Putting his phone down on the empty seat beside him, Krishan turned listlessly and looked out again through the window, unsure what to think as he replayed in his mind what his mother had said. He was bothered by the image of Appamma crying in her room, since it was true as his mother said that his grandmother seldom cried, but even more unsettling was the fact that she’d neglected to take her Sunday head bath. Her head baths were one of the primary rituals by which his grandmother gave movement to her time, an activity that taxed her body but that she continued performing with meticulous regularity, so that if she hadn’t wet her hair and shampooed it that morning it could only have been, he knew, because she’d been thoroughly shaken by Rani’s death. He’d assumed from her initial response that the news would leave her saddened but mostly untouched, that it would leave her unaffected the way many of the seemingly important deaths in her life had, the death of her sister several years prior, for example, which she’d been upset by for a few days and then seemed to forget about completely, or even the death of her husband decades before, at whose funeral, according to his mother, she hadn’t even cried. It was obvious now that Rani’s death had the potential to affect his grandmother more gravely than these other deaths, that the psychological impact of the loss might be severe enough to have a physical effect on her too. It had been due largely to Rani that Appamma had been brought back from the brink, after all, due to Rani’s nursing and attention during those first few weeks but also, even more significantly, to the constant human presence that Rani had provided in the subsequent months. She’d played a vital role in Appamma’s overall recovery, putting an end to the isolation she experienced spending hours on end alone in her room, coming over time to represent the wider world from which she’d been sundered. Appamma had taken personal affront to her unannounced departure, to the fact that Rani had ended their relationship without even informing her, and it had required significant work on her part to forgive the betrayal, to come up with an acceptable narrative for why Rani had cut off ties so abruptly. Whatever the plausibility of Appamma’s narrative, which appealed of course to Rani’s instability and not to any dissatisfaction with her situation in Colombo, it was possible now, Krishan knew, that the connection to the outside world that Rani had symbolized could be severed by the news of her death. There was a real chance now that Appamma could return to her earlier state of isolation, to a life lacking in meaningful stimulus, her mood and energy once more beginning to deteriorate, her mental sharpness and along with it her physical vitality, her mind and body spiraling in tandem once more toward oblivion.
It was striking now to think about how close his grandmother had become to Rani during their time together, about how much his grandmother had come, in spite of all her initial suspicions and resentments, to trust Rani and depend on her, to become, even, a kind of friend. He’d been nervous at the beginning about how Appamma would receive her, about whether she would treat Rani as a nurse or whether she would treat her as a servant who was at her beck and call, whether she would give her the respect and understanding due to someone who’d lost so much. The first weeks of Rani’s stay in Colombo had actually gone smoothly, Appamma still possessing only the most basic modes of awareness, scarcely even conscious of Rani’s presence in her room, taking her for granted the same way a newborn child takes for granted the fact it will be fed and washed and cleaned. It was only in the weeks that followed that his initial fears had begun to materialize, Appamma becoming more cognizant of her surroundings, surfacing from her unconsciousness to find that her existence was now bound to that of a stranger. She saw Rani as an alien presence in the household, an imposter who symbolized her new helplessness and was constantly taking her family’s attention away from her, attention, she felt, that belonged by rights only to her. With the gradual recovery of her speech and memory Appamma became, paradoxically, more infantile than before, incapable of recognizing anything but her own desires and far more irritable when those desires went unmet. Krishan remembered how, on a weekend afternoon relatively early on, not more than two months into Rani’s arrival, he’d gone to his grandmother’s room and found Rani stretched out on the floor on her thatched mat, her hands covering her face as if for protection from the light. It always made him uncomfortable to see Rani sleeping on the floor, as if this habit were a subtle critique of his way of life, but she’d insisted on it despite him setting up his brother’s bed in Appamma’s room, not being used to sleeping on a mattress, as she told him, preferring instead the cool hardness of the floor. She had turned slowly toward him as he entered the room, as though she hadn’t been sleeping but lying there lost in thought, her eyes red and her hair in greater disarray than usual. He’d asked whether everything was okay, and she’d told him she was fine, that she hadn’t slept at all the night before, that was all. She hardly slept on most nights, she said, she was unwell, and her illness made it difficult to sleep. Krishan had known what Rani meant by the word unwell, but it was the first time the question of her mental state had come up explicitly, she having brought it up herself, and wanting to let her say more if she wanted he’d asked her what she meant. She’d show him, she replied, and standing up a little unsteadily she went to the corner of her room where her bag was kept, rummaged through it till she found a cardboard folder. This is the reason I’m unwell, she’d told him, taking out two medium-size photographs from the folder and holding them out for him to see, the first of a boy about fifteen or sixteen, wearing a black suit two sizes too big for him, taken in a studio with a sky blue backdrop, the second of a boy about ten or eleven, wearing trousers and a shirt, taken in the same studio with the same blue background. The first was her eldest son, she explained, the one who’d died fighting, and the second was her youngest, the one who’d died in shelling on the seventeenth of May, the penultimate day of the war.
