Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  “But don’t you want to speak to your mother first? Just to understand what’s happening? She might be able to explain it to you in a better way than she could to me. Maybe if you let her sleep on it she can tell you what’s happening in the morning. Maybe that would be better?” Rachel said, tentative. Her mother-in-law’s English was better than Vinod’s, but there might be things that she wouldn’t say to Rachel, things that she might only want to say to her son. Or ways in which emotion was better expressed in a language she used daily, rather than one she trotted out for Rachel. Besides, with the rage pumping through him, anything Dhruv said to his father right now would be something he could regret later, and Rachel didn’t want that for him.

  Dhruv agreed, reluctant and confused.

  “She said she’s come to stay with us, so I can get some supplies and stuff. But I’m just not sure . . .”

  “What?” Dhruv said, distracted, tossing back a drink.

  “Well. How much I should get. Of the, um, supplies. Because it sounds like she plans to stay with us forever. But that—”

  “Oh, no, that’s not right,” Dhruv said, and relief blossomed through Rachel’s chest. “We will work it out tomorrow, as you said. I’m sure she will be back in Kolkata soon. She won’t stay with us all that long, I promise.”

  The relief withered away. Dhruv spoke like those were the only options, but Rachel had seen the determination in Swati’s eyes. She wasn’t going back to Vinod.

  “But what if she doesn’t? Go back to your dad, I mean.”

  “Let’s not even think about that,” Dhruv said firmly.

  “Dhruv. Okay. Look, think about this. If—and this would of course be horrible—but if someone passed away. My—my dad, say. My mom, she wouldn’t come stay with us. That wouldn’t be something that happened.”

  Dhruv looked at her oddly. “She wouldn’t want to,” Dhruv said.

  “Right.” How was it that they were saying the same thing but didn’t seem to understand each other at all? “It’s just . . . Of course she can stay, of course, as a guest, but, she can’t stay forever. She can’t, Dhruv, your mother can’t live with us. Right?”

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.” Hope? Surely it wasn’t a matter of hope, was it? “You know things are different here.”

  “But, I’m still me,” Rachel said. “I mean, do you want her to live with us?”

  Dhruv looked uncomfortable. “I mean, we wouldn’t have a choice. But it won’t come to that, Rachel, I promise. She’ll just go home, she’ll realize this is so insane and go home. Women don’t do things like this, not women like her.”

  “Apparently they do!”

  Dhruv winced, and Rachel felt horrible. This was so much for him. Thinking about his parents as people seemed like an entirely new concept for Dhruv.

  “Look, we aren’t going to figure anything out tonight, right? I mean, not without Swati. Or a lot more rum. So let’s just go to bed, and you can talk to her and understand it all in the morning,” Rachel found herself saying, when all she really wanted to do was demand that Dhruv promise her that they would find Swati a lovely apartment for herself if—when—she showed him that she was serious, she wasn’t going back to Vinod. Because as much as Rachel wanted to think that Dhruv was right, that this was some sort of episode, and Swati would soon be back where she belonged, she had a sinking feeling that Swati wasn’t going anywhere.

  On the spare bed in their second bedroom, Dhruv tossed and turned beside her, finally subsiding into an uneasy sleep at three a.m., while Rachel lay awake, watching him. Why hadn’t he just said Of course she won’t live with us? Why couldn’t he just have said it, so she knew they were in the same place, on the same page, attuned to each other? Instead, she lay in the dark, thinking about the phrase we wouldn’t have a choice and not understanding it at all. Of course they had a choice. Swati was a person, an adult. It wasn’t like she needed them to survive. Rachel pictured her mother-in-law as an errant toddler, playing with matches, sticking her finger in electrical sockets, licking lightbulbs. Ridiculous. If she was grown-up enough to leave her marriage, surely she could manage the task of living alone.

