by Kamala Nair
Veena Aunty stayed in our guest room for a month, and when the month was over, Amma came back clutching a bottle of pills. She was a new Amma, a serene, sedate Amma who never screamed or cried. I remember when she walked in the door for the first time, I ran away, and she followed me, caught me, and hugged me close to her breast, whispering, “I’ll never leave you again.”
As I watched her crying on the sofa now, these memories came back to me in searing flashes. I willed myself to speak. “Amma, what’s wrong?”
She glanced up, and at first it was as if she didn’t recognize me. Her eyes focused and she cleared her throat, but didn’t bother wiping away the tears, which flowed freely. “I’m just reading a sad book, molay, nothing to worry about.”
But I was worried. When I walked behind her, pretending I needed a glass of water from the kitchen, I saw something blue lying flat against the pages of her book.
By the time Aba came home, it was late and both Amma and I had gone to bed. I stared up at the yellow frill of my canopy and listened to my father’s light, quick steps, still so full of energy, coming up the stairs. Merlin, who was curled up at my feet, lifted his head, and the tags on his collar jingled. Throwing off my quilt, I got out of bed, opened the door, and squeezed through a thin crack, leaving Merlin, who gave a breathy whine, behind.
Aba did not see me at first, and I watched him. He was thirteen years older than Amma. His hair had begun to turn gray in patches around his ears, and there were lines around the corners of his mouth and eyes, but I still thought he was a handsome man. Distinguished. Tall and thin, with black, deep-set eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, thick, dark eyebrows, and a clean-shaven face. He was carrying a sheaf of papers under his arm.
“Rakhee, what are you doing awake?” Aba did not sound angry, only distracted.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Why not? Is something the matter?”
I paused, uncertain of what I would say, or why I had even come out in the first place. “Um, no.”
“Well then, you’d better go back to bed. You don’t want to be sleepy in school tomorrow and let the others get ahead.” Aba patted my hair before he turned and disappeared into his study.
I went back into my room and climbed into bed. Merlin came to sit beside me and placed a heavy paw on my arm. The moon was huge and gold; it winked at me through the curtains. I didn’t want to go back to school tomorrow. I didn’t care if the others got ahead, like Aba said. I wished I could just stay there forever with Merlin and my books and my art supplies, and never leave.
I lay awake like that, stroking Merlin’s paw for a long time, and finally I heard Aba moving into the room he shared with Amma. Not long after that, the drone of his snores reverberated through the wall. The numbers on the face of my digital clock cast a green glow across the room and I stared at it. The numbers kept changing and changing until they began to blur and fade, and at last I fell asleep.
After that day our lives began to unravel quickly. A steady stream of blue envelopes addressed to “Chitra Varma” in that same flowery cursive began flowing into our mailbox. I never picked up the mail anymore because Amma always beat me to it, but all the same I knew they were coming. I found the blue shreds in the trash or ashes in the fireplace, which we hardly ever used; and Amma grew increasingly unpredictable.
Some days she behaved as she always had, but at other times she would float around the house singing Malayalam songs and smiling at nothing in particular, or she would lock herself in the bathroom and sob. Some mornings she would be up early running around the house cleaning and preparing a huge breakfast for me and Aba, and other mornings she would stay in bed with the curtains drawn, and she would still be there when I came home in the afternoon. Even when she was in a happy mood I was afraid. She had this new faraway expression on her face, and I felt that she had retreated into a part of her heart where neither Aba nor I would ever belong.
Aba was so preoccupied with work that I don’t think he noticed anything at first. But one evening I heard them arguing. He had invited a few of his most important colleagues from the Clinic to our house for dinner, and Amma had left a steel knife encrusted with lemon rind inside the elaborate cake she baked for dessert. The day before that, she had dropped me off at the dentist’s office and never picked me up. I ended up shamefacedly accepting a ride home from the sympathetic dentist, who later informed Aba.
