Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  “Brindha, do you want some help?"my mother said.

  Brindha looked at us, sadly. “I want to wear my uniform but some aunties out there said I have to change. And I’m too young to wear a sari. I don’t know what to do.”

  My mother said, “I’m sure Ammamma won’t mind if you want to wear your uniform. That’s the only person you have to think about today, really.”

  Brindha’s face fell. “I can’t think about Ammamma. It’s too sad.”

  “I know it’s hard for you,” my mother took Brindha into her arms. “Both of you should do whatever you feel up for. If you want to be in the procession and see the pyre, come, but if you don’t want to, don’t.” I finished clipping my hair in the mirror. We could hear my father calling for my mother to come out, so she kissed each of our cheeks, and left.

  I turned to follow her, but Brindha tugged on my arm. “Maya … do you want a chocolate?”

  She produced from her schoolbag the shiny package of Snickers bars that my father had given her at the hospital.

  “They’re going to begin the hymns,” I said. “Don’t you want to come?”

  Brindha punctured the plastic with her thumbnail and started unraveling the packaging. She wiped away tears from her eyes. “Can’t we just wait a little while?”

  I sat with her on the bed and we shared a chocolate bar. I could feel the caramel slithering through my teeth, settling into gaps and crevices. We could hear the chanting get louder as more people joined the priest.

  “Let’s go, Brindha,” I said. “Or you can stay in here and I’m going to go.” 1 wanted to be part of things. It didn’t seem right to hide out in a back room like I was a kid and be excused for it. I didn’t want to be excused, I wanted people to see me sitting with my mother, my uncle, and know that I knew my place.

  Brindha didn’t want to go but she didn’t want to stay in her bedroom by herself. She held my hand but dragged her feet to try to slow my pace. We crossed through the dining room, and I could see and hear all the people sitting cross-legged around Ammamma and the priest. We would have to walk in front of them all to enter. On the dining table, there was a small pile of flowers left on a banana leaf, all that remained of the baskets I’d collected from the garden. I gave some flowers to Brindha in her outstretched palms, and I gathered flowers in my own hands cupped tightly together. We walked in together, the chants coursing over us. I tried not to look at anyone, and to walk slowly and primly, like a bridesmaid.

  Brindha and 1 squeezed in between my mother and Reema auntie, near Ammamma’s head. There were flowers heaped on her, except for her face. I tried to let the chants enter me and make me think about God and how he would look out for Ammamma. But I couldn’t stop looking at Ammamma, who looked more now like she used to look, better than she’d looked in the hospital, like a snake who reemerges young from a crackly old skin. Her hair was shiny and perfectly in place, and she no longer looked uncomfortable, her shoulders relaxed, her hands resting at her side. I could see the scar from the long-ago monkey bite on her upturned wrist. A fat buzzing fly landed on Ammamma’s face and I waited for her (expected her) to swat it away. I could hear the fly buzzing under the chanting, buzzing in a tonal scale all its own and then quietly landing for an investigation of Ammamma’s chin, the corner of her mouth, then buzzing again. I looked at my mother, whose eyes were closed in prayer, at my father, who was looking at the ground. I rapped my knuckles against the ground in front of the mat we were sitting on, hoping to distract the fly. It was undistracted, too devoted to Ammamma to notice me. I felt angry, and disgusted, seeing it perched on her chin. I got on my knees and crawled the small distance into the middle of the circle of people, and I raised my hand and swept it across Ammamma’s face.

  The fly jumped up and buzzed away, and people looked up. I felt hot and embarrassed, realizing they had not seen the fly but had seen me reach out to touch Ammamma. I kept making grand flapping motions over her face so that gradually people would understand that there must have been an insect or something. But 1 couldn’t look at her face as I bent over her, because touching her had established something that looking hadn’t yet but might soon confirm: she was cold, smooth and rubbery and cold, and there was no life in her.

  1 crawled backward, receding into my place near Brindha. She took the hand that had touched Ammamma and held it up, inspecting it closely like there was some residue she thought might be there, something that might make touching me be like touching Ammamma herself.

  The priest moved on from chanting to call-and-response prayers. He called, in deep, assured tones, and we responded, some uncertain, some heartfelt, some in tears, some in meditation. I knew the words to some of the prayers, Ammamma had taught me long ago, so I spoke some of them, and others I just lip-synched. At certain points in the prayer, the priest showered Ammamma with more flower petals, and nodded for us to do the same. I stripped petals off the flower stems and tossed them, with a timid, underhand swing.

  Brindha threw all of her flowers, stems and all, and didn’t save any for the next interval. She used her now free hands to cover her eyes. After a few minutes of sitting like that, she tugged at me, and whispered, “Do you think we might have another chocolate bar now?”

