by Kamala Nair
“It’s nothing serious. Dev has examined her.”
“Yes,” said Dev, stepping forward so that he was now standing beside my aunt. “It’s nothing but a f-f-f-fever, but at her age it’s better to be ca-ca-careful.”
“Dev would like Muthashi to keep to her bed for the next few days until the fever subsides,” Sadhana Aunty said. Dev shot her a look, irritated that she had stepped in and interrupted his speech. “I’d like you all to make an effort to be quieter when you’re in the house. I don’t want you disturbing Muthashi with too much noise.” I knew that this was directed at me, Krishna, and Meenu. “Also, Muthashi gets very lonely when she can’t be around people, so all of us must take turns sitting with her and keeping her company.” At this, I turned my attention to a cobweb shivering at the corner of the ceiling. “That means all of you. It’s very important that we keep her spirits up.” Sadhana Aunty’s eyes zeroed in on me.
“But how am I supposed to keep her company?” I asked. “She can’t understand anything I say.”
“Rakhee,” Amma said, “you don’t have to say anything. She’ll just be happy to be beside you and to know you’re there.”
“Okay, that is all.” Sadhana Aunty backed away from the table. “You may eat now.” She wiped her hands on her sari and left the room.
“Maybe we should just all go in together,” I suggested to Meenu and Krishna as we ate.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Meenu said. “Then we have to sit in there for three times as long. Just do it yourself—what’s the big deal?”
It wasn’t a big deal to my cousins who had grown up with our grandmother, who could speak to our grandmother, who knew her before she became this helpless, childlike creature. Although my memories of Muthashi before that trip were hazy, I had always thought about her. Whenever the teachers at school asked us what we were doing over the holidays, we would go around in a circle and the other kids would say “I’m going to Grandma’s house.” Grandma’s house became a vague, happy place synonymous in my mind with warmth and love—cookies in the oven, gifts under a tree, bony hugs that you shrugged away from but really looked forward to—images I had gleaned from movies or from overhearing postholiday conversations between the kids at school, images that I knew weren’t necessarily real, but that I dreamed about anyway.
Muthashi’s room smelled funny. It was hard to breathe with the dense curtains drawn over the windows, blocking out any light or air. I coughed as I stumbled over to the chair that Sadhana Aunty had placed next to the bed. My grandmother was lying asleep on her side with one arm stretched out under her ear and one arm resting on her delicate hip. From the meager light streaming in through the doorway, I could see that her gray hair, usually tied back, lay in scraggly disarray on the pillow. Her breathing was short and disjointed.
I settled down into the hard chair and thought about what Muthashan’s crazy old sister had told me, about how Muthashi had been a teenage bride. Muthashan had married her, then left her behind in that old, rotting house to live with his mother and three sisters. Later, after Vijay Uncle, she had tried to have more children but lost them all. Her life had been filled with sadness, nothing but sadness. Krishna had said that there was something not quite right about this place, and I believed her.
I remembered the picture Krishna had shown me of Muthashi when she was young. Her face had not been beautiful, but even then there had been a kindness, a dignity to her round, placid features. The kindness was there still, but the dignity had gone, and I thought what a horrible thing it must be to grow old.
After a while Muthashi’s eyelids opened. Instinctively I backed my chair away a few inches. Her eyes, blank as marbles, fell on me and slowly warmed with recognition. She reached out her hand. It trembled as it hung in the space between me and the bed. Reluctantly I took it and was surprised by the silkiness of her palm against mine. She closed her eyes again and smiled, and I felt a sudden rush of feeling that I hoped was love.
Chapter 15
Over the next week I juggled my visits to Tulasi with rehearsals for the play. My eleventh birthday was approaching, and my cousins and I had decided to put on a performance for the adults right after my birthday dinner, which Amma had taken upon herself to plan with surprising energy and determination.
In the early mornings I would sneak out of the house, quiet as a thief, and sprint through the forest to the garden, where Tulasi would be waiting, her excitement so palpable I could feel it radiating through the wall.
