A Sister's Promise

by Renita D'Silva

  ‘No.’ She will not hold her baby. If she does, she will not be able to let go.

  She looks, once more, at this child whose birth called for the sacrifice of her parents, committing every single minute detail of it to memory.

  Did you spare me or deny me, child, by deciding to enter the world at the very moment my parents were leaving it, so I was left without one final glimpse of the parents who abandoned me as easily as an out-of-favour toy, a guest who outstayed her welcome?

  I thought it would be me who would leave them, running away from the confines of the village that had always bound me too tight, suffocating me. Now, my last vision of them will be my father refusing to look at me, his words, ‘You are not my daughter,’ his hand lifting the stick and rupturing our relationship like the skin of my back.

  My mother pleading with her husband and yet not daring to go against him to stand up for her daughter.

  My sister crushed.

  Is your soul, child, an intermingling of my mother and father’s? Did they have to die for you to live?

  Have I chosen you over them?

  Everything and everyone she loves, she loses. Her family. Gopi.

  She is immoral, wicked. Her family, who knew her best and loved her once upon a time, thought so, which is why they exorcised her from their lives.

  She is unlovable, cursed, unworthy.

  She aches to hold her child close, protect it from the vicissitudes of a capricious world. But what this baby really needs is protection from her, its mother.

  This baby is unspoiled, faultless. How can she bear to destroy that purity, taint her child with the filthy brush of her sins, her innumerable imperfections?

  This wonderful being deserves so much better, someone who will preserve its innocence, someone who will lead by example. Someone who will be a good parent.

  She destroys everything good in her life: her parents’ adoration; her relationship with Sharda.

  She does not want to destroy this baby whom she loves more than she has ever loved anything or anybody else, even her own self.

  My darling child, you merit the right to a wonderful life and I can’t promise you that. I ventured to think I could, but God asked me how I dared. He showed me the folly of my hopes for a future with you in it by taking away my parents. Instead of the possibility of forgiveness and the expectation of reunion with them, I now have only the burden of their thwarted dreams, their hurt and their anger, the reverberations of the disgrace I wrought upon them.

  If I keep you as I yearn to, against God’s wishes, I will ruin you as I have ruined myself. And I love you too much to subject you to that, my precious.

  Love.

  It chokes the life out of one, child.

  I love and I lose—

  Ma, Da, Sharda, Gopi.

  You.

  Puja shuts her eyes tight and turns away from her child.

  KUSHI

  THE VULNERABLE FRAILTY OF A FLEETING LIFE

  I read my mother’s letters to her mother, pleas really, for her mother to intercede. To come back from the dead and help her. To guide her. To comfort her. To help her bring up her daughter right.

  I cry along with Ma when I find out how her parents died.

  I think, how much bad luck can a person endure? To have her parents die in a fire and years later her husband too. How devastated she must have been, how broken, when she found out Da had succumbed to flames as well.

  And yet, she hid her pain from me, allowing me leeway to express mine, imparting strength so I could begin to heal.

  Ma, I admire you so.

  I hear a man curse richly and profusely as he navigates the slippery, wet corridors of this hospital overflowing with people, the sickly wearing expressions of resignation, suffering set into the hollows of their faces as they await their turn to be seen by harassed doctors.

  I think of how, all through my life so far, Ma has always been with me, offering comfort and encouragement, supporting me through my every decision, tiding me through every dip and furrow.

  All that I am is thanks to my mother. I would be lost without her.

  I read on, despite tasting salt and seeing splotches speckling the yellowing pages bejewelled with my mother’s beautiful handwriting, the faded blue ink tinted mauve.

  Two nurses argue about the dosage of pills allowed a patient right in front of his bed and he looks from one to the other agog, happy to go with the winner. Their voices escalate to screeches, sounding like a company of parrots screaming from amongst the branches of banyan trees, and the few patients who are medicated enough to sleep through the perpetual noise and chaos in this bustling microcosm groan and grumble as they toss in their beds.

