by Vikas Khanna
“Yes, but your grandfather was not Tagore?” Choti said, shooing away more flies as Noor sipped and swallowed her last drops of chai.
“No,” Noor said. “No, dear, he was not.”
Noor entered her room and, suddenly, without warning, overcome with all that was happening in her life, broke down into unending tears.
Asha entered the room a short while later and stood over her with her arms crossed. “Noor, what’s happened? I haven’t seen you cry once, let alone like a river, in the fifty years I’ve known you. Did someone say something cruel to you? Do something terrible to you? Insult you? I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I can’t stand seeing you weep like this.”
Noor sat up, covered her feet, and reached for Asha to give her a hug, her tears still flowing as openly as the Ganga. “Asha, can you believe I had chai earlier today?” Noor said. She brought the back of her hands to her face and started to wipe away the tears clinging to her cheeks.
Asha pulled out of Noor’s desperate hug and grabbed her by the shoulders. “What? Ram Ram,” Asha chanted, for the Lord Rama’s forgiveness on behalf of Noor.
“And a fly flew into it,” Noor said.
“Oh! Did you put too much sugar in it? Ram Ram. What’s wrong with you?” Asha said, her already stern voice becoming sterner. “Noor, have you forgotten where you live? This is Varanasi. There are as many flies here as there are ashes. They are everywhere and you are acting like it was the first time you ever saw one. It landed in your chai? That’s why you are crying?”
Noor’s breath heaved and spluttered. “No, no. She— the child—she shooed away all the flies, so I could drink my chai in peace,” Noor said.
Asha stood back in shocked disapproval. “Noor, what’s gotten into you?” whispered Asha.
Noor shook her head from inside the pallu of her saree.
“Why are you having chai with someone in the first place? Especially a poor needy child? You know women like us aren’t allowed to do such a thing.”
Noor took a deep breath. “Asha, you don’t understand,” Noor said. “It’s not about the flies or the sugar, this is the first time in my life someone thought about me before they thought about themselves. Do you understand?”
Asha started to writhe with fury. “Ram Ram,” she said, even more stern than before.
“This is the first time in my life, Asha, that I feel like I have…a daughter. Now I want to color myself in pink, bright Rajasthani pink...”
“Shut your mouth! Don’t dare say that! For a colorless widow to become attached to a child like she’s your own rosy flesh and blood daughter is the lowest of sins! Have you forgotten who you are and why you have to live at the ashram with the rest of us? You are a widow, you are meant to live plainly and colorlessly without anything, and when you die, you are not allowed to leave anything behind— mahadev ki marzi. This is Lord Shiv’s edict. You must not become attached to anyone else on this earth. If you do, you are certain to rot in hell when you die,” Asha said, as she furiously paced their room.
Noor turned her face away to stare through her drying tears at the empty void of the balcony. A breeze blew into the room but offered no relief or pleasure. “I have been rotting in hell while I live,” were the only words Noor could think to say.
The Lost Spring
From imaginary homes to illusory colors
Inspector Raja arrived home drunk on his motorbike in the middle of the night. The quieting growl of his bike’s engine was still loud enough to wake his wife, Rani.
Raja parked his bike and stumbled into his house. His mother lay on a charpoy in the front room, “Do you know why your darling wife hasn’t borne you a son even after bathing in Lolark Kund every day?”
Even though Raja ignored his mother, she said, “Someone told me she goes down all the steps but doesn’t so much as wet her feet in the sacred water.”
Rani was heating up Raja’s usual meal as the drunken inspector plowed through the kitchen door and listed toward his wife like an overladen Ganga dinghy, his breath foul and pungent enough to dowse any flicker of Rani’s usual greeting smile. “I don’t want any dinner!” Raja shouted.
Rani turned her head away and clasped her hands together at the waist of her saree. “But Ji, I made your favorite dish—Banarsi aloo curry…”
Raja listed closer: “Rani, you can’t ever give me what I want! You hear me?” he said.
Rani rushed to the bedroom door and quietly closed it. “Shh! Raja! The girls are asleep, they have school tomorrow,” she said.
