Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  She had been invited to give a plenary at the conference, and on the desk before her was the abstract she had written, entitled Politics of Reproduction: The ‘Missing Girl’ in Indian Society. Amita’s name was well respected in the field of international feminist studies, particularly in the area of South East Asian women’s writing. Over the years, she had attended several conferences in India, in cities where she felt little connection to her ancestors, but the thought of going to Delhi excited her. The north was where her parents came from, and she planned to take a side trip to Vrindavan and Mathura to find her mother’s village, to trace her roots.

  Beside the abstract on the desk was a photocopy of a photograph she had found in an Indian newspaper, of the bodies of three young sisters who had taken their lives to spare their poor and ailing father the need to find dowries for them. Hanging from a ceiling fan, each strung upon a separate blade, their heads slumped forward like broken flowers upon thin stems. Beneath this were separate print outs from a paper on female infanticide that Amita was preparing to quote from in her own paper.

  I examined a young girl with an advanced case of tuberculosis. I asked the mother why she had not done something sooner about the girl’s condition, because at this stage treatment would be very expensive. The mother replied, “then let her die, I still have the burden of another daughter.” (report by a public health physician, Ludhiana Christian Medical College).

  Amita felt a great need for a cup of coffee, but her electric kettle was broken and she would have to wait for Parvati to make her one. Opening a drawer in her desk she pulled out a cereal bar from a supply she always had on hand, and tore off the wrapping. It was the last thing she should be eating, but she did not think she was capable of discipline this morning. She took a bite from the bar and her eyes returned to the papers before her.

  Statistics show that last year in India, 3 million girls or more went ‘missing’ at birth…

  Sex selection services now reach a poor, rural clientele in the back of a van…

  Women reported that they killed their babies under pressure from their husbands who would beat them if they refused…

  With a sweep of the hand Amita sent all the papers flying off her desk, and watched as they floated down, scattering about her on the floor. It was one thing to talk academically and theoretically about female infanticide as part of her job, and quite another to know that her grandmother was a serial murderess, and her mother a chance escapee from that fate. It made her furious and sad in equal proportion to know that a woman would so easily kill her child. That the woman in question was her own grandmother left Amita feeling tainted.

  Soon she heard the sound of the student leaving Parvati’s room, and left her desk to hurry down the corridor again.

  ‘Coffee?’ Parvati asked.

  Parvati refused to drink instant coffee, and always had available a large flask of sweet milky coffee made from freshly ground beans that she brought with her each day from home. Amita had an electric kettle in her room and a jar of instant coffee, but the element had burned out in the kettle and she had yet to replace it, and Parvati knew this. Amita sat down in the empty chair before the desk, biting her nails distractedly.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Parvati reminded her, and Amita nodded obediently, picking up the mug of coffee Parvati placed before her.

  Across the desk, Parvati waited for Amita to speak, knowing the signs of agitation well.

  ‘It’s upset me, all that talk yesterday of drowning that baby. I just can’t write on infanticide for the Delhi plenary; can’t stomach it now. I’ll have to talk about something else,’ Amita admitted. Parvati stared at Amita over the rim of the mug as she sipped her coffee.

  ‘It was a long time ago, and nothing to do with you,’ she reassured.

  ‘Of course it is to do with me. My aunt was murdered, and I may have many more “missing” aunts for all I know,’ Amita snapped.

  ‘Why are you so angry?’

  ‘I’m shocked to find I had a grandmother who regularly committed infanticide.’ Amita tried to order her thoughts, wondering why indeed she was so upset about something so far in the past.

  Traditional women of her mother’s generation, Amita observed, feeling a familiar impatience rising within her, either meekly submitted to their fate or used feminine wiles and mule-like stubbornness to get their way. What she strove to impart to her students in the cloistered space of the university was that they now had choices their mothers and grandmothers did not have. They were the very choices Amita had worked to cement into her own life, deliberately practising what she preached. She was the agent of her own destiny, whole within herself, choosing lovers, but possessed by none. There were those who queried why she had never married or taken a partner, but her life was as she wanted it, and she felt no need for more.

