“I think the boy will feel quite at home with Mrs. Ortiz, who has two children herself. However, I must ask you not to contact him while he is with her—it’ll only agitate him. By the way, Mrs. Ortiz speaks Spanish, which I thought would help in case that is his native language.”
“Isn’t that nice,” said Richard.
“Hola, mi pequenito,” said Mrs. Ortiz, bending down to Krishna. But when he shrank toward me, she moved back right away. “No rush,” she said.
My antagonism lessened a little. “His name is Krishna,” I told her. “You can call him Kris.”
Mrs. Ortiz nodded at me. “I will.”
“He likes books, especially that one there about the mouse family.”
Mrs. Ortiz picked up the book and held it out. “Chris, would you like me to read you this book?”
Krishna looked uncertain.
I gave him a little push. “Go on,” I said, and he moved hesitantly toward her.
“Well!” Richard stood up. “It looks like everything is settled for now. Meera and I had better get back to our work. …”
He held out his hand to me. I had to stand up too, although I wasn’t quite ready to leave.
“His clothes are in this bag—I packed enough for the week. His favorite T-shirt is the red Mickey Mouse one. And for dinner he likes to eat …” My voice wobbled.
“Don’t worry about Chris,” said Mrs. Ortiz with a sympathetic smile. “He’ll be OK.”
I picked up my purse. There seemed nothing left for me to do. “Goodbye, Krishna,” I said and started toward the door. “I’ll see you soon.”
Krishna pushed past Mrs. Ortiz and launched himself at my knees. He grabbed them and held on tight.
“This is often the hardest part,” said Ms. Mayhew as she and Mrs. Ortiz tried to pull him loose. “You probably won’t believe it, but they often calm down right after you leave.”
Krishna clung to me with unexpected tenacity. I knew I should be trying to help the women, at least by saying the right things—Be a good boy and go with the nice lady, it’s only for a little while—but it was as though my tongue were frozen right down to its root. It was all I could do not to cling on to him too.
“This is ridiculous,” Richard said after he had watched us for a few minutes. Bending, he pried Krishna’s fingers loose. Ignoring the kicks Krishna aimed at his shins and deftly avoiding his bared teeth, he handed him over to the two women. While he struggled fiercely—like he had with me that first day which seemed so long ago now—Richard grabbed my elbow and pulled me toward the door.
“Mama!” Krishna cried out then. “Mama!”
I whirled around. Tears were streaming down his face. “Mama-mama-mama,” he called, his voice as high and sweet as I had imagined it would be, the words pouring out as though a stopper had been removed from his throat.
“He’s never spoken before,” I said. No one seemed to have heard me.
“Ms. Bose, you’re making things harder by staying,” said Ms. Mayhew, her glasses accusingly askew.
“Please, yes, do leave,” said Mrs. Ortiz, red-faced and breathing hard.
“I’ve got to go to Krishna one last time,” I said, trying to pull away from Richard. I don’t know what I had in mind—a last hug, a final kiss, some word of reassurance that would keep him safe till I saw him again. But Richard wouldn’t let go.
“Take him away,” he shouted to the women, and as they dragged Krishna, crying and kicking, into another room, he pushed me—also struggling—out the door and into his car.
“Phew,” he said once we were in the car. “That kid’s worse than a wild animal!” He fingered the torn cuff of his shirt and shook his head in a way that made me want to rip the entire sleeve off.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” I said. I clenched my hands but the trembling in them wouldn’t stop. “You kept me from going to my baby when he needed me most.”
“For heaven’s sake, Meera, don’t exaggerate. He’s not your baby. And besides, it’s better for him that we cut the parting short.”
“You don’t know anything,” I said. Suddenly I felt very tired. Old. An old woman. Unmarried, childless, a failure. There was a name for such women in India, banja, empty. I put my face in my hands and let the sounds of Richard’s voice flow over me until they faded away.