  I stop reading for a while after my mother promises her mother on her deathbed to look out for Puja and bring her home, to assimilate everything I have learnt.

  ‘Sister,’ a weak voice calls from one of the other beds. ‘Please, Sister . . . ’

  It serves to stop the nurses quarrelling over pill dosage and they rush back to what they were doing before this argument put paid to their busyness, leaving the patient over whose medicine intake they were disagreeing with no pills at all. He calls, ‘Sister, my pills . . .’ but they are gone.

  I wonder how any patients in these poky, dirty wards ever get better with the relentless din, the exposure to more infections, the echoes of distress drifting on the dense, germ-laden, somnolent air flavoured with misery and hurt, linctus and the vulnerable frailty of fleeting life.

  Why didn’t Ma honour the deathbed promise she made to her mother and find Puja?

  Or did she? So why are she and Puja still estranged? What happened?

  SHARDA—AFTER

  EMBERS AND EARTH AND DAMP

  Dearest Ma,

  I go to find Puja, the morning following the fire, climbing the hill to Nilamma’s house.

  But the hut is deserted, forlorn looking, the front door left ajar and creaking on worn hinges. There are clothes billowing on a clothes line, soaked in the rain, which hasn’t let up since the previous day. I squeeze the water out of them and take them inside, holding Puja’s churidars (originally mine) close, trying to breathe in her scent. But all I can smell is the rain, imprinted with the memory of the fire: embers and earth and damp.

  * * *

  The evening after the fire, all the dead are burned together (again, although this time they cannot feel it), you and Da among them.

  I wear white, my sari swelling in anguish, curling in the rain.

  ‘The Goddess of Rain wasn’t satisfied with milk and produce, she wanted human sacrifice,’ the mourners say, flicking their gaze heavenward and wiping their eyes.

  ‘Rubbish. This deluge is because the Gods are mourning the devastation, the senseless loss of precious lives, right along with us,’ the matrons aver.

  The village is half the size now, diminished, defeated. Muslims and Hindus comfort each other. There is a scarlet, smouldering sensation of loss, of innocence wrenched from even the smallest child. The hiss of a struck match resounds in the survivors’ ears.

  I imagine maroon as the colour of sorrow. A deep, deathly maroon, the exact shade of viscous, clotted blood, exuding the dusky-rose scent of regret, a smoky odour that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

  The moist wood that fuels your and Da’s pyre, hisses and spits, the flames radiating bittersweet amber longing—the ache for more time together— and leaving a scorched taste in my mouth. It oozes the grey aroma of wet ash and precious instants lost to the quirks of fallible memory. I stand and I grieve and I promise you, Ma, that the first thing I am going to do after is to find Puja.

  * * *

  After your cremation, I walk down the fields to our hut, thinking to change from my wet clothes before I go looking for Puja again. My steps drag with loneliness and grief, as I near the two-room cottage that feels empty and too large without you and Da and Puja. It is besieged by memories, pickled by grief and strewn with lingering tendrils of happier
times.

  As I am almost upon the hut, a plaintive, mewling sound, in high contrast to the dog’s howl and skitter of rain, startles me. Has Janakiamma’s cat had her kittens in the field somewhere?

  The dog is circling the mango tree, ears cocked, emitting soft whines. I have never seen him like this before. Does he have an inkling of what’s happened, and that his owners are no more?

  ‘What’s the matter, eh?’ I ask, squatting down to scratch the itchy spot under his neck.

  And that is when I see it. Shimmering through a curtain of rain, a basket like the one the fisherwomen use, is set down at the base of the mango tree. It seems to be filled with blankets, and the mewling sound issuing from within.

  The dog bounds away from me, towards the basket and stands guard.

  And that is how I find her, Ma, a mewling, squirming package under the mango tree—the tree from where I watched Puja being kicked out of our family and life. Its wide branches shield her from the rain. The dog watches over her, somehow knowing that she is precious.

  She enters my life at its lowest point, and turns it around, transforming me for the better.