  ‘At that time, in a village, in a rural area, women lived with unbelievable cultural pressures,’ Parvati’s soothing voice interrupted her thoughts, but Amita was not ready to listen.

  ‘It’s still going on today. In the villages they suffocate newborn girls, drown them, feed them pesticide or poisonous herbs. I won’t mention what goes on in urban centres; abortions after a scan reveals the wrong gender, sleeping pills in milk formula if they go full term. I’ve written about it extensively, as you know,’ Amita argued in a rising voice.

  ‘Everything was stacked against your grandmother,’ Parvati reasoned.

  Leaning back in her chair Parvati studied Amita, whose high-handed way with students had gained her a reputation. She always leaned towards exaggeration, throwing herself so wholly behind a viewpoint or position that her academic impartiality was in danger; Parvati hesitated to use the word ‘obsessive’.

  ‘Then, why did she not kill my mother as well?’ Amita demanded. Parvati sighed and shrugged.

  ‘Maybe your mother refused to drown quietly, or maybe your grandmother just couldn’t find the strength to do it that time.’ Parvati replied.

  ‘Knowing my mother, she probably refused to drown without a fuss.’ Amita laughed uneasily, picking up the mug of coffee before continuing.

  ‘Its one thing to examine a fly under a microscope, and another to have it buzzing around alive inside your head! That’s how this feels now, too close to home!’

  As Amita sipped the coffee her eyes settled on the framed family photos on the bookshelves behind Parvati’s desk, on a photo of Parvati and her husband and their two teenage children, smiling happily at the camera, arms wrapped around each other. Parvati’s husband, Rishi, was an academic like Parvati, a professor in the Political Science Department at the university. In her present mood Amita had no wish to see Rishi’s face, and turned her head away. Draining the last of the coffee in one long gulp, she stood up with such abruptness that Parvati stared at her in surprise. Then, with no more than a curt goodbye, Amita hurried from the room.

  Each night Amita took care to leave her mother’s bedroom door open and her own ajar, always fearing an emergency if Sita tried to find her way to the bathroom in the darkness. Sita slept restlessly, as did Amita, who now heard her mother call out in her dreams the name of her long ago friend.

  ‘Muni.’

  Amita remembered the slight, thin-faced woman in the photograph who knelt beside Sita at target practice, both of them staring in concentration down the barrel of a gun. What had they shared together in the war that her name should haunt her mother’s dreams, Amita wondered. She listened to Sita toss and turn, to the laments of dreaming, a grief she knew had been stirred up by the conversation with Parvati. Yet, whatever the discomfort her mother must endure, Amita remained determined that Parvati’s interviews must continue. Her mother’s past was sealed in a silence Amita was determined to break.

  Now, already into middle age, Amita’s own experiences seemed to lack proper shape without a deeper knowledge of her mother’s story. The meaning of her mother’s life was in the challenges she had braved, and the choices she had made. Each life was shaped by it
s story, and until this point, Amita had never doubted the story she was trying to shape for herself. Yet, recently, and especially in these last days when her mother had begun the interviews with Parvati, she found herself filled with all manner of doubts. Was she just drifting through a role she had fashioned for herself, or was there a deeper meaning she must find in her life? Somehow, she felt sure that if she knew the truth of her mother’s story it would provide her with an image, one way or another, of what her own life should be. From India to Singapore, child marriage to widowhood, to recruitment in an army, her mother’s life appeared one of adventure and exception. Yet, as a child, the little she knew about her mother’s life had been nothing but an embarrassment to Amita.

