No Country: A Novel (53 page)

Once I darted into the kitchen for something and, for the first time in my life, caught Baba kissing Ammu. They were very awkward about it. Baba pretended he had simply been helping her
with something. I had not realized that Indian moms and dads kissed. It seemed bizarre—as bizarre as imagining our American teachers in sari, or kurta, I mean, could you even imagine Chitto-kaku and Kamala Auntie kissing! It’s too weird.

Baba loves me best. He talks about our Baba-Daughter team. But we never play any games, like American kids with their dads.
They and us:
I mean, I have an American passport, just like them, but we are so different. They
do
things together—like gymnastics, camping, jogging, softball, or homework—if they are lousy at reading or math—but I am good at school stuff, always have been. Baba is usually baffled when it comes to fixing things. Their dads buy tools and stuff all the time. I doubt Baba owns a screwdriver.
They
go to church: That’s usually a big deal for them. Then they go to Sunday family dinners where their parents have fights with their uncles or aunts or each other. It is all so intriguing.

It’s different with us: Baba and I just talk! We talk about everything under the sun. About insects and ant colonies, the double helix, the Three Musketeers, the
Odyssey
,
Lorna Doone
, Julius Caesar, the discovery of longitude, the spirits that bothered King Vikramaditya—whether they were ghosts—if there could even be such things as ghosts, chaos theory, Charlie Brown, Christian Gauss and how he added all the numbers from 1 to 100 in a few seconds when he was a kid, whether there could be a largest number which could never be counted, the fact that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the exact same day, same year—which is also my birthday, February 12.

Baba and I sometimes fried fish—which we both love. He buys frozen
ilish
from the Indian grocery store, or gets them fresh-caught in season from down near Haverstraw on the Hudson. It’s called shad in America. I help Baba smear the fish with turmeric
and salt before he fries them. He uses the garden hose to clean my hand, but it always stays yellowish for a whole day after. In third grade, I asked Baba why turmeric stained our hands, but not salt. So he explained about molecular structures. I loved that. We are all made of atoms and molecules. So are all things.

I was so excited I told everyone in school. It was more interesting than what we were taught in school about Creation. That story said that everything had just been created, but not
how
: That was what really interested me. Surely even the first man and woman and everything else were made of atoms and molecules. Baba also told me that there really was no “first man or woman” like in the stories. Sister Margaret and Sister Bonnie and Sister Carmelita were upset. They informed me that I was a heathen, which was okay with me. They claimed that Eve had been made from a rib.
All of her?
That sounded odd, I said, for which I was given detention, which is a waste of time.

Baba told me to ignore them. “They’ll always have a bone to pick with you.” I got the joke, of course, but I was the one who had to go back to Sister Margaret’s class the next day.

•  •  •

W
ITH ALL THIS
stuff about God, and saints, and the Holy Land every day at school, I once insisted on Baba taking me to the Hindu temple a few towns away, but we both got bored after the first time. It was nothing like being in India, although that is what Kamala Auntie claimed. But I should know, for every two years we would all go to India, where we stayed with Ammu’s mother in Madras.

I called her Paathi. She lived in a house with red tiles and an enclosed courtyard in the middle of which grew a big tamarind
tree with the dancing Shiva, daubed with vermilion, under it. A cuckoo used to sit in the branches and sing endlessly in the afternoons. Ammu became like a child herself when we were with Paathi in Madras. She is so brisk and busy here in Clairmont. I loved it when Paathi brushed our hair, and kissed both of us. Then Ammu would kiss and call me
kutty
, which means “little one,” and let me lie on her lap. There, she had all the time in the world. Baba would sit contentedly on the red-tiled verandah, which runs all around the house, and smoke local cigars, sipping the southern coffee, his favorite kind.

Just last year I found Ammu crying in the kitchen one morning after a phone call. She told me that Paathi was dead. Ammu insisted on going to work even that day, because she said it was the only thing that would calm her. She let Baba drive her there, for once, though she drives far better than my absentminded father. She handled everything, even this grief, in her own way. Baba and I sat together in his study, very sad, remembering Paathi.