  * * *

  I breathe in the tart smell of raw mango and wet leaves and soggy earth and something else, something fresh and new and green, as I pull away the blankets to find the source of the noise.

  A tuft of dark hair, a pointy face, a cherub mouth puckered in a wail.

  A baby.

  I blink and rock on my haunches. I look again. It is still there. It emits a sorry little excuse for a cry that wedges right into my heart.

  I pick it up and hold it close. It snuggles into me. It smells of innocence and milk and miracles and faith.

  ‘There, there, sweetie, shush,’ I whisper, rubbing the baby’s delicate comma shaped back, soft as lambskin, fragile as fairy wings, and in the process of dispensing comfort, the part of me that has been flailing since I lost you and Da, Ma, fractionally settles.

  In the corner of my eye, I catch a flicker of someone running across the fields. I look up in time to see a woman, a lined face, a tangle of silver hair, disappear over the knoll beyond the stream, which had dried up but is now surging again. Before I can cry out, ask if she’s the one who left the baby, she’s gone.

  The baby’s cries subside into hiccups.

  Cradling the babe, I squat down beside the basket under the fragrant, moisture stippled branches of the mango tree. The dog comes up and crouches beside me.

  That is when I see the note in Puja’s bold, curvy script, peeking from between the dislodged blankets.

  It says: ‘Sharda, when I am down, it is your face that flowers before my eyes, that offers relief. Your gentleness, your kind smile. You, who used to heft me everywhere on your hip, breathing in my ear, “You are very special, Puja. The most special girl in the world.”

  ‘I did not mean to hurt you. I am sorry for everything. I am sorry.

  ‘Please. Can you find it in yourself to love her like you loved me?’

  And at the bottom: ‘Could you call her Kushi—happiness, so her name is the harbinger of good things to come for her? And they will—for she has you.’

  The baby has fallen asleep in my arms.

  She has you.

  I take comfort from its miniature features, peaceful in repose, its little hands clasped in tight fists as if clutching hope in one hand and serenity in another, its lips flickering upwards in sleep as if stroked by an angel that has bestowed it with happy dreams despite what is happening in its immediate world.

  I am sorry too, Puja. Sorry that you had to go through all this alone. Sorry that it had to come to this. What did you have to endure to get to this point, Puja? What was going on in your head that you felt you had no recourse but to give up your child?

  I open my mouth and the tears I did not even know I was shedding flood my throat and mingle with rain and regret.

  We move to the my aunt’s hut at the top of the hill, Kushi, the dog, (who won’t leave Kushi’s side) and I, the hut that offered Puja shelter while she was pregnant with Kushi, the hut where she lived until she disappeared on the day of the fire.

  And it feels as if we are at the very top of the world, far away from the village and its ash permeated heartbreak, where a hesitant new layer of familiar saffron mud hides the scorch marks, the charred earth, the bloody evidence of the conflagration that has taken place.

  Whenever I think of it, (which is almost all the time), I catch a whiff of smoke and heartbreak. I see Da’s body, unflinching as the rain battered his poor, charred face. I picture the ghost of our stall where we had such wonderful times and I close my eyes and wish with all my heart to go back in time to how it was before, with Puja safe and happy with us and with the addition of Kushi too now, of course.

  And every single time, I open my eyes and hope against hope that my wish has come true, that you and Da are squatting in front of baskets of papayas and guavas as usual and shaking your heads at my fantastic claims of fire and death.

  What a romantic fool I am sometimes, eh, Ma!

  I suppose this is why I love cooking so much, because while I do so, I feel you are there, somehow, cooking alongside me like you did that very first time, the day you told me the important news that I was going to have a sibling, that I was going to be a big sister.

  I imagine telling you and Da about Kushi. I picture the two of you with her. How happy you both would be to have a grandchild! How blessed!

  Aunt Nilamma is ill. She is suffering from smoke inhalation from when she went to the market looking for you and Da, Ma. I tend to her and to Kushi and in between, I scout for jobs.

