by Avni Doshi
Photos, too, from inside the banquet hall. Barricaded in by furniture and distant relatives, the wedding party ready themselves for the real work, the export of dowry and daughter.
The women flank the bride, congregating in a fear only they can understand. The men dawdle with downturned mouths.
What did she look like in person, without lights blowing out the colour of her skin? How did she react to the unfamiliar faces of her new family? The groom, my father, looks bewildered, too young to comprehend the sanctioned kidnapping he must now commit.
By morning, the girl will be transformed. A new husband, a new life. And when she finds herself alone, perhaps she’ll still cry, thinking of the past, mourning an end that did not culminate in death.
Nani says she always worried about how Ma would manage in her new surroundings. ‘Your mother was a strange girl. No one knew what she wanted out of life. I guess nothing has changed. But your father’s mother was also very strange. No good came of them living in the same house.’
My mother recounted the strangeness of her early married life to me on several occasions. Her mother-in-law ate pickled Kashmiri garlic every day since her husband’s cardiac incident. The house had the particular smell of digested allium.
On the first day in her new home, her mother-in-law gave her a coarse bar of white soap and a hand towel to use for her baths. She also passed on a stack of old saris that had belonged to her mother-in-law. Ma was to wear them from then on. Ma smelled the fabric, inhaled the years of dust and mothballs. She shuddered.
On the second day, when she saw Ma moving around the house, my father’s mother called her new daughter-in-law to the hall, where the radio was blaring, to ask her what she was doing. ‘Nothing,’ my mother answered. It was true. There was nothing to do.
‘Sit with me, listen to some music.’
My mother sat on the sofa until she grew bored of the classical voices. She preferred The Doors, or Freddie Mercury. But when Ma tried to stand, her mother-in-law held her arm. ‘Stay here. I like the company.’
Their time together on the sofa by the radio would last up to six hours. Meals and tea were brought by the servants. My father’s mother kept a pair of tweezers in her hand. She would feel for the hard bristles on her chin and yank at them. She did this without the assistance of a mirror and, to Ma’s horror, would often tear into her own skin. Her jawline was edged with a chain of scabs and bristles.
‘You know what would be nice?’ the older lady said. ‘If you wait by the door when it’s time for my son to come home. I used to do it for my husband when we were newly-weds.’
She pointed at a large photograph of a man hanging on the wall. His eyebrows formed a dark line across his forehead, and he looked off to the side with a scowl. The portrait was garlanded with dried flowers.
‘Is that something you want to do?’ her mother-in-law asked.
Ma stared at the thick gap at the bottom of the front door, where an unobstructed ray of light curved in. Watching, waiting for something to break the line in half. A pair of feet. The shadow of a body approaching.
She wished she’d said no and found a way to avoid this chore. They were backwards, the people in this new family. Ma had preferred sitting in the living room.
Why don’t you try it? You might like it.
Like what, exactly? What was there to like about standing by the door like a dog?
At five minutes to six, she took her post by the door, swaying from side to side for up to thirty minutes, depending on traffic and how long it took her husband to come home.
The mother-in-law kept the door to the living room ajar so she could glance through and make sure Ma was at attention. Four days in, the older lady acknowledged that the act of standing for so long was tedious, and an elaborate plan was hatched for a servant to stand by the window in the kitchen and holler when he saw the young sahib approaching. At that moment, the mother-in-law would flutter her arms with excitement and motion for Ma to bound towards the door.
It came to pass that at five minutes to six, even though the arrival time was on average closer to six-thirty, the mother-in-law would turn off the music and shout for the servant to look out. Ma liked the silence, but was not allowed to put her head back or close her eyes without being tapped by her husband’s mother.
‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ Ma said one day.
The mother-in-law said nothing as Ma stood up and went to her room. The voice of Kishore Kumar seemed to forever hang in the air.
The room was a cage, but it was the only place Ma felt relief. Sometimes she would bang her body against the wall and scream silently to herself. Other times, she would lie on the bed, close her eyes and travel, knocking her arm against the pale, ginger-coloured side tables. The mattress was thinner than what she was used to. The bedcover was made of grey synthetic cloth, and she wondered how the servants managed to wash it. The floor was a burning red marble that in some lights looked like an endless abyss to fall into. On the dressing table was a cup that held her hairbrush and comb. She would tip it over and pick it up again, listening to the quiet crash. She would pull out all the hairs the brush had taken from her head and wrap the long strands between the comb’s teeth. Sometimes she wrapped the dark wire around her fingers, watching it cut into her skin. When this bored her, she put her feet up against the headboard, watching her thin ankles, drifting in and out of daydreams about her husband, imagining what he would be doing at that particular hour, before her mind would wander to the bed she was on, and other men she knew or had experienced only in fleeting interactions but who had imprinted themselves on her with an intensity she continued to long for. My mother knew marriages were generally unhappy, but she was young and had not fully metabolized the idea that this would be her reality. She still believed she was special, exceptional and had thoughts that no one else did.
