Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  ***

  “I didn’t do it,” Sita told her brother. She refused to cry. Crying was for women who were weak, who had done something wrong, who could not control themselves. Or that was what she thought as she tried to maintain a certain measure of control.

  She and her older brother, Deepak were standing on opposite sides of a fence that divided the visiting room of the women’s prison from the prison itself. The floors were smooth, unstained white-grey concrete that stank of urine. Behind her brother, she saw a vending machine. She imagined putting a few rupees in the machine, the Cadbury chocolate bar she would buy, the way it would melt on her tongue, a soft brown drizzle in the heat.

  “Then why did the machine tell the doctors you did?” Her brother wore a pink shirt and his copper-colored skin smelled like Old Spice, a scent he’d bought from a store full of imports. The stench of Anand—mud and fresh grass, the dirty fur, the sweaty skin of a hunter, the metallic taste of blood when he kissed her—never left her mind now, so she stuck her nose between the bars and breathed her brother in. He stepped back, uncertain, and she pulled back, too, eyeing him warily. Why was he so certain about her guilt?

  She shook her head. “It told the technician, not the doctors. But I tell you, I’m innocent.”

  “Come on. They’re doctors. And doctors invented the machine,” said Deepak. “It’s scientific. They can tell if you’re lying.” Perhaps, like most people, he was giving too much credit to the prevailing notions of the time, that they were right, that they were good, simply because the powerful espoused them.

  She knew otherwise. “No, they can’t. The machine isn’t right. I didn’t poison him.”

  “Okay, well, since there was arsenic in the dosas and you made the dosas—” Deepak looked away.

  “They said it was in the jalebi, not the dosas.” Sita stepped forward, unsettled, wanting to probe what he knew.

  Deepak continued to speak, but most of the conversation seemed trivial to Sita, filled as it was with reminders of a world she probably wouldn’t see again. He shared the minutiae of their parents’ health troubles. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she didn’t know what they would talk about if he didn’t elaborate on her mother’s hypochondria and her father’s bowel troubles. Was there any other common point of reference? He didn’t read, didn’t watch movies, didn’t think about the world. His entire conception of reality grew out of the tiny corner of the world where he’d lived since birth.

  Apple pie and sausages. Snow angels and men. Stuff she would probably never want to eat or make, only read about in American books. And yet, and yet—just knowing of exotic things that happened in places other than the village was enough to rattle her sense of reality, make her realize that her life in the village had been more limited than other people’s lives elsewhere. Western nonsense, Deepak would have said, if she’d given voice to any of these ideas, if she’d shared what she thought. But East, West—anybody could be free. She knew girls from school who had been free. They’d gone out dancing with boyfriends and planned careers in marketing. When they graduated, they had not gotten married, at least not immediately, but had gone to work in jobs they liked in the city. They shaped their reality, they sculpted it. They didn’t wait for the stars and planets to align. The world is changing, she wanted to tell Deepak, but she never did.

  Instead she nodded, pretending to listen to the litany of ailments their parents suffered, tuning in again when Deepak began talking about Srinivasan. He said that newspapers reported that her boyfriend had passed the lie-detector test and was living back in Jaipur.

  “Why hasn’t he written me, at least?”

  Deepak shrugged. Sita could tell that he thought she was being shallow, focusing on the wrong things, impractical nonsense again. She could see it on his visage, in the terrible smug curl of his lip as he spoke sentences he intended to be reassuring.

  She was supposed to understand that she deserved Srinivasan’s scorn—she’d done something so terrible, she would never recover her dignity. She was in prison awaiting trial because she deserved it. She was not supposed to be angry, nice girls didn’t get angry. Oh, nobody said, you can’t be angry, but it was implied, wasn’t it? The way people looked away when she tried to explain how wrong they had it, when her voice rose just a fraction, when she started moving her hands. She didn’t know who had murdered Anand, of course, but it wasn’t her. She didn’t concoct the murder plot her own attorney called “fiendish” as if they were all characters in the black-and-white Nick and Nora movie she had seen at a film festival in Chennai last year.

