by Tony D'Souza
My mother and father were married in Velha Goa, the Konkan capital’s old quarter, three months later. My mother was at the end of her service, and would have had no choice but to go home anyway. They chose to travel to Goa for the wedding because it had hotels on the beach that my mother’s Peace Corps friends could enjoy themselves in, as well as to get away from Chikmagalur, which had turned into a tiresome carnival, strangers coming to my mother’s house to throw flowers on her doorstep and sing benedictions, so shocked and pleased were they all that a boy from their town, even though a Konkan, would be marrying a white woman. This commotion had also ended my mother’s work there.
Velha Goa was where the Portuguese had erected some of their oldest cathedrals, and my mother and father were married in the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, built in 1549 on the quarter’s highest hill. On the right side of the small church stood tall and white Peace Corps volunteers in a hodgepodge of borrowed dresses and slacks, and across from them were my grandfather and all his family in suits and saris, including my uncle Sam. It was hot, and the Americans fanned themselves with their missals. The Indians didn’t move. My father wore a raw-silk Nehru jacket that was too big for him in the shoulders, and my mother wore a box hat and veil, and a simple white dress that revealed her calves. The dress she’d had tailored in Mangalore, the hat she’d bought in a European clothing store while in Bombay. Though the Konkans did not really have that tradition, a Peace Corps volunteer named Steve Stewart, who had been my mother’s friend in training, stood in as my father’s best man, and my mother’s maid of honor was Lenore. There was a short reception and buffet at the King Manuel I Hotel in Panjim, to which my grandfather paid to have my parents driven in a black Mercedes limousine, and then the Indians boarded their buses for home, and my parents went with my mother’s Peace Corps friends to party on the beach. Still ringing in my father’s ears were my grandfather’s words as they had left the church: “So we gave up a dowry, Babu. That is okay. But don’t let them say of me, ‘What a fool that Santan was, who paid for the wedding of his firstborn son.’”
My mother lived in my grandfather’s house for one year as my father’s wife, and as the months dragged on, my grandfather instructed my grandmother to scold and nag her in the kitchen until even my mother was ready to go home. And once she was, it wasn’t a hard thing to complete the immigration papers, because my father had long since sent for them and filled his half of them out.
“You’ve known all this time, haven’t you?” my mother said to him as she sat in exhaustion on their bed. My father said back, “Neither one of us will ever be real Indians.” My father’s visa came a few weeks later. My mother cried quietly as she folded her saris into her suitcase. In the lining of the suitcase was my grandmother’s gold.
At the bus stand in Chikmagalur, my grandmother embraced my mother with her arms, now bare. She said, “You have made me so happy, Denise. You have made me proud of my son.”
They had not been on speaking terms in weeks, ever since my grandmother had accused my mother of stealing her favorite paring knife, which of course my mother hadn’t. So my mother made a face at my grandmother and said, “Eugenia, how can you say that to me now?”
My grandmother rubbed my mother’s hands and said, “Simply because I am now allowed.”
My mother and father waved farewell to everyone from the windows of the bus. Then they settled into their seats for the long ride to Bombay. In two days they would be in Chicago. My mother would never see India again.
The Second Son
All these years later in America, my father began to worry about my uncle Sam in a real way. So many of my father’s dreams had come true; getting here in the first place, and beyond that, advancing and doing well. He had two fine children, a home in the suburbs, an Audi, an improving golf game. As he’d sip his evening tumblers of scotch in the basement and look at his painting of the lonely rider slumped over his donkey in the desert, he’d tell himself that he was happy. While he still usually passed out down there, now that my sister was in her bassinet beside my parents’ bed, he’d go upstairs after his first sleep had worn off, to sleep again beside my mother in the early hours of the morning. Then the alarm clock would sound with its voices, its busy traffic reports, and he’d get up to wash and dress himself for work, commute into the city on the train, labor in his office, and come back home to do it all again.
