Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  Dedication

  For Deborah, Mridula, and Isolda

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Leah Franqui

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  When her mother-in-law came to ruin her life, Rachel Meyer arrived at a conclusion that she would never, afterward, be swayed from: namely, that the whole thing was entirely her own fault.

  When the doorbell rang, Rachel thought, quite naturally, that it was the vegetable seller. He brought vegetables at five p.m. on the days Dhruv, her husband, called and asked for them. Rachel had tried to do it herself, but even though she had looked up how to pronounce each word in Hindi, they became garbled in her mouth and the man didn’t know what she was saying, and grew confused, and she ended up angry, her face hot and her voice an octave higher than it normally was, hanging up the phone in frustration. Dhruv had laughed so hard the time she had tried to say two lemons, do nimbu, but it had come out more like dough nipple, that he cried.

  She had walked to get beans and onions and lemons and potatoes that day, sweating out her anger, mostly at herself, in Mumbai’s sweltering humidity, which embraced her in a voluptuous oil-slicked hug, the air heavy with pollution and dust. The streets were uneven, paved but patchy in points, and although there was, technically, a sidewalk, every ten feet or so it was occupied by things like a pile of dry palm fronds, seven bags of gravel, a tea stall, an old toilet, a family of four, making it hard to walk. Rachel walked in the street, peeking over her shoulder constantly, thinking, How would it work, walking here? How did anyone walk here, where the streets were a never-ending obstacle course? But millions did, she knew.

  She arrived at the stand, and, pointing at what she wanted, she tried to say the names she had learned, but the vegetable seller was soon as confused as she was. She tried to apologize, but their conversation became a mutual avalanche of “Sorry, sir,” “Sorry, madam,” until she retreated home in shame. Later, she would learn that the vegetable seller mostly spoke Marathi, but by that point she was too embarrassed to try again.

  When they had moved to Mumbai just a few months before, Rachel and her husband had picked a place with an ocean view. Well, Dhruv had picked it, of course, and she pretended she had had some say in the matter because he had shown her listings, as if she knew anything about Mumbai, where they should try to live, what it would be like in its neighborhoods, its clogged traffic, and its sprawling streets. All she had noticed was that the kitchens had no ovens.

  Dhruv wanted a view, and Dhruv usually got the things he wanted, or decided he no longer wanted them at all, a quality Rachel found fascinating. Rachel didn’t know how he turned desire on and off like that. He had never lived in Mumbai before, having grown up in Kolkata, but the movies he had watched as a child featured laughing heroines in sweeping saris running down the beach hand in hand with handsome heroes who had feathered mullets and noble hearts, and that fantasy lived somewhere in him still. Dhruv had told her, in his marriage proposal two months earlier, that she would love it, the sweep of the sea in front of them, although for Rachel it seemed odd to live by an ocean she wasn’t allowed, for both modesty and health reasons, to swim in. She didn’t say that, though.

  So Dhruv had gotten a room with a view, in an area called Reclamation, so called because it was built on reclaimed land. Before moving, Rachel had joked that it would kill her to live in a place with so little imagination. But actually, what ended up bothering her about the area, which was lovely and tree lined, was the smell. The fishermen, who lived nearby at the edge of the sea in shacks made of sheet metal and bright blue tarps, with walls made from repurposed signs and billboards, hung their catch to dry along the ocean, and around five p.m. the smell was intense, and the air became thick with the scent of drying ocean and withering flesh.

  It was inescapable. Closing all the windows against it was no help at all, and it only made their apartment, large by Mumbai standards but still compact, stuffier. Rachel liked to keep everything open to catch the breeze and could not understand why the few guests who had come by preferred the air conditioner, which made their home a freezing, fishy box.

  The scent, which had been so wretched to her at first, was almost familiar now that she had been there for a few weeks, and she welcomed it, because it reminded her of the time daily, letting her know that the vegetable man might be on his way. Sometimes Dhruv let her know when he had called to order something, but sometimes he didn’t, and since she was home all the time, it hardly mattered either way.

  The vegetable seller had a cart with wheels that he set up daily underneath a mango tree on the end of their block outside their colony. Rachel had protested that she was happy to go pick up vegetables from him, or from the larger market, the way she had that one time the phone call had enraged her so, despite her mortification, but Dhruv had told her this would be better, and besides, it was how things were done, he said in a tone of voice that he seemed to have unpacked in India with his suits. She teased him, calling it his “Indian uncle” voice, and he grimaced, picking at the gray hairs at his temples, and then chased her around their apartment like Ashok Kumar in Shaukeen, an old Bollywood movie he had shown her.

  So she didn’t go pick up vegetables. She did things the way Dhruv said they should be done, worried that if she did them wrong, the way they were not done, she would be doing something offensive or dangerous or stupid. Nothing bad had happened that one time, of course, other than her feeling like an idiot, but it was easier, she had found quickly, on the whole, to let Dhruv tell her how to live in India. And he certainly seemed to like it. So now the man came to deliver the produce Dhruv preferred, like fenugreek and curry leaves, bitter gourd and tiny eggplants for the curries she tried hard to make, which were never quite the way he wanted them, although he swallowed them gratefully. They tasted good to Rachel, but she never felt she could say that. She wasn’t the expert.

