Good Indian Girls: Stories (18 page)

Mom and Dad would sit together at night and pray that I would be the kid who would one day grow that ball of snot; that it would be I who released the family from the curse. They were certain it would be me. Mom says she would shake me angrily, warning me what would happen if I didn’t produce that great predestined snot. But I became a vomiter, disappointing their most cherished hopes for my future. I would spew anywhere and everywhere: in the car, at the mall, in the doctor’s lap, at school and during phys ed, at birthday parties, when playing with friends or sitting for family portraits. It seemed to stop when I became a teenager,
or at least lessen, and my episodes of retching became shorter and less frequent. Dad put it on the yoga. I said never, never. I hated Dad’s yoga: having to watch him every morning became only a reminder of his incontinence, a shame I felt far greater than my own. I hated Dad for being descended from Razia, for having me, for the ways our bodies were linked, not only by blood, but by this common stigmata, the way our bodies battled against us and nature.

II

I was nineteen when Mom asked me to teach her to drive. I had just learned I was pregnant and didn’t know how to tell her. Didn’t know who the father was either, didn’t want to know. I laughed at her when she asked me—I was giddy and afraid—and felt again that old urge, to vomit there and then, to disgorge myself onto the kitchen table like I had done so many times before. “You drive a car,” I said with a patronizing and questioning inflection drifting into another laugh. I had never thought much of her motor abilities: she was a careless cook, never figured out a remote control, and for minutes after entering a room always cast about, unsure of herself, where to sit, fussing where she might settle her bones with the least fuss.

She stood at the stove making a pot of tea. She frowned at my laugh and confided that she’d already taken lessons with a private company.

I pictured her sitting next to some driver’s ed guy, gold chains dangling from his neck. “You took lessons?” I asked. “On your own?” and instinctively: “Does Dad know?”

“Don’t tell him,” she said, raising a finger to her lips. “You
know what he will do——fuss fuss about this, that, the insurance, this cost, that cost.”

“Will he let you?” I studied her face closely.

She said nothing. She waited a whole minute, her eyes fixed on the simmering milky tea, and finally offered, “I don’t care what your father says. He can do his silly yoga or whatever, all he wants. You know he never did anything like that in Uganda. He was always saying how silly those holy men in India are. What idiots, he said, and look at him now. Pissing everywhere.” She shook her head feverishly and clamped her lips tight together with an air of disapproval of Dad I had never seen so openly in her.

“Next time you see him,” she said, “you call him some silly sanyasi and see what he says.”

“I’ll call him a fuck if he doesn’t.”

She raised a hand ready to slap me but then dropped it, her eyes violent, muttering something in that other language.

I walked out, calling back, “Whenever you want.”

Our car was a Nissan, smooth and black, and it suited my mood that morning. I was in black: black, leg-hugging jeans, a black tank top and a black leather jacket which I threw casually across the length of the back seat; I had ringed my eyes with black eyeliner, and even my fingernails were painted black; my eyes were hidden behind a pair of black-rimmed Wayfarers. The dash was immaculate, and I threw my small purse with its black eye shadow and nail polish onto it.

Mom nervously jerked the car out of the driveway, her hands tight around the wheel, eyes darting between lanes, right foot pressing the gas. I detected a fragility to her. An arm might crack at any moment, splintering like a dry twig, her leg might come disjointed at the thigh and she would
walk always with the strange gait of one whose body no longer suits or fits. I thought of the secret inside me, as if I were possessed of an alchemical mystery, and understood my power. It was a formula that would make her old, make her into a grandmother. The wrinkles on her face multiplied, the bags under her eyes dragged down, and I watched how she labored slowly with her arms, the sharp jabs of pain from a worsening arthritis, her legs heavy, as though weighted down.

That day in the car it was hot; no clouds in the sky. One of those days when suburbs melt into a bland greyness of concrete and roadway and when you see fat old women by the side of the road, panting, waiting for a bus.

