Silhouette of a Girlhood

Meghana Mysore

__________

Lakshmi winced when she heard a thudding from upstairs. The kettle was on for chai, and its whistle grew from a tame whisper to a high-pitched scream. She turned off the kettle and ran upstairs to the bathroom where Mamatha took her showers. The door was ajar; she pushed it open and was met with chaos: talcum powder toppled over from the ledge of the shower to the floor, Mamatha’s sari submerged at the bottom of the tub, Himalaya body wash pouring out in a thick green goo. Soapy water trickled out from the fallen blue bucket in front of her. Mamatha lay fallen on her side like a corpse.

            “Amma! What happened?” Lakshmi took her mother-in-law’s hands in her own and attempted to pull her off the bathtub floor.

            “Bucket…it fell,” Mamatha said, peering up at Lakshmi helplessly. Lakshmi heard Srinivas’s footsteps approaching and turned to find him in the doorway, eyes wide.

            “What happened, Amma?” Srinivas ran towards the bathtub and Lakshmi pushed him back as she gripped Mamatha’s hands, pulling up her thin body. Mamatha strained to cover her nakedness with her wet sari. Lakshmi could see her ribcage jutting out from beneath the drenched silk. Holding onto Lakshmi’s hands as she was hauled out of the bathtub, Mamatha kept repeating “Ayyappa, ayyappa,” oh god, oh god, oh god.

            “Is something broken?” Srinivas shouted from outside the bathroom.

            “One moment, trying to get her out first.” Mamatha grabbed hold of Lakshmi’s shoulders, the water spilling all over Lakshmi’s white blouse and jeans.

            “Bring a towel,” Lakshmi instructed her husband. He came back, breathing heavily, with one, which Lakshmi draped over Mamatha. “Go downstairs, I’ll dress her.”

            “Hip…hurts…” As Mamatha rose out of the bathtub, thrusting all her weight onto one of Lakshmi’s shoulders, Lakshmi panicked. What was Mamatha saying about her hip? What if she needed surgery: how would they pay for it? Lakshmi maneuvered Mamatha into the prayer room. She grabbed the first sari she saw, a pink and green one, folded at the corner of the bed. She dried off Mamatha’s frail body and when her hands reached Mamatha’s shoulders, the older woman’s eyes met Lakshmi’s. “Thank you,” Mamatha said, weakly.

            It had been a long time since Mamatha had said thank you. Most days, she sat on the brown couch, where she would wait for Lakshmi to serve her morning coffee and evening chai. She had been in the house for the past three weeks and would stay for another two months before heading to Srinivas’s brother’s in New York.

            “Your hip hurts?”

            Mamatha nodded vigorously. Slowly, the two walked together down the stairs, and Mamatha hissed in pain the whole way down, her fingernails digging into Lakshmi’s palm. Srinivas paced back and forth in the living room.

            “We should take her to the doctor, says her hip’s really hurting. I got the keys, come on,” she said as he followed her to the car, sighing and making his frustration loudly known. Surya, whom Srinivas had picked up from swim practice earlier, was sitting in the living room, watching the scene unfold. “Can I come?” the eight-year-old asked, relishing the thought of being part of the drama. Mamatha and Surya sat in the back of the car with Lakshmi in the front passenger seat as Srinivas drove absent-mindedly.

            “Watch the road,” Lakshmi said as Srinivas swerved. At the Doctor’s Express, which was just a few minutes away from their house, Mamatha gripped her son’s arm.

            “My mother just fell in the shower,” Srinivas said to the receptionist.

            “Okay, one moment here…” She typed something into the computer. “Your name?”

            “Srinivas…Murthy…”

            Lakshmi sat with Surya in the waiting area, her eyes fixed upon a little child in red overalls playing with an abacus. He reminded her of a boy, Max, from the local preschool where she used to teach. He often wore red overalls and drew pictures of his family, which he’d leave behind on his desk. The boy’s mother held a tissue over his bleeding ear.

            “You have visitors’ insurance?”

            “No, no, we don’t—but this is just a checkup, right?”

            “Don’t worry, we’ll get the on-call doctor here.”

            Some minutes later, a man with a thick, curling beard and brown eyes came out and struggled to pronounce Mamatha’s name.

            Lakshmi glimpsed Surya staring at the abacus. “Been a long time since you played with one of those, huh?” she asked her daughter.

            Surya had taken to silence in the last year or so; in the car rides to school or swim practice, she’d just stare out the window, responding to Lakshmi’s questions with absent mms or nods. She much preferred spending time with Srinivas. Lakshmi convinced herself that it was just a phase, that once Surya emerged out of the grade school years their relationship would mend.

            “Guess so.”

