Everything Happens for a Reason. Kavita Daswani
Sanjay and I were awake and alert, he said that showing me around helped him to see old things as new again, that he loved the look on my face as I marvelled at the cut-price offers on batteries and baby lotion at the 99-Cents shop, and the warehouse stores – which were the size of Bihar, I thought – where people bought twelve-packs of pizza. American supermarkets were the stuff of legend in India, sightseeing venues in themselves. To me, it was like wandering through a giant lit-up refrigerator. Apple sauce, which doesn’t even exist in Delhi, here took up an entire lane. Even half these bottles wouldn’t fit into Jagdish’s, the dried goods store near my old home where the servants buy sacks of rice and dals and packets of stiff Indian-made chewing gum.
On my first visit to our neighbourhood supermarket, the day after we arrived in America, I shuffled down the aisle, pulling my sweater tightly around me as I approached the frozen foods section, with its big, frosty bins in the centre. I reached in and pulled out boxes of ice cream and pies, chicken and gravy, peas and potatoes and corn, incredulous that all that food could come out of a small square of cardboard and that there was no chopping or dicing involved.
‘Discounts, special offers, extra savings,’ said the cashier as I paid. ‘Just fill in this form, and join our club.’ I smiled with pride as I signed the application, impatient to call my parents and tell them that I was, so soon into my life here, a member of something.
At home that evening, Sanjay showed me how to make tofu burgers and fruit smoothies. He spent three hours filling my head with so many DVD-CD-TV-VCR-laptop-desktop instructions that, by the end, I was dizzy. He showed me where all the light switches were and how to open the garage door and what to do if the alarm system went off. He demonstrated the function of the waste-disposal system, and seemed baffled that I had never seen one before.
‘Don’t you have garbage disposals in India?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘It’s called the street.’
But I remained perplexed, scared to touch anything for fear that it would cause the house to collapse or the kitchen to explode. I asked Sanjay where the torches were, and he had no idea what I was talking about until I described them.
‘In America, they are called flashlights,’ he said. ‘What do you need one for?’
‘For the blackouts.’
‘That’s what happens when you have too much to drink. Here, we call them power outages. And they almost never happen. You keep forgetting, you are not in India any more,’ he said to me gently, laughing.
When Sanjay went off to work the following day, I began my role as wife in earnest. I started to unpack my personal belongings, all the accumulations and acquisitions of almost a quarter-century of living, pared down to two suitcases. Sanjay had cleared out a small section of his wardrobe, which was barely enough for the contents of my trousseau. It had stretched my parents, but they had given me six each of evening ensembles, saris, and daytime outfits – the wealthiest Delhi brides got upwards of twenty each, while the poor were lucky if they received two. I somehow had to find space for all this in a sliver of cupboard no wider than my own person. When Sanjay had showed me proudly how much room he had made for me, I had asked him meekly if perhaps he could afford a little more, but he showed me his dozens of knitted sweaters and suits and bulky winter jackets, and told me that, for now, I would have to make do.
By the time my in-laws returned, it was up to me to see to it that the house sparkled like marble in the moonlight. As is the custom for a bride, my trousseau consisted almost entirely of new clothes, but I had thankfully thought to pack two old outfits for days such as these, ‘heavy cleaning days’. I shrugged into a pale green salwar kameez, a traditional tunic top and flared trousers, which was flecked with old corn oil and turmeric stains that the dhobi wasn’t able to remove.
Comfortably clad, I moved sofas and cleaned underneath. I placed a ladder in front of the wall unit, and wiped on top. I scrubbed toilets and vacuumed carpets and threw out old newspapers. I even mopped down the dusty floors in the garage, astonished all the while that with two women living here, the house had been allowed to get this dirty. It was almost as if they were waiting for me to arrive.
The last room left to clean was that of my sister-in-law, Malini. At the sagri ceremony before the wedding, when the family of the groom celebrates and welcomes the arrival of a bride, she had garlanded me and placed a kiss on my cheek, and seemed almost to mean it. I remembered looking down and catching a glint of something on her stomach. For a moment, I thought that perhaps a chunk of glitter had fallen from my hair onto her belly, but upon closer inspection saw that Malini had a ring pierced through her navel. As she caught me staring, my eyes agog, she covered herself with her sari, and quickly moved away.
So I was sure that Malini would hate knowing that I had been in her room, and I had to confess that it was more my curiosity than any slovenliness on her part that drove me in here. I looked around and wondered what it must have been like to have grown up here, in America. The room was dark, with thick yellow curtains blocking out the sunlight. A slim bed rested against a wall, with a matching dressing table and bedside cabinet next to it. Furry teddy bears and monkeys spilled over the light orange flowered eiderdown, and a stack of Teen People magazines lay neatly on a side table. On the dressing table were photos in frames – Malini with Sanjay or with her parents, another as a lone Indian girl in a group of Americans. I didn’t remember her being this pretty. Her hair was cut short and smooth in a modern style, her teeth white and shiny, no doubt using one of the three thousand types of toothpaste you can find in America. In all the pictures, she was wearing jeans and a short shirt – pink in one, white in another, floral in one after that. I knew I shouldn’t, but I felt compelled to open her wardrobe and look through it: there were jeans and cute tops and small jackets, the kind of smart clothes that I had seen people in the supermarket and on the streets wear.
Later in the week, as I took out another load of trash, the postman was stuffing mail into the box outside. I had seen him from the window, but this was the first time I was standing so close to him.
‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he asked. ‘How many days a week do you work here?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘I didn’t know that the Sohnis had hired a maid. Good idea – they seem so busy. How often do you come?’
‘I’m not the maid,’ I replied quietly. ‘I’m the wife.’
Within days of arriving here, I knew what Sanjay meant when he talked about America and its ‘bumper-sticker mentality’.
‘See,’ he said, pointing out certain vehicles on the streets as we made our way to the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I could apply for a driver’s licence. ‘Here, everybody wants to tell everyone everything. Even the cars have something to say.’ In twenty minutes, I counted fifteen such displays of personal information brandished on the back bumpers of vehicles – someone boasting of a child’s academic achievements at school, their pride at being an American, or, alternatively, exhorting everyone to ‘Give Peace a Chance’. People lumbered by alone in huge cars that blocked roads and took up one-and-a-half parking spaces. They ate and drank and watched TV and talked on tiny phones as they drove what looked like streamlined tanks, their interiors larger than a family of four in India would live in.
People in this country were not shy, and did not expect others to mind their own business. I would queue at the past office, clutching close to my chest envelopes and packets addressed to my family in Delhi, and by the time I was at the counter, I could have penned a thesis on the person in front of me. A typical ‘Hey, how are you?’ thrown my way would launch a mostly one-sided conversation revealing their last divorce and an argument with their doctor about how to treat a hernia, all while I stood and nodded politely.
At the gym, which Sanjay insisted I join, telling me that everyone in America exercised, modesty was a non-issue. In the changing room, as I slipped into my workout clothes behind the safety of a toilet cubicle, women stood