And Laughter Fell From the Sky (23 page)

Abhay felt sick about the idea of tearing down the house and putting up apartments. This was the house where he’d had his first experiences with communal living: three or four generations of relatives living together in one household. When he’d visited this house as a child he’d loved waking up in the morning and having his grandmother give him a cup of warm milk to drink, and his aunt reminding him to take a bath, and his uncle driving him and his cousins out to Cubbon Park for a picnic. He’d loved having more people to interact with every day than just his parents and sister.

Now the household would be cut up into small apartments, with every family living on their own. There was nothing he could do about it. He closed the gate behind him and stepped carefully along the bumpy granite sidewalk. Being in India after so many years was eye opening. Why had he ever thought India dull as a teenager? If anything, the country was overstimulating. The traffic itself was an amazing sight. He could hardly even cross the street in front of his grandmother’s house, there was so much activity from early morning until late at night. There were no crosswalks, no stop signs, and very few stoplights. Vehicles paid no attention to lane markings. The buses, cars, autorickshaws, and motorbikes simply maneuvered into any space that could fit a wheel or a portion of bumper. If there was space in the oncoming lane, people casually drove along that lane until they encountered a wave of traffic surging toward them, and then, just as casually, horn honking, they veered back into their own overcrowded lane. If there was a suggestion of a pause in the traffic, pedestrians would insert themselves into the mix, calmly strolling across the vehicle-choked road.

Abhay generally avoided the main road on his early morning walks. Now he turned off the main road and walked down a side street. He moved carefully along the roadway—there was no sidewalk on this narrow street—to avoid running into anyone who happened to be wheeling a motorbike out from a compound gate, and to escape being hit by any cars that happened to be lumbering along. He made his way around women stooping in front of their gates to sprinkle rangoli powder in pretty patterns on the ground. He barely avoided being splashed by a bucket of water being dumped from a second-floor balcony. The traffic from the main road was already starting to surge, with cars, motorbikes, and autorickshaws roaring and beeping along.

In mid-November, a week after Rasika had left him, Abhay had mentioned to his mother that he was thinking he might go to India in December. She had immediately bought him a plane ticket and telephoned the relatives. His parents even insisted on paying his plane fare. Maybe they wanted to make sure at least one of their children identified with India, since Seema was so enamored of African-American culture.

He was here in a last-ditch quest to see Rasika. Mom had run into Sujata Auntie at the Indian grocery store near Cleveland, and had heard about the eligible bachelor Rasika planned to marry. Apparently Sujata Auntie had even shown Mom a photo of this guy. “Very handsome,” Mom had informed Abhay, rolling the
r
in
very
extra-long, to emphasize his good looks. “And so intelligent, they say. No trouble he will have to find job in U.S. Beautiful children they will have.”

Abhay had pretended to be completely uninterested, although he felt like he might explode with anger and frustration at Rasika’s stupid choices. He’d tried to contact her several times after she left Portland. He knew Rasika’s relatives lived somewhere in Bangalore, but he didn’t know where. It was insane to think he was somehow going to run into her here, but he felt compelled to see if it might happen. Of course he wouldn’t see her, and that, he hoped, would be enough of a sign for him to forget about her once and for all. Anyway, he had public reasons for visiting India, too—to reunite with family and to check out Auroville.

He had decided to come to India right after Kianga’s birthday party. Kianga said Auroville was started by a group of people who had reclaimed a desert by planting two million trees, and that she was going to volunteer there at an organic farm. She invited anyone interested to visit her in India. With these words, she gave Abhay a long look.

The night after the party, he’d done an Internet search on Auroville. At first he was put off because it seemed to have a religious foundation; the place was started by some sort of Hindu guru, and the Web site spoke of a “divine consciousness.” Nevertheless, the Auroville home page insisted that they followed no religion and wanted only to unify people. They experimented with rammed-earth buildings, creative ways of educating children, all sorts of healing therapies. The place was quite large, with almost two thousand residents. Could this be the community he’d been searching for? He planned to go and see Kianga in about a week, after spending a polite amount of time with his relatives.

Abhay turned left and passed a construction site, with piles of sand and stacks of bricks. The scaffolding was made of straight branches. As he approached the railroad tracks he could smell something burning, and soon came across a small trash fire. People stepped over the rails, seemingly oblivious to the litter strewn around: juice boxes, potato chip bags, banana peels, random shreds of plastic and rags. This was one of the things Abhay disliked most about India—the way the trash dispersed itself on the ground in certain public places. As he stepped over the tracks he encountered, on the other side, a few people picking through a mound of rubbish.

