Daughters Inherit Silence

by Rasana Atreya

  “Amma.” Jaya reached across and touched her mother’s hand. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “You’ve moved so far away. Who knows when I’ll get another chance?” When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes. “I guess I should start at the beginning. I grew up convinced that the only thing that gave my father happiness was hurting the people in his life. Growing up, my brother Anand, and I hated his guts.” She darted a quick glance at Jaya.

  Jaya was astounded. “You had a brother?”

  “He…” Amma cleared her throat, as if pushing aside deep sorrow.

  Jaya looked at her mother with compassion. How quickly one rushes to judge. “Did he pass away?”

  “For most of my life, I had no idea.”

  Jaya looked in confusion as Amma plucked the edge of her sari. Her mother’s eyes darted here and there. She jumped up, but the narrow rectangle of the room was too confining. “Is it okay for us to go inside?”

  Jaya nodded. She adored her own brother. As a girl she might have occasionally hated his guts, especially when he put bugs in her school bag, but as an adult she cherished her relationship with him. She was pretty sure she was as important to him. She couldn’t imagine not having him in her life, even when she was a few thousand kilometres away.

  Tossing the pillow aside, she led the way into the girls’ bedroom. The room had a big rectangular box where the window once was. This box was the air conditioner Jaya had hoped to replace someday, to match the sleek, remote-controlled one in the other bedroom.

  The girls’ bedroom led into hers and Kovid’s, which, in turn, led to the kitchen. The kitchen opened to the yard in the back, with a cemented toilet and a separate bathing area.

  Her in-laws had occupied the inner bedroom because the kitchen and bathroom were closer, especially at night. But this was awkward for Jaya because she didn’t want to keep treating their bedroom as a passageway at night, even though the door was always left open, as was common with older adults.

  As soon as she could afford it, and despite protests from her in-laws that the whole thing was a huge waste of money, she had doors cut into the walls of both bedrooms, so they could also access the bathroom and kitchen through the yard.

  “Can I look outside?” Amma asked.

  Nodding, Jaya led her mother out to the side yard through the kitchen door, along the narrow, cemented walkway lined with plants, past a cemented area with a tap so the maid could squat and wash dishes, to a small yard in the back.

  “You did a nice job here.”

  Her mother was trying, Jaya had to give her that. The older Amma would have turned this into The Many Failings of Jaya.

  A line of hibiscus shrubs, and a guava tree, separated her lot from the neighbours in the back.

  “Aunty!”

  A little head poked through the leaves, startling Amma. He jumped into Jaya’s yard, plastic plane in hand, and wove between the two women, making loud noises.

  Jaya laughed. She was used to the toddler darting in and out of her house.

  The wooden doors to the kitchen, the paint on them peeling off, remained propped open through the day. She climbed the two steps and entered the kitchen.

  The kitchen was old-fashioned. Actually, it was just old. Little had changed in seventy years, other than a whitewash on the walls once every few years. The kitchen platform was cemented, with the edges inexpertly rounded. Below it were open, cemented racks which held utensils. To the side was a wall of cupboards, which housed her dals, rice and spices. Most of them had been given away when they shifted to America.

  “Why are you staying here?” Amma asked. “Why did you reopen the house? Madhav would have been more than happy if you’d stayed with him.”

  “I hoped it would give Ananta comfort to see that not everything in her life has changed.”

  “Poor child!” Amma said.

  “Kovid’s mother has been amazing. Both girls adore her.”

  Sadness shadowed Amma’s eyes. “I wish I could be that grandmother.”

  “You still could.”

  Hope flared in Amma’s eyes.

  The cemented counter was coated with multiple layers of dark green paint. Next to it was an ungainly refrigerator that was on its last legs. Kovid had offered to replace it, but she had declined because they’d been in a holding pattern when they lived here, not knowing whether to land the plane here in Lingampally, or fly on to San Francisco. If she were to be honest, a part of her was still not sure.

