Kalyana Read online

  I had heard it only twice before in my lifetime. The first was when Uncle Mathur, my mother’s third-youngest brother, was shipped from Ba to Suva. I overheard my mother tell Manjula that his condition was serious and that he was being admitted to the Suva City Hospital. “Admitted” was the only angrezi, or English, word she used in the whole conversation.

  But it stayed with me, because a few days later, a blanket of sadness fell over our whole household. Uncle Mathur slept quietly in a rectangular box, his eyes tightly shut, listless and lifeless. I had lined up behind the adults to get a last look and watched as my mother took a silver teaspoon of crystal-clear water and dropped it into his open mouth. Afterward, family and friends and many people I did not know gathered in a circle, and the wailing began; women and men beat their chests, pulled their hair, and howled. Nobody wore color on that bleak and dreary day, only a single shade of purest white. Through it all, Uncle Mathur slept, frozen in time. It had all begun when he had been admitted to the hospital.

  The second time I heard the word “admitted” was when it happened to the daughter of one of my other uncles. The rumor among the aunties was that Shilpa Mani had ripped off all her clothes and run through seven villages, screaming that the seven-headed demons were coming. Amidst her insistence that they had five arms and two horns, she was admitted to the Mental Institute. I heard my mother sadly tell Manjula that poor Shilpa was in a dire state.

  We went to visit her there. Because of my age, I wasn’t allowed to enter the glass doors of the stark white building. Instead, I sat on a wooden bench outside with Manjula, under the shade of a low-hanging jackfruit tree.

  I saw Manjula steal two jackfruits that day. She quickly glanced over her shoulder, then broke them off the hanging branch above us and deftly packed them into the large wicker bag that hung over her shoulder. Winking at me, she said, “We’ll cook later. Jackfruit curry for dinner tonight. Okay?”

  I sat there with my mouth open, shaking my head at Manjula. Yet before I could speak a word, my mother emerged from the Institute, looking solemn. She paid me no attention, addressing Manjula only.

  “I feel a lot of worry for little Shilpa,” she said helplessly. “They keep her strapped onto her bed in a locked room. She can’t move her hands or feet at all. Every morning, they give her brain an electric shock.” My mother rested her hand on her chest as she delivered this grim tale.

  She shook her head. “Shilpa’s never getting out of there. Her condition is dire.”

  We never went back to the Mental Institute.

  I thought back to Uncle Mathur lying lifeless in his small box and then of Shilpa’s ill fate. And here I was, Kalyana Mani Seth, at the tender age of six, being admitted to a concrete building called Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Primary School.

  I wrapped my arms around my mother’s waist, wailing. “Let go, Kalyana,” she said through gritted teeth, looking briefly up at the headmaster in embarrassment. “Let go.”

  In the end, she was stronger than I. She firmly grasped my hand, digging her nails into my palm until she could untangle her silk sari from my wrist. She pushed me towards the headmaster, who was still holding onto my dress. I watched her walk through the door, down the concrete stairs, away from the building, and onto the pavement. The further away she walked from me, the smaller she appeared.

  I continued to wail. I was to be admitted, and my own mother had abandoned me; and worse, there was no toilet, pit or otherwise, in sight. Desperately I tried to shake free from the headmaster, squeezing my legs together yet knowing that at any minute the yellow liquid would flow from me and spill onto the cold floor. The headmaster ordered silence. “Be still!” he commanded. When I failed to obey, he opened his drawer and took out a long stick, red in color and about half an inch in diameter. He bent me over the edge of his swivel chair, lifted my new lemon-yellow dress, pulled down my underwear, and brought down the stick on my buttocks—once, twice, and thrice.

  I could hear the sage blow the conch shell in the distance, and the water wash up against the seawall, and the pundit blow on his bansuri, and the frogs croaking in the stillness of night. I heard the strum of an enormous sitar, and the quiet hum of the harmonica, and the howls of the wind, and the echo of a charmer’s flute. My father’s hands beat on the tabla as my urine flowed down the side of the headmaster’s swivel chair and onto my new black flat shoes. The sting of the stick fell on my behind exactly three times that day.

