Do you remember feast days, Ma—the excitement of guests arriving, the house full to bursting with people so we couldn’t turn round without bumping into someone, you laughing for once without worry lines creasing your forehead, the rich smell of feast food, all the best dishes prepared for the guests: vegetable bhath and chicken sukka, kori kachpu and fish fry, kori roti and sambar and semige payasa for afters…?
Ma, the chickens peck busily at the cracked earth; frogs croak and crows caw as I write this. The air is perfumed with jasmine and the heady rich scent of mango, tinged with the spicy tang of tamarind and the sweet, milky whiff of paddy ripening in the sun. In the far field, a trio of birds perch on a cow as it grazes in the fields. Nagappa’s wife gossips with Aarthiappa’s, baskets filled to bursting with the ambades they had been picking off the tree balancing neatly on their hips, their bodies curved in the shape of the letter ‘S’. Aarthiappa’s son sits among the branches of the ambade tree, only his knobbly knees and sticklike hairy legs visible, dangling down like adventitious roots, his job being to give the branches a shake to dislodge any remaining ambades. He yells down to his mother, a disembodied voice coming from the bowels of the tree like God speaking: ‘Is that enough?’ She nods yes without looking up, hefting her basket from one hip to the other, her mouth busily working as she continues her discussion with Nagappa’s wife.
The evening breeze blows fragrant on my face, twirling leaves on the trees and displacing mango- scented drops, carrying a whiff of rain and ripening pineapples. Twilight slowly saps the sky of colour and I sit here, letting the mosquitoes feast on me, not minding the flies that buzz, the crickets that chirp. Darkness descends slowly, an inky black curtain draining the sky of colour. On my lap, Bobby sleeps, nose twitching, waking up only when I stop scratching behind his ears, blinking up at me, a wounded expression in his caramel eyes.
Here, where I sit by the front door, all is quiet. Silence weighs down upon the house like clouds pregnant with condensation just before the heavens open. No Jalajakka sweeping her compound, her sari pallu tucked into her waist as she is wont to this time of day, no rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack of broomstick hitting cement. No rustling of Sumitranna’s Udayavani, as he sits on his veranda, slurping on sur, munching on chuda and squinting at the newspaper in the waning light.
Jalajakka, Sumitranna and their son have gone to Jalajakka’s village, to care for her mother who is very ill. Ma, after I left for England, they looked after you, didn’t they, making sure you ate on time, filling the silence with conversation, populating the lethargic hours that stretched endlessly before you with anecdotes, stories, the steady patter of their company? But once they left, you succumbed to loneliness, you forgot to eat, you fell ill… If Shali had not come looking for you when she did… I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.
The coconut trees silhouetted against a coffee sky whisper confidences in the conspiratorial breeze; lights twinkle in the darkness ahead, my baby jumps inside me and I miss you, Ma. I wish you were here, sharing this evening with me.
Come back to me, Ma, do. I will look after you and keep you company. I will not get irritated, impatient, angry with you. I will not yell at you and walk off in a huff. I will love you like you deserve to be loved. I will.
Yours,
Devi
Chapter 21
Shilpa
Semige Payasa and Goli Baje
Semige Payasa:
Ingredients:
1 cup semige/vermicelli
3 cups milk
1 cup granulated sugar
6 cardamom pods, peeled and seeds crushed to fine powder
2 tbsp ghee
12 cashew nuts
2 tbsp raisins
Method:
1. Heat the ghee in a pan and roast the cashew nuts in them until they are golden brown. Add raisins and fry until they plump up and take on a polished amber tinge. Take them out using a porous ladle and add vermicelli to the pan, roast till the vermicelli turns a warm honey colour.
2. Now add the milk.
3. Once cooked, add sugar and reduce the flame to low. Leave the mixture be until it simmers gently—around six minutes.
4. Switch off the flame and stir in powdered cardamom and the cashew nuts and raisins.
5. And there you have it—Semige Payasa, a treat fit for the kings.
* * *
Dear Diary,
Semige Payasa is traditionally served at feasts, weddings and celebrations. And do I have something to celebrate! After years of waiting, wanting, yearning—I am a mother! Am writing this quickly, between chores—oh, if I thought I was busy before… not a moment to myself now and that is just how I want it. Any free moment and I ruminate; Manoj’s face flashes before my eyes.
