Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  “It’s not the money. And it’s too late for an abortion.”

  “Susannah, you don’t understand how hard it is for those women. You don’t know how expensive childcare is in the Bay Area. And taking care of a baby is hard, harder than being a lawyer. And paavum! A baby growing up without a father! It shouldn’t be! This isn’t the life we want for you.” Her mother jumped up with an indignant expression.

  Susannah wanted to say that all she wanted was someone in the world who was like her, who loved her, who needed her, who belonged with her. And after all, even if she was going about it from a different direction, a painful direction, wasn’t creating her own family so she wouldn’t go through life alone just what her mother had wished for her? Instead she said nothing.

  Susannah’s mother walked to the other side of the store where a metal statue of Saraswathi, the goddess of wisdom, sat cross-legged, wreathed in fresh marigolds. She kneeled before the statue, lit sandalwood incense, and began to pray. Susannah’s father returned to the front of the store, shaking his head and drinking his coffee.

  There was no precedent for what she was doing—had any Tamil girl in all of America’s history had a baby out of wedlock? Doubtful, but then again, they probably wouldn’t tell the story of it. There hadn’t been a precedent for her parents either, and in spite of their faces, heavy with many disappointments, it had turned out all right for them. She might never travel the world, nor be a famous environmental lawyer, nor force her parents to understand her, but once upon a time, long, long ago, they’d flown across a vast ocean just so they could live by their own rules. This was not the life anyone would have envisioned for her, but in the end, she was only doing what her parents had done, making up the rules that would lead to her future. There was nobody she belonged to, until one day there was.

  The answer for me back then was yes—most numbers vibrated. They vibrated in Pittsburgh, they vibrated in Chennai, and the belief that I was deeply connected to everything in the world by numbers was infinitely comforting to me. My toes quivered when Miss Wabash—despised by the other fifth graders for her strictness—teased out these reverberations in purple chalk during the math hour. Amma, noticing how much I loved numbers, had asked Miss Wabash to give me extra math worksheets, even though it was not computation that thrilled me, but the numbers themselves—the accounting of all that was domestic or wild, safe or dangerous, a kind of language that remained stable no matter the city. I faithfully tallied the number of fruit jelly candies Amma bought at the greengrocer, the number of perforated ceiling tiles in my father’s office, the number of thrushes sipping from the birdbath by my classroom, the number of former friends who called me a terrorist in the months after 9/11.

  The trouble began during our annual three-week winter trip to Chennai in 2001, just a few days before we returned home. The prospect of returning to Pittsburgh filled me with dread, even though this time my grandfather was coming to live with us because his heart condition had worsened. We were staying at his small, sparely furnished two-bedroom flat with its orange and white tile floors and pit toilet. Thatha was a retired mathematics professor and the beige walls were lined with overflowing bookshelves. It was a Friday with no cosmic significance according to the numerology book I’d convinced my mother to buy that morning. Yet it remained seared in my memory because for many years afterward, my mind worried over how easily everything could have gone differently. If only they had.

  After lunch, I’d read the frontispiece of the numerology book: an optimistic promise that inside were answers about why there was so much chaos in the world. I finished calculating my family’s karmic numbers according to the instructions, and then I’d laid out all of Thatha’s heart pills on the dresser and counted them. Sixty-one. When I was done counting, I gathered the pills and rearranged them in their five respective bottles. I wandered out to the narrow cul-de-sac in front of my grandfather’s stucco split-level. On the porch, my grandfather was smoking a cigar while my mother scolded him for not taking care of his health in a blend of Tamil and English. “You’re doing this to yourself,” she said. Thatha rubbed his swollen legs under his veshti. I didn’t like how shrill Amma’s voice became when she spoke to Thatha and tried to hurry past them with my book in hand.

  “Put that rubbish book away,” my grandfather called after me. He continued chastising my mother for buying the book as I walked into the cul-de-sac, but I pretended I didn’t hear him.

