Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  The girl gave her a startled look, but nodded and began silently wiping off some of the polish with a rag. The hair she had refused to cut fell forward over her shoulder in a single thick plait.

  ‘My husband is also in the INA. He showed me how he cleans his boots, otherwise I too would not know,’ Sita confided, but the girl did not reply.

  Muniamma’s waist was so small an extra hole had been punched in her belt to hold up her shorts, the bones stuck out all over her. A dark scar ran down one cheek and another patterned her arm. A thin gold chain that she fingered nervously hung around her neck.

  ‘On the plantation we were always barefoot, only sometimes we wore sandals. I do not know anything about wearing shoes.’ Muniamma spoke at last in a whisper, her eyes dark with intensity. As they worked, Prema strolled up and down the barracks, issuing instructions. Fit from training, the muscles of her body were hard and compact.

  ‘You must learn to look after your kit; shoes and buckles must all be polished. Soon you will get your rifles and be taught how to clean them, and tomorrow you will learn how to make up your beds.’

  ‘Why don’t you cut your hair?’ Sita whispered to Munniama after Prema had passed.

  There was now a thick streak of shoe polish on the girl’s thin face. Sita wondered how she would have the strength to become a soldier, and felt a rush of sympathy for her.

  ‘My head was shaved once,’ Sita confided.

  ‘Why did you do that? Did you have lice? Was it for religious penance?’ Muniamma paused in her polishing and stared at Sita.

  ‘I was a widow.’ Sita kept her voice low.

  Even as she spoke, she was shocked at herself. Why was she sharing things she had been at pains to keep from the world, with this sullen girl? Muniamma gave a gasp, and her eyes widened. Sita looked down at the shoe in her hand, already regretting her words; it was as if she had allowed a stranger to see her naked.

  ‘But now I am married again,’ Sita reassured her, and Muniamma nodded, as if something was sealed between them.

  ‘The only good thing I have ever had was my hair. That’s why I don’t want to cut it,’ Muniamma whispered, returning the confidence.

  Most of the girls had already finished polishing their boots and were placing them beneath their lockers. Sita gave a last rub to her own shoes, and then picked up Muniamma’s remaining blacked but unpolished boot and began buffing it vigorously. Still struggling with the first boot, Muniamma threw her a grateful glance. Prema was now marching back down the barracks, inspecting the laid out shoes.

  ‘I have been placed in charge of you. Don’t let me down. I will be accompanying you to the camp in Burma once you finish your basic training here,’ she told them.

  ‘Burma?’ Muniamma whispered, looking up in new terror.

  Later, washed and changed into regulation pyjamas, they slipped into the rows of bunks, pulling the mosquito netting about them. Muniamma was not in the room as Sita settled herself into the strange bed, and her eyes were closing when the girl reappeared, shaking her into wakefulness.

  ‘I cut it. Please see.’ Muniamma pulled excitedly at Sita’s arm.

  Sita sat up and stared at Muniamma, who danced about before her now. Swinging her legs over the side of the bunk, Sita stared at the short hair now curling irrepressibly about her head. She gave a laugh and pulled Muniamma to her, feeling the girl’s body crushed against her own, aware that Muniamma’s thin arms returned the embrace.

  ‘Because of you I told Prema to cut it. It’s good it is gone. It’s all because of you,’ she repeated.

  ‘Now we are both new people. Everything bad in the past is gone with our hair,’ Sita’s eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.

  She knew nothing of this strange girl to whom she had already disclosed her deepest secret, but felt bound to her in a way she could not explain.

  ‘You are now a new person, so you should have a new name. I’ll call you Muni,’ Sita decided, as the girl climbed the ladder to the upper bunk.

  ‘Muni,’ Muniamma repeated, sounding pleased.

  The wire mesh of the upper bunk creaked with Muni’s weight. Settling down in the narrow bed again, Sita thought about Shiva and wondered if he too lay in a similar bunk in the Newton Circus camp. The barracks were hot and airless and she listened to the sound of breathing from the sleeping girls; a cough, a snore, the creak of metal as someone turned, the smell of close packed human bodies. It reminded her of the bhajanashram and, although the comparison comforted her, she wished that Billi were nearby, to guide her through the new world she was entering.

