Motherland (17 page)

“Is everything going to be normal?"I said.

“Everything looks pretty much on track. But tell your grandmother immediately if the headaches get more frequent or more intense, or if you feel like you are forgetting things or not able to think of words for things you know.”

I told him how I kept trying to think of things I wanted to make sure I didn't forget. I kept repeating my name over and over silently, so that it wouldn't go away from me. I wanted to write things down, but I couldn't because of my arm. It made me dizzy to think of everything in my head. “Is that strange?” I said.

“It's normal to be worried about failure of memory in a situation like this. But try not to be obsessive. Hopefully, you will have everything up there"—and he tapped my head—"that you used to have.”

My grandmother came in with a glass of tea for Dr. Mani.

“I am going to suggest to your grandmother that she help you explore your memory so you're not worried about it by yourself. If there are gaps, I can come back and meet with you and see if they are significant.”

“Like those questions Dr. Murugan is always asking?” I said.

“This is different. This is not testing abilities per se, this is about talking and exploring a whole range of memory,” he said. Picking up a picture frame from the bureau, he said to my grandmother, “Use photos of family, friends, possessions, speak of familiar names, places, interests, and activities. And, Maya, these things you're worried about losing, tell your grandmother. She can write it down and remember it for you, so she can remind you if you need it. If there's anything you don't feel fully comfortable sharing with her, you can give her keywords or names, so you can use them to remind yourself. This should help you relax, I hope. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

Yes, I thought. Will you stay? Will you take care of me? Will you be my confidant, my comrade, my partner in memory? I would tell you everything, so easily.

But instead, there was my grandmother. Over the next days, I told her things. She did not comment, she just wrote, asked me to repeat things, go slow. She filled page after page of a notebook, front and back.

I told everything—my first treehouse, my first swim team medal, my first period. The only time Mother ever slapped me, the only time I had detention at school, the only stuffed animal 1 still slept with. The walk home from junior high school to my house, the muddy field we cut across, red maple leaves in our hair, the races to the stop sign, and then running back to pick up the books and lunch bags we'd deposited on the side of the road. The bus to high school where everyone picked on the new girl from Hungary who wore the same clothes three days in a row and had crossed eyes. How my lab partner in chemistry class was known for breaking things, pipettes, flasks, microscopes, so that everyone thought it was her fault our experiment caught fire—but it was mine. How the girls at my last slumber party wouldn't talk to each other by the end of the night.

My best friend, Jennifer. My rival on the swim team, Samantha. The year I took horse-riding lessons until a horse threw me, and then I stopped. The summer I worked at the movie cineplex and gained seven pounds from sub-sisting on buttered popcorn and Raisinets.

My friend Steve. How I taught him the whole periodic table. And binomial equations. And trig. How he ran for student council and made a speech in front of the whole school. And lost.

And how I kissed him in the school parking lot that day to make him feel better. 1 wanted to say this, but I didn't. In the pause, as I thought of what to say instead, my grandmother looked up from the notebook, shaking her pen to bring more ink down.

“Maya,” my grandmother said. “Pretend I'm not your grandmother if it helps. I know in your life, like in anyone's life, there might be things you are not proud of, or things you are proud of that you think your family would not accept.”

I didn't say anything.

She continued. “I am old, and I won't to try to tell you what is acceptable or not. Tell me everything, so you can have everything back that was yours. These notebooks you can take, and the things I know I will take to my grave.”

“Don't talk like that, Ammamma. You'll be alive for a long time. Mother says half of it is positive thinking. She worries about you.”

“Does she? What your mother doesn't understand is that I'm not afraid to die—it's more natural than to live beyond everyone you know.”

“Seventy-one is not that old, Ammamma. We know lots of people older than you.”

“Yes, but unfortunately, not so many I am close to. Your grandfather's family, they have weak hearts, his three brothers died in their sixties soon after your grandfather. And my two brothers, they're not well. I would rather not live than be bedridden like them.”

“I'm bedridden,” I said, trying to make her smile.

“It's not the same. I sit by your bed, and each day I see you more lively, less tired, light in your eyes, restlessness in your legs. It's not like that when you're old. Lying in a bed when you're old, it saps the strength, the light leaves the eyes.”

My grandmother opened her armoire and took out her stuffed black leather address book. She opened it and ran her finger down a page, sight-reading, and then tore the page out. Then another, and another. “I should have done this a long time ago,” she said. I picked up one of the pages on my bed, and looked at the people listed there, some with many addresses, some with maiden names and married names both, the names of children and grandchildren written in the margin.

“Are all these people … gone?” I said. She nodded. Just before tearing out another page, she stopped.

“Look here,” she said. “This is the doctor that delivered you. I wonder if she is still alive.”

“Who was she, Ammamma?”

“Dr. Bose. She was the only lady doctor in our town, one of the first who was granted entry into India's best medical school. Your grandfather was impressed with her—he wanted your mother to grow up to be a doctor like Dr. Bose. We were all dear friends.”

“Then why don't you know where she is now?”

My grandmother would not look at me. She spoke in a flat voice. “Some things are too old to talk about. Shall we go back to the writing, to your memories?”

“These are my memories, too, Ammamma,” I said. The ones 1 couldn't forget because I had never known them. “These years before 1 was born. And the years I lived with you when I was a baby. How did that happen?”

“When your mother was six months pregnant, she came back to us from America. Your father brought her and had to go back in a few days, he didn't have much leave from his job, he'd only been at that company for a short time.”

“Didn't Dad mind not being here when I was born?”

