Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  ‘What are you knowing about the Mahatma?’ he asked, puzzled. Behind the veil of her sari, he could see little of her face.

  ‘Dr. Sen was living in Gandhiji’s camp, she wrote Mahatmaji’s letters for him. Write me please a letter to Dr. Sen,’ Sita whispered.

  She waited, but he did not reply, and when she looked up again he was back at work and the scratch of his pen filled her ears once more. Overwhelmed by having spoken so much, she was sure she had displeased him, but at last Shiva put down his pen and turned to her again.

  ‘I will not write a letter to your Dr. Sen,’ he told her, observing her shrouded form crouched in a corner against the wall, waiting mutely for his pleasure in a manner that annoyed him.

  ‘You can write it yourself.’ He watched her start in surprise and knew the bewilderment she must feel.

  ‘I will teach you.’ His voice softened. An idea was taking root in his mind and he moved from his desk to sit down before her.

  ‘Take that sari pallu off your head,’ he ordered, but in her confusion she only gripped the cloth more firmly beneath her chin.

  ‘Let me see your face properly.’ He reached out to push the drapery back over her short curly hair.

  ‘Please understand, I do not like the old forms of respect, we live in modern times. How will India move forward if we keep such old ways? Women must be educated, must live their own lives.’

  Already, he regretted his rashness in throwing himself into marriage with this unknown woman, an illiterate child. He was late in marrying, but he had always thought that when the time came he would marry a teacher like himself, an educated woman to whom he could talk of intellectual matters, and who would share his dreams. Now, he wondered at his mad moment of idealism. How could he have thought one woman was as good as another in the role of wife? When Dev told him that widowhood doomed his sister to live her life forever as an outcast, he became angry at the brutality of the old traditions. Just that day he had heard the Mahatma speaking on the radio. Be the change you want to see in the world, Gandhi had said, and the words had stayed with him.

  Now, staring down into Sita’s face, he was taken again by the unusual luminosity of her large eyes and the round, soft lips. At thirty he must appear an old man to her and, moved by this thought, he put out a hand to touch her cheek, aware that she cringed from him like a frightened animal.

  ‘I will not hurt you. You are my wife. You have left your old life behind, and in this new life you must learn new things, become a new person. I will be your teacher, and you will be my pupil.’

  He had been so determined to align himself with Gandhi’s thinking and to take on the challenge of social experiment, that he had given little thought to the woman he was marrying. Now, he saw that, just like him, she too was a bundle of thoughts and experiences that had carved their design upon her.

  Overcome by embarrassment at his scrutiny, Sita pulled the sari over her head again, but Shiva held her hand and the cloth fell from her shoulders, revealing the shape of her breasts beneath the tight blouse. Shiva continued his examination of her, his eyes travelling over her face and then the contours of her body.

  ‘Your hair is growing, soon it will be long again.’ He got up to fetch his small shaving mirror from the shelf.

  Placing the looking glass in her hands, and feeling the warmth of her fingers about his own, he watched her stare at herself. She was a fragile, small-boned animal that must be persuaded to trust. He knew she was pleased by the growth of her hair, the new fullness of her cheeks, the reassurance that she was once again a woman.

  ‘You are a real Sita, just like the goddess,’ he told her softly, surprised when tears filled her eyes.

  ‘You are not to cover your head before me any longer. And you must talk with me,’ he added, and she nodded mutely in promise.

  All she wanted was to please him, but the things her husband said overwhelmed her. It was as if she stood before an ocean and was ordered to cross it, even though she could not swim.

  There were things she needed for the kitchen, a new pan, a new spirit burner to cook on, bowls, spoons and ladles, a pestle and mortar, spices, pulses, rice. Shiva was a bachelor and had bought all his food, even tea, from the stalls on the road near the school; he knew nothing about the implements needed to cook a meal at home. Dev announced he would take Sita to his shop where, he assured her, all these things and more were available.

