IF YOU LOOK FOR ME, I AM NOT HERE

by Sara Srivatsa

  I unscrewed the cap of the bottle and sprinkled water over Tara’s grave. ‘Wake up, wake up, Tara, come alive.’

  Amma began to cry, wailing and howling. Tears streamed down her face. Then she turned and ran down the hill, the palav of her saree unfolding like batwings in the wind. She tumbled over the root of a tree and fell. Her body shook with the force of her heartache. Vishnu-thatha hurried to her. Holding her arm he took her down the hill. I followed close behind them.

  On our way back Amma, who was sitting in the front of the car, suddenly pulled at the steering wheel and dashed the vehicle into a tree with a singular purpose. Amma’s head slammed against the window; the glass cracked and it cut deep into her forehead and blood streamed down her eyes. Vishnu-thatha’s right leg crashed against the dashboard. I was pitched forwards and my head banged against the seat in front of me. Tara screamed. Although I was unhurt, the terror I felt seconds before the car hit the tree instilled a fear in me forever – a fear of uncertainties. A passerby rushed us to a hospital. Vishnu-thatha’s leg was broken; it had to be plastered. The doctor bandaged Amma’s head and dressed the bruises on her arm. She smiled at her father awkwardly. A dimple dented her left cheek. I longed to touch the dimple. But I didn’t. I was scared of her.

  It was well past lunchtime when we returned home in a taxi. Patti was on the veranda, waiting, worried. When we stepped out of the taxi and she saw Vishnu-thatha’s plastered leg and Amma’s bandaged head, her hands flew to her mouth. ‘What happened?’ Patti cried aloud as Amma walked to the veranda. Amma hurried past Patti and into the house. Vishnu-thatha waved from the gate, and then got into the taxi and drove away. Patti slapped her head with both her hands, and asked me. ‘What happened?’

  I didn’t reply. I walked up to my room and lay down in bed and thought about the day. I aged many years as I thought of the WHAT IFS. Appa had told me about the power of WHAT IFS in science, and how things could be predicted. Think out of the box, he would say. Think big, across history and geography, across the universe. So I thought about the bigger WHAT IFS.

  What If there had been no Universe…

  What If there had been no Earth…

  What If there had been no England …

  What If there had been no English …

  What If there had been no Queen…

  What If there had been no Georgie …

  What If...

  Thinking big didn’t work. It didn’t let me know about the small things to come. Premonition: knowing that something is going to happen. I didn’t have any premonition like Patti did. What was more, she had a host of superstitions and beliefs to help her, guide her, inform her well in advance: the twitching of an eyelid, the dog howling, summer rain and so on. If I had had even a pinch of premonition of the things to come, then I would have held my sister’s hand, swallowed water and sunk to the bottom of Amma’s womb. I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to sleep.

  I was covered in sweat when I woke up. It was still early. I rushed up to Amma’s room. She was sleeping with eyes halfclosed and her hair spread out on the pillow like a map. The room smelled of her, and of earth in the rains: scented, warm and moist. The diamond studs on her nose caught the morning light and the gold bangles on her wrist gleamed. She had not taken off the old wristwatch that had belonged to her mother. Unlike Appa and Vishnu-Thatha, Amma wore her watch with its face on the inside of her wrist as though she didn’t want to face time. She didn’t want to know if it had passed. Or stopped. Time, for her, didn’t have a future; it only contained a long gone past.

  The kohl had crept out of her eyes, and her lips pressed together were frail. The bandage on her head had spots of dried blood on it. She looked like a broken flower; I wanted to protect her. I lay down close to her, breathing her breath. She moaned and muttered in her sleep: Amma. Ma. Was she calling out to herself? Was she calling out to her mother? I touched my finger to the dimple on her cheek. She smiled. I would never forget this.

  She turned on her side and wrapped her arm around me. ‘Ma, Amma.’ Her voice trembled. ‘Please don’t go.’ Every muscle in my face contracted and a loud sob escaped from deep in my throat. Amma opened her eyes; they were wide open and yet asleep – an empty stare, one that didn’t include me. ‘Amma, look at me.’ she said, ‘it’s me, your Malli.’ She sat up on the bed and started to sing in a high-pitched voice. My stomach churned; I snivelled and coughed. ‘You’ve got a cold,’ Amma said at once. The concern in her voice warmed me. She stepped out of bed and hurried out of the door, down the stairs. Minutes later she walked into the room holding up a halved papaya like a trophy. ‘I got it for you. You like papaya, don’t you?’ Her eyes grew misty. ‘It’s good for your cold, ma.’

