Khartoum, 1964. Blood seeping into water, a slow dark pool of it and overhead the sun turning the surface of the Nile into a sheet of burning metal. Then the blood vaporizes in water, vanishes into heat and I cannot tell what is water and what is the sun that burns up the sky anymore. This keeps recurring in dreams. Somewhere, at the banks of the river, they are fishing out a man’s body, the head beaten to a pulp, the color of blood when it leaks into hot Nile water.
I hear her voice, calling, calling me, my friend, Sarra Annis. I’m sure it’s she. “Meena, come quick, quickly.” I hasten in the direction of the voice. I see a small crowd by an acacia tree at the water’s brink, see Sarra there too and crouch with her by the edge of the Blue Nile where a corpse has been raised: a poor student from Wau, head mashed to a pulp, lifted out in the arms of three swimmers.
We whisper to each other: is this Lenny Deng’s brother who, crossing into the Sudan, was held at the Chad border and tortured? Lenny had told the story at a students’ meeting. There was a genocidal war being waged in the southern parts of the Sudan by the government forces in the north. Shatha, Sudanese red chilis, Lenny explained, were poured into all his brother’s orfices. Then he was held in a room with a burning light and a slow trickle of water was trained onto his skull. After three weeks he was almost dead with the shock of the burning substance in his most tender parts, and the cold, relentless trickle of water. By the time he escaped—perhaps the guard’s head was deliberately turned away—Lenny’s brother Thomas was sick, vomiting, and half blind.
His nerve ends were shot and he trembled uncontrollably in the Catholic hospice in Khartoum that had taken him in. He had forgotten his mother tongue, Dinka. Or was it something more terrible than forgetfulness? What came out was a babble of tongues no one could decipher.
Was this the same Thomas Deng being fished out of the Nile? I clutched Sarra’s hand. Our friend Nurredin from the student newspaper was there with his old Kodak camera, snapping away, and then scribbling down notes. In the mounting crowd of students I saw a wisp of tissue-thin voile, and the garish red heels I had first seen in the dusty space by the Mahdi’s tomb. I turned around, looked over Sarra’s shoulder, but missed her, the mystery woman I thought of as my dark metamorphic angel in whose vacancy the imagination touches brutal north, smells death.
“Did you see her?” I asked Sarra as I held onto her elbows.
“Who?”
“The red-heeled woman.”
I could not hear her reply, for the crowd was pushing back, away from the water and we were caught in the crush.
Sarra and I met in Unity High School in 1959 when we both entered the first form. I was eight, far younger than the usual age of students, which varied between eleven and twelve in first form. Sarra was five years older than I. Quite quickly, we became close friends. I was painfully shy in those days and used to rely on her boldness to get me through the day. If she was head of the rounders team, I counted on her to choose me. Once she didn’t and I dissolved in tears, enormously betrayed, and wouldn’t speak to her for days till she pressed some sim-sim sweets and a sachet of Gaon’s perfume into my hands in the middle of our history class.
Our teacher was Sith Samia. So plump she could hardly rise to her feet, Sith Samia had a special blackboard brought in so she need not stand up. She sat there like a glistening white flower with a dark heart, face framed in her swiss voile tob, cheeks and forehead moist with sweat. Scents of rose attar mingled with Eau de Cologne 4711, a most unfortunate combination, emanated from her. Seated at our desks, lined up in neat rows, we shifted and giggled.
I tugged at my neighbor Elli’s plait. Fatima passed out sweets from the Greek grocery store down the road. A striped toffee fell from her lips onto the desk, tumbled into the hole for the inkwell. I hooted with laughter. Elli planted her foot on my toe. I shrieked. Sith Samia was oblivious to it all. The fragrant heat that came from her made a little halo. With an effort she lifted her right hand. The tob fell back revealing the green dress. Kobbles of flesh shook on her upper arm. Her elbow was so dimpled it was impossible to tell whether the bone had melted into the all-commodious flesh.
“Shu-shu-girls. Mathalb eh? Looki here. Suleiman. Suleiman the Magnificent. He came from here to here.” The chalk squeaked on the blackboard. “All the way from Turkey.”
Her fingers arced down, making a white line from the left side to the middle right. “All the way down. Girls. On his white horse. This is the conquest of Asia Minor.” As I watched the chalk move, I made up an invisible white charger that bore the great Suleiman. He was dressed up like a Maharashtrian bridegroom with headdress and jeweled sword tucked into his sherwani. He could have been trotting down the main street in Pune where I had lived, Deccan Gymkhana, where the bridal parties came with their torches and drums and fanfare.
“All the way down, down, here. Looki.”
As Sith Samia trembled into silence, my image of Suleiman the Magnficient, all his slaves behind him dragged in chains, his hands sparkling with bridal rosewater, vanished. There were voices in the street outside, in the harsh glare. Someone was shouting out, someone else was running away. The cries floated in with the scents of roasted peanuts a vendor was selling near the school wall. My gaze returned to the blackboard. I saw a white line traced from left to right, from top to bottom and that was what Suleiman was doing. A mere speck of dust crossing the board. Sith Samia shifted her bulk a little to the right. The fan had stopped working. Her brow was covered with sweat. It was clear she wanted to be rid of Suleiman and go home.
