Silence and the Word

by MaryAnne Mohanraj

  I haven’t been in my aunt’s house before. It’s embarrassing. I know my mother would want me to write and tell her all about it, but what do I say? That my uncle’s medical sketches of the human form are hung up right next to my aunt’s lush oil paintings? That while either might be innocent separately, they are clearly lascivious together? That when I sat in the kitchen drinking my breakfast tea, waiting for my aunt to wake up, a nude reclined before me, a brown-skinned woman basking in the sunlight, her sari a discarded crimson puddle around her, her face caught with an unmistakable smile? Oh, Amma would love that.

  Raji Aunty comes down, Vivek Uncle behind her. Is his hand on her back, or her buttocks? Is that faint scent perfume, or her own musk? Must I see sex everywhere? Is there something wrong with me? He says it is good to meet me, and that he is sorry he has to rush. We’ll talk at dinner. Then it’s a kiss, a long kiss, for his wife, and it’s off to the hospital. That’s it—I’ll ask him to perform the procedure. That’s perfect—just keep it all in the family!

  Ah, one of these days I’ll say the wrong thing and get myself into real trouble.

  There is no sign of another guest. I ask my aunt when they’ll be arriving. She tells me, with a little smile, that the guest was already here. She’s pregnant, it seems. She had been having a little joke with me. They just found out. The baby is due in July.

  If there are gods, they must hate me.

  Raji and Minal sit at the kitchen table, sipping morning chai. Raji’s eyes are sharp, focused on Minal’s face. Minal is sure she is noting each new line, realizing that it has only been a few months since they last met.

  “Are you well, Minal? You look a little tired.”

  Minal bites her lip before responding; it has been bitten raw. Her fingers tap the table, click click, click click. “Well enough.” She tries to smile, but does not manage to pull it off.

  “So. Your mother has written to me, about this doctor. A brilliant match, I hear.” Raji’s tone is careful, inquiring. Minal’s lips purse, just slightly, but enough. Raji nods, and says, “Your mother…she’s a passionate woman. But she isn’t good at admitting when she’s made a mistake. Ever since she moved back to India, she’s become more Indian-than-thou.” She pauses, but Minal says nothing. Raji continues, gently. “Maybe it’s the right thing for her; she does seem to love it there. Even your father’s behavior wasn’t enough to bring her back home. But maybe you aren’t ready for marriage, or at least for a traditional arranged marriage; maybe India isn’t the world for you… ?”

  Minal’s fingers tap, but her eyes are fixed on the tabletop, and her lips stay shut.

  Raji falls silent as well. They continue drinking their tea, and after a while, she reaches out for a pen and a long pad, starts to scribble on the paper—a shopping list. Cauliflower, eggplant, fresh chilies, more paper, Cadmium Blue. She asks, “Do you think we need anything else?” Minal hesitates, then takes the paper away from her aunt, and writes something on it. She pushes it back, and Raji reads it. Pickles and ice cream. She laughs. “I haven’t been craving either of those, but thank you for the thought.” Minal doesn’t laugh. She says, quietly, “I have.” Raji stops laughing. They are silent for a while. Minal counts to a hundred in Spanish, and then back down again. She wishes she’d learned more of it. Her chest is aching. O, mi corazón!

  Then her aunt leans forward, and whispers, “Pickles and ice cream? Really?”

  Minal starts to laugh. “No, not really.”

  “Well, good. That’s something, anyway.” Suddenly, they are both laughing. This may turn out all right.

  They compare dates. Minal is perhaps three days later. They agree that that’s something, at least, though they’re not sure what. Then a little silence again, and then Raji asks the dreaded question.

  “What do you want to do?”

  I could draw a chart. The branches: tell my mother, or not; go back to India, or not; have an arranged marriage, or not; have a baby, or not; be a doctor, or not; tell Diego, or not; marry Diego, or not. Some options exclude others. I don’t really think I can have a baby and an arranged marriage. And I’m not even sure I can tell my mother and have an arranged marriage. There are many things I’m not sure of, but there is one thing I do know, sitting here with my aunt the painter, looking at her nudes beside her husband’s medical sketches.

