A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

  This kindness, then, was a warning, Banu’s ajji realized. A caution not to expect much. Still, she was grateful. So grateful, in fact, that she took a bowl of rice flour to Neelamma Aunty’s mother’s doorstep the next morning at dawn. Crouched in the dirt, she laid out a series of dots, diagonals. Connected them with curves and lines and flourishes. When she finished, she sat back on her heels, admiring her work.

  “Who’s there?” Neelamma Aunty’s mother asked. Her voice trembled, like she’d been woken up this early before. More than once, probably. And probably to receive bad news.

  “It’s me,” Banu’s ajji said. “Sorry to disturb.”

  “Ah, yes. The one who took my pots,” Neelamma Aunty’s mother said. After her eyes focused in the dim light, she said, “This is beautiful. Is this what you do for work?”

  “For work?”

  “Rich people pay for kolam. Here they call it rangoli, though—some north Indian word. Whatever you call it, they don’t know how to do it themselves.” Neelamma Aunty’s mother knelt down and studied the intricate patterns. “You should get yourself some powders and go make some money.”

  “Oh no,” Banu’s ajji said, blushing. “I shouldn’t work outside of the home.”

  “Why not?” Neelamma Aunty’s mother asked.

  Even though Banu’s ajji mumbled another excuse, she thought to herself, Actually, she’s right. Why not?

  Here in Bangalore, she was not the illiterate, lazy-eyed shepherdess ruining her sisters’ futures. The toiling spouse working off the debt of her family’s desperation. The woman whose husband was too disgusted to touch her. Here, she was simply the pressingwallah’s wife. Kadhir’s mother. A woman who was good at kolam.

  Thus far, her life had been a collection of the consequences of other people’s choices. But maybe it no longer had to be. Maybe, now, the choices could be her own.

  Deepa rubs orange-yellow oil onto Banu’s ajji’s shoulders, feet, back. Neelamma Aunty got it from Fatima Aunty who got it from some woman in her village who knows which herbs heal soreness. It smells like a wet jungle. Makes the tips of Deepa’s fingers burn.

  “Mmm, that’s good,” Banu’s ajji says with a sigh.

  “Ajji,” Deepa says, “Amma says that they tried destroying Heaven before.”

  “Yes,” Banu’s ajji says, closing her eyes. “About fifteen, sixteen years ago, I think. Just before you were born.”

  “Amma says you’re the one who stopped them.”

  Deepa feels the old woman’s limbs tighten, muscles knot. Underneath Deepa’s oily fingers, Banu’s ajji’s body suddenly feels thick with memories.

  “Yes,” Banu’s ajji says, “I was.”

  “What did you do?”

  The hut fills up with city noises. Insects buzz and geckos chirp. Car horns blast and bus brakes screech. Somewhere nearby a cell phone rings. Banu’s ajji, though, stays quiet.

  Just when Deepa thinks the old woman has fallen asleep again, she says, “It doesn’t matter what I did. But I can tell you that it won’t work now. Otherwise I would’ve done it already.”

  “Did you know someone, ajji?”

  “Not someone, exactly,” Banu’s ajji says. “More like something.”

  After Neelamma Aunty’s mother suggested she should start a rangoli business, Banu’s ajji saved five annas here, ten paisa there, until she had enough to buy herself a basket of powders. Just four colors to start with: red, yellow, blue, and purple.

  Once she had the powders, all she needed was permission. The night her kit was complete, she sat cross-legged on the bare earth in front of their family’s tent flap, peering into the night, waiting for her husband to come home from wherever he always went. The ground was cold and dewy beneath her thighs.

  There were no streetlights in the neighborhood yet, but that night, the moon was full, turning the world as bright as day. Which is why Banu’s ajji could clearly see her husband when he emerged from the underbrush, sometime after midnight. Even if it had been pitch black, she would’ve known him: the way he swung his arms when he walked, dropped his shoulders, bowed his legs. After only a few years, his silhouette was already as familiar to her as her own.

  He wasn’t alone. A few steps behind him, a moonlit shadow wove between the trunks of trees. Tall and boxy. Close-cropped hair, muscled neck.

