The Abundance: A Novel (20 page)

“Sure, I could probably eat a piece.”

“Only if you are hungry.”

“I’d love a small piece, Mom.”

“Abhi? Do you want any lasagna?”

“I am contributing to the war effort,” he said, his glasses on his nose. “No time for a break when the Germans are on the march.”

“The Japanese,” Dev said impatiently.

The fluted pasta corners had not been cooked through properly and were dry and hard as plastic. I cut Amber a soft piece from the center. I microwaved it twenty seconds so her tongue would know it was fresh. I had kept it bland for the boys but I knew Amber liked spicy, so I offered her the crushed red pepper shaker and the grinder for black pepper. She agreed to some orange juice. Her forkfuls were slow to rise. She chewed slowly. I realized she was as full of burger as the boys but eating for my sake. She even showed an interest in the recipe, meatless though it was, lasagna that wasn’t really lasagna. When she was done, she sipped her orange juice and watched Abhi. He was trying to figure out how to reaffix the rotor to the wing engine in a way that would still let it spin. For the first time I can remember, I bent down and kissed Amber’s brown hair, something I did naturally to Mala.

Amber stiffened briefly. Her glass paused at her lip. She turned and beamed up at me with a joy and gratitude whose intensity was startling, almost disproportionate—a simple press of my lips! She had seen me kiss Mala that way in the past, I think. I did it absentmindedly sometimes, if I happened to find Mala sitting. The habit had originated in her high school years: she would be bent over calculus or American history, and I would visit her with a bowl of grapes and a kiss. Amber I had never kissed that way, not until that afternoon—such a small morsel of affection, but it made her rejoice. I never should have starved her.

The time Mala and I spend now, in the kitchen, is sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. The day after the landscapers arrived to work in the backyard, Mala and I go from tenderness to argument without intending to. I am about to drop some cumin in the dahl when Mala stops my wrist.

“Wait, wait,” she says. “How much are you putting in?”

My fingers are pinched together. I turn them up slightly. “This much.” I drop it in.

“No, Mom, wait. I need to know how much that was.”

“Why?”

“So I know for the future.”

“It doesn’t matter how much exactly.” I pinch my fingers and open them again. “This much. You use your sense.”

“I don’t
have
a sense.” She points at the notepad she has at her elbow. “That’s why I’m writing all this down for myself.”

“Write down ‘some.’”

“‘Some’? How much is ‘some’?”

“Write down ‘a pinch.’ Even cookbooks use ‘a pinch.’”

“Cookbook writers aren’t as neurotic as me.” She picks up the stacked plastic measuring spoons and holds out the smallest one. “Here. Sprinkle the same amount into this so I can see, at least.”

I do, even though I feel silly doing it, and the grains barely fill the depression. She makes a notation. I roll my eyes. “Are you going to measure it in micrograms, Doctor?”

“If I could, I would.” She sets down the pen. “I want to get things exact.”

“However you make things will be right.”

“I don’t want right.” She takes up the ladle and stirs. “I want exact.”

She keeps stirring, maybe so she doesn’t have to look at me.

“I want
you
.”

I want to hug her when she says that. I hold back. I see she does not like the heat. I tear a square of Bounty off the roll and touch her forehead.

“There is a fan in the basement,” I say.

“Oh, I’m fine. This is nothing.”

“It gets hotter when you have so many flames going. But it goes quicker.”

She blows upward through the corner of her mouth, and her hair skips off her forehead. “I know. How did women cook in India?”

“It could get bad in the summer. But there you don’t notice so much.”

“No?”

I shrug. “You can get used to something there that you could not bear here.”

“How about when you’ve been here a while, and go back?”

“You cannot bear it anymore.”

“I bet,” she says. “Like the way men treat us.”

“Who has treated us badly? No one ever treated us badly. You were a princess when we would take you there.”

“I mean, in general. The way men treat women. Having to cover your face and all that stuff.”

“It was just the way. Now no one covers their face. And it is no nicer of men here to expect women to show their bodies off.”

“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.” She stirs the dahl. A thumb’s length of dark cinnamon stick swims to the surface in the ladle’s wake before going under again. “But what about cooking?”