  “I don’t want to be just a doctor’s wife.”

  Raji Aunty nods. She knows what I mean. I want to stay here, which means no arranged marriage back home, which means I’ll have to write my mother. Amma can’t make me go back, not with the scholarship supporting me here. Small blessings.

  “And I don’t want to marry Diego.” That part is also clear, and has been for some time. He is sweet and kind and lovely in bed—but I don’t want to marry him.

  “School?” she asks. I nod. Definitely school. Only two choices left to make. This is going faster than I’d expected. I feel a little dizzy—or perhaps that is the baby.

  “If you want… .” she says it slowly, “I could help you raise the baby. You could transfer to Yale, and I could tell people I’d had twins, at least at first, if you wanted.”

  “That’s too much.” It is too much, and yet I know she’d do it. Family. She was family, after all. Even if she had had an arranged marriage, even if I hardly knew her.

  “Or, I could ask Vivek to recommend someone.”

  “No!” I couldn’t stand him, a stranger, my uncle, knowing.

  “Or I could take you somewhere myself.” She waits, patiently. I get up, and start pacing. Back and forth, back and forth. I can put this decision off for another month, if I want. If I said so, she would pick up her shopping list, and we’d go off, and nothing else would be said, and nothing would be decided. I think I could love Raji Aunty very much, but right now, I almost want her to be more like my mother, just to have someone who would tell me what to do. Finally, I stop pacing and face her.

  “You want your baby, don’t you?” I ask her quietly, knowing what she’ll say.

  “Very much. We’ve been trying for a while.” Her dark eyes are steady, and I know that she knows what I am about to say. I bite my lip, then speak.

  “I don’t want this one.”

  “Okay, then. I don’t see any need to tell your mother. I’m here to take care of you.” Her voice is firm, decisive, and with that last decision taken out of my hands, with everything over, finished, I sink down into one of her kitchen chairs, and bury my face in my hands, and do not cry.

  Dear Amma,

  I am very sorry to write you like this, but I must tell you that I do not want to have an arranged marriage right now. I am busy with my studies, and still have many years of school before I become a doctor. Please thank Bharati Aunty for me, and send my regrets to the young man in question. I will visit you this summer, but do not plan to set me up with anyone then either. Raji Aunty will be coming for a visit then too, so you will get to see us both at once… .

  I am modeling for my aunt until the holiday ends. This is a little strange, perhaps, but she promises that my face will be turned away in the picture. The family in India knows she paints, but nothing of the subjects. They undoubtedly think it is a pleasant hobby for a doctor’s wife, and that she paints wildflowers, or sunsets. She will be exhibiting her paintings in New York next month. I will be in one, with my body thin and bare, with my arms outstretched, with the snow surrounding me. She is painting me a tree in winter, barren and brown, waiting for spring. It isn’t as cold in Connecticut as it is in Chicago. It is easier to believe, here, that spring will come.

  I can stay quite still while she paints, but the muscles get tired and eventually start to tremble. The trembling is interesting.

  I am glad that she does not need to paint me and the snow at the same time. Her studio is warm and steaming, and there is always hot tea on the kitchen stove. My uncle knocks before entering, so that I have time to dress in an enveloping robe, and we have been having some very interesting talks about medi
cine, about muscles and sinews, electrical synapses and rushing blood. I think I am going to like being a doctor. Bodies are fascinating.

  I will talk to Diego when I return. He deserves to know. He probably also deserves to have a say in this, but I don’t think I am strong enough to give him one. Hopefully he will be all right. I’d like him to be happy.

  Perhaps I can set him up with Rose. She likes him, I know.

  As for me—the world is wide, and there are many possibilities.

  Snow falls outside my aunt’s window, quietly blanketing the ground, lacing the trees.

