Someone Else's Garden

by Dipika Rai

  The girls look at each other, trying to decide who will speak first. Finally they shrug. They have walked miles to get here, they are exhausted, and plan to reserve their energies for the one person they have to impress. Lata Bai.

  From the doorway Mamta can see her mother talking to a child no older than Manno. She feels that motherly love take over. The roles are once again reversed. She is the protector, Lata Bai the protected.

  ‘Amma,’ she calls from the doorway.

  Lata Bai looks up. She now wears white with pride, starched and crisp, brightly clean. She is finally content to be a widow with Seeta Ram dead and gone more than three years. ‘I will come to you,’ she says to Mamta. ‘I must finish here.’ Lata Bai has become consistently busy in the way of a city entrepreneur. There is a frenetic energy to her now, a sense that time is too short.

  Mamta’s eyes soften with love. ‘Sometimes I think it is her breath alone that keeps this place running. She never tires,’ she says to Eyebrows. ‘Amma has found her place at last. Jai ho Devi,’ says Mamta. It is close to one year since Lata Bai took a loan from the manageress of the Bank of India to establish a pickling shed at Mahila Sangat. ‘Let’s talk to her later. Come, I’ll show you the rest of the buildings.’ They start walking through the vegetable garden toward the rose bushes. Just above the flowers, Mamta can see two heads, one belonging to Kanno and the other, a new girl.

  How can she describe the feeling of being with these women plucked from their miserable existences and planted caringly in this colourful flowerbed full of fragrance and love? Like the flowers, she too is nourished every time she comes here with exactly what she needs: hope and acceptance everywhere, each minute of every day.

  The girls emerge from behind the bushes into fenugreek plants lapping at their ankles. Kanno puts her arm round Bela, the glassy-eyed new girl who arrived last week. Even from the distance Mamta can see the ligature marks on Bela’s ankles just above the fenugreek.

  ‘Her ankles? Those marks?’ ‘Slow.’ Asmara Didi circles her finger round and round by her temple. ‘Her father drugged her and tied her to the doorpost to prevent her from smearing her own shit on the walls. God, what is one to do? If her mother hadn’t come to Lata Bai in tears, the girl would still be there. You should see her hips: sores the size of lotus flowers. She couldn’t straighten up, but Kanno fixed that, put a board up her back as she slept.’

  A board up her back? Mamta winces, Eyebrows marvels, Asmara Didi laughs. They all acknowledge the averting of tragedy in their own ways.

  ‘Now you can’t get her to let go of Kanno’s hand!’ Asmara Didi says. ‘Bela talks, and Kanno listens. She says everything into her ear. There . . . there, look, there she goes again.’ Bela’s mouth is close to Kanno’s ear. Kanno has both her hands over her mouth, to stifle a giggle or a scream?

  ‘I wonder what they talk about.’

  ‘Gope.’

  ‘Gope?’

  ‘Wants to marry Kanno, silence and all.’

  ‘Marry her?’

  ‘Why, Mamta, yes, a love marriage.’

  ‘Devi jai ho,’ they say together.

  Mamta notices the jeep resting in the sun, its paint peeled so thoroughly that no one can tell what colour it once was.

  She twitches. She dreads her brother-in-law’s rare visits, which leave her feeling unclean, vulnerable and frightened. Ram Singh taunts her by never speaking to her directly and still refuses to acknowledge Manno, continuing to refer to him as his brother’s bastard in spite of their marriage. The older woman takes her hand.

  ‘Oho, you’re not over that still. How long have you been married? I keep telling her that that man cannot do anything to her, still she is afraid,’ Asmara Didi says to Eyebrows.

  ‘In his eyes I can never be one of them. I am not even worthy of being Manno’s father’s rakhale, let alone his wife.’

  ‘He doesn’t matter. He doesn’t hold up the sky for you, Lokend Bhai does. Remember, don’t let people tell you who you must be,’ says Eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve left Prem with those machines. What a gem he is, that brother of yours, he’s in his element amongst all that twisted metal! Now what have you girls been plotting all this time?’ asks Lokend, joining his wife. His breath is short and he sucks wind into his belly through his teeth.

  Mamta restrains the urge to hold out her hand to him and forgets to breathe herself.

