Inheritance (4 page)

“But I don’t know how to draw a mandala,” I told the Mystic. It was true—I was terrible at drawing. My trees looked like Africa balanced on a popsicle stick; my birds looked like loosened turbans.

“Mandalas can be drawn by connecting an infinite number of circles to squares,” said the Mystic.

The Mystic lived on King George Street. I had never been there before, forbidden by my grandmother to come within even two blocks of it. It was in a run-down section of town, flanked by government-built housing for the poor, drab buildings made of concrete with a veneer of pee and graffiti. They were full of crying babies and harried mothers. The sidewalk was blanketed by swarms of flies that shifted only slightly as you walked through, resettling lazily. The Mystic lived at the very end of the street, near a vacant lot that served as a common dump site, a home for the homeless.

My grandmother had told me stories about the Mystic, how she could cure snakebite and spider poison, how she could heal gaping wounds and broken legs. She had been honored for her medicinal cures until the doctors in town, or maybe it was the priests, or the bureaucrats, or the mothers, someone, became scared and jealous and declared her mentally unstable, dangerous to the community. She had lived for a time on Queen Victoria Street, where many merchants lived, but they chased her to King George Street, where she continued to practice her art. She could look at your toes and tell your future.

I gave her my birthday money. She dipped a sprig of jasmine in a bowl of water and shook it over my head as she ushered me out.

“Make a different mandala every day,” she repeated, refusing to say more.

Because they had seen me leave the Mystic’s shack, the men who had earlier taunted me or stood in my way to demand money now left me alone. I walked unbothered to Queen Victoria Street, but hardly recognized my surroundings, so concentrated was I on my task. I decided to go to the local library to research mandalas. A man stood on the steps, his arms mere stumps, an empty can around his neck for change. After I dropped some coins in the can, he continued to look at me with huge dark eyes out of a caved-in, grizzly-chinned face. “I can’t help you,” I forced myself to say, “I have to help my grandmother.”

Mandalas, I discovered, are also called cosmograms, and represent the entire world in a small picture. They signify the power of interrelation, of the interdependency of all things, of the separate layers to all life. I learned that the ancient Aztecs had mandalas, and so did the Greeks and the Hebrews, that mandalas could be found in the rose windows of the great cathedrals. I read that in New York City a Tibetan monk had made a mandala out of colored sands, a complex representation of many worlds with intricate designs, and had then brushed the whole thing carefully into a jar and deposited it in a river. It was an act for peace.

The armless man was gone when I came out. I had a chance to look at the library wall. It was a popular place for impassioned writing, and I checked out the new graffiti.
PROMOTE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT
, I read.
ADC OUT OF OFFICE
, and
FREE NELSON MANDELA
, Every day, for two weeks now, someone had scrawled this last message, and every day, for two weeks, someone had white-washed it away. There was nothing else interesting, so I moved on.

My grandmother had given me my first drawing lesson. She drew a large circle, then a small circle right on top of it; adding whiskers and ears, eyes and a tail, she had a cat. My grandmother’s hands were large and wrinkled, ancient-looking hands that could hold an entire bird in either palm. She used to make me rice pancakes for breakfast, spreading the batter into cat shapes. I loved it when my grandmother served me food; the flavor seemed to be imparted from her hands. Now we had a cook to prepare the meals.

My grandmother had lived for three years in Malaysia and knew some words in Cantonese. It was always a marvel to me that she’d lived in a land so far away from home, where people spoke a different language and ate fish with chopsticks all day. Women rode bicycles there with their tunics billowing in the wind, my grandmother said. She had a box of black lacquer, etched with ivory
dragons and flowers. I’d trace the whorls of dragon breath and wish I could see what she had seen.

For my first mandala, I chose blue and green watercolors to paint on pale violet paper. I knew that for the power to work, I’d have to draw truly, without hesitation; I couldn’t sketch first. I made a box and put a circle inside it. I decided to stop there, not wanting to take chances. I left it to dry on my desk, and it seemed to me to be a flag.

My grandmother called me, and I went to press her feet. Her feet had hard, cracked calluses on the soles, from years of labor and walking. They always distressed me, for they looked painful, but she would scoff at my sentiment. “They are evidence of a good life,” she’d say, but I didn’t believe her. I massaged her feet with oil and then braided her hair. As if in irony, ever since her illness, her hair had been growing luxuriantly, winding down her back like a silver rope.

On the second day, I drew concentric circles in orange on yellow paper. It looked like a sun, and I liked the effect. The first mandala had curled up, so I pressed it between two books. I reminded myself to use less water. I cleaned my brushes by dipping them in an old coffee tin and
squeezing out the water with my fingertips. In school, we always used dainty teacups in which the water became muddy with color too fast, and we weren’t allowed to use our fingers. I had nearly failed Drawing and Painting last year. Never mind, I told my grandmother, I do well in everything else and can still go to a good college. The third day, I drew a box, and inside it I placed a diamond. Inside the diamond, I placed another box and inside that, another diamond. I finished with one more box. It looked like a lotus.

