In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  STOP PRESS

  She walked away from the crowd to the pyre in childlike strides, her glance unwavering. All morning she had waited for this moment in patience as the men stacked logs of wood in the center of the square.

  The banyan in one corner stood forlorn, its arms beckoning. But few sat under it. They crowded instead around the men, watching with a horrible fascination as the castle of wood rose, one log interlacing another in a tight embrace. The men worked in grim silence, not once lifting their heads to acknowledge the curious bystanders. All day, there was the thump of one log clutching another, building into a grotesque fortress of death for a young child. In the end it piled higher than her, higher than the tallest man in Pathra.

  As night fell, a quietness descended upon the square. In an hour, the funeral would take place. But now the square was empty, the stack of logs standing alone as a symbol of what was to come. Passersby did not avert their gaze as they went into the square. The child had been condemned to her death by an entire village. There was no remorse in any face.

  Finally, one by one, clad in their best clothes— maroons, pinks, greens, and blues, mocking the widow’s whites—they crept into the square. Men, women, children, even babes cradled in mothers’ arms, all gathered around. Faces gave away little; eyes burned with a fanatical light.

  The old shopkeeper’s body was brought and laid upon the pyre. Disease had ravaged him long before death came to claim its share. He had been a small man, old and decrepit. It was hard to give him such a large share in history. In this twenty-first century A.D. he took with him on his long journey a girl who was old enough to be his wife, but too young for everything else life offered.

  This is the first reported incident of a Sati in almost fifty years. The child was merely twelve, but she held herself with a dignity and poise well beyond her years. There was much she did not comprehend, much she wanted to ask, but a fatality had numbed her mouth.

  Clad in the white sari of widowhood, devoid of ornaments, her face pale under ebony hair, she walked to the pyre with a look of defiance. Her husband’s head was placed on her lap. Her wrists were tied to the logs of wood. Only then did her brave look falter. But it was too late. Her forty-year-old stepson walked thrice around the pyre with a flaming torch before lighting the fire. As the flames licked their way greedily upward, the girl twitched and pulled at the ropes which held her.

  The crowd began chanting “Sati Ma,” their voices rising to a crescendo, their hands folded in prayer to the girl who would forever be revered in their village as the epitome of wifehood. The girl screamed as the fire roared toward her. It devoured her clothes, her hair; the ropes had burned through … She rose for a brief moment, a living inferno, then collapsed in a heap as the fire engulfed her still form.

  Sati has been illegal in India since 1829. Yet more than a hundred years later, the entire village of Pathra condemned a child to her death to uphold a dubious custom. There was no regret at the end of it. As horrible as it sounds, they all wished they had done it before. But where would they have found another child willing to listen to her elders thus? Willing to give up her life because she was obedient? The Sati was conducted in the greatest of secrecy. This reporter watched hidden behind the shutters of a house in the village square.

  After the fire died down and the frenetic crowd had disappeared, the girl’s family went home, their heads held high, their expressions of deep pride. Today their daughter had done what no other woman had done for a long time, even in Pathra. Tomorrow, they will build a shrine for their daughter in their house. People will come from neighboring villages for a glimpse at the garland-bedecked photograph of their child, and will pay for the privilege.

  The parents had already sold their daughter once to the highest bidder: the sixty-three-year-old man who married their child. Now they have sold her again.

  Fire

  I come to see her because my mother insists I should. She is dying, my mother says. She has but a few more days, perhaps hours. She wants to see you this last time. I don’t tell my mother that I wanted to see her anyway.

  Because of Kamala.

  The room is at one end of the house, away from where the others live. It is an ancestral home, cavernous-looking on the outside, inside squirreled with small, limewashed rooms. Like a maze. To get from the front door to the back, there are seventeen different ways. I know. I counted them as a child. I could always escape from the caller at the front door—sometimes lodging myself under a dark, cool staircase, my frock pulled over my knees. From this vantage point the bottom half of an adult sari would pass by, bare feet flip-flopping on the mosaic floor, voice almost shrieking out my name. Payal, where are you? Be polite, Payal. Come and see your great-aunt’s cousin’s wife’s second brother and his brood of children. Come see, and be shown.

