Outside, the wind rustled in the lime tree, and a playful breeze flew into my room, teased the curls on my temples, and blew softly into my ear. I knew him well, that breeze. He was as blue as the baby god Krishna and as cheeky. Whenever we dived from the highest rock into the waterfalls in the woods behind Ramesh’s house, he always managed to reach the icy cold water first. That’s because he cheats. His feet never touch the dark-green velvet moss on the rocks.
He laughed in my ear. “Come,” his voice tinkled merrily. He tickled my nose and flew out.
I leaned out of the window, craning my neck as far as I could, but to me the shining water and the blue breeze were lost forever. They belonged to a barefoot child, happy in a dirty dress.
Standing there nursing my resentment and frustration, I saw a carriage stop outside our house. Wheels creaked in the dry dust. A heavy woman in a dark blue silk sari and slippers too dainty for her frame heaved herself out. Stepping back into the gloom of my room, I watched her curiously. Her dark eyes roved around our small house and meager compound, nurturing some secret satisfaction. Surprised by her strange expression, I stared at her until I lost sight of her cunning face. She disappeared behind the bougainvillea trees fringing the garden path. Mother’s soft voice inviting her in wafted into my room. I stood pressed to my bedroom door and listened to the stranger’s unexpectedly musical voice. She had a lovely voice, one that belied the sly, small eyes and the thin compressed lips. Presently my mother called out to me to bring in the tea that she had prepared for our visitor. As soon as I stood at the threshold of the front room where Mother received visitors, I felt the stranger’s quick, appraising glance. Once more it seemed to me that she was satisfied by what met her searching eyes. Her lips opened into a warm smile. Truly, if I hadn’t seen the smug, almost victorious look she had thrown at our poor dwelling earlier, I might now have mistaken her for the adoring aunt that Mother smilingly introduced her as. I dropped my glance demurely as I had been instructed to do in the presence of benevolent adults and sharp-eyed diamond buyers.
“Come and sit by me,” Aunty Pani called softly, patting the bench beside her. I noticed that on her forehead was not the red kum kum dot customary for married women but a black dot signifying her unmarried status. I walked carefully toward her lest I should trip in the six yards of beautiful cloth that swirled dangerously around me, humiliate my mother, and amuse this sophisticated stranger.
“What a pretty girl you are!” she exclaimed in her musical voice.
Mutely I looked at her from the corner of my eye and felt a strange, inexplicable revulsion. Her skin was unwrinkled, smooth, and carefully powdered, her hair scented with sweet jasmine, and yet in my enchanted kingdom I imagined her a rat-eating snake woman, oozing like thick tar out of trees and gliding into bedrooms like a silent ribbon. All the while, black and hunting, she flicks out a tongue, long, pink, and cold-blooded. What does she know, the snake woman?
A plump, beringed hand delved into a small beaded handbag and snaked out with a wrapped sweet. Such treats were rare in the village. Not all snake women were poisonous, I decided. She held the morsel out to me. It was a test. I didn’t fail my watching mother. I didn’t snatch. Only when Mother smiled and nodded did I reach out for the precious offering. Our hands touched briefly. Hers were cold and wet. Our glances met and held. She hastily looked away. I had outstared the snake. I was sent back to my room. Once the door had closed behind me, I unwrapped the sweet and ate the snake woman’s bribe. It was delicious.
The stranger didn’t stay long, and soon Mother came into my room. She helped me with the complicated task of getting out of the long swathes of material, folding them, and putting them away carefully.
“Lakshmi, I have accepted a marriage proposal for you,” she said to the folded sari. “A very good proposal. He is of a better caste than we are. Also he lives in that rich land called Malaya.”
I was stunned. I stared at her in disbelief. A marriage proposal that would take me away from my mother? That land of the bird’s-nest thieves, so many thousands of miles away. Tears welled up in my eyes. I had never been parted from my mother.
Never.
Never. Never.
I ran to her, pulled her face down to mine, pressed my lips against her forehead, and cried desperately, “Why can’t I just marry someone who lives in Sangra?”
Her beautiful eyes were wet. Like a pelican that claws at its own breast to feed its young.
