Multiple birth dates ripple, sing inside me, as if a long stretch of silk were passing through my fingers. I think of the lives I have known for forty years, the lives unknown, the shining geographies that feed into the substance of any possible story I might have. As I make up a katha, a story of my life, the lives before me, around me, weave into a net without which I would drop ceaselessly. They keep me within range of difficult truths, the exhilarating dangers of memory.
Kuruchiethu Kuruvilla Kuruvilla, my maternal grandfather, was born in 1881 in Eraviperoor in the princely state of Travancore in India. Three years later in 1884, in his father’s ancestral home in Kozencheri just eight miles away, my paternal grandfather, my Kozencheri veliappechan, Kannadical Koruth Alexander was born. In 1892, in the town of Kottayam, twenty-six miles from Kozencheri, my grandmother Mariamma, Kannadical Mariamma was born. She was eight years younger than my Kozencheri veliappechan.
Grandmother Kunju, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, the youngest of my four grandparents, was born in 1894. That made her thirteen years younger than her husband K. K. Kuruvilla, my maternal grandfather, whom I called Ilya. As a small child my tongue could not get around the long syllables of veliappechan, which is grandfather in Malayalam, and the short name stuck. He was not a man overly fond of formalities and so remained Ilya to me.
Grandmother Kunju was the only one of my grandparents to be born outside the princely state of Travancore. She was born in Calicut, quite far to the north, where her father was working at the time. Calicut was in the old Madras presidency established by the British. As a child of seven I learnt that Calicut was where Vasco da Gama first struck land in his quest for India, and that knowledge shimmered, shot through the awareness of where my missing grandmother was born. I call her missing, for she died a month short of her fiftieth birthday, three years before Indian independence, which was also the year of my parents’ marriage, seven years before my birth.
Appa was born in 1921 in the ancestral home of Kozencheri. He was baptized George Alexander. In deference to the tug to Anglicize, his family name, Kannadical, was not officially used. Appa was the third child in a family of four children and the only son. Amma was born in 1927 in Tiruvella. She was the only child of her parents. A similar naming pattern held for her. She was baptized Mary and was first was known as Mary Kuruvilla and then after her marriage as Mary Alexander.
The first child of my parents, the eldest of three sisters, I was born in 1951 in Allahabad, in the north where my father was working, in a newly independent India. My sister Anna was born in 1956 and my sister Elsa in 1961. Amma returned to her home in Tiruvella each time to give birth.
In 1956 my father, who worked for the Indian government, had been “seconded” abroad to work in the newly independent Republic of the Sudan. My mother and I followed him in February of that year. I turned five on the Arabian Sea, my first ocean crossing. For the next thirteen years my childhood crisscrossed the continents. Amma would return to her home in Tiruvella, sometimes for six months of the year. The other six months were spent in Khartoum. In 1969, when I was eighteen, I graduated from Khartoum University and went to Britain as a student. I lived there for four years while I was completing my studies. In 1973 I returned to India to Delhi and Hyderabad. In 1979, just married, I left for the United States and have lived in New York City ever since.
My grandfather Kuruvilla was two months short of seventy when I was born. A century short of a single year separates his birth from that of my son, his namesake Adam Kuruvilla Lelyveld, who was born in New York City in 1980. My daughter Svati Mariam Lelyveld, whose middle name comes from that of her great-grandmother Mariamma, was born in New York City in 1986.
Ever since I can remember, amma and I have been raveled together in net after net of time. What was pulled apart at my birth has tensed and knotted up. Without her, I would not be, not even in someone else’s memory. I would be a stitch with no time, capless, gloveless, sans eyes sans nose sans the lot. Lacking her I cannot picture what I might be. It mists over, a mirror with no back where everything streams in : gooseberry bushes filled with sunlight, glossy branches of the mango tree, sharp blades of the green bamboo where serpents roost.
To enter that mist, I put out both hands as far as they will reach. My right hand reaches through the mirror with no back, into a ghostly past, a ceaseless atmosphere that shimmers in me even as I live and move. Within it I feel the warmth of the sun in Tiruvella. I smell the fragrance of new mango leaves.
But my left hand stretches into the present. With it I feel out a space for my living body. I touch rough bricks where the pigeon perched just an instant ago, on the wall at the corner of 113th Street and Broadway in Manhattan—Turtle Island as it once was in a sacred geography.
Moving west, both arms outstretched, I stand against the park wall, at Riverside Drive. The wind from the Hudson River whistles through my body. Thank God, I think, for two arms to bend and stretch, to make a try at living as what we are: crooked creatures that time blows through.
Tiruvella, where amma’s house stands, is a small town in Kerala on the west coast of India. There one finds the old religious centers, seminary, graveyards, and churches of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church. Syrian Christian families have house names and Kuruchiethu is the house name amma was born into, my grandfather K. K. Kuruvilla’s family name. The old lands are in Niranum where the Kuruchiethu clan, once so powerful, had established its own private church. My grandfather, who was born in 1881, settled, as a grown man, a little distance away in Tiruvella. Buying lands near his wife’s paternal home, he built a house with a gracious courtyard and tiled roofs, whitewashed walls and ceilings set with beams of rosewood. The doors and windows of the house were cut in teak, quartered in the fashion of the Dutch who first came to the coast in the mid-century in search of pepper and other precious spices.
When I was a child, the scent of pepper filled my nostrils. When the green flesh around the seed turned crimson, I bit into the sweetness of thin flesh. My teeth grated on the fierce seed within. Yet I found it strange that centuries ago Europeans had killed our people for this bitter prize. Still a child, I learnt of how the Portuguese—Vasco da Gama and his crew—set fire to an entire ship, all souls on board, as a sign to the Indian princes not to oppose them. Later, well established on shore, the Portuguese conducted an inquisition on the Syrian Christians, torturing believers because they thought them heretics, burning ancient church records inscribed on palmyra leaf, defacing the copper plates.
