by Anita Desai
After one of these, they would go and visit the boy, with gifts, and Rakesh came to look upon his parents as a visiting aunt and uncle, who offered him sweets and toys with a dumbly appeasing, appealing air. No one remembered when he started calling them Masi and Masa. Asha he already addressed as Ma: it was so clearly her role.
Anu had been confident other children would follow. She hoped for a daughter next time, somehow feeling a daughter might be more like her, and more likely to stay with her. But Rakesh had his second and third birthday in Asha's house, and there was no other child. Anu's husband looked discouraged now, and resentful, his own family turning into a chorus of mocking voices. He stayed away at work for long hours; there were rumours—quickly brought to Anu's attention—that he had taken to gambling, and drugs, and some even hinted at having seen him in quarters of the town where respectable people did not go. She was not too perturbed: their relationship was a furtive, nocturnal thing that never survived daylight. She was concerned, of course, when he began to look ill, to break out in boils and rashes, and come down with frequent fevers, and she nursed him in her usual bungling, tentative way. His family came to take over, criticising her sharply for her failings as a nurse, but he only seemed to grow worse, and died shortly before Rakesh's fifth birthday. His family set up a loud lament and clearly blamed her for the way he had dwindled away in spite of their care. She packed her belongings—in the same tin trunk in which she had brought them as a bride, having added nothing more to them—and went to live with Asha—and the child.
In the dark, Beth found it was she who was stroking the hair at Rakesh's temple now, and he who lay stretched out with his hands folded on his chest and his eyes staring at the ceiling.
'Then the woman you call Ma—she is really your aunt?' Beth queried.
Rakesh gave a long sigh. 'I always knew her as my mother.'
'And your aunt is your real mother? When did they tell you?'
'I don't know,' he admitted. 'I grew up knowing it—perhaps people spoke of it in the village, but when you are small you don't question. You just accept.'
'But didn't your real mother ever tell you, or try to take you away?'
'No!' he exclaimed. 'That's just it, Beth. She never did—she had given me to her sister, out of love, out of sympathy when her husband died. She never tried to break up the relationship I had with her. It was out of love.' He tried to explain again, 'The love sisters feel.'
Beth, unlike Rakesh, had a sister. Susan. She thought of her now, living with her jobless, worthless husband in a trailer somewhere in Manitoba with a string of children. The thought of handing over her child to her was so bizarre that it made her snort. 'I know I couldn't give my baby to Susan for anything,' she declared, removing her hand from his temple and placing it on her belly.
'You don't know, you can't say—what may happen, what things one may do—'
'Of course I know,' she said, more loudly. 'Nothing, no one, could make me do that. Give my baby away?' Her voice became shrill and he turned on his side, closing his eyes to show her he did not wish to continue the conversation.
She understood that gesture but she persisted. 'But didn't they ever fight? Or disagree about the way you were brought up? Didn't they have different ideas of how to do that? You know, I've told Susan—'
He sighed again. 'It was not like that. They understood each other. Ma looked after me—she cooked for me and fed me, made me sit down on a mat and sat in front of me and fed me with her own hands. And what a cook she is! Beth, you'll love—' he broke off, knowing he was going too far, growing foolish now. 'And Masi,' he recovered himself, 'she took me by the hand to school. In the evening, she lit the lamp and made me show her my books. She helped me with my lessons—and I think learned with me. She is a reader, Beth, like you,' he was able to say with greater confidence.
'But weren't they jealous of each other—of one for cooking for you and feeding you, and the other for sharing your lessons? Each was doing what the other didn't, after all.'
He caught her hand, on the coverlet, to stop her talking. 'It wasn't like that,' he said again, and wished she would be silent so he could remember for himself that brick-walled courtyard in the village, the pump gushing out the sweet water from the tube well, the sounds of cattle stirring in the sheaves of fodder in the sheds, the can of frothing milk the dairyman brought to the door, the low earthen stove over which his mother—his aunt—stirred a pan in the smoky dimness of dawn, making him tea. The pigeons in the rafters, cooing, a feather drifting down—
"Well, I suppose I'll be seeing them both, then—and I'll find out for myself,' Beth said, a bit grimly, and snapped off the light.
'Never heard of anything so daft,' pronounced her mother, pouring out a cup of coffee for Beth who sat at her kitchen table with her elbows on its plastic cover and her chin cupped in her hands. Doris was still in her housecoat and slippers, going about her morning in the sunlit kitchen. Beth had come early.
When Beth did not reply, Doris planted her hands on the table and stared into her brooding face. 'Well, isn't it?' she demanded. 'Whoever heard of such a thing? Rakesh having two mothers! Why ever didn't he tell us before?'
'He told me about them both of course,' Beth flared up, and began to stir her coffee. 'He talked of them as his mother and aunt. I knew they were both widows, lived together, that's all.'
Doris looked as if she had plenty more to say on the subject than that. She tightened the belt around her red-striped housecoat and sat down squarely across from Beth. 'Looks as if he never told you who his mother was though, or his father. The real ones, I mean. I call that peculiar, Beth, pec-u-liar!'
