Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  “Your home is nice. Nice place,” Swati said.

  Rachel looked around. Was it? They hadn’t been there for long, and it didn’t feel all that lived-in to Rachel. “Thank you.”

  “The floor is dusty. You should wear chappals.”

  “I don’t like them,” Rachel said simply.

  “I wear them always,” Swati said.

  “That’s nice,” Rachel said, unsure how else to respond. Swati looked at her like she was insane, and Rachel noticed then that Swati gripped her water glass so hard, Rachel wondered if she intended to crack it. She rolled it back and forth in her hands, her many rings, all for protection, blessed by one deity or another, clinking against the glass. In her ears were diamond studs, matching the one in her nose, and on her wrists were bright gold bangles, and the red and yellow thread Hindus used in ceremonies, the kind a priest tied around your wrist and you were supposed to wear until it fell off on its own. Rachel called it temple string and clipped it off her own wrist as soon as was polite after a ceremony or a visit to a temple, silently asking her rabbi for forgiveness for her forays into idolatry.

  Swati’s outfit was wrinkled with travel, but the fabric was rich, the embroidery work elaborate, and the dupatta delicate around her neck. She looked, in short, like many women Rachel had met since moving to Mumbai. Rachel had started to recognize Swati as a type: a rich society auntie, a wife and mother living in comfortable cycles of managing the household, going on morning walks and afternoon teas, lunches with old friends who were in gentle, and not-so-gentle, competition with one another over whose husband was doing the best, whose children had the best marriages, whose lives reflected back the ideal in the strongest ways. This was a life of obligations, some pleasant, some not, and of caring for others, and of judging them.

  They seemed to have comfortable lives, but comfortable could be a kind of imprisonment, or so it seemed to Rachel, and she always thought about these women, her mother-in-law included, as sitting in a living room bedecked with flowers, images of Krishna, and ugly pillows. There, Swati made sense. Transplanted into Rachel’s apparently dusty living room, with Rachel’s ironic Soviet propaganda poster of robust Russian women scything wheat hanging on the wall over her, Swati looked wildly out of place.

  In her own home, in Kolkata, which Rachel had visited for the first time two months ago, just a month after her move to India, Swati had seemed to Rachel a queen in her court. With its heavy furniture and dark rooms, Dhruv’s childhood home had surprised Rachel, who thought leather couches and thick upholstered chairs would have been impractical and uncomfortable given the climate, but Swati was clearly proud of it. Cut fresh flowers warred with fake ones on every surface, and Swati’s salwar suits in hazy floral prints matched every room. Rachel’s father-in-law, Vinod, with his crisp dress shirts and frowns, had seemed an outsider, while Swati was stamped on everything. Rachel had not known what to touch, where to get a glass of water, how to move without disrupting something. She had come back to the room she shared with Dhruv each night to discover her suitcase and toiletries and books had been moved, every time to some different spot, making her feel that wherever she put anything, it was wrong.

  She wished Swati would put the water glass down. Every time her rings rolled past it, she worried it would shatter. They didn’t have that many glasses; they couldn’t afford to lose one.

  “Would you like more?”

  Swati shook her head, rolling and rolling the glass. Click, click, click. The tapping sound echoed in the apartment, jangling against Rachel’s ears.

  “Has something happened? Was Dhruv expecting you? He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t know you were coming, I’m sorry, I would have been more prepared.”

  Rachel tried to speak slowly, which was not in her nature. Her in-laws had, when she met them, looked confused when she spoke, which Dhruv told her was because she had an American accent, but she privately believed was because they couldn’t speak English that well. She’d tried to suggest this to Dhruv and he’d been angry, and later she understood that it was an insult to say someone’s English was bad here. But why should it be good? Her Hindi was scant and horrible, and she didn’t speak a word of Marwari. She was thrilled anyone spoke any English, even just a little.

  Swati shook her head again.

