A People’s History of Heaven
a novel
Mathangi Subramanian
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
For Swarna Narasimhan
Contents
The People of Heaven
Part One
Early Civilization and Settlement
1. Breaking the Sky
2. Deepa Learns to Dance
3. Uninhabitable Planets
4. Banu the Builder
5. Frangipani
6. Finding Joy
7. Free
Part Two
Development and Expansion
8. Perfectly Clear
9. Walls
10. Half-Wild
11. The Mandap Tree
12. Playing Metro
Part Three
The Modern Era
13. Returned
14. Lathi Charge
15. Crooked
16. Heaven
Acknowledgments
The People of Heaven
Banu: A shy and talented artist who is the granddaughter of one of the first residents of Heaven.
Banu’s ajji: Banu’s grandmother (her father’s mother), who comes from a traditional village where women are identified as “mother of” and “wife of” rather than by their first names.
Kadhir Uncle: Banu’s father, who passed away soon after she was born.
Deepa: A gifted dancer and eavesdropper whose family pulls her out of school because she is visually impaired.
Neelamma Aunty: Deepa’s mother, who, abandoned by her family at a young age, lived with relatives but was mostly raised by Banu’s ajji.
Deepa’s father: An auto driver who is one of the more respected fathers in Heaven.
Joy: The queen of the group and the top-ranked student in their class, who is transgender and has three older brothers.
Selvi Aunty: Joy’s mother, a Dalit widow who converts to Christianity to escape casteism.
Rukshana: A queer, Muslim tomboy who is fiercely loyal and quick tempered.
Fatima Aunty: Rukshana’s mother, a hijabi union leader whose husband left after their son died.
Rania: Rukshana’s older sister, who eloped when Rukshana was young.
Padma: A migrant from the countryside who is the only literate member of her family.
Gita Aunty: Padma’s mother, who suffers from untreated mental illness.
Padma’s father: A night watchman known for his kindness.
Janaki Ma’am: The headmistress of the government school, who grew up in an orphanage.
Vihaan: Rukshana’s neighbor and Yousef’s best friend.
Yousef: Rukshana’s cousin, who is in love with Joy.
Leela: A resident of Purvapura who falls in love with Rukshana.
PART ONE
Early Civilization and Settlement
1
Breaking the Sky
the bulldozers arrive on a Friday, orders of destruction in their glove compartments, construction company logos on their doors. Beneath their massive wheels, tin roofs shatter and cinder blocks crumble, wooden doors splinter and bamboo frames snap. Homes and histories disintegrate, ground into dust.
Our houses may break, but our mothers won’t. Instead, they form a human chain, hijabs and dupattas snapping in the metallic wind, saris shimmering in the afternoon sun. Between the machines and the broken stone, our mothers blaze like carnations scattered at the feet of smashed-up goddesses. Angry, unforgiving goddesses, the kind with skulls around their necks and corpses beneath their feet.
The kind that protect their children.
That protect their daughters.
Ragged jigsaw of tilted tents, angry quilt of rusted roofs, maze of sagging sofas. Muddy monsoon squelch, dry summer hum. Jangle and clatter of gunshot tongues firing words faster than Rajni fires bullets. That’s where we’re from.
People who aren’t from here? They think beauty is country colors. Rice-paddy green, peacock-neck blue. Sunsets gold and purple and pink. No one writes poems about pavement gray, road-roller yellow, AC-bus red.
People who aren’t from here can’t see past the sign stuck in the ground thirty years ago. “Swargahalli,” it once said. English letters straight like soldiers. Kannada letters curved like destiny. Now it’s been split in two, cracked by one of the bulldozers the city sent to erase us the first time—or maybe the second or the third. (After a while, we stopped counting.) All that’s left is the word Swarga.
“Swarga?” people ask. “As in Sanskrit for Heaven? This place?”
“Heaven?” we say with them. “This place?”
Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes we do too. But most of the time, we don’t.
