Cowboys and East Indians

Cowboys and East Indians

I had been following the house for almost two miles and, while trying to pass it almost ten minutes back, saw its cross-sectioned insides laid open like a dollhouse. I half expected to see a family posed stiffly at a dining table, their legs straight out beneath the tabletop. But instead, a piece of cloudy plastic sheeting whipped out from the living room like a flag, waving me back behind the house at its crawling speed as it inched into the outskirts of Laramie.

It was then that I looked out the window and saw them in front of me, their black heads like notes marching up the scale of the shoulder. They walked two by two and one of them wore a long scarf that flapped like the plastic sheeting. I scanned ahead. The oversize load sign on the back of the flatbed hung unevenly and the flash of the pilot car blinked into the dusk. I was going nowhere. I passed the quartet of girls and looked into my mirrors.

Yes. They were Indian. I pulled my minivan onto the shoulder. The house continued up Grand Avenue to where the road turned into interstate, headed perhaps for a foundation in Cheyenne.

I rolled down the passenger side window and called out to them as they passed. “Do you need a ride? Where are you going? To Walmart?”

They stopped and huddled like Christmas carolers outside the window. The thinnest one looked into my empty car and then stopped on my face. She smiled. “Are you Indian?” I didn’t answer the question. I unbuckled my seat belt and moved across the passenger seat to open the door. The thin one repeated her question, “Are you Indian?” I pulled the door open.

The girl tried again, “From India?” I looked into their expectant faces. “Yes.” And they began to climb in.

The thin one’s name was Rani Mukherjee and she had been in the country ten days. The other three deferred to her. Their names were Suparna, Vidia, and inexplicably, Bunny, which I found very funny. Bunny was very fat and wore the scarf, which she wrapped around her neck like a mummy. Rani Mukherjee looked me up and down and declared I was from the South of India—she guessed from Kerala.

“Madras,” I told her.

“It’s Chennai now,” she said.

I could tell that Rani Mukherjee was used to being right and being the leader of the pack. But I could also tell that Laramie had thrown her off a bit. I wondered if it was the wind or the altitude. She asked my parents’ names and scrunched up her face when I told her Mike and Ellen Henderson.

“And my name’s Faith,” I added.

“Faith.” She held it in her mouth like a wad of chew, then turned to the backseat and looked at the others.

I told them the short version. Left at a church. Adoption. Raised all my life in Torrington. No, I had never been back to India. I didn’t know if I liked Indian food. I never knew my birth parents. I told them I was finishing my BA in communications.

They had been walking to Walmart to buy things for their new apartment. They were living together as graduate students in a small place off Third Street. They were all teaching assistants. But only Rani was going into the classroom that fall. The rest of them had flunked the incoming Summer ESL test at the University. Their grammar was beyond perfect, their knowledge of English far superior to that of any Chinese (who were common on the UW campus) or American graduate student, for that matter. But it was their stress and intonation that stuck them squarely in research positions. The speed with which they talked and the wrong stresses on syllables bought them a year of lab work rather than teaching. I wanted to tell them this was good. That I had had a teaching assistant for Computer Science who was Indian, and all of us had tuned him out. We laughed when he said simple words like hardware. Hardvare, he would say. And we would all roll with laughter. Another boy would do his own imitation of the teacher, stressing all his words like the Count on Sesame Street—all the V’s emphasized like a DJ. It was better none of them was teaching. I could see Bunny would be eaten alive.

All of them except Bunny were in engineering. She was a mathematician. Which again, I found funny. We talked about their programs and they asked me if I remembered India. And what could I say? I lied.

There was for me a kind of memory of India. Of a place where I lived for two years before being adopted by Ellen and Mike Henderson of Torrington, Wyoming. Before I went to live with Mike the veterinarian and Ellen who worked at the sugar factory. My memory was like an encyclopedia of facts. I knew I was born in Madras (population 6.9 million), abandoned (on the doorstep of St. Joseph’s, population 230), colicky (which affects 22.5 percent of newborns), not newborn (almost seven months, the May 1st birthdays of Saints James and Philip had been pronounced my birthday), and Hindu (there was a caste mark on my head when I was left there). And then there was the fiction of memory.