  Rachel was frustrated. Was the woman going to be like this all evening? What kind of person came, without warning, and then refused to explain why?

  Rachel’s life, which had been in a state of constant and uncomfortable transition since she had moved—since before that even, since preparing to move and meeting the many reactions, which ranged from disbelief to disapproval to the awed respect people give soldiers planning to enter a war zone, with ruthless manufactured cheer—suddenly seemed like a farce, a catastrophe, something that was happening to someone else. What was she doing, sitting on a couch with her mother-in-law in India?

  “Swati. Please. What are you doing here?”

  “I have come to stay,” Swati said simply.

  After all those long minutes of confused silence, Rachel had thought Swati’s speaking would be a relief, but it had only muddied the waters more fully. Was this some custom Dhruv had forgotten to tell her about, or didn’t even know about himself? He didn’t seem to know so many of the customs; perhaps they were the domain of women, or perhaps he hadn’t been paying attention growing up. He had lived abroad for years, too; maybe things had changed. Surely, though, someone else would have said something to her, if this intrusion was part of an important tradition.

  Rachel had read many books by Indian authors before she had arrived in Mumbai, trying to fill the gaps in her knowledge and in Dhruv’s descriptions with information. She had never been to India before she moved, and now she realized that perhaps that had been a good thing. Some part of her wondered, if she had visited, seen what it was like, understood the way her life would be, would she still have come? It was so foreign to her, so opaque, sometimes, that her mind rebelled against it. Having to accept it, to explore it and work to understand it, maybe that was the only way anyone could. It was better to come without a departure date.

  Swati was rolling the glass faster and faster now.

  Rachel reached out and stilled Swati’s hand. “Give me the glass, please.”

  Swati handed it over, like a child, her lower lip trembling. Something is very wrong here, Rachel thought.

  “I am leaving Mr. Aggarwal.”

  It took Rachel a long moment to realize that Swati was talking about Vinod, Dhruv’s father. She calls him Mr. Aggarwal? Rachel thought, her mind whirling. Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess. “Oh,” she said helplessly.

  “I have left my husband, and I have come to stay with you and Dhruv. And that’s all there is to say about that.”

  Rachel dropped the glass.

  Two

  Swati Aggarwal did not start her day intending to leave her husband. In fact, such a thing could not have been further from her mind on that day, or any other day in the forty-one years of her marriage to Vinod. But somehow, leave him she had, and now she was sitting in her son’s dusty and strangely decorated apartment in Mumbai, watching her gori daughter-in-law sweep up broken glass.

  She looked around at the posters on the wall. They were bright, and graphic, and they had images of men shaking their fists and a cat eating a mouse and all sorts of strange things, nothing pleasant like a flower. They were not things that she wanted to see every day, and she couldn’t understand why someone would have hung them. She could see Chinese letters on one, but it didn’t seem like something for feng shui, which her cousin Madhu particularly loved, and some other symbols on other images, in scripts she didn’t recognize. All the furniture was cold and simple, and there wasn’t an image of Krishna or any of the gods anywhere. Not even a swastika blessing the house. What a strange way to arrange a living room.

  The windows were open, and outside black crows sat on palm trees. Swati wondered whose souls they had, know
ing, as she did, that sometimes loved ones become crows that fly around your home and beg for bread. Perhaps the mother of the former occupant, waiting to see her children. Why did they keep the windows open like this? She could hear the stray dogs at the ground floor of the colony howling, startling the birds. They flew off, disturbing a pair of green parakeets that chattered and screamed. Who could live with the windows open, and all this sound?

  Rachel scuttled like a crab across the floor, probably getting her knees dirty, as she cleaned up the glass. She really should be wearing chappals. She would get a piece of glass in her foot. Not like them. Who ever heard of such a thing, not liking sandals?

  The girl straightened, and Swati thought about the first time she had ever seen her, the day Rachel had entered their home in Kolkata a few months earlier, the house she had lived in since she had first married Vinod more than four decades ago. The house she didn’t live in anymore.

