Hell-Heaven
by Jhumpa
Lahiri
tom-cheney-excellent-sermon-new-yorker-cartoon
COPYRIGHT
Hell-Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri. Copyright 2008 by Jhumpa Lahiri.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.
Hell-Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri. Copyright 2008 by Jhumpa Lahiri.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.
Pranab Chakraborty wasn’t technically my father’s
younger brother. He was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who
had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early
seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square
and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so
I was taught to call him Pranab Kaku. Accordingly, he called my father Shyamal
Da, always addressing him in the polite form, and he called my mother Boudi,
which is how Bengalis are supposed to address an older brother’s wife, instead
of using her first name, Aparna. After Pranab
Kaku was befriended by my parents, he confessed that on the day we met him he
had followed my mother and me for the better part of an afternoon around the
streets of Cambridge,
where she and I tended to roam after I got out of school. He had trailed behind
us along Massachusetts Avenue
and in and out of the Harvard Coop, where my mother liked to look at discounted
housewares. He wandered with us into Harvard Yard,
where my mother often sat on the grass on pleasant days and watched the stream
of students and professors filing busily along the paths, until, finally, as we
were climbing the steps to Widener Library so
that I could use the bathroom, he tapped my mother on the shoulder and
inquired, in English, if she might be a Bengali. The answer to his question was
clear, given that my mother was wearing the red and white bangles unique to
Bengali married women, and a common Tangail sari, and had a thick stem of
vermilion powder in the center parting of her hair, and the full round face and
large dark eyes that are so typical of Bengali women. He noticed the two or
three safety pins she wore fastened to the thin gold bangles that were behind
the red and white ones, which she would use to replace a missing hook on a
blouse or to draw a string through a petticoat at a moment’s notice, a practice
he associated strictly with his mother and sisters and aunts in Calcutta.
Moreover, Pranab Kaku had overheard my mother speaking to me in Bengali,
telling me that I couldn’t buy an issue of Archie at the Coop. But back
then, he also confessed, he was so new to America that he took nothing for
granted and doubted even the obvious.
My
parents and I had lived in Central Square for three years prior to that day;
before that, we lived in Berlin, where I was born
and where my father had finished his training in microbiology before accepting
a position as a researcher at Mass General, and before Berlin my mother and father had lived in India,
where they were strangers to each other, and where their marriage had been
arranged. Central Square is the first place I can recall living, and in my
memories of our apartment, in a dark brown shingled house on Ashburton Place, Pranab Kaku is always
there. According to the story he liked to recall often, my mother invited him
to accompany us back to our apartment that very afternoon and prepared tea for
the two of them; then, after learning that he had not had a proper Bengali meal
in more than three months, she served him the
leftover curried mackerel and rice that we had eaten for dinner the night
before. He remained into the evening for a second dinner after my father got
home, and after that he showed up for dinner almost every night, occupying the
fourth chair at our square Formica kitchen table and becoming a part of our
family in practice as well as in name.
He
was from a wealthy family in Calcutta and had
never had to do so much as pour himself a glass of water before moving to
America, to study engineering at MIT. Life as a graduate student in Boston
was a cruel shock, and in his first month he lost nearly twenty pounds. He had
arrived in January, in the middle of a snowstorm, and at the end of a week he
had packed his bags and gone to Logan,
prepared to abandon the opportunity he’d worked toward all his life, only to
change his mind at the last minute. He was living on Trowbridge Street
in the home of a divorced woman with two young
children who were always screaming and crying. He rented a room in the attic
and was permitted to use the kitchen only at specified times of the day and
instructed always to wipe down the stove with Windex and a sponge. My parents
agreed that it was a terrible situation, and if they’d had a bedroom to spare
they would have offered it to him. Instead, they welcomed him to our meals and
opened up our apartment to him at any time, and soon it was there he went
between classes and on his days off, always leaving behind some vestige of
himself: a nearly finished pack of cigarettes, a newspaper, a piece of mail he
had not bothered to open, a sweater he had taken off and forgotten in the
course of his stay.
I
remember vividly the sound of his exuberant laughter and the sight of his lanky
body slouched or sprawled on the dull, mismatched furniture that had come with
our apartment. He had a striking face, with a high forehead and a thick
mustache, and overgrown, untamed hair that my mother said made him look like the
American hippies who were everywhere in those days. His long legs jiggled
rapidly up and down wherever he sat, and his elegant hands trembled when he
held a cigarette between his fingers, tapping the ashes into a teacup that my
mother began to set aside for this exclusive purpose. Though he was a scientist
by training, there was nothing rigid or predictable or orderly about him. He
always seemed to be starving, walking through the door and announcing that he
hadn’t had lunch, and then he would eat ravenously, reaching behind my mother
to steal cutlets as she was frying them, before she had a chance to set them
properly on a plate with red onion salad. In private, my parents remarked that
he was a brilliant student, a star at Jadavpur who had come to MIT with an
impressive assistantship, but Pranab Kaku was
cavalier about his classes, skipping them with frequency. “These Americans are
learning equations I knew at Usha’s age,” he would complain. He was stunned
that my second-grade teacher didn’t assign any homework and that at the age of
seven I hadn’t yet been taught square roots or the concept of pi.