I learnt about the British and how, in order to consolidate their rule over India, they shot hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children who had congregated for a meeting in Jalianawalabagh; how finally they were forced to leave the country because of the massive nonviolent protests of Gandhi and his satyagrahis. Sometimes in my childhood dreams I saw the whole nation filled with men and women and even little girls and boys dressed in the colors of ripe pepper seeds, arms raised, singing
Go away, go away Britishers
or your lips will sting
your tongues will ring with pain.
No one can swallow us whole!
Under their red garments, some made of coarse cotton of the cheapest sort, others woven of fine, rich silks, how fierce the people were, just like hot peppers.
From the veranda of the Tiruvella house I had seen men pick the ripe peppers and toss them into baskets and then pour the harvest onto the sandy courtyard till it made a crimson carpet. In my dreams, it was as if that carpet had come alive, filled with people, raising their arms aloft, singing. And high above them was the clear blue of the Kerala sky.
I think of the Tiruvella house, the courtyard, the clear blue of the premonsoon sky, as filled with the spirit of my grandfather. It is where I trace my beginning. Even now, in New York City, I dream of the sparrow and the coil crying together in the guava tree, the blunt knocks of the woodpecker’s beak on the day of my grandfather’s death. I see the dry holes under the frangipani tree where the cobras crawled, seeking refuge from the terrible heat of noonday.
*
As a child growing up I knew that there were two spots where snakes loved to roost: in the dark welter of shoot and tender leaf at the base of the sixty-foot-high bamboo clump that stands at the back corner of the compound, and in the mound of earth under the frangipani tree whose thick clusters of white blossoms entice the new serpents out of their eggs as surely as music might, played on Lord Krishna’s flute. The frangipani tree stands to the left of the compound, in front of the house, not far from the new railway line. The railway line is thirty-four years old but I still think of when it was being constructed, the metallic rails hoisted on the shoulders of working men, set over the wooden sleepers, secured across the fish plates.
I can see the first train that passed on the Tiruvella line. It was a clear, dry night and the stars made silvery tracks, maps of other worlds. I imagined another life, pierced by cold. Restless, gripped by excitement, I could not sleep. A train packed with passengers from Bangalore and Palghat seemed a metallic creature come from as distant a land as that of the stars. I knew the names of Mars and Venus, of the plow and the bear and Orion’s belt, stars that my grandfather Ilya pointed out to me as he held me high on his shoulders in the cool night air.
At the first shrill hoot of the train whistle I leapt from under my covers, and grabbed Marya’s hand. I pulled her out of the room with me, fretting in her grip till she was forced to free me from the woolly cardigan amma had insisted on, a protection for my chest from the cool night air.
There was a large group of us that night, amma, appa, assorted cousins and guests, servants, ayahs, and my tall, white-haired Ilya. The night before I had watched him shift his books around at the edge of his desk, rearranging a volume of Marx—was it published by the People’s Publishing House in Moscow?—opening up his favorite chapter in Gandhi’s Autobiography. Now he was ready in his khadi kurta and white dhoti, a shawl flung over his shoulders, set to race out with us. He held a palmyra torch straight in front of him and the sparks fell at his feet. Several of the sparks dashed into blackness, just a fraction of an inch away from my bare toes. One sizzled on the skin at my ankle and died away. I felt my hand held tight by Ilya as he ran. He was well over seventy but ran as a horse might in the king’s army, or a giraffe, and I raced along with him, a young thing once removed from the original root, a heart-beat skipped. In the darkness he held onto my shoulders. I gripped the metal railings at the level crossing and watched the hot steel thing approach. It grunted and shoved forward and the sparks from the coal that belched in the dark funnel blew in fiery eddies that swirled into the sparks fleeing from our torches.
Chinna, my senior ayah, gasped with excitement. She sucked in her cheeks, blew out her breath. Aminey, her daughter, just my age, shivered in a thin dress next to the bars of the gate. Somewhere to my right, I thought I heard amma laugh, but it was just for an instant and then she fell silent. Thinking back I imagine her biting into her lower lip, pierced by a memory of grandmother Kunju’s death.
A train took amma away when she was barely sixteen, to Madras to enter Women’s Christian College. By the time another train brought her back, her mother, my grandmother Kunju, Ilya’s beloved wife, was already dead.
Years later her cousin Susamma told me: “Your amma wept outside the door of the Tiruvella house, stood at the steps and wept, crying, ‘No, I will not enter, will not enter a house where my mother lies dead.’ When finally they persuaded her in, she was worn out with tears, shaking in her thin cotton sari.”
I wondered how amma found the courage to open her eyes, to look at the bare floor, to look at the bed where her dead mother lay stretched out.
Grandmother Kunju: it’s hard for me to think of her even now. To think, in the sense of setting out, clarifying, refining. I could say she is to me as a vein of sapphire buried in a strip of earth, or the shifting aureole of pollen on a champak flower that in another hour will have fallen to the ground. But to free my voice, tell my story, I need to say something else.
