Shine, Coconut Moon

by Neesha Meminger

  He drops his head back and closes his eyes. “They needed to know, Sharan…they would be held accountable.”

  “There are better ways to do that,” Mom says firmly.

  I wish she would stop. “Mom, can’t we talk about this another time?”

  Uncle Sandeep looks off at a point on the ceiling for a moment. “She’s right, Samar,” he concedes. “I may have…let my emotions get…the better of me.”

  Mom throws an arm in the air. “May have?”

  I shoot her a look, but Uncle Sandeep gives her what passes for a lopsided grin. “Okay, fine, Sharan, you’ve made your point. You were right…again. Happy now?”

  Mom tries to look smug, but her eyelashes are wet and she doesn’t quite pull it off. “Yes, I am, actually,” she says gently.

  “God,” I say, shaking my head. “I can totally see you guys as kids.”

  We stay until he drifts off to sleep, neither of us wanting to leave. Eventually one of the nurses comes in to tell us what the official hospital visiting hours are and sends us on our way.

  On the way out, Mom stops to pick up more hot chocolate for us from the hospital cafeteria.

  When we walk out into the parking lot, the sky is just beginning to glow indigo as the sun begins its climb up over the horizon.

  “Been a long time since I’ve seen the sun come up like that,” Mom says, squinting into the sky. “It’s something, isn’t it? Like a symphony, with the sun as the conductor—there he is, leading the whole thing, pointing at each color to wake up and perform its magic.”

  We watch the colors change for several moments as day emerges from night, like stepping into a fresh new beginning. We let the sun’s rays seep deep into our skin and send them back out in our own way to write a new story on a new page. All of a sudden, it occurs to me that every day we get this chance. Every day, we can decide which way to take the moments that make up our lives, like being in a car and steering in the direction you want to go.

  Mom holds my hand the whole ride back to our house, but we sit in silence with our own thoughts. When we walk in the door, I’m relieved to be back home in our little house. It wraps around me like one of Mom’s hugs, with all her smells and loving words. Without warning, all the events of last night, last month, and all the months since Uncle Sandeep showed up on our doorstep catch up with me.

  I take off my boots, coat, and gloves, and walk to the kitchen table as the sobs slash through to my core. Mom slides a chair next to me, and holds me tight for as long as I need it.

  When we finally crawl into our beds, the sun is climbing high into the sky. What a gorgeous day it’s going to be, I think, as the sounds of the world coming alive outside my window begin to fade far into the distance.

  Then I have one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. I’m on a boat. A biting wind howls around us, but the sun shines, bright and fierce. The boat sways on the surface of the peacock blue waters off the Jersey shore. Nanaji stands stoically to one side of me, and Naniji leans against Mom on my other side. Molly’s not touching me, but I can feel her behind me.

  I hold up an urn and tilt it to let some ashes fly. They pour out and spread, sitting in the air like a twinkling mist. Little jewels in the bright afternoon sun, going up and out and down and everywhere. The ashes cling to my skin like talcum powder. When I try to brush them off, they only grind finer, sinking under the surface to burrow deep inside.

  Sun dust.

  A breeze whispers faintly into my ear, Shine, little muni, shine.

  I close my eyes and turn my face to the beaming warmth of the sun, realizing that the ashes in the urn are mine.

  I wake up in a cold sweat and breathe deeply to calm myself before falling back asleep.

  When I wake up again, I ask Mom about it. Her eyes light up. She says it might mean that I’m letting a part of myself go, but the most radiant parts of what I’m letting go are staying with me, clinging to me and being deeply absorbed. What I don’t need is flying away into the dust.

  Chapter 20

  Warm weather does wonders for my mood. Now that it’s summer and the birds are having little hangouts in our backyard and Mom’s garden is in full bloom, it’s a lot easier to look back at the past few months.

  Word got around quick about what happened in the parking lot. Maybe that was the reason my teachers took it easier on me, or maybe my performance-under-pressure mechanism kicked in. I don’t know, but somehow I made it through to graduation.

