Flame Tree Road

by Shona Patel

  Another thing bothered him. A few years ago Roy had approached his office, stood shyly outside the door and asked to speak with him on a private matter. He had explained to Owen about his family situation. His brother was unable to work because of an injury sustained a few years ago, so the responsibility for his aging parents, his brother’s family as well as his own, was on him. As Roy had talked, Owen McIntosh had begun to suspect he was going to ask for a loan, but he was wrong.

  Roy had said he had been thinking about the future of his boys. To make sure there would be sufficient funds for their college education, he wanted to set aside a portion of his salary every month. Unfortunately, he would have to do this without the knowledge of his family. His older brother, who managed the funds of the family, was childless and did not put the same value on education as Shamol did. Shamol Roy himself had missed the opportunity to finish college. He did not want his sons to suffer the same fate. He had asked if Mr. McIntosh could deduct a small portion of his salary every month and put it aside in a separate fund for him.

  Owen McIntosh had been deeply moved by his story. He said he would not only be glad to do that, but every month he would add a small bonus to compensate him for his hard work.

  Shamol Roy was now dead at the age of thirty-four. The fund, meanwhile, had grown to a sizable amount. The question was, what to do with the money? If Owen handed the money over to Roy’s joint family, chances were the boys would never see it. It became increasingly clear: he had a moral responsibility to protect the two boys.

  Now there was Roy’s final letter where he had asked, rather timidly, if Owen could help his sons get admission in an English missionary school. It had never occurred to Owen to do that for any employee, as it meant assuming full guardianship for the boys. But Roy was dead and Owen had his letter as proof. He decided he would do everything in his power to make Roy’s last wishes come true.

  Having come to that decision, Owen McIntosh felt better. He called for the bearer to make him a fresh pot of tea, and finally lit his pipe. He could only hope Shamol Roy’s family would agree to his plans.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Biren remembered very little of what happened in the next few days. He was told his father had died from a cobra bite in the jute mill. The house was full of strange people. They huddled in clusters; the women beat their breasts and wailed. Granny’s potted marigolds all died because nobody watered them. Bunches of tuberose lay discolored and rotting, still wrapped in newspaper and string. Granny took to bed and cried day and night, Uncle disappeared and Grandpa retreated into a stony silence while the gloomy aunt did her best to manage the chaotic household. As for Shibani, she was nowhere to be seen.

  Bewildered, Biren wandered around the house looking for his mother. He had seen her last on the morning before he left for school. She’d looked fine and had been getting ready to wash her hair. That night he and Nitin had fallen asleep in Apumashi’s house. Somebody had carried them home late at night and they had woken up to find both their mother and father gone and the house full of crying people.

  All he knew was his father had died and his mother had disappeared and nobody talked about her. There was a different bedspread on her bed. He looked for her sewing basket, which was full of needles, buttons and colored threads wrapped around bamboo spools. He often rummaged in this basket looking for tacking pins to bend into fishing hooks. Her basket was nowhere. Panic set in. He began to fear his mother had abandoned him and his brother. Maybe they were bad boys and she didn’t want them anymore.

  Everything that belonged to his mother was gone. Her trunk of saris, her comb, her bangles, the brass container of vermillion she used for the part of her hair. Oddly, his father’s things remained exactly where they were before he had died. His lungi and vest were folded neatly over the clotheshorse. His books, English calendar, wooden clogs and even his comb with a few black hairs still stuck to them. It almost felt as if his mother had died and his father had gone away. Something was just not adding up, but Biren could not put a finger on it.

  In the evenings Biren felt the urge to walk down the road to meet his father, only to realize with a stab of pain that his father would never come home again. He wished he could talk to Apumashi. She would explain everything. He wanted to go to her house, but Granny would not allow him. “We are in mourning,” she said. “You don’t visit other people in their homes for thirteen days.” In desperation he imitated his mother and rooster called to Apu across the pumpkin patch but there was no answering call back.

