by Veena Rao
“It’s not so bad. It really isn’t. I spend time vacuuming or cleaning the bathrooms. We have a computer, so I spend a couple of hours surfing the net and writing emails. I am learning to watch some of the daytime TV shows too.”
Amma continued to weep into the phone. “I want you to be happy,” she said. “That’s all a mother ever wants.”
That was Amma’s favorite line, repeated every so often, as if she had a constant need to be absolved of guilt. But if the past could be wiped clean at will, who would atone for the deep etches of memory that felt like scars?
Tara often wondered if her childhood memories would have been shaped differently if Pinky had been found in the boxes that arrived at New Mangalore Port by cargo ship four weeks after Tara and Amma moved to Shanti Nilaya. Would her transition to a new life have been easier?
Amma had spent an entire morning searching, emptying the boxes. But Pinky wasn’t there. Tara did not cry this time, because the four weeks of her new life in Mangalore had scattered her pain among new challenges. But the skies cried heavy sheets, flooding several low-lying areas on the west coast.
Tara stayed huddled inside their upstairs room with Amma after school, revisiting again and again the one afternoon she had spent with Pinky. Daddy had left to establish a new fairy tale for his family in Dubai. He would send for them after he had settled down, but it would take time. Until then, Shanti Nilaya was home to Amma and Tara, whether they liked it or not.
Amma had cried for a couple of days because she missed Daddy and her beautiful colonial home, her chauffeured station wagon, her kitty party friends. Then she had grown sullen. She came alive only at night, to help Tara with her homework. Her belly grew bigger by the day, like a ripe jackfruit. Tara knew now that it was not poop in her mother’s belly, but a baby that kicked her hard. The knowledge meant nothing to her, because the baby was only a ball inside Amma’s belly.
Six days a week, Tara trudged to St. Margaret’s Convent School, bundled up in a blue, red, and white flower-patterned raincoat with a massive hood. The first few days, Uncle Anand had walked with her. Then she walked alone, black rubber rain shoes on her feet, and a blue canvas school bag on her back, under the raincoat. The stretch from Shanti Nilaya up to the T-junction was the toughest to cross. The mud road was pitted with gaping craters that filled with water when it rained. Tara’s foot would invariably slip into a pool, filling her rubber shoe with muddied water. The first few times she had shuddered with revulsion—there was no telling what the water had touched. The lane was littered with cockleshells, and on the occasional day when it did not rain, she saw fresh goat droppings as well.
Walking to school was bad enough, but school was worse. There were fifty-three girls in her class, and she talked to none because her hair was too short—too short to plait or tie into pigtails; too short to look like her classmates. Each morning, before she left for school, Amma spent several minutes brushing her hair with a neat side parting. But by the time she reached school, wiry curls were springing up and sticking up in all directions, like an unkempt shrub.
“Your mummy doesn’t comb your hair?” Zainaba, the girl who sat next to Tara in class asked one day.
“She combs.” Tara felt her face growing hot.
“You must ask her to apply coconut oil. Your hair will grow long and thick like mine.”
Zainaba’s hair was always neatly braided into two plaits that were folded up and secured behind her ears with black ribbons. Sometimes, Tara saw black lice crawling up the side of Zainaba’s neck or on the top of her white shirt collar. Nobody pointed this out to Zainaba, so although Tara was repulsed by the lice the first few days, she changed her opinion quickly and wanted to cultivate some in her hair.
Every morning, after Zainaba’s advice, Tara insisted that her hair be drenched in oil before she set out to school. This pleased Grandmother Indira, who believed that coconut was essential to their lives—in their food, for prayers and as nourishment for hair.
Grandmother Indira was kind, but she stayed in the kitchen and cooked four meals, brewed tea and boiled milk, or she gave all of herself to her barn chores, retiring only after dinner with a long sigh, and the sigh was the only luxury she allowed herself.
