Motherland (18 page)

“I don't know if anything would have turned out differently in New York, I only know that I disregarded your mother's wish to stay there, to have her babies in the new country she had come to know and trust. It seemed so important then that she be here, that she share this birth with the family. I wanted you—and your sister—to be ours, not just hers. It was selfish, and everything might have been different.

“I read in the paper about miracle babies in America, five babies born at a time, at three pounds, two pounds, each. I think how our other little one might still be alive over there.”

“What was her name?” I tried to ask in a regular tone of voice but it came out in a cracked whisper.

“Shivani would have been her name. But she died before the name-day ceremony.”

“Everyone knows? Sanjay uncle, Reema auntie, Daddy's whole family?”

“Yes, everyone knows. Because they were either there for your birth or they were coming for the name-day ceremony. We had it still, but your mother couldn't take part, she was sedated by the doctor for most of it. She refused to talk to the guests in the house.”

“And no one thought of telling me?”

“Your mother never wanted it talked about. Many people are superstitious about things like that, she did not want them to say your life would be marred by it. That's why she never had a horoscope made for you. She did not want you to find out anything that would make you think your life had been unlucky.”

“But you could have told me 1 had a sister, I should have been told that.”

“When would we have told you, Maya? When you were four, and screaming in your parents' arms? Or when you were nine and had an imaginary friend you told us was because your parents never gave you a brother or sister? When you were here in the summers and seemed happy and at home?”

“I don't know when. But maybe I wouldn't feel like I didn't know myself now.”

“Don't blame your mother for that. Blame me,” Ammamma said.

That would be much harder. I had spent too many years thinking of everything a certain way. I didn't want to talk anymore. I slipped down lower on the pillows and closed my eyes. Ammamma gently lifted the net to exit, then tucked it back. She went to the kitchen and came back in a little while.

“Are you hungry? Do you think you might be ready for some food or do you want another electrolyte drink?” she said. She had a thali plate with her. There was rice in the middle, and on the side compartments, yogurt, dal, a piece of lime pickle, and a small mound of coarse sea salt.

I was hungry. She lifted the mosquito net and sat next to me. At first Ammamma mixed the food in the palm of her hand, and lined it up in spoon-size lumps for me to eat myself. But when I lost interest in eating after a few spoonfuls, she insisted on feeding me by hand. With each clump of rice, she alternated a dab of dal or a dab of yogurt, and touched it against the salt and the pickle for flavor. She scooped too much in her hand one time, and dal dribbled on my chin and the front of my salwar. I wiped my face with my good left arm, and tried to pick the lentil pieces off the front of my shirt. I put the remnants on the side of the plate.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She swabbed at my shirt with the end of her sari.

“Can you bring me another salwar kameez, please?” I said plaintively.

She brought me clothes from Reema auntie's closet and then stood outside the door. I was wearing my aunt's oldest salwars, the ones that were out of fashion now, because they were the loose flowing style and easier to pull on and off with my one good hand. Once I had it on I got under the covers, and Ammamma came in, tucked the nets around me, and sat in her chair knitting blindly in the dark, watching as I went to sleep.

A
FTER BREAKFAST THE
next morning, Ammamma brought her chair near the bed and filled her pen with ink.

I didn't want to do the notebooks and the remembering anymore. I wasn't sure I wanted to keep the way I remembered things the same.

“I'm bored,” I said. “Can I walk around?”

We walked out of my room for the first time, just the length of the hall. There were good smells from the kitchen. “Let's go in there,” I said. My grandmother walked me there, and Sunil and Matthew jumped to their feet. Ammamma told Matthew to bring me a mat to sit on. After watching me for a few minutes, Sunil and Matthew went back to squatting on their haunches. Sunil was sifting rice on a fine cane mat, separating out the husks and stones. Matthew was grinding spices, making garam masala for the week's curries. Coriander seeds and leaves, cumin seeds, whole peppercorns. Cardamom teased out of its jacket, cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, fresh nutmeg.