  ‘Amma,’ I said. That’s all I said. ‘Amma.’

  ‘Amma,’ she repeated. And then the feelings shackled within her seemed to break free. ‘Why did you go? Why did you leave me.’

  I felt a sadness I had not felt before. I tried to understand Amma’s pain and, overcoming my fear, I sat up in bed, reached out and held her face in both my hands and saw her smile; her eyes turned brighter and her dimple quivered. But only for a moment. A moment, and then gloom swelled in her eyes, filled them with fresh tears.

  I pulled her face towards me and kissed her on her cheek. The touch of my lips on her wet skin startled her. Her eyes seemed to wake up and then fill up with cold fury. She covered her mouth in horror as she gaped at the fruit she held in her hand. She hurled it across the room. Orange blood of the fruit stained the floor where it had landed. She froze. Minutes later she walked to the window with purpose. On the windowsill she had set small piles of pebbles. She had started to do this frequently: she would collect stones from the garden in the evening and arrange them on the sill. Come morning they would be gone. She now picked up the pebbles one by one and threw them out at the tree trunk. One, two, three, missed, missed, missed... Then she threw all the pebbles at once outside the window. Raising her hand to her chest she patted her heart where her ache resided, mumbling gently to it, ‘Why did you go, Amma?’ She started to rock to and fro. ‘Did you not love me?’

  ‘I love you, Amma,’ I said. That’s all I said.

  ***

  Next evening I went to see Vishnu-thatha. We sat in the garden at the back. The paving stones were covered with a film of evening dew. The flowerbeds were arranged with bushes that blossomed in the right places and the trees around them grew to the right height, flowered in the right colours. The cicadas in the trees made tuneful sounds. Everything was tidy and solemn. The bowl of Queens Mosquito Repellent Powder shone luminescent red in the shadows. Vishnu-thatha played a melancholy tune on his violin to match his mood and the surroundings.

  I reached out and touched his plastered leg. ‘Does it hurt, Thatha?’

  The old violin screeched on a particularly sad note and he put it down. It was too sad. ‘Don’t blame your mother,’ Vishnu-thatha said. ‘She has gone through a lot of pain.’

  ‘Is that why she crashed the car?’ I asked.

  ‘Whenever I was miserable I went to the hill with flowers and a cage of lovebirds. I sat under the parijat tree for many hours, sometimes most of the day. I took your mother with me once. She was only ten; I wanted her to feel my pain. Your mother died, I said. She said, okay. I buried her ashes under the tree, I said, and she said, okay. She picked up pebbles from the grave and threw them at the tree trunk: one, two, three, missed, four... She didn’t feel any pain. This pained me even more.

  ‘On our way back that day, I brought my foot down on the accelerator and crashed the car into a tree. The tree was dead and it toppled over. Your mother was unhurt. But she screamed – a long piercing, painful scream. I can still hear her in my head.’

  He sighed deep and long. ‘I tried to kill myself. I tried to kill your mother. It was because of her that my Vatsala died. I’ll never forget that night when your mother was born. Yo
ur grandmother was in terrible pain. I could see the pain in her eyes: dark, spreading like an inkdrop in water. She gave your mother her name – Malli, jasmine. Call her Mallika. And then she closed her eyes forever. Mother and child: one dead, the other recently born. Your mother cried all day. I did not want to look at her. I locked myself in my room and did not come out. I sat in my rocking chair, consumed by grief.

  ‘When your mother was eight years old the maidservant dressed her in your grandmother’s saree. She coiled her hair into a bun and stuck parijat flowers in it. She smeared red pottu on her forehead and lined her eyes with kohl. I saw your grandmother’s face in your mother’s face, her eyes in her eyes. I seemed to come alive. The same day I retrieved the violin from its case and began to play. I sang late into the night. And the next day, and the days after. I taught your mother music and song. I did this with patience and affection at first. I was thrilled to hear her sing so well: she had your grandmother’s voice. But later I became irate and demanding. I insisted that she wear a string of parijat flowers in her hair, kohl in her eyes and a large red pottu on her forehead just as your grandmother had done. Then I demanded that she wear a saree although she was only eight. I woke her at dawn to sing, or late in the night, whenever I needed to hear your grandmother’s voice.’