  Jaya waited for her mother to point out that in her own house and Madhav’s, the kitchens had been upgraded with modern cooktops and nice splashguards.

  “What do you use to make tea?” Amma asked, instead.

  The toddler followed them in, pushed Amma aside and honed in on a steel plate resting on a container. Pushing aside the steel plate, he grabbed a handful of Parle-G biscuits and ran out squealing.

  “You leave that for him?” Amma asked. There could be no other reason to replace the hard-to-open steel lid with a steel plate.

  Jaya smiled. “He’s a sweet kid. Always laughing. Always happy.” The child was about two-and-a-half now. Jaya was amazed that six months later, he still remembered the sweet treats.

  Amma leaned against the L-shaped platform, away from the gas range, and closer to the sink. “I’m glad you didn’t turn into me. I’d have a breakdown if someone disturbed my kitchen.”

  Not knowing how to respond, Jaya reached underneath the platform and turned the knob on the big orange cylinder of cooking gas. Then she turned on the knob on the two-burner gas-stove that sat so high on the counter, she had to raise herself on her tip-toes when she used the big pressure cooker. She poured water for tea in the pan and put it on a burner.

  “Anand left home when he was seventeen,” Amma started abruptly. “I was fourteen. He could not handle my father’s bullying. He never came back.” Tears started down her face as she focussed intently on an uneven patch on the cemented floor.

  Jaya hesitated. Theirs was not a touchy-feely relationship. Feeling the need to do something, she patted her mother awkwardly on the back.

  “He never bothered to let me know if he was okay. We were so close. For fifty years, I waited.”

  Jaya sensed something momentous about to unfold.

  “Then, just before you left for America, Mahesh mama casually let it be known that on the very day my brother left home, he was hit by a lorry. He died on the spot. Two kilometres from home, he died. And we never knew.”

  Jaya closed her eyes, feeling intense regret. So that’s why Amma had reached out. She had turned her mother away when she needed her the most.

  “Don’t,” Amma said softly. “You couldn’t have known.”

  Jaya swallowed back tears.

  Amma looked up. “Ironical, isn’t it? I storm out of your house, determined I was finished with you. Then Mahesh mama hits me with this news.”

  Mahesh mama was the one cousin of her mother’s Jaya had never cared for. The man she’d had long arguments with.

  “Why wait this long to tell you?”

  “He claimed he was trying to protect me from pain.”

  Jaya’s jaw dropped. “Did he tell your father, at least?”

  Amma snorted. “My dear father was the one who performed the last rites.”

  Jaya was rendered speechless.

  “He performed the cremation for my beloved brother, but never bothered to let us know. For fifty years, I waited.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?” Jaya was incensed. “Why would anyone?”

  Amma shrugged.

  Sorrow flooded Jaya’s being. Sorrow for the fourteen-year-old girl who had waited for word from her beloved brother; year after long year. She pulled her mother into a tight hug.

  Her mother broke down. For a long time, they did not move. Then her mother straightened and sniffed. She wouldn’t meet Jaya’s eyes, and that was fine with Jaya. The hug was already more than she was used to. She wiped her own tears surreptitious
ly.

  Jaya led Amma to the steps leading to the backyard. She helped her mother sit on the steps. The toddler barrelled through the shrubs, wrapped his arms around Amma’s knees and grinned up at her, his face stained with food. Jaya reached to remove the child, but Amma waved her away.

  “I’ll get you your tea,” Jaya said and headed inside.

  The water in the pan had almost completely evaporated. She poured more and waited for it to boil. She leaned against the counter and closed her eyes. Outside, the childish giggles faded. The child must have headed home. No sound of birds. Just the faraway call of some street vendor. The hiss of the flame underneath the pot of tea.

  Jaya took a deep breath to ease the tightness in her chest. The next time she was at the temple, she would offer an extra fruit for her brother’s health. Perhaps for her mother too.

  Jaya poured the tea into two cups, sat next to her mother and handed her a cup. Both women stared ahead, sipping tea.

