Daddy, Sheela’s otherwise kind Daddy, turned into a hideous beast. Nothing Sheela did was right. He picked on her and found fault incessantly: You don’t help your mother enough. Your friends are not our kind of people, they’re riff-raff! You watch too much TV. You wander around all the time. Who taught you to say ‘shit’ in every sentence? Who is that boy I saw you talking to near the park gates?
The list was endless and mostly contradictory. Sheela didn’t try to reason, as she would have once. ‘How can I watch TV all day and still be wandering around as you claim?’ She would have demanded when she was younger.
But Sheela didn’t talk to her Daddy like that any more. These days, when she thought she was being witty, he scolded her for being rude.
‘But I thought you wanted me to be witty. That you were proud of my sense of humour,’ Sheela wanted to cry. When she was a little girl, he had encouraged her to speak like an adult. With a razor-edged wit and a finely developed skill of repartee. But now that she was grown, when he saw her, he saw a woman and not his little girl any more and he only felt anger at what he thought was her questioning his authority.
Sometimes when friends came calling and there would be a little girl whose father beamed proudly at his daughter’s quick answers, Sheela would want to butt in and plead, ‘Don’t do this to her. My father was the same. He thought it funny when I was cheeky. Only now he calls it back chat and it makes him furious. Please, don’t do this to your daughter. She is going to grow up thinking this is the way to be. Instead, teach her to swallow her words, make her mouth nice and pleasant, innocuous things. Kill her spirit and tame her tongue. So that when she grows up, she won’t be like me, wondering what it is I said wrong and what blunder I am going to commit next by opening my mouth.’
Sheela heard Daddy out and waited for him to leave the room. When he was angry, he always left the room as if he
couldn’t trust himself to remain there and cause no harm. Sheela didn’t mind. Daddy was the same when he went to Ammumma’s house. Sheela was very often the butt of his ire.
She knew why he was being so abominable. He resented being relieved of his position as head of the household, man of the family. The rich brothers had taken over the running of the house – bills, shopping, they handled everything. The food he provided was not satisfactory. They craved for rare and delicate foods, which only they could afford to pay for. When Daddy produced a bottle of army rum, they ignored it for the duty-free Scotch they had brought with them.
The house was swamped with the fragrance of airline interiors and foreign lands. And the rich sister took over their lives, handing out advice that was both self-congratulatory and insulting. Sheela was the only one Daddy could exercise his power over. And Sheela knew there was no escaping the beast’s wrath until Ammumma left or died.
Sheela’s grandmother lost her mind. Ammumma sat up in bed, shrugging aside the thin cotton cloth that Mummy’s eldest brother and her favourite son had covered her with. She stared at the faded pink walls and began addressing the corner of the wall closest to her bed. ‘Mother,’ she said. And Sheela’s mother and aunt looked at each other in surprise. Why was their mother talking to their dead grandmother?
Women turn to their mothers when they have no one else to turn to. Women know that a mother alone will find it possible to unearth some shred of compassion and love that in everyone else has become ashes. Sheela knew why Ammumma sought her mother.
‘Mother,’ Ammumma said with a note of urgency in her voice. ‘Look at that bitch striding into the bedroom with her long legs. He sees the pale skin of her inner thighs, her milk and water complexion and falls deeper in love with her. The besotted fool!’ She was referring to Sheela’s eldest
uncle’s wife; her pet hate and the target of constant venom. According to Ammumma, she was the cause of all problems, real and imaginary.
Mummy pacified her distraught brother, ‘You shouldn’t be so upset. It is just the heat. The radiation causes unimaginable heat in her system, making her talk nonsense. Just turn the air-conditioning up.’ And later, she told her sister, ‘The heat has let loose all the demons that were slumbering inside our mother.’
Sheela knew it had nothing to do with the heat. Ammumma had finally realized her time was up and she wasn’t going to die without having spoken her mind. But Sheela still went to the hospital canteen and ordered a tumbler of pepper rasam. The waiter there gave her a curious look. She was the only one there that day, on that hot day, asking for a fiery hot dish instead of something cold – a badaam kheer or basundi — like everyone else.
