In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  The three girls went to the campus school. By then, Nathan did most of his outside work for the wife of one professor in the department, Mrs. Rao. She told him that his daughters had to go to school, so he sent them, watching the money he had saved for their dowries dissipate into textbooks, pencils, school uniforms. What use was it to educate girls? He had himself never learned to read and write too much and yet he managed at his job well enough. All the girls were fit for was to cook and clean and bear children. His wife could teach them that.

  So at first, Parvati’s very presence was painful to Nathan, thinking as he did of the son she should have been. Later, he began to see that what his wife had said in the postcard was true. Parvati was a beautiful child. Her two older sisters were regular hoydens in some senses, too attentive to themselves. They preened in front of the cracked mirror in the second room before school each day. Their uniforms needed to be starched and ironed. Their hair had to be well oiled, neatly plaited down their backs, one curl imprisoned and stuck to the sides of their cheeks. They painstakingly outlined their eyes with kohl. The pottus on the center of their foreheads were dabbed on with one finger dipped in glycerin, then with a dusting of red vermilion to form a perfect large circle. Jasmine flower garlands, measuring two elbow lengths, were pinned to the back of their heads. These two girls were so careful of their appearance that they would return home from school with their faces as though freshly done, not one hair awry, not one smudge on their skins, skirts still holding pleats as though they had not sat down during the day.

  But Parvati was different from her sisters, and this Nathan saw when he allowed himself to take notice of her, and when his son fantasies seemed unlikely to come true. She did not have her sisters’ obsessions with themselves. She would rise early in the morning too, but to sit on the verandah outside, to play with the pariah dog in the compound, to tease the squirrels and crows with nuts and tamarind fruit. Then five minutes before she had to go to school, with his wife yelling at her, Parvati would don her uniform, comb her long hair and plait it speedily, and run out of the house to catch up with her sisters. By the time she returned home the jasmine pinned to her plaits would be brown with age, her hair would be flying about her face, her shirt would be untucked from her skirt, and mud would ride up her shoes and socks, turning them a dull brown. She did not seem to care about this.

  Over the years the girls grew up. They did not study beyond eighth standard; Nathan would not allow it, no matter what Mrs. Rao said. It was easy for her to say things like daughters should be educated and that she educated her one daughter. But Nathan saw that Mrs. Rao’s son went to college on the campus, to get a degree in engineering; her daughter just did a BSc in some science subject in a Chennai college. And then she was married to a doctor in the city. In Mrs. Rao’s world, her daughter had to have a college degree to be married. In Nathan’s world, if his daughters were too learned, they would not find a husband. Eighth standard was enough, and they could even read and write and speak some English.

  The two older girls were married to alliances that came from Nathan’s home village. Good alliances, considering that he had only daughters, for even that fact was a strain on marriage negotiations. Prospective in-laws had hummed and muttered at his fate; asked if the other girls were married, if they had had their children already, all the while really asking how much left over for this daughter, this girl you are offering us? One boy was even a bank clerk. It was more than Nathan could have hoped for, and the dowry he paid for that daughter was twice the other’s.

  Then only Parvati was left at home with them. When she finished her schooling (at thirteen), Nathan put her to work at Mrs. Rao’s house, the same work his wife did—cooking and cleaning and washing clothes and vessels. This Parvati did well, her hands fluid as she worked, a song lilting under her breath. She was a quiet child, did not speak much to her father or her mother, listened to them when they said something. She rose in the morning at six, went to work, came home to cook the lunch meal, and went back in the afternoon for two more hours of work. As she grew older, Nathan said she should come back to the barracks before the sun set, and obedient to his wishes, she did so.

  Nathan washes up over the dirt around the verandah, leaning over the perimeter of concrete as his wife upends a brass chombu filled with water over his hands; eventually, she asks, “Enough?” in a sharp-edged tone. She has also heard the word raja from her daughter’s mouth, and everything she forced herself to forget has returned.

