The Abundance: A Novel (12 page)

“Are you crying? What happened?”

I take my hands away so he can see my laughter. He still isn’t sure.

“Are you okay? Look at me. Look at me.”

“She thought I looked
trim
,” I say, catching my breath. “Abhi, she was jealous of my figure!”

Abhi shakes his head. “She is an
ek number ka
idiot, isn’t she?” He grins. “Naina and the rest.”

“Swimsuit body!” I mimic her. I make an A-OK sign, which is also the evil eye. “Absolutely swimsuit body!”

He guffaws, and now we are both laughing with the car half out of the parking space. We can’t stop. Our ribs and cheeks ache. Soon we are crying-laughing and finally just crying until we are on the highway, where we go silent and stay silent. At home, we lie in bed holding each other in our dress clothes, which we throw later that afternoon in a pile at the back of the closet: his suit, my saree, never to be washed, never ironed, never worn again.

Mala and family arrive. This time they come for a week.

“You can’t keep wasting vacation,” I tell her after the embrace and the
how are you feeling
and the grandchildren’s cheddar cheese Goldfish in two Mickey Mouse bowls. The kids, snacked up, have gone to the toys I brought out for them: Ronak’s old cars and Transformers for Vivek, for Shivani the ball she kicks back and forth with Sachin.

“It’s not a waste of vacation,” says Mala. “How is it a waste?”

“Remember you were talking about Disney?”

“Yeah. We’d have put that off anyway. She’s still young.”

“But this is when they would love it.”

“She’s still young. Besides. This is where they
want
to come. You should have seen how excited they were. Naani’s house, Naani’s house.”

I nod. “It is such a long drive for you.”

“We let them watch
Nemo
.” She sits back. “For the billionth time.”

A pause. I run my hand nervously along the couch arm, ruffling the fabric dark, then smoothing it light again.

“What’s wrong?”

“I could not cook last week.”

“Not a problem. You know that’s not a problem, Mom.”

“I don’t know where the week went. I don’t know where any of the weeks go anymore.”

“We can order pizza.”

“Your father is always eating like that now. I have no strength.”

I realize I shouldn’t have said that. She is going to read too much into it. “You can’t expect yourself to cook, Mom. Not with all that’s going on.”

“It is not natural for me.”

I am not looking at her. But I can feel her staring at the side of my face, hard. “Can I help?”

“What?”

“Can I help?”

“The number is in Abhi’s phone. Abhi will go pick it up. Or Sachin. You can stay.”

“No. I mean, can you cook if I help you?”

“You mean cutting the vegetables?”

“Oh
God
, Mom!” She talks to the ceiling. “I’m not
that
incompetent, you know!”

“I know. You are a brilliant girl. I know.”

“I can do other stuff. I never learned. Or at least not as much as I should have. But I mean, there are things I can do. You could sit and guide me.”

She has come into my kitchen only rarely. Once, when she had a home economics class in high school, she decided she liked baking. She wouldn’t eat what she had made, not more than half a cookie fresh out of the oven. She would give me the other half from her fingers, hot, hotter where the chocolate chips had melted. As she grew older, she had no time, and then no patience, and then no respect for the art. It smacked of Old World female subservience; it was a chore, as lovelessly done as the dishes afterward. I try to imagine how it would be with her helping me now.

“I never learned. I can learn now. Mom?”

“Yes?”

“What do you say?”

“There is nothing in the house. Everything is used up.”

“Write me a list.”

“You want to go now?”

“I’ll get the pizza on the way back. Then for dinner we’ll have what you and I make together. How’s that sound?”

“Good.”

“Great.” She smiles at me. “I get to be the sorcerer’s apprentice.”

She goes to the counter and comes back with a junk-mail envelope and a pen. She clicks the pen three times quick.

“Rattle off what you need.”

I sit back and imagine my refrigerator and my pantry. I close my eyes. This is not what I am used to. I do all the grocery shopping for the house.

“Let’s start with produce.”

“Ginger,” I say. “A lot of ginger. Maybe five whole roots.” I go through it fast; it is my antiemetic.

She writes.

“Tomatoes … the cooking variety. You know those? They are kind of thicker, rounder—”

“I know cooking tomatoes, Mom.”

