A Sister's Promise (30 page)

Grotesquely pregnant, yellow-striped marrows hanging from the ceiling by coconut frond strips looped around their middle grin at her, then fade into oblivion.

‘Push,’ she hears from far away, ‘push, girl, push.’.

A flash of silver. Wild hair. Gleaming eyes probing. The wise woman.

Her belly heaves, kicks, has a mind of its own. She cannot think for the pain. It is a separate entity claiming her, owning her. She is tired, so tired. Her eyelids feel as if they are weighted down with rocks.

‘Shhh . . . It’ll be fine. Don’t you worry,’ the wise woman soothes.

Sweat dribbles down Puja’s face, in between the mounds of her breasts, and navigates the hillock of her belly. She feels a wet cloth on her face, smelling of vinegar—the wise woman kindly trying to help, but she only ends up spreading the sweat unevenly all over Puja’s face.

The room is rent with screams—hers, she realises, when she tries to garner saliva from her fuzzy, spent throat.

The torpid air is thick with scents—with rust, pain, sweat, anxiety, and bone-deep weariness—a musty, throbbing aroma that she will forever associate with this . . . afternoon? evening? night?

Dappled shadows hold court on the dank, peeling wall opposite. Pinky red, lengthening to black. Dusk. The smell of warm hay and fresh cow dung. Conjee burbling on the hearth in the far corner. The fraying mat she is lying on soaked through with perspiration and agony. Rotting beams overhead. Marrows dangling.

‘Push. Push. Push.’ The wise woman’s gravelly voice.

I can’t,
she thinks, but she cannot say it out loud. She doesn’t have the strength. She wants to sleep. Out of nowhere, behind heavy eyelids, Gopi’s face teasing, tantalising.

No, don’t think about him. He is the reason you are here.

Then, her father’s face intruding into her thoughts. Beloved. Pale. Fear-embellished. Hovering.

‘Push, Puja.’

‘Have you forgiven me, Da?’

‘Don’t call me Da. You are not my daughter.’ His face distorted with anger, his love turning to hate in the time it takes for a heart to beat, for a life to be created, his eyes muddy with the shame she has wrought upon them.

‘Push Puja, Please.’ Her mother’s anguished face. Morphing into Sharda’s.

‘How could you do it, Puja? Steal my betrothed?’

‘I am sorry Sharda. So sorry.’

‘Shame on you.’ All three of them, beloved, turning away. ‘You will not see us again.’

No, No, No. I will be good. A dutiful daughter like Sharda. I promise. Please come back. Please.

‘Come on, almost there now. One last big push.’ The wise woman’s voice bringing her back to this blood-splattered, anguish-swathed, fear-cramped room.

Almost there.

She pushes. And pushes.

The scorching pulse of all-consuming pain. The raging agony.

Then . . . a squelch. A scream. A bellow. A wail. A mewling.

‘Oh Puja!’ The wise woman’s voice—overwhelmed, awed, festive as glass bangles clinking on a bride’s hand—‘A perfect, healthy baby.’

Marrows dance, sunny yellow, joyful.

When she comes to, the wise woman is fondling a wispy haired bundle and looking at Puja with eyes that radiate kindness. She holds the bundle out to Puja.

A small, perfect face framed by tufts of coiled black hair. Tiny hands curled into fists. A flawless little body shaped like a question mark. Minuscule legs wiggling, drawing semi circles in the air.

Puja is consumed by the need to hold her baby close and not let go. She doesn’t reach for her child.

‘My parents . . . ’

The wise woman’s eyes cloud over. ‘I am sorry.’

‘Both of them?’

The wise woman nods.

It is my fault,
Puj thinks.
Everything, my fault.

‘Sharda?’

‘She was spared,’ the wise woman whispers.

The tart tang of blood and fluids and decay and drains. The briny, raw taste of loss.

I dared to dream of a happy ending, a new beginning. I hoped this baby could seal us together, mend the fracture in our family unit caused by my waywardness. I sat at the top of that hill and spun fairy tales. I pictured Da’s forgiving smile, Ma’s welcoming arms. And all the while God was planning his revenge, his punishment for my sins.

‘I could not make my peace,’ Puja whispers.

‘They loved you, child.’

‘Did they?’

‘Until the last.’

Why can’t she believe the wise woman? Why does her sore heart tell her otherwise?

‘Your child needs you. Here.’ Once more, the wise woman holds Puja’s child out to her.

Once more, Puja breathes in her baby, the perfection she has created in her imperfect body, her tainted person bringing forth this unblemished child.

‘No.’ She will not hold her baby. If she does, she will not be able to let go.

She looks, once more, at this child whose birth called for the sacrifice of her parents, committing every single minute detail of it to memory.

Did you spare me or deny me, child, by deciding to enter the world at the very moment my parents were leaving it, so I was left without one final glimpse of the parents who abandoned me as easily as an out-of-favour toy, a guest who outstayed her welcome?

I thought it would be me who would leave them, running away from the confines of the village that had always bound me too tight, suffocating me. Now, my last vision of them will be my father refusing to look at me, his words, ‘You are not my daughter,’ his hand lifting the stick and rupturing our relationship like the skin of my back.

My mother pleading with her husband and yet not daring to go against him to stand up for her daughter.

My sister crushed.

Is your soul, child, an intermingling of my mother and father’s? Did they have to die for you to live?

Have I chosen you over them?

Everything and everyone she loves, she loses. Her family. Gopi.

She is immoral, wicked. Her family, who knew her best and loved her once upon a time, thought so, which is why they exorcised her from their lives.

She is unlovable, cursed, unworthy.

She aches to hold her child close, protect it from the vicissitudes of a capricious world. But what this baby really needs is protection from
her
, its mother.

