Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  I tried to think of all the things my grandmother had said all summer, and what she would have said right now if she could have, and what my mother needed to hear. Jennifer had read to us at her last slumber party from a book about channeling spirits, and I wished I could remember what she had taught us.

  I looked at my mother, her shoulders limp, strands of hair stuck damply to her face. I said, “Mother, Ammamma forgives you. She wasn’t angry. She told me to tell you that.”

  My mother, turning the words over in her head, eyed me hungrily, seeking more. “What else did she say? What else did she tell you?”

  “She told me everything.”

  “Everything?” my mother enunciated the word.

  “About when J was born. And Shivani dying. And how no one knew how to comfort you.”

  “Why is it when something terrible happens, you need it to be someone’s fault. It mattered to me so much then to shut her out and make her feel guilty. Now it seems pathetic,” my mother said in a low voice, raspy from crying.

  “When I had my accident this summer, she wanted to prove to you that you could trust her. She said returning me healthy to you was the most important thing she could do for you. She wanted you to know that she took good care of me. That was the last thing she told me,” I said. My mother was ambushed by fresh tears. She came over to me and knelt next to my chair and I moved toward the edge of the chair so she could put her hands all the way around my waist. We hadn’t touched each other in more than a perfunctory way in a very long time. She lowered her head onto my lap and awkwardly, we held each other.

  I didn’t tell her that the real last thing Ammamma had told me was to take care of my mother. I couldn’t take care of my mother, in general, but I could try to do that right now. It was like all the generations had gotten mixed up, and I understood what Ammamma meant, but I didn’t want my mother to take it the wrong way. The time you probably needed your mother the most was when your mother was dying. And because Ammamma could not be there for her daughter through that, I think Ammamma wanted me to be her surrogate. So I tried to help my mother, but eventually, I wanted my rightful role back. My mother had to be a mother, I didn’t want her thinking there was any way around that. Because I needed her. And I wasn’t going to take as long as she had taken to realize that.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Karma

  BRINDHA AND I weren’t speaking after our brawl. That is, she wasn’t speaking to me, so I wasn’t speaking to her. In an odd way, I felt like she and I alone knew the truth—I felt, with a deep-seated grimness, that I had worn Ammamma out, made her weak and receptive to further illness. No one would admit to believing me—my aunt and uncle and my parents consumed with their own guilt, their own failures—except Brindha. But she despised me for it, and in a way, her not talking to me was a fraction of the punishment I felt I deserved.

  Brindha was unwilling to talk to our other relatives either, sensing like I did their secondhandness, their super-fluousness to our grandmother’s worsening state. She wanted only to be with her parents, but at the same time could not bear to be at Ammamma’s bedside, which was where her parents wanted to be. I would sit next to Mother holding her hand, my father sitting on the other side, holding her other hand, while Brindha clambered onto her parents’ laps, tried to cajole one of them into taking her on a walk or buying her candy or going back to the hotel to watch television.

  Sanjay uncle had Rupa brought to the hospital to keep Brindha busy. He gave them money to buy snacks in the cafeteria and trinkets in the gift shop. And he told them he had a “very important job” for them. “But then again,” he paused, as if undecided, “I don’t know if a young girl like you is up to such a very important job.”

  Brindha, eager and solemn, her eyes big, begged, “Achan, yes, yes, I can do very important jobs.”

  Then he turned over my duties of running receipts back and forth to the billing office to Brindha. “Except of course,” he said, “Brindha and Rupa will instruct you, Maya, to get the receipts if they are otherwise occupied. But Brindha will be in charge of deciding that, won’t you Brindha?” Brindha nodded proudly. Sanjay uncle winked apologetically at me, and 1 winked back, pleased to be invited to be among the adults in indulging a child.

  A few times each day, Brindha would be too engrossed in a card game with Rupa or in spying on a family of turtles in the courtyard and she would brusquely order me to get the receipts. The more rude she was to me, the more I could play the patient older cousin, above quarreling or cattiness at such a painful time. Rupa was oddly mute around me, we had lost the ease of our companionship. I think this was because the more I claimed my place among the adults, the more securely ensconced in this family I was, the less possible it seemed that we could have considered ourselves friends. Remembering the long, simple days with her and Ammamma, 1 sensed the doubleness of my loss.

