CHAPTER 4. Notes on the Discovery of America, 1974
MEENA ARRIVED DURING THEIR SECOND YEAR IN NICOLET. During the months when her stomach swelled with the growing baby, Sarala enjoyed the way, with this round, welcoming belly, anyone might stop to talk to her, asking, “When is your baby due?” and “Do you think it’s a girl or boy?” and “What will you name her?” when she confided that she knew, most certainly, that it would be a girl.
Sarala’s childhood home had been a rowdy, busy household in which she might toddle from aunt to grandmother to mother; in which uncles, her father, and grandfather were always coming and going; in which there were always cousins for playmates. She wondered what it would be like for her child to grow up in the quiet and solitude of their new home.
Abhijat and Sarala’s mothers, who had liked each other from the start, congratulated themselves on a successful and fruitful match, and traveled together to be there for the birth and for several weeks afterward. When the mothers arrived, they were surprised not only by the quiet of the large empty house but by how far everything in Nicolet was from everything else. They found it amusing how one rode in a car nearly everywhere one went.
Sarala’s mother began cooking almost as soon as she arrived, filling the house with smells that transported Sarala to her girlhood home. Abhijat’s mother had set about the cleaning, both of them insisting that Sarala take to her bed and rest. Sarala obeyed, but from her bedroom she could hear the mothers talking happily to one another as they worked, and she longed to join them. At dinner, with the mothers chattering away, Sarala felt happier than she had in quite a long time.
The mothers, though, seemed concerned. Had they not met and befriended any other Indian families, Sarala’s mother asked, loading plates into the dishwasher after Abhijat had retired to his study as he did nearly every night.
“It’s complicated,” Sarala said. Most of the other Indians at the Lab were visiting scientists, she explained, there for only a few months at a time. And, given how little time Abhijat had for socializing, she’d found it difficult to connect with them. Sarala noticed a look of concern pass over the mothers’ faces.
When Meena finally arrived, the house bustled in a way that felt familiar, one grandmother tending to the baby and one in the kitchen cooking what seemed to Sarala enough food to feed them until Meena was herself a grandmother.
The grandmothers stayed with them for several weeks, and when they left, Sarala was surprised by how quickly, even with the new baby, the house returned to its imposing silence. In the afternoons when Meena slept, and at night when Sarala woke to nurse her, the house stood large, still, and silent around them.
When the winter finally began to melt away, Sarala loaded Meena into her stroller and ventured out into the neighborhood. Sarala loved the way, with her baby smile and soft cooing, Meena drew the attention of the neighbors as Sarala pushed her along the sidewalks in her stroller. The leaves on the slim trees newly planted along the subdivision’s streets unfurled slowly as bright blades of grass began to stand proudly at attention in every yard. In the driveways, husbands tinkered with lawnmowers in preparation for the summer, wheeling snow blowers into the back of their garages, and in the yards, wives planted rows of bright blooming flowers along walkways.
Sarala’s favorite moments on these walks were when one of the neighbors, seeing Meena and Sarala coming, stopped to admire her daughter, to exchange baby conversation with her, to compliment her thick dark hair—“Who had ever seen such beautiful hair on such a tiny baby?”—further suggesting to Sarala that what she and Abhijat had on their hands was the world’s first and only perfect baby.
In fall, Sarala watched the leaves changing with a kind of wonder, new each day, as she stepped outside to find what colors the trees might have turned overnight, and it was with sadness that she watched them fall from the trees just after the first frost. They gathered on the grass, and in the evenings or on crisp, sunny weekend days, the neighborhood husbands raked the leaves together into piles, bagging them up and hauling the fat, shiny black plastic bags out to the curb.
Sarala and Abhijat’s lawn, however, remained covered in leaves. Sarala knew this was not the sort of thing Abhijat was likely to notice, so she made her first visit to the hardware store, where the clerk, a kindly old man who admired Meena’s perfect, tiny fingers, sold her a rake and bags for the leaves.
Back home, having arranged Meena on a blanket on the grass surrounded by her favorite playthings, Sarala set about tackling the leaves herself, the baby watching her with her wise, deep brown eyes.
It seemed to Sarala that the neighborhood husbands spent nearly the entire weekend outdoors, working on their homes and yards, tinkering in their driveways, screen doors slamming as they came in and out of their houses all day, shading their eyes from the sun, some new tool in hand. But Abhijat was not like these husbands. He spent his weekends, like any other workday, at the Lab, and Sarala did not feel it was her place to ask him to change. These other husbands, she guessed, did not have jobs as demanding as Abhijat’s.
Sarala had been delighted when Meena began to speak. She now had someone to talk with through the long, silent days that had, if she were being truthful with herself, begun to feel a bit lonely.
In the morning, after Abhijat left for work, Sarala poured milk into the last bit of his tea, added a spoonful of sugar, and let Meena finish it, her small hands wrapped around the teacup. Afternoons, she loaded Meena and her stroller into the car and visited the shopping mall, pushing Meena proudly before her to be admired by the older ladies who power-walked there together. In the J.C. Penney, Sarala bought small items to decorate their home — a burgundy ceramic vase full of always-blooming artificial flowers, a toothbrush holder with matching cup and soapdish for the powder room — that was what the realtor had called the small half-bath on the first floor, though Sarala had yet to find a satisfactory explanation for why it should be called that.
On rainy days, they visited the library and together selected books to borrow, Sarala lately favoring inspirational biographies of business leaders and the paperback romance novels whose front covers featured images of heroes and heroines in shiny foil, which the librarians kept in a rotating rack near the checkout desk. Meena favored sturdy board books with pictures of farm animals in bright primary colors, and Sarala was taken by how much the farms in Meena’s books resembled the farmhouses and barns left standing on the Lab’s campus.
On sunny days, they made the rounds of Nicolet’s parks, and sometimes, on special days, Sarala took Meena to the place in town she loved most — Heritage Village.
Sarala’s favorite exhibit was America’s Frontier. She loved the pioneer home, a simple one-room log cabin where a woman in a long dress and a white cap leaned over the hearth stirring a cast-iron pot, tended the fire, or churned butter in the yard near the barn. Sarala loved peeking inside the Conestoga wagon next to the log cabin and imagining what from her home she might bring with her were she to set off for such a new, unknown world.
Meena loved the blacksmith shop — the rough wood rafters of the shed hung with horseshoes and lanterns, carriage wheels lined up against the stone walls, the warm building noisy with clanging as a man in a leather apron hammered away at the red-hot piece of metal he’d pulled from the fire, the banging of his hammer carrying out over the day’s bright blue sky. She squealed in delight at the noise, clapping her tiny hands each time a blast of air from the bellows caused the fire in the hearth to leap up. Next to the bellows sat a barrel of water, and when the blacksmith pulled the metal from the fire, its tip glowing yellow-orange and cooling, as he hammered, back to a black-grey, he finished by dipping the tip into the water, the metal cooling with a fitz sound, smoke snaking up into the rafters.