Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  “Seventy-one is not that old, Ammamma. We know lots of people older than you.”

  “Yes, but unfortunately, not so many I am close to. Your grandfather’s family, they have weak hearts, his three brothers died in their sixties soon after your grandfather. And my two brothers, they’re not well. I would rather not live than be bedridden like them.”

  “I’m bedridden,” I said, trying to make her smile.

  “It’s not the same. I sit by your bed, and each day I see you more lively, less tired, light in your eyes, restlessness in your legs. It’s not like that when you’re old. Lying in a bed when you’re old, it saps the strength, the light leaves the eyes.”

  My grandmother opened her armoire and took out her stuffed black leather address book. She opened it and ran her finger down a page, sight-reading, and then tore the page out. Then another, and another. “I should have done this a long time ago,” she said. I picked up one of the pages on my bed, and looked at the people listed there, some with many addresses, some with maiden names and married names both, the names of children and grandchildren written in the margin.

  “Are all these people … gone?” I said. She nodded. Just before tearing out another page, she stopped.

  “Look here,” she said. “This is the doctor that delivered you. I wonder if she is still alive.”

  “Who was she, Ammamma?”

  “Dr. Bose. She was the only lady doctor in our town, one of the first who was granted entry into India’s best medical school. Your grandfather was impressed with her—he wanted your mother to grow up to be a doctor like Dr. Bose. We were all dear friends.”

  “Then why don’t you know where she is now?”

  My grandmother would not look at me. She spoke in a flat voice. “Some things are too old to talk about. Shall we go back to the writing, to your memories?”

  “These are my memories, too, Ammamma,” I said. The ones 1 couldn’t forget because I had never known them. “These years before 1 was born. And the years I lived with you when I was a baby. How did that happen?”

  “When your mother was six months pregnant, she came back to us from America. Your father brought her and had to go back in a few days, he didn’t have much leave from his job, he’d only been at that company for a short time.”

  “Didn’t Dad mind not being here when I was born?”

  “I’m sure he wished he could be, but he couldn’t come here for a longer stay, and we didn’t want her to be in America for her first child. We wanted her to come even sooner, but she had her job and had to stay on to finish some things. She came near the end of her sixth month, for her lying-in. In those days it was customary to have a time of confinement, when a girl would be with her mother and the women in her family, and everyone could watch over her.”

  “I must have missed my mother when she went back to New York.” I said it as both statement and question. I couldn’t call up memories of what I had felt as a baby, but I often suspected I could still know what it had been like.

  “I think you missed her, but you were so young, only three months. Your mother had been breastfeeding you, so it took some time for you to adjust to milk powder, you lost a few pounds and made us nervous. But you were eating and making sounds and banging on toys in no time.”

  “And Mother just left me like that. Just went back to New York.”

  “At the time, it seemed like the best thing. Your mother and father came to visit once every year, we sent them pictures of everything, your baby steps, your pretty dresses, your blessing at the temple. We did everything for you that we imagined they would do.”

  “But Ammamma, I didn’t even know really that you were not my mother. When I went to America, I kept wondering why you sent me to live with this nice auntie and uncle who used to visit us.”

  “We tried when they visited to explain to you who they were. You were shy, and we didn’t want to push you. We hoped in time you would understand.”

  “Understand what? That my mother didn’t take me with her because I would have been in the way?”

  “Maya, don’t be so hard on your parents, they want everything to be good in your life.”

  “Ammamma, you don’t have to protect them. Sometimes, I see Mother look at me like she’s reminding herself she even has a kid. I wonder if she didn’t really want to have one. I’ve never said that to her because I know she’ll deny it.”

  “It’s not true, Maya. They very much wanted children. They were so happy when your mother found out she was expecting, I remember the phones were down and your mother reaching us by telegram to tell us.”

  “But having a baby doesn’t mean just having it. They tell us that over and over again at school. You’re supposed to stay around and take care of it. That’s how you prove you’re a good mother.”

