Chapter 18

When she alighted at the Bombay Victoria Station, a man stood on the platform but it was not Mani. He must be running late as usual. He must come, he must. She paced the length of the platform, while the porter waited with her suitcase and watched.

The platform thinned out, the passengers and those who came to meet them dispersed. The engine disengaged and hissed off to the railway yard. Cleaners who came to wash the train down looked at her with interest. Finally, her limbs growing heavy and cumbersome with worry, she signaled to the man. He picked up her suitcase and she followed him off the platform.

Near the ticket collector’s window, she saw Mani. His kurta swung loosely on him, as he hurried through the station gates. Unshaven and even thinner than she remembered, he was bounding towards her. He ran past her without looking.

“Mani!”

He stopped in his tracks and turned around. His expression did not change when his eyes found her, as though his face had forgotten how to register surprise or delight. But as he approached her in long, unhurried strides, she saw his mouth relax into a smile.

“Good. Your train arrived early actually,” he said, catching his breath. “Curfew at 6. We’ll get a taxi. A little safer. If at all we get one.”

Mani got in the back seat with Sowmya. The stores were all shuttered, the streets were eerily calm and deserted.

“How far is the hospital?”

“What hospital. He’s home.”

“What?”

There was nothing they could do for him anymore, the hospital told them, and they needed the beds. Mani was just coming from the hospital himself, where he had taken a man who had been severely beaten.

“Who? Someone you know?”

“My chai-walla, Rajaram. He ran his tea shop right below where I lived.”

Mani had arrived at his building in the evening when it had become quite dark. The streets were quieter than usual, there was always some movement here. He first noticed the large aluminum kettle in which Rajaram cooked and cooked his tea all day long. Upside down in the dust it was lying in the middle of the street. The tea shop, only a shack with a tin sheet over sticks that were braced with bricks and rope, was destroyed. Mani looked for the kettle lid in the dark, found it and picked up the kettle which was dented and mangled so badly the lid would not fit anymore. With shaking hands he banged it on the platform to somehow twist it and make it fit again. But it was useless. The two large Primus stoves had been smashed and there was the smell of kerosene. He put all the scraps of his findings in one corner, his chest thumping with pity and horror. Rajaram was nowhere.

The doors to his room were ajar. Mani looked up and down the short gallery but the doors to the other two rooms were bolted and padlocked. His neighbors had fled, he hoped. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. In the darkness he found Rajaram squatting on the floor. His head was a pulpy mess of congealed blood. It was hard to tell what exactly had happened to his face, there were gashes and flesh hanging from it. Blood had streaked down his neck and stained his shirt-front. He was still breathing.

“They had beaten him with I don’t even know what. He had a key to my room, in order to collect things for me sometimes. He must have hidden there but they found him.”

She clutched at her throat, brimming with grief, for her father, for Rajaram, for Mani, for this woebegone city. “Why?”

Mani stared out the window without answering and they rode in silence for several minutes.

“We tried to get your father back in the hospital, my friend Gopal has connections. But he refused. ‘Just let me be,’ he said.”

Her father demanded so little, which is what made refusing his wish so impossible.

“You came. Good,” Mani said, looking at her. “Good.” A moment later when she turned toward him to say something, he was sprawled on his seat, his head thrown back, his jaw slack, snoring.

The car moved through the thinly populated streets. She was surprised to see people still around, going about their business. The handsome actor, Dilip Kumar, was smiling on posters above a building. They drove through the wounded and shuttered streets and yet, here and there she saw a store open. A grotesquely blue sky and a canopy of lush green converged down upon a defiant city that had been terrorized in so many different ways.

Even when she knew that her father had moved the family to Bombay, in Sowmya’s mind they were still back in the central space of her father’s house in the village, redolent with the smell of morning—a mingling of water and blossoms and trees. She turned and looked across the seat at Mani. She wished she could shake him awake but didn’t have the heart to. She was terribly alone and frightened.

