So Goldina’s mother went to her Hindu relatives by marriage. That baby was young enough that they would have buried him, but they didn’t want anyone to think they had performed Christian or Muslim rituals, so they collected firewood. And that night, they cremated the tiny body by the banks of the Yamuna River. Goldina’s mother seeing her son-in-law, the little boy’s father, too overcome to do it, lit the pyre.
My mother had no son. My father would have lit her pyre for her, if she hadn’t self-cremated. But he would never have allowed my sisters or me to do it.
“So you became Hindu again,” says Damini, inner tension abating.
“For a while,” says Goldina. “Then my mother went to work for a Hindu woman. But when she wasn’t allowed to enter the kitchen, and was beaten for touching a cup of water intended for her mistress, she found a Christian padri who would baptize her again.”
“And then you all became Christian?” says Damini, warming to the swing of the tale.
“Yes, and we still are. My mother arranged my marriage to a Christian.”
And that is how Goldina came to live in Gurkot, downhill, downstream from Damini.
“But explain me this,” says Damini. “Your mother must be very old if she was twenty or so during the Partition. My Mem-saab was in her twenties during Partition. And you—you’re so young. How is this?”
“My mother remarried. I came from her second marriage, that’s how I have two fathers.”
“Your padri performed the marriage of a widow, but he wouldn’t bury a baby who hadn’t been bapt—bapt—”
“Yes. My mother worried that she was Hindu when her husband died, so she must not be allowed to remarry. But the padri told her even Hindu women can remarry. You could, too.”
“I?” says Damini, “Who would arrange such a marriage for me? My mother-in-law? If I had remarried, any chance that my children might inherit these three terrace fields would have gone—pffft, just like that.”
Damini rises and peeks into the birthing room. Kamna looks up, puts her palms together and rests her cheek against them, miming: Leela is resting. Damini takes a feather from the peacock fan she brought Leela, and lights it. When the flame settles to a glow, she props it in an incense holder and returns to her stool.
“Who was with your mother when you were born?” asks Goldina, after a few minutes of gazing at the far peaks against the blue-black sky.
Damini shrugs. “We weren’t saabs who sing Happi Burday each year and tell stories about the day they were born. One of my grandmothers must have been with her. In Punjab the custom was for women to return to their parents’ home for birthing—but we did not speak of such things. I know only there was great sorrow. I was born after four girls, you see. Where is your mother now?”
Goldina says her mother lives in New Delhi. She is seventy and works as a sweeper in the archbishop’s residence. “Is your mother still here or gone?” asks Goldina.
Damini shakes her head. “Khetolai, my birth village, was only two day’s journey from Delhi where I was working for my Mem-saab, so I went to visit my sisters in nearby villages, and then my parents—this was only a few years ago. When I arrived, my mother told me my father had found a second bride to bear him sons. And just a few days later, she went up to the roof—houses there have terraces on the roofs, you know. And she poured kerosene on herself and lit her own funeral pyre. When I found her, her face was black as if with shame—I couldn’t recognize her.”
Every bone and muscle hurts to say it. She should say no more.
“Hai! What a terrible way to die,” says Goldina.
“Mem-saab needed my ears, but I wrote to say there had been an accident and I could not return on time. I tended my mother for a month, till her body released all the ener-jee of her atman. And I knew then, that I killed my mother by taking shape, entering the world when I did. Couldn’t I have waited? Why didn’t I listen to her wishes and die in her womb? Couldn’t I have gone to some other woman and not added to the burdens of a woman who already had four daughters?”
Damini’s eyes feel like hot wet marbles. She can feel her heart pulsing and skipping.
“You didn’t kill her,” says Goldina. “She did it because your father took a second wife.”
Damini should say no more, but she cannot seem to stop. “He would never have needed a second wife if I had come as a boy.”
After a while, Goldina says softly, “She didn’t have you cleaned out of her. Was she a Christian?”
“No,” says Damini. “She was a Hindu.”
“Then she must have wanted you to come.”
