Motherland (3 page)

“Yes, eat something,” my uncle said. “Even when we get home, we won't eat right away.”

My grandmother handed the open tiffin boxes to my uncle to hold while she took out a bottle of boiled water for washing our hands. I felt self-conscious eating with my hands at the beginning of each trip, since we didn't eat like that at home. I remembered my math teacher, Mr. Chen, who had brought in Chinese food for the Chinese New Year, teaching us to eat with chopsticks. He had said, at first you think the only objective is to get the food to your mouth by whatever mode available, but then you realize that the mode is an artful end in itself. In India, it was like that, too—watch an Indian bride at her wedding feast, and she will, in all of her gold and silk and brocade and mehndi, eat gracefully with her hands, knowing that it is part of how one takes the measure of her.

Yogurt-rice was easy, the rice sticks together because of the yogurt, and I could roll it into a little ball with the tips of my fingers, so that only the top two-thirds of each finger ever touched the food. Idli-sambar was also easy to handle (one of the reasons it was ideal tiffin box food)—the idli was highly absorbent of the sambar, so I could simply dip and soak, dip and soak. What was much harder was rassam, a clear broth, or payasam, a dessert pudding. At a regular dinner, these soups and puddings might be served in a cup alongside the plate. But at any kind of feast or religious day, food was served on banana leaves, so it was trickier. First I had to manage to keep the lentil soup in the center of the leaf. With whatever rice I had left, I made a mound and put the sambar in the center of it, pretending that I was pouring lava back into the center of a volcano. But payasam was served at the end of the meal, on an empty leaf, sometimes two or three kinds. There was no way to shore up pudding, no sandbags, no dikes, no sources of support. Here the key was speed and angle, the same things I'd consider for an ice cream cone. Tilting the surface of the banana leaf to slope toward me, I kept stemming the tide before it flowed to the bottom lip of the leaf and onto the table or floor. I made my hand into a little scooper and held-the fingers very tightly together and half threw it into my mouth, half slurped it from my hand. From time to time, so that pudding didn't run down my arm, it was acceptable to lick the lower portion of the hand from wrist to pinkie. Most times, I refused payasam when it was offered to me. Even if I didn't find it too sweet, it betrayed the limits of my skill.

We washed out the tiffin boxes, stored them in Ammamma's upright jute bag, and closed the trunk. “Shall we?” my uncle said, gesturing the driver onwards. “Only thirty-eight hairpins to go.”

W
E LEFT THE
hairpin bends behind, and we were in tea country. The tea hills were as benign as they sounded, slope after graceful slope of verdant green clustered on the top of the mountain. The sun was sinking; it was like a full moon in its tight hard circle of light. No halo, no heat anymore. When we were on the last hill before our house, my uncle flashed his headlights. From the house they would be able to watch our progress over this sister hill, and then we would dip into a small valley and come up on our hill. They would see us coming and know to be ready. No other cars used this stretch of road. The nearest house was on the next tea estate over, about five miles, or two hills, away, in a different direction than the one from which we came. I had seen maybe five or six cars total since we came up the mountain, and not one residence of any sort. My uncle said houses up here did not announce themselves. Unlike city houses that crowded around the road and each other for comfort, the houses here were nestled deep into the woods and the teabushes.

We took a little path that veered off the road we had been on for hours. It looked like we were heading straight into brush. But we came to a double-gated entrance, and an old man and a young boy ran down the drive to swing open the gates for the car to pass. The boy climbed onto the gate itself, swung in and out on it, and jumped down. Two more servants clung shyly to the railings on the verandah. We drove under the carport, and there was my cousin Brindha, a dog captive in her arms, and my aunt Reema. Then there was the bustle of saying hello, and taking my bags out of the car, and unpacking household sundries my uncle had bought in Coimbatore, and setting up a cot in the carport for the driver, who would stay the night and take a morning bus down to wherever he lived.

Brindha introduced me to her dog, Boli, a yappy white Pomeranian. She introduced me to the house too, opening up closet doors, peeking over the edge of the well. It was an old British house, with British oddities. A fireplace in every room, for the rainy season, as if the rains were like English rain and gave chills. When the rains arrived, they punctuated and relieved the hottest days of the year. Brindha said the fireplace came in handy in the guest room, where clothes were hung to dry because during the rainy season it was so humid it was hard to get them to dry by themselves. A cotton shirt could take three days to dry and a terrycloth towel five, so they saved the towels for guests and used thorthus (not towels at all but thin cotton-weave sheets) for everyday. The house also had closed eaves, which helped keep the insects out, but put a lot of pressure on the roof when it rained because there was no natural way to drain save for one overburdened gutter. And the glass windowpanes lacked the benefits of the traditional slatted shutters in controlling the shade, directing the breeze, and creating airflow through the house.

Then there was the lawn, which I had never seen in southern India before. Most people had a tidily swept yard, with a few bushes here and there, or if they had a fancy house there would be lots of gardens and trees and bushes and groundcover. Here, there was a big garden on the side of the house, but the front was taken up by an expanse of lawn. Brindha said it looked like a ricefield in the rainy season, swollen and swampy, full of leeches. And in the dry season, it was scorched and gray and brown and no one walked there because there was no shade. The gardener made valiant efforts to keep it looking presentable year-round, and in the two temperate months of the year, he was moderately successful.

There was a gardener who came every day, Brindha told me, and a woman, Vasani, who cleaned house. There was Matthew, the cook, and his son, Sunil, who attended the village school but also worked in the kitchen. They lived out back in a little cottage behind the house. When there were guests from the office, then Matthew brought his wife up the mountain and they acted as waitstaff.

