When I think back through earliest childhood, the houses I lived in, the real, solid places I knew shine out for me, various, multiple, bound together by the land-mass of India, an accustomed geography. The constancies of my life, the hands I held onto, the rooms or gardens I played in, ripple in memory, and sometimes it is as if the forgotten earth returns. I remember little things, a window ledge with white paint, the fragrance of wildflowers, appa’s bicycle.
In Allahabad appa had a black bicycle he rode to work each day. It suited him well. Sometimes the path that led to our house was so bumpy and he rode so fast that the tires jerked up a halo of dust. Appa was full of verve and loved to travel. We lived in Bambrali, near the Civil Aviation Training Centre where appa taught pilots the basics of meteorology, how to tell an oncoming storm, how to navigate their planes through rough weather. The buzz of aircraft filled my infancy.
When we moved to Khartoum, again we lived near an airport and the whine and splutter of low-flying craft, the low drone of the larger flying machines made a constant brown sound against which I lived and moved. My first lines when I made poems as a child were etched in my own head against the metallic sibilance of aircraft. How frail the words seemed when set against the constant reminder of flight, the skies crisscrossed by thundering silver birds.
In 1947, after his marriage to amma, appa set off for further studies in England. With a master’s degree in physics from Madras University, he had trained to be a meteorologist in the Indian government service. Now he was going abroad to study further. It was customary that a young man, before setting off abroad, be fitted out with a bride, an anchor, a calling card in reverse. There would be no danger then from temptations in London: liquor, white women, or whatever might befall a handsome, earnest young fellow determined to do well in his life. Returning two years later, in grand style, his M.Sc. from Imperial College in hand, two garden parties at Buckingham Palace behind him, appa picked up amma who had been waiting all this while and took her off to Allahabad, his first posting after Indian independence.
Amma was frail and beautiful. She was quite unsuited to life as the wife of a junior civil servant, which was what appa was in those days. He had to show her how to make tea and how to prepare a meat curry, his one culinary accomplishment. He never forgot that he had to borrow money from her father to hire a cook, Motrilal, an elderly man in clean white kurta-pyjama whose arts made for a precarious peace in the family. Motrilal prepared the delicious chapatis, flat whole-wheat pancakes. Rolled out and fried, they puffed up slightly. Massed on a piece of muslin, one on top of the other, basted with ghee, they melted in the mouth.
Sometimes amma would fill a hot chapati with jam and roll it up for me. She would let me stand on the front veranda of the Allahabad house, rolled up chapati in hand, warm jam dribbling down my lips. I amused myself by staring at the crows that pecked the overripe melons. Sometimes the crows circled very close to me, but they never actually touched me with their crinkled wings. Once as I stood on the Allahabad veranda, a cur approached. It had dirty matted fur from the ditches in which it slept, brown and white patches on its thin body, and held its tail erect. It approached me, wagging its tail. I inched back into a rattan armchair. It pounced at the chapati. Later that day amma and appa in a panic carried me into the clinic and I had seven injections in my upper thigh. Seven milk injections. I was fairly sure that nothing but the saliva of the dog had touched me. But their fear was acute and real. Had that scrawny creature been rabid, I might have been at risk. There were cases in the neighborhood of children dying terrible deaths, moaning and shaking and pulling out their own hair.
I lived with my parents in Allahabad till just before I turned four. Each year before the hot season started, amma, with an appropriate female traveling companion, a servant who could help with my things, set off with a four-day supply of food and fresh water. We entered the first-class compartment of the train, with its plush padded seats and shiny electric fans. The train could take us home, all the way to Kottayam. On the first journey, when I was four months old, Appa helped amma and the ayah into the train and the porter lowered his red turban, unloading a huge slab of ice. The ice was covered in sawdust and rough sacking. It had the odor of crushed jasmine, a rich, slightly overripe scent. With the fans turned on and the ice secure underfoot, we were kept reasonably cool for the long overland journey. The temperatures outside, as the train sped though the northern dry lands, could rise as high as 114 degrees.
The food and the drink were all secured in thermos flasks and stainless steel containers, piled into the baskets with two handles especially equipped for carrying. There were rolls of mattresses and pillows and piles of little diapers with separate safety pins. There was a pair of scissors too, lest a food parcel need to be slit open, or someone’s hair—this was my worst fear as I grew older—caught in one of the fans in the train and the long tug to death began.
I was taught very early that I should never stand with my head close to a whirling fan. Throughout childhood, in addition to ceiling fans, there were fans set on tabletops and pedestal fans that stood on the ground with their long silver stalks, capable of being adjusted for the maximum circulation of air. Girls were especially at risk. In a trice their long hair, pink ribbons and all, could be sucked up into the death machine.
That had happened to Graciemol, my uncle’s daughter. She was a grown woman, a surgeon with an FRCS, a brilliant woman with a fondness for red silk saris. She had lovely long hair down to her knees. One afternoon, while combing her hair after her bath—like all Kerala women she had a fondness for oiling her long hair and washing it twice a day—she stood by the fan. There was only an aged servant woman in the room with her. Graciemol’s hair started to tangle and knot as the fan whirled tighter and harder. The electric shocks passed into her poor twitching body and all that brilliance shivered into a heap of red silk. The old woman was too panic-stricken to touch her and so saved her own life. My uncle Patros, a man so proud of his English accent that he hardly knew what to say in that tongue, never revealed his pain. But each time I looked at him I wondered about it.
He was marked in my mind. He had lost a daughter to electric shocks. Yama, the God of Death, in the form of an electric Usha fan had carried her off. Even when his fine, aristocratic mouth rounded out English syllables that sounded so odd in the shade of the lime trees where the doves perched, or by the tethered goats, I could never forget the fate that had befallen his daughter. Indeed there was always a slight suspicion, fostered in me by amma, that it was Graciemol’s brilliance, surely somewhat unbalancing for anyone, let alone a woman, that led to her absent-mindedness that monsoon morning. And surely her love for red silks could not have helped. It too was distracting.
