Naming Maya Read Online Free PDF

we need to move on. What’s the point of feeling bad about things that can’t be changed?” To anyone else that would sound like good advice. To me their divorce is a wound that won’t close up the way it’s supposed to, like an itch from a scab that has not quite healed. How can you leave something behind when it’s been hidden so carefully from you that you never even knew what it was until it was too late?
    But this is Mami. She is not going to fuss about what’s okay and not okay to talk about. She laughs out loud. She says, “People aren’t always as they seem to be. Even your mother.”
    Oh, yes? What is Mami going to tell me now?
    â€œOnce when your mother was just a little thing, she decided she was going to run away from home.”

    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œWell, she was bored one afternoon, and your grandmother had scolded her for something she’d done, or hadn’t done. It probably just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
    I am forced to smile. Who can imagine a mother doing things like that? “Where did she go?”
    â€œNot far. The mango tree. She decided to go live in the tree. She left a note on the dining table saying, ‘I am running away. Don’t look for me in the mango tree.’
    â€œWell, of course your grandmother found the note, and she laughed and laughed. ‘Shall I send the gardener up the tree and get her down?’ your grandfather asked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Let the child run away for a while.’
    â€œSo we waited, and every time he said, ‘Now?’ she’d reply, ‘No, let her be. Not yet.’
    â€œWell, finally your grandmother let him send the gardener up the tree, and there she was, your mother. She was a bit nervous, because you see it was getting dark, and she knew that mosquitoes start to buzz for people’s blood in the evenings. But when your grandfather said, ‘Did you have a good time?’ she just looked at him, determined as anything, and replied, ‘Oh, yes. There are lions and tigers up there! It’s wonderful.’”

    All around us, the city buzzes. I try to see my mother as a little kid with fancies in her head, and lions and tigers up in the imaginary world of her mango tree. What I cannot understand is why Mami sighs, as if this were a sad, sad story instead of just a funny one. She keeps on walking. She says, “The next time she ran away was to get married.”
    I know that story. It used to be a romantic and mysterious family tale. That was before it became erased by arguments over everything from money to me. “Your grandfather didn’t want them to get married, you know.”
    I know that too. It seemed no one had wanted them to get married. And if they hadn’t, where would I be? I point that out to Mami. She laughs. “You might be the only good thing that came of all this,” she says.
    I object. “That’s not true. It wasn’t always bad. They didn’t always fight. It just got that way.”
    â€œDivorce,” says Mami. “No such thing in my day. The woman just stayed and suffered, that’s the way it was. Maybe it’s better now.”
    The noise picks up around us. Big black songbirds party in the neem and mango trees that line the roads. Kuyil, Mami says they are called. In India, even the birds are loud, all yelling at the same time, so different from the finches in New Jersey that take turns singing
civilized little songs. Looking up to see them, and paying more attention to my thoughts than to the world around me, I don’t see the crack in the sidewalk ahead. Where my feet expect flat pavement, slabs of concrete have been ripped out for a construction project. I go sprawling. I try to put my hands out to break the fall, but end up in the dirt anyway.
    â€œAyyo, ayyo!” Mami cries, and rushes to help me.
    â€œI’m all right,” I say. “I tripped.