Inheritance

by Indira Ganesan

“What did her sandals look like?” I asked.

  Vasanti threw me a distracted glance.

  I remembered the story of the Dancing Princesses who would steal away each night to visit their dream lovers, their worn-out shoes the only clue to their disappearance. Leaving Vasanti, I went to the foyer to check on the sandals, but I couldn’t find her pair. My grandmother was watering the lawn, and something about the line of her mouth kept me from asking any questions. I spent the day inside, idly reading, thinking of Richard now and then. I looked at more poems by the poet.

  Three days later I received this letter from Jani:

  My dear Sonil,

  I admit your news was a bit surprising, but do not despair. Young love is powerful, but it is just that: young. Perhaps you were also taken advantage of, in your innocence and inexperience. But your heart is very strong, and soon you will be able to put this business behind you.

  I assume that there were no lingering attachments on his part. I think it very advisable to come visit me for a month or two weeks. You will be able to relax and get away from the town, and after that, you will be headed back to school. I am sure our grandmother will like this idea. Why not ask her and then write to me immediately?

  Yours always,

  Jani

  I was very happy at the offer. It seemed the best thing to do. Going away might help me regain my balance. But when I asked my grandmother, she said no. Why ever not, I demanded. And then my grandmother said that my mother would miss me.

  “But she doesn’t even care about me!” I said.

  “Nevertheless, you are her daughter, and you cannot leave when any minute things might change.”

  “What things?” I demanded.

  My grandmother was cryptic and refused to say any more. But I persisted.

  “When you were born, you were as tiny as a teacup. We were so afraid you wouldn’t live. I said prayers daily, and Mrs. Narayan walked to the temple for us every day, as well. You wouldn’t accept milk, so we had to feed you with formula through an eye dropper. Slowly you gained strength and weight. You no longer felt like a dry leaf in my arms.”

  “Did you hold me a lot?”

  “I could hardly bear to put you down.”

  “And my mother?”

  “She suffered a great deal. The loss of your father was a hard blow. I think you inherited his mouth, because she could not look at you without crying.”

  “So she avoided me.”

  “Not like that. But it was too much for her, and we decided to send you to Shalani and Leila as soon as you were old enough.”

  “So she could have her affairs in private.”

  “Sonil—it may be hard for you to understand, but your mother did her best for you.”

  “So why did she neglect me? Why does she get drunk at night and meet strange men? Why does she disgrace us?”

  “I don’t think she meets men. I think most men are probably afraid of her. She is strong in her own right—the only thing that she is afraid of possibly is you.”

  “Afraid of me?”

  “You have so much anger toward her. You must learn to be more generous.”

  I stared past my grandmother.

  I missed Jani and after watching me mope for three days, my grandmother relented and off I went.

  The travel by rail was fun in that I was setting off for a part of Pi that I had never seen. The convent was fifty miles away to the east, in a sleepy town. I sat next to a man who was a singer from California, who told me that he was also a Buddhist monk. He was delighted that I was going to the Sacred Heart Convent because he thought it a very good sort of place. He said he came to Shankar Nagar three months every year just to meditate, which, considering his very busy schedule, was impressive. He showed me his computerized date book, and I saw that he had events planned as far as five years ahead.

  We both got off at the same station, and he steered me toward the convent. The convent was a white building enclosed by a wall with a garden in front of it. Several nuns were pulling out carrots and gathering them in a large basket. In my pocket I had the name of the Californian, the monk whose latest recording was a series of devotional prayers set to wind chimes. I planned to purchase the disk when I went back to Madras. He bid me a cheery farewell, and off I went to seek my cousin.

