The Abundance: A Novel Read online

  This is my room now. I have displaced him for good, haven’t I? He did eternal things in here. I have turned it into a clock tower with no time left. There it is, on the nightstand, just plugged in—my merely mortal arithmetic, blinking twelve.

  * * *

  Abhi’s mother grew immense in her last days. We bought a flat in Ahmedabad. It was important, to him and to the family (and maybe, had she been conscious then, to her), that she stay in his house. “My table, my house” was a fixation on Abhi’s side of the family, too. Wherever we kept our luggage was the most privileged house, but we also honored the politics of meals, and in which order we visited families. A get-together at some common venue wouldn’t do. The point wasn’t to meet everyone at once; the point was to show respect by coming and eating. We had to plan our meals to make sure we had eaten at every elder relative’s house before we left, ticking names off a mental checklist. The code also required that Abhi’s mother be cared for at her eldest son’s house. Our house in America was out of the question at this late stage. Our mothers began dying slowly at the same time. I stayed with my mother while Abhi brought his to the newly purchased flat. He and the most recent host brother transported and installed her like a piece of furniture. There: it was official now, Abhi was keeping her. His roof, his bed.

  She could not thank him by then, near inanimate as she was. Inside her great girth hid a tiny girl-sized heart. Her coronaries were brittle, crooked, pinched in places. The deposits were everywhere: the arteries in her neck and belly, the big thumping aorta itself—her plumbing sparkled with calcium on the CT scan. Every so often, some fleck or chip would dislodge and swim to the tip of an artery. The spot of brain or heart just beyond, choked with blood, would smudge black. Little heart attacks, little periodic strokes; not enough to kill her. She lived months with a slight, marble-in-the-mouth slur to her speech. Later, her left arm and left leg turned to solid lead. Abhi’s father had died early, but his mother proved indestructible. Even after the sagging left face, the failing kidneys, the fingertips pricked for sugar readings; even after the horn-rimmed bifocals could not read the Gita; even after the incontinence, yellow on white, sarees drying as fast as they were sullied, pulled in off the balcony to swaddle a mummified parchment widow.

  This indestructibility was its own curse. At first her body malfunctioned in small humiliating ways, error messages from the bladder, eyes, joints. The major strokes came only later. During those first years, her memory stayed inviolate while her mind peered over the side and observed the machine below going glitchy with age. It was much the same with my own mother. Our families were alike in that: The men died at thirty-nine, at forty-four, at forty-six. The garlanded photographs showed black hair. The widows lived forever.

  It was not a bad life, at least not for Abhi’s mother, who had so many sons and stepsons—that is, so many daughters-in-law. She had been the patriarch’s second wife. The groom had plucked the gray from his mustache. The bride had just passed the nymph stage. Over seven years, she bore five sons, something that seems scarcely mammalian to me. No epidurals. Not even an Advil. Was she ever not pregnant? It is hard to imagine the Nehru-capped patriarch in the photograph grunting atop the wife still raw from the last child, splayed like an overripe orchid. But he did. The tally told the story.

  Abhi’s father had been just as prolific in his first marriage. The stepbrothers’ wives were a few years older than Abhi’s mother. (I remember being confused at our wedding—so many venerable old ladies, yet his mother ordered them about, tu, tu, tu, second-person familiar.) Their closeness in age made the rivalries meaner.

  The new matriarch, the stepsons, and their young wives all lived together in the massive house that Abhi’s grandfather had built. Bhola sahib, the father, had been a well-known judge. Even Abhi’s mother called her late husband Bhola sahib—sahib tacked on to the affectionate diminutive of Bholanath. It felt natural when the family said it, but was very odd when I thought about it. I couldn’t imagine an American family calling their father “Mister Bobby.”

