Sevenese came into the world at the stroke of midnight. When he was born, the snake charmer was playing his flute, and the sweet, lonely notes that accompanied his birth were almost like an omen for the strange person that he swelled into. The midwife packed him, dark red in a clean towel, and presented him to me. Under his transparent skin his blood pounded through a web of minute green veins. When he opened his eyes, they were dark and strangely alert. I breathed another sigh of relief. He did not look like my stepchildren.
When he was a child Sevenese had a winning smile and a cheeky answer ready on his tongue at all times. With his head of curly hair and mischievous grin, he was irresistible. I was proud of his quick mind in those early days. Even very young, he was already attracted to all things unusual. The snake charmer’s house stood on the curve of the road and pulled him like a magnet. Even after I forbade him that house, he slipped away on the sly and spent hours there, tempted and tantalized by their strange charms and potions. One moment he would be in the backyard, and the next he would have disappeared to that horrible house. There was something missing or unfinished or different inside him that propelled him on, searching, searching, and never finding. Many nights he came running into the kitchen, awakened by morbid dreams that made the hairs on my forearms stand on end. Huge snarling panthers with glowing orange eyes that sprang out of his chest and then turned around and feasted on his face. Once he saw my death. He saw me lying inside a box. On the lids of my closed eyes were coins, and small children he didn’t recognize were walking around me with burning sticks in their hands. Old ladies were singing devotional songs in hoarse voices. Mohini, grown up and with a child on her lap, was crying in a corner. When he dreamed my death, he had never seen a Hindu funeral, yet he described it in such amazing detail that my back chilled. He lies beyond my understanding.
When Anna was two and a half, I walked in from the garden unexpectedly one day and stopped dead in my tracks. She was burrowed deep inside Mui Tsai’s blue-and-white-patterned samfu. I stood astonished, for I had imagined that Mui Tsai had stopped breast-feeding her a long, long time ago. This secret was like a betrayal. I didn’t think it normal for my two-year-old to be still breast-feeding. Anger rose up from the black mud in my stomach. The red-hot resentment made me forget that I had suckled at my mother’s breast till the age of almost seven. Ugly, cruel words gathered in my throat. They were bitter in my mouth. I opened my lips, then suddenly realized that Mui Tsai, unaware of my searing eyes, was staring far into the horizon, silent tears rolling down her grieving cheeks, her anguish such that I had to turn away and bite my tongue. The blood was racing in my veins. She was still my friend. My best friend. I swallowed the poison in my mouth.
Standing behind the kitchen door, I breathed deeply and, in the most normal voice I could manage, called to Anna. She came running with nothing but innocence in her face. There was no betrayal on her part. In my breast I still felt that strangely ugly beast of jealousy stirring. He is a pitiless thing. Why we hold him so close to our hearts, I will never know. He pretends to forgive, but he never does. Unmoved by the wolves he had seen crouched and waiting in her destroyed future, or the black crows of despair circling overhead, he whispered in my ear that she longed to steal my child for her own. I held little Anna close to me. She smacked a wet kiss on my cheek. “Aunty Mui Tsai is here,” she said.
“Oh, good,” I said cheerfully, but from then on I was loath to leave Anna alone with Mui Tsai.
Time burned into the months like lighted joss sticks and left fine white ashes on my body, changing it. I was nearly nineteen. A woman. My hips had broadened with creation, and my breasts were full and tender with milk. My face too was changing. Cheekbones appeared. A new sense of confidence had entered and settled inside my eyes. The children grew quickly, filling the house with laughter. I was happy. It was a good feeling to sit outside in the evening watching them play, the square white cloths that I used as diapers, Lakshmnan’s small shirts, and Mohini’s tiny dresses billowing in the wind. I hugged very close to me the knowledge that I had made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. My children were all beautiful, none of them afflicted with that which my stepchildren bore uncomplainingly.
Mui Tsai cut her long hair to a shoulder-length bob. We were both pregnant again. In those days every unguarded moment in the dark had, in its sticky ending, years of responsibility and pain. Baby Sevenese’s big round eyes watched as Mui Tsai walked with the heavy walk of the condemned.
