“Music? What kind of music?”
“Carnatic. You know, South Indian classical. I play the flute.” She says it sort of soft and shy, as if she’s confiding a secret. “Do you play an instrument?”
“Not unless my camera counts.”
“Oh, yeah. I think your mom sent us a picture you took once.”
“Really? Which one?”
“Years ago. No, wait, you were in it, so you couldn’t have taken it. You were—oh, I don’t know, maybe six years old?”
That is the year we bought my camera. Only it was Dad’s camera then. He got me started on taking pictures with it. When he left it behind, it became mine. I feel myself tensing.
“You’re in the middle, in that picture.” She stumbles on, realizing she doesn’t mean to go there, but now she cannot stop. “Between your parents. Oh, dear, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I tell her, but I can feel a smile pasting itself automatically on my face.
Mom comes looking for us. She is carrying her purse, and she’s armed with an umbrella against the sun’s glare. “You’re going out?” I ask her. “In this heat?”
“Just to the real estate agent’s,” she says. “I’ll be back soon.”
“The buyers didn’t come?” I ask her.
She says, “No. They didn’t show up.”
Mami has made cool side dishes to go with lunch, lots of yogurt and cucumber, and grated carrots with lime juice and a mustard seed garnish. We are not hungry. The heat saps hunger, and all we want is to drink huge quantities of water.
Mami worries about Mom. “She went off without eating,” she says. “You should have told her to eat and then go. It’s not good for her.”
“Why would she listen to me?” I retort. “She hasn’t listened to me in years.”
“What do you mean?” Sumati wants to know.
I tell her. “She and my dad stopped talking to each other years ago. By the time I was nine years old, they hardly said ten words to each other most days. I guess when you don’t talk there’s no listening to worry about, so maybe she just got out of the habit.”
Sumati looks surprised. “That must have been hard for you,” she says.
“They used to get me to do the talking. You know, ‘Tell your mother I’m going to the post office.’ ‘Tell your father dinner’s ready.’ That kind of thing.”
“They were both still listening to you then,” she says.
“I guess,” I say, “but I was only a messenger. Bad as that was, it was even worse when they did talk. I’d try to find reasons to make them talk to me, especially Dad, so they wouldn’t be yelling at each other.”
“When did your parents get divorced?” she asks.
“Well, they separated a year ago. A month before my eleventh birthday. Some gift. The divorce was after that.”
“Ever see him?” she asks.
“No.”
“Miss him?”
I shrug casually, not letting on. “I guess.” Because although she makes me laugh, and we can talk about nothing and everything for hours, she is not yet to be trusted. “Not that much.”
“It must be hard,” she says.
Mami still says nothing, but in passing behind my chair, as we get up from lunch and begin clearing away the plates, she rests her rough hand for a moment on my shoulder, so I can feel its warmth.
Ashwin survives his haircut with a fuzz of hair all across the top of his head and his ears sticking out. Lakshmi Auntie picks up Sumati. She says, “Kullan’s coming back from Bangalore tonight. Honestly, I’m starting to feel like a taxi service.”
Ashwin complains that his neck itches.
“You can go home and wash off the bits of hair. You could probably use a bath anyway, stinko,” says Sumati.
They drive off. Their friendly bickering is just another reminder that these people might be part of our larger family, but their lives are very different from ours.
On the Sidewalk
The trouble in my family began with naming me. Thatha, Mom’s father, had my name picked out even before I was born. Two names, actually, because he didn’t know I was going to be a girl and he wasn’t taking any chances. He also figured that since he was the only grandparent on my mom’s side he needed to be doubly prepared. Dad’s parents had a girl’s name picked out too. The only problem was it wasn’t the same name. Mom liked Maya, so Maya I became. Dad didn’t care. It would have been fine if it had stopped there, but it didn’t. When Thatha called us, and wanted to talk to me, he’d ask for Maya. But when Dad’s parents telephoned, they’d ask for Preeta. For a while I answered to both.