  Bearing her husband so many male children earned Abhi’s mother respect, even reverence. Superstitions rose around her—aging aunts and new brides came to touch her feet. Success in this one thing implied wisdom in all. From her cot in an inside room, no men allowed, she suckled her many toddlers. She kept nursing, I was told, until the youngest was five and during this time progressively absolved herself of all other duties. Her cot became the headquarters of the household. Orders issued from the room, and wives hurried in at the swing of a handbell like chambermaids to the invalid queen. And a queen mother she was, thirty-one years old, all-powerful yet curiously helpless. She drank milk to produce milk—prodigious liters, claimed the whispers—and never got out of the habit.

  Who did this whispering? My sisters-in-law, behind their saree hems. Leaning close, they spoke in a whisper even when she wasn’t in the house or the city. I had some inkling, when they lowered their voices, how people must behave under tyranny: nowhere relaxed, always furtive. It wasn’t that they were afraid of their husbands overhearing; they told me nothing they hadn’t yelled in an argument. It was she whom they feared even in her absence.

  Hearing of Abhi’s mother from Abhi, though, I could barely reconcile the two versions. To hear him talk, she was left a widow in a house full of grown stepsons and their wives. She was a minority in that house once her reason for being there—Abhi’s father—was gone. And she had her boys; she feared how they would be treated, these vulnerable sons of the second wife. The house, once the wives started bearing children, soon had a schoolyard crowdedness. Struggles for space, struggles for resources. The men were well educated, well off, every stepson English-speaking—but the old village cruelty against the widow was only a generation back.

  So she fought from the first day of her widowhood, demanding the larger, upstairs rooms for her sons. Her milk sufficed only for the two youngest; so, for her three elder sons, she demanded glass after glass, calling the boys into her room and bidding them drink. Her behavior seemed paranoid, but Abhi told me, very earnestly, that the wives diluted the milk, made their rotlis smaller, ladled them lukewarm dahl. The eldest stepson, whom Abhi called Motabhai, big brother, handled the running of the house, but she forced him to transfer two bank accounts to her name. The cash she withdrew she hid in three locations (known only to her sons, who were sworn to secrecy), and disbursed for bicycles, pencils, shoes—and expensive kite string on Uttarayan, so they could slice the kites of their cousins and stepbrothers. Abhi spoke of his mother tearfully, as if she were the Rani of Jhansi or some other warrior queen. Imagine her young, semiliterate, alone, he said. The wives would have made a housemaid of her, had she let them. But she hadn’t; she had fought; and in time she came to dominate the household. Decades later, Abhi said proudly, when real estate was being bought up all over the city, Motabhai—himself stooped and bald by then, six years older than she was—traveled from Rajkot to sit before her and ask her permission to sell.

  * * *

  Always implicit in the stories told to me by the brothers’ wives was unspoken resentment. As if every account of the old woman’s pettiness were prefaced with: Here’s another thing you’ll never have to put up with …

  I was insulated by distance, and the wives envied me for it. But I wasn’t totally insulated. Abhi’s mother had visited twice, both times in the eighties. Her second visit had coincided with an anomalously chilly Ohio May. Abhi knew she did not do well in the cold (it was chilly that May; it was never actually cold), so he bought her a ticket for the end of the month. Three costly, half-hour transatlantic phone calls had convinced her onto a plane. On her first visit, the overhead nozzle had kept up a hiss during her Frankfurt–Mumbai leg, and she had known neither how to shut it nor how to ask the stewardess. This time, she refused to fly Lufthansa and brought a scarf and two shawls against Air India’s air-conditioning.

  After tolerating the marathon flights, the putrid foil-covered navratan korma,
and the lines in Customs, she made it to her son’s city—and discovered the weather to be fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit with a strong breeze from the northeast. She experienced the temperature for about twenty feet, from the airport’s sliding glass doors to the minivan. Yet the “ice,” apparently, had gotten “in her bones”—a kind of psychological flash-freezing, irreversible. The complaint of cold lingered the whole trip. She kept her shawls around her through June’s crafts fair and July’s firecrackers, and at Niagara Falls in August. She scowled at Abhi’s Nikon. In the van, we couldn’t turn on the AC and we couldn’t open the windows. When Ronak and Mala complained, we scolded them in Gujarati and dabbed our sweat in silence. The cold hadn’t left her bones until she was back in India.