There was always something unnatural in the exceptionally gifted—fate strung them down into darkness, held them on a hook, sometimes even sprung them into death too soon. Like Sheemon, grandmother Mariamma’s cousin. I had seen his face in the photos of the Kudumacharitram, the family history book. He had a tight face, with high cheekbones, thin lips. A student at Presidency College, Calcutta, he favored the winged collars and dark Edwardian suits of the day. Just before he was to set off to Oxford, he suffered a terrible brain fever and died in Bengal. It was said that he could quote the whole of The Ancient Mariner by Coleridge without a single pause. No intake of breath, nothing. I marveled at his grace. I wondered what this terrible, exotic poem could be. I never reconciled myself to it even when finally I read it. With its palpable torment, its high seas and albatross, it seemed part of a fatal excess to me. Its author’s opium addiction and periodic craziness, when I learnt of them later, framed the brain fever my grandmother’s cousin had suffered.
Back and forth, forth and back, I went as a child. The train rides did not cease. They persisted right through my childhood. Once I saw a mad soldier tied up in knots. It was in Pune Station. Appa, amma, and I were waiting for a train. At the other side of the wide platform, curiously deserted for that time of day, was a group of soldiers. One soldier, a strongly built man, was stooped over, all contorted. Abruptly he jerked himself down, sideways onto the platform floor. I could not take my eyes off him. As he straightened up, his arms shot out at odd angles. Three others closed in on him. I kept staring at him though amma turned away. The muscles in his face grew swollen as his comrades approached. They were dressed in regulation khaki. They pummeled him to the ground. He struggled, a bullock with cramps in its gut. They tossed a tough net over him. Foam spilled from his mouth as he struggled and leapt, dragging the net tighter over his limbs and head. So knotted up and raging, he was pulled off to a reserved compartment of a train that had just drawn in. The net was so tight it seemed like a second skin within which, helpless and kicking, he was throttled.
In 1955 appa was transferred to the Meteorological Office in Pune, in the foothills of the Deccan. In Pune, I started a few mornings of school at Saint Mary’s, a convent school run by Protestant nuns. Each morning, a van with a driver picked me up. I was helped in and sat by the window, next to another little girl. I was stiff, uncomfortable at first in the dark navy uniform with white blouse that hurt my shoulders with the heaviness of starched cotton. I was proud, though, of my leather belt and little bag. The nuns were kind. They checked our fingernails before class and, in deference to four-year-old needs, laid out mats at noon each day for our naps.
I recall the great balconies of the school and the banyan tree with vines twisted over its trunk. The French windows on the second floor were open as we lay on the mats and the tree was so close, its upper trunk almost flush with the mosaic floor. When I squinted as I lay on my side, the mosaic bits came closer, splitting and moving in their patterns of maroon and black and white, making a figuration of roses, dancing roses that I kept behind my eyelids as I watched the trees. I was held in a bowl of stalk and leaf and vine that revived my Kerala summers. Bird song entered my ears, persisted as the noisy streets came closer, rough and bumpy as we rode back home. Amma was waiting for me at the red painted door of the house. I could not have conceived of returning home without her.
In summer there was the ritual return to Kerala, to Ilya’s home in Tiruvella. Amma traveled south when the heat grew too heady, when the green painted screens could not be flung any lower, nor mango juices cool the senses. However hot the season, the Kerala seacoast prevented terrible excesses of temperature. After a few months we returned to Pune. And so my life, though filled with motion, was stable. My childhood had a clear form: parents and then displacing them for part of each year my Ilya, the grandfather I loved so dearly.
*
In Pune, we lived in a little house with a large garden next to Deccan Gymkhana Road. “Deccan Gymkhana ki galli me hai,” amma made me learn the address in Hindi, a language that was native to me given my earliest years in Allahabad, but one which I have never acquired again with the delight that should surely be incumbent upon using an early tongue. I can read Devanagari script, though, if slowly and with great care, and the memory of learning those letters in Pune returns to me.
Behind the Pune house was a tangled garden with sunflowers that amma cultivated, their heavy black seed heads lit by the early morning sun as it rose over the hedge and flooded us. On the other side of the hedge was the home of the erstwhile actress of the Marathi stage, Mistress Snehaprabha.
She called on us very late one night with her hair marcelled in waves, in the manner of certain ladies of the stage and screen. She wore a red brocade blouse cut very low and her forehead was clean and pale. I think appa was rather charmed by her. He was young and handsome and had an eye for female beauty, though I knew his religious fervor, bred in the Syrian Orthodox churches of his childhood and then overlaid with the Anglicanism of his years in London as a young man, effectively prevented any effusion of passion. So Snehaprabha called on us that night, accepted the cardamom tea amma offered her, and called me to sit on her lap. I did so, feeling the shiny silk that covered her thighs. How white her face was with all that powder. And what was her story? I was fascinated by her, a single woman living across the hedge, quite independent it would seem, though one never knew if she had a protector in town: quite desirable, flaunting herself in that way, rather than being a wife. Amma was a wife, Snehaprabha was not. It seemed to me that all the benefits lay on the other side of the tamarind hedge where the sun rose in the morning: the profusion of chocolates she gave me on feast days, the expensive cars with gentlemen in them that landed on her side of the road, the clowns and even the bear-toting vagabonds, or men with dancing monkeys she befriended, calling me over in a loud voice, her cheeks dimpled with the effort, “Hurry, hurry before the bear stops dancing.” So I raced over, barefoot, my dress covered with dust, and watched the heavy footed bear tread on her daisies, its long sad shambles rewarded by shakes of the tambourine the thin man held, his loose arm hugging the drum as the bear danced, faster and harder, and the dust rose in a sheen.
