The Story Hour (13 page)

When I sees the kind in my dada's gray eyes, I feeling so happy, I get straight up from floor and put my head on his shoulder. He touch my hair. “You had a bad sapana, eh, child?” he say. “Don't be ascare.”

I am feeling so happy to leaf God and be back with my dada. But then I feeling so sad because I know I not seeing my ma on August 15. In my dream, Ma seem so nearby, and now she so, so far again. My dada kind, but not having power like God. God having power, but not kind like Dada. But between Dada and God, my dada win.

My ma always say, God make world perfect, Lakshmi. He not put extra leaf on tree or one extra hair on your head. He make everything exact-exact. Our job to be happy with what he give. In famine time, he give us not one grain less than we needs. In good time, he give us not one grain more than we needs. I use to argue with Ma. Why for I still then hungry, Ma? Why my stomach still growling like a dog? And Ma smile and say, So when you sees a stray dog, you will knows to feed it. And then Ma take scoop of rice from her plate and put it on mine. Eat, she say. I not hungry today.

At that time, I eats everything Ma put on my plate. I not notice how thin she become. The need of my stomach was bigger than the need of my eyes, you see. But today, Maggie, I understands everything. How she took the food out of her mouth and put it in ours. Today, each time I eat a mango from our grocery store, I reminder how Ma never ate mango fruit. She only suck the big seed. The soft, sweet fruit part, she gave us. The best part of my ma, we got. What was left for her was the 'rthritis and the pain and the hungriness. And this made her happy. Because that what it meaning to be a mother.

Today I know: If I could choose between meeting my ma again or meeting God, I choose her. Each time I choose her.

Maggie be quiet after I finish my story. I knows she not understand why I telling this dream or what my story mean. After a minute, she look at clock on wall and say, “Well, it's time to stop for today.”

I feel bad. Telling about my ma has make her come into the room with us, and I feeling again the sad I feels when she die. I fourteen year old then, but I become grown woman when my ma die.

Maggie stand up and I also. I about to say, “Okay, bye,” but I see Maggie face red. Her eyes crying. I so surprise.

“It's hard, isn't it?” she say. “Losing your mom. God knows I still miss mine. After all these years.”

Something magic happen. I fly. Fly out of this room in Cedarville, over mountain, over river, fly like bird or like Air India, until I standing in front of my dada's house. Inside, house is full of old women. Shilpa and I is standing barefoot, holding hands. The old womens crying, make caw-caw sound, like crows in early morning. But I's not crying. I's using my sleeve to wipe Shilpa's tears. I telling her not to be sad, Ma is happy now, that I her ma now, and I will look after her perfect-perfect. I promises her nobody will make her to stop school. I will work two-three times more to make the money. I tell her Ma is with the God now, and her body is not paining. I saying everything other people saying to me. But inside, my heart sour and rough as a guava fruit. Inside, someone clean me empty like a pumpkin.

And I never cries. Not when they puts Ma's body on the pyre. Not when priest make fire and Ma turn into smoke and ash. Not when I hears Shilpa crying at night. Not while helping Dada in the kheti. Not when doing accounting for Menon sahib, writing in the big red cloth ledger. Not when Ramu, the stray dog Ma give milk to every evening, sit outside our house and cry whoo-whoo-whoo for one straight week. Dada finally make Ramu go away with stick, because he say Ramu know his heart better than God do.

I tell you truth: I wicked woman. I never cries for my ma's death.

But now I catch Air India plane back to Maggie's porch. I see the tears in Maggie's eyes. They looking like stars in night sky. For first time since I meeting Maggie, I feeling useful.

“You know why you missing your ma?” I says. “It because dead peoples needs to know we still remindering them. Otherwise they feeling alonely, thinking we forgets them. That is why only God gives us missing feeling in heart. To keep them company.”

Maggie take my hand and squeeze. “You're wonderful. But I'm supposed to help you, not the other way around.”

“Why you alone to help? We friends, no?”

She look to saying something but then she stop. “Sure,” she say. “Sure.”

