“Our little Shiva has the makings of a fine warrior!” Appa lifted his small daughter from the horse and cradled
her in the safety of his arms. She clung
to his neck, laughing. What fun danger could be! Only seconds before, holding onto the rough
black mane and seeing nothing but the blur of hooves tearing up the earth with
that peculiar, hollow sound, Shiva had convinced herself these were the final
moments of this lifetime. She would gladly
go wherever fate took her, if she could do it on the back of this untamed
creature.
“All the children must learn,” Shiva’s father had explained to
her mother a few days earlier. They were in their jasmine-scented bedroom, which seemed too
small to contain him as he paced the floor, the rug already worn with his
steps. He stopped and lifted his wife's hands, metal-cold with bangles and
rings, and pumped them gently.
"The servants already gossip that our daughter is too
rough. She will be unmarriageable," the wife whimpered, lowering
kohl-heavy lashes over her tears. Squelching her protests with a stern look,
her husband pointed out, “Dacoits wreak mayhem upon the entire area. If our
children can ride a horse and shoot a gun, we may survive these lawless times.”
The wife rolled back her eyes inside her head and swooned
prettily. Such fainting was part of her repertoire of responses, choreographed convincingly. Shiva’s father caught his wife in her fall
and carried her to the bed."The ox pulls to the shore, the buffalo pulls
towards the water," he muttered. On his way out the door, he waved his
daughter, who had been playing just outside, into the room.
For hours, the little girl wouldn’t leave her mother’s side. She
cried and moaned, throwing herself across her mother’s body, refusing to move until
her mother fluttered her eyelashes and awoke. When Amma
finally raised Shiva's little face for blessing, she said,
“It is like using a Brahmaastra weapon on a sparrow,
but do what Appa asks, daughter. Learn to ride the
horse, but let no one outside the family find we have broken this taboo. I cannot find you a suitable boy if you only
do manly things.”
Shiva felt the cracked halves of her world mend, the rules of
the universe bending a little for her sake. Now she would not have to go
against one beloved parent to please the other. On these bright days, the huge
house they shared seemed to float on its acres of land, the river running almost
to the front porch. A herd of water buffalo lumbered lazily in the endless
grounds in back. When Shiva was younger
she would name each of her “pets.” Now,
it seemed more fun to use them for target practice with her brothers and the
cap pistol arsenal.
The brothers had allowed Shiva to use their cap pistols since
she was very little. “Appa says we must not let the big birds eat any grain,” the
eldest boy explained. “So you point the gun at the bird when he flies down on
the sack of grain, and then you - bang! - scare him away! Do you think you are
big enough to try?” Little Shiva just
nodded and, calmly planting her feet in the earth, took aim and fired at a
bird. It rose up and away to thunderous applause from the boys.
“Shiva will be a marksman when she grows up!”
“Maybe she’ll join the dacoits and fight everyone in India!”
Shiva’s eyes grew wide and terrified. She had only meant to save the grain from
harm! Why would that make her brothers
want to turn her into a bandit? She ran
all the way to the house and asked her mother for a story about her own girlhood
with six sisters and no brothers at all.
But by the time the real dacoits came, little Shiva knew
exactly what to do. Surrounding the
house with their wild whoops, the bandits whipped their horses viciously. Shiva
ran from the center of the house into which her petrified mother had dragged
her, and made her way to where the weapons were kept. She put her hands around
a small loaded pistol. She climbed onto
a chair and picked off her first marauder. She saw the bandit’s astonished eyes
as he tumbled from his horse, blinking back the mirage of the child at the
window, the little murderer.
When it was all over, if she had not seen admiration in her
mother’s eyes, all the cheers from the men would have meant nothing. “She has
courage, the moral and the physical.
When she becomes old, the one that is left will make the other still
seem possible,” Shiva heard her mother say, and the words took on the power of
Brahma's pen, rewriting her destiny.
The girl’s fearlessness lengthened and broadened with her bones.