She watched the hands on the small Seiko alarm clock move, waiting for the day to end, listening for voices outside the door, for steps passing in the corridor.
In time, Ma worked up the courage to pull open my father’s closet. There was so much there she had never seen him wear, items of clothing that probably no longer fitted him. She mentally marked what had to be given away without removing a single garment from its place. Ma touched the sleeves of each shirt. She inspected the way the soles of his shoes were worn, and the places in his undershirts that were thinning. There was something she loved about looking with leisure, something she didn’t let herself do when the man himself was present. Sometimes she wasn’t sure she knew what he looked like at all.
When he came home from his day of studies, my father greeted his mother before going to wash and read his books. After dinner, he often joined his mother in the living room and put his head in her lap. She would press her hands against his forehead, stroking the short baby hairs, willing them to grow in the opposite direction. From his mother’s lap, my father would watch my mother. His mother watched them both. Over months, lines were drawn.
Days would pass when husband and wife said little to each other. Ma thought he was strange, moody and distant. His mother was determined that he should excel in his studies, and he was keen to make her happy. The prize for his efforts would be America, where he could earn a master’s degree in the snow, eat burgers every day and buy acid-washed jeans. Ma learned to long for that dream too. For a while she wanted my father to be proud of her, to wear her on his arm at the Club, so she chopped her long hair off and dressed in floral silks when they went for lunch on Sundays. She planned and plotted, imagining a time when they would be in America, together and in love, and he would show his romantic side, the one that was not full of mathematics and mother.
Ma found out she was pregnant around the time she learned her mother-in-law planned to join them when they went abroad. ‘I will have to come,’ the older lady said, lifting her tweezers. ‘You will never be able to look after the house alone.’
The depth of Ma’s gloom and her alienation from
her own family – Nani refused to hear any complaints – made her lonely, and desperate. Or perhaps it was me, the surge of prenatal hormones, and a fear of the new life that awaited her, but she began to turn back into her former self.
She let her hair grow, stopped wearing make-up and shoulder pads.
She disposed of all her mother-in-law’s hand-me-down saris, and blamed an aged servant for stealing them.
She smoked in secret, though she knew it could be dangerous for her foetus.
Ma went back to her old cotton comforts, forgoing the bras she had enthusiastically purchased, and announced that she wanted to start attending a guru’s satsang, to hear him speak.
It was an odd request from a girl who had never shown any interest in religion, and her mother-in-law tried to stop her, but Ma was determined. She was on her way to no longer caring what everyone thought. Even after I was born, she would disappear every day, dripping with milk, leaving me unfed.
‘Take her with you,’ my Dadi-ma said when I was old enough. The relationship between my grandmother and Ma had soured, and my father’s mother had no great love for me, another girl, another nuisance.
And so I went with my mother, leaving in the morning and coming back late in the evening. She returned to the house every day smelling of sweat and joy – and one day they realized she had not come home at all.
The history of my mother’s life is not to be found in old photo albums. It is kept in a dusty metal cupboard in her flat. She never locks the door – maybe because she doesn’t value anything inside, or maybe because she hopes one day the contents will vanish. Still, the cupboard is hard to prise open. Pune isn’t wet enough for rust, but the hinges are almost solid and brown, and a light fuzz of rot covers the inside of the door. A cupboard that looks as though it was rescued from the bottom of the sea.
Inside is a pile of saris, metres of fabric carefully folded with paper between the creases, the cloth of another time – Banarasis woven with shimmering thread. There is one that is particularly beautiful, particularly heavy – the one my mother wore for her wedding, where it was draped in crisp, well-defined pleats. The fabric is stiff, almost crunchy, and smells of mothballs and iodine, but the gold never darkens or dulls, a sign that it is real, precious, a small fortune spent by my grandparents on their only child. The red makes it richer, almost oppressive, a true bridal red. Below this, the rest of her bridal trousseau – carefully selected saris and fabrics in colourful silks and ornate brocades – clothes to carry her into her new life as a married woman, the most important role she will have, enough fabric to last her an entire year so that her husband would not feel the burden of his new wife, at least not immediately. There are tussar silks in jewel tones, an embroidered dupatta covered in French knots, pastel Kanjivarams, even a parrot-green Patola peeks through the piles of material.
And then, one shelf below, are the other clothes. These are more familiar to me. There are a few faded block-prints on worn cotton, but mostly everything is white. If I hold them to my face, I can still smell her body, as though she wore them just yesterday. I can smell the neglect, the damp, the misery that grows in the absence of sunlight. These cottons are coarse, the kind worn for work. The whites are still bright, some glaring and some almost blue, the white of widows, of mourners and renunciants, holy men and women, monks and nuns, the white of those who no longer belong in the world, who have already put one foot on another plane. The white of the guru and his followers. Maybe Ma saw this white cotton as the means to her truth, a blank slate where she could remake herself and find the path to freedom. For me it was something different, a shroud that covered us like the living dead, a white too stark to ever be acceptable in polite society. A white that marked us as outsiders. To my mother this was the colour of her community, but I knew better: the white clothes were the ones that separated us from our family, our friends and everyone else, that made my life in them a kind of prison.
