Chapter One DISHES ON THE DRAINBOARD Christi Merrill I have three hours to finish my article before the Federal Express office closes and it's dinnertime. Kishan is downstairs waiting for me to make something to eat. We can't eat until I make dinner and I can't make dinner until the counters are clear and the counters won't be clear until the dishes in the sink are clean and I am too frantic to take the time to throw the fit to make him feel guilty enough to do the dishes so we can sit down and eat. Kishan categorically refuses to do dishes. Something about his masculinity and I-am-an-Indian-man-after-all. I could tell him I am an American woman after all and I have a deadline to meet besides, but he is as suspicious of being forced to play the part of American husband as I am of playing Indian wife. At this point I don't trust many aspects of his culture, and he doesn't trust many in mine. And yet here we are in this relationship, still, drawn to each other somehow. He's downstairs watching the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour now, with the volume turned low. He made a snack for himself an hour ago so he could wait patiently, without disturbing me. I heard him open the pantry door, heard him rinsing off something at the sink, heard silverware clattering. Sweet, buttery smells came from the kitchen. His quiet way of waiting is meant to prove that he encourages my writing. That he respects my American side. He tiptoes around the house and irons his shirts himself before he goes off in the morning. "Don't get up, I'll make my own tea," he said today when he got home from work. He looked at my back bent over the keyboard and waited for me to say, "Thank you." These are the ways we disappoint each other. These are the ways we become failures in each other's eyes. He smiles and nods over my shoulder as he reads the last paragraph I've written, and then looks pointedly at the laundry basket in the corner, overflowing with smelly clothes. His thick, dark eyebrows rise on his forehead. He thinks to himself that the balance I hope for myself is impossible, that I will never be a success as a writer and still be able to maintain a sane, happy home. "I could if my husband did his fair share," I retort, silently, arching my own eyebrows. I turn toward the overflowing laundry basket, too, and pick out his pair of pants, his dirty socks, with my eyes. "Yours, yours, yours," I want my look to say. We each try to pretend we don't hear these unarticulated accusations. His silent reprobations have become a voice in my head, telling me that I shouldn't be reading this book when the bed still hasn't been made, that I shouldn't continue to work at my computer when guests may drop by, or when dinner needs to be made, or when the floors need to be swept, or when any little thing in the house is dirty or out of place. In a house, I know, there is always something dirty or out of place. I try hanging curtains in front of messes, throwing blankets over piles. I try closing doors. But my outrage with the clutter grows to distracting proportions even when I am diligently ignoring it. Outrage not just with the clutter but with the thought that half of the housework generated between two people cannot be divided equally in a simple mathematical equation. A day multiplied by the two of us makes forty-eight hours, but the time I get for writing seems like such a small amount in comparison. Kishan says he doesn't believe that our life together should be reduced to such simple equations. Numbers are too stark, counting too petty. He recounts scenes from his childhood home in the dreamy, lyrical way he has with words that first made me fall in love with him: of his brothers and sisters waking before sunrise and bathing in cold water out of a bucket, his mother sweeping out the courtyard with a whiskbroom, her voice straining as she sang twilight devotional hymns to the goddess. You could be happy, too, he says, if you would stop calculating everything in life in these puny numbers. He is using his jokey voice, and I am touched to have his full attention turned on me. "You're a writer, not a vegetable seller!" he adds, and I can't stop laughing. I met Kishan in his village when I had gone there to interview his uncle for a magazine article on the relationship of folk traditions to his short stories. As a fellow writer, I was immediately brought into the men's world. Every morning I walked to the office with the men and sat all day at a large wooden desk while we worked. I walked back home with the men at noon after one of the children had come dashing up the hill to announce shyly and proudly that dinner was ready. A thrill shuddered through the house as our contingent announced its arrival with an insistent thud on the heavy, brass-worked wooden door. We sat ourselves down on cushiony aqua-tinted vinyl armchairs in a sunny parlor and enjoyed the spring desert breeze as the children began to run in plates full of food the women had spent the morning preparing. Sweetish, sourish mustard greens cooked over a cow-dung flame; creamy lentils hot with local red peppers; smooth, fatty yoghurt made from buffalo milk; and thick