  “You know the saddest thing?” Amma’s lips tightened.

  “What?”

  “My mother died waiting for her son to send word. Every evening, she lit one lamp near the gods, one near the doorstep, hoping to help her son find his way home. She did it every single day for the rest of her life. My mother waited for thirty years, and my bastard of a father didn’t think it necessary to tell her.”

  * * *

  “Why do you think your father never told your mother?” Jaya asked.

  “To punish her for her son’s misdeeds,” Amma said. “My brother did defy our father when he left home.”

  If her grandfather weren’t already dead, Jaya would have killed him herself. She couldn’t imagine this level of cruelty from anyone, let alone a loved one. Poor Amma. The groundwork for her life of discord had been laid long before Jaya was born, long before Amma married Nanna.

  “It began with the disappearance of my brother,” Amma said. “Soon after, my father tossed aside my dream of becoming a maths teacher. He told me such ambition was unbecoming of a woman. On my fifteenth birthday, I found myself draping a garland of flowers around your father’s neck.”

  When it got dark, Jaya set a plate of idlis to steam on the gas stove as her mother whirled coconut-and-peanut chutney in the blender, making it tangy and spicy the way only she knew how. Long after the idli and chutney were settled in her stomach, Jaya gave a sigh of contentment.

  The day had faded away, but the darkness did not feel threatening; there were no Brett Millers here, no Snigdhas. Or perhaps there were, but they were defanged in their familiarity.

  The evening’s warmth embraced her. Lights had come on in the street, in the houses of the surrounding neighbours. Jaya sat at the tiny kitchen table as her mother made them more tea. Voices floated in from their neighbours at the back. The toddler was getting cranky. The woman was placing used dishes from dinner in the small floor-level washing area. The maid would be over first thing in the morning to wash them.

  Sounds of everyday life. This was what she’d so desperately missed in San Francisco.

  Kovid teased her that she’d never survive in suburbia, where yard and driveway isolated one house from the next. Jaya wasn’t sure she’d ever want to move to the suburbs; the loneliness and lack of community in the stunning city she was learning to call home was bad enough.

  Her phone pinged. She smiled as she read the message.

  “Kovid’s at Madhav’s with the girls,” she told her mother. “He will stay over if you want to spend the night here.”

  “He makes you happy.”

  “He does.” Jaya’s face softened. “More than I thought possible.” She turned to her mother. “Isn’t that terrible?”

  “You’re not betraying Anant. As long as he was alive, you gave him your all.”

  Jaya reached over and hugged her mother. This time she did not let go. Daughters needed their mothers, and she’d missed having hers.

  * * *

  Every Indian girl, especially if she came from an orthodox family, grew up knowing this essential truth: marriage was to one man, and it was for seven cycles of birth and rebirth.

  Till she turned her back on this very basic tenet, till she married Kovid, she did not realise that her marriage to Anant had never been a partnership; it was what her father-in-law defined it to be. She had married into a tight family unit of three, so unhealthily tight that the married sisters weren’t allowed in it. She came on as a fourth, albeit lowly, member. Anant had been as much a victim of his father’s diktats as she.

  Jaya was beginning to realise the reason for the low rate of marital separations in India wasn’t because marriages were inherently more happy. It was because they were afflicted by the what-will-people-say? syndrome.

  Like her late grandmother always said, “People spend too much of their time worrying about what other people think.” An obvious reference to Amma. “If only they knew how little people think of them.”

  For those who actually worked up the courage and filed for divorce, the State acted as the hinderance owing to the inordinate amount of control it exercised. If the judges couldn’t be convinced there was a case for separation, there wasn’t. Still, the courts were for the middle- and upper-classes. The maids of the world, beaten into submission by their husbands and in-laws, never stood a chance. That said, the rates of divorce were inching up, much to the consternation of many.

  Whether or not they chose to divorce, daughters were putting themselves ahead of abuse, ahead of family honour. They were no longer inheriting the silence of their mothers. And of their fathers.

