A few months into their affair, the Princess began to call Naga “jaan”—Beloved. She taught the servants in the house to call her Bai Sa in the tradition of Rajput royalty. She cooked Naga dishes made with secret family recipes from her family’s royal kitchen. She ordered new curtains, embroidered cushions and lovely dhurries for the floor. She brought a sweet, sunny, feminine touch to an egregiously neglected apartment. Her attentions were balm to Naga’s injured pride. Though he didn’t reciprocate her feelings with the same intensity with which they were offered, he accepted them with a tired grace. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be the doted-on one in a couple. Notwithstanding his general prejudice towards small dogs, he grew inordinately fond of Prince Charles. He took him to the neighborhood park regularly, where he threw a tiny, saucer-sized frisbee for him that he had sourced and bought online. Prince Charles would retrieve his saucer-frisbee, lolloping back to Naga through weeds that were almost as tall as he was. The Princess played hostess at a few dinners that Naga threw. R.C. was entranced by her and impressed upon Naga that he should lose no time and marry her while she was still of childbearing age.
Naga, still distraught and still vulnerable to R.C.’s disastrous advice, asked the Princess if she would like to move in for a trial run. She reached across and tenderly neatened his unruly eyebrows, pressing the hairs into a ridge between her forefinger and her thumb. She said nothing would make her happier, but that before she moved in she would need to liberate Tilo’s chi that still hung about the house. With Naga’s permission she dry-roasted whole red chilies and carried the smoking copper pot from room to room, coughing delicately and turning her glossy head away from the acrid smoke with her eyes screwed shut. When the chilies stopped smoking she said a prayer and buried them in the garden along with the pot. Then she tied a red thread around Naga’s wrist and lit expensive scented candles, one in each room, and left them to burn down to the wick. She bought a dozen large cardboard cartons for Naga to pack Tilo’s things into and take down to the basement. It was while he was cleaning out Tilo’s cupboard (that smelled so unashamedly of her) that Naga came upon Tilo’s mother’s thick medical file from Lakeview Hospital in Cochin.
—
In all the years he and Tilo had been married, Naga had never met Tilo’s mother. Tilo never talked about her. He knew the broad contours of course. Her name was Maryam Ipe. She belonged to an old, aristocratic Syrian Christian family that had fallen on bad times. Two generations of the family—her father and her brother—had graduated from Oxford and she herself had been educated at a convent school in Ootacamund, a hill station in the Nilgiris, and then at a Christian college in Madras, after which her father’s illness forced her to return to her home town in Kerala. Naga knew that she had been an English teacher in a local school before she started her own school, which grew to be an extremely successful high school known for its innovative teaching methods—the school that Tilo had attended before she came to college in Delhi. He had read a few newspaper articles about Tilo’s mother in which Tilo was never named, but always referred to as her adopted daughter who lived in Delhi. R.C. (whose job it was to know everything about everybody and to let everybody know that he knew everything about everybody) had once made a file of clippings for him, saying, “Your Foster-Mother-in-Law is a cool chick, yaar.” The articles spanned a period of several years—some were about her school, its teaching methods and its beautiful campus, some were about the social and environmental campaigns that she had led or the awards she had won. They told the story of a woman who had overcome great adversity in her early life to become what she was—an iconic feminist who never moved to a big city, but chose instead to take the hard path and continue to live and fight her battles in the conservative little town she belonged to. They described how she had struggled against cabals of bullying men, how she eventually won the respect and admiration of those who had tormented her and how she had inspired a whole generation of young women to follow their dreams and desires.
It was obvious to anybody who knew Tilo that she was not the foster-daughter of the woman in the photographs in those articles. Although their complexions were dramatically different, their features were strikingly similar.
From what little he knew, Naga sensed there was a substantial piece of the puzzle that had gone missing in the newspaper stories—a sort of epic Macondo madness, the stuff of literature, not journalism. Although he never said so, he felt Tilo’s attitude towards her mother was punitive and unreasonable. In his opinion, even if it was true that Tilo was her real child whom she would not publicly acknowledge, it was equally true that for a young woman who belonged to a traditional community, to have chosen a life of independence, chosen to eschew marriage in order to claim a child born to her out of wedlock—even if it meant masking it as benevolence and masquerading as the baby’s foster-mother—was an act of immense courage and love.
Naga noticed that in all the newspaper articles, the paragraph concerning Tilo was always a set piece: “Sister Scholastica called me to say that a coolie woman had left a newborn baby in a basket outside the Mount Carmel orphanage. She asked if I wanted to take her. My family was dead against it, but I thought that if I adopted her I could give her a new life. She was a jet-black baby, like a little piece of coal. She was so small she almost fitted in the palm of my hand so I called her Tilottama, which means ‘sesame seed’ in Sanskrit.”
Hurtful as this might have been for Tilo, Naga thought she should be able to look at it from her mother’s point of view—she needed to distance herself from her baby if only in order to be able to claim her, own her and love her.
