The Abundance: A Novel Page 16

  “There is a fan in the basement,” I say.

  “Oh, I’m fine. This is nothing.”

  “It gets hotter when you have so many flames going. But it goes quicker.”

  She blows upward through the corner of her mouth, and her hair skips off her forehead. “I know. How did women cook in India?”

  “It could get bad in the summer. But there you don’t notice so much.”

  “No?”

  I shrug. “You can get used to something there that you could not bear here.”

  “How about when you’ve been here a while, and go back?”

  “You cannot bear it anymore.”

  “I bet,” she says. “Like the way men treat us.”

  “Who has treated us badly? No one ever treated us badly. You were a princess when we would take you there.”

  “I mean, in general. The way men treat women. Having to cover your face and all that stuff.”

  “It was just the way. Now no one covers their face. And it is no nicer of men here to expect women to show their bodies off.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.” She stirs the dahl. A thumb’s length of dark cinnamon stick swims to the surface in the ladle’s wake before going under again. “But what about cooking?”

  “No one cooks now unless they want to. They all have servants and Maggi noodles there.”

  “But in the old days. It’s not just hot. It’s lonely. If I didn’t have you here, I’m pretty sure I’d be lonely.”

  Is she thinking of the years I stood at this gas range, the children upstairs or at practice, Abhi in his study? I was never lonely, I want to tell her. I should have been, but I never was. She is still reflecting aloud as she taps the ladle and sets it in the bowl.

  “And having to do this for the men every day. No frozen meals, no eating out tonight because you’re tired or don’t feel like cooking. That’s how it used to be. It’s servitude, is what it is.”

  I feel a flush creeping up my face. “It may have been that way for some. But I know for a fact that it can be different.”

  She looks up in alarm. “Wait, Mom—you know I’m not talking about you, right? Or us? I’m generalizing. And you’re right, I shouldn’t generalize like that.”

  “It can be the opposite. Complete opposite. When I cook, I am the giver. The husband, the son—he comes to you with a bare plate. All empty inside. The man is the receiver.”

  Mala raises an eyebrow; she has decided against backing down. “Or the taker. Giver and taker.”

  “Only if it is not a gift.”

  “If you have to give something, day after day, it’s hardly a gift anymore.”

  “If there is love, then it is a gift.”

  “Why can’t we call it what it is? You can do a chore with love. You can do that chore while full of love for your family.”

  “It is not a chore.”

  “I’m not saying chore in the bad sense. I’m saying it literally. A routine thing you have to do.”

  “Do you want to stop? Do you want to go rest? I can finish this.”

  “Mom, please. That’s not what I meant.”

  “This is play for my left hand!” I have translated verbatim, in my rising anger, an old Indian expression I would have used if I were speaking Gujarati. It sounds awkward. I switch into Gujarati, and I am suddenly freer. “I can finish this. You can go upstairs.”

  My shift to Gujarati is an escalation. Mala knows it well. I do not want to shout. In another time, before my illness, she herself would have begun to shout. But I am already exhausted by my indignation, and she drops to one knee beside my chair and presses her lips to my hand. “Forget I said that, Mom. Forget the whole thing. I’m sorry.” Dying is a kind of royalty. I stroke her cheek. She waits, looking up at my face in the stovetop light. The pressure cooker whistles, and she rises.

  * * *

  It had gone through my mind when I was taking care of my mother. It must be going through Mala’s. I need to do this, or I am going to feel guilty later. That is what it is like for us good daughters. Not just guilt over the past, but fear of future guilt. Daughterhood has one natural resource, and that is guilt. Hourglass sand blows over events and words and, a million years later, there are guilt deposits, black guilt anywhere you sink a drill. So much burning out of something buried so long.

  Old quarrels; forget them. But there are new quarrels, too, things Mala asks that she wouldn’t if she didn’t feel newly close to me. One afternoon, without preamble, she pauses a carrot on the slope of the grater. By now it bears a nib like a calligraphy pen’s.

