Serving Crazy with Curry

by Amulya Malladi

  Devi stood at the very edge of the cliff, her heart pounding, the cold sea air biting at her sore wrists.

  She could hear the winds down below, the waves, and … giggling? She stood still and looked around to see who was there. For a moment she was scared; what if it were a ghost? An evil spirit?

  Having always been afraid of the monster under her bed, even as an adult, her imagination ricocheted against the improbable until she inhaled the distinct smell of marijuana.

  In her zest and focus to end her life she'd somehow missed the silhouette of a motorcycle resting by a bench, and she could now clearly see little puffs of gray smoke zigzagging upward against the dark canvas of the night.

  It seemed incongruous to think about suicide when there were people sitting on the bench, giggling and enjoying a joint or maybe two.

  “Give that to me,” Devi heard a female voice say. “Not here, you idiot… what if the cops come.”

  “No one will come,” a male voice said, and then there was some more giggling. It was a scene out of a cheesy teenage movie and Devi stood rooted, now unable to hear the waves below. She could only hear her oblivious companions kiss and shift on the bench. She could hear them moan and grunt. And above all she could hear them having fun.

  When had she stopped having fun? When had she stopped having a good time to the point that suicide started to sound like a great idea?

  She remembered the first time she'd smoked pot, all too clearly, as it was also the first time she'd had sex. Saroj would have been mortified to learn that the boy had been an Indian as she was convinced that good Indian boys “don't go sleeping around like those immoral white boys.”

  Ashish was Gujral Uncle's son and Gujral Uncle and Avi had known each other since before either of them had moved to the United States. Devi had been seventeen, primed to enter the forbidden land, made more attractive because of Saroj's constant vigil on her virginity. Gujral Uncle and Auntie were playing cards with Saroj and Avi at their place when Ashish and Devi snuck into his room. She settled comfortably on his bed while he shut the door and opened all his windows.

  “Oh, my God,” Devi gasped when she saw him draw out a joint. “Is it… is it?” she asked eagerly.

  Ashish grinned widely and lit the illegal substance. Devi saw stars that night. Unlike what had been promised to her by all her friends, her first time was actually enjoyable. Ashish and Devi vowed eternal love, heady with the taste of lust. It lasted about six months and Ashish was now happily married to a nice girl his parents found him in India, while Devi was standing at the edge of a cliff, literally.

  Almost involuntarily she took a few steps away from the edge. And suddenly she was afraid that she would trip and fall, end up in the waters anyway. The waves below didn't look inviting anymore. They seemed ominous, life-taking.

  There was more to life. There simply had to be. She wouldn't accept defeat, wouldn't accept this as the end. She had lost so much, now she had to try to get some of it back. It would never be the way it used to be, but she didn't want it the way it used to be. She didn't want to live that life again, where the wanting and getting didn't have a meeting point.

  But I'm scared, she almost cried out. What if it did end up the way it was? What if she once again ended in a bathtub slicing up her wrists?

  “Ah,” she heard a feminine cry of fulfillment, followed shortly by a heavy grunt from the man.

  Devi's thoughts scattered.

  “Get off me,” she heard the feminine voice say. “You're too heavy.”

  “Okay, okay.” She heard a sturdy, satisfied male laugh.

  Devi's lips curved. No, she wasn't ready to die, she decided, and then realized that she wasn't ready to live, either. She was at an impasse, but she knew one thing, she wasn't going back to that edge again.

  Her feet found momentum all of a sudden and she raced back to the Jeep and drove off, away from the cliff and toward the bright lights of Highway 280 and her parents’ home.

  devi's recipe

  life

  Day 8 after coming from hospital

  Tonight I made Cajun prawn biriyani. Tonight I almost ended it all, once again. Tonight was a long night and I wait for tomorrow when I can put this in the past, where it belongs. No one knows that I stood at the

  edge of a cliff and thought about taking the plunge into the black Pacific, but I know and that knowledge bends me in so many ways. It makes me feel guilty.

