It is poor consolation for the nights I have spent in her warm bed, surrounded by that safe, familiar, musty smell.
She was cheerful and never sick. But she was also undeniably old, and so it was no great surprise to us when she took to lying in bed all day a few weeks before her ninetieth birthday.
She had been lying in bed for close to two months, ignoring concern, advice, scolding, and then she suddenly gave up. She agreed to see a doctor.
The young doctor came out of her room, his face puzzled and angry. My father begged him to sit down and drink a tumbler of hot coffee.
‘She will need all kinds of tests,’ the doctor said. ‘How long has she had that lump on her neck? Have you had it checked?’
My father shifted uneasily in his cane chair. He is a cadaverous looking man, prone to nervousness and sweating. He keeps a big jar of antacids on his office desk. He has a nine-to-five accountant’s job in a government-owned company, the kind that never fires its employees.
My father pulled out the small towel he uses in place of a handkerchief. Wiping his forehead, he mumbled, ‘You know how these old women are. Impossible to argue with them.’
‘The neck,’ the doctor said more gently. I could see he pitied my father.
‘I think it was examined once, long ago. My father was alive then. There was supposed to have been an operation, I think. But you know what they thought in those days. An operation meant an unnatural death. All the relatives came over to scare her, advise her with horror stories. So she said no. You know how it is. And she was already a widow then, my father was the head of the household. How could he, a fourteen-year-old, take the responsibility?’
‘Hm,’ said the doctor. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Let me know when you want to admit her in my nursing home. But I suppose it’s best to let her die at home.’
When the doctor left, we looked at each other, the three of us, like shifty accomplices. My mother, practical as always, broke the silence and said, ‘Let’s not tell her anything. Why worry her? And then we’ll have all kinds of difficult old aunts and cousins visiting, it will be such a nuisance. How will Ratna study in the middle of all that chaos?’
But when I went to our room that night, my great-grandmother had a sly look on her face. ‘Come here, Ratna,’ she said. ‘Come here, my darling little gem.’
I went, my heart quaking at the thought of telling her. She held my hand and kissed each finger, her half-closed eyes almost flirtatious.
‘Tell me something, Ratna,’ she began in a wheedling voice.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it,’ I said quickly.
‘Of course you do!’ She was surprised, a little annoyed. ‘Those small cakes you got from the Christian shop that day. Do they have eggs in them?’
I was speechless with relief.
‘Do they?’ she persisted. ‘Will you,’ and her eyes narrowed with cunning, ‘will you get one for me?’
So we began a strange partnership, my great-grandmother and I. I smuggled cakes and ice cream, biscuits and samosas, made by non-brahmin hands, into a vegetarian invalid’s room. To the deathbed of a brahmin widow who had never eaten anything but pure, home-cooked food for almost a century.
She would grab it from my hand, late at night after my parents had gone to sleep. She would hold the pastry in her fingers, turn it round and round, as if on the verge of an earthshaking discovery.
‘And does it really have egg in it?’ she would ask again, as if she needed the password for her to bite into it with her gums.
‘Yes, yes,’ I would say, a little tired of midnight feasts by then. The pastries were a cheap yellow colour, topped by white frosting with hard, grey pearls.
‘Lots and lots of eggs,’ I would say wanting her to hurry up and put it in her mouth. ‘And the bakery is owned by a Christian. I think he hires Muslim cooks too.’
‘Ooooh,’ she would sigh. Her little pink tongue darted out and licked the frosting. Her toothless mouth worked its way steadily, munching, making happy sucking noises.
Our secret was safe for about a week. Then she became bold. She was bored with the cakes, she said. They give her heartburn.
She became a little more adventurous every day. Her cravings were varied and unpredictable. Laughable and always urgent.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she moaned, when my mother asked her if she wanted anything. ‘No, no, I don’t want water, I don’t want juice.’ She stopped the moaning and looked at my mother’s patient, exasperated face. ‘I’ll tell you what I want,’ she whined. ‘Get me a glass of that brown drink Ratna bought in the bottle. The kind that bubbles and makes a popping sound when you open the bottle. The one with the fizzy noise when you pour it out.’
‘A Coca-Cola?’ said my mother, shocked. ‘Don’t be silly, it will make you sick.’
‘I don’t care what it is called,’ my great-grandmother said and started moaning again. ‘I want it.’
So she got it and my mother poured out a small glassful, tight-lipped, and gave it to her without a word. She was always a dutiful granddaughter-in-law.
‘Ah,’ sighed my great-grandmother, propped up against her pillows, the steel tumbler lifted high over her lips. The lump on her neck moved in little gurgles as she drank. Then she burped a loud, contented burp, and asked, as if she had just thought of it, ‘Do you think there is something in it? You know, alcohol?’
A month later, we had got used to her unexpected, inappropriate demands. She had tasted, by now, lemon tarts, garlic, three types of aerated drinks, fruit cake laced with brandy, bhelpuri from the fly-infested bazaar nearby.
‘There’s going to be trouble,’ my mother kept muttering under her breath. ‘She’s losing her mind, she is going to be a lot of trouble.’
