Naming Maya (7 page)

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Authors: Uma Krishnaswami

BOOK: Naming Maya
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Sumati shows up the next morning. “Amma sent lime pickles for you,” she says, and hands my mother a little jar.
But we are in a crisis. The milk deliveryman hasn't shown up for some reason. Mami is in the kitchen, shaking her head and muttering to herself. There is no milk for coffee, she says, and how can we expect her to cook breakfast until after she's had her coffee? Mom offers her a can of condensed milk. Mami waves it away contemptuously. “Bad enough we have to buy milk in plastic packets from that crook Nazir,” she says, “because the wretched milkwoman brings her cow to the Rama Raos' doorstep and milks it for them, but she won't sell any to us. She's just too cheap to
feed her cow properly, the poor animal. Did you know her son-in-law tried to kill the cow by feeding it nails? So we have to wait for Nazir to bring us Aavin milk in plastic bags and now even he's disappeared. When I was a girl there was none of this milk in bags. Did you know that they're very bad for your health, you are actually eating bits of plastic that dissolve in the milk? And what about the poor cows out in the street, did you know they are dying from eating plastic bags?”
Mom ducks under this barrage of information that, true or not, is not helping us get any closer to breakfast. Mami wrings her hands and curses the milk deliveryman. She is sure he's taken off with all twenty of the rupees she gave him yesterday. Probably gone all the way to Bangalore by now. Mom tries to reason with Mami—there's no way twenty rupees will get Nazir the milk deliveryman to Bangalore. But she makes no headway.
Sumati says, “No problem, Mami. We'll go get you some milk, Maya and I. What kind do you want?”
Mami switches from despair to joy as quickly as flipping channels on a TV remote. “Full,” she says. “No, no, toned. No, one of each. Full is good for coffee, and toned sets better
thayiru.”
I realize she's talking about the milk. Whole is better for coffee. Reduced fat makes better yogurt.
Mom hands us money with a sigh of relief, and we set off.
It's one of those glaringly bright mornings that will soon turn to blistering heat. Mr. Rama Rao is right. There is no sign of rain in this sky.
“Thanks,” I say.
Sumati shrugs. “No point in letting her get upset about a thing like milk.”
“I know.” I fiddle with a button on my
kameez
till it flies off. It lands in the road, and when I step off the sidewalk to retrieve it I am almost knocked over by a passing cyclist. He rides off with an annoyed jangle of his bicycle bell.
“What is the matter with you?” says Sumati. “You're as jumpy as … as a mustard seed in a frying pan!”
She makes me grin in spite of myself.
“It's Mami, right?” she says.
I try to whistle and fail miserably. I've never been able to whistle anyway, why would I get it right this time?
She says, “Do you think … ?” at the same time as I begin, “That's what I …” She stops. “Okay, you go first.”
Mami,” I say. “There's something wrong with her.”
Sumati says, “She's just upset about the milk. She's touchy about things like that.”
“Is that all?”
“I don't know. Amma says she's just getting old.”
Our conversation has made the walk seem shorter than it is. The Aavin milk booth is a hole in the wall framed by wooden shutters that are painted a bright blue. It is wedged between a newspaper vendor's stall and the shop where Mami grinds her coffee. The scent of roasting beans fills the air, overpowering the faint nastiness of the rubbish heap on the other side of the road. A cow pushes through early morning traffic to pick a banana peel delicately off the garbage. People cross the road at a quick clip, avoiding the traffic that has already begun to thicken. The cow plods on, her sights set on a clump of flowers hanging over someone's hedge. Overhead, rows of pigeons sit like animated ornaments on the flat roof-edges of apartment buildings.
I am breathing in the day when suddenly I feel Sumati stiffen.
Teenage girls lounge in a gaggle at the bus stop just outside the milk shop. They eye us curiously. I eye them back—tight jeans, tailored jackets, and shoes with platforms so high you'd think only a stilt walker could handle them. Jangly earrings and black lipstick complete the picture. It isn't what you'd see in tourist videos of India.
My mother would go up in a puff of embarrassment
if I dared to dress like that. But, then, I wouldn't dare.
“Oh, no,” Sumati mutters.
“What?” I ask. “Do you know them?”
The girls giggle and nudge one another. They concentrate on giving us a collective scornful look.
Sumati doesn't reply at first. I try again.
“Well? Do you?”
She sighs. “Yeah,” she whispers. “One of them's in my school, the tall one with the nose ring. She used to live in Paris. She thinks she's so cool.”
It is hard to believe these girls share the same town as Sumati, in her rumpled blue
salwar kameez
, let alone the same school.
Joanie was my partner and defender when kids teased me at school. When Mark jeered, “My dad says Maya's dad got fired from his job!” Joanie stuck her tongue out at him and spilled juice on his homework. When he came back with, “My dad says Maya's dad's going to dump her mom!” Joanie ripped into him with fists and nails until Mrs. Harrison pulled them apart and sent them both to the principal's office. But not before Joanie made Mark the Drip (we called him that) say, “Okay, okay, I'll shut up.” “Apologize,” she insisted. “Apologize to Maya, you little rat.”
Now it seems the role of partner and defender is mine.
“Hi, Sumati,” says the tall girl, turning her face so her little nose ring glitters. She stretches out the “hi,” dragging more sarcasm out of the word than I'd have thought was possible.
“What are you talking to her for?” says one of the others. “
Ayyo
, look at those clothes!”
For the first time since I have met her, Sumati's confidence wavers. The girls giggle at her, secure in numbers. She pulls at her shabby
