“We used to do this for your mother to appease her when she wanted to sleep on the roof with her brother and his friends,” Ammamma said.
“I wish there was a flat roof for sleeping on this house,” 1 said. “I would sleep out there.”
“That’s why I’m glad there isn’t one,” Ammamma said. “I hope you can be back outside soon. I know it’s hard for you to be in here like this.”
“The stitches come out in two more days. 1 can’t wait,” I said.
Ammamma said, “And this weekend, Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle come back. And everything will be the way it was.”
“At least we can think about other things and forget all this,” I said.
“Yes,” my grandmother said, picking up the nets to get out. She repeated softly, not resentfully, but with wistfulness, “At least you can think about other things.”
IN THE MORNING when I woke up, my grandmother was tiptoeing around my bed. She had the pickle jar with her, she was collecting the fireflies, some dead, some comatose in sleep, to take away.
“1 didn’t want you to wake up and see them here, I find them depressing in the morning. They don’t have any place in the day,” she said, plucking one off the net near my head.
“I feel aches all over from lying down all the time,” I said, sitting up in bed.
Ammamma led me to a chair. She said, “Why don’t we try some dance steps?”
Dance steps? I could still hardly walk around the house.
“You can do it from the chair. It’s good for stretching,” Ammamma said.
She opened the standing armoire. The side that had been cleared out for me at the beginning of the summer now held my clothes, my medication, my books. Ammamma rummaged through her side and found in the back of a lower shelf what she was looking for. She pulled out a hand-pumped harmonium, and began to play.
I danced whatever I remembered, from the edge of my chair. I stretched my arms above my head, to the right, to the left, forming lotus leaves, holding tea lights, hiding behind peacock feathers. I bent my legs at the knees and pounded out the steps on the floor, my feet slapping the floor loudly, echoing through the room. She played the harmonium and kept time. We counted together, “one-two-three, one-two-three, ONE-TWO. Thid-thid-they, thid-thid-they, THID-THEY. Thid-they, thid-they, thid-they, THID-THEY.”
In the afternoon, we worked on my summer reading, Huckleberry Finn. Ammamma read me chapter eleven, where Huck discovered that men were coming to look for the runaway slave, Jim. Huck told Jim to hurry, “they’re after US,” even though they were only after Jim. I told Ammamma to read this part slowly, and I told her which sentences to underline in the book. I was going to use it as an example of Huck allying with the runaway slave who has broken with society, even though it meant jeopardizing his own safety. I had to write a paper on the topic: “Discuss Huck Finn’s choice between the freedom of the raft and the restriction of the society on the shore.” It had to be done before the first day of school.
It was Thursday, the day the stitches were to come out. I didn’t even want breakfast, I wanted to go to the infirmary as soon as I woke up.
Ammamma coaxed me to drink tea and sit at the table with her. “The doctor won’t be there this early, Maya. Ram is also repairing the tire, so even our car is not ready. Wait an hour or two and then we’ll go.”
Dr. Murugan was still saying his morning shlokas when we arrived, so we waited with the nurse. We sat in his office, and I leafed through one of his dusty medical books, shaking out the dead spiders to look at the color plates of the brain. His home adjoined the infirmary, and the chickens that his wife kept in their backyard were making loud fighting sounds.
Dr. Murugan came into his office, still buttoning his blue bush shirt. He pulled a white coat over himself, and moved his glasses down from the top of his head to sit far out on the tip of his nose.
There was another nurse, but no sight of the two that I had seen previously. She knew the routine: steel tray, steel instruments, and collecting the bits of thread onto the tray as the doctor worked. I could feel him maneuvering on top of my head, and I thought that I could even feel the stiches being undone, the threads coming loose, it felt like floss being moved between two tight teeth. It had to be wedged slowly through the tight part, and the rest was easy. The bandages that the doctor had stripped away lay in my lap, they seemed wholly foreign to me, yellowed from my betadyne, browned from my blood. I closed my eyes.
