by Tony D'Souza
In the darkness, Lira followed a path along the stream beyond the edge of town, and there were stars on the water where it eddied and pooled. The stream began in the mountains, joined the great rivers to eventually find its end at the sea, but here, this water belonged just to this place. The quiet silhouettes of the harijan frog-fishermen were benign shadows on the distant bank, and ducks slept in pairs in the roots of the tamarisks with their bills tucked under their wings. Lira walked on the powder of the trail in her bare feet. Twice she glanced back.
Under a mango tree, my uncle touched Lira’s shoulder. She was smaller than she looked, thinner. Was she even trembling? In a soft voice, my uncle said, “Why do you look at me the way you do?”
“I don’t know why, Samuel. I only know that I do it.”
“My father, my family, nothing would allow this.”
“Then why did you stand and follow me?”
“I closed my eyes to think of you as you passed, and when I opened them, I was here.”
In the few times they had together under the mango tree on the stream’s sandy bank, my uncle would never see her body properly. All of it was rushed and dangerous, both of them feeling that slick pleasure for the very first time. Back at the sweetmeats shop, the young men would clap their hands on my uncle’s back, rub his head, and he’d shake them off and blush. Yes, it was about that, but it was also about something more. My uncle lived in dread those weeks that his father would find out, as well as with his desire to do that with that girl.
In less than a month, Lira was sent to Bombay. Sometimes after that, my uncle would lie in his bed at my grandfather’s house and smoke a cigarette and imagine Lira in her red sari frying chapatis for him over coals in the cinder-block house that he knew would have been his life with her. Could he have loved that life? Every day he waited for his father to come in and tell him who he would marry. Two years went by in this way. Then my grandfather came into the room and told him he must go to America.
My grandfather had planned on the immigration of his sons to America through my mother all the time she had been in Chikmagalur. Though he saw her spending her time among the poorest of the Hindus and Muslims, still she was white and he knew that one day she must go home. My grandfather decided that she would take his son Lawrence with her, and in taking him, open the door to all of them.
What my grandfather did was this: He invited my mother over to the house for meals on Sundays, and though she couldn’t have known it, he made everyone dress in their best clothes, and paid the servants to fetch choice cuts from the Konkan pig butcher at the edge of town, which was like procuring contraband moonshine in India ever since the Hindus had come into power. The first time that my mother came to the house, my uncle Sam was the one who led the conversation, because he had been through middle school at the Catholic mission in Chikmagalur, and his English was the best, though he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. The first Sunday, my mother had picked the coveted chunks of obbe fat out of the curry and set them aside in a pile on her plate.
“Ask her why she doesn’t eat the meat,” my grandfather said to my uncle Sam, and my uncle said to her as he looked at his hands, “Ms. Denise, my father would like to know why the meat doesn’t please you.”
“I work with Muslims. Even though I am in your home, I must not disrespect their customs.”
“But we are not Muslims. We are Konkans and we eat this meat.”
“I do not work with Konkans. And since everyone here knows every little thing that I do, it is best for me to be careful. It wouldn’t be good for my work if my Muslim friends heard that I was eating pork in your house.”
My uncle Sam translated all of this to my grandfather, and my grandfather grunted and said in Konkani, “Everything in this world worth anything requires more work than men at first understand. Let her refuse our pork tonight. One day, she will cook pork for us herself.” Of course my uncle didn’t translate this to my mother.
After she had left that night on her bicycle, my grandfather made two changes in his plan. The first was, he told the servants to prepare vegetarian meals on the nights that my mother would eat with them, and the second was that he telegrammed my father, in Bombay: Come home this instant, Babu. Something of great import is going on here. Your family needs you now.
My father telegrammed back, No time off from work allowed, save for a death in the family.
My grandfather telegrammed back: Then I have died.
My father stepped off the bus and into the dusty street outside the market the next Saturday, and some chickens ran past him, a nearby buffalo mulled its cud, and he was right back in the thick of all that he hated most. There was dust on his shoes by the time he reached my grandfather’s house with his satchel, and in the central room, the old man himself was in his lungi plucking the wet feathers from the evening’s chicken.
“What is it that you’ve called me from Bombay to set my feet in this foul dust storm of a town to do?”
My grandfather was chewing paan, and he spit a long red rope of juice into the pot where he was also tossing clumps of white chicken feathers. He looked my father up and down in his fine clothes. Then he said, “You’ve turned into something, have you not, my Babu?”
“I’ve become something more than I was here.”
“Then come and show us what you can do, my son. There is a white woman in this town, teaching something or other to the harijans. She comes to dinner on Sundays. Let’s see if my money has been well spent on you. Let’s see if all that proper English I bought you can turn this white woman’s face toward us.”
My father began it with my mother like this: My mother was teaching the poor Hindu and Muslim women of the shantytowns how to build smokeless ovens, riding her bicycle through Chikmagalur in the mornings to their quarters, spending all of her days with them. Since always, these women had cooked as most Indian women did, in low-roofed kitchen shanties over dung fires that filled the rooms with smoke, and led to black lung and cancer by the age of forty. Teaching them how to build the domed covering out of clay that would vent the smoke out of the wall was what my mother had heeded Kennedy’s call to do.