“You are a very lucky girl. You will travel with your husband to a land where there is money to be found in the streets. Aunty Pani says that your husband-to-be is very wealthy, and you will live like a queen, just like your grandma did. You won’t have to live like me. He is neither a drunkard nor a gambler like your father.”
“How could you bear to send me away?” I breathed, betrayed.
There was aching love and pain behind her eyes. Life had yet to teach me that a child’s love can never equal a mother’s pain. It is deep and raw, but without it a mother is incomplete.
“I will be so alone without you,” I wailed.
“No, you won’t, because your new husband is a widower, and he has two children, aged nine and ten. So you will have much to keep you busy and plenty of companionship.”
I frowned uncertainly. His children were almost my age. “How old is he?”
“He’s thirty-seven years old,” Mother said briskly, turning me around to release the last hook on my blouse.
I wriggled around to face her. “But Ama, that’s even older than you!”
“That may be, but he will be a good husband for you. Aunty Pani says he owns not one but a few gold watches. He has had plenty of time to amass a huge fortune and is so rich he does not even require a dowry. He is her cousin, so she should know. I made a terrible mistake, and I have ensured that you will not. You shall be more. More than me. I will begin preparing your jewelry box immediately.”
I stared mutely at her. Her mind was made up.
I was doomed.
The five hundred burning oil lamps at my grandmother’s wedding nearly fifty years ago had surprised the awakening sun for five lavish days of merrymaking, but mine was to be a one-day affair. For a whole month wedding preparations kept everybody busy, and despite my earlier misgivings I came around to the idea of a mysterious husband who would treat me like a queen. I was also rather pleased with the idea of lording it over my two new stepchildren. Yes, perhaps it would all be a wonderful adventure. In the gorgeous fantasy I created, Mother came to visit once a month, and I took the boat back perhaps twice or thrice a year. A handsome stranger smiled tenderly and showered me with gifts. I bent my head shyly as a thousand romantic notions partly clothed and blushing ran through my silly teenage head. Of course none of them involved actual sex. No one I knew talked or even knew of such things. The secret process of making babies did not concern me. Curlyheaded, they would turn up when the time was ripe.
The big day arrived. Our little house seemed to sigh and groan with the weight of fat middle-aged ladies whirling about. The aroma of Mother’s famous black curry filled the air. I sat in my little room, right in the middle of the hustle and bustle. A little ball of excitement was growing in my stomach, and when I laid my palms on my cheeks, they were hot, very hot.
“Let’s have a look at you then,” my mother said after the clever hands of Poonama, our next-door neighbor, had twisted, pleated, and neatly pinned down the six yards of my red and gold wedding sari. For a long while Mother simply looked at me with the oddest mixture of sadness and joy, then she dabbed the corners of her swimming eyes and, unable to speak, simply nodded her approval. Efficiently, the lady she had engaged from a different village to do my hair moved forward. I sat on a stool as her quick hands threaded strings of pearls through my hair. She added a wad of coarse false hair, twisting the whole thing into a large round bun low on the nape of my thin neck. It looked like a second head had popped out of the back of my neck, but I could see that Mother seemed pleased with th
e idea of a two-headed daughter, so I said nothing. The lady then produced a little tub that she unscrewed to reveal a dense red paste. She dipped her fat forefinger into the vile-smelling product and applied the sticky grease carefully to my lips. I looked as if I had kissed somebody’s bleeding knee. I stared, fascinated.
“Don’t lick your lips,” she instructed bossily.
I agreed solemnly, but the temptation to wipe off the layer of thick smelly paint persisted until the moment I saw my bridegroom. That was when I forgot not just the annoyance of the blubber on my lips but everything else as well, when time stood still and my childhood fled forever, screaming in horror.
Decked in jewelry, I was escorted into the main hall, where my bridegroom waited on a dais, but as we reached the second row of seated guests I could hold back my curiosity no more. Brazenly I lifted my head and looked up at him. That ball of excitement that had bubbled and bounced so playfully in my stomach shattered. My knees went weak, and my step faltered. Both my smiling escorts simultaneously tightened their grip on my arms. I could hear their disapproving thoughts in my spinning head. What on earth is the matter with the tea-colored girl now?