“Write these things in the notebook, Ammamma,” I said. “How much garam masala for alu gobi, how much for channa. And write the way you make okra, Daddy says his favorite way is the way you make it. And bitter gourd fritters, too.”

Ammamma brought a notebook to the kitchen and flipped to a clean page. She took out a teaspoon, and the sugarbowl and kept putting sugar into the spoon with her fingers. She said she had to figure out how many pinches of things equaled how many spoons.

“Tomorrow, can we have okra so I can learn how to make it?”

“Maya, you're not well enough to eat that yet, you still have a weak stomach.”

“Then I don't have to eat it, Sunil can eat it. I just want to see how you make it. If you wait till I'm better, Reema auntie won't want me hanging around the kitchen. So let's do everything now.”

Ammamma told Matthew to pluck some green plaintain for tomorrow. And to bring some okra from the market for the day after that. And some chicken.

“But only a small portion. For two people only,” she said gravely in Malayalam. She whispered to me so he wouldn't hear, “Wait until he sees it's all for them!”

Ammamma helped me to the front porch for a few minutes. This time of day, the sunlight was directly on us. It was the first time I felt sun warm my face since the day of the fall, and it felt good, a warm, glowing reunion. Then I saw black spots before me, black and purple flashing spots, and my head hurt. We went back inside.

Ammamma asked in the afternoon if it was okay that the servants came into our room and she finished their letters home. Their families would have missed hearing from them these days that she had neglected them and been occupied with me. Matthew and Vasani sat on the floor at the side of my bed, and Ammamma sat in her chair. She did not try to make them have spelling lessons or drag out the dictations today. I wanted to sit up and watch, so another chair was brought for me.

When the letters were finished, Matthew brought cooked rice from the kitchen to use to seal the envelopes. Ammamma wrote the destinations on the outside in her graceful hand, and gave Matthew and Vasani their letters. They received them gingerly, like they were being entrusted with sacred stone tablets. As they got up to leave, Vasani shyly extracted a folded-up piece of paper from her skirts, and showed it to Ammamma. Vasani had traced out her alphabet letters just under Ammamma's handwriting. Each letter had many bumps, where the pen had lifted off and returned to the paper, and the ink was thick from pressing the nib hard. Ammamma was pleased, sometimes she had to push Vasani to complete her lessons. Ammamma wrote out five more letters, large and looping, and took Vasani's hand in hers, tracing over the letters so that Vasani started and ended in the one sweep that Ammamma used. Matthew and 1 looked on, and Ammamma took out more paper for him to write on. I took a piece of paper from her lap and drew the same letter Vasani and Ammamma had just drawn, a planet with a ring around it and an upward pointing tail. Then an oval-shaped planet, with two rings and a diagonal. Ammamma corrected the angle of the tail, once I had the shape of it, she told me to shrink it down to size. I repeated the downscaled letter five or ten times in a row. We filled up sheets and sheets like that, big bulky letters followed by their offspring of baby letters. Afraid of dampening my interest, Ammamma only told me afterward that I'd been learning to write Tamil, not Malayalam. She taught the servants Tamil so they could communicate with their families; she suggested separate lessons in Malayalam for me, and I agreed to try it for a while.

At night, Ammamma came into my room with a pickle jar covered with cloth. 1 was not sleeping but the lights were off in the room. They had been so dim that night because of the load-shedding that they were not useful at all. The nets had come down for the night, and 1 was lying there listening to the wheezing ceiling fan.

“Sunil helped me with these,” my grandmother said. She ducked under the netting and sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She removed the cloth cover and waved the jar through the air. Blinking lights tumbled out and took flight. Fireflies winged through the air, occasionally bumping into the nets and falling in straight vertical drops, then readjusting themselves. It felt magical.

