Whenever I think of my mother, certain incidents flash through my mind and stab my heart.
My elder sister Kalyani has frequent fainting fits. I am not of an age to understand, being only four years old.
I open my eyes at dawn. Something sounds in my ears like the rhythmic striking of a drum. I go to the door to see. They have seated Kalyani on a wooden plank. Someone stands in front of her with a switch of leaves in his hand. My baby brother, whose gurgling laugh was to delight us for only four months, is in his cradle in my room.
“Nirajatchi, go and bring it now,” says someone.
I look at my mother.
I remember her dark blue sari. Her hair is gathered into a knot. Mother goes into the little room that is adjacent to mine. She removes the top part of her sari and collects breast milk into the little bowl that is in her hand. Tears spill from her eyes.
Every morning, while it is still dark, my mother lights the firewood under the big brass pot which is built into the bathroom, and heats the water.
I watch her one day. Her hair has come undone and hangs loose. She sits on her haunches, knees doubled. Her hair falls on her cheek and ears. As soon as the fire is alight, the red glow of the flames plays across my mother’s lowered profile. That day she is wearing a red sari. Even as I am gazing at her, she quickly gets to her feet. Her hair falls down to her knees. Her sari has slipped and beneath her unhooked choli, I can see the green veins on her pale breasts. Suddenly she seems to me like the daughter of Agni who has come flying down from elsewhere. Could this be my mother? Really my mother?
Kali Kali Mahakali Bhadrakali
Namostute.
Why does the sloka come to mind all at once?
“Amma.”
My mother turns her head.
“What are you doing here, di?”
I cannot speak. My whole body is covered in sweat.
The sacred fire is lit in the house. It is the redness of my mother’s lips, or the sharp kumkumam mark on her forehead that makes her seem the very image of those blazing flames? With long drawn out “Agniye swaahaa,” they pour ghee on to the flames. And with each “swaaahaaa” my eyes dart from the fire to my mother.
My mother gives me an oil massage and bath. Her sari is lifted high and tucked up. I can see the smoothness of her light-skinned thighs. When she bends down and then stretches up, a green vein throbs there.
“Amma, how is it that you are so fair? How come I am dark?”
She laughs. “Go on with you. Who can be as beautiful as you are.”
There is no connection between all these incidents, except that my mother is queen in all of them. She was the purifying fire that burned away all impurities. With a single smile, she created a million beauties that seemed to hang like pennants in my mind. When I lay with my head on her lap, she would stroke me with her long, cool fingers and say quite ordinary things like, “I am going to send you to dance classes. You have a fine body.” Or she would say, “Such lovely hair, di.” Trivial things. But immediately something would flower in my heart.
Now I am not sure whether these feelings were of her instigation, or because of some quite independent imagination of my own. And I don’t know what she intended to create for herself when she sowed these seeds in me.
I am thirteen. My paavaadai are all getting too short for me. My mother has to lengthen each one of them.
One evening, as I lie with my head on my mother’s lap, some words I had read earlier, come to mind.
“Amma, what does ‘puberty’ mean?”
Silence.
A long silence.
Suddenly she says, “Always be as you are now, running about and playing, twirling your skirt…”
Some people are to visit my aunt’s house, to “see” her daughter, Radhu, for a possible marriage. My mother too goes away there. So on this eventful day she is not at home: it is my sister who rubs me with oil and washes my hair. Through the bathroom window I can see the still dark sky.
“Kalloos, you’ve woken me up far too early. I can’t even hear the sound of fireworks.”
“After your oil massage and bath, I’ve got to do mine, haven’t I? You are thirteen years old now. Can’t even do your own hair. Lower your head, stupid.”
Kalyani has no patience.
She rubs my head until it hurts, as if she is pulling away the fibers from a coconut shell.
For that particular Dipavali, my mother has made me a paavaadai of purple satin. How I had yearned for it as it slithered smoothly under the sewing machine! This time she had measured me carefully before she began.
“Come here child, I have to measure you. You’ve definitely grown taller.” She measures me and then looks up. “This girl has grown taller by two inches.”
This purple satin paavaadai was not going to be too short. It was sure to glide right down to reach the floor.
Abruptly Kalyani pulls me to my feet and rubs my hair dry. I pull on my chemise and run to the puja room. My father hands me my set of new clothes from the ones stacked on the plank.
“Here you are, dark girl.” He always called me that.
Sometimes when my father said that, I would go and look at myself in the mirror hanging in the hall. Then it would seem to me that my mother was whispering to me, “You are beautiful.”
The satin skirt slips and slides as smoothly as the fish in the glass case in Sarla’s house. There is a velvet jacket to go with it too. I place kumkumam on my forehead and run to stand in front of my father.
“Not at all bad!” he says.
I take the bundle of fireworks, place them in the front room and then race out to climb the champakam tree.
It was my special job to climb the champakam tree every morning, for its flowers. Always when I handed the filled basket to my mother, she would say, “So many.” Her eyes would widen, and her fingers, wandering among the flowers, would seem, petal-like, to disappear.
