A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

  Before they lumber off, the one with the wart says, “We’ll be back in the morning.”

  “So will we,” Fatima Aunty yells, throwing her fist in the air like her union taught her to do.

  “If you come back tomorrow, we’ll call the police,” the one with sneakers says. “We’ve had enough of your nonsense.”

  “Useless people,” the one with the wart says. “What do you think you’re going to do, stop the city?”

  The one with the wrong skin is gentler. He says, “Don’t waste your time on this. Move out of your house, find somewhere else to stay. Somewhere better.”

  “Somewhere else? Somewhere better?” Selvi Aunty says, snorting. “If we had somewhere better, you think we’d be living here?”

  “Then get yourself new husbands,” the one with the wart says. “Men who work like we do and take care of our families.”

  “My husband would never do what you do,” Neelamma Aunty says. Out of all of the mothers here, she’s the only one with a husband left to defend. “Destroy people’s lives for money? We’d rather starve.”

  “Starve then. We’re leaving.”

  The drivers float away, our mothers’ curses pelting them like asteroids.

  Without the drivers there to argue with, we get quiet—except for our stomachs, which growl like rusty engines. None of us women have been home long enough to massage flour into rotis, sizzle batter into dosas. To conjure chutney out of curry leaves, curry out of vegetables paid for with counted-out change.

  “I’ll make something quickly, quickly,” Neelamma Aunty says. “Ajji will help me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Fatima Aunty says. “I went shopping this morning. Why bother yourself when my kitchen is full?”

  “Chee! Today of all days I can’t suffer through your bland, healthy food,” Selvi Aunty says. She’s not wrong—ever since Fatima Aunty got a job as a health worker, it seems like she’s forgotten all about ghee, oil, and salt. Masala too. “I’ll make us some spicy, spicy curry. Like they make in my village.”

  “By the time they’re done arguing, we’ll starve to death,” Deepa mumbles.

  “Maybe not,” Padma says, sniffing the air. “Doesn’t it smell like chicken?”

  Banu runs up then, finally back from her kolam route. “They pulled up in a big white bus,” she says, panting. “They have pots and pots of something. Biryani, I think. Chutney too.”

  “What are you saying?” Deepa asks, stiffening. “The city brought us dinner?”

  “No, not the city,” Banu says, “the engineers.”

  If you ask us girls, we’ll tell you Bangalore’s a city with too many problems. Too many bars packed with too many men. Too many women with too many children. Not enough roofs and too much rain.

  If you ask our mothers, they’ll tell you Bangalore has just one problem: engineers.

  When our mothers were younger, they couldn’t walk ten meters without stumbling into a lake or a garden or a two-hundred-year-old banyan tree. Electronic City was a vast and sprawling pasture, a sleepy shepherd’s grazing ground, a village where farmers’ wives went hunting for grass for their cows, husbands for their daughters. Even the air force camps and the research parks had more leaves than bricks, more green than gray.

  Then the engineers who worked for the air force and research parks started inventing this, programming that. Founding this company, buying that one. Towering glass buildings sprouted in the grass where sheep used to graze. Highways paved over the husband-hunting grounds.

  We heard our mothers complain, but we never understood. How could we, when we’d never seen an actual engineer? To us, engineers sounded like wild animals, exotic birds, a species not entirely our own. Visitors from foreign planets who spoke in clipped and angry tongues laced with furious consonants, with frantic vowels.

  In eighth standard, we found out they were people, just like us, but richer. People who showed up at our school two or three times a year. Handed out T-shirts that we gave to our mothers to tear up into rags. Passed out chocolates we gave to our younger siblings when there wasn’t enough food at home. Played games with us that were supposed to give us confidence. Since they talked mostly in English, we didn’t know what they were saying, or what we were supposed to do. Which didn’t make us confident at all.

  Tonight, in the shadow of the bulldozers, there are no games or clothes or candies. Instead, there are tall metal pots of aromatic rice, shiny silver stacks of crimped foil plates, plastic tubs of raita made with mint and cumin and salt.

