‘I didn’t do that,’ the neighbour defended herself.
‘You didn’t. What you did was even worse. You hid in a room inside and asked your daughter to tell me that you had gone out to the shops.’
‘It was true. I had gone out to the shops,’ the neighbour pressed.
Sarasa shrugged, unwilling to debate on what had transpired some months ago. Hoping that her silence would sweep away from her doorstep this woman and her vicious curiosity disguised as neighbourly concern.
‘But even so, this?’ the neighbour persisted, letting her distaste show with a curl of the lip, nostrils that tightened and an open-handed comprehensive gesture.
‘If I was younger, I would have sold myself to keep my family fed and clothed. But this is tired flesh. No man has any use for it. And it isn’t as if she is consorting with several males. There is just one man. A regular. And she is happy.’
‘You are disgusting,’ the neighbour spat as she walked
away. ‘And unnatural. What woman would talk of her daughter having a regular?’
By that evening, for the brahmin community of that neighbourhood, the inmates of House 21 had forever ceased to exist.
It was fortunate that they didn’t live in an agraharam, Akhila thought. In the brahmin ghetto where even air is allowed entry only through narrow passages; where vermilion stripes anointing the lime-washed walls of the house exteriors suggest a rigidity of thought and a narrowness of acceptance; where the intricate rice powder kolam on the doorway prevents the arrival of any new thought, and all aberrant behaviour is exorcised by censure and complete isolation.
Often Akhila thought that if some wandering god were to pass that way, he would know an agraharam from the very sight of houses clinging to houses. Like an exotic species of caterpillar with a million red and white legs running into one another, emitting a curiously unique stench of asafoetida and soapnut.
But even though they didn’t live in an agraharam, the brahmin community behaved as though they did. So Sarasa, her whore daughter, her blind son and soon-to-be whore daughters were excommunicated. To Amma, this was a fate worse than death. For what was a brahmin if not accepted by the brahmin world to be one?
‘Look who is here,’ Akhila said under her breath. But Amma refused to rise to the bait. She pretended not to hear her and stared ahead into the horizon, willing the bus to appear and ferry them away before Akhila did something embarrassing like going up to them and beginning a conversation.
‘That is Jaya and her mother standing there,’ Akhila persisted. ‘Don’t you want to talk to Sarasa Mami? She was once your best friend, wasn’t she? Why don’t you? No one will know. We are so far away from home. Or, is it that
you don’t want to have anything to do with a woman who’s reputed to have sold her daughter into prostitution?’
Amma pursed her lips and frowned. ‘Will you be quiet?’
‘Don’t be unkind,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘Who is being unkind?’ Akhila snapped, angered by her mother’s self-righteous tone. ‘Are you accusing me of being unkind? Not me. It’s you and your brahmin cronies who have ostracized that poor woman and her family.’
‘I wish it weren’t so. But when one lives in a society, one has to conform to its expectations. I am not one of those revolutionaries who can stand up to the world. I’m a simple woman. A widow. And I need to belong to the society we live in.’
‘Do you realize it could have been us standing there, Amma?’ Akhila asked softly.
‘I know it could have been us. Which is why I don’t ever say a word against her, no matter how much the others have slandered her.’ And then Amma turned towards Akhila and put her hand on her shoulder. ‘But I had you.’
Akhila felt the heaviness of her hand press down upon her. Amma had her to rescue her from the threat of penury and degradation. Amma had Akhila to replace her husband as the head of the household. Amma had her – Akhila. Akhilandeswari. Mistress of all worlds. Master of none.
What Akhila missed the most was that no one ever called her by her name any more. Her brothers and sister had always called her Akka. Elder Sister. At work, her colleagues called her Madam. All women were Madam and all men Sir. And Amma had taken to addressing her as Ammadi. As though to call Akhila by her name would be an affront to her head-of-the-household status.
