Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  Mama was sitting at the kitchen table, the phone placed neatly in front of her, between a plate dusted with toast crumbs and a cup of tea. The tea was untouched, long cold, and Sasha understood that her mother had prepared it just to keep her hands busy, to have something to reach for, a nice civilised prop.

  ‘Please,’ Mama said, quietly. ‘Please sit down and tell me what I did wrong to raise a fucking slut.’

  Sasha rarely heard Mama curse. Her entire life, her mother had refrained from swearing, from blaspheming, and had cured Sasha’s propensity for it decades ago. Even after all these years, when Sasha stubbed a toe she yelled ‘sugar!’ or ‘forks!’ She could not say ‘fuck’ even in context, as instruction, not even while fucking, so thoroughly had the word been scoured from her vocabulary. So, now these words, fucking and slut, hit her like hot spit. She reeled back, stricken, frozen in the doorway. The kitchen, just a few metres across, most of it taken up by a pockmarked linoleum table, seemed vast, her mother an insurmountable distance away.

  Sasha’s mind sparked into focus as her eyes took in the little details. Not just the tea, cold on the table, but the tumbler of ice and clear liquid next to it, and the bottle of vodka, near empty, sat neatly by the kitchen sink. Mama had the slumped shoulders and sallow complexion that she took on after a long day of drinking, although it wasn’t even noon.

  Sasha understood that Mama had not been to bed, but all at once she realised a greater truth; that while Sasha had been distracted with school these past weeks, months, years, something in her mother had broken. Some integral part had worn out, slipped a gear, sent everything crashing down in quiet chaos.

  There was something wrong with Mama’s brain, her heart. Sasha had never, until this moment, realised that the rules of humanity applied to one’s mother.

  Sasha had no idea what to say. She had practised this conversation many times, with herself, workshopping the best way to explain she was ready to begin dating, but it had proved more and more daunting as the years passed and now the gentle, calming sentence she’d rehearsed slipped away from her. Instead, all she could do was declaim, lamely, ‘I’m not a whore, Mom.’ Tears prickled behind her eyes. ‘I like this guy.’

  Mama was not listening. She breathed like a sniper – even, controlled breaths that suggested she was about to unleash unspeakable damage. She spoke softly and venomously. Using the formal Polish, she said, ‘He will fuck you and then throw you away, and then you will be stuck with a child who will ruin your life and hers.’

  Her voice cracked, very slightly, on the final word. She threw her hands up, fluttered them in front of her eyes dramatically, as if drying tears. This gesture was familiar – Mama often deployed it when angry or upset, or just particularly moved by music – but now it seemed to unbalance her. Her fingers moved unsteadily and when her hands came back down they flattened heavily on the table. She leaned on them, flanking her vodka glass, as though they were keeping her moored to this scene, this room.

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Sasha had never sworn at her mother before. It was shocking to her, revelatory, but it affected her mother like a bullet bouncing off the hull of a battleship.

  ‘You see?’ Mama spat. ‘You even have a dirty mouth.’

  Sasha saw red. She’d always thought it was a figure of speech, but now a dark crimson filter flooded over her vision, top to bottom like a television losing tracking.

  ‘Just shut the fuck up! Mom! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Shut your fucking mouth.’

  Mama took a long swig from her tumbler, swished the ice thoughtfully, set it down with her hand clenched tight around it. ‘Why should I? Why should I bother with you?’ Another sip. ‘After everything I gave up, this is how you repay me? No better than the sluts your father kept. Don’t think I didn’t know about them. I am glad he killed himself.’

  ‘Goddamn it, Mom.’ Sasha was wounded, unexpectedly so, and closed the distance between her and Mama in seconds. She felt drunk herself, so pure was the anger, the sudden desire to hit back and wound Mama, to become a black wave that rolled in and receded, leaving only broken things in its wake.

  The words were out of her mouth before she could stop herself. ‘Do you blame him? You crazy drunk? Look at yourself. I would kill myself too if I was married to you.’