“It’s me,” I would say, and she would immediately begin moving about on the other side, so that I knew she had been waiting anxiously for my arrival.
Tulasi and I would sit together, drinking tea and talking until my hour was up and I would have to return to Ashoka. Usually during these visits she asked questions and I answered. She wanted to know all about things like school and other children. When I told her about them, a million more questions would follow. “Bus? But what is a bus?” She would reach out and grasp my arm in her hot hands and lean forward, her deformed mouth gaping, and I would do my best to explain. But it never felt enough. I could see the dissatisfaction growing in her face.
Once when we were out in the garden, she stopped talking midsentence.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Sssshhh,” she whispered.
A bottle-green dragonfly was sunning itself upon a heart-shaped anthurium. In one deft movement, Tulasi leaped forward and captured the creature in her cupped hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Come and have a look,” she said.
We went back into the cottage, where she placed the dragonfly into a glass jar and capped it. I watched it crawl up the side of the jar as Tulasi went over to the wardrobe and shuffled things around. She returned with a spool of silver thread and a pair of scissors. Picking up the jar, she motioned for me to follow her back outside and I recalled the mysterious dragonfly that had led me to the garden for the first time. Tulasi picked up a miniature rose, which had fallen to the grass, and poured the dragonfly from the jar back into her hand. Handling it with skilled delicacy, she tied one end of a piece of silver thread around its tail and the other around the stem of the rose.
Her face glowing, she released the dragonfly, and together we watched as it drifted over the garden wall with the rose trailing behind it like a comet.
“That won’t hurt him, will it?”
“No, of course not, silly,” said Tulasi. “It’s very light and it will fall off soon. It’s just a little fun I like to have.”
I got into the habit of bringing her things—small presents—each time I visited. A bag of Skittles Amma had bought me at the airport, a tattered Betty and Veronica comic book, a Walkman with a Madonna cassette inside it, and headphones.
“Have you ever heard music before?” I asked.
“Teacher has taught me a few traditional songs.”
I made her put on the headphones, adjusted the volume on the Walkman, and hit the play button. At first her limbs jolted and she stumbled backward as the music poured into her ears, but then she stood still and a warm light spread across her face. She smiled and began to sway back and forth with her eyes closed. After a few minutes the smile faded, and she pulled off the headphones and pushed the whole thing back toward me.
“Take it away,” she said.
On the day before my birthday, none of the junk I could find in my suitcase satisfied me. I wanted to bring her something special, something that would really make her happy. I thought of the bookcase in the sitting room, dusty and unappealing, covered by an enormous yellowing doily, and decided that was where I would find the something really special for Tulasi.
I went into the sitting room, knelt before the twoshelved bookcase, and lifted up the doily, which gave off a musty odor. The books had an austere look about them, with dark spines and bronze lettering. I scanned the titles, most of which were unfamiliar to me, until I found the perfect book, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: A Comp
lete Volume. The book was thick and would be difficult to carry through the forest, but I knew it would be perfect, so I slid it off the shelf and tucked it underneath my arm, thinking of Tulasi’s face lighting up when she saw that I had brought her an entire book of plays by her favorite writer.
As I arranged the doily back over the shelf, another book caught my eye. Unlike the thick hardbacks, this one was slender and frayed. I pulled it out. The Poems of Mirabai. Amma had been reading it that day when I had lain sick beside her. I opened the book to the first page; an inscription had been written on it in a familiar hand: “To my dear Chitra. Yours forever, Prem.”
I felt that old tightening inside my chest at the sight of these words and automatically stuck the book into the pages of the Shakespeare before I rearranged the doily, left the room, and began to walk down the hallway clutching my stolen booty. Amma’s door was open a crack, and I paused. I know I should have kept walking, that I should have run to hide the books, but I couldn’t help myself, I had grown so accustomed to spying and eavesdropping that it was now second nature.
