I touch their feet like a good Indian girl should, though I am somewhat embarrassed. Everyone in the airport is watching us, I’m sure of it. Aunt is embarrassed too, and shifts her weight from leg to leg. Then she kisses me on both cheeks, but a little hesitantly—I get the feeling she hasn’t done something like this in a long time.
“O Jayanti!” she says. “I am having no idea you are growing so beautiful. And so fair-skinned. And you such a thin thin girl with scabby knees when I left India. It is making me very happy.” Her voice is soft and uncertain, as though she rarely speaks above a whisper, but her eyes are warm, flecked with bits of light.
I don’t know what Uncle thinks. This makes me smile too widely and speak too fast and thank them too effusively for taking me in. I start to take out letters and packets from my carry-on bag.
“This is from Mother,” I tell Aunt. “This fat one wrapped in twine is from Grandfather. And here’s a jar of the lemon-mango pickle you used to like so much—Great-aunt Rama made it herself when she heard—”
Bikram-uncle interrupts. Unlike Aunt, who speaks refined Bengali, he uses a staccato American English. His accent jars my ears. I have trouble understanding it.
“Can we get going? I got to be back at work. You women can chat all day once you get home.”
His voice isn’t unkind. Still I feel reprimanded, as though I am a little girl again, and spitefully I wonder how a marriage could ever have been arranged between a man like Bikram-uncle and my aunt, who comes from an old and wealthy landowning family.
The overalls are part of the problem. They make him seem so—I hesitate to use the word, but only briefly—low-class. Why, even Mr. Bhalani, who owned the Lakshmi Motor Works near the Mint, always wore a starched white linen suit and a diamond on his little finger. Now as I stare from the back of the car at the fold of neck that overlaps the grimy collar of Uncle’s overalls, I feel that something is very wrong.
But only for a moment. Outside, America is whizzing by the fogged-up car window, blurry silhouettes of brick and stone and tall black glass that glint in the sun, making me dizzy. I wipe the moisture from the pane with the edge of my sari.
‘What’s this?” I ask. “And this?”
“The central post office,” Aunt replies, laughing a little at my excitement. “The Sears Tower.” But a lot of the time she says, “I am not knowing this one.” Uncle busies himself with swerving in and out of traffic, humming along with the song on the radio.
The apartment is another disappointment, not at all what an American home should be like. I’ve seen the pictures in Good Housekeeping and Sunset at the USIS library, and once our neighbor Aditi brought over the photos her chachaji had sent from Akron, Ohio. I remember clearly the neat red brick house with matching flowery drapes, the huge, perfectly mowed lawn green like it had been painted, the shiny concrete driveway on which sat two shiny motorcars. And Akron isn’t even as big as Chicago. And Aditi’s chachaji only works in an office, selling insurance.
This apartment smells of stale curry. It is crowded with faded, overstuffed sofas and rickety end tables that look like they’ve come from a larger place. A wadded newspaper is wedged under one of the legs of the dining table. Uncle and Aunt are watching me, his eyes defiant, hers anxious. I shift my gaze to the dingy walls hung with prints of landscapes, cattle standing under droopy weeping willows looking vaguely bored, (surely they are not Aunt’s choice?) and try to keep my face polite. My monogrammed leather cases are an embarrassment in this household. I push them under the bed in the tiny room I am to occupy—it is the same size as my bathroom at home. I remember that cool green mosaic floor, the claw-footed marble bathtub from colonial days, the large window that looks out on my mothers crimson and gold dahlias, and want to cry. But I tell Aunt that I will be very comfortable here, and I thank her for the rose she has put in a jelly jar and placed on the windowsill.
Aunt cooks happily all afternoon. Whenever I offer help she says, “No no, you just sit and rest your feet and tell me what-all’s going on at home.”