  She lunged, tried to grab the vodka glass from Mama. For several seconds they fought over it, but Sasha was no match for her mother’s wiry strength, still powerful from decades of labour. Sasha let go and Mama’s lips twisted into a satisfied snarl. She moved to take a victorious swig of vodka but halfway to her lips she paused and dropped the glass, which went skittering across the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she looked at Sasha and said, in a voice somewhere between soft and competitive:

  ‘Sasha, you should know that you can’t keep . . .’

  ‘Can’t keep what?’

  ‘You can’t . . . it’s not good for you . . .’

  ‘Do you even know what you’re trying to say, you crazy old bitch?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mama. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Well, what was it? What do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mama. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Never mind. I’m tired of talking. I want to go to bed.’

  ‘You don’t get to say these things to me and just walk away. Talk to me, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mama said again. ‘I just want to say . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I want . . .’ She reached one hand out across the table towards Sasha. Whatever else she was searching for, she failed to find it. ‘Oh. Oh.’

  ‘Mom?’

  Mama stood up, knocking her chair over, then collapsed onto the table, tried to stand again, keeled to one side. Sasha tried to grab her, too late, and caught only her gown, leaving her holding a handful of torn silk. Mama hit the floor with a dull, meaty thunk.

  Sasha stared at her in horror. Mama looked up at her. The right side of her face was slack, the skin hanging away from the bone like a curtain that had come off its runner. ‘Oh. I want. I want.’ She tried feebly to raise her hands, to reach for Sasha’s face, but missed, her hands veering off to the side.

  Sasha rested her mother’s head in her lap while Mama stared up at her, eyes empty, gasping, ‘I want. I want. I want.’

  The girl is not doing well. She soaks her sheets through, runs a fever of 103, festers. Her wounds grow angry, little red fractals snaking out from yellow coronas of infection. Sasha cleans them, changes the bandages as they soak through with nasty-smelling pus, hands them off to a servant to feed into the incinerator with the ashram’s garbage.

  For a whole day, then another, and another, the girl doesn’t open her eyes or respond to any stimulus. Sasha stays by her bedside, growing more and more worried.

  ‘She needs a hospital,’ Sasha tells the guru. ‘She needs a real doctor.’

  The guru protests, laments the quality of care to be found in the nearest town – the expense, incompetence, corruption. ‘She has a real doctor,’ she says, laying a reassuring hand over Sasha’s. ‘She has you.’

  Another day, another sleepless night, and Sasha tries again, finds the guru in her chambers, pleads for them to go to the authorities. The guru shakes her head sadly, explains that this is a terrible idea, that the police would hold the ashram responsible for her injuries, that Sasha herself would be targeted. ‘The police, they would see you as a cash machine, a cow to be milked dry. They would ruin you, and destroy the girl in the process.’ The guru’s tone moves from gentle to chiding. ‘You should be mindful of your own privilege. There are some things about this place a white woman will never understand.’

  Sasha flushes, shamed. She resumes her vigil at the girl’s bedside, rarely leaves, has meals brought to her, only sleeps when she nods off in her chair. She wakes with her chin on her chest, startled to find time has passed. Each time this happe
ns she crosses the room in a rush of disorientation, certain that the girl has gone, only to find her breathing, just a little more faintly.

  Days pass like this, and then in the middle of another sleepless night, the girl’s fever breaks. By the morning she is breathing easier, her wounds already knitting, the red tentacles of infection fading. Sasha goes back to her room to get some rest, and when she returns that evening the girl is conscious. Weak, malnourished – but alive, and awake. With Sasha’s help she sits up, takes a little food, scooping rice and tamarind water into her mouth, glaring warily at Sasha over the plate.

  ‘Hi,’ says Sasha. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’

  The girls swallows but says nothing, reaching for a ball of rice instead.

  ‘My name’s Sasha. What’s your name?’

  Again, the girl stays silent, but she finishes her meal, pushes the plate away, and closes her eyes. She sleeps through the night.

  The next day she is still silent, says nothing when Sasha asks her questions and changes her dressings. She is silent, too, when the guru comes to visit and tries engaging her in English, Tamil, French, Hindi.

