Of Marriageable Age (39 page)

She remembered all she'd heard, all she'd seen, but some dreams were dreams and some were true and it was impossible to sift the truth from the dreams. She looked around. A double room, the wooden walls painted in a fresh light lime, apricot-and-lime patterned curtains fluttering at the open window. Outside, a kiskadee called. There was that fresh scintillating feeling of early morning.

T
HE BED
next to hers was empty. A smell of antiseptic and sterility, of roses and fresh sheets and sea-breeze, of lightness and air and returning health. Her body contained pains in deep places but warm strength flowed through her, and her mind was alert as never before. Truth and dreams clicked together or fell apart. It was so vivid all she needed was her own sharp logic to piece together truth and discard dreams, and the truth was sharp and clear and full of pain.

She remembered.

Looking around she saw a button on the end of a cord. She pressed it. A white-clad woman came bustling in, an Indian nurse with her hair tucked neatly into her cap, smiling with the sisterly affection of having known Saroj longer than
she
knew
her.

'So, Miss Roy, you're back with us! How are you feeling?'

'Good, thanks. Have I had the operation?'

'Of course!' Her voice rose cheerfully on the second word. 'It all went fine, darling.'

'And the blood transfusion?'

'Yes, of course, of course! Everything's over! Now you can start to get better! Do you want to go to the toilet? Do you need help?'

'No, thanks, I'm fine... where...?'

'Just outside, the next door on the right!'

When Saroj returned the nurse was changing her sheets. She sat on the wooden chair in the corner and watched silently. On the night table was a vase with fresh ferns and roses, roses from Ma's garden. The nurse spoke:

'You can get washed in the basin over there, or you can have a shower if you like. Do you need help? I must say, you slept like a baby; it's already ten o'clock! Your mother was here early this morning, she brought you some flowers and some fruit. She'll be back later.'

'When can I go home?'

'Well, actually, you'll have to talk to the doctor about that, but it won't be long now; he'll be along in a while to have a look at you, there, now you have a nice fresh bed ... Shall I bring you some magazines?'

‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

The nurse looked at her watch. 'So, I have to go now, see you later!'

'Sister .. .' Saroj stood up, raised her voice to call her back, but she was gone and the door clicked discreetly into place behind her. Saroj walked over to her bed, picked up the vase, inspected it from all angles, gathering the determination to do what she'd just sworn. Empty out the water, then into the wastebasket with the roses.
Come on, don't be a coward, just do it.

Ma'll be back soon. It won't be long. What do I say to her? Shall I confront her? Pretend? Bide my time? Play-act? If she can play-act, why can't I? If she can tell a lie, live a lie, sustain a lie for a daughter's lifetime, why can't I live that lie for a while, just a little while longer, just as long as it takes to throw all her lies back in her face, and grab my freedom, what's left of it?

Lies! All lies! A lifetime of lies! Dirty, filthy lies! Trixie was right! I must have suspected the truth... Yes, she always suspected that Ma had a secret. A secret lover! And everything else was a lie!

Please let this be very discreet... she should never find out… my husband must not know…

Oh yes, she understood now. She understood everything. Ma's stealth, her slipping from the house, her serenity in the midst of a disastrous marriage. Ma had been playing a part. Playing the sweet, chaste, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth innocent angel, the saint, holier-than-thou. All Saroj's life. Play-acting. The docile, silent wife. The temple-going chaste saint. The Hindu Madonna.

Purity is the highest virtue, Ma had told her children. Purity of thought. Your body is a temple; care for it. She had drummed it into them when they were too small even to know the meaning of the words. Take care of your mind, and where you let it dwell; for where your thoughts go, that is what you become.

And all the while... this! This
lie!
Ma has a lover!
Adultery!
The hypocrisy of it!

Ma, of all people!
Ma!
But, well, yes, Ma. Of course.

All at once Ma's silent way of sliding around corners, up staircases, entering rooms, took on a dark, threatening, sinister connotation. Sneaking about, slinking out of the house when Baba was absent, to meet her lover in some dark room somewhere. Saroj remembered other words of Ma's, words that now took on a dire significance.

