Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  “She can’t stay here, Dhruv. It’s not good, for any of us. You can’t want this, do you?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. You, not me. Isn’t he frustrated, too? “It’s different here,” he said.

  “You don’t say!” Rachel half said, half shrieked. Oh God, she hated her voice like this. She hated sounding like this. It was a bad old joke about mothers-in-law, it couldn’t be her life, could it?

  “I can’t just make her leave. She can’t be on her own. Do you want me to throw her out?”

  “It’s not throwing her out! She could get an apartment, we could help her. She is an adult woman.”

  “She would see it as a rejection. You can’t just make your parents live alone—”

  “Like so much of the rest of the world does?”

  “We care about family here!”

  Rachel closed her eyes.

  “You have to understand that this is different, Rachel. You can’t see everyone as like your parents. My mother isn’t like yours.”

  “Obviously,” Rachel bit off, and she walked to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She didn’t get him anything. She drank it all in one long gulp and poured more.

  “The wine here is so terrible,” Rachel said. What she meant was, I am here because of you and it is so difficult sometimes that I feel like I am screaming into an abyss and no one can hear me.

  “I’ll bring you something better,” Dhruv said.

  “We have to figure something out,” Rachel said.

  “It’s the way things are.”

  “But it can’t be for us, Dhruv. It just, it can’t be. Can it?” Rachel looked at him, pleading.

  “I can’t transform the whole wine industry—”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I know.” He was smiling ruefully. “Just trying to make a joke.”

  “You should leave that to me. I’m the funny one.”

  “Not in India,” Dhruv said. “No one gets your TV references here.”

  “You do, though, right?” What she meant was, We are still us, aren’t we?

  He nodded.

  “It’s only been a couple weeks, Rachel. Give it time. We’ll adjust. You can get used to anything, really. You’ve already gotten used to so much.”

  “This might be too much,” Rachel said.

  “You can do it. I believe in you.” And in that moment, although she didn’t want to, she almost believed him.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Dhruv said.

  “I’ll join you in a bit.” Rachel watched him walk into the second bedroom. She refused to think of it as theirs. Their bedroom was the one that had been invaded. Giving up that title would be giving in to this reality, and Rachel could not, would not, do that. And then she downed her wine and followed him in. What else could she do?

  Give it time. She thought about Dhruv’s words as she got dressed that morning, dreading the tea that awaited her outside the door, another day with Swati, with the maid, Deeti, coming twice, with the life she wanted to carve out in India for herself slipping away just another inch. She did not want to get used to this. She wanted it to change, for the world to change, for her.

  She wanted to talk to her friends, her mother, but she couldn’t. They had all told her not to marry Dhruv so fast, that they didn’t know each other well. They had told her not to quit her job. They had told her not to move to Mumbai, to visit India first, then make a decision. But the decisions had been made, didn’t they see that? Dhruv was so certain that they should get married, so sure that she was the person for him, so clear that Mumbai would be good for both of them. So she had listened to him, told her friends that they were wrong, that they didn’t know what she did, which was that Dhruv would make her happy, he would make her life something stable, something solid.

  And now that it was solid, but the wrong shape, with a Swati hole in the middle, there was no one she could tell about it, no one she could trust not to judge her, not to be happy that they were right. They all had said they hoped that they were wrong about their advice, but Rachel knew no one in the history of the world had ever really hoped that they were wrong about much of anything. She was loath to hear the judgment in the voices of the people who knew her well, the way they would blame Dhruv, tell her to leave him, to come home. She didn’t want to leave her husband. She just wanted her mother-in-law to leave her.

