* * *
Ronak didn’t convert for her. Maybe Amber knew he didn’t really have anything to convert from; the children would be hers by forfeit. But he did stop brushing his teeth before breakfast, the way he had done his entire life, and switched to after-breakfast brushing. Amber taught the children the same habit, which I found much more disgusting than cold cuts. At least he didn’t give up scraping his tongue. His was the only one by the master bedroom sink, though, a stainless steel arch with little loops at the ends of the handle. I brought him a rubber-banded half-dozen once when I came back from India. I asked him, in a whisper, what Amber did. Apparently she “brushed her tongue.” I tried doing that the very next morning, just to see, and my tongue wasn’t nearly as clean.
Why Amber chose him, I can understand. If he had been a doctor, she would have been one of the pretty nurses who paged him on the pretext of a blood sugar, then coaxed the call into a conversation, a flirtation, a date … The analogy doesn’t entirely fit, though. Ronak had found Amber in high school. So early! How young he seemed then—his boyish face nicked after its second shave. Did that face kiss her, open-mouthed? I shudder to picture it. Had one of them been an adult, it would have been called corrupting a minor. But because both were so young, it’s puppy love and they are high school sweethearts. Their minds had an adult part and a child part. The adult corrupts, and the child is corrupted. It is twice as horrible.
Put tomatoes in a plastic bag, and they do the same thing: side by side, soaking in each other’s scent, the green ones redden, the red ones ripen, the ripe ones rot. That’s what happens to boys and girls in high school. They grow each other up before it’s time. Young doesn’t mean what it meant when I was young. The parents encourage it, sending their daughters in low-cut homecoming dresses. The schools themselves arrange and host such dances; the young don’t need secrecy. And the red flower on the front of the dress, that American tradition, the corsage, pinned where it will draw attention to the girl’s breasts, the literal flowering to mark the figurative. A child’s breasts. They are still more girl than woman at that age, no matter how they dress or speak or, in their Victoria’s Secret push-up bras, look.
But was it really any better in India, even in the past? Hasn’t it all been going on forever? My friends and I were just sheltered more successfully. The poorer classes, the slum boys and slum girls—they didn’t have exams like we did, their bodies were all they owned and their only source of pleasure. What about Navratri, the nine nights of dancing, ostensibly for the goddess? Garba let men and women dance in a circle, the still point of their orbit a full-color picture of Durga on her tiger. Raas dandia allowed vicarious contact, sticks on sticks, rhythmic, four taps and you moved on. There was never any one-on-one dancing, not even between husband and wife. But the statistics were eloquent. The number of abortions in Gujarat spikes yearly after those nine days. The raas boys in glittery red bandannas doing the showiest leaps, making the most of their brief opportunity across from us—they wanted our attention, our admiration, our lust. They were doing a mating display, like any peacock or gaudily crested tropical bird. Durga had nothing to do with it.
What was that phrase Ronak used, when he first brought Amber over? On and off. I had heard enough about on and off to know both might have had other lovers in the off times. I would never know. These were not things he would tell his mother. I had always hoped Ronak’s innate shrewdness, his selfishness, might guide him to an Indian girl. There was no shortage. I saw them at every local get-together, always someone else’s daughter-in-law. Or else out shopping, ponytailed, sunglasses hooked in the blouse, chic backpack with an Enfamil bottle in the side pocket, pushing her toddler in the shopping cart. Fresh out of their residencies, new mothers, working part-time … there were hundreds of such Indian girls, in Chicago, in the Bay Area, all of Ronak’s generation. They liked the same movies and the same bands, but he hadn’t wanted one. Since his early twenties he would dismiss the Indian girls I pointed out. He called them “future aunties.” In Amber, he found the perfect compromise. She was the good girl who would raise his children and devote herself to him—and the white woman, thrillingly foreign, parentally forbidden. His choice had its own logic. I felt I should have predicted it: how he alone would manage to have it both ways at once.
* * *
Sachin puts the children to sleep. He has an easier time of it than Mala. From Mala, Vivek demands songs and stories; Shivani plays with her mother’s hair. Sachin simply lies there, a child in the crook of either arm, and waits. Most of the time he goes to sleep alongside them, as he does tonight.
