Naming Maya Read online

  Sumati gets out of the car and struggles to open the gate for the car while her mom and kid brother stay inside. She’s grown taller. She wears glasses now. Her hair hangs in a long ponytail, down to her waist. Her flip-flops are worn at the heels. Auntie taps her hands impatiently on the steering wheel. The little brother makes faces at me.

  From next door, Mr. Balaji Rama Rao (retired stamp vendor, Tamil Nadu High Court) waves his newspaper and shouts, “Good evening. No rain as yet! Southwest monsoon is a flop this year, what?”

  Mr. Rama Rao is a neighborhood landmark. He is like the mango tree on the corner. He often spends his days on the porch calling out weather reports to anyone who cares to listen. Who needs radio or TV? It’s possible to keep up with rainfall and drought patterns by tuning in to Mr. Rama Rao. “Hot and humid again, I see.” “Cloudy day—good sign!” One way or another, everybody—coming and going, people and goats and stray yellow dogs—everybody knows him. Mom comes out to greet her cousin and has to endure the weather report as well, while I run over to help Sumati with the gate.

  Mrs. Rama Rao emerges to talk to the woman who brings her cow by every evening and milks it in front of their house, squirting frothy warm milk into a tall aluminum pail. Mr. Rama Rao is fussy about the milk for his coffee. He won’t take any of “this newfangled homogenized stuff packed into plastic bags.”

  “Raoji tells me he met Kamala at the bus stop,” Mr. Rama Rao’s wife calls out to my mother. She always refers to her husband respectfully as Raoji. “I must come and see her soon.”

  “Yes,” Mom shouts back. “Please do.” It seems a strange way to carry on a conversation, shouting over a wall. Mom has told me Mami and Mrs. Rama Rao are old friends, from back in the days when Mami worked for my grandfather.

  “Nice lady and such a cook,” says Mrs. Rama Rao. “I myself have learned many recipes from her. Devoted to your mother she was, ayyo, not like this or that devoted. Took care of her when she was sick and all, when you were just a little paapa.”

  Balaji smiles and nods and waves his paper. “Not a cloud in the sky,” he says.

  “Terrible trouble finding household help these days,” adds his wife. “Everyone wants to go work for this-company-that-company so they can get benefits and holiday pay. Sloppy work, that’s all we get. Take that Radha who does our sweeping-mopping. I tell you, I don’t know how much longer I can put up with her. Always wanting advance pay, always rushing through her work because she has five other houses. Can’t blame her, everyone needs money, but what are we middle-class people to do?”

  While Mom is trying to disentangle herself, Lakshmi Auntie fusses about parking the car. She drives carefully and slowly through the gate, stopping a dozen times to ask, “Is that all right? Do I have room on that side?”

  “Ouch.” Sumati peers at her thumb that the gate has pinched. “It’s okay, not a mortal injury. Hi, Maya. You look different.” She speaks in quick spurts, with laughter for punctuation. “Remember him?” She nods at her little brother making faces. “Ashwin. Also goes by ‘Pest,’ ‘Nuisance,’ ‘they You’ …” Sumati is one of those people you can pick up a conversation with where you left off, no matter how long it’s been.

  Lakshmi Auntie is out of the car now, smoothing crisp sari pleats into place. We go through a series of hugs and exclamations. Auntie smells of vanilla and starched cotton. Her hug is brief and bony—an efficient hug.

  Mom herds us all inside, and Lakshmi Auntie spots Mami. “My goodness, if it isn’t Kamala Mami! Don’t tell me. You took the bus all the way.”

  Mami has settled into place like a weed taking root. “Ah-uh,” she protests. “What’s so bad about taking the bus? Don’t scold me. You sound like my son.” She gets up and gives her a fierce hug. Lakshmi Auntie cannot get off with one of those quick and bony jobs. She has to be enveloped in Mami’s embrace. I stifle my laughter at Kamala Mami in action. I have never seen anyone being hugged into submission before.

  “Prema, Lakshmi,” says Mami happily, beaming at my mother and her cousin. “It’s so nice to be with you girls again.” And she breaks into song in the grimy old kitchen as she mixes tamarind and water and chops curry leaves. Her pebbly voice grinds and grates its way over the lyrics.