I can walk from my flat to Ma’s in about forty-five minutes if I take the shorter route and run across the main road while the light is still green. On the way, I pass three shopping malls that are situated in a triangle. One has a multiplex, and the circular road outside gets jammed on opening weekends of big films.
A two-lane bridge crosses the narrow river, which floods in the monsoon and dries up in the summer. Sometimes the smells from the stagnant puddles reach Ma’s flat. Buildings are coming up on the banks, a combination of luxury condominiums and five-star hotels that boast water views on their websites. Giant hoardings for Hindi soap operas and fairness creams are dividers between the construction sites.
The morning traffic collects at every corner, and Pune feels like one long bottleneck. Each eruption of horns is a torrent of bullets, and before long I am riddled. It will be winter soon and the temperature drops suddenly. Human beings need to be eased in slowly. Sudden movements lead to schizophrenia and sore throats.
Turning into Ma’s lane, I pass Hina, the fruit lady who once had a small cart but now owns a proper store. Dilip says she’s a modern Indian success story and should be written about. I wave at her but she doesn’t see me due to a detached retina that she refuses to get operated. Beside her is a salon called Munira’s Hair Garden. Dilip once pointed out that the placement of their logo, a pair of scissors, makes the word ‘Hair’ look like ‘Hairy’. And then there is a pharmacy that sells electrical products and, across the street, an electrical shop that illegally sells medicine.
At the gate, the doorman salutes me. I wait for the lift and say hello to Mrs Rao, who frowns at me while her Pomeranian defecates next to a flowerpot. The dirt lodged between the tiles at the entrance is a permanent fixture. Rot and years of disrepair have loosened the flooring. This building has been defeated, like so many others. I let myself into Ma’s apartment with the key I have copied.
Seven sticks of incense burn by the door. I cough and my mother pops her head out of the kitchen. I can smell that she is frying peanuts with cumin seeds in oil. I slip my feet out of my sneakers, which have stretched at the mouth because they’re never unlaced. The floor is cold and smells like lemongrass milk. Light pours in through the east-facing window in the kitchen, and Ma is a silhouette. She dumps a bowl of bloated tapioca balls into the pot and covers it to steam.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asks, and I say I haven’t even though I have.
I set the table like we used to, with glasses for water and buttermilk, and no spoon for Ma because she likes to eat with her hands. She brings out chillies, red and powdered, green and chopped. The pot is placed directly on the table, and when she lifts the lid, the cloud that conceals the meal inside evaporates.
I help myself to a large spoonful. The tapioca balls bounce on my plate, leaving a glistening trail behind them.
My mouth fills with a first bite. ‘Something is missing.’
‘What?’
‘Salt. Potato. Lemon.’
She takes a bite and sits back in her chair, chewing slowly. I wait for her anger, but she gets up and goes into the kitchen. I hear the suction of the refrigerator door separating and meeting, the clanging of utensils. She comes out with a small tray and places it on the table. There is lemon juice and a shaker of salt.
‘What about the potato?’
‘Sabudana khichdi doesn’t have potato.’
‘You always make it with potato.’
She pauses. ‘No potato this time.’
I push the food on my plate around and look at her.
‘Don’t keep looking at me like that.’
‘You’re not taking this seriously.’
She throws her head back and laughs, and I can see creamy tapioca clinging to the dark fillings at the back of her mouth. ‘Taking what seriously?’
‘Why did you tell Dilip I’m a liar?’
‘I never said that.’
It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done. It feels unfair that she c
an put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time. I fill papers, drawers, entire rooms with records, notes, thoughts, while she grows foggier with each passing day.
She takes another bite. ‘They say when the memory starts to go, other faculties become more powerful.’
‘What kind of faculties?’
‘There are women who can see past lives, who can talk to angels. Some women become clairvoyant.’
‘You’re mad.’ Reaching into my satchel, I pull out my sketchbook. I turn to the last page and add today’s date to a list that contains some forty entries. Next to the date, I write the word ‘potato’.
Ma squints at the book and shakes her head. ‘How does your husband tolerate you?’
‘You’re not even married, how would you know?’
Her mouth is open as I speak, and for a moment I think she is mouthing my words as I say them. Have we said these exact sentences to each other before? I wait for a reply but the moments pulse by. My armpits are damp and I feel something inside of me rearing up.
She smiles. Her teeth look sharp in the sunlight, and I wonder if she enjoys these moments, has grown to expect them. My heart is beating faster and my breath is shallow. I welcome this too.
She taps my hand and points to the notebook. ‘You should worry about your own madness instead of mine.’
I look down at the list, at the careful lines that form each column, before shutting the book soundlessly. On my plate, the tapioca begins to harden. The temperature between us cools. Within minutes, we forget that harsh words have been exchanged.
We mix a few drops of lemon juice in cups of hot water and go out on to the balcony. Ma has hung a dozen hand-washed bras along a clothing line. Some have been patched and mended.