by Kamala Nair
“Namaste Uncle and Aunty,” said Gitanjali, bringing her hands together as if in prayer. Meenu and Krishna both did the same thing.
Prem’s parents nodded their heads at them, and turned to me.
“Is this Chitra’s daughter?” said the mother.
“Yes, this is my daughter, Rakhee,” said Amma.
“What a nice child.” Prem’s mother smiled, and extended her hand to rub my cheek with a palm rough as bark. “Come, come inside,” she said with great animation, and bustled into the house.
The sitting room was cramped and dimly lit by two small windows, but in spite of the shabby furnishings the floors were spotless and the wooden tables had been polished to an immaculate shine. The walls were painted blue and were spotted with stains. A photograph of my grandfather was prominently displayed in a gold frame.
“Sit, sit,” said Prem’s mother before disappearing into the kitchen. I sat down between Amma and Krishna on the couch, which was long and hard as a bone. My backside began to ache.
Prem’s mother returned with a large plate piled high with an assorted selection of sweets. I wondered how long the plate of sweets had been sitting in the kitchen, patiently waiting for guests to serve.
“Oh, Aunty, we don’t need all this,” Amma said. “We just came to see you. You should save these for a special occasion.” But Prem’s mother looked so horrified at the suggestion that we each took a proffered sweet.
“Look at you both. How nice to see you together again,” said Prem’s mother, beaming and glancing between Amma and Prem. “What friends you used to be! Rakhee, did you know that when Prem went off to college, your mother was so frantic she would not let go of his hand and we had to tear her away. She cried so hard afterward she made herself sick.”
Prem’s father cleared his throat, and Prem looked down at the floor.
“Well, it’s probably time we head back to Ashoka,” said Amma, and I felt mortified by her brisk tone. “I’m sorry this has been such a short visit, but Sadhana Chechi will start to worry.”
Prem’s mother protested, saying how could we think of leaving without eating dinner, but Amma was insistent, so we left.
Chapter 10
I watched Amma wrap yard after yard of primrose pink silk around her waist. She was going out for the day, with Sadhana Aunty and Nalini Aunty, to visit friends in town. They were leaving us under the care of Gitanjali, who had been instructed by Sadhana Aunty to make sure Meenu and Krishna completed their two hours of study, and after that to see that we didn’t spend too much time outside in the sun—we were already dark as it was.
“I’ve been dreading this, but it has to be done,” said Amma, more to herself than to me, as she tucked the pleats of her sari into her beige underskirt. “People will talk if I don’t go and see them and act as if everything is normal. Stupid gossips.” She went over to the mirror and stared at her face—pale and tired, but still exquisite. She pinched her cheeks, blinked a few times, then took the round red bindi she had stuck on the smudged glass the night before and positioned it at the center of her forehead. Like a third eye, I thought.
I followed Amma outside, where Sadhana Aunty and Nalini Aunty were waiting near the front steps, both in stiff saris. Balu, who was perched in his usual spot on his mother’s hip and playing with her braid, looked like a little man in his checked, button-down shirt with his tufts of hair slicked to one side.
Amma kissed my forehead with her cool, soft lips before she disappeared down the stairs. I went to join my cousins, who were assembled on the verandah.
“You all don’t need me, do you?” Gitanjali looked around at the three of us as soon as the hum of the car motor grew distant. “I’m going to go read in my room, so don’t do anything that will get us into trouble,” she warned before stalking into her bedroom and closing the door.
We decided to go see what Muthashi was up to and found her in her bedroom, lying on her back with her bare feet splayed out to both sides. The top of her sari had unraveled, revealing the loose, defeated flap of her stomach. It looked as if she was just staring up at the rattling old ceiling fan without blinking, but then Krishna told me that Muthashi sometimes slept with her eyes open.
We spent the rest of the morning on the verandah, too exhausted by the growing heat to practice our play, or to even move. Swatting flies away was an effort. Janaki brought idlis and chutney, along with a pitcher of water, out to us on a round tray. By afternoon, the heat had become unbearable; it was by far the hottest day I can recall that summer.
