“Wash that well now, Padma,” Deepa’s mother yells. “Last time that cheat gave me spinach full of tiny, tiny flying ants. Filthy.”
“Yes, Aunty, I’m doing it,” Padma calls. “But there are still a lot of ants. You should go somewhere else to buy your spinach.”
“This is what I keep telling you,” Deepa yells.
“Who else is going to give me such a good price? And excuse me, you two boys, just because I’m talking to your sister doesn’t mean you stop reciting. What are thirteen twelves? Tell me.”
Deepa and Neelamma Aunty argue, and Padma’s brothers chant. Padma thinks of the silent post office full of love and loss and tragedy. Of stories begging to be rewritten.
She thought she would miss it. The power, the possibilities. The bending of time. But here, in this chaos of sisters and mothers and brothers, of families lost and found. Here, in this glorious present, she doesn’t miss a thing.
14
Lathi Charge
“the foreigner’s back,” Neelamma Aunty says. Teeth busy clutching a collection of safety pins, eyes busy glaring at the photographer framing the ruins of our lives. Hands busy wrapping herself in a cotton sari one of her clients gave her for Deepavali. It’s airier than her usual polyester blend, better able to weather sunshine and anger, uncertainty and rage. Perfect for a protest.
“What was that?” Deepa whispers, trying not to wake Banu’s ajji, who is asleep even though it’s at least two hours past sunrise.
Neelamma Aunty pulls the remaining pins out of her mouth and whispers, “The photographer woman. She’s back. These people, I’m telling you. Always around when we’re at our worst. But when we’re at our best? Nowhere to be found.”
“I know, Amma, I know,” Deepa says, groaning quietly. “Stop complaining and get ready. Let’s go.”
“Who says you’re coming?”
“Of course I’m coming.”
“Chee! Absolutely not. Today, you stay here.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s not safe.”
“Not safe? But all the other girls are out there. Why should it be different for me?”
“Of course it should be different for you! You’re—”
Just then, Banu’s ajji unleashes a giant, booming snore. Shreds the air into pieces. Sends Deepa and Neelamma Aunty into a fit of giggles.
“She’s louder than a bulldozer,” Neelamma Aunty whispers.
“Is she all right?” Deepa says, gasping.
“She’s fine!” Neelamma Aunty says. “That woman’s survived all this before. She’ll do it again.”
“What do you mean, again? This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to destroy Heaven?”
“No, no. Every few years they try something. The last time was just before you girls were born,” Neelamma Aunty says. “Back then, our houses extended up to the main road. The city wanted to widen it from two lanes to eight, but Heaven was in the way.”
“So what did you do?”
“The same thing we did yesterday. Got in front of the bulldozers and yelled and screamed and carried on. Not me, though. I was pregnant with you, and I didn’t want to take any chances,” Neelamma Aunty says. Rests her hand over her womb. A place where so many babies grew, so many died. Sometimes, she still feels them quivering. Still feels like a vessel full of ghosts.
“If you weren’t at the protest, then where were you?”
“Inside our house. I forced all the children to come with me. We were there for hours,” Neelamma Aunty says, skin prickling with memory. The feeling of her hand pressed against the vibrating walls, her feet pressed against the quaking floor. Of protecting Deepa, her unborn child. “We came out only after the bulldozers went away. After the lathi charge.”
“Lathi charge?” Deepa asked. She’s heard the phrase in the newspaper articles we read to her every morning. The words sound venomous, insidious, like the twin tooth marks of a spider bite. “Was it scary?”
“I’m sure it was,” Neelamma Aunty says. “I was inside, remember? We heard a lot of yelling and cursing. And then it got quiet, and everything stopped.”
“It can’t have just stopped. Someone must’ve done something,” Deepa says.
“Someone did do something,” Neelamma Aunty says. Remembrance seeps into her mind like a puddle under a locked door.
“Who?”
“People said it was Banu’s ajji,” Neelamma Aunty says. “But I don’t think anyone knew for sure.”