  I stopped crying and started gasping for breath. The headmaster, with a disgusted expression, gave me a clean cloth and ordered me to wipe his chair. Reluctantly I obeyed, but my heart was black inside. I prayed to God that the stench of my urine might glaze his floors and remain trapped within these walls forever and ever. I wished that the four old women would squat in every corner of his office and urinate fiercely too, creating a warm yellow river in the middle of the cruel headmaster’s quarters. My behind still smarted from the pain and indignity of the stick.

  News of the red stick and my incontinence reached my mother. She brought clean, white underwear in a plastic bag, along with a new dress. I didn’t see her bring these items to me, however; I was shut behind the cement walls with a toilet and a tap that poured water straight into a concrete drain. I had never seen water pour from a tap, and I was fascinated with my ability to turn the faucet on and off and run my fingers through the water. It made me temporarily forget my burning behind.

  When I limped home that afternoon, Manjula was quick to chastise me. “Fool,” she said, “Ungrateful fool. Now you hate school.” Manjula shook her head at my lost future.

  The stick had left red welts on my tender brown skin. For a week I had to sleep on my stomach and keep my buttocks up in the air. School would be out of the question for the duration of the healing, and Manjula was given the duty of fanning me the instant a moan escaped my lips. A burning sensation radiated from my behind throughout my entire being, though not a single drop of blood had been shed.

  My father shook with fury as he paced around our small house. My mother restrained him from going to the school. She knew my father wanted nothing more than to pull the fat, bald headmaster from his swivel chair, drag him onto the concrete stairs of the school, and beat him with his own red stick. Beat him until his own behind smarted and bloodless pain flowed throughout his body.

  “Think about Kalyana’s future,” Mother pleaded. “Without education, the man that marries her will be wearing only a blue collar. What future will she have without education, Rajdev?”

  Yet that day I learned that my future was to be one of security and prosperity.

  As I stood sniffling and moaning in a corner on the day of my beating, a deafening drum roll and loud chanting and singing stopped all conversation about the headmaster and sent my mother scurrying for the kitchen. She gathered bowls of flour, potatoes, carrots, and onions, as my father gravely watched the procession. A group of Hare Krishna devotees approached: men and women, barefoot and clad in vivid orange and yellow robes.

  My mother motioned for me to come forth. I hobbled to her like Manjula, my body aching. Mother put the provisions into a big silver bowl and told me to drop the items into the visitors’ sacks. I walked gingerly through the front door, my mother close behind.

  The devotees were dancing and singing songs I did not understand. I looked into their eyes. Their faces were frightening: needle piercings from one end to the other. Some heads were shaved entirely, but some boasted hair that grew to their knees. They all smelled like sandalwood and turmeric and had scars and strange piercings that covered their faces, hands, feet, and bodies. I shuddered and willed my feet forward.

  An unusually dark-skinned women fixed her protruding eyes upon me as I stood there holding my heart in my hands along with the bowl of offerings. Her companions danced circles around me and my mother, chanting and beating drums. The strange woman held out her empty sack, her eyes never once straying fro
m their keen gaze upon me. I tipped the silver bowl, dropping the rations into it, keeping my own eyes firmly focused on the inside of the canvas sack.

  The moment the silver bowl was emptied, the dark-skinned woman closed the sack and flung it over her left shoulder. With her other hand, she grabbed me by the hair and pulled me closer to her. Wild winds of storm rushed through my mind, and I could feel her lift me and drag me into a strange new life. They would pierce my cheeks, lips, and hands with long, thin needles and brand my forehead with strange symbols. My brown locks would fall upon the ground all around me as they shaved my head. I would be clothed in a lemon-yellow Hare Krishna uniform, admitting me to their ashram and sentencing me to a lifetime of godly devotion. As my mother had told me time after time, life was simply unfair.