  Rick Taylor, Chuck Banfield, and Simon Monroe were all expelled from school and charged with assault, driving while impaired, hit-and-run, and a bunch of other charges Mom rattled off to me. Because the boys were all over eighteen, they were tried as adults in court.

  The principal made several announcements in school about underage drinking and driving while impaired, as well as restating several times the school’s zero-tolerance policy on racial and sexual harassment. All future school dances were canceled until further notice.

  The first school year after the Trade Center attacks, America moved on: shopping, working, loving, growing—almost back to usual. But something fundamental had changed, deep inside the nation, and the world. Deep inside me and everyone I knew. Nothing would ever be the same. Something had died, and we needed to spill the ashes to allow the most dazzling specks to come back and burrow themselves under our skin.

  A couple of months after the dance, I heard from Molly, who heard from Bobbi, who got it from one of her numerous “sources,” that Mike was dating a blond junior on the cheerleading squad named Brittany. Bobbi, being Bobbi, was “helpful” enough to point Brittany out to me in the halls.

  Whenever she passed me, Brittany threw nervous, jittery looks my way. But my attention was so focused on other areas of my life, like college, meeting new members of my family, and learning more about myself and my mom and our history, that my relationship with Mike already felt like something far, far away.

  Uncle Sandeep stayed in the hospital for about ten days, recovering and undergoing physical therapy. He had another surgery after that first one and brags to anyone who’ll listen that he has plates and screws and pins in his bones.

  He still gives me regular lectures on the importance of learning more about myself. “You know what the ancient Egyptians used to say? ‘Know thyself.’ That’s the secret door to everything, Samar—know thyself.”

  The more I know myself, really know myself, he says, the more I’ll see that there’s actually no difference between me and everyone else. “We’re not humans on a spiritual journey, Samar,” he always says, wagging a finger at me. “We are spirits on a human journey. Remember that.”

  Yeah, okay, Uncle Sandeep.

  And Mom. Reconnecting with her family has changed something deep inside her. It’s obvious to everyone—even Molly mentioned it. She’s softer, somehow, in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. She now volunteers at the new Center for Young People downtown, as a specialist in the issues of immigrant youth. She seems more alive than ever, after she comes home from working with young women struggling with things similar to what she struggled with when she lived at home with Nanaji and Naniji.

  One quiet spring evening, Mom and I were having tea together at the kitchen table. All of a sudden, she looked at a point somewhere in the space between us, as if focusing on another scene, in another time.

  “My father once told me,” she said, “that without knowing ourselves, our history, we are all light feathers, torn from the body of a free bird and drifting alone in the wind.”

  I sat quietly and waited, knowing that she was sort of here and sort of somewhere else.

  “My grandmother had five girls,” she began, “and she loved them deeply. One of them is your naniji. The three eldest went to Fiji with their parents, and my mother and her younger sister were brought up in Punjab, by an aunt and uncle who had spent the majority of their lives in Britain…,” and she continued until three a.m.

  My heart raced as I listened to her sto
ry. My story. It’s a saga that I’m a part of. A huge line that goes way back into a distant, far-off past. All these layers and points on a time line. Gone, but not forgotten…a long-held memory whispered from the lips of the past into the ear of the future.

  One other thing I’ve learned through Uncle Sandeep and Mom’s conversations—because as much as they sometimes like to bicker, they really are very similar. I see that we’re all, each and every one of us, like little palaces with invaluable, one-of-a-kind treasures inside. And if there’s a part of ourselves that we don’t claim, whether we forget to, choose not to, or feel forced to, we put that unique, precious piece outside on the porch. And we let the world know we don’t want it, it’s not welcome inside. Then the world is free to treat that precious valuable in whatever way it wants. But it’s still a part of us, even though we’ve closed the door. And at some point we have to come back outside to get it, in whatever shape it’s in.

