‘Ma…’
‘It was the shock, I think.’ Maya looked at me, then at her hands, and with an impatience that felt unnatural in her, she dashed her hands.
‘It was a shock to you too, of course.’
‘And to you,’ she said.
‘And to me.’
‘And,’ she said, pointing towards the clutter, ‘I don’t think she ever tidied up again. There were no more guests. Well,’ she said, ‘Tasha-di occasionally, but she was limited to the public rooms of the house. She never saw the worst of it.’
The words were out before I could stop myself. ‘And you never thought of sorting things out after Ma…’
She looked at me sadly. ‘I didn’t know how, Siya.’
Papa was laid back by nature. He met Ma in college, and when Ma suggested he might want to invite her out for a meal, he was grateful to comply. She was beautiful, Ma, and ambitious, topping the college’s annual exams, writing for India’s leading magazines even before she graduated, and Papa was surprised to be noticed.
After marriage, he would defer to Ma’s judgement on most matters. Ma chose schools for us. She chose which activities we would take part in; she chose which friends were suitable, for Papa as much as for us. She decided the food we ate, the books we read, the schedule we kept. She was organised and articulate, and even if Papa had had the inclination to provide a counterpoint, he would have found it hard to get a word in.
The only time I really remember there being an altercation was to do with my education. Ma argued there were colleges in India too, but Papa was convinced that taking up the scholarship would broaden my horizons. They fought bitterly, Ma using her usual imperatives, but Papa remained resistant for the first time in my memory.
They usually began after dinner, and after we had all retired to our rooms for the evening, but I tended to dawdle in the living room outside our bedrooms. I knew my future was to be decided over the course of these arguments, and I was fearful of Ma winning. She was the vociferous one in our family, and on the night when the matter was decided, she was especially voluble. ‘I want to protect my girls,’ she said.
‘My sisters,’ he countered as Ma sneered, ‘all prospered by embracing the world.’
‘My world exists in these four walls.’
‘It never used to,’ he countered. ‘You were the bravest soul I had ever met.’
‘Yes,’ said Ma, and I leaned forward. This was all news to me.
‘All your plans,’ he was saying, and each word felt like a body blow. Ma didn’t respond, though I heard a deep intake of breath from behind the door. ‘You were my hero, Rupa,’ he said, as if he was the bereaved one. ‘You were going to go and conquer the world.’
There was no reply for a minute or longer, and as I told myself to remember to breathe, I heard the sound of Papa’s feet on the ground.
‘Well,’ Ma was saying, when Papa broke in.
‘They can’t spend their lives hiding from shadows.’
I didn’t hear much of what followed. There were tears from Ma, which surprised me. She was usually phlegmatic, but here she was, weeping audibly. I half expected Papa to mollify her, but he said in a resolute voice, ‘We have to think of what’s best for Siya.’
Silence followed. It was quiet outside, and as I waited, refusing to breathe, I heard the sound of crickets chirping outside. A bead of sweat formed on my neck, and I realised I hadn’t switched the fan on in my anxiety. I walked towards the switch, then heard the floorboard creak underfoot, and froze. ‘It’s Siya we’re talking about here,’ he said. ‘Siya, and not you.’
‘Fine,’ Ma screamed. She seemed restored to her vigour and this reassured and terrified me. ‘Fine!’ She was furious, I could tell, but I scarcely dared believe she would relinquish control. Her voice fell in timbre and acquired a terrible poise. ‘That’s it, Ratan,’ she said. ‘Do as you please.’
‘Come on, now.’
‘She’s your daughter,’ Ma said, as if it didn’t much matter.
‘She’s yours too.’
‘No, she’s not,’ Ma said. Her voice was loud, and even if I hadn’t been just outside their room, I would have heard them. I looked towards Maya’s room, but her door didn’t budge. ‘She looks like you. That nose,’ she said, and my hand rose self-consciously to my nose. It was broader than Maya’s or Ma’s, and I had long been conscious of it, but Ma had always told me it was beautiful, and that her own snub nose had often been a source of embarrassment to her. ‘That nose,’ she was screaming, in a tantrum to challenge any of our childhood ones, and then, ‘You know what’s best for her. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing.’
