On the other hand, it was not my job to save her now. I couldn’t even if I tried. The trade of cash for labor was long past. We lived in separate houses. I couldn’t save her from drug addiction or another bad marriage. It wasn’t my job, and it wasn’t even my right. Pooja had her own gravity and her own plans. Her life was flowing and so was mine, and I had coasted with her for a time, but then we’d parted. Insofar as I knew what I was doing, so did she.
Pooja stayed with me until it was time to go to the airport, and then she rode in the taxi and dropped me at the curb. I hugged her and thanked her and sent her back to town in the taxi. Not to her flat, as she’d reminded me, but to the flat where she stayed. Back to Rupesh and the vagaries of her life. And I flew back to my own life, which used to contain Pooja but now, to my lingering sorrow, did not.
Chapter 30
It was a Saturday afternoon, and the kitchen was empty. Mary kept interrupting.
“I’m working on this project about women and—”
“Okay, okay.”
“—work and childcare—”
“Okay. Yes. Okay.”
“Wait, just listen, because what I’m trying to—”
“Okay.”
“I want to write about you,” I blurted in exasperation.
“Oh yes, okay.”
“Just listen. Okay?”
“Okay.” She laughed.
“So I wanted to write about—like—I’m able to work because you’re here, taking care of my kids. But who’s taking care of your kids? See? That’s what I want to—”
“In the village we don’t have nannies,” she interrupted.
“Right.” Had we begun an interview on the spot?
“The children walk around from place to place. Everyone is taking care. They know who is taking care.”
She was picking up speed.
“We don’t have doctors and medicine. It’s not like that. In the village, you don’t get sick. Oh, there!”
She pointed her finger toward the window. I bent to follow, expecting to see something drastic—a wild monkey on the roof, an airplane tumbling from the sky, a robber scaling the wall. But there was only the familiar dusk landscape of rooftops and trees cut stark against a fading summer sky.
“What?”
“There.” She jabbed again. “On the terrace. That roof—not roof—like straw—”
“The thatching?” The neighboring roof terrace was shaded by thatched palm.
“Yes, that one. We have that on our houses.”
“Right.”
“That’s how we give birth.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Then I said, “What?”
“We have to hold on to that so our legs hang straight down. And they put a bedsheet below. And the baby falls out very easily. The baby is caught by the sheet.”
“You have to hang on to the roof?”
“Yes.”
“While you’re in labor?”
“Yes.”
“But what—how can you hang on? There’s so much pain. How can you concentrate to hang on to a roof?”
“We do like that.”
“Somebody must hold you up.”
“They hold on to your legs.”
“I see. Women do that?”
“Yes. Men cannot come there.”
“Even the father?”
“Yes. No. The father is not there.”
“I’ve heard of hanging on to a tree trunk. Like stretching up to keep your body straight. But what you’re describing—I’ve never heard of that.”
“Even I did like that.”
“You told me you delivered in the hospital.”
“Only my son. Because then we were in the city. My daughter, I delivered like that.”
“It’s very interesting.”
“So, we have to be like that. We have to be strong. That’s why, for us, if children are walking around, it’s better. That’s how they will learn. Otherwise they will be too soft. It’s all right to be a little bit soft”—she pointed in the area of her lungs—“but not too much. It’s better to be strong.”
“I don’t think you are soft.”
She laughed. “No.”
And then, as if there were nothing more to say, Mary packed up her phone and water bottles and walked out the door for the weekend.
I sighed. It was exactly the sort of stilted and at-cross-purposes dialogue Mary and I always had. I’d formally asked to interview and write about her. Mary had derailed the conversation with one of her amazing—and amazingly irrelevant—anecdotes. She’d rambled inconclusively and then abruptly left. I wasn’t sure she’d heard the fundamental thing I’d wanted to communicate. I wasn’t sure we were capable of understanding each other at all.
* * *
————
I opened the laptop and looked at Mary over the screen. She grinned uneasily and hissed through her teeth at the formality of this arrangement.
“Mary,” I said. “Where are you from?”
This was an open mystery. When a Bhutanese family had moved into our neighborhood, we’d discovered that Mary couldn’t speak Dzongkha, and Mary had stopped talking so confidently about Bhutan. Instead she’d mentioned Burmese heritage, a home in Assam, a city on the Bhutanese border.
Now Mary told me that her parents had been in Bhutan. That’s how she put it: “My parents were there in Bhutan.” They were among a group of Nepali refugees expelled from Bhutan in the 1970s, she said. They wound up in Matigara, in northern India, where her father was hired as a driver by Jesuit missionaries. Mary was naming the nuns and describing their good deeds when, abruptly, the conversation took a sharp turn.
“My mother was Mexican, actually,” she said.
