by Pratap Reddy
So, Daddy pored over a map of the district and decided to empty the urn into the Krishna River. In the meanwhile, the earthenware got broken by a careless maid sweeping the compound. Amma transferred the ashes to an empty biscuit tin that had been washed and wiped dry. The tin had the word Britannia printed on in bold, gothic letters, lending a kind of grandeur and solemnity no decorative silver container or ethnic artefact could match.
Daddy and Ramya hit the road in their new made-in-India Ambassador, a model which grew out of the old British Morris Oxford. A symbol of India’s self-reliance, the Ambassador was one of the most popular cars ever made in India, and remained on the roads, almost unchanged in appearance, for nearly half a century. Daddy had to go in for a new car after their venerable Standard refused to budge one fine morning. Cars too die.
They travelled for miles and miles, Daddy faithfully following the map. It was beginning to get dark, and they were nowhere near the temple town where they intended to scatter Mummy’s ashes. It slowly dawned on them that they were lost. Daddy tried to read the map in the dim ceiling-light of the car, but it was useless. He recalled crossing a small bridge about twenty miles behind them, so they made a U-turn and headed back. He stopped the car on the middle of the narrow bridge. There weren’t many vehicles on the road at that time of the day. They’d seen only a lumbering state transport bus and a couple of straw-laden bullock carts in the last half hour.
They stepped out of the car and went over to the railing — a set of pipes running through a few uprights. Some of the pipes were askew; some were missing. When Ramya leaned over them and looked down, she was relieved to make out a grumbling but steadily flowing ribbon of water in the light of the moon.
“Do you think it’s the River Krishna?” Ramya asked, in a voice fraught with doubt.
“Who knows,” Daddy said. “Anyway, all streams and rivers eventually flow into the mighty ocean.”
Daddy uttered the words in a matter-of-fact manner, but in the dark still night, with only the distant but tireless cicadas strumming a dirge for Mummy, it sounded deep and philosophical. Daddy prised open the lid with his thumbnail, and stretching his arms out, inverted the box. Just then, a gust of wind came up the stream, flinging back some of Mummy’s ashes on them. Startled, Daddy let go of the box. They heard a soft splash and a thud as the biscuit tin fell into shallow water.
They stamped their feet and ruffled their hair, trying to shake off the ashes. They got back into the car and drove away. But some of the ashes must have remained, clinging to their clothes and body. In a way, a small part of Mummy came back home with them.
5
Atom Auntie
RAMYA CANNOT BELIEVE her eyes …
From the odds and ends in her box she has unearthed a lemon-flavoured lollipop. It’s wrapped in translucent paper which is twisted into a tuft at the top. She can make out the dull yellow candy behind the veil of limp, greying paper that was once crackling crisp and snow white. With the passing years the candy has lost its delectable appeal, a sign that even nonliving things are not immune to aging.
But what about its taste? Does it remain the same? Candies are nothing but boiled sugar with artificial colour and flavour. Is it palatable after all these years?
Rather sketchily she remembers reading in a newspaper about a jar of honey (or was it wine?) discovered in an ancient Egyptian (or was it a Greek?) tomb. The report said it was still unspoilt and edible. Though not of similar vintage, the lollipop was nearly four decades old. It may also be safe to eat after all these years, but Ramya is no frame of mind to try.
As to who gave her that lollipop she doesn’t have to speculate: It was none other than her aunt — her beloved Atom Auntie, her father’s younger sister. Ramya remembers Atom Auntie always giving her candies, cookies and sundry gifts. She was the only person in the world who never uttered an unkind word to Ramya, nor ever spoke to her in a sharp tone. Despite the obvious difference in their ages, Atom Auntie always treated her as if she was her equal. She would regale her with stories — sometimes so comical and improbable, that Ramya, even as a child, suspected her aunt of making them up.
