Before We Visit the Goddess (32 page)

The books are jumbled and in no chronological order. The first one is filled with pictures I sent to her, mostly of Neel. The next one opens onto scenes of my mother at various culinary events: demonstrations in bookstores or clubs, talks at larger venues, some onstage. I try to judge her age by the photos. Here's one of her standing in front of grocery shelves arranged with Indian wares—lentil sacks, jars of pickles, spices in bright cardboard packets—stirring something in a wok. She wears a bunchy white apron and a chef's hat and looks out at the camera with a smile that's nervous but pleased, as though the photographer is someone she likes. Who could it be? The photo seems to be from three or four years after the divorce, a period she doesn't talk about. I turn the pages. The audiences grow larger. Here's one with her on a stage, holding up a new book. I guess it to be from her mid-fifties. She's wearing an embroidered Indian top with pants—very fusion—and has lost a lot of her post-divorce weight by this time. She has also bobbed her hair. The style suits her, and she angles her chin confidently as though she knows this. On the next page is a close-up of the same event. Once again there's that look on her face, a sparkly mix of pleasure and shyness, almost girlish. I'm intrigued enough to put the album aside. If she's in a forthcoming mood this evening, I'll ask her about the photographer. I wonder if he's the same man who picked up the phone when I called her all those years earlier, that fateful night before my abortion. I wonder if he'd made her—for a while, at least—happy.

The next album documents my history. On the first page is a class photo, labeled in my mother's handwriting:
3rd grade, St. John's Elementary
. I'm squinting at the camera, head tilted. Big grin, missing front tooth. Cute, if I say so myself. A few pages are dedicated to pictures of me in T-shirts imprinted with the logos of various recreational teams to which I must have belonged. In some, my right foot is on a basketball; in others, my arms are outstretched, fingers held up in the victory sign. Looking at them makes me chuckle, but there's an aftertaste of guilt. So many photos, so carefully preserved. How absurdly central I'd been to my mother's life.

I linger on a photo where I'm clutching a trophy to my chest, grinning maniacally. There's something odd about this picture. It's long and narrow, not the regular rectangular shape. Also, it's slanted at the edge, as though someone had cut away part of it. I turn the page, then another. There are several similarly lopped-off photos. In between, there are gaps as though entire photos have been ripped out of the book. It hits me that there are no pictures of my father here.

I turn to a different album, then another. Some are filled with my baby pictures from early in my parents' marriage, when they lived in California. My mother carrying me, drowsy-eyed in a blue-hooded onesie (she hadn't figured out the American color-coding system for babies yet), the requisite Golden Gate Bridge looming behind us. A birthday where I'm kneeling on a chair, trying to blow out two candles on a homemade cake. My first day of preschool, with a large red backpack, the photo slightly blurred because I'm too excited to stand still. Then we're in Texas: a trip to Austin, where I straddle a cannon outside the capitol; in our backyard pool, I swim elated in a tiger-print bikini my father had bought me over my mother's protests; at my graduation, I hug my best girlfriends—all now swallowed by time's darkness—group-smiling in the belief that our real life was finally about to begin. Every photo is meticulously fatherless. I imagine my mother after the divorce, bent over the albums with the kitchen scissors, cutting him out of our lives. Snipping late into the night, she is a figure at once piteous and triumphant.

But haven't I, too, done the same? I blocked his number. I instructed the bank so he couldn't transfer money into my account. Even when I was so short on cash that I didn't know how I'd pay next month's rent, I took nothing from him. I sent back his letters unopened. Later, when I had less energy to invest in such things, I tossed them in the trash. That's how much I hated him.

“Did he think I'd let him absolve himself so easily?” I tell Dr. Berger.

She says, “You blame him for your troubles. That's understandable. But did your own weaknesses play a role in your problems?”

Yes, they did. Still, for years I couldn't think of him without feeling my face heat up, my hands begin to sweat.

