I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
—Emily Dickinson
I
Overnight the fence had moved.
It was four a.m. and Sarojini’s mind was yet groping along sleep’s outlines while also sliding forward over the day’s tasks: fetch water from pond (done); teach five “private tuition” students who’d soon arrive; prepare breakfast for her daughter Christina Leibaklei and her husband Ratan, an evangelist, a Meitei Jonah whose Nineveh was his ancestral village; cycle to Brilliant Rural English Medium School to teach four classes and help the principal reconcile school fees; tend to her lima beans; sew a dress-on-order; and then . . . Sarojini saw that the wattle fence had moved, choking even farther the narrow dirt path that delineated their property from that of their next-door neighbor’s, a woman named Lupo Rani who also happened to be Ratan’s dead father’s cousin.
Sarojini had a secret enmity with this boundary fence.
Ten years ago, as a bride with tender hands, she’d walked down this path for the first time, holding the same water pot that now sat on her hip. Her father and mother had brought her to this village in a Magic van; at parting, they said, “Do not forget the things we taught you.” It was spring. A ripe starfruit had burst under her feet; she’d stopped to wipe off the orange pulp by that fence, so new then it smelled sunny like straw. A face materialized above it—belonging, she would learn later, to that aunt of Ratan’s, Lupo Rani—looking at everything but Sarojini with a blandness that approached equanimity. So that when Sarojini heard a terrific A-ha-HA-HEM! and felt a missile of wet spit land on her hand, she’d looked up and down the path.
Later, she wept.
Now she could not say what made her sadder—the memory of those early days in the village, or the knowledge that she seemed to have lost the capacity to weep. Her God-fearing Mama and Papa, safe in their haven—a Christian mission compound called Berachah, the only one in that district, seven miles from the village—said they prayed for her; their prayers, Sarojini knew, were nothing but their desire spoken, which was that their only child would carry with godly perseverance her particular cross: to be alone in a world of unbelievers, yet was she alone with such a man as God had selected?
To tell her parents about this boundary fence and the woman who had spat on her, was, therefore, out of the question.
Each morning, Sarojini stopped near the spot where Lupo Rani’s outhouse squeezed upon the fence; sun and rain had stripped it of everything that looked like life, Sarojini’s only consolation. Then she spat on the leprous bamboo. There was no longer any satisfaction in the act, but it was a habit.
And now. The outhouse’s corrugated iron wall, she saw, no longer kissed the fence. This path had been for four generations Ratan’s family’s property—at least that was Sarojini’s understanding.
Her first impulse was to shout: “O LUPO RANI!” Instead, she swallowed, pushing down the many-headed lump of insults already rising, words forbidden to an evangelist’s wife in a village of unbelievers. Sarojini set her pockmarked aluminum water pot down and looked through the slats. Here was more proof, which she did not need.
Between the fence and a narrow drain bubbling with sludge the shade of midnight, there used to be room for perhaps four mating bullfrogs—but now the earth was freshly turned; young banana trees, each the height of a toddler, stood in it. No doubt they had been hastily planted, for the soil was not packed tight about their bases, the way it ought to be.
Sarojini’s pot could not contain all its water as she went home.
▴ ▴ ▴
“The fence moved? Your meaning is what?” Ratan said. He was irate, the cushiony mole between his nose and mouth twitched; she had interrupted his Quiet Time. Ratan was in his favorite book, Job, well on his way to meeting the annual goal of, yet again, reading the Holy Bible—cover to cover—from the moment God wipes out unfathomable darkness with four words to that time to come when the saints will live in a place with no night. Or candle. Nor sun.
Sarojini repeated the facts—trying not to look at the mole—but if he asked again, she knew that those words tickling her tongue would fly at the only person she could belittle without compromising her testimony, because she was not out to save his soul.
Luckily he did not.
Last week she had found a healthy pile of feces among the weeds on the pond’s right bank. Surely such a large pile could only have come from Lupo Rani. Then, as now, Ratan expressed no outrage; this only multiplied hers.
A cycle bell tinkled, its sound irritatingly sweet—her first private tuition student.
“Something we have to do,” she said. “You do something.”
Forget the peace of mind he needed to turn his attention like a large Eveready torchlight on the Word of God, the evangelist Ratan was, at that moment, more disturbed by the spectacle of his wife than the news she’d brought.
The gate’s latch clanked.
“Good morning, Bungosana!” Their daughter Christina Leibaklei shouted from the courtyard. It was a warning. The girl was only eight, but she had shed all childish baggage in order to adapt to her parents’ world where they were, as the Scriptures put it, aliens and strangers.
The bhajan singer two lanes down began talking over the PA system, whether to himself or to an invisible audience, it was not apparent; then, without warning, he launched into an off-tune, melodious song, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. This made the silence between husband and wife swell. The evangelist removed his too-large spectacles—these gave him the aspect of a dragonfly—and wiped the lenses on his banian undershirt.
