A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

To children who have written to their parents after being disowned:

  Dear Child,

  I love you very much and always have. I am very proud of you. I accept everything that you are and who you married and who you love. I trust you.

  This is the only letter I can send to you because since you left I have become a spy. If I send you letters they will know I am your family and then you will be in mortal danger. So that’s why I don’t write you. But I will always be your father so you should not think about whether I love you or not. I do.

  Sincerely,

  Daddyji

  To old friends trying to make amends:

  Dear Satyam,

  Your apology is sincere. I forgive you. I hope you stop having nightmares about what you did to me because I am very happy and rich and I have married a beautiful woman who is also very kind. We are going to have lots of children together and she makes delicious food. So you don’t have to feel guilty any more.

  I run a big company now and have lots of duties. Because I became rich lots of people got jealous. So I left home and am hiding somewhere that my enemies can’t find me. Also because then they will leave my family alone.

  It is very pretty here but I don’t answer letters very often. So don’t worry if I do not write back. I still accept your apology.

  Wish You All

  the Best for

  a Happy Life,

  Your old friend

  And, most often, between lovers who quarreled or split or just got tired of each other:

  Dearest,

  I never stopped loving you. But I am going to have a really risky surgery and might not survive. You should move on and love someone else. Don’t worry, that will make me happy. If I die—which I probably will—then you should know that I loved you and only you and you are in my heart forever.

  Love,

  Your dearest

  In the letters Padma writes, people die. Vanish. Waste away. Flee. But they also forgive. Accept. Love. Trust.

  With her words, Padma makes the world into the place that it ought to be. A place too dangerous to forget how to love.

  There are signs, of course.

  How Padma suddenly starts watching serials with Joy right before dinner, starts listening to the radio plays with Deepa after. How she pays attention when Joy makes Rukshana help her act out dramatic scenes from the latest filmi flops. How she listens when any of our mothers wish out loud for a different life.

  Sure, it’s obvious when it’s all laid out. But not to us. Not then. We just didn’t see it.

  Same way Padma didn’t see the big letters “RLO” in the window of the office where she got her mother a job.

  When you’re hungry for something, it’s easy to ignore what is right in front of your eyes.

  One day, Padma pulls out a letter with handwriting that looks a little bit familiar. The slanted sentences, the country slang. Even the envelope smells familiar, like a certain kind of sunlight. A certain kind of rain.

  But then, she’s probably just imagining it.

  She eases open the flap, pulls out the letter. Reads:

  Dear Brother-in-Law,

  How many years has it been now? Fourteen? Fifteen? Long enough that everyone says it is useless to keep writing. But I don’t believe that you are gone.

  You are a good man. You wouldn’t do this to my sister and your daughter, who is twenty years old today.

  Your daughter is getting married. Did you know? She has made a good match. But now my sister needs money for the dowry. She needs you to come to the wedding so she can hold her head up with pride.

  I know you took up with Gita because after six years of marriage, my sister still couldn’t give you a son. I’ve heard Gita has given you one girl, but also two boys, like you wanted. I accept that. But when you moved to Bangalore to help your new family, you promised you wouldn’t forget my sister. I know you made good on your promise for years. Believe me, we saved all the money that you sent. But it’s been five years now since we’ve heard from you, and there is nothing left.

  I think your oldest daughter—the one Gita gave you—is fifteen now. What would you want for her? Is she so much more important than your very first daughter?

  It is time to accept your responsibility. My sister does not know I am writing. She would be furious if she knew. But what you are doing is not right so I cannot be quiet any longer.

  Come back. Pay for your first child’s wedding. Stand by your wife’s side at the ceremony so she is not humiliated. She is your first wife. You have a duty.

  You used to be a good man. Be one now.

  Sincerely,

  Raghav

  “No no no no no,” Padma whispers. Murmurs and hums like her mother. Feels herself crumple and fold like paper under teardrops. “It can’t be. It can’t.”

  But it can. It is.

  It always is.

  Just look at the return address: a place way up north of nowhere. Rice paddies watered by rivers the color of the afternoon sky. Yellow trucks scraping sand. Sisters walking barefoot to school along sandy half-made roads.

  Just look at the mailing address: Swargahalli. Behind Vidyalakshmi Hospital. House 3.

  Padma’s address.

  Padma knows about second families. We all do.

  How mothers warn their daughters to keep their husbands away from women with fertile wombs and hungry eyes. How second families hide in places where they cannot be found by first families.

  Places like Heaven.

  How some fathers—some of our fathers—start other families. How our mothers break coconuts and shave their heads and strike all kinds of bargains with God to send their men back. How our mothers blame themselves. Doesn’t matter how much he drank or hit or lied. Doesn’t matter how much money he gambled away.

  Not that Padma’s father does any of those things. He’s a good man. The letter even says so. All of us say so.

  Padma reads the letter and rereads it and then reads it again. Feels her heart, her lungs, her guts, twist into new shapes.

  History’s shape, though? That stays the same.

  Padma and Padma’s mother and Padma’s brothers are all a second family. Another woman’s nightmare. And now, if Padma’s father gets this letter, he might want to do the right thing. Not might. He will.

