Nineteen
Suddenly, in the absence of noise was noise. There were a great many rites to be performed. Things to do with food and water and smoke and fire. There were mourners to be dealt with, the tide of family and friends who swept through the house in waves. I stayed near the kitchen, suddenly shy. Vasanti gave me small tasks, like shelling peas, picking through the lentils. I helped make the dough for chapatis, while hired cooks, funeral professionals, shaped hundreds of small circles to be cooked.
There were pounds of eggplant, pounds of squash, cabbage and carrots that needed shredding and cutting. Vats of water were boiled to scald potatoes, so their skins would slip off easily. My sisters wandered in and out, commenting on the procession outside, the guests who wanted water and tea. At one point Savitri placed an arm around me and insisted I drink some tea, whereupon I burst into tears.
There was the cremation. And after that, the fuss over whether the remains should be taken to the Ganges near where my grandmother had been born. There was a lot of squabbling and shouting. There were the children getting tired, more people to feed, and lightbulbs to replace (the hallway light chose that time to burn out, giving rise to a tide of commentary over whether that was a good or bad omen). And there was the garden and the marigolds—and oh my grandmother, my grandmother.
I began to make more mandalas. I drew orange, scarlet, and green ones. Colors of Indian independence and then some. I drew spidery webs and chains of dots. But what was the use now that she had died? What was the use when our lives had changed? Three weeks ago everything had been familiar and fine, but now chaos, now an irreversible change in our lives. I could not continue to draw.
Jani found me tossing peas into the garden. We watched as birds came down to feed. “Give your sorrow to the birds. They will fly away with it and sing songs to the Lord,” she said. Together we deeply dug out our breath, expanded our chests of mourning, and let our sorrow fly. We did this many, many times. But my sorrow was slow to depart. My sorrow dipped in uneven curves. My sorrow traveled up to the sky and seemed to want to come back to earth again.
My mother found us. With her were my sisters. My mother carried teacups and a teapot on a tray. My sisters carried milk and sugar. We all sat in the garden and drank deeply. We opened a tin of biscuits and dipped them in more tea and ate the soggy result. Never did anything taste so good, the spicy tea and the biscuits. They warmed my tummy and soothed my constricted throat.
My mother bent her head as if to evade her own sorrow. Her face assumed a grave dignity as she gave directions to workmen who came to scale the coconut trees for fruit. Neighbors approached her hesitantly, bringing food, temple offerings. Children from the town stared, to see if they could distinguish her frightful attributes, her witchlike stance. I shooed them away angrily, wanting to protect my mother. She listened to the priests’ instructions and fed them.
Mrs. Narayan came over with an armful of roses. This time I hugged her with all my strength. My mother touched Mrs. Narayan’s feet in a gesture of respect. Together we all went to temple. I walked a prathakshana around the shrine for my grandmother and for myself and my mother. I stepped one slow foot against the other, inching my way forward.
I saw my mother in the kitchen kneading and squishing rice that she mixed with yoghurt and buttermilk for my great-uncle’s meal. I had never seen her prepare food before, so I stood in the doorway, her figure in profile to me. Then she began to cry, my great mother, my invincible tower of disdain. She was crying into the curd-rice, and wiping her tears with a corner of her sari. Her shoulders shook while she stirred.
All this time I had thought of my grandmother’s death as only affecting me, the granddaughter, I had not thought of my mother losing her mother, her own pillar of strength. Of course she and my grandmother had a life full of secrets that predated mine. I was jealous then for my grandmother’s attention. If her ghost were watching the two of us, would she bless us both? But there was no ghost. We had cremated my grandmother and sent her to the gods to return to earth again. My sorrow reincarnated as compassion for my mother.
I spied on Jani, looked at her slight figure kneeling and praying to Jesus. On her knees for salvation, blessings, help perhaps. Her lips moved in silent prayer. I knew she prayed for us, because Jani told me she did. But what did she pray for herself? Was there nothing she asked for herself?