  And yet it was not to be. The dark-skinned woman merely cracked a small smile, exposing a space where she was missing two front teeth. She laid her bony hands on my head and, in a chilling voice, whispered in Hindi, “Bless you, child. You shall prosper.”

  My mother patted my head happily. I had received the devotees’ blessing in return for my selfless giving, and perhaps now my future would be assured.

  As for me, I was less interested in future prosperity and more keen to examine the strangeness of our visitors. “Why do they have needles going through their cheeks?”

  “Kalyana, they embrace suffering. It’s a symbol of their devotion to their Lord Krishna.”

  “What does suffering have to do with devotion?”

  “Kalyana, it is in suffering that we are most connected to God.”

  I didn’t believe my mother. How could pain be the way to immortality?

  My mother paused and looked intently at me. “Your mind is greater than your physical being, Kalyana. If you believe there’s no pain, then you simply won’t feel pain.” She stroked my hair. “Later,” she said, “these devotees will cross a pit of burning coals barefoot, and the soles of their feet will remain intact and unscarred. There aren’t many in the world like them. They are extraordinary—beyond human.”

  I was feeling the burn on my behind, but in my own agony I had not felt a divine connection or the spark of a godly presence. Yet, in an odd way, I had bonded with Tulsi across the street. I was connected with the memory of Manjula huddled in the corner as my father rained down the beatings on her. I was even somehow linked with my own ancestors, who had crossed the great Pacific Sea and gracefully accepted the lashes that fell on the creases and curves of their hollow backs.

  There were two kinds of people in this world: one was the headmaster, the other the student. The headmaster had the control and the power to bestow the beatings. The student had the task of learning the lessons.

  6

  I returned to school, where I learned to spell and write words in the English language, the language of the British people. Every evening after dinner, I would spread my schoolwork in the middle of the mattress I shared with Manjula, and practice writing and spelling big words: “E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t.” Manjula, with a curious look on her face, would come into the room and sit on the floor beside me, flipping through my books with wide, eager eyes. Sometimes she would inject words and sounds such as, “Hm. Huh. Hahn.” She would look up to me, and I would see question marks in her eyes.

  “Manjula, do you know how to spell ‘elephant’?”

  Manjula pasted a stubborn smirk on her lips and proceeded with pride. “E-l-e-f-a-n-t.” And then she raised her eyebrow in a triumphant style.

  “It’s p-h-a-n-t. Not f-a-n-t.”

  Manjula would fling my books at me and grunt whenever I corrected her. “How would I know how to spell ‘elephant’ in angrezi, fool?” She would release a string of justifications and explanations: “I was taken out of school at the age of ten, so that I could help my mother care for your mother and our brothers when your mother was a baby!” Now she was hissing with anger. “It wasn’t like what it is now. Going to school was a privilege, not a right, back in my day, when I was young.” Then, in a higher pitch, shaking her head, she squealed, “How would I know how to spell ‘elephant’ in English?”

  She said the word English strangely. Ingalish.

  “I wasn’t taught to spell in Ingalish,” she would snap. “If I went to school like you, then I would know how to spell ‘elephant’ and five or ten other big words. You think I can’t learn?” With that she would stalk out of our room, muttering under her breath. “Now that you go to school, you think I am stupid!”

  After several practices alone in my bedroom, I was ready to stand in the middle of the kitchen in front of my mother, hands behind my back, and spell the word “elephant” two times. I was just four feet tall, but I towered over my audience. Raju mocked me, saying that he had been spelling the word “elephant” for years. Manjula pouted in a corner. My father sat by the table, with his head held up high in the air and a proud smile on his gentle face. He said nothing, but reached out to pat my back.

  My mother did the usual: she took center stage. She stood up in the middle of the room, flinging her bright blue dupatta over her shoulder and shaking her slim hips, and proceeded to entertain her audience. “Elephants are treasured animals in India, Kalyana. Did I ever tell you the story of how the Lord Ganesha got his head?”