I never knew her. And that is the most brutal fact I have about her as she enters me, enters my life. But there are other facts that I have gleaned. She was born in 1894, into a Mar Thoma Syrian Christian family. She was baptized Eli—Elizabeth—the eldest daughter of four, third child in a family of seven children. Her father, George Zachariah of Marathotatil House, came from a family of feudal landlords. He entered the civil service and was named Rao Bahadhur by the British. Her mother, Anna, a spirited lady who was married off at the age of seven and managed a large household, never had any formal education. But great-grandmother had taught herself to read and write both Malayalam and English and in her forties, once childbearing was over, ran a small newspaper for housewives, filled with information about child care, hygiene, and cooking. Grandmother Kunju’s three brothers were educated in the Western manner, and two of them were sent to Oxford while the third was groomed to manage the family property. It was different for her sisters. They were married off young, with large dowries, sight unseen, to young men of suitable family. Kunju, however, resisted getting married. She wanted to study further, to be of service, to make a difference. Her parents permitted her. Here now, over a century after her birth, I can only imagine what her struggles might have been like: tears, anger, overt rebellion, the slow, careful understanding her mother brought to bear on her husband’s opposition to his gifted daughter’s choices. Or was it the mustachioed Rao Bahadhur who said to her, “Go, daughter, go, if you must, be a Savitri, dedicate yourself—but not to a dead husband, rather to the living struggles of a people.” Greatly influenced by certain Scottish spinster ladies, missionaries who encouraged her in her quest for independence, she persisted in her studies. She traveled to Madras, she studied further and gained an M.A. in English literature from Presidency College. She joined the YWCA, which was quite active in India in the early decades of the twentieth century. In her work for the YWCA she traveled all over the world, to Peking and London and other foreign places that melded in my head, in a long melodious string of place names.
I saw the photos of her in sari and shawl standing against the Great Wall and its bleached bricks, then, juxtaposed next to it, a photo of her by the Tower of London, smiling, mindless of all the terror that had gone on in there. And she was beautiful, that fact remained with me. All the portraits in the house testified to that: great luminous eyes, perfectly shaped chin and brow, smooth cheekbones, curly hair. When she finally married, having steadfastly refused an arranged ceremony, by Indian standards she was already quite old, twenty-eight, the age I was when I married. She chose a man who was a Nationalist already and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.
I wonder how it was that she turned, my grandmother Kunju, from her youthful enthusiasm for Lord Chelmsford and his ilk—I recall my astonishment at opening up the album stashed in the spare room in the Tiruvella house and discovering a photo of Kunju demure, elegantly dressed, waiting to receive his lordship on his visit to Madras Presidency—how did she turn from that rough pupa cocooned by colonial ideologies into a full-blown winged thing, dreaming of national liberty? Was it a natural growth in one so sensitive to the needs of those around her, or was it more like an abrupt turn, a mental shock as of weighty waters turning, turning well, like a wheel already set in motion? Was grandmother Kunju’s idealism, her belief in the need to serve the people, inculcated by pious Christian devotion, gathered in a fluent motion into the Nationalist enterprise? Was her growing admiration for the goals of the freedom movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s calls for nonviolent resistance well knotted into her love for the man who was to be my grandfather?
After her marriage, Kunju’s energy fanned out into work for the women’s wing of the Mar Thoma Church, for children’s education, for famine and flood relief. Her concern with women’s education took her into the state capital at Trivandrum where she was nominated to the Travancore Legislative Assembly and became its first lady member. During the early years of the 1930s she was active in campaigns against the curse of untouchability. During the Vaikom satyagraha, the nonviolent action to allow all Hindus to enter the great temple at Vaikom, regardless of birth, regardless of the old curse of the pollution that so-called untouchables were thought to be born with, grandmother Kunju was active, collecting money for the movement, organizing men and women. When Gandhi visited my grandparents’ home in Kottayam in 1934, he had spirited discussions with the Christian leaders gathered there, including Ilya and the younger bearded man who was to become Juhanon Mar Thoma, the fifth metropolitan of the church. They debated the rights of missionaries to convert—something to which Gandhi was quite opposed—as well as the need for the Kerala Christians to receive the Nationalist message. Grandmother sat quietly, joining in every now and then. And, when the wizened old leader opened out his hands, she handed him her frail six-year-old daughter.
As Ilya’s youngest brother Alexander, old, freckled, and blind, tells it now, she stood there, the wind in her hair, holding out her only child to Gandhiji.
“The lantern shone in her eyes, I swear,” my old great-uncle whispered to me. “And the child was laughing, laughing. Kunju seemed a little nervous though. Why? I wonder.”
Amma does not recall meeting Gandhiji when she was six.
“Yes, yes, I knew he came to the house. But I was so young at the time. The house was filled with visitors. They poured in through all the doors and often flooded the courtyards too.”
The following year when she turned seven, amma was sent off from the Kottayam house next to the old seminary where Ilya was the principal. She entered a boarding school run by two Scottish Presbyterian ladies who bore the surname Nicholson.
Once, when I was growing up in Khartoum and spent long hours preening myself in front of the mirror, amma placed her hand firmly on my shoulder, something she rarely did.
“Know something, mol?”
“What?” I paused, my pink comb in hand.
“Remember Nicholson where I went to school?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, we never had a mirror in school. Not a single mirror. Can you imagine that? It was to prevent us girls from the sin of vanity.” She was smiling a little as she spoke.
“No mirror, nothing?” I was dumbfounded. “Then how did you see your face? How?” I gripped her arm.
“We didn’t really. Sometimes we looked into polished metal, or into a pool of water left by the rain. But there were no mirrors at school.”
The school, designed for Syrian Christian girls, stands on a hill with flowering trees and well-tended playing fields, two miles from where the Tiruvella house was built. I imagined my eleven-year-old mother snooping around for pools of water in which to find her face, scouting out bits of polished metal in which she could fix her plaits. What would it be like to be in a boarding school where you could never see your face? I could not imagine. Even boarding school seemed hard to think about, but with grandmother Kunju so preoccupied with political work, it had seemed the only way.
