by Akhil Sharma
Eventually, to drive out Gaurji and his family, we had to turn off the water and the electricity.
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER he became pandit, Manshu got married.
Manshu used to go on pilgrimages to Vaishno Devi three times a year. He returned from one of these with a non-Brahmin girl. He came back at night, entering the lane on foot because an auto rickshaw’s rattle would have drawn too much attention. He must have been ashamed because he told no one in advance about the marriage and, even the next day, he did not visit us or his uncle to announce the news.
The girl was Vaishya, her family were merchants who sold firewood and coal, and my father became upset. He sat on a chair in our courtyard, his pajamas rolled up to his knees to sun his legs. “Always in his heart, I sensed there was selfishness,” he said. “Now he’s going to turn the temple into a business.”
I tried to calm him. “I am a Brahmin, and I am as business minded as a Vaishya,” I said.
I went to the temple to see Manshu. I agreed with my father that Manshu had behaved dishonestly, that he should have told us of his intention to marry out of caste before we made him pandit, but I was used to dealing with conflict by then, and I went calmly.
Manshu and I sat in one of the small rooms on the second floor, a low-ceilinged room that was almost a cell.
“I knew you would not be angry,” Manshu said immediately, as if to preempt whatever I might say.
“How can I be angry at your happiness?” I asked. I did not care that Manshu had married out of caste. It felt awkward, though, that he had done this while the knowledge that my family had supported him so strongly was still fresh in people’s minds.
“Meet your sister-in-law,” he said, and called out, “Aruna.”
The woman who came through the door was short and round and fair-skinned. She looked like a Russian nesting doll. I got up and went and touched her feet. She gave a surprised laugh at being treated so formally. “Will you have tea?” she said.
Before I could answer, Manshu spoke. “She has diabetes, just like Ma.” He was smiling and he said this almost proudly. His pride struck me as odd, and being reminded of his mother took me aback. Since I no longer thought of her, it had not occurred to me that she continued to be real to him.
After this, I treated Manshu and his wife the way I would a business contact. I dropped by the temple in the evenings to say hello. I made sure to tell people to use Manshu for prayer ceremonies, and I let him know that I was the one who had made the suggestion.
MY FATHER’S CONJECTURE about Manshu’s plans for the temple turned out to be correct. One day, Manshu came to me. “How can I get on TV?” he asked, sitting on the other side of my desk. He wanted to be one of the yogis or miracle workers who are always on the cable channels. I didn’t know. I said I guessed that you had to have a connection with someone who worked for the cable channels. He asked if I knew anyone like that. I did not.
Manshu then put an ad in The Times of India, a small box at the bottom of one of the middle pages, in which he claimed that praying at his temple might cure cancer. My mother said that he should go to jail. My father did not speak, only glowered.
For a few weeks, people came into the lane with the cut-out ad, asking for the temple.
I visited Manshu one evening soon after the ad had come out and asked him how effective it had been. We were standing in the temple courtyard. “You need a lot of money to make advertising work,” Manshu said. “One or two ads is not enough.” He said this angrily, as if his not having enough money for a lot of ads were some kind of injustice.
He put another ad in The Times of India. This time when people came to the temple courtyard with the cut-out ad, he performed miracles. He had learned some magic tricks and did such things as hold out an open palm before the visitor, close it, and then open it again to reveal blessed ashes.
Although the ads did not get him consistent new worshippers, they did help, in that he began to be asked to perform prayer ceremonies outside the neighborhood. Just the fact that he had been mentioned in the newspaper made him appear famous, and people liked having somebody famous pray for them.