At Hindu Culture Camp they told us Maya was the name of the Buddha’s mother. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, since she’d died seven days after he was born. And even if she’d lived, her son would have left her to go off and teach the world. Great for the world, but what about poor Queen Maya? Joanie, who always tried to help when I had parent problems, once suggested, “Why don’t you just make ‘Preeta’ your middle name?” But when I asked Mom, she said, “Well, it says ‘Maya’ on the birth certificate and you don’t have a middle name.” So I waffled between names, and sometimes I used them like weapons. When I was mad at Mom, I wouldn’t answer to “Maya.” Once, I annoyed her for days by saying, “Maya’s gone away. I’m Preeta.”
I asked Dad, “Which name do you like?” and he said, “I like them both. Why don’t you use the one you like?” Only how was I supposed to choose and still please them both? I grew into Maya from habit, but Preeta still hung out there, a ghost-name waiting in the wings, crying, Choose me, choose me!
“You are very quiet,” Mami says to me on one of our shopping trips. I have taken to helping her haul the heavy produce from the market. We are eating so many tons of fresh vegetables I am in danger of turning into an okra or an eggplant.
“You have trouble in your heart,” she says. “It’s difficult for you, because you don’t understand.”
I protest. “What don’t I understand?”
“Things,” she says. “Grownup things. Things that should never have happened.”
“Like my parents being divorced?” There. I’ve said it. Why does it sound so terrible? Like something to be ashamed of. I think she’s going to tell me to be quiet. That is, after all, the response I have gotten from Mom when I have dared to raise the issue. She usually gets a pained look and says, “Maya, we need to move on. What’s the point of feeling bad about things that can’t be changed?” To anyone else that would sound like good advice. To me their divorce is a wound that won’t close up the way it’s supposed to, like an itch from a scab that has not quite healed. How can you leave something behind when it’s been hidden so carefully from you that you never even knew what it was until it was too late?
But this is Mami. She is not going to fuss about what’s okay and not okay to talk about. She laughs out loud. She says, “People aren’t always as they seem to be. Even your mother.”
Oh, yes? What is Mami going to tell me now?
“Once when your mother was just a little thing, she decided she was going to run away from home.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, she was bored one afternoon, and your grandmother had scolded her for something she’d done, or hadn’t done. It probably just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I am forced to smile. Who can imagine a mother doing things like that? “Where did she go?”
“Not far. The mango tree. She decided to go live in the tree. She left a note on the dining table saying, ‘I am running away. Don’t look for me in the mango tree.’
“Well, of course your grandmother found the note, and she laughed and laughed. ‘Shall I send the gardener up the tree and get her down?’ your grandfather asked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Let the child run away for a while.’
“So we waited, and every time he said, ‘Now?’ she’d reply, ‘No, let her be. Not yet.’
“Well, finally your grandmother let him send th
e gardener up the tree, and there she was, your mother. She was a bit nervous, because you see it was getting dark, and she knew that mosquitoes start to buzz for people’s blood in the evenings. But when your grandfather said, ‘Did you have a good time?’ she just looked at him, determined as anything, and replied, ‘Oh, yes. There are lions and tigers up there! It’s wonderful.’”
All around us, the city buzzes. I try to see my mother as a little kid with fancies in her head, and lions and tigers up in the imaginary world of her mango tree. What I cannot understand is why Mami sighs, as if this were a sad, sad story instead of just a funny one. She keeps on walking. She says, “The next time she ran away was to get married.”
I know that story. It used to be a romantic and mysterious family tale. That was before it became erased by arguments over everything from money to me. “Your grandfather didn’t want them to get married, you know.”
I know that too. It seemed no one had wanted them to get married. And if they hadn’t, where would I be? I point that out to Mami. She laughs. “You might be the only good thing that came of all this,” she says.
I object. “That’s not true. It wasn’t always bad. They didn’t always fight. It just got that way.”
