Silence and the Word (16 page)

Minal starts to laugh. “No, not really.”

“Well, good. That’s something, anyway.”
Suddenly, they are both laughing. This may turn out all right.

They compare dates. Minal is perhaps three
days later. They agree that that’s something, at least, though
they’re not sure what. Then a little silence again, and then Raji
asks the dreaded question.

“What do you want to do?”

I could draw a chart. The branches: tell my
mother, or not; go back to India, or not; have an arranged
marriage, or not; have a baby, or not; be a doctor, or not; tell
Diego, or not; marry Diego, or not. Some options exclude others. I
don’t really think I can have a baby
and
an arranged
marriage. And I’m not even sure I can tell my mother
and
have an arranged marriage. There are many things I’m not sure of,
but there is one thing I do know, sitting here with my aunt the
painter, looking at her nudes beside her husband’s medical
sketches.

“I don’t want to be
just
a doctor’s
wife.”

Raji Aunty nods. She knows what I mean. I
want to stay here, which means no arranged marriage back home,
which means I’ll have to write my mother. Amma can’t make me go
back, not with the scholarship supporting me here. Small
blessings.

“And I don’t want to marry Diego.” That part
is also clear, and has been for some time. He is sweet and kind and
lovely in bed—but I don’t want to marry him.

“School?” she asks. I nod. Definitely school.
Only two choices left to make. This is going faster than I’d
expected. I feel a little dizzy—or perhaps that is the baby.

“If you want… .” she says it slowly, “I could
help you raise the baby. You could transfer to Yale, and I could
tell people I’d had twins, at least at first, if you wanted.”

“That’s too much.” It is too much, and yet I
know she’d do it. Family. She was family, after all. Even if she
had had an arranged marriage, even if I hardly knew her.

“Or, I could ask Vivek to recommend
someone.”

“No!” I couldn’t stand him, a stranger, my
uncle, knowing.

“Or I could take you somewhere myself.” She
waits, patiently. I get up, and start pacing. Back and forth, back
and forth. I can put this decision off for another month, if I
want. If I said so, she would pick up her shopping list, and we’d
go off, and nothing else would be said, and nothing would be
decided. I think I could love Raji Aunty very much, but right now,
I almost want her to be more like my mother, just to have someone
who would tell me what to do. Finally, I stop pacing and face
her.

“You want your baby, don’t you?” I ask her
quietly, knowing what she’ll say.

“Very much. We’ve been trying for a while.”
Her dark eyes are steady, and I know that she knows what I am about
to say. I bite my lip, then speak.

“I don’t want this one.”

“Okay, then. I don’t see any need to tell
your mother. I’m here to take care of you.” Her voice is firm,
decisive, and with that last decision taken out of my hands, with
everything over, finished, I sink down into one of her kitchen
chairs, and bury my face in my hands, and do not cry.

Dear Amma,

I am very sorry to write you like this, but I
must tell you that I do not want to have an arranged marriage right
now. I am busy with my studies, and still have many years of school
before I become a doctor. Please thank Bharati Aunty for me, and
send my regrets to the young man in question. I will visit you this
summer, but do not plan to set me up with anyone then either. Raji
Aunty will be coming for a visit then too, so you will get to see
us both at once… .

I am modeling for my aunt until the holiday
ends. This is a little strange, perhaps, but she promises that my
face will be turned away in the picture. The family in India knows
she paints, but nothing of the subjects. They undoubtedly think it
is a pleasant hobby for a doctor’s wife, and that she paints
wildflowers, or sunsets. She will be exhibiting her paintings in
New York next month. I will be in one, with my body thin and bare,
with my arms outstretched, with the snow surrounding me. She is
painting me a tree in winter, barren and brown, waiting for spring.
It isn’t as cold in Connecticut as it is in Chicago. It is easier
to believe, here, that spring will come.

I can stay quite still while she paints, but
the muscles get tired and eventually start to tremble. The
trembling is interesting.

