The Hindi-Bindi Club (24 page)

“Right. Scratch subtle.”

“Which takes us back to the guilt factor,” Preity says. “How do you deal with it?”

“Ancient Catholic secret,” I whisper. “Confession.”

“No,” Rani says. “My father doesn’t believe in confession, says you don’t need a middleman with God. Likewise, I prefer to go directly to the source. If the problem’s between my parents and me, then I’ll talk it out with them. Shout it out. Pout. Cry. Apologize. Whatever it takes. For as long as it takes.”

“What if you reach an impasse?” Preity says. “And there’s no getting around it? Or have you always resolved—?”

“No, we’ve deadlocked lots of times. When I lived under their roof, they automatically won any stalemate. Since I’ve been on my own, we agree to disagree, shelve the subject, and move on,” Rani says, matter-of-fact.

I look at Preity; she looks at me. Together we bust out laughing.

“Oh, man. That’s a good one. A classic.” I wipe tears from my eyes.
“Agree to disagree.”

“Shelve the subject and move on,”
Preity says. “Tell me another one.”

Rani’s gaze shifts between us. “O-kay, and that’s funny because…?”

“Because,” I say, “it might work if your parents are Uma Auntie and Patrick Uncle, but it won’t fly with mine.”

“Amen, sister.” Preity nods, solidarity from an uncommon source.

Rani just shrugs.

“So again, getting back to guilt,” I say, curious myself now. “Let’s say you agree to disagree and shelve the subject, but you still feel guilty? What then?”

“Yeah, does that ever happen?” Preity asks.

“It happens.”

“And?”

“Well, my friends,” Rani says, “I hate to break it to you, but sometimes, there’s no magic cure-all. You have to learn to live with the pain. Think of it as the cost of doing business. The cost of being human.”

“In other words,” Preity says, “you’re fucked.” I expect her to say
pardon my French,
like she used to, but she doesn’t.

“Pretty much,” Rani says. “Sorry, Preity.”

“Yeah, well, I suspected as much,” Preity says. “I just wanted confirmation from someone who’s been there, felt that.” She draws her knees to her chest, tucking the hem of her long skirt under her feet.

Rani raises a hand. “Been there. Felt that. Got the T-shirt. Welcome to the club.”

“Is there a secret handshake?” Preity tries to laugh it off, but she’s just covering, I can tell.

“You, uh, want to talk about it, Preity?” I say. “I mean, your guilt, not the disagreement, if that’s possible.” I don’t want her to think I’m trying to get the dirt or anything. I’ve just heard enough to recognize she’s having a Victoria’s Secret Dressing Room Moment of her own.

Preity shrugs. “I guess the thing of it is…I love my parents. I respect them, admire them. I can’t easily dismiss their opinions. Not when they only want the best for me, when they love me more than life. I’m sure that sounds corny to you.” She flicks her gaze at me. “But it’s the truth. And when they love me that much, when they’ve struggled and sacrificed so much to provide for Tarun and me, to give us the Good Life, how can I let them down? I feel like a bad daughter, thumbing my nose at them. That’s the rub. It kills me to hurt people I love, and I know my parents interpret my disobedience as: ‘I don’t love you. I don’t respect you.’ That’s complete and utter bullshit, but it’s their perception, their reality. My words won’t change it. Actions speak louder and all that.” She drops her chin onto her knees and hugs her legs. “Go ahead, Kiran.” She gives a short laugh of self-deprecation. “Serenade me with ‘Goody Two-Shoes.’ You know you want to.”

Actually, I don’t.

There are times in your life when a lightbulb clicks on. When you see for the first time something that was there all along, only you were sitting in the dark. Blind. Ignorant. Worst of all: blind to your ignorance.

“You’re a good daughter, Preity,” I say. Okay,
mutter
. From the side of my mouth.

“What was that?” Rani cups a hand behind her ear. “I didn’t quite catch that. Could you say it a little louder, please?”

