by Amita Trasi
“What would I do there? Aai used to say that if I stepped foot in the village they’d kill me. I don’t know if that’s true, but I certainly don’t want to find out. And then both sets of grandparents are dead. Papa told me when they died. There is no one there for me now.”
Anupam chacha sighed, “What your Aai used to say . . . about the villagers trying to kill her was true . . . once. I don’t think . . . anyone cares anymore. Her parents are dead anyway. Besides . . . they revere your . . . father too much . . . in the village to bring . . . any harm to you. You shouldn’t worry about that. And . . . your father’s mother . . . she is alive. I am sure . . . she would like to . . . meet you.”
“No, no,” I chuckled, “that can’t be true. Papa wouldn’t lie to me about that. I mean, it was different when he told me Mukta was dead. He wanted me to get away from the grief of what had happened, have a better life in America. He—”
“There is a reason . . . he lied. That girl, Mukta . . . she was a prostitute’s daughter . . . from our village.”
“A prostitute’s daughter?
He nodded.
“You should go to the village . . . and talk to your grandmother. How I wish . . . he was alive today—your Papa. He . . . would have wanted you . . . to know how badly . . . he had always wanted to help . . . that girl. I never got a chance . . . to speak to him after . . . that one phone call he made . . . from America. Never had . . . a chance to say I . . . was sorry, never—”
“Sorry? For what?”
A bout of coughing overtook him. He held a towel to his mouth, and his face turned red. Before I knew it, Navin had rushed beside him, brought him a glass of water and put the glass to his mouth, letting him sip the water and wiping the spill from his mouth.
“Are you all right, Daddy?” Navin asked. Anupam chacha nodded.
“Maybe you should go now,” Navin said to me.
“Of course,” I said, stood up, and placed the tea cup on the table.
“No, no, don’t leave.” Anupam chacha said, having recovered. “There is so much . . . we have to talk about . . . so much I have to tell you—”
“Not now, Daddy. Maybe another time,” Navin admonished him.
“And I have to be somewhere. So I should probably go. But I will be back again,” I said, picking up my purse, letting the strap fall over my shoulders.
“Will you?” Anupam chacha asked, looking at me earnestly. “I would love it . . . if you come. I’d love . . . to hear you read . . . to me sometime, the . . . same stories that I . . . used to tell you.” He chuckled to himself.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll walk you out,” Navin told me. We walked down the corridor to the steps. I held on to the railing and looked at Navin. “How much time does he have?” I asked.
“Not much. A few months, a year maybe. Two if we are lucky. We had Rohan because Daddy wanted, you know, to see his grandchild before he died. So not much time—not much . . . ” he shook his head, tears glistening in his eyes.
“Maybe I will come by to read to him some days, if that’s okay?” I said.
“Of course, he would like that.”
I squeezed his shoulder. Take care, I whispered to him and walked back home.
That night as I slept, my conversation with Anupam chacha replayed in my head. Was Mukta a prostitute’s child? And how could my grandmother be alive? Why would Papa lie to me about that? It just wasn’t possible. Papa knew how badly I had wanted to meet my grandparents my whole life. He would not have lied to me about that. Maybe Anupam chacha was confused. With the cancer and the pain medicines he was on, he must have gotten his facts mixed up. My conversation with Anupam chacha replayed in my head, and I reminisced about his friendship with Papa, about my childhood, about how little time he had left, about how Navin’s son would never know his grandfather the way I had never known mine. But what was Anupam chacha sorry about? Something Papa and he had disagreed on? Was that why Papa had stopped calling them when we were in America?
My thoughts drifted to America. How quickly Papa and I left this country back then. We had always known we could never share the dream other immigrants had—the dream of prosperity as they settled there. The promise of another country had always been different for the both of us— to be able to forget all that had happened. I knew I could never forget how I had lost Aai, but I wanted to, so desperately, and I wanted to forget that I was responsible for Mukta’s death.
