Before We Visit the Goddess

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  I force myself to control my voice. “Coming, Mom.”

  I lean over the album. I snatch my grandmother up. I hurry to my bedroom, slip her inside my carry-on, and cover her with T-shirts. Elation and guilt thrill through me. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  It’s late at night. My mother has gone to bed. I can’t sleep, so I’m in the garage, dividing things into piles. Throwaway. Giveaway. Keep. Unsure. My body is still jangling from the theft. Little sounds make me jump. My breath feels jagged in my chest, like I’m coming down with something. My head aches, though I’ve taken a double dose of my mother’s ibuprofen.

  For dinner we had canned soup and toast. I could tell my mother was disappointed. She’d wanted us to use up all her fresh vegetables. She hated waste, especially of food. But that’s all I was capable of putting together. I would have killed for some vodka, but my mother doesn’t keep alcohol in the house. The way I was tonight, that was probably a good thing. Flashes of pain pulsed behind my eyes. When Gary called my cell phone the way he does every night, I ignored it. I responded to my mother’s questions with monosyllables, mumbling about a migraine. When she complained about her leg, how the pain keeps waking her up at night, I didn’t respond, though I could see she was hoping for some sympathy. It’s often this way after one of my lapses. I felt worse than usual because my mother had just given me three beautiful silk saris, her most expensive ones, plus an elegant white woolen shawl, which looked at once familiar and magical, an object out of a dream. I don’t think I’ll ever use them, though—they’re not exactly my thing.

  “Send me a photo when you wear them,” she said as she handed the bundle to me. Then, because she’s who she is, she sniffed and added, “If I’m still alive, that is.”

  I’ve made it to the corner of the garage. Another hour and I’ll be done. Another two days and I’ll be out of here with my stolen photo. I haven’t decided what I’ll do with it.

  Everything else I’ve stolen, I got rid of. It started with a stuffed raccoon I took from my boyfriend. (Or was it earlier? I forget.) I let the raccoon float away into the ocean. From the thrift store where I worked, I took a Jesus statue. Left it at a bus stop. With time, it got easier, though perhaps easier is not the word I’m looking for. When I went back to college, I stole textbooks from other students and stamped envelopes from the department where I worked. I stole pen-holders from my professors’ offices. Plaques. Things I didn’t need. Things I wouldn’t use. Sometimes I threw them in the first dumpster I came across. When I was dating Gary, I stole his college jersey, three novels, his spare keys, and a box of Clif Bars. I did this even though I was in love with him.

  At the various jobs I’ve held, I’ve stolen coffee mugs, staple removers, cushions, wall hangings, even photographs and kiddie art off of my coworkers’ desks. I once stole a rabbit paw. I’m good at it. I came dangerously close to being found out sometimes—those were the most thrilling moments—but I always believed I’d never be caught. When people started looking at me funny, I quit my job and moved on.

  Then a colleague brought in a glass paperweight, one of those antique ones where, if you shook it, snow fell slow and silent over a tiny Eiffel Tower. Her dead aunt had left it to her. She held it cupped in her palms and told us in a breathless, teary voice about how she would play with it when she went to visit her aunt. She looked so happy, remembering, that I had to have it.

  I took it one afternoon when I thought no one was around. But someone must have seen me. When I got down to the lobby, the security officer made me empty out my purse. Other employees stopped to gawk. My boss was summoned; there was talk of notifying the police. I was blamed for other things that had gone missing, even those I’d had nothing to do with.

  The security officers accompanied me to the house. I was terrified my family would find out, but providentially, Gary was still at work and Neel at an after-school game. The officers searched, but there were no stolen goods. I’d thrown them all away long ago.

  I lost my job, of course. But my boss, who’d been fond of me, said she wouldn’t put anything in my employment file if I started therapy. Thus, Dr. Berger.

  It took me a long time to find work again. I had to tell my poor trusting husband a slew of lies. I thought the ordeal had cured me, but it wasn’t so. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started stealing again, no matter how much I hate myself for it afterward.

