Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  “That’s no excuse. Emotions are one thing, but to break a home, it’s terrible. I didn’t think she was so silly as all this.”

  “You think it’s silly to leave your husband?” Swati realized her voice sounded urgent, but she needed to know. She had called to tell Bunny of her own escape, her own actions. What would Bunny think of what Swati had done, leaving with no provocation, in search of something as ephemeral, as silly, as happiness? She had always thought Bunny was such a romantic, so much more open than Swati herself. Now, though, Bunny spoke with the iron tongue of tradition, and Swati feared her judgment.

  “People who get a divorce didn’t deserve to get married in the first place. Look at people who get divorces. Westerners. Muslims. People who have no regard for their families. What kind of lives do they lead? They live for themselves. It’s wrong. I don’t like what Arjun has done, but it is Neera who has destroyed our family,” Bunny insisted.

  Swati said nothing. Now she was the one crying, but silently, desperately hoping that Bunny couldn’t hear the liquid sliding down her cheeks.

  “Oh, Swati. I just don’t know what to do. When are you coming home?”

  Never, Swati thought. “Soon,” Swati said.

  And after the call was over, she lay on her bed, drained of everything, an empty husk, and wished the moving fan above her would blow her far away.

  Ten

  When Dhruv returned from work the following day, Rachel took one look at his face as he walked through the door and knew, just knew, from the very blankness in his eyes, that he had something bad to tell her, something she wasn’t going to like.

  “Rachel. I have to talk to you.”

  Whenever he had something to tell her, he used her name. It was like the title of the thought, or an address. Like he needed to preface his negative thing with her name so she would know this was for her. Hearing it made her want to hold on to something, like when an airplane experiences turbulence and everyone clutches the armrests, like they will be saved from a violent crash if they can tighten their grip.

  It was almost midnight, and Swati had gone to sleep hours before. Rachel walked around the apartment, her limbs aching from inactivity. In Mumbai she barely walked anywhere, given the conditions of the roads and the shock with which most people she had met of her social class viewed the very concept of walking. Walking was for people who couldn’t afford something better, they said.

  And yet people did walk, of course, despite the many challenges of the broken and occupied sidewalks. Just not people like her. She didn’t mean Americans, or even white people. If you could afford not to walk, you didn’t. If you could afford better, you never picked worse. People like her watched the city through windows as millions of people walked from place to place to work and buy food and find space outside the millions of tiny cramped apartments in the city. People like her watched young couples fold themselves into corners for a moment of false privacy, and saw four people riding on a motorcycle, and closed their windows to the heat and dust and smells and outstretched hands of beggars, and told themselves no one walked in Mumbai. What they meant was, no one that mattered to them.

  Swati had told her not to walk in the city and Rachel wanted to do it, just to spite her, but that had proven difficult to achieve. She tried to do something physical every day, but it was increasingly hard, especially with Swati there. Their household had, so quickly, taken on Swati’s schedule, and in her efforts to host her mother-in-law, to accommodate her in this difficult and, Rachel told herself over and over again, temporary time, Rachel had allowed Swati’s plans to guide her own life.

  Rachel had told Swati she would cook for her, and so she had spent that day trying to make dhokla, something Swati particularly liked. Rachel had tried and tried to get it right, but she realized quickly that the dish, a kind of steamed chickpea-flour spongy bread, was fussy and difficult, far from the simpler Indian dishes she had made in the past. She had asked Swati for her advice, but the woman had simply shrugged.

  “It’s difficult. That’s why the cook makes it,” Swati had said smugly. Rachel wanted to slap her. Was her master plan to represent Indian cooking as impossible? Was that her idea to get Rachel to agree to a cook? Bizarre. But Rachel persisted. She would not fail at this. She took the bait, knowing even as she did it that it was futile. Swati would want a cook even if Rachel was the greatest cook in the world. Swati wanted servants because servants were things that made sense to her. Because that was the way things were supposed to be done.