  A man-shaped shadow that, with whispered urgency, pulled her husband into a passionate kiss.

  Banu’s ajji squeezed her eyes shut. Had she imagined it? But no, when she looked again, there they were, their bodies smashed together, hands searching each other’s backs, lips searching each other’s mouths. Clinging together like the steely remains of a two-car collision.

  She knew that she was supposed to be shocked, indignant. Maybe even distraught. Instead, she was flooded with relief.

  Because now, she had answers. She knew where her husband went. Knew why he didn’t touch her, speak to her. Knew that his throat was sealed with a potent mixture of shame and guilt and confusion. Knew the real reason he agreed to move to Bangalore. Not for money. For love.

  She watched her husband and his lover—because that’s what this man was, she realized, her husband’s lover—but she didn’t say anything, didn’t move. After all this time, she could wait. Wait for her husband to see her. Or, more specifically, to see her seeing him. To know that she knew.

  Tonight, when she told him that she wanted to work, he would say yes. In fact, from now on, no matter what she asked him, he would always say yes.

  “Do you need anything else, ajji?” Deepa asks. Washes ajji’s cup in a barrel of water that’s been sitting in the sun, just outside the door. It’s so hot it feels like Deepa warmed it up on a stove.

  “Besides a new set of lungs?” Banu’s ajji asks. Laughs a laugh like scraping metal.

  “What happened to your breathing, ajji?”

  “All those years of ironing,” Banu’s ajji says. Puts a rough hand on Deepa’s hair. “The coal turned my lungs black. Did the same thing to my husband.”

  “He passed away?”

  “Years and years ago. Right before my son, Banu’s father, got married. It’s a shame Banu never met her grandfather. He was handy, just like she is.”

  “Do you think that’s where she got it from?”

  “She didn’t get it from her father, that’s for sure!” Banu’s ajji laughs two or three loud, wild guffaws before her joy dissolves into a cough that jangles like rusted tin.

  When Banu’s ajji recovers, Deepa asks, “Do you miss him, Ajji? Your husband?”

  “Every day, my darling,” Banu’s ajji says. “Every single day.”

  Banu’s ajji loved doing her rangoli rounds. Back then, in the mornings, Bangalore’s air was still crisp with unfurling leaves and rippling water. Crows cawed and swooped between houses eating the cooked rice and lentils Brahmin women left on windowsills. In the near distance, the azaan poured from the tinny speakers of a newly constructed mosque, syllables smooth and shimmering like liquid bronze.

  Above it all, her own voice, clear and strong, calling out, “Rang-o-leeee! Rang-o-leee!”

  She loved the families too, and the houses. Strings of green lime and red chilies swinging from doorframes, warding off the evil eye. Clanking wrought-iron gates, posh housewives in cotton nighties and bare feet, saying, “My grandchildren are coming today. Can you do something special?” Or, “It’s my husband’s birthday. He likes the color red.” Or, her favorite, “I saw what you did at the neighbor’s house. Do something like that for me. Something to make them jealous.”

  While Banu’s ajji squatted on driveways and doorsteps, coaxing designs out of her ever expanding set of colored powders, her husband would wake their son. Bathe him, feed him, walk him to school. Banu’s ajji would be home in time for her husband to go collect the clothes that the two of them would spend the day pressing, often knocking on the doors of the same houses Banu’s ajji had just left, carefully stepping around the patterns drawn an hour before.

 
“My wife’s been here, I see,” he’d say with something like pride.

  “That’s your wife?” the client would say, handing over trousers, dress shirts, saris, salwars. Some damp with morning dew, others smelling like yesterday’s sunshine. “Such talent. You both are going places, I tell you.”

  They did the ironing in a three-walled shed, a boxy thing her husband had slapped together using plaster of Paris and bamboo. Together, they watched the children leave for school, the mothers go to work.

  When her husband left to do his deliveries, the neighborhood women and girls would stop by to talk, describing the parents that pushed them out of the schools they loved and into the marriages they despised. The toddy-soaked husbands that showed up only long enough to fill their wombs with unwanted children. The employers who left finger-shaped bruises on their arms, turning their skin into tangled blooms of green and black and blue.

