In the Convent of Little Flowers
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More praise for Indu Sundaresan and
IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS
“Indu Sundaresan guides us through a culture in transition…. The characters are unforgettable…. Sundaresan’s skill with language opens the door to India as well as the human heart.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University
“India, land of fragrances and colors! Indu Sundaresan shows us these two qualities in a smart way.”
—Shahrnush Parsipur, author of Touba and the Meaning of Night
THE SPLENDOR OF SILENCE
“Sundaresan unfolds her bittersweet story in flashbacks that are full of sharply drawn details and adroit dialogue. It’s a riveting read.”
—Seattle Times
“A sprawling story of forbidden love.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A colorful, engrossing read.”
—Library Journal
“Indu Sundaresan expertly blends together history, memorable characters, and the sights, colors, and smells of India to create a hugely compelling novel. It is, quite literally, a feast for the senses.”
—David Davidar, internationally bestselling author of The Solitude of Emperors
“Finely researched and full of evocative details, this sweeping tale of intrigue brings to life a fascinating era with richly drawn characters and a story that is engrossing, deep, and surprising.”
—Samina Ali, author of Madras on Rainy Days
These titles are also available as eBooks
ALSO BY INDU SUNDARESAN
The Splendor of Silence
The Twentieth Wife
The Feast of Roses
In the Convent of Little Flowers
INDU SUNDARESAN
Washington Square Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Indu Sundaresan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition September 2009
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“Shelter of Rain” was first published in The Vincent Brothers Review (2000). “Bedside Dreams” was published in India Currents (November 2004) and Verve magazine (India, July–August 2005). “The Faithful Wife” was first published in The Pen and the Key: 50th Anniversary Anthology of Pacific Northwest Writers (2005).
Designed by Jill Putorti
Manufactured in the United States of America
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the hardcover is available.
ISBN 978-1-4165-8610-4 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4165-8618-0 (ebook)
For Sitara
Who lights up my life
In the Convent of Little Flowers
Shelter of Rain
In my childhood
Deep equator skies
Whitened by an unforgiving sun
I stand now
Under the shelter of rain
I arrive at SeaTac airport early, two hours ahead of time. The terminal is deserted now, with yawning, shiny seats. After I sit, a little girl and her mother come to settle across from me, although empty places stretch to the far corner and, I think, around. The girl carries a sand bucket, which she sets down on the well-trodden carpet. Then, with a spade, she scoops imaginary sand in and out of the bucket. I watch the child’s face, her cheeks puffed in whistleless concentration, her hair cut in little-girl bangs, her arms sturdy in a summer frock’s sleeves. I was once like this girl—but also so different. I played in the red earth under the shade of a banyan tree, the mud coloring my palms for weeks. I had forgotten those days. But the letter came out of nowhere, with no warning, to remind me.
As I shift in my seat, the letter crackles against my leg. I take it out of my jeans pocket and smooth it over a knee. The paper is rough, unfinished, torn out of a child’s handwriting practice notebook; there are sets of four lines throughout the page, the top and bottom ones red, the inner two blue. It has been so long, yet I remember the exhortations to fit capital letters between the red lines and small letters between the blue. That was how, all those years ago, I learned to write. I look again at the paper, and the blue ink swarming over the page swims into a haze.
Since the letter came a month ago, I have thought of nothing else. An envelope blue as my mother Diana’s gaze lay on the kitchen counter for that time. In it, looped in an old, educated hand, words blurring before my now often-tired eyes, there is the story of another mother. The letter says she gave birth to me, not Diana. She lies sick in her house on Chinglepet street in Chennai.
A map of India has taken up permanent residence on the dining table at home. I could see the map through the corner of my eye no matter what room I was in. I knew I came from that country, twenty-three years ago, but I had not known from where. The letter told me where. It came from the Convent of Little Flowers in Chennai.
We have always had beautiful young girls here. Girls whose mothers could not keep them, dear Padmini. I hope that is still your name. It means the lotus flower. All our little girls have been named thus, after flowers. You came to us with that name. Your mother gave you the name. I am sure you have grown up to be as beautiful as the serene lotus in a village pond.
Tears come each time I read those lines. How dare she— Sister Mary Theresa—write me after so many years? I was six when Tom and Diana Merrick took me from the Convent of Little Flowers. They have never been back to India since. And neither have I. Now I am no longer that child who left.
There is a faded black-and-white picture in one of Mom’s photo albums. Diana, I mean, not the woman on Chinglepet street. In it I stand with an expression so scared, so beaten, I cannot recognize myself. The picture was taken two weeks before I left India. My feet are bare, my hair in a braid swings over one skinny shoulder, a new white frock sprayed with purple flowers billows over my knees. I remember I hated the day of the year when the frocks came. I do not look at that picture very often. And yet this Sister Mary Theresa, Mother Superior, talks of it and brings back the sun-drenched mud courtyard in the shadow of the Gemini bridge.
