* * *
MY MOTHER’S LETTER distressed me, but it was distress of a peculiar, blurred kind. I knew how serious the situation in Calcutta was, but somehow the tragedies Ma spoke of weren’t real, not like my own problems. The pain of my daughter’s swollen gums as her first teeth came through; the smell of our apartment which, no matter how much I scrubbed, stank of stale curry; the arguments I seemed to have every evening with Sandeep and which were resolved, inevitably, the only way we knew how: by the uneasy press of our bodies against each other in bed, his mouth tasting of cloves, making me drunk, making me temporarily forget. Inescapably mundane, these things loomed so large in my world that they forced everything else to recede. A few months later, when Tarun would arrive in Vermont and call me, his voice over the phone line would be edged with a sharp, silver need. But it, too, would belong to that other plane of existence, like a flash of lightning far up in the night sky.
I hated this change in myself, this shrinking of sensibility, this failure of intelligence. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Did anyone else suffer from such a disease? I was afraid to ask Sandeep, who was the only person I knew well enough in America to ask.
I kept my mother’s letter for a long time at the bottom of my jewelry case, under the thick gold wedding bangles that I no longer wore because they were too elegant for my pedestrian Sacramento life. I wasn’t sure if I should send it to Tarun, if that would be disloyal to my mother.
And then during a move to a new house, I lost the letter. By then it was too late, anyway.
THE FIRST FEW months after moving to this country, Tarun called me almost every day. He hated cooking for himself. Hated coming home in the evenings to an empty room. It was so cold in Vermont, he felt he was slowly freezing, one organ at a time. I forced myself to ignore the pleading in his voice. Sandeep was dead against any family—his or mine—coming to live with us. Landing on my head was the term he used. So I would offer Tarun a variation of We-all-went-through-the-same-thing, before-you-know-it-you’ll-get-used-to-this-lifestyle. It was hard to think of anything more profound to say with the baby screaming in my ear or the dal boiling over and Sandeep, like most husbands brought up in India, no help at all. Tarun would be silent for a moment. Then he would say good-bye in a quiet voice.
FOR A LONG time I didn’t know about the rift between Ma and Tarun, although I wonder now whether it was more that I didn’t want to know. I’d had my second baby by then, and Sandeep and I were finally falling in love. It seemed such a precarious miracle, our little house of kisses. I was afraid that even one careless word would topple it.
So when I rang up India and Ma would say that it had been a long time since she had heard from Tarun (she was too proud to say any more), could I call him and make sure he was okay, I wouldn’t let myself take it seriously. Oh, Ma! I’d say, my gay voice drowning out her hesitant words, Quit worrying! He isn’t a baby anymore. I’d leave a brief message on his answering machine telling him to write home, and add something cheerful about all the naughtiness his nieces had been up to. Those days, I worked hard at being cheerful because Sandeep had informed me that men disliked gloomy women.
Still, one night after Ma had been more insistent than usual, I spoke to Sandeep. I waited till after lovemaking, when he was usually in an expansive mood, and then I asked if we could have Tarun stay with us for the summer holidays.
“I’m the only family he has here, after all,” I said. “And he’s always been so shy, not the kind to make lots of friends—”
Sandeep touched my cheek lightly. “We’re just getting to know each other. Let’s give ourselves—and Tarun—a little more time alone, shall we?” When I hesitated, he sighed. “That’s the trouble with our Indian families, always worrying too much. It’s good for your brother to be on his own for a while. He’s probably having a great time at the university. For all you know, he has half a dozen girlfriends and would much rather you didn’t keep tabs on him.”
I wanted to tell Sandeep, who was an only child, about those afternoons in Calcutta, the smell of wheat rutis browning on the skillet, the way, when Tarun entered the kitchen, a certain sternness he carried to all his day’s activities fell away from his face. But Sandeep was yawning. In a moment he’d remind me that he had to get up early and go to work. I watched his lips, the way they stretched into a thin oval around his large, even teeth.
