by Avni Doshi
I learned how to regulate my body. How often I could bathe would determine how much I could sweat. How often I could urinate determined how much water I could drink. Part of me was sealed off. Little went in and little came out.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Mini asked.
I shook my head, but a sinking feeling pulled me down. The dining hall began to lose focus. The backs of my legs slid and scraped against the chair. The room turned black.
I woke to find my nose pressed to the ground. There were dozens of shiny black shoes as far as I could see. Murmurs and laughter. A cold hand came down on my forehead. I followed it up the veiny wrist and looked into the face of the nun above me.
‘Call the nurse.’
The nurse began the protocol of checking my temperature, but at the sight of my fiery red urine she shouted for the headmistress.
‘Infection,’ she said.
I was admitted to the local hospital, where the country doctor administered strong antibiotics. For three days, I stayed in the blue hospital room. My nose burned from the smell of bleach and the naphthalene balls that sat over the drains.
Ma and Nana were called. They arrived and brought the smells of Pune with them. Nana shook his head when he saw me. Ma cried.
‘We are taking her home,’ she said.
When I was released from the hospital I returned to the school only to collect my belongings. A small blue suitcase. Some drawings I had made. I hung them in a room in Nana and Nani’s flat, one that I would share with my mother.
No one ever asked me about what had happened, why I had lost so much weight and some of my hair, or why I had a round scar on both sides of my left hand. Life went on as though nothing had changed. Perhaps, in a sense, that was true. We all went on living in separate realities.
Nani spent a good deal of time trying to convince me to eat. When I told her I wasn’t hungry, she said she would call someone to take me away. A doctor, a policeman, a boogeyman. Some man. Always a man.
The moment was awkward – I felt too old for it, old enough to know there was something artificial in the construction of her warning. More than anything, I was curious about the details of the punishment I should expect, the specifics of the pain or humiliation. Take me away and do what, I wanted to ask. For my part, I could see over the horizon of her threats, down to the other side – I had visited there, this place she only alluded to, but I sensed that the truth of this would terrify her. So I ate my food, and let her believe I was afraid.
There are incidents with Ma almost daily now.
She doesn’t know who soaked the mung. Still, every morning, it’s there. Why is it there? Sometimes she remembers soaking it but doesn’t remember what it was for. Chila? Dal?
The same happens with the clothes in the laundry basket. She wonders if someone is living in her house, using her things. Who is this other woman? Is it one or several? She pays the maid her salary twice on the first of the month. The maid is uncharacteristically cheerful until I correct the mistake.
I don’t mention this to Dilip. The less I mention her, the better. As it is, Ma’s illness looms over us at night. Things are not quite the same at home. He locks the door when he’s in the bathroom, comes to bed when he is certain I’m asleep, and I shiver if I think too long on the fragility of what we have.
I go to see Ma’s doctor. He has cut his hair and isn’t wearing his wedding ring today.
I ask him if he had a pleasant Diwali. He says it was pleasant.
I tell him about the mung.
He tells me he will look at my mother’s dosage.
I tell him my mother is living alone again. ‘There was an incident.’
‘What kind of incident?’
‘She lit a fire using our things, doused it in alcohol. The whole room was ruined. She burned her hand. It was scary. She seemed as though she was possessed.’
He nods. ‘That sounds scary, but with the proper precautions I’m sure it can be avoided in the future.’
I shift back and forth. ‘At the moment, she can’t live with me.’
The doctor says that is unfortunate for my mother, but might be the best for me in the long run.
‘For me?’
He says my mother and I have always shared some version of our objective reality. Without me, her ties to that may have loosened, sad, but true – yet on the other hand, as a caregiver, the distance might be good for me. It is difficult when everything starts to vanish.
He says memory is a work in progress. It’s always being reconstructed.
‘Maybe she will remember things from the past,’ I say. ‘Things we have all forgotten.’
‘You’ll never know if the memory is real or imagined. Your mother is no longer reliable.’
We run through the later stages of this together, he an expert of medicine and me an expert at searching for theories.
Hallucinations, inhabiting the past, an archaic sense of self, a deep feeling of isolation. The present is seen for what it is, a fleck always slipping through the sieve.
He nods at me and says I am well versed. I thank him but I feel flimsy inside.
He tells me to keep talking to her, to help her turn things over in her mind. Writing may help too. It activates different centres in the brain. Feelings may remain, but eventually those will fade. I will lose her in increments. At the end, she will be a house I’ve moved out of, containing nothing that is familiar.
‘I have read,’ I begin, ‘that this disease is caused by insulin resistance in the brain. Like another kind of diabetes.’
‘There isn’t enough evidence to support that.’
‘I’ve also seen some studies that link cognitive health with problems in the intestines.’
He leans away from me, as though he can smell something awry. Perhaps it is my mention of the bowels holding the answer to our question, a desecration of the dogma he holds dear. French intellectuals sniffed when Bataille suggested enlightenment could be found in shit, or God in a prostitute, and it is likely that now neurologists prefer to retain the screen that separates their domain from the rest of the body, the sanctity of the blood–brain barrier, because a turd can have no relation to the mysteries they seek.