That was the day the doctor came to visit, and I painted while he examined my grandmother in the next room. Even though I was ten, he still gave me sucking candy. He smiled at me when he had finished in my grandmother’s room and asked me to get the prescription filled. With my mouth full of lively peppermint, I rode my bike to the pharmacy. On the way I passed the library wall. Underneath
FREE NELSON MANDELA
, the whitewasher, tired and possibly fed up, had written
WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE.
I stood there awhile and realized that with a letter change, Mandela was like the word “mandala.” I wondered if that was significant.

The next day, I drew a square, a diamond, a circle, another diamond, and another circle.

Mrs. Narayan from across the street called me over. She was watering her roses, which were famous all over town for their size and fragrance. She attributed the success of her gardening to a singular devotion to Laxshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity. On her dining-room walls were beautiful life-size murals of the goddess rising from a lotus, showering gold coins from her hands.

Mrs. Narayan and my grandmother had grown up together, neighbors until the time of Mrs. Narayan’s marriage. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Narayan had moved back to town. It was a ritual between our two houses that she sent over two roses for us each morning, one for our family shrine, one for my hair. I disdained her gift, thinking it too old-fashioned to wear flowers in my hair. My mother was the one fond of flowers, not I. My grandmother frowned at this—young girls, she believed, had a duty to adorn themselves.

“How is your grandmother?” asked Mrs. Narayan.

“Fine,” I said, looking at the ground. I will not cry, I told myself, I will not run into her arms. I stood still as she tucked a rose into my hairband.

“Pray to Laxshmi,” she said. “She is our benefactress.”

I wandered over to the library to see the latest development. I was not disappointed. Under the defensive
WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE
, someone had very neatly, in thick black paint, written this:

EVERYONE
is responsible. It is ridiculous to excuse oneself in the face of a crime and a gross injustice. If you accept money from a thief, you participate in the robbery. By refusing to take action on acts of cruelty and prejudice, you condone the injustice. Silence is shame. Silence is the closed eye. Free one prisoner and you free yourself.

I made two more mandalas the next two days. The first one was in gold and blue and featured a box in a circle and another box and circle inside that. It looked like a television screen. The second one was better. I made a box and a circle as before, but this time I put a diamond in it, and then a box and a circle inside that. I painted it in four colors, and it seemed to be as powerful as Shiva’s third eye. He is the Destroyer; he is the Creator, For the first time in a long time, I prayed to the gods to help my grandmother, to stop her pain. I read aloud to her that evening, from Dickens, but she fell asleep before I had gotten very far.

Morning, and my grandmother was still asleep. There was a large lizard on the wall, staring at me with its ugly eyes. Lizards are good, my grandmother said, they eat mosquitoes, they bring good luck. But I didn’t like them; I thought they were creepy. When I was younger, I would shout for my grandmother when I’d seen one, and she
would calmly catch it between the straws of a broom and shake it outdoors. I was painting a mandala that was a dark, velvety purple, the deepest color. I smiled to think that my grandmother would cluck her tongue at the choice: Wear pink, she used to screech at me when I appeared in something dark, wear pink!

Now the lizard was staring at me and I fought an impulse to shout for my grandmother. She needed her rest. Somehow I knew it was important not to be distracted, that I continue to paint steadily. I connected line to circles, connected my grandmother to Mrs. Narayan to the armless man to Nelson Mandela. I would even connect the nasty lizard as well, for it would make my grandmother well. It must make my grandmother well. For how would I live without the shade of my green hill? How would I travel, how would I transgress, how would I troubadour my life away if there was no hill upon which to rest my head?

My grandmother recovered that summer. Yama, the god of death, decided to stay away, and I stopped drawing mandalas.

Five

I loved wandering around in my grandmother’s house, My great-uncle’s room was always cool, with gauzy curtains over the open window. There were no window-panes in Grandmother’s house; insects flew in at will through the bars, and we all slept under mosquito netting. My grandmother had a room but I slept there, as did Jani, for Grandmother preferred the bench in the parlor for sleeping. We had a spare room for guests or to hang the washing in when it rained or on the days my grandmother went madhi—that is, super holy and untouchable until she had gone to temple and come back—her sari was hung by poles on lines high above the ground. The ceilings were twelve feet, and often I sat in this room, gazing at the madhi saris.

The parlor was airy, with plants and wooden
couches and cane chairs. There were carpets on the floor, old and thin with a few bare spots, but comfortable to the feet. There was a gods’ room, filled with images and renderings of Krishna, Laxshmi, Pilayar, and other gods from the pantheon. Fresh flowers were collected daily for the shrine; every morning, my grandmother made fresh designs with rice flour for the prayers. I often sat with her during the prayers, my task being to ring the bell when the oil lamp was passed in front of the gods. My great-uncle practiced Yoga and performed his morning ablutions and rituals even earlier than Grandmother. He’d apply his caste markings with red paste and veebuthi, a sacred powder made from elephant dung. He was a devotee of both Iyer and Iyengar customs, a follower of both Shiva and Vishnu, at least until noon each day.