In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  I look down at myself. The aroma of rose petals rises from my now perspiring skin. I have a sudden vision of being bathed by a female slave this morning. Her touch is soft as she pours warm misting water over me, and then soaps my skin. I can feel the brief, metallic caress of her gold rings. Then comes the massage with an attar of roses. And then the dressing. I am clad in a white silk dhoti, wrapped around my waist in neat pleats. My chest is bare and across it lies the sacred thread of the Brahmins. My feet are in leather hide sandals; amulets of gold weigh down my arms.

  A small, polite cough is directed at me and I turn to find a shopkeeper standing outside his shop.

  “Will you come in, sire?”

  I nod and he lifts a cotton blind to let me pass into the cool darkness of the shop. I peer over the low counter to look into a mirror. I like to do this when I travel. My breath hushes at the evenness of my features. No man, not even my original self, was so … beautiful. A gleaming, well-oiled crown of hair sits on my head. My eyes are a bright ebony, my lips sensuous, but not enough to be effeminate. There is no question about it; this assignment will be pleasurable. I am what is in these times known as a gentleman of leisure.

  When I smile at my image, perfectly chiseled teeth smile back at me, and two dimples deepen my cheeks. Women must find me delightful; I have every intention of being delighted by them. Why not? When I return to my time, all I have energy for is to rest before traveling again. All dalliances must be conducted during my travels; besides, when the time comes the assignment will pull me in. I have little choice in that. Sometimes the assignment will literally claw me from the arms of a beautiful woman in the form of an irate husband who bursts in on us and who is to be annihilated. So I enjoy myself when I can.

  “What would you like, sire?” the shopkeeper asks, his head bent in deference.

  I know the answer even as he speaks. There is an inner programming that even I am not conscious of, but which guides me to the right responses, which keeps me safe in this whirlwind I live in.

  “I hear you have a jewel in your keeping.”

  “Which one?” he says, gesturing around the dim shop. His cases display ornaments of every kind in gold and silver, sparkling with diamonds, emeralds, garnets, pearls, and rubies. I touch one magnificent necklace, and feel a longing for it. But this is not why I am here.

  “A special one,” I reply, “with the power to drive a man to madness.”

  “Ah,” he says, nodding, his hands coming together in contemplation. When he looks up, his decision has been made.

  “This way, please.”

  He leads me to a curtain at the back of the shop. We step through it and, leaving the heated street and dingy shop behind, I am transported to another world. We are in a square courtyard belonging to the house behind the shop. Open verandas run along the courtyard leading to various carved wood doors. Two massive mango trees spread their pink spring-flowered branches over the yard. Water gurgles with an afternoon hush into a small pond in the center. A tulasi plant, sweating out its intense fragrance, stands in one corner in a diamond-edged stone pot. I see a few rabbits nibbling on the grass and a doe lifts its head to stare at me with an unblinking, wide gaze.

  But all this comes to my subconscious. My conscious mind, my eyes, are drawn to the stone bench under one of the flower-laden mango trees. I draw in a sharp breath through a throat that suddenly chokes. She is, I think painfully in my fast-fogging brain, a jewel that would drive a man mad.

  The woman, the goddess in my mind, sits quietly on the bench, the sun dappling her through long mango leaves. On her lap is an earthenware pot and next to her are small jars of paint pigments. I watch, mesmerized, as with a graceful hennaed hand, she dips a brush into one of the jars and with even, sure strokes paints the rim of the pot in intricate circles. The doe wanders near her curiously. She puts out an absentminded hand and it nuzzles her palm. My stomach ties in knots. Lucky doe, I think; what I would not do to lay my face in that palm.