  “Eat,” she urges. “Stay and eat.” Lakshmi Auntie protests mildly (“No need, Mami, it’s only trouble for you”). At first I think she means it, but soon I see it is all part of a social dance. Mami insists, and Mom joins her. “Of course. You must.” In minutes Mami has produced a platter of crispy plantain chips, dusted with salt and a trace of chili powder. Then she shoos us out of the kitchen so she can make dinner.

  While Mom and Lakshmi Auntie go off to get caught up in the living room (“Drawing room,” says Sumati, over my protests that we don’t draw a thing in there other than curtains to keep the sun out), we kids sprawl on the cool stone dining-room floor, crunching plantain chips and talking.

  “How was your trip?” Sumati asks.

  “Horrible,” I say. “Too much to eat and nothing to do. Lines to stand in. Baggage to check. Arguing with Mom about everything from the window shade to the crossword puzzle.”

  Sumati grins sympathetically.

  “I really didn’t even want to come,” I tell her.

  “Oh?”

  “I told Mom she should just let me stay with my friend Joanie. But, ‘No, Maya, a month is far too long.’ So here I am.”

  “Joanie? She’s your best friend, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ve known her since we were both in kindergarten.”

  Sumati says, “Well, if you think traveling with your mom is a pain, you should try a holiday with Ashwin.” She tells me of a time she went by train from Chennai to Delhi with her parents and Ashwin. By the end of the long trip the bathrooms had become a little—“whiffy,” she says. “They were whiffy. The Pest won’t go unless the bathrooms are clean. Just wouldn’t go, can you believe that?” Ashwin giggles.

  “For how long?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” says Sumati. “Nothing. By the end of it, talk about wriggle. He was jelly. Quivering. Mass of. In the house, and zzzzip!”—she zips her hands past each other to show how—“He spent the next hour in the bog.”

  “The which?”

  “Bog. Loo. Toilet.” And Sumati puts on a crossed-eyes constipated look that has me laughing till my sides hurt.

  “Akka, shh.” Ashwin protests, but he laughs too.

  We start a game of hangman. Ashwin insists on going first. “Me against Maya akka,” he says. He frowns in concentration, and pencils in his first set of blanks.

  I pick a letter, and another, and another. I go swiftly to my execution.

  “Hangman!” Ashwin announces in triumph. “The word is boy.”

  “You’re being too nice,” says Sumati. “It’s not good to let the Pest win the first round.”

  Ashwin sticks his tongue out at her, and says to me, “Okay, it’s your turn. Sumati akka and me against you.” He adds generously, “I’ll let you beat us, if you like.”

  I space out the underlines for airplane.

  “I,” says Ashwin.

  From behind us in the drawing room, murmurs of conversation rise and fall in small tides.

  “N,” says Sumati. “Hello? You there, Maya?”

  “What?” I pull myself back to hangman, and put the n into its place.

  Ashwin purses his lips. “P.” I fill the p in where it belongs.

  Mom and Lakshmi Auntie wander years down the road, and their talk grows softer. Phrases like “difficult for you” and “so sad” float out. I strain to listen, but I lose them.

  “A,” says Sumati.

  I put the a’s in the right spaces.

  “That’s not a word,” Ashwin complains. To my surprise, Sumati agrees.

  “It is too.” I give up on eavesdropping. “We traveled here on one.”

  “Hmm. What? Oh!” Sumati throws up her hands in exasperation. “Airplane. American spelling. I should have guessed.”
r />   “It’s aeroplane.” Ashwin looks at me triumphantly.

  “How do you spell it?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know.” He races around the room pretending to be one.

  “Aer-o-plane,” Sumati corrects me. “A-e-r-o.”

  We do some more words. Sumati wins a few rounds in a row. I get one, lurch, almost by accident. When all the other vowels have failed, what else could it be but a u?

  “What does it mean?” Ashwin asks.

  “A movement, right?” I offer. “Kind of jerking or swaying?”

  “Yes, and it also means to cheat someone. Or desert them. To leave in the lurch,” says Sumati. “To leave someone in an unpleasant or difficult position.”

  To leave in the lurch. Obviously, I reflect, as Mami rounds all of us up for dinner, I have a lot to learn.