  These engineers are mostly women. Kumkum in their hairlines, bindis on their foreheads. Matching strands of jasmine fastened to their pinned-up hair. They wear T-shirts with company logos over tight, pressed jeans. Sit cross-legged on the pavement by the main road and serve us orange and yellow biryani dripping with juicy pieces of chicken, fat chunks of carrot. We mix the rice with spicy green chutney and plain yogurt that we squeeze from plastic bags. Push burnt black cloves and cardamom pods to the sides of our plates, pop the chilis in our mouth spicy and raw.

  “This is a protest,” Fatima Aunty mutters. “Not a picnic.”

  “Hush, Ma,” Rukshana says. “It’s free food. Just eat.”

  “Lucky thing they came, isn’t it? I don’t know how we would’ve managed otherwise,” Neelamma Aunty says, pushing some of her raita onto an empty spot on Padma’s plate. When Padma objects, she says, “Eat, eat. It’s good for the bones.”

  “That’s true,” Rukshana says. “How did they know?”

  “I told them.”

  That voice. We know that voice.

  “Janaki Ma’am!” Joy says.

  “If you think this is an excuse for skipping your tenth-class exams, you’re dead wrong,” our headmistress says. She reaches into the hemp bag slung over her shoulder and pulls out a handful of water bottles. The good kind with the green lettering, the kind we’ve seen foreigners drink on the street outside of five-star hotels.

  “Seriously?” Rukshana says under her breath.

  “I heard that, young lady,” Janaki Ma’am says, handing Rukshana a bottle. Rukshana looks down at her feet. Janaki Ma’am is the only one who ever makes her feel guilty. “How do you think you’re going to survive crises like this without an education?”

  “All the mothers in Heaven are surviving,” says Deepa, who doesn’t go to school, “and they barely studied at all.”

  “I know, darling.” Janaki Ma’am kisses Deepa on the top of her head and says, “I was their headmistress too.”

  Bangalore used to be a place where things grew. Trees, bushes, flowers. Tomatoes if you planted them in January. Cilantro and mint any time of year at all. A place where the soil pushed and the sun pulled life up, up, up.

  After the engineers came, Bangalore grew other things. Buildings, overpasses, toll roads.

  And walls. Lots and lots of walls.

  Brown concrete fortresses around the brand-new flats and offices and shopping malls that would never let us inside. Bracing themselves against the noise of the traffic, the smell of the cars. Against the rattle and clatter of girls like us. Girls who make all the noise that is supposed to be made by boys.

  We didn’t think much about the walls at first. Forgot that they were there.

  Until Janaki Ma’am told us we should scale them.

  Because eighth standard wasn’t just the year of the engineers. It was also the year of Janaki Ma’am. Specifically, it was the year Janaki Ma’am started finding excuses to teach us, lecture us, push us. Made us believe that we could be more than what everyone else thought we could be. What we thought we could be.

  “If you’re all going to pass your tenth-standard boards, we have to start now,” Janaki Ma’am said. “That’s right, two years ahead. I know to you lot that seems like an eternity, but believe me. It’s going to go by in a flash. A blink of an eye, I tell you.”

  “Who says we’re all going to pass?” Rukshana asked.

  “Who says we all want to pass?” Vihaan asked
.

  “Of course you want to,” Janaki Ma’am said. Used her sari to wipe sweat from where it pooled in the valleys along the edges of her hair. “Look around you. Call centers, IT companies, multinationals. The Indian space program is just down the street. We just sent some contraption to Mars for heaven’s sake. Mars. How are you going to work in any of these places if you don’t even have a tenth-class pass?”

  “You really think we could work at ISRO?” Padma asked timidly.

  “Of course you can!” Janaki Ma’am said, pulling out the English language newspaper from her purse to show us a photo of a group of chubby aunties giggling, hugging, taking selfies with their fancy phones. They wore saris and bindis, long strands of jasmine in their hair. It looked like they were on the set of an action film. “See this? These are the Mars scientists. The ones who launched that—that—well, that something or other. All Indian. Mostly south Indian. Just like you.”

  “They’re nothing like us,” Rukshana said.

  But not loud enough for Janaki Ma’am to hear. We liked her too much for that.