  I shook my head, even though I had heard the story before.

  My mother tied her long dupatta around the waist of her petticoat and broke out into a soft song. She had long ago claimed to have written the song, on a rainy Sunday morning, when the household was asleep, and Father was puttering mercilessly in the yard. She swayed in the calm of the living room, retelling the famous legend:

  It happened a long time ago, in Satyug.

  Listen, O devotee, to the story of Ganpati Baba.

  Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba,

  The son of the divine Parvati Ma.

  Legends say that Parvati Ma made a statue of clay

  In the early, early hours of the morning

  When the sun emerged above the Himalayas

  And the birds flew to take refuge in their nests.

  Legends say that the divine Parvati Ma

  Blew the breath of life into the clay

  And from it emerged a young boy.

  She asked him to guard her temple as she slept.

  It happened a long time ago in Satyug.

  Listen, O devotee, to the story of Ganpati Baba.

  Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba,

  The son of the divine Parvati Ma.

  Legends say along came Shiva ji, her heart, her love.

  The young boy denied him entry into the temple.

  Infuriated, Shiva ji took his trishul

  And beheaded the young boy made from clay.

  Legends say that the head of the boy made from clay

  Fell on the ground, shaking the earth,

  Awakening the divine Parvati Ma.

  In anger, she made a final request.

  It happened a long time ago in Satyug.

  Listen, O devotee, to the story of Ganpati Baba.

  Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba,

  The son of the divine Parvati Ma.

  Legends say that said the divine Parvati Ma

  To Shiva ji, that if he could find a newborn

  That has yet to see his mother’s face

  He was to bring the child’s head to her as a gift.

  Legends say that Shiva ji looked and looked

  Into all four corners of the world.

  And found only a newborn elephant

  That slept with his head facing towards the north.

  It happened a long time ago in Satyug.

  Listen, O devotee, to the story of Ganpati Baba.

  Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba,

  The son of the divine Parvati Ma.

  Legends say that Shiva ji beheaded the baby elephant

  And broug
ht his head to Parvati Ma,

  And she put it on top of the boy created from clay,

  Bringing him back to time of being.

  Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba, Ganpati Baba, Morya.

  The song was so lively, my mother’s dancing so vivid, that I had to join in; I was bouncing up and down on my seat and tapping my feet on the ground with more enthusiasm than rhythm. With a theatrical bow and a flashing smile on her face, my mother finished her song and dance. “That,” she said, “is why we all bow to him and say, ‘Jai Hind, glory to him.’”

  7

  Three months after I had started school, I found myself sitting in the middle of the kitchen on a wooden chair, surrounded by newspapers. Manjula took a small, round bowl from a shelf, and upon my mother’s instruction she put it on top of my head.

  “Pyala cut,” she said.

  Manjula held the bowl in place as my mother cut my hair around it. They talked about things I didn’t understand. After ninety-six years in coming, Independence Day was set: October 10 was the final date. Prince Charles himself would be in attendance, representing Queen Elizabeth at this propitious occasion. I did not know what this “Independence” could be, but I knew there would be great festivities. Would there be a bride and a groom? Would the pundit blow the conch shell, a symbol of bliss, celebration, and auspiciousness? Then its reverberation, mirroring the sound of Om, would vibrate through the rivers and sea, and the creeks and valleys of Viti Levu. Their conversation distracted me as snippets of my brown curls fell to the ground, covering the world news.

  “Much better, hey, Kalyana! What do you think? It was too much work every morning to wash, oil, part, and braid your hair for school.” My mother patted my head. “Much, much better! You’ll feel so much cooler now in the hot days when the breeze is still and the salty air is humid.” Then with a twisted smile, she said, “Thank goodness the women of America went mad. Now women all over the world can cut their hair as short as a man’s. Jai Hind to the women of America!”