Inheritance (19 page)

Should I never have loved? Should I have saved my heart? Maybe, yet what good would it have done me? I might never have known the rapture of sadness, as the poet says, the heights of despair, the ecstasy of agony. You can never escape one for the other. But I am not a philosopher, and I cannot make rules for the way to live my life. I am not that strong. Every time I swear never to fall in love again, my head is turned by the sight of a pretty face. My heart again fills with song, readying for heartbreak. Often I spend more time in recovery from love lost than in love itself. It is distraction and selfishness, but sometimes it is all I have.

After I left the island, I threw myself into my studies. Taking exams always terrified me. I would arrive very
early and sit in an exam hall while the proctors walked through the aisles, grimly handing out exam booklets. Soon, all would be quiet, except for the shuffling sound of feet skimming the floor in rhythmic agitation and the ticking of the clock. As always, I would lose myself in the test questions, busy with my pen, writing an essay.

My pre-college teachers believed in long, complex questions that required long and complex answers. Three hours would fly past as we addressed ourselves to history or science, reimagining experiments carried out in labs, the combinations of chemicals. Sometimes the answer was in the question itself, and sometimes the answer would only present itself in the writing.

I also read at home and went to the movies with my aunts and cousins. I even began to play cricket, since one of my younger cousins wanted to practice. I learned to swing my bat with a minimum of effort and learned to bowl properly.

My mother visited me every several weeks. It seemed to do her good to get off the island and see Madras. There were still many things unspoken between us, but I was learning that she was a complex person, and oddly shy as well. The effort of raising her daughters had been too great for her, so she gave us away to those who could. She tried to repair the damage she had done by listening to my sisters and downplaying her extravagance with perfume and such. She treated us to tea at the Taj Hotel and got idlis from Woodlands in the mornings. Sometimes
she and I would walk on the beach, not talking, but comfortable.

Eventually, I did pass the big qualifying exam and went on to gain admission at Radcliffe. It was colder than I expected, and there were so many things to learn at once, but I bundled up and settled in after the first year. I studied hard, wanting to justify my voyage overseas. When I felt I could not study anymore, I thought of my grandmother and how proud she might be of my achievements. I declared zoology as my major.

I joined an Indian Association and even went to the Indian temple on occasion. At first I spent all my time studying, but then I fell in with a group of international students. We spent Sunday afternoons making fun of the MIT engineers and drinking cappuccinos and reading fashion magazines. I found I could be as shallow as the best of them. My taste for rock and roll grew, but nostalgia for the father I had mythologized made me listen to country music as well. One night after dancing too much, I stumbled into a tattoo parlor—it was just a room in someone’s house—and got a small OM needled onto my ankle.

I traveled cross-country in a Ford Escort with some friends and looked up my father. He lived in Missouri, somewhere on the outskirts of Kansas City. I spent a weekend calling up all the Donaldsons in the state after
I wormed his name and residence from my mother. She was appalled that I wanted to call him, but I told her that she owed me. I didn’t tell her, of course, that I was going to try to visit.

He wasn’t a cowboy, but he had on a plaid shirt that first day. He also had a big black Labrador named Shirley, and together we took her for a walk. My father was still a photographer and worked long hours in the darkroom. He hadn’t married but was not that interested in hearing about my mother.

I told him a little about myself. I guess I liked him, but he was hard to fathom. I looked at his photographs and some caught my eye. One entitled “Goan Spring” pictured a young girl, head thrown back and laughing, holding a sprig of fresh, bright green peanuts, her smile wide, and I liked her instantly. Another featured a round man, also from India, talking animatedly to a patron in his shop. In the background was a light-bearded man who reminded me of Richard. I asked my father the date of the photograph.

“Nineteen eighty-four,” he replied.

“Eighty-four?”

“Yes … spring, I think,” he said, busy with his chemical processing.

“You were in India so recently?”

“Yes … what … oh. Yeah, I guess you were there. Well. I couldn’t really visit. Your mother made that very clear, early on.”

“What do you mean?”

“After I left your mother, it took a year for me to put everything in order. My daughter never really quit drugs, but she did enter a program. My son resented me and considered me the cause of everything wrong in his and his sister’s lives. I offered to help, to let him move in with me, to pay for college. He joined the army and never wrote. I missed your mother but never wrote. I couldn’t. I wanted to fix things and return to her. Maybe I wasn’t ready to give myself absolutely to her and wanted to see if I could make it alone. But all I could do was think of her. So I decided my children weren’t being helped by my presence and that I had a right to love. But your mother disagreed. She felt I couldn’t abandon my children.”

“My mother said that?”

“Something to that effect.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I begged her to come to the States, to bring your sisters, but she refused. She never told me there was another child. I heard about you years later, through a mutual friend. By then, I let things be. It seemed senseless to try and patch things up.”

By this time, I was learning to ride over whatever astonishing disclosures my family habitually provided for me. How could she deny him in her life? Perhaps the same way she had denied me. I guess she had been wounded, but weren’t we all wounded?

“You know,” he said, “she was always the subject of
gossip. You might have heard some … out-of-proportion stories. She’s an independent woman, fearless, and it makes people suspicious. I think people like to think she’s wanton, having enormous appetites.” He smiled. “She is not as people might say.”

“I think she had a lot of … male friends,” I said.

“She attracts men. She likes to take long walks by herself. Her absences probably give rise to rumor.”

I didn’t want to say that I had believed them, too. I continued to look at more pictures. He was talented, my father, but not famous. Perhaps he still loved my mother in the way I loved Richard, maybe even more. I had to stop trying to figure them out; they were changeable and in motion. I had thought for so long that they defined me, that I would be a repetition of them. I had thought that inheritance was inescapable. It is, but not in the ways I had imagined. My family is ingrained in my actions; they are uppermost in my mind. Yet there are parts of me that are nothing like them; I am a random mix of genes and attributes. I do not have to be like my mother. I am not destined to walk in her shadow. Yet a shard of her exists in everything I do, in the way I look at men, in the way I view my life. My grandmother is in my heart, a mandala I never part with, and my mother is the necklace I never take off. My father, my father is a hat, protecting me from sun and rain, but a hat I can lift off at will.

I returned to the photographs. There were some
from Sri Lanka, from Tibet and Nepal. A few from Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan, and China. Several from Alaska. In an album, I came across his American series and there were the prairies I had dreamed about, gently tinted in a violet wash. Here was a California coast, a slice of Chicago, a meditation on a lake in Minnesota. And there was Boston, my new home, taken in winter, snow clinging to the steps, beckoning me back.