  Her mother had been different from the mothers of her school friends, all absorbed in culinary matters and the birthing of children, the buying of gold and saris, and the running of their households. Her mother had no husband, had never developed the plump bolsters of hips and breasts that other mothers did, had never produced more children, or exuded the comforting odours of cooking and perspiration, and never laughed easily. Her mother did not share the interests of other women; her mother had been a soldier. Nothing could have been more outlandish. As a child, Amita never mentioned her mother’s eccentricities. Instead, she found herself empathising with people who were orphans, who did not know who exactly they were. Like them, a piece of her seemed to be missing.

  ‘Muni.’ Her mother called out the name once more.

  What long-ago terror had the two women experienced, Amita wondered yet again. The past was as much an illusion as the present, but in the darkness of nightmare time rewound, throwing her mother back into the dimension of her own inner space. The person her mother inhabited in her dream was a different person from the old woman who now dreamed the dream. Amita saw again the photographs spread out on the table, her mother’s hand on the butt of the rifle, ready to pull the trigger, to acknowlege the recoil as the bullet left the gun; her mother had been prepared to kill. Perhaps she had killed a man. This thought did not sit easily with Amita. Yet, in the photograph, the knowledge of this power was everywhere in her mother’s face, in the directness of her gaze.

  ‘Muni,’ the call came again.

  Her mother seemed to retrace her steps to the same haunted moments in her past, a place she could not easily leave, whose vividness must equal the reality unfolding in her waking time. Did she smell again the perfume of lemongrass as she crawled forward with her rifle, and was her husband again beside her as she wandered the landscape of memory, Amita wondered.

  Things moved forwards, not backwards, and what was done and lived through could not be undone, Amita reasoned. You just had to live with the consequences. She knew this fact now to her own great cost. The unfathomable movement of all she had so deliberately set in motion in her own life came forcefully before her now — her mother’s dreaming, the resentful face of the student peeling an orange, Parvati, Rishi. Rishi.

  5

  SINGAPORE, 1939

  At last they stopped before a shophouse in a busy street and Dev helped her out of the rickshaw.

  ‘On Serangoon Road you will not believe you are in Singapore; you will believe you are still in India.’

  Sita nodded, it seemed as Dev said; India appeared to be all about her in the familiar faces and familiar sights, in the smell of spices and incense, cow dung and jasmine. A priest hurried by, his brow smeared with ash in the lines of his religious caste, a bullock cart passed with a cargo of brightly painted plaster statues of the god Krishna. Then, another cart passed loaded with a strange fruit.

  ‘Those are pineapples. Chinese people have become millionaires from this fruit,’ Dev informed her.

  Sita stared at the prickly balls; such fruit did not grow in India. In the dark recess of the many tiny shops about her, she glimpsed a goldsmith at work and a garland maker, bales of cloth and familiar brass cooking utensils, but the architecture around her was unlike anything she had seen before. There was also the presence of many Chinamen, such as their rickshaw runner. Everything was familiar, yet everything was strange.

  Sita followed Dev through a narrow door into a dim interior, momentarily blinded after the sunlit road. Her brother began climbing the steep staircase inside the house, and Sita followed. People pushed past her on the narrow precipitous steps, almost throwing her off balance, while Dev climbed ahead without a backward glance. A confusion of sounds and smells assailed her, the distant clank of metal pots, the cries of a baby, the whirr of a sewing machine and the chanting of prayers. The perfume of incense mixed with the stale odour of food and spices, the stench of drains and old fermenting rice, all stewing together in the hot and airless house.

  Sita felt suddenly faint with exhaustion. Although the long journey from Vrindavan to Singapore was over, her senses still reeled from her experiences, a myriad images jumbling together in her head that she could make little sense of as yet. From Vrindavan to Calcutta there had been an old train, plaintively blowing its whistle as it trundled across India’s scorched plains. Sita had sat huddled before an open window, transfixed by the passing landscape and the rhythmic sway of the carriage. She barely noticed the black smoke that blew from the engine into the carriage, covering her face with a fine layer of soot, leaving a gritty taste on her tongue. She kept her eyes on the distant horizon, aware that she was now on her own, travelling deep into the world, just as Dev had done. Land was continually sucked away either side of the train. In the distance, fields and villages perched upon the horizon, but whenever these far places were reached, more fields and villages appeared upon yet another horizon, so that the train sped constantly towards a shifting destination at which it never arrived. Life itself, Sita had suddenly realised, might be just like this journey, rushing always towards a new horizon, a line that moved seamlessly as she moved, constantly evolving but never reached, always just beyond her.

