Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  Of dark-skinned Tamil ancestry, Parvati’s forbears had arrived in Malaya from Tamil Nadu generations before as indentured labourers on the many rubber plantations in the country. That past was now long forgotten for her community, and Parvati was a respected academic. A slight woman of quick movement and bird-like intensity, she waited patiently across the table, notepad open and pen poised, ready to deposit Sita’s words on the page.

  Sita stared at her unflinchingly. The woman’s thick curly hair was drawn tightly back into a pink band on her neck, from where it sprang free in a bushy tail. Her short cotton dress rose high on her thighs when she sat down, baring bony knees. What criteria determined which memories were of use for her book and which were not, Sita wondered. Sometimes she spoke at length and Parvati wrote nothing, and sometimes she said but a few words and the woman lowered her head and scribbled away at length. Whatever it was she wrote, Sita knew what Amita said was true, a mother’s life was a daughter’s history. She searched for the right place to begin.

  ‘You never know when you do something for the last time,’ she said, trying to put words to the recollections welling up within her now. A last glimpse of someone, the last closing of a door, a last word spoken; there was always the expectation that the moment would reappear, conversations continue, doors reopen, the festering emotions of a quarrel reignite or subside. Unable to frame these thoughts in words, she kept to the facts of that last day with Shiva, before they left separately for Burma and the war.

  ‘It was raining,’ she remembered. ‘I wore a sari to please him, although by then I was so used to my army uniform, to wearing shorts or trousers. In the regiment, we all liked the freedom trousers gave us. In those clothes, we walked like men.’ Sita gave a slight smile, moving her shoulders in an imitation of masculine swagger, remembering the pleasure of striding about.

  Immediately, Parvati began to write and Amita leaned forward, her lips parted expectantly. Her spectacles, as always, slid down her nose and she quickly pushed them back up. Sita paused, her gaze returning to the window, seeing in her mind her old home in Norris Road, behind the nearby Ramakrishna Mission, with its ornate roof of domed pavilions. A spiral staircase twisted up to her front door, and a plant in a rusty oil drum stood beside it. If she had her way she would be living there still, in the room she had shared with Shiva, where she had brought up her child. Now, settled in her daughter’s house, Sita knew at last that the past was a distant place, insubstantial and shifting as her memories, and felt bereft.

  ‘I was quarrelling with him when we parted. I’m sorry now for that,’ Sita confessed.

  ‘It was war, you knew he might die,’ Amita was unable to suppress the condemning edge in her voice. Instinctively, at any mention of her father she always found herself taking his side, although she had no memory of him.

  ‘Even when death is all around, you never think it will come for you. We were given a day off to be together before each of us left separately for Burma.’ Images spiralled up before Sita as she spoke.

  ‘I wore a sari, not my uniform. I wanted to please him,’ she repeated, anxious that these young women should think well of her.

  Instead, she saw the slight rise of Amita’s eyebrows, and knew she had made a mistake. Today’s young women had different attitudes from those imbued into her. At times she noticed Parvati and Amita exchanging a conspiring glance, as if humouring her eccentricity, and controlled her resentment. What did they know of her life?

  Yet it was not her mother Amita was thinking about as she raised an eyebrow, but her father. Why did her mother stress she had worn a sari to please her husband? In spite of his education, was her father’s view of women a traditional one? Had he encouraged his wife to join the army or had he been against it? Was their marriage an arranged one, or did they marry for love? If he had lived, would he have urged Amita to marry? She had only one old creased photograph of her father. Shiva stood in the shade of a tree behind his pupils at the Ramakrishna Mission School, a tall man with a narrow, intelligent face and a shock of thick black hair. To Amita’s regret little more could be seen of him behind his pupils, and no other pictures had survived. He had been a teacher, an educated man, and she was sure he would have been proud of her position at the university, proud that she earned enough to look after her mother.

  ‘Then we both left for Burma, for different destinations, by different routes, different trains,’ Sita added hurriedly, not wanting the painful burden of memory thrusting up within her now.

