Motherland Read Free Page A

It was dark and dank, and made me feel nauseated, but I was afraid 1 was getting my period and I just wanted to be prepared for the long ride home.
    â€œAre you all right?” my grandmother said loudly.
    â€œYes, fine, I’ll be out in a second, Ammamma.”
    I came out and looked in the mirror to make sure I was all in order, that there were no lines you could see through my khaki pants. Ammamma, in her six yards of white starched linen over a starched white petticoat, looked serene standing there, far beyond bleeding at inopportune times. She was waiting for me holding a pitcher of water she had filled from a half-full bucket. I held out my hands and she poured water over them, and then offered me the palloo of her sari to dry my hands. I refused, not wanting to get her sari wet, I wasn’t so little anymore. She dug in her big black handbag and gave me a handkerchief to use.
    W E FOUND OUR driver, Ram, eating and gossiping at the row of toddy stalls next to the parking lot. He led us to the car, and we started the drive home. My uncle sat in the front with Ram, and I sat in the back with my grandmother.
    Ammamma said, “I brought pillows and a sheet if you want to sleep or lie down.”
    When I was small, Ammamma would also bring my nightgown and I would change in the car and sleep all the way home from the airport. She would make my dad scrunch together with my uncle and the driver in the front seat, and then I would lie with my head on her lap and my legs on my mother. I’d been up for two nights straight, leaving New York in the early evening Friday, and landing in Frankfurt the next morning. 1 landed in Bombay Saturday at midnight, waited out the night in the airport, and flew south from Bombay to Coimbatore at seven this morning.
    â€œThat’s okay, I can wait to sleep when we get home.”
    â€œAre you sure?” my grandmother said, taking a pillow out of a canvas bag and smoothing a clean towel over it on her lap. “I brought a feather pillow that’s flat the way you like it.”
    â€œThe ride is pretty long, three to four hours,” my uncle said. “Did your mother tell you we moved farther out of the city?”
    Mother had said Sanjay uncle had moved high up into the mountains last year when he had transferred to the tea division.
    â€œThat’s right,” he said, “I couldn’t work for the tea division if I stayed down here near the city.” He said they lived ten minutes from the central tea factory he managed, and that twice a month he traveled around to check on the other tea properties in the region.
    â€œIt’s even quieter up there than where Sanjay lived last time you came,” Ammamma said. “He needs to come all the way back down here to go to the bank or to the doctor.”
    â€œI’ve gotten used to the drive,” my uncle said. “At least near the top of the mountain, that last hour or two is much cooler. And today, because it’s a weekend, there won’t be trucks or buses in our way.”
    We were starting to climb the mountain, and there was a cracked wooden sign that said 65. My uncle said the British had carved the road right into the side of the mountain, and it had sixty-five hairpin bends. “You’ve probably never been on a road quite like this before.”
    â€œNo,” I said. We soon hit our first one, and it was worse than those California highways in Hitchcock movies, where it seemed like the actors had been superglued to their seats so they didn’t fall out of the car. We slowly zigzagged our way up the face of a mountain. I felt dizzy looking out the window, seeing the trees growing sideways on the earth, the earth falling away from us as we turned each time. There were no seat belts in the car. I remembered learning from a movie in Driver’s Ed that in many Third World countries the steering wheels were still not collapsible, so that in an accident, the driver and