Serving Crazy With Curry (16 page)

The girls had always been important to Saroj and Avi. Sometimes Vasu felt that they had given up their lives for their children. She saw it all the time back home where couples forgot to be couples because they were busy being parents. Is that what happened to Avi and Saroj?

The third picture on the mantel was of the four of them, Avi, Saroj, a fifteen-year-old Shobha, and an eleven year-old Devi. Saroj wore a heavy brown-and-ivory-colored silk sari, Avi was in a dark suit, Shobha wore a classic green-and-red half sari, while Devi wore a maroon blouse with puff sleeves and a silk skirt in maroon and gold. They looked like a typical south Indian family. The picture was taken in India at a friend's wedding in Madras. In the background of the picture was the yet-to-be-used marriage
mandap,
decorated, ready for the bride and groom to sit in and be married.

This was the family Saroj always hoped for. Her daughters dressed traditionally, with white jasmine in their hair, a handsome husband by her side, and India in the background.

The happiness that was so evident in Saroj's wedding picture was not there in this one, though. The picture showed a contrived family. The happiness on their faces seemed fake.

The fourth picture was of Saroj, Vasu, and Ramakant. It was a black-and-white picture. Whenever Vasu looked at the picture she felt a pinch inside her. Is that what Ramakant used to look like? He was ordinary looking, just as Vasu was. They held hands while a three-year-old Saroj stood in between them, leaning slightly on her father. Vasu remembered how Saroj had hunted for that photograph when she was packing up to leave for the United States the first time all those years ago.

“I want it.” Saroj had been adamant.

“I don't know where it is. I don't even know which one you are talking about,” Vasu had said.

“I want it. That's the only picture with all of us,” Saroj had said, tears brimming in her eyes. And then she found it, hidden in a book along with other black-and-white pictures of Ramakant and his parents and family. She didn't take the rest, just that one where she leaned on her father's leg and her parents were holding hands.

Saroj was a pretty little girl. Her hair used to curl up when she was young. Now it was wavy. Vasu had always thought she had the brightest eyes and the prettiest smile.

How the days had flown by, Vasu thought fondly and sadly. Her little girl had her own little girls.

Devi laughed again, and Vasu felt some relief from the past. Even though she had never been able to have a sound relationship with her daughter, she had one with her granddaughter.

“Check, Vasu,” Avi said triumphantly and drew his opponent's attention back to the board.

“Not so fast, mister,” Vasu said and got to work on saving her king.

The Good Mother

Devi was a closet feminist.

Shobha was not in the closet. She wished things were different and accused feminists for screwing up her lot in life. “Some bitch burns her bra and now all of a sudden I have to work for a living
and
keep house. If it were the good old days I could happily sit at home doing nothing while Girish brought home the money.”

When Devi pointed out that Shobha could still do that if she wanted to, Shobha flared up. “But they already burned the bra and I'm already a different woman because of it. I can't go back and change how I feel about women who sit at home and don't work.”

That Devi concurred with. Because Saroj never worked, both her daughters had developed a healthy disrespect for homemakers. Devi didn't voice her opinion as loudly as Shobha did, but she didn't appreciate women who gave up lives outside their homes to be wives and/or mothers. It was women like that, she believed, who made it hard for career women like herself to break the glass ceiling. No matter what, every man who hired a woman thought about the woman going away on maternity leave and then not coming back to work because she didn't want to leave her child in day care.

Devi had seen it many times. And each time she saw someone do it, she was furious. Everyone has to have a role in society, and in
her book of definitions a homemaker was defined as a lazy woman who sat home pretending to have a full-time job.

So it seemed ironic to Devi that she was spending most of her time in the kitchen, chopping and baking and stirring. She, who had never cooked, never been part of the kitchen militia, was a general now. She loved it. And she realized that she owed her culinary epiphany to her mother.

