Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  Yesterday, the mother wrote, we got a letter from Naina Aunty. Her friend’s son, a boy of twenty-six, is doing his Ph.D. in Stanford. He is tall, fair and very handsome. He is also supposed to be very intellectual so don’t get on your high horse. His family background is very cultured. Both his parents are lawyers. They are looking for a suitable match for him and Naina Aunty who loves you so much, immediately thought of you and mentioned to them that you are also in the States. Now, before losing your temper with me, listen properly. This is just a suggestion. We are not forcing you into a marriage you don’t want. But you must keep an open mind. At least meet him. Rather, he will come to the university to meet you. Talk, go out together, see how much you like each other. Just meet him and try and look pleasant and smile for a change. Give your father and me the pleasure of saying, there is someone who will look after our child. If something happens to us who will look after you? I know what a romantic you are, but believe me, arranged marriages work very well. Firstly, the bride is readily accepted by the family. Now look at me. Ours was a love marriage and his parents disliked me and disapproved of our marriage because my sister had married out of the community. They thought I was fast because in those days I played tennis with other men, wore lipstick and bras. I wonder why I bore it. I should have been cold and as distant as them. But I was ingratiating and accommodating. Then your father and I had to marry off his sisters. Now in an arranged marriage you can choose not to have such liabilities. I am not materialistic, but I am not a fool either. I know you want to be economically independent, and you must be that, but it will also help if your husband isn’t burdened with debts. I am not blaming your father. Responsibilities are responsibilities. But if you can help it, why begin married life with them? Now don’t write back and say you’re sick of my nagging. You think I am a nag because it is I who wields the stick and your father who gives those wonderful, idealistic lectures. Perhaps when you marry you will realize that fathers and husbands are two very different things. In an arranged marriage you will not be disillusioned because you will not have any illusions to begin with. That is why arranged marriages work. Of course, we will not put any pressure on you. Let us know if it is all right for the boy to meet you and I will write to Naina Aunty accordingly. Each day I pray that you will not marry an American. That would be very hard on us. Now, look at your father and me. Whatever your father’s faults, infidelity isn’t one of them. Now these Americans, they will divorce you at the drop of a hat. They don’t know the meaning of the phrase, ‘sanctity of marriage’. My love, if you marry an American and he divorces you and we are no longer in this world, what will you do?

  When the milkman came early this morning, he enquired about you. I told him how far away you are. He sighed and said that it was indeed very far. I think he feels for us because he hasn’t watered down the milk since you left. I’m making the most of it and setting aside lots of thick malai for butter. When the postman came, he said, how is baby? I replied, now only you will bear her news for us. He immediately asked for baksheesh. I said, nothing doing, what do you mean, baksheesh, it isn’t Diwali. He replied, when I got you baby’s first letter, wasn’t it like Diwali? So I tipped him. Our bai has had a fight with her husband because he got drunk again and spent his entire salary gambling it away. She is in a fury and has left the house saying she won’t go back to him unless he swears in the temple that he will never drink again. Your father says, hats off to her. Your father is always enraptured by other women who stand up for themselves. If I stood up for myself he would think he was betrayed.

  Betrayal, betrayal, the mother mulled. His job had betrayed him, his strict father had, by a lack of tenderness betrayed him. India herself had betrayed him after Independence, and this betrayal he raved against every evening, every night. He told her that sometimes he felt glad that his daughter had left a country where brides were burnt for dowry, where everyone was corrupt, where people killed each other in the name of religion and where so many still discriminated against Harijans. At least, he said, his daughter was in a more civilized country. At this the mother got very angry. She said, in America fathers molested their own children. Wives were abused and beaten up, just like the servant classes in India. Friends raped other friends. No one looked after the old. In India, the mother said, every woman got equal pay for equal work. In America they were still fighting for it. Could America ever have a woman president? Never. Could it ever have a black president? Never. Americans were as foolish about religion as Indians, willing to give millions to charlatans who said that the Lord had asked for the money. She was also well read, the mother told her husband, and she knew that no Indian would part with his money so easily, as for discrimination against untouchables in India—it only happened among the uneducated, whereas discrimination against blacks was rampant even among educated Americans. Blacks were the American untouchables. The mother was now in her element. She too had read Time and Newsweek, she told her husband, and she knew that in India there had never been any question of having segregation in buses where Harijans were concerned, as was the case in America, not so long ago.

  Don’t rant, her husband told her, and lower your voice, I can hear you without your shrieking. The mother got into a terrible fury and the father left the room.

  The mother wrote, you better give us your views about that country—you can give us a more balanced picture. Your father thinks I’m the proverbial frog in the well. Well, perhaps that is true, but he is another frog in another well and Americans are all frogs in one large, rich well. Imagine, when your aunt was in America, several educated Americans asked her whether India had roads and if people lived in trees. They thought your aunt had learnt all the English she knew in America.