  On the weekends they tried cooking together, but Dhruv was hopeless in the kitchen, able to tell her that it wasn’t exactly right but not how to make it better, something that drove Rachel out of her mind with irritation, and they would bicker and fight and make up and order something instead.

  Dhruv had told her once that he liked her best when he had made her angry, when she was simmering with heat like a nice pot of tea. She didn’t know if that was a good thing to say to her or a bad thing. She did know that she didn’t like the idea that he was trying to rile her up, that he was observing her through a microscope of her emotions. Besides, she drank coffee.

  So now she waited daily for the vegetable seller, or for one of his delivery boys. As fragile as the little business was, it seemed he employed several people, as Rachel had seen at least three other men come to her door with bags of eggplant and cucumbers, garlic and mint. She waited for them and greeted them happily, but they seemed dazzled by her, and when she paid, tipping them of course, they always tried to give her change back or ducked th
eir heads when she told them in halting, mispronounced Hindi to have a nice day. She had no idea what she would do if they responded with something other than tikeh, “okay.”

  She wished she could communicate with the vegetable man and his employees directly. She wished they could understand her, or that she could understand them, or that they would mime a joke or something, anything, to make it seem a little more like two people in an equal exchange, not a servant bowing to a master. She hated the way waiters and cashiers and just, well, everyone who worked in service acted like a servant. When she’d asked a coffee shop worker once how his day was going, he had paled and bowed and run for his manager, unable to understand what she wanted. Dhruv sympathized with her when she complained about this, which had happened often since they had moved to Mumbai three months earlier, but she knew he didn’t really feel the same way, and the soothing noises he made were the ones you use with a cranky child when trying to get it to sleep.

  Rachel thought about the teenager with braces who had been her usual cashier in New York, at the tiny overpriced corner grocery shop where she had paid far too much money for milk and olive oil and zucchini for the eight years she had lived in the neighborhood after graduating college. The girl was a student and gossiped with her fellow cashier, waiting apathetically as Rachel counted exact change or decided which cheese to buy. When Rachel asked her opinion, the cashier had disdainfully told Rachel that she didn’t eat dairy because of her skin, that it was bad for Thai women, according to her mom. What she wouldn’t give for that girl’s disdain now.

  The problem with moving was that it made you alien, Rachel knew. Everyone was a stranger, and you were the invader, the outsider, the one desperate to achieve closeness with others. You were the only one in need. At Dhruv’s urging, Rachel had met up with one or two expat wives like her, women she had found online or through friends of friends. She had joined an expat Facebook group before she moved to the city, and that had led to a few others, and now she was a member of multiple groups, which threw events and had chatty members who had lots of opinions about subjects Rachel had little interest in. People asked about where to find a summer camp for their six-year-old, or if it was better to vacation in Goa or Kerala, and at which beach and which hotel, and plugged their new business ideas and wellness sessions with earnest abandon. Rachel didn’t think she would have much to say to the people discussing these things, but facing the reality of making friends as an adult in a new city, she tried to go to the meet-ups and participate online.

  She hated feeling so needy, so grasping, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be friends with the people she had encountered, not them specifically, that is. But she did want someone to talk to.

  She should have, she realized later, been more careful what she wished for.

  The ring of the bell came just as she had given up on the vegetable man and was looking in their crisper to see what she could throw together for dinner. Aren’t I a Susie Homemaker here in India, she thought ruefully as she opened the door. However, instead of a man in a cotton shirt and trousers holding bags of vegetables, she found her mother-in-law, Swati, holding a large suitcase with a determined yet petrified look on her face.

  “Swati!”

  Her mother-in-law winced at the sound of her own name. “You should call me Mum,” Swati said automatically. The fear had drained from her face, leaving only the determination. Correcting other people has that effect, Rachel thought through the shock of seeing Swati at her door.

  Rachel had been told before that she was expected to call Swati “Mum,” but she couldn’t do it. Even the respectful epithet Auntie would probably have gone over better than Swati’s own name, but Rachel couldn’t really manage that, either. There was something about it that implied a familiarity, a closeness, that Rachel, who had met her mother-in-law only once before, had yet to feel. She thought it was strange that you implied closeness, intimacy, to signify respect. Surely, they were opposites? But just like everything else in India, this was something different, something Rachel would have to get used to. She had started hating that phrase a day into her relocation and hadn’t stopped since. Every time she heard it, it felt like an indictment of her own inability to change. She was trying, she was, but who could change everything all at once? Who could move that quickly?