  I never went.

  When she fell ill two years ago, they put her in this room away from all of them, in a part of the house I had explored a long while ago. But as I walk through the corridors and rooms, I realize that even I have never gone this far through the east wing.

  There were many stories in my childhood. Of lights that came on in rooms never used. Of showerheads dripping and bathroom floors wet where no one had bathed in years. Of footprints in the untouched dust. Feet with seven toes, the maids would say. They must have had an effect on me. Even I never came this far.

  Yet they have put her here. Alone. Away from all of them. As though she is an outcast, a nonentity. But I remember a time when she was powerful, when she was the only real presence in this house. The matriarch of us all, the voice that commanded, with a gaze that made my mother shrivel, that made my father grovel. How small the mighty have become.

  Each day a maid trudges to her room with food, turns her over in the bed, washes down her tired limbs with tepid water, and then leaves. Each day someone in the family visits her. They take turns, my mother says. Draw lots. She never talks to them. She knows that they all blame her now.

  For what she did to Kamala.

  My feet slow and drag as memories come back.

  Of gentle, quiet Kamala. Yet with a smothered fire inside her that on two—no, three—occasions, burned fervent. I bore witness to two of them. It is because of the third I am here. Because of what she did to Kamala. Because what they all—the people in this house—did to Kamala.

  Fire.

  In my childhood, we were twenty-one people in the house. My mother and father, of course, and aunts and uncles who were not terribly good at having or keeping jobs, and their even more useless children. And the servants.

  The fat cook, who amply sampled every dish before it got to us. Just tasting, Amma, he would say. The mali whose thumb had never been green, who let the grass grow wild, yet who could coax rare blue-purple roses to bloom against the side wall. (The neighbor would pick them slyly for her puja, leading to loud, choleric fights between her and the mali.) A man to polish my father’s shoes—that’s all he did, polish my father’s shoes. The chauffeur, leaning against the car (he wouldn’t let us lean against it) smoking his smelly beedis all day. The khaki-clad chowkidar at the front gate with hot eyes that looked at us greedily when we hit puberty. Then there were the three maids who lived in a shack in the back garden, who swept and wiped the house each day, and spent the rest of the time on the steps, their voices delicious with gossip. They seemed to disappear a lot, one after another, leaving with heavy stomachs, made pregnant by the mali or the chowkidar, or even once, the chauffeur. The men stayed. The maids left.

  It was, this queen of our house had said, their fault. A woman must always know when to keep her legs closed.

  The room is dark when I enter. There are windows on two walls with iron grills on them shaped like peacocks in flight. The glass panes are shut and some industrious spider has spun fanciful webs over the peacocks, capturing them in needle-thin nets. The room has not been painted in many years; the walls are chipped, some places showing a light pistachio green, some an antacid pink.
Like all the other rooms in this house, it is small. The floor gleams, although the mosaic, brilliant chips dulled to blackness, has not been properly scrubbed for a long time. Perhaps not since the house was built a hundred and fifty years ago. But then, I don’t think this room has been used in a hundred and fifty years.

  She lies in the center of the room on a small cot. A ceiling fan clanks directly over her, shuddering with every revolution. I look at it, wondering if it will fall on her. Wishing it would.

  She is on her side, barely making a dent in the mattress. A strange yet familiar old-person smell rises over her, even though I know she is clean. She has always been clean, scouring her skin with a fanatic’s fervor, as though all her sins would slough away with the scrubbing. Her hair shines silver on the spotless pillow. The strands are sparse; I can see her skull through them. Everything is white around her: the sheet that covers her body; her blouse, through which gaunt arms protrude like sticks; the pearls she always wore; and her sari, of course. White, pure, spotless. To show she is a widow. To show she is faithful to her husband’s memory, to show that she does not consider it worth her while to preen in gold and colored silks for another man. To show that since he died she keeps her legs closed.

