The Abundance: A Novel Page 2

  Abhi played off the joke and patted his stomach. “You’re right, she has reduced. She cooks so beautifully, I leave nothing for her!” Polite laughter gave me cover to get into the kitchen.

  Henna, Shailesh’s wife, followed me, offering to set the table. I wanted to be alone, like a wounded deer, I wanted my kitchen’s familiar niche. But with Henna there, I wouldn’t have the chance. Maybe this was for the best. No opportunity for despair. Having guests would keep me heating and ladling and stirring for a few days. I would have some continuity between my life before and my life from now on.

  Henna filled the pitcher tentatively, with skinny, delicate fingers, her wedding mehndi’s paisleys a faded red-orange, only the pads of the fingers still dark. The jostle of ice cubes put an absurd lump in my throat. The sound, for me, meant time to call everyone to dinner. I always brought the water out last. I liked to set it cold and dripping under the chandelier. I always told the children to drink water with their meals. Enough so they could taste the food, but not so much that it would fool their hunger.

  Most of the meal I had set out on the counter to cool. I had made masoor dahl—the amenable lentil, a cop-out. But in the deepest casserole dish I had something to impress them: stuffed breaded baby eggplants with yams, potatoes, onions, and even segments of banana cooked in the sleeve, the peels blackened and edibly soft. This was a dish our mothers used to cook in open-field fire pits when I was girl. That and the bhartha spiced with its own burning. You could hold an eggplant to a ring of natural gas, and the shiny skin would crinkle. But nothing flavors eggplant quite like red fire and wood.

  I observed myself emerging from my mood as I set everything to heat. You are getting everything ready, you are still functioning. Then I saw the stray pot on the dormant back burner, and I remembered immediately the dahi. I curdle mine the old way, seeding it from the last pot. I had left it out overnight to take on body and the right hint of sour. It had been perfect this morning. I had tasted it and made sure. Why, why hadn’t I moved it to the refrigerator? Distraction. I had skipped forward, in my mind, to the appointment. And now, hours later, there it was.

  I checked on Henna at the dining table, then hurriedly tested a spoonful. Too sour: first the pucker inside the cheeks, then the smart of it down the throat. Ruined. I slammed the lid on it as if it had a stench and hid it in the refrigerator.

  The meal needed something else for coolness. What else, what else? I remembered the mango pulp. I’d gotten three dented orange cans from Bharat Grocers last week. I hurried out to the garage where we kept them to chill. The door swung shut behind me but the garage light was still on. The can felt icy under my hand, its flat top coarsely dusty. I lifted it, and the garage light timed out. I was in utter darkness and silence but for the dripping minivan. Will it happen to me like that? I brought the cold can of summer sweetness against my stomach: sweet and orange and preserved forever. I shuddered. You will come to wish it happened like that.

  In the kitchen, I slid a drawer open and found the can opener. My hand shook as I clipped and pushed two triangles into the top. I realized I had forgotten to rinse the can. I went to the faucet and paused; Henna would see I had made the punctures before running water over the lid.

  “Which bowls should we use? These small glass ones?” she asked. I reached past her and picked up four bowls myself. I must have seemed annoyed. Henna backed away, eyes on the ground, pulled into herself like a touch-me-not. I handed her the bowls and wiped the punctured lid with my sleeve. The dust came off visibly on my cuff. The can had been out a long time. It had come from the grocer’s shelf dusty, too—who knew how long it had sat there, across from wet coriander in the glass cooler?

  Henna took the bowls with a small nod and hurried out of the kitchen. I had offended her. I had made her feel uncomfortable. I was in my kitchen, nowhere so powerful as here. Yet I did not feel in control.

  I told myself I had done this thousands of times by now. This is my empire. I turned the gas up a little, took out two large spoons, and stirred the pot on the front burner and the one on the back. A familiar crackle. These scents comforted me. Only grandchildren in my lap could have calmed me more. I eased back into my mastery. I opened the drawer where I kept my hot plates and my salt-and-pepper-shaker mitt. The hand I slid into it did not tremble.