  I shook my head no, not wanting to move. I hoped no one had heard her, sounding so frivolous and unfeeling even though she wasn’t. I knew she didn’t want to watch, but I did; I was repelled but also transfixed, and it mattered to me to be strong like everybody else.

  There was a lot of whispering and rustling among my mother and father and Sanjay uncle and the priest. A piece of gold—we needed a piece of gold for Ammamma. Reema auntie and Mother had taken all their bangles and rings off, all they were wearing were their wedding necklaces that they never removed. Brindha was wearing no jewelry at all. I took off my necklace, and gave it to Mother. She looked at me gratefully, recognizing it to be Steve’s necklace. She yanked hard and the clasp came off in her hand and she gave me the remnants of the necklace back. She moved in toward Ammamma and the priest took the gold clasp, blessed it, and gave it back to Mother with directions. She said a low, halting prayer, and then put the gold in Ammamma’s mouth.

  Mother started to cry as we all stood up and men scurried around us to join Sanjay uncle and my father in carrying Ammamma on the bier. For a second, I imagined Ammamma still on the gurney at the hospital, just getting more tests. Some flowers tumbled off the bier and clung to our saris. We fell into a procession around the men.

  Ammamma was laid on top of the pyre, her feet facing south, and the priest recited more hymns. Brindha asked Madhu’s mother what these hymns were that she had never heard before. Madhu’s mother said they were portions of the Veda only recited for the dead. We were asking Yama, Lord of the Underworld, to prepare a good place for Ammamma among the ancestors. We were asking Agni, God of Fire, to carry the departed soul safely to the next realm. We were asking Mother Earth to be kind in accepting the body.

  We stood there around the pyre, dressed in white and bathed and cleansed and praying and still guilty for the various ways in which we feared we had failed Ammamma. We wore guilt invisibly, no one else saw or knew. Was that how it was for everybody, did it come in all sizes? There was no discovery process for personal crimes the way there was for political ones: while you were never proven guilty, you never felt innocent again.

  Sanjay uncle walked around the pyre pouring coconut oil. The priest poured water into a big earthen pot and Sanjay uncle picked it up and made another full circle around the pyre. The pot had holes in it so the water dripped onto the ground, making a line in the red dust. Then Sanjay uncle stood facing away from Ammamma and threw the pot backwards, and it fell nearby and cracked open. He set the pyre alight. Sandalwood and incense and curls of blue woodsmoke ascended upwards. The flames blazed higher around Ammamma. Some more flowers fell off the bier and landed on the ground near us, crumpled roses and lilies, their faces blackened by flame. The flames lapped at Ammamma’s sari, and the whi
te cloth shriveled and darkened, cauterized.

  “How much longer do we stay out here?” I asked Madhu’s mother.

  “It usually takes about an hour for the skull to crack,” she said. “When we hear it, then we can say the final prayers for today and bathe. The fire will burn itself out, after about a day, we don’t have to watch the whole time.”

  I couldn’t stay. Ammamma’s sari was getting blacker and blacker.

  I whispered in Brindha’s ear. “Do you still want some chocolate?”

  Brindha nodded yes immediately, her whole face thanking me, relieved. She grabbed my hand and this time I dragged my feet, so it made it clear to everyone that she was the one initiating this flight, I was leaving only to help her, accompany her. We stepped on plants and vines crossing through the garden, but we didn’t care, choosing the shortest diagonal. And then there was the quiet of the house, and the meticulous unraveling of the candy wrapper and the stickiness on our hands and teeth and lips. We ate candy bar after candy bar until the sun went down and everyone came back inside.

  THERE WAS, OF course, a lot of talk at the funeral rites and afterward, a lot of whispering and gossiping about Brindha’s and my entanglement in Tiger activities. But no one blamed us in the least. The aunties would say to each other, “The Pillais had a Tiger sneak into their house and try to convert their poor young girls! Can you imagine?” They would shudder, and shake their heads, and bolt the doors at night between their rooms and the rooms where their servants slept. And count the silver because terrorists probably wanted the silver as well as the fealty of young girls.

  Brindha and I coaxed our servants to bring us any news of Rupa, in case they knew people who knew her brothers or her parents. But they could not, or would not, tell us anything. Sanjay uncle found us in the kitchen trying to bribe Sunil with sweets for information. He noticed our anxiousness, and thinking that I was angry with him, said, “There wasn’t anything more we could have done.” I didn’t believe that. I couldn’t argue with him now, not when I had just seen him so full of love and grief at his mother’s funeral. I didn’t respond. Sanjay uncle cleared his throat in the silence.

  “I finished reading your Huck Finn,” he said. “Do you know, in the introduction in your book, it says that the story of Huck and Jim is based on a boy the author knew who befriended an escaped slave hiding on an island in the Mississippi. But in real life, the black man died on the island. It is just like an American to try to have a friendship like that and think it can make a difference.” He did not wait for me to speak, but turned and exited the kitchen.