  ‘I was just telling her not to let your brother bother her so. He does it because he can get away with it. Isn’t that the truth? You tell her.’

  Lokend looks to the jeep. ‘My brother can be a hard man, don’t let him upset you,’ he says, putting his arm round her. ‘These are the things of the body, the habit of the mind. Mamta, you are something else,’ he whispers in her ear.

  She releases her breath; Lokend’s words bring her great solace. Even a little of his knowledge protects from great fear. That perhaps is his biggest gift to her.

  Now that there is time to take a good look at the two of them, Eyebrows can see that Lokend is infinitely weaker than when they lived at her dispensary. She can also see that Mamta is infinitely stronger.

  Ram Singh is lounging on the veranda in the shade drinking tea from a cup balanced in a saucer.

  ‘Bhaia. What brings you here?’

  Ram Singh looks up, shading his eyes to see who addresses him, even though he knows the voice well. Mamta closes her eyes for long enough for it to become a mixture of a blink and a ponder.

  Ram Singh looks into his brother’s face. There is a debate going on in his head, anyone watching can see that. He is afraid to say anything, to give himself away. Suddenly he thrusts a piece of paper folded in three into Lokend’s hands. The paper is thick and stiff, stained brown in several places, official. Mamta can see the sturdy three-headed lion embossed on the very top. ‘For you. Of course, he left it to you.’

  ‘Left what to whom?’

  Ram Singh turns around to give Mamta the eye. He will not tolerate such an interruption from a wife, any wife, let alone a once-kept woman.

  ‘For you,’ he talks exclusively to Lokend. ‘Read it.’

  ‘Oho, it’s so official. Just tell me what’s in it.’

  ‘He left it to you.’ Since his father’s death, Ram Singh has held on to the deed. If there was any other way, he would not have brought it to his brother’s attention today, but he has come up against an infuriatingly incorruptible government servant who will soon mail an official letter to Lokend informing him that as the owner of the Big House he is liable for all government back taxes.

  ‘The Big House, Bapu left it to you.’ Inwardly and outwardly Ram Singh retreats into himself, gathering strength to attack. His shoulders hunch over his chest as if preparing to swallow his heart. His eyes narrow. Then he has to look away. The poison possesses him.

  Lokend gives his brother the dignity of an oblique look, then he folds that precious piece of paper over and over to just the right thickness and places it in his pocket. ‘No one needs to know. It’s big enough for all of us. Let bygones be bygones.’

  Chapter 21

  LOKEND PASSES AWAY IN THE BLUE room beneath the picture of Ganesha painted by his mother. Mamta clings to her husband’s hand as it grows cold. As she guides Lokend’s soul out of the Big House, just as she might an honoured dinner guest, she becomes acutely aware of her own mortality. In that instant she has her first taste of how her husband lived his life, in inspired splendour, each and every moment of it. She is able to shed her sorrow like an old skin, and it is she who comforts the inconsolable Asmara Didi, Gope and Eyebrows.

  Asmara Didi bathes the body, Manno lights the pyre, Ram Singh cracks the skull. This time the funeral is different from the last funeral conducted in the courtyard of the Big House. There are hundreds of mourners present, many of whom Mamta doesn’t know. People Lokend unknowingly helped, people he unconditionally loved. The number of policemen attending the last rites is astounding.

  Two weeks later a baby girl is born to
the widow Mamta. Kamla provides her expert services to the mother, who delivers her baby quietly and quickly.

  There was a time when Love seemed like the biggest word to fill, but not any more. She stopped asking ‘Why me?’ long ago. She is certain that the lines etched in her palms include one, the thickest, most visible one, for him. She continues to grasp his memory as firmly as her destiny.

  She knew it would happen, had prepared herself for it the day their hands touched over his hospital bed, him just alive enough to feel everything the more intensely. In fact she was so prepared that she’d never wished the end closer or farther, just accepted with an equanimity he would have approved of.

  And now she is a widow, his widow, in widow-white for the rest of her life. All other trappings of marriage are put away – her hair is washed and oiled, the red dust in her centre parting scrubbed out with ash from her husband’s funeral pyre, her toe ring resting neatly in a tied-up napkin, her bangles smashed at the Red Ruins like other widows’ before her . . . But what of her memories, more lasting than any dust, toe ring or bangle? Where will she put her memories?