He
appeared without warning, never phoning beforehand but simply knocking on the
door the way people did in Calcutta and calling
out “Boudi!” as he waited for my mother to let him in. Before we met him, I
would return from school and find my mother with her purse in her lap and her
trench coat on, desperate to escape the apartment where she had spent the day
alone. But now I would find her in the kitchen, rolling out dough for luchis,
which she normally made only on Sundays for my father and me, or putting up new
curtains she’d bought at Woolworth’s. I did not know, back then, that Pranab Kaku’s visits were what my mother looked forward to all
day, that she changed into a new sari and combed her hair in anticipation of
his arrival, and that she planned, days in advance, the snacks she would serve
him with such nonchalance. That she lived for the moment she heard him call out
“Boudi!” from the porch and that she was in a foul humor on the days he didn’t
materialize.
It
must have pleased her that I looked forward to his visits as well. He showed me
card tricks and an optical illusion in which he appeared to be severing his own
thumb with enormous struggle and strength and taught me to memorize
multiplication tables well before I had to learn them in school. His hobby was
photography. He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you
pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced,
missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of
myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer
possess, especially in front of a camera. I remember having to run back and
forth in Harvard Yard as he stood with the
camera, trying to capture me in motion, or posing on the steps of university
buildings and on the street and against the trunks of trees. There is only one
photograph in which my mother appears; she is holding me as I sit straddling
her lap, her head ti lted toward me, her hands pressed to my ears as if to
prevent me from hearing something. In that picture, Pranab Kaku’s shadow, his
two arms raised at angles to hold the camera to his face, hovers in the corner
of the frame, his darkened, featureless shape superimposed on one side of my
mother’s body. It was always the three of us. I was always there when he
visited. It would have been inappropriate for my mother to receive him in the
apartment alone; this was something that went without saying.
They
had in common all the things she and my father did not: a love of music, film,
leftist politics, poetry. They were from the same neighborhood in North Calcutta, their family homes within walking
distance, the facades familiar to them once the exact locations were described.
They knew the same shops, the same bus and tram routes, the same
holes-in-the-wallfor the best jelabis and moghlai parathas. My father, on the
other hand, came from a suburb twenty miles outside Calcutta, an area that my
mother considered the wilderness, and even in her bleakest hours of
homesickness she was grateful that my father had at least spared her a life in
the stern house of her inlaws, where she would have had to keep her head
covered with the end of her sari at all times and use an outhouse that was
nothing but a raised platform with a hole, and where, in the rooms, there was
not a single painting hanging on the walls. Within a few weeks, Pranab Kaku had
brought his reel-to-reel over to our apartment, and he played for my mother
medley after medley of songs from the Hindi films
of their youth. They were cheerful songs of courtship, which transformed the
quiet life in our apartment and transported my mother back to the world she’d
left behind in order to marry my father. She and Pranab Kaku would try to
recall which scene in which movie the songs were from, who the actors were and
what they were wearing. My mother would describe Raj
Kapoor and Nargis singing under umbrellas in the rain, or Dev Anand
strumminga guitar on the beach in Goa. She and
Pranab Kaku would argue passionately about these matters, raising their voices
in playful combat, confronting each other in a way she and my father never did.
Because
he played the part of a younger brother, she felt free to call him Pranab,
whereas she never called my father by his first name. My father was
thirty-seven then, nine years older than my mother. Pranab Kaku was
twenty-five. My father was a lover of silence and solitude. He had married my
mother to placate his parents; they were willing to accept his desertion as
long as he had a wife. He was wedded to his work, his research, and he existed
in a shell that neither my mother nor I could penetrate. Conversation was a
chore for him; it required an effort he preferred to expend at the lab. He
disliked excess in anything, voiced no cravings or needs apart from the frugal
elements of his daily routine: cereal and tea in the mornings, a cup of tea
after he got home, and two different vegetable dishes every night with dinner.
He did not eat with the reckless appetite of Pranab Kaku. My father had a
survivor’s mentality. From time to time, he liked to remark, in mixed comp any
and often with no relevant provocation, that starving Russians under Stalin had
resorted to eating the glue off the back of their wallpaper. One might think
that he would have felt slightly jealous, or at the very least suspicious,
about the regularity of Pranab Kaku’s visits and the effect they had on my
mother’s behavior and mood. But my guess is that my father was grateful to
Pranab Kaku for the companionship he provided, freed from the sense of
responsibility he must have felt for forcing her to leave India, and relieved, perhaps, to see her happy for a
change.
