In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  Meha’s arms darkened to the sleeves of her blouse. Her sari hiked up about her knees, the pallu wrapped around her thick black hair, she bent over the field each day. She would clutch a rice shoot and plunge her hand into the watery earth. Her fingers dug deep through the soil, leaving a single, green rice sapling standing in their place. Then came long days of weeding the field, and watching it grow strong and lush. Toward September, thick golden rice buds encrusted the ends of the stalks.

  There were lazy days too. A raised platform was built in the field; and here, under a cloth canopy to shield them from the heat, Meha and Chandar would lie and talk. Every now and then, they would lift their heads to yell at errant sparrows picking at their precious rice. They were human scarecrows. And here, when the sun hung in glaring shimmers around the ripening rice, Bikaner was conceived. They had little else to do, and it was early days yet in their marriage.

  The questions, the snickers, the looks in the village stopped as Meha’s stomach grew. Nine months later, one sweltering June afternoon, Meha dragged herself to the shelter of a copper pod tree and gave birth to her son.

  Meha looks down at the concrete pavement below. The flats ring this courtyard, their balconies fronting one another. Mrs. Patel left her bra out as usual on the clothesline, confident no one would steal it fourteen stories up from the ground. It is taking so long, this journey of retrospection. It is taking so long that there is even time to remember incidents from her childhood. Fifty-five years ago. The memories come clear as water, as though they happened yesterday. On her graying head, Meha can feel the pull of fingers as her mother plaited her hair each morning.

  * * *

  And during that daily ritual her mother told her stories of strong women. Of the goddess Parvati who, when she was bored and needed a distraction, made Lord Ganesha from within herself, without her husband or any other man. Who turned into Kali when her husband came home from the war and found a “son” guarding the door to his palace; a son he did not know existed, a son whom he killed, angering his powerful wife. Kali, almost demented in her grief, started wrecking the world and no one could stop her, not even her husband, Lord Shiva. So the gods appeased her by giving back life to Ganesha with a new elephant head to replace the one his father had cut off. And so Meha learned the power of a mother.

  Her maternal instincts were carefully cultivated in an ancient society attuned to motherhood. The stories told her that even husbands were not important. Not dispensable, but not really important. The child was everything. She did all that was required of her. But when Bikaner came, there was only a gap where nature should have fostered love.

  One second.

  From the beginning he was a demanding child, greedily gulping at her breast, screaming if not attended to. She had looked at him in astonishment; had her body made this little thing? But no matter what she thought, the lessons of her childhood were well learned. It was her duty, her responsibility. So she cooed to him, held him against her, never denied him her breast, indulged him. Sometimes she did this because it was expected of her, sometimes because after all he was the result of her love for Chandar.

  But Chandar also looked at him with surprise. Oh, he patted him to sleep when he cried at night (even though this was supposed to be woman’s work), but in him was the same void that Meha felt. They glanced at each other thoughtfully during those first months after Bikaner’s birth, both knowing they had had him because the village wanted them to, both also aware that life would not have been intolerable if the child were not there. They never talked about it, they just knew.

  Beside her Meha can see Chandar and wants to reach out to touch his forehead. She wants to pull him to her for a kiss. Like when they were young and he would lie against her, his head tucked under her chin, listening to the steady beat of her heart. When she puts out her hand, she comes up with only air. He is too far away, but as though he understands her need, he looks at her and smiles. For Meha that is enough.

  Almost as if he sensed their distance, Bikaner grew more demanding as the years passed. They tried very hard to love him. But he was a cruel child, given to destroying sparrows’ nests, using a slingshot on squirrels. All children were cruel, Meha thought. They did things heedless of consequences. Then one day she came upon him beating a stray monkey.

