A Life Less Ordinary (9 page)

“I'm okay now, but I feel very weak.”

“That'll be there for a while. You've gone through a lot. Had it been anyone else, she probably would have given up long ago.” Then, raising her voice, she said, “Oye, Shankar, it's not enough to just look at the boy, you'll have to look after his mother as well. Make sure you feed her properly.” Then she turned to Sadhna and said, “First light the fire and make a cup of tea for your Didi.”

The child was in my lap and suddenly he soiled himself. It got onto my clothes and my hands. As soon as I tried to clean one place, another part would get dirty. When Sadhna saw me she said, “Eh ma, what are you doing? Here, let me do it. You're just shifting it from one place to another!” Shamefaced, I looked at her, and then I turned away, smiling. Sadhna knew exactly what to do. Being the elder daughter, she had had to look after her young siblings. “This is all very well, but how long can Sadhna look after your child?” said Sandhya-di. “Finally, you're the one who is going to have to bring him up, so you'd better learn how to do all this.”

Sadhna cleaned up the child and handed him back to me, and in a little while she came back with some tea and bread. While I was eating, she cleaned up one corner of the house and made some space for me to lie down. Sadhna, the child, and I would sleep there at night. One night she told me that in her home no one would be allowed to walk in and out of the room where a new mother was before a certain time had elapsed, but I said to her, What can we do? We only have one room.

One day Ma arrived and said to Sadhna, “Come on, it's time for you to go back.” I asked if she could stay on for a while—at least till the child was a month old. I said that either my husband
or I would take her back, but Ma was adamant. Sadhna didn't want to go, either, but she had to listen to my mother, in whose house she was staying. She left and now I had to manage everything on my own: the housework, looking after the baby, everything. All the neighbors wondered where Sadhna had gone. Why didn't she stay on a bit longer, they asked; it would have been good if she had. But what could I do? She had come to visit my parents, and if they did not want her to stay with me any longer, I had no say in the matter. Some of them told me to be careful, especially with water, because I was still weak and could catch an infection. They were all so supportive of me, much more so than my Ma and Baba had been, that I sometimes marveled at it. Ma and Baba had come only once since I'd been back from the hospital, and even then it was only to take Sadhna away. And not once did they ask how the child was.

I had to continue to bear all these troubles. My child was barely a month old when my milk began to dry up. The baby would cry from hunger and I could not understand why. A neighbor once asked me, “Why is your child crying so much? Does he not get enough to eat? Why don't you give him some other milk and see?” I mentioned this to the child's father, but for several days, he completely ignored me. Then one day, I don't know what came into his head, but he went out and came back with a tin of milk powder. And with my milk and this milk, the child seemed to be satisfied. We needed to get three tins in a month. Whether we ate or not, the child had to be fed. If I asked my husband for anything else, he'd lose his temper and there would be tension in the house.

 

TIME PASSED LIKE THIS AND THEN ONE DAY, MY BROTHER
and my elder uncle and a friend of theirs named Dharni Kaku
arrived at our house. At the time, I was lying down with my child, so I quickly got up and made room for them to sit. “I won't sit, child,” Uncle said.

“Whyever not? What's wrong? Why is your face looking so pinched?” I asked. Uncle did not reply, so I turned to Dharni Kaku, but he also remained silent. Finally I asked my brother, “What's wrong? Why don't you tell me what it is?” He told me only that our sister was no more and then he began to weep. “Which sister?” I asked him.

“Our Sushila Didi,” he said. But I couldn't understand what could have happened to Didi. As the implications of what he had said sank in, I felt a chill spread through my body. I stood as if rooted to the ground. Dharni Kaku repeated the news two or three times and suddenly I screamed. I ran straight out of the house all the way to Baba's place. There, I beat my head on the ground and wailed, “Baba, now we've lost Didi as well. First it was Ma—and she's there and not there—and now it is Didi. We thought even if we don't have a mother, at least we have an older sister. And now she's also gone.” Baba held my arm and lifted me up and told me gently to calm down. “I'm going to find out what has happened,” he said.

