Motherland (10 page)

My uncle left the verandah and went back to the billiards room. I was tired of adults, tired of trying to make sense of them and make sense around them. I didn't want to go sit with Lalu or anyone else. But going home felt like admitting defeat. I looked out from the verandah at an enormous grid of half-grown trees. A labyrinth was mapped out there, but the bushes were only waist-high, so it wasn't much of a labyrinth yet. I opened the patio gate to walk out to see it up close.

“I don't think you should go out there.” It was the chemist.

“Why not? I always walk in our compound at night.”

“But this is much nearer to the woods, and there are wild boar around here at night,” Suraj said.

“Wild boar? You're serious?”

“Yes, absolutely. Look, they've destroyed these flower beds. Look here.” There were deep jagged furrows through the flower garden just outside the gate. The blossoms were mashed and the roots bared to the sky.

“A wild boar did that?”

“Yes, and see over to the left of that tuberose, you can see the footprints, hoofprints actually.”

“Where are you looking, I don't see,” I said, leaning over the gate next to him. He was pointing to the left and I pointed at what I thought was a tuberose. “You mean over there with the pink buds?”

“No, farther to the right, the one with the white flowers, see?” Suraj said, touching my hand lightly in a leftward nudge to direct my vision. It was so quick and light it almost seemed as if it hadn't happened. He had held my hand earlier when we were dancing, but that was just part of dancing. His hand touching mine out here in the quiet half-light half-dark felt like a whisper, a question, a declaration.

“Yes, I see now,” I said, even though I didn't.

“Then do you see the footprints, they're just next to the rose?” he said.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, trying to sound like I did. “But I want to see how the labyrinth works. Why don't we go out there just for a few minutes? I'm not ready to go back inside the club with those stuffy people.”

“But the boar could come back. That's what I've been trying to tell you.”

“If you're there, there'll be two of us. We can warn each other if it's coming and run back inside the gate, or we can make some noise and scare it away.” I lifted the latch on the gate and took a couple of steps. If he wanted to be alone with me, this was his chance.

He hesitated, but he followed me to the gate, saying, “You know, my father climbed his first tree when he saw a boar, and he didn't even think he knew how.”

“I've never seen a real-life labyrinth,” I said. “Whose idea was this?”

“Mr. Sethi, one of the senior vice presidents—he was posted in England for a few years, and he was taken to all these fancy homes and gardens, and he wanted to try to make one like what he saw there.”

“Right now, it's too easy to see the exits. I wonder how long it will take for the trees to grow and knit together.” We walked through the first few turns and twists of the maze.

“Not very long, everything grows fast here. They started growing these trees two years ago, and they're already three feet. Come, let's go back to the clubhouse, Maya, people might wonder where you are.”

“Do you think when it's finished, we could actually get lost in here—or only kids would?”

“1 saw the blueprints that Mr. Sethi had given to the club to work from, they're pretty complex. Of course, there's only a certain number of options, and with adults, they'll try each one and narrow it down to the right way out. The difference with children is that they aren't logical like that.”

“Let's crouch down so that the hedges are over our heads, and see if we can find our way out.” I knelt down on the ground and waited for him to do the same.

He reached down and put his hands around my waist. He pulled me up off my knees so that I was standing facing him. I thought he was going to kiss me then.

“Maya, what are you doing?” he said. “Now you've gotten mud all over your dress, what will people think?”

“Oh, it's okay,” I said, brushing at it with my hand. The dirt faded into the black part of the dress, but the cream-colored border showed the grass stains and dirt in high relief.

He took out a handkerchief and handed it to me.

“I don't think that'll make a difference,” I said, handing it back to him.

“You could at least try,” he said.

I took the handkerchief from him again and rubbed it across the border, where the brown and green were already set like indelible ink. “See? It won't come out until it's washed or dry cleaned. But I don't think it's ruined.”

“Who cares if it's ruined. How can you walk back to the clubhouse like that?” His voice was tense and clenched. “Do you understand what your uncle will think? Do you know who your uncle is? He could have me sacked, and I won't even have a chance to explain. Not that I would blame anyone for not believing me. I should never have been out here alone with you.”

“I can tell them nothing happened.” I looked at him, I tried to make him look at me. “Why are you so mad?”

“They'll think you're lying when you say nothing happened and they won't blame you for lying. Because you would want to protect your reputation. They'll think I came after you.”

