Forever Home
In honor of Shashikala Karnik Desai, Homemaker, Groundbreaker
My mother became a Mainer—in her 80s.
There’s a Maine saying: You can’t get there from here.
You can get here from there, though. All rivers lead to the sea, as my mother always told me (though you cannot step in any one river twice; change, a constant). And she—queen of brood, first to immigrate from her family, physician, artist, and groundbreaker of a homemaker—is proof.
Shashikala Karnik (not yet) Desai emerged from womb to room when her mother broke water in a Vile Parle village kitchen. Back when Mumbai was Bombay, and India was under British rule. Aided by a midwife, and attested to only by affidavit, my grandmother-to-be earthed this much-longed-for baby girl.
My future mother was Bombay-raised, with a few years, including her happiest childhood memories, in Kolhapur. In Kolhapur, when a plane swam the skies, children would run out to gaze up, thunderstruck—which amazed young Shashikala still more. She was a city girl, had often seen this winged wild blue yonder. Still, she goggled along, wondering:
Where were these passengers heading?
Where would she, perhaps, go one day, too?
That first flight was nearly two decades away. Growing up, back in Bombay, Shashikala sojourned miles by foot, train, foot again to school (no easy feat in a sari during monsoon season). She could sketch and soak up any face. Her nimble fingers deftly wove roses, hewed hibiscus into hip-length plaits; friends flocked to her to flair up their hair like Bollywood ranis for Diwalis, shaadis. Multilingual (Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, English) Shashikala spoke music, too: could thrum a harmonium, or simply tap knuckle and nail onto tabletop, accompany herself singing a jaggery-sweet stream into any room; even in Urdu.
At sixteen, countless of these rooms swooned when she crooned on India’s national radio.
My (apartheid-South-Africa-born Varad-Gujarat-raised) father fell in deep with this Bombayite of the shy smile, all-seeing gaze, when he heard her sing at the medical school class picnic in Borivali. “Zindagi Bhar Nahin Bhoolegi Barsaat ki Raat”—my parents’ love song.
I will never forget this night of pouring rain.
They would not.
No rain, all sun that Borivali day.
How my mother loved my father’s kind eyes, lush smile. His posture, walk, so elegantly upright—like a paddleboarder skimming Casco Bay waves, a near scriptural sighting she’d witness decades later.
The two eschewed straight-line rules from kasā kai; kem cho: hello. Diving into love and the uncharted—and, ultimately, that rarity in an era and environment of same-caste arranged unions: an intercaste love marriage.
Their first kiss: at Bombay beach Breach Candy, where my mother tread gracefully out across rock tips in swirling yellow sari and chappals hooked only to the toes, her sable waves rippling nearly to her knees.
Clearly, she’d had the gift of ocean-crossing even then. Sea legs. Land fins.
My father accompanied her. For a moment that would unfold into eons of lunar months and miles…to this coast by these so-called Calendar isles. This Breach Candy kiss proving to be not just a kiss—rather, a preamble to a lifelong ramble.
The wedded pair’s first port of call: Sewickley, Pennsylvania. My future father went ahead for a cardiology job. Five months later, my 25-year-old mother-to-be (in lime-green ebony-embroidered georgette sari, burbling baby boy in left arm and pink plastic tote woven by her mother for his belongings in the other’s crook) boarded an Air India flight to join him—for the first time flying: crossing alps of oceans, summits of seas, leaving her country, and perhaps much more, behind.
At last, she descends the plane, walks toward terminal, JFK, jetlagged eyes searching, swimming. Landing upon him.
They step toward each other—into the start of the winsome lose-some American Dream.
Next up: Pittsburgh. Following: Boston. Shashikala receives her Master’s in Public Health from Harvard (her work including groundbreaking research with rhesus monkeys). Arduously earned, this degree. All the while tending to her small son, busy catching every bug going round daycare.
All the while, a still-green immigrant to the red, white. Blues.
After my Brookline birth: ahoy, Bombay. And then West once more, eventually to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where I grew up, and we all grew into America—sometimes Friendly as this town’s claim-to-fame ice cream, sometimes more of a curdling go-back-whence-you-came variety.