millet chapatis baked over twigs scavenged from the sparse countryside. As the guest, I was served first, along with the patriarch of the household. Children sprinted from the kitchen to the parlor to offer us hot chapatis the moment our supply threatened exhaustion, to spoon seconds of lentils, mustard greens, yoghurt, into our half-empty steel bowls. It wasn't bad to be a man in India, after all. Was I to believe their assurances that the women were happy to go to such trouble for us? "This is the life they've chosen for themselves," I was told, as if pulling a veil down in front of one's face and spending eight hours a day grinding flour and scouring spice grease off dishes inside a dimly lit, smoky kitchen were the natural result of marital union. These women chose not to defy their parents and so were married. These women have chosen to obey their in-laws, every day for the rest of their lives--don't sit on the front porch where the neighbors might see your face, it will bring shame upon our family; last night your ankles were showing as you slept, have you no dignity; why are you in here reading a magazine, haven't you seen the courtyard, it's absolute confusion; bow to this uncle, bow to that aunt, have sons sons sons, daughters only suck money. I imagine myself waking in this same house day after day--to light the hearth fire and sweep out the rooms--and I am filled with a hollow despair as I think ahead to the end of each day, when I have to give some sort of account to myself. Is it because I have been taught only to value what has traditionally been considered men's work that a day spent cooking and cleaning feels like a waste? Why do I assume that the long hours I put into researching a magazine article are preferable to the long hours the women of the house put into preparing our food? Would they even want to live my life if given the choice? Would I really be so unhappy with theirs? I ask myself these questions because I know, at heart, that the regular rhythm of Indian life seduces me. Wake at dawn with the sun a red sliver on the scrubby, sandy horizon. Cook vegetables fresh from the garden, wholesome pulses and grains, deep-colored spices, turmeric yellow, chili-pepper red, cumin brown. The splash of cool water on warm concrete as you wash the dirty clothes. The shallow, moist breathing sounds of a child you have just put down to sleep. In India it is considered a sign of status if you can afford to let your women remain at home all day without having to step outside to work. A sign of status for whom? I ignore the larger questions and indulge my fantasies of a life without Federal Express deadlines, without rent to pay or subways to catch. No deadlines, no rent to pay, no trains to catch, would I ever get any writing done? I'm getting hungry now and begin to think in extremes. I want to steal into the kitchen and grab a handful of raw oats and raisins. Frozen peas. Anything I can eat quick and easy, without turning on the oven or washing plates. Uncooked egg noodles. Chocolate chips. Peanut butter. I don't want Kishan to hear me. He sneers whenever he sees me reduced to this: out of control, disheveled. We should have gone grocery shopping days ago, but I was already in a panic about the article when we ran out of bread and milk. The last time I had a deadline frenzy I saw it coming and made a pot of refried beans to last the week. We would stand at the counter whenever I took breaks, dipping tortilla chips into the beans, crunching wildly, and trading stories of what happened to us that day. We kept smiling at each other, fresh coriander and garlic on our tongues, relieved that the tension hadn't built up, that our life was still going on. The night I sent off that article, Kishan and I lay side by side in the darkness talking of life here, remembering life there. The more time we spend in India, he assures me, the happier I will be. The best thing for a writer, he tells me, is a regular routine. "Isn't it, my little vegetable seller," he teases. He is teasing me, but by the tone of his voice I know this deadline has upset his equilibrium, refried beans or no. "You could be happy, too," he reassures me, "if you would slow down and enjoy." He begins talking about his mother in the misty way he has when he's feeling most uncertain, of her laying her hand on his forehead whenever he was sick, of her sending him special sesame-seed sweets she had prepared when he was away at school. Her twilight prayers to the goddess, her milking the cows, baking the bread, morning, evening, morning, evening, as regular as the rise and set of the sun. It's the sudden distance between us, the sudden silence in the house, that bothers him most. The women he grew up with are as steady as heartbeats, filling buckets with fresh water when the spigots turn on, shaking out the sheets, sweeping the floors, washing the clothes. I am amazed that his mother can sustain the momentum of an entire family, day after day, without feeling depressed or resentful. A vital organ keeping all the life forces of their household coursing along track -- she is the heart of their home. I say simply that she gives much to those around