Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  “But Reema knows what to look for, and she’s lived in places like this all her life. Please, Maya, I don’t want anything to happen while we’re up here alone that will make Reema or Sanjay or your mother have to worry …”

  “Okay, okay. But how will we talk?”

  Ammamma said Rupa could speak a little English and decent Malayalam, besides being fluent in Tamil and Kannada. Like most servants, she adapted to her employers, and picked up languages like new uniforms as she moved from household to household.

  Rupa sat on the porch all morning. I was trying to make a mix tape on my uncle’s stereo from his old albums so that I could listen to it on my Walkman. He had old Simon and Garfunkel albums, and the Beatles and the Carpenters. He had tapes too, of recent stuff, but nothing I liked.

  After tea, I changed into Nikes and a T-shirt, and put on light cotton salwar pants, wishing I could wear shorts. I went out onto the front verandah and, without even glancing at Rupa sitting there, walked down the steps to the driveway. She got up, folded the clothes she was mending, and left them on a cane chair. She walked after me as I opened the gate. I didn’t wait for her, but I left the gate open behind me.

  I started with a light jog. I took light rabbit steps, trying to keep from kicking up dust. The sun was far down in the sky, but it was still hot, and I felt wetness at my ears, my neck, under my arms. Rupa was not far behind me, if she walked at a brisk pace, she was able to keep up. I thought about the bright red, rubberized track at my high school, and I stepped more deeply, pretending that the ground gave energy back to me, charged me for the next forward motion. My heart pulsed rapidly, trying to keep up with my lungs, absorb all the air I took in, pump air through and out, heart contracting, squeezing. My legs moved effortlessly, leaving me to concentrate on breathing, on trying to keep my mouth lubricated with saliva, resisting and finally giving in to the dry sharpness. My tongue was heavy in my mouth, tasting the dust and the tears that the dust brought to my eyes.

  After another mile or so, I stopped, my hands on my hips, my skin hot. I held my T-shirt away from my body, blew air down the neckhole. I turned around, and Rupa was far behind, panting. As she came closer, I could see she was drenched in sweat, her breathing loud and labored. And she was limping. Thinking she might have hurt herself, I stayed put to let her catch up. But she was limping because the heel on her left chapal had broken. She reached me and stood bent over, taking heavy, heaving breaths.

  “Why don’t you stay here and I’ll finish my run and come back here?” I said.

  She looked at me not comprehending. I pointed at her, and pointed for her to sit where she was. She sat. I pointed at myself, then at the horizon, moved my finger in a circle and then pointed at the ground. She said nothing.

  I turned toward the horizon and started running. When I turned around, she was many paces behind me, running, her chapals held out in front of her. I kept going, and we ran like that, like the engine and caboose of a train, changing speeds in tandem but with hundreds of feet of a long invisible link between us, over and up and down and through the hills.

  RUPA CAME THE next day again. As long as she was here anyway, I wanted to do something adventurous. I’d seen a waterfall on our car trips, Brindha had told me she’d been in the water at the base of it, and that it was cold and clean. I didn’t want my grandmother to worry herself, so I put my swimsuit on under a salwar kameez and didn’t tell her what I was planning. On the verandah, Rupa was playing with a deck of old cards. I beckoned for her to come, and we started walking.

  I walked the same path that we’d taken the previous night, even though I had no idea which direction the waterfall was in. After we’d gotten some distance from the house, I stopped and said to Rupa, “Please take me to the waterfalls.”

  She stopped short right behind me. She had been staring at the ground and walking mechanically, and now she raised her eyes up to look at me.

  “Is there problem, mem?” she asked in English.

  “I want to go to the waterfall,"I said slowly, “you know, where Brindha swims in the water?”

  “Water, mem?” she asked.

  “Pani, water, do you understand?” I said. She looked at me without any recognition in her eyes. I remembered pani was water in Hindi, not in Malayalam. What was the word in Malayalam?

  “Kuli,” I tried the word for “bath,” not able to remember the word for water.

  She understood this, but it did not explain what I wanted her to do.

