Child of my body, you are from me. I gave birth to you. Yet you are from another time,
another place.
My mother died when I was a toddler. My father remarried and started a new family. My
uncle, a bachelor, raised me in Mysore, the home city of our region’s Maharaja. I
grew up in a house with a pet deer in our large yard. As a child, I learned to knit
and embroider from my teachers. I sewed little pleated saris for the idol of
Lakshmi in the temple near my house. I liked to play sports in school, even while
wearing my ankle-length cotton skirts, but once I experienced puberty my family
did not think it was appropriate for me to run around. I learned to read and write
in Kannada and English. I left school at age 14, was married by age 17, and had
three children by age 19. You were my third child, my first daughter. You had
cholera as a baby. Others told me that you had died. They tried to take you away
from my arms. I did not believe them. I rocked you and prayed for you and held
you, and finally, you opened your eyes and looked at me. You had come back to
life.
I lived in a small house in the large city of Bangalore. Our house was behind a big house
that we called a “mansion.” I played marbles and hopscotch with my friends. I
started school before I was four. When I was 10 I began to get hives from playing
outside in the sun, and my parents told me to stay at home. After that I helped my
mother with the cooking. When I was a young teenager, my father installed a
ping-pong table in the middle of the main room in our house so my brothers could
practice. They won awards, and we had to sleep and live around that table!
Although my schooling was in English, I never spoke the language. I earned a
bachelor’s degree from a local women’s college, but I did not expect to have to
earn money. I was married to a man chosen by my parents. I did not speak to him
before our engagement. I embroidered pillowcases for our new home. I moved
with him to the United States, to Barberton, Ohio, where I had to get used to
speaking English. I was 21 when you were born. You were my first baby, my only
daughter.
I grew up not knowing if I was Indian or American. I was born in Ohio, lived in Canada
and India, then returned to Ohio. I learned from my parents that America is clean,
new, cold, materialistic, immoral, promiscuous. India is dirty, old, traditional, hot,
spiritual, and moral. I was an odd child. In third grade I wore a pair of purple
sunglasses, minus lenses, to school almost every day. I read all the time, I
collected rocks, I crocheted a winter scarf for myself. I knew I was supposed to
have an arranged marriage. I acquired a boyfriend in high school. My parents
were upset. I acquired a really strange boyfriend in college. My parents were even
more upset. In college, I studied English literature instead of becoming a doctor,
like I was supposed to. I earned a master’s degree, but didn’t think about a career
or how I would earn money. I finally broke up with the strange boyfriend, moved
to Washington, DC, married a Jewish-American man whose ancestors had fled
Russia and Poland, and gave birth to you at the age of 34—my first child, my first
son.
By the time I was two, I noticed that my parents looked different. I told people, “My
mommy is brown, and my daddy is pink.” I lived for six years in Washington,
DC. Then we moved to Moscow, Idaho. We visited India when I was nine, where
I met my great-grandmother. I couldn’t talk to her much because I don’t know
Kannada and her English is not very good. My mother taught me to play cat’s
cradle with a loop of yarn. I am saving money to buy a brand-new Macintosh
laptop. When I was 12, my father left our family, and we didn’t know if or when
he was coming home. I felt sad and scared, but I knew I had to be brave for my
mother and my little brother. My mother says, every day, “I can’t believe how big
you’ve gotten! I still remember when you were a baby!” I want to become a
doctor or a college professor. I know my mother would like grandchildren. I don’t
know if I will ever have children.
Child of my body, I think about you every day. You are from me. I fed you from my
body, I bathed you, I clothed you, I protected you. And you grew from the life-
force within you, which I did not put there. It is yours. I want to shield you from
all life’s troubles. I cannot. Your life is so different from mine. I cannot live your
life for you. I can only pray for you as I let go, and wave goodbye.
Jyotsna Sreenivasan’s new book is THESE AMERICANS, a collection of short stories and a novella published in 2021 by Minerva Rising Press. It is a bronze winner in the Foreword Reviews INDIES awards. An earlier version of the novella was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Her novel And Laughter Fell From the Sky was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies (including most recently The Journal and Copper Nickel). She received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for 2022, and was selected as a Fiction Fellow at the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference.