“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” she agreed, and pushed her glasses up her nose.
I was seeing this world, my ex-world from my Americanized vision. This ex-world of mine was different to me now from what it had been before. I saw some things better, while other things had blurred beyond recognition.
Thatha was not my hero anymore because I saw him in a harsher light, an American light that didn’t condone men like Thatha. I had changed, I agreed with Sowmya. I hoped it was for the better.
Ma wasn’t in a better mood when we got back. Despite bad tempers, upset moods, and the exhausting heat, the work in Ammamma’s pickle sweatshop continued.
Lata was barking orders, while Ma was telling Lata how she was doing everything wrong. Not out of love was this food made, but out of need to prove superiority.
Ammamma was also saying her piece but no one was listening to her. We all listened to Lata and Ma and I felt like a yo-yo doll giving in to whoever spoke the loudest.
For the first time I realized that this mango pickle-making ritual like everything else was a power game. Ammamma had lost the battle a long time ago; my mother had been winning, but now Lata had thrown in a googlie-a cricket ball with a spin-by getting pregnant to please the old ones.
Lata and Ma were the contenders while Neelima, Sowmya, and I were spectators. Ammamma sometimes played a biased referee while other times she tried to recapture her days of glory.
My relationship with everyone in this room was in some way or the other fractured, but it was my relationship with my grandmother that was the most superficial. Ammamma was a feeling, a smell, a memory, not a real person. I knew little about her. I knew who her favorite film star was and which movie she watched repeatedly ever since Thatha bought a VCR, but I didn’t know how she felt one way or the other about her life, about having given birth to her first child when she was just fifteen years old.
After Ma, it took Ammamma ten years to conceive again and I could only imagine how hard those years must have been. It would have been imperative to have a male child, especially for Thatha, and it must have been pure torture to wait every month to see if she had a period or not.
Jayant’s birth was a miracle, or so everyone claimed. After that Ammamma didn’t get pregnant for eight years but it hadn’t mattered since she’d already delivered the son.
Anand was born when Ammamma was thirty-two years old. “I didn’t even think I could get pregnant and boom… suddenly my belly was growing. Your Thatha, he was so happy,” she had told me, smiling fondly at Anand.
After Sowmya was born two years later, Ammamma started to have uterine problems. When Sowmya was a year old they found a tumor in Ammamma’s uterus and they had to perform a hysterectomy.
They had also found a tumor in Ma’s uterus when I was fifteen. Ma again put the blame squarely on that quack doctor and the birth control pills, but Ammamma told me that it was hereditary. Even Ma’s Ammamma had had a tumor.
“So you have children fast,” Ammamma always advised. “God may take your womanhood away and then where will that leave you?”
For Ammamma, having children was an achievement, something she was proud of. How did she feel today when all her children were grown and most of them ignored what she had to say?
I had asked her once how she felt about being married off so early. “It was the way it was those days,” she replied but never told me how she felt about following tradition, accepting her fate. I knew nothing about her true feelings, she was just Ammamma, the woman who sat on the sofa all day long watching television and eating paan.
I didn’t know the woman behind the relationship I had with her.
And neither did Ammamma know the woman behind her granddaughter.
I looked at all the women in the room and wondered if behind the facade all of us wore for family occasions we were strangers to each other.
I was trying to be the graceful granddaughter visiting from America but my true colors were slipping past the carefully built mockery of myself I was presenting. Maybe the masks worn by the others were slipping, too. Maybe by the end of the day I would know the women behind the masks and they would know me.
I tried once again to talk to Ma but she shunned me and I concluded that she didn’t want to look behind the labeclass="underline" DAUGHTER, and didn’t want me to look behind the labeclass="underline" MA. If she wouldn’t show me hers, how could I show her mine?
“We just add these in?” I asked, looking skeptically at the chickpeas soaking in water. Lata pulled a yellow bucket filled with spices close to her and dumped all the chickpeas in. Then, when her arm was up to her elbow she asked me to pour oil and the pieces of mango in for her to mix.
Lata always made the chickpea avakai, Thatha’s favorite. When I was little I used to pick the chickpeas out of Thatha’s plate as my palate was not ready to endure the chili and spice of the avakai. Thatha would wipe away traces of spices and chili from a chickpea and line it up with others for me to nibble on. Ma would tell Thatha he was spoiling me, that I should learn to eat spicy food and not eat out of other people’s plates, but Thatha continued and I continued.
Even as an adult I could never eat food that was too spicy. When Nick and I went out to Indian restaurants he usually handled the hot food better than I did.
“Who’s the Indian here?” Nick would ask, as he wiped moisture from his forehead. He would continue to eat, despite getting soaking wet with sweat, while I would give up on the really hot food.
“My mother would like you… well, your eating habits at least,” I told Nick. “She believes that food isn’t real food if your nose and eyes don’t water a little while you eat.”
Ma and Lata ordered us around like slaves to bring the big pickle jars from the kitchen. Sowmya and I demurely went and got six huge glass jars. Neelima started to cut muslin cloth into large squares. The pickle went inside the jars and then the muslin was tied to the mouth of the jar after which the lid was tightly closed.
We all worked as if we were on automatic pilot, abiding orders and following the leaders blindly. The last of the pickle was being put into the jars when Ammamma decided to stir up some conversation. “So tell us, Priya, do you have a lot of Telugu friends in the States?”
“A few.”
“They say the Bay Area has a very big Indian population, especially Telugu,” Lata said, as she used a wooden ladle to fill her jar with her pickle.
“Some,” I said tersely.
“You don’t like Telugu people?” Lata asked, when I seemed reluctant to expound.
“I didn’t say that,” I protested.
Lata shrugged. “My brother who lives in Los Angeles told me that there are some Indians who don’t like other Indians who live in the States. They always stay away from them and only make friends with white people. I think that is a shame.”
“I agree,” I replied with affected sincerity. “The race of a person should be of no importance when you make friends. I have several American and several Indian friends. I also know some people from Turkey.”
Ammamma’s eyes popped out. “What? You have friends who are white? Who are black?”
She could as well have been saying that my friends were little green men from Mars.
“What can you talk to them about?” Ammamma asked. “They are not really friends, are they?”
I gaped at her. Was the woman really stupid, or was she merely pretending?
“What do you mean?” I asked, unsure of her question.
“She means what do you have in common with these white people,” Ma piped in. “You should stay with your own kind. These white people will always swindle you.”
“And how do you know that?” I sighed, first my grandfather and now my mother. It was a family thing, probably embedded in the genes.