Authors: Amulya Malladi
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Literary, #Cultural Heritage, #General
She was absolutely right. They definitely would not have gotten a divorce in India. After all, divorce was still not commonplace. The pressure from their families would have kept them together even as Nilesh screwed everything in a skirt including Manju’s older married cousin.
“Why did they get a divorce?” Neelima asked softly.
“Does it matter?” my mother launched into a tirade. “They got a divorce and they would have been married if they were here in India. There . . . no one cares. Women have three, four marriages and all the men cheat on their wives. They all sleep around.”
This was why I knew it was going to be a tough, tough thing to tell the family about Nick. They had condemned the entire Western world to being immoral criminals and crooks. What chance did poor Nick stand in getting a fair trial?
“They don’t
all
sleep around,” I defended. “In the South, couples don’t have sex until they get married. They’re very religious there.”
I don’t know how and why this discussion was taking place. I couldn’t remember discussing sex in any fashion with my family ever before. Sowmya and I would talk about it once in a while, but that was girl talk. This was simply too weird.
“And then there are those religious fanatics,”
Thatha
added, and I lost it.
“And here there are none?” I demanded. “How can you say that about the West when you know nothing about it?
“Damn it, this country has its own screw-ups. Men beat up their wives and the wives stick to their marriages. At least in America they have a way out. They can walk out of their sick marriages. Here people don’t decide who they should marry, spend the rest of their lives with—their parents do. That seems okay to you?”
Silence fell like rain in monsoon.
Thatha
looked at me with the look reserved for the belligerent or the retarded—I wasn’t sure which.
“You only
live
in the States. It is not your country. They will never accept you. You will always be an outsider there, a dark person. Here they will accept you and don’t use foul language in this house,”
Thatha
said.
“Accept me?” I was on a roll so I stepped into cow dung, big time. “I apologize for the foul language, but,
Thatha
, you don’t accept Neelima because she comes from another state. You don’t accept Indians and you expect me to believe I’m accepted in this society. How long will this society accept me if I want to live by my own rules?”
“All societies have rules,” Lata launched into the discussion. “You have to follow American society rules, don’t you?”
I smiled that sick sarcastic smile I was warned against by Ma all my life. “Yes, but in that society no one can pressure me into having a child so that a family can have a male heir and—”
“
Priya
.” My mother silenced me with that one sharp word. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
Silence fell again. Except for the chewing of food and the movements of steel utensils, no one said anything.
Now I had done it and I wanted to kick myself. This was not how I was going to soften the blow—this was how I was going to make it more severe. Of all the stupid things to do I had to go and try to change my family’s mind about the evil and corrupt Western world. I might as well have tried to climb Mt. Everest in my shorts.
TO: NICHOLAS COLLINS
I FOUND AN INTERNET CAFE, JUST DOWN THE STREET FROM AMMAMMA’S HOUSE. SMALL PLACE, CHARGES RS. 30 FOR 15 MINUTES AND THE CONNECTION IS SOOOOO SLOW, IT CRAWLS. NEVERTHELESS, IT EXISTS AND SEVEN YEARS AGO IT DIDN’T. I’M CONSTANTLY SURPRISED AT HOW SOME THINGS HAVE CHANGED AND HOW SOME THINGS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME.
JUST MET WITH THATHA AND, NICK, THE MAN IS A CHAUVINIST. I MEAN, THE MAN IS A FREAK, OUT OF A MUSEUM. AND THE REST OF THEM ARE EQUALLY BAD. I TOLD YOU ABOUT ANAND AND HOW HE MARRIED NEELIMA. WELL, YOU SHOULD SEE HOW EVERYONE TREATS THE POOR GIRL—SLAPPING HER ACROSS THE FACE REPEATEDLY WOULD BE KIND.
AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS, BUT LATA IS PREGNANT AGAIN. THATHA WANTS A PUREBLOODED BRAHMIN GRANDSON AND ANAND’S SON, IF HE HAS ONE, WON’T CUT IT. NEELIMA ISN’T A TELUGU BRAHMIN, YOU SEE, JUST A MAHARASHTRIAN ONE. THIS FEELS LIKE A BAD TELUGU MOVIE; ALL THE CHARACTERS ARE THERE IN DIFFERENT SHADES OF GRAY: THE INTRACTABLE MOTHER-IN-LAW, THE VILE SISTER-IN-LAWS, THE SPINELESS HUSBAND, THE PATRIARCHAL FATHER-IN-LAW, AND, OF COURSE, THE POOR DAUGHTER-IN-LAW FROM THE OTHER CASTE.