“But they know you, they won't think that once we explain.”

“I was doing so well at the company, I might even have gotten posted abroad, away from these riots and government problems and whatnot. Maybe Singapore, or even America, somewhere with good laboratories where I could do advanced work. And now …”

“Stop it. You're being ridiculous. Look, I'll fix everything, don't worry,” I said.

“You can't ‘fix' it, you don't understand how things work here. God, the longer I'm out here with you the worse this looks. At least go back inside now, and I'll figure out by myself what I'm going to do.”

There had to be a way out of this. I was starting to realize even if I'd done nothing wrong, I'd have to explain to my uncle what I was doing out here in the first place. After I'd already told him that I would be careful and not cause trouble. He was just like my mother when things went wrong, he never got mad at me, he got disappointed. They were both like that, they would just close up and back away from you and they wouldn't want to share with you or laugh with you about anything for awhile. “Maybe they didn't even see you come out here,” I said.

“No, the bar staff saw you going into the gardens. They told me to stop you. I should never have let you force me to come out here.”

“I forced you to come out here?” I thought he came out here because he liked me, but now that was too embarrassing to say. “I thought you wanted to be out here, too, away from all those boring people.”

“Those people are people I work for, people whose respect I want. I only came out here to keep you from getting into trouble. Which was a big mistake.”

“Look,” I said. “I'm sorry it's a big mistake to be around me. If you can just stop hating me and listen for a second, I'll tell you what to do.”

“What?” he said.

“Go bring me food from the tables on the verandah, anything dark, like chicken curry or black bean curry. I'll say a waiter spilled a plate of food down the front of my dress. In case anyone is looking, go by the side and stay out of the light and I'll wait here.”

He brought back a heaped plate of food. I scooped some black beans into my hands and smeared it across the border of my dress. I held the dress away from my body as I dipped the hem of it in the plate to soak up the curry. 1 squeezed the hem to get out the excess liquid, and the fabric bled oily dark reds and browns onto my hands. I threw the plate of food into the hedges, and dried my hands by wiping them through the grass.

He held out his handkerchief again and I used it to blot the last of the curry off my fingers.

“That should do it,” I said. “Should we walk back now?”

“I'm sorry you had to do that to your dress.”

“Yeah, well, it's just a dress.”

“I'm sorry I was getting rude. I was nervous. Can you understand?”

“I guess,” I said, not looking at him as we approached the exit to the maze.

“Maya,” he said. He tipped my chin up with his hand so that I had to look at him. “I don't hate you. You're a nice girl. Maybe sometime over the summer you can ask your aunt and uncle to invite me over for tea or dinner or something.”

“Is that because you want me to like you or you want my uncle to like you?” I said.

“That's not a very polite question,” he said.

“I like honest people more than polite people,” I said.

“I want you both to like me. That's honest, isn't it?” he said. “I went to college up north, that's the only reason I even know how to talk to a girl like you. We don't talk about ‘liking' girls here, not unless you're marrying her.”

“I know that. 1 just meant like me as a friend,” I said, although I hadn't really.

“1 like you as a friend already, okay?” he said, but there was a long silence after that and he looked at me in a way that made me feel giddy and tremulous. “But even as friends, I can't invite you anywhere that will be proper to your aunt and uncle, so I'd like very much for you or your uncle to invite me to see you at your house or here at the club sometime.”

“That's only if my uncle ever invites me to the club again after he sees what I look like tonight,” I said. We closed the gate behind us and started across the patio. “I think it's better we go in separately. I'll stay out here and come in later.” He nodded, his face composed, distant, a different person already than the one who had just said all those things. He didn't even glance back at me as he swung open the doors and shut them behind him.

There was charades but I didn't play. Around four in the morning, the kitchen staff at the club was awakened and brought from their cottages across the greens to make an early breakfast. When we reached home, it was still dark but there was pink edging over the next hill. Vasani was mopping the dew off the windows, and Matthew and Sunil were in the kitchen grinding the rice flour for fresh idli batter for breakfast. I took off my dress and threw it somewhere in the dark at the foot of the bed, too tired to care. Lying in bed, half-asleep, I remembered that we hadn't done anything for Ammamma's birthday. We'd come home so late and we'd let it pass. Doing something tomorrow was not the same thing.