I could never figure out those scrawls on the blackboard, the names and dates I had to learn, all taken out of the old first-form textbooks. The books had faded, tobacco-colored covers. Imported from Britain, they were stored in the corner of the school library. I had nothing but mistrust for the facts and dates contained in those bound volumes—information about Bodicea, Julius Caesar, the history of the Britons and Celts, the Crusades, even Suleiman the Magnificent. It never struck me, how curious it was that in an independent Sudan, Sith Samia, fresh out of Teacher’s Training College in Omdurman, would have to plod through these old British colonial textbooks. What I had as protection was a stubborn skepticism. At times it made for a barbarous ignorance.
Later I heard tales of how the British sent their men wandering through India, clad in pith helmets and ugly khaki shorts, knee socks folded down to reveal the knobby bone. They were measuring people’s noses, the point, the bridge, the shape of the nostril, the width of the forehead, trying to make up facts about races. At the same time they were setting up measuring chains and triangles northward and southward, over the rich terrain of the subcontinent for their survey of India. What was surveyed could be known, controlled by sufficient use of force. Distances might be calculated for military purposes: how many troops to send, how large a quantity of supplies, how large a cavalry, to overcome intransigents like Tipu Sultan, whose tiger languishes in the Victoria and Albert Museum, useless, snapping its tongue.
I imagined meeting one of those surveyors. Walking towards him, I would turn quickly aside, hide behind a palm tree, only to stare better. After all, the Kannadical family name meant literally “glass stone,” which could translate as “surveyor’s stone”—kannadi in Malayalam being both glass and spectacles, the double sense of vision mediated ever present in my patronymic. “Probably one of your ancestors was a surveyor,” veliappechan told me, as he lay on his bed with piles of prayer books all around him, blankets, bottles of strengthening potions from the Kottakal Ayurvedashala, the finest source of ayurvedic medicine in all of Kerala. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the family had a great deal of land in Raani, and it made sense to have it surveyed.” I had listened silently, staring at his smooth old head.
And what of the head-measuring men? If I came across one of those trying to put a forehead into a bound book, I would rear to my full height, spit in his eyes, cobra-fashion, then drag him by the backs of those ridiculous socks with the stiff bits by the calves to keep them up, force him into the kitchen of the Kozencheri house. One glare from grandmother Mariamma and he would have blurted out, all red-faced and hot between the ears, incoherent words. “Sh-s-sh-s-sh-s-sh-s,” he would stutter, the sounds that Kerala people think the English make.
*
In Khartoum we went to Sunt Forest for picnics. Seated at the edge of the blanket with its striped pattern and the hem of mango leaf design, I watched the shadowy line where the waters of the Blue and White Niles met. How restless it was with the dark silt under water, a muddy turbulence made visible when the Nile crocodiles shot out and started snapping at hot empty air. Ever since appa had stood me on a rock and pointed out the water line I could not forget it.
I knew that Allahabad, the site of my birth, was where two great rivers of India, the Ganga and the Jamuna meet: a sacred city, marking a sangam, a joining of waters. Now I was on another continent, in another city, hot, sun bleached, created by another sangam, the meeting of the ancient Nile rivers, the quick indigo waters of the Blue Nile mingling with the sluggish gray waters of the White.
Once when I sat in my dreamy way, a plate of idli and vegetable pulao on my lap, I saw the brightly painted prow of the Mahdi’s ship cutting into the line. On board his hundred and one women, under the cover of their tobs, stood ululating. Surely the number one hundred and one is not right? Surely it comes from the number of petals the sacred lotus is said to have, the golden lotus one can see at the tops of temples throughout India, the mystic number that parts the veils of heaven, decipherable in the names that are given to the goddess Saraswati, she who is the purveyor of all wisdom.
Memory slips in me and I cannot recall the exact number of the Mahdi’s harem any more, though I knew it once. Sarra told me, when I was eight and she was twelve going on thirteen and she lived on Kasr Avenue and I lived in Hai el Matar and we both studied at Unity High School in the first form. She whispered it into my ear in the terrible heat of mid morning. The temperature was at least 112 degrees and in our freshly laundered dresses, blue checks with white belt, white socks and shoes, armpits soaking with sweat that the best talcum powders south of Beirut could not prevent, we raced with what half-hearted energy we could muster onto the playing fields of Khartoum. At our side jogged the reedy Miss Bay, with a goiter in her neck, gym mistress of Australian origin. At our left, a whistle slung round her neck, decked out in shorts and tee shirt, hair all scraggly and gray, thigh muscles pumping like a cart horse’s, sprinted Miss Reed our new headmistress, late of Cheltenham Ladies College, currently relocated to Unity High School, Khartoum: why no one could imagine except that having retired, she must have wished to extend her services beyond the tinkle of delicate porcelain and fine silver that the tea parties of Cheltenham afforded, turn her administrative skills to the great unwashed that we represented for her.
