The tie, not tightened for posterity, twists off easily. She peels the bag open, folding the top down, and after only a moment’s unthinking hesitation dips her index finger into the contents.
Some are slender as toothpicks, others broader, the width of a pencil. It is these larger slivers of bone — interiors finely textured in a pointillist pattern — that have retained colour, some ivory, some suggestive of henna. They are fragile, and after one turns to dust between her fingertips, she handles them like butterfly wings.
Foraging through the dust for corporeal remains of her mother leaves a grey residue on her hands. She holds her fingers up to her eyes, and is suddenly overwhelmed with a closeness — a sense of intimacy — never before experienced with the woman whose ways and manners cultivated warmth from a prim distance.
She brings her hand to her lips, licks the tip of the index finger, then places its length against her tongue. The dust is without flavour, but gritty. Then, closing her eyes, she slowly licks the dust from her other fingers, from her palm, from the back of her hand.
In the holiness of the act, she feels the distance between herself and her mother close forever.
For the first time in many years, she cries for her daughter, hot tears not of despair but of release.
She cries for her mother, hot tears not of longing but of farewell.
And she cries for herself, hot tears not of fear but of relief. Thus she knows that her journey may continue.
4
THE THING, MY dear Mrs. Livingston, is that we all dream of making a neat package of our lives — don’t we? Closing the circle, squaring the square. When that final full stop is penned in, we want to be satisfied that all the “i”s have been dotted and all the “t”s crossed.
Curious, isn’t it — that I should suddenly be littering my language with clichés? I, who have for so long avoided such linguistic shorthand …
But to get back, if I may, to this notion of the neat package: Have people always felt this way, do you think, or is it a consequence of the art we practise? All that neatness we find in novels, biographies and films, where everything fits into a larger pattern, everything is linked, and anomaly proves to be just the logical outcome of something that has gone before. Has art invaded life, offering us, if you will, a new arrogance — or perhaps merely new despair?
But of course, it may be only me. You, my dear, if I dare say so, have never worried about such things, have you? All this nonsense has left you untroubled, hasn’t it? And it may be that you are far better off for it.
Be that as it may, though, this urge to impose order — for that is what it is — on something we know to be messy seems integral to my being. But no one’s life truly allows that, does it, my dear? Disorder is the design of the package. Even the quietest, least eventful of lives is a messy affair on one level or another.
After all, one is left with so many unanswered questions at the end of it — not to mention so many unquestioned answers. One feels quite overwhelmed at times. For instance, I will never for the life of me understand …
Never …
Oh, my!
The sunshine, Mrs. Livingston!
Look at the sunshine!
Dawn already? It can’t be.
Oh, dear me …
Dear me. I —
Mrs. —
5
SHE IS RELIEVED, when she goes to fetch the box with her father’s affairs, that the dining room is deserted. No awkward questions will be asked, no awkward explanations given.
Back in her room, she shuts the door and places the box beside the urn. Then she sits on the edge of the bed, in the silence.
So here they are, her mother, her father and herself. All the pasts, all the worlds, that they have created. All the pasts, all the worlds, that have created them. Together for one last time.
She wonders briefly what it all means, if anything. The distilled essence of these two powerful people runs in her veins, a river of thought and emotion. But that, she knows, is not all she is, for she is not a prisoner of their worlds. Hers is, even now, a future still to be made.
And she sees, after a while, what it means: that she will return lightened to her world, to Jim and the marriage that is theirs. She knows she cannot predict the future. Jim, after all, has his own worlds floating around within him. Some will collide, some will attain harmonious orbit. But whatever comes, she returns ready.
A few minutes later, Penny calls to her from the door. It is time to go.
The river awaits.
6
YASMIN LAY STARTLED under the blankets, the ring of the telephone sharpened and magnified in the darkness.
Jim wrenched himself from the bed with an energy uncommon in his first waking moments. Something clattered and fell in his wake as his bustling shadow glided through the grey rectangle of their bedroom door.
Yasmin’s tongue lay dry and heavy in her mouth. The shrill of the telephone late at night, its brutal wrenching from sleep to a disorienting darkness, was so terrifying she would not have a telephone in the bedroom. And yet, the distant ring still held promise of terror — and that terror, funnelled through the wild fluttering of her heartbeat, began to shape a cry she did not wish to voice.
Jim answered the phone halfway through its fourth ring. He spoke in a voice of summoned composure.
Yasmin leapt from the bed, senses abandoned in a lightning shear. She did not feel the carpet beneath her feet, saw the doorway glide by her, saw the corridor doubling in length. Saw Jim planting himself before her, his arms opening. “Yas,” he said, his face shadowed, indistinct.
She stopped abruptly, two paces from him: a beat of empty time, her senses scrambling, then rapidly reassembling themselves in an impossible silence.
“Yas, it’s your mother.”
“What does she want at this ungodly hour?” The tightness in her chest was suddenly released; the intake of air made her giddy. “Is it poor Mrs. —” But even as she spoke she realized her own mistake.
“Yas, your mother’s had a heart attack — or something.”