Sheela sat there steaming, sweat running off her brow, and sipped the hot pepper rasam, trying to see if it would unleash the demons in her. Give her the courage to tell her father, ‘Why don’t you get off my back? Quit being a beast, will you? All you do these days is frown and snap at me. I didn’t make my grandmother ill. I’m not responsible. Do you understand?’
Make her tell her grimalkin aunt, ‘Shut up fat face, go bully someone else – your husband, your children, your half-a-dozen servants, and leave my poor mother alone.’
And make her glare at her uncles saying, ‘If you want to show your largesse, your wealth, hire a cook for my overworked mother, and a man to run between home and hospital and on your innumerable chores, instead of treating my father like your resident errand boy.’
The flames raged but the demons stayed locked. So she ordered a double scoop of rum ‘n’ raisin and doused the fire. She knew she had been right all the time.
Six weeks later, they brought Ammumma back home. The
brothers and sister had left after a few days. Mummy and Daddy took turns to nurse Ammumma. But the cancer wouldn’t relinquish its hold. Besides, everything that could go wrong did – her blood pressure soared, her kidneys failed and all the while the gnome in her womb kept growing. Once again, the brothers and sister were summoned to her bedside.
Sheela stood on the balcony, watching the road, waiting for Ammumma to arrive from the hospital. Suddenly the world seemed tired. The mango trees looked weary. The hedges were covered in a film of dust and even the colours of the crotons in the pots had turned dull and lifeless. Inside the house, Mummy and her sister wept, hugging each other as they wailed, ‘Mother, don’t leave us.’
Once when Sheela peeped, she saw them wiping each other’s tears until the next burst of anguish caused another stream of brine to flow. To look at them, one would never believe that these women were constantly warring, scoring points off each other all the time. But Sheela knew this was just for now. Their newly found sisterhood would soon come to an end.
When the green van stopped at the block of flats, Sheela knew Ammumma was in it. She saw them park the van in the slender shade of the ashoka tree. She waited for Ammumma to step out after the men. But there was no sign of her. For the first time, Sheela didn’t know what was happening.
‘Where is she?’ she wanted to scream. She felt Daddy touch her elbow. When she turned to him, he said quietly, ‘Go sit with her. She is in the van.’
A helpless creature, a giant mound of flesh smelling of urine and eau de cologne, lay in the back of the van. Its mouth was half-open, its lips cracked and dry. Its skin had creased into multiple folds of coarse parchment and its hair resembled fronds of steel wool. It lay there sucking in air with rasping breaths. Sheela looked at it and knew for
certain that her grandmother had already escaped her body. She was, Sheela knew, in some celestial realm, sitting on a four-poster cloud and decking herself with a thousand stars.
Nevertheless, this was Ammumma’s abandoned body and Sheela knew how much she would have hated to see herself as she was now. Once when Sheela was spending a summer with her, Ammumma had come back from a relative’s funeral looking tormented. Much later she had explained to Sheela the reason. ‘Lakshmi was such a well-groomed woman when she was alive. But you should have seen what they did to her today. They laid her out stark-naked on a banana leaf; every mole, vein and blemish exposed. Her hair was unkempt, her body looked unwashed and there wasn’t a grain of gold on her. How could they rob her of her dignity, of her grace? And I realized this is what I too will end up looking like when I’m dead. And there will be nothing I can do to prevent it.’
Sheela fanned the creature’s face, spooned water into its mouth and spoke to it. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to let the world see you like this.’ She plucked the wiry strands from her chin, carefully brushed the almost brittle hair on her head and braided it into a plait that she fixed in place with a glittering rubber band. Sheela rubbed her aunt’s foundation into her grandmother’s face, shoulders and chest. And dusted her aunt’s expensive talc just the way Ammumma liked to do it. On her face, neck, over her shoulders, and under her breasts that hung limply like empty pouches. When she was covered in a patina of fragrant chalky grey, Sheela rimmed her eyes with a kohl pencil and touched her eyebrows with feathery strokes in the manner her make-up book advocated. Sheela’s aunt had already confiscated all of Ammumma’s jewellery. So Sheela adorned her with costume jewellery. A crescent moon rested on her flaccid bosom. A waterfall of crystals cascaded from her ears.
