India

*Draft

My mother was a mixed ball of beauty, heart, and dreams. She had always wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the room, but never wanted to admit such a fact. To me, she always was and would always be that lady who could cook a dinner and still look all prim and proper without a hair out of place. My mother was from California and daddy, he was from the south, a southern gentleman. They had met during a college trip to Mexico where they were building houses for the “less fortunate”. It was an instant attraction, and with my mother’s American beauty and my father’s southern charm, being half white and half black, my mother couldn’t keep away. She was a free spirited woman and my father was someone she thought she would only dream of meeting.

It was in my parent’s destiny to live in the south together, down in Tennessee where my father’s family was placed. He was born in Nashville, and raised outside of the music city, and so he seemed destined to live there the rest of his life, and he was content in his home, a family home in the country. I remember his hunting dogs and the sound of a shot gun on Sunday morning before church. I had come to love that noise, signaling that it was time for me to wake and get ready for church. I loved my father.

It was the seventies when I was born, the year 1973 to be exact, and by the time I was born, my parents had been married for five years already. I was their first girl, and my mother was ecstatic when I was put in her arms. Now, being from a spiritual family, my mother believed I was special. The numbers seven and three were very important to her; they were her lucky numbers, and both being present at the same time was more than enough for my mother to dub me her special child, her last of three. However, upon looking down at me she thought her name of Rebecca wasn’t well suited to my dark looking skin nor was it worthy of how special I was.
My name, India Marie Richardson, was a title I disliked more than anything growing up. I was a child of the south. I wanted my name to be Susan or Elizabeth, but that wouldn’t be. While other girls, blonde girls with mothers who had sound mind to name their children from names in the Bible, I was named for a third world country. Why?

It was clear, growing up, that I had most of my father’s genes in me. I had dark eyes and curly black hair that I loved even though most girls in my class had smooth straight hair that was usually pushed back by a head band. I wasn’t bothered by my looks even though I had wondered, quiet often, what it would be like to look like my mother, but I was so close to my father and his looks made me feel like part of him. At the age of ten my father had even asked me to join him on his Sunday morning shoot outs. He hadn’t even invited my brothers and they were older than me, owned their own guns too. However, my mother was against me owning a gun, being a girl and all. I shot my father’s every time, and little did my mother know that being allowed to do this was better than owning my own gun any day. I was previlaged.

“How is a girl supposed to be a proper southern lady if she’s shooting a gun?” my mother would ask.

How was I supposed to be a normal girl with a name like India? I was named after a country that I knew nothing about. For crying out loud, it was a country that I couldn’t be farther from. I’m an American not an Indian, a mix of American cultures that my father always told me to be proud of.

The first time my mother truly understood how much my name bugged me was when, in the fourth grade, she saw my school papers. There wasn’t another child in my class that could compare in names when it came to me. No other person was named after a city or town or even country for that matter, and I wanted to keep that a secret as much as possible. Silly notion since everyone in the class had remembered my name since the first day of school, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

“What’s this…India?” my mother asked one evening after looking in my backpack, a pretty purple bag with strawberry short cake on the front. She was holding one of my math papers in her hand, looking at it like she had found something so terrible, and she seemed so confused by what she was looking at.

I had looked up from my snack of crackers and milk. I told her that it was a paper I had got back in class that day. I knew what she was specifically looking at, the name at the top of the paper. We had gone over capitals in the class over the week, so the first name that came to my mind when turning in that paper was not India, but Topeka the capital of Kansas. It was something I had done since the beginning of the school year. It was no big deal to me, and my teacher had always known it was my paper anyway, but to my mother it was like some sort of crime, some sort of wound inflicted on her. I didn’t understand why she was so upset, so quiet after setting down my paper. She knew nothing about India, was never there, but to her the name was so important, such a part of her that this new found information had really hurt her.

Then came middle school, my first dance, and I allowed my mother to pick out a pink dress, which I loved because I was sure to be noticed. After all, if I was anything like my mother a man like my father would fall in love with me instantly. My father handed everything to her like she was a queen, and I believe to him she was, as my father looked at her like she was the only woman in the world. She stood behind me as I sat at her mirror and she put my hair up, wrapping hair around her fingers to make curls around my face.

“Why did you name me India?” I asked, taking her powder puff in my hand, the dust coming up close to my nose, a sweet perfume smell. I felt the urge to sneeze, but held it in, feeling my eyes water.