  A shouting rage rises within Nathan because she dares to take her dissatisfaction out on him. He struggles to retain the shreds of his shattered dignity. He has never had to raise his voice at his wife, beat his daughters, lower himself by making noise in front of the others in the barracks. Well, only once he had to, but that was an anger like none else—it had swept through his blood, set him on fire, nearly killed him.

  He ignores his wife, ponderously silent as he pads down the verandah steps to the bottommost one, where he sits down. His wife brings him the vetalaipaak, and dutifully makes up a parcel of betel leaves and nuts. Nathan wedges the vetalaipaak between his back molars and his cheek and sucks the leafy juice into his throat. When the betel has softened and leaked out all of its redness, he will move it between his jaws, chew out the last of the juice, and then spit it out.

  By now, almost everyone in the barracks is outside on the verandah, squatting over their own steps, separated from one another by a few yards at most, but they all look ahead into the darkness of the tamarind tree, and if they talk, it is with low nighttime voices, fatigued and musical.

  Vikram, the sweeper in their barracks, had only one child, a boy named Raja, born a few months before Parvati. When Raja was born, Vikram went to the sweetshop outside the campus and bought jangiris for all of them. Eat, he had said, eat and make your mouths honeyed to fete the birth of my child. Nathan and his wife had obediently followed his instructions, and at the time, Nathan waited for his wife’s round belly to give him a son. He had already decided what he would buy at the sweetshop—gulab jamuns bursting with sugar syrup, aappams that flaked and melted to the touch, and palgova so thick and creamy it could be fed with a finger. No mere jangiris for his son.

  And this child Raja, called a king in the sweeper’s quarters, became Parvati’s favorite playmate. He had a mischievous face, thick swathes of hair that curled over his forehead, black eyes like an imp, a constant smile. When they were young, Parvati and Raja were inseparable, running to each other when they awoke, sitting together shoulder-by-shoulder, climbing the tamarind tree, fighting with the other children, defending only each other. Raja went to the campus school too, but all the way until twelfth standard.

  In the beginning, Nathan did not like this friendship between Parvati and Raja, mostly because Vikram was a sweeper. His wife told him to let the children be, they were young, they knew little of these class distinctions. But even his wife did not like it much, Nathan knew, for she would keep Parvati indoors when their relatives from the village came to visit and only let her out when they had left, so they could not see who she associated with.

  When Raja finished his school, the Department of Mechanical Engineering hired him as a peon. Just like that, no trials as sweeper or gardener or watchman—he went directly to peon, albeit a junior peon. It galled Nathan, but what could he do about it, other than watch Vikram gloat with pride at his son’s position in life?

  In these last years of Parvati’s working and Raja’s going to finish his schooling, a change had come over both of them. As was only right, Nathan decided. They were growing up, children no longer, and it would not have been correct for them to play together as they once had. Parvati was suddenly shy of Raja, and Nathan watched with foreboding as her eyes would glance to the left, toward Vikram’s quarters, flushing when Raja came out whistling a film song. She had never learned to contain her emotions; in that she was still a child, presenting a naked face to the world, hiding nothing.

  And then for t
he first time in almost all the years that they had been married, Nathan and his wife had a conversation. This was not just a command from Nathan to his wife, a comment from her to him—this was an exchanging of views. For in Nathan’s world, the rules were so simple an idiot could understand them. Men and women married for convenience; if a child were ill, they talked about doctors or medicines; when a child was to be married, the man’s opinion held sway on the rightness of alliances. And for his part, he never interfered in the cooking, although he had the authority to ask for specific dishes to be cooked, and to his liking. But now, with Parvati, Nathan was suddenly bereft, and wanted counsel even from his wife. Because there was no one else he could really turn to.

  He and his wife talked at night, when they were sure Parvati was asleep. There could be no alliance between Parvati and Raja. It would simply not do. Not just for the class matter, but also they were of a different caste. For Nathan this was very important. It defined who he was, and stepping out of the caste was something only the rich and famous and indifferent did. Something Mrs. Rao would have blithely done—if such an opportunity for riches through marriage had presented itself to her for either her daughter or her son—and have passed it off as being modern and living with the times.