  I approach and draw back almost at once. Everything is white, but her skin, that creamy, rich, rose-tinted Brahmin skin, that heralder of high birth, is now a blistered ebony. As though someone stripped her of her white clothes and dipped her into a fire. Not enough to burn, but enough to scorch.

  Fire.

  Her eyes open as I come near again. Even her pupils are white, clouded by cataract, milky white strands over once flashing eyes. But she knows I am here. She puts out her hand, and I take it.

  It is a small hand, bony, the knuckles dried with age. The veins on the back are thick green lines, like rivers frozen under her skin.

  Payal. Her voice is thin, reedy, like much of her body. Payal, look at my skin now. Look at the color of it.

  I am still standing looking down at her. There is no chair in the room, and I will not sit on the floor so she can look down at me. But after so many years of not seeing me, so many years when she must have thought about me, wondered where I was and how I was doing, she talks of her skin.

  Laughter bubbles inside me, forcing its way through the lump in my throat. Look at the color of my skin, she says.

  So I look. And I see the dark withered brown of chocolate gone bad. I see flecks of skin peeling from her arms. Deep lines furrow her thin face. I see her lips, dry and drawn over teeth that did not stand the test of time. These are her sins. She now wears them for everyone to see. They have come up from inside her, where she has hidden them for years. She has gone bad from the inside.

  But the expression in her near-opaque eyes has not changed. And from that comes a brief memory of a time long past when she was still young. From when I can remember she has worn this white. So I did not know him, the man she had married. But her pale skin always glowed, gold with sandalwood and turmeric, tinted pink on her cheeks with a dusting of the vermilion she would wear in the part of her hair. This last, defying the color ban on widows. Vermilion was a sign of marriage, married women wore it in their hair, but she, clad in white, ears bare of diamonds, fingers ringless and slender, wore vermilion in her hair and pearls around her neck.

  Only she knew where to find me when I escaped from all of them. Under the staircase, behind an almirah, inside an almirah—the smell of mothballs and neem leaves swirling among the neatly folded silk saris—or hidden in a corner of the many balconies. Payal, her voice would ring loud and strong through this house of many rooms. Payal, come down from the champa tree. Girls do not climb trees.

  I always listened to her. Then she would clap her hands and one of the not-yet-pregnant maids would materialize with a plate of sweets. In many colors. Purple-tinted coconut burfis, flakes sprinkling the tray; slow-simmered chickpea flour mysore pak, a rich brown and drowning in ghee; gulab jamuns the color of rust, oozing cardamom-scented sugar syrup; silver-foiled cashew squares, taut from the fridge yet melting on contact with my tongue; semolina flour laddus rolled into balls, their uneven curves carrying the imprint of the cook’s fingers.

  She rewarded me with those sweets when she called for me. That was why I always came. Now looking at that brown hand in mine, I taste the sweet-sour curd flavor of mishti dohi in my mouth. These fingers, blackened by hatred, had once dipped into a bowl of mishti dohi and fed me.

  We had a bond, this woman and I, even though we were years apart in age. She seemed to know what I was thinking, why I was thinking. She seemed to know what I wanted. And then after Kamala was born, she no longer knew who I was. It was as simple as that.

  Why so long to come, Payal?

  I meet her eyes.

  How can you even ask, bitch? I speak in English, a language she is not comfortable with, but I know she understands. I will not give her the pleasure of speaking in Tamil, even though what I have to say will be so much more effective, so much more terrible in that tongue. I use antiseptic English.

  Kamala. Her voice is soft; I have to lean over to hear it.

  Yes, Kamala. Because of Kamala. You know it is because of Kamala.

  In this house of many people, someone or the other was always having children. There was always a baby crawling around, bottom bare, peeing where it wanted, wallowing happily in that pee. And a maid mopping up when she could, or when my mother yelled at her. I never really noticed the babies, except as pesky, snot-nosed, bawling-mouthed, teary-eyed creatures. Or I should say, I pretended very hard not to notice them in case some auntie found my interest charming and left her precious little god with me while she went off shopping.

