Kalyana Read online

  With Manjula gone, I feared Uncle Baldev even more. But thankfully, he came to our house only five more times after the wedding. As usual, he bore gifts for me: fruits and sugarcane and Indian sweets. My mother asked him to sit outside and swat flies on the porch. She made excuses: “Brother, I just swept and washed the floors. Mud will come in and I’ll have to do it all over again. It’s better if you stay outside.”

  He always said, “No problem,” and stayed outside, smiling without a reason.

  My mother would hover over me every time he was near. Sometimes he would boldly ask her to let me go to the oceanside with him. I would tremble with fear at the thought of being alone with him on those same shores where the naked woman with the butterfly tattoo spread her wings. A tinny taste would fill my throat as I waited shivering, certain she would approve his request this time. But my mother always shook her head. “Not today, Baldev ji. She has homework.” Or she would say, “Not today, Baldev ji. She has to help me with chores.”

  Her excuses always prevailed. He would soon leave quietly, without saying goodbye. The yellow swatter would sit abandoned on the chair on the porch.

  Strangely, it was my mother who always developed stomachaches after visits from Uncle Baldev. She would vomit what she had eaten that day, right into the kitchen sink. Then she would run the tap and let it slip quietly down the drain, far into the depths, where no one would ever see.

  Doctor Sudhir Singh, a slender man with graying hair, came to the house once. He carried a black briefcase and wore a stethoscope around his neck. He tut-tutted away as he examined my mother. Then he took out a bottle of large brown pills. These must be taken for thirty days, or she would not be able to cure the sores that had erupted in the lining of her stomach.

  “Manage your stress better, Mrs. Seth,” he told her with an air of authority. “And keep away from spicy food. It does your stomach no good.”

  My mother would lower her eyes to the floor and mutter, “No problem, Doctor. No problem.” But after he left she would shrug her shoulders. Bland food would never please my father or console him on troubled days.

  My mother twisted and twirled each pill between her fingers for a few minutes before plopping it into her mouth. Sometimes she would choke and cough and spit the soggy pill back in the sink before immediately popping another one into her mouth and trying again.

  Eventually the pills were finished, and so, it seemed, were visits from Uncle Baldev. Whenever my aging father insisted on taking us to his home, my mother would take to her bed. She would say things like, “Maybe next month, Rajdev. Maybe next month we can go. Today, I don’t know why, but I feel sick. I might even be coming down with a fever.” She would crinkle her nose and rub her forehead, looking pitiful.

  Once, my father objected. “Always you are making excuses!” he complained. “Next month, we will go.” His voice was firm and scolding, flat and angry. I thought my father would strike my mother, like he had once struck Manjula, ending all arguments. We would then find ourselves once again sitting in Uncle Baldev’s gaudy living room, eating bitter sugarcane, staring at black-and-white photos of my aji and aja as the auntie-without-a-name ran like a squirrel, scrubbing stained sofas and sweeping clean floors.

  I stood in the corner, choking on my tears.

  But Father merely stared as my mother’s face crumpled and she began to weep. He dropped the matter immediately, and soon afterward he stopped making requests to see his brother. Over the years, he had grown in his devotion to my mother. Pleasing her had become his primary focus.

  My stomach was not fragile like my mother’s. I never developed sores in the lining or had to take brown pills, but my eyes burned and my joints ached. Like my mother, I would take to my bed.

  Some nights were worse. Then my sleeping mind would paint pictures of Uncle Baldev slicing the purple skin off the sugarcanes, chopping them to pieces. I would see him using his pocket knife expertly, with a swift motion gouging the eyes out of pineapples. He scattered pineapple pieces and sugarcane skin across our living-room floor and smiled a horrible smile. I would awaken in the dead of night, shuddering with the memory, but I never screamed.

  I had not screamed in the shack, either. Why? Thoughts tortured me constantly. I should have stayed among the guests, where it was safe. Why had I not refused the mango, the sugarcane, and the pineapple? I could have chosen not to go to the Chicken House. I might have known better than to trust my uncle and his oily voice. Most of all, I should have listened to my mother and refused the baby chickens when they came to our door in that small cardboard box.

