Inheritance (18 page)

I listened, not wanting to listen. Maybe I listened with the part of myself that wasn’t immediately equipped to listen, like the way dolphins can listen without having ears. I listened with that part of myself that would hear what she said years later.

But she went on: “I am not the only one of this opinion. Your father would agree with me. Freedom does not come easily in this world. It is not about having a perfect dress, or a perfect view, or even a paradise of a room. It is not about going to college on another continent, or even finding your father. It is about how you can survive after things are taken from you. It is about the prospect of losing what you love and the effort it takes to continue.

“Life is not romantic. Romance is hard to come by.
Romance does not always work,” said my mother, looking away.

Imagine the scene. My mother in a dark green sari, bold lipstick, her arms full of poetry. My father in dusty jeans—jeans splattered with darkroom chemicals—reaching for a book on still-life painting. Perhaps with her head in the clouds she ran into him—literally—and her books scattered at her feet. And he bent down to retrieve them and glanced up to find the single most beautiful face looking at him. His hair bristled. Her eyes turned to stars. But this was not youthful infatuation, so they dismissed their instincts and apologized and parted.

Later, the poet read of women making love with their mouths and silken skin and strong desire. As the poet read, my mother’s eyes wandered, and seeing him, she blushed.
I touch your neck and watch it flame and then I let my hand slide over your breast.
He couldn’t stop looking at her.
I undo the buttons slowly and your breath is alive with longing.
They smiled and shifted in their seats.
I tongue your heart and plunge lower.
They felt a pulse in their inner parts.

At tea, they said hello shyly and felt self-conscious. In three hours, when they are seated at a riverbank, he will lean toward her and recite the poet’s lines, and she will be astonished. Unconsciously she will unbutton her blouse.

They will circle each other and tell each other they
are too old for foolishness. They will pretend indifference. But one day he would unfold the pleats in her sari and she would reveal herself like a forgotten package. The earth would sigh with their pleasure and later their love. I would not be thought of, but there would be other ideas.

My mother would dream of planting in the spring, using terracotta pots. She will think of harvesting herbs and edible flowers, mulching trees bearing orange and lemon, watering beds. Her own bed would be damp, mussed, never completely made. She sketched the plants she might use, feeling tingles from the night still. He might steal behind her and wrap her in his arms. My Indian rose, my Eastern star. They would have a house and later a family.

The letter was airmail blue, thin. Typeface from a lawyer with a note from a concerned aunt. How had it been forwarded? Through the institution that funded his year in India. Her decision had been swift, resolute. He must act the hero, the knight, the savior. He must save his children as she could not save hers. They had all the time in the world, after all.

Had there been a train crash? Did his head get hurt and did he suffer amnesia? Did he fight with his daughter to go to rehab, threaten his son with jail? Did they enter his room one night and pour hot poison in his ear? Did a meddlesome relative bar his passage back? Did no one know?

Or had he simply succumbed to life in the West, traded his jeans for an Armani suit, paid his bills, let his photography languish, come to his senses? Had he known that there were no real love stories in the world and that to contemplate happiness was to invite pain? Did he seal his heart and airbrush her from his life?

Who was the cruelest of my mother’s lovers?

Twenty-one

My family was something precious, like jewelry, like a necklace you never take off. My family was deep as a rose, true as any tree. As my mother spoke to me that day, my laryngitis abated, and I felt that I knew something, just as I had always yearned. But I was so shocked and overcome with all that had happened to me, I began to yawn, and my throat began to hurt a little, and I began to think of cold fruit juice or ice cream and merely smiled at my mother to thank her. She let me rest. I recovered rapidly.

After all the ceremonies were over, after all the guests had left, when the house was once again empty and we were four, not five, but just four, we began to make plans.

When my grandmother died, my great-uncle played
the veena for nine days in a row. He had been devoted to her. She had once convinced my grandfather to open a gallery for him. My grandfather planned while my great-uncle painted. For days, they were confident of success. But my great-uncle felt the lure of opium once too often, and my grandfather fought with him. My grandfather vowed never to have anything to do with him again. My grandmother pleaded his cause but to no avail. My great-uncle left town to study with a veena master. My grandfather died on a mountain when I was three years old. My great-uncle returned for his funeral and stayed. He would remain now, as would my mother.

Jani was returning to the convent. “I’m not saying I’ll never get married, but I want to go, to finish what I started. I’ve found a kind of peace there that I haven’t had since Asha died,” she said.

“How long has she been—since she died?”

“Four months ago. Her mother wrote me. She had lymph cancer that was detected too late. All winter she thought she just had a cold and never bothered to see a doctor.… So I want to go back to the nuns.”

“What about studies?”