I have stolen moments from my other chores to put it all on paper, the fantastic miracle that is giving birth—lest I forget. My memory is not the best these days—too many things to do and not enough time, so tiny details escape into the recesses of my mind never to be retrieved again: the colour of Manoj’s eyes when he wanted me, the expression on his face at the moment of waking—and I do not want to forget a thing, not a minuscule detail of the birth, not even the pain of labour. It will never happen again for me, this miracle of conception and birth. It is done now and I have such a fantastic reward to show for it.
So… one March morning, four weeks before I was due, my baby decided it wanted out. Later, the matrons would say it was the trauma of losing Manoj that caused the labour to start early. And I would agree.
But first: 01:00 a.m., March the twentieth announced its presence with a storm that thrashed the mango trees into frenzy and churned the fields into muddy slush. Thunder bellowed and lightning ducked behind clouds, scratching dazed ‘V’s and ‘Z’s on an ink-splattered canvas. The power was robbed by an ostentatious flash that targeted the electricity pole swaying in the fields. Rain drummed, flies sang and the dogs sleeping on verandas complained as they were sprayed with jets of water angling in on gusts of breeze.
I woke. Drenched in sweat, speechless with pain, mattress wet. My waters had broken. Another thunderstorm. Another crisis. Relentlessly pushing away memories of that other thunderstorm, sweeping the pain, the guilt that threatened to undo me to a corner of my mind, I shook Jalaja, who had taken to sleeping with me after what happened (‘Only until the baby arrives,’ she had said when I assured her I was fine, ‘just in case’), awake. ‘The baby…’
Jalaja ran next door in the blinding rain and Sumitranna arrived, hastily tying his lungi. He picked me up, despite the fact that I was doubly heavy with pregnancy, and carried me through the fields, his tread heavy and deliberate so as not to slip on the mud path which was disintegrating to slush beneath his feet. He carried me, my sari wet and sticking to a swollen body that jerked with convulsions every once in a while, tears of pain running down my cheeks and mingling with the rain, all the way to the road where Anthu was waiting with his rickshaw.
This is what Jalaja told me later: She had run to Anthu’s house in the darkness without even waiting to light a candle, slipping once or twice in the sludge and almost drowning in the stream which was swollen to twice its size and was writhing in fury, the lightning that illuminated the sky every so often leading the way. She had banged on Anthu’s door until he woke and stood in the doorway in his lungi and holey vest, bleary-eyed, staring at the muddy apparition stooped in front of him, dripping water and muck and shouting in Jalaja’s voice to get a move on. I am sure Anthu was convinced he was having a nightmare, that Jalaja—whom he had always fancied and who had previously appeared in his dreams in a completely different guise—had transformed into this monster, this ghoulish apparition, to torment him, that God was teaching him a lesson for coveting what didn’t belong to him. He clutched at his crotch for comfort, blubbering until Jalaja stepped forward, shook him vigorously and ordered him to take his hand away from his crotch and place it on the steering wheel of his auto straightaway because Shilpamma was having her baby.
Around midday, there was a loud din just outside the hospital. Women yelling and hitting their heads. Men huddled in groups, hitching up their lungis and talking busily, their expressions serious. The rain had cleared sometime during the morning and the sun, not taking lightly to being out-shadowed, was burning with a vengeance, in a mood to evaporate every stubborn drop clinging to the leaves.
I was in a long room, the general women’s ward—beds on either side hosting women in various stages of agony. No door to the room, only a thin cloth curtain that lifted with what little breeze there was, on either end. One end led onto a corridor which connected with the men’s ward, the toilets and the operating theatre. The other opened onto a balcony and if I craned my neck, I could see the entrance to the hospital and the mud road outside, even the little shop selling tea and vadai by the gate. This was where the men had congregated, sipping tea in hushed concentration, their expressions serious. Something had happened.
