The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  What this meant in practical terms was that my father was always given the choicest cut of meat when there was meat in the curry, the best closed-toe shoes to be found on the Konkan Coast while the others wore sandals, the best English-style clothing to dress his body in, and beyond all else, the best education.

  Education for the Konkans of India rested solely in the hands of the celibate god-servants of their religion: priests and nuns. My father’s education also meant that he was exiled from the family, sent to boarding schools in Mangalore from the age of eight. So while he did learn the proper declensions of Latin verbs and the ins and outs of British English grammar, he did not know the first thing about chasing pigs in the gutters of his hometown, as my uncle Sam did. He learned that white was best, and all the rewards of meat and luxuries made him dependent on having them, and he learned to hate the India of the gutter, which he did not know, except to know that the nice things in life weren’t in it. So when the telegram about the white girl came from my grandfather and found him at Standard Chartered Bank in Bombay, he returned to Chikmagalur and wooed her just as he was supposed to.

  Imagine, my father was once a baby? My mother? My uncle? Winston and Jacqueline and Les and everyone else of this world? Before language, before culture, sucking on their mothers’ teats with their eyes closed, not knowing any of what was waiting to happen to them.

  So my father left India with my mother, and though she carried India to America in her in a way that began to harden her heart, my father’s heart softened, a bud about to bloom. It only took the flight to Chicago to release him. He worked every day with whites, he wore a suit. Often, there were parties to attend where he laughed and told jokes, ingratiated himself, and cemented his position. He’d drag along my mother, who didn’t want to go, and in her Western dresses and long hair, she was as beautiful as my father needed her to be. The men he worked with would call him “Laurie” the Monday mornings afterward as they recounted some funny thing someone had said, how embarrassingly drunk someone or his wife had been at the party. On top of all of that, my father worked harder than all of them.

  For the first two years after our move to Ridge Lawn, my father took golfing lessons at the public driving range to straighten his swing, at the Billy Caldwell and Chick Evans public links over the border in Chicago, under the tutelage of the course professionals. He applied himself to this study with the locomotive energy he reserved for his most important endeavors, and with those clubs in his hands, it was almost as if he were guarding wickets again in his whites for the British. “From the stumps of the back foot, he hammers it all the way to the wall for a four, what a shot, my friends!,” clap, clap, clap, had now become in his mind, “A booming drive splitting the middle of the fairway, look at that thing go, he’s made his life much easier with that approach, ladies and gentlemen,” clap, clap, clap.

  When he could chip a shot from a sand bunker so that the dimpled ball of legend would drop from the sky and stick on the green like a chunk of lead, when he could crouch with his putter in his hands like a surgical tool while the cumulus clouds, which he never noticed, passed in their rafts through the blue of the sky and sink the ball from six feet out with a firm and measured putt, he came home and told my mother that he was ready to apply for an invitation to the Ridge Lawn Country Club.

  All of those Saturdays that he practiced in preparation for this, my mother had been putting me down for my afternoon nap and taking my uncle into her arms in her languorous way, living India again through him, not hating my father, but not loving him either. Three times, once each of those following years in the spring, the country club’s prospective-member preliminary-inspection committee came to our house with their clipboards and sundresses and wicker hats, and three times my father had my mother dress herself in her best clothes to offer the women tea and finger sandwiches on a silver platter. There were five of them, the wives of the club’s board of directors, Margaret, Maggie, Sylvia, Bea, and Francine, and the first year my mother got their names all confused because it was the first time, and the second year she got them right, and the third year she mixed them all up again on purpose. Each time after they left, my mother closed the door, rolled her eyes, tousled out her sprayed hair, and said to my father, “I did my best, Lawrence. Please don’t take it out on me. They won’t let in the Jewish dentist. I can’t begin to imagine what they think of us,” and my father, watching from the window as the long sedans pulled away, would say back, “Why did you tell them the clock is a copy? Why didn’t you have honey this time for Bea? I don’t know that you’ve ever been a real wife to me. A real wife would understand and do these things.”

  The letters always came in cream-colored envelopes embossed with a picture of the country club’s main building on the back fold. It was ivy covered and English looking, seeming from the outside like a fortress that could not be breached, and maybe it seemed that same way if you were in it. And three times, my father swallowed a double tumbler of scotch in his basement, drew deep breaths, then carried the letter up to his study. The light umbrellaed down from his green shaded lamp, making the room seem smaller than it was and the moment all that more important. He opened the letter with the ivory knife that his father had presented to him in a velvet box on his acceptance to St. Aloysius Catholic Men’s College in Mangalore. The letter was the same all three times. It began, It is with sincere regret that we must inform you . . . Then my father would walk down to his basement as though in a dream and drink until he threw up.

  There was a rage in my father that threatened to destroy the whole world, but also a restraint in him when it came to his wife and children that made him bear that rage down onto himself Whether the drinking hurt or helped, I don’t know, but it helped him manage. When he’d wake up on the basement bathroom’s floor and return to the world above him in the morning, my mother would cook him a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, strong black coffee. Once the food began to work in him to mute the stunning hangover, my father would look at his empty plate and say blankly, “They said no.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” my mother would say, and refill his coffee.

