Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  Rupa was crying on the verandah one morning when I went out to join her after breakfast. She wouldn’t be able to work for a few days, she said. It was hard to understand her through her tears, and hard to get her to speak more. She started backing away from me, turning to go. I made her sit down with me on a swing. I wanted to know and, unprompted, I promised not to tell. Her eldest brother was in some trouble and he had gotten himself to Madras, and from there he would get a train to go far away. She was going to go meet him in Madras to give him the family savings, though how she and her other two brothers would manage, she didn’t know and couldn’t think about right now. Her tears were subsiding, and she dried her face on her sleeve.

  “What kind of trouble is he in?” I asked.

  She looked at me. I had asked too much, seemed too curious. She stood to leave, and I could sense her distrust and her regret that she had told me anything. She was leaving now, and she was never coming back.

  “Ammamma hasn’t paid you for the week yet,” I said. “I’ll go and ask her and bring it for you.”

  She stood there uncertainly on the verandah. I needed her to know she could trust me. There was money Ammamma kept in a vase for household spending, and I took all of it, but it wasn’t that much. I went into my own room, and took out the pocketbook 1 hadn’t touched since the day I arrived. I removed two crisp twenties from a billfold. I gave all of this to Rupa, but she gave the twenties back to me, she said you couldn’t change money without the right papers. But she saw that I was trying, and she seemed calmer and more friendly.

  “You will come back?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling a little. “I don’t much like Madras.”

  While Rupa was gone, I watched my grandmother to see how she filled her own days. She was on an unwritten but unvarying schedule. She studied and read Sanksrit verse in the early morning, before even the servants came at six. She helped them make breakfast and decided on the day’s menu. After we had breakfast, she bathed and performed morning prayers. She used to bathe and pray as soon as she woke up, I remembered as a child creeping into her prayer room and climbing into her lap, helping her offer fruit and flowers, light incense sticks and triple-tiered velakkus, feeling against my body the vibration of hers in quiet chanting. But now the bathing and the praying had been moved to the midmorning hours, she was afraid of catching cold bathing any earlier. Everyone thought it was damp and cool in the morning, before the sun found our hill, but to me, even at that hour, there was a mugginess, a latent heat, just waiting for its cue to take center stage.

  Then she sat in her room and wrote letters and responded to mail. She had an address book with every page filled in and stuffed with slips of notepaper with more names and addresses scrawled on them. My mother was the beneficiary of one out of seven of those writing sessions every week, the letters came with the predictability of credit card bills. Mail going the opposite direction was nowhere near as dependable. Our letters from the States often took two or three weeks to arrive, and sometimes they didn’t arrive at all. But we were also not dependable ourselves, and so, when we called on the phone, we would lie, and Mother would say, “You haven’t received our New Year’s card yet? But we sent it three weeks ago at least.” The thing with Mother was, she never forgot anything, she knew everyone’s birthday and anniversary and she checked all the holidays in advance on the lunar calendar. But just because she knew didn’t mean she would do anything about it unless she decided it was a priority. Which was why sometimes we sent out our Christmas cards in February, and why sometimes, when she was away or working late on my birthday, she wouldn’t even bother to call. My father and my friends taking me out to dinner and the cards and telegrams from India could almost—but not quite—disguise the stark fact that Mother had little interest in commemorating the one day in her life that had been totally consumed by my entry into the world.

  After taking care of her correspondence, and reading the newspaper, which the boy on the bicycle never brought as early as he was supposed to, Ammamma and I had lunch together. Then, there was the afternoon rest for us and for the servants too, an hour of rest in the dead still heat. My grandmother sometimes lay on the floor in the afternoon, because the doctor had told her it was good for her back. The floors were wonderfully cold, ice cold, sometimes I lay there to read, though I couldn’t sleep.

