Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

“You also always tell me that there is no place that will give me as much comfort as my own home will. But Mama, that isn’t true. The comfort that I feel when I’m with her is better than anything I have ever felt. How can that be true unless she is my home, Mama? I love you. I don’t want to see you upset like this. But I need you to love what I love. A learned person is honored, except in their own house. I have learned something in this country. I have learned that a life without the person that you love is no life at all and it doesn’t matter if that person you love is black or white or brown or a man or a woman. This is not respected in this house, but it should be. Don’t make me choose between you and the person that I love. Mama, you can’t say that you love me and ask me to choose.”

  Neeraj’s arms were folded across his potbelly. “Omkar, look at what you are doing to your mother,” he said.

  “I’m not doing anything to Mama. She is doing this to herself. Love should be celebrated and she’s acting like somebody just died.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes before Jarminder broke that silence by yelling in Punjabi. She scolded him about the cruelty of his character and guilted him about his selfish capacity to discard the wishes of his family, using cultural sayings as scaffolding for each argument. Her outcry bled her clean of the life she had always imagined for him until the only thing that was left was her fear of losing him.

  Jarminder started to cry. Neeraj handed her a tissue to blow her nose, but she continued to sniff. “I am your mother. All I ever wanted was your happiness,” she said.

  “I know, Mama. My happiness is Aria. Mama, she is the light of my life and I cannot live without her, please understand me.” There was silence for a few moments.

  “Where did you meet her? Where is she from? Who are her parents?” Neeraj asked, surprised at himself for being interested.

  Omkar looked at the carpet, knowing that what he was about to say would not be received well. “I met her here at the shop. She came in one day and I started talking to her. Papa, it was love at first sight.”

  Neeraj was surprised at his son’s answer. He had assumed that Omkar and Aria had met at school. Suddenly, he didn’t know whether he felt good about Omkar tending the store after all. He certainly hadn’t expected it to be the family’s undoing.

  Omkar continued, “Aria doesn’t have parents. I knew this was going to upset you. But it isn’t her fault, Papa. She lost them just like we lost Ajit and Shashi. Papa, it wouldn’t be fair if someone thought badly of you because they died. It isn’t fair to think badly of Aria because her parents died. She was sent here to live with an uncle, but he started abusing her, Papa. When she refused to sleep with him, he kicked her out of the house.”

  Neeraj was disgusted. His pride in the honor and decency of his own culture swelled within him. Only in white culture would a child be abandoned to a person like that. At the same time, his sense of Aria began to change. He could see that in contrast to his original impression, Aria was pure. Her chastity obviously meant so much to her that she was unwilling to trade it for her basic needs. Neeraj respected that quality in a woman. Despite his desire as a parent to remain dismissive of her, it made him feel protective of her.

  Omkar felt guilty for lying to his parents. He could not tell them the complete truth about Aria’s past. They would not understand it. They were too conservative to accept the idea that he intended to marry a woman who had a drug addict for a mother and who never knew her father, any more than they could accept that she had dropped out of school or was currently living on the streets. He would have to talk Aria into upholding the lie as well.

  “Is her uncle looking for her?” Neeraj said, wanting to steer clear of involvement in a potentially dangerous situation.

  “No … he said that if she wouldn’t sleep with him, he doesn’t care if she lives or dies.” Omkar felt himself winding them deeper and deeper into the lie he was telling to corrode their resistance to Aria.

  Much as she might not want to admit it, Jarminder could feel some empathy toward Aria. She wiped tears away from her eyes with the tissue. “Well, one thing would be good … I wouldn’t have to share my grandkids on holidays.”

  The three of them started laughing. “I’m not saying that I’m happy about it yet. You can’t expect that from me,” she said.

  “Does this mean you are OK with it?” Omkar asked, knowing his life was flailing on the hook of her next statement.

  “I’m saying we’ll live with it, Omkar. We want you to be happy. But don’t you dare ever, ever do that again!” she said, referring to Omkar’s disappearance.