  Eighth standard was the year of Janaki Ma’am, of the Mars rover, of the engineers. But it was also the year of Kalla.

  That same year, a few days before the skies thickened and burst with pre-monsoon rain, words thickened and burst onto the city’s walls.

  Specifically, the words

  KALLA WAS HERE

  The wall outside the BSNL office, which used to be the telephone exchange. The wall outside the glass-walled flats, which used to be an empty lot. The wall outside the shopping mall, which used to be a slum like ours. The wall outside the five-star hotel, which was always there but never used to be this full.

  “Kalla? What does that even mean?” Rukshana asked when we stopped to look at it. Partly because we wanted to, and partly because the longer we took to get home, the longer we didn’t have to do our chores.

  “It’s Kannada for thief,” Padma said. She grew up in the country so she knows these things.

  “Thief,” Rukshana repeated. “Is that supposed to be tough or something?”

  “What’s tough about a bunch of letters on a bunch of walls?” Joy asked.

  Two days later, the murals started. Sprouted and bloomed and spread like pumpkin vines. Spray-painted portraits of women in nighties getting water from a pump. Of auto-rickshaw drivers with chubby mustaches and skinny arms. Of children with sand-colored hair selling plastic pens on street corners.

  And always, across the bottom,

  KALLA WAS HERE

  Letters tall and blue and disciplined. Straight-backed as soldiers. Secret as spies.

  The engineers don’t just bring dinner. They also bring the foreign lady.

  Eyes as green blue as a parrot’s tail. Wrists fair as unboiled milk. Hair as yellow as the pencils our teachers tell us to use when we’re drawing sunlight.

  The foreign lady’s got a camera covered in dials and switches and lights. Every time she takes a picture, she rearranges her whole body, kneeling and crouching and leaning.

  We watch her as she frames our lives—or, at least, what’s left of them. Vihaan’s uncle cycling through the rubble, a handkerchief over his mouth to block out the bursts of gray and brown and red dust that rise up beneath the tires. Yousef’s mother rifling through the rubble, wet kohl running down her cheeks, swallowing her sobs with loud, choking gasps. Padma’s sleeping brothers curled up like starving kittens in the shade of a coconut tree.

  We watch what she doesn’t frame too. Fatima Aunty on her cell phone, wagging her finger in the air, barking out demands. Neelamma Aunty telling a dirty joke then throwing her head back and laughing while Selvi Aunty giggles behind her hand. Janaki Ma’am handing out water bottles to the good men, the fathers and brothers and cousins who are back from their shifts at work, ready to listen and help where they can.

  “She’s getting it all wrong,” Joy says.

  “She’s getting us all wrong,” Rukshana says.

  In Heaven, we are used to treating our girlhood like a territory that must be defended, staving off intruders and fending off disasters with each strategically plotted move.

  In our mothers’ eyes, in our eyes, it’s a war we have a chance of winning. But in the foreign lady’s photographs, it’s one we’ve already lost.

  The murals kept appearing, a new one every night. A garden full of birds and trees on the wall in front of the pub that’s just come up on the main road. Young girls selling roses on the wall in front of the last nut-and-screw warehouse on Mandappam Street. And on every mural, marching, saluting: KALLA WAS HERE.

  Vihaan and Yousef started showing up to school with blue paint under their fingernails, blue stains on their shirt sleeves.

  “Graffiti is a punishable offense,” Yousef announced. Stretched his hands to give us a glimpse of the blue islands on his wrists.

  “Where’d you learn such big words?” Rukshana asked.

  “From the papers,” Vihaan said. His uncle owns the used paper shop, so Vihaan reads the headlines from the day before. “Didn’t you hear? Kalla did a mural inside the Royale,” Vihaan says.

  “What, that fancy hotel where all the foreigners stay?” Joy said, like she does whenever anyone mentions anything posh. Tore her eyes away from her own purple finger nails. She said she only painted her left hand because it’s how the film stars do it, but we were pretty sure she ran out of paint.

  “How’d he get inside?” Padma asked.

  “No one knows,” Yousef said. Shook the article and said, “Here. Listen. ‘While rumors are spreading that Kalla is from the local slum known as Heaven, authorities are doubtful.’”

