by Sharon Maas
‘See, little sweetheart, I am not far away. Just a few hours. I will come as often as I can and visit you. And when you are a bit bigger you can visit me too. I will show you Madras. I will show you the sea! I will take you to Higginbothams Bookstore and buy you lots of English books. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Asha was an avid reader and that last suggestion comforted her somewhat, because Gingee did not have an English language bookshop, and she loved the stories of English children eating strawberries and cream and drinking ginger beer, and looking for treasure or going off to boarding school. Still, though, she was not satisfied.
‘Why you have to go, Janiki? Why you have to leave me?’
‘I am going to learn all about computers,’ Janiki said. ‘I am going to study at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. It’s a great honour to study there and I am so happy I got a place. And if you work hard at school you too can study there or somewhere else in Madras or Bangalore, or even in Bombay or Delhi.’
‘The Indian Institute of Technology!’ repeated Asha slowly. ‘It sounds scary!’
‘It’s not at all scary, baby!’ Janiki laughed. ‘It’s one of the best technology universities in all of India. It’s a wonderful opportunity, especially for a girl. Now come on, give me a nice long hug and a kiss and let me go – I have to finish packing. Run along now and remember Higginbothams! So many books. You will be in paradise!’
And Asha had to be content with that. Janiki would go off into the big wide world, and one day she, Asha, would follow.
* * *
Janiki kept her promise and came back as often as she could – after all, Madras wasn’t that far away from Gingee. And one day she even kept her promise and took Asha to see the sea. Asha frolicked in delight in the surf and went back home having made the firm decision that one day she, too would go to Madras to study. Asha showed her the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the little room where she lived in a hostel for female students, which she shared with a girl called Naadiya.
‘It’s just a small room but it’s my home, and I love it!’ Asha told her.
Naadiya became Janiki’s best friend. And just as she had predicted, Janiki met some nice young men and it wasn’t long before she met someone she could love. He was an aeronautical engineering student at the same university, and his name was Gridihar. Gridihar’s and Janiki’s parents wrote to each other and eventually the marriage was arranged, to take place a year after Janiki’s graduation.
For Asha’s eighth birthday, which fell on a Saturday, Janiki came with a huge cardboard box.
‘Guess what’s in here, baby!’ she said with twinkling eyes. But Asha could not even begin to guess. ‘Just let me open it,’ she begged, dancing around the box in excitement. So Janiki gave her a pair of scissors and Asha cut through the tape holding the cardboard flaps together, and opened the box. There was a lot of paper padding, but underneath that there was…
‘Oh! A television! My very own television!’
‘No, sweetheart, it’s not a TV set. It’s something else that looks like a TV. It’s a computer! Look, let me lift it out, carefully. See, there you go. And there are some more parts to it. This is the hard drive, and this is the keyboard, see? And his little thing is called a mouse. See?’
‘A mouse? That’s funny! But it’s not a real mouse!’
‘No, thank heavens! We don’t want a real mouse in the house. But let me set it up for you. It’s not a new computer, darling, but it’s not very old either. You remember my friend Naadiya? You met her when you came to Madras. Well, her family is very rich, and her daddy bought her a brand new computer, the very latest model called Apple Mac, and so she gave me her old one. She just gave it to me, like that! Because she’s my friend. But I thought I’d give it to you, because after all, I can use the university computers. Naadiya didn’t mind.’
‘But what’s it for, Janiki? What can I do with it? Can I watch TV on it?’
‘No, Asha, it’s not for TV watching. It’s for something very special and very amazing, called email. I will show you how to use email. When you have email you can write me every day and tell me what you are doing and I get your messages that very same day, imagine! Now that you can write so well you must write me every single day. Then you won’t miss me so much.’
And Janiki set up the computer for Asha in a corner of the living room, and connected it to the telephone line, and set up an email address, which was [email protected].
‘So, now let me show you how to send an email. It’s very simple. See, you just put in my address – mine is [email protected] – and then you write something right here. Go on, write something!’
‘What shall I write?’
‘Anything at all. Just a simple message.’
So Asha wrote ‘I love you, Janiki!’
Janiki laughed, and kissed Asha on the cheek. ‘Thank you, dear, and I love you too! Now let me connect it to the Internet, which is an amazing thing just like a spiderweb in space.’
Janiki pressed some buttons and the computer began to buzz wildly, and then Janiki said: ‘So now it’s connected – see that little sign? That means it’s in the World Wide Web. Now all you have to do is press this button on the keyboard – Enter – and see! It’s gone, and it will be in my account and I can read it. If I were in Madras right now I could read it immediately, and here I can read it too, I just have to go out of your account and into mine, and hey presto!’
‘It’s like magic!’ said Asha. ‘So no more letters?’
‘You can still write me letters, of course you can. But it’s such fun to send emails!’
‘I’ll send you an email every day. I promise!’
