by Avni Doshi
‘Pretty girl, will you wait outside for me?’
I nod, and stand outside the door, listening for sounds within. The lady in black lets out a steady stream, far louder and faster than mine. And I notice the bathroom door is one of many, that there is a vast corridor of doors and they are mostly shut. I jiggle the padlocks one by one. They feel heavy and metal and cold. Exposed bulbs buzz overhead, and I can hear a voice on a radio. At the end of the hall is a latticed railing that looks down to an open courtyard, and raindrops the size of fruit flies are misting the air.
I turn when I hear panting, and I see one of the doors is ajar, and through it come the sounds of animals and radios, and other things I cannot name. The padlock is hanging on its hinge like a severed limb. I push the door and it opens fully.
The other small one is there inside the room, without her rag, and she is flattened like a cross. While she lies on a table with her arms spread, a man in white holds her legs open. He is from the sea of white. He is the yellow-haired pyramid. His pants sag around his ankles and he grunts as he moves his body over hers. ‘Pretty girl, pretty girl.’ I hear the lady in black call me. I turn away from the open door and run. She is standing outside the toilet. She shifts from side to side when she walks, and the long drapes of her clothes sweep dust across the floor.
‘You want a little snack?’ she asks. She produces a packet of glucose biscuits. I fill my mouth with them, the surface soaking up the saliva from my palate before they melt. I feel like throwing up but I cannot stop eating. The lady smells like fabric, and the fumes of many days are embedded in her clothes.
She asks me if I want to rest while I wait for my ma. ‘Yes,’ I answer.
We lie down together on a damp mattress in the courtyard. It is stained and faded, camouflaged against the brown tiles it sits on. The rain has stopped for now. I can hear shrieking coming from the pyramid, but it’s faint and could be from the throat of any person, anywhere. I feel myself distancing from it, pulling away from the source, reassigning it to someone I don’t know, someone wholly unconnected with who I am.
The space between the noise and me grows, I feel my ears hollowing out as the sound withdraws, and softness spreads to the rest of my face. The muscles around my eyes relax, and the atmosphere is whiter than before. I don’t know where I learned to do this but I am good at it, and it’s a trick I repeat often throughout the rest of my life.
The lady in black asks if I have ever seen stars. I tell her I have, and we look up at the cloudy sky. I want to say something more about the stars, but can’t recall what they look like, how many there are in total, and if they cluster in some recognizable formation. Are they static or moving, do they flicker or glow like bulbs, and I begin to doubt whether I have seen stars at all – or if I know of their existence only indirectly, through my mother or my father, or someone else who had taken it upon themselves to teach me what I don’t remember, because the only reality that remains from that time are feelings and ideas, and whether I authored them or they were placed within me is impossible to know.
‘What’s your name?’ the lady in black asks.
‘Antara,’ I say.
‘Hi, Antara. I’m Kali Mata.’
Before she became Kali Mata, her name was Eve and she lived on two acres in Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Andrew, their daughter, Milly, and Andrew’s mother, June. I know them with their tongues sticking out, and in profile, from the pictures Kali Mata left behind. The family said grace at every meal while Grandma June was alive – Kali Mata said June was a stickler for that kind of thing, not because she necessarily believed, but because it was the right thing to teach the children. Eve didn’t care much for Grandma June’s advice, but even after the old bat bit the dust (just fifty-nine with all that praying) Eve decided to keep up the tradition. Grandma June had been the first body she’d seen devoid of life, one moment animated like a marionette strung up by the devil, and the next nothing more than a shadow on the floor, her limbs lying brokenly. Emergency services said something about a blood vessel exploding, but Eve just didn’t believe that. Grandma June hadn’t passed away with that kind of fireworks; it had been quiet, sudden, leaving the family disbelieving.
