Daughters Inherit Silence

by Rasana Atreya

  At the inner sanctum sanctorum, the priest said to Kovid, “Jaya’s great-great-grandfather had this temple built. Her own grandparents were such saintly people.” He joined his palms together and bowed to Goddess Durga.

  Kovid did the same.

  The priest bid them forward, smiling in apology at the others assembled. “Brief puja for them. Yours will take longer.”

  Jaya was mortified. Why was he focussing attention on them? Surely, a godly man like him wouldn’t humiliate them?

  The priest asked Kovid for his lineage, and the name of his daughter. He already knew the names of Jaya and her daughter. And, without fuss, he performed the puja for them as a family.

  As Jaya turned to go, one of the couples nodded at them in acknowledgement. And the priest said to Jaya, “Did you know your grandmother paid for the education of both my daughters? For fifteen years? Now one is an accountant in Visakhapatnam, and the other is a pharmacist in Kurnool. They both help out by sending us money each month. Like any son.”

  Jaya heard the pride in the man’s voice.

  * * *

  Outside the temple, Kovid raised an eyebrow at Jaya. She smiled briefly, not quite sure how to define what she was feeling. Whatever she’d expected when she’d come to the temple, support from the temple priest wasn’t it.

  Kovid looked around. Finding a waist-high, unfinished pillar of cement whose reason for existence was yet undetermined, he rested against it and pulled his sports shoes on.

  One of these days he’d realise that there was a reason many Indian men, and most ladies, wore leather slippers. Jaya slipped into her own. She had the benefit of experience, and the disposable income, to buy brand-name slippers. Most of the ones that the local cobblers made and sold were inexpertly made. They dug into the sides of her feet, often chafing away till tender skin was exposed.

  Kovid straightened up and put his hands in his pockets. “Your grandmother helped send his girls to school. Now he turns around and gives her formerly widowed, currently remarried, granddaughter the social validation she needs. Like Mom always said, a little kindness never hurt anyone.”

  40

  Jaya

  The girls hid behind a column, furiously whispering, occasionally giggling. Jaya and Kovid exchanged smiles.

  A loud noise from the direction of Kovid’s parents’ house startled them. On the other side of the chest-high wall, an empty tin of rice sailed across the courtyard. It bounced along the floor till it hit the other tin already lying there.

  Srinivas uncle shook his fist at the tins, then stalked inside.

  Ramani aunty picked them up and stacked them one atop another. Casting an apologetic look in the direction of Kovid and Jaya, she followed her husband into the house.

  Ananta flew to her mother and buried her face in Jaya’s side, wrapping her arms around her mother’s middle. Nina sidled up to her father. The four watched silently as Srinivas uncle dragged a large travel bag. His face was red from the strain.

  “Dad.” Kovid got to his feet.

  Uncle strained and shoved, pushing the bag up against the wall, his out-of-shape body clearly not up to the task. He rested his head against the bag, breathing heavily. Then he shoved it over to Jaya’s side.

  “Dad,” Kovid said, again. “Why don’t I come over and help with whatever it is that you want done?”

  “Oh, come over, will you? Obviously, the shaming you’ve already subjected us to isn’t enough. Come and shove our faces in the mud, while you’re at it. Finish off our reputations so we can never show our faces around here again.” He rested his chin against the wall, struggling to contain his breath. “What happened to your manhood?” He shook his head in disgust. “Do you really have so little shame that you’d want to be seen moving your luggage out of your own house, to hers?”

  Aunty looked at each girl in turn, deep sorrow in her eyes.

  Nina reached for her father. He wrapped an arm around her.

  Both girls looked shaken.

  Uncle threw a thumb back at Jaya and marched inside. This followed the pattern that had been in progress for the last month or so, though this was the first time the girls had been subjected to it. Uncle would come to the courtyard and act out his displeasure, and Aunty would finish the cleanup, apologetically following her husband back in.

  The girls had made a note of the fact that Ramani aunty no longer sat in the front. Aunty’s maid had told Jaya’s maid that, one morning, Uncle had ordered Aunty off the cot and dragged the cot all the way to the back, where undesirable neighbours could no longer observe her.

  Both girls had lost the only grandparents they knew, but were they the true losers? Each had gained a parent and a sister. Jaya deeply regretted that Ramani aunty was no longer permitted to speak to the girls, but as Jaya had learned firsthand, conditional love could be destructive.

  “Please,” Srinivas uncle stalked back out. Joining his palms, he raised it over the wall. “We have to live here. Please let us retain some dignity.” And he stalked back inside.

  41

  Kovid

  Kovid lay in bed, his arms crossed behind him. He was drained of all emotion. That display in Dad’s courtyard had been staged for the benefit of Kovid and Jaya, of course, but the girls were badly affected. They had taken a long time to settle down for the night.

  “I never told you about my baby sister,” Kovid said. “Kriti.”

  Jaya turned on her side and looked at him.

  The vein in his neck pulsated. “Talking about her is hard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead, is what I mean.”

  Jaya sat up and stared. “What!”

  “She is dead,” he repeated woodenly.

  “Oh,” Jaya said faintly.

