Authors: Anita Nair
Ladies Coupe (31 page)
‘Do you blame me for what I have become?’
‘I don’t, but …’
‘Not everyone in the hospital wards is a nice and a noble soul,’ I snapped.
‘I know that. Compassion is a very underrated virtue, Mari, but only where there is compassion can there be healing.
‘I’d like to persuade myself that this is just a phase. That someday you will become again who you once were; that you will seek your son out and accept him as your own. All these days I waited for you to tell me about your child. I thought you would want to go and see him. But I see a woman who pretends that her life hasn’t changed. How can I turn a blind eye to what you have become? What happened to you, Mari?’
I grimaced. What happened to me? Ask God. Ask that Brahma who wrote my destiny.
… I have been trained in despair. Despair came easily to us, my mother and me. And we accepted it because we told ourselves that what was meted out to us was what we deserved. But Amma set a limit to how much despair could take its toll. It was I who erected no such defences. Sometimes I think I was so used to despair that even if it shied away from me, I beckoned it back. and when it drew close, instead of pulling a basket over myself and hiding from it, I welcomed it with arms flung wide …
The Chettiar died, and the household fell apart. Rajendran Anna moved to Kancheepuram and Ranganathan Anna stayed on in Madras. Sridhar Anna and Sujata Akka inherited the Chettiar Kottai. With its turrets, long corridors, creaking doors, bottomless wells and the mad woman in the west wing.
‘If only she could be freed from this illness,’ Sujata Akka moaned. If only she would die, I knew she thought.
‘She might be old but the demons in her are only getting fiercer with age. Vadivu can’t handle her any more. She says she wants to leave. What do I do? I can’t lock her up in a mental asylum. We have to look after her and we need someone young and strong.’ Sujata Akka’s eyes descended on mine. ‘Will you come back, Marikolanthu?’
I nodded. I didn’t want to live at home where the child was. I didn’t want to see the contempt in my brothers’ eyes – or hear their self-righteous polemics. Since my brothers were earning, my mother had given up her job and she devoted her time to raising the child. If I went to live at home, Amma would expect me to do all that she did for the boy. Amma hadn’t ceased to hope that I would accept him.
I stared at my feet. Missy K was right, I thought. I must seem stern and uncompromising; incapable of compassion and gentleness; the perfect keeper for a mad woman.
‘You will have to live in the house. Someone has to be there to keep an eye on her all the time,’ Sujata Akka added.
Amma was furious with me. She thumped her palm on her forehead and hissed, ‘Why couldn’t you have stayed on in Vellore? It is better to wash someone’s dirty underwear than be a mad woman’s maid even if you don’t have much to do. She is dangerous, do you understand that?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m not frightened. And the pay is good.’
Amma peered at me closely, ‘Come on, admit it, you want to be near Muthu. That’s why you are taking this job. Isn’t that right?’
Amma would never give up. She thought that someday I would learn to love this child whose very sight made me feel ill. She called him Muthu, her rare pearl. I called him ‘it’. But Amma never ceased to hope.
‘Please Amma,’ I said, rising from the floor where we were sitting. ‘This has nothing to do with “it”. Sometimes I
think I’m going mad myself and if I’m with a mad woman all day, perhaps I will learn to curb my own madness.’
think I’m going mad myself and if I’m with a mad woman all day, perhaps I will learn to curb my own madness.’
Amma slumped. She raised her eyes to heaven and mumbled, ‘When will you show me some mercy?’
The next few years passed in a haze, aided by the tablets Missy V had prescribed for me. I increased the dosage to two a night and with that I kept at arm’s length all that happened around me.
Every day was just like the day before. There were no surprises. No events that shook me out of the trance-like state I had drifted into. Sometimes the thick veil-like mist that shrouded my mind parted and I glimpsed the passing of time on my brothers’ faces. I saw that my brothers were married. That their moustaches quivered with indignation when they saw me in their house. That they didn’t like their wives to have anything to do with me. I saw the seasons come and go. I learnt the child had begun to attend the village school. I saw how age spared no one when my mother began to walk with a stoop and complained of a persistent backache. But all I had to do was blink and I would be back where I had wandered from. The quiet grey world where nothing changed and I knew who I was. The mad woman’s keeper.