  The worry and concern I seem to have caused surprises me, even as I tell myself that I have no reason to be surprised. They love me. I've always known that. They may not love me as I need them to love me, but they do and with their love they tie me to this world. And I want to stay, not just because of them, because of me as well.

  I have made a decision and I have to follow through with it. I have decided to live, and now I need to find out how to make it happen.

  A pinch of hope, with a dollop of family-inspired guilt, plus a tablespoon of sense should get me there, hopefully. I will work on myself. I will make the wrongs of my past right. I will not find myself again at the edge of a cliff contemplating how long the fall, how deep the crevice.

  In the Business of Living

  The news arrived in a blue envelope with several Mahatma Gandhi stamps pasted on the front above Vasu's name.

  “But you've only been here three weeks,” Shobha protested over dinner, her nose dripping slightly as the chili in the chicken curry burned her mouth.

  “Geeta is my closest friend,” Vasu said sadly. “She needs my help.”

  Devi was angry as well, an emotion that always struck her when it was time for Vasu to leave. Even as a child she would throw a tantrum with the hope that it would make Vasu stay longer. She wasn't speaking yet, but her anger was obvious. Her chicken with blueberry curry sauce, served with fragrant cardamom rice, was peeling off the first layer of everyone's stomach lining.

  When she served Vasu she was extra forceful, and blueberry sauce from the curry splattered on Vasu's pale yellow cotton sari.

  “Devi, you know Geeta Auntie,” Vasu tried to explain.

  “Your friends have always been more important to you than your family,” Saroj declared saucily. “Devi needs you here, but you have to run along to hold Geeta Auntie's hand. So she had a small heart attack. It is a small heart attack. She will be fine and it's not like she doesn't have her own children who will take care of her.”

  “She is almost eighty years old,” Vasu said angrily. “You have no compassion.”

  “If she's eighty she already has a foot in the—” Shobha was cut off by Vasu's glare. “Why can't you just call her and send some flowers?”

  “Because I want to be with her,” Vasu said in a no-further-discussion tone.

  “More than you want to be with us?” Avi asked as he reached for the water. He usually never drank water while he ate but lately with Devi's moods seesawing from bland to spicy, it had sometimes become a necessity.

  “You are all trying to emotionally blackmail me,” Vasu said with a sigh. “Okay, why doesn't Devi come along with me to India? It will give her a—”

  “My daughter will not run along with you to India where you will abandon her to hold Geeta Auntie's or some other poor old friend's hand,” Saroj said loudly and angrily. “She needs her family and she will stay with us. You should stay here and support her. But if Geeta Auntie is more important—we have nothing more to say to each other.”

  Saroj rose from the table and walked out into the patio without finishing her meal.

  Her friends always came first. It had the power to anger Saroj even now, when she was an adult with grown children. How many times had Vasu left Saroj with a neighbor for a week or two to rescue some friend or the other? How many vacation days had Vasu's friends eaten away so that Vasu could never take Saroj anywhere on holiday?

  And now, when it was obvious Devi needed her, she was already getting ready to go take care of some old hag who'd had a heart attack. Wasn't Devi important? Was
n't Saroj?

  Vasu made her so angry. She lived her life on her own terms, sacrificing everyone else on the way. She came across as this righteous, free-minded person, but Saroj had paid for Vasu's free-mindedness. As a child she had listened to other children in school whisper about her dead father and about Shekhar Uncle. She had faced that man at breakfast in their house, knowing that he spent the night with her mother.

  Vasu hadn't made the transition from being a widow to a mistress easy for Saroj. She simply told her impressionable seven-year-old daughter about Shekhar Uncle.

  “No, he isn't your new father,” Vasu explained when Saroj wanted to know. “He's my friend. I am allowed to have friends just like you are.”

  It seemed logical to Saroj then and she accepted Shekhar Uncle as her mother's friend. But she wasn't stupid or blind. She knew that none of her friends’ mothers had men friends, and even if they did, none of those friends stayed the night.

  When she told Vasu that her friends were calling Vasu bad names because of her relationship with Shekhar Uncle, Vasu calmly told Saroj that she didn't care. She couldn't understand why Saroj would.

