by Tony D'Souza
She would have to be there every day from 9:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. She would have forty-five minutes for lunch. She was expected to answer the phone in a professional manner, type all memos in standard English.
Why had they all thought that she was capable of nothing more than being a bride? Why had not one of them believed that there could be more for her in the world than that one thing?
My aunt let herself think about the money she’d be making. Two dollars and ninety cents an hour. At the end of each day, she would have made $20.30. At the end of each week $101.50. My aunt had no idea what she would do with all of that money. Certainly she would buy her own clothes now, dress herself as she wanted to. In fact, that was the first thing she would do. Surely there were American clothes that she could feel beautiful in. Especially if she was allowed to choose them herself. My aunt tucked the binder under her arm. It was evening all around her in this strange and leafy neighborhood, and she understood immediately that she had no idea where she was.
My uncle searched the darkened house that night for his wife, realized she wasn’t there. For an instant, he thought she’d killed herself. In that same instant, he understood that he did not want her to die. There was nothing for him to do but sit on the couch and wait. Had her letters finally reached somebody?
The phone rang. When my uncle Sam answered it, a man said, “Do you know a girl named Asha?”
“Asha is my wife.”
“Well don’t you think you’d better get over here and pick her up?”
“Who am I talking to?”
“Nobody. We’re over at the Wally’s Burgers on Northwest Highway in Edison Park. I’d take her home myself, but I’m busy.”
“I’ll be right there.”
My uncle Sam found my aunt Asha sitting at a table in the Wally’s Burgers in the Western clothes he’d thought she’d never wear. She was sipping a milk shake through a straw, and she raised her eyebrows at him to let him know she was scared. The man from the phone was sitting across from her in his apron and hat. The place was otherwise empty.
“But how can you even taste the food when there is that much spice in it?” the man was saying.
My uncle waited until they were in the car. He glanced at my aunt again and again in her clothes as he drove with his hands tight around the wheel. For her part, my aunt looked out the window.
“That was not a nice thing to do, Asha,” my uncle said.
“I got fed up with sitting in the house.”
“What do you do when I am not home?”
“I have a job as a receptionist.”
“How can you work?”
“I gave them your Social Security number.”
“It will show up on my taxes.”
“I will have the money to pay it.”
The headlight beams cut through the falling night. Then my uncle said, “How much do you make?”
“Enough for me.”
“I will manage it for you.”
“Do you think, Samuel, that I will ever let you touch a penny of it?”
All the way home, my aunt looked out the window at the passing houses, at the trees in the parkways. Now and again, she saw her own face in reflection. The reason that she kept her face turned away from my uncle was because she was biting her tongue to keep from laughing. At home, my aunt took her keys out of her pocket to let them in. My uncle took off his jacket and hung it in the closet by the door. As he did, he said to my aunt, “What about all those letters?”
“Look in the bottom drawer of my side of the dresser, Sam,” my aunt said as she went into the kitchen to cut onions for supper.
My uncle went into the bedroom, turned on the light. He pulled open the bottom drawer on his wife’s side. The edges of the letters poked out from under her stack of saris. My uncle lifted out the saris to see the library of letters that waited for him. He took the first one and opened it. It began,
Dear Samuel, How can you treat me this way when I am to be the pathway to your children ? Don’t you want to respect your wife, who only wants to be respected by you? It is hard for me here, but if you only guide me, I will find the way to do my part. I realize now that we will not have a fairy-tale love. But if we can only find a way to respect one another, I know that all good things will come to us in this life. Children. A sort of happiness. I don’t need anything more than that.
My uncle Sam did not roll on my aunt that night. He didn’t call her Sita-devi again either.
The Peace Corps
My mother joined the Peace Corps for many reasons. The first of these was because she had suffered in the world, hated what her youth had done to her. Not only did she want to be as far away from that time as possible, but she also wanted to punish the memory of it with her good acts. But more than that, she wanted to see the world in a way she otherwise couldn’t afford to, and help people less fortunate than she was, even though she felt keenly that she had grown up poor.
My mother was full of stories. There were some that she liked to tell, and others that she did not. She did not like to talk about growing up in Detroit, about the man who had come into her darkened room. But the stories from her time in India were always dancing in my mother’s head. Of men on crowded buses who licked her neck, of jumping out of bathroom windows in funny hats with Lenore to escape the advances of the rich Tatas. A tale or two from her time before India when she worked in the Baby Ruth factory made her happy. But she always returned to India in her stories, as though through recounting them, she could take herself back there.
A story that made her both happy and sad came from early on in her service in India. Before she arrived in Chikmagalur, when she was still filled with dreams about making a difference in the world, she had been stationed in a small town in Karnataka named Hassan. Not far from town was an ancient temple complex called Halebid on a high hill in the forest, and the Halebid temple was seldom visited then, except for Hindu Brahmin priests who made offerings in it now and again. Every foot of its acre of black stone was covered with friezes of dancing girls, and in the great hall was a polished black granite Nandi bull. When the priests were there in their dhotis, they would burn incense and pray to the reclining Nandi.
