Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (12 page)

When I returned to finish fourth grade at PS 158, I joined my mother in Manhattan at 504 East Eighty-First Street, down the street from Mr. Chip’s Coffee Shop and Touch of Class cleaners, just two blocks from where we had started our life in America. I had a ball going to import stores like Azuma in the Village to decorate our new bachelorette pad—a studio apartment we divided with a yellow curtain to hide our bed. My mother’s heart must have been broken and aching at her second failed marriage, but she did not stop whatever activity was in progress to show it.

My mother had a way of making every task a more elaborate happening than it needed to be. She loved the ritual of things. Far from her own culture, and ripped away time and again from her family, she ardently made every shopping trip an excursion, every grocery run a treasure hunt, every unexpected visit by a family member an impromptu dinner party. She had the charming but exhausting habit of conceiving and cooking literally a dozen different dishes for each of these visits, all out of her tiny kitchen with no window. Our friends and family took to dropping in on us without warning so as to not impose on the already tiring schedule of a single mom working by day and studying for a graduate degree by night. I
don’t know when Mother found the hours to do all of it, but she did, willingly, and with a smile. She relished planning a menu in bed late the night before a gathering. I thought she was talking to me, but mostly she was talking aloud to herself about what spices she would use, concocting new chutneys in her head, rehearsing new experiments using funny American ingredients like Cream of Wheat or pasta shells with South Asian spices and vegetables. She sniffed out rare Asian flora like fresh coriander and sugarcane, not at all found easily on the northeastern coast of America in the late 1970s. The experiments were always wildly pungent, and mostly all delicious.

Our neighbors, stay-at-home mothers from down the hall, often offered me bologna and cheese sandwiches with something like misty, righteous pity glimmering in their eyes.

But I loved my mother’s cooking. I didn’t eat ham yet or whatever that mystery meat was. And I liked watching her—not only in the kitchen. She was incredibly glamorous. Once she shed her nurse’s uniform, she was liberated and instantly transformed. She got dressed to go out, spraying Norell perfume into her décolletage, trying to obscure the lingering aroma of cumin left in her cleavage from cooking my dinner. She wore heavy eye makeup with robin’s egg–blue eye shadow, rouge, and bright lipstick, the whole nine yards in the brightest colors. She had taken makeup lessons from an aging, striking Swedish model who ran them out of her home. I watched
The Dukes of Hazzard
with the model’s son in his bedroom while out in their living room, the women practiced on each other. I still remember the view over the city from their high-rise apartment. Our only windows looked out onto another building’s wall.

I couldn’t wait for her to leave after those nights of self-adornment, so I could climb onto the sink, open the medicine cabinet, and use all the tempting colors with abandon on my own face. Like a harlequin at the circus, I drew big, deep semicircles for eyebrows, coloring under them with
the blue eye shadow. I often fell asleep like that, streaking the sheets with her grease paint. She never got mad, though, not once.

My mother even paid me to do chores and groom her. I got five dollars for plucking her eyebrows, a raise from my starting pay of three dollars, and I got a buck for vacuuming, since our place was quite small. I would buy vegetables at Finest grocery store on York on my way home from school, and I could make an extra couple of bucks if I washed the produce and broke off the ends of beans. I don’t know how she afforded to live in the city on her nurse’s salary and do all the things we miraculously did.

After a year in our cozy little studio, when my mom finally disentangled herself legally from V., we moved to California. Another new beginning. My mother tried to convince me I’d be happier in our new apartment, where, for the first time in my life, I would have my own room. I would even have my own shelf in the kitchen for my beloved Pringles. I was angry at her for moving us out of New York, however, and never really forgave her until I was well into my twenties, shelf of Pringles notwithstanding. My mother must have been tired. Her feet and heart must have ached from the tap dancing and rebuilding and continual starting over. She hated the New York winters. A little girl is a wonderful source of joy and love, and even comfort, to any mother. But I look back now and realize how lonely she must have been. How alone without any support, or anyone to talk to, in bed or elsewhere, other than me. We were extremely close, but as a child I had no sense of what she might have needed as an adult.

