the food smells as she cooked the family’s meals. Her principal fear in these last few years before she left her childhood home for the house next door was that one of her few acquaintances from school might unexpectedly pop in with a question about the day’s homework, or a new record or film star poster, or an invitation to an outing, and would then hear the chanting, smell the pot, and spread the ghastly word. She concentrated her efforts on keeping such encounters at bay, avoiding the casual advances of other girls, taking care to mention that she never listened to music or watched the latest films (both true), and rushing to and from school with her eyes lowered and her shoulders hunched around a soft center she knew people were waiting to poke at with sticks.
Motherless, waning, weak at the knees, she beat a shaky path through the duties she’d inherited, cooking and cleaning, ironing her father’s shirts and her sisters’ box-pleated pinafores, tying her brothers’ striped school ties, packing the family’s lunches, and bringing home, at the end of every month, report cards limp with C’s. Every report card day her father had the children line up in a row before him in reverse order, youngest first, Amma last. One after the other they’d sit on the ottoman in front of his armchair and hold out their report cards to him. Some bursting with pride. Some trembling with unspilled tears. Some indifferent to it all, waiting to get it over with so that they could resume the game of marbles, hopscotch, or five stones they’d abandoned for the ritual. Amma had the misfortune of coming right after her brother Shankar, captain of the boys’ hockey team, Best Speaker on the debate team, Assistant Head Prefect, straight-A student, teacher’s pet. Their father would take one look at Shankar’s report card, chuckle, and dismiss him with a “Not bad, not bad” and an admiring whack on the right shoulder. Then he’d look up at Amma and lick his lips like a wolf before a kill. “And what special treat have you brought us this time, Vasanthi?” he’d say. “No doubt about it, you’re the genius of the family, no?” Amma would sit on the ottoman with her head bowed, cleaning her nails with a hairpin, dreaming of her escape. Over the years she learned to concentrate on the world outside and bear her father’s cruel words like a chained dog in the rain. Hungry. Vigilant. Ready to grab her share when it showed up. “What?” her father would press on. “Hanh? Suddenly-suddenly this manicure is oh-so-urgent, yes? A girl with zero brains and zeroer prospects must of course have tip-top nails for all those high-flying job interviews and society tea parties just around the corner, what?” Then, just as she was starting to feel herself crumple under his gaze, just as the first tears began to sting her eyes, he’d pull his pen out of his pocket without warning, sign her report card, and throw it in her face. “Okay,” he’d say. “Go. Go and sit in front of your books and sleep.”
And sleep she did, though inexpertly, uncomfortably, and joylessly, just as she did everything else: exhausted from cooking and ironing, from trying to help her siblings with trigonometry problems she’d never understood how to do herself, from wading against the life-sapping current of her mother’s unsplendid isolation, she slept, one arm folded under her cheek, on geography textbooks, on history flash cards, on rulers and protractors and compasses. “Pah, pah, I can’t wait till you bring home the results from this exam,” her father said the year she finally sat her Senior Cambridge Certificate. He rubbed his belly under his cotton singlet, like a peasant sitting down to a hot midday meal of dosais and sambar. “Whatta whatta treat that will be for us all. Straightaway they will accept you for post of Head Drain Sweeper. No questions asked. Or maybe better I start buying cows for your dowry now itself, hanh?” Then he’d give her head a sudden shove with the flat of his palm, grunt, and pronounce, “Fifty sixty cows also won’t convince anyone to take this numskull off my hands, I tell you.”
His apprehensions were justified. Amma got C’s in all her papers except geography, which she failed because of a panic attack at the last minute. “Syabas, Vasanthi!” her father exclaimed after glancing at the slip of paper she’d held out wordlessly. “Con-gra-chu-laaaaaations. You’ve really outdone yourself this time. Surpassed even my expectations, man!” He whacked her heartily on the right shoulder, then walked away whistling. “Start drafting your career plans now itself,” he called over his shoulder. “U.N. Secretary-General or editor in chief of the London Times? What’ll it be?”
