by Meghna Pant
Dave’s eyes become wet. Mrs Patel wipes his fogged glasses and puts them back on him.
We’re all startled by a flash. We turn around to see four teenagers. One of them has a cellphone with which he’s taken a photo of us.
‘Don’t stare. It will only encourage them,’ Mrs Patel hisses to Mrs Gupta. She has a point. Sitting in the mall day after day, like mannequins on public display, we have become objects of ridicule, especially in the easy black-or-white judgement of the young. We have to stay as invisible here as we do in our homes.
Mrs Gupta keeps staring at them. It’s difficult—I know—for her to let go of her Indian ways. We’d been alone once—when everyone else had left early—and she’d cried to me about the silence in her life. With little respect and no rights, her life in India as a widow had become difficult, so she quickly accepted her son’s invitation to move to the US. ‘Here no one is home, no one come home. My ear it want to hear knock of neighbour or sabziwallah. I want to gossip nicely with my friend. But I am completely alone whole of day,’ she had said softly.
I feel for Mrs Gupta, I really do. It is not easy being part of the immigrant story, and filling the empty space of shapes that used to be there.
~
When I first landed in the US, fifty years ago, I’d skittishly hailed a taxi to the Illinois University campus, a ride that would cost my family half our monthly income. Outside the dorm, I pulled out my bags hurriedly, hoping the meter wasn’t still running, and, as the taxi exited the driveway, realized that I’d left a bag behind. There was only one thing to do: lodge a complaint with the campus police.
‘I put my bags in the dicky and left one of them in there,’ I said to them, my voice high-pitched and vowels truncated—my first conversation with white people.
‘You left one of your bags in the what, sir?’
‘In the dicky.’
‘In the what, sir?’
‘In the back of the taxi, sir. Where you put your bags,’ I said resolutely, not believing their idiocy.
‘You mean to say that you left a bag in the trunk of the cab, sir?’
‘No, no. Not a trunk. It was only a bag.’
I saw the two policemen exchange a look. I was making a fool of myself.
After that morning was finally over, my mortification was still bristling on my skin. I opened my controversial bag. The first thing I saw was the lemon and chilli thread my mother had made to protect me from evil. I hurled it out of my dorm window. It was the first step towards my reinvention. I learned then to speak English—not the English I’d learned with pride in my village—but American English: ‘elevator’ not ‘lift’ and ‘peppers’ not ‘capsicum’. After watching scores of Hollywood movies, attending American parties and dating American girls, I developed that coveted nasal twang. I ate beef burgers and steaks, and I wore jeans and T-shirts. My Indian clothes were slowly discarded, along with the invitations to the Indian chess club and Friday’s Indian buffet at Maharaj restaurant. After a few years, I married a lovely American woman, who loved me more than I deserved, and raised our son as an American.
I became obsessed with wringing the best out of America. Each moment had to be lived perfectly, without mistakes: reaching the office on time, presenting my boss with a thoughtful Christmas gift, putting my son in a private school, not nicking my chin while shaving, becoming Vice-President of Operations at Delta and kissing my wife goodnight.
Life kept pushing forward like a line of tumbling dominoes and I became afraid—afraid that if I paused to look back, I’d stumble, and my past would fall upon me in a heap, suffocating me.
A heavy-handed pragmatism set into my life. I labelled everything in two categories: convenient or inconvenient. If I longed for my mother’s embrace or was hit by a wave of nostalgia for the smells of my village, the emotion was treated as excessive, ignored as inconvenient. My wife and son pecked on the fragments of emotions I could afford—a spontaneous picnic at Hunter Mountain or a surprise trip to Disneyland.
Thirty-eight years passed like this, with me ‘finding no time’ to go back to India or meet my parents. And then—as happens—my parents died.
The sense of loss I felt was so immense that I didn’t even know how to slot it into my life.
After all, my father had been the source of my ambition, and without him, I felt adrift, like a ship that sets sail for the world, only to find that it has nowhere to dock.