I narrow my gaze at her. Brat, she heard me perfectly.

So did Preity, who laughs. “That’s okay. She doesn’t have to….”

Actually, I do. And if you’re wondering: No, crow does not, in fact, taste like chicken.

“You’re a good daughter, Preity,” I say again, louder, minus the ’tude, a simple statement of fact. “You’re conscientious and caring, and you have a lifelong track record of love and respect for your parents. Everyone knows that. Including your parents. So you aren’t the Perfect Indian Daughter. Rest assured, you’re nauseatingly close.”

Preity chuckles. “Thanks, Kiran.”

I don’t tell her this is the real reason I could never stand her. Because she had what I lacked, and I was jealous, resentful that it came so easily to her.

She still has what I lack, and I’m still jealous, but not resentful. I don’t hate her anymore; I might even (gasp) like her.

She deserves to know. I
should
tell her. But let’s get real. You can only eat so much crow in one sitting. For now, it’s enough that
I
know.

“Don’t mention it,” I say. Then add, “
Ever.
Or I swear I’ll deny everything.”

“Um, hi. Hello. Yoo-hoo. Over here?” Rani points to herself. “Witness.”

“Who may have to go into the Protection Program,” Preity says, while I leisurely scratch my chin with my middle finger.

“Ah, just like old times,” Rani says.

“No,” Preity says. “New and improved.”

“A toast…” I raise my hot chocolate. “May each of us realize her goals in the New Year.”

Saroj’s Chhole (Chickpea Chili)

SERVES 4–6

3 teaspoons cumin seeds, divided, 2, 1

1½ cups tomatoes, finely chopped

2 teaspoons anardana seeds (dried pomegranate) or amchur powder (dried mango) or lemon juice

½ teaspoon cayenne powder

1 teaspoon coriander powder

½ teaspoon turmeric powder

2 (15-ounce cans) chickpeas, rinsed and drained

2 tablespoons canola oil

12-inch cinnamon stick

1 cup water

3 green cardamom pods, bruised

1 teaspoon salt

3 whole cloves

2 teaspoons tomato paste

4 black peppercorns

1 teaspoon garam masala

1 cup onion, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fresh ginger root, peeled and finely grated

¼ cup fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped

1 lemon, cut into wedges

2 fresh green chili peppers, finely chopped

1. In a small skillet over medium heat, dry roast 2 teaspoons each of cumin seeds and anardana seeds (if using), stirring constantly until lightly browned, about 2–3 minutes. Allow to cool, then ground into powder using a mortar and pestle. Set aside.

2. In a 2-quart saucepan, heat oil over medium heat. When hot, add remaining cumin seeds. Stir-fry until seeds begin to splutter.

3. Add cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and peppercorns. Sauté 2 minutes.

4. Add onion, ginger, and chilies. Sauté until onion turns light brown.

5. Add tomatoes, cayenne, coriander powder, turmeric, and the ground, toasted cumin and anardana (or amchur if using, but
not
lemon juice). Sauté until tomatoes melt and the sauce thickens.

6. Stir in chickpeas, water, and salt. Increase heat to medium-high. Bring to a boil.

7. Reduce heat to low and cover. Simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until sauce thickens, about 15–20 minutes.

8. Remove from heat. Remove and discard cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, cloves, and peppercorns.

9. Stir in lemon juice if using. Stir in tomato paste and garam masala.

10. Garnish with fresh coriander. Serve with lemon wedges.

Meenal Deshpande: Yeh India Hai (This Is India)

M
y Indian bones can’t stand another cold winter. This year, I’m wintering in India. I’ll spend time with my family
and
stay warm.

There’s something about strangers on a plane, I reflect as I board my flight, observe the others settling in. For better or worse, they’re often compelled to share their life stories. When you’re trapped on an international flight, you’re at God’s mercy in more ways than one. Ordinarily I like to chat with strangers. I never know what I’ll get, like the toy surprise at the bottom of the box. But, on an international flight, whatever you get, you’re stuck with for six hours or more, so I proceed with the utmost caution. And carry sound-cutting headphones.

