by Sejal Shah
“Why,” I asked my brother, “did you like the film so much?”
“So many messages. Look at the title. Everyone has problems underneath. Just because you are smart doesn’t mean you can work everything out yourself.”
Both my brother-in-law and Conrad’s brother in the film died suddenly. The visual that struck me the most in Ordinary People was the kitchen table, shown repeatedly. At one time, it would have been set for four, but now it had three place settings. The way a family must rearrange itself from a rectangle or square or circle into a triangle, into an ellipse, something oblong, something lopsided. Symmetry and shape broken, and so altered.
After we watched the film that night, I mentioned my brother and his love of the movie. I mentioned my brother-in-law, that it was now seventeen years since he passed. A woman I had spoken to only briefly before, sitting on the couch next to me, told us that her sister was in a psychiatric hospital. She and I stayed in the living room talking until late, after everyone else had left. We still stay in touch now.
Two of my graduate school fiction professors at UMass Amherst wrote books about their siblings and their relationships with them. In Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman wrote about his younger brother, who had been sentenced to prison for life without parole. Jay Neugeboren also wrote about his younger brother, who had been in and out of mental institutions and hospitals for most of his life, in his memoir Imagining Robert. Neugeboren once said that your sibling relationships are often your longest primary relationship.
My graduate school years in Massachusetts seemed at the time like an extension of high school or college. (I was not alone in thinking this; several of my classmates not only sensed this about our program but celebrated it—they threw an MFA prom every spring.) Western Massachusetts, also called the Pioneer Valley, had the nickname the Happy Valley. Everyone was aspiring, educated, liberal, and under forty. We were always at bars or in bookstores, in class or at readings, at concerts or in coffee shops. We had time. I had time, but the most severe depression of my life flattened me in that most picturesque valley.
A few years later, LeeAnne, my closest friend from UMass, took her life at thirty-six. She had been depressed. She had been an older sister to me. Two other friends from UMass have died in the past few years, at forty and forty-two, both in wrenching circumstances. Last year I married my husband, who lost his only brother when they were both still in their twenties. None of this is extraordinary; everyone loses someone—everyone will.
To say their names—this is one way to keep the people you love alive:
LeeAnne Smith White. The eldest of seven. We went to the Brimfield Antique Flea Market together and brought home too much stuff. We liked to drink vanilla au laits on Fridays after teaching our composition classes. She called my brother, worried, when I was depressed.
Mary Margaret Reda. The youngest of five. She introduced me to restorative yoga (you could exercise and lie down at the same time—brilliant!). Our best friends married each other in Maine. She wrote her dissertation on quiet students.
James Wright Foley. The eldest of five. He had the best laugh. We both loved Junot Díaz’s book Drown. Jim had this restlessness and this charm; he listened hard when you talked. He became a conflict journalist, reporting on the lives of civilians. He was kidnapped and later murdered in Syria.
Mahesh Venkatesh Singaravelu. The elder of two. He was friends with everyone. He threw parties in high school when his parents went to India. We knew three people in common. I never went to those parties. We never met. This is my start.
[2016]
Ring Theory
YELLOW GOLD
Six months after my husband tied an ornate gold mangalsutra around my neck and friends showered us with rice, I chose a wedding ring. Under the noontime Chennai sun, the center stone glowed, a cabochon dome. Inside the store, the ring spoke quietly: reserved, a dark, almost dull magenta, set with two tiny diamonds. Yellow gold, typical Indian gold, South Indian temple-style setting. I picked this ring halfway around the world from where we live in Rochester, at a store in Chennai my parents-in-law have frequented for years. They designed my wedding necklace here and bought the other jewelry I wore, all of it presented as part of the ceremony. I had not chosen any of this adornment; it was, per tradition, my in-laws’ choice.
ARCHITECTURAL
Three years earlier, I flew to New Mexico for a friend’s birthday, a week after my own. We had once been roommates, long been friends. We spent one afternoon in Santa Fe, wandering the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—the reason my friend chose New Mexico. O’Keeffe was a strong woman, an individual, an artist we both admired. In the gift shop, a particular designer’s rings called to both of us—sturdy, each different, each with an architectural quality. I am usually drawn to simpler, smaller jewelry, though larger pieces look sharper and suit me. My friend and I deliberated over who would buy what, but different rings called to each of us. I found mine: thick-banded and modernist, a statement in a way I don’t tend to make. They were inexpensive: we marked our fortieth birthdays with jewelry that cost less than forty dollars.
Now my New Mexico ring is discolored from wear and water. I wore it every day for the two years I taught ninth graders. I wore it during the two months my grandmother was in the hospital and in rehab for her stroke; I did not remove it when I washed my hands at school or in restaurants or at the hospital.
This ring had presence, declaring itself without shouting. It evoked the moon, the sun, an egg, a shield; a talisman in motion, a pendulum at the moment of pause.
