Purple Lotus

by Veena Rao

  And then, when they started to enact the killing of sheep, Uncle Anand undressed hurriedly on the verandah steps, discarding pants and shirt, and joined the dance. It was a strange sight, a fake among the pride, dancing out of line in blue-and-green-striped boxer shorts, and the members of the huli vesha split open their black lips to laugh.

  “One too many, Brother?” the leader of the pride asked, pointing a yellow thumb toward his mouth, but Uncle Anand only crouched and leaped, crouched and leaped, his face in deep stupor, until Grandmother Indira ran into the yard and slapped him on his back.

  “Stop!” she screamed, and he did at once, hunkering down, burying his face in his crossed arms. The drumbeat and the dance of the tigers stopped too.

  On the ninth day of the festival, after lunch, Uncle Anand disappeared. A fretting Grandmother Indira, her brow knitted, peeped out at the hilltop repeatedly from the corner room window, but Uncle Anand did not suddenly manifest under the banyan tree like he sometimes did, no matter how many times she looked. By early evening, she could no longer ignore the dread in her chest. She sent Tara down the T-junction to look for Uncle Anand.

  “Don’t go too far” she said. “Only up to Beary store. Ask if he was there this afternoon.”

  Tara didn’t have to ask, because she caught a glimpse of Uncle Anand just beyond the Beary store, surrounded by rowdies and little boys. The drumbeats of the huli vesha filled the air from somewhere in the neighborhood, and Uncle Anand was dancing again, shaking his head like a tiger and prancing in frenzy. Tara watched with a pounding chest, not knowing how to penetrate the thick ring of rowdies in their printed shirts open at the chest and flared pants, who were jeering, clapping, whistling.

  “Anand Circus has come to Morgan Hill,” the one in the gaudy yellow shirt yelled between catcalls.

  When Tara returned with Grandfather Madhava, the crowd had dispersed. The beat of the huli vesha drums was only a rumble further down the road. Only Uncle Anand remained, on his haunches, his back against the compound wall, sweat pouring down his face and wetting his vest. Around his neck was a twisted coir rope with a small bell that he was struggling to undo.

  Tara wished Uncle Anand would go back to being the Uncle Anand he once was. She missed their evening sojourns to the Beary store, the snacks he bought her. That night, he was in the mental ward at the hospital in Kankanady. It was schizophrenia, Grandmother Indira said. He’d had the same symptoms some years earlier, before Tara was born. Earlier in the evening, a decision was made. There was no more leeway for hoping, praying, pretending, or brushing the matter under the carpet. Uncle Anand desperately needed help. Zeenat’s father Hamabba’s rickshaw was summoned, and he came with his cousin Idinabba to coax a stiff, silent Uncle Anand into the rickshaw for their difficult ride to the hospital.

  When Uncle Anand returned home from hospital, the monsters in his head had not disappeared. During his good days, he stayed silent; on his bad days, he often targeted Tara.

  One Wednesday, returning from school, Tara was met by a mundu-clad, smiling Uncle Anand who filled the front doorway.

  “Uncle, let me pass,” she said.

  Uncle Anand moved aside, and when Tara attempted to pass through, her spine prickled in warning. A chill clamped down on her chest when he grabbed her hand and walked her out again to the middle of the yard where he had assembled firewood like a small pyre.

  “Divine Mother Sita,” he said, prostrating himself at her feet. “Show them your purity, your virtue. A test of fire is what they seek.”

  Tara knew Queen Sita, wife of Lord Rama from the epic Ramayana, was a paragon of virtue; Uncle Anand had told her that just last month, when she had to ask him the meaning of paragon and the meaning of virtue.

  “I am not Sita, I am Tara.” Her voice trembled as she tried to reason with Uncle Anand.

  “Your subjects, Mother Sita. Prove it to them.”

  Tara watched, frozen, as Uncle Anand bounced up and struck a match into the firewood. The pyre burst into golden flames, hissing, dancing, growing in the afternoon breeze.

  “Mother Sita,” Uncle Anand implored again with folded hands. “Walk through the fire, I beseech thee. Prove thy virtue.”