She was standing in front of the mirror wearing nothing but a threadbare brassiere held up by two thin straps and a beige underskirt, the kind she wore under a sari. Her scar, usually pale pink, seemed redder and angrier than usual. Her stomach was soft, brown, and flat. The long bones just below her throat were jutting out farther than I remembered, angled upward like a pair of eyebrows. Below them, her plump breasts rose and fell with the same steady, voluptuous rhythm of ocean waves on a calm day.
Her hair was loose and tucked behind her ears, and she was staring at her face while her fingertips were massaging her temples. They ran along the side of her face, down her neck, to her chest. They grazed the curving mound of one breast, then the other. There was a wild look in her eyes that I had never seen before.
The darkness of her nipples burned through the transparent white silk of her brassiere and her lips parted, letting a moan escape. A moan with a tumult of emotion behind it that I neither recognized nor understood, but that made me shrink away from the door nonetheless.
“God help me,” I heard her whisper, before I turned away and went back to my room with heavy hands and hot cheeks, ashamed both by the scene I had witnessed and for having spied in the first place. I felt dirty, disgraceful.
I hid the Shakespeare book under a pile of clothes in my suitcase and took the little poetry volume out into the yard.
The midafternoon blaze wrung sweat from my pores. It trickled down my face in rivulets. Carrying the book in both hands I went and stood by the moss-covered stone well situated in the corner of the yard. I had never come so close to the well before. On one of my first days at Ashoka, Nalini Aunty had caught me eyeing it and told me with a smirk that the long grass fringing the circumference of the well was a favorite haunt for cobras. By now I knew that Nalini Aunty wasn’t exactly trustworthy, but the damage had been done; the seed of fear had been planted.
I stared at the book in my hands, then down into the well, so black even the blinding sun flickered and disappeared like a dying bulb in its depths. My legs standing in that awful grass throbbed, but managed to stay rooted.
My parents had instilled the idea in me that books were sacred. Both Aba and Amma agreed on this one point. If I left books lying around on the floor of my room, Aba would pause in the doorway as he passed and frown.
“It seems to me you have more than enough shelf space, Rakhee, am I right?” he would say.
Amma taught me that if I ever stepped on a book, I should immediately kneel down, touch my fingers first to the book, then to my forehead, as a sign of respect. That motion had become a reflex to me now and I did it without thinking whenever my foot accidentally brushed against one. Books were meant to be revered, not destroyed.
How could something feel both right and wrong?
I heard the scratchy shuffle of cow hooves on sand. Soon Hari would be shepherding them onto the lawn and backing them into their pens. He would see me standing paralyzed and suspicious at the rim of the well.
It was now or never.
With a quick shove I sent the book over the edge. It seemed a long time before I heard a quiet splash but I forced myself to wait until I heard it.
Then I fled.
That night my cousins and I sat at the dinner table with Vijay Uncle and Dev, who had been over to check on Muthashi, while the aunts, Amma, and Gitanjali stood in silence against the wall. The creamy balloons of Vijay Uncle’s cheeks seemed to have miraculously deflated into flaccid jowls over the course of the last week. He was making small talk with Dev, but I could see that every word that left his dry lips was painful, strained, and that he seemed to be using up every last ounce of energy he had to keep up his end of the conversation.
“Na-na-nalini,” Dev said, turning finally to my aunt, who was standing behind her husband with a sullen expression on her face. “Your old friend Thara T-t-thomas. Did you hear, sh-sh-she has gone back to her parents’ p-pplace in disg-g-grace?”
“Oh, that woman, she is no friend of mine,” said Nalini Aunty in a subdued tone, though her eyes lit up at this piece of gossip.
“Her f-f-father should have thrown her out, but they h-h-have taken h-h-her in and she has no problems bringing sh-sh-shame to them all.”
Nalini Aunty clucked and shook her head from side to side in agreement, and through the corner of my eye I saw Amma scowl.
When Dev had finished eating, Sadhana Aunty gave Gitanjali a nudge and she came forward with downcast eyes to reload his banana leaf. He leaned back and watched her as she ladled curry onto his leaf, his eyes flicking upward from her face down to the soft hands that served him.