“I’ll manage without. Maybe I’ll join you in your America and finish there. I won’t stay away too long,” she promised me. I felt she was teasing me, pretending that America was as easy to get to as Bombay.

We spoke of Grandmother. To my surprise, I learned that Jani felt responsible for her demise, in a small way.

“If only I had stayed at home and agreed to marriage, she could have gone in peace. I worried her needlessly. I gave her much cause for pain.” She paused. “Going to the convent was perhaps a mistake then. To go there now seems infinitely correct.”

“I could have paid more attention to Grandmother, not been so distracted,” I said.

“You are too young, and anyway that American took advantage of you.”

“No, he didn’t, Jani. I liked him too much, beyond reason.”

“Reason seems to be rarely involved in love.”

Jani began to pack.

“I still want to examine this cloistered life. We all of us live in cloisters,” said Jani before tossing her cashmere shawl into her bag.

“Hey, how come you are taking pretty clothes to the convent? Jani, what’s going on?”

She laughed and said airily, “I don’t have a secret life, Sonil. I’m taking my shawl because the nights are sometimes cold.”

I would go back to Madras. My mother and my great-uncle would manage in the house, with Vasanti to help and Kirti, as well. My mother would take care of the garden; my great-uncle would take less opium.

Twenty-two

A few weeks later Richard returned. He rang me up, and my mother wordlessly handed me the receiver. He said he and Maria were having lunch together, and asked if I wanted to join them.

I biked over to the restaurant they had chosen. I wasn’t sure what it would be like seeing him, and my heart was skipping like a jump rope. I told myself it didn’t matter at all; I had already said goodbye. Still, when I saw him, I ran into his arms and hugged him. He was tanner, but seemed shorter. Maria looked the same as ever. We sat down to a Sri Lankan meal of milk rice and curried vegetables, everything appealing and tasty and in small portions. I told them about Grandmother, and Maria hugged me. Richard spoke of Ethiopia. He’d had a hard time until his mother abandoned
Helen Koenig and joined him at a cooperative farm. Together, they worked with Red Cross volunteers. Richard was going back to Ethiopia; his mother was returning to New York, spiritually content.

I spoke of Radcliffe; I spoke of zoology. I spoke until I got bored and longed to go home.

Love is funny. Every man I have loved since Richard has been a kind of protest, a defiant gesture against loneliness and isolation. Was I merely that kind of distraction for him, some way to buy time? I can’t make up my mind. Ten years after he left me, he married a girl from Kerala and now has three children. We don’t keep in touch. Once he was in the same city as me and telephoned. He had gotten my number from Maria, still on Pi. His voice was like an evocation of the past, but I didn’t want to see him. I had erased him from my life in the manner I suppose my mother had erased my father. I had ceased to remember how he smelled or how my head fit on his shoulder. I had stopped lighting the candle that kept his presence alive; the altar was cold.

But for years I saw his face in the faces of strangers on the street. He had imprinted me, and I was attracted to men like him for a long time. Once, I had read, there was a whooping crane that had been brought up in captivity. When it was time for her to breed, she rejected all the male cranes who came to call on her. Instead, she flirted with the man who had fed her from birth. In the name of science, this man courted her, hunted earthworms
for her, and danced for her, as well, to ready her mating phase. Duly, she was artificially inseminated, but she believed the father to be a six-foot man in jeans.

Hearts have no sense; we love what we love.

About the time of Richard’s marriage, Jani wrote to me. She had met the mad preacher and consented to give birth to his child. She hadn’t given up women, but somehow his skewed religion appealed to her, and she became involved. If she found him sexy, I never knew. The baby wasn’t Jesus, of course, but then perhaps all babies are born in the image of God. Perhaps the spirit of the Divine inhabits every child. Certainly that is what our family thought, giving children allowance to help themselves to offerings meant for the gods. Go to an Indian concert, and you will see children running amok in the aisles, climbing onto the stage, the parents not minding. Children were innocent, sacred and privileged. Jani had the baby, and they named him Dove, which means peace bird, or “where is” in Italian, and “a smoky dark color,” as well. The preacher lives with Jani, but has his own lover, as does Jani. I think they are happier than most. I think of them passing quiet evenings together—quiet since both were not given to talking. Perhaps he stopped smoking ganja, perhaps he had cut his hair and was less mad. I could imagine the two of them putting on a Dylan album and dancing with their child.

I have not yet found my true love, and sometimes doubt that I will. I can imagine living in a cabin in the wilderness with two large dogs for companions. I do not long to share my life with someone else anymore. Love has failed so many people I know. The poet writes of this often. She says love is like a golden blossom that sprouts at the footfall of Buddha, sprung from pure joy and adoration. But the beloved walks away without a glance. It seems the moment we meet someone, we are preparing to depart from him, just as our every breath brings us closer to death.