by Tony D'Souza
But it was hot, and she stopped at the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shop, took me into her arms from the seat, and leaned the bicycle against the window. She should have locked it up, that was always a part of the story, but she was happy and loved the world and her place in it, no matter how she felt in her continuing culture shock, and she didn’t unwind the lock from around the neck of the seat. She ordered a scoop of Pralines ’n Cream, her favorite, in a cake cone, and she sat at a table with me on her lap in my doughiness. Then she went to work at licking that ice cream.
Through the window, she watched as a white kid in a white T-shirt, his hair greased back in the style of poor white kids of that day, with pimples like a purple rash blooming across his cheeks, looked at her bike a long moment as he passed it. Even though she knew right then that he would steal it, the surety of that fact put a lethargy into my mother that kept her in her seat. Who can know for certain? Maybe she even wanted it to happen. He came back into the window, straddled the bike, stood up on the pedals, and pistoned away. For my mother, it was like watching a film. But she also knew that it wasn’t a film. So she did what she would have done in India or anywhere. She handed me and the cone across the counter to the man in his hat, and dashed out the door in her sneakers to chase the thief.
In India, my mother had had to learn to deal with many things: with being a white woman in a place where white women spread their legs in the dreams of the poor and long-colonized brown men, where men would lick her neck on crowded buses, would get drunk and peer in the windows of her house as they fondled themselves in the folds of their lungi wraps. It had toughened her without making her hate, because my mother had the ability to see the world from outside the reference of her culture and body. White women were held up to those men as the most desirous, the most sexually beautiful women in the world, as well as the most forbidden under the reign of the British. But also in India, seeing herself through Indian eyes, my mother had come to a private acknowledgment of her own physical beauty. India was where she began to love herself.
The rigors of being a white woman in India, coupled with the nightmares of her childhood, made my mother strict in setting her boundaries in the world. She threw her elbows into ribs to make the neck lickers yelp, she slammed shutters on the fingers of the men who had hoped to jack off to her bathing.
My mother ran and ran down those city blocks. The boy on her bicycle did not know that she was running after him, and though her every fiber wanted to shout Thief! Thief! she knew from her time in India not to trust crowds, that a shout for help among unknown people would do little more than turn the people into gawkers, that they would gather and obstruct her way, that they would let the boy know in doing so that he was being pursued. She ran as if fleeing a fire, which maybe in fact she was, and a half a block ahead of her, the boy on her bicycle stopped at the intersection to let the traffic pass. He shook a cigarette out from the pack he kept rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt. Just as he was about to touch the flame of his lighter to the cigarette in his lips, my mother left her feet, her hair unfurling behind her like a cape, and she tackled him. The bike clattered to the curb, the cigarettes scattered like matches, pigeons burst up from the sidewalk, and her body carried his into the street. Taxicabs blared their horns as they swerved away from their heads.
For a moment, my mother held the boy under her on the pavement like a lover. If anything else in the world was happening at that time, my mother didn’t know it. She looked into the boy’s startled eyes, and with a broad smile she said to him, “That’s my bicycle.”
“Lady,” the boy said beneath her, “you are one crazy bitch.” Then he scampered up from underneath her and ran away.
My mother pushed the bicycle back the six blocks to the ice-cream shop. Her elbows were scraped and bleeding, and the people who had stopped to watch looked at her with faces so creased it was as though she was the one who had committed the crime. My mother smiled despite them, because my mother at that moment was proud of herself.
At the ice-cream shop, the man in his hat was spooning me vanilla ice cream from a dish as I sat beside the cash register. People were standing up at every single one of the tables, ice cream melting in their hands. My mother looked at them as though to say, Say something to me. I dare you. None of them did. I looked at my mother, she grinned at me, and I turned to the man and opened my mouth for more ice cream. My mother wiped her hair from her sweating brow, tucked it behind her ears. She said to the ice-cream man, “May I have my son back?”
“Here you go.”
“What about my cone?”
