Daughter of the Ganges

by Asha Miro

  “Baba Radhu started to have problems with his feet and legs, which grew inflamed to the point where he could no longer walk. I went with him to the doctor. They didn’t know how to cure him. One day he died and I was left alone. Very very alone. You have seen what Shaha is like. Baba Radhu was cremated in the middle of a field, in the same place where we had cremated our mother. The ashes of the two are spread on the same ground.”

  I was very curious to know how she had met her husband and how they had lived in the first years of their marriage. I asked questions and she began to laugh in between phrases translated by Merlyn, who was also enjoying our conversation. Asha was embarrassed to talk about certain subjects, but little by little she told me everything I wanted to know.

  “I was still a little girl when my uncles, Pandit and Murlinder, started to look for a husband for me and to consider the proposals that came to them. Because I was very poor they didn’t have anything to offer as a dowry. The man they found was called Bikhaji Meherkhamb, he was from Kolpewadi, a big village which I didn’t know but which I knew was not very far away and was also very poor. He didn’t know how to read or write either, neither of us had ever been to school. As a couple, we were perfectly balanced and everyone thought this was for the best. We met for the first time a day before our wedding. The presentation was done in Shaha, at Janardan’s house. I remember perfectly well the look of surprise on Bikhaji’s face when he saw me. I looked so small next to him! I was still a little girl and he couldn’t hide his disappointment! He was eight or nine or ten years older than me. Neither he nor I knew exactly when we were born. We have no official document. I suppose we must figure in some register somewhere, but I don’t know where. In those days the difference in years between Bikhaji and me was very obvious, he seemed much older than me! I got married in a pink sari which cost a hundred rupees. In those days that was a lot of money! My uncles arranged for my dress and my bride’s necklace, which wasn’t even gold. A few years later I was able to change it for a real one. The ceremony was like all the Hindu ceremonies. With lots of flowers, rice, food, and music. We went to live in his village, in Kolpewadi, at his mother’s house. My mother-in-law was the worst thing about my marriage. She was very mean to me and used to hit me if I did something wrong, for the slightest reason. I suffered a lot. Bikhaji was always very good to me, he always treated me with a lot of respect, like a sister. He was helpless when his mother maltreated me, because she was in charge and it was her house! Now my mother-in-law is old and everything that happened is a long way in the past.”

  Then, suddenly, Asha became serious. She went on with her story, after telling us that no one had ever asked her so many questions as I. It was strange for her to talk about herself.

  “It was impossible for me to get pregnant, because I hadn’t even started menstruating!” she tells me, looking into my eyes and half smiling. “But even so, my mother-in-law threatened me, telling me that I would never have children, as if she wanted to put a curse on me. Three and a half years after we were married I became pregnant. You can work out how old I must have been, I always get mixed up about ages! Bikhaji and I were very happy. We all hoped it would be a boy, nobody wants to have girls. When a woman gives birth for the first time it is her own family that has to take care of everything, she has to go to the house of her family. Which is why they took me to my uncle Murlinder’s house in Balhegaon-Nagda, the village of the Sansares, of our mother. Murlinder’s wife and Pandit’s wife prepared a makeshift bed out of blankets on the floor, inside the house. I had not been seen by any doctor. I’ve only been to the doctor a few times. I don’t like them. But the midwife did not foresee any problems.

  “I gave birth for the first time just like almost all the women in our family: on the floor surrounded by other women. Without any form of anesthesia and without being sewn up as I hear they do in the hospital. Bikhaji didn’t attend, not for the first nor for the next three. How shameful it would be for him to see me like that! Sheetal was born. We were happy, even though it was a girl. But my mother-in-law was not at all pleased! I became pregnant again almost immediately. The second birth was also at the house of my uncle Murlinder and that is where Savita was born. That time neither my mother-in-law nor Bikhaji were at all happy! Several years went by before I became pregnant for the third time. Finally we had a boy! Bausaheb was born on the floor in our house in Kolpewadi, the house that you know. Yes, the whole village heard it. We are all accustomed to hearing the cries of a woman giving birth. There is no glass in the windows and we all share in each other’s lives. It is difficult to do anything without the others hearing. Rahul was born two years later. Also on the floor of the house. I didn’t want to go to some doctor’s house. Having two girls and two boys makes me feel very happy, I managed to make everyone happy.”

  “Bikhaji works in the sugarcane factory in Kolpewadi, moving sacks from one place to another. Before that he worked in the fields. Now he earns more. Two thousand five hundred rupees a month. We live a very normal life, but we are not poor. I will always be grateful to my uncles, Pandit and Murlinder, for marrying me to him. He is the best husband I could ever have found. We were married very young, we knew nothing about each other, but now we love each other very much and couldn’t live without one another.”

  Bikhaji now seems to me to be the best husband for my sister. I find him amiable and I will always be grateful to him for allowing me to spend all these hours together with Asha. I know that if he had been against the idea I would surely not have had the chance to get as close to my sister as I am now. Husbands rule in rural India. No matter how good the relationship is between husband and wife, it is the man who always has the last word.

