1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 green chillies slit in half lengthwise
Curry leaves—a handful
Coriander, handful, chopped for garnish
Salt to taste
Method:
1. Combine the rice and curd together in a bowl and keep aside.
2. Heat the oil in a vessel and add the mustard seeds.
3. When the seeds crackle, add the cumin seeds, green chillies, curry leaves and cook on a medium flame for a minute while stirring continuously.
4. Add the rice-curd mixture and salt. Mix well and cook for another minute. Serve hot garnished with coriander.
* * *
Dear Diary,
The matrons have ordered me to eat only white foods during my pregnancy. It will guarantee a fair baby, they say. And curd rice is my absolute favourite. I have been eating it in spades.
Food cravings—I’ve had some. To bite into a pomegranate and have the burgundy seeds explode in my mouth in a profusion of liquid sweetness. To sink my teeth into the watery coolness of a perfectly ripe watermelon on days when the sun is waging war on us, the juice dribbling down my chin and collecting in the folds of my neck. I yearn for the mackerel masala and the sardine curry my mother used to make. Whatever I wish for, Manoj brings, Jalaja cooks. I am blessed in my husband and in my neighbours and in the wise woman who can see into my future and knows who my baby will be even though I am the one growing it.
The day after I told the wise woman I was pregnant and thanked her with food, the day after she whispered, ‘Your pregnancy will cost you dearly,’ I was walking back from the tailor, where I had gone to get my sari blouses and skirts loosened in anticipation of my changing figure, when I saw something shiny sitting in my line of vision under the peepal tree. Getting closer, I saw a pile of gleaming aluminium dishes, my dishes, reflecting the light filtering through the leaves, twinkling like posh Mrs. Josephine’s pearls, washed better than I ever would using coconut husks and that washing powder that smelled like mud. The wise woman was nowhere in sight. She did not return for a week, and when she did, I took red rice, mango chutney and my special egg curry to her (my secret ingredient is the coconut shavings I add to the curry when it is simmering on the fire—gives it an additional sweetness and crunch). Once more, she did not acknowledge me, except to leave the cleaned dishes by the tree again the following day.
Manoj began setting aside money for dowry, just in case the child turned out to be a girl. The money set aside during my previous aborted pregnancies had been used up long since on various emergencies: the cow shed burning down; the well which was the source of all our drinking water being infested with hundreds of baby adders when a snake decided to use it as a birthing pit; the milking goat dying of a cobra bite while it was grazing in the fields.
Village matrons turned up with offerings of curd rice and sago payasam and made sure I ate in front of them. They shrugged off all my excuses of having just eaten and of being full—‘You are eating for two,’ they said. They sat and watched as I made a ball of rice with my fingers and stuffed it into my mouth. They admonished when I chewed slowly, saying I should eat quicker and tutted when I gulped it down, asking why I was in such a hurry, did I want to choke the baby? They brought pictures of fair, beautiful babies, mostly white, torn from newspapers—the Johnson and Johnson baby, the Rentokil cough medicine baby and the Boroline baby —and asked Jalaja to put them up on the walls pronto—‘Shilpa cannot risk climbing on wobbly stools to put pictures up,’ they said—and they told Jalaja off for sporting a sour face when doing so. ‘Don’t you know your neighbour should be shielded from all bad things, especially long faces?’ they admonished. ‘Smile, girl, for God’s sake.’ Manoj and I did not quite succeed in providing a satisfactory reply to Sumitranna’s son’s query as to why our house looked like Doctor Kumar’s waiting room, filled to bursting with smiling, blond-haired, blue-eyed babies.
The matrons begged Manoj to stop his subscription to the Udayavani, at least for the duration of the pregnancy. ‘Don’t you know that these papers nowadays are full of horrors?’ they said. ‘Killing here, fighting there. Shilpa should be shielded from this. If she is happy, the baby will be happy. Remember the miscarriages,’ they said. Manoj didn’t want to be reminded of the miscarriages so he duly cancelled the subscription.
‘Think good thoughts,’ they implored of me, promising that this would guarantee a beautiful child. ‘See how the bump is low and spread about?’ they said. ‘That is definitely a girl in there.’