Even now as Devi started to pick out the spices to splutter into the hot oil for the
masala
lima beans, her fingers automatically went through the ingredients she had seen her mother pick up. Some black mustard, a little
jeera,
a little coriander, a little red
gram dal,
and she immediately started to stir, in exactly the same way as Saroj always did, to ensure that none of the spices got burned.

Her food tasted different from her mother's but she had learned to cook from Saroj and that made Devi feel closer to Saroj in a way she never had before. Silence and the kitchen had brought them together, and it was a time and place that Devi had started to relish.

Since Devi wasn't talking, Saroj followed suit and just asked nod-or-shake questions whenever needed.

“Is this some kind of
masala dal
variation?” Saroj asked as Devi put a bunch of coriander leaves in front of her. “Chopped small?” Saroj asked Devi, who nodded.

“I still don't know why you won't just talk,” Saroj said as she cut the coriander with a sharp knife. “It is okay that you made a mistake. You can talk … why are you adding Tabasco? Why can't you add
apna
homemade chili powder?”

When Devi just shrugged, Saroj sighed. “I should keep my mouth shut, I know. You are cooking as if you have been cooking since you were a little girl. God knows I didn't teach you, so where did you learn?”

Devi smiled and pointed to Saroj.

“From me?” Saroj asked, surprised. “Really?”

Devi nodded with a smile and Saroj smiled back, her pride shining in her eyes.

Life had fallen into a pattern for Devi, for whom patterns had never been relevant. She enjoyed waking up at the same time every
day, cooking lunch, then dinner. She went grocery shopping after lunch to buy ingredients for dinner and the next lunch. There was comfort in monotony.

Vasu accompanied her to the supermarket, and Saroj helped her cook. Shobha and Girish showed up every evening for dinner. She knew her family was rallying around her and she knew why. Devi wanted to thank them but the words had disappeared. How could she just say
thank you
for what they were doing? How could that ever be enough? Since she couldn't think of a way to show her gratitude, to explain what she realized was the biggest mistake of her life, she decided to continue her silence.

It helped that Dr. Mara Berkley, whom she had visited three times since the “incident,” didn't find her not talking strange or insane.

“It's okay, you don't have to talk,” she had said in their first session, and after that had not pestered her to speak. She simply asked questions that could be answered with a nod or a shake.

“You'll speak when you're ready,” Dr. Berkley assured her. “But until then you still have to try to tell me how to help you. Your father tells me that you're cooking up a storm.”

Devi smiled shyly.

“Have you always enjoyed cooking?”

Devi shook her head.

“So, this is a new thing?”

Devi nodded.

“How did you learn to cook?”

And as she thought of the answer she realized that she had learned to cook from Saroj. She had watched her mother mix spices, grind ingredients, splatter oil, and burn dishes. She had seen her mother serve simple Indian food that tasted fabulous. Was she creating her own identity by cooking her own kind of food? She didn't know.

No matter how much she resented her mother's interference in her life, now she was starting to realize that every part of her life was touched in some way or the other by Saroj.

Pesky, annoying Saroj, who was always such a nuisance. A
woman with no career and no self-respect, a doormat, had given her so much. She birthed her twice, once after thirty-five hours of labor and again in that bathtub when Devi slit her wrists.

Talking, or rather listening to Dr. Berkley forced Devi to assess her life, past and present, and she had come to the conclusion that her mother had always tried her best, given all that she could. And slowly, but steadily, Devi stopped resenting Saroj. If only Saroj could see this as well and if she did, maybe she would stop being angry with her own mother. It was obvious to Devi that Vasu had shaped Saroj's life; influenced her in countless ways. A mother always touched her children's lives no matter what the children thought. In good ways or bad, the influence would remain.

And then Devi wondered if she would have made a good mother. If her baby, if she hadn't lost it, would have loved her or hated her. It had become easier to think about the baby now, to remember it with some joy and some sorrow instead of feeling like an utter failure each time she thought of little flailing hands and feet.

She had told Dr. Berkley about the baby. She hadn't meant to but she slipped up and her secret had spilled out. Dr. Berkley gave her a lump of Play-Doh in their second session together, so that Devi could start communicating using shapes and images. Devi hadn't thought she could conjure up anything with her fingers, but when Dr. Berkley asked her what she felt she had lost the most, the clay shaped itself into a baby.