Atom Auntie’s real name was Sunanda, and she got her nickname in a peculiar way. Daddy expected Ramya to call his sister Auntie, having a decided preference for English nomenclature. After all, he’d been educated in a school run by the Jesuits. He thought it reflected a modern outlook. But Mummy used to employ the Telugu word Attamma, which meant an aunt, while referring to Sunanda, like: “I can’t tell you stories the way to your Attamma does.” Or: “Your Attamma has all the patience in the world.” It was no wonder then that little Ramya started calling her aunt Attamma Auntie, a frightful tautology. But mercifully it was shortened to Atom Auntie, coming as it did straight from a babe’s mouth.
Atom Auntie was unmarried, and remained single all her not-so-long life. When speaking to Ramya, some people referred to her as “your spinster aunt,” piercing Ramya’s heart. It sounded so demeaning, though they didn’t mean to be unkind. They were merely stating an incontestable fact in an age when political correctness was practically nonexistent. Atom Auntie was good-looking, light of skin, and 5 feet 6 — tallish for an Indian woman. One would have expected her to be besieged by suitors, even in a tradition-bound society where marriages were made, not in heaven, but in comfortable living rooms abuzz with busybody relatives. Young men always had an eye for attractive women, and traditions be damned. Yet Atom Auntie, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, remained in a state of bachelorette-hood.
The answer to this mystery lay in her horoscope. According to the pundits, she was born at a time when Saturn was in ascendance, and there was also the matter of a wayward Mars. Or some such rigmarole, but, in a word, it meant Atom Auntie’s horoscope was not auspicious for the groom’s mother. Any man marrying her ran the risk of his mother meeting a sudden and untimely death. Despite the dire astrological prediction, Ramya’s father tried to broker a match. He was Atom Auntie’s elder brother, so it was his responsibility as much as their parents’ (who lived in their ancestral village in the back of beyond) to see she was duly married — in effect, to hand her over to the care of an upright and dependable male member of society. It turned out to be more of an uphill task than he could imagine.
Daddy did his best. He first enquired among his relatives; then, with rising desperation, among educated young men within the community; and later, in a lastditch effort, among his friends and acquaintances of any caste or creed. But all his attempts came to naught. Maybe because he was upfront about what the horoscope said. He couldn’t find a single rational and courageous young man who would disregard the horoscope. Even dangling the carrot of a nice, fat dowry — Daddy didn’t mind selling his lands in their village if the need arose — was of no avail. The horrendous future which the stars foretold was enough to dissuade the bravest of young men.
But, surprising as it may seem, Atom Auntie did have a suitor, and was even formally engaged to be married for a brief while. And it happened, not because of her brother’s perseverance, but as a matter of pure chance.
Daddy had just completed building their two-storey house, using his savings and an immense loan from a bank. The house, the same one in which Ramya grew up, was in a nice clean neighbourhood where the roads were lined with shady gulmohar trees, and pretty roundabouts graced every intersection. The upper floor of the building was rented out to meet the loan repayments. The family which moved in had a daughter of marriageable age. It so happened that a young man, with his family in attendance, dropped by to determine the suitability of a match. The boy didn’t take to the girl, but on his way out he spotted Atom Auntie in the garden — she was watering the lawn with a hosepipe. She was laughing and chatting with the maids who were lounging on the front steps. The maids were content to allow Atom Auntie to do their work while they leisurely folded betel leaves into paans and popped them into their mouths.
In the crystalline evening sunshine, Atom Auntie, who always cut
such a pleasing figure, must have looked like a vision to the young man’s eyes, jaded from viewing so many prospective brides in quick succession.
The very next day, their tenant, who was distantly related to the young man, came down, and with a sour face, conveyed the young man’s wish to Daddy. Daddy at once cautioned their tenant about the minefield in Atom Auntie’s horoscope.
“I’ve already told him about it,” the tenant said, his face turning a shade more sour, “but you know how young men are. He’s most insistent.”
“Well, if he doesn’t mind, then we’ll invite him over. Let’s see what will come out of it.”
Soon Atom Auntie and the young man were engaged. His name was Satyavan and he worked in a bank as a loans officer.