Raja grabbed his wife roughly by her shoulders: “I don’t care if they never go to school. You realize, I can stop your daughters’ schooling any time I want? You should know that,” Raja said, waving his finger threateningly in her face.
Rani’s eyes were lowered, but she stood taller. “Raja, calm down, I beg you.”
“I won’t,” Raja roared. “How many times has my mother asked you, even begged you, to go to Lolark Kund so we can finally have a son?” Raja said. “And now she’s telling me that all these years, you have never even touched the water?”
“Raja! You’re drunk. Can we discuss this tomorrow? The girls need their sleep for school.”
“Rani, how many times?” Raja repeated, his eyes bloodshot, “how many times did I beg you? How many times did my mother beg you, even try to set an example for you? All I want is a son and you bitch, you never gave me one! Why do you have to torture and humiliate me?”
On nights like this, when Raja arrived home drunk and bitter, she had to question everything her mother had taught her about remaining silent for the sake of peace. To be silent was to accept, to bow, to give up. It was only for the happiness and stability of her daughters’ lives that Rani would not reply.
Like her husband, Rani came from a family of police officers, a family who lived in a village near where Raja was born. Unlike her husband, Rani was educated and had graduated high school, while Raja had to pay to get a school certificate. Her husband was born late to his parents, twenty years into the marriage of Shiv, his policeman father, and Nandini, Raja’s mother—and it had taken year after year, prayer after prayer, ghat after ghat, and priest after priest for Nandini to finally conceive her precious boy: Raja, stubborn, entitled, obnoxious Raja.
When a son is born late in his parent’s marriage, to parents already softened by decades of waiting, chances are the boy grows up rarely hearing the word “no.” This explained a lot to Rani about her husband’s pugnacious attitude. He was a loud, demanding, hostile “mama’s boy,” but one whom Rani still tried to love. Was it entirely her husband’s fault that the same shadows and condemnations his mother experienced from her in-laws and husband, still chased and taunted him?
Early in their marriage, Raja’s mother, Nandini, educated her on how a woman should always seek to please her in-law’s family day-in, day-out, especially her husband. She told Rani to always have fresh hot rotis on the table. Though she did her best, Rani found her cooking always being faulted and her behavior constantly judged by Raja and his parents, and she found Nandini’s relentless speeches about how food should taste, or who was the better cook, Nandini or she, deeply annoying.
And every time Rani touched the feet of an elder of Raja’s family, they always blessed her with the same statement, “jaldi jaldi beta do,”—give us a son quickly. Her twin purposes in life seemed to be ensuring a constant supply of those hot, puffed, ghee-buttered rotis into Raja’s mouth, and becoming some sort of son-birthing machine. Rani’s own desires in life were totally irrelevant. “Husband is God. Obey Him. Your Husband’s in-laws are more important than your own family. Revere and worship them,” Her mother-in-law said over and over.
Rani had to suppress her own achievements, her dreams, her personality, to enter Raja’s family’s bounds. They saw no value in education, no real value in being a woman. Every time she and Raja had an argument related to her daughters’ attending school (which was often) Raja’s contention was that ed
ucating a girl was a waste of money. “What good is an education for cleaning the house, washing clothes, or cooking dinner?” he would say. At which Nandini, if she happened to be there, would whisper, “Ek chup sau sukh,”—Only in silence is there peace—basically asking Rani to shut her mouth and surrender.
Ten years of marriage to her husband had produced three daughters, two miscarried boys, and no sons for Raja. Every time Raja arrived home stinking of liquor and the dirty money he had earned, Nandini’s voice would rise up like a djinn from the fumes of his foul breath to remind Rani how she, Raja’s mother, in order to give birth to her own son, had bravely visited Lolark Kund at least four times every month.
Did no one realize that, after two miscarriages, it was medically dangerous for Rani to try to birth a son for Raja? She would have to risk her life! Now as she tried to calm her drunk husband, she heard his mother’s words louder than ever, “So many times I left my earrings or bangles in the well at Lolark Kund to please the Gods enough to grant my dynasty a son who will carry forward our family name and legacy.”