  “Why did you give it up?”

  She starts grating the carrot again, then lifts the grater to check the pile of shreds below.

  “Give up what?” I ask.

  “Medicine.”

  I swallow. This is not something I expected. Does she know it still hurts? Decades, and it still makes me flush with shame. “They did not let me past the exam,” I say quietly. (They did not let me past is far easier to say than I failed.)

  “You could have taken it again. After we’d grown up a little.”

  I shrug.

  “Was it Dad? Did he tell you not to?”

  I shake my head.

  “You shouldn’t have given up. You could have done it.”

  “I did other things.”

  “You’re brilliant. You’re just as smart as Dad.”

  “I did things.”

  “Well, cooking and cleaning. I mean—”

  “There is nothing wrong with cooking and cleaning.”

  “Don’t get mad. Please don’t get mad.”

  “I am not mad.”

  “Yes you are. Look at you. Mom.”

  “I am not mad. I am just saying there is nothing wrong with what I have done with my life.”

  “I wasn’t saying that either. I was just asking why.”

  “Why this why? Why does why matter?”

  “I’m sorry. This came out wrong.”

  “I am fine.”

  “I—I wanted you to know I think you’re brilliant.”

  I stare at her. Anger. I feel my healthiest in months during my anger. I forget everything. I actually feel strong. “You don’t think I’m brilliant, Mala.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  Anger helps me stride out of the kitchen—and abandons me on the carpet. I sit, instantly exhausted, on the couch. Mala turns off the gas and rinses her hands. She is helpless in the kitchen without me.

  I am in a sulk. I know I am in a childish irrational sulk, but I can’t help myself. I don’t like knowing she sees that old failure when she looks at me. I do not want my humiliation anywhere in her memory. How will she respect me? Respect, respect: I sound like Abhi fifteen years ago, always shouting at the mute children for respect. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. My heart knocks my ribs in the after-excitement. I felt shame and showed anger. I shouldn’t have done that. Part of me knows this one is my fault. But a bigger part of me wants to see if she will come apologize. That is childish, too. I wait. She comes. She sits next to me.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

  “I know you are thinking the question, Mala. What else do I have, other than cooking and cleaning? Ask me.”

  “You have plenty of other things. You’ve read more books than … than anyone I know. And the garden—”

  “What else do I have? Ask me.”

  “I don’t want to ask you that.”

  “Ask me.”

  She rubs her temples. “What else do you have?”

  “You.”

  She shakes her head. “You were really storing that up, weren’t you, Mom?”

  I feel out of control. I am pushing her to see if she will ignore my outburst and stay close. I want to pull out of this conversation and repair us. So I say, “Don’t talk to me right now. Go somewhere. Go,” but this makes me sound even angrier—like I don’t want her anywhere near, when really I want t
o protect her from the foulness inside me.

  She is still shaking her head. “God. I never knew you had so much anger.”

  “Me? I have anger?” My voice is not holding up. Fresh anger and fresh shame melt together in an old, recognizable sadness. But I am still talking. “You are the angry one. All the time. You are angry. At everyone.”

  Even my Gujarati has broken down. I cannot bear the touch of her arms around me, or the way she presses my sobbing to her as if I hadn’t been the first to argue. She feels guilt, maybe, that she brought this up. I wish a single question did not have the power to do this to me. I am overreacting. But my emotion is real and it measures what it measures. Mala murmurs as she holds me, and I want to be angry at how she dares put herself in this calm, consoling attitude after she has stirred me up this way. But I need her compassion as deeply as I need air. I wish it didn’t feel this good to be held by her. I wish my sickness hadn’t made me this dependent, even if she is my daughter. I want to be the compassionate one. I used to hold her during her crises. Her first C on a chemistry test. The meanness of other young girls, the sleepover that happened without her when she knew she was a topic of discussion. The time in medical school she totaled the Accord and staggered from the wreck marveling at her intact self and had the police drive her to her Histology final. Her despair at being single. I had consoled her, always, but now she is consoling me. I am grateful, and I am indignant. In time, as she kisses my scalp through my thinned hair, the gratitude overpowers everything else. I sit humbled in the embrace of my child. I nuzzle into her and go quiet, resisting nothing, drained. My cheek rests on her collarbone. My tears are on her neck.