I remember how, in America, I had wanted to learn their ways, wanted my accent to be different. I had wanted everything about me to be different. I had spent hours watching television, carefully listening to the dialogues, the way characters enunciated their words in movies, repeating after them hoping to decipher the language of the country in which I had landed. What I always found strange was the affection people placed in pets. It was more than we had ever placed in Mukta.
For the first three months, we had stayed in a studio apartment that belonged to Papa’s friends who had been kind enough to offer it to us for free until we rented an apartment in the city that would become my home for eleven years. I remember when Papa first took me to that apartment. Mustiness filled the air as he opened the doors and led me into the living room. The carpet was dirty and full of cat hair. Papa didn’t seem to notice all this; he strolled along to the window and pointed to a faraway building, hidden in the shadow of other buildings.
“There, at the corner of that street is your school. See, now you can walk to it.”
Just a few months ago, he would have asked me, “Do you like it?” Before Aai had become just a memory in our lives, he would have taken me in his arms and told me we could move if I didn’t like the apartment. But now, all he did was stand by the window and point to the school as if that were the place where I could hope to find respite from my memories.
I barricaded myself in my room that afternoon. I knew Papa would knock on the door and ask me what was wrong. I sat on my bed and waited, straining my ears to listen for the smallest sound outside the door. He needn’t have knocked on the door at all—I would have jumped out of bed and swung the door open if only I had heard him outside. But there was no such sound. When I opened the door hours later, I saw Papa’s tall figure sitting on the couch, a book in his hands, his shadow on the wall turning the page. He looked up at me, smiled, and asked, “Are we having dinner here? Or do you want to go out?”
I searched his face, seeing how it portrayed the sadness that had crept deep into my heart. A memory came to me of how comfortable we had been when Mukta had sobbed through the nights, many years ago, but we had not understood how lonely she had been.
Over those first days, I had arranged the apartment as best as I could, the way Aai would have, had she been here. I covered the cream-colored walls with cheap paintings bought at the supermarket; garish curtains from the Indian store adorned the windows, and the tablecloth spread on the dining table had been a gift to Aai from my grandmother, handed to her before she had eloped with Papa. Aai had treasured it, spread it on the dining table in our apartment in Bombay, and I had carried it with me in my suitcase to this foreign land. I was afraid Papa wouldn’t like it, but he didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t comment on it.
In my closet was a special place for Aai’s things—things I had carried with me that made me feel closer to her—a half-empty bottle of coconut oil and a spray bottle of rose water I sprayed on my pillow so I could imagine her lulling me to sleep the way she used to when we were in Bombay. Some nights I would get out of bed, sit on the ground, and look at the stars, pretending Mukta was by my side, giggling as if nothing had ever happened.
There were times when the loss of a mother seemed unfathomable to me. Like on the day when I stood up to read a chapter aloud during English period. A girl pointed out the blood on my skirt, and I sobbed, thinking I had gotten a dreadful disease after coming to this foreign country. The teacher took me aside while girls sneered; teasing me that I knew nothing, and expla
ined to me it was just the beginning of my womanhood. I stared at the teacher’s face, wondering if that was what Aai had meant when she wanted me to remember I was a girl and had no business playing with boys.
Papa took me to school in his used Camry. He left me at the school gates, saying, “I’ll see you at home. Be safe when you walk back.”
I always wanted to ask if he would pick me up, but all I did was nod, shut the car door behind me, and stand there watching his car disappear around the corner.
As I watched other children carrying their school bags, heading toward school, I remembered what Mukta had asked me one day: do you like school? I wondered what I would have told her if she had asked that now.
One day when I stood outside my school, a girl’s voice came from behind me. “You’re new!” The accent was strange, something I was still getting used to. “Hey, you’re that new girl!” she repeated as I turned around to face her.
Her hair was like spun gold, her eyes were shining as bright as hope. I nodded.
“I’m Elisa.” She smiled.