After his death last year, his lawyer phoned me. He'd left all his life insurance money—a substantial amount—to Neel. I was too furious to speak. Finally I said, “I don't want it. Donate it to charity.” But canny devil that he was, my father had thought of everything. The money wasn't mine to dispose of. It would be given to Neel as a lump sum when he turned twenty-one.

We've been having some big fights about that money, Gary, Neel, and I. I want Neel to give it away. It's tainted money, I tell them. They think I'm being ridiculous.

“It's bad enough that you never allowed Neel to see his grandfather when he was alive,” my usually mild-mannered husband says. “Now you want to take away his inheritance?”

“It's like that man is reaching out from the grave to tear my family apart,” I tell Dr. Berger, who blinks patiently.

“Do you think that perhaps you are exaggerating?” she says.

Here's a slim album I don't remember seeing before, pushed to the back of the cabinet. With its faded silk covering and tassels it looks exotic, non-American. Opening it, I'm assailed by a smell that plays hide-and-seek with me. Then I remember. On a hot afternoon years ago, I'd smelled it in a temple. Scent of benediction and catastrophe. I was in a car accident later that day. The details have faded, but I remember it was a bad one, the could-have-been-killed kind. It shook me up—pardon the pun. After that, somehow, I began fixing things in my life. Dr. Berger says being close to death will do that, but I'm not sure catalysts of change can be so easily identified.

There's a sentence, embossed in gold, on the inner cover of the album.
A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words.
It pulls me back into childhood, when my mother often quoted such sayings at me.
Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right. Beggars Can't Be Choosers.
And the one with which she woke me in the mornings:
By Delay Nectar Turns into Poison.
They used to drive me crazy. My father had his sayings, too, though his possessed more zing:
Whoever Owns the Stick, Owns the Buffalo
.
Loose Lips Sink Ships.
Or
Traitor Vibhishan
, which meant the enemy at home was more dangerous than any stranger.

Could sententiousness be a cultural gene? If so, was it lying inside me, too, waiting to explode?

Dr. Berger says I worry too much. She has gifted me a plaque with a Mark Twain quote:
I'VE LIVED THROUGH MANY TERRIBLE THINGS IN MY LIFE, SOME OF WHICH ACTUALLY HAPPENED
.

Opening this album, I'm surprised and delighted. It's filled with black-and-white pictures from India, attached with little brown photo corners to pages that are thick and soft. Here are glimpses into my mother as a girl, snippets of the life she's withheld from me all these years. In a rush of excitement, I call out to her to wake up and see what I've found.

“What is it?” my mother says. I can hear her scowling. She comes out to the family room, yawning, making a big show of limping as she drags her walker over the tiles.

I hand her the author events album. “Who took this one, Ma?” I ask, pointing to the photo of her smiling in the grocery store.

She peers at it. “That would be Ken. He was my neighbor when I first moved to Austin. I was going through a bad time then. He helped me turn my life around.”

Yes, he must have been the man who picked up the phone when I called the night before the abortion. So one could say he turned my life around, too—though maybe upside down would be a better term. I still wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if my mother had picked up the phone that night. I'll never mention it to her, of course.

I push aside my useless resentment of Ken.
It was a long time ago
, Dr. Berger would say.
Move forward, Tara
.

“Tell me more about this mysterious man,” I say.

My mother glances at me, her eyes mischievous. “He was a wonderful man. I've never known anyone quite like him.” She laughs at the look that must have taken over my face. “No, not
that
kind of wonderful. He was like a son to me, always there when I needed something.”

She looks sideways at me to see if I registered the dig. Then she turns serious. “I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for him. I'd probably be dead.”

From her tone, I can tell she isn't exaggerating. It shuts me up.

“He moved to Mexico some years ago with his partner, Lance,” she says, surprising me again. “I was happy for him, though of course I miss him terribly.” She's silent, remembering things I'll never know. And I'm silent, trying to take in this new, open-minded woman.

Then she breaks into my reverie with an exaggerated mother-sigh. “If he'd still been here today, I bet I wouldn't have to—”

I interrupt masterfully. “Look what else I've found, Mom.” I hand her the Indian album.