“I'm sure he wished he could be, but he couldn't come here for a longer stay, and we didn't want her to be in America for her first child. We wanted her to come even sooner, but she had her job and had to stay on to finish some things. She came near the end of her sixth month, for her lying-in. In those days it was customary to have a time of confinement, when a girl would be with her mother and the women in her family, and everyone could watch over her.”

“I must have missed my mother when she went back to New York.” I said it as both statement and question. I couldn't call up memories of what I had felt as a baby, but I often suspected I could still know what it had been like.

“I think you missed her, but you were so young, only three months. Your mother had been breastfeeding you, so it took some time for you to adjust to milk powder, you lost a few pounds and made us nervous. But you were eating and making sounds and banging on toys in no time.”

“And Mother just left me like that. Just went back to New York.”

“At the time, it seemed like the best thing. Your mother and father came to visit once every year, we sent them pictures of everything, your baby steps, your pretty dresses, your blessing at the temple. We did everything for you that we imagined they would do.”

“But Ammamma, I didn't even know really that you were not my mother. When I went to America, I kept wondering why you sent me to live with this nice auntie and uncle who used to visit us.”

“We tried when they visited to explain to you who they were. You were shy, and we didn't want to push you. We hoped in time you would understand.”

“Understand what? That my mother didn't take me with her because I would have been in the way?”

“Maya, don't be so hard on your parents, they want everything to be good in your life.”

“Ammamma, you don't have to protect them. Sometimes, I see Mother look at me like she's reminding herself she even has a kid. I wonder if she didn't really want to have one. I've never said that to her because I know she'll deny it.”

“It's not true, Maya. They very much wanted children. They were so happy when your mother found out she was expecting, I remember the phones were down and your mother reaching us by telegram to tell us.”

“But having a baby doesn't mean just having it. They tell us that over and over again at school. You're supposed to stay around and take care of it. That's how you prove you're a good mother.”

“You have to believe your mother loves you.”

“Why should 1 believe that, Ammamma? We don't talk, we're not close, it's just not that way.”

“Maybe it will get better, when you're not a teenager anymore and there aren't so many things to have conflict over.”

“The older I get, the less I need them. When I did need them, when I was a kid, they didn't bother. “

“Was it so hard for you back then? I hoped you would like it in America.”

“Everything was so new. I was scared of sleeping in my room, I'd never slept without you. I kept waiting for my real life to start again, to come back to our old house here with you and Sanjay uncle and that old monkey we had, remember Kiki?”

“How could I forget Kiki?” Ammamma extended her arm, where there were still sharp scars of the monkey's teethmarks at her wrist. “Maya, it's been a mistake to let you think these things for so many years. When I hear you blame your mother, I realize it's not right to let this continue. A lot of what happened back then was my fault.”

“Your fault, Ammamma?”

The servants had come in many times to ask us what to do about dinner. Ammamma sent them away again before she turned to me.

“It was my idea for you to stay with me. I thought that would be best.”

“But why didn't Mother stay here too?”

“Because she wasn't well. We thought it would help for her to go back to New York.”

“What do you mean she wasn't well? What was wrong with her?”

“She was in a depression after your birth, it wasn't improving even after a few months.”

“So she felt better by being far away from me?”

“You're not understanding … maybe I'm not explaining properly. Your mother doesn't talk about this, so I never thought I would tell you. But if it makes you resent her less, it is better for everyone.”

Ammamma looked so serious. She got up to arrange the netting around my bed, it was getting darker and the bugs were coming out. She sat on a chair next to the bed. But I wanted to see her face as she talked, so I picked up a corner of the net and made her creep under it and sit on my bed.

“It was my fault.” Ammamma put her hands over her face.

“What, Ammamma?” I said, sitting up straighter. My bad arm lay stiff on the blanket next to her, but I reached over with the other arm to touch her. She shivered for a second when I did that.

“When your mother was pregnant with you, I was the one who said she must come to India for your birth. That she should honor tradition. She offered to fly me to New York or to come in the months after your birth, but I told her that was not enough. Your father urged her to do what I wanted, he had only been married two years, he felt like he knew nothing about children being born, and that she was safer with us.

“She came, and in the last six weeks of her pregnancy, she wasn't well. I was glad she was with us, she had complete bed rest as the doctor instructed, and we could look after everything. I prepared her food by myself, not trusting the servants to cook without butter or ghee or any kind of nuts or tomatoes or the other things your mother was sensitive to. She was like you are now, only able to walk for a few minutes before tiring, thirsty all the time, sleepless at night because she had lain in bed all day.

“We had Dr. Bose, who I told you we thought was a very good doctor. I still think she was a good doctor, there are some things no doctor can control … There was another baby, Maya, besides you, your twin, and she died nineteen days after you were both born.”

I took my hand back from Ammamma. Part of me wanted to know everything she was saying and the other part of me kept chanting this is not real, this can't be real. Ammamma got out from the netting and went to her armoire and pulled out an old knapsack. She brought it with her back to the bed. She dumped the knapsack out and there were two sunbonnets, two rattles, two bibs, two tarnished, streaked silver spoons.

“Your mother took it very hard, she was afraid to get attached to you. And she didn't want comfort from any of us, especially me. Your mother believed if she had been in New York, they might have saved your sister. And your father was far away; communication was difficult—he did not even know the other baby had died for another three days, and there were still presents coming in the mail for weeks after that he'd already mailed, presents that came in twos. Your mother would cry every day when she saw the mail carrier coming to the house.

“The more your mother pushed me away, the guiltier I felt. I tried to do everything for you. I wanted to still be good at mothering someone, even if not my own daughter.