Kalpana Komal
My mother called her ‘Rendungattan’ which, translated literally, means ‘neither here nor there’ in Tamil. She called her that to her face. And maybe because she was really a rendungattan, she didn’t mind it at all. She laughed at it as though it was a compliment. A little proud even, that someone like my mom had actually bothered enough to rechristen her appropriately. Truth is, she did appear a little unhinged if you ever saw her at work. She would abruptly stop her work when no one was looking and stare intently at some printed material. My guess is it was her excuse to take an unnecessary break from mopping or chopping. Staring at a Subway flyer appeared less loony than staring at the wall, she must have figured. If one didn’t know that she was utterly illiterate, one might have commended her on her passion for reading. When she was caught staring at the paper in question, she would immediately point out to some fascinating picture, usually a picture of some Hindu god as proof of her religious leanings and therefore virtuous nature. And if there were no pictures, it would appear as though she was trying to guess what words they were. Or what language, I thought.
Her name was Muniamma, the last syllable stretched twice as long as the rest of the syllables. ‘Munyammaaaaaaaaa!!!’ is what she would have called herself if ever she felt the need. Her husband was an auto-rickshaw driver. The profession of choice, it would appear, for most maid-spouses. Even though she had practically lived in our house for over fifteen years, we had never seen the husband even once. I say practically because she was not supposed to be a live-in maid, and wasn’t even a maid on the many days she chose not to turn up.
She had five daughters whom we would see sporadically, confusing one for the other. Every single one of her daughters was beautiful like their mother, with sharp chocolate-brown features and unsmiling model-like faces. But beauty is not what you would associate her with if you ever saw her.
We had moved four houses since we had known her. And she had found her way to each one of them. Of course, my mother would have been lost if we had lost her.
I don’t remember the first time she came to our house, or how she ended up there. She was like a cat which came and went as it pleased. She had no home she was supposed to go back to every night. She chose to sleep anywhere, on any night, and was answerable to no one. She had no work timings, and we were fortunate if she visited our house even twice a week. Not because she was good at her work. In fact, she was the worst maid I had ever seen. She somehow managed to make a place look dirtier than it was after she was done with it. You would know when Muniamma was done working in a room by the tell-tale marks she left behind. Where the bathroom smelt dank earlier, it reeked of bleaching powder after she was done with it. You would know when she had taken out the garbage. By seeing it strewn all around the dustbin. I once caught her using the toilet brush on the seat after she had finished cleaning the toilet bowl. To her puzzlement, I threw a fit. She was expecting appreciation for even attempting to clean the toilet seat.
In spite of her poor attendance and workmanship, if you could call it that, my mom and her friends ended up running long telephone bills, calling each other to check if Muniamma was in one or other house, and when she would grace the next. Strangely, the Brahmin mamis who employed her never held any hostility towards each other, and didn’t mind time-sharing Muniamma. It was like having a common enemy to bond together with. She was like the pet peeve that people just couldn’t do without.
Everybody who knew her knew all about her life. We were left with no choice but to. She kept little a secret. And what she chose not to tell, my mother guessed. I remember a time when I was an impressionable teenager; I heard my mom whisper to my aunt that Muniamma was sleeping with the neighbour’s watchman. I was shocked to hear of marital infidelity occurring right in my middle-class neighbourhood, but more shocked that my conservative mother could talk about it so casually, like it was minor gossip and not a matter of great scandal and reason for banishment. Her addendum explained it. Muniamma was low-class, after all. And they did things like that all the time. It did not change my mom’s love for her. I wondered how my mom would react if one of my unmarried aunts had done the same thing. Were my aunts secretly hoping that they had been born low-class?
Also, I wondered how the watchman could do it at his age, and why would Muniamma want to sleep with someone old and haggard like him? Loneliness is an alien concept to popular teenage girls. My practical mind was concerned about where they would do it. There was hardly any privacy in his office. But, then, I remembered that he was a person accustomed to dancing with abandon at night after all the gates were locked in our street. It was the strangest dance we had seen. It looked like lasya, the feminine dance form in Bharatanatyam. He moved his limbs like a snake. He was too far away for us to be sure if he was moving to music or to some oddity inside his head. So my sister and I set his dance to a popular snake song ‘Aadu, paambe, vilayadu, paambe’, singing in rhythm with his movements, sitting in our living room. We would turn off the lights and hide behind the curtains at night, singing and watching him dance. Had my mom done the same thing to ascertain that Muniamma was sleeping with him? Anyway, his dance was our sole entertainment at a time when Doordarshan was done with all its programmes for the day. It occurs to me now that it might have been a mating dance of sorts.
I had moved out of home eight years earlier but every time I visited, Muniamma was there, like my grandfather in the living room. No one ever noticed him, but if he weren’t there, I bet the sofa would have looked abnormally vast. Sometimes, I acknowledged her presence. I even enquired about her daughters in one of my kinder moods, and about her granddaughter who was the same age as my son. Just to compare notes, you know. Which class was she in? Had she started reading or writing like my son? Did she have friends or was she a lonely kid? Muniamma needed less to start talking. She had made a blackboard by painting a slab of wood black, because blackboards were so expensive, you know. And her granddaughter was so smart that she took lessons for her and her aunts using the blackened board.