  I made swimming motions with my arms. I held my nose as if I was going underwater. She giggled. I said, “Evda?”

  She looked back to where we had just come from, toward the house, as if seeking permission from my grandmother. I repeated my question more insistently. I could tell she was trying to decide what kind of violation this was, what size the crime, and what size the possible punishment.

  Finally she nodded and said, “ba,” and I followed behind her on scratchy dirt paths through the thick teabushes. She gestured for me to walk very close behind her, so her shadow would protect me from direct sun. We walked for a long time, almost an hour, and I was beginning to doubt she had understood me after all. Then I heard what sounded like wind chimes tinkling, and Rupa pushed through another few bushes and the waterfall was there in front of us. It wasn’t much of a waterfall right now, the water slowed to gentle trickles over a wall of rock, splashing into the basin at the bottom. On the surface, perfect circles rippled away from unseen magnetic forces, and ended up as lacy foam decorating the point of division between water and shore.

  I stepped out of my salwar pants and pulled the kameez off over my head. I threw these on the ground, but Rupa picked them up and folded them. She sat on a rock nearby with my clothes on her lap, watching me in the water. The water was shallow, five feet in the deepest part, and I tried to stay afloat as much of the time as possible so as not to scrape my feet on the rough stones at the bottom.

  “Why don’t you come in the water,” I said. Rupa shook her head and looked at the ground. She seemed uncomforlable at the thought of having any fun while she was working. She was only a couple of years older than me, though I hadn’t really noticed that before. After the long hot walk, her dark navy salwar was covered in chalky dust up to the knees.

  I splashed her with some water, and it made spots on her clothes. She looked up and smiled, wiping her face clear of the spray with the back of her arm, her face shiny in the sun.

  “Come in the water,” I said in a loud commanding voice. 1 wanted her to feel the force of my voice, to relieve her of responsibility for her actions, so that she could just say later “Maya told me to.” She hesitated, put my clothes down on a flat part of a rock, and stepped out of her chapals. In quick motions, she undressed, and then leapt into the water so that it enveloped her nakedness. She stayed some distance from me in the water, and I kept to my side to respect her modesty, but gestured to her to race me across the basin from her parallel position. I swam a butterfly stroke across and she paddled, but she was strong, and kept up with me until the halfway point. Then, determined to win, I pushed hard into the strokes, breathed deeply, lunged back for the starting side and reached it first.

  Rupa dove under a few times and came up with beautiful purple pebbles and a translucent white stone with one dark vein running through it. She moved right under one of the streams of water coming down so that it was like a tap turned open over her head. “We can come after rains,” she said in Malayalam. “Real waterfall then.” We settled into a routine of her speaking Malayalam to me and my speaking English to her with a few Malayalam words thrown in. Her Malayalam was basic, you could see her making the mental translations in her head, but I envied her unselfconsciousness. I understood everything said around me, but I had not tried to form a whole sentence in Malayalam in years, embarrassed by my childlike grammar.

  We swam around for a while. I got out first and walked a little ways with my back to her so that she could get out and get dressed. I came back to
the water’s edge and sat on the rock next to my clothes, waiting for the sun to dry me a little before dressing. Rupa pointed at my legs, and there were two black marks on my left ankle and one on my calf, black marks that were the length and width of large industrial-strength staples. I peered at them closely, lifting my leg across my lap. She pointed to her own wrist, where there was a similar black staple, and with a quick pinching motion, she pulled it off, and threw it in the sand where it began to wriggle. A wave of repulsion came over me. They were leeches. I asked Rupa to take them off my leg. She looked at me strangely. “Please, mem,” she said shaking her head. “Your family would not want that I do it, better your grandmother do it when we reach the house,” she said.

  She was from a low caste, she wasn’t supposed to touch me. I couldn’t imagine walking the whole way back with those leeches on me, or putting my clothes on over them. “Please,” I asked, looking into her eyes.

  “You are ordering that I do this?” she asked. She did not want to get in trouble.