  It’s really quite beautiful.

  Under the Skin: A Survey

  What has occasionally caused me concern regarding my sexual past is not the number of lovers I have had, nor the types of relationships. It is true that my mother is not happy that I am still unmarried at thirty-two. She is even less happy about the fact that I am living with one lover, yet am involved with two others—and yes, everyone knows about everyone else, and we’re all fine with it. At this point in my life, my mother just wants me to get married, to marry anyone—anyone male, at any rate. Which is a funny turn of events, given that for quite a few years, she would have hated the idea of my marrying the man I now live with—after all, he’s white. Not Sri Lankan, not South Asian, not even brown-skinned. He’s white as white can be, a European mongrel; his last name is even Whyte. Remembering those lost years, the screaming phone calls, the not-speaking over my dating him is painfully funny now, when all she wants is for us to get married and settle down into something approaching normalcy. I never thought his skin color mattered; what mattered was that he was someone I loved. That was true for everyone I dated (or just slept with)—skin color wasn’t an issue.

  Unfortunately, skin color has become an issue. In the last few years, between writing a series of Sri Lankan immigrant stories and studying post-colonial criticism in grad school, I’ve been forced to actually think about skin color and ethnicity and race—all aspects of my life that I have dealt with mostly by ignoring them. This is surprisingly easy to do if you’re an upper-middle-class South Asian with a doctor for a father and no accent. I was born in Sri Lanka but came to the U.S. at age two; I grew up in a white Polish-Catholic neighborhood in Connecticut, and perhaps because there were so few brown kids at my school and they didn’t know quite what to do with me, the white kids mostly treated me as white. Which is a comfortable way to be treated, so I cheerfully went along with it—I didn’t even notice it, in fact. At sixteen, when fooling around with a neighborhood boy in my parents’ basement, I wasn’t thinking about the color of Tommy’s skin, or mine—I was much more concerned about the fact that Tommy had somehow managed to talk me into taking my shirt off where my parents could catch us. For most of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, when I left my parents’ house, I tended (tried) to forget that I was brown.

  College inevitably raised my consciousness, and grad school even more so. In fact, I found that it was surprisingly fun, studying post-colonial lit.; as a non-white person today, a significant and validating space is marked out for you in the literary world. I read Edward Said and indignantly realized that I, I had been Orientalized—or at least my great-grandparents, living under British rule, had been, and surely that counted? I read Gayatri Spivak, discovered the subaltern, a de-privileged person effectively barred from the academic conversation by barriers of race and class and language, and wondered in what ways I could be perceived as subaltern. (Very few, I eventually determined.)

  I considered my place as a first-generation immigrant, as a hybrid—certainly I had grown up in Connecticut feeling lost, betwixt and between, on the rare occasions I was forced to think about my ethnicity. I had eaten curry for dinner every night instead of pizza, but that was minor—after all, most of my grammar school friends had been eating pierogies. The real difficulties emerged in the sexual arena—when I wasn’t allowed to date, or even go to school dances, it was difficult to ignore the fact that my parents had had an arranged marriage, and wanted the same for me. In the adolescent American world of dating and teen sex culture, where was I supposed to fit in?

  I lived a dual life in the first years of college—dating white people, having sex, and lying about it to my parents. Before long the lying got too annoying, and I told them everything (even about the girls), but that didn’t actually solve the two-worlds problem; it just moved it to a different arena. The family pressure to marry a brown-skinned man became more intense, and I handled it mostly by dating more white men, avoiding calling home, and moving further and further away from Connecticut. I particularly enjoyed the freedom of dating white—with brown men I was always afraid that anything we did would get back to my parents, in detail, and would be gossiped about in the small, close-knit Sri Lankan community. White people, for the most part, seemed blessedly free of such complications—in a sense, one of the things I loved about them was their apparent lack of constricting culture—that appearance perhaps a function of the privileged place they held in American society. White people could do anything they wanted, whereas brown people were tied into a morass of responsibilities and duty to their parents, their families, their culture. It was exhausting.