  Finding her was not a problem. I asked the gardening nuns, and they pointed me toward the gate. As I walked toward it, a bell began to ring, announcing that it was two in the afternoon. The gate was ajar, and I wandered in. To my surprise, I found a very nice house with a verandah where a group of nuns was sitting around a girl who was playing a guitar. It was so bucolic, so serene, I just stared for a long while. Then, becoming self-conscious, I walked past them, uncertain as to whether to interrupt them and ask where Jani was or just to go into the house. I decided to go into the house. The nuns listening to the strumming smiled benignly and began to sing. I started to giggle; I mean, it was rather funny, singing nuns in a cloister, and me, a young girl who didn’t know where she was going. Luckily, I noticed a pump gurgling with water, and realizing I was thirsty, I seized the moment to take a drink.

  The water was cold, and it cleared my head of silliness. Inside, there was a waiting area and a large notebook for visitors. There was a bell that one could ring for assistance, and ring it I did.

  “May I help you?” asked a woman who seemed to materialize suddenly.

  “I am looking for Janaki Visnuwath,” I told her.

  I met Jani in the back, hanging her wash on a line in the courtyard. She smiled as I ploughed into her arms.

  “I know three things,” she told me. “Poetry can move your heart. Solitude can grant you wisdom. And love comes from a peaceful mind.

  “Let me write it down for you,” she laughed, as she saw my moody mouth pointing downward.

  “Isn’t love about passion?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Jani. She looked past me, seeing something I couldn’t see. Jani was like Joan of Arc, I thought. I never had to save her with a sword. She had worn one all along.

  I was given a cot in a room for visitors. I slept under a photograph of Mother Teresa. I awoke early, took a bath at a communal shower, having walked down three flights of stairs clutching my towel and soap. I joined the other nuns for a simple but filling breakfast (idlis, juice, beans-curry) and then either followed Jani as she did her chores or read while she prayed. Nearly every day we went for a long walk, and when we couldn’t because of rain, we stayed in and helped make chapatis. Jani helped out at a class teaching calisthenics, and I exercised alongside the schoolchildren, stretching up and down. These children were orphans whom the convent supported with help from the government. I talked with Jani most when she did laundry.

  I asked her how it was she chose to be a believer in Christ, and if that meant she had to be solitary.

  “I mean, you haven’t even given love a chance.”

  “But my Lord tells me to have only love in my heart.”

  “I meant boys, Jani.”

  “I would rather remain single, give my life in the service of God. This way I can help others while helping myself.”

  “But what about kissing?” I asked. “Aren’t you curious about it?”

  She looked at me with amusement, which I must confess infuriated me. How could Jani know that sex and marriage were not for her?

  “Sonil, once I was in love with someone in Delhi. Her family moved to Bombay, and she never answered my letters. Later, I found out that she had died. I went to the tiny garden Auntie Roja has and wondered what to do. As I was thinking, I saw an angel, who came toward me and smiled. I was filled with such light, such happiness. This is how I began to believe in God. Even more than mortal man.”

  “Can’t you also love God and man—woman—at the same time?”

  “No, I cannot.”

  She said it with such sad certainty, I wondered if she wasn’t being a martyr, suffering silently. Then again, given my own unhappiness, maybe she had
stumbled upon a truth, and love in God provided her with a barrier from the world of mortals.

  “But in fact,” said Jani, reading my mind, “I am not hiding myself from the world. We teach children, go to the market, and sometimes even go on holiday to the seashore. We aren’t locking ourselves in the convent all day and night. But a certain amount of solitude is necessary for contemplation and peace of mind. We then become stronger to help others.”

  She was convinced of her words, but I wasn’t. She was missing out, I knew that much for certain. And this girl in Bombay, that sounded like something from a story. I doubted there was a girl, only fear. But if a person is truly fearful, then one has to placate one’s fears and do whatever is possible to cure that timidity. Jani did not look fearful; she looked calm, collected, steady in her thoughts. Whatever made her a nun was whatever made her who she was from the start.

  And again I began to wonder if I shouldn’t have followed in her footsteps, become a devotee of God. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have suffered over Richard. I could have preserved my honor as well as my pride. But there was Radcliffe and all my plans. Maybe that was selfish, too, the desire to go overseas and become a great scientist. A great anything smacked of hubris, and I became very doubtful. Everything one could want in life I had: air, food, shelter, strength. But then I had found an even greater contentedness, at a cafe with a man whom I loved. Maybe it was the wanting that led people astray. Maybe it was like acquisition; one always strives for more. If happiness, then more happiness. Didn’t Madonna have a song about this? I decided to give the matter no further thought.

