Naming Maya

by Uma Krishnaswami

  “Now?” she asks. “You’ll probably get home before it does.”

  I didn’t want to come in the first place. I should be pleased to be going back. But I’m not. I’m as mixed up as Mami’s memories. “I guess,” I mumble, and slip out the door to go mail the postcard, never mind if I get there before it does.

  I pass the tea stall, the bus stop, and another row of shops. At the barbershop (HAIR CUTTING RS. 20/-, CHILD CUTTING ONLY RS. 10/-) I cross the street to get to the mailbox. It’s bright red and looks more like a giant fire hydrant than a mailbox. I slip my letter in. I drag my feet back to the house, thinking of Kamala Mami. She’s with her family, probably giving her daughter-in-law a hard time. I am smiling, thinking of her, when a woman hurries past me on the sidewalk.

  It is one of those times you’re so close to someone your eyes connect without your meaning them to. To my astonishment, I recognize the woman whose sari the escalator ate up outside the bookstore. There is no question, it is the same woman. I stared at her quite a bit when she was getting mauled by the escalator. What I don’t expect is that she’ll recognize me. She doesn’t say anything. But her eyes meet mine for a long moment, then tear away with such a look of embarrassment and dislike that it hits me like a slap in the face.

  Why? What did I do? I want to say, What was so terrible anyway? It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t my fault, was it, that the stupid machine decided to strip off your clothes? Of course, you can’t stop perfect strangers in the street and tell them things like that, so once we break eye contact, she brushes past me.

  The street kicks into fast-forward. The mango seller swears at someone who has jiggled her cart and loosened the brick placed under a wheel to hold it steady. The tea-stall owner shoos away the yellow dog that hangs around waiting for scraps. A bus stops suddenly and sets clouds of dust swirling. A pair of kids on bicycles race each other up the road, ringing bike bells as hard as they can, trrring-trrring-trrring! In an instant, the woman is gone. The crowds have closed right around her, as if I’ve imagined it all. But I haven’t.

  I remember Mami looking at me like that, not wanting to be spoken to, not wanting me to stop the voices in her head. And faintly, very faintly, there is a picture of someone else shooting a look like that at me.

  “I want to stay here with you!” I’d cried in desperation. “I don’t want to leave this house. Why do I have to?” But my father had become a very different father from the one I’d loved, the one who’d read to me and helped me with nosebleeds and made me laugh. He had pushed me aside, saying only, “You will have to talk to your mother about that.” Then he’d gone down to his office and slammed the door. Soon afterward Mom and I moved out.

  Crossing the road, while skirting the place where laborers are digging a big hole in the ground for water pipes, I begin to see these things again. And they are not what I have thought them to be. The look in the woman’s eyes was her own embarrassment. It was never about me.

  And the look in Mami’s eyes? Well, that had nothing to do with me. I just happened to be there to see it.

  My parents? There are things about them that I am only beginning to understand.

  I lean on the gate in front of Thatha’s house, push it open, and marvel at how treacherous memories can be. Mami no longer controls hers. I wish I could erase a few of mine.

  Mr. Rama Rao calls out to me, “‘If water is rationed, city will make it through summer.’ Right here in The New Indian Express.”

  I smile at him, wondering at how just being here, in this maddening, dazzling place, makes so many bits of my life fall together like a giant puzzle.

  My Fault

  The next day the entire tribe of my mother’s family descends on us with one long shriek. At least it seems that way. The cars begin to arrive at six o’clock in the evening, and swiftly fill the gravel driveway. “Are we having a party?” I ask Mom.

  She says a little breathlessly, “It’s all my cousins.”

  Within fifteen minutes, I am surrounded by relatives. I am drowning in conversations that compete for my attention. Two startlingly identical little boys (known together as “Rajeev-Sanjeev,” or sometimes

  “the twinlets”) play happily among my river of rocks in the garden. They hijack the shoes and slippers everyone’s taken off at the door, and arrange them carefully on the rocks like a strange flotilla of ships.

  I ask Sumati, “What’s the occasion? How come everyone’s here all at once?”