I could have argued, I know that now. I could have threatened. Sandeep needed a wife as much as I needed a husband. He feared aloneness as much as I did. But in those early days I was too unsure of myself, too much in love with being in love. It was easier to let myself believe him, to snuggle against the warm curve of his backbone and relinquish responsibility. To tell myself as I gave in to the sweet tiredness of after-sex sleep that I would have a real heart-to-heart chat with Tarun next weekend.
But something came up next weekend—and the one after, and the one after. Trips to the Laundromat, unexpected company for dinner, one of the kids running a fever. Until Tarun’s phone calls became shorter and less frequent, and the pauses between his sentences were longer than all his words put together. But I wasn’t listening. Let me tell you what we did yesterday, I’d say brightly into the silence, into the years that blurred by, while in my head I was making up the grocery list, or trying to remember when the children had to visit the dentist.
Then I came back from seeing our mother and called him to say I had to come and see him, right away, and he replied, in a carefully courteous voice so devoid of feeling that it frightened me, Sure, come if you like.
WHEN WE WERE little, Tarun and I liked to play a game called Trap the Tiger. It was played with stones and tamarind seeds—you had to encircle your opponent’s stones with your seeds. All through this visit, I feel I’ve been playing at that game—and losing. Circling and circling Tarun with my words, their chunky, chipped syllables, only to have him slip away.
“Tarun, that was a great lasagna you fixed! When did you learn to cook so well?”
“Picked it up along the way.”
“Remember when Ma used to fry us pantuas for dessert, how we’d sit and wait for them to turn red? Remember our kitchen . . . ?”
“Mmm. Listen, do you mind if I go out for a while? I’ve got a couple things to take care of.”
Left alone in the apartment, I would sit in front of the TV, its blank, black face. I would think of the intelligence of wild things. Geese, ants. How they knew to communicate without words, without sound. The flash of a wing, the waving of antennae. Food. Home. This way danger lies. I wanted to touch my fingertips to my brother’s and pulse into his body all the emotions that jostled inside mine.
THE TRIP I took last month to Calcutta to see my mother was my first since I had left as a new bride, ten years ago. I was shocked by how much had changed, and how little. Caught in a traffic jam on my way from the airport to my mother’s house (I was startled to discover that I no longer thought of it as mine), I had looked up at the gigantic movie billboards that towered over me. The colors were exactly as I remembered, garishly, naively brilliant. The gestures of the heroes and heroines hinted at the same exorbitant worlds of love and danger that had fascinated me as a teenager. But I didn’t know a single name, and the faces on the posters were so young—so young and beautiful and hard—that I wanted to weep.
As soon as I saw her at the airport, where she had come against the doctor’s advice, I knew that my mother was dying. It wasn’t just the droop of her sari-blouse in a dispirited V down her thin back, or the ugly, rubber-tipped cane she leaned on, or the yellowish tint to her lips. It was the look in her eyes, the way she stared past me for a moment when I came out of the customs area, as though she didn’t recognize me. As though she were looking beyond me for someone else.
I AM LEANING against the boat’s railing now, looking out blindly, counting on my frozen fingers the people I love. Sandeep, my daughters, my mother, my brother. It is a pitifully short list, and does not give me the comfort I ha
d hoped for. My mother is dying—perhaps she is already dead. How much of my husband’s fondness for me is based on the convenience of give-and-take? In how many ways will my daughters and I disappoint each other as they grow from my life into their own? And my brother? I see the impatient hunch of his shoulders in army camouflage. Is he as anxious for me to be gone as I am to leave?
Swallow the icy lump that is pressing up against your throat, I order myself. Stitch a smile onto your lips. To cry now would be the final humiliation. You’re going home tomorrow. You did your best, and now you’re going home.
Home. I turn the sound over on my tongue, trying to figure out the various tenses in which such a word might exist. The smell of my children’s damp heads after they’ve come in from play? Sandeep’s aftershave, the way it lingered in our first bedsheets? A dim cement-floored alcove in Calcutta, the smell of frying bitter gourd, the marvel in a listening boy’s eyes?
Is there ever a way back across the immigrant years, across the frozen warp of the heart?