M
AGGIE EYED THE
boxes of frozen hors d'oeuvres that Sudhir was tossing into their cart. “Honey,” she gasped. “I thought this was a small dinner for your chair and a few other faculty members. Who do you think's gonna eat all this food?”

Sudhir stopped in the middle of Costco, a sheepish look on his face. They stood under the fluorescent lights, facing each other, vulnerable to the mad frenzy of the other shoppers, who maneuvered oversize carts around the couple. “Ah, yes, I've been meaning to tell you. I sort of changed my mind. I mean, I'm thinking if we're throwing a party, why not invite the entire department?”

Despite her dismay, Maggie laughed. “You're incorrigible. Remember you promised me last time we weren't doing any more big parties?”

“I know. But really, I was going to invite at least two other couples along with Brent and his wife, anyway. So I figured, what's fifteen more people?”

“You don't know the difference between six or fifteen? And you're the math professor?” Maggie reached out for a bottle of olive oil as they began to wheel the cart again. “At least promise me you won't invite any grad students.”

“Well,” Sudhir began. “That's hard, you know.”

Maggie shook her head. I don't know why you're surprised, she told herself. When she'd first met him, Sudhir was sharing an apartment in the Village with three other students. Located above a bakery at the corner of West Third and MacDougal, it was the gathering place for all their friends. Sudhir and his roommates, two other Indian students, and a guy from Brazil cooked steaming pots of food every weekend—aloo gobi, rice pilaf, fish curry, Chinese spring rolls, Manchurian chicken—and the apartment filled with students wandering in and out, eating off of paper plates. Someone would bring a bottle of rum to make piña coladas; someone else would carry in a blender and a bag of ice. There would be killer games of gin rummy in one room, teams playing Scrabble in another. The apartment was like an all-night salon or speakeasy. There was just one sacrosanct rule—no one was allowed to touch Sudhir's stereo system. It was a cheap Panasonic three-in-one affair, but it was the first real purchase Sudhir had made in the U.S. out of his graduate assistantship money, and he loved that stereo. The others groaned and mocked the music he played as hopelessly outdated—in the late 1970s, Sudhir was still listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Bee Gees, and Simon & Garfunkel. Maggie, raised on the R&B records Wallace used to play, tried introducing him to Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Jimmy Cliff. But of all these performers, Sudhir really loved only Bob Marley—a fact that Maggie grew to regret when, in the late fall of 1980, he went through a three-month period of repeatedly playing “Redemption Song” back to back with Dylan's “Hurricane” until he drove them all crazy.

But Sudhir's hospitality, the casual ease with which he opened up his home to his friends and their friends, his generosity in feeding whoever wandered in, the commune-like atmosphere that he created, spoke powerfully to Maggie. She had not known how lonely she was until she met Sudhir and his brand of Indian hospitality. By this time, her mother was long dead, Wallace had moved to Florida with his new wife, Odell had settled in Paris, and Maggie was commuting to NYU from Brooklyn, where Mrs. Tabot, their old neighbor, was still renting her a room. The four years at Wellesley had been fruitful but isolating, hers being one of a handful of black faces on a campus that felt wintry-white. She was popular, or at least well liked, and her roommates and professors were too liberal and sophisticated for her to experience any overt racism. And for a city girl, there was an ever present awe and gratitude for Wellesley's tranquil, pastoral beauty, for its sheltering embrace. The rude awakening, the bruising delivered by the real world, came each time she and her friends drove into Boston. The first time she tried buying apples at Haymarket, she looked into the ruddy, hostile face of the Irish vendor, who yelled at her for touching the fruit, and she shuddered. She walked on, telling herself to not take it personally, that she had just encountered the legendary Boston rudeness, when she heard him mutter, “Dirty little black bitch.” She spun around, her eyes already filling with tears, but he was smiling at another customer, using a paper towel to wipe down the apple.

But such incidents were rare. Wellesley's brick buildings, its lush, woodsy campus, its air of erudition, its intellectualism, protected her. What it didn't, couldn't, protect her from was the knowledge that for all practical purposes, she was totally alone. Odell often told her to move to Paris after graduation, that he would support her while she continued her education, but she knew better than to take him up on the offer. Her brother was in a new marriage, a baby on the way. There was no way she was going to show up at his doorstep.