Amma’s education did not end there. After graduating from Nicholson High School, she left for Madras, for Women’s Christian College. There she lived in the shelter of the high walls of the college, enjoying a strict regimen of studies and meals, sedate games of badminton and netball. College was seen as a completion of school, and amma’s life in its dark fluid movement of girlhood growth found shelter in Christian institutions for young women. School and college nurtured her but also cut her away from the daily routines of a parental home and its tight bonds of love. In her later years, in fierce reparation, as if the past might be done over again in the rearing of a daughter, amma brought me and my sisters up in the strict belief that women should stay at home.
“If you ever marry,” she told me as I was growing up, “and if you have children, always remember that your role is to be there at their side, at home. It would be wrong for you to take a job. Remember that, Meena, a woman’s place is at home, by her family.” As she repeated the words over in her soft voice, almost as if she were teaching herself a difficult truth, I pondered the load of pain she had gathered into herself in her quest to live as a woman. And watching her stitch a torn hem, or stir a pot filled with dal, or outside, in the garden stooped in the shade of a neem tree, setting the fragile roots of a marigold into the flower bed, I learnt to love her, to love the slow persistence with which she had learnt how to live her life.
In my rebellion against my mother’s advice, in those Khartoum years filled with teenage parties, the writing of explosive poetry, the harsh, addictive throb of desire, in odd moments when my rage against her strictures ebbed away, I tried to understand what it was that made her so stern about a woman’s place in the world. Was it because grandmother Kunju’s public life had offered her so little time with her only daughter?
Surely, it was amma’s bitter longing for her own mother that made her this way. Grandmother Kunju had died an untimely death. She could never return from the grave, draw her lonely daughter to her side, sing to her, smooth her hair, set water to her dry lips as the first grandchild tore through the delicate skin of her daughter’s vagina. Did the domestic world give my mother a feeling of safety that she craved? But whenever I have asked her about her own choice of a life, about her feelings for her dead mother, amma has brushed me aside. It was as if a second skin had grown over her mouth, barring her from speech.
I shut the door as tight as I can. Still the room fills with dust. Workmen are tearing up the wood in the hallway. Two weeks earlier a drain in the bathroom had burst, flooding the hallway with rust and corrosives. Dirty water rose several inches high, ruining the woodwork. Now the whole space is being torn up and fixed. I pick up a cushion and wedge it into the crack under the door. I do not need to inhale all the dust of Manhattan.
When I arrived in America in 1979, five months pregnant, newly married to David, whom I had met in Hyderabad, I felt torn from the India I had learnt to love. In those days I was struck by all the differences between Hyderabad and New York. I could not get over how little dust there seemed to be in Manhattan. Then why pack up the vegetables, celery, broccoli, cabbage, in plastic? My own soul seemed to me, then, a cabbagelike thing, closed tight in a plastic cover. My two worlds, present and past, were torn apart, and I was the fault line, the crack that marked the dislocation.
I was filled with longing for an ancestral figure who would allow my mouth to open, permit me to speak. I skipped a whole ring of life and made up a grandmother figure, part ghost, part flesh. She was drawn over what I had learnt of grandmother Kunju. I imaged her: a sensitive, cultured woman; a woman who had a tradition, and a history—precisely what I lacked; a woman who had lived to witness the birth pangs of a nation.
Now I think: what would it be like if grandmother Kunju were alive, intact in all her simplicity and elegance, and I, a dusty tattered thing, ran into her on 113th Street. How would we possibly recognize each other, we who have never met in the flesh? Or if we were to greet each other over tea and sweetmeats, what could we say? Would she be ashamed of me, a woman with no fixed place, a creature struggling to make herself up in a new world? Or would her grace extend to me, the granddaughter she has never seen, who has inherited her slim, slightly arthritic fingers, and labors at this electronic machine, typing out fitful amber letters. What would she say to me, a woman turned forty in the last decade of this century, writing of the world that comes to her in little bits and pieces?
Bits and pieces, I ponder the phrase. My mind moves to stones—broken and whole—pebbles, slabs of granite, pink boulders. Lines from the Egyptian Book of the Dead I first read in Khartoum repeat in my head. I had sought the book out after my visit to the Great Pyramid in Giza, a sullen, grotesque thing of sandstone, massive icon of gravity, crouched over its own inner darkness. I was frightened of the spirits of the dead who inhabited it, and had to be coaxed by appa to enter. Amma, who has always suffered from claustrophobia, waited outside with my little sister Anna. So I entered the pyramid with my father and the Egyptian guide, and let the darkness and the dank underground smell wash into my flesh. For weeks later that pyramid cut into my dreams. The huge stones seemed forged from human flesh, broiled by the desert sun into the melancholy gold of Egyptian sandstone. And out of the stones came voices crying out in Arabic, Syriac, Persian, the words babbling in my head.
In Manhattan the dream recurred and long-lost lines from the Papyrus of Ani repeated in my head. I stumbled over the words: “Be opened my mouth by Ptah, untied the bandages, twice which are upon my mouth by the god of my town. . . Be opened my mouth, be unclosed my mouth. . .”
Where was my town? If I could not invoke the god of my town, how would the bandages drop from my mouth? How would I be freed to speak? Far, far from Tiruvella and Kozencheri, Allahabad, Pune, Delhi, Khartoum, far even from Nottingham, on that lovely cold island, the words I had carried around for so long echoed in my inner ear. I wanted to be more than a tympanum, a pale, vibrating thing that marked out the boundaries between worlds. More than a mere line in the dry earth. I wanted to give voice to my flesh, to learn to live as a woman. To do that, I had to spit out the stones that were in my mouth. I had to become a ghost, enter my own flesh.