  Sumati shakes her head, and I can’t tell if she’s giggling because the noise level has been ratcheted up several notches. She says, “No, no special occasion. Just a family get-together.”

  “Do you have them often?”

  “Actually, no,” she says. “But they all know you’re leaving. Some of them have been to see you already, right?”

  “Right.” I nod and smile at those I can recognize. And I find that I too want to meet all these people, so many of them just names tossed about by Mom and Lakshmi Auntie. An elderly woman in a sapphire-blue silk sari exclaims, “Prema, we’re so lucky you came to town! This family never gets together! Takes someone visiting from America to pull us all into the same room.” To me she says, “Oh, little Maya! You don’t know me but you can call me Ra Auntie. Everyone does.”

  The air is filled with simultaneous exclamations from people delighted to see one another. “Ajit! A married man! So where’s the generous girl who gave up her life to take you on?” “Prema, you should have been at Ajit’s wedding! His wife’s a Star TV commentator, you know. Couldn’t take a step at that wedding without tripping over one media celebrity or another.”

  Weddings, births, birthdays, college entrance exams—they fly by fast and furious in this cross fire of talk. Sumati whispers to me, “Watch, they’re going to start on you in a minute.”

  Sure enough, in a little while there is a lull in the conversation. They pause, only until someone’s eye alights on me. As one, they all cry out, “Maya! You’ve grown so big. Remember when you cried at seeing Lakshmi’s husband, Kullan, for the first time?”

  “Actually,” I say, “I don’t remember that. But I’m sure it’s true because everyone says so.”

  “Maya, darling,” says Priya, the mother of the twins, doing her best to restrain her energetic offspring. “You’ll soon find out if you don’t know already, if this bunch agrees on anything they tell you, it’s probably totally untrue.” She’s drowned out by a chorus of protests, agreement, laughter, and questions. “Oh, well said!” “What? What nonsense!” “Now, now, Priya, you always had a sharp tongue in your head.” “Where’s Kullan, anyway? Traveling again, huh?”

  To watch my mother in the middle of this is like viewing an elaborate show in which dancers come together in constantly shifting groups.

  And oh, the food they have all brought. There is aviyal, with tender vegetables swimming in a light and delicate coconut and green chili gravy. Tamarind rice, sour and hot at the same time, with fried nuts hiding flavor surprises in random bites. Yogurt with grated cucumber, garnished with popped mustard seeds, to counter the heat.

  “This food reminds me of something,” I say.

  The famous Raji, who defied her mother to go to architecture school, has the answer. “It’s all Mami’s influence,” she says, with the air of one who means, Can’t you tell? “Who do you think has left traces of her cooking magic in every single kitchen in this family?”

  Ra Auntie (I find out her younger sister, in green, is called Ro Auntie) explains, “When Mami used to work in your grandfather’s house, all of us old ladies were young like you, and we knew where the best food was to be had.”

  “But she didn’t teach all of you to cook, did she?” asks Sumati the practical.

  Ro Auntie chimes in, “Great cooking, my dear, can’t be taught. But great taste can be cultivated, and you know, Mami’s the best! None of us can help it—we keep trying to reach for that special touch! Come on, come on, everyone eat!”

  It’s true. Th
is food has come from a dozen different homes. It’s been cooked by a dozen different hands. Yet Mami’s signature lingers in every bite.

  So I miss her. But is that why I fall apart?

  The twins are the immediate cause. Ashwin’s playing big brother and making paper chains for them. They laugh and lug a long, growing-longer chain around the room. In the process of playing, it gets wound around the dining table. One end of it gets trapped by the leg of a chair. One of the twinlets, Rajeev, or maybe it’s Sanjeev, gets all droopy around the mouth.

  With the best intentions, I offer to help. “I’ll get it for you.” I make a dash for the table, at the exact moment that Lakshmi Auntie emerges from the kitchen, carrying an enormous bowl of payasam. In a superb display of klutziness, I run right into her.

  In dreadful slow motion the bowl capsizes. A wide white river of payasam spills out onto the floor.

  “Oh, Maya!” cries my mother.