  Parvati and Raja seemed to keep away from each other, as though knowing what their parents wanted. But Nathan’s dislike of Raja grew to a loathing. He was an arrogant young man, and his mouth was constantly pursed in a whistle, until the sound frittered away Nathan’s nerves. Raja’s body was compact, his stomach flat with youth. His eyes were too hot, his childhood smile lingering in them when he looked at Parvati. And Nathan saw his daughter glance back, wistfully sometimes, when sweat drenched the back of Raja’s khaki polyester uniform and defined muscles along his spine. For one year, they looked at each other. Just that.

  “Appa.” Parvati’s voice is barely audible over the sound of the crickets chirping in the tamarind tree.

  “What is it?” Nathan asks grimly.

  “Amma forgot to give you some payasam. Here.” She proffers a steel cup with the warm payasam, and then, when Nathan does not move, brings her arm around into his field of vision. That hand trembles suddenly, and the payasam slops around in its container. The glass bangles on her wrist meet in a tinkling sound.

  In the beginning, Nathan would not even allow her to call out to him with that word, Appa. Father. In the beginning, he would not talk with her, or acknowledge that she was there. He had held himself rigid with distaste when he heard her voice or saw her, frowned when she spoke, never met her gaze, never even looked at her. It was two years before Nathan could look upon his daughter Parvati again. And when he did, the roundness of her face surprised him. He had thought the immense tragedy that had befallen them, because of her, wretched girl, would have thinned her cheeks, laid hollows under her eyes, created the gauntness of guilt. But no, Parvati looked the same as she had, placid and content, the child Krishna in her lap, her smiles disappearing into her ears when she looked upon him.

  There was something endearing about that smile to Nathan, much as he tried to argue himself out of it. And so little by little, he had begun to talk to her again. In commands mostly. Heat water for my bath. Or, Go call your mother. Or, Take that bawling child away. She blossomed under even so little an affection from him, and his heart filled to choking with grief again. Why, he had thought. Why.

  “Appa.” This time Parvati’s voice is bold. “I heated the payasam again. Drink it soon, or it will cool and you will not like it.”

  Nathan eyes the cup, held in front of him with a hand that shakes no longer. The bangles are stilled of their clinking music, the forearm is steady, muscled. Parvati has thick hands and stubby fingers and a layer of grit decorates the edges of her short fingernails. She wears a cheap imitation gold ring on the little finger of her right hand. Nathan never bought her gold jewelry as he did for his other daughters when they got married; he never even gave her new clothes when Krishna was born.

  He accepts the cup with a grunt and drinks the payasam through the left side of his mouth, away from the vetalaipaak stewing on the right side, tucked over his gums. The sweetness of jaggery, mashed dal, cardamom, and boiled milk soars over his tongue, and he thinks suddenly that the payasam has never tasted so good before.

  “Where is he?” he asks, as he returns the cup to Parvati.

  She takes a long time to answer, and what her expression is, Nathan cannot tell, for he still sits facing out into the yard, with his back to her. But it is the first time he has asked after the child; the very first time he has admitted to the boy’s presence.

  “Asleep,” she says. “He has eaten well for his night’s meal. Now he sleeps, my Krishna.”

  “Go,” Nathan says, as an immense fatigue comes over him. He lights a beedi and smokes it in silence, waiting for Parvati to leave. She does walk away eventually, the long pleats of her sari whispering on the concrete floor. The sound scratches on Nathan’s eardrums. She is too young, he thinks, to have graduated already to a sari, because of that child Krishna—because he made her a mother.

  While it has been somewhat easy to ignore Parvati in the last two years, the child has infringed upon Nathan with his singing voice, his howls of imagined pain, his concentrated reciting of the nursery rhymes that Parvati has taught him. And then there were those unguarded moments when Nathan would feel a tiny hand tugging at the border of his veshti, or look up when the boy clasped his arms around Nathan’s knees as he laboriously read the Tamil newspaper. Then all he could do was to shout for his wife, or more lately for Parvati, and say, “Remove him. Now.”