  I never blamed Raju or my father for what had happened on that cursed day, even though they had not been there when I most needed a man’s protection. But I did blame my mother. She was the one who had told me that Kirtan wasn’t family, who refused to allow him to attend the wedding. Her attempt at rescue was minutes too late for me; minutes that marked the end of everything I had once known. I hated her for this, but even more, I hated her because of what she had done in the bedroom afterward. She had burned my past and crumbled my present.

  When I woke from my nightmares, I would shake with relief to find myself in my own room. The shadows of branches and trees were quivering on the dim walls, the windows rattling in the wind. To be alone was both a blessing and a curse. I would stare at the layers of mosquito net draped around my bed, trying to sense protection around me. Sometimes in the quiet night, I would wish for Manjula’s soft grunts and snores. I would wish for the warmth and security of her arms around my waist.

  When she left, Manjula had taken down the picture of the birds and bees, leaving behind an empty space on my far bedroom wall. With the picture stuffed in her bag, she had flown away to the land of maple trees, where she would live a different life than the one she lived here. Instead of catching crabs and sitting on the seawall, she would run amidst the buffalo. She would pick strawberries and cherries and make jam. She would wear a badge saying “Mrs. Simmons,” and with Peter she would trap beavers. She would believe in a bearded old man called Santa Claus.

  Sometimes in the quiet, lonely nights, I wished that Manjula had been my mother. For surely, wedding or no wedding, she would have gathered her sari, limped directly to the burning altar, and taken a hatchet to my uncle’s head. With Kali’s vengeance strapped across her chest, my auntie would have stood in the middle of that wedding and shouted to all the guests what my uncle had done. She would have arranged them in lines, sewn a bright yellow flag, and taken charge. She would have begun a movement, a movement that would have made Uncle Baldev quake with fear, stammering through his whiskey-soaked breath. And then, after she was done, she would have clutched me under her arm, and she and I would have grown beautiful wings and flown away to America—a land where women carried less of a curse, a land where a woman could perhaps forget.

  20

  Now that I could not transform my feelings into words and put them on paper, I developed a new obsession: I sat on the steps by the back porch and, for hours on end, stared out at the dead resting under the ground. In the cemetery I had found the answer: My mother had been right, for every woman’s life, regardless of the circumstances of her past and present, was entwined with pain and suffering. It was only in death that true freedom could be found.

  Sometimes my reverie would be interrupted when I noticed the Chicken House in the far distance. I wished that a lightning bolt would strike the shack and burn it to the ground, taking all the chickens with it. The very sight of the building deadened my spirit.

  My mother seemed to agree, if in an unspoken manner. She constantly complained about having to feed the chickens. “I don’t have enough hours in the day to feed the chickens along with all my other chores, Rajdev. Then there’s the garden that needs tending.”

  “Kill the chickens!” I shrieked across the kitchen, one quiet Sunday afternoon when my father was resting.

  “Kalyana, there
’s no need to raise your voice!” My father always raised his when I raised mine.

  Nevertheless, the first chicken was slaughtered the next weekend. It ran frantically around the backyard, headless but spilling blood, until it fell lifeless. I devoured three bowls of chicken curry that day, despite my mother’s disapproving glares.

  “No more,” she said, when I headed for the fourth bowl.

  “Let her eat, Sumitri. She’s a growing girl.” My father still rose to my defense.

  “Rajdev. She’s getting out of control,” said my mother. She sighed when she saw the stack of dirty dishes in the sink. “Now there are bloody dishes to do, too,” she said. “It never ends.” She paused, and then made a unique request. “Kalyana, come and help me do the dishes.”

  “Why doesn’t Raju help?”

  My mother shot me a glance. “Men don’t do dishes, Kalyana. But it’s time for you to learn how to do them properly.”