I stopped being the first person to arrive in the office every morning. I turned down the promotion to President of Operations. I sold my stock options and gave the money to Oxfam. When Karen made my favourite American dish—lamb roast—I asked for dal makhani, but couldn’t eat it. I would not go out for a movie or for a coffee unless Karen came with me. I insisted that Rahul spend every holiday, even New Year’s Eve with me.
Two years passed. I lost twelve kilos.
Karen grew concerned. She consulted doctors and psychiatrists on my behalf. She crammed our kitchen shelves with Indian recipe books and spices. I overheard her tell Rahul, ‘He looks lost, unhappy. I’ve never seen him like this.’
When Rahul married an Indian girl raised in the US like him, I suggested that we live together as a joint family. When Preeti said no, I sold our home in Long Island and bought a three-bedroom apartment on Oak Avenue in Metuchen, which was closer to Preeti’s and Rahul’s workplaces. I opened a joint bank account in all our names, where I pooled my savings, luring the struggling newlyweds with the ‘money-for-all’ hook. When Preeti quit her job to take care of her newborn, I pitched Karen and my services as babysitters, which, if we lived together, would allow Preeti to start working again. I promised to gift Rahul my last treasure—an Audi A6—which he could drive to work.
‘You can’t buy love, Sunny,’ Karen said to me gently.
But I had to speak in the language I’d taught my child. Ambition. He was ambitious for my love. He was ambitious for my generosity. So I used both.
Three years later, when I retired, we all finally moved in together. For Rahul and Preeti it was a pragmatic short-term decision to live rent-free for a couple of years and grow their savings.
Karen warned me, ‘This may not turn out as you expect.’
‘I can tolerate anything as long as I’m with family,’ I replied determinedly.
The first year of retirement, which is tough for most, was pleasant for me. Karen pampered the grandchildren and me; and Preeti and Rahul were affable and appreciative. It was only after Karen passed away from a heart attack two years later, and our living situation became a permanent possibility, that all our attitudes shifted.
Preeti became resentful. She bristled when we crossed in the corridor and her face carried a look of bitter perseverance when I was around.
Rahul took no one’s side, adopting an oblique approach, as would any man walking the tightrope between his wife and father. Still, he honoured his promise to his beloved dead mother, to look after me. He was a better absentee son to me than I’d been an absentee father to him.
Meanwhile, I was gripped with a fear of living and dying without family, as my parents had. After all, Jay and Karan were growing up fast, already ten and seven years old, and Rahul’s dental practice was flourishing: he’d soon be able to afford his own house. I couldn’t give them any cause for grievances.
So I let Karan push more and more for the lion’s portion of the queen bed we shared. I took Jay and Karan to school, swimming lessons and soccer practice; made them grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta when their mother wasn’t home; nursed them through their falls and fevers. I babysat them when Preeti and Rahul went for dinner and the movies on Saturday night.
I did all the things I hadn’t had time to do for my own son.
I lived like an uninvited guest in my own home, relegating myself to the background, coming out of my room only at mealtimes, showering after everyone else. On weekends I went for long walks alone, giving their family ‘family time’. I took no offence when Rahul didn’t inf
orm me that he was buying a new couch for the house and a bigger clinic.
I watched Rahul’s daily failures, quietly, as he had once watched mine. I saw him make the same mistakes with his sons as I had made with him—already isolating them with his ambition.
Remember, son, every man ends in his own family, was all I said to Rahul.
~
The tea in my cup has gone cold.
The mall is bustling now with scurrying office goers, more teenagers and bored housewives. There’s a sticky smell of food and the hurried clang of utensils coming from the food court a floor above us. It must be lunchtime.
Mrs Gupta rubs her nose and says, ‘I’m going to the toilet.’
Mrs Patel corrects her, ‘Divya, you must say, “I’m going to the ladies room, please excuse me.”’
‘Yes. Please excuse,’ says Mrs Gupta. She looks at me and I remember her instructions two days ago to follow her after ten minutes to the food court. I watch her as she tentatively steps onto the escalator; her bags cover half the stair and she covers the other half.