            Surya would never eat the food that Lakshmi cooked, always searching the fridge for something else. Lakshmi feared her daughter resented that she wasn’t like the mothers of her friends at school. After Lakshmi quit her job at the preschool, Surya started speaking even less with her. Once, after swim practice, Surya searched through the fridge and found nothing, then stared at Lakshmi, who was standing over the stove making pasta. She asked why the pasta wasn’t ready yet. “Almost done,” Lakshmi said, and Surya had said something that still felt like a stone lodged in Lakshmi’s throat. “But you’re always home anyway, how’s it so hard to make pasta?” Lakshmi wanted to yell back at her daughter, to tell her that she didn’t know her life, didn’t know what it was like to be at the school and to be treated as if she didn’t matter, as if she was old and brown and irrelevant to her white, younger colleagues. Srinivas and Surya sometimes looked at her like her colleagues did, like she didn’t matter.

            She was a co-teacher with twenty-five-year-old Marie who spent most of the lunch break talking about her slew of Bumble dates with guys. At the end of the day, Lakshmi was always the one who had to clean up. Marie would leave her alone in the classroom littered with broken crayons and cut-up papers and tissues filled with hardening yellow snot. Once, Lakshmi had lingered in the classroom until the lights no longer recognized her body and turned off. She left everything on the floor and sat at Max’s desk, finding comfort in his drawing of a family for that day—a mom and dad and little boy in purple crayon, all holding hands.

            Lakshmi looked at her daughter and resolved to let her linger within her own silence. Sometimes, without anyone else to talk to, Lakshmi called her appa at night lying awake in her bed, the blue bedsheets and thick blankets threatening to swallow her whole. Sometimes it was too early in the morning in India and he didn’t pick up.

            Lakshmi often felt that her husband and daughter didn’t really see her, but she had no one else to lean on. Her parents were in India and it would be difficult to bring them to Oregon; they were getting old and flights were increasingly expensive. She had nowhere else to look for love. In Mysore, before she married Srinivas, she had other people. She had Radha, her best friend, and Vikram, the boy who lived next door. In quiet moments alone, she returned to a picture that her appa sent her over WhatsApp a few months ago. In it, she was twenty, and sitting at the dining table with Vikram, her hair falling like a blanket onto his shoulder. Vikram grinned as though he could hardly contain his happiness, the dimples on his cheeks caving in. He and Lakshmi had been working on integrals for Dr. Rajkumar’s class; surely that couldn’t have been a pleasant task. Lakshmi looked at the picture, marveling at the carefree elation of this younger version of herself.

            She felt a longing to reach into the photo and retrieve the girl and boy inside of it. Now her appa was the only one who knew of Vikram’s whereabouts. He’d moved to Australia with his fiancée, Poojitha, Appa had told her. Lakshmi and Vikram exchanged emails until Surya was born, about a year into Lakshmi’s marriage to Srinivas. In Vikram’s last email, he described meeting Poojitha at a Rubik’s cube club meetup in Bangalore. Vikram loved solving Rubik’s cubes, often keeping his cube on the table when he did homework with Lakshmi. “She has this fierce look in her eyes, and when she laughs…” Vikram wrote about Poojitha, and Lakshmi exited out of her email.

            And now it had been nine years and her life had solidified into routine and moved far away from the image of the girl in the picture.

Srinivas emerged from the doctor’s office with Mamatha, looking ashen. He clenched his jaw and Mamatha held tight onto his hand and coughed.

            “What happened? Everything okay?”

            “This doctor, Marc, I think, Marc—”

            Lakshmi pulled him out of his fixation, back to the conversation. “What did he say?”

            “She might need a surgery. Hip replacement.” Marc had given Mamatha a large wooden cane to walk with. It was almost as tall as her entire body.

            “Oh god.” Lakshmi looked down at the carpet, the yellow bleeding into dark green. Mamatha stood helplessly, her mouth hung open, and Srinivas furrowed his eyebrows. Surya was still sitting in the waiting area, eyes glued to the TV on the wall. Lakshmi motioned to her that they were leaving.

            On the car ride home, Surya sat in the back with Mamatha, who sniffled every now and then, seeming to have suddenly caught a cold. Back home, Srinivas stood in the doorway to the backyard. A deer appeared on the grass. “Hey!” he shouted. “You’re not supposed to be here!” and he ran outside, trying to scare it away. The deer disappeared, frightened, hopping over the fence to the forest.

            He came inside and stood by the door again, turning to Lakshmi, who was sitting at the dining table. Surya had gone upstairs to her room. Mamatha was lying on the couch with a shawl Lakshmi had draped over her. She was still sniffling.

            “I didn’t get travel insurance,” he said, “when I bought her flight from India.”

            “Oh.”

            “We’re fucked. We can’t pay for surgery if that’s what she—”

            “Doctor said she had to get surgery?”

            “No, but he said it’s possible, they’d take another look on Monday—”

            “Okay, so we don’t know for sure—”

            “But if she needs, if she does, you know how much that costs?” He leaned his head against the door. “35,000 dollars. We can’t afford that.”

            Lakshmi walked over to the couch and looked at Mamatha. Her eyes were closed, but that didn’t mean she was asleep.