“O, Christ-ee-nah!” Sarojini yelled, having long forgotten to measure her tone to shield the child from the effects of what she called persecution and what her husband called privilege: the whispers of “Pig-Eater!” (untrue), the public taunts of “Little girl! Oh—Kissy-Teena! What a hi-fi name!” or “Stay away from my daughter—you use paper to clean your dirty part, is not?”(also untrue), the many ways, large and small and creative, in which they were reminded of their unbelonging.
The child appeared, wearing last year’s school skirt, the lowered hem several shades darker than the rest. She looked first at her father; he did not look back.
“Tell Bungosana and all,” Sarojini said, “do revision—Moral Science, lesson number seven about Swami Vivekananda—that nice story about how a letter dropped into this-postbox-or-that still reaches same destination! Understood?”
“Ma-will-ask-question-and-answer.” The child always anticipated her mother’s meaning. She left, blinking more often than was natural.
A fat tube of sunlight infiltrated the window of the “office”—a room so narrow one had to walk in and out sideways—and washed the single varnished bookshelf. It displayed Ratan’s Matthew Henry commentary and the bundles of gospel tracts the Eastern Presbyterian Mission in Ramnagar mailed each month along with his salary (one thousand rupees only, by money order), as well as a chart in which he was to mark his progress. Its columns were marked date of outreach, location & time, any declaration of faith made?, and follow-up status/applicable comments. Ratan gazed at the Matthew Henry—his most prized possession, it was covered with brown paper, dark ripples stippling it throughout.
“Going to sit like a statue? Not give me answer?” Sarojini whispered from outside the door in case her students could hear. “Or is Mr. Henry sending you telegram?”
She remembered how her father caned her when she was in class seven because she got caught writing love letters to a Muslim schoolmate with one gold eye named Amidul Mazumdar. Sarojini had been unable to do anything but say: “I won’t! I won’t do it again!” each time the bamboo rod, whistling, serrated her skin. The crimson ridges burned, then made her believe she had four legs, not two. Why was she thinking of this now? All she’d really wanted to know was whether Amidul wore a lungi to the masjid, and who was his favorite actor: Salman Khan or Shah Rukh Khan? Then, as now, a rising heat inundated her insides; her head, Sarojini sensed, was leaving her body—she wanted nothing more than to have it back. But between Sarojini and her head was the immeasurable distance created by helplessness.
She pressed her lips until the ripe veins on her temples, resisting or complying, throbbed. Once again Ratan removed his spectacles.
“What to do, Ma?” He said finally, squinting into the sunlight—it made his face almost noble. “Go fight with my own Baji’s cousin? From his father’s side also!”
When Christina Leibaklei was born, he’d begun calling her Ma. And he’d bought a narrow cot from the Army Canteen, on which he slept alone. Sarojini’s shock, meeting not much resistance, gave way to ambivalence; she began calling him Papa or Christina’s Papa when she felt like being formal.
“The father who kicked you out! The ‘auntie’”—Sarojini jabbed a finger in the direction of Lupo Rani’s house—“who calls you ‘White Man’s toilet cleaner’”—
“You—!”
Ratan’s you—nung, in Meiteilon—the syllable, already long and fraught, came out curdled, a rope winding about her.
Nung, indeed.
Turning sideways, Sarojini entered the office in two steps, blocking the window. Ratan had no choice but to behold her. The light bathed her oval head, like a saint on the brink of being boiled in hot oil.
“Two days I give you to talk to your auntie,” Sarojini pointed at Ratan’s mole, somehow seeing nothing but it. “After that—no more bok-bok. Let them find out this time that a girl raised in a mission compound also has heat in her belly—I have given up so much. No more. No more. No more.”
The evangelist opened his mouth, said nothing, shut it. Arguments abounded in their household, mostly civil, so he’d never found himself staring, as it were, at a bamboo cane hovering in the hands of his wife, who was supposed to submit to him. The Apostle Paul had cared enough to put this in a letter.
“Ma, please,” Ratan said at last, in English, as though the utterance of the language would render him some advantage. But Sarojini’s chappals, slapping the cement floor, were conveying her out. Soon, her voice, so forced in its cheerfulness his innards twisted, reached him: “Good morning, children! All on time today! Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man–?”
He abandoned Job.
▴ ▴ ▴
It was true, Lupo Rani knew and all the village knew, that in spite of her traditional name, in spite of her ability to balance a water pot, Sarojini had grown up in that Christian mission compound in the nearby subdivision of Dikhar, which the villagers found it pleasing to call ‘Digger.’ The villagers—although most only possessed an elementary school education—were alive to irony. For the mission compound was in a hilly area full of fertile red earth; property developers had sections of these hills excavated by scores of illegal Bangladeshi laborers who worked in rain and in heat so great some fainted. One or two never woke up.
