by Anubha Mehta
The slush of melted flakes covered the leather seats. They no longer smelled of plastic. I turned on the heat from the engine to warm me up, but I had no sensation in my body. Where was my body? I had to drive back to Toronto with Sachin’s ashes—it was my promise to him, to Albert. The brass urn stared at me from the adjoining seat.
I was going to hit highway any second. I had to stop. I had to call Diya. So I dialled her number. But I started shivering and I suddenly felt extraordinarily tired.
A black cloud had arisen from the fields. Why was it moving towards me? Oh God, I was trapped inside the car. Where was the handle?
I heard Diya’s sweet voice: “Mama … Mama … are you okay?”
But it was too late. I was already consumed by darkness.
***
I heard Diya’s anxious voice again, but could not see her. “Doctor, please tell me. Is she is okay?”
“She is suffering from hypothermia. It’s a good thing that you tracked her. It was just in time. Her body temperature was dangerously low. But she is stable now, at least physically.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she had a panic attack. It is a common occurrence in periods of extreme stress or emotion. It’s understandable, considering what your mother is going through. I would like to sedate her and watch her over the next few days.”
I was in an unfamiliar room. I strained my neck to see who was on the other side of the room, but could not see anyone. I did not recognize the grey walls, or the three-winged ceiling fan, or the plastic venetian blinds. There was screeching on the tiled floor, probably from something heavy like a janitor’s cart being dragged in the corridor. Everything smelled like sanitizer. My hand was sore, and my head was throbbing. I closed my eyes.
Where was I? Had I forgotten to water the potted dahlia in my study? Had the grease stain been cleaned from the garage floor?
Oh, but wait, something else was opening up. I was flying back to a warm and happy place. Running back home from school with Anita by my side, shopping for my peacock-coloured trousseau with Ma, playing Tom and Jerry with Veer in his house. I was back in Veer’s mansion, feeding the peacocks under the shimmering moonlight over the lily pond. The wind was moaning through the large leaves of the peepal tree, and then it called me inside to the mirrored room of the west wing. I followed the voice of the woman whispering, and she flew me on her wings, far away, to our frozen garden under the stone angel covered with deep green moss.
I must have walked this path a thousand times before, but today it seemed different. The garden was alive, rasping and whining. I could see the ripples of the lake ahead swelling around the soil that wrapped the boulders. The shore was lined with driftwood and weeds. Despite the frost, our magical garden was still in full bloom. White lilies, orange poppies, crimson snapdragons, lilacs, and wildflowers of all kinds. Passion from the bed of red roses, pride from the geraniums, and undying love from the primrose creepers—all had reflected my moods over the years.
Veer was sitting next to me. He was feeding the white doves. We were happy. The doves were pecking and cooing. But then the wind’s whispers became stronger. I turned around and Veer had vanished. The cobbled stones grew sharp edges under my bare toes. The sky started to change colour.
I felt someone shaking me. I opened my eyes to see a teary-eyed Diya. Behind her was a short, stocky doctor in an oversized starched white gown with a stethoscope around his neck. Behind him was a kind-eyed nurse. The nurse checked my pulse and the doctor scanned the various monitors attached to different parts of my body. He turned to say something to Diya, and they all walked out. “Do you have any family to inform?” I heard the nurse asking Diya.
“No, not here. Just my grandmother in India.”
She paused. “I am glad that you were able to talk to someone,” the nurse said in a comforting tone.
“Well, not really…” Diya said, shaking her head.
“Why not?”
“At first my grandmother was silent, and then she asked a very strange question.”
“What was that?”
“She asked me why Ma was not with Papa when he disappeared.”
I did not want to hear more. I could already guess Veer’s mother’s thoughts, her insinuations, her blame. I felt as though I had not slept in days. So, I gave in to my tiredness, closed my eyes, and was back in my garden.