Beth stirred resentfully. 'I's'pose he hardly thinks of it that way—he was a baby when it happened. He says he grew up just accepting it. They love each other, he said.'
Doris scratched at her head with one hand, rattled the coffee cup in its saucer with the other. 'Two sisters loving each other—that much? That's what's so daft—who in her right mind would give away her baby to her sister just like that? I mean, would you hand yours over to Susan? And would Susan take it? I mean, as if it were a birthday present!'
'Oh, Mum!'
'Now you've spilt your coffee! Wait, I'll get a sponge. Don't get up. You're getting big, girl. You OK? You mustn't mind me.'
'I'm OK, Mum, but now I'm going to have two women visiting. Rakesh's mum would be one thing, but two of 'em together—I don't know.'
'That's what I say,' Doris added quickly. 'And all that expense—why's he sending them tickets? I thought they had money: he keeps talking about that farm as if they were landlords—'
'Oh, that's where he grew up, Mum. They sold it long ago—that's what paid for his education at McGill, you know. That costs.'
'What—it cost them the whole farm? He's always talking about how big it was—'
'They sold it a bit at a time. They helped pay for our house, too, and then set up his practice.'
'Hmm,' said Doris, as she shook a cigarette out of a packet and put it in her mouth.
'Oh, Mum, I can't stand smoke now! It makes me nauseous—you know that—' Beth protested.
'Sorry, love,' Doris said, and laid down the matchbox she had picked up but with the cigarette still between her lips. 'I'm just worried about you—dealing with two Indian women—in your condition—'
'I guess they know about babies,' Beth said hopefully.
'But do they know about Canada?' Doris came back smartly, as one who had learned. 'And about the Canadian winter?'
They thought they did—from Rakesh's dutiful, although not very informative, letters over the years. After Rakesh had graduated from the local college, it was Asha who insisted he go abroad 'for further studies'. Anu would not have had the courage to suggest it, and had no money of her own to spend, but here was another instance of her sister's courage and boldness. Asha had seen all the bright young people of the village leave and told Anu, 'He'—meaning her late husband—'wanted Rakesh to study abroad. "We will
give him the best education," he had said, so I am only doing what he told me to.' She tucked her widow's white chunni behind her ears and lifted her chin, looking proud. When Anu raised the matter of expense, she waved her hand—so competent at raising the boy, at running the farm, and now at handling the accounts. 'We will sell some of the land. Where is the need for so much? Rakesh will never be a farmer,' she said. So Rakesh began to apply to foreign universities, and although his two mothers felt tightness in their chests at the prospect of his leaving them, they also swelled with pride to think he might do so, the first in the family to leave the country 'for further studies'. When he had completed his studies—the two women selling off bits and pieces of the land to pay for them till there was nothing left but the old farmhouse—he wrote to tell them he had been offered jobs by several firms. They wiped their eyes with the corners of their chunnis, weeping for joy at his success and the sorrowful knowledge that he would not come back. Instead, they received letters about his achievements: his salary, his promotion, and with it the apartment in the city, then his own office and practice, photographs accompanying each as proof.
Then, one day, the photograph that left them speechless: it showed him standing with his arm around a girl, a blonde girl, at an office party. She was smiling. She had fair hair cut short and wore a green hairband and a green dress. Rakesh was beaming. He had grown rather fat, his stomach bulging out of a striped shirt, above a leather belt with a big buckle. He was also rather bald. The girl looked small and slim and young beside him. Rakesh did not tell them how old she was, what family she came from, what schooling she had had, when was the wedding, should they come, and other such particulars of importance to them. Rakesh, when he wrote, managed to avoid almost all such particulars, mentioning only that the wedding would be small, merely an official matter of registration at the town hall, they need not trouble to come—as they had ventured to suggest.
They were hurt. They tried to hide it from their neighbours as they went around with boxes of tinsel-spread sweets as gifts to celebrate the far-off occasion. So when the letter arrived announcing Beth's punctual pregnancy and the impending birth, they did not again make the mistake of tactful enquiries: Anu's letter stated with unaccustomed boldness their intention to travel to Canada and see their grandchild for themselves. That was her term—'our grandchild'.
Yet it was with the greatest trepidation that they set out on this adventure. Everyone in the village was encouraging and supportive. Many of them had flown to the US, to Canada, to England, to visit their children abroad. It had become almost commonplace for the families to travel to New Delhi, catch a plane and fly off to some distant continent, bearing bundles and boxes full of the favourite pickles, chutneys and sweets of their far-flung progeny. Stories abounded of these goodies being confiscated on arrival at the airports, taken away by indignant customs officers to be burnt: 'He asked me, "What is this? What is this?" He had never seen mango pickle before, can you believe?' 'He didn't know what is betel nut! "Beetle? You are bringing in an insect?" he asked!'—and of being stranded at airports by great blizzards or lightning strikes by airline staff—'We were lucky we had taken our bedroll and could spread out on the floor and sleep'—and of course they vied with each other with reports of their sons' and daughters' palatial mansions, immense cars, stocked refrigerators, prodigies of shopping in the most extensive of department stores. They brought back with them electrical appliances, cosmetics, watches, these symbols of what was 'foreign'.