  “Yes,” I said. She pinched the first one, then the second one and they were gone. The third was stuck in more deeply, she pinched and dug in her fingernails and pulled and it was gone. The soft white underside of my calf, where the last leech had been, had a little blood running from it. She took a leaf and trimmed it down and stuck it on the cut.

  Rupa’s braid had come loose in the swim. As she gathered her hair up off her shoulders to tie it up, I noticed just at the bottom of the back of her neck, another black staple. She tried to look at it over her shoulder, but she couldn’t see it. I swallowed hard, and reached out to try to remove the leech. Rupa moved out of my reach when she saw what I was trying to do.

  “Please, don’t,” she said. “I can’t let you.”

  “You must let me,” 1 said. I hoped it would come out in one pinch, I tried to picture my nails under it, would it feel soft and slimy or hard and brittle?

  “I will wait, Vasani can help me at the house, I will wait,” she said. “Please.”

  But I want to show you I don’t care, I thought. I’m not afraid of your skin, your blood. She looked frightened as I came toward her, moving back as I moved forward. “Please,” she said. Respectfully, but there was real pleading in her voice. I stopped.

  She picked up the smooth pretty pebbles she had collected and offered them to me. I took only one so she could have the others. She tossed them into the bushes, and started walking. She turned to see if I was following close, and I was. I walked in her shadow, my eyes trained on the black mark slashed across the coffee skin all the way home.

  WE WENT ON walks with Brindha’s dog; he was much more demanding now that Reema auntie was away, too. He wanted to stay out on the hills for long periods of time, and he wanted to play games. I liked him, he was a good medium-size dog. The small ones were too much like rats, and I was afraid of the large ones. At five I had been chased around a park by a fierce German shepherd that got close enough to rip off a piece of my winter coat. The owner finally caught up with us and leashed his dog, and then he tried to help me find my mother. We found her inside a phone booth, with her back pressed up against the door. She had seen the dog running loose and taken refuge in the phone booth. Somehow, she hadn’t stopped to wonder where I might be; we had to knock a few times before she turned around slowly and came out.

  Boli had a nice white coat, and I didn’t mind feeding him table scraps at dinner or petting him when he came and sat by me on the verandah. Ammamma said he was calmer than he used to be: he was so hyper as a puppy that they would throw a blanket over him to make him quiet down. Even though he’d grown up, I didn’t think he had much composure. As soon as he saw me, he flipped onto his back and offered me his belly, his eyes glazed in a foolish stupor. Or he tried to get attention by licking my arm, my foot, the buckles of my sandals, anything within reach. It’s in his nature, Ammamma said, but he wanted more from me than I wanted to give. He had the run of the house, he was never locked up. If I wanted some peace, I had to tell Sunil or Vasani to come drag him out of the room and then I had to lock myself in. This was not so bad, because it became an excuse for privacy—otherwise the doors were never kept closed, everyone coming and going without knocking or asking.

  The one time I wanted Boli around was for walks. The tea pluckers loved him, and it made it less awkward when we ran into them, because I couldn’t talk to them, and Rupa wouldn’t. She held herself apart from them. They were country people, she told me, she at least was from the village. Boli ran round and round their skirts, and they put their baskets down, brimming with tea leaves, and picked him up and nuzzled him. He liked this, though he squirmed out of their clutch at the first glimpse of bird or mouse. The youngest of the girls who worked on the tea were probably younger than me, and the oldest women had white hair and earlobes stretched from half a century of wearing thick gold earrings. They were shoeless, with brown paste spread over their feet and hands. Rupa said this was a mix of tobacco paste and herbs that kept insects from biting them. They wore sari blouses that stuck to them with sweat and dark cotton lungis wrapped around their skinny waists. They worked quickly, each taking a bush, picking only the tender tips, the bud and the first two leaves of each stem.

  Soon after the women worked through a whole section and moved on, two men appeared with machetes. They pruned the bushes with a few deft strokes, and then dropped their knives by the side of the road and smoked and called out teasingly to the women bent over at work. Rupa said if the tea shrubs were not pruned, they would grow into trees. It would be too hard to pick the leaves then, and there would be fewer tender buds.

