In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  I turn and leave, from this house, from this city. I will never return.

  I will always wonder. If I had not taken my time, myself, away from my grandmother, Kamala would be here today. Except I was imprisoned by her strange love, fighting to be free. When Kamala came, I stepped away. And in doing so, saw my grandmother clearly. In doing so, I caused Kamala’s death.

  But I leave with a lightened heart, her terror following me. When at this last moment I see fear in my grandmother, I am almost happy.

  For this is how Kamala must have felt when this woman cut off her hair. Not when she stoned her. Not when she set fire to her.

  When she cut off her hair.

  The Most Unwanted

  Heat simmers thick in the air, although the sun set three hours ago, flatlining into the horizon with the chut-phut briskness of the tropics. One moment there was a smear of darkness, at the other a sudden deluge of it, revealing pale stars in the sky.

  Nathan walks to the verandah outside his quarters and squats on his haunches on the third step leading down, his hips moving smoothly into position as his thighs fold onto his shins. A beedi smolders between the fingers of his right hand. In a few minutes, he can feel the inky humidity of a Chennai night run sweat lines in the curve of his bare spine, pool damply into the waist of his white veshti. Somewhere, well beyond the patch of trees that line this engineering school campus, the horns of auto rickshaws, buses, and scooters howl on the road, accompanied by the crash of brakes and the shout of curses.

  The light is switched off on the verandah to keep away insects. Nathan puts the beedi to his mouth, pinching the unlit end between a nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger. He drags a mouthful of smoke. It swirls around in his mouth, rushes to fill his lungs, spews out of his nostrils. When he lowers his hand, a mosquito alights on his forearm, searching to plunge among the sparse hair. He lets it prod at him, settle to drink from his skin, and then, deliberately, lifts his other hand and smashes it into a mess of blood.

  Nathan sits alone outside his quarters, a one-storied armylike barrack, low and long, whitewashed after every five monsoons. Inside, he hears the soft hiss of the gas stove, the pop and spit of mustard seeds and curry leaves in hot oil, the sizzle as his wife seasons the rasam. The cooking rice wafts its starchy aroma over him. He brushes his face, and massages the back of his neck with a callused hand, easing the pain that lingers there. All the while he listens for the sound of the child, his ears bending back toward his rooms.

  Krishna Shiva-Rama-Lakshman.

  Named for every conceivable deity in the pantheon of Hindu gods. Blue-skinned Krishna, player of the flute, herder of cows, beloved of the Gopika maidens. Shiva, destroyer of evil, mendicant in the Himalayas, possessor of the wrecking third eye on his forehead. Rama, sent to exile by a wicked stepmother, who later, irresponsibly, sent his wife into exile. Lakshman, not a god, but brother of Rama and hence by association accorded that status. Who drew a simple line in the sand so potent, a demon could not cross it to abduct his brother’s wife.

  And so Parvati has named her child—Nathan’s grandchild.

  He listens again for the child. But the boy is quiet. Asleep already, perhaps? He had eaten buffalo milk and rice for his night meal, flitting around their two rooms and tiny verandah on his little sturdy feet, Parvati in pursuit. She had laughed in delight as she followed him with the stainless steel cup, pouncing on him, filling his unsuspecting open mouth with rice and sugar milk. “Eat, Krishna kanna.” Eat, apple-of-my-eye Krishna.

  The brown cotton string that holds the rolled-up tobacco leaf wisps into bits of smoke as the beedi burns low to the tips of Nathan’s fingers. With one hand, he shakes out another beedi from the packet and lights it with the frittering end of this one.

  He rubs his head. His hair is short, cropped close to his lean skull, scattered with gray. Each morning little stubbles of white decorate his chin before the razor whisks his face clean. His frame is small; Nathan has never been a big man. He will be sixty soon, and yet, his muscles flex tightly against his bones, lean from walking and riding a bicycle in his peon work. The sun has darkened his skin to so rich a mahogany that even his black eyelashes are swallowed by his face. If he smiles, two lines run alongside his mouth, deepening as the years pass.