In
the summer, Pranab Kaku bought a navy-blue Volkswagen Beetle and began to take
my mother and me for drivesthrough Boston
and Cambridge,
and soon outside the city, flying down the highway. He would take us to India
Tea and Spices in Watertown, and one time he
drove us all the way to New Hampshire
to look at the mountains. As the weather grew hotter, we started going, once or
twice a week, to Walden Pond.
My mother always prepared a picnic of hard-boiled eggs and cucumber sandwiches
and talked fondly about the winter picnics of her youth, grand expeditions with
fifty of her relatives, all taking the train into
the West Bengal countryside. Pranab Kaku listened
to these stories with interest, absorbing the vanishing details of her past. He
did not turn a deaf ear to her nostalgia, like my father, or listen
uncomprehending, like me. At Walden Pond,
Pranab Kaku would coax my mother through the woods, and lead her down the steep
slope to the water’s edge. She would unpack the picnic things and sit and watch
us as we swam. His chest was matted with thick dark hair, all the way to his
waist. He was an odd sight, with his polethin legs and a small, flaccid belly,
like an otherwise svelte woman who has had a baby and not bothered to tone her
abdomen. “You’re making me fat, Boudi,” he would complain after gorging himself
on my mother’s cooking. He swam noisily, clumsily, his head always above the
water; he didn’t know how to blow bubbles or hold his breath, as I had learned
in swimming class. Wherever we went, any stranger would have naturally assumed
that Pranab Kaku was my father, that my mother was his wife.
It
is clear to me now that my mother was in love with him. He wooed her as no
other man had, with the innocent affection of a brother-in-law. In my mind, he
was just a family member, a cross between an uncle and a much older brother,
for in certain respects my parents sheltered and cared for him in much the same
way they cared for me. He was respectful of my father, always seeking his
advice about making a life in the West, about setting up a bank account and getting
a job, and deferring to his opinions about Kissinger and Watergate. Occasionally, my mother would tease him
about women, asking about female Indian students at MIT or showing him pictures
of her younger cousins in India. “What do you
think of her?” she would ask. “Isn’t she pretty?” She knew that she could never
have Pranab Kaku for herself, and I suppose it was her attempt to keep him in
the family. But, most important, in the beginning he was totally dependent on
her, needing her for those months in a way my father never did in the whole
history of their marriage. He brought to my mother the first and, I suspect,
the only pure happiness she ever felt. I don’t think even my birth made her as
happy. I was evidence of her marriage to my father, an assumed consequence of
the life she had been raised to lead. But Pranab Kaku was different. He was the
one totally unanticipated pleasure in her life.
---
In
the fall of 1974, Pranab Kaku met a student at Radcliffe named Deborah, an
American, and she began to accompany him to our house. I called Deborah by her
first name, as my parents did, but Pranab Kaku taught her to call my father
Shyamal Da and my mother Boudi, something with which Deborah gladly complied.
Before they came to dinner for the first time, I asked my mother, as she was
straightening up the living room, if I ought to address her as Deborah Kakima,
turning her into an aunt as I had turned Pranab into an uncle. “What’s the
point?” my mother said, looking back at me sharply. “In a few weeks, the fun
will be over and she’ll leave him.” And yet Deborah remained by his side,
attending the weekend parties that Pranab Kaku and my parents were becoming
more involved with, gatherings that were exclusively Bengali with the exception
of her. Deborah was very tall, taller than both my parents and nearly as tall
as Pranab Kaku. She wore her long brass-colored hair center-parted, as my
mother did, but it was gathered into a low ponytail instead of a braid, or it
spilled messily over her shoulders and down her back in a way that my mother
considered indecent. She wore small silver spectacles and not a trace of
makeup, and she studied philosophy. I found her utterly beautiful, but
according to my mother she had spots on her face, and her hips were too small.
For
a while, Pranab Kaku still showed up once a week
for dinner on his own, mostly asking my mother what she thought of Deborah. He
sought her approval, telling her that Deborah was the daughter of professors at
Boston College,
that her father published poetry, and that both her parents had PhDs. When he
wasn’t around, my mother complained about Deborah’s visits, about having to
make the food less spicy, even though Deborah said she liked spicy food, and
feeling embarrassed to put a fried fish head in the dal. Pranab Kaku taught
Deborah to say khub bhalo and aacha and to pick up certain foods
with her fingers instead of with a fork. Sometimes they ended up feeding each
other, allowing their fingers to linger in each other’s mouth, causing my
parents to look down at their plates and wait for the moment to pass. At larger
gatherings, they kissed and held hands in front of everyone, and when they were
out of earshot my mother would talk to the other B engali women. “He used to be
so different. I don’t understand how a person can change so suddenly. It’s just
hell–heaven, the differ- ence,” she would say, always using the English words
for her self-concocted, backward metaphor.