            “And I’d have to call my katte brother, ask him for help, he’d go back and forth, eventually, he’d decide to be so gracious—”

            “So what? Then we’ll call him, we’ll ask for help. It’s his mom too.”

            “It’ll be so fucking embarrassing.”

            “Why?”

            “Should’ve never come to this godforsaken country, none of this would’ve happened, wouldn’t’ve mattered if she fell, if she die—”

            “Stop. You don’t mean that.”

            Srinivas walked over to the fridge and opened all the drawers. Lakshmi listened to the predictable beeping sound when the door closed, the ice rumbling into the freezer like an afterthought. She watched Srinivas, a doomed look on his face, and she wished suddenly that this wasn’t her life.

            In Mysore, as a girl, when she felt overwhelmed, she would escape to the room with the veena where patches of sunlight from the porch cracked in through the window. Most days when she came home from school, her amma would be upstairs sleeping just like Srinivas always was now. Her appa invited the neighbors over to distract from the silence. He didn’t want to confront the gulf between him and Amma, who’d hated Appa for most of Lakshmi’s childhood. She thought he was always more interested in entertaining others than attending to his own family. Because Amma was always upstairs sleeping, depressed, Lakshmi had to make chai and phulkas for the guests. Sometimes, phulka dust got all over her knuckles, and her knuckles hurt from kneading. When the guests left, she worked on the dishes piled up in the sink.

            Lakshmi would sit in the room and watch Julie, the stray dog, sleeping on the porch. She’d pull at the veena strings, closing her eyes and listening to the sour sound. Once, when Vikram came over, Lakshmi showed him the veena, and they sat together by it, looking out the window at Julie, who had lingered on the porch long after daylight. Lakshmi wished that she could close her eyes and open them and still find herself and Vikram right there.

            When Vikram was doing math problems, he always stared so intently at his paper like it was the only thing that mattered in the world. Sometimes, he’d go to the kitchen and make chai. Around him, Lakshmi didn’t have to make things. Your hands are tired, I’ll do it, he said, and brought them water too. When she didn’t understand a problem, didn’t know how to finish her essay, he’d sit there with her, sometimes saying something and sometimes nothing, and his presence quieted the sharp voices in her head. After class, they’d hop into an autorickshaw, not knowing where they wanted to go. To the Mysore Palace, he said once. They laughed and went all the way to the palace, standing in front of it until it was dark. At night the palace lit up, the brightness of God glowing throughout its structure. Everything in the world then felt bright and imbued with meaning. Lakshmi stared at Vikram, his thickly-rimmed glasses and his kind eyes. Some of his hair stood up in the middle of his head, a bit of it was matted in the front, but she didn’t mind. His kindness radiated through his face, his body, a warmth that made her feel warm too. Behind all the tourists, they sat on the dusty asphalt. Her skirt picked up dust but she didn’t care. She leaned her head on his shoulder. They didn’t kiss. They would never kiss. They didn’t know how to do that; they’d only seen people doing it in American movie commercials. They just held each other on the ground.

Srinivas gave up on looking through the fridge, finding nothing he wanted. He sighed and walked upstairs. Lakshmi was alone with Mamatha. She sat on the couch next to her, watching her frail sleeping body. Even now, after she’d fallen and might have to get hip surgery, Lakshmi resented Mamatha. Lakshmi and Mamatha barely spoke to each other. When they interacted, it was mainly for necessities—Lakshmi told her when the food and chai was ready, said good morning and good night every morning and evening, switched the TV to the Kannada channel, brought Mamatha blankets for her naps and shawls when she sat shivering on the couch.

            When Lakshmi stared too long at Mamatha’s cold eyes, her mind transported her back to 1995, when she had stood in Mamatha’s living room in Bangalore with Srinivas and his brother and sister-in-law. In Mamatha’s house, she rubbed her feet into the red carpet, the bangles around her ankles clinking with every movement. Earlier, she had sat on the sofa, extending her arm for a henna artist to litter her skin with designs. She asked for paisley and mango shapes. Around her, Manju and Karthik, Srinivas’s sister-in-law and brother, chatted effortlessly, Manju placing her hand on Karthik’s shoulder every now and then. Mamatha and Srinivas joined in their conversations too, their mouths spread wide in smiles that made Lakshmi feel inexplicably lonely. She looked at them, content in each other’s company, and wondered why she was here. In this room full of strangers, she concentrated on the warmth emanating from the henna artist’s palm on her arm. Mamatha kept looking at Lakshmi, eyes boring into Lakshmi’s skull. She walked over to Lakshmi, leaning over and whispering in her ear, “Your sister-in-law is so beautiful, her skin so fair.” Lakshmi smiled, a heaviness in her chest. She missed her amma and appa, who were at home in Mysore and would come for the ceremony the next day.