“Chitra, what is wrong with you?” Aba’s voice boomed into my bedroom. “I depend on you for certain things—to take care of our child and this house—I depend on you to do these things in order for me to focus on my work, and to provide you with all this.”
“I don’t care about all this,” said Amma in a harsh voice I didn’t recognize. “It means nothing to me.”
Aba was quiet and when he spoke next his tone was concerned, gentle. “Then what do you want? How can I help you? Has something happened that I don’t know about?”
“All I want right now is for you to go away,” Amma said in that same harsh voice. “Can you please do that for me?”
There was a long pause, and then I heard Aba leave the room, closing the door behind him. A week later he moved into the guest bedroom.
One day in the spring, I came home to find Amma fast asleep on the sofa. A letter was lying on her chest, which rose and fell in shallow breaths, like a wounded deer I once found in the ravine in the woods behind our house. Gingerly, I took up the thin blue paper and read it. It was short, only two sentences, and it had not been signed:
Remember the flock of green parrots that used to sit on the Ashoka tree outside your bedroom window? They were so perfectly green that you thought they were leaves, until a gust of wind would send them flying off into the dawn sky.
I placed the letter back on Amma’s breast, thinking what a strange thing it was to send all the way from India.
The week before summer vacation tension lived with us like a stubborn houseguest. Aba and Amma barely spoke anymore, and Aba would stay at the lab until long after my bedtime. But what scared me most was that Amma grew peaceful. The crying, the singing, the forgetfulness, all stopped. She was calm and balanced, as if she had come to some kind of important decision.
Even Merlin sensed something was wrong; he was normally well-behaved, but he became anxious and restless. One night I awoke to a high-pitched moan. I did not feel his familiar warm weight against my feet. A latch of fear pinched my spine.
“Merlin?” I climbed out of bed, put on my glasses, and tiptoed across the room.
I found Merlin cowering inside my closet, his long snout pointed toward the ceiling, his mouth opened into the shape of a small triangle. The rack of clothes muffled his sonorous howl and his legs quivered above a wet patch on the carpet where he had urinated.
Amma came running into my room in her nightgown, her hair loose and rumpled. Two violet half-moons ringed the undersides of her eyes. “Rakhee, what is it? What is going on?” She switched on the light and I squinted. Merlin bowed his head.
Amma instructed me to fetch a sponge and a bucket from under the bathroom sink, and to fill the bucket with soapy water. I expected her to scold Merlin, but instead she just got down on her hands and knees inside my closet and scrubbed. “We’ll take him to the vet tomorrow and have him checked out,” she said.
The next night I was shaken awake. I sat up, alarmed by the rattling bed frame. Merlin was lying at the edge of my bed caught in the midst of what seemed to be an especially vivid dream. He was moving his paws back and forth in a frantic motion, as if he was chasing something, or perhaps running away. I reached across, placing the palm of my hand on his belly, and he grew still. One shiny black eye opened and he raised his head to look at me. He whined softly, then went back to sleep.
On the last day of school Amma picked me up in the car, instead of making me take the bus. When we got home, she asked me to sit down on a stool in the kitchen.
“Rakhee,” she said, “I must speak with you.”
My neck stiffened and I felt a pinprick of panic in my chest.
“It has been a long time since I went back home to India. I’ve been thinking about how much I would like to spend time with my family, especially my mother—she’s getting old now, you know. Since you have vacation, this may be a good time for us to visit India together.”
I stared at her. She glanced back at me, trying to gauge my reaction before continuing in a tone that sounded artificial. “I think it’s important for you to learn about where you came from and to meet your extended family. Think about it, molay, it could be fun. You’ll have cousins around your age to play with, and it will certainly be more exciting than sitting around here all summer.”
“But what about Aba? What will he do about work?” “Aba won’t be joining us.” Amma bit her bottom lip. “It will be just the two of us, a girls’ adventure.” She gave me a forced smile.