I went to her room and she was still sleeping, though she was usually up at this time. How late had she waited up for us? I shook her, and said, “Happy birthday, Ammamma, I didn't know we'd be out so late.” She looked at me sleepily, reached up and pulled the drooping jasmine out of my hair, and asked me if she should have Matthew walk Boli or would I be up in time to do it. I promised her I'd be up in time to walk him, and she nodded drowsily, sinking back into sleep. I returned to my room and my bed and lay face down so as not to see the streak of sun at the window.

CHAPTER FOUR

The British Are Coming

I
T WAS ALREADY
hot at five thirty in the morning. In New York, I could hardly get out of bed before checking the weather in the papers or on TV. In the winter I called the seventy five-cents-a-minute ski weather bureau to get exact predictions as to winds, amount of precipitation, time of day the sun would go down. I liked to be prepared.

None of that was necessary in Tamil Nadu. It had been an unusually hot and dry summer. The nights were cooler, just enough to tease me into sleep, but the heat came crashing back again before six every morning. I could hear my grandmother's rustlings in the next room as she unlatched the windows and pushed them out. The other day I was up this early, I thought I would go sit on the front porch and read magazines. I liked being up alone—at home, 1 ruled the house until my parents woke. But Ammamma broke her morning prayers to fuss over me, to prepare tea for me and make breakfast without the servants. I hadn't even been able to go out to the porch, because Ammamma pointed out all the slugs that had crept up onto the smooth red stone in the night and would need to be salted and swept away when the servants arrived.

Today, I decided to stay in bed until a more reasonable hour. I watched the birds that nested in the jackfruit tree outside my window organize themselves for morning chores and take flight, find worms, and return. I wondered why the birds didn't just live off the jackfruit. Maybe the newborns didn't like jackfruit. Or maybe they needed protein. I watched them take turns, one guarding, the other flying away. Matthew and the gardener were talking as they walked toward the back door, and the frightened birds rushed up into higher branches, their nest pitifully exposed. I got up to go ask Matthew to heat water for a bath.

My cousin Madhu must have already boarded the flight from Bombay to Coimbatore. She was supposed to land at eight o'clock, and Sanjay uncle had stayed in Coimbatore last night on business so that he could be there today at the airport. He was good about that, being there right when the flight landed, as if he knew how nervous it could make her, standing by herself wrestling with turbaned porters who were probably trying to mount her suitcases on their heads before she had even agreed to purchase their services.

Of course when Madhu arrived, I realized she wouldn't have been nervous at all if Sanjay uncle had been late; she wasn't the nervous type. She had come with lots of luggage, she was not interested in being self-sufficient, she knew people would help her; they would want to help her. She was beautiful in a way that demanded notice, tall, wearing high stacked heels and a short lime-green dress, a polyester one, the kind that cool girls at my school recycled out of their mother's seventies wardrobe, but that Madhu or I had to buy in a flea market to make up for a lack of history. Why didn't she worry about twisting an ankle in the customs line with all those wheeled carts around? Why didn't she think about how cold it usually was on international flights? Or wearing a dark color in case of spills? Or being dressed more like a nice Indian girl walking into this house?

Madhu begged off from having lunch right away and went out on the porch with a pack of Camel Lights. She looked so American that I was continually surprised by her British accent.

She laughed when I told her that. She said, “It's your accent that's off, you know. That American advertising voice—you sound like you're selling laundry detergent.”

I asked her whether my aunt and uncle were coming from England anytime soon.

“Mum and Dad hate the heat, and Dad took ill last time we came four years ago, hepatitis B from eating mussels during the monsoon. They're too busy to go on vacations that disrupt their schedules like that. They'll come back only for big things. Births, deaths—but not just to come say hello.”

“Don't they miss it here?” My parents had come every year since they'd emigrated twenty years ago, except for these last three years when I had wanted normal summers like other kids. They used to keep a calendar in the kitchen marking the months and days until our next trip.

“Sometimes it's five or six years between trips for us. It's expensive to come out here, and there are other places we want to go—we took a trip to Sweden a year ago, and to Russia before that. Mum wants to go to Greece for a few weeks next summer, maybe even go sailing out there.”