  Ever since Krishna’s birth, Nathan does not smile very much.

  Krishna, his daughter Parvati calls this child. Unashamed, unrepentant, unembarrassed about giving him the name. There is a story Nathan now remembers about the baby-god Krishna who would steal butter from his mother’s churn. One day she chases him around the courtyard, accusing. He laughs, saying no I did not. Open your mouth, she says. Open your mouth so I can see for myself. Still laughing, the child opens his mouth. And there the mother sees— not traces of pilfered butter, but an image of the world. She draws back in wonder, in awe. Knowing this child of hers is no ordinary child, but an incarnation of Lord Vishnu come down to earth. At the time she does not even know that Krishna was not born of her, since he was brought to her bed and switched with her daughter as she slept, exhausted after childbirth. This was because he was unwanted too, by his evil uncle Kamsa who had wanted to kill him. And so the baby Krishna, born to one woman, brought up unknowingly by another, survived. The gods had wanted him to live, to grow, to battle his wicked uncle.

  When Nathan remembers this story about the baby Krishna, confused and angered as he seems to be almost every day now, his memories halt at that sentence—the baby Krishna was unwanted too … and yet he survived, just like Nathan’s grandchild.

  There is the slap of naked feet on the floor of the verandah. Nathan shifts his head slightly on a stiff neck, watching the movement out of the corner of his eye, without seeming to do so. Swamy, the watchman, comes out of his quarters and settles into a wooden easy chair sitting on the beaten earth outside. He belches loudly, patting his stomach. He yells for his wife to bring vetalaipaak. A few minutes later she comes out with a steel plate bearing betel nuts and leaves, sits on the dirt next to Swamy, and folds the nuts into the leaves, secures it with a clove. Nathan does not look at Swamy; he keeps his gaze away from him and straight toward the tamarind tree in the yard, now noisy with night crickets.

  Around Nathan, light spills in yellow rectangles from the verandah windows, from all the others’ quarters. Swamy, the watchman at the campus gates, puffed with importance at being able to deny entrance to whom he chooses. Vikram, the sweeper, who swirls his broom over the department offices, leaving brown dust under chairs and tables. Muthu, the gardener, who digs assiduously in the dry mud where nothing grows. Prashanth, the chai man—all he does is bring chai and coffee for the professors, making umpteen trips to the shop outside the campus and returning with a tray of clay cups balanced precariously on the back of his bicycle. Of course, this is a big campus, the biggest in the city, so there are other quarters for other department servants. But these quarters, attached to the Department of Electrical Engineering, are where Nathan has spent thirty-five years. In two rooms.

  And here, last year, Parvati brought the child Krishna. She did not ask Nathan or his wife permission for the name; they would not have given it anyway. Preferring to let the child be nameless, for giving him a name would mean putting a name to their shame.

  Swamy, the watchman, calls out to him. “Nathan sir, how are you? And your wife?”

  Swamy calls him sir because Nathan is not just the eldest of those who occupy these quarters, but, by profession, the highest rank. A peon does not soil himself with menial tasks. In Nathan’s barracks, he has precedence. This is something he has worked toward for many years, starting at the campus as a sweeper, then a chai man, then a watchman, and now finally, a peon.

  Now Nathan nods briefly in Swamy’s direction. Two years ago, before the child became public knowledge, he had status. Now these salutations are empty, meaningless—there is no real respect behind them, as though there is no more reason for Nathan to be able to hold his head high again with pride.

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nbsp; Swamy’s wife is all smiles, her eyes aglitter with malice in the darkness. Even with his back to them, Nathan knows this; it is as though her gaze lights up the darkened yard. He hears the rustle of her cotton sari as she nudges her husband with a thick elbow. Swamy grunts heavily, clears his throat, and asks, “And your third daughter? And the child? Everything is well in your house?”

  Nathan ignores him and looks at the tamarind, its fruit hanging heavy, brown with ripeness, and too high in the branches. When Parvati was a child she used to throw stones and rocks at the fruit to dislodge it from the tree and when it fell, she would gorge herself, carefully keeping the seeds. For the children of the barracks, the black smooth seeds, the size of peas, were currency. With them they traded for marbles, pieces of chalk, a broken slate, a rubber ball, flat stones for playing pittu, a ribbon for their hair.