So who was Akhilandeswari? Did she exist at all? If she did, what was her identity? Did her heart skip a beat when it saw a mango tree studded with blossoms? Did the feel of rain on her bare skin send a line of goose bumps down her spine? Did she sing? Did she dream? Did she weep for no reason?
Akhila often thought of a Tamil film she had seen some years before. Of a woman like her who was destined to be nothing more than a workhorse. A woman who gave up her life and love for her family.
When the film came to the cinema theatre near her home, Amma and she had gone to see it. Though they had read enough about the film to know what the plot was and the character of the heroine, the film took them both by surprise. Akhila could have been the heroine and her despair Akhila’s. They had watched the film in silence and when the lights came on during the interval, Akhila saw her mother avoid her eyes. That night they didn’t talk much and Amma went to bed early. Akhila couldn’t sleep. She looked at Padma who lay curled into a ball by her side. Padma who was maturing into a woman. Her face had lost its babyish roundness and had begun to hint at what her adult face would look like. If I had a man who loved me madly and wanted to marry me, would I give him up for Padma, Akhila wondered. No, she wouldn’t, she told herself Akhila dismissed the film as silly sentimental sop and turned on her side. In those days, she was still young enough to think that this would not be the pattern of the rest of her life. One day, she too would have a home and family of her own.
But ten years later, when Akhila thought of the film, she felt darkness lick at her. Would her life end like the life of the woman in the film?
Akhila never let her mind dwell on these things. To do so would be entering dangerous territory. Instead, on her thirty-fifth birthday, she decided to get herself an education.
She enrolled in the open university for a Bachelor of Arts degree. Akhila chose history as her main subject. There is probably no one more suited to study history than a spinster, she thought. To trace the rise and fall of civilizations. To study the intricacies of what made a certain dynasty behave in a certain manner. To watch the unravelling of life from the sidelines. To read about
monarchs and concubines; wars and heroes; to observe and no more.
It was Katherine Webber who brought an egg into Akhila’s life.
Katherine was the closest thing Akhila had for a friend. Though Akhila had worked in the same income-tax office for more than sixteen years, she still didn’t have any friends there. Each one of them was a colleague she shared her working hours with and no more. It wasn’t as if they didn’t make any overtures but Akhila preferred to keep her distance from them and all that their individual lives revolved around. Akhila was the only unmarried person in that entire office of twenty-four people. And she had nothing in common with them. What would she understand of a father’s anguish when his child was persistently ill? Or a mother’s joy when her child took its first step? The world of the householder was not hers.
From the Gurukula stage of life, she had moved directly to the Vanaprastha. And she wanted no part of someone else’s karnuc flow.
In that office of husbands and wives, Katherine and Akhila were thrown together. Katherine Webber came on a transfer from Bangalore. Her family lived in Madras and she said she had managed to get the transfer with great difficulty. Akhila liked Katherine. She liked Katherine’s calf-length dresses and the way her wispy brown hair framed her face. (The only time Amma saw her, she whispered darkly, ‘Don’t they have oil in her house? If I were her mother, I would oil her hair and comb it back into a nice tight plait. What is her mother thinking of, letting a young unmarried girl walk around with hair flowing down her back and her legs on display for the whole world!’)
Akhila liked the way Katherine talked tirelessly, pausing only to giggle. But most of all, Akhila liked Katherine because she was perhaps the only other person she knew
who was not preoccupied with the four corner stones of the grihasthashrama — husband, baby, home and mother-in-law.
‘Why are you so friendly with that Anglo-Indian girl?’ Sarala, the Upper Division Clerk, murmured one day as they went over a file together.
‘Why? What’s wrong?’ Akhila asked quietly.
‘Nothing is wrong. But you know what they say about Anglo-Indians. They eat beef and their flesh stinks. Both men and women smoke and drink. And they have no moral standards like us Hindus. If you wanted a friend, there are so many other women in this office. All from respectable families like yours,’ Sarala said, pressing her index finger on the wet sponge and flicking a page.