Indeed her best efforts were turned to teaching us not only “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which she sang in a stout contralto and we mumbled under our breaths, but also to the arts of the playing fields, netball, rounders, and tennis. Twice I fainted on the netball field in the intense heat, and rounders, however slowly it was played, the girls traipsing around in the field, hitting the ball and running, became a form of masochism. When a slight wind blew over the wall and cooled our faces, the game almost stopped. But we had to wait till Miss Reed, secure under the cap she had purchased for herself in Paris en route to Khartoum, pulled out her whistle and blew: a loud piercing sound that startled the crows in the date palms and sounded far worse to our ears than the siren that sounded at midday in the factories north of the river. It was on such a morning, as I ambled by Sarra’s side, in a pack of girls being chased out to play rounders by two aging ladies of the Empire, that my friend, no doubt to cheer me up, whispered:
“Listen, Meena, I have a cousin Samira who is related to Sadek. He says his great-uncle the Mahdi has . . . women in his harem. Suppose we were headed there instead of the rounders field. Just suppose.” And she giggled in my ear. I could not bear the ticklish sound of her laughter and gripped her hand and laughed too, with sheer pleasure at entering the Mahdi’s harem and seeing the ladies laid out on their rope cots with lion skins and velvet cloths, their breath laced with incense from the earthen censers between their toes, their tobs—the long sarilike swaths of cloth, nine yards though, instead of six, with which women covered themselves in public—hanging on hooks all ready to take out for their Nile voyage. When approaching land the Mahdi’s women would stand in a ring and ululate for the old man, the hairy-chested white-haired old man.
So I held onto Sarra’s hand and giggled with delight as we leapt over the channels for running water, proud that the present Mahdi’s grandfather had defeated the British Gordon, though the thought of Gordon sitting alone in the midday heat under a thorn tree stopped me. Did he see his death approaching in the form of the Mahdi? Then a more troubling thought came up: what would our Gandhi have said had he seen the fierce warrior, the Mahdi, sword raised in his right hand? Such thoughts rose in me as Sarra and I raced through the playing fields, hand in hand, then scraped past the tamarind hedge closer to the classroom. The number of wives the Mahdi had blurred in my head with the numbers Miss Reed was snapping out in her parched English voice, “Girls, Attennsshun, One-Two-Three-Three? Hear Me?” And Sarra and I, as if joined at the hip, snapped straight.
When I was just on the brink of turning eleven and had started to menstruate, it was Sarra who stuffed my mouth with sweets and congratulated me with wet kisses, and dragged me to meet all our friends. At the top of her voice, she proclaimed, “It’s happened, it’s happened,” so that I felt proud as of a great accomplishment and forgot the discomfort of the thick pad between my legs amma had given me to wear; forgot too amma’s hesitation, her soft words when she tried to explain why I was bleeding: “It’s not uncommon,” she had said, and I was left half-fearful that I might have contracted an unspeakable illness that made me bleed. But one of our teachers, an Englishwoman, on hearing of my predicament, had drawn me firmly into the wood-paneled library of Unity High School, sat me down next to the copy of Strindberg’s Road to Damascus, a book that I kept peeking at, fascinated by the words inside. In her firm voice she explained how it happened to every single girl who was on the brink of becoming a woman, that it was part of the body’s reproductive cycle. She pulled out an old book with pictures of ovaries and fallopian tubes and explained to me all about the egg and how it slipped down the bloody lining of the uterus if it was not fertilized. The pictures were in black ink, cool against the paper, and I was grateful to my teacher who explained that it happened to every single girl. So I did not need to feel odd, singled out by the blood that seeped from me. It was Sarra, though, who filled me with joy as she stuffed more sweets in my pocket. Soad tied a bright velvet bow in my hair, and, as she and Sarra, Fatima, Intissarat, Munira, and Antoinette and Nahid danced around me, I felt I had entered a bright circle of women.
Later that year, when Sarra and her sister Azza came along with us to see the sparkling lights and watch the fireworks display at the Moulid al Nabi festivities that were held in the wide open space in front of the first Mahdi’s tomb, Sarra latched her sticky fingers in mine. We were both gobbling up the moulid sweets filled with sim-sim and peanuts as fast as we could. She drew me into a dark place by a wall and whispered, “Look, Meena there she goes, Suraiya, she is part of his harem. Honest True Nancy Drew.” And Sarra crossed herself.
I stared at the dark crack in the wall into which a beautiful woman with red high heels had passed, a fragrance as of rose attar wafting into the dusty air behind her. As the elusive woman vanished into the broken wall by the Mahdi’s tomb I stared at my friend and felt a mounting excitement at the pleasures of life in red heels and Swiss voile tobs with tiny hearts stitched on in the latest imported mode. I had caught a flash of a dark face, high cheekbones, full lips, two dark scars on each cheek running vertically, dried wounds, fault lines in the flesh that enhanced her beauty.
Pondering the woman, I never asked myself why, if indeed she were part of the Mahdi’s harem, she would be let to roam during a crowded festival of the prophet’s birth. The festival was complete with a brass band dressed up in white and green, an oud player and a vocalist who had modeled himself almost to the point of parody on a popular Egyptian singer who had just died. The music rose in waves from the platform to the right, the singer’s voice rose, orotund, the Arabic syllables lost in the curlicues of notes bent to an emotion that seemed to invade the skin, the hair, so that far from knowing what we felt, we were swept up in an oceanic thing, that left us speechless, senseless, intoxicated by a beautiful woman vanishing through a broken wall.