And she did, though after the initial wonder wore off she tended not to write every day any more, but maybe once a week, or once every two weeks, and Janiki would write back and tell her what she was up to. She enjoyed her studies, she said, and was doing very well, and she had ideas and plans.
* * *
After her last year of university Janiki applied for, and won, a paid internship at a big company called Grant Reed IT in Silicon Valley, in California, and in great excitement she packed her bags and flew off to America.
‘But it doesn’t matter, baby. I won’t see you for a year but we have email, don’t we? We’re never very far away from each other. This is a great opportunity for me. America! Who knows: perhaps Gridihar and I will move to America later, when we are married, and you can come and live with us then – you will be near your mom!’
And so it happened that Janiki was in America when the terrible thing happened that ruined Asha’s life. Janiki hurried home in shock.
Chapter 17
Asha. Gingee, 2000
The next day, the day after I came home from Saasna Aunty’s, Paruthy Uncle took me on a bus to Madras. I don’t remember much of the bus drive because I was so terrified about leaving my brothers, and of course my home, which was now actually Paruthy Uncle’s home. But still I missed it so badly I cried all the way to Madras, which is why I didn’t look out the window much.
And I didn’t want to go to Madras at all, though of course everybody wants to go to Madras; the way people always used to talk about Madras, I used to think it must be a kind of paradise, and if somebody had been to Madras it was a very special thing. That’s why when Janiki took me to Madras that one time I had been so excited. I had friends at my school who had been to Madras and everybody treated them like kings and queens afterwards, and they strutted around telling about all the marvellous things in Madras, things the rest of us had never seen and never would see. And when Janiki took me there I thought it was a trip to paradise. But now? I didn’t want to go there with Paruthy Uncle because all I could remember was Janiki’s scared face when she took me to Saasna Aunty’s place, and I knew that I would not come back home. Don’t ask me how I knew this. I just knew it. And this time there was no Janiki to save me because she had already gone back to America.
I told you a
lready that I was to see bigger houses than our own house in Gingee. Well, the place he took me to was the first of those big houses. It seemed to me then to be a palace, though
now I have seen yet bigger ones. So you see, everything in life is relative. Happiness is relative and so is suffering. People complain about this and that, and they think their sorrows insurmountable and unbearable, yet if I could have exchanged just one little moment of my own burdens for a whole lifetime of those little trivial things some people call problems, oh, I would have rushed to do so! But that was to come later. Reaching this big house, which was also very beautiful inside, was the beginning.
I still don’t know how Paruthy Uncle heard about these people and that they wanted a maid, and I don’t know why they took me and not a girl from Madras; perhaps they knew I would have nowhere to run, if running ever came into my head? Anyway, Paruthy Uncle handed me over to them and I heard some talk about wages, and how Appa was to have them sent to him every week. All that was not my business, it seemed.
Living with those people I began for the first time to wonder about the nature of cruelty. Why do some people choose to be cruel, when they could just as well be kind, and happier? I can tell by their faces that cruel people are not happy. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a cruel person? I have, and they are all muddy and twisted inside, and their mouths are ugly slits, and when they are being cruel I can see so clearly how terrible will be their fate. Cruelty is like a heavy ball thrown up into the sky: once it reaches a certain height, it changes course and falls with terrible speed and will hit the very thrower – perhaps not in this life, but in the next. Was I, then, a cruel person in my last life, that I should be the recipient in this? I do not know. Only God has his eye on such matters, and who are we to question him?
But I am straying away from my story. I will return. Paruthy Uncle left me with those cruel people. It was a man and his wife. Their names were Sri and Srimati Ramcharran. And I was to be their servant.
But instead I was their slave. You may think that now I was living in this grand house it can’t have been so bad, but you know, even if you live in the grandest of places, if you are treated like a beast of burden the pain is unbearable. That lady beat me for the slightest misdemeanour, or what in her eyes was a misdemeanour.
For instance, if I polished a mirror, and she found one fingerprint on it, she would beat me with the leather belt she kept hanging on a hook especially for this purpose. The house was certainly magnificent and well furnished – they had real tables and chairs, Western-style, and it was the first time I had ever seen a home furnished this way. And carpets everywhere, and beds, and several electrical machines. I didn’t know how to operate these machines at first; as a matter of fact they terrified me. That mixer for instance. The first time I used it Srimati had given me a bowl with some kind of mixture in it and she only told me to place the bowl under the beaters of the mixer and switch on the button but when I did so the bowl woke up and started dancing in wild circles, and when I grabbed it in panic the yellow slop inside started to dance and flew out all over the kitchen. She whipped me for that, of course. The vacuum cleaner wasn’t much better; it was much stronger than me and pulled me in several directions at once, it seemed. But I won’t complain about those machines – they can’t help being what they are; they do not have a soul and they were not trying deliberately to hurt me. Srimati was.
In Appa’s English school Teacher taught us that rhyme ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.’
