What You Call Winter

  Grace is still waiting when Rowena puts down the receiver. “It was Aunty Beryl,” she says quickly, “just telling me where to meet her for lunch.” Rowena’s aunt Beryl lives in nearby Pali Hill, in the house where Rowena was raised after her own mother died.

  “But I’ve been wanting to speak to Beryl! I meant to phone her yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry, Mum. I would have put you on, but she was rushing out of the house.”

  Grace looks away, her lips moving briefly against each other in a gesture of such delicate agitation that Rowena is reminded of a cat. “It’s strange she didn’t ask to speak to me.”

  Mark looks at Rowena over Lizzie’s head. “She’s meeting you in town?” Lizzie is trying with both hands to grasp his cup of tea, but Mark catches her fingers and holds them fast. “That’s hot,” he warns her. “Wait ’til it cools.” Lizzie puffs her cheeks and begins to blow. She is four years old, their only child. Rowena would like another. Mark says he’s happy as they are — a temporary stance, Rowena believes. A kind of indolence from which she must rouse him.

  “You should ride in with her,” he says.

  “She has to see someone first.” Rowena busies herself with the kettle, pouring a cup of tea she will not have time to drink. She keeps her voice calm, her hands steady, though her stomach feels sour. She has told Mark and Grace that she will spend the day shopping in the city, a story that, she comforts herself, is at least partially true. She had not intended to invent a lunch, to involve Beryl. “Actually, she may not be able to get away in time to meet me. We’ll see.”

  For the past several days, Rowena has worried that all her plans will go awry, that Mark will announce he’d like to join her. They used to go on such outings together: wandering in and out of shops, choosing bedspreads, letter paper, a small carved wooden screen that Mark fit into their canvas duffel for the trip back to the States.

  But he just nods, one arm looped around Lizzie, the other holding the Times of India. His hair is still thick and curly but beginning to gray. He hasn’t shaved in two days, reminding Rowena of days when he was a resident and buried his face in her neck the moment he came home. “You’re taking the train in? Maybe she can give you a lift home.”

  “Oh, no, darling! Not the train. It’s so hot and dirty! And pickpockets everywhere. Take a taxi. I can give you money if you need.”

  Grace has never liked the commuter train, which is so crowded during the morning and evening rushes that men near the open doorways have been known to fall off. When Rowena and Mark were first married, they used to laugh off her objections and take the train together, Rowena passing up the peace of the ladies’ compartment to ride in a regular car with Mark.

  “A cab might be simpler if you have bags.” Mark returns to his newspaper. “Just pay the guy to stay with you all day.”

  Rowena has bathed and dressed early, but Mark hasn’t yet washed. He is wearing an old T-shirt, bright red running shorts, and reading glasses. His slippers are tumbled near the door, where he left them early that morning. He spent nearly an hour walking with Lizzie at dawn, up and down the driveway and on the sandy bit of road outside the compound. They only arrived from the States a week ago, and Lizzie has not quite adjusted to her new nights and days.

  Now she hangs over Mark’s teacup, clamoring for a sip, and Grace holds out her arms to the child. “Come, baby, let Daddy have his tea. I’ll give you your own cup, all for you.” She fills a mug with milk and adds a thin stream of tea from the kettle.

  “Now you stir,” Lizzie tells her.

  “That’s right.” Grace laughs. “Where’s our spoon? See, now we’re happy. Look at Mumma, doesn’t she look nice? She’s going to town.”

  Rowena has dressed as though for work at home, in a pharmaceutical firm where she has cut back to three days a week since they brought Lizzie home. She adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, Lizzie’s adoption files zipped carefully inside, out of sight.

  Lizzie considers her mother. “I want to go too,” she says stoutly. She is a happy child, fat and healthy, with curly black hair all over her head that looks like Mark’s. When people notice a resemblance, Rowena says nothing to dissuade them.

  “No, no, baby. You stay with Grandma.” Grace hugs her, realizing her mistake, and Rowena moves quickly to kiss the child—a smacking kiss to make Lizzie laugh. She and Mark prefer not to make a production of leaving.

