God’s Own Country

God’s Own Country

BY RITA AJIT

CW: illness, death

I. Big Jesus

In early April of 33 A.D., Jesus was nailed into the wood of the cross on the hill of Golgotha. In early January of 1998 A.D., Jesus was nailed into the wood yet again, on newly painted walls in the first house that my parents had in the United States of America, on a quiet tree-lined suburban street.

In this massive portrait, his head is emanating soft light. Like either he is the sun or he’s eclipsed it perfectly. His heart is doing the same. It is also on fire, or maybe the crucifix extending upward from his heart is. Big Jesus wears his own cross on his chest. This portrait is filled with hues of gray-blue and white, unlike the one in our house now, which is far more warm-toned. I associate this older one with peace and nostalgia, the feeling of my parents’ bedroom where I slept more often than not. The same portrait in a smaller frame hung there too.

His chin ever so slightly tucked, he’s looking straight ahead, almost through his eyebrows so a little bit of the whites of his eyes are showing below his pupil. It’s almost a sultry expression, like he’s seducing you with his tranquil radiance. I’ve told this Jesus a million of my secrets and he’s kept them all. He’s given me none in return. Worse, he never says anything at all.

Big Jesus lived in that house before me, Jake, and Leeza did. The walls of that house remained bare otherwise, until the arrival of new stray dirty fingerprints and impassioned streaks of (un)washable Crayola felt tips, literal markers of three childhoods simultaneously unfolding under one roof. Bare still, but for those and for Big Jesus. That was about as far as decor went in our family in this place. We never stayed anywhere long enough to make it quite our own.

The walls in their homes in India were muted Dettol oranges, with jackfruit green ceilings and sky blue bathroom tiling. Almost tacky, always humming with life. Windows open so warm air and mosquitos can circulate. Humid, buzzy, vibrant. Jerky ceiling fans whose noisy rattle puts you to sleep and gently ripples shapes into the silky patterned curtains by the windows. Everything loud and everything colorful. Here, white walls, silent AC, and those plastic blinds that keep getting stuck on one side.

There is only so much of the old life that can be imported, and the larger-than-life portrait of Jesus from India was deemed essential. Wrapped in layers of Malayala Manorama and bubble wrap to ensure his safe voyage in their suitcase, Jesus was risen once more—tens of thousands of feet in the air on a Qatar Airways flight from Kerala to Virginia. Jesus the immigrant, happy to lead my parents through new Customs. They braved the second coming, the new world, together.

Here or there, Big Jesus remained a singular constant in their uprooted life. Much like the rumored rule in the capital city of the new world that you can’t build at a height exceeding that of the Pentagon, you cannot place anything above Big Jesus. He sat in his permanent throne above the mantle, below nothing but the ceiling and next to nothing at all. I used to think everyone had a larger-than-life portrait of Jesus in their house and a rosary hanging off the rearview mirror in their family minivan. Religion was a fact of life.

“You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Exodus 20:3–6

We worship the likeness of God as many days as we can praying to Big Jesus. If that violates the second commandment, we are repeat offenders. We orient life towards his wall in the old house.

Before I start my first day of kindergarten at St. Joseph’s school, I put on my Bratz backpack, pick up my Hello Kitty lunch box, and bring them to the living room so the Bratz and Hello Kitty and I can have God’s blessing. My mom tells me to face the portrait, fold my hands, close my eyes, and complete her call and response while my dad gets the car keys.

“Jesus, help me have a good year at school,” she says.

“Jesus, help me have a good year at school,” I repeat.

“Jesus, help me make new friends.”

“Jesus, make me a good girl and love Amma and Appa.”

“Jesus, make me—” I am a good girl. I don’t think I need Jesus’ help but I say it anyway. It feels more patronizing when I am in high school and still saying the same prayer. And I’m not sure if it’s me or my parents praying that I should be good to them, but I say it anyway. It doesn’t take prayer for me to love them.

After our family eats dinner, we all join together in the living room. During the day, we sit on the sofa facing the TV. But Big Jesus is on the other wall, the one he has all to himself, so now we sit on the floor and face this wall.