Jalaja walked in, averting her eyes from the sight of other women’s distress, knowing they didn’t want her to partake in it.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, between contractions.
‘The Chief Minister of Karnataka is dead. Heart attack. They are closing the hospital. People are upset. Their relatives are suffering and need medical help.’ She paused, wiped her forehead which was gleaming with droplets of sweat. ‘I went to the nurse and fell at her feet, saying I would not leave until your baby was born safe and sound…’
‘Oh,’ I said, reaching out to squeeze my neighbour’s hand, my eyes stinging with tears. ‘Thank you.’
‘But it didn’t help, amma,’ Jalaja said, grimacing. ‘That stupid nurse asked me to stop the dramatics and free her leg, that you were not going anywhere, but the doctor was not coming in.’ Jalaja sounded out of breath. ‘I asked her, ‘‘What if something happens?” “Well, we’ll see then, won’t we,” was that stupid, heartless nurse’s reply. Pah!’ She spat loudly and dramatically out the window and came back to perch at my bedside.
Several of the women had turned to watch Jalaja, transfixed. Now, they went back to moaning and groaning and sighing and complaining, while their husbands gossiped and discreetly partook of cashew feni outside, near the hospital gates.
Her narration finished, Jalaja lifted the aluminium jug on the table beside me and tipped its entire contents into her open mouth from a height, not missing a drop. Some of the women cheered. ‘Don’t worry, amma, I will stay here and look after you,’ she said when she was able to take a breath.
‘I know,’ I managed before another wrenching contraction took possession of me again.
Something did happen. The baby was stuck. It was facing the wrong way and couldn’t come out. I pushed and pushed to no avail. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ I panted between contractions.
‘No doctor, this hospital is supposed to be closed, the Chief Minister is dead, and I am left looking after twenty women all having their babies at once and not one of them straightforward,’ muttered the nurse, taking out her frustration on me.
‘Please… my baby.’
Jalaja fell at the nurse’s feet again and was rewarded by a kick in the shins. ‘Do you want me to help your amma or do you want to lie in the next bed? Because if you don’t let go, I am going to kick you senseless.’
‘Get me Devi,’ I yelled amid contractions. ‘Someone, please get me Devi.’ Once she understood who I was talking about, Jalaja paid one of the jobless boys hanging by the little shop outside the gate of the hospital with her own money and asked him to fetch the madwoman who sat by the peepal tree. Jalaja told me later that as soon as he heard the word ‘madwoman’, the boy crossed himself, held out the money he had pocketed and refused to budge from his stance under the thatched roof of the shop.
‘What are you crossing yourself for? You are not Christian,’ Jalaja yelled.
‘A Christian God will do as well as any,’ the boy retorted.
‘Look at you, cheeky; if your mother knew you were talking back like this, what would she say?’ Jalaja yelled, and the boy had the grace to blush. ‘And where are my other five rupees? I gave you ten and you are returning only five.’
The boy’s face flushed even more and he held out the other five rupees.
‘If my amma didn’t need me by her side, I would go get that harmless old woman myself,’ Jalaja grumbled. ‘What do you think she will do to you?’
‘Curse me, kill me, who knows? I can’t read the mind of a madwoman!’
‘No one’s asking you to! Now, here’s fifteen rupees. Go quickly—I need to get back to amma, sponge her head.’
‘She’ll curse me,’ he repeated.
‘Nonsense,’ spat Jalaja, losing patience—never her best virtue—a mouthful of betel juice staining the boy’s Bata chappals.
‘Hey, watch out, they’re new. Twenty rupees I paid for them,’ he complained. And, ‘She’ll set the serpent which lives in the anthill beside her on me.’
‘Nonsense.’ Jalaja’s palm itched to slap his insolent cheek, but for once she showed restraint, knowing that it would serve no purpose, that none of the other boys would agree to go fetch that old woman I had taken a fancy to (Why on earth couldn’t I have liked someone more accepted by society? thought Jalaja, irritably), and she would have to abandon me in my moment of need and go herself. She settled for coaxing him instead, keeping her mounting fury in check—just— and consenting to pay him twice the original amount. And at last, just as she was losing her rag, he agreed.
