Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  “You’re still young, but you’ll get the picture soon. Last time I came to India, my grandmother, the one on my mother’s side, she sat me down and told me the whole Sita story to warn me to be a good girl. Your Ammamma seems nice, but watch out for what you tell her. Grandmothers are the worst. They don’t understand that things change.”

  I wished Madhu wouldn’t keep thinking of me as so young. But I hadn’t understood what she was saying about Sita. Sita was the goddess who was the wife of the god Rama. There were many stories about their courtship and their marriage, and the epic battle against the evil demon-king who abducted Sita and held her prisoner, Rama, his brother, and a whole army of celestial monkeys rescued Sita and brought her back home to their kingdom. Everyone knew these stories, they were constantly retold as bedtime stories, television serials, dance dramas, comic strips. When Madhu didn’t elaborate on her own, 1 finally asked, “What does the Sita story have to do with being a good girl?”

  Madhu settled herself on one of the stone benches at the far end of the garden, and I sat down next to her. She said, “Do you know what happens after Sita is rescued from the demon world?”

  I thought that was the ending. Sita and Rama went home to rule their kingdom happily ever after.

  “That’s what all kids think,” Madhu said. Her grandmother had told Madhu that after Sita’s long imprisonment, Sita had to prove she was still pure. She was not fit to be Rama’s wife again if she had been with any other man, even against her will. Sita gave her word of honor that she was pure, but they made her take a test of purity, she had to walk unscathed through fire. She passed the test, but there were still rumors spreading in their kingdom that she had sinned. She lost the trust of her people, and, eventually, of her husband. Sita was heartbroken and she asked Mother Earth to swallow her up. Mother Earth took her in. Rama went on to have a long and prosperous reign by himself.

  “Your grandmother told you that?” I had never heard this ending before. It wasn’t enough that Sita was good. Everyone had to believe she was good, and they didn’t.

  “I’m sure your grandmother will soon too. Mine wanted me to know that’s how much purity matters in India. She warned me about preserving my morals in that underworld of England. After that, I wouldn’t exactly come back here with my boyfriend on my arm, would I?”

  I couldn’t remotely imagine bringing Steve here either. His hair was never clean, and it was too long, and he was always wearing a baseball cap. And he was not Indian, not Hindu, not Malayali, not high-caste.

  “Is your boyfriend Indian?” I said in a casual voice, like it was just another quality like any other quality, like having red hair, or being tall.

  “No, his name’s Perry.” Madhu laughed, 1 could tell she was thinking about him, about some happy memory. “Definitely not Indian.”

  “So he’ll be there in Goa with your friends?” I said.

  “No, 1 told you this is a hen party, all girls before Marg/s wedding.”

  “So maybe Reema auntie won’t mind, since it’s all girls,” I said. It was my first glimmer of hope.

  “God, they see everything in this narrow way,” Madhu said scornfully. “I know I can only come back here a few more times before my life will be too incomprehensible to them.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Like when I’m thirty, what if I’m not married? I won’t come here and let everyone feel sorry for me. They’ll say my parents neglected me by not arranging a marriage for me. Or, worse, what if 1 marry someone Pakistani or poor or both?”

  “Your mother’s family’s poor, so maybe that’s okay?” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized maybe I wasn’t supposed to know that, but I’d heard it from one of Reema auntie’s sisters. And Madhu had mentioned how they had no shoes or anything in that village.

  Madhu paused, looked at me, and decided not to feel insulted. “Well, they weren’t poor when she married my dad—her parents lost their family business later, otherwise I’m sure his family wouldn’t have let the marriage happen. Listen to Reema auntie’s friends talk about marriages for their daughters. They talk about a marriage between equals. That doesn’t mean education, or equal rights for women. That means money.”