  Nitin behaved strangely. He walked around with his hair uncombed and sucked his thumb. He started to wet his bed and after a while he stopped talking entirely. One day Biren saw him put a blue marble inside his mouth. The next thing he knew, Nitin had gulped. Biren rushed over and forced Nitin’s mouth open. He stuck his finger inside and moved it around but the marble was gone.

  “Granny!” screamed Biren, dragging Nitin to Granny’s room. “Nitin swallowed a marble!” To his shock, Granny did not seem to care.

  Biren wandered around in a daze holding Nitin tightly by the hand. His father and mother had both disappeared; now Nitin had swallowed a marble and was surely going to die and nobody cared. What was going on?

  Then out of the blue Nitin fell on the ground and threw a tantrum. He screamed and begged and promised never to play with his mother’s sari again. Nobody, except Biren, knew what the hysteria was about. Biren knew for certain their mother had not gone away because Nitin had spoiled her expensive sari. Finally, he could stand it no longer.

  “Where is my ma?” he asked his morose aunt.

  “She will be here soon,” said the aunt.

  “Where is Ma’s sewing basket?” he persisted. “Where are all her things?”

  “They have been disposed of,” said the aunt. “They are contaminated.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief. So that was the problem. His mother had caught an infectious disease and she was in quarantine, which is why nobody was allowed to see her. It was probably measles or chicken pox. Why didn’t they just say so? She would soon recover, and Apumashi would come to wash her hair again and they would laugh and eat chili tamarind in the sun.

  For now, he would have to take care of his younger brother. Biren invented little games for them to play and tried to teach Nitin his ABCs. Nitin solemnly chanted in a singsong with his finger on each letter: “A for pipra, B for cheley,” substituting the Bengali words for ant and boy, and Biren did not have the heart to correct him.

  The next day he combed Nitin’s hair, holding him firmly by the chin just as his mother used to do, and took him for a walk down the road.

  “Is Baba coming home today?” Nitin’s small face was bright with hope.

  “Not today,” said Biren. He wondered how much longer he would have to lie to his little brother. How could he explain anything when he was so baffled himself?

  A neighbor they only vaguely knew hurried down the road on her way home from the fish market. She stopped to ask how they were doing, but made no mention of their mother.

  “My mother is getting better,” he called after her. “Come and see her soon.” The neighbor just nodded and hurried along.

  Three days passed in a blur. The house was sickly with the smell of incense and dying tuberoses. Most nights Biren dropped off to sleep from exhaustion. In his dreams he saw black twisted smoke, and smelled burning ghee. He started awake with a great choking sensation, unable to breathe, unable to cry. Every sound was amplified in the night. The soft wheezing snore from his grandfather’s room, the rustle of a mouse scrambling on the thatch. One night, late, he heard a sound. It was same sound he had heard from Apu’s house the day his father had died: the low, moaning sound of an animal in pain.

  He crept out of bed, tiptoed out into the courtyard and stood beside the holy basil plant and listened. There it was again, louder this
time. The sound came from the direction of the old woodshed next to the taro patch. He walked toward the shed and could see the flickering yellow glow of a diya lamp through the slatted wooden walls. There was somebody inside. The sound was a singsong moan, rising and falling, regular and monotonous, almost mechanical. Biren inched up to the papaya tree, not daring to go any farther. Someone was quarantined in the shed, and she was in a lot of pain.

  Ma!

  He ran across the undergrowth to the shed. The door was locked.

  He rattled the lock. “Ma!” he whispered urgently. “Ma! It’s me.”

  The moaning stopped. He peeped through the slats and froze in terror. It was not his mother at all but a bald old man dressed in a white cloth sitting on the floor with his back turned.

  It was a ghost—the petni that Kanai spoke about!

  Biren thought he would suffocate with fear. He was about to step backward when the man turned his head around and looked at him. The face was dull and white, flat as the moon with bloodshot eyes.