Damini doesn’t remember receiving such a feeling from her mother. “She could have had me cleaned out, it is true. She knew the ways, yes.” Another knowing that always travelled inside her as a little girl, was that her mother could have been poisoned or turned out of the house for giving birth to her, and that all of them were grateful for what had not been done to her. And she remembers that helpless feeling that she and her sisters just could not stop needing. They kept growing, eating, taking, learning. Knowing, yet unable to stop needing. Saris, sandals, bangles, nose rings—five schoolings, five dowries, five weddings. Later, after her eldest sister died, only four.
“Tell about your family?” she says.
“My husband, his brothers, cousins, father are stonecutters,” says Goldina. “And Samuel carved the idols for the Ram-Sita temple in Jalawaaz, even though he’s Christian.” She says her husband’s name straight out, with no fear of hurting him or meaning any disrespect. Damini is fascinated and repelled. “But he comes whenever called—you know, wherever dirty work needs to be done. When someone dies, people come and ask him and his brothers to burn or bury the dead, just as their forefathers did. And last night he and his brothers went to clean the cesspit at the Big House. They had to get drunk to stand the stench, but they did it. If you need help here, you tell me—he’ll come.”
“Do you eat beef?” asks Damini.
“Never,” says Goldina. “We have many Hindus in my family and they wouldn’t like it. Now some have become Sikhs and a few of them do eat beef, but my husband and I can’t stomach it. We eat pork from our own pigs. Especially,” a note of virtue strengthens her voice, “on Easter, so no one thinks we’re Muslims. Our pork is so tasty, Hindu men from brahmin families come to eat it.”
“No! Samanya men? Aren’t they vegetarians?”
“Oh, respected men come. At night, of course. They take it to Jalawaaz, to some single man’s home where elders won’t see them eating it. Sometimes I take it to them.”
The Christians of her community have many babies, she says, and Goldina has plenty of work. “Our padri, Father Pashan tells us not to use the topi or any medicines,” she explains, referring to condoms and pills, “but I tell women, after two-three, make your husband wear a topi. Too many children wear out your body.”
“Not before three, surely.” These days, Damini sometimes wishes she had one more son to share the burden of her old age with Suresh.
“We have so many Christians now, Father Pashan is opening up the old chapel at the top of the hill, near the Big House. You’ve seen it—the one that was empty since British-times. He’s paying my husband and his brothers to weed the cemetery. A few gravestones are so old, Samuel will have to recarve them.”
“But still, your padri needs money for the materials.”
“Amanjit Singh-saab has donated money. And given more for a school.”
Ha! Aman’s buying good karma for his next life. He’s afraid he will be reborn as an ant for the way he treated Mem-saab.
“Hindus always came to the top of the Christians’ hill to pray to Golunath-ji for justice,” Goldina says. “Now we Christians will come to the top of the Hindu hill and ask Yeshu if he can find any justice for us?” She raises her head and laughs—a bit too loudly.
“Huh!” says Damini.
Goldina must be watching TV somewhere. Getting ideas, thinking she can joke with her betters,
do chitty-chat, answer-back. It’s okay-okay when no one is here to see, but …
“Father is also reopening the school building for children, and he will have classes so that even women like me can learn to read and write.” Goldina adds, “I only have one book I want to read, maybe his teachers can teach me.”
“The Bible?” says Damini.
“No, I know my Bible by heart. This one.” She pulls a book from the cloth shoulder bag beside her. The title, in Devanagari script, is The Buddha and His Dhamma by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. “I bought it in Nagpur—Samuel and I went for Ambedkar-ji’s birthday celebration after my second daughter was born. So that was fifteen years ago.”
The name Ambedkar is unfamiliar, but the photo on the cover shows a man with spectacles; he must be learned. Goldina kisses the book, puts it back in her bag.
“How many children do you have?”
Goldina looks past Damini at the long arc of icy ridges in the distance. “Seven,” she says eventually. “Five are left. Three girls to marry off. The padri says his teachers can teach them English.”
