A Sister's Promise

by Renita D'Silva

  ‘We heard, child, about your betrothal.’ They say, but their paan-etched, tea-stained grins resemble grimaces.

  Please, God. The finger of dread is now an entire hand, taking my spine captive. My stomach cramps.

  They sigh. They fidget.

  I wait.

  ‘Your sister, Puja,’ they say, finally, once they have drunk the tea and complained that it has too much ginger, too little cardamom, and not enough sugar.

  Ah, I exhale the huge lungful of air I have been holding in, tasting relief. It’s nothing to do with me, or Gopi. Thank you, God.

  They take fresh paan. They chew noisily. They ask for the coconut shell spittoon.

  ‘She was a delight as a child, but now . . .’ they sigh and spit reddish yellow flakes of masticated paan, and their eyes gleam maliciously. ‘How will your parents get her married if she keeps mixing with boys, and running riot with them?’ They click their teeth to convey disgust.

  I nod agreement, and step back imperceptibly to wipe my paan-flecked face with my churidar shawl, which smells of Rin soap and dog. This party of meddlers came here to tell us this? A wasted trip, surely. They know we know all this, they have complained about Puja’s antics a hundred times before.

  But the matrons never waste energy making a house visit in the oppressive sun; energy they can conserve while nattering on a comfortable veranda being waited upon and plied with sweetmeats, unless there is value to be gleaned by imparting a choice nugget of information, something hot off the press, which has to be shared in person. There is more to come, I am sure.

  I wait. Fear clamps my body even as it makes my legs quake.

  Please God.

  ‘Child, we would rather be telling this to your parents, but as they are not here . . . ’

  Please.

  They take a collective breath.

  God.

  ‘Your sister is running around with your beau.’

  Do not react, I tell myself, even as the meaning of what they are saying sinks in, each word a tumbler of acid, burning a path down my insides, reducing to a withering, smoking heap everything it comes in contact with.

  Your sister . . .

  Puja, whom I have adored from the moment she was born. Puja, whom I have loved more than life itself, and who I always assumed loved me just as much in return. Puja with whom I have swapped confidences. Puja whom I have rescued from scrapes, taking the blame myriad times for her indiscretions. Puja with whom I made a promise that we would love each other best and look out for each other; a promise I have kept so far.

  Puja who makes me laugh, even when I feel like crying.

  Puja, who despite the fact that I have two left feet, took it upon herself to teach me to dance—‘Christian Wedding Boogie’ she called it: her take on ballroom dancing —out among the fields with our feet sinking in the mud and the dog nipping at our heels and the cows mooing in surprise.

  Puja, who knows how afraid I am of lizards and meticulously chases away each one clinging to the beams above us every night before we lie down to sleep. Puja whom I have tended through fever. Puja, who diligently soothed my itchy skin when I had chicken pox.

  Puja, who taught me how to apply makeup, tips she picked up from God knows where, using wet mud for foundation and the sticky yellow stamen from hibiscus flowers for lipstick.

  Puja who sleeps beside me at night, each of us breathing in air festooned by the other’s dreams.

  Puja who still throws her arms around me every so often and whispers in my ear, ‘Sharda, you are the best sister in the world.’

  Puja, who is party to my deepest fears.

  Puja, who is my closest friend.

  Puja, my only sibling; my precious, beloved sister.

  Puja, the traitor, if what the matrons are saying is true.

  Your sister is running around with your beau.

  Gopi’s face, his smiling eyes, his hot breath in my ear: ‘You are the best teacher, Sharda.’ His hand holding out a Campco chocolate, damp with sweat, thus sealing a friendship. His eyes during our betrothal, evasive as a glimpse of moon on a tempestuous night.

  Puja asking, ‘Sharda, have you ever been in love?’

  I bite the inside of my cheek until the hot, sweet taste of pain floods my mouth with the rusty tang of blood.

  I picture again Puja’s face when she came upon Gopi and his da in our hut, colour draining from it like waves receding from the shore at low tide leaving forlorn debris behind, the dregs of what could have been. I had felt guilty then and something else . . . unease, sly as an uninvited guest at a wedding sneaking up behind the bride: ‘Boo’.