“I can’t sit around here like this—I’ll go crazy,” Meenu finally said, her body stretched across the swing. She wiped a ribbon of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and sighed. Krishna was slumped on a chair, with her mosquito-bitten legs spread out at an unladylike angle, fanning herself with a dust-laced comic book. I had laid myself down on the ground and pressed my cheek against the cool floor, for once not caring about dirt or bugs.
Vijay Uncle was down at the hospital, and Hari had taken the cows and goats out to the paddy field to graze. A thin cat with a mottled brown coat lay on the verandah step and licked the previous night’s rainwater from a cracked flowerpot. Even the birds, whose various cackles and coos issued from the surrounding trees with unceasing frequency most days, had retreated, leaving the yard in silence.
“We have to do something.” Meenu sat upright and a mischievous smile spread across her face. “I know! Let’s go for a swim.”
Sadhana Aunty had specifically forbidden us from swimming in the river because the monsoon rains had caused the water levels to surge. “The last thing I need on my hands is a drowned child,” she had said.
“But what if the grown-ups find out?” said Krishna. “And won’t Gitanjali Chechi worry if we disappear?”
“No one is going to find out. The grown-ups are not returning until evening. Who knows where Vijay Uncle is, and Gitanjali Chechi doesn’t care what we do. I bet she won’t even notice we’re gone. She’s too busy daydreaming about her boyfriend.” Meenu emphasized the word boyfriend in a singsong voice and stuck out her tongue in disdain.
Krishna looked shocked for a moment, then giggled and glanced sideways at me.
“Anyhow,” Meenu hopped off the swing, “no one ever said the two of you had to join me. I can go by myself.” She skipped over the half-comatose cat, down the steps, and began strutting across the lawn. When neither of us made a move to follow her, she paused, her two braids swinging over her shoulders as she turned to face us. “Do you actually mean to stay here all day and burn to death? Stop being such bores—come along!”
I turned to Krishna. She shrugged her shoulders and grinned.
Together we scurried across the road, the giddy thrill of rebellion propelling our limbs through the sluggish heat. We decided to cut through the luxuriant overgrowth of bushes and trees behind the hospital to get to the river, but a gathering of people on the hospital’s front lawn temporarily distracted us from our mission.
“What’s going on?” Meenu pushed herself into the crowd and we followed. A young man was crouched on the ground in the center of the circle, clutching his gut and groaning. The women surrounding him were in various states of distress.
“Help him!” one of them sobbed, as the man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he appeared to lose consciousness. “He’s my son, help him!”
Vijay Uncle came running outside, accompanied by a young woman, and the crowd parted to let them through.
“What happened?” he asked the young woman, as he knelt beside the man and clasped his limp wrist.
“He had stomach pain all morning, but I did not think anything of it. We should have brought him in earlier,” she said.
After asking the woman a series of questions about her husband’s eating and bowel habits, Vijay Uncle hurried back inside and reemerged moments later with two glass bottles containing a bronze-colored liquid. He unscrewed the cap of one of the bottles, bent over the man, coaxed h
is mouth open, and released a few small drops of the liquid onto his tongue. Then he tilted the man’s chin back and poured some more down his throat. We stood around waiting in anxious silence, and after about fifteen minutes the man’s lids fluttered and opened.
“Thank God,” a voice cried, and the crowd began to cheer. Vijay Uncle helped the man sit up and handed him one of the bottles.
“Take one ounce of this three times a day before every meal for five days. That should do it,” he said. The man nodded and bowed his head in gratitude.
The mother and the young woman rushed forward and fell to the ground, touching Vijay Uncle’s feet. “Thank you, Doctor, thank you,” they wept.
Vijay Uncle’s face flushed with pride. It was the first time I had seen Ayurvedic medicine being used to heal a patient. The whole scene had felt so magical, so foreign to anything that happened within the sterile white walls of the Plainfield Clinic. I could not fathom why Vijay Uncle, who had never looked more vigorous than he did in that moment, spent more of his time at the toddy shop than at the hospital.