  Pot-bellied clouds, the grey of gunshot, rolled overhead, signaling an impending monsoon. Up the street, near the busy intersection, six idle young men chewing betel leaves hovered on the sidewalk and cattle lumbered alongside nimble yellow rickshaws and bulky motorcyclists and honking cars. In the other direction, three housewives squatted in front of their houses drawing elaborate kolam with white, pink and green chalk. Twelve neighborhood kids chased each other screaming and laughing, and for a moment, I wished I were among them. My old friends from the convent school had returned to the classroom after Christmas, so I’d tried to play with the neighborhood kids, but my accent had changed in the three years since we’d moved to the States, and they’d mocked me. It was not as painful as my life in Pittsburgh, where the kids teased me about the veil of downy hairs on my upper lip and arms and shunned me because my mother packed me lunches of rice and sambar in a steel tiffin every day. Some of the girls had told me sambar was the grossest thing they had ever smelled or seen someone eat. Often, one of the boys would grab the tiffin tin and throw it away, leaving me to fish through the trash for the tin so I wouldn’t have to explain to my mother why I’d come home without it.

  Next door were our family friends, the Kumaraswamys, with whom we’d been friends before we moved to Pittsburgh. Through the crisscrossed black metal bars of their front gate, I saw Latha Kumaraswamy sitting with her toddler in the dimly lit room, listening to the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil.

  I called through a diamond-shaped opening.

  Latha unlatched the heavy gate and tugged it open. “What do you need, Hagar kutty?”

  I asked for her birthdate, explaining about the numerology book, its practical magic, and how much it seemed to explain. She sniffed. “We don’t believe in that kind of superstitious nonsense,” she said, but invited me in for tea.

  In the sitting area, an army of porcelain animal figurines looked out from the curiosity cabinet. Anju placed a doll’s cup in front of me. “Paal venama?” I nodded and she poured milk into the cup.

  Latha said, “Tell me about America, Hagar.” As I talked, she smiled, not in the condescending way adults did when they thought they’d made headway with a recalcitrant youngster, but as if she were genuinely interested. “And do you like your school?”

  I nodded, but what I really wanted to say was that I desperately missed my old friends, and I missed my grandfather. Latha continued asking questions—there was something exciting about being asked questions by a grown-up, as if I were an expert on America. “And the other children are nice to you?”

  I hesitated a moment, and then I answered yes, as I knew my parents would want me to answer. In truth, just before our trip, Bobby Jamison had ambushed me in the cafeteria. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me up against the concrete wall so that the back of my head banged against it and my teeth rattled. His freckles loomed so close to my face, I could smell the tuna fish on his hot breath and the gathering sweat under the brim of his backward baseball cap. He pinned my wrists over my head, and squeezed them with such force he left painful, moon-shaped violet bruises. Beyond him, I saw the lunch lady, her hair wrapped in a net, watching from ten feet away. She did nothing. “Go back to Iraq,” he yelled. I told him I was Indian. He spit at me, and let go of my wrists, and strode away without a backward glance. Afterward, I went to the girls’ bathroom, curled up in the corner, and counted the tiny powder blue tiles on the floor until I could no longer see the beige grout between them, until they blurred into a sea. Miss Wabash rolled her eyes when I told he
r about the attack and said nobody likes a tattletale and boys would be boys.

  The worst of it, though, was not the bruises, but what had happened with Anne. Last year, Anne and I had slept over at each other’s houses, French braided each other’s hair, and played on the same handball team at lunch, and even on 9/11 when we learned of the nightmarish crashes of the airplanes, one of them in nearby Shanksville, we huddled together and whispered over our matching mauve ballerina lunchboxes. One day we were trading Fruit Roll-Up flavors, and the next, silence. When my mother called out of concern, Anne’s mother said Anne couldn’t come to playdates at our house anymore. My mother’s lips tensed after she told me, like she was keeping herself from saying something else, and when I asked her why, she shook her head.

  “Are you getting good grades?” Latha asked.

  “Yes.”