I opened them and the nurse was standing there with a mirror.
Dr. Murugan was washing his hands as he talked to me, “Don’t worry, child, the hair will grow back. Not right where the scar is, but all around it. And until then, you can use hairpins to pin your hair over it. You can wash your hair but be very careful—have your grandmother help you. Keep the splints on your arm for another two weeks and then we’ll see.”
In the mirror, I saw a small, pale clearing at the top right side of my head. 1 touched it tentatively, and there were raised scars in the center of the clearing. 1 closed my eyes.
WE WERE HOME. Vasani carried hot bathwater to my bathroom. Ammamma said, “Look what Ram brought you.” He had brought five different kinds of shampoo from the city, afraid of choosing the wrong one. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“You pick,” 1 said. Ammamma picked one and put it on the window ledge in the bathroom.
She filled a bucket with cold water, and then poured hot and cold water together in a third bucket. She swirled the water inside the bucket to mix the water from bottom to top, hot and cold melding into warm.
“Are you ready?” she said. I took the robe off, keeping my arm stiffly in place. I remembered Ammamma giving me baths when I was little, I would clutch her sari-covered leg at the knee. I would reach out and try to grab her gold wedding necklace, which would be fluttering just out of reach as she bent to pour water over me. She would keep a hand as a brim over my forehead, to keep the soap from my eyes. Her sari would be soggy and bedraggled by the end.
Now I was taller than she was, by two inches. 1 sat on the bench, and she poured water over me. She kept a hand as a brim over my forehead, to keep the soap from my eyes. I felt a shiver travel over my spine, my arms bristling with goosepimples, my breasts rising up under her touch. She moved quickly, smoothly, soaping, then rinsing, shampooing, then rinsing. She worked her fingers through my hair, massaging gently, pouring pitchers of water at a slant to fall away from my face. And then, wrapping a thorthu deftly around me, avoiding my limp right arm, she applied another towel to my hair, not rubbing, but sponging, pressing lightly.
Afterward, I sat on my bed, and held a mirror up as she combed my hair. We parted the hair on the side, and clipped it over the pale white empty patch. It looked unnatural, lopsided.
“Let’s try something,” Ammamma said. Rather than pushing hair from one side over to the other, she pulled all the hair upwards into a ponytail on the top of my head. It did cover the white spot more naturally. But because my hair was short, there was no nice ponytail at the end, just a true pig’s tail, a stubby, bumpy knot of a tail. Ammamma opened and closed different drawers in her dresser, and then she came back to the bed with one of her British cookie tins. She opened it, and inside was red tissue paper, and inside that was a coil of hair.
“Your mother’s hair,” Ammamma said. “Extensions were the fashion when she was your age.”
She undid the ponytail and braided my mother’s hair into mine, starting at the nape of my neck. She braided it halfway and swept up the end into a ponytail, and rubberbanded it in place. A sleek shiny ponytail nodded at me in the mirror when I moved my head.
“I’ve never worn fake hair before,” I said. “But it does look better than without it.”
“In another two weeks, the hair will grow back enough to cover the whiteness, then it won’t be that noticeable. But for now, if you want, we can do your hair up like this, it’s easy.”
A new thought occurred to me. “Maybe we don’t have to te
ll Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle this all happened. They’ll make such a fuss, and their friends and everyone will ask about it.”
“It’s impossible not to tell them—the servants know, and everyone at the infirmary, and probably some people at the factory, fust tell what happened, and how you’ve been taken care of.”