When she’d first signed on with the Peace Corps, she was sent to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she and the seventy-five others in her training group logged eight hundred hours of classroom work in Indian cultural and language studies. Then they were sent for two weeks to the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin, where they lived in canvas tents. The Peace Corps had constructed a mock Indian village there, replete with shanties and stocked with educated Indian functionaries they had hired and flown over from Delhi to play the role of the poor and underserved.
Acting the part of people they didn’t even condescend to speak to in life, those high-caste Indian educators needed help from the American trainees, some of whom enjoyed camping, to light the mock hearth fires, to pull water from the well, and they were glad when the day was done so they could retreat to their nearby hotel rooms, turn up the thermostats, and watch American television. The trainees were altruistic college grads, mostly hippies, and the men were avoiding a potential draft. It was cold in Wisconsin that fall, it rained every day. The Mohicans who lived there looked on as they drove by in their pickup trucks. My mother learned how to count to twenty in Kannada, and how to build smokeless ovens out of clay. The other trainees learned these things as well, but they also spent much of those two field weeks fucking each other in the tents, smoking pot, and gossiping. My mother wasn’t interested in any of that. She even took the calisthenics part of the training seriously.
Finally, in Washington, where the group was shipped for their last three days in America, they were given vaccinations at the Peace Corps medical office, were lucky enough to be sworn in at the headquarters by the director, Sargent Shriver himself, and put on a plane to Madras. My mother stepped out of that plane and into the light of India when she was twenty-three years old. Volunteers would begin to quit that
very first week; some of the men decided, their shirts plastered to their fevered bodies, that even Vietnam must be a better place than this. But my mother took off the sweater that had kept her warm on the plane, gave it to the happy porter at the bottom of the steps, let the airline women in their uniforms slip yellow welcome garlands around her neck, and pressed her hands together to return their greeting, Namaste. Then she began to fall in love.
All of the things she loved about India—the flowers in the women’s hair, the call of the fishmonger in the mornings as he pushed his cart through the streets, the fuss and hullabaloo that went along with every simple transaction in the market for the day’s salt and rice—she recounted to my father when he’d escort her home from dinner at my grandfather’s house. Though my father didn’t tell her so, those were all of the very same things that made him hate that place.
“How can you not find it backward, Ms. Denise, to haggle all day over one rupee here, one rupee there, that determining the price of a sack of rice should have the same import as buying and selling a car for these people?”
“For some of these people, Lawrence, one rupee here or there is as important as buying a car. Not everyone is as privileged as you are.”
“All the noise, the crowd, the filth?”
“The kaleidoscope of life.”
“Illness all around?”
“The healing festivals and spirituality.”
“The lunatic babble of languages?”
“The songs and dances.”
“The corruption and lack of opportunity?”
My mother hesitated at a rain puddle in the path, took my father’s hand, and in her sari she hopped over it to him. “I know that not everything is perfect here, Lawrence. But don’t you think that will change with time?”
“Not before your short visit here is over, I don’t think, Ms. Denise. Not even before the end of our lives. I feel here that I’ll never get to discover who I am. What my capabilities are and what I can do. Here, I am another unfulfilled face. But as you say, there are many interesting things about it. I am glad you are having a wonderful time before you will return to your own country.”
“That is also true,” my mother had said quietly.
My father confused my mother, made her worry about her idea of India in a way she hadn’t before. What did he think of the work she and the Peace Corps were doing in India? she would ask him. What could even a thousand naive young Americans accomplish in a place that housed six hundred million people? my father would grin and say. But wasn’t the world changed one life at a time? my mother would argue. Again my father would grin. “Then why not change mine?”
Though my mother couldn’t have known it then, my father had given up his job in Bombay to be here, to sit in the enclosed garden of her house and have tea with her twice a week. He would often arrive with an umbrella opened above him just at the end of a heavy rain. He’d have to bang on my mother’s door to be heard above the din, and she’d let him in, out of the downpour. They began to move about each other with ease without even noticing it, my father shaking the umbrella dry out the door, my mother lighting the kerosene stove in her kitchen to put on water for tea. It would be too loud from the rain to talk to each other, and sometimes they’d stand at the window together and look out at all the sullen people in the market huddled under the metal sheeting of their lean-to stalls. One time, they’d watched a gang of white cows trot into the market to find shelter from the rain. The cows had rolled their eyes in confusion when the people beat them back with sticks, had lowed like children crying in the rain, and my mother and father had looked at each other and smiled.
Perhaps my father timed his arrivals. After the rain, the air was cool and fresh, the world felt open and new, and he’d have brought a packet of almond cookies with him that they’d eat with their tea. My mother had placed purple daturas in old pickling jars about the patio, and they were surrounded by the lush leaves and color. The water would drip around them from the corrugated roof to the puddles on the patio, and then the still puddles would reflect the blue of the opening sky. My mother and father sat in her slat-backed chairs to look at this.