Difficult days to get there from here: Once in the US, my parents didn’t see, speak, to their phoneless families for six years. Contact with India was solely via pale blue airmail letters that took weeks, sometimes months, to sail into our mailbox, turn it azure with that pined-for sky. These missives: triple-folded fins, wings, to a motherland that—especially with no people of our particular diasporic background on our streets, bookshelves, TV; in bands, magazines (nor even, yet, in my imagination)—seemed speedily receding: a fata morgana beyond horizon’s horizon; a mergrrrl’s ultramarine breach…and then silence.
Shashikala gave up medicine to be another kind of healer: a full-time homemaker. Fiercely loving, unflaggingly inventive. Sinking and swimming into this new environment. I may have—out in the world, and later on the page—struggled with not feeling Indian enough, nor American enough. Home, though, was a sanctuary, where my mother created ample space, safe amidships, for both sides of our Indian-American selves, turning that hyphen from border to bridge: Christmas tree near kitchen Krishna temple. Mango pulp (from three-hour-drive-away Indian grocer) residing beside alphabet soup. My mother melody-and-two-meals-making (spaghetti for my brother and me, for my father: khichdi khadhi), segueing seamlessly from “Rupa Tera” to Linda Ronstadt.
She emboldened authenticity: Be yourself. Buoyed creativity: Keep writing.
Dreaming.
She made our life a map that could fit all our parts. Made us forever home wherever we were. Whoever we are.
And whatever the world, or even we, might say: firmly included in our from here our from away.
(She also helped, with my father, numerous others grow land legs here, sponsoring, hosting—encouraging in word and deed—family and friends over the years: taking my adoptive uncle out daily to teach him to drive; a ‘mentor’, in their words, of new country-borrowed blue brides; a navigator, form-filler, for immigrants recently arrived.
Providing a pillow to rest their heads; a freshly laundered bug-snug bed. Ensuring they were delightfully fusion-feast fed.
Friends to this day describe her as the ‘rock’, salt, of their lives.)
In 2000, newly wedded, my husband and I away’d to London for a year…which turned to seventeen.
Our UK era, my parents jetted Eastward (and we wended West) for treasured visits. They were all-hands-on-homemaking-deck for the births of my two book babies. And two human ones, too: Indo-Franco-Belgo-Americano London-born daughters with British accents, who grew up waking to Maine summers (where my brother now lived, as well as the first two Maine women in our South Asian American family: my nieces)—and dreaming it every season, their uncle’s gifts of Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine favorite bedtime stories.
And so the years ripened, kerplunk-kerplink. And when, after seventeen, it grew too difficult for my parents to fly to us, we fledged back to the US.
One-way tickets: Heathrow—Logan. Needing, wanting, to be beside them. In with the babies, bathwater. Blood, rushing: thicker than.
At my brother’s suggestion, we frequent Maine, exploring it as more than Vacationland. And it was love at coucou, cheers: hello. First roll in the snow. Frozen ocean. Wild blueberry sky.
Lighthouse: of family, after nearly two decades, so nearby.
Still: not close enough to my parents for our comfort. Our home base in Wilbraham, we wore-and-tore I-95.
You are in such a beautiful place, meeting such wonderful people, my mother said. Don’t come back here for us. We will come to you.
My mother: mobile homemaker.
By fortuitous timing, just two weeks after the pandemic hit: We bring my parents to Maine, realizing the dream of uniting our three generations under one roof (and just up the road from my brother).
We are in such a beautiful place, my mother says now, the there transforming to here, for nearly two and a half more years, during which every sea, every shore, of our family’s diasporic story is welcomed in all its fullness.
We celebrate birthdays. Holidays (Diwali, with our lobsterman friend’s catch; Christmas with hake curry, a side of saag, a spruce sprung for at the town hall). My parents’ diamond anniversary, my mother, smiling—short of breath now but long of feeling, faint voice perfectly pitched—sings of zindagi: Life. Of how she will never forget this night of pouring rain…which spills now from my father’s all-ears eyes.
We celebrate every day.
She teaches me her recipes, and these are stories, too, a time-traveling topography of her own wayfaring: a Heinz ketchup shortcut for chole bhature. How to turn toor dahl (shout-out, South Portland grocer Masala Mahal) into the golden comfort food her own mother would make for her, and she, in turn, for me.
Gifting me the tools to feed our family—and find her in this act. To digest in a most sensory way, be nourished by: her love.
The recipes grow in frequency this past year. Helpful hints as well abound.
She is, as always, homemaking—but now it is to ensure we will be at home without her, too.
Blood, thicker than: what drew us from sea to shining sea. Now: a seasick quease. For hers: Thicker still, as this salty summer steeps.