I was four and a half months pregnant and out in the orchard picking ambade for pickle when the pains began. Pains shooting right down my abdomen fit to slice it in two. I hobbled to the lean-to toilet behind the house and when I saw the spotting, I fainted. When I came to, I found myself on the veranda outside the kitchen bathed in sweat, the sun a scalding insinuating presence upon my drooping eyelids, mosquitoes feasting on the bare flesh of my arms. Jalaja was fanning me vigorously with the peacock feather fan she was inordinately proud of, that I had always thought was more for show than anything else—countless multi-hued eyes mocking me as they moved up and down, close and far: swish, swish, bad mother, bad mother, why were you bending down when you were so tired, why weren’t you resting, swish, swish, bad mother. The pains had stopped. I looked down, trepidation warring with the need to know. The bump was still there. You don’t deserve that baby, swish, swish, that baby doesn’t deserve you. I asked for water, gulped it down and, ignoring Jalaja’s cries, ran barefoot in the blistering heat, through the fields and past Beerakka’s tumbling down cottage, past the church, the Catholic school and Master’s shop, to where the wise woman sat ranting under the peepal tree. I grabbed her hand much like she had grabbed mine once before. ‘Please. Tell me. Will I have this baby?’ I bit out between gasps. Steel-grey eyes met mine. The wise woman gently disentangled her hand from my grip and rested it on the curve of my belly. She smiled, the smile transforming her face. That was enough. And there, in the mud and dust under the peepal tree, the air permeated with the smell of rotting fish from the market, as a small crowd gathered around us, I prostrated myself at the wise woman’s feet, not caring about the grime, the stones pressing into my arms, my thighs. ‘Thank you.’
‘What are you looking at?’ the wise woman asked of the crowd, ‘Shoo.’ And they dispersed, buzzing busily, gossip already spreading into the next village and beyond.
Before I left, as I stood and brushed off the dirt and twigs sticking to my sari, I asked of the wise woman, ‘What is your name?’
The wise woman’s eyes—the colour of the sky just before it disgorged rain—softened as she smiled once more. ‘Devi,’ she said.
‘It means Goddess,’ I smiled at the woman: fading sari, dishevelled appearance, arresting face. Great people always came in humble guises. Jesus was born in a stable. Buddha had started his religion from under a Bodhi tree. ‘Fitting,’ I said.
I was the talk of the village for a few days. ‘She’s become like that madwoman she’s befriended. This pregnancy is driving her crazy,’ people muttered in not-so-quiet whispers behind my back. I smiled happily at the whisperers and they stopped, shocked. They had meant for me to hear of course but they hadn’t expected this reaction. ‘See, what did I tell you?’ they said, drawing concentric circles in the air near their forehead with their index fingers as I turned and walked away, shoulders pushed back, head held high, basket containing food for the wise woman tucked snug under my arm, my heart singing, ‘My baby is safe. My baby is safe.’
Two weeks later when I felt the first fluster in my stomach, my baby waving hello from inside the womb, I went to the wise woman. I sat down next to her on the disintegrating cane mat under the peepal tree. It was a sweltering day, the kind just before the monsoons, when there is a shimmer to the air, everything is still and a hush descends, heavy, weighted down with anticipation. Sweat collected under my armpits and in runnels down my back. The peepal branch
es afforded some shade but not much. The stray cows and dogs that usually roamed the streets lay down exhausted, the dogs’ tongues hanging out, the cows mooing weakly, their tails twitching busily to frighten away the flies that dared settle on their backs. I squatted as comfortably as I could, which was not very much, what with the bump and the heat, and waited. A flutter. Another. I took the wise woman’s hand and put it on my stomach and my baby obediently performed another little flurry, waved hello. And at that moment the heat broke, the clouds opened and the monsoons announced their arrival with a majestic clap of thunder and the exuberant whipping of coconut trees into turmoil. The cows stood up, mooing urgently, the dogs barked and they started their usual beat, walking up and down, a motley crowd laying claim to the mud-drenched, rain-scented streets of the village. Under the peepal tree, sheltered from the rain, fat drops clinging to the leaves and alighting on our heads like blessings, the air fragrant with the scent of sated earth, beneath the wise woman’s touch, my baby danced. The wise woman smiled and in her smile was reflected the joy, the contentment that I felt.