“Come on, the fun’s over. Let’s go,” said Meenu, grabbing both Krishna and me by our arms and leading us away.
When we reached the red banks we stopped to catch our breath and gazed down at the water. The prospect of entering the crisp churning waves below subdued the intensity of what we had just witnessed. Meenu pulled out her ribbons and ran her fingers through her hair, releasing the strands from the tight confines of their braids.
She looked at us. “Jump!”
Both my cousins laughed, tossed off their sandals, and left their dresses behind, as they leaped into the water with two great splashes.
“Come on, Rakhee!” Meenu doused me with a flush of water. “Don’t be a baby.” I peeled off my skirt, folded it, took off my glasses, and laid them down on top. Curling my toes, I hesitated at the edge of the bank.
“It feels so good, come in!” said Krishna.
I took a deep breath and jumped into the water, my limbs flailing as I fell. My long, loose T-shirt billowed out around my waist.
I ducked my head beneath the surface, ashamed of the tender nubs on my chest that the shock of cold water had exposed beneath the cotton.
I opened my eyes and even without my glasses I could see the perfectly rounded stones at the bottom of the river, the clouds of mud that puffed up through the cracks between the stones, the schools of miniature fish that flashed by like zippers. I thought I saw the white whip of a water snake, but when I blinked it was gone. I rose to the surface with a sense of panic growing in my chest.
“Are there any snakes in this river?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course not,” said Meenu.
I let myself relax, floating on my back and flapping my arms at my sides to prevent the current from carrying me off too far. The water lapped in and out of my ears; every now and then it covered my face. A network of spindly branches fringed with tapering leaves stretched out overhead like a swath of lace. The sky was a searing blue.
It reminded me of the feeling I got one summer afternoon when I ate two cartons of blueberries in a single sitting even though Amma had warned me not to. They were so juicy, so sweet as they slid down my throat, and even though I knew that they would cause me pain later, I couldn’t stop sucking them down, one after the other, until my mouth was stained a grotesque purple and my stomach was full of pins and needles.
I wished I could stay in that moment, that I could drift like that forever, and that the sick feeling would never come. If I could somehow preserve it, then Aba would set all his mice free in a field and Amma would kiss him in a patch of moonlight. If I could lie like that on my back forever, staring up into the spotless cape of sky, then the cottage in the forest behind Ashoka wouldn’t exist; there would be no garden, and most of all, there would be no monster inside it for Amma and Sadhana Aunty to hide.
“Rakhee, come back here.” Meenu’s distant voice broke the silence. “We want to have a contest. Who can stay underwater the longest?” Wheeling around, I found my footing on the river bottom and paddled back toward my cousins. It was harder than I expected, making my way through the water, swimming against the thick current, and I felt a twinge of fear about what we were doing.
We formed a circle of three, grasped hands, and plunged beneath the surface, sinking downward together, our cheeks puffed out, our hair flying upward like black jellyfish. Krishna did not last very long—I saw her pop up out of the water after about ten seconds. Meenu released my hand and stared me down. Her eyes and cheeks bulged, fishlike, and her hair swirled around her head; she looked like an underwater Medusa. I squeezed my eyes shut. Soon I began to feel light-headed, but I didn’t want to give up. I tried to think of something other than my choking desire for air.
1,2,3,4,5, I counted in my head. Everything was still and quiet.
I opened my eyes and Meenu was gone. Again, I saw something white rippling through the water, past my head, and then brushing its slimy length against my arm.
I shot out of the water, my skin crawling. “Snake! It’s a snake! Get out!” I yelled to Krishna, as I struggled through the water and pulled myself onto the bank. Gasping and with a spinning head, I scrambled toward where our clothes lay and heard Krishna, out of breath at my heels.
“Where’s Meenu Chechi?”
We looked around. She was nowhere in sight.
“Meenu! Meenu!” We ran up and down across the exposed stretch of riverbank, the grizzled grass that poked through the sand nicking at our ankles. The current seemed even stronger now that I watched it flow furiously from above.