  After all, Padma’s father is a good man.

  If Padma’s father does do the right thing, he will go back to the village. He will pay for this daughter’s wedding. He will face the family he left. The life he could have had.

  What if he never comes back? Or what if he does?

  How will Padma, the one who has saved her mother and her brothers and all the rest of us from so many disasters, spend her life knowing that she is the cause of someone else’s pain?

  What kind of future is that?

  It is one thing to write stories to save others. It is another to write a story to save yourself.

  Padma knows it’s risky, but she takes the letter with her. Tucks it into the waistband of her skirt in the morning when she’s getting dressed for school. At lunch, she doesn’t sit with us. Instead, she climbs the banyan in the middle of the compound and reads the letter over and over and over. Like she’s searching for meanings hidden in the spaces between the words, between the lines. Like if she reads it enough times, its story will make sense. Will change.

  But all the reading does is make her tired. Tired of being everything for her mother, her father, her brothers. For strangers who write letters because it is easier to hope than to admit the truth.

  Tired of growing into the kind of woman who spends so much time being strong for others that she forgets to be strong for herself.

  On the second day that Padma avoids us, Joy calls up through the tree branches, “What’s the matter? You sick of us?”

  “Something like that,” Padma yells down. Really, she aches to be with us. To be folded up in our us-ness, our girl-ness.

  But she can’t.

  Padma’s never
kept secrets before. But how can she tell us this? After everything she’s agreed to—we’ve all agreed to—about second wives. Second families. Second choices. Promises we’ve made to one another. That we will not be like our mothers. That when we get married, we won’t be the first wife. We’ll be the only wife. And that, if we find out we are not the only wife, we will fight. Or walk away. Either way, we will win.

  “Whatever it is,” Joy says, “you’ll get over it.”

  Padma wonders if that is true. Thinks about the histories she has rewritten for all those returned letters. If this were someone else, Padma thinks, what would I write?

  She opens her notebooks and stares at the blank page. Most probably she would kill the father, she realizes. Humanely, though. A heart attack, maybe. Or a coma, like in the serials. Something quick. Without suffering. The news would come from a relative. A mother-in-law, maybe, or an aunt. It would say that the woman, the daughter, may have been abandoned, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t loved. It would urge the woman to forgive the family, to move on with her life, to find a new kind of happiness.

  Love. Trust. Acceptance. Forgiveness.

  Just yesterday, they seemed like the truest things Padma knew. Now they feel like the worst kind of fiction.

  Padma sends her brothers to Deepa’s house and walks her mother to the India Post. But today, the gray-yellow light is the color of rejections, the crooked metal shelves the shapes of collapsing bodies. Each register of unreturned mail bends beneath the weight of hundreds of hearts as heavy as Padma’s. Maybe thousands.

  It’s a wonder the whole building doesn’t sink into the earth.

  Padma opens her maths, but the numbers on the page dip and ripple. She blinks rapidly, but it doesn’t help. Tears still perch on her eyelids, ready to leave spots on the parentheses and triangles and x’s and y’s. All the bits and pieces of things that Janaki Ma’am says will help her get to college.

  Janaki Ma’am, who is one more person who needs Padma to be strong.

  “Ma,” Padma finally says. “Is this place okay for you? Is it too sad?”

  Gita Aunty smiles her distracted smile. Beneath it, Padma imagines she sees a flicker of the mother she once knew. The mother with black-brown arms and a back knotted and strong from farm labor. The mother whose sari smelled like cooked rice and burnt paddy and courage. “I like it here,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s quiet,” Gita Aunty says. “It’s an easy place to forget things.”

  “Okay,” Padma says. “Then I’m going. But you can’t lose this job, okay? You have to stay here. No stealing things or running away or anything like that.”

  “Go,” Padma’s mother says, humming under her breath. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  Padma hopes that this time, her mother’s words will not be fiction.

  Padma gets home just as her father is about to leave for his shift.

  When he sees her, his face lights up. “Padma,” he says, “I didn’t think I’d see you today!”

  “There’s something you should know,” Padma blurts out.

  “Is everything all right? Is it your brothers? Tell me, darling, I’ll help.”

  “It’s about your daughter,” she says. “Not me. Your other daughter. From your first family.”

  She pulls the letter from her skirt’s waistband and reads it out loud. Anger coats her tongue like lava, turning the words liquid, volcanic. Explosive. When she looks up, her vision is blurred, like she is looking through a cloud of ash.

  Her father remains perfectly calm. Asks, “How much money is in your mother’s bank account?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” he says. “How much money is in your mother’s bank account?”

  “That’s my college money. You said so yourself.”

  “That’s our family’s money. You said so yourself.”

  “Our family’s,” Padma says, “or your other family’s?”

  “Padma,” her father says, saccharine as honey, viscous as betrayal. “I moved to Bangalore to give you and your brothers comfort and opportunities.”

  “Me and my brothers,” Padma asks, “or just my brothers?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful. You have a good life.”