Women must be quiet, and secretive, and cunning.

Ma, slinking off to the Purushottama Temple. But not actually being there.

She never stays here for very long.

And it's not over. It's still going on!

Ma
still
has a lover. She meets him almost every day. She's had a lover for at least sixteen years,
and I am that man's daughter!
Ma has a secret life. Who is this man, who sired me? Where is he? Obviously, he knows of me...

I can bring somebody with the matching blood…

And, worse than all that, worse than her hypocrisy, letting Baba ruin her life! Baba, a stranger to Saroj, no relation whatsoever, no blood, nothing... The most distant stranger, yet he had been allowed the intimacy and the rights, the privileges of a father.

Baba is not my father. He never was!
And Ma had let him do this to her! Oh, cruel, cruel, Ma! Too lazy to fight, too passive to act, too cowardly to admit that I am not his daughter. Too fainthearted to leave Baba and live another life with the man she loved, with the daughter of that union!

Saroj's initial amazement and disbelief gave way to a fury so wild she almost wrecked the room.

Fury at Ma. At Baba.

Her fury lent her strength. All physical discomfort fled. She paced the room in wrath. She picked up the vase and the roses and could not bear their stench, the stench of Ma's betrayal. She poured away the water and threw the roses into the wastebasket, got the better of herself and grabbed them again, pricked her finger on a thorn, shoved them back into the vase, plonked the vase, without water, on to the bedside table of the other bed, pulled viciously at the sheets and got into bed before she caused more damage.

There she sat, sucking her bleeding finger and brooding, every cell of her being a boiling cauldron of wrath, counting off every last one of Baba's crimes against her since the day she could see them as crimes, her wrath gathering momentum, ready to unload on the first human being who dared to cross her path, who dared to open that door and walk in. She prayed it could be Ma. Pray! No! She'd never pray again. It was nothing but a tremendous lie — her whole life, a lie! Ma, who should be her protector, had in fact delivered her into Baba's hands! She had given Saroj to Baba, without need!

She gave me to him like a lamb to be slaughtered! This thought was the last straw. The world so lovingly built by Ma —
lovingly! Ha!
— crashed down around her, as irreparably shattered as a fragile eggshell under a ruthless foot. Everything she had ever believed, and everything she had
not
believed but accepted anyway because of her trust in Ma, was, in the opening of the eye of knowledge, destroyed, in shambles.

She couldn't just lie there doing nothing. She got up again, walked to the window, looked out across the emerald green of the parade ground. The mounted police were doing some sort of an exercise on the green, eight horses circling a mounted sergeant shouting out his commands. The policemen on the horses' backs looked so smart in their navy blue uniforms. Straight-backed in the saddle, they calmly trotted their circles, now turning, now stopping and saluting, now forking off to meet in pairs, riding away in diagonals, returning, stopping again, backing three paces. Now they were all walking towards the sergeant in two rows of four, these again forking away and meeting in one row of eight, walking towards the sergeant, stopping, saluting. Without Saroj realising it the horses and their riders effectively drew her attention and held it fixed. Watching them brought a calmness to her mind, and the violent emotions that had waged their war within her somehow settled into a new mode.

Thoughts began to tick through her mind in methodical, cold alignment, like marching soldiers, like horses in training, obedient, under her command.

Somewhere from the middle of police headquarters on the far side of the parade ground the sound of a bugler practicing the
reveille
drifted across, sometimes just two faltering notes, then three, repeated over and over again. A little bird flapped its wings, learning to fly.

I must leave home. I will never, ever, return to Ma and Baba.
Saroj swore this with a vengeance so cold in its conviction that the pores rose on her arms despite the warmth of the mid-morning sunshine, golden on her skin and filling the room with light. But not her heart. That was dark.
I will go.
Go now, before the doctor comes, before Ma comes, before anything happens to stop this slow methodical march of thoughts, this steady, unflinching resolve
. I will never live with them under the same roof again.