  We eat while darkness descends outside. I am starving, which delights Mami greatly. She heaps steaming rice on our plates, and dribbles a few drops of ghee onto it. Then she spoons up generous servings of vegetables and spicy sour sambar, with crisp fried appalam on the side.

  We work our way through this feast. Mami refills water glasses and makes small encouraging noises when it seems as if Ashwin’s attention is wandering away from his vegetables.

  “When do we get to see Kullan?” Mom asks.

  “Oh, he just got this huge contract in Bangalore, something to do with redesigning traffic flow in the city. He’s a total stranger to us these days, I swear. Puts in a guest appearance between trips. Such a nuisance that he has to work so hard,” says Lakshmi Auntie, looking not a bit put out.

  Lakshmi Auntie’s husband is named Krishnan, but somehow, despite being almost six feet tall, he has managed to acquire the name of Kullan, “Shorty.” The big family joke is that when I first saw him I was frightened and burst out crying because I’d never seen someone that tall before. I just know they will tell this story at every family gathering till I am forty years old.

  Auntie goes on to talk about Ashwin’s school, Sumati’s school, and her job at an ad agency. “Everyone says the economy’s down, but clients keep on coming, you wouldn’t believe the work. I have to keep such long hours, and I bring copy home to write all the time. Poor kids, both parents in the rat race.”

  Mom makes sympathetic murmurs.

  “Rat race, rat race,” sings Ashwin, as he finishes all his rice and makes little hills with his eggplant. He rolls the words about, liking the sound of them. “What’s a rat race?” he asks Sumati.

  “Hmm?” Sumati is working on a mustard seed that has lodged itself between her teeth. “It’s very hard,” she points out when I laugh, “to do this gracefully.”

  “What’s a rat race?” demands Ashwin.

  Sumati says, “A tough and competitive pressured lifestyle with no time left for silly little boys.”

  Ashwin complains to his mother, “Maya and Sumati are being mean to me.”

  “That’s nice, raja.” She isn’t listening.

  “A rat race is when the other rats are mean to you, and you have to run away,” I say.

  “Where will I go?” he asks.

  “Texas,” I say, thinking of Dad, and then I catch myself, grateful that Mom is deep in conversation with her cousin, and has not heard.

  Sumati gives me a curious look.

  Mami is dishing out sweet sojji halwa, with its garnish of saffron and cashew nuts. A generous scoop of it hovers over Ashwin’s plate, making him wring his hands because the smell of it is so tantalizing.

  “Ah!” He digs in. So do we all. The grainy sweetness of its cream of wheat is perfect and full. “You like it?” says Mami. “When I was a child in Trichy, we used to have this every Friday afternoon. But in wartime everything was rationed—sojji, sugar, butter, everything—so for more than one year, no sojji-bajji. Those English people fought their war, and we had to give up our sugar.”

  “The Indo-Pak war?” asks Ashwin. The border wars between India and Pakistan are the only kind he’s ever heard of.

  “Illai, kutti,” says Mami. “Great big war. The Second World War.”

  “Oh.” Ashwin looks a bit baffled, but I think, Only Mami can produce a meal so good it makes you exclaim out loud, and then use it to bring history alive.

  Mami serves the final round of rice and yogurt (“because ending with a sweet is not good for you”). Then she retires to the kitchen to eat in her preferred way—cross-legged on the floor, with the plate in front of her, her fingers expertly gathering up the rice and vegetables. Tables are only for softies like us.

  Our mothers launch into the old days—picnics at places with wild and beautiful names, Gingee Fort and Vedanthangal. They wander up through time, chuckling over friends and relatives, most of whom I do not know. “Did Rajan Mama’s son Ajit ever get married?” “How many people?” “Good grief, why spend that much money on a wedding?” “What about his sister Priya?” “Twins—really? Heavens, poor thing.” “Is it true that Uttam’s daughter Raji is going to architecture school?” “Is Sriram doing well?” “Oh, dear, software company layoffs? It’s the way it goes.” “Two kids, really cute but so spoiled.” They laugh out loud, and interrupt each other, talking over each other’s sentences in the way that everyone seems to talk in India.

  Later, after they’re all gone and Mom is upstairs trying to persuade the terrace door to latch properly (Lakshmi Auntie having cautioned her at length about the increase in burglary rates in Chennai), I help Mami clean up in the kitchen.