For the next three days, carefully, correctly, I did all the things I was supposed to. I went to the bank, where I completed installing a new software program on the teller machines. In the study, now converted into a boy’s bedroom, I arranged Krishna’s books on the shelves and put up posters of animals. (There were no mouse posters available, so I had to make do with wide-eyed puppies and cats peeping from baskets.) I went to visit Sharmila, whose baby was now doing much better, though she was still too exhausted to ask me her usual sharp questions. I attended my last parenting class and received my certificate from the smiling instructor, who congratulated me on a job well done. I didn’t call Amelia Ortiz, not even once, though several times each day I looked at her number in the phone book.
On the fourth day when I came back from my solitary morning jog, the red cyclops eye on the answering machine was blinking ominously. I turned the machine on with unsteady fingers, telling myself that it was stupid to get so nervous, it could be anyone, Sharmila, or perhaps Richard—he’d been leaving a lot of messages on my machine lately. But of course it wasn’t.
Please come over to the office at 9 A.M., said the message.
I replayed it several times, trying to read the terse inflections of Ms. Mayhew’s voice. Her tone didn’t give much away, but I knew it was bad news, something really serious.
Krishna, I whispered. The word was a dull, dead sound in my mouth.
“I just went in for a moment,” Amelia Ortiz was telling us, “just for a moment to answer the phone, and when I came back out into the backyard where he’d been helping me with the weeding, he was gone.” She wiped at her tear-streaked face with a balled-up Kleenex. “At first I thought he must be in the house—the gate was still latched. But he wasn’t. He must have climbed over the wall or something.”
I sat in front of Ms. Mayhew’s meticulous desk, stupidly silent. I kept waiting for the anger to hit me, but I felt nothing.
“Of course Mrs. Ortiz called the police right away, but they couldn’t find him. They’re going to keep searching for the next few days.” Behind her glasses, Ms. Mayhew’s eyes looked tired. “I thought I should let you know.”
“Six years I’ve been a foster mother, this never happened to me,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “And he was so good too, so quiet and neat and obedient, who would have thought …”
From outside the window, an eucalyptus tree that surely hadn’t been here the last time was throwing an intricate pattern of light and shadow onto Ms. Mayhew’s desk, onto the solid brass plaque bearing her name. The plaque, I noticed, sat at a crooked angle. I felt a crazy impulse to reach out and straighten it.
“Ms. Bose, are you feeling OK?” Ms. Mayhew leaned across the desk to touch my hand.
The feel of her fingers, warm and moist on my cold, cold hand, shattered the numbness inside me. I snatched my arm back and sprang up so fast that my chair toppled to the carpeted floor with a thud.
“Don’t touch me, you bitch,” I heard myself say, low and furious, in a strangers voice. “None of this would have happened if you’d let him stay with me for a week—just one more week—instead of sending him off with this—this cow. But no, you had to be legal. Legal!”
“Ms. Bose.” Ms. Mayhew spoke calmly enough, but her face was white. Mrs. Ortiz had clapped a shocked hand over her mouth. “I realize you’re upset, but it doesn’t help to point the finger at other people or call them names. Mrs. Ortiz did the best she could—she’s not a jailer, after all. And though you seem to have such little regard for the laws of the State of California, I am obliged to follow them.”
I was already at the door.
“I’m going to go look for my little boy,” I sho
uted over my shoulder, “and if I find him, this time sure as hell I’m not going to hand him over to you.”. I slammed the door hard behind me and was pleased to feel the walls shake. But it was a small, hollow pleasure.
I searched for Krishna all that day, and the next, and the next. All week I drove up and down the streets of Mrs. Ortiz’s neighborhood, stopping passersby to ask if they had seen him. I even went up into the foothills which were several miles from her house. I struggled through groves of eucalyptus and thorny thickets of scrub oak, calling Krishna’s name. At night I ignored the stares of the other tenants and sat for hours on the front steps of my building, my legs aching, my arms stinging from the thorns, waiting and hoping.
But I didn’t really expect him to turn up. I wouldn’t have come back either to someone who’d taken me in only to give me up, who had loved me briefly only to betray me forever.
It’s been more than a year since then, a time in which my life has returned pretty much to normal. As Richard says, you can only mourn so long. I guess he’s right.
