Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (41 page)

“I have cut cloth. Yards and yards and yards and yards of cloth. I have sewn garments. Skirts. Frocks. Blouses. Embroidered tablecloths and altar cloths and God knows what other cloths. Look. Do you see my fingers? Always swollen and cut all over. Scratched. I have nightmares. At least two every night. Those sewing machines in those small rooms with those bare bulbs burning around the clock and the tired, tired, tired, tired women. Women ordered to work quickly. All the time. Told to shut up and work.

“And,” my mother continued her one-sided argument with Philip, “I have always paid my taxes. My enemies are here. My friends are here. My only family, my daughter, is here. God and the beautiful, Asho Farohars, our guardian angels, are of course everywhere. You are damned right I am an American. And I am an Indian. Who are you to tell me that I can’t love two places? No one, no one can cut boundaries into my heart! Do you want this authentic American turkey? It will most probably taste quite good with the authentic Indian achaar. Better than with cranberry sauce.”

It was a very short Thanksgiving dinner. Mother had not served the stew or the shrimp. That Thanksgiving was memorable because of the glorious leftovers we ate for many
weeks following that “Turkey for Four or Maybe Three” celebration. I was sure that my mother, our landlady Mary Crawford, who liked rich, hot food, and I were the only people in the whole world who had eaten turkey dhaan-saak for eight days straight. The rice fried with cinnamon and brown sugar, covered with the thick, spicy daal made with lentils and filled with potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, and roasted turkey cut into chunky pieces. It was on the second day of the turkey dhaan-saak feasting that I discovered that soy sauce isn’t really called for with this particular Parsi specialty.

And now, my mother was dying in South San Francisco and asking me about “American.” Since I didn’t know quite what to say, I asked, “Mamma, do you want me to take you back to Bombay? It is not the monsoon season there but you could make believe and maybe your headache will go away. I will ask your doctor and I am sure …”

“No,” she said. “Just bury me here. Your father is a part of this earth now. It will be my gift to this land … swollen fingers, failed eyesight, and all. After all, I have eaten the food from this land and breathed the air here for most of my life. But remember. No coffin. I want to disintegrate quickly. Maybe my bones and flesh and blood will wipe out the blood spilled all over here. So much blood!”

I told her that she sounded like a martyr. “That early Bombay convent-school training is beginning to show in your old age.”

“Martyr-tamatyr! Just because you are a hot-shot architect, you think you know about dead, decaying bodies and the earth. And the worms. Now, those worms … they do bother me, Kamal, dear. And don’t forget that it was, after all, Mother Hilda at the convent who forced me to learn how to sew and embroider. And that is what put food on our table for many years!

“And,” she continued, “remember to track down our old
landlady Mrs. Mary Crawford, and get back our Chinese silk sari, the Parsi gaaro, from her.”

“Mamma, you gave it to her. Remember? For our rent.”

“And because she had always lusted after that sari and because we liked her. She was a good woman. Of course I remember. I am not losing my mind, I am only dying. We gave her that sari and a shawl in exchange for a month’s rent and money to buy those Louisa May Alcott books. And you didn’t even have the decency to cry when Beth died! I cried. All you said was, ‘Thank God. She’s dead. At last!’ Pay Mary Crawford, build her a house if you want to, but get back that gaaro. Let her keep the shawl. The gaaro is important. You know that it is the only thing we have from your Chinese great-great-grandmother. My mother’s grandmother. It was given to me before I left India by my cousin who had inherited the sari. To keep me safe in America. She told me that the Chinese lady, our great-grandmother, embroidered that sari herself. All those hand-embroidered white spider patterns all over the sari. She embroidered it specially for the wife and the daughter and the granddaughter and so on and so forth of the one child, the eldest son, she and your great-great-grandfather who never returned home, sent back to India from Malaysia. Back to his Parsi family in India. He stayed there, in Malaysia, with his wife and his other children. And died there.”

“Mamma, let Mrs. Crawford keep the gaaro.”

“Listen to me, Kamal. Get it back and then decide what you want to do with it. Your ancestress sent it to the land she would never see. With the son she never saw again. As long as you have it, you will be blessed. You will remember Asia. You will remember the men and women who stayed and the ones who traveled away. I always meant to get it back.” And she closed her eyes, turned her back to me, and fell asleep.