  When Rachel had asked him about his parents, Dhruv had told her that for the first five years of their marriage, Swati and Vinod had observed the tradition of never addressing each other by name, but only referring to each other as my wife and my husband, or even that one said in a respectful way, in Marwari. The way Dhruv had said it, it sounded like he found it romantic. Rachel had been horrified. What was romance without intimacy?

  So Rachel called her by name anyway, even though Swati looked as if Rachel had slapped her each time she said it. Rachel was trying to be adaptive, or at least subservient, to Indian culture. After all, she knew it would not bother to adapt to her, any more than a rock in a river becomes water. But this was a boundary she refused to cross. In fact, it gave Rachel a strange kind of thrill to disturb Swati this way. It was an assertion of her own feelings about names, the fact that she only liked to be called Rachel, nothing else, not even Rach. It was one thing she got to carry with her from home of herself, a thing she could control.

  But whatever Rachel called her, the woman was standing in her doorway, in Mumbai, half the country away from Kolkata, with no prior warning.

  “Is everything all right?” Rachel asked quietly as she ushered her in. She wondered if Swati would actually tell her if there was something wrong. She did not know her mother-in-law well, but the one thing she knew with certainty was that Swati was extremely conscious of other people and what they thought of her. According to Dhruv, she believed the worst of most and didn’t hesitate to comment on other people’s breaches in decorum, and therefore assumed they would be as quick to judge her own.

  Swati had forgotten to roll her suitcase into the apartment, Rachel realized as soon as she shut the door. She opened it again, to allow her mother-in-law to grab it, but Swati had already sat on the couch, her kurta and salwar billowing and crinkling in an expensive way.

  Later, Rachel wondered if that had been the moment when her life had truly changed, rather than the moment of Swati’s arrival. If she had made Swati get her own suitcase, would everything have been different? Might life have taken, for the both of them, an entirely different path?

  She would never know. She wheeled it in, surprised by its weight. It was almost as big as Swati herself. How long was she planning on staying? Why was she even here?

  When Rachel had first met Dhruv, somewhere in the whirlwind of the six months they had spent dating before they got married, they had compared cultures like children compare baseball cards. Now she remembered one conversation, with mounting panic, when Dhruv had described how Indian family members sometimes appeared unannounced, staying for days, or even months, with no communication about whether or not it was appropriate. It wasn’t just, as she had first assumed, the prerogative of those who couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel. Relatives, rich and poor alike, stayed with their family members, inconveniencing them, as Rachel saw it, as a custom. Dhruv had recounted stories of uncles who had stayed for weeks, displacing him from his bed and room, and the dance of discomfort around gentle inquiries as to the length of the visit, carefully calibrated so the guest wouldn’t feel offended, usually so delicate that they communicated nothing at all. These had been funny to her at the time, and she had laughed in the safety of a New York bar over a glass of wine, bathing in Dhruv’s warm gaze.

  They no longer amused her.

  Swati still hadn’t said a word. Rachel sat beside her warily, and the older woman, her plum lipstick fading at the center of her lips, vivid in the outlines, looked at her helplessly.

  “Would you like some water?” Rachel asked politely. Swati nodded yes, so Rachel got her a glass of lukewarm water, which every Indian Rachel had met seemed to prefe
r, and watched as the woman drank it without putting her mouth on the rim of the glass, letting the water flow down her throat without spilling a drop. Everyone here in Mumbai did that, never touching a drinking vessel with their lips. Dhruv had said it was to avoid contaminating it with one’s mouth, a holdover from the purity and pollution laws that had governed the country for so long through the caste system. Rachel, who had not known her mouth was a contaminant, could not manage the art of drinking without putting her mouth on the rim of the glass or bottle; it made her choke and splutter and spill. She worried, though, when she drank water in India, that she was disgusting in the eyes of those who met her. She had started covering her glass with her hand when she drank, hiding the way her mouth hit the vessel.

  She did that now, looking at Swati above her palm, but the woman didn’t seem disgusted. They sat in silence for a long moment, each woman stiff with tension, the suitcase an anvil that had landed in the room between them. Rachel longed for Swati to speak, for the vegetable man to come, for anything to happen. She was sure that Swati had not just dropped by, had not come all the way from Kolkata just to say hello. What she was less sure of was if this was a planned visit, something Dhruv had known about but had forgotten, or worse, had chosen not to tell her about. Rachel and Dhruv hadn’t been together for very long, but surely he would know that above all things, she hated being surprised.

  Rachel felt a sense of rising panic as she considered that she was in no way prepared for an extended visit from her mother-in-law. They weren’t even prepared for an overnight guest. They had only one extra pillow, they would need sheets, she would need activities, and they would need alcohol, not for Swati, who did not drink, but for herself, as a response to said extended visit. Rachel sent a covert look in the direction of her kitchen. A half bottle of rum and a bit of whiskey remained, and if she wasn’t mistaken there was some white wine, local, bad, in the fridge. That was something. But as part of her brain dashed to the logistics of hosting, already imagining a thousand scenarios and ideas, another part of it couldn’t move away from the larger point: what on earth was happening?