Inheritance

by Indira Ganesan

  One summer, there were no papadums. This was when my grandmother fell ill. I was ten, on holiday, on my second visit to the island.

  The Mystic of Madhupur told me how to save my grandmother. She said if I were to sit in front of a lighted candle, if I made a space in my heart and concentrated, and carefully drew a mandala for seven days, I could ease my grandmother’s pain.

  I had gone to the Mystic in desperation one day when my grandmother could not stop trembling. At first she had trembled only at night, and the pills the doctor prescribed calmed her, but later she began to shake all the time, and complained of aches in her limbs. She had an illness of the nervous system, the doctor said, something that possessed her legs and would not allow her to rest. So she spent her days on the hard wood couch that served her as a bed. She lay on her side, swathed in a green cotton sari, a gently breathing hill in our house. My mother was away at the time and I saw little of my great-uncle.

  “But I don’t know how to draw a mandala,” I told the Mystic. It was true—I was terrible at drawing. My trees looked like Africa balanced on a popsicle stick; my birds looked like loosened turbans.

  “Mandalas can be drawn by connecting an infinite number of circles to squares,” said the Mystic.

  The Mystic lived on King George Street. I had never been there before, forbidden by my grandmother to come within even two blocks of it. It was in a run-down section of town, flanked by government-built housing for the poor, drab buildings made of concrete with a veneer of pee and graffiti. They were full of crying babies and harried mothers. The sidewalk was blanketed by swarms of flies that shifted only slightly as you walked through, resettling lazily. The Mystic lived at the very end of the street, near a vacant lot that served as a common dump site, a home for the homeless.

  My grandmother had told me stories about the Mystic, how she could cure snakebite and spider poison, how she could heal gaping wounds and broken legs. She had been honored for her medicinal cures until the doctors in town, or maybe it was the priests, or the bureaucrats, or the mothers, someone, became scared and jealous and declared her mentally unstable, dangerous to the community. She had lived for a time on Queen Victoria Street, where many merchants lived, but they chased her to King George Street, where she continued to practice her art. She could look at your toes and tell your future.

  I gave her my birthday money. She dipped a sprig of jasmine in a bowl of water and shook it over my head as she ushered me out.

  “Make a different mandala every day,” she repeated, refusing to say more.

  Because they had seen me leave the Mystic’s shack, the men who had earlier taunted me or stood in my way to demand money now left me alone. I walked unbothered to Queen Victoria Street, but hardly recognized my surroundings, so concentrated was I on my task. I decided to go to the local library to research mandalas. A man stood on the steps, his arms mere stumps, an empty can around his neck for change. After I dropped some coins in the can, he continued to look at me with huge dark eyes out of a caved-in, grizzly-chinned face. “I can’t help you,” I forced myself to say, “I have to help my grandmother.”

  Mandalas, I discovered, are also called cosmograms, and represent the entire world in a small picture. They signify the power of interrelation, of the interdependency of all things, of the separate layers to all life. I learned that the ancient Aztecs had mandalas, and so did the Greeks and the Hebrews, that mandalas could be found in the rose windows of the great cathedrals. I read that in New York City a Tibetan monk had made a mandala out of colored sands, a complex representation of many worlds with intricate designs, and had then brushed the whole thing carefully into a jar and deposited it in a river. It was an act for peace.

  The armless man was gone when I came out. I had a chance to look at the library wall. It was a popular place for impassioned writing, and I checked out the new graffiti. PROMOTE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, I read. ADC OUT OF OFFICE, and FREE NELSON MANDELA, Every day, for two weeks now, someone had scrawled this last message, and every day, for two weeks, someone had white-washed it away. There was nothing else interesting, so I moved on.

  My grandmother had given me my first drawing lesson. She drew a large circle, then a small circle right on top of it; adding whiskers and ears, eyes and a tail, she had a cat. My grandmother’s hands were large and wrinkled, ancient-looking hands that could hold an entire bird in either palm. She used to make me rice pancakes for breakfast, spreading the batter into cat shapes. I loved it when my grandmother served me food; the flavor seemed to be imparted from her hands. Now we had a cook to prepare the meals.

