The Hindi-Bindi Club Read online

  “I know it,” I say. “I know. It’s just…hard.”

  “Well, there is something you could do. Doesn’t sound like you’re doing it—”

  “What?”

  “Let yourself be happy. Don’t force it, but don’t fight it, either. There’s no reason to feel guilty. Bryan isn’t jealous or resentful. He’s genuinely happy for you. And you know what? Your pleasure’s the closest thing he’s got to his own right now. So don’t cheat him out of it.”

  I cast George a sidelong glance. “I never thought of it that way.” After a moment, I add, “That was some sleight of hand. You redirected my guilt to fuel the opposite outcome.” I smile. “When you’re good, you’re good. You’re good, George.”

  “I know.” He flashes a cheesy grin. “That’s why they pay me the little bucks.”

  “Oh, man. I knew I forgot something. Tell me you brought some of those little bucks with you because I forgot. Again.”

  “Gotcha covered, pal.”

  “Thanks. For everything.”

  We run to the Starbucks on Union, where we get four lattes to go (for us and our spouses), then walk the remaining blocks home. George’s door opens just as we return.

  “Wow,” I say. “Who is that sharp-dressed man?”

  Said sharp-dressed man chuckles. “Morning, Rani.”

  “Morning, Walker. Love the power suit.”

  “Thank you. See you tonight.”

  “Tonight.” As George hands him a latte, I wave good-bye and go inside.

  “Tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night…” In his rich baritone, Bryan belts out the show tune from West Side Story, and I chime in with my off-key-from-fighting-a-cold soprano.

  As he twirls me around the kitchen, I remember when we used to be silly like this all the time. It was what I loved most about Bryan. He wasn’t afraid to be a complete and total dork. He took pride in it, embraced who he was. He had such courage and conviction, such strength of character. But when his dream shattered, so did his confidence. And with it, his joie de vivre, as the French call it, or masti as Saroj Auntie says. Passion for life. How I want to give it back to him.

  Restore the gleam in his eyes. Rekindle his excitement. Resuscitate his masti.

  “Pick you up at five,” he says, grabbing his laptop bag.

  We met the first day of our freshman year at Berkeley. We lived on the same dorm floor, though we didn’t date until two years later. For two years, he watched my parade of boyfriends, if you can even call them that, since their average shelf life was two to four weeks. It seemed all the good guys were taken, already in relationships, as Bryan was with his girlfriend, who was two years younger and still in high school. That left the available market glutted with the commitment-phobic, just-want-to-get-laid crowd.

  I looked around and thought: I’m the only virgin I know on this campus. Virgins were an endangered species. All of my friends were sexually active, which is not to say “sleeping around,” though that certainly happened, too. Most committed, monogamous relationships, which was what I wanted, involved sex. So did flings, which accounted for the lifespan of my romantic interests. The guys I hooked up with seemed to view sex as a prerequisite for a relationship, bass-ackwards in my book. On this, I agreed one hundred percent with my mother: Why buy the cow if the milk’s free?

  Now before you pat me on the back, or the head, you should know I can’t credit my “fine moral upbringing” or my “superior, wholesome values” for the fact I held onto my prized virginity until the ripe age of twenty. Don’t think for a second it was any valiant struggle. It wasn’t. The truth is, I was a loser magnet, which made it easy to keep my legs closed—a no-brainer—until Bryan.

  “There’s no high school girlfriend,” he told me one day.

  “You broke up?”

  He shook his head. “I made her up.”

  “Why—?”

  “Because I’m a geek, and I have no life. It was easier—”

  “No. Why are you telling me this? Why not take the story to its natural conclusion and say you and Imaginary Girl parted ways?”

  “Oh. Well. That would be because I’m in love with you. Madly. Deeply. Passionately. Irrevocably. Pathetically, I suppose, if you tell me I don’t stand a chance…”

  When I picked my jaw up off the floor, doves flew, conch shells blew, and the Gates of Paradise swung wide open.