  Rachel turned and watched Dhruv’s troubled face scrunch up in the moonlight, wishing she could soothe the strain on his forehead. He slept like a sick child, batting at the air. She wished she knew what to say, how to help. She wondered if she would have known if she were Indian. Would a Marwari woman know just what to say to her husband in this situation? To her mother-in-law? To herself? Would she have understood all this better than Rachel could have? Perhaps this was some kind of ritual test, and an Indian girl would have laughed at Swati and shooed her back to Vinod, and they all would have had a nice moment about it, and she would have proven herself as the right kind of person, the right kind of wife. Maybe this was all a game and Rachel didn’t know the rules.

  But shouldn’t Dhruv have told them to me? She wanted to dismiss the thought as disloyal, so she shut her eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t, not for hours. Outside, in the colony, dogs without homes howled, and cats hunted and screamed for mates. Why didn’t people take care of these animals? The other day, while buying bananas in the market—for she found fruit easier to buy for some reason, maybe because they didn’t need it so much and she didn’t mind if she couldn’t get the right thing—she had seen a woman scream and throw a brick at a cat that was rubbing itself on Rachel’s legs. It missed them both, but what kind of person did that? She had looked at Rachel as though she was doing her a favor.

  When Rachel did finally fall asleep, she dreamed of Swati’s chasing her with a pair of sandals, screaming at her to wear them, while Dhruv did nothing and a thousand women threw bricks at a thousand cats but hit Rachel’s legs instead. She’ll tire herself out, he kept saying about Swati, or any of the thousand women, Rachel didn’t know. But either way, he was wrong.

  And when she woke up in the morning, she felt exactly the same way. He was wrong. Rachel knew it.

  Five

  When Swati woke up in the morning, she had just had the best sleep of her entire life. But when she remembered the task in front of her, to see her son, to face him, the memory of that wonderful rest was replaced with dread.

  Would he be angry? Would he hate her? What if he simply bought her a plane ticket and ordered her to return home immediately? She tried to prepare herself for the possibility, tried to practice her firmest refusal, but her mind, contemplating that scenario, drew a complete blank. Dhruv was her child, yes, but he was a man, an adult. She couldn’t imagine saying a direct no to her son if he told her to go back. But she wasn’t going to go back to Kolkata, either.

  In her entire life, she didn’t think she’d ever seen her own mother directly address her father for anything, ever. For anything she needed from him, for any question she had, she would tell it to the air, to the table, to Swati herself. “Swati, dinner is ready, and I’ve made the dal your father likes.” “Swati, the driver was insolent, and he should be fired by your father.” “Swati, I’m going shopping, and I will need money for that.” Then her father would hand over the money, or fire the driver, or eat the dal.

  When she had married Vinod and moved into his house, it had come as a shock to see her mother-in-law look her father-in-law in the eye and ask him to pass her the salt. For months she struggled to ask Vinod direct questions, having been taught for so long that this was rude and disrespectful of her husband. She had spoken to her in-laws through her dupatta, stretching it along the side of her face with her right hand like a slanted roof. She had felt that meeting anyone’s gaze was shocking, and her face flushed every time she did it.

  Vinod had been impatient with her, and his impatience had been a kind of kindness. He had found her reluctance irritating, and told her so, and she had been so worried about irritating him that she had tried her hardest, no matter how uncomfortable she was. But that was Vinod, concerned with his own comfort. He was not cruel, by any means, but neither was he caring
. He wanted no ill to come to her, she knew; he wanted to give her the best of things, but he wanted to determine what those were. When she had gotten sick once as a young wife, just a few months out of her parents’ house and missing its familiar comfort daily, she had asked him to get a medicine from a homeopathic doctor she had grown up close to. It was something she had taken every time she had been sick in her life before her wedding, and it was something that always made her feel better. Vinod had brought her something else instead, claiming it was more efficient for illness, and besides, going to her doctor would have been far out of his way. He had been right, the medicine worked much faster, but for Swati there was no comfort in a man who hadn’t seen that what she really wanted was a taste of home, a piece of her past, that could live with her in the present. He was like that. Someone who couldn’t see anything beyond the literal. She had never explained to him how disappointing it had been to receive that, even though it healed her, and to know he did not know how to care for her because he could not hear what she was really asking for.

