by Avni Doshi
I dress her in dry clothes, ignoring the pustules on her fingers. We put her to bed in the living room. The leather couch is too slippery to accommodate sheets, but we do the best we can. Dilip and I do not speak as we watch her curl into herself. We lie awake, watching shapes flash across the ceiling like fevered clouds.
The next day, I take Ma home wordlessly, without listening to Dilip’s request to call a doctor. I am unaffected by the idea that she might do harm to herself. Whatever she wants to do, let her do it in her own home. She wanted to destroy my drawings, and she did – years of life studies, preparatory sketches, some more than ten years old, have vanished overnight. All the images that were a record of moments in my life, memories, but also my becoming, the making of me that is separate from her. Maybe there was something more she was after – maybe she wanted this home to disappear, my marital home, the one that keeps me away, the only place where I am safe. Maybe she hoped to incinerate my marriage. Maybe my life.
The remnants of that disaster take longer to manage. A painter overcharges me to cover the grey spot on the ceiling, and the flooring has been discontinued and requires a full redo. For two weeks, the studio is taped off, covered in dust, a danger zone of chemicals and confusion. All of my belongings are removed, stacked in a corner of the living room. It doesn’t escape us that none of this would have happened if I had cleared the room out in the first place.
I wake up to dim, pale light and all the boxes open. My drawings are scattered, with the butter paper unfolded. Some in piles, others separate. That face unprotected, vulnerable to the elements – that same face with little differences, repeating itself like an endless stammer around Dilip.
‘You said there was no picture,’ he says.
My eyes are still on the drawings. I haven’t seen them all opened like this in a while. I barely register what he says.
‘You said there was no picture,’ he says again. ‘You said that you had lost it.’
I take a step towards him. In his hand is a photograph with a creased corner. It hovers lightly on the skin of his open palm. I step back again.
‘Why did you lie?’
My mouth is dry from the night.
‘What was the need to lie? Who is he?’
I try to swallow.
‘I’m not going to ask you again. Who is he?’
‘I found the picture,’ I hear myself say. ‘In her things.’
‘You found it? Or you took it?’
‘I found it.’
‘Antara, who is he?’
‘No one. No one to me anyway. He’s a man my mother knew.’ My shoulders fall. ‘They used to be lovers.’
1989
I knew that night was different when Ma came into the room I shared with Kali Mata. She had the beginnings of bruises on her face. She didn’t close the door gently.
‘Wake up,’ she said.
She put a bottle of water and a hundred rupees tied with a rubber band into a cloth bag. She spoke to Kali Mata in a low voice.
I knew they were talking about her, the golden one, the new favourite who would be taking Ma’s place, who would now live on the other side of the carved door with Baba. It had been decided. Kali Mata sighed and shook her head. ‘This is no reason to leave. Did I leave? Did any of the others leave? We all love you. You’re one of us. There will always be a place here for you.’
Ma laughed and cried at the same time. She wiped her dripping nose with the sleeve of her kurta. Her eyes were wide, her mouth taut.
‘The truth is, I hate it here,’ Ma said. ‘I always have.’
I’d never seen her like this before. I began to shake. Kali Mata held me in her arms and told me she loved me.
We left without a word to anyone else. No one came to watch us go. We walked for some time. The night was filled with the tang of diesel fuel and the sounds of trucks. Ma’s mouth moved as she talked herself out of turning around. She covered her lips with her hand to stop the words.
A decrepit vehicle halted in front of us. It was a Tempo Traveller and the driver’s face was obscured. A jagged parcel lay in the back, held down with old rope.
‘What’s that in the back?’ Ma asked. He looked at her but didn’t answer. ‘Furniture?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Which way?’
He wore a woollen cap and a frayed muffler in the heat. Grey hair sprouted on his face, a thicket from his ears. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were magnified to twice their size. Blue flowers bloomed in his pupils.
‘Poona Club,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Pune Club.’