Sarojini’s father was a pastor in a church that stood on such a hill (unexcavated, Praise the Lord); Sarojini’s mother taught in the Presbyterian mission school. The only real interaction Sarojini had had with “unbelievers”—excepting the occasional ‘seeker’ who came to church via the paddy fields out of fear of being seen and ostracized—was in school with the children of some open-minded tea garden manager or low-ranking civil servant, Amidul of the golden eye being one of them.
The mission school’s principal, a Khasi import, had his salary padded in ways as mysterious as the predestination of souls; he sent his daughter Gifty away to a convent school in a hill station that may as well have been England to Sarojini and the mission compound’s children. This same Gifty, when she came for winter vacations, wearing socks that went all the way up past her skirt hem, would mock their provincial English, or as she put it, “All-Broken English.” But other than these glimpses of another, greater world provided by Gifty, Sarojini grew up having no problem chanting “All the Time!” when her Sunday School teacher said: “God is Good—?”
Perhaps most remarkably, a real white missionary lady—old, half-blind, who was rumored to sleep with her thirteen cats—still lived in the compound in an Assam-style cottage, on the highest tilla, a hillock. So Sarojini had been raised away from the world, knowing nothing but that it was a thing of no consequence to have Christian neighbors; sit on Sunday in varnished pews (real ones with back shelves for hymnbooks, as the Americans were rumored to possess); and, at Christmas, be invited into the home of an ancient white lady wearing a velvet skull cap (but her eyes! still so blue!) who handed each child a cellophane bag containing an Object of Great Curiosity. For, upon realizing that her years in this strange land—Assam, India, and the earth—were coming to an end, the missionary had begun to dispense with the many, often frivolous, often useless objects she had brought when she first arrived by ship (from New York to Calcutta, and from there onward, by lorry truck) in several iron barrels each large enough to hold two men. So Sarojini had received—and now kept in a box with her meager gold jewelry—an oval pendant with the outline of a woman’s head (the bun missing); a pot of Avon cold cream whose oil sat separated in a clear film; and a 1919 edition of Good Housekeeping magazine with a diaper-clad white baby standing on a globe, a strap of ammunition across his pudgy chest, holding a bayonet.
On Easter, Miss Patricia—that was the missionary’s name, which the locals had converted to the more easily pronounced “Miss Persia”—distributed cookies made with sugar, flour, and precious Amul butter, cut out in the shape of rabbits, whose logic as a symbol of Easter she had hardly been able to explain.
It was in this oasis of Christianity, a speckle in the sea of Hindus and Muslims, that Sarojini had been raised by God-fearing parents; been courted by Ratan (a college student, Sarojini’s father’s first highly educated convert in a decade); and been wed (she’d wept throughout the two-hour ceremony). Sarojini’s visits to this oasis grew less and less frequent, for the contrast between it and the world into which she had been thrust was unbearably deep. She forgot often that the mission compound was only seven miles from the village where she was now the wife of an evangelist whose relatives were uneducated and unbelieving, who cared not a whit for how she could pronounce certain English words like an American (“ske-jewel” for schedule instead of “shay-dool”). Indeed, none of them spoke English—although Lupo Rani, remarkably, knew the word damn, which she pronounced as dem. Nobody—not even Lupo Rani—knew where she’d picked up that word.
Ten years had passed since Sarojini left the mission compound: Christina Leibaklei had been born; Ratan said that the Lord deserved his mind, body, and soul, and that greatest of all resources, his time—all of it. And so Sarojini had taken a job at a private English-medium school run by a heathen who paid more than the mission school, although she sent Christina to the latter. In addition, she established a business—it thrived before the annual Durga Puja festival—out of her veranda. Miss Persia had given Sarojini some pages out of a ‘pattern book’ called McCall’s, and the village’s young women suspended their disapproval at Durga Puja because the dresses the Christian Woman created, customized with a puff sleeve here, a ruffle there, et cetera, were different. The good kind of different. Word had spread, too, that these dress designs came from Eh-may-rika; their wearers did not hesitate to insinuate that small parts (a button, for example) came from that country itself through unknown channels.
Between this seasonal work, her teacher’s salary plus the additional sum Principal Roy endowed for helping him reconcile school fees, and the few hundred rupees from her private tuition students (whose parents sent them for extra coaching in hopes that it would allow them a progression of at least one rank toward the pinnacle, Roll Number One), Sarojini had managed to establish a revolving savings account for Christina. She would not leave it to the Lord and Ratan to get Christina out of this backward village, to a college bearing the name of any Christian saint in a hill station, so her child might have what she had gone without: a chance to make a life of her own, her only responsibility to ensure that she was flying at top speed in whichever direction the needle of her inner compass pointed.
Each night, when Sarojini had tucked in her daughter’s white cotton mosquito net, she said, “What will you do for your Ma?”