I took Ammamma’s hand from my hair where she was still smoothing the ponytail, wrapping my fingers over her soft wrinkled hands, feeling the skin and the bone of her hand as distinctly discrete things. Her eyes looked tired and shadowed; she had not slept through a whole night since I’d been injured. I felt sleepy from the exertions at the infirmary, the bath. I drew Ammamma down next to me on my bed, and we slept the afternoon away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harvest
THE HOUSE WAS full of sound again once Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle returned from Bombay. Sanjay uncle was frustrated with the factory mechanics whom he’d summoned to repair the phone line to the house. He asked us how long it had been out of order, and we shrugged. At least the last two weeks, we weren’t sure—we hadn’t needed to phone anyone. Reema auntie wanted the furniture in the drawing room rearranged to make space for the inlaid marble table she had bought from a Bombay antiques dealer. Neighbors came to ask for news of Bombay movies and restaurants and sari emporiums.
Ammamma and I sat in our room and made faces at each other. We’d both been put to bed the second Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle spotted my artfully arranged hair and found out what had happened. Neither of us felt like we needed to be in bed, but we took our punishment quietly. They were furious that we hadn’t called them in Bombay. They would have come home earlier, sent friends and company people to look in on us, and consulted all their doctors in Coimbatore.
Ammamma bore the brunt of both their reproaches and their concern. I looked healthy enough now, sounded good-humored about my injury; I was surely getting better. But Ammamma should have been responsible and called them, and she should have arranged full-time help to take care of me, a nurse or an ayah or both, rather than doing it herself. They were worried that she looked tired, that she hadn’t been eating properly, that she hadn’t even reordered some of her medicines when she had run out. As soon as the phones were fixed, they were calling their doctors in Coimbatore to come up the mountain to look at both of us.
By the second day of their return, I was restless. Ammamma and I weren’t allowed anywhere near the kitchen, nor in the drawing room with the visitors, and certainly not outside where we couldn’t be watched over. They didn’t want us to exert ourselves or have undue excitement. Even our food had no excitement, just rice and yogurt and dal, even though Ammamma in the days just before their return had let me graduate to eating the vegetable curries we cooked together.
I tossed my book aside and disentangled myself from the bedcovers. “Shall I go protest our confinement?” I said to Ammamma.
“I don’t know if it will do much good,” she said, looking at me over her book.
“The doctors aren’t coming for another two days and we can’t just lie here until then,” I said. “We can at least try to campaign for more rights.”
“You go then, you’ll be more effective. I’m in more trouble than you are,” she said, smiling.
I slipped my feet into my sandals, saluted her, and walked down the hall toward my aunt and uncle’s bedroom.
They weren’t there, but I heard voices in the drawing room. As I crossed the dining room to join them, I caught a glimpse of my aunt on a sofa, with blue letter paper strewn across her lap. 1 stopped in my tracks in the dining room, hearing my aunt crying. I stood outside their view, listening.
“Reema, she’ll manage, she will. She is growing up, and she will learn how to be on her own.”
“Sanjay, I can’t bear leaving her there with those children. They sound cruel and awful. She’s the first one to get her period, she’s still a child. She writes that they taunt her, and say that she is polluted and dirty,” my aunt covered her face with her hands. “They’re calling our daughter dirty, Sanjay.”
My uncle reached out to her on the sofa. “Reema, what can we do? She has to go to school, and it’s a good school. Do you want me to call the headmistress and say something?”
“Don’t call. If she reprimands any of the children, they’ll take it out on Brindha.”
“We’ll go see her, in three more weeks is the Visiting Weekend. I’ve booked the company bungalow, and we’ll have a nice stay.”
“I don’t want to wait three weeks. She didn’t even know what was happening to her. I never thought to tell her—ten is so early.”
“She was making friends, wasn’t she, this year? That letter we got before we went to Bombay said she was trying to choose between two girls for who would be her new best friend.”
“But these letters that came while we were away, she sounds lonely. And the letters 1 wrote her from Bombay were about stupid films and parties. I couldn’t even write her about these things she’s upset about. I didn’t even know.”
“It’s not your fault, Reema. These things happen. You can’t sit here like you did when she first went to boarding last year, you can’t spend the whole day waiting for the boy to bring the mail. That’s not the answer.”
