by Anita Desai
Later, sons were born to their parents, and the pressure, the tension in their relationships with their daughters was relieved. Good-naturedly, the father allowed both of them to go to school. ‘What is the harm?’ he asked the elderly critics of this unusual move. ‘These days it is good for girls to be educated. One day, who knows, they may work in an office – or a bank!’
That certainly did not happen. Another generation would be born and raised before any girl in that Punjab village became an office clerk or a bank teller. Asha and Anu had a few years in the local government school where they wore blue cotton kameezes with white chunnis, and white gym shoes, and sat on benches learning the Punjabi alphabet and their numbers. Here the scales may well have tipped the other way, because Asha found the work ferociously difficult and grew hot and bothered as she tried to work out problems in addition and subtraction or to read her lessons from the tattered, illustrated textbooks, while Anu discovered an unexpected nimbleness of mind that skipped about the numbers with the agility of a young goat, and scampered through the letters quite friskily. Asha threw her sister exasperated looks but did not mind so much when Anu took over her homework and did it for her in her beautiful hand. Anu drew praise when she wrote essays on ‘The Cow’ and ‘My Favourite Festival’ – but, alas, the latter proved to be her swan song because at this point Asha turned fifteen and the family found her a bridegroom and married her off and Anu had to stay home from then on to help her mother.
Asha’s bridegroom was a large man, not so young, but it did not matter because he owned so much land and cattle. He had a great handlebar moustache and a turban and Anu was terrified for Asha when she first saw him, but was later to find no cause for terror: he was a kindly, good-natured man who clearly adored his bright-eyed, quick-tongued, lively young wife and was generous to her and to her entire family. His voice was unexpectedly soft and melodious, and he often regaled his visitors, or a gathering in the village, with his songs. Asha – who had plenty of talents but not artistic ones – looked at him with admiration then, sitting back on her haunches and cupping her chin in her hands which were bedecked with the rings and bracelets he had given her.
They often asked Anu to come and stay with them. Asha found she was so accustomed to having her younger sister at her heels, she really could not do without her. She might have done, had she had children, but, though many were born to her, they were either stillborn or died soon after birth, none living for more than a few days. This created an emptiness in the big house so full of goods and comforts, and Asha grew querulous and plaintive, a kind of bitterness informing her every gesture and expression, while her husband became prone to depression which no one would have predicted earlier. Anu often came upon him seated in an armchair at the end of the veranda, or up on the flat roof of the house in the cool evenings, looking out with an expression of deep melancholy across his fields to the horizon where the white spire and the golden dome of the Sikh temple stood against the sky. He left the work on the farm to a trusted headman to supervise and became idle himself, exasperating Asha who tended to throw herself into every possible activity with determined vigour and thought a man should too.
After yet another miscarriage, Asha roused herself with a grim wilfulness to join in the preparation for Anu’s wedding, arranged by the parents to a clerk in a neighbouring town, a sullen, silent young man with large teeth and large hands that he rubbed together all the time. Anu kept her face and her tears hidden throughout the wedding, as brides did, and Asha was both consoling and encouraging, as women were.
Unexpectedly, that unpromising young man, who blinked through his spectacles and could scarcely croak one sentence at a time, showed no hesitation whatsoever when it came to fathering a child. Nor did Anu, who was so slight of frame and mousy in manner, seem to be in any way handicapped as a woman or mother – her child was born easily, and it was a son. A round, black-haired, red-cheeked boy who roared lustily for his milk and thrashed out with his legs and grabbed with his hands, clearly meant for survival and success.
If Anu and her husband were astonished by him, it could scarcely have matched Asha and her husband’s wonder. They were enthralled by the boy: he was the child of their dreams, their thwarted hopes and desires. Anu lay back and watched how Asha scooped Rakesh up into her large, soft arms, how she cradled and kissed him, then how her husband took him from her, wrapped in the candy pink wool shawl knitted by Asha, and crooned over him. She was touched and grateful for Asha’s competence, as adept at handling the baby as in churning butter or making sweets. Anu stayed in bed, letting her sister fuss over both her and the baby – making Anu special milk and almond and jaggery drinks in tall metal tumblers, keeping the baby happy and content, massaging him with mustard oil, feeding him sips of sweetened milk from a silver shell, tickling him till he smiled.