  My hands are sticky from my unsuccessful effort to recover some of the spilled dessert. “I’m sorry! It was an accident.” My voice sounds shrill, on the brink of losing control.

  Mom murmurs, “It’s all right.” She smiles, that bright, bright smile that is meant to keep peace at any cost. But it won’t this time. It can’t, because words are pouring out of me so fast I don’t even know where they’re coming from.

  “No. You always do this. Make like everything’s all right when it isn’t. Smile and carry on. You’ve done it for years, Mom. You did it when Dad went away and you can’t, I mean, I can’t!” I am shouting and I can’t stop myself. This is about as public a place as I can pick for this, and I know she hates it and I hate it and I don’t care. Don’t. Care. All I know is that this is it. We have to stop pretending everything’s all right, but we also have to pick up our lives, and stop wishing for magic to happen. Here and now is what counts. It’s the only thing. I am a wave of words, crashing, pounding, on a wide flat beach.

  The wave has dashed over my mother, knocking her breath away. We both know this isn’t about spilled payasam. My face grows hot and tears come streaming down my cheeks.

  The hubbub of family conversation, the clamor of plates, the chinking of cups, all seem to stop, and there is only us, pooling our old unspoken anger under the rhythmic swishing of the ceiling fan.

  “Oh, my God,” says Lakshmi Auntie.

  “I tried and tried to make it all right,” I said. “I tried so hard. You weren’t even there half the time. You’re still not there for me. You’re so busy planning for tomorrow, you don’t know when today’s just about gone.” I can hear my voice. It sounds like somebody else’s. “All I am for you is trouble. Ever since I was born, I’ve been nothing but trouble.”

  The silence is thunderous. It is like that moment you get when the power goes out, a tiny sigh of time before all the electric appliances in the house click quietly and shut themselves off. Then, as if on cue, the twinlets burst into synchronized tears.

  Like an army galvanized into action, the family moves in on the trouble spot. They pick up and comfort the little guys. They roll up their sleeves and get to work. They mop. They soothe. They sweep. They scrub. They clean up. They rid us of that offending spill in a matter of minutes, and they do it all under cover of a barrage of banter and advice, offered up at top volume.

  And then, quite suddenly, it’s done. They leave as swiftly as they arrived, in a flurry of jasmine-scented goodbyes. Lakshmi Auntie, Sumati, and Ashwin are left with us.

  Sumati says, “You’re going to be gone so soon. Then we’ll be back to me and the Pest.”

  Ashwin’s so tired from chasing the twinlets, he can’t do more than grin.

  She says, “Send me an e-mail when you get back, okay?” She scribbles her e-mail address on a scrap of paper, folds it into an impossibly tiny square, and thrusts it in my hand.

  I nod. We go out to see them off.

  “Lakshmi,” says my mother sometime during the last round of hugs. “Did you call everyone? Did you engineer this gathering?”

  “I’m not admitting to anything,” says Lakshmi Auntie.

  Naming Maya

  We fall into bed exhausted that night. Another hot day goes by, and people arrive to buy the furniture, leaving only two beds for us to sleep in. They’ll come back for those after we’ve left. A music collector scoops up a stack of old 78-rpm records. He is a friend of Mr. Rama Rao’s. “Oh, thank you,” he says over and over. “This collection will have a good home, I assure you.” Even piles of old magazines and newspapers are weighed and sold. A van with “Seva Ashram” on it in red letters hauls off boxes of old clothes for the homeless. In all the flurry Mom and I have no time to say two words to each other.

  The day after the house has emptied, the rains arrive in the city. The clouds burst suddenly. The hot earth gives up the smells it has hoarded all summer, and in minutes the gutters rush in torrents, and the gaping construction holes fill with swirls of red mud. The kuyils in the mango tree grow frantic with delight. So does Mr. Rama Rao. He runs outside into the storm, wearing a woolen scarf wrapped around his head. He waves his newspaper, proclaiming to anyone willing to listen, “Oh, I say, very good, southwest monsoon is here! I was telling you all, we will get rain in Chennai this summer!”