  “My stomach hurts, Mummy. I ate too much chicken,” I lied, shifting my gaze away from her questioning eyes. I feared that she might catch me in the middle of my fib, so I slouched on the sofa, a pained expression on my face as I looked at the bare wall. Mother looked away.

  Later that night, I heard pots and pans banging loudly in the kitchen. It made it difficult for all of us, especially my father, to fall asleep peacefully.

  To ease my mother’s load, my father invited Auntie Shami to come and live with us. She was the unmarried sister of Uncle Baldev’s wife. Word was that she immediately accepted my father’s offer, for in her current situation she had only a thin mat on the floor on which to sleep and was surviving on one small meal a day.

  “Does she walk with a limp?” I muttered, rolling my eyes when I heard the news that Auntie Shami was to arrive the next day.

  “Why would you say something like that, Kalyana?” said my mother. She sounded hurt. I remembered how, when Manjula left, my mother and Manjula had stood there holding tightly to each other, in full sight of the neighbors. Their tears, like blood, could have filled buckets from deep wells of pain within.

  But all I said to Mother was, “Well, she’s not married, so she must have something wrong with her. Why is she not married?”

  “Her head shakes.”

  “Her head shakes! What do you mean, ‘Her head shakes’?”

  “She has some kind of a condition. Her head doesn’t stop shaking. Sometimes her hands shake, too. You’ll see.”

  “What’s a condition? What causes it? Did she eat something bad?”

  “Nobody knows. The doctors don’t even know. Maybe it’s too much activity in the brain.”

  I stood up, arms folded across my chest. “I am not sharing my bed with a stranger whose whole body shakes,” I said defiantly. “Does she shake in her sleep, too?”

  “She will sleep on the floor, Kalyana. Father will buy a mattress and put it on the floor. At her own home she only has a thin mat to sleep on. That’s what I heard, anyhow. She’ll love a thick mattress.”

  “Does she shake in her sleep?” I persisted.

  But my mother didn’t know.

  Auntie Shami, a rather large woman, arrived on a rainy Sunday. She carried two small bags. I stared at her balefully as she entered the house, willing for her to leave and Manjula, shining happily, to come back through that door instead. But she was not Manjula, of this we all became sure. Auntie Shami lasted only six weeks in our house.

  First, even though she may not have shaken in her sleep, she certainly snored. Her snores from the mattress were loud enough to split a coconut tree in half. The noise kept all of us, even my father, awake every night.

  Second, she was of no help to my mother, as we all came to know. For every time my mother asked her to help with the chores, Auntie Shami’s head and hands shook with greater intensity, making it necessary for her to rest her back on my bed. She plopped her large frame on my bed often: in the middle of the noon hour, when lunch had to be prepared; after breakfast, when dishes had to be done; in the middle of the afternoon, when clothes had to be taken off the lines outside and brought into the house; and especially in the evenings, when the clothes had to be ironed and put away or dinner prepared and dirty dishes soaped and rinsed. I had to help Mother fold wrinkled clothes into heaps and piles. Even Raju had to start rinsing dishes.

  Even worse than her snoring and her laziness were her tales. Auntie Shami, too exhausted to help Mother, would shake all the way to the neighbors’ houses and entertain them with her own kind of storytelling. She started distasteful rumors about the horrors she had to endure in our home, horrors that included sleeping on the floor on a thin mat without blankets to keep her shivering and aging body warm. She insisted that we fed her just one small meal a day in return for completing all the household chores.

  My mother very quickly realized that Shami was not Manjula. She wasn’t pretty like Manjula, for Manjula had been pretty despite her limp. Shami had a weathered look to her face and a rather large nose. Unlike Manjula, she didn’t wear a traditional lengha; instead, she chose knee-length dresses with polka-dots in all different colors and sizes. Sometimes, on special occasions, she put polka-dot ribbons in her hair or wore silk polka-dot scarves.