  I press the lump on my forehead, exploring the pain. A hard knot of blood, nothing sinister. The sinister lumps are the ones you cannot feel, the ones that hide.

  We had sat on the bed until two in the morning the night of Henna and Shailesh’s visit, roughly the time it is now. My face hidden in Abhi’s neck, I had cried, wringing out the heart’s old rag. I was careful not to be too loud. The guest room shared a wall with ours.

  Abhi asked when and how we should tell Ronak and Mala. I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell them. They had their rhythms: morning alarm clocks, blue toothpaste for the children, granola in this bowl, Lucky Charms in the others, changing the children out of their pajamas, the commutes, the jobs, the microwave beeps at dinnertime, bedtime routines, that last hour padding around a quiet house, picking up toys, checking e-mail, paying bills, thumbing appointment reminders into the corkboard beside the fridge.

  And then, suddenly, this? It would throw off the finely balanced movement of their lives. Over every meal: I talked to Mom today. How’s Mom holding up? What did the oncologist say? How is she feeling? Is she in pain?… I did not want the spotlight of their concern. I imagined the phone calls between Mala and Ronak, the news dominating every conversation. The idea embarrassed me. I wanted them to talk about their week or the upcoming ski trip or Shivani’s new word or Nikhil’s report card. Not me. Not this.

  “But we have to tell them,” Abhi whispered. “This isn’t something we can keep a secret. We should tell India, too. Your brother may want to visit. We will cover his ticket.”

  I wiped my cheeks. I could breathe and speak again. “I want everyone to stay as they are.”

  Abhi shook his head.

  “Things will change for me. But things shouldn’t have to change for them. I want them to stay as they are.”

  “Things are going to change for all of us.”

  “I want them to stay happy.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “As long as they can.”

  “Yes. We both want that.” He gazed at the carpet, imagining, maybe, the act I was asking us to stage: three weeks’ pleasantries over the phone, and finally Mala’s Christmas visit, five days face to cheerful face. “You can’t not tell them. You can’t.”

  “I will. But later. Not while I am still strong. You saw. I cooked today. A full meal. Dahl, rice, rotli, shaak.”

  “Things change. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I am still strong, aren’t I?”

  “You are. But it’s okay to feel tired. It’s okay to rest.”

  “I don’t need to rest. You’ll see tomorrow. It will be like always, for now.”

  Abhi put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He looked up. “We have to tell the kids. I can’t hide this from them. Not even on the phone. It’s hard enough with guests.”

  “No. Please. Not yet. Mala is coming during Christmas week.”

  “You’ll tell her then? Face-to-face?”

  I thought ahead to her arrival. It felt good to do that. Only three weeks from now, attainable happiness. “I want to have one last time together, Abhi. Without this coloring everything.”

  “You want to hide it from her the whole stay?”

  “And I want Ronak here, too.”

  “You know he’s spending Christmas with Amber’s family.”

  “In Pittsburgh. It’s not far. They can spend Christmas there, but the next day they can come here. He has until the second off. He told me so.”

  “They celebrate Christmas in a way we don’t. It’s—it’s religious for them.”

  “They go to church on Christmas day. The day after, there aren’t any services. They can drive
here.”

  Abhi shook his head. “The only way to convince Ronak,” he said, “is to tell him why.”

  “We’ll both call him.”

  “When has he listened to me? He doesn’t pick up his phone when he sees it’s me.”

  “You call him and invite him. I will, too.”

  “You’re going to exhaust yourself getting ready for it. I know. This is no time for that kind of hard work.”

  I shook my head. “I have to get a few things.”

  “Give me a list.”

  “There are things only I’ll know how to get.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  I stood up. “You’re acting like I can’t walk. You’re acting like I’m already bedridden.”

  “All right. All right.”

