Naming Maya (12 page)

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Authors: Uma Krishnaswami

BOOK: Naming Maya
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A week goes by so slowly it gives me the prickles, like when you sit on a folded leg too long. Mom waits to hear from Prasad, who is waiting to hear from the Tri-Star Development people about when they need to go to the registrar's office for one last meeting about the house. The Tri-Star people take their time because they are waiting to get a good date for the meeting—from their astrologer.
“Astrologer?” I ask. “Really? Why?”
She nods. “Just a custom, that's all. They'll call Prasad when they have a date.”
“Perfectly normal,” Sumati reassures me. “You never begin a thing without consulting an astrologer.” Lakshmi Auntie mutters something about that being
the whole problem with India because how can you make any progress when you can't even hiccup without having to get the astrologers to pick a good day for it.
At last the meeting happens. Finally—yes!—the house is sold. Prasad shows up with sweets to celebrate. Mr. Rama Rao leaves his post on the porch to come and talk to him. “Prasad, my good friend,” he cries, and hurries over to shake his hand so hard the change in the real estate agent's pockets rattles. “And how is the market treating you these days?” I wait for him to move into a discussion about the weather, but instead they talk about the old days when Mr. Rama Rao was the person to go to in the High Court for the special “stamp paper” you needed for legal documents.
“That's what you used to do?” I say. “I wondered why you'd work at the High Court selling stamps.” It's a mistake. I get a half-hour lecture on the fine points of stamp paper and the importance of getting the right value of it for various things, wills and bonds and sale deeds. Mr. Rama Rao imparts this knowledge as if he is sharing valued truths with me. Prasad says a hasty goodbye and goes into the house to talk to Mom.
Mr. Rama Rao's wife comes out and gives me some more sweets because their grandson has just turned six, “and you will not get these real Indian sweets in
America, no?” She regales me with the latest on the domestic-help front. “All is well. Radha is back working for us. She has two little kids. When you go back to America, you must send them some nice pens and pencils they can use in their school, all right? We must do what we can to help uplift these poor people.” I promise to do my bit, and eat sweets until the charge of sugar makes my head spin. I am rescued by a bloodcurdling scream that comes from inside the Rama Raos' house.
“No worry,” says Mrs. Rama Rao, seeing my startled look. “Tea kettle. Raoji says world coffee-bean prices are going sky-high, so we are switching to tea.” She hurries off to take care of the shrieking kettle, and I make my escape.
The talk of stamps reminds me that I owe Joanie her postcard to go with the Two-Gift. I pick one from the lot we bought at the bookstore. I write a few lines on it, address it, and tell Mom I'm going to go mail it.
“Now?” she asks. “You'll probably get home before it does.”
I didn't want to come in the first place. I should be pleased to be going back. But I'm not. I'm as mixed up as Mami's memories. “I guess,” I mumble, and slip out the door to go mail the postcard, never mind if I get there before it does.
I pass the tea stall, the bus stop, and another row of shops. At the barbershop (HAIR CUTTING RS. 20/-, CHILD CUTTING ONLY RS. 10/-) I cross the street to get to the mailbox. It's bright red and looks more like a giant fire hydrant than a mailbox. I slip my letter in. I drag my feet back to the house, thinking of Kamala Mami. She's with her family, probably giving her daughter-in-law a hard time. I am smiling, thinking of her, when a woman hurries past me on the sidewalk.
It is one of those times you're so close to someone your eyes connect without your meaning them to. To my astonishment, I recognize the woman whose sari the escalator ate up outside the bookstore. There is no question, it is the same woman. I stared at her quite a bit when she was getting mauled by the escalator. What I don't expect is that she'll recognize me. She doesn't say anything. But her eyes meet mine for a long moment, then tear away with such a look of embarrassment and dislike that it hits me like a slap in the face.
Why? What did I do? I want to say,
What was so terrible anyway? It wasn't your fault. And it wasn't my fault, was it, that the stupid machine decided to strip off your clothes?
Of course, you can't stop perfect strangers in the street and tell them things like that, so once we break eye contact, she brushes past me.
The street kicks into fast-forward. The mango seller swears at someone who has jiggled her cart and loosened the brick placed under a wheel to hold it steady. The tea-stall owner shoos away the yellow dog that hangs around waiting for scraps. A bus stops suddenly and sets clouds of dust swirling. A pair of kids on bicycles race each other up the road, ringing bike bells as hard as they can,
trrring-trrring-trrring!