And she was right, of course. My great-grandmother could no longer swallow very well. She would pour the coke into her mouth and half of it would trickle out of her nostrils, thick, brown, nauseating.
‘It burns, it burns,’ she would yell then, but she pursed her lips tightly together when my mother spooned a thin gruel into her mouth. ‘No, no,’ she screamed deliriously. ‘Get me something from the bazaar. Raw onions. Fried bread. Chickens and goats.’
Then we knew she was lost to us.
She was dying. She was in the nursing home for ten whole days. My mother and I took turns sitting by her, sleeping on the floor by the hospital cot.
She lay there quietly, the pendulous neck almost as big as her face. But she would not let the nurses near her bed. She would squirm and wriggle like a big fish that refused to be caught. The sheets smelled, and the young doctor shook his head. ‘Not much to be done now,’ he said. ‘The cancer has left nothing intact.’
The day she died, she kept searching the room with her eyes. Her arms were held down by the tubes and needles, criss-cross, in, out. The glucose dripped into her veins but her nose still ran. The clear, thin liquid trickling down like dribble on to her chin. Her hands clenched and unclenched with the effort and she whispered, like a miracle, ‘Ratna.’
My mother and I rushed to her bedside. Tears streaming down her face, my mother bent her head before her and pleaded, ‘Give me your blessings, Paati. Bless me before you go.’
My great-grandmother looked at her for a minute, her lips working furiously, noiselessly. For the first time in my life I saw a fine veil of perspiration on her face. The muscles on her face twitched in mad, frenzied jerks. Then she pulled one arm free of the tubes, in a sudden, crazy spurt of strength, and the IV pole crashed to the floor.
‘Bring me a red sari,’ she screamed. ‘A red one with a big wide border of gold. And,’ her voice cracked, ‘bring me peanuts with chilli powder from the corner shop. Onion and green chilli bondas deep-fried in oil.’
Then the voice gurgled and gurgled, her face and neck swayed, rocked like a boat lost in a stormy sea. She retched, and as the vomit flew out of her mouth and her nose, thick like the milkshakes she had drunk, brown like the alcoholic coke, her head sl
umped forward, her rounded chin buried in the cancerous neck.
When we brought the body home—I am not yet a doctor and already I can call her that—I helped my mother to wipe her clean with a wet, soft cloth. We wiped away the smells, the smell of the hospital bed, the smell of an old woman’s juices drying. Her skin was dry and papery. The stubble on her head—she had refused to shave her head once she got sick—had grown, like the soft, white bristles of a hairbrush.
She had had only one child though she had lived so long. But the skin on her stomach was like crumpled, frayed velvet, the creases running to and fro in fine, silvery rivulets.
‘Bring her sari,’ my mother whispered, as if my great-grandmother could still hear her.
I looked at the stiff, cold body that I was seeing naked for the first time. She was asleep at last, quiet at last. I had learnt, in the last month or two, to expect the unexpected from her. I waited, in case she changed her mind and sat up, remembering one more taboo to be tasted.
‘Bring me your eyebrow tweezers,’ I heard her say, ‘Bring me that hair-removing cream. I have a moustache and I don’t want to be an ugly old woman.’
But she lay still, the wads of cotton in her nostrils and ears shutting us out. Shutting out her belated ardour.
I ran to my cupboard and brought her the brightest, reddest sari I could find: last year’s Diwali sari, my first silk.
I unfolded it, ignoring my mother’s eyes which were turning aghast. I covered her naked body lovingly. The red silk glittered like her childish laughter.
‘Have you gone mad?’ my mother whispered furiously. ‘She was a sick old woman, she didn’t know what she was saying.’
She rolled up the sari and flung it aside, as if it had been polluted. She wiped the body again to free it from foolish, trivial desires.
They burnt her in a pale-brown sari, her widow’s weeds. The prayer beads I had never seen her touch encircled the bulging, obscene neck.
I am still a novice at anatomy. I hover just over the body, I am just beneath the skin. I have yet to look at the insides, the entrails of memories she told me nothing about, the pain congealing into a cancer.
She has left me behind with nothing but a smell, a legacy that grows fainter every day. For a while I haunt the dirtiest bakeries and tea-stalls I can find. I search for her, my sweet great-grandmother, in plate after plate of stale confections, in needle-sharp green chillies, deep-fried in rancid oil. I plot her revenge for her, I give myself diarrhoea for a week.
Then I open all the windows and her cupboard and air the rooms. I tear her dirty, grey saris to shreds. I line the shelves of her empty cupboard with my thick, newly-bought, glossy-jacketed texts, one next to the other. They stand straight and solid, row after row of armed soldiers. They fill up the small cupboard quickly.
Notes on Authors
Anita Desai was born in 1937; her father was Bengali and her mother German, and she was educated in Delhi. Her published work includes In Custody which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, Clear Light of Day, which was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize, Fire on the Mountain, for which she won the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the 1978 Sahitya Akademi Award, a volume of short stories, Games at Twilight, The Village by the Sea and Baumgartner’s Bombay. She has also written several books for children. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She has been awarded the Neil Gunn International Fellowship for 1994. Anita Desai is married, has four children and divides her time between India and the USA.