There was Rupa, eighteen, an ayah for Brindha, “even though I'm ten,” Brindha said indignantly. For these summer months that Brindha was home from boarding schoool, Rupa had been brought to stay at the house. Brindha only pretended to object. She liked Rupa, and she had no other playmates here.

The house displayed Indian oddities too, habits clung to beyond their original motivation. The refrigerator was in the dining room, the way it was in homes where the kitchen had a wood-fueled open fire that could damage electric appliances. But it had evolved into more of a cabinet than an appliance, and so it sat right next to the drink cart and the china hutch. And in the kitchen, where the shiny new mixers and beaters looked unused, there was a large mortar and pestle and pirate-size daggers lined up on the floor where Matthew and his boy would sit on their haunches and grind and cut and chop. Brindha said some servants were afraid of the appliances, some were forbidden to use them because they had broken other ones, but regardless, most still did everything the old way.

The house was organized like a T, with the drawing room and dining room in the front area. On the left edge of the T were the two guest bedrooms and on the right were Brindha's bedroom, Ammamma's room, and my aunt and uncle's. At the end of that hall was the kitchen, spilling over into a side yard where there was an outdoor kitchen that was essentially the front yard of Matthew's little cottage.

Brindha took me to my grandmother's room, where my bags were lined up against the wall. Ammamma had just finished her bath and was putting oil in her hair. Brindha crouched and pounced on the bed and Ammamma smiled. To me, she said, “Do you want to put your things away? I've cleared out some drawers and half an armoire for you.”

I knew I wasn't going to be offered one of the guest rooms. Those were for company guests, or for my parents, but not for me. If you were single, and you were family, whether you were fifteen or thirty or fifty, you piled in with your cousins and siblings and grandparents, as long as everyone was the same sex. When there were lots of relatives over, during holidays or poojas, the men would sleep in the living room or on the porch. Women would sleep horizontally on the two double beds that were usually found pushed together in each room, with other cots and bedrolls and mats brought out for the younger girls. My cousins were unbothered sleeping on a thin blanket put over a straw mat on the floor, sometimes with a pillow, sometimes without, like it was no hardship at all; I would twist and turn all night.

In my grandmother's room, there were the expected two double beds pushed together, united under a king-size blue paisley bedcover. She sat on one side of the bed and brushed the oil through her hair, accumulating on her lap a little pile of hair that had fallen out. Ammamma once had very thick black hair, but now I caught frequent glimpses of scalp between the coils of gray hair, and only a rare glimpse of black, when she bowed her head to brush the underside section at the nape of her neck. The bath oil had a strong sweet smell, and there was the smell of the Vicks and the rosewater, and of the incense that was lit every morning and evening in front of the little shrine my grandmother kept in one corner of the room. There on the dresser were the English biscuit tins, adorned with distinguished royal cavalry, that my cousins from London brought on visits. They contained my grandmother's medications, and when the lid to any of them was opened, there would be the musty and tart smell of vitamins and powdery prescriptions and ayurvedic ointments, and dried herb treatments.

It would only be a matter of days before all of that permeated me, my hair, my clothes, my magazines and books.

“Why don't 1 sleep in Brindha's room and keep her company? We only have a week together before she goes back to boarding school.”

“The ayah sleeps in there with me. But we can let her go early, since this is my last week,” said Brindha.

“Brindha hasn't organized her things yet for school so I'm afraid her closets are a mess. Are you sure you don't want to use all this space?” Ammamma opened the armoire doors. One whole side was bare and empty, the shelves had been newly lined with pretty paper. The other side was packed tight with my grandmother's things, everything wedged precariously into place: more biscuit tins, blood pressure equipment still stored in its original now tattered box, skeins of wool in garish green and yellow, letters and papers rubberbanded together, a pile of prayer books with the bindings falling off, and then stacked on top of each other in folded squares, drab sari after drab sari. I felt the way I had felt when Bobby, my lab partner in chemistry last year, opened his mouth really wide to show me where he got his tooth pulled, and I saw red gums and a chipped tooth and fat silver fillings and a gaping hole, and I hadn't asked to see any of it.

“I'm sure Brindha and I can manage, Ammamma.”

“I'm good at sharing, remember,” Brindha said to Ammamma. “I know I'm not neat all the time, but when I ask for you or Amma to come sleep over I make everything nice, don't I?”

She turned to me. “Not because I'm scared or anything, I just like to have them over for a little slumber party sometimes. The ayah is too tired to stay up late with me.”

“I'll stay up late with you, I promise,” I said.

“What do we do about mosquito nets for Maya?"Brindha asked Ammamma.

“I hope the mosquitoes aren't as bad as last time,” I said. I'd gone home last time with lots of battle scars. Mosquitoes seemed to like foreign goods, my uncle had said. They liked imports better than Made in India, he joked. My cousins and my grandmother and everyone except newborns slept without netting, and somehow they never got more than an occasional bite. I had slept under mosquito nets every night, but was sufficiently tortured during dinner, teatime, early evening walks.

“I'm not sure the mosquitoes will be any kinder to you,” Ammamma said. “The trouble is, only this room has bed-posts to hang the netting from.”

“I have bug spray with me, 1 can use that.” Anyway, I didn't want everyone having to bother to put the nets up for me every night and take them down every morning. I didn't want so much fuss this summer; I just wanted to be able to do things for myself.

Brindha and I each started tugging at a suitcase to drag over to her room. Matthew was walking down the hall, and saw us, and called the ayah Rupa to come. He tried to take the suitcase I was struggling with, but I didn't want to let him, so together we half-carried and half-pushed it into Brindha's room. I had forgotten how to act around servants.