  Dr. Berger says, Stealing doesn’t bring back whatever it is that you feel you lost. Think about it, Tara.

  She says, Why are you attracted to self-sabotage?

  I don’t know, Dr. Berger. Is it because it takes less courage to hurt oneself than to hurt others?

  There’s a big box in the corner, sealed. I’m surprised to find my name on it, and our old address from when my parents were married. It’s battered, as though it’s made it through several of my mother’s moves. For a moment I’m confused. Then I see that it’s from my dorm, postmarked from the time when I dropped out of school. I’d walked out with a backpack, leaving everything else behind, as though in doing that I could shrug off my life. I remember a message from my mother on my cell phone, saying the university had mailed my things back to the house. I hadn’t responded. I’d been sure she would have got rid of them by now. But she hadn’t. Nor had she opened the box to pry into my life. She’d carried it patiently with her, apartment to apartment, year to year, hoping I’d come back to her.

  I carry the box to the throwaway pile, but then I pull at the packing tape. I want a glance at my old self, the Tara who would never have dreamed of stealing anything. The brittle tape comes off easily. Textbooks, outdated clothes, music CDs, a jumble of Sharpies, strips of Pepto-Bismol crumbled into pink powder, an alarm clock, bottles from which the perfumes have long evaporated, a favorite blue comforter that my mother gave me so I wouldn’t feel homesick.

  The girl I’d been, I can’t feel her in any of this.

  I throw the box on the pile. It tilts. Items spill onto the floor, clattering. I swear. More work for me now. Squatting, I start to stuff everything back. Then I catch sight of a large sealed envelope. It doesn’t look familiar, unlike the rest of the junk in here. When I pull it out of the box, I see row upon row of Indian stamps. Someone spent a lot of money to mail this to me. The sender’s name is Bipin Bihari Ghatak. I have no idea who he might be.

  Inside is a thick stack of papers. The sheet on top, written in a cramped, meticulous hand, says, Your grandmother spent the last hours before her heart attack writing this letter to you.

  My grandmother. I imagine her sitting cross-legged on a marble floor, pulling a low rosewood table close to her. I see her unscrewing a fountain pen. She looks a little like old Mrs. Mehta, a woman I’d once known. Mrs. Mehta had told me stories about the stars. She’d gone with me to get my things out of my cheating boyfriend’s house. She wrote to me twice after she went back to India, lovely, meandering, melancholy letters in which she she invited me to come and live with her. I reread the letters thirstily and thought about it. But I didn’t have the courage. Then I moved, and moved again, leaving no forwarding address, and I lost her, too.

  I’m afraid the letter will be in Bengali, which I can’t read, but it’s in English. My hands start to tremble. When I was young, I asked my mother many times about my grandmother. But she never liked to talk about her. I knew Grandma passed away around the time of the divorce, but I didn’t have any details, and later, when my mother and I started speaking again, I’d been reluctant to bring up a topic that would surely have been painful for her. Perhaps, finally, this letter will help me parse the mystery that is Sabitri Das.

  Dearest Granddaughter Tara,

  Your mother informs me that you do not wish to continue with college. I am very sorry to hear this and hope you will reconsider. It would be a criminal waste if you do not avail yourself of the opportunity life has given you.

  How would my grandmother have known about me dropping out of college? Did my mother and she discuss me?
I feel a twinge of anger but drop it. It was a long time ago, and besides, I’m curious.

  But the letter is confusing. Page after page is a variation of the same theme. Had my grandmother developed dementia in her old age? I shuffle the pages of clichéd advice, disappointed, glancing through them one last time before I stuff them into the box.

  Then I come across this:

  . . . at that, I stopped. Perhaps a part of me believed that, charity case that I was, he had the right to command me. But a part of me wanted to stay because he was young and handsome and had been chivalrous. My heart beat unevenly as I turned to face him, and not just out of fear.

