Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (40 page)

The old man is still bent, head even with his broad backside. Occasionally he pulls a bunch to his mouth. His tobacco-stained teeth part to make way for the muddy greens that he quickly stuffs into his mouth. He tastes the weeds to tell his next direction. Now sweating, he rubs his muddied wrist against his dripping forehead as though his wrist was a matchstick and his forehead the striking surface.

The friction leaves a red impression on his already sunburned skin. Under the cap, behind the sweatband, head causes hair to itch and itch causes eyes to wince. Soon his hands stop picking and with knife yet in hand he pulls back the woolen cap. Out pours more sweat in thin streams. The silvered hair is matted with oily sweat. He runs his fingers through the thick hair, scratching vigorously with his fingernails. He replaces the cap; all the while his eyes have not left the field he works in. Sweat puddles the ridge where his glasses usually rest. It is a thick sweat that deposits grime deep into the honey-colored glasses that ride the tip of his nose, like a loose saddle on a cantering horse. The glasses’ frames wedge red rims into the sunburned cheeks and the old man’s eyes puff with moisture that seeps from irritated tear ducts. He takes out a handkerchief and rubs it across his face, his glasses still on. He returns to work, not noticing that Frankie has stopped and is watching him from more than ten yards away. As Grandpa retakes his straddling stance Frankie returns to his picking.

Hours pass. The old man still wears his thick jacket. The sky remains unchanged, still sweating into the air of late morning.

Grandpa never stops and his pace leaves Frankie far behind. He is now just over the side of a small hill. Only his cap is visible, bobbing into and then peeking over the tips of golden grass. Frankie looks up and sees only the gray cap. He hurries to catch up. He can’t move as quickly as Grandpa can in this bent position. He crouches and hops plant to plant, like a throb as though it was a bat that repeatedly bounces against his spine. A cold sweat pours. Patience battles pain, pride wages war with passivity. To shorten the distance between him and the General he skips yards of plants, squishing the unpicked flowers underfoot so that Grandpa won’t see that he’s missed them. He hears Grandpa wheezing as he sucks in air with emphysematic lungs. He returns to picking only when he feels he is within Grandpa’s sight. He cuts, throws, digs, cuts, and throws the leaves into his sack. The half-full sack slows him down. “Francino, bring me a nudder sacco. Whoa-aye Francino, hurr’ up!” Frankie hobbles to Grandpa and the exchange is made without eye contact. “Grandpa is so serious. He doesn’t talk. He stops swinging his knife only to chew more chicaudies. That’s okay though. What could we talk about anyway? He embarrasses me. Hope no one sees me here, like some beggar.” And he remembers the time that his friend Pickles tried to chase Grandpa from left field.

The guys were standing around home plate when Frankie arrived.

“What’s up, guys. I thought I’d be late. Thought my grandfather would never finish that lawn.”

“We got to play left field out.”

“Why?”

“Some old Moustache Pete is out there picking weeds. He chased Pickles out with a knife.”

He looked out to left field to see Grandpa. He couldn’t believe it. There he was picking chicaudies right when they
were trying to play ball. Frankie agreed that they should play left field out. Just then Grandpa moved to center. Pickles screamed, “Look. We can’t play center field out now. Hey, old man! Get the hell out of there.” Grandpa looked up and shook his knife at them.

“Let’s go play on the school grounds,” Frankie suggested, and they left before anyone could recognize that it was Grandpa. “Why can’t he be like Grandpa Benet? Work on a lawn or something.”

Grandpa needs Frankie only for the feeling of working with someone in the fields. He’s strong enough to carry the full sacks without slowing his pace. He knows there is some reason that he can’t do this without Frankie. Working with Frankie reminds him of working in the fields with his brothers and father. For hours they used to work without speaking words. The sounds of their work spoke to each other, keeping them company. There’s water, wine, bread, and cheese in his large pockets. Frankie’s thirsty and he knows that Grandpa won’t stop to eat until three bags are filled.

As Grandpa works sweat rolls into his mouth. Frankie wants to ask him for water. “How could he not be thirsty? Could it be that he drinks his sweat?” Finally Grandpa waves him over. “We eat now.” He pulls his coat off, revealing a white short-sleeved shirt that is soaked through with perspiration. The shirt has become transparent and his undershirt can be seen through it. The exchange of bread and cheese is silent. Grandpa sips his wine and Frankie, his water. The melody of the turning carousel breaks the silence and Frankie lifts his eyes to the turning Ferris wheel. A roller coaster takes a dip, a sharp turn, and a chorus of screams echoes in the forest. Grandpa eats with his eyes closed.