  As soon as Abhi would leave for work, I saw what the wives were talking about. Her tea wasn’t sweet enough, so I added sugar. She would take a slow slurp, fingers splayed under the saucer. Now the tea wasn’t strong enough. I must make it again. A remark about Ronak’s fingernails, about Mala’s inability to sit still. Why didn’t the children speak Gujarati? Was that normal here?

  Her towel upstairs was leaving an itch on her. I offered her a fresh one, but no, there was soap “dried into the cloth”—I must soak the towel by hand in a bucket of warm water, and dunk and wring it by hand and let it dry outside, naturally. By hand, she made sure to repeat it, by hand, and added that the “girl” shouldn’t do it. I should do it myself.

  “What girl, Ba? Do you mean little Mala?”

  Her face crinkled irritably. “The girl who comes to do the housework, of course.”

  “We don’t have a girl for that. I do the housework myself.”

  “Even the dishes? Even mopping the floor?”

  “Everything.”

  This puzzled Abhi’s mother for some time. She had been expecting a “girl” to show up and do a couple of hours of housework, as in every home she’d lived in, and she had wanted to inflict some inconvenience on me. Maybe she expected two girl servants; this was America, after all, and her doctor son possessed infinite doctor wealth. I think she assumed I laid about as idle as a begum. Did her daughters-in-law assume that, too? When they had the luxury of ordering a maidservant?

  I don’t think she believed me until after lunch, when it became evident there were no slums to supply us a silent dark girl, no one to join her hands at a Happy Diwali coin from the mistress, no one who was going to wash my dishes or mop up the body lotion puddled—poured?—on the bathroom tiles.

  My mother-in-law’s weren’t the assumptions of India’s rich, either. The four sons who had stayed in India all drove Bajaj scooters to work. They were well-off but not wealthy. Assistant manager at a bank, two electrical engineers with the Gujarat Electrical Board, and a chemical engineer who worked for a fertilizer company. A certain family stinginess, inherited from their mother, kept their flats modest. Still, they were part of upper India, which as years went by only grew larger. Not the idle rich: the idle middle class. Their rupee went as far in the slums as our dollar went in the cities. On my last visit to India, the wives had stopped making rotlis; each one had a woman in her kitchen, a bai with thinly muscular arms who would steamroll a stack in fifteen minutes and leave. This bai was different from the one who made the rest of the meal. While the cooking took place, the wives watched television shows.

  Those three summer months when I was in her power, she did her best to inconvenience me, and I was dutifully inconvenienced. Maybe it didn’t feel like persecution because I knew it had an end. I wasn’t her prisoner; I was being granted a tour of the prison, trying on the black stripes, having my picture taken in Alcatraz.

  No matter how often I showed her what to do, she just would not drop her dirty underclothes in the hamper I had placed in her room. She draped them on the bar in the bathroom, next to the hand towel. There were wet footprints from her squatting on the toilet seat, water everywhere, the floor mat wet under the unwary sock. The toilet paper roll, thick and never used, sat swollen on the holder thanks to her old-country splashing.

  More than once she had me make a trip to the Indian grocery for some emergent need like incense or Parle-G. Sometimes I thought to myself, Here’s a story I can tell. I was pleased to have some stories of my own now—on my next visit, I could countercomplain. Once, I finished making rotlis, no dough left, the top ones cooling, the bottom ones still warm, the perfect time to call everyone, and she—who had watched me butter and stack them—declared she must have ghee on hers. I had to prepare another fistful of dough just for her, another three rotlis. Clicking the gas on again I thought, with detached amusement, So this is why they hate her.

