When she got her daughter’s first letter from America, the mother had a good cry. Everything was fine, the daughter said. The plane journey was fine, her professor who met her at the airport was nice, her university was very nice, the house she shared with two American girls (nice girls) was fine, her classes were OK and her teaching was surprisingly fine. She ended the letter saying she was fine and hoping her mother and father were too. The mother let out a moan she could barely control and wept in an agony of longing and pain and frustration. Who would have dreamt that her daughter was doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, she thought, wiping her eyes with her sari palla, when all the words at her command were ‘‘fine,’’ ‘‘nice,’’ and ‘‘OK.’’ Who would have imagined that she was a gold medallist from Delhi University? Who would know from the blandness of her letter, its vapidity, the monotony of its tone and the indifference of its adjectives that it came from a girl so intense and articulate? Her daughter had written promptly, as she had said she would, the mother thought, cleaning her smudged spectacles and beginning to reread the letter. It had taken only ten days to arrive. She examined her daughter’s handwriting. There seemed to be no trace of loneliness there, or discomfort, or insecurity—the writing was firm, rounded and clear. She hadn’t mentioned if that overfriendly man at the airport had sat next to her on the plane. The mother hoped not. Once Indian men boarded the plane for a new country, the anonymity drove them crazy. They got drunk and made life hell for the air-hostesses and everyone else nearby, but of course, they thought they were flirting with finesse. Her daughter, for all her arguments with her parents, didn’t know how to deal with such men. Most men. Her brows furrowed, the mother took out a letter-writing pad from her folder on the dining table and began to write. Eat properly, she wrote. Have plenty of milk, cheese and cereal. Eating badly makes you age fast. That’s why western women look so haggard. They might be pencil slim, but look at the lines on their faces. At thirty they start looking faded. So don’t start these stupid, western dieting fads. Oil your hair every week and avoid shampoos. Chemicals ruin the hair. (You can get almond oil easily if coconut oil isn’t available.) With all the hundreds of shampoos in America, American women’s hair isn’t a patch on Indian women’s. Your grandmother had thick, black hair till the day she died. One day, two months earlier, her daughter had cut off her long thick hair, just like that. The abruptness and sacrilege of this act still haunted the mother. That evening, when she opened the door for her daughter, her hair reached just below her ears. The daughter stood there, not looking at either her mother or father, but almost, it seemed, beyond them, her face a strange mixture of relief and defiance and anger, as her father, his face twisted, said, why, why. I like it short, she said. Fifteen years of growing it below her knees, of oiling it every week, and washing it so lovingly, the mother thought as she touched her daughter’s cheek and said, you are angry with us . . . is this your revenge? Her daughter had removed her hand and moved past her parents, past her brother-in-law who was behind them, and into her room. For the father it was as though a limb had been amputated. For days he brooded in his chair in the corner of the sitting-room, almost in mourning, avoiding even looking at her, while the mother murmured, you have perfected the art of hurting us. Your brother-in-law has finally been allotted his three-bedroomed house, she wrote, and he moved into it last week. I think he was quite relieved to, after living with us these few months. So there he is, living all alone in that big house with two servants while your sister continues working in Bombay. Your sister says that commuting marriages are inevitable, and like you, is not interested in hearing her mother’s opinion on the subject. I suppose they will go on like this for years, postponing having children, postponing being together, until one day when they’re as old as your father and me, they’ll have nothing to look forward to. Tell me, where would we have been without you both? Of course, you will only support your sister and your brother-in-law and their strange, selfish marriage. Perhaps that is your dream too. Nobody seems to have normal dreams any more.

The mother had once dreamt of love and a large home, silk saris and sapphires. The love she had got, but as her husband struggled in his job and the children came and as they took loans to marry off her husband’s sisters, the rest she did not. In the next fifteen years she had collected a nice selection of silk saris and jewellery for her daughters, but by that time, they showed no inclination for either. The older daughter and her husband had had a registered marriage, refused to have even a reception and did not accept so much as a handkerchief from their respective parents. And the younger one had said quite firmly before she left, that she wasn’t even thinking of marriage.