‘Don’t be silly!’ Akhila snapped. ‘Katherine is a good girl and as respectable as you and me. Just because she is not a Hindu doesn’t automatically make her an immoral person.’
Sarala’s mouth twisted into a smirk, ‘One of these days you will find out for yourself.’
Sarala’s warning further cemented their relationship. Katherine and Akhila began to talk. Not the usual prattle that had tempered their earlier conversations. Instead they spoke about what really mattered to them. Katherine told Akhila about her Daddy; her piano teacher Daddy who was drunk on happiness when he was playing the piano and drunk on cheap alcohol at all other times. She told Akhila of her Mummy from whom she inherited her pale skin, brown hair, and a fondness for men with a cleft chin and moustache (Daddy had both). She told Akhila of her brothers and sister, who had escaped the fug compounded of Daddy’s alcohol fumes and Mummy’s unhappiness, to make a life for themselves. And then she told Akhila about Raymond, her boyfriend who had gone away to Melbourne and had forgotten all about her. In some strange way Akhila felt comforted. Here was a companion who knew what it was like to be her – single and lonely.
They shared confidences and lunch. Katherine liked Amma’s cooking – the lemon rice and coconut rice; the idli
and vada; the puri and korma. Akhila in turn enjoyed the bread-butter-jam sandwich that Katherine wrapped separately for her. And then one day Katherine opened her lunch box and brought out an egg.
Akhila had never seen an egg so close before. She watched Katherine tap it on the table and saw a crack run down the shell in zigzag lines. She watched as Katherine removed the fragments of the shell and it seemed to Akhila that it must be the most pleasurable thing anyone could do. Then, like a Russian doll, the shell gave way to yet another layer of white. What lay inside that? What did the inside smell of? What did it feel like to touch?
Akhila felt a great urge to know and before she could help it, she blurted out, ‘Can I have a bite?’
At first, Katherine gaped at her in surprise. Then she said, ‘Sure.’
‘Here, take it,’ she said, passing Akhila the egg.
She took it in her hand gingerly. It felt cold and smooth in her palm. The next time, she would crack the shell herself. But now that she held it in her hand, Akhila felt fear. What would Amma say if she knew? Akhila had never done anything like this before.
‘Eat it with this,’ Katherine said, thrusting a screw of paper with salt in it towards Akhila. Then she giggled. ‘My mother always says that eating an egg without salt is like kissing a man without a moustache.’
‘Really?’
Katherine giggled some more. ‘Oh, I forgot. You have never been kissed.’
Akhila shrugged and bit into the egg. The first bite yielded nothing. Neither taste nor disgust.
‘The white of an egg is tasteless,’ Katherine said at the look of surprise on Akhila’s face.
Then came the hint of yellow. The yolk crumbled in her mouth, coating her tongue, clinging to her palate even as it slid down her throat spreading a pure sensation of delight in its wake.
‘I can see that you like it,’ Katherine said, amused by what a mere egg was doing to Akhila. ‘Maybe I should bring you an egg for lunch every now and then.’
Akhila nodded, still a little overwhelmed by what she had done. She had actually eaten an egg.
For a whole year, Akhila feasted secretly on hard-boiled eggs. In spite of what Katherine’s Mummy believed, she needed neither salt nor pepper. Akhila liked it plain so that she could taste the translucent white of the albumen, the opaque yellow of the yolk, the composite joy of surreptitious pleasures.
Then Katherine’s emigration papers arrived. She was going to Australia where she had fifty-two cousins, nine uncles and twelve aunts, she said. They would take care of her, help her settle down, introduce her to their friends and shape a new life for her there.
Akhila knew that things would never be the same again. She bought Katherine a narrow gold ring set with a pearl as a goodbye present. And Katherine bought her a pair of high-heeled sandals with slender straps and a lipstick. ‘Akhila, you are a very good-looking woman. This is just to make you look smarter. You are only thirty-six years old. So stop pretending you are fifty,’ she said, laying the giftwrapped parcel on Akhila’s table.