But once, late at night more than a full year after Paathi died, I heard her weeping alone in the kitchen downstairs. I had gone down for a glass of milk. I held her, and she let me. She was whispering for Paathi in Tamil, in words that I could not completely understand. I hugged her for a long time. It was as if Ammu’s grief had no map, no calendar, a story with secret words. I have thought about this many times since.

Baba told me once that we must remember the names of our ancestors, to the seventh generation. He taught me their names. My ancestor Doorgadass Mitra used to live in a mansion now in ruins. It only survives as a picture my grandfather drew from memory; it hangs in Baba’s study now.

After fourth grade, we visited Calcutta, where my father grew
up and went to school, but we couldn’t visit where he had been born because he was too young to remember the exact place. The only one who would have known was my grandfather Monimoy, but he died a long time ago. My grandfather never even saw America. It is kind of strange how, after all these years, Baba gets a bit quiet when I ask him about his childhood.

Chitto-kaku’s brother and his family invited us over when we went to Calcutta. They just sat in a row on their sofa and smiled continually at us, after offering us huge amounts of too-sweet desserts and too-sweet tea with milk already poured into it.

Oh yeah, I also saw my first elephants in the Calcutta zoo. Sad hulking creatures, shackled at the leg, swaying back and forth, accepting peanuts with the ends of their moist-tipped trunks. I suppose that moist stuff was elephant nose-goo. I was not thrilled.

I enjoyed myself much more on trips with Ammu and Baba in the small holidays we took, just by ourselves, after visiting Paathi in Madras. Like Lake Periyar, miles long, with a half-submerged petrified forest of leafless branches stretched akimbo, like still black dancers in the water. We stayed on a small island in the middle, surrounded by gentle green hills, everything quiet here except the breeze. The only house on this solitary island used to belong to a king of Travancore; he would come there by himself to think. You had to get there by boat, which the boatman kept at a small jetty, just for us to use. He was also the cook. All around the island were forests. In the evenings we watched buffaloes and wild pigs come to drink water. The monkeys also came in groups.

One afternoon, when my parents were resting indoors, and I was wandering about the island bungalow, I saw a small herd of elephants come to the far bank. The mother elephants were teaching their babies to swim. I quickly called Ammu and Baba. I loved
watching elephants this way. When we returned to Clairmont, I insisted that Ammu teach me how to swim, no excuses—no talk about being too busy, or surgery schedules and births. I put my foot down. Ammu taught me in Chitto-kaku’s pool. I had never seen potbellied Chitto-kaku or Kamala Auntie in the pool. Ammu said that they liked having a pool to sit next to. I learned to swim by the third day.

•  •  •

N
OTHING IS FOREVER,
except numbers, Baba said. When I asked him on my tenth birthday whether numbers existed before God created the earth in six days, he said that if God was forever, then so were numbers. He said that there is a book called the Qur’an which says that “there is no God but God.” Baba said that it is really about Zero and One, which is the basis of all things binary. Why couldn’t we have a simple answer that everyone agreed about? Baba suggested that if God existed, He was in everything that we could think about and that it was especially true of mathematics. I repeated this in school, and the nuns were so confused they didn’t know whether to punish me. No one told me at home that there were questions I could not ask.

Once when I asked my mother where babies came from; she simply took me with her to the hospital the next Saturday and I watched her deliver a baby. Three years later, I began to bleed one afternoon. My father in a panic called Ammu, who came home immediately and explained it to me. I was fascinated that it would suddenly happen to
me
! When I told my friends at school the next day and wanted to know about them, they reported me to the nuns. The nuns told me not to talk about such matters. These
were shameful things, secret, said Sister Adolphus, and part of Eve’s curse.

I pointed out that I did not care about Eve, and my mother who was a gynecologist had explained it all to me. Sister Adolphus, looking stern, asked me sarcastically if I knew everything in the world. Not everything, I conceded, but I had seen a baby born. Had she? That seemed to stump her completely. I was sent home with a letter.