  My sister was born, my uncle Sam was married. All of those things that my father had felt sure would make him happy hadn’t, and the next thing now was the country club. Three years in a row!

  The first two years he had understood. But now he played golf well. Now he drove an Audi and was making respectable money. The house was too small, the furniture too simple. Now was the time for a new decision. They would move. They would find a house in a more desirable neighborhood of Ridge Lawn. They would fill it with fine things. They would invite the ladies from the country club. My mother had given up protesting my father’s decisions ever since my sister had been born. He told her this new one and she simply nodded. So my father found a four-bedroom house in Ridge Lawn’s prestigious Southwest Woods neighborhood and secured a loan from the First National Bank.

  The immensity of America stunned my uncle’s wife, just the way it should have. Asha was twenty, a girl really, and all she had ever known before coming here was saris and helping her mother cook. Whatever her dreams of her married life had been, they were based only on her life in India, and while she had been raised to serve her future husband, whom my uncle Sam turned out to be, she had not been raised to imagine the bare walls of his house, the isolation of their life among all these white people, the cars, the buildings, the strange love shows on TV. My uncle Sam didn’t help her with any of this. Though he crawled on top of her at night to grunt and moan and say other women’s names before rolling off of her to sleep, he also did not do any of those other things she had imagined that her husband who lived in America would: He did not take her for a fine meal in a restaurant where her gold bangles would shine in the light for all to see, he did not bow before her on the bed and say, “You are my sacred one. The pathway to my children.” He didn’t in fact have much at all to say to her, and he left her alone at home during the day to show houses
for his work like leaving behind a pet.

  My mother visited often, nearly every day at first, and though soon it became less so, she was still a presence in my uncle’s house. The jealousy my mother had felt when my uncle brought Jacqueline to dinner was gone. Now my mother insinuated herself into my uncle’s life as Asha’s savior and confidante, a sudden best friend when Asha had no other choice. My mother told herself that all this was really true, that she was happy because Sam was now happy, that she was Asha’s friend.

  “You should take her to a show, Sam. You should take her to see Navy Pier and the lakefront,” my mother would say, the girl beside her on the couch in her blue sari and bindi like a peacock while my mother wore what she always did, a blouse and blue jeans. I had books to color down on the carpet, and my sister had the curtains to try and tug down.

  “That is what I say to Samuel! That is exactly what I tell him each and every day,” Asha would say in her shrill voice. As he cooked, my uncle would drift in and out of the kitchen to listen to them talk. Even Asha’s cooking had grown to irritate him.

  “This girl is here now, so what? Has she changed my life? There are bills to pay and I must pay them. What does she do to help? Who has the money for shows, the time to go into the city?”

  “Take her somewhere, Sam. Help her get used to life here. She’s a young woman. You should feel lucky. Do fun things with her. Take her to a disco. Show her how to dress.”

  “That is what I say to him every day, Denise-auntie. Every day I say these things to him.”

  My uncle would duck his head in the doorway, blinking from the sizzle of the onions in the pan he held. “How can she dress other than she does, Denise? I bought clothing for her. I bought her a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. Do you think that she wears them?”

  “I have never worn pants before, Auntie,” Asha said in her quiet voice, and she looked at her hands. Even her hands seemed dirty to her here, the marital henna lingering on them in brown smudges.

  My mother petted Asha’s hands. She said, “We’ll do it together. Step by step, we will figure it out. Have faith. It was hard for Sam when he first came. He might not admit it now, but in fact he had a very hard time here at first.” Then she brushed Asha’s hair with her fingers to calm her.

  “I don’t know anything about this place. Nothing here is as I imagined it would be. In India, it was all singing the poems and dancing the stories and knowing how to cook for my husband. Here, I am a burden. Who cares about the poems here? Why would I ever dance? I am like a child. I had only hoped to be a wife.”

  “I understand you, Asha. I was like you are when I first arrived in India.”

  “If I did not have you, Denise-auntie,” my aunt Asha said, shaking her head in despair, “I don’t even want to think of what it would be for me here if I did not have you always at my side.”

  Soon enough, it would be time for my mother to gather my sister and me up from the floor. My aunt Asha always stood in the doorway in her sari to watch my uncle Sam help my mother trundle us into her car. My uncle had brought Asha to America like a doll from the store. In my uncle’s house, my aunt began to fade. Her skin turned pale, she often couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. My mother was her great friend; my uncle, her husband and enemy. Asha quickly grew to hate America and everything in it, save my mother, who had become the best friend she had ever known.

  The house my father found for us in the Southwest Woods section of Ridge Lawn was on a cul-de-sac ringed with stately elm trees. It was only eleven blocks from where we used to live, on Aldine, but there was space here between the homes and it was a different world. We slept in sleeping bags in the living room the night my father bought it, even before the movers arrived with our things, and my father held me to him as we slept. What did he dream of that night?

