Mami has washed the tote bag. It is a shriveled and shrunken thing now, flapping on the clothesline. I take it down and put it away in the closet with the rest of my stuff.
Unlike Dad, whose voice in my head is getting less and less reliable, and Mom, who doesn’t have time to talk to me when I am right here, Kamala Mami has begun to talk loudly and at great length to people who aren’t there at all. Actually, it’s worse than that. She talks to people who are dead as if they were still alive.
I listen to her conversations. I flop onto my stomach on the broad wooden plank of the oonjal, and prop open a book. Sometimes I even read, and wait for the grumbling, rattling voice from the kitchen to blur its way into the stories I’m reading. From the oonjal I can peer into the kitchen when I want to. In this way, I watch Mami slipping into the world of her thoughts. It is like looking into one of those computer-screen savers where the desktop swirls away into a slow point of blackness, and then comes on in full color to start all over again. That’s sort of how she is, making dark predictions one minute, and stirring up delicious treats the next. And every day I listen to her recite the names of the goddess, all 108, mine among them, slipping quickly away in the torrent of others. Her mind is on a peculiar journey of its own, and I get to run alongside.
It seems to me she lets it show more when I am around. To Mom, she is just Kamala Mami, eccentric and loud, and refusing to admit my mother is no longer a willful teenager. They bicker about everything, and especially about the house. Mom doesn’t understand why Mami is working so hard at cleaning it when it’s going to be sold. Mami says if she’s going to see this house pass into the hands of strangers, she’s going to give it to them clean if it takes her last breath. If Mom doesn’t care what people think, she, Kamala, does, so will Prema let her go by, for the love of the gods, because the stairs need mopping again.
While she is arguing with Mom, Mami seems irritable but also normal. Or whatever is normal for her.
Every day I listen to her talking to Mom, and then, when Mom is out, when it is just the two of us in the house, she talks to herself. Sometimes from the way she looks at me, I think she knows I am listening.
Still, I watch her, learning to read the dips and dives of her behavior. One day she catches me off guard.
Mom has gone next door, to Mr. Rama Rao’s house. Since we don’t have a phone, she has to go next door every time she needs to call the bank or the realtor. Mr. Rama Rao often holds her up after she’s done, bending her ear with weather predictions and complaints about the noise from the bus stop. The Rama Raos have fired their household help again, and Mrs. Rama Rao will need to vent about what she calls “the servant problem.” So I know, because I too have been trapped in these conversations with them, that when my mother says, “I’m going to go make a phone call,” it’ll be forty-five minutes before we see her again.
I’m taking a bath when the doorbell rings. I hear the door open. Then I hear Mami saying something loudly, the same angry words over and over. I can’t make out what they are. The door slams shut. The bell rings again, and then again.
But I am not really paying attention, for one small reason. It has four legs and a tail.
I haven’t gotten used to sharing the bathroom with this gecko. I am afraid it will fall off the wall and drown in the bathwater or, worse, crawl across the ceiling, have a sudden heart attack, and fall on my head. So I make sure I keep an eye on it all through bath time. Sometimes it goes and hides behind the window curtains. That makes me really nervous because then I don’t know where it is, and I become even more certain it will dart out from its hiding place to ambush me.
This bath does not involve a tub and suds. I take two buckets, one with cool water from the regular faucet, the one marked “cold,” and one with boiling-hot water from a little heater thing that hangs on the wall and needs to be turned on half an hour before I begin the whole process. I mix the two buckets together, scooping with a big plastic container with a handle, until the water is a bearable temperature. I undress quickly, and pour scoopfuls of water over myself, stop and soap, then wash down again with more water. I do all this while trying to keep one eye on the gecko on the wall, which sometimes encourages me with startling and unexpected chirps. Its little translucent throat swells with the sound.
I brood about the gecko all through my bath, which is why I am not attending to Kamala Mami and the door. Even through the fog of steam from the bathwater, and the splash of it falling over me, though, it seems to me there’s way too much shouting, and the doorbell rings a lot.