When they came down, there were gasps of horror. ‘You dreadful girl,’ Mummy cried, ‘how could you?’
Sheela saw Daddy’s face tighten ominously and felt his fingers bite into the flesh of her upper arm in mute anger. Sheela knew they thought that she had committed sacrilege. She knew they thought that she had turned Ammumma into an obnoxious creature – a garish, dressed-up dying harlot. But Sheela knew Ammumma would have preferred this to looking diseased and decaying.
There was no time to clean her up. She had always wanted to die in her own bed and they had a long drive ahead before they reached home. Her home. Through a haze of pain and humiliation, Sheela watched the brothers and sisters get into the van and huddle around their mother’s dying body. Daddy stood by Sheela’s side, stern with disapproval and disappointment. She didn’t care. She knew Ammumma would have been pleased.
When Akhila’s father died, two things happened: Sundays became just another day of the week and Akhila became the man of the family.
Since Appa had ‘died in harness’, and Akhila had passed her pre-university examinations with a first-class, she was offered a job in the income-tax department on ‘compassionate grounds’ and with it the responsibility of keeping her family’s bodies and souls together. Akhila was nineteen but she wasn’t unsure of what she had to do or overwhelmed by what was expected of her.
Narayan, the oldest of her younger siblings, was to go to the polytechnic college next year. Narsi was to continue at the school. He still had several years left and by that time, Akhila thought, they could afford to put him through college. She said, ‘Think of it, he will be the first graduate in our family. A Bachelor of Arts or Science, whichever stream he chooses. As for Padma, we needn’t worry about her right now. She is content as long as I buy her satin ribbons for her hair and glass bangles for her wrists.’
That left just Amma, who wore a pleat of worry in the middle of her forehead and had taken to twisting and wringing her hands as if they were tangled in the intricate
folds of the voluminous nine-yard sari she swathed herself in.
‘I don’t care what anyone says,’ Akhila told her. ‘But I won’t let you shave your head or exchange your pretty madisars for a saffron sari. Just because Appa is no more, you don’t have to turn yourself into a hideous monster.’
Akhila saw the relief in Amma’s eyes and felt what at first was pride. Only later it turned to a sense of heaviness that caused muscles to knot into tight hard lumps in her shoulders. To Amma, Akhila had become the head of the household. Someone who would chart and steer the course of the family’s destiny to safe shores.
The next few years went by without much incident. Their lives were led with military precision. That was the only way Akhila knew how to preserve order and keep her family from floating away from its moorings. Dawns diminished to dusk and Sundays dwindled to be the day when she washed, starched, dried and ironed the six cotton saris that comprised her entire office-going wardrobe.
Akhila thought of her father every morning when, heavy with starch and sunlight, the sari rustled around her as though someone were turning the sheets of a newspaper. When she tucked the last pleat in at the waist and flung the pallu over her left shoulder, the bottom of the sari hiked up her legs playfully, so that the last thing Padma did before Akhila left home was to crouch at her feet and teach the sari the laws of gravity. Tug, tug … what goes up has to come down and stay there. By evening, the sari had neither the vitality nor the starch to resist the pull of the earth. The humid air and the dripping heat corroded even the staunchest human spirit, so what hope did a blob of starch have? It was perhaps in those years that the starch entered Akhila’s soul. Imbuing her every action and word with a delicate film of stiffness that soon became her natural way to talk and be.
Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, Akhila lay on the swing like her father had. The iron chains moaned as
always, only now they were the echoes of her grief, for what had been and would never be again.
Amma would comb Akhila’s hair. Tugging at the knots and disentangling them with a gentleness that almost made Akhila want to cry. It was the only time she felt as though she could close her eyes and life would take care of itself without her having to plot and plan.
Narayan joined the tank factory as a machinist. Narsi became the first graduate in the family and then, the first postgraduate. He found a teaching job. Akhila felt the iron bands around her chest begin to loosen: Dare I breathe again? Dare I dream again? Now that the boys are men, can I start feeling like a woman again?
Narsi decided he wanted to get married. She was the college principal’s daughter and a brahmin. No one could fault his choice and there was nothing anyone could say except perhaps – Don’t you think you should wait for your elder sister to get married before you think of a wife and a family?
But who was to mouth this rebuke?