  The monkeys haunted the Hanuman temple’s compound in the village, begging for bananas and coconut wedges from the pilgrims. They swarmed over the branches of a banyan tree, their bodies a mass of silver-gray fur, their eyes bright and ringed in black. Every now and then, a child would fall from its mother’s grip as she swung through the tree, only to scramble up the trunk on shaky limbs. One of these, Bikaner, then only five, had brought home. He had tied its hands together with a piece of twine and weighted the other end with a large rock. The monkey could move around, but only in tight little circles around the rock. The family was at the fields that afternoon and Meha had returned home to get water for them. The monkey’s squeals drew her to the courtyard. There she saw Bikaner lift his stick and bring it down on the little animal over and over again. When she arrived, it was too bloody and broken to even whimper, too far gone to be saved. It just lay on the ground, hands up over its eyes to cover its face, humanlike in its gestures. She pulled a frenzied Bikaner away from the monkey, yanked the stick from him, and cleaned the blood off his face, hands, and clothes. Then she slapped him, hard, leaving the imprint of her fingers on his face. She could not bring herself to say anything to Bikaner; speech was impossible, she just slapped him and walked away, her heart exploding in her chest.

  That night, Chandar buried the monkey in the fields behind the hut. They told no one of the incident; the in-laws never knew. Chandar came back from the fields and leaned his spade against the mud wall of the courtyard. Meha glanced at him and he nodded. Then he washed his hands and sat down near the men of the family to smoke a hand-rolled beedi. They stared at each other for a long time that night, the squeals of children, the low murmur of women’s voices, and the harsher sounds of men’s laughter melting away. They were no longer newlyweds; it was not their turn to sleep in the room, so they slept outside in the courtyard with everyone else. There had been no time to talk. So they had not talked.

  That night, and for many nights that followed, Bikaner had stayed up wailing, keeping the whole family at the edge of sleep. Meha tried to comfort him, but she was too disgusted, too ashamed of this child she had borne. When they went to the temple, Bikaner would stay under the banyan, watching the chattering monkeys with a stolid, unwavering gaze. He would stare at the little monkeys until Meha pulled him away.

  And so time had passed. They had both ignored Bikaner’s cruelty. It seemed easier to do so as any alternative was immensely frightening. Confront it, they could not. What to say to a five-year-old child? How to say it? Meha looks at Chandar now, wondering if there is time to remind him of that incident. It has lain gathering cobwebs in their minds. Yet now, dusted off and held to her gaze again, Meha realizes that they should have seen that this predicament too would eventually have come. They should never have forgotten the monkey’s death. They should have done something about the monkey’s death.

  One year, not long after that, the rains failed. The irrigation canals dried up as the well emptied, water lying low in its depths. Meha threw stones down the well and listened for a long time before they hit the bottom. The five hard-worked acres lay dry and fractured. The next year it rained, but barely enough to wet the scorch ed earth. They dipped into their reserves of rice and wheat. The huge grain silo in the main room of the hut rang hollow as the children played inside it. The four large copper pod trees outside the hut that sheltered the family from the sun now played host to vultures sitting solemnly on the lower branches, eyeing the children with hungry glances.

  Some of the goats and cows sickened and died. The pariah dogs fought for chappatis with the children. Chandar and his brothers sat around in the courtyard on their haunches, watching the cloudless sky with w
orried eyes, watching as the days passed and the small transistor radio crackled with news of the worst drought in a hundred years. When Meha found the time, she sat by Chandar, not too close to him because they were in public, but close enough to share in his onerous anxiety. He said once, “Why did your father ever agree to give you to me?”

  Meha laughed. They had been married eight years. “He would not take me back now,” she said. “Not after all this time; I’m too old now.” She put love into her voice. “Things will improve, Chandar.”

  He shook his head and looked down at his hands, callused from years of working in the fields, his nails cracked and chipped. Then he squinted up at the sun again, burning down upon them, harsh and searing.