My baby grows and my delight grows with it. Everyone says how wonderful I look, how this child is going to be good-looking judging from the way its mother is blooming.
And I eat curd rice and mashed banana, boiled eggs and curries cooked with coconut milk as I wait to be acquainted with my beautiful child, as I wait for my dream, my lifelong ambition, to finally be realised.
Chapter 16
Nisha
Ruby-Tinged White Orb
Her hands trembling uncontrollably, Nisha picks up the phone. Just a few days ago, she would have despised herself for this weakness, this display of fear, of emotion. Not anymore. Is this my true self coming through?
Fingers shaking as she dials. The photograph is in front of her, and she breathes her sister’s face in, awed every time she looks at it.
She drops the phone. Picks it up. Redials. A pause. A beep. Then a high-pitched whine indicating a wrong number. She is not prepared for the disappointment she feels. It is almost physical, crushing down on her like a weight pinning down her chest. She looks at the numbers she has punched; cross checks them against the numbers on the sheet her parents have bequeathed her. Bequeathed, why did that grand word inveigle its way into her mind just then? ‘Here, I bequeath you your history—a set of numbers that do not work.’ And then it hits her, all of a sudden. What she is missing. She needs to add a country code, as it is an international phone call. She looks up the country code for India, her hands trembling. 0091. She punches in the numbers again. A beep. Static. Then a ring, two, three. Her heart beats like a prisoner behind bars, raving and ranting, wanting out. Four rings, five. This number must be out of date, she thinks. But knowing her parents, they would have done their research carefully, made sure to include the most recent number—it all depends on when they wrote her the letter of course.
She is used to solving things, hunting for answers, not resting until she gets them. But she is beginning to realise that all the rules change when the puzzle is you. How can she wait? How can she not? She will do what it takes to find her sister, unearth her roots, discover who she is. Even if it means travelling to India, to the ends of the world to track her sister, her birth parents down. She wants answers. She wants to know why she was given away like a surplus kitten from a litter. She owes it to herself and to Matt.
On the ninth ring, someone picks up. ‘Hello?’ a benevolent voice, older, heavy Indian accent, emphasis on the ‘llo’, tilting in a question at the end.
She cannot speak. The words she has so carefully prepared are lost somewhere in her chest. Her eyes blur.
‘Hello, Kon ulaytha?’ The soft words of a language. Not Kannada, she would have recognised that. The words unintelligible and yet somehow vaguely familiar, shifting something inside. Some ghost of a memory. She pictures flowers blooming, bursting in a riot of colour out of the nun’s mouth. That’s how the sound of this foreign language makes her feel.
Somehow, hearing the soft voice say something incomprehensible galvanises Nisha. ‘I am looking for Sister Priya?’ she blurts, her voice high, squeaky. Where did that come from? That wasn’t the question she had been planning to ask first, if at all. There might not be a Sister Priya and this soft-voiced nun might dismiss her as some crank. And yet…
A heartbeat of static. Hiss. Splutter. Then, ‘Sister Priya is ill, my child,’ the woman says, in English, her voice apologetic. ‘Who is this?’ The nun’s speech is like caramel, smooth and honeyed, the accent lilting, soothing, the words slipping out of her mouth like precious stones, prized gifts bestowed to the listener.
So there is a Sister Priya. It may not be the Sister Priya from your dream. There can be more than one Sister Priya, you know. Her inner voice, chiding.
‘I… I am calling from England. My parents died a few days ago in a car accident. They left me a letter.’ Her voice trembles, tilts alarmingly. She swallows.
The nun waits, somehow sensing Nisha has more to say, and her measured breathing, in between sputters of static like a car engine struggling to start in the dead of winter, calms Nisha somewhat. ‘I was adopted around twenty years ago from your convent. I must have been about four?’
‘I am sorry for your loss, child.’ The nun’s chocolate voice is her undoing. She watches her tears splat onto the letter, the list she has made and the laptop on which she googled country codes.
‘I would like to find out about my roots, who I am.’ Saying the words out loud gives them meaning, weight. ‘I… I have so many questions.’