The
more my mother began to resent Deborah’s visits, the more I began to anticipate
them. I fell in love with Deborah, the way young girls often fall in love with
women who are not their mothers. I loved her serene gray eyes, the ponchos and
denim wrap skirts and sandals she wore, her
straight hair that she let me manipulate into all sorts of silly styles. I
longed for her casual appearance; my mother insisted whenever there was a
gathering that I wear one of my ankle-length, faintly Victorian dresses, which
she referred to as maxis, and have party hair, which meant taking a strand from
either side of my head and joining them with a barrette at the back. At
parties, Deborah would, eventually, politely slip away, much to the relief of
the Bengali women with whom she was expected to carry on a conversation, and
she would play with me. I was older than all my parents’ friends’ children, but
with Deborah I had a companion. She knew all about the books I read, about Pippi Longstocking and Anne of
Green Gables. She gave me the sorts of gifts my parents had neither the
money nor the inspiration to buy: a large book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with
watercolor illustrations on thick, silken pages, wooden puppets with hair
fashioned from yarn. She told me about her family, three older sisters and two
brothers, the youngest of whom was closer to my age than to hers. Once, after
visiting her parents, she brought back three Nancy Drews, her name written in a
girlish hand at the top of the first page, and an old toy she’d had, a small
paper theater set with interchangeable backdrops, the exterior of a castle and
a ballroom and an open field. Deborah and I spoke freely in English, a language
in which, by that age, I expressed myself more easily than Bengali, which I was
required to speak at home. Sometimes she asked me how to say this or that in
Bengali; once, she asked me what asobbho meant. I hesitated, then told
her it was what my mother called me if I had done something extremely naughty,
and Deborah’s face clouded. I felt protective of her, aware that she was
unwanted, that she was resented, aware of the nasty things people said.
Outings
in the Volkswagen now involved the four of us, Deborah in the front, her hand
over Pranab Kaku’s while it rested on the gearshift, my mother and I in the
back. Soon, mymother began coming up with reasons to excuse herself, headaches
and incipient colds, and so I became part of a new triangle. To my surprise, my
mother allowed me to go with them, to the Museum
of Fine Arts and the Public Garden
and the Aquarium. She was waiting for the affair to end, for Deborah to break
Pranab Kaku’s heart and for him to return to us, scarred and penitent. I saw no
sign of their relationship foundering. Their open affection for each other,
their easily expressed happiness, was a new and romantic thing to me. Having me
in the backseat allowed Pranab Kaku and Deborah to practice for the future, to
try on the idea of a family of their own. Countless photographs were taken of
me and Deborah, of me sitting on Deborah’s lap, holding her hand, kissing her
on the cheek. We exchanged what I believed were secret smiles, and in those
moments I felt that she understood me better than anyone else in the world.
Anyone would have said that Deborah would make an excellent mother one day. But
my mother refused to acknowledge such a thing. I did not know at the time that my
mother allowed me to go off with Pranab Kaku and Deborah because she was
pregnant for the fifth time since my birth and was so sick and exhausted and
fearful of losing another baby that she slept most of the day. After ten weeks,
she miscarried once again and was advised by her doctor to stop trying.
By
summer, there was a diamond on Deborah’s left hand, something my mother had
never been given. Because his own family lived so far away, Pranab Kaku came to
the house alone one day, to ask for my parents’ blessing before giving her the
ring. He showed us the box, opening it and taking out the diamond nestled
inside. “I want to see how it looks on someone,” he said, urging my mother to
try it on, but she refused. I was the one who stuck out my hand, feeling the
weight of the ring suspended at the base of my finger. Then he asked for a
second thing: he wanted my parents to write to his parents, saying that they
had met Deborah and that they thought highly of her. He was nervous, naturally,
about telling his family that he intended to marry an American girl. He had
told his parents all about us, and at one point my parents had received a
letter from them, expressing appreciation for taking such good care of their
son and for giving him a proper home in America. “It needn’t be long,”
Pranab Kaku said. “Just a few lines. They’ll accept it more easily if it comes
from you.” My father thought neither ill nor well of Deborah, never commenting
or criticizing as my mother did, but he assured Pranab Kaku that a letter of endorsement
would be on its way to Calcutta by the end of the
week. My mother nodded her assent, but the following day I saw the teacup
Pranab Kaku had used all this time as an ashtray in the kitchen garbage can, in
pieces, and three Band-Aids taped to my mother’s hand.
Pranab
Kaku’s parents were horrified by the thought of their only son marrying an
American woman, and a few weeks later our telephone rang in the middle of the
night: it was Mr. Chakraborty telling my father that they could not possibly
bless such a marriage, that it was out of the question, that if Pranab Kaku
dared to marry Deborah he would no longer acknowledge him as a son. Then his
wife got on the phone, asking to speak to my mother and attacked her as if they
were intimate, blaming my mother for allowing the affair to develop. She said
that they had already chosen a wife for him in Calcutta,
that he’d left for America
with the understanding that he’d go back after he had finished his studies and
marry this girl. They had bought the neighboring flat in their building for
Pranab and his betrothed, and it was sitting empty, waiting for his return. “We
thought we could trust you, and yet you have betrayed us so deeply,” his mother
said, taking out her anger on a stranger in a way she could not with her son.