  I adore my husband. With every breath I take. Every fiber of my being. Ever more, every day. For ten years, we’ve grown together. I hope we never grow apart, but lately I worry about it. We’re both in a holding pattern, wondering where our lives are going. What’s next for us as individuals, and as a couple? I look at my childhood friends Kiran and Preity. One I haven’t seen in years, now divorced. One happily married with children.

  What direction will Bryan and I take?

  At our front door, I lay my hand on his freshly shaven jaw, nuzzle my face to his neck, and breathe in his clean scent. “I love you, Bry,” I say. Such inadequate words for what I feel.

  “Love you, too.” He pecks my lips, but I rise onto my toes, wind my arms around his neck, and deepen the kiss. He pulls away and lifts his head with a groan. “Save that thought. Gotta run, catch the yuppie bus.”

  “Have a good day,” I say.

  “You, too. Good luck.”

  After he leaves, emptiness swells inside me. A big black hole that threatens to swallow me whole. I want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head.

  No no no. I shake my head. Snap out of it.

  Every artist wishes for a life like mine. An opportunity like mine. No financial pressures. Ample time and resources. I’m damn lucky. I need to make the most of my gifts, put my blessings to good use. March into my studio and kick ass.

  Determined, I shower and change, whip up a chocolate-banana soy milk smoothie and go to my studio in the spare bedroom. The morning light is perfect. I burn a stick of sandalwood incense and put on some mood music. Enigma’s “L.S.D.” plays first. Love Sensuality Devotion. The room reverberates with an intoxicating blend of New Age music, a club beat, and Gregorian and Native American chants. I absorb the atmosphere, hips swaying to the rhythm, and try to work.

  Try and try. And keep making a mess. And more mess.

  It’s okay, I tell myself, trying to shake it off. You’re warming up. It’ll come.

  But it doesn’t. It hasn’t. Not for days. Weeks. Months.

  I was so jazzed when I started my Goddess series, modern renditions of mythic females. But my first taste of commercial success has turned me into a constipated artist. For the first time in my life, I can’t gag the gremlins, haranguing voices in my head that constantly critique my work.

  “You think that’s art?”

  “Will anyone like this?”

  “Too much like the last one.”

  “Too different.”

  “Sloppy, Rani. Sloppy.”

  It’s so draining. Not that my art has always provided a bliss hit—it is hard, after all—but lately, it never does. Lately, I dread it. I’m secretly afraid that somewhere on the Road to Success, I lost my own passion. Bryan lost his on his fall down. Did I lose mine on my rise up?

  Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.

  No no no. My passion can’t be lost; it’s simply misplaced. I’ll find it again. I have to.

  I take a break and go to the kitchen. I’m tempted to open the refrigerator and pull up a chair (it beats turning on the oven and sticking my head inside), but I resist. I gather the ingredients for the chocolate sandesh truffles I’m bringing to accompany the chocolate-dipped strawberries and champagne the gallery has arranged. You gotta have protein, right? You’d never guess it, but these little babies are made with fresh, homemade cheese called chhana that looks, but doesn’t taste, similar to cottage cheese or ricotta.

  A celebratory sweet, sandesh means “good news” in Bengali. The “s” in Bengali is pronounced “sh,” and an “a” is often “o.
” There’s other tricky stuff that will make your eyes cross, so let’s stick with this abridged Hooked On Phonics lesson and take my word that Bengalis have their reasons for pronouncing sandesh as shawn-dhaysh.

  I tweaked Mom’s family recipe for my own taste. The sandesh I had when we visited Kolkata commemorated my cousins passing their exams. Sweetened with newly harvested paundra sugarcane, shaped like conch shells, and packed in rice for freshness. I subtracted those steps and added chocolate—I find anything and everything tastes better dipped in, or slathered with, chocolate.

  Making chhana, I try to think happy, pleasant thoughts, but a gnawing desperation claws at me. What if I can’t do it? What if I can’t produce what’s expected of me?

  Art is my life’s purpose. Without it…I shake my head. I don’t want to go there.