  They ate the goats that week, chewing on stringy muscle and brittle bones—even the marrow seemed to have dried up. The cows watched mournfully, but they could not bring themselves to eat the cows. Good Hindus did not. So the cows were left to die outside the compound wall; during the day vultures, crows, flies—and at night a liver-colored jackal— stripped their bones of meat. It was the end of their existence as farmers; they all knew this. Two consecutive years of drought had devastated them. Without the animals there could be no farming, without water they were as good as dead.

  Meha went hungry for days, using her share of food for Chandar, too weak to scold him when he gave a morsel to the pariah dog that haunted their compound.

  Meha touches her wrist lightly. There is almost no muscle left, just skin covering aged bones. Just as in those days in the village, so many years ago. The government promised aid; they even brought food packets to the villages. Rice, some dal, a few saris and dhotis to cover dried-up bodies. That lasted only for a few months, in the end, the government gave up. Even they could not conjure rain-filled clouds to placate a thirsty earth. But then, Chandar and she had been young, resilient, confident even.

  Chandar finally decided that they must head to the big city in search of work. And so they packed their belongings: one extra set of clothes each, which was all they had; a handful of rice; four handfuls of atta from the communal bin to knead for chappatis; a brass pot; an old pink talcum powder tin with the top cut off and filled with chili pickle; fifty rupees rolled into a tight wad and tied to the pallu of Meha’s sari. Chandar’s parents left the land with other sons. He promised to send them money, even to send for them when there was money. For now it was only Meha and Chandar. And Bikaner.

  The bus journey to the outskirts of Mumbai took up half their money—a little of the rest went for food at a street corner panipuri stand.

  Meha can remember being horrified at paying five rupees for the panipuri. They must have eaten sixty between the three of them. She remembers, as though it were only yesterday, watching the panipuri vendor’s strong wrist pick up a fluffed wheat puri, burst the air bubble with his dirty thumb, fill it with one chickpea, a sliver of onion, one coriander leaf, then dip it into the spicy chat water. His hands moved fluidly from practice. Pick, burst, bury, dip. Then he put the marinated panipuri in their waiting palms, the water dripping down his wrist to his elbow. He had nice cityman’s hands, not like theirs with the earth under their fingernails and in the creases of their palms. They had been so hungry that day at the start of their new life. It was years before that hunger would abate. Even with a full stomach, her brain would not forget those starved drought-filled days. Meha touches her flat, almost concave stomach lightly. That hunger had gone, but now it is back. Not for food. For tranquillity.

  They spent the night on the footpath, anonymous among other huddled and covered forms. Meha looked around her, unable to sleep. In the village, in their compound, she had always slept outside on hot nights, but then she knew everyone around her. In Mumbai, the noises from the street were strange, so many cars and taxis and scooters and buses. And the people were rude. She lay awake that night looking at the little strip of starless sky between two skyscrapers. There were so many people who pushed and shoved and yelled, “Behenji, move out of the way.” Behenji, they had called her, sisterji—a term of endearment, even respect, yet it slipped glibly off tongues of people so as to barely catch in their conscience. They called her behenji as they pushed her. In the village, the men of other families barely looked at her, or stood aside as she passed, knowing she was not of their family. Here, already, one man had put his broad hand on her back. Bikaner whimpered, and Meha patted him back to sleep. She wondered how they would survive here in this big city.

  Two seconds.

  The next day Chandar started looking for work. The buildings were so big, bigger than he had seen before; he decided then that he would only work on the ground floor, near the earth that had sustained him. On the first day, he went to the Farmer’s Bank because he recognized the logo. A year ago, while the sun still baked their land, his father had taken him to the local branch of the bank for a loan. Chandar could not read or write very well but he had memorized the logo of the bank— cutouts of two farmers, axes slung over their shoulders.

  “What is it you can do?” the manager had asked him.

  “Till soil, plant rice, harvest …” Chandar’s voice had trailed away as he looked around him. Here on the concrete floor no soil showed, green fans clanked noisily on a whitewashed ceiling. Big, fat, leather-bound ledgers sprouted on desks. Clerks, looking important, dug into numbers and endless cups of chai, and unlike his field, the walls closed in on him.