  He had never been a bad man, her husband. She couldn’t say that, wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t think it. But she had, she knew, endured him rather than cared for him. She worried for him even now, hoped he was eating well, hoped the shock of her leaving wouldn’t put a strain on his health, but her worry was an almost physical response, immediate, duty bound, logistical. Her fears for him were of shirking her obligation, not of losing her heart, and after so many years, she had thought that was more than enough, until her son had come home with his wife.

  As Marwaris who had done well for themselves, who had worked hard and succeeded, when it had come time to send their son to college, they, like many they knew, had sent their child to America to study business. Vinod had a vision of Dhruv’s returning and helming the family grocery store, turning it into an empire. He saw his son as a dictator of dry goods, a sultan of salt, a prince of provisions. Dhruv, however, secured a job for himself in investment banking after graduating from Wharton and made it clear that grocery stores, and Kolkata, were not for him. He had visited regularly, yes—and set up for them wireless internet and iPads, installed credit card machines in the shops, and trained workers in computers—but only ever for a few days.

  It had been disappointing, of course. Vinod had built something, and he wanted his son to cherish it. Around them, all the other families they knew had their own businesses, too, as was so common in their community, with its long history of entrepreneurship. Vinod would spend evenings with his friends at the Calcutta Swimming Club, a place where he had never even seen the pool, hearing about the way this one was working so hard for his family, that one was modernizing the factory, this one couldn’t stop fighting with his cousins, all working at the company, too. He would come home quiet, and drawn, and Swati would serve him tea and they would talk to each other about how successful Dhruv was, all on his own, how wonderful that was, and neither of them would really mean a word. Theirs was a lonely life, with no children, no daughter-in-law, no family living with them, and they clung to each other in those days, in a way that almost fooled Swati into thinking she had done it, she had learned to care for Vinod the way she had always hoped to do.

  For a long time, Dhruv disappointed them in his love life as well. Dhruv had politely met the parade of girls she and Vinod had arranged for him, both in Kolkata and in New York, although of course Swati trusted the New York prospects less than someone she could see herself and evaluate. He was polite, and kind, and never spoke to anyone more than once. And then, just when she had begun to truly despair, when her son was thirty-six and unmarried, and therefore might as well have been dead or in prison or something, the way he was shaming them, he called and told her he had met someone, just six months earlier. She wasn’t Marwari, she wasn’t even Indian, and he was going to marry her. Dhruv just thought Swati should know.

  They had not been able to attend the wedding. At least, that is what they had told people. In truth, they weren’t really sure if Dhruv wanted them there. He had announced that he and his fiancée (fiancée, the one he’d acquired without his parents’ ever meeting her, ever setting eyes on her, without a proper engagement ceremony, an exchange of gifts between family members, a woman with no people Swati could investigate, no family she could research, no tribe she could find), planned to marry at city hall in New York, in a fast and tiny ceremony, and there was no need for her and Vinod to undergo the long and difficult trip, which would be hard on their bodies and wallets. He said they could have a reception in Kolkata after they moved to Mumbai and it would be better to wait for that. Then he said that his new wife didn’t want such a thing, but that they were moving to India and would be sure to visit soon.

  They had agreed, of course, what else could they do, when their son told instead of asked, and sat at home, worrying, wondering, desperate to know what kind of girl this would be, terrified to ask. They recounted, in hushed tones, horror stories of mail-order brides from Russia, large-breasted blond women named Bambi or Sandy from Texas who enchanted Indian boys and stole them away from their families, foreign women with no values and long nails. They huddled together, united in their anxiety, truly together. It was the closest they had ever been to each other, Swati realized later, and the least happy she had ever been.

  Neither Swati nor Vinod dared hope that they might actually like their new daughter-in-law. Instead, they focused on finding her bearable. That, they felt, was the most they could hope for from a foreigner.

  Then Dhruv and Rachel walked into their home.