I am glad that she does not need to paint me
and the snow at the same time. Her studio is warm and steaming, and
there is always hot tea on the kitchen stove. My uncle knocks
before entering, so that I have time to dress in an enveloping
robe, and we have been having some very interesting talks about
medicine, about muscles and sinews, electrical synapses and rushing
blood. I think I am going to like being a doctor. Bodies are
fascinating.

I will talk to Diego when I return. He
deserves to know. He probably also deserves to have a say in this,
but I don’t think I am strong enough to give him one. Hopefully he
will be all right. I’d like him to be happy.

Perhaps I can set him up with Rose. She likes
him, I know.

As for me—the world is wide, and there are
many possibilities.

Snow falls outside my aunt’s window, quietly
blanketing the ground, lacing the trees.

It’s really quite beautiful.

What has occasionally caused me concern
regarding my sexual past is not the number of lovers I have had,
nor the types of relationships. It is true that my mother is not
happy that I am still unmarried at thirty-two. She is even less
happy about the fact that I am living with one lover, yet am
involved with two others—and yes, everyone knows about everyone
else, and we’re all fine with it. At this point in my life, my
mother just wants me to get married, to marry anyone—anyone male,
at any rate. Which is a funny turn of events, given that for quite
a few years, she would have hated the idea of my marrying the man I
now live with—after all, he’s white. Not Sri Lankan, not South
Asian, not even brown-skinned. He’s white as white can be, a
European mongrel; his last name is even Whyte. Remembering those
lost years, the screaming phone calls, the not-speaking over my
dating him is painfully funny now, when all she wants is for us to
get married and settle down into something approaching normalcy. I
never thought his skin color mattered; what mattered was that he
was someone I loved. That was true for everyone I dated (or just
slept with)—skin color wasn’t an issue.

Unfortunately, skin color has become an
issue. In the last few years, between writing a series of Sri
Lankan immigrant stories and studying post-colonial criticism in
grad school, I’ve been forced to actually think about skin color
and ethnicity and race—all aspects of my life that I have dealt
with mostly by ignoring them. This is surprisingly easy to do if
you’re an upper-middle-class South Asian with a doctor for a father
and no accent. I was born in Sri Lanka but came to the U.S. at age
two; I grew up in a white Polish-Catholic neighborhood in
Connecticut, and perhaps because there were so few brown kids at my
school and they didn’t know quite what to do with me, the white
kids mostly treated me as white. Which is a comfortable way to be
treated, so I cheerfully went along with it—I didn’t even notice
it, in fact. At sixteen, when fooling around with a neighborhood
boy in my parents’ basement, I wasn’t thinking about the color of
Tommy’s skin, or mine—I was much more concerned about the fact that
Tommy had somehow managed to talk me into taking my shirt off where
my parents could catch us. For most of my childhood, adolescence,
and young adulthood, when I left my parents’ house, I tended
(tried) to forget that I was brown.

College inevitably raised my consciousness,
and grad school even more so. In fact, I found that it was
surprisingly fun, studying post-colonial lit.; as a non-white
person today, a significant and validating space is marked out for
you in the literary world. I read Edward Said and indignantly
realized that I, I had been Orientalized—or at least my
great-grandparents, living under British rule, had been, and surely
that counted? I read Gayatri Spivak, discovered the subaltern, a
de-privileged person effectively barred from the academic
conversation by barriers of race and class and language, and
wondered in what ways I could be perceived as subaltern. (Very few,
I eventually determined.)

I considered my place as a first-generation
immigrant, as a hybrid—certainly I had grown up in Connecticut
feeling lost, betwixt and between, on the rare occasions I was
forced to think about my ethnicity. I had eaten curry for dinner
every night instead of pizza, but that was minor—after all, most of
my grammar school friends had been eating pierogies. The real
difficulties emerged in the sexual arena—when I wasn’t allowed to
date, or even go to school dances, it was difficult to ignore the
fact that my parents had had an arranged marriage, and wanted the
same for me. In the adolescent American world of dating and teen
sex culture, where was I supposed to fit in?