My earliest years flow back: skin, cotton, wall, mattress, and quilt. The old mattress mender with the blind blue of a cataract in his left eye, hand raised with the metal hook he threaded into the old cotton, puffing up the crushed stuff inside. It needed air, needed to tumble a little before being shut up in the striped ticking. I remember the clean scented mattresses of Allahabad; air so hot and dry it flayed my cheek; dirt, tons of it; the blue, blue glaze of heaven; moisture, sudden moisture.
How misty it all is, water vapor dashing against mirror and bed and bowl. We needed the water ritual to survive the Allahabad summers. Usually the maid did what was necessary, twice a day, as the heat rose from the Gangetic plains. But one night it was appa’s job. He got up and fetched a metal bucket filled high with tap water, crossed into the middle of the room, tipped the water out. It hissed on the hot floor, spreading its wet film over the tiles. Bucket followed on bucket till the iridescent sheet of water petaled the stone floor, making lamplight gleam and flower, an unfinished paradise shifting till the whitewashed walls closed where they touched ground, making a pale bud, a vessel in water, rocking a little, a delicious safety, for I knew the light would subside and with it the motion of the water from the bucket. In its wake a heavenly coolness infiltrated the room, pouring through silks and pottery, metals and glass, and our human skin felt less like a hot tight helmet or body shield made out of copper as in those ancient etchings, and more like ordinary flesh should, smooth, vulnerable, the source of feeling.
There was no need for the water ritual in winter, or once the rains had come. So I lay curled up in a little ball, my toes poking through yards of muslin, willing to lie there the whole night, sleepless, or in that partial dream state I endured at night, fearful, edgy without amma, yet resolute in my own way, feeling fully able, when I needed, to knock over the earthen jar with cool drinking water in it and cry out shamelessly. I pretended the mist had come into my mouth, that it was wearing away the dark mahogany slats of the crib.
I remember one particular awakening, rude and clumsy. Amma came in mumbling something under her breath, housecoat all scrabbled up at the edges, the buttons askew. She rolled me up and carried me out, through one doorway after the other, crying and crying till we hit the cold night air and the dream, if that was what it was, dashed into rough earth.
She fell. She fell carrying me.
Appa ran over from the distance where he was, from the darkness, where the cracks ran in the earth. He had his big stick in his hand, the one he kept under his bed for snakes and dacoits. He ran over to help her.
But already she was picking herself up, clumsy, stepping on her long, lace-edged petticoat, lopsided with my weight, swaddling clothes all tangled. Behind us, on the veranda of the converted army barracks that served as our first home, the Gurkha in his heavy mailed boots was shouting something out. Everyone turned towards him. The bare bulb, lit all night to scare off hyenas and other night creatures, shone over his head. In one raised hand he held up the dead weight of a python, its head smashed in with his stick, body huge and green.
Time was, I want to write.
Time was, the tail trembled on the veranda floor.
In his left hand the Gurkha brandished a gun. Behind him, thrust onto the veranda from the safe niche in which it normally stood, was a heavy metal trunk in which appa kept all his documents, his M.Sc. from Imperial College London, his passport, shares to a rubber estate, my baptismal certificate signed by his Grace, Juhanon Mar Thoma, metropolitan of the Mar Thoma Syrian Christian Church. Attracted no doubt by the cool metal of the trunk, the python had rolled its heft of snakeflesh and smooth skin, coil after coil, through the drawing room window, through the dining room, into the main bedroom where the trunk was set.
The Gurkha, as he tramped around the barracks with his heavy nightstick, cracking up the small bodies of crickets in his fingers, whistling on his fine tin whistle, had caught a glint of the python’s tail. Or claimed he had. For when appa, always a poor sleeper in the dry winter air, saw the light-colored shadow move, heavy and sluggish behind his metal chest, he sprang up crying out and it took the Gurkha quite a few minutes to get there.
Next the python hung from a beam on the veranda. Something dripped out of its mouth. Amma did not want to enter the house again. She walked with me, as appa led us, torch in hand, towards the cracks in the earth that ran beyond the Bambrali garden: fault lines, fine and feverish.
In dry weather an ocher powder, almost like the pollen of wild poppies, came out of them. It was dust really, hot Gangetic dust, but the color and pungent fragrance was like the pollen that fell off poppies. The small fault lines, fissures in the ground, were caused by the shifting of the underground plates that had caused even the Himalaya Mountains to form. In these northern plains those cracks were sharpened by drought and heat. But when the rains came and wildflowers bloomed in the spring season, they were scarcely visible.
Once I could run, amma or my ayah had to watch me all the time as I played in the garden, picking flowers, scrambling here and there, in case I stumbled and fell, hurting an ankle or heel. Worse, too, could happen. I learnt that children sometimes fell into cracks in the earth and vanished. Sometimes they jumped into wells or quarries full of water. It was never entirely clear to me why a child would ever want to do such a thing, but in my childhood dreams they seemed to be doing that much of the time.
*
Who says in dreams begin reponsibilities? In dreams begin craziness, the bitterness of shot silk in the mouth as your lover leaves and huddled on the subway you bite into your sari of pure kanjeevaram silk. Iron in the teeth as you grip the railings by the shuttle at Grand Central, and next to you the derelict stands, his entire assortment of possessions tucked into his sweatshirt, bits of paper, an old billfold, three cans of Sprite smashed flat that he can redeem for five cents apiece, and an undershirt someone cast off, somewhere, this side of the Hudson River.
