A People's History of Heaven

by Mathangi Subramanian

  Padma makes us take the long way home. Starts in the alleyway behind the school. Weaves through piles of plastic milk bags and cow dung and rotting vegetables. Opens into the posh neighborhood full of three-story houses with gardens full of roses and carnations, driveways full of cars, entire floors to rent to strangers.

  Or, in one house, a veranda just for birds.

  There are plenty of birds in Bangalore. Mynahs with feathers the color of mud. Pigeons with necks that pop like rusty bed springs. Kites that carry pieces of rotting flesh in their city-sharpened claws.

  These are not those kinds of birds. These birds are the colors of the jewels in the Joyalukka’s window. These birds are so posh that if they applied for visas at the American embassy, they would get them on the first try.

  When she sees the house, Padma dusts off her skirt, tucks in her shirt. Licks her palm, smooths down her hair. Walks right up to the door and rings the doorbell.

  “Madam,” she says to the lady who answers. A lady dripping in actual jewels from the actual window of Joyalukka’s. “Do you need a maid?”

  “In fact, I do,” the lady says. Words pleated like she hired the ironwallah to press her tongue. “But you’re a bit young, aren’t you, darling?”

  “Not me, madam,” Padma says. “My mother. Her name is Gita.”

  “Is she neat and clean like you?” the lady asks.

  “Yes,” Padma says. “And she has impeccable manners.”

  Where did Padma learn a word like that? We can’t help but be impressed. The lady is too, because she says, “Bring your mother tomorrow, darling. She must be a decent woman if she raised a girl like you.”

  On the road that wound between Padma’s village and Bangalore, golden-green paddy fields gave way to abandoned farms the brown-gray hue of defeat. Stalks of sugar cane and corn slumped against each other like drunks. Every so often green and purple fingers of ragi defiantly pushed their way through the asthmatic earth, the dirt around their roots cracked and brown.

  Two hours into the ride, the bus tilted into a ditch. The driver revved the engine, cursed colorfully in Telugu. Passengers covered their heads to protect themselves from the luggage tumbling from the racks above.

  Behind Padma, an old woman cackled and slapped her thigh. “My daughter and I dug that ditch. They made us do it for that sarkari money.”

  She was talking about the one hundred days of paid labor the government had started guaranteeing starving farm families, meaningless, measurable tasks, like collecting sticks of wood, digging ditches. At the end of the day, an inspector with sweat-stained armpits would count the sticks, record the depth and width of the pits, determine if the crew had done enough to warrant getting paid. The work was meant for men, but the women were the ones who showed up for it, babies wrapped in their saris, toddlers waddling at their heels.

  “We dug and dug so we wouldn’t starve to death,” the old woman said as the bus tipped and lurched, unable to right itself. “And now, just see. We’re going to die anyway.”

  “I didn’t even get paid,” Gita Aunty said. “The sarkari man promised me, but the money never came.”

  “None of us were paid, darling,” said the old woman. “If we had been, we wouldn’t be on this blasted bus, now would we?”

  On her mother’s first day of work, Padma wakes her early. Makes her apply the tiniest bit of kohl to hide the dark circles under her eyes, wear the sari Padma has washed and dried and pressed the night before. Holds Gita Aunty’s hand as they cross the footbridge, taking a left instead of going straight. As they plunge into the rich neighborhoods, memories of rivers and farms trace watery tributaries on Gita Aunty’s cheeks.

  Inside the house, the hall hums with whirring ceiling fans, with wind rushing between open windows. The floor is lined with earthen pots full of tall, feathery plants, the walls with tasteful folk art. The air is still buttery with the smell of the alu parathas and yogurt the family had for breakfast.

  “The work is nothing difficult,” the pressed-tongue woman says, gesturing for Padma and Gita Aunty to follow her up the stairs. “We have a girl to do the chopping and cooking. Another girl for the clothes. The mali comes for the plants. We’d need you only for some sweeping and dusting and tidying up. And then, of course, we need you to care for the birds.”