A cold draft blew in from the lake and brought in the darkness. There was a bolt of lightning, and the sky turned dark with thundering clouds. The tentacles of dandelions and bulrushes sprang out and wrapped violently around my ankles, locking me to the ground. I could not move.
Something was coming. I smelled the rotten carcasses of dead fish floating on the lake’s edge. The sky lit up with sparks and then gave way to a piercing blaze. A gaping stillness spread around me. As my eyes acclimatized to the sharpness, I saw her outline. Her long black hair blew over her beautiful ashen face, and her deep brown eyes looked straight at me. She wore a jade green dress with a peacock feather on her sash.
Gayatri Devi Rajsinghania.
I knew it was time to meet her, to ask her, to confront her. She started first.
“Maya, you are free. I set you free….” Her voice was an echo, low and silky soft, like the lowest music note of a song. The tentacles that had bound me suddenly vanished.
I stood up slowly, bravely, and asked, “Free … of what?”
She raised her hand and pointed to the sky. It was white as chalk against the expanse of dark slate. “Free of this cursed family, free of this cursed blood, free of Veer.”
For the first time, I saw the silver thread woven though her dress. It was reflecting the sparks from the sky like a shield, blinding me. The black ice under my feet was cold and slippery. I inhaled deeply and replied, “Veer’s blood is not cursed, and my Diya belongs to that blood. I do not want to be free. I love Veer.”
She laughed a slow mocking laugh. Her dress stretched and coiled itself around my waist. I tried to open its knots, to release myself, but she kept coiling it around me, tighter and tighter. I was beginning to suffocate me.
“Maya, he is gone. He sacrificed himself for your freedom … for you to live.”
I tasted lemon on my tongue, and then the sharpness of wasabi.
She suddenly released my waist, and her dress untangled. My feet skidded, and I fell hard on the ice. My knees bled and my hands were scraped.
What had she just said? Veer sacrified himself? I felt my chest fill up. “You are evil….” I whispered from shivering lips.
I didn’t want to show her my weakness. I didn’t want to cry. But there was such finality in her thoughts. What had she done?
In a flash, she shot up into the sky, above the stone angel’s head, above the majestic oaks. Her wild hair knotted up, her face turned livid, the red veins inside her eyes bulged and her nostrils fumed. This was not the beautiful Gayatri from a few seconds ago. She had taken another avatar. Her voice whipped down at me, “Maya, how can you say that I am evil? Even after how we have both been treated? Ahhhh….” Her moan slashed against the sky.
Bolts of lightning shot down at me like spears, their light so blinding that I couldn’t see where I was running. The clammy mud under my feet had started caving in. Yes, this was my end. I had no where left to run.
I opened my eyes. I was sweating.
Was this the last I had seen of her?
I realized that she wanted to take away my hope, to hijack my spirit and take it with her into the darkness of hatred that consumed her.
I was thankful for returning to the mundane hospital sounds. I welcomed the busyness of the morning around me. The clinking of bedpans, the screeching of trolley wheels, the smell of toast, and the chatter of nurses. I was still groggy. The morning sunlight was streaming in from the open venetian blinds.
A plump matron with a
round sweaty face walked in smiling. “Good Morning, Missus. How are you today?”
Diya’s armchair was empty. The matron was watching me. “Oh, what a sweet child. You are very lucky, Missus. You know children these days…. The poor girl refused to go home, but then I convinced her that your drugs would not wake you up till later and so she said she was going home only to freshen up….”
The matron was back with a small cupful of dense purple liquid medicine. “Come on, sit up,” she ordered. She propped the steel bed up with the lever and wrapped an inflatable cuff around my arm to take my blood pressure.
Diya entered.
I tried to put up some resistance as the nurse came towards me with the cupful of medicine, but I was overpowered by both the nurse and the second-in-command, Diya. “Open up, Ma.”
“Oh, so who made you the boss?” I joked feebly.
“You did. When you decided to behave like a child and run in the snow.”