He looked up at every house he passed, wondering in spite of himself if Rasika might be behind the walls. At the end of one narrow street he stumbled upon a rectangular neighborhood park, about two blocks long. He walked along bricked paths among the formal arrangements of low shrubs with yellow or red leaves. The place was immaculate, with women workers in saris and men in their skirtlike lungis sweeping and clipping hedges.

He sat on a bench and gazed at the scene. Next to the park was a row of three-story apartment buildings, with laundry hung over the balcony railings. Many of the older single-family houses in the neighborhood were being torn down to create these small apartment complexes. The colors were pastel: light yellow with blue trim, light peach with a dull red trim. On one balcony, a slim woman in a long blue nightgown was shaking out her hair, bending over at the waist as her long black hair fell over the railing. She straightened up, flung her hair back, and started combing it. She reminded him of Rasika. A small naked child toddled out onto the balcony and clung to the woman’s nightgown as she combed.

Had Rasika met her intended already? For all he knew, she was married and on her honeymoon.

The woman on the balcony picked up the baby and went inside. Abhay raised his eyes to what was happening behind the low apartments. Looming over everything were the gray skeletons of twenty-story apartment buildings under construction. Who would live there? How would the residents even maneuver all their cars along the roads? What was happening to the Bangalore he knew? Abhay tilted his head back and looked up at massive yellow cranes moving slowly against the blue sky. He could hear faint clanging sounds from that direction. There were no branches for scaffolding on this monstrosity.

Bangalore was growing like crazy. He’d heard his parents talk about it, and now he could see for himself. Since the Indian economy opened up in 1990 to foreign investments, many multinational companies had set up operations in major Indian cities. Bangalore had been one of the early targets of this, because of its relatively mild climate.

Now that Abhay was being confronted with the polluted, crowded, and often incomprehensible reality of this rampantly developing country, he wondered whether he was crazy to even be checking out an intentional community in India.

Chapter 14

A
fter Rasika’s lunch with Yuvan, things came to a standstill for a few days. His mother called and said they were going to do some sort of pooja before making a final decision. Oddly, during this time Rasika herself was almost ignored. No one seemed to think it necessary to consult with her or pay her any special attention, although Mridula Auntie did take Rasika to the ayurvedic doctor who had helped Mayuri. Rasika came home with a yellow skin cream and some bitter herbal tea.

Every day her mother and aunt inspected her skin, supervised the application of her ointment, and brewed the herbal tea for her. Everyone was pleased that the pimples were disappearing. Yet no one noticed that Rasika had hardly eaten since arriving in India and that she was having trouble sleeping, which was unusual for her. Sleep was generally the one thing she could count on to take her away from her problems.

Rasika spent time with her grandmother, helping her gather jasmine blossoms in the garden and tying the blossoms into short garlands. Pati had taught her this skill many years ago, and Rasika found it soothing to sit in the sunshine and loop and knot pairs of flowers by the stems. Then Pati would hand around these garlands so the women of the household could pin them into their hair.

“What was it like when you got married, Pati?” Rasika asked one morning. They sat on a bench in the backyard, their heads shaded by a crape myrtle tree. Rasika stretched her bare feet into the warm sunshine. They were somewhat insulated by the house and yard from the usual sounds of the city: traffic beeping and rumbling, someone’s radio broadcasting a male voice, and a female chorus singing a rhythmic Hindi movie song.

“I was very keen to get married.” Pati chuckled. “The wedding was an excuse to get dressed up for three days in a row. Back then weddings used to go on for three days, but nowadays no one has the patience for all that.” Pati spoke in Tamil, slowly and calmly, as though she had all the time in the world.

“You were only sixteen,” Rasika said.

“I was born in 1940, and married in 1956. At that time, among our people, girls were married at fifteen or sixteen. If you reached eighteen and you were unmarried, you were considered old for a bride. We thought we were very modern because we did not believe in child marriage. The girls finished schooling before marriage, after all. We started school early in those days. By the age of four I was in school, so by fifteen I was finished with tenth standard. No one thought of college for girls in those days.”

Rasika knew that her other grandmother, her father’s mother, hadn’t even been allowed to finish tenth grade—the end of high school in India—before getting married. “What about Ammachi?” she asked. “She was only fourteen.”

“She is quite a bit older to me,” Pati said. “From her time to my time, things changed for women.”

“Was it difficult to decide which man to marry?” Rasika picked two more blossoms from the basket between them. The maidservant exited the back door of the house with a basket of wet clothes from the washing machine, and began pinning the garments to the clothesline.