“No one cooks now unless they want to. They all have servants and Maggi noodles there.”

“But in the old days. It’s not just hot. It’s
lonely
. If I didn’t have you here, I’m pretty sure I’d be lonely.”

Is she thinking of the years I stood at this gas range, the children upstairs or at practice, Abhi in his study?
I was never lonely
, I want to tell her.
I should have been, but I never was.
She is still reflecting aloud as she taps the ladle and sets it in the bowl.

“And having to do this for the men every day. No frozen meals, no eating out tonight because you’re tired or don’t feel like cooking. That’s how it used to be. It’s servitude, is what it is.”

I feel a flush creeping up my face. “It may have been that way for some. But I know for a fact that it can be different.”

She looks up in alarm. “Wait, Mom—you know I’m not talking about
you
, right? Or us? I’m generalizing. And you’re right, I shouldn’t generalize like that.”

“It can be the opposite. Complete opposite. When I cook, I am the giver. The husband, the son—he comes to you with a bare plate. All empty inside. The man is the receiver.”

Mala raises an eyebrow; she has decided against backing down. “Or the
taker
. Giver and
taker
.”

“Only if it is not a gift.”

“If you
have
to give something, day after day, it’s hardly a gift anymore.”

“If there is love, then it is a gift.”

“Why can’t we call it what it is? You can do a chore with love. You can do that chore while full of love for your family.”

“It is not a chore.”

“I’m not saying
chore
in the bad sense. I’m saying it literally. A routine thing you have to do.”

“Do you want to stop? Do you want to go rest? I can finish this.”

“Mom, please. That’s not what I meant.”

“This is play for my left hand!” I have translated verbatim, in my rising anger, an old Indian expression I would have used if I were speaking Gujarati. It sounds awkward. I switch into Gujarati, and I am suddenly freer. “I can finish this. You can go upstairs.”

My shift to Gujarati is an escalation. Mala knows it well. I do not want to shout. In another time, before my illness, she herself would have begun to shout. But I am already exhausted by my indignation, and she drops to one knee beside my chair and presses her lips to my hand. “Forget I said that, Mom. Forget the whole thing. I’m sorry.” Dying is a kind of royalty. I stroke her cheek. She waits, looking up at my face in the stovetop light. The pressure cooker whistles, and she rises.

*   *   *

It had gone through my mind when I was taking care of my mother. It must be going through Mala’s.
I need to do this, or I am going to feel guilty later
. That is what it is like for us good daughters. Not just guilt over the past, but fear of future guilt. Daughterhood has one natural resource, and that is guilt. Hourglass sand blows over events and words and, a million years later, there are guilt deposits, black guilt anywhere you sink a drill. So much burning out of something buried so long.

Old quarrels; forget them. But there are new quarrels, too, things Mala asks that she wouldn’t if she didn’t feel newly close to me. One afternoon, without preamble, she pauses a carrot on the slope of the grater. By now it bears a nib like a calligraphy pen’s.

“Why did you give it up?”

She starts grating the carrot again, then lifts the grater to check the pile of shreds below.

“Give up what?” I ask.

“Medicine.”

I swallow. This is not something I expected. Does she know it still hurts? Decades, and it still makes me flush with shame. “They did not let me past the exam,” I say quietly. (
They did not let me past
is far easier to say than
I failed
.)

“You could have taken it again. After we’d grown up a little.”

I shrug.

“Was it Dad? Did he tell you not to?”

I shake my head.

“You shouldn’t have given up. You could have done it.”

“I did other things.”

“You’re brilliant. You’re just as smart as Dad.”

“I did things.”

“Well, cooking and cleaning. I mean—”

“There is nothing wrong with cooking and cleaning.”

“Don’t get mad. Please don’t get mad.”

“I am not mad.”

“Yes you are. Look at you. Mom.”

“I am not mad. I am just saying there is nothing wrong with what I have done with my life.”

“I wasn’t saying that either. I was just asking
why
.”

“Why this
why
? Why does
why
matter?”

“I’m sorry. This came out wrong.”

“I am fine.”

“I—I wanted you to know I think you’re brilliant.”