I smile at the thought of being alone with her.
The owner of the jewellery kiosk in front of us packs away her wares and locks them up. I wave to her. She gives me a stiff smile. I’ve never bought anything from her.
Seeing her pack up is a cue for everyone else to go home for lunch: being frugal, we never eat at the mall. My house is a forty-minute walk from the mall so I skip lunch altogether.
After the group leaves, I go to the food court.
Mrs Gupta is sitting on the edge of a chair, opening a steel tiffin carrier stacked with four boxes—a contraption I haven’t seen in half a century. People carrying food trays choose to sit away from her table.
‘Thank you, Mrs Gupta. You really didn’t have to do all this,’ I say as I approach her.
‘Please, no formal,’ she says. Her face is flushed; this is only the second time that we’re alone. She adds, ‘I didn’t got chance to say thank you. You so very kindly listen to me last time. It is difficult, no, to talk openly in front of so much people?’
She takes out the boxes one by one.
‘This is food from your region in India. You from Charuri village, no, in Himachal? I have friend of friend’s sister, from Shimla, who give me recipe on phone.’
She opens a box containing madra, yogurt-doused kidney beans.
‘I hope this reminding you of your Mummyji’s cooking. Maybe, if I am so lucky, your wifeji’s cooking. Never I see you eat, so I think this dishes make you feel good hunger.’
This time I identify the sweet-and-sour smell before she opens the next box. It used to be my favourite dish, kaale chane ka khatta; my Biji slow-cooked it every Sunday especially for me, laughing as I hovered around the stove, impatient for it to be ready.
Mrs Gupta then takes out the dessert box that holds mitha, sweet rice mixed with raisins, pistachios and saffron. The smell and sight of this food transfixes me, taking me slowly back to my past, to my village in Kangra, above my two-hectare farmland, to my mud hut where my Baba is watching me bent over a kerosene lamp, solving a math problem.
‘It took much time. Each dish have twenty spices, but I think it taste okay,’ Mrs Gupta is saying.
There is a rumble of sounds in the food court, yet one by one each sound becomes distinct. A baby cries in the distance. Someone orders a chicken burrito. A cash register clangs.
‘Why you are staring at food? It is not looking good?’ says a voice to me. This voice, all the other noises, they start becoming distant till I am not able to listen to them any more.
All I can hear now are the voices from my past.
~
‘I will cut open my stomach if I have to, but my son will go to America,’ said Baba grimly.
Earlier that morning Biji’s voice rang through the fields informing Baba and me that I had been accepted to study at ‘Ill-o-no’ University. After I had topped the state and national exams, my junior college principal had entered my name in a government programme that granted a full scholarship to one below-poverty-line student per year to attend college in the US. My name had been selected this year.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I said quietly, placing a plastic bucket below the leak from our kacchi chatt. There was so much for me to do in Charuri. The dung patties would be crisp the next week, ready to be taken to sell for fuel in the market. My sister Sarita’s history exam was next week and I still had to teach her about Gandhiji’s assassination. And I’d promised to help Baba in the harvest season. But my voice did not rise above the pounding rain.
I didn’t get too concerned though and even slept soundly knowing that Baba did not have the twentythousand rupees needed for my airline ticket, clothes and books.
When I woke up the next morning at four a.m. to plough the fields, Baba was still sitting on the straw mat, looking at me.
‘I will take a loan against the land,’ he declared in a thin voice, as if the weight of the decision had sapped him of all strength. Our farmland was pawned off that very day to the local moneylender, as was, I deemed, my life.
I left India at the age of seventeen, angry with my father for always pushing me to be the man of the house; the man of the school; the man of the farms; and now, without his hand on my back, the man of the world.
I felt orphaned and exiled.
My anger frothed with humiliation on my first day in America. It coalesced into ambition: I would prove myself to America and to Baba.