“We used to do this for your mother to appease her when she wanted to sleep on the roof with her brother and his friends,” Ammamma said.

“I wish there was a flat roof for sleeping on this house,” 1 said. “I would sleep out there.”

“That's why I'm glad there isn't one,” Ammamma said. “I hope you can be back outside soon. I know it's hard for you to be in here like this.”

“The stitches come out in two more days. 1 can't wait,” I said.

Ammamma said, “And this weekend, Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle come back. And everything will be the way it was.”

“At least we can think about other things and forget all this,” I said.

“Yes,” my grandmother said, picking up the nets to get out. She repeated softly, not resentfully, but with wistfulness, “At least you can think about other things.”

I
N THE MORNING
when I woke up, my grandmother was tiptoeing around my bed. She had the pickle jar with her, she was collecting the fireflies, some dead, some comatose in sleep, to take away.

“1 didn't want you to wake up and see them here, I find them depressing in the morning. They don't have any place in the day,” she said, plucking one off the net near my head.

“I feel aches all over from lying down all the time,” I said, sitting up in bed.

Ammamma led me to a chair. She said, “Why don't we try some dance steps?”

Dance steps? I could still hardly walk around the house.

“You can do it from the chair. It's good for stretching,” Ammamma said.

She opened the standing armoire. The side that had been cleared out for me at the beginning of the summer now held my clothes, my medication, my books. Ammamma rummaged through her side and found in the back of a lower shelf what she was looking for. She pulled out a hand-pumped harmonium, and began to play.

I danced whatever I remembered, from the edge of my chair. I stretched my arms above my head, to the right, to the left, forming lotus leaves, holding tea lights, hiding behind peacock feathers. I bent my legs at the knees and pounded out the steps on the floor, my feet slapping the floor loudly, echoing through the room. She played the harmonium and kept time. We counted together, “one-two-three, one-two-three, ONE-TWO. Thid-thid-they, thid-thid-they, THID-THEY. Thid-they, thid-they, thid-they, THID-THEY.”

In the afternoon, we worked on my summer reading,
Huckleberry Finn.
Ammamma read me chapter eleven, where Huck discovered that men were coming to look for the runaway slave, Jim. Huck told Jim to hurry, “they're after US,” even though they were only after Jim. I told Ammamma to read this part slowly, and I told her which sentences to underline in the book. I was going to use it as an example of Huck allying with the runaway slave who has broken with society, even though it meant jeopardizing his own safety. I had to write a paper on the topic: “Discuss Huck Finn's choice between the freedom of the raft and the restriction of the society on the shore.” It had to be done before the first day of school.

It was Thursday, the day the stitches were to come out. I didn't even want breakfast, I wanted to go to the infirmary as soon as I woke up.

Ammamma coaxed me to drink tea and sit at the table with her. “The doctor won't be there this early, Maya. Ram is also repairing the tire, so even our car is not ready. Wait an hour or two and then we'll go.”

Dr. Murugan was still saying his morning shlokas when we arrived, so we waited with the nurse. We sat in his office, and I leafed through one of his dusty medical books, shaking out the dead spiders to look at the color plates of the brain. His home adjoined the infirmary, and the chickens that his wife kept in their backyard were making loud fighting sounds.

Dr. Murugan came into his office, still buttoning his blue bush shirt. He pulled a white coat over himself, and moved his glasses down from the top of his head to sit far out on the tip of his nose.

There was another nurse, but no sight of the two that I had seen previously. She knew the routine: steel tray, steel instruments, and collecting the bits of thread onto the tray as the doctor worked. I could feel him maneuvering on top of my head, and I thought that I could even feel the stiches being undone, the threads coming loose, it felt like floss being moved between two tight teeth. It had to be wedged slowly through the tight part, and the rest was easy. The bandages that the doctor had stripped away lay in my lap, they seemed wholly foreign to me, yellowed from my betadyne, browned from my blood. I closed my eyes.