The week after our clear-out began, we ventured to the second floor. Maya tried different keys in the lock before running into Ma’s room. She emerged, carrying a rusty bunch of keys. One of these finally fit. ‘To be honest,’ she told me, ‘I didn’t know if we even had one that would work. I haven’t been up here for years.’
We entered a dim passage. Our entry disturbed the dust that had collected on the surfaces, and both Maya and I coughed. I reached out to Maya, but she was stumbling towards the light fixtures and pressing down on a switch. The lights must not have been switched on for years, as there was a pause, and then an arthritic wheeze as the hallway came into flickering view. We proceeded with the aid of the wavering light, stopping in front of the first room we came to. This was locked too, and Maya tried a few keys before the door yielded.
‘Do you remember?’ I asked, but here too Maya was switching on a light, and the room came into focus. It was exactly as I remembered it; the large wooden bed against one wall, and then the doll’s house we had set up. We must have been playing at doctors the last time we were up here, as several of the dolls lay on their backs with bandaged arms or legs. One had a plaster on her nose, and I asked, ‘When were we last here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maya. ‘Not for years.’
We must have fallen out of the habit of playing upstairs, though I couldn’t remember the actual moment we outgrew our dolls. And yet, here they all were, preserved and unchanging, as they had been all those years ago, in the throes of a fever or healing from a fractured wrist. ‘Maybe,’ I asked, ‘no one ever came up here after we stopped playing?’
Maya didn’t reply. She walked towards a cardboard box half-buried under the bed and pulled it out. Clouds of dust rose in the air, and I abandoned the dolls to rush towards her. ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ she said to me. ‘Is it yours?’ and as I shook my head, she began to brush the dust off the box’s surface.
She scraped at the surface with a focus I didn’t normally associate with her, and I wondered if the box contained her possessions. The thought of love letters from her lawyer friend rose in my mind, but as I saw her, attacking the dust, her forehead furrowed with her effort, I knew not to voice my thoughts.
And then the box caved. It had been held in place by a heavy band of tape, but this must have been opened and reopened over the years, as Maya’s brushing caused it to collapse. I was struck again by the thought that it contained papers that were personal to her.
‘Oh,’ she was saying now, surprised, and I knew it wasn’t one of her own treasures she had uncovered. Her mouth widened, and I leaned forward to see what she had found.
‘These are Ma’s,’ she was telling me, and sure enough, I saw Ma’s round, looping script on several large unsealed envelopes.
‘Yes,’ I said to her, ‘But what are they?’
‘Estate papers?’
‘Or,’ I said, ‘a will perhaps?’ There hadn’t been one among the papers we found in her room, but I saw how Maya looked at me, the old suspicions rising to the fore, and I hurried to add, ‘Well, hand me a pile, then.’
Ma had given me a small box when I was a little girl. It was brightly coloured, its purple and green sploshes gem-like in my young eyes. She had probably received it as part of a gift, and had stripped it of its inserts, but it was the most magical thing I had ev
er seen. I was a little bit of a magpie in those days, and soon, anything I deemed to be of value, an abandoned receipt, a theatre ticket, a trinket, would find its way into the box.
Ma seemed to have had a similar impulse. As I peered into the box, I saw swatches of colour beneath the paper. There were long strings of beads, corals and amethysts, silk scarves and other, neatly folded items of clothing. These we hurried to tip out, and as a white shirt fell out, Maya exclaimed, ‘This was her favourite shirt!’
It had tiny blue polka dots on it, and Maya told me that Ma had worn it nearly constantly for years. ‘She absolutely loved it,’ she said. ‘There was a huge panic once when it was lost. Shanti must have mislaid it in her little ironing room, and for days, Ma asked for the shirt only to be told that Shanti couldn’t find it. There were tears,’ and as I raised an eyebrow, she insisted, ‘No, really. She was convinced Shanti had stolen it for herself.’