her and am about to add-- But Kishan finishes my sentence for me. "Doing all this makes her very happy," he says, with so much bitterness I cannot tell him that I had meant to say that, too. He doesn't believe I understood this. Doesn't believe that part of me wants this kind of life, also. He describes to me how content his mother is, suddenly propping himself up on his elbow so that he can look directly into my eyes and read my reactions by distant streetlight. He tells me how the satisfaction of being interdependent with others outweighs any other satisfaction; we are not scavenging jackals to live alone and die alone, we are human beings. He does not understand that I also want to be interdependent, but I want to find a new way to balance the workload. I try to explain this to him in Hindi and realize I do not even know the word for "equal." When I buy vegetables in the bazaars, I calculate sums on a more tangible level--this many classes per week per semester gives me so many months longer to stay. Are my American dollars really "equal" to the number of rupees that are a meal's worth of okra? Are my English lessons "equal" to the dinners the mothers of these children prepare for me? At times I undersell myself and at others balk at the thought of paying a rickshaw-pedaller or a sweeper so little. Equal is a word I do not know in Hindi because it represents a level of abstraction that must be translated into practical terms to have any bearing on the life I live. Equal is a balance I have to negotiate every single day, with every person I come into contact with, in a give-and-take, tug-of-war bargaining ritual. I play this tug of war with Kishan, as well, with Kishan most particularly, and have realized that the goal of this game should not be to upset your opponent, but to be sure that he can keep his balance as surely as you can keep yours. To do well in this game you must respond to every subtle shift the other person makes, anticipate your own alterations of position so as not to catch the other unaware, and find a rhythm between the two of you that allows you to settle back into your weight in a counterbalance that is intuitive, spontaneous, comfortable, even. We've been leaning back, trusting the weight of the other to keep our balance. Holding our hands tight. Then I let go suddenly. Of course he's scared of falling. Kishan may argue with me, he may fight with me, but whenever I reach out he is still there. I've never been afraid of falling. But the more Kishan talks, the less I trust him to allow me to find a position I find most natural. The more he talks, the more I see what he waits for as he waits. I am beginning to worry that Kishan seeks stability based on a formula he will never want to exchange. With Kishan I talk as if there were neat, clean lines separating his attitude from mine: American versus Indian, North versus South. Our rhetoric has become polarized. But Kishan's voice that says housework is the woman's responsibility echoes the voices I heard growing up, in my father's romantic accounts of threshing and hunting and midday dinners at the farm, in my grandmother's nostalgia for the rhythm of her mother's warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. I struggle to discount these voices, and yet I continue to judge myself by them. If I don't play by their rules, that simple, beautiful way of life will be lost to me completely. I long for a past that I began to dream of listening to the stories of my grandmother, my father, my great-uncle: waking up in a house you've built yourself on land full of tenacious wildflowers and century-old shade trees, picking fresh tomatoes and string beans from your kitchen garden out back, the entire family gathering in the kitchen three times a day for meals, playing card games at night by lamplight in warm circles of familiarity and laughter, slipping into deep, satisfied sleep each night. My great-grandmother I only knew as a bespectacled, purple-lidded woman who baked buttermilk biscuits and roast chicken for us on holidays. After dinner she would ease her slight, brittle frame into a worn corduroy Lazy-boy rocker near the Ben Franklin stove and smile as she watched us charging past in enthusiastic packs. My grandmother told me her mother knew all the names and birthdates of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whose pictures she tucked into ingenious nooks in her china cabinet. Grandma often said she wanted to die just like her mother did, in her sleep, peacefully. The way my grandmother talked, it seemed she thought her mother died contented and peaceful because she lived that way, too. But I would like to go back and ask her now whether she ever had doubts about the life she had chosen for herself, or felt that her expectations for herself were in conflict with the expectations others had of her. Did she resent the amount of work she had to do each day to keep the family running? Did she ever wish she had time to do something else, something creative, something perhaps utterly indulgent? I sit at the computer feeling ashamed that I am not at the sink. I am determined to ignore the dishes sitting on the drainboard