  I concentrate on the sandesh. I roll the truffles in cocoa powder and crushed pistachios. Drizzle on melted chocolate. Make another smoothie. Add a splash of rum. Then a more generous splash. Go to my studio. Try to work again. Create stuff only my mother could love. Return to the kitchen. Do a shot. Get toasted. Still, nothing worth keeping. Flop onto the love seat. Fling an arm over my eyes.

  I want my mommy.

  When I was little, I was my mother’s shadow. An only child, I was the center of her world, and she was mine. I followed her everywhere. If she shut me out of the bathroom, I sat outside the door and cried, whined, or wiggled my fingers under the crack until she came out. Every week she took me on field trips to the park, the library, the grocery store, and the fresh fish market.

  I loved to watch her prepare Bengali food. When she cooked, she removed her rings and set them on the window-sill in a bowl of salt water. On her left hand, she wore her wedding band—gold with seven channel-set diamonds. On her right, she wore a white sapphire on her middle finger and a red coral called a paula on her ring finger. When preparing a large quantity, she sat on the kitchen floor and impaled such legumes as cauliflower, potatoes, and eggplant over a bonti—a contraption with a curved upright blade that served as an old-fashioned, manual food processor. Different dishes required different shapes.

  “When I’m a grown-up, I’ll chop all the vegetables, Mommy,” I said, puffing out my chest.

  “Okay, but until then, you glue your bottom on that stool.” She positioned my stool at a safe distance, and I wasn’t allowed to get up until she put the serrated knife away, out of my reach.

  She let me stand on a chair at the counter when she rolled wheat dough into perfect rounds for luchis—puffy fried bread. She would give me a little ball to knead and flatten with my mini rolling pin, which was better than Play-Doh because I could eat it, though I never got the hang of shaping my dough into a neat circle. The odd shapes I created made my mother laugh and say, “If you hope to marry a Bengali, we’ll have to work on this.”

  Fish was the singlemost recurring item on my mother’s menu. Fish in a sweet mustard sauce was her specialty. She never ate or prepared beef. She said that for her, eating a cow was like eating a dog or a horse. “If one day you move to another country where people, given plenty of options, choose to eat dog burgers and horse steaks, could you learn to do it?”

  No, I couldn’t. And neither could she.

  If not for my father and me needing a bit more variety, she would have served fish every day, every meal, even for breakfast, she loved it that much. Sometimes when Dad or I complimented her on a particular fish dish, she would say, “One day we will visit Calcutta, and you will taste hilsa, the best fish in the world.”

  My father would pat her hand, hug her, or kiss her cheek. “We will, honey. We will.”

  We didn’t go to Calcutta until I was ten because, after my mother eloped with my father, her father said she was dead to him, and as long as he was alive, she should never come back. She returned—just once—at the request of my aunt, Anandita-mashi, when my grandfather was on his deathbed.

  Over the years, my mother had regularly written letters home, which my grandfather refused to read or hear, but Anandita-mashi saved them and read each blue aerogramme to him as he lay dying. When he heard my mother’s words, he cried. And when he learned from Anandita-mashi it was my mother and her American husband who’d secretly subsidized their upper-middle-class lifestyle all along—not his deadbeat nephew as everyone had led him to believe—my grandfather finally asked to see her.

  When she arrived at his bedside, he told her he had endured social disapproval to allow her—young, unmarried, and alone—to pursue her dream of higher studies in America. His father had overruled him and granted my mother permission. In return, she proved all of his fears correct. She shamed him by marrying my father, and no amount of black money—dirty money—could ever erase my grandfather’s suffering. In Indian culture, a child’s duty to a parent superceded all else, and she dishonored him and tarnished the family name. For that, he would never forgive her. The last words he spoke to her quoted an Indian proverb: “I gave her a staff for her support, and she used it to break my head.” He died the next day.

  My father said it was lucky timing, because he might have killed the old man.

  I didn’t learn any of this until much later in life. It still haunts my mother and enrages my father.