The mother looked at her husband’s back in the verandah. That’s all he did after he came back from the office—sit in the verandah and think of his precious daughters, while she cooked and cleaned, attended to visitors and wrote to all her sisters and his sisters. Solitude to think—what a luxury! She had never thought in solitude. Her thoughts jumped to and fro and up and down and in and out as she dusted, cooked, cleaned, rearranged cupboards, polished the brass, put buttons on shirts and falls on saris, as she sympathised with her neighbour’s problems and scolded the dhobi for not putting enough starch on the saris, as she reprimanded the milkman for watering the milk and lit the kerosene stove because the gas had finished, as she took the dry clothes from the clothes line and couldn’t press them because the electricity had failed and realised that the cake in the oven would now never rise. The daughter was like her father, the mother thought—she too had wanted the escape of solitude, which meant, of course, that in the process she neither made her bed nor tidied up her room.

How will you look after yourself, my Rani Beti? she wrote. You have always had your mother to look after your comforts. I’m your mother and I don’t mind doing all this, but some day you’ll have to do it for the man you marry and how will you, when you can’t even thread a needle?

But of course, her daughter didn’t want marriage. She had been saying so, vehemently, in the last few months. The father blamed the mother. The mother had not taught her how to cook or sew and had only encouraged her and her sister to think and act with an independence quite uncalled for in daughters. How then, he asked her, could she expect her daughters to be suddenly amenable? How could she complain that she had no grandchildren and lose herself in self-pity when it was all her doing? Sometimes the mother fought with the father when he said such things, at other times she cried or brooded. But she was not much of a brooder, and losing her temper or crying helped her cope better.

The mother laid aside her pen. She had vowed not to lecture her daughter, and there she was, filling pages of rubbish when all she wanted to do was cry out, why did you leave us in such anger? what did we not do for you? why, why? No, she would not ask. She wasn’t one to get after the poor child like that.

How far away you are, my pet, she wrote. How could you go away like that, so angry with the world? Why, my love, why? Your father says that I taught you to be so independent that all you hankered for was to get away from us. He says it’s all my fault. I have heard that refrain enough in my married life. After all that I did for you, tutoring you, disciplining you, indulging you, caring for you, he says he understands you better because you are like him. And I can’t even deny that because it’s true. I must say it’s very unfair, considering that all he did for you and your sister was give you chocolates and books.

When her daughter was six, the mother recalled, the teacher had asked the class to make a sentence with the word ‘‘good.’’ She had written, my father is a good man. The mother sighed as she recalled asking her, isn’t your mother a good woman? And the daughter’s reply, daddy is gooder. The mother wrote, no, I don’t understand— you talk like him, look like him, are as obstinate and as stupidly honest. It is as though he conceived you and gave birth to you entirely on his own. She was an ayah, the mother thought, putting her pen aside, that was all she was; she did all the dirty work and her husband got all the love.

The next day, after her husband had left for the office, the mother continued her letter. She wrote in a tinier handwriting now, squeezing as much as possible into the thin air-mail sheet. Write a longer letter to me, next time, my Rani, she wrote. Try and write as though you were talking to me. Describe the trees, the buildings, the people. Try not to be your usual perfunctory self. Let your mother experience America through your eyes. Also, before I forget, you must bathe every day, regardless of how cold it gets. People there can be quite dirty. But no, if I recall correctly, it is the English and other Europeans who hate to bathe. Your Naina Aunty, after her trip to Europe, said that they smelled all the time. Americans are almost as clean as Indians. And don’t get into the dirty habit of using toilet paper, all right?

The mother blew her nose and wiped her cheek. Two years, she wrote, or even more for you to come back. I can’t even begin to count the days for two years. How we worry, how we worry. Had you gone abroad with a husband, we would have been at peace, but now? If you fall ill who will look after you? You can’t even make dal. You can’t live on bread and cheese forever, but knowing you, you will. You will lose your complexion, your health, your hair. But why should I concern myself with your hair? You cut it off, just like that.

