The Konkans

by Tony D'Souza

  On Sundays, their mothers would boil great pots of fresh crabs before dawn, the compound dogs crouching in close on their paws as they looked about at the humans, knowing they, too, would soon have a feast. Into the pots with the crabs, once the water boiled down, went onions and garlic and potatoes and peas, and piles of that red curry powder that made everything taste so good. Each of the children would be given a crab to pick apart and eat, and if they were lucky, the crab would be full of yellow egg sacs. The body casings they tossed to the dogs to gnaw and lick.

  At this time in her youth, my aunt had been neither Asha nor Sita-devi, but “sister” and “daughter,” and her father, whom she knew by the smile he saved just for her, was simply another of those men among the Mulki River Konkans who were all her fathers. Then she grew, and her mother braided flowers into her hair, and even the Hindu harijans who rented their fathers’ canoes during the week to fill with sand from the shoals in the river and pole to the building sites of the rich Mangalorians’ new retreat estates, even they would look at her in their muscled labors as they passed. Bare-chested, black from their days in the sun, glistening from the sweat of their work as though oiled, those thin men would say to her in Konkani—which was not their language—as she walked in her woman’s sari along the bank, “E puri kon achi?” and wink.

  My aunt Asha was enrolled in a convent school in Mangalore because she was beautiful, to learn to read and write, and later, to sew and type. Not because any of these men who had raised her really cared that she learned anything, but because they could all see that she was desirable, and that one day, she would make a fine match for the betterment of the family. To this end, she was also taught to sing and dance in the traditional way, the instructor coming to her room in the boarding school on Wednesday evenings, as well as on Saturdays before evening Mass, to work her through the proper foot placement of the dances, the subtle hand gestures, and more than anything, the turn of her hips in her sari, until she possessed the movements like a right. This was directed by a Hindu teacher, because Hindus still understood these things better than Konkans ever would, an old woman who had herself once been beautiful, and who corrected my aunt with quick smacks to her hands, her hips, with the ruler that was the principal tool of instruction.

  My aunt understood even then that none of this was done for her own good. But because she loved her family and the Mulki River and the special smile her father had for her when he’d come back from crab fishing to touch her head in his offhand way and say, “This one belongs to me,” she not only pushed herself to do well at those lessons, but to excel. Then her body filled her uniform, filled her saris on the weekends when she’d walk with her friends through the busy streets of Mangalore to have a tea and sweetmeats in a shop for fun, and when school was done, she came home from the convent with her body grown up around her. And afterward, because of her body, she passed two years mostly confined to her room. She turned twenty, which was old to be unmarried, and she understood that they were saving her for something grand. Then her father came to her room one evening with a mango sliced into slivers on a banana leaf, and he sat beside her on the bed. Her father touched her cheek, petted her hair. He was not an old man yet, but he wore gray at his temples. He was her only father in this world.

  “A match has been made for you, my Asha.”

  “I understand, Father.”

  “He is a handsome boy, older than you, but that is the normal way. He is a second son of the Chikmagalurian Konkan D’Sais. They were once very successful people, and are again because they have sons in America. One of these American sons is in need of a bride. They are demanding a big dowry, which is both difficult for me, and very flattering. You should be proud of the dowry that I will pay to these people. What do you think about it, my Asha?”

  “I don’t think, Father. I obey as I always have.”

  “This man will take you to America. If you find yourself unhappy there, simply write to me and I will whisk you home.”

  My uncle flew in from Chicago, and with his father and uncles, he took the bus to Mulki to look at the girl. Asha sat in her room in the sari and bangles and flowers that her mother and aunts had decorated her with, and as evening turned to night, she could hear the men on their stools in the courtyard growing loud with the singing of “E puri kon achi?,” with the crab eating and drinking of fenny, which her father brewed himself in the still behind the house. As she sat wringing her hands, the sound of the drunken men was as terrible as the sound of feasting monsters. Then she made herself think of her childhood, of swimming in the river, of her mother’s hands cutting a spiny jackfruit open on the ground with a hooked knife so that they all might eat together of the sweet yellow pulp. She thought of her father touching her head and saying, “This one is mine.” She thought of the beautiful river. She loved all the people of her life, and now was her time to take her place among them. She would have her own children so that her parents would be proud, she would have her own daughters so that her own husband might lay his hand on their heads and say, “These are the ones that belong to me.” Soon enough, there was a rap on the door, and her father in his suit came in to her with a smile and said, “Come, my daughter, hurry.”

  In the courtyard, around the circle of the lantern on its crate, were men. Most of them were old, all in suits, and then there was one young one with his eyes on her, and my aunt knew that he was her intended. Her father sat on his chair in his place among the men of his clan, and everyone looked at her. “Show them now, my Asha,” her father said, and smiled.