  Banu’s ajji helped them as much as she could. Made friends with the local health workers and the school officials. Ferried wives and daughters to the post office when she knew the sympathetic clerk was on duty, the one who was patient enough to open bank accounts for women who pinned dupattas on their heads to hide their torn hair, their black eyes. Became someone reliable, dependable. Useful.

  Sometimes, if a neighbor’s problem required carpentry—a leaky roof, for instance, or a cracked wall—she’d ask her husband to help. Sometimes, she didn’t even have to ask.

  “I heard you talking,” he’d tell her later. “I thought I’d do it before you started nagging.”

  It was a joke, Banu’s ajji knew. She didn’t nag him. Barely spoke to him, really. It was too risky, all those words. So much of the truth of their marriage was hidden. These days, neither one of them had the energy to lie.

  Once, when they were ironing, her husband said to her, “If you wanted to find someone, I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Find someone?”

  “Someone like I have,” he said.

  “Are you mad?” She laughed. “Why would I need another man in my life? You and your son are more than enough trouble.”

  “Fine, fine,” her husband said, laughing too. “I know my son and I could both do better.”

  “Oh, you know I’m teasing. You’re a good husband and a good father. A good man, really,” Banu’s ajji said. She paused then, digging through the silence for a way to say what she meant. A way to speak the unspeakable. “That’s why I’m fine with you. Whatever you want to do, I’m fine.”

  “All right,” he said, clearing his throat. He clapped her awkwardly on the back, as he would a brother or a cousin. A friend. “All right then.”

  It was the closest he ever came to thanking her.

  At night, after they were both sure Kadhir was asleep, she watched her husband weave through the lopsided tents, sidestepping the sewage running down from the new hospital. Stealing away from this home built on adultery, this marriage built on disappointment. From the cancer that neither one knew was pushing its coal-colored fingers into their lungs.

  There, beneath the blinking stars and airplane taillights, Banu’s ajji breathed in deeply and said to herself, Well now. Just see. After all this, I’ve ended up happy. We both have.

  How strange, she thought. How very, very strange.

  The first time the city tried to demolish Heaven, our mothers’ mothers and their husbands streamed out of their houses with rocks and crowbars and broken metal. A few of our mothers did too. Rushed toward the bulldozers like fire from a dragon’s mouth. Wedged open the bulldozers’ doors and pulled out the drivers.

  The police came quickly, so quickly, in fact, that some people thought they must’ve been crouched in the bushes the whole time, their khaki uniforms the color of the undergrowth. They came screaming out of the foliage, twirling their lathis. The people of Heaven ran right at them, welcoming a new target for their unspent rage.

  The police commander stayed out of it, marching coldly around the perimeter, measuring out his officers’ madness. When necessary, he pulled them back, yelling, “Just scare them. Don’t murder them. We don’t need the extra paperwork.”

  When necessary, he also yelled, “Harder. Faster. Teach these ruffians a lesson.”

  When the bulldozers came, the first thing Banu’s ajji did was find Neelamma Aunty and the neighborhood children. Shoved them all into Neelamma Aunty’s house and shut the door. At first the smallest ones hurled themselves against the walls, mewling like indignant kittens, insisting they were old enough to help. Banu’s ajji ignored them, her back against the house, staring into the trees and willing her husband to come home from his deliveries early so he could tell her what to do.

  She didn’t find her husband. Instead, she found the police commander.

  Boxy shoulders. Muscled neck. Close-cropped hair. But more than anything, the smell. That sickly sweet cologne. Banu’s ajji knew that smell.

  Banu’s ajji adjusted her sari. Dusted off her hands, hitched her petticoat up from where it was peeking out beneath her skirt. Slunk up to the commander, careful as a cat. Surefooted. Calm.

  “What do you want, woman?”

  “Commander, sir, I think you know my husband,” she said, staring at the ground.

  “Who is your husband?”

  “The pressingwallah,” she said. For a second, her eyes flicked up at him, her gaze black with knowledge. “I think you know him quite well, in fact.”