  Tara ought to have run, but it was as if her legs were pegged to the ground. She buried her eyes in her hands and let out a high-pitched cry.

  “Aaaaaah, aaaaah, aaaaah!” she cried, even when she felt a pair of hands under her armpits, when she was suspended in midair and then delivered to the safety of the verandah steps. Grandfather Madhava, who had now retired from his job as postmaster, had saved her in the nick of time.

  Following that incident, she latched her upstairs room door from the inside every night. She ached to lay her cheek on Amma’s comforting lap, to have Amma wipe away her tears with her soft fingers, to tell her that all would be well.

  Her mind drifted, seeking happier times, and scenes emerged, montages of another life: swinging on a swing in a lush green yard lined with rose bushes, the wind in her hair; helping Amma decorate her birthday cake with pink frosting and Cadbury’s Gems, and then blowing out six candles in a pretty pink lace frock with red patchwork flowers surrounded by her friends Pippi, Leenika, and Runa. Was it all only a fairytale?

  Tara did not remain downstairs without reason. She put all her effort into avoiding Uncle Anand, and when she saw him, she averted her eyes. She tiptoed out the back door to school every morning and slithered in the same way, and stayed in her upstairs room all evening until dinner time, away from Uncle Anand’s maniacal reach.

  Daddy’s kinder, more loving younger brother, the one who told her stories and bought her snacks, had disintegrated into a million schizophrenic bits. The one person in her corner had pushed her into complete isolation. Nothing in life was ever absolute. Not love, not trust. Only books remained; they were her only escape from life.

  She was relegated to a room again every night, this one across the world, but the solace of books remained constant. A couple of times, Sanjay had knocked on her door and burst in looking for a technical book or a manual from the shelf. It made her self-conscious of her new one-piece gown that barely reached her knees and left her slender shoulders and arms almost bare. He had brought in his manliness and the faint smell of shampoo—it stirred and stoked a longing in her, to be touched, to be caressed, to be loved; it morphed to anger when she remembered what had become of their marriage. She had her eyes fixed on the book, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and he was out as soon as he had found what he was looking for, impervious to her presence, her longings, her anger. How wretched she was, to still cry for his love.

  As the months wore on, and her initial shock and anguish plateaued, her imagination sometimes went into overdrive. In her spare time, her mind crafted little fantasy tales. They all ended the same way: with Sanjay realizing his folly, recognizing Tara as the true love of his life, falling on his knees, seeking her forgiveness, taking her with tender passion.

  She yearned to tell him that she was the proud owner of a car, which was parked in their common apartment parking lot; that she had the license to zip around in her prized possession; that she could drive and change lanes; that she had even merged on the interstate once. But she knew he didn’t care. She lurked only as a minor inconvenience in a corner of his apartment. Like a roach.

  “I don’t care!” Tara whispered under her breath, but it was a rather loud whisper, and the corners of her mouth drooped after she said it. The sexy lingerie, it was certainly not to catch his attention. She dressed better in mall-bought clothes, got highlights in her hair, touched her eyelashes with mascara when she went out—they were self-improvement exercises that uplifted her sagging self-esteem. She didn’t do any of this for him, and certainly not to come up a few notches in comparison with an evil blonde bitch.

  Chapter 13

  Tara had seen little of her brother at Shanti Nilaya. The first time he returned to Mangalore with Amma and Daddy during the summer of 1979, he wasn’t e
ven the brother she had said good-bye to. He was a four-year-old boy with curly hair who called her Akka, big sister, but said he didn’t know her.

  A week into their vacation, Daddy took his family to the Summer Sands beach resort in Ullal. They stayed at a luxurious red-tiled villa with soft beds and a palm-fringed pool, the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea before them. An idyllic weekend, so far away from her reality. Daddy looked every bit a Gulf resident in his gold-rimmed aviator glasses and swimming trunks. He was in a good mood too. He ruffled Tara’s hair and joked about its unamenable nature.

  “Thank God, it is only your hair that is wild,” he said.

  Amma, lovely Amma, whose fashionable chiffon sari billowed in the warm seaside breeze, shook her head, blinked her eyes at Daddy to make him stop teasing. “We’ll get a haircut next week,” she said, as if her hair were wild too. It wasn’t.

