Naming Maya (4 page)

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Authors: Uma Krishnaswami

BOOK: Naming Maya
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I twiddle the pages of a book lying open on the
oonjal.
“Maybe you shouldn't have gone out in the heat,” says my mother at last.
I really don't think she means anything by it. It is something to say.
But I have had it. The day, the dreadful sticky hot nosebleed, the dust, the dirty sidewalk, Kamala Mami and her ramblings, the crowds of people—it is all too much.
“Oh, sure.” My voice comes out sharp and highpitched, what Joanie calls my “tangry voice,” teary and angry. “Blame me. It's my fault! I had the nosebleed because I chose to go out, right? You weren't even there!”
“Maya!” I've stopped her in her tracks. “You know I didn't mean—”
But I swing my legs off the
oonjal,
fling the book to the floor, and march out, noting with terrible triumph that my words have landed smack on target, every single one.
The days get hotter. Mom gets busier. She also gets nervous when I venture anywhere outside the house. We have conversations that go like this:
Me: I'm going to walk up the street and take some photos, okay?
Mom: I'll come with you.
Me: It's all right, I'll be fine. I thought you had to go get those papers notarized.
Mom: Yes. Well, maybe Mami can go with you.
Me: Maybe I'll just go another time.
I don't even go to the store with Mami when we run out of beans and rice because Lakshmi Auntie picks
up groceries for us on her way home from work. She insists it's to save Mami the hassle of walking to the shops in the heat, but I think maybe Mom has told her about my nosebleed.
I do make my way up onto the flat terrace roof and get some great shots of the city. One day I surprise a rhesus monkey sitting on the edge of the roof. He sidles up to me. I back away. He stops, scratches himself, and comes closer. I remember Mami saying, “They'd come and snatch the food out of our hands.” I retreat, in case he decides to make a grab for my camera. Only later do I think,
Oops, missed a photo op.
After that I stay indoors and thumb through all the moth-eaten books in the glass-fronted cupboard on the landing. Issues of
The Strand Magazine
with the original Sherlock Holmes stories. Scads of children's books by a writer named Enid Blyton, about little English kids having tea and going to the seaside.
Mrs. Rama Rao comes to chat with Mami. Mami goes next door to sample Mrs. Rama Rao's new mango pickles.
Prospective buyers begin to arrive in small groups. They walk through the house, pointing out flaws as if we are not even there. A few relatives drop by to say hello to Mom. I begin to put some faces to the names I have heard Mom and Auntie mention—Uttam's daughter
Raji, and Priya with the twins. They come and go like minor whirlwinds. Predictably they say, “Is this Maya? How she's grown. Is this Maya who cried when she saw Kullan because he was
so
tall?”
Lakshmi Auntie asks about others. “Did Ajit and his wife come to see you? What about … ?” She names a few others.
“No,” says Mom. “It's okay, Lakshmi. I'm not here to hold court with the family.”
But Auntie sniffs and says, “They are so rude.”
Mom suggests that perhaps the family does not approve of my parents' divorce. “What is wrong with them?” says Lakshmi Auntie. “How totally medieval. What do they think, it's contagious?”
 