  “As you already know, my father has very little use for women. He treated my sister the same way he treated my mother. With deep disdain.” Kovid stared at the ceiling, unblinking. “My brother and I got all the privileges. She got all the leftovers. We all hated it.” He released a long breath. “I remember the fight that final night. Diwakar and I had moved out on our own, by then—he was working, I was in med school. Diwakar moved back with them after marriage, but that was only to protect Mom from Dad’s verbal abuse. Dad had this bizarre vision of us being the perfect family, and he wanted to continue this illusion by having all of us live together. That, in a string of long reasons, is why he’s so mad at me. That, and the fact that I minimised my interaction with him after Kriti was gone. He thinks that it was weakness that caused her to…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Dad wanted her to do medicine, but she had this idea for a clean-energy product. She put a lot of effort into first researching the product, then creating a business plan for it.”

  “Is that why you’ve been reading up on clean energy?” Jaya asked gently.

  “Her time on this earth needs to be acknowledged.” Kovid’s voice was thick with emotion. “I can’t let it all have been in vain.”

  Jaya reached over and hugged him.

  “I want to see if I can productize her idea, then use those profits to create a scholarship in her name for female entrepreneurs.”

  “That would be a lovely tribute to her.”

  “Yeah. And maybe that’ll drag Mom out of her apathy. Though, with Dad being a constant in her life, I don’t know.” Kovid sighed deeply. “So. Kriti. Dad wouldn’t even listen to her idea, so she dropped out of college. He was livid.”

  “But I thought, you said. I mean—”

  “Why was he insisting on med school when he wouldn’t let Mom work?”

  Jaya nodded.

  “So no one would doubt that the great Srinivas Murty, inventor and philanthropist, had done right by all his kids. If she got her medical degree from an Ivy league school, like he’d planned for her, it would reflect well on him.” His voice was toneless. “I’ve relived that night over and over. I’ve driven myself crazy wondering what I could have done differently. I know, my brother has too.” Tea
rs started to trickle down his cheeks. He made no to attempt to stem them.

  “Oh, Kovid!” Jaya put her arms around him, pulling him closer.

  He didn’t resist, but he didn’t react, either.

  “That night she hung herself from the rafters of our fancy house? That was the night our family died.”

  42

  Jaya

  “What kind of lady are you?”

  Jaya raised her head sharply.

  A stout lady, her bodyweight resting on the curved handle of an upside-down umbrella, stood in the neighbouring shop. The red bottu of kumkum powder adorning her forehead travelled from hairline to mid-eyebrow in a full circle of muted redness.

  Inside the shop where she stood, waiting for her purse to be repaired, Jaya frowned, trying to place the other lady. It came to her: Next-door aunty’s sister. Jaya was curious now. Why would the lady attack Jaya without provocation? As far as Jaya could tell, they had never exchanged anything beyond a namaskaaram.

  “You tossed your in-laws out onto the street. You shamelessly got remarried. Which lady even has a second set of in-laws? And now, you won’t take care of the new ones, either. You should be ashamed of yourself.” The lady’s heavy bosom heaved in her outrage.

  Like Jaya’s grandmother frequently said, how people behaved was often a reflection of their own selves. We see things not as they are; we see things as we are.

  Jaya wondered what it was about the lady’s life that was causing her to attack Jaya. She looked directly at the lady. “You’re right,” she said quietly. “I’ve failed at my responsibilities. I’m able to take care of neither.”

  The lady’s mouth was open, ready for further attack. At Jaya’s words, she abruptly closed her mouth and walked away.

  Empathy and kindness—the two values her beloved grandma had said were the values to live by. The happier she was in her personal life, the easier it seemed to be to live by those values. And, no matter the situation in the village, at home she was very, very happy.

  Jaya focussed on the tailor’s hands as he guided the strap of her purse through the industrial-sized sewing machine. In the years with her father-in-law, she’d taught herself to swallow emotions, swallow words. Today, she might have regulated her words, but she hadn’t swallowed her emotions. It was a heady feeling.

  Smiling slightly, she walked around the shop, admiring the workmanship of the tailor. Much of the luggage Jaya owned was made-to-order by this man.

  The man had sped up the machine, perhaps in an effort to drown out the lady’s voice. He pointed at the rickety, backless plastic stool. “Amma, please take a seat.”

  Jaya accepted the offer with a smile of thanks.

  The lady had a point, though. People did have sons as insurance against old age. And those same people expected their sons to bring home daughters-in-law who would devote their lives to the care of their in-laws, husbands and children. That the daughter-in-law was expected to buy into this life of servitude with the dowry she brought with her, was an irony not lost on Jaya. Was viewing sons as investments any different from viewing daughters as commodities whose value could be negotiated in the marriage market?

  She thought back to last night, to the raw pain in Kovid’s voice when he’d talked about his sister, to Uncle’s view of his daughter as a commodity. Now Kovid’s protective behaviour toward his mother made even more sense. Whenever Uncle stepped out of the house, which wasn’t too often anymore, Kovid would walk up to the wall and ask the maid, or a worker, to get his mother. He was perfectly willing to go over, but Aunty wouldn’t allow Kovid to enter her husband’s house behind his back.