When the water in the bucket runs out, I turn it upside down and listen to the last gurgles draining away. I rub myself down with the big thin white towel, noticing I’ve grown taller. I glance in the mirror, all misted up from the steam, and someone strange stares back at me, her hair standing up in a cloud around her head, dark and smoky. Her eyes are big and shinybrown, looking into mine so deeply she seems to be reading my jumbled thoughts. I stare, and as I stare my ordinary face swims back into focus.
I get dressed quickly and open the door, keeping careful watch to make sure the gecko stays out of my way. It chirps at me.
“What are you, trying to make friends?” I say. “Forget it.”
Headlines and Stories
“You did what?” my mother is saying when I get downstairs. “You sent Prasad away? Mami, he’s the real estate agent. He’s helping me sell the house.”
Kamala Mami mutters and mumbles under her breath, then bursts out in explanation. Prasad isn’t Prasad at all, she tells Mom, but a bandit called Malayappa who is wanted by the police.
“Police?” Mom shakes her head. “Mami, that’s not so. You’re getting him mixed up with someone else.”
But Mami will have none of it.
“Oh, my lord,” Mom mutters under her breath. “I go next door to make one lousy phone call, and she sends Prasad packing.”
Mami brings an old yellowed newspaper from the kitchen. She shows us the headline: SANDALWOOD SMUGGLER DIES IN EXCHANGE OF FIRE, and, in smaller letters below, FAMILY ACCUSES POLICE OF MISCONDUCT.
“There!” she declares, rustling the paper under our noses. “Look at him! He’s a scoundrel. Look at his face!”
We look. The man in the picture has a mustache, and thick black hair, and a glint in his eye that shows up even in the blotchy newspaper photo.
“Prasad has a mustache,” I tell Mom.
“Yes,” she says. “But so do lots of men. And everyone here has thick black hair.”
We are grasping for logic. There is none to be found.
Malayappa the sandalwood smuggler is dead. The article says so. He has been killed in a shootout with police. We point this out to Kamala Mami.
“Poor Prasad certainly doesn’t look like a crook,” says Mom. “He’d be really upset if he knew you thought he was a bandit.”
Mami is unimpressed. “You can say what you like,” she insists. “I know he is a scoundrel and a murderer. Don’t let him try to tell you he will sell the house. He’ll stick a knife in your back.”
We stare at her.
“You don’t know,” Mami warns us. “These are terrible times.” And she shows us other headlines to prove her point: BLAST SNUFFS OUT LIFE OF SCHOOLGIRL IN SRINAGAR; BOOTLEG LIQUOR SNUFFS OUT 13 LIVES IN CHENNAI; MISCREANTS FOUND HIDING IN TRAIN. It doesn’t tell us if they got snuffed out too.
“See?” she says to us. “See?”
It doesn’t seem to matter to her that Srinagar is three thousand miles north, or that some guys brewing toddy without a license couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my mother’s real estate agent. Mami is going to protect us from criminals and miscreants, and that is that.
In the afternoon she cooks up a perfectly wonderful meal while talking as fast as she can, and at the top of her voice. “They took you to jail!” she yells. “Because you wouldn’t give your own gold wedding bangles for the white man’s war. And you marched with the protesters, telling them to Quit India.�
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“Who?” I ask, in spite of Mom’s warning frown.
“Oh, those people,” says Mami, “those vellaikkara, they have a lot to answer for. You spent a day in jail for that protest, poor girl, and then you went again when they arrested people in 1945.” And she belts out a few curses about the British. I listen with interest.
We get chapter two over the second course of rice and rasam. The rasam is delicious, sour and hot with tomatoes and black mustard seeds. “You both went to jail together to throw the white men out. You said, ‘If Mahatma Gandhi can go to jail, we can go too. Nineteen years old and one of you unmarried even, the other a new bride! Such a terrible thing and yet so brave and wonderful. More rasam?”
I can’t stand it. “Who?” I ask, even though Mom shakes her head, urging me not to get Mami any more worked up.
“Who? What do you mean, who?” Mami demands. “I ask you if you want some more rasam and you say, ‘Who?’ Your grandmother, that’s who. And your grandfather’s sister Lalli.” And she dumps a ladle of rasam onto my rice, saying, “Eat, eat. You’re too thin.”