  My grandmother had lived for three years in Malaysia and knew some words in Cantonese. It was always a marvel to me that she’d lived in a land so far away from home, where people spoke a different language and ate fish with chopsticks all day. Women rode bicycles there with their tunics billowing in the wind, my grandmother said. She had a box of black lacquer, etched with ivory dragons and flowers. I’d trace the whorls of dragon breath and wish I could see what she had seen.

  For my first mandala, I chose blue and green watercolors to paint on pale violet paper. I knew that for the power to work, I’d have to draw truly, without hesitation; I couldn’t sketch first. I made a box and put a circle inside it. I decided to stop there, not wanting to take chances. I left it to dry on my desk, and it seemed to me to be a flag.

  My grandmother called me, and I went to press her feet. Her feet had hard, cracked calluses on the soles, from years of labor and walking. They always distressed me, for they looked painful, but she would scoff at my sentiment. “They are evidence of a good life,” she’d say, but I didn’t believe her. I massaged her feet with oil and then braided her hair. As if in irony, ever since her illness, her hair had been growing luxuriantly, winding down her back like a silver rope.

  On the second day, I drew concentric circles in orange on yellow paper. It looked like a sun, and I liked the effect. The first mandala had curled up, so I pressed it between two books. I reminded myself to use less water. I cleaned my brushes by dipping them in an old coffee tin and squeezing out the water with my fingertips. In school, we always used dainty teacups in which the water became muddy with color too fast, and we weren’t allowed to use our fingers. I had nearly failed Drawing and Painting last year. Never mind, I told my grandmother, I do well in everything else and can still go to a good college. The third day, I drew a box, and inside it I placed a diamond. Inside the diamond, I placed another box and inside that, another diamond. I finished with one more box. It looked like a lotus.

  That was the day the doctor came to visit, and I painted while he examined my grandmother in the next room. Even though I was ten, he still gave me sucking candy. He smiled at me when he had finished in my grandmother’s room and asked me to get the prescription filled. With my mouth full of lively peppermint, I rode my bike to the pharmacy. On the way I passed the library wall. Underneath FREE NELSON MANDELA, the whitewasher, tired and possibly fed up, had written WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE. I stood there awhile and realized that with a letter change, Mandela was like the word “mandala.” I wondered if that was significant.

  The next day, I drew a square, a diamond, a circle, another diamond, and another circle.

  Mrs. Narayan from across the street called me over. She was watering her roses, which were famous all over town for their size and fragrance. She attributed the success of her gardening to a singular devotion to Laxshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity. On her dining-room walls were beautiful life-size murals of the goddess rising from a lotus, showering gold coins from her hands.

  Mrs. Narayan and my grandmother had grown up together, neighbors until the time of Mrs. Narayan’s marriage. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Narayan had moved back to town. It was a ritual between our two houses that she sent over two roses for us each morning, one for our family shrine, one for my hair. I disdained her gift, thinking it too old-fashioned to wear flowers in my hair. My mother was the one fond of flowers, not I. My grandm
other frowned at this—young girls, she believed, had a duty to adorn themselves.

  “How is your grandmother?” asked Mrs. Narayan.

  “Fine,” I said, looking at the ground. I will not cry, I told myself, I will not run into her arms. I stood still as she tucked a rose into my hairband.

  “Pray to Laxshmi,” she said. “She is our benefactress.”

  I wandered over to the library to see the latest development. I was not disappointed. Under the defensive WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE, someone had very neatly, in thick black paint, written this:

  EVERYONE is responsible. It is ridiculous to excuse oneself in the face of a crime and a gross injustice. If you accept money from a thief, you participate in the robbery. By refusing to take action on acts of cruelty and prejudice, you condone the injustice. Silence is shame. Silence is the closed eye. Free one prisoner and you free yourself.