  As she hurried along Serangoon Road beside Dev, he pointed out the local sights, the mosque, the temple, the racecourse a short distance from the road, the Youth League where Shiva spoke to young men each week, the market, the slaughterhouse, the parrot astrologer with his caged birds and pack of cards, the Chettiar money lender, the barber, the herbalist. The sun was hot on her head, and sweat collected in the small of her back. In the heat rotting piles of rubbish fermented, the fetid odours mixing with the scent of cowpats left in the road by wandering cattle.

  Soon Dev turned down a side street to stop before the open recess of a large shop with a dark and cavernous interior.

  “This is where I work,” he announced with a proud smile, pointing to a large sign that was nailed to the wall above them, on which was written in faded letters, Krishnaswami and Sons.

  Sita followed him into the shop, cool after the heat of the road. Baskets and brooms and buckets for sale hung on long strings from high rafters. Shelves lined the walls, packed with polished metal utensils, pans and long handled tawa on which to cook dosai or chapati, water lotas of all sizes, steel tumblers, plates and jugs, spirit stoves and kerosene lamps. One section of the shop was given over to religious figurines of varying sizes, and brightly coloured framed pictures of the gods covered a wall. Marble pestles and mortars, wooden rolling pins, dusters and mosquito nets, spoons and knives and mousetraps; the place was packed with merchandise, and busy with shoppers. People pushed against Sita, assistants hurried about calling out in loud voices the items required by customers, and peons scurried up and down ladders to storage areas above the shop, searching out requests. The place was all noise and bustle.

  One end of the shop stocked dry foodstuffs, pulses and spices, rice and sugar, and pungent odours thickened the air. As she trailed after Dev picking out the things she needed, he introduced her to the other assistants. Then, putting a peon in her charge to collect the things she needed, he busied himself in serving waiting customers. Soon Sita amassed a large pile of items, and the young peon ran with each piece to the accounts desk and the wrapping table. As she made her way to the desk for a final reckoning, Sita passed the wall hung with pictures of gods and goddesses; Ganesh, Krishna, Shiva, Kali, and more. She searched the bank of frames until she found the devi, sitting as ever upon her tiger, face radiant, weapons at the ready, suffused by light.

  ‘That also,’ Sita ordered the boy, pointing to the picture, watching him take it down from the wall. Her heart lifted as she watched him place the goddess on top of her pile of purchases.

  8

  SINGAPORE, 2000

  Although her mother eventually quietened and slept, Amita lay awake. There was little need in her tenth floor apartment for air conditioning, the cross ventilation was good and the ceiling fan moved lazily above her. The lights of the town outside eased the darkness in the room, and in the dim light she stared up at a large damp stain that had been growing over the last few days on the ceiling above her bed. The upstairs flat must have some leakage again, and she would have to battle for repairs and painting with the owner, an elderly Chinese, who made his dislike of Indians clear. The stain had built up, and seemed, as she stared at it, to take on a menacing shape. She could make out the curved back, the bulbous head and the budding limbs of a dark incubus, and turned away determined to ignore the sinister image, willing sleep to come.

  Across the corridor her mother moaned softly again as she dreamed. If sleep could so easily tease out buried memories from her mother, then she too must be wary of unguarded moments and the things she might unwittingly rev
eal. The image of Parvati came forcefully before her and, alone in the darkness, she had nowhere to hide.

  In the past, unknown to her mother, Amita had had a couple of long affairs with male colleagues at the university, married professors, both of whom had eventually terminated the liaisons. Amita had drifted into these relationships because that was what experience of life appeared to demand, and stayed in them apathetically, surprised at her own indifference when each affair finally ended. Then, just a few months ago, Rishi appeared.

  The irony of the situation was painful; her best friend and confidant was also now her lover’s unsuspecting wife. Her own vileness sickened her. She had only slept with him twice, but such infrequency of involvement did not ease her guilt, and although Amita watched for signs, Parvati appeared unsuspecting. She continued to consult Amita on departmental issues, continued to share her flask of coffee. Did Parvati choose not to see what was before her, was she used to Rishi’s philandering ways, or did she perhaps no longer care, Amita wondered. Although ignorant of the labyrinthine ways of marriage, Amita was acutely aware of the feckless nature of the friendship she now offered Parvati. The situation knotted tighter within her each day, often filling her with an irrational desire to confess to Parvati, to beg for absolution, but that would heal nothing, she knew.