She glanced around the room to see what she would take: nothing, just slip out of her nightdress and into her own clothes and shoes. This she did, and then she walked down the stairs — nobody seemed to notice — and out into the sunshine.

32

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

SAVITRI

Somewhere in rural Madras State, 1938

L
ET ME KEEP THIS CHILD
. Let it live, and let it be a boy!
Savitri stooped on the steps down to the Parvati Tank and paused to send this prayer up to the Lord. Oh, let this child live! The cry from Savitri's heart was so anguished that surely every living thing in the universe must hear, and nod and smile to acknowledge it!

But no answer came. The farmer ploughing the peanut field next to the Parvati Tank walked stolidly on, step by step behind the pair of oxen, holding the wooden plough that drove deep furrows into the red earth. Up and down, up and down the field. Indifferent. What a little thing was Savitri's prayer. Who would ever listen?

She lifted Ayyar's lungi from the water and wrung it into a thick rope to beat against the stone, and spoke to the baby inside her. She begged it to stay, she begged the Lord to bless it, to keep it safe within her body, but most of all,
to keep it safe once it was out,
to hold His hand above it. If she could only have a child there would be something to live for!
And ... let it be a boy, dear Lord, oh let it be a boy!

For if it were a girl something might happen again, like with the first two. Accidents both, but nevertheless…

T
HE FIRST TWO
years Savitri's body had refused to conceive, as if privately mourning for David, as if refusing to bear any other fruit but his. Ayyar's beatings had started then. They stopped when at last, as if to ward off the beatings, she finally was with child; and started again when the first little girl was born.

S
HE WAS NAMED
A
MRITA
, and had lived one day. Savitri had left the baby sleeping safely in the depths of a hammock made of a sari hanging across the room. She had gone out to fetch water from the well before dawn, as always, leaving her husband still asleep in the little room which was their sleeping quarters in the station-master's house. When she got back she found that one end of the sari had mysteriously loosened from the rafter it had been tied to, and slipped to the ground. The baby had fallen on its head and it was dead.

Ayyar was still asleep, and had noticed nothing. He had wept and pulled at his hair when she woke him, but Amrita, whose name meant
nectar of immortality
, could not be brought back to life.

The second little girl, named Shanthi, lived six months. Then she took ill and died. The doctor said it was from rat poison. Rat poison! Savitri had no rat poison in the house. But her mother-in-law did, and she often went to see her mother-in-law, who lived with two younger sons and their wives two blocks away, and maybe the rat-poison had been on the floor when she had let the baby down to crawl? No-one knew, and Shanthi, whose name meant
peace
, was dead.

'This time it will be a son,' Ayyar said when she was with child a third time. 'Certainly it will be a son. The chances are high that this will be a boy. Take heart, wife. He will bring great joy to your heart.'

The chances were indeed high. Ayyar had five children already, four of them girls, three of them married. His two brothers had four daughters between them, and no son. So the chances were high that this time, it would be a boy. After so many girls in one family, it had to be a boy!

'My mother's heart is yearning to hold a grandson in her arms!' said Ayyar. 'Twenty years since my first child was born, that is too long for a grandmother to wait! I have had to give so much dowry for those daughters. This last girl must be married soon but we have no more funds for dowry. Let us thank the Lord for his kindness in removing your two first daughters. This time he will be kind enough to grant a son. You will see.'

A
ND SO
S
AVITRI
hoped this would be a son. Then it would live. She could not bear to lose a third daughter.

But even if she had a daughter who lived, she would have little joy. What can I give a daughter? she said to herself. Nothing. I would like to give her so much but I cannot. Education, and books, and the love of a man like David. The power of healing. She stopped lashing her husband's wet lungi against the flat stone near the tank where she did her washing, and looked up at the sky and a great silent cry escaped her heart:
Why, oh why!
She held the palms of her hands up before her, and looked at them. Useless, now, except for cooking and washing and fetching water. She often found herself grumbling in this way and quickly pulled herself together.
Do not complain,
she told herself.
It is a waste of time for nothing will change. Go to the place behind the thought-body, and bear it all in silence, for in silence the strength will gather and one day you will be free.