“English. Vah!” says Damini. Maybe Suresh is right—the good opportunities are going to sweepers, giving them airs. “The church school is closer than the government school. Maybe Mohan can go.” But then he may have to sit beside Goldina’s daughters.
“Your mother will be rewarded for her suffering in her next life,” she assures Goldina as she rises.
“Why should she wait till after death?” says Goldina. “Her reward should come in this life.”
“Be grateful your mother is alive,” says Damini, “and her spirit is not wandering and wandering, like my mother’s.”
Damini pops her head into the men’s quarters. Chunilal’s blanket is over his head, the TV is on and wasting electricity. Scent of rum; Chunilal must have sent Mohan to buy him some this afternoon.
On TV, her son’s spiritual guide Swami Rudransh, is sitting on an ornately carved high-back chair, a saffron shawl drawn under his double chin. He’s on a platform, his rupee-size red bindi moving like a searchlight over a gathering of a Cow Protection Society. Hindus, he is saying very gently and calmly, must protect the cow from slaughter. Muslims, he says, are slaughtering cows and getting rich tanning leather, selling it abroad. He is saying Muck-dun-alds company has been granted permission by the government to come to India. But they will slaughter cows and make their customers eat beef. Shameful, he says, and quotes Mahatma Gandhi, “Because the cow is my mother. The cow is everyone’s mother. They should ask its blessing, never slaughter it.”
Cows should do the kind of labour Leela does every day before any man calls it mother. What can that swami know about mothers? Or cows. If the mahatma or Swami Rudransh don’t want cows slaughtered, will they look after old cows?
The swami sits in lotus, hands in dhyana-mudra position and says about a crore of people—one hundred hundred thousand!—have been helped in his ashrams and centres for Vedic creationism, and another fifty crore more “via media.” His tummy constricts, demonstrating kapalbhati-breathing, which, he says, cures diseases known and unknown, “including wrinkles, knots in the uterus, fibroids, cysts, fistulas, philaria, nicoderma, cholesterol, uric acid, weakness in the gonads, heart blockages, chest pains, diabetes, bronchitis, asthma, cancer, epilepsy, deafness …” If tummy-tucks could cure deafness, wouldn’t Mem-saab have done kapalbhati for a few months and been cured?
This man is now her son’s second father, when no man but Piara Singh should be called Suresh’s father. Maybe the swami connects him to Piara Singh’s ghost and Suresh visits his father as frequently as Damini—an ojha can open himself to the spirit world as easily as any woman. But demons can enter through a medium who cannot set himself aside—she must tell Suresh to be careful.
Mohan is sitting at the foot of his father’s rope-bed, playing with the red-brown stuffed monkey Suresh played with, and Leela before Suresh. The white patch on Lord Hanuman’s tail waves like a bandage, and his black and white button eyes look amazed by this world.
Chunilal’s blanket flips down. Glittering eyes hold Damini’s gaze.
“Mata-ji, if that child is still rolling downhill, it’s your fault.”
“This is now in the hands of the gods,” says Damini. “You should be praying, not watching TV.”
“I am watching a holy man,” says Chunilal. He rises on one elbow with an effort. “And I’m thinking: if it’s a girl, I don’t want to see her.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Whatever is necessary,” he says. He lies down and flips the blanket back over his face.
The swami’s nasal voice fades, letters scroll too fast to read.
Young boys and girls prance across the TV screen and an announcer cries out Jo Chahe Ho Jaye.
“If drinking one bottle of Coke can make you young people think you can make a wish and it will happen,” says Damini, “then drinking a whole bottle of rum will make you believe all your wishes will happen.”
She continues on her way before Chunilal can retort.
The dancing people on TV, Chunilal, Suresh—all same-same.
Inside the birthing chamber, her exhausted daughter is doing her dharma, still groaning.
It’s three in the morning when Leela’s baby emerges. She’s standing, using earth-pull, as the baby uses her as its gateway to the world. The child competed with its mother for twenty hours before Leela gave in and let it slip into the basin of water Damini held between her legs. Any longer, and the baby might have killed her.