The crust is dry but the bread is moist in the middle as it has soaked out the moisture of the cheese. The cheese crumbles in his mouth. The water is warm. Frankie chews rapidly
and swallows hard. Grandpa pulls a few leaves from where he sits and stuffs them into the sandwich. He finishes and lights up a Pall Mall. The smoke spirals blue against the gray sky. Grandpa coughs and when he can’t stop, he stubs the cigarette out against his shoe and slips the butt into his shirt pocket. Then he is back picking chicaudies. He leaves his coat and the water and wine bottles next to his grandson, who is still chewing. Grandpa moves to the other side of the hill, down to a small valley, and leaves Frankie alone on the crest, next to the three filled bags.

Frankie stretches out on Grandpa’s coat and soon falls asleep, blanketed by the windless, humid air. Even in his sleep he picks chicaudies. It is a shallow sleep and the smell of the grass near his nose leads him to think he is not asleep, but awake, picking chicaudies. Now as he works he is completely refreshed and feels heat only on his forehead. He picks the last two bags by himself as Grandpa sits watching, applauding, commending his labor in perfect English. He raises his hand to pull his cap lower. The motion startles him awake and he sees Grandpa straddled over him, knife in his right hand, his left hand tugging the brim of his baseball cap. All Grandpa has to do is to swing that knife down to cut off the hat’s brim, just like it was a chicaudie. Frankie is frightened by the knife and the hand on his hat, but then the hand tilts the brim back and Grandpa smiles, teeth yellowed with bits of dandelion greens sticking in between the front teeth.

“Whoa-aye Franco, you fall asleep. What’s the matter? You tire. C’mon boy wake yourself up. We gotta more to go. C’mon you poor boy.”

Grandpa grabs Frankie’s left cheek in between his thumb and forefinger, twisting the chunk of skin firmly. Frankie jumps up, rubbing his cheek. He grabs the water, the coat, the sacks, and follows Grandpa down the side of the hill. There is still one bag left to fill.

ROSHNI RUSTOMJI

The last conversation I had with my dying mother, Dinaz Mehta, was in a hospital room in South San Francisco. Outside the closed window, the morning was heavy with fog. The wind would not begin to whip through the hospital parking lot until later in the day.

“Kamal,” my mother demanded from her bed. “Are you a
convinced
American? A practicing citizen of the U.S.A.?”

The question startled me. I had been preparing to answer my mother’s demand, repeated daily for the last seventeen days, that she be taken back to Bombay. My mother had had a headache for seventeen days which the doctors refused to attribute to the cancer. To the deadly growth surprising the very marrow of her being. Mother had agreed with her doctors. Her headache had nothing to do with the cancer. It was merely her familiar childhood reaction to the pre-monsoon season. The headache which kept pace with the suffocating heat and the heavy clouds pushing down upon the land. The waiting for the rains as the ceiling fans and the flies circled around without much enthusiasm. And then the rains. The relief from the headache. And once again the pain, the heat, the brief, sharp brightness before the next lightning and thunder, and then once again the rains.

My mother had of course experienced neither her pre-monsoon headache nor the monsoons in the past fifty-odd years which she had spent rooting herself into an unfamiliar land, living her life on the continent of North America. She
assured me, her doctors, and her nurses that her headache would disappear the minute the rains came down on her ancestral home on Malabar Hill in Bombay. But she would not be in Bombay. She would be in South San Francisco. She complained that she was not happy about spending eternity with her pre-monsoon headache. All because she had died in a monsoonless land.

I found my mother’s surprising question about citizenship rather unfair. Especially since it came on the day I had decided that I would offer to take her home to India. To die without a headache. But instead of unrelenting headaches, heavy monsoons, rain-drenched fragrant earth, and eternity, she had asked about being an American. She was insistent.

“Really, Kamal, dear, tell me! Are you a practicing, convinced American?”

And in that hospital room while my mother was dreaming of the monsoon heat and rains, I remembered the Thanksgiving celebration nearly thirty-five years earlier. I had been exactly twelve years and one month old.