She was humouring me. I opened my arms and she ran into them like a child. “You will always be my baby, Diya.”
She started weeping. I stroked her hair and then wiped her face with the edge of my hospital gown. The nurse was standing over us, watching. “Now, now,” she sniffled, then clapped. “Open wide.” She brought the liquid to my lips and then poured it in my mouth with force. “It is time to rest again. Soon you will be out of here,” she smiled and clucked.
But I did not want to sleep anymore. I wanted to go home.
I knew what I had to do.
***
Diya brought me home. She carried the brass urn and the peacock box in the trunk with my suitcase. I could see that Diya was curious about the urn and was waiting for the right time to ask some questions. Strangely, my mind was at peace after confronting Gayatri. And, even more strangely, the seed of hope I had for Veer inside my heart grew stronger each moment. Every sunrise the doves would wait under the stone angel statue, and every sunset I would look at the urn on the mantle of our study.
Then one day the doves did not come. I sat on the bench waiting for them to show up, but they didn’t. I knew why they had not come to peck. It was their way of telling me to wake up and complete my unfinished business.
I went in and started looking for the last missing piece. If I had to put this story to rest then I had to bury it completely. No part of it could be left behind or remain in our lives any longer.
I emptied my wardrobe and my shoe closet, and looked under my bed, in the storage chest, and finally each box in the attic. It was not there. Where had I put Gayatri’s polka-dotted diary? There was only one place left. Veer’s study. I looked on the bookshelves, the dresser, even the cocktail hutch and TV cabinet. Where had it vanished? Tired and frustrated, I sat down on the ottoman. A horrible thought crossed my mind. I had shown Veer the diary and the photo. What if Veer had become curious and wanted to read it on his own? Then where would he have kept it? I closed my eyes and thought. Of course, the most predictable place. I opened the last side drawer on his desk and pulled out some files, letters, and bank papers. There it was. So Veer had read the diary!
I opened it carefully and slowly pulled out the small peacock feather that I owed to Sheila. I knew she would be waiting for it. I had promised to return it to her as a token of my well-being. But could I return it? I slipped the feather back into the diary and packed it in my travel bag.
That evening I bought a plane ticket to Delhi.
“Why are you going, Ma? Why do you do this? Who do you have there?” Diya argued relentlessly. I was combing her long hair to calm her down, just as my mother had done for me. And then she finally asked. “Mama, I see you looking at the brass urn. What is in it?”
I had been preparing for her question, but I was not prepared to give her the answer. How could I tell her the story of her doomed ancestors? I wanted the story to die with me. Otherwise Diya would never be free, just like I was never free. But I could not lie either. “Something that needs closure, my child.”
She looked at me sideways and opened her mouth to say something else, but thankfully she decided to pursue what was for her a more urgent matter.
“Mama, when you reach Delhi, buy a local cellphone and speak to me every day. And I want you back in a week.” She was being the parent again.
Diya came to see me off at the airport. As I walked towards the security check, I turned to look at her one last time. She was waving at me with that same worried look that had been on her face for the past few weeks. I felt like taking her in my arms as I had done when she was a toddler and telling her it would all be okay, that I had much more strength that she could ever fathom. Instead, I waved back and walked through the gates.
41.
THE TRIP BACK TO INDIA was difficult. It was not the same without Veer. It never would be. The journey was long and tedious. The familiar smells hit me as soon as the the doors of the plane opened and allowed us to disembark.
I gave my cab driver the address of my parents’ house. Everything seemed different during the ride from the airport. The last I remembered of these streets was the maddening, chaotic traffic. As our taxi moved through the spaghetti junctions and new flyover passes, I was impressed with the infrastructure development and how neatly we glided through the organized intersections.
After about ten minutes on the road, our taxi swirled and honked loudly outside a large iron gate, to wake a sleeping night guard. The taxi driver took out my luggage and placed it on the marble porch entrance of a palatial apartment building. I tipped him an extra three hundred rupees for bringing me safely, but he crinkled his nose. Maybe three hundred rupees was not a good tip anymore, I thought.