Damini is breathing as hard as if she too had given birth. She directs Kamna to tear up an old sari for rags.
Kamna must have noticed Damini’s surprise when she saw the baby responding to larger space, stepping on air as if beginning a new dance. Kamna must have noted the sadness in Damini’s eyes when the child gave its first cry. Still Kamna is quietly efficient, helping Leela sit up, move over, lie down.
Leela covers her face, but Damini can see the glint of tears through the fabric of her sari. Did this child dream, in its soft cocoon, that it would enter the world to such a chorus of sighs, tears and recriminations? Does it see, as it opens its eyes for the first time, that condemned look on Leela’s face?
The baby is slick with blood, sticky with birth-fluid, its head and dark hair so soft against her shoulder. Damini wipes it clean gently, so gently.
No tail.
She wipes and wipes again between its legs, looking for a penis.
None at all.
What terrible deeds must this soul have done in a past life, to now be punished by taking form as a girl. What will she face but suffering that leads to more suffering.
Did this baby girl know, as she grew according to some intricate plan of the gods, that her incredibly complex form is yet inadequate?
Does this girl feel that she has become the node of sorrow, that she is born disabled by her womanhood? Does she know yet, from the sad melody of speech heard in her mother’s belly, just how unwanted she is?
Give her a few days, and she will know.
Damini rubs Leela’s trembling back and shoulders in sympathy. She wipes her daughter’s eyes with her sari.
Damini waits—all wait—in the fluid quiet for the creeper-like cord to stop pulsing and the afterbirth to emerge. When it does, Damini directs Goldina to grasp the cord. Goldina binds it in two places, and cuts between, turning the Lotus almost harmless.
Damini cannot find it in herself to berate old Vijayanthi, who had cautioned against applying more than a thumbnail of the fire plant. She can only berate herself in Punjabi and Hindi, and even in English: Are you or are you not a moron?
Goldina croons as her large dark hands slide over the baby in the basin. She lifts the baby and gives her to Damini. Damini rubs the baby’s butter-soft skin with turmeric paste.
With a kajal pencil, she makes a black dot bindi just above the bridge of the baby’s nose to ward off evil eye and bring her any luck she’s been granted in this life
. She swaddles the baby in an old sari and lets Kamna hold her sister for a few minutes, while she and Goldina bind Leela’s stomach tight to keep out bad air and demons lurking to use Leela’s emptiness.
Damini places the child beside Leela, but the exhausted mother has drifted off to sleep. She directs Goldina to clean up, and wrap the afterbirth in a paper bag. Goldina retreats outside and the door creaks closed.
“Watch the baby,” Damini says to Kamna.
Goldina hasn’t gone far—now she’ll want to be paid.
Standing on the cement terrace, Damini fills her lungs with the cool night air. She hunkers down, her back to the wall, and gazes at the moonlit mountains. The gleaming snow on those peaks will melt before any girl crosses the many ranges between here and that far ring of mountains.
Goldina, sitting cross-legged on the ground a few feet away, proffers the shawl Damini lent her earlier.
Every time she wears that shawl it will remind her that Goldina has worn it.
This is not a city. Here someone is lower so that someone else can be higher.
“Keep it,” she says, sounding magnanimous. In memory of their mother’s stories, told and untold, she bestows a ten rupee note on Goldina. Goldina touches the money to her forehead, but still looks expectant.
Damini rises, enters the storeroom and fetches a sack of potatoes.
“This is all?” says Goldina.
“Be grateful you got something for delivering a girl.”
“This is my fault?” says Goldina. “Plant a radish, expect a cauliflower?”
“Be more respectful, churi!”
Goldina mutters under her breath, “Hein! Do I get anything from being respectful … ?” but heaves the sack of potatoes over her shoulder. She reaches for the paper bag with the afterbirth and cord.
“Bury it deep,” says Damini. “Don’t let stray dogs dig it up.”
Goldina cocks her head in assent, and melts into the shadows past the terrace.