Straining to see the mystery woman, I entirely forgot my bewilderment at Sarra’s addiction to what I put down as a North American custom, one that had stuck from her early years in a Washington, D.C. public school where her father, a kindly dental surgeon, had been posted as Sudan’s first ambassador to the United States. His children had learnt to relish Superman comics, gooey bubble gum, and curious customs involving characters such as Ken, Barbie, and Nancy Drew, none of whom attracted me. But the mysterious Suraiya, if that indeed was her name, remained in my memory. Time and again she cropped up in my dreams, crossing the borders of the real.
A few weeks later I thought I caught sight of her again. This time across a broken alleyway where a red light hung, entering a mud door outside which hungry men hovered like flies. This was at the outskirts of Khartoum where appa used to drive to get us loaves of the long fresh-baked baguettes, that when broken and tossed into the open mouth, sizzled on the tongue. The bakery, run by Copts, was in a run-down neighborhood and from the parked car I watched the red lit door and the men in their long gelabiyas loitering in hot clusters. Was Suraiya there too? I never saw the mysterious woman’s face, so how could I tell? But in those days, her figure became for me a quintessential thing, shining, female, metamorphic.
When I was in Unity High School, arithmetic with its rhythms of crude additions and subtractions and lumpish carryings over offended some internal logic in me. I could never manage it. Algebra with its finer music of compounds and metamorphic elements drew me, however, and once I was introduced to the figure x, I was fascinated by its possibilities. I would sit by the back wall of the Hai el Matar house, while amma or my sisters roamed around crying out for me to come and take tea and samosas, or come and get dressed for we were expected for dinner at the Kanagasundarams or Kannans or Gopalakrishnans and were already late. I sat in utter silence as they whirled about in the distance calling my name, secure in my hiding place by the white stucco wall, under the shade of a neem tree.
I fastened on the way the sunlight moved over the tips of the neem leaves, or the golden surface of the fruits; the way the pebbles were stacked near my bare feet, with streaks of cobalt under them scarcely visible as if a skin colored like my own, only a tinge lighter, had masked the essential properties stone held to itself. I bent over, laid my cheek against that warm surface, felt the sunlight ripple from tree leaf and bark over my body, or sitting straight felt the rough wall behind me. Each surface in turn echoed my own, made for a shining thing that rendered my own consciousness, held in a growing child’s body, less arbitrary, less senseless.
Though I had not started writing poetry, it was in a mood akin to this that poetry began in me, words welling from a voice freed for an instant or two from the prison house of necessity—the calls to duty, the round of taking tea, sitting pretending to read a book at the edge of a circle of idle chatter about where the newest chiffons might be found, or how Mrs. So and So had received a pile of old kanjeevarams from her mother-in-law’s tumbledown house in Madras, or how Miss Such and Such was sneaking off to Geneva for a secret rendezvous—this in hushed tones—with a high-placed gentleman. Yet without those duties, those social rounds where I was held in a net of women’s voices, what would have become of me? What if the x, the shining symbol I now gave to all that moved me—the gleaming intricate surfaces of the world, the feelings that welled up from too deep for words to reach—were to become all that I was, a spirit on the brink of dissolution, nothing, literally nothing. Such moods used to fling me into a wordless condition and amma would run out of the house worried at finding her eldest daughter crouched in utter silence at the side of the house, gazing at nothing in particular.
“What is this, child? Why do you behave as if the cares of the world were on your shoulders? What are you thinking of?”
There was little I could say in my defense for I had no language for what was passing through me. It might have pleased amma that the clear perception of beauty, in leaf and stone and sky, allowed me to join again with the gardens of my Tiruvella childhood. For by now Ilya was dead and amma was my thickest bond, the blood bond with that life. She turned to me not unkindly and said:
“Come put on that new striped dress, there’ll be ice cream, I’m sure, at the party. The Vijaykrishnans have cousins who are coming from Canada to visit. They say there are huge forests in Canada and you can drive through and come to clearings with wooden benches and chairs and even metal grills where people can cook. Imagine that? What convenience. Could such a thing ever happen in our own countries? These Westerners have such conveniences!”
I stared at her, drawn back to the world of have and can, shall and shall not, the thought of metal grills, and charcoal in Ooty or Coonoor, Sabaloka or Wadi Sedna quite crazy to me. Who would put them there, who would use them? Amma, however, was charmed at the possibilities of such civilization, cars driven through forests without need of a driver like our ancient Rajan in Tiruvella, and magical cooking places. She knew she had hooked me back into her world, for she hurried on:
“Come, come. Manorama’s brother, you know, is married to a Canadian, Chloe. This is her first visit abroad. She is said to be rather nervous. Perhaps you can speak to her.”
