My father is old country. He came to America as a young man to study medicine at a time when this was a rarity for a Bengali. But he is a very smart man and hardworking and determined to make a success. The American dream, right? One day, when he was working as a young intern, a patient hobbled in with a broken foot. She smiled at the beautiful doctor. He lingered awhile at her bedside, beguiled by her accent. An immigrant who had escaped Poland, and when the cast came off, she asked him out on a date. I imagine the two of them, struggling with their own cultural differences and then the language and the strange customs of America, and it is still difficult to see what drew them together. Opposites attract and all that.
So they marry, yes. Young Indian doctor and his fair-haired wife. Understand this was a time when such combinations were not as commonplace as today, but they were in love and did not care about stares in the street or the whispers in the grocery store. He had no one at all in the big city. She had room in her heart for every possibility of love. They had each other, and what difference did it make what others might say?
Katya, that is my mother, yes, she was studying poetry of all things at the University of Chicago and Niren was happily in residence at a hospital nearby, and one fine day around Christmas, when all of the decorations are up, and it is cold, and people are bustling about with their shopping and preparations, she casually says, “I’m expecting.” “Expecting?” he asks. “What is it you’re expecting?” He had in mind a package, perhaps, for the holidays from her folks back in Gdansk, but of course, she beams at his cluelessness. “A baby, Niren,” she says, and later, when I was a little girl, he told me that moment he knew how wide the universe was, for it had filled his heart. They both were happiest, I think, in those months before the first child was born, when anticipation and joy and a little fear supersede the inevitable fatigue and reality of caring for a real infant. All the talk was of the coming event, and as such things go, they planned and prepared, found a bigger apartment, bought the necessary accoutrements. Time goes by, the matter of what to call the baby came up. Katya had told him that he was to decide upon the firstborn’s name and that she would choose the rest. A wise woman, my mother.
Now my father is not a particularly religious man, not in any formal sense, and I have no real idea what his family back in the old country believes. I’ve never been to India except once, when I was all of six months old. Nana fell so in love with me that they all moved to Chicago by the very next year. Furthermore, he had by this time adopted nearly all of my mother’s customs. There was a Christmas tree in the new apartment. We never spoke of the matter, but I am sure he thought attending the Christian church and so on was part and parcel of becoming a full-fledged American. Or maybe he just wanted to please her. But to my knowledge, his upbringing was secular, so it was a surprise he found my name in the Ramayana. Do you know this story?
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My brother shook his head. In his dark suit and tie, Sam looked incongruous sitting there upon the bed. By now I was more used to him as an old man in a bathrobe, and part of me wished I could speak to him and let him know how he would turn out in the future. The cat stood with an air of mild annoyance and then found his place in the moving patch of sunshine on the floor. I was curious to hear what Sita had to say, since she so rarely spoke about this part of her life.
The Ramayana is the life story of Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and I guess you’d call it one of the foundational stories of the Hindu tradition. It’s this long, multilayered epic poem about the exiled prince Rama and his wife. She gets abducted by the demon Ravana, a creature with ten heads and twenty arms, who tricks her and takes her to the kingdom of Lanka across the sea. This monkey-god, Hanuman, helps Rama rescue the girl, but Lord, it gets more complicated as it goes. But the point of me telling you this is that Rama’s wife is named Sita, incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, and she is the epitome of beauty, virtue, and loyalty. Follower of the principles of dharma. The ideal wife. Some standard to live up to, eh? How’s that a proper name for a baby girl? What was the poor man thinking?