The matter with the tea-colored girl was that she had seen the bridegroom.
Sitting on the dais awaiting me was the biggest giant of a man I had ever seen, so dark his skin shone like black oil in the night. On his temples, like a bird of prey, rode twin wings of gray. Beneath his broad nose, long yellow teeth jutted forward, making it impossible for him to completely close his mouth.
Fear coursed through my child’s body at the thought of that man as my husband. My silly romantic dream desperately gasped its last breath, and I was suddenly very small, alone, and tearful. From that moment on, love for me became the worm in an apple. Whenever my seeking mouth meets its soft body, I destroy it, and it in turn disgusts me. Panic-stricken, I searched through the blur of watching faces for the one person who could make it better again.
Our eyes met. My mother smiled at me happily, her eyes shining proudly in her poor face. I could never disappoint her. She had wanted this for me. In the face of our abject poverty his wealth had blinded her to everything else. My feet took me ever closer. I refused to hang my head like other shy brides. I stared hard at my new husband-to-be with a mixture of fear and boldness.
I must have been but one-third his size.
He looked up. He had small black eyes. I caught the small black beads in my bold gaze. In them I found an irritating expression of proud possession. I stared unblinking at him. Show no fear, I thought, my stomach in angry knots. I locked him into my favorite game of who could outstare whom. The sound of drums and trumpets faded away, and the watching people became a blur, gray, as my eyes blazed ceaselessly into his. Suddenly I felt a shift in my new husband’s eyes. Surprise swallowed proud possession. He dropped his eyes. How strange. I had defeated the ugly beast. He was the prey, and I the hunter, after all. I had tamed the wild beast with a look. I felt my unexpected triumph rush through my body like a fever.
I looked again at my mother. She was still smiling that same proud, encouraging smile that she had smiled before, before my momentous victory. For her the moment had never been. Only my new husband and I had sensed it. I smiled back at her and, raising my hand slightly, let my middle finger tap my thumb three times, our secret signal, “Everything is grand.” As I reached the decorated dais, my legs folded beneath me on a bed of flowers. Beside me I could feel waves of unfamiliar heat emanating from the body of the beast, but there was nothing to fear. It was tame. It didn’t turn its head to look at me. The rest of the ceremony passed in a blur. He never sought the fierce blaze in my eyes again. And I, I spent the entire ceremony diving tirelessly again and again from the highest rock into the cool waterfall behind Ramesh’s house.
That night I lay very quietly in the dark as he pushed aside my clothes and mounted me clumsily, muffling my cry of pain in his large hand. I remember his hand smelled of cow’s milk.
“Shhh . . . it only hurts the first time,” he consoled.
He was gentle, but my child’s mind reeled in shock. He did to me what the dogs in the streets did . . . until we threw water on them, making them part grudgingly, disgruntled pink bits still distended. I concentrated my thoughts on the clever way he could completely dissolve in the darkness. His long teeth hung in the night without support and his watching eyes glistened wetly without expression like a rat in the dark. Sometimes the gold watch that had impressed Mother so much flashed. I stared into his open, watching eyes until he blinked, and then I stared at his teeth instead. And in this way it was over very quickly.
Sated, he lay back and cuddled me like a bruised child. In his arms I lay as rigid as firewood. I had only known my mother’s soft embrace, and his hardness was unfamiliar. When his breathing turned even and his limbs heavy, I carefully inched out from under his sleeping body and tiptoed to the mirror. I stared at my own tear-streaked, shocked face in confusion. What was it he had just done to me? Had Mother known that he would do that to me? Did Father also violate Mother in this disgusting manner? I felt dirty. Was all the coy secrecy for this? I was disappointed. There was still sticky liquid and blood soiling my thighs, and soreness between my legs.