It took considerable effort to understand what Muniamma said, and I normally didn’t make the effort. Even though she spoke Tamil, her colloquialisms and poor communication skills were not what my PhD ears were used to. But I did gather that she was having financial difficulties. Because she said so in so many words. She kept asking me to buy her a sari. The off-white sari with a golden border like the Malayalis wear… She had asked me on so many occasions that I missed her not asking me any more. I generously gave away my unwanted clothes and my son’s old clothes, broken toys, shoes and so on to her. I would have been embarrassed to do that with any other maid. I would have tactfully given them the discarded things, asked for them to be thrown away, hoping they might ask if they could keep them instead. But I had no such inhibitions with Muniamma. She was happy to just be wearing bras.
In fact, she hoarded stuff discarded by others, and sometimes even when they weren’t. My mother had complained to us on many occasions about her thieving habits, asking us to be careful with our precious stuff. What my mother didn’t understand was that things didn’t have to be valuable for Muniamma to claim them for herself. Also, my otherwise fiery mother never had the courage to confront her, even though Muniamma was the easiest person in the world to confront. My mother could scold her the entire day and she would still come back. That was easy to understand, because nobody my mother scolded ever held a grudge against her, children excluded. She was the kind of person who used scolding as an expression of love. Don’t ask.
Muniamma didn’t possess an ego. By that, I mean Freudian psychology-type ego. She was practically a nonentity, the way she carried herself. Her life was out there to be shared with anyone, she was there to be scolded or abused by anyone, but she went about her life unscathed. She used speech as a way of venting. I had never heard her abuse anyone verbally, though. She just ranted and spoke of whatever was happening and what she thought of things, sometimes as a plea for affirmation. She was also not the garrulous maid that one comes across so often. She spoke to one and she spoke to all and she spoke to no one at all. She just needed to speak, like we need to sleep. It was proof of her existence. It mattered not if people responded. I so often didn’t. I would just wait for her to finish yet another incomprehensible story, visibly itching to go back to my boring emails, but she never got the hint. Like most things, hints didn’t get to her. Mostly because she was busy having a one-sided conversation with the world. She just didn’t have the wherewithal to listen. Or comprehend. I mean, she did comprehend if I asked her to clean my room or to do the dishes before she dried the clothes. But that was the extent of her grasp.
Her daughters didn’t see Muniamma as much as we did. She would be gone from home for days on end, leaving her young daughters to fend for themselves. As a result, they had learned to cook, clean, study and make love on their own. The elder ones took care of the younger ones the way they had learned to take care of themselves. Their mother could be staying over at any one of the houses she worked at, or at some temple. Where there was a night-long thiruvizha with Tamil film music blaring on loudspeakers, and huge, cardboard chariots carried plaster-of-Paris statues of giant gods, blocking traffic as though forcing them to show respect. Men and women dressed in shiny nylons, fake silk and gold made an appearance and rubbed shoulders with the rest of their kind. In Chennai, these were the only places where people were allowed to socialize all night. Discothèques and pubs closed at eleven o’clock. The religious high was acceptable, and here, men and women had licence to be licentious.
One could always make out when Muniamma was going to one of these temple orgies, decked up in a shiny sari and a blouse that never matched and certainly didn’t fit. Because they had always been tailored for someone else. She wore white and orange flowers, or any other colour that she could find, in her curly hair that was always oiled and always in a state of disarray. The bun on her head was always lopsided. You knew she had bathed because her face was a funny shade of yellow because of the turmeric she generously rubbed into it. That in-your-face sign of auspiciousness. She also had on a red chaandupottu on her forehead that took odd shapes depending on how steady her hand was while painting it. It was like a drop of liquid that assumed any shape depending on the surface it was on. You also knew she was going out because her sari hung to the floor. Otherwise, when she was home, the bottom of her sari along with her petticoat was normally tucked into her waist, so that one could see one very smooth, brown leg all the way to the top of her thigh. No one seemed to notice this great exposure as something unnatural in our conservative society. She was still wearing a sari, a south Indian woman’s traditional outfit, wasn’t she? I, on the other hand, got stared at for wearing shorts when I went running! Or maybe I got stared at for running and not the shorts.
Her daughters, of course, were all very conservative and she was mighty proud of that. Also, that all of them were literate. Especially the youngest, Komala, who had actually finished high school, a natural leader that people were jealous of. So jealous that one of the boys, a eunuch actually, had fed her something that had made her act crazy and suicidal. She was found walking into the ocean a few weeks ago. The very same eunuch had seen her do that, and had done the proper thing of informing her family. Of course, the girl was saved instantly (by the sisters, not the eunuch) and got thrashed thoroughly by the third sister. Perhaps the sister was aiding Komala in her failed suicide attempt?
