Mehendi Tides

by Siobhan Malany

  “Krishna,” Kate said, breaking her silence, “maybe you don’t have to say anything…right now.”

  Krishna sat stiff and motionless with eyes shut, a pained expression shadowing her brow.

  Kate bowed her head and closed her eyes, willing herself to pray. She didn’t pray to a Christian God. She was not baptized. Sometimes she attended Sunday school with friends, but church to her felt like wearing heavy shoes that clomped and dragged loudly against the floor with each slow step.

  Sometimes Kate lay on the basement floor in the dark, wrestling with contradictive thoughts about the logic of Christ versus the logic of science, a curse of choice. She wanted to believe that her mother was somewhere comfortable, floating timelessly in the mist of a cloud, or that her spirit hung in the everyday objects around her. The more she understood about religions, the more agnostic she became, carrying the burdens of the world upon her shoulders—and the more challenging it became for her to commit to any one religious sect without self-sacrifice. A commitment to one was a rejection of others; a commitment to all was hypocrisy, a belief in nothing. She was quite simply in a state of religious limbo. Why would Lord Ganesha hear her now?

  Are you listening, Lord Ganesha? Kate thought.

  Pink eyes looked back at her.

  She never asked Nasreen or Krishna the difference between mosques and temples, growing up Muslim or Hindu. She visualized the Birla Temple that overlooked the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad and how it filled the sky out the rear window of the speeding car as they headed north along the Hussain Sagar Lake. It was the Hindu temple, the white marble wonder on the hill, that was the object in her camera lens that day they waited outside the Bhilwara Bank for Krishna’s uncle to return, the photo she had taken that caused such ruckus on the city’s main roadway.

  To Kate, the temple with its multiple levels and ample girth looked plump and soft with billowing domes reflected in the lake’s drifting crescents. The temple had lovely white staircases leading to many smaller temples. She imagined sitting in an enclave, whispering privately with a deity about nothing in particular, or about things that concerned her, thoughts that weighed too heavily.

  So unlike the temple, the Mecca Masjid mosque had twisted spires, embedded rows of spades along the flat rooftop, and endless passageways lined with pointed arches. In the vast open spaces of the mosque, she felt her own judgments reflected in the reflecting pond. The space was a tribute to Allah’s omnipotence, a place to join the masses in prayer.

  The ring of the doorbell jarred Kate from her thoughts.

  Krishna remained still beside Kate with her eyes closed. Her head was bent forward and her hair hung down across her cheekbones. Beguiled in Sanskrit and meditation, Krishna flicked each sandalwood mala as her lips moved in mumbling recitation.

  Not wanting to disturb Krishna, Kate closed her eyes again.

  Lord Ganesha, she prayed. Let Krishna’s mother’s soul find peace. Give Krishna the strength to find what makes her happy. And, Lord, remover of obstacles, please help me finish graduate school. Help me persevere and know where to go from here, I pray.

  Kate breathed deeply. The sweet incense and warm spices massaged her nostrils. She was reminded of India and felt the caressing hand of Nanima across her hair.

  Krishna’s hand was patting her shoulder.

  “Kate,” she said softly. “Kate, I don’t want to disturb you, but Nasreen is downstairs.”

  Kate followed Krishna down the staircase and to the door.

  “I’m glad you are both here,” Krishna stated.

  “Grab a coat, you two. Let’s walk,” Nasreen urged.

  A short trek out the back of Krishna’s house, down the hill, was Deerfield Park. Nasreen marched ahead like a soldier. Krishna and Kate followed reluctantly.

  “Why are we out here?” Krishna asked. “It’s chilly.”

  “I thought the fresh April air would feel good,” Nasreen announced.

  Nasreen spun around and jogged backward.

  “Come on!” she urged to Kate and Krishna, both shuffling along the path, hands in their pockets. “We have to move faster, get some exercise.”