  “For the last five years we have had two buffalos at home. Now we also have three calves. We sell the milk that we get every day at the factory where Bikhaji works and it helps us to earn a few more rupees. Bikhaji is still very surprised about your unexpected visit. I had told him that I had a younger sister named Usha, but we never imagined that you would appear again after thirty years! All this coming and going, the last few days I have spent alone here in Nasik with you, is confusing to him. But I know that he is happy because he knows that I am happy.”

  “Our daughter Sheetal only attended school in Kolpewadi for a very short time. We married her very early. We went looking for a husband for her among our relations and acquaintances. Finding a husband for a girl is a great responsibility. The husband we found was young but he had had an education. They live in the village where his parents come from, not far from Pune. Now they have two little girls, Kumali is two and a half years old and Khushya is only ten months. You have met them now, they are lovely and very healthy. Sheetal did go to the doctor when she was going to give birth, and the two girls were born by cesarean. I don’t understand why.

  “Savita went to school for a little longer, until she was fifteen. Now she helps with the housework and they help me with the buffalo milk, with the clothes, with the grass that has to be cut …. Now we are looking for a good husband for her. We would like to marry her as soon as possible, a few months from now. We have already met three boys who have made good offers. We have to choose one of them soon. Savita will be happy with whoever we pick, she knows that we are looking for the best husband within our own limitations. She doesn’t have much of an education and she doesn’t earn any money, so she doesn’t really have much choice. We can’t afford for her to remain single and we have to take advantage of the proposals we are receiving.”

  And the boys?

  “My two boys don’t worry me, even though my future, and Bikhaji’s too, completely depends on them. They are very lively and very keen to learn. They really like going to school and we hope that when they finish they will be able to find good jobs. These days, since you turned up, they want even more to learn about things. They say they want to be like you, they want to go and live where you live, they want to learn your language. They have found your city on a map and they have wo
rked out the distance to get there. The four children have always treated me very well. They listen to me, they don’t make me angry. They are good. We are a happy family. Our children are properly registered for the simple reason that they have been to school. I am a grandmother now to two little girls, but my daughter doesn’t need my help. I like to see my grandchildren from time to time. Now you are a great-aunt as well!”

  Each answer to my questions makes clearer what my life would have been like up until now. It is a feeling that is difficult to describe. The sensation fills me and paralyzes me on this stone bench in the convent garden.

  “My days are really very similar to those of other people. We all get up between five and six in the morning and all of us do the first jobs of the day. We wash and go to fetch firewood. We have tea and chapatis for breakfast. We give the buffalos water and food. I prepare food for Bikhaji to take with him to work and for the two boys for school …. Our meals normally consist of chapatis with vegetables and fruit which we buy from the village market. Dhal, rice, our cereals (bajri and jawri above all), fruit …. We never eat any meat, we are vegetarians. The three of them don’t come back until the afternoon. Savita and I spend a lot of hours in the fields taking care of the crops, and the grass that we sow. We eat lunch together and we don’t take a nap afterwards. We have to walk to the river to wash the clothes, hang them out to dry, then go back and fetch them. Then we have to go and fetch water from the well, for ourselves and for the buffalos …. We have no running water at home. Luckily, the water in the well is free and we can take as much of it as we want. Now we can have electric light as well by connecting the cable to the house of a neighbor, but we are thinking of getting our own connection soon, as well as having more than one lightbulb. Some of our neighbors have a television and sometimes they invite us to go over and watch a film. I have learned a lot from the television. I have seen how people live outside this village. Now I would like to watch more and pick up more. Perhaps one day the city where you live will come on!”

  Now I cannot resist asking her what she felt when she first heard that I was still alive.

  “I will never forget the day when Francis Waghmare appeared at the door of the house on his motorbike, that dark blue jacket of his that is so big, and the silver helmet. It was raining. He looked like a bad man, like some kind of thief, or someone from the police. I was afraid. Bikhaji wasn’t there and I was very scared. I thought this man had come to rob us, even though he insisted that if he had wanted to steal something he would not have traveled so many kilometers in the rain on his motorbike. Francis began to tell me the story of my family in such detail, knowing all the names of the people and the villages, that I became even more confused. I made a signal to Bausaheb, who went running out of the house to go and fetch my husband. It was difficult to believe what he was telling me. That my little sister Usha was in Nasik and that she wanted to come and see me and that the following day she would be coming to Kolpewadi.