It was Snehaprabha who explained to us the significance of the round concrete pit, three feet deep, large as a good-sized swimming pool, that lay in the back garden:
“Godavaran’s circus. All those young things from Tamil Nadu used to pitch their tents here. Those were the days! With my rehearsals at the theater all day, the acting at night, what a storm of applause we used to raise. And then at night, returning past the main road, the tents flickering with lights. Sometimes they set up flares in metal hooks, at the sides of the tents as the trapeze artists swung.”
She patted me on the arm as she said this and I was filled with expectations. I wanted to be a trapeze artist. I was convinced of the merit of my decision and told Ilya when I saw him that summer. He did not say much. So I whispered it all to Susikali, the mad magical little girl Ilya had made up for me. In the large southern bedroom in the Tiruvella house I crouched under one of the desks where the books lay in heaps, and paper shone with ink markings—Ilya was revising his History of the Mar Thoma Church. I crouched, making up tents and flying bodies, the shining suits of the trapeze children bulging from the dark underside of the teak desk on which grandmother’s initials, E. K., were marked. Why, I asked amma, why did grandmother Kunju want her initials on the furniture? Several of the fine wood pieces had the same letters.
“That was so that, if Ilya were in prison and the British came to take away the furniture, it would have her initials and she could hold onto it. The pieces marked with her name could not be impounded.” Amma was quite serious. There was something in her tone that made me stop, a vein of hardness, of facing up to things that it took me years to appreciate. So under grandmother’s desk, tucked behind the white khadi dhoti that Ilya always wore, his legs shielding me from the world outside, I dreamt up the fliers in red silk, their bodies hoisted and framed by the threads that ran glittering through Godavaran’s circus tent that had once stood in our Pune backyard.
In 1956, just before I turned five, I left India in amma’s company. In 1956 when the Sudan gained independence, Azhari, the president, turned to Nehru for help. Rather than have the British send technical aid, he wanted assistance from other Third World countries. Appa was thirty-five at the time; amma was twenty-eight, my age when I made the journey to America. A position for a meteorologist had been advertised in the Government Gazette, and full-time members of the Indian Service could apply. He applied for the position and was chosen to work “under secondment” from the Indian government. When I was four and a half, he left Pune for his new job. It was five years since his return from London after his studies at Imperial College.
I have often felt that my father was a Royalist at heart. Something in the pomp and circumstance of British rule appealed to him. He was devoted to the secular ideals of the new Indian government, but the British sense of order, of stilling the “native” chaos in the colonies struck a chord with my father. Perhaps that had to do with the tumult of the feudal family he came from and his constant efforts to keep his own emotions under firm dominion. Years later he told me he believed in Newton’s conceptions of the universe, the order and clarity presumed in the universe. The instabilities of the winds and waters, of the monsoon and the haboob (that dark desert wind he had to forecast in the Sudanese summers) coexisted in his mind with the geometric precisions of a physics that could refigure all things in a divinity without division.
The photographs of the time show a handsome young man, slender, with strong shoulders, even-featured, with dark wavy hair. His eyes are tender with happiness. Amma by his side is slight, her hair pulled back in a low, tight bun. Her face is delicately molded, the cheekbones high, the forehead wide and handsome. There is something quiet, even reticent about my mother in the photograph. She looks down, away from the photographer to the little child in a smock dress, whose curly hair is pinned to one side. I am there, at four, skipping between my parents, one hand in each of theirs. I am wearing shiny shoes that catch the light and deflect the image. We are standing in the back courtyard of the Tiruvella house where the roof points down in two triangles for the rain water to fall onto granite slabs. We are close to the mulberry tree, a bit of a blur in the photo. Like my Kozencheri grandfather before him, my father has strong shoulders. In the photo I see a small child swinging in the air, between her parents. Like the clot of blood the Koran speaks of. The rest abyssal.
*
In Ilya’s study there was an old atlas with shiny oil cloth covers. The rivers of all the world were drawn in blue-green. Ilya showed me the map of Africa. He explained that amma and I were going to live in a place called Khartoum. It was colored yellow like the rest of the Sudan. What a curious country it made in the atlas, with the straight lines that marked out the boundaries to the top and sides, as if someone had taken a ruler and drawn it all out. Ilya ran his fingers over the green lines of the Nile, that met and held in a great fork. He pointed out the twin arms of the Red Sea. Just south of it Meroë hung like a pool of great water, an ancient Christian civilization. “It was an extraordinary civilization,” Ilya explained to me, “with many connections to our own.” His voice seemed to come from very far away. Sometimes I thought it was because he was so much older than I; sometimes I reasoned it was because of his great height, six feet, one inch. I tugged at his hand and he bent a little closer and hugged me. I sensed some intense emotion in him, something that churned inside, of which he could not free himself. I raced away into the bedroom where amma slept and I bumped straight into my great-aunt from Chenangeri, a tiny woman swathed in a white silk cloak, who was supervising the elaborate packing.
For many weeks on the cool stone floor of the two central bedrooms in the Tiruvella house, trunks and suitcases, portmanteaus and traveling bags had stood with their mouths yawning open. Women sat on the low rattan modas, packing and unpacking all that we might need. Almost as much was taken out as was put back in. Pickles, for instance, the delicious tiny mangoes stewed in spices and coconut oil, wedged in with the tiny green chillies that grew on the bush by the kitchen window. Great-aunt from Chenangeri had insisted they be packed, so Marya without thinking too carefully wedged them in next to amma’s silk saris. Never mind that the mango bottles had their cocoon of wax paper and stitched cloth all over them, or that they were wrapped up yet again in newspaper. When great aunt saw them she tugged them out with a loud yell and placed them upside down on amma’s embroidered pillowcases. The old lady had an odd sense of humor. “Like decapitated fishes, won’t they bleed!” she cackled. Little tears of joy ran down the edges of her eyes. I thought her special, not quite of our time or place, a dark red stitch that held us to the past.