  We never went back again, though my mother still writes—and sends money—to her family. (My parents provide complete financial support for Anandita-mashi, whom no one would marry because of her “defect” of epilepsy.)

  Both of my parents came from large families, and sometimes, when I was lonely, when no kids could play with me, I would ask for a brother or sister. My Indian friends Kiran and Preity both had brothers, and I wanted one, too. My father would grab me and tickle me and say, “Why, when God gave us a perfect little girl?” Whenever he said this, my mother’s eyes would soften, and I could see her love for him written all over her face.

  The truth is I was a difficult pregnancy and delivery. My mother suffered two miscarriages before me, and after me, she couldn’t have more children. In India, this would have been the Kiss of Death. Social ostracizing. As my mother explained it, the only fate worse than not producing sons was being barren. But none of that mattered to my dad. To him, our family was perfect. Rani means “queen.”

  Most of the time, I was plenty happy not to have to share. My parents or my stuff.

  My mother stayed home with me until I went to kindergarten, then she worked part-time, so she was always home when I got out of school. This was great until I was a teenager and started to develop my own strong identity. No longer docile, I often disagreed with my overprotective mother. To her, disagreement and debate were often interpreted as disrespect and back talk “answering back,” which frustrated both of us to no end and sometimes escalated into shouting matches.

  One awful day in my hormonal, angst-ridden trauma-drama, I screamed, “In this country, we have freedom of speech! I have the right to express my opinion even if it’s contrary to yours! Why can’t you be like other mothers? I hate you! I hate my life! I wish I’d never been born!” I stormed to my room and slammed the door. Then I locked it, because I knew, right away, I was in Big Shit Trouble. With my mother and with my father, once she told him. Even in ambiguous disputes—which clearly this wasn’t—they always sided together against me.

  Half an hour later, when The Knock sounded, I was shaking. Whatever punishment was headed my way, it was sure to be bad.

  “Rani, open the door,” my mother said.

  I didn’t answer.

  After a minute, the door opened, and my mother stood there, a bobby pin in her hand. She’d been crying, which made me cry worse than if she’d beaten me with her chappal—leather sandal—which she never did but occasionally threatened. “I-I’m sorry. I-I shouldn’t have said those things.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” she said in a small voice. “My parents would have thrown me onto the streets to beg if I ever spoke to them that way.”

  “I’m sorry. I was disrespectful.”
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br />   “Yes, and you were very hurtful.”

  I cried harder. “I was hurt, too!”

  She crossed her arms and sat on the edge of my bed. “I know you’re hurting, Rani. I know this is a hard time. For you. For all of us. But I want to get some things straight.”

  I dropped my gaze and braced myself.

  She leaned over and took my chin in her hand, so I would look at her. Meeting my eyes directly, she said, “Whether you like it or not, I am the mother this time. You are the daughter. One day, you’ll have the freedom you crave. You won’t have to ask my permission or explain yourself to me, and I can only hope you’ll make the right decisions. If you’re rash and follow your impulses without any thought to the consequences, you can hurt others and yourself badly. With freedom comes responsibility. Remember that.”

  I nodded.

  “Remember this, too…No matter what happens, now or then, no matter how bad it gets, I will always be your mother, you will always be my daughter, and I will always love you. You are the most precious thing in my life, and I thank God you were born in this life, to me.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. How could she say such nice things to me when I’d just been so ugly? I didn’t deserve her kindness. But when she opened her arms, I didn’t question or hesitate. I launched myself against her, hugging her hard.

  She hugged me back and said, “Even if we disagree, even if we fight, even if we hurt each other, we have to promise to make up, no matter how hard it is. I will never turn my back on you. I don’t ever, ever want to lose you. I know I’m not like other mothers. American moms or Indian moms—”

  “No, you’re better! You’re the greatest mom in the world! I love you, Mom!” We stayed like that for a long time, crying and rocking. I kept saying, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  And she said to me the words her father withheld from her, “You’re forgiven.”