Shock to Shanti Read online

  Next in line is the storybook section; ‘My Life’, Reya’s book title states with a gaping blank spot on the cover. I look at the other books on the wall to understand what the void should contain and realize it’s another folly of mine. I forgot to send a baby picture of Reya. The one she begged for weeks on end, but I never put in her folder. She doesn’t chastise me while I look at the empty spot. In fact, Reya is pointing to the story with pride, as if the cover is embroidered in gold. In my defense, I did spend a few days contemplating rummaging through the drawer dedicated for future scrapbooks. It contains a chaotic collection of random photos with no home. But on each attempt that I sifted through the endless pile, I suddenly felt dizzy and tired and then I just forgot.

  Kindergarten is already stressful.

  Among all the cute cover photos, there was one other empty book cover on the wall; shamefully, this brought a smile to my face.

  It’s called Schadenfreude, enjoyment at the misfortunes of others. A study at the University of Netherlands in 2012 showed that many people experience schadenfreude at some point in their lives, mainly due to low self-esteem. Well, mingling with adults who seem to have a secret handbook on perfect parenting may have caused a dent to my self-esteem.

  ‘Next time we’ll remember,’ the mom standing next to me whispers. This visual and verbal connection now makes me feel empathetic towards her, which according to the Netherlands study means I am not pure evil.

  ‘We know that it’s very good to feel empathy and sympathy for people, so if you feel Schadenfreude without any sympathy or compassion for that other person, that would not be good,’ one researcher stated.

  Our eyes connect and linger, forming a bond and giving me comfort that imperfection exists outside myself.

  ‘Show time,’ the teacher merrily states and asks us to take our seats for the big production. My knees complain by cracking loudly as I sit on Reya’s mini chair.

  Finally, I have an opportunity to relax and genuinely smile at my daughter. But as I let my gaze rest on her, I am mortified to see her snot covered nose and knotted hair. There is no way I let her leave the house in this state, I assure myself. Even with my lapsing memory I distinctly remember brushing Reya’s hair and putting on her favourite sparkly headband for the play, so did she encounter a tornado before making it to school? I quickly pull her to the side to hand brush her hair and clean her nose.

  The show commences and my body relaxes as I watch Reya sing with her classmates about Halloween.

  ‘It’s pumpkin, not punkin,’ Reya interrupts the song to correct the boy next to her. She quickly realizes there is an audience and embraces the boy, while smiling as if nothing happened. It’s too late. He looks dejected; his mom looks upset, and my eyes immediately dart down to focus on a rug stain. My shoulders feel tight and I wonder once again where her personality came from. It has to be from my husband’s side of the family.

  The children eventually partner with their classmates to record numbers by rolling a dice. We are to observe as the kids practice their counting and adding.

  ‘Charlie, roll the dice slowly so it doesn’t fall off the table and hurry up. I want my turn,’ Reya barks at her partner. This time there is no attempt to cover this short soliloquy with a smile or hug.

  Hello Reya. The wolf has stepped out of sheep’s clothing. ‘Be nice,’ I say through grated teeth. What I want to add is ‘quit being so bossy’. However the use of this word has become controversial since Sheryl Sandberg, former executive of Google and COO of Facebook, started a campaign to ban the word, saying it undermines girls who exhibit leadership skills. There is a website dedicated specifically to this cause, with a girl on the home page looking quite bossy but no doubt thinking ‘You can’t call me bossy because all the feminists will shame you into silence.’

  In my generation, this word was used for boys and girls who loved ordering the rest of us followers around. However if curbing my use of this word will give Reya the confidence to become an executive, so be it; but I can’t think of a better word to label her behaviour at the moment. And being a believer in equality I wouldn’t mind using it on some boys in this class also.

  A morning of shows, dice, and diva attitude is not all that awaits me at school.

  After Reya’s programme, I run up the stairs with my shoulders still tense to drop off cupcakes for my son’s birthday. For two years he has been asking me why I don’t bring some goodies to school for his birthday like other parents.

  How many birthday parties does it take to make a modern day child happy, I wonder in disbelief?

  My intentions were to bake homemade vegan cupcakes so every child could indulge in one without worrying about any allergies. Additionally, my desire was to decorate them with numbers of subway trains to satisfy Ansh’s train obsession. Instead I ran to Whole Foods, bought the first sugary item I found and ripped the price tags off on the train to school.

  I knock on the door with no response. After a quick peek through the glass, I knock again and, in typical NY fashion, force my way in. The teacher glares at me, as if knocking the door is a sacrilegious act.

  ‘May I help you?’ she asks in an icy voice, immediately forming frostbite on my arms. She doesn’t know who I am. Of course, I am the derelict mom who doesn’t volunteer for any school functions, only making guest appearances like today.

  Luckily Ansh, after making eye contact with the cupcakes in my hand, acknowledges me as a parent and pulls me inside. My knight in shining armour has rescued me; never mind what the true reason is.