Then Rani recalled the day that had infuriated her the most, not only because of her husband’s misbehavior, but because, always the submissive wife, she had said not one word in protest. Her three daughters, Sita, Durga, and Saraswati, whom Rani had named for her three favorite Hindu goddesses, had come home early that day in order to proudly tell their father what they had been excelling at in school.
“Papaji! I scored 88% on my government studies test, but I wish I had focused more on mathematics, and then I could be at the top of the class,” said Sita, Rani’s eldest. Durga said: “Papaji! I am the top dancer in my 5th grade dance class, and next year I plan to be at the top of my 6th grade dance class, too,” the middle one said. Then Saraswati, the youngest one said, “Papaji! My teacher told me she is so proud that I’m the best mathematician in my math class—she even took me to see my Principal Ma’am, in her office so she could congratulate me. And you know what Ma’am said?” Raja didn’t even look up from his paper. “She said I was her favorite student in the whole school and if I set my mind to it, I could become anything I wanted to be—even an astronaut!”
Raja didn’t look up, so the little girl tugged at his sleeve. “What is it?” Raja had finally bristled, squinting his eyes and trying to shut out the image of Saraswati floating around in space proclaiming to the universe that she was her father’s daughter—the third of three.
“What do you want me to be, Papaji?” the young astronaut-to-be had asked then.
“I don’t want you to become anything,” he’d shouted at the shocked girl. “Become a son, can you do that?”
Rani could have slapped his face. The manner in which Raja and his family treated her daughters as insignificant— only good for becoming future roti slingers and sonmakers—suffocated her. Their education wasn’t necessary, their development not a priority, their health and wellbeing insignificant.
Rani’s darkest truth was that, beyond the medical risks, she was terrified of giving birth to a son because she was certain he would turn out just like Raja, for Raja was just like his own father. How far does a fruit fall from the tree? Rani was determined more than ever to give her daughters the best education she could, even if she had to suffer through Raja’s drunken evening rages.
The commotion had awakened their slumbering daughters. Rani could hear them moving restlessly in their sleep. When Rani reached out to pacify her husband, Raja barreled into the bedroom he shared with her and crashed onto their mosquito-netted wooden bed, still in his uniform and boots, and still holding his baton.
Rani followed him in to at least relieve her husband— and their always crisply sheeted bed—of Raja’s street and tavern-soiled boots. When Raja felt his daughter-bearing wife’s hands yanking at his boots, he reached down and pushed her away, then sat up to push her away with more force.
“Raja! You’re soiling our bed with your dirty boots! Take them off!”
Raja kicked off his boots and rolled over onto his back. “Rani, Ma told me you never go far down deep enough when you bathe at Lolark Kund. You go down the steps but never into the water. Everyone saw you,” Raja said.
Rani sat by her husband’s head on the edge of the bed. She stared into her husband’s drunken eyes like a mother might stare at her misbehaving son. “Raja, listen,” Rani said. “You and I are blessed with three beautiful daughters. They are like having our very own aarti lamps at home, all the time. The light they bring us every day makes us truly blessed.”
Raja turned his back to her. “I don’t want them, you can have them. If you don’t return to Lolark Kund and take a proper dip in the holy waters, I will find another wife who will give me a son,” Raja growled. Soon the ferocious rasping of his snores further sullied his wife’s ears.
It was pointless.
Rani stood up, turned off the bedroom lights on her drunken husband, crossed the kitchen, and went to sleep between her precious daughters, embracing them all and whispering into their ears the same words she’d whispered to them after the astronaut incident: “Be anything you want my dears, be who you are, be yourself. Bring a revolution. Fly.”
Choti walked the narrow streets behind the Tulsi Ghat, passing stall after stall stacked with mounds and packets of every possible shade of Holi pigment. The pigments were not things she felt she could touch, for Holi was not a holiday for invisible, colorless scums-of-the-earth like Choti and Anarkali, and certainly not for a widow like Noor.