  The commander didn’t say anything. Just tightened his grip on his lathi, tensed the muscles on his neck. They stuck out like rope.

  “Call off your men,” she said quietly.

  “You don’t scare me,” he said, his voice low and strained. “You have no one to tell. Even if you did, who’s going to believe the words of a crazy old kolam lady.”

  So it is him, she thought. He knows what I do for a living. My husband has told him. The edges of her advantage felt crisp as a one-thousand-rupee note.

  “Your officers may not believe me,” she said, “but my husband will.”

  The man grunted. So she continued.

  “He’ll believe me if I tell him that you allowed our home to be destroyed,” she said. “That you stood by while we lost all of our possessions. Our papers and our savings. Our livelihood. Our reason for being in this city at all, really.”

  He cleared his throat but still did not speak. She was close enough to see the stubble on his chin, his neck. Some of it, she saw, was speckled white. It reminded her of the rice flour she used to make her first kolams. The ones at her mother-in-law’s house.

  Banu’s ajji kept her eyes on the ground, but she was sure she could feel the police commander assessing her. Feel his blood pulsing in his ears, drowning out the noise of people screaming, banging, rioting. Of houses falling to the ground.

  “He’s not in love with you,” the commander said finally.

  “I’m not in love with him either,” she said. “I’m not in love with anyone, in fact. So if we move back to the village, it’s all the same to me.”

  “He would never move back to the village,” the commander said, laughing harshly.

  “If we lose our home, we’ll have to,” Banu’s ajji said firmly. “We have nowhere else to go.”

  The air vibrated with pounding footsteps, desperate screams. Unmitigated rage. But Banu’s ajji felt that she and the commander were somewhere else. Somewhere cold and still and silent. Somewhere between what would happen and what would not.

  A place where Banu’s ajji, and not the policeman, had the power.

  “Call off your officers,” Banu’s ajji said quietly, “and then call the city. Tell them to stop all of this. Not just for now, but for good.”

  In Heaven, the ground quivered, the trees shuddered. Even the wind seemed to tremble. But Banu’s ajji felt still and sturdy and bright.

  After a minute, the police commander yelled, “Officers! Stand down!”

  After five minutes, he called his contact in the city, speaking just loudly enough that he kne
w Banu’s ajji—but no one else—could hear.

  After ten minutes, the bulldozers pulled away.

  “Hello? Deepa, are you in there?”

  Banu’s ajji’s eyes flutter open. She’d fallen into a confusing half sleep, somewhere between dreaming and waking. Now, covered in sweat, in a house that isn’t her own, she is sure that the voice is part of a dream, or perhaps a haunting. It sounds like Kadhir, maybe, or her husband. After all, what human male would show up in a slum in the middle of a demolition, when they could be out playing at colors or cards or anything at all besides being a provider?

  But when she opens her eyes, it’s not a specter speaking, but a boy. A boy who is not like other boys but might be a little bit like Deepa.

  “Who’s there?” Banu’s ajji asks sleepily.

  “Hello, Aunty,” says the boy politely. When he steps through the doorway, Banu’s ajji sees that he is bent over. At first she thinks he is leaning over to enter the house. Until she realizes that his hunch is not something he’s doing, but his actual back.

  “What happened to your—”

  “Polio, when I was a child,” the boy says. Smiles charmingly and adds, “But don’t worry, Aunty, my health is just fine. My mind too.”

  “You! What are you doing here?” Deepa asks. She comes in from around the side of the house, where she’s been soaking up the day’s pathetic excuse for a breeze.

  “Deepa!” the boy says. “I’ve been so worried. Are you all right? Where’s your mother?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Just bored out of my mind,” Deepa says. “My mother’s outside. Can you take me to her?”

  “Of course,” the boy says. Reaches for Deepa’s elbow like he’s done it before. Like it’s his right.

  “One minute, young lady,” Banu’s ajji says. Fighting to find the strict mother she knows is still inside her, the one that kept Kadhir Uncle and Neelamma Aunty and so many of our mothers out of harm’s way for so many years. “Where do you think you’re going? Who gave you permission? And who is this boy?”