As Sweet as Honey (8 page)

“Every girl has a friend like Chitra—even I had a friend named Chitra,” grumbled Grandmother, and I knew she loved Chitra. I suppose Grandmother meant there are always girls who test the borders of every life. I wasn’t sure if I had that kind of mettle. Rasi did—she did for sure. But me, I tended, even at a young age, to be more cautious, to be the follower, not the leader. If we lied as children, it was my palms that would break out in a sweat, my eyes that widened slightly for fear of being caught. To this day, I can’t tell lies very well.

“What is it?” Meterling asked, putting down her knitting.

“Here, it’s from Archer’s estate.” Uncle Darshan smiled, handing her the envelope. Meterling saw the letterhead of Archer’s solicitor. Opening the note, she read swiftly.

He had left her three fields: one for rye, two for spice. He’d left her a house. He’d left her his legacy in England.

Rasi whispered, “She’s going to tell us that old story about the golden mango.”

But Meterling shot us a piercing look, and said, “This is also a story about family.”

And Nalani would tell us more later. Nalani would tell us to remember that Aunt Meterling was always thinking tenderly about her parents.

And we knew the story by heart. One day Shiva and Parvati held a contest between their two squabbling children, Ganesha and Murugan. Whoever spun around the world three times first would receive the prize of a most special golden mango. Murugan was the older, and more prone to quick action. He sprang on the back of his peacock, laughing at his brother, and sped around the world. But Ganesha, slower, smaller, more compact, simply folded his hands together in a gesture of respect and circled his parents three times. Delighted, his parents presented him with the golden prize. When I first heard this story, I felt sorry for Murugan, because I too would have chosen to fly fast on a chariot. I thought that this was a story told by parents to keep their children home and safe.

“They gave you life so you spin this way and that. Sideways and upside down, like an astronaut, so you can see the world.”

“I want to be an astronaut!” shouted Sanjay at once.

“An astronaut?” said Rasi.

I was mad because I wanted to be one too but Sanjay said it first. In our games, he would get to do it then.

(“You dolt, Mina—of course, you could have been an astronaut,” he said years later. “What were you thinking?”)

Meterling spoke again:

“Your parents are the people who let you dream. Your parents are the ones who taught you how to fly. Spin. See the world. Come home and report, then fly out again.”

I dreamed of an enormous cow walking through a field of grain. From the cow’s belly grew stalks of grain and rice mixed with barley. The grains mixed freely as the cow swished her tail.
She wore a yellow headdress, with rows upon rows of bells, sewn with green and red thread. The cow’s feet danced, and I dreamed of anklets tinkling silver with sound. The cow’s eyes were unfathomable and reminded me of Meterling’s (which is strange, because, of course, her eyes were always dancing or deep or dark) and I woke up.

12

M
eterling, our goose. Our giant. She sat in the sun and looked at the ocean. First she climbed up the banks of shifting sand, where fragrant pink roses bloomed. Beach roses. Then, there was the sight of the sea. The sea, the sea, it slid toward us, then slid back. All that water, all that rain. Meterling drank in the ocean, lay back on the sand, and felt the sun’s heat. The water roared and sounded, crash after crash in the soft broken swish glass shatter of water. “Auntie Meterling,” we cried, “come splash us with the water, come play with us!” But Meterling lay on the beach, and took in the sun full blast. Only for fifteen minutes, because we were all warned against its rays—all the aunties told us again and again to stay out of the sun. It will darken us and burn us to a crisp, make us faint, and create vomit, headache. Go to the ocean when it is dawn, evening, they say, soft twilight, the in-between hours. For the most part, we listened, but there were some times when we sneaked off to play in the sun, wanting to turn darker and darker, and Meterling once in a great while joined us. She splashed her feet at the water’s edge, but brought out an umbrella when the sun became too intense. In
truth, our aunties were right, we could only stay a short while before the sand painted out feet with fire and we ran for the shade of the trees, laughing and screaming all the while.

Grandmother spoke:

“I remember when Meterling was born. Her mother was a scrawny thing when Tharak married her. Quiet and abashed by our noisiness, she still found ways to assert herself by wearing jangling earrings instead of heavy wedding gold. We so love gold, don’t we, in our culture? Melted down and reshaped—how often has Roshanji come to our house to remake us new jewelry? But Asha wore jangling earrings, and was always abreast of fashion in the cut of her choli sleeves, in the fabric of her saris. That was the way she had her voice among us, I suppose, in her clothes.