  Now I remember what she said that made us laugh. Her words in this very room adorned with my happiness and bedecked with my dreams of a future with Gopi, ringing as clear as an immaculate reputation, ‘Why can’t I marry him instead?’

  ‘Child, did you hear what we just said?’ The matrons squawking like so many hens excited by a cockerel in their midst.

  This is why they’ve come.

  I feel their collective gaze upon me like a spotlight shining right into my eyes, keen with the gossip they are itching to spread. They wait for my reaction, which will do very well for their chinwag sessions for the whole of next week. Already, they are rewriting what is taking place in their heads, adding embellishments as they go along, musing on what expressions they will use when they relate this scene to their relatives and loved ones.

  ‘She went pale,’ they will say.

  ‘We had to hold her to stop her from falling,’ they will murmur.

  ‘She smacked her forehead repeatedly and invoked God while bursting into heart rending sobs,’ they will croon.

  ‘What a shame! The poor, deluded sister,’ they will sigh.

  ‘Thank God,’ they will chant, chomping on their paan and heaving sighs of relief at finally being able to rest their ailing legs, ‘thank God our families are normal, our daughters demure. That devastated girl, conned by her own sister, crying her heart out . . . ’

  ‘Holding hands without a care in the world! Puja hugging him tight as they conjure up a sandstorm on that motorbike of his! Shameless, that’s what . . .’ they moan now, nodding like puppets.

  ‘Thank you, I’ll tell Ma and Da,’ I say, grateful that my voice is steady.

  The ladies stand, a collective rustle and whoosh; sighs and cracking of knees. The odour of sweat and stale betel leaves.

  I usher them out, even though they are loath to depart without getting more from me. A fit, a tantrum, they’ll even settle for a lament, a shocked whisper.

  I give them nothing. I wait until they have rounded the corner past Sumatiakka’s fields, craning their necks until the last to catch sight of me, to witness my spectacular collapse.

  A pity, I think, my mind rejecting what it has learned, and fixing on inconsequential thoughts instead, that they resemble waddling penguins even if their necks can swivel as flexibly as swans’.

  I wash the saucepan in which I brewed the tea and the dregs of the paan-tinted tea tumblers. My mind is quiet as a note stripped of music, bland as a tapestry robbed of colour, empty as art robbed of meaning.

  I do not think of that exhilarated girl who had sat beside Gopi in this very room just one day ago. I do not dwell on the thrill she had felt at his proximity—this boy she had secretly adored for so long, who was now hers.

  I do not think of the distance I have traversed in just a few minutes; it is too big a gap to bridge—the creamy innocence of a few minutes ago besmirched irrevocably by the chilli-powder red blot of knowledge that I cannot unlearn, the awareness of having been betrayed by two of the people who make up my world, two of the people I have loved most.

  I look back at the girl I was this morning, spinning dreams of a happy future with a boy she finally dared own, and I want to laugh at her. Loudly, hysterically. Laugh and never stop.

  I think of what I have always believed. That being traditional, dutiful, and following the rules, will get me what I want. />
  Wrong.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  I hang out the clothes to dry, and wait until one of the matrons returns under the pretext of looking for a lost hanky, when all the while, it is fastened securely to her sari skirt with the biggest safety pin I have ever seen.

  And only after I have waved her goodbye, and after I have swept the courtyard and fed the dog, only then do I go inside and pull out Puja’s favourite churidar; not one of my hand-me-downs, Ma, but the one you had especially made for her with cloth she had picked out, as a special treat for her last birthday, and I rip it to shreds.

  And then, I walk to the market.

  You are grateful, Ma, that I have come to relieve you, so you can go home and put your tired feet up for a brief while.

  You cup my face in your palms, plant a kiss on my forehead, whisper, ‘My sweet girl.’

  You cannot contain your happiness at having secured such a good match for me. Even though the landlord’s son’s proposal has been on the cards for a while, it is only now that it has been formalised, that you can breathe easy that it will actually happen. Your joy gives your face a sheen that makes you look so beautiful, like the mother I remember before Puja was born and sucked all the youth, and the cheerful abandon out of you.