“But what's the use?” I asked him. “No one ever bothered to find out anything about her.” Every time I went to see Didi, her neighbors would ask if her father had completely forgotten her, for he never went to see her. Was it because of his new wife, they asked, that our father now had no time for his own children? I told Baba that he had no idea how sad it made my sister to have to listen to all these things. “And now look at you. You never really cared about her,” I said to him between sobs.

When I had run off to see Baba, my uncle and Dharni Kaku left to see my elder brother, who lived in a nearby village with his wife. When Uncle got there, he found my brother just sitting
down to eat. He started to rise, but Uncle said to him, “Son, finish your meal first.” When my brother's wife saw everyone she started to light the fire again but Dharni Kaku said to her, “Daughter, there's no need to cook for us.” My other brother had left Uncle and Dharni Kaku at my brother's house and gone to give the news to Grandma. My brother sat back down to eat and was halfway through his meal when my grandma arrived. “
Arre
, Ajay, what is this I hear about your Didi dying?” My brother was shocked. Dharni Kaku said to my grandma, gently, “Look, we just arrived here, and didn't want to tell him anything at least until he had finished eating. But you've just come and blurted everything out.” My brother left his food half eaten and ran to meet Baba.

I was with Baba at the time. When my brother arrived, his eyes were bloodshot and it looked as if he were ready to kill someone. He couldn't even cry. It took quite a while for the tears to come. He was watching Baba strangely: here was a man who had just lost his elder daughter, yet there was not a tear in his eye. Suddenly my brother began to cry loudly. Dharni Kaku tried to comfort him, but it was no use and the more he cried, the more my tears fell. When he had run off to meet Baba, Grandma had followed him. Now, wiping her tears, she said to him, “I have never seen your father lift a finger to help your sister. It was only when we forced him that he took the trouble to find out about her.”

“But none of us bothered about her,” said my brother, “that's why that bastard thought that there was no one to care for her.” Then, softly, he asked Uncle, “What happened to Didi, Uncle?”

“Mangal came to see me,” explained Uncle, “and he told me that she was very unwell and we should go to see her.”

Mangal was my Didi's husband. This was all he told Uncle and then he disappeared. Uncle's wife asked after the children, but he did not even stay to answer. As he was leaving, Uncle asked him what was wrong with Didi and all he said was that she had small
pox. Uncle did not even stop to eat anything: he just rushed off straightaway to see Didi. But when he got there, he found her lying wrapped in a sheet in the courtyard. He was shocked, and the fruit he had hurriedly picked up for her fell from his hands and scattered on the ground. He had taken along a tender coconut to offer her so she could bathe with its healing water, and that, too, fell from his hands. There was no sign of her husband: it seemed he had disappeared after he went to Uncle's house. My heart was hammering in anger at hearing this story but Baba's eyes were still dry. Once, in anger, Didi had said to Baba, “How can a father be like this? It's as though I have already performed my father's last rites, his
shraadh
.” And now Baba kept repeating, “Now we'll see who will do whose
shraadh
.”

Grandma chided him: “Is that all you can think of at a time like this? Your daughter has died and you have not the slightest concern or sorrow for her.”

“No, Didi, that's not what I mean…”

“What are you saying then?” she interrupted him. “Your daughter is dead and instead of going there straightaway you're wasting your breath here wondering who said what to whom…”

“Yes,” Uncle said angrily, “do you want to go there or not? Otherwise tell me and I will go.”

“No, Dada, of course I will go. I do want to. But will my daughter still be there? Won't they have taken her away?”

“No, I have told them and I have left Raju there with her, and have told her to make sure no one takes our girl away before we come.” Raju was my elder aunt.

“So I will be able to see my daughter?” Baba asked.