“Well,” she said, twirling a curl around her finger. My father stood in the door for a second, admiring my mother, and he must not have known that I saw him smile and shake his head. “When you were born you looked like an Indian and you were the most beautiful baby, the Indian princess I could never be, so it just seemed fitting.”

I wasn’t happy with this answer. I should have been, but I wasn’t. The look of my hair was very princess like and my dress was perfect for my growing body, but an Indian princess, that's corny.

Fifteen years later, my father would call in the middle of the night to inform me that my mother had died, cancer. Thank God, she had see me get married to a man who, she told me, looked at me like I was the only woman in the room. He should, I thought. I had thought of my father’s calm attitude and grace under pressure when I had considered who I was going to marry. He wasn’t a college professor like my father, but a doctor, who met when my car had broken down in the parking lot of the college we both attended. He was a southern gentleman and we had hit it off right away as he fixed my car, finishing up just as the down pour of rain had started. He followed me in a pick up truck to the closest restaurant, and I bought him a thank you dinner.

“What’s your name?” I rememberng him asking, sweetly, very gentleman like with a courtious smile.

I was hesitant like telling him my name would change that smile on his face. “India,” I said and he held out his hand.

“Carson,” he said, and I placed my hand in his. That was the beginning of us, of Carson and India.

He was tall, and blonde, and I thought of sand and Carson City, Nevada. I told him this one night, the third date I believe, and he laughed. His mother’s home town was Carson City, and his name came from that place. I felt a sting of pink humiliation on my cheeks, but he kissed me and all was well again.

After two years of dating, camping trips when we could get away, and of my father and him hitting it off behind shot guns, it was time to settle down. I knew that he was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. My father had said he was content with my choice of a soul mate, but would always claim me as his baby girl. Carson asked me to marry him in April and we were married by fall the same year. Just a month later, he began his internship at a hospital just outside of Gulf Port, Mississippi. We moved soon after our wedding, and my mother looked as if there had been a death in the family. She was proud of my choices as I was proud of her for not balling like a baby when we said our good-byes.

Carson had told me that he would say my name out loud when he was alone. He said it was a way of visualizing me when he was lonely and needed to see my face. To him India had become some sort of mantra that he would repeat when he needed something to get him by on the long nights we were away from each other. He thought my name was sexy and after our first child, after hearing him say I love you India, the mother of my child, I knew something was different in me.

I learned my mother had cancer just after Rachel was born, but my mother had tried to keep it from me like she was protecting me. I took the trip back to Nashville, Rachel and I, as it was hard for Carson to get away because of the hospital. I didn’t mind though, and we both knew it was probably best that I spend time with Rachel and my mother alone.

The first time I saw her again, after learning she was sick, I thought of how graceful she looked in her robe and how beautiful she still seemed with a pale face and dark circles under eyes. She took Rachel in her arms and I saw this light in her that I could imagine being there when I was put in her arms. Rachel hardly had any hair, looked mostly like her father I believed, but my mother said she saw me in her.

“Why’d you name her Rachel?”

I took my daughter in my arms, and held her close, rocking her back and forth. Couldn’t my mother understand why I named her Rachel? “Because I saw her and thought of the most beautiful woman I had ever known, the mother I can only dream of being.”

My mother looked like she was going to cry, but she pulled together a smile instead. She held out her arms to hold Rachel again, and I handed my daughter over to the safest hands I had ever known.

For the most of my life I had thought that I was so much like my father; his looks had seemed to dominate me. I had only dreamt of being like my mother, but I had never admitted so until recently. I had dreamt of a name that would seem more like my mother’s common name of Rachel, but I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the name that made my mother. A common Bible name meant nothing when describing my out of the ordinary mother.

The Sunday after my mother’s funeral and before I returned home I went out with my father, holding up the shot gun to take my first shot when I noticed something I had never once seen on his face, tears. He was crying. After seeing those tears I understood that he had known, from the start, that my mother was something else. He loved my mother, had made her his life, and that’s what it was all about in the end. I smiled, took my shot then looked back to my childhood home. Part of me had expected to see her standing in her church dress, waiting for us to finish so we could go inside and get ready. I loved my father, looked like him, but I am my mother’s daughter too. I am India, the baby she held and loved, the baby she had named because she thought I was beautiful. She, a woman of infinite beauty, had thought I was beautiful.

For our ten year anniversary Carson convinced me to go to my name sake, and we vacationed in India. That’s not the first time I got the look from my husband, but the first time I had cried because I knew that I was his life, and then I understood.