  The mirror reflected the back of Parvati’s head. Sita observed the knobbly line of the woman’s spine beneath the floral dress, the smooth curve of her buttocks and thighs, the bare protruding knees. The woman was at ease with her body, as was Amita, in spite of her weight. They did not know the shame associated with exposing their limbs in the way Sita had felt that first day in the Bras Basah camp. They did not know the shame she had felt at being a woman, or the far place from where she had journeyed.

  You have changed…you were nothing when I married you…she heard Shiva’s words again, and her bitterness deepened. All the old injustices hardened, pushing her down into the dark space that seemed ordained for her, from where she had struggled free. She could not assemble words as Amita did, using them like a sword to cut through attack or confusion. She wanted to tell these young women — because I have changed, you too could change, because I did what I did, you now do what you do. She did not know how to explain this, but she knew it was true. And she knew too that at last she must put words to her story, if not for Amita, then for herself. To speak would be to experience again her experiences, to weigh them anew in her mind.

  Before her on the table was a stack of old photographs she had found the previous night, in a box unopened for decades. She fanned them out on the table before her now, until she found the one she wanted.

  ‘That’s me there. It was the day Netaji came to meet us.’ She stubbed a finger on the old black and white print, first pointing out herself, and then Subhas Chandra Bose.

  ‘And that is Muni. She was my friend.’ Her finger moved to the image of the slight woman standing beside her. As Sita stared at the image of Muni with her thin face and burning eyes, a sense of loss overwhelmed her. She returned her gaze hurriedly to the figure of Subhas Chandra Bose, whom they always called Netaji, Great Leader. He stood with his back to the photographer, surveying the girls lined up on a field before him in their uniforms of khaki shirts and jodhpurs, narrow caps set at a jaunty angle upon their heads, shoulders pulled back, heads held high. Sita’s hand rested on the butt of the rifle at her side. Netaji’s high polished boots and portly frame were instantly recognisable, and even now Sita remembered the glint of his spectacles, the smoothness of his voice, the faint scent of sandalwood soap as he stepped forward to speak to them. In the foreground of the photo, wearing dark glasses and the stripes of her rank, Captain Lakshmi saluted smartly.

  Sita pushed another photo over the table to Parvati, who looked down at it with interest. In the picture a group of Ranis, guns held out before them, crawled forward stealthily on their stomachs, practicing the art of ambush. The scent of the hot dry earth and the crushed grass that stained their uniforms, came back again to Sita as she stared at the photo. She remembered the heat of the sun on her back, searing through her cotton shirt.

  ‘We were practising guerrilla warfare. Wild lemongrass grew in the camp in Burma. We crushed it and rubbed the juice all over us to keep off mosquitoes. There were so many mosquitoes there.’

  The scent of lemongrass had pervaded everything. The past rose up before her as she closed her eyes; smells and sensations she thought long forgotten she found her body had held onto, and released to her now.

  ‘Shut your eyes. Think back. What comes into your mind?’ Amita leaned towards her mother, her tone encouraging.

  As Parvati picked up the photographs, examining them intently, Sita turned to the window to stare again across the urban sprawl of the town with its high-rise buildi
ngs interlocked with banks of lush green vegetation, to the distant view of the sea. Across the Black Water lay India, and somewhere in that endless continent was buried the village from where she had come, the hot dry earth cracked by the sun, hardened and sharp beneath her feet as pieces of broken ceramic, the water dry in the well in summer, the air plagued with the fever that took her parents one by one as they waited in vain for the monsoon, scanning the sky for clouds each day. A short distance beyond the village was the wide Yamuna River, immune to their every sorrow, touching them all in both life and death.