The mother laid her cheek on her hand and gazed at the door where her daughter had stood with her cropped hair, while she, her husband and her son-in-law stood like three figures in a tableau. The short hair made her face look even thinner. Suddenly she looked ordinary, like all the thousands of short-haired, western-looking Delhi girls one saw, all ordinarily attractive like the others, all the same. Her husband saying, why, why? his hands up in the air, then slowly falling down at his sides, her son-in-law, his lazy grin suddenly wiped off his face; she recalled it all, like a film in slow motion.

I always thought I understood you, she wrote, your dreams, your problems, but suddenly it seems there is nothing that I understand. No, nothing, she thought, the tiredness weighing down her eyes. She was ranting—the child could do without it. But how, how could she not think of this daughter of hers, who in the last few months had rushed from her usual, settled quietness to such unsettled stillness that it seemed the very house would begin to balloon outwards, unable to contain her straining.

Enough, she wrote. Let me give you the news before I make you angry with my grief. The day after you left, Mrs. Gupta from next door dropped in to comfort me, bless her. She said she had full faith you would come back, that only boys didn’t. She says a daughter will always regard her parents’ home as her only home, unlike sons who attach themselves to their wives. As you know, she has four sons, all married, and all, she says, under their wives’ thumbs. But it was true, the mother thought. Her own husband fell to pieces every time she visited her parents without him. When he accompanied her there he needed so much looking after that she couldn’t talk to her mother, so she preferred to go without him. With her parents she felt indulged and irresponsible. Who indulged her now? And when she came back from her parents the ayah would complain that her husband could never find his clothes, slept on the bedcover, constantly misplaced his spectacles, didn’t know how to get himself a glass of water and kept waiting for the postman.

With all your talk about women’s rights, she wrote, you refuse to see that your father has given me none. And on top of that he says that I am a nag. If I am a nag, it is because he’s made me one. And talking of women’s rights, some women take it too far. Mrs. Parekh is having, as the books say, a torrid affair with a married man. This man’s wife is presently with her parents and when Mrs. Parekh’s husband is on tour, she spends the night with him, and comes back early in the morning to get her children ready for school. Everyone has seen her car parked in the middle of the night outside his flat. Today our ayah said, memsahib, people like us do it for money. Why do memsahibs like her do it? But of course, you will launch into a tirade of how this is none of my business and sum it up with your famous phrase, each to her own. But my child, they’re both married. Surely you won’t defend it? Sometimes I don’t understand how your strong principles co-exist with such strange values for what society says is wrong. Each to her own, you have often told me angrily, never seeming to realise that it is never one’s own when one takes such a reckless step, that entire families disintegrate, that children bear scars forever. Each to her own, indeed.

Yes, she was a straightforward girl, the mother thought, and so loyal to those she loved. When the older daughter had got married five years ago, and this one was only seventeen, how staunchly she had supported her sister and brother-in-law’s decision to do without all the frills of an Indian wedding. How she had later defended her sister’s decision to continue with her job in Bombay, when her husband came on a transfer to Delhi. She had lost her temper with her parents for writing reproachful letters to the older daughter, and scolded them when they expressed their worry to the son-in-law, saying that as long as he was living with them, they should say nothing.

The mother was fond of her son-in-law in her own way. But deep inside she felt that he was irresponsible, uncaring and lazy. Yes, he had infinite charm, but he didn’t write regularly to his wife, didn’t save a paisa of his salary (he didn’t even have a life insurance policy and no thoughts at all of buying a house), and instead of spending his evenings in the house as befitted a married man, went on a binge of plays and other cultural programmes, often taking her younger daughter with him, spending huge amounts on petrol and eating out. His wife was too practical, he told the mother, especially about money. She believed in saving, he believed in spending. She wanted security, he wanted fun. He laughed as he said this, and gave her a huge box of the most expensive barfis. The mother had to smile. She wanted him to pine for her daughter. Instead, he joked about her passion for her work and how he was waiting for the day when she would be earning twice as much as him, so that he could resign from his job and live luxuriously off her, reading, trekking and sleeping. At such times the mother couldn’t even force a smile out. But her younger daughter would laugh and say that his priorities were clear. And the older daughter would write and urge the mother not to hound her sister about marriage, to let her pursue her interests. The sisters supported each other, the mother thought, irritated but happy.

