Kalyana Read online

  At first my father sat there, stunned. Then, as she showed him the driver’s manual she had been studying for those weeks spent sitting on the seawall, he burst into a piercing laugh.

  “Drive?” he said. “Manjula, have you gone mad? Look outside. Do you see an Indian woman driving out there?” My father laughed again, and shook his head.

  My mother rolled her eyes and giggled. “Manjula, how do you come up with all these grand ideas?” she said.

  Manjula groaned and escaped to our bedroom. She stayed there for the rest of the day, refusing food and milk, and instead oiling her hair and skin with her precious coconut oil. The next day, however, the scent of the flowers and the budding lime tree drew her out of our room. She grabbed a green hose and tended to her garden in supreme silence, as the fourth old woman, the old Mother herself, hovered over her.

  When Father came home from work that day, he casually walked up to her. “I want to see if an Indian woman can learn how to drive,” he said. “Besides, if you learn how to drive, then you can take Sumitri for shopping every week, while I sit home and listen to the news on the radio.” He nodded his head. “You’ll have to pay for your own lessons, Manjula. I won’t pay for them.”

  “No problem. I’ll pay myself.” She touched the ground he had walked on and raised her fingers to her forehead. She kissed her fingertips. Her eyes were full of light.

  “Thank you, Jija! Thank you. Thank you.” She paused and looked up to the sky. “Ah!” she whispered before she blew a gentle kiss in the air.

  The tall, skinny driving instructor arrived the very next evening. He shook his small head when he saw his new student. Mumbling, he said, “A woman driver! And one that hasn’t even learned to walk straight. God help this world.”

  Mother just stood at the window and watched. I could sense her fear in the way she chewed the ends of her blue dupatta.

  “Oh, God!” she said under her breath. “Oh, Manjula. Be careful, Manjula,” she said, even though my aunt could not hear her. Then she clenched her jaws together and sucked air into her lungs, hissing like a snake. “Oh, God. Let her live!”

  Father said nothing. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his new chair, listening to the news.

  Raju went around the house, making abrupt banging sounds—to scare my mother, I think. Every time he banged the side of a steel pot or dropped a lid into the sink, my mother, stiffening her pose, would breathe in through her mouth and make an even louder gasp. Raju would look at her and break out into fits of laughter.

  Manjula strapped on a seatbelt. Taking a deep breath, she turned the key, but then stalled several times as she shifted gears. She clutched the steering wheel desperately, a frown creating deep grooves in her forehead as she leaned forward to peer out the wide window. She worked the windshield wipers frantically, even though the windows were clear and there was no rain; I noticed the instructor leaning forward to turn them off, shaking his head. All this happened before Manjula even left our driveway. It was not promising.

  Manjula crawled down the driveway and onto the road. I saw the turning signals flashing randomly as the car made its way precariously down the lane. From the kitchen, my mother muttered, “Good grief.” My father shook his head.

  Yet Manjula continued her lessons. Eventually, even the villagers, men and women, would come out of their wooden houses every evening with hands interlocked behind their backs to watch Manjula back out of the driveway and cautiously speed away. They would line up at the end of their driveways and gossip about how they had seen Manjula abruptly stop and stall the car in the middle of the street in broad daylight. In the beginning they watched with trepidation, but as Manjula’s confidence grew, you could see smirks of amusement begin to spread across their tanned faces.

  The older men of the village shook their heads disapprovingly, muttering that Rajdev gave the women of his household too much freedom. They said that his ways were sure to corrupt all the women of the village. Goodness knows, one did not want all women thinking that they, too, could hop behind a monstrous machine and roll away with a turn of the ignition.

  The story floating in the village was that Rajdev’s Sali drove at a tortoise’s pace at first, but with a few months’ practice she had learned to go faster. She had also learned to back up, park, and even go up and down the hills and screech the tires at red stop signs. Eventually, the signals flickered only at the precise moment that she began to ease into making a turn. The consensus was that an Indian woman could indeed learn how to drive, even if she couldn’t learn how to walk straight.

