She gulped, “It says we two. Ours one.”
“Good.” He nodded, pleased. “That’s what I wanted. I haven’t studied like you, so I didn’t know if they did it properly.”
“Do you know what it means?”
He wrinkled his eyebrows and his forehead. “It means that in our country, two people should only have one child. Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said.
It’s happening, she thought. Now he’ll lay out my failures. He’ll say my uterus—the thing he married me for, the thing every man marries every woman for—is useless. Impudent. Disrespectful. Had the audacity to bring a girl into the world. That too, a blind girl.
This is when he will say that it is his right to find another wife. A wife who can give him one child. A son. A son who can see.
Neelamma Aunty took a deep, blameless breath. She would let him go. After all, this is how men work. How marriage works.
But instead, he said, “We have our one now. We’re finally complete.”
She was so startled that she blurted out, “So you’re not leaving?”
“Leaving?” he said, sounding just as startled as his wife. “Why would I leave?”
“Because of the one I gave you,” she said. “She’s a girl. And that too, she’s—”
He didn’t let her finish. “I’m not leaving,” he said. Kissed Deepa’s velvety cheek. Their baby—their blind baby girl—giggled and smiled.
For the first time in her marriage—maybe in her life—Neelamma Aunty allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to be part of something lasting. Something she’s heard others call love.
Deepa makes a final twirl, presses her hands together, and bows. So do we. Our dance is done.
The audience bursts into applause. Hindi folks yell “Vah vah” and “Kya bath hai.” Southerners whistle and stomp their feet. Some even stand up.
When the prizes are announced, and we are not chosen, the whole audience boos.
“What nonsense is this?” they shout. “Didn’t you see Ambedkar school? Or are you lot blind as well?”
Joy squeezes Deepa’s hand and says, “Thank you.”
“For what?” Deepa asks.
“For this,” Joy says. Gestures at the audience, even though she knows Deepa can’t see.
Sure, we protected Deepa. Kept our teachers away from her when we could, warned her when we couldn’t. Whispered the secrets the older girls told us about bodies, marriage, love. But over the years, Deepa’s done more for us than we’ve done for her. Fed Padma and Banu countless dinners. Slipped Rukshana extra rotis when hers came out crooked. Hid Joy’s makeup collection in an old pouch. Made us read the paper to her and talk about what we read. Made us pay attention to the world. To each other.
It’s funny, being a girl. That thing that’s supposed to push you down, defeat you, shove you back, back, and farther back still? Turn it the right way, and it’ll push you forward instead.
“It’s not like we won or anything,” Deepa says.
“We didn’t win,” Rukshana says, “but for once, we didn’t lose either.”
3
Uninhabitable Planets
a driver steps out of the bulldozer closest to us, reeking of sweat and machine-warmed air. Pulls his ringing phone out of his pocket and looks at the caller ID, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Balances the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he lights a bidi, its ashy musk curling between the words sputtering from his nervous mouth.
“Yes, Madam Secretary, thank you so much for returning my call. Very generous of you, very generous. Yes, yes, I know admissions season is over. But please, try to understand my side,” he says. Stuffs his local accent behind a wall of words he’s read in the newspaper but has never said out loud, inflections he’s heard on the radio but has never tried with his own tongue. “We’ve been calling and calling, my wife and I. For months we’ve been calling, but only just now have we gotten a response.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to get his son into private school,” Deepa says. “Poor man.”
“Poor him?” Rukshana says, rubbing her sweaty palms on her pants. “What about us? Standing out here in this heat for hours and hours. Why did the city have to do this in March?”
“Don’t blame the weather. You’re the one wearing trousers,” Joy says.
“They’ve done it today because Holi’s on Monday,” Deepa tells us.
“Bloody north Indian holiday,” Joy grumbles. “Nobody in Bangalore even celebrated Holi until all those Hindi engineers showed up.”
“You mean Hindu-Hindi engineers,” Rukshana says. “There’s no Holi in Islam.”
“So how come I saw your Muslim cousin-brother filling up balloons with powder?”