Dinner turns out to be an elaborate affair—a spicy almond-chicken curry arranged over hot rice, a spinach-lentil dal, a yogurt cucumber raita, fried potato pakoras, crisp golden papads, and sweet white kheer—which has taken hours to prepare—for dessert. I have a guilty feeling that Aunt and Uncle don’t usually eat this way, and as we sit down I glance at Uncle for confirmation. But he has already started on the food. He eats quickly and with concentration, without raising his head. When he wants more he points silently, and Aunt hurries to serve him. He has taken a shower and put on the muslin kurta-pajama I brought him as a gift from India. With his hair brushed back wetly and chappals on his feet, he could be any Indian man sitting down to his dinner after a hard days work. As I watch Aunt ladle more dal onto his plate, I have a strange sense of disorientation, and for a moment I wonder whether I’ve left Calcutta at all.
“I think he is liking you,” whispers Aunt Pratima when we are alone in the kitchen. She stops spooning dessert into bowls to touch me lightly on the wrist, her face bright. “See how he is wearing the clothes you brought for him? Most nights he does not even change out of his overalls, let alone take a shower.”
I am dubious. Uncle’s attitude toward me, as far as I can tell, is one of testy tolerance. But I give Aunt a hug and hope, for her sake, that she is right. And as I help her pour tea into chipped cups of fine bone china that look like they might have once been part of her dowry, I make a special effort. I offer Uncle my most charming smile.
“I can’t believe I’m finally here in the U.S.,” I tell him. “I’ve heard so much about Chicago—Lake Michigan, which is surely big as an ocean, the Egyptian museum with mummies three thousand years old, and is it true that the big downtown stores have real silver mannequins in their windows?”
Uncle grunts noncommittally, regarding the teacups with disfavor. He stomps into the kitchen where I hear him rummage in the refrigerator.
“I can’t wait to see it all!” I call after him. “I’m so glad I have the summer, though of course I’m looking forward to starting at the university in September!”
“You will do well, I know.” Aunt nods encouragingly. “You are such a smart girl to be getting into this university where people from all over the world are trying to become students. Soon you will have many many American friends, and—”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Bikram-uncle breaks in, startling me. His voice is harsh, raspy. He stands in the kitchen doorway, drinking from a can which glints in his fist. “Things here aren’t as perfect as people at home like to think. We all thought we’d become millionaires. But it’s not so easy.”
“Please,” Aunt says, but he seems not to hear her. He tips his head back to swallow, and the scar on his neck glistens pinkly like a live thing. Budweiser, I read as he sets the can down, and am shocked to realize he’s drinking beer. At home in Calcutta none of the family touches alcohol, not even cousin Ramesh, who attends St. Xavier’s College and sports a navy-blue blazer and a British accent. Mother has always told me what a disgusting habit it is, and she’s right. I remember Grandfather’s village at harvesttime, the farmhands lying in ditches, drunk on palm-toddy, flies buzzing around their faces. I try not to let my distaste show on my face.
Now Uncle’s tone is dark and raw. The bitterness in it coats my mouth like the karela juice Mother used to give me to cool my liver.
“The Americans hate us. They’re always putting us down because we’re dark-skinned foreigners, kala admi. Blaming us for the damn economy, for taking away their jobs. You’ll see it for yourself soon enough.”
What has made him detest this country so much?
I look beyond Uncle’s head at the window. All I can see is a dark rectangle. But I know the sky outside is filled with strange and beautiful stars, and I am suddenly angry with him for trying to ruin it all for me. I take a deep breath. I tell myself, I’ll wait to make up my own mind.
At night I lie in my lumpy bed un
der a coarse green blanket. I try to sleep, but the night noises that still seem unfamiliar after a week—the desperate whee-whee of a siren, the wind sighing as it coils about the house—keep me awake. Small sounds filter, too, through the walls from Aunt’s bedroom. And though they are quite innocent—the bedsprings creaking as someone turns over in sleep, footsteps and then the hum of the exhaust as the bathroom light is switched on—each time I stiffen with embarrassment. I cannot stop thinking of Uncle and Aunt. I would rather think only of Aunt, but like the shawls of the bride and groom at an Indian wedding ceremony, their lives are inextricably knotted together. I try to imagine her arriving in this country, speaking only a little English, red-veiled, wearing the heavy, elaborate jewelry I’ve seen in the wedding photo. (What happened to it all? Now Aunt only wears a thin gold chain and the tiniest of pearls in her ears.) Her shock at discovering that her husband was not the owner of an automobile empire (as the matchmaker had assured her family) but only a mechanic who had a dingy garage in an undesirable part of town.