  Somewhere in there, my grandmother had started telling me a story. Her story. The story I’d been longing to know since I saw her photo. No, I’d needed to know this story all my life, though I hadn’t always been aware of the needing. My breath comes fast as I retrieve the sheets and spread them out on the garage floor. I try to put them in sequence. It takes a while because nothing is numbered. I’m longing to read, but there’s something I must do first. The universe has given me an undreamed-of gift. I must reciprocate.

  I go to my bedroom and retrieve the sepia photo from my carry-on. It isn’t easy. I take a deep breath and hold it. I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. Twice I turn back. But finally I manage to walk with the photo to the family room, stepping carefully in the dark. I’m going to put it back in the album.

  Dr. Berger, it’s the first time in my life that I’m returning what I’ve stolen. I think you might call this a landmark moment.

  I maneuver gingerly between unfamiliar pieces of furniture, banging my knee a couple of times in the process. But I don’t want to switch on a light and wake my mother, who’s sleeping with her door open. I don’t want to field a host of awkward questions. I feel around on the coffee table for the album, but I can’t seem to find it. Damn. Could my mother have taken it into the bedroom with her? I feel around some more and knock over something loud and metallic.

  “Who’s there?” my mother calls in a startled, quavery voice. I’m startled, too. Her voice sounds very close—much closer than the bedroom. I hear a sharp clapping sound, and then I’m blinded by the blaze of a table lamp directly in front of me. Double damn. She has one of those clap-activated switches.

  My mother sits up groggily, feeling around on the table for her glasses. She must have woken up and come out here to try and find a more comfortable position on the sofa. On the side table, in front of which I’m standing, is the photo album. So near. But there’s no way I can replace the photo without my mother seeing it.

  “What are you doing, Tara?”

  “I—I was sorting through your things in the garage. I came in for a drink of water.” Even to my ears, my voice sounds squeaky and suspicious. I try to hide the photo behind my back, which of course draws her attention to it.

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  I offer up the photo, feeling much like a four-year-old caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

  My mother stares at it, then at me, anger replacing the surprise on her face.

  “You were taking it? After I’d told you no? Taking my mother’s picture, which would have given me a little comfort in that mausoleum?”

  “Actually, I was putting it back,” I say. But there’s guilt in my voice, and with her infallible mother-instinct, she hones in on it.

  “You couldn’t wait a few months, until I was dead? You had to steal it now?”

  Maybe it’s that word, steal. Maybe it’s the pent-up stress of the entire week. Maybe it’s the weight I feel because I’m putting an end to my mother’s independence. Something breaks inside me.

  “Yes,” I shout. “I steal. That’s what I do. That’s why I keep moving from job to job. I already got caught once. I’m sure I’ll get caught again. My husband will come to know. My son. But I can’t stop.”

  She shrinks back from me. The horror—or is it disgust?—on her face is like red pepper rubbed into a wound. It forces me onward.

  “Do you want to know why I steal? I take things that I should have had but didn’t get. Things that mean happy memories. Things that stand for love and commitment. But sometimes I steal things that mean nothing. I steal them because there’s a big hole in the middle of my chest and stealing fills it up for a moment.”

  “Why the photo?” Her whisper is shaky now, as though she is afraid to hear the answer. As she should be.

  “I stole the photo because you kept her from me all my life.”

  And suddenly she’s furious. “How dare you accuse me! What do you know of how carefully I had to walk the razor’s edge with your father? Do you think I didn’t miss her? Didn’t want her to come to America and be with me when I was so lonely that I wanted to die? Didn’t want to see her holding you when you were born, as you were growing up? But he wouldn’t let me.”

  At the mention of my father, I find myself beginning to shake. God, that he should have such a hold on me years after I promised myself I wouldn’t care! My words come from somewhere deep down that I’d forgotten about—or forced myself to forget. Why don’t you ask her? he’d said at our last meeting outside the thrift store where I’d been working at the time.

  “Don’t blame my father,” I say. “None of this would have happened—not the divorce, not all the disasters afterwards—if you hadn’t betrayed him first.”

