by Tony D'Souza
That my mother was made of unusual things should be obvious in her desire to go to India, to marry an Indian. Her childhood had developed these things in her. My mother’s mother was a redhead named Margaret Klein, a second-generation American of German descent, a waitress, an alcoholic. But before any of that, it was my grandfather on that side who had started my grandmother’s troubles. The boy next door, he took my grandmother to the mattress in the building’s basement, where the kids who did that went to do it. She was fourteen. He told her that his long-absent father was Henry Ford’s chauffeur, that he lived on the beach in Florida and was rich. My grandmother believed him.
He was a grade ahead of her in high school, and by the time he left all of them behind for California six years later, my grandmother had three little girls and a senile grandmother to take care of, as well as more spite, resentment, and meanness than any other woman in the neighborhood. In the bars on the way home from work, men complimented her on her hair. She freelanced herself to those men, called them her “boyfriends.”
Not one of my grandmother’s daughters inherited that red hair, but they ended up hating her as vividly as that color. The three girls shared a double bed in a room with their own great-grandmother, the woman who had brought the German genes to America from a fishing village near Hamburg. She also baptized each one of her great-granddaughters Christian in the bathroom sink when their mother could not be bothered. The only good memory my mother had of Detroit was of a balding man named Barry who gave her a teddy bear with a red ribbon around its neck, and who lived with them through a winter until her mother had either suddenly woken up one day and realized that a man named Barry Weinberg was a dirty Jew, or his money had run out, or she had simply gotten tired of his nagging about her drinking. She threw his clothes out the window.
My mother’s great-grandmother died when my mother was seven, and then my mother had to bathe and feed her sisters herself. She inherited her great-grandmother’s bed, as well as the one secret that her great-grand had told her when she’d been small: their real last name wasn’t Klein, which meant “little,” but Kleinschrot, which meant “little pebble.” They’d made her shorten her name when she had entered the country. Even my mother’s mother didn’t know that.
When my mother was thirteen, her bones ached from her growth spurt, and she had a terrible time sleeping. So she was awake when a naked man opened the door and stood in it. He was backlit. My mother knew her mother was passed out somewhere. The girls were asleep in their bed; she could hear their breathing. There was no one in this world who could save her from this man. He weaved across the room, kneeled on the bed, licked her neck, squeezed her breasts, laid heavily on her, and fell asleep. When she was certain he wouldn’t wake, she inched her way out from under him. She put on her clothes, stuffed her few things in a laundry bag. Her mother was asleep on the couch, her black underwear around her ankles in the tattered room. My mother took the money in her mother’s purse, spent it on a train ticket to Chicago. My mother’s great-aunt on her father’s side took her in. The old woman grudged her every instant of those years, and my mother’s only prayer was that the old woman would not die before she could manage to get herself through school. The old woman didn’t. She saw my mother all the way through a bachelor’s degree in education.
My mother was a freshman at the University of Michigan in ’60 when Kennedy made his speech in the middle of the night from the steps of the student union inaugurating the idea of the Peace Corps, and nearly six years later, after a brief stint as a typist at Standard Oil in Chicago, she was in India herself, wearing a white sari and teaching low-caste women how to make smokeless ovens in Chikmagalur. My grandfather, the police commissioner of that place, invited her to dinners on Sunday evenings, and he sent a telegram to his son Lawrence in Bombay saying, “Get down here, Babu. There is a white girl dining at our house.” My father wooed her with walks along the stream that ran through town, and it wasn’t a hard thing to woo my mother because my mother was ready for that. She loved India, wanted to tie herself to it with a family of her own.
In the spring of 1969, my father and mother came to America, to her great-aunt’s, where they stayed for three weeks before buying the house on Nelson Street. My mother taught second grade at Nettlehorse Public School, while my father went on the job market. Despite all his bravado in India, his job search in America staggered on for six frightening months. Later, after he’d been at Hinton & Thompson a year, they had their honeymoon in Mexico. At Christmastime 1972, they made a trip to Detroit in their first car, a secondhand Pontiac Executive with a leaky oil pan. Her mother met them at her door.