Yesterday, the mother wrote, we got a letter from Naina Aunty. Her friend’s son, a boy of twenty-six, is doing his Ph.D. in Stanford. He is tall, fair and very handsome. He is also supposed to be very intellectual, so don’t get on your high horse. His family background is very cultured. Both his parents are lawyers. They are looking for a suitable match for him and Naina Aunty, who loves you so much, immediately thought of you and mentioned to them that you are also in the States. Now, before losing your temper with me, listen properly. This is just a suggestion. We are not forcing you into a marriage you don’t want. But you must keep an open mind. At least meet him. Rather, he will come to the university to meet you. Talk, go out together, see how much you like each other. Just meet him and try and look pleasant and smile for a change. Give your father and me the pleasure of saying, there is someone who will look after our child. If something happens to us who will look after you? I know what a romantic you are, but believe me, arranged marriages work very well. Firstly, the bride is readily accepted by the family. Now look at me. Ours was a love marriage and his parents disliked me and disapproved of our marriage because my sister had married out of the community. They thought I was fast because in those days I played tennis with other men, wore lipstick and bras. I wonder why I bore it. I should have been cold and as distant as them. But I was ingratiating and accommodating. Then your father and I had to marry off his sisters. Now in an arranged marriage you can choose not to have such liabilities. I am not materialistic, but I am not a fool either. I know you want to be economically independent, and you must be that, but it will also help if your husband isn’t burdened with debts. I am not blaming your father. Responsibilities are responsibilities. But if you can help it, why begin married life with them? Now don’t write back and say you’re sick of my nagging. You think I am a nag because it is I who wield the stick and your father who gives those wonderful, idealistic lectures. Perhaps when you marry you will realise that fathers and husbands are two very different things. In an arranged marriage you will not be disillusioned because you will not have any illusions to begin with. That is why arranged marriages work. Of course, we will not put any pressure on you. Let us know if it is all right for the boy to meet you and I will write to Naina Aunty accordingly. Each day I pray that you will not marry an American. That would be very hard on us. Now, look at your father and me. Whatever your father’s faults, infidelity isn’t one of them. Now these Americans, they will divorce you at the drop of a hat. They don’t know the meaning of the phrase, ‘‘sanctity of marriage.’’ My love, if you marry an American and he divorces you and we are no longer in this world, what will you do?

When the milkman came early this morning, he enquired about you. I told him how far away you are. He sighed and said that it was indeed very far. I think he feels for us because he hasn’t watered the milk since you left. I’m making the most of it and setting aside lots of thick malai for butter. When the postman came, he said, how is the baby? I replied, now only you will bear her news for us. He immediately asked for baksheesh. I said, nothing doing, what do you mean, baksheesh, it isn’t Diwali. He replied, when I got your baby’s first letter, wasn’t it like Diwali? So I tipped him. Our bai has had a fight with her husband because he got drunk again and spent his entire salary gambling it away. She is in a fury and has left the house saying she won’t go back to him unless he swears in the temple that he will never drink again. Your father says, hats off to her. Your father is always enraptured by other women who stand up for themselves. If I stood up for myself he would think he was betrayed. Betrayal, betrayal, the mother mulled. His job had betrayed him, his strict father had, by a lack of tenderness, betrayed him, India herself had betrayed him after Independence, and this betrayal he raved against every evening, every night. He told her that sometimes he felt glad that his daughter had left a country where brides were burnt for dowry, where everyone was corrupt, where people killed each other in the name of religion and where so many still discriminated against Harijans. At least, he said, his daughter was in a more civilised country. At this the mother got very angry. She said, in America fathers molested their own children. Wives were abused and beaten up, just like the servant classes in India. Friends raped other friends. No one looked after the old. In India, the mother said, every woman got equal pay for equal work. In America they were still fighting for it. Could America ever have a woman president? Never. Could it ever have a black president? Never. Americans were as foolish about religion as Indians, willing to give millions to charlatans who said that the Lord had asked for the money. She was also well read, the mother told her husband, and she knew that no Indian would part with his money so easily. As for discrimination against untouchables in India—it only happened among the uneducated, whereas discrimination against blacks was rampant even among educated Americans. Blacks were the American untouchables. The mother was now in her element. She too had read Time and Newsweek, she told her husband, and she knew that in India there had never been any question of having segregation in buses where Harijans were concerned, as was the case in America, not so long ago. Don’t rant, her husband told her, and lower your voice, I can hear you without your shrieking. The mother got into a terrible fury and the father left the room. The mother wrote, you better give us your views about that country—you can give us a more balanced picture. Your father thinks I’m the proverbial frog in the well. Well, perhaps that is true, but he is another frog in another well and Americans are all frogs in one large, rich well. Imagine, when your aunt was in America, several educated Americans asked her whether India had roads and if people lived in trees. They thought your aunt had learnt all the English she knew in America.

