Mother Land

by Leah Franqui

  But then again, maybe she was jealous not because of what they had gone through, or hadn’t, but because of who they were, and who she wasn’t. For what they knew to be true of life, and what she didn’t, not at all.

  Three hours later, Rachel could feel her throat pinching as she leaned back, stretching and rubbing her arms for warmth. All in all, she had recorded twelve episodes that day, a personal record, and exhausted as she was, she smiled, triumphant.

  Beyond her actual episodes, the last hour of the day had just been reaction sounds, correcting older episodes where Ram Arjuna had missed a section where a woman was crying or screaming. Rachel had sobbed her way through multiple episodes, and when she had asked if it was all right to be crying for characters whose voice she didn’t even dub, Ram Arjuna simply shrugged and gestured for her to continue.

  Crying for an hour, even if it was completely artificial, had been a surreal and cathartic experience for Rachel. Her throat was dry, but her body felt relieved, her heart aching with the effort, wrung out, yes, but also relieved in that way a good cry, when you really need it, is a kind of medicine. Ram Arjuna looked at her, awed, at the end of the session, and then started contorting his face, trying to make himself fake-cry as well.

  “It’s very funny! All this waaaaaaah, waaaaaah,” Ram Arjuna said.

  “There is so much crying in this show,” Rachel said, shaking her head.

  “And kissing,” Ram Arjuna said disapprovingly. Rachel wanted to laugh. At first her producer had been fascinated by all the embracing the show contained. It was all rather tame by US standards, but certainly many episodes featured kissing, some light touching, and then a cut to the clear aftermath of passion, all discreetly done, of course, with both parties rolled up neatly in sheets, but still. Ram Arjuna had clearly enjoyed these scenes initially, but it seemed that familiarity had bred his contempt, for he now looked piously upon them with slight scorn, clearly judging the loose morals of these characters.

  “So you don’t think Indian soap operas are like this?” Rachel asked, mildly curious about his opinion. She had never seen one, and Swati seemed to think that Magda’s Moment could have been made right there in Mumbai.

  Ram Arjuna shook his head vigorously.

  “They must be so boring.”

  “No, not boring. There is more in the eyes. More longing. Little things mean more. Love comes through poetry, through the falling of a flower, through two people who both love the rain. Not all this kissing kissing kissing. And outside, where everyone can see!”

  “So if it’s in private it’s okay?” Rachel asked, gently mocking him.

  Ram Arjuna shrugged. “Who knows what people do in private. Inside is own business. Outside is different. No? Is America like this? You seeing people do private things, kissing, in public?”

  “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “You like this?”

  “I think it’s nice,” Rachel said without thinking. Ram Arjuna turned to her, his eyes wide. Had she offended him?

  “You and your husband are like this?” he said, nodding his head at the screen. Rachel could have sighed in relief. He was just curious, not upset.

  “Well, we don’t speak Romanian,” Rachel answered, gathering up her water bottle and bag as she deflected.

  But Ram Arjuna obviously felt she had confirmed his suspicions of foreigners, because he leaned back, filled half with knowing disapproval, half with ill-concealed excitement. Rachel wondered if he would be masturbating later to the image of her having sex with an Indian man, and immediately hated herself for thinking it. What was wrong with her? But she couldn’t unthink it, couldn’t stop wondering what Ram Arjuna thought of her now that she had confessed to liking people’s kissing in public.

  Rachel had been told time and again since moving to India that she needed to be careful with men, that they didn’t understand friendly women the way American men did, that they would read something into her actions because that level of familiarity was not a part of Indian culture and would therefore be interpreted as interest. Wasn’t that what Swati had said, when she was going to see Fifi and Richard, that it was good he was American, an Indian man wouldn’t know how to be friends?