When people asked me if I remembered India, I would always say yes. Yes, of course. And I would lay out my memory like a list: I remember the sounds of the orphanage, the calls of the washerman outside, the smell of rice and sounds of bare feet slapping the cool tile floors, the Mother Superior’s voice and the lullabies she sang. Sometimes in my head, I hear Hindi, I would say. Years later, I realized Hindi was not spoken in Madras. I must have heard Tamil. And so my story changed. But it all didn’t matter much. My memories were not mine. They were my mother’s; they were Ellen Henderson’s memories. Ellen had told me about how they had chosen me. That there was a woman who brought a cart of groceries to the side door of the orphanage. Her cart was filled with long beans and mangos. She told me about the lullabies, the sound of the man who did laundry, how the whole place smelled like cooked rice. She also told me I was special.

And there were the pictures. I had studied them all. Ellen and Mike took only one roll in India. They were odd photos. Of children begging, people sleeping on the street, a cow with flowers around its neck, food and a cup of tea with a thin skin on its surface—pictures later shown on a screen as white as a block of ice, in our church basement as a slideshow. I had seen this slideshow over the years since I joined the Henderson house. When the church was raising money for some place, some place far away from Torrington, Ellen would bring out the slides like a roulette wheel and spin them onto the screen. If the church was lucky, the collection baskets would be brimming with cash.

And there were orphanage photos. Of its yellow and white façade. And there was Ellen, wearing a poorly draped pink sari over her skirt and white long-sleeved top, holding me. I was not Faith then, but Ranjani. And there is Ranjani before she was Faith, she would voice over as the slideshow moved to its dramatic climax. It’s true I was skinny as a toddler and my shaved head gave me a grim look. In a tomato-red dress, my hair shorn, I look like a little black sheep who had met with an accident. My feet are in small orange plastic sandals. Mike holds one of my feet like a hoof. I would see him hold the feet of many animals over the years; it was his doctor’s tic. He would hold the feet of dog and cow alike, looking at their paws or hooves as if they would give him a clue as to what ailed them, like they were some sort of koan. Mike is wearing glasses that were fashionable at the time, the frames big and round like pockets; he wears a suit even though it is hot and the air is thick. I would see that suit a handful of times before Mike and Ellen divorced twelve years later. Once when their other child, their real child, Cammie, made her first communion, once at a veterinary convention, and at an Elks dinner. Most Sundays for church he wore a dress shirt and slacks.

Ellen and Mike hold me like a prop in the courtyard of the orphanage. Mother Esther must have taken the picture. Mike and Ellen grin wildly. Their legs are cut off. Ranjani’s—I mean my—face is blurred, but it looks to me like I am frowning.

There is only one more photo from that day. I sit crooked in the arms of Mother Esther and some other staff whose names Ellen didn’t write on the back of the photo. None of them are smiling. All of them, except one, wear white saris. The odd one wears a smocked white dress and a white handkerchief on her head; she looks as if she is crying. I am like a spot of blood amongst the whiteness of their clothes. Their faces are the color of wet dirt. The kind of brown soil that collects in the grooves of horseshoes, packed until you pick them out. Later I will think about that photo while working in the barn over some Christmas break.

The photos taken afterwards are clichés. Now I am Faith, asleep in new clothes on the plane. Here is Faith eating her first bit of Western food! Here is Faith with a woolen cap on her head and a new too-big coat! It is cold where you are going, they cooed to me on the plane. Here is Faith arriving with Ellen and Mike in Denver. The next photos are taken by Ellen’s parents. Of me, Ellen, and Mike in the same pose as in the courtyard, but this time I am smiling. Cammie is there too. A little tadpole in Ellen’s stomach. Cammie and I both were conceived in a country far away. Cammie and I both took our first moments of being in India.

We walked around the Walmart. We looked at the pots and bathmats, and Bunny made conversions for them. When they converted from rupees to dollars, they walked away. Only Bunny bought anything, a disposable camera. She wanted to take pictures to show her family back in Pune. They all stopped at the jewelry case and made cracks at the quality of the gold jewelry.