  I quickly have Ansh distribute the plates and cupcakes while the teacher is still contemplating whether I am an intruder. I mumble something to her about previously scheduling this drop-off time and give a chocolate cupcake with sprinkles as an offering of truce. Ansh flashes a big toothy grin as all the kids sing ‘ARE YOU ONE, ARE YOU TWO, ARE YOU THREE,’ while stuffing themselves with treats.

  This smile is worth all the effort. At this moment I feel like I am in the middle of a MasterCard priceless commercial, except I bought the cupcakes with a Visa card.

  As I walk out of the room I refuse to look at the walls. I am not going to ruin this happy moment by potentially finding more gaping holes in my other child’s projects. The general statistic with my children is if Reya misses one assignment, Ansh will miss three. My children fall in line with scientific data pointing to girls maturing faster than boys. On most occasions I’m happy if Ansh doesn’t have his shirt on backwards and his shoes are tied—so I’ll definitely skip looking at the walls.

  The school festivities are not yet complete; I will have the honour of participating in a PTA general assembly today. As I enter the auditorium, I see parents greeting each other happily. They seem to be friends and they appear to be genuinely inquisitive about each other’s children. I am fascinated by their camaraderie and wouldn’t mind participating; however I can’t remember most of their names nor am I familiar with any of the topics they are discussing. Instead, I spend my time finding a seat closest to the exit.

  When the meeting commences they speak about the state of the school and of course how additional money and supplies are needed because of budget cuts for public schools. I keep hearing two sides of an endless debate from the New York city council: budget cuts being too steep vs. cuts being acceptable if the budget is managed properly. I haven’t done enough research to take a side but if the PTA doesn’t raise enough money or gather enough supplies my kids won’t have any art programmes or Kleenex to blow their nose into.

  For now I wonder what can my husband and I donate from our work supply cabinets to help this cause; notebooks, index cards, pens, folders?

  Also I am concerned I may need to bake cookies again for one of the school auctions. My attempt at making healthy wholewheat chocolate chip cookies didn’t bring too many dollars to the school fund last time. I thought the grainy, crispy, and slightly burnt flavour was unique and definitely stood out from the alleged tasty cookies.

  I
soothe myself by deciding to donate cash. How mundane would the world be if everyone were a Martha Stewart clone?

  The session is over and I run towards the exit like a schoolgirl hearing the dismissal bell. Hallelujah, I am free at last.

  I have to remind myself I fell in love with this school during a kindergarten tour. It was clean, organized, and had a pool. This was drool worthy because a city that apparently has it all hardly had any pools in public schools, and even fewer that were usable. In fact, because a budget to fix pools didn’t exist for eons, it was used in multiple schools as a storage facility for broken chairs, desks, and other unproductive school supplies. At the conclusion of the tour, as the principal spoke, I felt my body sway slightly with his words and my eyes become damp. It was embarrassing but his moving sermon on diversity and creative learning was refreshing and a reminder of what New York City had to offer.

  As with many things in life, a few years caused the original shine to dull.

  I make my way out feeling light again and unusually stress free. In fact, I indulged myself with a vacation day precisely to get this high instead of repeatedly checking my watch in fear of missing a meeting at work.

  As I walk in the midst of red, yellow, and brown leaves whirling in an autumn fiesta, on my way back home, my thoughts linger on the kids. I can’t quite grasp that my children are already in elementary school. They dress themselves and yell at me through their oversized-looking permanent teeth to run faster to make it to the school gates before they shut.

  By now I should be a seasoned parent and yet I can’t master the skillsets required to be one.

  Auntie

  Indeed, I have two children, a husband, a job, and a house. I am an adult who has responsibilities. I have varicose veins, a stretch-marked belly, and dark circles under my eyes.

  Surprisingly I still feel like a child, or at least act like one on many occasions. Every so often I dress like a teenager in skinny jeans and contemplate getting a tattoo from the doorman of our building, who happens to own a tattoo parlour.

  The idea of inking my skin as a middle-aged woman came from a curvaceous woman standing next to me on a subway ride to Coney Island, who had the word Moksha tattooed in Hindi right above her well-endowed breast. It means liberation. Hindi is the language of my roots, yet my knowledge is shoddy and mainly fuelled by watching Bollywood films. I can’t string words together without multiple grammatical mistakes. But I know random complex words like Moksha. It happened to be the title of a film I had seen. The dimensions of the word in Hindi script, Devanagari, looked as delicate as a tattoo can on a middle-aged person, which may be why I’m inclined to follow her footsteps.

  These whimsical fantasies are amusing and fun, but it can’t conceal the fact that I may officially be an Auntie and the thought makes me involuntarily cringe.

  While growing up in Pittsburgh, it was customary in my culture to address all Southeast Asian middle-aged women as Aunties, even the ones I met once a year for my father’s college reunion. Although there were a handful of women who were near and dear to my family, most were acquaintances and none were technically related to us; yet their title persistently remained.

  ‘Call her Auntie,’ my parents instructed whenever women visited from India.

  ‘Auntie,’ they nodded their head from side to side towards any new brown face that entered their orbit of diverseless Asian friends. A side-to-side head movement in the Southeast Asian community means yes or a nod of confirmation and could easily be misconstrued as a no.

  We obeyed and ungrudgingly grouped them all into our limitless pool of aunties.

