Going Home

The first time I saw my white aunt, I nearly freaked. She was ugly.

“Well,” my mother shrugged, “they say love is blind.” Everybody else had been content to get married the normal way, by arranged marriage. But my father’s brother, Bhan, had gone to England to study and come back with a pipe, an English accent, and a way of sitting with his legs crossed over at the knee as though he was having tea with the queen.

“But it look like she is the one who blind,” my father responded.

My new aunt had thick, thick glasses with heavy black frames. And lapping-over teeth. And a kind of grainy skin, which hung on her face. And dull hair, neither blond nor dark, neither curly nor straight, that just ended—baps!—at the bottom of her head.

For me, this was a disaster. How could I be so unlucky as to get for an aunt the only ugly white person God had ever made? I had seen lots of movies. My older sister was an Elvis Presley fan, and I could recognise Ann Margaret, Priscilla Presley, and Bridget Bardot at a glance. None of them looked anything like Uncle Bhan’s wife. In fact, nobody in the movies was remotely like her. Nobody’s clothes hung limply from obsocky breasts and a little paunch.

And I had been so pleased to have a white aunt at last. Everybody in school had one. Somebody in their family had gone away and married an Englishman or American and had relatives called Roger or Shelley. I had never had anybody except Kissoondaye and Vishnudath, and, God help me, Gowrie.

It was just my bad luck again, I thought. Every time I was about to get something to elevate me, God would just place some element in my way, to make me remain the most unfashionable, miserable, shameful person I knew. My mother always said I was a lucky child. I was born on a Sunday, was bright in school, and everybody liked me. But little did my mother know. First of all, I had the darkest skin in my family, and I knew how my aunts described dark people. “She dark but good-looking,” they said. But nobody ever said I was good-looking. Only bright. Then, I was a klutz. “Poohar,” my mother called it, always spilling things and dropping things and forgetting. If she sent me upstairs to get something, by the time I had reached the top of the stairs I would have forgotten what it was and be shouting down at her to remind me.

“You go forget your head one of these days,” she would snap when I came back. “It always in some damn book.”

But the characters in books, the Rogers and Shelleys and Jeremies, were always more interesting than the Kissoondayes and Vishnudaths with whom I was surrounded. They would hatch plots to find buried treasure while sitting on the branches of a peach tree and end up capturing a gang of dangerous smugglers. I had never even seen a peach, far less a peach tree. When we sat on the branches of our mango tree, all we did was eat green mangoes with salt and pepper and end up getting a castor-oil purge.

Eventually, the family forgave my white aunt her ugliness.

“She have nice ways,” my mother said. Which was like saying somebody was dark but good-looking.

Aunty Norma was surprisingly keen to learn everything: how to cook paratha properly, for example, and what kind of gift to buy for a wedding. And she took an interest in even the most backward branches of the family, the Gowries and Kissoondayes, who did things like fall into the latrine, or take off their panties when they visited to hang them in the bedroom to “air out.” And so did her husband, Uncle Bhan, despite his English accent, pipe, and way of crossing his legs.

So when I got a scholarship for one of the top high schools in the city, they suggested I go and stay with them. I was thrilled...