The worst thing that Manshu did, in my eyes as well as in my father’s, was start a small phone business at the end of the lane. Near the mouth of the lane, where it merges into a commercial street, were several shops, each about the size of a closet. One of these belonged to the temple. Originally, there had been an idol there so that people could pray on their way out of the lane to start their day. Gaurji, however, had convinced the temple committee that he needed more money, and his son had begun selling various knickknacks from there. Now Manshu put a phone in the closet and a curtain across it so that boys and girls who wanted to make friendship calls but did not want to use their cell phones could use the booth. It was improper for a pandit to be involved in this kind of business, but even worse was the fact that it was Manshu’s wife who ran it. When a customer was in the booth, Aruna would come out into the lane and chatter with the other stall owners. She was popular with them for her willingness to be ordinary, but many of us felt that she was giving our lane a bad name.
IN THOSE DAYS, Manshu only rarely came to our house. He was busy and had his own family. My father, who did not actually want to see him, began to view his not visiting as disrespectful. It is hard to be around someone who has strong opinions without being influenced by those opinions. I, too, started to feel that Manshu was abusing us. I began to feel that he had tricked us, that he had taken advantage of our family relationship to become the pandit, and then had turned the temple into a business. I continued to see Manshu regularly, though, just as I continue to do business with people who strike me as immoral.
When my father was sixty-seven, the doctors told him that he had cancer. He went into the hospital for an operation, came out, and then had to go in again. He had chemotherapy, which caused his hair and his teeth to fall out. He became frail. His skin turned red, as if it were burned. Sometimes I sponge-bathed my father in his bed at home, patting him with a handkerchief, because a towel was too rough. Even the handkerchief could cause his skin to peel and bleed.
Near the end, he developed a lung infection. When I told him that I had to take him back to the hospital, he started to cry. “Why? What purpose will that serve?” he said, weeping.
I wanted him to keep living, though, so I told him that he was worrying for no reason. Because he was so afraid and lonely in his white room at the hospital, I asked everyone he knew to visit. I went to the temple several times to ask Manshu to visit. He did not come, though his wife did. I began to hate him around then.
I was with my father when he died. He was in his bed, open-eyed and hallucinating. “It’s me. It’s me,” he said, right before he passed.
I took my father to Kanchi, the village by the Ganges where my family and many of the families in our lane perform cremations. As I walked around the pyre before it was lit and put the clarified butter on my father, I felt embarrassed, as if I were doing something wrong by putting butter on the nice silk kurta that he was wearing.
After the cremation, we asked Manshu to come to the house and lead the singing of the prayers. I did this because I wanted my father, even in death, not to be alone. I wanted him to be surrounded by people he knew. People came and sat cross-legged in the courtyard. Manshu sat on cushions in a corner, singing and playing a harmonium. His cell phone was lying on the cushion beside him, and periodically it would ring and he would gesture for us to keep singing while he answered the phone with one hand and played the harmonium with the other.
I was standing in a corner during the ceremony. It was a beautiful day and it was awful that my father was not there to see it. I also felt as though I were failing my father. He deserved more than he was receiving and I was not providing it.
I left the courtyard and went out into the lane. I walked toward the end of the alley. I was the only person there. As I walked, I panted. Halfway to the end of the lane, there was a scooter,
and a cow eating some trash. I could hear the sound of the prayers from our house dying down, and this made me feel worse. I did not want the prayers to end, because once they were over all the rituals would be done and my father would somehow be more dead.
I came back to the courtyard and stood at the entrance. My mother was sitting near Manshu, her head covered with a fold of her white sari, rocking and weeping, surrounded by women, who were caressing her. Manshu looked up at me from his cushions and said, “Won’t somebody say something about the soul that has left?”
I hate this eulogizing thing that has started up in India. To me, it is a Western fashion. Because of all these cable channels, pandits now watch American movies and they want to be seen as doing the latest, most advanced thing.
I remained silent in my corner.
“Will you let him go without saying anything?” Manshu said to the crowd. “Is he so little loved?”
One of my uncles, who was sitting on the floor near where I was standing, tapped my ankle.
I began speaking. “Ji, you all know what a kind man my father was. You know how he helped found orphanages.” As I spoke, I began to sob. I felt angry that this intimate thing had been turned into a display. “You know that when my grandfather was dying, for two years he lay on his cot and my father took such good care of him that he never developed a bedsore.”