She and Ilya’s oldest sister Mallapallileamachi were the only women in our immediate family whose ears had been stitched with those heavy gold ornaments, studs of ruby and diamond and fretwork so intricate that the inner cubicles of gold were never visible to the eye, only the jeweler’s awl had reached them. I wondered at the delicacy of the hidden tympanum of gold, never visible to us, hidden in the burden of metal and precious stone that was so weighty it had to be pinned into the hair and suspended with gold chains over the head lest it tear the cartilage in the woman’s ear. But the earlobe grew and grew with its burden, flapping its long oval form till the flesh reached great-aunt’s humped shoulder and its drape of white silk.
“Hurry, hurry,” Chenagerileamachi cried. She was dancing a crooked dance of joy, “before the cut fishes bleed!” She loved to watch people prepare for travel, watch people leave. No one thought of her as crazy, for, in an instant, an inner sorrow shut her up and her eyes misted over. Her mother had died when she was just a baby and the loss had confounded her forever. Married early to a man with large holdings of property in one of the more waterlogged districts of Central Travancore, she had lived out her days as the mistress of the house, overseeing the long boats as they bore in their cargoes of pepper and coconuts, and watching out of the carved wooden windows as dusk fell over waters that in monsoon time rose so close to the house that the cows had to be moved into a makeshift stable just outside the kitchen and the whole brood of chickens with their cackling and filthy droppings accommodated in what had been her clean pantry.
It was then that the Chenangeri chickens took to laying eggs everywhere, in little nooks where brass vessels were kept, under the shrine where the candles were lit so the image of Jesus would have light under it, in the ash in the warmth of the old-fashioned earthern stoves. Having seen the Chenangeri chickens in action, I tried fruitlessly to persuade the Tiruvella chickens to do the same. But at the slightest scratch of chicken claw in the clean stone kitchen, Chinna rushed out with her broom in hand, crying “Shoo-Kori-Shoo,” glaring at me as I imitated her gesture. Now I was happy to see that it was a tearful Chinna who presided over the packing for our departure. There were blouses and saris and petticoats to fold, books and toys and a boxful of beads, sweets boiled in sticky gur, almonds pressed into jackfruit, brocades and silks and muslin frocks with matching underskirts. I had special clothes laid out for the trip, the first leg of which took us to Madras.
Ilya accompanied us as far as Madras. As we left for Bombay, I saw his tall figure dressed in white dhoti and juba, and clung nervously to amma’s hand. As the train started up, metal wheels biting into tracks, I felt for an instant as if I had metamorphosed, become another thing. Looking back, I feel as if in that instant my life split, then doubled itself, in a terrible concupiscence. That moment of parting from Ilya, repeated time and again as we returned to Tiruvella, only to leave again, became my trope of loss. Even now, I see his tall figure standing in the sunlight at the edge of the runway in Cochin airport, or in the station at Madras. Just before the sun blinded me, I saw the tears on his face. “Unless the eye were soliform, it could not see the sun,” Coleridge wrote, quoting Plotinus, in explanation of our bond to divinity. For me that bond comes from radical loss, the light pouring into the place where Ilya stood as the train that was carrying me moved its metal body into the future.
On the train to Bombay, I remember the cool air wafting from the fans in the first-class compartment, but in my excitement I found it hard to sleep. I clutched my picture book, given me by Ilya, a book of Bible stories. I loved the pictures of Joseph best because of his many-colored coat, but could not bear him trapped in a pit like a wild beast. I felt that not all the years in the Pharaoh’s favor in the courts of Egypt could restore the grace he was robbed of by that first betrayal. So when I came to the Joseph story, as the train rattled north and amma flipped through her Eve’s Weekly magazine or stared listlessly out of the window at the brown dusty landscape that turned cows and horses into the same color, I shut the pages of the coloring book with a quick snap. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the Tiruvella garden, the freckled green leaves on the mango tree by the cow shed, the chickens that might finally have tricked Chinna and managed to lay their eggs in the ash pile, cackling and dancing in their triumph. For an instant I thought of Ilya, who was probably approaching the empty house now. How would he live without me? What would he do? I could not bear the thought and pushed it aside. Then lulled by the jogging train, I fell asleep in my soft cotton holdall.
In Bombay amma and I spent an afternoon by the sea in the elaborate stone house that the Pisharotis lived in. Dr. Pisharoti was appa’s friend and he was to take us to the SS Jehangir, in which amma and I would set sail. It was at Bombay that I got my first taste of the middle stretches of the Arabian Sea. Not that I hadn’t seen the sea before. From Tiruvella we were quite close to the southern seas and I had made lots of trips in the black car with a driver to Kanyakumari, home of the virgin goddess Meenakshi. I felt a kinship with the eponymous goddess but could not understand why she needed to remain virginal. I knew that Kanika Mariam was a virgin too, Marya the mother of Jesus after whom I was baptized. Why were they both virgins? I had asked Chinna once, but with her eyes fixed on the elaborate fish stew she was cooking at the time, ladling in the fresh grated coconut, adding a dash of turmeric, heaps of chopped coriander, she refused a real answer. “They had nothing better to do child, except keep themselves that way. Though for the Holy Marya who can say? Perhaps that was the commandment.” Behind her, Marya the maid, buxom, pink cheeked, a veritable siren by the waters of the Pamba where she was learning how to swim, started giggling.
I wanted to be back in Tiruvella, but as best I could I threw myself into the afternoon with the Pisharoti girls and the picnic they had arranged by the waters of the Arabian Sea in Bombay. We were just a stone’s throw away from their veranda in Colaba and the mothers could watch us.