“Is that true?” I whisper to Mom when Mami goes to get more rice for us.
“Yes,” she whispers back. “My mother and Thatha’s sister used to go to freedom meetings. A lot of people did that. Civil disobedience.”
I know about the freedom struggle that led to India’s independence from British rule. I know that there were mass protests, burning British cloth, marching to the seaside to make salt in defiance of salt tax laws. But I had no idea my grandmother was involved in any of it. “She was arrested? Twice?”
Mom nods. “She got sick,” she says. “I’ve always heard it was something she picked up in jail. Typhoid, I think it was, but it left her quite weak and she never got her health back again. She died when I was very young, and no one ever talked much about it.”
“I can hear you still,” Kamala Mami continues, over the sweet payasam. “You tell me, ‘Kamala, they let us out. They let us out because they are afraid. All together, we can topple an empire.’”
I say to Mom, “You never told me these stories about your family. I didn’t know any of this.”
Mami mutters and mumbles over the rest of our lunch. She has used up her story bag, it seems, and all she can give us now are incoherent snippets. She reels off the names of Indian leaders and British rulers of the freedom struggle days—“Gandhi-Patel-Nehru-Maulana Azad-Mountbatten-George the Fifth!” She murmurs snatches of freedom songs—
“Mere vatan ke logon
Zara aankh mein bhar lo pani.”
Oh, people of my nation, fill your eyes with tears.
I know from the Culture Camp, where they’d taught us, yes, this very song, that Mami’s Hindi is as heavy with her Tamil accent as my Tamil is weighed down by my American one. Language can make you a stranger in many places, but only if you let it. I find that comforting, even while I feel Mami wandering beyond our reach.
After we’ve eaten lunch and put everything away, I notice Mami sits cross-legged by the screen door, clicking and cracking her knuckles and staring out at the wash slab and the garden beyond. She’s staring with a secret smile on her face, as if she can see something that the rest of us can’t.
Mom sighs. “I’m worried about Mami. I think I’d better have a talk with Lakshmi about her. Maybe she needs to go see a doctor. Maybe there’s something we can do to help her. Lakshmi might know.”
I say, “Yes,” and then I stop. I almost say, Yes, yes. You’re right. Something’s the matter. But then I remember Mami imploring, “Don’t tell your mother.” So, I say nothing.
Mom gives me a curious look as she gathers up stray papers from the dining table and puts them in piles that line the walls of the drawing room. I get the sense that she is organizing her thoughts as she does this, making the house feel comfortable to her, like hanging friendship bracelets on the doorknob of my room does for me. The drawing room is starting to look like our house in New Jersey. I wonder if that is why Mami talks to the people in her life who are long dead—if it is her way of making a place comfortable, filling it with something of her own. But when you do that with paper and bracelets, people don’t call you crazy.
“Maybe we need to call her family. Her son and his wife,” says Mom.
It strikes me that Mami never talks about her family. Later, when I ask her about them, her face tightens. “They don’t need me,” she says. “They have their own lives.” She grabs my hands and says, “Please. You must listen to me.”
“What?”
“I have left my son’s house. I will not go back. His wife hates me.”
“What?” I am beginning to sound like a skipping CD.
Mami whispers urgently, “You mustn’t tell anyone. She can’t bear to have me live in their house. She reads my letters. She steals my money. I won’t go back there. Please. Please don’t make me.” She is frantic, begging. “I would rather go to some temple and live on the charity of strangers,” she says, “than go back to their house again.”
“It’s all right.” I comfort her as best as I can. And I think, All right? Maya, what are you going to do now?
She says again, as she did before, “Please don’t tell your mother or your Lakshmi Auntie. They’ll make me go back there.”
She droops in her old cotton sari, looking so distressed that I say quickly, “Mami! Look here. I need some help. Will you help me make some lime juice?” That distracts her and sets her mind on squeezing limes and stirring in sugar and water, and she says no more about her son. My mind is in a whirl. How can anyone treat Mami like that?