At that dinner party there were tall lamps set out on the lawn at the edge of the house in Khartoum North, cries of mongoose and jackal from the area of darkness that surrounded the lamplight, and Chloe, beautiful, pallid in a low-cut printed dress, seated very still, her freckles and reddish hair in all that lamplight making her seem like a creature out of one of the books of poems I had found in the library. I was fascinated by her looks and wondered what it would be like to live in such a body and have a tall dark man like the Tamilian Tiru drawn to her. I do not think she opened her mouth except to him, and he hovered over her the whole time as chicken was borne out to the table in the garden, and golden brown puris and the chapatis, and dal and paneer saag, and as the expatriates from South India and Sri Lanka, Malayalees and Tamilians, hung together over glasses of whiskey and cold lemonade, laughing into the night. Over the hedges of acacia and tamarind, across the rough dirt road, wild creatures gathered: asses and hounds and jackals came in from the desert places, and scorpions summoned by the dim moonlight out of the cracks in the earth.
To my gaze Chloe was so pale, so exotic. I imagined all the men drawn to her, but foiled in the end by her childishness, her sheer need to be fed and sung to on a wooden bench at the edge of a Canadian forest, surrounded by metal implements with which the crudest of foods might be cooked. How did Tiru manage? They had been married just three months and he was immensely proud of her, bringing her first to the Sudan to visit his only sister, Manorama, whose husband was a veterinary surgeon at the university, then onto the family homes in Bangalore and Madras.
I heard later that Chloe was stunned by the chaotic moving surfaces of India. That she shut herself in a room in the Woodlands Hotel and refused to drink anything that hadn’t been boiled three times and only ate food that resembled the mash that is fed to babies. Her poor mother-in-law finally took to making pots of kanji for her. Chloe languished on this fare. She was invaded by nightmares in which she saw a whole crowd of South Indians, their faces all scrubbed out, coming at her with cooking pots and ladles. And out of the cooking pots came dried turds, wet feces, excrement. They approached her, waiting to shove all this down her throat. She started to choke in her dreams and cried out that she could not breathe. Her condition grew worse. The learned Dr. Gunashekaran could not help her and Tiru was forced to flee with her on a night flight to Canada. Once she hit the cold air of Calgary and was restored to her newly furnished suburban split-level, Chloe seemed her old self again. Tiru, terribly nervous, resolved never to cross a border with her again, not even to visit Disneyland, the great dream of his life.
When I open the journals I kept as a teenager in Khartoum, the thin cardboard of the covers slips through my hands. I see lines of bold, upright script scrawled in between the pages of poetry and quotes from Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Wallace Stevens. These lines tell of the misery I went through:
“If you want me to live as a woman, why educate me?”
“Why not kill me if you want to dictate my life?”
“God, why teach me to write?”
The invocation to God in the last was not to any idea of God, but rather a desperate cry aimed at my mother. The fault lay in the tension I felt between the claims of my intelligence—what my father had taught me to honor, what allowed me to live my life—and the requirements of a femininity my mother had been born and bred to.
Essential to the latter was an arranged marriage. It was the narrow gate through which all women had to enter, and entering it, or so I understood, they had to let fall all their accomplishments, other than those that suited a life of gentility: some cooking, a little musical training, a little embroidery, enough skills of computation to run a household. In essential details and with a few cultural variants, the list would not have differed from Rousseau’s outline for Emile’s intended, the young Sophie. Indeed, I was to be a Malayalee version of Sophie, or so it sometimes seemed to me. There was a snag though. Amma was living quite far from the decorum of her Syrian Christian peers, and the expatriate life of Khartoum set up singular difficulties in her path. How was she to cope with the parties to which I went in the company of Sarra or Samira, where I met boys, even danced with boys? And what of the University where she knew I read out poems I had written in secret, hiding out in the bathroom at home? What was I learning there? How would I live?
I poured my pain into my journals. I sensed that my sexual desires—which were budding at the time, though they had hardly been satisfied in the flesh—were essential to my poetry. But how did they fit within the rational powers that enabled me to think, pass exams, maintain some independence of thought? I had no answer here. I knew I could not live without passion; but passion burnt me up. That was the forked twig that held me. In dreams I was the snake struggling in that grip. The snake about to be beaten to death.
One night, filled with longing for a young man, a Gujarati whose parents lived in Omdurman, on the other side of the river, filled too with despair at the memory of a dead body, tortured, swollen, lifted out from the Nile River, I walked out into the garden at night. The brilliant desert stars came close, swooping down towards me. I lay down on the grass. I put my cheek to the ground, took the blades of grass into my mouth. I put out both my hands and ran them across the ground till I reached a slight crack in the soil. I was convinced by the evidence of my touch and of my beating heart, that there was a crack in the earth nothing could heal, a fault in the very nature of things, treachery in creation.
What I could not admit, as my parents wished me to, was that sexuality made for that fault, had caused the Fall of Man appa reverted to, time and again, in his discourses to me. Appa was pleased that I was being educated, that my rationality, as he liked to think of it, was developing, but he was clearly anxious about my desire to study philosophy, a discipline that he believed could only confound the religious sentiments he sought to inculcate in me.
“First acknowledge God,” he said, “then all things, including human intelligence, can be perfected.”
