Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
2004
On a good day: she sits in the front seat, looking back at my sister and me, while Dada* drives the Camry. We park at McDonald’s and my sister and I get out first, whispering jokes and dancing around, colorful sneakers crunching on the gravel. There’s a poster in the window advertising the Shark Tale toys waiting for us along with nuggets and fries, and my sister and I run to it, moths to a lamp.
“Little lady!” My grandfather’s voice does not yet strike me as abrasive, but even then it is loud.
“What?” I yell, air bellowing out of all three feet of me. The cozy fluorescence of yellow and red is waiting for me inside and I do not understand why we are taking so long to just go and get our toys and food already.
“Come help your Dadi.**” I see my grandfather easing my grandmother out of the car. Him, big and stately in a pink turban and dark leather jacket. Her, elegant and vast in a satin green suit. I notice the little icebox in her hand—the one that contains her diabetes medication and, more importantly, the occasional Fruit Roll-Up—and I walk over a little quicker. She smiles when she sees me. In that smile I see I am loved and adored, the only two things—aside from Shark Tale toys—that my four-year-old self needs to be happy.
When I take her hand in mine, it is soft and smooth. We walk to the door together, and when I open it for her, she pats my shoulder and says, “That’s my poti.***” I feel a sense of pride in those two syllables. And when the four of us have gotten our food, slid around a shiny white booth, and my hand is gripping a plastic Angie, I feel a sense of pride in that, too.
***
*Punjabi for paternal grandfather
**Punjabi for paternal grandmother
***Punjabi for granddaughter
***
On a bad day: she is yelling at my sister and me. We are sitting at her plastic-covered kitchen table, here for the day while our parents are at work. I don’t understand why she is being so loud, because all I said is that I didn’t like peas and couldn’t eat the rice because of them. There is a lot of pea-infested rice on my plate, alongside various mushy yellow-colored vegetables. I have swallowed as much of them as I can stomach, so the piles look untouched. I would eat more, but I don’t like it.
She screams something about me hating her cooking and stupid Americans and then slips into loud Punjabi, which I cannot decipher because I am one of those stupid Americans. My grandfather sits by quietly in the corner and my sister tries to eat down some of the piles for me.
When my parents come to pick us up that evening, I am so happy to see my dad that I latch onto his leg with both of my little arms. He is warm and safe and smells vaguely of the hospital. When my grandmother sees him, she shakes her head in disgust and my dad, who is the biggest person I know, looks small. I want to go already so I pull on his arm, but he won’t let me.
“Go hug Dadi, girls.”
I hug her without meaning it and then scamper back to my dad’s side. As my sister, me, and him are leaving the house, I hear her yelling again and I walk a little quicker.
2019
It’s a good day. At least it started as one.
I am standing in my grandparents’ house, the third one they’ve moved to this year. The countertops are an odd brown-granite blend and the kitchen table is covered with the same faded “Visit Arizona!” placemats they must’ve had since my family lived in Phoenix. Maria, my grandparent’s underpaid and overworked “helper,” stands by the counter with two bowls, some vegetables, and my grandmother, seated on her walker. Even with the second hip replacement, she is not a mobile creature, and I take it they’ve been waiting for me for some time now.
“Hi Dadi,” I say in a voice quieter and more frightened than usual. I reach out for a hug and brace myself for impact when I do, leaving a body’s width between us. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“My my, hello stranger. Look at you.” It is a good day but even on good days, she can’t resist mentioning my not visiting her enough. She scans me through her droopy eyelid and laughs, delighted that I am here. “My granddaughter!” She says to Maria, and I want to believe she is proud and that that pride is unconditional. She has not brought up how much nicer I was when I was little or ranted about her children and husband being useless. She does not slip into cussing all of us out in Punjabi. It is a good day. Because it’s a good day, I decide to try to be kind.
“What are we making? Walk me through it. Tell me all about it. I’m so excited to cook with you.”
“Of course you are,” she says, and she waves me over. “Cut this,” she says and hands me a knife and a head of cabbage. I oblige, and focus on the slight crunch of the cabbage as I slice, telling myself to stay present, telling myself to stay calm. When I am here, I feel like I am walking over a grassy field where monsters sleep beneath the blades. I do not want to step wrong and wake them, and so I proceed with caution, I proceed afraid.