I had never seen seawater like this. It lacked the blueness of the ocean on the Kerala coast, or the ruddiness in monsoon time when the undertow loosened the laterite that bled into the sands at the shoreline. Here where the seawater washed onto humped rocks, it was gray, lashed with white; I thought I saw darting fish. The foam washed in almost as far as the balcony where we all sat drinking tea and eating the most perfect dahi vadais. The sweet dahi dripped onto my wrist. I licked it up.
There were seven Pisharoti children, and Jaya, thin and birdlike, closest to me in age, drew me as far down to the water’s edge as I would venture. The foam hissed and blubbered. Now there was no one else in sight, a few spindly palm trees, black rocks, and the purring foam. I felt my feet slipping forward. But the grains of sand underneath, hard and prickly, saved me from that old croaking sound. Round the curve of the veranda amma and Mrs. Pisharoti were laughing, their voices rippling out towards us, weightless. I was glad amma could not see me now, my legs smeared with salt water, leaping as I clutched one of Jaya’s incredibly long plaits, woven up and looped with shining black ribbon. Both of us were dressed in the long pavade, ankle-length skirts that South Indian girl-children wear. Mine was fastened up around my waist, tucked into my bloomers that hung around my thighs in bagged swirls. Jaya’s was pinned up to her little blouse. She was most enterprising and kept a safety pin tucked into her bodice for precisely such exigencies. I was glad she was there with me. I did not like the cold, slippery water and the pale bleached sand underfoot, dirty-white colored like tired, unbleached garments worn by the very poor.
That first ocean crossing obsesses me. I think of it as a figuration of death. Losing sense, being blotted out, thrown irretrievably across a border. But it also provokes the imaginary. I am forced to fabricate, trust to the maquillage of words, weave tales. A five-year-old child, I stood still by amma’s side on deck watching the dark coil of waves. She wasn’t dragging me off in a net. Could I have stopped her? My mind moved to the mad soldier dragged off in a net at Pune Station. What would they have done if I had rolled myself into a ball, then flung out, kicking, biting Chinna’s hand, tearing Marya’s blouse, crying, “No, no, I don’t want to go.” I felt I hated my mother for taking me away. I let go of her hand. I stared at the thick dark waves. Even now, in memory, they unfold like cut tongues.
Lying in bed, dreaming of that crossing, I am invaded by the fragrance of burning water. How can water burn, you might ask? What fragrance can it have, this burning water?
In a white painted steamer of the Mogul Lines, the SS Jehangir, amma and I sailed from Bombay to Port Sudan. On deck with the shining glass beads that our neighbor from Tiruvella had wrapped up in tissue paper for my birthday, I sat mute, wordless. In spite of amma, sitting in her Kashmir silk sari in a deck chair in the shade, I felt I had no name, no nature. The water was flat and blue and endless. That night, out of the porthole, I saw an oil tanker sailing towards Iraq.
We sat at the captain’s table. Amma had tried to school me in how to use my spoon correctly, how to adjust the white napkin on my lap. I felt uncomfortable. A Parsi lady sat next to me. She kept picking at her fishbones with a silver toothpick. “Sweeti, sweeti,” she cooed at me. Once, after a glass of too much of something, she leant over and kissed me several times on the cheek. Instinctively I lifted my right hand and did what I did with my great-aunts who were given to the same mischief. With great deliberation I wiped her wetness off my cheek, first with the outside of my hand, then with the palm. Then I glared at her with my rakshasi gaze. I imagined my eyes smoking red as Shiva’s did in his rage, or as the rakshasi’s when the priest from Patananthita approached her with his hammer and nail to capture her.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw amma gulp down her glass of water. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. As if from a great distance I saw her trying to placate Mrs. Bootliwalla. I kept my eyes on the lady’s large bosom where a red rose, cut and crimped from stiff Bazaar lace, bobbed uncomfortably.
There were no other children among the regular passengers. There were old retired civil service men, a few diplomats nodding in the shade, several wives, and some unattached ladies. There were also those who traveled in the hold, though I had nothing to do with them. I could hear them when we sat on the lower deck with parasols over our heads, amma and I. My legs were thin and long already and covered at the ankles with little white socks, their rims turned down. If I dropped a book or a ball of thread from something I was stitching, I could peer down through the angle of my legs, past the little white socks, blurred now with my haste. In that way I could see the figures in the hold behind us, through the part of the metal covering that was raised.
A blur of figures, mothers, children, old grandparents, all knotted into each other. I heard a babble of tongues, watched rice bubbling in a blackened cooking pot, parts of life I recognized, the poverty, the desperate energy of making do, the enervation. All the while amma and I sat quietly, cut out like two paper figures in our well-ironed clothes. I was drawn towards the figures in the hold, frightened too by the darkness there. I knew that, when the rains came, the passengers would have to huddle under the huge canvas pilings tossed now to the side of the metal bulwarks. And sea storms were sudden. In the rising heat that always overcame the rain on the Indian Ocean, the hold people would hang out their bedding and wet clothes, boil up the lentils, or play cards. The children, in little groups, chattered and raced. I heard their stamping feet.
I was tempted once to stand by the side of the hold and peer right in, but amma would not let me. She would not even let me look directly at them, so I was forced to drop my ball of wool or the book I was glancing at in order to gaze through my knees, my hair swinging low, touching the wooden deck. The blood rushed to my face. I felt the winds, with the scent of salt in them as I hung there. Bit by bit I learnt from amma a shyness in the face of the world, a fear of looking straight at the lives of others. I did not want to be seen. I did not want to intrude. What would they make of me? But that reticence, even as it has held me back, has served me. For I learnt from her too the art of withdrawal, of thinking inwards so that no one could look and tell from a woman’s face what her heart might hold.
