Before We Visit the Goddess (34 page)

Dr. Berger, it's the first time in my life that I'm returning what I've stolen. I think you might call this a landmark moment.

I maneuver gingerly between unfamiliar pieces of furniture, banging my knee a couple of times in the process. But I don't want to switch on a light and wake my mother, who's sleeping with her door open. I don't want to field a host of awkward questions. I feel around on the coffee table for the album, but I can't seem to find it. Damn. Could my mother have taken it into the bedroom with her? I feel around some more and knock over something loud and metallic.

“Who's there?” my mother calls in a startled, quavery voice. I'm startled, too. Her voice sounds very close—much closer than the bedroom. I hear a sharp clapping sound, and then I'm blinded by the blaze of a table lamp directly in front of me. Double damn. She has one of those clap-activated switches.

My mother sits up groggily, feeling around on the table for her glasses. She must have woken up and come out here to try and find a more comfortable position on the sofa. On the side table, in front of which I'm standing, is the photo album. So near. But there's no way I can replace the photo without my mother seeing it.

“What are you doing, Tara?”

“I—I was sorting through your things in the garage. I came in for a drink of water.” Even to my ears, my voice sounds squeaky and suspicious. I try to hide the photo behind my back, which of course draws her attention to it.

“What's that in your hand?”

I offer up the photo, feeling much like a four-year-old caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

My mother stares at it, then at me, anger replacing the surprise on her face.

“You were taking it? After I'd told you no? Taking my mother's picture, which would have given me a little comfort in that mausoleum?”

“Actually, I was putting it back,” I say. But there's guilt in my voice, and with her infallible mother-instinct, she hones in on it.

“You couldn't wait a few months, until I was dead? You had to steal it now?”

Maybe it's that word,
steal
. Maybe it's the pent-up stress of the entire week. Maybe it's the weight I feel because I'm putting an end to my mother's independence. Something breaks inside me.

“Yes,” I shout. “I steal. That's what I do. That's why I keep moving from job to job. I already got caught once. I'm sure I'll get caught again. My husband will come to know. My son. But I can't stop.”

She shrinks back from me. The horror—or is it disgust?—on her face is like red pepper rubbed into a wound. It forces me onward.

“Do you want to know why I steal? I take things that I should have had but didn't get. Things that mean happy memories. Things that stand for love and commitment. But sometimes I steal things that mean nothing. I steal them because there's a big hole in the middle of my chest and stealing fills it up for a moment.”

“Why the photo?” Her whisper is shaky now, as though she is afraid to hear the answer. As she should be.

“I stole the photo because
you
kept her from me all my life.”

And suddenly she's furious. “How dare you accuse me! What do you know of how carefully I had to walk the razor's edge with your father? Do you think I didn't miss her? Didn't want her to come to America and be with me when I was so lonely that I wanted to die? Didn't want to see her holding you when you were born, as you were growing up? But he wouldn't let me.”

At the mention of my father, I find myself beginning to shake. God, that he should have such a hold on me years after I promised myself I wouldn't care! My words come from somewhere deep down that I'd forgotten about—or forced myself to forget.
Why don't you ask her?
he'd said at our last meeting outside the thrift store where I'd been working at the time.

“Don't blame my father,” I say. “None of this would have happened—not the divorce, not all the disasters afterwards—if you hadn't betrayed him first.”

The words sound ridiculous as soon as they're out of my mouth. I wait for her to laugh an incredulous laugh of denial, to scoff at me for trying to change the subject, to accuse me some more of thievery. But she looks down, defeat evident in the slump of her shoulders.

My mother? She was unfaithful, too? What kind of stock do I come from, then? What twisted genes have I passed on to my son?

She averts her eyes, reaches for her walker, and makes her lurching way to the bedroom. The door closes behind her with a small, final click.

I've ruined everything.

After I replace my grandmother's photo, because I can't think of what else to do, I go back to the garage, to her letter. All night I read my grandmother's adventures. Her words enter me like spears. They hurt, but also for a while they make me forget my own problems.

Her dreams were audacious, unseemly for the daughter of a poor village priest. People around her were determined to crush them. The rules her mother wanted her to live by, proverbs for good women, were too simple for her. She could not accept them.