  ‘Not very talkative, are you?’ the guru says. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ The girl scowls, stares at the floor. ‘Do you have a name? No? Well we will have to call you something. You look like a Velli to me. Little Girl Velli.’

  ‘What do you think?’ says Sasha. ‘“Velli”? Do you like that name?’

  The girl gives no sign she has heard, rolls over in bed and stares at the wall.

  ‘She understands us,’ Sasha says. ‘She’s just not talking.’

  ‘The bite on her throat?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Sasha is thinking. It’s possible, she thinks; nerve damage, blunt force trauma. She feels acutely how little she understands. There are a million reasons the girl might be silent. ‘Maybe not. She’s been through an awful thing.’

  ‘Yes, but a wonderful thing too. She is alive because of you. You should be proud.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do,’ says the guru. ‘And you should think about why the universe has brought you two together. We’ll look for her family, if they exist, but for now she needs looking after. And, perhaps, you need someone to look after. Stay with her. Stay with us.’

  The wounds start to heal, and the next time Sasha changes Velli’s bandages they are clean and clear from signs of infection. The girl grows stronger, her eyes clearer, and she is moved from the makeshift hospice to a bunk in the schoolhouse.

  The breezy, open-air school hall was built in the sixties in a quiet clearing in the jungle, far from the centre of the ashram, the chalkboard dusted with a coating of fine red sand, neat rows of old-fashioned wooden desks, each with a forgotten inkwell and generations of graffiti carved into them.

  Three generations of hippies rutting in the jungle, and the contempt for contraception and monogamy that came with that, meant their offspring popped up unexpectedly here and there in the jungle – bright-eyed, near-naked children tearing through the undergrowth as part of a game, sullen teens with shaved heads and bad tattoos glaring at her from the back of passing dirt bikes.

  The schoolhouse accommodates them all. The guru herself was educated in that schoolhouse, grew up playing with the Tamil children on the beaches and farms, and opened the school up to the next generation of locals. Alongside the ashram children, fewer than ten on any given day, there are a dozen children with parents who work as live-in help for the ashram. These kids sleep in a longhouse behind the school – simple, clean beds all in rows – and take classes until sixteen, when they are old enough to take jobs in the ashram or out in the real world.

  The headmaster and only teacher, Pasteur, is a jolly fifty-something who was once a priest in small-town France. The only souvenir concession to his old religion is the crucifix he wears on a gold chain around his neck, which jangles against an om pendant, a crescent moon and a Star of David. ‘All religions make sense some of the time.’ He shrugs. ‘They can’t all be wrong, right?’

  He adopted the charms after coming to the ashram a decade prior to reflect on his expanding spirituality. He shines them as lovingly as his hair, which is worn grey and to the shoulder, swept back to accentuate a hairline that tends towards baldness without committing to it.

  Classes are ad-hoc, conducted on a whim, whatever Pasteur feels like teaching that day: history, theology, carpentry. The ashram-born sit up the front, argue with him and each other in French, while the children of the help sit down the back, more reserved. In the very last row sits Velli, silent, head down, ignoring everything around her as she draws. Sasha watches her carefully selecting a crayon, shading in a shape, placing it back in the box before choosing a new one.

  ‘She never talks,’ says Pasteur. ‘Not a word, not a sound. Is she hurt? Is she mute?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Sasha feels the limits of her experience acutely. ‘Maybe she just doesn’t feel like talking? I wish we could find her family. They must be worried sick.’

  Pasteur shakes his head sadly. ‘If she had a family, don’t you think we would have heard from them by now? She’s orphaned. It might not seem like it, but winding up here – it could be the best thing that ever happened to her.’

  If she is being honest with herself, Velli’s ordeal has given Sasha the feeling of purpose the guru talked about. It’s incredible to wake up with something meaningful to do, someone to care for. The morning comes for her to remove the final stitches from the wounds on Velli’s arm; Sasha feels a valedictory melancholy as she snips them away.

