Amma began to cry. No loud sobs. No scrunching up of features, but a relentless stream of salted defeat.
‘Now don’t start this. All I said is, we can’t bring up Murugesan’s name. But there are other things we can do,’ Sujata Akka said softly. ‘No one knows about this except my husband and he won’t talk about it anymore. You must send her away and have the pregnancy aborted. When she returns, send her back to Vellore. She was talking about the doctors offering to train her. Let her do that training. Arranging a marriage for her is going to be very difficult. No man will be willing to marry a woman who’s lost her virginity and even if we kept it a secret, what if he finds out
later? He’ll forsake her then. But if she has a job, that will replace a husband’s protection.’
… Husband’s protection! The phrase made me cringe. Neither Sujata Akka nor my mother ever had their husbands look out for them. The Chettiar took care of Sujata Akka’s needs. And Amma had to look after herself. The men in their lives had done nothing and yet to them a fulfilled woman was one who was married. Everything else was secondary. But I was so young then that these thoughts were like strands of a cobweb floating through the air. I didn’t know enough to think them through and even if I had, they would have dismissed it as arrogance …
Periamma. My mother’s aunt was old with giant gold earrings that dragged her earlobes down nearly to her shoulders, and a mouth tainted red with her incessant chewing of betel leaves. She had silver hair pulled back in a knot and she wore a white sari the old way, stretched to cover her sagging breasts so that it didn’t matter that she didn’t wear a blouse.
Periamma lived in a little village called Arsikuppam, near Salem. She was a widow and lived alone. Her two sons were soldiers and were stationed in some northern land. After four years of continuous drought, they had to forsake their lands and find another way to earn a living. For young men like them, with only a high school education, the sole recourse was the army, where well-developed muscles and a willingness to toil were enough to secure them a place. Periamma’s daughters were married and lived elsewhere. Amma turned to Periamma because she had no one else to go to. Besides, Periamma always knew what needed to be done.
We travelled together, my mother and I, to Arsikuppam. In hushed tones, Amma explained while I sat with my head hung in embarrassment. Everyone expected me to be
ashamed. I didn’t feel shame; anger, humiliation but not shame …
I saw Periamma sneak glances at me. Once I caught her eyes and I saw sympathy. Or was it pity?
Periamma was capable and strong. She was the mother of many children. Periamma didn’t believe in doctors and hospitals. She would take care of everything, she said. Besides, the outside world was not known for its discretion. A thousand tongues and a million renderings of the same story – that is what happened if one sought the outside world for help.
Amma went back reassured. The boys were alone at home and they would wonder what had happened if Amma stayed away too long. Periamma will deal with it, Amma said.
Periamma did. With slices of golden yellow papaya, and toasted sesame seeds rolled in jaggery syrup ladoos. With green jackfruit cooked and sautéed with mustard and curry leaves. With the sap of a wild plant that grew in clumps. ‘Look at this one,’ Periamma said, pointing to the plant that grew everywhere, in my village and hers, and any odd piece of ‘poromboke’ land. An innocuous-looking thing with fleshy leaves and a star-shaped flower cluster the colour of a faded ink spot.
Periamma snapped the fleshy, rubbery stalk of the plant and a milky fluid oozed out. ‘This will finish off the weevil growing inside you,’ she said.
Every day we waited for the cramps to begin. For hate to drip out of me. For pain to take root and cleanse. Every day we waited. Six weeks later, I was still pregnant.
‘What do we do now?’ Amma asked on her next visit, worry creasing her face into an old woman’s.
‘It will be born dead. No foetus can survive all this and be alive,’ Periamma offered.
‘It’s still alive. That much we know. Maybe we should take her to a clinic and get it aborted there.’
‘Are you mad? Do you want the whole world to know about this?’
‘If the child is born alive, the whole world will know anyway,’ I said, vexed by Periamma’s insistence that we don’t go to a clinic.
