In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  With one hand, Mrs. Rao waved the others back to their quarters and took a weeping Parvati indoors. The girl was bleeding from her head where her father had kicked her; Nathan’s wife had a scraped elbow. Nathan sat outside, smoking beedi after beedi into the night, lifting a blood-caked hand to his mouth. Mrs. Rao came out and without a word went back to her house. She did not even look at him.

  He sat there all night, weighted down by all that had happened, even his anger. He had never struck any of his children before. The lights stayed on in his quarters, and from time to time he saw his wife and Parvati look out of the window at him. As the sun glowed in the eastern sky, Nathan cried. At first he sobbed softly, tears running down his face, drenching the beedi end. Then out loud, hopelessness racking his body. Then he was enraged at Raja, at Vikram, a tough, surging anger that swamped through him. He rose and went to Vikram’s door, demanded that Raja come from the city to marry his daughter. It was the right thing to do.

  Suddenly, Vikram was no longer respectful. All night he had waited for this conversation, from the time he had watched Nathan beat Parvati. He said little, only this: “Is it really Raja’s, Nathan? How do we know? How do we know anymore of anything? Is it really Raja’s?”

  After that day, Nathan grew densely quiet within himself. Mrs. Rao finally talked to him and told him he must look after Parvati. Somewhere within his heart, Nathan agreed with her. But how did she know how he felt, how could she even begin to see his pain? Of Raja, there was no news, no indication even that he had once lived in their barracks. He was gone, had disappeared into the city of ten million, not to be seen again. Nathan sent Parvati to the village to have the child. A few months after it was born, she came back to them. For there was nowhere else she could go, no one else whose name she bore, but Nathan’s.

  And slowly this child, this Krishna Shiva-Rama-Lakshman, pervades their lives. With his laughter; his shock of curly hair; his little, lithe body; his melodious voice. Parvati still works for Mrs. Rao, but takes the child with her and sits him down in the kitchen with a few spoons and a stainless steel tumbler for toys. She comes back home with him on her hip, a hibiscus bloom plucked from the Department’s garden tucked behind his ear.

  Behind him, Nathan strains to listen to the voices of his wife and his daughter. They have finished washing the vessels, now they wipe the plates, tumblers, and cups and stack them in the cupboards. What are they talking about? Where does Parvati find this vast courage? Why does nothing daunt her? She has returned from the village with an inner calmness as though she has done nothing to be ashamed of.

  She does not look anymore toward the left, where Vikram lives. It is as though they do not exist, even though the child carries Raja’s face. A year ago, Raja married some girl. The wedding was not here in the barracks. Nathan never sees Parvati pine for him.

  She never seems to give a thought to herself either. This child she has borne, this Krishna she named after a god, has effectively banished all chance of a normal life for Parvati. There will be no marriage or future children for her—for who would marry a woman who has had a child out of wedlock, while her neck was still bare of the marriage thali? What will she do when Nathan and his wife are no longer alive, or too old to look after her? Nathan’s head spins with these questions that have no agreeable answers, and now this is all he thinks about.

  As he sits outside his barracks, still holding the beedi, he feels a touch, like a butterfly settling on his shoulder. It is Krishna, sleep heavy on his eyes, his hair tousled. He has crept out of his bed and walked to the verandah in search of his mother. He does not see her, but he sees his grandfather. He leans against Nathan’s stiff back, and then moves around him to sit, puts his head in his lap. “Tha-tha,” he says, haltingly. Grandfather. The first time he has used this word, although Nathan has heard Parvati teach him many times, pointing to Nathan’s silent figure on the verandah steps.

  For the first time, Nathan also sees Parvati’s sweet face in the child. Her eyebrows, thick and meeting in the middle; her smile, her lips, not Raja’s. Nathan throws away the beedi; his hands hang by his side. He does not know what to do with them. Krishna looks up at him. Slowly, Nathan smoothes the hair from his forehead and pats him on the chest as he has seen Parvati do. “Jo-jo,” he rasps, his voice unused to these words of petting. “Jo-jo, kanna.” Sleep, my love. Krishna closes his eyes.