  “The birds?” Gita Aunty whispers.

  “I hope you don’t mind?” the pressed-tongue woman says, giving the door at the top of the stairs the slightest push. It glides on its hinges, like it’s recently been oiled.

  Padma and her mother step out onto a veranda wrapped in wooden boards and chicken wire. The air flashes with feathers, beaks, throats, wings. Wooden perches and baskets of seeds hang from the ceiling, swinging back and forth as birds land, pause, take flight. The air smells of ammonia and grain.

  “You’ll need to clean this and feed them twice a day,” the pressed-tongue lady says. “We only get the best organic feed. Oh, and don’t forget to make sure they always have water. From the dispenser, not the tap.”

  Padma bites the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. No one in Heaven would waste money on a bottle of Bisleri-branded water, let alone a whole twenty-liter can a week just for birds.

  “Would you mind, madam,” Gita Aunty asks, “if I sing to them?”

  Padma tenses. It’s over now, she thinks. Her mother has revealed too much, stepped over the line from charmingly naive to downright insane.

  But the pressed-tongue woman seems pleased. “That would be wonderful,” she says. “I’m sure that would make them happy.”

  Padma isn’t sure then, but she thinks she sees the currents of her mother’s waters still.

  Padma hears what we say about her, even though she pretends she doesn’t. We say that she doesn’t know anything—well, okay, she knows some things, but nothing useful. That she’s from a place that might as well be nowhere.

  It doesn’t bother her. After all, she knows what nowhere’s like.

  Nowhere is earth crushed and folded. A place where laughter plows furrows into faces. Makes the green-blue world greener and bluer and greener and bluer. Makes stomachs hurt, throats sore, breath short.

  A place where even pain comes from too much joy.

  At least, that’s how Padma decides to remember it. The way it used to be. Back when her feet were always wet from the mud of rice paddies, her hair was always tangled from too much sun and wind. Back before the world curled up at the edges like a burning photograph held up to a flame.

  Whenever they miss nowhere, Padma’s father tells them they must be strong. “We didn’t come here for the easy life. We came here for more. More jobs, more schools, more money, more chances. So we, ourselves, could become more. More than our village. More than who we are.”

  But Padma had always thought that they were enough.

  For three months, everything might be better. Gita Aunty sweeps and dusts and tidies up. Brings home rupees folded in the damp end of her sari. Brings the birds their food and water and keeps the veranda clean. Pets them and coos to them in her mother tongue.

  The pressed-tongue lady doesn’t understand what Gita Aunty is saying but claims that she has never seen the brood so plump and lithe and fluttery.

  “These village women just have a way with wildlife,” she tells her neighbors. Tilts her pretty pale face for a minute and adds, “I suppose it is because they are, themselves, half-wild.”

  Gita Aunty still cries rivers of tears. But these days, the waters run with determination, not despair.

  “Do you see the city out there?” Gita Aunty whispers to the birds, pointing to the world beyond the veranda. “It is full of rage and fear, but you have courage. You have wings.

  “Do you see the buildings?” Gita Aunty chants. “The offices and shopping malls and flats? Between those buildings there are trees. Between those buildings there are homes. All just waiting for us to find them. Just waiting to become ours.

  “If you think about it,” Padma’s mother murmu
rs, “Bangalore is just another jungle.”

  Once her mother starts getting better, Padma starts getting better too. Her village accent is disappearing, watering down, getting to be less ragi mudde and more sopu saru. Every now and then we hear her say a word in English, Tamil, Hindi. When she tells the woman at the vegetable cart how much she is willing to pay for tomatoes or onions or greens, she speaks with a confidence that comes from belonging somewhere, from knowing how things work.

  One afternoon, when we’re on our way to Vihaan’s uncle’s used paper shop to watch a brand-new Hindi serial on Heaven’s only working TV, Banu says, “Let’s bring Padma.”

  “Ugh, why?” Rukshana asks. “She’s so quiet and sad.”