‘If the child is born alive, you can leave it with me. I’ll take care of it. It will keep me company in my old age. But trust me, this one won’t be born alive,’ Periamma said, stuffing her mouth with betel leaves and cutting further conversation off.
Amma went back home and I returned to waiting for it to die.
Periamma wasn’t worried when I began to show. Right from the beginning she had made it known that I was an abandoned wife. My husband, she told everyone, had forsaken me for another woman. ‘Which is the truth,’ she said when she saw me grimace. ‘He did forsake you, didn’t he?’
‘This way, no one will think any less of you,’ she added.
‘But can’t we say the same at the hospital,’ I asked. ‘I’m still only four months gone.’
‘We could, but at the hospital, they’ll ask for names and details. Your name. Your husband’s name. Your address. Your next of kin. Do you want to let everyone know who you are? Let me do it my way. No one will be hurt.’ Periamma fanned herself briskly.
The heat ate into our skins and oozed out of our pores. It was May. The fiercest month of the year. The heat parched the earth and stilled the breeze. ‘This summer is the worst I have ever known,’ Periamma said as I sluiced the floors with water, hoping that would cool the rooms. ‘Maybe the heat will accomplish what the others didn’t,’ she said.
A month later, we gave up. The child still lived within me. What next, I wondered.
I pressed my palm on my belly. Go away. Leave me. I don’t want you, I told this child of mine. The creature kicked. My belly rippled gently. Die, die, I prayed.
I delivered a month early. The pains began, two iron fists that crept out of my lower spine and pulled at my hip bones, trying to wrench them apart while a giant foot pressed on my insides, squeezing, pushing, making me bite on my inner cheek to quell the pain … Periamma narrowed her eyes and shook her head knowingly. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be born dead.’
Periamma stood vigil as with a giant heave I thrust it out of me. Through the pain, and the relief of knowing there was to be no more pain, I heard a cry. A lusty wail.
Through a haze, I saw the delight in Periamma’s eyes and knew that she had planned for this to happen. And so all those cures Periamma had wrought to piece my life together had been a kind of sham. The less vicious ones she had administered, and the more powerful ones she had pretended to.
‘Why? Why?’ I cried.
Holding the baby close to her bosom, she said, ‘It didn’t ask to be created, but once it is here, who are we to play God and take its life?’
The sight of one’s own baby; the feeling of holding your own baby in your arms – Periamma thought all of it would make me want the child. But she didn’t know me well enough, nor the power of hate.
‘Put the baby to your breast. Let him suckle. That’s how you’ll bond with the baby even though the umbilicus is severed,’ Periamma said, offering me the child.
I turned away. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I told you I want nothing to do with him. It’s still not too late. Shove a grain of paddy into his throat. Wring his neck. Kill him.’
Periamma gathered the baby to her bosom and stared at me, unable to believe her ears. ‘You are a wicked girl and you don’t deserve to have him,’ she said and walked away.
I stared at the ceiling and felt tears wet the corners of my eyes and trickle into my hair. Why didn’t anyone understand how I felt?
Amma arrived. Amma would be more realistic. I would
tell Amma that we should leave the child with Periarmna. After all, she had offered to keep him with her if it was born alive.
‘Take him with you,’ Periamma said. ‘In time, she will learn to love him. Some day when you are no more and she has no one to call her own in the world, he will be there for her …’
‘Amma, I don’t want him. You should have taken me to a clinic for an abortion. It is all her fault. She was cheating us,’ I said, pointing my finger at Periamma. I heard Amma gasp in shock. No one ever did that to an older person. Point a finger literally or figuratively.
‘She knew that this baby would be born alive, but she let us believe that she had taken care of everything. Let her keep it. Or give it away or do as she pleases. I don’t want it near me.
Nothing of what I said registered with Amma. Periamma knew how to convince her and so they decided to pass the baby off as a relative’s child. An orphan whose parents had died in an accident and for whom no one else could be responsible but Amma.
