Chapter 10 - Those Naughty Girl Genes
The music was pumping loudly, with jovial Hindi words I didn't understand booming out of the speakers. The dance floor was a swirl of bright colors and rhinestones weaving through the air- it was an Indian wedding. The wedding, held in Toronto where the bride was from, was for a child of my paternal cousin, though at least half of the guests appeared to be populated by my entire maternal family who lived in America. Because both my maternal and paternal families had evolved from the same house in India, you rarely saw an event where one party was there without the other. I was closer to my maternal side than my paternal side and had a close relationship with my cousin’s children, in Indian culture, considered nieces and nephew. Their parents, though far more reasonable and lenient than mine had been, were still born in India. Things like premarital sex and birth-control were difficult for them to digest.
As my nieces grew from sweet young girls to young women, they found they could confide in me in a way they couldn’t with their own parents. Sometimes it went too far. Truly, I did not want to know about how one of my nieces had asked her boyfriend to choke her as a part of their sexual play. My niece, harboring the same dark humor I possessed, had implored of the boyfriend "now finish the job!" as his hands had tightened around her neck. She was joking, of course. He did not get the joke and that relationship ended soon afterward. I too was horrified as she relayed the story. But also a little amused, because I got her sick sense of humor, since I carried the same sick sense of humor. I could joke about anything. But still, this was far more than I needed to know about my sweet young niece I had once held as a baby.
My American born nieces and nephews did not distinguish between themselves and me. Despite decades of difference between us. At one family dinner, all the children had been placed at a separate dinner table and my nieces pulled me over and said “you are sitting with us because you are one of us!” “I most certainly am not! I am decades older than you and could be your mother,” I exclaimed indignantly. They were not hearing it. I ended up at the kids table. For this particular wedding, the organizers seemed to agree with them. I had been seated at the kids table, again. Granted, the kids were now adult. But the average age at the table was 23 and I was almost 50. "I am at the kid's table?" I asked the nervously, looking at my nieces' young faces and wondering if they actually wanted me there. I glanced over at a table about 20 feet away, where my cousins were seated and where I should logically have been seated. "I consider you one of us!" exclaimed a niece from my paternal side I hadn't seen in years. I pondered this for a moment, choosing to believe this had to do with my youthful physical appearance and fun personality and not some sort of perceived immaturity by the entire family.
Picking at some paneer from the buffet, I realized that in the minds of my family, I wasn't necessarily mature. The maternal family was jovial and carefree but they had still gotten their required arranged marriages when it was time. I had not. I continued to live like their children, a single, child-free, cat owning world traveler. "My mom would never have had kids if she had a choice," I would tell myself in reassurance. I got my spirit from her. I got the depression genes, generational trauma and abuse from my dad, but I also got all sorts of good stuff from my mom. Seriously cool and entertaining stuff. This side of my family would be my saving grace. They had generational trauma in their history, but refused to pass it down. Instead, they handed on on generational laughter.
My mother's story was not without its ups and downs, but she would tell the story in stride. She grew up in Calcutta with her mother and father, living alongside her maternal uncle and his family. Her own mother had also been married as a child, but her luck had landed her a mild mannered and educated husband. My mother’s two older sisters had been sent to live with their paternal aunt in Kumbakonam, at the family house, as the aunt did not have any children of her own and requested for them to live with her when her own husband had died early. My mother’s father complied. This wasn’t so unusual in India at the time. Children seemed to be readily distributed amongst family members as needed.
Like my father, my mother was smart and at the top of her class at school. Unlike my father, she did not glue herself to her books. Her own childhood stories were as formidable as mine. There was the time she decided to skip school for weeks on end as a child. She would tell us the story with a grin on her face as she described camping out at a neighbor’s house under the guise of being sick. " I just lied and said I was ill," she told us with pride. "Didn't they question why you weren't resting in your own home?" I asked, surprised at her boldness. "No, but then then I was caught," she explained, as though this was a mundane occurrence in the 1950s in India. But being caught didn’t stop my mother’s antics any more that it ever stopped my antics. She kept going.