  Omkar rushed in to hug her. Her consent spoke for both his parents. It was more leniency than he had imagined either of them to be capable of.

  In truth, in the hours of torment since Omkar and Aria drove off, they had already had it brought back to them with explosive force what it felt like to lose their children. When you lose a child, you never ever forget, but it’s something that over time can sleep in your mind because of the pressures of day-to-day life. Omkar’s absence had reminded them that as long as he was alive and happy, it didn’t matter what school he graduated from or even whether he graduated at all. It didn’t matter if he got a good job or didn’t. It didn’t matter if he married the sort of girl they wanted him to marry or even if he got married at all. Faced with the threat of losing Omkar from their lives, they realized that when you love your child, everything that you think matters no longer matters in comparison to having them be a part of your life.

  Omkar went to the kitchen to do the dishes that were layered in the sink. Neeraj and Jarminder followed him. “What are you working on at school?” Jarminder asked him, still sniffling the remnants of their conflict away from the surface of her expression.

  “I’m taking a physics course that’s really challenging. But I’m also taking a class on wave propagation in solids, and so far I really like it. Did you know that when an earthquake happens, the earth’s crust ruptures and it creates elastic waves in the earth? So essentially an earthquake is a wave.”

  Omkar’s enthusiasm was met with protest. “Don’t talk to me about earthquakes, Omkar. I’ve had enough for one day.”

  The soapsuds began to make Omkar’s hand itch so he turned off the water and scratched the top of his hand. Jarminder noticed him scratching. It was a good omen. “Ah … look, you’re going to receive good luck,” she said.

  Omkar rolled his eyes and went back to washing. Superstitious as she was, it gave her comfort. She imagined it was God giving her the message that maybe her son was right in choosing Aria. “Omkar, why don’t you bring her for dinner tonight so we can meet her the right way? I am making sarhon dā sâg. Do you think she would like it?”

  It had never occurred to Jarminder until this minute that she might be cooking one day for a daughter-in-law whose tastes differed from their own. She felt the very real fear that if Aria disliked her cooking, she might not have any other grounds for a relationship with her.

  “Yes, Mama, I think she would like that very much,” Omkar replied, throwing the dishtowel over his shoulder.

  “You’re not going to let this get in the way of your studies?” The question was more of an order she barked at him.

  “No, Mama. I promise,” he said.

  When Omkar hugged them both to say goodbye after settling on a time to come back that night with Aria, he walked down the stairs light with excitement and heavy with maturity. Omkar felt like a man. Aria had a way of calling those dormant qualities out in him. He felt like he was taking his place in the world of men. Aria had been like an angel who had come to awaken him to himself.

  As he got into the car to drive toward her, he remembered an old Punjabi saying. “If a man expects his wife to be an angel in his life, then he should first create heaven for her.” He finally understood that saying. It was now exactly what he planned to do.

  CHAPTER 30

  When Omkar and Aria opened the door of the Super Sun Market, the air was heavy
with the smell of onion and ginger. Omkar’s mother was crouching in the kitchen, using the floor as a counter. She was making makki ki rotis while a curry of mustard greens sweltered on the stovetop.

  “Hello, Mama,” Omkar said, placing a pile of mint that they had purchased on the counter. Not knowing how to act around the two of them together, Jarminder barely acknowledged them with a nod of the head when they came in. Instead, she directed her energies to what she felt confident in doing: her cooking.

  Neeraj emerged from his bedroom to join them. He was no longer bellicose. Though he still maintained something of a graceless attitude, a smile just peeked out from beneath the bramble of his beard when he greeted Omkar.

  Omkar introduced him to Aria as if they had never met before. Though Aria found it strange to pretend as if nothing had ever happened between them, she went along with it. When Neeraj took her hand, he held it instead of shaking it. Without thinking, she responded by doing a miniature curtsy. It made her feel like an idiot. A dense awkwardness trespassed between them. In response to it, they all put their focus on the cooking.