“You know Yousef. When it comes to mischief, he’s fully secular.”
“Fine, so it’s Holi,” Padma says. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s a public holiday,” Deepa says. “That means all the government offices will be closed for three days. Courts too. We have no one to complain to and no way to get a legal stay.”
“One minute, one minute,” Rukshana says, shaking her head. “Are you saying that because of this festival that none of us celebrates, during the height of summer, we’re going to stand out here for three days and either melt or get our homes destroyed?”
“Yes,” Deepa says.
Rukshana groans.
Joy sucks her teeth and says, “Oh, stop it, Rukshana. Look how many people are here. Do you see any of them complaining?”
Joy’s right. Sometime between school letting out and the sun creeping up, our neighbors have joined us. Single mothers with broken bits of straw from used-up brooms clinging to the bottoms of their saris. Old ladies with hands shaking from throwing dirt on graves, frankincense on funeral pyres. Girls with evil-eye spots smudged onto their cheeks wearing clothes that used to be ours. We never knew where all those shirts and pajamas and dupattas went. Then again, we didn’t know where they came from either. Only knew they had been worn before.
“These people live here?” Rukshana asks. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Of course you have,” Padma says. “Banu’s got them in her notebooks.”
If you open our school notebooks, you’ll see they’re full. Full of passages copied from English textbooks, figures calculated on counted fingers, facts we will rewrite word for word on our next geography exam.
Technically, Banu’s notebooks are full too. Except they aren’t full of passages and facts and figures like they’re supposed to be.
They’re full of people. Drawings of people. Or, more specifically, the people of Heaven. The thin-lipped knife sharpener who smells like toddy in the evenings and metal in the afternoons. The trash collector who pairs chunky plastic-gold earrings with her fluorescent government-issued vest. The vegetable vendor’s daughter, who runs in front of her father’s cart yelling, “Spinach! Fresh spinach! Best prices, just for you!”
Banu’s drawings are full of details—the dimples on chins, the callouses on fingers, the grass stains on knees. Scars left behind by struggle and disappointment and pain. Her sketches make our world feel intricate, significant, precious. Like a work of art.
Poverty might make our lives ugly. But in Banu’s drawings, our survival is full of beauty.
“You girls need to stay hydrated,” Joy’s mother, Selvi Aunty, tells us. She trudges toward us, arms loaded with plastic bottles of the sugary orange juice they sell in tea stalls next to the tamarind candies and the masala chips. “Drink this.”
“Did everyone run out of water?” Rukshana asks.
“We’re trying to save it,” Selvi Aunty says. “Especially since the pump wasn’t working this morning.”
“Thanks, Ma,” Joy says, taking a bottle from her mother. She tilts her head back, tips the liquid into her mouth in a thin, steady stream, all without touching the bottle to her lips.
“Banu, darling, how are you? Have you and y
our ajji decided what to do about your house?” Selvi Aunty asks.
“What do you mean, Aunty?” Banu asks. “What happened to my house?”
“Oh, kanna,” Selvi Aunty says, cupping Banu’s cheek with her hand. “You better go see before it gets dark. The rest of you lot, go with her.”
“Why, Ma?” Joy asks.
“Just go,” Selvi Aunty says, squeezing her daughter’s arm. “Take care of your friend.”
If you want a people’s history of Heaven, just look at the houses.
The newest buildings are only thatch. Woven walls listing and tilting, not yet anchored to the ground. The oldest homes are solid, stubborn. Brown brick walls, red shingled roofs. Wooden doors streaked with rainbows of waterproof paint, warped from years of Bangalore’s monsoons.
In between are all the other houses, the ones still waiting for more time, more money, more hope. Padma’s house is a precarious tumble of asbestos siding, its entrance a gaping, empty hole. Deepa’s house has a real wooden door but only two real brick walls; the other two are pieces of aluminum donated by an NGO. Rukshana’s roof is a ramshackle layering of plastic, tin, tarp, and extra-thick cardboard, while Joy’s is a waterproof mosaic of red ceramic tiles.