  When Parvati has gone back to the kitchen to wash and put away his payasam cup, Nathan begins to breathe again, until the ache blankets and smothers him. He rubs a hand over his chest, hoping to ease the pain. For three years this despair has persisted within him. When will it finally leave? When will he be free? Why had he not been more aware of what was happening with his daughter? But all Raja and Parvati had done was to glance at each other with an immense yearning.

  Nathan went to speak with Vikram. This must not go on, he said of the atmosphere of longing. Vikram knew, and he knew that no marriage could come of this.

  “But what to do, sir?” Vikram asked, his tone respectful, though laid under with a lightly mocking mirth. He did not have to worry too much, he had a son. A male child could do no wrong. If anyone had to be protected, it was Nathan’s daughter, and that was not Vikram’s problem. They smoked a beedi together, sitting outside the barracks on their haunches. This was the first and only time Nathan talked publicly with Vikram. “Get your Parvati married, sir,” Vikram said. Nathan nodded and went away, thinking about what the sweeper had said.

  For the next few months, his wife and he cast around for alliances—from the village, from the neighboring barracks, and even from the Tamil newspaper’s matrimonial advertisements section. But nothing came through, mostly because they did this desultorily, without too much enthusiasm. The reasons were myriad. Suddenly, they were both afraid of a house without a child, so used were they to having a third person around. And Parvati brought in some money from her maid’s work. And the older daughters (and these were expected events) had children from their marriages. With each child, they came back to the barracks for their confinements and so there were hospital bills, doctor fees, new clothes for each birth, gold bangles for the babies, amulets of gold to be strung on black rope around the babies’ waists to ward off the evil eye. It was, Nathan thought, an unending penance for having had daughters.

  Then Raja got a new job—the job Nathan had coveted for his ghost son—as a peon for the managing director of a local foundry. He left the barracks and went to live in his own quarters in the city. A sudden space formed around them all and Nathan breathed more easily, did not dread returning home after a day’s work, did not have to anticipate trouble. Parvati moped. Her eyes grew heavy with almost constant tears, and she took to refusing food, eating only sparingly,
until she grew thin and wasted. Nathan’s wife worried about her, retreating into an unnatural silence. But Nathan did not see the gloom over their quarters. He did not see, although he should have, that Parvati wore her thick-skirted pavadai higher and higher on her waist, covering something. Six months passed and one day, Nathan saw Parvati put a hand to her aching back as she squatted on the floor chopping up a cauliflower for curry. It was such a simple gesture, that massaging touch to the back, but one thronging with meaning.

  His heart stopped and then flooded back into action. How? Where? When? Why did this have to happen to him? He ran to Parvati and grabbed a handful of her hair. Lifting her by her hair until the skin peeled away from her skull, he slapped her. Over and over again. Witch. Bitch. How could she? Nathan’s wife came running out of the other room and shoved him against the wall. Please. Let her be. She did not know what she was doing. How could she have known?

  He turned on her, enraged. She knew. She had known and not told him. He slapped his wife, knocked Parvati down, rained blows on her. Nathan’s wife heaved herself up and covered her daughter. Don’t, she yelled. You cannot hit her when she is in this condition. Think of the child. Think of her, think of your child.

  “She is no longer my child.” Nathan kicked at his daughter’s legs, pulled his wife away, and dragged his daughter out to the verandah and to the gate near the tamarind tree. “Get out! I don’t ever want to see you again. Get out and stay out.”

  By this time, the barracks were full of the others, leaning out of their windows, filling the verandah, watching goggle-eyed. Someone ran to Mrs. Rao, who left her dinner and came in a hurry. “Nathan, stop this!” she shouted.

  Nathan was so saturated with rage that his limbs shook violently, and when he could not hit Parvati, he began to bang his fist into the bark of the tamarind tree’s trunk until his fingers were bloody. And then, finally, his anger abated, his hands began to flare with pain, and the shivering stopped.