  I could tell from his eyes he was afraid he had offended me. The last thing I wanted was for him to watch himself around me, or to swallow his benign Gujarati puns and jokes, to give up his weekend swims and his nightly retreats to the study. I didn’t want him to alter our routine as a couple, in however minor a detail. But he would, wouldn’t he? The change had already found its way between us.

  I stood and held his head and shoulders to my stomach, the way I had once, long ago, when I felt our first child kick.

  * * *

  The second pregnancy is supposed to be easier to carry and easier to drop, but that wasn’t the case for me. Ronak was easy. Mala kicked me awake in the last trimester. She took an eternity parting from me. In the end they had to cut me open and cut her from me.

  Mala, the second born, had been strangely fearless, unlike our expectations of a daughter. Pictures show her wild-eyed, shirtless, barefoot. Wild-haired, too—she pulled out her hair bands, unraveled the careful braids I gave her. You would think I was a neglectful mother. In pictures she looks almost feral, crouched atop our old coffee table or the hood of our car. Me in a saree, Abhi with his black hair, Ronak close to my hip, a shy five. And Mala, two years younger, always apart, always in some spring-loaded pose. The most memorable snapshot (Where is it now? Where have I saved it?) is the one where Abhi caught her jumping off a fence. The pink clip sits askew in her messy black hair, her mouth is open, her arms wide, her eyebrows high; the maroon velvet birthday-party frock has fluttered up to show her skinny calves as she braces for the landing. Had we tamed that tomboy? And if we had, why?

  I could not reconcile that Mala with the woman who, at twenty-nine, undernourished from a resident’s life, said she was scared she would never find someone to love. A girl like Mala—beautiful, successful. The men her age had done their playing, she sobbed, the men had dated around, and now they were marrying twenty-three- and twenty-four-year-olds. She would soon be thirty and the pool kept getting smaller. Who was left?

  Mala had waited until Abhi left for work, and then she broke. She had said nothing of her despair before. He must have broken it off with her. I have no name, just he. Who, she never told me. Maybe an American boy. Virile, athletic, hairless on the back and chest. Had she worked to impress him? Had she studied his favorite movies so she could talk about them? Had she made him agree never to call her at home? Had he introduced her to his parents—“my girlfriend,” nothing momentous, the father waving hello from behind his computer—and never understood why she wouldn’t do the same? Or had they pretended for as long as they could, growing closer, wearing each other’s T-shirts sometimes, sleeping in each other’s dorm rooms when a roommate went home for the weekend—everything shared except this fenced-off part of her?

  “You can make your phone calls now,” she had said, giving us the go-ahead to send inquiries about marriageable boys. (Twenty-nine was her cutoff, but still we called them “boys.” A “boy” for our “girl.”) Had there been resentment in her voice? Go, have your fun, do the thing you’ve always wanted to do. Even so, how wrong of me to treasure her resignation. To rejoice as I hugged her and stroked her arm.

  * * *

  My fingers could touch in a ring around her arm, above the elbow no less. I thought she was “picky,” I called her “picky”—until the ninth grade, when she collapsed during track practice. (Ronak ran track, so Mala had to run track.) I drove to school to find her looking sheepish, a scrape on her forehead of shallow parallel red lines, an ice pack to her cheek and ear. Apparently she had been crouching at the starting line when she blacked out. A few tall, broad-shouldered blond girls and a compact, exquisitely formed black girl were sitting beside her on the bleachers. I had seen Mala go running with these girls, their ponytails bouncing in synchrony. Two sets of two on the sidewalk, Mala just behind them and alone. The black girl was named Shaunte, which came, I assumed, from Shanti. Her legs and arms were so taut the flesh on them wouldn’t pinch, her calves were two sleek vases, her arms faintly muscled, but she still looked healthy. Part of it was her eyes, which were not set deep in her face, but rather on a plane with her forehead. Mala looked at me, and her eyes were sunk in dark holes. She had a layer of softness on her thighs, girl fat, normal Indian girl flesh, but her skin had no luster. I saw, for the first time, that she had been starving herself. Yet the starving had shrunk only her torso, which was wasting away atop a woman’s hips, the hips she inherited from me. Her friends had gotten her to suck on a straw without interest. “She got hypoglycemic,” they said confidently. I drew the ice pack away to check Mala’s ear and cheek, then guided it back. Mala handed me the juice box to let me inspect her scraped palm. I didn’t know how long she had been sipping, but the juice box was still heavy.