“Are you and Aba getting a divorce?” I don’t know what made me say it, but as soon as the word slipped out it did not seem implausible. It made me choke, that word. Divorce.
Some of the kids at school had parents who were divorced, and I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. I had a vision of Aba living all by himself in a sloppy apartment, having nothing to eat, and no company, and my having to live alone with Amma and her stupid letters.
“Rakhee, don’t talk like that.” Amma’s face blanched and she began rubbing her finger against an invisible stain on the kitchen counter. “We’re just going for the summer, and I really think you’ll have a nice time.”
“But why can’t I stay here with Aba? What if I don’t want to go to India with you?”
Amma’s jaw went rigid. “Rakhee, Aba is at work all day. He won’t have time to look after you, you know that. Why do you have to make this so difficult?”
I had no choice. It had already been planned and decided and no one had bothered to consult me. In that moment I hated Amma. I scowled. “So, when are we leaving?”
“In a week.”
With the force of a few words, my entire world was smashed, and I was furious.
“I don’t want to go to India!” I shouted before leaping off the stool and stalking up the stairs and into my bedroom. Glancing around, my eyes fixed upon a small green plant in a clay pot resting on the windowsill. I stormed over to the plant and seized it in my hands.
Back in April, everyone in my class had been given a plant to care for. Within a month most of the plants had shriveled up. By the end of the school year only mine continued to flourish. The day before I had carried home the clay pot and Amma had praised the glossy green leaves. Just that morning I had watered it faithfully.
With one motion I sent it crashing to the ground. Streaks of dirt tumbled out of the pot. I lifted my bare foot and stomped over the leaves, flattening them and grinding the mess deeper into the carpet, savoring the feel of the crumbling soil under the arch of my foot. Then I burst into tears and flung myself facedown on the bed. Amma came in later that day and cleaned up, without saying a word to me.
Chapter 3
I had never left the country before and knew little about Indian culture. Amma sometimes told me stories about her village in Kerala—Malanad, it was called—of how they could pluck ripe mangoes and eat them straight from the tree, and of frogs so plump that when they leaped out of the river they looked like green bowling balls. She read me a Hindu epic called the Ramayana at bedtime, and once a year on Vishu, the Kerala New Year, she woke me up at dawn, before even Aba had risen, with the cool touch of her fingers over my eyes. She would lead me, blinded, down the stairs and into the living room. When she removed her hands the first thing I saw was a fantastically decorated table draped in a gold brocade shawl. A framed picture of the goddess Saraswati (“the Goddess of Knowledge,” she told me, “so you do well in your studies”) sat propped at the center, surrounded by a flickering lamp, roses, carnations, oranges, apples, bananas, and gold coins.
Aba had been raised as a Sikh but now was an atheist who disapproved of any organized religion. Amma kept a windowless prayer room in our house—a closet, actually—at the end of our upstairs hall. Every morning she went in carrying a lamp, a bottle of oil, and a wick, and soon I would see a strip of light shining from the crack below the door. About ten minutes later the light would go off and Amma would emerge with a secretive smile on her face. I never joined her, and she never asked me to because she knew Aba wouldn’t like it.
The room confused and scared me, but there was also something alluring about it. Every now and then I crept in on my own and would be greeted by the sharp musk of incense along with dozens of sets of staring eyes. The walls were hung with pictures of different gods and goddesses—a big-bellied half man/half elephant, a fierceeyed woman with many arms, a blue man with a snake wrapped around his neck. The fear would return and I would run out, closing the door behind me. Later they would pay me visits in my dreams—the woman would dance at the edge of my bed, waving her arms around with a taunting smile, or the blue man would press his face against the window and his snake’s tongue would dart in and out, in and out. I always woke up in a sweat.