  “You can play with your cousins,” she says in a bright voice. Mark’s sister and her family live in the same building, in a flat upstairs; there is a new baby, three weeks old, whom Lizzie adores.

  “And later on you have a special visitor coming,” Grace adds. “We can make a cake for her.” In the holiday season visitors dropped by nearly every evening, and tonight Sister Agnes is expected. After another week she will return to Mysore, where she has worked for years at Holy Family Orphanage. It was Sister Agnes who took Rowena through the wards, the first time Rowena saw Lizzie.

  Grace glances at Rowena. “Tell Beryl to come too, if you see her,” she offers stiffly.

  “I’ll be back before dinner,” Rowena promises before turning to Mark. “You’ll be okay? You may need to lie down with her later.” Grace’s apartment is still a foreign landscape to Lizzie; when she’s tired, the strong-tasting milk or the angry red light of the hot water heater can reduce her to tears. In bright sunlit hours Lizzie is content to be without her mother, but before and after sleep, she has been clinging to Rowena.

  Mark yawns widely, the paper rustling between them. “We’ll be fine.”

  Grace smooths Lizzie’s bangs from her forehead. “I’ll nap with her. Happy to, darling.”

  “I’m not napping,” Lizzie announces.

  “After the cake, darling. Not for a long while. Rowena, you have your wallet? Keep it at the bottom of your bag,” Grace warns.

  “I’d be better off if she left the wallet. Don’t go crazy,” Mark calls after her—a joke that seems as if it ought to belong to another sort of couple, nothing Rowena imagined she and Mark would become. But she doesn’t say anything, just hurries away before Lizzie notices she has gone.

  For the first few years, Mark and Rowena both laughed at the postscripts in his mother’s letters. He used to read them aloud to her in bed at night, Rowena’s head tucked against Mark’s chest, his arm reaching around her shoulder to hold the thin blue aerogrammes Grace sent every week. Spring swelled into summer. In the small, dark bedroom of their first apartment, an electric fan trained on the bed and the sheets of the letter trembling in its breeze, Rowena pressed against Mark and listened to rambling accounts of the extra bit of fish his mother bought at the market or the cousin who came to visit and stayed only twenty minutes or how much she gave to the lady collecting for little slum children. Always at the absolute bottom of the last page, Grace sent blessings, hugs, kisses. A month after the wedding, the postscripts began. I am praying for good news soon.

  Twelve years later, Rowena could still call it all to mind: the futon, soft and warm as bread dough; the fan blades rattling in their cage; the old bureau they shared, its surface littered with matchbooks from bars, Rowena’s hair clips and jewelry, Mark’s watch, a few crumpled receipts. In those days Mark wore a faded Harvard T-shirt to bed, the letters cracked and flaking, and Rowena used to drag a finger along his ribs in a slow, serpentine motion while he read aloud. She knew the days when he had used her soap, could feel as well as hear his voice, rumbling beneath her cheek. Sometimes she tried to match her breathing to his, deep and even, in perfect accord.

  In the taxi, her nerves are loose and jangly as pocket change; she cannot collect herself. Traffic is heavy and she worries that she’ll be late. The window is smeared with grime, and she rolls it down to a blast of fumes and hot air. The taxi heaves forward, past a rattling red bus. A brisk commerce has struck up beneath the new flyover, where vendors have set up stalls despite municipal notices. The taxi driver grumbles and they lurch into another lane. Rowena slides hard to one sid
e of the vinyl bench seat, empty except for her small frame. For a moment, her relief at having concealed the meeting from Mark is replaced by the feeling that she is completely alone. What began as an omission has taken new unsettling form, become a secret.

  Rowena has kept secrets before, secrets that only her body knew. “There are tests we can run, but the truth is, we may never know why this happened,” the doctor told her after the first miscarriage. She had shown Rowena a picture from the week before, when the baby was still developing normally. “This is what I expected to see,” she said gently, and then she pointed to the picture she had just taken. Rowena nodded. When she had to speak—to schedule a procedure, to refuse assistance from the nurse — it was in quick dry bursts, like dust beaten from cushions. She drove herself home and did not call Mark for several hours.

