All Eyes On Her. Poonam Sharma

      My mother was understated in much the same way that dating show contestants wear makeup. It didn’t help when she upstaged me at my Sweet Sixteen party in a dress cut-down-to-there, but it didn’t hurt when she told me on the day I left for college that As long as I was living happily and honestly no matter what choices I made, she would always be right behind me. Between mother and daughter, the good is just the other half of the bad.

      Thankfully, my father always managed to cast her behavior in only the most positive light. And, after all, he had explained to me after a particularly embarrassing incident involving an impromptu conga-line to the tune of “The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” at my fifth-grade dance that my mother had insisted on chaperoning, she had been hardwired for drama. How else could she have mustered the courage to defy her parents by wearing those tight blue jeans, which were like a bull’s-eye in that small Indian village for the motorcycle-riding, chain-smoking, loner Gujurati boy named Deepak who would eventually become my father?

      As the story went, he invited her to meet him for a cup of chai in the bazaar one afternoon during her winter break from college, and she (having grown accustomed to the free-thinking of the 1970s London social scene) decided to accept. It wasn’t until the following morning, after news of mom’s—or rather, the self-important Renu Malhotra’s—brazen public liaison had reached every corner of the village, that word reached her of Deepak’s parents already having committed his hand in marriage. An incensed and insulted twenty-one-year-old Renu’s immediate response was to march over to Deepak’s house, bang on the door, stomp into the family’s living room and demand that he marry her as a form of reparation for thinking that he could sully her reputation.

      Who could resist such a fiery pataka? he would recount to anyone who would listen, while my mother demurred and waved away any comparison of herself to a firecracker.

      A bundook then? he would chide.

      Do I look like I can spit bullets? she would mock warn him.

      Only if I step out of line, sergeant. He would salute, with a clip of his heels for effect.

      Do you see how your father mocks me, Monica? she would play along, despite the initiation of my gag reflex. Whatever you do, don’t marry a funny man.

      Happy wife, happy life, my father would say, over the rim of his glasses, before returning his attention to his usual Sunday morning copy of India Abroad.

      Theirs was the kind of love that every little girl imagines for herself—full of grand gestures, stolen kisses, clandestine rendezvous and passionate choices no one ever second-guessed. I held very firmly to that ideal through most of my formative years. I held on to it through the high school football player who brought me wildflowers, but didn’t love me enough to dance in public. And through that shy boy in my college freshman literature class who wrote poetry to me describing a sort of hunger that I never could have felt for him. I held on all the way to the film major with the dimples, who nearly dropped all those copies of his screenplay trying to hold the student union door open for me our first day of junior year.

      His name was Alex, and that screenplay was the first of many that I would read and critique for him over the next few years. I can only describe it as the most consuming love I’ve ever had. Which is probably how it is for everyone, when it really happens, but still…

      I might have held on to the grand idea of such a big love for long enough to let Alex become the man of my life, if I hadn’t seen what became of my mother once she lost hers.

      One summer afternoon, I came home from lunch to find my father slumped over our kitchen table. My mother stood in the hallway just outside the kitchen. The backdoor key was still in her hand, and she was mumbling something repeatedly to herself about dinner. Later, I learned that there was very little my father hadn’t done for us. He had done so much, in fact, that my mother hadn’t the slightest idea of the terms of his life insurance, the balance of their mortgage, or the location of the key to the bank deposit box. In short, she was the girl in those blue jeans, wondering where the boy named Deepak had gone.

      Two months after my father’s death, my mother moved to London to be closer to the extended family who we had visited every summer of my childhood en route to Bombay.