  Manjula, as always, ignored the village gossip and remained intent on her goal. She impatiently paced by the driveway ten minutes before the instructor arrived every evening to pick her up for her lessons, and at the end of each lesson she made him verbally promise twice to come back. At first she paid him in Fiji dollar bills, but when she ran out of cash I heard her plead loudly and shamelessly with the instructor to come back anyway. I even heard her offer to sew his wife frocks with frills and pleated skirts for free—something I had never heard her say to anyone before. The instructor shook his head politely; his wife sewed her own clothes. “Too bad,” he said, unrolling the collar of his shirt, “I wanted to be the first man to have succeeded in teaching a woman how to drive.”

  Anxiety, like drifting black clouds, swept over Manjula’s small body. Watching from the doorway, I shook my head; running out of money served her well, I thought, since a woman should not have a license to drive. Manjula should not be stomping over traditions and breaking the rules. What kind of a movement was she trying to start?

  My father brushed past me, strolling towards the driveway. He took out a roll of cash from his back pocket and offered the money to the instructor. To everyone’s surprise, Manjula intervened. She shook her head and said, “No, Jija. I can pay on my own. I’ll think of something.” She promised the instructor that there would be payment when he returned the next week.

  The following week, when the instructor returned, Manjula brought out her library. She bent down and pulled out boxes and boxes of dusty romance novels from underneath our bed. There were hundreds of them, all stacked in neat piles. The tall man smiled when he flipped through the collection. “You remembered,” he said, “how I told you that my dear wife loves to read romance novels.”

  Manjula pursed her lips and stood confidently in our small living room, towering over the books. The instructor carried all the boxes out to his car and said, “Let’s go driving!”

  On the day of her driving test, Manjula awoke before sunrise and knelt down beside our bed. Putting her palms together, she bowed her head and prayed silently. She then powdered her face and put on her best frock.

  My mother nudged her. “The worst is over, Manjula. Don’t fear. You’ll pass. You drive like a man.”

  Later that day Manjula returned, grinning as she flashed a small card at my mother. I saw that it had her picture on it. She looked like a mongoose caught in the middle of the road in the headlights, but she did not complain. And that evening, when my father came home from work, he quietly dropped a second car key in Manjula’s lap. “I don’t ever want to see a scratch on my car,” he said sternly.

  “No problem, no problem, Jija. I’ll be extra careful.” She bent down and touched the ground my father walked on. Kissing her fingertips, she said, “Thank you.”

  The four old women surrounded our Toyota Corolla as Manjula climbed into the driver’s seat, with my mother in the passenger seat and me in the back. The old women cried, “Jai Hind!” as my mother clutched the front dashboard and glanced nervously out the window. Yet Manjula rested her palms loosely on the steering wheel and drove just like my father.

  As the months passed, my mother eased her grip on the front dash and sat back with her shoulders relaxed. The villagers stopped coming out of their houses to watch Manjula speed away. Rumors floated around the villag
e that Rajdev’s sister-in-law, the one who walked with a limp and was unmarried still, was really a man under her lengha. Some even said that she had chest hair beneath her brassiere. Perhaps the reason she still wasn’t married was that she was really in search of a woman. Lord behold!

  “What’s next, Manjula?” smirked my mother, a proud look spreading over her joyous face. “Are you going to walk in the door one day wearing khaki pants, like those mad American women?”

  Manjula just smiled.

  12

  The lime plant stretched into a tree. Its branches spread to the skies. The tree’s leaves were small, green, and glossy, and limes plummeted to the ground in abundance.

  Manjula would collect them, wash them, and cut them into even moons. She would squeeze them into a white jug, mix in a half a cup of sugar, and pour in clear, crisp water, right from the tap. Blocks of ice, which made a crackling and popping sound, would instantly chill the lemonade. She would serve the drink to my father when he returned from the shop, and to Uncle Baldev when he came for a visit.