  The girl’s scars are ugly things that lace up and down one mangled arm and the tender skin of her neck, but apart from her silence she seems to be recovering well. Sasha does as good a test for nerve damage as she can with a mute, unresponsive patient, improvising with the tools she has to hand. Velli manages to grip a crayon fine in her left hand, spared in the mauling, but the right shows significant neurological deformity; the fingers spasm and the crayon slips from her grasp.

  Sasha is dismayed. One of the bites was barely an inch off the artery in the wrist, close enough that Sasha’s clumsy stitches probably nicked a nerve.

  ‘Don’t worry, honey,’ Sasha tells her, showing her the pinched flesh of her own hand. ‘Guys dig scars.’

  Sasha moves from her hired bungalow into a more secluded cottage out in the jungle. It has a bed, a concrete recess with a latrine and a large brass bucket to wash with, a heavy ceiling fan, and a couple of camp dogs who sleep on her porch and keep away intruders.

  They give her a motorcycle, a Royal Enfield. It’s a cantankerous, growling chrome and leather monstrosity that she falls in love with immediately, even before one of the help teaches her to ride it. He’s all eyes and cheekbones, limbs so long he moves languidly as though he’s used to tripping himself up and has learned to take it easy.

  He doesn’t have much English, but he demonstrates the clutch and the kickstart, then folds his long arms and stands so still that he seems to disappear entirely under his sarong and shirt – a string of muscles held together by billowing white cotton. When she gets the hang of it, shifts from first to second and turns a couple of wobbly circles in the clearing, his smile is quick and shy. A slight bow and he is gone, walking off into the rainforest.

  The same man turns up several times in the next few days, gunning his scooter down the narrow dirt road to her cottage, overloaded with items for a medical kit: bandages, disinfectant, a bar fridge loaded with a small pharmacy and a diesel generator to keep it running. He uses electrical tape to connect one extension cord to another, runs it through her window. When plugged in, the whole setup emits a low growl.

  ‘Is this safe?’ worries Sasha.

  He gives a cheerful thumbs up. ‘Safe!’ he says, and is gone again, zipping off into the jungle on his scooter.

  She’s thankful for her new cottage, and the ceiling fan, which rotates fast enough to cool the room down to a habitable level, provided she stays very still and does noth
ing to excite herself. Which isn’t easy, because as word spreads that a doctor has joined the ashram, Seekers start knocking on her door with a moveable feast of ailments, real and imagined, competing for her attention; parasites, malnutrition, melanoma, the epidemic of fungal infections that come with tropical living. Also requests for reiki healing, the removal of rotten teeth and evil eyes, apache curses, soul retrieval, the malignant influence of past lives and visitors from higher dimensions.

  There is a line between the acceptance of otherworldly wonder and intractable dipshittery, and that border is different for everyone, but Sasha feels obliged to treat them all with equal seriousness. Most days she listens patiently and, to get them out the door, prescribes vitamins, hands them over, receives a handful of rupees in return.

  The economy of the ashram is a nebulous, ill-defined thing. Officially there is no such thing as currency – the founders considered money to be a false idol, so goods and services are to be exchanged according to need and ability.

  But of course there is money. Seekers like Sasha, who journey across the world to study and meditate and practise yoga, bring huge injections of cash, which is held in trust by the community to buy necessities. A lot of money, really – it’s not something Sasha discusses with the other Seekers, but every couple of weeks, without fail, a sizeable chunk of change is deducted from her chequing account.

  There’s a rush, a run of days where she is deluged by visitors from first light to last; enough time for her to triage those with a genuine grievance and cultivate a sense of quiet disbelief at the breadth of imaginary problems the upwardly mobile and spiritually inclined invent for themselves.

  She’s struck, too, that the servants never take time off. The work is backbreaking – women carrying giant casks of drinking water on their hips, men heading into the jungle with pickaxes to repair roads and floodwater levees – but they go about their days without rest or complaint.

  When the maid comes to clean her room one evening, she returns Sasha’s greeting with a friendly grimace. She admits – after some gentle questioning – to a toothache. When Sasha coaxes her into letting her look at her mouth, she finds a cave of horrors. She sends her home with Tylenol and some cash, and begs her to see a dentist in Puducherry.