  Grinding her teeth deeply, she carefully whipped up the batter once again, determined to get it right. After double-checking multiple YouTube videos and timing the steaming on her phone precisely, she served Swati the food, and Swati, grudgingly, said it was adequate. Upon sampling it herself, Rachel found that she strongly disliked it, with its bland taste and a texture that was somehow both spongy and gritty. She wondered if it was too early for a glass of wine.

  Swati picked at it and declared herself not very hungry. The only thing that had stopped Rachel from throwing the food directly into Swati’s face was the reminder that her real life in Mumbai could start when this was all over, and that it would be all over, because somehow, Swati would leave. They would find her an apartment, a retirement community, a kennel. But the serious look on Dhruv’s face as he walked in the door horrified her.

  Wordlessly, Rachel walked into the kitchen and reached for the good bourbon. They had brought a few bottles with them to savor, things they couldn’t find in India. Dhruv, who had followed her, gestured instead for the scotch.

  “You’re going native,” Rachel said, smiling slightly, trying to make him smile. All the Indian men she saw at parties drank scotch like fish, and she and Dhruv had joked that it was a remnant of the British colonialism, alive and well in cocktails.

  “I prefer it,” he snapped. “I can prefer scotch, can’t I, without it being some kind of thing? And that’s fairly racist, Rachel. I’m not going anywhere, I am native. What’s wrong with being native?”

  Rachel took a step back. Dhruv never got angry. He was eternally patient; in fact, he made Rachel feel mercurial. “I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, I didn’t mean it like that, it was a joke, because before we had said that, so I thought . . . I’m sorry.” Rachel was mortified. Perhaps he thought it was the kind of joke only he should make. Perhaps it was.

  “Sorry.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I overreacted. I’m just—stressed. Look, we should save that for a happier occasion. I don’t want to associate tonight with bourbon.”

  “Okay,” she said, worried. “I am sorry, I—”

  “It’s okay.”

  He poured them each a measure of scotch and added water to his. Rachel drank hers with ice, and was sipping her drink as she watched Dhruv suddenly swallow his own in one go. Then he grabbed the bottle, walking back out into the living room. She followed him.

  “I have to go on a business trip.”

  This was not usually a cause for such dismay.

  “In Kolkata.” Oh. “They know I have family there, so they asked me to stay with my parents.”

  Rachel blew out her breath. Dhruv looked so distressed. She couldn’t imagine what he was feeling. She sat down next to him.

  “You work for a multimillion-dollar consulting firm. They can’t spring for a hotel?”

  Dhruv sighed, nodding his head in agreement. “What they said was, they are sure I would prefer to stay with my family because this is a monthlong trip and I would be more comfortable with them. They know my parents live there. They’re trying to be nice, considerate even. People usually love a chance like this. What can I tell them?”

  “A month.” Rachel, who had only half heard most of what Dhruv was saying, felt dizzy. Her eyes started to lose focus, like when she had gotten food poisoning on a trip to China once and she had thrown up so much that her eyes felt like they were sparkling, or the world was sparkling; it became fuzzy, covered in dots, point
illism made real. “So this means you are leaving me alone with your mother for a month.”

  “I know,” Dhruv said, drinking deeply.

  “I’ll come with you,” Rachel said desperately.

  “Rachel—”

  “We can all go. Together. All three of us. It will be like a vacation!” Rachel looked at Dhruv hopefully, but she knew what he would say before he said it.

  “My mother can’t go back to Kolkata, Rachel.”

  “Well, then, she can be here and—and I’ll come with you! It’ll be fun, you can show me Kolkata, I didn’t see much of it before—”

  “It’s a work trip, it can’t be a vacation, and you can’t leave her here alone.”

  “Dhruv, I can’t stay here for a month with your mother!”