Grandfather Madhava was a postmaster in his post office, and a reader of news at home. He left home precisely at eight thirty each morning and returned an hour before daylight faded. But before he left home and after he returned, Tara rarely stepped out to the verandah, where grandfather spent much time on an easy chair, feverishly rustling newspapers and gleaning the same news on All India Radio, as if some glitch in censorship during the emergency would allow real news to trickle into his day. Grandfather did not see little Tara, and when he did, his gruff manner sent her scurrying inside.
Uncle Anand held a clerical position at the Department of Central Excise in Attavar. He was the opposite of his father, Madhava. He allowed Tara to trail him like Mary’s little lamb. Often, when the rain gave respite in the evening, he took her to the Beary store past the T-junction and bought her peanut chikkis or coconut-jaggery candy.
Some evenings, when the mood struck him, Uncle Anand ambled to the verandah of an old vacant house down Morgan Hill, Tara in tow, an enormous, prickly, brown-green jackfruit wrapped in sheets of newspaper in one hand, and a sickle in the other. Tara sat beside him on the steps leading to the house and watched in fascination as he spread newspaper sheets on the dusty red verandah and placed the fruit at the center. He expertly sliced the fruit in half, wiped the oozing white gum away with several sheets of newspaper, cut the halves lengthwise again, and carefully removed the fleshy yellow bulbs. He piled Tara’s side of the newspaper high with the sweet, pungent bulbs, and showed her how to pull the seed out before plopping one into her mouth. Tara did not remember eating jackfruit before. Once she got used to its rich odor, she enjoyed its full, sweet taste.
When Amma got to know about the jackfruit events, she forbade Uncle Anand from giving Tara any. Not from a piece of paper, not sitting in a dirty verandah, she said. That was asking for a stomach upset. But Uncle Anand cast aside Amma’s concerns with a laugh. Tara believed him when he said Amma was being overly fussy, that jackfruit was the healthiest fruit on earth. Besides, somehow, jackfruit tasted better after Amma forbade her from eating it. So she indulged in the only sweet moments of her day, and listened to Uncle Anand narrate stories of Tulu Nadu, their land encompassing the southwestern coast of India.
Each time, he drew out a different fable from memory. The first time, it was the story of Koti and Chennaya, the legendary twin heroes from a Tulu epic who were raised by King Perumala Ballala of Padumale and fought valiantly against caste discrimination.
By the time Koti fell to a treacherous arrow from Perumala Ballala, whose very hands had fed him as a child, and Chennaya, unable to bear the grief over the loss of his twin brother, had killed himself, Tara had wet, brimming eyes.
The next time, it was the story of Abbakka, the warrior queen of Ullal who put up a spirited resistance against the Portuguese army. Then it was the story of Punyakoti, the noble cow, for whom keeping promises mattered more than life itself.
Uncle Anand’s stories made Tara forget the day spent among fifty-three other girls she did not talk to, the fat black widow spiders in the bathroom, the lizards that watched without blinking from the ceiling beams. They made her forget the day she had spent in a quiet square shoe room with a doll whose golden hair and violet eyes had made happiness seem so real, yet so fleeting.
“It was only a doll. Plastic shell and empty inside,” Uncle Anand told her, every now and then. “Did you put your ear to her plastic chest? If you had, you would have known. Dolls have no heart; they cannot love you back. Only living things can.”
In August, when Tara’s little brother arrived, she made sure he had a heart. She put her ear to the baby’s chest and concentrated until she felt the faint human thump-thump. He looked like a fragile doll, swaddled in soft, white voile, asleep in th
e hospital crib next to Amma’s green metal bed. Round, red face. Eyes tightly closed. Tara looked at him in wonderment. She couldn’t imagine this little creature had been in her mother’s stomach so many months, and she wasn’t fully aware of his existence, at least not as a human of flesh and blood—with a heart that could love back.
“Amma, did he really come out of your stomach?” she asked.
Amma laughed. “Of course, Tara, I carried him in my belly for nine months, just like I carried you.”
Tara couldn’t imagine living in a dark belly for nine long months, curled up, constricted, unable to move around, alone. She certainly wouldn’t want to go back in there. She looked at the baby again. She was glad he was out in the world, out of darkness, out of solitude.