  “But arranged marriages aren’t so bad.” Sometimes Madhu seemed ready to get rid of everything, and I wasn’t sure what would be left to hold on to, to be proud of. “I mean, look at my parents or yours. They’re happy,” I said. Thinking of my parents, I said, “Or at least as happy as my friends’ parents are in their nonarranged marriages. “

  “I’m not saying it never works, Maya. I’m just saying it leaves a lot of people out. In England, we’re all the same, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi. We’re more the same than we are like anyone else in England. But here, if I married a Paki, some of our relatives would never talk to me again.”

  “Paki is for Pakistanis?” I said.

  “You’ve never heard that before? It’s not a very nice word for Pakistanis. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the word, but people say it in England as an insult. Not just to Pakistanis, to me, anyone dark.”

  I didn’t know any Bangladeshis. I knew some Pakistanis, but I’d never thought about whether that was important, to my parents or anyone else. Sumeer at school was Pakistani and Muslim, but I didn’t find out until we were all at a baseball game and we had to ask around for kosher hot dogs.

  “What do Americans say? What do they call you?” Madhu asked, curious.

  They didn’t call me anything. Or not usually. There weren’t enough Indians around for us to be noticed. When I was in the first grade, I remembered making headbands out of construction paper to stick paper feathers in for recreating the First Thanksgiving. Some kids asked me if I could bring in a real headdress from home, since I was Indian. Now, there were more Indians, people knew who we were, that we were from somewhere else. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  “I’ve heard them say ‘Dothead’ to other kids at school,” I offered. “And when I was walking home from school one day last year, a kid yelled ‘Hindu’ at me, from the window of aschoolbus.”

  “Hindu?” Madhu thought that was funny. “That’s just like Paki. It’s not intrinsically demeaning—in your case, it’s actually true. But people use it in this hateful way. Imagine if I started yelling ‘Italian’ on a tube platform in London! They’d think I was another crazy homeless person. “

  I remembered when that kid had yelled “Hindu,” I didn’t feel like it was true about me, it seemed like a curse-word. In my head, it looked like ‘Hindoo,’ the way it looked in old racist history books and Walt Whitman poems.

  After Madhu went inside, I made one last attempt with my aunt. She was at the other end of the garden, instructing the gardener on how to space newly whittled wooden stakes among the chili pepper plants. Reema auntie was using cloth rags as mitts to pluck the chilis, they were so hot they would burn her skin. She was wearing sunglasses that were large and round on her face, like Jackie O. She showed me the chilis nestled in the rag in her hand, two gnarled green ones, and one firm-skinned, shiny red one.

  “If you even look at these for too long, your eyes will start to water,” my aunt said. “Sanjay likes pakora made from these peppers. 1 was thinking I would tell Matthew to serve that tonight before dinner.”

  “Reema auntie, I was talking to Madhu about Goa. And she says her boyfriend isn’t even coming. It’s all girls, so won’t it be okay if I go?”

  My aunt paused, then leaned forward across the row of plants toward me. “I’ll come in with you. Take my glasses, will you. I don’t want to touch my face.”

  1 reached out and slipped the glasses over her ears and off. She walked with me to the door, motioning for me to open it. I trailed her to the kitchen, where she put the peppers next to the sink and lathered her hands with soap.

  “These things are difficult to talk about,” she said.

  “What things?” I said.

  My aunt took my hands in her chapped wet on
es and looked straight at me. “We love Madhu, but she is not any kind of example. We could never take her to a company party or the nice places we take you. She would make too many people upset with her opinions and the things she does.”

  “But—”

  “Look, Maya,” my aunt said, with an edge of exasperation. “It’s up to you. You can come here and be a tourist, do whatever you like to do, or you can come here and be a member of this family, with responsibilities and obligations. You choose.”

  My aunt’s watch had accidentally gotten wet. I took my hand out of her grip to use the hem of my kameez to swab at her watch. My aunt took the watch off her arm, shaking it, holding it up to her ear.

  “Can you hear something,” I said.

  “No, I guess not. I always think I should be able to hear the sound of time passing, but I don’t think this watch ever made sounds. I think it’s working still.”

  “That grandfather clock in the hall makes enough sound for everyone to hear time passing,” I said, trying to find something safe to talk about.