“Okay, what’s next?” I say when the cabbage is cut and she tells me which spices to grab down from the cabinet. I pull down various unmarked jars for her to sniff, some of which she says “give it here” to and some of which she wrinkles her nose at and swats away. When she’s satisfied with the spices in the cabbage, she commands me to mix, and I do.
After the cabbage comes the dough. She tells me the Punjabi word for the chickpea flour we use to make it, but I forget it moments after it’s escaped her lips. I bring up that mixing the water and the chickpea flour is like making tortillas and try to talk about how that’s something I’ve done before, but she shakes her head and just tells me no, it’s not that. This is different. The dough is warm and sticky on my fingers, and as I squish it around, I think of myself as readying clay to craft into some sort of life form; she tells Maria to take over for me because I’m messing it up.
“You make it like this.” Dadi grabs two clumps of the chickpea dough and rolls them until they are flat. She flips a handful of the cabbage mixture inside one of them, stacks it with the other, and then crimps the edges the way I might crimp a pie crust. It seems straightforward enough, so I try to make them alongside her. The cabbage mixture smells earthy and bright, and for once, I am excited to eat her cooking. But she shakes her head as she watches me form the paranthas (which I will later learn are called parathas but will still be unable to pronounce).
“Let Maria do it. She does it better.”
I step away from the counter and watch. I don’t let the words hurt me because I have come here today determined to not be hurt. But as I’m picking the dough off my fingers under the hot tap, I feel the familiar sense of having disappointed her. I don’t realize the water has begun to steam. I don’t feel my hands turning red.
I am permitted to join the cooking process again once the paranthas are formed. This part I manage okay at and she claps those tiny little hands together when I slide one onto a plate. I make a stack of them and the kitchen is fragrant with spices and heat. When they are done, we sit by the Arizona placemats and she downs her cocktail of pills.
“This is so yummy,” I say, biting into a hot one, and I mean it, too. The dough is buttery and crisp and the filling has the perfect balance of heat and flavor. Maria nods in agreement and I am thinking that this went well, that I can finish eating the paranthas with her, clean up, and drive home without any drama.
But then I see her bite into hers and hear, “This is shit. Terrible.”
“I thought they were pretty good,” I try, sensing something has shifted. But it is too late for appeasement, too late for “good.”
“Awful. Maria, throw them away.” She starts crying and rambles on about how messed up the paranthas are. I want to help her, but I don’t know how to, so I try my best to listen and assure her they are not that bad. But she has had enough.
“Go,” she says to me. And, of course, that’s what I do.
20??
An overheard conversation: “She didn’t want to come here, you know.” My dad’s cousins are speaking with my mom, using the hushed tones people use when they are gossiping about something important. “He didn’t tell her until after they married. She thought they were going to live in Amritsar. She had never even heard of Cleveland.”
2020
A photograph: Dada and Dadi sitting under the opened door of their garage. The van with the electric scooter parked in it sits to Dada’s right. On the left is the closet with their matching white leather jackets. Both sit in their walkers with little red slippers on their feet. Tiny, raisined hands rest on their laps. He’s wearing pajamas and her suit is covered in daisies. If you zoom in, you can see the tufts of white hair floating like a cloud around her face. If you look at her face, you’ll notice she is smiling. Well, almost.
2015
A good day. It is Christmas Eve and my grandparents have come over earlier than the others. My grandpa sits at the kitchen table, wheezing through his pneumonia-battered lungs. Indian Christmas music that somehow bastardizes both Indian music and Christian songs muffles through the kitchen walls and the air is perfumed with chocolate cookies baking in the oven.
“What can I do?” Dadi is sitting at the kitchen table, too, dressed in a purple satin suit with a lavender chunni. She looks sweet and wisened, wrinkles adding depth and texture to her face and hands. I bring over trays of cornmeal lime cookies and set them on the table in front of her, along with another bowl full of thick white glaze with curls of lime zest in it. “Oh boy!” she says, and I smile; it’s nice to see her happy.
I show her how to spoon icing on the cookies and top them with a sprinkling of dried flower petals. She asks for an apron and once she’s properly outfitted, takes on the task dutifully. The tip of her tongue sticks out of the corner of her mouth as she works, and the familiarity of the gesture surprises me. It is the same thing my sister pokes fun at me for doing when I concentrate.