So Mala kneels and unzips the red wheeled suitcase, which is full of wrapped presents, while I go to our stash in the walk-in closet. I stacked our presents against the wall. They are hidden by Abhi’s Arrow shirts. On the shelves above them, I store my sarees in crinkly Asopalav bags. They remind me of the photographs in which I wore them rather than the occasions themselves. Old-fashioned albums, sticky background with a plastic oversheet, small envelope containing negatives stored in the back. Each negative the bookmark in a finished book. Mala used to hold them to the light, squint at our dark teeth and luminous hair, and declare, “Ghosts! Everyone’s ghosts!”
I touch my old sarees and marvel at this country where silk can lie folded so many years and no moths find it. So clean, this part of the world. Sterile, almost. Uncrowded by people, uncrowded by bugs.
The saris stay in my mind as Mala and I place the gifts around the tree. Ronak has already stacked his in a tower and gone back upstairs. We mix our boxes with his, making something arbitrary but aesthetic with the different box sizes and the three kinds of wrapping paper. Ronak and Mala have gotten Abhi and me two things each, even though they know we do the tree and gifts for the children. Ronak wanders downstairs again as Mala is putting candy canes in the stockings, which she has hung beneath the peacock-filigreed show plate on our mantelpiece. He has gift cards. He slides them casually out of his wallet.
“You still get stuff for Shivani from Babies ‘R’ Us, right? Or is she too big for that place?”
Mala cocks an eyebrow. “You’re really asking me? You’ve got three of your own, don’t you?”
“Amber handles that kind of stuff. Kid shopping.”
“You didn’t ask Amber?”
“Is this going to be any use to you or no?”
“Of course. Nipples and onesies.” Ronak shows no comprehension of what even I understand to be sarcasm. His hand is still in midair. Mala grins. “Amber’s a saint the way she treats you. What’d you get her for Christmas?”
Ronak drops the card in the stocking. “Massage treatment. One of those spa things. She likes that.”
“Any guesses what Sachin got me this year?”
Ronak glances at me. He knows Mala’s cuts at Sachin pain me. The first year, Sachin had gotten her nothing—like Abhi and me in our first years here, Sachin assumed Christmas, like Halloween, was for children. Abhi had advised him to get Mala “something special,” and the next Christmas, Sachin had purchased some earrings. He called Abhi over to record him as he handed her the gift. The smallness of the box might have made the gift seem bigger, had not the Kohl’s bag (receipt still inside) sitting on the couch armrest. We have coached him since. He has gotten better.
Ronak now senses a cut coming, just as I do. “Ooh,” he says to Mala, as if he has just noticed her baby candy canes. “Can I have one of those?” She offers him one, and he plucks it playfully from her fingers and taps it on her forehead, successfully diverting her attention. “Thanks!” he says, and makes an escape upstairs.
I watch as Mala rearranges the gifts one more time, steps back, then unhooks a silver ball and a reindeer and switches their places on the tree. “Let’s see it with the lights on.” She plugs in the lights Abhi has strung on the tree. They begin to blink. She thumbs a small device along the cord, and the fifty nipples of white light hold steady. She assesses the tree, and I know what she is thinking: When they
come down the stairs, this is how it’s going to look. She stands on the couch to tilt the star atop the tree so it will face the approach.
She is stepping down onto the carpet when she loses her footing. Suddenly her body fills my arms. Her hard shoulder blades dig against my chest. I have not held her whole in a very long time. She is out of my arms immediately. “Sorry about that. Good thing you were there.”
My breath is coming quick and shallow. “You have room in the bag now, right?”
She is distracted. She tugs her shirt to make it hang correctly. “Hm?”
“In your red bag?”
“Yeah. It’s empty.”
“Let me give you some things.”
“What?”
“Come on. I want to give you some things.”
