I am forever lost. No one can save me. Not one of my three mothers is here to rescue me from this hell. Not one of my two fathers.
The mother who gave birth to me? I have no memory of her. I know her only through the letters she wrote to me over the years, the photographs of herself; she has yellow hair and pale skin, because she is a foreigner. She signs her letters Mom. She is so far away in a country called America, and does not even care. She can never save me.
Amma is my other mother, the one who raised me. Mom gave me to her because she had no milk. She is the one who nourished me at her breast, the one I love. But she is dead.
Janiki is my third mother, my chinna-amma, my little mother. She isn’t really my mother. She isn’t even really my sister. Janiki was thirteen when I was born and she has told me the story over and over again. How Amma placed me in her arms after the one called Mom left, and said to her, ‘Janiki, I have been given this little waif to look after but my hands are full with Kanaan and the next one to come. I give her to you; you care for her. She is yours. I will feed her, but everything else, you must do. You must be her chinna-amma.’
And so, though I shared Amma’s milk with Kanaan, and later with Ramesh, Janiki became my little mother. But she too is far away now, in another country, another world, and she will never find me in this hell.
Three mothers, and two fathers. The man I called Appa, Father, was Amma’s husband. He is also dead. Appa was headmaster of the English Medium School and so he was highly respected, and so were his children. He wore large thick glasses and he would peer at you over the top of them and smile. He was kind but distant, and could also be strict. As a headmaster you have to be very strict. Sometimes he even flogged some of the naughtiest children, but only the boys, never the girls. But then girls are never naughty. Why then is it always the girls who get the worst punishments? I would rather have been flogged a million times than endure the punishments I had to take later, because of being a girl.
A father should find his lost daughter. But Appa is not my real father.
There is only Him. The man I am supposed to call Daddy, but I cannot. Daddy is too ordinary. He is not ordinary.
I’ve always known about Him. Always, as far back as I can remember, there he was, the man who was supposed to be my real father, but who for me was more like a god, up in the heavens somewhere along with Indra and all the other celestial beings, occasionally deigning to descend to us and bless me with his presence. He came seldom; the last time I was only about eight, and I never forgot that last visit.
By then, Amma had told me he is really a prince. And that makes me a princess. Amma used to call me Little Princess. But I am not a princess. A princess does not live in such wretchedness.
Whenever he came I was truly tongue-tied – I could hardly speak a word to him, and answered his questions with a yes or a no or even just a shrug of my shoulders, turning my face away so as not to meet his eyes, for I could not bear the way they seemed to see all the way through me, right down to the bottom of my being, and I would tingle with happiness. And when he left again the tingling would stay with me for a long time so I hardly felt like a human child until normal life seeped through me once again and called me back to earth. What I am saying is I really worshipped that man, and I didn’t think of him as a father but as my saviour, even as a small child. Yes, I worshipped him. But he never came again, and so I know he has forgotten me. Amma told me he lives far away, in another country, a country that is all desert. So he, too, cannot save me.
I want to go home!
I used to live in a big house in Gingee, with Amma and Appa and Janiki and our five brothers. At least, for me it was a big house, though I have since seen really grand homes and ours was a hovel in comparison. But compared to other Gingee homes it was certainly large. I had seen the homes of other children in my school class and ours seemed so much grander – though now I can only laugh at such innocence. I mean, I would laugh if I could, had I not forgotten how to laugh.
Our home, in fact, was just a gathering of rooms, and mats laid out where we slept – inside in winter, outside in summer – and some shelves where we kept our clothes and utensils. That’s all, though we did have electric lights and a radio that blared filmi music all day long; Amma liked this music, and she sang along with the radio.
So we had comforts, and our home in Gingee was no hovel either – for now I live in a real hovel. The very worst kind of place, a hole in hell. The only escape is in sleep. I sleep as much as I can. But when I open my eyes again and remember where I am my heart beats faster and I feel the panic rising in me like vomit, panic that is trapped inside me and can never leave the body, like vomit that lurches up but falls back down again. I would give anything to be able to vomit but I cannot. It is trapped in me for ever and when I pray it is for healing from that sickness in me.
Looking back, I think of my Gingee home as paradise. And I would exchange all the palaces in the world and all of paradise to go back there – or better yet, never to have left. But my destiny said otherwise.
We were all so happy, but didn’t know it. We lived in a quiet part of Gingee. When we finished our schoolwork and our household chores we children could play in the street outside our door as much as we wanted, because there was not much traffic, not like in the busier areas of town where the whole street would be filled with all kinds of vehicles with stinking exhaust fumes, as well as rickshaws that would appear out of nowhere and pounce on you if you tried to cross the street. I used to be terrified of streets like that and always grabbed Janiki’s hand when we went anywhere in the town. Janiki was always there for me.
But of course now I know that that those terrifying Gingee streets were really nothing more than quiet lanes; because now I have seen the world and I know the terrors the world holds are worse than any terror on the main streets of Gingee.
I have read about hell, and the demons that live there, but I can assure you, this hell I am in now is a million times worse. That is the truth. And because I was happy with Amma and Appa and Janiki and my brothers I can compare, and so I can say my childhood was pure heaven. That is how it seems to me now.
Looking back, I cannot see much of the details. I see our home, a house with a large veranda at the front, where Amma used to sit cleaning rice or stringing beans and things like that, because she liked to see who was passing by and sometimes have a little chat with the other ladies who lived on that street.
I cannot believe I was fortunate enough to have parents like them, even though they weren’t my real parents. And Janiki. How I long for Little Amma! When I think of them and that time before my twelfth birthday tears come to my eyes because a good family is so rare. I know that now, and when I close my eyes I can see Janiki’s beautiful face and those eyes brimming with love.
I am sure there were unpleasant things in Gingee as well, but I don’t remember them because they are nothing. I only remember the good things. It is as if my life back then, the life I lived from day to day, was nothing more than a film passing before my eyes, insubstantial pictures of no lasting value, so there’s no use at all in describing them to you. The important thing was the feeling I had, the feeling of being embedded in this wonderful cushion of love where nothing could touch you and nothing could ever hurt you. I suppose that is the essence of my childhood, not the individual events that followed each other in a chain – because those things
pass away, passing pictures in a cinema. What remains at all times is the thing behind it – the screen of my being, you could say, over which those pictures passed; a backdrop of goodness. Because that is what has stayed with me, what keeps me alive: the remembrance of goodness. Of what goodness was like. That memory is what really keeps me alive when everything else is
dying, crumbling into a dark abyss and swallowing up my soul. That is what has sustained me in my journey through hell.
Because I am able to say to myself, if the events of my childhood are nothing more than passing pictures, then so is this horror. Everything else is a passing picture.
That is the secret of my survival. I don’t mean my physical survival, for my body, though often injured, was never even near death – though often it felt that way, and often I prayed it could be dead, and I know that one day it will be dead. I mean the survival of my soul, which has been so much in jeopardy these past weeks or months or even years. I have lost count of time. I have stopped counting the days. My life now is from breath to breath. The only one who can save me now is Bhagavan, God. He could but he won’t. My prayers go unanswered.
I said I don’t remember the unpleasant things of my past life; well, that’s not quite true. I do remember the day when Amma and Appa never came home.
That was the beginning of the end. Now I am in this monstrous city, a single grain on a beach full of sand. No one can find that single grain. That is what it means to be lost. But my name is Asha. It means hope. In her last message my sister Janiki said never give up hope, Janiki. Hope, and faith, will keep you safe. Even just a spark of it. And so, though I know I am forever lost, I cling to that one spark of hope.