I slide into my seat for the first, seven-hour leg of my twenty-hour journey: Washington, D.C., to Paris. Getting as comfortable as I can in the inches allocated to me, I adjust a pillow in the small of my back, drape the blanket over my legs, and gaze out the window at luggage being loaded onto a conveyer belt.

A bespectacled gentleman takes the seat next to me, nods, and smiles. “Where you are going?”

“Mumbai. You?”

“Gujarat.”

“Going home?” I ask.

“
Gi.
You, too?” At my nod, he asks, “How long you were here, in America?”

“Forty years.”

“
Achah,
you are
living
in America. You are N.R.I.” Non-Resident Indian.

“Yes,” I say. “I have family here and there.”

“Very good, very good.” He smiles and wobbles his head. “Which you’re liking better, India or America?” Everyone wants to know this. They might as well ask whom I like better, Vivek or Kiran.

“I like them both,” I say. “They’re both my homes.”

It’s not enough.

“But you must be preferring some things about India, some things about America.”

“Yes.”

“What things?”

And so it goes.

Things I prefer in India…
Real men ask for directions. Spirituality. Hospitality. Community. Respect for elders. Cultural diversity. Multiple languages. Traditions and celebrations. Family values. Family values. Family values.

Things I prefer in America…
Cleanliness. Relatively low corruption. Safety. Education. Efficiency. Use of
please
and
thank you
. Orderly lines (queues) and the concept of “first-come-first-served.” Infrastructure. Conveniences. Work ethic. Respect for manual laborers and subordinates. Acceptance of outsiders. Cultural diversity. Accurate, detailed maps.

Family & Friends,

Bonjour from Paris! I’m writing this from a“cyber-café” at the Orly airport. I’ve always been curious about these places where you can pay to use a computer, like a copier in a photocopy shop. But you know how it can be with trying new things, especially all by myself…Scary! But this time, I said to myself: no excuses, Meenal, be adventurous!

And here I am.:)

I purchased 1 hr of computer access time because I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to figure this out. As it turns out, it’s easier than I thought! You just enter a temporary code, almost like the way you do at the car wash, and then it’s the same as using your computer at home!

50 min left. Oh well. What to do? Next time I’ll buy 15 min instead of 1 hr.:)

Now I’m going to walk around a while and stretch my legs before my next plane leaves. I will call/email when I reach Mumbai.

Love,
Meenal

On the plane to Mumbai, I take my seat and watch passengers board. Most are Indians, and I hear many regional languages. My heart goes out to a young mother traveling alone with two small, fussing children. They sit in the bulkhead row of the center section. Poor things. I remember when that was me with Vivek and Kiran. Between the singing, whining, and crying, I thought the other passengers would throw us out the emergency exit door if they could.

The young mother keeps glancing around, her face anxious. A flight attendant stops to say she’s located the baby’s bassinet, and she’ll bring it when we’re in the air. “Let me know if you need anything,” she says. “We know how hard it can be traveling with small children, and we want to do everything we can to make your journey comfortable.” She stays and chats a bit, inquiring about them, and the mother smiles and relaxes.

“Ma’am?” The rumble of a deep voice startles me. I was so impressed with the flight attendant’s warmth, I didn’t notice the young man standing in the aisle next to my row. Tall and blond, he has a receding hairline, a heart-shaped forehead, and a pink baby face. “I’ll be sitting next to you,” he says in a slight drawl and asks if he can fetch me another pillow or blanket or anything from the overhead compartment while he’s up.

“No, thank you.” I smile. “I’m fine.”

He ducks his head and folds his frame into the aisle seat beside me, tucking in his booted feet and long legs.

“You fit,” I say.

“Barely.” He grins. “Where you coming from?”