  Jarminder pinched off a piece of dough from the rest and rolled it in her hands. She smacked it against her palm while rotating it again and again until it was flat and circular enough to her liking. She placed it on an unoiled griddle and turned it from one side to the next. Just like a tortilla, the bread began to blacken in spots. Just when Aria thought that Jarminder was about to put it on a serving plate, she took the griddle off of the flame of her little gas stove entirely and held the roti with a pair of tongs over the open flame. The roti responded by puffing up so it was no longer flat, like a pancake filled with air. When Jarminder took it off the flame, she ladled a spoonful of clarified butter onto the roti and spread it across the surface with the back of the spoon.

  Omkar took Aria over to the living room in order to show her some of the items in the house. He made her touch the yellow flush of the curtains, which had been sewn by hand by his grandmother. He showed her a pair of ornately embroidered fabric shoes, called jutti, on a shelf and joked that they were his mother’s best weapon in the house when he was growing up. He explained the portrait of Guru Nanak as well as the sheathed sword, which was mounted on the wall beneath the painting. There was no plan behind the decoration of the house. Oil marks still stained the wall in rectangles where pictures used to hang. The items that served as decoration had been added over the years one by one and as a result, it boasted no aestheticism. Like a nest for a magpie who had been collecting things, the house served as a personal treasure box for Jarminder. And Neeraj had let her do whatever she wanted with it.

  Omkar pulled a photo album out of the bookcase and started flipping through it for Aria to see. Most of the pictures had yellowed; the plastic covering them had lost its flex. They cracked with stickiness when Omkar opened the pages. Aria found it painful to see so many years of a life that he had lived before her. She watched him lose his baby fat, learn to ride a bike, spend his first years in America and every birthday that had passed before she’d met him. She saw his aunties, who, according to Omkar, could give the FBI a run for its money when it came to keeping tabs on everyone they knew. She saw the faces of his brother and sister who had died. The tragedy had projected sorrow over their smiles.

  “I thought your last name was Agarwal. Why does your name here say Singh?” Aria asked, pointing to the names written beside the pictures.

  “Actually, it isn’t a last name, it’s a kind of middle name. Every man in our culture has the same middle name, which is Singh, which means lion. And every woman in our culture has the same middle name, which is Kaur, which means princess,” Omkar replied.

  “Ooh, that’s sexy, the lion and the princess,” Aria whispered under her breath, softly enough so that Omkar’s parents wouldn’t hear her or see her wink at him.

  When the food was ready, they all sat down at the tiny dining table beside the kitchen. Neeraj and Jarminder studied the lines of Aria’s face. They found it beautiful, but distrusted the motives beneath it. The conversation that happened at the dinner table was a concerted effort to avoid sitting there mutely. Though they had set the table with utensils, they ate with their hands instead. Aria copied them, leaving her fork untouched, which made them smile.

  Omkar spent the time offering up details about Aria that he imagined would convert his parents to some shade of approval of her. Aria was so nervous that once she finished eating, she realized that she hadn’t even really tasted it. When their plates were empty, Omkar insisted upon doing the dishes, despite Jarminder’s protests. Neeraj turned on the television to watch a cricket game and sat in front of it, finding it hard to take his mind off of what was happening in the kitchen. Jarminder allowed herself to be consumed by a project that required her to carry things up and down the stairs from the store to their apartment at least a dozen times.

  Aria stood next to Omkar with a cold glass of mint chaas in her hand. She sipped on the freshness of the mint, cumin and green chili in the cream of it while watching the look of worry play across the side of his face. Omkar spoke low enough that his parents couldn’t hear him over the chatter of the television. “I’m sorry if all of this is a little weird. Some of this stuff we do is kind of stupid. When we moved here, my parents never got it that we live in a different country and they just kept doing the same stuff they did back home in India.”