  Suddenly, the doe rears away from her, its head whipping around in my direction, and retreats behind the tree. I must have made a sudden movement, but so frozen am I in my thoughts, I do not even realize it. The shopkeeper nudges me slowly and I turn to him in a trance. He stretches out his hand in an age-old gesture of want. I now feel the weight of the chamois bag tied around my waist, hanging heavy against my thigh. Without looking at him, I find the knot and untie the bag. It is his without counting, for money—this money—is worthless to me anyway, and for her nothing can be too much. I barely notice him depart as I descend the stone steps into the courtyard. She looks up at me then.

  “Hush,” she says, her voice sending excruciating goose bumps up my arm. “No slippers, please.”

  I obey, slipping off my sandals, that voice still echoing in my numbed ears. How did she know I was coming?

  She beckons and that thought is forgotten. I move toward her. On the stone pathway, pebbles bite into the soles of my feet; in the grass, I sink ankle-deep and dewy blades whisper against my skin. The doe, hiding behind the tree, her nostrils quivering in fright, flees on elegant legs. The rabbits leap behind a stone and stand there, their fur on edge. I always have this effect on animals. It is the only glitch the programming has, and many a time has almost revealed us Chosen Ones as unusual beings in whatever time we travel to.

  But the woman does not notice, and I continue to approach her. Her image is to me a jumble of impressions. The skin is poured cream. Her eyelashes fan down over liquid eyes. Her eyebrows arch like the wings of a dove. Her hair is a color the midnight sky would envy, blue-black and straight, shimmering to below the end of her spine. Her tiny waist, the heave of her breasts, the smell of snowy jasmines threaded in a garland around her neck—all make me quicken my step.

  When I sit down next to her, a wave of nausea hits my body. When it passes, I look up in wonder. Her effect on me is so strong, I am almost physically sick. I had not wanted to travel to this assignment, but it was showing signs of being the best voyage yet.

  She takes my hand in hers; her palm is cool and soft in my now-perspiring one. Her thumb rolls slowly over my skin. A dull throb starts at the base of my neck as I lean into her hand and kiss the fingers. The fragrance of sandalwood oil fills my nostrils and starts the edge of a headache. She pulls my hand again and lets it rest on the earthenware pot on her lap.

  “Feel this,” she says softly. The pot feels cool and damp against my skin and I take a deep breath to dispel the pain between my eyebrows.

  “It is a music pot,” she says. “I paint and sell them to musicians. Listen.”

  She raps the pot lightly with her left hand and a sweet, hollow tone rings out, reverberating around the silent courtyard. I suddenly realize how silent it is. There are no birds in the trees, a quietness lies over us, even the water flowing to the pond has dried up. The throb at the bottom of my neck deepens and I groan. I cannot be falling sick, this body cannot be falling sick already. Only twice before, during my voyages, have I sensed these aches and pains in my altered state. And both were …

  The agony in my head intensifies, spreading down over my shoulders into my whole body. She is still holding my hand, an amused look on her face. My energy seems to be draining into her. I try to pull back but I cannot, there is little strength left. I realize then. The other two times were during meetings with other Chosen Ones, the ones who are in me, the ones I killed. The termination of ordinary mortals is never this painful, and if I had not been swept away by her beauty I would have realized it before. Touching another Chosen One willingly, as I have done, is an invitation to death; my power has been sapped without my knowledge. And thus have I before executed my Chosen Ones.

  I struggle now, furiously and fast, but she holds me tight. She has the advantage, I did not see her, did not know her. How could that be? How was it the Select Seven sent me here to be annihilated and I had no inkling of what was to come? And I know why. I made the mistake of thinking myself more powerful than them. How was
I so stupid all of a sudden? I knew they were tapped into my consciousness all the time, how could I have thought such thoughts and allowed them to see my revulsion? And yet how could I not think? Too late, too late, my shrinking brain tells me. I had learned from the Select Seven that ultimate strength came not from brute might, but from the ability to read a mind in its entirety. I knew that well, also from Dosha who had resided in me so long … now she was fleeing to this other Chosen One. I had, in these final moments of my existence, added idiocy to my list of sins. The irony would have made me laugh—if I could have laughed then.