Akhila waited for Amma or Narayan to say something. To broach the subject of Akhila’s marriage. When they didn’t, Akhila swallowed the hurt she felt and let the anger that grew in her flare. She insisted that a suitable bride for Narayan be found. ‘Let both the weddings take place together. Same wedding hall, same day, same time … Narayan has taken care of this family and it is not fair that he is sidelined simply because Mr College Professor is in a tearing hurry to get married.’
Even then, Amma and her brothers never asked, ‘What about you? You’ve been the head of this family ever since Appa died. Don’t you want a husband, children, a home of your own?’
In their minds Akhila had ceased to be a woman and had already metamorphosed into a spinster.
Besides, there was Padma. When she had her first period, Amma dressed her as a bride and had her photograph taken
in the local studio with her back to a mirror, so that the intricate flower arrangement on her braid would be seen as well. She gave the photograph to Akhila to admire and stood looking at it from over her shoulder.
‘My little one is a woman now,’ she said quietly.
The message couldn’t have been more explicit. Soon it would be time for her to be married and dowries don’t accumulate by themselves like dust on a window sill.
Padma was twenty-two by the time Akhila put together a dowry for her. Gold jewellery; a diamond nose-stud; a steel almirah, a cot and a mattress; stainless steel and bronze cookware; silver lamps; a gold ring and an expensive wristwatch for the groom; and twenty thousand rupees in cash. And even then, it wasn’t easy. Prospective grooms worried that once they married her, there was little more they could expect from her family. Finally they found someone who was willing to believe Akhila when she said she wouldn’t forsake her Padma.
Akhila was thirty-four. What does a single woman do next in life?
She took a train into work in Madras every morning from Ambattur. Her job didn’t demand much from her; after all, she was just a clerk. In the evenings, she took the same route back and was home by seven. Her mother would wait for Akhila to arrive before she put the pressure cooker on. They ate, they listened to the radio, and by a quarter to ten were in their beds. They lived quiet, starched and ironed lives where there was no room for chiffon-like flourishes of feeling or heavy zari-lined silken excesses.
When they fell ill, they went to Steadford hospital. And for their souls, Akhila and her mother visited the Shiva temple at Thirumulavayil on Mondays. While Amma stood with her palms pressed together, her eyes closed and her lips moving in prayer, Akhila would stand entranced by the Nandi that guarded the entrance of the temple.
Akhila would touch the flanks of the stone bull that unlike all other Nandis rested with its back to the sanctum
sanctorum. An aberration like me, she told herself with a wry smile every Monday.
If the Nandi’s position had been correct, the temple would have been one of the holiest of Shiva shrines, rivalling even the Kailasa temple. For in the Thirumulavayil temple yard grew the rare lingam and yoni flower. Manifestations of Shiva’s and Shakthi’s presence on every branch, scenting the air with the power of a divine consummation.
No matter how many times Akhila saw the Nandi, it still intrigued her. This Nandi that had turned its back on its lord and master to protect a devotee from being killed by his enemies. Had the Nandi ever wondered what came first – devotion or duty? Had the Nandi known that with this gesture it had de-sanctified the temple and turned Shiva’s presence away? Had the Nandi known what it was doing?
Once a month, Akhila took her mother out to lunch at the Dasaprakash Hotel where they always chose the Special Meals. A thick, viciously-red tomato soup; two puris and a bowl of vegetable korma; a helping of curd rice; a helping of sambar rice; a bowl of rasam; three kinds of vegetables; an appalum; two pickles; as much plain rice as one wanted; and finally a fruit salad that came with half a cherry on top and a cream wafer stuck into the melting ice cream.
Akhila would watch with concealed irritation as her mother ate. She pecked at the food as if she hated every crumb and yet when Akhila suggested that they try another restaurant, Amma was vehement in her protests. ‘What is wrong with Dasaprakash? It is one place where brahmins can eat without worrying about who’s doing the chopping and cooking or even the washing-up. Haven’t you noticed that even the boys who serve us wear the sacred thread?’
To Amma, all waiters were boys and all brahmins above reproach. Which is why, even though they saw Sarasa Mami, Subramani Iyer’s widow, standing with her oldest daughter Java at the bus stand, Amma simply gathered the
folds of her sari tightly around her and pretended not to notice them.