  She checked the photo she had posted the day before, of the paan seller, perfect in his amazing stall. It was truly incredible, the way people could live with so little here, but it also made her feel uncomfortable. She had photographed it; was she fetishizing it? It had gotten eighteen new likes overnight, bringing the total up to fifty-two, with comments like So cute and Wow, what adventures! She only posted cheerful photos, photos that made it look like her life was a grand trip, full of beauty. Photos that said, Look at me, look at my exciting life, not This is harder than I could have imagined or My mother-in-law is living with me now. Her post hadn’t captured the crow plucking the eyes out of a dead rat that she had seen, perched on the pile of garbage the paan seller had thrown to the side of his stall. She had edited that out, so all they could see was the pretty part.

  There were many pretty parts. But they all mixed together for her. When she had first come to Mumbai, it had whirled past her window in the cab from the airport, and it had looked so much dingier than she had thought it would, as if the city were sepia toned, broken by bright flashes that seemed garish in comparison. The longer she stayed, the more beauty she found, but she didn’t know how to separate it from everything around her. She really did think the paan seller was amazing. But was that because he was amazing against everything around him? She didn’t know if she could remove one image from the other, the way she was doing for others.

  Some people she knew talked about India like it was a kind of cancer, or a war zone, or both. Other people talked about it like the whole country was an ashram, that you couldn’t help but find yourself there, even if you didn’t know you were missing, and they looked at her enviously, like she was going to become a shaman. But the longer she stayed in Mumbai, the more she knew that it was a place, just like any other in the world, no more poetic or strange from the inside.

  She wondered what the person who had taken a photo of her had done with that photo. Was it on his Instagram, somewhere, with a caption about idiot white people so delighted with paanwallas who make less in a year than the average American’s coffee budget? Or had he gone home and told everyone she was his new girlfriend? What was she, something disgusting or something desired, for him?

  We’ll adjust, Dhruv had said, with the certainty she had so loved, now echoing over and over again in her mind. Rachel had the most horrible feeling that unless she did something, they would all live together forever. She couldn’t give it time. Time would become eternity.

  Rachel had just sat down with a cup of coffee, having explained patiently for the fifteenth day in a row that she really didn’t want tea, when the bell rang.

  It rang all the time. People came to deliver all sorts of things in the building, things that people had ordered, things that people might want. A man with a puffed-rice snack, mixed with chopped onions, coriander, and tomatoes, came in the afternoons, balancing all the ingredients in a basket on his head. A man selling milk and bread came in the midmorning. A man with a clear bag of treats, wildly shaped food items that dizzied Rachel with their variety and flavors, came on alternate weeks, and she bought little bags of sticky and strange things, most of which she passed on to Deeti, after trying them. She had yet to eat anything she liked, but she lived in hope that there was something out there for her and never stopped buying new things.

  But when she looked up, instead of seeing a delivery person or a seller, she saw an older woman, cut from Swati’s same floral cloth, standing in the doorway.

  Swati exclaimed and embraced the woman before turning to Rachel, the smile on her face a touch forced. Obviously this was an expected gu
est, although Swati had not mentioned she was expecting anyone.

  “Hello, I’m Rachel.” She introduced herself, her hand reaching out, when it became clear that Swati wasn’t going to introduce her. The stranger looked at her hand, baffled by it, then shook it, limply.

  “Dhruv’s wife,” Swati said to the woman, by way of explanation. The stranger nodded sagely.

  “Congratulations on your marriage,” said the woman gravely. She offered no other explanation for who she was, however, so Rachel smiled and looked at her mother-in-law.

  “This is Akanksha auntie,” Swati said, as if that meant something to Rachel. Rachel knew enough about India by this point to assume that the woman wasn’t Dhruv’s actual aunt, but beyond that she had no information. Had Dhruv ever mentioned an Akanksha? Why didn’t anyone mention last names?

  “Dhruv must have told you about her. She is Papa’s good friend Sujay uncle’s wife. They have been friends since they were very small, and they have shifted to Mumbai from Kolkata since twenty years.” Dhruv had never told Rachel about any of the parade of elderly friends and relatives who all seemed to assume that he had described them in depth. Rachel smiled and nodded, feeling like a bobblehead doll.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Rachel said. Akanksha looked Rachel up and down and sniffed, clearly doubting the veracity of her statement. Rachel shrugged internally as her mother-in-law looked at her nervously. Well, if Swati had wanted her to look more presentable than her simple cotton skirt and knit top, she should have told her someone was coming.

