Motherland (4 page)

Brindha freely relinquished the other suitcase to Rupa, and walked into our room, my sweater caped over her shoulders, my pocketbook swinging jauntily on one arm. Brindha announced, “I told her not to feel jealous. She can have you all to herself in just a week.”

“Ammamma's not jealous, don't be silly,” I said.

“Well, not jealous, but lonely, then. Since I have to go back to school, I'm glad you'll be here with her. She doesn't like to go to society things so she's alone a lot unless there's kids around.”

“Society things?”

“You know, that stuff Amma and Achan go to. Teas at the club, and tournaments, and weddings and stuff. I don't like all that. Do you?”

“Well, sometimes it's fun to get dressed up and meet people.”

“Only cricket matches, those are the only fun ones. Do you like these cricket posters on my wall—I know you don't know the players, but just from these posters, which one's your favorite? I have movie posters too, Amma and Achan don't know I have them, but I can show them to you if you don't tell.”

“Why won't they let you have movie posters?”

Brindha rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a bunch of photo clippings. “Amma says the new Bombay movies are cheap—they don't let me watch them.”

“How do you know the actors if you've never seen the movies?”

“I've seen pictures of them in the magazines and read about them, and some of the girls at school are allowed to watch anything, so they tell us what happens in all the new movies. When I'm home, Rupa tells me, she loves movies, too.”

Rupa had been rearranging Brindha's clothes to make room for me. She looked up when she heard her name mentioned. Brindha took one of the movie star pictures to her, and Rupa smiled and said something in Tamil. Brindha translated for me, “This one, Rukmini, she just got fired from a movie because she pushed another actress overboard off a cruiseship.” Rupa fingered the pictures lovingly, carefully, as if they were delicate Moghul miniatures, or illuminated manuscripts.

Brindha said something in Tamil to Rupa, and Rupa's hands rose up to cover her face, the movie photos fluttering to the floor. She quickly knelt to gather them up, and Brindha helped her collect them. Brindha came over to me and whispered, “I told Rupa we don't need her anymore, but she needs this money, she only has her older brothers to look out for her and they're always getting into trouble. Amma will wonder why we should keep an ayah on now that you're here, but I'll just say that you didn't want to play my baby games, like Snakes and Ladders, okay?”

I nodded. Brindha went back to Rupa's side, and told her the new plan. Rupa's face lifted, and she put her hands together and bowed in gratitude. Brindha, pleased that Rupa was no longer upset, pressed the movie pictures back into her hands and they chattered more about Rukmini.

I stared at the cricketers on her wall, posed like movie stars themselves, wearing flirty smiles and jeans or leather jackets. Except some of the cricketers were dark, and Indian movie stars were usually light-skinned, especially the women, often with light eyes, hazel or green. The only way I could tell they were not straight out of
Tigerbeat
was because they all had black hair, and they were not pencil-thin like teen idols in America.

A bell rang out from another part of the house, a trilling like the bell on my old bicycle with the pink banana seat.

Brindha said, “That's Matthew saying dinner is ready. He thinks it's the proper way because that's what Anglos like. Amma keeps trying to get him to stop.”

“I guess I'll unpack later. Is there something for me to change into for now?”

“Amma left some salwar kameezes out on her bed for you to choose from. I'll go tell Matthew you're coming in a couple minutes. Don't forget to cut your nails before you come,” Brindha said as she left the room.

Ammamma hadn't said anything earlier, but Brindha was not going to let me get away with anything she couldn't get away with. It was considered unattractive to have long nails on your right hand because food got under them when you were eating. Older women kept their fingernails uniformly short, without nail polish or jewelry. Girls my age often had long nails and nail polish and friendship rings and even little diamonds glued on their nails but only on their left hand, the right one was left completely plain. No one minded the lack of symmetry, but it seemed as weird to me as wearing eyeshadow on one eye and not the other. I filed and trimmed down the nails on both hands.