  “They’re not the only ones,” Joy said.

  “‘The quality of the art shows a’—wait, what’s this word?” Yousef leaned over Joy’s desk with the paper, but Rukshana snatched it away.

  “‘The quality of the art shows a sophistication normally associated with classically trained artists, rather than slum dwellers,’” Rukshana read. “‘The local police chief says, “Whoever he may be or whatever walk of life he comes from, Kalla is breaking the law. Make no mistake: when we apprehend him, he will face serious consequences.”’”

  “How do they know it’s a he?” Banu asked.

  “Although I am glad to see you reading the paper, Kalla or no Kalla, your year-end exams are just a month away,” Janaki Ma’am said, sweeping into the room. The air swished with the cotton-silk of her sari, the yellow-edged pages of worksheets in her arms. “Kamala Miss is late today, so I’m taking your social studies class.”

  We all groaned, but secretly we were pleased. None of us liked Kamala Miss. She smelled like raw onions and bidis. She said the bidi smell was from her useless husband’s useless habits, but Joy and Rukshana have both seen her smoking behind the school. (“It’s okay if she does it,” Joy used to say, “but she shouldn’t lie about it.”)

  “Janaki Ma’am,” Yousef yelled out, “you think Kalla could be from Heaven?”

  “Possibly,” she said. Leaned back on the desk like she was really considering the question. Which was something we didn’t expect. “Just because something is illegal doesn’t always mean it’s wrong.”

  The morning after Kalla broke into the Royale, the water pump stopped working again. Our mothers crouched along the main road, calculating how many more dishes they could wash, how many more vegetables they could clean, if the water truck didn’t show. Wondering if today was the day they’d finally be fired from their jobs for being late again.

  So they did what they always did when they got worried: they gossiped.

  “Selvi, have you found a girl for that son of yours?” Neelamma Aunty asked. Selvi Aunty had already married off Joy’s two oldest brothers. Traditionally, the last brother should wait until Joy’s wedding.

  But then, Selvi Aunty isn’t one for tradition.

  “He found someone himself,” Selvi Aunty said. An ancient city bus slowed down in front of them and its door folded open. A m
an with a mustache and skin the color of burnt sugar braced himself against the step and yelled out, “Mainroadmainroadmainroad.” Our mothers waved him off.

  “You like her?” Fatima Aunty asked.

  “She’s a nice girl. Wants to go for her graduation in nursing,” Selvi Aunty said.

  “Same community?” Neelamma Aunty asked. “Known family?”

  Selvi Aunty nodded and said, “From our church.”

  “That’s lucky,” Fatima Aunty said. Wiped an arm across her forehead. Thought of her daughter Rania, probably, with her Buddhist husband.

  “Only problem is this rumor about that graffiti boy. What is his name again? Kanna?” Selvi Aunty said.

  “Kalla,” Neelamma Aunty said. “What rumor?”

  “That he’s from Heaven,” Fatima Aunty said. “I’ve heard it too. They even wrote about it in the newspaper this morning.”

  “What, they think your son might be Kalla?” Neelamma Aunty asked. “That dear boy. How could he be doing this painting nonsense when he’s always, always studying?”

  “That’s the problem,” Selvi Aunty said. Reached back to adjust the jasmine pinned in her hair. It was a long strand, the ten-rupee kind. One of her older sons must’ve given her some extra money. “The papers say Kalla’s intelligent. My son just finished engineering, came third in his class. Good at drawing too—has to sketch roads and buildings and things for his classes. Doesn’t help that he doesn’t have a father around.”

  “Ridiculous,” Fatima Aunty said. “Better to have a mother like you than a father like some of the fathers I know. My husband, for example. Wherever he is.”

  “We’ll see. Our family is a much better match than what they’ve already been offered,” Selvi Aunty said. “They’ll come around.”

  The water truck pulled up then, smelling like burnt rubber and exhaust. Before the driver even had time to turn off the engine, our mothers surged forward, swinging their sari-covered hips at each other like acrylic maces.

  “Took you long enough,” Fatima Aunty yelled at the driver.