waiting for me, because it is simply not fair and, once I start pandering to these expectations, I will never get any writing done. I get little writing done anyway, since I am too busy arguing in my head. Every sentence I write has to make its way through the stacks of milk-sticky bowls, past cutting boards full of toast crumbs and cheese crusts and the week-old omelette scum left on the skillet, past the drinking glasses mildewing in cold, garlicky dishwater, before it finally burbles up into my head, then down my arms through my fingers to be typed onto the computer screen. It's a long journey my poor sentence has to make. How can Kishan possibly be taken in by this ruse of mine -- that I'm ignoring it all, that I have my mind's door shut so I can concentrate on matters more important than dishes? I hope Kishan is sitting downstairs this moment trying to ignore my voice inside his head. I hope he feels restless and terribly, terribly guilty. He won't, though, I know. He has very clear ideas about how the work between us is divided. He tells me stories about the Indian men he knows who do dishes, and his voice drops an octave. He uses guttural words from his native Rajasthani to explain how very odd, how very feminine these husbands are who squat at the courtyard spigot working layers of oil and spices off plates and pots with mud. A man's work, of course, is outside the home. He digs irrigation ditches and chops firewood. Men who let their wives bully them into doing dishes are men who let themselves be cuckolded. "Doing too many dishes can make a man's dick fall off," I tease. He laughs, too, and looks down at his pants to check. Kishan doesn't understand where I have seized upon the conviction that housework should be shared evenly between men and women. He never saw my father even clear his plate when we visited there. And after a two-month stay at my aunt and uncle's house he came to the conclusion that a man may contribute to the housekeeping by paying an unassuming woman to clean toilets and vacuum every other week. Where did I get these ideas indeed? Kishan conjectures. Maybe I just don't care enough to take time out for cleaning? Maybe all my talk of equality is just an excuse for a very basic and childish reaction to having to do physical labor: that I simply hate housework. Or that I don't notice. It's true that I am repulsed by washing dishes and resent having to wash huge mounds of stinky clothing by hand. But I like nothing better than to wake up in a bedroom where all the clothes are neatly folded and the books tucked tidily in place. To me, clean cotton sheets are one of the world's great pleasures. I love to go padding around on recently swept and mopped floors with the sunlight brightening the polish of the stone tile. No matter how many sleazy men have called me darling and tried to touch my bottom out on the Indian streets, if I come home to a kitchen where the erratic daily supply of "fresh" water from the spigot has been collected in a clean bucket ready for cooking, and there are plenty of lentils, rice, and wheat flour on hand, a stash of onions, ginger, garlic, and a spice container full of turmeric, cumin, coriander, red pepper, salt, and perhaps some cloves and bay leaves, and if, of course, the dishes from the previous meal have been cleaned and wait neatly stacked in a corner by the tap, and the counters and floor have been wiped, then I find nothing more relaxing than to spend a few hours cooking up rice and dal, frying up some spicy okra, rolling out chapati after chapati and baking them over the fire on the iron tawa. But who has time to orchestrate such elaborate performances? Kishan says what I really need is an Indian wife. He says this because he is afraid I am trying to make him into one. "It's wonderful living next door to a feminist," he tells me, talking as if there are twenty strangers listening to our conversation, even though we are alone. "When you live next door to a feminist, you can brag to your friends-- look how smart she is! Look how brave she is! How advanced! I would much rather live next door to one than with one. Living with a feminist is too, too much work!" I try to laugh along with him and the invisible twenty men he imagines would find this kind of joke funny, but instead of bringing us closer together, his way of joking only makes me worry that the ideals I thought we once shared were nothing to him but a passing whim. That he doesn't have the commitment necessary to translate these dreams of simplicity, equality, and beauty into day-to-day life. That when it comes to living his life rather than just talking about it, he has other priorities. Kishan tries to convince me that we should settle in India because that is the place where we will have more time for our writing and filmmaking. "But if I live as your wife, when will I have time for my writing?" I ask him. "Afternoons," he tells me, "that's when the women usually take naps and rest. You can write then." My temper flares. "We can hire a woman to clean our home," he relents. Dishes are not important enough to argue about. We are artists. We should live in a place, he says, where life is calm and