“Divorce,” says Mami. “No such thing in my day. The woman just stayed and suffered, that’s the way it was. Maybe it’s better now.”
The noise picks up around us. Big black songbirds party in the neem and mango trees that line the roads. Kuyil, Mami says they are called. In India, even the birds are loud, all yelling at the same time, so different from the finches in New Jersey that take turns singing civilized little songs. Looking up to see them, and paying more attention to my thoughts than to the world around me, I don’t see the crack in the sidewalk ahead. Where my feet expect flat pavement, slabs of concrete have been ripped out for a construction project. I go sprawling. I try to put my hands out to break the fall, but end up in the dirt anyway.
“Ayyo, ayyo!” Mami cries, and rushes to help me.
“I’m all right,” I say. “I tripped. I’m fine.” I get up and dust myself off. I pick up the shopping bags and begin gathering the scattered potatoes and greens. And then all at once, I feel a familiar sticky hot trickle in my nose and watch in dismay as the first warm drop of blood falls on my pale-green cotton kameez.
Terrible timing.
When I was younger I used to have frequent nosebleeds. Not the little drippy jobs some kids get. These were gushing fountains that spouted out of my nose and over everything in sight. By the time I’d put ice on my forehead and pinched my nostrils together, and reassured people, “Don’t worry. It’s okay, I’ll be all right,” I’d be covered with enough blood, you’d think I was the goddess Durga herself, coming back from battling the buffalo demon Mahisha. No lion for me to ride, though.
My mother is funny about blood, so she’d get really flustered whenever it happened. Dad would get me to sit up, lean my head back, pinch my nostrils, cool down. Then he’d get me a big glass of juice.
Over the years he was there less and less. Sometimes he’d be around, but too wrapped up in work to help me. He’d say, “Coming, Maya, I’ll be there in just a minute,” but then I began to figure out that wasn’t always true.
He had quit his job and tried to start a business, something to do with the stock market. The basement became an office, where before it had been one big playroom for me.
One weekend when I was eight, Mom was out grocery shopping and the telephone rang. Dad was in the office, which was where he’d begun to spend a lot of time, sometimes even falling asleep at his desk. I picked it up.
“Preeta, is that you? How nicely you answer the phone!” My grandmother asked to speak to Dad.
“Daddy,” I called. “It’s Ammamma for you.”
He picked it up in the basement. I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs and listened. He kept on clacking those keys and talking on the phone, but soon his voice rose higher, drowning out the frantic tap-tap-tap of his fingers on the computer keyboard.
It was then that I felt a tickle in my nostril. I stood in his office, but he didn’t even notice me. He was too busy arguing with his mother on the phone. When Mom came home I lied to her. “I had a nosebleed, and Daddy helped me,” I said. Because of course I knew that if he could have, he would have.
Ever since then, when it happened, I’d go in the bathroom to take care of it, then I’d wash up and cool off when it was over, and I’d get a drink afterward. And I wouldn’t tell my parents about it.
Here on the sidewalk, with a hundred people gathering around to gawk at me, I don’t feel so capable.
No problem, as it turns out. Kamala Mami handles the crowds. She swears and fusses (“Fools! Madaya! Muttal! Don’t you have anything better to do than stand around and cast evil eyes on this poor child?”) until they leave us alone. She gets me into a little grocery store crammed with tins of everything from cooking oil to baby powder. Mami makes me sit on the dusty floor and lean back on a sack of rice. She gets the man in the store to turn on a giant electric fan so the cool air swishes on my face. She buys a green coconut from the old man selling them on the sidewalk, and asks him to hack it open for me. Then she sticks a straw in it, and holds it in her cracked old hands while I drain it gratefully.
“Sit still and don’t try to talk,” Mami warns.
That’s fine with me.
She chants the way she does at home, in the kitchen, or while she’s lighting incense sticks in her little shrine. “Annapurni, sadaapurni …” She chants the names of Devi, the goddess, giver of food and killer of demons. She tells stories of all the forms the goddess can take when she comes down to earth, some sweet and loving, and some strong and fierce.
