by Tony D'Souza
“Do you really want to give her a name from your family?”
“What about your mother? She was nice to me the year after I finished with the Peace Corps and lived in your home.”
“My mother didn’t trust at first that a white woman would make a good wife for a Konkan. We had our ideas about white women then.”
“I know that.”
“She also wasn’t very happy about that gold.”
“Well she’s happy about it now. Tell me another name, Sam. I want you to have a say in it.”
“It is not my place to have a say.”
“Sam, no matter what, I know that you will be more of a father to her than Lawrence could ever be, just as you’ve been to Francisco.”
“Lawrence will always be her only father.”
“I want you to tell me a name.”
My uncle was quiet on the couch a long time, his legs folded, the grandfather clock keeping time. The shadows on the walls were tall things now, but neither my uncle nor my mother went to turn on a light. My uncle said, “The only name I can think of is Sabitha.”
“Who was Sabitha?”
“No one. A girl I played with. I was a small boy, she was a neighbor’s daughter. We played in the gutter with the pigs. Later, her family moved to Mangalore, and I never saw her again. I don’t even know what her father did, or their last name. When I opened that sweetmeats shop in Chikmagalur, I called it Sabitha. Workmen painted that name above the shutters for me with blue paint. Those were the best times for me. Two good years after you and Babu left. Everyone came and played carom in my shop and listened to my music. Then my father told me I must come here, and that was the end of it.”
“Sabitha is a pretty name.”
“She was a pretty girl. A friend. A child of my youth. Every time I saw her I felt happy. That was before everything became about men and women. We were children and we did not think about those things. It was playing only. Playing in the gutter with pigs.”
Listening to them, to the mention of my grandfather, the things my father had told me in his study came into my head, and I said to them as I colored, “Grandfather is a firstborn son, like Dad and I are. Uncle Sam can run and play, but Grandfather had to shoot the sandalwood poachers.”
My mother looked at me like she’d forgotten I was there. She made a face and said, “What do you know about it, Francisco?”
“Grandfather was brave and killed the bad men. Dad told me so.”
“Did your father tell you what happened to the sandalwood after your grandfather killed those men?”
“No,” I said, and looked at her.
“He and his police officers sold it themselves. They didn’t tell the British. They sold coffee and silver and gems, everything they could get their hands on. How else do you think he could afford to buy your grandmother all of her gold? Your father has a very selective memory, Francisco. He chooses what parts of stories to remember. Remember that when he tells you things. Your grandfather cheated the Hindus and the British both. And he was smart to do it. When the British left, they didn’t leave him with anything, they didn’t even tell him, ‘Thank you.’ And the Hindus remembered all the bad things your grandfather had done to them. They came to the house and wanted to burn it down. They wanted your father and your uncles and everyone to live on the street. But your grandfather gave them back their gems, and they let him start again as a clerk. But they took away his badge and his gun. Ask your father about that someday.”
“Don’t do these things, Denise.”
“I don’t want Francisco to turn out as screwed up as them, Sam.”
“Francisco is too young for these things.”
“Not if Lawrence has already started him in on it.”
“Your life here is because of all of those things, too.”
“You don’t think I think about that?” my mother said.
My uncle carried me up to bed. He tucked me in, and lay beside me on the covers. He petted my hair and sang “E puri kon achi” in his soft voice. Then he told me a story while I closed my eyes. He said, “One time, Francisco, the Hindus came to our house after the British left, and we watched them from the windows with our mother because we were scared. Some Hindus had done bad things to the people who had helped the British. Gandhi told them that they must not do bad things, but some of them were very angry and they did not listen to him. They killed people. They hung the children from the trees. When the Hindus came to our house, my father went out in his lungi and met them at the gate.
“‘Santan D’Sai, where are your Britishers now?’ they yelled. ‘All the time that they were here, you were very bad to us. Now we have come to make you remember what you did.’
