THE SIKH PATIENT----Chapter 4---OPERATORS

OPERATORS

I will never be as beautiful as my mother.  I wonder if she thinks I’m beautiful.  Why do I want so badly to be beautiful?  She didn’t show up in America because she wanted to; just like none of showed up on Earth exactly on purpose, as far as we know.  Yet the part of my mother that hates America is so American, just like the part of me that hates life is so alive. 

My mother came here because her marriage was arranged to a man who had migrated from India to America.  See it was in her astrological chart that she would go overseas, and in India astrology is not next to the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, wars are only fought if the stars are aligned properly.  She married a man who had told her there was something missing in her eyes and that in this new place she wouldn’t feel so separate from herself.  A man who was delusional enough to think that people are different, anywhere.  A man who promised her there was such a place as paradise.  In India America used to be considered the equivalent of the Garden of Eden.  Because the American brochure is shiny, all the people are smiling with straight teeth and there are no beggars in the background.  Later my mother learned that my father was right, in this place without servants, this place with cars and dishwashers she wasn’t separate from herself anymore: she was alone.  And the man, he learned how to become separate from his soul and took her to a place far, far away from paradise. 

I will never be as heartbreaking as my father.  

My mother’s mother, my Nani, flew to America later.  After she had survived the partition of India and Pakistan where she had to abandon a house with emerald green marble floors and a garden with red and yellow carnations and then hide in a kitchen closet for three days while she was pregnant with my mother.  She came here after Indra Gandhi was shot and she had to hide her husband in the first house they had ever owned because Mrs. Gandhi was shot by a Sikh man and there were riots all over India.  They were hunting down Sikh men and yanking off their turbans in the streets, cutting their hair, burning their faces, and raping their wives.  But Darji, my grandfather, wanted to walk outside.  Nani cried every night for months so my mother told her parents to come to America because we owned a teal Pontiac and a beige Honda. Here they wouldn’t have to worry about walking.   

            No one will ever be as beautiful as my grandmother. 

I hate to tell you this.  I hate to say she was beautiful while dying because the only thing I hate her for is dying.  I stared at my grandmother’s frayed black hair that had been died with some Indian version of Loving Care but I knew there was grey underneath just like I knew there was blood underneath her skin.  What I don’t understand is how we shared the blood.  How did we share it when I don’t remember us ever exchanging any?  I would have given her some of my blood because it seems as though I have too much anyways.

She lay still, faking death, at her hospital bed.  Later she would unfake it.  You can say unfake is not a word, but she didn’t care because she didn’t know English.  She didn’t care about words I spent thousands of dollars learning, so I say them wrongly for her because I spend time and money on these words and none of them make sense to her so it makes no sense to me why I’m wasting my time.  So there you go sleeping, being malignant, but feeling fine about it.  There you go, twisting the tops of bottles, with ugly pills inside that remind me of powdery dirt.  I’ve never seen these bottles with see-through tops before.  I guess these are your bottles.  Well you can have them; don’t ever share them with me.  Nani didn’t like medicine but we didn’t care because we thought medicine stops death.  Now, I too hate medicine, but I still would have shoved it down her throat if I thought it would keep her alive, even a second longer.    

Nani never said much about losing her home in the partition or about the riots.  She never talked about how all of her children left her and my grandfather alone in India.  She never questioned what was so remarkable about America, what was so remarkable about economies and great nations.  She never questioned our superiority; rather she made us question it.  In the end she didn’t come to America because she wanted to, she came here because the land of the free has the best medical care in the world.  She came here to die with her children watching.

            She never talked much, but she once did say something to me as she was frying an egg for Darji on the stove a year or two ago.  She was my grandfather’s slave, and I think she loved him for it.  I think she loved being a slave.  I think she loved ironing his underwear and getting him glasses of water.  Because he had legs and he could go get water too, but he worked fifteen hours a day as a Manager in a Coal Mine.  She thought the least she could do was fry him an egg and get him some water. 