Of course, the third sister, Sengamalam, was only displaying violence because she was possessed. By the spirit of the second sister, Jamuna’s dead husband. He was not an evil spirit, mind you. He was only trying to live with his wife and four-year-old daughter through the sister, after having died a horrible death at twenty-five. The freaky auto accident in which he had died was not a drunken mistake. He had been forced to crash the auto due to an invisible spirit that was throttling him at the time. The lesson learnt was that you should never go near Madhya Kailash temple late at night. It was haunted and even the god sitting inside couldn’t do anything about it. He, the dead son-in-law, had testified to this fact just before he died, on the way to the hospital. A dying man never lies. Of course, he didn’t know he was going to die at that point. But that’s beside the point.
He was not just a good spirit given to a little violence, but had also been a good man while he was alive. He had done the honourable thing and married Jamuna, hadn’t he? He was actually a hero who had saved Jamuna’s life, knocked up as she had been by him. She had threatened to give up her life, and thereby the baby’s, if he didn’t marry her. He was saving her life even now by the look of it, his spirit deciding to leave Sengamalam and possess his own wife instead. It made more sense, if you ask me. How much closer than that can you get to your wife? And whenever she had an accident, he tried to avert it. Like when she was cooking and tried to pour hot oil over herself, he stopped it from burning her to death. And when she was chopping vegetables and tried to cut off her digits, he had made sure that she didn’t cut all of them off. He was even watching over her in the guise of an overweight Mohammedan bhai while she was lying down with a black serpent-like girl on top of her. They were not visible to an ordinary person’s eye. You had to have divine grace bestowed on you to see the subtle spirits. The serpent girl went right away, thank god. It may have been Muniamma’s positive presence that drove away the serpent girl.
In any case, he’s gone now. In body and in spirit. Muniamma had gone with her daughters and husband to a temple in Sholingar, close to Chennai. I would have never known about it if my sister hadn’t called from her office in the middle of her busy workday, asking if Muniamma was home. One of her daughters had made a desperate call to her asking why her mother wasn’t home yet. They were late for the temple trip. It wasn’t like Muniamma to be secretive. It was likely she had forgotten all about it. It was her idea to go to the temple that was famous for driving in tourists who wanted spirits driven away. Even the good ones like her erstwhile son-in-law’s. A guest should never overstay his welcome, you see.
Muniamma knew just the temples that cured everything, from possession to impotence. Even though impotence was not a problem in her family, almost all of her daughters had been possessed at some time or the other. So we knew that the temples really worked their magic.
Everything about Muniamma’s life was magic, if you ask me. The way she kept on working in the same houses without getting fired for years on end. We did not know how many years exactly, as she was clueless about the passage of time. For instance, she did not how many years had passed since she was born, or her daughters. She lived from day to day. The years rolled by without affecting her in any way except in appearance. It was also magical how all of her five daughters had grown to adulthood in a house that had more snakes than parents. How she had kept one husband for all the years of her married life. I suspected it was because most of those years were spent at our house. Were the many rosaries she wore around her neck actually protecting her? Or was it the unquestioning faith she had in the many gods and rituals? While she had no work timetable, she did have a religious timetable. She visited a different temple every day of the week, and paid homage to a different god on each day. On special days like Pradosham, Amavasya and the like, she had special rituals, where she lit lamps filled with ghee, tied coloured threads around important-looking trees. My mother was very proud of her protégé, who followed her own religious timetable like a puppy dog. My mother took her to all the local temples, and even the faraway ones, for which we had to drive. These were treats for Muniamma, who did not just get to sit in an air-conditioned car, but also got to visit some special gods whom she did not have access to every day. Her daughters would surely be protected due to her worship of those special gods, she proclaimed. She was doing all of this only for them, after all.
I remember a trip to a temple in Kanchipuram a few years ago, where we had to stand in a long queue in the hot afternoon. It was too hot for Muniamma and my small baby to be standing in. So I entrusted my baby to her and made them sit in a shady mandapam. When I went to check on them two minutes later, they were missing. I went around the temple, sweating in my rich silk sari, looking for my baby like a mad woman, thoughts of kidnapping raging through my suspicious mind. I knew that Muniamma did not have the smarts to kidnap a child. She had left her own children free to be kidnapped for years, after all. But there wasn’t enough sense in my panicked mind to pay heed to reason. After three-and-a-half minutes, I found them sitting in the very same mandapam where I had left them.
But it isn’t just the assumed kidnapping of my baby that makes that day memorable. Later that day, when Muniamma was lighting lamps, I saw my child blow out the fire from her lamps. I saw Muniamma’s face through the wisp of smoke that emerged from the wick. She stared at it, fascinated. What was she thinking at that moment? How there could be smoke without fire? That it was a miracle? And the wisp of smoke disappeared in the wind to reappear again from another lamp in another corner. And so on it went. She lit the lamps repeatedly as my son kept blowing them out, without notice or annoyance. The act seemed bound by nothing but its own volition. A volition that doesn’t even know it exists. Just like Rendungattan.