A Sister's Promise

by Renita D'Silva

  The next day she sits at her favourite spot on the beach where a lifetime ago, she had been heckled for kissing Gopi.

  Sea gulls squawk, children scream, the salt and pepper whitecaps grumble and bash churlishly against the rocks. The sharp breeze rising from the sea tastes bittersweet, of billowing seaweed and misplaced love.

  Everything is the same, and nothing is the same.

  The day of the kiss her heart had been full to overflowing. Now it is destitute, undone by what has happened, what she has set in motion.

  What to do? What is she to do?

  Please God, help me, she prays.

  And as if in answer to her prayers, she recalls Chinnamma coming to her ma in tears one summer afternoon . . .

  Her ma had asked Sharda and Puja to play with Chinnamma’s kids, hollow-bellied, scrawny-legged, bedraggled children who warily catalogued their every move from beneath unruly shocks of matted hair.

  Sharda had patiently drawn the kids out, asking questions and sharing jokes, while Puja had eavesdropped on Ma and Chinnamma.

  ‘What shall I do? He spends every penny on drink, comes home and forces himself on me. We are starving as it is, how will I feed one more?’ Chinnamma rubbed her belly.

  And Ma had said, ‘There’s a wise woman who lives just outside Dhoompur. Go to her. She will do the needful.’

  Afterwards, Puja cornered Sharda where she was sitting with her books under the guava tree. ‘Why did Ma send Chinnamma to the wise woman?’

  The air smelled green, of new shoots and curiosity.

  ‘Oh Puja . . .’ the dog had come up and licked Sharda’s face.

  ‘Please, tell me why?’ Puja had plucked a guava off the tree, biting into its yielding pink flesh. ‘I am old enough,’ intercepting Sharda’s protests.

  And Sharda had told her.

  The wise woman’s hut rests picturesque in the flowing emerald fields. It seems obscene that Puja has come to such a beautiful place to commit such an ugly act.

  The wise woman is sitting in the courtyard underneath a fragrant lime tree, chewing paan. She is wiry and ancient, with silver hair and silver eyes that shine from a furrowed, leathery face.

  She looks at Puja, and then her eyes alight on Puja’s stomach. ‘Come here,’ she beckons and rests her palms gently on Puja’s belly.

  ‘No,’ the wise woman says softly, after a while, shaking her weathered head. ‘You are too far gone. The baby is moving beneath my hands. I cannot do this. It will be murder.’

  Puja nods slowly, as the woman’s words sink in, realising that, despite the fact that this is the worst transgression a young unmarried girl can commit, and despite the fact that she will be scorned and snubbed even more as an unmarried mother, the feeling that floods through her now, is one of overwhelming relief.

  KUSHI

  A SCULPTURE MOULDED FROM CLAY

  The lights in the ward have dimmed, and I am reading by the yellow glow of my bedside lamp.

  All around me grunts and whimpers and mumbling and snores and prayers and pleas. A woman thumbs a rosary. There is the hollow, gushing trickle of anguished tears—tormented relatives giving in to their fears, while their loved ones submit to the drugged sleep of the heavily medicated.

  ‘Stop reading for a bit, Kushi. Try and get some rest,’ the kindly nurse who’s been checking up on me has urged.

  But I can’t. I won’t.

  My body complains as soon as I close my eyes. I feel trapped. I see the car pinning me down, devastating my body like a sculpture moulded from clay; I see my kidneys disintegrating, my leaking blood, roiling red, and my life wasting away.

  When I try to rest, the fear I am holding at bay looms. What if this is my future? What if Puja does not agree to donate her kidney? What if she does and it is not a match? What if a suitable donor cannot be found? What then?

  The burst of confidence I had felt when the villagers visited has dissipated along with the enticing slice of daylight glimpsed outside the window.

  ‘We’ll keep looking for donors for as long as it takes,’ my doctor assured me, when I hesitantly ventured my doubts, ‘And while waiting for a donor, once you are stabilised, you can go home and come up here for dialysis every other day.’ He’d grinned at me as if he was bestowing a special prize.

