doesn’t want to believe that I don’t really like her or care that she and Nanna made a thousand sacrifices for me.”
Lies, all lies. I did care, how could I not? But like gifts that become uncouth burdens when pointed at with ownership by the giver, Ma and Nanna’s sacrifices seemed to be uncomfortable loads that I didn’t want to acknowledge because I was being asked to.
“But they did,” Sowmya argued.
I twisted around and faced Sowmya. “And that makes me what? Their property?”
“Just their daughter.”
I shook my head. Sowmya knew better than anyone that a daughter was a piece of property, something you unloaded after a certain point. Sowmya had already become excess baggage and my grandparents were waiting to get her married and out of their house.
In Telugu, the word for girl is adapilla, where ada means theirs and pilla means girl. In essence, the creators of the language had followed the rules of society and deemed that a girl was never her parents’, always the in-laws’, always belonging to someone else rather than to those who birthed and raised her.
“But I’m not just a daughter, I am me,” I said wearily, trying not to sound like a cliché. “No one seems to give a damn about me. Everyone is interested in their daughter, granddaughter . . .” I let my words trail away as I wiped from my face tears that had fallen, unbeknownst to me.
“Let us go inside,” Sowmya suggested, uneasy I believed with my show of emotion. “We have to put the mango pieces in peanut oil.”
We sat down again in the living room. My grandfather was taking a nap in the adjoining bedroom and Ammamma was snoring softly on the sofa. Ma was pounding on mustard seeds in a large black stone pestle; runaway mustard seeds that had jumped out of the pestle were evidence of the indelicate force she was using to powder them.
I sat down next to Neelima who was pounding dried red chili. Her eyes were watering and I held my breath. There was red hot chili pepper in the air.
Lata was putting fenugreek seeds in another pestle. No one was speaking. I felt I had silenced them all, blown up a bomb, and everyone was now quiet in the aftermath.
“Lata, I’m really sorry,” I said humbly. Now that the blood was not roaring in my ears, I knew that I had no right to judge her. She had made the choices she wanted to make and I who claimed that personal choice was of great importance should respect that. Lata gave me a tremulous smile and shrugged. It was more than I deserved.
“Ma,” I called out but she didn’t even look at me, “I’m sorry, Ma. Really.”
She didn’t acknowledge the apology and I sighed. There she was again, sulking like a five-year-old, instead of behaving like a grown woman.
Just like me?
“Ma, I’m really, really sorry,” I repeated, and she continued to pound on her mustard seeds, probably to drown out my voice.
Sowmya was visibly disturbed and she sat down next to my mother on the floor and spoke softly to her. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but, whatever it was, my mother was obviously displeased.
“You stay out of it,” Ma bellowed, and Sowmya immediately moved away from her. “She is my daughter and I will do as I want to do.”
“Akka, she is just here for a few more days,” Sowmya said. But her Akka, my mother, was in no mood to listen to Sowmya.
“She thinks she can say anything she likes,” Ma rattled away as her hands powdered mustard seeds. “So she is in America . . . as if that should impress us.” She looked at me and stopped pounding for an instant. “I don’t care. If you don’t treat me with respect . . . I am your mother after all.” She continued the pounding.
“Then you have to learn to treat me with respect, too,” I told her very gently, and the shit hit the fan.
“You are too young to gain my respect and you have done nothing so far to gain it,” she raged. “Respect! Children respect their parents . . . and that is all there is to it. You have to learn to behave yourself. I am not your classmate or your friend that you can speak to me like this.”
The eternal problem! My mother wanted to be a textbook parent while I felt that I was old enough to warrant being treated