Praying the rosary daily has many benefits. It strengthens your family as a unit graced by faith. It advances each of your dedications through consistency and combined prayer. It brings God into your daily routine. A rosary has five decades, and there are five members of our family. The math could be simple, but it never is. We rotate who does two decades each time, one on their behalf and one on my older sister. Leeza is exempted from her turn in the rosary and from the kneeling, but she has a call and response prayer just for her. It is almost always just one line.

“Eesho, heal me.”

“Heeme.”

Sometimes she says it, sometimes she doesn’t.

When we moved to India when I was in second grade, Big Jesus went into storage in Virginia along with our TV and beds and boxes. We didn’t need him to come with us. There is an abundance of Big Jesuses in nameless roadside markets in Kerala, a state whose tourism tagline is “God’s Own Country.” Big Jesuses abound in God’s Own Country, the same state where Christianity was first introduced to a nation originally known as “Hindustan,” or land of the Hindus. Kerala, however, became Big-Jesus-stan by the 19th century, with a Christian population proportionally much larger than that of India as a whole. Every house I went to here had a Big Jesus, or a Big Krishna, or a Big ElderRelativeNowPassed. Gods take up a lot of space in India.

There, we started every day with a school-wide assembly. Each day, we sang a prayer song together. On Mondays and Wednesdays, a Hindu song, on Tuesdays, a Christian song, Thursdays, a Muslim song, and Friday, “Hum Honge Kamyab,” a Hindi translation of “We Shall Overcome” that grew popular in India. I walked to church with my neighbors on Sundays, and then we’d play outside until it grew dark. The local mosque blared the evening azan, calling the neighborhood mothers to action from their evening strolls to get all the kids back home. We wake up to the sound of devotional music playing from the temple loudspeakers. We let the gods keep time.

Two years later, we moved back to houses of dreary whites and silent AC. I was starting fourth grade in a public school. Once or twice, our family has been asked when and why we converted to Christianity. We didn’t. My parents have only ever switched between two radio stations in our minivan: 91.9 “Christian Music” and 102.9 “Bollywood Hits.” Only two percent of the Indian population is Christian, and my family falls into that category. I can often spot Kerala Christians by their biblically-derived names that often sound so white that no white person could ever possibly have them, like my cousin “Joseph Joe.” It felt like a contradiction to be so Indian and Christian. We got another Big Jesus internationally shipped to us this time, and the old one from storage went to my parents’ bedroom. When my friends come over, we hang out in the dining room or my room so as not to be third-wheeled by God in case that made them uncomfortable. There’s also a huge photobook in the living room with a cover of me in a white dress, lace gloves, and a veil, melodramatically posed in a photo studio. White bold letters spell out “RITA’S FIRST HOLY COMMUNION” against the blue backdrop of the studio. My friends who have seen it will call it the photo album from my wedding with Jesus.

I began to prefer that our guests avoid the living room. Most of my friends didn’t have Big Jesuses or gods at all. They have an Elf on the Shelf during the holidays, who is meant to be a moral figurehead who watches over affairs in your house and reports back to a higher power. That is about as close as it gets. We have Jesus on the Wall all year round. Unlike elves on shelves, Big Jesus is featured in countless family pictures, his hand raised to bless all beneath him.

Before my first day of college, I bring my suitcases to the living room so we can have God’s blessing on our first voyage to the new world named Texas. We orient ourselves around the portrait, fold our hands, close our eyes, and say a decade of the rosary together.

“O my Jesus, save me from the fires of hell.”

“Jesus, help me have a good year at school,” my mom says.

“Jesus, help me have a good year at school,” I repeat.

“Jesus, help me make new friends.”

“Jesus, make me good and faithful.”

How many times can I be made good?