“The buffalo demon thought he was safe,” she says. “He thought no man or god could harm him, and so his pride grew monstrous. And in the end who killed him? Devi! No man or god, do you understand?”
I understand. I sip the clear sweet coconut juice, and I am grateful for Mami, who seems every bit as fierce as any goddess.
“Killed him, just like that,” she says with relish, and the shopkeeper warns her, “Shh. Please. My customers.”
Mami waves him away and carries on. “Devi, mother of us all, she’ll take care of you.”
Sometimes Mami talks to the shopkeeper, who is still nearby. He is wearing a strained look by this time, trying to assure concerned customers that everything is fine. And sometimes it seems to me, although I can’t be sure of it, that she is talking to no one at all.
Of course Mom goes into a flap when I return home with great splotches of blood all over my kameez. “Oh, no, Maya! Are you all right? Oh, my God, look at all that blood.”
Exhausted, I lower myself onto the broad wooden seat of the oonjal, the swing that hangs at one end of the dining room. It is so big it could hold half a dozen people. Giant chains suspend it from hooks in the ceiling. Mom brings me a glass of water, and the sight of my bloody kameez makes her go shuddery.
“You’ve not had one of those in so long. I’d hoped—”
“Yeah, me too. But it’s okay. Mami helped me.” Mami is out of help mode now. She tells Mom in detail all about it, and how she’s looked after lots of children, and never seen anything like this. Do many children in America have nosebleeds? Maybe it’s the food. Or the cold weather, very unhealthy.
Mom tries to answer the questions, but it is a bit like trying to stop one of the city buses by waving at it. And anyway, Mami isn’t waiting for answers. She is recapping how she cussed out the people who tried to gather around while I lay bleeding to death on the sidewalk. I can’t tell if I am imagining it or if she’s really talking too much, too loud, too long. I decide I’m just tired. Finally she runs out of steam and wanders away to get laundry off the clothesline. Mom and I are left alone sharing an awkward silence.
I twiddle the pages of a book lying open on the oonjal.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have gone out in the heat,” says my mother at last.
I really don’t think she means anything by it. It is something to say.
But I have had it. The day, the dreadful sticky hot nosebleed, the dust, the dirty sidewalk, Kamala Mami and her ramblings, the crowds of people—it is all too much.
“Oh, sure.” My voice comes out sharp and highpitched, what Joanie calls my “tangry voice,” teary and angry. “Blame me. It’s my fault! I had the nosebleed because I chose to go out, right? You weren’t even there!”
“Maya!” I’ve stopped her in her tracks. “You know I didn’t mean—”
But I swing my legs off the oonjal, fling the book to the floor, and march out, noting with terrible triumph that my words have landed smack on target, every single one.
The Cottage at the Beach
The days get hotter. Mom gets busier. She also gets nervous when I venture anywhere outside the house. We have conversations that go like this:
Me: I’m going to walk up the street and take some photos, okay?
Mom: I’ll come with you.
Me: It’s all right, I’ll be fine. I thought you had to go get those papers notarized.
Mom: Yes. Well, maybe Mami can go with you.
Me: Maybe I’ll just go another time.
I don’t even go to the store with Mami when we run out of beans and rice because Lakshmi Auntie picks up groceries for us on her way home from work. She insists it’s to save Mami the hassle of walking to the shops in the heat, but I think maybe Mom has told her about my nosebleed.
I do make my way up onto the flat terrace roof and get some great shots of the city. One day I surprise a rhesus monkey sitting on the edge of the roof. He sidles up to me. I back away. He stops, scratches himself, and comes closer. I remember Mami saying, “They’d come and snatch the food out of our hands.” I retreat, in case he decides to make a grab for my camera. Only later do I think, Oops, missed a photo op.
Naming Maya Page 3