attention if I were wearing nothing—I tried not to look back at the many eyes turning to follow us as my uncle maneuvered us through the room. He introduced me to the club’s director, Ravi, and his wife Lalu. Ravi was a big, broad-shouldered man wearing a
tight jacket, sloshing a glass with a lot of ice so it made clinking noises. Lalu wore an ice-queen sari of ivory bordered in gold and black, her upswept hair was lacquered and untouchable. Her expertly cut sari blouse framed a heavy diamond choker that climbed high on her thin neck. Lalu had an aimless pink smile and eyes that constantly fluttered around the room. I tried to smile and nod as they talked about cricket, labor disputes at the factory, what kind of tea season the weather would produce.

  “Our tasters are concerned—the tea may not be as high-grade from these parts this year, and we hear from up north that Darjeeling is having a splendid growing season,” my uncle said.

  “Then we’ll all drink Darjeeling tea this year in India and export our low-grade stuff to Chicago or some such place, why don’t we?” Ravi said. Everyone laughed loudly. He pronounced the “ch” in Chicago like “cherry.”

  “Can I get you a drink to start or would you rather play first and drink later?” Ravi asked.

  “Lalu, you’ll take her, won’t you?” my uncle said.

  “Of course, Sanjay, she’ll be fine with me,” Lalu said. Ravi clapped his hand on my uncle’s back and they walked across the dance floor to the long sleek chrome bar. Lalu put a bony hand on my shoulder and steered me in the opposite direction, out through one room into another, and then into a small alcove. There was dark wood and cane, and plush cushions tossed haphazardly on carpets and couches. Ladies were sitting and standing, a blur of saris, and everywhere, the clinking of glasses.

  Lalu nudged me to a sofa and sat on another sofa next to a fat lady who looked like she had sunk deeply, irretrievably, into the cushions.

  “Lalu, we thought you’d left us,” the lady said, handing a lipsticked glass to Lalu.

  Lalu drank a sip, then nodded a waiter over. “The ice has melted in this drink. Can you bring another one, please?”

  “Is it punch, mem?”

  “Yes, and also a cola for the girl there.” She pointed to me, the waiter nodded, and walked away. To everyone else, she said, “This is Maya, Sanjay and Reema’s niece.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky duck?” the fat lady said. “We’ve just been talking about them, and we’ve decided Sanjay and Reema are by far the nicest couple we know. “

  “Yes, Reema’s an absolute favorite up here,” another lady said. “It’s too bad that they’ll be leaving us.”

  “Oh, has Sanjay got his transfer already then?” someone else said.

  “No, no, it won’t come for a while, they like him, and they will give him what he wants, but he hasn’t put in enough time yet.”

  “If Reema were only tougher, they would do better to stay here, he’s well positioned at the company, my husband tells me.”

  “Reema’s too sensitive about her daughter. We all have our children in boarding school and we manage, she should realize that.”

  “What can you do? If your daughter was having difficulties at boarding, you would have to think about living somewhere else, wouldn’t you?”

  “But children are adaptable—they can handle anything if they are told that they have to. If the mother’s too easy on them, or if she wants the child home for herself, then that’s where the problem is—it’s the mother, not the child.”

  “Strange, too, because Reema and Sanjay seem to get along well, you’d think they would be happy now that they have time to do meaningful things together, not run after homework and dance lessons and such.”

  I had to say something. “There’s nothing wrong with Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle, they just want to be able to raise Brindha themselves.”

  “Parents are not always the best people to raise their own children. They can’t provide discipline and structure as well as a boarding school can. You’ll see these things when you’re a mother, betta.”

  “And children learn so much from their peers, the best thing you can do is make sure they’re schooled in an upstanding environment, with the right sort of people.”

  I didn’t want to argue.

  I was brought a glass of ice with a bottle of Limca soda.

  “No ice please,” I told the waiter, and, with a quick turn of the wrist, he simply dumped the ice onto his tray and handed the glass back to me.

  “I’m sure the ice cubes are purified—you needn^t worry we’ll make you sick,” Lalu said.

  I hadn’t thought anyone would notice my carefulness. I felt my face grow hot. “Oh, I don’t really like ice anyway.”

  “In this heat? Ice is the only thing that gets me through the day,” the fat lady said. She held up her glass, fogged and beaded with water, in an imaginary toast.

  “Remember how ghastly it was before the company gave us backup power supply through the factory?” said a lady in a sparkly red sari. “When the electricity used to go off for days at a time, I would go to bed dreaming of ice, and soft drinks, and mango lassi.”