And so Sudhir's apartment, with its strange odors, its outdated music, its open front door, its all-night conversations and card sessions, its Indian guys who walked around barefoot on the green-carpeted floor, became her refuge.

Maggie had grown up in a home where her parents had only occasionally had guests over for dinner and then just another couple and their kids. Their main source of socializing were the Saturday gatherings held at the Church of the Open Heart, which the family had attended faithfully until Maggie's mother, Hilda, took ill. Packed into the tiny storefront church with its two oscillating wall fans, the Elder Lawrence Jemmont beaming at his parishioners, they sweated, prayed, and clapped as they sang, gave praise to the Lord, and finally, feasted on whatever food people had brought—jerk chicken, goat curry, fried plantains, currant rolls. The atmosphere in the MacDougal apartment revived her dim memories of those long-past Saturday socials. But the thought of inviting all these people into her home and then cooking for them, as Sudhir did each weekend, was alien to her.

Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was—it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA. Their time in India was an endless procession of relatives visiting them at Sudhir's parents' home, and going to visit relatives at their homes. Every visit, no matter how short, involved food. They were invited, begged, forced, emotionally blackmailed, arm-twisted into eating a meal at every home they visited. There were hurt feelings if they refused; inter-family rivalries were provoked if they let slip that they'd eaten at the last home they'd visited. They were cajoled into staying for dinner, and if not that, having dessert or a fruit juice, or come, come, at the very least some sweetmeats, baba, and if not even that, please, you cannot leave without taking a cup of tea. As infuriating as it was to be browbeaten into eating, Maggie learned something important about her husband during that visit. She realized that Sudhir had simply, perhaps unconsciously, duplicated his Bengali upbringing in his apartment in New York, and she learned that he had done more than provide her with a sense of home, of family, of belonging—he had done the same for himself. One of the things she'd always admired and feared about Sudhir was how self-sufficient and self-contained he seemed, and now she saw how deep that instinct was in him. What he didn't have, he built.

I guess it isn't surprising that we are apparently hosting a party for more than fifteen people, a bemused Maggie thought, half-watching as Sudhir put three cartons of eggs into the cart. She was about to stop him when she heard a voice call her name.

She knew who it was before she turned around, heard the thick accent and recognized it as Lakshmi's. Her heart sank a bit as she saw that Lakshmi's husband was also walking toward them. Instinctively, she leaned in to Sudhir.

“Hello, Maggie. Hello, sir.” Lakshmi's voice was breathless, as if she'd been running. “From far away, I see you. I says to my husband, that's Maggie madam, for sure.”

“Hello, Lakshmi,” Sudhir said quietly, and the other man looked startled. Before he could speak, Lakshmi said, “This is Sir, Madam's husband. Sir, this is my mister.”

Adit Patil looked uncomfortable, but Sudhir smiled pleasantly. “Hi, how are you?” he said. “I think I was in your store years ago. Business is good, I hope?”

The man shrugged. “Chalta hai,” he said. “Economy is so bad.” A look of cunning came over his face. “If we can get business from more top clients like you, sir, we will do better. I can offer five percent discount on many items.”

Lakshmi looked mortified. “Sorry,” she said to Maggie, shaking her head. “Husband always thinking of business, only.”

But Adit didn't look remotely chastised. “That what businessman do.” He waved his hand in the direction of his cart. “That's why we here to do the weekly shopping. For restaurant. Work is our life.” He eyed their cart, which was brimming with frozen foods. “You also opening restaurant, sir?” He grinned, and Maggie thought it made him look fifteen years younger.

Sudhir laughed dutifully. “No. Just stuff for a work party we're having next weekend.”

Adit turned an accusatory eye on Maggie, and she thought she knew exactly what the man was thinking—what kind of wife doesn't cook for her husband's party? She flushed and heard Adit say, “You should give us catering order, sir, for future party. We provide napkin, plates, food, hot plate, everything. We can do serving also. You just sit and enjoy.”