AND CALL AGAIN, BUT IT COULD BE TRICKY. I CAN CERTAINLY SEND EMAIL. MA DOESN’T UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS SO SHE’LL NOT SNOOP AROUND NATE’S COMPUTER AND HE’LL DEFINITELY CHEW HER OUT IF SHE TRIES.
I LOVE YOU,
PRIYA
I went downstairs and found my mother lying haphazardly on the couch, snoring harshly. Her thin hair, which had been through repeated bad dye jobs, lay lifelessly against the maroon fabric of the sofa. Her lumpy stomach went up and down and I could see the flesh at her midriff spill each time she breathed out. I never understood why Indian women wore saris in this day and age when alternatives like salwar kameez would not be frowned upon. A sari was uncomfortable, and the midriff—the area where most of the battles of the bulge were fought and lost—stood exposed like an unraveled guilty secret.
I looked at my wristwatch and frowned. She had made me hurry up but had fallen asleep herself.
“Ma,” I called out. She stirred a little, so I called out again and this time her eyes opened. They were bloodshot and she looked at me, slightly disoriented. Her gaze then fell on the clock. She sat up groggily.
“Go and get an auto,” she told me, then stood up yawning and stretching. “And not one paisa more than fifteen rupees. Tell the auto rickshawwallah that and if he does any kitch-kitch , I will deal with him.”
I slipped on my sunglasses, took my purse, and went through rows of houses to reach the main road. A buffalo strolled on the newly laid asphalt street and I tiptoed around it in fear. I was always afraid of stray animals on the road. The fear of buffaloes was deep-rooted, probably embossed onto my consciousness because of a “bad childhood experience” as the shrinks in all the movies say about serial killers. According to my father (my mother tells a slightly different version of the same story), when I was just seven months old we went to visit some relatives in Kavali, a small town in the same state as Hyderabad. My mother left me in the open veranda on a straw mat, while she went inside the house for something or the other. All of a sudden a buffalo came charging through the street, inside the gate, and onto the veranda. By the time my mother called out and my father came rushing outside, the buffalo was towering over me, sharp horns pointed toward me, a leaky snout dropping mucus close to where I lay unaware of the perilous situation I was in.
“God knows why, but the bull went away, though for a while we thought it would hurt you,” my father said.
My mother’s version of the story was mostly the same as my father’s, only in her story it was my father who had left me on the veranda, not she. “I never left any of my children anywhere without supervision. It is your father . . . always wants this and that and leaves children where they are without any thought,” she explained.
I reached the main road and found an auto rickshaw. The driver was smoking a bidi, lounging on the vinyl-covered seat of his three-wheeler, while a small radio at his feet was playing the latest hit song from a Telugu film. “Come and take me in your arms, come and take me and make me yours. You are gone I know but I wait you know, for you to come and make me yours,” a female voice sang to an oft-used melody.
“Himayatnagar,” I said loudly to be heard over the song, and the auto rickshaw guy nodded and turned the radio off just as a woman’s heartbroken voice begged her lover yet again not to leave.
“Chalis rupya,” he said, and I shook my head. I hated to barter, but even I knew forty rupees was too much.
“Thees,” I countered, holding up three fingers, and he agreed without any resistance, which underscored the point that forty rupees was too much and probably even thirty was excessive, but I didn’t have the stomach to go on.
I pulled out fifteen rupees from my purse and gave it to him. “I will give this to you now and my mother will give you another fifteen,” I told him and he looked at me quizzically. I got into the rickshaw and asked him to drive to my parents’ house. “And don’t tell my mother that the price is thirty, just fifteen. Accha?”