Motherland (25 page)

T
HERE WAS
, OF course, a lot of talk at the funeral rites and afterward, a lot of whispering and gossiping about Brindha's and my entanglement in Tiger activities. But no one blamed us in the least. The aunties would say to each other, “The Pillais had a Tiger sneak into their house and try to convert their poor young girls! Can you imagine?” They would shudder, and shake their heads, and bolt the doors at night between their rooms and the rooms where their servants slept. And count the silver because terrorists probably wanted the silver as well as the fealty of young girls.

Brindha and I coaxed our servants to bring us any news of Rupa, in case they knew people who knew her brothers or her parents. But they could not, or would not, tell us anything. Sanjay uncle found us in the kitchen trying to bribe Sunil with sweets for information. He noticed our anxiousness, and thinking that I was angry with him, said, “There wasn't anything more we could have done.” I didn't believe that. I couldn't argue with him now, not when I had just seen him so full of love and grief at his mother's funeral. I didn't respond. Sanjay uncle cleared his throat in the silence.

“I finished reading your Huck Finn,” he said. “Do you know, in the introduction in your book, it says that the story of Huck and Jim is based on a boy the author knew who befriended an escaped slave hiding on an island in the Mississippi. But in real life, the black man died on the island. It is just like an American to try to have a friendship like that and think it can make a difference.” He did not wait for me to speak, but turned and exited the kitchen.

Usually when Sanjay uncle said something was American, it was something I didn't want to be. This time I wasn't sure. Even if trying to have that kind of friendship—the kind that made you see the other person's humanity as equal and sacred—wasn't very realistic, it surely was better than not trying.

Our names, Brindha's and mine, were entirely vindicated when, three days after my grandmother's death, there was fresh news that the police ended their manhunt in a village hundreds of miles away from us. Moments before the paramilitary commandos stormed the Tiger hideout, Subha and Sivarasan, as well as five other allies, had chewed their cyanide capsules. Sivarasan had also shot himself in the head for good measure. The government was frustrated, they had wanted live quarry to prosecute and execute themselves, but they pretended it was a victory. Police allowed reporters into the house to see the heap of bodies, and finally there were fresh photo stills for the television news and the morning papers. Brindha and I read every edition of the newspapers, simultaneously searching for Rupa's name and hoping not to find it. The most gossip surrounded the fact that Subha was found with a newlywed's silver rings on her toes. It had mattered even to the nation's biggest outlaws to legitimize their union before death's reckoning.

People moved on to these new tidbits and stopped whispering about Brindha and me and the Tigers. But 1 was acquitted of some crimes more easily than others. Everyone had heard about the birth control pills in my suitcase. Madhu spoke up and said they were hers, and when she saw how distressed everyone was by her confession, she was furious. She said this was the last time she was coming to India anyway and she didn't really care what they all thought of her. As in Sita's story, the truth didn't make anything better for me. Reema auntie reported that Suraj's parents had written to rescind both their request for my horoscope and their related marriage proposal.

“We can hardly blame them,” Reema auntie said to my mother, bringing the newly delivered letter to the lunch table. Sanjay uncle and my father had already excused themselves from the table and retired for afternoon rest.

“They can hardly blame Maya—those were Madhu's pills,” my mother said archly. “They didn't bother to find out the details.”

Reema auntie looked up from reading their letter, surprised. “Kamala, you've been away too long. Don't you see that Maya should know better than to even give the appearance of impropriety? Haven't you taught her how important these things are?”

My mother looked over at me. I was looking down at my plate, pushing the potatoes and the coconut chutney around. They were talking as if I wasn't even there, so I was concentrating on pretending I wasn't.

My mother sighed. “Reema, I spent years feeling like India had taken a daughter from me, and that was probably not fair. But I don't want India to take my only living daughter from me now. If I try to make Maya live in America the way we would have lived here, I'll lose her. I can't bear that, after everything that's happened.”

It mattered to hear my mother say those things. She wanted to be a mother, my mother, if she hadn't always, then at least from now on. It didn't mean we were going to be close or happy or understanding all the time, but it meant we had new aspirations.

We were leaving for New York at the end of the week. I'd gotten a letter from Jennifer telling me what she was wearing to the first day of class. New York—it was the other side of the planet—seemed so far away. I hadn't expected it to be so hard to leave, to feel so confused about what I was going back to, to remember startlingly that we called that place home. That place was home even though here was where I had gained and lost a grandmother, gained and lost a friendship, a sister, a marriage proposal. Here I had gained (however tenuously) a mother, a conscience, and the awareness that compassion often mattered as much or more than justice.

Reema auntie agreed to let Brindha stay until we left, but I couldn't just run around with her in the hills. First there was finishing my summer reading and reports, and there was packing to do. There wasn't much to put in my suitcases. The gifts that had weighed my luggage down had been given away, usually replaced by a collection of pickles and preserves and banana chips and dried chili and tamarind candy that had not been cooked this time, out of respect for our mourning. As I was packing my few things, Sunil crept into my room. He brought his hands out from behind his back, holding the notebooks Ammamma had written in for me during my convalescence. When the intelligence agents had come and turned the house upside down, Sunil had squirreled the notebooks away. He gave them to me now, and I flipped through them. In the pages after Ammamma had stopped writing down my memories, she had started writing down her own. Her own stories about my first steps, my first words, which neighbors I liked the most. And she had written out my birth chart, and asked an astrologer to read my stars, and pasted my horoscope into the notebook.

Not just in these notebooks, but all summer, Ammamma had given me maps of my past and future to navigate by. Sanjay uncle had said there weren't maps for where we lived, but that wasn't true. There weren't maps of our roads and our homes, but there were maps for the inside, maps of the heart, and they could only be drawn by those who loved you. Maps of the physical world were changed all the time because history and memory ultimately trumped geography. With what Ammamma had given me, I had a suspicion that I, too, could surpass geography. I could live anywhere, be grafted and take root anywhere, and anywhere could become home.