“Oh my God, she’s drowned!” Krishna began to wail.
“Meenu!” I called once more. Even amid the sound of rushing water and Krishna’s whimpers, an eerie quiet pervaded the air. Just as I was about to slink down beside my cousin, my body limp, I heard a loud splash and a gasping for air, followed by a triumphant laugh.
“I win! I win!” Meenu emerged from the river naked and dripping wet, waving her white slip in the air like a banner. “Rakhee, you should have listened to me. I told you there were no snakes in this river.” She flashed her mischievous grin once more, and I realized that what had appeared to my impaired eyes to be a snake had actually been nothing more than Meenu’s petticoat.
“Chechi, it’s not funny! You frightened us—I thought you were dead!” Krishna’s bottom lip quivered.
“Oh don’t be so upset, it was just a joke,” said Meenu, squeezing the water from her petticoat.
Now that we were over our immediate shock, Krishna and I became aware of Meenu’s nakedness. We looked down at our feet, embarrassed by what we saw—the full, round breasts that she hid so well under her dresses and the thatch of dark hair between her legs. She was suddenly not Meenu Chechi anymore, she was a woman, like Amma, like Sadhana Aunty.
Meenu grew self-conscious and pulled her sopping wet petticoat and dress over her head.
“I’ll give you one more chance to win,” she said quickly, “How about a game of hide-and-seek?”
“No, I don’t feel like playing any more games, I’m going back home.” Krishna let out a sob, turned abruptly, and ran back toward Ashoka.
“How about you, Rakhee? Are you going to be a coward as well?” She arched one brow.
“I’ll play. What are the rules?”
We agreed that Meenu would have ten minutes to find a hiding spot back at the house, and I had half an hour to find her.
Meenu ran laughing into the forest.
At first I thought about following her in stealth, discovering her hiding place right away, and humiliating her. But then I remembered how Aba always told me, “Never fight fire with fire.” So instead I found a shady spot under some trees to wait. I examined my arms and legs, noticing that they had browned significantly over the course of the day; I hoped Sadhana Aunty wouldn’t notice.
After the swim and Meenu’s brush with death, my seat under the trees was as cool and comfortable as a bed.
I pushed the pebbles that sprinkled the dirt out from under my bottom and leaned back against a tree trunk, resting my head against it. I closed my eyes.
When I woke up, the sun was already hanging low in the sky, an angry orange ball preparing to sink. Meenu was going to kill me. I started to get up, ready to run back home, hoping to make it before Amma returned, until I realized I was not alone. A group of servant women from Ashoka had gathered by the river and settled on their haunches next to heaps of clothes, some of which I recognized as my own. They were washing the clothes in the river, roughly and efficiently, then standing and slapping them dry on rocks. Each time they brought a piece of cloth down upon the rock it made a resilient thwack. It was almost a dance: the women in their stained, monochromatic saris, their prematurely graying hair pulled back into frazzled buns, crouching, washing, standing, and beating, the rhythm of their movements imbued with a surprising grace.
There was no way I could slip away without their seeing me, so I settled back into my spot in the shadows, which was now no longer so comfortable. For a while they washed the clothes and folded them in tidy piles, quiet and intent in their work. When they had finally finished, streaks of pink and purple bruised the sky.
“Leave, leave,” I said under my breath.
But instead the women sat down on the ground with their knees up and began chatting, so I had to remain in hiding until, finally, as it grew darker they stood, gathered up their stacks of clothing, balanced the piles upon their heads, and began to make their way back to the house, winding through the trees in a single-file line. I was about to slink away after them when I saw a lone figure still standing at the edge of the river. The color of the sky was now so deep that the figure was nothing but a forlorn silhouette. But I knew right away that it was Hema. I knew her by that wild white hair and those long, praying hands that trembled in the windless air. A brown sack lay in a puddle at her feet. A thrill of fear and excitement shot through me.
She remained by the banks for only a few moments before she picked up the sack, turned around, and began heading back. Quietly I followed, now no longer concerned about Meenu’s being angry or Amma’s getting home before me.