  * * *

  Just when I settle into a new rhythm of days, I hear the click of luggage nubs against the hardwood. Sunday afternoon shines on blithely. The luggage comes downstairs, carried two pieces at a time. Then the handbags, the grandchildren’s cartoon-colorful backpacks, the bags with snacks and bottled waters. Time to go. These are the things the parents have been packing upstairs, both cell phones diligently charged from the same wall outlet, Saturday’s sunscreen-smelling clothes quarantined separately to wash at home. The departure has never left their minds. I am the only one who has gotten used to having them around. I grew shorter- and shorter-sighted all weekend, seeing no later than Saturday no matter how close Sunday approached. They got the next day’s boarding passes online while I was still promising the grandchildren Neapolitan and Cookies & Cream, “but only after dinner.”

  The grandchildren and I live exclusively in the present. Saturday is Saturday. Sunday morning is Sunday morning. So for us, zipped luggage descending the stairs is a surprise. The children cry. They don’t want to go home. They don’t want the weekend to be over. I wish I were young enough to do that; it’s what I feel, after all. But I am mature, so I nod and check the clock on the microwave; yes, it’s time, don’t be late.

  Flight or drive, it’s no use pleading. The times are there on the creased printout. Or else the drive’s first leg has to be coordinated with Vivek and Shivani’s after-lunch nap. The thinking is practical. The parents’ need to leave hastens their farewell hugs.

  Shivani is in her car seat. I tap the van window for a smile. I screen my temples against the tinted glass and make a face at Vivek. After the van pulls out, a window slides down so a hand can wave. The hand pulls in, the window slides up. All four profiles have turned toward home. Then the van is gone, but for a few beats afterward I am still waving. Abhi and I cross our arms and shuffle back into the house too big by two rooms again. Abhi turns on the television, but in vain. Not silent is not the same as full.

  I still take care of the mail. My daily expedition is to bring it indoors. I open and sort it and pay the utilities and credit card bills. Abhi insists he can do it all online, just a few clicks on the tablet he carries around the floors now, but I don’t want to let go of mailing our payments. The stamp may be a cracked bell, but up its edge is the word FOREVER. At some point during my overlong day, sealed indoors against the too-hot Ohio summer that quite recently was a too-cold Ohio spring, I pile the credit card solicitations and home improvement deals with the weekly SuperSaver circular; the utility and Amex bills with the bank and Scudder statements; the medical journals with the CME conference flyers: Alzheimer’s in Maui, Sleep Medicine in Tampa, Cerebrovascular Thrombolysis in sunny San Diego.

  I have a fourth category, for Abhi’s mathematics-related mail. For years there was nothing at all. For six months, it filled its own bin. Since then, the mail has petered off. Intermittently, Abhi gets envelopes from strangers in faraway universities. These are separate from the e-mails, of course, and their attachments. Because he is (or was) a fellow amateur, other amateurs tend to send Abhi copies of the Unified Field. I sort the occasional manila envelope from an obscure professor in Hungary or South Africa, addressed using small, closely packed capital letters. They never spell his name wrong.

  Four times in May, I noticed the thin envelopes that meant payment for publication. I held each to the window light and could make out a check. The fourth check was from the London Mathematical Society.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of good work recently, haven’t you, Abhi?” I asked him when he got home. “You’re getting papers published everywhere. London, too, I saw?”

  He nodded as he unlaced his shoes. “How was the day? Did you do okay?”

  “You aren’t telling me the good news anymore. You used to tell me every time you got something accepted.”