I take her hand in mine as she steps down. I lead her upstairs to the walk-in closet, hurrying, her hand in mine the whole time. I begin drawing my old sarees from their stacks and laying them at her feet, like Ahmedabadi saree merchants reaching to their shelves and flinging silk after silk before mothers and daughters, everything brought out. Nothing has faded. Does she remember these? The creases stay, but the colors spill, spectacular and Indian, on the carpet’s beige. She will never have occasion to wear them. She senses the panic in my giving. I cannot conceal my panic, alone with her there in the closet. Abhi’s shirts are still clustered at one end of the shelf, and I see empty space where the presents had been. I get down my punjabis and old garba cholis with bits of mirror sewn in, and they are all unreally vivid under the bulb. My hands shake as I give her dress after dress, telling her she can send the blouses to India to have them sized, telling her they are all hers now. “Mom, stop,” Mala says. “Tell me what’s going on. Please.”
Part of me knows the children will rush down the stairs just ten hours from now. We will beam at them and crouch to see their faces light up from below with each fulfilled desire. This is the wrong time. I should wait. I cannot wait. I give her everything, and after I have given her everything, I tell her everything. If I had set the sarees down in neat piles, I might have stayed silent or made up a story. With the sarees disordered, I cannot hold back. Ronak hears Mala’s small frightened shout. He peeks through the door of the closet and shakes his head at us embracing. “More drama? Every time. Jeez, what is it with you two?” He assumes we’ve had the usual quarrel followed by the usual crying. He is about to turn and leave us to ourselves, but he senses in our faces and in the wild turbulence of silks, a rupture beyond reconciliation. His eyes fix on me alone. His hand goes out tentatively as if to touch my face, then retreats. “Everything okay?” Mala buries her face in my neck. Ronak kneels. One knee, then both. “Mom?”
PART TWO
FAMINE
Rameshbhai Kothari, a distant acquaintance, no one close, died in the scent of fresh cut grass, unhooking the bag from the mower. Today is his katha at the temple, the recitation of Hanuman’s story from the Ramayana. It has come up on the same day as a wedding reception. Brandon Weds Neelam—I still have the invitation in a drawer with its filigree Ganesha. I checked yes to the reception centuries ago.
“Both will be too much,” says Abhi. “All that traveling. The temple is forty-five minutes, the Hilton is downtown.”
“I feel good. And the last scan was good. Mala showed it to her radiologist friend.”
“The scan means nothing. It’s how you feel. We need to pick one.”
I decide on the katha—it won’t last as long, and there will be less socializing to tire me.
The car ride north takes us on the highway. I see a small pile of gray fur serried with darker gray. It’s on the white line, a few bits of the body marking its trajectory. Abhi steers the car around it, and I do what I always do when I pass roadkill, a quick jab of the ring finger toward the spot where it lay, then to my chest, an under-the-breath Rama Rama. I do this even when we don’t happen to be driving to the local temple. I never think about the soul, only of the black beady eyes and the sound of its paws—a padding then a clicking, curious. No grass. The sense of having arrived in a clearing. And then the instantaneous shattering of every bone.
The temple is a low brick building that might have been a school. Lexuses and Camrys and Honda Accords fill its lot almost to capacity. We are late, but we are not the only ones. A man in shirt and tie is followed by two young children in jeans and sweatshirts; the mother, paused by the car as it blinks its lights and beeps, looks over her shoulder to check the cascade of her saree, then does two quick shuffles to catch up.
Inside, leather shoes and worn Nikes and beaded women’s chappals crowd the entryway. Hanuman has already jumped. He is in midair, en route to Lanka. This is the Sundarakanda, the part of the Ramayana that tells of Hanuman’s journey over the sea to find Sita, his capture, and how he broke loose after the Lankans set his tail on fire. The Kotharis invited some musicians from Detroit. I saw two Toyota minivans outside, the ones with the Michigan Proud to Be American license plates, SNGEET1 and TAALAM. The father sings, the two docile white-kameezed sons play tabla and harmonium. I imagine them unloading their instruments, the speakers and mics and cords, the empty SunChips bags and Hardee’s straws and cups from the long drive. They wear saffron turbans pleated and fanned at the front.