  But I felt as if I were sinking deeper into the morass of an endless nightmare when his words registered. Is this how it will be for the rest of my life? This tie to the hospital? This agony of waiting for a suitable match. This half-life of ailment and injury, this life where I am a patient, a victim like the girls I help. Prone to infection, with death ever closer, chilly fingers dragging up my spine, muttering in my ear, ‘Upsy Daisy.’

  I have never been good at waiting. I am impatient to the core. If I think of something, I want it done now. This is the worst punishment I can conceive of. Waiting for my life to resume.

  Why? Why am I being punished? For what sin?

  And no matter how many banks Ma visits asking for loans, even after she sells the factory and the cottage, there is no way we can procure enough money for life-long dialysis . . .

  I hate this situation I find myself in. I have always been a go-getter. I abhor this forced inactivity, this helplessness, this watching my life waste away from the side-lines. I am so angry with the people who did this. When I am not reading Ma’s letters, I plan my revenge on the perpetrators, thinking up ways to make them pay.

  An old woman shuffles her way back to her bed from the communal bathroom, one agonised step at a time, a nurse helping her along.

  I have always thought my life was destined for great things. That starting with Bhoomihalli, I was born to change the world. To make waves. To improve lives.

  I am not meant to be here, breathing in the sour smell of death and decay that clings to the yellowing walls of this room like the lizards that scuttle between the cracks in the plaster of the ceiling overhead looking for flies to devour.

  For as long as I can recall, my dream has been to become a lawyer who fights for justice for the underdog and from there, to becoming one of the few uncorrupted politicians in India.

  I never envisioned this . . . being stuck in hospital waiting for a kidney, for a piece of meat that will give me new tenancy inside my own body. Waiting for a woman I don’t know—the woman who stole my Ma’s beau, the woman who was my mother’s undoing—to visit. Waiting to see if she will consent to being a donor, and my saviour (if her kidney is a match that is).

  As I turn Ma’s letter over to add it to the stack I have already read, I find that this one too, has an annotated postscript scribbled in different ink.

  * * *

  For a long time, Ma, I blamed Puja for everything that happened. I thought that if only she had stayed within the bounds of propriety, cared for her reputation, taken heed of your warnings and mine, none of this would have happened. A part of me thought that she deserved the beating and the ostracism from our family. That is why I did not do anything, did not plead with Da to bring her back.

  And this is my biggest regret: I sometimes wonder if I had begged Da to bring Puja back, would he have? Was he holding back for me, as I was the wronged party? You wanted me to ask Da to bring Puja back, I know, like you had done. You kept dropping hints and I deliberately ignored them.

  Jealousy and hurt—they ruined me. They ruined us.

  It took Kushi to open my eyes to the truth. Kushi, who is the very best of me and Puja, Ma. She is spirited, like Puja, but she also carries a sensible head on her young shoulders. She thinks before she acts, unlike Puja, who would jump headlong into adventure. That was her undoing, I see now.

  Whatever Puja did, she did completely, with all her heart. Kushi is the same but with one small but vital difference. Before Kushi attempts anything, she takes a step back, considers the pros and cons of what she is about to do.

  When Kushi does something I am proud of, I want to share it with Puja. The other day, when Kushi told me that women were spectacular in their own
right, that they did not need men to underline their success, (I can’t for the life of me recall what we were talking about that prompted this observation), I thought of Puja, how she used to sigh and grumble when you served Da first, the best pieces of fish, so we had to make do with only bones.

  ‘Why does Da get to sleep on the only bench and we have to huddle together on the floor? Just because he is a man? What is the fairness in that?’ she would ask and you would shake your head at what you considered her contrariness.

  I’ve always regretted not being able to give Kushi siblings. We tried. But it was not meant to be . . .