“Grandfather folded his arms. Though the Hindus were very many, he was not afraid. He had never been afraid of Hindus, so why should he be now? That is what your grandfather is like. He said to them, ‘My family is inside. Whatever we have is between only us. I never touched the slightest hair on your children’s heads. Whatever you must do, then do it to me here before my children’s eyes. But you will not come into my home and touch my children so long as I am alive.’
“The Hindus began to quarrel. Some of them wanted to shoot your grandfather right then. I know that if your grandfather had shown them any fear, they would have killed him. That is what people are like, Francisco. But Grandfather was not afraid of them, and so they became confused. Some of the Hindus said, ‘These Konkans have been helping the Europeans steal from us ever since the very first Portuguese. We have had enough of these Konkans. Especially this one. No matter who is watching, this Konkan should die right here.’ But others among them said, ‘If we kill him, then we will be as bad as the British have been to us.’
“We all watched from the window, Francisco. We were all very frightened for our father. What had we known until then but that we were Konkans and the Hindus were Hindus? We did not know any of these things they were saying. Even now, I don’t know what is true. But what we did know was that we loved our father. We began to pray to the Virgin Mary that the Hindus would go away.
“They spit on Grandfather, they spit betel-nut juice on his lungis so that it was stained red, and he would never wear it again. But they did not kill him. They gathered our pigs, the pigs of all the Konkans of Chikmagalur, and drove them into the forest, where the tigers would eat them. Konkans have always been allowed to keep pigs, Francisco, but after the British left, the Hindus came and drove them away to teach us a lesson because they said we had been mean to them.”
“Were we mean to the Hindus, Uncle Sam?”
“Everyone is mean to everyone, Francisco. But everyone also loves everyone, even though they don’t know it. The British had not been good to the Hindus, and the Konkans had helped them do it. But the Hindus had been mean to the Konkans before the British came, so when the British asked us to be their officers, what choice did we have? The Hindus made our lives very hard for a time after the Britishers left. I was very young, four, five, the age that you are now. We used to have all the fine things. But then we were hungry.
“One day, your grandfather was begging rice for us from the Hindus all up and down the streets. He did not have his uniform anymore, and he went about in his lungi like any pushcart driver. Grandfather came to the house of a Hindu whom he had once beaten with his baton and put in jail. Who knows why? Maybe the Hindu had been a bad man, maybe not. He said to Grandfather from his gate, ‘Oh, Santan D’Sai, how does it feel now?’ ‘It does not feel good,’ your grandfather told him, ‘but my wife and children are hungry, and they do not deserve to be hungry when it was I who did the things.’ The Hindu said, ‘But the things you did made your family fat while my wife and children were skinny,’ and Grandfather said, ‘Everything belongs to you now. I only want to feed my children.’
“That Hindu had been beaten by Grandfather’s own hand. Why should he have given Grandfather anything? But he gave Grandfather a sack of rice, and we were able to eat. Then the terrible
anger of those times began to pass. And the Konkans were still there. Do you know what I am trying to tell you, Francisco?”
“No, Uncle.”
“We must always be good, no matter what has happened to us. And we must remember that it is easy to become bad.”
“Am I good or bad, Uncle Sam?”
“You are good, Francisco.”
“And Grandfather?”
“He only wanted to feed his family.”
“Like a firstborn son.”
“That’s right.”
“Like Dad is.”
“That’s exactly right, old man.”
My mother gave birth to my sister in the dead of winter, just after the first of the year. The world was white with snow. My uncle Les had come from Tucson to stay with us for the holidays, and he gave me a rattlesnake’s rattle to keep in the drawer of my nightstand for good luck, like he said the red Indians in Arizona did. He was there when my father drove my mother to the hospital to have the baby. After the baby had come and she and my mother were resting, my father took me and my uncles to the Victoria Station restaurant in Niles that was made out of old train cars. We had a room of a car to ourselves, and my father and uncles drank whiskeys and ate steaks and ribs. The waitress brought the ribs on metal platters to the table, and they were long and curved things, covered in so much barbecue sauce that she tied a plastic bib around my neck so I wouldn’t get sauce on my shirt. I still did.
