by Avni Doshi
‘You need new ones.’ I finger the murky lace of one battered specimen.
‘Why? Who’s looking at them?’
Below us, in the building grounds, a baby is crying in her ayah’s arms. The woman rocks her maniacally while talking to the watchman. The cries are like that of an animal in pain. We sit silently, waiting for the baby to tire, for her vocal cords to give way, but the screams continue without intermission. The ayah keeps rocking, panting, in panic, perhaps hoping her employers in the building above don’t hear.
‘I don’t understand why you won’t buy new bras,’ I say. I wasn’t planning on returning to this, but somehow I have. The baby is still crying. I wonder what the child could possibly want, and why it seems like the only thing that matters.
‘I have to be an example.’
‘An example for what?’
‘For you. You don’t have to care what others say all the time. Not everything is a show for the world. Sometimes we do things just because we want to.’
If our conversations were itineraries, they would show us always returning to this vacant cul-de-sac, one we cannot escape from.
I start by taking the bait: ‘What have I done that I don’t want to do?’
She feigns benevolent dismissal: ‘Anyway, let’s not get into all of that.’
The refusal to let things go: ‘Then why did you bring it up?’
More dismissal and rejection: ‘Leave it, it doesn’t matter.’
The outright anger: ‘It matters to me.’
The rest unfolds predictably. She asks why I am always after her, behind her, chasing after her like a rabid dog with my fangs out. Don’t I have anything better to do, she asks, than bully my own mother?
I do not hesitate for a moment when I tell her she only knows how to think about herself. Her expression moves towards injury but turns back, and she says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with thinking about oneself.’
I halt at the usual impasse. Where do we go from here?
I want to tell her all the things that are wrong with it, but can never find the words. I want to ask her what’s so terrible about doing what other people want, with making another person happy. Ma always ran from anything that felt like oppression. Marriage, diets, medical diagnoses. And while she did that, she lost what she refers to as excess fat. She has no interest in being lean of body – but she doesn’t need repressed know-nothings around her, she says. The feeling has become mutual. Certain contemporaries at the Club refuse to acknowledge Ma. The elder relatives, who might have had a soft spot for the child they remembered, are infirm or dead. Yes, Ma has people around her, people who love her, but to me they seem few. To me, we have always been alone.
There are repercussions for living the life she’s chosen. I wonder if the loss is worth it, and if she believes it’s worth it. I wonder what she feels after I leave to go back to Dilip and she looks around her house. Maybe this isn’t her choice at all, but another path she has mapped over and over, one she cannot unlearn. I want to ask her if, in all the years she has run away, any part of her screams come after me? Does she want to be caught, brought back and convinced that she is important, that she is necessary?
But these questions dissolve when I see her leaning back in her chair, eyes closed, humming to the soundtrack of the crying baby and sipping her sour water.
Dilip wants to become a vegetarian because a lion killed a lioness in America yesterday.
The lions grew up in the same zoo, in captivity all their lives. They mated many times, produced cubs that were taken from them at a young age. One busy weekend afternoon, they were sitting in their cage as usual, and a bunch of children were running about, pointing at the animals, asking their parents if the lions were real, like the ones they had seen in the National Geographic programmes on television. The newspaper added that last bit, as though the lions had heard, turned to each other and said, Those kids want to know if we’re real. Should we show them how real we are?
And then the male bit the female’s head off.
Not exactly like that, but he swallowed her face and held her, incapacitated, while she suffocated inside his mouth, in front of all the screaming humans.
The article left the reader with a series of questions: Were the lions depressed? Is this part of a larger cover-up, like SeaWorld? Are they trying to hide a common occurrence by suggesting the incident is isolated? Can captivity ever be a normal thing – and should it be such a big part of our culture or something that we encourage as a childhood amusement? Doesn’t the public have a right to know the truth?