Hassan was not far from Chikmagalur, where she would later ride an iron bicycle through the streets for twenty-two months, teaching untouchable women in the shantytown how to build smokeless ovens so they would not die of lung cancer at age forty. The untouchable women would call her “Shanti,” which means “peace” in Hindi, because they could not pronounce her American name. And that was how my mother would see herself on her headiest days in Chikmagalur, as peace embodied, riding her bicycle, the wind and scents of the flowering trees in her hair.
But the story was this: Before anything ever happened to her in Chikmagalur, my mother was stationed in Hassan near the Halebid temple in southern Karnataka State with Lenore and a young man named Peter Merchant. Peter had a cot under a mosquito net in one bedroom of their house, and my mother and Lenore had their cots under mosquito nets in the other. They’d only just arrived in India, were coming to terms with the fact that not anything of India was anything like that mock village on the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation where they’d done their field training. Who in the world had come up with that idea?
This was the delicate time when many of the volunteers quit and went home in a state of shock about the grim reality of the desperate world, which they’d never really shake off, and understanding this, the Peace Corps didn’t expect the ones who stayed to start projects right away, but to simply get used to the heat and poverty, the dust and noise, the languages and latrines, and to the psychological burden of being the center of attention.
My mother found that she didn’t mind the people’s stares, their endless waves and whistles and aggressive invitations to tea. Even their rough hands on her skin when they’d snatch touches of her arms as she moved through the cramped stalls of the Hassan market those first days didn’t m
ake her angry. In fact, the opposite was often true, the attention elated her. Yes, she couldn’t get the damned sari to fit right. The way it kept falling off her shoulder made her have to all but redress herself completely in the middle of the road every ten feet while half the town folded their arms to grin and watch the show. And no, she didn’t think she’d ever get used to the roaches on the walls of the latrine. And yes, the way that some of the men hissed at her was in fact rude. But that girl with the mole on her lip and holding the child with the long lashes on her lap in the market had smiled at her the day before, and here she was smiling again. “Is this your daughter?” my mother asked. “No, madame. My auntie’s daughter.” “She’s very pretty.” “Madame, my auntie will thank you.”
Peter and Lenore were different. The heat, the dust, the chaos and danger of the rickshaws banging over the broken streets like chariot races upset them. So did the donkey carts, the horned and humpbacked cattle, the smoke-belching Ambassador cars, the ratty and cute beggar children dashing through all these things. The men urinating on the side of the road, smiling and waving even as they did. The men clearing their nostrils with hearty blasts. A woman with an empty eye socket. An emaciated old man moving a pile of stones ten feet up the road rock by rock, crossing the countryside in his death pooja. Bedbugs in the bedrooms, rats in the rafters, mangy dogs in the yard, roaches everywhere. All of those people. All of those staring people. So Peter and Lenore left the house as little as possible, and my mother brought provisions back for them from the market.
They had an Indian cook who lived in their courtyard shed and prepared their meals, a low-caste Hindu named Krishna Arjuna, or was it Rama Krishna, none of them could ever remember, and my mother and Lenore were altruistic Midwestern girls, and Peter had graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in engineering. This was late 1966, and though my mother and Lenore both wanted to talk about Vietnam with him, the one time my mother found the words coming out of her mouth, “Did you join in case they start up the draft, Pete?” he’d looked at her with such a quickness that she understood that he had. He was a tall boy, blond, not ugly by any means, save for a fullness to his cheeks that made him seem heavier than he really was. They had been drinking Kingfishers by the light of a hurricane lamp on their porch in the night when she’d said it. Why had she said that when she’d already known? Peter shook his head, looked at my mother, and said, “Fuck you, Denise.”
Peter had gone into his room, and Lenore had raised her eyebrows at my mother. Though they were on speaking terms again in a few days, as they had to be in those conditions, my mother and Peter both knew that they would never be friends.
Though my mother was falling for India, when she was honest with herself, there were moments when she hated it. Sometimes she wanted to shout at all of them, Aren’t you ever going to get used to me? and she quickly learned to ignore the beggars. If she gave money to even one of them, she’d be begged by a horde the rest of the day. Even when she didn’t give money to anyone, someone was always there, at every simple transaction she made in the market for bread, for candles, a filthy, hungry wretched person just paces away, holding out his hand, trying to shift into her vision, his mouth intoning dully, Ek rupee. Ek rupee, madame. Ek rupee. Ek rupee, madame. It got so that the old man with stumps for arms and a pail hanging from one of them who followed her from the market all the way up the road to the house in the functionaries’ quarter where they lived and bleating that refrain like a wounded lamb couldn’t get a piaster out of her when she had a fistful of them. When the grubby kids of the poorest of the poor ran out from the tent village along the railroad tracks where the working poor of the shantytown went to shit, she’d yell in Kannada, “Don’t soil my clothing.” In her first days, she had picked those children up. Even now, if she looked at their faces, it was hard, but as my mother did or didn’t realize at that time, falling in love with India required being careful about what you looked at.