The satin skirt is slippery. I can’t climb to the topmost branch. Besides, it is still very dark. Just as I am about to climb down, suddenly a firework explodes. Shaken, trembling all over, I leap off the tree. I dash to the house, still trembling, gasping for breath.
Somehow I pull myself together and run into the front room to light my share of the fireworks. It is only after that that I remember the flower basket.
Dawn has broken.
Holding up my paavaadai I bend down to pick up the flower basket. Some of the flowers lie scattered about. As I stoop well down to pick them up, my skirt spreads about me on the ground. Here and there I can see stains upon it. Perhaps from climbing the tree?
I go back inside, calling out to my sister, “Kalloos…” Basket in hand I stand in front of her saying, “I’ve gone and stained my new skirt all over. Will Amma scold me?”
Kalyani gives me a horrified stare for a full minute and then goes off screaming, “Appa!”
That look, and the way she runs off, without so much as taking the basket from me, send centipedes crawling in my mind. I glance at the satin skirt. I run my hand over the velvet jacket.
Nothing has happened, has it?
Good God, nothing has happened to me, has it? But even as I ask myself this, I realize that something has indeed happened. Everywhere about me there is the thunderous noise of exploding fireworks. I stand there, clutching the flower basket, my breath coming in gasps, lips trembling, shaking all over.
With a great sob the tears come.
I want my mother. I want to bury my head deep into the Chinnalampatti silk of her shoulder. I want, unashamed, to tell her, “I am frightened.” I want her to comfort me and stroke my head. Because surely something very terrible has happened.
Kalyani brings along the shaven-headed old widow from next door who helps with jobs like making murukku. This old woman comes up to me.
“What are you crying about, you silly girl? What has happened after all? Nothing the whole world doesn’t know about.”
I cannot follow a word of what she is saying. Nothing seems to reach my understanding, although my instinct, half grasping something, freezes in fear. I feel a single desperate need from the depth of my being, like an unquenchable thirst. Amma…
I remember the time I was lost, when I was five years old. I am walking along a huge park, oblivious of the gathering darkness. Then all of a sudden, the darkening trees loom; the noises and the silences begin to frighten me. My father finds me, but it is not until I see my mother that the tears come bursting out.
My mother takes me to her side. She strokes me and says softly, “There! Nothing whatever has happened to you. Everything is all right now.” Her lips are like blades of flame when she puts her face against mine.
Now too I am struck with that same fear, as if I am lost. I sink down, bury me head against my knees and weep. I feel as if something has ended for ever. As if I have left something behind, in the way one leaves the cinema after they show “The End” on the screen. It seems to me that in all human history I am alone in my sadness. I weep as if I carry all the world’s sorrows on my own narrow velvet-clad shoulders.
I wonder why my mother never spoke to me of these things when we were together in the evenings.
My mind is pervaded with fear. It isn’t even the kind of fright that grips one because of alien surroundings or unknown people. No, this is like the absolute terror and confusion that assaults one at mid-scream, seconds after seeing a snake. Such terror hangs, like spiders’ webs, from all corners of my mind.
I remember seeing a corpse with pale lips split apart. The head had smashed against a stone. A moment before, a bald pink head had been in front of me. Now it was split open like the mouth of a cave, and gushing dark red blood. Within minutes, the blood dripped to the ground. I stared at it. The redness spread everywhere and seemed to leap into my eyes. Now these repelling images return. So much blood. So much blood — but no sound comes from my mouth. A bed of blood. The older man opens his mouth. The eyes stare open. They bore into my heart. Blood is so frightful…enough to make lips pale and limbs freeze.
I need my mother. My heart yearns for her to free me from this fear and ugliness.
“Please, why don’t you get up. How much longer will you keep crying?” Kalyani begs. She is sitting next to me and has been crying too.
“Amma…”
“But you know she’s coming back next week. I’ve just written to her about all this. She’ll come as soon as Radhu’s ‘viewing’ is over. Get up now. This is becoming a real headache.” Kalyani is getting angry.
“What has happened to me?”
“Nothing. Your skull. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Am I not allowed to climb trees after this?”
She gives me a swift blow on the head.
“Fathead! Here I’ve been begging you for the last half hour to come and change your clothes, and you’ve got to be asking all these questions. Appa!” She calls out to my father, “She’s being a terrible nuisance.”
My father comes and says, “You mustn’t be difficult now. You must do as Kalyani says.”
And after he goes away, the old widow adds, “Why does she have to be so stubborn? This is every woman’s destiny, after all.”
Seven days. Seven days for Mother to come home after they have “seen” Radhu. Seven days of stumbling in the dark.
One day the women from the neighboring houses come to visit.
“Shouldn’t she be wearing a davani now, Kalyani?”
“Only after my mother returns, Maami. She’s terribly willful. She only listens to Amma.”
“O, she’ll be all right hereafter. Hereafter she’ll be modest, she’ll know what is proper.”
Why?
What is going to happen hereafter?
Why should I wear a davani? Didn’t Amma say, “Always be the same as you are now, twirling your skirt…” Why should I change?