Once every fortnight, she made Christina Leibaklei hand the thin stack of rupees to the manager of the Rural Bank of India, whose left eye looked elsewhere.
Such was Sarojini’s life. And then the fence moved.
▴ ▴ ▴
Sarojini dismissed her students ten minutes early, as a ‘reward.’ At breakfast, she said nothing except, “Christina Leibaklei, chew with your mouth closed.” Miss Persia had taught all the mission compound’s children that to show food being masticated was uncivilized. The missionary wisely left the question of silverware untouched.
As Sarojini walked down the lane, one arm resting on the Hercules’s handlebars, the women gathered at the water pipe ceased their chatter about the latest fashions (kameezes over, of all things, parallel pants!), the weather (too warm for the turnips), and the inconsistencies in the village lottery (how had Rajesh the bicycle mechanic won twice in a span of ten months?). In nearly worshipful silence, they surveyed the Christian Woman—from her big toes that spilled out of jute sandals to the hair chopped off far past the length considered proper—and they saw that Sarojini’s eyes were fixed on Lupo Rani.
But the neighbor, whose turn it was at the pipe, appeared oblivious not just to Sarojini’s gaze, but even to her approach. She slid her second pot under the r-shaped spout, plucked a long grass, and proceeded to nibble it. Sarojini’s bicycle jangled over the culvert; still Lupo ruminated.
“Look at her face,” said Tombi, the newlywed whose complexion was often compared to fresh milk and who, as a result, was extra bold for a newcomer.
“A-ha-ha-HEM,” Lupo Rani cleared her throat.
Sarojini walked past the pipe, her eyes never leaving Lupo Rani’s face, or, as it were just then, the back of her head.
“Nowadays women not frightened of calling evil spirits through boy-cut, what bravery!” said Chadramani—yet another aunt of Ratan’s; everyone in the village was somehow related—as Sarojini ascended the slope toward the main road, her head still twisted. She hopped onto the bicycle seat. The sun seared the back of her neck.
Something wheezed just up the road—it was the Janata Express bus, the last of the snout-nosed, wooden-body variety, which still bore forth with remarkable speed. Just as Sarojini opened her mouth to call out, “In your life, ever seen a picture of Indira Gandhi?,” a great preceding cloud of dust blanketed the Hercules. Sarojini had to dismount, to cover her face with the cotton handkerchief which was pinned to her shoulder. Dust crunched between her teeth, obscured the women at the pipe. Eight o’clock! The Janata Express was the eight o’clock bus and assembly was at eight thirty. She was running late.
“Hut, Hut!” sang out the conductor, hanging from the bottom step—all the better to show off his “djinn pants,” in other parts known as jeans. His ‘Hut!’ and the bus’s wheeze did not—could not—muffle the women’s laughter.
Sarojini tied her hankie over her nose like a facemask and trundled away. In front of the fermented fish merchant’s near the junction, she had to stop to flip the handkerchief up, over her eyes. The air was foul. But it was not that: her vision was a little unclear, like she was looking at a mirror that had been left out in an unseasonable drizzle.
▴ ▴ ▴
Principal Roy greeted Sarojini with a “Lucky Friday!” outside her classroom; it was the second period. She was checking on the four boys who were standing in the hot veranda as punishment—they were allowed to have only one foot planted. Sarojini was not the biggest believer in corporal punishment, but the principal maintained that the only discipline these rural children comprehended was the Discipline of the Stick. After her first year, Sarojini had developed a pain in her right elbow that surfaced only when she was whipping the palms or buttocks of some child, depending on the offense. So she had resorted to creative measures.
“Yes, Sir, yes,” Sarojini said. Then, louder: “Will you forget to bring your textbooks again? Heh? Heh?”
The principal stood watching from the courtyard where no grass could grow, a smile blooming on his slippery lips. He was fond of Vaseline. Uttering a loud HEM, he walked away, swinging his arms like a soldier. From the top of his domed baldhead to his gray Power sneakers, demarcated by a black belt worn high, Principal Roy resembled a clothes trunk stood upright.
But he was a giving man, especially toward Sarojini.
▴ ▴ ▴
What Sarojini did not appreciate was how often the ‘bookkeeping’ sessions with the principal began with a session of private probing, questions that flew wide but ever-shrinking circles around the mark that was the older man’s unquenchable curiosity about Sarojini’s peculiar life. She was circumspect, but there was, firstly, his standing as her employer, the provider of financial and other ancillary benefits, and secondly, the teachings that been poured into her ears until they sat like eternal wax: Honesty is the Best Policy, Also Honoring Unto the Lord (Who Hates Lying Lips), etc.
Therefore, when circumstances demanded—the time she was an hour late because a neighbor had blocked their gate with a small hill of dirt, for example—Sarojini managed by giving only the barest details. But Principal Roy had not lived threescore years for nothing.
