The Abundance: A Novel (17 page)

*   *   *

Always implicit in the stories told to me by the brothers’ wives was unspoken resentment. As if every account of the old woman’s pettiness were prefaced with:
Here’s another thing you’ll never have to put up with …

I was insulated by distance, and the wives envied me for it. But I wasn’t totally insulated. Abhi’s mother had visited twice, both times in the eighties. Her second visit had coincided with an anomalously chilly Ohio May. Abhi knew she did not do well in the cold (it was
chilly
that May; it was never actually
cold
), so he bought her a ticket for the end of the month. Three costly, half-hour transatlantic phone calls had convinced her onto a plane. On her first visit, the overhead nozzle had kept up a hiss during her Frankfurt–Mumbai leg, and she had known neither how to shut it nor how to ask the stewardess. This time, she refused to fly Lufthansa and brought a scarf and two shawls against Air India’s air-conditioning.

After tolerating the marathon flights, the putrid foil-covered navratan korma, and the lines in Customs, she made it to her son’s city—and discovered the weather to be fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit with a strong breeze from the northeast. She experienced the temperature for about twenty feet, from the airport’s sliding glass doors to the minivan. Yet the “ice,” apparently, had gotten “in her bones”—a kind of psychological flash-freezing, irreversible. The complaint of cold lingered the whole trip. She kept her shawls around her through June’s crafts fair and July’s firecrackers, and at Niagara Falls in August. She scowled at Abhi’s Nikon. In the van, we couldn’t turn on the AC and we couldn’t open the windows. When Ronak and Mala complained, we scolded them in Gujarati and dabbed our sweat in silence. The cold hadn’t left her bones until she was back in India.

As soon as Abhi would leave for work, I saw what the wives were talking about. Her tea wasn’t sweet enough, so I added sugar. She would take a slow slurp, fingers splayed under the saucer. Now the tea wasn’t strong enough. I must make it again. A remark about Ronak’s fingernails, about Mala’s inability to sit still. Why didn’t the children speak Gujarati? Was that normal here?

Her towel upstairs was leaving an itch on her. I offered her a fresh one, but no, there was soap “dried into the cloth”—I must soak the towel by hand in a bucket of warm water, and dunk and wring it by hand and let it dry outside, naturally.
By hand
, she made sure to repeat it,
by hand
, and added that the “girl” shouldn’t do it. I should do it myself.

“What girl, Ba? Do you mean little Mala?”

Her face crinkled irritably. “The girl who comes to do the housework, of course.”

“We don’t have a girl for that. I do the housework myself.”

“Even the dishes? Even mopping the floor?”

“Everything.”

This puzzled Abhi’s mother for some time. She had been expecting a “girl” to show up and do a couple of hours of housework, as in every home she’d lived in, and she had wanted to inflict some inconvenience on me. Maybe she expected two girl servants; this was America, after all, and her doctor son possessed infinite doctor wealth. I think she assumed I laid about as idle as a begum. Did her daughters-in-law assume that, too? When
they
had the luxury of ordering a maidservant?

I don’t think she believed me until after lunch, when it became evident there were no slums to supply us a silent dark girl, no one to join her hands at a Happy Diwali coin from the mistress, no one who was going to wash my dishes or mop up the body lotion puddled—poured?—on the bathroom tiles.

My mother-in-law’s weren’t the assumptions of India’s rich, either. The four sons who had stayed in India all drove Bajaj scooters to work. They were well-off but not wealthy. Assistant manager at a bank, two electrical engineers with the Gujarat Electrical Board, and a chemical engineer who worked for a fertilizer company. A certain family stinginess, inherited from their mother, kept their flats modest. Still, they were part of upper India, which as years went by only grew larger. Not the idle rich: the idle middle class. Their rupee went as far in the slums as our dollar went in the cities. On my last visit to India, the wives had stopped making rotlis; each one had a woman in her kitchen, a bai with thinly muscular arms who would steamroll a stack in fifteen minutes and leave. This bai was different from the one who made the rest of the meal. While the cooking took place, the wives watched television shows.