By age thirteen, she was ungovernable by any laws. As free as the animals on
her father’s unspoiled lands, she played her rough games in an endless
childhood, so when she first heard the muffled sounds of matchmaking in the
parlor, Shiva skidded to a stop and eavesdropped. Her parents could not
possibly mean to give her to another family! How could they! How dare they! Did they not realize that a wedding meant they would
all see each other only when the husband’s family allowed it? Surely they would
miss her! Shiva felt her child's heart begin to harden against them, and hoped
for some minor disgrace that might render her unmarriageable and invisible,
something to let her continue playing her brave games.
But the thing we are most afraid of, for which we diligently
prepare, seldom turns out to be what ruins everything. For Shiva, ruination was
a polo game, played with brothers who no longer saw a small asthmatic girl atop
the horse, but a worthy adversary. She
had forced their respect, passed so many tests; all those Herculean labors.
Shiva would dream about it for the rest of her life, that
confusing thrill of being hurtled upside down through the air from the pinnacle
of slick horseflesh, the explosion of bones as she hit the ground. As she lay in bed, mending, she demanded that
horse be shot as soon as she could do it herself." I do not blame it for
throwing me," she said to her mother. "It is the demon inside its
body. It deliberately meant to stomp its hooves into my chest as I lay helpless
on the ground."
“No, child, it is the
asthma that took your balance when you lost your breath,” her mother explained
over and over, but Shiva believed if she could put the blame on the poor dumb
beast, she could get the doctor to take back his prescription.
“No more vigorous
excitement for this girl. Let her keep
to female pursuits inside the house.”
The little man had pushed his spectacles further up his nose, wrinkled with distaste at the wild life Shiva had been
allowed. Shame, shame, he had clucked when he thought he was out of
earshot. He could be counted on to tell
the story to everyone. Drastic measures would soon be taken. It was the death of Shiva's childhood.
After the accident, the doors to the world slammed shut. It seemed that each time Shiva so much as thought of going
outside, there would be another lesson, taught by another silly teacher.
“Classical dance and singing lessons are very good medicine for your asthma,”
cajoled one brother, catching her as she stood at the window, aiming an imaginary
pistol at the approaching teacher.
Shiva knew he missed his playmate, so, hanging onto his sleeve,
said, “It is you who once told that running outside is
best medicine! You could change Appa’s and Amma’s mind about the doctor, if you wanted. I know you could!” But it was no use. The brother peeled her
hand from his arms. "There is neither cotton nor thread, yet weavers are
fighting," he muttered and made a fearsome face at his sister. The only
praise Shiva would earn from then on would be for feminine arts worthy of an
Indian princess. She pretended to bow to her fate.
The bad luck that had come in a trickle now gushed like the
Ganges. Wizened female relatives of possible suitors formed a queque to the parlor of the old stone house. With cunning
eyes, they calculated the immense wealth all around them, and each one seemed
to imagine that Shiva’s mother would drop to her knees, grateful for her
ruffian daughter’s acceptance into a respectable family. But Shiva’s mother was a good negotiator and
would not be swayed by the trickery of some old crone. She would give her daughter away, but not to
just anyone. Shiva had to stifle her giggles from her hiding place behind the
damask curtain as her mother exposed one old woman after another for the greedy
viper she was.
Time wore on and Shiva’s mother became less critical of the
women, more eager to establish a fruitful rapport. One day, Shiva, standing behind her curtain,
listened to the the weariness in her mother's voice
as she made polite replies to the candidate before her. "Your daughter is quite dark, isn't it,
from staying in the sun?" the crone asked, extending one large-knuckled
bejeweled finger at a photograph of Shiva on the mahogany table. She waited the
beat or two it would take her mother to counter with a delicate insult to the
prospective groom's hairline. Her mother sighed deeply and folded her hands in
her lap. She stared at the floor. "She is too old for playing now. We are keeping
her with us inside the home. She studies her singing and classical dance."