Every morning I woke Chettiar Amma and persuaded her to enter the bathroom. Some days she brushed her teeth quietly. Other days she refused to do so or kept at it relentlessly till I feared that her few remaining teeth would fall out. Then I would bathe her. Ten buckets of cold water had to be emptied over her head; to keep her system cool, the herbal doctor had said. Then I dried her and helped her into her clothes. Sujata Akka had decided that saris were impractical and Chettiar Amma, who had worn only the finest of silk and cotton saris, now dressed like an old Anglo-Indian woman in long drab gowns.
Some days Chettiar Amma was coy and girlish, demanding flowers be braided into her hair, which was cropped to
ear length. Some days she refused to wear any clothes and walked around naked. A baby with sagging breasts and a puckered stomach, and a wrinkled bottom, she crawled around, played with her faeces and spat food into my face. I let her be whatever she chose to be.
ear length. Some days she refused to wear any clothes and walked around naked. A baby with sagging breasts and a puckered stomach, and a wrinkled bottom, she crawled around, played with her faeces and spat food into my face. I let her be whatever she chose to be.
We were not all that different. In her madness, she escaped from the long iron chain that manacled her to this world. In my sleep, I escaped from the child that grew in my mother’s house.
On a damp October afternoon, Chettiar Amma finally escaped her madness and the chain.
When I had cleaned out the west wing, I went to Sujata Akka. ‘What do I do now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t go away. I want you to stay here. I’ll find you something to do,’ she said.
‘I will not replace my mother in your kitchen. I will not be another Rukmini Akka. I will not sweep your yards or clean the cowsheds. And now that Prabhu-papa is at boarding school, he doesn’t need an ayah chasing after him. What is there left for me to do?’ I asked.
Sujata Akka looked at me thoughtfully. I sensed that she was reluctant to let me go. In many ways, I was the only tie she had with the past. Of the times when all she had to be was the daughter-in-law of the house and no more was expected of her. ‘You will be my assistant – my eyes and ears. Your hands will reach where mine don’t. Your feet will tread where mine can’t. Do you understand?’
I stared at her in disbelief. Did she mean what I thought she meant? She wanted me to take her place. She wanted me to be her proxy.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. She looked at me for a long moment and said, ‘Yes.’
So I nodded my acceptance.
Amma didn’t approve. I’d known she wouldn’t. ‘Who does she think she is? A queen? What kind of a job is this? What sane woman would give up her house for another woman to run? Her assistant!’ Amma snorted. ‘If you ask
me, the trick is to find a position where you are indispensable … what is this? All of it will end in grief.’
me, the trick is to find a position where you are indispensable … what is this? All of it will end in grief.’
Then Amma wiped her face and with it her manner. Her voice softened as she cajoled, ‘Don’t you want to see Muthu? He’ll be back from school in a few minutes. He is very good and the school master says when the time comes, we should send him to a good school in Kancheepuram.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see him. As far as I’m concerned, my duty ends with the money I provide for his care. Don’t expect more than that from me.’
‘But this is unnatural,’ Anna cried. ‘He is your son, no matter how often you deny it. I see you with the Chettiar’s grandson and I get angry. How can you love someone else’s child and not your own?’
I walked away. I had a job to do. To be someone else’s eyes, ears, hands and feet. Amma could keep her advice and her Muthu. I wanted no part of it.
My life was the way I determined it to be. I continued to sleep in the west wing. I preferred its isolation to the hum of the main house. My days had no fixed pattern; I did everything Sujata Akka wanted me to do. I wasn’t unhappy. In the night, the tablets swept me away into a dark hole that I crouched in till the morning came with its long-handled broom and prodded my eyelids open.
… A year later I discovered how thin the walls of this quiet content were. A year later, I was caught in a churning whirlpool of emotions.
Aren’t you bored? Do you really wish me to go on? If you do, I must warn you that you will not approve of what happened next.
