And now, this man is here. No parents. Just him. And he is smiling at me. Good sign? I hope so. I have no wish to remain an old maid.
Manoj doesn’t have any parents—hence no first stage; he’s jumped right to the second. I doubt he’s hired the services of the village gossip either. His parents passed away when he was just a boy, he tells us. They were struck by typhoid, taken from him, one after the other. He was brought up by an uncle who also passed away this past year, he says. He is lonely, he wants to settle down. ‘I like your daughter; I would like to offer for her hand,’ he declares, setting down his empty tumbler carefully.
All it takes is one tumbler of lime sherbet. This man is easily pleased.
Afterwards, as we are washing the dishes by the bimbli tree, my mother says, ‘It is a good thing he doesn’t have any parents. There will be no one to nag you, order you around. You get to be your own boss, run your house the way you like.’
My house. I feel a shiver of anticipation, of excitement, run up my spine. This is what I have been waiting for all these years.
And so, it is decided. Over my trademark green plantain podis, my father broaches the subject of dowry.
‘I don’t want any dowry, Sir, your daughter is enough,’ Manoj says, surprising my father so much that he chokes on his plantain podi and has to be slapped on the back by my mother.
‘But… she is our only daughter; we have to send her to you with dowry,’ my mother says firmly and my father looks fit to choke again.
‘How do you plan to look after her?’ my father asks, sufficiently recovered but still quite red in the face.
They are discussing me like they would debate what fish to buy at the market, whether the mackerel is fresher than the sardine. Outside, the chickens cluck plaintively, a cow moos somewhere among the fields. And here, my future is being decided over plantain podis and tumblers of cardamom and ginger tea.
‘I work for Sumitranna in Sompur—you know him?’ Manoj looks at my father who nods. ‘He has agreed to loan me a quarter of his field in which to build our house. He will take a portion off my earnings every month until I have repaid him.’
‘Well then, we will give you the money we have been saving for Shilpa’s dowry towards the cost of materials for building the house,’ my mother says even as my father sputters a, ‘But he doesn’t want…’
And just like that, it is decided, the date is set and my lifelong ambition is looking to be fulfilled.
Chapter 7
Nisha
The Smell of Prayer
Nisha hunkers down among the pews, breathing in the tang of turpentine, the wood jutting against her ribs and back, soothing in its familiarity. Around her, the whisper of hymns, the sigh of prayer books being opened, the giggle of children, the hiss of parents telling them off, the familiar mothball odour of desperation, of entreaties to the Lord. She can see the prayers making their way heavenward, carried upward by the voices of the nuns raised in chorus, by the dust motes swirling in the multi-hued patterns created by the sun reflecting off the stained-glass windows, by the mosquitoes and the flies that lift them up with their wings. She can hear how hollow the prayers sound as they make their way to the very top, past the mother crows jealously guarding their young snug in the nests tucked into the beams. The prayers get stuck in the roof, quivering helplessly, looking to her for assistance. She draws air smelling of incense and a hint of jasmine into her lungs, inhaling some dust motes in the process and blows, poof, and away the prayers go, through the cricks in the mellow orange Mangalore tiles, heaven-bound. ‘Thank you,’ the prayers sing, their voices as precious and insubstantial as fairy dust, before they fly into the arms of God. ‘Thank you.’ The statues of the Mother Mary of Miracles and Jesus on the cross, St Francis of Assisi and St Paul and St Peter, all smile down at her and she feels their collective approval like a warm caress, enveloping her in its velvet arms.
There’s a gnawing deep inside her. Her stomach is cavernous, a yawning tunnel that wants to be filled. It rumbles, the sound loud in the shadowy blue underneath the pews. She smothers a laugh. No one must know she is here. She sees toes, so many toes, some painted, nail varnish peeling off, others dusty, a broken nail, a weeping gash, a toe shaped like a question mark, another like a comma. She pictures God opening up the Heavens with a crack like lightning, his hand, golden and iridescent wafting through and plucking at the prayers. He smiles down at her and her hunger disappears. She is sated, happy, her stomach warm and full like when she has eaten a masala dosa with lots of sambar and a whole container of chutney.