Like my father, my mother also went hungry- but not from poverty. She had severe tonsilitis as a child and couldn’t swallow her food. Her parents tried to help her with proper medical care, but my mother refused to swallow the horse size pills she was prescribed. They went into her mouth and were promptly spit out the window, lining the sidewalk with big pink pills her father would occasionally stumble upon. Though I envisioned a lot of scolding in her childhood, she had the good fortune of a non-violent father. When I asked her how she was punished, she described something that sounded like the equivalent of doing burpees. She was never hit. But she had to do a hundred burpees. "Boy, she must have been in great shape," I would think to myself when she would tell us the story.
My mother had good fortune until her father died, when she was 16. She told us her father died of “dropsy,” which we had never heard of. My mother, never a good medical historian, insisted it meant his blood turned to water. To date, it is unclear what happened, but I always imagined cardiac failure with edema. Either way, like my paternal grandfather, he died young and I never met him. My mother and her mother moved to Kumbakonam to live with my mother’s paternal aunt, leaving a big city and settling into a small dusty town. By then, my mother’s two older sisters had already been married off and left the house. While my father’s family lived on the bottom floor of the house, my father was 11 years older than my mother and he had already left to go study in America. My mother's 'siblings' became my cousins, who were closer to her age than mine.
I reveled in hearing descriptions of what my mother was like when she was young and unattached to my father. Fun loving, argumentative and…..very different than what she became once married to my father. So vivid were my mother’s own descriptions of her time in Kumbakonam that, when she talked about it, I could felt transported in time to see her life. Kumbakonam was known as a temple town for obvious reasons- there were a lot of temples. The house rested on a dusty, narrow street tat was busier than it could handle. In my visits, I watched numerous things fly past the front door. Bicycles, cars, trucks, motorcycles, cow carts and once, a rogue elephant. Also regularly frequenting the streets were fruit and vegetable vendor, loudly advertising their products, and beggar women with their children, wailing "amma, thaye," translating to "mother, goddess." And deep within the house, four families co-existed in 5 rooms, sharing the space with the mice, large spiders and cockroaches that ran freely through the house.
Years later, my mother would turn her nose up at Manhattan. "This is as bad as India," she would grumble, looking around in disgust. She wasn't wrong. Manhattan came with a requirement of co-existing with roahces, rodents and trash. "Well how did you tolerate Kumbakonam?" I would ask, irritated that she didn't like the place I had chosen to live. "I sat under a mosquito net the whole time," she responded quickly. In all honestly, I had started to despise the vermin aspect of Manhattan. I just didn't want my mother to point it out. My mother had also made it out of the rural Indian trenches and chosen a better surrounding for herself. For some reason, she was allowed to pursue a college education before getting married, a luxury not awarded to her sisters. She became a history and geography teacher and taught at a Catholic school, where she was scolded for showing too much abdomen with her sari which apparently was not being worn conservatively enough.
Once upon a time, my mother was a free spirit. My mother was excited to come to America, once arranged to marry my father. Unlike my father, she arrived on a plane. She described the many wonders of coming to America for the first tine- television, something she had never seen before. "I had never seen snow before, and your father had to buy me a coat," she would tell my sibling and I. It was as though she could remember her excitement from the time. I could envision her stories just by looking into her eyes. Seeing snow for the first time, wearing coats and mittens for the first time, shopping at indoor grocery stores and people owning their own cars- all of it was new. Having never seen a television, she now watched sitcom after sitcom. ‘I love Lucy,’ “The Carol Burnett Show.” But even before I was born, it started to become clear that the man she was married to had an erratic temperament. Kind and affectionate one moment, violently explosive the next. "I am a good husband, I never hit your mother," my father would angrily yell at me, in our many fights throughout the years. It was true that he never physically hit her, but his words were always more painful than his fists. As someone who experienced both, I could vouch for that.
In 1975, they had their first child (me). My mother liked to describe the view out the window the day I was born at Michael Reese hospital as a gloomy day with an even gloomier truck yard outside with miles of storage containers. Born with a full head of hair and nasty colic, I charged out of my mother’s womb with an extremely healthy set of lungs. My father, unable to handle the sight of blood, fainted during my birth. Perhaps that should have been his clue that his daughter would be a massive source of shock for the rest of his life. Indeed, his daughter would come at him like a screaming child bathed in placenta and afterbirth warpaint, ready for the battle to come.