Since Ma and Pa passed away, I realized that Delhi was just another empty city for me. Being the only child, they had left their apartment for occasions like these, when one of us decided to visit India. I took off the dusty covers to reveal and relive my childhood with every framed photograph, painting, cushion cover, and teacup. If only I could bring a bit of that abandon, a bit of that carelessness and innocence of childhood back into my life. For the rest of the day, I mourned for my parents, and the fact that I had not been able to come back to see them before they left this world.
The next morning, I opened my phonebook to pick up the threads with the people I had left behind, the people that I remembered often and missed. The first, of course, was my soul sister, Anita. In her last email, she had complained about Ajay’s posting in congested Mumbai and how they were hankering to get away from it all. I left a message with her housekeeper, hoping that she would call me back soon.
Then I called Tina, my socialite friend, who had married Rony, Veer’s friend and the goal keeper of the school soccer team. A few years ago, I had seen Tina’s photograph in one of the Indian newspapers I bought at an ethnic Toronto market. Her hair had turned steel grey, and she looked aged far beyond her years. The article talked about a political rally that she was leading just before the general elections to topple the current government with her renowned politician father. She had changed from being a fashion buff to a self-proclaimed socialist and a politician. Rony was not by her side—instead there was a younger man who had his arm around her shoulder. Again, no response.
I decided to make my last call, to Jiya, who had been in touch over Facebook and was still her ravishing self. Her story had also made headlines in the tabloids, but for a different reason. She had successfully won a celebrated class action lawsuit against her husband Sam, who abused her for not bringing with her a satisfactory dowry when they married. Jiya was one of the millions who faced dowry abuse The tabloids spoke of how Jiya was physically, emotionally, and verbally abused for years because of the inability of her parents to shower her husband and his family with gifts, money, property and other material tokens as payment for his marriage to their daughter. Jiya defied this age-old custom of dowry by winning this court case and she had become a symbol of
strength for other women in similar situations. I was so proud of all of my friends.
Jiya picked up the phone. The same voice, a little more poised. “Maya, I cannot believe it! Is that really you?” she cried out with joy, and I felt myself sniffling. “Is Veer with you too?” She did not know. No one knew. “I am so sorry to hang up this way, but I am running late for a meeting and then I am going out of town for a few days. I will call you back first thing when I return. Love you, and so nice to hear from you.” We hung up.
I felt an emptiness. How futile this trip was. Diya was right. I was running after shadows. I had nothing in this city except my memories. I did not want to call anyone else.
Instead, I called a taxi, resolving to complete the tasks for which I had come. I gathered all the pieces of my old life that I needed to return to their rightful owners, and then free myself of them forever. I placed these items in my bag, one by one. The brass urn, the peacock bracelets, the black diary, and the peacock feather. Then I placed the bag carefully next to me on the taxi seat.
And, with that, we drove to our old mansion.
My myth about the new and improved state of Indian traffic from the previous night was shattered immediately. I rolled down the window to get away from the synthetic smell of the sandalwood air freshener. Greasy fumes reeking of gasoline mixed with grime hit my face from a platoon of trucks that was blocking the street ahead. There were different volumes of car horns blaring as if in competition with each other. Cars, scooters, stray dogs, pedestrians, rickshaws, cows, buses, cyclists, all moving in different directions on the same road, trying to forge ahead into any inch of space they could seize.
I had never seen such mastery, such skill being exhibited by any driver on the road, except my own taxi driver. He waded through each obstacle as a quarterback would to get a touchdown. I sat up in anticipation of recognizing any landmarks. But nothing looked familiar. Then we turned the corner. And, in a moment, I was back in time. In front of me stood the mansion. The façade was a little faded but essentially the same, with its, arches and domes, east and west wings, and the sprawling gardens.