“You’re the one who left us, Denise. Even without him, do you think I would let you in?”
My mother took a last look at her mother, whom she’d never see again, to remember the lines of her aging face in case she might forget them. Then she turned my father around by his elbow. As they walked back to the car in the cold, my mother was pleased because she was done with those people, and my father quietly realized that even in marrying a white woman, he had married below his caste.
On their first date, my uncle Sam took my mother’s Peace Corps friend Lenore to a basement restaurant at Lincoln and Clark: The House of India. He wore a jacket and tie, and Lenore wore a blue sari she’d brought back with her from her years of service. Between her eyebrows, she’d pasted a saffron bindi, which matched the color of her hair. When he’d picked her up, she had pressed her palms together, bowed her head, and said, “Namaste.” In his car, my uncle lit a cigarette and turned on the radio. There was Chuck Berry and Jefferson Airplane and Steely Dan and the Doors as they drove through the city, and my uncle wanted Lenore to ask him, “You listen to this music?” but she didn’t. They ate mutton curry with their fingers, drank three Kingfishers apiece, and Sam let her talk about India. She had been nervous there, sometimes frightened; she’d had the happiest times of her life. She had been really glad when my mother called. People lost touch so quickly over here.
“And what about right now?” Sam had asked her.
“About right now, Sam?”
“What makes you happy over here?”
Lenore turned her face away for the only time that night, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror beside them. For an instant the bindi on her forehead looked silly even to her. She shook a Camel out of her cigarette purse, lit it, shrugged, and said, “What is there to talk about over here? I clerk for a tort lawyer.”
Would she like to go to the beach, my uncle asked Lenore after dinner. Lenore said she would. They drove again, were quiet in the car, and then Sam pulled in among the line of darkened cars at the North Beach parking lot. There were stars out over the lake. She said, “Sometimes all I can think about is that place.”
Week by week, Lenore called my mother with the details, they talked about my uncle on the phone like girls. Lenore laughed and said to my mother, “Who knows, Denise, after all that we’ve been through, maybe we’ll even be in-laws.”
Sam was exciting for a girl who knew India and could have very little of it here. He knew all the courtship rules Lenore had come to appreciate while living there, and more than that, he could confirm her memories of it, make her believe that she really had been there. Talking to him, she felt that India was still out there as vividly as her memories of it, though it felt so far away. India had teemed with boys like Sam. Failing for him now, Lenore told herself it was fate that one of them should find her here. Besides, Denise was happy.
Lenore loved my uncle’s stories of India. In the car at North Beach on their dates, one of the stories my uncle told Lenore was about the time he’d managed my grandfather’s coffee plantation high in Karnataka’s mountains. It hadn’t been much of a plantation, more of a parcel of terraced land in the forest, and all along the terraces grew Robusta coffee bushes, tended by harijans in rags in the rain.
The mountains had been a different place, full of gods and superstitious Hindus and spirits and nig
ht animals. During his two-year sojourn in the unfinished cinder-block house that my grandfather had had built there, my uncle walked the paths that ran through the terraces of the plantation during the harvest with a flashlight and shotgun at night, to keep bean poachers from stripping the plants. He carried the shotgun loaded, two more shells in the pocket of his shirt, and when he’d hear rustlings in the bushes, he’d slip out of his sandals and stalk the sounds in his bare feet. It was always animals: spotted cats and gazelles, a porcupine, a mongoose. One time he flicked on the light, and all around him were long-horned sambars, their eyes glinting like embers before they turned to leap away.
“Wasn’t it hard to be so far away from people?”