This time definitely, the master had promised. “He looks sincere this time,” Mui Tsai said. There was nothing I could do or say. Her dull eyes looked at me with a blankness that I had never seen before. She was a small animal, her foot trapped in a mangle. Even in the shadows cast by my oil lamp I saw her silent, pitiful cries glittering in her eyes. Before, we had discussed everything. Even bedroom secrets; nothing was large enough to be a secret between us. Now there was my silent, petty wall, and on the other side she stood woeful, alone and watching. I had my brood of children, and she had her master’s visits and her empty pregnancies.
But we are still friends, I told myself, stubbornly refusing to tear the wall down. When you are young, it is difficult to destroy a wall you have built with the red bricks of selfishness and cemented with gray pride.
After she gave birth, I kept the kerosene lamp burning late into the night and sat by the window listening for her footsteps, for her singsong voice to whisper, “Are you still awake?” Weeks went by, but her round face never appeared at my window. Of course in my heart I knew what had happened. Quite by chance I saw her. I was very pregnant then, but from my veranda I saw her sitting on one of the green stone chairs, her elbows resting on the heavy stone table. Head bent, she was staring at the ground. Her straight hair had fallen forward, hiding her face. Slipping my feet into my slippers, I hurried clumsily to the wall that circled Old Soong’s property. I called out to her, and she turned her head dully. For a moment she simply stared at me. At that moment I felt as if I didn’t know, had never known her. She was a different person. Then she stood up reluctantly and walked over to me.
“What happened?” I asked, although I knew.
“Second Wife has the baby,” she said expressionlessly. “But the master says I can keep the next one. Where is Anna?” she asked, and a trace of emotion came into her face.
“Come and see her. She’s getting very big very quickly.”
“I shall come to visit soon,” she said softly with a small smile. “You had better go before the mistress sees you. Good-bye.”
The curtains at one of the windows twitched and fell back into place. And before I could say good-bye, Mui Tsai had already turned away and was walking back toward the house.
I didn’t worry about Mui Tsai for long because that afternoon word came that my husband had met with an accident. While he was cycling to the bank, a motorbike had crashed into him. I swallowed the news that he had been taken unconscious to the hospital as if it were a solid object. It had the feel of a weathered brown stone in a shrinking riverbed, tasteless and hard but smooth.
The stone was very heavy in my stomach when the children and I took a taxi to the hospital. I was sick with fear. The thought of bringing them up on my own without a breadwinner terrified me. I herded the children into the emergency ward and arranged them on one of the long benches in the waiting room. They squeezed their small bodies between a groaning woman and a man with a terrible case of elephantiasis. I left them staring at the poor man’s hugely bloated leg and walked along a corridor. There I saw Ayah’s still body lying on a narrow trolley pushed up against the corridor wall. I ran toward him, but the closer I got, the more frightened I became. A gash had opened his head like a coconut, and red blood had gurgled out, matting his hair, spilling on his shirt, and pooled under his head. I had never seen so much blood in all my life. In his bloodied face, four of his front teeth, the very ones that I had taken such exception to at our wedding, were gone. A hole blacker than his face gaped at me, but t
he real shock was his leg. The bone had broken clean off and was pushing through his pink flesh. The sight of it made me feel faint and peculiar. I had to grab something to stay upright. The nearest thing was the corridor wall, and I fell back against it heavily. With the wall solid against my back, I called his name, but he was unconscious.
Some male orderlies came rushing along the corridor and they wheeled him through the swinging double doors of the emergency ward. I stood leaning against the wall in a daze. My knees felt weak. The baby inside me kicked, and I felt tears start at the back of my eyes. I looked at the bench, and the children were sitting quietly in a row, staring at me with large, fearful eyes. I smiled at them and walked back to the bench. My knees felt like jelly. They huddled around me.
Lakshmnan put his thin arms around my neck. “Ama, can we go home now?” he whispered in an odd little voice.
“Soon,” I said in a choked voice, hugging his small body so tightly that a whimper slipped past his lips. The children and I waited for hours.
