Seven Steps

“Seminole Lullaby” by Despy Boutris

The Cowbane Ridge Community Center was large enough to make all of Pallavi Reddy’s matrimonial dreams come true, even if she was reluctant to voice them out loud. French doors ran the length of the main hall where seniors played Bingo on weekday mornings, and opened onto the garden with its well-maintained paths of trimmed grass (instead of bumpy concrete walkways that might trip elders). Pallavi pictured throwing open the doors and setting up one or two tented areas with folding chairs. Whomever they found to marry them could project his or her voice through the mic so that guests who were still not comfortable socializing indoors might feel included. Inclusivity was crucial. There was no need, given what they had waited so long to celebrate, to judge or criticize anyone else’s choices. It would be a ceremony for a new moment, a new country. A new way of moving forward after almost suffocating in isolation, drowning in fear.

Pallavi paced slowly across the hardwood floor thinking about doing yoga as a child. The venue finalized, she couldn’t help now but want to locate and recruit Swami Sukathaya, the old temple leader, to perform the Hindu wedding rites, despite the fact that Mallory was neither Hindu nor male.

Mallory snapped a photo of the area in front of the stage on her phone, seeming Mallory, seeming amused rather than irritated. “When is the last time you saw him?”

Pallavi couldn’t remember, and her mother’s memory was no longer reliable.

“I like the idea,” Mallory said carefully. Her positive outlook was what Pallavi loved most about her. “But we’re probably dealing with someone who’s very traditional, someone who’s older than our parents. Or just as old.”

“You mean he might still worry about being safe indoors?”

“Something like that,” Mallory answered, smiling. 

In Pallavi’s mind, the Hindu leader’s philosophizing about emotional consciousness when she was young, ideas which a year of therapy had finally brought into focus, made the Swami the best person to marry them. But she didn’t press it now. She didn’t know if Mallory would find her need to be sanctioned by a holy man who was friends with her parents to be trivial. Mallory had grown up learning not to put too much stock in what people in charge thought about her.

“Imagine how pretty the bud vases are going to look set up on white tablecloths,” Mallory enthused, standing at one of the French doors and looking back at the center’s dusty tables. “What’s the guest list count now?” She grinned at her phone as she asked the question. She texted something while waiting for Pallavi to answer and then snapped a shot of the whole room. 

“One hundred and thirty.”

“That’s a lot of pottery my mother’s going to have to do.”

Inside Pallavi’s mind she heard her own mother chide, “Clay pots for wedding favors, Pallu?” She saw her mother’s lips purse at the ombre-colored vase Mallory had shown Pallavi, with its teardrop shape and bristly texture. Idi emiti? Pallavi imagined her mother muttering in Telugu. It looks like something villagers try to sell on the roadside.

“Yeah, but remember,” Pallavi began now. “Some of those guests will be couples and families. She’ll only be making one per party.”

Mallory had retreated to the stage and was peering around at the narrow parallelogram of space afforded there with the curtains closed. “If we set up our ceremony area in the center of the hall instead of on the stage, people outside will be able to see what’s going on.”

Pallavi loved it when Mallory contributed in this way. It reminded her of being young and playing Barbies--the elation of introducing an outrageous scenario to a play partner who ran with it. 

“Mall,” she called across the room, hating now to have to make this point. “Remember the tablecloths can’t be white. Too funereal for Indians.”

Mallory waved her hand. “Whatever color you want!”

 “I’ve heard that these lesbians are having babies now,” Pallavi’s mother said to her five years prior, when Pallavi and Mallory first started dating. “But do you really want to have a child who could be partially black?” And then, in Telugu, “Do you really want to have children with hair like that?”

             ***

These things Pallavi had shoved into her vault of hurts, never to be opened and shared for fear of injuring Mallory. Her mother’s questions, leaving aside that they suggested women might easily conceive children in their forties, had granted Pallavi the most important favor of her life, created a hole through which she could finally see. They had knocked down the last planks of the that separated her from the rest of the bulwark her parents had built without asking if she were interested in such protection.

“You’re getting what you want,” Pallavi’s older brother, Ravi, had told her a year ago, after Pallavi asked her siblings and her sister-in-law about their interest in participating in the festivities, “but remember that Amma’s very delicate right now,” he added about their mother. “You should try doing everything to make her comfortable.” He’d snuck a glance at his Apple Watch after speaking, looking up at her with expectancy a moment later.

“It’s her wedding, Ravi,” Kavya put in gently. “We should stay out of it, no?”

Pallavi had never loved her sister-in-law more than she did at that moment, Indian accent and all. She’d never agreed more with her other brother, Arjun, that Ravi couldn’t help but be an asshole. But she was tired now of always looping through these thoughts, cataloguing who was on her side and who wasn’t, building up and then breaking down once comforting truths: about women raised in India being repressed and thereby rigid, about materially successful brothers having more wisdom than slacker brothers, about gay people always needing to be diplomatic. 