Because the sign isn’t right. But it’s not wrong either.
There are five of us girls: Deepa, Banu, Padma, Rukshana, and Joy. Born the same year in the same slum. In the same class at school—until Deepa’s parents pulled her out. Her mother, Neelamma Aunty, says it’s because Deepa’s blind, but we don’t believe her. In Heaven, there are plenty of reasons to stop a girl’s education. None of them are any good.
Every afternoon, we stop at Deepa’s house on the way to our own. We like sitting with her in the sunlight that puddles outside her door, our hands busy peeling garlic bulbs or stripping curry leaves off of their stems. We like sipping the sugar-strong coffee Neelamma Aunty pours us while she tells us the day’s gossip, rumors and stories we’ll tell our mothers. We like answering Deepa’s questions about our classes. What we learned, what she’s missed. It makes us feel lucky. Smart. Important.
The afternoon of the demolition, though, Deepa and Neelamma Aunty aren’t home. They’re with the rest of our mothers, hand in hand, staring down the machines. The world smells like burnt rubber. The engines are off, but the air still hums.
Joy takes Deepa’s hand, joins the chain, and asks, “What’s going on?”
Deepa blinks her sightless eyes and says, “The city said we had a month. They lied.”
“Same way they lied about getting us a water pump,” Padma says, reaching for Joy with one hand and Rukshana with the other, “and about cleaning up the sewage behind the hospital.”
“Where are the police? They always send police,” Rukshana says, taking Joy’s hand and reaching for Banu’s. Rukshana’s mother is always dragging her to protests, so she knows these things.
“The police? They left,” Deepa says. “Told the bulldozer drivers not to run us over while they were gone.”
“Are they coming back?” Padma asks.
“Who knows,” Deepa says. “It’s Holi weekend. I bet they’re all off playing colors with their policewallah friends.”
“Makes sense,” Joy says, nodding. “They don’t care about people like us.”
“You mean they don’t see people like us,” Banu says. “That’s different.”
“You’re right,” Rukshana says. “It’s worse.”
“Whether they see us or not, this is our home,” Deepa says. “The city can’t just take it away from us.”
“Sure they can,” Rukshana says.
“Well, they won’t,” Deepa says. “We won’t let them.”
Once, when Deepa was watching Padma’s brothers, an airplane cut a whirring path across the sky. Deepa couldn’t see it, of course. But she could hear it roar.
“Wow!” Padma’s brothers said, jumping up and down and pointing at the sky. “Wow, wow, wow!”
“Akka, what’s that thing called?”
“An aer-o-plane,” Deepa said, stumbling across the jagged vowels, the serrated consonants. The syllables sharp as shattered stones.
“It flies so high, akka,” the youngest boy said. “Why doesn’t it break the sky?”
“Chee! What nonsense. You can’t break the sky.”
“But that aer-o-plane looks so pointy,” the youngest said.
“Like a screwdriver,” the oldest said, “or a needle.”
“If it did break the sky, I bet it would make a big sound,” the youngest said, throwing his hands up in the air. “I bet it would be an explosion!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t break the sky,” Deepa said again, more firmly this time.
But really, she wasn’t so sure. What would it sound like, if you broke the sky? Would it be a jagged shattering of sharp-edged glass? A frayed ripping of overwashed fabric? Or would the sky break the way skin breaks, silently oozing, and smelling like blood?
This afternoon, when the bulldozers come, Deepa feels the air tremble, the clouds shudder. Hears the sounds of cooking pots and pressure cookers, lightbulbs and radios, table fans and kerosene cans being thrashed into pieces, being beaten into the ground.
Oh-ho, she thinks, so this is what it sounds like.
This is what it sounds like to break the sky.
2
Deepa Learns to Dance
deepa was born on deepavali, the festival of lights—that’s how she got her name. Hair soft and nervy as October’s final skies. Screams shrill as the hiss of Indian-made sparklers, the screech of Chinese-made rockets. Toes red-brown as the clay lamps lining pensioners’ windowsills, slum dwellers’ doorways.