Nobody explains. They make me sit here like a doll and gossip among themselves. When my father comes in, they draw their saris tightly about themselves and lower their voices.
On the fifth day, Kalyani gives me warmed oil in a bowl. “From now on, you had better do your own oil massage,” she says.
Weeping, I battle with my waist-length hair, and then stand in front of the hall mirror in my chemise.
“Finish dressing in the bathroom hereafter. Understand?” says my father.
I close the door after him and remove my chemise. The mirror reflects to me my own dark body. My hands run by turns over my shoulders, arms, my chest, my waist and my soft thighs, all of them very slightly paler than my face. Then am I not the same girl as I was? What is my mother going to say? I put on my school uniform.
As soon as I open the door, Kalyani comes in. “What are you going to tell them at school when they ask you why you’ve been absent?”
I stare at her. I had been about to set off for school with the exultation of a bird that has just been released from its cage, but now my spirit is dashed.
“You don’t have to say anything. Just keep quiet.”
I don’t join in during the games lesson. I hide behind a large tree. Once before I had done this and Miss Leela Menon asked us in class the next day, “Who are the fools who didn’t play yesterday?”
I didn’t stand up.
“And you? Why aren’t you on your feet?” she asked.
“I am not a fool, Miss,” I replied. She wrote in my progress report that I am impertinent.
But today I don’t even fear Miss Leela Menon’s scolding — it strikes me that nothing will ever be more important to me than this one thing that has happened to me now. I don’t want to sit under the tree and read Enid Blyton as I usually do. I ask the dry leaves that have fallen into a hole by the tree, “What on earth has happened to me?”
I look forward to my mother’s answer with the anxiety of an accused who waits upon the pronouncement of a judge.
Will Amma say, lowering her eyes and looking at me, “This thing that has happened to you is beautiful too?” I know that by the fiery spark of her smile she will get rid of all of them: the old woman who frightened me, Kalyani, all. My mother is different from all of them. Where she stands there is no place for unnecessary things. Everything is essentially beautiful to her.
I need her desperately. There is something yet to be explained. Someone has to explain to me gently why my whole body sweats and trembles at the mere thought of the purple satin skirt; why all of a sudden my tongue goes as dead as a piece of wood; why the world seems to darken and before I can turn to look I hear that terrible exploding noise and see streaming blood and a long corpse.
I sense that everyone has gone and I am alone. The gardener wakes me up. Slowly I go home.
“Why are you so late, girl? Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. I was sitting under the tree.”
“Alone?”
“Mmm.”
“What is the matter with you? Do you imagine you are still a little girl? Supposing something were to happen…”
I throw down my satchel. My face feels very hot. Putting my hands over my ears, I shriek, “Yes, I will sit there like that. Nothing is wrong with me.”
It’s a crazy shriek, each word drawn out into a scream. My father and Kalyani stand there, stunned.
In a great fury, I rush past them upstairs, and sit on the open terrace. I want to stay alone in the scent of the champakam. Neither Kalyani nor my father should ever come up here. This scent which is without words or touch is more comforting to me than the people of this house. How pleasant it would be if they never, never spoke. Why can’t they just smile with that widening of the eyes, like my mother? When she smiles like that, something happens inside me. I want to break out into laughter. I want to sing. She is an artist, a creator. With a turn of the head and a smile she can summon joy, enthusiasm, beauty. Like magic.
Kalyani comes upstairs.
“Come and eat, your highness. Amma has spoilt you rotten and no mistake.”
I stand up nonchalantly and look at her in scorn.
My mother comes home the next day. She opens the taxi door and walks into the house, her sari of dark green silk creased from the journey.
“What happened?” asks my father.
“He’s refused, the rascal. Apparently the girl is too dark-skinned.”
“What does your sister say?”
“She grieves, naturally. Poor thing.”
“We too have a dark girl.”
I dash down to stand in front of her. I want to explain everything to her myself, much better than Kalyani did in her letter. I want to tell her about all the creeping horrors. I want to pour it all out into the crook of her neck, quietly, with trembling mouth.
I look deeply in to her eyes, sure that now, at last, she is going to explain the mystery; the feelings that choke my throat at night, my distress at the changes in my own body. She is just about to take me into the circle of her arms. I know I shall weep out loud. I shall twist my fingers into her hair and let the loud sobs come bursting out.
She looks at me.
I don’t know whether in that instant I am changed into another Radhu.
Her words are like a sting. “And what a time for this wretched business of yours! It’s just one more burden for us now.”
Whom is she accusing?
Noiseless sobs knock at my chest.
A blood-red glow spits out from my mother’s lips and her nostrils and her kumkumam mark and her nose-drop and her eyes. In that fiery instant the divine image that covered her falls away to reveal the mere, the human mother. Her cold unfeeling words rise like swords blindly butchering all the beauties that she had hitherto tended. Endless fears will stay forever in my mind from now on; dark pictures.
Agniye swaa-haa. Not impurities alone are burnt in the fire. Buds and blossoms too are blackened.