  In the afternoon, Ammamma knitted, right now she was making a sweater for her sister’s new granddaughter. And she listened to music, bhajans playing on a musty small radio in her room with crackly speakers. I told her the stereo in the living room was much better, but she said she didn’t know how to use it and she didn’t want to ruin anything. Anyway, she said, she knew all the songs, she was mostly listening to them in her head, and she just used the radio to fill in the gaps, check on certain verses, remind her of the rhythm and the count.

  If Vasani and Matthew had finished their work, they would come to her to have her write letters to their villages for them. She only wrote after they scrawled out a few alphabetic characters for her, to show her they had made some progress. She drew lines on the blank paper before she gave it to them, so that they would write in straight lines across the page. Then she took a couple of lines of recitation from each of them, and added to the letters that were already in various stages of completion. She said if she wrote a letter in one sitting for them, they would have no reason to come back to her for a week or two. By then, they would have forgotten anything she taught them.

  Then, after teatime, Ammamma walked around the garden, saw what work had been done that day and what work there was to do. She walked around the entire compound, but always within it, never outside the gate. She peered up at our trees for ripe fruit that could fall and hurt someone. She called Sunil, just home from school and full of energy, and he scampered up tree trunks, to cut coconuts, or mangos, or jackfruit. Sunil would bring down green coconuts if we asked him. He hacked them with a knife in such a way that he always created a perfect spout for drinking from, like the triangle cuts the kindergarten teachers would make in Hawaiian Punch juice cans at snacktime. One cut and the juice went all over the place, sprayed our play tables, but two cuts, and the juice poured smoothly, miraculously.

  Ammamma had another bath then, but with her hair pinned up on top of her head to keep it dry, and then evening prayers. It was always at the twilight hour during which mosquitoes and fireflies started their day, they would hear her chanting, smell the sweet spicy incense, and try to insinuate themselves into the house, to sneak in through a torn screen window or a gap in the caulking.

  1 lingered on the porch some days, covered in insect repellent and a long-sleeve kameez, to watch the fireflies, which were bigger and shone brighter than any I’d ever seen. It was as if they knew they had an extra burden. Some nights, the electric company dimmed our lights, and other nights, we’d have no electricity at all, and the fireflies tried to do their part, offer bright burning light to see the night, the world.

  We would watch the evening news on the television, the broadcasters usually beautiful pale Bombayites, talking about mining scandals, cholera epidemics, the new census report. There were updates on the Subha and Sivarasan manhunt every day, which was not really news at all. The government owned the only television station and had banned it from independent reporting on the manhunt, saying that too many fresh leads were getting out. But people were clamoring for news, especially the millions who could not read the newspapers. So the government allowed the television news anchors to regurgitate the headline articles from that morning’s papers. The newscasters were not allowed to interview anyone or film anything live for the updates either. They showed the same stills everyday. Subha and Sivarasan of course. And Sonia Gandhi at the funeral pyre of Rajiv Gandhi. And the one I was most fascinated by, Dhanu bending to touch Rajiv’s feet. To pay her respects. To blow him up. Concentrating on performing flawlessly.

  They had caught other Tamil Tigers even though they had not caught Subha and
Sivarasan. So far an actress and a prostitute, a pamphlet printer and his mother who was a nurse. The hard part was catching Tigers before they took their own life. Two killed themselves just before arrest, another hanged himself while in prison. The police carried cyanide antidotes every time they broke into a suspected hideout. We watched and listened carefully, in case the broadcast had any sliver of information that our papers had missed. But it was usually all old news.

  Then Ammamma would help with dinner, both her own meal and whatever was being cooked for me and the household. Matthew and Sunil and Vasani and Ram would kneel on the floor in the drawing room, and Ammamma would put the television on for them. When Sanjay uncle was home, he only allowed television programs once or twice a week, he wanted quiet after the factory day. Ammamma let them watch every night. Then she would fill and light the oil lamps and put them in the halls throughout the house, and one for me if I was reading. Around ten or eleven, we would go to bed. I would often lie there, not tired enough to sleep. But if I stayed up, my grandmother would feel obliged to stay up with me. We both tried to accommodate each other, pretended things were natural. But I had no way of sharing in her quiet, slow days. I didn’t know how to knit or write Malayalam or sing bhajans. So we just went on with our separate lives in this house where we had been left together.