Shiva had never heard her mother speak in such a meek voice to a guest.
Terrorized by a possible new life in which she would be captive
made her throat seize up. I can’t
breathe! She threw off the curtain that separated her from the women, and
hurled her small body into her mother’s arms, sure she was about to die.
After a show of retching and tears, the visitor excused
herself, and Shiva felt the air fill her lungs again. The humiliation was a
small price to pay for her parents’ stillborn hopes for her future. When I
am an old maid and they need me to manage their affairs for them, they will be
glad I am still here where I have always been.
All the coughing fits in the universe could not have changed
Shiva’s fate, and deep down she knew it.
Her stubbornness, rude answers to prying questions,
inexplicable memory lapses while singing -- all of these just made her parents
stricter and more unyielding. Her
resistance came to nothing, in the end; her parents didn’t really want her, it
was clear, so Shiva consented to be married to a stranger called Sambashivan. She was
fifteen years old.
Except for the day after the wedding when Shiva ran back home
in tears, demanding to know why her parents had given her to such a barbarian,
the only times she saw her family again were on a feast days and during her
confinements. Her old life had died a violent death and she could not feel the
future.
Now, every morning, when Shiva awoke in her new bed, with the
morning sun pouring giddily in the window, she would capture a moment of
sleepy, stupid happiness before the realization of where she was and whom she
belonged to set in. The little sparrow on Appa’s land must have
felt like this, in the moment the
wild cat’s jaws closed down on it. Everything turns black
and there is no air anywhere. Shiva
emptied herself of expectations, and began to watch her own life as if from a
great distance.
What is the purpose of
marriage? Shiva wondered as she
watched Samba gingerly lower his body onto her. She tried to think back to the
half-glimpsed passion of her own parents. It seemed to have little in common
with this formal act, this bizarre invasion. Sambashivan
seemed to sense her fear and worked to strike a balance between his God-given
right to, and his compassion for, the wife who was still a child. He spoke
little to his bride, beyond the traditional greetings. What does a monkey know of the taste of ginger? she
thought, when awkwardness took hold of him and bit off his tongue.
Soon enough Shiva left
off averting her face at his approach or knuckling her fists by her
thighs. Soon enough, she began to be
interested in the countless ways he could make her sari disappear. One night, she sought his opinion of her, and
when she found it in his eyes, she tenderly touched his cheek.
Even as her nights became bearable, Shiva’s days hardened into
a succession of dreary household chores.
Samba’s blue-eyed mother gloried in the authority she assumed over
Shiva. “I will instruct you in our
proper Brahmin ways, daughter,” she would say, jangling the household keys
which she kept around her waist. “Why
your mother neglected you in training for marriage? A pampered woman is
useless, a stone around my Samba’s neck. Oh, now -- what is the use of crying
when the birds ate the whole farm? Come along, I must teach, for the sake of my
boy.”
Shiva would be forced to swallow her pride and trail the old
woman from room to room, disturbing dust that was never allowed to accumulate. She
learned to cook, clean and submit to her mother-in-law’s will, but of course,
there was no pleasing the old lady.
“Blue-eyed devil,” Shiva would curse under her breath as she polished
the brass urns for the third time in one day.
She made mental bargains with herself.
“If the old woman dares to ask me to do the work of the untouchables,
then I will demand intervention by Samba.”
Battle lines in Shiva’s mind gave her a kind of comfort. The old woman was far too shrewd to step over
the lines and fall into a web of Shiva’s making, however. She knew when to press and when to withdraw,
always with those keys jangling.
Shiva continued to do all that was asked of her. Days passed in
the monotonous glare of the Indian sun and of her mother-in-law’s hard blue
eyes, and when Shiva began to feel nauseated in the mornings, she fancied it
was hatred toward the old woman that lodged in her stomach and was blooming
there. Though one weeps, will the fate written by Brahma be removed? she asked herself. She looked into the big mirror for an
answer, and immediately her heart leapt like a fish on a dock. Hollow-eyed and huge, she knew her means of
escape was at hand. Soon she would go home to her real family. Excitement rose
up inside her, but as she sought her mind for precious memories, she found them
disjointed and flattened, as if they had been run over by a rickshaw.
