In the Convent of Little Flowers (2 page)

My life since has been peppered by Seattle rain. Rain in the winter—hardly had that in Chennai—rain in the spring, and summer and fall. Chennai is very close to the equator. It must be hot. I remember now it
is
hot. Is that why I love the rain?

I did not choose this life. I did not even choose to be born, let alone to this nameless woman in the southeast
corner of India. I did not choose to be given away, or be taken by the sunny blond couple who stood on the verandah one day and, I think, pointed at me. But they took me. I came here. I belong no more to Chinglepet street.

I don’t think I have ever realized I am different. I cannot say not American, because what really
is
American? But I look into the mirror more often now and I see that dark skin. To me it seems as dark as Sister Mary Theresa’s, yet I am married where she took the veil for hers.
Autre temps, autre moeurs.
Sister Bloody Mary Theresa. I am so angry I will not even now allow her the luxury of having chosen then a life for the love of her religion, for the love of her God, or even, for the love of her work. It must be because somebody rejected her. Or she would not be a nun at the Convent of Little Flowers. And I would not have met her, and she would not have now written me the letter.

Do you remember much of us, dear Padmini? The convent was built in the shadow of the Gemini Flyover, the only road bridge in all of Chennai then, and a big landmark for giving directions. I have seen pictures of America. There are many many such flyovers there. Some even in the shape of clover leaves. But this you must know, these you must have seen. I’m afraid nothing much grows even now in our courtyard. It is still the same, a bare
maidan,
dusty when the rains do not come; but under the banyan it is shady. The tree has added a few more arms to the ground since you were last
here. Every day I stand on the verandah and watch the children play under its shade and thank God it is still there. Somehow, it finds the strength to survive year after year of drought as the trees and saplings around the city wilt and die. It has been five years since an adequate rain has visited Chennai.

The lowering skies have now completely engulfed the Cascades outside the floor-to-ceiling glass of the airport. I want to send them westward, across the vast Pacific Ocean, flying over Hawaii, over Hong Kong and Singapore and China, sweeping down the Bay of Bengal to hover over the Gemini Flyover. We have enough rain here. The little flowers could do with some of ours. When she writes like this, in her singsong talking voice, I can remember her even more.

The Merricks came one rain-threatening day to stand on the verandah to choose me. Later Mom would say they brought the rain from Seattle. I firmly believe it was me they wanted among all others. Mom said so, night after night when I asked her. I could barely speak English when I came here, just a few words. It was a long plane ride from Chennai to Seattle. I sat between them in the white frock I hated. They had brought jeans for me, but only boys wore pants; why would I all of a sudden? Besides, the frock was the only thing then that was mine. Under it I wore a baggy pair of Mom’s stockings, pooling around my ankles in frothy beige, knotted and pinned at my waist. One of Dad’s sweaters flopped over my shoulders down to my knees. Somehow,
in giving me their clothes, they made me theirs. They patted me a lot during that flight, not knowing what to say. They would pat me on the head, on the shoulders, on the knees, all accompanied by a stream of gibberish. English, I found out later. I dutifully nodded my head and chewed on unforgiving limp lettuce and candy bars. I had not tasted chocolate till then. I still like it. I guess the flight was not so bad after all.

School was hard. At the Convent of Little Flowers we had our classes in a haphazard fashion. It depended on how free Sister Mary was during the day. She taught us math and English (not very well, obviously). A schoolmaster came in for Tamil. Strangely, I remember him very well. He was a handsome man, with a commanding movie-star mustache and a deep male voice. At the Convent of Little Flowers, we were all either little flowers or older women—teachers and sweepers and clerks. The schoolmaster was a welcome distraction, despite his polio-affected limp that made him swing to one side as he walked. As we forgot Sister Mary’s smallpox face, we forgot the schoolmaster’s polio walk. With the precocity of children left to themselves most of the day, we made up happy endings for Sister Mary and the schoolmaster. It did not matter that one was a nun and the other married.

