The Abundance: A Novel (27 page)

I nod. It is not long before she tells me what she has been thinking about.

“There were those months,” she says, “when you and Dad were taking care of Ma and Ba.”

“It was strange. It happened at the same time.”

“You were taking care of your mothers.”

“Yes.”

“Where was I?”

“You were in school, Mala.”

“No, I mean, what was I doing?”

“School. It was a busy time.”

She shakes her head. “Why wasn’t I there? Where was Ronak?” She is shaking her head and staring through the steam of her drink. “They were my grandmothers. They were dying.”

“You were busy.”

“With what?”

“They were in India, Mala. There was nothing you could do.”

“I don’t think I even cried.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe I could tell her the truth and say I had never imagined her crying. Or would that make her feel worse?

“It was my grandmother, and I found out, and … you called me, remember?”

“You were sweet to me. You were very sweet.”

“I consoled you.”

“You did. You said such sweet things to me. I still remember.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t crying, Mom.”

“You hadn’t been to India in years. You hadn’t seen them for years.”

“How is that okay? That my own grandmothers died within a few months of each other, and I didn’t cry?”

She sets the mug on the table but doesn’t take her hands away.

“I feel like, like I’ve done this horrible thing in my past…”

“Ma and Ba were proud of you. They would ask about you.”

“… And I didn’t know it until now.”

“We showed them photos.”

“For God’s sake, where
was
I?”

Her hands slide away from the mug. They are shaking. I reach and steady them in mine, and the heat in her palms is sharp and startling and does not fade. We stay like this for a while. But my hands do not wholly calm her. After her next sip, she says, more steadily, “I guess they were kind of unreal to me.”

“They were so far away.”

“It’s no excuse.”

“It’s partly our fault. Your father and I should have made sure you saw everyone more. How many times did you even see them face-to-face?”

“It’s not your fault. It’s just that they were unreal to me.”

I do not know what the young mean when they say this word,
real
. I remember overhearing Ronak once, right after he got engaged, on the phone with his old high school friend Philip.
The problem with that city is, none of those women are real. Amber is just real in a way they aren’t.
I know it is good to be real. I want to be real. I ask her, “Am I unreal?”

“How could you possibly be unreal to me, Mom?”

“I feel unreal sometimes.”

“You’re more real to me right now than my job or even my husband and kids. It’s been that way for months.”

“No. Don’t say that. It’s not right.”

“You are all I think about. Coming back here and being with you.”

“Mala, Mala, do not get too deeply … I am not permanent. They are permanent.”

“It’s too late for that, Mom.”

“Focus on them.”

“You went to India for months to be by your mother. This is the same thing.”

“You were out of the house by then. You were grown.”

“I should have gone there with you. That was my grandmother. And if not for her sake then at least for yours. I should have gone.”

She takes a sip of her hot chocolate. I can tell it has lost its taste for her. It is just heat now, and fading. She slides the mug away.

“Remember what Ronak said about us writing our story?”

I remember what she said just yesterday.
No one would want to read it anyway.
I shake my head and sit back. “He doesn’t understand. It would be so embarrassing.”

“So what, we fight sometimes. Everyone fights sometimes.”

I point at the shut laptop. “Is that what you were doing? Writing about us?”

“No. I was just writing some things for myself. To myself. Abstract stuff.”

“What were you writing? About Ma?”

“No.”

“About me?”

“I was just thinking. Nothing specific, just ideas. What if someone wrote someone else’s life, from that person’s perspective?”

“Like a biography?”

“More like an autobiography.”

“But isn’t an autobiography written by the person?”

“That’s what this would be. The writer would try to see everything as her subject sees it. Everything. Even herself.”

“Like in a novel?”

“Like, imagine me writing our story. I’d talk about us, only I’d be doing it from
your
perspective. Not mine.”

“To do that you would have to get inside my head. That would be embarrassing!”

“No. It wouldn’t, not at all.”

I glance at her laptop. “You aren’t going to write about me, are you?”

“When do I ever write anything?”

“Your essay won first place. Remember, when you wrote about Martin Luther King? Did you forget?”