You live three blocks from the Hudson River, on the island of Manhattan, three blocks away from wind and high water. There is the width of Riverside Park by 113th Street: rocks, a few trees stitched together, the glamour of sunlight streaking over old soil where grass prickles through in springtime. Further down, overlooking the river, is a rough square with concrete on it. People bike ride, or roller skate, or just hang out on the benches with their newspapers, books, or boom boxes mercifully shut off. Children race around on their tricycles, round and round in a madcap way. The stiff wind off the Hudson snarls their hair and stings their eyes.
The sunlight is so sharp in late springtime that it burns the child’s eyes and she hugs herself to the handlebars of her tricycle, folds her body over, pummels hard, harder with her little legs. Her doll, made of plastic and nylon, bits of blue tinted cellophane where the eyes form, is tied on behind. It slips sideways with the sudden force of the wind. The cloth book with pictures of Miss Piggy and Kermit that the child had set over the doll like a quilt—“Its just like a quilt, mama, a quilt, isn’t it? I think this book is a quilt”—flops onto concrete. The pink washcloth she had folded behind the doll to make it secure drops off too. The wind lifts it an inch, then another inch or two, threatening to blow it into the Hudson River.
We have a little house in the Hudson Valley, in Claverack, two hours by car along the Taconic Parkway, dead north of the city. In the bedroom that looks out onto sumac and wild rhubarb, there is a big wooden bed with ornate Spanish carvings, courtesy of Dorris. Dorris, in a fit of spring cleaning, got rid of much of her stuff from her Long Island house. She felt it was time for new furniture, new curtains, new mattresses, and all that. Toby, knowing our penurious state, bedless, mattressless, quiltless in the country, insisted on having her friend’s castoff bed delivered to our doorstep. They carried it in, the old Spanish bedstead, three men who tumbled out of a truck as the neighbors stared. The tiny door at the back by the kitchen almost split open as the bedstead jammed and then the stove had to be shifted. The bed is fine as beds go but for some reason the sheet always slips off the corner of the mattress cover and has to be lodged in place with pins or hooks or whatever comes to hand. There is something so low-down, so thoroughly improvised about my housekeeping that any child visitor coming in can tell that my mind’s been elsewhere, my thoughts surging out of the room in memories, dreams, reflections the mere walls will never tell, nor Spanish bedsteads catch.
Lying on that bed all alone one summer afternoon I had a dream that felt like a memory, a true happening evoked in the shot silk of time present, when sense fractures and real places shake themselves apart. I dreamt I was falling. I heard the wind whistle around me as I fell.
I fell and fell and there was no swing or helicopter, or trapdoor from heaven. I fell in a hot, unswerving motion that turned my body into fluid. There was mud at the sides of the quarry where I fell. Clearly it was a quarry. The kind of Kerala quarry from which sandstone is cut, pink-streaked sandstone. Little Svati was running across the steep-sided bottom, water up to her ankles. “Mami, mami” she cried as she used to do in those days. “Mami, mami.” Time and again she slipped into the water, each time picking herself up again. By now her dress was splashed and torn. Watching her, I felt she was invincible.
Then something cramped inside me, right where the heart makes its strong, muscular beat. Exhausted, she bobbed up and down on the gray surface of water, brown hair bleached to the color of straw. I jumped in. I could not swim. I dragged her up as best I could and held her to my breasts. Her hair massed over my right shoulder, gained color as I held her there, my girl-child and I, both fallen. On the sides of the quarry, on stones marked with red veins, moss twisted and squirmed, making vowel shapes. The vowel shapes had serpent bodies, fish tails, glittering hooks, eyes. I heard a hoarse sound. Whose breath was it? Hers or mine? Or was it the blur of vowels in the quarry of flesh?
*
I was born out of my mother, and out of her mother before her, and her mother, and her mother, and hers. Womb blood and womb tissue flowing, gleaming, no stopping. I was born in Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh, in the plains of northern India, the great city of God, where two rivers meet, the Ganga and the Jamuna. At the sangam, the holiest part of flowing water, ashes from the newly dead are set afloat. Elsewhere on the dung heaps, the bloodied tissue of abortions clots and festers. Pigeons, crows, vultures cluster in the air. The air is thick with cries.
Allahabad has many houses, built of sand, tin, mud, bricks, rocks, sandstone. The houses have walls, doors, windows. Some have beds, bedrolls, mats, cribs, sheets, rubber sheets, mattresses made of flecked stuff. From time to time the cotton in the mattresses needs to be puffed out, blown into the air by an old man who goes from house to house with his metal instruments, knocking at doors, crying:
“Ten paise, fifteen paise, two rupees. Who wants a mattress done? Who wants a razai done?”
He drags the old mattresses out into the cool sunlight, picks at the curled up cotton.
My eyes open. My cheek moist with milk rests on the newly furbished mattress. Amma brings me home from the hospital and lays me there. The mattress is covered in white muslin. There is a little stain under my cheek, where the milk dribbles down. I have enormous cheeks, all puffed up with sucking.
This is my first house: a military barrack left empty after the second world war and used now for junior civil servants in the newly formed Indian government. The barracks are long and spacious, but room runs on from room in a monotonous fashion. The narrow front veranda is divided up so that each family with its two or three bedrooms, living room, dining room, and so forth, has a fair share of the veranda. The land in front, cracked and dry in the summer season, is filled with wildflowers, poppies, sunflowers, and a few half-stunted mango trees. The small kitchen garden at the back is filled with tomato plants. As I grow older I race through that back garden, eyes shut, both palms extended, plucking as many of the sour green fruits as I can.
I pop them into my mouth as I rush. I try not to trip. Sometimes the little boy who lives next door joins me in this mad race, denuding the tomato plants. We grow noisy as we race, tagging each other through the soft leaves that scrape our necks. He shouts to me in Hindi. We are both three. Amma sipping tea at the kitchen window pretends not to see. For a whole eternity amma pretends not to see. She squints, she shuts her eyes, she screws her eyes up so tight not even the fierce winter sun can seep into her pupils.
