The Taste of Ginger(31)

Dipti had been floating through the house as if in a trance, so I was surprised when she stopped in the doorway to my bedroom soon after my mother had marched downstairs.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to get you something?” I asked her, desperate to ease her pain and push mine aside.

“I heard you and Mom fighting.”

“Sorry. We didn’t mean to be so loud. I hope we didn’t wake you.”

Mom felt like a label that only Neel and I should be using, and it sounded strange every time I heard Dipti say it, almost as if she were an outsider trying to fit in. Or worse, maybe it bothered me because she was the one who did fit in and I was the outsider.

Dipti was no longer wearing the white sari she’d had on for the past few days to signify that she was in mourning and was now wearing Western lounge pants and a cotton T-shirt. She sat on the bed next to me and stared out of the window. It was slightly ajar, and the smell of burnt paper from fireworks wafted in, likely from a neighbor’s wedding event.

“What were you fighting about?”

“Oh, um, nothing important,” I lied, in part because I didn’t want to burden her with any of my problems, and also because I didn’t feel like my relationship with my mother was her business.

After a long pause, she said, “Your mother is a proud woman. I imagine all mothers are.” Her voice trailed off.

“When the time is right, you’ll be a great mom,” I said.

She nodded absently. “You are lucky.”

It was my turn to nod. Disagreeing with her about anything was unthinkable given what she’d been through. My mother and I had spent a complex thirty years together, and Dipti had only been witness to a handful of them. She’d lost her own mother so young that I didn’t think she could relate to the shifting dynamic I had with my mother as I became an adult. We all idolized our mothers as children, so hers was frozen in time on that pedestal.

“I’ll go lie down in the other room again.” She rose from the bed.

“Okay. We’ll be quieter. Let me know if you need anything.”

Without responding, she began to make her way toward the bedroom across the hall.

“Oh, Dipti.” I jumped to my feet and called after her. She turned around. “I saw you give the beggar money at the funeral yesterday. I was wondering why you did it.”

“She spoke the same dialect the servants used in my father’s family’s home in Mumbai.”

“Oh,” I said noncommittally, not sure why that mattered.

“When she approached Virag Mama, she told him she needed money to feed her grandchildren.” Dipti then disappeared into the bedroom.

Her compassion humbled me. She had never had a moment with her daughter living outside of the womb, but she had become a mother nonetheless.

During this trip to India, I’d witnessed many different sides of Dipti that I hadn’t expected to see. When she and Neel first married, I didn’t understand his decision. His bringing home a doting Indian bride seemed to go against our unspoken childhood pact that we would not end up in marriages like our parents’. We’d vowed to have equal partnerships with our spouses, like we saw with the parents of our American friends or on television shows. That’s what I thought I had found with Alex because if we had to fight through that many obstacles to be together and we still wanted each other, then that had to be love, right?

But then Neel brought Dipti home, and she was the least controversial wife he could have picked from our parents’ perspective. A perfect biodata match. Complete with the mannerisms. Just like our mother had done when we were kids, Dipti would stay back in the kitchen, serving the rest of us a hot meal, and then she and my mother ate only after we had finished.

She seemed so traditional and so opposite from the type of person I could relate to, so I hadn’t bothered to spend much time with her apart from family events. And she had taken Neel from me, converted him back into a more traditional Indian role after he and I had put so much time and energy into assimilating. Now I realized the Dipti I saw around my parents wasn’t all of the person Neel married, and maybe their marriage wasn’t so far off from what I wanted as well.





14


Virag Mama offered to push back Hari and Laila’s wedding, but Neel insisted the preparations continue as scheduled. He reminded us that Nana had always said, “When faced with tragedy, we must celebrate the good.”

So we did. My unexpected arrival necessitated some changes in the plans. Because Hari had no direct sisters, as the next-closest female relative, I would now be able to fulfill those duties. Mistakenly, I assumed my role would be similar to what I’d done at Neel’s wedding. As we sat together in the living room the next day, I quickly learned that Neel and Dipti’s wedding had been the American abridged version of the traditional Hindu ceremony. Dipti was more modern than I had given her credit for and had cut out several days of events that she thought were extraneous, like the baithak, which, from what I could gather, was nothing more than the wedding guests getting together for dinner on each of the three nights before the main days of ceremonies began.

When I asked the point of everyone being obligated to come to dinner for the days before the wedding, Indira Mami told me, “It used to be for the family to prepare invitations for hand delivery and assign the wedding tasks, but now we contract those activities outside of the family.” With a shrug, she said, “Still, people expect the baithak, so we do the baithak. It’s easier than having the gossip and seeming cheap if we don’t do it.”