  Amita switched on the light and threw off the thin quilt; if she could not sleep, it was best to work. Just that day an email had come from a friend in New York, a well-known Indian academic who would also be at the coming Delhi conference. Amita had promised to write a paper for a volume of a prestigious American academic journal the friend was guest editing. “Everyone else’s piece is in but yours. Get it to me pronto please. We have to go to print!” the friend had written. The publication was a special volume entitled Indian Woman: Warrior or Victim? Amita sighed. Time had run out and she would have to rehash some old piece or cobble something together from various past papers.

  With a sigh, she sat down at the desk and opened her laptop. Pulling up relevant documents, she began trawling through them for inspiration. It had been suggested she write on the old subject of sati, the immolation of a widow on the husband’s funeral pyre. This repugnant practice, although outlawed a century earlier, was still relevant in the context of modern Indian attitudes towards women, and some isolated cases had even been known to occur in recent times. It was not Amita’s choice of subject; she was doing a favour for a friend. The lighted screen drew her in, and she began to cut and paste from the documents she opened, promising herself she would find a way to recast it all the next day.

  …the Hindu male traverses his life through four ascending stages… Woman as wife is indispensable to a man’s status…as a woman, a wife has no access herself to the final stage of asceticism. Trapped in the misfortune of her female body, a woman is denied entry to Heaven, which remains the sole prerogative of men…

  Feeling suddenly hungry, Amita pushed her chair back and padded over the tiled floor to the kitchen. In the passageway she always left a nightlight on, a small bulb pushed into an electric socket outside her mother’s room. Sometimes, she awoke to hear her mother wandering around, and worried that she would stumble in the dark, or worse. Amita’s bare feet made no sound as she passed her mother’s open door, pausing briefly to check the peaceful rise and fall of Sita’s breathing. A surge of freedom filled her at the knowledge that her mother slept. She was not used to living with anyone, and the constant sense of another presence in her home, even if it was her mother, appeared an invasion of privacy. Her space and time were also eroded by her mother’s inevitable demands. At the university, it was all about students, teaching, lecturing, marking and, before her mother moved in, she had often worked through part of the night to keep up with her own writing, especially at weekends, when she could sleep in the next day. In the academic hierarchy it was necessary to write and publish, publish, publish. Now, the evenings were dented by the needs of her mother, and frustration grew within her.

  In the kitchen, she made a mug of Milo and opened the tin in which she kept biscuits. Inside it there were only her mother’s favourite jam centred cookies that Amita found too sweet. Opening a packet of plain crackers, she stood by the window, staring out over the town as she sipped the hot drink. The diffused radiance of the lights below yellowed the sky and obliterated the stars. The town had grown into a modern metropolis since she was a child. Then, the night sky felt like an actual presence in her life, a black pincushion of luminosity, dense with the infinite depth of the universe. Sitting on the spiral stair of their Norris Road home, Amita had felt her own smallness beneath it. Yet, at the same time, she had also sensed the possibilities life might offer if she could only set herself free of her mother, and the claustrophobia of the room they shared together. Now, so many years later, as she squinted up at the thin gauzy clouds drifting before the moon, she realised that life was not waiting to be found and claimed somewhere in the future. Life was being lived at each moment, and she was in a state of constant becoming. A state that must now include Rishi.

  She first met Rishi as Parvati’s husband. Sometimes, at the end of the day, if their times coincided, he came up to the English Department from his own room in the Political Science department to collect Parvati, and go home together. Amita knew little more of him until, in the process of setting up the new gender studies course together, Parvati had invited her home for dinner.

