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173 appendix “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” By Chitra Divakaruni When the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., buzzing like a trapped wasp, Mrs. Dutta has been lying awake for quite a while. She still has difficulty sleeping on the Perma Rest mattress that Sagar and Shyamoli, her son and daughter-in-law, have bought specially for her, though she has had it now for two months. It is too American-soft, unlike the reassuring solid copra ticking she used at home. But this is home now, she reminds herself. She reaches hurriedly to turn off the alarm, but in the dark her fingers get confused among the knobs, and the electric clock falls with a thud to the floor. Its angry metallic call vibrates through the walls of her room, and she is sure it will wake everyone. She yanks frantically at the wire until she feels it give, and in the abrupt silence that follows she hears herself breathing, a sound harsh and uneven and full of guilt. Mrs. Dutta knows, of course, that this ruckus is her own fault. She should just not set the alarm. She does not need to get up early here in California, in her son’s house. But the habit, taught her by her mother-in-law when she was a bride of seventeen, A good wife wakes before the rest of the household, is one she finds impossible to break. How hard it was then to pull her unwilling body away from the sleep-warm clasp of her husband, Sagar’s father, whom she had just learned to love; to stumble to the kitchen that smelled of stale garam masala and light the coal stove so that she could make morning tea for them all—her parents-in-law, her husband, his two younger brothers, and the widowed aunt who lived with them. After dinner, when the family sits in front of the TV, she tries to tell her grandchildren about those days. “I was never good at starting that stove—the smoke stung my eyes, making me cough and cough. Breakfast was never ready on time, and my mother-in-law—oh, how she scolded me, until I was in tears. Every night I’d pray to Goddess Durga, please let me sleep late, just one morning!” “Mmmm,” Pradeep says, bent over a model plane. “Oooh, how awful,” Mrinalini says, wrinkling her nose politely before she turns back to a show filled with jokes that Mrs. Dutta does not understand. 174 Appendix “That’s why you should sleep in now, Mother,” Shyamoli says, smiling at her from the recliner where she sits looking through the Wall Street Journal. With her legs crossed so elegantly under the shimmery blue skirt she has changed into after work, and her unusually fair skin, she could pass for an American, thinks Mrs. Dutta, whose own skin is as brown as roasted cumin. The thought fills her with an uneasy pride. From the floor where he leans against Shyamoli’s knee, Sagar adds, “We want you to be comfortable, Ma. To rest. That’s why we brought you to America.” In spite of his thinning hair and the gold-rimmed glasses that he has recently taken to wearing, Sagar’s face seems to Mrs. Dutta still that of the boy she used to send off to primary school with his metal tiffin box. She remembers how he crawled into her bed on stormy monsoon nights, how when he was ill, no one else could make him drink his barley water. Her heart lightens in sudden gladness because she is really here, with him and his children in America. “Oh, Sagar,” she says, smiling, “now you’re talking like this! But did you give me a moment’s rest while you were growing up?” And she launches into a description of childhood pranks that has him shaking his head indulgently while disembodied TV laughter echoes through the room. But later he comes into her bedroom and says, a little shamefaced, “Mother, please don’t get up so early in the morning. All that noise in the bathroom—it wakes us up, and Molli has such a long day at work . . .” And she, turning a little so that he won’t see her foolish eyes filling with tears, as though she were a teenage bride again and not a woman well over sixty, nods her head, yes, yes. Waiting for the sounds of the stirring...

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