At home, I turn the lights on and a fly whips past my face. It roams the parameters of its cage, bumping into mirrors and pressing against windows, tasting surfaces with its feet. I watch it fly in circles and wonder how many hours it has been in here. By now it has mapped this place, created coordinates in its mind. It knows the furthest distance it can travel, the sofa, the bookshelf, the door handle. I slide open the balcony door and stand aside. I wait for the fly to leave, to catch a scent from outside, a familiar breeze. But it doesn’t. It continues crossing from one side of the room to another.
I return to the sofa, put my feet up on the armrest. Maybe it likes it here, a new home. It buzzes around my head, frustrated. Trapped.
Once more, the fly passes by the door, gaping as it is. I watch it and wonder if it can see the door at all, or if the map it has made of this era in its little life is so persistent that the outside world ceases to exist. It is blind to the way out. All it knows, as it hits its body against the mirror, against its own reflection, is that something is missing, something is amiss.
Ma leaves the house in the middle of night. She wakes up, uses the loo and heads out in her nightgown. The watchman finds her trying to hail a rickshaw. When he brings her back to her apartment, the door is wide open.
He calls me right away. Dilip and I arrive within thirty minutes. The sky is beginning to brighten. The watchman tells me that she had left the tap running in the bathroom. I thank him and give him the smallest note I have for his trouble.
‘Is she unwell?’ he asks me just before leaving.
‘No,’ I say. ‘She’s fine. Just bad dreams.’
After he is gone, I turn to Dilip. ‘Now he knows.’
Dilip blinks. My arms are trembling.
‘He knows that she’s not well,’ I
say. ‘The whole building will know, all the servants, that a single woman living alone is unwell, maybe mad. She isn’t safe any more.’
I tell Dilip I am staying with Ma until we find a solution. He doesn’t ask me how long I expect to be gone. I try not to think about it, ignore the tightness in my face and the sense that everything is falling apart.
Ma and I share a bed, something we haven’t done since before I went to boarding school.
The maid sweeps the house twice a day, bending low and inching along. She rubs her eyes with her free hand. Dust and hair form a pile near the sofa. The bristles of the broom graze my feet.
A lizard has found its way inside, either through the door that is always ajar, or through the open window in the kitchen. It creeps upside down across the ceiling, getting lost in the brown stains. I watch it edge forward like it’s walking on ice. A scab of plaster hangs like a sheet, swaying with the rotating fan.
The maid finishes sweeping and moves away. Her pile stays on the floor like a nest of black wire.
I see new spots on the ceiling. They seem to darken. ‘The upstairs neighbour’s pipe broke,’ the maid says.
I lean my head back, mapping the bubbling paint. Pune is hazy, but the universe within these walls gapes grandly. They mimic each other, the lizard and the maid, lingering around me. My head throbs. Ma has been waking up every night with bad dreams.
At twilight, we listen to the cars and trucks, all honking, fighting across the main road beyond the compound gate. Men holler at each other, their voices distant but familiar.
I pour Dettol on the shower floor and leave it overnight. In the morning, I pick up my loofah. It smells like ethyl alcohol. I use it around my knees, scouring the dead skin. The hot water hits my back. I keep rubbing. Soon, I glow red. I imagine that if I go long enough, hard enough, I will be a diaphanous cloud. I can forget that there is something underneath.
The ceiling trembles like it’s alive.
Sometimes I think maybe it’s this flat. It’s easy to go mad here.
Other days it’s unmistakeable: Ma has lost it.
She tells Nani she hears Baba’s voice. He doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary – comments on the weather, calls out her name. Sometimes it’s no more than a grunt or a cough, or his laughter drifting up from the car park below.
She looks around at first, sure he’s there, coming in through the window or the door – he misses her and knows where she lives. He sounds so close he must be here. It gnaws at her until she gives in, until she stops what she is doing and walks around the house, checking behind furniture and jabbing at curtains. I watch as she does this, but look away when she turns back with nothing.
Nani’s mouth crinkles but she remains silent. I go into the bathroom and cry.
‘I think she hallucinates about what hurt her most,’ I tell Nani. ‘She expected something different when she left the ashram. She expected he would come after her, demand she return and take up her place beside him. But that never happened.’
‘That was so long ago,’ Nani says. ‘People don’t hold on to things like that.’
I walk Nani down to her car. The gate has been left open. The watchman is sharing a bidi and chai with his friend down the road. Mrs Rao is nowhere in sight, but her Pomeranian barks down from the balcony, pushing his head through the metal bars. We kiss each other. I wave as she drives away. We have settled into a pattern of avoidance. My grandmother has never seemed more like a stranger.
In the evening, Ma falls asleep in bed with her slippers still on. I dial Dilip. He is eating dinner by himself, in front of the television. His voice crackles, as if he is far away.