“I’ll get you a new one.”
“I got my bike.”
“You certainly did.”
“Did my boy behave himself?”
“He didn’t make a peep.”
“He’s my kid. My kid and my bike. Just try and let someone take something from me. I like this feeling.”
The idea of ice cream had passed, and my mother put me in the seat and rode us home. As she did, the reality of leaving me with strangers so she could chase a bicycle thief down the street began to settle into her. First she felt ashamed and frightened, and then she felt proud again. All the way home, these emotions alternated in her like the light and shadow of the trees she rode under. At home, she swabbed her abrasions with Mercurochrome in the bathroom, sipped the beer that my uncle Sam came upstairs to offer her. Then she lit a cigarette at the kitchen table and let the last of the emotions of the bicycle thief leave her with the smoke.
“A bicycle is not worth a son,” my uncle Sam said to her, though he was smiling.
“I know that, Sam.”
“Even these cuts aren’t worth it.”
“It wasn’t about the bicycle.”
“I won’t tell Lawrence.”
“Why would you think you had to?”
“You must have frightened that thief badly.”
“He’ll never forget it.”
But life quickly happened, and my mother saw her face in the mirror in the middle of the night in her suburban home in Ridge Lawn, and the tired and thickening woman in it was not her, and the memories of the things she’d done in this life did not seem to be so purely good anymore.
For his part, my uncle Sam had been living in America as though he really wasn’t in it. After my sister’s birth, he was more alone than he had ever felt, and there were many nights when he drove in his car through this strange, green land looking at it as a visitor would, standing later at his darkened kitchen window and contemplating the growing plants of his garden as he let this loneliness settle into him. He did not cry or lament or bemoan his fate over beers into the ears of fellow drinkers at the bars, he did not bare his soul to the priest in the confessional at church. He knew that no one else in the world suffered from his particular brand of shame, and though he was a second son and free from the weight of familial responsibility, he was still beholden enough in his Konkan self to not feel that the role of exile was something he deserved. Yes, he knew that his love for my mother was a wrong thing, and the isolation it left him in after my sister’s birth could not be any other way. He worked and went on drives and let the leaves brown and fall, and then the snow blanketed everything. Snow had long since become his favorite thing about America.
Once, my uncle Sam had never seen snow, could only imagine what it must be like from the occasional ice cubes in his sweet tea in India, and in the months before he’d come over, he’d roll the cubes on his tongue until his tongue hurt. Then he’d spit the smoothed cubes into his hand and hold them up to the light like diamonds. This was on the stoop of his sweetmeats shop in Chikmagalur, where the young Konkan men his age came to smoke and drink tea and play carom at the boards he had for meager wagers they made with the few rupees their fathers allowed them.
Really, the Sabitha sweetmeats shop was a small storefront in a long line of small storefronts off the central market, where merchants sold brooms and buckets and batteries and cheap colored kickballs and k
ites from Japan. But when the other vendors would gather in their wares from the sidewalk to close and go home to their families in the evenings, Sam would arrive from sleeping in late at my grandfather’s house, roll up Sabitha’s steel shutter like a garage door, turn on the lights, set a record on the turntable, place the sweetmeats on metal trays in the glass display, and if there had been an ice truck going through the town from Mangalore, the seller would make my uncle’s shop the last of his stops, would chip a steel tub full of shards from a block with his pick. These frosted shards would begin to melt immediately, until soon they were all smooth and floating in the rising pool of water. My uncle would sit in a plastic chair on the stoop of his shop, cross his legs in the Indian way, smoke a cigarette, and the evening would settle down on Chikmagalur. It was a town on the road to other places, the bicycle-rickshaw drivers hurrying past with women in saris in the seats behind them, the policemen in their brown uniforms puttering out on their motorcycles to change the guard at the highway’s posts, the retired pandits in their peaked Congress hats taking their last restorative walks with their hands clasped behind their backs in the meditative way of Gandhi. The muezzin would cry from the mosque tower in the distant Muslim quarter, the cattle would return from grazing in the fields in lines and settle down for the night in the emptying market, the servant girls would hurry to their masters’ homes from the washing stones at the stream, laundry folded in tall white stacks on their heads. Everywhere people were eating their evening meals in their homes by lamplight, around communal pots, with their fingers, rice for all of them, curry and chapatis as well for the wealthy, and while their fathers sat down in their chairs to listen to the BBC over tea or rum or brandy after the food was eaten, the young Konkan men in their starched shirts and wristwatches, some of which even worked, would come in groups of two and three out of the night to the light of my uncle’s shop like apparitions, to sit and smoke at the tables, to talk the politics of the day, which as Konkans was always against them, to bring out the carom disks from their felt bags and shoot them like marbles on the boards with their calloused index fingers. Sometimes a young woman or two would stop by on the way to evening visits among the families, to peer into the shop from the street and see if their favorite one was there, to say then to my uncle, “Is that all that you boys do? Drink tea and smoke cigarettes and play your silly games and talk and talk and talk?”