Taking the photos uncertainly in his hands Krishan looked at the two boys, both of whom held their arms awkwardly by their sides, neither of them, it seemed, having posed for a formal photograph before. He was wondering whether to ask Rani what their names were or whether to wait till she told him of her own volition when he noticed, through the corner of his eyes, that Appamma was beginning to shuffle around on the bed with irritation, as if to attract his attention. She didn’t like him having long conversations with Rani, he knew, since in her mind she was the one who was ill and needed to be looked after, whereas Rani was perfectly well and was there only to look after her. Not wanting to encourage her indignation he kept his gaze fixed on Rani, who was beginning to describe the circumstances of her youngest son’s death. It had been early morning when it happened, she was saying, and they’d been trying to cross the front lines from what remained of Tiger territory, which had been shelled every day and night for the previous several months. They had been unsure whether or not to cross for some time, afraid of being killed in the cross fire and about what the soldiers would do to them if they went over to the government side, but they’d decided finally that it was safer to try crossing over than to remain behind under constant shelling. Appamma, whose shuffling on the bed was becoming more conspicuous, interjected suddenly that the afternoon’s film had been no good, that when there was no good film playing she preferred the TV to be off. This was irrelevant, of course, the TV in any case being off, and trying to show Rani that he was paying attention Krishan asked who she’d been with at the time. She’d been with her husband, her youngest son, her daughter, and her sister’s family, Rani replied, all of whom she’d been together with throughout the various displacements. They’d been walking for about half an hour through the shelled debris of the camp, trying to find the best place to cross, when they heard a high-pitched whistling in the sky, a sound that indicated a standard-issue shell, she explained, for every kind of airborne weapon had its own sound, the cluster bombs, the rockets, and even the drones. They began to run, not knowing whether they were moving toward the shell or away, and after a few seconds it had fallen, not close but not far away
either. Looking around in the rising dust and smoke she saw that her youngest son had fallen down and was unable to get up, and running toward the body she realized that he’d been struck by a piece of shrapnel in the stomach and died instantaneously, without so much as a sound.
Rani, whose eyes had been welling up, wiped away a tear, and as Krishan was wondering what he could say to console her he heard his grandmother calling his name from the bed. He tried to ignore her, but she repeated his name with irritation until he was forced to turn around. She was pointing to the dressing table beside the TV, at several tins of canned tuna that her brother had put in her bags before she returned from London. She’d forgotten about them till finding them that morning, she said loudly, that was how much her brother loved her, he was always thinking of her, even while she was sick he’d thought to buy canned tuna for her, knowing they were her favorite food. She wasn’t planning on opening any yet, since there was plenty of fish available these days, she would save them for later, she’d decided, when the price of fish was higher. Krishan nodded quickly and turned back to Rani with a look of apology, terrified she would be hurt or offended by the interruption, but Rani continued as though Appamma hadn’t spoken at all. They’d had no choice but to keep running, she went on, they’d had no choice but to keep running since the shells were continuing to fall. She wasn’t able to bury her son’s body, her daughter had been with her, and she couldn’t put her at risk by staying there any longer—what happened subsequently to her son’s body she’d never managed to find out. Appamma, who’d taken Krishan’s curt response to her statement as a snub, raised her voice and shouted across the room that some of the tins were not ordinary tuna but were in fact flavored, some lemon, some pepper, and some tomato, but Rani, too caught up in what she was saying to take heed, simply raised her voice and continued, describing how they’d escaped finally and made it to the other side of the front lines, how they were frisked by the Sri Lankan army, extensively interrogated, and then interned in camps for more than a year and a half. Krishan kept his gaze fixed on Rani as she told him how they’d lost almost all their belongings in the last few months of fighting, how the only tokens of her sons she’d managed to hold on to were the two photographs he was holding in his hands. He didn’t look away till she finished her account, transfixed, despite his fear of another interruption, by the strange tension and immediacy in her eyes, which were directed not into the distance as they often were, not far away the way the people’s eyes usually were when describing an event from a different time and place, but vividly alert and present, as if the world she was describing was somehow in front of her as she spoke, as if she’d never left that other world behind.