“Mom.” Mala laughs. “That was in eighth grade!”

“It was a beautiful essay. I still have it in a folder. You wrote so many stories in high school.”

“You keep that stuff?”

“I do. I keep all of your things from that time.”

“Where are they? In the basement?”

“No. Upstairs.”

“Can we see it sometime?”

“Why not now?”

She helps me upstairs. Mala stops outside the walk-in closet. I realize it is where I first broke the news. This spot in the house retains the trauma for her. I take her hand and lead her inside. I find the boxes and pull them out. Her old zigzag coloring-book pages are talismans of innocence. I have not saved everything, but I have saved a lot. I show her a red pen “A
+
!!!” atop a geography quiz, a paper-clipped stack of report cards, ecstatic scribbles in Teacher Comments sections, Perfect Attendance certificates, art class fingerpaints on a paper plate, a Thanksgiving turkey made out of fanned popsicle sticks, and finally her old book reports and essays in outsize cursive. I have them in plastic slipcovers. We pass them back and forth, reading choice sentences aloud and laughing.

*   *   *

That night makes me forget. I can still say too much, ask too much. Mala came on Friday night, so she arranged for Monday off. She is there to drive me to my appointment. We are silent for much of the ride, groggy from having stayed up so late. Finally I ask her.

“So you keep a diary?”

“What?” A defensive reflex. “Yeah,” she says, more quietly. She keeps her eyes on the road.

“Do you use one of those blank books?”

She shakes her head. “The computer.”

“Was that what I saw you writing last night?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not safe, is it? Anyone could click on it.”

“You can lock files. You can hide files. There are things you can do.”

“Do you write in it every day?”

“No time.”

“When did you start writing it?”

“I don’t know. College. I write off and on.”

“Do you write about me?”

“Good things, Mom. Don’t worry.”

“Then can I read it?”

“No, Mom, you can’t read it. It’s private.”

“But you told Ronak you would make it the story part of the cookbook.”

“That’s not happening, remember?”

“I know.”

“We decided not to.”

“Right.”

She checks my face and turns back to the road. “Did Ronak say anything more to you about it?”

“No.”

“When you were holding him?”

“No.”

“You sound like you don’t mind the idea anymore.”

“It was a bad idea. We are not like that. We do not talk about ourselves in public.”

“That’s what I thought. Then why are you bringing up my diary?”

“Why? Mala, I am your mother. I am curious what you think, what you feel.”

“I tell you what I think. Even if you and Dad don’t always want to hear it.”

“I want to know about you.”

“What about me? You know everything.”

I pause. What point is there in being dishonest now? We have never been this close. We have never been this open. “I want to know about you before Sachin.”

She looks at me through the corner of her eye. “You mean my love life?”

“Yes,” I say softly—and then the shame of my admission comes over me. I try to make her understand. “It is none of my business, I know. But it is such a big part of someone. With Ronak, at least—”

“You think I’m keeping secrets.”

I say nothing.

“Your son is the one with secrets. But
he
gets covered in kisses. I can do everything right, and you’ll invent things I did wrong.”

“Not wrong. Nothing is wrong. But if you had someone, if my own daughter loved someone, I can’t imagine never knowing.”

“Mom—”

“It is all over. You are happily married now. Why is it so hard to open up to me? Do you think I will judge you? After all this time, when you have two beautiful children?”

Mala shakes her head. Three times she taps the bowed-back curve of her palm on the steering wheel. Very lightly; it is not anger, it is annoyance. I should have stayed quiet.

“You want the dirt on me, Mom?”

“Don’t say
dirt.
It is not dirt.”

“Here’s the dirt. There was no one. All through high school, all through college, all through med school, residency, everything. I don’t attract men. And if anyone ever showed interest, he would hang around me a while, and either I wouldn’t like him, or he wouldn’t like me, and that was the end of the great forbidden romance, every time.”

Her voice shakes toward the end. She is telling me the truth. I flush.

