My father used to tell me stories from the Ramayanas—for there are many versions—at bedtime when I was just a little girl, though I don’t know how much of it was true and what he may have invented. I don’t believe he was secretly trying to make a good Hindu of me, or even much of a Bengali. The bedtime stories were as much for his sake as for putting me to sleep. He seemed to be remembering his own childhood by telling those tales to me, and I enjoyed them for what they were—scary and funny and sad. In one, the monkeys make a bridge from India to Sri Lanka by joining hand to foot and holding on to the next one’s tail, and in another, old Ravana sets the monkey-god’s tail afire, and he just scoots through the kingdom spreading the blaze from building to building and destroying all.
Whatever the stories meant to him, they were a kind of ritual between us, a private language and a personal bond despite the fact that they’re known all around the Hindu world. In that little corner of Chicago, the Ramayana was just ours. None of the other kids had ever heard of such an elaborate myth, and for sure I wasn’t going to mention the gods to the nuns at my grammar school. But I liked being the only Sita among all the Mary Margarets and Sean Michael Patrick Francis Joseph Aloysiuses at Our Lady of Grace, the only Sita in the whole neighborhood, or in all of Chicago for all I knew. Although there was a stretch as a teenager when I wished to be Suzie or Rita, but I outgrew all that when I left home for college.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Sam offered, and Sita blushed at the compliment. She walked to the window and looked out upon the fair summer day. Too nice for a funeral. I was tempted to cross the room and stand behind her, put my arms around her waist, but as neither one of us could feel the gesture, it seemed pointless. In the glass of the windowpanes, her eyes stared straight ahead, not searching the exterior world, but locked upon some inner landscape far away from here.
I began to forget my father’s stories and became instead just Sita, a girl with an unusual name. One of many strangers when I went to university in Philadelphia. A boy named Ayodeji from Nigeria. Michiko from Kyoto in my English Composition section. Josip and Baxter and a girl named Feather from Los Lunas, New Mexico. Nothing strange about me, nothing exotic. Just a girl, a little darker than some, but hardly unusual. What’s in a name? I was more American than many of these foreign satellites landed on campus, and I became more fully American away from my funny mixed-up parents and their mélange of food and customs, stories and memories.
So in earnest I was determined to say good-bye to the past and become just American like everyone else. My boyfriends were all regular Joes. I hung around with my pixie blonde roommate and the ordinary Janes. In retrospect, it all seems a much more conscious decision, but I had no idea at the time just how much I longed to be just like everyone else. Another eighteen-year-old inventing herself. Funny story, though, I dated this guy a few times, sweet as pie, and one time we got all dolled up for a night on the town and he ends up taking me to an Indian restaurant for dinner, Bombay something or other. And we’re sitting there in the red room, the silver samovars and Ganesh and Siva duking it out on the wall, while we waited for our lamb rogan josh or whatever and I must have looked absolutely morose. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Don’t you like Indian food?” And that cracks me up for some reason, and I just can’t stop laughing. Poor guy didn’t even know.
I floundered around for a couple years like a lot of kids, but by senior year, I had decided to study urban design and was going on to graduate school. Ended up at Rhode Island School of Design, and that’s where my Americanization project became complete. Nobody blinked when I introduced myself as Sita. I was just one more competitor. We were so focused on doing well and landing a job after graduation, and everyone was so earnest and smart and superior. Lots of pressure to perform, and I felt completely out of my depth for the first time in my life. And just about the worst possible moment, when I’m struggling with school and worrying about the future, along comes Matthew.
? ? ?
She had told me all about Matthew before. The inevitable dating conversation about our sordid pasts, the litany of exes. We were in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art, waiting for a free summer jazz concert to begin, the big fountain spritzing in the middle of the plaza, the tourists staking out their spots along the circle of stone benches. A pair of mallards paddled about, and children of all ages dangled their bare feet in the water. A mob of sparrows hopped on the ground, begging for handouts. Among the dozens of idlers was a scruffy fellow in a black T-shirt and jeans, big hairy feet strapped into sandals, and sunglasses perched atop his head. He strolled along, yakking on his cell, and Sita gasped when he passed by.
“Someone you know?” I asked.
She bent her head and hid her face behind her long dark hair. “Not really. He just reminded me of someone I know. Knew. An old boyfriend.”