The Mango Season (10 page)

Sowmya smiled. “Remember when we went there in your final year and drank so much coconut water?”

“Hmm,” I said as the forgotten taste of coconut water streamed through my lips. “Why do Ma and I never get along? I always think I try but . . . in retrospect I can feel that I don’t. She makes me feel like a little child and I start to behave like one.”

“Maybe you want too much,” Sowmya said, plucking a leaf from a bougainvillea bush growing by the bench.

“You don’t see too many of those in the U.S.,” I said, pointing to the paperlike purple flowers. “Whenever I see a bougainvillea I’m reminded of the house we lived in in Himayatnagar where there were so many of those bushes.”

“And your mother had half of them cut down when she found that snake in the bathroom,” Sowmya remembered, laughing. “Remember how big the snake was?”

It was a black, thick, coiled cobra that had managed to get inside the bathroom. And Ma had walked in on it when we were all watching TV. The scream she rendered when she saw the snake gave all of us goose bumps and for a second we were a little afraid to go into the bathroom and see the hair-raising monster Ma was crying out about.

“It raised its fangs and hissed,” Ma had said hysterically, even after the snake had been killed and burned. “Those bushes, that’s where they hide,” she told
Nanna
. “You have to cut them all off.”

So the bougainvillea bushes went, but
Nanna
left just a few by the gate of the house and Ma always insisted that they should be cut down as well. What if another cobra was lurking there? “They live in pairs.” She was fearful until the day we moved out of the rented house into the house Ma and
Nanna
constructed in Chikadpally.

“There are some good memories,” I said to Sowmya. “I’m sure there are. . . . I just can’t remember them. When it comes to Ma, I can’t remember any of the good times.”

“I sometimes feel the same way,” Sowmya said and patted my shoulder sympathetically. “Want to go inside the temple? It’s closed but they got a new
Shivaling
. It is very beautiful, made of black marble, with gold work done on it.”

This temple had seen several
pujas
conducted on behalf of and by several of my maternal family members. In the seven years since I had seen it last it hadn’t changed much.
Thatha
had brought me here in the morning, the day before I left for Bombay where I caught the 2 A.M. flight to Frankfurt and then onward to the United States.

Thatha had some
puja
performed then. All I could make out from the Sanskrit words mumbled by the
pandit
were my first and last names, and
Thatha’s
family name. The old
pandit
with a large potbelly hanging behind his thin ceremonial thread that languished across his chest had seemed grouchy. He had a hoarse voice and he had coughed half a dozen times through the
puja
that
Thatha
had paid for in my name.

“To bless you,”
Thatha
said, patting my head fondly. “To wish you the best in your long journey to a whole new world.”

There had been quite a crowd that morning. It was just 8 A.M. but several people had already lined up to have
pujas
performed for their loved ones, their cars, computers, children, et cetera.

Thatha
and I had taken some consecrated white sugar,
prasadam,
and found a quiet corner in the garden in front of the temple to sit and watch the people, dressed in bright colors, moving with the purpose of God. As we ate the
prasadam
from our hands, the sugar melted in the May heat and made our hands sticky.

“Now don’t forget to call . . . often . . . as long as you have the money,”
Thatha
told me. “And if you need money, you are really short, then call. . . . I will send you some.”

I nodded. I had promised myself that once I left home I would not take any money from my parents or my family. Independence was not just a word to me, I wanted to stand on my own two feet, not run back to
Thatha
and
Nanna
at the first sign of trouble, financial or otherwise.

“I have a tuition waiver,” I said to
Thatha
. “I will get some kind of assistantship. I will find a job . . . anything . . . I will be okay.”

“Pay attention to your studies,”
Thatha
said sternly. “And don’t take up some stupid job in some restaurant bussing tables. Okay?”

I had known even then that it wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever to
Thatha’s
mindset regarding what he thought were lowly jobs for those of a higher caste and I hadn’t bothered to convince him otherwise. But now I felt compelled to talk him out of his beliefs about black and white people, Americans, love marriages, and compulsory heirs. Why was it important to me now what had been understandable then?

I didn’t know why I had changed from accepting
Thatha
the way he was to a
Thatha
who I wanted to change.

“Look.” Sowmya pointed to a thick gold chain studded with diamonds that circled the top of the
Shivaling
inside a cage within the temple. “They say it costs one
lakh
rupees.”

“Is that why they have it so nicely locked up?” I asked, barely able to see anything through the thick, closely aligned metal bars between us and the Gods.

“Ah, you know people, they will steal anything, even God’s jewelry,” Sowmya said. “So silent it is, but in another few hours, there will be so many people here. Are there temples in the U.S.? I know there is one in Pittsburgh; everyone says it is a big temple. All Indians get married there.”

I laughed. “I don’t think all Indians get married there. But yes, I’ve heard it’s a big temple. There are a couple in the Bay Area. There is a huge one in a place called Livermore and there is another one in Sunnyvale, close to where I work.”

“Do you go there often?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been there a couple times . . . I don’t have the time, Sowmya.”

I didn’t add that I was not particularly religious. I didn’t go to any temple because I didn’t feel compelled to go.

“Do you go to church, then?” Sowmya asked, and I was taken aback.

“Why would you think that?”

Sowmya shrugged. “Got to follow something, right?”

“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t go to church.”

“I just . . . thought maybe you’ve changed that way as well,” Sowmya said.

“I have changed?” I didn’t think I had changed at all.

“Yes,” Sowmya said. “You are more . . . stronger. You stand by your opinions a lot more than you used to and you don’t let your
Thatha
get away with everything.”

I laughed softly. “But my relationship with Ma is still in the same pit.”

“Nobody can fix that one, ” Sowmya declared, and brought her hands together in prayer with a clap. “Maybe he can”—she pointed to the
Shivaling
with folded hands—“but I don’t think so.”

