Inheritance (2 page)

“How are you feeling? Are you well? Do you have a temperature?” she asked.

A dozen times a day, she questioned me about my health. She made up careful menus of non-fried foods for me and sent back reports to Madras. (Vasanti, the cook, felt sorry for me and sometimes sneaked outlawed savories and buttery pooris to my plate.) Great-uncle, annoyed at the disturbance to his lesson, rose from the table, leaving me with unlearned verbs. My grandmother brushed crumbs from the table.

“Don’t believe his nonsense, Sonil-ma,” she said. “He doesn’t know a word of Italian.”

Vasanti was going into town for groceries, a plastic bag from Paris, a relic from my great-uncle, in her hand. She met my mother on her way to hang her wet saris, a tangle of color, on the terraced roof.

“Do you want anything from the shops?” asked Vasanti.

“A jar of Pond’s—a large one,” replied my mother.

“And something for your daughter?” asked Vasanti who thought she was being diplomatic. “Should I buy her something?”

My mother pretended not to hear. Sometimes I wanted to scream, to shout out loud,
I AM YOUR DAUGHTER
,
TALK TO ME
! I wanted to force her to regard me, to stop pretending I didn’t exist, to stop denying my part in her life. I could accept her madness, but not her hatred. If all her acts could be explained away by her madness, then I was safe, because she was not responsible for her actions. To ask why she didn’t want to raise me herself, to wonder why she continued to live at my grandmother’s house then became moot. Vasanti left by the back door, and my mother climbed the outer stairs. The milkman had come at dawn to deliver our milk. I thought of his bicycle clattering away on the pavement and began to dream of going away, of leaving everyone behind. I wanted to travel fast.

Feeling the pull of the afternoon, my grandmother lay down on the couch to read the mail. There was a letter from my sister Ramani full of house-talk and news of her children. Both of my sisters were pregnant again and neither planned to invite our mother to her baby’s first birthday celebration. They liked her even less than I did. I pressed my grandmother’s feet and told her my dreams.
Because I had nothing else to do but read while I was sick, I pulled first marks in all the school exams. In the room I shared with two cousins in Madras, I’d tacked up a picture of an American college from a catalogue a teacher had once given me. If I continued to do well, and if I took a qualifying exam in Delhi, I told myself I could go to Radcliffe.

“What is that place?” asked my grandmother.

“Do you know
Love Story
?
Love Story
took place there,” I said.

My grandmother in her wisdom glasses looked at the wall a long time before replying.

“I don’t think I approve of that sort of life, Sonil,” she said.

The sun had calmed for a moment, but it would be back, fierce as ever. The village herders brought back the indifferent cows from pasture. Their thin bodies passed like ghosts behind the gate. The sweets seller made his late rounds while the iron man clattered his cart down the street. My grandmother was in the back garden, watering the plants. I rocked myself on the veranda swing, sucking experimentally on the cigarette butts my great-uncle had left behind. While I tried to compose a letter to my aunts, I could pick out from the street the voice of the man who sold pinwheels and silver ribbons to children.

Two of my aunts raised me, both sisters of my
mother’s, Aunt Leila and Aunt Shalani. Aunt Leila was thin and Aunt Shalani even thinner. They were warmhearted, the two of them, indulgent with their riches. Their husbands, Uncle Petrov and Uncle Dan, were in Abu Dhabi, oil investors by night, engineers by day. They were Russian and Irish; my mother wasn’t the only one in her family to look outside the island or India for marriage. Uncle Petrov had grown up in North India and met Aunt Leila at a plant bazaar, an Indo-Russo event of cultural exchange. Uncle Dan had been schooled in Scotland and met Aunt Shalani at the home of his parents, who lived in Mysore. They married and had no children, while Aunt Leila had four. The two uncles decided to try their luck in the Middle East when I was ten and set off from India. They stayed overseas and sent home money. If my aunts missed their husbands, they didn’t show it, having decided to merge their two households and visit Abu Dhabi twice a year. Twice a year, the uncles visited, so their marriages were seasonally conjugal, an arrangement that suited all. My favorite cousin, Jani, was looked after by my grandfather’s sister (on my mother’s side) in Delhi, but she visited us as well.