  Above the odours of the crowded room, the light scent of freshly sawn wood and paint still lingered in the newly built barracks, underlining the sense of adventure filling her now. She was on the verge of new experience, and everything around and within her was changing. By the side of her pillow she had propped up a miniature picture of the devi she had bought, to keep near her in the camp. A faint light from a lamp outside lifted the darkness. She could just make out the form of the goddess, the radiance of her face and the dark shape of her tiger with its burning eyes fixed upon her in this strange place.

  15

  SINGAPORE, 2000

  ‘When is she coming?’ Sita asked every few minutes, fidgeting at the table as they waited for Parvati to arrive.

  ‘Soon,’ Amita replied.

  The three hundred and sixty degree turn her mother had made, now asking continually about Parvati, annoyed her unreasonably. It had disturbed Amita to learn at the last interview, that her mother was a child widow when she married Amita’s father, something she had not known before. Even though she understood her mother had had no choice in the matter of her marriage, nor a voice in the shaping of her life at that time, even though she was married and widowed on the same day, it still angered Amita that her mother had mentioned none of this to her before. The memories Sita was now revealing to Parvati were things she should have shared with her daughter, Amita thought. As at the last meeting, Amita noticed the extra care Sita took with her appearance, the loose comfortable trousers topped by a bright chiffon blouse with a loose bow at the neck that she had not seen for a while.

  Waiting impatiently at the table, Sita’s eyes were bright with expectation. Spreading out some new photographs she had unearthed, she gazed at them intently, sometimes lifting one to her nose as if it released a secret perfume, as if she could enter again those frozen moments in time. She was surprised how the loosening of memories, teased from her initially with such difficulty, sprang from her now with ease.

  Her gaze settled on a large pot of white orchids before the window, the long bare stems tied to thin sticks to support the fleshy weight of the flowers. The only things Sita liked about her daughter’s home was the transformative beauty of these flowers, and the endless sky-scape beyond the window, light changing by the hour, majestic with cloud, dark with tropical storms. There was not an hour, however, when she did not long for her old home, cramped, grimy and overrun with cockroaches, but familiar as her memories.

  She stared out of the window across the distant buildings of the university, in the direction of Serangoon Road. A conservation order now protected the buildings of Little India, and tourists crowded the narrow streets. Yet, unlike the tawdry commercialisation of Chinatown, Little India was still a lived-in place. Vegetables and fruit were bought from roadside barrows, jasmine garlands bedecked the flower vendor’s stall, hardware, sari and jewellery shops flourished, the parrot astrologer ministered from a street corner to a regular clientele, the huge wet market reigned at the end of the road. The high-rise buildings of modern Singapore ringed the place, but could not encroach. She closed her eyes to visualize it the better and knew she would never return.

  At last Parvati arrived, giving Sita a kiss before pulling notebooks from her bag. Already a routine was established between interviewer and interviewee. Now Sita spoke rapidly and without reserve, and Parvati made notes, writing swiftly, head down, as if she were taking dicta
tion.

  When Sita presented her with the new photographs, Parvati clapped her hands in pleasure, moving nearer to Sita to examine them better. Standing behind them, Amita stared down in irritation at the two heads drawn together over the photographs, and felt excluded. Pulling a chair up to the table, she sat down on it with deliberate force. Everything in the day conspired to annoy her. When she had finally slept the night before she had dreamed of Amsterdam, and awoken with a headache that nothing seemed to relieve. The residue of that nightmare and all it dredged up within her continued to shape her day.

  On Amita’s return from Amsterdam, Parvati hurried up to her in the university, her unsuspecting face full of welcome. It was all Amita could do not to turn away. Instead, she bit down upon a rush of guilt and smiled, and reported that Rishi had read a good paper at the conference. The intolerable feelings overwhelming her could only be balanced by the degree of affability she showered upon Parvati. As bad as the culpability now consuming her was the slow burn of desire Rishi left in her body, which she seemed powerless to control.

