Daughters Inherit Silence

by Rasana Atreya

  “You should consider taking up nursing. I’m sure the local clinic could use help.”

  Aunty cast a quick, nervous look over her shoulder. But Uncle was in the back, chastising the labourers. She gave a non-committal smile.

  “Amma, can I go home?”

  Ananta seemed back to normal, so Jaya said, “Ok, finish your homework. I’ll come in ten minutes.” To Aunty, she said, “It is unusual for Ananta to panic that way. She’s such a calm girl.”

  Aunty put the kit aside. “Sometimes, little girls just need a little hugging.”

  Jaya nodded, puzzled at the atypical behaviour.

  “My Diwakar is arriving in two days. He’s bringing my Kovid’s daughter to me.” Aunty’s beaming face transformed her.

  And, just like that, Jaya understood the cause of Ananta’s outburst. Her daughter had minimal interaction with her own grandparents, both sets. But in the two years Ramani aunty had lived next door, Ananta had developed a close relationship with the older lady. The feeling was mutual, and the two spent a lot of time together.

  Jaya turned away, surreptitiously blinking back unexpected tears. She was saddened that her daughter was so unsure about her place in Aunty’s life that she felt threatened by the imminent arrival of Aunty’s granddaughter.

  Aunty reached over and touched Jaya’s hand. “Now I’ll have two little girls to pamper.”

  The lady was as close to a saint as a person could get.

  Jaya turned away, hating that she was so prone to tears.

  Around them was unusual activity, evidence enough that something was afoot. Servants were busy applying fresh cow dung to the floor of the courtyard.

  Jaya wrinkled her nose, trying not to inhale the odour. The practice was common enough in villages, but she, having grown up in the city, couldn’t get used to the smell.

  The recycle-everything-and-throwaway-nothing mentality that had now come into vogue with the environmentally aware set was nothing new to older generations. That generation had adopted the use of dried cow dung as insect-repellent, earthen idols for community-wide religious celebrations, whitewash for walls instead of toxic paint, banana leaves instead of Styrofoam plates, and earthen cups instead of disposable plastic glasses.

  Uncle was from the older generation, certainly, but he’d also travelled the world. Still, he had implemented many of the old ways here. But Jaya cringed as the jeetagaadlu—the daily-wage labourers—hefted buckets of water over plants, spilling copious amounts, even as farmers, old timers included, were switching to drip irrigation in a bid to conserve water.

  As it stood now, the house looked like the selectively restored Tollywood vision of a 1980s home, Tollywood being the Telugu film industry. The mandatory cowshed, but without the hassle of maintaining enough cows to provide a typical family’s milk needs; the packed-mud courtyard patted down with cow dung to keep the insects at bay but, from Uncle’s temper after each application, it was obvious that the pressure it placed on his olfactory nerve hadn’t been taken into consideration.

  Uncle and Aunty had set sail, metaphorically speaking, for America, forty-odd years ago. After Uncle’s parents passed away, the house was locked up, entrapping the nostalgia within.

  When they returned two years ago, Uncle had gone about repairing the decay to align it with the India of his selective memories: there was the cowshed by the side of the yard, thatched with straw. The lone cow, tied to one of the wooden poles holding up the shed, indifferently chewed cud. Every once in a while she mooed, though, from what Jaya could tell, even the intermittent mooing was beginning to test Uncle’s already limited patience. Jaya didn’t have hopes for the cow’s long-term residence in this household.

  There was also the mandatory hand pump. In addition, Uncle had the well of his youth restored. From what Aunty relayed, her husband had memories of manually drawing water with a rope and bucket, and using that water to bathe in, right by the well, with a towel wrapped around the waist to protect modesty.

  Aunty’s maid had explained to Jaya’s maid how long that particular trip down nostalgia lane had lasted: one day of bathing with water drawn by his own hands, and Uncle had ended it by kicking the bucket. Thankfully, that incident wasn’t metaphorical.