‘But that’s just bonkers!’
‘I know,’ said my sister. ‘But Ma wasn’t making any sense. Eventually the shirt was found, and Ma was restored to herself. But it was a tense few days until it was found.’
I took the shirt from Maya and brought it up to smell. It smelt musty, and of mothballs, and if the shirt had been party to happy moments of my mother’s life, it betrayed no sign of it. I picked up one of Ma’s strings of beads. A hazy image flickered in front of my eyes, of Ma in bright lipstick, high heels and silken scarves. I smiled at the thought. Ma, my unchanging, dependable Ma, in such glamourous wear! Now I twirled a scarf around my fingers, imagining a trace of a fragrance to go with the mustiness of the fabric, when Maya turned to the envelopes.
The first one was full of notepads and pencils. We rifled through them, trying to glean clues to Ma’s existence independent of us, but nothing was obvious. ‘They’re just notes,’ I said to Maya. ‘Leads on stories, quotes she had been given, that sort of stuff. Nothing interesting.’
Maya nodded. She turned towards the next envelope, which contained a sheaf of papers held together by a rubber band. We scanned them, Maya reading each page first before handing it to me. Most related to articles Ma had written, and mentioned citations or prizes she was being nominated for.
Further down the pack, there began to emerge correspondence relating to a new magazine.
‘I thought I’d dreamt this!’ Maya cried, stabbing a finger at a page circled with a crimson marker. She looked up from the paper and sang the little tune we had made up all those years ago. ‘A political, satirical magazine for political, satirical girls!’
I laughed, moving closer to her. I skimmed through the words, focussing on the letters written in red in our mother’s hand. The Satirist! The words were circled in the same emphatic red, and then underlined thrice.
‘This must have been it,’ said Maya. ‘This must have been the magazine that Ma and Tasha-di planned.’
Our scanning of the papers grew more frantic, and it felt a little like we were on a scavenger hunt. We were bloodhounds, the two daughters of a woman we had known only as Ma, and were on the search for signs of a life that existed beyond ours. There had been no sign of it in my memory, but here, as we read, delicious words spilled out offering us glimpses of promise, and more, of hope. There were more letters between the two women discussing staffing and costs, and I said to Maya, ‘I never knew that Tasha-di…’ when Maya interrupted me. She pushed a new letter at me, saying, ‘This is a new writer.’
The letter was written in a hurried, fluid script, the sentences generally short and urgent. We quickly surmised that the author of these letters was a mentor, and potentially a source of funding for the venture, though the writer’s name remained unclear. There was no reference to their name or profession in the letter, which was signed simply with a large scrawl.
I looked at the last letter that had passed between Ma and Tasha-di, and the closest it got to referring to a third party was a line that said, ‘I think we’re ready to talk funding.’
‘R,’ Maya said now, pointing at the scrawled signature at the bottom of the letter. It was an untidy sign-off, the writing half-smudged, and could have represented a number of letters, and I shook my head at her. ‘Look,’ she said, tracing out the letter with her finger. The paper was pushed towards me, and in the end, I nodded half-heartedly.
‘It is R.’
‘It could be.’
‘It is,’ she insisted.
‘Does that narrow the field, though?’ I asked. ‘Do we know an R?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She had followed Ma into the field of journalism, and though a new generation was writing today’s stories, some of the old guard had progressed to positions of eminence. She considered the page in my lap. ‘It could be a last name,’ she said.
‘It could,’ I said. I looked carefully at the handwriting, taking in the large, florid script. ‘It feels like a man’s handwriting.’
She shrugged. We were none the wiser. There was no person with a name beginning with R we could think of, no hidden or declared benefactor we knew about. ‘But it is an R,’ she said insistently, and I shrugged. The writing was too uncertain.
We began to look at the other papers in the pile. They continued to be written by the same hand, and were authored in the same didactic manner. It told my mother what to do, demanded progress reports and staff changes, and it appeared that Ma complied, as following letters contained praise interspersed with further demands.