            Just that Spring, she had graduated from Amrita School and said goodbye to Radha and Vikram at the Mysuru Junction railway station. She had stood with Vikram at the station’s entrance, biting her tongue to suppress her tears. She leaned her head on his chest, listening to the steady thumping of his heart. “Good luck, Lakshmi,” he whispered, and his soft voice stayed in her throat all the way to Bangalore.

            Mamatha did not respect Lakshmi’s appa for his pleasing nature, seeing him as pitiable. Lakshmi thought some of her pity for him carried over into how she saw Lakshmi. Lakshmi’s appa had been a doctor in the Indian Army in the 1980s and a bullet had ricocheted and hit his leg. He could barely walk after that and bruises scattered on his leg. Every morning, as if in defiance of his body, he woke up and walked to Ananthaswamy Park. When he arrived, he’d be out of breath, his leg unable to move anymore, and collapse on a bench. Lakshmi would sometimes follow him to the park, letting him lean what felt like half his weight on her as they walked back to their house.

            At the wedding, Mamatha glared at Lakshmi’s dark skin, the silhouettes of acne scars on her cheeks. Lakshmi was not beautiful, not in the way that Manju was. Her eyes were a hardened black—not almost hazel like Manju’s, glistening in the light—her lips creased thin and slanting oddly to the right, the result of a nervous artist’s hand running a pencil across a canvas.

            Lakshmi carried loneliness in her chest when she locked herself inside a room in Mamatha’s house. Srinivas and the others were still outside, laughing and drinking sweet coffee and complimenting Manju on her slight figure and radiant skin. Lakshmi took off her sari, untwisting herself from the pink and gold-embroidered silk. She had gotten it one day after school with Radha, standing for hours in a dressing stall trying on one sari after another while Radha waited outside. The man in the boutique stood outside the stall, asking after her: “Everything okay, ma’am, another sari? Want to try a blue one?” She sat on the floor crying, imagining herself in the sari on her wedding day, a bit of watery snot falling on the gold embroidering. “I’ll get this one,” she said, and paid with the money her appa had given her. She unpeeled the sari from her body until she could see her shoulders, then her breasts, her thighs, her knees. She looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t want Srinivas to see her body. Her hips seemed to jut out, her stomach swelling slightly at the bottom. She wished she didn’t have to see herself.

On Monday, Srinivas took Mamatha to the doctor again. The doctor said that surgery was probably not necessary, but she might need to see a physical therapist. It was less of a financial burden than surgery, but Srinivas still cringed at the monthly bill he would incur from the therapy sessions. He would leave for San Francisco the next morning for work, and wouldn’t be back until Saturday morning. He’d tried to get out of the trip, telling his boss that his mother had fallen, but his boss told him that if Mamatha was okay the customer needed him to go. “Katte customer,” he said, and Lakshmi promised that she’d take care of Mamatha, as she always did.

            But taking care of Mamatha alone became excruciating. Mamatha wasn’t moving from the couch. She spent her days and nights there. The thought entered Lakshmi’s mind—and she quickly pushed it away—that maybe Mamatha’s hip was actually okay and she was using her new injury as a reason for Lakshmi to continually wait on her. When she needed, she got up to go to the bathroom, but couldn’t get up to get her own chai or food. She sat in front of the TV all day and wouldn’t even click the button to play the next episode of her serial. She’d turn around to Lakshmi, indicating that she wanted Lakshmi to change it for her. Surya had come to Lakshmi one evening expressing her annoyance at Mamatha’s perpetual presence on the couch. Surya couldn’t watch Say Yes to the Dress, which apparently really bothered her. “Okay, okay, remember she just fell down,” Lakshmi told her daughter, who rolled her eyes and went up to her room.

            Lakshmi didn’t understand her daughter’s fascination for Say Yes to the Dress. Surya often watched the show after swim practice, the smell of the chlorine on her hair and skin filling the living room. In one episode, a woman named Agnes was marrying her high school sweetheart, Dan. She was picking between a sequined sleeveless dress and a bare off-the-shoulder one. Every time Lakshmi watched the show from afar, she was struck by the distance between these women’s lives and her own. Their most agonizing choices concerned the type of cut for their dresses. Only in the vein of dresses they had so many choices, and Lakshmi couldn’t even fathom the amount of choice they might have had in finding a life partner.

            That week, Srinivas called home almost every night, not to check on Lakshmi or Surya but for Mamatha. This Friday, Srinivas called right on time, at 7:35, as the green numbers on the microwave indicated. She stared at the microwave, then looked inside the pantry where a cereal box had toppled over, granola spilling all over the shelf.

            “How’s Amma today?”

            Lakshmi heard the buzz of the television screen in the background but couldn’t tell what he was watching. “Fine. Been watching serial all day. Sometimes gets up to go to the bathroom.”

            “So I found physical therapist we could go to. By University of Oregon. Anders something. Works with older people. Got appointment for Saturday evening. Thought would be nice to do something before, you know, show Amma something. If she’s up for walking a little. You said she’s been walking around the house a bit?”