“I’m not even sure, Mom, what kind of shame I’d have preferred. The shame of having had some guy in secret, which would be shame in front of you and Dad and all our India relatives, and, I guess, God, or
this
shame of never having had an actual boyfriend. Never having bowled a guy over with my looks or my personality or my anything.”

“What about Sachin?”

“I love Sachin.”

“He is the one you bowled over. He is the one.”

“Speaking of shame—”

“How can you be ashamed of such a wonderful husband?”

“I am
not
ashamed of him!” Her voice has risen in volume. Red light. She brakes a little too roughly. “It’s just that I … I actually
did
the arranged marriage thing. Me alone out of all my friends. I mean, even my cousins in
India
are doing love marriages. But me, I married the guy my parents found for me.”

“What is wrong with that?”

“Exact same caste, from the exact same part of India, with my parents knowing his parents from way back. The whole arranged marriage thing, which I had so many problems with since I was a kid—that whole system turned out to be
set up
for people like me. I would have never thought that growing up. Never. You want to know my secret? My secret is, I really
am
this person through and through. My past really is me taking exams and me renting romantic comedies. Are you happy? Is that secret dirty enough for you?”

I look out the window. We drive in silence until the next red light. She brakes hard again.

“Your daughter did everything right. Became a doctor, married Indian, had the babies.”

I nod.

“So next time, when you’re deciding which child’s face to cover with kisses, keep that in mind. I. Did. Everything. Right.”

After her outburst, Mala is silent. After her silence, she is sweet.

She asks me to direct her to the parking deck even though she knows how to get there. Her hands on my elbows are gentle as she raises me from the passenger seat. I can walk by myself, but she stays close and eventually holds my hand, like a little girl. She is repentant. I hold no grudge. How can I? When I have her grown-up little girl hand.

She signs in and fills out the clipboard pages without asking about my medications or allergies. She knows all of them. I am here to have the fluid drawn off my belly. I know what to expect. I have had this done twice before. A gentle-voiced technologist in a teddy-bears-with-stethoscopes scrub top squirts clear jelly onto my domed abdomen and smears the jelly around with an ultrasound probe. The screen is mostly dark. The dark is the fluid that’s accumulated in me. It looks like a third pregnancy—my navel is like Mala’s now, an outie.

A Sharpie makes a mark on the downcurve of the dome. The doctor, in a plain blue scrub-top over his shirt and tie, numbs up the Sharpie mark with a thin lidocaine needle whose sting dulls and keeps dulling until it becomes a little crater of numbness. I remember Ronak grinning after a dentist’s visit, tapping his face in fascination.
Hey, Mom, my cheek is still dead!
The small sting makes me oblivious to the big sting, the thicker needle sheathed in plastic that dives an inch into the fluid. The needle comes out while its tube sheath stays inside me. What emerges is not blood but a fluid that looks like apple juice. The nurse connects some plastic tubes to a vacuum jar. The yellow races along the tube and finally the jar begins to fill, noisily. The fluid, drawn out hard by the vacuum, froths. This is when I look away. Until then I feel fascination—look, that is my ascites, look, that needle is actually inside me—but when I hear the fluid rush out of me, the sound reminds me of a man urinating in a quiet house.

Today is the first appointment when Mala has been present. She holds my hand the whole time. As soon as I lay my head back, no longer wanting to see what’s going on, she starts talking. Last time, the technologist, who had to stay to supervise the drainage (the doctor had left with a kind pat of my hand), talked about her dogs. I do not know what collies look like. Today I have Mala. Eager to make up for raising her voice in the car, she talks about Vivek and Shivani. Her voice is louder than the draining fluid, whose jet changes timbre as the jar fills. With her hand in mine, I don’t mind the gurney and tube light. My five-months-along belly deflates. The technologist, freed from the obligation to chat, turns her swivel stool and browses an old
Good Housekeeping
. She looks up when my tubing is ready to be switched to a new jar. Mala keeps talking until I am all drained away. A jar and a half total. The radiologist comes in, scribbles
1.5 L clear yellow ascites
, and leaves. Without any prompting, Mala bends to kiss my hand. It is easy to forget her brief anger on the car ride over. I do just that.