  She saw again in her mind the dark water of the Yamuna, sombre as stone. The distant bank was far away, another country, with figures no taller than her thumb. The river pulsed with suppressed energy that came from deep within it, always moving, its thick scent filling her nostrils, expanding in her head. Upon its banks rested numerous small temples where ash-smeared holy men meditated above the fast flowing water, the religious minded bathed below, seeking blessings or redemption. On the stone ghats of temples cremations took place, the smoke of funeral pyres billowing up, the cooled ashes of the dead fed to the river. Women gossiped as they laundered clothes, fishermen hauled in nets of thrashing mercurial bounty, turtles rested in the cool mud of the shore while egrets stalked the shallows for fish. To all things, the river gave life and nurture. The goddess Yami, who lived in the river, was the sister of Yama, God of Death. Bathing in these sacred waters, grandmother said, freed a person from the torments of death. Sita remembered how she and her brother, Dev, had sat by the river after their parents died.

  2

  INDIA, 1932–1936

  Sita sat beside her brother on a flat protruding rock, kicking her bare heels against the muddy riverbank. The sad weight of the day hung upon them.

  Earlier, a fisherman had rowed them out midstream in his boat, along with a priest, Dev clutching the box of their father’s ashes. Crowded with family, the craft sailed dangerously low in the water. While the priest chanted prayers, Dev, as the eldest son, scattered the ashes into the fast flowing current, a handful at a time. Mixed with the ashes were melted calcium deposits, and these floated on the water like small white stars before slowly sinking into the depths.

  ‘Where does the river go to?’ Sita asked as they sat together now. Dev was older than her and knew the answer to most things.

  ‘All rivers flow into the sea. There, the Black Water waits for them. The creatures in the sea cannot live unless they drink pure river water.’

  ‘What happens to Yami when she reaches the sea? Does she swim out into the ocean?’ Sita thought of the river goddess, lithe and graceful as a fish, formless as water, long hair flowing about her.

  ‘Yami remains in the river, that is her home. The ocean is the world of Varuna, god of the sea.’

  Their village, Sagarnagar, stood on the bank of the great Yamuna River, and was named after a rich man who endowed the place with a small school and a well. The village was between the holy cities of Mathura and Vrindavan, where the god Krishna was said to have spent his youth. They knew no other home.

  ‘What will happen to us now?’

  Sita looked down at the river and thought of their father’s ashes drifting through the muddy silt, food for a multitude of fish, mixing with the residue of the many other cremations that were scattered daily into the river. The Yamuna swallowed them all. There must be another river beneath the river, she thought, where the spirits of those tipped into the sacred waters swam with the river goddess. A place where she imagined her sister lived, whenever she remembered her.

  In just a little over a year, they had lost both parents. Their mother died the previous year of a fever that visited the village at the end of the monsoon; doctors and holy men were powerless before the pestilence. Weakened by a new pregnancy, Sita’s mother fell ill, and all they could do was watch her die. Grandmother kept a vigil beside her, praying to be taken first, but soon it was over. Too many people died too quickly, and the village temple was pressured by the constant cremations. Oil and wood had to be rationed, each allowance barely enough to render a body to ash. Half-cremated corpses were regularly being tipped into the Yamuna.

  After her mother’s death, the weight of the silent house was so great Sita and her grandmother grew mute beneath it. Sita took over her mother’s duties, peeling vegetables, picking leaves off the stems of wilting coriander, grinding flour, churning butter, pounding spices, and cooking. Once these chores were finished there was always mending, sewing, the fetching of cowpats for the fire, work that kept her busy all day. Whatever Sita did, the sound of her mother’s voice, singing the old songs of the millstone, echoed in her head and weighed on her heart.

  Within the cool, muted light of the house where she spent her day, the bright square of the open door was always before her, the searing radiance of the sun suffusing the world beyond the threshold. Each morning the men of the house crossed over that threshold, Dev to go to school, her father to the shop. They walked out into the brilliance of the day, into a masculine world of commerce and complexity, leaving the women behind in the shadowy realms of the house.