“The harijans were there. But even with them, it was like being alone. Except for the harvest time, I came down to my parents’ house twice a month. But the harvest time was very busy. First, the harijans dried the beans on the cement patios. Everything was green and red. Then they did the shelling and roasting, and the beans turned black as oil. Everything smelled of the flavor of coffee. Then the buyers’ trucks would come. Once the sacks were sewn shut and loaded on the trucks, I would pay the harijans, and even the grandmothers would ride down out of the mountains sitting on top of those sacks. I would sit in the cab with the high castes. After me, my younger brothers went there. It could rain for three days without stopping. There was always mist in the trees. Always I was alone in that house, nothing to do but look at the forest and wonder. My brother Lawrence never went there. At our house in Chikmagalur, he was the only child allowed to drink coffee with my father. But he never saw it grow.”
“Even the cities feel like dreams to me now. Even all those people.”
“Those things happened long ago.”
The first time my uncle made love to Lenore was at the end of July, in her studio apartment in Andersonville. She invited him up, and my uncle sat on her couch in his tie. Lenore gave my uncle a glass of red wine. Then she sat down beside him. The bed was a large thing before them in that small room. How could they talk about anything with that bed standing there? Both of them wanted this; neither knew how to make it start. Cars passed outside in the night like the sound of the waves on the lake.
Lenore breathed deeply, calmed herself, and then she stood and took a photo album down from her shelf, sat on the edge of her bed with it. She patted the place beside her. “Come and look at some pictures with me, Sam.”
Together they leafed through the album’s pages of Lenore’s time in India, of the town in Maharashtra where she had lived. These were all pictures of people my uncle knew, or rather, of people he had never seen, though he’d seen them every day of his life in Chikmagalur. The poor Hindu and Muslim women Lenore had befriended and worked among. All of those men with their arms crossed on their chests who would never know a thing in this world.
Seeing Lenore among those people in the pictures, Sam remembered how strange it had been to see my mother whirling on her bicycle through Chikmagalur’s streets. Who among them hadn’t stopped to look? Even when she’d walked in her saris, in her salwar kameez, her height and white limbs had blotted out the whole world. How tall my mother had seemed at first. A giant white woman come among them like a god.
But looking at the pictures of Lenore now, it was not the white woman who seemed out of place, but the rest of it, the skinny women, the mustached men, the cattle with their humps lying in the road, the bearded Hindu priests in front of their temple. It was India that had become strange, and he closed the album on Lenore’s knees away from that emotion.
“What was the name of this town where you lived?”
“Ahmednagar. Near Poona.”
“I was never north of Goa.”
“I always preferred the south.”
“You have seen more of India than I have.”
“And the south was my favorite part.”
“The south was all I knew.”
Lenore looked at my uncle, took his hand and pressed it to her face. Then she closed her eyes and kissed it. She set the album on the floor, reached and tugged the cord to turn off the lamp.
Lenore was the first white woman my uncle had ever touched in this way. Her breasts, the smoothness of her thighs, her scent, her flavor, even the way she moaned was just the same as other women. But when he’d open his eyes to see his hands on her shoulders, on her waist, he was surprised each time to see how dark his skin looked against hers. Then all these questions would rush into his head just when they didn’t belong there, of race, of worth, of who he was, of who he should and shouldn’t touch. It had never been this way with anyone else. Only with Lenore. In this way, my uncle came to know that secret thing that my father already knew, what it felt like to make love to a white woman.
As they lay together afterward, Lenore said, “I wanted to do this the very first night.”
Sam and Lenore’s affair put a lightness into my mother’s step. She had her nails done and her hair curled. She dusted every inch of the house. Even the meals were elaborate now, Cornish hens with steamed asparagus, poached salmon sprinkled with capers. My father couldn’t help but notice, and finally one Saturday after my uncle had left, he came home from golf and found my mother up on a chair in the kitchen, scrubbing the molding. He set his golf bag on the floor and said, “What is going on, Denise? What is all of this that is suddenly going on with you?”
“Why do you think anything in the world is suddenly going on with me, Lawrence?” my mother had said and smiled.
“You’re acting like you did when we first met.”
“What’s wrong with that? That was a very happy time for me.”