“No one asked me. My parents chose. Maybe it was difficult for them. I don’t know.” Pati held the blossoms deftly in her left hand. Her right hand made a loop of the cotton thread and pulled it tightly around the stems. Her fingers were still supple. “One day they told me that I was going to marry so-and-so. I had never seen him. Nowadays, girls have much more say. You go here and there with the boys, even before engagement. In those days, we didn’t have any choice at all. Only after marriage did we go about with our husbands.”

“Were you afraid to marry someone you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t even know what marriage was. I just thought about the wedding—being the center of attention. I was considered quite beautiful then. Everyone talked about my beauty, and it went to my head.”

“You are still very beautiful, Pati,” Rasika said.

Pati smiled. “I was very interested in saris and jewelry.” Pati held up a string of flowers and considered its length. “I would always be thinking about what sari I wanted to ask my father to buy for me. If anyone wore new jewelry, I would inspect it carefully.”

“Really?” Since Rasika had known her, Pati had seemed most interested in cooking and chanting prayers. She could hardly imagine Pati as a teenager obsessed with clothes. “What was it like after you got married?”

“My mother-in-law was very particular. She was not a bad woman, but I had to do exactly as she wished. She told me when to get up in the morning, how to cut the vegetables, what prayers to say, when to wash my hair. That was all fine. I did not mind working and following orders.” Pati knotted her thread, snapped it off the spool, and set the flowers in the basket. “But she also told me what to wear and not wear. That was the difficult part for me. She bought me so much jewelry—heavy gold necklaces.” Pati mimed the width of the necklaces against her collarbone. “Thick bangles. I wanted something light and delicate. She bought me heavy silk saris in dull colors with lots of gold embroidery, but I wanted something bright.” Pati picked up the spool and measured out another length of thread against her arm.

“Pati, you mean you never chose your own clothes?” Rasika was horrified.

“My mother-in-law bought all the clothes for me. I had many saris.”

“You didn’t choose anything for yourself?” Rasika asked again in disbelief.

“After all, we must not think about clothes all the time. I became a mother, and then I stopped worrying about my saris, finally.”

Rasika had been so absorbed in this story that she’d only managed to connect a total of six flowers. She picked up two more flowers from the basket, and then rested her hands on her lap. She felt a weight around her heart at the thought of what her grandmother had had to go through. Pati had to give up even her smallest inclinations and desires once she was married.

Nowadays—was it better? After marriage, Rasika would have her own job, her own money, her own clothes. Yet she was not completely free. Her parents had let her meet a few eligible bachelors, but in effect, they too had told her that she was going to marry so-and-so. And she had agreed. In fact, her biggest worry now was that Mr. So-and-So would reject her.

When Yuvan’s acceptance was conveyed through his father, Rasika was so relieved that she exclaimed, “Tell them I also accept.”

“Don’t worry, we have already told them,” her mother said.

Two days later, the engagement ceremony took place at the house. All the furniture was moved out of the living room and bedsheets were spread over the floor for people to sit on.

Again, her aunt dressed Rasika and applied too much makeup. It seemed to Rasika that she was a doll they were playing with in their game of “the perfect wedding.” Although it was supposed to be a small gathering, all sorts of relatives crowded into the house to observe the ceremony: Appa’s siblings and their families, Amma’s distant cousins. Subhash and his family were there, too.

Rasika tried not to look at Yuvan’s father. She knew, intellectually, that he was not really Kanchan, but whenever she saw his face, her mind flashed to that evening in the hotel, and she felt panic and the urge to run away. During the ceremony, as she sat on the wooden platform at one end of the room, she kept her eyes down, as a modest bride should.

After the engagement ceremony, as Yuvan and Rasika stood at one end of the room accepting blessings and greetings, the crowd parted. Appa’s mother was being led toward them. Thin and bent, gripping a walker in her clawlike hands, she thumped slowly toward them, with Balu Uncle pressing the crowd back from her. When she stood in front of Rasika, Amma said, “Do namaskar to Ammachi,” and Rasika and Yuvan both obediently kneeled in front of the old woman and touched their foreheads to the floor. Ammachi blessed them by sprinkling raw turmeric-colored rice over them. When Rasika rose from the floor, her grandmother gripped Rasika’s hand in her claw, and stood there for several seconds, her hand shaking, her lips working. Finally she said, “You have come home to marry. Now I can die in peace.”

As the old woman hauled herself away, Amma whispered, “She always says things like that. Don’t worry.”

