Money
Give me a quarter for every one of those women who goes to India to learn what yoga does for her body, a dollar for every one that says, I don’t mind taking a tour, but can we rent a car with an AC? Give me a job while she tries to find herself, a sabbatical when she confesses to me, unprompted, I’m scared of it, actually scared to be on those streets, as if her honesty has become our friendship. She’ll fly home, eventually, but I’m left turning over her loose change in my hands as if I can afford a comeback. Maybe she’ll start up a business selling chai-flavored tea, clarified ghee-butter, detoxifying turmeric milkshake.
Meanwhile, every day my grandmother would make a three-course meal for six plus unexpected guests and was always the last to eat. She didn’t know about flushing toxins through mindfulness, about small-business loans and Buzzfeed and improving bone density through high-impact exercise. She read the news in Tamil, kept tabs on the minds of men, counted only her meager blessings. She took the long view about time passing, never dyeing her hair like other paati-maamis, even if it would have taken years off her face. She said, When I board the bus looking like this, men go, Maa-ji, maa-ji, please take my seat. I’d rather have that than have my bum pinched.
Ammamma had a snaggletooth and coke-bottle glasses and feet like landslides, always giving out. Her body gave up eight years before she did, but even when she was spent of levity, she had the sense to say, Pass the pickle jar, it’s a dying woman’s only wish.
After she died, I searched Tamil dictionaries for a way to conjure her ghost and found so many ways to say woman sensu undesirable that I wondered what it cost to be fluent in a language not meant for us.
I speak this milk-sap tongue, sticky with regrets.
I made money off her story once, my Ammamma, and she pressed a large-print copy of my version of her life right up to her warped glasses and read it through, with her ninth-grade English. She’d been married off at fifteen, a fact that never made the final cut of my story, but she said, Everything you’ve written here is true, and I’m glad my life was worth something if you were given money for it.
I had just graduated from university, knew too much English for my own good. I had thought I was going to write about agency, and those who didn’t have it. About microaggressions and clap backs, land rights and language and the body, a trap. As if I’d known a thing. As if there were truth in writing, when the truth was, it was a business. Ten thousand dollars for my grandmother’s story and I hadn’t captured a moment of her wit.
And the thing that sticks with me, at the end of it all, is that I’d never known the words to say to her back then: There’s nothing worthy I could buy with this.
Geetha Iyer (@Geetha_Iyer) received an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. Her publications include work in Orion, Gulf Coast, The Account, The Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and National Geographic. Her writing has received the O. Henry Award, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Calvino Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize. She is the 2020-2023 Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College.