  Though there was no music, my aunt knew what was expected of her. She looked at the face of the man who was her intended, and she found that she did not hate his face. She looked again at the expectant faces of the men she had loved as a girl. There were no women around. My aunt lifted her sari to expose her bare feet, to reveal her anklets with the bells on them that would soon chime like the calls of small birds. Then she descended the three steps and entered the open space before the lantern. Looking only at my uncle, she lifted her arms above her head to the stars like the opening of the petals of a lotus blossom. Then she closed her eyes and began to dance. At first she felt the eyes of the men on her, and then she didn’t. Her mind lowered itself into the shifting of her hips. She danced the harvest, and then the feast of the harvest. She danced the cycle of the sun across the face of the sky, and she danced the moon. All of these dances were punctuated with the delicate annotations of her hands. These were Hindu dances. But because she danced them as her mother had, as all their mothers before them had, they were also Konkan. My aunt Asha focused herself and became the stories of the life cycles. She wanted to impress my uncle, but she also simply wanted to get the dances right. Perspiration wet her brow, and she panted quietly. Everything was the sound of the chimes on her ankles. When she was done, she looked first at my uncle Sam, whose face was blank, and then at her father, who looked back at her with eyes that said he had never really seen her before this moment. Yes, he had been drinking. But yes, too, he now saw her for what she was. He rose and escorted her by her arm up the steps and to her room. He said to her, “Even if you never marry, my Asha, I will now be happy.”

  My aunt lay on her bed and breathed away her nerves. She listened to the voices of the men. They were discussing now, bartering over the bridal price. It was serious talk, like arguing. The Chikmagalurians shouted something, and then her men did. Her men shouted something, and the strangers shouted something back. What could she feel but pleased? She had caused this with her dance.

  The chairs were folded with loud claps, the men hiccuped their good-byes to one another. Then all was quiet for a long time, save for the sound of the crickets. Someone rapped at her door. Her father came in with the lantern, and his eyes were bleary from the fenny. He sat in the chair with the lantern on the floor, and looked at her a long time without saying anything. Her father’s eyes on her made my aunt cover herself with her hands, so she looked at her feet, at the silver rings o
n her toes like slivers of the moon. Her father finally said, “I wish that I could marry you myself, my daughter. All has gone well. We’ve agreed on a dowry.”

  At the wedding feast, my aunt and uncle sat beside each other in their finery in my grandfather’s courtyard for all to see. My aunt was nervous and happy, and my uncle was happy, too. Then they walked in a long procession to the church, were married in it, and then they came back to the house. My aunt’s mother took her aside and said, “The first time will be difficult. He doesn’t know anything, just as you don’t. Be gentle and be kind. Remember that he is also scared.”

  My uncle showered my aunt with kisses in their confinement room in his father’s house, touched her body in ways that let her know instantly that he knew more about this than she did. Even as he entered her that first time in India, my aunt understood that there had been other women. Soon enough, in America, where she didn’t know anything and was afraid to leave the house, he brought out a photo album and showed her the pictures of them, both white and black, smiling on my uncle’s arm as only wives should, and my uncle Sam said, “You see, my Sita-devi? I was happy with my gopis. Now you are here. What in the world am I supposed to do with someone the likes of you?”

  My aunt did not hate my uncle, though maybe she should have. In the night, the bedroom black with the drapes drawn against this place, America, which she did not know and hated, he would lie beside her, and both of their breathing would be fast. Yes, they were supposed to sleep now, but they were married, and they both knew that there were other things that married people were meant to do. My aunt would lie still and think of the flow of the Mulki River, and soon enough she could feel my uncle’s heartbeat slowing beside her. Then in the dark my uncle would rub her thigh, touch her breast, and roll on top of her. She was bewildered at these times because she did not understand why he touched her in the night when he called her “Sita-devi” all day long. When he was finished, my uncle would roll off of her again, curl on his side away from her, and sigh, and then he would fall asleep. Something inside my aunt wanted to caress my uncle’s back and make it right, but another part of her didn’t. In the morning, as she’d dress in her sari, my uncle would insult her casually as he put on his shirt and tie. “This is America, Sita-devi. Why do you insist on going on with these old things?”

  The first months went by in this way, and then the snowflakes began to fall. They looked to my aunt like the dust of heaven falling to earth, and for as much as she hated America, this at least was beautiful. When it snowed and my uncle was not there, she would stand in the yard and catch flakes on the palms of her hands and on her tongue. Yes, it was brutally cold here, but the snow of this place was beautiful. When she began to shiver in the wool coat my uncle had bought for her, she would go inside again to watch from the window the snow fall in its silence. What dark days those were. My aunt had had no idea that a cold such as this existed in the world.