  I know now that, in a way, Mom was the treasure Uncle Sandeep came back to get that Saturday morning. The forgotten cast-off on the porch. Her silent screams rang out loud and clear in those photographs in the family albums, if anyone had chosen to take notice. I never would have thought so at first, since she was the one who cut off ties, but to be ninety minutes away, living in the same state, with no contact for fifteen years, is a two-way street. For years they let her stay there, just outside the door.

  So Uncle Sandeep brought her, and me, back inside. Strangely enough, that’s when I brought them back inside too. “Them” being Naniji, Nanaji, Uncle Sandeep, my heritage, history, and everything else that brought me here, to this moment.

  I now have two bona fide South Asian friends, Shazia and Balvir—my “peeps.” I also am a regular poster on South Asian forums and have an entire cyber-community of former and recovering coconuts. I tell all of them that coconuts are very resilient and often grow taller than many of the plants around them, usually in less than optimal conditions.

  Ever since the night of the Midwinter Dance, Mom and Uncle Sandeep have stuck to a regular weekend schedule of hanging out. Every Sunday they get together for brunch and drop me off to hang out with Nanaji and Naniji. Some days Mom comes in when she comes to pick me up and stays for a bit before we head home.

  Even though she won’t admit it, I saw the look of relief on Mom’s face when Naniji and Nanaji decided not to sell the house for a little longer. As Nanaji said, “You never know—your uncle could still get married, and then we’ll wish we had all this space again for the grandchildren.”

  Things aren’t as warm and fuzzy as I’d like them to be with Mom and her parents, but she’s trying. And that’s something. Uncle Sandeep says, “It’s progress, Samar. Delhi wasn’t built in a day. Brick by brick. Give them time.”

  So that’s where I am this Sunday: in Nanaji and Naniji’s kitchen with the sun spilling liquid gold onto the countertops.

  “Grind them, beta, don’t pound.”

  I turn my attention back to the task at hand. Naniji throws a few more cloves into the marble mortar and pestle set and wraps her warm marshmallow hand around my fingers to show me how it’s done. “Han, like that…see? Perfect!”

  I peer into the combination of spices in the marble bowl. “Okay, so we’ve got cardamom, cloves, fennel…and what was that last one?”

  “I don’t know in English, but in Punjabi, we call it ajwain,” she says, tucking a small corner of her chunni scarf into her mouth and measuring out teaspoons of sugar. She dumps the sugar into a separate small steel bowl and mixes some crushed cinnamon in with it.

  When I’ve finished grinding the spices, Naniji pours the mixture into a pot of boiling water. Next she stirs in the sugar-cinnamon mixture.

  Nanaji sits on a stool at their kitchen island, reading the weekly newspaper, Times of Punjab. He glances at us over his reading glasses and says a few words to Naniji in Punjabi. She nods.

  “Samar, beta, come here,” he calls.

  Naniji nods to me. “Go on, we must allow the chai to simmer now. We want to give the flavors a chance to mingle, nah? I’ll heat up the pakoras in the meantime.”

  Nanaji puts his paper down and beckons for me to follow. Before I even get close, he heads toward the back of the house. I follow, wondering what he plans to share with me today. Each time I’ve visited, Nanaji has shared something new about himself or his life.

  During my last visit, he showed me old, sepia-stained photos of when he was in the military in India. The time before that, he took out a beautiful, hand-carved, wooden and ivory box that was his mother’s. Nanaji pressed it into my hands and told me to take good care of it. As the first grandchild, it was now rightfully mine.

  I’ve placed it in my trunk, next to my Winnie the Pooh stars and moon yum-yum. When I showed the box to Mom, she stared at it in stunned silence, fingering the intricate carvings gingerly as tears welled up in her eyes.

  Today I follow Nanaji out into the sunroom that faces their huge backyard. “Come here,” he says. I stand next to him and look at the plants all around us. Some are as tall as I am, growing out of clay pots on the floor, others are on benches that come to my waist. “These are the plants,” he says, pointing to all of the plants.

  I nod. “They look great, Nanaji.”

  He shakes his head. “Samar, look closely at these plants. What do you see? What do you smell?”