When amma tucked me into my berth at night, I asked about the tanker I had seen in the distance, as we sat on deck.
“Sometimes those tankers burn on the water and there is no way to stop them. So it’s best not to go too close,” amma told me. “Captain Irani is very careful.” I shut my eyes tight. I imagined the braid on Captain Irani’s immaculate coat catching fire. The golden threads shot out as fireworks might and played in the night air over the tanker bound for Iraq. Flames trickled from the tanker, first in little sprays, then sharper forms, arrows or stars as might have adorned an excessively ornate captain’s uniform, then fierce plumes, cascades that tumbled from the chariot in which her faithless lover descended into Shakuntala’s garden, quite forgetting the pain he had caused her by failing to recognize his true beloved.
Finally I fell asleep, but in the middle of the night I dreamt of a sheet of burning substance such as I had never conceived of before, a covering of immaculate heat, impossible for wood, flesh, or metal to bear. It coated the steamer and the water too, till darkness boiled over into flames and flames burned into waves and danced over the vessel filled with crude oil. But there was no substantial vessel there. No skeletal thing even. Only a ghostly spume upheld by the burning.
I woke up sweating, crying a little, so that amma, sleeping above me, woke too. She came down from her bunk and held my hand and gave me a glass of water to drink from the carafe the steward had brought in. Icy cold water. As I held the glass in my hand, I peeped over her head at the darkness where no flames were. Amma had become a dark silhouette framed by the porthole.
Staring into that black, inky mirror, night water cut by a gray line where water ends and sky begins, I saw my mother. She was poised out of time, a girl again. I saw her as I see her now in my mind’s eye, freed from the constraints of this perishing flesh. I saw her as if for the first and last time. I do not know if I knew then what I know now, or perhaps I sensed it dimly in my child’s way, taking the knowledge whole into myself where it settled into a place no words could reach: amma and I, mother and child, were crossing into another life.
A week later she was sick with chicken pox and confined herself to the small but well-appointed cabin. All our meals were delivered to our cabin and I never ventured beyond the door. Sometimes I caught a quick glimpse of waves at the edge of the deck, or returned the greetings of the friendly Mrs. Srinivasan who was sailing to Port Said to join her diplomat husband. “Amma is ill,” I told her in my very bad Tamil, slipping into Malayalam. And since her own mother was from Palghat, that border region where people speak a mixture of the two tongues, she understood me perfectly.
But amma did not want her in our cabin lest the chicken pox spread, so Mrs. Srinivasan was reduced to keeping a benign if distant gaze on me as she sat like a plump Parvati on her mountainous deck chair, piles of unread Kalki and Anandaviketan spread out around her. In the middle distance the dark waters of the Indian Ocean broke into waves that could not touch her.
Arriving at Port Sudan in March 1956, I laughed and wept all together, freed onto dry earth, freed from those ocean tongues. I rushed into appa’s arms, forgetting about amma who walked with her head modestly covered, her cheeks with the chicken pox scars shaded by her silk sari.
Over and over again in the days that followed, as we ate supper in the cool shade of the Red Sea Hotel, or as we crossed the desert in a railway train to Khartoum and I saw the rough glittering sands on either side, I made appa repeat the tale of recognition. I think it gave him real pleasure to tell the story to me, though sometimes he had to be prodded a little till he fell into the rhythm of it.
The narrative repeated made an entry for me into a new life, affixing a running stitch of child and father, appa and I. Without his words, those inklings of the actual, where would I be? Stuck somewhere on the docks at Port Sudan, in between the huge bales of cotton tamped down with metal. I watched fifteen, twenty men with huge heads of hair sticking up high over their shoulders, their muscles working in sweat and sea heat, straining to lift the bales up to the cranes that waited with metal hooks dangling in place. Cotton, grown in the fields of Gezira and Atbara, was packed into bales and loaded onto ships bound for Lisbon, Manchester, Newcastle.
Lacking my father’s recognition as I raced up the pier, shorn of the tale he repeated over and over again for me, I might still be held in the darkened cabin of the SS Jehangir, still haunted by an oil tanker bound for Iraq, its hull fit to burst into flames.
On the train journey through the desert, from Port Sudan to Khartoum, I recall the polished wood of the table in the Sudan Railways dining car where we had our meals. There were lamps with hooked brass necks built into the side of the carriage, whose green shades cast double images in the bright wood, and thick glass windows and beige curtains to shield the travelers from desert glare. I saw date palms, clumps of them out of the window. Then a wave of speckled sand blew forward, covering them up.
In Kerala the sunlight was always filtered through the green of a vigorous tropical growth, leaves, coconut palms, new paddy fields, acres of intricately bordered fruit trees, while here in the sub-Saharan desert it glinted off the sameness of one earthly substance—sand in all its forms, sliding, shifting over the surfaces of perception. Sometimes I saw a single lorry in the distance, jousting with its own reflection. Sometimes a camel and its hooded rider and then four or five others in a caravan appeared in the moving window, upended, reflected in imaginary water. It took me years to reflect on mirages, consider what is involved in sighting water where there is none, bitter, mimic doublings that dazzle, deflecting gravity, shattering all coordinates.
Reflecting back on that train ride, I am struck by a dry pleasure, a sensation almost aesthetic in the lack of comfort. The desert remains for me a place of austerity, a site where skins are stripped away, where words dance with their illusory doubles.
I enjoyed that train ride immensely. Appa was handsome and well trimmed and I loved to sit next to him, lapping up all his attention. After the efforts of her journey and her recent sickness, amma looked pale, even nauseous. She spoke little. Perhaps she felt that my father, in his pin-striped shirt, was well able to take charge in this strange land to which he had brought us. Over the glass of fresh lemon juice and the cakes the bearer brought in, appa began the story for the third time.