Anu’s husband looked on, awkwardly, too nervous to hold his own child: small creatures made him afraid; he never failed to kick a puppy or a kitten out of his way, fiercely. Anu rose from her bed occasionally to make a few tentative gestures of motherhood but soon relinquished them, one by one, first letting Asha feed the baby and dress him, then giving up attempts to nurse the boy and letting Asha take over the feeding.
At the first hint of illness – actually, the baby was teething which caused a tummy upset – Asha bundled him up in his blanket and took him home, promising, ‘I’ll bring him back as soon as he is well. Now you go and rest, Anu, you haven’t slept and you look sick yourself.’
When Anu went to fetch him after a week, she came upon Asha’s husband, sitting on that upright chair of his on the veranda, but now transformed. He had the baby on his knee and was hopping him up and down while singing a rhyme, and his eyes sparkled as vivaciously as the child’s. Instead of taking her son from him, Anu held back, enjoying the scene. Noticing her at last, the large man in the turban beamed at her. ‘A prince!’ he said, ‘and one day he will have all my fields, my cattle, the dairy, the cane-crushing factory, everything. He will grow up to be a prince!’
Rakesh’s first birthday was to be celebrated at Asha’s house – ‘We will do it in style,’ she said, revealing how little she thought Anu and her husband were capable of achieving it. Preparations went on for weeks beforehand. There was to be a feast for the whole village. A goat was to be slaughtered and roasted, and the women in the family were busy making sweets and delicacies with no expense spared: Asha’s husband was seeing to that. He himself went out to shoot partridges for the festive dinner, setting out before dawn into the rippling grainfields and calling back to the women to have the fire ready for his return.
Those were his last words – to have the fire ready. ‘As if he knew’, wept Asha’s mother, ‘that it was the funeral pyre we would light.’ Apparently there had been an accident with the gun. It had gone off unexpectedly and the bullet had pierced his shoulder and a lung: he had bled to death. There were no birthday festivities for one-year-old Rakesh.
Knowing that the one thing that could comfort Asha was the presence of the baby in her arms, Anu refrained from suggesting she take him home. At first, she had planned to leave the boy with her widowed sister for the first month of mourning, then drew it out to two and even three months. When her husband, taunted by his own family for his failure to establish himself as head of his household, ordered her to bring their son home, Anu surprised herself by answering, ‘Let him be. Asha needs him. We can have more sons for ourselves.’ Their house was empty and melancholy – it had always been a mean place, a narrow set of rooms in the bazaar, with no sunlight or air – but she sat in its gloom, stitching clothes for her rapidly growing son, a chunni drawn over her head, a picture of acceptance that her husband was not able to disturb, except briefly, with fits of violence.
After one of these, they would go and visit the boy, with gifts, and Rakesh came to look upon his parents as a visiting aunt and uncle, who offered him sweets and toys with a dumbly appeasing, appealing air. No one remembered when he started call
ing them Masi and Masa. Asha he already addressed as Ma: it was so clearly her role.
Anu had been confident other children would follow. She hoped for a daughter next time, somehow feeling a daughter might be more like her, and more likely to stay with her. But Rakesh had his second and third birthday in Asha’s house, and there was no other child. Anu’s husband looked discouraged now, and resentful, his own family turning into a chorus of mocking voices. He stayed away at work for long hours; there were rumours – quickly brought to Anu’s attention – that he had taken to gambling, and drugs, and some even hinted at having seen him in quarters of the town where respectable people did not go. She was not too perturbed: their relationship was a furtive, nocturnal thing that never survived daylight. She was concerned, of course, when he began to look ill, to break out in boils and rashes, and come down with frequent fevers, and she nursed him in her usual bungling, tentative way. His family came to take over, criticizing her sharply for her failings as a nurse, but he only seemed to grow worse, and died shortly before Rakesh’s fifth birthday. His family set up a loud lament and clearly blamed her for the way he had dwindled away in spite of their care. She packed her belongings – in the same tin trunk in which she had brought them as a bride, having added nothing more to them – and went to live with Asha – and the child.