  Biren stifled a scream, stumbled through the bushes and ran back toward the house. He flung himself down on his bed and lay there. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, his fingers dug into his palms; every muscle in his body was contorted with fear.

  That pale, flat face with its red eyes kept floating into his mind. He had no doubt the creature in the woodshed was his mother. She had stretched out her hand and he’d recognized her plaintive voice as she called his name.

  But what had happened to her?

  * * *

  He drifted off into a fitful sleep. Random choppy images swirled through his brain. He saw himself in a large field. The ground was strewn with damp white lilies and tiny pencils with broken points. There were so many broken pencils that they looked like scattered peanuts. Biren was bending down to examine the pencils when he heard something that sounded like the drone of bees in the distance. He looked up to see a crowd approaching. They were faceless, hairless people, neither men nor women, all dressed in white, moving toward him in a serpentine wave. As they drew closer, their hum turned into a mournful wail that looped over and over in a mounting crescendo. They trampled over the delicate lilies and left behind a brown, slimy waste. They headed toward the fish market and Biren followed them.

  Next he found himself in the fish market with his father. Biren reached for his father’s hand but came up with a fistful of coarse, white cloth. He panicked. Where was Baba? None of the people around him had any faces. To his relief, he saw the chicken man. Biren knew he could wait safely at the chicken stall and his father would surely find him. The chicken man acknowledged him with a friendly nod. He was in the middle of telling his customer the story of a man who contacted rabies after being bitten by a chital fish. Biren listened idly, thinking one did not get rabies from a fish bite. But he didn’t want to spoil the chicken man’s story. The chicken man stroked the beautiful black rooster on his lap as he spoke. The rooster’s yellow eyes were closed and it looked like it would purr like a cat. Its blissful expression reminded Biren of his mother’s face when Apu gave her a head massage.

  The chicken man finished his story. He took a puff of his bidi and, with the bidi still dangling between his lips, he placed both his hands around the rooster’s neck and broke it with a single, sharp twist. Then he held the bird down until its wings stopped flailing. Biren felt bile rise in his throat as he watched the chicken man chop off the rooster’s head, pluck the feathers, gut its entrails and tear out a small pink heart that was still pulsing. After splashing water from a bucket to wash off the blood, he shoved the heart, liver and gizzard back inside the chicken, trussed up the bird in a banana leaf and put it in the man’s cloth shopping bag. Then the chicken man counted his money, shoved it under his mat, rocked back on his haunches and smoked the rest of his bidi. Every time he drew in the smoke, he narrowed his eyes.

  Biren woke up clammy with sweat and lay in bed thinking. That was what had happened to his mother. In the same way the rooster was changed from a bright-eyed bird to three pounds of meat and bone in a banana leaf, his mother was stripped of her long hair, her colorful sari, her bright laugh and the kohl in her eyes. Dehumanized, she was just meat and bones wrapped in a white piece of cloth. She had become one of those cursed ones: a widow.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Biren returned to the woodshed again that night. Shibani was expecting him. She pressed her cheek to the wall and touched a finger to his through a gap in the wooden slats.

  “You came back, my son,” she whispered. “I think of you and Nitin all the time.”

  “What happened to you, Ma?” Biren cried in a broken voice. “Who did this to you? What happened to your hair?”

  Shibani touched her bald head. “Oh, I must look a sight, don’t I?” she said ruefully. “I have not seen myself, which is just as well. This is what being a widow is all about, mia.”

  “Did they cut all your hair off?”

  She nodded. “The priest shaved it.”

  “Why?”

  Shibani gazed at her son’s soft, troubled eyes. “It is the custom, mia. That is what they do to widows so they can never marry again.”

  “Why did they lock you here? Who gives you food?”

  She sighed. “This is my mourning period. I must be kept in isolation. Even when that is over, things will be very different. I want you and Nitin to prepare yourselves. You will not see much of me after I come back into the house. I will no longer be a part of the family. I have to cook my own food now. Eat alone and only once a day. I can never touch meat or fish or eat spicy food or even drink a cup of tea.”