It was night before we left with no news. He was still unconscious. In the taxi the twins looked at me solemnly. Anna fell asleep sucking her thumb, and baby Sevenese blew bubbles. I watched them and felt as if I knew how the widow who threw her sixteen children and then herself into a well had felt. The thought of bringing my children up on my own was terrifying. I stumbled alone in a tunnel, the voices of my children echoing around me.
Listlessly I fed them and put them to bed. I was too shocked to eat, and I sat on my bench, staring out at the stars. “Why me?” I asked again and again. “Why, dear God, do you throw such hardship my way?” That night I waited for Mui Tsai and missed her desperately when she did not come.
When the children awoke the next morning, I fed them and we went back to the hospital. A gray, unconscious figure with a very white bandage lay on a bed. I brought the children home for lunch and, unable to face the trip back to the hospital, sat down and cried. That evening I took the children to the temple. I laid baby Sevenese on the cold floor and stood my children in a row in front of me, and together we prayed. “Please, Ganesha, do not forsake us now. Look at them,” I begged. “They are so innocent and so young. Please give them back their father.”
There was no news the next day. He was still unconscious.
When I looked down at my hands, I saw that someone had lined the glass bangles of worry and fear on them. They caught the light and sparkled from afar. Distracted by their soundless jangle, I did the unthinkable. I stopped eating. I had forgotten about the little person inside me. For four days I starved my blameless baby. On the fifth day I woke up disoriented on my bench, my body aching all over.
I watched my children eat their favorite breakfast of sweet purple root broth. The sight of children eating is heartbreaking when you are frightened and alone. They chewed with their mouths open, purple goo swirling around small pink tongues. More purple dribbled onto Sevenese’s white shirt. I looked at them, so young and so unprotected, and felt sick with fear. Tomorrow I would be nineteen. Tears prickled the back of my eyes and blurred the wounded picture of my children, their virtuous mess, and their tiny teeth. Sometimes a face cried while its owner stood apart and made terrible plans, saw terrible things. That was what happened to me. I saw dying in the distance all the dreams and hopes that I had nurtured so carefully. I watched the flesh come off my dreams. It was a frightening sight. And when I turned my eyes away from the horrible sight, I saw my fate sniggering in a corner, my fleshless dreams imprisoned inside his iron box.
I rushed into the prayer room. At the altar I dipped a shaking finger in the silver bowl of red kum kum and drew such a large, uneven red dot that it nearly covered my entire forehead. “Look, look,” I cried to the picture of Ganesha. “I still have a husband.” He stared back at me calmly. All the gods I had prayed to for as long as I can remember stared back at me with exactly the same inwardly gratified expression they had worn all these years. And all these years I had mistaken that half-smile for gentle munificence. Inside my skull, the violent things bubbled into angry words that appeared on my tongue. “Take him if you must. Make me a widow as a birthday present,” I challenged, my voice incoherent with rage, my hand rubbing away at the red dot on my forehead. “Go on,” I screeched fiercely, “but don’t ever think I will drown my children in a well or lie down and die. I will go on. I will feed them and make something of them. So go on. Take the useless man. Have him if you must.”
The instant my mouth closed on those harsh, ugly words, and I swear this is the truth, someone called my name from outside the house. At the door was a lady that I knew from the temple who worked as a cleaner in the hospital. She had come to tell me that my husband was awake. Muddled, but asking about the children and me.
I gazed at her, mystified. God’s messenger? Then I saw her eyes flick to the red mess on my forehead and remembered that I had not bathed for three days.
“Let me have a quick shower,” I said to her, my heart beating very fast. Hyenas padded over to me bearing celestial flowers in their vicious jaws. God had answered my prayers. He had heard me. I was lightheaded with joy. God was only testing, playing with me as I did with my children.
