The Hindi-Bindi Club Read Online Free PDF

don’t like the distance between us. I don’t
want
it anymore. This “separate lives” thing has run its course.
    “Mom?”
    “Hmmm?” She heats a
tawa
—griddle pan—for the
chappatis
.
    “I…Here, let me do that. A culinary task I actually know how to do.”
    “That’s okay—”
    “Really, I don’t mind.” I wash and dry my hands, nudge her away from the stove, and take her place. I expect her to say something to the effect of there’s hope for me in the kitchen yet, but she just squeezes my arm and thanks me.
    Who is this pod person, and what have the aliens done with my real mom?
    I laugh to myself, thinking she must be wondering the same thing about me.
    One at a time, I flip the
chappatis
that she places on the
tawa,
counting each flip the way she taught. One, two, three, done. Watching her bustle around the kitchen, I want to say more, but I don’t know what. I want to reach out, but I don’t know how to break the ice that froze in layers over too many years. I’m afraid—of falling in, of needing help, of dying unassisted.
    From behind me, my mother says softly, “I’ve missed you.”
    Tears spring to my eyes. I blink and bob my head up and down. “I’ve missed you, too, Mom. I hope you know…”
    “I know,” she says, and for the moment, it’s enough.
    It’s a start.

    W hen we finish, I take the plate of hot-hot
chappatis
into the dining room, returning to our program, already in progress:
    “We’re running out of authors,” an auntie says.
    “It’s a short list,” laments another.
    “Why is that, do you think?”
    I pipe up, “Because Indian parents offer their children two career choices: doctor or engineer.” It’s a joke; no one laughs. I sip from my wineglass. “Never mind.”
    I’m aware that I may drink wine and sit at the big table, but I’m not one of them. They will always be my mother’s peers, not mine. They are the seniors; I am the junior. I will never completely get them, nor will they entirely fathom me. So I sit back and attempt to do as instructed all my life (with limited success): keep my mouth shut, listen to my elders, and try to learn something.
    The aunties are in their late fifties to late sixties, both pilgrims and Indians, born in that Far East land of spices for which Columbus set sail and erroneously thought he discovered. Instead, they wouldn’t arrive on American shores for hundreds more years, their sizable waves post-1965, a direct result of new, highly selective U.S. immigration laws.
    “You mean
all
Indian men aren’t doctors or engineers?” I once said in passing to Sandeep Uncle.
    He was the one who first explained this phenomenon to me. “That was all they
allowed
into the country from India at our time. My elder brother stood first in his college. Brilliant man. Lawyer. Thrice he applied to come here, but Immigration said no. Finally, he went to Canada.”
    That’s also why Indian parents
highly encouraged
their sons to become doctors or engineers—the professions that offered the best shot at economic success. And the American children born to those Indian-immigrant doctors and engineers? Care to venture a guess what that next generation was
highly encouraged
to become?
    You got it.
    My parents thought they were progressive for giving Vivek and me the option of choosing
what type
of doctor or engineer. (For the record, I became a physician
despite
my parents, not
because
of them. But let’s just keep that between us, okay?)
    Most of the Hindi-Bindi Club’s founding mothers emigrated during those first big waves that India called her brain drain. Now they reign as matriarchs of the Indian-immigrant community, keepers of tales of the pioneer days before cell phones, before the Internet, before you could buy basmati rice in the supermarket.
    From their animated conversations, I note that some (my mom) still have thick Indian accents, some (Uma Auntie) hardly a trace of Indian, and some (Saroj Auntie) an