This baby is unspoiled, faultless. How can she bear to destroy that purity, taint her child with the filthy brush of her sins, her innumerable imperfections?

This wonderful being deserves so much better, someone who will preserve its innocence, someone who will lead by example. Someone who will be a
good
parent.

She destroys everything good in her life: her parents’ adoration; her relationship with Sharda.

She does not want to destroy this baby whom she loves more than she has ever loved anything or anybody else, even her own self.

My darling child, you merit the right to a wonderful life and I can’t promise you that. I ventured to think I could, but God asked me how I dared. He showed me the folly of my hopes for a future with you in it by taking away my parents. Instead of the possibility of forgiveness and the expectation of reunion with them, I now have only the burden of their thwarted dreams, their hurt and their anger, the reverberations of the disgrace I wrought upon them.

If I keep you as I yearn to, against God’s wishes, I will ruin you as I have ruined myself. And I love you too much to subject you to that, my precious.

Love.

It chokes the life out of one, child.

I love and I lose—

Ma, Da, Sharda, Gopi.

You.

Puja shuts her eyes tight and turns away from her child.

KUSHI

THE VULNERABLE FRAILTY OF A FLEETING LIFE

I read my mother’s letters to
her
mother, pleas really, for her mother to intercede. To come back from the dead and help her. To guide her. To comfort her. To help her bring up her daughter right.

I cry along with Ma when I find out how her parents died.

I think, how much bad luck can a person endure? To have her parents die in a fire and years later her husband too. How devastated she must have been, how broken, when she found out Da had succumbed to flames as well.

And yet, she hid her pain from me, allowing me leeway to express mine, imparting strength so I could begin to heal.

Ma, I admire you so.

I hear a man curse richly and profusely as he navigates the slippery, wet corridors of this hospital overflowing with people, the sickly wearing expressions of resignation, suffering set into the hollows of their faces as they await their turn to be seen by harassed doctors.

I think of how, all through my life so far, Ma has always been with me, offering comfort and encouragement, supporting me through my every decision, tiding me through every dip and furrow.

All that I am is thanks to my mother. I would be lost without her.

I read on, despite tasting salt and seeing splotches speckling the yellowing pages bejewelled with my mother’s beautiful handwriting, the faded blue ink tinted mauve.

Two nurses argue about the dosage of pills allowed a patient right in front of his bed and he looks from one to the other agog, happy to go with the winner. Their voices escalate to screeches, sounding like a company of parrots screaming from amongst the branches of banyan trees, and the few patients who are medicated enough to sleep through the perpetual noise and chaos in this bustling microcosm groan and grumble as they toss in their beds.

I stop reading for a while after my mother promises her mother on her deathbed to look out for Puja and bring her home, to assimilate everything I have learnt.

‘Sister,’ a weak voice calls from one of the other beds. ‘Please, Sister . . . ’

It serves to stop the nurses quarrelling over pill dosage and they rush back to what they were doing before this argument put paid to their busyness, leaving the patient over whose medicine intake they were disagreeing with no pills at all. He calls, ‘Sister, my pills . . .’ but they are gone.

I wonder how any patients in these poky, dirty wards ever get better with the relentless din, the exposure to more infections, the echoes of distress drifting on the dense, germ-laden, somnolent air flavoured with misery and hurt, linctus and the vulnerable frailty of fleeting life.

Why didn’t Ma honour the deathbed promise she made to her mother and find Puja?

Or did she? So why are she and Puja still estranged? What happened?

SHARDA—AFTER

EMBERS AND EARTH AND DAMP

Dearest Ma,

I go to find Puja, the morning following the fire, climbing the hill to Nilamma’s house.

But the hut is deserted, forlorn looking, the front door left ajar and creaking on worn hinges. There are clothes billowing on a clothes line, soaked in the rain, which hasn’t let up since the previous day. I squeeze the water out of them and take them inside, holding Puja’s churidars (originally mine) close, trying to breathe in her scent. But all I can smell is the rain, imprinted with the memory of the fire: embers and earth and damp.

The evening after the fire, all the dead are burned together (again, although this time they cannot feel it), you and Da among them.

I wear white, my sari swelling in anguish, curling in the rain.

‘The Goddess of Rain wasn’t satisfied with milk and produce, she wanted human sacrifice,’ the mourners say, flicking their gaze heavenward and wiping their eyes.

‘Rubbish. This deluge is because the Gods are mourning the devastation, the senseless loss of precious lives, right along with us,’ the matrons aver.

The village is half the size now, diminished, defeated. Muslims and Hindus comfort each other. There is a scarlet, smouldering sensation of loss, of innocence wrenched from even the smallest child. The hiss of a struck match resounds in the survivors’ ears.

I imagine maroon as the colour of sorrow. A deep, deathly maroon, the exact shade of viscous, clotted blood, exuding the dusky-rose scent of regret, a smoky odour that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

The moist wood that fuels your and Da’s pyre, hisses and spits, the flames radiating bittersweet amber longing—the ache for more time together— and leaving a scorched taste in my mouth. It oozes
the grey aroma of wet ash and precious instants lost to the quirks of fallible memory. I stand and I grieve and I promise you, Ma, that the first thing I am going to do after is to find Puja.

After your cremation, I walk down the fields to our hut, thinking to change from my wet clothes before I go looking for Puja again. My steps drag with loneliness and grief, as I near the two-room cottage that feels empty and too large without you and Da and Puja. It is besieged by memories, pickled by grief and strewn with lingering tendrils of happier times.

As I am almost upon the hut, a plaintive, mewling sound, in high contrast to the dog’s howl and skitter of rain, startles me. Has Janakiamma’s cat had her kittens in the field somewhere?