That evening, Rasika stayed at home with a headache. Everyone else in the house went out to the ISKCON temple, which, her uncle informed them, was the largest Hare Krishna temple in the world. She didn’t want to endure a long car ride and then jostle among thousands of other tourists.

In the room she was sharing with Mayuri, she swallowed a couple of painkillers and then sat up in bed, sipping water from a steel cup. The window was open, and a soft evening breeze wafted into the room, bringing with it sounds of street vendors calling out their wares, the grinding of traffic, and whiffs of smell: the acrid scent of burning trash, and the oniony smell of fried food. As the headache faded, she was surprised to discover that tears were running down her face.

“What is it?” Pati had appeared at the side of her bed. “Why are you crying, raja?” Pati sat down next to her, put her strong fingers against Rasika’s temples, and massaged firmly.

“I thought you went with them.” Rasika took another sip of water.

“I have already seen that temple. Lie down. You are exhausted.” Pati took the cup away from Rasika and patted Rasika’s shoulder. “Go to sleep now.”

Rasika obediently lay down. “Pati, stay with me.” She rolled onto her side and grasped her grandmother’s hand. “I feel so sad.”

“Sometimes it happens like that after a lot of excitement. You will feel better in the morning.”

“I don’t know if I made the right decision, Pati.”

Pati began massaging Rasika’s head with her free hand. “We pray to God, and make the best decisions we can.”

“What if—what if I’m marrying the wrong boy?” Rasika said this almost to herself.

“What other boy is there? Hm?” Pati’s fingers worked on the nape of Rasika’s neck. “Don’t worry. One boy is just as good as another. Tomorrow you will feel better.”

Rasika closed her eyes and tried to relax, but her mind kept racing. She felt as if all the guests at the ceremony were swarming toward her, led by her crippled grandmother. “What if there is another boy?” she asked softly.

Pati’s fingers stopped. “What are you saying?” she asked gently. “Is there someone else you want to marry?”

Rasika put both hands up to cover her face. “I don’t know.”

Pati grasped Rasika’s wrists and pulled the hands away from her face. Her sharp eyes penetrated into Rasika’s eyes. “If there is someone else, you must speak up now.”

“But they won’t approve.” Rasika closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at Pati.

Pati let go of Rasika’s wrists. “Listen to me. Sit up, open your eyes, and listen to me.”

Rasika sat up. She opened her eyes but kept them focused down on her hands in her lap. For the engagement ceremony, Mayuri had decorated Rasika’s palms with intricate henna designs. She concentrated on following the spirals and flowers Mayuri had drawn.

Pati put both hands on either side of Rasika’s head and turned the head so Rasika had to look at Pati. “Now is the time to speak. If you don’t speak, you must not speak after marriage.”

Rasika nodded.

“Is there someone else?” Pati demanded softly.

Rasika looked into Pati’s eyes. What would Pati say if she knew about Rasika’s life? She would be shocked. Rasika couldn’t let everyone down now, after she had come so far. “No,” she whispered. She shook her head, with Pati’s hands still on either side of her face. “No.”

During the engagement ceremony, Yuvan’s parents had given Rasika thousands of rupees as a gift. “We wanted to give you something, but we want you to select your own gifts, so you will use them,” Yuvan’s mother said, and everyone agreed this was very sensible.

The next day, Rasika was sent shopping with Mayuri, who would help Rasika select only the most fashionable outfits. They attempted to walk along the narrow sidewalk on Commercial Street, which most of the time was blocked by merchandise displayed outside of shops, or by A-frame sidewalk signs advertising the wares of a shop. She and Mayuri jostled among all the other shoppers and tried to stay out of the way of the cars and motor scooters that attempted to squeeze their way down the narrow street.

“You’re so lucky, Rasika.” They carefully stepped past a shop bursting with frilly little girls’ dresses. “You’ve fallen in love with a man who is acceptable to your parents.”

“I haven’t really fallen in love with him,” Rasika said. “I’m not even sure he likes me.”

“He has agreed to marry you! Of course he likes you. He is not a very emotional person, but I don’t think he would agree to marry someone he didn’t like. Everyone is talking about what a great match it is. You’re very lucky.”

Rasika and Mayuri were accosted by a young man holding a wooden snake in his hand. “Snake, madam?” he asked politely. On Commercial Street, even the pavement peddlers spoke in English.

“Go away,” Mayuri said.

Undaunted, the peddler walked along with them, holding the snake by the tail and demonstrating how it could sway in the air because of its jointed construction. “Three hundred rupees,” he said. He was dressed in a nice plaid woven shirt and long pants, with sandals on his feet.

“Go,” Mayuri commanded.