Sometimes as I now toss and squinch in bed, I see amma as she was, frail and twenty-seven, black hair shining, her cotton sari tucked in at her waist, her eyes bright red with sunlight. She stands there at the kitchen window in Allahabad. Behind her is Motrilal the cook, making hot steaming chapatis. Amma has her back to him. She has absolutely no interest in chapatis. Never did. They always turn out like dried dosas when she cooks them, a south Indian unused to cooking with wheat. Rice was just right, wheat was too crude and raw. During the rice shortages in Kerala in the late sixties, hundreds of acres of paddy fields were devastated in the monsoon floods and wheat was sent down from the north. But who could eat it? Who could cook it? People waited patiently for hours for some rice gruel to fill their empty bellies while sacks of wheat grew damp in the godowns. When the shortages turned more acute the wheat was pulled out. Then ways had to be devised to cook it, make a palatable dough out of it, bake it, broil it.
But amma stands in my dream, her back to the wheat. Masses of it spinning out of the cook’s immaculate hands. Wheat leaping its milky shapes onto the hot griddle, then turning just the right shade of golden brown, tiny bubbles of heat bursting so the black spots smoke and fall apart on the fine cooked surface, giving just that burnt savor to the chapati. I loved to poke my tongue into the burnt holes of the chapatis. Amma would pour ghee over the chapati and when I poked my tongue in, the warm ghee dribbled out.
But as I watch her now she touches nothing. She has her back turned to all the cooking business. On and on Motrilal goes with his task as if she weren’t there at all. But I know he knows she is there and she knows too. For her palms are clenched on the windowsill and her eyes shut tight are bright red and dry. I can see through her lids. Her eyes are red like fish eyes pulled from the living stream. Sharp red with all that sunlight burning her.
Though I was born there, Allahabad is not my home. It is far from Tiruvella, about a thousand miles due north. Nadu is the Malayalam word for home, for homeland. Tiruvella, where my mother’s home, Kuruchiethu House, stands, and Kozencheri, where appa’s home, Kannadical House, stands, together compose my nadu, the dark soil of self. I was taught that what I am is bound up always with a particular ancestral site. Perhaps I will return there to be buried, my cells poured back into the soil from which they sprung. How tight the bonds are, how narrow the passage from birth to death.
But for a woman, marriage makes a gash. It tears you from your original home. Though you may return to give birth, once married you are part and parcel of the husband’s household. You enter those doors wearing the rich mathrakodi sari his mother draped over your head at the marriage ceremony. When you finally leave in a simple rosewood casket, the same sari becomes your shroud. Hence the song I heard as a child and repeat now in my own head:
Glistening silk
the color of milk
decking the bride!
Who’ll bind up the shroud?
Amma, amma I’ll come
for the ride!
Amma was married into the Kannadical family. She followed appa north to Allahabad and gave birth to me in Kamala Nehru Hospital sometime around nine o’clock on a winter’s morning, on the seventeenth of February 1951. No one will tell me the exact time of my birth, perhaps no one knows.
Kozencheri veliappechan, my paternal grandfather, had a horoscope made for me, based, he claimed, on the precise instant of my birth. He would never show it to me. It was locked away with his files and ayurvedic potions, somewhere in a teak cabinet in the large white house he built for himself, high on a hill on ancestral property in Kozencheri. Kozencheri is only twelve miles away from Tiruvella, but in my mind’s eye it is a lifetime away; more archaic, more backward, bent to the darkness of blood feuds and feudal torments. The white house, fitted with electricity, was built after veliappechan tore down the house of teak and mahogany that had stood for four hundred years in the lower garden at the edge of the sugarcane fields. Together with the granary and sacred relics, clothes and books and rosewood furniture, together with my grandmother Mariamma’s carved chests that once bore her dowry of muslins and silks, the horoscope was carried to the upper garden, to the drawing room of the new house and locked away. I never got to see it. Perhaps I never will. For many years, though, I wondered whether his refusal was based on some fault in me that the learned astrologer had foretold. A dosham, a grievous wrong.
Something like, whoever marries her is fated to death. Or fated to her infidelity. Or fated to her constant flitting back and forth. Or even worse: she will never marry and will remain like a ram in a thicket, a pigeon in a fence spike, throat caught in the paternal house of origin.
When I asked amma for the time of my birth, she said she was so weak and exhausted that she couldn’t possibly have asked for the time. It was a difficult birth, she confided to me later, and quite frightening really.
“There was no one to tell me what to do, child. Afterwards, I never wanted to wear the tight wrap around my belly they told me to. Nor could I stop drinking water. I was so thirsty! Allahabad was hot and dry! So my belly never became tight and slim again.”
Amma always had a large belly and her children snuggled up against it, first me, then Anna, then Elsa. It was time itself, the first home. It housed us, growing slack as she aged and its old uses failed. When she gave birth to me amma was twenty-four, sixteen years younger than I am now. Grandmother Kunju had died seven years before that. One night in Women’s Christian College in Madras, where she lived in the hostel, amma had a dream. In my mind that dream is colored blue, flashing and fitful, a bird’s feather, a vanishing covered over by darkness.
