The Last Word
Richardson, Laura
THE LAST WORD Laura Richardson The Twain Meet Some months before I moved to India, my Hindi teacher in Texas tried to explain what it was like, coming to the United States from India, and meeting...
...In India, when the hot season sets in and the loo, the incessant dry wind that parches and kills, begins to blow, the dairymen turn their herds out into the streets to forage as they can, and the starving beasts, hips like hat-racks, eyes enormous, mild, and uncomplaining, are everywhere...
...All day the little animal struggles...
...He had met a man on the plane, an Indian, who seemed so pleasant, so intelligent, so friendly...
...I couldn't bear even the idea of dust blowing in...
...You could eat off those streets...
...You pay as you like, madam...
...In Texas, I walked daily, a mile or two around the neighborhood, trundling my enormous pregnant stomach...
...In India, the street in front of my house is never empty: the rattan-vwz//a/2, with his cane chairs and baskets piled high on the back of his bicycle...
...I had to go home...
...THE LAST WORD Laura Richardson The Twain Meet Some months before I moved to India, my Hindi teacher in Texas tried to explain what it was like, coming to the United States from India, and meeting this man, her husband (whom she had seen only once before, at her wedding), and discovering that he had no Mercedes...
...Why...
...I have six children...
...One doesn't go around saying, though, that India is A Land of Contrasts, because it is not...
...Not all, surely...
...the balloon-man, the icecream man, the popcorn-wa//a/!, the purveyors of embroidery and gaudy silk, the bunder-wallah with two sad-faced monkeys in costume...
...At home in Texas, the local television news kept running stories about a man who had adopted a herd of wild horses and then allowed them to starve to death...
...Here in India, the streets of Old Delhi are puddles of urine and animal muck and coils of human feces, and people do eat off them, and sleep on them and, one presumes, make love on them somehow, beLaura Richardson moved to India with her husband, a journalist, in 1984...
...These people are...
...everyone in America is rich...
...He gave them his card: C.K...
...He makes all the cars in India...
...they're ignorant, they're dirty, they're corrupt, they believe ridiculous things, they're cowards, they're cruel, they burn their wives, they piss in the streetsl I can't wait to leave...
...And every night, waiting for sleep, I hear the sound of the chowkidar, the watchman, making his rounds, pounding his bamboo stave, blowing his gurgling whistle, hawking and spitting in the darkness...
...And the story goes around that the baby has spoken before death, has acknowledged its godhead as an avatar of Krishna...
...Birla, Hindustan Motors...
...the orange-man, the phal-wallah, pulling his two-wheeled cart and crying his wares...
...Footage of the stubbly field littered with horses' skulls and fragments of skeletons was interspersed with interviews: outraged sheriffs' deputies, a grim spokesman for the Humane Society...
...I went to the funeral," she said sadly, "and the preacher said Gran 'reached out and touched someone.' What's happened to us...
...he had been most cordial...
...He . . . went for the gusto...
...Finally, in the late afternoon, it lies churning convulsively...
...After all, I have no right to love India because it passes before me like a bazaar...
...because the Rajasthani women working construction wear bright red skirts and yellow shawls, heavy silver anklets, rings on their toes...
...In the slums of Delhi where my gardener lives, a carpenter's young wife gives birth to a premature, deformed infant...
...This is true, madam...
...I was nineteen years old, here was this man who lived in America, he must be rich, he must have a Mercedes, I mean, everyone in America is rich, aren't they...
...My husband's publisher came to India not long ago...
...the rag-picker collecting treasures of old bottles and papers at every house...
...As her voice climbs into the registers of hysteria, I am embarrassed and chastened...
...All in India is poor man, madam...
...I am pregnant when I read of this and see the photograph in the newspaper, and I cannot stop crying...
...I hate this place...
...I am poor man, madam," my cook in New Delhi says when I ask him what wage he wants...
...At home, a North Texas suburb, a friend died of cancer—an untimely death of a much-loved man...
...reached out," the priest intoned, "and touched someone...
...I went home to Texas from New Delhi last fall to have my baby, not because I am fond of Texas but because India, in its ancient filth and resignation, is terrifying...
...But they were dubious, the publisher said, because the man claimed, most improbably, that he made all the cars in India...
...And the cook swears that in my own garden is a lizard whose urine makes one's head explode...
...At the end of my street, a calf is dying in the sun...
...This is India, we revere the cow...
...because in the hot season the shadows are black at noon and the leaves of the trees, the very air, glitter with the brazen burden of dust...
...India's poverty is so deep, so pervasive, that even its great wealth is somehow shabby...
...And that night inside this house ten people are dying of cholera...
...It doesn't love you back...
...One must paint kohl around the baby's eyes to ward off the evil eye...
...Her daughter, Gene Marie, was born in Piano, Texas, on January 1. cause the babies are everywhere, laughing in their ragged older sisters' laps...
...You can't be serious...
...The man invited the publisher and his wife to his house...
...the snake charmer with his defanged cobras and a mongoose in baskets balanced across his shoulders...
...Aren't they...
...One must not eat melon in the rainy season, or one will contract cholera...
...The gardener tries to comfort me: "It was not God, madam, only a man's baby...
...All in India is poor man...
...I have no tongue...
...And oh, it was so cleanl "Look at those streets," my husband kept marveling...
...Hundreds turned out for the funeral...
...Shortly after birth it dies...
...A cow must not be killed...
...I say as much to another American woman, and she becomes angry...
...A self-proclaimed holy man erects a tent over the corpse and collects money offerings from those who come to worship...
...Joe...
...Let's be sure your tetanus vaccination is to date," my obstetrician said...
...Every Sunday, the mutilated beggar-boy rings the doorbell and thrusts forward his scrap of paper, opening his mouth to display a horrific emptiness...
...I was so shocked, so stunned," she said...
...In India, death is omnipresent and omnipotent, and magical...
...And I think, I love this, I love this, I want to live here always...
...You can't love India," a U.S...
...official tells me...
...So when you are having the baby, if dust blows in you won't get tetanus, and baby will be safe...
...She smiled...
...the grimy note begins...
...Later that month, a friend's grandmother died in a small West Texas town...
...In the thirty-odd years my family has lived there, the place has changed...
...The milkman tells of a house in his village "where outside in tree two crows are fighting, and one fall down dead...
...Where children's voices were heard everywhere at all times of day, now only the odd silence of empty houses awaits the working wives and husbands who arrive home each evening...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