“What did I do? I went up to the top of the Red Sea Hotel. The very top, mind you. And from there I looked out to sea. There it came, slowly up the waterway, the white steamer. And who should I see on the deck?”
Shifting on my seat, I hugged myself in delight, in anticipation.
“I saw Meenamol. Meenamol herself, with two plaits and this very same dress.”
I almost knocked over the glass of lemon juice. Now even amma was smiling. By this time all three of us had forgotten the patently fictive nature of this detail.
“Did you see me, appa, did you see me on the ship? Really?”
“Of course, my dear. What do you think? Of course I saw you, right on deck.” So on he went with the tale.
“Then I knew it was the right ship. So I rushed down the stairs and jumped into the taxi. The taxi raced the ship to the dock. We were racing neck to neck, my taxi and the SS Jehangir!”
I sighed. I was happy now, at peace. I almost didn’t need his last words.
“And then you ran down the gangplank, ran and ran into my arms and I lifted you up, up, so high in the air!”
He raised his strong arms above me as he spoke and I felt the air whirl and the mirage outside the window seemed to enter with all its glittering force, till we were lifted, appa and I, in a warm gush of air and we levitated without moving, while amma, so long my guardian, was left behind, a frail, pensive figure seated by the window in a silk sari marked with patterns of mango leaf and bird wing, the very same figures that were etched into the silver box that belonged to her great-great-grandmother, which she was carrying with her in the trunk safely stowed away in our sleeper.
Having left India, on the brink of turning five, I spent the following years of childhood partly in Khartoum, partly in Kerala. Each summer, till Ilya’s death in 1962, amma returned with her children to Tiruvella. My sister Anna, who has inherited our grandmother Kunju’s lovely heart-shaped face and curly hair, was born in the Mission Hospital in Tiruvella in 1956. My little sister Elsa, who like me has inherited our grandmother Mariamma’s lean cheekbones and straight hair, was born there in 1961. Often, for several months after appa returned to Khartoum at the end of each summer, my mother, my sisters, and I remained in the Tiruvella house. My attachment to Kerala deepened. Retained in memory, my affections grew closer, adding layer upon layer to the soil of my imagination.
In Khartoum I lived with my parents just south of the ancient cities of Nubia, broken, buried under rubble and sand. The music of oud, zither, and lute, the dark elongated faces of men, women, and angels bristled in me. They formed a spiral in my thoughts with the virgins and saints of my native Kerala.
Khartoum was as parched as a shed snakeskin. I learnt to love the shifting dunes with their spare versions of color, beige, nut brown in the shade, blackness where the sand dipped into invisibility and then a pouring silvery whiteness, almost like the stuff that came off the wings of the cabbage butterflies I trapped in between the rocks of Kozencheri. Freeing the wings, I found my fingers coated in the silvery stuff and afterwards imagined the wings of a human soul composed of that stuff, which seemed to me as rare as the atoms of Democritus, less accessible to touch and taste than the most refined delights of sensuality, akin finally to the spirit the sage Yajnavalkya had dreamt of.
The sands of the Sahara swept into Khartoum. In the stiff winds the sands tore into the heart of the city, into the palace General Gordon had built, into the golden tomb where the Mahdi was buried. The winds were as harsh as coir on the face and hot as spilt ash. Sometimes in dreams I saw them turn and, in a sudden metamorphic twist, dissolve into the finest of silks, torn up, particled, drifting like the powder on a Kerala butterfly’s wing.
But dreams, images, cannot annul the shock of transition. The child gulping her vomit down as the plane soars and then drops precipitously through the clouds above the Red Sea; the green fields of Kerala fallen into the brutal heat of the desert.
In the desert, rocks jut out at odd angles and the traveler gazing out of the window of the train or car in the empty regions south of Port Sudan catches a sudden glimpse of mimic water, where trucks painted ocher and dull green drive with their mirror images laced to them, where camels hobble, hooves nailed to other hooves, humps doubled, the lonely riders in gelabia and turban, buckled knee and thigh into imaginary water.
First catching sight of a mirage in the Sudanese desert, a child of five, I found myself clutching the window ledge of the train in sheer excitement. In my mind’s eye, the waters of the Tiruvella well, the cool depths of the Pamba River that turns past my Kozencheri grandfather’s paddy fields, even the gray welter of the Arabian Sea, all began flowing into this sheer kingdom of doubling, murderous site of vision.
From Ilya I had heard of how a traveler, parched and fit to perish, would stumble to the pool of water under a date palm, sink his mouth into it, and end up bruised. I understood early how the hollowness of the actual can hurt. One mirage too many and one could lose all one’s energy and end up too tired even to crawl towards the real source of water.
Twelve years later, at the age of seventeen, that season of excess, I gladly accepted the hyperbole of passion when a man whispered, “No mirage, you are my oasis.” I tried hard to contain the ache in my soul when he left to return to Prague. That was in the spring of 1968, and our meetings in a small flat left empty by an acquaintance of his, in a white room by the Nile, were filled with tales of excitement in Wenceslaus Square, of how the Vltava was lit at night by the songs of young people, newly liberated, pouring out poems, plays, stout ideas for reform. He read out the poems of Pushkin to me in the original and the shining lyrics of Pasternak. In between sips of mint tea he described a train ride he had made from Moscow to Vladivostok passing by Siberia. I could only imagine such a cold landscape and I curled into his arms. From down below the cries of the seller of melons and the seller of fresh-caught pigeons rose up from the avenue that wound past the Blue Nile.
In his halting English my friend said, “You must understand, Meena, if you want to be a poet, there is no stopping place. We poets go on and on. Stations. Small stops. Sometimes an oasis. That’s it, on and on and on.” In speaking to each other we made do with fragments of English and French. For I knew neither Czech nor German, and he had no Malayalam, no Hindi, no Arabic, languages that had served me well. When he left, I longed to follow him, across multiple borders, leaving all my skins behind me.