I the LORD your God am a jealous God

In my new world, there is no Big Jesus to orient my life around. There are posters on my wall, but all are less than or equal to life-sized. I’ve made false idols of Lorde and Hozier, and the longer I look at them, the longer I start to see the ethnically-and-even-gender-wise-somewhat-ambiguous Big Jesus I’ve known and loved. There are three separate posters of Dev Patel, whose facial hair and kind eyes also bear a resemblance to a certain portrait I have seen before. Jealous God, are you bitter that Dev Patel is on my wall now and you are not?

II. Small Rita

Shoes off, feet sprawled, the backseat of the 2003 Honda Odyssey becomes a bed after a long family function in an itchy dress. The heater is warm and the pillow that is always floating around the minivan that says “Sweet Dreams Baby Sleep” is the perfect intermediary between my head and the car speaker. The youngest of three may be relegated to the furthest row back in the car, but she wins all three of its seats.

I am looking up at the moon and it is moving at the same speed as the car. I know everyone can see the moon, but it is moving with me right now, just me, darting behind bare branches to keep up.

And I think this is what God is.

From here, I can only see sky and not the road beneath, but my internal compass tells me that we are on the winding woods road two turns from home. No one has to say it to know where we are going, all together.

And I didn’t have enough time to fall asleep so I just pretend. My parents carry me to their bed and my eyes are closed but I know I am being taken care of and there is nothing that I have to do but be still. And I think this is what god is.

Everything takes care of itself. Only, if I opened my eyes I would see that it is living, breathing, human love taking care of me all the while, running warm fingers across my forehead and whispering “good night Rita” without even expecting it to be heard. I would say it back but I am asleep.

The moon appears to be moving with you because it is so far away, a years-later Google search tells me. God appears to be moving with you because he is so far away.

As a young girl, I was determined to be the best Catholic in the world. I might even achieve sainthood, I think. Only a few years after I learned how to read, I set a goal to read the bible. I didn’t understand every other word, so I put it on hiatus until around fifth grade, after we had moved back from India. This time, I stopped because I could tell they started talking about sex really early on. I tried to cover the bad words with my hands because I didn’t know what exactly they meant but I knew they were not for me. I don’t know who put this in there if I wasn’t supposed to read it.

One of my most prized possessions, even now, is my “Good Samaritan” award. At St. Joseph’s Catholic School, where I spent kindergarten through second grade, students vote for one girl and one boy from each grade to receive the annual award. Jack and I were deemed the Good Samaritans of second grade. My parents came to the church for the award ceremony, beaming at me standing under that Big Jesus with their cameras out. It was better than any academic achievement; it said I was a true child of God, the best thing a child can be.

The funny thing about the parable of the good samaritan is its underlying message that your religion does not define your goodness and your willingness to help others in need. In the Book of Luke, chapter ten, a Jewish traveler is robbed, beaten, and left to die by the side of the road. A Jewish priest and a Levite pass him by, their indifference owed in part to their perceived ethnic and religious superiority. A Samaritan stops, asks no questions, and gives himself over to the traveler to nurse him back to health.

Selflessness and love, the ingredients for good samaritanism, are human before they are religious.

III. Appacha

Appacha lived in Meridian Gardens in Kerala, India, for as long as I knew him, in house number 8 with the plaque engraved “M.J. Alex.” Everyone in the neighborhood ignores the plaque and calls him Appacha, meaning grandpa, even his own wife. Appacha spent a lifetime in the garage, tinkering with small inventions like a new handcrafted mega bubble wand for a six-year-old me or a cage for the mongoose my grandma had acquired by unknown means, which she soon abandoned by unknown means after it bit her. Within a week of getting a label maker, he had churned out tags for every switch in the house, fans, lights, water heaters, and all.

Appacha was soft-spoken, even in the Before, a sweet character with big round glasses and a rosy complexion. One of the great mysteries of our family is that most of us are brown but he is somewhat pink. Everything about him is soft: his voice, his skin, the way he’d always let his grandchildren win, and how he’d loan out money to family and friends (he rarely made such distinctions) in need and conveniently forgets to collect it back, to my grandmother’s chagrin.

