Inheritance (17 page)

I saw my mother in the kitchen kneading and squishing rice that she mixed with yoghurt and buttermilk for my great-uncle’s meal. I had never seen her prepare food before, so I stood in the doorway, her figure in profile to me. Then she began to cry, my great mother, my invincible tower of disdain. She was crying into the curd-rice, and wiping her tears with a corner of her sari. Her shoulders shook while she stirred.

All this time I had thought of my grandmother’s death as only affecting me, the granddaughter, I had not thought of my mother losing her mother, her own pillar of strength. Of course she and my grandmother had a life full of secrets that predated mine. I was jealous then for my grandmother’s attention. If her ghost were watching the two of us, would she bless us both? But there was no ghost. We had cremated my grandmother and sent her to the gods to return to earth again. My sorrow reincarnated as compassion for my mother.

I spied on Jani, looked at her slight figure kneeling and praying to Jesus. On her knees for salvation, blessings, help perhaps. Her lips moved in silent prayer. I knew she prayed for us, because Jani told me she did. But what did she pray for herself? Was there nothing she asked for herself?

Perhaps it was three days after the funeral, perhaps more, when my mother received a telegram. Savitri’s father, her second husband, was arriving. I knew this because my mother gave me the slip of paper. He offered his sympathy. He was coming by plane, he was landing in Delhi, he was catching the boat to the island. He was arriving soon. When I took the telegram to Savitri, she looked as baffled as I felt, and went on nursing her one-year-old.

One day and one night passed. At noon the next day a taxi arrived in the courtyard and out stepped Ashoka Ram, a middle-aged man with a plump body straining at a brown three-piece Western suit. He had a large yellow handkerchief to wipe his face after he paid the fare. I was on the verandah swing, and he climbed the steps to me.

“Where is Lakshmi?” he asked, bushy eyebrows quivering with impatience.

I didn’t know what to say. My mouth went dry, cracking my lips. He was not as I had imagined.

“My mother’s inside,” I managed.

He went in without another word. I followed to see the commotion.

He spoke to his daughter and admired his grandson. My mother observed him in her witchy way, and was silent. He was brandishing a shining coin in front of the baby. Savitri’s face was expressionless. I had never deeply considered my sisters’ feelings toward our mother and our various fathers. Maybe they felt as outcast as I did but had immersed themselves in their husbands’ lives, and those of their children. Savitri told me that she never thought of our mother, that she had dismissed her from her life, a dead mother.

Meanwhile Ashoka was fumbling with his coin when it suddenly slipped out of his fingers and landed in front of my mother. For an instant everyone froze, then Ashoka was on his hands and knees picking up the coin and touching my mother’s feet in obeisance. “Lakshmi,” he intoned, this film-land playboy, this philanderer, this cad.

My mother turned on her heel and left the room. Ashoka’s eyes welled up with tears, as did Savitri’s. I too felt weepy and took the baby from my sister. Ashoka and Savitri now confronted one another and fell awkwardly into each other’s arms. Opera, opera, opera, went my mind, trying to remain cynical and detached amidst this scene, holding my niece and rocking her body.

Ashoka stayed until the next day. We fixed a cot in the spare room. Ramani and Savitri stayed up most of the night, murmuring, but shooed me away from their whispered conversation. “Marry me,” Ashoka asked our
mother at least six times, in front of me. My mother said no and watched the cab drive off.

“Why don’t you marry him?”

“I don’t want to,” she replied.

Stupid mother! I couldn’t understand her. Marriage could give her respectability, give us respectability, end her sorrow. Marriage could save her.

I watched her with my sisters’ children. She wouldn’t play with them or hold them. She was a grandmother. But she really wasn’t at ease with babies.

Oddly, I began to feel sorry for my mother. As if she guessed my thoughts, she laughed at me, and again I harbored the old familiar hatred.

“You know, Ashoka wasn’t always a kind man.”

I wasn’t surprised.

“We fought bitterly all the time.”

“Maybe he has changed,” I said.

“He hit me, Sonil. Some things never change.”

Twenty

My grandmother used to tell me stories of her childhood. She would speak of the Tamil New Year, Holi, the Harvest Festival, the Festival of Lights, harbingers of the seasons. She spoke of her own mother getting up early to bathe in the river, sweeping away all the past unhappy days in one immersion, and rising refreshed, ready to face a new season. Dry season, wet season, those were our seasons, hot and less hot. But if one watched closely enough, one could discern a spring and summer, a fall and winter. There were minute changes, a shift in the air, a different kind of blooming bud.

Changes brought illness. A shift in the wind, and I’d come down with a cold and cough. The monsoons brought mosquitoes, which brought malaria. Perhaps grief brought about my laryngitis, it is hard to say. In any case, I found myself ill and in bed.

Jani brought rice with petite peas and tiny spiced potatoes to my room. My mother came too, and together we ate dahl spooned over the rice. Jani and my mother drew chairs up near my bed, and I sat up to eat my meal. No one spoke much. Jani was still wary of my mother, I noticed. I still distrusted my mother, despite her disclosure about Ashoka. Grief allowed me to feel pity for her, but my heart was more cautious. I ate without tasting.