  Mostly, I dealt with the ethnic problem by ignoring it. But when I finally started thinking about these issues in grad school, it seemed like there must be a better way to handle culture-clash problems than to just pretend they didn’t exist. I wrote an essay examining my hybrid nature (part brown, part white) for a class, and got an A. I started obsessing over my non-white aspects—ironic, considering that I’d done my best to ignore them up until that point, getting as far away from my cultural heritage as I possible could. I even ended up in Utah for grad school—talk about white!

  So there I was, living in Utah and obsessing about skin color, and also obsessing about sex (which I do a fair bit of the time). I started thinking about the people I’ve had sex with—and was shocked to realize that they were all white. Okay, so I’d had brief encounters with one or two South Asians, but anyone I’d spent any time in bed with had been white—and most of the brief encounters had been too. I started to think about it…and then I started to fret about it. I had just spent semesters pleasurably ranting against the white male gaze, exoticization, dreams of domination and a lost colonial heritage. Why had all those white boys (and a few girls) been interested in me, after all? Should I be worried?

  I wasn’t totally blind. I did realize that the picture I was considering raised far more questions about me than it did about them. Why had I been so exclusive in my desires? What was I looking for, in all those pale bodies? Those were the real questions. But I wasn’t ready to just dive right in there. I needed to start with inquiring into their desires, their reasons and rationale, and then sneak up on my own. This stuff isn’t easy. And besides—I was curious what they’d say.

  I sent out an e-mail to several old and current lovers. I realize that this is not the approach that most people would have taken, and I hesitated briefly before sending the letter out, wondering, perhaps, if I were presuming too much on lingering affection and friendship. But in the end, I sent the letter, full of impertinent questions. I asked people whom I had lived with, people I had dated for months, people I had thought about marrying, and people with whom I had just had lovely one-night stands. I mostly asked men, though there were a few women in the mix. Ten people responded in detail; a few responded briefly, saying only that the questions didn’t seem relevant to them, or to their relationship with me. Some didn’t respond at all.

  I am grateful for those who did respond, and for the sake of their privacy, I have changed their initials. Of my ten respondents all were male, except for GD. Several people were hesitant to answer these questions, worried about why I was asking them, worried about how I’d respond to their honest answers, worried about who else would see their responses, and judge them. If you’re a good liberal, it can be extremely distressing to consider the ways in which your own atti
tudes, your attractions, and especially your sexual desires may be racialized. It isn’t equivalent to being a racist—but it can feel that way. I do believe that everyone who responded tried to be as honest as they could be in their answers, but I’m also sure that for many of them, it was difficult to get past the fear of being perceived as a racist, just for admitting that race/ethnicity/skin color may have (unconsciously) factored into their desires.

  For the record, not a single response, not even the ones which admitted that race may have been a factor in their desire for me, made me feel in any way damaged by my old lovers. Rather the opposite, as you’ll see.

  Question 1. I’ve never had sex with anyone who had darker skin than mine, oddly enough. When you have(had) sex with me, did you ever think about our skin tones? If you did, what did(do) you think about them? Does the contrast appeal to you or excite you? Did it ever bother you?

  Some claimed that they didn’t notice, or barely noticed my skin tone:

  ES: I can’t say that skin color ever had much of an impact on my feelings

  about you.

  GD: I definitely noticed the differences in our skin tones (especially when at one point, we held our arms against each others’), but the experience…had the same emotional quality as comparing hand sizes… .

  These seem similar in their response, or at least in their assessment of their response, to those who responded only by claiming that these questions didn’t really apply to them at all. I could have written back, questioning this response; I am not sure if it is possible, in modern American culture, to not notice skin tone, to not have it influence cultural and aesthetic judgments. Were they merely hiding from themselves the possibility that in choosing to date a brown-skinned girl, they had traveled into politically problematic waters, set loose on a raft of dark desires?