I HATED MANSHU for years after that. I felt that he was pathologically selfish, that any decent person would have visited a dying relative, that any decent person would have tried to be humble during the funeral prayers instead of drawing attention to himself.
I stopped dropping by the temple. When we passed each other in the lane, I didn’t speak to him.
Manshu’s wife gave birth to two children, a girl named Priya and then, a few years later, a boy named Rahul. With her diabetes, she should not have had any. The girl was born without problems, but when Aruna gave birth to the boy she went into a coma. My mother went and sat in the temple with the many people from the lane who had come to pray for her.
Aruna woke from her coma but she remained unhealthy afterward. Years passed. Her black hair began to have white in it. She kept going in and out of the hospital. Manshu had bought a white van but he sold it to pay the hospital bills. Aruna still sometimes sat outside their phone booth. Other times they hired a neighborhood boy to oversee it. Eventually, she died.
Manshu was not close to his father’s side of the family and so he asked me to help with the funeral. I had to do everything, from hiring the jeweler to come and snip the nose ring out of Aruna’s nostril, to buying the coconuts and grass used in the prayers. Manshu did not have enough money for a wooden pyre. I arranged the electric cremation. I arranged the jeep that took the body to the crematorium, and I hired a minibus to take people there. All the while I was doing this, I felt stupid for helping someone I hated.
Many people are vile. When I went with Manshu to pick up the ashes, the man who made us sign a register and gave them to us in a white cardboard box said that often people didn’t bother to pick up their relatives’ remains. “That is family love,” he said, his eyes bloodshot, speaking with the bitterness typical of government employees.
Kanchi, where we were taking the ashes, is about a hundred kilometers from Delhi. I wanted to go directly there from the crematorium, but as we were getting into the car Manshu asked if we could first go back to the lane. He said that the children needed to salute their mother. It was a bright, hot day. I sighed loudly, obviously. I wanted to say no, to tell him that I did not have time to waste. Shame kept me from saying this, of course.
All the way back into the city, the traffic was stop-and-go. Manshu sat with the box in a red duffel bag in his lap. We parked opposite the mouth of the lane, with the busy street between us and the lane’s entrance. Priya appeared, holding her brother’s hand, and as she led him across the road, Manshu started sobbing. He got out of the car and left the bag on the seat and told his children to wait while he went and bought some flowers.
He left the car door open. I thought about closing it so that the air conditioning wouldn’t escape. But it felt wrong to separate the children from their mother’s ashes. Manshu returned. He opened the bag’s zipper so that we could see the box. “Say what I say,” he said, and led them in a prayer, asking them to put handfuls of geraniums in the bag.
The drive to Kanchi took hours. At some point, Manshu fell asleep, his chin tipping into his chest. I looked at him as I drove and remembered my father’s funeral ceremony, Manshu sitting in the corner talking on his cell phone. I felt that I was a fool, that I did not have the courage to take revenge.
Kanchi’s primary industry is funerals. You get off the highway and almost immediately there is a parking lot. Along the lanes from the parking lot to the river there are only restaurants and flower shops. (The restaurants are there because for many families it is customary to eat a meal before they go back home.) The village’s temples stand in a line by the river, and between them and the gray-green water is a steeply sloping sandy bank covered with shacks. Outside these, young men, Brahmins, in tight pants and cheap white shirts stand waiting.
Manshu sat on a cot beside one of these shacks, and a young man led him through the prayers. The cardboard box was open before him and there was a plastic bag inside, with ash and flecks of bone, like shards of seashell.
It was all depraved. In the middle of the prayers, the Brahmin turned to me, since I had been the one who selected him, and asked me to give him more money than we had agreed to. I told him that he had no shame. He said the next part of the prayer, so that Manshu could keep going, and then repeated that I needed to give more. We agreed on an amount, and then the prayers were finished.