I sat in her lap on the passenger seat. She wrapped her arms tightly around my waist. My bladder was full but I didn’t mention this. A small metal Lakshmi hung from the askew rear-view mirror. The goddess sat on a lotus. She had four arms. Or six. She jerked with the sputters of the vehicle. Ma sighed and let her shoulders rest against the vinyl seat. I could smell the driver’s last meal and a whiff of sulphur when he leaned over to adjust her door. His arm lingered, pressing against me, against Ma’s arms around me, for a moment. ‘You won’t remember this hardship one day,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘When you’re older, all these moments will cease to exist.’
The sun was beginning to come up when we reached the Club, and the guard recognized Ma in her dishevelled state and let us in. Ma had asked to be dropped at the Club because it was the only location, besides the train station, that the driver was sure to know. Also, it was the only place where we would be able to use the phone. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Ma had not made any plans before leaving the ashram. She had no idea where we would go, who would agree to take us in, and under what conditions. She hadn’t spoken to her husband in years, and she had told her parents she didn’t want to have anything to do with them if they were going to insist she give her marriage a second chance.
Ma told me to wait in the playground by the entrance while she went to make a call. I sat at the bottom of the metal slide and lay back, looking at the sky. I watched birds landing on the electrical wires criss-crossing the trees, swinging back and forth like small children. The playground was empty and there was no one else around. I knew children liked to play in them, but I never had, and I wasn’t sure what I should do there. I decided that I hated playgrounds, strange metal landscapes with no purpose. Hating the playground felt good, gave a direction to my feeling of unease, grounded it in an object that I could see. This contempt still draws up the moment I feel uncomfortable. I disown so I can never be disowned.
When Ma returned, I had mud on my knees and dirt under my fingernails. Or did I have this from before? The day was brighter. Ma didn’t seem to notice. I could feel her heart beating in her hand when she grabbed my arm.
‘They won’t help us.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Your disgusting father. Or your Nana–Nani.’
They wouldn’t help us? That didn’t sound like them, from what little I knew – the woman who held me to her creased skin and the man who stuck out his top dentures like a cashier’s tray because it made me laugh. And my father. My father, surely, would help me.
Father. Father. Father. I couldn’t remember anything about my father. I was a baby when I left his house. And, as far as I knew, he had never come for me.
I would dream of him sometimes, when I was in the ashram. Sometimes I would picture a man whose face I couldn’t recall taking me away from my mother. (Did I picture that, or did Ma plant it there when she told me I always wanted to leave her, that I always wanted to hurt her?)
My father was unknown, and sometimes I could be persuaded into imagining that was better.
‘They’re trying to rule over us like tyrants, but I won’t let them,’ Ma said. Her eyes were wide and red in the corners, and her breath smelled of day-old banana. ‘I will look after us. You trust me, don’t you?’
I wanted to nod or say something in return, but I didn’t. Or maybe I couldn’t. I wonder now if I even understood the question at that time.
Trust her with what? What choice did I have, and what else did I know?
We lived at the Club. Sometimes within the walls and sometimes right outside. I met a stray dog whom I called Candle because the tip of his tail looked like a burnt wick. I kept him with us to keep away the bandicoot rats I saw burrowing in and out of the flower beds in the darkest part of the night.
Ma took to begging. I wasn’t young enough to evoke sympathy so she made me stay near the gate. On the first day, we learned there were rules for begging, that certain streets belonged to certain women and children, and that encroaching on their space was an act of war. They had missing teeth, dust embedded in their hair and spoke a kind of Marathi I had never heard before. They were quick with their hands and on their feet, the kind of beggars who could persist, the ones Ma had told me never to make eye contact with. They looked different from us, smelled different. But as the days passed, the differences began to recede.