            “Yes, a bit, seems to be getting better.”

            “Maybe we’ll go for picnic in Hendricks Park?”

            “Sure, good idea.” Lakshmi knew this meant that she would have to ready the food for the picnic. Her hands hurt, even just thinking about all the cooking. But Lakshmi liked Hendricks Park. The trails felt expansive, and hydrangea lined the paths in clusters of blue and pink and purple. There was one spot in the middle of the trails by two pine trees that hunched over with the love and fatigue of an old couple. Every time the family went for a walk at the park, Lakshmi stood in that spot, letting time pulse around her, while Surya and Srinivas walked forward.

            Lakshmi blurted something out she didn’t know she was seriously considering. “Maybe I should go back to the school.”

            “Oh…why?”

            “I was just thinking. With Amma’s expenses, make some extra money.”

            Srinivas was quiet for a moment. “You can go back, but don’t know how much it’ll help.”

            “It’ll bring a little extra—”

            “Not much. We’ll figure out how to make do.” In his sweeping sentence, he’d ended the conversation, and Lakshmi felt she didn’t have much more to say.

            She turned to the pantry and glimpsed again the fallen box of cereal and sighed. Her mind wandered away to when she had sat with Vikram on the ground in front of the palace. Then, she had been able to imagine so many things, so many trajectories for her life. After classes, she would run through Devaraja Market with Radha and could hear the possibilities running through her head. One day, they entered a clothes shop and Radha wanted to steal shirts and Lakshmi said they couldn’t do that, but Radha grinned and said, come on Lakshmi, when have you ever done anything bad in your life? She wanted to feel alive so she stole a shirt. It was bright purple with gold sequins running down the middle. She knew it was a bad thing to do, but she was proud of herself for stealing it. It was her own bad thing.

            Lakshmi tried to steady herself and return to the phone call. She looked towards the couch and saw Mamatha slowly rising up and limping to the bathroom. Lakshmi spoke softly into the phone. “You know, it’s been a little hard, with Amma, she’s always on the couch, Surya can’t watch what she wants.”

            “She’s just an old woman. Think of her life now, how little she has. Appa’s gone too.”

            “I know, I know, I just—”

            “Let’s not be selfish.” Selfish. Lakshmi felt she’d given up everything to wait on his mother. She had given up her girlhood to get married to a man she did not know. And, somehow, in this interaction, Lakshmi felt that her feelings were unwarranted. Lakshmi said she was feeling tired and hung up.

            Before she slept, she draped the green shawl over Mamatha on the couch. Mamatha was still watching the serial. The same episode seemed to have repeated for the last few hours. Aarti the detective looked into the camera with the same surprised, gasping face.

            “How’s your hip, Amma? Feeling okay? Tomorrow, Srinivas is coming, he’ll take you to a physical therapist. And we’ll go for a picnic in the park. You can walk a bit?” Mamatha just made an mm sound and closed her eyes.

            Lakshmi looked at the microwave. 8:01. She went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Lines like cobwebs settled underneath her eyes. Not wanting to look at herself anymore, she sat on the bed, too large for one person. Tonight, she felt all the space her body couldn’t fill. She and Srinivas had slept together in this bed for a week after they moved in, but neither of them craved each other’s touch, and Srinivas snored, which bothered Lakshmi. Now Lakshmi slept in this bed alone. Lakshmi felt restless. She stared at the little white bumps of paint on the ceiling.

            An unused notebook that she had gotten several months ago at a community center writing workshop sat on her bedside table. She’d registered for the class on a whim, wanting to feel again the spark she used to feel as a girl when she wrote in the privacy of her room. She wrote at night after her parents had gone to sleep and she’d finished cleaning the dishes. Lakshmi only attended one of the six workshops, feeling uncomfortable with the thought of the other five white women in the workshop scrutinizing her writing. One of the ladies, Patricia, kept commenting on how hard her name was to get right. “Sorry,” Lakshmi had said, and wondered why she apologized. Anyway, she didn’t even know if she had anything to write about. She sat up in her bed and opened the journal. Lakshmi turned on the lamp beside her. She brought the journal to her lap and opened it. On the first page, she’d written her name in block letters, circling the letters with crosshatch patterns. The teacher had prompted the women to write about their first dates or first encounters with love. Lakshmi left the rest of the page blank.

            Lakshmi found a pencil from the drawer below the bedside table. She drew a line on the next page. Then, her pencil began to move swiftly across the page and language emerged from her. She thought of Mamatha, sitting on the sofa in the morning, expecting her coffee, and in the evening, her chai. She never thanked Lakshmi for her labor, taking it for granted that Lakshmi was there to serve her. She thought of Mamatha’s little mm, the way she sat every morning on the couch, unable to move, watching the same serial. Mamatha moved with an innocence that comes with old age, and yet she was the same woman who had pierced Lakshmi with a cold stare at the wedding, who, years after, would call Srinivas to tell him about Manju’s many virtues as Karthik’s wife. Lakshmi was always inadequate. She began to pen a letter to Mamatha—one she would never give her; she wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. But Srinivas could.