  “I don’t think it’s wrong to love a girl when you are a girl. One thing the nuns might disagree with, but still. I loved Asha, I was infatuated, I strove to be like her. And she loved me. Maybe if she’d lived, we could have lived together, and I could have borne the world better. But God called her, and at the same time He called me.”

  I listened to Jani, idly playing with a piece of grass. Loving girls, she couldn’t love boys. Loving Asha, she couldn’t love C.P. I drew the blade across my knee, liking the tickling, then suddenly feeling self-conscious as I remembered kissing myself. I wanted to kiss Jani, pull her toward me, make her leave the convent. Who needed boys anyway? But Richard was too strong, too present, too new. Jani looked eternally sad. Asha and Richard. They had kissed us and marked us and left us. They had conquered and retreated and declared checkmate.

  There was a pond at the convent. During early evening prayers, I slipped off my clothes and slid into the water. It was delicious, enveloping. I bobbed up and down for a while and then ducked down to open my eyes. The interior was murky, greenish. My eyes smarted, and I surfaced. Dragonflies landed near me and buzzed overhead. Silvery fish darted away. I floated on my back, exposed and not caring. No one could see. I thought about Krishna and the gopis, how he had spied on them, laughing at their nakedness. How embarrassed they had been upon discovery, how quick their hands flew to cover themselves. But surely there had been one gopi who didn’t care, who didn’t blush and hide but floated like this to let the god appraise her, whose breasts rose like flowers from the water, whose hair glinted like a mermaid’s. A maid who challenged the god to look as he might, to understand that her body was hers alone, even if he possessed it, to know that her bathing was an act of self. And I couldn’t help thinking that Krishna withdrew his eyes and turned to the others, who were flustered, who were angered, and that he let the brave girl alone. He didn’t dance with her or clasp his leg around her or cover her with blue-lipped caresses. The girl had met his boldness with her own and somehow proved a point. A girl who might have strolled like my mother out of the water without shame, let her body dry in the sun, and chosen any lover who pleased her. And perhaps her love was another girl, a creature she could mock and adore at the same time, whose hair she could plait, whose ears she could fill with song, knowing she had defeated Krishna himself. But her first kiss would be for the god who let her alone, who withdrew his eyes. And as she lay with her lovers, maybe she realized that she was equal to the peacock-feathered, blue-skinned flute player. But the poets never wrote about this.

  I finished my swim and went back to the nuns.

  After ten days at the convent, we received a phone call. I took it, expecting a scolding from my grandmother about the sweater I’d left behind. Instead it was my mother on the phone. My grandmother had died.

  Eighteen

  Arriving at Madhupur for the funeral was oddly easy; suddenly all the trains were available and on time. Jani and I traveled together, of course, and there were at once so many helpful people to carry her luggage and the food we packed. No one seemed to notice that we were unusually quiet and in a state of shock, because when we got the news, we acted normally, as if we were just making the trip back as scheduled.

  My grandmother. My green hill. O, my grandmother, how could this happen? It must not have happened. If only I could do something to reverse it all. My grandmother. My grandmother, my dear, darling, lovely, brave, practical, doting grandmother. My eyes filled with tears, my nose started to run, my chest began to panic. My body began to heave, although with a supreme effort, I held myself in, telling myself there was time for all of this later, that Jani and I needed to get back home so Grandmother … Grandmother … Grandmother …

  Mandalas. I should have made more mandalas. I should never have stopped. In doing so, I had neglected my grandmother; I had neglected her by seeing Richard, by forgetting her health. My grandmother. If only I had made mandalas again, I could have filled a notebook and given them to her. She who loved anything on paper that I did. She who had taught me to draw. My grandmother, my mothering muse. My actions were misguided; I had spent all my excess energy on seeing Richard or mooning over him instead of drawing for her whom I adored.

