The Storyteller's Secret

Three months after Jaya’s miscarriage, she remembers as a child asking her mother Lena for a dog because “I just wanted something of my own to love and to hold tight” (9). When the dog ran away, Jaya was inconsolable, but her mother “never said a word to me about my loss” (9).

Jaya and Patrick meet on the banks of the Hudson. They have barely spoken since the miscarriage and struggle to understand one another’s grief. They reminisce about the beginning of their relationship. Patrick encourages her to return to skydiving, an activity she loved but stopped in her first pregnancy.

Patrick announces that he has found an apartment close to their current home. Though they are in the process of separating, they remain kind and mindful of each other’s emotions. Jaya has been experiencing blackouts, moments of distance where she is not present in reality, but keeps this from Patrick.

Jaya has told her parents of their separation; she’ll be visiting them this weekend. Patrick offers to go with her and help explain the situation, worried about Jaya’s interaction with her mother, who is often emotionally distant. Jaya refuses—”We both know nothing will change my mother’s detachment” (12). Instead, Patrick will come to the apartment at the end of the weekend to pick up the rest of his belongings.

Jaya visits her parents’ home in the suburbs of New York City. When she was a child, her father was always at work and her mother Lena raised her at a remove: “She set the course of our mother-daughter relationship and cemented it to what we are today—two strangers with blood as our bond” (15).

Jaya’s mother insists that Jaya should stay with them longer instead of being alone while Patrick is leaving her. Resentfully, Jaya insists that Patrick didn’t leave, and that their separation is mutual, lying to protect her pride. However, to herself, Jaya admits that her own depression prompted by not being able to have children drove Patrick away. As they sit to dinner, Jaya’s mother uncharacteristically pushes the subject of Jaya’s inability to carry children. She proposes that Jaya move in with them, but Jaya doesn’t want to talk about her life, especially “Not with you” (17).

Jaya’s mother leaves the table. With her mother out of the room, Jaya shares with her father the pain of her mother’s emotional distance. Jaya’s father gives Jaya a letter that he found in the trash. In a letter addressed to Jaya’s mother, her brother Paresh tells her that their father is close to death. Paresh knows that Lena “would never […] return to a place that caused so much pain” (19), she should know the situation with their father.

That night, Jaya is unable to sleep. She finds her mother at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Rather than admit something it wrong, Jaya’s mother heats up milk for them to drink and brings out cookies.

Motivated by the recent loss of her unborn child and her marriage, Jaya presses her mother to explain why she won’t go to India. Jaya has another episode of “darkness” (21), in which she loses track of time and cannot see. Her mother steadfastly refuses to divulge any information about her past; all she admits is that she promised her stepmother and father to never return to India after her marriage: “My promise was the price I had to pay for being born” (22).

Jaya’s episodes of darkness become more frequent and uncontrollable: “There’s no explanation for the time lost with each occurrence when grief envelops me and I am blinded to the outside world” (23). Amid an episode of darkness, Jaya is awakened by Patrick entering with his key. He tried calling for her, but she didn’t hear him. He is there to pick up the rest of his belongings to move into his new apartment.

Patrick admits that he has been spending time with Stacey, one of Jaya’s college friends. Jaya feels so betrayed that the darkness threatens to come again. She manages to fight it off. Patrick admits that he enjoys spending time with Stacey because “she listens. Because she talks” (26), something that Jaya has been unable to do during her depression. The thought of Patrick talking to Stacey about Jaya’s miscarriages is the final straw. She is ready to let Patrick go with the thought, “I wonder if this is how most marriages end—with a calm discussion of the one who will replace you” (26).

In an effort to assuage her pain and connect with her extended family in India, Jaya decides to respond to her uncle Paresh’s letter herself and travel to her mother’s birthplace: “In going to India, I am escaping my reality in the hopes of saving my sanity” (28). Her boss grants her a leave of absence as well as a spot on a friend’s blog to write about her travels; this is comforting to Jaya, as writing is an integral part of her identity.

Jaya flies to India. As she leaves the airport, Jaya sees a world both culturally and socially unfamiliar to her. Still, she finds comfort in knowing that this is her homeland: “I recognize no one, and yet I know that, in this place I have never visited, I am a reflection of each one” (30). She meets a group of children selling trinkets on the street. Having never encountered a child begging for money, Jaya quickly pays them for a plastic necklace.

In a taxi bound for her mother’s village, Jaya is astonished by the cows and other animals walking in the roads. The taxi driver asks her if she’s visiting India for religious purposes and is surprised when she says no, asking, “Then why the village?” (31) Jaya can only respond that she is in India for her mother, and for herself.

The small village is crowded with people and “filled with decrepit homes scattered among smaller houses” (32). Jaya arrives at her mother’s childhood home. She knocks and calls out. Someone answers, thinking that she is Amisha, Jaya’s grandmother. Jaya meets Ravi, a longtime servant of her mother’s family. He tells Jaya that she is too late. Her grandfather is already dead.

Jaya is eager to hear more of her grandmother Amisha, whom Ravi holds in the highest esteem: “He speaks of her with reverence, with warmth that turns cold when he mentions my grandfather” (38). Ravi admits that Amisha was exceedingly kind to him and his family despite the fact that they are Dalits, or Untouchables, the lowest caste in the Hindu caste system. Jaya remembers learning about the caste system in school; meeting Ravi introduces her to the truth of his experiences.

They go on a short tour of the small house, which Ravi proudly describes as “one of the first fitted for electricity,” (38) a statement that humbles Jaya for all that she takes for granted. Jaya has a room in a hotel in a nearby village, but she decides to stay the night in her mother’s old home in an effort to connect with her.

The next day, Jaya wants to go to the hotel, but Ravi becomes upset and insists that she stay in her family home. He reveals that Amisha was a gifted storyteller. Jaya becomes excited, thinking that her deceased grandfather may have left a collection of her grandmother’s stories as an inheritance, but Ravi tells her that the stories were destroyed. He knows what Jaya’s grandfather left for her mother, but insists that she listen to a story first. It is one that he had to keep a secret for years and can now share because Jaya’s grandfather is dead.