We were on the highway heading west. I remember the way she looked, wearing large gold hoop earrings glinting in the sunlight, a green Marines T-shirt, I don’t know why, and blue polyester pants, and plain sandals with worn tan straps that she insisted were the most comfortable shoes she’d ever worn. It was the first time she’d ever driven on the freeway, and I could see how excited she was. We were in the right lane, and the speedometer wavered between fifty and sixty-five. One of her tapes played in the stereo: Hindi or Urdu or one of those; the soprano wailed like a dying cat.

“Try the next exit,” I suggested. She ignored me.

“Do you see that woman doing her make-up in that car?” Her tongue clicked in judgment. She pointed with a vague gesture but I could see no one. The engine revved faster and the speedometer began arcing toward seventy. It was a busy morning and the freeway, though moving, felt clogged with cars and trucks, as though we were pressing into the diminishing lanes of a country highway.

“What would you do if I was caught shoplifting?”

She laughed. “I hope you would steal something attractive, not like what you wear.”

“What if I was a heroin dealer?”

“Your cousin was arrested for that,” she said without drama. “He smuggled heroin and gold.” The freeway opened up ahead of us, and for some distance there were few cars on the road. She slowed down, and I was angry at her for what I guessed was fear of this sudden freedom.

“Who? I didn’t know.” Cars began passing us on all sides.

“No one you know. This was when you were a baby.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, they hung him, I think. We never found out. He was in Kenya. He was a shitter.”

It was the tone of voice that decided me; the way she said shitter. She said the word with a deliberate hardness, and it was this hardness that I reacted to. There was no rationality in telling her then, no guile on my part, no hope that in a car she wouldn’t kill me; there was only myself battering at what I believed was a hardness in her voice, scratching at it, trying to chisel myself into it.

I pulled off the sunglasses and dropped them onto the dash. The thin tube of eyeliner rolled up against them. The sun was now high and the blacktop of the freeway reminded me of the charred underbrush of a field after a wildfire has devoured the surface.

Ahead, a truck labored up a shallow grade. On its shimmering and silver back doors oversized letters extolled: “Start the Week out Right. Go to Church on Sunday.” Diesel fumes skated at us over the flat top of the trailer. “Pass this truck,” I told her. Mom signaled and pulled around on the left. “Don’t brake when you change lanes,” I insisted. She
frowned. I was feeling pretty bad. My stomach pushed at my mouth; it wanted to get out right there. The lines of the freeway began to twist and waver. I was no longer sure which lane we were in, or which was the car in front of us.

When I said it, I simply threw it out at her, the way I used to tell her Dad had pissed again or I had lost it on her favorite sari: with short, precise sentences and words, not apologizing or demanding, simply stating. We were back in the right lane, some way ahead of the truck. I closed my eyes and waited. Colors spun around me. I was frightened. I thought she would strike me, throw me out of the car. I could feel the blows already.

After a minute of silence, I felt the car meander briefly, but nothing else, no words or shouts or slaps. The silence was worse, being full of all the blows I was certain were coming.

The car began to slow down. I opened my eyes. Her foot was firmly on the brake. “What’re you doing?” I spat out. She said nothing. Behind us, a truck horn sliced through the air. We were on a downhill grade and the truck had gathered speed, coming down on top of us.

“Mom!” I shouted. “We’ll have an accident.” But she didn’t move her foot. The car stopped with a sudden lurching motion. I heard the sound of air escaping the pressurized brakes of the truck. Its shadow smothered our car, and I thought of the baby inside me and thought I could smell the trucker’s breath, stale, stinking of anger.

She was calm. “Now tell me again,” she said. “What you just told me.”

The truck’s horn erupted behind us, shaking me to my toes.

“Tell me,” Mom said calmly. “Again.”

Before I could speak, I heard a loud banging from the back
of the car. I turned my head and saw the truck driver. He had climbed out of the truck and was thumping his fist on the trunk. I could see his teeth, stained brown, spit spilling onto the back window. He walked around to Mom’s side of the car, his fist clenching, unclenching. Cars honked at him. The slow boil of my stomach felt ready to erupt.