Sarojini entered his office, sticking out a hand for the orange door that swung back too fast. He was already ensconced behind his desk, which was topped with a tinted slab of glass that trapped an old photo of him (seated) and his young son who stood sandwiched between paternal legs, a 1994 calendar, and a colorful poster of Goddess Saraswati plus a larger one of Lord Ganesh. Principal Roy had taken the time and trouble to arrange the register notebooks into three piles—Primary, Middle Elementary, and High School—and was sipping chai from a saucer that looked like ice. A stick of incense smoldered in a copper holder, filling the room with the cloying essence of sandalwood; the dead gray end quivered, ready to fall. There was, somehow, incense always burning when Sarojini arrived.
She refused the tea, hoping that would be signal enough. The principal either could not, or would not, take the hint.
“How is your dotaar?” he wanted to know.
“Christina Leibaklei roll number two in midterm exams,” Sarojini said.
The principal went on nibbling his lower lip.
“She lost one tooth last week,” Sarojini added, “also she has changed her ambition from scientist to dentist.”
The old man took this piece of intelligence with upward nods, as though to say: more, more, more. The next few minutes he spent pontificating about how Sarojini might prepare Christina for her lofty yet reachable goal by sending her to Guru Nanak College in Ramnagar-town to major in science. (Did she know his uncle had been HoD—Head of the Department—in its commerce department?)
Sarojini said, “Yes, Sir, Yes, Sir,” trying to convey her impatience in a not-disrespectful way.
He wound down, at last.
Against the life-affirming whirr of traffic on the main road and the kulfi hawker’s bleating cry outside the school gates, a click-clack, click-clack, click-clack punctured Sarojini’s ears: the principal was retracting his ballpoint pen’s tip. The signal. Sarojini fixed her eyes on his chair’s curvaceous back; jute fiber poked out of a rip in the faux leather.
“You and Mister—everything tip-top, Madam? Home is castle, is not it?”
He nibbled on a Nice Time biscuit. Then, thrusting it away with a sudden motion, he said: “Happy wife, happy life!”
Not without some effort, Sarojini transferred her gaze to his face, where, through thick glasses that took the sunlight like a dragonfly’s wing, several eyes surveyed her.
“Tip-top, eh, Madam?”
The principal leaned forward, carefully constructing a temple of his fingers over the goddess Saraswati’s face.
“Ah—yes, Sir,” Sarojini said, “Today I must tutor Christina in maths—to help in her ambition. Weak in maths . . .”
Sarojini reached for the nearest register; she propped her head on an open hand and, with the other, turned the pages. They were the shade of light vomit.
“My-grain, Madam?” (Fingers still a temple.)
“No, Sir—thank you for concern about my well-fare. Very busy! Wanting to help you with heeshab while my brain little-bit fresh.”
Without waiting for a reply, Sarojini found the page that read outstanding in the principal’s handwriting, the letters narrow and erect. Her index finger trailed down a row of names; she paused to swish right and place a check mark against the ones that read fees paid in 30 percent or parent delivered gift to offset total fee – value to be determined (some of these had addendums such as 1 katha of new rice, and so on). Principal Roy prided himself on his benevolence, a fact he had trouble keeping to himself; Sarojini’s arrival had been a boon—his word—in helping him balance the accounts, so full of aberrant entries, the price of his altruism.
The Oscar ceiling fan gave a screech; its blades grew more and more visible until they stood still, a torn spider web dripping from one.
“Bloody electricity board!” the principal said.
The columns before Sarojini’s eyes, signposts in a dream, wavered: left first, then right. A dot of liquid plopped onto the paper. Why. She could not. Must not. This was unconscionable!
She was crying . . . right in front of Principal Roy.
▴ ▴ ▴
The moon was a waxen sickle. Drilling through the jackfruit and bamboo trees, its light turned the pond’s water silvery and impenetrable. The autumn night—Durga Puja was a few weeks away—draped cool and light about Sarojini. But she felt nothing. She first fetched a pot of water for her lima beans, moving on bare feet. Then she set it down. Sarojini knelt beside Lupo Rani’s fence and placed an elbow against the earth—she felt a pinch, hoped it was not a red ant. Sliding her arm through the wide bottom gap where she could perceive that smelly drain, she measured, laying her forearm down, marking its end with her index finger and then repeating the process. Two feet. Principal Roy had said, “Make ekdum 100% guarantee sure, Madam.”
Sarojini stood. Her head resisted, and the edges of everything she perceived grew blurred. The spots on the weathered fence became mocking eyes. Without even the preamble of reaching back—she did not need to; she was there again—the women’s laughter at the water pipe, something joyous under their collective scorn binding them together, pierced Sarojini in a place she could not identify. Heart, soul, or what?
Her father used to say vengeance was the Lord’s. Where were either of them that morning? Where had they been these ten long years?