My uncle Sam sat beside me and was very quiet, while my uncle Les and my father were very loud. They kept standing up together to sing that song I knew, “E puri kon achi!” “Whose daughter is she?” My uncle Sam sat in his chair and didn’t sing. “What’s the matter with you, Samuel?” my uncle Les said to him. “It’s time to celebrate. E puri kon achi! E puri kon achi!”
My father held my uncle Les around the shoulders and said, “All of Samuel’s mistakes are keeping him in that chair. He regrets not marrying now. He regrets not having kids. Come on, Samuel, stand up with us and let it go. E puri kon achi! There is a new Konkan daughter in the world. It is time to sing!”
My uncle Sam wiped his mouth on his red napkin. He went and stood with his brothers, and they draped their arms over each other’s shoulders as they sang the song. Soon, even my uncle began to sing and smile. The three of them kicked up their feet, and their drinks sloshed out of their glasses.
“E pu-ri, e pu-ri, e puuur-ee! E pu-ri kon ah-chi?”
My sister was named Elizabeth Sabitha D’Sai. Elizabeth after the queen of England so that she would have an American name. And my mother insisted on Sabitha to remember India by, the name of my uncle Sam’s sweetmeats shop, the happiest time of his life. “Whose daughter is she?” my father and uncles sang. The waitress ignored their singing as she brought them drinks long into the night.
PART 2
The Konkans
My uncle Sam took long drives through Chicago that spring after the snow had melted and the first crocuses had pushed up from the thaw in their blues and yellows in the city’s window boxes: meandering and meaningless journeys up and down Lake Shore Drive, along the Kennedy out to O’Hare, to the South Side, where he didn’t belong and didn’t care that he didn’t, and even beyond the lights of the city and onto the straight and dark highways of the Illinois prairie, where he belonged even less. Last year’s corn stubble stretched out on either side as far as the eye could see. Perhaps it was the wandering spirit of the Konkans rising up in him, but perhaps it was something else. He liked to sit in his car in the gravel lot at the O’Hare fence where lovers went at night to watch the planes thunder up from the tarmac like ponderous birds, he liked to turn off his car on the shoulders of rural highways and look at water towers standing up against the fading light of evening like monuments surrounded by the electric susurrus of crickets. Whatever his brothers were doing in their places in America, whatever the rest of his blood was doing in the dirt roads of the Konkan Coast, there was my uncle Sam in his car, the stars above him and full of meaning, at thirty, trying to listen to the world from his place in it.
No longer did he sing and dance the way he had when he arrived here, no longer did he get himself involved in adventures with pigs and journeys to pick up Konkans who appeared out of the woods at that obscure intersection in northern Vermont, and he became absent again from our house. My mother called him now and again, but she had changed, too. The labor had exhausted her, as did the nursing of my sister.
It was during this time that my mother woke up one morning while the rest of us slept. It was night still, really, and the windows were open onto the new spring, and what woke my mother at a time when she was otherwise hard to wake was the smell of the lilac bushes flowering in our yard. The syrupy thickness came to her like a scent from India. All those smells that India had been: the fish stink from the morning market, the roasting almonds, the dung of the field buffalo, the perspiration of herself and all those people under the tropical sun in the humidity of the monsoon. And the flowers, of course, too many to ever hope to name, the jacaranda and hydrangeas and bougainvillea and frangipani, the blossoms of the orange and lemon trees along the streets of the town, the hibiscus. The lush scent of those lilacs in our yard woke my mother into the person she had been in India, a white girl on a one-speed iron bicycle riding through all those milling men to teach poor women in the Hindu and Muslim shantytowns how to build smokeless ovens.