  His brow cleared for a minute. ‘I remember it all so clearly. Your mother had a bad cold. I came home with a papaya. I had brought one for your grandmother whenever she had a cold. It was a hot fruit, she would explain to me, and the heat would melt the phlegm in her lungs. I cut the papaya into halves, a small one and a bigger one. I put one half on a plate and walked into your mother’s room. Leaving the fruit plate on the bed, I sat beside her and shook her awake. “You like papaya, Vatsala, don’t you? This is good for your cold.” I held up the fruit.

  ‘She took it from me. “I am Mallika. I am your daughter,” she said and hurled it across the room. It was the smaller half. For some reason I remember this.’

  Vishnu-Thatha looked far away and his eyes were fixed on a yellow leaf on the tree before us. As though burdened with sadness, the yellow leaf trembled in the breeze and fell to the ground. On that signal, Vishnu-thatha covered his face with both his hands and wept. ‘Please forgive me, Siva. I caused your mother a lot of pain.’

  ‘Is this why she is sad?’

  ‘Sadness is like a monsoon cobweb,’ Vishnu-thatha said. ‘Sticky, damp, something that lurks in a dark corner and reappears each time you think it’s gone. She can’t forget what I did to her. She can’t forget her dead mother. She can’t forget your dead sister.’

  My heart felt cramped as I walked back. I walked to the end of the mudpath, past the trees to the lake in the woods. I sat near the water and threw stones at a distant tree: one, two, three, missed, four.... I don’t know why I was replaying the scene. As though by doing so I would find an altered end to it all. As I threw the stones I let images of Amma’s unhappiness flash in my mind like the slide projector at school. They click-clicked, whir-whirred like slides projected on the screen in an illfated sequence. Whirr: Her mother died. Whirr: Her daughter died. Whirr: Appa was preoccupied. Whirr: Rukmini-aunty had arrived. There was no one to love Amma and for her to love back. But I was there. I was there.

  I felt alone and sad. I looked up at the moon, lonely and grey, without a face. A bird flew across and for an instant split it in two. Another bird chirped in its sleep; I felt consolation in its voice. The sound deepened the spell and everything quivered and rustled with life. I was not alone. I had Tara; she was always there with me.

  11

  Oilseed plants grew around the compound and, here and there, chakka trees with their trunks painted in red-and-white stripes. The George Gibbs institute was a large rambling house with many rooms. In them were scientists and their assistants dressed in long lab coats. They greeted Appa as we walked past. One of them came up to Appa. ‘Have you heard, sir, the Malaysian scientists are now trying to grow female mosquitoes in the lab. When they release them in the atmosphere they hope that these mutant mosquitoes will reduce the real mosquito population because no babies will be born to them.’

  ‘I read about this.’ Appa shook his head. ‘However, I am sure that the outcome of this experiment is still a grey area.’

  When we were in Appa’s office I asked him, ‘What is a grey area?’

  Appa laughed. ‘A grey area is a place which exists between two extremes, where things can be one or the other, and everything is a probability.’

  I didn’t quite understand much of what the scientist had said about mutant mosquitoes but I liked the idea of Grey Areas. I was grey. I was a probability. For Patti, however, there was no grey; everything was black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. White was good and black was bad. She followed Gandhiji’s dictum: See No Bad. Hear No Bad. Talk No Bad. Patti tried to be purely white. She had been a good daughter, wife, mother, grandmother and a widow. She lived by white rules. She dressed like a white widow, talked and thought like one, prayed like one, and hoped to die like one: pure and white. Hence, tonsuring her head was an act of whiteness, and Tuesday was the designated white day of the week. The barber came every other Tuesday to shave the stubble from her head.

  It was Tuesday. Patti was on the veranda, her eyes fixed to the tarred road. Illusory heatsmoke rose from it and the sweet smell of ripe jackfruits clung to the hot air and curdled the heat. Patti fanned her face with a coconut leaf fan; the breeze it gave off was warm. I was on the floor not far from Patti, colouring a sketch I had drawn. Tara kept muttering in my head. I slapped my head with both my fists to keep her quiet.