  “We bought that last summer, at Brindha’s request. When your grandmother had her heart problems, Brindha was upset, she was afraid Ammamma would leave us at any time. She wanted a clock that rang out the hours, so she could break from her games and her studies and go and check on Ammamma and make sure she was resting and breathing easily, that everything was okay. Brindha wanted to sleep in Ammamma’s room, but she’s too restless a sleeper, she woke Ammamma too often, so we convinced her to stay in her own room.”

  I felt bad about the last few weeks, about not having paid more attention, been more aware of my grandmother’s presence. I would be better about it, even if it meant staying home more, doing less fun things.

  “So maybe 1 should stay here with Ammamma while Madhu and you and Sanjay uncle are away?” I wanted to make peace with Reema auntie.

  “That would be good, it would make us worry less about her.”

  We didn’t talk about what she had said about Madhu, and I didn’t tell Madhu either. I wanted to tell Reema auntie she didn’t understand. One day would she say about me what she said about Madhu? “We love Maya, but…” But what?

  Everyone was leaving. On the verandah were Madhu’s luggage and big orange steel-frame backpack, my aunt’s carpetbags and vanity case, my uncle’s lone black carryall looking like an oversized dob kit. The assembly of servants and Ammamma, and me. I held on to Boli, waving goodbye as the car muttered to itself, slowly gathering speed.

  Watching for the car to come up over the neighboring hill, I saw movement among the teabushes. The pluckers, who worked section by section throughout the day, emerged en masse like a cloud of grasshoppers. I finally saw the car pop up on the horizon, just the profile outlined sharply by morning glare, and then it was gone.

  I turned to go back in the house, and my grandmother was standing in the doorway, her eyes on the same horizon. We were alone now.

  She asked, “Shall I have Matthew serve breakfast?”

  I was not hungry yet, and preferred a bath first. But I wanted to keep her company, start things out on the right foot. I said, “Yes, sure, we can eat now.”

  “Actually,” my grandmother said, “today is a fast day for me.”

  I had forgotten this. I realized that meant all day I would eat my meals alone.

  “But come have breakfast,” my grandmother said. “I’ll sit with you, drink some water.”

  “No, that’s not necessary,” I said. “Besides, won’t it be tempting to sit in front of food? When Mother’s on a diet, she never comes to the dinner table, she says it’s too dangerous.”

  “It’s not like a diet,” my grandmother said.

  “Oh,” I said, as if I understood. If I was the only one eating, and I wasn’t keeping her waiting, then I’d do what I wanted. I said, “I think I’ll bathe first.”

  “Of course,” my grandmother said. “Whatever you want to do is fine.”

  I told Vasani to bring hot water into my bathroom. I was out of shampoo, and I looked at the shampoo bottles Brindha had left on the window ledge, “Fair Beauty” and “Beautisoft.” I opened one and it smelled strong, the way a perm smelled the first day you washed it after the salon and there was still a lot of chemicals.

  I went to the guestroom and the bathroom there to see if Madhu had left any good shampoo behind. There was nothing on the countertops or on the sink. I looked on the shelf under the sink, and there were some things there. No shampoo, but a bottle of sunblock. I also saw Madhu had left her hairbrush behind, it was a nice wood-handled one with a wide paddle, it made her hair straight and smooth. Looking at the brush closely, I saw blonde hair mixed in with the black. There was also a wheel of pills on the shelf, and looking at the dates, and the punched out spots for each of them, I could tell they were birth-control pills, just like the ones Jennifer brought home after trips to the doctor with her mom.

