Kalyana Read online

  An intruder comes and forces her to part from her home,

  Snatches her from what she knows

  The leaves fall away, one by one

  The clouds swallow the whole sun

  The selfish man taints her, for an eternity to come

  The redness is lost from her lips

  The sweet scent dissipates, in one breath

  The rose, crumbles and falls to the earth

  It becomes dust.

  “This story is just about a cursed rose,” she said, hoarsely.

  People cheered, smiled, clapped, and made noise. Some banged rhythmically on the table, creating music. The hefty girl walked off the stage, pounding her feet and making the microphone squeal.

  I sat still, feeling numb. Now I understood why I could no longer write or gather the courage to speak my story. The chains of silence put upon me by my mother were still strangling me, bit by bit, day by day.

  30

  As time passed my mother’s letters grew grimmer, often recounting the deaths of people I had known. Cancer had eaten Dr. Timoci Bavadra, she said, many years ago now. It was a sad day for all the supporters of the Labour Party. Kalwant Singh from down the road had died of heart failure. I remembered how the village had taken a collection for him after Hurricane Elsa had flattened his home. Mother said that he had eaten food cooked in too much ghee, and it had clogged his arteries.

  Uncle Bhatur, a distant uncle I had met just once, had died of unknown causes. He had collapsed in the middle of the wheat field while laying out plots of ground. Yashna’s Baba, or father, had also passed away. He had cut his finger, which led to a blood infection. He died in the hospital a week later, at precisely the same time he cut his finger. Auntie Shami had shaken and snored herself to her end. Mother said her snores and shakes must be keeping the gods and goddesses awake in the heavens above.

  Tulsi’s husband across the street had died in a drunken stupor. He had choked on his vomit and the breathlessness had seized him. His cruel mother had touched a fallen live wire and died of shock. Her body was found burnt to a crisp under the jasmine bush. Gossip on the streets, my mother wrote, was that it was Tulsi’s doing, for, a week before the deaths, Tulsi had visited a priest. Perhaps she had summoned a holy man to put a spell on her husband and her slave-driving mother-in-law. Only a mere month later, my mother wrote, Tulsi flew away like a bird to New Zealand to be close to her sister.

  So Tulsi got her revenge? I pondered this question.

  “Only God knows what the truth is,” wrote my mother, “In the end, God sees to everything.” With God’s good grace, she prayed that they all might come back to the earth in a better reincarnated form, and live a blessed life.

  News of the death of my father didn’t come in a form of a letter, but in a dream. I dreamed that I sat cross-legged at the head of my bed, rearranging fluffy pillows on my lap. My father came into my room. He had dropped many pounds and looked frail, and there was a sickly purple hue that surrounded his entire body. He slid onto my bed and put his head on my lap. The scent of Vicks filled the air, and I remembered the days of my breathlessness, when the icy heat of the ointment had brought me no relief. Gasping, he took his last breath while looking at my face. I cupped my hands over his cheeks. They felt cold. I closed his eyes. He looked peaceful, resting on my lap.

  The next morning I awoke to Raju’s phone call. My mother was crying hysterically in the background, speaking to the neighbors and relatives who had gathered in our house, and telling stories of my father’s last request: “Rub some Vicks on my back and chest, Sumitri. My lungs are feeling congested.’ I didn’t know it would be the last time I would be rubbing Vicks on his chest. I didn’t know.” My mother howled.

  There was loud chattering and strange noises. Dishes were falling and breaking. I started crying before Raju broke the news slowly and gently, over the rumble and static. “He went in his sleep,” he said. “Exact cause is uncertain.”

  I regretted fiercely that I had not given Aditi a chance to know him.