Before today, Banu’s house was the oldest. Cinderblock walls painted blue, roof shingled red. Wooden shelves lined with steel pots that held rice, oil, and palm sugar before Banu’s mother left, before her father died. One window with real glass that opened and closed and didn’t even leak when it rained. Materials and improvements painstakingly acquired over three decades, three generations, pieced together from countless hours of prayer and labor, strategy and luck.
All of it was destroyed in a matter of seconds, crushed beneath a bulldozer’s wheels.
Now, Banu’s half of Heaven is an uninhabitable planet. Wood frames of houses jut out of the earth like broken bones. Wires twist out of the rubble like severed limbs. Banu kneels in the dirt, excavating her former home like it’s a grave site.
“You can fix it, Banu,” Padma says.
Banu pushes aside the pebbles and sand and broken glass. Holds up half of a red and black Rakshasa mask her ajji once hung on a wall to repel bad fortune.
“She’s right, Banu. You can fix anything,” Rukshana says. “Even this.”
Banu pieces together the cracked remains of a shelf she built using a tool set borrowed from a bicycle mechanic whose shop was near our school.
“We’ll help you,” Joy says. “Just like before.”
She uncovers a sepia-toned snapshot of her parents’ wedding. Her father’s face is pierced through with a rusty nail. Banu pokes her finger through the father-size hole.
“Okay,” Banu says, in a voice that sounds like she knows nothing will ever be okay again.
4
Banu the Builder
the last time banu saw her mother, she was boarding a plane to Dubai. She had bought a plane ticket and working papers and a live-in nanny job from a fast-talking man with bruised knuckles and Brylcreemed hair. Sent money home on the thirteenth of every month, starting the month that she landed.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough to give Banu’s ajji hope that they could move out of Heaven. Rent a flat with a window or two, a place breezy enough to dry clothes inside when it rains. A place with a shady veranda for afternoon coffee, with cool linoleum floors for afternoon naps. Naps Banu’s ajji planned to take when her daughter-in-law had put enough away that they could both stop working.
Banu’s ajji never stopped working, though. Neither did her daughter-in-law. But the money did.
Three years after the payments stopped coming, a human rights lawyer asked if Banu’s ajji would like to investigate what happened. Apparently, there was some kind of fund set up for legal cases of women who disappeared in the Gulf. Banu’s ajji was grateful but still respectfully declined. She’d heard enough to know that some stories are better left untold.
When word got around that her mother had disappeared, Banu’s teachers started shooting her looks of deep concern. Over and over again, Banu told them that she was fine.
“I live with Ajji,” she said, “father’s mother. She’s an artist. She’s got magical hands.”
That’s not true, of course. Banu’s grandmother is just like the rest of us.
Banu’s ajji is a kolam lady. Walks around posh neighborhoods with tins of colored powder on her head. Clatters gates and yells out “KOOOO-lam, ran-GO-leeee,” sharp as a mynah bird’s cry. For a reasonable price, she squats on the concrete on her leathery heels, funnels red-yellow-purple-green fistfuls of powder into lotus petals and starbursts and shapes without names, turns driveways and temple floors into the insides of kaleidoscopes, into pinwheel blades spinning in the sun.
She tries to teach us sometimes, at Pongal or Onam or Ugadi or Deepavali, when Hindu houses welcome the gods. How to move our wrists with straight, sure movements. How to draw our imagination out of our mind and onto the ground. When she does it, it looks like she’s grinding rainbows out of Bangalore’s gray-blue sky. But all we get are piles of chemical dust.
So maybe Banu’s grandmother isn’t quite like the rest of us. But maybe she’s a little bit like Banu.
In fourth standard, when we were twelve, the airport started hiring more and more construction people. We thought they were making the place bigger, shinier, newer—just like the rest of the city. Turns out they were taking it apart. Building a new airport in some village where a potbellied politician bought a lot of land and promised impossible things.
We should’ve known back then that nothing in Bangalore was built to last—least of all Heaven.