The Club members who knew us, and knew my grandparents, looked at us with confusion, unsure of how to react to our pleas. Some shielded the eyes of their children and walked on. Others laughed and patted me on the head, as though it were a kind of joke. They all passed us with a little hatred because of what they knew of Ma and because we were proof of how easy it was to fall. One night, she held her hands up in front of her face and made a little box. She peered inside.
‘Look in here.’
I looked, but there was only the street in front of us. Candle was lying on his back. A lady in a magenta sari walked by.
‘The world exists only as far as you can see,’ Ma said. ‘What’s above, what’s below, that’s no concern of ours. What they’ve told us before, none of that matters.’
I looked straight ahead, at what was in my eyeline. Bottoms, hands. A couple sitting on a bench, waiting. Some scrap metal on the side of the road. A girl sitting in a car with her cheek pressed against the window. I looked back at Ma, and she was crying.
I remember sleeping sitting up against the gate, lolling over, waking up with my head in Ma’s lap. But I don’t remember being hungry. The security guard brought plates of food and water at regular intervals. I later found out that my father had been calling the Club manager to instruct him to feed me. I’m not sure how long we lived like this. I was with Ma and she was with me, and there were no rules or chores or timetables to observe. I had not bathed, and fur grew along my gum line. I slept with Candle, napping on his mangy coat, watching creatures mow little lines in his hair, resting my hand on the pustules that my mother called scabies. Soon, I itched like him, looked like him, was converted by his presence, and I knew I had met a member of my family.
One morning, when it was still early enough that the Club security guard could openly sleep in his chair, my father came to collect us in his off-white Contessa.
He looked the way he does now, a full-grown man whose beard begins to show itself a few hours after shaving, but thinner, with a sharper nose. He looked nothing like Baba or any of the men I had seen in the ashram. His ears were clean and there were no hairs coming out of his nostrils.
He held the door open. Ma stood up slowly and tugged my arm. We climbed into the back seat and shut the door.
My father did not turn to look at me, and I admired the back of his head. He did not speak a word to Ma. He put the radio on. As we drove away, I called out for Candle, who rose from where he was lazing and jumped forward, the muscles in his hind legs pressing against the damaged fur. The dog chased us for a moment, but then stopped to scratch.
*
No one made any mention of us looking like beggars. There were no questions about the ashram. In my grandparents’ house, I soon learned, Baba’s name was forbidden. Nani was waiting for us with hot breakfast on the table and a kettle of steaming tea. The milk had malai on top and everything was cooked in ghee.
My father, having dropped us here, now stood back, hovering in the doorway, a driver, a baggage handler, ready to make a hasty departure when this job was done.
Nani’s arms were crossed in front of her, her bangles catching on her fleshy forearms, her bottom spreading on the red semicircular sofa. ‘I hope your tantrum is over,’ Nani said. Her voice echoed in the flat. I didn’t know whom she was speaking to until I saw Ma’s sullen face.
‘Antara,’ she said. ‘Do you remember your Nani Ma? Come here.’
I walked across the speckled tiles towards her but stopped when she put her face in her hands. She started to heave and her shoulders shook. I turned around to my father and Ma, who stood in the shadow. Ma waved her hand, motioning for me to go forward. When I turned, I noticed the colour of my feet, covered in dust, in stains, and the footprints I had left behind me. One of my toenails was black, and the nail bed bloody.
I was taken for a bath, scrubbed clean by a servant I hadn’t seen before. Her hair was in a knot on the top of her head, and her cotton sari sat high on her waist so her ankles and calves were exposed. I smelled her hands as she washed my face and neck. Garlic, chillies and soapsuds. Not so different from Kali Mata. Afterwards, I sat limply between her legs as she used her fingers to plough rows through my hair, checking for foreign creatures.
Nani looked in on us. ‘Bai,’ she said to the maid, ‘yeh amchi beti hai.’
‘Kasa hai,’ the woman said to me.
‘Baby, this is Vandana,’ Nani said.