Auntie drops by the next day with Sumati and Ashwin, bringing us wheat halwa and crunchy murukkus from Grand Sweets Emporium. Mami leaves early, as she usually does on Friday, saying she has to go to the temple.
“You’ll come back tomorrow, right?” I ask her. I worry that she might just decide to check in at the nearest temple. I think of the shaven-headed homeless old women who seem to live around large temples in the city. They eat at the temple kitchens and earn loose change from generous worshipers.
“Of course I’m coming back tomorrow,” says Mami, suddenly herself again. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I hang around, just in case Mom decides to talk to Lakshmi Auntie about Mami. Sumati tells me about a card-trick book her dad bought her. I can’t listen. I need to buy time to think. I crunch my way through four rounds of crispy murukku. Lakshmi Auntie pointedly picks up the crumbs I scatter.
I eat so much wheat halwa, I begin to feel slightly bloated. I resist Sumati’s efforts to get me to see her card tricks, and Ashwin’s efforts to get both of us to listen to him recite funny poems. I want to know what’s going to happen to Mami. I need to know. At the same time I don’t want them to make any plans she wouldn’t want to go along with. In addition, I’ve made my promise to her, and I must keep it. Life’s a mess, Maya-Preeta, says the Dad voice in my head. I have to agree.
Mom tries to get rid of us. “Why don’t you young people go up on the roof, or outside?” she says.
To which I cry, in desperation, “Oh, look at that man outside! He’s peeing on the wall!” It’s true. Some guy has decided he can’t wait, and is using the outside of our garden wall for his bathroom.
Sumati smothers a laugh. Ashwin’s eyes grow as big as lightbulbs. Lakshmi Auntie launches into a speech on the lack of discipline among India’s masses and the growing number of unsanitary conditions in Chennai. She seems annoyed with me, as if I were personally responsible for these things. And Mom is so aggravated by my strange behavior that she gives me one of her “Maya-please-don’t-interrupt-while-I’m-in-the-middleof-a-conversation” talks. Pretty soon Lakshmi Auntie says they had better get going, and Mom ends up saying not one peep about Mami to her.
I have a frightful stomachache that night from all the wheat halwa I’ve eaten. It tempers my brief victory, and I begin to wonder if this is really a bigger problem than I can deal with.
Mami says she
is all right. But she isn’t. She won’t go to her son’s house, because her daughter-in-law hates her. Is Mami sick? Will medicine help her? I need to know. But I can’t know, because I have promised Mami I won’t tell.
Cyberconnexions
The next day Mami keeps her promise, and returns. She has no stories to tell me. My mind is first restless, then undecided, then finally made up. True, I have promised Mami I won’t tell Mom or Lakshmi Auntie a thing. I have not, however, promised her I won’t tell Sumati. So I walk the two street lengths to Sumati’s house, and share my dilemma.
She considers my story like a judge weighing the evidence. “All right,” she says. “Let’s think about this. The question is, is Mami okay, or should she go see a doctor? Right?”
“Right.”
“And if she’s sick, her son should take her to see one, right?”
“But she doesn’t want us to tell him,” I point out. “Because his wife hates her. And if my mom or yours found out, they would definitely call her son.”
“Okay, fine. But a doctor would know if Mami’s sick or not. Right?”
“Right.” Can’t argue with that logic, but how can we take Mami to a doctor? First of all, she won’t go. Second, even with the money Sumati’s aunt has sent her, we certainly don’t have enough to pay for a doctor’s visit.
We stare at each other. All at once, an idea strikes me. It is so perfect I feel faint from its brilliance. I say in triumph, “I know! Cyberconnexions!”
“The Internet place?” Sumati shakes her head in puzzlement.
“We can run a search,” I tell her, “to look for information on what would make someone act like Mami.”
We make our way to Cyberconnexions, with money we have scrounged up between us in hand. A few minutes later we stand in dismay, staring at the sign. It reads, SURF THE NET. RS. 35/- PER HOUR. We have only thirty rupees.
We are about to turn around and head back in defeat when the door opens and a friendly voice inquires, “May I help you, young ladies?” A white-shirted man with glasses waves us in. He is wearing a shiny brass name tag that says D. MOHANRAJ.
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