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name.

Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family's fame.

There are secrets in this letter, things she has told no one: How she lived, a poor guest in a rich Kolkata home, swallowing humiliation daily for the privilege of education. How she fell into forbidden love and for that crime was thrown out into the night; how in desperation she beguiled my grandfather; how she got back at her onetime hosts but learned that revenge exacts its price. How the problems between her and my mother began, with words of deadly innocence spoken in a car, and a slap that echoed through the years.

It's morning by the time I finish reading and rereading the letters. I'm exhausted. My eyes are rough and burning, scratchy with sand—as though I've traveled halfway across the world without stopping. But I'm strangely comforted, too. In the context of my grandmother's life, mine seems a little less desperate.

But no, I'm not finished. There was something else Grandma Sabitri had learned, the most important of all. It was the last thing she wrote for me before she died. In truth, she wrote it for my mother as much as myself, and thus I must share it with her before I leave.

I knock on my mother's door. I know it's not going to be easy.

“Go away,” she says, her voice muffled.

I turn the knob and enter.

“Didn't you hear me?” she says. “Go. We have nothing more to say to each other. Fortunately, after today, we won't have to see each other again.”

I hand her the letter and tell her where I found it. I hear the intake of her breath. I wait.

“I didn't know,” she whispers to herself as she reads. “Oh, God, I didn't know.” I think she has forgotten my presence.

My mother's on the last page now. She's crying—ugly, racking sobs that make it hard for the words to push through.

“When you told me you were dropping out of college, Tara, I didn't know what to do. I'd dropped out of college myself—so many of my problems stemmed from that. I didn't want the same thing to happen to you. I guess that's when people call their mothers—when their world is falling apart. I told your grandma that she must write to you. Get you to change your mind. That it was her duty. I was so focused on my own pain, I didn't even think how much my news might distress her. Oh, my poor mother, all my life I've given her only trouble. Even as a child, I was sullen and difficult. I blamed her for my dad's death. And even more for my baby brother's. I felt it was her job to keep him safe. I didn't know then that mothers can't necessarily save their children, no matter how much they want to.

“After I talked to her, all day I paced the house. I called you, but you didn't answer. I called your father. He had already changed his number. My body felt like it was burning up. That night—probably just as my mother was having her heart attack—I took sleeping pills. I was planning to take the whole bottle, but halfway through, I lost courage. In any case, I passed out. Didn't hear the phone when it rang. The next morning, I woke up on the bathroom floor, dry-mouthed, my head feeling like it was about to split open. I wanted to crawl into bed and never get up.

“But I dragged myself to the phone and checked for messages. I was hoping you'd called back. But the messages were all from my mother's phone. I skipped them. I couldn't bear to listen to her scoldings, telling me once again that I'd messed up.

“The messages weren't from her, though. They were from Bipin Babu, our old manager at Durga Sweets, the only one who was there for her in the end. By the time I realized this, everything was over, even her ashes scattered. Tara, I'd killed my mother!”

She rocks back and forth, her shoulders shaking. I hold her as best as I can, and think how near she herself had come to death because of me. Dr. Berger, I, too, am entangled in this web of sorrow and responsibility. Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire.

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

In a while, my mother sits up.

“I did betray your father,” she says. “But not in the way you think. Perhaps what I did was more shameful. I'll tell you about it before you leave. It's only right that you should know. But first, will you read me the rest of the letter? My eyes hurt.”

She holds out the page.

“Yes,” I say.

But that moment in the car wasn't the happiest moment of my life. Just like it hadn't been so on the starlit terrace. . . . My happiest moment would come much later. . . .

One day, in the kitchen at the back of the store, I held in my hand a new recipe I had perfected, the sweet I would go on to name after my dead mother. I took a bite of the conch-shaped dessert, the palest, most elegant mango color. The smooth, creamy flavor of fruit and milk, sugar and saffron mingled and melted on my tongue. Satisfaction overwhelmed me. This was something I had achieved by myself, without having to depend on anyone. No one could take it away. That's what I want for you, my Tara, my Bela. That's what it really means to be a fortunate lamp.