  A few minutes later, Parvati comes rushing out of the quarters, trembling with worry. She stops when she sees them, her child with his head in her father’s lap. The tears on her father’s face, his hand caressing Krishna’s hair.

  The Key Club

  On this night, once every four months, they change their names to Ram and Sita. They begin to think of themselves by these names from the moment the servant maid knocks on their bedroom door at ten A.M. and says, “Kapi thayaar.” Coffee is ready. The club always meets on a Saturday night, and on Sunday, Ram and Sita each go to their yoga class, their meditation class, the five-star gym at the Temple Palace Hotel with its shimmering Olympic-sized swimming pool, and end the day with a Laugh Class in Clyde Park where they learn to laugh from the bottom of their bellies until their eyes tear up.

  The membership into the Key Club was Ram’s idea; Sunday’s schedule is Sita’s. “It centers us,” she had said. Ram has always been “centered,” well, around himself anyway, so the classes are unnecessary for him. He could say, Come on, Sita, we’re Indian, no necessity to indulge in New Age stuff to make us feel … more oriental. He gives in, however, graciously; Sita obviously needs the centering more than he does. On Monday, and every day after, until the next club meeting, their lives follow an unaltered routine.

  The children have long been awake when the maid scrapes at the door to their bedroom. Ram woke first at eight o’clock and heard his son shout for his milk. The maid’s voice answered, and then he heard a cooing as his son drank, singing behind the sips of milk.

  “What will you do until the evening?” Ram asks, lifting his head from his pillow to look at his wife.

  “Get ready,” she says.

  “You are beautiful today,” he says. And he means it. He and his wife keep different hours. He comes home late from work, sometimes at ten o’clock in the evening, sometimes later, and the children are usually in bed by then. Sita will be watching a television show or reading a book; she has already eaten her dinner.

  There is little that passes for conversation between them, because they have very dissimilar interests. The television does not interest Ram, neither do movies; he lives so much in himself, in the present, that he cannot manage even the smidgen of credulity it requires to watch other people’s (fictionalized) lives and perhaps project their cares and worries onto his own. He has never read a book in his life. This is not an entirely true statement, of course—Ram has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the United States; a bachelor’s degree in engineering from a local Chennai college; a school passing certificate from Bledsoe Academy (“Only the best go to Bledsoe”)—somewhere in all that schooling Ram has read a book, a textbook only, perhaps, but a book. Until a few years ago, Ram would proclaim with some pride, “I have never read a book in my life. And I don’t intend to spoil my streak.”

  The statement, delivered as it was, among his friends, or acquaintances who had similar interests (or were in the mood to be adoring of Ram), was met, as it was expected by him to be met, with laughter and a crack about “How funny, yaar—what a riot you are. What about an instruction manual?”

  “Why?” Ram would say lazily. “I have enough people to set up anything I want set up, operate it, and fix it when it’s broken.” This would be followed by a silent and long sigh, sometimes filled with envy. And then Ram said this at a dinner that his parents were hosting at the Gymkhana Club a few years ago.

  They were twelve at the table, the dinner had been cleared away, Sita was delicately scraping the last of the mango ice cream from the white bowl in front of her, a few of the men and some of
the women had leaned back in their chairs to light cigarettes. The usual laughter followed, somewhat muted and not as idolizing (these were his parents’ friends—they didn’t feel compelled to applaud his efforts), but from the person Ram had most hoped to impress, there was a raised eyebrow and a look of such incredulity that he felt himself flush. Seated across from him was the guest of honor of the evening, a woman who wrote novels about something, he couldn’t remember what. He had asked, and he remembered that she had answered him, her voice falling into silence when she realized that he wasn’t paying attention to her, only to the curve of her neck. She hadn’t even looked at him since. And people didn’t normally ignore Ram, not for long, anyhow. He was a handsome man. His hair crowned his head in thick and loose curls, his smile captured everyone, his body was slender and long and he towered over crowds. Women liked him. They liked his height, they liked his broad hands, and they liked his sense of humor. If his sheer beauty and appeal could be ignored, very few could pass by his lineage.