“Sh-sh-she is a lovely girl, indeed, Sadhana Chechi, this d-d-d-daughter of yours. L-l-l-ike a full moon on a c-c-clear night.”
Meenu let out a loud, involuntary snort, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Krishna’s eyes widened and Sadhana Aunty’s lips tightened.
A dull shade of red crept into Dev’s neck and he turned to Meenu, who met his look with a mixture of fear and brazen amusement dancing in her eyes.
“Quite unlike this one,” he said in a voice suddenly smooth as silk, “so dark, so homely.” Dev tore off a piece of dosa from his plate, stuffed it in his mouth, and chewed. “I fear, my dear Sadhana Chechi, sh-sh-sh-she will be difficult to marry off. She was not b-b-blessed with the Varma beauty.”
To my surprise, Meenu’s face fell at these words. She had always seemed so tough, so uncaring. But now a shadow dulled the glint in her eyes, and the hand that had covered her mouth dropped to her lap, revealing the limp corners of her lips.
Sadhana Aunty cleared her throat. “I’m not concerned with that just yet, Dev. She is still very young.” She moved to the table where she began to collect our banana leaves, before adding in a softer voice, “And she is a good, smart girl.”
Dev opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, but then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth it. “Vijay, shall we r-r-r-retreat and leave these l-l-ladies to their dinner?”
“Yes, let us do that,” said Vijay Uncle uncomfortably, pushing back his chair with a squeak.
I looked at Meenu; something had changed in her face. The mischievous glint had returned to her eyes, but her nostrils were flared and her lips screwed up into a tight, bloodless ball. She didn’t say or do anything—just stood and went to wash her curry-smeared hands in the sink, but my bad feeling was confirmed when she came up behind me as we left the dining room.
“Rakhee, switch parts with me,” she said casually, but as she said it her fingers curled around my arm and she gave me a hard squeeze.
“What?” I said, turning to face her. “We’re performing tomorrow. How can we switch now? I thought you liked your part. My character doesn’t even come in until halfway through.”
“I’ve changed my mind.” She let go of my arm. “I already know all your lines and it won’t be difficult to learn mine. You hated playing the villain anyhow.
”
Krishna furrowed her brow but didn’t say anything.
Meenu stared at me.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good. I’ll give you the script, you can relearn your lines tonight, and we’ll rehearse tomorrow. Just trust me, it will be better this way.”
I stayed awake late into the night reading the script and only let myself close my eyes long after the net of sleep had settled over the house. A couple of hours later, I opened my eyes and it dawned on me that it was my birthday. I was eleven. Birthdays were still something exciting back then, so in spite of my lack of sleep I leaped out of bed, full of energy, and pulled my dress over my head, eager to get to the garden. I wrapped the Shakespeare book in a silk shawl I had swiped from Amma’s room. I stuck it in my backpack and secured the straps around my shoulders.
Before I left I crept into the bathroom for a glance in the mirror, just to see if anything had changed. I thought that there surely had to be some kind of minor transformation to mark this passage into a new year. To my disappointment, however, my reflection was the exact same one that had greeted me the day before. It was a funny thing to look and feel identical to the way I did yesterday, but to suddenly be a whole year older.
When I got to the garden, Tulasi put her arms around me and wished me a happy birthday. “I’ve made a cake,” she said with a smile. “Let me just finish watering these roses and we’ll go inside and have some.”
I knelt down beside Puck, who was curled up in the grass. He looked at me with his beady black eyes, then bent his head down, much in the way Merlin would do, and I realized he wanted to be petted. I ran my hand across his snowy feathers, from the rounded nub of his head down to the tip of his endless tail. I wondered if he ever danced, like the peacocks I saw in nature books, spreading out the intricate fan of his plumage. I was glad that Tulasi had Puck as a companion, but seeing him there, lying in the grass like a purring cat, also made me sad.