Serving Crazy With Curry (14 page)

“Children,” Devi said.

“Oh yes, I would love grandchildren. Shobha, don't wait too long,
hanh}
Have those children soon. Devi will probably never have children.”

“Why won't I?” Devi demanded and then the conversation became playful and loud, so loud that Avi came to investigate what was wrong.

Despite the various strains in their relationships, there were times and topics of conversation that brought them closer.

If she hadn't lost the baby, Devi wondered how it would've been. If by some stroke of luck, she'd been allowed to keep the baby and she'd touched the wrinkled face, held the little body, felt the small fingers. Would Saroj have accepted a grandchild regardless of its illegitimacy? And what about Shobha, how would she have felt?

Devi now knew what Shobha went through every day of her life. She'd only lost a baby. She knew that if she ever found a man worth being with again, she could have another baby. But Shobha knew, every morning, every night, all day that there would be no baby. Whose grief was bigger? Whose sorrow larger?

At least Shobha had some semblance of a good life. She had a career and maybe she could still repair her marriage. Devi had nothing. No career, no baby, no life. Shobha had prospects, Devi had none. She couldn't see anything bright and shiny in her tomorrow. She couldn't even see a tomorrow.

If only she could've kept the baby, all her tomorrows would've been alive, enriched by that little life. But she couldn't and no matter
how many times her doctor told her that it wasn't her fault, that sometimes nature just decided to let a baby slip away, Devi couldn't help but blame herself. Like dominoes, one after the other, her world started to collapse.

The futility of it, the loss of it, frustrated Devi. She slammed on the brakes of the Jeep, then pressed on the accelerator again and took the first exit from the freeway.

She parked her father's car at a vista point where a big sign specifically said that cars couldn't be parked there after sunset.

She stepped outside and wrapped her arms around herself as the chill in the air penetrated her long-sleeved white shirt and jeans.

She pushed her sleeves up her arms and looked at her bandaged wrists. The bandages had become smaller. She went to see her regular physician every other day to have the wounds dressed. The cuts were deep, but they were healing. Her doctor had suggested reconstructive surgery for her scars but Devi shied away. If she lived she wanted to be reminded of the “incident,” and if she didn't, how would it matter?

She unwrapped the bandage on her left wrist first and felt the cool air slide against her rough wounds. She stuffed the bandage inside her jeans pocket and unwrapped the bandage on her right wrist. The cuts were angry, sore, and raw. They were healing, but slowly. There would always be scars, if she lived. And even if the scars on her wrists became less visible in time, she'd still know they were there.

She could see the Pacific roll onto the tiny patch of sand far below her and slam onto the rocks. The waves were white foamlike creatures dancing in the night down below. Back and forth they went, created and dismantled by the force of the water.

It would be so easy, she thought as her heart hammered against her ribs. So very easy. All she had to do was let go. Just walk to the end of the world and fly. Her feet seemed impatient to get to the edge. There was an itch in her arms. They wanted to rise up and seek the skies.

So she closed her eyes, spread her arms, and took a step forward.

•••

Avi called Girish five times and on the last call they contemplated whether they should telephone the police and let them know that a suicidal mute was on the loose in a green Jeep Cherokee. After a heated discussion, they decided to wait another half an hour before doing anything.

It had been ninety minutes since Devi dropped Girish off and for the past hour panic had sunk into her family.

“Did you have a fight with her?” Shobha demanded as she paced the living room, her feet clammy against the hardwood floors. Tension was making her back stiffen, and her heart was pounding.

“No,” Girish said and then sighed. “Well, I got a little frustrated with her.”

“So you had a fight with her?” Shobha accused.

“It wasn't a fight,” Girish said, sounding just a little guilty. “She's probably just driving down Highway One, soaking in the sea air.”

Shobha glared at him. “She's suicidal, not some rational fun-loving person who thinks how great the sea air is. What if she isn't soaking in the sea air? What if she's thinking about jumping off a cliff?”

“She's not going to jump off a cliff,” Girish said, but Shobha could hear the fear in his voice.

He was afraid. Would he be this afraid if it was her thinking about jumping off a cliff? Would anyone in her family worry about her this way if she was late getting somewhere?

“I should've come and picked you up,” Shobha said as she sat down on the floor. “What were you all thinking? Letting her drive like this? Are you fucking nuts?”

Girish rose from the rocking chair next to the telephone rashly, and the chair creaked against the floor. “Her doctor thinks that she isn't suicidal anymore. She thought it'd be okay for her to spend a little time alone.”

