A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

Instead, Janaki Ma’am says, “I know, darling. Everybody knows.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Banu asks. “I’m all alone.”

  “What’s so wrong with being alone?” Janaki Ma’am says, gesturing around her flat. “I’ve been alone my whole life. And my life’s not so bad, now, is it?”

  Janaki Ma’am was the Sisters’ favorite. Or, at least, everybody thought she was. Why else would the nuns pool their money to enroll her, and only her, in the convent school across the street from the government school where the rest of the motherless girls studied for free? Why else would they allow Janaki Ma’am to skip chores two afternoons a week to spend time in the head office, flipping through books the director’s nephew sent from the United States?

  The books. Oh, the books. Not the battered old textbooks they hand out at government schools or the overly polite textbooks they hand out at private ones. These books had dense covers and woven bindings. Smelled like secrets and wisdom and ink. In Janaki Ma’am’s hands, they felt heavy and sturdy as promises—the kept kind, not the broken kind.

  Janaki Ma’am’s favorite book was an illustrated guide to the human body, its pages sprinkled with English letters, curved and juicy as Karnataka grapes. Each thin, delicate plate peeled away a layer of skin, muscle, blood, bone. The nuns helped her sound out the captions. Epidermis. Scapula. Appendix. Words that tasted strange and hefty and important.

  “You’ll be a doctor someday,” the nuns said. “You’ll go study at Vellore. They make lady doctors there.”

  Like it wasn’t a question. Like abandoned girls topped the medical school entrance exams every day.

  Janaki Ma’am tried not to get her hopes up. Tried not to believe them. But she couldn’t stop herself from studying, memorizing. More syllables, more words. Circulation. Respiration. Digestion. Swallowed up a world in which everything could be illustrated, reasoned, explained.

  If I read enough, she thought, I’ll be able to understand everything. There won’t be any mysteries left.

  Of course Janaki Ma’am didn’t want to understand everything. She only wanted to understand one thing: how she could be so fiercely accepted, so intensely protected, so effortlessly adored by so many girls, so many women—regular girls like the other orphans, extraordinary women like the Sisters—but not by her mother.

  Her mother, who left Janaki Ma’am on the doorstep of the children’s home mere hours after giving birth. Who used whatever love she had for her daughter to entrust her life to the goodwill of strangers.

  Her mother, who may or may not have loved her but is not around to say which one it is.

  Where are the words to explain that?

  Banu can do things that the rest of us can’t. She can fix a broken bicycle using only leftover cooking oil, a bent wrench, and a tarnished chain filched from a junk pile. She can sketch our entire neighborhood from memory, down to the number of branches on the tree leaning over Padma’s door, the exact angle of the paths we take to Deepa’s house, the changing level of water in the drum that Joy’s family keeps on their front stoop. She can break the world down into colors and patterns and structures that the rest of us can’t even picture.

  But for some reason, she cannot do school. In her books, the letters twist and tangle, the numbers tumble and churn. When she is supposed to memorize a passage about our independence movement, or solve a multiplication problem, she can’t focus. Finds herself noticing the texture of a piece of wood, the contours of a piece of metal. The way sunlight streaming through an open window gathers and pulls the shadows into new lines. New planes.

  It never bothered her much. She doesn’t have a mother like our mothers, someone who pictures her having a better home, a better life. For Banu’s ajji, the hut she owns in Heaven is a better life—better than the village where she slept on dried grass and packed mud, better than the joint family farm where she was treated more like a servant than a wife.

  Except now her ajji’s home is gone. Soon her ajji will be too.

  “I imagine your troubles seem endless right now,” Janaki Ma’am tells Banu. Rifles through stacks of papers balanced precariously between piles of notebooks and unread novels. Underneath, Banu sees the contours of a desk. “Insurmountable.”

  “Insur-what?” Banu asks.

  “Insurmountable,” Janaki Ma’am says. “It’s an English word. It means an obstacle that is impossible to overcome.”

  Banu nods and says, “Yes.” Because that is exactly how things seem, even though she’d never tell anyone that. Not even herself.

  Even now, she says, “I have my ajji’s kolam route. And I can do construction. I hear they give women 150 rupees a day. It’s fine.”

  “The thing is,” Janaki Ma’am says, recovering a glossy pamphlet from the tumble of books and papers, “life can be so much more than just fine.”

  Janaki Ma’am was not like the other students in the convent school. Those girls had mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and grandmothers and grandfathers and cousins and brothers and sisters. Those girls were tethered to a glorious chaos of blood and bone.

  Janaki Ma’am, though? She wasn’t tethered to anything.

  In the children’s home, girls like Janaki Ma’am asked the nuns for explanations.

  “Where is my family?” they asked the Sisters before falling asleep at night.

  “In your heart,” the Sisters would say, smiling and pressing their palms against a dozen orphanage-issued cotton nightgowns, their brown knotted fingers like tree roots in concrete.

  The other girls thought hearts were imaginary. Like princesses or Rakshasas or promises exchanged between heroes and heroines in the films the older girls acted out when the nuns weren’t listening.

  Only Janaki Ma’am—ever-studying, ever-sciencing Janaki Ma’am—understood that the heart is a real organ, an actual muscle that actually beats in everyone’s chest. Understood that the heart is not just a thing but also a place. That the heart has tunnels and hollows and caverns, a million tiny nooks and crannies where blood is stored and released. Where secrets and mysteries can hide.

  If the heart could hold blood, Janaki Ma’am reasoned, it could hold other things too. Why not?

  Janaki Ma’am understood anatomy. She understood evidence, experiments, truths. She did not understand lies. Or, more specifically, she did not understand that the cruelest lies are meant to be kind.

  So, every night, while her convent school classmates lay down on sun-faded sheets, squeezed between cousins and siblings and parents; while her fellow destitute girls stretched out next to her on the floor in the main hall of the children’s home, Janaki Ma’am put her hand on her chest. Started to believe that her mother sat cross-legged inside of her, in a heart-shaped cavern pulsing with blood. Pictured her mother’s braid swinging as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, singing a song the color of turmeric in warm milk. Felt a tickling buzz of melody somewhere at the bottom of her throat. Imagined her body illustrated in paper-thin plates, her mother’s outline visible on the page.

  Not that she thought she’d ever see her body sliced thin that way.

  Until the day the doctors took the girls to a magic camera designed to reveal the insides of chests, the insides of hearts. Uncover the room where her mother has been singing, rocking, hiding her whole life.

  How much will I be able to see? Janaki Ma’am wondered. The color of my mother’s skin? The curve of her smile? The tilt of her eyes?

  Or maybe, Janaki Ma’am thought, maybe the camera is so powerful that I will see inside her heart too. Maybe I will see her secrets. Her longings. Her regrets. The hollowed-out place that formed when she gave me up, the piece she carved out of herself like a tiny crescent moon. Or maybe, I will just see her shadow. Whether she is fat or thin. Whether her hair is curly or wavy or straight.

  Whatever it is, Janaki Ma’am thought, it will be enough. It will be mine.

  Janaki Ma’am hands Banu the pamphlet. Banu runs her hand over the cover. Studies a photo of a cluste
r of students in a courtyard. Girls in jewelry carved out of silver and wood, boys in trousers knit from handspun cotton. Together, they lean over easels, charcoal pencils darkening their fingertips.

  “The school of fine arts,” Janaki Ma’am says. “It’s a government program. Admission comes with a scholarship. Just pass your tenth, and then your twelfth, and leave the rest to me.”

  Banu runs her finger over the yellow Kannada letters. Turns the pages and listens to them crackle crisply, hopefully. Traces the stapled edges of the pamphlet with her finger. When she was younger, the staple would have cut her. Now, her hands are calloused from building, drawing, kolam-ing. They feel armored, impenetrable.

  Insurmountable, Banu thinks. Even though she knows that isn’t what the word means.

  “You’re acting like everything is ending,” Janaki Ma’am says, “but your life is just beginning. You’re fifteen, for God’s sake.”

  “Sixteen,” Banu says. “Last week I turned sixteen.”

  “Still young,” Janaki Ma’am says. “Too young to give up. You’ve survived more than most girls your age, I’ll give you that. But we both know that you’ve done far more than just survive, haven’t you? Your drawings. Your buildings. Your—other activities.”

  Banu blushes and looks out the window at the street below. At the bare driveways that, tomorrow, will be covered in color. Some of it will be hers.

  “You have a gift, Banu,” Janaki Ma’am says softly. Lays her hand on Banu’s shoulder. Banu realizes then that she’s been trembling. Beneath Janaki Ma’am’s palm, she feels her body still. “You owe it to your ajji to do something about that gift.”

  The lady doctor smiled at Janaki Ma’am and said, “Such a brave girl.”

  Janaki Ma’am took off her salwar and put on the sea-green hospital gown that smelled like other people’s worries. Stood in front of a boxy robot with metal arms and asked, “This will take a picture of my chest?”

  “Yes, ma,” the lady doctor said, “your chest and everything inside.”

  “So that means my lungs. And also my ribs,” Janaki Ma’am said. “And also my heart?”

  “So smart.” The doctor cupped Janaki Ma’am’s chin, kissed her nose. “They’ve been teaching you quite well in that school, na?”

  “After it’s over,” Janaki Ma’am asked, “do you think I could look at the X-ray, Doctor Aunty?”

  “No, ma. We don’t let you girls see.”

  “Someday I want to be like you, Doctor Aunty,” Janaki Ma’am said, widening her eyes. “I want to be a doctor. So I can help people.”

  The lady doctor’s cheeks dimpled and blushed. “Well. In that case. I suppose we could make an exception this time. Only because you are such a smart little girl.”

  Janaki Ma’am smiled. Did she get her smile from her mother? In just a few minutes, she would know.

  The lady doctor left the room and told Janaki Ma’am to take a deep breath.

  “You won’t feel a thing. Don’t worry.”

  Janaki Ma’am puffed out her chest. And started to worry.

  What if, she thought, my mother is not alone? After all, she hadn’t asked Sister about her mother specifically. She’d asked about her whole family. And ever-studying, ever-sciencing Janaki Ma’am knew the value of precision.

  Who else, Janaki Ma’am wondered, is in my heart?

  The way the Sisters tell it, Janaki Ma’am’s mother was a martyr, and Janaki Ma’am’s abandonment was an act of love. They focus on the details: The perfect roundness of the black mark on Janaki Ma’am’s cheek, drawn to ward off the evil eye. The care with which red plastic bangles had been placed on her wrist, silver anklets hooked around her legs. The softness of the pink silk-cotton dupatta wrapped around her otherwise naked body. The pillow tucked under her head in the straw basket woven the way they do in the countryside.

  “Your mother knew we would love you from the minute we saw you there on the doorstep,” the nuns said, pinching Janaki Ma’am’s cheeks. “And we did. You have always been our precious daughter.”

  Janaki Ma’am had seen the evidence. Had run her fingers along the inside of the basket, held the pink silk-cotton dupatta in her hands. Kept one of the red bangles in her pencil box. Believed the story, believed that her mother is, at most, loving, and is, at least, kind.

  But what about the rest of her family? What did she know about them?

  Janaki Ma’am thought about the other girls at the orphanage, the ones who ran away, who whispered stories to each other about the lives they left behind. Stories of uncles and brothers and fathers with hands that wanted too much. Of aunts and grandmothers and great grandmothers desperate to feed babies that wouldn’t stop growing, wouldn’t stop being born. Of cousins and sisters and sisters-in-law who spat rumors and venom to protect themselves from the lives they were almost leading.

  In the sunlight, those girls shimmered with hope. At night, they simmered with rage.

  Janaki Ma’am had not thought much about the rest of her family. But now, in the face of the magic camera, she began to imagine them. A father with quick fingers, a chin rough with half-grown beard. A brother whose friends aim X-ray eyes at the wrong part of her chest. An aunt with a tongue sharper and more bitter than any vaccine. Imagined the shoulders and elbows and ankles and earlobes of the people who convinced her mother to abandon her.

  Were they in her heart as well?