  “May I offer you anything?” Rachel said, wondering to herself if there was actually anything to offer, other than the coffee in her own cup. Swati took control of more and more of the kitchen every day, and Rachel had no idea what was currently in it.

  “No, no.” Akanksha, a large woman with a hooked nose and pudgy hands, sat herself on the couch Rachel had vacated. Her hair was dyed, Rachel knew, because there was a brownish-red stain from the henna-based dye around her forehead, and her outfit was fussy, a georgette kurta and salwar, with a fluttering dupatta that looked like it was strangling the woman to death when she moved. She had thick diamond studs in her nose and ears, and a clattering of gold bangles on her wrists entwined with red and yellow thread. Rachel wondered if Indian women of a certain class and social group received a mandatory uniform at the age of fifty.

  “Well, some water. Normal, please,” Akanksha said, amending her statement. Rachel looked at Swati, who was settling into the couch herself, making no move to see to the needs of her own guest. Rachel sighed internally and walked to the kitchen. Who was this woman? What was she doing here? Was she fleeing a husband, too? Would Swati fill her home with other women leaving their marriages, making the apartment a halfway house for well-off Indian wives who never moved on but simply lived with Rachel and Dhruv forever?

  She poured Akanksha filtered water from a bottle and handed it to her, then perched with her coffee on the only seat left, an uncomfortable chair she usually avoided. A long moment of awkward silence stretched out, and then Akanksha turned to Swati and said something in Hindi. Rachel wondered if it was about her, and then decided that it probably was. She supposed it must be either very exciting or very shameful, to have a white daughter-in-law. She wondered which Swati thought it was.

  “She’s saying you are very pretty,” Swati said, interrupting Rachel’s thoughts.

  “You don’t look too much like a foreigner,” Akanksha intoned approvingly. Rachel’s smile grew pained. For all that people doused themselves in Fair & Lovely, apparently paleness was positive only if it was Indian paleness. How was it that looking white both was and wasn’t desirable at the same time? How could something be in two simultaneous states of being? It was the Schrödinger’s cat of beauty standards.

  “Helping them get settled in, is it?” the woman said, turning back to Swati. “How long will you be visiting?” Swati looked at Rachel nervously again, and this time Rachel understood why. She hadn’t told this person that she had left her husband. Rachel wondered suddenly if she had told anyone in her life that she had left Vinod, or if this was all some deceit, if everyone she knew thought she was just visiting and not changing her entire life.

  Rachel said nothing.

  “For as long as I’m needed. Just want to make sure they settle in here, of course,” Swati said, smiling sweetly.

  Akanksha nodded in approval. “Such a kind mother-in-law,” she said pointedly to Rachel. “Coming from so far, in a new place, you must need help. How do you find India?”

  “It’s on a map,” Rachel murmured dryly, and instantly regretted it. It was a perfectly natural question, but she had tired quickly of answering it. She had no easy response to offer. She usually said difficult, but that never sufficed, and neither did wonderful or different or great, and it often became a long conversation with someone who didn’t particularly care what she really thought, but only wanted their own opinions, or their opinions about other people’s opinions, reflected back at them.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I find it very interesting,” Rachel said, returning to a more scripted and conventional response.

  “It must be very different. Of course, it’s very hot here. And do you like the food?”

  All of it? Every single piece of food in India? Rachel wondered. “I do. I actually—”

  “It must be very different for you, food like this.”

  “Well, I had had Indian food before, although the quality wasn’t as good—”

  “Don’t you find it very spicy? Foreigners always find it very spicy. My son, Anuj, he has one colleague from Canada, he finds it very spicy. My son works in a very big company, Deloitte, consulting. He does very well. He stays in Dubai.”