“Washington, D.C. You?”

“Austin, Texas.”

I nod. “My son’s in Houston.”

“Yeah? How’s he like it?”

“Better than Dallas. Not as much as Austin.”

He chuckles. “Same here.”

Here we go again…

As the plane accelerates, I peer out the window. I love takeoffs. Speeding faster and faster. Climbing into the sky. The aerial view of the world. The geometric shapes of the land. With international flights, I’m continually awed when these big, lumbering birds take flight. A tiny part of me always thinks, no way can this huge lug make it off the ground, but it always does, taking to the skies like a magic school bus.

Once we level out, I turn my head to my neighbor, thinking:
Let’s get niceties over and go to sleep, shall we?

“Are you traveling to Mumbai on business?” I ask.

“Actually, I’m living in India right now with a host family. I was just home for Christmas. Now I’m headed back to Pune.”

“Oh. I’m going there next week. Our family divides their time between Mumbai and Pune.”

“That’s pretty common, it seems,” he says. “Like New York. Lots of people live in the city and have retreats on Long Island or upstate.”

“Good analogy.” I learn he did his undergraduate studies in the Big Apple and tell him Kiran went to Columbia Medical School. “What are you doing in Pune?”

“Learning Marathi,” he says, making me do a double take.

I laugh, amazed and delighted. “This is a new one…”

“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I get that a lot.”

“I’ll bet. So why in the world are you learning Marathi? Trying to impress an Indian girlfriend?”

“No…” He grins, the pink of his cheeks deepening. “I’m a music professor at U.T.-Austin, and I’m studying Indian classical music. I want to learn Marathi to understand the music better. I’m studying and teaching at Symbiosis University. Been there almost two years. I finish in May.”

“Mug thumala chan Marathi boltha yet ashnar?”
I say. Then you must be speaking very good Marathi.

“Aho, me sagla Marathi bolu shakto.”
Yes, ma’am, I can say anything in Marathi.

My jaw drops. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. This blond-haired, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked cowboy from Austin, Texas, speaks beautiful, grammatically flawless Marathi like a native!

Our conversation proceeds exclusively in Marathi.

“Which do you prefer, Mumbai or Pune?” he asks.

“I like them both, for different reasons. I love the sound of the ocean, but it’s cooler and drier in the mountains, which I prefer. Communities mix more in Mumbai, but Pune’s catching up. Pune’s quieter. Less polluted.”

“Compared to Mumbai, yes, but Pune’s local people say it’s more congested than it used to be. Urban sprawl is everywhere. Bangalore and Mysore have much less pollution than Pune. And a lot more greenery.”

“At my age, you’d think not a lot surprises me, but this…this…” I laugh and shake my head. “A year and a half, and you’re speaking better Marathi than my children!”

He laughs, too. “A year and a half
at the college level
. In their defense.”

“Amazing. We should have sent them for a year abroad. I never even thought of it.”

“Maybe the grandchildren.”

“Maybe.” I smile. “My name’s Meenal.” I offer my hand.

He takes it. “John Cooper. Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

Texas John proves an excellent travel companion, providing the optimal balance of quiet and conversation. At Vivek’s age, he’s sadly already a widower, having lost his beloved Madelline, a concert pianist, to ovarian cancer three years ago. I don’t mention my own ordeal. I’m fed up with this damned disease defining my life, my identity. I just want to be Meenal—not Meenal the Breast Cancer Survivor—and for my three months in India, I plan to be.

Before his wife passed away, she made a list of things she wanted him to do for her. A long, handwritten list. He carries a copy with him, and I’m honored and touched he lets me read it.

Maddie’s List for John,
she wrote at the top in block print, with a heart on each side. On five pages, she listed numerous tasks, which would surely take a lifetime to complete, but he’s made a good dent, as evidenced by checkmarks. He smiles when I point out
learn to play the sitar, hike the Himalayas,
and
see the Taj Mahal
.

