by Anne Cherian
In the last year of high school, all the seniors met here at night. Tattappa had no idea that Neel used to sneak out of the house to smoke forbidden cigarettes with his friends. The strong, cheap Charminar tips glowed contraband red in the dark as the sixteen-year-olds dreamed their futures aloud. College, girls, jobs, marriage. Neel yearned to travel: Paris, London, New York. Drive a fast car. Fly a plane. Have the best stereo equipment. Gamble in casinos reckless about winning or losing. When the others spoke of marrying India’s current Bollywood heartthrob, he pictured himself with a blond-haired wife with Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes. Mark’s mother had eyes that color and she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen. Blond, blue-eyed Mark Krueger had become his best friend and introduced him to the wonders of the Western world during the one magical year the family lived in their town. Neel never forgot their best-friend days, though Mark and his parents had returned to the United States many years earlier.
During the three years it took to get their undergraduate degree, the group fell apart as marriage claimed its members. Neel remembered the first to succumb: handlebar-mustached Mohan, his voice permanently hoarse from smoking, with an affinity for numbers first manifested when he counted to a thousand before his third birthday. How they tormented him. Mohan had just announced his engagement, a little shamefaced because he had sworn not to give in to his parents’ pushing until he finished his master’s degree. Everyone ragged him, and Neel coined a ditty on the spot that the others picked up and began chanting:
What is wrahng? She is strahng
She is nice, her hair has no lice
She is fine, quite divine;
Her skin is very light,
So Mohan said, “Ahl right.”
Parents always win in the end, Neel could hear Mohan’s voice genuflect to filial obligation.
“Suneel, Suneel,” Tattappa said placatingly.
“Tattappa, they didn’t even have the decency to wait a few days before starting in on me.” Indians were like that, but he wasn’t an India resident anymore.
“You know how our women can be. But they are not bad. Only a little pushy.”
“The pushy part I can handle, I think. But Mummy lied to me. She told me you were ill. That’s the main reason I came home. It wasn’t easy for me to get leave at such short notice.”
Tattappa didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “She is only virry worried for your future. You know in India it is our thinking that everyone should get married. It is not like Ahmerica, where many people don’t care about families.”
“But she lied to me about you.”
“No, no, Suneel, my sickness is not a lie. I asked your mummy to say I was only a little weak because I wanted to tell you myself. The doctor has found some cancer.” Tattappa shrugged his shoulders, the gesture indicating he had placed himself in God’s hands. “A little here, a little there. Six months they have given me.”
Neel forgot Mummy, his anger, the fear that somehow he would be coerced into marrying while at home. All he could think of was Tattappa reciting long passages from the Ramayana. Telling him how a British bullet had blasted off his little finger during the fight for Independence. Cheering Neel on at every basketball game. When asthma racked Neel’s knobbly young body, only Tattappa’s presence had brought comfort.
“Let’s get another opinion. I’ll fly you to the States. We’ll get the best oncologist to check you.”
“Calm down, Suneel, you will only to make yourself sick,” Tattappa said. “Your father is virry much like you. He took me to another doctor and that one also did the same exam, poking this way, taking this tissue. Paah! A waste of time. He gave the virry same diagnosis.”
“Can’t they operate?” Neel asked, though he knew the answer.
“No. Six months, and if all the days are like today, then I shall to be happy. My grandson is home.”
“Tattappa, I’d like to talk to your doctors, make sure you are getting the best treatment. And following orders.” He remembered Mummy telling him that Tattappa was being difficult.
“You can talk to the doctor, why not? But right now he has gone home to his village to see his father. You see, everyone is going to their families.”
They turned back, Neel dragging his feet as if that would somehow slow Tattappa’s cancer.
“Suneel, we have left your mummy virry upset. Maybe you can see some of the girls they have arranged for you. Only to make peace in the house while you are with us.”
“Please, not you, too, Tattappa. You know I don’t want an arranged marriage.”
“You have never come out and said it, but yes, that I know. But also it is not good to live alone for too long and I am only a little worried that you are not yet married.”
That makes two of us, Neel wanted to say, but he could not suddenly confide his personal life and desires to Tattappa. They had never discussed marriage, not even during the last disastrous visit when Mummy went around the house with a teary, defeated face. Now, surprisingly, Tattappa was implying that he would accept any bride Neel brought home.
“So you wouldn’t mind if I married an American?” Neel tested Tattappa’s prejudice.
“It is not a question of minding or not minding. It is simply better to marry one’s own kind.”
For some years now Neel had analyzed the reasons why he had not met his “own kind” in America. Not a girl Tattappa would consider suitable, but the sort of women his colleagues married. One by one his former classmates at Stanford—Sanjay, Brendan, Victor—had walked down the aisle with a wife who was pretty, well educated, and whose family, seated in the front pew, exuded wealth and power. In their designer wedding gowns and professionally sculpted hair, they had just the sort of pedigree Neel longed for in a partner. Tattappa would neither have understood nor accepted a daughter-in-law named Savannah. “Ahmerican?” he could hear Tattappa shout. “We are Indians. Did I fight away the British only to have my own family spoiled with the blood of a white fahrinner?”