SILVER
Later that week, my friend and I drove south, to White Sands National Monument. She had signed us up for a moonrise walk there, and we treaded and twirled, taking photos of shadows, across all that sparkling (in sun) then glowing (in dusk) sand (was it once an ocean). It was a desert: beautiful-barren—stark. The dunes recalled salt flats I had seen in Sicily, a lifetime ago in my twenties, wearing a silver ring from Mexico I’ve since lost. The dunes and the silver ring reminded me of all that had slipped by unnoticed, all that had happened, and had not happened, since then. What we knew or didn’t know about friendship, about time; about which jewelry lasts and for how long; about which friendships last and for how long; about how meaning morphs with age; about age itself.
HAMMERED
A few years ago, I left New York City, unwilling, when it came down to it, to hustle. I had not found a partner, not secured a book contract or tenure. All the golden handcuffs. But I didn’t want to stay on the treadmill or in the water, treading, waiting for life to begin. I did not want to lean in. I opted out. I landed in India, and traveled for a few months. Then I moved back home. Before all that, I threw a ring into the East River—a hammered silver one I had bought for the interview for the job I had just left. It was my longest relationship, that job. After six years, leaving was my divorce.
MANGALSUTRA
In western New York, I marry a teacher who had grown up two miles from me, just outside Rochester. We live here, ten miles from the shore of Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes. His parents chose the mangalsutra and the particular design of the pendant. He is South Indian, I am North Indian, and we are Hindu. He is Tamilian, I am Gujarati, we are ourselves. We place flowers in water, we perform rituals at the temple, at home; we are told to gaze at the full moon, to drink in the moonlight, and there are special full-moon pujas. He is not an artist, but it is an art of sorts—marriage—learning a way to live together.
NEW MEXICO RING
I usually vacillate, take time to decide. Yet that first ring was easy, like something out of Georgia O’Keeffe’s world, harsh in its beauty and also elegant. An amulet, a protection, a shield, a decorated sword: proud, confident—not bashful. What a strong woman would wear when she’s single and has just lost her job. And maybe she hasn’t published her first book, but who’s counting?
Is it strange to have such a strong feeling about a ring? When I decided to marry my husban
d, no ring leapt out and said, “Here. This. Here I am.” Even after I got married. Perhaps part of it was that no engagement or wedding ring I tried on or found looked right with my New Mexico ring on.
I did not want him to choose a ring. “I’ll be wearing it,” I said. How could someone else choose it?
BRASS RING
During the year we were engaged, I wore a slim, inexpensive, hexagonal brass ring made by a local designer we knew, bought by my husband at a shop I liked. Though I did not choose it, I wore the ring on my left pinky, and it stamped a moss green band around the base of that finger, ghostly, oxidizing. But the whole time I was engaged, that whole year, I wore my New Mexico ring on my middle finger and an almost invisible band on my pinky finger. And no other rings. Nothing on my ring finger.
I consult the dictionary. A brass ring (informal) refers to “wealth, success, or a prestigious position considered as a goal or prize, e.g.: few of those who reach for the brass ring of the presidency achieve it.”
A month before my husband presented me with the brass ring (though we had already decided to marry), my in-laws hosted a ceremony in their home, according to South Indian tradition. This event proclaimed our engagement: a document signed by our parents and my brother and sister-in-law; a priest from Toronto; a fire ceremony, chanting, lunch, many flowers; our immediate families and my grandmother, aunt, nephews, cousin, and cousin-in-law present. No rings. I wasn’t even sure I wanted one.
Getting engaged and married is considered an achievement in the countries and cultures to which I belong by birth and ancestry, by nationality and ethnicity, by language and skin, by blood and memory, by gender and age. I did not want getting married to be the greatest achievement of my life.
TIFFANY RING
A month before the wedding, my sister-in-law and I ducked into Tiffany’s, an unplanned side trip at the Providence Place Mall. I slipped on solitaires and halos and snapped a few photos to send my fiancé. Oddly thrilling, that sea-green, blue-green store! But eleven thousand dollars? Ridiculous, obscene, lacking imagination. Ostentatious, ethically dubious, suburban, traditional, not to mention tacky, buying into the status quo.
Engagement rings seem to be about signaling how much your fiancé is able or willing to spend. I didn’t want to signal anything. My family originally hails from Gujarat, India. Gujaratis have traditionally worked in the diamond industry; some of my relatives are still in it. Diamonds are important in our culture—a symbol of status. But I never liked diamonds; I wanted something less obvious and more artistic. But after the wedding I began to scroll through designs. My husband told me about the four C’s: carat, cut, color, and clarity. I had never bothered to learn anything about diamonds. They had seemed so superficial. And later so attractive.
Months after I was married, I couldn’t stop staring at women’s hands at the gym, in yoga classes; at readings, at parties, at bars. Blood diamonds be damned. They sparkled. Turns out I wasn’t immune to noticing that. And sparkly: I could see how the parade could topple a person.
TOTEM
I lost the card that came with my New Mexico ring but searched Google until I dredged up the name. The designer, Christophe Poly, is Montreal-based. The rings, unique and particular, require care. Wear them in water, you ruin them.
Right now, my hands are swollen, and I can wear no rings. But I could never wear both, and that has been hardest: I knew this to be true the day we bought the wedding ring, and even more when I wore it all the days that followed.