A few weeks before the wedding day, Satyavan and his mother were returning from Moazzamjahi Market where they’d been to buy small green mangoes and red chillies to make avakkai pickle. His mother, who was slightly on the heavier side, was perched precariously on the back saddle of his Lambretta. She was clutching a jute bag which contained their purchases. An elderly Bedford lorry roared out of nowhere, and with scant regard to traffic rules, made a beeline towards them. At its helm was a man in an infernal hurry. It was later discovered that he was completely intoxicated with vast quantities of toddy, a potent country liquor. Terrified, Satyavan’s mother jumped off the scooter, startling poor Satyavan into losing his balance. The Lambretta took a tumble, but the accident, mercifully, wasn’t fatal: Satyavan escaped with a few bruises, but his mother, who fell on the road like a dhobi’s bundle of unwashed clothes, had her leg — tibia, as Daddy pointed out with a physician’s exactitude — broken.
Every man, woman, and dog recalled the oracular warning of the pundits. It wasn’t a nice situation for Atom Auntie to be in. Very awkward for Daddy too. He and Atom Auntie visited the hospital, taking half a dozen expensive but mournful looking apples (the best they could buy in the local market) along with a packet of rusk, the standard offerings for a patient in a hospital. Satyavan and his mother were engaged in earnest conversation, which Satyavan broke off when he saw Atom Auntie and her brother. Seated on an easy chair provided for family attendants, he looked sullen. He had masses of plaster and wads of iodine-soaked cotton stuck on various parts of his body.
His mother, a plump lady of fifty years, lay trussed up on a metal cot whose ancient white paint was bruised with rust. The light brown bed sheets, which had once been lily-white, sported beige floral patterns — ghosts of bloodstains of past patients which repeated washing couldn’t completely exorcise. She too had her fair share of bandages and one of her legs was in a cast. When she spotted Atom Auntie, a wave of terror swept over her face.
“Hello, Hello, Hello,” Daddy said, making a brave attempt at cheeriness. “How are you all feeling?”
Daddy engaged Satyavan in light breezy conversation hoping to improve his mood, while the two ladies remained silent — Atom Auntie out of respect, Satyavan’s mother with a lack of graciousness. Daddy glanced at the hospital reports and said: “Nothing to worry, Satyavan, we’ll have your mother out of the hospital in no time.” Daddy had a number of friends in the hospital though he himself didn’t work there, and as a consequence Satyavan and his mother got special treatment.
When Satyavan’s mother was released a week later, Daddy left early from work to drive her in his elderly but handy Standard Companion to her house. In the days that followed, Daddy visited Satyavan and his mother regularly.
“They are coming along nicely,” he told Atom Auntie. “Satyavan can return to work coming Monday.”
When they didn’t hear from Satyavan in the next few days, they weren’t unduly perturbed. Satyavan’s family didn’t have a phone in their house, and he would have a lot of catching up to do at work. But one day their tenant turned up at their front door unannounced. He didn’t sport a sour look this time round, rather a shadow of a smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Still, he started off in a grave tone: “Satyavan has sent word …”
“Yes?” Daddy asked.
“His family is very upset. He’ll speak to you in person when he gets better. In the meantime, he has sent this letter for you.”
Even before Daddy could unfold the single sheet of paper, Atom Auntie guessed what it would contain. Her brief flirtation with matrimony was over. Daddy read through the letter, and said, with an air of distraction: “I can understand how Satyavan feels. But he shouldn’t decide in haste … Anyway, thank you for bringing the letter.”
It was said that Atom Auntie, given short shrift in such an undeserving manner, neither wept nor expressed any resentment. She accepted her fate with a stoicism which comes from long experience of living in a world that was fickle and heartless.
All this happened when Ramya was a toddler. She heard the story in bits and pieces from Amma and the maids. Though a gifted storyteller herself, Atom Auntie had neglected to recount her own story, which was the very stuff Bollywood cinema was made of, except that in Indian films there’s always a happy ending.
In the aftermath of the broken engagement, Daddy searched, not for a groom, but for a job for Atom Auntie. He correctly reckoned that having something to do would keep her mind from brooding. She got a job as a teacher in a small primary school. It was only meant to be a stop gap arrangement as the school was far away in the suburbs. Atom Auntie was good with children because she could empathize with them so well, and her students adored her in return. She made a proficient teacher too; being a natural raconteur, she could even make dreary subjects like civics or grammar sound fascinating. So Atom Auntie stuck to her job, though it wasn’t well-paying and required her to take a bus and a local train to get to her place of work.