“And Tharak. My middle child, who was always reading and working. A great scientist, they said, readying for the Nobel, but who knew his life would be so short? Thirty-nine only, and a car crash got them both. And Meterling only six years old.

“It was Tharak who named her, and yes, we all protested. ‘What kind of name is that,’ we asked, ‘and for a girl?’ But he said it was special, it would give her strength. We thought it was a name from one of those German textbooks he was reading at the time, about fissures or fixtures or something. Something about test tubes. ‘Meta’ we knew, there are so many families named ‘Mehta,’ after all, and someone said it was a diminutive, like the way we shorten ‘Shubashree’ to ‘Shuba,’ ‘Shobhana’ to ‘Shoba.’ But this ‘ling’ had a German sound to it, or Malaysian, perhaps. And then the
r
. I never could understand what Tharak
was doing with the name. Asha said it had come to him in a dream. She was eight months gone, and he woke her up, shouting, ‘Meterling!’ But sometimes I think that’s just what she told us. Meterling. We got used to it, you know, and of course, it fits. Meterling. Sometimes I swallow it, so it becomes ‘Meta-ling.’ And of course, we all call her ‘Meti’ now and then.

“My Tharak. A joy, you know. An absolute joy.”

And we kissed our granny’s tears away just then.

There were many beaches on Pi. The most popular were crowded, with “Hot peanuts!” and “Lassi here!” sellers and fruit vendors, carts full of pinwheels and streamers, beaches full of kurta- and pajama-clad women, or women in saris, fully clothed men, all walking arm in arm, chatting and laughing, and children shrieking. The sea! The sea! Everything happened at the sea.

There was the Gandhi statue, just like in Madras, garlanded with fresh roses and chrysanthemums. Across the Pacific, on a beach in California, it was a Hawaiian surfer so garlanded, and farther on, in Rio, Gandhi again, only not at the beach. Elsewhere, on beaches around the world, there are statues of Madonnas, some who weep real tears, and Imanjas, gods and goddesses to herald the power of the earth and water. But on Pi, at Madhupur Beach, Gandhi’s eyeglasses merely glinted as the sun sank into the water, and all around, children cried out in joy at being at the beach.

But there was another kind of beach on Pi as well, the private beach, where only the privileged could wander, where wealth or status opened the barred gates, where miles of smooth soft
sand folded toward the sea line. Once a beach pass was in hand, pure bliss awaited the lucky who walked on its sand.

Oh! The sea! The sea as it shines on the horizon, the sea as it leaps toward the shore, the sea as it sucks back, all foam and spray and salt and wind.

And here is Meterling at the shore, piling small pebbles into a circle. Sometimes she takes twigs and sticks them straight upright near the stones on the sand. She is building prayer circles, she is building miniature Stonehenges, she is creating rock gardens, tiny, small, temporary memorials to Archer. Little shrines to her large, overpowering loss. Her hands work ceaselessly, blue-green pebbles and glittery rocks shaped into circles and left on the sand.

Rasi and I like to build castles. We like to pile sand into soft mounds and dig under them to form tunnels, so that our hands can meet and shake hello. The wet sand sometimes fills with water and we shout with glee.

But Meterling makes circles to track her tears, makes small sculptures to declare her loss.

13

M
eterling was twenty-eight when she lost everything she could lose in losing Archer. And yet at twenty-eight, she had everything she could hope for as well. Three short months, that was the entirety of their courtship, their desire, their hope. Twenty-one, that shiny age, had passed her, then twenty-three. By twenty-five, she was treated tenderly, assumed to a life of spinsterhood. At twenty-five,
Meterling became a warning for marriageable daughters as well. It happens, the elders mused. If, as the gossips say, a daughter can only be so dark, or so poor, she certainly could only be so tall as well. That golden promise of a perfect bride required golden skin, golden height, and the golden means of proportions. And Meterling had nothing—her skin was dark, like amber gone opaque, and she was so tall. Meterling was a beauty in a school all her own, and that’s why we flocked to her. She was not film-star material, our Meterling, she was no universal beauty. But she was our standard.