“Okay.”

“What else?”

“Onions. White. At least two. And two limes. Not the organic ones, those are more expensive for nothing. We have lemons I think. Cilantro, of course. And maybe bring grapes, too. Vivek likes grapes, right?”

“V, if I bring grapes, will you eat them?”

Vivek’s truck pauses under his hand. “Yeah.”

“You want the purple ones or the green ones?”

“The purple-flavored ones.”

“All right, purple grapes for V.”

He looks up suddenly. “Wait! Not with the seeds!”

“No seeds, got it. What else, Mom?”

I go through the store in my memory, aisle by aisle. I keep my eyes shut so I can visualize it exactly and not forget anything. The menu decides itself as I go: black beans, palak paneer, cucumber raita. As I say each ingredient, the finished dish implies itself and draws other items off the shelves and into my imaginary cart. Mala has started a second column. Some of the things I say I already have in the house, but I desire fresh cumin, fresh fennel seeds, even fresh salt, not three-weeks-unbreathing spices in the dark of my cupboard. It is wasteful of me, I know, so I press several twenties into Mala’s hand. She resists, but not too forcefully because I am weak now. A little persistence on my part, and she takes the money. The back of the envelope is covered in pen, the second column packed smaller and smaller at the bottom right, fitting in as much as possible before the end.

*   *   *

That afternoon—in the smell of empty pizza boxes, the side panels untucked and the coupons left stapled to the cardboard—we start.

Mala comes down wearing a tank top. I remember, when she was a teenager, when I forced her to learn some basic dishes, she used to complain how hot it got around the stove. Now that she’s not wearing sleeves I see the ancient scar on her upper arm. Centuries ago, when she was four, she reached up and pulled a pot of tea off the stove. I used the rear burners almost exclusively for three years after that and still prefer them if I have a choice. To this day I turn all pot handles to the twelve o’clock position even when there is no one else in the house. The tea had splashed the floor, mostly; the pot itself, bouncing off the stove edge, left that red slat on her shoulder. I remember the scene afterward. Brown drops clung to the nearby cupboards and the oven. Black tea-grounds soiled the linoleum over a startling distance, like the spill from a knocked-over houseplant. Thankfully she had been wearing pajama pants, or her pale legs might have been scalded by the splatter. She hadn’t pulled the pot directly onto herself. She had tried to move it aside for me, onto a neighboring unlit range, as she had seen me do every morning. The heavy pot leaped at her off the high ledge. I had been washing my hands across the gulf of the kitchen floor. I turned around, and it had already happened. If she had been standing a little to the left … if I had waited at the stove instead of washing my hands … How efficient I liked to be, no time wasted, every minute used.
Let me wash last night’s ice cream bowls while the tea’s heating.
I was rinsing my hands when the milky tea frothed, rose, rushed to the brim.

“Mom? You all right?”

“Let’s start.”

“Wait.” She has brought something folded. Two matching aprons. I never wear one, but I will today.

“You like them?”

“Of course.” Was she planning this cooking adventure before she came? “Where did you find them?”

“I passed them in the store, and I got them. Cute, eh? With the teddy bears?”

“Which one do you want?”

“You pick.” She holds one flat on each palm.

“Red.”

“Here.”

“You’re sure you don’t want the red?”

“I’m sure, Mom.”

We put them on. We are both skinny now, mother and daughter. The ties at our waists could wrap us fully around and knot in front. But we tie them in the back anyway and let the long ends dangle.