What I want and what I
can expect are separated by as deep a gulf as this, Shiva warned herself as
she glided back through the waterway that had brought her to her husband’s home
the year before. She trailed her fingers through the wet foam and dreamt dreams
of a perfect, permanent homecoming. Samba could visit her on feast days. His
mother could sleep on the veranda, with the beggars.
The old stone house shone white as a moon rising from the
twilight. At Shiva's approach, the door flung wide and Mother and daughter each
flew to embrace the other. The mother caressed her daughter’s belly as if it
were a separate entity, worthy of her absolute devotion. “Where is Appa?” Shiva asked. Shyly, her father came forward and
gingerly hugged her, careful not to touch her bulge.
It was not the reception Shiva wanted, but she couldn’t have
explained what was lacking. She should be proud that her new status had the
ability to discombobulate her father. She had the means to finally make him
respect and salute her as a grown woman of nearly sixteen years.
The servants eased Shiva into the best chair in the parlor. One
of the maids brought her milky tea, politely as if she were a stranger. This woman used to braid my hair. Suddenly
agitated, Shiva twirled her cup recklessly, and silently complained. Do I not belong here, either? Her eyes welled up with tears that no one
noticed.
Against the backdrop of shared history, parents and daughter made
superficial conversation. When the couple asked, "Are you happy with your
new family?" Shiva felt the stab of abandonment all over again. Educating a daughter is like watering
another family's garden. The old saying brought forth resentments piled on
top of old hurts until the ancient love she had held on to for so long began to
yellow and curl up at the edges like an expired leaf.
Shiva made up her mind then and there that she would never shed
another tear on her family’s account. And later that night, when labor pains
tore her apart, she refused to cry out.
As the light of the new day filled the room where she too had
been born, her infant son was held up to her, a red and wiggling thing. No rush
of love overtook Shiva. She thought her son rather ugly and turned her head
away, saying, “Let me sleep now.”
The females in the household, relations and friends and the
merely curious, rallied around the new mother but every time her mother came in
to spoon-feed her dal and yogurt, Shiva’s muscles
would involuntarily tighten. She wanted
nothing from the woman who had birthed but betrayed her.
When her father came in proudly bearing his new grandson, Shiva
laughed at his sentimental expression, sneered at him right to his face. He did not notice, but bent low over his
girl’s childhood bed and placed his grandson on her belly. “The women tell me they have never seen
anything like it--so many hours of labor and not a teardrop, not a scream. You
have always been my little warrior,” he whispered, pumping her hand.
Shiva was unmoved. She
had made up her mind to be, so that was that.
She looked at the little squirming thing on her body, searching for a
connection. She examined his fingers, the razor-sharp nails; she counted his
toes. He looked like no one she knew, not her relatives, not her husband’s. The
baby could have been anyone.
Every man hath his own planet. The proverb rose into her
consciousness unbidden, and a fierce, searing love tore through her. She fanned
it into mythic proportions within an instant. Her old loves sloughed from her
heart and left it ready to devote to this boy, forever.
Now things must change, Shiva decided. She walked slowly into
her husband’s house, cradling the baby.
“He’s a fine child,” said Samba and carefully scooped the child from his
wife's arm.
“Do you like him, then?” Shiva said, hovering near father and
son. Samba couldn’t smile wide enough. Although she invoked the evil eye under
her breath, to divert the demon from her husband's happiness, she too began to
laugh happily with her small family. The parents set the child between them on
the floor and marveled at his miniature perfection, like new parents
everywhere.
Samba looked at Shiva and said, “I heard you made no fuss. I
hope that means you will want to bear many more children?”