  I wait and watch until I am sure you have walked home and are not coming back. Then and only then, do I tell Da.

  Da who has always put Puja on a pedestal. Da, in whose eyes my sister can do no wrong.

  I know what I am doing. I do not tell you and Da together, Ma, because I do not want to diminish the import of what I am about to do: open Da’s eyes to the despicable truth that his favourite child is in actual fact, a traitor. A reckless, unthinking, selfish monster.

  She slept next to me last night, Ma, as always, folding into me, her sputtering little snores the soundtrack to my dreams, knowing that this morning she would go to him, hold him, my beau. How can she enjoy the sleep of a saint when she is the worst possible transgressor?

  I take a deep breath, tasting bile and betrayal.

  ‘Da,’ I say. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  RAJ

  SPILLED INK AND TAINTED SHEETS

  ‘It was just a bit of fun at first,’ his mum says. Her voice is the bluish purple of clouds at dusk. It is spilled ink and tainted sheets, the smell of sorrow and the taste of remorse. ‘But as time went on, Gopi became the drug I needed for survival. I yearned to be free, and he was the embodiment of that freedom.’

  ‘Was he telling the truth when he said it was you he loved?’ Raj asks. He is trying to summon the shock his mother must have felt when she stumbled upon the love of her life being promised to her sister.

  ‘He convinced me,’ she says softly.

  And at that moment, with her face tear-splashed and her makeup collecting in clumps on her cheeks, Raj can see clearly the little girl she once was, and the old woman she will become.

  His mother.

  He feels a rush of tenderness for her.

  And before Raj thinks about what he is doing, he reaches out to touch the tears on his mother’s cheek. The tip of his finger glistens for a minute and triggers in him an acute sense of loss.

  ‘I believed him,’ his mother says, her eyes glittering in her haunted face. She is thousands of miles away, and years in the past, in a claustrophobic village in a dust ravaged state, in a spice-flavoured country, and he is right there with her, an observer from the future, being introduced to the country as they hurtle towards it, spanning the distance of five thousand miles and nearly twenty years of unspoken words, unforgiven crimes, and unsorted messes—towards a woman and a girl—his unknown aunt and cousin—who are waiting for them to arrive . . .

  PUJA—FISSURE

  THE MILKY SCENT OF RIPENING PADDY

  Puja dances home on a high, breathing in the milky scent of ripening paddy, tasting yellow sunlight on her lips.

  He loves me, he does.

  But as she reaches home, passing the place where the motorbike was resting the previous day, her steps falter. How to face Sharda? How to tell her? She recalls how yesterday, her sister’s face had radiated happiness; how plain, dumpy Sharda had looked almost beautiful.

  But she doesn’t love Gopi. She doesn’t even properly know him!

  It will be fine. Puja will convince Sharda and her parents as she has always done.

  When she hears the hiss of the stick rushing through the air, and feels the sharp smack of it on her back; when she sees a grimacing stranger inhabiting her da’s placid countenance, when she feels her skin split and spurt, she cannot believe it. Even as she buckles and tries to skip away from the stick which makes ripping, stinging contact with her flesh again and again, she wonders if she is dreaming, if she has entered an alternate reality.

  ‘No,’ her ma shouts, ‘That’s enough. What are you doing?’

  Ma grabs Da’s hand, and tries to stop him, but Da hits Puja with his other hand, repeatedly. She hears a strangled wail, a panicked scream, tastes rust and salt, and realises that it is she who is howling.

  The world has gone mad, has tilted on its axis. Puja throws her bag on the ground and cowers under the assault of her beloved Da’s hands, the barrage of his words yelled stuttering and gasping, in an unrecognisable voice, so it sounds as if he is crying, and hurting as much as he is hurting her. ‘How could you do this? Bring this disgrace upon us? Steal your sister’s husband-to-be from right under our noses? Have you no shame?’