  Daddy asked Tara about school, but nothing about home where Uncle Anand was doing a good job hiding his paranoia from his Dubai relatives behind a stony face and deep silence.

  “How is school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you studying hard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am expecting you to be the first doctor in the family.”

  “I want to be a writer.”

  “A writer?” Daddy laughed. “All romantic notions in that head, eh? Reading is good, but writing is not a real career. Writers go hungry.”

  Amma shook her head again and called Tara her little Shakespeare. “Not all writers go hungry,” she retorted. “Your room wouldn’t be lined with books if they did.”

  Tara looked at her little brother as he sped from the pool to the golden sands to the ocean’s cool edge to marvel at the frothy blue waves. She knew he would grow up to become a doctor or engineer. He would make Daddy and Amma proud. Even now, at four, he was a curious child and asked unending questions.

  “My intelligent boy,” Daddy said with pride, when Vijay wanted to know if the waves that licked his feet at Summer Sands traveled all the way to Dubai. The wind carried sea water across great distances, Daddy explained. So it was possible the water would one day reach Dubai.

  Later that day, Tara helped Vijay mold wet sand into a castle.

  “Who lives in the castle?” he asked.

  “Amma, Daddy, Vijay, and I,” she replied.

  “No. Amma, Daddy, and Vijay. You live in India.”

  “But I am your sister. We should all live together, no?”

  Vijay contemplated this for a while, then shook his head. “No, you are the dragon. You are in the attic, locked up.”

  “Why am I the dragon? Why should I be locked up? I am your sister.”

  Vijay made curved claws of his chubby hands, stuck his tongue out, and made guttural growling noises.

  “Do this, do this,” he cried.

  Tara ducked from the attack of Vijay’s wet tongue. Then momentarily, the dragon was inside her as she gripped the back of Vijay’s head and pushed his face into the sandcastle. Seconds ticked. The castle crumbled into wet sand. The palm of her hand felt his panic as he struggled to push his head up, get his face out of the sand. His legs thrashed about. When she released him, she realized that she had held her breath as long as she had denied her brother air. She used the edge of her frock to wipe the wet sand from his eyelids, and off his face. When she held him in her arms and kissed his cheeks, they were salty with tears.

  “That man did it,” she said to Vijay, pointing a shaking, guilty finger at a stranger’s silhouette in the far distance. She didn’t know if Vijay believed her, because he only bawled in return.

  Vijay never called Tara a dragon again. After her family returned to Mangalore in 1982, he had no need for the protection of his big sister. Every evening, she stood watch as he played with other little boys and girls in their community, riding his bike or playing cricket or “catch the pillar.” Whenever he fell off his bike, he picked himself up without crying. He was outgoing, talkative. She was quiet, introverted. At eighteen, Vijay had moved out of their home to live in the dorm at his engineering college in Mysore. Since then, they’d had little opportunity to bond because, after getting an electronic engineering degree, Vijay had moved to California to complete his master’s in computer science, and then taken up a job there.

  When Daddy got together with his drinking buddies, he never ceased to brag about his bright son whose zest, drive, and intelligence were unmatched in his eyes. He would sigh, a little tipsy from the scotch, his voice slurring mildly, and repeat his desire to be alive to see all the wonders his son would accomplish in his life.

  Amma bragged about Vijay too, but always remembered to add a good word for her daughter. “She is so creative. She writes beautifully.”

  At twenty-eight, Vijay was already director of business intelligence in a large healthcare company. At thirty-four, Tara still cleaned offices three times a week. And it was she, the big sister, who needed him now. She called Vijay late one afternoon and gave him an overview of her circumstances.

  “I knew there was something crooked about the asshole,” he said. “Something just didn’t add up.”

  Vijay visited her one weekend and helped her write her resume. He was only an inch taller than Tara, but he had inherited Amma’s translucent skin. His face shone brightly and was crowned with thick, curly hair. She didn’t want him staying in the apartment, so he checked himself into the nearby Holiday Inn. In his hotel room, she settled into a moss-green upholstered chair and watched sullenly as he worked his contacts in the Atlanta area, hatching the best route for Tara to build a career in IT.