  First of all, she was not a blonde. Instead, her hair was a rich brown, falling in loose waves around a plump face, matching the brown eyes that looked everywhere, curious, fascinated. For another thing, she was short. Swati had seen photos of her, it was true, but she supposed she had always overlaid them with the image she had in her mind, of a sleek and serpentine seductress, pawing at their unsuspecting child. Instead, she looked commonplace, slightly ethnic, even, her skin vaguely olive, her features more normal than Swati could have anticipated.

  But what she did next was truly astounding. Rachel saw her and Vinod, both standing stock-still like puppets waiting for the puppeteer to activate them, and she smiled widely and held out her hand to shake Swati’s. She looked her in the eyes, clear, direct, with no hint of shyness or discomfort, and said: “It’s so very wonderful to meet you. You must be Swati.”

  Swati would never have addressed her in-laws in this way; she would have died with shame first. And yet, beyond the shock, Swati was aware that it felt pleasant to have her new daughter-in-law say her name, and greet her first, before Vinod, before anyone. To talk to her like they were business associates or in a meeting, to shake her hand. It felt almost professional.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you, too,” Swati said. To her surprise, it really was.

  There was something that fascinated her about Rachel, or rather, about the way she was with Dhruv. Perhaps, actually, the thing that was more fascinating was Dhruv, because he was her child, and yet he was something different with his wife. Watching the couple, she saw there was such an openness between them, such affection in every gesture. Rachel touched Dhruv all the time, and he allowed it, smiling. Rachel told Dhruv that she didn’t like something and he listened. They seemed to like each other, really like each other, to enjoy each other in a way that made Swati uncomfortable. It was so achingly unfamiliar to Swati, and it made her uneasy, until she realized why. It was because she, Swati, had never been that comfortable with anyone in her life. Not with Vinod, not with her parents, her siblings, her son, and certainly never with herself. It was like walking around in uncomfortable shoes all your life, and never knowing that shoes could be comfortable, and then finding out you could have been walking comfortably the whole time.

  Before meeting Rachel, and seeing the way Dhruv was with her, Swati had not thought much about whether she was content with her life, probably because her life was one that she should be content with. Because she had the things that made someone content, because her life was the way it was supposed to be. But as she saw Dhruv with
Rachel, the way that they made each other happy, she wondered, for the first time, perhaps, whether that was not true. She had seen that kind of happiness in television shows and movies, that American cheer, and she had thought that was just for Westerners. But if Dhruv could find it, if he could be so close with someone, so happy from that closeness, then surely it was not a Western trait at all. She began, unconsciously, to explore the contours of her life and examine them for happiness, or the lack thereof.

  Vinod, meanwhile, continued on his plodding way, his life the same as it had been before, and Swati could not understand him. This man whom she had lived with for so long, whom she had had inside of her body, whom she had mixed with and borne a child for, whom she had nursed in illness and celebrated with in wealth, he did not see what she saw in their child. Worse, he found Dhruv’s happiness unseemly. He found Rachel’s affection embarrassing, indecorous. He had, it was true, been relieved that she wasn’t worse than they had thought, but otherwise, he felt as suspicious of her as he had before. Seeing their son so happy didn’t dim his own idea of his life in comparison; instead, he refused to trust it.

  Swati found herself feeling further and further away from him every day, until one morning she woke up and sat with Vinod at the breakfast table. She watched him drink his second cup of coffee, which he wasn’t supposed to have because of his heart, and realized that she didn’t care whether he drank it or not, whether he died soon or in a year or in a decade, it was all the same to her. And it shouldn’t have been. If she were really happy in her life, happy with Vinod, content, wouldn’t it matter to her if he died because of his heart, because of the caffeine she had watched him drink cup after cup of and never said a word? Could she live with herself, knowing she had let him die, knowing that even after so many years, after the child they’d had and the life they’d built, she cared no more for him than she had on her wedding night when he was a stranger?