  I WANTED TO take pictures today, with the camera I’d borrowed from my father. His camera had seemed ungainly and awkward to me, set up on a wobbly tripod at my dance recitals and school award ceremonies. But when I sprained my ankle last year and couldn’t take gym, I took photography with Mr. Thompson. And he was impressed with my father’s camera, he showed me how many settings and options it had. I wanted to see what I could do with it here, with the light so extreme, the house full of shadows and ledges and silhouettes. Look for contrasts, Mr. Thompson said, contrast can be the heart of the picture. He didn’t always like my pictures. I liked to overexpose my film, make everything look bleached and harsh, as if all my subjects lived under this Indian sun. I thought it was nice when a picture unfolded, when it didn’t tell its whole story right away. When you overexposed a picture, it made the person looking at it see that light could hide things as much as darkness.

  When my mother left for a long business trip last year, five weeks in California and the Pacific Rim, I turned her home office into a darkroom. 1 painted the walls black and papered the windows over with grocery bags. She came back a few days early, before I had a chance to explain. But she didn’t say anything until I brought it up. She thought she would wait to talk to me until she talked to the counselor at school, she said. She had told the counselor she thought I’d joined a cult, because of the black paint, and no light, and tubes of chemicals. That’s how little she knew.

  Over breakfast, I asked my grandmother about going to the tea factory to take photos. I remembered seeing huge blowers there, with steel screens placed over them, the wet tea leaves taking flight as they dried. Workers jumped up on top of the screens, to try to catch and remove leaves that looked blackened or damaged. The workers’ hair would fly around, and their sarongs would whip around their legs, and they would suddenly look startled, like Marilyn Monroe on that subway grate.

  “I think you should wait till your uncle returns,” Ammamma said.

  “Why? He wouldn’t mind, would he?” I said. I hadn’t expected her to object, I had wanted her to call someone at the factory who could walk me around and get me through the gated areas.

  “He might not mind, but the company might. They might have rules about photos and things,” Ammamma said.

  “Rules? It’s just a tea factory.” She wasn’t going to help, so I’d have to wait for my uncle. Maybe I would take pictures of the kitchen, the indoor one and the outdoor one, the open fire, brass pots burnished by flame, the stainless steel trays lined up for dinner.

  “Why don’t you take pictures of the garden. It’s looking quite nice, Reema and the gardener are having a good growing season.”

  “The garden’s too pretty. The pictures wouldn’t be interesting.”

  My grandmother looked puzzled, but she let the subject drop.

  “Could we ask the driver to bring new shampoo the next time he goes down the mountain?” I asked. “Brindha’s shampoo is ruining my hair.”

  “Your hair does look dry,” Ammamma said.

  Brindha’s shampoo had dulled my hair, made it chemical-smelling and rough. Ammamma said Brindha had very different hair. Mine was more like Ammamma’s, wispy and fine. She said, “When you were small, I would put barrettes in your hair, and by the evening, they had slid all the way down, dangling around your chin.”

  I wasn’t surprised. When I went to the junior-high-school prom, and we teased each other’s hair, within minutes all my locks sat back down flat against my head. But people said I had good hair, at least it was soft and silky. Secretly, I often thought it was my best feature.

  Ammamma said Ram could bring a good imported shampoo from the city when he went at the end of the week. For now, she suggested using hair oil. I was reluctant, I remembered how greasy and heavy it felt.

  Ammamma said, “We used to put it in your hair when you were little, that’s how your hair became soft. Just try it. Do you want me to comb the oil through your hair?”

  “No, no, I can do it,” I said, standing up from the table. Anything I accepted from her she took as a sign to push for more. It was like a foot in the door trying to wedge a larger place to occupy.