  My aunt wrote a long letter the week after New Year’s to her father. She wrote it at the dresser in the bedroom, and in it, she recalled her youth, how much she had loved it when he’d touch her head, and also she wrote about how lost she felt in the steel and cement world of America, how poorly my uncle treated her, how unhappy she was here, even though she knew how much her marriage pleased all of them. She wrote, finally, that she wanted to come home. Then she put down the pen and looked at herself in the mirror.

  So it has not turned out as you imagined, Asha. So what? Am I the first Konkan girl to be unhappy in marriage?

  The winter relented into spring, and when it was warm enough, what my aunt did was this: She unwound the sari from her body, folded it, and put it away. My uncle was away at work, and she would have plenty of time. She unbraided her hair in the bathroom mirror, and then dressed herself in the blouse and jeans that my uncle had bought for her. Though she hated the dumpy American clothing, she turned in the mirror until she was almost convinced that she was still beautiful in them. She pulled on the sneakers my uncle had long since given up trying to get her to wear, and at the door, she put on the coat and hat and mittens that were hers. Then she went out into the drizzle of the day and began to walk. She did not know where she was going, and her footprints recorded her passage for the briefest of moments in the wet pavement behind her. Even though it wasn’t cold now like the winter had been, still it stung her eyes. She walked to where the streets were busy with cars, entered the supermarket with its vast aisles of food. She looked at the white people putting vegetables into their carts, at the women paying for those things at the checkout lines. She examined how they dressed, how they walked, how they took yogurts out of the refrigerated cases, read the labels, put them back again. In this way, my aunt Asha recorded every little thing of America. Then she went back before my uncle Sam came home.

  My uncle Sam said to my mother one Saturday after New Year’s, “If she wants to go home, then I’ll let her. It wasn’t my choice to marry her. I was happier before she came.”

  “Try to be nice to her, Sam.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she is your wife. What’s done is done. You had to marry somebody. She’s young and pretty. She’s also very nice. Why not try to make the best of it?”

  “Is that what it takes to be happy, Denise?”

  “I don’t know what it takes to be happy, Sam. But what I do know is that Asha is now your wife.”

  What my aunt liked best was to look at young women. Young white women her age in their ponytails and sweatpants in the supermarket, how they’d pull off their hats and their ponytails sprang to life at the back of their heads, how they moved about the aisles and world with the confidence that men did, as though the world belonged to them, too. They seemed like gods in their power. As she stared at them touching their fingers to their lips as they contemplated prices at the deli counter, as they scratched their heads before the dozens of choices of pastas, my aunt decided that she would also be who they were.

  When the weather broke that spring, my aunt learned to take the bus, she used bits of the money my uncle had given her when they’d first come to ride the “L.” Some days, she would walk past the downtown skyscrapers, craning her neck to take them in and wondering, “How can anything else also exist in the world?” She began to read newspapers in McDonald’s as she sipped her coffee, she began to look through the want ads. Soon enough, my aunt Asha was at her first job interview.

  “You have no real experience,” the woman at the temp agency said to my aunt, and looked through her glasses.

  “I can speak English and I can type,” my aunt said back.

  “There is work for you today as a maid if you want it.”

  “I want better work than that,” my aunt said back.

  All of these months, my uncle found himself avoiding his own home. He would drive past our house, past Jacqueline’s apartment. He didn’t know a thing about what Jacqueline’s life was like now, and as far as my mother went, that was something that he felt was also fading into the past. He’d roll on his Sita-devi in the night, and as he did, he’d imagine that her body belonged to these other women. Then he would roll off her and lie on his side and wonder how he was supposed to get through this life, when this was not the life he wanted.

  My aunt Asha did get a job, as a typist for a busy packaging supplier in Skokie. It was neither glamorous nor very interesting, and the temp agency took 15 percent of her wages. She took the bus and the “L” back and forth from work, and she didn’t wear a bindi. The rough people on the “L” frightened her at first, and then they didn’t. My uncle Sam left before she did, came home later.

  They liked my aunt at the packing supplier, the men would ask her about India when they came in with orders from the warehouse for her to process. They were white men and black, and they made her blush with their questions about if she had ever ridden an elephant, if she wore that wraparound Indian dress when she went home at night. Even the manager in his white shirt and tie stopped to talk to her when he ca
me in and out of his office at lunch. He was an older man, portly, and reminded my aunt of her father. Now and again he would set his hand on her shoulder and say, “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ you know, Asha. This is America, not India. Everyone is equal here.” Then he’d rap his knuckles on her desk and say, “Your husband’s a lucky guy,” as he turned to walk away.

  After three weeks, they made my aunt permanent. It wasn’t a cheap thing for them to do, the manager told her, but then he smiled and said, “But everyone thinks you are worth keeping around the old barn.” He gave her a ring binder that explained the details of her job, office conduct, and other formalities, and as she read it leaving work that day, my aunt began to walk. There was plenty of time before my uncle Sam would get home, and she read each page again and again as she walked through Skokie, then Niles.