  It was only after Deepak left that she had time to wonder why he believed the arsenic was in the dosas, not the jalebi. The machines claimed that she remembered pouring poison into the syrup, and this supposed fact was what the newspapers reported.

  ***

  The first thing Sita did when she and Srinivasan arrived in the city of pink palaces was to locate a doctor who would perform abortions with a forged certification. The certification claimed that the abortion was necessary to protect her health, but it was written by a doctor who drew breath only in her imagination: Dr. Venkateshwaran. She didn’t tell Srinivasan, of course. She was too afraid of what he would say, what he would think of her. Instead, she snuck out one morning while he was at his new university job.

  Morning air. The green, watery smell of monsoon rains as the bright orange rickshaw hurtled toward the clinic. After the procedure, she woke from the anesthesia in tears, not sure why she was crying. The city doctor held something that smelled terrible. “Mam, see here, you were pregnant with a tiger cub,” he said with an expression of disgust, showing her the dish, the tiny curled tiger fetus, furless and grey and still covered with viscous amniotic fluid. A tiny tail unfurled beside his body. Unmistakable pointy ears sticking up from the sides of his head. She breathed a sigh of relief that she’d escaped being the mother of this tiny copy of Anand.

  “Here, you take it,” he said.

  “I don’t want it,” she said. “You throw it out.” For more than twenty years, she’d visited the same village doctor. He helped deliver her. She couldn’t imagine what he would have said about the tiger fetus, if he’d performed the procedure.

  The city doctor forced her to take the dish, and her hands trembled as she took hold of it, but by the time she arrived home, she’d changed her mind about throwing it out. Or perhaps she’d convinced herself she’d changed her mind because she felt strange about throwing it aside, like it meant nothing, when it actually represented her freedom. She was too superstitious to throw it away, and so instead she laid it gently in a large embossed silver jewelry box, as a reminder of what had happened, of what she had done. The box sealed well, sealing away the stench of the aborted fetus.

  As much as it saved her, the abortion proved to be her undoing, too, for it was how the police located her. The doctor’s nurse saw the news of the tiger’s death, the call for information about his murderer. She reported the woman who sought an abortion of a tiger cub at the clinic. As newspapers would report, the police discovered the fetal cub inside a jewelry box.

  News of her abortion inflamed not only the villagers, but also the entire country. A woman who would forge a note to secure an abortion of her tiger cub could surely be motivated to kill the tiger that was his father as well, or so they seemed to think.

  What Sita couldn’t understand was how learning of a possible motive so easily transformed speculation into a firm belief that she had murdered the tiger. How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were truth.

  ***

  After the story of what happened grew fuzzy with time, after the newspapers and the local gossips transformed her story into theirs, it was hard to get any sort of clarity back, to disentangle what she had imagined from what she remembered. She stood on the precipice of reality, but it was not her reality. The memories she understood to be true before Smriti 3000’s proper voice had
spoken would never be recovered. Instead she had truth as conveyed by the Smriti 3000.

  That evening around six, young professionals were arriving home from the city, carrying empty silver tiffin boxes and books for reading on the train. The women she no longer envied, the men who rejected her parents’ efforts to marry her off. They were returning to their homes just as she planned to leave hers. No streetlights. Through the window, a faint pink shimmer from the setting sun filtered through the arecas, illuminating potholes and deep gouges on the village road, and she imagined this light was like the light she would see all the time in her new life, in the city of pink palaces.