Mani asked the driver to stop at the top of the lane where the family lived. Sowmya got down from the car and stood on the street. Like the rest of the city here too it looked like unfinished business – life quickly withdrawn from the street and waiting, still ticking.

Sowmya looked at the buildings cramped together on both sides of a narrow lane, almost touching each other across it. Mani picked up her suitcase in one hand and slung the bag that contained a flask and a tiffin-carrier over his shoulder. Sowmya followed him and they walked down the deserted street, their footsteps causing a small disturbance.

A small crowd had gathered at the entrance to the building. Some of those who stood outside the building entrance seemed tenants of the building. Sowmya felt in her stomach, too late, too late. They recognized Mani and nodded to him. As their attention shifted towards her coming up behind him, the expression in their eyes changed. A murmur went up among the crowd when they recognized the famous actress.

Mani immediately paused, hung back a bit, and signaled Sowmya to get in front of him. The crowd parted reluctantly to let her pass. Mani stepped up behind her and followed her closely as they went up the stairs.

The front door to the flat was flung wide open, as if it was useless anymore to try and secure anything. Sowmya stopped at the door. A few people had huddled in corners and were leaning against the walls. A young woman, her eyes red and swollen and still weeping, separated from the crowd that seemed intently discussing something. Immediately, and without hesitation, Sowmya recognized Jaya. She felt Mani taking her hand and she let him lead her to the middle of the room where Natesan lay in a cot.

Natesan looked as though he was sleeping peacefully, except for the cotton balls placed at his nostrils, and his toes that were tied together with a piece of cloth. Illness had aged him in ways Sowmya had not imagined. She touched his thin fingers. They were stiff and cold and she fought the impulse to jerk her hands back. How often had she clutched these hands, which now at death repulsed her. She was five or maybe six, on the night of the quarter-moon festival. Her father had raised her and cousin Niru onto his shoulders, one on each side, high above the crowd of heads so they could see the temple chariot. Two dozen men were pulling it, shouting in unison, Govinda, Go-vinda! The huge temple cart rolled with a fearsome grinding sound, carrying the deity for the evening stroll around the temple precincts. Later they had gone past the temple shops that shimmered with toys, mirrors, ribbons and tassels, setting Sowmya’s eyes ablaze. She had clutched her father’s firm hand then, and skipped with glee, firm and sure of her place on the earth on which she walked. A bright image from a distant past sprung unsullied by any sorrows, like a gift.

Sowmya took her father’s shrunken hands into hers. She let go of her grief and it flowed and rushed through her, this searing, cleansing grief, like a stream swollen with the monsoon rain clearing out everything in its way, making little debris out of all the other grievances and regrets that had lodged in her, and leaving in its wake only the crystallized brilliance of his love and tenderness for her that she had known, which would always be true.

A touch like the flutter of a butterfly, on her shoulder. Sowmya turned and looked into her mother’s pale, colorless eyes. She had once looked into these very eyes that were made brilliant with kohl. What happened to the blooming lotus that was her mother’s face, the sparkling light of diamonds at her ears? She looked at Janaki’s shrunken cheeks, the sparse gray hair that hung at her temples. Fifteen years could age someone so much? She held her mother’s hand.

“Amma.”

“He waited as long as he could for you, Sowmya. Finally this morning, right after he had his coffee . . .”

She had been aware of so little of what had passed in her mother’s daily life. She had only seen her mother brimming with life, giving life, and watching over the destruction of her daughter’s life like a prison guard. It was impossible to have seen the grief and loss, the tight grip guilt and insecurity had on her mother’s emotions. How hateful she had seemed then and how helpless she seemed now.

“Anyway, she’s here now.” It was Jaya. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and she held it out to Sowmya. “Did Mani show up on time?”

Sowmya smiled and took the coffee. She could see how Mani must have so easily recognized Jaya, the resemblance to her was striking.

How could she tell them the fear that held her back without seeming selfish? Would she ever be able to connect with her sisters? Uma, she learnt later, had refused to come when informed. But she would find her in this great big city that can absorb death and destruction and acrimony, and keep blooming like those blood red blossoms of gulmohar.