  Uncle Baldev had become a regular feature in our home. The four old women would scatter and disappear the moment he set foot inside.

  He would come over in the late afternoon and bring sugarcanes, or ripe mangoes, fresh pineapples, or green coconuts. He would lean down, tousle my hair, and kiss me on both of my cheeks. “I wish the gods had gifted me a daughter just like you, Kali-yana.”

  Mother said that he was yearning to be a father, and it was unfortunate that he had married a banj.

  The familiar smell of stale tobacco and whiskey would hang in the air when Uncle came around. It still made my stomach curdle like spoiled milk, so that sometimes I could hardly eat the treats he brought. He would sit in our living room and shave the hard shell from the sugarcane, then slice the white fibre into equal pieces—just as he had in his own living room on the day Manjula had met her suitor.

  I would sit by his feet, chewing the sugarcane pieces, trying to taste their sweetness. My Uncle Baldev also taught me to squeeze a lush mango, turning its insides into a stream of juice. Making a small hole in the tip of the fruit with a pocket knife he carried in his side pocket, he would hand it back to me and watch me suck the juice. Some would run down my chin, making it feel sticky.

  “Is it good?” he would ask. I would nod my head. My mother would tell me to say “Thank you, Uncle,” and I would.

  My uncle would use the same pocket knife to take the eyes out of a pineapple. He would summon Manjula and instruct her to slice away the skin, cutting the pineapple into round rings and soaking them in salty water. Manjula always obeyed without question.

  Sometimes he brought over a green coconut. He always claimed that he had climbed the tree like a monkey, wrapping his legs and arms around the thin, ridged trunk. When he reached the top, he had hung with one arm and used his other to dislodge an unripe green coconut, throwing it to the ground. The coconut made a loud thumping sound when it hit the earth.

  I didn’t believe that my Uncle Baldev could really climb the coconut tree like a monkey; his bones were too old and would crackle and pop on the way up. I was sure that he had really paid a few dollars to the young village boys, bribing them to climb the coconut tree and drop the coconuts for him.

  I never told him this, however. I feared what I had witnessed in his living room, and knew that if I angered him as Manjula had it might be the end of his treats. No longer would he carry sugarcanes, mangoes, pineapples, and coconuts right to my doorstep. I would have to go back to eating the dry scrapings of a mature brown coconut.

  “Don’t bring any more food, Baldev ji,” my mother would tell him frequently. She would tap my protruding stomach, sigh, and say, “Too fat.”

  My uncle would shake his head and smile. “Let her eat, Sister. She’s a growing girl. She needs food to grow into a woman. One day she’ll run for Miss Hibiscus and win, I am sure.”

  “Miss Hibiscus, Baldev? If she keeps eating like this, the only thing she’ll do at the Hibiscus Festival is line up to eat candy floss and ice cream.”

  “She would still be able to go on the rides, Sumitri. What are you saying?”

  “Rides? The only ride she could fit onto would be the merry-go-round horses! If she went on the swings or the Ferris wheel, the chains would break and she would fall to the ground and crack her head open.” My mother shuddered at the thought.

  Uncle Baldev rubbed my head in affection and kissed my cheek as I indulged in the soft coconut meat. I guzzled down the coconut milk in one big gulp. It tasted sweet and delicious. Sometimes my mother’s words hurt, but I don’t think she ever noticed.

  Uncle Baldev grinned and winked at me. “Sister, you are letting your imagination run away. She’s a good, solid build. She will be the next Miss Hibiscus, you’ll see.”

  “Whatever you say, Brother,” said my mother.

  I flashed Uncle Baldev my biggest smile. It was as if he was my only friend.

  13

  I met my first real school friend in Class Four. His name was Kirtan. His face was round, like Moon-Face in my favorite Enid Blyton stories, but his belly was flat as a board. He was an inch taller than me, with shoulders even huskier than mine.

