A Good Indian Wife: A Novel (4 page)

“Suneel, wait for me.” Tattappa hurried out the gate after him while Mummy cried, “Where are you going?” and Aunty Vimla, struggling to get her girth out of the chair, half-lifted it before sitting down again in defeat.

ALL THE WEIGHTLESSNESS
, the fatigue that had settled on his skin like a rash, vanished as soon as he left the house. He was full of energy. If he were in San Francisco, he’d head straight to the health club. Right to the punching bag that swung in the air, the hit-without-telling cure for daily frustrations. Instead, he kept walking until he reached the edge of the old basketball court. One of the posts looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The hard earth of the court had been gouged out in places by the rain. Neel looked around for a ball. He wanted to slam the black and white sphere into the basket as if it were Aunty Vimla’s face. But there was no ball anywhere, and the rusted hoops bent downward, the bits of net torn and dirty.

He was home. In an environment where he felt loved and comfortable in a way not possible in the United States. And yet, he no longer fit in. He loved living in America, but knew that there, too, he didn’t quite fit in. It was the classic immigrant dilemma.

Tattappa came up behind him. “Suneel, brings back some virry good times.” Tattappa smiled at the memories.

Fourteen-year-old Neel used to meet the team here every morning for practice. He was the captain (“That is only because you are so tall,” Aunty Vimla said to put down Neel’s talent), and Tattappa, an old-time basketball player himself, never missed a practice. Neel had played so many championship games on this dirt rectangle that served as a court. He couldn’t picture himself in the baggy navy blue uniform, could not recall how many games his team had won, but remembered the ritual he always performed before free throws. Bounce the ball three times slowly before taking aim at the basket. Had he always made the baskets? Probably not. Such a silly little ritual, he thought now.

In the last year of high school, all the seniors met here at night. Tattappa had no idea that Neel used to sneak out of the house to smoke forbidden cigarettes with his friends. The strong, cheap Charminar tips glowed contraband red in the dark as the sixteen-year-olds dreamed their futures aloud. College, girls, jobs, marriage. Neel yearned to travel: Paris, London, New York. Drive a fast car. Fly a plane. Have the best stereo equipment. Gamble in casinos reckless about winning or losing. When the others spoke of marrying India’s current Bollywood heartthrob, he pictured himself with a blond-haired wife with Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes. Mark’s mother had eyes that color and she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen. Blond, blue-eyed Mark Krueger had become his best friend and introduced him to the wonders of the Western world during the one magical year the family lived in their town. Neel never forgot their best-friend days, though Mark and his parents had returned to the United States many years earlier.

During the three years it took to get their undergraduate degree, the group fell apart as marriage claimed its members. Neel remembered the first to succumb: handlebar-mustached Mohan, his voice permanently hoarse from smoking, with an affinity for numbers first manifested when he counted to a thousand before his third birthday. How they tormented him. Mohan had just announced his engagement, a little shamefaced because he had sworn not to give in to his parents’ pushing until he finished his master’s degree. Everyone ragged him, and Neel coined a ditty on the spot that the others picked up and began chanting:

Parents always win in the end, Neel could hear Mohan’s voice genuflect to filial obligation.

“Suneel, Suneel,” Tattappa said placatingly.

“Tattappa, they didn’t even have the decency to wait a few days before starting in on me.” Indians were like that, but he wasn’t an India resident anymore.

“You know how our women can be. But they are not bad. Only a little pushy.”

“The pushy part I can handle, I think. But Mummy lied to me. She told me you were ill. That’s the main reason I came home. It wasn’t easy for me to get leave at such short notice.”

Tattappa didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “She is only virry worried for your future. You know in India it is our thinking that everyone should get married. It is not like Ahmerica, where many people don’t care about families.”

“But she lied to me about you.”

“No, no, Suneel, my sickness is not a lie. I asked your mummy to say I was only a little weak because I wanted to tell you myself. The doctor has found some cancer.” Tattappa shrugged his shoulders, the gesture indicating he had placed himself in God’s hands. “A little here, a little there. Six months they have given me.”

Neel forgot Mummy, his anger, the fear that somehow he would be coerced into marrying while at home. All he could think of was Tattappa reciting long passages from the
Ramayana
. Telling him how a British bullet had blasted off his little finger during the fight for Independence. Cheering Neel on at every basketball game. When asthma racked Neel’s knobbly young body, only Tattappa’s presence had brought comfort.

“Let’s get another opinion. I’ll fly you to the States. We’ll get the best oncologist to check you.”

“Calm down, Suneel, you will only to make yourself sick,” Tattappa said. “Your father is virry much like you. He took me to another doctor and that one also did the same exam, poking this way, taking this tissue. Paah! A waste of time. He gave the virry same diagnosis.”

“Can’t they operate?” Neel asked, though he knew the answer.

“No. Six months, and if all the days are like today, then I shall to be happy. My grandson is home.”

“Tattappa, I’d like to talk to your doctors, make sure you are getting the best treatment. And following orders.” He remembered Mummy telling him that Tattappa was being difficult.

“You can talk to the doctor, why not? But right now he has gone home to his village to see his father. You see, everyone is going to their families.”

They turned back, Neel dragging his feet as if that would somehow slow Tattappa’s cancer.

“Suneel, we have left your mummy virry upset. Maybe you can see some of the girls they have arranged for you. Only to make peace in the house while you are with us.”

“Please, not you, too, Tattappa. You know I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

“You have never come out and said it, but yes, that I know. But also it is not good to live alone for too long and I am only a little worried that you are not yet married.”