  Part of Rachel had always rebelled at these pithy little lectures. They seemed so condescending, so infantilizing of a general male populace. All men could not think this way. It was simply insane. Being paranoid about her actions seemed useless, a surefire method of being suspicious of everyone, assuming everyone was out to rape her; it would be like living in an episode of Law & Order: SVU. It was racist, was what it was. Looking at all men with judgmental fear was for the WASPy older women of the world, not a modern girl like herself. But looking at Ram Arjuna, a man who loved his wife, who had children, looking at her with concentrated interest, not flirting, but like she was a fascinating thing, activated all her worst suspicions.

  “See you,” Rachel said, trying to keep her tone neutral.

  Ram Arjuna nodded, smiling, looking like his normal self. “Twelve episodes! You are so good. Truly the best one.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said. Had that been too warm? Too cold? She left before she could ask. Why were there so many ways for her to make a mistake here? Because to be foreign is to wonder, forever, what you’re doing wrong, Rachel realized. To judge people you trust, to never know if you’re being wise or foolish in your assessments of others. To be conscious, always. For better, and for worse.

  In the rickshaw on the way to the hotel to meet Adam, Rachel alternated between scolding herself for her colonial arrogance in assuming that Ram Arjuna, a happily married father, was slavering over her in secret just because she was a white woman, and telling herself she had imagined the entire thing and was being ridiculous.

  A thought struck her as she tried to focus on the neighborhoods passing her by, the vibrant and scuffed lives she witnessed by the millions in her commute. The work was two hundred episodes in total, and Rachel had now done just under half. She had a few weeks of work left, and then it would be over. This was positive, of course, if Ram Arjuna had any sort of designs on her—Which he doesn’t, she reminded herself, rolling her eyes at herself. But it also meant the end of Magda’s story, the end of this job. The end of the distraction that had taken up Rachel’s whole life, the end of a feeling of purpose.

  Really she should have been looking for other jobs. Something in food, something in something she knew about. But it seemed that distracting herself, avoiding the real world, had become her new habit, and it was hard to break. And besides, she liked dubbing. She liked being Magda’s voice, telling her story. She didn’t know if she wanted to do it forever, but she remembered the disdain in Dhruv’s voice when he had laughed at it, said it wasn’t a real job, and she bristled. It was as real as anything else. She worked, she emoted, she spoke, and they paid her for her labor. She got to travel, she got to be brave and sad and fragile and strong, she got to do new things, all through Magda. That—what she felt, what she got to experience—was real enough for her.

  The rickshaw stopped at an intersection, and as they waited, Rachel watched two boys bathe themselves outside their home with a bucket. Naked, they must have been all of eight or nine years old, and their messy, vigorous cleaning style, which mostly seemed to involve throwing soapy suds at each other, fascinated a nearby stray cat, while a chicken pecked its way down the pavement, neatly avoiding the spraying water and soap in its quest for food. A group of stray dogs dozed in the gutter, curled into each other like snails, while passersby, many of them, tried to avoid the boys, the cat, the chicken, and the dogs in their quest to reach their respective destinations.

  All this, coexisting. Soon their mother might come and scold them for making a mess or wasting water, or simply tell them supper was ready, or a passerby would step into the firing range of the soapy water and scold them, or the chicken would annoy one of the dogs, or someone would come join them, also trying to get clean.

  What a contrast it was, Ram Arjuna’s cen
sorious view of kissing, his thesis on indoor and outdoor activities, when here, on the street, Rachel could see a dozen of what she would have deemed indoor activities all playing out in a public space. People visiting a barber, whose shop was nothing more than a broken piece of mirror and a crate for the customer to sit on; women in their nightgowns bargaining for vegetables; men sleeping in their rickshaws between driving shifts. All these things were things you would rarely see in public back home, unless a person was insane, or homeless, or a performance artist, or all of the above. And yet kissing was unacceptable.

  The sun was setting as the rickshaw ascended the highway ramp. Taking the fragile little vehicles on the highway should have terrified Rachel, but instead, it gave her a sense of exhilarated delight. She could be crushed at any moment. She could roll right out of the open sides of the rickshaw and slam her body into the highway. The interior became a wind tunnel, and she closed her eyes, inhaling the polluted air, which, nevertheless, refreshed her. Her hair whipped around her face and her eyes stung when she opened them again, but it didn’t matter.