II
Sarojini waited until she and Ratan were alone the next evening. It was Friday. All her day’s work was done except for cutting a bodice with a wide collar whose name—per McCall’s—was the sailor collar.
The power had gone yet again; the long veranda was lit, rather poorly, by two points of light: a hurricane lantern beside Sarojini’s Singer sewing machine and, not within spitting distance, a half-gone candle near Ratan, who was reading out loud from Our Daily Bread. This particular ritual was their Couple’s Devotion Time, something the missionaries had ingrained in Sarojini’s father who then passed it on to his son-in-law.
“When-you-put-your-faith-in-Christ-Gaad-commissions-Himself-to-provide-for-you,” Ratan read in the halting manner he adopted only when expounding scripture or scriptural things. The Americanized pronunciation for God was yet something else he’d picked up from his father-in-law who had acquired it from Miss Persia.
Cicadas clamored as though wanting inside. Sarojini needed the red thread, but the black sat in the needle.
“Gaad-always-provides-for-His-children-though-often-it-is-not-in-the-way-we-expect. . .”
Two shadows flickered on the green mud-plastered wall: one, head bent, was steady; the other—its head like an overgrown marigold, petals one flick away from separation—bobbled.
“Papa,” Sarojini said. “Sorry to disturb scripture reading—cannot make thread to enter needle-eye—”
Other than absolutely necessary communications—Papa, kindly check your daughter’s Moral Science homework, for example—Sarojini had not talked to Ratan since unloading her ultimatum.
The steady shadow floated toward the marigold. In the attic, something rustled.
“Papa, oof, mice running or what! I visit Miss Persia and ask her for a kitten?”
The steady shadow bowed.
“Your eyes wow so sharp, Christina’s Papa!”
The steady shadow straightened, sailed home.
“Gaad’s-provision—” Ratan began. But just then Sarojini, head bent over the Singer, said: “Land documents having for all our property, no, Christina’s Papa? Where?”
“Land documents, Ma?” Sarojini had never asked for such details about the property that was, after all, his inheritance. Ratan said, in English: “For what and wherefore, Ma, you ask for land documents?”
“Oh!” Sarojini said. A thump overhead interrupted. “Mice overpopulation, Papa! Your Baji did not leave land deeds proper-proper?”
“Many generations, Ma,” Ratan dropped Our Daily Bread onto the bench, something he would not have done with the Holy Bible. “Land running in my family—”
“So papers having?” She pushed the bodice into the clattering needle’s bite.
“Many different papers, Ma”—Ratan cleared his throat—“many, many—”
The sight of the needle clamping two pieces of fabric with such efficiency imparted boldness. “All papers in one place, then, Papa?” Sarojini said. “In your office, almirah, or. . .?”
“Ma, let us finish our devotion,” Ratan said, uncharacteristically firm.
▴ ▴ ▴
No matter which way she turned her face that night, Sarojini kept seeing the principal’s moist lips saying that all she had to do was “pro-cure” the land documents; if the situation was not remedied domestically (that was really all he said, but the meaning was bright), he himself, busy man as he was, would escort her to the District Commissioner’s Office where his brother worked. There they could do an off-the-record ‘namjari’—a mutation—and ensure that the document identified the two feet as belonging to Ratan. Sarojini could then, if she so desired, go wave that piece of paper in Lupo Rani’s face. Would an illiterate woman want the police to come? Tell, tell?
It was the first time Sarojini had proffered confidential family information. But then again, it was the first time she’d cried in front of someone who was, as her parents and Ratan would say, “of the world.” How furiously the principal had retracted his ballpoint pen—the clicks and the clacks could not be told apart. Now this memory bothered her. But, like the clattering sewing needle, it also transported possibility to her present.
She fell into a dreamless sleep. Once or twice Sarojini had the sensation of something prancing on her chest, but the action seemed to be taking place in a room not attached to the temple that was her body, somewhere far, far away.
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The sun bleached the village skies; worms of light crawled against Sarojini’s eyelids. It was Saturday, the final day of her ultimatum. School would be dismissed at noon—the only mercy, Sarojini thought. Then she realized something was amiss. Instead of the mullah’s four o’clock call to prayer from the mosque near the bus station, she could hear All India Radio’s Pratap Mukhopadhyay delivering the morning headlines in his panicky, officious way. Thirteen Children Burnt Alive in Indian Tribal Fight – Mysterious Ape-Like Creature Detected in Assam’s Dhansiri Reserve Forest! Yeti’s Cousin? Ratan always listened to the seven o’clock broadcast over breakfast.
Sarojini tried to get up, but her head was unwieldy. A very definite pain asserted itself in the back of her throat—come to think of it, like the sewing machine’s needle or Principal Roy’s ballpoint pen going in and out of all that tender tissue. She counted to twenty, and then with a ‘Hayisha!’ cranked herself up into a sitting position. Now it was unmistakable. An axe of ache hammered within her skull—she had to lean against the tall, scroll-like headboard, which Christina Leibaklei called the Ten Commandments.