I lived a dual life in the first years of
college—dating white people, having sex, and lying about it to my
parents. Before long the lying got too annoying, and I told them
everything (even about the girls), but that didn’t actually solve
the two-worlds problem; it just moved it to a different arena. The
family pressure to marry a brown-skinned man became more intense,
and I handled it mostly by dating more white men, avoiding calling
home, and moving further and further away from Connecticut. I
particularly enjoyed the freedom of dating white—with brown men I
was always afraid that anything we did would get back to my
parents, in detail, and would be gossiped about in the small,
close-knit Sri Lankan community. White people, for the most part,
seemed blessedly free of such complications—in a sense, one of the
things I loved about them was their apparent lack of constricting
culture—that appearance perhaps a function of the privileged place
they held in American society. White people could do anything they
wanted, whereas brown people were tied into a morass of
responsibilities and duty to their parents, their families, their
culture. It was exhausting.

Mostly, I dealt with the ethnic problem by
ignoring it. But when I finally started thinking about these issues
in grad school, it seemed like there must be a better way to handle
culture-clash problems than to just pretend they didn’t exist. I
wrote an essay examining my hybrid nature (part brown, part white)
for a class, and got an A. I started obsessing over my non-white
aspects—ironic, considering that I’d done my best to ignore them up
until that point, getting as far away from my cultural heritage as
I possible could. I even ended up in Utah for grad school—talk
about white!

So there I was, living in Utah and obsessing
about skin color, and also obsessing about sex (which I do a fair
bit of the time). I started thinking about the people I’ve had sex
with—and was shocked to realize that they were all white. Okay, so
I’d had brief encounters with one or two South Asians, but anyone
I’d spent any time in bed with had been white—and most of the brief
encounters had been too. I started to think about it…and then I
started to fret about it. I had just spent semesters pleasurably
ranting against the white male gaze, exoticization, dreams of
domination and a lost colonial heritage. Why
had
all those
white boys (and a few girls) been interested in me, after all?
Should I be worried?

I wasn’t totally blind. I did realize that
the picture I was considering raised far more questions about me
than it did about them. Why had I been so exclusive in my desires?
What was I looking for, in all those pale bodies? Those were the
real questions. But I wasn’t ready to just dive right in there. I
needed to start with inquiring into their desires, their reasons
and rationale, and then sneak up on my own. This stuff isn’t easy.
And besides—I was curious what they’d say.

I sent out an e-mail to several old and
current lovers. I realize that this is not the approach that most
people would have taken, and I hesitated briefly before sending the
letter out, wondering, perhaps, if I were presuming too much on
lingering affection and friendship. But in the end, I sent the
letter, full of impertinent questions. I asked people whom I had
lived with, people I had dated for months, people I had thought
about marrying, and people with whom I had just had lovely
one-night stands. I mostly asked men, though there were a few women
in the mix. Ten people responded in detail; a few responded
briefly, saying only that the questions didn’t seem relevant to
them, or to their relationship with me. Some didn’t respond at
all.

I am grateful for those who did respond, and
for the sake of their privacy, I have changed their initials. Of my
ten respondents all were male, except for GD. Several people were
hesitant to answer these questions, worried about why I was asking
them, worried about how I’d respond to their honest answers,
worried about who else would see their responses, and judge them.
If you’re a good liberal, it can be extremely distressing to
consider the ways in which your own attitudes, your attractions,
and especially your sexual desires may be racialized. It isn’t
equivalent to being a racist—but it can feel that way. I do believe
that everyone who responded tried to be as honest as they could be
in their answers, but I’m also sure that for many of them, it was
difficult to get past the fear of
being perceived
as a
racist, just for admitting that race/ethnicity/skin color may have
(unconsciously) factored into their desires.