Your mother would send frocks for you on every birthday. Somehow, she always knew the right size. For your sixth birthday it was a sleeveless white frock printed with purple lilacs. Have you seen a lilac blossom, Padmini? Your mother liked flowers. Believe me, the dress each year was more than she could afford to do then. Her circumstances had changed, questions would have been asked, but she was brave, she always remembered.
I volunteered to go on call every week after the letter came. My colleagues stared at me in disbelief at first, then escaped thankfully to their suntan lotions and backyards. But I did not care. If I was going t
o stay awake anyway through the July nights, I might as well keep my mind numbingly occupied. The ER at Harborview is not the place for dreaming of old memories, just brief stunning reflections of how stupid people can get when it comes to injuring themselves. I spent eight hours in surgery one memorable day trying to stitch a twenty-three-year-old man’s hand back to his forearm while across the table from me, the ophthalmologist on call worked in tandem on his blown-out right eye. He had tried to pick up a lit cherry bomb.
Yet for me, there was always time to think of the letter. My mother always remembered, Mary Theresa says. But she never remembered to visit. Did she ever come? Did I know her when she came? Or did she just stand on the whitewashed verandah and watch me play under the shade of the many-armed banyan in the courtyard?
That memory comes back too. One I do not want. One I try to hold away. But once dredged up, it is here to stay. Why did that letter come? Damn Sister Mary Interfering Theresa. I suddenly remember her too. Short—even to a child she seemed so—with kind black eyes behind thick glasses. Soda Booddies, we used to call them. Soda bottle glasses, disfigured by thickness. Mary Theresa had a plump face, spotted by an unrepentant and errant not-yet-eradicated smallpox. Yet her starched white wimple and her wide smile and her gentle hands that never held the neem tree–child-beating branch made us oblivious to it. But we talked under that banyan. She must have joined the convent because no man would marry her. A smallpox-pitted face is not exactly marriage market material. She was also dark. Even as six-year-olds we knew those things. What a pity, we would think, she would have made a wonderful mother. And we would turn yearning glances to the verandah when she appeared, each of us thinking, make me your child, don’t be mother to everyone.
Sometimes Mary Theresa would walk down the verandah doing her day’s work. Sometimes—very often, actually— she would stand with a woman or a man from the outside and point toward our group, or another one. We were far enough away not to know whom she was pointing at. But we knew that man or woman was either one of our parents or a relative come to see us, or, as we often hoped, someone who would make us theirs. It would be a bizarre game for us, watching these people—perhaps related to us by blood, perhaps judging us as their future children—trying to guess whom they belonged to. Sister Mary says my mother always remembered. Did she also come to stand on that verandah? Which one was she?
It never bothered me then. I wonder why it bothers me now. No one has pointed at me for twenty-three years from across a dusty courtyard.
I came away from that hot city to rainy green Seattle. Tom and Diana lived in a golden western sun–lit condo on Queen Anne Hill. Everything about those three words excited me. Queen. I had seen pictures of one. Anne. The name of a queen. And hill. I had not seen a hill before. Chennai, Mary Theresa tells me now, is flat. I had not seen mountains feathered with wayward snow on October evenings. I had not seen the sun set behind the Olympics or the ferry making its lone streaking way through the calm Puget Sound. Or Mount Rainier, glorious godly Mount Rainier, suddenly appearing on the horizon. For months, I knelt before the windows of our home (how easily the our comes now) and watched the sun set each day. I remember Dad, shattered in Vietnam—not from bodily harm—yelling out at night and Mom soothing, crooning, holding him in her arms, lit by the streetlight outside the windows. I would stand at the door to their room and watch until they called me to their bed to lie between them. Until then I had only seen little flowers cry at night, not grown men.
My life since has been peppered by Seattle rain. Rain in the winter—hardly had that in Chennai—rain in the spring, and summer and fall. Chennai is very close to the equator. It must be hot. I remember now it is hot. Is that why I love the rain?
I did not choose this life. I did not even choose to be born, let alone to this nameless woman in the southeast corner of India. I did not choose to be given away, or be taken by the sunny blond couple who stood on the verandah one day and, I think, pointed at me. But they took me. I came here. I belong no more to Chinglepet street.
I don’t think I have ever realized I am different. I cannot say not American, because what really is American? But I look into the mirror more often now and I see that dark skin. To me it seems as dark as Sister Mary Theresa’s, yet I am married where she took the veil for hers. Autre temps, autre moeurs. Sister Bloody Mary Theresa. I am so angry I will not even now allow her the luxury of having chosen then a life for the love of her religion, for the love of her God, or even, for the love of her work. It must be because somebody rejected her. Or she would not be a nun at the Convent of Little Flowers. And I would not have met her, and she would not have now written me the letter.