beautiful. "Life in an Indian village is calm and beautiful," I say, "precisely because the women work so hard." He thinks once we are back in India I will adjust, will compromise, will step into the rhythm there. If I were the husband and had an Indian wife, I could enjoy the calmness and beauty of the life without this contradiction. I recognize the daily pleasures and rhythms he describes so lovingly as the India I was captivated by my first few years there as a student, before I ever met Kishan. The fresh, hot milk I drank every night before falling asleep tasted creamy and animalish, like the milk I used to drink at my great-grandfather's farm. The fine layers of soot that collected along the walls where the women cooked smelled like my great-grandmother's kitchen, a smell enhanced by the metallic yellow stain on the glasses left from the minerals in the well water. The women's hands, gentle and competent as they rolled out dough and bent kindling in half, reminded me of my grandmother's, sprinkling chopped walnuts onto Christmas cookies, pressing a cold cloth onto my feverish forehead. Kishan persists. He tells me stories of the happy women he remembers from his childhood who sang as they scrubbed floors, who spent hours together every afternoon stitching clothes, chaffing wheat, gossiping, laughing. I smile, in frustration, and wish I could be satisfied with such a life. That I wouldn't always be wanting, lacking, something else, something more. Something I'm not sure I will ever have. "I want a wife, not a house slave," he told his mother once, somewhat indelicately, when she was pressing him with threats and tears to agree to an arranged marriage with a village girl of his caste. Is this what he thinks of when he says I need an Indian wife? I think of my friends, many of whom are, indeed, Indian wives. My friend the journalist who collaborates with her photographer husband on magazine articles. My friend the teacher who started an alternative primary school with her husband, also a teacher. Poets, clothing designers, social activists, professors, I can think of many Indian wives who haven't succumbed to the extreme expectations that would turn them into house slaves. I couldn't make someone a house slave any more than become one myself. In his village I cringed every time his sisters-in-law insisted on laying out my bedding for me at night or offered to make me tea. Each morning when I walked up the hill away from the house, I stumbled and tripped over stones in the road, worried that I walked with the same self-important, oblivious swagger I saw in the men. Of course, the eyes that saw this swagger were ones I imagined looking out from the house. I was being split into two. I began to miss the tangible satisfaction of chopping vegetables. Miss knowing where the antiseptic was to treat a child's cut, miss polishing the copper-bottomed pots when I got stuck writing. I was not accustomed to walking so far from the room where I cooked to the room where I wrote. I started to make my own rules that wobbled between the gender lines. I still went to the office everyday but started sitting with the women in the kitchen when I went home for meals, and rinsing off my own plates when I was finished. A small gesture, really, but the men in his family never sat in the kitchen. It caused great bewilderment at the beginning. The first time I came into the kitchen, their mother-in-law pushed me back out and, when I insisted, ordered Savitri to fetch me a burlap sack to sit on, and eyed me strangely through her thick, black-rimmed glasses that magnified the protruding ovalness of her eyeballs. I plunked down on the floor a few feet from the hearth, with the children on either side of me slurping at the warm milk, while the men sat on their aqua-tinted armchairs, waiting for their food to be brought in and served. I could sense alarm behind the women's polite demonstrations, but they let me sit there just the same, and after a few days it began to feel routine almost. I felt relieved to be in the company of women again, not to be constantly reminded that I was from the opposite side of the gender line. But as far as the women of the family were concerned, I moved in the men's world and played by men's rules. They lumbered about in the traditional skirts and blouses, whose great lengths of floral printed polyester forced a slow gracefulness of movement that soothed me to watch, but that I could never tolerate for myself. They tucked and retucked the ends of their veils into their waists as they talked, and pulled the sheer meters of pastel-colored cotton low past their chins whenever they heard footsteps. Whereas I sat modern and nimble in my hand-printed cotton salwar-kurta, loose pants and tunic outfits they said made me look like a television starlet from Delhi. I would never move with the same overlapping rhythms and responsibilities that they shared, nor would I understand the names of festival foods or villages or relatives that made up most of their talk. The women treated me with friendly wariness and curiosity. They would engage me in bright, fast-paced conversation as they rolled out chapatis, warmed