  And yet I told my mother that I could not afford to come to the funeral. It was true that, with the mortgage payments and only Kirtan working, it would be impossible. I think she understood the truth: that I could not face the thought of my father, frail and weak in death, closed up in a small box. How could I watch his lifeless body succumb to the hungry flames? I wanted to hold onto the memory of the father of my childhood, overflowing with life and showing limitless compassion to all. In my mind, I wanted him to stay that vigorous man who would punch the air fiercely as morning broke. I wanted to picture him going off to work, wearing his khaki pants and white T-shirt; cracking the shells of crabs and prawns with his teeth, slurping the juices; or walking down the street, with his chin up and head held high, making the neighborhood boys stop and shiver. I was glad for my mother that Manjula went to the funeral. I was sure that she would have found solace and strength, leaning on her sister’s shoulders.

  My father’s death marked the end of my nostalgia for the land where the coconut trees swayed freely in the winds, the land that stirred poetic feelings within me. No longer did I feel a connection. Gone were my last few happy memories of Fiji.

  After my father’s death, my mother wrote fewer and fewer letters. She said that old age was striking her eyes, making her lose sight. She took to speaking with me on the phone occasionally, instead. She provided the same news and offered the same advice, and asked the same questions. But one piece of news, she wrote in a letter: Uncle Baldev, she said, had passed away. Cold had seeped into all his joints, making them brittle as glass; he was bound to the wheelchair in his final months, with no one to care for him. His wife, Mother said, had disappeared years before. No one knew where she had gone, but I knew that, even if they had looked under the stars and the moon or in the shade of a bougainvillea hedge, they would not have found her. Whom would they look for? For nobody knew her name. Uncle Baldev had died lonely and sad, wrapped up in his own vomit and fecal stench.

  I thought of Tulsi and her revenge on her husband and mother-in-law. “In the end, God sees to everything,” my mother had written then. So this was the end that the gods had devised for Uncle Baldev? This was how the auntie-without-a-name and I would have our revenge? To die alone was sad, but it was without shame. Why did the gods not come down to the very earth, proclaiming to the relatives and villagers the man’s evil deeds, the man’s crimes? Pain and suffering could be felt both outwardly and within, and it is that which no one can see that wounds the spirit the most. It is she who pays the price for whom life can be unfair.

  I banged the cupboards in the kitchen. I dropped cups and plates on the floor; the ceramic dishes splattered all over the clean tiles in a million pieces. I took the doormat of our home and beat it on the crabapple tree outside. I stripped the clean bedsheets off the beds and washed them again and again. Kirtan wondered loudly what was eating me, while Aditi cowered in a corner.

  I didn’t answer.

  I had always followed tradition and kept my mother’s letters, just as my mother and Manjula had done themselves. After reading my mother’s careful script, I would fold them up and place them neatly in a cardboard box, the stiff paper tied with ribbon. But I did not keep this letter. I read it and threw it into the fire. I watched it burn for a long time.

  The following week, I ventured to the monthly spoken-word group with Angela, but I remained invisible among the crowd. I barely heard anyone say their piece; I looked at the stage but saw only blinding light.

  On the drive home that night, through the tunnels of cherry blossoms, I remained silent. I did not comment on the works of the rising stars. Nor did I discuss stories and poetry that had touched me.

  “When did you stop writing?” asked Angela. There was a gentle quietness in her voice.

  “How did you know I used to write?”

  “I saw it in your eyes the very fir
st time I met you under the crabapple tree in your backyard. And that’s why I invited you to the writers’ club.” Angela looked at me quickly, then back at the road. “I know there’s a whole book inside you, waiting to be written.”

  I gazed out the car window at the roads covered in cherry blossoms. Light reflected off the bright pink petals, making the dark surface of the asphalt appear lit.

  “What made you stop?” asked Angela.

  I remained silent. Then, in one instant, I unleashed the dark secret choking me inside. I had to tell someone, anyone. So I told Angela everything: about Manjula’s wedding; of Uncle Baldev’s doings and misdoings; of the chickens making noise in the Chicken House; of the four old women beating drums and shaking the earth; of the stench of whiskey on his breath; the coconut leaves rustling in the wind; but most of all, I told her about my mother. I told her how she threw my bloody underwear in the fire that night, when the guests had gone home. No one saw anything. No one heard my cries. I told Angela I had not forgiven my mother. I told her that my mother’s biggest crime was that she remained silent and hid my shame. She—my own mother—took Uncle Baldev’s side.