  “What about chili tamarind?” asked Biren. He had not meant it to be funny, but he was relieved to see her old crooked smile.

  She looked away. “No chili tamarind,” she said softly.

  “When will Apumashi come to—” he was about to say “oil your hair” but stopped himself “—see you?”

  She sighed. “I will not be allowed to socialize with anyone. A widow is a cursed being. Married women with children and happy families like your Apumashi are not allowed to come near us. They fear our bad luck may rub off on them. My friendship with Apu is over, I’m afraid.”

  It was inconceivable! They were best friends; they told each other all their secrets. Had they not promised to live next door to each other forever? They had even planned to get their children married to one another, so that they could live together as one big happy family.

  Biren was beginning to feel desperate. His words came out in a rush. “What if...if I marry Ruby? What if Nitin marries Ratna? Then you will both be in-laws. You have to be friends.”

  Shibani regarded her son tenderly. His sweet, hopeful face, the feverish plea in his eyes. A tear coursed down his cheek. Biren dismissed it with a careless flick. Seeing this adultlike gesture broke her heart. Her sweet baby boy was growing up in front of her eyes.

  Biren’s chin trembled. “I will marry Ruby,” he declared with manly determination.

  Shibani was touched and amused at the same time. “Oh, you really want to marry Ruby, then?” She suppressed a smile. “So you think it is a good idea, after all, do you?”

  “No, but...”

  “I want you to listen to me, son,” Shibani said firmly. “Your father...” Her eyes filled with tears, but she controlled herself. “Your father and I did not bring you up to do things against your will. Marrying Ruby is childish talk. That is not the answer and that is not going to solve the problem. You must take care of your brother. Only you can explain things to him. Just do the best you can. Be there for him. I cannot be there for you both any longer. My life is over. Yours has just begun.”

  Biren’s thin veneer of adulthood cracked and he broke down with a cry. “Why do you say that, Ma?” He sobbed. “Why do you say your life is over? Are you going to die?”

>   “Shush, mia,” she whispered, touching his cheek with the tip of her finger. How she wished she could cradle him in her arms and wipe those clumped eyelashes with the end of her sari. “Of course I am not going to die. This is no time to cry. I am just trying to prepare you for what lies ahead. I will be here, but I will no longer be a part of your life. A widow does not have a position in the family. I will remain in the background and you may not see much of me, but I want you both to remember me—not the way I have become, but the way I used to be. You can come and see me when you wish, but you must promise not to do so out of sorrow or guilt. Come and see me when you have good tidings and we will rejoice together. I may be cursed as a widow, but I have been blessed as a wife and mother, and nobody can take that from me.”

  Through the slit in the wood, all Biren could see were her eyes. They burned with the unnatural brightness of anger at the injustice of it all.

  His mother may be trapped, Biren decided, but he was not. It would be up to him to set her free.

  He did not go straight back to bed. Rather, he sat on the kitchen steps by the pot of holy basil and hugged his knees, thinking. A big moon sailed high in the sky, weaving in and out of the clouds, sometimes bright, other times clumped and patchy. Biren’s thoughts churned deep and dark into his soul, trying to find glimmers of meaning through his sorrow. Surely there was something he could do.

  His throat caught in a strangled sob. What would his father do if he saw what had become of Ma? Surely he would do something? But Baba was dead. He was no longer there to protect her. Biren sat up a little straighter. He had a young brother to take care of. Nitin would grow up and have his own life, but what would happen to his mother? Would she become destitute like Charulata and be forced to beg under the banyan tree?

  He thought of Charulata. She had given him his name and painted it in the patterns of hopes and dreams. She must have seen in him the seed of a warrior. Baba said a warrior did not follow the dictates of others but his own conscience. Biren’s conscience told him the treatment of widows was inhuman and unjust and it should be condemned. He would fight for them.