  “Maybe she’s lonely,” Banu says. “Or worried about something.”

  “We’re all worried about something,” Rukshana says.

  “But Padma’s worried about her mother,” Joy says.

  We know what she means. Mother-worry is a different kind of worry.

  “We might as well get her. I mean, her house is on the way,” Rukshana says then. Of course, Heaven is so small that all of our houses are always on the way. But that’s not the point.

  When they first arrived at Majestic bus terminal, Padma and her mother stepped onto the jagged pavement, inhaled Bangalore’s salty air. Padma carried her brother, and her mother carried the luggage. Her father had mixed up the bus timings and hadn’t yet reached the station.

  “What now?” Padma asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gita Aunty said. Her voice, usually strong and sure as rushing water, sounded different here. Frail. Timid even. Like she was loosening, slightly, around the edges.

  Padma knew then with frightening certainty that whatever her parents sought, it wasn’t here, in this granite metropolis that stared at her family with gravel-mottled eyes. Maybe it wasn’t anywhere.

  One morning, before she leaves for whatever she does all day, the pressed-tongue lady takes Gita Aunty aside.

  “I’m going out,” she says, placing the key on the table in the hall. “When you leave, lock the door and tell the watchman.”

  It is that moment. The moment between maid and housewife when trust is bestowed, privilege given. The moment when Gita Aunty knows she is guaranteed a job here, in this house, forever. Here among the jeweled birds and the flame of the forest trees and the tiled floors that someone else is paid to clean.

  On the veranda, Padma’s mother gazes out the wire-mesh at the pressed-tongue lady gathering up the folds of her kanjeevaram sari and stepping into her Mercedes-Benz.

  Gita Aunty worries the key in her fingers. Thinks about home. Thinks about trust, family, money. Thinks about birds, trees, farms. Right and wrong. Prisons and freedom.

  When the shiny silver car pulls away, Gita Aunty counts to one hundred. Lays the key back down on the table. Reaches into her sari blouse and removes a knife.

  Cuts a hole in the wire-mesh window. It is the shape of a summer moon.

  Some of the birds leave immediately, but others aren’t sure. Gita Aunty cradles the uncertain ones. Sings them village songs, jungle songs. Their claws make crooked tracks on the palms of her hands.

  Whispers, “You are strong. You have wings. Use them.”

  One by one, they go. Padma’s mother watches them disappear, fading from the colors of emerald and diamond and sapphire into the colors of leaf and cloud and sky. The hues of their new lives. Or perhaps their old ones.

  When they are all gone, she sweeps away the feathers they left behind. Eyes dry, hands steady, she gives the key to the watchman.

  Gita Aunty doesn’t work at rich people’s houses any more. But she doesn’t cry anymore either.

  11

  The Mandap Tree

  the foreign lady’s lens frames Heaven at its worst: an apocalyptic wasteland, a ruined landscape interrupted only by inhabitants felled by great struggles, crushing defeats.

  With each photo, the camera growls like a bulldozer pushing its way through concrete, rolling over tin. Like one more machine complicit in our destruction.

  “Enough,” Joy says. Yells across the wreckage, “You, madam! Come.”

  “You think she speaks Kannada?” Deepa asks.

  “She knows what this means,” Joy says, gesturing to the photographer to come quickly, churning her arm in urgent circles.

  “Oy!” Rukshana says. “Over here!”

  “Don’t scare her,” Padma says.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Padma. She’s a woman, not a squirrel,” Rukshana says.

  The foreign lady picks her way through the rubble like she’s worried about ruining her shoes. When she gets close to us, she says, “Namaste. It is nice to meet you. I am here taking photos.”

  “What language is that?” Padma whispers.

  “I think it might be Hindi,” Rukshana says.

  “Are you sure?” Joy asks. Because this Hindi is not the Hindi we’ve pieced together from All India Radio and Bollywood movies, from the sentences we copy out of the workbooks they give us at school. This Hindi is peeled out of the pages of the out-of-date dictionaries our grandmothers used before their brothers burned them all in the name of Kannada pride.