In an instant, the woman is gone. The crowds have closed right around her, as if I've imagined it all. But I haven't.
I remember Mami looking at me like that, not wanting to be spoken to, not wanting me to stop the voices in her head. And faintly, very faintly, there is a picture of someone else shooting a look like that at me.
“I want to stay here with you!” I'd cried in desperation. “I don't want to leave this house. Why do I have to?” But my father had become a very different father from the one I'd loved, the one who'd read to me and helped me with nosebleeds and made me laugh. He had pushed me aside, saying only, “You will have to talk to your mother about that.” Then he'd gone down to his office and slammed the door. Soon afterward Mom and I moved out.
Crossing the road, while skirting the place where laborers are digging a big hole in the ground for water pipes, I begin to see these things again. And they are
not what I have thought them to be. The look in the woman's eyes was her own embarrassment. It was never about me.
And the look in Mami's eyes? Well, that had nothing to do with me. I just happened to be there to see it.
My parents? There are things about them that I am only beginning to understand.
I lean on the gate in front of Thatha's house, push it open, and marvel at how treacherous memories can be. Mami no longer controls hers. I wish I could erase a few of mine.
Mr. Rama Rao calls out to me, “‘If water is rationed, city will make it through summer.' Right here in
The New Indian Express.”
I smile at him, wondering at how just being here, in this maddening, dazzling place, makes so many bits of my life fall together like a giant puzzle.
The next day the entire tribe of my mother's family descends on us with one long shriek. At least it seems that way. The cars begin to arrive at six o'clock in the evening, and swiftly fill the gravel driveway. “Are we having a party?” I ask Mom.
She says a little breathlessly, “It's all my cousins.”
Within fifteen minutes, I am surrounded by relatives. I am drowning in conversations that compete for my attention. Two startlingly identical little boys (known together as “Rajeev-Sanjeev,” or sometimes
“the twinlets”) play happily among my river of rocks in the garden. They hijack the shoes and slippers everyone's taken off at the door, and arrange them carefully on the rocks like a strange flotilla of ships.
I ask Sumati, “What's the occasion? How come everyone's here all at once?”
Sumati shakes her head, and I can't tell if she's giggling because the noise level has been ratcheted up several notches. She says, “No, no special occasion. Just a family get-together.”
“Do you have them often?”
“Actually, no,” she says. “But they all know you're leaving. Some of them have been to see you already, right?”
“Right.” I nod and smile at those I can recognize. And I find that I too want to meet all these people, so many of them just names tossed about by Mom and Lakshmi Auntie. An elderly woman in a sapphire-blue silk sari exclaims, “Prema, we're so lucky you came to town! This family never gets together! Takes someone visiting from America to pull us all into the same room.” To me she says, “Oh, little Maya! You don't know me but you can call me Ra Auntie. Everyone does.”
The air is filled with simultaneous exclamations from people delighted to see one another. “Ajit! A married man! So where's the generous girl who gave up her life to take you on?” “Prema, you should have been at Ajit's wedding! His wife's a Star TV commentator, you know. Couldn't take a step at that wedding without tripping over one media celebrity or another.”
Weddings, births, birthdays, college entrance exams—they fly by fast and furious in this cross fire of talk. Sumati whispers to me, “Watch, they're going to start on you in a minute.”
Sure enough, in a little while there is a lull in the conversation. They pause, only until someone's eye alights on me. As one, they all cry out, “Maya! You've grown so big. Remember when you cried at seeing Lakshmi's husband, Kullan, for the first time?”
“Actually,” I say, “I don't remember that. But I'm sure it's true because everyone says so.”
“Maya, darling,” says Priya, the mother of the twins, doing her best to restrain her energetic offspring. “You'll soon find out if you don't know already, if this bunch agrees on anything they tell you, it's probably totally untrue.” She's drowned out by a chorus of protests, agreement, laughter, and questions. “Oh, well said!” “What? What nonsense!” “Now, now, Priya, you always had a sharp tongue in your head.” “Where's Kullan, anyway? Traveling again, huh?”
To watch my mother in the middle of this is like viewing an elaborate show in which dancers come together in constantly shifting groups.
And oh, the food they have all brought. There is
aviyal,
with tender vegetables swimming in a light and delicate coconut and green chili gravy. Tamarind rice,
sour and hot at the same time, with fried nuts hiding flavor surprises in random bites. Yogurt with grated cucumber, garnished with popped mustard seeds, to counter the heat.