“Is this what happens to people in America?” For Pranab Kaku’s sake,
my mother defended the engagement, telling his mother that Deborah was a polite
girl from a decent family. Pranab Kaku’s parents pleaded with mine to talk him
out of it, but my father refused, deciding that it was not their place to get
embroiled. “We are not his parents,” he told my mother. “We can tell him they
don’t approve but nothing more.” And so my parents told Pranab Kaku nothing
about how his parents had berated them and blamed them, and threatened to
disown Pranab Kaku, only that they had refused to give him their blessing. In
the face of this refusal, Pranab Kaku shrugged. “I don’t care. Not everyone can
be as open-minded as you,” he told my parents. “Your blessing is blessing
enough.”
---
After
the engagement, Pranab Kaku and Deborah began drifting out of our lives. They
moved in together, to an apartment in Boston,
in the South End, a part of the city my parents considered unsafe. We moved as
well, to a house in Natick.
Though my parents had bought the house, they occupied it as if they were still
tenants, touching up scuff marks with leftover paint and reluctant to put holes
in the walls, and every afternoon when the sun shone through the living-room
window my mother closed the blinds so that our new furniture would not fade. A
few weeks before the wedding, my parents invited Pranab Kaku to the house
alone, and my mother prepared a special meal to mark the end of his
bachelorhood. It would be the only Bengali aspect of the wedding; the rest of
it would be strictly American, with a cake and a minister and Deborah in a long
white dress and veil. There is a photograph of the dinner, taken by my father,
the only picture, to my knowledge, in which my mother and Pranab Kaku appear
together. The picture is slightly blurry; I remember Pranab Kaku explaining to
my father how to work the camera, and so he is captured looking up from the
kitchen table and the elaborate array of food my mother had prepared in his
honor, his mouth open, his long arm outstretched and his finger pointing,
instructing my father how to read the light meter or some such thing. My mother
stands beside him, one hand placed on top of his head in a gesture of blessing,
the first and last time she was to touch him in her life. “She will leave him,”
my mother told her friends afterward. “He is throwing his life away.”
The
wedding was at a church in Ipswich, with a
reception at a country club. It was going to be a small ceremony, which my
parents took to mean one or two hundred people as opposed to three or four
hundred. My mother was shocked that fewer than thirty people had been invited,
and she was more perplexed than honored that, of all the Bengalis Pranab Kaku knew by then, we were the only ones on the
list. At the wedding we sat, like the other guests, first on the hard wooden
pews of the church and then at a long table that had been set up for lunch.
Though we were the closest thing Pranab Kaku had to a family that day, we were
not included in the group photographs that were taken on the grounds of the
country club, with Deborah’s parents and grandparents and her many siblings,
and neither my mother nor my father got up to make a toast. My mother did not
appreciate the fact that Deborah had made sure that my parents, who did not eat
beef, were given fish instead of filet mignon like everyone else. She kept
speaking in Bengali, complaining about the formality of the proceedings, and
the fact that Pranab Kaku, wearing a tuxedo, barely said a word to us because
he was too busy leaning over the shoulders of his new American in-laws as he
circled the table. As usual, my father said nothing in response to my mother’s
commentary, quietly and methodically working though his meal, his fork and
knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china,
because he was accustomed to eating with his hands. He cleared his plate and
then my mother’s, for she had pronounced the food inedible, and then he
announced that he had overeaten and had a stomachache. The only time my mother
forced a smile was when Deborah appeared behind her chair, kissing her on the
cheek and asking if we were enjoying ourselves. When the dancing started, my
parents remained at the table, drinking tea, and after two or three songs they
decided that it was time for us to go home, my mother shooting me looks to that
effect across the room, where I was dancing in a circle with Pranab Kaku and
Deborah and the other children at the wedding. I wanted to stay, and when,
reluctantly, I walked over to where my parents sat, Deborah followed me.
“Boudi, let Usha stay. She’s having such a good time,” she said to my mother.
“Lots of people will be heading back your way, someone can drop her off in a
little while.” But my mother said no, I had had plenty of fun already and
forced me to put on my coat over my long puff-sleeved dress. As we drove home
from the wedding I told my mother, for the first but not the last time in my
life, that I hated her.
