Essays & Stories
Stalks
(excerpt of novel, Shadow Gardens)
​
Without fanfare or complaint of the number of days eating peanut butter and ramen noodles, old bread and leftovers of rice and lentils, Swapna’s and Saras’ mother had a single mission and her father obeyed. Once a year, they were to go home to India to visit the family. Six weeks. No exceptions or conditions. The first three weeks were expended on the father’s side, his parents, his older brother and the cousins. They lived in the family’s expansive apartment in a fashionable side of town, on an upper floor of a tall high-rise, a beautiful view of south Calcutta from the windows. There were late night parties and excessive Hindi movie watching, drinking Limca out of bottles and sneaking off with the older cousins to eat samosas from a street vendor. Bonus moments when the aunties pressed the cousins to buy them spicy snacks from the shop two blocks away and everyone stopped to swoon over Amitabh Bachchan billboards that advertised his fatale role in a new film. The girls’ father peeled off the colorful bills from a wad of money tucked in his wallet as he paid for every excursion, every snack, and each bauble from the stores, for all of the relatives and their children. Mr. Mazumdar’s grin toothy and unrelenting.
​
The last three weeks of vacation were at their mother’s childhood home, with their grandfather and grandmother, their uncle and his wife. Quieter and charming, it was a house with a yard. Swapna and Saras were left to entertain themselves, and fell in lock step with their grandparents’ routine of worship and cooking, trips to the market, and of course, winding the old grandfather clock, an old relic from the time when the British Raj ruled India. Mr. Mazumdar visited a few of those days, but he didn’t spend the night. He returned to his brother’s residence before dark, begging off dinner with a thousand excuses readied at the lips, all of them distilled from the idea that if his wife could go home to her parents, then he could do the same and for a time return to his bachelor ways.
​
Even as a child, Swapna couldn’t help but think that she wished her grandfather would reset her mother every day, like he did the clock. In India, Mrs. Mazumdar was a different person: well-dressed, gregarious, patient. It was the heat, the familiarity of the language and food. The way the entire landscape made her mother happy. In India, Swapna could look at the entire scene of her life in America, and take stock from a safe distance. She knew her mother did not like living in the United States, had no interest in it, had no desire for it to continue. Mrs. Mazumdar was alone, abandoned, laughed at for her dress, her accent, an inability to really become American. Mrs. Mazumdar frequently wept, lived entirely in a blue terry-cloth robe and only managed to get out of bed when her husband was due home in an hour and expecting dinner. Swapna also knew her father wasn’t going to change his plans because his wife was homesick. Her father didn’t change his plans for the weather or for any person; he simply carried on oblivious to anyone else’s wants or desires. He had his expectations, and Swapna knew that her mother did her very best to superficially maintain them around him, but on those rare occasions when her father had gone out of town, presumably for work, it was dreary for the girls. They ate leftovers, if there were any, or made a sandwich. They did their homework, started the laundry, washed the dishes, and ran off to take a bath and hop into bed. All the while, their mother stayed in her bedroom, sitting on the carpeted floor with her back against the wall next to the bathroom door, crying, or alternately sitting in bed, head propped up by all the pillows, watching TV in black and white on a tiny box that rested atop the dresser across the room. Mr. Mazumdar was employed but Swapna did not know what he did for work. Every time that she asked, the answer changed and her parents’ moods grew bleaker, and the tension between them almost tangible.
​
Still, in India, the Mazumdars were different. Swapna and her sister were lavished with new clothes, sleek styles with tiny mirrors stitched on the hems and the wrists; sweet treats, trips to the Victoria Memorial, taxi rides, trips to the zoo and picnics at the botanical gardens. There were servants, some of them hardly as old as the girls, who knew how to cook and clean, who could expertly mend a pair of pants or negotiate with the vendor for a bushel of pygmy bananas or a drink from a green coconut. Swapna and Saras marveled at them, but even in Calcutta, there were no friendships to be had outside of the cousins. It was strictly forbidden to play with the help, or even to distract them from their chores and unending responsibilities. Still, Swapna had a favorite, little Neela in her grandparents’ house, who had a great big laugh for such a lithe body, and whose smile remained constant, no matter who was berating her for an incomplete or shoddy job of washing clothes in a cold bucket of water or dicing vegetables that were to be added to the lentil soup and should have remained whole. Swapna always remembered Neela’s face when she came back to her home in the States, a home that felt especially empty after the bustle of her grandfather’s house. Neela’s smile was a beacon and Swapna adopted that smile.