But those people had put enormous pressure on my aunt and had forced her to let them take the body away. First they said they could not keep a body in the house for so long. She tried to insist that they wait for Uncle and Baba, but then they threatened her
and forcibly took the body away. Before anyone from our family could get there, they had completed all the rites and cremated the body. She could do nothing. My uncle and Baba took a long time to get there because they had first to take a train and then walk for three miles. When they finally arrived, my aunt ran out crying, saying to Uncle, “Dada, I was not able to keep my promise! I could not do as you asked. They forced me to let her go!”

The moment I heard the news about Didi, I'd left everything and run off to my father's house. When I got home, my husband was sitting on the kitchen stool with the baby. When he saw me he said, angrily, “Have you no sense at all? Leaving such a small baby and running off like that!”

“But I knew you were at home,” I said. Just then, Sandhya-di saw that I was back so she came across and said, “What is all this? What happened?”

“My sister is no more and I am in such a sorry state that I can't even offer to look after her children. They'll be so bereft. I know what it is like to be a motherless child. Who can they turn to when they are hungry or in need? We have a mother, yet we have spent our lives being motherless. These children will also suffer like we did.”

“Can your father not keep them with him?”

“Do you think those people have any idea how to bring up children? I don't know what they're thinking of. We'll only find out when they come back from Didi's house.”

“All right, we'll talk later. Now it's time you fed your own child.”

I put the baby to my breast and as he suckled, my thoughts turned to Didi. Had my mother been alive today, how much she would have wept to see her daughter gone. But this new mother of ours had not shed a single tear. What would Didi's children do now? They must be devastated. There was no one to feed them, to
comfort them now. If they wept, their father would probably beat them. Or that family would treat them like animals and throw them out of the house. “Get out of here,” they would say. “Who do you think you are?” Imagine those children's shock and grief—who would they turn to? The same fate awaited them that we had lived through. I looked at my child and wondered what life held for him.

After a couple of days of this, I announced to my husband that I wanted to go to my father's house.

“But you said they were not there, that they'd gone to Didi's place, so what will you do there?”

“Grandma is there, and I want to go and find out what happened.” So off I went, and the very next day Baba and Ma came back. Ma went in straightaway to bathe. The moment Baba saw me he put his bag down on the floor and his eyes filled with tears. I began to weep and in between my loud sobs, I asked him to tell me what had happened to Didi. He held me and said, “Child, don't cry. I've lost my daughter, and I keep thinking how difficult her life must have been.”

“Stop crying now,” Grandma said to me. “What's happened has happened. Crying will not bring her back, will it?”

“Oh, Didi,” Baba said, “she had to bear so much. That bastard Mangal was carrying on with someone else. And if my daughter said anything to him, he would beat her. Some people there were saying she took poison; others said she was ill. So many stories. But I asked her little boy to tell me what had happened. At first, he was a little scared and would not talk to me. I felt so sorry for him, poor little child, he's only five. Then I picked him up and took him out, and spoke to him there. Slowly he told me…Grandpa, he said, there was nothing wrong with her. I told him, quickly, tell me what happened, I'll take you with me. Do you want to come? Yes, the child said, you promise you will take me? I
said, Yes, yes, and you will stay with Grandmother. Now tell me what happened. I'll tell you, he said, but you must promise not to tell my father. I promised that I wouldn't let anything happen to him. Then, slowly, the child started to tell me his story. This is what he said: ‘Do you know Grandpa, that for three or four days now Baba had been fighting with Ma and beating her. Yesterday he locked the door of the room and beat her up very badly. I was in the room at the time. When Ma began to shout for help, Baba caught hold of her throat and began to strangle her. When her tongue started to come out, I cried out: Baba, stop, she will die, let her go, my Ma will die…and I began to howl and beat him on his back but even then he didn't stop. When Ma's voice was completely gone and she could not speak anymore, he let her go and she fell with a thud to the ground. Then he began to call out to her but she did not reply.' I asked him, ‘What happened next?'”

Perhaps Baba thought that Didi had not died then, that there was still some life in her, so he asked again what happened. The child told him that after that, his father had pushed him out of the room and gone away himself. Then he was crying so hard he could not say any more. Baba asked the neighbors and they told him that Didi hadn't survived the beating.