“What the fuck does her doctor know?” Shobha demanded and winced because it sounded so much like her mother. Saroj never believed in doctors, never trusted them, maybe because G'ma was one.

“Now you sound like Saroj,” Girish pointed out and then shook
his head. “Nothing is going to happen to her. People who cook don't kill themselves and that's a direct quote from the shrink.”

“I can't believe this,” Shobha muttered. “Devi was always nuts, a little flaky, but this? How can she? What the fuck happened?”

Girish shrugged.

“Have you ever thought about it?” Shobha asked suddenly, as the question crossed her mind.

“Thought about what?”

“About killing yourself?”

Girish went completely still for a moment. “No. How about you?”

“Never,” Shobha lied even though she could clearly remember wanting to end her life when the doctors told her she could never create one.

“Do you think something terrible happened to Devi?” Shobha went on wonderingly. “Do you think she got raped?” The idea was horrifying, but it was a possibility.

“Raped? Why?” Girish seemed flustered. “Where do you get such screwed-up ideas? Why would she kill herself if she got raped?”

“Because some women are not able to handle something that horrible,” Shobha explained. “Are you sure she's not standing on one of those cliffs waiting to jump?”

“I'm sure,” Girish said, not sounding sure at all.

Devi stood at the very edge of the cliff, her heart pounding, the cold sea air biting at her sore wrists.

She could hear the winds down below, the waves, and … giggling? She stood still and looked around to see who was there. For a moment she was scared; what if it were a ghost? An evil spirit?

Having always been afraid of the monster under her bed, even as an adult, her imagination ricocheted against the improbable until she inhaled the distinct smell of marijuana.

In her zest and focus to end her life she'd somehow missed the silhouette of a motorcycle resting by a bench, and she could now
clearly see little puffs of gray smoke zigzagging upward against the dark canvas of the night.

It seemed incongruous to think about suicide when there were people sitting on the bench, giggling and enjoying a joint or maybe two.

“Give that to me,” Devi heard a female voice say. “Not here, you idiot… what if the cops come.”

“No one will come,” a male voice said, and then there was some more giggling. It was a scene out of a cheesy teenage movie and Devi stood rooted, now unable to hear the waves below. She could only hear her oblivious companions kiss and shift on the bench. She could hear them moan and grunt. And above all she could hear them having fun.

When had she stopped having fun? When had she stopped having a good time to the point that suicide started to sound like a great idea?

She remembered the first time she'd smoked pot, all too clearly, as it was also the first time she'd had sex. Saroj would have been mortified to learn that the boy had been an Indian as she was convinced that good Indian boys “don't go sleeping around like those immoral white boys.”

Ashish was Gujral Uncle's son and Gujral Uncle and Avi had known each other since before either of them had moved to the United States. Devi had been seventeen, primed to enter the forbidden land, made more attractive because of Saroj's constant vigil on her virginity. Gujral Uncle and Auntie were playing cards with Saroj and Avi at their place when Ashish and Devi snuck into his room. She settled comfortably on his bed while he shut the door and opened all his windows.

“Oh, my God,” Devi gasped when she saw him draw out a joint. “Is it… is it?” she asked eagerly.

Ashish grinned widely and lit the illegal substance. Devi saw stars that night. Unlike what had been promised to her by all her friends, her first time was actually enjoyable. Ashish and Devi vowed eternal love, heady with the taste of lust. It lasted about six months and Ashish was now happily married to a nice girl his parents found him in India, while Devi was standing at the edge of a cliff, literally.

Almost involuntarily she took a few steps away from the edge. And suddenly she was afraid that she would trip and fall, end up in the waters anyway. The waves below didn't look inviting anymore. They seemed ominous, life-taking.

There was more to life. There simply had to be. She wouldn't accept defeat, wouldn't accept this as the end. She had lost so much, now she had to try to get some of it back. It would never be the way it used to be, but she didn't want it the way it used to be. She didn't want to live that life again, where the wanting and getting didn't have a meeting point.

But I'm scared,
she almost cried out. What if it did end up the way it was? What if she once again ended in a bathtub slicing up her wrists?

“Ah,” she heard a feminine cry of fulfillment, followed shortly by a heavy grunt from the man.

Devi's thoughts scattered.

“Get off me,” she heard the feminine voice say. “You're too heavy.”