​
Mrs. Mazumdar was determined to take a piece of her homeland back to America each time she was forced to leave Calcutta and return to her sleepy Georgia hamlet. It was her way to maintain the picture of India she’d created in her mind, an India that was still her home, and one that she did not have to routinely abandon. She was the kind of woman, it turned out, who was intimate with the changing faces of time in only the way that bedraggled travelers could be. She knew when she flew toward Asia, she was losing the hours somewhere over the Atlantic and then Eastern Europe. She would land and an entire day would be lost, and it would be night, and she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She knew as she was flying back to the mall-like quality that was America she would gain back those hours, and there would be the shoppers at the mall, in the concourses and in the terminals, poised with their shiny bags and shinier credit cards. She frequented different airports and knew them as well as housewives in America knew their favorite grocers, their favorite tailors, the best butcher. She possessed this information the way others possessed a second language. But she didn’t want this knowledge. Instead she wanted to turn back the hands of her father’s clock. One year she gathered all of her mother’s worn, tattered saris and took them to a blanket-making shop several miles away. Mrs. Mazumdar paid for a taxi that day, one way toward the shop. She had a large suitcase full of these saris, and the day before the family returned to America she traveled again via taxi—one way coming home—with the suitcase bulging at its seams. Mrs. Mazumdar wouldn’t open the suitcase in India, but once they reached the airport, cleared customs and entered their home, she cut the beige rope and it was like a magician appearing out of cake. Everything burst open – silk saris, refurbished and stuffed with quilt material and made into beautiful throw blankets that Mrs. Mazumdar did indeed throw around the house that year, covering the sofas and the beds, covering the backs of the chairs in the kitchen. One of the smaller ones, frayed along almost every edge, was quite undersized and their mother covered the front seat of the car with it. Swapna and Saras’s father just rolled his eyes toward heaven but said not one word. He had abandoned smiling years before, and his daughters could not remember a time when they had heard him laugh outside of India.
​
The next year, Mrs. Mazumdar came home with a suitcase full of stainless steel plates, bowls, cups, and glasses. Beautiful latticework ornamented the plates; tiny engraving that created a floral pattern and shimmered in the lights of the kitchen. Their father rolled his eyes again and grumbled that these dishes did not mesh with the modern conveniences of America, that the microwave he bought three years after everyone else had them in their kitchens could not be put to use with this tableware from the past.
​
One year, Mrs. Mazumdar brought back buffalo carp, deeply fried and packed in several layers of plastic. Mr. Mazumdar should have said something but he didn’t. He was quite partial to the fish and knew his wife would make a pungent curry when they returned to America. The luggage was lost, of course. The parents concluded they had not tipped the porter enough at the Calcutta customs checkpoint, and blamed one another for their own inherent stinginess. And the suitcase spent three days traveling in the underbelly of various airplanes across three continents. The luggage finally did arrive and the Mazumdars were almost too frightened to open it, to find the remains of old, fried fish smelling up every inch of the suitcase, and then, when opened, their house. Surprisingly, there was nothing to report. The fish was tightly packed in plastic and resting comfortably between two packets of hand towels, the other clothes were unsoiled and merely smelled like Calcutta, its air, its salt, its dust, its people breathing in and breathing out its dust and air and salt. The Mazumdars hugged each other with joy. Soon after, the family was at the table eating the curried fish and hot rice. At the end of the meal, Mr. Mazumdar smiled genuinely for the first time in years and emitted a grand belch. Everyone laughed; even Saras who found bodily noises and functions to be most disgusting. The fish incident led Mrs. Mazumdar more boldness in the coming trips: milk-based sweets, and pomegranates, pygmy bananas, some guavas from an orchard of a distant cousin’s.