I’M NOT GETTING ALONG WITH MA EITHER. I’M TRYING HARD AND FAILING. FOR ONCE I WANTED US TO BE FRIENDS AND I THOUGHT THAT NOW THAT I’M OLDER, WE WOULD BE FRIENDS. NOT HAPPENING FOR US. AND IT HURTS. I HAD THIS FANTASY OF US GETTING ALONG ONCE I GOT BACK. BUT TIME HAS HAD ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT ON OUR RELATIONSHIP.
NATE HAS GONE HIKING WITH FRIENDS AND I’M STUCK HERE WITH THE RELATIVES FROM HELL. I WANT SO MUCH FOR THEM TO BE DIFFERENT, MORE ACCEPTING, LESS JUDGMENTAL, LESS RACIST, MORE TOLERANT. I WANT THEM TO ACCEPT YOU. BUT THE MORE I SEE, THE MORE I REALIZE THAT IT ISN’T GOING TO HAPPEN.
HOW AM I GOING TO TELL THEM, NICK? HOW ON EARTH AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THEM ABOUT YOU? IT’S GOING TO BREAK MY HEART TO BREAK THEIRS. BUT I LOVE YOU AND I CAN’T DREDGE UP AN OUNCE OF GUILT . . . AND THAT MAKES ME FEEL GUILTY. I’M SUPPOSED TO FEEL GUILT, RIGHT?
ANYWAY, GOT TO GO. THE MAN AT THE FRONT DESK IS LOOKING AT HIS WATCH AND THEN AT ME . . . SUBTLE AS A CHAINSAW. I’LL COME BY AGAIN AND CHECK EMAIL.
AND, I AM NOT GOING TO MARRY SOME INDIAN BOY!! HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT, EVEN IRRATIONALLY?
AND I’M COMING HOME AS SOON AS I CAN.
PRIYA
Swimming in Peanut Oil and Apologies
Ma all but dragged me out to the back yard after lunch. “You might be here just for a few days but you will behave yourself,” she said, gripping my arm tightly.
I jerked her hand off and rubbed the small bruises her fingers left behind. “I will say what I feel like saying. If you don’t like it, I can pack up and leave.” That was not what I really wanted to say, but I was angry and furious at being treated like a five-year-old. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman; I was not a child. When would they learn that? And then again, when would I learn to act my age? Why did I have to go off the deep end over matters that did not concern me? I knew that; I knew that it didn’t really matter what
Thatha
or
Ammamma
thought about black people or white. Yet I couldn’t help myself and couldn’t regret what I said. Somehow I felt justified in taking umbrage at what they had said because I was
right
. But that didn’t change the fact that I had behaved badly and hurt my grandfather, my aunt, my grandmother, and my mother. Now if only I could find some beggars on the street to kick, I could call it a day.
“Are you threatening me?” Ma demanded, and I just gave her a “yeah sure” look but didn’t say anything.
“Are you?” she asked again, her eyes boring into mine.
I didn’t look away. Sometimes it was better to face the demons than ignore them. All that was left now was to purse my lips in a pout to look like a recalcitrant adolescent. Just the image I was trying not to portray. How could I convince them to trust my judgment in men if I was pouting like a child?
“All the sacrifices we made for you,” Ma said in disgust. “And this is how you repay us?”
I raised one eyebrow negligently and the little guilt I was feeling took a nosedive. “Ma, put a sock on the sacrifice routine,” I said with belligerence, all my vows of being the perfect daughter for the two week trip vanishing completely. This “you owe us” line was not one I liked, not one I believed in. I hadn’t put a petition to my parents asking them to give birth to me. It was their choice and since they made that choice I couldn’t owe them.
My mother’s eyes raged at me and she was about to say something when Sowmya came into the back yard with the dirty dishes in a blue plastic tub for the maid to clean. She set the tub down next to a plastic bucket that lay directly beneath a leaky water tap. For a while there was just the sound of the drops of water, drip-drip-drip, landing on a steel plate recently rinsed by Sowmya.
She looked at both of us and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “We are getting the oil and spices together,” she said calmly.
Ma nodded vaguely, obviously shook up by my statement. I refused to feel guilty. All my life my mother had been drilling in me the “we sacrificed for you, so you have to be our slave” line and I had had it up to here. If I would think about it calmly I would see that I was exaggerating. My parents had given me a lot of leeway compared to so many other parents. They had afforded me a good education. They had spent a decent amount of money to send me to the United States and make a better life. Sure they always tried to get me married but they never forced a decision on me as I had seen other parents do.