Ammu laughed when she read the letter, and my parents simply transferred me to a public school. I didn’t mind. I hated the uniform.

•  •  •

A
FEW YEARS
later, the spring I finished middle school, Chitto-kaku convinced my parents to buy a house in foreclosure, which he swore was a bargain. My father would never have been able to find such a house by himself, his head buried in mathematical equations, and Ammu was always busy at the hospital and perfectly happy in our three-bedroom apartment. She had little interest in houses or matching cushions and such. She agreed simply because she loved to take baths, and this house had a really large bathroom with a window that looked onto a fine garden. And I would be able to walk to my new high school.

One odd thing about the house was a freshly chopped tree in the middle of the backyard. When I asked Baba, he said nothing but just shook his head. But the day after we moved in, he insisted on taking Ammu and me to Byng’s Garden Center, where he bought a sapling of horse chestnut to replace the one that had been chopped down. We planted it together. “It’ll grow lovely
white flowers, Devi,” Ammu said, “and you’ll see why they are called candles.” Then she remembered a poem:

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

“Who wrote that?” I broke in. “That is so good!” Ammu smiled at me, adding,

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

That very afternoon, we went down to Stern’s Bookstore and my parents bought me my own copy of Yeats.

•  •  •

W
ELL,
I
WAS
glad for I had a bigger room to myself, and Baba turned one of the ground-floor rooms into his study. There he put up the family tree I had made when I was in elementary school, which he loved so much he had it framed. It hung next to the picture of the huge ancestral house in Barisal. The rest of the walls were taken over by books. I loved to curl up our comfortable old leather sofa to read or chat with him.

I liked our wide two-car garage, which had a kind of high platform, almost head-high at the very back, like a secret place. I climbed up there and found quite a number of empty bottles, mostly Jack Daniel’s.

“It’s like the house was Mr. Jack Daniel’s,” I commented, and Chitto-kaku laughed until he doubled over coughing, as if I had made a great joke.

“Did you notice Baba, our house numbers, 1 6 6, add up to 13. Is that unlucky?”

“That’s just an old superstition, Devi,” he said, “but prime numbers are my favorites.”

•  •  •

S
INCE WE INVARIABLY
parked our cars in the driveway, the garage was the perfect spot for frying fish on a rainy day, for Ammu had banished this particular activity from inside the new house. We would eat our fried
ilish
there till the rain let up, a favorite Baba-Daughter team activity.

Baba had bought me a small ladder for the loft at its back, where I kept some of my books. There I found a small matchbox with strange roundish pebbles in it. I asked Baba what it was. He did not know. In the evening, I showed Ammu—and she said that they were somebody’s kidney stones. “How do they form inside the kidneys?” I asked. And she explained. I took them to school to show our biology teacher at my new high school. But in our homeroom, Mrs. Bonnie Grounder, the English teacher, said they were icky, wrinkling her discolored nose, wagging one thick-jointed finger. No one wanted to touch them. Carol Miele, who usually wore a scowl, asked me the next day why I had saved them. She said her mom had wondered if we Indians ate them. I did not care to answer, for I know that there are no real answers to stupid questions. People who ask questions to make you seem strange or ridiculous do not really want to listen to your answers anyway.

But I made other friends, even some Indian kids, like me. Maya Chhabra told me that Ammu had delivered both her and her kid brother, Mayur. Her mom sold Avon stuff, and Maya said her dad was going to get her married off after high school to someone in
India she had never even met. Vijay Kohli’s parents just wanted him to study all the time so he could become a doctor, like his uncle in Utica. Neither of them was allowed to date or receive long phone calls. My parents had no such hang-ups. I had a boyfriend, Jimmy, who was kind of dorky but cute. He was fond of horror movies. I soon got bored with him.

•  •  •

T
O MY FATHER’S
great delight, I chose his old university. My undergrad years breezed past faster than I could have imagined, and I stayed on for grad school. I loved books, and did not have any lucrative career in mind, so I thought that being a grad student was a perfect alibi for reading what I chose.