  The mother made herself a cup of tea and sipped it slowly. Her son-in-law hadn’t even been at home the night her daughter had left. It upset the mother deeply. He could have offered to drive them to the airport at least, comforted them in their sorrow. But he had gone off for one of his plays and arrived a few minutes after they returned from the airport, his hair tousled, his eyes bright. He stopped briefly in the living room where the mother and father sat quietly, at opposite ends, opened his mouth to say something, then shrugged slightly and went to his room.

  Selfish, the mother thought. Thoughtless. The daughter hadn’t even enquired about him when she left. Had she recognized that her fun-loving brother-in-law had not an ounce of consideration in him?

  The two months before her daughter had left had been the worst. Not only had she stopped talking to her parents, but to him. It frightened the mother. One can say and do what one likes with parents, she told her silent child once, parents will take anything. Don’t cold shoulder him too. If he takes a dislike to you and your moods, then you will be alienated even from your sister. Remember, marriage bonds are ultimately stronger than ties between sisters. The daughter had continued reading her book. And soon after, she had cut off her hair. Rapunzel, her brother-in-law had said once, as he watched her dry her hair in the courtyard and it fell like black silk below her knees. Rapunzel, he said again, as the mother smiled and watched her child comb it with her fingers, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Oh, she won’t do that, the mother had said, proud that she understood, she is too quiet and withdrawn, and her daughter had gone back to the room and the next day she had cut if off, just like that.

  The mother finished her tea and continued her letter. Let me end with some advice, she wrote, and don’t groan now. First, keep your distance from American men. You are innocent and have no idea what men are like. Men have more physical feelings than women. I’m sure you understand. Platonic friendships between the two sexes does not exist. In America they do not even pretend that it does. There kissing is as casual as holding hands. And after that you know what happens. One thing can lead to another and the next thing we know you will bring us an American son-in-law. You know we will accept even that if we have to, but it will make us most unhappy.

  Secondly, if t
here is an Indian association in your university, please join it. You might meet some nice Indian men there with the same interests that you have. For get-togethers there, always wear a sari and try to look pleasant. Your father doesn’t believe in joining such associations, but I feel it is a must.

  The mother was tired of giving advice. What changed you so much the last few months before you left, she wanted to cry, why was going abroad no longer an adventure but an escape? At the airport, when the mother hugged the daughter, she had felt with a mother’s instinct that the daughter would not return.

  There had been a brief period when her child had seemed suddenly happy, which was strange, considering her final exams were drawing closer. She would work late into the night and the mother would sometimes awaken at night to hear the sounds of her making coffee in the kitchen. Once, on the way to the bathroom she heard sounds of laughter in the kitchen and stepped in to see her daughter and son-in-law cooking a monstrous omelette. He had just returned from one of his late-night jaunts. An omelette at 1 a.m., the mother grunted sleepily and the two laughed even more as the toast emerged burnt and the omelette stuck to the pan. Silly children, the mother said and went back to bed.

  And then, a few weeks later, that peculiar, turbulent stillness, as her daughter continued studying for her exams and stopped talking to all of them, her face pale and shadows under her eyes, emanating a tension that gripped the mother like tentacles and left the father hurt and confused. She snapped at them when they questioned her, so they stopped. I’ll talk to her after her exams, the mother told herself. She even stopped having dinner with them, eating either before they all sat at the table, or much later, and then only in her room.

  And that pinched look on her face . . . the mother jerked up. It was pain, not anger. Her daughter had been in pain, in pain. She was hiding something. Twelve years ago, when the child was ten, her mother had seen the same pinched, strained look on her face. The child bore her secret for three days, avoiding her parents and her sister, spending long hours in the bathroom and moving almost furtively around the house. The mother noticed that two rolls of cotton had disappeared from her dressing-table drawer and that an old bedsheet she had left in the cupboard to cut up and use as dusters, had also disappeared. On the third day she saw her daughter go to the bathroom with a suspicious lump in her shirt. She stopped her, her hands on the trembling child’s arms, put her fingers into her shirt and took out a large roll of cotton. She guided the child to the bathroom, raised her skirt and pulled down her panties. The daughter watched her mother’s face, her eyes filled with terror, waiting for the same terror to reflect on her face, as her mother saw the blood flowing from this unmentionable part of her body and recognized her daughter’s imminent death. The mother said, my love, why didn’t you tell me, and the child, seeing only compassion, knew she would live, and wept.

  The omniscience of motherhood could last only so long, the mother thought, and she could no longer guess her daughter’s secrets. Twelve years ago there had been the disappearing cotton and sheet, but now? The mother closed her eyes and her daughter’s face swam before her, her eyes dark, that delicate nose and long plaited hair—no, no, it was gone now and she could never picture her with her new face. After her daughter had cut her hair, the mother temporarily lost her vivacity. And the daughter became uncharacteristically tidy—her room spick and span, her desk always in order, every corner dusted, even her cupboard neatly arranged. The mother’s daily scoldings to her, which were equally her daily declarations of love, ceased, and she thought she would burst with sadness. So one day, when the mother saw her daughter standing in her room, looking out of the window, a large white handkerchief held to her face, the mother said, don’t cry, my love, don’t cry, and there, don’t you know it’s unhygienic to use someone else’s hanky, does nothing I tell you register, my Rani? And her daughter, her face flushed, saying, it’s clean, and the mother taking it out of her hand and smelling it and snorting, clean, what rubbish, and it isn’t even your father’s, it’s your brother-in-law’s, it smells of him, and it did, of cigarettes and after-shave and God knows what else and the mother had put it for a wash.