  “You have to believe your mother loves you.”

  “Why should 1 believe that, Ammamma? We don’t talk, we’re not close, it’s just not that way.”

  “Maybe it will get better, when you’re not a teenager anymore and there aren’t so many things to have conflict over.”

  “The older I get, the less I need them. When I did need them, when I was a kid, they didn’t bother. “

  “Was it so hard for you back then? I hoped you would like it in America.”

  “Everything was so new. I was scared of sleeping in my room, I’d never slept without you. I kept waiting for my real life to start again, to come back to our old house here with you and Sanjay uncle and that old monkey we had, remember Kiki?”

  “How could I forget Kiki?” Ammamma extended her arm, where there were still sharp scars of the monkey’s teethmarks at her wrist. “Maya, it’s been a mistake to let you think these things for so many years. When I hear you blame your mother, I realize it’s not right to let this continue. A lot of what happened back then was my fault.”

  “Your fault, Ammamma?”

  The servants had come in many times to ask us what to do about dinner. Ammamma sent them away again before she turned to me.

  “It was my idea for you to stay with me. I thought that would be best.”

  “But why didn’t Mother stay here too?”

  “Because she wasn’t well. We thought it would help for her to go back to New York.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t well? What was wrong with her?”

  “She was in a depression after your birth, it wasn’t improving even after a few months.”

  “So she felt better by being far away from me?”

  “You’re not understanding … maybe I’m not explaining properly. Your mother doesn’t talk about this, so I never thought I would tell you. But if it makes you resent her less, it is better for everyone.”

  Ammamma looked so serious. She got up to arrange the netting around my bed, it was getting darker and the bugs were coming out. She sat on a chair next to the bed. But I wanted to see her face as she talked, so I picked up a corner of the net and made her creep under it and sit on my bed.

  “It was my fault.” Ammamma put her hands over her face.

  “What, Ammamma?” I said, sitting up straighter. My bad arm lay stiff on the blanket next to her, but I reached over with the other arm to touch her. She shivered for a second when I did that.

  “When your mother was pregnant with you, I was the one who said she must come to India for your birth. That she should honor tradition. She offered to fly me to New York or to come in the months after your birth, but I told her that was not enough. Your father urged her to do what I wanted, he had only been married two years, he felt like he knew nothing about children being born, and that she was safer with us.

  “She came, and in the last six weeks of her pregnancy, she wasn’t well. I was glad she was with us, she had complete bed rest as the doctor instructed, and we could look after everything. I prepared her food by myself, not trusting the servants to cook without butter or ghee or any kind of nuts or tomatoes or the other things your mother was sensitive to. She was like you are now,
only able to walk for a few minutes before tiring, thirsty all the time, sleepless at night because she had lain in bed all day.

  “We had Dr. Bose, who I told you we thought was a very good doctor. I still think she was a good doctor, there are some things no doctor can control … There was another baby, Maya, besides you, your twin, and she died nineteen days after you were both born.”

  I took my hand back from Ammamma. Part of me wanted to know everything she was saying and the other part of me kept chanting this is not real, this can’t be real. Ammamma got out from the netting and went to her armoire and pulled out an old knapsack. She brought it with her back to the bed. She dumped the knapsack out and there were two sunbonnets, two rattles, two bibs, two tarnished, streaked silver spoons.

  “Your mother took it very hard, she was afraid to get attached to you. And she didn’t want comfort from any of us, especially me. Your mother believed if she had been in New York, they might have saved your sister. And your father was far away; communication was difficult—he did not even know the other baby had died for another three days, and there were still presents coming in the mail for weeks after that he’d already mailed, presents that came in twos. Your mother would cry every day when she saw the mail carrier coming to the house.

  “The more your mother pushed me away, the guiltier I felt. I tried to do everything for you. I wanted to still be good at mothering someone, even if not my own daughter.