When I was visiting, the six-year-old mega-bubble-me and him started each week together the same way. Pill day was the best day of the week. I sat on his lap, endowed with the important task of breaking his pills out of the smooth foil and hearing them clatter into his teal pill organizer, keeping meticulous count. I assumed it was good counting practice for me. I also loved the feeling of splitting the foil with the edge of my nail, creating perfect empty circles, and getting to use the pill-halving tool. One of the small tasks given to small children to feel important and useful. Not because his hands were starting to shake more and a pill was becoming a very difficult thing to pick up once dropped.

Appacha was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease before any of his grandchildren were born. Parkinson’s sends the body into a slow decline, one that can be seemingly resisted for decades until it finally, inevitably triumphs over the past self and becomes all-consuming. In home videos of Appacha in America, where he met his grandchildren for the first time, you can never tell. He took the large patch of grass called our backyard and transformed it into distinct plots of soil, supported by wooden siding and wired fencing of his own creation, where he planted everything from strawberries to tomatoes to peach trees. He plays little of a speaking role in these videos; he is hard at work. My mom or dad narrates behind the camera, “There’s Appacha, tilling the soil.”

“See Appacha, building a swing set for the kids. We went to Home Depot and got the wood today.”

“There’s Appacha, pushing Leeza on the swing set he made her.”

He did it all, racing against the countdown his body had set.

When I was one, Ammamma and Appacha took me back to India with them. Leeza was hospitalized, and my parents had hardly enough capacity to take care of one baby, let alone three. My grandparents insisted they take the baby with them, who could not care for herself the way her brother could, being five by now. They went to the airport with a letter from my parents that probably said “THEIR ENGLISH IS NOT GREAT BUT THESE KIND OLDER FOLK ARE NOT KIDNAPPING MY CHILD,” I imagine. We spent a few months there, just the three of us. I don’t remember any of it, but he did, even when it was one of the only things he could remember. I always slept in between them in the bedroom of house number 8. When Appacha’s memory started to go, my grandma told me he would pat the empty space next to him in that same bed and ask, “Where is the kid?” This remained.

Not long after, Appacha’s life in India, in America, in Libya, back to India again, in the garden, in the garage, in the backyard, then the front yard had shrunk to a life spent in his bed, and the rocking chair by his bed, and then his bed again. He became someone I prayed for more than I talked to. Even in the two years we all lived in India, I spent more time thinking of him than engaging with him. It was hard to watch. He started getting scolded like a little child when his spirit found itself in conflict with his body, when he insisted on walking to the garage without his walker, alarming everyone because he was a fall-risk first and Appacha second.

He rifled through his drawers one day, looking for something to keep the body and the mind engaged, each slowly slipping away from the other. My grandmother walked into the room to find mercury balls, so spherical and perfect if only they weren’t so dangerous, scattering on the floor from an old thermometer he’d found and accidentally shattered. My mom and grandma were livid that he could have hurt himself when he should have been laying in bed or sitting in his rocking chair. He was frustrated by overreaction after overreaction; he, for one, was no longer afraid of chemicals. He’d worked in a factory in Libya for five years. We know now that factories like those can contain the toxic inhalants that contribute to the development of Parkinson’s. It is possible that in Libya, he unknowingly sold his body to work for his family. He was neither the first nor last to do so. God let his physical form die too, so that his innumerable children would live.

Every time I said goodbye to Appacha, I worried it could be the last. I don’t know if it was my love or fear that caused me to pray every day, some days even for hours, that Appacha would get better. Our phone conversations were frequently “how are you,” “I’m okay, Rita”, “what are you up to,” “I’m praying for you Appacha,” followed by a stream of unremarkable updates about my life, which only felt to me like an irreverent contrast to the lack of updates he could provide. It was harder to hear him and make out his words, our communication further strained by my shaky Malayalam and his fading voice. Just pray, just pray, just pray. He told me this, Ammamma confirmed, and my parents said the same.