            And that day, as she flipped the egg, she said to me, “You don’t look people in the face when you talk to them.”  She said this in Hindi but I can’t remember the words.

            “I don’t want them to look at my face,” I said in broken Hindi.

            “Watch people, look at their faces,” she said as she sprinkled red masala on the egg.

            “Why are you always watching me?” I asked and didn’t look at her.

            “You should watch me watching you.”  She dipped her hands in cold water.

            “Why?”

            “I see you.”

            “What…”

            “I see how much you don’t see.  You know the sapana of yourself.  You don’t know the uslee cheez.”  She said all of this in Hindi.  That I know the dream, not the real thing. 

            There are too many people in India, she would say.  Too many faces.  And here not enough faces here; but too many expressions.  When Nani first came here, she walked outside of our suburban house and asked:  Where are the people?  Where are they when they are not walking in the streets? 

She later learned they were watching TV or surfing the Internet.  Nani never watched TV.  We were all convinced that she understood English, but she told us that she didn’t.  We thought she was a spy.  I want to know what she did when she wasn’t watching TV.  Those are the questions you should ask people before they die.  I want to know why she never complained about Cancer.  I want to know how a person turns out like that.

            The night she died I stood next to Amar Uncle, he wore a brown plaid shirt and a small silver chain.  “You don’t have control over this situation, this situation with Cancer.  That must be very difficult for you,” my mother said to my Uncle.

            “Everything is very difficult for me.  I’m difficult for me.”  All my family members speak the same convoluted language.  In our language, your mother’s brother is called Mama.  Yeah, I know, it’s kind of embarrassing.  Mama?  It kind of confuses the whole mama joke phenomena.  

 I remember my mother telling me the story of Amar Uncle, her younger brother.  It was like a fairytale without the fairy.  He fell in love with a woman, Rimmi, who was the daughter of an alcoholic, which made me of course wonder when alcoholism was invented.  Who was the first alcoholic?  Rimmi’s father would come to the temple drunk.  Amar Uncle wanted to marry her.  My grandfather worked for the government.  One day a superior officer came to their home and said that if my uncle married Rimmi, it would ruin the reputation of his company. (I mean I don’t know if his company was the government which would be all of India, and I can’t imagine all of India caring about a drunk guy at a temple.  For God sakes if anyone needs to pray…) The officer said he would tell everyone that my grandfather was a liar and an alcoholic.  (Yeah this is where you kind of wonder how people were so weirdly mean to each other in different ages.  Ancient meanness is interesting).  My grandfather told my uncle that if he wanted to marry Rimmi, he had to elope.  My grandmother told my uncle that he should not marry her.  My young uncle said he wanted a ceremony, he wanted his family and everyone, at his wedding.  He wanted to be normal.  To be fair, he was a weak asshole.  My grandfather said that if he didn’t marry Rimmi, he could marry any woman he wanted.  My uncle left Rimmi and searched for the most beautiful woman he could find.  I don’t know if he left Rimmi because he loved his family more than her, or if he was just arrogant and scared.  The truth is probably that he didn’t know how to love, because even in India they don’t teach it at school.  There’s no love assignments, projects, they just send you out there…and you end up in America trying to figure out if there is a way to prove you are capable of love.  You swear it exists, you just can’t find where you put it.

            In Bombay, Amar Uncle found a tall beautiful woman with fair skin and a perfect nose.  They arranged a marriage, because in India most marriages were arranged.  His new wife Sarena was selfish; she wasn’t Rimmi.  She threatened to divorce him if she didn’t get what she wanted.  Amar Uncle told her he never loved anyone like he loved Rimmi.  My uncle told my aunt that she ruined his life.  This was after they had two girls, this was after she gained forty pounds; this was after they had moved to America.  This was after they had nowhere else to go.   