“Okay, okay.” She heard a sturdy, satisfied male laugh.

Devi's lips curved. No, she wasn't ready to die, she decided, and then realized that she wasn't ready to live, either. She was at an impasse, but she knew one thing, she wasn't going back to that edge again.

Her feet found momentum all of a sudden and she raced back to the Jeep and drove off, away from the cliff and toward the bright lights of Highway 280 and her parents’ home.

devi's recipe
life
Day 8 after coming from hospital

Tonight I made Cajun prawn
biriyani.
Tonight I almost ended it all, once again. Tonight was a long night and I wait for tomorrow when I can put this in the past, where it belongs. No one knows that I stood at the

edge of a cliff and thought about taking the plunge into the black Pacific, but I know and that knowledge bends me in so many ways. It makes me feel guilty.

The worry and concern I seem to have caused surprises me, even as I tell myself that I have no reason to be surprised. They love me. I've always known that. They may not love me as I need them to love me, but they do and with their love they tie me to this world. And I want to stay, not just because of them, because of me as well.

I have made a decision and I have to follow through with it. I have decided to live, and now I need to find out how to make it happen.

A
pinch of hope, with a dollop of family-inspired guilt, plus a tablespoon of sense should get me there, hopefully. I will work on myself. I will make the wrongs of my past right. I will not find myself again at the edge of a cliff contemplating how long the fall, how deep the crevice.

In the Business of Living

The news arrived in a blue envelope with several Mahatma Gandhi stamps pasted on the front above Vasu's name.

“But you've only been here three weeks,” Shobha protested over dinner, her nose dripping slightly as the chili in the chicken curry burned her mouth.

“Geeta is my closest friend,” Vasu said sadly. “She needs my help.”

Devi was angry as well, an emotion that always struck her when it was time for Vasu to leave. Even as a child she would throw a tantrum with the hope that it would make Vasu stay longer. She wasn't speaking yet, but her anger was obvious. Her chicken with blueberry curry sauce, served with fragrant cardamom rice, was peeling off the first layer of everyone's stomach lining.

When she served Vasu she was extra forceful, and blueberry sauce from the curry splattered on Vasu's pale yellow cotton sari.

“Devi, you know Geeta Auntie,” Vasu tried to explain.

“Your friends have always been more important to you than your family,” Saroj declared saucily. “Devi needs you here, but you have to run along to hold Geeta Auntie's hand. So she had a small heart attack. It is a
small
heart attack. She will be fine and it's not like she doesn't have her own children who will take care of her.”

“She is almost eighty years old,” Vasu said angrily. “You have no compassion.”

“If she's eighty she already has a foot in the—” Shobha was cut off by Vasu's glare. “Why can't you just call her and send some flowers?”

“Because I want to be with her,” Vasu said in a no-further-discussion tone.

“More than you want to be with us?” Avi asked as he reached for the water. He usually never drank water while he ate but lately with Devi's moods seesawing from bland to spicy, it had sometimes become a necessity.

“You are all trying to emotionally blackmail me,” Vasu said with a sigh. “Okay, why doesn't Devi come along with me to India? It will give her a—”

“My daughter will not run along with you to India where you will abandon her to hold Geeta Auntie's or some other poor old friend's hand,” Saroj said loudly and angrily. “She needs her family and she will stay with us. You should stay here and support her. But if Geeta Auntie is more important—we have nothing more to say to each other.”

Saroj rose from the table and walked out into the patio without finishing her meal.

Her friends always came first. It had the power to anger Saroj even now, when she was an adult with grown children. How many times had Vasu left Saroj with a neighbor for a week or two to rescue some friend or the other? How many vacation days had Vasu's friends eaten away so that Vasu could never take Saroj anywhere on holiday?

And now, when it was obvious Devi needed her, she was already getting ready to go take care of some old hag who'd had a heart attack. Wasn't Devi important? Wasn't Saroj?

Vasu made her so angry. She lived her life on her own terms, sacrificing everyone else on the way. She came across as this righteous, free-minded person, but Saroj had paid for Vasu's free-mindedness. As a child she had listened to other children in school whisper about her dead father and about Shekhar Uncle. She had faced that man at breakfast in their house, knowing that he spent the night with her mother.

Vasu hadn't made the transition from being a widow to a mistress easy for Saroj. She simply told her impressionable seven-year-old daughter about Shekhar Uncle.

“No, he isn't your new father,” Vasu explained when Saroj wanted to know. “He's
my
friend. I am allowed to have friends just like you are.”