My mom told me often that God sees children’s tears first and these prayers mean the most to him. So I would dwell on worst case scenarios, forcing my eyes to well until the tears formed themselves and rolled off my cheek and onto the pillow. At the very least, this meant that my dedications skipped the queue on God’s priority list, I had hoped. I exploited my own emotions and my grandfather’s sickness for a compulsion to cry before God, so maybe he would listen. Appacha passed away, and it’s hard to say he did so peacefully (though many did) when the peace he knew was down the hall, in his space in the garage, where he hadn’t been for years. When peace was the ability to eat his favorite foods, or any at all, or have a sip of water by mouth. To say he passed away quietly, just as he lived, would be a more apt description. I had stopped praying that he would be miraculously cured, but I never stopped praying that he could get a little bit better before it was too late.

I was starting to stop believing in God, although I wanted nothing more than to pray for his peaceful passage into heaven. It was an inconvenient time to lose faith because the following days were filled with prayers and religious rituals I was fortunate to never have known before. The body is brought back to the house and prayed over all night, mostly by the women. It brought some comfort to think that we would never leave Appacha alone, but my mom and I both wonder why it couldn’t have been more like this when he was alive. Faces that had never come to visit him were now the most solemn, with closed eyes and veils over them, reciting prayers where no one even knows what exactly the antiquated words even mean. Prayer as performance, comforting who, I didn’t know.

It felt pointless at best and abrasive otherwise. It’s hard to say that everything happens for a reason, unless we make up a reason that no one can confirm or deny. It was convenient to think that he was tinkering away in heaven with buzzsaws and epoxy galore, but it was harder to believe. But God watched his own son suffer the greatest pain in the world and did nothing, my mom tells me, her

faith restored by our great uncles and aunts in the clergy who explained the value of suffering in house number 8.

God can do or not do whatever he wants with his son. But this was our Appacha, the only one we had.

It was not exactly God, but my grandma, who took care of him until the very end. She would’ve walked with him all the way up to heaven’s door if God let her. She lost decades of her sleep to monitor his, lost hair and her appetite from constant stress, and lost the man she married long before he died. She is an A+ Catholic; the biggest losers will reap the biggest rewards. The more you can lose in this life, the more you shall gain in the next.

IV. Leeza

1. Chechi

2. Appacha

3. My parents

This is the definitive list of the top three people I have prayed for, four if you count my parents. Chechi has not gotten better. My grandfather passed away, slowly and painfully from Parkinson’s, and my parents spend nearly every waking hour taking care of Chechi. I’ve hardly ever prayed for my brother, yet he’s working a great job at a hedge fund in New York City and currently on a trip to Japan with his girlfriend. It’s becoming hard to rationalize prayer with such a low chance of return on investment.

Two years ago, my sister’s birthday was one of the rare days when I decided to check my campus mailbox, just in case. In it, I find President Reginald DesRoches’s inauguration invite from over a month ago, along with a large folded envelope from a lawyer-sounding name I didn’t recognize. It had come from “Judicial Drive” in Fairfax, Virginia. Something to do with the courts. My friends, behind me in the mail room, joke that I’m being called to baby’s first jury duty. I opened the envelope to find my copy of my parents’ official guardianship request for my sister. It’s quite the birthday present, I imagine. I put the papers back into the envelope dismissively because it’s “just family stuff,” I reassure my friends. Not hardly as fun as jury duty, if that’s saying anything.

In my room, I flip through the pages, greeted by facts I have already known repackaged in all-caps typeface and cold, legal language that makes me feel like my sister falls short of total personhood. “At this time Elizabeth Vanniamparampil Ajit suffers from the debilitating and degenerative effects of her condition to such an extent that she is physically and mentally incapacitated and incapable of taking proper care of her person or her property.” I am thankful for the first three words, “at this time.” Their quiet hopefulness softens the blow. Another page shows a list of criteria to be deemed self-sufficient, all of the filled-in circles united on the “no” and “unable” sign. It all feels wrong; her identity to me is my sister and all the things we have ever done together, and her legal identity is her disability and all the things she cannot do. As she gets older, the realities of her condition have inched ever closer to my family as the miracle we all pray for seems to grow further away. Although my parents have always taken care of her and always will, putting these things down on paper adds a layer of gravity that we are still beginning to grapple with. Her nightly prayer prescribed by my parents is still “Jesus, heal me.”