The mother made herself a cup of tea and sipped it slowly. Her son-in-law hadn’t even been at home the night her daughter had left. It upset the mother deeply. He could have offered to drive them to the airport at least, comforted them in their sorrow. But he had gone off for one of his plays and arrived a few minutes after they returned from the airport, his hair tousled, his eyes bright. He stopped briefly in the living room where the mother and father sat quietly, at opposite ends, opened his mouth to say something, then shrugged slightly and went to his room.

Selfish, the mother thought. Thoughtless. The daughter hadn’t even enquired about him when she left. Had she recognised that her fun-loving brother-in-law had not an ounce of consideration in him?

The two months before her daughter had left had been the worst. Not only had she stopped talking to her parents, but to him. It frightened the mother. One can say and do what one likes with parents, she told her silent child once, parents will take anything. Don’t cold-shoulder him too. If he takes a dislike to you and your moods, then you will be alienated even from your sister. Remember, marriage bonds are ultimately stronger than ties between sisters. The daughter had continued reading her book. And soon after, she had cut off her hair. Rapunzel, her brother-in-law had said once, as he watched her dry her hair in the courtyard and it fell like black silk below her knees. Rapunzel, he said again, as the mother smiled and watched her child comb it with her fingers. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Oh she won’t do that, the mother had said, proud that she understood, she is too quiet and withdrawn, and her daughter had gone back to her room and the next day she had cut it off, just like that.

The mother finished her tea and continued her letter. Let me end with some advice, she wrote, and don’t groan now. Firstly, keep your distance from American men. You are innocent and have no idea what men are like. Men have more physical feelings than women. I’m sure you understand. Platonic friendship between the two sexes does not exist. In America they do not even pretend that it does. There kissing is as casual as holding hands. And after that you know what happens. One thing can lead to another and the next thing we know you will bring us an American son-in-law. You know we will accept even that if we have to, but it will make us most unhappy.

Secondly, if there is an Indian association in your university, please join it. You might meet some nice Indian men there with the same interests that you have. For get-togethers there, always wear a sari and try to look pleasant. Your father doesn’t believe in joining such associations, but I feel it is a must.

The mother was tired of giving advice. What changed you so much the last few months before you left? she wanted to cry, why was going abroad no longer an adventure but an escape? At the airport, when the mother hugged the daughter, she had felt with a mother’s instinct that the daughter would not return.

There had been a brief period when her child had seemed suddenly happy, which was strange, considering her final exams were drawing closer. She would work late into the night and the mother would sometimes awaken at night to hear the sounds of her making coffee in the kitchen. Once, on the way to the bathroom she heard sounds of laughter in the kitchen and stepped in to see her daughter and son-in-law cooking a monstrous omelette. He had just returned from one of his late night jaunts. An omelette at one a.m., the mother grunted sleepily and the two laughed even more as the toast emerged burnt and the omelette stuck to the pan. Silly children, the mother said and went back to bed.

And then, a few weeks later, that peculiar, turbulent stillness as her daughter continued studying for her exams and stopped talking to all of them, her face pale and shadows under her eyes, emanating a tension that gripped the mother like tentacles and left the father hurt and confused. She snapped at them when they questioned her, so they stopped. I’ll talk to her after the exams, the mother told herself. She even stopped having dinner with them, eating either before they all sat at the table, or much after, and then only in her room.