  At the university, she continued to work with Parvati as if nothing had happened. Weeks went by before she saw Rishi again on a Sunday afternoon, buying bread with Parvati at an artisan bakery she had gone to in Tiong Baru. The meeting was breezy, and when Parvati insisted they all have coffee, she readily sat down with them, surprised at how easy it was to focus solely on the moment.

  The following week Rishi contacted her, and she knew she had been waiting. They met at a budget hotel on Bencoolen Street. She went without a backward glance to where he waited for her. Even as she hailed a taxi, the blatancy of what she was doing shocked her deeply, but a woman within her whom she did not recognise now pushed her forward and would not let her free.

  It was only afterwards, as he dozed, lying heavily upon her, his bare fleshy shoulder pressed uncomfortably against her jaw, that she looked beyond him to the window with its view of high rise buildings, and knew she could not continue with the deception, that to do so would destroy her. Across the oceans, in the provisional world of Amsterdam, nothing had seemed rooted in actuality. Here, in Singapore, but a short distance from where the unsuspecting Parvati went about her day, it was not possible to continue with such a base charade. Amita gave Rishi a push, struggling free from under him, gathering up her clothes, holding them before her nakedness, the decision already strong within her.

  ‘I should not have come. It is not right.’

  ‘What about Amsterdam? It didn’t seem wrong to you then?’ Rishi rolled over to stare up at her.

  Censure edged his words, and she knew when he observed her he saw an aging spinster, ripe for the taking, fleshy and awkward, intellectually adept but naïve before the worldly negotiations such situations demanded. Yet, he would be wrong, she thought angrily. She was not naïve, he knew nothing of her past, and she was not about to tell him. All she wanted suddenly was to be free of him, free of guilt to live her life anew.

  ‘These things can be arranged, you know; no need for anyone to get hurt.’ He propped himself up on one elbow, staring at her.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with arrangements. Parvati is my friend.’

  Even as she spoke, standing naked before him, and trying to hide that nakedness behind the clothes bunched up in her arms, she heard herself shifting angrily to Parvati’s defence. He shrugged and sighed resignedly, rolling again into the comfort of the bed, turning his bare back towards her.

  Later, in the taxi on her way home, the scent of him still upon her, the horror of her duplicity burst so violently within her that she thought she might be sick. She heard the censure again in his voice and knew he held himself above any blame. She had conspired in her own humiliation, betrayed a friend and thought she could place her actions beyond the parameters of all their lives.

  For days afterwards such a presentiment of her own evil doing filled her that she thought of resigning from the university and finding a job abroad. At every opportunity she avoided Parvati, diving into a convenient door in the department if she saw her coming, taking unaccustomed routes along alien corridors, until Parvati asked in distress, what had she done wrong that threatened their friendship? There was no option but further concealment, pushing her secret deeper within her, a large stone she was forced to carry. Yet, as the months passed, the misery of that ill-considered meeting in Bencoolen Street eased. Amita was surprised that guilt could be managed so effectively as she stepped inside the different compartments of her life, as if one was not linked to the other. Now, when Parvati sat with her mother, Amita found she felt almost nothing.

  At the table Sita searched amongst a pile of photographs, and at last found the one she wanted.

  ‘Here, see. This was during our training, before we left Singapore for Burma. I am there, and that is Muni beside me.’

  Amita stared down at the photos spread out on the table; she had seen them before as a child but had not understood their significance. Peering over her mother’s shoulder, she gazed at the faded image of a line of young women at target practice, crouched down on one knee to support the weight of the heavy guns they thrust before them. She recognised the slight figure of Muni, whose uniform seemed too big for her. Head lowered to a thick-barrelled gun, Muni’s expression was determined as she waited for the command to fire. Beside her, Sita bent in a similar pose, eyes intent upon the distant target. Her narrow military cap, tilted at a rakish angle, reflected the confidence radiating from her. Her mother was enjoying what she was doing, and had probably been a good shot, Amita thought.