‘I am sure you do, child. You were adopted twenty years ago, you say?’
‘About then, yes.’ And, ‘Were you there at the time?’ Perhaps she knew this woman.
‘No, child.’ The nun’s voice rueful. ‘I wish I had been for then we could have sorted this out here and now. I joined this convent four years ago. They move us about now, see, every five years. Change in policy. The nun who has been here longest is Sister Priya. She refused to move. The Mother respected that, did not press her. She has been here, what, fifty years? Her whole adult life. Joined as a novitiate.’
Her heart does a little jiggle. So it is her Sister Priya. It is. Her dreams are suppressed memories after all. What a fantastic machine the brain is. These memories must have been some of her very first. She remembers her joy from the dream, the relief she felt when she saw Sister Priya, how she had rushed up to her and hugged her. She tries to picture her face but it just doesn’t form. How can it? After all those years of suppressed memories, she can’t just expect perfectly formed pictures of long ago loved ones to fall into her head. ‘Do you still give children up for adoption from your convent?’ She had tried looking up information on the convent but there was precious little on the Web, even in this day and age.
‘No, child, we don’t and I don’t think we used to back then either, not regularly. But I will check.’
She likes the heartfelt way the nun calls her ‘child’; the word is like a hug, enveloping her in its warm depths. Cocooning her, shielding her like a womb.
‘What is your name, child?’
‘Nisha. Nisha Kamath.’ Was Nisha the name my birth parents gave me, or did they not bother to name me at all?
‘Your parents’ names?’
‘Lekha and Ravi Kamath.’
‘I will see if I can dig out your records.’
She takes a deep breath, thinking, in for a penny, in for a pound, ‘I would like to know who my parents were, how old I was when I was adopted from the convent, how my adoptive parents found me. Also when I arrived at the convent. And… if there was another little girl with me. My twin.’ Saying it out loud overwhelms her. My sister. My twin.
‘Please could you repeat what you just said, child? I am not getting any younger, my memory is not like it used to be,’ the nun’s voice apologetic. ‘Go slow. I will note everything down.’
She repeats her questions. Then, ‘Thank you.’
‘Take ca
re, child, God bless.’ A pause.
The nun is waiting for her to say her goodbyes. And then, the words slip out, as if of their own accord, ‘I just… Is there a courtyard in your convent, with a jasmine bush and a lime tree?’ The sharp, slightly acidic smell of limes ripening in the sun. Sister Priya plaiting the jasmine in neat orderly rows into wraiths that will adorn the statues of the Holy Family in the chapel. Memories flooding her, bombarding her, after a hiatus of over twenty years. The woman peering through the bars. Straggly hair. One huge eye, raining rust-stained tears.
‘The jasmine bush died after Sister Priya fell ill, no one to tend to it, see. Do you remember it all, child?’
Oh, Lord. She has never felt the need to call on a higher power before. She doesn’t even believe in Him. This is real. This is real. I actually experienced it all. That little girl hunkering among the pews, running into the courtyard, hunting for Sister Priya. Me. In another country. In another life. Softly, ‘I do now.’
‘Call me tomorrow. I will find out what I can.’
Afterwards, she cradles the phone in her hand before gently replacing it in its holder. The smell of incense, wet pews and sweat reach out from the past, from a different country, and engulf her, taking her to a sun-roasted garden, surrounded by high compound walls and a tarnishing iron gate, bringing up hazy pictures of a little girl dancing, her hair flying in the aromatic breeze wafting in from outside the gate, bringing with it the smell of sugarcane and frying peanuts, while a nun plaits flowers as white as her habit into garlands. An ache of pure longing to be that little girl again, carefree, her only worry what to eat next, loved by the nuns, secure, permeates her entire being even as dulcet tones reverberate in her head. ‘God bless you, child.’
* * *
Nisha wakes to the feeling of warm jasmine-perfumed breeze caressing her skin, the melodious tones of long-forgotten hymns crooned in the nuns’ honeyed voices loud in her ear, the taste of Eucharist bread dipped in sweetened wine in her mouth—the ruby tinged white orb melting deliciously almost as soon as it lands on her pink tongue.
The Forgotten Daughter Page 16