  I have given up the medical degree. I cannot be doing that as well as looking after Kushi. Nilamma is not well enough to care for Kushi and no-one else, with the exception of aunt’s friend Gangamma, will come near us. I have become a pariah now, an unwed mother, the lowest of the low.

  ‘Whore,’ the inhabitants of Nilamma’s village label me. ‘Slut.’

  They point and jeer, spitting and crossing the street to avoid me. I am not served in the shops. It is Gangamma who gets the groceries for me and I cook for her in return.

  Most of the time I don’t let it get to me. I am strong and cheerful for Kushi and my poorly aunt. But some days when I collect the shopping from Gangamma and she asks me how I am, I succumb to the tears that I have been suppressing for what seems like forever.

  ‘Look around you, Sharda,’ Gangamma says, gently patting my back, ‘These people have hardly any food and no proper roof over their heads. They have nothing but the fragile veneer of their respectability to lay claim to. They feel better about themselves when they pass judgement on someone else. Believe me, it is not about you.’

  I sniff, wipe my face with my sari pallu, squeeze Gangamma’s hand, and begin the long trudge back up the hill. It is a blessing, I think, even as the bags of groceries dig into my palms, that my aunt’s hut is so remote, otherwise we would have had to endure much more than just spitting and name calling.

  Sometimes I wonder if Puja left me Kushi as a form of punishment for what I, along with you and Da, did to her? I wonder if she knew that this was what she would have to endure as a single mother and decided to pass the baton on to me.

  I don’t know how I feel about Puja. I am angry with her, still. I am hurt, the hurt having multiplied when I realized that Kushi is Gopi’s child. But I also feel sorry for Puja, for everything she went through all alone, without the bolstering support of us, her family. Now I understand why Puja asked the landlord if she could marry Gopi. It was a desperate act on the part of a floundering girl.

  Is Kushi Puja’s way of giving me something of Gopi because she stole him from me?

  I love Kushi like nothing and no one else. It was love at first sight as it was with Puja, Ma, but with none of the jealousy. How could I resent this tiny new life, this helpless minuscule being who had come into my world on the rain ravaged day when I bid adieu to you and Da, a blessing at a time when I h
ad never felt more alone?

  Whatever her reasons, I am grateful to Puja for the gift of Kushi, this little girl who floods my heart with love, and chases away the anger and the guilt, the regret and the blame, the taint of smoke and fire, and the bile of betrayal.

  ‘She said she would wait in the hut for us,’ Nilamma said bewildered, between wracking coughs, when I asked her where Puja was, the day I found Kushi. She was staying at Gangamma’s house, as she was too weak to climb back up the hill to her hut the day of the fire, which is why, when I went to look for Puja on the day of your cremation, the hut was empty.

  ‘I thought she was at home.’ Nilamma’s eyes blinked repeatedly in dumbfounded surprise as she took in the fact of the baby. ‘I did not even know she was pregnant. I had not an inkling.’

  I went to find the wise woman, having placed the wiry hair, and the shambling gait of the woman I’d seen disappearing across the waterlogged fields when I found Kushi.

  Marrows dangled from the low beams of her hut, green and yellow dancing bubbles. The piquant fragrance of ripening mulch and ground spices infused the air. Conjee simmered merrily on the hearth, tapping the lid of the pot, and making it dance, the gruel effervescing out of the sides.

  The wise woman’s eyes lit up when she saw Kushi, who was drifting to sleep in my arms, her hands thrown up on either side of her diminutive head in exquisite surrender, her breath coming in sweet, milk-scented gasps.

  ‘It was you who left her under the mango tree for me to find,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I waited until I was sure she had won your heart. And then I left.’

  ‘Why leave her there? Why not just give her to me?’

  ‘Would you have taken her from me if I had held her out to you saying she was your sister’s child with Gopi? You would not even have looked at Kushi, this manifestation of your sister’s final treachery. I wanted you to fall in love with Kushi, to consider Kushi for herself, and not in connection with anybody else. You needed to look forward not back. To be reminded of the immense love you are capable of and not the hate that has recently begrimed your heart.’