Those three summer months when I was in her power, she did her best to inconvenience me, and I was dutifully inconvenienced. Maybe it didn’t feel like persecution because I knew it had an end. I wasn’t her prisoner; I was being granted a tour of the prison, trying on the black stripes, having my picture taken in Alcatraz.

No matter how often I showed her what to do, she just would not drop her dirty underclothes in the hamper I had placed in her room. She draped them on the bar in the bathroom, next to the hand towel. There were wet footprints from her squatting on the toilet seat, water everywhere, the floor mat wet under the unwary sock. The toilet paper roll, thick and never used, sat swollen on the holder thanks to her old-country splashing.

More than once she had me make a trip to the Indian grocery for some emergent need like incense or Parle-G. Sometimes I thought to myself,
Here’s a story I can tell.
I was pleased to have some stories of my own now—on my next visit, I could countercomplain. Once, I finished making rotlis, no dough left, the top ones cooling, the bottom ones still warm, the perfect time to call everyone, and she—who had watched me butter and stack them—declared she
must
have ghee on hers. I had to prepare another fistful of dough just for her, another three rotlis. Clicking the gas on again I thought, with detached amusement,
So this is why they hate her.

Abhi knew his mother’s tendencies well enough, and he monitored me for signs of conflict: the undue pause after asking him how his day had been, a refusal to sit in the same room, extralong we-need-to-talk eye contact. At night, he would ask me for a report. He didn’t want to hear how she had done; he wanted to hear how I had done. Just to see, I floated a complaint. Sure enough, he didn’t offer to say anything to her. Instead he offered pleas for tolerance on my end. They came out all at once (he had been storing them up, I suspect): it’s only a short time now; she is used to living a certain way; I’ll make it up to you after she’s gone; she’s getting old; it’s an adjustment period; she treats the other wives far worse. And then the discussion ender, when I persisted: “Don’t forget, this is my mother you’re talking about. Okay? Enough.”

I began to think of her, by the conclusion of that stay, not as a mother at all or even as an elder, but as a child. This was two decades before the strokes threw her back, physically, even farther—the inability to roll over or sit up, the drooling, the need to be wiped. Before she turned into an infant, I saw her for the child she was. Not evil, not cruel. Just bratty. Wanting attention and willing to make a mess to get it.

She issued her demands, but what she wanted had nothing to do with her daughter-in-law, although extracting deference carried its own pleasure. More than anything, she wanted constant demonstrations of her son’s bond to her. By demanding more and more from the wife, she proved something to herself about her son:
I can go this far, and he still won’t challenge me. I came first, and I remain first.
This is what struck me as most childish, the need for proof.

*   *   *

Abhi took care of her, but he wasn’t present for the end itself. As we boarded the plane to leave India, he told me he knew it would happen soon, when he wasn’t at her side. He couldn’t guess how soon.

The phone call came while our bags, freshly unzipped, still made the bedroom smell of India. Four forty-two
AM
, the second night after our return. He knew the exact time; jet lag insomnia and the prospect of morning rounds the next day kept him aware of each minute. It was as if he had been waiting for the call. He was shaking his head, he told me, knowing the news even before he brought the receiver to his ear.

His brothers, all in the eldest brother’s house, crowded around the green rotary phone. I could visualize the side table, the betel nut partly shaved in its silver tray, the niece’s
Stardust
facedown on the couch arm. The connection was a good one, but both sides yelled, partly from habit, partly from the logic of the international call, longer distance, louder voice. In our cavernously dark house with its empty rooms, Abhi yelled
Hullo, hullo, hullo
into every pause and crackle. His yelling and their yelling kept back the grief, like torches waved at a feral animal. I hurried downstairs and picked up the kitchen handset so I could hear, too. Abhi’s brothers were talking in the background, saying,
Tell him he doesn’t have to come
. Abhi insisted he would. They all heard him and insisted he shouldn’t, an almost panicked shouting at the phone—the journey was too exhausting, he would fall ill, it was too expensive, how would he get more days off? Abhi tried to speak into this stock-exchange cacophony but resorted again to a
hullo, hullo
, as if the voices were interference and he needed to reestablish the connection. His eldest brother, who must have calmed the others with a hand gesture, reminded Abhi that it was summer. The rites were scheduled for the same day.