I'd never been to Russia or anywhere like that. After going to India every summer, my parents never had many vacation days left over. Some years we went with my parents' friends the Bavnanis and their daughter Rena on a driving trip for a long weekend. We'd gone to Williamsburg once, Saratoga another time. My mother liked it to be historical so we would learn something. The only time I had been abroad, not counting India, was one summer when we were en route to India and we used the stopover to stay in Paris for a few days. I remembered crying at the Eiffel Tower because my mother thought it was too dangerous to go all the way to the top. Because she didn't like heights, none of us got to go up. I dropped Mother's camera cover into the Seine when we were on a boatride. I don't think she believed me that it was an accident.

“Do you know how to sail?” I said. Sailing seemed very glamorous, and very WASPy, to me.

“I can't, but Mum and Dad were learning with some friends who sail. They like the idea of it, I think, being far from people, independent, relying on your own resources. When they retire in a few years, they want to sail more, go on more trips. What are your parents going to do when they retire?”

“I don't know,” I said, thinking hard about whether they had said anything about it. “I think they have a while, because I have to go to college and stuff. I know they want to come back here, because Sanjay uncle bought some property for his family and our family near the coast.”

“So they're going to come back and relive the past. Doesn't sound very adventurous. Maybe they'll change their plans, hopefully for your sake.”

“I kind of think it's nice if they come out here,” I said. It was better than picturing them in some old people's resort in Florida or Arizona.

“But you'd have to come here and visit them and feel guilty whether you do enough for them or see them enough, just like our parents feel. Why go through that?”

“I like coming to India,” I said, believing it more as I heard myself say it, reacting defensively to Madhu's disdain. “I like seeing my aunts and uncles and going places with them. Don't you?”

“Well, of course you like coming here. Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie are sweethearts, I like staying here too. And the rest of Dad's family live in pretty nice setups, I don't mind going to see them. But Mum's family lives in a miserable little village. My brother and I always beg not to go there, there's no septic system or anything and the whole town reeks. And everyone stares at us because we have shoes. Sometimes, Mum gets her sisters and their husbands to come meet us in the city nearby, and we pay for them to take the overnight train in and stay at a lodge with us. But one time her oldest sister asked if she could just have the money instead to use for her son's school fees, and Mum was hurt that they didn't even want to see us.”

“Are you going to go see them next?”

“No, this is my holiday, I'm just seeing who I want to see. Just you all, and my cousin Deepa who lives in Bombay, I don't think you know her. And I'm meeting my flatmates in Goa, they wanted to do India for Margy's bachelorette party. It should be a good time.” The Canary Islands used to be the place to go, Madhu said, but now it was tacky, and India was hot—bhangra rock, mehndi, Hinduism. They were spending some days in Goa at the beach, and then they were trekking for a week.

It made hanging out here seem boring. My whole day yesterday—walking around with Brindha's dog Boli and helping him chase birds, playing cards with Reema auntie and her friends—seemed kind of lame.

“I love going to the beach,” I said. “I go to my friend Steve's beach house a lot back home.” I decided in that moment to edit out the fact that Steve was sort of more than a friend, because he wasn't exactly my boyfriend either, and anyway, Madhu would probably think it all sounded very teenagerish.

“You can come to Goa with us if you want. You can't come trekking, no offense, but I don't want to be responsible for you. If you've never trekked before, you should go with a beginner group, not with us.”

“That's okay, the beach sounds better to me anyway,” I said quickly, glad she had invited me even on part of her trip. “That would be really nice.”

“Ask Reema auntie first. And let me know soon, okay?” Madhu put out her second cigarette and crushed the empty cigarette pack. She threw it off the porch onto the pile of scraps heaped up on one side of the yard. The servants lit a match to the trash, and they stirred the pile of trash with a big stick, like they were stirring a pot of oat-meal, so it heated evenly, and burned without much smoke. It was a daily, conscious objective, not to create too much waste. All the food remnants were taken by the servants at the end of the day, to feed milkcows kept by some of their families. They took the newspapers, too, some for their children to practice reading, and some they used for wrapping fish or vegetables they bought at the market. There would be that burned rubber smell all day from the few plastic containers that my aunt could not recycle for some other use, the few that defeated her imagination.

“The tailor will be here, soon, so why don't you both come and have lunch,” my aunt said from the doorway.