In the dark, Beth found it was she who was stroking the hair at Rakesh’s temple now, and he who lay stretched out with his hands folded on his chest and his eyes staring at the ceiling.
‘Then the woman you call Ma – she is really your aunt?’ Beth queried.
Rakesh gave a long sigh. ‘I always knew her as my mother.’
‘And your aunt is your real mother? When did they tell you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I grew up knowing it – perhaps people spoke of it in the village, but when you are small you don’t question. You just accept.’
‘But didn’t your real mother ever tell you, or try to take you away?’
‘No!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s just it, Beth. She never did – she had given me to her sister, out of love, out of sympathy when her husband died. She never tried to break up the relationship I had with her. It was out of love.’ He tried to explain again, ‘The love sisters feel.’
Beth, unlike Rakesh, had a sister. Susan. She thought of her now, living with her jobless, worthless husband in a trailer somewhere in Manitoba with a string of children. The thought of handing over her child to her was so bizarre that it made her snort. ‘I know I couldn’t give my baby to Susan for anything,’ she declared, removing her hand from his temple and placing it on her belly.
‘You don’t know, you can’t say – what may happen, what things one may do—’
‘Of course I know,’ she said, more loudly. ‘Nothing, no one, could make me do that. Give my baby away?’ Her voice became shrill and he turned on his side, closing his eyes to show her he did not wish to continue the conversation.
She understood that gesture but she persisted. ‘But didn’t they ever fight? Or disagree about the way you were brought up? Didn’t they have different ideas of how to do that? You know, I’ve told Susan—’
He sighed again. ‘It was not like that. They understood each other. Ma looked after me – she cooked for me and fed me, made me sit down on a mat and sat in front of me and fed me with her own hands. And what a cook she is! Beth, you’ll love—’ he broke off, knowing he was going too far, growing foolish now. ‘And Masi,’ he recovered himself, ‘she took me by the hand to school. In the evening, she lit the lamp and made me show her my books. She helped me with my lessons – and I think learned with me. She is a reader, Beth, like you,’ he was able to say with greater confidence.
‘But weren’t they jealous of each other – of one for cooking for you and feeding you, and the other for sharing your lessons? Each was doing what the other didn’t, after all.’
He caught her hand, on the coverlet, to stop her talking. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said again, and wished she would be silent so he could remember for himself that brick-walled courtyard in the village, the pump gushing out the sweet water from the tube well, the sounds of cattle stirring in the sheaves of fodder in the sheds, the can of frothing milk the dairyman brought to the door, the low earthen stove over which his mother – his aunt – stirred a pan in the smoky dimness of dawn, making him tea. The pigeons in the rafters, cooing, a feather drifting down –
‘Well, I suppose I’ll be seeing them both, then – and I’ll find out for myself,’ Beth said, a bit grimly, and snapped off the light.
‘Never heard of anything so daft,’ pronounced her mother, pouring out a cup of coffee for Beth who sat at her kitchen table with her elbows on its plastic cover and her chin cupped in her hands. Doris was still in her housecoat and slippers, going about her morning in the sunlit kitchen. Beth had come early.
When Beth did not reply, Doris planted her hands on the table and stared into her brooding face. ‘Well, isn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing? Rakesh having two mothers! Why ever didn’t he tell us before?’
‘He told me about them both of course,’ Beth flared up, and began to stir her coffee. ‘He talked of them as his mother and aunt. I knew they were both widows, lived together, that’s all.’
Doris looked as if she had plenty more to say on the subject than that. She tightened the belt around her red-striped housecoat and sat down squarely across from Beth. ‘Looks as if he never told you who his mother was though, or his father. The real ones, I mean. I call that peculiar, Beth, pec-u-liar!’