“Then what’s the answer? Maybe I’ll go stay at my parents’ house in Palgaat, and she can go to school there.”
“Then what will I do? I have to stay on here. This job is important. In a few years, I have to think about sending Brindha to university, even abroad if necessary. And look at how my mother is, her health isn’t so good—I can see a difference even in this short time we’ve been away. What if she needs to go to hospital or what if my sister wants me to send Amma to an American hospital? I have to think of these things. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” My aunt breathed heavily, her tears coming under control. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Look here in this letter, she doesn’t sound so sad. Did you read this one? She’s talking about the state education minister coming to the school assembly, and she was asked to do a recitation. She says the minister gave her a sandalwood letter opener.”
“Yes, I read that,” my aunt said.
“And see here, she is helping in a celebration of Onam. Reema, read this part, from here.”
My aunt cleared her throat, reading. “She says ‘the other Malayali girls here are “too Mallu” to be good actresses, so I am the only Malayali taking part. The other girls don’t even know what Onam is but they are happy for any excuse for a party. I am going to play King Mahabali, and my Punjabi friend, Jyothi, is going to play God. I think Mahabali is a better role because I get to wear a lot of makeup and gold and silver robes, and God is only wearing a cotton kurta.’”
“See, she is getting through. I know the children can be cruel, but they seem to have short memories.”
“Brindha doesn’t have a short memory,” Reema auntie said.
“Yes, but learning to live with insults, that’s part of school.”
“Not for me. It wasn’t like that at my school,” Reema auntie said.
Sanjay uncle said, “Then you were lucky. They were merciless to my sister—they said she would never marry because she was too busy studying and she didn’t even know how to wear a sari properly or cook a payasam. There’s always something.”
“What should we do about Onam? I don’t feel like celebrating since Brindha’s not here. “
“Yes, but Maya is here, and for us too, we have to have a full life, Reema, just like we tell Brindha to have at school.”
“They wanted me to run the Onam festival at the club, but I haven’t given an answer yet.”
“Tell them you will. We’ll have a big show of it—it will be good for you.”
I crept silently back down the hall to my room. Ammamma looked over at me as I slipped into bed.
“No success?” she said.
I shook my head no.
“That’s okay, I’m
a bit tired, anyway. I hope the doctors will soon release you from captivity.” Ammamma looked quite settled in her bed. Her thin gray hair was unpinned and smoothed out on the pillow behind her head. There was another pillow under her lower back so she could sit up at a slight incline to read, and another pillow under her knees, which she’d rubbed with herbal ointment to ease the arthritic aches. When I had been three or four, Ammamma used to have me walk on her legs and lower back to relieve her aches. Walking on uneven territory like that, 1 would slip and stumble in her sari folds and fall giggling on top of her.
The doctors came, one for me, one for Ammamma. They were both dour-faced, but they admitted we couldn’t stay in bed forever. They told both of us to take bed rest whenever we felt the least bit tired. The doctor for Ammamma brought loads of pills for her, big, hard-to-swallow ones in pastel colors. He laid them out on a magazine cover and reminded her what each one was for and how many times a day to take them. Ammamma dumped the whole collection of jewels in her lap, and wrapped each color of pills in separate pieces of brown paper, and then tucked them snugly into the British biscuit tins where they belonged.
Reema auntie said to my doctor, “I am chairing an Onam festival at our club, and I was thinking Maya might take part if it’s not too much for her.”
The doctor said, “A doctor doesn’t like to say his patients know more than he does, but in a situation like this, only she knows what goes on inside her head. The external wound is healing correctly, so it’s more a matter of headaches, continued dizziness. Maya’s the best judge of what she can manage.”
Repacking his medical bag, Ammamma’s doctor said, “So will you be having grand Onam celebrations this year in the hills?”
“I don’t know about grand,” my aunt said. “But you must come join us if you can.”
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