We laughed together and then she held my hand and squeezed it. “I am so happy to see you, Priya. You are a welcome change and I have missed you so much.” Sowmya hugged me then. “It is so good to talk to someone like this again,” she said, and sighed. “But you’ll be gone soon.”

“I’ll come more often from now on,” I said impulsively. “Maybe you can come and visit me?”

Sowmya made a face. “Yes, your
Thatha
is waiting for me to go gallivanting around the world unmarried.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe,” she agreed, and pushed her glasses up her nose.

I was seeing this world, my ex-world from my Americanized vision. This ex-world of mine was different to me now from what it had been before. I saw some things better, while other things had blurred beyond recognition.

Thatha
was not my hero anymore because I saw him in a harsher light, an American light that didn’t condone men like
Thatha
. I had changed, I agreed with Sowmya. I hoped it was for the better.

Ma wasn’t in a better mood when we got back. Despite bad tempers, upset moods, and the exhausting heat, the work in
Ammamma’s
pickle sweatshop continued.

Lata was barking orders, while Ma was telling Lata how she was doing everything wrong. Not out of love was this food made, but out of need to prove superiority.

Ammamma
was also saying her piece but no one was listening to her. We all listened to Lata and Ma and I felt like a yo-yo doll giving in to whoever spoke the loudest.

For the first time I realized that this mango pickle–making ritual like everything else was a power game.
Ammamma
had lost the battle a long time ago; my mother had been winning, but now Lata had thrown in a googlie—a cricket ball with a spin—by getting pregnant to please the old ones.

Lata and Ma were the contenders while Neelima, Sowmya, and I were spectators.
Ammamma
sometimes played a biased referee while other times she tried to recapture her days of glory.

My relationship with everyone in this room was in some way or the other fractured, but it was my relationship with my grandmother that was the most superficial.
Ammamma
was a feeling, a smell, a memory, not a real person. I knew little about her. I knew who her favorite film star was and which movie she watched repeatedly ever since
Thatha
bought a VCR, but I didn’t know how she felt one way or the other about her life, about having given birth to her first child when she was just fifteen years old.

After Ma, it took
Ammamma
ten years to conceive again and I could only imagine how hard those years must have been. It would have been imperative to have a male child, especially for
Thatha
, and it must have been pure torture to wait every month to see if she had a period or not.

Jayant’s birth was a miracle, or so everyone claimed. After that
Ammamma
didn’t get pregnant for eight years but it hadn’t mattered since she’d already delivered the son.

Anand was born when
Ammamma
was thirty-two years old. “I didn’t even think I could get pregnant and boom . . . suddenly my belly was growing. Your
Thatha
, he was so happy,” she had told me, smiling fondly at Anand.

After Sowmya was born two years later,
Ammamma
started to have uterine problems. When Sowmya was a year old they found a tumor in
Ammamma’s
uterus and they had to perform a hysterectomy.

They had also found a tumor in Ma’s uterus when I was fifteen. Ma again put the blame squarely on that quack doctor and the birth control pills, but
Ammamma
told me that it was hereditary. Even Ma’s
Ammamma
had had a tumor.

“So you have children fast,”
Ammamma
always advised. “God may take your womanhood away and then where will that leave you?”

For
Ammamma
, having children was an achievement, something she was proud of. How did she feel today when all her children were grown and most of them ignored what she had to say?

I had asked her once how she felt about being married off so early. “It was the way it was those days,” she replied but never told me how
she
felt about following tradition, accepting her fate. I knew nothing about her true feelings, she was just
Ammamma
, the woman who sat on the sofa all day long watching television and eating
paan
.

I didn’t know the woman behind the relationship I had with her.

And neither did
Ammamma
know the woman behind her granddaughter.

I looked at all the women in the room and wondered if behind the facade all of us wore for family occasions we were strangers to each other.

I was trying to be the graceful granddaughter visiting from America but my true colors were slipping past the carefully built mockery of myself I was presenting. Maybe the masks worn by the others were slipping, too. Maybe by the end of the day I would know the women behind the masks and they would know me.

I tried once again to talk to Ma but she shunned me and I concluded that she didn’t want to look behind the label: DAUGHTER, and didn’t want me to look behind the label: MA. If she wouldn’t show me hers, how could I show her mine?

“We just add these in?” I asked, looking skeptically at the chickpeas soaking in water. Lata pulled a yellow bucket filled with spices close to her and dumped all the chickpeas in. Then, when her arm was up to her elbow she asked me to pour oil and the pieces of mango in for her to mix.

Lata always made the chickpea
avakai
,
Thatha’s
favorite. When I was little I used to pick the chickpeas out of
Thatha’s
plate as my palate was not ready to endure the chili and spice of the
avakai
.
Thatha
would wipe away traces of spices and chili from a chickpea and line it up with others for me to nibble on. Ma would tell
Thatha
he was spoiling me, that I should learn to eat spicy food and not eat out of other people’s plates, but
Thatha
continued and I continued.

Even as an adult I could never eat food that was too spicy. When Nick and I went out to Indian restaurants he usually handled the hot food better than I did.

“Who’s the Indian here?” Nick would ask, as he wiped moisture from his forehead. He would continue to eat, despite getting soaking wet with sweat, while I would give up on the really hot food.

“My mother would like you . . . well, your eating habits at least,” I told Nick. “She believes that food isn’t real food if your nose and eyes don’t water a little while you eat.”

Ma and Lata ordered us around like slaves to bring the big pickle jars from the kitchen. Sowmya and I demurely went and got six huge glass jars. Neelima started to cut muslin cloth into large squares. The pickle went inside the jars and then the muslin was tied to the mouth of the jar after which the lid was tightly closed.