  I furrow my brow. I lean closer to a bushy one with dark green leaves. I don’t see anything unusual. Again he shakes his head. He snaps a leaf off and hands it to me. “Smell,” he commands.

  Before the leaf even reaches my nose, I’m bombarded with its scent. “Cardamom!” I breathe.

  He looks pleased. “Absolutely,” he says, walking away. “I wanted you to see the source of those seeds and barks you are grinding up with your naniji.” Then, in a quieter, almost reverent voice, he says, “I planted every single one of these herbs and spices. These hands nurtured them from tiny seeds wrapped in paper.”

  Nanaji shows me a few more of his plants: curry leaves, fennel, anise, cinnamon. He walks with his hands behind his rigid back, his voice booming but gentle.

  When we’re done, he puts a hand on my shoulder—the closest he ever comes to hugging me. “Bas. Come, let us have chai with your naniji.”

  We walk back to the kitchen, where Naniji has already poured the chai into huge mugs. There is a plate of pakoras and a plate of sweets on the table as well. “Samar, you must always have something sweet and something savory to serve your guests,” she says, putting a small plate in front of me and piling it high with the snacks. “And pakoras are easy to make. We don’t have much time left today, but next time I will show you how to make them. These sweets were your mother’s favorite when she was a girl.” She pulls out a red box with a gold bow and places it next to my plate. “There are more in here—take them for Sharanjit when you go.”

  My heart feels buoyant, like a feather attached to a free bird, soaring high into the clouds. This is a feeling I’ve been getting a lot lately. I stare into my chai, eyes welling up. “I wish I had this before,” I say softly. “Like, when I was growing up…”

  Naniji laughs and puts a hand on the top of my head. “So is it all over, then? You’re done growing up?” She crinkles her eyes and looks at me the same way that Mom does. “We have a lot of time to make up. All is not lost, beta.”

  I know she’s right. I should do what Mom always says and “savor the present.” I raise the cup of chai to my lips and, in spite of my trembling chin, sip a tiny amount of the creamy, sweet concoction. I think about how, in the relatively short amount of time since Uncle Sandeep rang our doorbell, he taught this coconut to shine like the moon.

  Right now, the summer stretches out before me like a wide, sparkling, silver sheet of ocean. At the end of summer, Sarah Lawrence College awaits. It was one of my choices when Molly and I were sending our applications out. NYU was, of course, my first pick because it was where Molly and I talked about being roommates togethe
r. That was when I so desperately wanted to be part of her extended family.

  But when I was looking at my acceptance letters and deciding where I truly wanted to go, one tagline stood out: You are different. So are we. On their website, they had a quote from one of the founders of the school: “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

  These days, in spite of Mom’s insistence all my life that I’m no different from anyone else, I’m kind of happy with my differences. I’ve decided it’s not such a bad thing after all to have a few of those.

  It was like the folks at Sarah Lawrence were speaking directly to me and everything I’d gone through in the last six months. I scoured their website and fell in love with the sociology curriculum: “Students investigate the ways in which social structures and institutions affect individual experience and shape competing definitions of social situations, issues, and identities.”

  I thought about Balvir’s definition of a coconut: brown on the outside, white on the inside, mixed-up, confused. And then Uncle Sandeep’s: The coconut is also a symbol of resilience, Samar. Even in conditions where there’s very little nourishment and even less nurturance, it flourishes, growing taller than most of the plants around it.

  Talk about competing definitions. That settled it for me. I want to investigate what’s made the experiences of four Sikh Indian women living in America—Mom, Balvir, me, and Naniji—so vastly different, when we all spring from the same resilient coconut tree.

  Molly will be going to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City in the fall. She’s so delighted that she’s jumping and popping like mustard seeds in Naniji’s frying pan. It’s contagious; you can’t help but jump and pop with her in her excitement.

  I look at the soft grooves around Naniji’s eyes. She reaches up to tighten the silvery white bun on her head. When she looks at me again, I see Mom’s eyes the way they might be in another twenty years or so. And quite possibly my own, another twenty or thirty years after that.