Perhaps it was three days after the funeral, perhaps more, when my mother received a telegram. Savitri’s father, her second husband, was arriving. I knew this because my mother gave me the slip of paper. He offered his sympathy. He was coming by plane, he was landing in Delhi, he was catching the boat to the island. He was arriving soon. When I took the telegram to Savitri, she looked as baffled as I felt, and went on nursing her one-year-old.
One day and one night passed. At noon the next day a taxi arrived in the courtyard and out stepped Ashoka Ram, a middle-aged man with a plump body straining at a brown three-piece Western suit. He had a large yellow handkerchief to wipe his face after he paid the fare. I was on the verandah swing, and he climbed the steps to me.
“Where is Lakshmi?” he asked, bushy eyebrows quivering with impatience.
I didn’t know what to say. My mouth went dry, cracking my lips. He was not as I had imagined.
“My mother’s inside,” I managed.
He went in without another word. I followed to see the commotion.
He spoke to his daughter and admired his grandson. My mother observed him in her witchy way, and was silent. He was brandishing a shining coin in front of the baby. Savitri’s face was expressionless. I had never deeply considered my sisters’ feelings toward our mother and our various fathers. Maybe they felt as outcast as I did but had immersed themselves in their husbands’ lives, and those of their children. Savitri told me that she never thought of our mother, that she had dismissed her from her life, a dead mother.
Meanwhile Ashoka was fumbling with his coin when it suddenly slipped out of his fingers and landed in front of my mother. For an instant everyone froze, then Ashoka was on his hands and knees picking up the coin and touching my mother’s feet in obeisance. “Lakshmi,” he intoned, this film-land playboy, this philanderer, this cad.
My mother turned on her heel and left the room. Ashoka’s eyes welled up with tears, as did Savitri’s. I too felt weepy and took the baby from my sister. Ashoka and Savitri now confronted one another and fell awkwardly into each other’s arms. Opera, opera, opera, went my mind, trying to remain cynical and detached amidst this scene, holding my niece and rocking her body.
Ashoka stayed until the next day. We fixed a cot in the spare room. Ramani and Savitri stayed up most of the night, murmuring, but shooed me away from their whispered conversation. “Marry me,” Ashoka asked our mother at least six times, in front of me. My mother said no and watched the cab drive off.
“Why don’t you marry him?”
“I don’t want to,” she replied.
Stupid mother! I couldn’t understand her. Marriage could give her respectability, give us respectability, end her sorrow. Marriage could save her.
I watched her with my sisters’ children. She wouldn’t play with them or hold them. She was a grandmother. But she really wasn’t at ease with babies.
Oddly, I began to feel sorry for my mother. As if she guessed my thoughts, she laughed at me, and again I harbored the old familiar hatred.
“You know, Ashoka wasn’t always a kind man.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“We fought bitterly all the time.”
“Maybe he has changed,” I said.
“He hit me, Sonil. Some things never change.”
Twenty
My grandmother used to tell me stories of her childhood. She would speak of the Tamil New Year, Holi, the Harvest Festival, the Festival of Lights, harbingers of the seasons. She spoke of her own mother getting up early to bathe in the river, sweeping away all the past unhappy days in one immersion, and rising refreshed, ready to face a
new season. Dry season, wet season, those were our seasons, hot and less hot. But if one watched closely enough, one could discern a spring and summer, a fall and winter. There were minute changes, a shift in the air, a different kind of blooming bud.
Changes brought illness. A shift in the wind, and I’d come down with a cold and cough. The monsoons brought mosquitoes, which brought malaria. Perhaps grief brought about my laryngitis, it is hard to say. In any case, I found myself ill and in bed.
Jani brought rice with petite peas and tiny spiced potatoes to my room. My mother came too, and together we ate dahl spooned over the rice. Jani and my mother drew chairs up near my bed, and I sat up to eat my meal. No one spoke much. Jani was still wary of my mother, I noticed. I still distrusted my mother, despite her disclosure about Ashoka. Grief allowed me to feel pity for her, but my heart was more cautious. I ate without tasting.