“So you smoke.”

It was my mother. She seated herself on the swing, tucking her legs under her sari. I could smell a mixture of perfume and hard-milled soap from her hands. The first
button on her blouse was undone, exposing flesh I was carefully trying not to look at. Casually, I offered her a butt, but she grasped my other hand instead.

“Look,” she said, uncurling my fingers. She traced the lines around my thumb, the arch of my palm. “This is the heart line, this is the psychic cross, this is the mount of Venus,” she said, running her fingers lightly across the marks on my palm. She placed her hand next to mine, stretching it open like a flower. “They’re alike,” she said. “We could be twins.”

I was too astonished to say anything. She dropped my hand and began to walk back to the roof, leaving my hands hard fists, her face broken with laughter.

“No, I won’t be like you!” I shouted.

I would not live on the edge of things as she did, I thought, a strange, bizarre, unnatural creature, a scornful observer. I resolved to dress in sober clothes, to wear my hair tight behind my ears, and to grow old and dignified in spite of my mother.

The sun was dazzling, touching everything with light. The roses were so bright, they seemed to tremble with color, and, dully, I could make out the sound of the monkeys which never shut up. A clatter of pebbles sounded from the roof. Looking up, I saw my mother standing straight as a bony tree against that vivid sky. With her mocking eyes upon me, she began to dance with broad steps, waving a sun-dried sari around her head. I was arrested by the sight.

Two

I was sunburnt by my mother. She was the incandescent light in my life, illuminating my days with an anger that tempted me to kick at rocks and stones. If I saw her face, my teeth ached with rage. Often she was inactive, a model of repose, an Indian odalisque, luxuriously lazy. Unlike my grandmother, who gardened incessantly, or even my great-uncle, who shaped pieces of wood to build fantastic toy cities, my mother did nothing. She lay on a chair, drying her hair, occasionally smoothing sunscreen onto her face and hands. Never did she gaze at me with curiosity as I did at her. I schemed to get her attention.

I wanted to pull her hair, tug at her ears as babies did, I wanted to cry for milk. At night, she became a darkened moon, and I was left cold. Sometimes the loneliness was so great I crept into my grandmother’s bed
where she held me warmly. I buried my face in my grandmother’s sari and stared at the night through the mosquito netting. I’d awaken cranky.

Once, while my mother slept at noon in the front room, I snuck into her bedroom. Her bed was swathed under netting, a silk coverlet stretched tight across its frame. Her pillows were hard, filled with feathers tightly packed, her sheets cool. Her dresser held boxes of lacquer and wood, containing jewelry. I found a silver ring with a peace sign on it, a hippie ornament, and wondered if my father had given it to her. I searched the drawers for letters but found none. Her underwear was plain, her blouses neatly stacked. I felt a little ill snooping through her clothes, so I shut the drawers. A few sticks of incense were stuck into a burner, and a small painting of a nature view was propped in a corner. It was mostly green and yellow, fields seen through a window. In the distance, mountains. Did she dream over this picture, long to flee through the grass, across the hill? Who painted it for her? No signature. I turned to her vanity, a low table topped by an ancient, heavy mirror. Her emollients were arranged in bottles and jars: face cream, neck cream, eye cream. Softeners for the hands. Cucumber water for cooling down. Rose essence for fragrance. A nearly empty bottle of foreign perfume. For whom did she beautify herself? Whom did she meet in secret on those occasions when she left the house? Whose arms held her?

I looked into her mirror, seeing what features I had from her. Eyes perhaps, a bit of the nose. But her chin was sharp where mine was soft. My cheeks were still full, baby cheeks, the kind people like to pinch and kiss. Where my mother was beauty, I was ugly, a changeling child, a half-breed, a mistake. Feeling destructive, I unscrewed her perfume bottle, so the perfume would vanish into the heat. I wanted to pierce a hole into her, to drain her smugness, her indifference. I wanted to go to sleep and awaken to discover a loving mother in her place, one who tied ribbons in my hair, who swept me into her arms. I wanted to be praised, boasted of, scolded a little. But I was stuck with a mother who paid more attention to her body than to her daughters.