For a while though, it was touch and go. I wouldn’t answer the anxious messages Richard left on my answering machine, and when he showed up at the apartment I threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave me alone. Even with Sharmila I refused to discuss Krishna. I considered quitting my job—I was doing so badly I was close to being fired anyway—and returning to India. I spent a lot of time going through the photos of the Brylcreemed men my mother had sent me. At one point I wrote her a letter saying that I would consider an arranged marriage if she could find me a widower with a little boy of about seven. Such a man, I reasoned, would understand about mother-love far more than Richard—or any other American male, for that matter—ever could. But I never posted the letter. Even then, crazy as I was with anger and sorrow and guilt, I knew that would have been a bigger mistake than the ones I’d made already.
And I was right. Things are good again. Recently I received a promotion at work for debugging a data-entry program that was driving everyone crazy. Even Dan Luftner stopped by my office afterward to say thank you. I’ve moved to a bigger, better apartment up near Grizzly Peak, with all white carpeting and bleached Scandinavian furniture to match. From the front window I can see the entire San Francisco Bay spread out at my feet. When I get together with Sharmila—though not as often as before because she’s really busy with her little boy—we have a good time, talking only about happy things.
Richard and I are back together, and last month when I finally wrote to my mother about him, she surprised me by being far less upset than I’d feared. Maybe she figured that even a foreign husband—a firingi—is better than no husband at all. At any rate, she’s planning to attend our wedding, which is to be this June, followed by a honeymoon in the south of France. I haven’t yet told her that I agreed to the marriage only on condition that we don’t have children. But no doubt she’ll get used to that as well. For a while Ms. Mayhew would leave messages on my machine about boys I might like to take in, now that I was an eligible foster parent. I would erase the messages right away (though her voice continued to travel through my body, insidious, deadly, like a piece of shrapnel the surgeon had missed) and after some time she stopped calling.
Only sometimes, once in a while, I take a day off from work. I go back to Mrs. Ortiz’s neighborhood—nobody knows this—and drive through all the streets, slowly, carefully, peering at passing faces. I hike up into the eucalyptus and scrub oak, the dead bark crumbling under my feet like sloughed-off snakeskin, the thorny branches catching in my clothes, and call a name until the shadows congeal deep and cold around me. And when I come back to my apartment, I close my eyes before the last bend of the stairs that lead to my door. I hold my breath and imagine a boy in a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt sitting on the topmost step. If I can count to twenty, thirty, forty, without letting go, I say to myself, he’ll be there. He’ll hold out his arms, and in his high, clear voice he’ll call to me. I stand there halfway up the darkening staircase feeling the emptiness swirl around me, my lungs burning, my eyes shut tight as though in prayer.
THE MAID
SERVANT’S
STORY
THE AFTERNOON SUN LIGHTS UP THE SOFT FOLDS OF Deepa Mashi’s red-and-white sari as she sits back with a satisfied after-lunch sigh in her cushioned easy chair. It shines on her hair, which is still as glossy and black as in my childhood, when I loved running my fingers through it. The ghu-ghu birds are cooing in the calm shadows under the eaves of her house, and in the distance I can hear the faint cry of the kulfi vendor calling out fresh fresh ices, sweet sweet ices. For a moment it is as though I had never left Calcutta.
Then Mashi says, “So, Manisha, I hear you might be getting married soon.”
I am not surprised by the comment. I’ve been anticipating something of the sort ever since I mentioned to my mother, with careful casualness, that I’d met a Bengali professor at the university in California where I taught English. Still, disappointment rises raw and bitter in my throat. I’d hoped that things would be different between my mother and myself this time.
I told her about Bijoy the very first night of my visit home. We were alone in her small flat overlooking a park filled with kadam trees that sent their too-sweet fragrance into the dark, moist air. We served ourselves from the dishes the day maid had cooked before she left. Rice, dal, a plain cauliflower curry. My mother lives simply. Strains of Rabindra Sangeet from a neighboring radio floated on the still evening —Ami chini go chini tomare, I know you well, woman from a distant land beyond the ocean. It was a good time, I felt, to talk—if not as mother and daughter, at least as two intelligent, adult women.