  “Chalo bhai, get out of here.” The manager went back to his office and slammed the door.

  But Chandar was a persistent man. Every morning as Meha and Bikaner fought on the street for food scraps, as they dug through the dustbins for leftovers, he greeted the manager at the bank, “Find me something, sahib. Any job, a few rupees a month. I have a wife, a son.”

  “So do I,” said the manager brusquely. At the end of the week the security guard fell ill, and lithe, strong Chandar, his muscles defined by years in the fields, took his job.

  Meha tries to look at her outstretched hands but they blur in front of her eyes. She knows they are withered and old, creased at the knuckles. But for twenty years they had served her well.

  The money still was not enough. The bank job brought in only a few rupees, barely enough for food. One night as they lay on the footpath looking up at a cloudy sky, Meha said to Chandar, “Geeta said her memsahib’s neighbor lady needs a bai.”

  He turned to her, his voice harsh. “My wife will not be a maidservant. We are a proud people, Meha. What will the village elders think if they knew? I forbid you to go; you will not be a bai like Geeta.”

  “But Chandar, how long will we live like this? Geeta says the monsoon will come next month. There is no money to even buy a tarpaulin to shelter us.”

  Chandar shook his head stubbornly, refusing to meet her eyes. Meha lay beside him in silence. What pride was there in living like pariah dogs on the street? She slid an arm over his chest. A man passing on the street snickered, then stood over them watching. They stayed very still and soon he wandered away. Meha touched Chandar’s face and her hand came away wet with hot tears. She laid her hand back on his chest, over his thumping heart. The next morning she went with Geeta to the neighbor lady’s house.

  Slowly, very slowly, the money came. Bikaner went to school. It was nothing like the village patshala with its drowsy, cane-wielding schoolmaster. This school was a thin building of three stories, fifty children to a classroom, and women teachers in bright saris. Uniforms and chappals were required and so Meha went to the bazaar near Dadar station and bought them, watching the rupees dissolve in her hand. But she understood that it was necessary for Bikaner to go to school. At home in the village, it would not have been necessary, but here even a peon was an Intermediate pass, or at least had appeared for the exams.

  Meha and Chandar learned that even this last distinction—having sat for the school passing examination, though not necessarily having passed it—would sway a prospective employer. So they wore the same village clothes they had b
rought with them for two years so that Bikaner could go to school. In the beginning he came back very often in tears, his uniform torn from schoolyard tussles, for he fought with almost every child in his class. His spirit bent under the weight of ignorance and jibes. Why did he know so little, he asked Meha. Why hadn’t they tried to teach him more? The village patshala schoolmaster had only taught him the alphabet, and that only in Hindi and Marathi, even though Bikaner was almost seven. Here he was taught English, the teacher recited strange-sounding nursery rhymes, Bikaner was bigger than all the children in his class (they were only four years old!)—the humiliations were endless.

  Through all these cries, Meha was patient. Wait, she had said, taking Bikaner in her lap, in a year you will be in the right class. She tried to explain to him how they had had so little money for food and water these last few years, and so he had not gone to the village school regularly, and Bikaner would grow furious. When he quietened, she sat up with him every night after dinner under the orange halogen streetlamp, pointing out the letters he was to copy one by one. What is this? Z, he would laugh as he replied. You don’t even know Z, Ma. Idiot Ma. But she persisted, learning the unfamiliar shapes and sounds from him and in the process teaching him.

  She opens her mouth and says, “Za-ye-d.” Just the way Bikaner had taught her. Pronouncing it wrong as usual, she knows. A little smile wells up in that great aching space her heart has turned into for these last four years. It was during those moments, sitting under that streetlamp, Chandar sleeping nearby in the darkness, that she had finally found something akin to affection for her son. He had laughed at her attempts to make out the curves and lines, had made fun of her, but they had learned together.