  The mother’s face jerked up. Her fingers’ grip on the pen loosened and her eyes dilated. Her daughter had not been crying. Her eyes, as they turned to her mother, had that pinched look, but they were clear as she removed the handkerchief from her nose. It had smelled of him as she held it there and she wasn’t wiping her tears.

  The mother moaned. If God was omniscient, it hadn’t seemed to hurt Him. Why hadn’t He denied the omniscience of motherhood? Oh, my love, the mother thought. She held her hand to her aching throat. The tears weren’t flowing now. She began to write. Sometimes when one is troubled, she wrote, and there is no solution for the trouble, prayer helps. It gives you the strength to carry on. I know you don’t believe in rituals, but all I’m asking you to do is to light the lamp in the morning, light an agarbatti, fold your hands, close your eyes and think of truth and correct actions. That’s all. Keep these items and the silver idol of Ganesh which I put into your suitcase, in a corner in your cupboard or on your desk. For the mother, who had prayed all her life, prayer was like bathing or brushing her teeth or chopping onions. She had found some strength in the patterns these created, and sometimes, some peace. Once, when her husband reprimanded her for cooking only eight dishes for a dinner party, she had wanted to break all the crockery in the kitchen, but after five minutes in her corner with the gods, she didn’t break them. She couldn’t explain this to her child. She couldn’t say, it’s all right, it happens; or say, you’ll forget, knowing her daughter wouldn’t. If you don’t come back next year, she wrote, knowing her daughter wouldn’t, I’ll come and get you. She would pretend to have a heart attack, the mother said to herself, her heart beating very fast, her tears now falling very rapidly, holding her head in her hands, she would phone her daughter and say, I have to see you before I die, and then her daughter would come home, yes, she would come home, and she would grow her hair again.

  The Remains of the Feast

  GITHA HARIHARAN

  The room still smells of her. Not as she did when she was dying, an overripe smell that clung to everything that had touched her: sheets, saris, hands. She had been in the nursing home for only ten days but a bedsore grew like an angry red welt on her back. Her neck was a big hump, and she lay in bed like a moody camel that would snap or bite at unpredictable intervals. The goitred lump, the familiar swelling I had seen on her neck all my life, that I had stroked and teasingly pinched as a child, was now a cancer that spread like a fire down the old body, licking clean everything in its way.

  The room now smells like a pressed, faded rose. A dry, elusive smell. Burnt, a candle put out.

  We were not exactly room-mates, but we shared two rooms, one corner of the old ancestral house, all my twenty-year-old life.

  She was Rukmini, my great-grandmother. She was ninety when she died last month, outliving by ten years her only son and daughter-in-law. I don’t know how she felt when they died, but later she seemed to find something slightly hilarious about it all. That she, an ignorant village-bred woman, who signed the papers my father brought her with a thumb-print, should survive; while they, city-bred, ambitious, should collapse of weak hearts and arthritic knees at the first sign of old age.

  Her sense of humour was always quaint. It could also be embarrassing. She would sit in her corner, her round, plump face reddening, giggling like a little girl. I knew better than ask her why, I was a teenager by then. But some uninitiated friend would be unable to resist, and would go up to my great-grandmother and ask her why she was laughing. This, I knew, would send her into uncontrollable peals. The tears would flow down her cheeks, and finally, catching her breath, still weak with laughter, she would confess. She could fart exactly like a train whistling its way out of the station, and this achievement gave her as much joy as a child might get when she saw or heard a train.

  So perhaps it is n
ot all that surprising that she could be so flippant about her only child’s death, especially since ten years had passed.

  ‘Yes, Ratna, you study hard and become a big doctor-madam,’ she would chuckle when I kept the lights on all night and paced up and down the room, reading to myself.

  ‘The last time I saw a doctor, I was thirty years old. Your grandfather was in the hospital for three months. He would faint every time he saw his own blood.’

  And as if that summed up the progress made between two generations, she would pull her blanket over her head and begin snoring almost immediately.

  I have two rooms, the entire downstairs to myself now, since my great-grandmother died. I begin my course at medical college next month, and I am afraid to be here alone at night.

  I have to live up to the gold medal I won last year. I keep late hours, reading my anatomy textbook before the course begins. The body is a solid, reliable thing. It is a wonderful, resilient machine. I hold on to the thick, hardbound book and flip through the new-smelling pages greedily. I stop every time I find an illustration, and look at it closely. It reduces us to pink, blue and white, colour-coded, labelled parts. Muscles, veins, tendons. Everything has a name. Everything is linked, one with the other, all parts of a functioning whole.