  The bond between siblings is something special. And even though Puja and I have not spoken for years, I realise now that the link is there, between us, a link that stretches across the distance that separates us. It always has been there, even during that horrible time, when I went to Da with my tale-bearing, that time when he hit her and I was too angry to contemplate compassion, too shocked to intervene, too mired in my own misery to realise that I was watching our family fragment like the stick Da was hitting her with.

  I miss her so much, Ma, every single day.

  As I get older, as Kushi grows and I commit her every quirk to memory, I understand that Puja is the only one who shares my memories of our joint childhood. Who lived through it with me.

  I wrote this letter to you when Kushi was just a child, when the memories of what happened were still too raw. Now, she is nearly eighteen, and she is lying here prone and I am rereading this letter as I wait for her to wake and for Puja to arrive.

  I pause, realising that my hands are shaking. Ma wrote this addendum very recently, perhaps even this morning, while she was waiting for me to regain consciousness . . .

  My eyes drop down again to her words.

  And as I read, Ma, I realise that the hate is gone, the rage, the blame.

  Now all that is left is remorse for all that we lost, all that wasted time. And hope. Hope that when I see Puja again, I will recognise in the woman she has become, the sister I knew and loved, that we will be able to get past the years apart, the hurt and the upset to the affection we once harboured. And there is faith, that it will all be okay.

  I blink. Will it, Ma? I want to ask of my mother, who I trust is even now making her way back to me. Will it be okay?

  I know that in her letter she is talking about her relationship with her sister. But what if Puja is still holding on to the grudge of what happened in the past and does not agree to give me her kidney? What then?

  What if Puja is coming here just to gloat? Feast on her sister’s misfortune?

  No, somehow I don’t think so . . .

  My ma is so kind, surely her sister will be too? But Ma was not kind where her sister was concerned. Why should Puja be kind in return? What incentive does she have?

  In the slice of corridor visible from my bed, I glimpse a woman mopping the floor. Why on earth she is cleaning when there are people still milling about, I don’t know. The wet floors are an accident waiting to happen. And anyway the once white tiles, now stamped dirty red by hundreds of diseased feet, are beyond the attentions of a phenyl soaked cloth pushed half-heartedly across the floor, I think.

  Outside the window of this prison of a room, the day is waning, I imagine, twilight arriving on a cool, cashew-scented breeze, the pink grapefruit of setting sun holding court to graceful black fans—birds flying home to roost—silhouetted against a patchwork sky.

  SHARDA—CHASM

  A BLACKENED BIG TOE WITH A BROKEN NAIL

  Dearest Ma,

  I do not want to think of that horrible time, but I have to. There is no other way.

  It happened. And it changed everything. Left everything in its wake burnt and raw, livid and wounded.

  Looking back, I wish that we had left the village and moved far away, with Puja in tow, the day the landlord visited. I wish that with all my heart, every single day that’s passed since.

  But we didn’t.

  It starts with the famine. There’s been not much rain for two years running, not nearly enough for livelihoods dependent on agriculture, so tensions simmer along with the earth—parched throats panting for rain and hungry for water.

  The farmers do circuits of the temple on their knees; they feed laddoos and milk they cannot afford, and would give anything to have a gulp of to soothe their angry throats, to the Goddess so she will give them rain.

  But, every morning without fail, the sky is such a bright blue that it hurts the eyes; the clouds are light and fluffy, frisky as lambs, not wearing a broody black scowl, nor pregnant with rain and fatigued with hefting their moisture-laden burden.

  The sun is relentlessly, cheerfully yellow; the green grass now the gold of hay bales, the wells arid as baked cowpats. The ground is cracked, people ravenous, and livelihoods destroyed. Children die from drinking unclean dregs scraped from the bed of the dry lake. The earth starts splintering as do relationships. It is a dangerous time. A time when war can erupt from a mere rumour, a wrong word, a misplaced look.

  Da is preparing for our house move, has been for months. He is sounding out farmers in other villages, looking for jobs. But there are none going. The drought has put paid to that.

  The longer it takes for Da to organise our move, the more relieved you are, Ma, as am I.