  The struggle is too hard, I feel my feet turn leaden, my torso empties as she reaches down my throat to grab my stomach, more excruciating is the drain of evil, and the drain of knowledge from my brain. I fight, I kick mentally, and now, too late again, I see the light of the Chosen One behind her eyes. The animals ran, I think thickly, from her at first then from the combined evil in both of us. If only I had seen it earlier … A red blindness comes over me as my head explodes.

  I am in her and I watch my borrowed body turn blue, green, then into a brief miasma of my early Earth self, and then it disappears. She, my Chosen One host, sighs and picks up the brush to paint her pot. As she does so, she forces me to go over my last voyage again, from the moment I find myself on the bazaar street, knowing I fear this voyage, not knowing why, but also feeling that deceptive sense of excitement.

  Hunger

  I meet Sheela a month after load shedding begins for the summer. March in Mumbai—temperatures ascend steadily and the air is dry and tangy with exhaust fumes. Skies plead for clouds, air conditioners cough and hum, and electric lines fry from an overload of use. At least two more blinding months before the monsoons. This summer the public works department decides to shut down the city (known by the unlovely appellation of load shedding) for four hours every day, eleven to three in the afternoon, and everything—companies, industries, Bollywood film sets—slows to a nimbupani and ganna juice–sipping, tandoori chicken–eating, sweat-swiping, cigarette-smoking torpor. The taxi drops me off in front of our building and even before I go in I know there is a long climb ahead. Munshi, our watchman, sits chewing paan on the front parapet under the gulmohur tree, legs splayed.

  “No light, memsahib,” he says, scratching under his khaki shirt.

  I stand in front of him, my arms spilling with the shopping. He does not offer to help and I do not ask. Munshi always wants too much of a tip. For what? The building association pays his salary—far more generous than the one I get. Which is nothing. And I do a lot more work than Munshi, who seems to spend all his time on the parapet, whistling slyly after the giggling maids. I tell Prakrit that we should sack Munshi and I will do his job instead. How hard can it be to lift a hand in a halfhearted salute when the managing director passes, or ogle at the new wives in the building, or ignore visitors when they ask questions?

  Prakrit, being Prakrit, is properly horrified at my suggestion. “Nitu, you are my wife,” he hisses. “What would the MD think? What would people think?”

  Munshi grins again with barely concealed satisfaction. His face is smooth, like a much-used mortar stone, brown like dirt. “Fourteen floors, memsahib,” he says, holding up ten fingers and then four.

  “I know where I live, Munshi.” I go into the cool darkness of the building, sweeping as majestically as I can past Munshi’s smirk, and confront the lifeless lifts. If I leave my bags in the little cupboard in the lobby and return for them when the electricity comes back, half their contents will have disappeared. The lifts gape back at me, their faces painted a mocking, hospital green. Munshi’s color choice. The association voted for blue, but for the budget we had, Munshi got us green … cheap, very cheap, memsahib.

  As I stand there, someone else comes in. The light is behind her and for a moment I cannot see her face, only a thin figure clad in jeans and a loose T-shirt that hangs in the still air. I look away as she approaches, it would be rude to stare, but strangely she comes up to me and smiles.

  “Hello.”

  I turn in surprise. People rarely talk to one another in our building, we just bestow on-the-edge-of-civil pleasantries as we take the lift or meet in the lobby. Unless the woman you are trying to ignore is your husband’s manager’s wife, then you smile very much at her until she ignores you. This is the way building hierarchy works. Of course, the company does not own the entire building, just fifty flats. But I can tell civilians from company workers. Was this girl one of Prakrit’s juniors’ wives?

  I turn away from her with a cardboard smile, playing my part as best I can. Prakrit is not very senior yet, but one day he will be, and I need to learn how to do this.

  “It looks like the electricity is off, but this is not the right time for it to go, is it?” she says.