She wasn’t used to getting what she wanted. In fact, it felt wrong. Pallavi looked around this perfect venue, which was not a temple so as not to offend Mallory’s Jewish father, and which permitted rituals with an open flame so as to please Pallavi’s Hindu parents, and she saw the problems that a younger person, someone carrying fewer things to forgive and forget, might not have spotted: the mildew on the stage curtains, the stains on the wood floor, the slight incline of the grass in the garden, a challenge for any Indian woman wearing the heeled shoes seen as obligatory with a sari. She saw the Hindu elders of the community clucking their tongues at the Sanskrit pronunciations of whichever hippy officiant they would have to employ at the last minute, once it became clear that no Hindu priest would agree to marry two women. No Hindu holy man would lead two women in love around a sacred fire in the symbolic observance of starting a new life together, the ritual of Saptapadi, seven steps towards higher ground.

“The problem with you,” Pallavi’s mother told her on the phone a few weeks before her stroke, “is that you’re so sensitive about what I say.” At Mallory’s spirited urging, Pallavi had downed two mimosas over brunch and called her mother to discuss their intention of getting married. She’d armed herself with a pathetic cheat sheet of handwritten phrases placed on the counter of the condo she still rented because her parents weren’t comfortable with her living together with Mallory. “Need respect for trust,” read one statement in Pallavi’s notes.

“You talk about respect, but how is this respecting me?” her mother’s voice was dangerous. “How is it respecting us to tell us that you want to get married?” Pallavi must have looked at Mallory in appeal then, because Mallory had pointed to a word on the sheet that was underlined: “control.” When Pallavi later used the word, it had floundered, all logic lost in currents of anger so mighty in their whipping, her mother’s voice so shrill and Mallory’s orders to put down the phone like a life vest just out of reach that Pallavi still could not believe she had withstood it. She could not believe that it had not sucked her into its vortex or dashed her against the rocks.

“You and Arjun are always saying that we try to control you, but how do we do that, tell me?” her mother’s voice had climbed. “If we could control you, would you be dating Mallory? Would you be gay? Would you be doing all these things that are hurting us? Killing us and killing us for so many years?!”

There had been nothing in Pallavi’s notes prompting her to say what she should have said next, and her father got on the phone then and closed the call in such a reasonable voice that she’d had to confirm with Mallory later that she’d heard him correctly. “This is enough now, Pallavi. We let you be gay. This is enough.”

All of it, it occurred to Pallavi now as she walked by the center’s tables and ran a finger through the dust there, was like surviving instead of living. One could argue that her mother had been clotting blood for years, that it wasn’t Pallavi’s request to be married that had sunk her but rather the disappointments of American life, which was supposed to make everything easier for the promising people Pallavi’s parents had been fifty years before. Supposed to enable their dreams instead of setting them back.

One could argue that the stroke had hit Pallavi with its force as well, shocking her into action even as it left her mother depleted on shore, coming back to consciousness in the hospital room with a softer look of aggrievement, as if she was too tired to blame anyone for letting this happen to her. Pallavi felt, without being able to admit that it mattered, that she had been pulled under the waves of years as well. She was conscious of having taken too much water in, aware of this without being able to shake the guilt from staying buoyant. Mallory had been the one to explain, from her years of work at the Pittsburgh branch of the AHA, that heart-related trauma could manifest as deep depression. That her mother might take years to be herself again. That it was not Pallavi’s fault.

Pallavi had leaned into the embrace that Mallory offered then, not wanting to say that she was afraid that the wait would do little to change anything. That she was beginning to understand that most people on the planet were quietly enduring blocked arteries, making do despite scars and stents, walking around with smarting wounds and watery lungs, carting vaults of hidden wrongs turning into dead weight. The only categorizing of people that seemed now to matter in the long run was the difference between those who would willingly drown and those who would fight to swim. Between those who would flail and drag another person down with them and those who could be coaxed to stay calm and remember how to kick their own legs towards safety.

Mallory’s phone was back inside her purse now, the strap across her shoulder like the garland Pallavi would place there in a few months. They exited the hall into the sunlight, taking each other’s hands as if they both understood that the real work was done. All else was just ceremony.

about the author

Reshmi Hebbar is a writer and professor of multicultural literature at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where she also produces a podcast about South Asian American experiences. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Appalachian Review, West Trade Review, and Parhelion, among others, and she is a 2021 alumna of Barrelhouse’s Writer Camp. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

about the artist

Despy Boutris's writing has been published in Copper Nickel, Guernica, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Agni, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.