“Was it a miscarriage?” Dr. Berkley asked.

Devi nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Is that why you wanted to die?”

Devi nodded again and then shook her head and then nodded again. That was one of the reasons, but there were so many other reasons, one tangled up in another.

“Are you scared of telling your family about the baby?”

Devi nodded. It was not just simple fear, it was a mountains-big fear.

“Was the father of the baby an old boyfriend?”

Was he ever her boyfriend? No, he wasn't, so Devi shook her head. And then because she didn't want to talk about this anymore,
she dropped the clay she was holding into the sparkling glass ashtray in front of her. And as she realized that she had dropped her clay baby into an ashtray her eyes filled again and she started to cry. When she came home after that session, she felt some peace, and felt clean for the first time since she'd almost died. Something inside her told her that it would all work out and that she would eventually heal. She would soon start finding the words again, the right words that she needed to tell her family about the baby, its father, and the “incident.”

Just Looking for Happiness

Usually Saroj enjoyed the afternoon rummy parties she and her friends had been having for the past twenty years. But not this afternoon. Everyone knew what Devi had done, and they were talking ceaselessly about suicide and how many people they knew who had attempted or committed suicide.

Usually Renuka Chopra and Saroj got along like rice and pickle, but this day Saroj wanted to strangle her with the
pallu
of her blue-and-yellow sari.

“My brother's best friend in college hung himself from the ceiling fan in his hostel room.” Renuka offered her suicide story dramatically. “His tongue was sticking out, not nice and clean like they show in the movies. It was horrible. Poor Brijesh, he didn't sleep properly for years after that. So, Saroj, I know what you are going through. But remember, she is alive.”

Did she look like she needed consoling? Saroj wondered as she smiled unconvincingly.

“Why don't we start the game?” she suggested before someone else could start telling her suicide story.

“Ah, can we wait another five minutes?” Meera Reddy, their hostess, asked and then grinned. “I thought I would surprise all of you. We are having a special guest today. Guess who?”

“Madhuri Dixit,” Karuna Rao offered immediately.

“Just because she married some guy in LA doesn't mean she shows up in the Bay Area to play cards with us,” Kala Shetty muttered. “So, Meera,
kaun aa raha hai}”

Meera smiled smugly. “Not Madhuri, but someone closer to our times. Amrita Saxena.”

“Of
Kala Gulab
and
Love in London?”
Renuka asked, her eyes shining brightly.

“The same,” Meera said gleefully. “She married husband number three five years ago. He's some Gujrati business fellow, and he knows Sri. We met them at a party last week. They just moved to Atherton and I asked her if she had time for a rummy game. She jumped at the idea. Bored it seems. They were in New Jersey and she had lots of friends there, so she's looking for new friends. I thought we could help her.”

All the women agreed that it was fabulous even though they were jealous that they had never invited someone as posh as Indian movie star Amrita Saxena to their house for a rummy game.

Saroj couldn't help but feel excited. She had seen Amrita Saxena dance around trees with her favorite movie actors before she left India. Amrita Saxena was part of her teenage years, part of the life she'd left behind in her homeland.

“Arrey,
we should ask her how it was to act with Vikram Anand,” Karuna said brightly.

“And Shashi Kapoor,” Saroj piped in.

“And Raj Kumar,” Renuka said dreamily. “He would talk in that deep voice and I would start getting goose bumps in the most unlikely places.”

“Chee,
Renuka,” Meera said with an embarrassed smile. “How you talk.”

“What? You don't have a big thing for
apna
Amitabh?” Kala teased. “Honestly, are there any real men in the business besides Amitabh?”

“Oh, I like Aamir Khan,” Saroj said in defense of the new generation of stars, and the conversation went from suicide to Bollywood in no time.