My sisters had a different attitude. But they were older than I, and had their own families to think of. They pretended my mother didn’t exist, content to bask in the glow of my aunts or cousins, their husbands and children. They did not miss my mother, they had erased her from their lives. She was an embarrassment, a thought flicked away. But she consumed me. I felt I was only half, that she took my soul somehow, that she kept it from me. My identity was lost, and I did not know who I was. She named me Sonil but gave me nothing else.

Perhaps something had happened to her, perhaps something so dreadful that her heart had iced overnight. Perhaps a catastrophe such as I could not comprehend had stolen her kindness or her concern and replaced it
with bitterness. My mother’s mystery—I would find its secret. I would plumb her history, worm out the details, free her past to learn what had happened to her. My Aunt Shalani had a friend whose daughter was struck by a car. It left her with a personality disorder. Perhaps my mother mistakenly wandered into a minefield and set off an old explosive, but there had not been a war on Pi for a hundred years. Even the Freedom Movement was on paper—no salt marches, no fasts, no brother killing. Gandhi had no need to visit the island, for it didn’t need him; like a small tug following a ship, it relied on the back waves to lift it into a new era; it expended no energy of its own. Once, a militant group from Sri Lanka had landed on these shores to stir up funds and sympathy, but the apathy with which they met led the militants to retreat. There is a saying: For the future, invest in Indian computers; to write with a quill, come to Pi.

But what accident had my mother met with, to leave her so cruel and unfulfilled a woman? What ate her stomach, to leave it so lean and hard? I would have to work hard to find her truth.

They say she tried to take her life once. She was in a strange city, somewhere in the north, and she tried to fling herself from a window. She carried stones in her hands to weigh herself down, thinking perhaps that she might fly up instead. But as she placed her foot on the
air, to test its nothingness, someone came into the room and screamed. It could have gone either way; my mother could have continued her action and hurtled to the ground. And with her stones, she would have fallen heavily onto the pavement. But the scream—I think it was a maidservant’s—brought her to her senses, and, embarrassed, she withdrew her suicidal foot. The maidservant would not be bribed, however, and my mother returned home under the supervision of some family elders. I heard the story by chance, listening to servants’ talk, being where I shouldn’t have been.

Her despair must have been great, her marriage unhappy. This was when she had only two children. But the scream had saved her and, as a consequence, me. I think she tried to slash her wrists later. I know one of our relatives did, and I have always thought it was my mother. Who else could be so selfish? I did not care much to cast my mother as a great tragedienne. Thinking of my grandmother only made me think my mother was selfish. Selfish more than cowardly. Wanting her way. Marrying whomever she pleased, seeing however many men she pleased. For my mother was wanton with her affections and gave herself freely to a variety of lovers. I don’t think she gave her heart away to my father, for she still toyed with many. Like a cat with a ball of yarn, she’d play with one, then another, and then, tiring of them, slink back
home to sup on milk. I believed I’d catch her licking her lips; I believed I could read her thoughts.

What proof did I have of my mother’s indiscretions? I never saw the men; I might have hit them if I had. Only the whispers, the stares, the laughs, indicated her wantonness, her open desires. Her late hours, her constant slipping away from the house and returning to sleep for hours. The emollients on her dresser, the lilt of her hips as she walked. My grandmother said nothing, it was out of her hands. Perhaps she argued with my mother when I wasn’t around. I sometimes saw my mother with multiple arms and multiple breasts, like the bizarre temple paintings one sees in remote villages, the kind that other children’s mothers hurriedly wave their babies away from. A monster of carnal desire, a rakshasha like the one who tried to seduce Rama and Lakmana. A sister of Ravana and a would-be seductress who got her nose chopped off. Except that my mother never had her face disfigured; she always remained the victor. She disgusted me, yet I couldn’t ignore her. I wanted to find out what part of her was me.