“Love, it seems, is very important,” Ma said sarcastically. “He was making eighty thousand dollars a year. Do you know how much that is in rupees?”
“I make eighty-five; do you know how much that is in rupees?” I countered.
“You didn’t three years ago,” she shot back. “He must be making so much more now. All that money…” She clicked her tongue and started giving directions to the driver instead.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.
My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.
The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.
When I was twelve years old it had been a rite of passage for me to be allowed by my grandfather to bring up a bucket of water from the well. Ma had been scared that I wouldn’t be able to pull the heavy bucket and that it would pull me inside the well instead. She wanted me to have help, but Thatha had been adamant that I do it all by myself. I had rope burns on my soft palms but I strutted around like a proud peacock for days after that.
There was a small two-room house for the servants in one far corner of the plot and on another corner there was a large house that my grandparents rented. They had even constructed a second floor to their house. It was a modern three-bedroom apartment, which my grandparents rented out, too. They lived downstairs with my aunt Sowmya. Sowmya was three years older than I, and like me was not married, but unlike me had always wanted very much to be.
Ma paid off the auto rickshaw driver who winked at me as he told my mother with a straight face that the fare was only pandrah rupiya. We carried the basketful of mangoes to the house gate. Ma opened the gate and yelled for my grandparents’ servant.
Badri was my grandparents’ new servant. He and his wife Parvati had taken residence in the servant quarters just a year ago. Badri did all the gardenwork and cleaned the yard, while Parvati did the dishes and swept and mopped the floors in the house.
The old maidservant I grew up with, Rajni, was as much a part of my childhood as my grandparents’ house. She had left a year after I went to the United States, to go back to her village to live with her son.
Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen, but my grandparents had given her access to pretty much everything else. Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them. Sowmya would take the clean dishes back inside the kitchen to put them in their rightful places. I used to think Rajni was a slacker because she didn’t do that part.
It had been a rainy day when my grandmother explained to me that Rajni was from a lower caste and we were from the highest caste. She couldn’t enter our kitchens; in fact, in the good old days, lower caste people wouldn’t even be allowed inside the house and Rajni would be untouchable, in every sense of the word. Things were apparently better now, Ammamma had said. “We Brahmins have become more tolerant, what with the days being so mordern and everything.” She hadn’t sounded too happy about the modern days.
I picked up our bags and helped Badri put the basket of mangoes on his head. My mother walked into the house like a queen as Badri and I followed like servile courtiers.
I smiled when I entered the grilled veranda on which a huge wooden swing swayed, covering it almost entirely-an obvious hazard for children. The swing had always been on the veranda. I probably wouldn’t recognize the veranda without it.
I removed my sandals and peeped inside. The living room was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the womb of the house, resonating with my memories as if a tuning fork had been put into motion.
One could see to the other end of the house from the front door. All the rooms lay on opposite sides of my line of vision and I saw a smiling Sowmya step outside the dining area next to the kitchen.
She ran to me and we hugged.
The Politics of Giving and Receiving Gifts
My grandmother hugged me so hard that I almost cracked a rib. Ammamma had this strange notion that the harder the hug, the more the love. Despite the discomfort, the subtle smell of betel leaves and cloves that clung to her body pervaded my senses and I soaked the smells in. This was familiar territory and at that instant it didn’t seem so bad to be back.
I knew that today or tomorrow, literally, I would have to tell them all about my plans for the future, and about the man in my life of whom they would wholeheartedly disapprove. But for now Ammamma was hugging me the way she always did and it was enough.
My aunt gave me a perfunctory hug. Lata and I never got along, to a great extent because of the cold war between Ma and her. I didn’t have any feelings toward her, good or bad-I just thought of her as my very beautiful aunt about whom I didn’t feel one way or the other. I remember, when I was around fourteen years old, my uncle Jayant got married and I had showed off to all my friends that I was getting a very beautiful aunt.
I was not wrong; Lata was beautiful. She was tall and walked like a “graceful deer”-so everyone said-and she was fair. Unlike me, she was very fair. Fair somehow always meant beautiful and having darker skin was a flaw. I got my father’s dark color, my mother always said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Nate got her fairer skin. According to Ma, that was my bad karma. A boy could get a good wife irrespective of how he looked if he was financially viable; for a woman, however, physical appearance was important. My dark skin color, Ma felt, could pose a problem when the time came to find me a suitable husband.
Nick was heartily amused when I told him how my own mother had discriminated against me because I was dark. He couldn’t see the subtle differences between the various shades of Indian dark, which made the situation even more preposterous to him.
“All Indians are dark,” Nick pointed out. “Compared to say a Scandinavian… what chance does your mother have of being called fair?”
But my mother was fair, fairer than most, and everyone including her talked about how beautiful she had been when she was young. Just like a marble doll, they would tell Nate and me. Then they would look at me, make sad sounds, and sympathize with Ma: “Too bad your daughter didn’t get your looks.” I was raised under the limelight of a mother whose beauty was long gone, but hardly forgotten. Today my mother could not be called beautiful. Her face, along with the rest of her body, had puffed up and any remnants of beauty were submerged by obesity.
Ma blamed her weight problem on birth control pills. They did the damage, she would accuse, as if eating mountains of white rice with lots of fat smeared on it was not responsible for the abundance of fat tissue in her body. She also blamed the doctor who had prescribed the criminal birth control pills to her almost twenty-seven years ago.