Madhu was on a special diet, she ate nothing cooked at lunch, and nothing raw at dinner. This made for an odd assortment on her plate: yogurt (heated and fermented she didn't count as cooked), bananas, mango, tender green beans and carrots. My aunt had prepared a regular lunch for me, I ate rice and pullishery and potatoes and beans. My uncle, who missed work all morning because of the airport trip, would not come home for lunch today, so Reema auntie sent the driver to the factory with food for him.

As the table was being cleared, my aunt said, “We might as well let them come in even though they're early.”

I looked out on the front porch, and there were two people standing there patiently, carrying string-tied bundles on their heads. It was the tailor and the seamstress, and my aunt told Matthew to take them to the guest bedroom. As we followed them into the room, I saw Madhu's clothes strewn across the bed, and realized that meant she was sleeping there. I wondered how this was decided, that she would not sleep with either me or my grandmother. I felt a little indignant—that Madhu was guest enough to warrant the guest room and I was not—and also a little hurt that Madhu didn't want to share a room with me. It's one thing my not wanting to share a room with my grandmother, with all her particular ways. But I would have liked sharing a room with Madhu, watching her do her hair in the morning, put on her makeup. I had even cleaned up my room in preparation, moved my clothes to make space for her, stuffed some of my things into Brindha's half-full drawers. I had found in the bottom drawer of the bureau more of Brindha's stash of movie star pictures clipped from magazines. And also pictures of Subha and Sivarasan clipped from newspapers and newsweeklies, close-ups where I could tell his glass eye from the real one. And pamphlets with inscrutable Tamil words in runny green ink, and diagrams too, like the ones that came with a bike or a computer printer that my father would stare at for hours. I wondered if Rupa realized Brindha must have taken these pamphlets, and whether she felt safe anyway. I wondered who had provided Rupa with these instructions in the first place and if she had ever tried to put together an explosive or a poison compound. It was so far out of the realm of what girls were normally allowed to do that I could imagine feeling proud to occupy such a central role. When Dhanu had been entrusted with killing Rajiv Gandhi, did she feel proud to be chosen? It had come out in the papers that Sivarasan had been also wearing explosives on his own body and was loitering nearby as a backup. Dhanu must have felt the pressure to perform, to not be shown up by a man who was older and more experienced. I put the clippings and the pamphlets in my empty suitcase under the bed, and cleared two more drawers in the bureau for Madhu.

My aunt brought Indian fashion magazines from her bedroom and gave them to Madhu. Madhu took some magazines out of her suitcase and gave them to my delighted aunt—
Elle, Vogue, Mademoiselle.
They were sold only in Bombay, and they were expensive, my uncle sometimes brought one for my aunt as a gift from a business trip. We sat on the bed and pored over the pages, scratching at perfume samples, tossing the postcards and inserts on the floor. The seamstress and tailor unrolled a straw
mat on the floor and then unpacked and arranged their bundles on the mat. In the magazines she had brought, Madhu had circled the dresses and outfits she wanted the tailor to make for her, and my aunt went through them, trying to figure out which ones he could do a decent imitation of and which ones were beyond him. The short swingy jersey dress she said would be easy, so would the long straight column dress.

“I don't think you should have him do pants,” my aunt said in a low tone to Madhu. “He doesn't have experience with that.”

“Who makes pants for Sanjay uncle?” Madhu asked.

“Sanjay gets his pants made down in the city, but that tailor is a men's tailor.”

“Can't we ask him anyway?”

“I don't think so,” my aunt said. “He's very respected, he would be embarrassed.”

“Everyone's so prissy about everything,” Madhu said, as she swung the lime green dress over her head. Underneath, she had a on a silky beige slip.

“Maya,” my aunt said. “Will you also go change, put on a petticoat, and bring Madhu my dressing gown. She'll be cold.”

I could tell my aunt did not want Madhu in lingerie in front of the tailor, who was openly staring at her, but Reema auntie refrained from saying anything directly. I went to my aunt's room and got her robe off the back of the armoire door. Then I went to my room and took off the salwar kameez I was wearing, and put on a sari petticoat and a sari blouse. I went back to the guest room and gave Madhu the robe. It didn't really cover her, she wore it loose and open, and you could still see the shape and bounce of her full breasts, the darker nipples outlined in silk. My sari blouse was gray, and I wore a bra under it, but I felt exposed with even just my stomach bared the way it was. I knew I was pretty enough for men, but not enough to feel secure around girls like Madhu.