  A year after their mother died, their father came home with a gash on his hand from a rusty nail. The poison spread quickly through his veins, and soon he too sickened and died. The neighbours gathered around in shock, doing what they could. Dev was now the man of the house and the villagers helped him to arrange the cremation, contributing what little they could.

  Kanta Aunty and her husband, Ashok Uncle, hurried over from nearby Vrindavan, just as they had done when their mother had died. Kanta Aunty was Sita’s father’s sister, his only surviving sibling, a plump woman who bustled around, finding fault with whatever and whomever she could. She had married a man who had grown suddenly rich in ways no one could fully explain, and now lived in a house in the middle of town with running water and an outside toilet. Her visits to her brother and mother were rare occurrences, and during each visit she never failed to complain in a loud hoarse voice of the backwardness of the village. Her husband, tall and gaunt, stood silently beside his wife, his eyes sliding about beneath lowered lids, never looking directly at anyone. Women did not attend cremations, but Kanta Aunty bribed the priest at the temple to load the pyre amply with wood, and instructed her husband to check that enough oil was poured on to burn the corpse properly to ash.

  While the priest chanted prayers, Dev scattered their father’s ashes over the water. Sita looked down into the darkness of the river, and the shadows of grey carp swarming beneath her, and she knew she was entering a new life. There was no way back to what had been, and what lay ahead was unknowable.

  Now, as they sat beside the Yamuna in the dying light of the afternoon, Dev was silent, chin upon his knees, arms clasped about his drawn up legs.

  ‘What will happen to us now?’ Sita asked again, her eyes on the road leading out of the village, where the corrugated metal roof of her father’s dry goods shop could just be glimpsed.

  Each day, when school was over, Dev had joined their father at the shop, sitting on a high stool behind jars of biscuits and pulses and sugar, learning the trade. Stacked up around him were brushes and brooms, metal buckets, insecticide sprays, dustpans, matches, oil and wicks for lamps, mousetraps, rat poison and packets of tea.

  ‘I am going to sell the business to one of the villagers. He is giving me a good price. You will stay with grandmother, and I will go to the Faraway Places, to Singapore, where it is said lots of money can be made. I will send money to you and grandmother from there.’

  Sita stared at Dev in shock, remembering the men who had come to the village some months before. They rode a bullock cart strung with bright bunting, beating a drum as if to announce a wedding. They were labour agents from Mathura, who offered a handful of silver to any man who would agree to work in the Faraway Places. They shouted out the strange names of these places, Malaya, Singapore, Penang, Ipoh, and sang a song about how men had only to reach these lands for gold to fall in
to their hands. Dev was excited, but the men laughed and said he was too young to be sent to the rubber estates of Malaya. Yet, afterwards, one of them said it was possible for him to go by himself to Singapore and find work. The man told him that in the nearby town of Mathura, he could buy a railway ticket to Calcutta, and even recommended someone in that great city who would help him get a passage on a boat to Singapore.

  ‘Don’t go.’ Sita shook his arm in alarm, but Dev stared resolutely at the distant bank of the river, at the small figures there going about their business.

  In the following days, no amount of tears could dissuade Dev from his decision to go off to work in the Faraway Places. Grandmother kept repeating that those places lay across the Black Water, and crossing the Kala Pani would mean a loss of caste and identity, and an end to the possibility of a good reincarnation. And when, if ever, would they see him again?

  ‘In those places the gods cannot protect you. Also, no water from the holy Ganges or Yamuna rivers is there to wash away your sins.’ Grandmother’s soft face was aquiver with grief, tears filled her eyes, already opaque with cataract.

  Sita stood by her grandmother’s side, feeling the old woman’s pain, and seeing in her mind the endless expanse of rolling black water, a great beast that would swallow her brother and spit him out on some far shore, to be separated from them forever.

  ‘The ships that carry us across the Kala Pani have large matkas of Ganges water on them. The holy river travels with us in those large pots, and the gods continue to protect us just as if we were still in India,’ Dev assured the old lady, flashing a confident grin.