  Soon, a plan emerged, after long tele-conversations with faceless, seemingly knowledgeable techies at the other end of the phone. A path was laid out for her. The first step would be to enroll in an IT institute run by an acquaintance of Vijay’s in Norcross, to train in quality assurance. Once she had the QA certification, the acquaintance would help place her and take a cut from her salary each month.

  Vijay was pragmatic and operated like the engineer he was. In his world view, problems were always material and had solutions. Tara was grateful to Vijay for the support, and for helping with the fees at Anil Rajgopalan’s Qvision Tech Institute. And yet, even when he berated Sanjay, not once had he put his arm around her or asked how she was coping with her situation.

  “You need to get out of the victim mentality,” he told her matter-of-factly before leaving for California. “Focus on bettering yourself.”

  She resisted the urge to snap back at him, to return his check that she was holding in her hand. It was the same hand that had pushed his head into a sandcastle all those years ago. From where she stood, it was important to put things in perspective. At least Vijay had cared enough to rush to her aid. She smiled a thin smile and said nothing in return. She prepared herself mentally to go back to tech class, despite her poor aptitude.

  The road to QvisionTech was littered with obstacles, like merging from the ramp onto interstate I-85, then getting into the third lane that took her directly to Jimmy Carter Boulevard, peering into her driver’s-side mirror, making sure—then doubly sure—no other car was within disaster range in those lanes. Once she had passed the busy Spaghetti Junction, which looked like a massive, impossibly complicated intertwining of roads that left her awestruck, she then had the task of moving over to her right, which was trickier, with the traffic merging from I-285. She breathed a little easier once she was safely off the interstate and on the relatively non-overwhelming Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Overall, though, driving wasn’t nearly as nerve-racking as she had imagined it to be. Or maybe fears became easier to grapple with when not facing them was no longer an option.

  Her instructor, Samuel Varghese, was an amiable, stocky, bespectacled Indian. The first day of class, he took the time to learn the names of his eight students, seven of them Indian, and the eighth a Hispanic guy. He then introduced himself, waxed eloquent about his wonderful years of experience in QA, four of them at Qvision, an
d chatted with his students, asking each of them about their backgrounds and their former careers. Tara learned that most of her classmates had minimal knowledge of computers, and were, like her, wide-eyed, anxious, and looking for new careers. Her classmates had gleaned little about her, except that she had a background in print journalism and she had never worked in the US. The embarrassing bit about her job at the cleaning agency she kept to herself.

  Tara willed her mind to be receptive as Samuel started his first class with the basics of software quality, the difference between software testing and software quality assurance, and the necessity of testing. When she loosened her grip over her thoughts, her mind wandered, but it was surprisingly stripped of emotion. Her mind created fleeting snapshots—Sanjay and Liz having lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant, giggling, holding hands; Sanjay and Liz kissing in his car; Sanjay saying “I love you” to Liz—and still, she felt no emotion. She pushed her stray thoughts away and brought her focus back to Samuel. He had progressed to bug reporting, bug tracking, and release certification—what they meant, she had no clue. She saw a teenage girl in a blue skirt and white shirt, her head bent, eyes moist, a report card in hand, and Daddy yelling in the background, “You are only fit to clean pots and pans.”

  She snapped out of the scene. Tara, focus, she reprimanded herself. Daddy, I will prove you wrong. Her mind had to stay on Samuel, on his full lips as they formed words, on his slight Kerala accent, on the words he had written, in neat round letters, on the blackboard.

  Tara’s days were divided into class mornings, work afternoons, and study nights, each segment filled to the brim with a routine that she was slowly getting used to. She got home from class, kicked off her shoes, changed into her comfortable work uniform, and waited, a bit impatiently, for the honk of Nadya’s horn. She cleaned offices with the same zest—Nadya now trusted her to clean entire offices on her own—and her mind was filled with thoughts that did not always involve her husband the Romeo and his beautiful Juliet. Often, they involved recent experiences of the morning and new challenges of the evening assignments. Sometimes, Sanjay and Liz came to the fore, and sometimes they lingered on, but she could will herself to think of other things.