There was no way he could make it in time. They would be out of their white kameezes and the ritual tilaks would be washed off their foreheads. I was upstairs again by this time, my arm around Abhi. He nodded at the impossibility and said nothing, his head on one hand, in grief or exhaustion. The other end of the line erupted in
hullo, hullo, hullo
. Abhi had dropped the phone and started shaking under my touch. His brothers hung up, assuming the line was dead.

PART THREE

SEEDTIME

It’s not that there aren’t fights. There are. They happen unexpectedly. Put me and Mala together for long enough, something will trigger it. I do not mind the arguments at first. They are like a new pain that takes the mind off the old pain. A fight with Mala is worth being able to forget, for a time, that I am Mala’s dying mother. This one is about Amber. All I do is mention that she called. Maybe there is too much praise in my tone.

Mala doesn’t look up from her chopping. “Amber called, hm? What did she say?”

“She was just checking on me. She had the boys get on and talk to me one by one.” I smile. “You should have heard Raj. Have you heard him sing his songs? Amber sent us a video clip of him singing ‘Old King Cole.’”

Mala looks up. “Really? When was that?”

“Just this week. Tuesday.”

She nods and looks down. “Did Ronak get on the phone, too?”

I shake my head. “He was at work.”

From here we go on to talk of other things. How Ronak works such long hours, how Mala’s call schedule is going to get lighter now that they are adding a partner. The chopping is done, so we move to the gas range. Things have gotten going when she skips back to an earlier point in the conversation.

“Does she call often?”

“Amber? Very often. She’s very conscientious, always checking up on me.”

Mala nods at this. I realize that what I thought was curiosity and chitchat is really Mala investigating a rival, territorial. As if there could ever be our kind of closeness (a quarrelsome closeness though it sometimes has been) between me and Ronak’s American wife. “How often does she call? Every day?”

“Not every day.”

“And Ronak?”

“You’re the only one who calls me every day.”

“About Amber, you know, it’s not like she’s working. Why isn’t she here more?”

I do not wish to defend Amber—at this point, I can tell it will annoy Mala if I do—but I feel I should point the facts out, at least. “The boys have school. And she wouldn’t want to take them away from Ronak. He would miss them. They come as a family when they come.”

“I would be here way more if I had the time, kids and all.”

“I know that. But Amber isn’t my own daughter like you. You can’t hold her to the same standard. It’s a long drive with three children.”

“It’d be a long drive with two. I mean, it’s not like she works and has that on top of everything.”

“Are you angry with her?”

Her movements have gotten wider and more decisive over the course of our conversation. It’s in the way she dumps the diced green peppers into a hot pan, then grabs the handle and shakes their sizzle; in the way her elbows come out when forcing my clove jar open. Just as I ask Mala if she’s angry, she touches a hot surface. She says “shit” twice under her breath, shaking her hand. She sucks her thumb.

“Cold water,” I say nervously, “cold water!”

“Relax, Mom. It’s nothing.”

“Put it under cold water.”

She goes to the faucet. I hurry behind her, trying to see the burn. The worry makes my voice a little too loud. My next words come out more aggressively than I mean them.

“Do you see what happened? You can’t cook while you are angry like that. You will always do something to yourself.”

“What makes you think I was angry?”

“Let me see. Let me see.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

I turn the pink, raw burn to the light. By reflex, I make a few quick, muted clicks with my tongue; she pulls back her hand, and I realize it might seem a tsk-tsk about her conduct and not pity for her pain.

“Let me get the ice pack.”

We are soon sitting knees to knees, her hand in my hands, a towel between the icepack and her skin. I press and lift.

“I wasn’t angry,” she says.

The phone rings. We look at it on the table. She reaches over with her good hand. “It’s Ronak.” She brings the phone to her ear. “What’s up?”

I can faintly hear his voice. “Mom there?”

“Yeah. She’s right here. What’s going on?”

“Are they there yet?”

“Who?”

“The guys I sent. They should be there. I just got off the phone with them.”