  Matthew came in to clear the breakfast dishes. When my aunt and uncle were here, Matthew stayed in the room to serve, but when it was just us, we served ourselves. My grandmother had taken her small portion from the serving dishes first, and then she slid them toward my side of the table, where they remained lined up like a row of ducks for the rest of the meal.

  Sunil brought the hot bath water today. He carried the big stainless steel bucket, his head and shoulders stuck far out to the right to balance the weight on his left side. He didn’t pay much attention to me. He was eleven, and to him I was an irrelevant in-between age. The significant people in his life were either his own age or the ripe old age of his parents, his teachers, his employers. He was dressed for school, wearing a stiff white shirt that had gone grayish in the wash, and blue shorts. He hated school, but my aunt and uncle paid his fees at the village school, so Matthew forced him to go. Sunil preferred being here, helping the mechanics who came from the factory to make repairs to our car, or the gardener to chop down a tree that had cracked in a rainstorm.

  He set the bucket down gently in my bathroom. In bare noiseless feet, he padded back to the hall, leaving wet footprints across my bedroom on the soon-to-be-swept floor. I closed the heavy wood door to the bathroom, and latched it. The sun escaped from behind rainclouds, and morning light sliced across the small square room, surprising moths that were settled in sleep on the window ledge. I hung my fresh clothes on one hook, and the clothes I’d taken off on the other. I was out of everything I had brought from home: soap, lotion, toothpaste; now there were no familiar smells. I brushed my teeth with baking soda. I bathed with resin-colored sandalwood soap. I cleaned my hair with half a capful of Brindha’s shampoo, and then I conditioned with the oil. Everyone left the hair oil on after bathing, but I couldn’t leave it in my hair. I would never sleep, I could picture the dark greasemarks on my pillow-case. I left it on for some minutes and then rinsed. It had the smell of boiling sugar, before you whisked it into peaks of frosting. When my friends would play house when I was little, and I’d have to be the husband because I was tallest, I used to pull the end of my ponytail under my nose to make a mustache, and my hair would smell just like this.

  I turned the tap too far, cold water thundered into the smaller mixing bucket, silver drops shooting up off the stainless-steel bottom, a fountain catching the light of the sun, until I managed to steer the tap back. Each day, I made myself use less and less hot water in the mixing bucket and more and more cold water. One day soon, Vasani was goin
g to come with a brimming bucket, and I was going to say, maybe at the breakfast table in front of everybody, that’s okay, Vasani, I won’t be needing that. I can withstand what you can withstand, 1 don’t need to be accommodated.

  I poured the last of the water out. Soap bubbles slid across the purposely ever-so-slightly tilted floor. The sun played over me now, reaching places it usually never reached, and I felt unexpectedly intoxicated, droplets of water glistening on my stomach, my richly soft hair exotic to me. I imagined growing it really long, so it could be braided and flowers would stay in it. 1 took talc powder from a lower shelf and dabbed it everywhere, a translucent white sheen.

  I reached for my clothes on the hook, just to the left of the sink. And 1 slipped. 1 felt the oil slick underneath, and heard my head hit the sink. The sharp sound of a single clap, or a snap, or a smash. The sound of a baseball bat making contact with a baseball. Then I was down on the floor.

  I didn’t pass out. I felt a sticky, oily feeling in my hair, but it wasn’t oil. I had rinsed all the oil out.

  “Ammamma,” I called, uncertainly. I wished there was someone else to call.

  I tried to stand up. I unlatched the door, and called again, louder, “Ammamma.”

  I put my clothes on, underwear, salwar, pulled the draw-string tight, bra, catching the eye with the hook, twice. Then the kameez, over my head, and when I brought it down over my shoulders, and smoothed it down over my hips, the kameez was stained with red, and my hands were stained with red. My grandmother walked in, and she caught me as I slumped toward the ground. She sat right on the floor, the wet floor, and as I sank into her lap I was engulfed by the white of her sari, and watched as her sari became batiked red with my blood. And then I passed out.