When I was fifteen, he insisted I go with him and amma to the sandstone cathedral the British had built in the center of Khartoum. Worn out with fighting, I went, but shut my heart and soul to the vicar of the Church of England who had confirmed me in the Christian faith, had checked my knowledge of its teachings over Sunday breakfasts of scrambled eggs and toast that I shared with him and his wife and their three boisterous children.
My struggles over received religion have caused me some anguish. Even now I am sometimes pierced with a longing to believe, but I know that were I to try to enter the steps of the American cathedral two blocks from where I now live, I would be swept out, as if by a hot dry wind, flung onto the stone steps, at the trembling feet of the man who has stumbled out of the methadone maintenance center. Sometimes I dream about trying to enter the cathedral and being flung out, onto the steps by a hot dry wind. In my dream the sandstone of the cathedral the British built in Khartoum turns into the rough gray blocks of Saint John the Divine. I am out on the steps, clinging to the cold stone, cast out perpetually.
They sit around the long dining table that almost fills the room, appa and amma, side by side. Behind them, the long windows of the Khartoum house edged with white shutters. Through the windows the sky and the acacia hedge are visible. The sky is white hot. There they are, appa and amma, male and female, the beginning of me, discussing their daughters’ clothing.
“They can’t travel to Kozencheri like this.”
Amma was worried. The lines on her forehead were just beginning to form. She was approaching forty. I sensed in her a heaviness of flesh, a settling in, a being there. A mother with freckles and small lines on the face, never picture perfect. So close at hand that she shut the light out. The fine bones in her face were growing coarser, as she put on a little weight, as mothering troubles rose up.
Appa sat there, arms crossed, looking grim.
“Of course they can’t.” The words seemed to be torn out of him.
“Why not?” I was being daring now, foolhardy even.
I leant across the polished tabletop. The sunlight from the window was in my eyes. I was squinting, trying hard to see. There didn’t seem to be anything terribly wrong in what I was asking.
“Why on earth not?” I persisted, hearing my voice in my ears, as if it were going nowhere, as if it could not be heard.
He straightened up. He was an honest, decent man, but one who held in his passions with great effort.
“Know what they do with women? If you go sleeveless in the marketplace, they stone you.”
Amma was appalled in spite of herself.
“Shh, Mol.” She was trying to calm me down. “You’re too headstrong. Just like Sosamma and see what shame she’s brought the family. Of course you won’t wear sleeveless blouses. You’ll cover your arms up. You’ll dress well.”
The trouble was persistent, and it involved dressing well. It might have been simple if dressing well could work for all times and all places. But while one could dress without long sleeves in Tiruvella, in Kozencheri, twelve miles to the south, it was impossible.
How exaggerated it all grew in my fifteen-year-old mind, all hot and feverish and blurred. The thick-skinned grapefruit from the garden, the taut lemons, the slippery dates, shone with an internal heat. The blue painted ceramic bowl in which they sat grew heavy, bearing the naked fruit. I pulled myself round.
“So what am I going to wear? Are you going to make a new set of clothes for us, all over again?”
Amma nodded, mutely. I knew she was worried. Her mind was on Sosamma, a close relative who had contravened all the family dictates and married a Brahmin doctor. The man, however, was already married, and since he had a high government position, the double bond put him in trouble with the civil authorities. But they were wealthy, had a large house, several Alsatian dogs who were fed meat and raw eggs, more than the beggars got when they called at their gates. They had two lovely sons. Then the quarrels started. Sosamma left her husband to return to her father’s protection. That was thirty years ago and it must have seemed to her like leaping from the frying pan into the fire. In order to live in the ancestral home, she had to be accepted back into the church; she had to sign an apology saying she had sinned. Her tall majestic back, her loud shouts of disdain, the bitter recriminations that passed between her and my veliappechan were vivid in my mind. Appa, too, was deeply involved. He was very close to Sosamma and even as he was dead set against her ways, he seemed to understand the will that drove her. But for amma, Sosamma with her proud self-determination, her car and driver that she commanded at will, was much too much. In secret, amma scolded me, crying out, behind locked doors, “You too will be perachathe like Sosamma, bringing shame on us. I can tell even now, how strong your will is.”
That morning, at the dining table in Khartoum, I felt amma’s nervousness and gave in. In my mind’s eye I saw my arms, bare all the way from Khartoum to Tiruvella, covered up in cotton sleeves for Kozencheri consumption; my skirts suddenly two inches longer; the necks of the blouses cut so high I could hardly breathe.
It was only in Kozencheri, appa’s ancestral place, that we had to be careful. Elsewhere women from the family dressed in diaphanous saris and revealed all the plumpness of their tender forearms. And who cared? Some even wore backless blouses at dinner parties on Pedder Road. But Malabar Hill in Bombay was one thing, the ancestral home in Kerala was another. I thought of my aunt Simi who wore sleeveless blouses and tissue thin saris and had her servants wear enormous turbans—a sign I always thought of desperate westernization. Her father, who was related to my grandmother Kunju, had a house not far from ours in Tiurvella. I remember being astounded at all the show to which his money had been put. The house was fitted out in the latest fashion: instead of the carved wooden shutters that we were all used to, the old man had installed glass windows. And not content with that, he had caused a long strip of glass to be installed above eye level in the veranda so that one could gaze into the house, consider the pirouettes of turbans as the servants passed with glasses on their trays.