Dilip says his friends in Dubai just moved into a nice place that has a garden and a garage for two cars. Five minutes away on foot from them there is a public beach. Would I want to move to Dubai someday? he asks. I listen to his bare descriptions, trying to imagine this other city, wondering how the beach becomes the desert, how the air turns from wet to dry.
Ma cries out in her sleep. ‘What was that?’ Dilip asks.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
My mother comes out of the bedroom. Her hair is pressed to the side of her face. She slithers into the armchair across from me.
‘You have to stop,’ she whispers. Her eyes are wet.
I sigh and rest the phone against my neck. ‘Ma, it’s not real. Should I put you back to sleep?’
‘I know it’s real. You have to stop making those drawings.’
The television is on. A female news anchor of open ethnicity is reporting on a suspected terrorist attack. I reach for the remote.
‘Did you hear me?’ she says. ‘Stop making those disgusting drawings. They are an insult to me. They are an insult to your husband. You insult us every day that you do them. You insult us every time you hang them in some fancy gallery show.’
I place the phone on the sofa and push myself up. My heart pounds and my knees crack as I straighten. I put my hands on her shoulders, one at a time.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Whatever you want. But I want you to lie down for a little while.’
She seems to calm down and allows me to help her from the chair. Her hands are cold as I tuck her under her covers.
Dilip is quiet on the line.
‘So,’ I say. ‘What else?’
‘Why did she mention me? Why are the drawings an insult to your husband?’
I rub my eye. White from the corner sticks like glue on my fingers. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of it.’
1993
My mother and Nani could not abide the sight of each other any more and Ma decided to rent a small apartment not far from the ashram.
At the time, I was not sure how she paid for the place, but later my grandmother told me that Nana gave her the money to restore some peace in his life. Kali Mata, too, would come from time to time with envelopes of what she referred to as goodwill from the ashram.
I started attending a local English-medium school, ill prepared to keep up with the other students. The principal suggested daily tuition for several hours, but Ma only smiled in response. There wasn’t enough money for that sort of thing.
The subject I dreaded most of all was Hindi. How could a language I heard and spoke all the time be so utterly foreign? Otherwise, my reading and writing skills were passable, and the teachers praised my mechanical handwriting. Submission was apparent in every line I wrote.
‘Convent school,’ my mother said. The principal seemed to understand.
Now that I had numbers, and letters, too, the whole world opened up for me. Kali Mata smiled. ‘Reading changes everything.’ But it wasn’t language that held appeal, only the symbols that made it up, abstract and random, characters I infused with alternate meanings.
I began to keep a diary, but not the kind the other girls at school kept – no entries about romance and boys and dreams and wishes. Mine was a collection of moments from the past, the ones I could remember anyway, primarily a list of grudges. I coded this list carefully, contrived an order, one that could be read chronologically but also by the severity of the transgression. Entire tables were dedicated to Sister Maria Theresa, and several to my mother, too. Others were given their own form of data entry, coded by colour or numerically.
My father did not receive this treatment. In my journal, he did not exist.
I made few friends at school and even fewer in the building. My alienation intensified when I woke up one morning to find my left eyebrow missing. The hairs were scattered on my pillow like scraps of thread, so insufficient I couldn’t believe they had once formed a neat row on my brow. I looked in the mirror and ran my finger over my face. My left eye seemed defeated, incomplete.
‘What have you done?’ Ma said when she saw me.
Kali Mata put down her tea. Her eyeshadow cracked like the top of a brûlée. ‘What bad luck you have,’ she said.
I begged my mother to let me miss school, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
‘It is
n’t so noticeable,’ Kali Mata said. ‘Well, it is, but only because you still have the other one.’
I kept my head down, brushed my hair over one side of my face. I leaned my head in my hand and favoured certain angles. That afternoon, I came home exhausted.
‘It’s nothing pretty,’ Ma said. ‘But why should you hide your face? Young girls are supposed to be brave.’
She was talking about herself, her own self-image. A rebel, a contrarian. But I was nothing like her. I didn’t feel brave.
My anxiety produced a fever and I stayed home for a couple of days, reading Enid Blyton books and checking the mirror every hour. I searched for a glimmer of black somewhere, but my brow was a blank.
When the light moved on my face I saw two different people. The girl I had been and the creature I was now, something inhuman.
I swept my mother’s razor along the other eyebrow.
In less than a second, it vanished. Black slivers speckled the wet drain.
The hair looked thicker on the bathroom floor, wetter, blacker than what had been on the pillow.
Nani cried when she saw me.
‘I knew this would happen, it’s some disease she picked up in the convent,’ she said.
When I said I had shaved it off myself, my mother leaned forward at the dining table. Her arms were as white as raw chicken thighs.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you could scare the devil, but I’m glad you did the right thing.’
Leaving the house became daunting. Eyes followed me wherever I went. I spent time indoors. Only Kali Mata would visit me regularly. She brought books, old packs of cards, games that she had never heard of or seen. Then she brought other strange objects: oriental tea sets, old keys and some photographs of me as a child at the ashram. We laid out the faded pictures on the dining table. Kali Mata had gained weight and she leaned over heavily, her breasts resting on the table, separating like dough.