I gathered the bangles I had borrowed from Indira Mami for the wedding and took them to her closet, which was a room off her bedroom with wardrobes along three sides. I used to play dress-up with her jewelry as a young girl and knew she didn’t mind me opening the wardrobes. A quick tug on the closet door reminded me that the cabinets in the house were always locked for fear that the servants would steal or looters would break in. It took some getting used to for me to keep everything under lock and key and never leave clothing or my laptop or earbuds lying around. Virag Mama and Indira Mami didn’t want to leave any temptations in plain sight.
There were horror stories of servants who had been with families for years learning their secrets and then robbing them and taking the money back to their families in the villages they grew up in. It saddened me to think that the caste system forced some to steal from the people who employed them to help feed their families. Equality was not even a topic of discussion in India, let alone something people strove for. Unlike in America, in India, the presumption was that the caste you were born into reflected your karma from past lives, and a life better lived meant that you’d elevate in the next life. Of course, the opposite held true as well. The fear of the unknown was enough to keep an undecided like me on the karmic straight and narrow as much as I could manage.
Indira Mami kept a large ring of dozens of skeleton keys on a clasp that tucked into her sari, and they jingled with each step she took. When we were kids causing mischief around the house, we knew to disperse and pretend we were behaving as soon as we heard that sound. Those keys were always on her. She had given me a small key to open the key box that hung on the wall in the foyer. I rummaged around the ones dangling on the hooks, until I found the spare set for her wardrobes.
After trying several keys in her closet, I heard the latch release, and the large cabinet door swung open. Indira Mami’s colorful bangles were organized on red velour rods on a higher shelf. I pulled a stepping block over to the cabinet and removed a rod that had space on it. When I slid the bangles back in their place, I noticed the thick cardboard boxes I had seen as a child—the ones that held old family photos.
It had been decades since I had looked through those. I removed a couple and sat on the floor. The photos were yellowed with age, some in sepia tones rather than the vibrant colors of modern-day prints. There were photos of Hari and Bharat when they were young. Neel and I were in some of them: playing in the yard, climbing on the hichko, sitting at the dining table. In some, my family was dressed in traditional Indian attire for weddings or dinner parties. In others, Neel and I wore our Western shorts and shirts, grinning at the camera like happy fools.
When I met people in Ahmedabad, they always knew I was American. Without me saying a word. Something in my clothing, hairstyle, or general presence projected that I was not a local. Comparing the photos from when I was a little girl in Ahmedabad to the ones from our visits after moving to America, I realized it had become obvious I was now NRI. In the later pictures my smile was bolder and more direct compared to the demure, deferential looks on my relatives’ faces. I stood with my hands on my hips, rather than clasped neatly in front of me like the other girls in the photos. My subconscious self in India hadn’t been as focused on blending in or hiding, which seemed ironic because my conscious self in America had thought of nothing else since the day we moved there.
In the second box were photos of a little girl who had my familiar smile and large eyes. For my entire life, relatives had commented that I was a “copy” of my mother. I held the photo of her next to one of myself, finally seeing what everyone else had. How could two people who looked so similar on the outside be so different on the inside?
I continued sifting through the box. There were photos of my mother from her Kathak dance performances when she was a teenager. Her smile was soft and demure, but she beamed into the camera, her eyes shining brighter than the diamonds around her neck. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her with such a genuine smile on her face, but I also couldn’t recall the last time I had seen her dance. There were also photos of my parents as a young newly married couple. Their smiles were shy and awkward. I had seen those paired smiles countless times. I thought about what it must have been like for Mom to have met Dad only once before her wedding day. I had always been sure that if they had ever dated, they never would have married, because they didn’t seem to have any common interests from which to build a foundation. But that wasn’t the criteria for a marriage in India, and theirs, by Indian and maybe even Western standards, was considered a successful one. They had been married over thirty-five years and had two professionally prosperous kids to continue their legacy.