Family secrets...

Short Story

I was twelve and a half when Mai had a heart attack. I remember being more puzzled than distressed when my father woke me up with the news.  In the 11 years that I lived with my grandparents, not once had I seen my grandmother fall ill.  She didn’t have the time; there was a household of 11 that needed to be attended to. Mornings began with an impatient Mai tugging at my bedsheet so I could use the vacant toilet before my uncles started filling it up with cigarette smoke. Nights ended with an impatient Mai tucking in a fresh bed-spread so I could tumble onto it sleepily and she could get back to her cleaning up chores

in the kitchen. When I returned from school in the afternoon, it was to the reassuring sight of Mai bent over the gas stove, stirring the day’s snack. In the evenings, when I closed one eye to carefully take aim at the lagori, there she would be in the distance — a tiny portly figure with her peculiar left-leg favouring tread, lugging two black bags filled with vegetables which would then have to be cooked in time for dinner. And hadn’t I spoken to her just yesterday? she had slipped a small parcel of liver kebabs into my skirt pocket while urging me to hurry back.  She had looked perfectly time then.

“I told you I don’t know anything more.  Hemu Mama called and said to come, your mother already left at six.” My father was busy locking all the balcony doors and gesturing me to wear my chappals. “Now hurry up or we’ll be late.” Late for what, I wondered as the taxi sped past the huge oil refineries. Could you be late for a heart attack, I mused, fingering the puckered patch of burnt skin on my right arm. The burn, still raw and pink, elicited a “Couldn’t you have worn something longer?” from my father. I turned my face and looked out of the window; some days the indifference I felt towards my father was so intense that I could simply close my eyes and will him to disappear from my sight. Today though all I could summon up was an odd tightness in my chest and an urge to put my head in his lap and weep. I was aghast.

I never cried. Not even on all those evenings when I would return, physically spent from the weekend at my mother’s house. Over the years, my mother and grandmother had each developed a macabre language to converse with me. Sunday morning, my mother would find some excuse to beat me brutally before sending me back. And every Sunday evening after I returned, mai would run her eyes furtively over my exposed limbs and serve me an extra large helping for dinner. Mai appeased her guilt of not confronting her middle daughter’s violence by carrying out her own form of gastronomical rebellion against the family. Thus it was that every fresh welt or bruise that appeared on her grand daughter’s body would be compensated by a piece of thickly buttered, brown bread meant for Appa, the coveted stomach portion of a green masala stuffed pompfret which typically would have been served to Shyam Mama: her youngest and most favourite son, four sausages instead of the regulated two, extra malai in between the pao and to my delight, as many rasagollas as I could eat from Chandru Halwai while my cousins got only three each.

Now as the taxi reached the Dadar Bridge, I hoped the burn on my arm wouldn’t heal too soon. Next Thursday was a cousin brother’s eighth birthday party and I had overheard the menu yesterday.  Crab curry, prawns masala, quail fry, mutton cutlets, chicken manchurian, brain fry and gurda kaleji.

When I got down in front of Appa’s building, I could tell from a certainty born out of watching Sholay five times that Mai was not just ill, she was dead. Every single person gathered outside the house was dressed in white and my mother along with several of my aunts was weeping. An uncle came forward and led me by the hand inside the house.  There were people seated on every raised surface.  The bed, which I had shared for 11 years with Mai, now had nine people perched on it.

Some faces nodded at me in acknowledgement, some openly stared. Everybody had heard of Kamini who married that jobless fellow against her parents’ wishes, had a daughter within a year of the marriage and then accepted with alacrity her parents’ offer to take care of the three-month old infant till things got better.  It was also common knowledge that for the last 12 years, things had not gotten better between Kamini and her husband.

He gambled, was always in between jobs, borrowed heavily, stole and disappeared for months.  She held down her job, emasculated him with her tongue, turned to other men friends and carried on the sham of a married woman. On occasional weekends, the daughter, a spitting image of the father, would be taken home, thrashed to a pulp and then sent back the following evening.

There were whispered stories of fractured fingers, broken noses, cracked foreheads and wire lashings. There were rumours of how on Friday evenings, as the time to go to her mother’s house drew closer, the daughter would try to physically injure herself so that she might be allowed to stay back. Of how finally, despite the grandparents' efforts, their sons had insisted that the sister now start looking after her daughter permanently.
“Thats’s her.... the one in green.  Poor thing eh, see her hand? Saw that? My god, now who will protect her from that witch?” I wished more than ever that I had remembered to wear a long sleeved dress. As I pushed my way through the throng, my eldest cousin reached out and pulled me to one side. Slowly the crowd thinned out and when I saw what lay in the centre of it, I wished it hadn’t. On the floor, wrapped tightly in a white sheet lay somebody who faintly resembled the only person in this world with whom I had felt safe. It must be Mai but what have they done to her, I wondered? Two wads of cotton were stuffed into her nostrils. Her plump, soft, wrinkled skin, which always smelt of Goda Masala and Vicks Vaporub was tightly bound, so tight that her face seemed pinched with the exertion of holding her breath. And where were her spectacles? What had they done with them? Even when I woke up in the dark after having wet the bed, all I had to do was listen for her exasperated sigh and turn towards it. Mai’s eyes would be glinting at me behind her spectacles.