Quite early in childhood though, I had been forced to accept the burden of flesh, the impossibility of leaping out of my own skin in the direction of desire. There was no way to evade the sheer distance in miles between Khartoum and Kerala. To get from one to the other, I was dependent on the metal bodies of trains, boats, planes. So I danced in my dreams, the imaginary burning up space.
“If you can’t walk, dance!” runs a Nubian proverb, and for years it haunted me. Sometimes, though, I wonder if such mimic motion rivaling that of the angels and apsaras, covering continents held in a child’s soul, hasn’t left me with a fear of walking, of covering ground. I think of it as a feminine fear, because, had I been a male child, brought up between two lands, surely I would have been able to read maps, figure out the crossroads of the world.
But I was a Kerala girl-child brought up abroad and one of my feet was bound to the raised wooden threshold of my ancestral home. I often tripped trying to walk out. At times I have sighted water where there was none. Occasionally I have been overpowered by maps that covered whole territories so completely that the earth beneath vanished and I spent all my energies shutting out buried cries from rubble.
But the rubble is what I am.
Sometimes I think of the English language as a pale skin that has covered up my flesh, the broken parts of my world. In order to free my face, in order to appear, I have had to use my teeth and nails, I have had to tear that fine skin, to speak out my discrepant otherness.
Sometimes I think I have to write myself into being. Write in order not to be erased. What should I write with? Milk, blood, feces, spittle, stumps of bone, torn flesh? Is this mutilation? Surely milk is not torn out of a female body, nor blood: each might be a perfect blossoming. Sometimes I think I write to evade the names they have given me. “Mary Elizabeth” I was baptized, the names of my two grandmothers strung together, anglicized from Mariamma and Eli as befit our existence in the aftermath of a colonial era when English was all powerful. Fifteen years old in Khartoum, I changed my name to Meena, what everyone knew me as, but just as important to me, the name under which I had started to write poems. On all my papers at the university, I put Meena, crossing out Mary Elizabeth. Appa was dismayed: you will get irretrievably confused in the public records, no one will know who you are, he insisted. And as long as I lived under his protection, I was Mary Elizabeth in my passport. Then I added an alias: Meena. I felt I had changed my name to what I already was, some truer self, stripped free of the colonial burden. The name means fish in Sanskrit, enamel work or jeweling in Urdu, port in Arabic. It is also the home name my parents had chosen for me at birth. It is the name under which I wished to appear.
What does it mean to appear, to be allowed to appear, or to be wiped out, to be wiped off the slates of publicity? Audre Lorde’s voice rings in my ears. June 1990. I am standing with her in the Barbizon Hotel. Together we look at the program for the Fourth International Interdisciplinary Congress of Women that is being held at Hunter College. The three names—Kamala Das, Claribel Alegria, Audre Lorde—are missing from the entry for the poetry reading I had planned as an evening’s highlight. I had invited three poets I admired: Audre Lorde from the United States, Kamala Das from India, Claribel Alegria from Nicaragua. But from the general program—not the glossy brochure—the three Third World poets were missing. Now Audre was in front of me, in the hotel room in the Barbizon where she was staying:
“I came because you asked me, Meena, I respect you, otherwise I would not have come, all the way from Berlin after the cancer treatment. There are no white women on the program you have put together. What the hell is it all about? They want to suppress our names, Meena, they want to scrub us out.”
Her pain, her rage entered me, her delicacy too. I was filled with admiration for her passionate being. When I first entered the room at the Barbizon, she had pointed out the tree outside her window, its branches spare in the summer sunlight. A poet needs a tree, I had said to her, always.
“Audre,” I replied, looking at the tree, “I feel devastated that the names are not on the program. I feel so ashamed. What can I do?”
“They cannot bear us, Meena,” she said, “those women of color who talk out.”
“We are living here,” I said to her, “in this city, in the shadow of the skyscrapers, inside the skyscrapers. See the driveway outside where the tree stands. If I lie in that driveway and put kerosene on my sari and burn my body, what would that do? It would not even make the newspapers. What would they say? That a woman of color had immolated herself? Would they even know that? What skin would be left to know the color by?” For an instant, standing next to Audre, I imagine the words in the local paper: “Woman of Color from the Edge of Harlem Discovered Burnt, Wrapped in Long Oriental Garment.” I open my eyes again, and looking at Audre’s lovely strong face, I try to shake myself loose of the craziness. I thank her once again for coming to the city.
She has many admirers here and the news of her reading spreads by word of mouth, through little leaflets the women students pass out, and two nights later the auditorium in the old Hunter building is crammed full of people, waiting to hear the three poets read. I introduce each poet, speak briefly of how poetry brings us news of the world. Kamala, her hair flowing, glorious in a red silk sari, goes first. I feel a rush of blood, a thrill in me as she reads out, slowly and clearly—using a borrowed flashlight, for the stage lights are defective—the long slow syllables of her poem “Blood.” How early that poem had entered into me and remained: a Kerala woman’s tracing of her bloodlines. I think that poem was within me when I looked backwards to my grandmothers, forward to my son and daughter. Claribel reads next, in Spanish and in English, the delicate passionate lines that tell of terror and love, and the clarity of the image upheld in the glass of time. Then Audre reads and her power and her anger mingle in the words, sometimes sung, sometimes spat out in rage. Her voice seems an instrument for her daring, ravaged spirit, nothing more, nothing less. The applause after the reading is thunderous. It reminds me of a mushaira in India, or a kavi sammelan, the listeners entering into the rhythm of the lines, hearing their own longings voiced, transfigured, in the syllables of poetry. How essential poetry seems, placed in the ordinary world in which we live and move and have our being.