I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother, when she mentioned my excitement over the prospect of entering a poem in a fifth-grade writing competition. “It is not practical, and we should not encourage her in it.”
“Oh, don’t be so serious, Sushil,” my mother replied from the kitchen, while I squeezed my head through the bars of the banister to get within closer earshot. “It’s just a writing contest.”
“It is not just a writing contest, Shardha. It is a signal. And it is a waste of her time. These are important years. She should be working on her Math Olympiad, or on the Spelling Bee. Why should we train her to care what these so-called judges think? Her teacher is no Professor of Literature. He is there to teach her Mathematics and Science and History. Anyway, writing is something where there is never an absolute score. It cannot get her into good colleges. It is a waste of her time.”
“Sushil, be reasonable. I cannot tell her no after I have already told her yes. She’s very enthusiastic. She wrote some poem about Reality, and I think it’s very clever for her age.”
“That is all fine. Yet I do not agree with it. You and I both know that the world does not value these things. They value success that can be measured. We know this. We have seen this. Why should we send our daughter into such a struggling life?”
“Teekh hai,” she agreed. “Perhaps you have a point. Though we cannot do anything about it now. And keep your voice down. She just went up to bed.”
“Chuhlow, fine. But my daughter will not be a writer.”
“And I will not reheat your Rotis if they get cold while you are prolonging this discussion. Let’s eat in peace, okay?”
To my eleven-year-old ears, the distinction between a father’s protectiveness and dismissal of my interest in writing wasn’t exactly clear. What was clear was that he had tried to prevent me from doing something, so I had to do it anyway. I proudly entered my poem “Is This Reality?” into the contest. Based on a dream I had, the poem was made up of questions about what proof we had that our world wasn’t some other child’s dream, and whether or not that child could end our world just by waking up.
The next day, Mr. Kronin called me over to his desk to tell me that it was all right to feel angry and confused about the world, and to ask if I was interested in speaking with the school psychiatrist. Obviously, this was not the response I had hoped for. You talk to the psychiatrist, I screamed, before running to the bus and crying all the way home. If this was what writing would lead to, I told myself, I wanted no part of it.
“Sometimes it’s not the best thing to share these kinds of feelings,” my mother tried to console me. “Because it is not always guaranteed that everyone will understand it. And that can hurt your feelings. But I’m sure that Mr. Kronin didn’t mean it. Not everybody knows what a special girl you are, beti…like we do.”
Burying my head in my pillow, I scooted closer to my Nani. Mom and Dad took the hint and left us alone.
“Vina, you must not be angry with your parents.”
“I hate it that they were right,” I told her defiantly.
“Beti, they don’t want to be right. They want you to be successful.”
I pulled the covers over my face.
“Try to understand….This is the way that it is in India. Boys and girls must choose which line they will take in the eighth grade…either science for medicine or math for engineering. They start preparations for college early. And your parents want to make life easier for you. It’s the same way as they corrected your hands.”
I came out from under the covers. “What?”
“You don’t know this, but you were naturally left-handed as a child, so they corrected you.”
“How?”
“When you were very small, they told you ‘No’ every time you used the left hand. They wanted to make your life easier because the world is built for right-handed people. See? You don’t even remember being left-handed.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Beti, good girls trust their parents.”
I stood corrected, again. And this time there was no point in arguing. It was better not to waste time questioning those who knew more than I did about things like school. They were clearly more intelligent than I was or ever would be, at anything. On that particular lesson, it turned out, I was a pretty fast learner.
6
On the afternoon of the blackout I was still sitting on the floor, examining the wound from Booboo’s outburst, when I heard a familiar voice.
“Vina? You okay?” The voice came from the hallway outside my apartment.
I knew that it was him by his footsteps, and by the way that he left out the verb to save time. Jon had used his elbow to prop himself against my door frame, so his palm obstructed my view when I swung the door open. I was always a sucker for breathless and brave. But he was also sweaty. I imagined him running the twenty blocks between his restaurant and my building, and the ten f lights up to my door. Love is the only thing in life that is not anticlimactic; and as much as I hated to admit it, seeing him in my doorway made me feel like I was home.
Jon was tall, dark and Sicilian, in that broad-shouldered, olive-complexioned sort of a way, so I often told myself that we looked good together. We met in his restaurant, Peccavi, eighteen months ago when I requested a rare vintage of Chateau Cabrieres for myself and my girlfriends. He complimented my choice while personally delivering the wine to our table, and stayed to chat us up and steal a glance down my blouse. I’m the first to admit that I was not above doing whatever I could to make it easier for him. I’ve got to use these puppies while they’ve still got the inclination to stand and salute.
Eventually, he gave me his business card with the following scrawled across the back: “Bella, I would love to continue our conversation alone, some other time.”
I called three days later (sending the message that I was interested, but not desperate), and refused a Saturday-night date but agreed to an early dinner on Sunday (making it clear that while I was far too fabulous to have a Saturday night unbooked four days in advance, I wasn’t dating anyone exclusively enough to have my Sunday evenings reserved).
He wooed me expertly from the start, which naturally made me uncomfortable; would Chinese takeout and a rental of Say Anything be too pedestrian for him? After our first dinner, he draped his jacket around my shoulders as we strolled through Central Park. Then he kissed me, after holding my face in his hands, looking into my eyes and smiling in a way that asked for my permission.
“Do you think he’s embarrassed?” he had asked me, as we passed by a dog who stared at us with one leg raised, peeing against a tree.
Emotional risk-taking never came easily to me. My plan was to have a few months of fun with the big, sexy man, and (All together now…) “to keep it casual.” A year later, I was drafting speeches that might dissuade my parents from disowning me for bringing home an Italian and an engagement ring. Since I had already ventured so far outside my original romantic parameters, I even surprised myself by deciding to end our relationship over his disinterest in my ticking biological clock. One of the few things I knew I wanted for sure in this life was a child. So I had broken up with