            The next time I had to go to the hospital I couldn’t go.  I had to go shopping.  I was looking for a cotton dress, even though it was December I wanted a white cotton dress.  They had put Nani in a robe, a white cotton robe or nightgown or whatever you could possibly call hospital attire for patients. Forgive my incessant need for fashion, but everything you do, do with style, that includes dying  What they put on her was so dreadful and I wanted to rip it to shreds and let her wear her salvaars, her silk salvaars.  How can you die in someone else’s clothes?   I could give her cotton Indian suits, with small lavender flowers.  But they would never let me do that, so I walked around looking for a pretty white cotton dress with delicate embroidery that I could wear one day.  Not that day, not even that week, but after she died.  I would wear a pretty white gown and she could look at me from somewhere far away and know that the reason I didn’t come to the hospital right away to sit by her side and talk to Darji was because I had to find that dress. 

Five hours after I looked for a cotton dress in December, after walking into boutiques that I could not afford I ended up buying a red tied died sheet, made in India with huge swirls of orange and green triangles.  But like the Bermuda Triangle, shopping didn’t help death make more sense.  The only thing shopping explains is why you have no money.

            My mom called me and said that Darji couldn’t believe I had not come yet, it had been five hours. He didn’t care if I was studying, and I knew he didn’t believe I was studying.  He knew I was a liar since the day I was born. Grandparents don’t care as much about how horrendous their kid’s kids are.  I think they secretly find it hilarious.   So I finally went into the hospital with my new useless red sheet tucked into my bag.   

            “Where were you?”  My grandfather asked.  Where was I?  How about this, where was Ravi?  Oh, he was in Tibet.  Where was Sonia?  Oh, she was at work, at TJ Max.  Granted they didn’t want her to come so far away from her school, I mean high school being so demanding and all, and they didn’t want to traumatize her little mind, her being eighteen and all.  So I was it, where was I?  “I-I-I- had some work I had to finish, a paper, I….”  I live next door to the hospital.  I am obscene.  I was shopping?  Am I human?

            “I’ve been here since morning; you could not come and see your Nani for five minutes.”

            “I’m sorry.”  I said and hugged him very tight.  I felt his body become less tense as I held on to it.  Then I realized he wasn’t asking where I was, he wasn’t angry because I wasn’t there.  He was asking where my father was.  We all knew that he was at home on the couch, on the blue fucking couch.  He was asking where my alcoholic father was.  We all knew that he only left that couch to urinate.  I looked over at my Nani who had a bedpan underneath her.  I knew that Darji wasn’t asking where I was, he wanted to know where Amar Uncle was.  Because we all knew he was at work, at fucking GM.  We all knew he drove a Honda to his job at GM and had to park three blocks away so that no one would throw stones at his car.  We all knew he was busy parking his Japanese car to get to his American job to try and forget about his Indian mother.  

            His wife, my aunt Sarena, didn’t like my grandmother.  So most likely she was at home sewing because you see she had a college degree in Home Economics.  However she took breaks from decorating her home to study Computer Science because she also knew she had to get an American job, because that’s what American women do.  They get jobs and make sure there is absolutely no time to entertain their in-laws because life is so busy here.  There are no servants here.  So when my grandparents visited from India, Sarena Auntie didn’t let them stay in her home.  It is a custom that the eldest son takes care of his parents; he is supposed to support them or live with them.  And if he is deemed completely incompetent, the eldest son is at least supposed to invite his parents over for dinner.  And if his wife has a degree in making dinner, it would seem like the natural thing to do.  But apparently she believed that if they came over once for dinner they would never leave, and there would be more dinners.   And I mean; she only had an undergraduate degree in dinnertime activities and did we expect her to further her education in this field and completely forget about Computer Science?  She had to be practical.  She was a career woman now.  