---
The
following year, we received a birth announcement
from the Chakrabortys, a picture of twin girls, which my mother did not paste
into an album or display on the refrigerator door. The girls were named Srabani
and Sabitri but were called Bonny and Sara. Apart from a thank-you card for our
wedding gift, it was their only communication; we were not invited to the new
house in Marblehead,
bought after Pranab Kaku got a highpaying job at Stone & Webster. For a
while, my parents and their friends continued to invite the Chakrabortys to
gatherings, but because they never came, or left after staying only an hour,
the invitations stopped. Their absences were attributed, by my parents and
their circle, to Deborah, and it was universally agreed that she had stripped
Pranab Kaku not only of his origins but of his independence. She was the enemy,
he was her prey, and their example was invoked as a warning, and as
vindication, that mixed marriages were a doomed enterprise. Occasionally, they
surprised everyone, appearing at a pujo for a few hours with their two
identical little girls who barely looked Bengali and spoke only English and
were being raised so differently from me and most of the other children. They
were not taken to Calcutta every summer, they
did not have parents who were clinging to another way of life and exhorting
their children to do the same. Because of Deborah, they were exempt from all
that, and for this reason I envied them. “Usha, look at you, all grown up and
so pretty,” Deborah would say whenever she saw me, rekindling, if only for a
minute, our bond of years before. She had cut off her beautiful long hair by
then, and had a bob. “I bet you’ll be old enough to babysit soon,” she would
say. “I’ll call you—the girls would love that.” But she never did.
---
I
began to grow out of my girlhood, entering middle school and developing crushes
on the American boys in my class. The crushes amounted to nothing; in spite of
Deborah’s compliments, I was always overlooked at that age. But my mother must
have picked up on something, for she forbade me to attend the dances that were
held the last Friday of every month in the school cafeteria, and it was an
unspoken law that I was not allowed to date. “Don’t think you’ll get away with
marrying an American, the way Pranab Kaku did,” she would say from time to
time. I was thirteen, the thought of marriage irrelevant to my life. Still, her
words upset me, and I felt her grip on me tighten. She would fly into a rage
when I told her I wanted to start wearing a bra, or if I wanted to go to Harvard Square
with a friend. In the middle of our arguments, she often conjured Deborah as
her antithesis, the sort of woman she refused to be. “If she were your mother,
she would let you do whatever you wanted, because she wouldn’t care. Is that
what you want, Usha, a mother who doesn’t care?” When I began menstruating, the
summer before I started ninth grade, my mother gave me a speech, telling me
that I was to let no boy touch me, and then she asked if I knew how a woman
became pregnant. I told her what I had been taught in science, about the sperm
fertilizing the egg, and then she asked if I knew how, exactly, that happened.
I saw the terror in her eyes and so, though I knew that aspect of procreation
as well, I lied, and told her it hadn’t been explained to us.
I
began keeping other secrets from her, evading her with the aid of my friends. I
told her I was sleeping over at a friend’s when really I went to parties,
drinking beer and allowing boys to kiss me and fondle my breasts and press
their erections against my hip as we lay groping on a sofa or the backseat of a
car. I began to pity my mother; the older I got, the more I saw what a desolate
life she led. She had never worked, and during the day she watched soap operas
to pass the time. Her only job, every day, was to clean and cook for my father
and me. We rarely went to restaurants, my father always pointing out, even in
cheap ones, how expensive they were compared with eating at home. When my
mother complained to him about how much she hated life in the suburbs and how
lonely she felt, he said nothing to placate her. “If you are so unhappy, go
back to Calcutta,”
he would offer, making it clear that their separation would not affect him one
way or the other. I began to take my cues from my father in dealing with her,
isolating her doubly. When she screamed at me for talking too long on the
telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back,
telling her that she was pathetic, that she knew nothing about me, and it was
clear to us both that I had stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly,
just as Pranab Kaku had.
Then,
the year before I went off to college, my parents and I were invited to the
Chakrabortys’ home for Thanksgiving. We were not
the only guests from my parents’ old Cambridge
crowd; it turned out that Pranab Kaku and Deborah wanted to have a sort of
reunion of all the people they had been friendly with back then. Normally, my
parents did not celebrate Thanksgiving; the ritual of a large sit-down dinner
and the foods that one was supposed to eat was lost on them. They treated it as
if it were Memorial Day or Veterans Day—just another holiday in the American year.
But we drove out to Marblehead,
to an impressive stone-faced house with a semicircular gravel driveway clogged
with cars. The house was a short walk from the ocean; on our way, we had driven
by the harbor overlooking the cold, glittering Atlantic, and when we stepped out of the
car we were greeted by the sound of gulls and waves. Most of the living-room
furniture had been moved to the basement and extra tables joined to the main
one to form a giant U. They were covered with tablecloths, set with white
plates and silverware, and had centerpieces of gourds. I was struck by the toys
and dolls that were everywhere, dogs that shed long yellow hairs on everything,
all the photographs of Bonny and Sara and Deborah decorating the walls, still
more plastering the refrigerator door. Food was being prepared when we arrived,
something my mother always frowned upon, the kitchen a chaos of people and
smells and enormous dirtied bowls.