By convention, this part of Hanuman’s story is sung for the dead. All those images of breaking free, first from gravity, then from chains. Unless this part is really sung to cheer the mourners with monkey mischief. Every other part of the Ramayana is sad: Rama’s exile, Sita’s kidnapping, the war against Ravana, the gossip in Ayodhya after they get back, Sita’s banishment. Even the reunions are ruinous. Rama reproaches Sita when they meet in Lanka. Years later, when their twins are grown boys and the parents meet again in Ayodhya, Sita wills a chasm in the earth to open and throws herself into it. No, only Hanuman’s part would do to send off the dead—a divine monkey jumping off a cliff and soaring.
We have slipped off our shoes. I push them closer together with my bare foot, his and mine, so they huddle like rabbits. A few young children run past us. The men and women are segregated, men left, women right. I will have to sit apart from Abhi. He is waiting, surveying the seated people, some swaying back and forth. The elderly grandmothers roost on folding metal chairs along the periphery. He doesn’t want to be apart from me, either. I touch Abhi’s elbow.
“Everything all right?” he whispers.
I am about to tell him, These musicians are good, find out how much they charge. I change my mind. I nod, and we settle on either side of the aisle, far to the back. He sits lotus style and checks his watch. I start looking at people’s faces, the backs of their heads, their clothes. The men’s bald spots vary in size and glisten. The women in front of me have thick braids. I touch my own diminished knot. My hair was always thin and quick to shed, even before. I got that from my mother. I use the comb gingerly now. How hard I always tugged when it caught! Now I extricate the teeth patiently, listening, in the misty bathroom, as my brittle strands break. I fear each day that I will draw the comb through and come away with a whole tuft.
Some women wear punjabis, others, sarees. The one directly in front of me wears a saree. Her blouse is taut, beneath it, her flanks crease from their own weight. Her lower back, bare, shows the faintest black down. The fine hairs mark the course water would take down the skin. The Indian word for overweight is healthy. It’s still a compliment there, or was, when we last visited. (Things keep changing; it was only after India became American that I started feeling foreign to it.) I am not healthy. I am afraid to go. The relatives would notice and comment right away. There’s no etiquette there in this regard. My saree blouse would be off my shoulders were it not for six strategic safety pins. No matter. It’s not feasible to go, not anymore. Abhi sets up a webchat sometimes. I see our relatives that way—sitting close, shoulders up, constantly glancing at myself in the box. We have nothing to talk about but distance and absence. Yes, we want to make a trip. Yes, it’s been too long. Yes,
yes, yes.
Abhi is focused on the singers. He is rocking back and forth. He is really following this. Isn’t his mind wandering? Isn’t everyone’s? I look around. Everyone is focusing. I should focus. What is wrong with me that I’m not focusing? I don’t know where Hanuman is, or even whether he has found Sita yet. I listen to the singsong a while, trying to pick up clues, trying to pick up recognizable words. This is not in Gujarati or even modern Hindi, which I can usually follow. It is Tulsidas’s Hindi, hundreds of years old and rhyming, almost folksy, kahu, kachu, naahi. I am thinking about focusing, and this is keeping me from focusing. You are in a temple. This is being sung for the dead. The gods are watching you right now. They know what you are thinking, and they know you aren’t thinking about death. Must I? I do all the rest of the time. It’s only now, when I am supposed to, that I get some respite.
I wish, I do wish I had been pious all my life. Now it is too late. Would the gods even want me if I went to them out of fear? What if I admitted it was fear, would they respect my honesty and forgive me? The slinking, shamefaced motive, last-minute slokas and good-luck Ganeshas. They must be used to it.
I note the nooks for each of the murtis. As I do, I sense a kind of cosmic shaking of the head. Does it matter that I don’t have an aptitude for religion? That I have always noticed things and daydreamed most keenly when made to sit still during kathas, bhajans, holy talks? I glance at Abhi again, and he is staring ahead, rocking gently. My eye jumps to a little boy in a kameez: he looks bored, he drapes himself across his mother’s lap for a moment, sits up and stares at the ceiling, pokes, pokes, pokes her arm. She is paying attention, too, and she bats gently at his hand. He dives forward onto her lap.
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