Inheritance (Vintage International) - Softcover

Ganesan, Indira

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804169241 ISBN 13: 9780804169240

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

On the surface, fifteen-year-old Sonil has come to her adored grandmother's house on a small island off the coast of India to mend her shaky health. Secretly, however, she longs to find out why her mysteriously distant mother agreed to have her sent away as a child.
 
She spends her time studying Italian with her absentminded uncle and talking about boys and clothes with her favorite cousin until she finds the perfect escape from her mother’s rejection--a passionate affair with a young American. But the affair will have a surprising outcome, forcing Sonil to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Indira Ganesan is the author three novels, including The Journey and As Sweet as Honey. She has held fellowships from the Paden Institute for Writers of Color, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in addition to the W. K. Rose Fellowship. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Antaeus, Black Renaissance, Bombay Gin, Half and Half: Writers on Biracialism & Biculturalism, Glamour, and Mississippi Review. She lives in Boston and Provincetown.

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One

 

My mother awoke in the holy hour before dawn, rumple-eyed and irritable. From the branches of the coral jasmine tree, a night-flowering wonder, small orange-centered blossoms fell to the ground in slow rhythms outside her window. She let a comb creep through her hair, with her fingertips touched sandalwood oil to her throat, between her breasts, her eyes closed in dreams. Perhaps she thought of marrying again. My mother wore a sari of pale yellow, and I imagined she felt she could write a novel then and there. Didn’t she have forty-six years of life to tell?

 

But in came my grandmother, scattering my mother’s thoughts away, shuffling on feet that had turned as hard as stone. Trumpeting words like an elephant, she asked my mother, “Have you brushed your teeth yet? Do you want your coffee now?” My mother, caught in her dreams, caught with her hand on her breast, nodded yes. The house was awake. The maids began to wash the dishesfrom the night before, and the cook yelled at them while cutting vegetables. The orange vendors and tomato sellers were already at the doorstep, calling out their wares. In the midst of this morning chaos, it was my mother who was labeled the maddest. She was the strange one, the daughter gone wrong, the bad woman who refused to go to temple, who needed her own mother to fetch her morning coffee, who would not wear widow-white. “Why should I wear white if I still have fifty years more of my life to live?” she had asked when her first husband died, refusing to look at my grandmother’s face.

 

I imagined my mother in the mornings like this, imagined her thoughts, her longings. She did not speak to me. When I was six, and arrived at my grandmother’s house on the island of Pi, dusty and yet presentable after a sultry train and boat journey from India, only my grandmother and Great-uncle Raj were at the table set for the midday meal. Even before I saw her bold-patterned sari and unbound hair, I knew my mother was watching me, suspicious, from acorner. For days we edged past each other. She spoke no words to me.

 

When I turned fifteen, I came to my grandmother’s house for a long stay, this time to rest, to get over a dragging spell of bronchitis. I had been given four months leave from my pre-university. My life was filledwith so much illness that I had become a kind of heroine for my younger cousins. (“This is Sonil,” they told their friends. “She gets a lot of diseases,”) There were hardly two days apart when I was not sick. It was when the huskiness in my voice was lifting, and my chest no longer ached as if atiger were walking about inside, that my grandmother suggested I spend the summer months at her home, away from the infected cities.

 

“The island air is so good-she’ll recover well,” wrote my grandmother to my guardian aunts in Madras.

 

“And Lakshmi, what about Lakshmi? Has she recovered as well?” whispered my aunts on the phone.

 

Lakshmi: that name had been whispered, lingered over in soft tones in my undetected presence for years. My mother, Lakshmi, who hadn’t seen me in nine years. Only from the merest shreds of conversation had I gathered bits of my mother’s story. They would not tell me the whole truth, so I became an eavesdropper, not knowing they shielded me from whatever harm could be imparted in words. It would be unthinkable, they said, to live with my mother. Only bad would come of it, they thought. What are they afraid of? Would shespit at me, scream at me, shake me as enraged madwomen do in the movies? Or was it simply the association they feared, that her strange ways would rub off on me, the way certain flowers left gold dust on my fingers? But despite the protests, my grandmother, who can wear a face as strong as any god’s, had her way.

 

So I went to Pi, to spend a summer full of change and wonder. It was a summer of attuned perceptions, a turnover, a prelude to adulthood; even now, I have not fully recovered from it. It was a summer ofawakening. My grandmother’s house was different from my home in Madras. Here, I could walk under the mango trees in a place that lacked only a waterfall tomake it a kind of paradise. In the mornings, tiny parrots, blazes of red and green, rushed into the skies that were brighter than any in Madras. The trees were full of monkeys, bright fruit stuffed into their mouths. I could make a telescope out of my hands and see their glittery old-man eyes.

 

Since she wouldn’t speak to me, I spied on my mother, wanting to learn the facts, the truths to tie a kind of monkey-knot to her, a knot that could not be undone. I wanted to know about the circumstances before and after my birth. They had said my arrival was not graceful.

 

They wouldn’t let my mother in the kitchen, I observed, to ward off the evil that must surround her, to keep it away from the most holy place in the house. She would take her coffee outside to the brick steps near the pots of roses. She would snap off a deep red bud to adorn herself, having no patience to wait for the lame girl who sold stringed jasmine wound with sage to wear in one’s hair. My mother, from her perch, and I, from mine, kept abreast of the flirtations between the cook’s daughter and the driver, noting the way he casually brushed by the daughter’s perfumed arms before mygreat-uncle rushed out for his morning drive. They didn’t worry about my mother’s gaze, so inconsequential was she.

My mother was infuriating. She refused to eat with the rest of us, making Grandmother set an extra plate for her after we’d eaten, before she, my grandmother, could eat. My grandmother insisted on serving all of us, Mother included, before she herself ate. This I did not think was nice of my mother, to delay my grandmother’s dinner. But maybe my grandmother enjoyed the conversation with my mother, for the two of them often spoke together for two hours, one for my mother’s dining, one for my grandmother’s. Their voices were only murmurs, hard for me to hear.

 

Maybe my mother ran away from me because there was a gene in our family that caused people to run and hide. Our family was shy, excepting my mother, and even she might be shy, for wouldn’t that have caused her to flee from me, her third daughter? For she did run away, run away from the American, my father, and leave me to my aunts.

 

My mother had three daughters. Her first she presented to a husband who wanted a son; she tried to fix things by choosing a name that could pass for masculine: Ramani. After her husband died, taking his secrets to the fire, several trendy college girls began to invite my mother, lovely at twenty-one, to their lawn parties. At one party, a rich boy, coolly dressedafter the fashion dictated by his affected English accent, a filmmaker’s son, promised to marry my mother. Whether she believed him or not, surely she was seduced by his voice, which ran like warm champagne. She named his child after Savitri, the most dutiful of wives in Hindu legend, a woman whose footstepsfollowed her husband’s even after his death. My mother didn’t trail after the filmmaker’s boy, though. She met an American expatriate, a photographer who came to Pi to capture on film the faces of wise seers and shy, mysterious women. The village women say she asked him to sleep with her, and he accepted, and she gave birth to me.

 

They named me Sonil, a name with no definite roots. When I was younger, I used to make up stories regarding my father’s death and my mother’s grief but they brought me nowhere. My parents remained as distant as any in a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804169241
• ISBN 13: 9780804169240
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland