A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

  “How?” Fatima Aunty asked. Cheeks shiny with tears, neck shiny with sweat. “I can’t support them. I can’t face the community. I can’t even face myself.”

  “Of course you can,” Rukshana’s grandmother said. “We are women. Sometimes our husbands leave us. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they’re there and we’re still alone. Yet every one of us has survived. What makes you so special?”

  Rukshana looked up at her grandmother then. Sunlight bounced off the mirrors embroidered in the cloth wrapped around the old woman’s head, making the bits of glass shine like stars. Like the whole universe.

  A few days later, Rukshana and her sister and her mother boarded a city-bound bus. Carried a few dresses they’d had stitched by a neighbor, a short stack of rotis wrapped in a torn sari. A phone number of a politician and a stack of crisp new thousand-rupee bills high enough to pay a union leader a reasonable bribe. (Borrowed from another neighbor at a reasonable rate.)

  Rukshana’s mother wore a black dupatta around her head. Now and then, when she was distracted, she pulled the edge over the bottom of her face, so all Rukshana could see was her mother’s kohl-lined eyes.

  “Why are you wearing that, Mummy?” Rukshana asked.

  Fatima Aunty said, “Because it helps me feel like a part of something. Something bigger. It makes me feel free. And brave. For you girls. For me. For all of us.”

  Other daughters would’ve been inspired. But Rukshana just rolled her eyes.

  Rukshana may have forgotten she was a girl, but back in Bangalore, the whole city is ready to remind her. When she tries to sneak away with Vihaan and Yousef and the other boys in the afternoons, one of our mothers always catches her.

  “Hey, Rukshana! Naughty girl! What do you think you’re doing?” they say. “Go home and help your mother.”

  “You help her,” Rukshana says. “I want to play.”

  “You want us to help her?” our mothers say. “Oh-ho! That’s a good one. If we help, who will make dinner and do the wash and sweep the floor at our house? Who will do the dishes and make sure that all the children come home?”

  “You mean the boy children?” Rukshana says.

  By the time she finishes arguing, Vihaan and Yousef are already gone. There’s nothing left for Rukshana to do except drag herself home. She tries to pretend that washing dishes in buckets of soapy water is the same as catching water bugs in the river. That making the dough for rotis is the same as splashing in the mud.

  “The work is bad, but the rules are worse,” Rukshana grumbles, imitating our teachers, our mothers. “Keep your knees together when you sit. It’s so sunny, take an umbrella so you won’t get dark. No, no, don’t speak up. Just do as you’re told.”

  “It’s the way things are,” Padma says. “Might as well accept them.”

  “Plus, it’s better than being a boy,” Joy adds.

  “Is it, though?” Rukshana asks.

  Things get worse in sixth standard, when Rukshana’s body begins to bubble and rise. Every day there is some new bulge to deal with, some unexpected change.

  In the winter, Fatima Aunty pulls Rukshana out of school to go back to the village and help with a family wedding. On the walk from the bus stop to the farm, Rukshana feels her legs and arms and stomach and heart coiled and ready. Her braid swings back and forth, back and forth. Like even her hair cannot contain its pent-up energy.

  But when she gets to the farm, instead of sending her out into the field, Fatima Aunty hands her a bowl full of unshelled peas. “Do these,” she says.

  Rukshana, too shocked to reply, looks up at her mother with round tamarind-pod eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” Fatima Aunty says. Just as Rukshana is relaxing, she adds, “I’ll get you some tea. To keep you awake after the ride.”

  Rukshana does her work beneath a tree whose high branches used to be her favorite hiding place. Now, even in its shade, she feels cruelly exposed. While she works, she watches. Watches the younger boys play cricket and fight kites and catch fat black horseflies with their bare hands. Watches the older boys leave the house on bicycles and two wheelers, smelling like cheap body spray. Watches them come back smelling like wind and music and other people’s cigarettes.

  Rukshana’s aunts hand her an endless stream of chores and chai. After the peas are done, she soaks coriander and mint from the garden in bowls of water from the tank where she learned how to swim. Peels the skin off of gourds from the gardens where she used to chase rabbits and build stick forts. Strips curry leaves from the wooden stems she and her cousins used to use as swords. The leaves fall into the metal colander with a hollow rattle. When she washes the dishes from the meals that she helped prepare, she studies the callouses on her fingers, wondering if they’re the same consistency as the ones she got climbing trees and fighting kites.

  The day before the wedding, Rukshana’s mother brings her a piece of black cotton and a set of pins. Holds the fabric across her palms like a dagger.

  “It’s not just us, you know,” she tells Rukshana. “These Marathis? They’re Hindu, and they cover using the ends of their saris. And I read somewhere that some Jews do also. In America.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes them a part of something bigger. And that makes them brave. Sets them free.”

  “Makes them brave?” Rukshana repeats. “Sets them free?”

  “When I cover, I am more than myself. I am all the women who covered before me. I’m the ones who cover now. So all the things the world wants me to be, wants me to do? That men want me to be and do? I don’t have to be any of them. I don’t have to do any of them. Because I’m not just myself. I’m more than myself. I’m everyone. And that’s what makes me brave. And free.”

  “I already know how to be brave,” Rukshana says. And she does. Fearlessness quivers inside of her like the pulled-back string of a hunting bow. As long as she can remember, that’s how it’s been.

  Rukshana doesn’t care about being any braver than she already is. What she cares about is being free. Not the kind of free Fatima Aunty wants. Rukshana wants—not something more, exactly. But something different.

  Bravery, she thinks, belongs to girls. But freedom belongs to boys.

  Fatima Aunty doesn’t make Rukshana wear a head scarf to the wedding. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. When they get back to Bangalore, she starts again. “Just try it,” Fatima Aunty says. “You can wear it around your hair only, like your grandmother.”

  “Skirts are bad enough. Now you want me to wear this too?”

  “I only want you to try. See what it’s like to be a part of something.”

  “Part of something like your union, which has never gotten you a single raise?” Rukshana asks. On especially bad days, she adds, “Part of something like your marriage, which you couldn’t hold onto?”

  “Strength isn’t about holding on,” Fatima Aunty says, pretending not to notice how badly her daughter wants to hurt her. “It’s about letting go.”

  Rukshana thinks of the kites she used to make with the boy cousins. Flimsy newspaper cut into diamonds, clumsy twine looped around splintery sticks, bits and pieces of glass woven into the deadly tails. The feeling of catching the wind. The feeling of opening her palm, releasing the string. Watching the cheap paper flap and whirl into the vastness of the sky. A sky that makes everything else feel small.

  Her fingers twitch, imagining tying her world to a kite string. What would it take to untether, to let go? To be free?

  “It’s not that I don’t want to be a part of something bigger,” Rukshana says to no one in particular. “It’s that I want to be myself first.”

  This morning, she pilfered a pair of scissors from Janaki Ma’am’s desk. Blue plastic handles, blades sharp and shiny. If she holds them open at a certain angle, they make the shape of a kite. The shape of a decision.

  Rukshana combs her hair and fastens it into one long plait. Hair that, since that time with the lice, she’s never cut. The braid swings across her
back when she bowls cricket balls or chases after the ice cream cart. The boys at school say it’s the only thing about her that is beautiful.

  She knows that they are wrong.

  In two fast motions, she cuts. When the braid falls, she thinks it will sound definite, stubborn. Final. Instead, it crunches and crinkles like fireworks. Like something about to happen. Like something flaming and free.

  Fatima Aunty finds Rukshana standing in front of the almirah with her hair cut short, her lopped-off braid curled around her feet.

  “What are you doing?” she says, gasping.

  Rukshana looks up, startled. Checks that she is not, in fact, hovering above the ground.

  “Letting go,” she says.

  Rukshana’s mother takes the braid. Feels the soft ends unraveling. Thinks of all of the years of her daughter’s life she is holding in her hands.

  “Your beautiful hair,” she whispers. But even as she says it, she knows that something about her daughter’s life—something more than this long hair—is already done.

  Fatima Aunty rifles through the almirah until she finds a clean plastic bag. Holds it open so Rukshana can drop the hair inside. It falls in with a quiet crash.

  “Tomorrow I’ll sell it. We’ll have enough for cooking gas and provisions. And fabric.”

  “Fabric?”

  “For a new skirt for your uniform. Yours is getting short. And tight.”

  “Trousers,” Rukshana says. “I want trousers.”

  Fatima Aunty looks outside the open door of their hut, where a bunch of boys play cricket with plastic bats donated by the local rotary club. There is a thwack, a scream. The sound of pounding feet, of bodies moving beneath the falling ball.

  “That’s a six! That’s a six!” one of them says.

  Another yells, “Catch it! Catch it!”

  They are so loud that Rukshana almost doesn’t hear it when her mother says, “Fine.”

  Her mother, who has lost a father. Lost a husband, a daughter, a son. Once, not so long ago, she thought she might lose herself. Somehow, after all of this loss, she survived.

  Losing Rukshana, though? That she could never survive.

  Fatima Aunty decides that her daughter’s choice to cover her legs is not so different from the choice to cover her face. That cutting her hair is not so different from hiding it.

  Sometimes, the smallest decisions are the most important.

  “Now stop your daydreaming,” Fatima Aunty says, “and help me put the clothes outside to dry.”

  Outside, mosquitoes buzz, auto-rickshaws honk. The boys playing cricket run past, chasing each other and fighting over the score. Rukshana’s mother hands Rukshana blouses and towels and scarves and a plastic bucket full of clothespins. When Rukshana snaps the fabric on the line, the air smells of blue soap and sunshine. Of secret languages. Of beginnings.

  PART TWO

  Development and Expansion

  8

  Perfectly Clear

  the sun slides down the sky, dragging the heat with it. Timid breezes poke their heads up from the depths of Bangalore’s dying lakes, pawing at the air and puffing at the sparse remains of clouds. Dulling the edges of the unforgiving day.

  Beyond the borders of Heaven, men and boys fill the street. Suck bhang lassis through plastic straws the color of zinnias, moonshine from bottles the color of moss. Laugh and scream, their speech syrupy with ganja and liquor, their words as mean as riots.

  The women, though, are just like us. Housewives with their hair tied up in towels, their hands sticky with caramelized milk and almond paste. Daughters with their arms slick and soapy from scrubbing away dirt, yelling at their younger siblings above the wail of pressure cookers and bubbling pots. Trapped inside their homes the same way we would be if we weren’t so busy trying to keep our homes from falling down.

  All of us, that is, except for Banu, who can’t afford to be like the rest of us. She’s gone out to do her ajji’s kolam route. Tips of her fingers stained red and yellow, forehead smudged purple and green. Pockets of her salwar pants stuffed with ten- and twenty-rupee notes, crumpled with fingerprints the colors of Holi.

  She’s already gone to her ajji’s regular houses and done the traditional designs her ajji’s taught her, the kind that usually bore her with their rules and lines, their formulas that feel suspiciously like school. Tonight, though, Banu doesn’t mind the predictability, the symmetry, the sameness.

  Tonight, she wants at least one thing that she can control.

  Banu takes the long way home, hoping for some new clients. Balancing her ajji’s powder basket on her head, she calls out, “Rang-o-lee! Rang-o-lee!” Her voice is thin, pastel, a hue too weak to penetrate the riotous rainbow of sound that spangles the night.

  Unless, of course, someone is listening with X-ray ears.

  “Banu? Banu, darling, is that you?”

  Banu looks up and realizes she is underneath Janaki Ma’am’s balcony. Janaki Ma’am, who can’t be bothered with holiday preparations. Who, instead of taking care of a family, like all the other women in Bangalore, is taking care of herself. She sprawls on a weather-beaten wicker chair on her veranda, feet propped up on a stool, fingers around a cup of coffee. Peers over the top of her wireless reading glasses at a Kannada novel borrowed from a friend.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Banu says, “just doing my ajji’s route for her.”

  “Are you on your way back to your house?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Banu says again. Then, remembering that she no longer has a house, she adds, “Something like that.”

  “What do you mean, something like that?”

  “They’re demolishing Heaven, ma’am,” Banu says, gulping. “They brought bulldozers.”

  “What are you saying? When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Chee! Shameless people,” Janaki Ma’am says. “The notices they posted said we had another month. This city, I tell you. Need them to do something, they drag their feet. Need them to drag their feet, they do something.”

  “That’s what Fatima Aunty says, too,” Banu says. “They’re all out there protesting. I was too. I didn’t want to leave, but—it’s just—we need the money. They destroyed our house. And my ajji’s medicine was inside, so I need to buy some more.”

  “I see,” Janaki Ma’am says. Chews the inside of her cheek. The sunset turns the lenses of her spectacles lavender and gold. “Sounds like I should get over there too. Before we both go, though, why don’t you come up for a minute. There’s something we need to discuss.”

  In the summer of 1975, the orphans in the Home for Destitute Women and Girls began clanking like jars of marbles. Hacking, coughing, rattling. Jangling and clattering their way toward the light. And not the good kind of light.

  Doctors crinkled their foreheads and knitted their eyebrows, filled manila folders with scribbled patient records that rustled with defeat. Walked halfway up the orphanage stairs, hesitated, retreated. Whispered words that thirteen-year-old Janaki Ma’am did not understand. Antibiotics. Tuberculosis. English syllables that knocked against each other, hollow and hard.

  The nuns lined the girls up oldest to youngest. The youngest pinned jasmine to what was left of their closely cut hair. The oldest wore half saris over frayed petticoats and sun-faded blouses. Everyone clung to each other and tried not to be afraid.

  “Where are we going, akka?” a little one asked.

  “We’re getting chest X-rays,” the older one said.

  “That sounds like it might hurt,” someone else whispered. The girls shuddered with memories of the sharp prick of injections, the slow burn of lice shampoos. The littlest ones started to sob.

  “Don’t worry, darlings,” an older girl said to the younger ones. Used her thumbs to roughly rub tears from a crying girl’s eyes. “It’s just a machine that snaps a photo of your inside.”

  “Like the inside of my tummy?”

  “No, the inside of your chest. Your heart, your lungs. Like that.”


  “We’re getting a picture of our hearts?” Janaki Ma’am asked, her voice feathery and small.

  The older girl nodded, misunderstanding. Placed her hand affectionately on Janaki Ma’am’s head. “Like a magic camera. Don’t worry. It’s over in one two three seconds, just like that. Doesn’t hurt at all.”

  But Janaki Ma’am was not that kind of worried.

  Banu sets her basket of colors on the floor outside of Janaki Ma’am’s door, next to the rack where she would leave her sandals if she owned any.

  “Ma’am?” she calls out softly.

  “Come, come. I’m in the kitchen,” Janaki Ma’am says. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Banu steps inside and looks around. Janaki Ma’am’s flat is a boxy jumble of cluttered rooms lined with bookshelves and framed folk art, a kitchen in the back, a toilet on one side, a bedroom on the other. In the kitchen, dishes rattle, a burner lights with a hiss and a pop.

  “Have you studied for your exams?” Janaki Ma’am calls through the doorway.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Banu says. Wiggles her dirty toes on the immaculate red tiles lining the hallway floor. “But I don’t think I’m going to pass.”

  “I see,” Janaki Ma’am says. Comes out of the kitchen and hands Banu a steaming steel tumbler of buffalo milk mixed with some kind of protein malt. Horlicks, probably. Or Ovaltine. “Have you thought about your future, then? What you’d like to do after tenth standard?”

  “My future?” Banu puts her lips to the rim of the metal cup, takes a drink. “I haven’t thought much about it.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “They bulldozed my house,” Banu says, “and my ajji is dying.”

  It’s the first time she’s said the words out loud. She feels them float up in the air, like the hissing of spray paint before it hits a wall. She waits for Janaki Ma’am to deny them, to say that everything will be all right, that the worst will never come.