“For as much as you love India, Denise, you also like to spend your time in here.”
“I get tired of all the staring. Any normal person would.”
“It’s the same for you here as a movie star, isn’t it?”
“They have mansions and bodyguards, Lawrence. What do I have but my patio? And now I have you.”
“Why are you quiet today, Denise?”
My mother looked out at the patio. The noise of the market was like a waking thing. Somewhere someone shouted. An oxcart driver cracked his whip, and the hooves and wheels began with a start. “I don’t know why I’m quiet today, Lawrence. I snapped at you. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Let’s talk about that thing,” my father said, and looked at her. “Whatever it is that is troubling you. Tell it to me, Denise. And all of my things, I will tell to you.”
My mother said, “One of my women asked for money to buy clay for a stove. They are supposed to save and buy it on their own. I gave her the money. She bought glass bangles with it.”
“That’s only one of them, Denise.”
“It hurt me. It made me feel foolish. It made me feel like nothing can be done. Even after all of this time here, what she did makes me feel like I don’t want to help anyone.”
Speaking English with my father was a respite, talking about the greater world with someone who knew there was one let my mother rest her mind. She didn’t like my father’s tailored clothes, his disdain for all things Indian, but she found that she didn’t hate those things about him either. He was easy to be with, well mannered, polite. Whether he was stepping around her to open a door, or looking the other way in the market as she stopped to touch hands with a harijan friend, he was always exactly who he was. My mother liked my father’s attempt at a mustache.
The monsoon rains muddied the town; men whipped buffalo at the plow in the rice paddies on the terraced hills. My mother and father began to talk about other things now, at other times, later at night, in the kitchen, where moths cast large shadows on the bare walls as they battered themselves against the lantern. Did my father feel pressure from his family to do something with his life? An unbearable pressure at all times, my father said. And what about her family? Did they support her in this endeavor of hers in India?
My mother looked down at the tumbler of rum and lychee juice in her hand, at the jokers and aces on the table from the game of three card they’d been playing as they talked. In her quiet voice, my mother said, “I’m not like you, Lawrence, with family all around me. In fact, I’m very envious of what you have. I see all the noise in your house, all the people. Even though your father is stern with you, when I visit your house, all I see is love.”
“Your family is smaller, is it? Mother, father, sister, brother? That is how families are in America.”
“It’s more than that. My family is so small, it’s as though I don’t have any family at all. My mother abandoned me when I was young, and I had to live with my aunt. I have two sisters. I haven’t seen them in twelve years, and I doubt I’ll ever see them again. So I see your family, and I see everything I never had.”
“And I see your independence here, Denise, your ability to move about, to think, to do what you want. I imagine the sort of freedom from family that you must have for yourself at home. To live as I desire. To work at my chosen career. That is all I want from this world.”
“Do you want a family, Lawrence?”
“‘Family is the door to happiness.’”
“And do you want to love your wife?”
“‘The wife is the path to family.’”
My mother touched my father’s hand. She said, “I want to stay in India.”
My father looked at her hand on his and his heart leaped into his throat. Still, he was my father. He said, “Then we will stay.”<
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That Sunday morning, my father brought my mother white garlands, which she wove into her hair, and then they walked through the town to let everyone know what had happened, my father in his suit, my mother on his arm in her white silk sari. My mother wore a sandalwood bindi on her forehead for beauty, and the sari came all the way down and covered her feet, making her look smaller than she really was. Her right arm, which my father held, was white and bare. She looked like a porcelain doll beside him, and in the market as they approached, the bicycle-rickshaw drivers waiting in their lines sat up and rang their bells, the chai vendors clapped the lids on their steel pots, and the people rushed out of the market to line the road and look at them. The white woman was so beautiful! Like Lakshmi herself. The young women ran into the market, came back, and scattered flower petals before my mother’s feet. The older women covered their mouths with their hands as they smiled. My mother glanced at them, blushed, composed herself again. My father looked straight ahead.
At the Catholic church on the hill, the young men slouching and smoking cigarettes outside hopped up and opened the doors for them, and the church was full of the well-dressed Konkans of Chikmagalur, the men in the pews on the left in suits, the women and children in the pews on the right in tidy outfits and dark saris. Every single one of those five hundred faces turned to look at my mother and father as they stood framed in the doorway of the church, and when they did, their mouths dropped open. In the front pew, my grandfather waited just long enough for everyone to get a good, long look, and then he stamped his cane, cleared his throat, and the Konkans shut their mouths and turned their faces back to the altar. All through the Mass, children glanced at my mother where she stood alone among them, and my mother tried unsuccessfully not to sweat. Then my father led her on his arm to my grandfather’s house, where my grandfather told the servants to put pork in the curry for dukrajemas. For the very first time since she’d been visiting them, my mother rinsed her fingers in the washing bowl, and she ate the food of the Konkans.