And the madwoman, who, to everybody’s knowledge, had never left the peepal tree except for when she disappeared weeks at a time no one knew where, came to the hospital at the boy’s summons. The boy did not even go up to her, Jalaja told me later. He stood on the opposite side of the road, made a cone of his hands and yelled across, amid the blaring horns of the bus, the barks of the dogs and the mooing of the cows that Shilpamma needed her at the hospital. When Jalaja found this out, last week, from Shali the fisherwoman, she saw red. She hunted out the boy, who was lounging with his friends near the cycle repair shop, sitting on a pile of dusty rubber tubes and eyeing the girls sewing in the tailor shop opposite. She held him by the scruff of his neck and shook him, hard. ‘Give me back my money. Thirty rupees I paid you—for what, to yell across the road?’ She shook him once more, until she could hear his teeth chattering. ‘You can keep five; give me back twenty-five,’ she screamed, much to his friends’ chagrin, as the girls in the tailor shop watched agog, giggling nervously. ‘Or have you spent it already? What are you looking at?’ She bellowed at his friends, who had identical horror-struck expressions on their faces. Her gaze then landed on the girls. ‘Mr Prashant, what are you paying your girls for? To work or watch the show?’ she shouted, and they bent their heads simultaneously and started working the sewing machines, wheels turning, needles clicking, feet tapping in unison.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, I had lost my will to push, to do anything at all. I was so tired. Weighted lids dragged my eyes down towards blessed oblivion, free of pain. Just as I was giving in to that impulse, I glimpsed gnarled hands pushing the curtain aside and Devi the wise woman’s long stride bridging the distance between the doorway and my bed, her weather-beaten face, the bushy grey hair and matching eyes oozing serenity. I relaxed. I knew then that my baby would be fine. Devi put both hands on my stomach and kneaded gently and I felt my baby shift. ‘Push,’ Devi urged, her steely gaze imbibing in me the strength I needed. I thrust with all my might and my baby popped out, blue in the face, floppy, limp. Devi held the baby in her arms very gently and then, to the fascinated
horror of everyone present, Jalaja, the nurse and even me, who trusted her completely, dangled the baby upside down and shook her hard. ‘No!’ we all screamed in unison, and a tiny mewling cry joined our wails. Pink-faced, angry, the baby screamed at the top of her voice.
‘She’s so fair, a real beauty. Looking at all those foreign babies helped, amma,’ said Jalaja, laughing through her tears.
‘Wait, it’s not over yet,’ the wise woman said in her gravelly voice, handing my baby over to Jalaja, who cooed and gushed in a way I had rarely witnessed. ‘Do you still feel the urge to push?’ the wise woman asked of me, kneading my stomach.
I nodded, unable to speak. I wanted to hold my baby and yet my body was convulsing, the urge to push still strong.
‘Go on,’ the wise woman said, steel-grey eyes soft as they held my exhausted gaze. ‘Push.’
I pushed, hard. There was a gushing sound, the feeling of something moving down and plopping out. I looked down, shocked. Another baby!
The room erupted. ‘Twins, she has twins.’ ‘We didn’t have a clue.’ ‘No doctor, that’s why,’ Jalaja’s strident barb directed at the nurse.
I have two children, I thought, joy beginning to swell out of me in exalted waves.
More shouts. ‘Another girl! What’s the matter with her face?’ And the nurse, her voice high-pitched, ‘A monster, she has given birth to a monster.’
I am being punished, I thought, as my little girl’s face came into view, for what I did to Manoj. The wise woman subjected this baby to the same treatment as my other, and she let out a plaintive mewl through the open wound that she had in lieu of a mouth. Why punish my child for my mistakes, Lord? I asked. Why her face, Lord? I knew the answer of course. For a girl, her face is her fortune. The best way to punish a mother is to give her a daughter who has no prospects, no groom asking for her hand in marriage.
The Forgotten Daughter Page 23