  “When I was carrying my second, I had terrible cravings for lassi. My husband would get our servant girl to pour lassi into an airtight whiskey bottle and lower it on a rope down our well so it would stay cold enough.”

  It was going to be a long night. There was no one my age. I hadn’t considered before coming that their kids would be at their boarding schools. It was just me and the adults. And my uncle had disappeared on me. I sat quietly and sipped my drink and listened to the prattle: the problems of servants, of finding good courts for lawn tennis, of measles breaking out at their children’s boarding schools, of journeying to Mysore or Bangalore or Madras to help some niece or sister or godchild pick out a wedding trousseau, because in this forsaken place you certainly couldn’t do anything “properly.”

  I kept thinking about my mother. These women were not so different from her. They all knew English, Hindi, and at least one other language, they were well bred and well educated, with master’s degrees in political science or economics or biology. But none of them had jobs, some of them had never had one at all. The one in the red sari was a doctor who had graduated from an elite medical institute. She hadn’t practiced in over ten years, she said.

  “Maya’s asking why I don’t practice medicine anymore,” she announced to the group.

  “How could Vandana practice? She was an oncologist; there are no cancer patients here, no hospital here, just the company’s infirmary.”

  “Would you want to work in the infirmary then?” I asked.

  “It has nothing to do with what I was trained for. I don’t want to bandage kids who fall off their bikes and tea pluckers who are bitten by snakes and wives having false labor. That’s not medicine I’m interested in.”

  “Sometimes there must be real illnesses, even cancer, up here?” I said.

  “Yes, in any population there will be some serious illness.” Vandana spoke with exaggerated patience, like she was talking to someone who was not very bright. “But anything serious would be sent down to the city for treatment at a fully equipped hospital.”

  “Do you think we should work just for the sake of working, like women do in America, even if it’s menial or not interesting?” Lalu said to me.

  “I didn’t say that. I was just…”

  “Don’t jump on her, Lalu,” said a woman who hadn’t spoken before, coming to my aid. She looked like a large honeybee, rounded at the middle and dressed in a black and yellow salwar kameez. “Our wealth and our social status come from our husbands’ jobs. But we have no embarrassment about that, and 1 think this is what is new to Maya?”

  “In these remote places where our husbands’ jobs take us, making life palatable for them is a full-time occupation,” said the fat lady from among the cushions. “They could not survive up here without us, and they know it.”

  “There are men here tonight at this dance who are unmarried, but none over thirty, none rank even an assistant manager. The unmarried ones want to marry soon so they can stay here and do well.”

  “And the company is grateful to us. There is an unspoken understanding that the women will take care of the men and the
company will take care of the women—contribute to our lending library, open country clubs and throw garden parties, pay our children’s tuition, our trips to see family, our medical care. Ask your uncle, he will tell you this is how it works.”

  “Come, let’s all go back to the main room. There’s probably a little time for dancing before dinner.”

  In the main room, the one we’d first come into, the candles had been augmented with chandeliers. The dance floor was bordered on one side by couches and settees filled with ladies who weren’t dancing. The orchestra was on another side, and opposite it were the doors to the verandah, open for the night breezes, through which I could see the staff setting up dinner. Directly across the dance floor from the settees was the bar. There and in the rooms behind it were the men.

  I danced with a cluster of ladies to some Hindi film music, and then a Madonna song came on. I tried not to dance the way we danced at home, our eyes blank and unsmiling in a sexy daze, hips slowly rolling. I modified and adjusted my steps to match the women around me so I would not seem so American, so improper. Slow songs were easier. Lalu’s husband, Ravi, came and asked me to dance, and I danced with him the way I would dance with my friends’ fathers at a wedding or a Christmas Party, plenty of air between us, hands held lightly, his hand on my waist, far from my hips.

  One of the unmarried twenty-somethings asked me to dance. Suraj wore dark framed glasses, but his seriousness was undermined by his symmetrical dimples. He told me he was a chemist, he was involved with the processing and preserving of the tea. He asked me about New York and whether I’d ever been to the New York Public Library. He said he’d seen it in the movie Ghostbusters, and he’d heard it was the biggest library anywhere. He said he’d heard there were a lot of Indians in New York now, in a place called Jersey City. I told him that Jersey City was in another state called New Jersey and there were a lot of Indians now, there and in New York both. He was the first person who asked if I missed home and meant America.