Outside, in the light of oil lamps, the most dedicated merrymakers still laughed and drank. I found an old sari in the cupboard. My face hooded, I cautiously opened the door and slipped outside. My feet were silent on the cold cement floor, and nobody took notice of my slight figure moving close to the wall, hugging the voiceless shadows. Very quietly I ran out through the back door and was soon standing beside Poonama’s well. It was a deep hole in the earth. I stripped in a mad frenzy and drew a bucketful of glinting black water. As the icy cold cascaded down my body, I began to sob, great racking sobs that made my body heave uncontrollably. I poured black water over my shivering body until it turned numb. And when I had washed all my sobs onto the hungry earth, I dressed my wretched body and made my way back to my husband’s bed.
He lay peacefully asleep. My eyes slid to his gold watch. At least I would live like a queen in Malaya. Perhaps he had a house on the hill so big that our entire house could fit into his kitchen. I was now no longer a child but a woman, and he, my husband. Tentatively I reached out a hand and stroked the broad forehead. Under my fingers his skin was smooth. He didn’t stir. Comforted by my thoughts of a kitchen bigger than our entire house, I curled up into a ball as far away from his large body as I could and fell into an exhausted sleep.
We were to set sail in two days, and there was much to do. I hardly saw my husband. He was the dark shadow that spread its great wings over me at the end of every day, shutting out even that curious, thin ray of light that usually stayed at the bottom of my door to watch me fall asleep.
On the morning of our departure I sat by the back doorstep and watched Mother in her silent world. She was cleaning the stove as she had done every morning for as long as I could remember. But that morning tears dripped off her chin and made round dark patches on her sari blouse. I had always known that I did not love my father, but I did not realize that I loved my mother so deeply it could hurt. There was nothing I could do to change the picture of her all alone in our small house, cooking, sewing, cleaning, and sweeping. I turned away from her and watched the last of the thunderstorm retreat. In the woods, hundreds of frogs joined in song, begging the skies to open once more so the puddles on the earth could become frog-sized swimming pools. I looked around at all that was familiar; the smooth cement floor of our home, the badly built wooden walls, and the old wooden stool where Mother sat and oiled my hair. I felt bereft suddenly. Who would comb my hair? It was almost a ritual. Dashing back tears, I promised myself that I would not forget a single thing about my mother. The smell of her, the taste of the food that came off her work-worn fingers straight into my mouth, her beautiful, sad eyes, and all the precious stories that she stored in the golden box inside her head. I sat for a while imagining my grandfather on his white hors
e, tall and proud, and imagined what he would have made of me. Puny me.
In the yard Nandi, our cow, oblivious and unconcerned with the details of my departure, rolled her eyes mournfully at nothing, and the newly hatched baby chicks were already at ease in the role life required of them. Part of me couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that I was leaving that day, leaving everything I had ever known to sail away with a man who said, “Call me Ayah.”
We arrived at the agreed meeting point in the harbor. I stared mesmerized at the massive liner rising out of the water, gleaming importantly in the sunshine, ready to cross the ocean. Aunty Pani, entrusted with the task of bringing my stepchildren, was late. Creased with worry, Ayah glanced once more at his resplendent watch. Just as the great horns were about to blow, she arrived in her carriage, but minus the children. “They are quite ill and not fit to make the journey. They will stay with me for a few more months,” she announced, cheerfully, to my stunned husband. “When they are better I will bring them to Malaya myself,” she added.
Ayah looked around helplessly like a lost baby elephant. “I can’t leave without them,” he cried desperately.
“You must,” she insisted. “All the arrangements have been made on both sides. They are not seriously ill. No harm will come to them, to stay for a few more weeks with me. You know how fond I am of them. No one could possibly take better care of them.”
For a painful moment my husband stood hesitant, undecided. All around him were watching faces. Aunty Pani’s unrepentant face gloated victory when he finally picked up a small case by my feet and prepared to board. Incredible as it seemed, he was going to leave them. It was obvious to me, as it was to everyone else watching, that the mysterious illness was no more than a ploy of some kind. Why didn’t he insist that someone hurry to her home and get the children? I followed him slowly, not understanding but silent. She was not a good person. I felt it clearly, yet deep inside me flowered a black thought that perhaps it was all for the best. I had seen my stepchildren at the wedding, and they were small copies of their father. They wore sluggish expressions on their ugly faces and moved with irritating slowness. I didn’t like conceding victory to the Pani woman, but my dread of my simpleminded stepchildren was greater.