I’m not ashamed. I’m not sorry. I am not ridden with guilt. I did what I thought I had to do. If at all any emotion rocks me, it is anger. For valuing myself so little …
Sujata Akka was thirty-seven years old. I had known her for seventeen years. Which meant she had been married for at
least nineteen years. But she had only one child. Like everyone else, I too wondered why. Until the day she let me read her eyes and I was reminded of the Missies in Vellore …
least nineteen years. But she had only one child. Like everyone else, I too wondered why. Until the day she let me read her eyes and I was reminded of the Missies in Vellore …
Every afternoon, Sujata Akka and I watched TV together for a while. There was a dish antenna on the roof, which offered a choice of seven channels. To me, it was like having a private movie hall.
The Chettiar household had acquired a TV many years ago. But it was placed in the hall and seldom switched on except three times a week. For the Sunday movie, for a film-songs programme on Friday night and for another programme on Wednesday nights.
But once Chettiar Amma died and Sujata Akka became the new Chettiar Amma, she changed everything. The heavy old furniture was replaced; curtains were hung over windows and the old TV was exchanged for a new one.
Sujata Akka placed it in the hall upstairs and she watched it any time she felt like it, and she let me watch it with her.
I reduced the dosage of my sleeping tablets. I no longer had to go through the day in a haze. The TV kept my mind occupied. I only needed to sleep at night. I began to put on weight and the dark circles around my eyes disappeared. I don’t know what the other servants thought of me but I didn’t care. It wasn’t as if I fraternized with them. Once again, just as when I had first come here seventeen years ago, my world was built around Sujata Akka and that was all I needed.
Around two in the afternoon Sujata Akka would begin to look sleepy and I knew what I had to do. I went into the bedroom, pulled the curtains shut, switched the fan on and folded the bedspread so that all she had to do was lie down. While she slept. I turned the volume of the TV down and watched a film. At quarter past four, I would wake her up and she would bathe and wear the sari that I had laid out for her. Sujata Akka was no longer the fresh-faced beauty she
was when she first came to the Chettiar Kottai, but she was still very beautiful.
was when she first came to the Chettiar Kottai, but she was still very beautiful.
One afternoon as I prepared the room for her, she said, ‘Bring a mat and lie down here. Let’s talk a bit.’
Sujata Akka was lonely. I knew that. Sridhar Anna was always busy or travelling and Prabhu-papa had been sent to a boarding school in Ooty. There was hardly anyone she could talk to. If she became friendly with the other women, she knew that they would take advantage and start making demands on her. She had no one but me. I didn’t mind that she turned to me only because she didn’t have an alternative.
One afternoon, she lay on her side facing me and she said in a faltering voice, ‘Tell me about the Missies again. Tell me what you saw.’
I was silent for a moment and then I told her about their strange love for each other and how they seemed to need no one else when they were together. And the joy they found in each others’ bodies.
Sujata Akka stared at the ceiling and asked, ‘Do you ever wonder what it must be like to be with a man?’
‘I’ve been with a man. Which is why I’m here and there is a child growing in my mother’s house.’
‘That’s not what I meant. In all the films that we see they make such a fuss about love. All those dialogues they speak, the songs they sing, if only those heroines knew what came after.’
‘What comes after?’ I turned on my side so that I could see her face.
‘What comes after is revulsion. When he comes near me, I feel as though a lizard is crawling up my skin. But I close my eyes and let him do whatever he wants to. I know he goes to other women, but if I don’t let him do it once in a while, he’ll find a mistress like his father did, and flaunt her beneath my nose. Every night when I go to bed, I wait for his touch. Only when he turns on his side and goes to sleep do I fall asleep.
‘Marikolanthu, I worry that something is wrong with me. What if I go mad like his mother did? Was it this revulsion for the physical part of marriage that turned her into a mad woman? Is it some sort of a curse on this house?’
‘Sujata Akka,’ I said, rising to sit by the bed, ‘don’t be silly. Nothing is wrong with you.’
I placed my palm on her belly. ‘Here … do you feel as if a lizard is crawling over you?’
‘No, but …’
And then, her eyes met mine and I saw a hunger there. Such forlorn eyes. Such frustrated desires. Such need … I thought of how Missy K’s eyes had followed Missy V. I began to comprehend that Sujata Akka too was filled with the same longings that had made Missy K seek Missy V. But where was she to find someone like Missy V?
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