  Now Saroj wondered if it would have been so difficult for Vasu to have conducted her affair with a married man with some discretion. Would it have killed her to not let the entire world know? But that was not how Vasu lived. She clearly told anyone who would listen that she didn't hide herself and her feelings. She was brave, open, and just a little stupid, Saroj thought. It was stupid to let the world know that she was a widow with a married lover. It was stupid to tell a young child about an illicit affair and drag her into a contemptuous world she wasn't ready for.

  Vasu turned a blind eye to all the criticism and societal pressure. She didn't hear the whispers, or see the condemnation. But Saroj did.

  Devi came outside with Saroj's half-full dinner plate and turned on the outdoor lights. She had reheated the food in the microwave, and Saroj was touched by her concern.

  Devi put the plate on the patio table in front of Saroj and sat down beside her.

  “It is very spicy,” Saroj commented as she pierced a piece of chicken on the fork. “I am angry, too,” she said as she chewed on the meat.

  Devi sighed and leaned back into the chair.

  Shobha joined them and sat on a chair across from Saroj. She put her feet up on the table and then dropped them onto the tiled floor when Saroj groaned, pointing to her food.

  “You can be so Indian, Mama,” Shobha said. “Never point feet at a person and all that.”

  “I don't know where your shoes have been and why would you put them next to my food?” Saroj said angrily. “And, madam, I am Indian. So are you.”

  “Nah,” Shobha said.

  “What do you mean, nah}” Saroj said on a mouthful of rice.

  “I was born in India, but, Mama, I'm not Indian,” she said.

  “Yes, you are,” Saroj said, and then Devi and she grinned, looking at each other as if they were sharing a private joke.

  “What, the mute and you are best pals now?” Shobha demanded sarcastically.

  Saroj shook her head, a big smile on her face. “You had an arranged marriage. I fell in love and got married.”

  “And that makes me more Indian than you?”

  “No, maybe just as Indian,” Saroj said, a laugh escaping her.

  “Next you'll say Devi is also Indian,” Shobha muttered.

  Saroj raised her hands in defeat and laughed softly.

  Her daughters! Her wonderful daughters! Sure they had problems and they didn't listen to her, because if they did their lives wouldn't be such messes, but they were still hers.

  “Okay, I have decided to stay another two weeks, but then I have to go,” Vasu said as she came outside. “Now is everyone happy?”

  Devi all but jumped out of her chair and hugged Vasu. Shobha gave her grandmother a big smile.

  Saroj sat sullenly, resenting Vasu for interrupting her good moment with her daughters.

  devi's recipe

  angry at vasu grilled chicken

  in blueberry curried sauce

  Day 15 after coming from hospital

  It is a shame that Mama doesn't use the hundreds of other fruits and vegetables and spices available from around the world. If it isn't Indian,

  according to her, it isn't good. I think she stared so long at the blueberries that they shriveled.

  The butcher gave me three whole breasts of fresh free-range chicken. Ml of a sudden I have become very particular about ecological vegetables and free-range chickens. If they've petted the chicken and played with it before cutting it open for my eating pleasure, I'll be happy to purchase its body parts. Even if I have a tough time understanding this ecological nonsense, I feel better for buying carrots that were grown without chemicals, and I can't come up with a good reason to deny myself that happiness.

  I marinated the chicken breasts in white wine and salt and pepper for a while and then grilled them on the barbecue outside. The blueberry sauce was ridiculously simple. Fry some onions in butter, add the regular green chili, ginger, garlic, and fry a while longer. Add just a touch of tomato paste along with white wine vinegar. In the end add the blueberries. Cook until everything becomes sofl. Blend in a blender. Put it in a saucepan and heat it until it bubbles.

  In the end because G'ma wouldn't shut up about going back right away, I added, in anger and therefore in too much quantity: cayenne pepper. I felt the sauce needed a little bite … but I think I bit off more than the others could swallow.