But when I’d spoken she just glanced up sharply with a look that could have been suspicion or disapproval, or even relief that a prospect had appeared, at last, on my barren marital horizon. I never have been able to read my mothers expressions. “That must be very nice, dear,” she said. Then she went back to describing the naming ceremony for my cousin Sheela’s oldest son in Burdwan last year.
Deepa Mashi is waiting. So I force a laugh and raise my hands in exaggerated protest, feeling myself slip back into the habits of my childhood, hiding pain with humor. “Mashi! I’ve just started seeing Bijoy! No one’s said anything about a wedding yet.”
Mashi opens her silver paan case, carefully chooses a rolled-up betel leaf, and places it in her mouth. “Two months since you met him, no?”
When, I wonder—as I used to throughout my growing up years—did the sisters manage to get together to discuss their errant daughter-niece? My resentment is all for my mother—it is she who should be asking these questions, not my aunt, much as I love her.
“You know for how long I met your uncle before we were married?” Deepa Mashi continues.
Of course I know. She’s told me of it a hundred times. But I also know how much pleasure the retelling will give her. So I offer her a fond, expectant smile.
“Fifteen minutes during the bride-viewing, that’s how long!” Mashi speaks with the plump and breathless exuberance she brings to all her stories. “And last year, grace of God, we celebrated our twentieth anniversary.” She shuts her paan case with a victorious snap, as if she’s won a major argument.
I take refuge in platitude. “Times have changed, Mashi.”
Mashi waves away the intervening decades with a be-ringed, dimpled hand. “Oh, you Americanized girls! The really important things never change.”
Perhaps she’s right. I’d come back from my three years abroad feeling adult and sophisticated, determined to match my mother’s distant courtesy. Over and over on the flight to Dum Dum airport, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t offer up my life for her inspection and approval, as I had so many times before. Yet I’d done it almost immediately. I guess transformations—the really important ones—require more than time and distance, and even desire.
That first night back, smarting at Mother’s seeming indifference, I’d forced my way into her description of the g
uests at the naming ceremony. “Bijoy teaches psychology—it’s quite unusual to find Indians in that field, at least in California.”
I was angry with myself as soon as I blurted it out, callow as any adolescent yearning for parental love—even before I heard her responding, in the perfectly modulated voice which I remembered so well, that he must be a most interesting man. I felt the familiar, furious urge to say something brutal enough to shatter her self-possession. You’re right, Mother, he’s very interesting—especially in bed. But I swallowed them both, the anger and the words. What good would it do? What good had anything done?
Throughout high school I’d pushed myself to stand first in exams, to win debates and drama competitions; but I never got the praise I craved, that squeezed-breathless, delirious-with-joy hug that other mothers gave their daughters for far lesser achievements. For a while in college I’d tried the opposite, cutting classes and running around with a wild crowd, smoking cigarettes (an absolute taboo for an Indian girl of good family) and even ganja a couple of times, letting boys hold my hand in broad daylight in the Maidan park, where it was certain someone would see us and report the facts back to my mother. But all she did was look at me with a distant sadness, as one might regard a character in a book or movie, and say that she didn’t understand why I’d want to ruin my life this way. When, in my final attempt to shock some kind of feeling out of her, I’d told her that I was leaving for America, she’d merely said, “Be careful, and write if you need anything.” At the airport she’d pressed a cool, dry cheek to mine (while all around us parents clung to departing children and let fall torrents of tears) and said, “You know I want the best for you.”
The worst part was, I knew she did. She watched over my life carefully, vigilantly, if from afar. All through my childhood, everything I wanted—everything material, that is—was provided for me, often before I needed to ask. But what she thought, what she longed for, what made her cry out in her dreams (for I’d heard her, once or twice), I never knew. It was as though she’d built a wall of ice around her, thin and invisible and unbreakable. No matter how often I flung myself against it, I was refused entry.