Holiday Fiction: ‘Tis the Season
A daughter comes home from college for Christmas, but it’s very different this year.
My boyfriend, Rob, turns up the volume on the car radio. We’re driving on Interstate 10 out of Phoenix.
“Can you lower that?” I snap. I’m not in the mood for Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.
“You really don’t want to go home for Christmas, huh?” He shoots me a glance, turns down the music.
I grab a granola bar from my handbag, tear it open, tuck the crumpled wrapper into his glove compartment.
“No. But my dad said he wouldn’t pay my tuition next semester if I didn’t.” The bar tastes stale.
Rod switches off the radio. “Hema, he just wants to see you, that’s all.”
“When he has acquired a new wife and a new daughter?” I snort.
Uttering the words “wife” and “daughter” slices a raw, sharp pain through me. Amma died five years ago in a devastating car crash. Clearly, Appa has chosen to move on. When he visited India earlier this year, my aunts introduced him to a widow. They got married, and she followed him once the paperwork was done. As simple as that.
We arrive in Irvine, California, just before 6:00 pm. Dusk has fallen and lights twinkle from every house on the street—except ours. I chew on my lower lip, remind myself others live there now.
“Your house could use some lights,” Rod says.
I shrug, pick up my bag.
He puts his arms around me. “‘Tis the season . . .”
I know he wants me to accept the situation. “Thanks for driving last minute,” I say. “There’s no way we could’ve gotten air tickets two days before Christmas.”
“Hey, my family will be thrilled I showed up,” he says.
I have a front-door key but it feels appropriate to ring the bell.
The porch light comes on. A girl, about seven, opens the door a crack.
I’m jolted when she says, “Akka?” With the term for older sister, she’s establishing a relationship I don’t want.
I nod and enter.
“I’m Ramya,” she says.
I take my shoes off, race up to my old room. The bedroom remains as I left it over a year ago. I fall upon my bed, close my eyes. The aroma of coriander and cumin wafts up from the kitchen. I smell the tang of curry leaves, hear the sizzle of appalams in hot oil. I bury my head under my pillow. The fragrances and sounds ignite a yearning for Amma, for her piquant tamarind rice laden with peanuts.
I remove the pillow when solemn Ramya pats my shoulder. “Akka, please come down for dinner.” Two of her upper teeth are missing. Pigtails swing against her thin shoulders.
I make my reluctant way downstairs. Amma’s photo hangs on the landing’s wall. This is the picture Appa and I had framed a month after she died.
“Welcome, Hema!” My father’s new wife—I know her name is Kalyani—waits at the bottom of the stairs. She’s short of stature, wears a salwar kameez and sports a round pottu on her forehead. Her long hair is knotted in a loose braid. She’s the opposite of my tall, slender mother.
Her welcome reminds me, again, of my outsider status.
Yet, this is where I grew up. This is where I lost my first tooth. This is where I fractured my ulna while sliding down the banister. This is where I had my birthday parties. This is where I received my SAT scores.
She steps forward as if to give me a hug. I forestall her by extending my arm to shake her hand, eyes transfixed on her shiny-new taali—the sign of marriage.
“Your father went to fill the car . . . he’ll be back soon. We’ve been looking forward to seeing you. Hope you like sambar sadam and potato curry?”
We, she says, like Appa and she are one unit. Her English, while fluent, is tinged with an Indian accent.
I observe changes. Brass lamps stand in a row—tallest to shortest—on the mantle; a set of peacock-shaped hangings adds splashes of color to the dining room; a Tamil calendar tracks auspicious dates on the kitchen wall; a stack of stainless steel plates, bowls, and cups awaits us on the dining table.
She has taken over my mother’s house. She has taken over my mother’s kitchen. She has taken over my mother’s husband.
I hear the noisy grating of the garage door as it opens. Appa is here.
A fleeting shadow—worry, hesitation, concern?—sweeps over his face, but it’s gone before I can decipher the emotion. He greets me with a bear hug as if he never threatened to cut off my college funding, as if he’s the same Appa he was when Amma was alive—large of body, large of heart. As if he’s always had a second daughter, he also hugs Ramya. As if he’s forgotten he called my mother his darling, he addresses his new wife as “Kalyani darling.”
I cannot wait to flee upstairs after dinner.
“We were waiting for you to come and string lights outside,” Appa says.
I bite on an errant red chili in the potato curry, cough. Appa thumps my back.
The bulb in the dusty, cobweb-festooned attic has burned out. I stoop-walk in the cramped space using my cell phone’s flash.
Each January, Amma would pack and label two boxes—“Christmas Lights” and “Christmas Ornaments”—in her sloping cursive. I find the receptacle with the lights, but not the one with the ornaments. Despite the suffocating air in the attic, I scour every corner for the missing box, a sense of loss welling in the pit of my stomach when I don’t locate it.
I drag the container of lights outside. Some of the strings work, others don’t. For the next hour, Ramya watches while I wind the lengths above the door and around the columns on our porch. When I turn on the sparkly illumination, she claps. I repack the lights that are dead; I cannot toss what Amma had saved.
In my room, I pull everything out of my closet. There are no Christmas ornaments here, either.
Next morning, I wake to upma scents filling the air.
