The rest of Friday and much of Saturday, Birendra kept close to Mama Maddy and waited for the day of the funeral to arrive. Uncle Eddie had brought him home Friday evening and told Mama Maddy about their mother. For a long time, they sat and said nothing. And then it was time for bed. On Saturday, Mama Maddy explained to him that nothing would happen for now, that the funeral for her mother would take place on one day only, the following Friday. And that she would be buried and not cremated. She didn’t know what an atma was, and he couldn’t really explain it to her. Nor was she sure why they waited so long in America to bury a person, except that everything took time, and that people who wanted to come needed to arrange their schedules. Even dying, he thought, was different in America.
On Sunday morning, at breakfast, she told him not to eat too much cereal and that he should get ready to go someplace special. Maybe he’d misunderstood. Maybe there was more than one day of ceremonies here as well. Either way, he was looking forward to a day with Mama Maddy. She’d been working a lot lately at the big house. He missed those days just after they arrived in California, when they spent all their time together. But he was also glad to have school again, even if learning French was difficult. Now he chose his favorite sweater and jeans and went to her bedroom. He was impatient to ask where they were going, but she was biting her lower lip when he reached her doorway, as she did sometimes. He didn’t like to disturb her in these moments, so he waited until she caught his eye in the mirror.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“You look nice. Where are we going?”
She waved him over and began to pull at his cowlick, trying to smooth it down. She often did this, even though it always sprang back up.
“Come with me,” she said and led him to her bathroom. She ran a comb under the tap, then passed it through his hair, straight back, not to the side as he always combed it. “There,” she said.
His hair was standing straight up, but she was laughing, and he was glad to see she had been teasing but also happy she was not as sad as she had been. She combed his hair down again neatly and turned him toward the mirror in front of her. His cowlick was still there.
“We, my little Bindi, are going to the Huntington gardens for high tea.”
“What’s that?”
“The Huntington or high tea?”
“Um…both?” She squeezed a small mound of white mousse into the palm of her hands, then ran it through his hair until the foam disappeared.
“The Huntington gardens was once the home of a very wealthy family that, I think, made its money in railroads at the turn of the century.”
“You have trains in Los Angeles?” he asked.
“Of course we do. They’ve actually been trying to revive the whole system. There’s even a subway now, an underground train. Next time we go to dinner in Chinatown, I’ll take you to see the downtown station. It’s a beautiful old building.” She began to brush her hair now, then fixed her lipstick while he waited for her. “Oh, and high tea is just a fancy way of saying tea and sandwiches and little sweets. My grandmother liked to take me there when I was a little girl. It was my favorite place to go.” He followed her back to her bed. She’d never mentioned her grandmother before. That’s what her mother would have been for him. “There’s a museum and beautiful gardens and forests, with a koi pond and giant cacti that make the desert garden look like another planet.”
She pulled out a folded square of fabric and held it up to her chin.
“Is your grandmother with God, too?”
“What a nice way to think of it. Yes, she is, dear.” She held up a different scarf. “I was not much older than you are when she died.”
She’d told him that it wasn’t just one thing that took her mother’s life. She was on the wrong medication and she didn’t care of herself. And the man she was with was a bad influence. It all caught up with her. She seemed sad but not as surprised as Uncle Eddie. He thought of his own father, who had drowned. And the shock of coming home to find his mother gone.
“How did your grandmother die?”
“Pneumonia killed her in the end, but her body had been struggling already.”
“Was she nice?”
“She was perfect,” she said, then she walked over to him and pulled his forehead to her lips. “The best grandmother ever.”
“Was your mother like her?”
“No, sweetie.”
She held up both scarves for him to choose. He would have liked to have a grandmother. “The green one,” he said.
“My mother was not like Grandma June at all. I wish she had been, but that’s life.” She took his hand and they went downstairs. “You know how we were talking about my mother’s funeral next week and what will happen there?” He nodded. “Well, I was thinking that going to tea today might be something special that you and I could do to remember my mother, something for—what was it you called it? Her atma?”
He didn’t know if it worked that way, or if there was a priest they could ask, but he nodded. Maybe the priests here knew different ways of achieving the same results. And he was happy to do whatever Mama Maddy thought might help, like seeing the garden and eating little sweets and sandwiches so she could remember. He pulled her purse from where it hung on the hook below the mirror at the base of the stairs.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” she said and followed him out of the house.
“Did your mother take you to high tea when you were a girl?” he asked.
“Actually,” Mama Maddy said, waiting for him to buckle his seat belt, “the three of us went together once—my mother, Grandma June, and me. It’s one of my favorite memories. I was obsessed with this little doll in a white dress, and I insisted that she come along. And that we dress identically.”
She shook her head and laughed a little. Then she changed the radio to her grandmother’s favorite station. He tried to think of more questions, but she’d gone quiet, listening to the music, as though she were far away. They turned in a new direction once they hit the main road, so he watched the unfamiliar landscape as it passed by. A woman began to sing. It was in a foreign language, but not French. At first the song sounded dark and scary, and then it was just very sad. It filled the car completely, and he felt even stranger than he had before listening to the music. So lonely. They passed over a bridge, and the sun was bright on his face for a moment, then it hid behind the hill. When the song was over, the announcer said the title translated as “You Are with Me,” and this surprised Birendra, for he’d never heard a lonelier-sounding song.
The bridge led to a town called Pasadena. Mama Maddy said they were getting close now. The houses were enormous, much bigger than Mama Maddy’s, more like the one she was working on in Los Feliz. They’d driven by it once, and she’d pointed it out and said a very famous singer was going to live there. He wondered if famous people lived in these houses as well. And then the houses were gone and they drove into a tree-shaded parking lot. The air outside was fresh, and there was a cool breeze. He could hear the tweeting sounds of excited birds, and he caught sight of a squirrel, staring back at him through a pair of scared black eyes. He listened for crows, remembering how they squawked constantly in India. In Los Angeles, he often saw them, but only one or two at a time, nothing like what he saw in Varkala, where they swarmed, sometimes so numerous they made the sky go black. Mama Maddy joined him and looked up into the trees as well. It was often the absence of crows, whenever he was somewhere like this, with a lot of trees around, that made him remember the crows in India. And he couldn’t remember the crows without thinking a little of his mother as well. He wondered what it was that made Mama Maddy think of her mother. He would ask her. He took her hand and they walked toward the entrance. Maybe it would help to remember her mother in this special place.