I haven’t seen Uncle’s shop yet. Of course I haven’t seen anything else either, but as soon as the weather—which has been a bone-chilling gray—improves, I plan to. I’ve already called the people at Midwest Bus Tours, which picks up passengers from their homes for an extra five dollars. But I have a feeling I’ll never get to see the shop, and so—again spitefully—I make it, in my head, a cheerless place that smells of sweat and grease, where the hiss of hydraulics and the clanging of tools mix with the curses of mechanics who are all as surly as Bikram-uncle.
But soon, with the self-absorption of the young, I move on the wings of imagination to more exciting matters. In my Modern Novel class at the university, I sit dressed in a plaid skirt and a matching sweater. My legs, elegant in knee-high boots like the ones I have seen on one of the afternoon TV shows that Aunt likes, are casually crossed. My bobbed hair swings around my face as I spiritedly argue against the handsome professors interpretation of Dreiser’s philosophy. I discourse brilliantly on the character of Sister Carrie until he is convinced, and later we go out for dinner to a quiet little French restaurant. Candlelight shines on the professor’s reddish hair, on his gold spectacle frames. On the rims of our wineglasses. Chopin plays in the background as he confesses his admiration, his love for me. He slips onto my finger a ring with stones that sparkle like his eyes and tells me of the trips we will go on around the world, the books we will coauthor when I am his wife. (No arranged marriage like Aunt’s for me!) After dinner he takes me to his apartment overlooking the lake, where fairy lights twinkle and shiver on the water. He pulls me down, respectfully but ardently, on the couch. His lips are hot against my throat, his …
But here my imagination, conditioned by a lifetime of maternal censorship, shuts itself down.
After lunch the next day I walk out onto the narrow balcony. It is still cold, but the sun is finally out. The sky stretches over me, a sheet of polished metal. The skyscrapers of downtown Chicago float glimmering in the distance, enchanted towers out of an old storybook. The air is so new and crisp that it makes me suddenly happy, full of hope.
As a child in India, sometimes I used to sing a song. Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land, where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold? My girlfriends and I would play skipping games to its rhythm, laughing carelessly, thoughtlessly. And now here I am. America, I think, and the word opens inside me like a folded paper flower placed in water, filling me until there is no room to breathe.
The apartment with its faded cushions and its crookedly hung pictures seems newly oppressive when I go back inside. Aunt is in the kitchen—where I have noticed she spends most of her time—chopping vegetables.
“Can we go for a walk?” I ask. “Please?”
Aunt looks doubtful. “It is being very cold outside,” she tells me.
“Oh no,” I assure her. “I was just out on the balcony and it’s lovely, it really is.”
“Your uncle does not like me to go out. He is telling me it is dangerous.”
“How can it be dangerous?” I say. It’s just a ploy of his to keep her shut up in the house and under his control. He would like to do the same with me, only I won’t let him. I pull her by the hand to the window. “Look,” I say. The streets are clean and empty and very wide. A gleaming blue car speeds by. A bus belches to a stop and two laughing girls get down.
I can feel Aunt weakening. But she says, “Better to wait. This weekend he is taking us to the mall. So many big big shops there, you’ll like it. He says he will buy pizza for dinner. Do you know pizza? Is it coming to India yet?”
I want to tell her that the walls are closing in on me. My brain is dying. Soon I will turn into one of those mournful-eyed cows in the painting behind the sofa.
“Just a short walk for some exercise,” I say. “We’ll be back long before Uncle. He need not even know.”
Maybe Aunt Pratima hears the longing in my voice. Maybe it makes her feel guilty. She lifts her thin face. When she smiles, she seems not that much older than me.