Mamatha,
I know you wish I wasn’t your daughter-in-law. I wish you weren’t my mother-in-law. A lot of the time I wish I hadn’t married your son. What was he like when he was younger? There’s so much I don’t know about him. Married for nine years and still strangers. He doesn’t know how to communicate. Thinks others are always telling him he isn’t good enough. Mostly he’s saying that to himself.

You looked at me with such bitterness during the wedding. You were supposed to sit next to my parents during the ceremony but you sat next to Manju and Karthik instead. When you looked at Manju, there was a softness. Manju was the daughter-in-law you loved. No matter what I did, I’d never make the cut. Even now, doesn’t matter that you sleep in my house, that you drink and eat from the plates and cups I picked out, doesn’t matter that you wear my shawls in the evening to keep you warm. You just wanted to get rid of Srinivas, because he was difficult—skipped school for weeks, acted out in class, disagreed with his appa all the time.

You just thought I’d be able to deal with it. But I can’t. I pretend. Sometimes I think back to that morning, when I agreed to the marriage. I hadn’t been able to say anything. I listened and nodded. I didn’t think it was possible to tell my appa about Vikram. I didn’t know if I loved Vikram; I didn’t trust my feelings. I didn’t know then that it was possible to love someone and to be with them. I thought it was all I could do, accept a marriage and bite my tongue. It’s what I’d watched my amma do, silent behind those walls. After a while, she didn’t even object to my appa’s pandering to others. She just let it go. She bit her tongue. I wish I hadn’t.

Srinivas and I never touch each other. The night we conceived Surya it hurt so much because I’d never touched anyone before. One time, I went up to Appa’s library and searched through the books. I found a book about sex and stood there, flipping through the pages, stunned. I didn’t think that my parents ever had sex. Maybe back when they first got married. I stared at the stick figure drawings, their bodies twisting into one another. 

I’ve never felt a touch that I actually wanted, that didn’t hurt. The only person who didn’t hurt to be around was Vikram. I looked at him and couldn’t hear my parents’ fighting anymore. Or, at least, it was a duller sound.

Towards the end of fourth year, he came over and I told him that I’d accepted a marriage to Srinivas, and in a month I’d go to Bangalore to marry a man who my appa had met just once in a café. “Show me his picture,” he said, and I pulled out the slip of paper from my knapsack and set it on the table. Vikram stared at it as he stared at math problems he didn’t yet understand. “Does he seem nice?” I asked Vikram, as though he’d somehow know. I was banking on his answer to tell me that this man I was going to spend the rest of my life with would treat me with kindness. “I guess so,” he said, and the hesitation in his voice made me cringe. In the picture, Srinivas’s smile was plastered on his face, his thick moustache curling at the ends, the green stripes on his shirt somehow too bright. But it seemed like all the components were in place—he was smiling, so he seemed happy, he had hair on his head and clothes on his chest. 

Sometimes, when I look at you now, sitting on our couch, a contented grin on your face, I feel like you’ve taken something from me. You’ve stolen something, I just don’t know what. My eyes used to be bright in the morning and when I look in the mirror now, I want nothing more than to look away. I used to be carefree, used to take risks, used to not know what the rest of my life would hold. He tells me sometimes that I’m the reason he didn't get to be all he wanted to be. What about all I wanted to be? 

When I was nineteen, I wrote a column for the Times of India about “Fair and Lovely” skin creams and the association between fairness and beauty that had been so deeply ingrained in society. When the column ran, Appa placed copies of the newspaper all over the house and showed all the neighbors who visited that night. I made phulka and my knuckles hurt from all the kneading but it felt okay because one of the neighbors, Ms. Jaya, came to me in the kitchen and told me how powerful the column was, how, one day, I would be a writer, and my words would make an impact in the world. 

I smiled. I didn’t know if she was right, but it felt good to know she thought I had something to say. 
The column is still in the house in Mysore plastered against a wall, but it’s gathering dust now. They’re the words of another girl, someone who had the fire that comes from infinite possibilities in her eyes, whose life had not yet been written out. I miss that girl; I wish, somewhere, she was still alive.

            Lakshmi closed the journal, leaving the pencil on the page where the note ended. She left the journal on the beside table, wanting it out in the open. These were her thoughts, and she wanted them to be known. She felt restless, and yet as though she had finally exhaled. She turned off the lamp, and the darkness closed in around her.

She woke around seven to make food for the picnic. Mamatha was already on the couch. Lakshmi turned on the serial. Lakshmi filled the pot with water and the filter with coffee grains. She watched the coffee slowly drip into the pot. “Amma, coffee,” she said, pouring it into the clay kulhar cup Mamatha liked. Mamatha slurped her coffee at the dining table.