  She looked out onto the sweep of the city, the view from the highway showing her the foothills of South Mumbai, the Sea Link bridge rising dramatically over the water, tiny fishing boats dwarfed by skyscrapers, all of it somehow in the same place at once. Just like her, somehow there, somehow sitting in a rickshaw next to a million other people, all on the same road in the same place; who knew how or why?

  In the rickshaw next to hers, there was a couple furiously making out. The young woman’s head scarf had come undone, and the young man was eagerly wiggling his hand down the front of her kurta, both desperate to touch each other, as the driver navigated the rickshaw, seemingly oblivious to the carnal activity behind him as he sang along to a song weakly pumping from his phone, mounted above his head next to a small bobbling statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. Apparently India wasn’t quite so tied to an indoor-outdoor binary as Ram Arjuna might have liked to think.

  Rachel started laughing, wildly, with as much energy as she had put into crying for an hour for Ram Arjuna’s corrections. Something inside of her loosened, like the head scarf, which even now was halfway outside of the rickshaw, rippling like a streamer in the breeze. She watched it fly away, into the big city, lost to its owner forever, and some tight, hard part of her just fell apart, and everything felt blissfully, momentarily, clear. Nothing was national. Nothing was universal. Everything was personal. It was a frightening thing, but it also made her free.

  Sitting at the bar in the Raj Lands End, a sleek hotel at the southern tip of Reclamation, the sister of the hotel down by the Gateway of India in Nariman Point, which had been taken over by terrorists in the 2008 attack, Rachel was conscious, for the first time in weeks, of how white she was, in a country of nonwhite people.

  Of course she knew what she was, white, female, Jewish, all of that, every day, and of course she always knew that she was white in India, where white people were rare and visible at all times; it would have been impossible not to know those things. But there was nothing like being in an exclusive space, slick and sterile, filled with more white people than she saw in a week, to make her feel her distinct whiteness in Mumbai.

  She never felt more out of place in India, she realized, than when she was somewhere that she, as a white person, was clearly supposed to be comfortable. Everything in the smoothly slick and elegant interior of the hotel screamed its contrast to the world outside. A far-too-solicitous waiter refilled her water glass, having already looked askance at her request for regular filtered water instead of the bottled stuff. The waiters in these places were always impeccably dressed in something traditional and Indian, and the white people always looked busy and harried. All in all, it felt like a last vestige of colonial power. A room of white people being served by deferential brown people. How was this supposed to make anyone feel comfortable? And yet it remained.

  Taking a rickshaw to the hotel meant getting out before the gates of the hotel, as rickshaws weren’t allowed to enter the neatly manicured ground and putter their way up the cobbled entry road. While cars and cabs sped their way in, only to be stopped and searched, one by one, by the guards at the entry point, Rachel had gotten out and paid her rickshaw, amused as she usually was when he had refused to accept the ten-rupee tip she had offered him on top of the ninety-rupee fare, all in all about a dollar and sixty cents for the ride. It was the rare rickshaw driver in Mumbai who accepted tips, but Rachel couldn’t stop offering them any more than she could stop telling people to have a nice day. Some things, it seemed, truly were cultural.

  Beside the hotel, which rose up from rocks by the ocean, was a flock of children begging and a paan stall advertising a local cookie company and selling cigarettes and sodas. Behind them, there were large trees and cement apartment buildings, churches and tropical vines.

  This, Rachel thought, was really the most distinct thing about Mumbai, the thing that she noticed everywhere she went, that she struggled to describe to others when they asked her about the city. It was such a place of contrasts. There was no denying the reality of any part of it. Public toilets and small slums sat next to dazzlingly new high-rise buildings, while malls sprawled out under the shadows of industrial mills and business centers, and in the corners were stray dogs and humans. There was no separation of anything, no nice area or not-nice area, really; to Rachel’s eye, it was all intermixed and mingled. There was so much life everywhere, oozing out of the cracks, sending the air buzzing. It was everything at once, it was dazzling and stupefying. It defied any single description.