One of those long, empty beats passed between us. The improbability of this statement was so total, the fact that she’d never mentioned it before so bizarre, that at first I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“How is that possible?” I finally asked.
“She was traveling. She was doing some business in Bhutan. She met my father.”
“What was her business?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why she came to Bhutan?”
“No.”
“Was she backpacking?”
“No. Traveling. Some work.”
“And she met your father?”
“She didn’t have the paper to go back to Mexico. She learned the language. Nobody could recognize her.”
“What do you mean, she didn’t have the paper?”
“It happens to many people. They lose their papers.”
“You mean she lost her passport?”
“Like that.”
“But she could have gone to the Mexican embassy. You don’t just get stuck.”
“It happens.”
I couldn’t agree that it happened. You didn’t lose your passport on the other side of the planet and then simply shrug and marry a Nepali refugee and learn the language and spend the rest of your life pretending to be Indian or Bhutanese. But how could I press this point when I was, in effect, denying Mary’s origins?
“I mean…” I studied Mary’s face. “You look Mexican. You really do.”
“We all have the same face.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Yes.”
“What was she like?”
“She was my mother. Very nice.”
“And then they died?”
“On the same day. They were going to China for some work. The plane crashed. I was eight.”
These details never varied. About her parents, Mary always said: They died on the same day. And then: I was eight. The plane crash was mentioned as an aside, if at all. The first time we discussed he
r parents, Mary had said: “They died in a crash,” and I’d assumed it was a car accident.
“You don’t know why they were going to China?”
“No.”
“Where did the plane crash?”
“In China, maybe.”
“Do you remember the day they died?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We were little,” she said vaguely, and then skipped ahead. “We were like strays after my parents died. But these missionaries, they adopt a lot of families. So, it didn’t make that much difference.”
Mary was the youngest of four or three children, depending on whether she counted an older sister named Lamia. A wealthy Bhutanese family adopted Lamia when she was ten, Mary said, and took her back to—
“Sweden—no Switzerland—I think Switzerland—yes, Switzerland,” Mary said.
I’d already learned that such equivocation from Mary could mean Germany or Canada or Swaziland. This geographical uncertainty was in my mind, along with the knowledge that girls of this relatively advanced age rarely get adopted. Lamia came back to India sometimes, Mary said. They were grown women, but Mary still spoke of her sister as a ward of foreign guardians.
“She’s become very rich, but the ones who adopted her, they don’t want her to go back to her people,” Mary said.
One of Mary’s brothers joined the Indian army and died under circumstances she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. Her other brother entered the Catholic priesthood and became principal of a missionary school in the hills. But he was gay, and eventually he left the church.
“He just gave up. He said there’s a lot of injustice among the priests, inside the hostels,” Mary said. “He faced a lot of problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and changed the subject.
* * *
————
There is some uncanny connection between Mary and Pooja. If you believe in Buddhist principles, you’d say they have a karmic link. Otherwise, it’s a crazy coincidence. Their lives flow on parallel paths in this land of a billion souls, touching every few years then stretching apart again.
Pooja and her sister remembered Mary as a class leader in the convent school, an alpha personality from the orphanage next door. “To be honest, she was a mean-type girl,” Pooja said. They didn’t keep in touch.
Years later, when Pooja came to Delhi and stayed with her uncle, their paths crossed again. The uncle kept a girlfriend on the side. The girlfriend, Pooja told me, was Mary.
Pooja didn’t recognize her old schoolmate at the time. The girlfriend, of course, didn’t visit the house. Pooja heard plenty of family gossip, but Mary was a common name.
It was on that first day of unexpected reunion in our living room, chattering excitedly in Nepali, that Pooja and Mary uncovered this coincidence, Pooja told me.
“Mary said, ‘Don’t tell her about your uncle,’ ” Pooja told me. “And I said, ‘Okay.’ ”
Now that their friendship was beyond salvage, Pooja and I sometimes discussed the mysteries of Mary. Pooja, like me, had puzzled over Mary’s tangled past and her contradictory stories.
The Mary described by Pooja was crafty, manipulative, and highly secretive. She was a notorious borrower of money. “Whenever she got her salary, everybody came to collect.”
Neither of us could understand where Mary spent her money. She wore my hand-me-downs until they fell apart. She didn’t have a smartphone. She hadn’t traveled in five years. She ate simply and didn’t seem to drink.
“I’d ask her,” Pooja said. “But she never really explained.”
“What’s your theory?” I wanted to hear all of Pooja’s thoughts about Mary. I felt duplicitous, discussing Mary behind her back, but I was so eager for information I stifled the misgivings.
“I thought about it.” Pooja raised empty hands. “But I never understood.”
“You think she was giving to charity?”
“Maybe.” Her voice was doubtful.