It’s like the legal paperwork has already written its own flawed, one-dimensional profile piece on my sister. I understand the necessity for concise and objective legal writing, but they really leave so much out. Excessive and subjective has always been more of my style. My first complaint is hardly fair: her legal name is indeed, Elizabeth, but it feels like it has nothing to do with her. To almost everyone who knows her, she is Leeza. Names are integral to identity—nicknames even more so. My family video-calls to celebrate her birthday, and I ask my mom how “Leeza” came to be spelled that way of all possibilities. Understandably, no one ever gets it right. She tells me it’s just “for style” which makes me smile. Z’s are commodities–10 point letters, I remember from the games of Scrabble my family used to play. My mom elaborates, “Leeza sounds very fancy…and there are enough Lisa’s, Liz’s, and Lizzy’s in the family.” I have never met another Leeza.

To me, though, she is Chechi. Our older brother is Cheta. In Malayali households, elder siblings are often called this way. I want to ask Leeza why she defies the nomenclature and calls me Chechi when I’m two years younger than her. And yet, my mom tells me that when I am at college, she points to my pictures and says baby (they are not baby pictures). She keeps me humble, reminding me that I was once infantile and she’ll never let me live it down. I guess it stuck. Younger siblings will always be babies. To be her sister is to perpetually be both her baby and her Chechi. I do my best to help take care of her when I am home, calm her down when she’s upset, and advocate for her when my parents and her get frustrated with each other. I still know I have a long way to go before awarding myself the title of big-sisterhood that she has bestowed on me.

There’s no section in the paperwork that tells you that Leeza is one of the most interesting people in my life. She totes around a collection of—in as linguistically precise terms as I can describe—things, which is always fluctuating in size and composition. Currently, there is a non-functioning credit card, an iPad with a giant toddler-proof (and Leeza-proof) case, a book filled with cats, one of our dog’s toys, multiple toothbrushes, a mug, nasal spray, and a small steel plate—probably the cause behind some lonesome steel pot missing its lid. She is very particular about keeping a careful inventory of all of these things. The steel plate has been around for a long time, for example. She once took it to a restaurant in India and we’d left without it. It didn’t take her long to notice, so we went back and asked the staff if they had seen it. It was returned to us cleaner than we had ever seen it: the staff had assumed it came from the kitchen and washed it with the rest of their dishes. Recently, she’s been trying to bring back markers from school in her backpack to incorporate into the inventory, but my mom keeps sending them back to school with her. They always make it back again.

On paper, Leeza is “nonverbal,” but our family knows she’s far from it. Besides the standalone words that she uses regularly, she’s introduced us to bits and pieces of a language of her own creation. “Pikki pikki” in a high register means she’s happy, and “waaayne” is that times a hundred. “Thukkuthukku” signals anger or frustration. Like an onomatopoeic description of grinding gears. To outsiders, it’s nonsense. She used to call our grandpa “game” because he used to ask her to play a game with him often, so much so that he became the human embodiment of a game. Now we call him “game” too sometimes, because it’s cute. Our family has slowly acquired a third language, courtesy of Leeza.

There is so much left unsaid. She can answer simple questions, like her name or how she gets to school (enthusiastically: schoolbus!) but there’s a lot more I wish I could ask. Everything I know about her feelings is from what I can see on her face and hear in the sound of her voice. She can’t even tell me if she gets tired of being spoken for all the time, even here. Maybe you would rather be spoken to.

We prayed for so long that you would be “normal.” I’m sorry for those prayers, that decided the person you were was in a temporary state that could be fixed in time by God. I love you as you are, even if you can’t or wouldn’t say it back. People like to tell us you are a special gift from God. I don’t really know what that means. I’m sorry that when I was younger I loved you harder so I could be closer to God because they said you were innocent and you were like God. I love you now for no reason. I love you when I can’t tell if you love me back, when I don’t believe there is any reward for loving you unconditionally. For little things like the way we both understand a love for music that doesn’t require words. I think that means a lot more.