Banu’s ajji grew up with six sisters who were said to be the most beautiful girls in the district. Skin fair as clarified butter, eyes light as filter coffee. After every one of their coming-of-age ceremonies—and sometimes before—marriage proposals flowed in, each offer more prestigious than the last. Wealthy suitors and their powerful families made unbelievable promises to waive dowries, to split the costs of weddings. Promises unheard of in a village where women identified only as the wives of their husbands and the mothers of their sons, where the oldest grandmothers couldn’t even remember their original names.
Banu’s ajji’s parents should have been overjoyed. Instead, every potential groom made them more anxious. Because standing before all of this good fortune was an insurmountable obstacle: Banu’s ajji.
Custom dictated that none of the girls could marry until the oldest was settled. Banu’s ajji was the oldest. And Banu’s ajji was not like her sisters.
Skin dark and leathery from years of herding sheep. Hair perpetually matted with dust and grass and sunlight. Second toes longer than the first, which everyone knows is a mark of independence, a warning sign that a wife will be impossible to control.
By the time Banu’s ajji turned sixteen, she hadn’t received a single proposal. Her parents panicked, sure that if they waited any longer, they would have seven old maids on their hands instead of just one. So they called Banu’s ajji’s mother’s third cousin’s family. A family with five unmarried sons and no daughters, with plenty of hands for the field but none for the kitchen.
A family that didn’t have the money for a servant but certainly had the space for a wife.
“Strong as a buffalo, this one,” her mother-in-law said at Banu’s ajji’s bride viewing, “and doesn’t seem like the complaining type. Her horoscope’s a good match for my second son. We’ll take a dowry, but there’s no need for a wedding. Let’s register the marriage and spare the expense. What do you say?”
Banu’s ajji’s parents were delighted. By the end of the week, they obtained an official marriage license through the family court, sent their oldest daughter to her new husband’s village, and put out the word that their second daughter was ready for offers.
Banu’s ajji never saw her parents again.
The air in Deepa’s hut feels heavy, trapped. So does Deepa. She paces the floor like a caged animal, heat and bitterness pressing against her body like iron bars.
She keeps up her restless circles until Banu’s ajji finally stirs.
“Deepa, darling. Bring me some water, no?” she asks. Her words are raspy, labored, defeated. As though her lungs resent the fact that they are still expected to carry on.
“Here, Ajji,” Deepa says, handing the old woman a bottle of lukewarm water. “I’m sorry it isn’t cold.”
“Thank you, child,” Banu’s ajji says. Seeing the clouds pass across the girl’s face, she asks, “What’s wrong?”
“Amma said I couldn’t go out there,” Deepa says. “It’s not fair.”
“Don’t be so hard on her, darling. She’s just trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection. I’m not a child.”
“I see,” Banu’s ajji says, smiling. But only because she knows Deepa can’t see. “You’re an adult now, is it?”
“Only when my mother thinks it’s convenient,” Deepa says, grumbling.
“You girls,” Banu’s ajji says. “So ready to be old.”
“It’s not like we’re young,” Deepa says. “Not the way the boys are, anyway. Playing
and studying and doing whatever they want.”
“You’re right,” Banu’s ajji says gently. “It’s not easy to be a girl. But trust me, my dear. It is much, much harder to be a woman.”
During the first few months in her husband’s home, Banu’s ajji fell into a rhythm of chores punctuated by the thrumming beat of her mother-in-law’s constant criticisms.
“Don’t skin the vegetables so thickly. Just see how much you’re wasting.”
“Don’t scrub the shirts so hard. Just see the marks you’re leaving.”
And, sometimes, when her mistakes were worse than usual, “We did you a favor, bringing you into this family. Don’t make me regret my generosity.”
As for the man she married, Banu’s ajji rarely saw him. During the day, he worked in the fields with his father and brothers, coming home only long enough for Banu’s ajji and her mother-in-law to serve them meals. When the sun set, he lay down beside Banu’s ajji in a room the family had built for the newlyweds with walls made of cow dung and a roof made of straw. After an hour or two, he always left, returning early in the morning smelling like gasoline and cheap foreign cologne—cologne that Banu’s ajji was sure he didn’t own.