For my first day at Coe Elementary, sometime in mid-October, Dad took the morning off from work and the three of us walked down the road together to school. They insisted upon holding my hands. I let them. It was a nice feeling. The first person we met was Mrs. Haley, my class teacher, with
her triangular glasses and her formfitting sweater dress and her short cropped hair artfully arranged in curls around her head. I asked her, my English still not strong, if she was married. She was. She was most unlike Sister Mary. Then I thought it was the glasses that did it. It was the glasses anyway that made me unclench my hand from Dad’s large one and willingly put it in hers, and for many hours in the next few months I would stare at Mrs. Haley’s pretty face in class. She was never as pretty as Mom, though.

That first day she took me into class, to the very front, and said, “Class, this is Padmini Merrick. Everyone, please welcome Padmini to the class.” The class promptly chorused back, “Welcome, Pud-mi-ni.” There was one little boy in front who yelled out the loudest, Mike. Even then I thought him quite handsome with his brown hair and hazel eyes and two front teeth knocked out in a schoolyard brawl. For many months after that Mike would fight for me when someone teased me about my accent, or the English I learned painfully at first and then rapidly, or for sitting quietly in the schoolyard in May as the plum and peach trees burst into wondrous pink and white blossoms. The banyan seemed to be always green; I don’t remember flowers in the Convent of Little Flowers. A week ago Mike told me what he thought when he first saw me standing in front of the class.

We were sitting on the park benches on Pier 66 a few minutes before sunset. It had been a warm day and there were people all around us, laughing and talking and feeding the persistent gulls. “You were wearing a red sweater and
black jeans,” Mike said. I was. Funny he would remember that; he never seems to notice what I wear now. “But,” he continued, “I mostly see in my mind a thin face with deep black eyes, huge and frightened. Your hair was long and braided down your back to the waist. You cut it in fourth grade, I remember that too.”

I had not seen many boys until then, only little flower girls. So I was fascinated by Mike with his blown-out front teeth—which he showed endearingly each time he smiled— and his spiky hair, and his dirty hands and face. Over the years that face has changed only slightly. I think I must have known I would marry Mike one day, because I don’t remember having seen anyone but him in all the years of my memory.

Are you married now, dear Padmini? Do you work? I hear that in America all women work. Do you have children of your own, Padmini? Who did you marry? Is he Indian? American? So many questions to ask of you. So many things I want to know. Not just for myself, child, but for another person who asks after you. I have told you of your mother, who wishes she might see you now that she is sick. She has uterine cancer and has undergone months of chemotherapy and radiation. She is very brave really; she bears her pain and her nausea with a strength I would not have attributed to her. She does not talk about you, but I know she thinks and wonders where you are. I know
her well, your mother. I knew she always wanted you but could not keep you for various reasons. Reasons I will not go into here.

Why? I want to cry out each time I read that. She talks of knowing my mother, of being next to her and not hearing her ask after me. Why does Meddling Sister Mary Theresa care what has happened to me when my own mother—no, the woman who gave birth to me—does not seem to care? And why does she want to know if I have children? Mike and I have none, not yet at least. Somehow, my memory fills with pictures of little flowers who have no parents. But I think at times I would like a boy with spiky hair who fights ferociously for what he thinks is right … or a girl just like him—like Mike.

I called Mom when the letter came. They live in Bellingham now; Dad is retired from Boeing. They have a tiny cottage on four acres of land, spilling into the Pacific at the edge of the garden. I think it was living on Queen Anne that made them want the space. So they gave Mike and me the condo and went to their little house up north. Dad is still too young to be retired, but he wanted to stop working and potter about a garden, his own for once. Mom works now in the administrative offices of Western; she says it drives her nuts to have Dad home all the time, pestering her about something or the other. Dee, get me the wheelbarrow; Dee, are you sure the spaghetti isn’t overcooked? Dee, when is Padma going to visit? He won’t pick up the phone and ask me; he will just pester Mom until she does.