Delicately, I ask if he knows the history behind the Taj, checking to make sure he knows the white marble architectural wonder is a mausoleum built for a deceased empress, not a palace, as many mistakenly think.

He knows. That’s one of the reasons Maddie chose it—the symbolism—and why he’s delayed going. “It’s gonna be tough.” He thumps his fist over his broad chest, the way one does to settle a cough. “Hits close to home.”

Bichara mulga.
Poor guy.

I pat his arm. “You go when the time is right. You’ll know.” I tap my own chest, the part that’s real, that still feels, between the prostheses. “In here.”

Later, after we eat and sleep, watch a movie, sleep some more, when the projection screen displays our plane’s location two hours away from the Indian border, John tells me that he enjoys hearing the story of the Taj told by different people, picks up something new each time.

“Would you like me…?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

I smile. “Not at all. Moms love to tell stories, right?” I take a sip from my water bottle, rest my head back, and begin the tale of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and the love of his life, his favorite wife whom he gave the name Mumtaz Mahal—meaning in her native Persian “beloved ornament of the palace”—who died at the age of thirty-eight while giving birth to their fourteenth child.

When the time comes to fill in our immigration and customs forms, John and I exchange contact information. We deplane in Mumbai in the early hours of morning. The warm, muggy airport feels good after the bone-chilling air-conditioning. We march through two immigration lines like a procession of ants, Indian citizens in one line, visitors in another. I’ve always been a little annoyed to be viewed as a foreigner in my birth country. I’m so glad dual citizenship’s finally an option.

At the counter, I fork over my American passport with its Indian visa stamp. A few basic questions and I’m on my way to the luggage carousel. What a zoo. I maneuver my luggage cart through the bodies and spot one of my suitcases already pulled from the conveyor belt. As I raise the handle to tow it, John approaches.

“I got it,” he says. Hefting the sixty-pound bag onto the cart, he teases, “You remembered to pack the kitchen sink.”

I laugh. “Hey, I’m ten pounds underweight this time!”

Funny how the things I carry to and from India have changed over the years. In the Boston Days, I packed food, toys, makeup, sneakers, and linens (clothes, bed sheets, tablecloths) to take to India. And Indian snacks, sweets, spices, sandals, clothes, and jewelry to bring back to the States. Today, we get so many things here and there. One hardly has to go without. The need to transport precious goods isn’t anywhere near as dire anymore.

This trip, I stuffed my suitcases with things like pretzels, baking mixes, flavored gelatin and pudding, mayonnaise, shelf-stable cheese spreads, powdered salad dressing, instant soups, and pasta sauces.

I stand with the cart while John fetches the remaining bags. Uniformed boys scramble around me. “Madam, do you have anything to declare? I can take you to the Red Zone quickly. Only five hundred bucks.”

Only!
The most you’d tip in India is one hundred rupees—and this in a five-star hotel.

“No, thank you,” I say.

“You have electronics?”

“No, I don’t.” I eye the Green Zone. Long, long lines.

“Madam, I’ll take you out in five minutes from Red Zone,” the coolie insists. “You don’t have to worry.”

“No, thank you.”

“Madam—”

I hold up a palm in front of me like a stop sign, cutting off his sales pitch.

John appears at my elbow. “Madam doesn’t need your help,” he says in Marathi.

At the coolie’s startled expression, I can’t help smiling. A Marathi-speaking cowboy is good entertainment.

I point to John’s lone suitcase and carry-on duffle bag. “That’s all you have?” At his nod, I say, “Light traveler.”

The cumbersome luggage and security screening process is something like the checkout of a self-serve supermarket with
very heavy
groceries. First, you unload your seventy-pound suitcases from the luggage carousel and load them onto a cart. Then, you push your cart to a security screening line, where you unload luggage from the cart and load it onto a conveyor belt to be X-rayed. Finally, you load it back onto the cart.