Shiva let out a low whistle that surprised them both. “Perhaps
we can discuss later!” Samba laughed and kissed her hand. Shocked, Shiva pulled her fingers away. It
was the first kiss Samba had given her outside their bedroom. She reddened and stared at the floor until
Samba’s chuckle and cooing noise convinced her he hadn’t really noticed her
reaction. He only had eyes for the baby.
The days fell together, formed their new shape. Each morning
Shiva, intent on her son and on shutting out the part of the world she had no
use for, had a fight on her hands.
“Shiva, Shiva! Where is that lazy
girl?” The mother-in-law would
thump-thump up and down the corridors, flinging open the room doors and forcing
them to yield all secrets. “She is hiding
with that little creature again, isn't it? No excuses, Shiva, I need you to take
the laundry to the river. No, no, the boy will be fine. You just fed him, have you? Look lively girl, do
not make my son ashamed of you!”
By nightfall, the skin under Shiva’s eyes had taken on blue
bags of overwork and resentment. After she served Samba his dinner, she picked
up her son to feed him. “I think he hates me, too,” she said as her little son
fisted his tiny hands against her and cried a long sequence of piercing wails. “My
milk must be sour.” Did I fall from the sky to get stuck in a date palm?
“Amma says such crying is not
natural. Maybe we should call the physician?”
Samba hovered over his wife and son.
Shiva bit her tongue. Of course,
he believes anything his mother says. She burst into tears.
Samba gathered her into his arms until her sobs and her
incoherent ramblings had subsided. “Now
tell me, exactly, what makes you so tired and sad? Are you not happy in your
new life? Is there someone in this household not giving you proper respect?”
Shiva looked into her husband’s face, searching, testing to see
how much truth he could take. Clinging to him with urgent fingers, she said, “I
overheard your mother tell one of the servants a story about a daughter-in-law
who was a mistake for a certain family. The mother lured her into the kitchen
and threw kerosene on her and lit her afire all so her son could get a better
wife with a bigger dowry.” Shiva pushed out of Samba’s embrace, eager to see
how this was affecting him. His sober mouth began to curl, and he suddenly erupted
into great, silly guffaws!
“Better stay away from the kitchen then! Never know how devious
a desperate mother-in-law can be!”
Shiva pushed him roughly, snatched her son to her heart and
began to pace furiously across the floor. Samba was all attention now. In a
low, deadly voice, his wife catalogued every abuse, every insult and slight his
mother had committed against her. “I do
not know how long I can keep silent. I feel myself rise up against her and I’m
afraid of what may happen.” She sank,
dejected and desperate, into the cushions on the floor. Samba crouched down to
embrace his family in the new, protective gesture that Shiva would come to
cherish. “I won’t have you treated
badly,” he said.
Shiva began to believe that when a thing shifts, so do the
things around it. Even though the
blue-eyed mother-in-law could be still seen skulking around doorways, listening
for useful gossip, she was suddenly the most polite woman in the province. Shiva
wondered what Samba had said to her, what he had threatened her with to make
her change into this paragon. She wanted to know the exact words.
Although the old woman would no longer meet the young one’s
eyes, and the young one kept as far from kerosene as possible, calmness fell
softly over all their lives, and one night, Shiva's curiosity got the better of
Shiva. She waited until Samba had eaten
his fill of the curry she had selected for him and served in their thalis. “Thank you
for defending me against your mother,” she said. “I realize it may have been
difficult.”
Samba’s face flushed and he studiously picked at his teeth with
a toothpick. Finally, he said, “I meant
to speak to Amma, but it seems the need is past. You
have had no more complaints, isn’t it?” he asked, reaching for Shiva’s hand.
She quickly reshuffled the elements in her mind. They were on
the same side now, it was clear. Surely if the need arose for intervention,
Samba could find the strength for it.
Still, Shiva felt a foreboding, a distrust open up between them. She would
have to turn away from it for the sake of her marriage and instead, grow eyes
in the back of her head and ears in every pore.
“It seems peaceful now. I assumed you were the one to make it
all come right.” She let him hear the note of bitterness in her voice and was
satisfied to witness his wince as it registered.