  How this word exploded in the Indian culture remains unclear to me as everyone has their own version and opinion on the phenomena. And because I’m not aware of a universal reason, I also have my own interpretation based on my parents’ initial trials and tribulations in the US.

  The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, established a new immigration policy that included attracting skilled labour to the United States irrespective of their origins. Under the old system, entrance largely depended upon an immigrant’s country of birth. Seventy per cent of all immigrant slots were allotted to natives of just three countries—United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, which mainly went unused. Simultaneously, there were long waiting lists for the small number of visas available to those born in other parts of the world.

  Although the new immigration bill didn’t consider roping in skilled labour as top priority, inadvertently this law certainly supported my father’s journey to Pittsburgh from India as an engineer in the early 1970s to carve a new life for his family.

  As my mother explained to us from time to time, they came with nothing but their brains and grit to succeed in the West. Yet, along with the glory came a little heartache.

  ‘Your dad worked hard after moving here which I suppose was good, but not so wonderful for me.’

  She had what seemed like an infinite amount of time on her hands to explore the new landscape, as she wasn’t working, but was mortified to travel alone in her new world. In fact, it would have been virtually impossible for her to communicate with her limited English skills, coated with a thick accent. And wrapping two shawls around her traditional Indian garment, a sari, and a thin coat wasn’t enough to help her adjust to the shocking change in weather. My mom had never seen a day of snow, and she quickly concluded that looking at it from the window was far more appealing than walking through it.

  So she sat in their cold apartment with no friends, family, or kids to preoccupy her time, and cried to go back to her homeland. Her days passed watching daytime soaps with life encompassing names such as The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, and Days of Our Lives.

  In that dark transitional phase she eventually found a few women in her neighbourhood who spoke her native tongue. They too were shedding tears from loneliness and found comfort in each other. They adjusted to their foreign surroundings together. It didn’t matter that they came from different backgrounds because they shared a common language and homeland. These women became family, and the first-generation children had the privilege of calling them Aunties.

  I loved these women who were a part of my life for decades. They were an extended family we wouldn’t have experienced otherwise in the US; but somehow or other my mind always flashed an unappealing caricature at the mere thought of them. As I sat in my room decorated in pink wallpaper and plush pink carpet, living an easy life my parents provided me, I thought—why must my beloved aunties be so—uncouth.

  My immaturity and shallowness were much too powerful to see beyond a handful of unflattering images: potbellied women with a fashion sense directly correlated to sales racks, copious cups of tea, and never-ending discussions about their incredibly difficult lives. I should have felt guilty about my thoughts of trivializing their toilsome lives. After all, adjusting to a foreign land, a foreign language, foreign food, and foreign people at once was overwhelming.

  Instead, I took refuge in the fact that most of my first generation Asian friends had nearly identical views; it was really a universal thought among us adolescents.

  There was no need to delve further than my own house to seal the vision; my mom was an auntie and by no means was she an exception to the norm.

  SPICE MANIA

  The day would begin and end with spices. In the morning it was the lingering smell on her fingers from packing leftover lunches; leaving a trail of curry stains like breadcrumbs in her path—first on our clothes when shaking us out of our morning comatose—then on our homework papers while throwing it in our bags.

  No matter how I tried to keep my assignments away from the food, 90 per cent of my papers and books were stained with bright yellow turmeric.

  The pungent smell and use of seasonings was most potent in the evenings, as my mom had all four burners going, even the broken one that took an hour to heat a pan. It seemed like a prerequisite to the auntie sororityhood, to
have a broken burner, never to be fixed but necessary to utilize. Every spice in the kitchen was thrown in one of the pots to cook—cumin, coriander, chilli powder, and turmeric rounding out the top four spices. Contrary to popular Western belief, Indian dishes aren’t made with one magic curry powder. She had a kitchen cabinet full of mismatched glass bottles that originally had jam or peanut butter, now filled with coloured spices. My mom wasn’t about to spend money on matching container sets when she could reuse empty peanut butter and jelly jars.

  We salivated over the dishes she made, eating without bothering about the calories. However, we did care about the smell that lingered on in our hair and clothing from all the spices. My parents didn’t purchase air fresheners to replace the odour of curries with the scent of lavender and camomile. So my mom’s cooking tagged along with me to school, allowing my classmates to smell my previous night’s dinner.

  DRIVING INCIDENTS

  Although my mom was licenced to drive soon after she immigrated to Pittsburgh, it seemed she would forever be a neophyte automobilist. Every time she approached our car her shoulders would tense and a loud sigh could be heard. She was never comfortable with ‘all the buttons’ in the car. The location of each knob was also a guessing game, even for the basic options that were used regularly. ‘It’s so cold, where is the heat button,’ she would ask every day, every winter season as if when she last left the vehicle, all the buttons miraculously moved around like musical chairs. The car was complicated but the road was just as formidable an enemy; they were windy and narrow, the stop signs and stop lights confusing, and all the vehicles on either side of the car made her feel claustrophobic. ‘The truck is going to hit me,’ she would nervously say while grasping the wheel tightly with both hands while passing one.