That makes two of us, Neel wanted to say, but he could not suddenly confide his personal life and desires to Tattappa. They had never discussed marriage, not even during the last disastrous visit when Mummy went around the house with a teary, defeated face. Now, surprisingly, Tattappa was implying that he would accept any bride Neel brought home.

“So you wouldn’t mind if I married an American?” Neel tested Tattappa’s prejudice.

“It is not a question of minding or not minding. It is simply better to marry one’s own kind.”

For some years now Neel had analyzed the reasons why he had not met his “own kind” in America. Not a girl Tattappa would consider suitable, but the sort of women his colleagues married. One by one his former classmates at Stanford—Sanjay, Brendan, Victor—had walked down the aisle with a wife who was pretty, well educated, and whose family, seated in the front pew, exuded wealth and power. In their designer wedding gowns and professionally sculpted hair, they had just the sort of pedigree Neel longed for in a partner. Tattappa would neither have understood nor accepted a daughter-in-law named Savannah. “Ahmerican?” he could hear Tattappa shout. “We are Indians. Did I fight away the British only to have my own family spoiled with the blood of a white fahrinner?”

Now Neel said, “By ‘one’s own kind’ you of course mean a nice Iyengar girl.”

Tattappa ignored the statement. “Suneel, if you had someone in Ahmerica, you would definitely have made that mention to me. So why not just see one of our girls? I am not asking for you to marry her.”

“Tattappa, you know how it is here. If I see a girl, Mummy will expect me to marry her.”

“No, Suneel, even your mummy cannot force you to marry against your wish. Just it will make her happy that at least she is trying her best for you. There will be no fights, no sadness in the house.”

He was using his illness to blackmail Neel into submission. A sick man needing peace. Neel decided to change tactics. “I don’t think that’s right. Not just for me but also for the
girl
.” He stressed the last word, hoping Tattappa would note his kindness. “She won’t know I’m using her to get Mummy off my back.”

“Nowadays girls know that not every boy who sees them will want to marry them. So there is no need for you to worry for that little reason.”

“Even if I were to agree—and I’m not saying yes,” Neel clarified, “Mummy said she and Aunty Vimla have lined up lots of girls. Which one would I see?”

“That is a good point. I am not sure who all they have arranged. Ah, but now I remember. There is this one girl. She is a little on the old side. And the poor parents, they don’t have the money for a dowry. Why don’t you go see her?”

“Why would you want me to see someone like that?” Neel couldn’t believe that Tattappa was behaving like Aunty Vimla. He was a doctor. From America. He could command the best girl not just in their town, but from the Iyengar community anywhere in the world.

“Because then if you say no, it will not be a problem. Everyone will understand.”

NEEL CLOSED THE BATHROOM DOOR
behind him, thankful to get away from the living room where Aunty Vimla and Mummy thought they were planning his future. The last two hours had resurrected the short list of women in his past. Should he have told Tattappa about Caroline? He had never even mentioned Savannah, the girl he so desperately wanted to marry, and whose rejection had left him afraid to approach any woman for years. Time was an effective Band-Aid and he no longer cringed at his youthful, romantic foolishness: Playing with her ring finger to try and figure out the right measurements, planning to slip the diamond into a flute of champagne, practicing asking her to marry him.

Savannah Sibley. It was strange to think of her while standing in this spare, practical bathroom. The white porcelain did not rise up to form a comfortable toilet seat, but curved, peanut-shaped, around a hole in the floor. There was no inviting tub to soak in and no shower with a hundred spouts to massage a tired body. Just a leaky faucet that spurted water into a faded blue bucket. Bathing was a big production in India that began long before one entered the bathroom. He had to turn on the small hot water geyser, wait until it heated, then fill the undersize bucket with hot and then cold water to get the temperature right. Bending to get the water was the hardest part for a tall man like Neel. The mug that hooked onto the side of the bucket held so little water it required three pourings before he could begin to soap himself.

Savannah had never known this side of him. He had told her about Mark Krueger, the American boy whose father was the biggest big shot in the steel factory. “Darling,” the violet-eyed mother called Mark and his father. She gave them glasses of Tang, so much tastier than the lime juice his mother made, and introduced him to canned peaches, a flavor he did not know how to explain to Tattappa. In those days, America was the faraway land made closer only by powders and cans bursting with flavor.

He had seen Savannah at a party, his bones melting even before he heard her speak. Silvery hair that glistened with every head movement, dark blue eyes—and smart enough to get into Stanford, where she was studying French. She was the type of woman he had dreamed of meeting and marrying. Determined to have her, Neel approached her as he would an exam. During his life he had acquired the confidence that if you applied yourself well, you would get the grade you desired. What he hadn’t accounted for was how society, her deb-strutting, white-columned Southern society and upbringing, could hamper his hard work. There was an ironical symmetry in their families, a clash of colors that prohibited mingling. Her parents, preeminent Southerners, had met him with a series of polite, pointed questions—Hindu? Indian?—forcing him to consider the brownness, and limitations, of his own face, albeit Stanford-educated, the doctor tag within year’s reach. Tattappa, too, would have looked at Savannah’s pale skin and found it lacking.

The year with Savannah had been a series of revelations. It proved that a white girlfriend was more advantageous than an American passport. One allowed you entry to countries without a visa; the other moved you up the social ladder. But Tattappa would not be able to comprehend that. He had never left India, felt too persecuted by the British to trust a white person. He didn’t understand the difficulty of living in a country whose welcoming Statue of Liberty ushered one inside without promising equality. Neel had presumed that when he went to America he was simply moving countries, but staying in the same echelon of the educated upper class. The experience with Savannah’s parents taught him otherwise, but didn’t make him want to return home. If anything, it cemented his desire to become as American as possible, and that included finding the elusive white wife.