  “Don’t worry about those mailings.”

  “I still care. I still want to know if you are having more success, Abhi.”

  He slid one shoe over the heel, then the other. “Of course, I don’t doubt it. I’m just saying you can put it in a pile. I can take care of it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me such good things were happening?”

  He hooked a finger in his tie and loosened it. “It’s a very long process. It gets read, it goes to peer review, the professors take their time. It comes back, they read what the professors said about it … It takes time. That is work I did last year. They only got back to me recently.”

  “The London Mathematical Society, Abhi! Isn’t this a big thing?

  “Yes.”

  “When did they get back to you?” My voice, involuntarily, fell. “December?”

  “January.”

  “It wasn’t a good time.”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded celebrating. It might have cheered me up.”

  He shrugged. “It didn’t cheer me up.”

  “Well, now you can be cheerful, right?” I asked as if something had changed between January and June. As if things hadn’t gotten, in their own slow humiliating way, worse. “Abhi? Can’t we celebrate tonight?”

  His sunken eyes turned to me. He stood abruptly to change the mood.

  “How do you want to celebrate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can sit on the recliner together and watch Chupke Chupke again.”

  I smiled. My hands came up and clapped two noiseless claps. “Yes! Can we do that?”

  My smile didn’t make him smile. My shrunken face must have crinkled strangely and clashed with his memory of my smile. He looked away.

  “You don’t have to finish something, do you?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s been a long time since we last saw it. Let’s watch it tonight.”

  Having ice cream or sparkling grape juice to celebrate wouldn’t have worked, now that I neither hunger nor savor, so we saw the movie instead. We were rewatching all our old comedies, one a week, cycling through them a second time. I like going back to the old Hindi movies. Abhi is indifferent. He watches them to be with me. I know I am taking up his time, but by now it is a ritual. He catnaps on me, then works in his study into the early morning. I am not soft anymore, although I am his pillow. I make sure I laugh without shaking my shoulders. I stay very still from the neck down. My face, ghosted white
by the screen’s light, periodically tilts back, and my lips peel away from my teeth.

  * * *

  After Mala’s weeklong visit, I decide to let people know.

  It is a project. Abhi sits next to me holding the handset and an old-fashioned spiral-bound notebook where he has scrawled the numbers of our circle. I tell him we should only call family and let the news spread on its own, but he has more liberal notions of who deserves a call. Not just every family in India; not just the local friends with whom we had dinner parties and after-dinner card games. Our old, once-a-year friends in Tennessee and the Bay Area all, in his opinion, would do well to hear my voice. “They are going to call you anyway when they find out,” he says.

  “I know, so let them.”

  “Who knows how things will be two months, three months from now?”

  So that is the time frame he has in his mind. “Big news travels faster than that.”

  “But it doesn’t travel that fast uniformly,” Abhi says, waxing professorial as he does when he wishes to convince me. “People get left out. People get missed. These are our people.” He points at the book. “At least people like Dhimant bhai.”

  “We haven’t gone to Virginia in six years!”

  “I have the book out. This is the morning. Let’s just take care of everyone and get it over with. Then if you want to leave the phone off the hook for a while, fine.”

  “Why call Virginia?”

  “Let’s do the India calls and then see how we feel.”

  “Dhimant bhai is your friend. He is not my friend.”

  “Wait a minute. He is a family friend. He helped me in New York when I came here for the first time. I stayed in his apartment for two months.”

  “At least start with the India calls.”

  “If your friend Kalyani had this going on, imagine how you would feel finding out from some third party. Just over dinner at someone’s house…”

  “This is going to be more exhausting than you think.”

  He is already dialing the international code. “Let’s take it one call at a time.”

  “Who are you calling first?”

  This is a petty point, but he is dialing his own eldest brother, and I want the first India relative who knows to be my brother—even if only by minutes. Abhi aborts the call without arguing, licks his thumb, and flips to my brother’s number.