  Hurt and angry though I might be, I balk from taking that final step, cutting ourselves off completely from Puja, leaving the hut where her memories thrive. And sometimes I think Da is delaying the move for the same reason.

  And then one day, he comes home to say that he has found a job as a bricklayer in a village the other side of Dhoompur. We will be moving in a week.

  You look shattered, Ma. Raisin hued shadows ring your pink rimmed eyes as you digest this news.

  ‘Please,’ you implore. ‘We can’t go away without telling her. Please. I want to see her, just once, before we go.’

  And to everyone’s surprise, including, I imagine, his own, Da agrees.

  We decide to go to see Puja the day after next, so you have time to prepare all of her favourite delicacies, Ma. You are hoping that once Da sees Puja, talks with her, he will not be able to leave her behind. You are hoping that meeting with the beloved daughter who was once his world will convince Da to take her with us.

  But before we can act on this unexpected sanction from Da, before you can put your plan for reuniting our broken family into action, Ma, our world changes, irreversibly, forever . . .

  It starts, as these things do, in the marketplace on a Thursday morning, the day after Da gives his permission for all of us to visit with Puja, the day before we are due to meet her. What follows is what I pieced together later, from various disparate accounts as to what happened.

  The market sits on a little flat piece of land right next to the highway, and it is permanently cloaked in the peach-coloured dust displaced by the buses hurtling past on their way to the big cities, which stop once in a lucrative (for the villagers) while when the conductor or driver or one of the passengers needs a pee or a bite to eat. Situated where it is, there is always hope that some of these rich people from the cities will buy the produce and meat that the villagers grow but cannot afford to eat.

  Now, these potential customers take one look at the wilting produce and the flaccid meat coated in a layer of flies, and climb back into the buses without buying anything. And with each lost sale, starvation and death loom dangerously close for the villagers and their loved ones.

  At one corner of the market is the Muslim butcher who sells beef but not pork, of course. In these difficult times, his stall is almost empty, with just a few scrawny cuts of meat from emaciated beasts.

  Nobody knows how it happens, but some beef from the sacred cow ends up in the Hindu onion vendor’s stall and in one searing heartbeat there is uproar. The villagers, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, upper caste and lower caste alike, who have lived side by side harmoniously for so many years are now up in arms against each other. Shouts rend
the air, stippled red, brimming with vitriol. Accusations are hurled; Allah, Jesus, Vishnu and Brahma are all besmirched and reviled.

  And then . . . a struck match, and in a moment of unthinking madness, the onion vendor sets fire to the beef and the market is in flames in a matter of minutes.

  I am at the convent in Dhoompur, Ma, along with most of the youth and children from Nandihalli. To get our minds off our suffering, dogged thirst a dry gasp at the back of our throats, the nuns have organised a fun day, having managed to procure a barrel of water from somewhere at great cost.

  It is the prospect of clean water after days of drinking the trickle of muddy slush jettisoned from the bottom of the well, which, no matter how much you boil, Ma, still tastes of dirt, and leaves me feeling thirstier than before, that finds me at the convent, despite us being Hindus.

  Even though most of us are not Christians, we, the youth of Nandihalli, join the nuns in singing a hymn together, thanking Jesus for our blessings, our newly watered throats raised in grateful chorus. Our hands are clapping along as we savour once more in memory the sweet nectar taste of fresh water, when a bedraggled man bursts into the room, smelling of smoke. He falls at the nuns’ feet, and asks them to please come at once, to help the injured in Nandihalli market.

  ‘There is a fire,’ he says, sobs choking his words out in strangled wheezes. ‘Everything destroyed. People have died.’

  But even before his words have sunk in, I am on my feet, running as soon as I hear the word ‘Nandihalli’. My legs are flying, even though I am short and squat and chubby. Flying like they did when I got my PUC results.

  Please God, I pray to a generic god, all gods, please let my parents be okay.

  But even as I frantically send my entreaties heavenward, I don’t hold out much hope. If the gods have not listened to the appeals of an entire village and not sent rain, why would they now listen to me, a mere one of their many supplicants?