  * * *

  When Mala told me to start looking into a marriage partner, I was too thrilled to speculate why she had reached this point. I had been given the go-ahead. She wanted my help. During her early twenties, I had sometimes suggested this or that friend’s son, and she would snap at me or, if she was in a good mood, roll her eyes. “You and Dad had an arranged marriage that worked out, but you’re lucky. That’s not the rule,” she would say. My answer was that arranged marriages had a lower divorce rate than love marriages. She countered that couples who could be forced by their parents to marry were also the sort to force themselves to stay together. I would say no one was forcing her, just as no one forced me; we only wanted her to meet this boy, whose family we knew very well. I probably was forced back then, she would say, I just didn’t know I was being forced. “Then forcing me to marry your father was the greatest gift my mother ever gave me,” I would tell her. We would go back and forth like children after that. “That wasn’t what I meant.” “That was what you meant.” No it wasn’t, yes it was—she would clench her fists in frustration, close her eyes, and, in a quiet voice, declare she couldn’t have a conversation with me. That would begin a silence we both maintained for altogether too long.

  But at last, I thought, she was willing. She had come around late, which made my job harder, but it was welcome work and something new to do. I called India, I called California, I called New Jersey and Chicago. Grandmothers were my best resource—even if their grandchildren were married, they always had a nephew’s son in Baroda or Jamnagar. I tracked every youngish man at the weddings of other people’s children, checking for a ring, checking whether he placed his hand in the small of a woman’s back or brought someone a drink. A receding hairline and a thick watch suggested a professional—such boys drew my attention. I made unsubtle inquiries. I traded e-mails, I sent and received biodata, the standard JPEG and Word file with which we advertised our aging children (some mothers, I suspect, without their sons’ knowledge). Age, caste, job and education, hobbies: year, make, model, maintenance history.

  My picture showed Mala at twenty-four, but the fudging was customary. It was the same photo she had posted when she tried an online Indian dating site. About that experience she had told me with a mixture of horror, self-pity, and mirth. Because she had failed to click on a box of some sort, her profile had been made public. That night, within hours, her cell phone came alive. Men in India and the United Kingdom called to woo her without unde
rstanding the time difference. Men across the world desperately wished to meet her—she, being a doctor, could provide airfare, yes? Men in the States with student visas, men who attended obscure community colleges in Indiana, Minnesota, Connecticut, four bachelors to an apartment. She turned her phone off in horror and collected seven messages by the time her alarm clock went off. Later, she got callers who sounded like they had been born in America. They were the nervous ones. “The fobs were never nervous,” she said. They were blissfully free of insight.

  I worried about her meeting them in person. No knowledge of the family meant no safeguard. A lot of the profiles, Mala told me, were posted by the parents themselves. She could tell from the grammatical mistakes and the British spelling for colour—as well as the list of Indian dishes the boy enjoyed.

  One caller had something in his voice that she responded to—the faintest trace of an Indian accent, the way his v softened into a w—he had come to America at eleven. They talked twice more, asking questions about their lives and plans, but it went nowhere “We had nothing to talk about,” Mala said, shrugging, “but who we were.”

  I laughed when she made fun of fobs and their accents. She imitated her callers vivaciously, viciously. Yet hadn’t Abhi and I been like that only three decades ago? Had we appeared to Americans as that inept, that silly?

  I knew I had best avoid showing her boys too recently arrived from India, or worse, still in India. We would have gotten along with such a boy, I imagine. He would have made a good son-in-law. But Mala would not have respected him as a man, I could tell. I was heartened that she had been open to a boy who had come over young and, during his teens at least, had grown up here. Soon after our conversation, I invited Sachin to meet her.