“This food reminds me of something,” I say.
The famous Raji, who defied her mother to go to architecture school, has the answer. “It's all Mami's influence,” she says, with the air of one who means,
Can't
you tell
? “Who do you think has left traces of her cooking magic in every single kitchen in this family?”
Ra Auntie (I find out her younger sister, in green, is called Ro Auntie) explains, “When Mami used to work in your grandfather's house, all of us old ladies were young like you, and we knew where the best food was to be had.”
“But she didn't teach all of you to cook, did she?” asks Sumati the practical.
Ro Auntie chimes in, “Great cooking, my dear, can't be taught. But great taste can be cultivated, and you know, Mami's the best! None of us can help it—we keep trying to reach for that special touch! Come on, come on, everyone eat!”
It's true. This food has come from a dozen different homes. It's been cooked by a dozen different hands. Yet Mami's signature lingers in every bite.
So I miss her. But is that why I fall apart?
The twins are the immediate cause. Ashwin's playing big brother and making paper chains for them. They laugh and lug a long, growing-longer chain around the room. In the process of playing, it gets wound around the dining table. One end of it gets trapped by the leg of a chair. One of the twinlets, Rajeev, or maybe it's Sanjeev, gets all droopy around the mouth.
With the best intentions, I offer to help. “I'll get it for you.” I make a dash for the table, at the exact moment that Lakshmi Auntie emerges from the kitchen, carrying an enormous bowl of
payasam.
In a superb display of klutziness, I run right into her.
In dreadful slow motion the bowl capsizes. A wide white river of
payasam
spills out onto the floor.
“Oh, Maya!” cries my mother.
My hands are sticky from my unsuccessful effort to recover some of the spilled dessert. “I'm sorry! It was an accident.” My voice sounds shrill, on the brink of losing control.
Mom murmurs, “It's all right.” She smiles, that bright, bright smile that is meant to keep peace at any cost. But it won't this time. It can't, because words are pouring out of me so fast I don't even know where they're coming from.
“No. You always do this. Make like everything's all right when it isn't. Smile and carry on. You've done it
for years, Mom. You did it when Dad went away and you can't, I mean, I can't!” I am shouting and I can't stop myself. This is about as public a place as I can pick for this, and I know she hates it and I hate it and I don't care. Don't. Care. All I know is that this is it. We have to stop pretending everything's all right, but we also have to pick up our lives, and stop wishing for magic to happen. Here and now is what counts. It's the only thing. I am a wave of words, crashing, pounding, on a wide flat beach.
The wave has dashed over my mother, knocking her breath away. We both know this isn't about spilled
payasam.
My face grows hot and tears come streaming down my cheeks.
The hubbub of family conversation, the clamor of plates, the chinking of cups, all seem to stop, and there is only us, pooling our old unspoken anger under the rhythmic swishing of the ceiling fan.
“Oh, my God,” says Lakshmi Auntie.
“I tried and tried to make it all right,” I said. “I tried so hard. You weren't even there half the time. You're still not there for me. You're so busy planning for tomorrow, you don't know when today's just about gone.” I can hear my voice. It sounds like somebody else's. “All I am for you is trouble. Ever since I was born, I've been nothing but trouble.”
The silence is thunderous. It is like that moment you get when the power goes out, a tiny sigh of time before all the electric appliances in the house click quietly and shut themselves off. Then, as if on cue, the twinlets burst into synchronized tears.
Like an army galvanized into action, the family moves in on the trouble spot. They pick up and comfort the little guys. They roll up their sleeves and get to work. They mop. They soothe. They sweep. They scrub. They clean up. They rid us of that offending spill in a matter of minutes, and they do it all under cover of a barrage of banter and advice, offered up at top volume.
And then, quite suddenly, it's done. They leave as swiftly as they arrived, in a flurry of jasmine-scented goodbyes. Lakshmi Auntie, Sumati, and Ashwin are left with us.
Sumati says, “You're going to be gone so soon. Then we'll be back to me and the Pest.”
Ashwin's so tired from chasing the twinlets, he can't do more than grin.
She says, “Send me an e-mail when you get back, okay?” She scribbles her e-mail address on a scrap of paper, folds it into an impossibly tiny square, and thrusts it in my hand.
I nod. We go out to see them off.
“Lakshmi,” says my mother sometime during the last round of hugs. “Did you call everyone? Did you engineer this gathering?”
“I'm not admitting to anything,” says Lakshmi Auntie.

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