​
One summer, Mrs. Mazumdar stood next to a cluster of hibiscus trees that were almost as old as she was and said, “Oh, if I could have my own garden, descending from the flowers in this perfect garden.” Swapna overheard the tone of her mother’s voice, and knew that what her mother wanted to do was smuggle. Mrs. Mazumdar wanted to take away from her parents’ home the very thing that made it her parents’ home and her hometown in India: not just the memories, and the familial and the strangers’ use of Bengali, the colorful saris, the sweets and the pungent curries but the grander things, the clouds, the melancholy of the sun as it hit the laden laundry lines on the flat rooftops midday, the unrelenting beat of the monsoon season, the leaves on the neem trees and the fragrances of the family garden; the beautiful movement of the flowers like a symphony, all of the hibiscus and jasmine and lilacs, and lotus like instruments, the garden an opera house, and all of the congruent music that played together and stood apart too like all cacophonies do, to drown out the silence that was her America. Then and there sprouted the idea for taking home several sets of cuttings from several different flowers, excluding the lilacs because Saras was allergic. Swapna and Neela were instructed to put the stalks and pollen-covered stems of the two different colors of hibiscus, the red and the yellow, as well as several cuttings of the jasmine, into wet plastic sheets and then gently wrap towels over them to keep them insulated. “The belly of the plane is very cold, the stalks will survive,” Mrs. Mazumdar said, confidently.
​
Four suitcases were going home, one for each member of the Mazumdar family. Swapna’s suitcase had the red hibiscus in hers, Saras’s luggage had the yellow hibiscus, while her mother’s and father’s each had one of the jasmine cuttings. On the plane, Mr. and Mrs. Mazumdar whispered conspiratorially during the time they had to fill out the customs declarations forms. There in bold red letters it specifically warned travelers not to bring in food or live animals or plants. Mr. Mazumdar wanted to lie and check off the boxes that declared they had nothing, but Mrs. Mazumdar did not want to be caught in the lie, and possibly pay a severe fine, maybe even spend a night or two in jail. So the couple checked no to the food and live animals boxes and left the plant box blank and unchecked.
​
From the air, the city below looked like one giant mall. Boxy white buildings, and a steady stream of blue and green and gray and black cars crawling on the roads single or double file, like ants. From the window seat, Mr. Mazumdar beamed with relief. The girls were torn, wanting to go back to their grandparents, but excited at seeing again their school, their streets, and the rooms of their house. Even once the plane landed and taxied to the gate, and she stepped onto the concourse, Mrs. Mazumdar felt she should be armed with a credit card and a shopping cart, that she wouldn’t be welcomed back until she’d bought something. During the walk through the concourse she saw people on the other side of the glass walls buzzing around purchasing gum and candy and sandwiches, hot and cold drinks; there was a group in a darkened room, smoking, and watching TV but she hurried by them, not wanting to be seen somehow. She found herself wanting to stop and buy anything, everything as she walked to the customs area, an expensive pink leather purse, jelly beans that had the flavor of apple martinis, scarves that sported the no doubt genuine spots of a leopard, something to mark the moment that she’d allowed herself to return here, to this life on Sycamore Street, marked by time spent in front of a small black and white TV in her bedroom. Instead, she stood in the back of a long line of “permanent residents,” and sighed.
​
Swapna and her sister were Americans, by birth, so they stood with their American passports in the line for returning citizens during customs. Their parents were Indian citizens with green cards, so they stood in a separate line. Typically, Mr. Mazumdar would saunter through customs, and threaten to leave the rest of the family at the airport and rush home. But on this occasion, it was his daughters’ turn. The two girls vaguely pointed in the direction of the green card line when the customs officer saw two American minors traveling unaccompanied. Their bags were not searched and they were merely welcomed home and told they could go. The parents craned their necks above the tall Sikh family ahead of them, looked past the colorful turbans to watch their daughters exit and disappear from view. Fortune didn’t smile upon the parents. They were randomly selected to have their bags searched and the customs agents and the customs dogs became apoplectic when they noticed the still-living jasmine plants in the couple’s suitcases.