Lenore listened to my mother’s catalog of sights at night before bed. In the dark of their room with their nets around them like curtains, my mother would talk about going into the shantytown, what the shanties were like inside, how they were cleaner than she’d imagined, how they were decorated with pictures of Bombay film stars salvaged from scraps of newspaper, how the women put on their bindis and combed their hair in small shards of mirror. About conversations she’d had in the town, at the bus stand. Would madame dare to ride up here? the young men had called down to her and smiled, perched on the rice sacks lashed to the top of the bus to Belur. Of course she would, she’d called back. They’d all reached down their hands. And so Lenore would go to sleep with her head full of stories of what lay beyond the door. And more than that, she began to step out into India on my mother’s arm, and when she was ready to, she went out on her own. The women of Hassan, who had trouble distinguishing between the white women, gave my mother and Lenore nicknames to tell them apart. “You are the one who walks fast,” the oldest flower seller said in Kannada one day, and poked Lenore in the arm, and then she turned to my mother and told her, “And you are the one who walks slow.”
“What did she say?” Lenore asked my mother, and my mother said, “That your hair is the color of amber, and my hair is the color of gold.”
Lenore and my mother hired a motor rickshaw to take them out to the temple complex now and again, which was wonderful. Not only was the temple itself beautiful, with its rows of slender columns, that reclining bull, and all those dancing girls, but usually there were no other people around. In the open-air halls where living asparas had long ago danced before the priests, my mother and Lenore modeled their arms like the lines of women in the friezes. Then they’d tilt their hips and stamp their feet like they’d seen dancers do in the Hindi movies. Sometimes they would mimic the latest overwrought love scene between the star-crossed young film couple, with my mother playing the man, and Lenore the woman, and my mother would dip Lenore in her arms and say in a deep voice in Hindi, “Kya tum mujhe pyar karte ho?” and Lenore would say back in English, “And I, too, . . . for me nothing will remain without you, but only death,” and throw her arm across her forehead in anguish. Then my mother would release her and they would dance again around that room. Then just Lenore would dance, throwing her arms up to the heavens as though being soaked in a deluge, which she really would have been in the movie, the see-through wet sari scene a requisite part of every Hindi film.
Whether they knew it or not, these dances, this change in culture, were revealing to them things about their bodies that they had not known in America. After another of these silly dances in the temple, my mother and Lenore fell laughing into each other’s arms. They gave themselves up to the laughter, let their eyes tear from it, and then they went and sat in their saris on the temple steps and looked down the hill and over the forest. The sky was overcast and brooding, and they could see rain falling in curtains here and there in the distance. The clamor of the town they now lived in felt like a faraway thing. The laughter passed from them the way it had come, and then they sat quietly.
My mother imagined the wet town in her mind, the thronging people. But even in this distant mood she could still imagine the color of the flowers at the market. She said, “No matter how much I like parts of it, sometimes it is incredibly difficult to be here.”
Lenore looked at my mother’s face. “Denise, don’t you know how hard it’s been for me every day?”
“The men can be awful.”
“I hate it when they hiss.”
“What do they think we’ll do when they do that?” my mother said, and shook her head. “That they’ll hiss at us and we’ll suddenly go and sleep with them? Do they think we are really that loose? If that’s all it took, then that’s all we’d be doing our whole time here.”
“Sometimes I catch a man looking at me, and I know he would pay me for it if he could.”
“The whole town together couldn’t afford my fee.”
Lenore squeezed my
mother’s arm, smiled. Then she laid her head on my mother’s shoulder, and my mother petted her hair.
“I am so lonely, here, Denise,” Lenore said.
“You’ve done so good, Lenore.”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What is it?” my mother said.
“What would you say if I told you that I’ve been thinking about sleeping with Peter?”
Peter Merchant, aside from the many other things he was or wasn’t, was an Eagle Scout. He’d brought the uniform with him, and the morning after my mother’s comment about Vietnam, he came out of his room wearing it. It was covered in badges and beads and all of that stuff, and he wore the shorts, too. My mother understood when she saw him that it had to do with what she’d said. She looked at him, noted what he was wearing, and left for the market. If Peter had gotten whatever satisfaction he’d thought he needed by dressing up in that outfit, my mother didn’t care. If it wasn’t for the Peace Corps, she would have never had to meet this person.
But Peter and his uniform weren’t just about my mother. It was also about his developing relationship with India. India did not do much to meet Peter on his terms, and Peter did not do much to meet India on its. He hated being touched by the people, and few were the times he attempted to go to the market that he didn’t deal out a handful of shoves. Peter was also the tallest man in town. People followed him and laughed, and in the evening crowds, men lifted small children to their shoulders to point him out.
“Indians don’t have a fully developed sense of respect,” Peter complained to Lenore as they ate peanuts and drank away another evening in their enclosed courtyard in the early days. “What you’ve got to understand is that this is a caste culture that is thousands and thousands of years old. They’ve had these low self-esteem characteristics ingrained in them all of that time. Can’t you see how the Indians have created their own conditions? At home, I thought it was because of the shortage of teachers. Now I think it’s more than that.”