  ‘Did Netaji come to see you training?’ Amita asked, seeking a way to insert herself into the closed circle that Parvati and her mother now seemed to form. Sita shook her head.

  ‘In Singapore we did not see Netaji while we were training; he was already in Burma. We kept hoping he would come, but he did not. We saw him only when we arrived in Burma, at Maymyo.’ As she spoke of Subhas Chandra Bose, Sita’s eyes filled with emotion.

  ‘We were all in love with him. He was our Krishna, we were his gopis.’ Her voice was low and full.

  Amita gazed at her mother in embarrassment, seeing the naked sentiment in her face, hearing the wistful sigh.

  ‘But you had a husband,’ Amita heard the primness in her voice, the absurdity of her comment.

  ‘Maybe Netaji was the romance we never had. We were all in love with him,’ Sita repeated, lowering her eyes.

  Amita’s embarrassment intensified. Something about her mother still mystified and frightened her, as it had during her growing up. That part of her mother she had needed most as a child, from where she sought approbation and love, had always seemed elusive.

  Staring again at the young woman in the black and white photographs, a woman who resembled her mother and yet was not her mother, Amita wondered at the journey Sita had embarked upon so long ago. As a young woman, her mother had an uneven beauty, a mobile face with thin cheeks, large luminous eyes, a wide mouth and a determined chin. There was also an overlay of shy innocence in her expression; an expectation that life still had more to give than to take. Yet the experiences that awaited her had dulled and dispersed that light, and Amita was determined to know what those experiences were.

  Why, Amita wondered, should it discomfort her to think her mother had secrets or hidden emotions, or that she had once been young, with a body that must have throbbed like her own, with needs and desire? She herself had a life her mother knew nothing about. She knew to her own cost that secrets were a way to survive, a way not to remember, a way to forget. Such reasoning did not help her discomfiture. However well she knew her mother in an everyday sense, an unknown woman lay buried within that known person. If a chink in her mother’s armour were prised open, Amita thought, she had no idea what she might find.

  Amita fell silent, recognising that part of her growing irritation with the interview came from knowing Parvati was already making use of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment material she had prised from Sita. She was presenti
ng a paper at a workshop organised by the Institute of South Asian Studies in the university, Past and Present: Voices of South Asian Women in Malaysia and Singapore, and reading the same paper again for the Gender Studies module in their own department. She had also lost no time in planning her book on the subject, and it had already been accepted for publication the following year by the university press. She was doing well out of Sita, Amita thought, but immediately checked this professional spite. Why could she not be more forgiving of her mother?

  Maybe her Uncle Dev, who had been some years older than his sister, and had lived not far from them in Singapore, could have told her more about her mother, but he had died many years earlier. He had two daughters, and Amita remembered him as an indulgent father, always trying to balance his wife’s iron discipline. After his death, the family returned to India, and there was little contact between them and Amita and Sita, who had never got on with her sister-in-law, Rohini.

  She remembered a visit with her mother long before, to her Uncle Dev’s house. He was a good-humoured man, who enjoyed gently teasing his sharp-eyed wife about how she had not given him a son, but only daughters. Amita remembered how he reminisced with her about events when her mother, Sita, had been born.

  ‘Your grandmother got a good beating for producing another girl and not a boy, and for not getting rid of the baby at birth. Sadly, such things happened in the village in those days. Father was always beating Mother for everything, and after baby Sita was born he shut her out of the house for one full week. Our neighbours were good people and they gave Mother shelter, looking after her and also pleading with Father. Grandmother and I begged him every day to let her come home. I worried about what would happen if Father did not take her back. I imagined her living on the street like the fingerless leper in a hut of paper and sticks, and mad dogs attacking the new baby and carrying her off to eat. Mother could have drowned the baby in the river, or fed her poisonous berries, as so many women did, to be rid of girl babies. But for some reason Mother clung onto Sita and would not let her die. At last, the pleadings of Grandmother and I prevailed, and Father told me to bring Mother and the baby back into the house.’