Well, it’s not true. I may not be very old but in my whole life it’s always been the feeling of being worthless to other people that hurts most of all. Yes, I have had my share of blows, but it is the words, and even the unspoken things, the looks of people who think of me as nothing and less than nothing; that is the worst kind of hurt in the world. I was hurt this way by Appa’s brother and then by that lady and that man. But they hurt my body too, each one in a different way.
Look at my legs, and excuse me for lifting my skirt this way, but I must show you: do you see these marks on my upper thighs, like the rungs of a ladder marching up and down? Those are from her. When I had done something wrong – it was always little things, so little I can’t even remember – she would stick a fork into the flame on the gas stove, leave it there till the prongs were red hot. And then she would lift the hem of my skirt and press them against my thigh. And the more I screamed the more prongs I got. Now I mention forks, I remember the first of my crimes, which was not knowing how to use knives and forks, for of course at home we always ate with our fingers. But when I started to do so there – well. They gave me a bowl of rice with some thin sambar on it, that first evening, and I took it into a corner and sat on the floor to eat, a far corner where I wouldn’t disturb anybody – that’s when she scolded me the first time, calling me a stupid pig. She said I had to learn proper manners and must sit at the kitchen table like civilised people, so I did, but then I put my fingers in the rice and made a ball of it and that’s when she laughed that horrible mocking laugh, which she always laughs before getting really angry, and she said to him, Just look at this nasty little pig, how she eats! So I had to use a knife and fork, which I had never done before. I didn’t know how to use them and by mistake I put the rice on the knife and lifted it to my mouth and she lashed out and slapped it away, scattering the rice on the floor. That’s not how we eat in this house! she screamed. So I had to put the rice on a fork, which seemed silly – surely the grains would fall through the prongs? Seeing the fork must have given her the idea of torturing me this way, because that was the first time it happened.
It is hard to believe that people can treat others this way but it is true; here are the marks to prove it.
But I am not complaining, I’m just telling you because you asked. I was locked up in that house. I was not allowed to leave. They had other servants, a cook, and a man who went shopping and came back from the market with bags of food that he gave to the cook, and a gardener. I was the only maid and I was not allowed to leave the house, not even for a moment.
So with that lady I had to do all sorts of things in a different way, and I learned a lot about Western ways, though of course they were Indian. But they said Western ways were better and I had to do things so and not so.
I haven’t told you about the children yet. She had two and though I have always loved small children I must say that those two were hard to love, for they were as nasty as their parents.
They took such great pleasure in hurting me whenever they could; but in sneaky sly ways, especially that little girl. She was even worse than the little boy, if you can believe that. She would walk behind me quite innocently, but in passing kick me from behind, or pull my hair, or pinch me. Little things, to be sure, but still they hurt.
The man hurt me in a different way but excuse me for not talking about that, not telling you the details. Even after all this time and much worse things I am filled with shame at the very thought. I’ll just tell you that it started soon after I came to live with them and it always happened when she was not at home. Perhaps she had taken her children to her sister’s or some such thing; she went visiting often, leaving me at home, locked up in the house, which had heavy padlocks at the doors and bars at all the windows. That man would come home now and then and do
dirty things to me. That’s when I learned about the demon that lives in every man. But as I said before, it is all relative. Now I can almost laugh at the things that man did. But back then they were no laughing matter. But I won’t tell you. I don’t want you to feel shame for me. The details don’t matter.
The woman spoke only Tamil but the man spoke English too and he spoke to me in English, and he tried to force me to speak back to him in English. But I would not speak, and he could not force me. It was the one power I had, not to speak. Sometimes he got angry when I did not speak and threatened to beat me, but he never did.
One day they both came to me and made me take
off all my clothes and then they put a red sari on me. I don’t know why. They took off my worn old sari and threw it in a corner and then wrapped me in this shiny red sari. And then the woman put jewels on me. And put funny creams on my face and black around my eyes and on my eyelashes and styled my hair in a fancy style like I saw in the magazines she liked to read, just like a grown-up woman. And put jewels in my hair and around my neck, but I don’t think they were real jewels, and bangles on my arms. And they made me sit on a chair. And then a man with a camera came into the room and took photos of me sitting on a chair. And they told me to move this way and that and I did.
But still I refused to speak English. Not to that man. It was the one way I could defy him.
Chapter 18
Caroline. 2000
Email from Caroline to Kamal:
Dear Kamal, thanks so much for sending me your email address, it will make communicating a lot easier. Because no matter what we are still Asha’s parents and nothing can change that. It’s a bond that will remain for ever, and I’m so glad we were able to remain friends – well, pen-pals, I guess – even after the divorce. Though I would feel much better if you too married – I still feel so guilty about being the one to bail out on our marriage! I hope you have your eyes and heart open for someone new – it would make me feel so much better to know that you are in good hands with a wonderful wife!
Kamal, I’m writing today because I’m so very worried about Asha, and I wondered – have you heard from Sundari at all in the last two months? Because I haven’t.