  There were clinics and specialists, tests. Grace’s postscripts advocated prayer or special diets; she wrote at length to urge a course of homeopathic medicine that had worked for someone’s niece. At first each month’s disappointment felt short-lived, a misstep, luck stumbling before they moved forward into their real life. But eventually it seemed to her that all along, their hopes were being funneled slowly, painfully, away. After the third miscarriage, Rowena woke in the middle of the night in an empty bed. She heard Mark’s voice and slipped downstairs to find him hunched on a kitchen stool in the dark, his back to where she stood in the doorway. He was speaking softly into the phone, warning his mother not to mention anything upsetting. Rowena went back to bed before he discovered her. When he finally came up, she pretended to be asleep.

  A few years later they adopted Lizzie, and the family that had once seemed lost to Rowena came rushing back, possible once more. She was not prepared for Mark’s reluctance when she mentioned a second child. Rowena remained on adoption list servers, kept in contact with families in various stages of waiting, considered herself in a waiting stage. She only needed more time to convince Mark. Then a few days before her thirty-eighth birthday, she faced the mirror, running her fingers through her hair to find the silver strands beneath. Soon she would be forty. Her children would only know her as an older woman, a woman who had to dye her hair. That was the day she wrote to Sonali.

  Sonali is a wealthy, stylish woman in her mid-fifties. Her two grown sons are in university, but the house is kept lively with three foster children, girls no one has wanted. One, a toddler, is underfoot during their meeting. “Kripa loves to be where the action is,” says Sonali fondly. The child breaks Rowena’s heart—bald-headed, skin patched together as though by a ragman. Her lips are more like scars, shiny and misshapen. Her arms and legs seem to be flaking away and even her eyes are affected, the eyelids scarred and heavy, the pupils strangely fixed. She stands between Sonali’s knees, barefoot, in a pink cotton dress that hangs nearly to her ankles, and picks up one after another of the ornaments on the coffee table. “She loves to organize things — right, my precious? And she loves to help me find my spectacles. Kripa! Where are my spectacles, Kripa?”

  The child gropes along the table.

  “Can she see?” asks Rowena.

  “A little yet. The sight is gone in one eye. Ooh! There are my specs. Thank you, Kripa. Now take that box and play with it, yes?” Kripa laughs and tries to grab the glasses from Sonali’s face. “We’d better get this monkey out of here, or we’ll get nothing accomplished.” She calls for one of her servants to take Kripa to the kitchen. “Give her some coconut. She’ll be feeling hungry soon.”

  “Poor little thing. Was she burned?” Rowena asks when the child has been led away.

  “Born like that. The family kept her for a month or so, waiting to see if it would go away. I suppose the mother was petrified, a village girl. Just as well. Baby would have died without special care.” She looks toward the doorway through which the girl has gone and smiles as tenderly as if Kripa were still there. “No one thought she would live past a year, and now she’s fifteen months. Doctor says who knows, now she may be out of danger. She’s a happy little thing, with all she endures. You know, we have to bathe her twice a day to clear away the skin, even in her ears. It scales away constantly.”

  “Is she in pain?”

  “She is uncomfortable if we don’t tend to her. There are medicated lotions we must use, and we’re careful with her diet. Her feet become irritated when she walks too much, but she’s always wanting to run around.”

  Rowena imagines the child’s cracked skin peeling away like the outer layers of onion. All that was dry and discolored would fall away, and Kripa would emerge unscarred, smiling with fresh new lips. “And she’ll improve?”

  “They say not. This is for all her life.”

  Rowena tries to absorb this and cannot. It seems impossible that a child should be locked in her own skin, that no treatment, no medicine, can help her.

  “But we’ve fallen in love with her,” Sonali says warmly. “Such a funny little creature, you can’t think. So adventurous, so determined. More stubborn than either of my boys. And they adore her, they send e-mails that I read to her at bedtime.” She crosses her leg. “Now. You haven’t come here to speak about Kripa.”

  Rowena shifts in her seat, knits her hands in resolve. “We want to adopt another. We think it’s time. And we both come from big families. That’s something we’ve always wanted.” Her voice is firm and even; there is enough truth in what she is saying. She and Mark had both hoped for many children — until he changed his mind.