And that pinched look on her face . . . the mother jerked up. It was pain, not anger. Her daughter had been in pain, in pain. She was hiding something. Twelve years ago, when the child was ten, the mother had seen the same pinched, strained look on her face. The child bore her secret for three days, avoiding her parents and her sister, spending long hours in the bathroom and moving almost furtively around the house. The mother noticed that two rolls of cotton had disappeared from her dressing table drawer and that an old bedsheet she had left in the cupboard to cut up and use as dusters had also disappeared. On the third day she saw her daughter go to the bathroom with a suspicious lump in her shirt. She stopped her, her hands on the trembling child’s arms, put her fingers into her shirt and took out a large roll of cotton. She guided the child to the bathroom, raised her skirt and pulled down her panties. The daughter watched her mother’s face, her eyes filled with terror, waiting for the same terror to reflect on her face, as her mother saw the blood flowing from this unmentionable part of her body and recognised her daughter’s imminent death. The mother said, my love, why didn’t you tell me, and the child, seeing only compassion, knew she would live, and wept.

The omniscience of motherhood could last only so long, the mother thought, and she could no longer guess her daughter’s secrets. Twelve years ago there had been the disappearing cotton and sheet, but now? The mother closed her eyes and her daughter’s face swam before her, her eyes dark, that delicate nose and long plaited hair—no, no, it was gone now and she could never picture her with her new face. After her daughter had cut her hair, the mother temporarily lost her vivacity. And the daughter became uncharacteristically tidy—her room spick and span, her desk always in order, every corner dusted, even her cupboard neatly arranged. The mother’s daily scoldings to her, which were equally her daily declarations of love, ceased, and she thought she would burst with sadness. So one day, when the mother saw her daughter standing in her room, looking out of the window, a large white handkerchief held to her face, the mother said, don’t cry, my love, don’t cry, and then, don’t you know it’s unhygienic to use someone else’s hanky, does nothing I tell you register, my Rani? And her daughter, her face flushed, saying, it’s clean, and the mother taking it out of her hand and smelling it and snorting, clean, what rubbish and it isn’t even your father’s, it’s your brother-in-law’s, it smells of him, and it did, of cigarettes and aftershave and God knows what else and the mother had put it for a wash.

The mother’s face jerked up. Her fingers’ grip on the pen loosened and her eyes dilated. Her daughter had not been crying. Her eyes, as they turned to her mother, had that pinched look, but they were clear as she removed the handkerchief from her nose. It had smelled of him as she held it there and she wasn’t wiping her tears. The mother moaned. If God was omniscient, it didn’t seem to hurt him. Why hadn’t He denied her the omniscience of motherhood? Oh my love, my love, the mother thought. She held her hand to her aching throat. Oh my love. The tears weren’t coming now. She began to write. Sometimes when one is troubled, she wrote, and there is no solution for the trouble, prayer helps. It gives you the strength to carry on. I know you don’t believe in rituals, but all I’m asking you to do is to light the lamp in the morning, light an agarbatti, fold your hands, close your eyes and think of truth and correct actions. That’s all. Keep these items and the silver idol of Ganesha which I put into your suitcase in a corner in your cupboard or on your desk. For the mother, who had prayed all her life, prayer was like bathing or brushing her teeth or chopping onions. She had found some strength in the patterns these created, and sometimes, some peace. Once, when her husband reprimanded her for cooking only eight dishes for a dinner party, she had wanted to break all the crockery in the kitchen, but after five minutes in her corner with the Gods, she didn’t break them. She couldn’t explain this to her child. She couldn’t say, it’s all right, it happens; or say, you’ll forget, knowing her daughter wouldn’t. If you don’t come back next year, she wrote, knowing her daughter wouldn’t, I’ll come and get you. She would pretend to have a heart attack, the mother said to herself, her heart beating very fast, her tears now falling very rapidly, holding her head in her hands, she would phone her daughter and say, I have to see you before I die, and then her daughter would come home, yes, she would come home, and she would grow her hair again.