  I took the grilled chicken, cut the breasts in long slices, and poured the sauce over them. I made some regular basmati with fried cardamoms and some regular tomato and onion raita. I put too much green chili in the raita as well.

  Let the Past Go Fast

  It was a lazy Sunday morning. Cars were being driven slower than usual and the California sun beamed down on the brown hills surrounding Silicon Valley.

  Devi stood outside the New India Bazaar and felt her hands grow clammy. Saroj's neighbors’ car was parked outside and so was Vikram Uncle's. Vikram Uncle and Megha Auntie had come to see her the first week she stayed with her parents. They came for just half an hour and left, looking sad and unhappy.

  Most of her parents’ friends had either visited or called and each time they'd stayed for a very short period of time, distraught that Devi had attempted suicide and confused that she refused to speak. Devi found the visits trying and the one-sided conversations immensely patronizing and condescending.

  “You have to go in sometime,” Saroj said and took Devi's elbow in a firm grasp. “So what if everyone knows? So you made a mistake. You don't have to hang your head in shame all your life.”

  Devi wrenched her elbow free and took a deep breath. She didn't want to face these people. Family was different, but to these people she was gossip. They probably had already talked to their friends and their friends’ friends about her.

  “You know Saroj and Avi Veturi's girl… no, no, not the smart one married to that Stanford professor, the younger one. She committed suicide. Nahi, she's not dead. Saroj apparently found her bleeding in her bathtub. These girls today they watch too much television and try to imitate soap operas.”

  She didn't want to go in, but for once Saroj was right. How long would she hang her head in shame?

  They were in the frozen food section and Saroj was piling the shopping cart with paneer when Megha Auntie spotted them. She wasn't alone. Her daughter, Anita, who lived in New York with her investment banker husband, was with her. Anita was seven months’ pregnant and chewing on a Mars bar.

  “Hai, Devi, Saroj.” Megha Auntie patted Devi's shoulder. “So, beta, how are you doing?”

  Devi nodded and then smiled at Anita.

  “Still not talking?” Megha Auntie asked, speaking in a low saccharine-sweet voice as if Devi were five years old and had lost her favorite Barbie.

  “She is doing well, very happy,” Saroj intervened smoothly. “So, Anita, how are y
ou feeling? You shouldn't be eating sweets, nahi} Megha told me you have gestational diabetes.”

  “Oh, Auntie, once in a while is okay,” Anita said and shared a we-are-being-tortured-by-each-other's-mothers look with Devi.

  Devi didn't know Anita or her younger brother Purohit very well. Even though Avi and Megha Auntie's husband, Vikram, had been in business together for years, their families were not close. Saroj and Megha were too busy competing with each other to form any kind of stable friendship.

  “Arrey Saroj, Devi.” Raina Kashyap, Saroj's neighbor, came along with her overflowing shopping cart. “Have you seen the karela, limp and dry, and they're charging four dollars a pound. Kya zamana hai, everyone is trying to swindle us.”

  “The tomatoes are very cheap. Cheaper than in Safeway,” Megha Auntie said and then wriggled her eyes at Raina, inclining her head toward Devi. “Have you seen our Devi… she's looking bright and happy, no?”

  “Oh yes, yes,” Raina said immediately, contrite that she hadn't already mentioned something to soothe the suicidal girl's obvious insecurity.

  Oh Lord, were these women really worried that if they didn't say something nice to her she'd do herself in again? How long would this go on? How long would it take for everyone else, besides her, to let go of her attempted suicide?

  “How was the meeting with the psychiatrist?” Raina asked and Devi nodded.

  “Not talking still, beta}” Raina asked and smiled as if Devi had lost a few screws. “You just let your mummy and daddy take care of you and everything will be all right. Okay?”

  Devi nodded again, calmly, when all she wanted to do was throw the bag of spinach she was holding at the women.

  “Okay then, we should go,” Saroj said as if sensing the anger in Devi.

  By the time they got home, Devi was seething with rage and had a sick feeling that this anger would never end. Even if she let go of the past, others would remember and they'd never forget. This would go on and on.