  The labourers were complaining because watering all the plants with buckets was too much effort, and why couldn’t Uncle have a motorised pump installed like everyone else? Surely, a project this small wouldn’t make a dent in all those American dollars Uncle was certain to have?

  Jaya watched a labourer install a metal grate over the well, for the safety of their soon-to-arrive granddaughter. Ananta’s innate caution had not necessitated this.

  Uncle’s ancestral compound was a large corner plot at the intersection of two roads. Jaya’s house, before she purchased it, had been an addendum to his: a space to house the servants that served the landlord. Uncle had taken to the role of landed gentry rather well, displaying the same tolerance of her as a master of his servant.

  His house had a circular room in one corner of the veranda. The room was shaped like a turret in those pictures of old English castles, except it was short and squat, rising up a mere one-storey from the veranda. A staircase spiralled up and around the outside of the circular room, leading to the terrace. Jaya wondered if Uncle had recreated his past by storing grain in there. If he had, he must be buying it from the supermarket because the house no longer came with farmland. In any other household Jaya would know, because she would be invited in and given free run of the house. But Uncle had also brought back with him the American need for privacy. There were limits to how Indian he could be.

  He had paid handsomely to transplant a rather large mango tree to the far side of the veranda, declaring that the Mexican mangoes that they’d eaten in America were no match for sheer Indian deliciousness. This, Jaya’s well-travelled brother had assured her, was the truth.

  Uncle talked of lying on the terrace on hot summer days, plucking and eating banginpally mangoes, while that tree protected his friends and him from the harsh summer sun. For Uncle’s sake, Jaya hoped this tree had rooted well in its new home. She worried the two-hundred-year-old structure wasn’t strong enough to withstand the crash of a mature tree, and their furious thunderstorms were a lightning-and-thunder spectacle to behold.

  But the granddaughter would be here. And that made Aunty happy. So Jaya said, “It’s wonderful that you’ll soon have your granddaughter with you!”

  “I wish I could be sure about that.” The happiness on Aunty’s face dimmed. “I’m being selfish because I want my granddaughter with me. But poor Kovid.” Her voice caught. “For seven years he’s been struggling. Raising a young daughter single-handedly. No man should have to do that.”

  Both of Aunty’s sons remained wife-less: Diwakar was divorced, and Kovid, widowed. Had they been in India, both men would have been firmly resettled back into domesticity, though Diwakar’s case was more complicated. Weddings wove together numerous threads from two different families. To unravel this tightly woven fabric in the event of divorce was to rend it. The stigma was such that matrimonial ads for those seeking remarriage almost always mentioned “innocent divorcee seeks alliance,” which translated to “it wasn’t my fault.” It could also be code for an unconsummated marriage, though that was hard to tell because almost all divorcees seeking alliances between the matrimonial pages of a newspaper were innocent, with innocence taking on new meaning if there were children involved.

  In any case, growing up without a parent was not easy: Jaya knew how her own daughter struggled.

  “He’s been widowed seven years?” she asked now.

  “Yes. When my granddaughter was three, her mother died of cancer. Uncle and I lived in California too, driving distance from them, so we were able to bring Nina back home each weekend. That way Kovid got a break, though he never complained. During the week he managed a busy career and a young daughter. On the weekends he had us. But Uncle chose to return us to India two years ago, as you k
now.”

  Interesting way of putting it. There was no doubt, though, that the separation was hard on Aunty. There was a bleakness in her eyes that never left.

  Jaya felt bad for the older lady. Jaya was passionate about educating girls for this exact reason: girls should be more than inanimate puppets in the stories of their own lives. Thankfully, things were changing.

  “But now, Kovid is fretting.” Dampness pooled in Aunty’s eyes. “He worries that Nina’s getting older, and she will soon need a woman in her life. That he won’t be enough for her. He’s sending her to me, but I know he’s going to miss her terribly. He’s devoted his life to her.”

  “I’m sorry that she lost her mother. That’s so hard on a child. But she’s fortunate to have a grandmother like you.” Nina would know she was loved; of that, there was no doubt.