  The words sound ridiculous as soon as they’re out of my mouth. I wait for her to laugh an incredulous laugh of denial, to scoff at me for trying to change the subject, to accuse me some more of thievery. But she looks down, defeat evident in the slump of her shoulders.

  My mother? She was unfaithful, too? What kind of stock do I come from, then? What twisted genes have I passed on to my son?

  She averts her eyes, reaches for her walker, and makes her lurching way to the bedroom. The door closes behind her with a small, final click.

  I’ve ruined everything.

  After I replace my grandmother’s photo, because I can’t think of what else to do, I go back to the garage, to her letter. All night I read my grandmother’s adventures. Her words enter me like spears. They hurt, but also for a while they make me forget my own problems.

  Her dreams were audacious, unseemly for the daughter of a poor village priest. People around her were determined to crush them. The rules her mother wanted her to live by, proverbs for good women, were too simple for her. She could not accept them.

  Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family’s name.

  Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family’s fame.

  There are secrets in this letter, things she has told no one: How she lived, a poor guest in a rich Kolkata home, swallowing humiliation daily for the privilege of education. How she fell into forbidden love and for that crime was thrown out into the night; how in desperation she beguiled my grandfather; how she got back at her onetime hosts but learned that revenge exacts its price. How the problems between her and my mother began, with words of deadly innocence spoken in a car, and a slap that echoed through the years.

  It’s morning by the time I finish reading and rereading the letters. I’m exhausted. My eyes are rough and burning, scratchy with sand—as though I’ve traveled halfway across the world without stopping. But I’m strangely comforted, too. In the context of my grandmother’s life, mine seems a little less desperate.

  But no, I’m not finished. There was something else Grandma Sabitri had learned, the most important of all. It was the last thing she wrote for me before she died. In truth, she wrote it for my mother as much as myself, and thus I must share it with her before I leave.

  I knock on my mother’s door. I know it’s not going to be easy.

  “Go away,” she says, her voice muffled.

  I turn the knob and enter.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she says. “Go. We have nothing more to say to each other. Fortunately, after today, we won’t have to see each other again.”


  I hand her the letter and tell her where I found it. I hear the intake of her breath. I wait.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispers to herself as she reads. “Oh, God, I didn’t know.” I think she has forgotten my presence.

  My mother’s on the last page now. She’s crying—ugly, racking sobs that make it hard for the words to push through.

  “When you told me you were dropping out of college, Tara, I didn’t know what to do. I’d dropped out of college myself—so many of my problems stemmed from that. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you. I guess that’s when people call their mothers—when their world is falling apart. I told your grandma that she must write to you. Get you to change your mind. That it was her duty. I was so focused on my own pain, I didn’t even think how much my news might distress her. Oh, my poor mother, all my life I’ve given her only trouble. Even as a child, I was sullen and difficult. I blamed her for my dad’s death. And even more for my baby brother’s. I felt it was her job to keep him safe. I didn’t know then that mothers can’t necessarily save their children, no matter how much they want to.

  “After I talked to her, all day I paced the house. I called you, but you didn’t answer. I called your father. He had already changed his number. My body felt like it was burning up. That night—probably just as my mother was having her heart attack—I took sleeping pills. I was planning to take the whole bottle, but halfway through, I lost courage. In any case, I passed out. Didn’t hear the phone when it rang. The next morning, I woke up on the bathroom floor, dry-mouthed, my head feeling like it was about to split open. I wanted to crawl into bed and never get up.

  “But I dragged myself to the phone and checked for messages. I was hoping you’d called back. But the messages were all from my mother’s phone. I skipped them. I couldn’t bear to listen to her scoldings, telling me once again that I’d messed up.

  “The messages weren’t from her, though. They were from Bipin Babu, our old manager at Durga Sweets, the only one who was there for her in the end. By the time I realized this, everything was over, even her ashes scattered. Tara, I’d killed my mother!”