She dreamt her mother had died, that she was waving goodbye to her. Waving and waving across a gulf. She knew it was a gulf, for no sounds came. The next morning the telegram arrived. Grandmother Kunju had died. A gold injection had killed her. There was a new English doctor at the Mission Hospital in Tiruvella, a man called Churchwarden, supposedly very bright. He knew of a cure for arthritis. Grandmother’s fingers were racked with arthritis. She played her piano early each morning, then arranged the new tiger lilies in the vases along the window, so the light would catch the soft petals and open them. Later in the day her fingers grew worse. First the gold injection made her skin itch. As the itch grew worse her skin started to peel off in layers. The poison rose in her blood, making her hot and feverish. Her whole body burnt with an invisible fire, its heat so great that forty-eight hours after the injection she fell into a coma and slipped away. Ilya never recovered. Nor did amma, though it has taken me all this time to realize it.
As soon as she had graduated from college, amma’s marriage was arranged. It was done in an unusual way, for the boy’s side did the searching. Kozencheri veliappechan, having heard that amma was ready for marriage, made the proposal. He called on Ilya in the Tiruvella home, accompanied by the go-between, a relative on both sides. The go-between carried appa’s M.Sc. answer papers, in which appa had a perfect score of 100. Since amma came from a distinguished family, veliappechan wanted his future relatives by marriage to know his only son’s worth.
Years later, grandmother Mariamma told me, “You know we arranged the marriage because we saw your grandmother Kunju from a distance and all sang a song to her: ‘Welcome, welcome Mrs. Kuruvilla, M.A. kum!’ ” Kum was just a suffix, a little lilt at the end of the song that the children in Saint Mary’s School, Kozencheri, had made up to welcome grandmother Kunju. She was coming to open the new school building. Appa in those days was just a boy, a rather naughty boy who ran wild in the paddy fields and raced straight at white bulls so that his oldest sister screamed out in fear. He saw nothing of all this. But my grandmother Mariamma came out of her proud seclusion and stood by the granite gates watching as this other woman, young as she was, dark and beautiful, her curly hair bound back in a tight bun, stepped out of the car to the claps of the children and the songs of the elders.
Did grandmother Kunju bear scissors in her hand, glinting silver scissors with which to cut the pink ribbons strung across the new school rooms? Did she feel the sunlight on her hair and blink her eyes at the light? Had she any sense at all that her only daughter would be married into the family whose ancestral lands lay all around the schoolhouse on the hill? She smiled at the children, she stepped forward on her small feet, she folded her palms and bent forward in greeting. She was tired of all the traveling. But she held her mind clear and free.
After her mother’s sudden death, after her college graduation, amma served tea and sweets to the young man who came to visit. She saw him just once, her sari drawn over her head, her eyes peeping through the fine cotton. He wanted to return, to see her again, but his mother prevented him.
“It would be quite improper, what would people say?” I giggled as amma explained this to me when I was thirteen. I could not imagine what the world was like then.
I turned to appa. “But why didn’t you insist?”
“How could I? She was my mother.”
I think I understood him. Grandmother Mariamma, though quite reclusive, was the power in the Kozencheri house. Appa would never raise his voice in her presence. Nor would he ever let her see him smoke. Like a small boy, stealing away, he would go to immense lengths to light his cigarettes in the shelter of the lime trees that rose in abundance around the side of the house. He strolled back and forth in the darkness, only the tips of his lighted cigarettes showing, quickly stubbing them out if his mother chanced out in search of air. The scent of my father’s imported cigarettes, Players, Winston, Camel, pervades the night air where the lime trees bloom, on a hillside in Kerala. On the other side of the hill is the school where the grandmother I never saw with ordinary sight strode up briskly, silver scissors in hand.
I do not know who cut my umbilical cord. Or how it was cut. Did he or she use scissors? Perhaps it was a harassed doctor. Perhaps a nurse held me, all slippery and mussed, my head a purplish cone with the pressure of entry. Perhaps by this time amma was too worn out with tears to care. But she put me to her breasts as soon as they let her and set the sweet milk flowing.
I know she loved me. I also know that she was broken up, not quite ready for the difficulties of the world, when I popped out. The normal custom was to return to one’s mother’s home to give birth. While marriage is a parting, an exile from the maternal home, giving birth is a time to return, to celebrate, to feast on rich nutty sweets, to imbibe life-giving proteins, to have your body, numb after childbirth, rubbed over with hot oils and unguents steeped in herbs.
But with grandmother dead, amma had nowhere to return. The closest was her mother’s sister, my great-aunt Sara. She lived in Burhanpur where her husband had retired from Simla. Their house was filled with crystal and cigar smoke. Appa went by train to fetch her and brought her back to the little house on the empty field filled with wild flowers that was our first home. She spent her time in Allahabad, preparing muslins and baby woolens, waiting for me to arrive. After my arrival she stayed for a few weeks, then left. Great-aunt Sara was the closest amma could get to home. I know she wept bitterly, missing her own mother at the season of my birth. She felt very far from home. In five years she was to travel even further, again following appa, but this time across the boundaries of a new India, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, further, much further than Allahabad.
Sometimes I think that the journey across the ocean was like a death to her. Or perhaps I should say that it made for an entirely different life for her. As for me, just turned five, my days changed utterly and I became a child of a different sort. My life shattered into little bits and pieces. In my dreams, I am haunted by thoughts of a homeland I will never find. So I have tuned my lines to a different aesthetic, one that I build up out of all the stuff around me, improvising as I go along. I am surrounded by jetsam. It is what I am, the marks of my being: old, overboiled baby bottles, half-used tubes of A and D ointment, applications for visas to here and there, an American green card with my face printed on so dark you can scarcely make out the flesh from the black hair floating around, a diaphragm I no longer use, a wedding ring I cannot wear for my finger has grown plumper, scraps of scribbled paper, a fragment of silk from my grandmother Kunju’s wedding sari that I have preserved in a silver box with intricate patterns of mango leaf and the wings of dancing herons that belonged to my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother and is set now on a bookshelf in my bedroom in the Manhattan apartment where I live.