In the coming long season, Shiva and Samba would learn to trust
each other, he implicitly, she withholding a small part, trusting more in her
dreams full of premonition and accident.
The non-verbal communication between the spouses became acute, honed
with nighttime visits, encouraged by the lives of their bodies. It was Shiva’s
nature to be both suspicious and superstitious, but she took Samba’s capacity
for joy into herself and came to believe that she was happy
By the time the monsoons came, the couple felt blessed to be
alone inside the house, curtained off from the rest of the world. Shiva would
rise before dawn, look out the window, and be as grateful for the sheets of
slate gray wet and steam pummeling the house as if it had been raining
blossoms. One morning, while she reached for a fresh sari, still clad in her
wet, purified towel, Shiva noticed that Samba was watching her through heavy
lidded eyes. While he feigned the breathing patterns of sleep, she felt the
blush reach right up into the roots of her hair. How dare he make her party to some unclean
act? She stuck out her chin and yanked
the nine yards of cotton around her.
The altar stood in the corner of the adjacent chamber, still shrouded
in the pre-dawn watercolor light. She
lit the incense and Samba groaned theatrically, as if that were the thing that
had wakened from his deep sleep, his sleep
of the just. “Why must you take your devotions so literally?” he demanded.
“Every single morning of your life it is the same--wash, dress, pray, pray, pray!”
Shiva’s skin prickled.
She knew she must be careful, must show respect to her husband, his
awful mother, the gods she couldn’t see!
“You need not complain, husband.
It is time, anyway, for you to prepare yourself and take your son to the
temple, as you promised,” she added in a voice carved from a glacier.
Samba moaned and put a pillow over his head. “He will make a fuss. He will scream and cry. The priests will scare him...”
Shiva tuned her husband out and began chanting. If she waited patiently for her spirit to
quiet inside her and restore her equilibrium, she wouldn’t be tempted to argue
with him. She needed the help of her
gods for that.
Later that morning, Samba drummed his fingers on the table as
he waited for his morning dosa. What is
he thinking now? Shiva wondered, annoyed.
Well, she wouldn’t make it easy for him to back out of his duties. With
her back straight and unyielding, her face a mask, she stood at her husband’s
elbow while he ate, ready to pounce.
He beat her to the punch. “It will not be too hot this
morning,” he began, clearing his throat before he plunged onward. “Since not all of the neighbor ladies have
met my son, why not take him with you when you go to the river? You can display him...” he trailed off
weakly, suddenly unsure of what to say.
Shiva cut him down. “If
you refuse to take your son to the temple, I will be forced to make more
sacrifices to atone! You will find
yourself more and more disturbed by the length of my devotions!” She had snatched up the coffeepot and fixed
her husband with her best intimidating glower.
How could Shiva have known that threatening and humiliating
Samba like this was what his blue-eyed mother had done about the same
subject? Her heart would have gone out
to the man as a young boy, standing stony-faced and still while his mother
kicked him, reaching up with her ringed hands to slap at him. Worthless
buffalo! I have spawned a devil!
Rising slowly to his feet, Samba took each of Shiva’s shoulders
in his hands, and bore a hole into her upturned face with his angry black
eyes. “Never again will you speak on
this.” And he turned away from a stunned
and silent Shiva. Even when he had gone from
the room she found she couldn’t stop shaking.
When she had calmed herself, Shiva bundled a few dirty clothes
together--the servants always did the main household wash--and she hoisted
Mahesh onto her hip. With her bundle on
her head and her child in tow, she stomped along the path to the river, kicking
at the clods of dirt as if she wanted to kill the earth beneath her feet. She thought of smashing a rock into her
husband’s dhoti and laughed bitterly. Oh, I hope those silly women aren’t lounging
around with their brats today.
But there they were, every last one of them, sunning themselves
like lizards on the rocks. Rolling
everyone’s head! Shiva sighed,
nodded vague greetings to the sprawled assembly. She sent Mahesh toddling off
with the other children. Maybe he can spread light today. I cannot.