  Ram’s great-grandfather had begun a small automotive company in the early 1900s with his fishing profits. To begin with, it was little more than a garage with one mechanic who knew how cars worked. Most of the business came from bicycle repairs. Today, Shiva Motors sold tires; rebuilt engines; manufactured scooters, bicycles, and mopeds; and dealt in car sales. Ram’s mother was the fourth daughter of the current ruling house and had a tenth of a share in the company. They owned three houses in the city and one in the hill station of Ooty. Ram had traveled around the world twice already—once when he was ten years old as a birthday present from his parents, and once when Sita and he went on their honeymoon, another gift from his parents. Ram worked in the company as one of the directors. No one could easily disregard the weight of all this favor visited upon Ram. But the novelist had.

  Sita had laughed, Ram remembered, at the novelist’s reaction to Ram’s statement that he had never read a book. It wasn’t anything overt, nothing anyone else had picked up on at the table, but Ram knew Sita had laughed, when she held the last of her mango ice cream on a spoon at the very tip of her luscious tongue and deliberately closed her mouth around it. Ram never repeated this statement again in public. In time, he forgot that he used to say it. It began not to matter anymore.

  The children come in for their morning playtime. They jump on the bed between Ram and Sita, they squeal for a while; the maid watches them anxiously from the door to the bedroom awaiting a signal from either of them to take the children away.

  For a week before the club meeting, Sita keeps away from Ram, and he lets her be. The asceticism suits him also. He revels in the constant longing, waking nights to her beside him, once even touching her hip under the covers only to have her breathing tense. She makes no mention of that touch in the morning. So by the day of the club meeting, Ram’s senses are wild and on edge; to keep them thus, he eats very little all through the day. A boiled egg and half a slice of toast for breakfast. A cup of dal and a salad for lunch. He picks at his dinner. By nighttime, after two perfectly mixed gin and tonics, his body hums with anticipation. His mind is sharp and with his thoughts he reaches out where he wants, makes and wills things to go his way. They always have. On the club evenings, Ram has always acquired what he wanted.

  The club was … someone’s idea; Ram can no longer remember whose. There are eight of them in the club. They don’t count their wives as members; their wives are guests. There is always the possibility that one of their marriages will not work out. Although that is much less of a probability than a possibility—they are all, in that sense, old-fashioned enough to think that they will remain married to these women until they die. Still, when they formed the club, they vested themselves only as the primary and sole members. Most of them are in their early thirties now—Vish is thirty-five, and he is the oldest member of the club. Ram, Jay, Dharma, and Sat are thirty-two. Vy, Alistair, and Arth are thirty-three.

  None of the names are real, even as Ram is not his real name. But now he only thinks of them as such, by these names, because they no longer see one another in social gatherings, or invite one another home for dinners or go out for movies. All these casual engagements among the eight of them and their wives stopped a few months after they formed the club. Among the eight of them—well, among them and all of their parents—they own seventy-five percent of the city’s wealth.

  Ram has known Jay and Vish all of his life. He grew up on the street that led to the city’s Boat Club, known eventually as Boat Club Road. Ancient rain trees cant over the tar road, creating a semipermanent and cool shade from the summer’s heat. The houses lie behind whitewashed concrete walls; graffiti never mars their pristine fronts, since they all have a watchman at their iron gates. The driveways curve to the front of the houses. The verandahs have long and smooth white pillars. The windows have no metal grills, just plain and shiny glass hand-polished into a gleam by the maids every day. Inside, the mosaic floors shine, Persian rugs adorn hallways and drawing rooms, and when Ram was in high school, the top floor of his house echoed with the music of Pink Floyd from his Bang & Olufsen system. There was a brief Jethro Tull period in Ram’s life, and another foray into hard rock with Deep Purple, but it is Pink Floyd Ram carries with him into his adulthood.