I went into my aunt and uncle's bedroom and took a couple salwar sets from the bed. Returning to Brindha's room, I bolted shut the door and took off my clothes. My khakis were crumpled and dusty from the long car trip, and my light cotton sweater had lost its shape because I'd balled it up into a pillow on the international flight. I left everything on the floor near the door so the servants would know to take it for washing. I wouldn't wear those clothes for the rest of the trip. Younger girls wore skirts, but everyone my age wore the pajamalike salwar kameezes every day. I had brought a few dresses and jeans from home, in case we went to a city or a hotel for a few days where I could wear American clothes, but otherwise, they stayed in the suitcase. I felt like a nun relinquishing my street clothes for a habit. Salwar kameezes were nice enough, some were colorful and pretty, but I didn't look like myself when I looked in the mirror.

I noticed a slight movement in the mirror and turned around. Rupa was crouched in the corner next to the bureau facing the wall. I went over to her and tapped her on the shoulder and she stood up, blushing. She had still been in the room, looking at the movie pictures when I'd come in and started undressing, and she hadn't known what to do. She seemed afraid that I was angry, and I shook my head vigorously, to let her know 1 wasn't. She dropped the movie pictures on the bed, and scurried out of the room.

“Look, Maya, Amma even has VIP curry for you,” Brindha said as I took my chair at the dinner table.

“What's VIP curry?”

Reema auntie laughed. “It's a mutton curry. I don't serve it all the time but it's one of Brindha's favorite dishes.”

“Amma only serves it when Very Important guests are coming, even though I wish we could have it every day. It has mutton, and eggs, and it's nice and spicy.”

“If you want it again before you leave next week, tell me, Brindha, and I'll bring some good mutton from the city,” Sanjay uncle said.

Mutton and eggs were the last things I felt like eating after traveling for three days on three flights. There was also chicken curry, and green banana curry and cabbage with grated coconut and fried okra. And tamarind chutney and lime pickle and salt mango and peppered papadum. But nothing tasted quite the way I liked it. This was because Ammamma had been out all day, so the cooking had been left to the cook. Reema auntie had guided his hand, but this was Matthew's cooking, and therefore, Matthew's palate. He had been liberal with the chilis, and the clarified butter and the coconut. Everything was as heavy as North Indian restaurant food. I looked with envy at my grandmother, eating her plate of kanjivellum, rice served in its own water, with cucumber steamed till it softened and then sauteed with mustard seeds. Old people were allowed to be ascetic in their ways without offending anybody. Many grandmothers were like my grandmother, fasting one or two days a week, and at every evening meal, only eating rice and water and maybe one pickle or one vegetable. But all this food had been cooked for me. I tried my best to make my way through it.

“I hope nothing's too hot for you?” my aunt said.

Everything was. I kept adding yogurt to dilute the heat as much as possible. I remembered when Ammamma used to rinse off my food: chicken, vegetables, even pickle, she would run water over it to take away the sting, and then she would put it back on a stainless-steel thali plate held over the open flame to make everything warm again.

“Maybe I can learn to cook some things this summer,” I said.

“You don't want to spend any time in that hot kitchen,” Reema auntie said. “And you would distract Matthew—he's always looking for excuses to be slow. But I do have to make a cake this week. We're having friends over to say good-bye to Brindha before she goes back to school. You can help me if you want, I was thinking maybe angelfood cake?”

Angelfood cake I could make at home; I'd been making it since I was eight when 1 got a Barbie baking oven at Christmas. I wanted to make something difficult, the things my aunt and grandmother knew how to cook that my mother could never seem to duplicate well enough in New York. Mother insisted it was because we couldn't get the same vegetables, although at the Korean grocery store, we could get small eggplant and foot-long string beans that were almost like the Indian kind. For some others there truly wasn't any substitute. But it was really because my mother did what she wanted in the kitchen, she didn't pay much attention to Ammamma's recipes. Now that my dad was doing so much of the cooking, I thought if I could just write down the way it was done here, he wouldn't mind following the instructions. He tried a lot harder to make me happy than Mother did.

“Did you see any Black Cat Commandos at the airport?” Brindha asked.

“No, just the regular policemen standing around,” Sanjay uncle said.