I stare at her. Anger. I feel my healthiest in months during my anger. I forget everything. I actually feel strong. “You don’t think I’m brilliant, Mala.”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

Anger helps me stride out of the kitchen—and abandons me on the carpet. I sit, instantly exhausted, on the couch. Mala turns off the gas and rinses her hands. She is helpless in the kitchen without me.

I am in a sulk. I know I am in a childish irrational sulk, but I can’t help myself. I don’t like knowing she sees that old failure when she looks at me. I do not want my humiliation anywhere in her memory. How will she respect me? Respect, respect: I sound like Abhi fifteen years ago, always shouting at the mute children for respect. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. My heart knocks my ribs in the after-excitement. I felt shame and showed anger. I shouldn’t have done that. Part of me knows this one is my fault. But a bigger part of me wants to see if she will come apologize. That is childish, too. I wait. She comes. She sits next to me.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“I know you are thinking the question, Mala. What else do I have, other than cooking and cleaning? Ask me.”

“You have plenty of other things. You’ve read more books than … than anyone I know. And the garden—”

“What else do I have? Ask me.”

“I don’t want to ask you that.”

“Ask me.”

She rubs her temples. “What else do you have?”

“You.”

She shakes her head. “You were really storing that up, weren’t you, Mom?”

I feel out of control. I am pushing her to see if she will ignore my outburst and stay close. I want to pull out of this conversation and repair us. So I say, “Don’t talk to me right now. Go somewhere. Go,” but this makes me sound even angrier—like I don’t want her anywhere near, when really I want to protect her from the foulness inside me.

She is still shaking her head. “God. I never knew you had so much anger.”

“Me? I have anger?” My voice is not holding up. Fresh anger and fresh shame melt together in an old, recognizable sadness. But I am still talking. “You are the angry one. All the time. You are angry. At everyone.”

Even my Gujarati has broken down. I cannot bear the touch of her arms around me, or the way she presses my sobbing to her as if I hadn’t been the first to argue. She feels guilt, maybe, that she brought this up. I wish a single question did not have the power to do this to me. I am overreacting. But my emotion is real and it measures what it measures. Mala murmurs as she holds me, and I want to be angry at how she dares put herself in this calm, consoling attitude after she has stirred me up this way. But I need her compassion as deeply as I need air. I wish it didn’t feel this good to be held by her. I wish my sickness hadn’t made me this dependent, even if she is my daughter. I want to be the compassionate one. I used to hold her during
her
crises. Her first C on a chemistry test. The meanness of other young girls, the sleepover that happened without her when she knew she was a topic of discussion. The time in medical school she totaled the Accord and staggered from the wreck marveling at her intact self and had the police drive her to her Histology final. Her despair at being single. I had consoled her, always, but now she is consoling me. I am grateful, and I am indignant. In time, as she kisses my scalp through my thinned hair, the gratitude overpowers everything else. I sit humbled in the embrace of my child. I nuzzle into her and go quiet, resisting nothing, drained. My cheek rests on her collarbone. My tears are on her neck.

*   *   *

Just when I settle into a new rhythm of days, I hear the click of luggage nubs against the hardwood. Sunday afternoon shines on blithely. The luggage comes downstairs, carried two pieces at a time. Then the handbags, the grandchildren’s cartoon-colorful backpacks, the bags with snacks and bottled waters. Time to go. These are the things the parents have been packing upstairs, both cell phones diligently charged from the same wall outlet, Saturday’s sunscreen-smelling clothes quarantined separately to wash at home. The departure has never left their minds. I am the only one who has gotten used to having them around. I grew shorter- and shorter-sighted all weekend, seeing no later than Saturday no matter how close Sunday approached. They got the next day’s boarding passes online while I was still promising the grandchildren Neapolitan and Cookies & Cream, “but only after dinner.”

The grandchildren and I live exclusively in the present. Saturday is Saturday. Sunday morning is Sunday morning. So for us, zipped luggage descending the stairs is a surprise. The children cry. They don’t want to go home. They don’t want the weekend to be over. I wish I were young enough to do that; it’s what I feel, after all. But I am mature, so I nod and check the clock on the microwave; yes, it’s time, don’t be late.