Dilip says he hated going to the zoo, even as a child. There was nothing that could be worse than looking at a creature in a cage. He had the same feeling as when he studied colonial history and his textbook had a full-page picture of the Hottentot Venus, chained up at the neck and smoking. The entry described how, after her death, she was dissected and her organs put on display. He tells me that, when he was a teenager, he avoided going to Juhu beach on family trips to Bombay because a cousin told him the camels there were suffocating in the damp air, their giant lungs sodden like wet pillowcases.
Some things move my husband, but I can never predict what. He ate kale before it was fashionable and once tried to make his own soap. He leaves bowls of water out on the window ledge in case birds get thirsty on summer days. Racism, sexism and animal cruelty come from the same source, in his estimation, and he speaks about them interchangeably.
I tell his mother about the lions when she calls that evening – and she laughs at her son, says she doesn’t know where these ideas have come from, except maybe that one summer he went to Surat to stay with her in-laws, because she knows they’re a veggie-preaching lot. She wonders why she didn’t hear about the lion incident in Milwaukee, and why the papers in India have nothing better to do than report on American zoos.
I tell him what his mother said, and he shrugs. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.’
He smiles without showing his teeth, and I have a sudden desire to confess something. ‘I loved killing slugs as a child.’ I realize I am sweating, as though a poison has been released from within me. ‘At the ashram.’
He looks at me, but his face is unreadable. ‘Okay.’
‘I poured salt on them, and they would shrivel and scream. Kali Mata taught me.’
He looks in the mirror as he answers. ‘I don’t think they scream.’
‘They do. I remember there were screams.’
‘It’s not a big deal. You were just a kid.’
‘Today I fought with Ma.’
‘About what?’
‘Our usual fight.’
‘You know how to push each other’s buttons.’
He eats dal and two vegetables that night at dinner and says he already feels better, lighter, after just three meals.
Two days later, over quinoa and spinach soup, he tells me that his mother was actually right, that something did happen when he went to Surat in Gujarat all those summers ago. He heard a story about his aunt, his father’s aunt actually, named Kamala. She was born in 1923 and her father was the first man in the town of Bhavnagar to buy an automobile. He was also the first to educate his daughters as well as his sons. But when it was Kamala’s turn to attend university, she begged her father to let her become a Jain nun, to live near the temples in the small city of Palitana, and climb the thousands of steps with the other pilgrims and devotees to the top of the Shatrunjaya hills every day. She told him of a recurring dream she’d been having, of the face of the Jain deity Adinath from a statue of him that sits in a temple in Palitana. But as she drew closer, the face would disappear into darkness.
I know enough about Jainism to know that Jains are some of the most extreme vegetarians around, forgoing not only meat and eggs but also plants that must be uprooted for consumption. Jain food was commonly made without onions and garlic. I run through all the recipes I will have to change if he decides to take this further. The nuns often tie white cloth over the
ir mouths and sweep the ground before they take a step so that they neither inhale nor step on any living being, even by accident. However, the Jains I knew still wore leather and didn’t seem to notice what industrial dairy farming meant for cows all over India.
I feel betrayed, as though some dark secret has been revealed. ‘You never told me you were a Jain.’
‘Only a quarter. On my dad’s side.’
‘How did Kamala know which temple it was?’
Dilip taps the table. ‘I don’t know. Maybe she had been there.’
I nod, and he continues, but I detect less enthusiasm than he started with.
Kamala’s request was refused, and she was beaten and locked in her room. For seven days after that, her mother knocked at the door with a plate of food but not a single morsel was consumed. On the eighth day, Kamala’s father opened the door and saw his child was already wearing the thin white cloth of the Jain nuns. In anger, he pulled at the white cotton covering her head. What he saw stopped his hand. Her hair was all but gone. Her scalp was red and inflamed.
When he asked her what she had done, she told him Paryushan, the Jain holy days of introspection and abstinence, had begun, and it was a time when Jain nuns plucked every hair from their heads as penance.