When we first arrived, we spent the summer in the city of Orange, near Disneyland, on the pullout couch in my uncle Bharat’s family room. After that we moved to a two-bedroom rental in Arcadia, about fifteen miles northeast of L.A. Every day, my mom rode the bus for twenty minutes from Arcadia to City of Hope, the hospital where she worked. She hadn’t yet learned to drive.

While the apartment itself felt almost palatial compared with our studio on the Upper East Side, I was put off by the calm and quiet of my new home. I had always lived in a metropolis. First it was Delhi, then Chennai, then New York. Now I felt burdened by the lack of bustle, the empty sidewalks, and the looming San Gabriel Mountains. I missed Gracie Mansion and the East River, which to me at the time had the romance of the Seine. In New York, I had had a measure of real independence. If I was hungry, I could stroll down the block and get a bagel and cream cheese at the Jewish deli. I could grab an after-school slice and a soda (for one dollar!) at the pizzeria. I could roller-skate, alone, the eleven blocks south to Sloan Kettering and meet my mother at work. I felt like a
person,
albeit a small one. In Arcadia, however, I felt like a kid. I had to rely on my mom for almost everything.

And Arcadia was strange and foreign to me in another, equally isolating way: it was populated mostly by white people and a small smattering of Asians—Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos. Other than my mother and my reflection in the mirror, I effectively saw just one other Indian: my uncle. He was married to my aunt Trudy, a Swiss woman, so their kids, Sheila and Ashok, were half Indian, half Swiss ethnically, but were otherwise pretty much brown-skinned American kids from Orange County, California. They did not identify with many things in Indian culture and only went to India once every few years. But because they were used to frequent visits from strange relatives of their father’s from back home, they were incredibly nice and welcoming. My cousin Ashok was a year older than me, and his sister, Sheila, six years younger. But the three of us were close and played well together. At some point, my mother befriended a Gujarati couple, the Mishras. Pratima Mishra was an expert at assimilating non-Indian ingredients into her cooking. Often, she would deep-fry whatever she found (flour tortillas cut into triangles, say) and serve it with chutney.

India, of course, was a sea of brown faces. And in New York, Indians had been everywhere, from the subcontinenters who colonized our Elmhurst apartment building, to the cab drivers who knew the quickest way to get anywhere in the city, to the doctors who worked with my mom at Sloan Kettering, to the hot dog vendors who had sold us our hot-dog-less dogs. In New York I even heard many Indian languages spoken, including Tamil. I never felt like an outsider. Or at least when I did, I knew I was in the company of many, many other outsiders. On the walk to school, whether it was in Elmhurst or on York Avenue in Manhattan, I’d pass Filipinos and Peruvians, Barbadians and Chinese, Puerto Ricans and African Americans and Middle Easterners. Even some of the white faces I saw were minorities, I learned, because they were Polish or had menorahs instead of Christmas trees. We were different from one another—we spoke different languages, ate different foods, went home to see our families in different far-flung countries—but we were alike in our differences. In that respect, New York City didn’t feel that much different from India. Just as Chennai and Delhi included people from all over India with different languages, religions, and cultures, so, too, did New York, where everyone seemed united by place and shared purpose, different from one another but part of a larger sameness.

California, and especially the greater Los Angeles area, is incredibly diverse, but the vast sprawl meant that the great pockets of Mexican and Chinese and African American inhabitants, at least from my vantage point, stayed separate. In high school, I observed this in microcosm. The Filipinos hung out together. So did the Mexicans. At school, kids didn’t know what to make of me. They were confused that I didn’t speak Spanish. “But you look Mexican,” they’d say. The types of insults and treatment I got used to in elementary school came fast and furious here, too, though they were less creative than “Black Giraffe.” I was taller and ganglier than most kids in my fifth-grade class. At age ten, being tall seemed intentional, like
an affront. You could almost see the contempt on the other kids’ faces.
Who does she think she is, taking up all that space?
My vocabulary—nothing special, but distasteful to those who felt that trying at school was an offense almost as grave as being tall—led the kids to call me “Dictionary” behind my back. Becky liked to yank my hair from behind me in English class. David stuck to giving me flat tires by stepping on my heels as we walked to class, making me struggle to get my shoes back on, and frequently called me the N-word in my sixth-grade class. I got egged in seventh grade on the last day of school. I was punched by a girl in the face; then an egg was smashed on top of my head. I remember banging on Mr. Piela’s classroom door, dripping with yolk and gooey ooze all in my hair, pleading for him to let me in. I was bullied and humiliated and relieved that school was over and we were moving. We only lived a couple of years in the mostly white enclave of Arcadia, then moved to a more working-class neighborhood in another part of the Valley where my mom and her boyfriend could afford to buy a house. In eighth grade at Sierra Vista Junior High, in La Puente, I became perhaps the world’s least popular cheerleader. I suspect that the teachers, who liked me because I worked hard, ensured that I made the squad. The rest of the girls definitely did not approve. For the first time in my life, even after a childhood spent shuttling between New York and India, I felt foreign. I felt like I didn’t belong.