  Mother and I were trying to be sensitive to each other, trying to be our best selves. I felt like a better person, not just the way I was behaving, but the way I could tell she was thinking of me, 1 had become more visible and intelligible to her, I had come into focus. I was one of the people she made eye contact with while telling a story; sharing grief, she reached for my hand as often as my father’s. There was a burgeoning closeness in these moments as she was losing her mother and 1 was finding mine.

  I felt conscious of trying to be my mother’s daughter when Suraj and his parents came to visit at the hospital. They said they had come to say how sorry they were to find my grandmother in ill health, although Reema auntie said later that they had also heard my parents had made an unexpected visit and they wanted to take the opportunity to meet and advance their suit. They said nothing explicit about the marriage proposal that had been extended, it would have been too unseemly. This time, I answered no questions and raised none either, just sat next to my mother and smiled when it was expected. His mother stared at me in her openly appraising way, noticing approvingly that my cast had come off, commenting that I was looking less gaunt than last time. I did not even make eye contact with Suraj, and he gave up trying to catch my gaze after awhile. He spoke politely to my mother, he was more discreet than his mother, more conscious of the strangeness of their presence in this hospital room. I found myself capitulating to his deep-voiced soft-spoken expressions of empathy to my mother. 1 couldn’t imagine any of the boys I knew knowing what to say in a situation like this, not to me and certainly not to my mother. I watched Mother to see how she was reacting; we had never been in this situation before. She didn’t like Steve, I knew that, but 1 didn’t know if that applied to only Steve or all boyfriends. I had never thought to find out whether she wanted me to get married in this traditional way, or whether she assumed I would marry of my own choosing in the American way. I did not know what she wanted partly because I had not cared, up till now.

  Mother was polite, but very noncommittal. She refused to be distracted by Suraj’s mother’s chatter or led onto topics that were too far from our present situation to be appropriately discussed. Mother only glancingly talked about where we lived and what she did, but mostly she trained her eyes on Ammamma and resisted being drawn into further conversation. Suraj picked up this cue, and eventually got his parents to acknowledge his quiet but persistent nudging, and leave. Reema auntie walked them out.

  “She’s really something,” Mother smiled cryptically at Reema auntie when she returned.

  Reema auntie said, “She wants a horoscope, Kamala. I told her I would get back to her after talking to you.”

  Mother looked at me. “Do you want a horoscope, Maya?”

  I did not know how to take her question. I finally knew something about my past, and [ wanted to know something about my future. I didn’t want to be protected from knowledge, however lucky or unlucky. But if a horoscope was being prepared now for the sake of determining my compatibility in marriage, then was Mother asking if I was conceding to an arranged marriage in general and considering this marriage to Suraj sp
ecifically? What I wanted to ask Mother was, what did she want the answer to her question to be?

  A knock at the door interrupted the silence between question and answer. My father stood to answer the door, saying wearily, “More visitors.”

  My mother said in a thick whisper, “We don’t want more visitors right now, send them away.”

  But there was no sending these visitors away. Involuntarily I stood up, my chair falling back and clattering on the floor. Reema auntie, Sanjay uncle, my father, and my mother turned to look at me. Then they turned to look at the visitors.

  The visitors were three men wearing black pants and black shirts, and the shiny black belts with gun holsters. I recognized them as colleagues of the James Bond people from the airport. I also recognized, before anyone else in the room did, that one of them was carrying my suitcase.

  A fourth man entered, steering Brindha and Rupa into our room, holding them each by the shoulder. Then it was Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie’s turn to rise up suddenly from their seats, startled, their mouths agape.

  Sanjay uncle was the first to regain speech. He went over to stand by Brindha, putting his hand on her free shoulder, implicitly claiming her back. He said tersely, “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Crimes have been committed,” said one of the men.

  They were from the Central Bureau of Intelligence, with the Special Investigation Team that had been assembled to track down the Tamil Tigers involved in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There were several Tigers convalescing in this hospital, and some of them had medical receipts that had been paid by a Mr. Sanjay Pillai.

  “That’s not possible,” Sanjay uncle said. “There’s been some mix-up.”