  “No,” I reply, despite myself. “Today it has gone off much earlier.” Now I see her properly. Her face is as though unfinished, no lipstick, and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She must be someone’s daughter; no wife can be so young nowadays. They all seem to wait, to finish their degrees, to get jobs, to have children. They wait with a voice I did not have; now I will never have it.

  “Fourteen floors is a long way, can I help?” She starts pulling packages from my arms without waiting for a reply.

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve seen you before with your children. They are beautiful, like little gods. Such perfect, unspoiled faces. Like yours a little.”

  I look at her, mute. So much praise. I am suspicious. Who is this girl? What does she want? As I try to wrestle my belongings from her, she waves me away and says, “We are in 8A. Jai, my husband, he works with your husband, same department. Our flat faces the slums, terrible view, but what interesting and smelly lives they lead, always fighting, always screaming at each other, but at eight o’clock when Rishta comes on Channel 5, everything stops. Jai and I watch them when we have nothing else to do.”

  Eighth floor. Definitely Prakrit’s junior, although the way she says it, it seems like they work together in the same position. But the higher you live, the more senior you are in the company. Eight is almost half of fourteen. I must not be too familiar, but gracious.

  “Coming?”

  She has the door to the stairs propped open with one Keds-clad foot, her hip holding it in place. I nod and follow her through, trying to be distant. After so many years of wearing a sari, I have still not mastered the art of climbing stairs gracefully in one. Kick your pleats as you walk, keep your back straight, head high, not one lesson sticks. Prakrit always says I lumber in a sari, no grace, stick to salwars, Nitu. I plod ahead of the girl, one hand holding my pleats up from the ground. I can hear her skipping up the steps behind me. Even when I was her age, I did not skip; girls were in training to be ladies. I stop at the first landing, already out of breath. Fourteen landings loom in front of me, this girl will leave at eight, how will I go up the rest alone?

  “I will come up to your floor,” she says. “Jai tells me the view is fabulous from your flat.”

  “Jai has been to our home?”

  “Yes, a few months ago, right after we were married, before I came to Mumbai. My Bapa did not want me to leave home so soon after the wedding; he convinced Jai to let me stay for three weeks saying I had to get my completion certificate from college.” She laughs, a trilling, youthful sound. It makes her face glow. “I need the certificate to get a job here, only Jai does not want me to work, not yet anyway. He thinks we should start a family first. But this morning I went for an interview at an advertising firm. They offered me a job.”

  So candid, so much information in just a few minutes of knowing her. This is the new way. In my day, we did not talk so much or so openly. And that too about having children with those smiles—we blushed when we talked of children for they came through, well, you know, the way they come.

  “When did Jai come to our home?” I ask again.

  “Let me see …” Her well-sc
ulpted eyebrows meet in thought as we climb the stairs again. Thankfully, I am not talking anymore. But her voice goes on. “July, no August. No, no, it was July. We were married in May; Jai came back here almost immediately. I followed in July.” Again that laugh, white teeth shining. “I guess I stayed back home with Bapa longer than a few weeks.” A wink now. “My college is very backward in giving out certificates, then I had to get my marks sheets also.”

  “Jai did not mind?”

  “Oh, I think he minded. But Bapa can be very strong when he wants. I don’t have a mother; she died when I was two. Bapa brought me up alone, did not marry again, he thought the new wife might be cruel to me. Sometimes, though, I wish he had, it would have been nice to have a mother. Like when I got my period. At first, I simply could not go to Bapa and ask him to buy me sanitary napkins.”

  “What did you do?” I ask, interested despite myself. A single man bringing up a girl child on his own. People must have talked. And so unusual to not want a wife who would take care of the child.

  “I thought of going to the neighbor auntie’s house, but she and Bapa always squabbled over something or the other. She would tell him not to let me wear jeans, unwomanly she would say. The next day I had five new jeans and I wore them each day until she fought with Bapa again. There was no one else around. The neighbor auntie only had boys, I could not ask them. In the end, I asked Bapa.”