I too have ambivalent feelings about Indian customs.  I don’t want to live with my husband’s parents even though I’ve never met them or my husband.  But I wasn’t brought up in India and I didn’t take advantage of the plus side of these customs.  The plus side that I couldn’t think of when I stared at my grandmother from the window seat by her bed.  All she ever wanted was to stay at her son Amar’s home.  Her frail body couldn’t lift itself up so I went to her side.  She didn’t speak in English or Punjabi as I pushed the button on the hospital bed that lifted her back.  The walls in the room were a frozen off-white color that resonated into my taste buds.  The room looked like we were paying rent to a disease.  I could taste the medicine in the hallways, and I could see Nani wishing she didn’t have to die here.  The last place I want to die is in a hospital in the Midwest of the United States.

            Waiting.  It’s hard to wait for death sanely because you worry that it may turn into anticipation. Waiting made my head spin as I tried to read TIME magazine and drink coffee that tasted like gasoline in a Styrofoam cup.  But according to TIME other people in the world were also dying and I suddenly became enraged at myself for spending one extra minute thinking about them instead of Nani.  Who were they? They had an audience of mourners.  Half of our audience was missing, so I would do double the mourning; triple it if I had to.  Sometimes I waited with my grandfather, who wasn’t waiting, but doing the very opposite.  He rarely moved from the brown plastic chair next to Nani.  His black turban accented the white in his beard.  His beard could have blended into the walls, he was almost motionless for hours, as if he was sitting still for a portrait .  But no one was painting our picture.  Darji, didn’t cry or ask why Cancer was happening, he just stared at it.  He sat up and tried to read books, mostly biographies of Richard Nixon and Hitler, every now and then.  I tried to hide the TIME magazines from him, I thought it was healthier for him to read about traitors and demented dictators.  I was inventing reasons to make senseless decisions.  Darji  pressed his shirts before he came to the hospital.  He pressed new salvaar kameez’s for Nani every day, but she couldn’t wear them.

            As I was sitting there I felt something very strange come over my body.  I tried not to notice it as I sat in an alarmingly uncomfortable chair in a hospital that had sunroofs and sections of actual marble floors.  I tried to stare into space instead of concentrating on the uncomfortable pain between my legs, but there it was.  I had not done my laundry and therefore all I had left in terms of underwear was thongs. I couldn’t sit anymore because the thong was completely jetting into my buttocks.  A black lace thong that I had bought with the hope of someday becoming extravagantly sexy. So there I was; the sexy granddaughter in the waiting room.  The thing about thongs is; it’s embarrassing to think too much about what exactly is happening when they begin to slowly inch their way inside you and cause excruciating pain.  It’s actually not embarrassing to think about it, I mean it is my own body.   But to try and meander a way to remedy the situation can be very complex.  Especially when your Grandfather is in the room.

            I had to leave the waiting room. 

            I walked into Nani’s room and told Devi Auntie, my mom’s sister, to sit with Darji until I came back.  Came back from where?   She wanted to know. The bathroom?  The gift shop?  They might sell underwear in the gift shop.  Underwear might be a decent gift for someone who’s ill and is basically only wearing underwear.  Doesn’t the hospital keep like paper underwear for the patients to match the paper gowns?  I was ready to raid the linen closets.  Because the thing about lace is, if it gets a little tangled, it itches, it almost burns.  I was worried that if I didn’t fix this quick, I might have to see one of these doctors and then I would be distracting them from their only purpose on Earth, to save Nani. 

But it was Devi Auntie who actually wanted to save Nani.   My aunt Devi would sit for hours and pray.  Prayer after prayer.  Sometimes we joined her, but mostly she kept speaking to herself. “I fight with God,” she once told me.  This room didn’t seem to contain god.  The cream blankets blended with the mashed potatoes.  Devi Auntie rocked back and forth for hours, while she prayed.  I remember my roommate once telling me about rocking syndrome.  It happens to children who are not held enough when they are babies; many orphans have it.  What happens is that the child rocks back and forth for hours because nobody touches her enough.  I wanted to touch my aunt because Nani couldn’t touch her for much longer.  Everyone eventually becomes an orphan.

As I left them and headed for the bathroom it occurred to me that I am so amazingly moronic that I’m leaving my grieving family to care of a chronic wedgy that is…to be continued….

by

Nina Kaur