Every night he disappeared, and every day Banu’s ajji said nothing. What good would it do? She wasn’t a wife so much as a business arrangement, a stone that felled two mangoes, a solution to the problems of two families burdened with the wrong number of girls. Who was she to fault her husband for seeking love elsewhere, for supplying himself with everything he had been denied?
Besides, her husband fulfilled his one conjugal duty by impregnating her on their wedding night. At least, that’s what she assumed he’d done. She didn’t actually know how women became pregnant; no one had ever told her. When he mounted her, pressing his rough farmer’s hands against the dirt floor instead of her bare skin, she was confused, but circumspect. Observed his movements with a detached curiosity, assessing whether this ritual would become a new inconvenience in her life. So far, it hadn’t.
In those first days of her marriage, she was happy only in the mornings, when she rose before the rest of the household, sometimes even before the sun. Then, in the pearled light of the waking world, Banu’s ajji crouched on her heels outside the hut’s door, a mud pot full of rice flour cradled in her arms. Gathering the soft mixture in her fingers, she moved her hands in delicate circles, spinning the powder into flowers, stars, comets, planets. Whole galaxies away from the life she knew.
Her mother-in-law, who woke up soon after, would come outside to examine Banu’s ajji’s work. Tilting her head and shoving her fists into her hips, she’d say, “Well that’s not so bad now, is it?”
It was the closest she ever came to a compliment.
Our mothers say there are no secrets in Heaven.
They’re wrong, of course. There are plenty of secrets in Heaven. Secrets that hide in pots and pans, waiting for an excuse to bang and crash and roll and boil. Secrets that soak in pooled-up sunlight, watching the world with half-moon eyes. Secrets that lunge out of doorways, wind around windowsills, baring their fangs, making sure they are seen. Secrets shaped like the edges of shadows, the bottoms of clouds. Hues and textures that are woven so tightly into our vision that they are easily missed, even when they are right there, right in plain sight.
There are plenty of secrets still left in Heaven. Plenty of hiding places too.
Banu’s ajji’s past? That’s the biggest secret of all.
We don’t know where she came from, who her parents were, or who her husband’s parents were. How much or how little she studied, and whether she wanted to study more. We don’t even know her real name.
Back when she lived with her husband and her son and her son’s wife, Banu’s ajji introduced herself as Kadhir’s mother. Now that Kadhir Uncle is dead, she says she’s Banu’s ajji.
“I know that you said that in your village, women don’t use their first names,” Banu says. “But you live in the city now. Why not tell people what you’re really called?”
“The first thing I want people to know about me is that I’m your grandmother,” Banu’s ajji says. “So when I meet them, that’s what I tell them.”
“But there’s nobody left to meet. And everyone you’ve met already knows,” Banu says. She’s right—Banu’s ajji’s universe includes only Heaven and its orbit. Parents, teachers, headmistress. A vegetable vendor here and there, a doctor or nurse who came by with free injections. Migrants who moved in and out, staying for a few months, a few years.
“What’s wrong with calling myself your ajji?”
“Nothing. It’s just that all the other mothers use their proper names. Don’t you have a proper name?”
“I do. But like I said, it’s not important.”
“But it’s your name,” Banu says. “It’s who you are.”
“Who I am is your grandmother,” Banu’s ajji says. “There are lots of other parts of me, but you are the most important.”
“So is your name a secret?”
“Not a secret, exactly,” Banu’s ajji says thoughtfully. “Just something that the world doesn’t need to know.”
Soon after Kadhir Uncle was born, Banu’s ajji was told she was moving to the city.
“You’ll work beside my son as a pressingwallah, ironing the clothes of engineers for money,” her mother-in-law said. “My husband’s arranged it.”
“City?” Banu’s ajji asked. “What city?”
“What city, she asks? Just see this dimwitted girl,” her mother-in-law said, cackling. “Bangalore, of course. What other city do you know?”