Beth stirred resentfully. ‘I s’pose he hardly thinks of it that way – he was a baby when it happened. He says he grew up just accepting it. They love each other, he said.’
Doris scratched at her head with one hand, rattled the coffee cup in its saucer with the other. ‘Two sisters loving each other – that much? That’s what’s so daft – who in her right mind would give away her baby to her sister just like that? I mean, would you hand yours over to Susan? And would Susan take it? I mean, as if it were a birthday present!’
‘Oh, Mum!’
‘Now you’ve spilt your coffee! Wait, I’ll get a sponge. Don’t get up. You’re getting big, girl. You OK? You mustn’t mind me.’
‘I’m OK, Mum, but now I’m going to have two women visiting. Rakesh’s mum would be one thing, but two of ’em together – I don’t know.’
‘That’s what I say,’ Doris added quickly. ‘And all that expense – why’s he sending them tickets? I thought they had money: he keeps talking about that farm as if they were landlords—’
‘Oh, that’s where he grew up, Mum. They sold it long ago – that’s what paid for his education at McGill, you know. That costs.’
‘What – it cost them the whole farm? He’s always talking about how big it was—’
‘They sold it a bit at a time. They helped pay for our house, too, and then set up his practice.’
‘Hmm,’ said Doris, as she shook a cigarette out of a packet and put it in her mouth.
‘Oh, Mum, I can’t stand smoke now! It makes me nauseous – you know that—’ Beth protested.
‘Sorry, love,’ Doris said, and laid down the matchbox she had picked up but with the cigarette still between her lips. ‘I’m just worried about you – dealing with two Indian women – in your condition—’
‘I guess they know about babies,’ Beth said hopefully.
‘But do they know about Canada?’ Doris came back smartly, as one who had learnt. ‘And about the Canadian winter?’
They thought they did – from Rakesh’s dutiful, although not very informative, letters over the years. After Rakesh had graduated from the local college, it was Asha who insisted he go abroad ‘for further studies’. Anu would not have had the courage to suggest it, and had no money of her own to spend, but here was another instance of her sister’s courage and boldness. Asha had seen all the bright young people of the village leave and told Anu, ‘He’ – meaning
her late husband – ‘wanted Rakesh to study abroad. “We will give him the best education,” he had said, so I am only doing what he told me to.’ She tucked her widow’s white chunni behind her ears and lifted her chin, looking proud. When Anu raised the matter of expense, she waved her hand – so competent at raising the boy, at running the farm, and now at handling the accounts. ‘We will sell some of the land. Where is the need for so much? Rakesh will never be a farmer,’ she said. So Rakesh began to apply to foreign universities, and although his two mothers felt tightness in their chests at the prospect of his leaving them, they also swelled with pride to think he might do so, the first in the family to leave the country ‘for further studies’. When he had completed his studies – the two women selling off bits and pieces of the land to pay for them till there was nothing left but the old farmhouse – he wrote to tell them he had been offered jobs by several firms. They wiped their eyes with the corners of their chunnis, weeping for joy at his success and the sorrowful knowledge that he would not come back. Instead, they received letters about his achievements: his salary, his promotion, and with it the apartment in the city, then his own office and practice, photographs accompanying each as proof.
Then, one day, the photograph that left them speechless: it showed him standing with his arm around a girl, a blonde girl, at an office party. She was smiling. She had fair hair cut short and wore a green hairband and a green dress. Rakesh was beaming. He had grown rather fat, his stomach bulging out of a striped shirt, above a leather belt with a big buckle. He was also rather bald. The girl looked small and slim and young beside him. Rakesh did not tell them how old she was, what family she came from, what schooling she had had, when was the wedding, should they come, and other such particulars of importance to them. Rakesh, when he wrote, managed to avoid almost all such particulars, mentioning only that the wedding would be small, merely an official matter of registration at the town hall, they need not trouble to come – as they had ventured to suggest.