The only time she took them off was when she brushed her still knee-length black hair. There were barely a few strands of silver in them and as she stood in front of the small mirror running a cream coloured comb along the length of her frame, she would be transformed. For those few precious minutes, she went back to wherever it was that she had come from, before her dreams had not been darkened by the humiliation of her husband and then father of one, impregnating her younger sister with his second child.
 The humiliation would be further complete with the younger sister firmly ensconced into Mai’s household as her husband’s second wife and both of them would eventually go on to bear him five children each.  But for those few moments bathed in a golden light cast by the afternoon sun, Mai would turn into beguiling, sensuous, fair skinned and lithe of limb, Manjula.

She must have been exquisitely beautiful as a young girl. There were friends of my grandfather who still turned up every once in a while to catch up with ‘so, what’s happening with you, Khanderao?’ but spent their entire visit settled at the green formica table in the kitchen, quaffing cups of ginger tea and unburdening the going-ons in their pensioned lives on Mai’s shoulders.  Mai busied herself with her kitchen chores, making soothing, uh-uh sounds under her husband’s watchful eye. One particular friend, a bald and overweight gentleman who would come all the way from Khopoli bearing strings of fresh jasmine and batatawadas for Mai, once pinned me in the corridor with a baleful red eye. “Total waste all of you, four daughters and six grand daughters. Not one has taken after her, Tchah!’

I saw the same gentleman now standing next to Mai’s body. He was mopping his brow continuously with a large white kerchief and was trying to get Mahesh Mama, my eldest uncle’s attention. “Call Khanderao.  It’s time now.” Yes, yes, nodded Mahesh Mama, looking distractedly at the clock and avoiding meeting anybody’s eyes.  A murmur went around the room. Where was Appa? People, especially those who had come from afar, were craning their necks and whispering with a sense of suppressed excitement. Where is he? Nobody has seen him for the last two hours. Then a shrill voice. A woman’s. I recognised her as my aunt’s brother-in-law’s mother. She was asking if anybody had seen Shyam. Where is he, she was demanding? He was Manjula’s favourite. Why isn’t he here? My aunt hushed her but the crowd had already picked up on the sudden panic in my aunt’s gesture.

“Where is Shyam? Where is he?,” several voices rose and suddenly Mahesh Mama threw down the marigold garland he had been nervously twisting till now. At first, his jerky movements went unnoticed but then when he strode in the centre of the room and started waving his arms towards the door, the crowd quietened down and his voice, high-pitched and rather crazed, was the only sound that could be herd. “All of you, go away, GO AWAY. Get Out.  Now.  Go on, all of you, Leave.” In the crowd, people exchanged glances and began murmuring.  Some were resentful, most were belligerent.  
They had come from far, some had arrived as early as 5.30  in the morning having forsaken their morning tea, they were not going to be treated like this. “Eh Mahesh, what is all this? This is no way to behave”, this from the neighbour who lived in the opposite building - a pot bellied man who came out in his balcony every night to chew tobacco and fart loudly. Two other uncles rushed in and tried to calm down Mahesh Mama. He only bellowed louder, his hands windmilling even more furiously. “Leave, Leave NOW. All of you”.

Even though I was only 12, I knew something really, really terrible had happened and it wasn’t Mai’s death; it was something to do with Shyam Mama. And that the two were somehow related.

It would take many years before my eldest cousin could bring himself to narrate the events which unfolded on the day when Mai had her heart attack. So this is how I imagine it must have happened and there is no other way of saying this. Shyam was molesting Suman, the nine year old servant girl, in the upstairs flat when she, by some twist of fate, escaped. Running down, she threw herself, torn dress, dishevelled hair and all, on to the first safe person she met on the stairs. It turned out to be my eldest uncle.  
After he was able to calm her down and make sense out of her high pitched screams, he went and dragged a quiet and calm Shyam down the stairs. Shyam’s composure seemed to further incense Mahesh Mama because he kept on trying to pull an unresisting Shyam and was calling him the vilest of names in a voice held together by tears and shock. And so they went down the two flights of steps, this unholy procession of the eldest and youngest sired sons of Khanderao and Manjula Karmarkar. One by one the neighbours came out to watch. Nobody needed to ask anything. Everybody noticed the manner in which Suman with her unbuttoned dress shrank into the wall making keening, frightened sounds as a stumbling Shyam passed her on the stairs.

Downstairs, Mai stood framed in the open door. Her eyes were bright and clear and for once, the wrinkly pouches of skin under her forearms hung taut as she clutched on to the door frame. Her mouth moved in an effort to summon up some words. Then she gave up and silently moved aside to let her two sons pass. The door closed firmly behind them and reopened only after midnight when the eldest son came rushing out in his vest and hastily done up trousers to summon a taxi on the deserted road. Mai had suffered a heart attack.

She was only 56. She would have lived much, much longer, said my cousin as he leant back against the wall, his voice spent and still carrying traces of bewilderment. I nodded in agreement. Really, 56 was no age to die. I was suddenly so glad that I had never told Mai what Shyam Mama was doing to me in the nights after she went back to her chores in the kitchen.