            Around nine, Lakshmi heard the rumble of the garage door. Srinivas came inside. He went up to sleep for an hour, then they’d all leave for the park. At ten, Surya came downstairs, already dressed in jeans and her swim team tee-shirt.

            “Ready to go?”

            “Yeah, just gotta put my shoes on. Where’s Dad?”

            “Sleeping, I’ll go wake him.”

            As Lakshmi ascended the stairs, she wondered if he had found it. She’d left the journal on the bedside table, knowingly. A part of her hoped that he would read all her words and understand. But she also knew that he would see her criticisms of him, and stop there. Still, she clung onto the hope.

            When she entered the room, she found him sitting on the bed with the journal splayed open.

            “Not sleeping?” He sat up on the bed. He’d yell and stare at her, first anger in his eyes then sadness. She could see it already. Lakshmi talked, trying to find ways out of the silence. “We’re ready to go whenever you are, I’ve packed up all the food.”

            He rested his finger where the pencil had been. “You wrote this all…when?”

            She looked down at the carpet. “Last night. Doesn’t really mean much, I was just—”

            “How you could be so irresponsible?” He turned to face her, his legs dangling out from the side of the bed. His mouth hung open.

            “I was just thinking through things, trying to understand myself.”

            “This is how you see me. A burden to you.” He stood up from the bed and walked to Lakshmi, leaning his face so close to hers that she could see the dark pigmentation under his eyes and the pockmarks on his skin. “It’s shameful,” he yelled, a bit of his spit spraying onto her nose. And then, “painful,” he said, quieter.

            He turned away from her and cradled his own shoulders. She looked at the lamp on the bedside table, the loud light screaming in her eyes. Of course this was the way it would go. The two of them pushed further into themselves.

            “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to find it,” she lied.

            “You left it out in the open, addressed it to Amma. And she’s an old woman now, can’t hear, can’t do anything.” He turned back to her and squinted his eyes, as if trying to clearly make out her face, this woman who wanted to be anywhere but with him.

            “I was so young when we married, I didn’t have a chance to see who I could become.”

            “You think this is what I wanted?” he asked. “Being with someone so dissatisfied with who I am?”

            Lakshmi averted her eyes to the window at the other side of the room where she could see the swing set she and Srinivas had installed when Surya started kindergarten.

            “You’re not listening, are you?”

            “I’m just trying to calm myself.”

            “Always somewhere else, always want to be somewhere else. I was never enough for you.”

            “Stop this.”

            “How I cannot think that way? Look at what you wrote.”

            Lakshmi kept staring at the swing set. She imagined a younger Surya slipping down the bright yellow slide in a blue dress. She smiled, taken away momentarily to this adjacent place.

            “You’re smiling. How can you be smiling?”

            “Stop scrutinizing me.” She moved away from him onto the bed, but he rushed towards her, grabbing her wrist, squeezing it.

            “You’re always stuck there in the past, always in the goddamn past,” he yelled, and Lakshmi grabbed onto the thick blanket under her, digging her fingernails into the fibers of fabric. In her periphery, Lakshmi saw a body standing in the doorway. It was Surya. “Stop!” she yelled at Srinivas, getting up and pushing away his arm.

            Lakshmi knew that Surya had seen her and Srinivas fighting for a good portion of her childhood. She thought of this image of Srinivas, spit at the corners of his mouth, his eyes wild and angry, and her like this, grabbing onto the blanket for stability. She didn’t want this moment to crystallize in Surya’s mind. In her own mind, she held an image of her parents in the kitchen in Mysore, Amma grabbing hold of Appa’s arm, squeezing it forcefully, a red mark forming on his skin when she released her grip. A kulhar had wobbled on the table behind them and fallen to the floor when she let go. Lakshmi shivered every time this image resurfaced.

            “Surya, you’re ready to go?” Surya nodded and crossed one foot in front of the other and played with the doorknob, pushing the door open and closed. She peeked in mischievously through the slit. “Come on now,” Lakshmi addressed her daughter. “Let’s go downstairs.”

            Before leaving the room, Lakshmi looked at Srinivas sitting at the edge of the bed, catching his breath.

            “What time is the appointment for Amma?” she asked.

            “2:30.”

            “Calm yourself, then come down,” she said, walking out of the room and closing the door behind her. She knew he would follow in some time.

            Downstairs, Mamatha was watching her Kannada serial, where Aarti the detective was solving a case about a missing child. Mamatha stared at the screen, transfixed. Surya poured milk into a glass and sat at the table, sipping slowly. Lakshmi went to the laundry room to bring her shoes and Mamatha’s. She looked at Mamatha’s small black loafers, selected for her when she arrived in Oregon. Lakshmi remembered walking through the aisles with Mamatha and looking down at her own pair of fading blue Tom’s. She brought the shoes for Mamatha and placed them before her.

            “We’re going to the park soon for the picnic. Srinivas will be down in a bit.”