  So on the trip down I began to imagine mandalas, elaborate designs of connections, of cause and effect, of cycles, of the reason for all things, of the reason for my grandmother’s death. Why had she been taken from us? What purpose did it serve? What wheel in life was churning that could explain her death? She was still young, not even seventy. We needed her, Jani and I needed her. My mandalas became wheels and trees with mandalas of leaves and mango, mandalas of life. And at the core was my proper grandmother, my bundle of hope.

  At first Jani and I sat opposite one another, and turned our heads to look out the window at the same time. We had the compartment to ourselves. We barely spoke to each other, just used head nods and blank expressions. We both had taken baths with strong-smelling soap, as if to present a fresh-faced visage to the world was of utmost importance. We had packed the same way, with care, yet not addressing each other more than necessary. The compartment began to fill up, and two businessmen joined us. At this point, Jani moved over next to me and held my hand.

  The power of her grasp. Strength poured out of her hand and surged into mine, so that the energy between us was palpable. Still we refused to look at each other, for any moment our held-in-check world might collapse. I remember reading the Indian Express one of the men held. The headlines spoke of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. In three months, Indira Gandhi would be dead, and our nations—Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, and Pi—would be stunned into disbelief. But right now, the fighting was in the background, the world was occupied by other things. So I read a biography of a soccer player in the news, of fans rushing a stadium somewhere in England. All this I read from the back of the businessman’s newspaper. Neither he nor his companion said a word, and if they noticed our grief, they were quiet about it. I remember being grateful that they were ordinary-looking businessmen in their suits and ties, with gleaming tiffintins at their sides. They helped us keep everything at bay.

  We arrived at our station without incident. Great-uncle met us, something we didn’t arrange, but didn’t question. The only way I can describe our actions then is to say that we danced slowly to a choreographed ballet. Great-uncle had a taxi waiting for us, and we carried our luggage to it.
Again, the entire ride was in silence. The cabdriver was kind, infinitely kind as he helped us down at our compound gate. He offered his hand first to Great-uncle, then to Jani, and finally to me. Island cab-drivers as a rule just open doors, and sometimes not even that, since everyone knows opening cab doors is not a great task. But this cabdriver acted as if he were escorting royalty. I think he even forgot about being paid because he was starting to drive off when Jani ran back and paid him through the window.

  The family. The funeral. When we climbed up the stairs, my mother stood by the door. Her hair was tied back, her face as well-scrubbed as ours. She was wearing a pale blue sari; it was Jani’s, I remember noting.

  “Good, You’ve arrived safely,” she said, surveying our luggage.

  Jani and I placed our suitcases in the inside hallway and took off our sandals. Everything was quiet. My mother led the three of us inside where a meal awaited us. I remember eating an orange, all the while staring at a mound of rice at the center of the table.

  One by one, other relatives began to arrive.

  My sisters got there first. Ramani and Savitri, both with round bellies, one clutching the hand of my nephew, Suresh, the other followed by my nieces, Revathi, Usha, and Rukmani. Suddenly the house filled with chatter.

  Behind a closed door, my grandmother lay on her side. Not sleeping. My mother began to tell the story.

  “She was watering the garden. She was leaning over the marigolds with her hand full of water, a pail in her other hand. I was watching her because I loved to watch her, as you know.”

  I didn’t know.

  “She seemed to be admiring the flowers, sprinkling the water, the water catching the light, her hand scooping back for more water. I looked up to see a raven fly overhead. When I looked back at my mother, she was on the ground, the pail overturned, the flowers hidden.”

  My mother told this story at least a dozen times over the next week, but it was this first telling that I recall with such clarity, that day with my sisters and Jani. My sisters wept at once, scaring their children. Jani took the children to the kitchen to get them milk. My brothers-in-law entered bearing more luggage. My great-uncle went to telephone someone. Soon after that, the house filled with people.