  “I don’t know if anything would have turned out differently in New York, I only know that I disregarded your mother’s wish to stay there, to have her babies in the new country she had come to know and trust. It seemed so important then that she be here, that she share this birth with the family. I wanted you—and your sister—to be ours, not just hers. It was selfish, and everything might have been different.

  “I read in the paper about miracle babies in America, five babies born at a time, at three pounds, two pounds, each. I think how our other little one might still be alive over there.”

  “What was her name?” I tried to ask in a regular tone of voice but it came out in a cracked whisper.

  “Shivani would have been her name. But she died before the name-day ceremony.”

  “Everyone knows? Sanjay uncle, Reema auntie, Daddy’s whole family?”

  “Yes, everyone knows. Because they were either there for your birth or they were coming for the name-day ceremony. We had it still, but your mother couldn’t take part, she was sedated by the doctor for most of it. She refused to talk to the guests in the house.”

  “And no one thought of telling me?”

  “Your mother never wanted it talked about. Many people are superstitious about things like that, she did not want them to say your life would be marred by it. That’s why she never had a horoscope made for you. She did not want you to find out anything that would make you think your life had been unlucky.”

  “But you could have told me 1 had a sister, I should have been told that.”

  “When would we have told you, Maya? When you were four, and screaming in your parents’ arms? Or when you were nine and had an imaginary friend you told us was because your parents never gave you a brother or sister? When you were here in the summers and seemed happy and at home?”

  “I don’t know when. But maybe I wouldn’t feel like I didn’t know myself now.”

  “Don’t blame your mother for that. Blame me,” Ammamma said.

  That would be much harder. I had spent too many years thinking of everything a certain way. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I slipped down lower on the pillows and closed my eyes. Ammamma gently lifted the net to exit, then tucked it back. She went to the kitchen and came back in a little while.

  “Are you hungry? Do you think you might be ready for some food or do you want another electrolyte drink?” she said. She had a thali plate with her. There was rice in the middle, and on the side compartments, yogurt, dal, a piece of lime pickle, and a small mound of coarse sea salt.

  I was hungry. She lifted the mosquito net and sat next to me. At first Ammamma mixed the food in the palm of her hand, and lined it up in spoon-size lumps for me to eat myself. But when I lost interest in eating after a few spoonfuls, she insisted on feeding me by hand. With each clump of rice, she alternated a dab of dal or a dab of yogurt, and touched it against the salt and the pickle for flavor. She scooped too much in her hand one time, and dal dribbled on my chin and the front of my salwar. I wiped my face with my good left arm, and tried to pick the lentil pieces off the front of my shirt. I put the remnants on the side of the plate.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She swabbed at my shirt with the end of her sari.

  “Can you bring me another salwar kameez, please?” I said plaintively.

  She brought me clothes from Reema auntie’s closet and then stood outside the door. I was wearing my aunt’s oldest salwars, the ones that were out of fashion now, because they were the loose flowing style and easier to pull on and off with my one good hand. Once I had it on I got under the covers, and Ammamma came in, tucked the nets around me, and sat in her chair knitting blindly in the dark, watching as I went to sleep.

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE next morning, Ammamma brought her chair near the bed and filled her pen with ink.

  I didn’t want to do the notebooks and the remembering anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the way I remembered things the same.

  “I’m bored,” I said. “Can I walk around?”

  We walked out of my room for the first time, just the length of the hall. There were good smells from the kitchen. “Let’s go in there,” I said. My grandmother walked me there, and Sunil and Matthew jumped to their feet. Ammamma told Matthew to bring me a mat to sit on. After watching me for a few minutes, Sunil and Matthew went back to squatting on their haunches. Sunil was sifting rice on a fine cane mat, separating out the husks and stones. Matthew was grinding spices, making garam masala for the week’s curries. Coriander seeds and leaves, cumin seeds, whole peppercorns. Cardamom teased out of its jacket, cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, fresh nutmeg.