“There,” she says when the last cookie is iced and decorated. “It’s done.”
Later, when the evening’s winding down and everyone’s sipping tea and eating cookies, she pulls me aside.
“Those cookies are so good,” she tells me, and I want to hold onto those words forever, those tiny testaments to my having done something, at least one thing, right.
20??
A conversation: “Well, in the country, you know, they got up to all kinds of stuff.” My dad’s cousin is talking about my family, how they were back in India. “Tattoos, gambling. I don’t see why you wouldn’t let her get a tattoo.” (They’re talking about me.) “They used to have us join in on the games too, yeah. But when we were there, we always knew to avoid Biji [my grandmother’s mom]. We all know something’s up with his mom (gestures to my dad), but she was even worse. Rumor was she used to walk around with a knife hidden at her waist.”
I don’t understand, fully. I didn’t know something was up with Dadi. I thought that was just who she was. No one has words like “depression” or “personality disorder” in my family. The “something” that is up with her could have been a lot of things.
2012
“You work too much,” she says to my dad, shaking her head in disgust. “Never have any time for your mother. Never have any time for your family. Never have time for any of us.”
“That’s not true,” he says, with an urgency that seems to suggest he is not just trying to convince her but to convince himself. “I come to see you guys all the time.”
“What kind of son are you.” It is not a question. “Even your brother is better than you.”
She has not spoken to his brother in fifteen years. His brother went to UC Davis where he fell in love with a gorgeous Desi girl who wanted to become a teacher. Back then he was lean and handsome, and the two of them made a striking pair. But when my aunt met my grandmother for the first time, my grandmother did not see a radiant personality and freely given warmth; she saw a dark-skinned girl who was Hindu and from Fiji, not India. She told him he was not to see this girl. So when she learned my aunt had moved in with my uncle for an apartment he was renting under her name, she called the cops on them and said they were intruding. When they married, she cut him off completely. If he tried to speak to her, she acted as if no sound had punctured the silence of the room. If he tried to reason with her, she acted if she could just not see him pleading before her at all.
“What kind of son are you,” she says again to my father, hitting him with a black-eyed glare.
My dad is quiet. What kind of son am I? he thinks and spends the rest of his life trying to answer this question to her satisfaction.
2011
Vik’s Chaat House. Berkeley, California. Land of hippies, activism, and my dad’s alma mater. We’re sitting with my grandparents around a metal cafeteria table, Dixie cups of water in front of us. Chatter from the other twenty families in the room and the boom of a speaker announcing names every few minutes, calling people up to reclaim their food.
“Randeep!” A voice booms, pronouncing it the Punjabi way. I’ve only ever heard my dad pronounce it in an Americanized way or call himself “Randy.” My sister and I get up and jog to the origin of the voice, where a pillowy bhature waits for us on the tall counter. The grease glistens on its surface and the whole thing is begging for someone to tear through and deflate it.
When we bring it back to the table, one other person shares my delight. Dadi pats the table in front of her and I slide it to her.
“My favorite,” she says. Then she looks at me and beams. “From my favorite poti.”
2018
“He cannot die.” (A bad day. Her husband is in the hospital, in critical condition.)
“He’s not doing well, Mom.” My dad, a doctor, has had many conversations like this. “He would need dialysis, he might be in there for months, he could have another heart attack, he could have another infection. It’s not going to be a pleasant life.”
“He cannot die!” She screams and starts shaking. She is consumed with some mixture of tears and raw emotion and my dad, who is always easily unnerved around her, seems more upset than usual. He does not know what to say. You can see it in the slump of his shoulders while he tries to reason with her.
“He won’t. But you should talk to him about what he wants when he is better. They told me he feels ready to go.”
“What would you know!” She’s yelling now. “What would you know about what he wants? What do you know about anything! He is all I have here. He is the only thing I have here. I didn’t want to come to this stupid country and raise stupid sons like you. I didn’t want any of this. He is the only thing. The only thing. Not that you would understand. You don’t understand anything. You don’t care about us!”
My Dad is tired. There are lines deeper than hers ringing the bottom of his eyes.
“If he dies, then I’ll, well, I’ll…I’ll just kill myself!”
My grandfather does not die. My dad does not talk to her any further about changing his medical documents to DNR. My grandfather walks around his house now with a walker and an oxygen tank attached to him. He breathes like Darth Vader and falls asleep every few minutes. But he is alive. He is there because she demanded it.