It was Pooja who told me about Mary’s sideline as a self-styled healer whose pills and advice were sought by other domestic workers. This revelation was appalling—I’d often witnessed Mary’s biomedical ignorance. Twice she’d poisoned herself—her head swollen like a balloon, vomiting for days—with toxic doses of random pills prescribed by shady “doctors.” The night I’d rushed home because Patrick had thrown up while she was babysitting, I found her feeding him yogurt and thumping his back. She believed eating raw citrus peels prevented intestinal worms. She thought mustard oil and prayer cured almost everything.
Whenever she returned from a doctor visit she’d thrust into my hands a packet of lab reports and prescriptions. We paid for her medical care, so this was partly a presentation of receipts, but it was more than that—she wanted me to examine the paperwork and evaluate her health. She wanted to involve me in the condition of her body. And I always slipped away because it felt too feudalistic; it implied a scope of control over Mary’s person that I couldn’t accept.
“I don’t know how to read X-rays,” I’d stammered the first time.
It took me years of living in India to understand that, to Mary, my efforts to draw a respectful boundary must have looked like callous indifference.
And then there was the story of Pooja’s abortion. Intellectually I understood that Pooja had faced a terrible predicament and that Mary had saved her. But something about the way Pooja told the story refracted Mary into a weird and shadowy figure, brandishing her tinctures and spells.
And yet—that nightmare image wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair. When everybody else was oblivious or quailing, Mary had been steadfast. She was not afraid to go into the darkness. She’d dirty her hands, and she’d even—by her own definition—pollute her soul. She’d accept the hard assignment; she’d take the sin. Mary would do what needed to be done.
* * *
————
Mary loved to talk about her childhood with the missionaries. She grew up in spartan lodgings, one of a band of girls whose parents had died or abandoned their newborns.
“I don’t know, people say it’s hard, but for us—we really enjoyed,” she told me. “You don’t feel stress. Your friends are there. You have playing time, singing time, church time, study time. You know?”
The orphans lived in hostels and studied in the missionary schools dotting the foothills of the Himalayas. Later they were steered into vocational training: nursing, stitching, teaching.
“Life was very precious with those missionaries,” Mary said. “We felt it was better than other people who live with parents.”
“Wasn’t it hard for you at first?” I asked. “I just imagine, for a little girl, it would be painful to lose your parents and go into an orphanage.”
Mary shook her head. It had all been fine, she insisted. Not just fine, but better. Mary’s life had been better and had made her stronger than ordinary people.
“They take you in and make you forget,” she said. “The missionaries love you more than parents.”
Mary had a gift with children, and so she worked in schools. She traveled to remote villages for mission work. She grew up and left high school and met a young science teacher—“a very brilliant man”—who also worked with the church.
“He was Christian?” I asked.
“His family was Hindu, but he converted.”
“His family worked in the tea plantations?”
“Yes. He was from a very good family. A poor family, but a very nice, simple family.”
One day, tittering in anticipation of my reaction, she showed me a photograph of her wedding day.
“Wow,” I exclaimed. “You were beautiful.”
In the picture Mary stood among her new in-laws, willowy and unbelievably pretty, smiling
that same broad, calm smile from an exquisite version of her face. Her wedding gown had a high neck and long sleeves, like something from the nineteenth century.
“And then?” I couldn’t stop staring at this familiar but unknown bride in the photograph.
“We had a small house. He was teaching school,” Mary said. “I was at home.”
It was hard for me to imagine Mary as a housewife in a cottage. The whole setup sounded too cramped, too ordinary, to contain her personality. But that had been a long time ago, and perhaps Mary had been a simpler person in her youth. I always had the suspicion that Mary’s troubles had forced her to grow into the outsized woman we knew, that she’d flourished under adversity like a wild plant blocked from growing up—by sprouting fresh shoots and unfurling new leaves. Mary was like that; an overgrown person.
“How was it for you, getting married?” I asked.
“Only after marriage did reality start,” she said. “Then I understood how hard it is. Then I understood what is life.”
“Why was it hard?” I was thinking, as she talked, that this was the first time any of the women had described a lifestyle that did not sound depressing or precarious—and it was also the first time any of them had characterized something as difficult. Growing up as a charity case in Indian orphanages had been idyllic, but living as a middle-class housewife was hard? It was all backward, and yet I could see her sincerity, so I tried to follow.
“I don’t know. I felt alone even though my husband was there,” Mary said. “From the beginning of life, I was always in a group. Then I was in my house, and suddenly I was alone.”
For Mary, then, marriage did not represent an escape from barren institutions, but rather the loss of the collective lifestyle she knew—and her first contact with a world no longer filtered and censored by a protective screen of nuns and clergy. I was starting to have a dim understanding. Mary had no experience with family life, and she’d disliked her only taste of running her own household. But if she so disdained households, how come she was the person I’d hired to run mine?
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