It seemed logical to Saroj then and she accepted Shekhar Uncle as her mother's friend. But she wasn't stupid or blind. She knew that none of her friends’ mothers had men friends, and even if they did, none of those friends stayed the night.

When she told Vasu that her friends were calling Vasu bad names because of her relationship with Shekhar Uncle, Vasu calmly told Saroj that she didn't care. She couldn't understand why Saroj would.

Now Saroj wondered if it would have been so difficult for Vasu to have conducted her affair with a married man with some discretion. Would it have killed her to not let the entire world know? But that was not how Vasu lived. She clearly told anyone who would listen that she didn't hide herself and her feelings. She was brave, open, and just a little stupid, Saroj thought. It was stupid to let the world know that she was a widow with a married lover. It was stupid to tell a young child about an illicit affair and drag her into a contemptuous world she wasn't ready for.

Vasu turned a blind eye to all the criticism and societal pressure. She didn't hear the whispers, or see the condemnation. But Saroj did.

Devi came outside with Saroj's half-full dinner plate and turned on the outdoor lights. She had reheated the food in the microwave, and Saroj was touched by her concern.

Devi put the plate on the patio table in front of Saroj and sat down beside her.

“It is very spicy,” Saroj commented as she pierced a piece of chicken on the fork. “I am angry, too,” she said as she chewed on the meat.

Devi sighed and leaned back into the chair.

Shobha joined them and sat on a chair across from Saroj. She put her feet up on the table and then dropped them onto the tiled floor when Saroj groaned, pointing to her food.

“You can be so Indian, Mama,” Shobha said. “Never point feet at a person and all that.”

“I don't know where your shoes have been and why would you put them next to my food?” Saroj said angrily. “And, madam, I
am
Indian. So are you.”

“Nah,” Shobha said.

“What do you mean,
nah}”
Saroj said on a mouthful of rice.

“I was born in India, but, Mama, I'm not Indian,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” Saroj said, and then Devi and she grinned, looking at each other as if they were sharing a private joke.

“What, the mute and you are best pals now?” Shobha demanded sarcastically.

Saroj shook her head, a big smile on her face. “You had an arranged marriage. I fell in love and got married.”

“And that makes me more Indian than you?”

“No, maybe just as Indian,” Saroj said, a laugh escaping her.

“Next you'll say Devi is also Indian,” Shobha muttered.

Saroj raised her hands in defeat and laughed softly.

Her daughters! Her wonderful daughters! Sure they had problems and they didn't listen to her, because if they did their lives wouldn't be such messes, but they were still hers.

“Okay, I have decided to stay another two weeks, but then I have to go,” Vasu said as she came outside. “Now is everyone happy?”

Devi all but jumped out of her chair and hugged Vasu. Shobha gave her grandmother a big smile.

Saroj sat sullenly, resenting Vasu for interrupting her good moment with her daughters.

devi's recipe
angry at vasu grilled chicken
in blueberry curried sauce
Day
15
after coming from hospital

It is a shame that Mama doesn't use the hundreds of other fruits and vegetables and spices available from around the world. If it isn't Indian,

according to her, it isn't good. I think she stared so long at the blueberries that they shriveled.

The butcher gave me three whole breasts of fresh free-range chicken. Ml of a sudden I have become very particular about ecological vegetables and free-range chickens. If they've petted the chicken and played with it before cutting it open for my eating pleasure, I'll be happy to purchase its body parts. Even if I have a tough time understanding this ecological nonsense, I feel better for buying carrots that were grown without chemicals, and I can't come up with a good reason to deny myself that happiness.

I marinated the chicken breasts in white wine and salt and pepper for a while and then grilled them on the barbecue outside. The blueberry sauce was ridiculously simple. Fry some onions in butter, add the regular green chili, ginger, garlic, and fry a while longer. Add just a touch of tomato paste along with white wine vinegar. In the end add the blueberries. Cook until everything becomes sofl. Blend in a blender. Put it in a saucepan and heat it until it bubbles.

In the end because G'ma wouldn't shut up about going back right away, I added, in anger and therefore in too much quantity: cayenne pepper. I felt the sauce needed a little bite … but I think I bit off more than the others could swallow.

I took the grilled chicken, cut the breasts in long slices, and poured the sauce over them. I made some regular
basmati
with fried cardamoms and some regular tomato and onion
raita.
I put too much green chili in the
raita
as well.