“Nine carat!” This seemed to strike Vidia as inexplicably funny. I had a nine-carat cross around my neck. It was a high school graduation gift from Mike. Vidia had a mouth of crooked teeth and a bob cut at an angle. Her hair was like origami, all lines. Her teeth were like crumpled paper. There was no symmetry at all.

I suggested the Dollar Store and when we arrived, I saw this was much more up their alley. Vidia and Suparna were practical, buying plastic trash cans, sponges, a fake plant. Bunny bought discount shampoo and a bucket. I was not sure what the bucket was for. Rani circled the aisles, taking it all in. And then slowly filled her cart. With two-liter jugs of no-name pineapple and strawberry soda, clothespins, instant coffee, and also, a bucket. I asked them if they wanted to go to the Salvation Army. It was downtown, not too far from their apartment.

They were not as impressed with the thrift shop’s wares and I could see why. The shelves were piled with odds and ends—decorative plates, figurines, old fishing reels, kitchen gadgets in immeasurable numbers. In the lined sections were sleeping bags with faded rainbows and army trucks on them, hand-tied quilts with patches frayed. Records, books, clothes—there were rows and rows of junk. It was all the debris of small-town America. But then, they began to see the prices. Rani pulled out a thin silver phone and dialed. She spoke in quick tones to someone and then smiled at me.

“I told the boys they should come down here.” She pointed to a chair marked $5. “There are many more Indian boys than girls at the university.”

I knew this already. I had seen them playing cricket in Prexy’s Pasture most nights before the snows came and turned the pasture into a slushy mess. Prexy’s was a huge grassy area in the dead center of campus. It was first created for cowboys so they could tie their horses up there while they went to class. It was still in the university by-laws that they could. But I had never seen a horse there. Instead, in the late afternoon, one could hear the whack of bat against ball as a whole group of Indian men played cricket. When I walked by, none of them would make eye contact with me. I tried to smile, even stop and watch, but they all looked away. I looked Indian all right. I even had long black hair. But perhaps it was something in the way that I walked, in my lace-up cowboy boots, in my ranch girl jeans that said, No, she is not.

Rani came back to me holding a large pot like a baby. It was a pressure cooker and she was thrilled. It was $3.

“I can make curries in this,” she said as she turned it over, inspecting its bottom, which was a little scarred with char marks. Suparna and Vidia also had their arms full—with wooden spoons, smaller pots, a full set of Corelle ware. Bunny stood by a microwave, her hand on top of it, staking it out as if she had summited its peak and wanted to mark the occasion. The boys arrived, and more negotiations began. I was only brought into the conversation as I had my van, which could hold all the objects they were coveting.

“I can carry anything!” I said. And I meant it. I wanted them to have cozy places with pots and La-Z-Boys. Rani saw a mattress that was fairly clean and talked to a boy I would know later as Ash about whether buying a used mattress was, indeed, sanitary.

It took three trips in my van to carry all their loot home. In the end, they had a fairly complete kitchen. They also bought two chairs, one mattress, the microwave and a small TV with a grainy picture. Suparna purchased a painting of an abstract scene—all blacks and reds. But it was $5 and would give their home something more. She held the painting in her arms with an odd smile on her face, and I was not sure what she saw in it: the leering colors or the fact that she had been in the country not even two weeks and owned a painting. I thought, She is the one I should know.

My own mother Ellen also loves paintings. She would march down to the Goshen County Library once a month and check one out. They had a whole back room with racks of poorly framed posters and reproductions, waiting to hang in living rooms across the county. Ellen favored older artists. One month, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers would be the centerpiece of the dining room, the next month Monet’s Water Lilies would set the tone. She stayed away from abstracts and tried always for a motif of flowers and gardens. It was after Mike moved out and when I started calling them Ellen and Mike and not Mom and Dad that she moved on to Western art. Russells in particular. Now we ate under the view of cattle drives and rodeo riders, prairie scenes with only a horse and rider blurring by.

“Haven’t we seen enough animals?” I’d ask. Mike’s practice was just down the road, and we lived outside of town, but not quite in the country. Occasionally when he had a particularly sick cow or horse, he’d tie it up in the corral we had in back.

Ellen would look at the scenes dreamily. “No” was all she would say.