It was summer, and my mother was always asleep at these times because raising her kids wore her out, but she’d wake when my father would get in bed beside her with his cold body, chilled from the night in the basement. Most nights she would sigh at this, turn on her side away from him, and the times when my father had a headache, he would lie with his hands behind his head, looking up at the darkened ceiling. What did he think about at those times? His hopes and dreams, surely, as people do in the night. But also, what was this vague unease he felt?
“Are you awake, Denise?” my father said one of these early mornings.
“I’m awake, Lawrence.”
“Do you remember when we were first married and living in my father’s house in Chikmagalur?”
“I remember it.”
“Do you remember how late we’d sleep in together? How we’d hear the whole house wake up around us? How we’d lie there even when we could hear them talking about us, wondering if we were sick? How my mother would quiet them, telling them that we were newly married, and that the newly married are always tired?”
“Your mother was nice to me in the beginning.”
“It was nice to lie so long in bed, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Lawrence. It was nice.”
“It was also a long time ago.”
“It was.”
“Did Elizabeth wake much while I was downstairs?”
“Every three hours. You know that.”
“We were happy when Francisco was a baby, too.”
“It was our very first time.”
“I’ll dress and feed him in the morning.”
“That would help me.”
“Our daughter Elizabeth is very beautiful, isn’t she?”
“We’ve been lucky people.”
“Francisco has been a good boy about it, hasn’t he?”
“Francisco is a good boy.”
“You don’t talk to me anymore like you did in Chikmagalur.”
“You don’t talk to me that way either.”
“Life has gone on, hasn’t it, Denise?”
“Life has happened to both of us.”
“We have a happy life.”
“We have wonderful children.”
“Denise,” my father said in the dark.
“What is it, Lawrence?”
“I’m worried about Sam.”
“About Sam?”
“I’m worried that he’s unhappy.”
“Sam’s fine, Lawrence. Sam’s just the way he’s always been.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Sam will be thirty-one this year.”
“So we’ll throw him a party.”
“He’ll be thirty-one, and he’s not married. It’s not normal for a Konkan man to pass thirty without being married, let alone to be thirty-one. All that Sam has done here is run and play. I worry that he will always do only that.”
My mother turned to look at my father in the dark. She could see the shape of his body. She had been his wife nine years now. Many times in those years, she had loved him. For how tired she always felt since my sister’s birth, she did not feel tired now. She said, “Why in the world are you suddenly worried about Sam?”
“It’s not normal for a Konkan man to be alone the way he is.”
“Since when has he been a normal Konkan man? All of that ended when he got off that plane. And then you made him shave off that mustache. Why did you make them do that, Lawrence? That must have been so humiliating for them. All of us are here because you wanted to come. You know as well a
s anyone that when people come here, they can’t be who they were before.”
“Sam should be married.”
“Sam should be left alone.”
“I’m worried that he’s not happy.”
“Since when have you worried about Sam’s being happy?”
“I have always worried about my brother’s happiness.”
“You have always told yourself that you worried about his happiness, just as you tell yourself that you worry about all of them. But when was the last time you wrote a letter to India? And why is it that we’ve never visited? You know what’s really going on. And it’s your worry about those things that’s tearing you up. Your work. Your career. Where you live. Your car. And now it’s the country club more than anything.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I know everything that goes on in this house.”
“Sam’s situation is unseemly.”
“There it is. There we are. I knew we’d get to the truth if we only tried.”
“I should have left you in India with all the other trash.”
“How would you have gotten here?”
“I would have found my way.”
“And who would you take to your wretched company parties?”
“There are other women in this country.”
“Then why don’t you go and find one?”
“If you tempt me, then I will.”
“Then I’ve tempted you.”
“Then I will.”
“Be my guest.”
“What’s happened to you?”
“What’s happened to you?”
Then my sister began to cry.