  “Good news, good for you!” Sonali checks her watch. “I have twenty minutes before I dash. So let’s be quick. You’re what? Thirty-eight?”

  “Thirty-nine in October.”

  “Then we must hurry. It will probably be a girl again. You can request a boy, but that may cause a delay and everything becomes more difficult once you’re past forty.”

  “No, no, a girl is fine. A girl is wonderful.”

  Sonali nods briskly. “Right, then. How long are you here?”

  “Three more weeks. I thought I could begin with the paperwork on this end.”

  “Good. Your fingerprints and all will be on file from the last time, but you’ll have to turn in your application right away so it can be processed before your birthday. You have your U.S. application ready? You and Mark have signed everything?”

  “There wasn’t time before we left,” Rowena says smoothly. “I’ve prepared nearly everything, but we haven’t turned in the final paperwork.” In fact she only needed Mark’s signature. She had even written the statements from the parents.

  “Fill out the financial records at least, and send those in. You go home in three weeks and work on the rest — submit them as quickly as you can. Now it won’t be as easy as with Lizzie. The government position has changed. They’re pushing for children to be placed with Indian families.”

  “But Mark and I both—”

  “You’re nonresident Indians, you have different status. And you know there’s a bias toward Hindus.”

  Rowena feels a familiar twinge: always the chance that it will not happen after all. “But it’s not impossible?”

  “Not impossible.” Sonali takes Rowena’s hand, a sudden swift motion that threatens Rowena’s composure. “You must be realistic, that’s all. The child may be a few months older or have some minor condition. Or she may just have darker skin, who knows? Let’s go one step at a time; we’ll see what happens once the papers are in. I’ll do everything I can for you. How is Lizzie doing?” she asks abruptly.

  Rowena recovers herself, smiles. “She’s fine. Perfect. The apple of her father’s eye. He’s so in love with her he can hardly imagine another.”

  “They always think that.” Sonali shakes her head. “Until they meet the next one. Then suddenly they can’t imagine their lives without. Nikhil is crazy about Kripa.”

  “Will you adopt her, then?”

  Sonali shrugs. “I am fifty-five, Nikhil is sixty. We have to think about the boys, since they may well land up with her care. And w
e don’t know yet what that means. She’s been good for the boys. They look on her as a little sister, very protective, very loving. But adoption is a big step. You know.” She laughs. “For now, the little one rules the household. Absolute dictator, I’m telling you. We may not have a choice in the matter!”

  Just before it is time to go, Kripa comes rushing back into the room, clapping hands that resemble paws. Rowena thanks Sonali; she kisses Kripa on her forehead—the bald scalp like paper beneath her lips; she walks out into the dazzle of midday sun. She moves quickly through her shopping and eats near a children’s store Sonali recommended, where she buys a mirror-work outfit for Lizzie and a small embroidered top with matching pants, size six months. She has begun to see her next child, asleep in the crib they will bring down from the attic, or sitting in Lizzie’s lap for a picture, both in their Indian outfits. When she puts up her hand to hail a taxi, her bangles fall toward her elbow and make a noise that reminds her of her mother, who died when Rowena was seven.

  Rowena sits in the taxi, clinging to a leather strap as they jounce over ruts in the road. She hardly notices the city neighborhoods outside her window except as another portion of her journey accomplished. The road is clogged, even in midafternoon, and bicycles edge in and out of crowds. A motor scooter carrying a family of five draws close, and though such sights are commonplace Rowena is struck by them. They fit together like nesting bowls, the smaller boy tucked against the older, the older boy leaning into the father. The mother sits in the back, a baby tight to her chest. They move at roughly the same speed as the taxi, surging briefly ahead and then dropping behind, until eventually they turn off somewhere near Worli. Rowena feels oddly bereft as they curve away from her. One corner of the woman’s dupatta has slipped free from beneath her and it flutters behind them, a rippling wave that Rowena watches until the taxi pulls forward and the motor scooter has moved out of sight. She does not notice the cyclist on their other side until the cab jerks and she sees a shape all in white come hurtling over the hood. It hits the window like a bale of cotton, a dull, soft thud that jars the whole car so that Rowena is still shaking when it is all over and the man and the taxi are still.