  And what if, Janaki Ma’am wondered, it is just my mother. What if she hates me for being born, for making her into a woman who abandons children? What if she’s forgotten me altogether?

  The room flashes with purple light.

  The doctor was almost right. On the outside, Janaki Ma’am felt nothing but the hot wet tears rolling down her cheeks. But inside, she ached and ached and ached.

  Janaki Ma’am takes the empty cup from Banu’s hand. Banu’s whole body feels liquid and full, tingling and warm. She’s not sure if it’s the drink, or the idea that Janaki Ma’am has given her. The idea that after everything precious in her life is destroyed, there could be something left. The idea that she, herself, is something precious.

  “Will you think about it, at least?” Janaki Ma’am asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Banu says. “But right now, I should go back. Are you coming?”

  “I’ll come, but not now. I need to make a few calls first.”

  “Okay,” Banu bends down to pick up her basket of colors. As she does, her back brushes the garland of dried mango leaves Janaki Ma’am strung around the door frame, probably for a celebration, or maybe just for good luck. The leaves crackle and Banu leaps away, startled. But when she turns around, she sees that they’re still intact, unbroken. Whole.

  When the doctor finally called her into the X-ray room, Janaki Ma’am was a mess of swollen eyes, twitching mouth. The lady doctor, who grew up surrounded by parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins, who knew family only as the people who wanted the best for her, was not trained to recognize these symptoms. Symptoms triggered by the past.

  Thinking only of the future, of Janaki Ma’am’s healthy future, she said, “Don’t worry, darling. The X-ray is clear.”

  “Clear?” Janaki Ma’am asked.

  “Perfectly clear,” the lady doctor repeated, speaking of bacteria and cloudy lungs. Speaking of pain that can be eliminated with a course of drugs. Speaking of people whose families are real and present.

  Janaki Ma’am thought of all the other places where memories could pool. The insides of ears. The edges of eyes. Ran her finger inside her collarbone, the curve where her neck met her chest. Pictured her heart as just a heart, her chest as just a chest, her body as a place where only she resided. A place holding only herself. A place that is her very own.

  “There’s nothing there?” Janaki Ma’am asked, just to be sure.

  “Not a thing. Just look. It’s right here.”

  The lady doctor smiled and showed her a gray sheet that looked like a collection of shadows. Pointed to a smu
dge in the corner and said, “This is your heart. And these—”

  “Are my lungs,” Janaki Ma’am said. She began to use words her classmates have never heard: Thoracic. Bronchial. Aorta. Pushed her nose close to the film. Searched the shadows for a shape like a body, like a sari, like a hanging braid.

  “You know, there are scholarships for girls like you,” the lady doctor says. “I bet you could get one.”

  No one would find Janaki Ma’am a husband or plan her wedding. No one would stay home to make sure she studied for her exams. No one would tell her the secrets mothers tell daughters, would fight for her the way our mothers fight for us.

  But no one would tell her to quit studying to get married either. No one would tell her that sending a girl to college is a waste of money. A waste of time.

  Maybe no one would tell her she could do anything she set her mind to. But no one would tell her she couldn’t either.

  The road ahead was perfectly clear.

  Janaki Ma’am leans over the veranda railing and watches Banu. The girl’s curly hair is clumsily plaited, the ends dry and split. Banu’s collarbones jut out beneath the jagged cut of her salwar blouse—a shirt that Janaki Ma’am is sure used to belong to Joy—like a pair of calcified wings.

  Janaki Ma’am, who never had a mother. Never had siblings, neighbors, friends that might as well be family. Janaki Ma’am, who is nothing like the rest of us.

  But who is maybe a little bit like Banu.

  9

  Walls

  just before dusk, the drivers step out of the bulldozers and into the graying evening buzzing with mosquitos. Oily hair, thick mustaches. Teeth stained brown by bidis and tea. Vests with fluorescent stripes, “BBMP” painted in the front in bold capital letters. Seeing them all together, here, we notice they are different only in the tiniest details. One has those maroon patches around his eye and down his cheeks. Another has a wart on his chin. The last one limps, which is maybe why he wears scuffed-up sneakers instead of plastic sandals.