  A car took his father to work. Three cars stood in the driveway with three drivers who waited until Ram, his mother, or his sister decided to go somewhere during the day. The drivers came to the house at five A.M. and left at ten P.M. each night, unless Ram chose to go to a party at Vish’s or Jay’s homes. Jay lived two houses down the street, toward the Boat Club; Vish lived three houses up the street. The car still took Ram to their houses and brought him back when he wished to come back. The next morning, the driver would be at the house again at five A.M.

  He thought little about this lifestyle. He thinks little about this even now. After he leaves for work every morning, a car and a driver wait for Sita in their driveway; another car and driver take the children to school and come back home until it is time for them to return from school. There is nothing in life that Ram has wanted. Nothing he has not acquired when he has wanted it. It has been the same for Vish and Jay—these two whom Ram has known all of his life, with whom he has climbed the rain trees on the road, whose European travel stories so perfectly match his, who went to Bledsoe Academy with him and then to the engineering college in the city where they met the other five members of their club.

  The one thing they all have in common is wealth. Of course. And it was easy enough, even in college during their undergraduate years, to see who had money and who didn’t. The cars that brought them to their classes each morning were Mercedes-Benzes or Volvos. Sat’s father owned a Maserati and only allowed him once, in the four years they spent at college, to drive it into the campus. All other times, he had to make do with a BMW. The poor chap. Ram thought that his father was an unfair man.

  So their combined wealth, flaunted or not, brought the eight of them together. Vish lit the first joint that Ram smoked, late one night when they drove out to the campus and climbed the concrete bleachers in the stadium to huddle together at the top right corner. From here, they could see and not be seen. The grounds below were swathed in darkness, but as they became progressively and gently stoned, they saw a white dog cross the field, and the college phantom, a man with a limp and a scythe held on his shoulder, its curved edge around his neck. They both saw the man and watched him scuttle across the beaten mud maidan with its faint white running track lines painted in an oval.

  Ram drove home that night in a daze. He thought he remembered being stopped by a policeman on Boat Club Road; the next morning, a policeman knocked at their gate, and his mother sent a maidservant out with five hundred rupees in a brown envelope. Ram never recalled what he hit on the road on his way back home. A dog? A cat? A … ? But he also never smoked a joint again.

  He never smoked cigarettes (none of the eight members of the club smoked), he never drank in excess (even when he was in colle
ge), he never overate and became fat, and he never tried marijuana or any other drug again. He had the money; it was easily accessible. And that was the reason why Ram kept some virtues—there was never a curiosity in him for things that his money could buy. He suspected that it was much the same for the other members of his club. Wealth, power, position, prestige, privilege—they had it all, and they had all. Except … and so, they started the Key Club.

  Ram spent two years in the United States acquiring an MS in mechanical engineering. His grades in college had been good; his GRE scores were actually almost perfect. He sat for the Advanced GREs in Mathematics and Physics and aced them both. For a lark, because he had little else to do the summer before he went to America, Ram took an AGRE in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology also, and scored spectacularly in it. He had wanted to be a doctor at one point, in tenth standard, and then gave up the wish to do so because it would involve far too much work. Sita found his biochemistry AGRE score sheet one day in his study and asked him, a look of puzzlement on her face, “Why?”

  “I don’t know why,” Ram had replied. “Just because. I wanted to. I did well, you know.”

  She held the paper in front of him. “Obviously.”

  Ram was awarded a teaching assistantship at the U.S. university, which he refused. His parents paid for his MS degree. They also paid for his apartment, the furniture in the apartment, and the 1967 Chevy Camaro with a V-8 engine that Ram had painted indigo blue with thin pink stripes along the sides in a body shop. Ram opted for the university he went to because both Sat and Vish were there also. Summers, they dumped duffel bags with their clothes into the Chevy’s boot and drove across the country, the windows rolled down, Pink Floyd on the music system, picking up girls where they stopped for the night. They came back to India with photos from Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, and Yosemite. Ram also returned with a perfect 4.0 GPA for his graduate degree—Sat and Vish didn’t do quite as well, but neither of them had gone to America to study. They had jobs waiting for them at home, regardless of how they spent their postgraduate years.