  So I was an unencumbered ten years old when Kamala was born. To my mother.

  It was during the summer holidays and the house seemed full of people, hiding in cool, dark corners from the heat. All of my hiding places. I spent that whole vacation in the champa trees, watching the squirrels protest at my presence, watching a bright snake nestle in the branches, drawn by the sweet smell of the flowers. And then Kamala was born. Small, squishy, indeterminate features. A mouth that rarely cried.

  That intrigued me. How could a child possibly be so silent? But I still stayed on the periphery, skirting around her, watching from afar. Until my mother forced me to go see her properly (it is only polite, Payal, she’s your sister). I think my mother had forgotten I existed for a while; she had had a difficult pregnancy, and then after Kamala came, she was busy with the visitors.

  Kamala lay on a sheet on the floor following me around the room with her brilliant eyes. I think she actually smiled when I slid the gold bangles (that my mother gave me for her—a gesture of protection from an older sister) onto her tiny arms. When the holidays ended and I came home daily from school, I went to her, and she looked for me. I would lie beside her on the floor, and Kamala would grab my hair with her hands and put it in her mouth. Or she would try to entertain me by kicking her legs in the air, silver anklets trilling with each movement, the sound always seeming to take her by surprise. It was her quietness that pervaded my world. Her contentment when I held her—some auntie screaming I was to put a hand under her head for it had not set yet—her first smile, and that not for gas.

  Kamala, she says again.

  Her free hand, the one I am not holding, rises to touch her hair. And I know what she wants to say.

  Kamala of the doe eyes, large, liquid, edged with a sweeping fan of eyelashes. We all grew up modern. Western. The aunties cut our hair short, bangs in the front, a straight sweep just above the shoulders in the back, but Kamala, dreamy, tranquil Kamala would not let them touch her head. When she was three, that inner fire burst into flames and she said no. The word frightened the whole house immeasurably, for she had not spoken yet. Not one single word. They thought, we all thought, she was mute.

  She told me later she felt there had been no necessity to speak, for everything in her life so far had progressed as she h
ad wanted it. No ripples, no waves. But when some auntie came to her with the scissors, Kamala said no. Just once. There were no arguments, no cajoling, no scolding, nothing. Just that simple no.

  I did all the yelling and screaming on her behalf. I kept her behind me, away from the scissors. I hauled her up the champa tree when someone came calling with the barber my father used every second Sunday. I distracted the adults (they were easily distracted) by sprinkling sugar on the back verandah to beckon an army of red ants. It took them five days to get rid of the ants. Kamala just watched me, did not even say thank-you, for things were progressing as she wanted them. But one night, a few months later, as I was up late studying for a history exam, she came to the door of my room and just stood there. I looked at her in silence, knowing she wanted to say something, silent because she had taught me the value of it. Then she came in, reached up from the floor, put her little arms around me and laid her cheek against mine. We did not kiss much in this house; neither of us would have known how to do so. But that one embrace was enough. It was never repeated again. It did not have to be. For I knew.

  So Kamala’s hair grew long and luxuriant. A gleaming ebony, catching multicolored highlights in the sun. Her hair seemed almost too big and too heavy for such a small face, a slender neck, a tiny child.

  I envied that hair, the old woman says now, cleaving through my thoughts. Envied its length, its brilliance, envied as she bent over her books, her hair weighing down her neck. Envied that skin. Envied her silence. No one who was so silent was normal. She cannot have been normal. Look what she did later on.

  My grip tightens on her hand. I see distress darken her eyes. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. She does not cry out. Does not ask for help as I squeeze her fingers, my knuckles crushed against hers.

  Once I loved this woman. So much. She is my grandmother after all, my father’s mother. My mother and father were always at the edges of my affection. But she consumed my hours until Kamala came. There were boys in the house—born to continue the male line, to deposit genes, to carry the name. But she ignored them and favored me. Only a girl child. I slept in her bed until I wanted a room of my own.