“Ratan!” Sarojini called, but only a croak came out. How lucky there was no private tuition scheduled today! But it was seven already. Must get dressed! She’d never missed a day of work except when Christina Leibaklei was four and caught malaria. Through diarrhea, fever, whatnot, Sarojini dragged herself—flesh, bone, teeth—through life’s duties.
But on that Saturday, she found herself so disoriented that, swinging her legs over the bed’s edge, her feet missed her rubber Hawai chappals each time.
“Ma?” Christina Leibaklei had entered, unheard. She caressed the Ten Commandments and stuck her pinafore’s strap into her mouth, the missing front tooth forming a small, curtainless window.
“Chweetie-Pie—put chappals on Ma’s feet!” Sarojini said. The child did not obey. Instead, she tried to push her mother back onto the pillow. Christina Leibaklei was dressed in her navy-and-white school uniform—even her hair was divided into two flowery ponytails, but the part was jagged. This bothered Sarojini too.
“No, no,” Sarojini said, “your Ma has to get-up-and-go.” But she allowed her head to fall—hush—onto the once-white pillowcase, which was adorned by a single cabbage-sized rose. Sarojini had been a bride-to-be when she embroidered that rose, and the things she could not speak of went into every stab of the needle.
The heaviness in her head was total. Christina Leibaklei laid her small cool hand on her mother’s forehead, and when Sarojini began to fret about fetching water and going to work, she clucked her tongue. “Oh, oh,” she said.
This was how Sarojini soothed her.
“Papa getting water from pond already—expert Papa!” Christina Leibaklei said. “He taking me to school now.” Sarojini wanted to say, “Don’t say ‘He taking me,’ Christina; say, ‘he will take me’” but she did not have the energy to be Gifty.
Ratan cleared his throat; the noise jabbed Sarojini’s throat. He was standing just outside the bedroom door, one arm resting on the barrel that had been Miss Persia’s wedding present and in which they stored their blankets. Ratan told Christina to go, put on her Naughty Boy school shoes. She obeyed at once.
“Let me pray for you,” he said to Sarojini. And it was through this prayer that she discovered—eavesdropping, as it were, on a conversation between her husband and his God—that Ratan had seen the encroachment. That he had, “in peace,” asked his aunt to please move the fence back.
“Thy Word says you can move a heart of stone,” Ratan prayed, “and I claim that promise in this—in this—trial.”
Whose heart? What stone? Sarojini wanted to say. But what she really wanted was to cut off the prayer with a loud Amen, to tell her husband how the women at the water pipe had humiliated her, and that the cause of all this tumult, Lupo Rani, had not even looked at her. But Sarojini had for so long been in the habit of not telling Ratan her deepest thoughts that she could not begin to fathom the depth of her grievances—much less let one drop fall onto the inhospitable ground.
“Aaaahmen!” Ratan said.
“Ready!” Christina Leibaklei called from the veranda; it was Sarojini’s preference that no one enter the bedroom with shoes that treaded the filthy world.
“My auntie stubborn woman—is what happens when woman without husband for very long time, Ma,” Ratan said. “We will keep praying—our God is a God of miracles. It will be fine, Ma! Glucose-D—here—near your pillow. Drink it, okay? Today only two houses for visitation. Pray for me, pray for their souls, Ma, and rest nicely, rest nicely. . . heart like stone, but . . .”
So, murmuring, he left. The gate scraped shut; then—and only then—hot tears spilled out of Sarojini’s eyes with a readiness that comes from prolonged suppression. With the knowledge of some empty hours ahead, Sarojini could not cease. Weeping, at last. This thought made her laugh until a pain where she imagined her left kidney might be stopped her. A breeze parted the window curtains, ushering in the acrid smell of frying cumin seeds. Must be from Lupo Rani’s house—the window faced that direction. Then it entered Sarojini’s head that Lupo Rani must have told the story of Ratan’s appeal at the water pipe—the women might have included Christina Leibaklei in their scorn. She could see her daughter going past, sitting on the metal bicycle carrier, her thin legs sticking out, knowing, Sarojini thought, nothing.
She drank the Glucose-D. The surge of energy from the sugary drink filtered through; Sarojini raised herself with a great effort—no ‘Hayisha!’ this time—and went, her hands caressing the half-mud wall the entire way, to Ratan’s office.
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It seemed to Sarojini when she woke up, at the Ajanta clock’s two loud dings, that she had dreamed a long, vivid dream; that, in fact, she had never left the bed. It was the silence that made her think this, a silence so weighty it was more awful than the shouting of the half-wit rickshaw-wallah Gulati’s wife on paydays, when he got drunk and beat her. Sunlight bathed every corner of the bedroom; the first things Sarojini saw were Ratan’s Bata sandals, the ones with a loop for the big toe, standing inside her bedroom’s doorway. A flake—was it dried cow dung?—hung onto the sole; she closed her eyes, irritated beyond measure. The surprise of the desecrating sandals past, Sarojini became aware that her pain, which she had thought rest would dissipate, had only swelled.