My uncle would stand up and say back, “Don’t you know that all we talk about is you?” and take off his sandal as though to slap them with it, the dirtiest insult that there was. Then the girls would dash off as though they really were afraid, reach the edge of the light the shop cast out into the street, and turn to smile and laugh. “Samuel Erasmus D’Sai, do you think we are afraid of a boy as skinny and boastful as you?”
The night bugs swirled around the outside light in a battering swarm, and my uncle would drop his sandal and toe it back on, and everyone in the shop would laugh and laugh. It was the dance of young Konkan men and women going back five hundred years. Because the fact was, none of those young people had any control over whom they would eventually marry.
Occasionally some Muslim errand boy or other would come to buy a parcel of sweetmeats for a marriage or birth or funeral celebration in their quarter, but mostly not. The Sabitha shop didn’t really make any money, it was simply the young Konkan men’s social club of Chikmagalur, run by my uncle, who didn’t have anything better to do. It was financed at a loss by my grandfather. Despite the hierarchy of first and second sons that they had all bound themselves to for better or worse, my uncle Sam was still a son to my grandfather. Having given the family’s gold to Babu for his move to America, and having spent money on educating my father in his youth, my grandfather found it in himself to dip again into the remains of the horde of money and gems he’d hidden in coffee cans, in mattresses, and the bottoms of potted plants all around the house, to let my uncle have something of his own. It didn’t cost much of anything to have a simple shop like that in India then, and even so, my uncle felt grateful to his father for it because, as a second son, he didn’t have a right to anything.
My uncle was everything to those Indians that my father wasn’t. For one, he was present among them. All the years that my father was away in the Catholic schools in Mangalore on the coast, in his nice clothes and shoes that he’d wear on his visits home, my uncle was in his boy’s lungi, keeping an eye on my grandfather’s pigs as he played in the streets with the Hindu and Muslim kids. And then, those years when my father was working at Standard Chartered Bank in Bombay, my uncle was alone in the mountains, tending to my grandfather’s coffee plantation. And finally, those first years that my father was gone for good in America with my mother, my uncle was on the steps of his sweetmeats shop in his handed-down slacks and sandals, under the light of the doorway.
My uncle had an easy laugh and spoke the Konkan language like an ersatz scholar. He knew all the stories of the Konkan migration, the terrible drought that had left the people with nothing, how they came down from the Deccan Plateau to meet the Portuguese on the shore when they arrived after their own long journey, how the Konkans, before their reduction, had been Brahmins. He knew the story of how the last of the starved Konkans had stood on the beach in their tattered white dhotis as the sails of Vasco da Gama’s ship grew on the horizon. How da Gama in his steel helmet had arrived like a god from the sea, had waded through the surf half dead from the voyage, and planted his sword in the sand to claim the Konkan Coast for Portugal. How St. Francis Xavier in his black vestments had commanded everyone to kneel before his staff as the sky turned bloodred, how he had baptized the Konkans in the name of the Savior, each and every one. How they had stood up again as a new people, singular in the vast throng of India, the Indian Konkans of the Catholic Church. And though they liked all of these stories that my uncle told them, the young Konkan men of Chikmagalur admired him even more because he knew how to joke and play.