2022
A rumor: Dadi and Dada are moving in with my uncle and his family. Dadi and Dada are moving in with the child they did not talk to for nearly two decades because they did not like the color of his wife.
***
A rumor, confirmed: Dadi and Dada live with my uncle and his family. When my grandmother moved into her room, she had the same reaction to it as she had to the last three houses they’ve lived in over the past couple of years. “I hate it. It’s terrible.” But unlike the last places, she did not demand they move.
She did, however, refuse to move quietly. After one night on her brand new queen-size bed, she deemed it intolerable and sat on the floor, refusing to budge until the bed situation was fixed. Dada said they might have to call 911—she can’t get up on her own—but my uncle and his cousins managed to lift her with some grunting and effort. My poor aunt, already hated enough by my grandmother, ordered her a new bed frame and a new mattress. Unsure of what to do with the old ones, she took them for herself and sleeps there every night.
Last I heard, my cousins have been acting out because they don’t like living with these “two old people we barely know.” My grandmother is happier than she has been in a while because she lives with one of her kids and her grandchildren. No one brings up that she ignored this particular kid for nearly two decades. I bring this up to my sister and she shrugs.
That’s all anyone ever knows to do about my grandmother.
2006
A photograph: Dadi and her two potis sitting around a yellow oilcloth-covered table. A variety of Indian dishes and two lit candles are set in the middle. Her granddaughters, each still so small, are in silver and pink suits. They’re laughing about some private joke, while she looks on. In the photograph she is smiling and her smile is slightly open. She is happy.
2005
“Prableen!” She is talking to me but not saying my name. “Come here, Prableen.” She pats her lap like I am some sort of dog.
“That’s. Not. My. NAME!” I shout, refusing to shift from where I am, a healthy ten feet away from her. My sister has told me the reason I have “Prableen” as a middle name is because it kind of sounds like “problem” when you say it and my parents must have thought I was really awful to pick a name that sounds like that instead of a normal middle name like hers (Alice). Because I am five, I believe her. So when my Grandma calls me Prableen, I hear problem, and feel horrible.
“Oh, Prableen, you’re not going to come hug your Dadi?” I do not move. “Filthy little child.” I scowl from where I am, way far away from her, thank goodness. “Come here Prableen.” I do not budge.
“Prableen, you stupid child.” And neither does she.
20??
An overheard conversation: “I’ll kill myself, that’s what I’ll do.” My grandmother’s eyes are shut and she is speaking, once more, in angry bursts to my father. I think he has just said something about her not being able to move in with my family, but I cannot remember. What I do remember is the threat. I’ll kill myself, that’s what I’ll do.
2010
My uncle’s first kid was born, eight pounds, eight ounces. She does not get to meet him because she and my uncle are still not talking. She hears from my dad that his name is “Rohan” and when she says the name to herself, she gets this funny look on her face, almost as if she were sad.
2000
I am born the day before her favorite son was. Eight pounds, five ounces. My first middle name is Prableen, my last name Singh, and if she forgets about my first name and my mother’s last name, she can almost pretend I am fully Punjabi. It is a good day.
2013
My uncle’s second kid is born, ten pounds flat. He’s a large baby with weak lungs like my grandfather, already linked up to tubes and pouches within moments of him being in the world. He’s a fighter, the doctors tell my uncle, when, a week later, it has become clear he will be okay and survive.
As he grows bigger, he will have the hottest temper of any kid I have ever encountered.
On a family trip to Hawaii, he will want to wear his coordinated Nemo swim shorts and rash guard—his Nemo suit—all day every day. When my aunt tries to get him to wear something else for dinner—it’s at a nice restaurant—he will shove her away, scream “No!” and literally growl at her from across the room, where he crouches into himself, fuming. When this happens, my dad’s cousin will see and raise her eyebrows to her sister and my mom.
An overheard conversation: “Well, we’ve seen that before.”
I don’t realize then that they are talking about my grandma.
Recently
A phone conversation with my mother:
Me: “He needs therapy. It makes me feel like shit when he just assumes that the reason I keep failing my classes and dropping my commitments is because I’m lazy. It’s not fair. He doesn’t understand what I’m going through and experiencing because he’s in total denial of what he’s experiencing. He needs to talk to someone.”