  “I do not have a good life,” Padma says. “I have to go to Deepa’s house if I want to eat properly. I have to babysit my own mother. My mother who stopped being a mother the second you brought us here. I have to manage the finances and speak to the bill collectors and the tellers at the bank, most of whom look at me like I’m scum. I don’t have a good life.”

  “Shut your mouth, you ungrateful girl,” he says. “Whatever life you have, I’ve given you. You know how parents drown their daughters when they’re babies? Leave them out for tigers? But when you were born, we kept you. I kept you. Now you tell me exactly how much money is in that account before you make me regret my decision.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No,” she says. Padma, who knows the bank tellers. Padma, who reads the notices, keeps the books. “I’m not letting you have the money. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Why you disrespectful little—”

  “You can’t read. Can’t do math, can’t fill out a withdrawal slip. You don’t even know where I opened the account,” Padma says. “You made me do it. So I’m the only one who knows.”

  “Padma, I’m warning you,” he says. Raises his hand. It’s trembling.

  “Go ahead,” Padma says. “Hit me.”

  She means it.

  “Well?” she says. Waiting.

  He keeps his hand raised. But it never falls.

  “Didn’t think so,” she says. “Now, about the money. Go to the wedding if you want. Give your other daughter a dowry. Just don’t expect this daughter to pay for it.”

  At Deepa’s house, Padma’s brothers are racing around Neelamma Aunty’s sewing machine, reciting their times tables. Every once in a while, Deepa’s mother looks up from her tailoring and yells at them to pay attention.

  “Hey! Four eights is not twenty-four,” Neelamma Aunty says. “What is it?”

  “Four eights is thirty-two,” her brothers say.

  “Good,” Deepa’s mother says. Then, “Hello, darling. Here to pick up these rascals?”

  “Yes, Aunty,” Padma says. Adds, for the thousandth time, “Thank you for watching them while I take my mother to work.”

  “Chee! How many times do I have to tell you not to thank me. Anyway, good you’re here. I was just letting out the hem of your uniform skirt,” Neelamma Aunty says. The black Singer sewing machine clacks and rattles. “This should last you another month or two, but tell your mother she needs to get you some new uniforms. Janaki Ma’am can arrange for it.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Aunty,” Padma says. “I could’ve done it. Don’t you have a lot of other work to do?”

  What Padma really means is paid work. Deepa’s mother knows better than anyone that Padma’s family doesn’t have the money for tailoring. Even simple jobs like this.

  “Nonsense,” Neelamma Aunty says briskly. “Deepa tells me you have studying to do. Didn’t I see Janaki Ma’am visit your house the other day?”

  “Yes, Aunty,” Padma says, blushing.

  “Well then. You just worry about studying. You let me worry about my work. Now go inside. Deepa is waiting for you, I’m sure,” she says.

  Padma steps into the house, as she’s told, inhaling its familiar odor of talcum powder and curry leaves. Deepa, who is pounding ragi into soft, doughy balls, says, “Hey, useless! Come here and help me chop some spinach for sopu saru.”

  Padma rolls her eyes, but only because she knows Deepa can’t see it.

  “You’re early,” Deepa says, scooting over to make room for Padma beside her on the floor. “Your mother is okay by herself now?”

  “Seems like it,” Padma says. Takes a straw mat from the corner of the room and sits down on it cross
-legged.

  “Good,” Deepa says. “Now what’s wrong with you? I’m blind, and even I can see that something is on your mind.”

  “Nothing,” Padma says, a little too quickly.

  “Liar.”

  “Oh, shut up. Where’d your mother put that washing bowl? This spinach is filthy.”

  “Check in the corner by the water,” Deepa says. Her braid sways slightly as she pounds the ragi, her wrists and fingers fluttering and hopping like babbler birds.

  “There is something on my mind. But I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Padma says, tipping water from the drum into the bowl of spinach. Words barely louder than the sloshing of the water.

  “Then don’t talk about it now,” Deepa says. “Or ever, if you don’t want to.”

  Could this be an option, Padma wonders? What if this story, the story of a second family, of one of the most hated things in Heaven, is fully told? What if there are no words to add, no problems to resolve? What if she never has to speak about it, think about it, grapple with it, ever again?

  “Whatever it is, I’m glad your mom is settled and you’re back to coming here after school. I missed you,” Deepa says.

  “Of course I’m back,” Padma says. “Where would I go?”

  “College,” Deepa says. “Pre-university. Places I can’t go.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Padma says. Even though she knows it does. “You can’t get rid of me so easily.”

  Padma stuffs the spinach in the bowl full of water. Swishes it back and forth, back and forth. Insects float to the top, tiny black corpses with paper-thin wings.

  From outside, Deepa’s mother yells, “Padma, why are you washing vegetables? Shouldn’t you be doing your math problems? Make my lazy daughter do it.”

  “Don’t call me lazy, Amma! I’m blind, not deaf.”

  “I’ll just help her and then do my maths, Aunty.”

  “Fine, fine. But don’t try and get out of your homework, young lady. I’m watching you.”

  “Yes, Aunty.”

  In Heaven, there are first families and second families. But there are other families too. Families born out of something more than blood. Families that cannot be erased with a new letter, a new story. A new neighborhood, a new wife.