MAGENTA BOUGAINVILLEA

1

Lima, November 1992

Find a job or fold. That was what it boiled down to. Twenty days since Sergio had died, and I was already caving—jobless and moneyless until I received my pension of three hundred dollars in Peruvian currency from the foreign office of Peru because Serg had been a Peruvian diplomat. Only I couldn’t get a job in the country without the degree or certificate I lacked. And jobless, I was an unfit mother to support my children.

I had paid the electric bill, the water bill, but food and gas money was running scarce when the Villa Maria School sent me a letter to collapse my world. It stated I owed the school a total of three hundred dollars in school fees for my two daughters along with a fine for the late payment. And I had assumed my biggest problem was the headache I had woken up with the day after the cremation that had never stopped. Why didn’t someone warn me that widowhood came with a permanent headache, intermittent vomiting, plus horrifying nightmares? They were of Serg lying on the floor with his chest cut open in a pool of AIDS-tainted blood, Serg crying with his liver pulsating in his hands, Serg in a hundred predicaments that hadn’t happened in real life.

“Señora, can I help you any further?” The brown-haired lady at the Villa Maria School’s business office held out a yellow receipt in place of the last two hundred dollars I had had to my name, though the solicited amount had been three hundred. 

My eyes burned and watered, making the finance office glow white-hot under fluorescent lighting. I voiced the question that had kept me awake despite four antianxiety tablets and seven Advil last night. “Señora, isn’t there a law in Peru that specifies how children who lose their wage-earning parent automatically receive a hardship scholarship from the school they attend? My children lost their father twenty days ago.”

The finance lady touched her brown curls. “Let me fetch the treasurer. She might know the answer.”

A few minutes later, a white-haired, bespectacled lady hurried out of an inner door. “I’m sorry for your loss, señora. Let me explain the death-related scholarship to you. To activate it, bring me Señor Santander’s death certificate. You haven’t done that yet.”

Relief grayed the edges of my eyesight. “Where would I find his death certificate?” I wiped wet palms on the sides of my jeans. 

“In the municipality of the neighborhood where he was born. On what day did he die?”

“October 6.” Serg had been born in the older section of Jesus Maria near the center of Lima. I had no clue how to find its municipality. How many other pitfalls await me? Yet I couldn’t hunt down the municipality that day if I meant to do the afternoon school carpool on time. The death certificate would be the next day’s mountain to climb.

“Let’s see. Today is October 26. Give it another week. They should have the certificate by then. When you bring it in, we’ll refund the portion of school fees you just paid.”

“Are you serious?” The refund would save the month of October. Is this Serg saving the day? Yes, in the Villa Maria, my children would never learn the English I wanted them to know—yet right now, can I argue with a free education? 

Pia’s and Abril’s education was my crowning goal in life since, without it, they would be like me—basically unemployable in a country where I couldn’t find a job without the credentials I didn’t have. Someday, I would address the alarming dearth of English in my children’s lives, since English was my comfort language besides being the most important language in the world, but it was not the day to face that fight. 

Villa Maria business office transaction concluded, I hobbled to my car, officially penniless. I lost it once I inserted the key in the ignition. Without warning, I bashed my aching head on the steering wheel and let forth an animal cry. Shaking both fists at the sky, I screamed, “You bastard! You’ve given me a job I can’t tackle. I want you to know I hate you! I will never ever believe in you again. Every hardship you’ve piled on my head I bore without question, but this time, you’ve maxed your quota. This time you’ve fucked with me one time too many. Go screw yourself, God!” I broke into sobs, but my sobs were of rage—sheer, panicked rage. A long time later, I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t have the luxury to break down with two children to take care of.

Once Sergio died, too soon, life forced Pia, Abril, and me to assimilate the fact and continue as if he had never existed. Each day, the children attended school while none of us mentioned the topic of their dead father. On the days I did the school carpool, I stared at Pia’s and Abril’s faces in the rearview mirror—Pia, blond, with her hair in a tight ponytail, had a stony face, her gray-green eyes focused on the cityscape racing by. Abril, brown haired, brown eyed, had an unfathomable gaze. What are they thinking? Feeling? Are they both as overwhelmed as I? At least neither one had complained of the nonstop headache I had, boom, boom, boom, clobbering the left half of my head, day and night.

A week into the crucifying pain, I had called Dick McBee, assistant headmaster of the Roosevelt School, to inform him I was available to work per diem as a substitute teacher. The Roosevelt administration knew me since I had briefly worked there as a substitute teacher several years ago—a time when Sergio had already been diagnosed with AIDS but was still alive to take care of the children and me, a time when I had no idea what “being alone” meant.