  The dull ache Nathan has carried around flares into a bitter pain in his chest when he hears Swamy’s wife stifle a giggle. Even now, after three years, he has not learned to disregard what others say. Every effort has gone into making his face smooth and expressionless, of listening with reverence to what his betters have told him about Parvati and the child, of seeming not to care when his lessers like Swamy have slyly taunted him. But the ache does not go away.

  He remembers in the dark of the night when Parvati herself was born, their third girl child.

  His wife had gone for her confinement to her mother’s house in the village as usual and Nathan waited for the news. The postman who brought the yellow postcard to Nathan slapped it down in front of him with a “Here. For you.” Then he turned his back and went around the department giving the professors their mail.

  The previous Diwali, the postman had come to Nathan for his festival baksheesh for the first time. Nathan had not given him any, incredulous that a postman would ask a peon, when he had not begged even of the secretaries and typists. For this Nathan was made to wait, postcard in hand, the blue ink smudged with tan fingerprints, some of the words blotted with drops of ink. He could not ask the secretaries or the typists, they did not come from his village, would not understand the scribe’s handwriting, and spoke only English when they could. He followed the postman on his rounds of the college grounds, the principal’s office, the various engineering departments, the mess halls, the hostels named for peaks in the Himalayas—Kanchenjunga, Everest, Godwin-Austen, Kailash—and the professors’ houses on campus. Finally, in the evening, as the postcard crumpled and smeared with sweat, taking pity on Nathan’s pleading look, the postman hammered out the edges and read the writing in the village scribe’s unformed hand. We have a girl child, my respected husband. Only another girl child, but she is beautiful. If I may, I would like to call her Parvati.

  Nathan stood there, crushed of feeling. For this he had lowered his dignity all day long? The postman bared his teeth with a smile, still holding the postcard. He knew Nathan’s two older children were also daughters. So he smiled as if to say that if he had got his baksheesh at Diwali as was only right, the seed Nathan sowed within his wife would have grown into a boy child.

  “Come and eat,” a voice says. His wife stands close by his shoulder, close enough that the pleats of her sari stray by his skin. It is the way she touches him when they are in public. Not for them the blatant holding of hands, or mingling of fingers, or even, God forbid, the meeting of lips in full sight of everyone on the streets as Nathan has seen in two of the English films screened on campus in the open-air auditorium. He suddenly remembers the films and wonders if Parvati, sheltered and cloistered by him and his wife, had seen them. Was that why she had been … so … ?

  His voice is harsh. “Has she eaten?”

  “Of course not,” his wife says softly. “You know she will not eat before you. But your grandchild is fed. His little tummy is full; he is on his way to sleep.” She speaks in a low voice, so that, close as they are to Swamy and his wife, they will not hear this conversation.

  “How are you?” Swamy’s wife yells as they pass by her, deliberately overloud. Nathan’s wife ignores her.

  They sit as usual on the front verandah, where everyone else can see them. Nathan’s wife has spread a knitted jute pai on the concrete floor, and set out just one stainless steel plate and a steel tumbler with boiled water. This is because Nathan will eat alone—the women of his family have never joined him in the meal; they are there to serve him and then to eat after he has had his fill. Until the child Krishna came into his quarters, no one has eaten before Nathan in the house. Nathan’s wife first dots the outer rim of his plate with a jaggery payasam, so that he does not start his meal without a sweetened tongue. Then she heaps a mound of steaming rice in the center, ladles rasam over it, asks him how much of the potato curry he wants. She settles against the wall, watching him as he eats, anticipating second helpings of this, less of that.

  Nathan eats like a king, for in his house, he is a king. Even if he is only a peon at work. Even he is the father of only daughters.