  Aunty touched the edge of her sari to her eyes, blotted out her tears, and reached over to stroke Jaya’s hair affectionately. “What am I complaining about? You, of all people, would know about life and unfairness. You’ve been widowed a long time. And being a widow in India is a lot harder than being a widower anywhere else in the world.”

  Jaya smiled in acknowledgement. For some reason, this reminded her of a passionate comment one of her aunts had made: “I’ve lost my husband, my only child, and both of my parents. The only person in your life that ever died was your husband. If you look at it, my loss has been greater than yours.”

  This, at the funeral of the husband of a very pregnant Jaya.

  Like life had a standardised scale against which each tragedy must be measured.

  Take Ananta: how did you measure a child’s loss of a father who’d died before she had the chance to be born, with that of an aunt who had lost the four people closest to her?

  It had taken Jaya a long time to grasp that the way each person processed a personal tragedy depended on how much support—emotional, societal and, perhaps, financial—they had.

  Jaya smiled softly at Ramani aunty. “Just because my life is hard, doesn’t mean your son’s has to be be.”

  Aunty kissed Jaya on the head. “You’re a good girl. I wish my Diwakar would find someone like you.” She blushed furiously. “You know what I mean.”

  Yes, Jaya knew what Aunty meant. Once married off, a lady remained forever tied to that family. Just because your husband was no more, didn’t mean your marriage wasn’t.

  Jaya felt a pang at the thought. Social mores weren’t the companion you sought in times of loneliness. She shoved the thought aside. That was a dangerous path for her to tread.

  She found it interesting that Aunty talked of remarriage only in the context of Diwakar—the older one. Aunty had let it slip in her husband’s presence that Diwakar was divorced, and that his children lived with their mother. Srinivas uncle’s sharp glance had stopped her shameful disclosure, mid-sentence.

  “I know Nina needs a woman in her life,” Aunty said now, “but she needs her father too. The two are very close. I don’t want her to feel that her father abandoned her. I know Kovid is struggling with this, too. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is.”

  “Is Nina’s father sending her here permanently?”

  The older lady breathed in deeply, and slowly. With a troubled sigh, she said, “I wish I knew. I wish he knew.”

  5

  Kovid

  Present Day

  Kovid sat on the floor by his daughter’s bed, watching her eyelids flutter. Every once in a while she’d jerk awake, reaching for his hand. Kovid tightened his hand on hers, using the other to stroke her hair gently until she fell back into an uneasy sleep. Drained, he leaned his back against her bed. She’d made him promise that he’d sit by her side all night, and he would.

  He looked up at the ceiling he’d helped his daughter paint. Sparkly pink stars and shimmering princesses. He remembered the fun the two of them had had, sketching out princesses racing motorcycles, jumping off airplanes in parachutes, zip-lining across gorges. Then they’d picked out outrageous colours with which to paint them.

  He closed his eyes. The tips of his lashes dampened. He was putting Nina on a flight to India early tomorrow, and he still didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.

  Earlier that evening, Diwakar had accused Kovid of overreacting. “One crazed woman, and you pack your daughter off?”

  “It’s not just the woman, it’s the whole atmosphere. Things are turning ugly.”

  “And your solution is to bubble wrap her from life?”

  “I’m not bubble wrapping her,” Kovid insisted. Incidents of racism weren’t pervasive, thankfully, and he was able to shrug most of them off. Right now, he was more worried that his beloved daughter would be hitting puberty, and that she’d need a woman to hand-hold her through the process.

  “All of us are exposed to micro-aggressions on a frequent basis,” Diwakar said. “Man, woman, child.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Turning into Dad isn’t the solution.”

  That stung.

  Was that what he was doing with his daughter? Coddling her to the point she had no say in her own life? “What does a nine-year-old know, anyway?”

  Diwakar gave him a look from the floor where he sat, a bottle of beer resting loosely between his knees.

  Kovid was lying lengthwise on the swing in the balcony, looking out at the bay. He traced the streetlights along the Embarcadero. Across from it, the mesmerising lights of the Bay Bridge glittered like diamonds.