  No mix-up, said the intelligence agent gripping Brindha and Rupa. These two girls had been seen going into and out of the patient wards where the Tiger patients were. They had been seen carrying receipts. The other girl, Maya Krishnan, she had been seen carrying receipts too, although she had not been spotted making contact with a Tiger patient herself.

  “All three are part of ongoing activity, we have investigated thoroughly and found this out,” the agent said, with a leer of self-congratulation. He said that he had gone to St. Helena’s yesterday and interrogated Brindha’s friends. He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and on the tray next to Ammamma’s bed, spilled its contents: there was the cyanide capsule, and there were my silver star earrings.

  They had also gone up to our tea hills and scoured the Pillai house and its environs. They said they had found evidence of illicit behavior in “the room that the three conspirators had at various points resided in.” The agent carrying my suitcase looked for a large flat surface on which to lay it down, and, noticing that there was empty space at the foot of the bed my grandmother was lying in, he moved toward it. Mother stood up to block him from coming near the bed.

  He backed away a few steps uncertainly, then knelt awkwardly and opened the suitcase on the floor. In the big black cavity of the suitcase the items seemed meager, but successfully lurid: the Tamil Tiger pamphlets and the pictures of Subha and Sivarasan, the movie magazine centerfolds, my medical records, the syringes my mother had sent with me, letters from Jennifer and my parents from throughout the summer, the birth control pills and hairbrush from Madhu’s room, the fluorescently yellow-and-black cover of the Cliffs Notes for Huck Finn.

  “We need answers,” the agent said, standing up, brushing off dust from the knees of his fitted black pants.

  I waited for my uncle to say, “We won’t speak till we have our lawyers,” the way that everyone did on the police dramas. I thought about all the ways I could explain, how we could defend ourselves.

  “They’re only children,” Sanjay uncle said.

  That was not one of them. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, like I was being pushed back through the mirror and into a world on the other side where I was forced to be a child again. I wanted to protest. “But Sanjay uncle, we—”

  “Not now, Maya,” Sanjay uncle said sharply, cutting me off. “Not now” did not just mean me, it meant Reema auntie and my parents, we were not to say anything, we were to leave it in his hands. He turned to the agents again. “Please, sir, they’re only children.”

  The agent looked at Sanjay uncle doubtfully. “The Tigers have death squads now that are only women and children. Everyone is capable of crime these days.”

  “Not these children,” Sanjay uncle said. “They didn’t know what they were doing. Isn’t that right, Brindha?” He knew he could count on his daughter.

  Brindha looked at her father uncertainly. “Achan, I was helping Rupa’s friends. Ammamma had medicine and they didn’t. You always say we’re supposed to help people …”

  “That’s right, Brindha, I know, but sometimes it’s more complicated than that,” Sanjay uncle said, extending his arm around her shoulders, nearly touching the agent’s hand still clamped there. “She doesn’t know better, you see, officer? She and Maya, our niece Maya, they’re just children.”

  Something curdled inside of me as I realized Sanjay uncle was not mentioning Rupa. They were not going to try to help Rupa. They were isolating her as the trouble-maker, winnowing out Brindha and me as innocents. There was a lot more talking—but it all amounted to that. Rupa didn’t have anything to do with the assassination herself—Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie wrote out and signed the agents’ reports saying that Rupa had slept in their house every night since their daughter had been home on vacation from boarding school, from March through June. They had to initial the sentence in the report that said specifically that Rupa had slept in their house the night of Rajiv Gandhi’s murder, which had in any case taken place a whole night’s train ride away from our tea hills. The agents interrogated Rupa, who had been silent the whole time, and when she refused to answer, they switched from English to Tamil to Hindi. She still refused to speak. They couldn’t prove that Rupa had done anything worse than what Brindha and I had done—not turned in people she knew to be Tamil Tigers. The agents were letting us go because Sanjay uncle had convinced them we were different from Rupa, that we didn’t have the same motivations, but that wasn’t necessarily true. They weren’t accounting for our fascination with danger, Brindha’s and mine, with the forbidden and the unknown. They weren’t accounting for the thrill of rebelliousness, the power we felt for having secrets, for knowing more than the people—family, journalists, employers, the bureau of intelligence—who were supposed to know everything.