“Look!” Tarun is pointing to a white blur on a nearby ice floe. I wipe at my eyes, hoping they haven’t turned their usual telltale red, and try to show some interest. Will this miserable boat ride never end? “Look!” It’s some sort of a large bird, red-beaked, with slim red legs. It isn’t native to this region, judging from the comments of the parka-clad young men, but it doesn’t appear to be lost. As the boat chugs closer, it spreads its white wings and looks toward us with cool self-possession. I’ve seen a bird like this somewhere, sometime, but I can’t quite remember.
“Didi, doesn’t it look like a sharash?”
Yes, indeed, it does look like the marsh crane of the Bengal countryside. But I am more startled by the Bengali name for the bird, so unexpected in my brother’s mouth. That, and the childhood endearment which he hasn’t used in years. Didi. A small flash of a word, potent as any enchanted jewel from my mother’s stories.
IT IS SOON after my father’s death. I am eight, my brother three. My harried mother, hoping for a brief respite, has sent us to visit Third Uncle, out in the country. We are homesick and miserable, suspicious of shuffly night noises, terrified of the huge spiders studding the dark walls of the outhouse. We do not fit in with our cousins, who know how to milk cows and swim across the pond. We scrape our knees when we try to climb trees with them. They jeer if we cry.
But, today, after a morning filled with rain, the sun glimmers around the edges of black monsoon clouds, and the puddles are so inviting that we can’t resist jumping in them. We’re muddy from head to toe, but we don’t care, even though we know Third Aunt will give us a yelling when she sees our clothes. Defiantly, we run and run—all the way past the rice mill, past the irrigation ditch, past the sugarcane fields with their breathy swishing sounds. We are running toward the rail lines. Perhaps we can jump on to a passing train and make our way back to our mother in Calcutta? Then abruptly we come across them, a whole flock of sharash feeding in the flooded rice fields. My brother lifts his delighted hands, Look, Didi! as the birds fly up, an arc of silver air. For a moment the sky is full of wings. Whiteness and possibility. We stand with our arms around each other until they disappear.
THE FERRY IS closer now, and everyone is looking at the bird. Even the raucous young men are quiet. The bird’s eyes shine like beads of blood. It looks back at us. At me. I am sure of this. It has flown all the way from Bengal, out of the old tales, to bring me a message that will save us—if only I can hear it.
Some illusions are essential. We need them to live by.
Through a gap in the clouds the sun hangs so low over the lake that if I reached out, I could cup its burning sweetness in my palm. Lake Champlain, the name comes to me all at once. Before I returned to the States, I begged my mother to come and live with me. She refused. I want to die in the house where your father died, where you were born, you and Taru. Some days, the pain medication confused her.
What can I do for you, Mother? What will make you happy?
Seeing my children before I die.
But I am here, Mother.
Seeing my children before I die. Seeing my children . . .
All of us groping in caverns, our fingertips raw against stone, searching for that slight crack, the edge of a door opening into love.
Suddenly I am glad about the girl with the red-gold hair.
The bird takes off, beating its powerful wings, wheeling with confident grace over our heads. I’m certain that my brother doesn’t remember that long-ago day in the countryside. Still, I step closer. Touch the sleeve of his jacket. He looks as though he might move away. Then he puts his arm around my shoulders and gives them a brief, awkward hug.
Tonight I will tell my brother a story. Once there was a widow-woman who had two children. I’ll tell it the way the old tales were told, without guilt or blame, out of sorrow and hope, in honor of memory. Maybe he won’t listen, and maybe he will.
We stand side by side, shoulders touching. The wind blows through us, a wild, intelligent wind. The white bird flies directly into the sun.
THE LIVES OF STRANGERS
THE SEEPAGE OF rainwater has formed a tapestry against the peeling walls of the Nataraj Yatri House dining hall, but no one except Leela notices this. The other members of the pilgrimage party jostle around the fire that sputters in a corner and shout at the pahari boy to hurry with the tea. Aunt Seema sits at one of the scratched wooden tables with a group of women, all of them swaddled in the bright shawls they bought for this trip. From time to time they look down at their laps with a startled expression, like sparrows who have awakened to find themselves plumaged in cockatoo feathers.