“I think I saw them,” I said. I told them about the men in black and their questions and photographs.

Brindha said excitedly, “Achan, she's seen the pictures of Dhanu and Subha and everyone.” Even Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle looked excited.

Sanjay uncle asked me to describe the people in the photos and he identified some of them. The dark-skinned girl with slightly protruding teeth and two braids, that was Dhanu, the suicide bomber, who had worn plastic explosives strapped to her body that blew up both her and Rajiv Gandhi and a dozen bystanders. “The chief masterminds,” as Sanjay uncle put it, of the assassination, were suspected to be a man named Sivarasan, and a twenty-two-year-old woman named Subha, who was his second in command as well as his “woman companion” ("his lover,” Reema auntie clarified, as Sanjay uncle blushed). They were being hunted all over the state.

“Subha's the fair one, and Sivarasan is the one with the weird eyes, didn't you notice?” Brindha prodded me. Sivarasan, she said, had one glass eye, because he had lost the other eye on an earlier terrorist mission. I looked at my uncle to see whether she was just making this up to be dramatic.

“It's true,” my uncle confirmed, “he's called the One-eyed Jack.”

Reema auntie said that the One-eyed Jack was a leader of the Liberation Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka. Even though national government politicians like Rajiv Gandhi were against it, many ethnic Tamils in Tamil Nadu state supported the Sri Lankan Tamil cause. The Tigers knew they could come here to hide out and use the hospitals, to buy weapons and other provisions, and to plot and carry out an assassination. But this time the Indian government swore they would bring the Tigers to justice.

Brindha said, “Achan, tell her about the death vows.”

Sanjay uncle explained that the Tamil Tigers were known to take vows to commit suicide if they faced arrest. Each of them carried a cyanide capsule expressly for that purpose.

Reema auntie said, “There must be a curse on that family. Nehru had a good long life, but to have his daughter assassinated, and now her son too …”

Ammamma spoke for the first time at dinner. “It's not a curse, it's a blessing that Indira died rather than see what happened to Rajiv. No mother wants to outlive her child.” She gathered some empty dishes and shuffled off toward the kitchen.

Brindha said, “You're so lucky, Maya, you've seen more of the pictures than we have—they'll only show a couple pictures on the television. Did they show you the fire and the explosion? Was there blood?”

Reema auntie shook her head, as if she were shaking off a daydream. She said, “You mustn't go on talking like this, Brindha. This is not one of your mystery novels or action movies. Let's leave it to the police and not sit here conjecturing about it.” She got up to tell Matthew to clear the table.

“And one other thing.” Sanjay uncle touched Reema auntie's wrist to make her pause for a minute. “Don't talk about these things around the servants or when guests are in the house. There are a few other out-of-staters like us, but most everybody around here is Tamil. Even though everyone is denouncing the murder, we can't really know who is a Tiger sympathizer deep down. It is wiser to assume that anybody could be until this is all over.”

Ammamma had Matthew bring out mango and pomegranate for dessert, Technicolor orange and red. Usually, there was no dessert, sweet things were eaten at teatime, not at night. But I loved mango, and she did not want me to have to wait until tomorrow.

We finished eating. The lights had already dimmed because the electric company lowered electricity transmitted to each home when the usage was highest to avoid power outages. My aunt brought an oil lamp to put in the drawing room so my uncle could read the newspapers. Brindha took another oil lamp with her to her room where she and Rupa were trying to empty out a few more drawers for me.

“Can Matthew heat some water for a bath?” I asked.

“It's cool this late at night, you may catch a cold, don't you think?” my aunt said.

“I won't be cold, you forget what I'm used to,” I said. “I have to have a bath after all this travel.”

“But still, the climate change is sudden, and then to go to sleep with wet hair,” my grandmother said anxiously. “It can't be a good idea.”

“Just tell Matthew to put on a lot of hot water, and I'll make my bath warm enough. Don't worry.”

Ammamma still looked doubtful. “Make sure you dry your hair well. And be careful, the floors get slippery. Take an oil lamp in case the electricity goes.”