Anjana Appachana was educated at Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Pennsylvania State University. Her first book, Incantations and Other Stories was published in India, England and the US and was translated into German. Her story, ‘Sharmaji’, was included by Salman Rushdie in the collection, Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing. Appachana is a recipient of an O. Henry Festival Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her novel, Listening Now, has recently been published by Random House in the US and IndiaInk in India.
Attia Hosain was born in Lucknow in 1913. She was educated at La Martiniere and Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, blending an English liberal education with that of a traditional Muslim household where she was taught Persian, Urdu and Arabic. She became the first woman amongst the feudal taluqdari families to complete her graduation.
Influenced, in the 1930s, by the nationalist movement and the Progressive Writers’ Group in India, she became a journalist, broadcaster and writer of short stories.
In 1947 she went to England with her husband and two children. She presented her own woman’s programme on the BBC Eastern service for many years and also appeared on television and the West End stage. In addition she lectured on the confluence of Indian and Western culture and wrote Phoenix Fled, a collection of short stories, and Sunlight on a Broken Column, a novel.
She passed away in January 1998.
Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and educated there and in the US. She took a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her fiction.
She has published The Middleman and Other Stories and three novels, Jasmine, Wife and The Tiger’s Daughter, two works of non-fiction, Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror, and a collection of short stories, Darkness, which the New York Times Book Review named one of the best books of the year. She has taught Creative Writing at Columbia University and City University of New York and now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Githa Hariharan grew up in Bombay and in Manila. She was educated in these two cities and later in the US, where she worked in public television. Since 1979, she has worked in Bombay, Madras and New Delhi, first as an editor in a publishing house, then as a freelancer. Githa Hariharan has published several short stories in magazines and journals as well as a story collection, The Art of Dying, and three novels, The Thousand Faces of Night, The Ghosts of Vasu Master and When Dreams Travel.
She lives with her husband and two sons in New Delhi.
K.A. Abbas was born in 1914 in Panipat. He studied at Aligarh Muslim University and began a career in journalism, writing and film-making. He worked with the National Call and Bombay Chronicle and was the writer of the longest-running column in India, in Blitz. He also wrote a number of novels and short stories in Urdu and English, the best known of which are Inquilab, The World is My Village, I Am Not an Island. He produced and wrote stories and screenplays for a number of films.
Keki N. Daruwalla, better known as a poet, has published short fiction since the Seventies. His first book of short stories, Sword and Abyss contained much experimental fiction. He published a novella set in Latin America and seventeen short stories in a volume entitled The Minister for Permanent Unrest. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) in 1987.
Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. He has been founder-editor of Yojna, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, editor of the National Herald, chief editor of New Delhi and editor of the Hindustan Times. Today he is India’s best-known columnist. Among the works he has published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels (the best known of which are Delhi and Train to Pakistan), and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs.
Khushwant Singh was Member of Parliament from 1980-1986. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 which he returned in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar.
Manjula Padmanabhan was born in 1953 and is an illustrator and writer. She has illustrated twenty-one children’s books and publishe
d one collection of short stories, Hot Death, Cold Soup. She writes a fortnightly column for The Pioneer. Harvest, her fifth play, won the Onassis International Cultural Competitions Prize for Theatrical Plays in 1997, in Greece. Manjula Padmanabhan lives in New Delhi.
Manohar Malgonkar was born in 1913. After taking a Bachelor’s degree in English and Sanskrit, he became a hunting guide but gave up that career in a couple of years and turned conservationist. A few years later he joined the army. After a decade in the armed forces he tried his hand at various careers before settling down to a life of farming and writing with occasional breaks for lecture tours and travel.
Manohar Malgonkar has written ten novels, four volumes of non-fiction and three history books. The best known of his books are Combat of Shadows, The Princes, A Bend in the Ganges, Distant Drum, The Men Who Killed Gandhi and The Devil’s Wind.
He lives on an estate in the middle of a jungle and devotes himself to farming and writing.
Manoj Das was born in 1934 in the Balasore district in Orissa. He writes in both Oriya and English. He published a collection of poems and started bringing out a periodical, Diganta, while still in school. His first collection of stories in English was published in 1967 and since then several more including a novel, have followed. A recipient of several honours, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972, his stories have been translated into numerous languages. A Marxist youth leader at one time who spent time behind bars, he gradually turned away from politics and in 1963 joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, where he is a professor of English Literature at the International Centre for Education. He edited a prestigious monthly, The Heritage, from 1985 to 1989.
Mulk Raj Anand, one of the most highly regarded Indian novelists writing in English, was born in Peshawar in 1905. He was educated at the universities of Lahore, London and Cambridge, and lived in England for many years, finally settling in a village in western India after the war. His novels of humanism have been translated into several languages. The fiction-factions include Untouchable, Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud, The Village, Across the Black Waters, The Sword and the Sickle and the much-acclaimed Private Life of an Indian Prince. His autobiographical novels, Seven Summers, Morning Face, which won the National Academy Award, Confession of a Lover and The Bubble, reveal the story of his experiments with truth and the struggle of his various egos to attain a possible higher self.
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