  This was why it was so amazing to her, sometimes, when she was speaking to Dhruv’s colleagues’ wives and they talked about how they were somewhere and saw something shocking, some horribly poor child, some terrible situation they never knew existed. Their lack of consciousness seemed absurd to Rachel. How could any of this be a surprise to anyone? All you had to do was look out your window, or get out of your rickshaw a little before your destination, and there it all was, the swirling mass of humanity all at once, in every direction. But perhaps many people, the world over, didn’t even do that, when it came to life around them. And those women didn’t ride in rickshaws, anyway.

  Of course, in the hotel bar, with its flattering lighting and array of continental cocktails, one could easily ignore any reality and lose oneself in fifteen-dollar martinis, Rachel thought. Maybe that was why she always felt so strange in places like this, because they denied the reality of the world outside in such an aggressive way. But for the hotel uniform, which for men included a turquoise turban with a pleated fan at the end of the wrapping, she could have been anywhere in the world. That should have been comforting, given how ambivalent she felt about her life in Mumbai, but instead, it was confusing. Rachel had realized in her time in Mumbai that she did not crave temporary escapes. They just made real life harder.

  She was waiting for her friend Adam, whom she had been due to meet ten minutes earlier but who, she was sure, was caught in Mumbai traffic or victim to Indian time in his string of meetings. He had come to India as part of his work as a designer with a New York advertising company, which was interested in opening up an Indian office, and they had been looking at spaces all day. Adam was staying at the hotel, of course, and had confided in Rachel over email that he wanted to get smashed quickly and stumble to bed before heading to the airport the next day. He had less than twenty-four hours in Mumbai before heading to Delhi, and then Bangalore, to see other potential office sites.

  Rachel was sure he had been dragged all over the city, and she was looking forward to his complaints about it avidly. Adam would see past her digitally manufactured positivity, he would moan and clutch imaginary pearls with her and help her feel like she wasn’t so alone, that he understood everything that was wrong in her life, that she was right to find it terrible.

  She had come in feeling grubby, but the air-conditioning quickly dried her sweat. In fact, with the blasting cool air all
around her, Rachel felt chilled in her light cotton top and jeans, and she almost laughed out loud at herself, at how weak against the cold she was becoming in the tropical climate. She pushed her hair behind her ears, combing it through with her fingers, and used the time to apply lipstick, to pinch her cheeks, to try to look more normal, or at least alive.

  It was too dim in the bar to read her book, and she could barely concentrate on it, anyway, so eager was she to see Adam, nervous, strangely enough, to see someone she had known all her life. But it was the first time in months that she was seeing someone who knew her, someone from her life, not Dhruv’s or his mother’s, or a stranger she wasn’t sure she wanted to be her friend. Someone of hers.

  She had hoped that Fifi would become that for her, but subsequent text messages to the other woman had gone unanswered, or worse, answered with emojis. She still would have liked for Fifi to become her friend, but she didn’t want to beg. She couldn’t blame the other woman, really; Fifi had a life and friends and a whole world here. Rachel wanted to enter it, to become a part of it, without having done any of the work to build it. She had every incentive to want to see Fifi, and Fifi had no real reason to want to see her. Still, it would have been nice to get something other than a thumbs-up. But she put that out of her mind, choosing instead to focus on the fact that someone she knew and loved was there, and she would see him soon.

  Would Adam think she was different now? she wondered. She wasn’t sure if she hoped he would applaud her for her adaptive abilities, her resilience and fortitude, or worry for her, with her discomfort, her doubts, her mother-in-law drama, her husband. Should she even tell him about Dhruv, about the fact that he had dumped his mother on her and effectively left? A few months ago she wouldn’t have even wondered, she would have told him all about it, with abandon; she and Adam were close. But she didn’t want Adam looking at her with pity, and the words stuck in her throat.