Before they packed it all in, the airport was close enough to Heaven that every time a jet took off, the sides of our houses shivered and tilted, the air crackled and rushed. At night, red and yellow wing lights out-blinked the stars.
Banu’s house was closest to the runway, just on the other side of a falling-down wall that people from the north were getting paid to tear down. Some afternoons we climbed up on Banu’s roof, lay on our backs, and watched the planes cut shiny silver paths through the sky. Watched so hard that we stopped feeling the corrugated tin against our skin, the jagged nails in our hair.
“Why don’t they crash?” Banu asked.
“Because they’re full of rich people,” Rukshana said.
“One day I’m going to be one of those ladies who works on planes. The ones with the fancy hair and short, short skirts,” Joy said. She folded her hand like she was carrying a tray. “I saw it in a film once. They bring people drinks and snacks and they wear lipstick to make their smiles look bigger.”
“I’m not going to work on planes,” Rukshana said. “I’m going to be the one they serve on planes. I’ll make them give me hot, hot bhaji and then massage my feet.”
“No one will massage your feet,” Joy said. “They’re too smelly.”
Rukshana pretended to hit Joy. But we all heard her giggle along with the rest of us.
“Anyway, come on, yaa. Giving people drinks and snacks? All the way up in the air like that?” Rukshana said. “Not possible.”
“They built something that goes in the sky,” Banu whispered. “Anything is possible.”
We used to stay up there until somebody’s mother or older brother or cousin saw us and told us to stop acting like monkeys. Or boys.
“What is this sky-watching nonsense?” our mothers said. “Waste of time. Better you all learn how to live on the ground.”
Except learning isn’t Banu’s style.
The mothers in Heaven all work. Make their money sweeping other people’s floors, cooking other people’s meals, pressing other people’s machine-washed, ready-made clothes. Filling out government forms for other people’s rations, giving injections to other people’s children. In the evening they come home with mouths full of questions, eyes full of suspicion. Show up at times they think we won’t suspect it, even if it’s just for an hour. How else will they know if we’re s
neaking into dirty movies or doing unmentionable things with boys? If we’re memorizing curse words instead of Kannada verses, polishing off cheap whiskey instead of problem sets?
If our mothers don’t check on us when school lets out, they send their spies. Grandmothers, cousins, sisters-in-law, aunts. Sons can wander and roam and get into all sorts of delicious trouble. Boys will be boys, after all. But daughters are not to be trusted. When you are a girl in Heaven, someone is always watching.
Unless, that is, you’re Banu.
Once, before we were born, Banu’s ajji was the head of maternal intelligence, a master of womanly espionage. That’s how she raised Banu’s father. In a way, that’s how she raised our mothers too. Found them dowries and leant them jewelry when they married the right husbands. Hid them in her house to escape the wrong ones. Squeezed their hands through birth, death, abandonment.
Now, though, Banu’s ajji is tired. She’s buried too many children: the one she bore, the many she raised. Choked down too many untold secrets, too much unspent grief. When she laughs, the sound dissolves into a hacking cough, her body folding in on itself in pain.
At night, and lately, sometimes, during the day, she curls up in the home she thought her daughter-in-law would one day help her vacate. Sometimes Banu lies beside her, breathing deeply, searching for the talcum-powder aroma her grandmother used to carry around in the folds of her sari, the hollow of her neck. These days, Banu’s ajji smells like flowers after a puja: sweetly wilting, rotten and brown.
On bad nights, Banu tries to cheer her ajji up by practicing kolam. She doesn’t do the usual designs, though—dots and curves and flowers and pots. Instead, she does a city. Skyscrapers, airplanes, roads. Bridges and bullock carts, motorcycles and Metro rails. Her ajji watches. Places her hand on Banu’s arm, laughs quietly.
“You mad child,” she tells Banu. “What’s going to become of you?”
When our mothers talk about Banu’s ajji, they say, “What’s gotten into that woman? So many years of telling us not to give up, and now look at her.”
A People's History of Heaven Page 4