  ‘Why are you hitting your head like that, kanna?’ Patti asked.

  ‘I want it to stop thinking.’

  Patti laughed. ‘Thinking is good, kanna. Ghandiji said: your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions.’ Just then a loud shout came from the gate. ‘There you are, Thambi,’ Patti said, ‘I have been waiting all morning. Hurry now.’ Patti stood up from the floor and sat down on a low stool.

  The barber walked in with a bag of tools. Patti shut her eyes as Thambi touched the blade to her scalp. The barber giggled. ‘Not that I have any reason to complain, ma, but tell me what do you eat that your hair grows so quickly? I will give you a free head shave if you tell me your secret.’

  ‘You idiot! Why are you giggling like a donkey?’ Patti grunted. ‘Have you opened a barber shop to get rid of hair or grow it?’ There was a rattling at the gate. Rose-aunty and Rebecca were coming toward us. ‘Go now,’ Patti said to the barber. She quickly covered her freshly tonsured head with the end of her saree, moved the stool against the wall and sat down on the pai. The barber packed his tools in the bag, claimed his fee and left.

  Rose-aunty was tall and lean and had a quiet voice. She wore oversized black spectacles as though she needed to hide behind them. Despite being a widow she wore a bright-coloured cotton saree and pearl ear-studs; her face was madeup. She sat down beside Patti and held out a plate with four large wedges of cake. ‘It’s eggless lemon cake. I made it this morning,’ she said. ‘It was Rebecca’s mother’s favourite cake.’

  Patti set the plate on the floor and wiped the sweat that had collected on the tip of her nose with the end of her saree then tucked her breasts under it.

  Rose-aunty said, ‘It must be so uncomfortable. Why don’t you wear a blouse?’

  Patti frowned. ‘I am a widow. I can’t wear a blouse. It’s sin. And my Gods will punish me.’

  ‘I would like to face Jesus as a woman and not a widow,’ Rose-aunty said.

  Rebecca stood before me hopping from one foot to the other. ‘See Siva, Daddy got me this new dress.’ The frock had layered frills of soft chiffon and lace, pure white, with mother of pearl buttons and a broad white satin sash. Tara’s heart beat loudly in my ears. I looked down at the T-shirt and faded shorts I had on.

  ‘Daddy got me other things too,’
Rebecca said. ‘Come to my house and I will show them to you.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Ask your Mama.’

  ‘She’s not well.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She feels sticky and moist and cobwebby.’

  Rose-aunty said, ‘Becky, let’s go home. I have to get lunch ready.’

  ‘Can he come to my house?’ Rebecca asked Patti.

  Patti had never let me go before so I was surprised when she said okay. Rebecca’s mother having been a vegetarian had possibly done the trick.

  ***

  Rebecca’s house was smaller than ours. It had a pitched roof and wooden pillars all along the veranda. The living room was large and airy and on the far wall was a picture of a young woman. I guessed it was Rebecca’s mother. The picture was freshly garlanded with jasmine buds. Their scent had permeated the room making her absence present. There were three more photographs fixed to the adjacent wall. In the first one, Rebecca’s mother was wearing a long white gown that hid her entire body from neck-to-toe, and a flowing veil. The veil was seethrough and didn’t hide much. Rebecca’s father had on a black suit with a red flower stuck into the lapel. Both of them had happy-smiles on their faces. Rebecca was with them in the second photograph. She wore a happy-smile but her parents were not smiling anymore. Between these photographs was one of Jesus Christ. He was not smiling either. But given the life he had had, I understood.

  The tops of all the sofas, chairs, and even the centre table were covered with white lace sheets. On a corner table was a glass vase with roses: stem, leaves and all. In my house we had unstemmed flowers, and only in the prayer room. And here, plants were everywhere: in the corners, on windowsills and even in old whiskey bottles. At home all the plants were in the garden. The dining table was round and on top of it was another disc, which went round and round. Rebecca later told me it was called Lazy Suzy. I didn’t get it: it did most of the work, so why would it be called lazy? And I learned that they had Coca Cola in the fridge. Real Fridge. Real Coke. The only drink we had in my house was buttermilk. We had no fridge.