Our mothers filled Heaven with light that night. Portioning precious cooking oil, digging soggy matchbooks out from the corners of almirahs, the bottoms of plastic bags. Coaxing reluctant wicks into oily flame. But after all that scrimping and scrounging and lamping and lighting, they forgot to tend to the most important flames of all: the ones in Deepa’s eyes.
Eyes tucked tenderly behind peacock feather lashes, freshly finished skin. Eyes that can only see the edges of things, the borders and tracings. Eyes that, at first, our mothers think are perfect.
Eyes that are perfect. Until you ask them to do their proper job.
Deepa the lamp, the light of our lives, the child of the flame, is, for all practical purposes, blind.
“Her womb is fine, though, isn’t it?” Our mothers cluck. “Good, good. At least they’ll be able to get her married.”
Deepa’s mother, Neelamma Aunty, was the first child born in Heaven.
Back then, Heaven was just a bunch of blue tarps strung up into haphazard tents in a clearing on the edge of a coconut grove. A for-now kind of place, not a forever kind of place. A square of dirt to tide a family over until something better came along.
Of course, for some families—for our families—nothing ever did.
Back then, no one knew Heaven would outlast the squat brick homes bordering the empty lot, the barely paved lanes where children played cricket and rode their bicycles to school. That those homes and lanes would flatten and crackle and burst into parking lots and shoe stores, breweries and offices. Into hospitals specializing in diseases contracted by people who eat too much, work too little.
“Even the diseases are posher than us,” Banu’s ajji said.
No one thought it was funny. Everybody laughed.
Everybody except Neelamma Aunty’s mother. She was too busy instructing the midwife to hand Neelamma Aunty off to distant relations. What else was Neelamma Aunty’s mother supposed to do? She already had four daughters and one son. She had no use for this tiny new scrap of life.
Particularly because it was a tiny new scrap of female life.
The relative that took Neelamma Aunty in had liver spots on his shaky hands. His wife was stooped and hard of hearing. Still, he did the best he could. Kept Neelamma Aunty fed and clothed and mostly in school. Gave her as much love as he had for as long as he lived. Which wasn’t very long.
For the most part, Neelamma Aunty took care of herself. Grew up tough and lonely and watchful. Cultivated uncertain allies among the women who married their way in and out of Heaven. Women who were fiercely loved, cruelly abandoned. Who woke up every morning with fists clenched, knees tensed, ready to fight. Desperate to live.
Women who became our mothers.
Except for those eyes of hers, Deepa is just like the rest of us. Trains her fingers to fold the clothing her mother mends into perfect, even squares. Learns to fill the cook stove with kerosene, to rinse the breakfast dishes in half-filled buckets of water. Hums along to the film songs the neighbors play on the radio they got for free from a political party before the last election.
Normal things. Girl things.
We see Deepa all the time. Our teachers, though? They only see her on Annual Day. Which anyone will tell you is just a fancy name for pity day.
Every year, our maths teacher, Sushila Miss, goes around Heaven inviting out-of-school children to the function. Miss teaches us geometry, but she used to study dance. She’s convinced that if she had just eloped with the nice boy from Bombay who proposed to her in the twelfth standard, she could’ve become a Bollywood backup dancer. Maybe even an item girl.
Instead she turned him down—or, more accurately, her parents turned him down—and she married an engineer with a bachelor’s degree and a respectable score on the civil service exam. They settled into a government flat with a moldy roof, cinder-block walls. She learned how to pour coffee with her left hand while feeding a child with the right, how to serve breakfast without unraveling the razor-sharp pleats of her school teacher sari.
Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, she still plays the role of respectful housewife, devoted mother, government servant. But on Annual Day, she indulges herself in a different kind of performance. A performance of what could have been, had she done what she wanted to do instead of what she was supposed to do.