According to Naga, the credit for Tilo’s individuality, her quirkiness and unusualness—regardless of which school you subscribed to, nature or nurture—went straight to her mother. But nothing he could say, directly or indirectly, led to a rapprochement.
So Naga was puzzled when, having kept away from her mother for so many years, Tilo so readily agreed to go to Cochin and look after her in hospital. He imagined (even though he couldn’t recall Tilo ever having betrayed any curiosity on the subject) that it could have been in the hope of gaining some information, a deathbed revelation perhaps, about herself and who her father really was. He was right. But it turned out to be a little late for that sort of thing.
BY THE TIME Tilo reached Cochin, her mother’s deteriorating lungs had led to a build-up of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream, which in turn led to the inflammation of her brain, which made her severely disoriented. To add to that, her medication and her extended stay in the ICU had induced a form of psychosis which doctors said particularly affected powerful, self-willed people who suddenly found themselves helpless and at the mercy of those they had once treated as minions. Other than the hospital staff, her anger and bewilderment were directed at her faithful old servants and the teachers from her school who took turns to be on hospital duty. They hovered around in the hospital corridor and were allowed to visit their beloved Ammachi in the ICU for a few minutes every couple of hours.
On the day Tilo arrived, her mother’s face lit up.
“I’m scratching all the time,” she said by way of greeting. “He says it’s good to scratch, but I couldn’t stand it any more, so I took the scratching medicine. How are you?”
She held up her dark purple arms, one of them attached to a drip, to show Tilo what had happened to her skin from having been prodded and poked with needles by the doctors’ endless search for veins that were still open. Most of her veins had collapsed and closed down and formed a darker purple web underneath the already-purple skin.
“Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say, ‘These wounds had I on Crispin’s day.’ Remember? I taught you that.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the next line?”
“Old men forget. Yet all shall be forgot. But he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.”
Tilo had forgotten that she remembered. Shakespeare came back to
her not as a feat of memory so much as music, as an old tune remembered. She was taken aback by her mother’s condition, but the doctors were pleased and said the fact that her mother had recognized her was a remarkable improvement. That day they moved her to a private room with a window that overlooked the saltwater lagoon and the Coconut trees that bent into it and the monsoon storms that blew across it.
The improvement didn’t last. In the days that followed the old lady drifted in and out of lucidity and didn’t always recognize Tilo. Each day was an unpredictable new chapter in the course her illness took. She developed new quirks and irrational preoccupations. The hospital staff, the doctors, nurses and even the attendants were kind, and seemed not to take anything she said to heart. They too called her Ammachi, sponged her, changed her nappies and combed her hair with no sign of annoyance or rancor. In fact, the more havoc she created, the more they seemed to love her.
A few days after Tilo arrived, her mother developed a weird fixation. She turned into a sort of caste-inquisitor. She began to insist on knowing the caste and subcaste and sub-subcaste of everybody who attended to her. It wasn’t enough if they said they were “Syrian Christian”—she had to know whether they were Marthoma, Yacoba, Church of South India or C’naah. If they were “Hindu,” it wasn’t enough if they said Ezhava, she had to know if they were Theeyas or Chekavars. If they said “Scheduled Caste,” she had to know if they were Parayas, Pulayas, Paravans, Ulladans. Were they originally of the coconut-picker caste? Or were their ancestors designated corpse-carriers, shit-cleaners, clothes-washers or rat-catchers? She insisted on specifics and only once she knew would she permit herself to be handled by them. If they were Syrian Christian, then what was their family name? Whose nephew was married to whose sister-in-law’s niece? Whose grandfather had been married to whose great-grandfather’s sister’s daughter?
“COPD,” the smiling nurses said to Tilo when they saw the expression on her face. “Don’t worry. It happens like this always.” She looked it up. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The nurses told Tilo it was a disease that could give harmless old grandmothers the manners of brothel-owners and make bishops swear like drunks. It was best not to take anything personally. They were fabulous girls, those nurses, precise and professional. Each of them was waiting for a job that would take her to a Gulf country, or to England or the US, where they would join that elite community of Malayali nurses. Until then, they fluttered around the patients in Lakeview Hospital like butterfly healers. They became friends with Tilo and exchanged phone numbers and email addresses. For years after that she’d receive WhatsApp Christmas greetings and round-robin Malayali nurse jokes from them.
As her illness intensified, the old lady became restless and almost impossible to manage. Sleep forsook her and she stayed awake, night after night, her pupils dilated, her eyes terrified, talking continuously to herself and to anybody who would listen. It was as though she thought she could outsmart death by remaining constantly vigilant. So she talked continuously, sometimes belligerent, sometimes pleasant and amusing. She sang snatches of old songs, hymns, Christmas carols, Onam boat-race songs. She recited Shakespeare in her impeccable convent-school English. When she got upset she insulted everybody around her in a hard-core dialect of guttersnipe Malayalam that nobody could work out how (and from where) in the world a woman of her class and breeding had picked up. As the days wore on, she grew more and more aggressive. Her appetite increased dramatically and she downed soft-boiled eggs and pineapple upside-down pastries with the urgency of a convict on parole. She tapped into reserves of physical strength that were nothing short of superhuman for a woman of her age. She fought off nurses and doctors, pulled ports and syringes out of her veins. She could not be sedated because sedatives suppressed lung function. Finally she was moved back to the ICU.