She walked with me to class, and the day after that she was standing near the gates, looking for me. Soon she began sitting next to me in class, asking me if her dress looked pretty or wondering aloud if her mother had styled her hair properly that day. As days passed we walked to our lockers together, sat at the same table to eat lunch in the cafeteria, and walked home together. Usually she jabbered on and on about something at home, complaining about how her elder sister took advantage of her, while I wasn’t even listening to her. Everybody at school assumed she was my best friend. I wasn’t sure if she was; she knew nothing about me. But I didn’t have the energy to clarify anything to anybody—most of all to tell Elisa she wasn’t my friend. Admittedly, her dull babble gave me respite from the chatter in my mind, from the mélange of memories inflicted on me by the smallest whiff of Indian food from a restaurant we passed or the bickering and giggling of school girls ahead of us, reminding me of my walks with Mukta.
One afternoon as we were buying food from the school cafeteria, I opened my wallet and she peered inside. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Lovely girl, who is she?”
It was a photograph of Mukta and me standing outside the Asiatic library, something I had sneaked into my wallet before leaving India. I looked at Mukta’s tired face beside my own excited one, at her beautiful green eyes that had taught me to see so many things differently, and I felt a sudden surge of guilt, of grief—tasted it like the bitterness of a pill sliding down my throat.
“None of your business!” I snapped, and everybody around me stared at us.
But Elisa didn’t mind my tone or my loud voice. She followed me to the table as I carried the tray of food and let it crash on the table. The table rattled.
“Well, she must have been your best friend.” Elisa shrugged as she sat down and bit into a cookie.
I tried to gulp down my food.
“She was a friend . . . a very good friend,” I whispered to Elisa later when I had calmed down.
“Hmm . . . ” Elisa said, “you know, you are just weird. What is the matter with you?”
Sometimes, I used to think of the early morning raga Navin would sing—the music that used to float in the air and wake me up in Bombay. There was nothing of the sort here; sometimes the garbage trucks woke me up or a distant whoosh of traffic on the highway. I asked Papa a couple of times why we couldn’t call Navin or Anupam chacha and speak to them; after all, Anupam chacha was his best friend. Papa frowned when I asked him this, his expression hardened, and he looked away as if hiding something from me before he said, “Well, I did speak to him a couple of times. I also spoke to Navin the last time. But you know Tara . . . it’s . . . ” he looked around as if fumbling for an excuse, “it’s expensive. It’s expensive to call India.”
I left it at that.
Papa had tried to introduce me to several Indian girls my age—girls who had traveled to the US like me, trying to establish an anchor in this country. But whenever one of the girls called, I would say I had something else to do, something more important, and soon they stopped calling.
“What’s happened to you?” Papa asked when he heard me making an excuse over the phone. “You used to have so many friends in Bombay—running around, making masti. Neighbors used to come and complain about you, remember?”
“Papa, I really have something important to do,” I said as I dropped the receiver.
What could I have told Papa? That the girls reminded me too much of the life I used to have in Bombay and everything that came with it. How could I tell him I desperately wanted to leave behind the girl I once was?
One day when walking down a quiet corridor after class, I came across what I thought was the quietest place on earth. I took a peek inside at rows and rows of books, and the lady at the desk looked up at me from a book she was reading, adjusted her glasses, and smiled. I knew I was in a place that could give me some answers. I walked up to the shelf and picked a book. The Arabian Nights.
“Oh, that’s a good one honey; haven’t you read it yet?” the librarian behind the desk called out softly.
I didn’t let her know that Papa used to tell me the stories. I wanted to be Scheherazade—wise and brave— when I was eight years old. When I told this to Mukta once, she had listened in awe.
“You are just like her,” she had told me, “—very brave. The things you do, I could never hope to do.”
I took the book home that night, sat in my room, and watched the sky, book in hand. The rain fell silently outside, the drizzle too afraid to awaken anyone. I imagined Mukta beside me, heard her giggles, then pictured her looking at the sky solemnly, telling me the rain had a life of its own, making its journey from sky to earth—a long, tiring journey. I opened the book. I should have read this book many years ago, I told myself. I would have understood Scheherazade better and known then that I was nothing like her.