  Usually when Sanjay uncle said something was American, it was something I didn’t want to be. This time I wasn’t sure. Even if trying to have that kind of friendship—the kind that made you see the other person’s humanity as equal and sacred—wasn’t very realistic, it surely was better than not trying.

  Our names, Brindha’s and mine, were entirely vindicated when, three days after my grandmother’s death, there was fresh news that the police ended their manhunt in a village hundreds of miles away from us. Moments before the paramilitary commandos stormed the Tiger hideout, Subha and Sivarasan, as well as five other allies, had chewed their cyanide capsules. Sivarasan had also shot himself in the head for good measure. The government was frustrated, they had wanted live quarry to prosecute and execute themselves, but they pretended it was a victory. Police allowed reporters into the house to see the heap of bodies, and finally there were fresh photo stills for the television news and the morning papers. Brindha and I read every edition of the newspapers, simultaneously searching for Rupa’s name and hoping not to find it. The most gossip surrounded the fact that Subha was found with a newlywed’s silver rings on her toes. It had mattered even to the nation’s biggest outlaws to legitimize their union before death’s reckoning.

  People moved on to these new tidbits and stopped whispering about Brindha and me and the Tigers. But 1 was acquitted of some crimes more easily than others. Everyone had heard about the birth control pills in my suitcase. Madhu spoke up and said they were hers, and when she saw how distressed everyone was by her confession, she was furious. She said this was the last time she was coming to India anyway and she didn’t really care what they all thought of her. As in Sita’s story, the truth didn’t make anything better for me. Reema auntie reported that Suraj’s parents had written to rescind both their request for my horoscope and their related marriage proposal.

  “We can hardly blame them,” Reema auntie said to my mother, bringing the newly delivered letter to the lunch table. Sanjay uncle and my father had already excused themselves from the table and retired for afternoon rest.

  “They can hardly blame Maya—those were Madhu’s pills,” my mother said archly. “They didn’t bother to find out the details.”

  Reema auntie looked up from reading their letter, surprised. “Kamala, you’ve been away too long. Don’t you see that Maya should know better than to even give the appearance of impropriety? Haven’t you taught her how important these things are?”

  My mother looked over at me. I was looking down at my plate, pushing the potatoes and the coconut chutney around. They were talking as if I wasn’t even there, so I was concentrating on pretending I wasn’t.

  My mother sighed. “Reema, I spent years feeling like India had taken a daughter from me, and that was probably not fair. But I don’t want India to take my only living daughter from me now. If I try to make Maya live in America the way we would have lived here, I’ll lose her. I can’t bear that, after everything that’s happened.”

  It mattered to hear my mother say those things. She wanted to be a mother, my mother, if she hadn’t always, then at least from now on. It didn’t mean we were going to be close or happy or understanding all the time, but it meant we had new aspirations.

  We were leaving for New York at the end of the week. I’d gotten a letter from Jennifer telling me what she was wearing to the first day of class. New York—it was the other side of the planet—seemed so far away. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to leave, to feel so confused about what I was going back to, to remember startlingly that we called that place home. That place was home even though here was where I had gained and lost a grandmother, gained and lost a friendship, a sister, a marriage proposal. Here I had gained (however tenuously) a mother, a conscience, and the awareness that compassion often mattered as much or more than justice.

  Reema auntie agreed to let Brindha stay until we left, but I couldn’t just run around with her in the hills. First there was finishing my summer reading and reports, and there was packing to do. There wasn’t much to put in my suitcases. The gifts that had weighed my luggage down had been given away, usually replaced by a collection of pickles and preserves and banana chips and dried chili and tamarind candy that had not been cooked this time, out of respect for our mourning. As I was packing my few things, Sunil crept into my room. He brought his hands out from behind his back, holding the notebooks Ammamma had written in for me during my convalescence. When the intelligence agents had come and turned the house upside down, Sunil had squirreled the notebooks away. He gave them to me now, and I flipped through them. In the pages after Ammamma had stopped writing down my memories, she had started writing down her own. Her own stories about my first steps, my first words, which neighbors I liked the most. And she had written out my birth chart, and asked an astrologer to read my stars, and pasted my horoscope into the notebook.

  Not just in these notebooks, but all summer, Ammamma had given me maps of my past and future to navigate by. Sanjay uncle had said there weren’t maps for where we lived, but that wasn’t true. There weren’t maps of our roads and our homes, but there were maps for the inside, maps of the heart, and they could only be drawn by those who loved you. Maps of the physical world were changed all the time because history and memory ultimately trumped geography. With what Ammamma had given me, I had a suspicion that I, too, could surpass geography. I could live anywhere, be grafted and take roo
t anywhere, and anywhere could become home.