  She made jalebis first. She stood over the cast iron wok, squirting long curling strings of dough into concentric circles in the hot oil. After the jalebi had fried, sucking up the oil, turning a deep gold, she dunked them in sugar syrup. Was there arsenic in the batter? Once the machine told her there was, her mind filled in other information, building off the first lie: the batter was laced with rat poison she had purchased that day. As she dunked the jalebi, she was careful not to lick her fingers as she usually did. She washed her hands thoroughly with the half-dissolved bar of green-blue soap by the sink. Next, she mixed hing, coriander, and mustard seeds into the curd rice. The okra curry was from the day before. She made the lemon sevai last, tossing rice sticks and lemon juice with gusto. As she added chopped coriander leaves, a lizard ran up the wall. She knocked it off and across the cool teal linoleum tiles with a broom, sweeping it out of the house. The night before, she’d prepared the dosa batter, and left it to ferment in a plastic container as she always did. She opened the top of the container and put another cast iron pan on the range. She sniffed the container, noticing it smelled a little different, not bad, just slightly sweet and metallic.

  A farewell dinner. Not that Anand knew that it was a farewell, but for her, it had been the most complete way to say goodbye. All of Anand’s favorite foods, including one of the primary reasons he had wanted to marry a human wife—the large, just-fried dosas. She liked the sense of closure that preparing the feast provided.

  He had been in a good mood for some time and hadn’t hit or kicked her in ages. The last fight had involved a lamp flung across the room, smashing against the wall and leaving a red streak from the painted ceramic base. Since that night, everything had stayed quiet for several weeks, yet she was overcome with joy at the thought of her escape.

  On the table, she set out stainless steel bowls filled with curd rice, lemon sevai, vada, and okra curry. Fragrant steam rose from the bowls, whitening the air. Anand arrived home at 6:45 as he always did, his fur matted with sweat, lying in shaggy orange and white clumps around his muscular shoulders. His big paws were muddy, flecked with bits of grass from hunting in the nearby forest, and the thick wide nails curling over the edge of his paws were black with grit.

  Sita welcomed him with a kiss. She didn’t like touching him anymore, but she did not want him to suspect anything. She swallowed the urge to spit in his large eyes. His whiskers worked against her upper lip and cheeks like rasps on alabaster. Places around her mouth were rubbed raw and red now from his kisses. He sauntered into the bedroom to freshen up in the cement shower. She arranged the jalebis on a plate and placed the plate on the table next to a jar of hot onion pickle. Again she washed her hands. She began frying the dosas he liked so much.

  When he returned to the kitchen, Anand was discoursing on deforestation, complaining about how his tracking of deer and buffalo had changed as a result of humans. She poured some Kingfisher beer into a bowl and set it out in front of him on the table. Without a word to her, his enormous wide pink tongue lapped it up. When he was finished drinking, he tore into a dosa and slurped from a bright orange pool of molaga podi. She tuned out his lecture. Soon this charade would be over.

  She touched her thali, turning the gold pendant first one way with her thumb and then the other, feeling a familiar pang of shame. Just a few months after they married, Anand had begun to snap at her. There would be good days for long stretches and then, without any clear warning, he would snap, “Be quiet or I shall show you my true shape.” They were walking by a lake one day when he repeated the words. By now she had come to think of him as an enormous cat, and she laughingly replied, “Fine, show me your true shape.”

  He growled at her and gnashed his teeth. Sharp and suicide white. His nostrils flaring. Steel blue lake reflected in his bright round eyes. She walked backward for a moment, before spinning and running. He chased her to the base of a jujube tree as she fled up into the branches, coaxing her down several hours later with a slim volume of Irish poetry and a bowl of gulab jamun.

  Once she invited him to show his true shape, there was no way to turn it off. He could no longer suppress his true shape, the way he had during their first few weeks of courtship. What she once experienced as a passionate intensity transformed into an energy that was threatening, raging, controlling. He wanted the house to be spotless—no easy feat since he shed long thin orange hairs all over the linoleum floor that collected into hair balls that blew around the room on hot days when she turned on the ceiling fan. He wanted everything in its right place, his music and books scrupulously alphabetized. He was enraged about the politics of the forest, the relentless press of the human population against the trees, and sometimes he took it out on her.