  Angela pulled onto the side of road, struck by my confession. She was deeply moved. She said she had no words to express her anguish, speak her truths. She prayed to God that the vengeance of Mother Kali would fall on my uncle in the hell below, where, she was sure, he now rested. She said all the things I had longed to hear from my mother.

  Angela wept with me and for me, on the side of the road that night. And I, having the lonely burden of shame lifted from my shoulders, felt a hundred tons lighter.

  After that night, I still called my mother occasionally, although out of a sense of duty more than a true desire. Then one day, out of the blue, I received an envelope in the mail, addressed in her neat handwriting.

  I opened the letter with slight trepidation. What had compelled her to take up this old-fashioned habit again? Even now, she wrote in the same archaic way: on lined paper, in blue or black ink, she started her letter with “Dear Kalyana” and ended with “Your Loving Mother, Sumitri.” The address and date were tucked neatly in the right-hand corner, as they always had been.

  I wondered whether my mother knew that the world had moved forward, that the Internet, like a spider web that went from one end of the ceiling to another, had created an invisible maze of connections from one computer to the next. Few people now exchanged words with a paper and a pen. Even Raju emailed me short notes.

  In my mother’s letter, she asked why I had not come to Fiji with Kirtan. She had been glad to see him when he traveled back to Fiji to attend his mother’s funeral and visit his family, but she was disappointed that I had stayed behind. She said she wanted to see Aditi before her spirit left the earth and joined with her departed husband’s. I telephoned her and told her that the reason I couldn’t come was money; that we could not afford to travel there as a family on Kirtan’s modest income; that it was costing Kirtan thousands of dollars already. His trip had been more than what we could really afford, I said.

  But that was not the truth. In Fiji there were still bad memories lurking in the dark shadows of the jasmine bushes. Here, far from the small island, I could forget. I could pretend. I feared that, were I to visit, these ghosts would follow me across the ocean, through the crowded cities and maple-leaf-covered towns, and into the haunting silence of the room that Kirtan and I shared.

  My mother did not understand. She seemed heartbroken. So, out of guilt, I invited her to visit Canada instead.

  31

  I had often wondered what my mother would think of this and that, if she were to see Canada with her own two eyes. What stories would she gather in her dupatta and take back for her three grandchildren at home? Would she say that, in the land of maple syrup, where goras eat poutine with forks, men lie with men and women lie with women, and people shrug and look the other way? What would she say about this strange land, where buffalo used to roam and bears infested the forests, this land where women trot the streets wearing pants, tight and loose, short and long? Where teenaged children, boys and girls, dye their hair red and blue and shout at their parents, where anything goes? Would she throw her hands in the air and look up to the skies, and say, “Oh God, what has this world come to?” Maybe she would pause and sigh and say, “It must be another one of those American movements.”

  By this time there was a movement of a different kind brewing, making its way across the vast distances and into every home. This movement was one I was desperate to understand. I was also desperate to make my voice heard, though my mother might well have thought it was crazy.

  This movement attempted to tear down years of pain, to “break the cycle of silence and wipe away the shame” about childhood sexual abuse. The American talk-show host Oprah Winfrey had initiated the telling of tales, doing away with the shame and secrecy. It seemed clinics and centers were popping up on every street corner to help victims to come to terms with their silent suffering. New laws protecting the rights of victims were being negotiated, while old traditions were being questioned and changed. People lined the streets, carrying banners and making noise. Angela and I were among them.

  Watching all of this on the news and on the streets, evening after evening, day after day, I realized that the silence and shame surrounding abuse was not just my lot. It had been shared by American women, and men, too. It was the lot of the rich and elite and the poor and desolate, the experience of the young and the old. I came to understand that it was this single thread, this hidden pain, that bound one victim to another. Just like the blood that linked women of all races, classes, and creeds, so this shared experience made us sisters and brothers on the road to healing.