Clearly, how one dressed was a problem. I was at Khartoum University at this time, and my girlfriends were caught up in the enormous excitement of shedding the tob. They were dressing in skirts and dresses and some of them, driving fast cars down the main street, behaved as if they were fit to turn into those women one had seen on international flights: at the drop of a seat belt they slipped out of their elaborate burkhas and, clad like liquid butterflies in fine Parisian costumes, sat downing drinks and sucking up cigarette smoke through ivory holders.
But Kozencheri and its demands could not be evaded. Watching a woman in a skimpy dress, her burkha shed to the side as she relaxed on a plane, was one thing; getting suitable clothing to gain permission to enter Kozencheri was another. Once puberty had set in, my returning home was fraught with anxiety. Ilya had been dead for four years and the Tiruvella house was locked up. Grandmother Mariamma was growing old and would soon herself die, quite peacefully in her sleep, dressed in her pure white garments. I wanted to lie with her in her great four-poster bed, learn the trick of silence, of female invisibility. How else could women protect themselves? Sometimes I felt it would be easiest for me, if I stood utterly still and disappeared.
In Kozencheri I had to learn all over again that girls could not walk outside the compound without appropriate escorts. It was hard to get the scary image of women being stoned out of my mind. Did appa get it from the Bible? From the Koran? Hunched over the dining table, staring at his stern, handsome face, I decided it probably came from his raw experience. Such things did indeed happen to women in the marketplaces of Kerala, in the inner courtyards of the ancestral houses. And sometimes women took it upon themselves to do away with their own shameful bodies: they jumped into wells. The image of women jumping into wells was constantly with me during my childhood.
*
A voice comes to me, out of mist and desert rain, out of well water and water in a blackened cooking pot where I looked in and saw my face: “You come from a long line of well-jumped women.”
Women come to me, countless women, some older, some younger: sixty-year-olds, hair bleached by time, stretched back tight over the skull, knotted at the nape; twenty-year-olds, their sweet hair hovering over the mouth, black hair blown back over the mouth in the monsoon winds; four-year-old children playing hopscotch, then swooped above ground on a wooden swing, hair brushing the branches of the love apple tree; babies too, plump, cheeks marked with beauty spots to keep away the evil eye, soft mouths dribbling milk.
And in the courtyard of a Kerala house I see worlds filled with women, women riding elephants, women like Princess Chitrangada with swords at their hips, bodies covered in rough jute—and who can see the softness of cotton underneath stained with menstrual blood? I see women in white starched saris, tucked in at the waist, hands sore with cooking rice and dal and fried fish, cleaning out the threshold stones that give entry to the courtyard, scrubbing out the cooking pots, popping riceballs into the mouths of young children. I see women, saris swept up shamelessly, high above the ankles, high above the knees, women well-jumping: jumping over wells.
I stare into well water. In that shining water no names anymore; the houses and places don’t matter any more; no first there, nor second nor third; no foreground, background, left, right, or sideways; just the clarity of eyes shorn free of the bodies that held them in. Eyes bobbing in well water.
My amma’s eyes, she who was born in Tiruvella out of whose womb I fell, blue, babbling. The eyes of both my grandmothers—appa’s mother Mariamma born in the Kaitheyil house in Kottayam, amma’s mother Kunju who died before my birth, she who was born in the Kurial house at the edge of Tiruvella. The eyes of my great-grandmothers, all four of them: how we grow in multiples of four, dunked into blackening water. Larger still, the eyes of my two sisters: I dwell in their sight, curious, fearful as I hang upside down from my tree.
Slipping, sloshing eyes of aunts, great-aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins and fourth, relatives by marriage from all the Suriani families to the east and west, north, and south. Eyes of other women, Marya and Chinna and Rameeza and Suraiya and Munira. Eyes of all the women they have ever seen. So many eyes crowded, jostling, bobbing, all female eyes. Why are they there? Why are there no male eyes? Why have these eyes popped free of their bodies? But how foolish to ask. These are eyes, not voices. I see them fluid, black, precisely as heavy as the water that bears them: the eyes of well-jumped women.
Born under the sign of Aquarius, I gravitate towards water: well water, pond, lagoon, river, sea. But the bond is uneasy. I am gripped by fear. I do not know what would become of me if I fell in. Perhaps I would dissolve, flesh devolving back into its own element, only my eyes remaining. Well water is most local, most domestic. Set at the threshold of the house, it calls all the girl-children to it. As a young child growing up in Tiruvella I heard countless stories of young women, beautiful as lotus blossoms in bud. At dawn they were discovered, black hair streaming, stretched fine as spider’s filament over the well’s mouth, bodies blanched and swollen.
Who discovered them? Why did they leap in? Eyes turned downwards, Marya would never tell. Nor would Chinna. Finally Bhaskaran blurted:
“The shame of it, Meenamol. The utter shame,” and he gulped. He poked with a little stick at the ash that lay at his feet, at the shining fish scales Govindan the cook had lopped off the parrot fish we had for dinner two nights earlier.