  “Please, darling, please.” He rarely used pet names, and she loved them very much. Whenever he did, she felt special. Her heart glowed even as it sank. He took her hand. “I know this is awful but I just need you to take care of her. I’m begging you. She can’t be alone, she won’t know what to do.”

  “She’s an adult,” Rachel said, without much heat.

  “She’s fragile like this. I know it’s so much to ask, but you are so strong, and good, and I know you wouldn’t want something to happen to her.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Please.” There was such pain in his voice. This was all coming down so hard on him, and Rachel didn’t want to be another person hurting him, letting him down. She didn’t want to fight with him, either, she wanted to be that couple that didn’t fight, that was always happy. So, her stomach clenching in distress, she nodded, slowly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sure.” Rachel got up and downed her drink.

  “What should I say, other than that?”

  Rachel closed her eyes. She didn’t know what she wanted him to say, what he should say. There was nothing, really. What was he supposed to do, quit his job in protest?

  He would be leaving her alone with his mother for a month. And that was all there was to it. He poured himself another drink.

  “I don’t want to face him. I don’t want to live with him for a month. I don’t want any of it. What a mess.”

  “Why don’t you just tell them that you don’t want to stay with your family?”

  Dhruv looked horrified. “If I tell them, they’ll ask me why.”

  “Right. So?” Rachel didn’t understand.

  “Well, what would I say?”

  “The truth, I guess. Some sanitized safe-for-work version of it. Your mother and father are divorcing and you don’t feel comfortable staying with your dad. That’s it. One sentence. Then you get a month in a nice hotel.”

  “I can’t say something like that! I can’t just, just tell people what’s happening with my family. Just like that. I mean, what would they say?”

  “But, I mean, they don’t even know your parents, so why not?”

  Dhruv looked at her like she was out of her mind, like “shopping cart and wig made of toys on the New York subway” out of her mind. “I can’t tell people this.”

  “But—”

  “If they find out, they won’t ask me questions about it, because they will assume I don’t want to talk about it. But if I tell them then it opens up the door to them asking me questions.” He was speaking slowly, the way adults who are bad with children talk to them.

  “And?”

  “Rachel! I can’t air my family’s dirty laundry for everyone to see!”

  “It’s a divorce, Dhruv, it’s not like your father has a bunker of kidnapped sex slaves or your mother runs a meth ring.”

  Dhruv just shook his head violently. “They will judge me for it. They will think I’m less stable because I come from an unstable family.”

  “That can’t possibly be true.”

  “That’s how it is. You are what your family is,” Dhruv said, looking down.

  “Dhruv, if that’s true, then fuck those people.”

  “And then what? I can’t just say fuck them, Rachel, it will cost me a promotion or something, it really will; they will think all kinds of things about me, it will affect me, it will affect us.”

  Rachel didn’t know what to say. It felt so Victorian.

  “That’s so unfair, and—archaic.”

  “I might want it to be different, but I can’t change it. I have to stay with him. That’s all there is to it. Bloody hell, why did it have to be Kolkata?”

  Rachel sighed. She was seeing a side of Dhruv, the one that had emerged since they had come to India—or maybe it had been there all along? You don’t know him very well, voices echoed in her head. But she hadn’t thought he cared so much about appearances, about the way things looked, in New York. At least, he hadn’t talked so much about not having choices, about everything’s being something he had to do. Or maybe he had, but she didn’t notice. Or maybe he split the world into India and not India. She didn’t like thinking about him this way, but she couldn’t help it as these thoughts invaded her brain, reminding her that there were things living in her husband that she might never really be able to understand, pieces of him that would forever be foreign to her, in every way. Did everyone feel this way? Was there some part of every person that was boxed off from their spouse, or was it just her, in her marriage, feeling so alone?

  “What do we do now?” Rachel asked, sipping on her own drink. At this rate, Dhruv would be passing out soon, all that scotch on an empty stomach.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “I made dhokla, if you want some.”

  “You did?”