Elephants mourn their dead with copious tears and a thrashing of tree branches. When an elephant herd comes across the bones of a departed member, it caresses what’s left and grieves the loss. Baby calves will not part from their dead mother’s body for a long time, and if one observes closely, one can discern the haunted look in their eyes as they wait for her to come back to life. My mother wore such a look, dark rings around her eyes, her nose red with crying.

But here she was speaking of her own childhood, her life with my grandmother.

“She would wake us at four sometimes to listen to the hum of insects and birds awakening. Other times, if the next day was a festival, she let us stay up late and help the cook prepare the food. We’d cook while it was dark outside. She insisted we girls learn to cook and mend and manage money, for she wanted us to become
fair, good wives. But she never counted on Shalani and Leila marrying foreigners. Partly to please her, I married Balu, a man who was old enough to be my father. We lived at his mother’s house in Kerala. He was a strict man, insistent on order—the socks had to be rolled just so, the books stacked alphabetically—and he was thrifty. He would daily measure out how many grams of dahl I could use, how much ghee. His mother naturally thought I was conjuse—miserly—in my cooking. We are not poor, she’d say, and I could not tell her it was her son’s hand that made the bread dry. He never touched me after our wedding night.”

Why was she telling me this? Did I need to know such details? And what was Jani thinking of it all?

“After he died, I met Ashoka. I was paid attention to for the first time. He promised me roses and champagne and Bombay. I didn’t know that he promised these things to all his girls, and that there were many girls. Even the night before we ran off to Bombay, he paid his mistress a visit that took hours more than a simple goodbye. He told me his women were crazy, that his mistress here wanted to kill herself, that his mistress there had a disease. He swore to be faithful in the north. After Savitri was born, I stopped listening to him.

“I met your father much later. I didn’t even like him at first. We met at the library, and later he came to a reading by my friend the poet. We had dinner that night, and listening to him, I saw that here was a man who knew
what he wanted to do with his life. He had a passion, which Ashoka never did. He was devoted to his photography. Our courtship was slow—I know what people say, that we leapt into bed immediately, but that’s not true. Ashoka had flattered me with his attention but your father took me seriously. I fell in love as I never had before.”

I longed to speak but my throat ached. Her forwardness was startling, but my mother was never one to do what was expected. Perhaps my grandmother’s death released her history.

“But I must have been born between two warring planets. After six months, your father told me he had been married once before, and had two children. He and his wife had separated and he didn’t get custody. I was not as shocked as you might suppose, for hadn’t I a past as well, and children besides? We planned a life together—we would buy a house, up north on the island, plant a garden. I dreamed of rows of roses and climbing jasmine. I envisioned blue daisies and canahambra.

“Of course it was never to be. He received a letter. His wife had been killed in an accident. His daughter was a heroin addict, his son a thief.” She gave a short laugh. “I told him he had to go and help them. He begged me to come with him, but I felt that he needed to go alone, that it wasn’t right for his children to see me just yet. We parted in March.

“Who can say what happened? He didn’t write. Did
America change him? Certainly I must have occupied a smaller and smaller place in his heart. Maybe he met with an accident. I was pregnant with you, and he didn’t know. Madame Butterfly on Pi. It was like a bad Tamil film.”

Her voice turned comic, her own solution to unhappiness. My throat ached with something more than sickness. Jani had tears in her eyes. My cowboy dad had ridden into the sunset, vanished without a trace, leapt on his horse and kept on riding. Exit the hero.

I thought of those monks who swept their sand mandalas into the river. Beauty, perfection, all so momentary. Circled perfection was not a constant in their lives—a life centered on God, bowls of food, occasional television. Other artists carve in stone, try to make their work immortal. But the Taj gets polluted, the Sphinx gets worn away, the jewels are knocked out of the idol’s eyes. The monks knew that nothing was permanent and kicked their creation to oblivion at once. They didn’t fool themselves. My parents had had an illusion of happiness, my mother had dreamed of a garden. They had held hands and planned. If they had known better, they would have parted as soon as they met. They wouldn’t have tried to mock the gods with their unconventional coupling.

But like ants who keep working no matter what, we try to control our own lives, tunnel paths to ideals and wants, unaware that an accidental footstep will knock everything asunder. I was old enough to get by on instinct,
I thought. But listening to my mother changed my life. I think it was that night that I learned not to take anything for granted, that no future was ever secure. But what was there to hold on to? What gave us hope?

“I want to go to college in America. I want to meet my father,” I told her, not because I felt I had to, but because it was the only thing I could say with my hoarse throat.

“Look,” she said as if she hadn’t heard, “life is not easy. You need more than good looks and good marks to get you by in this world. And it’s not merely intelligence, either. It’s practicality that is at issue. Do you have what it takes to live away from this island, from India itself? Can you maintain yourself beyond your imagination?”