“I don’t care!” Tara whispered under her breath, but it was a rather loud whisper, and the corners of her mouth drooped after she said it. The sexy lingerie, it was certainly not to catch his attention. She dressed better in mall-bought clothes, got highlights in her hair, touched her eyelashes with mascara when she went out—they were self-improvement exercises that uplifted her sagging self-esteem. She didn’t do any of this for him, and certainly not to come up a few notches in comparison with an evil blonde bitch.
Chapter 13
Tara had seen little of her brother at Shanti Nilaya. The first time he returned to Mangalore with Amma and Daddy during the summer of 1979, he wasn’t even the brother she had said good-bye to. He was a four-year-old boy with curly hair who called her Akka, big sister, but said he didn’t know her.
A week into their vacation, Daddy took his family to the Summer Sands beach resort in Ullal. They stayed at a luxurious red-tiled villa with soft beds and a palm-fringed pool, the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea before them. An idyllic weekend, so far away from her reality. Daddy looked every bit a Gulf resident in his gold-rimmed aviator glasses and swimming trunks. He was in a good mood too. He ruffled Tara’s hair and joked about its unamenable nature.
“Thank God, it is only your hair that is wild,” he said.
Amma, lovely Amma, whose fashionable chiffon sari billowed in the warm seaside breeze, shook her head, blinked her eyes at Daddy to make him stop teasing. “We’ll get a haircut next week,” she said, as if her hair were wild too. It wasn’t.
Daddy asked Tara about school, but nothing about home where Uncle Anand was doing a good job hiding his paranoia from his Dubai relatives behind a stony face and deep silence.
“How is school?”
“Fine.”
“Are you studying hard?”
“Yes.”
“I am expecting you to be the first doctor in the family.”
“I want to be a writer.”
“A writer?” Daddy laughed. “All romantic notions in that head, eh? Reading is good, but writing is not a real career. Writers go hungry.”
Amma shook her head again and called Tara her little Shakespeare. “Not all writers go hungry,” she retorted. “Your room wouldn’t be lined with books if they did.”
Tara looked at her little brother as he sped from the pool to the golden sands to the ocean’s cool edge to marvel at the frothy blue waves. She knew he would grow up to become a doctor or engineer. He would make Daddy and Amma proud. Even now, at four, he was a curious child and asked unending questions.
“My intelligent boy,” Daddy said with pride, when Vijay wanted to know if the waves that licked his feet at Summer Sands traveled all the way to Dubai. The wind carried sea water across great distances, Daddy explained. So it was possible the water would one day reach Dubai.
Later that day, Tara helped Vijay mold wet sand into a castle.
“Who lives in the castle?” he asked.
“Amma, Daddy, Vijay, and I,” she replied.
“No. Amma, Daddy, and Vijay. You live in India.”
“But I am your sister. We should all live together, no?”
Vijay contemplated this for a while, then shook his head. “No, you are the dragon. You are in the attic, locked up.”
“Why am I the dragon? Why should I be locked up? I am your sister.”
Vijay made curved claws of his chubby hands, stuck his tongue out, and made guttural growling noises.
“Do this, do this,” he cried.
Tara ducked from the attack of Vijay’s wet tongue. Then momentarily, the dragon was inside her as she gripped the back of Vijay’s head and pushed his face into the sandcastle. Seconds ticked. The castle crumbled into wet sand. The palm of her hand felt his panic as he struggled to push his head up, get his face out of the sand. His legs thrashed about. When she released him, she realized that she had held her breath as long as she had denied her brother air. She used the edge of her frock to wipe the wet sand from his eyelids, and off his face. When she held him in her arms and kissed his cheeks, they were salty with tears.
“That man did it,” she said to Vijay, pointing a shaking, guilty finger at a stranger’s silhouette in the far distance. She didn’t know if Vijay believed her, because he only bawled in return.
Vijay never called Tara a dragon again. After her family returned to Mangalore in 1982, he had no need for the protection of his big sister. Every evening, she stood watch as he played with other little boys and girls in their community, riding his bike or playing cricket or “catch the pillar.” Whenever he fell off his bike, he picked himself up without crying. He was outgoing, talkative. She was quiet, introverted. At eighteen, Vijay had moved out of their home to live in the dorm at his engineering college in Mysore. Since then, they’d had little opportunity to bond because, after getting an electronic engineering degree, Vijay had moved to California to complete his master’s in computer science, and then taken up a job there.
When Daddy got together with his drinking buddies, he never ceased to brag about his bright son whose zest, drive, and intelligence were unmatched in his eyes. He would sigh, a little tipsy from the scotch, his voice slurring mildly, and repeat his desire to be alive to see all the wonders his son would accomplish in his life.
Amma bragged about Vijay too, but always remembered to add a good word for her daughter. “She is so creative. She writes beautifully.”
At twenty-eight, Vijay was already director of business intelligence in a large healthcare company. At thirty-four, Tara still cleaned offices three times a week. And it was she, the big sister, who needed him now. She called Vijay late one afternoon and gave him an overview of her circumstances.
“I knew there was something crooked about the asshole,” he said. “Something just didn’t add up.”
Vijay visited her one weekend and helped her write her resume. He was only an inch taller than Tara, but he had inherited Amma’s translucent skin. His face shone brightly and was crowned with thick, curly hair. She didn’t want him staying in the apartment, so he checked himself into the nearby Holiday Inn. In his hotel room, she settled into a moss-green upholstered chair and watched sullenly as he worked his contacts in the Atlanta area, hatching the best route for Tara to build a career in IT.
Soon, a plan emerged, after long tele-conversations with faceless, seemingly knowledgeable techies at the other end of the phone. A path was laid out for her. The first step would be to enroll in an IT institute run by an acquaintance of Vijay’s in Norcross, to train in quality assurance. Once she had the QA certification, the acquaintance would help place her and take a cut from her salary each month.
Vijay was pragmatic and operated like the engineer he was. In his world view, problems were always material and had solutions. Tara was grateful to Vijay for the support, and for helping with the fees at Anil Rajgopalan’s Qvision Tech Institute. And yet, even when he berated Sanjay, not once had he put his arm around her or asked how she was coping with her situation.
“You need to get out of the victim mentality,” he told her matter-of-factly before leaving for California. “Focus on bettering yourself.”
She resisted the urge to snap back at him, to return his check that she was holding in her hand. It was the same hand that had pushed his head into a sandcastle all those years ago. From where she stood, it was important to put things in perspective. At least Vijay had cared enough to rush to her aid. She smiled a thin smile and said nothing in return. She prepared herself mentally to go back to tech class, despite her poor aptitude.