  It had been a cheerful, wine-filled evening. Amita sat contentedly at the dinner table with the family, successfully engaging Parvati’s withdrawn sixteen-year-old son, Arun, and gaining the begrudging respect of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Anu, by her knowledge of Japanese manga and their heroines, a genre Anu was currently obsessed with. Amita’s detailed knowledge of this abstruse subject had been gained from one of her MA students, whose thesis was on the depiction of women in Japanese manga. Fleetingly then, within the warmth of this family, Amita wondered for the first time if she had missed something by not marrying and having a child, and the thought had surprised her.

  With Rishi, a tall, fleshy man with an endearing smile and ready affability, there had been easy banter as he attempted to educate her on the subject of wine, about which he had considerable knowledge. She found him an attractive man and he was attentive, but there had been no special chemistry. As they talked about his work, Parvati sipped spasmodically on her wine, snatching up her glass from the table as she ran in and out of the kitchen, seeing to the food.

  Rishi’s specialist area of study and research was Complexity, Adaptive Systems and Evolutionary Theory. Amita listened closely as he talked about understanding the interrelationships between microscopic processes and macroscopic patterns, and the evolutionary forces that shape all systems. She kept thinking of how the concepts he spoke about could be fitted into her own feminist gender related subject, and how she could tweak part of a paper she was writing for a forthcoming conference in Amsterdam to incorporate something of these ideas. Even as her mind processed these thoughts, she noticed how his eyes lit up as he spoke, how his upper lip was fuller than the lower, and how the words tumbled from his mouth. Her interest in his subject, even if for her own ends, added a depth to their interchange. Rishi appeared pleased with the questions she asked and the interest she showed in matters he was passionate about.

  ‘Oh, you’re both getting on well. It’s not often in this house he finds such a good listener,’ Parvati teased, placing a hot dish of baked macaroni before them, her brow damp from the blast of the open oven door.

  The unexpected edge to her tone made Amita look up. Parvati’s eyes were fixed upon her husband with such measured intensity that Amita drew back, conscious suddenly of how her interest in Rishi’s conversation might appear. Yet she knew the censure, so light it barely weighted the air, had nothing to do with her but rose from some toxic vein in their marriage.

  ‘I was just thinking of how all this could be applied to a paper I’m writing for a conference in Amsterdam.’ Amita hasten
ed to distance herself from the situation, hoping she had not inadvertently upset Parvati.

  ‘Contemporary Ethnography Across Disciplines? I’ll be there too,’ Rishi announced, and she stared at him in surprise.

  With an effort Amita put an end to these recollections and returned her attention to her laptop. Her mother still slept peacefully as she guided the cursor to the next cut.

  …as widow the woman must regress…self immolation becomes the extreme case of the general law… The sati widow is…often pushed and poked into the fire with long stakes after having been bathed and ritually attired and drugged out of her mind…

  In each new course she taught at the university, she always included something of the subject of sati, to illuminate the roots of traditional Indian attitudes towards women. There was a novel she listed for her students to read, by a modern Indian novelist, a woman whose own great-grandmother had committed sati. The book described the horror of a young son sent on an errand by his widowed mother, who returns home to an empty house. Some premonition drives him to the riverbank where he sees a blazing pyre and realises that, in his absence, his mother has been forced by her in-laws to become a sati. Amita clicked the mouse on a passage she always quoted to her students, and added the cut to her list of passages.

  He saw his mother fling her arms wildly in the air, then wrap them about her breasts before she subsided like a wax doll into the flames.

  The words stared up at her as she pasted them onto her list, the image formed indelibly in her mind. Years ago, when she first read the novel from which she was quoting, the scene had touched her deeply. Now, remembering the curses thrown at her own mother by her in-laws, a sense of outrage filled her.

  ‘Die with him in those flames! In your next life may you bear only daughters, never a son.’

  The words still echoed though her, close and personal now, not the words of a distant novelist in a distant country, to be taught impersonally in an academic course, but a curse heaped on her own mother. Remorse ran through her; the things her mother had survived did not bear thinking about. What right had she, Amita, to complain about the small issue of sharing her space, and the dent in her privacy?