Neither Aba nor Amma was very forthcoming about the lives they had left behind in India. I knew that Aba was an only child who came from a wealthy Punjabi family in Delhi and that his parents had died suddenly in a car crash when he was a college student. Fueled by sorrow and ambition, he chopped off his hair, folded away his turban, cut ties with his extended family, and moved to the United States, armed only with his inheritance, to pursue his medical studies. Eventually the Plainfield Clinic heard of his research and offered to shower it with money. He accepted, tempted by the idea of a simple existence in a small town that would never remind him of what he left behind.
Whenever I asked him about India he told me stories about its history—about Gandhi and the struggle for independence, about the old Mughal emperors, famous Indian mathematicians, and the Indus Valley Civilization. If I ever asked him about his own life there, he would brush me off: “There’s no point in dwelling on that, Rakhee. People who live in the past never get ahead, just remember that. We’re here now and we’re Americans.”
Amma grew up in Malanad, a rural village in Kerala, a sliver of a state at the southernmost tip of India. She came to Plainfield when she was only eighteen to live with her cousin Veena, who had gotten married and left the village a few years before. She attended classes at Plainfield Community College during the day and helped Veena Aunty around the house at night. Amma told me she left Kerala because she needed a change of scene and because Veena Aunty was lonely. I did not question this explanation at the time, but it should have struck me as odd. Veena Aunty was a vibrant, sociable woman who blended into the Plainfield community almost seamlessly, heading committees, power walking through the Hill with the other housewives in the mornings, swapping recipes, and grilling on the deck in the summers. But even after thirteen years in Plainfield, Veena Aunty was Amma’s only friend.
Veena Aunty’s husband, Chandran, worked with Aba at the Clinic. Aba was a bachelor at the time, living in cramped hospital quarters, eating frozen dinners, and working so hard he rarely went out and socialized. Because he was the only other Indian in Plainfield, Veena Aunty and her husband felt a kinship and began inviting him over for weekly dinners. This was how Aba met Amma and eventually married her.
Sometimes I wonder why he did it. She was a young, uneducated country girl with whom he shared nothing, except a common desire to avoid the past. Aba was a kind man, but he had a distant, professional demeanor, even with me, and he disliked showy displays of emotion. When I wanted something, I had to appeal to his logic; my tears only hardened his heart. But with Amma, he was different. She had a funny effect on him.
When we all sat together in the family room, he would look up suddenly from the newspaper, take her hand in his and stroke it, delicately, as if he were holding a dying bird. If she got up and walked away, he would watch her go with an expression o
f deep longing in his eyes. There was something otherworldly about Amma that we both sensed; it was as if she was not a flesh-and-blood woman but a dream conjured into existence by Aba’s and my love. Aba gave her whatever she asked for, which was never anything much. Not long after she came home from the hospital following her long absence, I heard him ask:
“Chitra, tell me what I can give you that will make you happy.”
Amma told him what she wanted more than anything else was a garden.
The next day Aba hired men to tear up the fortress of bushes at the front of our house to make room for a flower bed and a vegetable patch. That weekend, armed with a shovel, he lovingly turned up the earth himself.
Even when they were fighting, I saw the love burning behind his sad gaze.
I know they must have been happy once. Old photographs reveal to me two young souls with faces radiating love and hope: A windy beach shot of a rakish Aba with his arm wrapped around a beaming Amma’s shoulder. Amma pregnant and red-cheeked, bundled in a winter coat, laughing in the snow. Aba holding me as a newborn at the hospital, awkward but full of proud joy. I wish I could remember it.
When I thought about India I felt a sense of dread. I had always dreamed of traveling, of leaving behind plodding Plainfield for some distant land. Aba kept a set of picturesque travel books, a gift from a grateful patient, in a neat row on one of the shelves in his study. Sometimes I went in when he wasn’t around and paged through them, imagining myself into the colorful photographs, drifting down the Amazon or on a safari in the Tanzanian jungle. It was what made school endurable, those pictures and the dream of escape that was both sweet and punishing. Sweet because it meant the end of my suffering at school, and punishing because it would take me away from Aba and Amma.