When I bought the New Mexico ring, I chose myself, my life, without needing to prove anything to anyone. I had already failed, and still, I was happy.
Nothing has felt right in terms of an engagement or wedding ring. I debated returning to my New Mexico ring: sometimes adornment can serve as both talisman and totem, speaking for who we are. Then months pass, and we can never wear a thing again, or not for a while, leaving it to lie unworn and forlorn. Yet for a time, a pendant or ring can hold such power: an emblem filled with energy, force, intention, love.
METAL
Once I married, I found it almost impossible to be the self I had previously forged. Isn’t the point of an engagement ring or wedding ring that it should trump your other rings? It is the thing that shows, that is meant to be noticed. Recently, I slipped on a plain band, something cheap I found in my jewelry drawer. It suited me. My husband agreed. A nondescript metal. I didn’t want the fact of my being married to be the most noticeable thing about me.
The problem is I have never been simple. Though I knew my husband was the right one, I never felt that way about a ring. Now my hands are swollen, and I wear no rings. Not swollen from pregnancy, just mysterious swelling, from punching these words, perhaps.
AMULET
In India, I found a quiet-eyed cabochon, a cipher. The Burmese ruby has no flash, no game—it is a non-neon digital crimson, polished, not cut, modest and understated. Too understated? We would leave Chennai in a few days and I was afraid if I did not choose a ring there, when I had a deadline, I might never do it.
I wear my wedding ring when I go out, and the mangalsutra to the temple and sometimes when I dress up. During the day, when writing or at the gym or preparing to teach, I wear nothing, my hands clicking away on keys, typing. No nail polish, no rings.
Two years after the wedding, I call my father-in-law to ask what the mangalsutra means, why it matters to them—to my mother-in-law, especially—that I wear it. I know it identifies me as married. But I had never seen the pendant’s design before, nor would I have chosen it. “It’s a representation of Ganesh,” he says. The remover of obstacles. To protect one from harm. To protect one’s husband from harm. Who wouldn’t want that? I will wear my necklace more.
In a silver dish, the New Mexico ring and my wedding ring sit side by side. My mangalsutra lies coiled in my dresser drawer cupped in a hollowed-out gourd. I look at them; they look back at me. I wait for them to speak; I wait for the next talisman to enter my life, to be summoned, to appear—and to remind me of what I do not wish to forget.
[2017]
Saris and Sorrows
We had not wanted an elaborate wedding. We wanted our friends and family present, our communities. Our wedding was big, but not for the reasons you/Americans might assume (Bollywood spectacle, large families, over the top). Only a few relatives on my husband’s side attended—most of them live in India and Malaysia and could not be present. My extended family is small and in the United States. All of them, most crucially my grandmother, attended our wedding. We married in our hometown where our parents had lived for forty years, and they had their lists of who had to be invited; they had attended the weddings of all of their friends’ children. I had close friends in each of the places I lived—when single and moving for work, you have to make your own family.
My parents and in-laws recognized each other from the Hindu Temple but had never met. They belonged to different communities (Gujarati, Tamilian) with few overlaps in their guest lists. A Hindu wedding does not join two individuals, but instead two families, witnessed by their communities. To include both of our communities meant a small wedding was impossible.
My father-in-law created a profile for his son on Tamil-matrimony.com, a marriage site made for people of Tamil origin. My in-laws worried as the years went by. R turned thirty, then thirty-five.
Father-in-law in an email to me:
I discarded the information once he got engaged. Basically, it spelled out the bio data like date of birth, age, height, color of complexion, birth star (anusham), raisi (virchigam), educational qualifications, current career.
Personal information: soft natured, family oriented, helpful nature and concern for the deprived, tennis player and coach. Future bride’s requirements: well educated preferably with a master’s degree, can peruse [pursue]* a career, family oriented, and tall. Preferably the birth stars should match.
That my in-laws don’t have parents or siblings in the United States made them even more con
cerned. Five years ago, R and I met at work not through a matrimonial—at the school where he had taught for many years and where I was a new teacher. He saw my photo and bio before we met, in the new faculty hires email sent to everyone at our school. He told me he made a point of meeting me. R kept stopping by my classroom and suggesting that we catch up. I said sure, but thought, How can we catch up? We don’t even know each other! Maybe it’s the “You’re Indian, I’m Indian, let’s have lunch and I’ll give you the lay of the land thing.” Later I found out it was the “Are you single because I want to ask you on a date” thing. Not the Indian thing. Less than two months after our first date, we knew. I made a list of possible bridesmaids.
We met with two separate wedding planners. I had never once in my life thought about colors or themes. My father-in-law made the appointments. My idea of a theme: we’re getting married! The colors: bright, like any Indian wedding. Gold jewelry and many bangles—always many bangles. As we left the office of one planner, my father-in-law shook his head. “Too much money. I can do it better than that.” My father-in-law had worked for Xerox in its heyday, and as one small part of his job he planned their annual holiday party for over a thousand employees. In the end, we hired no one. My father-in-law planned our wedding. He knew he would do a better job.
There is no such thing as a typical Indian wedding. Though I married another Indian, my wedding did not resemble my parents’ or any of my friends’ ceremonies.