For a short time after my parents had left for America, my uncle flirted with a peasant girl named Lira. My uncle’s breaking of caste to pursue her could have been simply something that was fated to happen, but maybe it was because of how my mother’s time in Chikmagalur had changed him. My mother had arrived there with her long white limbs, with the bicycle that she alone among the women there bunched her salwar kameez around her knees to mount and ride, to live alone in her small house beside the market, to treat harijans as equals, to marry my father, and to throw all of the old assumptions into disarray.
Lira was dark for a Konkan, pretty, with a rope of braided hair down her back that tossed like a horse’s tail from the rhythm of her gait. She was the last daughter of a desperately poor cobbler named Saldanha, and every evening this Saldanha sent Lira to beg rice in the wealthy Konkan neighborhood called the Christian Colony, where my grandfather lived. As she’d pass my uncle’s sweetmeats shop on her nightly errand, she would walk through the edge of the light with her eyes downcast, just close enough to break from the shadows and be noticed. She wore a threadbare red sari, two glass bangles on her left arm, and even though she was poor, she somehow managed to always wear a string of white flowers in her hair, as the single young women of that place did for beauty. She would glance at my uncle, her eyes as dewy as those of the gopis who had inspired the Hindu poets to write their fevered cantos. My uncle would draw on his cigarette as he noticed Lira, follow her hippy passage with hooded eyes. As soon as she was gone into the night, the young men playing carom inside would wag their fingers at him, smile, and say, “If she comes any closer, she will melt all the ice. She will boil all the tea. Do something about it, eh Samuel? E puri kon achi? Whose daughter is she anyway?”
“Saldanha’s,” my uncle would say, and stub out his cigarette.
“Saldanha the spice merchant, or Saldanha the cobbler?”
“Which Saldanha would have a daughter like that in this life, you stupid bangadees?” my uncle would say back in disgust, and the young men would groan a
nd tap their shooting disks on the boards in misery and say, “The cobbler.” They knew, as my uncle did, that none of their fathers would ever consent to a match so poor. The cobbler Saldanha would never be able to pay the dowry for Lira that their fathers would expect, especially after the marriages of his older daughters had already impoverished him. There would be nothing left for this last daughter but to be sent away.
What all of those young men knew, including my uncle, as they played their second- and third- and fourth-son board games in the Sabitha shop, was that despite her beauty, and maybe even more so because of it, Lira was destined for Bombay, to serve as a waiting girl to a rich Konkan’s family. Once there, sooner or later she would be pregnant with her master’s child, and a marriage would quickly be arranged to one of the laborers on his rubber or coffee plantation, some long-serving and loyal Konkan with a missing eye or other deformity. Time and time again, the prettiest girls were born poor. It was the way these things happened. The young men in my uncle’s shop also knew that their own marriages would be arranged soon to the plain third daughters of their fathers’ social friends.
My uncle could have smoked and accepted the fact that this girl who cast eyes at him could never be his, but he was full of life, and my mother’s marriage to my father had put new ideas in him. Yes, the world had made it so nothing would ever really belong to him, but the world also couldn’t take away the fact that this girl looked at him the way she did. The Hindus had their festival of the cobra, and for three days the streets were full of fakirs playing flutes for money to the snakes that rose up from their baskets in their hoods. Then the town was quiet again. Lira stepped into the light of his shop in her bangles and sari, looked at him and went on, and this time, my uncle stubbed out his cigarette, stood up from his chair, and went down the steps to follow her. In an instant, every game of carom in that shop stopped as the young men lifted their eyebrows at each other. Then they clamored from their chairs to peek out the door after him.