By the time I was eighteen and almost done with high school, I had learned to escape from my memories by delving into books. I read Eudora Welty, Patti Smith, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, the works of Rumi, and I agreed with what Mukta had once told me—they are better than the world we live in. Elisa didn’t like that the library had become my sanctuary. She would hover around me in the library, telling me we needed to do something more interesting with our lives. She would come up with ideas and rattle them off to me, one after another, until people around us in the library shushed her.
“You are eighteen years old. You should be out with a boy, staring into his eyes. What do you find in those damn books anyway,” she whispered to me one afternoon, peering over my shoulder into the book I was holding.
I chuckled. “You know, I asked somebody the same question years ago,” I told her. “Maybe I am just trying to find the answer.”
“Huh,” she whispered, “I know who you are talking about. It is the look you get in your eyes when you talk about her. It’s that girl from the photograph, isn’t it?”
I looked away and shut the book sharply between my hands. “What do you want Elisa?” My voice was loud, my tone abrupt, and people shushed around us, but I didn’t care.
We were quiet for some time, until people stopped staring and settled back into their reading.
“Oh nothing, it’s just that you never tell me about what happened to her—to your best friend.”
I gave her a glare. “What do you want?” I repeated.
Elisa never seemed to mind the tone I spoke in when I grew annoyed with her. Over the years, my exasperation with her grew on her as much as her talkativeness grew on me.
“Well, there’s a party tonight at Frank’s place. You might meet someone interesting.”
Frank was her boyfriend. Elisa changed boyfriends with the season, which I had no problem with. What disgusted me was that she was always determined to set me up with someone.
“Not interested,” I said, opening my book, drawing my eyes to it.
“You never come. Thi
s time I am not listening to any excuse. I will pick you up at 7 pm,” she said. When I lifted my head she was already walking out the door.
It was at Elisa’s party that I met Brian. Elisa introduced us.
“You don’t seem to be enjoying the party very much,” he said—his first words to me. His blue eyes caught me by surprise as I turned around—brown flecks floating in water—as hypnotic as the sea. He smiled and raised his eyebrows as he looked at me, his forehead wrinkling under stray strands of bronze hair. He asked me out for a drive, and I went. He took down my number, asked me out a couple days later, and I couldn’t refuse. I considered telling Papa but wasn’t sure if he would approve, so every time I was with Brian, I told Papa I was going out with Elisa. Ultimately, in my repertoire of lies, this white lie could do no harm.
Brian was a rich kid. He took me out for lavish dinners on his pocket money and bought me expensive dresses and perfumes that I stowed away from Papa’s eyes. He took me for long drives in expensive cars borrowed from his father. He almost always hit the gas pedal. We raced around bends on roads, up winding steep roads. I could see the Fernando valley below and the city looked breathtaking, lit up at night. We would sit and stare at the city for so long from up there—it was as if we didn’t need words to say how each of us felt. On those warm summer afternoons when he played the guitar for me and sang songs, the honeyed tone of his voice melting my heart, I would consider telling him what happened to Mukta or how it happened, get it out in the open, but until the very end, it remained a secret locked away in my heart.
In less than a year Brian proposed, and before I knew it I had moved in with him despite Papa’s protests. I remember that hot afternoon when I was nineteen, standing in our living room and twirling the ring on my finger while Papa kept shouting, “It is not what Indian girls from respectable families do.”
When we first moved in together we were both jubilant about getting into UCLA—I had enrolled in journalism like Papa wanted. Brian had chosen music as his major. What Brian hadn’t told me was that his father had thrown him out because he hadn’t agreed to pursue law. And along with that went his trust fund. But when I learned about it, I didn’t mind. I wanted us to make a home in the tiny apartment we had discovered in East LA. That was all we would need, I had thought. Both of us worked part-time to pay the rent—Brian at a coffee shop and I at Mc Donald’s, serving burgers.