I poured a bucket of cold water over my head, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water on my weakened body or the fact that I had hardly eaten for five days, but my lungs froze. Refused to take in air. My knees gave way beneath me, and I fell to the wet floor, my hands urgently banging on the door. God’s messenger came running to help me. Mirrored in her eyes was horror, and no wonder. A horrendously pregnant naked woman with blue lips and a twisted expression was writhing on a bathroom floor. Oddly there is no clarity anymore, but I can remember very clearly seeing the edges of the messenger’s lime green sari turning bottle green as it came into contact with water. She pulled me up with some difficulty, panting with the effort. My wet limbs kept sliding out of her small hands. Terrified I was dying, I leaned against the gray walls, gasping like a fish until inexplicably the muscles in my chest loosened and the tight bands of constricting steel relaxed. Small breaths became possible. The messenger covered my body with a towel, and slowly I learned to breathe normally like all God’s children. Suddenly my children, shocked and traumatized, lunged at me sobbing and screaming.
A few days later we brought him home. And a few weeks later he took a rickshaw to work. Things slowly got back to normal except for a slight wheezing in my chest on very cold nights.
Jeyan when he was born was a great shock. He had small dull eyes in a large square face and painfully thin limbs. I kissed him gently on the dewy eyelids of his tiny half-closed eyes and hoped for the best, but I knew even then that he would never amount to much. Life would treat him with the same contempt it had reserved for his poor father. I didn’t know then that I would be the instrument that life would use to torment my own son. In his poor head God had seen fit to release only a few words and a whole lot of spaces in between them. He didn’t speak until he was almost three years old. He moved as he thought—slowly. He reminded me of my stepchildren, whom I had so successfully pushed into the back of my mind. Sometimes it came to me to wonder guiltily if the terrible shock that I experienced in the bathroom when I poured that bucket of cold water on my head or the glass bangles that made me neglect food were responsible for his condition.
Mohini thought him enchanting. She cradled his dark, still body in her fair arms and told him his skin was as beautiful as the blue skin of baby Krishna. He stared at her curiously. He was a watcher. Like a cat he followed you around the room with his eyes. I wondered what went through his head. Unlike my other children, he refused to smile. Tickling him brought forth only short barks of involuntary laughter, but smiling as an art eluded him.
Eight months after Jeyan was born, Mui Tsai had another baby. The tiny infant screamed until he was red in the face when First Wife came to claim him. He was needed as a companion for “her” first child, who in the absence of brothers and siste
rs was becoming too spoiled and unruly for her to control.
January came rolling in, bringing not just its usual monsoon rains but also a new baby. Mrs. Gopal, who was present at the delivery, was very brisk and practical. “Better eat less of expensive shrimp and start saving now for the child’s dowry instead,” she advised, jangling the keys hanging from her petticoat. My poor daughter was the color and texture of bitter chocolate. Even as a baby Lalita was extraordinarily ugly. The gods were getting careless with their gifts. First with Jeyan, and now with this tiny mite, who looked at me through sorrow-filled eyes. Like the fading eyes of a very sad old woman, they looked at me as if saying, “Ah, you poor fool. If only you knew what I know.” It was as if my Lalita already knew then what unhappiness awaited her flat face.
My brood, I decided, was complete. The pot was full. No more unguarded moments in the dark. The months put little flesh on Lalita. Limbs thin to the point of emaciation waved peacefully about her body. She was as quiet as her father. She was never exuberant with her affection, but I think she loved Ayah dearly. In his eyes she saw all that was wrong in her forgiven unconditionally. Notoriously shy and impossible to provoke, she lived in her own fantasy world. She spent hours in the vegetable patch turning over leaves and stones, peering underneath them, and whispering secrets to the invisible things she found there. When she grew up and her invisible friends deserted her, life was very unkind to her but she withstood all that it threw at her without a fight. Nay, without a murmur.
When Jeyan was one and a half, he tired of crawling and wanted to stand, but his legs were too weak to support his own weight. Mother wrote to advise me to dig a hole in the sand and stand him in it. Buried thus, his limbs would slowly grow strong and sturdy. I dug a hole a foot and a half deep just outside the kitchen window, where I could keep an eye on him while I cooked, and lowered him into the hole in the mornings, leaving him there for hours at a time. Often Mohini sat beside him to keep him company. Slowly his limbs improved, and when he could stand on his own two feet, the hole was covered up again.