A classmate of mine in engineering college had ended up marrying a man she didn’t even like the look of because her parents insisted that it was the best match she could get. He was not asking for any dowry—it was her lucky day!
“All this is the influence of America,” Ma concluded. “You were never such a bad or rude girl before.”
She went inside and I curbed the impulse to run behind her with apologies. The love-hate relationship I shared with Ma was peppered with guilt and seasoned with the need for acceptance, I think from both sides. I wanted—no, sometimes needed—acceptance from Ma, but I wanted her to accept me the way I was, not the way she envisioned me to be. I wanted her to love Priya the person, not Priya the daughter who didn’t live outside of her imagination.
“Priya.” Sowmya tried to soothe me and I raised both my hands to silence her.
“She doesn’t want to believe that I am who I am, so she blames America for it,” I said caustically. “She doesn’t want to believe that I don’t really like her or care that she and
Nanna
made a thousand sacrifices for me.”
Lies, all lies. I did care, how could I not? But like gifts that become uncouth burdens when pointed at with ownership by the giver, Ma and
Nanna’s
sacrifices seemed to be uncomfortable loads that I didn’t want to acknowledge because I was being asked to.
“But they did,” Sowmya argued.
I twisted around and faced Sowmya. “And that makes me what? Their property?”
“Just their daughter.”
I shook my head. Sowmya knew better than anyone that a daughter was a piece of property, something you unloaded after a certain point. Sowmya had already become excess baggage and my grandparents were waiting to get her married and out of their house.
In Telugu, the word for girl is
adapilla
, where
ada
means theirs and
pilla
means girl. In essence, the creators of the language had followed the rules of society and deemed that a girl was never her parents’, always the in-laws’, always belonging to someone else rather than to those who birthed and raised her.
“But I’m not just a daughter, I am me,” I said wearily, trying not to sound like a cliché. “No one seems to give a damn about me. Everyone is interested in their daughter, granddaughter . . .” I let my words trail away as I wiped from my face tears that had fallen, unbeknownst to me.
“Let us go inside,” Sowmya suggested, uneasy I believed with my show of emotion. “We have to put the mango pieces in peanut oil.”
We sat down again in the living room. My grandfather was taking a nap in the adjoining bedroom and
Ammamma
was snoring softly on the sofa. Ma was pounding on mustard seeds in a large black stone pestle; runaway mustard seeds that had jumped out of the pestle were evidence of the indelicate force she was using to powder them.
I sat down next to Neelima who was pounding dried red chili. Her eyes were watering and I held my breath. There was red hot chili pepper in the air.
Lata was putting fenugreek seeds in another pestle. No one was speaking. I felt I had silenced them all, blown up a bomb, and everyone was now quiet in the aftermath.
“Lata, I’m really sorry,” I said humbly. Now that the blood was not roaring in my ears, I knew that I had no right to judge her. She had made the choices she wanted to make and I who claimed that personal choice was of great importance should respect that. Lata gave me a tremulous smile and shrugged. It was more than I deserved.
“Ma,” I called out but she didn’t even look at me, “I’m sorry, Ma. Really.”
She didn’t acknowledge the apology and I sighed. There she was again, sulking like a five-year-old, instead of behaving like a grown woman.
Just like me?
“Ma, I’m really, really sorry,” I repeated, and she continued to pound on her mustard seeds, probably to drown out my voice.
Sowmya was visibly disturbed and she sat down next to my mother on the floor and spoke softly to her. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but, whatever it was, my mother was obviously displeased.
“You stay out of it,” Ma bellowed, and Sowmya immediately moved away from her. “She is my daughter and I will do as I want to do.”
“
Akka
, she is just here for a few more days,” Sowmya said. But her
Akka
, my mother, was in no mood to listen to Sowmya.
“She thinks she can say anything she likes,” Ma rattled away as her hands powdered mustard seeds. “So she is in America . . . as if that should impress us.” She looked at me and stopped pounding for an instant. “I don’t care. If you don’t treat me with respect . . . I am your mother after all.” She continued the pounding.
“Then you have to learn to treat me with respect, too,” I told her very gently, and the shit hit the fan.
“You are too young to gain my respect and you have done nothing so far to gain it,” she raged. “Respect! Children respect their parents . . . and that is all there is to it. You have to learn to behave yourself. I am not your classmate or your friend that you can speak to me like this.”
The eternal problem! My mother wanted to be a textbook parent while I felt that I was old enough to warrant being treated as an equal. We had had this particular flavor of fighting many times in the twenty years I had lived in her house.