I was still sitting beside her when she woke up a few hours
later. The wind had blown away the fog but it was still chilly.

“Open the window, Kamal. I want to look at the air! It smells just like the earth in the garden on Malabar Hill. When the rains begin to fall. I want to look at the air.”

“Mamma, one can’t look at the air!”

But my mother was dead and the only things she had asked me to do were to bury her without a coffin and to get back the maroon sari, the gaaro, with the spider pattern embroidered in white silk. One spider in each square inch of the six yards.

Instead of leaving her body to the mercy of worms, I decided to cremate my mother. And in honor of her Thanksgiving litany of what part of her body she had left in which parts of the United States of America, I decided that my mother’s final gift to the land would be best given by scattering her ashes across the continent instead of interring her in one, limited burial space.

And so I traveled across the United States, leaving small amounts of my mother’s ashes in various places. I began by surreptitiously placing the fine ash mixed with tiny gray-and-white crystals under a tree root which had pushed through the earth in the Golden Gate Park. I then dropped some of the contents of what I called my “mother bag” into Lake Michigan in Chicago, some in the Mississippi, in Wisconsin, and some on a mountain trail behind a souvenir shop along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Remembering my mother’s fascination with witches, I set afloat some of the ashes onto the Atlantic from Salem. When my travels took me to New Mexico, I scattered ashes in a ravine on a mountain road between Santa Fe and Taos. A silent, watchful raven and a very old man with a straw hat watched me. The man took off his hat and bowed to me. The raven flew off, diving after the ashes, as they drifted down the ravine.

My general route across the United States was pre-selected by my search for Mary Crawford.

Mary Crawford had apparently been on a quest. She had left her two-story home on Santiago Avenue in San Francisco. Abandoning the foam from the Pacific Ocean which constantly blew across two blocks and settled in front of her house, she had gone to Chicago, Illinois, then Boston, Massachusetts, then Charlottesville, Virginia, then Taos, New Mexico, and then to San Antonio, Texas. Mary Crawford had begun her quest in the company of the followers of a lady with electric spiritual teachings, great charisma, and a genuine urge to help people overcome their ennui and despair. The lady called herself Divine Sister Magda and sometimes Mataji Dolores.

I lost track of Mary Crawford for a short time in Texas. When I called Divine Sister Magda’s office in Chicago from my motel in Texas, the office computer informed me that Mary Crawford had extended her quest into Mexico. She had become interested in healing and healers and had decided to find a true
curandera.
The secretary at the office told me that according to her informants on the Internet, Mary Crawford was in Oaxaca. Oaxaca was currently the targeted place for those in search of authentic
curanderas.

So, I found myself in Oaxaca. In front of a house on the fringes of the cobblestoned Colonia Jalatlaco. A crazy-looking mobile made of newspaper piñatas was hanging from a pole on the sidewalk in front of the entrance gate and a small statue of Nuestra Señora de La Soledad, the Virgin of Oaxaca, guarded the entrance to the yard.

An old woman, no more than five feet tall, with two gray braids tied together with Day-Glo pink yarn, an apron with a bright red embroidered flower over her polyester blue dress, and a pair of steel-rimmed round spectacles firmly anchored onto her nose answered my knock. She identified herself as
Señora Florencia Nunez, at the foreign lady’s service, and informed me that yes, Señora Mary Crawford had lived in this house but unfortunately, the señora had died three months ago. She had died in the house. Her body had been sent off to San Diego, to her son, in an airplane. She had died peacefully.

The house, Señora Nunez told me, did not belong to Señora Mary. “And please call me Florencia. Any friend of Señora Mary is a friend of mine.” The house belonged to Señora Florencia’s nephew, Rogelio. He was an artist. A few months before Mary Crawford’s arrival, he had retreated, first to the mountains of Oaxaca and then to Peru, in pursuit of his art and to look for UFOs.

Mary Crawford had rented two rooms in the house and Señora Florencia had been her cook and Spanish teacher. And in the end, her nurse. And what could she, asked Señora Florencia, do for the señorita who had arrived at her door during today’s dull, hot siesta hours? But first the señorita should get out of the heat and come into the house. Yes, the piñatas were her nephew Rogelio’s work. He had left them there, together with the Virgin, to guard his aunt and their home.