Aunt beckons to Leela to come sit by her. “Baap re,” she says, “I can’t believe how cold it is here in Kashmir. It’s quite delightful, actually. Just think, in Calcutta right now people are bathing in sweat, even with the fans on full speed!”
The women smile, pleased at having had the foresight to leave sweaty Calcutta behind at the height of summer for a journey which is going to earn them comfort on earth and goodwill in heaven. They hold their chins high and elongate their necks as classical dancers might. Plump, middle-aged women who sleepily read love stories in Desh magazine through the interminable train journey from Howrah Station, already they are metamorphosed into handmaidens of Shiva, adventure-bound toward his holy shrine in Amarnath. Their eyes sparkle with zeal as they discuss how remote the shrine is. How they will have to walk across treacherous glaciers for three whole days to reach it. Contemplating them, Leela wonders if this is the true lure of travel, this hope of a transformed self. Will her own journey, begun when she left America a month ago, bring her this coveted change?
Tea arrives, sweet and steaming in huge aluminum kettles, along with dinner: buttery wheat parathas, fatly stuffed with spicy potatoes. When they have eaten, the guide advises them to get their rest. This is no touristy excursion, he reminds them sternly. It is a serious and sacred yatra, and dangerous, too. He talks awhile of the laws to be observed while on pilgrimage: no non-vegetarian food, no sex. Any menstruating women should not proceed beyond this point. There is a lot more, but his Bengali is full of long, formal words that Leela does not know, and her attention wanders. He ends by saying something about sin and expiation, which seems to her terribly complex and thus very Indian.
Later in bed, Leela will think of Mrs. Das. At dinner Mrs. Das sat by herself at a table that was more rickety than the others. In a room filled with nervous laughter (for the headman had frightened them all a bit, though no one would admit it) she held herself with an absorbed stillness, her elbows pulled close as though early in life she had been taught not to take up too much space in the world. She did not speak to anyone. Under her frizzy pepper-colored hair, her face was angular and ascetic.
Leela has not met Mrs. Das, but she knows a great deal about her because Aunt Seema’s friends discuss her frequently. Mostly they marvel at her bad luck.
“Can you imagine!” the doctor’s wife says.
“Her husband died just two years after her marriage, and right away her in-laws, who hated her because it had been a love match, claimed that the marriage wasn’t legal. They were filthy rich—the Dases of Tollygunge, you understand—they hired the shrewdest lawyers. She lost everything—the money, the house, even the wedding jewelry.”
“No justice in this world,” Aunt says, clicking her tongue sympathetically.
“She had to go to work in an office,” someone else adds. “Think of it, a woman of good family, forced to work with low-caste peons and clerks! That’s how she put her son through college and got him married.”
“And now the daughter-in-law refuses to live with her,” Aunt says. “So she’s had to move into a women’s hostel. A women’s hostel! At her age!”
The doctor’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Some people are like that, born under an unlucky star. They bring bad luck to themselves and everyone close to them.”
Leela studies the kaleidoscope of emotions flitting across the women’s faces. Excitement, pity, cheerful outrage. Can it be true, that part about an unlucky star? In America she would have dealt with such superstition with fluent, dismissive ease, but India is complicated. Like entering a murky, primal lake, in India she has to watch her step.
LEELA’S HAPPIEST CHILDHOOD memories were of aloneness: reading in her room with the door closed, playing chess on the computer, embarking on long bike rides through the city, going to the movies by herself. You saw more that way, she explained to her parents. You didn’t miss crucial bits of dialogue because your companion was busy making inane remarks. Her parents, themselves solitary individuals, didn’t object. People—except for a selected handful—were noisy and messy. They knew that. Which was why, early in their lives, they had escaped India to take up research positions in America. Ever since Leela could remember, they had encouraged her taste for privacy. When Leela became a computer programmer, they applauded the fact that she could do most of her work from home. When she became involved with Dexter, another programmer whom she had met at one of the rare conferences she attended, they applauded that too, though more cautiously.