  Nasreen had on Mustafa’s oversized gray university sweatshirt, sweatpants, and pink gloves that matched the pink trim on her jogging shoes. Pumping her arms as if she lifted imaginary weights, she stomped ahead along the trail. The trees were still bare, the thawing ground a bluish gray. Canadian geese huddled underneath the deck at the edge of the pond with their beaks tucked under their puffy wings. They soon would paddle in the water, making v-shaped ripples behind them as they darted to feast on bread thrown by spring’s first visitors. But today the Canadian geese stayed huddled and warm.

  The girls followed the path across a bridge. The ducks rustled their feathers, hearing the girls’ feet above.

  “Any news on the adoption front?” Krishna asked Nasreen, trying to be positive despite her raw grief.

  “Yes,” answered Nasreen, excitedly. “I might be going back to Pakistan very soon.”

  “Really?”

  “We jumped to the top of the adoption list thanks to my uncle’s connections in Pakistan. We may have a baby soon.”

  Kate and Krishna stared blankly at Nasreen. After Saritha’s death, the announcement of a baby took time to seep through the layers of clothing and into their skin.

  Nasreen’s tone grew serious. “Well, this walk isn’t about me adopting a baby. It’s about you, Krishna.”

  “What about me? I am sad, can’t you see?”

  “I know,” Nasreen sighed. “Do you want to talk about anything?”

  “No, not really.”

  Kate and Krishna kept pace with Nasreen’s marching speed, warming their bodies in silence until they had rounded the opposite end of the pond.

  The path around the pond inclined a short distance. At the crest of the slope, the carillon tower peeked into view rising above the maple trees. During town festivals and in the summer evenings, Kate listened through the open bedroom window of her childhood home to the faint chromatic octaves of the sixty-seven cast bronze bells played from the carillonneur’s cabin.

  “I love this view,” Kate said breathlessly. “You can just see the top row of bells. They look so tiny from here, like bells you can ring in your hand.”

  “I will always remember the carillon as part of my childhood,” Krishna reminisced. “My mother and I walked this park almost every summer evening, and my parents took me up to the observatory when I was a kid. On a clear day, you can see the city.”

  “That’s a nice memory,” Kate said.

  Krishna stopped walking and stared ahead. “It’s just me and my dad,” she said faintly, suddenly peering through the grief and confronted with the future. “We pace through the house, through two thousand square feet of memories too painful to share with one another.”

  “Krishna, I know it has been just a few weeks,” Nasreen said, treading carefully, “but are you going back to medical school? Maybe getting back into the program will help get your mind…”

  “I’m not going back to medical school!” Krishna shouted, still staring ahead. “I’m out! I failed my exams!”

  “Krish. Why didn’t you tell me?” Nasreen looked helpless.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Krishna cried. “I couldn’t tell my parents. And then… and then my mother was in a coma!” She heaved and clutched her heart.

  In the background, one of the female geese, apparently disturbed from her nap, stretched her black neck lithely in the air and honked long and fiercely.

  “While she was in the coma, I kept thinking, how could this be happening?” Krishna began. “There was time for my mother and me to become best friends. I always imagined we would achieve that closeness, eventually.”

  The goose quieted. Kate and Nasreen stood motionless, listening.

  “I remember when I used to go around the house with my Nikon Zoom camera,” Krishna continued, “recording the eighties in our wood-paneled ho
me, focusing on the tin and gold trinkets from India lying all around that my mother had brought back from Kerala along with murals of the sea. She would snap at me, ‘Put the camera down, Krishna! That is not what I mean when I say focus! Are you listening? You must think about your career and your future.’”

  Krishna pretended to be her mother and planted her fists against her hips.

  “My mother had the slightest South India accent, and even when she was angry her voice purred. My father would always take her side even though he had given me the camera one year for Diwali, and honestly, he would rather have been reading an article in Applied Physics or preparing notes for a class he was teaching in…thermodynamics or whatever. ‘Dat is why we came here. To A-mey-ee-ka!’”

  Krishna mimicked her father’s ways and thick Gujarati accent by pinching her fingers together and striking the air with each syllable.

