Indian Summer
“You do realise, you’re the wrong kind of Indian?”
Hemani looked at her son quizzically in the mirror. It was a long, slim rectangle on a swivel: the kind that, if positioned tilting upwards reminded her unpleasantly that her jaw-line was no longer as firm as it had once been; if tilted slightly downwards, it preserved an illusion of youth, but gave her short legs.
“What do you mean? It says Dress: Indian Summer on the invitation. A joke, of course.”
Outside, the warm light of early evening made the trees in the street shine like green glass. Only the faintest tinge of other colours had begun to creep into their veins. Birds sang, and shrubs had burst into bloom, as if it were spring. But it was not spring. Bron looked so handsome that she wondered how long it would be before he discovered something more interesting than sport or computer games. His mobile was constantly buzzing with texts from girls, but he didn’t seem particularly interested yet, or anxious about his own body.
If only I could feel the same way myself, Hemani thought.
She returned her attention to the problem of getting dressed for Polly’s party. Make-up, a bit heavy but OK. It was the costume that worried her. How did the drapery go? There was a trick to folding the slithering silk, which made it hang properly and if she couldn’t remember how to do it she’d have to ring a relation.
“Indian summers weren’t from our India,” Bron was saying. “They’re from America. You know, from when they called Native Americans Indians, because they didn’t realise the world was twice as big as they thought when sailing round it.”
“Oh. Well, I bet nobody else will worry,” she said, a touch sharply. “It’s just a birthday party, and an excuse to dress up.”
“You just love seeing your friends, don’t you?”
Hemani, if she were truthful, was dreading Polly’s fancy dress party. It was an annual event, and in theory, a good thing. Now that nobody had dinner parties – combining work with families left nothing over by way of time, energy and in many cases money – so it was as if they’d reverted to the kind of larger gatherings they’d had in their early twenties. The downside was that these also provided a snapshot of how they were all ageing. From one year to the next, men whom she had remembered as having thick locks and trim waists morphed into balding trolls whose only hair sprouted from their newly protruberant ears; the women, while taking more care of themselves, had mouths that turned downwards when relaxed and the faint but perceptible down of a moustache. They all pretended not to notice, or mind, but soon, Hemani thought grimly, I’ll be worse than any of them.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as if,” she muttered. She had never thought she would define herself by her femininity.
“Wicked,” Bron said. “You should wear stuff like that more often. Why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t want to look like Gran.”
“I thought you loved her.”
“Oh, I do. But I’m British, and in her heart she’s never left Home.”
“You call it Home too.”
“I mean it ironically. This is home!” Hemani’s row of glass bangles on her wrists clinked musically as she gestured. “Ma and Fa – well, they gave up good careers in Bombay because they felt they would have a better chance of life here. They didn’t understand that a part of that was the possibility of at least one of their children wanting to marry out.”
Bron said,
“But Mum, loads of people do that. You know what Dad says, it’s not where you’ve come from, it’s where you’re going to that matters.”
Hemani had found the right way of fastening her sari. She picked up a pair of earrings. These? Into her memory came a line from a Nancy Mitford novel: Always wear touches of white near the face, especially as you get older.
“I know all that, darling. When you’re middle aged, though, you realise how much of the present is dictated by the past.”
As if to underline the truth of this, her uncles’ nose was repeated in the mirror before her. The sari felt like a shroud. She touched the unnatural smoothness of her forearms, and thought of her aunties clacking on about the importance of “waxing and threading.” How scornfully she had looked at them, when a little older than Bron, on her occasional visits! She had honestly believed their personal defects to be due to a kind of Third World backwardness. The arrogance of youth….
“You see, we were right to come to this country,” her mother would say, proudly, when Hemani qualified as a doctor. “You will be more than either of us, my dear.” Now, as a successful, happily married professional woman, she should not be fretting over a few grey hairs and wrinkles! She dabbed at the dark patches under her eyes with concealer. The alternative to not ageing was not being alive – and heaven knew this, too, was a growing trend at Polly’s parties. Last year, the healthiest man they all knew from college had dropped dead of a heart attack in the gym; this year, two women had had a mastectomy. Anno domini…
Really, this was what was making her miserable, not her mother’s old sari. The dull ache in her joints in the morning, the thickening waist, the loss of her periods. Early menopause ran in the family, she had always dreaded it, and now it was upon her. It was an event in every woman’s life which some welcomed, but bad luck to be getting it at her age. Outside, the brilliant green leaves swayed, as if in mockery: Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
“Sweetheart, we should be going soon,” her husband called from downstairs.
“Have you found her present?”
“No. Where is it?”
“Look by the door. Bron, go and help him, he’s hopeless.”
He grinned at her, the flash of white teeth twisting her heart. However much she adored Daniel, nothing was like that passion of pride and protectiveness. If only, she thought, and hot tears suddenly welled up, disastrously. It wasn’t even ageing she minded so much as the loss of that deep, forlorn hope …Biology, what a bitch.
“Wow!” Daniel said, when she came downstairs, freshly made-up with a defiant slash of red lipstick.
“Apparently, we’re the wrong kind of Indian.”
“Who cares? You know, there’s some mail here for you.”
“Oh.”
It was from her GP. She knew what it would be: the dreaded blood test results, telling her that her hormone levels had fallen off a cliff. Hemani ripped open the envelope.
“Is everything OK?” her husband asked anxiously.
Hemani began to laugh.
“Yes. Yes, it is. Darling, you might want to sit down, and take a deep breath. You see, it turns out that I’m having a bit of an Indian summer myself….”
Copyright Amanda Craig 2008
Good Housekeeping magazine, October 2008