  I made two more mandalas the next two days. The first one was in gold and blue and featured a box in a circle and another box and circle inside that. It looked like a television screen. The second one was better. I made a box and a circle as before, but this time I put a diamond in it, and then a box and a circle inside that. I painted it in four colors, and it seemed to be as powerful as Shiva’s third eye. He is the Destroyer; he is the Creator, For the first time in a long time, I prayed to the gods to help my grandmother, to stop her pain. I read aloud to her that evening, from Dickens, but she fell asleep before I had gotten very far.

  Morning, and my grandmother was still asleep. There was a large lizard on the wall, staring at me with its ugly eyes. Lizards are good, my grandmother said, they eat mosquitoes, they bring good luck. But I didn’t like them; I thought they were creepy. When I was younger, I would shout for my grandmother when I’d seen one, and she would calmly catch it between the straws of a broom and shake it outdoors. I was painting a mandala that was a dark, velvety purple, the deepest color. I smiled to think that my grandmother would cluck her tongue at the choice: Wear pink, she used to screech at me when I appeared in something dark, wear pink!

  Now the lizard was staring at me and I fought an impulse to shout for my grandmother. She needed her rest. Somehow I knew it was important not to be distracted, that I continue to paint steadily. I connected line to circles, connected my grandmother to Mrs. Narayan to the armless man to Nelson Mandela. I would even connect the nasty lizard as well, for it would make my grandmother well. It must make my grandmother well. For how would I live without the shade of my green hill? How would I travel, how would I transgress, how would I troubadour my life away if there was no hill upon which to rest my head?

  My grandmother recovered that summer. Yama, the god of death, decided to stay away, and I stopped drawing mandalas.

  Five

  I loved wandering around in my grandmother’s house, My great-uncle’s room was always cool, with gauzy curtains over the open window. There were no window-panes in Grandmother’s house; insects flew in at will through the bars, and we all slept under mosquito netting. My grandmother had a room but I slept there, as did Jani, for Grandmother preferred the bench in the parlor for sleeping. We had a spare room for guests or to hang the washing in when it rained or on the days my grandmother went madhi—that is, super holy and untouchable until she had gone to temple and come back—her sari was hung by poles on lines high above the ground. The ceilings were twelve feet, and often I sat in this room, gazing at the madhi saris.

  The parlor was airy, with plants and wooden couches and cane chairs. There were carpets on the floor, old and thin with a few bare spots, but comfortable to the feet. There was a gods’ room, filled with images and renderings of Krishna, Laxshmi, Pilayar, and other gods from the pantheon. Fresh flowers were collected daily for the shrine; every morning, my grandmother made fresh designs with rice flour for the prayers. I often sat with her during the prayers, my task being to ring the bell when the oil lamp was passed in front of the gods. My great-uncle practiced Yoga and performed his morning ablutions and rituals even earlier than Grandmother. He’d apply his caste markings with red paste and veebuthi, a sacred powder made from elephant dung. He was a devotee of both Iyer and Iyengar customs, a follower of both Shiva and Vishnu, at least until noon each day.

  There was a music room with a veena with a carved dragon’s head in red and yellow at the end of its long neck, and a violin that Aunt Shalani could play on her visits. I don’t know who played drums, but a mridangam stood in a corner. My grandmother said there used to be many musical evenings in the house when my mother was young. My mother’s room and a small room with a writing desk and dusty trunks and wardrobes completed the house.

  My grandmother told some stories about my mother to me. How when she was young, she could run like a pony, fast on her feet. How she liked to wear ribbons in her hair and wanted green ones for every birthday. My mother was born March 11, and the astrologists said hers was to be a special life.