That made her furious and pushed her further into psychosis. Her eyes turned sly and hunted and she constantly plotted her escape. She offered bribes to nurses and attendants. She promised a young doctor that she would sign over her school and its grounds to him if he would help her to get out. Twice she made it all the way down the corridor in her hospital gown. After that episode two nurses had to keep constant vigil, and occasionally even hold her down in her bed. When she had exhausted everybody around her the doctors said the hospital could not afford to give her round-the-clock nursing care and that she would need to be physically restrained, strapped to her bed. They asked Tilo, as her next of kin, to sign the forms that gave them permission to do so. Tilo asked them for one last chance to try to calm her mother down. The doctors agreed, if a little reluctantly.
The last time she called Naga from the hospital, Tilo told him that she had been given special permission to stay by her mother’s side in the ICU because she had finally found a way of soothing her. He thought he detected a hint of laughter and even affection in her voice. She said she had found a simple, workable solution. She sat on a chair by her mother’s bed with a notebook and her mother dictated endless notes to her. Sometimes they were letters: Dear Parent comma next line…it has been brought to my notice that…did you put a comma after Dear Parent? Mostly they were pure gibberish. Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.
Naga had no idea what Tilo was talking about and told her she sounded a little delirious herself. She laughed and said he’d understand when he saw the notes. He remembered wondering at the time what kind of person it was that got on best with her mother when she was hallucinating on her deathbed in an ICU while she, the daughter, masqueraded as her stenographer.
Eventually, though, things didn’t turn out well in Lakeview Hospital. Tilo returned after her mother’s funeral, gaunt and more uncommunicative than ever. Her description of her mother’s passing was brief and almost clinical. Within weeks of returning to Delhi she began her restless wandering.
Naga never did see the notes.
THAT MORNING, as he leafed aimlessly through the medical file in Tilo’s cupboard, he found some of them. They were in Tilo’s writing, on ruled pages torn out of a notebook, folded up and tucked between hospital bills, medicine prescriptions, oxygen-saturation charts and blood-gas test results. As he read them, Naga realized how little he knew about the woman he had married. And how little he would ever know:
9/7/2009
Take care of the potted plants they may fall.
And that fold—the crumple in the blanket—I might have to trump them all.
What does that say about you Madam Ambassador Master Builder Paraya Girl?
Those people in blue, they handle the shit. Are they your relatives?
As far as I know Paulose doesn’t get on with the orchids, he’s killing them. It could be a Paraya problem.
Ask Biju or Reju to take over.
Have you heard the dogs at night? They come to take away the legs from the diabetes people that are cut off and thrown away. I can hear them howling and they run off with people’s arms and legs. Nobody tells them not to.
Are they your dogs? Are they boys or girls? They seem to like sweet things.
Can you get me a good-quality jujube?
The blue people must stop hanging around us.
We must be very careful, you and I. You know that, don’t you?
They have measured my tears and they are OK in terms of salt and water. I have dry eyes and must keep bathing them and eating sardines to make tears. Sardines are full of tears.
This girl in checks will do stunning deeds with the lottery.
Let’s go.
Ask Reju to get the car. I just can’t. I don’t want to.
Hello! How nice to meet you! This is my granddaughter. She cannot be controlled. Please see that this place is cleaned out.
As soon as Reju comes let’s take the car and make a run for it. Carry the potty. Leave the shit.
You come here now. Give me a whisper. I’m
in a jam. Are you in a jam too?
We’ll sit on the potty and make a jump for it.
I’ll have a Johnnie Walker. Is he up there on top of us?
I’ll just take two sheets. But what should our legs do?
Will there be a horse?
A great war has started between me and the butterflies.
Will you get out as soon as possible with Princey, Nicey and friends? Take the brass vase, the violin and the stitches. Leave the shit and darkglasses and forget about the broken chairs, they’re always hanging around, they come and go.
She’ll help you with your shit this girl in checks. Her father is going to be here soon to take out the rubbish. I don’t want him to be caught with you. I think we should just clear out.
When you look out behind those curtains, do you feel there’s a crowd of people? I feel there is. There’s definitely a smell. A crowd smell. A bit rotten, like the sea.
I think you should leave your poems and all your plans with Alicekutty. She is hideously ugly. I’d like a photograph of her for me to laugh at. That’s how nasty I am.
The bishop will want to see me in my coffin. It’s quite a relief because it’s for my funeral. I never thought I’d get there. Is it raining, is it shining, is it dark is it day is it night? Can’t somebody please tell me?
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Page 23