  “It’s not just that,” Kovid said.

  “What else is it?” Diwakar said. “Nina loves you. Is it fair to deprive her of the only parent she’s known?”

  When they were young, Mom had enrolled them in a swim class run by high schoolers who were not particularly kind. Diwakar was a natural, as he was at a lot of athletic activities. Kovid, not so much. But Kovid had survived the class knowing Diwakar had his back.

  Kovid wished they didn’t live fifty miles apart. Maybe, then, he wouldn’t feel terrible guilt that his baby girl was growing up with no family other than him.

  “It’s not just that woman,” he said, knowing he sounded defensive. “It’s also that I’m not able to find enough time for my daughter. That she spends more time with the babysitter than with me. And, in my line of work, there is always some emergency.”

  Was that the real reason, though? Could it be that he was overreacting, trying to protect his little girl from the big, bad world? He wished he knew.

  “There’s also Mom,” Kovid said. “You know how devastated Nina was when Dad upped and moved them both to India. You know Mom wanted to stay here for Nina. You know she had no choice.”

  “Does Nina?”

  Kovid drew a sharp breath, feeling the punch directly in his gut.

  Diwakar sighed. “Sorry, man. That was a low blow.”

  Kovid waved it away.

  Diwakar softened his tone. “I’m sure you’ve thought this through. I don’t want to make it any harder than it is. Just make sure she doesn’t feel abandoned.”

  “I’ll FaceTime her every day.” That would be more than what she got here. Some days he left before she got up, returning only after it was well past her bedtime.

  He sighed now, rubbing a hand over his bristle. He’d need to shave before driving her to the airport. He didn’t want to scratch her face when he hugged her goodbye.

  Diwakar used the balustrade to pull himself up. “I need to get to bed, man.”

  Kovid nodded. They had an early flight to India, Diwakar and Nina.

  6

  Jaya

  This slice of time, after her daughter left for school, and before her in-laws returned from their hour-long walk, was precious. It was the only time Jaya had to herself. Every other waking hour, her father-in-law was ensconced in his rocking chair on the veranda, while her mother-in-law paced through the house, her face drawn, her eyes turned inward, floating wraith-like, from room to room. Jaya half-expected to see her mother-in-law with her feet pointin
g backward at the calves—this, her friends back in kindergarten had explained, was the surest way to identify someone who’d ceased to exist.

  Because of the railway-compartment style of the house—each room lined up and opening into the next: front room, to outer bedroom, to inner bedroom, to kitchen, to yard—there was no place where Jaya could be alone. She wondered at the thought process of the mason who had slapped together this design, the only kind her money could buy. Surely, no architect would claim this style of house as a shining illustration of his work.

  She happened to mention her need for alone-time in an over-the-wall conversation with Ramani aunty a year or so after they shifted next door. That had set Srinivas uncle off like a helium balloon spiralling into the sky after the knot came undone. He raged at her for being one of those feminist crazies who went about breaking up families. He accused ladies like her of being too lazy, and too “job-minded,” to take care of their in-laws.

  Jaya was reeling from the unexpected attack, staring after Uncle as he stormed out of his courtyard, when Aunty rose from the cot and walked up to the wall. With a quick look over her shoulder, she said softly, “Please accept my apologies.”

  Nodding, Jaya dragged in a deep breath. Aunty, with her innate decency, had nothing to apologise for.

  “I know it’s easy for me to say, but please don’t take it personally. It isn’t you he’s angry at. When my Diwakar got married, Uncle insisted we all live together. At that time, Diwakar had two children, both boys.” From the pain in her voice, it was obvious she missed them. “Seven years later, our daughter-in-law left us.”

  “Oh.”

  Aunty let out a breath. “Uncle spent a lot of time with Diwakar when he was growing up. They were very close. Uncle raised Diwakar to believe that because he was the oldest son, he had special responsibilities to us, his parents. He was to take care of us in our old age, to conduct the rituals for our afterlife.” She gave Jaya a quick smile. “I know you know this. But Indian kids growing up in America don’t always know.”