“Please don’t give me one of your history lessons. Simply tell me what is going on in my house.”
My mother hopped off the chair in her rubber gloves. She looked at my father in his golf shoes, his visor, his checkered pants. She said, “Have you completely forgotten how to have fun? So what about you. I called Lenore, and she and Sam have been dating. Things have been going very well for them. Who knows, maybe they are even in love.”
My father looked at my mother a long moment as though trying to figure it out. Then he picked up his golf clubs and carried them downstairs. He didn’t come back up again. Not for dinner and not for bed. My mother decided to ignore it, though maybe she shouldn’t have. If she had gone down to the basement, she would have found my father with a drink in his hand, sitting forward on his couch and scratching his knees, looking at the painting of his lonesome rider, which is what he did when he hatched his plans.
What my father decided was this: My mother should invite Lenore and Sam over on a Saturday night, and he would grill steaks. Then they would all eat and drink wine on the back porch, which he’d recently had screened in. In doing this, my father planned on letting them all know that, firstly, he approved of his younger brother’s dating Lenore, and secondly, that he’d forgiven my uncle for all the difficulties he’d caused when he’d first come to America. Though he couldn’t allow himself to admit it, my father missed my uncle. Calling Sam to the house on the subject of Lenore would allow my father to address the real issue—his relationship with his younger brother—without losing any face as a firstborn son. For as far behind as my father had left India, there were still many very Indian things about him.
Sam and Lenore came in my uncle’s car soon after, on a Saturday evening in late August. My uncle wore a jacket and tie, and Lenore wore a mauve dress. She’d planned on wearing a sari, of course, but my mother had told her not to. All things Indian put my father in a foul mood, especially a white woman in a sari. This was his night to show off his new American screened-in porch. The best thing was to humor him.
My mother wore a blouse and blue jeans as a statement, though she did also wear the pearls my father had given her for their anniversary. My father was dressed for golf. The first of the belly that would come and go over the years could be seen beneath his argyle sweater, and he grimaced as he grilled the meat over coals that
were burning too hot. Around him, the year’s last lightning bugs lifted out of the yard.
On the porch, the others sipped cold retsina, which my father had learned about from his boss, Marshall Caldwaller, a Harvard man whom he admired and emulated, and who had just come back from a sailing vacation in the Greek Isles, where everyone drank that wine. Sam felt stiff and uncomfortable around my father. After one attempt to make conversation at the grill in which my father had grinned and said out of the corner of his mouth, “What about golf, Sam? Have you ever thought about investing in a set of clubs?” Sam said, “All these American sports, Babu, hey? I don’t know about any of it,” and he tossed back his wine and went inside. The way my father had said it felt to my uncle as though my father had really wanted to say, “How do you like it now, little brother, fucking these white women?”
My mother’s latest hobby was music, and on the turntable she brought out from inside, she played exactly one song each from her new Bob Dylan, Francis Faye, Barry Manilow, and John Lennon albums. Then she put on Simon & Garfunkel to remind Lenore of when they had smoked pot at the beach at Goa on their first R & R, how they’d taken off their tops in the moonlight to splash into the warm water of the Indian Ocean with a couple of scruffy American boys who were traveling the world after their tours in Vietnam. My mother had not slept with her boy on their towel on the beach, but she had let him grip her body with his eyes closed as he moaned over and over, “I missed you. I missed you so much.” But Lenore had slept with hers. Later, on the bus back to their very first Indian posting in Hassan, where they shared a two-room functionary’s house so close to the busy market that some old man or other was always prying open their shutters to peek in their windows any time of day or night, which caused them to scream and drop things, like breakfast bowls of morning dal, or glasses of mango lassi, though never their bathing towels, which is what the men were hoping, Lenore had admitted to my mother that it had been her first time with a man. How alive and free she felt away from her family, as though they, and Nebraska, and the Presbyterian Church didn’t exist in the world at all. “I don’t miss them,” Lenore had said on the bus.