Eve never saw her own parents die, and even though she didn’t like Grandma June’s long lectures, the sight of death alarmed her. Andrew found himself explaining more about the phenomenon of death to Eve than to little Milly. Milly held her father’s hand, said she understood, and told him that she hoped he would be okay. But Eve, a mother, well into her thirties, could only stare at the wall for weeks. ‘They were really close,’ people murmured at the wake. ‘They were very close and she loved the old lady like her own mother.’ Eve didn’t correct people, didn’t tell them about the occasions she whispered to herself that she hoped the old lady would drop dead, but she had to admit that death, when it stared her in the face, looked as final as it was.
Eve insisted on grace every night and Andrew was happy to oblige, but when everybody put their heads down and thanked the Lord for their daily bread, Eve began her own private negotiations with the Almighty: if God saw fit to take food from her table and the roof from her head, she would survive. But, if he was listening, and if all those Sundays spent in a dusty barn in Bible Study were penitence enough, she would ask for only one thing now, one thing that the Lord should grant her, because it was really nothing at all. She asked only that the Lord take her first, that he welcome her into his kingdom before anyone else who sat at the table in front of her. She wouldn’t survive, she reasoned, if she had to bury one of those dear souls while she still walked the Earth. Those were wakes she did not plan on attending. And so, if there was any way this one small request could be arranged, she would be happy to keep insisting the family say grace at the table. In Eve’s eyes, she kept up her end of the bargain, but the Lord didn’t keep his, and when news of the car crash reached her Eve was inconsolable for the next five days. Then she packed a bag and left town. She’d meant what she’d said – no wakes, no identifying bodies. She would never see them as they looked in their final resting places. Eve lived in Philadelphia with her sister for a while, got a job as a sales girl in a bridal warehouse until she met a man who called himself Govinda. He was handsome, with light brown hair and glasses, possessed a melancholy she, too, felt, and made money selling marijuana. He took her to the Hare Krishna Mission, where they sang songs, and then to his apartment, where he said he was saving up to go to India to see the Brahma temple in Pushkar and escape the cycle of suffering. He asked her if she wanted to come.
In Pushkar, she started dressing herself in black embroidered fabric. It was weighty and forced her to move slowly. She had been a fair child, with orange freckles on her forearms, but that year they spent living in the desert darkened her complexion and puckered her skin. Her hair formed a short trail of dreadlocks behind her. Eyeshadow hung like turquoise dust on her clenched eyelids, settling into the grooves, creating patterns, and black kohl encircled the entirety of her eyes. Her lips were dark raisins. In her hair she kept an arrangement of ornaments collected along the way, feathers and trinkets hanging from threads.
They wandered the desert, living on the outskirts of villages, forgetting the lives they had before.
No one was sure where she came from. Some said she was ageless and had been meditating in the Thar desert for as long as anyone could remember. Villagers bowed to her, some even touched her feet, and the children called her oont bai, camel lady, because she could survive without water.
It was there that she met a giant dressed in white who asked her to join him on his journey. We never learned why she wore black, only that he had found her this way, and that she was quite perfect, quite complete the way she was. Perhaps she was still in a kind of mourning, and mourning for her would always be black. She had been at the ashram in Pune for more than a decade before a pale, bewildered pregnant woman stumbled into the meditation hall. Kali Mata was no longer the giant’s consort but she thought o
f herself as the mother of his children, as the nurturer for his many followers.
She invited the new devotee to sit down, but Ma shook her head and her eyes darted around the room. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay. But when the giant entered, Ma rushed to the front and found a spot at his feet. She meditated there for more than four hours, still like furniture. When Ma opened her eyes, she looked up at her guru and said she would devote her life to him. Then she placed her head in his lap and wept.
I must have been no more than three years old when Kali Mata told me about America for the first time, and about the ashram where I found myself living. She told me we were still in Pune, but when I looked around I couldn’t believe it. The ashram was nothing like the rest of Pune.