My experiences became mine to keep, undeserving of Baba’s rustic analysis. I switched my degree from agricultural to aeronautical engineering, abandoning the original plan to go back to India to expand our farm. The monthly letters from my parents took me months to answer. Because of the expense, we didn’t speak on the phone, and later, when I could afford it, I rang them only once or twice a year, the surprise of the calls giving our conversations so much gravity that they became dull. I didn’t seek their blessings before getting married or after having a son.
Over the years, I kept making excuses to avoid moving back or visiting—expensive tickets, demanding boss, son’s exams or wife’s sinus operation. I didn’t invite my parents or sister to visit, ashamed of how they would look to my American wife, half-American child, American neighbours and American friends. The squalor I came from ensured that I didn’t take my wife or son to India, despite their eagerness.
My parents did not persist either, as though their memory of me was enough for them. They told me that the farm was doing well—they bought buffaloes every few years and then an automatic tilling machine. When I offered to pay back the loan, Baba refused, saying it had already been repaid, and declined my offers to send money home, insisting that it was of no use to them.
‘Brahma does not forgive the father who takes from his son,’ he wrote.
Nothing that they did made me feel needed, and so I needed them less.
In the little correspondence I had with them, I exaggerated my life’s grandeur and pace. I waited for my award—a word from Baba to say that I had proved my worth, that he was proud of me. It never came.
And it never would, for he died soon after, and a few weeks later, so did Biji. Sarita called—for the very first time—and begged me to come. I almost didn’t go, cancelling my ticket twice, gripped by this premonition of dread. But, then I went, alone. And when I arrived in India it felt like I’d left nothing behind in America, as if my life had simply been on pause and all I had to do was resume it from where I’d last left it.
On reaching my childhood home, I saw thirty-eight years of change in one moment. It loomed before me, this house of hay, rope, mud and hope. Inhaling deeply, like I used to as a child, I tried to gather the familiar smell of animal manure and compost, but it was hot and airless, stinging my nostrils.
An old lemon and chilli thread hung in the porch. I remembered how Biji used to make a new one every week, running her threaded needle through three green chillies, a juicy lemon, and three more chi
llies. I used to watch the thread cavort in the wind, keeping the evil spirits out of our lives. But this one was beaten and withered, as if it had fought spirits for years. I touched it. It disintegrated in my hand.
The house seemed to be empty. The front door stood open. I stepped inside. My home had aged faster than I had. While it had never been well furnished, now it was threadbare, with a charpai, a kerosene stove, a broken plastic chair, and some empty utensils. The paint on the wall was peeling. Nothing adorned these walls save for a tattered poster of a god and the only photo of me with Karen and Rahul that I had sent to my parents, almost fifteen years back. The photo was wrapped in cellophane, probably to preserve it.
The heat in the house stifled me; I unknotted my tie and wished I hadn’t worn a suit.
I heard a soft voice behind me say in Pahari, ‘Welcome home, brother.’
I turned around slowly, taking a moment to let the words form. It was my sister, Sarita; wizened and unsmiling. She had always carried an air of contained sensibility; now she looked plagued by it.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked, shocked.
‘I am unable to smile, brother, but I am happy to see you,’ she replied in rasps, tears forming in her eyes. I went over and hugged her, needing just one arm to wrap around her body.
‘I called you here to show you the truth,’ she said.
I had seen it before she even told me. Yet, I listened to the price my family paid for my education.
Baba didn’t anticipate that I wouldn’t return or that the errant monsoons would yield low crops for years. The high-interest loan accumulated, forcing him to forfeit our farmland to the moneylender. Left with no livelihood, he took up any job that came his way—carpentry, labour, plumbing—and Biji sold their belongings, one by one. They took to eating one meal a day, living—sometimes for days on end—only on wild grains, and later in their lives—when Baba became too old to work—they ate only boiled seeds of wild grass and fungus-ridden mango kernel. Sarita’s facial muscles became weak and she was unable to marry well; her husband, now dead, had been a poor widower, three times her age, with children older than her. The marriage had saved her from starvation but nothing could save my parents. My father developed an acute digestive problem and couldn’t eat for weeks before his death, and my mother died of dysentery.