Now Neel said, “By ‘one’s own kind’ you of course mean a nice Iyengar girl.”
Tattappa ignored the statement. “Suneel, if you had someone in Ahmerica, you would definitely have made that mention to me. So why not just see one of our girls? I am not asking for you to marry her.”
“Tattappa, you know how it is here. If I see a girl, Mummy will expect me to marry her.”
“No, Suneel, even your mummy cannot force you to marry against your wish. Just it will make her happy that at least she is trying her best for you. There will be no fights, no sadness in the house.”
He was using his illness to blackmail Neel into submission. A sick man needing peace. Neel decided to change tactics. “I don’t think that’s right. Not just for me but also for the girl.” He stressed the last word, hoping Tattappa would note his kindness. “She won’t know I’m using her to get Mummy off my back.”
“Nowadays girls know that not every boy who sees them will want to marry them. So there is no need for you to worry for that little reason.”
“Even if I were to agree—and I’m not saying yes,” Neel clarified, “Mummy said she and Aunty Vimla have lined up lots of girls. Which one would I see?”
“That is a good point. I am not sure who all they have arranged. Ah, but now I remember. There is this one girl. She is a little on the old side. And the poor parents, they don’t have the money for a dowry. Why don’t you go see her?”
“Why would you want me to see someone like that?” Neel couldn’t believe that Tattappa was behaving like Aunty Vimla. He was a doctor. From America. He could command the best girl not just in their town, but from the Iyengar community anywhere in the world.
“Because then if you say no, it will not be a problem. Everyone will understand.”
NEEL CLOSED THE BATHROOM DOOR behind him, thankful to get away from the living room where Aunty Vimla and Mummy thought they were planning his future. The last two hours had resurrected the short list of women in his past. Should he have
told Tattappa about Caroline? He had never even mentioned Savannah, the girl he so desperately wanted to marry, and whose rejection had left him afraid to approach any woman for years. Time was an effective Band-Aid and he no longer cringed at his youthful, romantic foolishness: Playing with her ring finger to try and figure out the right measurements, planning to slip the diamond into a flute of champagne, practicing asking her to marry him.
Savannah Sibley. It was strange to think of her while standing in this spare, practical bathroom. The white porcelain did not rise up to form a comfortable toilet seat, but curved, peanut-shaped, around a hole in the floor. There was no inviting tub to soak in and no shower with a hundred spouts to massage a tired body. Just a leaky faucet that spurted water into a faded blue bucket. Bathing was a big production in India that began long before one entered the bathroom. He had to turn on the small hot water geyser, wait until it heated, then fill the undersize bucket with hot and then cold water to get the temperature right. Bending to get the water was the hardest part for a tall man like Neel. The mug that hooked onto the side of the bucket held so little water it required three pourings before he could begin to soap himself.
Savannah had never known this side of him. He had told her about Mark Krueger, the American boy whose father was the biggest big shot in the steel factory. “Darling,” the violet-eyed mother called Mark and his father. She gave them glasses of Tang, so much tastier than the lime juice his mother made, and introduced him to canned peaches, a flavor he did not know how to explain to Tattappa. In those days, America was the faraway land made closer only by powders and cans bursting with flavor.
He had seen Savannah at a party, his bones melting even before he heard her speak. Silvery hair that glistened with every head movement, dark blue eyes—and smart enough to get into Stanford, where she was studying French. She was the type of woman he had dreamed of meeting and marrying. Determined to have her, Neel approached her as he would an exam. During his life he had acquired the confidence that if you applied yourself well, you would get the grade you desired. What he hadn’t accounted for was how society, her deb-strutting, white-columned Southern society and upbringing, could hamper his hard work. There was an ironical symmetry in their families, a clash of colors that prohibited mingling. Her parents, preeminent Southerners, had met him with a series of polite, pointed questions—Hindu? Indian?—forcing him to consider the brownness, and limitations, of his own face, albeit Stanford-educated, the doctor tag within year’s reach. Tattappa, too, would have looked at Savannah’s pale skin and found it lacking.
The year with Savannah had been a series of revelations. It proved that a white girlfriend was more advantageous than an American passport. One allowed you entry to countries without a visa; the other moved you up the social ladder. But Tattappa would not be able to comprehend that. He had never left India, felt too persecuted by the British to trust a white person. He didn’t understand the difficulty of living in a country whose welcoming Statue of Liberty ushered one inside without promising equality. Neel had presumed that when he went to America he was simply moving countries, but staying in the same echelon of the educated upper class. The experience with Savannah’s parents taught him otherwise, but didn’t make him want to return home. If anything, it cemented his desire to become as American as possible, and that included finding the elusive white wife.
He wished there was someone whose picture he could show to Tattappa and say, “I’m going to marry her. Period.” He was fed up with his married colleagues asking him how he had “escaped.” He was tired of laughing and giving the same trite answer.
The relationship with Savannah had been his only serious one at Stanford, and when he started at the hospital he kept away from the smiles and interested eyes of the nurses.