She taught me that the giant was called Baba, that he had other names, many others, but this was how we should refer to him. He would be a father to us, a leader, a god. But he was also a humble servant in many ways, because he had taken a human form once more to relieve us of our ignorance. His lineage of teachers and masters included several famous maharishis and acharyas, and even certain sages who appeared in ancient texts. These are outlined in his autobiography.
Baba travelled in a Mercedes Benz and collected VHS tapes of Brigitte Bardot films. He was more than eight feet tall, a height that doesn’t seem as remarkable now. His voice was gentle and soft, even through the speakers he used while addressing crowds of thousands. And his teachings appealed to everyone, a carefully layered narrative that drew on the Buddha, Christ, Krishna and Zorba. Baba liked science and was interested in computers. He watched India play in Test matches and enjoyed Japanese food. There was something familiar for everyone to come home to.
As a teenager, Ma had admired the ashram from outside, the freedom that festooned its devotees, but she herself entered only years later, when she found her husband’s house was full of loneliness and boredom. Ma was looking for a way out.
The ashram’s marketing materials show the beginnings, when they lived in makeshift structures with tin roofs and little light. The ashram grew around a banyan tree which was twenty metres tall, sprawling, coiling, its branches growing up and down, staking claim to the earth. The sanyasis planted saplings of lemon and mango trees, which would one day bear fruit. Slowly, they got permits for piped water and electricity. They explored the possibility of a well. Septic tanks were required. Concrete was poured and foundations were laid. Then the frames went up and the trusses were set in place.
This picture fades into a new shot of the ashram today, a resort, a sanctuary. The master is dead but his vision lives on. All rooms are now fitted with flat-screen televisions, and they offer couples massages and Tarot readings. AIDS testing is mandatory for admittance.
Only some part of those four years of my life left an imprint. There was the ratty mosquito net that hung over my bed in the room I shared with Kali Mata. She let me use the colours in her make-up palette to paint my face. The kitchen was my favourite place in the ashram, where hundreds of steel plates and glasses shone as they hung to dry, and where Kali Mata taught me how to steady my hand and peel an apple with a knife. It was also where I saw Ma, where she would be cooking for Baba. And I remember running my fingers over carvings of birds and snakes while I knocked on the heavy wooden door that led to a room my mother shared with him.
And then there was the day when my grandfather came and told my mother he couldn’t bear the thought of us staying there any more, among this gathering of foreigners and whores. He told her that she had shamed her family, that she should go back to her husband’s house immediately. Ma ignored him and said this was her home now. She said that Baba would be my father and the sanyasis would be my family.
As for the girl with the rag, her name was Sita. She cleaned the meditation hall, watered plants, never speaking. After lunch, she used to rest on a patched-up straw mat, her eyes shining through the crevices of her elbows. I have asked about her in recent years, but no one can remember that she existed.
I’ve collected some images of Baba that I keep in an envelope. Baba loved pictures and always had photographers on hand. ‘Pictures,’ Baba said, ‘do not record history. They decide history. If there are no pictures of you, you never existed.’
Ma poses next to him in a number of images. In one, she wears a sari. It was the first time since she had left her husband’s house, and she wore it on the occasion of her symbolic marriage to Baba.
The cotton looks coarse and bright white, two sheets cut and sewn together. There is no petticoat, and a brown ribbon is tied around her waist. The rope has a plastic tassel on one end, much like a shoelace. The pleats are tucked in place. Only three, and narrow, half the width of what is normal, but that was all the fabric she had. She must have taken small steps that day. She is sitting on a jute mat, beside Baba but a little behind. They arranged her hair over her bare shoulder. The short pallu is left to rest on her head. Ma clutches at the loose end. The sun must have been bright because she is fighting a squint.
I have pictures of Baba in the form of postcards and keychains that I got from the ashram bookstore, and also a copy of his obituary that I converted from microfiche.
The obituary states that the possible cause of death was a drug overdose, though a group of his followers insist he was poisoned by local authorities. He was fifty-seven years old and may have had a condition called gigantism that explained his notable height. He left behind no widow or known children.