Shiva waded out to the group of bleached rocks, her sari tucked
up around her legs. She shook out
Samba’s favorite dhoti from her bundle of laundry. She slammed the rock into the cloth as if she
hoped to see blood. Random ropes of hair slipped from her topknot, but she
barely noticed their lashings. Her lips
moved as she argued with herself: I will
never go the Ganges now, not even when my godless husband is in ashes because
his godless son won’t know that it is right to strew the ashes into the holy
river. How can I teach them? Only when her eyes went out of focus did
Shiva notice her own tears. She stood up
in the river, stretched her back and looked into the sky as if searching for an
answer.
“The little one misses his Amma, came
a gentle voice, piecing Shiva’s reverie. A woman held out Mahesh to her, and
she opened her arms with a grateful cry as he spilled into them. The woman hung back a little, not knowing
what more she should do. for this Shiva, about whom so
many stories had circulated. She
wouldn’t have been surprised to see her to come to the riverbank astride a fine
white horse, carrying a rifle.
Back home, Shiva began to pin up her dhotis and chemises on the
clothesline in the courtyard. A crippled nephew of Samba’s sat in the corner,
the only other person in sight.
“Namaste, Mani,” said Shiva. The
boy blushed and looked down self-consciously at his wizened legs splayed before
him. He had been playing with brightly colored stones all day, making endless
variations on a traditional game. It was
his sole occupation and he pursued it more and more agitatedly these days, it
seemed to Shiva.
“Your brother treats poor Mani no better than a common beggar,”
Shiva had complained more than once to Samba. “I have seen the intelligence in
his eyes! It is his legs only are no
good. All else working fine. And as for your mother,
she cannot look at poor Mani without hurrying away from him as if she had seen
a demon.”
“But quite recently I have seen my mother and Mani enjoined in
a great conference, heads together on the veranda bench. She was feeding him
sweets by her own hand!”
Shiva felt a wave of sympathy for her husband then, always
trying to prove some humanity existed in his mother when they each knew better.
“Fools, the lot of them,” she said crossly, remembering. “I live in a viper’s nest!” She looked down
at Mani, and watched him duck her gaze. There’s
something afoot here. Why won’t he talk to me? She reached for her wet sari and carefully
folded it over the clothesline, keeping an eye on the nephew. Lately, she had tried to collect the clues to
the mystery whose presence she felt approaching like a poisonous cloud. She worried that somehow, someday, her
mother-in-law would bring her to her knees.
But how could she trick Mani into helping with all that? The blue-eyed hag had never been a proper
grandmother to little Mahesh, of course, but lately she stomped out of the room
if Mahesh happened into it. She couldn’t bear the mere idea of him, it
seemed. Of course, this cut Samba to the
quick, but how could more bad blood between them possibly benefit his mother?
A clue came to her from a servant girl who had overheard a
conversation, a threat really, made by the old woman to Mani. Shiva had always found waving a rupee or two
under the servants’ noses jogged their memories, and so that’s what she did with
this girl. “I really should not tell,”
the girl sniveled, but Shiva used soft words and money to get the story out of
her. “I had to gather up some clothes
from the line outside,” the servant began tentatively. “I tried to keep quiet
because I saw her crouching over the poor boy, whispering with anger. She held those stones he likes in her
fist. She would not give them back
unless he promised."
“Promised what? Go on, girl...”
The girl gulped and went on, scratching her fingers nervously on her knees.
“‘Do as I ask, or I won’t give the
stones back! And you’ll have nothing at
all to do but rot away in this courtyard!’
Then, poor Mani cried and said ‘I don’t want to’ and I accidentally said
tsk-tsk
aloud. The old water-buffalo heard me
and she jumped up and ran into me, hitting and biting like a madwoman!”
That was all. Not much
to go on, thought Shiva at the time.