They called me Padma from when I came to them. When the letter came, I asked Mom why they did that, when my name was Padmini. Padma also meant lotus, Mom said, and they asked Sister Mary Theresa for a nickname, a shorter form of Padmini. They did not know Tamil well enough to do so themselves. Looking back, it was a peculiar conversation. We were almost like strangers with each other again, afraid to say anything outright, filling up silences with thoughts. We talked of my name, of Mary Theresa; I read out parts of the letter to her. To them both. Dad had picked up the extension as he always did when I called, but he did not say a word until the very last. I just heard his presence on the other end. Then gently, his voice cracking, he said, “Padma, are you going to India?” I had to say I didn’t know. Then he said, “I have to go now, sweetheart, the dandelions are growing even as we speak.” After Dad put down the extension, I asked Mom a question I had not asked for a long time. It had not been necessary to do so, but now it suddenly was. “Mom, was it
me
you wanted from the Convent of Little Flowers?” And she answered as she always did: “Only you, my dear, no one else. Ever.”

I used to be fascinated by my parents at the beginning. I would sit on Dad’s lap and stare into his eyes, blue as the midsummer sky on a breathless morning. Then I saw the lines around his mouth, which showed he smiled a lot. I hung from his arm with my knees swinging off the ground. Mom brought me milk in the mornings; no one had done that for me before. I learned to sleep in my own bed,
without fleeing across the hall to theirs in the middle of the night, knowing I would wake them. And I learned to be fiercely protective of them, and jealous if they bent down to talk with the neighbor’s child. They were mine, I thought. And so I filled in pieces like a jigsaw, a history of my own with Mom and Dad, without the little flowers.

We do not usually keep in touch with our little flowers, dear Padmini, yet here I am writing to you. When the Merricks came to the convent looking for a little girl, I judged them very carefully. I was still very young then, perhaps I did not seem so to you, but I watched them, I listened, I heard the kindness in their voices and saw it in their eyes. I knew they would be good for you. Did I make a good choice, my child?

I should not say however that the choice was entirely mine. When Tom and Diana Merrick came to the Convent of Little Flowers they wanted a child younger than one year. Later, I took them out onto the verandah to show them the school and the mess hall and the playground behind. You were playing hide-and-seek with your friends between the arms of the banyan. You were the seeker and as you danced your way through the tree roots, you were singing. I cannot remember anymore what the song was; it was in Tamil. Even for a child you had a haunting, lilting voice. Diana Merrick wanted you then, just as you
were, your hair sticking to your head in sweaty strips, your arms and legs dusty to the elbows and knees, your bare feet the color of mud.

It wrenched my heart to give you away. But they insisted. No other child would do, not even the one picked out ahead of time. I said yes after four weeks of pleading from them. Four weeks when I watched and listened and decided they would love you as much as I do. Have they been good to you, my dear?

Why the hell did she give me away if it wrenched her heart? And yet how could anyone but Tom and Diana be Mom and Dad? It has been a month since the letter came, but they have not come down to visit. Every week, Mom and Dad used to pop by on some pretext on Sundays for lunch. Oh, we were in the neighborhood. Your dad wanted to shop at a downtown store, nothing else would do. (Dad has, to my knowledge, never been in what he calls “fancy stores,” and neither has Mom.) Or the fresh vegetables at Pike Place beckoned to them all the way from Bellingham, where they grow at least half an acre of vegetables in their garden—and give away crates of carrots and cauliflowers under a
FREE
sign at the top of their driveway.

But they have not come down in four weekends. I have been on call, at work; that was my excuse. They rapidly grow old waiting for me to do whatever I want to do. If I could burn the letter and flush the ashes and it would all disappear
in the toilet water, perhaps I would do that. But then I would not be here at SeaTac, waiting for the flight to arrive from L.A. I looked up the route. Chennai to London, London to New York, New York to L.A., and then here. Exactly twenty-four hours in flight. The least I could do was come here two hours ahead of scheduled arrival. I sit at the gate now, staring through the Plexiglas as the cleaning crew, the catering crew, the refueling crew, the baggage-handlers, the tire-pressure-checking crew all buzz around some airplane, swarming into it and then popping out at odd places.