If it had been anyone else, Amma would have used her tongue like a scythe, chopping brutally at their reputation, their character, their lack of shame, and end with her favourite – ‘If I was in her place, I would have fed my children poison and killed myself. Anything is better than selling one’s honour.’
But Sarasa Mami was a brahmin. And it was easier to forgive a brahmin, no matter how serious her crime, than the rest of the world that was made of flesh-eaters and gravediggers.
Perhaps I’m doing Amma an injustice, Akhila thought, eyeing her mother. Maybe Amma found it easier to accept what Subramani Iyer’s widow did because it could have happened to her.
When Subramani Iyer’s eyes remained fixed on the ceiling one morning as if he had been stricken by some revelation at the crack of dawn, Sarasa Mami raised her eyes to the heavens for help. What am I going to do? she wept, beating her chest. How am I to cope? How do I look after three girls and a blind boy?
What was she expecting? Akhila watched Sarasa Mami beg and plead with the various gods her family had worshipped for generations. Did she seriously think that one of those gods would descend to earth and help her in her distress?
For a while Sarasa Mami coped. She sold all the little pieces of jewellery she owned. Finally, when there was nothing left to sell and hunger gnawed at her wilting honour and shook the respectability out of their bones, she sold her eldest daughter Jaya.
From the tin trunk, she took out the only Kancheepuram sari she owned and unfolded it gently. Sarasa had clung to it for that last journey of her life. She, like all good Hindu wives, had prayed every day that she be allowed to die before her husband did. She had wanted to climb the
stairway to the heavens, lit by the radiance of the bright red circle of kumkum on her forehead. The strands of jasmine in her hair would scent her passageway and all those who saw her would think how blessed she was to die looking like a bride. And this sari was the one that would have put the world’s nose out of joint when it flocked to pay its last respects to a woman it had ignored when alive. Now that this was no longer to be, Sarasa allowed her dreams to roll out of the folds of the sari. Mothballs that dissipated into nothingness when touched by air.
What did Sarasa Mami think of when she helped Jaya with the sari? A little lower around the hip. Let the curve of your waist show. Tighter over your bosom. Don’t hide the tilt of your breasts. Let it fall over your shoulder and cascade down your back so that when you walk, it hints at the fullness of your hips. Maybe she felt she was helping dress a bride or maybe it was a corpse that swam into her mind as she teased and arranged the layers of woven cloth.
And Jaya? What did Jaya think when her mother asked her to bathe earlier than usual one evening? Did she feel a cloud of butterflies dance in her stomach when Sarasa lined her eyelids with the density of darkness and wound jasmine buds in her plait? Jaya must have thought that at least tonight she wouldn’t go hungry. They never did after that night.
It wasn’t as if Jaya stood on street corners soliciting lust. There was a thin veneer of respectability Sarasa concocted to disguise what was expected of Jaya. The men who lived in the bachelor quarters needed someone to cook for them, she said. That was all Jaya did, she claimed when someone asked. ‘They treat her well and are generous,’ she added.
It soon became a familiar sight; the blind Srini pretending to be a motor car as he jogged along by his sister’s side every evening on their way to the barracks. Parp … parp … his mouth honked when they crossed the road. Vroom … vroom … his lips blubbered when she hurried to escape the knowing looks the neighbours threw at her like darts.
What do the dead think of the havoc wrought by their absence? Subramani Iyer? Appa? In some bubbled realm of no-return, do they twist and writhe in pain? Or is that what death is all about? To be able to leave. To cease to care. To be free.
At first, the whole neighbourhood watched in horrified silence. Then they talked in voices that quivered with righteous indignation of the slur Sarasa Mami was inflicting by this brazen behaviour. On Subramani Iyer’s good name. On the brahmin community. On womanhood. Wasn’t there a more honourable way to stay alive?
‘You tell me how,’ Sarasa told a neighbour who decided to confront her. ‘I’m willing to work. Do any kind of work to earn a living. I went to each one of the houses in the neighbourhood and asked if anyone wanted a maid. And everyone behaved just like you did. Giving me a handful of rice as though I were a beggar woman and then shooing me away.’