  My mother frequently wiped the dust off the empty wall where Manjula’s birds-and-bees picture had hung. She would curse in Hindi as she slaved around the house and in the kitchen, completing other necessary tasks. She would ramble on for hours: “I never had to ask Manjula to get the clothes from outside. I never had to ask Manjula to help me with the dinner. I never had to ask Manjula to feed the chickens, water the gardens, or sweep the floors. I never had to wait for Rajdev to drive me to the store. I never…”

  At first, Auntie Shami sat quietly in the living room as she watched my mother charge like lightning from one room to another. She listened without comment as my mother complained. Then Auntie Shami’s nostrils began to flare, and her head started shaking at an even fiercer speed. She would glare as though she might spit red dragon fire from her eyes, scorching my mother to a miserable heap. She stopped eating with us and took to her mattress and slept with her face to the wall.

  On her fifth week in our house, Auntie Shami stopped glaring and took to yelling. “I am not Manjula!” she would shriek every time my mother made a comment.

  “Manjula planted the whole garden in the back all by herself.”

  “I am not Manjula!”

  “Manjula even knew how to catch crabs.”

  “I am not Manjula!”

  “Manjula sewed.”

  “I am not Manjula!”

  On Auntie Shami’s final day in our house, it was my mother who screamed at the top of her voice, “I know! I know! I know! You’re not Manjula!”

  The next day, under skies as mournful as those on the Sunday on which she had arrived, Auntie Shami packed her two bags and left without a word. After her departure, we followed a trail of ants to the scone and bread crumbs hidden underneath her mattress. Of course, Mother had to clean that too, along with the butter-crusted bedsheets, late into the gloom-filled night. She did not complain, though, for I think her relief was greater than her anger.

  That night we all slept soundly for the first time in six weeks.

  21

  My mother began nagging Raju to settle down and get married to a nice Indian girl, one with long hair and large eyes. “Bring a bride into this house, Raju,” she said. “My bones are getting old. Who will take care of this house after I am gone?”

  “Mummy, I’ve barely turned eighteen. It’s not 1950 anymore.”

  She told him that she didn’t approve of him lying on top of the Fijian girl, the one who had already borne three children to three different men. Neighbors were talking, she said, and relatives snickered when she passed. Her son, mingling casually with a native Fijian woman! Did Raju only want to be a father to someone else’s children? Did
he not want to bear his own blood, his own flesh? She couldn’t go to the town or the temple without feeling shame or hiding her face in the shade of her dupatta.

  Raju would embrace her and smirk. “Okay, Mummy, anything for you. Anything. Even marriage.” And then he would walk out of the house, smiling like he had won the Fiji Six lottery, but all the same disregarding my mother’s tearful pleas.

  When Raju went to his lover’s house, he wouldn’t return for three or four days. Word was that she fed him well. She fried dalo and cassava and made coconut rice and sweet tapioca. Sometimes she boiled potatoes and made fish soup.

  My mother would shake her head and sit on the edge of her bed, mumbling and staring at the wooden boards on the floor. “What will I do, oh God?” she would moan. “What will I do?”

  Sometimes she would sigh loudly and bite her nails, making them bleed. “I have to feed the damn chickens! And water the damn gardens. Manjula, you left me with a big headache!”

  But then she would rise from the edge of her bed and go outside to hose the gardens. Still with hunched shoulders and a morose face, she would mix grain with water in the red bucket and feed the chickens. The chickens would noisily flutter around her at the sight of their dinner, but my mother would pay them no attention.

  At least in this respect my mother and I were together: We both hated the poor birds. And whether it was my angry wishes or my mother’s negative thoughts, a few weeks later a roaring storm came and shredded the Chicken House into a pile of rubble. The newspapers and the radio called it Cyclone Elsa.

  The night of the cyclone, we huddled in our living room to wait for the storm to pass. Mother had bought enough oil for the lamps and had cooked all the food for the day. She had forbidden Raju from leaving the house, and together he and Father had hammered shutters over our windows to keep out the storm. The noise of the rain on our tin roof was deafening. All through the night we listened to it beating upon our home, pounding even louder than the howling of the winds and the crackling of trees. It was almost sunrise before the raging winds subsided and the ocean ceased to rise and swell.