Caroline pursued him, and in a weak moment, he permitted himself to succumb to her brazenness and beauty. Sure it would never last, given their differences, he had gone out with her. Weeks went by, years accumulated, and somehow he never took a step to end it. He told Caroline they should keep their private life a secret because it could have professional repercussions. But in truth he was ashamed of being seen with her, a mere secretary with a high school education. He did enjoy her California chic and felt proud of the way other men looked at her. No one could accuse them of fitting the profile of one typical mixed couple: handsome Indian man, blowzy and ill-kempt white woman. He just wished she were more like the women his friends had married. He wanted to marry up, not sideways, and certainly not down.
Now he was cornered by his own inability to produce a girl and by Mummy’s scheming. He had the oppressive sense that India was stalking him with its customs and expectations. Even the bathroom walls felt like they were enveloping him, repackaging him into the young boy who had been trained to listen to his elders. But he wasn’t that boy anymore. He was a successful anesthesiologist who managed his own career and life.
It was as if he had never left India. The sinuous crack in the tile had always looked like a dead snake. Ubiquitous spiders embroidered the corner of the ceiling in a variety of patterns. The paint on the doorway was still peeling in a steady, diagonal slant. He had always disliked the sweet, feminine aroma of the sandalwood soap on his skin, and recoiled from the dark ring of mud and God knows what else around the edges of the floor. He wished India were more like America. Even if the cleaning crew did not come every week, his condo never got this dirty.
Last trip he had brought back some Comet and asked the servant to scrub the bathroom. But within half a day the floor had acquired its regular patina of dirt. It was always like that.
No matter how hard he tried to bring America here, India inevitably asserted itself.
FOUR
BOTH LEILA AND NEEL WON a victory the Sunday they unwillingly met each other.
On Saturday, Neel’s mother said she couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to meet a twenty-year-old girl, a recent graduate in English. When he heard the girl’s age, he exploded. “For God’s sake, I’m thirty-five.” His mother quickly said, “Amita’s parents, they do not mind.”
“I don’t care about them. I mind. I told you, I’m only going to see one girl. And I refuse to see someone who is so young. I’ll see the older one.”
Muttering under her breath that America had made him “virry difficult,” Mummy asked Aunty Vimla to phone Amita’s parents. And grumbling under his breath, Neel deliberately put on a suit the next day. Tattappa suggested he wear a kurta pajama, but in spite of the heat, Neel opted for a light gray pinstripe. He had to assert his independence, show that he wasn’t giving in entirely.
Leila regretted the thinning silk of the saree. Should she have allowed Amma to buy her a new one? For a week they had battled, high-pitched words giving way to sullen silences that made meals awkward for the whole family.
But Leila did not care. She knew this America-returned doctor was going to marry elsewhere. Right after Mrs. Rajan’s visit, they had heard through the servant grapevine that Suneel was also going to see Amita. Petite Amita with hair that flowed down to her knees. Even Indy, who generally did not envy people, was jealous of Amita’s straight, silky hair. Leila had taught Amita the previous year and knew that her parents were rich enough to own two cars and employ four servants. Most families, even relatively poor ones like theirs, had one servant, but four was a mark of great wealth. Then there was Amita’s beauty, which had achieved a legendary status ever since a talent scout suggested she try for the Miss India pageant. Amita had refused. Naturally. No good girl from a good family would compromise herself by taking part in something so public. Instead, the story became her crowning glory. Leila knew who was going to win this doctor pageant and wished that Amma could, for once, see the situation for what it was.
“Why have you to be so stubborn, Leila?” Amma shouted.
“Amma, why do you insist I always do everything your way?”
Leila’s words immediately conjured up Janni. Tousle-haired, joking Janni. He was t
he uninvited guest, never seen, never spoken of, but whose absence was the stick used to “straighten” Leila out. Amma would never forget or forgive her daughter for shaming the family.
“I have a saree,” Leila said quickly, wanting to purge the specter from the room.
“An old saree,” Amma countered. “For seeing such a good man you want to be wearing an old saree?”
Leila was relieved Amma was talking instead of shouting. “The green one is not that old, Amma.”
“Old is old,” Amma said, her face set.
“It’s good enough.” Leila decided to be blunt. “You know he is going to say yes to Amita.”
“You know, you know.” Amma shook her fist. “You know how I have suffered all these years? So many people asking why for you are not married? And now I bring you a good man and you, you…”
Leila, too, had heard women ask, “So, Mrs. Krishnan, when is your fair and beautiful Leila going to make you a mother-in-law?”
In the silence Leila could hear Kila playing house with her one doll. “You have to make coffee every morning for your husband…” Indy was ironing their saree blouses for tomorrow, body tense from the fight she could clearly hear.
“I shall to go out and buy the saree by myself,” Amma threatened.
“Go,” Leila challenged her mother. “See if I care. See if I wear it.”
She didn’t want to add a Suneel saree to her collection. All her silk sarees, the good, going-out ones, bore the memory of rejection; she knew her wardrobe by the men who had not wanted to marry her. She had to put a stop to it, even if Amma persisted in the mad belief that every new proposal was a real possibility.