Whenever they were in the courtyard Mahesh would huddle close
to Mani, giggling and playing little games with him. Mani would light up at the child’s approach
and delighted in singing him fragments of songs he remembered from his own
clouded childhood, stories and little jokes.
He usually let Mahesh drag one of his crutches around, always trusting
him to bring it back. The boys’ thin, tuneless voices floated to her on wisps
of the hot dry wind, as she pinned up the clothes, her mind opening onto the
vast, curving horizon in the distance.
She had never lost her ability to become one with the landscape, a
creature in camouflage, the most simple of
beings. This hour of the day was always
her favorite time: endless calm, pierced through from time to time with the
buzzing of some insect, made Shiva long for the sea and for the sight of tall,
undulating sheaves of wheat, the heat rising up from the soil.
What mother can’t hear her child crying, even through veils of
dreams? Mahesh’s piercing wail shattered
Shiva’s daydream. Fear shot up the knuckles of her spine. “What is it?” she cried as she stumbled over
fabric dropped onto the ground. “What
have you done to my baby?” she screamed at Mani. She gathered her sobbing child
into her arms.
Mani stammered, “The mother of my father, she told me Mahesh
wanted to know the cobra story. She said
he needed a warning, and if I would not--Auntie, I didn’t want to--she said she
would keep my marbles.”
He held his hands to his face and tried to scuttle backward on
his tailbone to get out of the reach of the furious Shiva. She positioned
herself over him. I could step on him and
he would crush like a crab
“What exactly did you tell my son?” Shiva heard her voice let loose, a growl
bursting through clenched teeth. Mani
was crying now, in great gulping sobs.
“I said the two spots on the cobra’s head are eyes that can see
everything and will have their revenge, if Mahesh is a bad boy.”
The breath emptied out of Shiva then. She backed away from Mani and began to
pace. So this was all the damage the blue-eyed
hag could do? This was the revenge for
Samba’s imagined disloyalty? One
superstition passed on to a baby not yet able to understand? She laughed out loud .
What is that wretch Mani
doing now? The nephew frantically
poked something with his crutch. What is he trying to hide behind that tree? She
covered the ground between them in two steps.
Her mouth twitched at what she saw--a dead cobra next to a wicker
basket. Mani had been trying to hide it inside the basket.
“You evil boy!” exploded Shiva. “You are a replica of your evil
grandmother! Praise Krishna you were
born a cripple, unfit to wreak as much chaos as she!” Shiva grabbed the boy’s
crutch and slammed it against the tree.
She slammed it again and again, until the ancient tree was peeled of its
bark and the crutch reduced to a pile of splinters.
Inside the house, behind the heavy wooden doors that closed her
off from her enemies, Shiva plopped Mahesh on the floor in front of his
toys. Soon he was humming and cooing at
his favorite animals, as if the violence he had just witnessed had no more
substance than a dream. Shiva slid into a chair close to her son and began to
wait for Samba, her eyes on the heavy door.
No smell of curry greeted Samba in the hallway that evening.
Shiva heard his quickened steps, saw him push into their rooms, eyes grown wild
in the space of a few moments. He
searched Shiva’s face for explanations. She told him what had happened in a
quiet, serious tone. She didn’t want to
upset Mahesh again, and she hated to upset Samba, but he saw clearly what must
be done, isn’t it?
I will have to provide
more children to make him forget this loss of family, Shiva thought as she
stuffed their belongings into suitcases and hold-alls. The noises, angry and shrill, echoed
throughout the other rooms of the house. Little Mahesh stood at the closed door
murmuring “Appa? Appa?” at
the sound of his father’s distant, enraged voice.
With the sound of slamming doors and bitter cries still ringing
in their ears, the three of them left the big old house to find their future at
the railway station. They chose their
destination with a child’s game of chance, and the train to Bombay was fetid
and crowded. Shiva, folded in her seat, already felt as if she had been
traveling for days, Samba next to her like a statue, a new mantra going through
her mind: Freedom.