Elephants mourn their dead with copious tears and a thrashing of tree branches. When an elephant herd comes across the bones of a departed member, it caresses what’s left and grieves the loss. Baby calves will not part from their dead mother’s body for a long time, and if one observes closely, one can discern the haunted look in their eyes as they wait for her to come back to life. My mother wore such a look, dark rings around her eyes, her nose red with crying.
But here she was speaking of her own childhood, her life with my grandmother.
“She would wake us at four sometimes to listen to the hum of insects and birds awakening. Other times, if the next day was a festival, she let us stay up late and help the cook prepare the food. We’d cook while it was dark outside. She insisted we girls learn to cook and mend and manage money, for she wanted us to become fair, good wives. But she never counted on Shalani and Leila marrying foreigners. Partly to please her, I married Balu, a man who was old enough to be my father. We lived at his mother’s house in Kerala. He was a strict man, insistent on order—the socks had to be rolled just so, the books stacked alphabetically—and he was thrifty. He would daily measure out how many grams of dahl I could use, how much ghee. His mother naturally thought I was conjuse—miserly—in my cooking. We are not poor, she’d say, and I could not tell her it was her son’s hand that made the bread dry. He never touched me after our wedding night.”
Why was she telling me this? Did I need to know such details? And what was Jani thinking of it all?
“After he died, I met Ashoka. I was paid attention to for the first time. He promised me roses and champagne and Bombay. I didn’t know that he promised these things to all his girls, and that there were many girls. Even the night before we ran off to Bombay, he paid his mistress a visit that took hours more than a simple goodbye. He told me his women were crazy, that his mistress here wanted to kill herself, that his mistress there had a disease. He swore to be faithful in the north. After Savitri was born, I stopped listening to him.
“I met your father much later. I didn’t even like him at first. We met at the library, and later he came to a reading by my friend the poet. We had dinner that night, and listening to him, I saw that here was a man who knew what he wanted to do with his life. He had a passion, which Ashoka never did. He was devoted to his photography. Our courtship was slow—I know what people say, that we leapt into bed immediately, but that’s not true. Ashoka had flattered me with his attention but your father took me seriously. I fell in love as I never had before.”
I longed to speak but my throat ached. Her forwardness was startling, but my mother was never one to do what was expected. Perhaps my grandmother’s death released her history.
“But I must have been born between two warring planets. After six months, your father told me he had been married once before, and had two children. He and his wife had separated and he didn’t get custody. I was not as shocked as you might suppose, for hadn’t I a past as well, and children besides? We planned a life together—we would buy a house, up north on the island, plant a garden. I dreamed of rows of roses and climbing jasmine. I envisioned blue daisies and canahambra.
“Of course it was never to be. He received a letter. His wife had been killed in an accident. His daughter was a heroin addict, his son a thief.” She gave a short laugh. “I told him he had to go and help them. He begged me to come with him, but I felt that he needed to go alone, that it wasn’t right for his children to see me just yet. We parted in March.
“Who can say what happened? He didn’t write. Did America change him? Certainly I must have occupied a smaller and smaller place in his heart. Maybe he met with an accident. I was pregnant with you, and he didn’t know. Madame Butterfly on Pi. It was like a bad Tamil film.”
Her voice turned comic, her own solution to unhappiness. My throat ached with something more than sickness. Jani had tears in her eyes. My cowboy dad had ridden into the sunset, vanished without a trace, leapt on his horse and kept on riding. Exit the hero.
