Motherland Read Free Page B

the person sitting behind him (me) could be gored.
    I tried to ignore the signs counting the bends because it gave no comfort to know when they were coming, there was no way to prepare. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the seat in front of me.
    â€œAre you sure you don’t want to lie down,” Ammamma asked.
    I didn’t think that would make it any better. She took out a lime and made a cut in it with her teeth, releasing its strong soothing fragrance. She handed it to me and I held it under my nose to keep from getting sick. I used to throw up on long drives, so my mother routinely traveled with plastic bags in her purse. The last few years had been much better, except when we came to India where the cars were worse and the roads were worse, and you felt every bump. And that was even without hairpin bends.
    â€œDo you want to stop for some air?” my uncle said some time later, as we neared the sign for the thirty-ninth bend.
    My uncle and my grandmother and the driver looked anxious. I could feel something rising in my throat, but I willed it to go away. “I’ll be fine, we should just keep driving, so we get it over with.”
    Every time we returned to the States from trips to India, I was in heaven in the taxi home. A big American car, with good brakes, good shocks, leather cushions, and a real road, fully paved and sealed.
    My uncle tried a new and fairly transparent tactic to get us off the road without making me admit my carsickness. “Shall we stop and see the view, Maya? I think we’ll catch the sunset right now.”
    I went along with it and agreed to stop when we could find a wide enough part of the road. The car soon came to a blissful halt, hugging the mountain side of the road. We walked across to the other side, and my uncle led me onto a rock ledge that was jutting off the road. I sat down on the rock so I wouldn’t lose my balance looking out into the swirling tangle of wilderness.
    â€œIt’s so nice there is still land that nobody owns,” I said, thinking of the fences and no-trespassing signs and gated communities back home.
    My uncle laughed. “This isn’t the frontier, Maya. It may look untamed to you, but all this land is owned, and constantly fought over.”
    He said there were some private landowners, and then the tea companies on the top of the mountain who kept trying to exaggerate their boundaries, and then the Indian government owned the rest of it. And all of it was a protected wildlife sanctuary.
    Sanjay uncle raised a thumb, then a forefinger, then an index finger as he enumerated, “You can’t hunt here whether or not it’s your land, and you can’t drain water from ponds even if they attract malarial mosquitoes, and you can’t carry any kind of natural product out of here without paying an excise tax on it at the bottom of the mountain.”
    â€œWhen the tea companies came, had anyone been up in these mountains before them?” I asked.
    â€œWell, 1 imagine we dispossessed the tribals here like everywhere else in India. They had no concept of ownership, they wandered and gathered food, and so the British and Indian tea companies ignored them altogether and measured out everything and created certificates saying who owned what and the tribals of course had no certificates to show for themselves.”
    â€œThat sounds like us and the Native Americans,” I said. Not us, my mother would have said, them, the Americans, the locals. When I did a project on Rosa Parks for Black History Month, she had said, “You needn’t feel guilty for American history, you had no part in it.” I would make sure to tell her when I went back, there was plenty to feel guilty about in India, too.
    Sanjay uncle said, “Yes, well, it’s what most people who settled did to people who wandered. It’s no different here. Are you ready to get going?”
    We walked back to the car. Ram