I watched the women as they petted him. To them, he was a baby to be cherished and cosseted. To them, he was blameless. To them, he was my crutch for tomorrow.
What of now? My life … how could I forget what had happened as he grew before me, a reminder of what my life had turned out to be …
I went back to Vellore. The stand-in maid was found another place and I moved in as if nothing had changed. I waited for the Missies to broach the subject of my training. They didn’t.
The Missies’ lives too had changed. Missy V didn’t look very happy and I sensed a tension between them. Some nights Missy V kept her door locked and Missy K would knock on it softly, calling, ‘Viv, it’s me, Viv, open the door …’
But Missy V either pretended to be asleep or was really sleeping. Missy K would go back to her room and sometimes I would feel her glance at me. Now I knew what it was they sought each other for: loving – mouths, fingers, arching toes, curving tongues …
I thought of how the monster had forced himself on me in the mango orchard and told myself that what these women did was not wrong. Nothing could be worse that what had happened to me. Nothing could be more wrong than a man raping a woman.
I was nineteen years old. My dreams were ashes and the overriding taste in my mouth was bitterness. My eyes were blinkered with self-pity and it showed. In my walk, manner, on my face …
My nights were swamped with the most frightening dreams. Almost every night, I woke up screaming. Missy V gave me some tablets. ‘Take one every night, before you go to sleep,’ she said.
Missy K didn’t approve. ‘You are starting her on something she’s going to need hereafter to sleep well.’
‘Don’t be so sanctimonious,’ Missy V snapped. ‘I know what I’m doing. She needs help. Haven’t you heard her screaming in her sleep every night? Do you think that’s normal?’
‘I’m not denying she needs help. But this,’ Missy K said, pointing to the little white tablets, ‘is not help. This is going to create more trouble than you think.’
I didn’t care what Missy K said or thought. I took one tablet every night and slept as if I were dead. No dreams prodded my mind; nothing touched me. In the mornings when I woke up, my arms and legs felt heavy, as if they were filled with iron rods. My eyelids drooped and lethargy clung to me all day. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Perhaps that was why I failed to notice the signs that all was not well in the household.
Missy V was going back to England and Missy K was
unhappy about it. I heard them quarrel all the time and Missy K would storm out stone-faced while Missy V sat in her room shredding paper.
Periaswamy had disappeared and not even the Missies knew what happened to him. The garden was wild and overgrown and while I waited for him to come back, I weeded and watered and tried to take his place.
‘Missy K, the roses need to be tended,’ I said one day.
She rose from her chair and went into the garden with a pair of garden scissors. And quietly she set about snipping the rose plants till they stood just about six inches high. Then she took a hoe and dug up the bed till all the rose plants lay with their roots exposed and shivering …
‘Kate, what’s wrong with you?’ Missy V screamed from the window.
‘You,’ she said. ‘These were for you. I don’t want them here reminding me of you.’
Missy V turned away from the window. When the rose bed was wrecked beyond redemption, Missy K went back in.
A few months after Missy V left, Missy K called me and said, ‘Mari, I’m leaving Vellore. I’m going away to Bangalore to join a hospital there. Would you like me to find you another place here in Vellore?’
‘Missy K, what about the training in the hospital? I was hoping you would recommend my name for that.’
Missy K looked at the floor and made a complicated gesture with her arms. Oh that, it seemed to say. She sighed, ‘I won’t be able to help you with that. I don’t think you are right for it.’
‘Why? Is it because I’m an unwed mother?’
‘You have changed, Mari. At first when you came here, I thought you would suit the job. You had so much joy in you; a willingness to please. There was a kind of glow that came from you that made me think you would bring light into those dreadful hospital wards. Not any more.
‘A helper’s job is difficult and thankless. You need to be
at peace with yourself to be able to do your job well. More than anything else, you need to have compassion. And you …’ Missy K’s face was pale with the effort of having to speak those hateful words.