To make matters worse, this was around the time I met Peter. We had only been in Los Angeles for two years. I was still in sixth grade, living in our apartment in Arcadia, when I came out of my room one morning to the sight of a man snoring loudly on the divan in a big, dark heap. He had greasy hair and skin the color of mahogany leather. A beer belly leaked out of the space between his tattered T-shirt and paint-speckled jeans. I was scared of this man, of his big, knotty, callused hands, of his smell, sour like old beer and tobacco. Two years later, he would become my stepfather.

“Mom!” I yelled. “Who is this man?”

She explained that she had hired him, a friend of a friend, to build us a stereo cabinet. For some reason, he had decided to show up at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday, too early for hammering. She told him so and suggested he lie down for a while. When the sleeping giant awoke, he clomped around in his work boots and spoke to my mother in bass, tortured Hindi. My preteen self immediately hated him.

Born and raised in Fiji, Peter descended from generations of lower-caste Indians whom the British shipped as indentured laborers to colonies like Fiji and Guyana with the promise of a better life. He immigrated to California directly from Fiji, working first as a gardener. Historically, the Indian migrants to Fiji had a combative relationship with Fiji’s indigenous peoples. Afraid of losing their culture to that of their adoptive home, they clung to it. While India moved forward, the insularity of these transplants kept them culturally frozen in time. Gender roles were sharply defined. Women had little say; they belonged at home. Punishment of children was always corporal. Girls were to be married off, fraternizing with the opposite sex was forbidden.

In part because of his size but mainly because of what I saw as his crude, beast-like ignorance, I referred to Peter when speaking to my mom in private as “the Incredible Hulk.” I was too young to understand how he went from cabinet builder to main squeeze. All I knew was that I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his big belt buckle, his stench, his coarse way. I didn’t like his Hindi, which bore a thick island drawl—ugly, I thought then.

I wanted my mom to be with someone more cultured. Not this man who had never visited India, this farmer with an eighth-grade education, this brute who would unleash strings of curses from the front door when an unsuspecting boy classmate dared to walk me home and set foot on Peter’s lawn. How could my mom, who in New York had stretched her income to take me to movies and museums and Broadway shows, who
held a master’s degree in public health, date this man so far beneath her? I felt entitled to judge her choice of companion. Her choice of companion drastically affected my daily home life, and suddenly our home became known at my high school as the house with the irascible, ill-tempered stepdad. Over time he would repeatedly go back to school to study for various trade licenses, like plumbing, contracting, and even real estate. Many years after his intrusion into my life, this giant and I would bond deeply through the love we shared for my daughter and my mother—this ogre turned out to be more Shrek than Grendel. Now he is my daughter’s closest grandparent, playing physically with her and spoiling her in a way no one else can.

Through the decades, I’ve thought hard about the reasons behind the virulence of my initial reaction to Peter. There was, of course, his interruption of the intimacy my mother and I shared. I didn’t like his intrusion into our life. For years, it had been just the two of us against the world. There was also my history with wannabe fathers: first my birth father’s abandonment of me, and the second divorce because V. had not believed us. They had hurt me and they had hurt my mother. I felt I had to protect us both. And finally, there was a more subtle reason: I had begun to internalize the judgment I felt for being Indian, for being dark-skinned, for being from a poor, strange country. Then Peter came along and made manifest everything I hated about who people thought I was. I changed my name just as my mother and Peter were getting close.