The smell of sweat from the many bodies packed into the church envelops her along with the aroma of spicy fried fish with a faint undertone of jasmine drifting in on the breeze from Duja’s compound, and a whiff of camphor incense from where the altar boys are swinging the thurible a bit too hard, earning a raised eyebrow from the priest. Then she is in the cool vestry as if by magic; she is watching the priest put on his robes, transforming from an ordinary balding person in a white cloak into someone magnificent. A Miracle, like the nuns keep going on about. A real live Miracle. He carries the golden orb containing the Sacrament, the Body of Jesus, and she watches transfixed. The altar boys whisper among themselves and the priest quiets them with a look. Watch out, boys, he can perform Miracles; he might transform you into frogs if you’re not careful.
Her stomach rumbles again, God’s benevolent munificence gone. She is hungry, so hungry. She goes to the convent in search of food. She wanders into the chapel. Empty. The dining hall, empty. The prayer room, same. The confessional. Not a soul. She is running, through every room, calling for the nuns, shouting, her voice echoing back, shrill, tinged with hysteria. Empty. Empty. Empty. Where is everyone? Where is she? She is lost. She is lost. Her stomach feels hollow. Her breath comes in gasps.
She is lost.
‘Nisha, darling, wake up.’ And she is in Matt’s familiar embrace, breathing in his smell, faint remnants of the musky cologne he wears. Sweat. Her eyes are streaming. Her throat feels hoarse. ‘It’s okay, babe,’ he says, rocking her in the cradle of his arms. ‘It’s fine.’
Slowly she comes back into the present. The gnawing in her stomach—not hunger. Loss. Hurt. Betrayal. It hits her then, the ache, and she wishes she was back in the dream again. She prefers the feeling of being lost to the feeling of being adrift, a directionless compass. Her insides are hollow, she is a shell.
‘A nightmare?’ Matt asks, his voice soft, as he switches on the bedside lamp.
She squints in the sudden yellow light, warm and mellow as yolk oozing out of a runny boiled egg, flooding the room. The remembered smell of jasmine and camphor inundates her nostrils. ‘What is happening to me, Matt?’
He pours her a glass of water from the jug sitting handy beside him. ‘Drink,’ he says, ‘then we’ll talk.’ His eyes are soft as a meadow soaking in the first golden rays of warm spring sun after a hellish winter. She wants to sink into them, stay there.
The previous evening she had showed him the letter, asked him if she should call the number for the convent.
‘What do you think?’ he had asked, stroking his beard the way he did when he was thinking, his gaze tender.
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘Sleep on it, Nisha. Sometimes, your subconscious has a way of providing the solution.’ He had smiled then, the smile that lit up his face like a beacon, like a house just visible through a blanket of blinding fog, a hazy silhouette that provides the promise of shelter to a weary traveller lost en route to wherever he was going.
She had clung to Matt, taking comfort from the steady beating of his heart, so solid, so real. She had pushed all thought away, focusing instead on calculating the value of pi to as many decimal places as she could. Matt was not sleeping, she knew; he was waiting for her to fall asleep first and for this she was inordinately grateful.
‘What are you thinking?’ she had whispered, her soft hiss loud in the thick silence of the darkened room.
‘I’m thinking of you,’ he had said, turning round, smiling down at her. ‘Of how much I love you.’
She knew he wanted her to say, ‘I love you too.’ She wanted to say it, if just to please him, give something back, but her tongue wouldn’t, couldn’t push out the words. How could she, when she didn’t know for sure? How could she, especially now, when she couldn’t even be assured of her parents’ love—the one thing she had taken for granted, accepted without proof? Neither of her parents had said those words to her, and the couple of times she had told them she loved them out loud, they had blushed, embarrassed, and swiftly changed the topic. And yet, she had always known she was loved. She, who never believed in anything without accompanying evidence, had accepted her parents’ love as a given. Why hadn’t she questioned it, requested evidence?
‘And you?’ Matt had said after a bit, ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I was calculating the value of pi—had reached up to ten decimal places,’ she had said and he had thrown back his head and laughed, a low rumble starting in his stomach and bursting out of him in sonorous waves.