Tara stroked the baby’s soft cheek. He was magical. She felt a surge of love. Uncle Anand didn’t tell her this, but this love was a new feeling, quite different from what she had felt for Pinky. This was a love with no sense of ownership, no neediness. “You are my brother,” she declared to him proudly.
The resentment had come later—little bouts of dark emotion that Tara had tried all her life to shake off, get over, bury.
Last night Vijay had called again, his second call since her arrival in Atlanta. Sanjay had picked up. Tara’s ears had perked up when he said, “Hey, Vijay. What’s up, man?” She had taken the receiver from Sanjay eagerly.
“How are you? Do you like Atlanta? Is he treating you well?”
She had held on to Vijay’s familiar voice, savoring the known in an unfamiliar world. “I am fine,” she had said in a low voice, hoping Sanjay hadn’t heard Vijay’s last question.
Vijay said he would pay her a visit at the first opportunity.
“Come soon,” she had implored.
California was at the other end of the US, he had reminded her. They even had a three-hour time difference between them. “I’ll have to wait for the next long weekend.”
“I’ll be waiting for the next long weekend.”
“I’ll call often,” he had promised.
Chapter 5
Tara double-checked to make sure the front door was locked. She made her way down the flight of steps, walked on the sidewalk past the soft cream siding and red brick apartment buildings with sloping black shingled roofs. The sidewalk took her, in wavelike fashion, to the tall, wrought iron, main gates. She took the little pedestrian gate beside it, and found herself outside, on a side street of Atlanta.
She stood by the gate, contemplating which way to turn. One side led to the main road just a short distance away, where the traffic was heavy. The other side seemed to stretch on as far as the eye could see.
West Hill Baptist Church loomed right opposite the road, its red bricks radiating warmth, but it was still a very foreign-looking structure. She turned to the right and walked down the road, passing the little red-brick-fronted homes she had seen from her balcony. They were just as interesting up close: the green lawns, the flower bushes, the closed doors and glass windows. She slowed down when she passed the picture book white house with the neat little garden. A squirrel scampered across the grass and disappeared into a bush; a dog barked from the backyard, shrill and excited, but no human was in sight. Not here, nor outside any other home, or on the sidewalk.
So, this is America, she thought. Not a soul in sight. Where are all the people?
The only people she passed by were those she did not see, or barely caught a glimpse of, because they were in the cars that whizzed past on the two-lane street.
She had walked about ten minutes when she came to a major intersection. Crossing the busy road seemed too scary a task. She turned around and started to walk back, sweat beads glistening on her forehead. She had not imagined America as being hot in summer. She would have to start earlier tomorrow.
The walk back home involved an uphill segment. Tara panted a little from the heat and wiped her brow on her sleeve. Sensing the hum of a motor close to her, instinctively, she looked over her shoulder. A car had slowed down, a yellow taxi with a white hood. The driver had a broad grin on his face, his teeth exposed, stark white against his chocolate skin.
He held a card in his hand, which he had stretched out in Tara’s direction through the open window.
“Miss, if you ever need me,” he said in a foreign accent.
She looked away and increased her pace. Did she hear him jeer? Her heart raced. Was he following her? She looked back after a while. He was gone.
Tara half ran until she was back in the safety of the apartment. The pounding in her chest took a while to subside. She was so thirsty, she thought she would choke. The clock on the microwave said ten thirty in the morning. Countries north of the hemisphere could get hot too, she had learned. She gulped a tall glass of chilled water, then another, and finally it dawned upon her. The taxi driver was only trying to score a customer, and she had been a stupid scaredy-cat.
“Are you from the bush country? From some tiny, godforsaken hamlet?” she mimicked Sanjay, and then in her regular voice said, “Yes, yes, I am from the same godforsaken hamlet that you come from, you fake American.”