Someone was singing—a child. Halle-lu- Halle-lu- Halle-lu- Halle-lu-jah, Praise Ye the Lord.
Christina Leibaklei! She wanted to call out her daughter’s name. Could not. Her eyes swept sideways: a chipped Melamine plate, the zinnias on it mere memories, sat on a folding chair beside the bed; it held a glass of water and a Paracetamol pain reliever tablet split into half-moons.
It was too bright. Must shut the windows. Her right arm crossed her chest, aiming for the stainless-steel glass. It hit the floor. The clang rattled Sarojini’s pain, a hunk of steel wool raking the insides of her veins. The child’s singing stopped. A drawer slammed shut.
When Ratan and Christina Leibaklei walked in, she was groping for the Paracetamol. Christina was still in her school uniform, and her ponytails were intact. Why? What time was it, and had Ratan remembered to give her a little ghee—
Ratan thrust his hand into his kurta pocket and drew out an old brown envelope, white splotches of dried flour paste at its seams.
“Instead of going through my desk like a thief, Ma,” said Ratan, “you could have—”
His desk? I going to get-up-and-go. I buying a bucket of hot coals. Ratan, do you need help with bookkeeping? The voice in her head was neither mocking nor earnest.
Christina stood behind her father, rolling his kurta’s hem. Sarojini wanted to see her daughter’s eyes, forget the hot coals. She shifted her head this way and that, but the child moved too, like a belated shadow. This, more than anything—more than her mysterious pain, more than Ratan’s discovering that she had been rooting through his things, looking for those land deeds—distressed Sarojini. Extending her arms, she wiggled her fingers—this was how she’d invited the child to her before she stopped breastfeeding, at the age of nearly four.
A noise somewhere in the unknown region between mirth and sorrow broke out. It was not a nice noise. Sarojini had never heard Ratan cry. It was hard, at first, to connect sight to sound. He was crying—crying. In front of her, in front of Christina Leibaklei.
“Papa,” said the girl, “Papa.” And she began to cry too, sniffling each time he did.
Ratan came forward, holding the envelope in both hands like it was the Lord’s birth certificate; he dropped it on Sarojini’s belly and left. Again Sarojini beckoned, but Christina would not come. What good was the envelope anyway? She swept it off with a flick of the hand. A dull squelch told her it had fallen onto the puddle of water.
Christina, looking at the floor, picked up the envelope; she handed it to Sarojini, and ran out, crying: “Papa! Papa!”
Her child’s ragged voice dismantled Sarojini. Please let me cry, she prayed. But no tears came. How many years would go by in this way, she could not tell. The years were as impenetrable as the pond last night, holding all its secrets in its leech-ridden opaque depths. Her hands grew restless, and got to work.
Instead of the land deed, Sarojini uncovered their marriage certificate, Christina’s birth certificate, a diploma from the Bible correspondence course Ratan had taken from a Bangalore seminary, and a clipping from the Assam Tribune that gave Christina’s name as the runner-up of the Annual Junior Independence Day Quiz, 1992. A dot of water was darkening the marriage certificate—which bore Sarojini’s father’s signature as the officiant—and already the “Reverend” was fading.
“Christ-ee-nah,” Sarojini called, but it was only a whisper, really. The child did not come. When the alive rays of sunlight had deserted the Ten Commandments, Ratan returned, silent. He placed an elbow on Miss Persia’s drum; the metal lid popped. This gave Sarojini a reason to look at him. But he was staring at the window opposite, whose curtain weighed heavy with that unbearable sunlight, while an insect zipped against it, seeking entry. A woman shouted for her son to come home for lunch. “Boo-ngo—hait, Boo-ngo!” It was Lupo Rani, whose voice Sarojini liked to say could curdle a pot of milk instantly. But she no longer cared about Lupo Rani, or the fence, or the women at the pipe. Or anything at all.
She closed her eyes, imagining that she could smell the comforting odor—Nycil prickly heat powder Amul butter faithful cats—that hung about Miss Persia’s person.
If Ratan said one more word about the fence—Sarojini waited; surely he would—she knew what she would say: tomorrow, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, she wanted to go home. When she returned, the banana trees Lupo Rani had planted within the encroaching fence might have grown to full height. Banana trees grow within a year, so they say. If they bore fruit, she would pluck them from outside the fence. She would make banana bread for Christina in her Hawkins pressure cooker; she would copy the recipe from Miss Persia’s Landour Cookbook for Missionaries. She would make the cake sweet. . . yes, she would put in seven extra tablespoons of sugar so that her child would have no choice but to come when called.