Another beat of empty time: mind examining each word, searching for its meaning, finding a multiplicity. “I see.” And the two words, the two syllables, began a marking of the empty time: seconds counted down through a readying of the self. “And …”
Jim stepped up to her, his hands grasping her arms. “She didn’t … She isn’t …” His lips parted as he sucked at air: a gruff inhalation. “It was massive —” He tugged her to his chest. She fell into an embrace that felt captive and airless. “Hold on, Yas,” he said. “Hold on tight.”
But she could not, she lacked the strength. And in the sudden enfeeblement, in a darkness immediate and crackling, Yasmin felt her body contract, muscles contorting — and heard a voice not her own but issued of her throat wail Ariana.
7
SHE TAKES THEM for a type of lemon — the shape is similar, the smaller ones green, the larger ripened to a bright yellow — but she sees that the ground is littered with them, and that those which have broken open reveal a red meat and dozens of small white seeds. She says, “A nurse found her.”
Penny presses her palm to her chest in a sign of distress. “She was a’read …?”
Yasmin nods. “At first they thought she was asleep. She’d put her head on Mrs. Livingston’s bed and they found her like that, still sitting in her chair.”
Cyril shakes his head. “Poor Shakti.”
Penny says, “An’ her friend? Mrs. Livingstone?”
“Livingston.” Yasmin shrugs, feigning indifference to the scene as she imagines it: a still life too still. “No change. She’s still there in her coma. Jim and I went to visit her but, you know, there’s not much point.”
“What about her son?”
“My mom told me that, as far as he’s concerned, she’s already dead.”
“He does visit her?”
Yasmin shrugs again. “I suppose.” She looks up at the tree, laden with its fruit.<
br />
“I wonder what Shakti did all that time, sittin’ by her friend’s bedside,” Penny says. “If I know her, she probably just sat there doing nothing, keeping an eye out. You and I both know — eh, Yasmin? — Shakti wasn’t the talkative kind.”
Cyril and Yasmin share a glance, Cyril sealing their silence by saying, “Want a guava?”
“Guava. So that’s what it is.”
Cyril reaches up, plucks a large yellow one. He rubs it on his shirt and hands it to her.
The fruit is warm in Yasmin’s palm but she barely notices it. She is still thinking about how Cyril has pronounced the word. Not gwava but gawva. His speech is sown with her mother’s voice.
8
IT WAS AS if the apartment itself knew that the irrevocable had occurred.
Only hours — but already a musty neutrality suffused the air, as if the walls were divesting themselves of her mother’s unfathomable residue in preparation for the assumption of the next tenant’s personality. The objects with which she had surrounded herself — the chairs, tables, lamps, the things on the walls — all appeared displaced, the possessions now of no one.
Yasmin stood at the window and raised the binoculars to her eyes. Sky, cloud, bits of trees and buildings. She lowered her gaze, and the playing field closed in: the crisp greenery, the long and narrow rectangle of denuded earth: sights her mother had seen countless times, sights she would no longer see. And the realization that next Sunday afternoon men in whites would bowl and bat and run and catch struck her as obscene, disrespectful. She could not prevent her hands from trembling as she replaced the binoculars on the windowsill and took a step backwards, away from the sense of indecency she knew to be absurd but before which she felt helpless.
She wandered slowly through the apartment, footsteps loud in this place where she no longer belonged. The bathroom, small and neat, devoid of clutter. The hall closet in which hung only two coats, one tan for spring and fall, the other a winter grey she had considered too sombre for her mother. She paused at the bedroom door, steeling herself for the silence she feared would be overwhelming in this room of greatest intimacy.
She had always thought the bedroom small, but her mother had found it adequate to her needs. She organized herself better in an insufficiency of space. It sharpened the mind, she felt, it pared sentimentality, so that objects found their contexts and disorder was stemmed. Her mother’s idea of luxury was precise and severe: it made no concession to baubles.
One Christmas, Mrs. Livingston had given her an elaborate porcelain ashtray in the form of a female hand cupping a seashell. Her mother neither smoked nor knew anyone who did — the source of her friend’s inspiration mystified her — and she could not bring herself to admire it. She suffered its presence on the coffee table for several weeks — and then one day it wasn’t there. Yasmin asked where it was and her mother, with all the innocence she could command, said, “An accident, dear. I was dusting it. It slipped. Terribly sad. It broke into a million pieces.” And then she smiled.
Yasmin proceeded warily into the room, her shoes stealthy on the shining parquet floor, and sat on the edge of the bed. She saw that it had been made up with her mother’s customary neatness, and she was grateful for that: mussed sheets, signs of the last awakening, would have been unbearable. A curious comfort, this — and suddenly she wished she could believe in something: a higher power, a place beyond, an idea of warmth in the aftermath of life.
Her mother’s belief had been private, shorn of ostentation. Among the perfumes and powders on the dressing table were two objects which had been in her mother’s possession for as long as she could remember and which she vaguely understood to be objects of reverence. There was a deeah, a small prayer lamp of unglazed red clay that had never been used and which Yasmin, as a child, had enjoyed caressing with her fingertips, the bowl hard and powdery. Behind it stood the Hindu deity Shiva, a brass figurine of curiously indeterminate gender standing on one foot, the other kicking out, his four arms upheld in an elegant gesture of dance; around him was what appeared to be a ring of fire. Religious implements, then — but Yasmin had never known her mother to pray, and so she had come to think of them as objects of sentiment, icons of another life. Mementos. If they had held a value beyond this, her mother had kept it to herself.