“Aunt Meenakshi is asking for you,” Jaya said.

Meenakshi was in a small bed made on the floor. Sowmya kneeled down. Meenakshi opened her eyes and looked at her for a few minutes, trying to focus. She then reached for Sowmya’s hand, took it in hers and kissed it.

They came with the funeral bier just before noon. When they took Natesan out Sowmya held on to Janaki who stumbled, her legs buckling beneath her. The men did not have much difficulty getting the bier out the apartment’s door and down the stairs. Natesan could not have weighed much. The funeral procession waited in the street.

Mani came out of the bathing room, dripping water from the wet funeral clothes. He would accompany the funeral procession to the cremation ground, where he would do the last rites and light the pyre.

Jaya was determined to go to the cremation ground as well. There was fear that the procession may be waylaid by a mob, but she could not be dissuaded and left with Mani. Sowmya stayed back with her mother and aunt and waited.

“I am sorry I arrived too late,” Sowmya said.

“It is not safe to travel anywhere anyway,” Meenakshi said. “It is very bad here right now in the city, Muslims and Hindus roaming the streets with daggers and machetes, breaking everybody’s heads. We will have peace only when the white man leaves.”

Even on her sick bed she had an opinion. Sowmya smiled.

She imagined her father here, in this apartment in a foreign city. She thought of what Mani had told her, about disparate regions coming together as a nation. And yet how difficult it must have been for Natesan to transact these borders, the courage it took to make it in a place so far and so different from where he was born and raised, to lose one daughter to one city and another daughter in another city. Once she left with the man she wanted to marry, Uma never returned. Not even for the funeral. The city had transformed everything that her father possessed, even himself.

Janaki moved closer to Sowmya and stroked her head, stroked her hair, as if getting reacquainted with her.

“Appa was very angry, none of us could talk to him about you. But once he got sick everything changed,” Meenakshi said.

“Did he ever ask to see me?”

The women were silent.

“He never said anything, but he wanted to see you,” Janaki said after a while. “He wanted to resolve everything.”

“Ask forgiveness,” Meenakshi said. “Guilt is a big burden. Everybody wants to shed their weight when they are staring at death.”

“I needed his forgiveness too,” Sowmya said. “I wanted him to say it, that it was all right, but I know, I know he would never—”

Meenakshi stirred and slowly sat up in her bed.

“Look. There are no words to describe what happened to you. I am trying to work out the part I played in this too, setting up everything with Mani. A nice mess we all made. But you know,” her voice started shaking with the effort to catch her breath. “I don’t regret it. Not anymore. What have we lost by what you did? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Look at Uma, she is lost to us forever. She does not want to have anything to do with this family. At least you came back to see your father, even if only like this. She never—,” Meenakshi shook her head, her voice breaking.

At night Meenaskhi did not have any appetite for dinner. They persuaded her to eat a small banana in some milk.

Mani, Jaya, and Sowmya ate the food neighbors had brought in. The electricity had been cut off so they ate in darkness.

“I came here for another reason also,” Sowmya said.

All faces turned to her.

“I want to take Aunt Meenakshi to Banares,” she said.

“Yes, good. Something my sister has been wanting for a long time,” Janaki said.

“You can also drop you father’s ashes there,” Mani said.

“So we’ll all go,” Sowmya said.

“Not me. I cannot take anymore leave,” Jaya said.

Ashes from Natesan’s remains were brought back from the cremation ground on the third day. Janaki removed the only piece of jewelry she wore, the gold pendants that she wore since her wedding day, and dropped it into the urn.

The government’s efforts for relief at the refugee camps were so poor that Mani’s work, coordinating the volunteer efforts, was essential. Jaya had exhausted her leave with Natesan’s illness and she could not afford to go.

“I’ll talk to Gopal,” Mani said and the next day returned with a letter sanctioning Jaya’s leave, and four tickets in the Kashi Express.

They arrived at Banares, the holy city on the river Ganges, a one day journey in normal times, three nights and four days after leaving Bombay.