  They weren’t accounting for the loyalty and love we could have for someone, even when she might have done something wrong, that could keep us from turning on her. That was not something we shared only with Rupa—it was something we shared with our parents, who would have signed anything or said or paid or sold anything to keep us out of trouble. But the agents were taking Rupa, the four of them surrounding her in our grandmother’s hospital room, and they were leaving us. Brindha, who the agent had released into her father’s embrace, wriggled free. She pushed two agents aside and flung herself at Rupa. For a second, I imagined it to be a repeat of her earlier attack on me. But Brindha clung to Rupa, and Rupa smoothed Brindha’s hair, patted her back soothingly. “Come back to us soon,” Brindha said, in a muffled voice. I was frozen, not child enough to throw myself on Rupa. Not child enough to stand up for her, and not adult enough either.

  AMMAMMA DIED THE next day. We emerged from two weeks in the hospital into the middle of the Onam holidays. Many people came to the funeral in their festival clothes, straight from boat races and elephant parades and flower exhibits. People were already waiting for us at the house when Reema auntie, my father, and I got back. Sanjay uncle and Mother would come after taking care of final arrangements at the hospital. Brindha had wanted to stay and wait with her father. In all her waking hours and some of her sleeping ones, she refused to let go of his hand. Ammamma was brought back to Sanjay uncle’s house in the same jeep she had come down in, wrapped in blankets, dressed in white.

 
; Reema auntie sent me into the garden to collect flowers for Ammamma. I could hear the chatter and arguing of factory workers and tea workers as they built a pyre on the side of the house beyond the garden. They brought their own bullock-carts from hillside farms, full of wood fuel. Some walked in sets of two, one on each end, carrying long branches of stripped mango wood, roped together around the middle. The branches were cut to even lengths and tied together to form a narrow bed.

  I sat on the bed in her room where my mosquito nets still hung, their sides raised up and draped over the top to form an opaque canopy. Three of my mother’s cousins, all sisters, washed Ammamma and dressed her in a new white sari. She lay on a bedspread on the newly swept floor next to our beds, where she often took her afternoon naps. They trimmed her fingernails and brushed out her hair. They put sandalwood paste on her forehead and on her throat. When they were finished, three workers came with the mangowood stretcher, lifted Ammamma onto it, and carried her to the drawing room.

  The carpets had been rolled up, and the furniture moved to the guest rooms. Ammamma was laid out in the center of the drawing room, and the priest brought a tall temple velakku with him which had five wicks on each tier, six tiers high. He started chanting and lighting incense sticks and camphor, and blue smoke rose up around him and my grandmother.

  Outside behind the kitchen, Madhu’s mother directed the other ladies and Matthew and his wife and Sunil in cooking for the guests. No food could be cooked in the house until after the ceremony, so Matthew had built a big open fire. They made rice in big urns and boiled milk for yogurt. They soaked lentils and stirred red chilies and black pepper with tomatoes for rasam. Tea brewed in big pots, releasing vapors of clove and nutmeg.

  Vasani and the gardener were outside the house near the well, where they had opened one of the pipes that carried cold clear water into the house. Vasani kept her fingers over the end of the pipe to direct the burbling flow into buckets that the gardener lined up around them. The buckets said FIRE on them, they were the big red ones usually filled with sand at the tea factory. Everyone had to bathe before the last rites. Madhu and Reema auntie were distributing clothes to anyone who was ready. White mundus for men, white saris for women. As the workers finished building the pyre, they came to the well, to accept a bucket and a tin cup to pour water over themselves. They took a sari or mundu and slipped behind the kitchen or into the servant quarters to change. Mother and many of the ladies bathed inside the house, simple, fast, cold baths, everyone emerging into bright sun with soft white cotton sticking to their wet skin, wet hair streaming down their backs. Reema auntie and Madhu and I bathed outside, each of us in four or five quick, deft motions, baptized in cold water from deep in the earth, blanketed in hot noon sun. Mother took me into Brindha’s room to help me with my sari, folding and pleating and draping. I looked for hairclips on the dresser to cover the cutaway spot in my hair. Brindha came into her room just as we were finishing, and started tugging clothes out of her dresser and armoires. She was wearing her school uniform.