  “Write these things in the notebook, Ammamma,” I said. “How much garam masala for alu gobi, how much for channa. And write the way you make okra, Daddy says his favorite way is the way you make it. And bitter gourd fritters, too.”

  Ammamma brought a notebook to the kitchen and flipped to a clean page. She took out a teaspoon, and the sugarbowl and kept putting sugar into the spoon with her fingers. She said she had to figure out how many pinches of things equaled how many spoons.

  “Tomorrow, can we have okra so I can learn how to make it?”

  “Maya, you’re not well enough to eat that yet, you still have a weak stomach.”

  “Then I don’t have to eat it, Sunil can eat it. I just want to see how you make it. If you wait till I’m better, Reema auntie won’t want me hanging around the kitchen. So let’s do everything now.”

  Ammamma told Matthew to pluck some green plaintain for tomorrow. And to bring some okra from the market for the day after that. And some chicken.

  “But only a small portion. For two people only,” she said gravely in Malayalam. She whispered to me so he wouldn’t hear, “Wait until he sees it’s all for them!”

  Ammamma helped me to the front porch for a few minutes. This time of day, the sunlight was directly on us. It was the first time I felt sun warm my face since the day of the fall, and it felt good, a warm, glowing reunion. Then I saw black spots before me, black and purple flashing spots, and my head hurt. We went back inside.

  Ammamma asked in the afternoon if it was okay that the servants came into our room and she finished their letters home. Their families would have missed hearing from them these days that she had neglected them and been occupied with me. Matthew and Vasani sat on the floor at the side of my bed, and Ammamma sat in her chair. She did not try to make them have spelling lessons or drag out the dictations today. I wanted to sit up and watch, so another chair was brought for me.

  When the letters w
ere finished, Matthew brought cooked rice from the kitchen to use to seal the envelopes. Ammamma wrote the destinations on the outside in her graceful hand, and gave Matthew and Vasani their letters. They received them gingerly, like they were being entrusted with sacred stone tablets. As they got up to leave, Vasani shyly extracted a folded-up piece of paper from her skirts, and showed it to Ammamma. Vasani had traced out her alphabet letters just under Ammamma’s handwriting. Each letter had many bumps, where the pen had lifted off and returned to the paper, and the ink was thick from pressing the nib hard. Ammamma was pleased, sometimes she had to push Vasani to complete her lessons. Ammamma wrote out five more letters, large and looping, and took Vasani’s hand in hers, tracing over the letters so that Vasani started and ended in the one sweep that Ammamma used. Matthew and 1 looked on, and Ammamma took out more paper for him to write on. I took a piece of paper from her lap and drew the same letter Vasani and Ammamma had just drawn, a planet with a ring around it and an upward pointing tail. Then an oval-shaped planet, with two rings and a diagonal. Ammamma corrected the angle of the tail, once I had the shape of it, she told me to shrink it down to size. I repeated the downscaled letter five or ten times in a row. We filled up sheets and sheets like that, big bulky letters followed by their offspring of baby letters. Afraid of dampening my interest, Ammamma only told me afterward that I’d been learning to write Tamil, not Malayalam. She taught the servants Tamil so they could communicate with their families; she suggested separate lessons in Malayalam for me, and I agreed to try it for a while.

  At night, Ammamma came into my room with a pickle jar covered with cloth. 1 was not sleeping but the lights were off in the room. They had been so dim that night because of the load-shedding that they were not useful at all. The nets had come down for the night, and 1 was lying there listening to the wheezing ceiling fan.

  “Sunil helped me with these,” my grandmother said. She ducked under the netting and sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She removed the cloth cover and waved the jar through the air. Blinking lights tumbled out and took flight. Fireflies winged through the air, occasionally bumping into the nets and falling in straight vertical drops, then readjusting themselves. It felt magical.