I thought of those monks who swept their sand mandalas into the river. Beauty, perfection, all so momentary. Circled perfection was not a constant in their lives—a life centered on God, bowls of food, occasional television. Other artists carve in stone, try to make their work immortal. But the Taj gets polluted, the Sphinx gets worn away, the jewels are knocked out of the idol’s eyes. The monks knew that nothing was permanent and kicked their creation to oblivion at once. They didn’t fool themselves. My parents had had an illusion of happiness, my mother had dreamed of a garden. They had held hands and planned. If they had known better, they would have parted as soon as they met. They wouldn’t have tried to mock the gods with their unconventional coupling.
But like ants who keep working no matter what, we try to control our own lives, tunnel paths to ideals and wants, unaware that an accidental footstep will knock everything asunder. I was old enough to get by on instinct, I thought. But listening to my mother changed my life. I think it was that night that I learned not to take anything for granted, that no future was ever secure. But what was there to hold on to? What gave us hope?
“I want to go to college in America. I want to meet my father,” I told her, not because I felt I had to, but because it was the only thing I could say with my hoarse throat.
“Look,” she said as if she hadn’t heard, “life is not easy. You need more than good looks and good marks to get you by in this world. And it’s not merely intelligence, either. It’s practicality that is at issue. Do you have what it takes to live away from this island, from India itself? Can you maintain yourself beyond your imagination?”
I listened, not wanting to listen. Maybe I listened with the part of myself that wasn’t immediately equipped to listen, like the way dolphins can listen without having ears. I listened with that part of myself that would hear what she said years later.
But she went on: “I am not the only one of this opinion. Your father would agree with me. Freedom does not come easily in this world. It is not about having a perfect dress, or a perfect view, or even a paradise of a room. It is not about going to college on another continent, or even finding your father. It is about how you can survive after things are taken from you. It is about the prospect of losing what you love and the effort it takes to continue.
“Life is not romantic. Romance is hard to come by. Romance does not always work,” said my mother, looking away.
Imagine the scene. My mother in a dark green sari, bold lipstick, her arms full of poetry. My father in dusty jeans—jeans splattered with darkroom chemicals—reaching for a book on still-life painting. Perhaps with her head in the clouds she ran into him—literally—and her books scattered at her feet. And he bent down to retrieve them and glanced up to find the single most beautiful face looking at him. His hair bristled. Her eyes turned to stars. But this was not youthful infatuation, so they dismissed their instincts and apologized and parted.
Later, the poet read of women making love with their mouths and silken skin and strong desire. As the poet read, my mother’s eyes wandered, and seeing him, she blushed. I touch your neck and watch it flame
and then I let my hand slide over your breast. He couldn’t stop looking at her. I undo the buttons slowly and your breath is alive with longing. They smiled and shifted in their seats. I tongue your heart and plunge lower. They felt a pulse in their inner parts.
At tea, they said hello shyly and felt self-conscious. In three hours, when they are seated at a riverbank, he will lean toward her and recite the poet’s lines, and she will be astonished. Unconsciously she will unbutton her blouse.
They will circle each other and tell each other they are too old for foolishness. They will pretend indifference. But one day he would unfold the pleats in her sari and she would reveal herself like a forgotten package. The earth would sigh with their pleasure and later their love. I would not be thought of, but there would be other ideas.
My mother would dream of planting in the spring, using terracotta pots. She will think of harvesting herbs and edible flowers, mulching trees bearing orange and lemon, watering beds. Her own bed would be damp, mussed, never completely made. She sketched the plants she might use, feeling tingles from the night still. He might steal behind her and wrap her in his arms. My Indian rose, my Eastern star. They would have a house and later a family.
The letter was airmail blue, thin. Typeface from a lawyer with a note from a concerned aunt. How had it been forwarded? Through the institution that funded his year in India. Her decision had been swift, resolute. He must act the hero, the knight, the savior. He must save his children as she could not save hers. They had all the time in the world, after all.
Had there been a train crash? Did his head get hurt and did he suffer amnesia? Did he fight with his daughter to go to rehab, threaten his son with jail? Did they enter his room one night and pour hot poison in his ear? Did a meddlesome relative bar his passage back? Did no one know?
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