“Lady!” he shouted, his voice muted by the thin glass, as though underwater. “Lady! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

His eyes terrified me.

She opened the door. The bursting noise of the freeway crowded in on us; the hot afternoon air, the smell of the trucker, of his belligerence, assaulted me. I didn’t know what she was doing. She stepped out of the car. I wanted to scream at her to stop, to get back in, to shout for help. But I didn’t do any of those. I opened my own door, the hills to my right staggered into mountains and I let my head fall toward the pavement, spewing pale green and white vomit onto the black and insensible surface.

When I sat up I could see her shouting at the guy. Her hands cracked taut gestures in the air; all around us, horns blared, passing cars sucked air from the small cabin, my stomach boiled. This guy was going to throw her into the oncoming traffic. I knew it, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I opened my door again and vomited. The puke spilled down the side of the car and formed the beginnings of a channel along the black edge of the highway.

But she didn’t die. She stepped back into the car, and for the first time in how long I could not remember, I was filled with a surging pride and love for her. How beautifully she was
dressed! How well she looked in that odd T-shirt and cheap pants! The trucker shuffled back to his truck, the car horns and faces now angry with him. I looked over my shoulder as he stepped up into the cab; he looked small and ineffectual, and I thought, how could she have seen that so easily when to me he was a horror.

I searched for something to say; I wanted to tell her how magnificent she had been, how I knew that no one—not Dad, not the kid’s father—would have done that for me, but my throat was clogged with vomit and any words that tried to seep out soon choked and were made incomprehensible. I opened my door again and heaved and this time I kept at it for a whole minute, retching and puking, my throat gargling out my innards as though driven by the motor of some impassive engine pushing up against everything I wanted.

I sat up and turned to look at her. Her face blistered with rage. Without warning, she started to slap at me violently and I held my arms up weakly to protect myself. Her blows came harder and harder and soon she was using both hands with uncontrolled force. “You and your father!” she shouted. “You and your father! To be like that in public. Why can’t you control yourself. Always! Always the same!”

She finally relented and dropped her hands into her lap. My face and arms and shoulders stung with pain. She was crying. I could hear her voice catching in her throat.

“Why do you always have to be sick,” she said.

I said nothing. I could still taste vomit in my mouth. I felt my nose and found it was bleeding. We drove in silence to the next exit where she wound the car around the looped ramp and parked in a 7-Eleven lot. I dropped my head into my hands and felt the warmth of my forehead
and the drip of blood onto my bare wrists.

“American girl,” I heard her say. Her voice was rough and excited. “American girl,” she repeated with a threat in her voice.

I heard the door open and she stepped out and I raised my head and watched her walk into the store. She returned after a couple of minutes carrying a Coke and a handful of paper towels. I could feel my face swelling up already. “You drink this,” she said without violence. “It’ll settle your stomach.” Her voice was resigned and exhausted. I took the Coke carefully from her hands and drank from the straw. After a minute, I wiped myself clean with the towels. When I examined them, I found less blood than I had expected.

A car pulled up next to ours, its stereo blasting a song by Nirvana. Two guys sat in the front. They seemed in no hurry to get out of the car; I could see them joking with each other the way guys do, laughing and punching each other. One turned his head and when he saw me, winked and smiled. He had a handsome, broad smile and I think the corners of my mouth turned up.

I wanted to say something to Mom, but nothing came, and even if it did I can’t now imagine what it might have been because at that moment I had no understanding of her anger: it was an anger not at anything I had done, but at me, at my essence, and there was no way I could persuade her that I was not the person she saw. After a minute, I looked out the window and into the sky. The two guys had walked inside. I didn’t want to look at her. I folded my arms on my stomach and pushed hard with my forearms. For a moment I wanted to crush whatever life was inside me. Up in the sky the trail of a plane’s exhaust hung like a bridal train. I dug my nails
into my palms. I released my arms, though it felt more out of weakness than any decision on my part.