Meera and Karuna were new to the group, but Saroj had known Renuka and Kala for more than two decades now. They had followed their husbands and their husbands’ dreams to the United States. Kala's and Renuka's husbands had opened a software company together. They'd sold the company during the software boom in the early 1990s and had recently started a business in India.

Saroj was immediately envious. She'd insisted Avi join Kala's and Renuka's husbands but he'd refused, saying that he simply didn't have the energy to start yet another business.

“But we could move to India then,” Saroj had said in despair.

“But I don't want to move to India and I know nothing about semiconductors, Saroj. I'm not interested in what they're doing,” Avi told her.

Saroj was further baffled when Renuka and Kala refused to move full time to India.

“Arrey,
visiting is okay, but I can't live there. My mother-in-law will drive me crazy,” Kala said to Saroj. “You haven't been to India for a long time or you wouldn't want to move back there, either. I like to visit, but California is home.”

In the beginning Kala and Renuka had joined her in bitching and moaning about how hard their husbands worked and how difficult it was to raise their children alone in a strange country. They got together at least once a week and brought a piece of India into their lives. They would order Hindi movies on video from India and have marathon movie sessions.

Saroj realized that Kala and Renuka were the women she was closest to, yet she couldn't tell them anything about how things were with Avi, how Devi's silence was gnawing at her, and how she was worried about Shobha and Girish, who didn't seem to be happy at all.

“I met your Girish the other day,” Kala said as if on cue. “We were at the Stanford shopping mall and he was there, too, buying some chicken or something at the butcher. Didn't remember me and when I told him who I was, he just smiled, was very polite and then left. I don't think he remembered me. Total absentminded professor, your son-in-law.”

Saroj laughed. In the beginning they envied Saroj for snagging such a catch for Shobha but now they sympathized with her for having such an unfriendly son-in-law.

Kala's daughter, Puja, had married an American man. Kala hadn't minded at all, though Saroj couldn't understand why. Nice Indian girls didn't go around marrying American men. It just wasn't right. Mark was a lot friendlier to Kala than Girish was to her. Her daughter had an arranged marriage to a nice Indian boy and they both were at each other's throats all the time, while Kala's daughter married some white boy and… well, everyone had their own
karma
to contend with.

“How about Devi?” Meera asked. Are you going to start looking for a boy now?”

Saroj shrugged and said, “Maybe.”

Everyone was too polite to point out that looking for a boy for Devi would be a futile attempt. No decent family would be interested in an arrangement now that Devi's latest escapade had hit the gossip charts of the Bay Area Indian community.

“Why don't we just start playing?” Karuna suggested, trying to break the awkward silence that filled the room.

And then as the first set of cards was being dealt, Amrita Saxena showed up.

“I got lost,” she said sheepishly. “Everything is so different from New Jersey, a lot of adjusting for me.”

Amrita Saxena spoke with a polished semi-American accent. It was not
adjusting
the way Indians said it, it was
adjusting
where the
t
and
d
came out with American flourish. Saroj had lived in the United States for more than three decades now and still spoke with a
pukka
Indian accent.

Saroj disliked Amrita Saxena instantly.

Karuna, Meera, and Renuka seemed unperturbed by the accent and were starstruck, as if they had just met a goddess but Saroj knew that Kala would agree with her that Amrita Saxena was a fraud.

“And Shashi Kapoor, what was he like?” Meera asked with excitement.

The card game as such was not really being played.

“He's such a doll,” Amrita replied, and Kala rolled her eyes. “An amazing man, very devoted to Jennifer when she was alive, never strayed even though there was a lot of temptation.”

The other three were so enthralled with Amrita and her stories of the Hindi film industry that Kala and Saroj had to nudge everyone to drop a card or pick one up.

“Really?” Karuna said. “You mean … women threw themselves on him?”

“It happened all the time, but he's a gentleman,” Amrita said. “When I made
Hum Turn Sath Sath
with him, I was going through such a bad period. I was divorcing Rakesh—”

“Rakesh Bajaj?” Renuka asked to confirm.