We were living in Oakland, California, that year. In a one-bedroom apartment with cracks in two of the five windows and a perpetually leaking toilet. Five weeks before that Thanksgiving, a disturbing amount of the paint on our kitchen ceiling had peeled off and dropped into the lentils mother had left to cook, uncovered, on the stove. She had to throw away the lentils. My mother hated to waste any food, throw away anything she thought might be useful. To someone, anyone. Sometime. Someplace. As a good Zoroastrian, she would beg Ahura Mazda’s forgiveness any time she was forced to throw out any food. She prayed even when she had to tear off the slimy, wilted edges of old lettuce. As she was throwing out the lentils with the flakes of paint floating on the top, she told me, “Kamal, your Grandfather Tehmurasp would have laughed and said to me, ‘Use your imagination,
Dinaz! Think of the plain rice without any of the lentil daal that you will have to eat as the best mutton palau you have ever tasted!’”

But I refused to accept the plain rice as any kind of palau. I had eaten palau very few times in my life. I doused my plate of plain white rice with soy sauce and ate it with the chopsticks our landlady, Mary Crawford, had given me one Christmas. When mother looked somewhat perplexed, I raised my glass of milk and said, “In honor of my Chinese great-great-grandmother, whose name we do not know.”

Later that evening, a couple I didn’t know, Philip and Ginny Johnson, telephoned us. Although my mother had not heard from either Philip or Ginny for at least ten years, she invited them for the forthcoming Thanksgiving meal.

When I demanded to know why strangers were being invited to what my mother usually referred to as the “Two for Turkey and Turkey for Two, Turkey for You and Turkey for Me” celebration, she said, “Because of your late and wonderful Grandfather Tehmurasp. Because he considered the Johnsons as his friends. They used to visit our home on Malabar Hill to look at all the books on Parsis that your grandfather had. Even one by a Peruvian. In Spanish. Your grandfather met them the year your father and I got engaged and joined the group that made bombs to throw out the British, and the police found out and we were sent off to America by your grandparents. Instead of to jail by the police.”

On that Thanksgiving day, when I was twelve years and one month old, mother was hot and frustrated. The turkey had somehow managed to expand monstrously in the process of cooking. It was impossible to baste it while it was in the small oven. She had to pull out the heavy roaster every twenty-five minutes, balance it on the stove top cluttered with the pots and pans she had used to fry the vegetables for
the sweet-sour-hot Parsi wedding stew and cook the sweet-sour-hot shrimp, baste the miraculously swollen turkey, and then bend down to push it back into the oven.

Philip Johnson walked into the apartment with a package of papadums, a jar of pickled mango achaar, and the news that Ginny could not come because she had to go to Massachusetts. “A family emergency. Sorry we didn’t call. Lost your number. But to make up, here’s genuine papadums and authentic mango achaar from our last trip to India.”

I wanted to say, “We had to disconnect our phone three days ago,” but was stopped by the expression on Philip’s face. He was staring at my mother while she was in the process of carefully putting the turkey into the oven after her final bout of basting it. Philip was frowning.

“What, Dinaz Mehta! What is this? A turkey! Have you forgotten to cook Parsi food? I came here for pukka, real Parsi food. And what do I see? A turkey! What do you think you are? An American!”

I wondered if I should say, “But she has also made Parsi stew and Parsi shrimp.” I said, “But it is Thanksgiving.”

Mother shut the oven door, uncrouched herself, and said, “You are damned right I am an American!”

Later that night, I asked her how one could dam right. Right wasn’t water. She hadn’t bothered with explanations. “You can use the word when you understand it.”

To Philip she had said, “I have lived here for over eighteen years. I have borne my one and only child here. I have buried my husband here. Here in America. Only five years and three months after we came here. Buried him while I was seven months’ pregnant. My husband, my Ashok, shot by a drunken idiot who wanted to clean America out. Get rid of all us heathen Asians. Shot because the man was insulted by my husband’s accent! My husband is buried somewhere in New York. Oh yes. Don’t worry yourself. I am an American.
I breathe here. I speak here. I sing here. I laugh and cry here. I have left parts of my body all over this place. Nail clipping and hair trimmings across the country. My uterus in North Carolina. Both ovaries in Milwaukee. Wisdom teeth in Los Angeles and rotted teeth right here in Oakland. I have eaten the food of this land and made friends with the people of this land. And I have worked here. I have given my hands to this land. Look. Look at these hands!” And she had waved her hands stained with the turkey basting and smelling of onions, garlic, green chilies, cilantro, vinegar, and shrimp right in front of Philip’s face. The man had retreated into a petulant silence.