She slipped behind the computer in the study. “Open sesame,” she murmured as she typed in “lizsan” on the keyboard. Lizsan, what did it even mean? she wondered. Why not something that made sense, like lizard, or lizclaiborne? The desktop appeared. She surfed the Internet for the next two hours. She checked out the Indian news websites, played some Hindi songs on a live streaming website, checked her Hotmail twice. She had no new emails. She looked to see if any of her contacts were on MSN messenger. Only Sharat, her colleague at the Morning Herald appeared online, and she wasn’t going to chat with him. She allowed her mind to wander. She wondered how prison inmates in isolation must feel, the walls eating into their mind each day. She typed in “prisoners in isolation” on Yahoo. The search took her to an article on solitary confinement and the effects of this cruel, inhuman punishment on the human mind. She shuddered.
She was beginning to feel a little hungry, but she decided that a shower was in order first. Water always had a calming effect on her. Besides, the walk had been sweat inducing; she felt dirty and smelly. She stood under the shower for the longest time possible, allowing the warm water to percolate into her body and permeate her being. She turned her face up and allowed the water stream to douse her face. She hummed softly, a Hindi song from the biggest Bollywood hit of the year so far:
Kaho na pyar hai
Kaho na pyar hai
Haan tumse pyar hai
Ke tumse pyar hai
Say you love me,
Say you love me,
Yes, I love you
Yes, I love you
She mutilated the song, going from verse to chorus to verse, over and over again, her mind a tangle of thoughts. Did she love her husband at all? She would, if only he’d make it easier. Love wasn’t a shower head; it didn’t just automatically pour out of your heart because your parents decided you would be together for life. Why did Sanjay make himself so unlovable? To what end?
She turned off the water stream and stepped out of the shower. Low, muffled voices reached her ears. She listened keenly, her stomach in knots, ear against the door. She heard faint drawls, but then she heard music. It was the TV. She did not remember turning on the TV at all. Was Sanjay back? She quickly dried herself and dressed in her sweaty clothes; she regretted not taking fresh ones into the bathroom. She opened the bathroom door an inch and peeped out cautiously.
“Sanjay? Are you back?” she called out.
“Yup, it’s me.” That was most certainly Sanjay’s deep voice.
She tiptoed into her closet and changed into fresh clothes—floral culottes and a gray top.
“So, you are a bathroom singer,” he said, when she came out to the living room, her damp hair brushed into place. She blushed.
“I had no idea you’d be back so early.”
“I thought we could talk.”
“Talk? About what?�
�� Talk? Sanjay never talked. Did he mean a chitchat kind of talk or a serious discussion? Why was his face so grave?
“Never mind. It can wait.”
It can wait? So it wasn’t chitchat? She knotted the end of her top with nervous fingers. She sat on the loveseat, because he had taken the three-seater. She could hold back no more.
“You don’t like me.” She had meant that to be a question, but it sounded like an indictment.
He looked taken aback but recovered quickly.
“I have nothing against you. I barely even know you.” At least his voice was passive, even gentle, she thought. “It’s just the whole arranged marriage thing. I’ve never really believed in it.”
“So why did you get married?”
“It was part impulse, part giving in to my parents’ wish.”
“Oh!” Tara looked down at her hands, her heart sinking.
“I am not a cruel person, but I don’t see how this can work. We are so different from each other.”
“But we are married now.” She hoped her angst had not reached her voice, that she had not sounded imploring.
“I know, and I am deeply sorry about that. I didn’t set out to ruin somebody’s life. I wish I had thought through it better.” He closed his eyes, rubbing his temples with the tips of his long fingers.
A weird thought crossed her mind before she lost it to her sinking heart. He was being the kindest she had known him to be, when he was saying the cruelest things.
But he wasn’t done yet. “I am sorry. But you are free to leave. It might be the best thing to do.”
She stared at him. “I am not leaving.” Her voice was throaty. “Please, I cannot go back.”
He sighed, looked away, and studied the carpet. The silence gnawed into her, so she chewed on her lower lip until she tasted blood.
“All right,” he said finally. “You will get your green card in less than two years. Perhaps you can hang in until then. A green card will open up possibilities for you, and you don’t even have to go back to India.”