  The house feels abandoned without the furniture, without the commotion of relatives gossiping and joking and taking verbal potshots at one another. Without Mami singing in the kitchen, clanging pots and pans to drive away the crows. There aren’t even any crows—they are probably hiding somewhere, trying to stay dry. I miss the smell of incense in the house. I go to the dining room where Mami’s little shrine still sits in its niche in the wall. I pick up the packet of incense sticks, “Jyothy Agarbathi Sticks” in bright red lettering on the barrel box, and light one. The match scratches and flares and soon the sandalwood scent is thick.

  I trudge upstairs, thinking I should begin packing my stuff for the next day’s flight. I gather up all my rolls of film and put them away in my suitcase. I turn around and see Mom standing in the doorway, watching me.

  “Put as much as you can into the suitcase,” she says. “That way you’ll have less to carry on board.”

  “Okay.” But she doesn’t check me off and go on with the next thing on her list. She keeps looking at me.

  “What?” I say, getting squirmy.

  She says, “A cat may look at a king, right?”

  The phrase is an old joke. Thatha used to say that. I’d catch him smiling to himself and looking at me, and I’d say, just like now, “What?” He’d make me laugh with that cat-king line. I’d ask, “Who’s the cat? Who’s the king?” And he’d say, “Now, that, your majesty, you have to decide.”

  We laugh now, and then I say, “I’m no king. Look how I ruined your party. Some royal behavior that was.

  “It’s all right,” she says, coming into the room. “I don’t think anyone really minded.” She sits down on the bed and straightens out a suitcase strap that has twisted around itself. “You were dramatic,” she says, “but you got my attention. And that’s a good thing, because maybe I just haven’t given you enough of it lately.”

  It’s my turn to stare at her, then slowly I continue to put things into my suitcase.

  A hundred thoughts from this strange, sad summer hammer in my head like the rain on the pavement. I pick up Mami’s Two-Gift book from the floor where I have put it, thinking I will pack it away as well. As I do so the yellow silk cord that holds it together comes undone. The accordion-folded pages flip open. Papers flop out of the book and spill all over the floor.

  I pick one up. Mami has hoarded photographs in the book, tucked them into a little pocket on the back page. “Oh, my,” says Mom.

  My mother’s younger self, six or seven years old, with a round face and a set chin, looks curiously out of a yellowing picture at us, as if she too wants to know about this business of family secrets and what to do with them, when to keep them and when to give them away. She clutches a doll in one hand. T
he doll stares into the camera, a smile painted on its face.

  “It’s very unfair,” I say.

  “What is?”

  “The way things change.” I know Mom has questions, but she does not ask them. She just waits. She offers me a silence that is really an invitation.

  “Mami,” I say. “We needed to take care of her, and yet there was a time when she took care of you.”

  She nods. “Things changed with us too, didn’t they? You, me, your father.” There. It is simple and true. Things change. She says, “I married someone who was funny and smart and charming. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he changed, or maybe it was me. But there you were, caught between us. You were such a tough little kid. Such a will you had, trying so hard to hold us together. I couldn’t stand to see you torn in two because we were unable to carry on. At some point I began to realize the marriage was a promise I had to break.”

  She knew, then. She knew about me in the middle. Me between parents, between grandparents, between names. Between promises made and kept like Two-Gifts. But in the end, you can’t live your life by them, because people come and go. Payasam spills, and you can’t keep trying to cover it all up. Sumati would say, “It’s how it is.” Joanie would say, “Just do what’s right and it’ll be okay.”

  When my parents split up, it never occurred to me that Mom needed caring for too. She planted a perpetual smile on her face and kept on going. She went to graduate school. She got a degree. She got a job. I lost her to all those things. She did what she could for me, dropped me off and picked me up from piano lessons and soccer, came to parent-teacher conferences. She did all the things she had to do, so I never knew how she felt about it all inside.

  We share this thing that has happened in our family, Mom and me. It is not good or bad that we share it. It just is. The only bad thing is we never talked about it.

  Mom says, “You’ll still have the last couple of weeks of your summer vacation, before school starts.”