At the end of the kaleidoscopic gauntlet of dazzling colors, Choti spied a cart full of ambis—green, tart, tangy unripened mangoes—and she remembered how Noor had said she loved them. When Choti tried to speak civilly to the mango-wallah about his mangoes, the vendor only glared down his gourd-like nose at her and crossed his arms. “What do you want, street girl? Get away from my cart, shoo. You are scaring my customers away,” he said.
Choti glared back into the vendor’s face and ground her teeth, and before the mango-wallah could do anything about it—has his nose obscured his vision? Choti had to wonder—she snatched a pair of the fattest ambis her eyes could find and ran as fast as her legs could carry her. If only she could have run so fast earlier, she might have caught that rupee-stealing bastard Chintu!
The vendor was too lazy to chase Choti with his legs, so he chased her with his abuses and threats, “Chal bhag, nahi toh police ko bulaonga!” Run away or I will call the police to lock you up, Choti heard him shout. She stopped and yelled back: “You greedy, fat-nosed wallah!” she said. “You have so many ambis, losing a couple won’t make a difference!”
The truth was that the unripe mangoes were not for her, they were for Noor, her beloved friend. This provided a good enough reason for Choti not to feel guilty about taking them, though the vendor’s despicable attitude alone made him, at least in her mind, fully deserving of having been relieved of two of his brightest, greenest mangoes.
Choti ran all the way to the hidden terrace with the heavenly view near her favorite chai-cart, where she had once taken Noor, her heart leaping with anticipation. The two of them had such a pleasant time there before, so peaceful and private and breeze-filled, despite the swarming flies that would, doubtless, join them again. She had so many questions for Noor that it was impossible for Choti to dam up all the questions that spilled from her mouth. She had to learn to be polite, of course, Noor was an elder, and she didn’t want to cause her any trouble because she was also a widow.
As Choti ran, she crossed more and more carts piled high with growing mountains of Holi powder: earthen red, rose pink, turmeric yellow, and a dissolvable salt to be mixed with water that was the dark purple of the jamun berry. So many colors soon to be thrown and smeared and cast in the air, or splattered and thrown across many peoples’ joyous laughing faces like clouds and explosions from a dream, while wretches like herself groveled for a few rupees, or were starved of any color whatsoever. All that color going to waste for the pleasure of a chosen few, Cho
ti thought.
Choti found Noor already sitting on their newfound favorite bench on the terrace. She slowed her steps and snuck up behind her. Then, from behind, Choti thrust one mango and then another in front of Noor’s eyes. Noor shivered and put her hand on her heart. Then looked back to see Choti’s mischievous grin. “Uii Ma! Small one, you scared me more than Lord Yamraja, the God of Death,” Noor said. “Suddenly all I could see was a sinful field of green color and it made my heart almost stop.”
Choti couldn’t keep from laughing.
“Don’t do that again!” Noor said. “Or they’ll have to take me to Manikarnika sooner than expected. Uff! My heart is still beating.”
“So sorry, Noor, I only wanted to surprise you.”
“You did surprise me, almost to death. Where did you buy the mangoes?” Noor asked, one brow raised, “Hmm?”
“Uh… I… uh… I got them from a fruit-seller I know,” Choti said, giggling and looking away to avoid Noor’s accusatory eyebrow.
“I see. You got them, eh? Don’t get thrown in jail, child. You are too young for jail,” Noor said.
Choti sat on the bench next to Noor and both started ripping the green skin of the mangoes with their teeth. Soon they were both enjoying the sweet-sour light yellow fruit inside. Noor bit into the fruit and her face lit up like the million lamps of Diwali. Such a taste as she could barely remember, like heaven set upon her palate, but Noor would not express the reality of her pleasure.
Choti spotted Noor’s pink book on her lap. “May I take a look?” she said.
“Sure,” Noor said, between bites of mango.
Choti reached over and opened Noor’s precious book. She flipped through its pages, pin-pointing passage after passage, Tagore’s or otherwise, that caught her eye. “What is written here on this page?” Choti inquired, “And this? And this?”
Noor knew every passage and where it was inscribed by heart. The widow’s memory was truly impressive. Choti couldn’t read, but Noor could recite every passage along with its page perfectly.