For a few months she halfheartedly combed the classifieds for job vacancies. Clerk, cashier, receptionist. She circled them all with her leaky red pen, made phone calls, set up interviews. She dressed for each interview in the same navy blue skirt, white blouse, and sensible leather pumps she’d bought with the money relatives had given her for passing he senior Cambridge exam. In between interviews she washed, ironed, and starched the skirt and the blouse. She took the town bus to each interview, thrilled but terrified to be out on her own, convinced it was all useless. They were going to snort with laughter the minute she walked in. They were going to shake their heads at her failing grade in geography and send her home. As it happened, they never asked to see her results. One after another, they took one look at her trembling hands, heard a single stuttering answer to the simplest question, and sent her home with a promise to call. She busied herself while she waited, scrubbing the sink three times a day, scraping the grout between the bathroom tiles, polishing the linoleum on all fours, her ugly cotton housedress tied in a knot around her knees. At the back of her mind a tiny black seed began to sprout: the frightening thought that this was what the rest of her life would be. Waiting and scrubbing. Polishing and dreaming. Its terrible tendrils threatened to cut her breath short, to clog her veins if she gave it free rein. So she stuffed her head full of unyielding, ready-made pictures that left no room for her seedling of doubt. She choked it to death with lurid love scenes from Indian films she’d seen on family outings in her childhood. With richly embroidered wedding sarees and a loving hand feeding her sweetmeats before a hairy-chested, chanting priest. With handsome, blurry men in fedoras and Italian suits. Smoking imported cigars. Peppering their Tamil with English declarations of love and defiance.
That was the year Appa came home from Singapore in his pea-green Morris Minor with beige leather seats. Amma was cleaning the shutters in her father’s bedroom as it pulled into the driveway next door one Sunday afternoon. Had she been standing there two days before, she would have seen Appa’s father keel over in his beautiful garden. Now, rag in hand, she peered through the shutters and watched Appa unload three matching leather suitcases, a black briefcase, and a small trunk. Sunlight spilled in between the wooden slats of the shutters and fanned out in neat swaths on the spotless floor of the bedroom. “Vasanthi!” her father called from the foot of the stairs. “What is this, taking three days just to wipe the shutters? If you have no brains can’t you at least make your hands useful?”
When she and her father went to pay their last respects to Tata, she sat with her navy interview skirt pulled carefully over her knees and watched Appa curiously out of the corner of her eye. So this was what someone with a law degree from England looked like. This was how one moved and talked when one had matching monogrammed luggage. With an air of subdued authority. She watched him make his rounds of the shady sitting room, full of drooping potted palms and women’s sorrow. When he got to Amma’s father he shook his hand wordlessly. “Very sorry, my wife simply couldn’t make it,” Amma’s father lied with a mournful shake of the head. “Not feeling well. We ourselves are getting old, what to do?” Amma thought of her mother, erect and white-lipped that morning when her father had gone to ask her to come next door for a few hours. “For God’s sake,” he’d said, “stop this nonsense for one day. All the neighbors will be wondering whether I’ve killed you and hidden the body. At least just come for a few minutes to pay your last respects to the old man.”
“Let the dead bury their dead,” Ammachi had said, momentarily switching from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible. Amma, who’d had twelve years of Scripture Knowledge at her convent school, noted the inappropriateness of the quotation’s coming from a woman who’d renounced the world and refused to budge from her room. “Why mourn?” her mother had continued, her philosophizing growing stubbornly expansive in the face of her husband’s intransigent scorn. “The old man has come one step closer to escaping the chains of rebirth. In fact we should all be rejoicing for him. Why all this fuss? Why two hundred three hundred people should crowd their house? All simply coming for free food only. Shameless. Why not let his family quietly remember him and celebrate his passing?”
In