“In the village before marriage I was always walking everywhere—it was so nice, the fresh air, the sky, the ponds with lotus flowers, the dogs and goats and chickens all around. Of course, here we cannot be expecting such country things….”
I wait.
“No harm in it, I am thinking,” she finally says. “As long as we are staying close to the house. As long as we are coming back in time to fix a nice dinner for your uncle.”
“Just a half-hour walk,” I assure her. “Well be back in plenty of time.”
As we walk down the dim corridor that smells, just like the apartment, of stale curry (do the neighbors mind?), she adds, a bit apologetically, “Please do not be saying anything to Uncle. It will make him angry.” She shakes her head. “He worries too much since …”
I want to ask her since what, but I sense she doesn’t want to talk about it. I give her a bright smile.
“I won’t say a word to Uncle. It’ll be our secret.”
In coats and saris we walk down the street. A few pedestrians stare at us silently as they sidle past. I miss the bustle of the Calcutta streets a little, the hawkers with their bright wares, the honking buses loaded with people, the rickshaw-wallahs calling out make way, but I say, “It’s so neat and quiet, isn’t it?”
“Every Wednesday the cleaning truck is coming with big brushes to sweep the streets,” Aunt tells me proudly.
The sun has ducked behind a cloud, and it is colder than I had thought. When I look up the April light is a muted glare that hurts my eyes.
“It is probably snowing later today,” Aunt says.
“That’s wonderful! You know, I’ve only seen snow in movies! It always looked so pretty and delicate. I didn’t think I’d get to see any this late in the year….”
Aunt pulls her shapeless coat tighter around her. “It is not that great,” she says. Her tone is regretful, as though she is sorry to disillusion me. “It melts inside the collar of your jacket and drips down your back. Cars are skidding when it turns to ice. And see how it looks like afterward….” She lacks at the brown slush on the side of the road with a force that surprises me.
I like my aunt though, the endearing way in which her eyes widen like a little girl’s when she asks a question, the small frown line between her eyebrows when she listens, the sudden, liquid shift of her features when she smiles. I remember that she’d been considered a beauty back home, someone who deserved the good luck of having a marriage arranged with a man who lived in America.
As we walk, the brisk, invigorating air seems to loosen something inside of Aunt. She talks and talks. She asks about the design on my sari, deep rose-embroidered peacocks dancing against a cream background. Is this being the latest fashion in India? (She uses the word desh, country, to refer to India, as though it were the only one in the world.) “I am always loving Calcutta, visiting your mother in that beautiful old house with marble fountains and lions.” She wants
to know what movies are showing at the Roxy. Do children still fly the moon-shaped kites at the Maidan and do the street vendors still sell puffed rice spiced with green chilies? How about Victoria Memorial with the black angel on top of the white marble dome, is it still the same? Is it true that New Market with all those charming little clothing stores has burnt down? Have I been on the new subway she has read about in India Abroad? The words pour from her in a rush. “Imagine all those tunnels under the city, you could be getting lost in there and nobody will be finding you if you do not want them to.” I hear the hunger in her voice. And so I hold back my own eagerness to learn about America and answer her the best I can.
The street has narrowed now and the apartment buildings look run-down, even to me, with peeling walls and patchy yellow spots on lawns where the snow has melted. There are chain-link fences and garbage on the pavement. Broken-down cars, their rusted hoods gaping, sit in several front yards. The sweet stench of rot rises from the drains. I am disconcerted. I thought I had left all such smells behind in Calcutta.
“Shouldn’t we be going back, Aunt?” I ask, suddenly nervous.
Aunt Pratima looks around blindly.
“Yes yes, my goodness, is it that late already? Look at that black sky. It is so nice to be talking to someone about home that I am forgetting the time completely.”
We start back, lifting up our saris to walk faster, our steps echoing along the empty sidewalk, and when we go back a bit Aunt stops and looks up and down the street without recognition, her head pivoting loosely like a lost animal’s.