If the opportunity for other women had ever presented itself to my father, he had not had that in him. For one, he wasn’t brave enough to face what that would bring to his house. He knew my mother would leave him, and sooner or later the news would make it to India, where they would devour it the way they did all gossip. Then he would have failed in his duties as a firstborn son, and even here in America, he would know nothing but shame. And for two, in the fingerprint that was my father’s sexual identity, my mother was the only one in the world he would ever be able to meet in intimacy. My mother had been his first and only. His imagination could not move beyond that.
If, in fact, my father were to fail to succeed at the American way of life, there would be nowhere in the world he could go to escape the regret he knew would follow him. So he dealt with my mother’s resentment against him the way he dealt with everything that did not fit the plan: He ignored it. And when his anger against her rose up in him again in the evenings, with the children asleep and the house quiet around him, he’d sit in the basement by his painting and imagine that he was the man on the donkey’s back riding through the desert of his life. As he’d drink, he’d feel the nobility of his hard calling rise up, and toward the end of another session, his cheeks warm and red, his vision spinning, at that moment when he’d understand that he’d numbed himself enough to shut his eyes and sleep, he’d feel ecstatically proud of himself, that life had turned out good despite all, that he was lucky indeed to have achieved so much: his job, this house, his children, even his lawn with the oak trees on it. In Chikmagalur, as a boy, he’d put himself to bed dreaming of being welcomed into the Britishers’ club, the white men standing up in their red jackets and waxed mustaches to hurrah and clap for him. No, America was not Britain. But America was the most powerful country in the world. So my father felt, in those last euphoric moments, that every choice he’d made to get here had been the right one, that what he’d do tomorrow would be just what he’d done today. He’d lay himself on his couch, puff out a few quick breaths, curl his knees up to his chest, and sleep. Some four or five hours later, he’d blink his eyes awake, sober again, his head pounding, and the times he was sick with it, he’d say aloud in that basement, “Why do I do it? Why do I always do it?” He’d walk up the two flights of stairs in the dark, past his antique grandfather clock with its pendulum swinging away ever more bits of this life, and he wouldn’t think any one of those self-congratulatory thoughts he had before in the drinking, would even feel remorse for having thought them. There was so much more to do. He hadn’t achieved anything yet. Then his new hobbyhorse would come into his head and as he’d lay himself down beside my mother, he’d say to himself, It is time for my brother Samuel to marry.
My uncle’s time on my grandfather’s coffee plantation had informed him about himself more than anything else in his youth. What a miserable time that had been. The plantation wasn’t large by any means, was something the great Hindu planters of the mountains might have given to their third-born sons, but it was what my grandfather had managed to scrape out for himself in the time that he had served the British.
The plantation measured sixty acres along the steep slope of a mountain on the road to Kemmangundi, and my grandfather had hired a crew of harijans to throw up a two-room cinder-block house on the level hilltop for the times he’d thought he’d spend there. If the British hadn’t left, my grandfather would have built a proper coffee planter’s house for himself with a portico and deck, an orchard of citrus and breadfruit, he would have enlarged the holdings until it was an estate, and one day he would have retired up there. But then the British left. My grandfather hid the titles to the land through those terrible years at the end of the Raj, and the plantation was the least of his worries.
In 1952, when his troubles had passed and he was reinstated as a police officer as part of the reconciliations begun by Nehru, who saw early on that the fledgling India needed trained men, my grandfather rode his old Triumph motorcycle up into the mountains to see what had become of the place. He expected to find everything fallen into neglect, the embankments of the terraces collapsed by the rains, weeds risen up between the coffee bushes, the forest taking back what belonged to it. Instead, he found it even more neatly tended than when he’d left, row after tidy row of trimmed bushes on the sharp-looking steps of the terraces, beans sprouting on the branches in clusters, weeds drying in the sunlight in piles. Somebody had come to love this land in a way no one had loved it before. In fact, the only thing in disrepair on the whole of the plantation was the long-shuttered house. My grandfather unlocked the door, made a hand broom from a string and some sticks, and went to work sweeping out the rat shit.