  He did peruse the books she suggested, and they still went to the movies. Little luxuries, but at first, somehow, they made up for the larger devastations. For a time, she told herself that his true shape was not so bad.

  The first time he hit her with his enormous paw, it was painful because it was surprising, not because the blow had much force. It didn’t leave a bruise. There was no proof that what happened had happened and this absence of evidence made it easy to push the hitting, the shoving, out of her consciousness. But her family, for all its faults, had been a gentle one. She’d never been beaten in her life and so she had never developed the vigilance, the anxiety that those who are beaten from an early age grow as an invisible second skin. She soldiered on. By the tenth or twelfth time, her ribs were streaked black and blue. She tasted blood for the first time. He always explained that she didn’t seem to understand the first time he told her things. She only responded to extreme messages, to violent measures, and for that he was sorry. When her brothers saw her after one of his beatings, she concocted a story about falling into a statue at the Meenakshi temple, but she could tell they didn’t believe her.

  On the night in question, she was pregnant, and this seemed like the most extreme message of all. The fetus could be a tiger cub, or it could be a human baby. If the latter, Anand would be unlikely to accept the child. If the former, she would not know what to do. Raise another Anand? The notion was grotesque. Far more likely to be a human, she thought, but she couldn’t take the risk that it would be a tiger cub in the image of her husband.

  She watched the tiger scoop curry with large pieces of warm dosa. She watched as he lectured her. Licking his paws with abandon as he ate. His shiny black nose sweating as he nearly inhaled his spicy food. She was a good cook. He took so much pleasure in her food that she was almost ashamed, thinking of how absurdly close to freedom she stood, and how he didn’t even know. She ate more slowly. Later she would briefly wonder if she was trying to be careful about what she was eating. Was the machine right about her?

  Every time Anand picked up a dosa, she discreetly wiped her fingers on the edge of her violet-blue dupatta. She didn’t hear a word because she was thinking about escape, about a freedom she’d only ever read about or seen in foreign films, a freedom some of her friends—friends with more liberal parents—enjoyed. She was intoxicated by what she thought it would be like, by the imagined sensation of weightlessness.

  When Anand was finished with the curd rice, he reached out for a jalebi, his claws scratching the wooden table. It was covered with gouge marks from his carelessness during meals. He paused for a moment before popping the jalebi int
o his mouth and said, “You haven’t made these for months.”

  “I had some extra time after my cleaning.” She sipped her water.

  He handed her a jalebi and said, “Take it. You’ve been working so hard.”

  “I don’t want to get fat.”

  She set the jalebi on the edge of the plate.

  “You look nice, Ma,” said Anand. “You don’t want to be a skinny thing, do you?”

  She shrugged. There was nothing wrong with being thin, she thought, but of course he liked women with curves and meat. He took another jalebi for himself and bit into it, sighing with pleasure as the sweet liquid gushed across his large tongue. He closed his shining yellow eyes. She was nauseated by the carrot-colored syrup sticking to the brownish-orange fur on his paws. The syrup pooled on the fur at his jowls and glimmered under the overhead fluorescent light, where a few moths were hovering. She placed another jalebi on his plate. He grabbed it and scarfed it down. Another and another. With his disarming weakness for sweets, he ate fifteen or sixteen of them with true pleasure, licking his whole paw after each one. After he consumed everything on the plate, she started clearing the table.

  When she was done packing the refrigerator with leftovers, she turned. He clutched his head between his massive paws, digging into his own skull with his sharp claws.

  “I don’t feel well, Ma,” he said. “My stomach pains me.”

  “Go lie down,” she said. “We’re out of coffee. I’ll just go fetch some at the corner store.”

  He padded to their bedroom. Usually his tail moved as he walked, but it had been stilled by the torpor that accompanied the poison. She unplugged the telephone. She turned and glanced back at the house, its whitewashed exterior and clunky iron gate, the bright pink and blue kolam she had drawn with rice powder on the doorstep just that morning.