  I met him on the same day that I had a brush with the word “movement,” except that my teacher called it a “revolution.” She had asked me to come forward, to the front of the class.

  “What is this, Kalyana?” she asked.

  “My essay, Teacher ji.”

  “I can see that. But what is this?” She pointed to my use of “she” in the place of “he.” She had circled the word with a bright red pen everywhere it had appeared throughout the three-page essay.

  “This is not proper English,” she snapped. “When the identity of a speaker or person is not known, proper English demands that you use ‘he’ or ‘him’ or ‘his.’ You never substitute ‘she’ or ‘her’ in place of ‘him.’ Understand?”

  I shook my head. The teacher squinted; she looked startled and confused.

  “What’s there not to understand?”

  “I…I don’t understand why we…we can’t use ‘she’ sometimes. If…it’s not known if it is a boy or a girl…could it not perhaps be a girl?” I stammered.

  My heart was already picking up speed. I couldn’t understand, but I was terrified that I would be sent to the headmaster’s office. I did not want to have the red stick rained down on me again. A few children chuckled under their breaths in the background, but I ignored them.

  The teacher stared harder. “No, you can’t do that. It’s improper. And it’s incorrect. You’ll be marked wrong.”

  She flung my essay back at me. I caught two of the pages, while the third fell to the concrete floor. I bent down, picked it up, and walked humbly back to my wooden desk. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my teacher shake her head.

  “Today’s children,” she mumbled. “Give an inch; they take a mile. And young girls everywhere think that they can start a revolution! Good grace!”

  Revolution? That was a new word.

  That lunch period, a boy followed me outside. Gone were those days when I hid in the toilet to eat lunch, for I had made peace with my shame. Time, it seemed, could make one embrace the unacceptable things: the constant leering, the ceaseless teasing. Still, sometimes I wished that I could be more like the women of America or like the man behind the stone-cold statue gracing our school’s front steps. I would start my own movement and forever banish Ashita and Noora from the playground. Like Mother Kali, I would stand upon their heads with my two small feet.

  Although now I embraced the daylight outside, I still hung my head low and ate alone. That day, I took my curry and roti roll and an Enid Blyton book to the shade of an overgrown bougainvillea hedge by the netball field, sitting on the green grass and watching grasshoppers skipping around me as butterflies floated on colorful wings. />
  I was sitting there when the boy approached me. “You are the girl who was starting a revolution in class,” he said, and then plunged down and sat beside me. “Do you know what ‘Revolution’ means?” he asked.

  I was silent; this was a new experience, as welcome as it was. How should I respond? I didn’t know what to say, what to think, or even how to move. Should I shake my head and tell him “no”? Or should I lie?

  He was new in my class. The gossip was that Kirtan’s family had moved to Suva from Nadi, the land where airplanes raced down concrete strips illuminated by white lights, bringing with them people who were not Indians. I wanted to ask Kirtan if he had seen a true gora, with hair the color of buttercups and skin lighter than cream.

  But I remained quiet, for I was seized with a sudden fear that he would break into shattering laughter and leave me sitting alone. He might join hands with Ashita or Noora, the class queens, who had every boy buzzing like crazed bees around their fat, ugly heads. I hated them and the way they fell into fits of giggles every time I walked by them in the open hallways.

  “There goes the forty-four-gallon lonely drum,” they would whisper loud enough for everyone—even me—to hear. Their words were like the bite of a poisonous plant. Kirtan’s laugh would be much worse, like the sting of a bee; it would swell, infecting my body and wounding my heart. So I said nothing. I looked ahead and let the breeze blow through my short brown hair.

  Kirtan broke the silence. “I agree,” he said. “I think we should be able to write ‘she’ if we don’t know whether the person is a boy or a girl. The teacher doesn’t make sense. I think it’s good to start a movement sometimes.” He started unrolling his lunch, still sitting beside me.

  “Movement?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s just like a revolution. A change! That’s what my father told me, anyway.”