“Yes.” Amrita sighed. “He was my first true love, but… a girl learns everything is not written in stone.”

“Marriage is not written in stone?” Kala asked impertinently.

“Rakesh used to slap me around,” Amrita explained, a small tremor in her voice. But then she was an accomplished actress and knew how to deliver her lines, Saroj thought without feeling any compassion.

“It was a long time ago but I can still remember the fear and pain.” She sighed dramatically and Saroj wanted to stomp her feet on the ground. She had read the gossip magazines and many of the reporters thought the reason for the divorce was not Rakesh Bajaj's abusive ways but Amrita Saxena's affair with the director of her hit film
Jamuna,
Pradeep Shankar. And the journalists were probably right: Amrita Saxena married Pradeep Shankar just a few months after her divorce from Rakesh.

These movie stars lived such debauched lives, Saroj thought in disgust as the excitement of meeting a live actress faded swiftly under Amrita's false accent and melodramatic tales.

“And then why did you divorce Pradeep Shankar?” Saroj asked and saw Meera shake her head and mouth a
hush.

Amrita looked straight at Saroj and smiled sadly. “When we got married we loved each other so much. It didn't matter to me that he had that limp. Polio. He was always ashamed about it. But for me,
he was my god. And I loved him, but I couldn't compete with the passion he had for his work. I even quit acting for two years after we were married, but he was never there, always working, always gone. Can you imagine what that was like?”

For an instant Saroj wondered if Amrita knew the truth about Avi's bad working hours and the emptiness of her marriage. Was Amrita baiting her?

Amrita licked her lips and set the cards she was holding down on the table. “He was in love with the camera more than he was with any woman, definitely not me. I couldn't compete and how long was I supposed to play the extra in the movie of his life?” She paused after delivering that electric line and then rose from her chair. “Excuse me,” she said and then asked Meera directions to a bathroom.

Kala sighed dramatically as soon as Amrita was out of earshot.
“Extra in the movie of his life? Kya
acting. My God, the woman never left the movies.”

And what is all this about
he was my god.
All
bakwas,”
Saroj said.

“Oh come on, Kala, Saroj,” Meera said angrily. “What is wrong with the two of you? She's a nice woman.”

“Yes,” Karuna said, “and imagine being hit by her husband. I feel so sorry for her.”

“Hitting, nothing. She was doing it with that director while she was married to her first husband,” Saroj retorted.

“And how do you know that?” Renuka asked, annoyed. “Come on, Saroj, she is the genuine article.”

Kala and Saroj shrugged and put the cards they were holding on the table.

“No more rummy,
han}”
Saroj asked as she stood up. “I'll go see if the bathroom is available.”

The door to Meera's guest bathroom was open and Amrita Saxena was standing in front of the mirror applying lipstick.

“Ek
minute, okay,” Amrita said, her mouth wide in a big O. She tore a piece of toilet paper and put it between her lips. She dropped the paper with shape of her lips in red on them inside the toilet and smiled at Saroj.

“Have to keep up appearances, right?” she said and then her smile folded. “You don't like me, I can see.”

Saroj was baffled and had no idea how to respond.

“I can see,” Amrita Saxena repeated and sighed. “I know it's hard for Indian women to understand why I divorced two men and am married for the third time. You think I liked divorcing?”

Saroj shook her head. “Look, I don't even know you. I am sorry if I came across—”

“I can see very clearly how you look at me,” Amrita Saxena continued as if Saroj hadn't spoken. “I loved Pradeep. He was my savior. After Rakesh, he was the man I wanted to be with, and I was married to him for four years. I stuck it out for as long as I could, you know.”

Saroj nodded. “I am sure you had your reasons.”

“But he just didn't have any time for me. I quit acting but that didn't change anything and when I started acting again he was so insecure,” Amrita Saxena said in frustration.

Saroj wanted to tell her that she wasn't interested in listening to this, that she didn't care one way or the other for her reasons. She would still dislike her. Women who didn't make their marriages work always had good excuses. Her mother most definitely did.