  “That’s nice,” Rachel said. She had decided to give up on real answers. They were obviously not useful here.

  “So nice that you’ve come, na?” Akanksha directed this back to Swati. “Dhruv must be finding it so helpful, having someone to help him. And of course you must have family with you. That’s important. Here we care about family.” This was back to Rachel, who winced at the echo of Dhruv’s earlier words. Did he really think that way? That she didn’t care about family? Did everyone in India? “We aren’t like them, with all this divorce nonsense. Family is important here. You will see. Where is your cook?” Akanksha looked around. “It’s almost lunch. Aren’t you having some cook come?”

  Rachel shook her head while Swati smiled at Akanksha. It was only eleven, and they had no cook. Rachel hoped that would mean this woman would leave sooner rather than later. She was already sick of this one-sided interrogation in which Akanksha supplied both question and answer. Although, she wondered what the woman might say if she learned about Swati’s own divorce nonsense. Dhruv had told Rachel to tell no one, so she hadn’t, but surely it would come out eventually.

  “Perhaps you could recommend someone. In Kolkata I could find someone for them, but here . . .” Before Rachel could protest, explain that they weren’t getting a cook, Akanksha was nodding her head vigorously.

  “Of course, of course. You must be needing references. I will help with all such things. You just call this one girl, very nice, clean, trustworthy. Well, if there is no lunch here, you must come to my place, of course! Let me call my cook. I will have her make it not too spicy, for you,” Akanksha assured Rachel as she pulled out her cell phone. “Home food is very good for you. Not like all that nonsense you eat in America. Here we have real food. My son told me when he went to America every meal he had was pizza, or some pasta-shasta nonsense. Here you get something good. Come, we will go.”

  Swati nodded vigorously as Akanksha shouted loudly at her maid while heading for the door, leading Rachel out of her own home.

  “It will be so nice to have home food,” Swati murmured to Rachel, who simply reached for her purse, trying to avoid the conversation. All the food in her home was home food, to Rachel.

  “All is ready. My driver is
downstairs, come,” Akanksha said. “It will be very good, my cook makes the best food.”

  Wonderful, thought Rachel. Perhaps my mother-in-law will like it so much, she’ll move in with you.

  Nine

  Swati felt, during the entire meal with Akanksha, that she was holding her breath inside her body. This was a shame, because she really did miss simple normal food, instead of the salads and things that Rachel made. Rachel had meal after meal without rice or dal and never seemed to feel, as Swati did, that her plate was empty without roti or some curd. She ate things that were uncooked, which Swati worried was terribly unhealthy and would make her sick, but they didn’t. And she ate at different times of the day, instead of precisely at eight, one, five (teatime), and eight, the way a person ought to do. It was so disorienting, so scattered, that it made Swati anxious.

  Swati’s life with Vinod had been a carefully timed and choreographed affair. It had followed a series of routines and rituals that Swati had rarely questioned, except when they had contrasted with the rhythms of the house she had grown up in. In the years after her own in-laws had passed, she had, slowly, slowly, arranged her household to mirror her parents’ home, as she remembered it, gauging carefully what Vinod would notice and mind, and what he wouldn’t see at all. She had found that as long as his immediate and essential needs were met in the way he needed and expected them to be, fresh shirts from the presswalla ready for him at nine a.m., no deliveries or work in the house at six p.m. during his evening prayers, and so on, he hardly noticed the rest. And food was within Swati’s domain entirely. Vinod had been happy to hand over the running of the house to her as long as she made sure his rice was piping hot and his curries were simmering. She had known what he expected of her and done it, arduous as it could sometimes be; it was life. These were the things that made up a life, the routines and pieces of the day all stitched neatly together, a patchwork of regularity. She had hoped she could remove Vinod from it, or herself from him, like cutting out a piece of cloth to help the item fit a different body, but it hadn’t proved so simple, not yet.