Banu’s ajji blushed, but she didn’t say anything. When she was a girl, Bangalore was a scattering of bungalows and ration shops, a single stop on a bus route bumping over dirt paths. Going to Bangalore wasn’t going “to the city.” It was going “to market” or, maybe, sometimes, “to town.”
If Banu’s ajji could read, she would’ve known that, just as she was no longer a child, Bangalore was no longer a sleepy hamlet peopled with air force families and retirees. Would’ve seen the names of new companies hurtling through the newspapers, surging across the want ads like electrons stringing together a new kind of current: Infosys. Texas Instruments. Wipro. Names of places where people made things. Things like computers and calculators, cell phones and semiconductors. Money, money, and more money.
But Banu’s ajji had never been to school for longer than a week at a time. Which means that when she packed some saris and a bar of soap in a bag sewn out of empty rice sacks, she had no idea where she was going. Or why she was going there.
She boarded the first bus with her luggage in one arm, baby Kadhir Uncle in the other. Then another bus. Then another. On every vehicle, Banu’s ajji’s husband settled her and their child into a window seat, submitting himself to the rancid crush of passengers packed into the aisle. Each seat was a small kindness, a tiny sacrifice. Banu’s ajji noticed, and she was grateful.
When they finally reached Bangalore, Banu’s ajji nursed her son under her sari and pressed her nose against the bus’s double-paned glass. Watched the city unfurl like a roll of half-developed film. Cinemas and parks, churches and mosques, offices and petrol pumps. Lake breezes puffing perfumed petals off of the limbs of blooming trees.
They passed a building with tall red letters on the roof. Banu’s ajji heard the woman sitting behind her ask, “What does that say?”
“Karnataka Slum Clearance Board,” the woman’s husband said.
“Slum Clearance Board? Or just Slum Board?”
“Slum Clearance Board.”
“So the point is to get rid of slums, or to help them?”
“Get rid of them I guess.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. If people live in a slum, they probably need help. No one wants to live in a slum.”
“Hmm, true, true. But maybe that’s why these people want to clear slums. So no one has to live in them.”
“If that’s it, then that’s q
uite good, isn’t it?”
Listening to them, Banu’s ajji wondered what it would be like to be in a marriage like theirs. To have conversations with whole words and phrases instead of just gestures and grunts. To ask each other questions. To answer.
Twenty minutes later, they disembarked in the middle of a forest so dense that Banu’s ajji thought her husband had missed their stop. Instead, he pushed through shrubbery and high grass, shoved aside branches, and stepped over tree roots. Brought her and Kadhir to a clearing where a few families had strung plastic tarps between wooden poles sunk into the muddy ground. Where women crouched over smoky cook stoves, washed dishes in barrels of rainwater, sewed patches on the holes in their children’s clothes. Where everyone looked exhausted, fragile. Broken.
She wanted to ask her husband how he had found this place, and why he seemed to know it so well. Why he was so happy to trade a farmhouse built on an endless expanse of black earth and green fields for this cramped wasteland with a cut-up sky?
But hers was not a marriage of answers. So all she asked was, “Where are we?”
“Our new home,” her husband said.
Left to her own devices, Banu’s ajji narrowed her questions down to the smallest ones, the ones she could ask wives, mothers, daughters. Women like her, brought to this place with no information, no choice. Questions like, where is the best place to buy cheap vegetables? Where is the right place to hang laundry? Where does the water come, and how often?
Neelamma Aunty’s mother was the first to take pity on Banu’s ajji, offering her a cook stove and a stack of pots and pans.
“I’m sure I’ll have more to give you soon. We’re moving to government quarters, you see, and planning to start fresh,” Neelamma Aunty’s mother said. (She didn’t mention that she wasn’t taking Neelamma Aunty with her—Banu’s ajji would find out later.)
“Congratulations, Aunty,” Banu’s ajji said, readjusting Kadhir on her hip. “That’s wonderful.”
“My son found a position with the space program. He’s a driver,” Neelamma Aunty’s mother continued. “They gave him a flat and everything. He has an eighth-class pass so they say he may be able to become a supervisor. I suppose your husband hasn’t studied that far, has he?”
A People's History of Heaven Page 20