  Gradually she had stopped talking to her in-laws through a veil, but she had felt a pinch of fear, every time. How ashamed her mother would have been of her.

  It was only recently, in the past few years, that that fear had taken on a new quality, and she knew it for what it was. It was anger. Anger that she had thought Vinod so deserving of respect when he had not tried to care for her, to give her what she asked for. Anger that her mother never asked for anything directly and that she had taught her daughter the same habits that had kept her a beggar in her own home, her hand out, never looking her own husband in the eye.

  Now he was the one with his hand out. On her phone she had fifteen missed calls from her husband, and even some attempts at texting. He had never really learned how to do it, so the messages were indecipherable, but she knew what he was trying to say: Come back home right now. Well, she didn’t have to listen to him. She was home. As long as her son let her stay.

  No matter how angry she was, though, she didn’t know how she would say no if Dhruv tried to send her back. Really, she wouldn’t have even questioned if he would or not if he hadn’t married a foreigner, who might have turned his heart from the values with which he had been raised to something bad. Impious. Undutiful.

  She wondered if perhaps a flood of tears, or a faint, could circumvent the issue. Everyone hated to see their mother cry, didn’t they? In preparation, she thought about the sad things that usually made her cry—doomed love stories from movies, a sad scene from one of her favorite serialized shows from Pakistan, her favorite ghazal sung sadly over the radio—as she emerged for breakfast.

  Her son was sitting on the couch, looking dreadful.

  “You didn’t sleep well?” she said in Hindi.

  He looked up at her, startled. “Mum!”

  She hugged him. “I have a medicine for that. All one hundred percent homeopathic. You take it, you’ll sleep better. It’s from Dr. Mehta.” Her doctor from all those years ago.

  “He’s still practicing? I thought he must have retired by now.”

  “His son has taken the business. And his grandson.”

  “Of course he has,” Dhruv said under his breath.

  “That’s what good boys do,” Swati said reprovingly.

  Dhruv looked at her. “Well, I bet you’re happy I didn’t do that now,” he pointed out, shocking her. Perhaps his wife had taught him to be so direct, so rude. She looked away.

  “Mum . . .” Dhruv said, his eyes pleading. Oh dear, he was going to want to talk about it, wasn’t he? Should she start crying now? “Are you all right?”

  “I am fine,” she said. “Would you like tea?”

  “Mum. Please. Don’t you think we should talk?”

  “It would be better to talk with tea.” She walked to the kitchen, which was curiously open to the living room. Who wanted to see their cook while she was cooking? Perhaps she could get a screen of some kind.

  She opened the drawers, noting what would need to be moved to improve the kitchen’s organization, and found a pot for tea, busying herself making it rich and strong, with spices. They had a kind she wasn’t familiar with, in a pretty box covered in flowers and elephants. She made a note in her mind to tell Rachel they needed to buy some good old-fashioned Red Label.

  “I thought you were happy,” Dhruv said, looking confused.

  “I am happy to be here,” Swati said.

  “I meant with Papa,” Dhruv said, stating the obvious. Swati sighed. It must be the influence of his American wife, it really must. She hadn’t raised her son to want to talk about things all the time, or question his elders.

  “Your father was a fine husband. He took good care of me. But I will be staying here now. It’s better that I stay here. I will help you. Rachel doesn’t know how things are in India. I will teach her.”

  “Did you have a fight? Did something happen, did he—”

  “I made a decision. I did not want to stay with your father any longer. So I left. It is like that, only.” She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. “It was difficult.”

  “Oh, Mum—”

  “But I have made it.” She held his gaze, willing him to understand, to stop trying to ask her what had happened, to prevent him from telling her to go back. She could not go back now. Having come, she had closed that door. She was letting go of everything in Kolkata by leaving, and she could not have it back. The city might as well not exist for her anymore. By leaving it, she had destroyed it. There was no marriage to go back to, there was no house left to unbreak. To leave her husband meant leaving her life. That was what she had done and it could not be undone. He must see that, mustn’t he?

  Dhruv dropped his gaze. A relief such as she had never felt washed over her. He understood.