We begin with knives and okra, speaking of Vivek’s time at the Montessori school and Shivani’s new words. She is saying
chocolate milk
and, of course,
Dora, Boots, Backpack.
I am happy about this. I know Mala had been worried, though she had no reason to be. Children speak when they are ready to speak. I had told her this and so had the pediatrician, but Mala was impatient because the daughters of Rachna and Sima, her two close friends, started speaking well before Shivani. We dice the potatoes, and I watch Mala’s fingers. A cut this early might turn her off, or at least spoil the afternoon for her. Now that we are here together, I want to keep going. I want to talk to her like this for as long as she will stay. With cutting boards before us and a meal to be prepared, this is not a self-conscious heart-to-heart, taking place during time we have set aside to have one. The attention is off the words for once, and that inattention is sunlight. The words grow free and crack the pavement and cover the bricks in green. We talk about Rachna’s marriage to Sohum for a while, and Mala takes some pleasure in telling me how hard their daughter is to discipline. They have to hide their pens because she’s obsessed with writing on the couches. Then Mala shrugs and says how not everyone can be like Amber’s kids, “all yes-ma’am-no-ma’am.” We start talking about Amber. The more we do—about how Amber is far too strict with the boys, how Ronak needs to stand up to her more, how Dev has finally grown out of his stammer—the closer she feels to me. It is not cruel of us. Is it? If Amber were upstairs or had just stepped out, that would be different. But she is far away, and Mala is right here, opening up, telling me what she thinks, sharing stories from her last visit to New York. I know she loves Amber and Ronak and their boys. I love them, too, no question.

“So what happened back at Christmas?”

She stops cutting. “Hm?”

“You know. At Christmas. Ronak came home without warning. Amber wouldn’t answer her phone. Were they fighting?”

She shrugs and starts cutting again, but the motions are suddenly subdued. Nothing like when she had been telling me her stories. “I don’t know.”

I watch her fingers. “You know. You’re just not telling me.”

Her voice is quiet. “I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

In the silence that follows, I regret how the mood between us has broken.

“They’re fine now,” Mala says at last. “That’s all that matters.”

“It was probably just a fight.”

“Yeah,” she nods. “Probably.”

Another silence.

“Are we done with this?”

“I think so.”

“All right.” She begins scraping what she has cut into a tighter pile. I do the same. “This is it. I’m going to cook. You tell me what to do, step by step.”

“I don’t feel very tired. I can do most of it, Mala.”

“No, no, no,” she says. “I’ll never learn that way. Same as with procedures. Watching is useless. You have to do it.”

She washes her hands and brings a chair from the dining room into the kitchen.

“Sit there,” she says, “and tell me what to do.”

I smile. “Mala, I can’t just sit here.”

“If you don’t, you’re going to get up and do it yourself.”

“I am not so ill. Look at me. I feel good. You made me feel good.”

“Mom, you’re strong, you could do this in your sleep, I know. But I’m trying to learn.”

“You already know some things. You made masoor ni daal last time we came. You made that wonderful raita…”

“From a cookbook. Shredded cucumber and store-bought yogurt. I want to learn the real stuff.”

“Sachin will be happy.”

She grins with one corner of her mouth. “Sachin will be ecstatic.”

“Good.”

“I want to do this for me,” she says defiantly. “And—with you.”

“Good.”

“You’ll sit still, then?”

We are connecting again, I can feel it. I sigh and roll my eyes, the way I have seen her sometimes do, and say, again like her, “I guess.”

“So.” She opens a cupboard and bites her lip.

“That pan. No. The one next to it … let me see…” Some things I only know Gujarati words for, but she knows the words too from hearing them so often. “The sansi is in that drawer. Put the gas on medium, about. Good. Let it heat up a bit. This is a good time to take out the cooker. We can get that started while we’re doing the spinach. It’s a good idea to get everything going. The whistle? I keep it in the drawer with the spoons.”

*   *   *

On their second morning here, Sachin helps Abhi move the study upstairs so that I can sleep downstairs. I don’t want this, but everyone decides it’s too dangerous for me to keep going upstairs and downstairs, especially at night. They have watched me uneasily ever since that silly fall of mine in December—an honest slip of the sock, but try convincing them. Abhi has exhumed from the basement some ancient cardboard boxes from the year we moved into the house. He reinforces their bottoms and edges with duct tape. The name of the mover—are they still even in business?—takes me back. Abhi wanted the first-floor study because, he said, it would stay cooler, and he couldn’t think in heat. That was his pet theory about blood flow and brain work: cold vasoconstricted the blood vessels at the skin, so more blood was available for thinking. The brain flushed and prickled. This was also why he didn’t eat much at my table when he was seized with some idea. More blood to the belly, he believed, meant less to the brain.

Abhi packs my closet upstairs while Sachin transfers the study, whose contents are already meticulously stacked and labeled. This was a two-evening project for Abhi and it interfered greatly with his productive work. But he wouldn’t let me do the packing for him.