  Aria was surprised by his apology. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “Omkar, you should never be ashamed of your culture. It is so cool. You guys are like exotic warriors or something. You guys have been telling me about your culture all night and it’s been making me think and I don’t think we even have a culture. I mean, unless you call backyard barbecues and football games a culture.”

  Omkar laughed and said, “That’s the thing: you never think you have a culture until you leave the place where your culture is the only culture. If I took you to India, you would all of a sudden know what American culture is. It’s like a fish that spends his life swimming in water. The fish doesn’t know how to tell you about water until he is suddenly in the air.”

  Omkar’s culture was like an exotic spice that ran through his veins. Aria could smell that spice in every word he spoke and in everything he did. She found it erotic. She felt the stoic power in the line of men and the sensual mysticism in the line of women that had lent their lineage to him. Unlike her, his belonging was never questioned. He could resist that belonging, he could try to talk and act like something else, but it was something he could not wash himself clean of. The culture he came from was like a flavor that permeated the way he felt to her. It was so much a part of who he was and perhaps even part of what she loved so much about him.

  “Can you drive me back to the lot tonight?” Aria asked.

  Omkar shot a confused and dejected look down toward her. “Why do you want to go there?”

  Aria was equally confused. “Because you know I don’t have anywhere else to stay,” she responded. To her, it was obvious that the reconciliation between Omkar and his parents would mean they wouldn’t be spending the night at the hotel again. And given their culture, it was obvious that she couldn’t stay with him there.

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s OK; Mama’s been doing something to fix things,” Omkar said and yelled for his mother. Jarminder shouted something back up the stairs in Punjabi. “Just a minute and I promise I’ll show you.” Omkar said, leaning against the counter with a satisfied look on his face.

  Jarminder arrived at the door and motioned for Omkar and Aria to follow her back downstairs. She opened the door to the storeroom feeling a mix of anxiety and pride.

  It was no longer the barren cement room that Aria remembered. The floor had been covered with mismatched carpets. A twin mattress had been laid on the floor and a bed had carefully been made with lavender-colored sheets and pillows. The cement foundation ridge that ran through the room now acted as a mantle for an ornate statue of Ganesh, with its head of a whit
e elephant and body of a human with four arms. Every wall had been covered with unfolded saris. Their colorful and opalescent silk lifted and billowed when the door opened. A frail stream of smoke, carrying the scent from a stick of sandalwood incense, rose from a little bronze incense burner near the door.

  Aria could not believe what she was seeing. “You can stay here. My mother made it up for you,” Omkar said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Aria asked.

  Jarminder thought the question implied that Aria had been insulted that they would put her in a storeroom and so she sought to justify herself. “I’m sorry, it’s just that we don’t have any more rooms upstairs.”

  “No … No … It’s lovely,” Aria said, realizing that Jarminder had misinterpreted her. Ignoring the air of formality that she’d felt until then between herself and Jarminder, as well as the way Jarminder went rigid when she did it, Aria rushed in to hug her. “Are you totally sure?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, we’re sure,” Jarminder said, wobbling her head back and forth instead of up and down. “The sheets are new. If they are stiff, I can just wash them,” she said.

  Aria was quiet in disbelief. “I’m going to stay down here with her to talk for a bit, Mama,” Omkar said, indicating his readiness for her to go back upstairs.

  “OK, you can use the bathroom upstairs, but no hankypanky,” Jarminder said, pointing her index finger at Omkar.

  Aria sat on the end of the bed, listening to the stairs creak as Jarminder climbed them. Omkar sat down next to her. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she said again, looking to Omkar for an explanation about the strange turn of events.

  “My parents are good people, even though they don’t exactly act like it sometimes,” Omkar said. “They could never feel good knowing that you don’t have somewhere to stay. Plus I told them that I wanted to move out and get a place with you and they sort of freaked out. Indian parents can’t stand the idea of not living with their kids.” He giggled.