Vandana began looking after me because Ma spent most of the day sleeping or locked in a room with Nana and Nani. I could hear them shouting at each other through the door, but that stopped when they came out for lunch or dinner. Ma looked down into her plate, mixing her food, pretending that none of us existed.
My father often stopped by in the evenings before returning to his house and his mother. He and Ma sat together for a while, sometimes without speaking to each other. On other occasions they would whisper, sometimes even shout. I hid under the dining table, even though I was too old for that sort of thing. I tried to read my father’s lips, but a table leg blocked him from my vision.
He never asked us to come back with him. Sometimes I thought he looked at me with the same eyes he had for her. One day, he came with another man and a briefcase full of documents. Ma glanced them over and signed her name.
I had questions that I never asked: Why were we at Nana and Nani’s house? Would we ever go back and live with my father again? It seemed to me that parents and children all lived together, that husband and wife should be inseparable, even in their mutual dislike of one another.
Vandana took me to the Club in the afternoons to play. She packed a tiffin and carried it in one hand while she held me with the other. In the auto-rickshaw, she taught me to speak a bit in Marathi. She was from a village that we only called gaon. She laughed at my pronunciation, which made me redden and not want to try again, but it didn’t occur to me to tease her when she said she couldn’t read or write. I suppose that was because I couldn’t do either myself. I made a pact with her that she would teach me more Marathi and I could teach her the English alphabet. I never really enjoyed the playground, but when she got on the swings and started pumping her legs back and forth, flying higher into the air, I wanted to join her.
Sometimes Vandana pulled her sari up behind her and brought it through the middle of her legs. She squatted down so far on her haunches when she swept the floor that I was sure her bottom would touch the ground. It never did. She could stay in that position for what seemed like for ever, and once I tried to time her, but she went so long that I forgot I was watching the clock and never made an accurate reading. The teeth at the front of her mouth were missing, and I saw the pink gaps of her gums when she smiled. She brought fresh green chillies with her every day and cooked me poha for breakfast.
One evening, I watched Vandana tie her keys to a string at her waist and put on her chappals outside the door.
‘Bye-bye,’ she said, showing me her toothless gums. I could hear Ma in her bedroom, humming. I waited for Vandana to close the door before I went out behi
nd her, slipping down the stairs, confident she wouldn’t see me, and defensive when she turned and said, ‘Eh, what are you doing?’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.
‘Coming with me where?’
‘To your house. To meet your husband.’
She cocked her head and looked at me. ‘You can’t come with me. Go back upstairs. Your mama will be looking for you.’
Murli, the liftman, watched our tussle and laughed.
‘Take her to her house,’ Vandana told him in Marathi.
‘No,’ I said. I felt something scraping up the sides of my stomach and I pushed down on it. ‘I want to go with you. You have to listen to me, you’re a bai. I’m the boss of you.’
Four lines appeared on Vandana’s forehead and her eyes became black slits. ‘You’re nobody. Your own mother barely looks at you.’ She took me by the back of the neck and pushed me into the lift. I reached up and slapped her, and she slapped me back.
Upstairs, Nani opened the door to find me crying and Vandana scowling, with patches of sweat appearing on her lilac blouse.
‘What happened?’ Nani said.
‘She tried to follow me home.’ Vandana dropped my hand and nudged me forward. Ma appeared behind Nani at the door.
‘Follow you home?’ Ma looked at me. Her face turned the colour of a burn. I flinched, expecting to be slapped again, but instead I heard Ma shout at Vandana. ‘You should be more careful.’
Ma pulled me into the house, but they continued shouting at each other, both becoming less and less intelligible. Vandana slapped her forehead and pointed at Ma. She didn’t come to work again, and Ma told Nani to keep a manservant from then on.
Ma and I shared a bed after that, and she would invite me out on to the terrace with her to watch while she smoked in the dark. It was then that I first realized how beautiful my mother was. When she finished, she gave me the butt and taught me how to flick it far, into the traffic near the station.