Connecting more dots

I woke up at about 7:30 a.m. Because my mother was using the hotel room coffeemaker to boil water for tea, I headed out into the lobby to get a cup of coffee. En route, I passed an elderly Indian gentleman who was wearing exercise clothes and also looked to be heading for the coffee. When he saw me, his face broke into a smile and he said in a loud booming voice that felt oddly familiar, "Good morning, Aiyeee, aiyee" which I think translates to "Come and get it," as in the coffee.

I kept wondering who the gentleman was, and over breakfast a couple of hours later, I pointed him out to my parents. They filled in the gaps, and in doing so, reminded me of a story of a childhood mis-remembered experience, for lack of a better word.

First, the gaps. The man was actually a second cousin to me. He was the son of my mother's eldest sister's husband's brother, and we had visited him in Los Angeles in 1969 on a family trip that had included visits to Disneyland and Universal Studios. He had come to the United States in 1968, shortly after the first trip we had taken back to India during the December break a year earlier.

As they filled the gaps, I exclaimed, "Oh, I've got to go talk to him. I have a story I need to tell him."

Excitedly, I spilled out the story to my parents. I know I've probably told it to them before, but they don't always remember this one.

I had just turned seven during that trip to Los Angeles in 1969. Like most seven-year-olds, I have my fretful moments and I was acting out of them while we were in my second cousin's apartment. I remember my dad saying that if I didn't behave myself, he would put me out on the freeway. That shut me up good, and scared me for many years after. As I grew older, however, I often wondered what I had done that was so terrible that my father would say something like that. He is a quiet, soft-spoken, gentle man who occasionally gets angry. But statements like "putting you out on the freeway" are not in his nature.

More years passed, and at age 40, in 2003, I was at the Iowa Summer Writer's Festival, taking workshops in fiction and poetry. One day, I was attending a reading in which the workshop teachers were sharing their work in progress. One read from a piece in which she quoted American cultural commentator Joan Didion describing a dehumanizing incident in Los Angeles in which a child was left out on the freeway. When police found the child, the skin of her palms had stuck to the wire fencing around the on-ramps that she had clung to in terror. News reports, according to the Didion piece cited by the reader, had said that the child's parents had put her out on the freeway because she had misbehaved.

I remember that during the reading I sat bolt upright in my chair, and felt my chest start to pound. Tears came to my eyes, as I realized that I probably had not heard my father talking but that news report. In a small apartment and in the mind of a small child, voices can easily mingle. I felt a huge load of accumulated shame and fear slide off me as I realized that I had mis-remembered my memory.

That was ten years ago. I wrote the story out once during a Write O Rama workshop at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle and shared it via an open mic, but I've never done more than that. Neither one of my parents know who Joan Didion is, or remember the newscast.

As I re-told my parents the story this morning, my mother intervened gently. "He is a practical man," she said, "so be careful in how you present the story."

I cornered my second cousin at the end of the Hindu ceremony that was part of my cousin Shikha's wedding. My dad was standing nearby and so was his wife, so they all got to hear the story. He also didn't know who Joan Didion was and didn't remember the incident. But he did remember the trip to Los Angeles and burst into laughter as I brought up other scraps of memory from the vacation such as going to Disneyland, staying in his apartment, and eating cotton candy. Then, he asked me: "Do you know how we are related?"

He explained the family connection, much as my parents had earlier that day. He also laughed as he told me that at age 70 he was older than most of my mother's surviving siblings, even though in the genealogical line, he was technically their nephew. He also noted that my Hema Auntie (who is just four years younger than my mother, who is 77) had married a cousin of his father.

"I didn't know that connection," I said with a laugh.

"It's hard to keep track," he said, "especially when we disperse. We might know the relatives of three or four of our family members, but then  we just drift apart."

In the meantime, his wife asked me how old I was. When I responded that I was fifty, she stared in disbelief. "Fifty? You can't be. You were born here (referring to the United States)?"

I explained that my parents had emigrated in 1961 and that I had been born a year later. I also pointed out my two younger sisters and my nieces who were milling about.

My mother's oldest sister was 13 years older than she was. If she had not passed away in 1986, she would be 90 years old today. My mother's youngest sister is 58, just eight years older than I am. I talked over these details with two of my younger cousins during the reception when one of them expressed surprised that I was just ten years younger than her mother.

"The family was so big," I said.

"And our Nanaji married twice," one of them added.

As we spoke, I recalled that the voice of my second cousin had sounded somewhat familiar when he greeted me in the morning. It dawned on me that the tone was very much like the tone of that oldest sister's husband. When we lived in India in 1973-74, we stayed in their house for quite awhile and I had remembered "Masaji" as a good-humored man who spoke a bit loudly in a jovial way. That was the tone that my second cousin emitted.