  The taste of distress and resentment, fury and incredulity—pink tinged brine. Blazing, garnet-hued agony. The dog’s howls indistinguishable from the humans’.

  Her back is on fire. The stick breaks. Her father collapses.

  Her ma tends to her wounds to the accompaniment of salty sobs. She applies Tiger Balm, with its peppermint and eucalyptus aroma of a thousand fevered dreams, of hot milk mixed with barley and bitter pills.

  Sharda hunches in the corner, her head in the cushion of her lap.

  Her father looks at his hands, the hands that used to lift Puja in the air, twirl her around and around, the hands in whose embrace she always felt safe, the hands that have flogged her, relentlessly, tearing her fragile skin, and breaking her heart.

  ‘You are not my daughter.’

  Words she never thought to hear, uttered in a voice that is as familiar as her own name, a voice that used to whisper endearments: ‘My princess, my delight, my pride and joy.’

  ‘No,’ her mother screams.

  Sharda buries her face in her hands, shuddering sobs racking her body.

  Puja is numb. Bewildered. Uncomprehending.

  Her da, who has just disowned her, examines his hands as if he cannot recognise them—those hands that have wrought such damage. But the words that come out of his mouth are the ones that destroy, that rupture the fabric of her life.

  ‘You will stay with your aunt Nilamma in the village across the river. You will not see that boy again. And you will not see us.’

  KUSHI

  A FLOURISHING GROWL

  I set down Ma’s letter feeling chilled and warmed in equal measure.

  Chilled because of what happened, and what Puja—whom I was beginning to like, based on the picture of her I have gleaned from these letters—did to my Ma. Stealing her beau, a boy Ma had loved from afar for so long, a boy whom Ma was so thrilled to be marrying.

  I am warmed because Ma says I healed her at the beginning of the letter, that it was I who taught her to love again.

  ‘You bring out the best in me,’ she says to me often.

  I want her here with me. I want to talk to her about what I am learning about her past. I wonder what is happening at the bank. Has she managed to procure the loan needed to see me through this? I really hope she doesn’t have to sell the factory. I wouldn’t be able to bear it . . .

  The bald sister in the bed next to mine is asleep. The grey-haired one sits on the chair, dozing.

  The letter I was reading flutters down beside me, onto
the bed sheet, and I notice something I missed. A little note tagged onto the end, penned in the margin. Different ink. Her handwriting is slightly different too, more rounded, much as it is now.

  I run my hands over Ma’s words and picture her carrying these letters everywhere, tucked into her sari blouse, re-reading them and adding follow-ups from the safe distance of a future that is thick with retrospection, but bereft of her sister.

  The bald woman moans. The grey-haired one reaches across and cups her cheek. ‘Shush,’ she whispers imparting solace, and easing her unwell sister back into sleep.

  I always thought we would grow old together, Puja and I, Ma writes in the addendum to her letter. If there is one thing I sincerely wish I could undo, it would be going to Da, and embellishing the matrons’ account with titbits fuelled by my rage, and my jealousy. I honestly didn’t realise, at the time, what my angry tale would unleash.

  It broke us.

  And nothing was ever the same again.

  Lost in Ma’s words, it is a while before I am aware of a rustle and bustle, a flourishing growl like a swarm of insects converging. I look up, blink, and look again. Up and down the ward, the ailing and their relatives are doing the same.

  A throng of villagers, every single one of whom I recognise, hone in on my bed.

  I blink back my tears, touched beyond words by my unexpected visitors. They have waited until their chores have finished, and endured a meandering journey on the local bus to make their way here, I know. The trip would have taken them the best part of an hour, and cost them money they can ill afford. When they get back, they will need to cook and feed their families, heat up the water for the family’s wash, scour the dishes, feed their dogs and only then get to bed, to be up at the crack of dawn as usual on the morrow for another long day in the fields or working as servants as the case might be.

  They place a basket of fruit beside my bed: the ripest bananas, juiciest mangoes, watermelon and guavas. I am overcome by their generosity, and the thought that has gone into this gift. I know that this is fruit they could have sold for profit; it is the best of their meagre crop.