The last letter in the pack, however, saw a change in tone. The writing itself was neater, more measured, as if some thought had gone into the author’s words. Where normally half a dozen sentences were spread out over an entire page, this letter was succinct. There was no opening greeting. Maya read it first, and then passed it wordlessly on to me. I bent over the words:
I saw last night as a meeting between old friends. That you considered my conduct overfamiliar fills me with endless regret.
There was no scrawl at the end of this letter, and though the tone of this missive—both the words and the writing—were so at odds with what had passed before, I was in no doubt that the author was the same nameless person who had earlier corresponded with Ma. I looked towards Maya, who was rereading the last letter over my shoulder.
‘It is the same person, isn’t it?’
She nodded. She brought out the previous note, tracing out the scrawled signature at the bottom, and put it next to the letter in my hand. ‘It’s the same.’
We pored over the letters. It was the same person writing both, and I read the final words out loud. ‘That you considered my conduct overfamiliar fills me with endless regret.’
‘Overfamiliar.’
I didn’t ask her what she thought the words meant, but there she was again, tracing out the signature on the letter in her hand. ‘Overfamiliar…’ I trailed off, but she didn’t look up. I found I couldn’t articulate my suspicions. I hardly knew what to make of the words I saw in front of me. Ma had always been just that, our mother. She was there to scold us about untidiness, and to make sure our homework was done. She organised classes and holidays for us, she managed our clothes and our schedules and our futures. She grew grumpy towards the end of the day, and was easily incensed by an irreverent word, but for the bulk of our childhood, she had been a solid presence in our lives. She had always been the foundation we built our lives around. Papa’s sisters, our brilliant aunts, had been the ones we aspired to emulate, but Ma had been our bedrock. We had never had to think of a time without her, not while I was still under her wing, and the thought that she had ever faced conflict, or a challenge filled me with dread. It was sadness at any pain she had felt that I experienced, but also an unsettling sense that the truths I had taken for granted as a child hadn’t been wholly valid.
Maya was silent, and I tried again. ‘Do you think,’ I began, and then, ‘Have you any memory,’ but she was shaking her head.
‘You know Ma,’ she told me. She weighed her next words, then said, ‘She was Ma,’ and I n
odded. ‘But then again,’ she said, before trailing off. Maya was silent a while longer, and I knew she was trying to make sense of the letter she had just read. This sentiment I took for gospel, though I myself had no real memory of it. The only Ma I remembered was the one I had known, and that Ma had been stolid and unimaginative and unwilling to change. ‘But then,’ Maya was saying, rubbing at the scrawl at the foot of the letter, and I knew she was remembering a different Ma.
After the funeral pyre had been lit, after we had dressed and adorned her for the last time, and after we had watched the flames take her into their embrace, we had made our way to our local temple. The cremation itself had been a small ceremony, with Shanti, Tasha-di and Kitty Bua, Papa’s favourite sister, in attendance, but the gathering at the temple had been open to a larger number. Half-forgotten relatives turned up, ostentatious in their profession of grief. A woman whose name I couldn’t recall hugged me close every time she saw me. ‘You remember, beta,’ she said to me, ‘how cute you were as a baby?’ and I could only nod in reply. The nameless lady was overcome with sadness at the passing of Ma, and more so at Maya having been left alone.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, passing her a tissue from my pocket. She sniffed, and I said, ‘Really, it will. Maya is a survivor.’ The lady stared at me expectantly, and I wondered if she expected me to appear more distraught. ‘Really,’ I said finally, prising myself from her embrace, and then, as she continued to stare, ‘It really will, Aunty.’
We were soon thronged by others; neighbours, old associates of Papa’s, classmates and childhood friends, and a small group of journalists who had once known Ma. Neither Maya nor I recognised many of these last faces, but Tasha-di occasionally provided an introduction. It was all a haze for us though, and in spite of the chill of the season, I soon found my face flushed. I threw off the shawl Shanti had insisted I carry, and though I wouldn’t find it again at the end of the afternoon, I wouldn’t notice the loss until long after the day had passed.
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