  Until I was fifteen, I had never thought of my family as sad. We were not wealthy, but my grandfather had been a structural engineer of some renown. My mother, of course, had stripped our family bare, and because of her ours was a family violated by scandal, indiscretion, and shame. It was like Phaedra wedded to the House of Athens; of course, even after her, the House endured. But while Phaedra had been cursed by the gods, my mother alone was responsible for her actions. So I thought. Our family shook like a tree after my mother’s various transgressions. Once Jani and I attended a bharatnatyam recital in the city; as we were being seated, several acquaintances murmured a hello. It was then that someone whispered something about “those poor girls” and I realized our situation must look bad on the outside. I wanted to shoot the whisperer immediately.

  My great-uncle, with his strange mannerisms and shaky past—a man whose nails were yellow with opium, whose head swam with drugs—did little to help us; he would get dreamy in the middle of the day. He liked to wear multicolored turbans. He thought Coleridge was the greatest poet ever and could recite “Kubla Khan” any time. My great-uncle was a thin, wraith-like man with a sweep of white hair that he sometimes pulled to a knot at his neck. I was twelve before I learned that he had been married, that his wife had been struck by a car and died. I couldn’t imagine him married, any more than I could believe he had ever been a baby. I thought he had simply sprung from somewhere, fully grown and alone, born in a field of poppies with a pipe in his hand.

  He was always lounging, a pillow behind his back, his legs completely relaxed. Even standing, he looked graceful, like a tall girl. His clothes all flowed. They rippled somehow, his shirttails long, his dhoti full of folds. Sometimes it seemed he didn’t have any bones in his body. They said opium eaters imagine they can make their bodies so malleable that they can slip through the smallest spaces; my great-uncle seemed to be able to go anywhere, his body merely pretending to be flesh.

  My great-uncle was a painter. He could paint miniatures of courtly scenes of times past very efficiently. He would bend over small squares of canvas and apply blue, green, and red paints with the tiniest brush. He was extremely disciplined in the morning. He got up at dawn, performed his ablutions, ate a spartan meal. Then for four hours, he would attend to his canvas, silently working. He sold about half through an arts association in town, his customers being largely both island-Asian and Chinese. He had a retrospective once in Taiwan. He attended the opening-day ceremony, but growing bored, he hurried home to Pi, to his paint and his opium.

  “Careful,” he’d say to me in Italian as I leafed through his works. “The gold will shake off the canvas if you are not careful.” He painted dancing girls and musicians and once an unusual series of ordinary folk done in the courtly style, sweepers and villagers performing their daily tasks. He asked me to pose once, which caused a big ruckus with Grandmother.

  I had one of his contemporary studies, as they were called, at home in Madras. It was of a schoolteacher with her pupils under a banyan tree. It gave me a sense of serenity. Through it, I saw his po
wer, and I thought my family’s strength was inextinguishable.

  The gossips didn’t think so. We were a family of women, without a strong man to give us buoyancy in the social waters of Madhupur. I didn’t think we needed men. My aunts largely managed without them, and prospered. In fact, I think, without men we were stronger. No one to slap us into obeisance. Society required women to marry, and men were needed to father children. But once that occurred, wouldn’t everyone be better if they vanished into their own worlds like my great-uncle, leaving women to conduct their lives? But my grandmother was worried about our reputations; she wanted to find a suitable boy for my cousin Jani to marry.

  I looked forward to Jani’s arrival. She would make me laugh and help me keep my anger toward my mother at bay. But Grandmother said Jani was reported to be forever frowning, clutching Christian books in her hands. Her eyes were listless and she would answer queries with monosyllables. “She’s moody because she longs for a companion,” my grandmother said, but I wasn’t sure. What had happened to Jani?

  I spent March at my grandmother’s with a great deal of freedom. I’d rise late, read storybooks, eat lightly. I spied on my mother, as I’ve said, and made up stories to amuse myself. Often I took a chair to the field behind the house. I sat and watched the green grass, the dandelion fuzz at the edge of the field, the rough, high grass. Dragonflies speckled gold and green whizzed by, and fat bees sucked greedily from the nectar-laden flowers. Sometimes I could picture my entire life in the slow rise and fall of the field, the way it expanded so that I could see what was just in front of me really well but couldn’t make out what was in the distance.