  “Have your tea,” she said happily. She was doing it, she was insisting to her adult son. And it wasn’t so hard, after all. She put the cup in his hands and watched him sip.

  “It’s perfect,” he said, smiling weakly.

  “Everything is better with tea,” she told him.

  She felt wonderful. Everything was settled, the house would soon be just as she wanted it to be, and she had not had to cry, after all. She sipped her own cup. It was good. But it would be better with Red Label.

  Six

  Rachel had been up for an hour, but she wasn’t sure whether to leave the room or not. Listening intently, she heard murmuring in the living room, words she didn’t understand, a conversation in Hindi. She heard more Hindi than English most days; it was a shame she still hadn’t learned much. She wasn’t good with languages, not like Dhruv was. Everything just passed her by; she could feel things washing over her, nothing sticking in her mind. But now that there were two Hindi speakers in her house, maybe she would get better. She listened for a few long moments and then told herself firmly that she should go out, that this was her own home and she couldn’t let anyone hold her hostage in her bedroom, or guest room, as it was.

  She used the bathroom, to give them a warning that she was up and about without saying anything. Then, still in her pajamas, she entered the kitchen, which faced the living room area, with the intention of making coffee. The sight that greeted her there, however, gave her pause. It looked as though someone had used everything in their limited kitchen to make tea and toast. A jumble of cups, plates, strainers, and spoons was lined up all around the sink, with nothing in the sink itself but a milk-foamed saucepan, studded with tea leaves. How on earth could anyone use this many dishes to make tea? She hadn’t even thought Dhruv liked tea; he never drank it around her.

  She sighed under her breath and shrugged. She wasn’t sure if Dhruv and his mother, locked in conversation as they were, had even really noticed she had entered the room. Still, she wouldn’t function well without caffeine, so she might as well start cleaning.

  “The girl will get that, won’t she?” Swati’s voice barely cut through the sound of running water, and Rachel turned off the faucet. Dhruv
was sitting at the table, resigned, while Swati looked at Rachel, puzzled.

  “Of course you hired a maid?” she said, turning back to Dhruv, who nodded but said nothing else. Swati turned back to Rachel.

  “Just leave it for her,” she ordered Rachel calmly. Rachel knew that she shouldn’t be offended, although of course she was, immediately, at the order. She knew many Indians spoke this way—she had been in the houses of Dhruv’s friends in Mumbai—and all of them, husbands and wives, ordered people around without intending offense. But somehow, Swati’s doing it in her home irritated Rachel. Who was Swati to tell her what to do?

  Rachel clamped down her instant irritation and tried to smile.

  “I prefer to do the dishes myself. And I need to do them, if I want to make coffee. You’ve used them all,” Rachel said neutrally, or at least, she thought she was being neutral. Dhruv looked at her strangely, and she wondered if maybe she had been firmer, or sharper, than she had intended. Be kind, be kind, she thought. She will be gone soon, she won’t live here forever, he promised. But then she remembered, he hadn’t, not really.

  “How are you today?” Rachel said to Swati as she washed up, trying to steer the conversation back to the point. Swati, though, instead of answering her, looked at Dhruv. Dhruv shrugged.

  “I slept well,” Swati said simply, as if that had been Rachel’s question. What was happening here? It was like a play where Rachel didn’t know the lines and everyone else was angry that she was dropping her cues.

  “Dhruv, do you have a better sense of what’s happening? Did you two talk about your mother’s decision, or her future?” Rachel didn’t care if it was impolite. Politeness was for WASPs and parents of ugly babies.

  “We talked,” Dhruv said shortly. “Mum has made her decision, she says. So she will stay with us, for—well, she will stay with us. Look, it’s getting late. I have to go to work.” He picked up his briefcase and toed his feet into his shoes. Rachel met him at the door as he was about to walk out, looking up at him, her eyes wide and confused. What is happening? she mouthed, and he shook his head. “Later,” he whispered to her as he kissed her cheek, and then he was gone. Abandoning her to go into the world, to work, to the life he had come to Mumbai to have, while she had only this apartment. And now, his mother.