“I said I was sorry, what more do you want?” I demanded in frustration, not using an apologetic tone, not even by a long shot.
“You always say sorry, but you do the same thing again. You don’t mean it.”
My temper flared once more. “So now I’m a bad and rude person
and
a liar?” I asked petulantly.
“Priya, shush,” Sowmya pleaded. “Please don’t fight. She is here for such a short time. If you fight like this, she might never come here again.”
My mother’s eyes blazed at that. “She doesn’t have to come here. She is not doing us any favors by coming here. She has done nothing but made our lives miserable.” Ma stopped pounding on the mustard seeds and went to work on me instead. “She is twenty-seven years old and she won’t marry. Our neighbors keep asking us and we have nothing to say. You are an embarrassment, Priya. You have done nothing to make us proud. So if you don’t come back, it won’t kill anyone here.”
That hurt!
I walked out of the living room in a daze. I reached the veranda and slipped my feet into my slippers, slung my purse on my shoulder, and shakily got the hell out of my grandparents’ house.
Yellow and black auto rickshaws drove noisily on the thin, broken, asphalt road as I walked on the dirty roadside, sidestepping around rotten banana peels and other unidentified trash. A vendor was pushing a wooden cart on the uneven road as he announced to the world he had fresh coriander and spinach. I walked past the vendor and kept walking. The roads became familiar as they flipped past my eyes.
I wish I had never come, I thought, as I blinked the tears away. I wished Nick was here, just to tell me that everything was okay with my universe. I felt like I was a little girl again, scared that mummy didn’t love me. And she didn’t, she had just said so. Fresh tears sprang in my eyes even as I brushed the old ones away.
I stopped in front of a small
paan
and
bidi
shop where they sold soda, cigarettes,
bidis
,
paan
, chewing gum, and black-market porn magazines, the covers of which you could only see through shiny plastic wrappers. They were hidden, but not completely; you could once in a while catch a naked thigh or a dark nipple thrusting against the plastic wrap. A man sat at the hole in the wall and looked at me questioningly.
“
Goli
soda,
hai
?” I asked.
“
Hau
,” the man said with a perfect Hyderabad Hindi accent. “Flavored, or plain?”
“Plain,” I said, and dropped a ten rupee note in front of him.
The first time I had
goli
soda, I was five years old. I remember going for a movie with Jayant and Anand; it was an old black-and-white movie made in the thirties called
Mayabazaar
, the bazaar of illusions, a Telugu movie, which I watched even now, whenever I could get ahold of it. It was a magical movie, a small, obscure story plucked from the great epic
The Mahabharata
.
I had seen some other children drink the soda before the movie and I threw a tantrum to get one too. We had been given strict orders by my mother that, no matter what, I should not eat or drink anything at the cinema theater because the food and water was not good there and there was a good chance I would fall sick.
The soda came in thick green bottles and the gas of the soda was blocked inside with a marble. The bottle was opened with a black rubber opener that sucked the marble out with a big popping sound. As a child I could hardly resist the sound of the marble popping out of place and landing inside the neck of the bottle, or the fizz that appeared on top.
After I threw a mile long tantrum, Jayant relented and bought both Anand and me one soda each and made us promise on the top of his head (the theory being that if we went against our promise, Jayant would die) that we wouldn’t tell anyone he let us drink
goli
soda. Unfortunately, Jayant had been found out because both Anand and I came down with dysentery and the blame was placed squarely on the unhygienic
goli
soda.
As soon as the shopkeeper opened the bottle I grabbed it eagerly and put it to my lips even as warning bells rang inside my head. This could be a really bad idea if I fell sick for the rest of my visit.
“
Chee
, Priya,” Sowmya called out from behind me and I almost jumped at her voice. “Can’t you drink a nice cool drink or something? Why does it have to be this . . .
chee
dirty stuff you drink?”
I drank the entire soda before speaking. “It’s good stuff,” I told her and she sighed.
“Two
meetha paan
,” Sowmya said to the shopkeeper and I pulled out money from my purse.
“Can we go sit somewhere?” I asked as I waited to put the
paan
in my mouth and relish the sweetness and taste of it.
Sowmya looked around and pointed to a dilapidated road that had been trampled on by numerous feet and automobiles over the years. We took that road and came close to the Shiva temple our family frequented often because of its proximity. We sat down on a cement bench that had a worn campaign poster on it.
We both chewed noisily on our
paans
. Juices threatened to drip from the corner of my mouth to embarrass me.
“They make the best sweet
paan
at this place near the university,” I said, remembering my old engineering college days. “And there is another place in Koti,” I added, “where they sell used textbooks.”