  After Parvati there were no more children, and over the years Nathan grew accepting of the girls. They were a burden to be sure, all together, without the relief of a son. If Nathan had had a son, that son’s earned dowry would pay for his daughters’ given dowry. To earn this large dowry, the son would have to be educated somewhat, and have a good job, perhaps a peon at a large bank with air-conditioning, or personal peon to the managing director of some big company. For many years Nathan would conjure these ghost visions of the successful son he never had. Nathan would even painstakingly do some of the calculations or go to the department secretary to ask humbly for her to do the math. First, he would estimate education expenditures for the son, and add a little bribe for getting him a good job because that was necessary and a fact of life. Then he would add two dowries for his two older daughters (Parvati was supposed to be the son, so she was not counted in these grandiose schemes). The secretary would tell him what the total was and Nathan would add an extra ten percent to that amount for incidental expenses (one could never tell what Nathan might encounter as the children were growing up, the wretched girls might fall, or burn themselves in a kitchen fire, or some other demand would be made on his earnings). The total was a very nice sum and eased Nathan’s burdens for many hours.

  When in these reveries, he forgot that Parvati was their third child; and after that Nathan’s wife would not let him come near her without a condom, the chance of a son in their future be damned. He tried to reason with her, but her reasoning made more sense than his—she was tired of having children, saving for three dowries was enough, three was enough. Even the government said so. At this, Nathan stayed his arguments, for everywhere he went in the city, the government had family planning boardings picturing two adults and two children. “We are two, we have two.” Nathan and his wife already had three. But three girls? Even the government would pity him. Surely. He was being made to pay for some sin he had committed in a previous life.

  Nathan waits for the rice to cool on his plate, separating the grains so that the steam escapes from between them. He nods and his wife adds a dollop of curds on the rice, and another one, and yet another, until he holds his left hand flat across his plate, palm down, to say that it is enough. Nathan never speaks during his meals, and his wife does not expect him to. Instead she talks, feeding him little bits of gossip from the barracks, the happenings of their household, what the girls did, what they said.

  In the last three years, she has suddenly become mute, for she is unable to talk of their grandchild to him. She knows Nathan disapproves so greatly that she is afraid the food will curdle in his stomach if she mentions the child. But they live in two rooms, the child has been tottering around them, his little cries of joy and his tantrums fill the air—how does one ignore this? Pretend it does not exist? She sighs as she puts a piece of mango pickle next to the curds and rice. The mango piece falls from the spoon and small flecks of oil splatter on Nathan’s rice. His hand stops on its way to his mouth but he does not look u
p at his wife. Even that small action is a reprimand in itself. She busies herself with asking if he wants more curds, more pickle, more of anything. He grunts and at that moment, his grandson wails in the room.

  Nathan and his wife hear Parvati rise from her place in the other room and rush to her son. She croons to him. “Jo, jo, raja.” Sleep, my king. When she says that word, raja, her voice cracks and falls into a silence, but they can still hear her pat the child back to sleep. Nathan eats steadily, wiping his plate clean, licking his fingers. His heart is laden with hurt at his daughter’s slip of tongue in calling her son raja. For anyone else, this would be a common term of endearment, for her it is only shame. It is a pity, he thinks, that Parvati was not born a son—then none of this would be happening. Why, in the early years there had been nothing to indicate that such misfortune would befall them.

  Even as his head filled with unfulfilled son dreams after Parvati’s birth, Nathan worked very hard at his job at the Department of Electrical Engineering, and was always respectful to the professors. Their wives hired him in the evenings and on weekends when there was a function or a festival in the house. On the bicycle that the college had given him, he rode to the vegetable mandi early every morning for one professor’s wife who had fought with the grocer who wheeled his cart into the campus. Nathan took the bus to the train station to greet their relatives holding cardboard placards with names scribbled on them that he could not decipher. One professor did not send his children to the campus school, preferring a convent instead, so Nathan brought them back every afternoon by autorickshaw. Although he was long past his gardener status, he weeded gardens, mowed lawns, and with his meager carpentry skills even made tables and chairs on order. Nathan’s wife worked as a maid, sweeping and mopping houses, cooking at times, washing clothes and vessels.