  Just then, Boli started barking loudly, and as we looked to see what had claimed his interest, he was drowned out by the approaching helicopters. The tea pluckers shielded their eyes to stare up at the sleek silver insects. As they passed directly over us, papers rained down on our heads. I unfolded a square of white paper to stare at the faces of Subha and Sivarasan. Beneath their pictures was a picture of a wad of bills, making the cash award for their capture clear even to illiterates. The pluckers clutched the photos and chattered excitedly, and I looked at Rupa, who would not look at me. What did she know? Would she ever tell me if I asked? The more I knew her, the less I hoped she knew. Yet, the more I knew her, the more I hoped she’d share what she knew. She was no longer a remote person, no longer an anonymous brush with danger, and history. She crumpled the paper in her hands and then thought better of it, opening it and smoothing it out. She made herself busy collecting the papers littering the path, putting a rock on top of a sheaf of them. As if the outdoors were a great big house she could tidy up and bring some order to.

  Boli bounded into the bushes after one of his favorite girls and we waited on the path for him to come back. After some time passed, I called his name loudly, and then Rupa did the same. We waded through the bushes, and saw far ahead of us the bobbing heads of the women working farther down the hill. Rupa told me to wait, that she would go down and bring him back, but I went with her, trying to hold my arms in close to my body to keep from getting scratched up.

  The women were entering a straw hut. The baskets of green leaves were lined up neatly in the clearing. Rupa and I heard Boli barking and we walked into the hut. There was incense and clouds of smoke and torches lit at a stone altar. Women were kneeling on the floor chanting, and each went to the altar and prostated herself before leaving. I squinted to see the altar through all the smoke, looking for a statue of Shiva or Vishnu or Lakshmi. But all I saw was a little pile of twigs, lying on a faded piece of silk. Boli was crouched on the floor between two women and I tried to reach him without stepping on anyone. I gathered him in my arms and headed for the square of daylight at the back of the hut. We were outside again, with fresh air, and light.

  “What was that?” I said. “Who is that temple for?”

  “It is just an altar they’ve set up for praying at the end of the workday,” Rupa said.

  I’d never seen an altar like t
hat, there was no icon or anything, just those sticks. “Who are they worshipping?” She didn’t understand me. 1 reeled off names of common gods, “Shiva? Parvati? Vishnu?”

  “No, it is not for any of our gods. These are country people, I told you, it is just for some god of theirs, the spirit of sticks or sun or tea leaves, who knows.”

  I thought of temples I’d been in with my family, the elaborate architecture, marble pillars, gold and silver necklaces and hundred-rupee notes lying on big trays in front of statues of our gods. Statues painted in blues and reds and blacks, glossy from butter and oil, with aggressive, sometimes leering smiles. People crowded between the rails, leaning into those in front, waiting to drop coins in little boxes before making a full circle around each statue’s shrine. My mother hunted for enough change in her purse, my father stood on another line to pay the priest the fees listed on a big menu for special prayers with our names in them. You could purchase prayers for specific good things, like good grades, good marriages, many children. If you paid a little extra, my father said, the priest would recite prayers for good things you didn’t even know to ask for.

  RUPA CAME EVERY day, and as we embarked on our various excursions we built a vocabulary of our own, mostly laughter and nudging and nodding interspersed with broken Malayalam. We rarely spent any time indoors because Rupa would not sit on the living-room couches or lounge on my bed or eat at the dining table, and it strained my idea of our friendship to see her crouched over her food in the corner of the kitchen or watching a television program squatting at my feet. So our world was the world out of doors, where we were equals before birds and snakes and fish. Ammamma would let us eat our lunch on the verandah, and when we were finally exhausted, we descended onto the twin porch swings and rocked ourselves into afternoon naps. Rupa went home to her brothers at the end of the day, I was not Brindha’s age after all, and Ammamma had not hired her to stay the nights and ward off monsters in closets. Some days, we were so caught up in whatever we were doing that Rupa would have missed the last bus home if 1 didn’t make Ram drive us to meet the bus.