  None of the women in this part of town worked, there were no other cars but BMWs, Benzes, my father’s Audi, and one black Maserati driven by an old guy who wore black driving gloves. Even the oaks were tall and old, and the men spent their weekends at the country club, golfing. My father hung his Mexican painting in the bigger basement of this new and bigger house, at the end of his new and longer bar. Drinking the same tumblers of scotch down there as he had before, he’d smile to himself thinking of all that he’d achieved, this poor boy that he was inside himself who had somehow made it out of India.

  The tomatoes came sometime in the night between Tuesday and Wednesday the first week of November. When my father pulled the cords to open the drapes over the picture window in the morning, the tomatoes looked like splashes of paint. One, two, three, four, five of them. My mother came bleary-eyed out of the bedroom with my sister tugging at the nipple of the breast she’d unbuttoned her nightgown to give her. Behind them in the room was the baby grand piano my father had bought because it belonged in a house like this. For a moment, they looked at that window as though it were a canvas in a modern art exhibition at the Art Institute, an unfamiliar young painter’s strange masterpiece. Both of my parents fell into a dreamlike state as they took it in. Then my mother touched my father’s arm, and it became real. She said, “Wash that off before you go. I don’t want Francisco to see it.”

  My father nodded. He went out in his pajamas and blue paisley bathrobe, unrolled the hose, turned the knob on the spigot, pulled the trigger on the nozzle, and washed the tomatoes away. It was a fine autumn day, the last pair of cardinals flying away in red dashes from the juniper bushes that fronted the house, the berries on the junipers frosted and blue, the oak and maple trees all gold and purple with the season. Then my father dressed and went to work, made his calls to his clients, Motorola and Caterpillar, from his thirty-third-floor office on Wacker Drive, downtown. How could something like this have happened? How could something like this have happened in a world where he worked as hard as this? He had lunch with another client at the Italian Village, veal and martinis. The client was from Boeing, which Hinton & Thompson was very excited to be doing business with, my father explained to him. When the client was buzzed, he said to my father, “I had to go to India to deliver a prospectus to a Tata affiliate in Delhi in seventy-six. I took the train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Gorgeous. But at the same time, how can they let people live like that? I know you sometimes pinch yourself, Lawrence. All I could think of was Dante’s hell.”

  In the evening, my father took the Metra commuter home. His windows were as clean as any of the other homes’ were, and he knew that what had happened was not really a part of his life, that even if it had been, it was already over. He made love to my mother that night, for a change. When he opened the curtains in the morning, there were the tomatoes.

  “Wash it off,” my mother said, and my father went out and did that. This went on all that week, their first week as residents of Ridge Lawn’s prestigious Southwest Woods. Even my mother was given pause by it. They kept quiet, washed the window, imagined it would go away. It didn’t.

  My uncle Sam came up with his nickname for his wife at this time, Sita-devi, after the Hindu goddess, Rama’s wife. In other circumstances, an Indian woman might find this very flattering. But the way my uncle said it to Asha wasn’t flattering at all. When my mother was at their house and on the couch with my aunt and telling my uncle in the kitchen all the amusements and museums he should take Asha into the city to see so she could begin to acclimate herself to America, my uncle would step into the kitchen doorway in his lungi and laugh and say, “Take her to the Field Museum? For what, Denise? Don’t you know the goddess is happiest at home? Ask the goddess herself. She is sitting right beside you. My goddess. My Sita-devi.”

  “Why don’t you take her to the church parking lot and teach her how to drive your car? Why don’t you take her to Harlem and Irving and simply walk around the shops in the mall?”

  “That is what I say to him, Denise-auntie. All of these things are what I always say to him.”

  My uncle would smile and shake his head like laughing in the doorway. He was always k
neading or stirring something, rice dough for idlis, gizzards and onions in a pan. “Look at her. Can you imagine her behind the wheel of a car in her bindi? Who has heard of a devi who can drive? A Sita-devi no less. She can comb her hair and braid it and wrap herself in a sari. But imagine her behind the wheel of a car? Oh my. But what she can do very well is wear a sari. My goddess, my Sita-devi. What she is very good at is wearing her goddess saris.”

  “You see how he treats me, Auntie?”

  “Sam,” my mother would say, “even Lawrence didn’t treat you like a Gujarati when you first arrived, though you acted like one.”

  “You didn’t mind how I acted then, Denise.”

  Then my mother would flush and shake her head, and Asha would rub her arm to console her.

  “And do you know what else, Denise-auntie? He drinks. Not every day. But when he drinks, it is terrible. He shows me pictures. White women. A black woman. He says to me, ‘You see what I had? You see what I had here? I was happy. I was such a happy man before I was made to marry you.’ If my father knew. If I was to write a letter to my father, he would come here himself and take me home.”

  “He won’t come here, Sita-devi. On Gore Road, maybe, and then I would have to pick him up. Your father can never come here. He can’t get a visa.”

  “Then I’ll go home myself.”

  “Then go.”

  “My father is an important administrator in Mangalore. Every ship that comes into the port, my father stamps the papers. If it wasn’t for your America, you could not have a high caste like me. What is your father but a man with sons in America?”