  She will at first be a miser, hoarding her memories, never speaking of their union, using them only to return to her potential self. Later, much later, because there will be no service of tears, no absolution through grieving, she will understand that life isn’t exclusively about loss, that you don’t start dying from the day you were born, that longevity isn’t dictated by the time of your death but on how you lived your life; and she will realise that she is healed, that she was always whole, and that once and for all we can transform the past, not in how it happened, but in how well we learned from it. After all, it is in the lessons that the healing begins.

  In the minds of others, for a long time the widow Mamta will remain the appendage of her man, a thing without the right to exist on its own. But many long days after his death, they will one day seek her out for advice; she will have somehow become her own person without ceremony.

  And so, in the dusty little village of Gopalpur, where rigid social customs govern not only the actions of its people, but some say the ripening of the grain itself, Mamta will inject an element of uncertainty, a tiny seed of perhaps-things-can-change, which will allow other women to dream their own astonishing dreams.

  The Smell of Wet Earth

  Chapter 22

  ‘SHANTI, YOU HAVE TO BLOCK ME.’ He thrusts the lid into her hands and jumps back on split feet with a stick in both hands, ready to strike. His little sister is unconvinced. The lid clatters to the floor.

  ‘Mam . . . Mammo,’ she calls him Mammo, the ‘n’s still out of her reach. She puts her arms out to him to be carried. Shanti is devoted to her brother.

  ‘Where’s your amma?’ Eyebrows enters the Big House with a flourish.

  She takes Shanti on her knee. Shanti likes the smell of her aunt; clean, like tooth powder. ‘This is for you –’ Eyebrows hands her a sweet and a toy stethoscope whose tubes you can break but not bend. ‘Tell your amma there’s someone to see her.’ She talks to the boy as if he were her own.

  ‘What’s for me?’ ‘A hug first, then go tell your amma, and then I’ll show you.’ He won’t hug her. He won’t hug anyone. He misses Lokend even more than his mother does.

  Eyebrows holds up a water pistol. He puts out his hand for the toy. She quickly snatches it away. ‘Go call your mother. You’ll need this to drench your sister,’ she teases him, revealing the muzzle from under her arm. The boy stands his ground, then finally calls out, ‘Amma, Amma.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean like that, go call her nicely.’

  ‘Amma, Amma,’ he repeats.

  ‘Uffo, what’s the rush? Hell isn’t going anywhere,’ says Mamta, running down the stairs. For the first few months Mamta tiptoed around the Big House as if she didn’t belong. But now, having planted both her children’s umbilical cords under the mango tree to make sure they would return lifetime after lifetime, at last she accepts it as her rightful home.

  ‘Neither is heaven,’ Eyebrows informs her friend. ‘There’s someone to see you. Rani,’ says Eyebrows, virtually pushing the woman into the room.

  ‘Hello, Rani.’ This one is silent. Usually they start talking fast the minute they walk in the door.

  ‘Amma.’ The woman looks quickly to her face and then to the floor.

  Mamta peers into the glaring light outside, expecting to see the woman’s mother. ‘Yes, Rani.’

  ‘Amma.’

  ‘This is Rani. Rani. Remember her? Rani? Your daughter,’ says Eyebrows.

  ‘Shanti?’

  ‘No, the other one. Your stepdaughter. The one you left behind.’

  Mamta sits on the edge of Bibiji’s chairs. ‘Rani?’ The smell of saffron, a dangling nose ring, the money, flapping slippers, mile after mile of dust, and finally the electric poles.

  ‘Amma.’ It is a woman’s voice. There is nothing familiar in the voice, the sound, or the image. It should have been a young girl with snot running into her teeth. Rani may have changed, but Mamta has hardly changed. To Rani there is everything familiar in the woman standing before her with a toddler swinging off the lower pleats of her sari. ‘Amma.’

  The child squeezes herself behind her mother and starts kicking her back. ‘Amma,’ she chants, kick, ‘Amma’, kick, ‘Amma.’ Mamta doesn’t want to hear that word in the presence of Rani, the daughter she left behind.