‘How many hairs are on the average head?’ I interrupt. He shrugs.
‘How many thousands of steps is it to the top of Palitana?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Dilip says. ‘A lot.’
‘Most of this story has been exaggerated.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Yes, we do. In a generation, she’ll have walked on water.’
‘I’m just saying, the people in my family, they have the calling.’
‘The calling for what?’
‘For a life of radical non-violence.’
‘But they also have a calling for the opposite,’ I say. I bring up his mother’s love for American holidays with big birds on the dinner table, and the fur she wears to shield herself from the Midwestern winters. I mention his uncle, the wife-beater.
I didn’t understand what was non-violent about pulling hair out of your scalp, or running up and down thousands of steps every day. I want to ask if Jain monks are expected to violate their bodies in the same way, but Dilip’s expression stops me.
‘Something about this is making you uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to stop eating meat if you don’t think you can manage it.’
My earliest memory is of a giant in a pyramid. The giant sits at the centre of the pyramid, on an elevated platform. He mimics the structure he sits within, forming a large white pyramid composed of white clothes, grey hair and a thick beard. Around him are smaller pyramids, also white, and Ma is one of them – one among a sea of pyramids – and when I look up, the ceiling of the room meets in an apex high above my head, pointing upwards to the sky outside.
The smaller pyramids sit cross-legged. The aim of the congregation seems to be to copy the giant. I am the smallest in the room and I don’t know how I would manage being any bigger. Some of the pyramids are terrifying if I get too close; they have hair and pimples, and large pores on their noses.
There is one other who is about my size. She waits in the corner, a dirty rag in her hand, watching us. From time to time she shuffles forward to refill water for those who ask. Before, when we entered the pyramid, I saw her crouched outside, collecting shit left by the ashram dogs.
The giant opens his eyes; his lower lids fall away from the upper. Hair grows all over his face, but somehow I can make out he is a man and not a beast, and Ma is not afraid so I try not to be. Three strings of beads hang around his neck – brown, pink and green – forming a tangle. I want to pull them off him and wear them myself because I have no necklace of my own, but I dare not go near him. His mouth opens and his tongue pushes out, and I can see darkness at the back of his throat, teeth covered in darkness, a never-ending recess.
I move close to Ma. She is looking at him, sweating with the rest of the room, but I can smell her particular smell, and I love her because she is known to me in some way I cannot explain.
She draws me to her and kisses me full on the mouth. Then she squeezes me into her side and tickles my neck. I am embarrassed, and wary of her affection because it’s often followed by something unpleasant.
The giant draws his tongue back in and swallows, preparing before once more pushing it out. Saliva falls a metre in front of him, on to a medium-sized pyramid, a man with yellow hair, but the yellow-haired pyramid does not move – he is mesmerized and copies the giant, sticking his tongue out of his mouth, and a light spray of spit falls just beyond his shadow. I look around and my mother and all the other pyramids are following. The giant laughs or coughs, I am not sure which, and laughs and coughs more, in a continuous stream, and his belly, which sits a little in front of him, is shaking and his hair is bound into tentacles. The rest of the group follows, coughing, laughing. I even hear a belch. A woman beside me starts to cry, but when I look at her, no tears are falling down her face.
The room smells warmer, like my finger when I rub it in my navel.
The woman beside me screams between her cries, and some other pyramids scream in response. I look at Ma and her face is red from coughing. I hold her hand, but she pulls it away and begins to stand, and I see that the giant is also standing and all the pyramids are transforming themselves into white columns.
I stand and hold on to the edge of Ma’s kurta, curling it in my hand, working my fingers against the fabric.
The giant has lifted his arms and is shaking them, and they wiggle and fly away from his body as though he is loosening, as though he is going to let his limbs go and give them to the sea of white, the way he gave his breath and his saliva.