What had she really taught those women, my mother wondered in the dark room, what had she taken away from them? India, nearly a decade removed, somehow felt like a grand thing that she had heard about happening to someone else. Here now, she ran her fingers along the wall to the hallway, to the bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light, and a bleary, bloated woman looked back at her from the mirror.
How could this be her face? How could she be this person? In her mind, she saw herself as someone else: that girl on that bicycle doing all of those brave things. It would be better in the day, but right now this face made her hate herself. Why had she ever lost faith in that girl? Why had she ever given that girl up? That she deserved the memories she had, that she’d ever been arrogant enough to think that she deserved any happiness in this world could not be justified by this ugly face. This ugly face deserved what it got, and there would be no more happiness for it—only fleeting moments with its children in its task of getting them raised. The thought of what she’d done with my uncle was a nasty thing, as nasty as this face was with its bloated lines, the arrogant act of someone who had thought she was prettier than everyone else, when in fact she was not. My mother turned out the light, laid herself again in bed beside my father, who snored loudly from the drinking that had put him to sleep. My mother lay there until the yellow dawn crept down the walls of the room. My father’s alarm clock came to life with the voices of the news of the world, and my sister, in her bassinet, lifted her arms to mewl and grope at the morning.
“Did you sleep?” my father said as he rubbed his eyes.
“Yes, Lawrence, I slept a bit.”
“Did Elizabeth cry?”
“You know that she did.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“She didn’t cry long.”
“I’ll dress and feed Francisco.”
“I would appreciate that.”
My mother was as full of stories as my uncle was. There was a story she loved to tell about herself, a story from when I was a baby. She would tell this story when she drank, at off moments at a table of people, to friends she’d have in later life, to women from the neighborhood, to me, when the wheel of conversation swung to her and she knew she was expected to reveal herself.
My mother’s eyes would light up as she’d remember, she’d smile, she’d lift her hands from her lap to illustrate the story’s movements. My mother had long fingers that would have been good for playing piano, had life given her the chance to do that. But life didn’t, and so those fingers conducted her minuets of the spoken word instead.
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sp; The story went like this: In those early years in America, on Nelson Street, when there was no money and she lived in a house purchased with smuggled gold with her husband who was still more Indian than American, though he wouldn’t have admitted it, where she would soon have a baby in the bassinet, and two wild boys from India living in her basement, my mother rode her bicycle. It was a three-speed Schwinn cruiser, green with sparkles in the paint, with a basket and bell that my father had bought for her because he was ashamed that they couldn’t afford a car. And even once they could afford a car, my mother still went everywhere on that bike.
In the fall and spring, she rode her bicycle to the Nettlehorse Public School, where she taught second grade, with her books, lesson plan, and lunch in a bag in the basket. And on weekends, and all summer long, she rode up and down Belmont, through the DePaul campus, even along the lake, to see the people going about their lives in this American world, which she still didn’t feel a part of, though life had already made its decision about that.
She’d ride her bike to see the Mexican men in their wicker hats pushing their carts with the bells on the handles and selling shaved ice corner to corner, the girls in braids skipping rope, the hustle of traffic, the trees, the young people of those days on the sidewalks holding hands in their long hair and sunglasses and looking in the windows of the music stores and incense shops. She liked to ride to the totem pole at Belmont Harbor and look at the carved animals squatting on top of one another, she liked to ride to the Lincoln Park Zoo and toss bread to the ducks in the rookery. After I was born and old enough to sit in the yellow plastic seat that my uncle Sam had bought and attached to the back of the bike, my mother would pedal through the streets in her jeans and T-shirt with the same abandon she had before, and she had more time to do it now because she wasn’t a teacher any longer.
One summer day, me asleep behind her in my bonnet, she rode us past Wrigley Field. The crowds in their blue hats and Cubs shirts were leaving the stadium through the turnstiles, and the game had certainly been another loss despite the slugging heroics of Billy Williams. The crowd’s revelry didn’t admit this defeat, of course, as Cub fans never will.