‘Shh,’ she’d nudged, laughing along, ‘you’ll wake the neighbours.’ And then, ‘Matt?’
‘Yes,’ he’d stopped long enough to squint down at her.
‘You don’t have any surprises up your sleeve do you? You aren’t biding your time waiting to spring something on me?’ She felt naked, vulnerable, asking. She could not hide the tremor in her voice.
‘Oh, Nisha.’ He had bent down, kissed her, his eyes boring into hers, doing the talking. And then they had made love, slowly, drawing comfort from each other. Afterwards, he had said, ‘This is me. All that I am. All yours.’ And she had fallen asleep, anchored in his arms, safe in the knowledge that this at least was real, the truth.
Now she shivers as she recounts the dream, still so tangible that she can smell the pews, see the prayers, touch the thurible dispensing incense, experience the palpable fear. ‘This is the dream I have been having the past few days, I am sure of it,’ she says. ‘I used to wake with the smell of jasmine invading my nose, but I couldn’t remember anything at all. And then, when I was reading the letter…’ The letter, that awful, damning letter. ‘…fragments of it came back. Do you think this is my subconscious at work, Matt?’
He scrunches up his nose in that way she loves, strokes his beard thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispers, padding out of the bedroom in her slippers, pulling her dressing gown close around her naked body to ward off the chill, the cold air sneaking in through the vents. She doesn’t like the heating on when she sleeps and she keeps the vents open. She gets the laptop, climbs back into bed. Matt is still wide awake, propped up amongst the tangle of duvet and bed sheets. When he sees her approach, squat cross-legged on the bed and open up the computer, he smiles, shakes his head. ‘You are still you,’ he whispers.
She types fast, fingers flying on the keys. ‘Our brain deceives us,’ she says. ‘Memory is surprisingly easy to trick,’ she says. ‘Aha, a paper on research of suppressed memories resurfacing as dreams.’ She scans the article, turns to him. This is her forte. Research, talking ideas through. What she does best. ‘I might be having these dreams because of trauma, my parents dying. But why would I dream of the convent? Could be because of the letter. Hmm.’ An idea is beginning to form. She turns to Matt, ‘Or… I was adopted at four, say, definitely before I turned five. Suppose the trauma of separation, the transition to a new country and culture, having to accept these strangers as parents was too much for me and I “lost” all my memories. Don’t forget, just after I also started school, my parents making sure I knew what was expected of me from day one, so there was the added pressure of settling in, performing well. Also, I started having rectifying operations for the cleft around then too. All reasons why I could have repressed memories of my life before—they would have been too much for my brain to cope.’ She ticks points off on her fingers as she speaks, holding Matt captive with her eyes, ‘So now, when my parents die, the trauma serves as a trigger and then I get this letter…’
‘Makes sense,’ Matt says.
She takes another long gulp of water. ‘Matt, if what I experienced there was a suppressed memory, then I was a very imaginative child. Where has that girl gone?’ She pauses. Then…‘Or it could be my subconscious messing with me, the contents of the letter playing on my brain and triggering vivid dreams. But… Matt, it felt like I was there. And the detail: the priest’s robes, the brown rows of feet in fraying sandals—how could my mind have made that up? And the smells? The vivid smells which accost my nose even after I’m awake?’
‘Your subconscious has definitely done its job, been working overtime,’ Matt says. And then, softly, ‘So… will you call the convent then?’
‘I… before this letter, I knew myself, who I was. It was a certainty I took comfort in. You know I like to slot facts into compartments in my brain. It makes me feel good, feel whole. And now, all the compartments have burst open, spilling their contents. What I knew to be the truth I now find out is just an illusion. I am a puzzle and until I solve it, until I slot the pieces together, I will not feel whole again.’
‘I understand,’ Matt says and in that moment her affection for him overflows.
Is this love? What else could this emotion that threatens to engulf me, take me captive, be? I wish I could stop analysing every single feeling and just tell him I love him. I wish my throat wouldn’t clog up every time I open my mouth to convince him, convince myself of the depth of my feeling. She reaches out and caresses his lower lip gently with her finger. He looks at her and she knows he understands. But it is not enough, not nearly enough.