“They were found with child,” Chinna told me firmly, looking at me straight in the face. “They could not carry the dishonor.”
We were standing beside the well as she spoke. Marya of the beautiful breasts had a bar of Sunlight soap in her hand. She was soaping up the clothes, before beating them on a rock set by the well. Bhaskaran stared at her uncontrollably as he gulped. He could not help himself.
“Kaveri, the blind girl who lived by the schoolhouse. They couldn’t clean out the well after that! Who would drink from the water where his child had drowned? Some say the father pushed her to it.”
“Pushed?” Chinna spoke up. “Listen, I think it’s time we checked the mangoes. Come with me.”
She pulled me away. As I walked with Chinna towards the tapioca patch I saw in a blur of light those great star-shaped leaves poised on the crimson stalks, high, higher than my face. But my pleasure was blotted out. Instead of feeling the stalks brush against my cheeks, I kept seeing the well. Over and over, like a mad flashback, I saw the well. First the wall, the brick painted over with gray mortar, streaked with moss, damp with monsoon rain, and then, as if the film had jerked, the inside.
Inside lay a woman. Once she must have been a girl-child like me. Now she was full grown, though she still had the slightly plump cheeks of a girl. I could see the tip of her nose, a fine pointed shape. Her oval face and floating hair framed by water were perfectly posed, like one of those calendar pictures sold in the marketplace. The water was a cloud on which she floated, hair splashing a little as the well frogs leapt. But this woman wasn’t Paravati or Lakshmi. She didn’t have four golden arms. Nor was she a film star like Nutan or Saira Banu, cheeks pink with paint. She was an ordinary Kerala woman, once girl-child, now full grown, skin wrinkled with water. Her eyes were wide open, staring shamelessly.
The almond shaped eyes were huge, black, lidless. Under the face, tangling the black hair, was the mound of a belly covered in floating cloth. Doubled up inside it like the baby dolphin I had seen in Trivandrum Zoo, was a creature, skinless, face blotched out. What manner of thing was it, forcing the poor woman to leap into water? Was her heart beating wildly as mine did now, this Kaveri or Mariamma, Meena or Munira? Had she locked her eyes so tight as she leapt over the hibiscus fence by the outhouse the servants used? Had she forced herself into the well, both hands clutching her nest of hair? Did she know that in well water her eyes would swing open wide, so shamelessly?
“Ah, the shame of it!” I glanced at Chinna. She was repeating herself, pointing to the golden coconuts on the miniature trees that grew by the hedge. The globes, heavy as a child’s head, were tinged with green. They rolled in the sunlight. When I squinted my eyes they made glorious beads you could string together, clear, hard fruit, on a thread of sight. Gazing at the coconuts, I figured out how to freeze them in an instant of looking so the sun wouldn’t blind me, so the poor pale thing in the well would flee from me.
Years later, when I read Wyatt’s lines: “They flee from me that sometimes did me seek / With naked foot stalking in my chamber,” I understood the poem immediately. The beloved, fleet of foot, was racing into water, and the lover was quite confused, bewildered by desire, but deciding not to do very much except stand where he was and make his poem. All dressed up in frills and furbelows and hose of apple green, the rage at the time, he stood his ground in his stately house, while she, poor thing, filled with shame, fled into the nearest tarn.
Sex and death were spliced and fitted into each other, quite precisely: like the milk-white flesh curved into the shell of the tender coconut as it hung on the tree; like the juicy flesh of the love apple rippling inside the purple husk that shone if you rubbed it against skirt or thigh. And shame lit the image. It was what women had to feel. Part of being, not doing. Part of one’s very flesh.
Author’s maternal great-grandparents with their children, circa 1910, Calicut. From left: (standing) Eapen, Sara, Elizabeth (author’s grandmother); (seated) Anna (author’s great-grandmother), Sosa, George Zachariah (author’s great-grandfather); (seated on floor) George, Anna, Kuruvilla.
Author’s maternal grandparents with their daughter, 1942, Kottayam. From left: Elizabeth, Mary (author’s mother), Kuruchiethu Kuruvilla.
Author’s paternal grandparents with their children, 1937, Kozencheri. From left: (standing) George (author’s father), Sara; (seated) Annamma, Mariamma (author’s grandmother), Kannadical Koruth Alexander (author’s grandfather), Mary.
Author’s parents, Mary and George Alexander, 1947, Madras.
Author as baby with parents, 1951, Allahabad.
Author with her maternal grandfather, Kuruchiethu Kuruvilla (Ilya), 1959, Tiruvella.
Author’s family, 1965, Khartoum. From left: (standing) George; (seated) Meena, Elsa, Anna, Mary.
Author with her husband, David Lelyveld, son, Adam Kuruvilla Lelyveld, and daughter, Svati Mariam Lelyveld, 1986, New York City. Photo by Beryl Goldberg.
Svati and Adam, 1998, New York City.
Author, 1990, New York City. Photo by Colleen McKay.