  The pain seeped into Krishna’s voice. “We had time, my mother and I, to understand each other. I wanted her to open her eyes one last time to see me.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Then I was just going through the steps…for my family’s sake. They still held out hope; but I knew…I knew she would never open her eyes.”

  Krishna covered her face with her hands.

  Nasreen galloped toward Krishna, catching her.

  “It will get better, I promise. You need time.” Nasreen drew back and clutched Krishna’s hands in her pink-gloved ones.

  Krishna broke Nasreen’s grasp and backed away.

  “My father wanders the house in a daze. I don’t think he knows what to do with me,” Krishna sighed. “I’m not the person my parents wanted me to be. In so many ways, I’m not!”

  Her words descended through the air to lay a cloak on the cracked earth.

  Nasreen looked confused. “What do you mean, ‘in so many ways?’”

  “Nothing. I just don’t meet their expectations.”

  “Screw medical school!” Kate blurted. “It’s not for you. Go travel. Go to India and visit your mother’s family!”

  Nasreen and Krishna blinked at Kate.

  “Well, that is what I would do,” Kate added.

  Nasreen shrugged. “Traveling with your dad could be very therapeutic.”

  “Or a disaster. My mother’s family never quite accepted him.”

  “Maybe they will think differently now. For your sake.”

  Krishna started walking again. They had almost completed a single circuit around the pond. Just ahead was the path up the hill to return to the house. The walk of fresh air was nearly over.

  “I don’t know much about my mother’s childhood. She said she came to America because it was her dream. But I still wonder how she had the courage to leave and travel alone to a country she knew nothing about.”

  Krishna looked in the distance across the pond. The aroused goose strutted to the lake’s edge and plucked its black beak against the thawing, thick mud, awakening its senses to the changing season.

  “When I traveled to India,” she continued, “I was a visitor, the cousin from America. It wasn’t until I was nearly twenty that I began to see things differently. When the weather was nice, my mother and I knelt together on the back porch in the warm sun and meditated sitting side by side. There was no one else around, and it was the one time I felt close to her. I understood finally what being Hindu meant to me,” she confessed. “I never told my mother that I was proud of her but I was. And I am proud to be a Hindu-American.”

  The awakened goose suddenly opened her wings in full span and fluttered them repeatedly. The bird’s beautiful neck arched sensuously as it prepared to soar.

  “Maybe you are both right,” she said. “Maybe my father and I should go to India for a while and visit relatives. I would like to understand why my mother left the Arabian coastline for Middle America. Maybe the trip will help me figure out where to go from here.”

  “It’s a great idea,” Nasreen said, satisfied.

  Kate nodded and breathed in the cool air.

  Krishna’s gaze followed the goose’s flight over the pond until it disappeared beyond the trees.

  Chapter 11

  Garden at the Tombs

  Hyderabad 1987

  The bubble car drivers went on strike.

  “The strike could last a day, a week, who knows,” Aunty Samina remarked.

  “That is India.” She smiled broadly.

  Kate was secretly thankful for a break from the untamed streets of Hyderabad’s city center and the incessant stares at the color of her hair.

  She bathed in the dilapidated outhouse adjacent to her bedroom to wash away the grit of India trapped deep in her pores mixed with night sweat.

  The mosquitoes flying in through the warped spaces of the rotting wood boards were ready to attack. She had to be quick about it. She leaned over the basin of cloudy lukewarm water. The coils wrapped around the basin glowed menacingly like a cobra ready to hiss. She grabbed a bucket, scooped, and dumped the cool water over her head with a gasp then swirled a slippery ball of soap against her body. The soap escaped and landed with a splatter on the concrete floor in a pool of floating mosquito corpses.

  Dropping the metal bucket, she ripped the tail of the electric snake from the socket of its bellowing belly. With a gurgling sizzle, the hot coils faded to black. With a towel loosely around her, Kate bolted from the bathhouse to the bedroom, her hair dripping wet and soaking the stepping-stones.

  She appeared for chai donning a light blue salwar kameez. Nanima smiled approvingly.