kameez
as if she is ashamed of it. She is frozen in the spotlight of their attention.
Not me. The look, the tone, the attitude, strike me with a lightning bolt of energy. I know exactly what to do. I feel as I did years ago and far away, when those other teenagers had driven by and yelled insults at us. “Dot-heads!” they'd cried. “Go home, you dirty dot-heads!”
My timing is perfect. I gather energy from inside me. I pause while they consider what to do next. I deliver, with mighty concentration, fueled by all the breath I have in me, a good, large raspberry.
It stops them cold. It's not what they expect. They stare at us in bafflement. There's an uncertain moment when I think,
Oh, boy, I've made it really bad for Sumati now
.
Then the tall girl bursts out laughing, and they all
follow suit. But it's a different kind of laughter now. The tension's broken. They burst into exclamations and questions. “Hey, who's this? Where'd you dig her up from, yeah, Sumati?” It's all good-humored now, take it or leave it.
Sumati introduces me.
“From America, huh? Where?”
“New Jersey,” I reply, and feel their surprise at my accent. They can't figure me out. I don't fit their sense of what someone from America should be like.
“So, how come the
desi
clothes?” one of them asks.
I hesitate, wondering why I need to defend my
salwar
kameez.
Then, “They fit,” I say. “Come on, Sumati.”
We walk tall, up the steps to where the Aavin man has been watching with a grin on his face. We say, in one voice, “One full and one toned milk, please.”
We walk home with the fat little pillows of milk. We don't speak as we walk. We don't need to. We are a partnership.
Mom needs to go to the bank the following day, and because Sumati and Ashwin have to go to the tailor and get measured for new school uniforms, and the bank is on the way, we all go together.
The bank is only a few blocks away from the house. Finding parking is such a pain that it seems it might have been easier if we'd walked. “Maybe you should just drop us off, and we'll get back on our own,” Mom suggests. Auntie pooh-poohs the idea, insisting, “No trouble at all. Really, Prema, I'm used to driving in this messy place.” Between the cows that have taken up grazing stations at the corner trash heap and all the auto rickshaws whose drivers seem to be gathering for an early lunch, it is a stressful matter, but Lakshmi
Auntie manages to wedge us into a tiny space where the car will be out of harm's way.
We sidestep the cows and cross the street, pausing to drop a couple of coins into the bowl of a blind man snapping finger cymbals and singing at the top of his lungs. He has positioned himself strategically just outside the bank, so he can appeal to people going in and out of a place that deals in money.
Under the blue-and-white Union Bank sign, a uniformed guard swings a door open for us. This door is more than an entrance and exit. It is the dividing line between worlds. We leave the bright harsh street behind for a room crowded with dark wooden counters, the only sounds the murmur of conversation, the clacking of computer keys, and the occasional jingling of coins. Overhead the ceiling fans whir to a rhythm of their own. Some things mark this bank so it could be nowhere else in the world but here. At one end of the room, on the wall, there is a large framed poster, offering loans to account holders and listing current interest rates. Above the lettering is a large, friendly Ganesha, beaming at us all. A similar poster hangs on the opposite wall, but the picture on that one is an equally large and friendly Jesus, hand raised in blessing.
My mother asks a teller if she can see the bank manager. “Is Mr. Devadas here today?”
“No, madam. He has gone to Bangalore for his son's wedding. Maybe the assistant manager can help you?”
In no time we are ushered into a back office where a plump woman in a purple sari looks up from her paper-strewn desk and motions to us to sit down. My mother makes her request. She needs to close out a safe-deposit box.
“Certainly. Number? Key? Complete this form, please, and I can help you with that.”
My mother begins to fill out the form, when Lakshmi Auntie exclaims, “I know where I've seen you before. You're Jana, right? Kamala Mami's daughter-in-law!”
The woman freezes, then forces a smile. She says, “Yes, and you are … ?”
Lakshmi Auntie explains the family connections, how Mami knows three generations of us. She introduces Mom, and then Ashwin, Sumati, and me.
“Did she come to see you?” Jana asks.
There is a brief silence. Then Mom says, “Yes. She insisted she wanted to come and cook for us while we were here. Didn't you know that? At first she wouldn't take any money, but I finally persuaded her that the only way I could let her come every day was if she'd let me pay her.”
“We didn't know.” Jana shakes her head. “She
doesn't tell us where she's going, what she's doing. My husband is really worried about her. And she lives all alone. She doesn't have to, you know. She's getting old, and she forgets things sometimes.”
Mom says awkwardly, “I told her she didn't have to come and work so hard. We'd manage on our own.”
“She really shouldn't be on her own,” says Jana. “Old people living alone—it's unsafe. The crime rate and all is terrible here in Chennai. Once she left the front door open all night. She could be murdered in her bed and we wouldn't even know.” She collects herself and mumbles, “Your locker. I'll take care of it. Excuse me.
Mom and Lakshmi Auntie look at each other.
I whisper, “Mom, why won't Mami go stay with her son?”
Mom says, “I don't know.”
Sumati says, “Mummy … ?”
Lakshmi Auntie says, quickly, “Shh, not now,” because Mami's daughter-in-law returns with more papers. She is her composed business self again, and we have no time now to talk about an old woman with stories in her head who does as she pleases and won't listen to anyone.

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