  Eyebrows takes the girl’s arm, and sets her down in a chair.

  Then she scoops Shanti into her arms from behind Mamta’s back. Holding her face forward like a soiled cat, she takes her to the kitchen, where she will entertain both children with the help of Kamla.

  ‘I didn’t know where to find you,’ says Mamta.

  ‘It’s all right,’ replies Rani in that voice of the downtrodden who cannot accept anything good in their fate.

  ‘No, no, it’s not. I tried. We both tried, Manno’s father and I.’

  ‘They said they would beat him to death if he didn’t pay them soon. He said he’d sell one of mine so he could pay them off, but he fell sick and died.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me, I ran away.’

  ‘Where?’ The question out in the open, Mamta puts her hand to her mouth and shakes her head, she doesn’t want any answers, doesn’t want to delve too deep. The guilt is making her sick. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive,’ says the girl with everything to forgive.

  ‘So how did my friend find you?’

  ‘I found her. I’ve known about you for a long time. I should have told you about his death, so you could have got married. Yes, we heard about that. There isn’t a soul in Gopalpur who doesn’t know about that.’ There is some acid in her tone, a need to hurt. ‘I should have told you, you could have been married sooner.’ Mamta feels the knife twist.

  She deserves it; for sure she deserves it. She is back in her husband’s hut, with her foot poised in the door of maturity, holding on to Rani for companionship. Tell no one, we will run away together and be safe forever. She’d said those words. Yes, she deserves it.

  ‘Are you well? You can stay here. You will stay here with me. You must meet my mother. Oh, Rani, you will be so happy here. Come, you will sleep in the blue room tonight. Upstairs. Next to me. My mother-in-law decorated the walls of it herself. It is beautiful. Oh, Rani, we will be so happy here together. Forgive me. I should have come back, but I can’t even begin to tell you how it was. No direction, no hope, no safety till Manno’s father came along. Forgive me,’ she says, her exuberance lye soap for lifelong guilt.

  Dinner is a solemn affair. There is seriousness to their happiness, an acknowledgement of Devi’s divine hand in bringing them together.

  ‘You two have much to talk about,’ says Eyebrows, stretching after an unusually heavy meal. ‘I must get back to the Sangat. Good thing I brought the bicycle. Three were brought in today, they will all sleep in my room.’ Mamta knows Eyebrows is talking about the babies res
cued from the dumpster. Some mothers pretend their babies are born dead so they can throw them in the garbage. Mamta shudders with guilt. The babies rescued from the rubbish have more of a chance than she gave Rani.

  ‘Tell Amma I will come to the Sangat tomorrow.’ It is Mamta’s job to make sure the cement is mixed properly. Her shoulders ache from carrying Shanti at the mixer all day, but she never complains. What do they say? A mother’s arms are never tired. She pushes back her chair and stands up. Rani, following her stepmother’s actions closely, also stands up.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Ram Singh always appears at this time for his meal, just before she leaves the public downstairs to go to bed.

  In deference to her husband’s unspoken wishes, Mamta is civil with her brother-in-law. They haven’t fought since Lokend’s death, and have managed to somehow carve out their own separate orbits at the Big House. ‘This is my friend. My friend Rani.’ The women look at each other. It isn’t a lie, but it is so far from the truth that it could be one.

  He nods without looking up from his thali. He has made a tacit agreement with himself to be dispassionately satisfied with his loneliness. He will never have a legal heir, because the Big House is lost to him forever.

  ‘We are going upstairs. Rani is staying.’ She could never have dared say those words to him before. No explanation, just three words: Rani is staying.

  * * *

  The true dawn reveals an old cracked photo of herself as a young girl and Lata Bai lying next to a steaming cup of tea. She’d never forgotten that photo, the one from her memory box. The one she’d left behind in the dip of Rani’s bed when she ran away, the one that Rani carried with her all these years.

  Some time while she slept, Rani slipped back into the night, disappeared from sight.

  Mamta looks into her cup. Her face still, even thoughtful, resigned, like her stepdaughter’s heart must have been last night. Help me, she thinks, and turns around, seeking his eyes. The feeling of being watched over is strongly with her, but before she can grasp it fully, it is gone like a shiver on a warm day, leaving behind the reality of her loneliness.