Lakshmi Auntie invites me to go with Sumati and Ashwin and her to the beach for a couple of days. “Come on,” she says. “Your mother's busy. What will you do here by yourself? We'll take a cottage. It'll be a change for you, and you girls can have some time together.”
“Yes, do come,” says Sumati.
Even Ashwin begs. “The beach! Yes, Maya
akka,
come with us!”
“Go, Maya,” says Mom. “Lakshmi's right. It must be getting pretty boring for you here, hanging around the house.”
Well, that's true enough. Mom certainly doesn't have time for me. I'm only in the way.
“All right,” I say to Sumati, “I'll come.”
On the drive to the beach, Lakshmi Auntie chatters like a rattly set of window blinds.
The “cottage” turns out to be a flat-roofed one-room house, painted pink, with a deep covered porch. A hammock dangles outside, slung between two coconut trees. We lug our suitcases inside. The room is painted like the inside of a peach. It has only one bed in it.
“Where do we sleep?” I ask.
Sumati looks around. A rolled-up pile of mattresses and sheets rests across the arms of a wooden chair. “We unroll those and sleep on the floor.”
“Like camping,” I say.
Ashwin sits on the bed and swings his legs. After a few minutes he says, “I'm bored.”
“Come on,” says Lakshmi Auntie. “Let's go sit out in the hammock and read a book.” She pulls copies of
Chachaji,
a children's magazine, out of a tote bag, and Ashwin follows her out.
“Want to go for a walk?” Sumati asks. “I'll take you to a special place.”
“Sure.” I check the film in my camera and slip a new roll into my pocket.
Outside, Lakshmi Auntie and Ashwin have settled
down to the riddles page of
Chachaji.
The laziness of sea and sand and sky has even managed to slow Ashwin down.
“Maybe you'll grow up to be a photographer,” says Sumati, “like my uncle.”
“Your uncle's a photographer?”
“My father's younger brother. He works for a newspaper in Delhi. He travels all over the place.”
“What about your dad?”
“What about him?” Sumati is leading the way toward the water, up a steep sand dune covered with some kind of trailing weed. I am barefoot, and the green stems feel like ropes between my toes.
“He travels a lot too, right?”
She wrinkles her nose, considering. “Yeah, he's always gone. But so? We know he'll be back. And then he'll go again, somewhere else, and then come back. It's how it is.”
She sounds so sure, it twists my insides.
We reach the top of the dune. Talking while climbing, I haven't paid attention to where we are going. Now I look down, and see how far we've come. The row of pink box cottages stretches away far behind us. Before us is the gray sea, flecked with white foam. The waves reach across the horizon. You can't see where they begin and end.
We sit on the highest point of this high hill of sand. I dig my heels in, and wiggle my behind into place. Waxy weeds tickle the back of my legs where my
salwar
has scrunched up.
“This is my special place,” Sumati says. “I can sit here and listen to the ocean for hours.”
We listen together. The ocean grumbles like an old woman, pulling its waves back, gathering its voice, then returning steadily to slap the shore. It reminds me of Mami, her voice burbling over the pots and pans in the kitchen. I wonder if she is telling stories today even though I'm not there to listen.
I think of the map at the Hindu Culture Camp, with dot stickers showing where everybody's families came from for three generations. There were yellow dots in different parts of America where most of us kids had been born. There were orange dots for places where parents had been born—many in different parts of India, but some in California and Ohio and New York. A sprinkling of blue dots told of grandparents born in Pakistan and Nepal and Sri Lanka, and even some in America. A few dots were scattered about in Canada; a few more in Guyana and Trinidad, mainly for Dina Ramchurran's family, who were all from there; a few in England and Australia (the Gupta twins and Geeta's uncle Prem); and even one orange dot on the
little island of Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean (Coomi's mom, who spoke French and taught us yoga two days a week). All of their faces, and the faces I know in my family, seem to be reflected in this water. Sitting here and looking at the ocean, the world makes sense.
We used to go to the beach in New Jersey, Mom and Dad and I, when I was younger. But all the beaches we went to were white piers and boardwalk and saltwater taffy. Not like this wild place with its single high mountain of sand and this deep gray grumbling ocean. Mom said something about it once. “Isn't it funny how pale everything is here? Even at the beach, all the colors are pastel. In India, everything's so bright.” My father disagreed. “Goa has a beach with white sand. White. Can't get paler than white.” “That's different,” she said, and they stared at the ocean as if they were waiting to see if it would change color.
No muted colors at this beach. Down at the row of cottages, flame-of-the-forest trees hold eye-popping orange flashes of flowers. I look back toward the water. In the distance I can see smudges of fishing boats—one, two, three of them—bobbing around. The air is filled with a sharp sea smell, fish and salt and seaweed. Farther up the beach from where we are, Sumati tells me, the next morning will bring crowds. “See there?
It's where the fishermen take off early, before the sun rises.”
I can see the pegs that will hold nets fast to the shore. As she talks I can imagine the women in bright saris tucked up high to keep them out of the water, tying large nets to the pegs.
“One time, when I was five or six,” says Sumati, “we came here and I went in the water with my
chappals
on.” She points to her flip-flops with the worn-out soles so I'll know what she means.
“I know
chappals,”
I tell her. “What do you think I am?”
“Some kind of American, that's what!” she teases.
I shiver.
“What's wrong?” says Sumati.
“It's funny,” I say. “I'm American here, but in America, I'm Indian.”
“Is that bad?”
“I don't know. Years ago we were going to a friend's house for a party. It was Divali …” The Hindu festival of lights was always an occasion to dress up, me in a long silk skirt, with my hair braided and a sticky
bindi
on my forehead.
“And?”
“Oh, it was nothing, really. A bunch of teenagers drove by and shouted at us. They called us dirty dot-heads.”
Sumati's jaw drops. “That's terrible. That's—why, that's racist!”
“Well, yeah. Of course. But you know, I was only five years old.”
“What did you do?”
“I took a really deep breath and gave them the best and biggest raspberry I could manage. I don't know if they saw it, but it made me feel better.” She looks puzzled at “raspberry,” so I stick out my tongue and show her.
Sumati laughs. “You are something. You know that?”
She pours a trickle of sand onto her feet and watches them disappear. “Go on about your
chappals,”
I tell her.
“Oh, it wasn't all that exciting. A big wave came and knocked me over. And when my parents pulled me out, my
chappals
had washed away. I could see them floating off on the water like little boats. My father said they'd go all the way to Singapore, or maybe even Australia.”
We laugh about those flip-flops from Sumati's younger, smaller feet, traveling around the world with all its people, some of them with good hearts and some filled with hate. “I cried and cried,” she says, and smiles, the way you can smile at your younger self because, after all, what did you know back then? She adds, “They were purple.”
I dig my hands into the sand, finding small shells, round ones and little cone-shaped ones, mostly broken, but some whole. There is one little double shell, its two halves still joined at the hinge. It seems too perfect to disturb, so I put it back gently and cover it with sand again.
Sumati slides around till she is lying flat on the ridge of sand. She stretches out and sighs, closing her eyes.
“Say ‘pizza,'” I tell her, and get my camera ready.
She opens one eye and makes a funny face. I laugh and click. She sticks out her tongue, and I click again.
“My turn. I'll take your picture. Can I?”
After that we sit for a while, looking at the ocean. From this high up it is like a painting. Soon Ashwin comes yelling for us. “Come see me fly my paper aeroplanes!”
 
All that evening we help Ashwin flutter his paper planes back and forth across the beach. The next day we walk along the beach and watch a man do his morning yoga. Ashwin tries to stand on his head and the man, distracted, frowns at him.
The day goes by in a warm glow of sunlight on water. We get in the car and drive to a place where ancient temples have been sculpted out of solid rock. The
carvings are intricate, each telling a story. A cluster of small temples is strewn on the seashore, each designed to look like a chariot. A larger one, farther away, sends two spires towering up into the sky. “Look,” says a man who has appointed himself our guide. “Single rock carved into temples. Seventh century. Pallava dynasty. UNESCO has declared this as a World Heritage Site.”

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