Do you remember much of us, dear Padmini? The convent was built in the shadow of the Gemini Flyover, the only road bridge in all of Chennai then, and a big landmark for giving directions. I have seen pictures of America. There are many many such flyovers there. Some even in the shape of clover leaves. But this you must know, these you must have seen. I’m afraid nothing much grows even now in our courtyard. It is still the same, a bare maidan, dusty when the rains do not come; but under the banyan it is shady. The tree has added a few more arms to the ground since you were last here. Every day I stand on the verandah and watch the children play under its shade and thank God it is still there. Somehow, it finds the strength to survive year after year of drought as the trees and saplings around the city wilt and die. It has been five years since an adequate rain has visited Chennai.
The lowering skies have now completely engulfed the Cascades outside the floor-to-ceiling glass of the airport. I want to send them westward, across the vast Pacific Ocean, flying over Hawaii, over Hong Kong and Singapore and China, sweeping down the Bay of Bengal to hover over the Gemini Flyover. We have enough rain here. The little flowers could do with some of ours. When she writes like this, in her singsong talking voice, I can remember her even more.
The Merricks came one rain-threatening day to stand on the verandah to choose me. Later Mom would say they brought the rain from Seattle. I firmly believe it was me they wanted among all others. Mom said so, night after night when I asked her. I could barely speak English when I came here, just a few words. It was a long plane ride from Chennai to Seattle. I sat between them in the white frock I hated. They had brought jeans for me, but only boys wore pants; why would I all of a sudden? Besides, the frock was the only thing then that was mine. Under it I wore a baggy pair of Mom’s stockings, pooling around my ankles in frothy beige, knotted and pinned at my waist. One of Dad’s sweaters flopped over my shoulders down to my knees. Somehow, in giving me their clothes, they made me theirs. They patted me a lot during that flight, not knowing what to say. They would pat me on the head, on the shoulders, on the knees, all accompanied by a stream of gibberish. English, I found out later. I dutifully nodded my head and chewed on unforgiving limp lettuce and candy bars. I had not tasted chocolate till then. I still like it. I guess the flight was not so bad after all.
School was hard. At the Convent of Little Flowers we had our classes in a haphazard fashion. It depended on how free Sister Mary was during the day. She taught us math and English (not very well, obviously). A schoolmaster came in for Tamil. Strangely, I remember him very well. He was a handsome man, with a commanding movie-star mustache and a deep male voice. At the Convent of Little Flowers, we were all either little flowers or older women—teachers and sweepers and clerks. The schoolmaster was a welcome distraction, despite his polio-affected limp that made him swing to one side as he walked. As we forgot Sister Mary’s smallpox face, we forgot the schoolmaster’s polio walk. With the precocity of children left to themselves most of the day, we made up happy endings for Sister Mary and the schoolmaster. It did not matter that one was a nun and the other married.
For my first day at Coe Elementary, sometime in mid-October, Dad took the morning off from work and the three of us walked down the road together to school. They insisted upon holding my hands. I let them. It was a nice feeling. The first
person we met was Mrs. Haley, my class teacher, with her triangular glasses and her formfitting sweater dress and her short cropped hair artfully arranged in curls around her head. I asked her, my English still not strong, if she was married. She was. She was most unlike Sister Mary. Then I thought it was the glasses that did it. It was the glasses anyway that made me unclench my hand from Dad’s large one and willingly put it in hers, and for many hours in the next few months I would stare at Mrs. Haley’s pretty face in class. She was never as pretty as Mom, though.
That first day she took me into class, to the very front, and said, “Class, this is Padmini Merrick. Everyone, please welcome Padmini to the class.” The class promptly chorused back, “Welcome, Pud-mi-ni.” There was one little boy in front who yelled out the loudest, Mike. Even then I thought him quite handsome with his brown hair and hazel eyes and two front teeth knocked out in a schoolyard brawl. For many months after that Mike would fight for me when someone teased me about my accent, or the English I learned painfully at first and then rapidly, or for sitting quietly in the schoolyard in May as the plum and peach trees burst into wondrous pink and white blossoms. The banyan seemed to be always green; I don’t remember flowers in the Convent of Little Flowers. A week ago Mike told me what he thought when he first saw me standing in front of the class.
We were sitting on the park benches on Pier 66 a few minutes before sunset. It had been a warm day and there were people all around us, laughing and talking and feeding the persistent gulls. “You were wearing a red sweater and black jeans,” Mike said. I was. Funny he would remember that; he never seems to notice what I wear now. “But,” he continued, “I mostly see in my mind a thin face with deep black eyes, huge and frightened. Your hair was long and braided down your back to the waist. You cut it in fourth grade, I remember that too.”