Amritha

My daughter, you think you know me. You think of yourself as a photograph, me—the forgettable negative. You inhabit the curves of poetry; I am the blank space around your lyrics.

I am, to you, a mere Indian housewife. Old-fashioned. Not simply traditional, but archaic. Out of place. Out of time, and nation.

I won’t cut my hair. I won’t buy frozen foods and stop cooking, or join salsa aerobics at the Y. I don’t mind ironing your father’s clothes; I like the hot fabrics smoothed until pure, the perfection in my hands. The chores I do that you scorn—they let me be alone. They give me time to think, and to remember, again, the life I once had.

You think, my daughter, that I don’t know you. Don’t I know that you escape at night, dressed in slipping-off clothes, to meet American boys? Pale-skinned, black-clad boys courting despair, calling themselves artists.

Those smells you bring home—liquor and smoke, the scent of desire: how they linger in the air behind you. On those nights, I await, without sleeping, the whisper of you back at dawn. I listen for the sound of your bedroom door closing—always closing. Myself, always outside.

I feel your irritation with me. Yesterday, when I asked you to set the dinner thalis—how you tossed your hair, your too-large jewelry clinking; how you banged my plates on the table. Lucky, stainless steel won’t crack. Later, how you cried out when I slipped and broke your water glass! Glass—like you—eludes me; it is too fragile for my life.

I picked up what I shattered, my thumb bleeding, my knees bent. I worked until I felt you lifting me, saying you would take over. I saw something in you then, as you squatted on the floor searching for shards—something beyond contempt. There in your eyes . . . Like how you looked at five-years-old, waiting for me at school, and then catapulting into my arms. Like how you looked at eight, when you showed me your first poem.

And now, how you look when I bend over your bed, as you first wake up.

You think you are not like me. My daughter, we share not just the slant of our eyes, the shapes of our chins, the stubborn slope of our shoulders. Those books you adore—your volumes of verse. From whom do you think that love comes?

You say you want to leave home and make yourself a new one. Go then. Dream your illusions until those—like all women’s—die. But before you go, know that I was not always the mother you see, washed-out and faded. Before you go, be aware that I was once someone else.

My daughter, you think the facts are easy. My name is Kalpana Rangaswami. But even that is not a simple fact for me; that is not my birth name. I used to be Amritha Lakshman. Amritha—nectar of the gods. Lakshman—the name of my father who passed away a week before my wedding and left a hollow space within me like a cave.

As Amritha, I wore my hair in two braids, heavy with coconut oil and thick as the bodies of snakes I found in the garden and tickled with sticks. How my mother screamed when she caught me dancing like God Shiva with snakes! All the women around me—mothers, aunts, cousins, servants— hated them. But when I looked into golden snake eyes, I saw only light, and in darting tongues, only tenderness.

As Amritha I wore frocks, but would sometimes sneak on a pair of pants left in the servants’ quarters by Cheenya, our last gardener. They were too big, of course, and so I would roll up the cuffs. Stains of green from moss and yellow from crushed flowers speckled the knees and the backs of those pants, soft and thin as my mother’s pillowcases, cool against my skin. I must have looked a sight with my lace frocks hanging over an old gardener’s pants, but I never cared—in the pants I felt I could run fast as any boy without being afraid to tumble and land with my dress over my head.

When I answered to Amritha, I spent my free days at the stream nearby our house that led to a little waterfall and a pool cooler than monsoon rains and deep enough for me to swim. I floated on my back in that green-black pool while the waterfall caressed my neck and frogs made quiet splashes just beyond my toes. You never knew I could swim? I can, even against rippling currents made by water crashing on rocks and even in angry streams swollen with mud-flooded riverbanks.

When your father decided he would marry me, he informed my parents that my name would have to be changed, as his mother wanted all the girls in the family to have names beginning with “K,” like hers—Kamala. So they named me Kalpana and gave me his name as well—Rangaswami—to bind me to him. But in the secret places in my mind where time has stopped and nothing changes, and where the wind echoes like it does in ancient temples, I will always be Amritha.

I know he is your father, but I must tell you that I did not want to marry Rangu; I had other plans. I wanted to study English literature, to leave Madras for Delhi. Can you imagine me as the scholar I should have been?

Of course, I had other reasons to leave Madras besides a love of books; Arun, a fellow student, had gained admission to Delhi University and I wanted to be with him. Mind you, I never dated or mated him as these American girls seem so easily to do. But we used to sit together in the park outside our school under a canopy of bougainvilleas and read poetry.

Sometimes my eyes would stray from the word and focus instead upon patterns of sun and shade playing over his lovely, slender brown arms. He was dark, night dark, and while most people condemned him for that, I loved the mystery of his skin. I planned to go to Delhi and to one day marry him.

My father may not have minded. But my father, with his armloads of dusty books within which he buried himself, was no match for my mother.

“What is the need for her to be more educated?” my mother said. “She should marry a decent boy, learn to cook, be at home where a woman belongs. How else will she raise children? All this nonsense about reading . . . empty air that will do her no good with a mother-in-law, husband, and babies to watch.”

She wanted me to marry an engineer—someone with a respectable, understandable job. Not a poet with a wisp of a dream, skin like night, and a love of words. She found Rangu through her cousin who was asking around about a girl for him. And so, at eighteen, I found myself in front of the wedding fire sitting next to a man who had never read a word of poetry in his life, and who did not plan to start.

It was not easy for me to leave India but my father’s death numbed me to its loss. The numbness helped me in this barren America where Rangu brought me, and where I had to learn to live the life of an engineer’s wife. I did what was expected of me.

And I gave birth to you. My victory, my one fulfilled dream. I named you Kavita: Poetry—the name that defines you. I poured, into you, my longings.

Now, when I fear I may lose you, I thought it time to tell my life in hopes that you will hear it, and not lose yourself in silence, as I have, for all these years.