  The commotion from the neighborhood children playing outside subsided as Latha’s cook arrived to prepare dinner. Clanging pots, red chilies frying. The warm, comforting golden smell of ghee and cumin, the sound of mustard seeds sizzling. Latha would soon tell me it was time to return home. That’s when it happened.

  I dug my teeth into my lower lip, and said, “The teacher, she puts me in a garbage can.”

  “What?” Latha swung Anju onto her hip. “What are you talking about?”

  “She makes me come inside during the lunch hour every week and forces me to stand inside a garbage can.”

  “What? In America? Truly?” Latha’s eyes narrowed. “Are you making up a story? Hagar, it’s wrong to make up stories.”

  “No, auntie, it’s true! She thinks I’m a terrorist.” I added, “I’m not a liar.”

  Latha slipped her feet into her black chappals. “Come, I’m going to walk you home.” In that moment, I remembered the scolding my father had given me for being so sullen before we boarded the plane. This is India, not the States, so smile and be pleasant, my father had said, and what had I done instead? Made up an awful story. I was mindfully backpedaling, trying to come up with some way in which what I said was true.

  “You don’t have to walk me.” I’d lit a match and given it to someone else to hold. What surprised me in that moment was that there were no signs I would lie, nor any that Latha would respond so strongly. It was December 27th. An odd number. A seven. It should have been a lovely day, like all odd days were, and it almost had been. I dragged my feet as we returned to my grandfather’s house in the darkness and drizzle. Rain clouds obliterated the moon. The narrow street smelled like running mud and leaves. Above the neighbors’ houses, a pair of lanky palms shivered against strong gusts of wind.

  “I want to talk to your mother,” said Latha when we reached Thatha’s gate. She forced her mouth into a smile, but the corners of her eyes stayed in place.

  Inside, Amma sent me into the bedroom. Standing with an ear to the closed door, I could hear them firing back and forth in Tamil, my mother’s voice rising both in pitch and volume compared to Latha’s hushed replies. Amma opened the door unexpectedly, knocking me back. Latha was gone. “You told her your teacher puts you in a garbage can? What is this?”

  “Amma, she did. She hates me.” Even after I’d done all her extra math problems correctly and quickly, Miss Wabash had said offhandedly that I was probably not going to be good enough at advanced mathematics to be a mathematician, and this statement alarmed me. In my convent school in Chennai, I had been at the top of the first and second standards. Most of what Miss Wabash taught in our Pittsburgh classroom, I’d learned from my grandfather before starting school, but every time I raised my hand, she said, Oh my god, enough! Let somebody else answer.

  “Miss Wabash wouldn’t do that to you.” Amma sounded desperate. “She gives you those extra maths problems. I know you like those. On back-to-school night she was so welcoming. You’re lying.” Perhaps Amma was thinking of all the times over the last few months when she’d caught me stuffing cookies into my mouth because I’d missed lunch, hiding in the bathroom. I’d lied then, in spite of the crumbs around my mouth.

  “I’m not lying!” I insisted, frantic now. “Why don’t you believe me?”

  I could imagine it so clearly, standing in the garbage can, my feet hidden by five crumpled papers, two apple cores—one red and one green—the stink of half a tuna fish sandwich. Half of a one vibrating. “It happened over and over. And she makes me recite the times tables while I stand there. Because she thinks I’m a show-off.” Of course, it was freckle-faced Bobby Jamison and a band of boys who’d called me a show-off at lunchtime while making me recite the times tables, which I’d known for years, and mimicking my accent, but this fact was only a trivial detail now, as were the after-school games of cops and robbers Bobby and I played after we arrived in the States. It seemed truer that it was Miss Wabash who never said anything when they teased me about my lunches, Miss Wabash who made me feel forgotten because she was in charge.

  “I thought she was trying to help you with maths? You love numbers,” Amma said. The rain pelted the windows.