  I wondered what my mother would say about this Afro-haired woman called Oprah Winfrey. Would she say that there is a woman whose hair is as black as the feathers of a raven, who wears dresses made of rubies and diamonds? Would she say that rumor has it when she walks through the streets of America, like the pathways of the heavens, they too turn to pure gold? Or would she say, there’s this African-American woman who is stirring up a can of worms with a long wooden stick? There is this African-American woman telling stories that shouldn’t be told? What has this world come to and where else is it going to go? Oh, Brother! Is that what she would say while sifting flour in a pot, while picking pebbles from a plate of rice, while wringing wet clothes in a concrete sink?

  My mother accepted my invitation. But it was a full year later that she boarded Air Pacific and flew from Nadi to Vancouver to see her sprouting granddaughter. Mother arrived on a chilly day, when the skies were cloudy and leaves bright orange. Amid the dark suits in the airport, she alone reflected the glory of the autumn skies in her pale-yellow-and-orange sari.

  I handed her a light-gray fleece jacket. She inspected it closely before she put it on, and then stepped outside, walking slowly beside Kirtan, Aditi, and me. She drank in the reddened leaves covering the ground and the orange leaves blowing in the chilly breeze. I knew this was the first time she had seen the foliage of autumn. She gazed upon it in wonderment.

  Mother’s hair, now dyed black, was pulled back in a bun, and she wore a gold coin necklace and gold earrings. Although she was slightly hunched over, she showed no other signs of age. Her skin was still supple, and any wrinkles had been kept at bay. For the first time, I began to wonder about the cream my mother had always encouraged me to use on my own face. Perhaps it was sold in Canadian stores, too.

  My mother had put her arms around me at the airport, breaking into a smile, and kissed me on my forehead. I could still feel the warmth of her embrace on my skin. She had gazed at Aditi long and hard before she ruffled her hair. Aditi just looked sternly at my mother, this stranger who mussed her hair and pinched her cheeks.

  “She looks just like you did at eleven,” Mother said, once we were back at our home. She stared closely at Aditi. Did she reme
mber the weight of silence that had been put upon my shoulders when I was my daughter’s age? My mother’s voice broke across my thoughts. “I am here in time for your birthday, Aditi,” she said. “How can I forget? It was Diwali in Fiji on the day you were born. November 13, I remember very well.”

  “This is your nani,” I said to Aditi, doing my best to sound cheerful. “That’s your grandma!”

  Aditi spoke to my mother politely in English. Mother smiled, but her reply was short, just one or two English words. She stood stiffly and pursed her lips, and in her raised eyebrows I was sure I saw a judgment.

  I wanted to take her to the Hanging Bridge, to the hiking trails, to chai houses and Indian restaurants. I wanted to take her for a ride in the Sky-Train, for a walk down Robson Street, to stroll with her through Stanley Park. I was desperate to show her my new life: the millions of pigeons on Granville Island and the highest buildings silhouetted across the downtown. But my mother wanted to see none of these things. She wished only to stay in my house, sit at the dinner table, and talk to Kirtan, or to watch me cook and make chai. She told me that I made rotis just like the full moon, nice and round, although she asked for a little more salt and a few more chilies to sprinkle on the chicken curry.

  Mother did, however, accompany Angela and me to our writers’ group once. I expected her to ask questions, to scrutinize my friend, to offer advice and criticism, but Mother quieted and gave a small smile, not much more. It was as though, upon meeting Angela, she gently and discreetly backed into a corner.

  Angela chatted about this and that, in English. She asked my mother numerous questions, and when silence followed, she answered all of the questions herself: How was your trip, Aunty? It must have been long. Were you comfortable on the plane ride? Planes are never comfortable, are they? How long has it been since you saw Kalyana? Kalyana says it has been so many years. You must be happy to see her again, and Kirtan. And meet Aditi. What a beautiful granddaughter you have!