Deborah’s
family, whom we remembered dimly from the wedding, was there, her parents and
her brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives and boyfriends and
babies. Her sisters were in their thirties, but, like Deborah, they could have
been mistaken for college students, wearing jeans and clogs and fisherman
sweaters, and her brother Matty, with whom I had danced in a circle at the
wedding, was now a freshman at Amherst,
with wide-set green eyes and wispy brown hair and a complexion that reddened
easily. As soon as I saw Deborah’s siblings, joking with one another as they
chopped and stirred things in the kitchen, I was furious with my mother for
making a scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar
kameez. I knew they assumed, from my clothing, that I had more in common with
the other Bengalis than with them. But Deborah insisted on including me,
setting me to work peeling apples with Matty, and out of my parents’ sight I
was given beer to dri nk. When the meal was ready, we were told where to sit,
in an alternating boy-girl formation that made the Bengalis uncomfortable.
Bottles of wine were lined up on the table. Two turkeys were brought out, one
stuffed with sausage and one without. My mouth watered at the food, but I knew
that afterward, on our way home, my mother would complain that it was all
tasteless and bland. “Impossible,” my mother said, shaking her hand over the
top of her glass when someone tried to pour her a little wine.
Deborah’s
father, Gene, got up to say grace, and asked everyone at the table to join
hands. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Dear Lord, we thank you today
for the food we are about to receive,” he began. My parents were seated next to
each other, and I was stunned to see that they complied, that my father’s brown
fingers lightly clasped my mother’s pale ones. I noticed Matty seated on the
other side of the room and saw him glancing at me as his father spoke. After
the chorus of Amens, Gene raised his glass and said, “Forgive me, but I never
thought I’d have the opportunity to say this: Here’s to Thanksgiving
with the Indians.” Only a few people laughed at the joke.
Then
Pranab Kaku stood up and thanked everyone for coming. He was relaxed from
alcohol, his once wiry body beginning to thicken. He started to talk
sentimentally about his early days in Cambridge,
and then suddenly he recounted the story of meeting me and my mother for the
first time, telling the guests about how he had followed us that afternoon. The
people who did not know us laughed, amused by the description of the encounter,
and by Pranab Kaku’s desperation. He walked around the room to where my mother
was sitting and draped a lanky arm around her shoulder, forcing her, for a
brief moment, to stand up. “This woman,” he declared, pulling her close to his
side, “this woman hosted my first real Thanksgiving in America. It might have been an
afternoon in May, but that first meal at Boudi’s table was Thanksgiving to me.
If it weren’t for that meal, I would have gone back to Calcutta.” My
mother looked away, embarrassed. She was thirty-eight, already going gray, and
she looked closer to my father’s age than to Pranab Kaku’s; regardless of his
waistline, he retained his handsome, carefree looks. Pranab Kaku went back to
his place at the head of the table, next to Deborah, and concluded, “And if
that had been the case I’d have never met you, my darling,” and he kissed her
on the mouth in front of everyone, to much applause, as if it were their
wedding day all over again.
After
the turkey, smaller forks were distributed and orders were taken for three
different kinds of pie, written on small pads by Deborah’s sisters, as if they
were waitresses. After dessert, the dogs needed to go out, and Pranab Kaku
volunteered to take them. “How about a walk on the beach?” he suggested, and
Deborah’s side of the family agreed that that was an excellent idea. None of
the Bengalis wanted to go, preferring to sit with their tea and cluster
together, at last, at one end of the room, speaking freely after the forced
chitchat with the Americans during the meal. Matty came over and sat in the
chair beside me that was now empty, encouraging me to join the walk. When I
hesitated, pointing to my inappropriate clothes and shoes but also aware of my
mother’s silent fury at the sight of us together, he said, “I’m sure Deb can
lend you something.” So I went upstairs, where Deborah gave me a pair of her
jeans and a thick sweater and some sneakers, so that I looked like her and her
sisters.
She
sat on the edge of her bed, watching me change, as if we were girlfriends, and
she asked if I had a boyfriend. When I told her no, she said, “Matty thinks
you’re cute.”
“He
told you?”
“No,
but I can tell.”
As
I walked back downstairs, emboldened by this information, in the jeans I’d had
to roll up and in which I felt finally like myself, I noticed my mother lift
her eyes from her teacup and stare at me, but she said nothing, and off I went,
with Pranab Kaku and his dogs and his in-laws, along a road and then down some
steep wooden steps to the water. Deborah and one of her sisters stayed behind,
to begin the cleanup and see to the needs of those who remained. Initially, we
all walked together, in a single row across the sand, but then I noticed Matty
hanging back, and so the two of us trailed behind, the distance between us and
the others increasing. We began flirting, talking of things I no longer
remember, and eventually we wandered into a rocky inlet and Matty fished a
joint out of his pocket. We turned our backs to the wind and smoked it, our
cold fingers touching in the process, our lips pressed to the same damp section
of the rolling paper. At first I didn’t feel any effect, but then, listening to
him talk about the band he was in, I was aware that his voice sounded miles away,
and that I had the urge to laugh, even though what he was saying was not
terribly funny. It felt as if we were apart from the group for hours, but when
we wandered back to the sand we could still see them, walking out onto a
promontory to watch the sun set.