Her mother had once said to Jim that she considered herself a Hindu because she could be nothing else. Hinduism, she said, was less her religion than her way of life. She would not eat beef, but could not subscribe to bovine divinity, either: that was an idea that was sensible only in another time and place; in her context, she had said, the logic would mean conferring divinity on her local supermarket. She had an open mind on reincarnation despite the doubt sown in her mind by a grandfather who warned, when she was young, that failure to improve her behaviour would lead to a future life as a stone. “For a long time,” Yasmin remembered her mother saying, “I treated gravel with the utmost reverence. I was worried about treading on some incorrigible ancestor.” She had, too, a horror of cemeteries, the idea of internment repellent to her. The manners of the religion, she explained, had shaped her, and she had never felt the need to reach beyond its peculiarities, had never felt herself limited by them.
Yasmin ran her palm along the comforter, feeling the silky keenness of its surface. Listening to her mother, she had come to understand that the simplicity of her mother’s spiritual notions had been the votive anchor of her life. They were notions unconcerned with a hereafter, or a godhead; they neither held out promise nor threatened disappointment. Hinduism, her mother had said to Jim, was not a religion of proselytizers. Conversion was not possible. One was simply born to the life — or not.
“And despite Yasmin’s being born to that life, events changed everything.” Her mother did not even glance in her direction. “This is why I foisted on her none of the strictures I accepted for myself.” Those were ways of being, ways of seeing the world, which would have been of use only in other, more alien circumstances. The strengths they offered would have been illusory, their implicit fatalism inhibiting in a society of competition and promise. The tenor of her own life had already been decided, she said, and she had made the best of it. But the world to which she had brought Yasmin was a vastly different place, with new imperatives requiring new responses. She would have to seek out her possibilities unhindered by the limitations of her mother’s time and place. “This is the reason, you see, Mr. Summerhayes, that I learnt to make hamburgers and to cook steaks. For her.”
This, too, was the reason, she went on, that Westerners who turned east in search of wisdom — like the young men with shaven heads and saffron robes who rhythmically proclaimed the glories of Krishna to passersby on downtown streets — were always a source of great amusement to her. They were, she felt, devotees of self-deception — and India, like everywhere else, was full of people willing to fleece those who wished to be fleeced.
Yasmin had never told her mother that those people she found so amusing were, to her, a source of embarrassment. Walking past their public displays of devotion, she could feel their eyes on her, seeking acknowledgement of a kinship they thought they saw in her race. But she had laughed uneasily the day that Charlotte, eyeing a group clanging and chanting on the street, had said, “Boy, what a bunch of cults!”
The light flooding into the bedroom through the undraped window took on a deeper hue. She watched the dressing table and the wall behind it turn lemony, and she remembered something else — so many words once offered in passing, now precious — that her mother had once said to her. “Be glad that your great-grandparents chose to leave India. Would you want to be born into that mess of humanity?”
The light in the bedroom turned the colour of molten gold. She felt its warmth on her shoulders, a warmth that made her aware of a chill proceeding from deep within herself. So much left unsaid, so much left unknown. And yet she began to see that what her mother had given her was best thought of as a kind of freedom. The only question that rema
ined was, freedom from what?
Jim came in, his footsteps soundless on the floor. “Yas? You okay?”
She nodded, accepted the tissue he offered. The tears bewildered her. She had been unaware of them, but they were sufficient to have trailed down her chin and dotted her lap.
Jim stood before the dressing table. He reached for the brass deity. “Ah,” he said. “Shiva. He who destroys to reconstruct. Your mother always was full of surprises.” He held it for a moment, thoughtful, then he put it back down. “Come, let’s go home.”
Yasmin crumpled the tissue in her hand, paused for a moment before the dressing table gilded still by the light: the perfumes, the powders, the dancing god.
She picked up the deeah and clasping it to her breast allowed Jim to lead her from the apartment.
9
THE DAY IS overcast, the sky not so much cloudy as veiled, colours muted in the filtered sunlight.
The cremation ground, a field of packed earth that falls off at the far end at a placid sea, is deserted. As they walk in silence towards the water’s edge, she is glad she refused Cyril’s offer of a pundit to say a prayer. In the heavy air, the silence will remain holy only if unbroken.
She is touched that Cyril and Penny have both dressed for the occasion; that Cyril has insisted on carrying the urn which he holds before him in both hands; that Penny has brought a garland of roses, which will accompany the ashes into the water.
At the water’s edge, she stands looking out: at the painful sky, at the glassy, silvered sea, at the distant horizon where they meet. There is, out there, a faint haze, a suggestion of immense evaporation, and for a brief and terrifying moment she harbours the certainty that she finds herself standing on the last fringe of land before the end of the earth. She goes light-headed, and her body sways. She is grateful when Cyril takes her elbow.
The Worlds Within Her Page 33