Ramya sits in front of the TV idly watching a shopping channel airing a pitch for cosmetics for aging women. The rapturous anchors mention the word décolleté repeatedly like it is some kind of mantra, pricking Ramya conscience. Her own décolleté is fine and does not need attention for the next few years, but it reminds her of the inexorable passage of time, and the long list of things she needs to get done (even if improving her décolleté is not at the top of her list).
Ramya doesn’t know why she’s put the TV on, or why she’s stopped by at this particular channel while surfing, except that TV, God bless the idiot box, does have the power to keep loneliness at bay, a feature not even its inventor could have foreseen in his most optimistic moment. A TV can be a substitute for live human company, even if a poor one.
Ramya’s mind drifts from the show, reflecting whether she would have been better off if she had made different choices in the past. When she immigrated to Canada she presumed that jobs were plentiful, and you could indulge in cherry picking. Things didn’t turn out so rosy, but as she could afford to pay for education — they’d brought a substantial sum of money from India, she surveyed all the learning avenues available.
One of the first things she learned was that getting another management degree in Canada was a waste of time and money, as she wouldn’t have Canadian experience to go with it.
She seriously contemplated enrolling in a teacher’s training college, but then she learned that newly qualified teachers often languished as supply teachers. Unattached to any specific school, they had to wait to be called as a stand-in for a teacher who hadn’t showed up. Such a teaching stint could last for a day, a week, a month or even a year, depending on the type of leave the regular teachers took. Ramya heard horror stories of supply teachers who got no more than a few days of work in a year.
Somebody suggested Ramya train as a nurse. Unlike in India, a nurse’s pay was nothing to be sneezed at, but being a doctor’s daughter, and a pampered one at that, she couldn’t countenance working as a nurse. It also needed a kind of empathetic disposition Ramya knew she didn’t possess, to say nothing of the time and study required to become a Registered Professional Nurse.
Eventually realizing you couldn’t be too picky if you’re a new immigrant, Ramya took the f
irst job that came her way. She started at a Tim Hortons coffee shop as a cashier, then cut and chopped her way, via The Bay and Walmart, to — at last! — an office job in a car parts factory, where she got health and dental benefits on top of a reasonable fortnightly paycheque.
Wherever Ramya worked, whether in India or Canada, she was liked by her supervisors and employers. It was gratifying to learn that she was perceived as diligent, reliable and hardworking — a sure-fire cocktail of attributes any recruiter would fall for. Totally engaged, Ramya always gave her best to her job. She never worked with her face turned to the clock, never minded working late if there was an urgent task to be finished.
Yet, when it came to the crunch, her employer cast her out in a heartbeat. Just like that, without even an iota of compunction. Ramya suspected that it wasn’t such a simple matter — there may have been racism and nepotism at play.
She had never felt so worthless in her life as when she was laid off, not even when Prakash went out of her life. Their separation was a matter of mutual incompatibility years in the making, having stopped liking each other as far back as she could remember. But losing her job had cut her to the quick, undermining her self-esteem. Not many of her cashiered colleagues appeared to take it so badly. Was it because she was an immigrant, and had found looking for a job a herculean task? Besides, it wasn’t that the company had closed its shutters, leaving the entire workforce in the lurch. The layoff had affected only a few employees, and the company was running and making profits for its share- and stockholders.
Ramya remembers the fateful Friday in the third week of December as if it’s yesterday. Just before the close of day, nearly fifty employees were told not to turn up for work the following Monday. (The home office in Michigan had asked the Canadian operations to reduce the workforce by ten percent to improve their financial outlook. There were 485 employees, so they cashiered 49 hands, rounding off the number.) Veronica, her colleague who worked in the accounts payable department, was a petite woman who was five feet nothing in her stilettoes. She said: “I must be that half employee who’s getting the sack.”