  Jaya could see why Ayn Rand remained popular on college campuses, especially amongst young women. Rand’s brand of extreme individualism might not be what they were looking for, but it was their first exposure to a concept as radical as individualism, and the possibilities were enthralling. She smiled wryly, knowing Kovid would tease her for a lack of segue.

  “Are you okay?” Amma asked, snapping Jaya out of her introspection.

  Another first—her mother taking her feelings into consideration. “Amma,” she said hesitantly. “I’m really sorry about your brother.”

  Amma nodded. She took another sip of her tea. “There’s a reason Madhav and you never called my father ‘grandfather.’”

  What Amma said was true: when she thought of her grandfather, it was always their father’s father. Amma never talked much about her own father, even when he was alive. Jaya said, “I assumed you didn’t have anything to do with him because, um, you maybe—”

  “Had a fight with him, like I did with pretty much everyone else?” Amma’s tone was wry.

  Jaya flushed in embarrassment.

  “I don’t blame you for thinking it.” Amma said. “I’ve alienated so many people, I’ve lost count. I’m beginning to think it was because I wasn’t able to process my grief.”

  “If that had been me, and I’d lost Anna…” Jaya shuddered.

  Amma got up from the kitchen table and walked to the door, looking out into the dark night. “My father also denied me the love of my life.”

  “What?”

  Amma turned back. There was an emotion on her face that Jaya couldn’t identify. “Your friend, Revati?”

  Jaya was confused. She and Revati had spent hours in each other’s houses every summer. They didn’t go to the same school, but they’d met at a function at a common relative’s house and hit it off. They begged to spend the upcoming holidays with each other, and that was the start of their lifelong friendship. Now, though, Revati was in Australia. Her mother had been a cold fish. But her dad had made everything so much fun. “What does Revati have to do with this?”

  Amma watched the horror dawn on Jaya’s face.

  “Pratap uncle?” Jaya whispered.

  “He was the love of my life. The one my father wouldn’t permit me to marry.”

  “Did he… you know?”

  “Care for me? He did. The poor man was trapped, too.” Tears flooded Amma’s eyes.

&n
bsp; The emotion made Jaya uncomfortable. Romantic love wasn’t an emotion one associated with someone of Amma’s generation. Besides, what did that say of her parents’ marriage?

  Jaya had loved Pratap uncle as a second father. He was a big bear of a man. Jaya had learned that the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, was also a big man who was called Teddy. And that the teddy bear was named in his honour. She remembered the pride she felt in conveying this nugget of information to Pratap uncle. And his kindness, his affection, the sudden sadness that would flash across his face for a brief instance. And she understood her mother a little more.

  Without conscious thought her feet led her to her mother, who was leaning against the kitchen door, staring out again. Jaya gave her a hug before both women drew away awkwardly.

  “I was reading about a white nationalist from America,” Amma said.

  Jaya was confused at the sudden change in topic, though she knew her mother was a voracious reader, reading anything she could lay her hands on in any of the languages she knew—Telugu, English, Sanskrit, Hindi.

  “I went online after you decided to move to America. Anyway, this man is a reformed racist. His life’s mission is to reach out to other white nationalists. He says that many young men are turning to extremism, not necessarily because they are violent, but they have an emptiness within them that they’re looking to fill. He says what the young men are really searching for is identity.”

  Jaya smiled. There could be no doubt where she’d inherited her own thought process from.

  “So,” Amma continued, “they join these gangs and get caught up in violence against the Negros.”

  Jaya winced. “Amma, the correct term is African American. Or Black.”

  Amma looked confused. “But everyone says it.”

  “In India, yes. Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  “Oh.” Amma paused. “Sorry. You know I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Jaya nodded. Amma had her faults, but bigotry wasn’t one of them.

  “So all that anger inside, it doesn’t really fill-in that emptiness. It doesn’t make them. So, when this man reaches out to them, treats them like lost souls…”