Such incidents occurred a few times in the first two or three months of Rani’s arrival, but Rani would always ignore them or respond to them quickly and sharply, rarely seeming to take them to heart. They became less common as time passed, partly because Krishan’s mother made a point of scolding her mother-in-law whenever she overheard a rude remark or demand, but mainly because the childishness induced in Appamma as a result of her trip gradually began to subside on its own. As time passed and her condition improved, Appamma became more capable of seeing things from the perspective of others and more aware of how much she owed to Rani, in whom she had, she discovered, a person she could count on for all her personal and social needs, a companion who wouldn’t desert her even when everyone else had said good night. It was to Rani that she directed her questions about what was happening downstairs, what they were going to have for dinner, how much the onions, coconuts, or brinjal cost, how the various plants in the garden were doing, questions that previously she would have had to ask Krishan or his mother and to which Rani, unlike the two of them, was compelled to give some response. Rani’s eyes and ears and hands and feet became, over the course of her recovery, her proxy sensory and motor organs, and not only did Appamma’s ability to understand and participate in the affairs of the household begin to improve but so too did her consciousness of the world beyond the house. Through Rani her conception of the world began to expand to include the north and east, parts of the country she’d grown up and spent her married life but hadn’t seen in decades. She learned from Rani about the war and about Kilinochchi and Jaffna, about how things had worked in the areas under Tiger control and how they worked now under government control, and it was because of Rani too that Appamma began reading the newspapers, paying more attention to the evening news, forming political opinions and keeping abreast of political developments, things Krishan had never noticed her caring about till then. All this knowledge, this sense of being once more part of the world, together with the presence of a full-time interlocutor and companion, someone with whom she could watch TV, express her opinions, quarrel, and make jokes, had the effect of energizing Appamma, improving her moods, so that not only did she recover her condition prior to the trip to London but soon surpassed it too. She became healthier and more mobile, more youthful and more vital than she’d seemed in several years, making it obvious that her deterioration in the years leading up to the trip had its source not so much in the physical process of aging as in the withdrawal that came about as a result, the loneliness and isolation of having nothing to do and nobody to engage with, a withdrawal that led to the atrophy of the body far more quickly, it seemed, than any merely physical process.
Krishan remembered how another day later on, when all Appamma’s faculties had been fully restored, he’d gone into their room in the morning and found the two of them talking, both of them in a seemingly good mood, Rani explaining to Appamma some development in the TV show they’d just finished watching. He’d said hello to Rani and asked his grandmother how she’d slept the previous night, to which she’d responded by slapping her hand dramatically against her forehead in a kind of mock frustration, a sly smile on her lips as she told him she’d spent the entire night looking after Rani, as if she were Rani’s caretaker and not the other way around. He’d glanced nervously at Rani, unsure how she would respond to this statement, but she too was smiling, partly out of embarrassment and partly because of the liveliness of Appamma’s account. She’d woken up the previous night, Appamma explained, to the sound of sudden screaming and shouting, had been worried there was a thief in the house or that some other terrible thing had happened. She’d sat up in a state of disorientation, not knowing what the source of the commotion was, then turning around had realized that Rani was the one yelling, that she was having one of her nightmares again. She’d gone over and begun shaking Rani by the shoulders, trying to wake her up, but even after she woke it had taken several minutes to calm her down. They’d tried going back to sleep but the entire night Rani had tossed and turned, mumbling loudly to herself, and two more times she’d woken up screaming and shouting. It was fine for Rani, Appamma went on, still pretending to be upset, the smile on her lips widening into a grin, for Rani always made up for her lost sleep in the afternoons. What about her though, she who could never sleep in the afternoons, what was she supposed to do? The three of them had laughed at Appamma’s humorous narration but Krishan had been left somewhat unsettled, for the nightmares Rani had, he knew, were nightmares about the last months of the war, most often about the death of her younger son, sometimes about other things she’d seen or heard. For him these were subjects that had to be discussed with utmost gravity, subjects that had to be approached with the solemnity reserved for funerals, and he found the lightness with which Appamma treated them disturbing. He’d still been living and working in the northeast at the time, but despite coming across countless people who’d suffered just like Rani during the war, he hadn’t become close enough to anyone to witness their traumas firsthand. It was only on moving back to Colombo and living opposite his grandmother and Rani, observing the dynamic that had formed between the two women, that he began to wonder whether it was his own stance that had been misplaced. The trauma Rani had suffered during the war was, for better or worse, part of her ordi
nary life, something she couldn’t help thinking about or reacting to, whether she was waking up, eating, performing her duties, or sleeping, and it had been foolish of him to think it belonged to some separate sphere. Trauma for Rani was something that had to coexist with all the various exigencies of daily existence, and precisely for this reason she couldn’t afford to treat it with the same weight or seriousness that he did. In treating Rani as someone she could tease, argue with, and exchange stories with, as someone with whom she had to compete for the attention of her grandson and for power within the household, Appamma was in a way treating Rani as an equal, as someone who was going through something that was normal and not unusual, someone who didn’t have to be stopped and pitied or treated with excessive caution. Even if she sometimes hurt Rani with her cavalier stance, Appamma’s way of dealing with her had probably made Rani more comfortable on the whole, and perhaps it was this nonchalance that had allowed a camaraderie and even a kind of friendship to form between the two women, between that rapidly aging woman who was fighting to remain in the world and that invisibly wounded stranger who didn’t seem to care about whether she stayed or left, a bond that despite all his guilt and despite all his efforts he himself, he felt now, had been unable to forge over the course of Rani’s time with them.
A Passage North Page 15