i.
I learned that women hold tight to their feelings from my mom. When my dad used to get mad at me for crying, I would cry harder and harder until I finally learned to be quiet. I would complain to my mom about the unjustness, about how my tears weren’t something I could control. My mom told me later, I think, that she also used to cry like me, that my dad would get mad at her too. I wonder if it is the legacy of all women in our family to hide their tears.
Amma was worse than I was about handling this repression, but I guess it wasn’t a fair comparison when she had spent many more years learning it than I had unlearning it. She was bad at expressing her feelings and got mad instead, blowing up for a few hours while we tiptoed around her wrath. I see this more sympathetically than I do my dad’s anger. My mom was doing a hell of a lot more around the house anyway.
I wonder when my mom learned to keep her tears in and whether she ever got better about communicating.
My mom didn’t believe religion was something to be forced on someone but surrounded me and my sister with the labor of culture, so we could have something to claim for ourselves. I grew up reading stories of Draupadi who had five husbands and Sita who had to walk through fire to prove her virtue, so it could be argued that I got mixed signals of what a woman should be from what I was taught. I don’t know if I was taught any of it as “gospel” anyway, my introduction to religion was more through the abridged picture books my mom bought me to read when I was young.
I liked stories so I read them all.
Thumbing through the pages, I guess I ended up absorbing Draupadi more as an object, it wasn’t her choice to marry all five men. I suppose I learned that Sita is afforded more or less agency in different versions of the Ramayana. I don’t know. I don’t think women are viewed very highly in any society much less within my own family.
ii.
Chintu Akka was known to me through my scarce visits to India. She always spoke to me in more Kannada than any of my other cousins did, either trusting my understanding of the language or more likely, not considering that English was practically my first language after two decades of speaking it. I liked it though, I liked that she trusted me. I followed almost all her sentences, anyway. She mixed English and Kannada together in a way that made sense to me.
Her name is Pravalika, but I don’t know anyone who calls her that. To me, she was always Chintu Akka, even when I was probably too old to still be calling her Akka. I know Rujula stopped. In some ways, I’m jealous of Rujula because I always wanted an older sister and Chintu was the closest I ever got to having one.
Chintu Akka embodied everything a woman was, everything I wanted to be. She was beautiful and sophisticated and talked to my mom familiarly, like the cousins they were. I was ten and eavesdropping on phone calls, jealous and seething. I thought of her as my cousin, my sister, she was too young to be my aunt. How could she and my mom be friends, what did they even have to talk about?! I wanted her to be mine and mine alone.
She had these tiny bumps on the back of her arms that I noticed. I don’t think they were particularly significant or even particularly beautiful, but I would scratch my arms in the rainy smog warmth until I would get them too, raised red and small. She was always so skinny, in a way that was alluring when I was younger. When asked how she’d lose weight, she said she would just think that she had to lose weight and then she would lose it. It sounds better in Kannada. I tried to do the same. In my head, it worked.
When I got older, she would talk to me about how hard it was for her in India. She wanted to study in the US and was looking for Master’s programs near our house, but it never ended up happening. I don’t think she had the money. For two months though, I built up a fantasy of coming home for the summer and driving her around, paying for her food, talking to her about everything we hadn’t had the chance to discuss before. She would be mine, and Saanvi’s maybe, but mine first. I could take care of her instead of her having to baby me.
She used to take me around Bengaluru in an auto, expertly giving the drivers directions, and paying them at the end, refusing the rupees my mom had carefully tucked into my pocket. She would tell me about the boy bands she was obsessed with, her travels with her friends, and how work was going. She would complain about the fact that she could never wear the new bikini she had bought outside of her room, that she had a one hour commute to her workplace every morning, that everyone was gossiping about when she would get married.
I barely saw her the last time we went to India, she was busy working. My mom told me she was meeting guys, looking to get married. I felt betrayed, she had told me she wanted to study. She was 24! She was too young to be married. I wanted her to be my cousin, my older sister, forever and ever.
I wanted her to be mine and she was slipping away.
If she gets married, I wonder if our conversations will change, if they will falter or halt.
Will she be closer than ever to my mom, complaining about husbands and work and the
cleaning that never gets done at the end of the day?
After she gets married, all I’ll be left with are the bumps on my arm, no longer just-scratched or red but permanently melded to my skin even without the humidity. Maybe they were genetic after all.
iii.
Rujula made a joke out of calling me Akka once, teasing when my younger sister asked why she never referred to me as older. She’s less than a year younger than me but always felt ahead. In Bangalore, they start school in the spring so whenever we’d visit in the summer, she’d always be in the same year as me. I don’t think we were ever in competition just because there was no conceivable way of me winning anything against her.
She always cooked and cleaned, helping my aunt with chores around the house. My dad would ask on calls why Ruchik didn’t do anything. I thought it was ironic that we grew up spoiled by my mother’s labor.
She was outgoing and fluent in two languages, switching easily from Kannada for the rest of the family to English for me and Saanvi. I was soft spoken in both languages I barely had a claim to.
We whispered about bras, and I scandalized her with stories of American middle school health class. We never talked about boys.
Me and Saanvi constantly conspired to get her to visit us in the U.S., but she would always say she couldn’t, she didn’t have a visa, she had to go to school, she had college. Excuses.
She got a tattoo when she turned eighteen with Chintu. It’s big and covers the whole of her forearm. My mom was surprised she was allowed to get something so large, disapproval etched on her face even as she oohed and aahed with the rest of us. I guess that’s one place I won.
When she joined the psychology program at her college, my dad said it was because she was a girl. He said she wouldn’t have been allowed to study psych if she was a guy, that she would’ve gone into CS like her brother, but her parents were probably fine with her making her own choices since she’d be married to a man eventually. I couldn’t tell if he was being sexist, racist, or if he was telling the truth.
Looking back, I think he was a bit harsh. After all, neither of my cousins are married yet. Maybe they never will be. They live in a different time, a different place than my mom and I. Maybe this whole thing is my privileged projection, my wandering eyes rewriting their lives into consumable bites of a story.
I apologize. I didn’t mean to meddle.