  While we’re putting away all the pots and pans, she takes a strand of my hair between her fingers and clucks over it. “Did you put oil in your hair this morning?”

  “Oil? What for?”

  Mami rolls her eyes at my ignorance. “It’ll all fall out if you don’t,” she warns, and proceeds to give me a talking to on the virtues of rubbing coconut oil into my hair and scalp every morning.

  “Ew.” I back away from the bottle she produces from somewhere. That makes her laugh so hard she nearly drops it.

  “I don’t think so,” I say as firmly as I can. “I’m not putting that stuff in my hair.”

  Mami tries to convince me it will give me long, shiny, beautiful black hair. She points out places my hair is turning brown—like some white girl’s. “Vellaikkara ponnu,” she scoffs. I protest that I am not a white girl, and that I like my hair the way it is.

  “Stubborn,” says Mami, “like your mother.”

  I do not think I am like my mother at all. I don’t want to be like my mother. I nibble on a hangnail.

  “Tchah, yecchal,” she scolds, and makes me go wash my hands. “We went to Gingee Fort when your mother was younger than you are now. Shall I tell you?”

  She keeps on talking, so I do not have a chance to answer. Perhaps it’s the heat, or the clacking rhythms of her voice, but I am pulled into this story.

  “Your mother decided we had to go on a picnic. When we got there, the place was overrun with monkeys. Those monkeys, ayyo!

  “‘Let’s go,’ your grandfather said. ‘Can’t we find a better picnic place?’” Her eyes are alight with those old days.

  “There we were, four adults—your grandfather, grandmother, the driver, and me. And we’re all saying, ‘Let’s go. Please, enough picnic.’ But Prema refused to budge, and of course if Prema insisted a stork had only one leg, Lakshmi would follow her lead. The girls clamored, ‘No, no, we have to have our picnic here.’”

  “So what happened?”

  “We had to get back in the car, because otherwise they’d come and snatch the food out of our hands. So we ate our whole meal in the car, and all the time those monkeys were sitting on top of the car, on the hood, everywhere, picking lice off one another. Snarling at us too, and leaping at the glass to try to get at our food.” She laughs at the memory, and says softly, “That child had your grandfather wrapped around her finger. In his eyes, she could do no wrong.”

  Back When

  Lakshmi Auntie drops Sumati off with us a couple of da
ys later, and scurries a protesting Ashwin away for a haircut. Mom is pacing up and down in front of the house, waiting for possible buyers who are supposed to come and take a look at it. Twice already, the real estate agent has sent a ragged-looking urchin pedaling frantically on a bicycle all the way down the road from his office to ask, “Are they here yet?” So far there is no sign of these prospective buyers.

  The day promises to turn from plain hot to furnace hot. But Sumati has money. “My auntie on my father’s side,” she explains, “forgets my birthday every single year. Then she feels bad. A letter from her means money!” We count out enough rupee notes from her fat wallet to get ourselves ice-cold lemon sodas from the corner tea-and-soda stall.

  “My treat,” she says, and glows with the light of being generous.

  Sumati and I bring back the bottles, the red letters on them, Limca, already beginning to bead with cold drops. The soda is sweet and lemony-fizzy, perfect for this day that is so humid the air sits on the back of your neck like a wet sponge. We take the sodas upstairs to my room and lie on the bed so we can feel the air from the whirring ceiling fan.

  “Summer,” she says. “Hot, hotter, hottest. But no school, thank goodness.”

  I agree.

  “I hate school,” she says.

  I am surprised. She means it.

  “Why?”

  She makes a face. “I liked my last school. It was nice and I had friends. Then Mummy decided this was a better school, but the kids are so snobby. It’s been a year already and still no one wants to be friends with poor old me.”

  “I’ll be friends,” I say, “with poor old you.”

  We laugh. “Okay,” she says. “So, what would you be doing back home if you weren’t here?”

  I tell her about the Hindu Association’s Culture Camp. “I don’t know if I would’ve gone this year, but I’ve been going most summers. It’s okay, but we do the same thing every year.”

  She turns up her nose. She does not think it is a worthwhile way to spend the summer, listening to stories and taking dance lessons. “Oh, well,” she says. “All I’m doing is taking music lessons, so I can’t talk.”