            Mamatha nodded and kept watching the serial, laughing at the silly faces Aarti’s cartoonish son was making. Her sharp spurts of laughter grated against Lakshmi’s ears.

            “You want to turn off the serial, Amma?”

            “One minute, the son is saying something funny.”

            “Okay. I brought you your shoes.” Lakshmi sat on the other side of the couch, watching Mamatha’s profile. She wore a grin on her face, and Lakshmi wanted to tear it from her lips and make the older woman look straight into her eyes.

            Lakshmi heard Srinivas’s steps coming down the stairs, the uneven thumping of his movement as he entered the living room.

            “Turning this off, Amma, we’re going to park now,” he said, switching off the TV.

            “Funny episode.” She looked up at him with the grin that had not left her face for the past few minutes.

            Srinivas sat on the rocking chair across from Lakshmi and watched her. She flicked her eyes to the carpet.

            “Put on your shoes, Amma,” Srinivas directed Mamatha.

            “Need some help.” She turned expectantly to Lakshmi, as did Srinivas. Lakshmi looked at both of them, struck by the almost identical expression on their faces.

            “I think you can put them on yourself, it’s not so hard.”

            “Her hip is hurting, come on.”

            “She’s strong. I believe she can do it.”

            Srinivas narrowed his gaze at Lakshmi but she didn’t move. They all sat like this for a few moments, the air around them heavy, every potential movement able to alter the scoreboard of their silent battle. Srinivas sighed and got up off the rocking chair, kneeling below his amma. He lifted each foot with the palm of his hand and moved it into its respective shoe. When her feet settled in her loafers, Srinivas went to the laundry room to get his own shoes, and Mamatha had a chance to look at her daughter-in-law. Lakshmi and Mamatha lingered together, the only two people in the room of their past. Mamatha ran her eyes over Lakshmi’s forehead, her nose, her lips, as if she were seeing her for the first time.

Lakshmi picked up the chapati, palya and sandwiches she had packed into containers and plastic Ziploc bags. The whole car ride to the park, she stared out the window, not at the trees or the skyline, but at the wheels in the mirror’s reflection, moving violently over the concrete, again and again. After a while the movement didn’t even seem violent anymore.

            At Hendricks Park, blue jays sang and the leaves of pine trees bristled in the breeze. The family walked on the same trail they always traversed. Every now and then, Srinivas pointed out something beautiful to his amma—the vibrant hydrangea here, the outline of Mount Hood in the distance—and she nodded her head, often missing what he said. She held her hip, and he held her. They walked slowly, trailing behind Surya and Lakshmi. “Careful, Amma, careful,” he said, and she looked down at her small feet, placing one foot in front of the other. Here, in the park, the air was fresh and clean.

            The family found a spot at the edge of the forest with picnic tables. They sat next to a white family of four. The woman leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder; the teenage boy jokingly poked his sister’s nose and laughed, crunching chips between his teeth. Lakshmi scattered the chapati, the lotus root palya and sandwiches on the table. The other three began to eat. Srinivas took some palya onto his plastic plate and a bit of it dropped onto the table. He put some palya and chapati on a plate for Mamatha. “One second, I’ll be right back,” Lakshmi said, and walked to the spot in the forest that was hers, where she lingered every time they came here. She stood under the two hunched-over pine trees. They bent so precariously together, and yet, for the eight years she’d been coming here, these same trees still stood. From this point, Lakshmi could see her family. Srinivas wiped a bit of palya from his chin. Surya stared at her sandwich, peeling off the top slice of bread and examining the insides. Mamatha looked down at the table, then at her son, and he looked at her. The canopy of branches above Lakshmi folded together, letting in triangles of sunlight. Lakshmi stared out at the silhouette of Mount Hood in the distance, the blue of clouds and white of snow becoming indistinguishable in the morning light.

            Out in the distance, she thought she could see her younger self with Vikram at the palace at night. She rested her head on his bony shoulder; it was uncomfortable, but she didn’t want to move. She saw herself in her childhood home, standing over the July 1992 Sunday edition of the Times of India. Something pulsed in her chest when she read her name printed in ink on page F6. I’ll never stop writing, she had sworn to herself then, and that night, as she stood over the stove making chai, her face warmed in the rising steam and her eyes watering a little, she penned her next column in her mind. It would be about caste and how it carried into the lives of the South Asian diaspora. Lakshmi held onto this image of herself, a fierceness in her eyes, before it disappeared into the silhouette of the mountain.

__________

Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer. A 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, her work appears or will appear in Apogee, Passages North, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, wildness, Boston Review, Pleiades, Yalobusha Review, The Margins of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). A Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction and a Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Scholar, she has also received recognition from Tin House, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and The de Groot Foundation, through which she was a finalist for the 2023 LANDO Grant. She holds a B.A. in English with Distinction from Yale University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is working on a novel exploring three generations of an Indian American family. 

Please consider subscribing to the McNeese Review or purchasing a current issue or past one! Click on the Submit button to find out more about subscription and purchase options.