butter, filled water jugs. Often Savitri would double over in laughter at my ridiculously mundane questions about cow-dung fuel and brassieres. Mangala would wait and ask me in her quiet, patient way about life in America, questions I always found unanswerable however much they prodded. Why doesn't your father give you money to come here and study? Whom do you have to take care of with the money you earn? Doesn't he worry about your being so far from home, alone? And then suddenly the bond we had built would be broken, the mutual suspicions and envies revealed. You are very lucky to travel around the world, Mangala would sigh bitterly. You have so much free time for reading and writing. Only moments before, I had been marveling at the fluidity of her movements as she poured milk into her son's tumbler, skimmed off the fat, and rinsed out the empty pot. Only moments before, I had wanted to be at the heart of a home, to do as she did without conflict. If I did what you do, Mangala once told me, my parents would never have been able to marry me off. No, this is the life they've chosen for themselves, the men in his village reassured me, but later that night, my first in their village, when I remained in the bright parlor after dinner to read, the young daughters-in-law from the house sent the children to scout the room for men, and, once they were assured that I was alone, rushed in, giggling and frenzied with excitement, to ask me about my country and my life there. I hadn't set foot on American soil for two years and hardly felt as though I were established there, but in answering their questions--Do I live with my mother and father? Am I married? When will I? How far did I get with my education? Do I plan to continue working as a writer?--I realized that even after three years in India, my expectations for myself were very American. They told me that they hadn't been outside the house for weeks, that they hadn't met anyone from outside the village for months. They seemed reluctant and even a bit bored answering questions about their children, their in-laws, the day-to-day details of life in a joint family in a village. The beauty in life that they longed for seemed elsewhere, they seemed to say. Their eyes widened in a soulfully hungry way as I described my favorite museums, described walks in clean parks, sitting in coffee shops with friends discussing novels we had read. My descriptions were lively and involved, inspired as I was by the village life they were so tired of. I began asking them about their schooling, their career aspirations, the homes where they grew up, and was surprised to find Savitri talking of her job as a Sanskrit teacher that she had to give up to get married. Suddenly, her eyes were sparkling. My father ordered me to get married, she confided to me, but I am thinking of leaving this village and going back there to work. I asked her if her parents would support her in this decision, but she shook her head, sadly, no. The next time I went back to the village, she was mysteriously gone, and Mangala looked lonelier and more overburdened than ever. When I asked after her, her husband explained snidely that she couldn't live in a village without her cooler and fridge. I asked after Savitri's career ambitions, her literary inspirations, while he answered in generalizations about modern girls not appreciating the calm and beauty of the village. Mangala just shrugged her shoulders and said, if she were as educated as Savitri, she, too, would go back to her parents' home to work. But it wasn't long before Savitri's parents insisted she go back to her husband. At least, that was the explanation offered to me. In the year since her return I noticed she had grown even skinnier and more pinched, despite her pregnancy. It was painful to watch her pound the water-heavy, sudsy laundry against the stone slab. When I tried to ask how she felt to be back, she shrugged her shoulders, but I saw in her face that she was becoming bitter and resigned like Mangala. She said she missed wearing salwar-kurtas and jeans sometimes, and riding around on scooters. Kishan tells me that if we marry and move to his village, I will have to wear a skirt and veil just like Savitri and Mangala. I think to myself, "never." He tells me it would be comfortable, that I will begin to feel embarrassed wearing my salwar-kurtas once I have adapted to life in the village, but I can't imagine adapting that much, crossing the line that far. I keep hoping that we will move beyond these extremes. I want to find a place of mutual respect and understanding that is organic and spontaneous and grows out of our own needs. I am not an Indian wife. Why should I have to live according to formulas I don't believe even Indian women should have to abide? I get up and creep into the kitchen without turning the lights on. Kishan has done the dishes, quietly, and left them dripping and clean stacked upside-down on the counters. He set some ginger halwa he made out on a plate, hoping I would take a break soon, so I could eat it hot, not wanting to disturb me while I worked. Copyright © 1995 University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