The two mothers had „taken no part in this, saying, 'We can get those here too,' and contenting themselves by passing around the latest photographs of Rakesh and his wife and their home in Toronto. Now that they too were to join this great adventure, they became nervous—even Asha did. Young, travelled daughters and granddaughters of old friends came around to reassure them: 'Auntie, it is not difficult at all! Just buy a ticket at the booth, put it in the slot, and step into the subway. It will take you where you like,' or 'Over there you won't need kerosene or coal for the stove, Auntie. You have only to switch on the stove, it will light by itself,' or 'You won't need to wash your clothes, Auntie. They have machines, you put everything in, with soap, it washes by itself.' The two women wondered if these self-confident youngsters were, pulling their legs: they were not reassured. Every piece of information, meant to help, threw them into greater agitation. They were convinced they would be swallowed up by the subway if they went out, or electrocuted at home if they stayed in. By the time the day of their departure came around, they were feverish with anxiety and sleeplessness. Anu would gladly have abandoned the plan—but Asha reminded her that Rakesh had sent them tickets, his first present to them after leaving home, how could they refuse?
It was ten years since Rakesh had seen his mothers, and he had forgotten how thinly they tended to dress, how unequipped they might be. Beth's first impression of them as they came out of the immigration control area, wheeling a trolley between them with their luggage precariously balanced on it, was of their wisps of widows' white clothing—muslin, clearly—and slippers flapping at their feet. Rakesh was embarrassed by their skimpy apparel, Beth unexpectedly moved. She had always thought of them as having so much; now her reaction was: they have so little!
She took them to the stores at once to fit them out with overcoats, gloves, mufflers—and woollen socks. They drew the line at shoes: they had never worn shoes, could not fit their feet into them, insisting on wearing their sandals with thick socks instead. She brought them back barely able to totter out of the car and up the drive, weighed down as they were by great duffle coats that kept their arms lifted from their sides, with their hands fitted into huge gloves, and with their heads almost invisible under the wrappings of woollen mufflers. Under it all, their white cotton kameezes hung out like rags of their past, sadly.
When Doris came around to visit them, she brought along all the spare blankets she had in her apartment, presciently. 'Thought you'd be cold,' she told them. 'I went through the war in England, and I know what that's like, I can tell you. And it isn't half cold yet. Wait till it starts to snow.' They smiled eagerly, in polite anticipation.
While Beth and Doris bustled about, 'settling them in', Rakesh stood around, unexpectedly awkward and ill at ease. After the first ecstatic embrace and the deep breath of their lingering odour of the barnyard and woodsmoke and the old soft muslin of their clothing, their sparse hair, he felt himself in their way and didn't know quite what to do with himself or with them. It was Beth who made them tea and tested their English while Rakesh sat with his feet apart, cracking his knuckles and smiling somewhat vacantly.
At the table, it was different: his mothers unpacked all the foods they had brought along, tied up in small bundles or packed in small boxes, and coaxed him to eat, laughing as they remembered how he had pestered them for these as a child. To them, he was still that: a child, and now he ate, and a glistening look of remembrance covered his face like a film of oil on his fingers, but he also glanced sideways at Beth, guiltily, afraid of betraying any disloyalty to her. She wrinkled her nose slightly, put her hand on her belly and excused herself from eating on account of her pregnancy. They nodded sympathetically and promised to make special preparations for her.
On weekends, Beth insisted he take them out and show them the sights, and they dutifully allowed themselves to be led into his car, and then around museums, up radio towers and into department stores—but they tended to become carsick on these excursions, foot-weary in museums and confused in stores. They clearly preferred to stay in. That was painful, and the only way out of the boredom was to bring home videos and put them on. Then everyone could put their heads back and sleep, or pretend to sleep.
On weekdays, in desperation, Beth too took to switching on the television set, tuned to programmes she surmised were blandly innocent, and imagined they would sit together on the sofa and find amusement in the nature, travel and cooking programmes. Unfortunately these had a way of changing when her back was turne
d and she would return to find them in a state of shock from Watching a torrid sex scene or violent battle taking place before their affronted and disbelieving eyes. They sat side by side with their feet dangling and their eyes screwed up, munching on their dentures with fear at the popping of guns, the exploding of bombs and grunting of naked, bodies. Their relief when she suggested a break for tea was palpable. Once in the kitchen, the kettle whistling shrilly, cups standing ready with the threads of tea bags dangling out of them, they seemed reluctant to leave the sanctuary. The kitchen was their great joy, once they had got used to the shiny enamel and chrome and up-to-date gadgetry. They became expert at punching the buttons of the microwave although they never learned what items could and what could not be placed in it. To Rakesh's surprise it was Anu who seemed to comprehend the rules better, she who peered at any scrap of writing, trying to decipher some meaning. Together the two would open the refrigerator twenty times in one morning, never able to resist looking in at its crowded, illuminated shelves; that reassurance of food seemed to satisfy them on some deep level—their eyes gleamed and they closed the door on it gently, with a dreamy expression.