“We’ll call you soon, I’m sure,” Dick had said, but he’d never called.

Meanwhile, another week passed, and my nonstop headache didn’t abate, convincing me I had a brain tumor. However, I refused to go see Dr. Ritter because his consult would cost forty dollars, and I didn’t have health insurance. 

I called him on day fifteen. 

“What are you taking for it?” Dr. Ritter didn’t sound happy.

“Advil. But it doesn’t help.” I rubbed my aching eye.

“It isn’t a tumor. It’s stress, so stop the Advil or you’ll give yourself a nice big ulcer.”

Upon reaching home after resolving the Villa Maria school-fee conundrum, against Dr. Ritter’s warnings, I popped four Advil because the temptation to hope perhaps that time they might work defeated the logic of evidence. 

Then I called Dick McBee again. “Dick, I know I’m supposed to wait for your call, but I’m desperate. Do you have any work for me?”

“We need a sub for two weeks from November 15. Can you do it?”

I felt like screaming, Then, why didn’t you call me? Instead, I said, “I’ll be there at seven thirty in the morning, sharp.” Please, dear God. Please let the two weeks of pay from the Roosevelt and the Villa Maria refund save November for me.

To distract myself, I asked Dulci, our live-in maid, who substituted as my younger sister, to make me six toasts and layer them thick with butter and sugar. Eating to cope was a childhood habit I had never beaten. Whenever my grandma, Didima, who had been my primary caretaker, fell sick, I ate to overcome the threat of her dying and leaving me stranded. 

The shrill of the phone ringing shattered the relief of my last bite of toast. From New Delhi, my mother said, “Shona, how are you and the children holding up? Come home. Robu and I will take care of you.” Shona meant “darling” in Bengali.

I dug the heel of one palm into my throbbing left eye. “Thanks, Ma, but no. I’m never coming back to you or India.”

“Ma shona, why are you so stubborn? Here, Robu will take care of us all.” 

Robu Chatterjee, my stepfather, had been unable to control his temptation to molest me at six years old, the first time I had visited the couple for a potential sleepover at their home. 

“Ma, we’ve had this conversation a thousand times. I will never expose Pia and Abril to your pedophile husband.”

“Shona, he’s not a pedophile, and he never molested you! You’re stuck on a childhood perception—” My mother’s voice shrilled to defend her husband. 

“Fine, he’s not a pedophile, but I’m never returning home!” I slammed the phone back in its cradle, too angry to cry as I headed to the bathroom. 

With manic urgency, I shoved two fingers down my throat. Only vomiting the toast, butter, and sugar I had eaten would afford me relief, give me a temporary sense of control. The phone rang again, but I ignored it. Instead, I heaved and retched the fresh taste of all I had eaten, hurling until nothing more came up. Panting like I had run a mile, I gagged as I washed up and brushed my teeth, head pounding so hard I felt it would burst unless I lay back and calmed my breathing.

I crashed onto my bed, face up. I had to find a job—a real one. Only, in Peru, as in India, by law, my chances of securing a job were slim without completed qualifications. That was why Dick McBee of the Roosevelt School couldn’t hire me as a full-time teacher, overqualified as I was when measured in college credits. And if I didn’t find a job, and the money ran out, my only asset was our house. I would have to sell it. When Serg had lost his health insurance in early 1992, it had automatically terminated the fifty thousand dollars of life insurance money I would have received upon his death. Right then, I didn’t have a single penny until I either received my pension from the foreign office or the Villa Maria School refunded me the two hundred dollars I had given them. 

Tears pooled in my eyes. Serg and I had struggled so hard, sacrificed so much to build a mortgage-free house, and I would have to sell it anyway. It would start the beginning of the end, and “the end” might well terminate in India, in my parents’ home. So much for telling my mother off. 

I was crying into my pillow when Dulci rushed up the stairwell. 

“Señora Noor?” She shook her head at the sight of me crying because, during the past twenty days, sometimes I cried nonstop when the children were in school. Dulci understood stress since she was the oldest child of a farming couple on a remote mountain farm. As such, it had been her special burden to support her mother when her father had raped his wife’s only daughter from a former marriage. The resultant child had become Dulci’s fourth “brother” after Dulci’s half sister had been committed to a mental institution. Like me, Dulci had aged young.

I wiped my eyes and nose with the corner of the bed cover. “Did you pick up the phone downstairs? Tell my mother I don’t want to speak to her—”

“It’s not your mother. The foreign office wants to speak to you.”