When the moon was full, my mother would burn sandalwood incense throughout her flat with the windows closed. Kali Mata had told her to do this to vanquish evil spirits and mosquitoes. We stopped the practice for a year when the doctor said it was giving me asthma. Ma believes that was the year everything went wrong.
Today, the smoke is heavy as Kashta performs this little ritual, and I watch the baroque plumes for shapes and faces. Nani sits surrounded by haze in an upright chair while I cough. I cannot tell if she has fallen asleep. Ma is next to her, looking dazed. She hasn’t been very alert today.
I stand by the window. The moon is white in the sky and I imagine the tides rising into tall peaks and crashing on moonlit shores. The newspaper, folded on the coffee table alongside stacks of magazines and unopened mail, calls it a supermoon. I look at its surface through the window again, glowing but battered, as though it has been struck too many times. I pull the page with the article from the newspaper, and over it I sketch the skin of the moon with a pencil, mapping these brutalities.
The article says the moon will look larger than normal, that this is the closest it has been to the Earth since 1948.
‘Nani,’ I say, and she looks at me, blinking. ‘The last time the moon was this close to the Earth was in 1948.’
Nani smiles and scratches her nose. ‘The year you were born,’ I add.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I remember that year.’
There are no birth records of when my grandmother was born because most children in the refugee camps died before their mundans, when babies have their heads ritually shaved. Her husband invented the date of birth for her passport. But when Nani tells the story of her life, she starts at the very beginning: the midwives are screaming in Multani and they use a dirty cloth to wipe the fluid from her body. She’s hungry and crying, searching frantically for her mother’s breast, so anaemic that they name her Gauri, the fair one.
I ask her how she can be sure she remembers when the rest of us can barely piece together our childhoods.
Nani scoffs. She says I couldn’t understand unless I had been there. Partition was a different time. Things happened then that never happened again.
Her eyes quiver and move to the wall behind my head. I turn away and reach for my laptop, open up several pages detailing the structure of amyloid plaque: a side of Velcro that misses its coordinating opposite. More diagrams showing brain tissue submerged in plaque, a mess of tatters, trapped in a grid where they don’t belong.
This is what Alois Alzheimer found wh
en he dissected his patient Augusta’s brain after her death in 1906. Poor Augusta couldn’t keep anything straight.
Scientists don’t know where the plaques come from, or why the protein divides incorrectly. It reminds me a good deal of what I’ve read about cancer, but I don’t say this to anyone for fear of sounding careless with words.
Amyloid plaque may only be a symptom. What’s the cause? The length of telomeres, which sit at the end of chromosomes like the handles at the end of a skipping rope, could be one. They shorten over time, a sign of biological ageing.
Is this a cause or another symptom?
Ageing, it seems, is not everyone’s destiny. Neither is cognitive decline.
I wonder if there are examples of agelessness. I wonder if there are immortals.
Nani seems in good health, sharper than she was when her husband was alive. But ageless? No. She seems old. There is stiffness in her joints and her mind.
I draw X and Y axes, marking them as age and decline. I plot my mother and Nani on the graph. Between them is a little family of krill.
I always imagined Kali Mata defying the limits of this graph, an asymptote to the infinite, until she dropped dead one morning in her home.
How many krill will die on this mission to make Ma remember? In the top corner of the page, I begin a flat depiction of the moon.
‘You have your period.’
I look up from my drawings. I have transformed the moon into a peppered omelette. My mother turns off the bathroom light and sits down on the sofa. The smoke is settling. Nani’s head droops on to her shoulder.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘How do you know?’
‘You leave a smell behind. Pineapple.’
I’ve never had a smell before, not one so specifically categorized. Dilip has never mentioned it. I wonder if he knows what pineapple smells like. He once had an allergic reaction to a kiwi and his lips broke into ulcers.