That girl, the imaginative girl from the dream, would she have been able to express what she felt out loud without feeling there was a boulder stuck in her oesophagus preventing speech?
‘If I called the convent, I wouldn’t know where to start. I am so angry at them, my parents…’ She bunches the sheets in her fists. ‘All they leave me is a slip of paper telling me not nearly enough. Typical. They were never good with words of this kind. It would have been different had they been writing a scientific paper…’ Her eyes fill with involuntary tears. She can picture how hard it must have been for the dry couple who shied away from emotion to sit down and write the letter: each word a struggle. How can she understand them so well when they duped her so, when they let her live a lie her whole life?
Matt reaches across and touches her face. A tear trembles on the tip of his finger, a shimmery globule, suspended, fragile.
That is exactly how I feel, like I will shatter into a thousand disjointed pieces any minute.
‘There are so many questions…’ she says instead. ‘They buzz round my brain like a babble of wasps. I just… I need to sort them out in my head first, then I will be able to call…’
‘Write them down,’ Matt says softly, ‘write all the questions down and then we will approach them one by one.’
He knows her so well, knows the comfort she derives from making methodical lists.
And he said ‘we’. He said ‘we’, not ‘you’.
She reaches up, and with one finger traces the outline of his face, his eyes, his lips. And as dawn’s blush suffuses the drowsy sky the rosy pink of newborn skin, Matt makes love to her, erasing the imprint of the dream, writing himself into her mind instead.
Chapter 8
Devi
Hymn of Pain
Ma,
This morning as I was reading to you in that stuffy room, I thought you stirred. I paused, looked up. Nothing. You lay serene, unruffled, breathing with the aid of those machines, electronic monsters bolstering you, holding you in place. I went back to reading to you and you moaned. I looked up. This time, you moved. I rushed to the door, shouted for a nurse, a doctor. You thrashed about wildly, dislodging the drip that feeds nutrients into you. I bent close. ‘What is it, Ma?’ I asked.
&nb
sp; ‘Baby,’ I made out. ‘Wise woman.’ Your first words since all this happened, Ma, and guess whom you call upon! I shouldn’t be surprised, really.
Was it the mention of the madwoman in the letter I was reading that triggered something, fired your synapses into action? Did the madwoman have a baby? Is that what were you trying to say, Ma? Of all the things that I imagined you would say when you regained consciousness, this was furthest from my mind…What is going on in your head as you lie there looking so calm, Ma?
By the time the nurse arrived, you were back to your unconscious state. At least when you inhabit that state you are peaceful, not flaying about, agitated. ‘It is a good sign,’ the nurse said, expertly fixing your drip, noting down the readings on your various machines. ‘She is trying to come back. There is no imminent danger of her slipping into a coma.’
Well then, that’s fantastic, Ma, that means these letters are helping. There’s more of a mention of the madwoman in this letter—I know you hate me calling her that. ‘She is wise, not mad,’ you have said a million times. But to me, she will always be madwoman—the raving ranting witch who had an insane hold over you to the point that even now, when you come back briefly from your unconscious state, you invoke her, not me.
Anyway, let’s see how you react when I read this letter out to you.
So, I ran away from home and you spent an agonised night waiting for me by the college gates, praying that no harm would come to me. You told me later that the madwoman had said, ‘Devi was singed but not burnt’—your only reference to the night, your eyes asking me a question. ‘Your prayers worked, Ma,’ I replied, not wanting to acknowledge the madwoman one way or another. You smiled, relieved, and never brought that night up again, preferring to forget. I was fine with that; I wanted to forget too. And anyway, the events that took place after rather eclipsed that night, didn’t they?
That morning, after I have sent you on your way with promises to come home after college, the discomfort of the previous night manifesting itself in aches and pains all over my body, my roiling anger having dissipated to a dull throb, I turn to wave at Rohan. He bounds across the road towards me, his smile mesmerising as a peacock strutting its plumage. He takes my arm and once again I try not to flinch as the healing sores are bruised afresh. I watch you hobble to the bus stop, stop to catch your breath and turn around, your eyes searching for me. I turn away.
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