The harijans came to him that night, fifty thin men in their rags in the yard. Even if it had been five thousand men like that, my grandfather would not have been afraid. They raised their fists and shouted their arguments, and for a long time my grandfather let them. Then he pointed his finger at them, all of them at once, as he stood on that raised porch with his gun on his hip and his lantern in his hand. He said, “The master has come back!
“All of this is now over. You’ve enjoyed yourselves in my absence. I won’t begrudge you that. I also won’t demand compensation for the harvests that you’ve stolen from me.” He stood on that porch until every last one of those men receded into the trees. After that, his titles were recognized by the new Indian Coffee Board, and he sent up different cousins to manage the bean picking and sale at harvest time. When my uncle Sam turned eighteen, my grandfather sent him.
The house was full of spiders and rats when my uncle Sam arrived, and his first days were busy with chasing them out. Then he unfolded his clothes on the simple shelves in the room with the hammock where he’d sleep. As children, he and Les had often imagined their father’s mansion in the coffee mountains, its high, gabled roof, the great double doors. And though on the bus ride up, my uncle had known to expect much less than that, the first sight of this cattle shed of a house had sunk him. The porters tossed his bags from their heads onto its porch, and then they ran back along the path to the bus to leave him there. There was nothing he could do but unlock the metal door, closed eight months, since last year’s harvest, and let light into the house again.
There was nowhere to shit but in the bushes; he couldn’t light the lantern at night be
cause insects would swarm in. There was one table, one chair, a knife, a spoon, a pot for cooking rice, a two-burner stove on the table, a plain wooden cross on the wall of each room, and a well in the back with a hand pump. It was a place to be alone and hear the forest sounds. In time, my uncle would come to appreciate the sealed cement floor, which was easy to keep clean, the view down the mountain’s slope from the bedroom window, bathing behind the house with cold well water. But not yet. On the lee side of the mountain was the harijan village, where the workers lived out of sight with their families. In the mornings, those men would appear in the mist among the coffee plants in their rags, slashing down weeds, pruning the bushes with hand knives, and my uncle would rise from his hammock in the back room to make himself tea on the burner before going out in his boots to see that the work was done.
It rained every day in the mountains, at night my uncle felt alone for the first time in his life. What a strange thing it was to be alone, to have no people about him as he’d always had, to have no sound from the radio, to not have one single thing around him but the forest and its might. The great Hindu plantations had elephants for the heavy work of clearing the forest, to lift the fallen trees to the roadside with their trunks once the men had sawed them down. The men buried the trees too big for even the elephants to lift in smoldering pits and turned them into charcoal.
My uncle knew nothing about growing coffee, didn’t pretend that he did. The harijans had nothing to say to him as they went about their work, and even leaning against the trunk of a great tree and watching them during the day, he existed only unto himself. The harijans knew what they were doing, they didn’t need him. So my uncle went for long walks in his rubber boots along those steep paths and roads, reflecting all the time on himself, and now and again he would come upon sights in the forest: scarlet birds with orange bills on every branch of a teak tree, a tumbling creek lined with a carpet of emerald ferns, a gang of Hindu mahouts in their turbans working young elephants through virgin forest. He’d watch as the Hindus whistled and clucked, tapped the elephants’ knees with their sticks, and the elephants would flap their ears and rip young trees from the ground. Sometimes an elephant would trumpet and rear, and a mahout would stroke its face like a loved thing to calm it. The elephants flicked at flies with their tails, pushed down trees with their gleaming tusks. Then they would kneel to pick the trees up, lumber up out of the ravine with the vegetation clutched in their trunks. Sometimes a train of four or five of them would come swinging down a road, mahouts perched on their necks, and my uncle would step aside to let them all pass. The elephants wore chains around their feet like anklets, and the long lashes over their eyes were like women’s. Who wouldn’t love to look at elephants? And what was it about elephants that could make one feel so sad?