  “Bikhaji arrived straightaway. He listened to everything that Francis explained but he thought it so strange that he didn’t believe a word of it. He told me that it was impossible for that girl they had left with the nuns when she was so small to suddenly appear out of nowhere. After Francis had gone we talked for a long time. Our children listened anxiously to us. The next day Bikhaji decided to take the bus to Nasik to see if it was true or if someone was deceiving us for some reason. With his cousin and another younger man he went to the convent where you lived when you were little and where Francis said that you were staying. And yes, Bikhaji saw you and confirmed that it was all true. When he came out of the convent it was dark. Before catching the bus to come back home he called our neighbor’s house from a public telephone box. I came running and when I spoke to him I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. You were alive! You existed! He described you very well. You are exactly as he described you that evening on the telephone!

  “Bikhaji told me that we should start cleaning up the house, because the next day you and your companions would be coming to visit us. He said that I should buy biscuits and tea and that we shouldn’t be short of anything and if I didn’t have money I should go and ask those people who owed us money for the milk. And that is what I did, and when I had collected all the money, I went to buy some pakoras, and the ingredients I needed to make fritters, biscuits, and tea.”

  My life will never be the same now that I have gotten to know Asha. Before Merlyn can finish translating what I would like to say to her, Asha takes my hand once more and, looking at me, carries on speaking in a language that at times I pretend to understand by nodding my head.

  “I have never had any great dreams or hopes, I don’t expect great things, but suddenly all of that has changed. Having found you again has changed everything. I have always had a kind of anonymous life in the village and now everyone is talking about me, about my good fortune. They want to know everything about you even though I tell them I don’t know all that much about you myself. Some parents with young sons want me to give them your address and telephone number so they can write and call to ask you to help them obtain a visa and work in Spain. I imagine that you can’t help everyone, but I don’t know what to say to them!

  “The only thing I wish for now is not to lose you. And that you learn Marathi so that we can understand one another better! I don’t want you to live in India, I am sure you are fine where you are, much better than you would be here. Our life is very hard, very simple. Stay where you are. I only ask one thing of you: that from time to time you call the house of my brother-in-law, Bikhaji’s brother who lives a few houses farther down. They will call me straightaway. You speak your language and even though I won’t understand, the sound of your voice would be enough to feel you near!”

  20.

  LEAVING THE LAND BEHIND

  The five of us make the journey back from Nasik to Mumbai in the white Toyota driven by Akaram. There is an impressive monsoon downpour and a gray light that inspires calm. We are all tired. The high emotions of the last few days have left us all exhausted. We hardly talk. The road passes through a green landscape filled with cultivated terraces. From time to time a train overloaded with people passes by, so many people that it seems as though some of them must fall from the windows and doors, all of which are open. How many people there are in India! So many children everywhere!

  I am getting farther away from the land where I was born, from Asha, from Sakubai, from my nephews, from all the relatives who were so excited knowing that I had come back, that they had found me. The rain drums on the roof of the car. Akaram knows all the tricks to overtake the trucks, evade the bicycles, rickshaws, motorbikes, dogs, goats, and the people who walk along the side of the road under umbrellas.

  Finding your biological family is not like going on an ordinary trip; it is a journey into yourself, an experience that takes time to digest. I know that things will never be the same again, not after having walked hand in hand with my sister through the fields to the place where my parents rest, or discovering that the woman who I had always thought was my mother in fact wasn’t. Nothing will be the same again after learning that my father didn’t abandon me a few days after I was born, but handed me over to the people he thought would ensure that I had a better life than he thought he could give me. It was the only solution once Sakubai’s father-in-law refused to allow her to breast-feed me any longer. Nothing will be the same after having consoled Sakubai over the death of my mother, her friend.

  Of all the things I discovered in the last few days, learning that Sitabai, my mother, did not appear in any register, any document, that she lives on only in the memory of the few people alive who knew her, has had a big impact on me. It was wonderful being able to speak to them, to hear them talk about my mother.

  To tell the truth, I hadn’t prepared myself to confront the experience of finding a biological sister, even less to find the woman who helped me survive by giving me her milk after my mother died. I hadn’t read any bo
oks on the subject. I hadn’t spoken to anyone who had had a similar experience. I had to believe that it would work out. Now, however, I think that it wouldn’t have been bad to prepare myself a little, because the flurry of ideas and sensations, contradictions and emotions that I am now returning home with is quite daunting.

  When I came home after my first trip to India I realized suddenly that there was a whole world of mothers and fathers in the middle of the adoption process, and that perhaps they might find it useful to hear my story in order to imagine what their children would experience, and so I felt obliged to write it down. Now I am returning home thinking above all about adopted people like myself, all those people who were born in some far-off corner of the world and were educated in a different culture, a different environment. I am thinking of all those people who at some point in their lives ask themselves where they came from and what happened for them to end up living with their new parents, far away from where they were born. It is those people whom I now feel I want to talk to, it is for them that I would like to tell this story of my return to the Godavari, to inspire them to look for the pieces of their puzzle much earlier than I did, and be much better prepared than I was.

  If it takes too long to unravel the background trail of an adoption, it is quite possible that none of the people involved are still around. It may be that the stories you hear from different people are too far apart, or that there is simply nothing left to find, no means of information, that all the tracks have disappeared.