As I crossed the yard with flowers growing on vines, flowers growing in clay pots, flowers growing in tin cans, two sleeping parrots and the sweet smell of jasmines, I wondered if my mother’s garden on Malabar Hill had resembled this yard. Sitting in the small room with bright pictures of the Virgin in her many incarnations, a faded picture of Pope John cut out from a magazine, flowers made from newspapers stuck into black pottery vases, and a large television, I asked Señora Florencia if she knew anything about a long piece of heavy silk embroidered cloth which might have been in Señora Mary’s possession.

I tried to explain what a sari was and the importance of this particular sari, grateful that my mother had insisted that
I take Spanish in high school and the first two years of college. “I have taught you Gujarati, Kamal. But when I am dead, you may have very little chance to speak it. And if you continue to speak only English, you might decide to believe like the rest of the people around you that English is either the only language spoken on this earth or that it is the only language worth knowing. Learn Spanish. Maybe one day we can go to Peru. I want to see if a person from Peru would really be interested in writing about Parsis! As I told you, your Grandfather Tehmurasp had a book on Parsis which he insisted was written by a scholar from Peru.”

To my complete bewilderment, Señora Florencia answered my question about the sari, a long piece of embroidered silk, with, “¿Conoce usted la China Poblana?”

I knew of “La China Poblana” only as a Mexican-Indian restaurant which used to be in Berkeley, on San Pablo Avenue. Mother and I had frequented it until it closed down. The owners-cooks-servers were a Mexican woman from Puebla and an Indian man from Goa.

But no, Señora Florencia wasn’t speaking of any restaurant. She was speaking of the original China Poblana: Mirrha, a princess, who had been stolen from India by Spanish pirates, taken to the Philippines and then to China, as they put together their cargo of spices and silks and ivory and sandalwood for New Spain. Mirrha had arrived with the cargo from Asia to the coast of what was to be named Mexico. In 1621, Señora Florencia seemed sure about the date of arrival as well as the fact that the young girl, who had eventually ended up as a slave in Puebla de los Angeles, had been baptized, somewhere along the way, with the name Catarina de San Juan. Mirrha’s once scintillating, sequined, silk embroidered skirts and shawls from India had reputedly influenced the clothes worn by the China Poblanas. The dashing, glamorous young women of Puebla. Señora Florencia wasn’t too
sure about the clothes part. She had read in one of the biographies about Mirrha that her abductors had brought her to New Spain disguised in boy’s clothing, in order to protect her virginity. Chastity and beauty for the highest bidder.

Señora Florencia assured me that she often dreamed of Catarina de San Juan. In all her manifestations. As a young girl slave, as the woman who had refused to consummate her marriage to another slave, as a widow, as a visionary.

I listened to Señora Florencia’s account of the girl abducted from India and wondered if my Chinese great-great-grandmother’s gaaro was in this house or in San Diego or in San Francisco. I found myself telling my hostess about my mother. My mother’s headache, her longing to feel the monsoon rain in her garden on Malabar Hill, her request that I find the sari and of her death. Señora Florencia looked at me for four long minutes. It was neither a rude nor a disturbing stare. She got up from the couch and gestured me to follow her into the room behind the kitchen. It contained two long tables, a bed, and a chest. The rose vine in the garden had climbed across the room’s single window. Señora Florencia led me to one of the tables, which was covered with jars and bottles filled with dried leaves, twigs, seeds, and roots. Each container had a piece of paper wrapped around it with a thick rubber band. The name and uses of an herb or a healing plant was written in beautiful, straight script in jet black ink on each piece of paper. She picked up a jar labeled
té malabar
and poured some of the contents into a small plastic bag. “Scatter these herbs on your mother’s grave. It will help to cure her homesickness.”

I told her that there was no grave. I described my ash-scattering, continent-spanning expedition. I went to the living room and returned with my “mother bag.” The old woman nodded, plunged her hand into the bag, pulled out the plastic Ziploc bag I had been using for my mother’s ashes,
and emptied the ashes into a small clay bowl. She then added the
té
Malabar to the ashes and carried the bowl to the other table in the room. There were candles, flowers, and a beautifully framed picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the table. A bowl carved from a gourd, painted in reds, oranges, pinks, greens, and blues and filled with rose petals stood in front of the picture. As Señora Florencia lit a fat pink candle that was stuck into a small brass candlestick, I leaned forward and grabbed the corner of the cloth that covered the table.