It
was dark by the time we all headed back to the house, and I dreaded seeing my
parents while I was still high. But when we got there Deborah told me that my
parents, feeling tired, had left, agreeing to let someone drive me home later.
A fire had been lit and I was told to relax and have more pie as the leftovers
were put away and the living room slowly put back in order. Of course, it was
Matty who drove me home, and sitting in my parents’ driveway I kissed him, at
once thrilled and terrified that my mother might walk onto the lawn in her
nightgown and discover us. I gave Matty my phone number, and for a few weeks I
thought of him constantly, and hoped foolishly that he would call.
---
In
the end, my mother was right, and fourteen years after that Thanksgiving, after twenty-three years of marriage,
Pranab Kaku and Deborah got divorced. It was he who had strayed, falling in
love with a married Bengali woman, destroying two families in the process. The
other woman was someone my parents knew, though not very well. Deborah was in
her forties by then, Bonny and Sara away at college. In her shock and grief, it
was my mother whom Deborah turned to, calling and weeping into the phone.
Somehow, through all the years, she had continued to regard us as quasi in-laws,
sending flowers when my grandparents died and giving me a compact edition of
the O.E.D. as a college-graduation present. “You knew him so well. How could he
do something like this?” Deborah asked my mother. And then, “Did you know
anything about it?” My mother answered truthfully that she did not. Their
hearts had been broken by the same man, only my mother’s had long ago mended,
and in an odd way, as my parents approached their old age, she and my father
had grown fond of each other, out of habit if nothing else. I believe my
absence from the house, once I left for college, had something to do with this,
because over the years, when I visited, I noticed a warmth between my parents
that had not been there before, a quiet teasing, a solidarity, a concern when
one of them fell ill. My mother and I had also made peace; she had accepted the
fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well. Slowly, she
accepted that I dated one American man, and then another, and then yet another,
that I slept with them, and even that I lived with one though we were not
married. She welcomed my boyfriends into our home and when things didn’t work
out she told me I would find someone better. After years of being idle, she
decided, when she turned fifty, to get a degree in library science at a nearby
university.
On
the phone, Deborah admitted something that surprised my mother: that all these
years she had felt hopelessly shut out of a part of Pranab Kaku’s life. “I was
so horribly jealous of you back then, for knowing him, understanding him in a
way I never could. He turned his back on his family, on all of you, really, but
I still felt threatened. I could never get over that.” She told my mother that
she had tried, for years, to get Pranab Kaku to reconcile with his parents, and
that she had also encouraged him to maintain ties with other Bengalis, but he
had resisted. It had been Deborah’s idea to invite us to their Thanksgiving;
ironically, the other woman had been there, too. “I hope you don’t blame me for
taking him away from your lives, Boudi. I always worried that you did.”
My
mother assured Deborah that she blamed her for nothing. She confessed nothing
to Deborah about her own jealousy of decades before, only that she was sorry
for what had happened, that it was a sad and terrible thing for their family.
She did not tell Deborah that a few weeks after Pranab Kaku’s wedding, while I
was at a Girl Scout meeting and my father was at work, she had gone through the
house, gathering up all the safety pins that lurked in drawers and tins, and
adding them to the few fastened to her bracelets. When she’d found enough, she
pinned them to her sari one by one, attaching the front piece to the layer of
material underneath, so that no one would be able to pull the garment off her
body. Then she took a can of lighter fluid and a box of kitchen matches and
stepped outside, into our chilly backyard, which was full of leaves needing to
be raked. Over her sari she was wearing a knee-length lilac trench coat, and to
any neighbor she must have looked as though she’d simply stepped out for some
fresh air. She opened up the coat and removed the tip from the can of lighter
fluid and doused herself, then buttoned and belted the coat. She walked over to
the garbage barrel behind our house and disposed of the fluid, then returned to
the middle of the yard with the box of matches in her coat pocket. For nearly
an hour she stood there, looking at our house, trying to work up the courage to
strike a match. It was not I who saved her, or my father, but our next-door
neighbor, Mrs. Holcomb, with whom my mother had never been particularly
friendly. She came out to rake the leaves in her yard, calling out to my mother
and remarking how beautiful the sunset was. “I see you’ve been admiring it for
a while now,” she said. My mother agreed, and then she went back into the
house. By the time my father and I came home in the early evening, she was in
the kitchen boiling rice for our dinner, as if it were any other day.
My
mother told Deborah none of this. It was to me that she confessed, after my own
heart was broken by a man I’d hoped to marry.
THE END
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