“Amma and Appa went to the grocery store because it’s Christmas Eve and Appa said they close early.” Ramya’s waiting for me on the landing.
The word Appa coming out of Ramya’s mouth lands hard as a fist on my ribs. Her mother will be Aunty to me; always.
I ignore the girl, go down to the kitchen, make coffee. The beverage doesn’t dispel the dull ache in the base of my belly. I check the hall closet, rummage in the garage, search in the pantry: no box of ornaments.
I get more coffee, avoid the upma, pop a slice of bread into the toaster.
I text Rod.
Me: Can we leave the day after Christmas?
Rod: That bad?
Me: Yes.
Rod: ??
Me: My dad’s different. I don’t belong here, not with this new lady and her daughter . . . and I can’t find our Christmas ornaments.
Rod: Do you have a tree?
Me: Grr . . .
Rod: Sorry. But seriously, you’ll graduate, get a job, get married, move on. Why shouldn’t your dad move on?
Me: Stop with the sermon!
Rod: I’ll bring you Christmas cookies.
Me: As consolation?
Rod: Look for them outside your door. (-:
Twenty minutes later, I bring the wicker basket inside. The package, loaded with cookies, is wrapped in a red-gold bow. I know Rod has no artistic talent; his mother must have put this together.
“Come!” I call to Ramya.
She holds the basket on her lap and sits on the sofa, peering at the decorated cookies, waiting for my permission to untie the bow. An unexpected tug pulls in the region of my chest.
Appa and Aunty return with a twenty-four-inch pre-lit Christmas tree.
We had real trees when Amma was alive, not a miniature fake. We’d go to the tree lot right after Thanks-giving, purchase a huge tree and set it up in a corner of the living room, right by the window. Amma and I spent hours trimming—she called it decorating—the tree with ornaments old and new: some from our travels, some that I made in kindergarten and grade school, some that were gifts from my music teacher and my ballet teacher, some that we picked up at my school’s craft fairs. They represent our history, our family, our years together. None of which remains.
Appa sets the artificial tree on the coffee table by the window and plugs it in. He didn’t buy ornaments.
For Christmas Eve dinner, Aunty makes us masala dosais. For this holiday, Amma would have departed from her usual menu to explore Mexican, Italian, or Chinese cuisines.
“What a perfect blend,” Appa gushes. I’m not sure if he means the juxtaposition of a South Indian meal and Christmas Eve, or his family as it is now.
Later, Appa and Aunty sit together to watch Christmas in Connecticut on TCM. It’s the same sofa where my parents sat to watch television or to argue about politics and world events. My heart pinches.
I thank Aunty for the dosai with a deliberate, stilted formality, underscoring the distance in our relationship.
I wake up, disoriented and parched, at 11:15 pm. Downstairs in the kitchen, I fill a glass with cold milk. When I was little, Amma wouldn’t permit me to leave my room until 6:00 am on Christmas Day. She wanted me to believe Santa came while I slept. Amma and I would leave out cookies and milk for Santa before I went to bed. Ramya won’t know about that tradition. Or how our tree would boast gifts under it, all of them awaiting the grand unwrapping ceremony on Christmas morning.
There are no presents under the miniature tree.
“Excuse me, Hema.” Aunty glides into the dark room, a large Tupperware container in her hands. “I think this belongs to you?”
I flip a wall switch. Light floods the area.
“Where did you find that?” I lunge at the taped box with the words “Christmas Ornaments” written in green marker on the lid.
“On the top shelf in our closet.”
I tear the tape off. They’re all here: the laminated flower from kindergarten; the angel I made in first grade; the elf, the reindeer, the Santa hat, the painted pinecone.
Aunty stays. Thankfully, she doesn’t chatter.
When I’m done, the decorations shimmer. If I stand back from the tree, I can see Amma smile from the
photograph on the landing. A runaway tear escapes, meanders down my cheek.
Aunty squeezes my shoulder before she leaves.
Rod arrives early—it’s semi-dark and wintry—to pick me up the day after Christmas. Appa hugs me, says no adviser should expect a student in the lab between Christmas and New Year.
I’m climbing into the car when Aunty rushes out of the house, hands me a heavy grocery bag.
“Take this. You’ll need food for the long drive.”
As always, Rod turns the music on once we hit the highway. A happy voice sings to us about a jolly Christmas. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, stops, reaches forward to turn the music off.
“You can leave it,” I say.
Three hours later, I unpack Aunty’s food bag at a rest area. A plastic baggie bursts with bite-sized sesame laddoos. There’s a flask of filter coffee.
My breath catches when I open a lunch box brimming with tamarind rice.
I pause after the first disappointing spoonful. This is not Amma’s tamarind rice; Aunty has used cashews instead of peanuts. I take another mouthful, a third, a fourth. My taste buds tingle, awaken.
If I close my eyes to savor the food, I can almost believe Amma has made this lunch for me.
Sudha Balagopal’s short fiction can be found in literary journals and anthologies worldwide. Nominated for several awards, her work is published in Best Microfiction 2021, 2022 and Best Small Fictions, 2022, 2023. Her novella in flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She is the author of a novel, A New Dawn, and two short story collections, There are Seven Notes and Missing and Other Stories. Her full-length collection of flash fiction, Tiny Untruths, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press in 2024.
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