  At Calcutta she had boarded a great ship, and for days the swell of the waves pitched her this way and that. That voyage had been even more traumatic than the long train journey, and she did not want to think about it just now. Nor did she want to remember the widows’ ashram in Vrindavan, where she had lived after her husband died. If it were not for Dev she would still be there. Somehow, she had reached Singapore and that was all that mattered. Above her on the stairs, her brother was now reaching out a hand to pull her up beside him as he stepped into a narrow corridor.

  Dev held onto her hand, drawing her along behind him down the dim passage. From a half shuttered window at the far end, some light filtered through, revealing rows of small cubicles. Before most of the open doors a curtain was hooked up, but Sita could easily glimpse the tiny spaces behind, crammed with people and belongings. In one room a tailor and his assistant sewed busily, in another an ayurvedic doctor tended to his waiting patients, who overflowed into the corridor. In another, men slept on narrow shelves, head to foot, two to a bed, stacked up one above another, floor to ceiling. Dev turned into a room near the end of the corridor.

  ‘What place is this?’ Sita asked, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  ‘This is my home. I share this room with two other men from the shop, but they have moved out today to make room for you. I can pay for this room now because I am promoted to Number Three Assistant. Before my promotion, I was sleeping in the shop on the floor behind the counter.’ Dev smiled proudly.

  She did not know what she had expected, but the weight in her chest suggested it was not the dark cupboard of a room she now saw before her. Spreading a frayed checked cloth on a sleeping shelf, Dev instructed Sita to rest while he went to get a meal for them from one of the food stalls in the road below. Left on her own, she was suddenly overcome by the weariness of the day. Her sari dropped about her shoulders and putting up a hand she examined the short spikes of hair, measuring how long they had grown since she left the ashram in Vrindavan. For the first time in days she sat alone, and in the hot space of the tiny room memories engulfed
her.

  The morning after the wedding and her husband’s untimely death, a tongawallah had arrived with a horse-drawn trap to take her to that place. Her mother-in-law’s voice was hard with satisfaction.

  ‘Only in that place can widows hide their shame. Just as my son is dead, you too are now dead to the world.’

  Sita listened to the sound of the tonga wheels bowling along, and the familiar clop of horse’s hooves that had accompanied her so recently on the journey to her bridegroom’s home. The air rushed uncomfortably about her newly shorn skull. Soon the tonga entered the narrow twisting lanes of the old part of the city, and stopped at last. Her mother-in-law got down and rapped on a door in a weathered wall.

  A wizened black dwarf of a man with an oversized head and bandy legs opened the door to them. Behind him towered a mountainous woman, tonsured like Sita, and dressed in a white sari. A short hawk nose dominated a fleshy face out of which glared small hooded eyes. The woman nodded and turned, her bulk balanced upon tiny feet, and they followed her and the black dwarf across a large courtyard. The singing of bhajans echoed about them, hymns Sita remembered her grandmother had liked to sing and, hearing the familiar songs again, a lump rose in her throat.

  In the shade of a colonnade the other side of the courtyard, a priest sat at a table, upon which rested a ledger and a large metal cash box. He looked up, assessing Sita critically before turning to her mother-in-law. His sunken cheeks were covered by grey stubble and his dark face gleamed with perspiration. Immediately, with a curt nod to the priest, Sita’s mother-in-law hurried away.

  ‘Whatever you have you must give me now.’ From beneath shaggy eyebrows the man’s eyes squinted at Sita from different angles, it was hard to know which eye was looking at her.