  “No, she just wanted to make fun of me.” I pushed away the memory of Miss Wabash recommending a novel about an Indian girl she thought I might like to get from the school library and the mixed feelings it stirred in me, both gratitude for the gesture and resentment that she assumed I’d only be interested in Indians. I plunked down on the hard cot in the living room where I slept and flipped through my numerology book as the cook prepared dinner.

  When my father returned from visiting his old IT classmates, I ran to hug him. As I wrapped my arms around his neck, Amma emerged from the kitchen and told him what Latha had said.

  “The world has gone mad,” Appa said. He pulled me from his neck and studied my face. “Is this true?”

  I bit my lip. “Yes.”

  “No, I can’t believe Miss Wabash could be so cruel,” Amma said. “Americans know that Indians are not behind that attack.”

  “White people know no such thing. Anyone dark could be a terrorist in their minds. And at work, there’s been a chill for the past few months. I’ve told you that.”

  Amma looked away, and then she said, “Well, that could be anything. Maybe it’s just a bad fit with the office.”

  I had heard them talking about the chill my father experienced at work before that night—although we’d all lived there the same amount of time, they saw two different Americas. Amma with her fawn-colored skin believed that the white graduate students saw her as their equal and that they made a place for her, while Appa with his blue-black skin was convinced that a number of white Americans in his program were racists who saw him as inferior. Later I would look back and realize I had taken something away from my mother that night—a confidence in the dream that brought us to America—and she never quite got it back again.

  At the dinner table that night, Thatha asked, “Why these long faces?” He looked right at me.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. My grandfather had criticized my parents over the last few dinners, telling them they shouldn’t have moved to the States, and that they should come home.

  Amma answered for me, “We’re just talking about how the world is a mess.” Before she hid her face inside a teacup, I saw her blanch with anxiety.

  Appa began talking quickly about the terrorist attack at the Parliament House in New Delhi. Later I would understand that they were trying to avoid getting another lecture from my grandfather. “We’re discussing the suicide vest and these morons that blow themselves up for ideological reasons.”

  More talk about the rise of terrorism and violence in the world today, the clatter of their voices rising as they momentarily forgot about me and what I’d said. “You ignore the way America bullies other countries, the way it has supported fanatics for its own ends,” my grandfather said. “No country deserves 9/11, but as Noam Chomsky said, it is only in children’s stories that power is used wisely to destroy evil. I’m not looking forward to living in a country like that.”

  “What would a pro
fessor of linguistics know about terrorism? And if you would take better care of your health, you wouldn’t have to,” Amma retorted.

  While mopping the spicy orange molaga podi with my dosa, I read the numerology book again. I brought the book with me when we went to have snacks and tea with my father’s sister, and when we went to an older cousin’s wedding on the penultimate day of our trip, but no matter how many times I reread the book, there seemed to be no numbers to explain my lie, or what would happen because of it.

  ***

  We brought my grandfather with us when we returned to Pittsburgh. This was just days before the Indian government announced it would lay landmines along its border with Pakistan. In America, pundits were exploring who was to blame for missing all the signs that 9/11 would occur. We were detained longer than other passengers at customs in the airport, and I caught Appa looking at Amma as if to say I told you so. “Where you coming from?” asked the rough-spoken blond man at the counter. “No trips to the Middle East while you were there?” He dumped out the bags of clothes from the tailor’s, my mother’s turmeric creams and gold jewelry, the cowrie shell souvenirs they’d brought for friends, the sealed bags of seedai and jars of Latha’s homemade lemon pickles. He searched thoroughly, and then we had to pack everything back in the bags while the passengers behind us grumbled.

  In front of our tiny rented house in Squirrel Hill, the pale January sky burned whiter than it had in Mandaveli, and my red plastic boots sank deep into the snow on the front lawn. I walked into the foyer and set down my suitcase. It looked exactly as we left it, furnished entirely by our American landlord because my parents were too busy working on their graduate degrees to make it feel like ours. But the rooms smelled strange, like a doppelganger family had been living there in our absence, cooking their curries and burning our sandalwood incense.