  43

  Jaya

  The priest might have spoken, but things weren’t that much better. When Jaya walked through the streets of the village, people wouldn’t meet her eyes. Whispers trailed in her wake. In the weeks since the wedding, she had begun to lose business. Guilt by association was very real in rural India. No one wanted to be associated with scandal. They didn’t want someone else’s immoral behaviour tainting their daughters. Girls were no longer permitted to come to the computer centre. Jaya sat at her desk by the door, watching the people walk past, heads down. Only the brazen met her eyes. With condemnation. With Chinese whispers: each person who relayed the story to the next person added their own spice, till nothing remained of the original circumstances. It saddened her that people were so willing to believe ill of a lady who’d lived in their midst for so long.

  “Knock, knock,” Kovid said from the doorway.

  Jaya looked up and smiled. No matter how stressful everything else, this man made her life worth living.

  Kovid frowned. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Who’s there?’”

  Dutifully, she said, “Who’s there?”

  “Kovid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not ‘okay.’ ‘Kovid, who?’”

  “Kovid, who?”

  “Kovid, who’s come to take you out for lunch.”

  She laughed.

  “Lock up. Let’s drive to town and get some good food.” He grinned down at her.

  She grinned back. “Where are the girls?”

  “At Madhav’s.”

  At the car, she hesitated, then gave Kovid the keys.

  He frowned. “You okay?”

  Jaya nodded. He still didn’t drive much, and definitely not on highways, because the traffic was so wild. No one followed any of the rules Kovid was used to. This was quite the opposite for Jaya. She knew nothing else, so this felt normal.

  “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “If you don’t mind driving, we’ll talk when we get there.”

  They got on the highway, not saying much because Kovid needed all his skills to anticipate traffic. “I can’t believe this,” he said after a bit. “Traffic from the left, traffic from the right, traffic from angles I’d have never expected. Signals are mere suggestions. Anything else I need to worry about?”

  The drive to the wedding registrar’s office had been straightforward, an almost no-traffic road. This was something else.

  “People running across the highway. Unexpected traffic signals. Two-wheelers and three-wheelers darting into fast-moving traffic from unexpected corners.” Jaya didn’t intend to be funny, but Kovid gave her a crooked smile.

  They didn’t speak again till they reached a newly built rest area and pulled in. Though the public resisted, the government was trying to move them toward discipline on the roads. Towards this end, they’d been building high-quality highways and Western-style rest areas along them. This place had clean restrooms, a nice dosa place, a decent North Indian place, a Subway, a Domino’s and an Italian place.

  “Does Italian sound good?” Kovid asked.

  Jaya nodded.

  Before she got married to Anant, she’d had a big circle of friends. Now she was back in touch with them, thanks to the power of WhatsApp. Her engineering college classmates and her school friends had two different groups that they’d invited her to, and chatting on WhatsApp helped her reconnect, which she deeply appreciated. But this was different. Having the freedom to walk into a restaurant with her husband, to be able to enjoy his company in public—there were some things WhatsApp could simply not replace.

  Once seated, Kovid said to the waiter in Telugu, “Can you get the menu?”

  The waiter had a blank look on his face: Anglicised Telugu didn’t seem to be his forte.

  Jaya repeated what Kovid had said.

  The waiter nodded furiously.

  “You want to tell me what that was about? You wanting me to drive?”

  “You know Madhav and I grew up in Hyderabad?”

  Kovid nodded.

  “There, it wasn’t uncommon for every girl to study hard, working to get into a good college. In India, to prove you’re smart, you get into either engineering or medicine. Nothing else matters. Or it didn’t, when I was preparing for college. Now things are changing, but just a little. If your education has the potential to lead you
to a prestigious college, and toward a good job, then it is considered acceptable. In real terms, this means that the other viable option is a law degree from a prestigious college like NALSAR. Nothing else will do.”

  “Okay.”

  “The things I do here are not really appreciated, not by the older generation, anyway. Especially by the men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I drive a car here. Even in Hyderabad, it is fairly unusual to see ladies drive cars. But it is still acceptable. Here, though, men seem to feel more threatened. Two-wheelers are the only appropriate vehicle for ladies to drive. Not four-wheelers, certainly not three-wheelers, which even men from good families won’t drive.” At Kovid’s look of incomprehension, she said, “It is a class thing. Anyway, so they try to diminish me by calling me names like maga rayudu.”

  “Doesn’t it mean ‘tomboy?’”

  “Not quite. When you call a girl a tomboy, it is indulgent. There is nothing indulgent about maga rayudu, believe me. The intent is absolutely to demean. For not being feminine enough.” She blinked back her tears.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Jaya,” Kovid said softly. “I know our life together has been such a whirlwind that I never had the chance to tell you: I was smitten the first time I saw you. I kept trying to figure out ways to meet you. I’m sorry this put you in such a tough position, but I’m really glad that I get to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Jaya smiled at him through her tears. “Me too.”

  Kovid leaned forward and put his hand on hers.

  The waiter smirked as he thumped two glasses on the table. Water spilled over.