  Madhu thought I was so young. She wouldn’t think to tell me—she would say sex wasn’t a big deal anyway—but I sort of wish she had. Just to talk to someone. I collected the sunblock, and the hairbrush, and the pills, and took them to my room. I dragged out my suitcase from under the bed, and I dumped Madhu’s stuff in a side pocket, alongside Brindha’s Tiger clippings and her movie magazines. Then I took my bath, resigned to the noxious shampoo.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Solitude

  THE HOUSE WAS quiet. No kids, no guests, no visitors. My grandmother and I talked in low tones. Boli was subdued. The servants still came every day. Even with just us here, they had a lot to do. Less laundry and less ironing, but the house needed cleaning every day—dust and insects resettled on every surface soon after it was swept. And the garden still grew at its furious pace, fruit needed to be picked, flowers to be weeded, grass to be cut with the shiny dull-bladed scythe. And food—Matthew still cooked as if we had a full house. Ammamma and I sat down to tea and Matthew had made banana appam, two kinds of vada, and three kinds of chutney.

  “Ammamma, you have to tell him to stop making so much food for us.”

  “He must know we can’t eat all this. I think he’s calculated so that Sunil can eat to his heart’s content while Reema’s away, “Ammamma said. Usually Matthew and Sunil and the other servants would eat whatever rice or vegetable we ate, but not the chicken or fish at dinner, unless there was some small piece left over, not the teatime snacks or the desserts. Now, because Reema auntie was not here to oversee the cooking, they were getting five-course dinners out of it.

  “Wouldn’t Reema auntie want us to say something?”

  “She might, but I can’t be bothered, it’s not that big an infringement. They don’t mean any harm, they never steal outright from us. When Reema’s back in three weeks, she can run a tight ship again, but it’s not in my nature.”

  My grandmother said things like that, “it’s not in my nature.” It sounded permanent and immutable, like no one could ever make her be a different kind of person. I could not say things like that. “My nature” could change at any time, I felt like I was made up of the drops of mercury that were inside a thermometer that could move—shoot rapidly up or down, break into pieces, re-form—when you least expected it.

  We’d had two days already of breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners. Four-hour blocks of time in between each of those meals needed to be filled. I tried sitting with my grandmother, but I was nervous that if we talked between meals then we might run out of things to say at the table. Food, the servants, the weather. My mother, my father, my school, my summer assignments. I had to think a few sentences ahead, so I didn’t say anything stupid. I spoke slowly and made my vowels very round and my consonants very hard so she followed everything. She was polite and nonjudgmental about everything, but when I talked about New York to her, it was watered down, drained of life. I told her a version of my life filmed in black and white.

  She was also nervous with me, she was worried she didn’t know how to entertain me. She was relieved when I told
her 1 was going to read or listen to music, these were things I liked doing, and they didn’t require anything of her, and we were both happy.

  She was less happy when I went outside. The garden was okay, safe enough, but I liked to go outside the gate, to walk around, check things out. She wasn’t able to keep up with me and she didn’t want me out there alone. She feared I would lose my way or maybe get hurt.

  In the early evening on the second day, I went jogging. I’d done almost no exercise since coming here, and swim team tryouts were the week before school started. There was nowhere to swim, but at least running helped my breathing, my endurance. To remember my path home, I ran directly into the sun, picking the westward side of every fork.

  On the third day, after breakfast, there was a girl on the front porch. It was Rupa, Brindha’s ayah.

  “What’s she doing here? She must know Brindha’s back at school, “I asked.

  “I called Rupa here to show you around when you go walking,” my grandmother said.

  “You mean, to follow me around? I don’t need her, send her back down the mountain.”

  “Maya, please, it’s better to have someone with you.”

  “A babysitter? Brindha’s ten, Ammamma, I’m fifteen. I don’t believe this.”

  “She’s not babysitting you. When you’re here at the house, you can go about as you please. But when you go outside, she’ll go with you, I’ll tell her to stay ten steps behind if you want, so she won’t disturb you.”

  “I can’t even talk to her, she doesn’t speak any English. This is a crazy idea.” It was an even crazier idea that Ammamma was inviting a Tamil Tiger back into our home. Or someone with Tiger connections. But I couldn’t tell her that.

  “Maya, we’re five miles from any neighbor, and there’s snakes and wild animals out there, someone should be with you.”

  “There’s snakes out there when Reema auntie goes walking, too. She just takes her chances. That’s what living’s about, Ammamma.”