​
“How can you break the law?” one fat American agent asked, waving her fat arms the color of sugar cookie dough into the air, her face a mask of moral superiority. “I didn’t realize,” Mrs. Mazumdar murmured twice and again, running one hand through her hair. “I didn’t understand.” When she wanted to look helpless, Mrs. Mazumdar was the consummate actress, and both men and women would take pity on her and release her from the rules that everyone else had to follow. The agent searched thoroughly Mrs. Mazumdar’s bag and confiscated the flowers, some hibiscus oil used for controlling dandruff and a box of flaky sweetmeats that her parents had snuck in at the final hour of packing, knowing how much their granddaughters were crazed for them.
​
Mr. Mazumdar was not so lucky: they led him and his luggage away and questioned him in a small room with no windows for two hours. They finally released him but stripped his luggage of anything deemed remotely controversial: the plant cuttings, of course, some shaving cream and toothpaste, two mini-bottles of Scotch that he’d helped himself to when the flight attendant had to assist a woman who had thrown up in her seat in the forward cabin during their duty-free sale, leaving behind a cart of goodies such as liquor and perfume, scarves and jewelry that were still expensive despite the lack of tax. The irony was that Mr. Mazumdar didn’t drink, but he had a friend in the Indian community who did and Mr. Mazumdar had thought to present him with a gift.
​
In the meantime, Mrs. Mazumdar could not attend to her children or to the cargo they were carrying. In the first half-hour, she thought she saw Saras walking alone to the women’s restroom, and then Swapna lingering by the bathroom doorway until her sister emerged. Some customs agents asked her, and someone had brought her first a bottle of water and then a murky cup of tea, if there were other people she was traveling with, if she wanted to track them down. But Mrs. Mazumdar was afraid that their bags would be searched and she didn’t want to get her husband into more trouble, since no doubt he was telling several lies in order to get out of the mess her best-laid plans had put them in. She kept the two customs agents entertained with small stories about growing up in and around Calcutta, living in a joint family with tens of cousins and never a moment of silence or peace. She noticed an hour after Mr. Mazumdar had been detained, there was no more sign of her American daughters, no sign of their luggage and their pieces of her mother’s garden. After another half hour waiting game, Mrs. Mazumdar’s throat ran dry and the words stopped flowing out of her, and she began to cough. More Styrofoam cups of tea and milk and juice appeared, and more bottles of water. This had little impact on Mrs. Mazumdar’s cough but it did cause her to look around in search of a restroom. The customs agent understood immediately, and pointed her in the direction of the women’s bathroom. Mrs. Mazumdar took her purse but made a small joke of it by leaving her suitcase at the table where she was sitting. “I trust no one else will go through this,” she said. Everyone’s laugh around her was polite.
​
She walked briskly to the toilet, eyes searching for her children, and after using the restroom, she faced herself in the mirror under the flickering fluorescent beams. Her desires to create a new world out of the familiar world of her parents’ were to be the death of them. She knew she shouldn’t have done it but it was hard to avoid the lure and tug of the old world. Mrs. Mazumdar knew she should be more concerned about her girls but she couldn’t leave her husband behind. She washed her hands and then dried them with a rough paper towel. She was still beautiful, she with high cheekbones and big eyes, the long hair, the decent figure unmarred by her laborious birthing. Mrs. Mazumdar sighed and left the bathroom.
​
Another hour, and Mrs. Mazumdar saw her husband emerge, bedraggled and unfocused. He found his wife among her new friends, the customs agents, and smiled warily. “Goodbye,” Mrs. Mazumdar said, rising. The customs agents bid their farewells dutifully, and the couple each picked up their own suitcases and trudged out the door.