  Abhi knew his mother’s tendencies well enough, and he monitored me for signs of conflict: the undue pause after asking him how his day had been, a refusal to sit in the same room, extralong we-need-to-talk eye contact. At night, he would ask me for a report. He didn’t want to hear how she had done; he wanted to hear how I had done. Just to see, I floated a complaint. Sure enough, he didn’t offer to say anything to her. Instead he offered pleas for tolerance on my end. They came out all at once (he had been storing them up, I suspect): it’s only a short time now; she is used to living a certain way; I’ll make it up to you after she’s gone; she’s getting old; it’s an adjustment period; she treats the other wives far worse. And then the discussion ender, when I persisted: “Don’t forget, this is my mother you’re talking about. Okay? Enough.”

  I began to think of her, by the conclusion of that stay, not as a mother at all or even as an elder, but as a child. This was two decades before the strokes threw her back, physically, even farther—the inability to roll over or sit up, the drooling, the need to be wiped. Before she turned into an infant, I saw her for the child she was. Not evil, not cruel. Just bratty. Wanting attention and willing to make a mess to get it.

  She issued her demands, but what she wanted had nothing to do with her daughter-in-law, although extracting deference carried its own pleasure. More than anything, she wanted constant demonstrations of her son’s bond to her. By demanding more and more from the wife, she proved something to herself about her son: I can go this far, and he still won’t challenge me. I came first, and I remain first. This is what struck me as most childish, the need for proof.

  * * *

  Abhi took care of her, but he wasn’t present for the end itself. As we boarded the plane to leave India, he told me he knew it would happen soon, when he wasn’t at her side. He couldn’t guess how soon.

  The phone call came while our bags, freshly unzipped, still made the bedroom smell of India. Four forty-two AM, the second night after our return. He knew the exact time; jet lag insomnia and the prospect of morning rounds the next day kept him aware of each minute. It was as if he had been waiting for the call. He was shaking his head, he told me, knowing the news even before he brought the receiver to his ear.

  His brothers, all in the eldest brother’s house, crowded around the green rotary phone. I could visualize the side table, the betel nut partly shaved in its silver tray, the niece’s Stardust facedown on the couch arm. The connection was a good one, but both sides yelled, partly from habit, partly from the logic of the international call, longer distance, louder voice. In our cavernously dark house with its empty rooms, Abhi yelled Hullo, hullo, hullo into every pause and crackle. His yelling and their yelling kept back the grief, like torches waved at a feral animal. I hurried downstairs and picked up the kitchen handset so I could hear, too. Abhi’s brothers were talking in the background, saying, Tell him he doesn’t have to come. Abhi insisted he would. They all heard him and insisted he shouldn’t, an almost panicked shouting at the phone—the journey was too exhausting, he would fall ill, it was too expensive, how would he get more days off? Abhi tried to speak into this stock-exchange cacophony but resorted again to a hullo, hullo, as if the voices were interference and he needed to reestablish the connection. His eldest brother, who must have calmed the others with a hand gesture, reminded Abhi that it was su
mmer. The rites were scheduled for the same day.

  There was no way he could make it in time. They would be out of their white kameezes and the ritual tilaks would be washed off their foreheads. I was upstairs again by this time, my arm around Abhi. He nodded at the impossibility and said nothing, his head on one hand, in grief or exhaustion. The other end of the line erupted in hullo, hullo, hullo. Abhi had dropped the phone and started shaking under my touch. His brothers hung up, assuming the line was dead.

  PART THREE

  SEEDTIME

  It’s not that there aren’t fights. There are. They happen unexpectedly. Put me and Mala together for long enough, something will trigger it. I do not mind the arguments at first. They are like a new pain that takes the mind off the old pain. A fight with Mala is worth being able to forget, for a time, that I am Mala’s dying mother. This one is about Amber. All I do is mention that she called. Maybe there is too much praise in my tone.

  Mala doesn’t look up from her chopping. “Amber called, hm? What did she say?”

  “She was just checking on me. She had the boys get on and talk to me one by one.” I smile. “You should have heard Raj. Have you heard him sing his songs? Amber sent us a video clip of him singing ‘Old King Cole.’”

  Mala looks up. “Really? When was that?”

  “Just this week. Tuesday.”