The last Friday of July my mother shares with me a historic, herstoric, childhood memory: the day, 75 years ago that then upcoming August 15th, of Indian Independence; Partition. She was there, then, in Kolhapur, city of the Panchganga River, Rankala Lake: a jigsaw iota of atlas that meant so tremendously much to her. How: Ahh! Teacher distributed luscious longed-for laddoos from magic-hat barrel. How: Mmm! Sugar-lipped, salt-skinned, she imagined this boon in the hands of all! The Catholic schoolkids, too, tucking in. Polish children from the nearby refugee camp, with their fascinating faces and beautiful Marathi, in the semolina savouring a hint of the kasza manna from the homeland they’d been forced to flee. This—no flag-hoist, headline, parade—my mother’s image of Independence: Sooji. Sakar. Badam. Ghee. A treasure in her, every, palm. A taste of sweeter days to come.
We speak, too, of those planes, the train; her arrivals.
That same evening she celebrates my younger daughter’s done-and-dusted co-authored fantasy novel.
Over the weekend, I write up my mother’s Kolhapur recollections as a poem for Pen America’s India at 75 anthology. She loves it.
Keep writing, she tells me, has always told me.
I will think of so many nice stories to tell you, she adds, Monday.
Tuesday, she joyfully witnesses the finished copy of my elder daughter’s first YA novel. Teaches me how to submerge; soak: sprout mung.
Wednesday morning papers didn’t come.
Thursday, in the depths of a restless night, she rises again, again, points upward, elsewhere, repeats a word I do not know, sees a place—that winged wild blue?—I cannot yet go.
Friday, a week to the day, nearly hour, of her sharing her story of Independence, it is my father who now provides the mouth, the inlet where all rivers lead to the sea. Here, near the Royal and Cousins (diasporically arrived at via the Ganges, Hudson), he recounts, with such tenderness—to her, as her sleep irretrievably deepens; to her children and grandchildren, a life raft surrounding her; to himself, at sea, swimming in memories—a last, an avast, daytime-bedtime tale:
A girl. A boy. Borivali picnic. Breach Candy kiss.
The story of their love.
The map, this morning in Maine: of us.
You are in such a wonderful, beautiful place, my mother tells me during that last week, this woman who made everywhere—from Bombay, Boston to Mumbai, Maine—wonderful. Beautiful. Keep writing.
I am, Mom. These words are my water; my tears. Thicker than. A map to keep you near.
Home is not a place: rather, a safe space, with love, you make. And a legacy, a story across time we trace. A relaying and relay. A kind of state of aching grace.
This is one story of one Maine woman. My main woman. A Bombay baby, bacchoodi girl, who shaded her eyes, looked out to sea—then dove on in to an epic go-West land-ho: breaching horizon’s horizon: over the river, and through the woods, across multiple oceans and seas—and nearly a century—to this now grandmother’s house she flowed. Bombay to Casco Bay. From away to here to stay…in the Land of the Dawn: this not-yet-in-her-lexicon fine Pine Tree State (Wabanaki land upon).
And who—I see now, and in my heart perhaps already sensed—became a Maine woman in her 82nd year to bring us all together in one place where she knew we could lay roots. Bloom. To launch a new chapter of our collective story to enjoy together. Surround us with beauty and wonder, both natural and human. And, superlative homemaker that she was, to build a safe harbour for my father, for all of us, for when her ship set sail.
Choosing Maine as the last earthly place she would see. Breathe.
Worth a visit. Worth a lifetime.
And before that room-to-womb avast—that mergrrrl morgana in reach, at last?—she journeyed here to imbue this house with lifetimes of her love, laughter. Wisdom, words. Recipes, reassurances. Worlds. To gather all our from aways…
Here.
My first home.
Forever home.
No place like her.
Author photograph by Ali Cali Photo; all other photos courtesy of Tanuja Desai Hidiera
TANUJA DESAI HIDIER is an author/singer-songwriter. Her pioneering debut Born Confused, considered to be the first South Asian American YA novel, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Sequel Bombay Blues received the South Asia Book Award. Tanuja has also created ‘booktrack’ albums of original songs based on the novels. Please visit www.ThisIsTanuja.com for more info.
Teen author Leela Marie Hidier’s debut YA novel, Changes in the Weather, was published this year by The Telling Room, a youth literary non-profit based in Portland, Maine.