​
They stepped outside and Mrs. Mazumdar groaned at the sight of the skyline, the feel of the sun against her skin, the hordes of people walking in and out of the sliding glass doors. She didn’t want to continue to her house. She merely wanted to return home to her parents. But Mr. Mazumdar surveyed the horizon as if it were the near boundary of his fiefdom, deeply inhaling the air and beaming in the afternoon sun. “Where did you tell the girls to wait for us?” “I didn’t,” Mrs. Mazumdar’s voice was weak, distant. “Well, you must have seen them,” he said. “You have had to wait for hours. You drank so many cups of tea.” “I saw them an hour ago,” Mrs. Mazumdar said. “They were waiting near the bathrooms.”
Mr. Mazumdar looked east and then looked west, and saw no one that even remotely resembled his daughters. “You lost them? Here? At the airport?” “You only gave them $10 each. They won’t get far.” Mrs. Mazumdar’s voice was sanguine although she herself was becoming quite worried. She bit the edges of her fingernails, starting at the pinky and moving all the way around both hands.
​
They were supposed to have called their Indian friends, Mr. and Mrs. Goswami, when they cleared customs and they were to get a ride home from them. But the flight had been delayed several hours when the family switched airplanes in Amsterdam. Then the debacle during customs. They could still call Mr. Goswami, but then they would have to explain that they didn’t know where their daughters were. The couple was forced to dig through their purses and wallets and find another ten or fifteen dollars and step onto the city bus that would take them into town, and from the central station transfer to another bus to take them home. The ride was especially long in light of the missing members of the family, and Swapna’s and Saras’s parents muttered and bickered quietly in a steady stream of insults in Bengali as every passing mile brought them closer and closer to their house.
​
“Your daughters are the most stubborn, obstinate, girls in the world,” Mrs. Mazumdar said. “No one will marry them.” “Your daughters learned every irresponsible lackadaisical action from watching you,” Mr. Mazumdar replied. “Do you think that I don’t know how much television you watch? How you sit around in your nightgown all day?” Mrs. Mazumdar looked out the window at the streets and cars and people whizzing by, and wished she were among them, anywhere, with anyone, doing anything at all, cooking over an open flame, cleaning toilets, singing on corners for money, rather than sitting in the stiff seat listening to her husband’s unceasing rebuke.
​
They exited the bus, carrying their largely depleted suitcases feebly, one foot in front of the other, their luggage bumping against their thighs and knees, the handle awkward in their sweaty palms wondering what lay ahead. They turned the corner and their pace grew faster as they inched closer to their lawn, their car parked in the driveway, their front door wide open but the screen door in front of it shut, their daughters and their daughters’ suitcases nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Mazumdar dropped her suitcase on the sidewalk and practically ran across the front lawn toward the front door. “Someone broke in!” In Bengali, he yelled, “Hey, what are you doing?” and then stopped where the bag had been flung and picked up his wife’s suitcase. “What am I, your coolie?”
​
Opening the screen door just a crack, Mrs. Mazumdar wasted no energy slipping through to the foyer. Her husband continued to yell: “No one broke in! Your foolish daughters came home without telling us!” He marched with two suitcases on the sidewalk and then up the driveway. Mr. Mazumdar pulled at the doorknob, and barreled his way through the door, dropping the bags in the foyer next to his wife’s shoes and marching into the kitchen. He glanced into the den and saw his daughters’ suitcases open and the contents strewn about the floor. He saw no one when he entered the kitchen but then looked through the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Mr. Mazumdar’s daughters, still dressed in the matching pink salwar kameezes they’d worn on the plane, stood next to their mother, who was cradling the cut flowers in her arms like a baby.
​
Mr. Mazumdar looked at his reflection in the glass and saw a disheveled man with angry eyes and for a long moment did not recognize himself or the faded-green wallpaper in the kitchen or the white face of the cheap clock above his head. He heard the sound of his own breath and the ticking of the second hand, and the stuffy silence of his house. He opened the sliding glass doors and yelled, “I told you so!” He slammed shut the door and waited for a response but his wife and daughters appeared not to have heard.
​
​
​
​