  “Look at you,” Nasreen grinned.

  “It’s more comfortable than jeans,” Kate explained. “And entirely less hot.”

  “That salwar is one of my favorites.”

  After breakfast, the cousins arrived at the Banjara Hills house. Kate emerged in the front room already sweating in the cotton salwar kameez. Yasmine looked bright in a yellow pinstriped salwar kameez. Her hair was neatly braided. She stood and kissed Kate’s clammy cheek with feathery lightness. Kate was still getting used to the intimate greetings in India.

  “We have a great day planned for you,” Yasmine said. “To the countryside!”

  “I thought the auto rickshaws were on strike.”

  “Who needs auto rickshaws?” Tariq said. “We have a van. You can’t let the ways of India slow you down. You won’t get anywhere!”

  “Chelo!” Max shouted from the door. “Hari and Azra are in the van.”

  The five cousins and Sana, Nasreen, Kate, and Sameer piled into a rented baby blue Suzuki van with rusted wheel hulls.

  Max drove a long distance through the sprawling city until they reached the city limits marked by decaying archways. The van’s engine smoothed to a hum. Kate’s seat bones ached against the jostling of the Suzuki bunker, but she sensed lightness, the void of urban toil. She heard it in Nasreen’s carefree laugh: to be out in mixed company, no concern, and no suspicions to be talked about at the mosque on Fridays.

  They drove along the Musi River through ancient gateways to the picturesque old city and to the massive fort surrounded by crumbling stone walls.

  “First stop, Fort Golconda,” Hari announced as he stretched across Yasmine and Azra, impatient to exit the van.

  “Hari!” Yasmine yelled, smacking him on the back as he crawled over her.

  “These walls used to stand fifty feet high,” Hari said, standing at the entrance to the fort and stretching his neck upwards. “Can you imagine?”

  Kate looked up at what remained of the blocks of granite and mortar. She admired the iron knobs protruding from the archways. The pointed knobs, once sharp, were now blunted and shiny from visitors rubbing them over the years.

  “The knobs were to stop the charging elephants,” Hari explained.

  “Really?”

  “The Mongols attacked while riding on elephants, so the knobs prevented the animals from battering the walls. I read a lot about history,” he said, grinning.

  “Interesting,” Kate said, as her at
tention drifted to three native women, their long dark braids swooped together, nearly touching as they looked toward the structure on top of the ruins.

  Their skirts lifted in the breeze, the vibrant crimson and ginger colors contrasting starkly from the layers upon layers of gray granite rubble. The women’s heads bent together in an intimate exchange.

  Kate imagined the women transformed in time, standing in the lush courtyard among the royal palaces, gossiping about the love affairs of the nobles. She continued walking, a diminished figure, under a series of stone archways imagining the impressiveness of the fort’s perimeter that protected its sultans through the ages. She watched Tariq’s figure come in and out of view as he meandered among the ruins ahead of her. His eyes caught hers as he stepped around a column.

  “This region was famous for its mines,” he told her as he leaned against the column.

  “Mines?” she questioned.

  “Yes. Mines that produced the most famous diamonds,” he said. “Like the Hope Diamond.”

  “What is a hope diamond?” Kate asked, intrigued.

  “Something very rare and beautiful,” he said, squinting against the sun.

  “Race you to the top,” Sameer shouted to Tariq, jabbing him in the stomach as he hurried past toward the tower.

  Tariq doubled over from the direct hit and raced after Sameer, leaving Kate to ponder the gems once hidden away in the fort.

  Three hundred and sixty steps led through the maze of walls in a zigzagged path to the top of the fort. Kate followed the others up and up. At the top were three arches and a lookout tower. Panting, she could see to the other side of the river with the sprawling new city of modern buildings and fashionable localities.

  “An underground tunnel runs all the way to the city center,” Hari said to Kate. “I read about that too.”

  His hand pointed to where her eyes focused: all the way past the Saify stores to the corner of Bangalore Road where the old man with a gray turban squatted, selling roasted nuts and guavas.