Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee
“Like Kissinger,” he says. They tell me I have no accent, but I don’t sound Iowan, either. I’m like those voices on the telephone, very clear and soothing. Maybe Northern California, they say. Du says they’re computer generated.
It was January when Du arrived at Des Moines from Honolulu with his agency escort. He was wearing an ALOHA, Y’ALL T-shirt and a blue-jean jacket. We’d brought a new duffel coat with us, as instructed. Next to Bud, he seemed so tiny, so unmarked, for all he’d been through. The agency hadn’t minded Bud’s divorce. Karin could have made trouble but didn’t. The agency was charmed by the notion of Bud’s “Asian” wife, without inquiring too deeply. Du was one of the hard-to-place orphans.
He had never seen snow, never felt cold air, never worn a coat. We stopped at a McDonald’s on the way back to Baden. When we parked, Du jumped down from the back, leaving the new coat on the seat. The wind chill was –35, and he waited for us in the middle of the parking lot in his ALOHA, Y’ALL T-shirt while we bundled up and locked the doors. He wasn’t slapping his arms or blowing on his hands.
The day I came to Baden and walked into his bank with Mother Ripplemeyer, looking for a job, Bud was a tall, fit, fifty-year-old banker, husband of Karin, father of Buddy and Vern, both married farmers in nearby counties. Asia he’d thought of only as a soy-bean market. He’d gone to Beijing on a bankers’ delegation and walked the Great Wall.
Six months later, Bud Ripplemeyer was a divorced man living with an Indian woman in a hired man’s house five miles out of town. Asia had transformed him, made him reckless and emotional. He wanted to make up for fifty years of “selfishness,” as he calls it. One night he saw a television special on boat people in Thai prisons, and he called the agency the next day. Fates are so intertwined in the modern world, how can a god keep them straight? A year after that, we had added Du to our life, and Bud was confined to a wheelchair.
Mother likes to cook, but she’s crotchety this afternoon. It’s one of her medium-bad days, which means she’ll wink out on us entirely by the end. She is seventy-six, and sprightly in a Younkers pantsuit, white hair squeezed into curls by Madame Cleo, who trained in Ottumwa.
In Hasnapur a woman may be old at twenty-two.
I think of Vimla, a girl I envied because she lived in a two-story brick house with real windows. Our hut was mud. Her marriage was the fanciest the village had ever seen. Her father gave away a zippy red Maruti and a refrigerator in the dowry. When he was twenty-one her husband died of typhoid, and at twenty-two she doused herself with kerosene and flung herself on a stove, shouting to the god of death, “Yama, bring me to you”.
The villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside. Vimla set herself on fire because she had broken her pitcher; she saw there were no insides and outsides. We are just shells of the same Absolute. In Hasnapur, Vimlas isn’t a sad story. The sad story would be a woman Mother Ripplemeyer’s age still working on her shell, bothering to get her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s.
* * *
Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories. In the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not that she’s hostile. It’s like looking at the name in my passport and seeing “Jyo—” at the beginning and deciding that her mouth was not destined to make those sounds. She can’t begin to picture a village in Punjab. She doesn’t mind my stories about New York and Florida because she’s been to Florida many times and seen enough pictures of New York. I have to be careful about those stories. I have to be careful about nearly everything I say. If I talk about India, I talk about my parents.
I could tell her about water famines in Hasnapur, how at the dried-out well docile women turned savage for the last muddy bucketful. Even here, I store water in orange-juice jars, plastic milk bottles, tumblers, mixing bowls, any container I can find. I’ve been through thirsty times, and not that long ago. Mother doesn’t think that’s crazy. The Depression turned her into a hoarder, too. She’s shown me her stock of tinfoil. She stashes the foil, neatly wrapped in a flannel sheet, in a drawer built into the bed for blankets and extra pillows.
She wonders, I know, why I left. I tell her, Education, which is true enough. She knows there is something else. I say, I had a mission. I want to protect her from too much reality.
She says she likes me better than she did Karin, though Karin grew up right here in Baden and Karin’s mother, who is eighty-two, still picks her up for their Lutheran Mission Relief Funds quilting group. Last year the Relief Fund raised $ 18,000 for Ethiopia. Mothers group’s quilt went for eleven hundred dollars to a bald, smiling man from Chicago who said it was for his granddaughter, but I read the commercial lettering on his panel truck.
Just before the divorce, according to Bud, Karin was agitating to stick Mother in the Lutheran Home. Mother senses I have different feelings about family.
The table is set and ready. Du’s made a centerpiece out of some early flowers and I’ve polished the display rack of silver spoons. Bud has five brothers and three sisters, and they were all born or at least christened with silver spoons in their mouths. I, too, come from a family of nine. Figure the odds on that, Bud says. He has a brother in Minneapolis and a sister in Omaha and a brother named Vern Ripplemeyer, Jr., who died in Korea, the family’s only other encounter with Asia. All the others are in Texas or California. After the divorce, Mother asked Karin to give the spoons back. “Call me an Indian giver,” Mother likes to joke. “I mean our kind.”
Du and Scott, whose father works down in the corn sweetener plant, are sprawled on the rug watching Monster Truck Madness. It’s trucks versus tanks, and the tanks are creaming them. We bought ourselves a satellite dish the day after we first talked long distance to Du. There’s no telling where this telecast is coming from.
Du’s first question to Bud, in painful English over trans Pacific cable, was “You have television? You get?” He talked of having watched television in his home in Saigon. We got the point. He’d had two lives, one in Saigon and another in the refugee camp. In Saigon he’d lived in a house with a large family, and he’d been happy. He doesn’t talk much about the refugee camp, other than that his mother cut hair, his older brother raised fighting fish, his married sister brought back live crabs and worms for him to eat whenever she could sneak a visit from her own camp. From a chatty agency worker we know that Du’s mother and brother were hacked to death in the fields by a jealous madman, after they’d gotten their visas.
“Look at that sucker fly!” Scott shouts, crawling closer to the screen. “All right!” Mud scuds behind the Scarlet Slugger.
“Whoa, Nellie!” Du can match Scott shout for shout now. “Hold on, mama!” The Slugger is the body of a Chevy Blazer welded onto a World War II tank.
Mother wanders over to the television but doesn’t sit down. In an instant replay we watch the Scarlet Slugger tear up the center of a bog. I can’t help thinking, It looks like a bomb crater. Does Du even think such things? I don’t know what he thinks. He’s called Yogi in school, mainly because his name in English sounds more like “Yo.” But he is a real yogi, always in control. I’ve told him my stories of India, the years between India and Iowa, hoping he’d share something with me. When they’re over he usually says, “That’s wild. Can I go now?”
“Holy Toledo!” Mother is into it.
“Mom, it’s okay, isn’t it, if Scott stays for dinner?”
“If it’s okay with his parents.”
Scott grins at me with his perfect teeth. I envy him his teeth. We had no dentist in Hasnapur. For a long time we had no doctor either, except for Vaccinations-sahib, who rode in and out of the village in a WHO jeep. My teeth look as though they’ve been through slugfests. Du’s seventeen and wears braces. Orthodontics was the Christmas present he asked for.
“And if the two of you wash the beans,” I add.
“You aren’t making the yellow stuff, Mrs. R.?” I detect disappointment.
“I