After a month of this, my plan worked. A whole day and night went by without any Aiedeo visits. I tried to open my front door without using the knob and couldn’t even make it budge. I didn’t have any special powers anymore.
At first, I didn’t buy that it was really over. I stayed up night after night, expecting them to show. But after a few months, I started to think maybe my dead relatives were actually done with me. Months turned into years without one Aiedeo visit, and little by little, I’ve let my guard down.
I’m not delusional. I know the craziness that I experienced. There’s a scar running down my entire right calf from the night of the car incident to remind me that that shit was real. I just didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. As time went on, I found that I could choose to forget it all. It took work to make the memories fade—the bad ones and the good ones too. Eventually it all went away. Or at least enough of it that I can believe that I’m finally free.
In my new life, without the Aiedeo, I’m normal. I don’t have to deal with ghosts, witches, and dead warrior queens anymore.
I’m just like everyone else, I tell myself as I pull into my driveway. And with enough denial in my arsenal, I can convince myself it’s actually true.
* * *
“Dede! I’ve got food!” I shout as I walk into the kitchen, managing to keep my backpack over one shoulder while holding the drink carrier and BK bag.
People think I’m rich for the same reason they think Naomi is loaded. The Talberts live in a big house and have nice things, and you could probably say the same about us Choudhurys. The fact that I live in a good neighborhood, that my father works at the university, that I have a nanny, and that I travel abroad every summer seems fancy.
Rich, however, is relative. In Meadowdale, where you can still feed a family of four at a sit-down restaurant for under thirty dollars and the most expensive car in my high school’s parking lot is a 2018 Mazda Miata, we sit somewhere between the middle and the higher rungs of the economic ladder. But in other parts of the world, particularly those where girls wear couture under their burqas, people consider hanging with me and my Coach wristlet slumming it.
“Bring me burger, please,” my nanny yells back. “Private Practice starting.”
I drop my backpack on the kitchen floor and head to the family room with the food. When Naresh is here, we have to eat our meals in the dining room. But when it’s just Dede and me, we like to veg out in front of the TV.
My father extended his summer consulting gig in Turkey to last the entire fall semester and now he won’t be back until winter break in December. I’m pretty sure that return will be temporary and he’ll be off to some other country by spring.
On most matters, my dad is quite black-and-white, but when it comes to his kid’s cultural identity, he’s refreshingly open. It might not have been Naresh’s goal to assimilate but he has certainly made it easier for me to adapt to American life by raising me as a universal citizen.
Theoretically, universal citizenship means, in my case, that I’m neither Indian nor American. I have no ethnic, religious, cultural, or racial boundaries; I am supposed to be exposed to as many cultures as possible with no definitions or limitations. In practice, it can be simplified to this: I’m not Hindu, I eat everything—including beef—and the only language I can speak is English. (Well, unless you consider the janky-ass mix of broken English and even more broken Assamese that Dede and I speak to each other a different language, which I don’t.) Naresh probably won’t agree, but my interpretation of universal citizenship is that it allows me to be less Indian and more American.
“I got you the onion rings,” I say as I place a Whopper with cheese on the glass coffee table in front of my nanny. “With extra mustard.”
Dede smiles, which pushes her already high cheekbones up to her small hazel eyes. Her skin is the color and texture of sandpaper, and deep-set wrinkles line her face like the rings around an old tree, yet she has the speed and agility of a fit sixty-year-old woman. I’ve stopped trying to guess her age and Dede won’t admit to anything anyway.
I plop onto the couch. My whole body aches from the hard practice and the long day.
“You miss Grey’s Anatomy but I DVR for you.” Dede pops an onion ring into her mouth.
I watch TV everywhere I can—on my phone, tablet, and laptop—but I prefer old-school-style in front of our massive flat-screen. Usually Dede, who raised me on trashy soap operas and police procedurals, is right next to me. Recently, we’ve become addicted to a block of Shondaland shows like How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal. It’s so easy to let my mind go somewhere else with Olivia Pope’s bizarre love triangles and killer wardrobe.
“What you do today?” Dede asks during a commercial break.
I shrug. I’m too tired to remember. “I don’t know.”
Dede smacks me on my thigh. “Chht, you never know! That because you keep too many secret, swali.”
I can’t help but smile at the way my nanny uses the Assamese word for “girl” to chastise me. “I don’t know. School sucked. We had a long practice. And then I had to go for a meeting at Naomi’s house that lasted forever,” I gripe. There is something so solid about Dede that it is easy for me to regress back into a whiny child around her.
My nanny is mysteriously tight-lipped about her past but I managed to piece together a big chunk of her backstory during my last trip to India when I discovered a rather loose-lipped gatekeeper at one of my grandfather’s homes who was actually old enough to remember Dede. Her real name is Purnakala Gurung and she hails from the hills of Nepal. When she was sixteen years old, she ran away from her tiny village and landed in nearby Assam, India. Most people who met the young Purnakala commented on what a rarity she was. First, she had received a formal education up through high school, which was uncommon for poor boys and, especially, poor girls back then. Second, Purnakala refused to act naive or inferior around the males she came in contact with, which was the behavior expected of females in those times. Instead, she was feisty and street-smart and unafraid to show it.
It was this unique set of qualities that caught the attention of Madhur, the wife of Assam’s richest man. She observed the teenager outfox an infamous gang of hooligans in a card game and hired the girl to work for her right there on the spot. From that day, Purnakala became my mother’s nanny. Laya called Purnakala by the respected title of Dede, which means “older sister,” and it soon caught on as the name everyone used for her.
Dede cared for Laya until Laya was sent off to boarding school at the age of twelve. From there, what happened to Dede is a mystery that I imagine could rival the crazy plots of the trashy soap operas that we devour. Maybe Dede had a love child, was hit on the head and got amnesia, or became the lady boss of an underground crime syndicate in Assam’s wild, wild east. If I had to pick, I’d choose the last option.
Wherever Dede disappeared to during what I’ve dubbed “the missing years,” Laya eventually found her and brought her back to Assam. Laya was expecting her first child and wanted no one but her beloved Dede to be the baby’s nanny.
“Talbert House of Dead.” Dede cackles, exposing her dazzling set of dentures. “Why Amricans bury dead body in ground?”