This is what real, unconditional love is like. It is painful but durable. I love you even when you hurt me, not because I do not think you know better, but because I think it is okay to express that you are unhappy in the only ways you know how, to let me know that you wish it were different. It is your way of letting me carry some of your burden, I think. Even when I feel like we are doing good together, you remind me that good is so easy for me to say and so much harder for you to maintain. Amma still has dreams that one day you will just start speaking in full sentences. There are stories like this in the Bible. But you are not a miracle away from your true self, you are here today as the sister I have always known and always loved, and there is no more room for contingencies for who you may or may not miraculously become. Whether or not God is here for you, I am.

V. Amma

My mom has not been afforded time for hobbies in the plural sense in this lifetime between caring for my dad, Leeza, our grandmothers, grandfathers, and everyone in between (besides herself). She has just enough time to spare for one, which is gardening. In other words, in her spare time, when she is not caring for others, she cares for herself by caring for other living beings to help them grow and make the world around her more beautiful. Classic. On bad days, my dad insists that she gives herself a trip to Meadows Farms, a nursery ten minutes from home to go look at the plants and have time to herself.

We made a habit of spending Thursday mornings this summer at the local farmer’s market. My mom would ask the sellers why her plants weren’t growing and how to fend off deer. At one point, the deers were eating every promise of a bud off her blooming roses. Years of nurture lost to a careless appetite. “Oh, Rita. It happened again,” she’d inform me in the morning. No matter what barriers she constructed, they’d find their way in. Nothing belongs solely to her.

Her garden is most beautiful in late May. The roses bloom for my birthday, she tells me. The strawberries begin to grow, reminding us of Appacha, who littered our backyard with these plants. The birthday card I got from her this summer hangs on the wall next to my bed. Taped to it is a mama rose and a baby rose, according to her. They are crunchy and dry now, but I’ve preserved them. Utterly unappealing to eat and still beautiful to look at. They are finally safe from the deer.

They say the love of a mother is fierce and protective, but a daughter’s love for her can be just the same. The story of Amma is a story of a woman who has made her entire life about her love for others, about everyone but herself, about growing things and nurturing them and giving them what they need to thrive until she has run herself dry. I want to believe in a God for her. I want all of this to be worth something in another life that belongs all to her. If there is no heaven, God will have spent up a lifetime of taking from her and giving so little in return. Whatever I can do for her is not enough. If her reward is not in the afterlife, her just reward does not exist. I cannot stomach this, and so I have to believe in some god, somewhere, somehow so my mother can one day cultivate a vibrant, flourishing garden of dreams where there is good soil and no deer at all.

When I was born, my brother came to the hospital dressed in a crisp button-down flannel shirt, with two strawberries in his chest pocket. In the home video, my grandma in a lavender saree, the first Rita, is there holding Leeza in her arms. Appacha is behind her, beaming in a quiet way. He grew all of those strawberries in our backyard.

“Jakinne kannam, Jakinne kannam!” He shouts in front of the camera, bobbing up and down. Can you see Jake, see Jake! He reaches into his shirt pocket and tells my parents that he brought a strawberry in case I was hungry. My mom finds another strawberry there, and he explains in Malayalam, “Jake will get hungry.”

The baby looks like she is checking his pockets for strawberries herself, hungry after a long day of being born. He takes out a strawberry and we smile. Love has long lived in fruits, but there has never been so much softness contained in a single strawberry in the history of the world.

We use symbols long before we know exactly what they mean. We fill the tiny plastic beads of the rosary with love and care for one another. We put love in strawberries and take them to the hospital for baby sisters with no teeth to eat them. We plant gods in the garden and let them grow and we gift god to each other over and over. They tell us the body of Christ is in that little piece of bread they serve us on Sundays. But that baby witnessed god before church, her first eucharist tucked away in the seeds of a strawberry gifted to her by her big brother from the soil tilled by her grandfather.