  Rachel served him a plate and he ate it, mindlessly, enjoying the thing she had worked so hard on and liked so little.

  “It’s pretty good.”

  “I don’t really like it,” Rachel admitted.

  “My mom makes it really well.” Of course she does, thought Rachel. All that “only the cook can make it” bullshit.

  “I have to pack. I’m leaving in the morning.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I know. Rachel.” There it was again, her name, but not the way he ever said it in normal conversation, a stop in the middle of everything. Her name was a way to say, Enough, stop talking. She looked away. “I am sorry.”

  “I know you are.”

  But not enough not to go. And not quite as sorry as Rachel herself.

  Eleven

  Watching Rachel move around the apartment made Swati tired. Her nose wrinkled as she watched Rachel wash dishes briskly, getting her entire front wet in the process. Swati had tried to tell her to wait for the girl, but it was no use. Rachel looked at the world as a series of tasks to be accomplished. What an exhausting way to live.

  The girl had so much energy. Part of Swati felt she should help her, ask her what she needed, but another part of her resented Rachel for her buzzing around. Hadn’t Swati earned the right to be lazy? She was almost sixty, well into old age. Everyone she knew that was over the age of fifty talked about themselves as old. Being old meant you could get in line first at wedding banquets, be served tea by younger women, have people give up seats for you and make sure you didn’t have to walk in airports, commandeering wheelchairs for your comfort instead. Being old meant people had to listen to you, even if they didn’t want to, even if you were a woman. Being old meant being cared for. Why wouldn’t she want all those things?

  Of course, it was something you traded for being attractive, being noticed as a woman, but Swati had never been comfortable with that, anyway. She had internalized so many of her mother’s lectures on boys. All the things she could do or say that might attract their interest, she had worked to make sure her body never did a single one of them. She had made sure she learned all the ways she had to be vigilant, and she guarded her virtue from everyone, even her own desires. Vinod had never really looked at her with desire, and she had been grateful for it. How inconvenient it would be to have a husband who wanted you all the time, especially if you didn’t want h
im. No, she didn’t miss being seen, the way Bunny had told Swati she did. At least, she didn’t think so.

  She would rather be respected than desired, and she didn’t understand why a woman would make a different choice than that. When she had been younger, she had felt there was something lacking in her, the way she didn’t seem to want passion, pleasure, the way her friends sometimes whispered that they did, the way they giggled over vegetable markets, comparing their husbands’ genitals, the way they sighed over kissing scenes in movies, complaining that their husbands never touched them that way anymore. Now Swati didn’t have to feel that there was anything wrong with her. A woman her age wasn’t supposed to want such things.

  So much of life had to be endured, Swati thought. Not the way, of course, people living horrible lives endured so much, but the way that even ordinary people like herself had most of their lives happen to them. Or perhaps that was just women. Yes, she had ruled her home, and counted herself lucky to do so, but wasn’t that an empty gift, a lure? The rest of her life, all of it had been ruled by others. What she could afford to have in that home, who could enter it, who could leave it, all that had been dictated by her husband. Vinod had not been bad. She could not say that of him. But he had been the dictator of her world. Could you love your dictator? He had been the creator of the rule book that had circumscribed her life. He had been the law. She had followed the law, but how could she have ever loved it? It simply was her only option, until one day, it wasn’t.

  But now her son was going back there, back into the world where Vinod was the law. Dhruv had left that morning for Kolkata, for a monthlong business trip. He would be staying with his father, of course; anything else would be far worse. She didn’t want Vinod to be hurt, and she never would have wanted Dhruv to stay outside of his own home, for the apartment in Kolkata was his home, would always be so. Still, she dreaded what he might say to Vinod, what Vinod might say to him, but then she took comfort in the fact that for all three of them, talking about something was far more difficult than saying nothing at all. Swati would miss him, and worry for him, but she took comfort in the fact that she was sure Dhruv would enjoy his new household once she finally got it running well.