When Diya turned eighteen, she told her grandmother where she wanted to go to college and what she wanted to study and build her life’s work out of, which was art. Her grandmother’s mood immediately shifted, in the familiar way Diya had spent nearly a lifetime tiptoeing around. At that moment, though, on the cusp of starting a different life, or perhaps just the same one in a different setting, Diya’s ability to accept her grandmother’s reticence collapsed.
Is there some kind of problem? she asked.
No, no problem at all, her grandmother said, with forced cheerfulness. Diya couldn’t tell if her grandmother thought she was succeeding in masking her feelings or whether she wanted the dissonance to ring loudly, to stir some sort of guilt in Diya. Either way, it was infuriating.
I’m not stupid, Diya said, I can tell this bothers you.
Still, her grandmother demurred. Diya felt her anger rising and fought to push it down. She took care of you all these years when no one else would have, she thought; and yet also, You never had a father but you once had a mother and she let that mother leave; she stole that from you; THIEF.
I’ll ask again, Diya said, almost yelling. What exactly is your problem? I’m not doing this anymore, this pretending. Just say what it is you’re thinking.
Once she got going, she found she couldn’t stop; there were too many grievances that needed to be aired. Her grandmother sat through most of Diya’s unprecedented outburst—her railing against the shame they shrouded themselves in, their inability to speak freely about the one topic that consumed both of them—before putting her hand up.
Okay, her grandmother said, wiping tears and composing herself. I understand. How about this: you can ask me one question. Any question. And I promise you I’ll answer it honestly.
What her grandmother was offering, then, was not apology but concession. Diya sensed this still cost her grandmother deeply, and that she was not really the person who should be answering any of the myriad questions that had accumulated over the years. So she blurted the freshest one, which was: Why did you go quiet when I said I wanted to make a career out of art?
And her grandmother wrenched an answer out of herself, which was: Because your mother ran off with an artist. She worked as a translator for an author, they became close… and that was it, I think. They wanted their work, themselves, together, that’s all, and that was it.
Later, when Diya graduated art school, she invited her grandmother to the closing day of the seniors’ exhibition. Her grandmother stopped before an image of a hilly green landscape devoid of people, the colors rendered soft and malleable so that the photograph gave the impression of a painting.
Is this yours? she asked. It’s beautiful.
It was not; her images hung in the adjoining room. Diya had spent the year on a series of digital collages that inserted figures from her family photographs into scenes from vintage postcards from her (grand)mother’s city. She hadn’t mentioned the project to her grandmother, worried about her response.
It’s mine, she said, losing her will, wanting instead to bask in the celebratory mood, which was so much easier. She steered her grandmother out of the exhibition and toward the spread of canapés outside.
So the single answer she’d gotten earlier was the last time they spoke of her mother. Diya had moved away after school and flitted from job to job for years, periodically dropping in on her grandmother, who had then died, unexpectedly. That detail about her mother had to be enough for Diya, or at least she told herself it was. It made sense that her mother had been a translator. That was what Diya had been grieving already, all along: the loss of her mother as an intermediary, a medium through which to communicate with the ancestors she had no names for.
*
The morning after her second trip to the village, Diya woke again with a dream of the place fading, her hands balled into fists and her sheets sweat-soaked. I have to let this go, she thought to herself, even as she dialed the front desk for another car, even as she traveled the now-familiar road back to the village. The woman seemed less surprised to see Diya this time. She opened the door on the tenth knock or so, before Diya had to resort to pounding.