The ground is moving because they are moving – all the pyramids, jumping, stomping, dancing, holding each other. Someone taps me on the forehead, and someone gathers me into her arms. I cry for Ma, but I cannot see her for a moment, until I find her behind me. Her breasts are bouncing below her white kurta, and the sea of people envelops her, fondles parts of her body and releases her once more.
The giant is croaking and his eyes bulge, and his face is like a frog’s. He croaks again and again, and some follow him, adding to the croaking, but others heave their bodies around like different animals, neighing, bleating, bringing up sounds from inside themselves that are unfamiliar to me. They are all around me, closing in and receding, and I sit on the ground and they seem to forget I am there, but I can smell the skin of their feet as it rubs against the tiled floor.
Ma, I think to myself as I watch her. I want her to look at me, but she is elsewhere. I can see it in her face, a face she wears when she cannot see me. I don’t know where I have seen this face before because I can’t remember what came before it, but it is familiar and something I know to fear.
Ma has her arms in the air and is spinning around in circles. There are two men on either side of her and she disappears between them as they dance. She stops turning and teeters here and there, and one of the men holds her steady, laughing, but her hair is stuck to her head and her mouth falls to one side, still finding its balance. Others are shouting, retching, crying out at the top of their lungs, charging the air with nonsensical sounds.
‘Ma,’ I say.
Her mouth is regrouping, starting to point upwards at its ends, until she is smiling for someone. I follow her eyes and the giant is there.
The giant is returning Ma’s smile, or perhaps she is returning his, but this I will never truly know because I did not witness whose mouth broke first. He is on his hands and knees, springing himself up. His long hair falls on to his face. Saliva bubbles on his lips, collecting between the strands of his beard.
I slap Ma’s leg with my hand, and she looks down at me and pushes me away.
‘Don’t do that,’ she says.
I feel my arms unravel at my sides. She pushes me again and I stagger backwards.
Her breasts are moving in a way that makes her ugly.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she says. ‘Dance! What’s wrong with you?’
More bodies appear between Ma and me, other bodies in white that are travelling from the back of the room to the front, hoping to get closer to the giant. Their faces distend, their jaws pulse with blood. They’re afraid to go too close.
I stand up again. ‘Ma,’ I say. She cannot hear me over the hoots and laughter and tears.
‘Ma,’ I shout, and I feel an urgency in my abdomen, something that I didn’t feel a moment ago but is now ready to burst.
‘Ma!’ I am screaming, but the sound I make is lost.
‘Ma! Ma! Ma!’ I am flapping my wings, but she doesn’t notice.
‘What’s the matter, pretty girl?’ The voice is close to my ear, and I pull away when I see the face. A woman painted with chalk and dressed in black is crouching beside me. The only black in the sea of white. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Ma,’ I say.
‘Ma? What do you need to tell your ma?’
I point, but there are too many around her.
‘Okay, okay, let me help you. Is there anything I can do?’
I point to my stomach and back to Ma. I feel bubbles in my throat, ones that have risen from my stomach, not the soft ones that form with soap but hard, plastic bubbles, lodged in place and growing. No sound comes out of my mouth.
The woman looks from my stomach to my face, and the dark kohl that circles her blue eyes stretches when she raises her glistening eyebrows. ‘Tummy ache?’ Her voice is strange, has a lilt I haven’t heard before, as though she is singing a song.
‘Susu,’ I mumble.
‘Okay. Well, lemme take you. I can show you where the potty is.’
She holds my hand and we snake through the white. Her skin is rough, and when I let my fingers wander in her grip I feel the edges of her talons. I turn back for a moment, but Ma has vanished in the white sea.
The toilet is quiet, and the lady in black holds me under my arms as I squat above the hole. We look at each other as we listen to my urine hit the bottom of the bowl, and I nod at her when it has stopped. She adjusts my pants and ties a bow with the string at my waist, and I see her nails are ridged and grey, and her hands are covered in brown spots.