How she loves that three hundred and sixty fifth day.
When Sushila Miss gets to Deepa’s house, Neelamma Aunty is delivering a batch of hand-stitched sari blouses to a rich lady who lives on the other side of the main road. Deepa’s father is in his auto-rickshaw picking up the office workers who are his regular fares. Deepa sits in her doorway skinning carrots with a blunt kitchen knife. The peels twist off in red-orange spirals, like the inside of a firecracker before it explodes.
Sushila Miss says, “You poor thing. Do they always leave you here like this?”
“Who?”
“Your parents, darling,” Sushila Miss says. Acts like she’s rehearsed in front of the mirror. Which maybe she has. Sucks her teeth like this, tilts her head like that. All without loosening a strand of her tightly braided, waist-length blue-black hair.
(“It’s from a bottle,” our mothers say. “She can’t go this long with these children without any grays to show for it. Not possible.”)
“So sorry, ma’am,” Deepa says politely, “but I don’t think I got your name.”
“Sushila Miss. I teach maths over at the school,” she says. “I’m here to invite you to Annual Day. There will be free lunch from the local leader. Last year we had kichadi and basen ka ladoo.” She pinches the red-clay flesh on Deepa’s arm and says, “Join us. Fatten up those skinny bones.”
“That sounds nice,” Deepa says. “Is there a program?”
“Your schoolmates—” Sushila Miss says, then catches herself. “Students will indeed be performing. There will be plays, dances, and recitations. How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Ah, yes. Eleven. Fifth standard, then. The girls your age are dancing in a competition between the local schools. It’s a tradition, you see. I’m choreographing. Coaching them too, actually.” Sushila Miss leans in like she’s telling a secret. Deepa inhales Miss’s bouquet of cheap foreign perfume and sandalwood soap. “I was quite a good dancer when I was your age. Won awards.” Caught up in her own generosity, she puts her hand on her chest, bats her eyelashes. When she remembers that Deepa can’t see, she sighs a heavy sigh. “I’m doing my humble part to pass my gift on to them.”
“How kind of you,” Deepa says. Like she
’s hearing all of this for the first time. Like we haven’t already cribbed about Annual Day, haven’t imitated Sushila Miss’s barked orders, her exasperation. Even warned Deepa about this very visit. “That sounds like something I would love to—er—see.”
Sushila Miss laughs uncomfortably. She’s not used to girls who don’t apologize for who they are.
“You’ll come then?”
“I’ll come, ma’am,” Deepa says. “And I’ll be in the dance.”
Sushila Miss laughs again, this time with confidence. Because really. A blind girl in the Annual Day dance competition? She can’t be serious.
Can she?
Sushila Miss says soothingly, “Why trouble yourself?” She purrs like a kitten against a young child’s knees. “Just come enjoy.”
“Oh, I will,” Deepa says. “I always enjoy learning new things.”
“It’s a dance competition,” Sushila Miss repeats.
A competition our school has never won. Probably never will. But no need to admit that now, to this girl, who refuses to see what is right there in front of her sightless eyes.
“Which is why practice is so important,” says Deepa, who understands perfectly.
In preschool, Deepa was Heaven’s undisputed star. Counted up to twenty in English and Hindi, fifty in Tamil and Malayalam, one hundred in Kannada and Telugu. Recited multiplication tables like poems and poems like multiplication tables. Whenever a visitor came by to pass out a holiday lunch, Deepa was chosen to say the prayer before the meal. Tilted and turned her voice in all the right ways at all the right times.
We were only a little bit jealous. Especially after we figured out her secret: That she knew all of the words to the elephant rhyme, but none of the hand motions. That she could recite the Kannada vowels, but she couldn’t write them down. That when she was at the front of the line, she didn’t know which way to turn to take us to the toilets. Animals, birds, vegetables. Deepa could tell you their names. Their sounds, smells, textures. Just not their faces.
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