Manshu and I walked down to the long wooden boats by the river. Several boatmen, short and wiry, came up to us as we reached the water. Again, as Manshu held the bag against his chest, there were nasty negotiations, with the boatmen demanding outrageous amounts. “Tell them that we need to go to the middle of the river,” Manshu whispered. Often the boatmen stroke only a few yards from shore and demand that one pour one’s ashes there. “You tell them,” I wanted to say.
We got on one of the boats and the boatman poled us into the river. In the distance was a bridge, and on the other side were large buildings with chimneys. Manshu sat in the bow of the boat with the red duffel bag in his lap.
It was now mid-afternoon, and for a while there was only the creak of the pole in its lock and the splash of the water. Manshu sat there silently, the bag with its open cardboard box before him.
It was hot, and I was sweating heavily. The boatman pulled his pole out of the water and let us drift.
After a few minutes, he began stroking again so that we would not get caught by the current.
“Manshu, brother,” I said, “you have to do it.”
“She’ll be all alone,” Manshu murmured. “We won’t be here and she’ll be all alone.”
I did not know what to say to this. I was sitting a few feet from him. I got up and crossed the boat. The boat tipped before me and the boatman moved from one side to the other. I took the box from the bag. “Let me help,” I said. Manshu looked up at me, startled. I took out my car keys and used one to tear open the plastic bag. I held the bag out over the river with one hand and shook the ashes into the water. The bag lightened very quickly. Feeling it lighten, I realized that I was doing something wrong. When I had poured my father’s ashes into the river, I had been glad that I was doing this for him, that I was taking care of him in this way. It was not fair to Aruna that someone outside her family was pouring her ashes into the river. It was not fair to Manshu that I was taking away this chance for him to care for his wife.
Once the bag was empty, I dipped it into the river and drained it so that all the ashes were gone. I flung the bag into the water. I threw the box also and the government form that said that the ashes were human remains.
NEAR KANCHI IS A VILLAGE famous for the deities that
craftsmen there make out of clay and straw. They advertise their wares by standing the statues along the side of the road. We drove back to Delhi past half a mile of gods. In the car, holding the steering wheel, I could still feel the bag lightening in my hands. Not knowing what to say about the terrible thing I had done, I spoke to Manshu about the future. “You have to think of Priya and Rahul. They only have you now.”
I parked the car by the mouth of our lane and phoned my mother and waited. After a few minutes, women began to appear at the entrance of the lane, carrying buckets. It is a ritual in our families that after putting someone in the Ganges, we bathe before we reenter the lane. Manshu and I got out of the car and took off our shoes and shirts. It was strange to feel the road beneath our bare feet and the hot polluted wind against our bellies. Then we tied towels around our waists and took off our pants and underwear. Scooters and bicycles stopped behind us and then slowly went around.
Before bathing myself, I bathed Manshu. I poured water on his head and then on his neck and back. I kneaded his fat shoulders. I rubbed his back with soap, his skin warm and the sun on my hands. I knelt down beside him and washed his legs and feet.
IF YOU SING LIKE THAT FOR ME
Late one June afternoon, seven months after my wedding, I woke from a short, deep sleep, in love with my husband. I did not know then, lying in bed and looking out the window at the line of gray clouds, that my love would last only a few hours and that I would never again care for Rajinder with the same urgency—never again in the five homes we would share and through the two daughters and one son we would also share, though unevenly and with great bitterness. I did not know this then, suddenly awake and only twenty-six, with a husband not much older, nor did I know that the memory of the coming hours would periodically overwhelm me throughout my life.
We were living in a small flat on the roof of a three-story house in Defense Colony, in New Delhi. Rajinder had signed the lease a week before our wedding. Two days after we married, he took me to the flat. I had thought I would be frightened entering my new home for the first time, but I was not. I felt very still that morning, watching Rajinder in his gray sweater bend over and open the padlock. Although it was cold, I wore only a pink silk sari and blouse, because I knew that my thick eyebrows, broad nose, and thin lips made me homely, and to win his love I must try especially hard to be appealing, even though I did not want to be.