Her: “Well, yes. I agree, and I am with you.”
Me: “Thank you.”
Her: “But I mean you know—you’ve met his mother—you know what she is like.”
A pause.
“It used to always bother me. The way she was with you guys. So hot and cold. Like you were always walking on eggshells around her. When I first met her, I just thought it was cultural [my mother is Chicana and white]. But then she has always seemed to be struggling with something. And the way she treated those boys…you know we all always thought she seemed a little borderline.”
2018
It is nine P.M. and I have been with my grandmother all day again, for the third time this week. It is the summer before I am going to college and I am not out with my friends but standing awkwardly in my grandparents’ bathroom after a day of running errands for her and sitting beside her while she watches soaps and Judge Judy. The latest thing she’s asked me to do is buy her adult diapers. I went to three stores until finally, blissfully, Target had some. When I checked out, the cashier looked at me quizzically, and I avoided meeting his eyes.
Now, Dadi hands me a rattail comb and tells me to brush. Her hair falls down her back and is thin and wiry from years of being pulled into a tight bun. The room is quiet save the faintest sound of the strands of her hair separating. She stares straight ahead as I brush. I do not know how to braid very well but I do what I can. As I braid, the oils come off onto my fingers, and I want nothing more than to be anywhere but here, with clean hands, living my life like a free and normal eighteen year old.
When her hair is done, I say goodnight, and get ready to escape to the blissful warmth of my car outside, where I can turn my music up to forty volume and forget about all this. But before I can leave, she asks me to do another few things for her—to close the blinds and prep her food and hang out with her for a while. I am rarely angry and rarely stand up for myself but tonight I am tired of being a caretaker, tired of missing out on my summer, tired of playing the good granddaughter, and so I make an exception. Even as I do, though, I shake so much with anxiety that I drop my keys.
“If you keep asking me to stay here longer than I said I could and keep treating me like your caretaker, I am not going to keep coming around.”
Dadi is quiet.
“Okay,” she says. I collect my keys and walk quickly out to my car, where I shut the door and collapse over the wheel, breathing to calm myself, closing my eyes.
I had never known anyone to stand up to her.
2021
I am sitting across from my grandmother in the house of her second-favorite son. My hair is faded close to my scalp but thankfully, this time, she does not comment on how I’m a different person every time I see her or call me a white boy or say she doesn’t recognize her little poti anymore or ask me how I’ll get a husband when I look like a boy.
“Nice to see you,” I say. I don’t mean it, but it’s the polite thing to say and she is my grandmother, after all.
“Well what’s new with you?”
“Just the usual. Taking some classes. Hanging with friends. Oh! And I might become a tour guide.”
“As long as you’re happy. That’s all that matters to me.”
And then:
“You know, you shouldn’t have gone to school so far away. We never see you. Don’t you love your grandparents? Don’t you care about us? I don’t know who this person is (talking about me). I don’t know her.”
I look at my watch as if I have an agenda today and hadn’t cleared out my afternoon to come and visit her. “I’m sorry, Dadi, but I actually have to go.” I stand up. “I am meeting up with a friend for lunch.”
“You stay happy,” she says, and I don’t know what to say. So I say what I think she wants to hear.
“Of course, Dadi. Always.”
2003
A good day. Her granddaughters are at her house. They have both run up to her and nestled their sweet warm faces into her side. They’ll be with her all day and will delight her with silly stories and giggles. They’ll eat whatever she cooks them and they will love it because it has come from her. They are so sweet and so young and she wants them to stay like this forever.
19??
A photograph: Manjit Sundu is looking at something away from the camera. Rendered in black and white, her skin is glowing and the kohl under her eyes makes them alive and crackling with life. She hasn’t yet been made to marry a man she doesn’t know or move to a country she knows even less. She teaches English with her sister at a nearby school and eats mangoes straight from the tree when school lets out. She goes to the gurdwara once a week, and when she sees the golden accents of the building, she remembers her dad—the government man—taking her to the upper deck of the Golden Temple in Amritsar to watch fireworks bloom in the night. She is twenty-one years old—the same as I am now—just old enough to be excited for the rest of her adult life, still young enough to think it might be something beautiful.
Lila Velasquez Singh is a writer and student of writing at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Spectrum, the oldest literary magazine in the UC system, and is currently working on her first short story collection.