My strategy works.

“Goodness, this old thing!” she says, abandoning her walker and her grouchiness as she sits down on the sofa to flip through the pages. “Why, I can't remember the last time I opened it. Here's our apartment in Kolkata, and the balcony on which my mother grew jasmines. It used to be my favorite place.”

I peer over her shoulder at the photo. In it, my mother, a teenager, wears a sari and has her hair in looped braids tied back with ribbons. She's perched on a stool, her elbows resting on the railing of a tiny balcony not much bigger than a bathtub. She's looking down at something. What is she watching so intently? I try to guess, though most of what I know about India is from books and movies and the Internet. Perhaps there were children sailing paper boats in the gutters after rain. Perhaps there were lovers making their surreptitious way to the cinema. Perhaps a tram was set on fire during a bandh.

Or was she hoping to see my father?

My mother squelches my fantasies. “I was waiting for the jhal-muri man. He made the best puffed-rice snacks. It's the one thing I've never been able to replicate. Probably the special taste came from Kolkata dust! Oh, look, here's our store.”

It's a modest rectangle of a shop,
DURGA SWEETS
etched on the glass-front, collapsible gate raised to the top. My schoolgirl mother stands in front of it, wearing a pleated uniform skirt and looking vaguely bored. It strikes me that she, too, had been central to her mother's life.

“You'd never know it was one of Kolkata's most famous sweet shops,” my mother says. “The bigger confectioners were always trying to steal my mother's recipes. It wouldn't have done them any good, though. It was my mother's special touch that gave the sweets their unique flavor. In Bengali we call this haater-gun.”

“Did you like visiting the shop?”

“I loved it when I was little because inside it always smelled of sugar and saffron and chocolate, like a festival. But once I got older, I started hating it. It stole my mother from me. So many nights, I fell asleep on the sofa waiting for her to come home. . . .”

I know the feeling. When I was little, I used to wait for my father in the same way. His business deals often took place late in the night, and I'd fight with my mother if she tried to put me to sleep before he returned. Forced into bed, I'd pinch myself to keep awake until he came in to kiss me good night.

“The shop made us grow apart,” my mother was saying. “That's why, once your father was earning enough, I quit work so I could be at home with you. I paid for it, of course, when the divorce happened, because I was good for nothing.”

I stiffen. This is when the accusations start. I heard them all, over and over, in the months following the divorce.

“She really believed I was responsible for her difficulties!” I tell Dr. Berger. “She blamed me for them!”

“Yes,” Dr. Berger says. “People tend to do that.” She looks at me and raises an eyebrow. Then she adds, “Have you ever told her how you felt about this?”

I draw in a deep breath. Today. Today I'm going to tell my mother how I feel about this unfair blaming.

But she's distracted by a picture of herself in an elaborate costume. “We were performing a dance drama of Tagore's in college,” she explains. “I was Shyama, the heroine who saves the hero from death and is then abandoned by him.”

The moment's gone. I'll have to find another opportunity. I peer at the elegant young woman dressed in glistening silk and ankle bells, her hair braided back with silver ribbons, her tragic, painted eyes. I would not have recognized her as my mother.

“You don't know this,” my mother says, “but that's where your father first saw me. Onstage. Maybe the woman he fell in love with was never me. It was Shyama. . . .”

Two of the pages are stuck together. She tugs at them gently. They separate and a photo falls to the floor. I pick it up. It's older than the others, a formal, sepia-toned composition. In it a young woman—not my mother—stands looking directly at the camera, dressed in widow's white. Her hair is pulled back in a matronly bun and her face is grave, but it shines with unintended beauty. She holds on to the shoulders of a girl of about twelve who stands stiffly in front of her, wearing a ruffled frock and looking equally grave.

“Oh, this photo!” my mother says in a strange voice. “I'd completely forgotten about it.”

“Is that girl you? And is that—Grandma?”

My mother nods. She turns the photo over. On the back there's a faded ink-stamp that reads,
With the Compliments of Amrita Bazar Patrika
.