  “I am taking photos. I want the people to know what is happening. Now the people do not know what is happening,” the photographer says, sounding more and more like the exercises Janaki Ma’am makes us memorize for our tenth-class boards.

  “You’re saying that you’re taking pictures so people know what’s happening here?” Joy says.

  “Yes, yes,” the photographer says, thrilled that we’ve understood. “The people do not know. I want to make them know.”

  “You think people don’t know what’s happening?” Rukshana asks.

  “How will they know?” the foreign lady says. Shakes her head and tries again, saying, “Matlab, how would they be knowing?”

  “All they have to do is look around,” Padma says. “All they have to do is notice.”

  “If they know, they would be helping,” the photographer says. Points to her camera and shakes it. Like she’s trying to shake the right words out of it, the right arguments.

  “You think they’re going to help? Listen, let me save you some time. Here’s what’s going to happen,” Rukshana says. “The photographs will show up in the newspaper. Rich people will get mad. Lawyers will get involved. A few volunteers will show up and pass out some blankets, maybe, and some food. But the slum will still get destroyed. That’s how it happens. Every single time.”

  “This time will be different,” the photographer says. “I will make it different.”

  Rukshana thinks of all of the slum dwellers she and her mother have stood beside, chanting slogans, raising hell. The hands they’ve held, the stomachs they’ve filled. The tears they’ve dried. All those women, all those girls, and not one of them bothered showing up today.

  “It’s never different,” she says, “and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

  Two years ago, the city destroyed Purvapura, the slum next door. Even though it was nearly a decade old, Purvapura was still just a collection of tents sprouting out of the pavement like blue-tarped weeds, a gaggle of children who hadn’t let go of their country accents, country fears. The adults who lived there had jobs collecting garbage, hauling sand. The kind of work our mothers’ mothers did so they could earn the money to move to a place like Heaven.

  We saw photos of the demolition in all the papers—English, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. Other people did too. People with money, degrees, power. People who got angry enough to take time off from their corporate jobs to volunteer, protest, file court cases. All that came in the papers too.

  It didn’t matter, though. The Purvapura families had already lost everything. We could tell from the photos: Shredded straps of school bags, shattered heads of dolls. Twisted wheels of government-issued bicycles, dented pots still sticky with cooking oil. Charred family portraits and god pictures curled up at the edges lik
e clenched fists.

  Letters and protests and court cases wouldn’t bring any of those things back.

  Even though it wasn’t our slum, we lost things too. People, mostly. After her house collapsed, Deepa’s great-aunt started sleeping in a pipe on the sidewalk. Neelamma Aunty gave her a few hundred rupees and tried to convince her to move in with them. The old lady refused, then she disappeared. They never found out what happened, didn’t have the heart to check the local hospitals for a body. Joy’s mother’s cousin—or maybe cousin’s cousin—married a man from that side. Selvi Aunty eventually found out they moved into one of the flats Bangalore builds for the slum dwellers that get removed, a place where Joy says you have to pay two rupees every time you want to use the toilet. Padma’s father said one of his fellow night watchmen stopped coming to work, but no one knew whether it was because he was from Purvapura or because he finally got arrested for public urination.

  In the end, though, most of us didn’t think much about it. We knew the Purvapura people, sure. But we didn’t really know them, not the way we knew each other. Didn’t know their names, their families. What they had for breakfast every morning or what rumors their jealous neighbors were spreading or whether their children were the type to elope.

  Except for Rukshana. She knew someone.

  Really knew her.

  There’s one tree in Heaven that’s not like the rest of them. We call it the mandap tree. It’s an ancient banyan full of nooks the size of toes, crannies curved in the shape of fingers. Limbs wide and flat like park benches.

  Around the middle there’s a branch that stretches over a lane full of used-to-be-warehouses. Used to have corrugated walls and cement floors. Used to hold watches and screws and airplane parts and workers hired to box all the things that other people buy, buy, buy.