Motherland (14 page)

She was from a low caste, she wasn't supposed to touch me. I couldn't imagine walking the whole way back with those leeches on me, or putting my clothes on over them. “Please,” I asked, looking into her eyes.

“You are ordering that I do this?” she asked. She did not want to get in trouble.

“Yes,” I said. She pinched the first one, then the second one and they were gone. The third was stuck in more deeply, she pinched and dug in her fingernails and pulled and it was gone. The soft white underside of my calf, where the last leech had been, had a little blood running from it. She took a leaf and trimmed it down and stuck it on the cut.

Rupa's braid had come loose in the swim. As she gathered her hair up off her shoulders to tie it up, I noticed just at the bottom of the back of her neck, another black staple. She tried to look at it over her shoulder, but she couldn't see it. I swallowed hard, and reached out to try to remove the leech. Rupa moved out of my reach when she saw what I was trying to do.

“Please, don't,” she said. “I can't let you.”

“You must let me,” 1 said. I hoped it would come out in one pinch, I tried to picture my nails under it, would it feel soft and slimy or hard and brittle?

“I will wait, Vasani can help me at the house, I will wait,” she said. “Please.”

But I want to show you I don't care, I thought. I'm not afraid of your skin, your blood. She looked frightened as I came toward her, moving back as I moved forward. “Please,” she said. Respectfully, but there was real pleading in her voice. I stopped.

She picked up the smooth pretty pebbles she had collected and offered them to me. I took only one so she could have the others. She tossed them into the bushes, and started walking. She turned to see if I was following close, and I was. I walked in her shadow, my eyes trained on the black mark slashed across the coffee skin all the way home.

W
E WENT ON
walks with Brindha's dog; he was much more demanding now that Reema auntie was away, too. He wanted to stay out on the hills for long periods of time, and he wanted to play games. I liked him, he was a good medium-size dog. The small ones were too much like rats, and I was afraid of the large ones. At five I had been chased around a park by a fierce German shepherd that got close enough to rip off a piece of my winter coat. The owner finally caught up with us and leashed his dog, and then he tried to help me find my mother. We found her inside a phone booth, with her back pressed up against the door. She had seen the dog running loose and taken refuge in the phone booth. Somehow, she hadn't stopped to wonder where I might be; we had to knock a few times before she turned around slowly and came out.

Boli had a nice white coat, and I didn't mind feeding him table scraps at dinner or petting him when he came and sat by me on the verandah. Ammamma said he was calmer than he used to be: he was so hyper as a puppy that they would throw a blanket over him to make him quiet down. Even though he'd grown up, I didn't think he had much composure. As soon as he saw me, he flipped onto his back and offered me his belly, his eyes glazed in a foolish stupor. Or he tried to get attention by licking my arm, my foot, the buckles of my sandals, anything within reach. It's in his nature, Ammamma said, but he wanted more from me than I wanted to give. He had the run of the house, he was never locked up. If I wanted some peace, I had to tell Sunil or Vasani to come drag him out of the room and then I had to lock myself in. This was not so bad, because it became an excuse for privacy—otherwise the doors were never kept closed, everyone coming and going without knocking or asking.

The one time I wanted Boli around was for walks. The tea pluckers loved him, and it made it less awkward when we ran into them, because I couldn't talk to them, and Rupa wouldn't. She held herself apart from them. They were country people, she told me, she at least was from the village. Boli ran round and round their skirts, and they put their baskets down, brimming with tea leaves, and picked him up and nuzzled him. He liked this, though he squirmed out of their clutch at the first glimpse of bird or mouse. The youngest of the girls who worked on the tea were probably younger than me, and the oldest women had white hair and earlobes stretched from half a century of wearing thick gold earrings. They were shoeless, with brown paste spread over their feet and hands. Rupa said this was a mix of tobacco paste and herbs that kept insects from biting them. They wore sari blouses that stuck to them with sweat and dark cotton lungis wrapped around their skinny waists. They worked quickly, each taking a bush, picking only the tender tips, the bud and the first two leaves of each stem.

Soon after the women worked through a whole section and moved on, two men appeared with machetes. They pruned the bushes with a few deft strokes, and then dropped their knives by the side of the road and smoked and called out teasingly to the women bent over at work. Rupa said if the tea shrubs were not pruned, they would grow into trees. It would be too hard to pick the leaves then, and there would be fewer tender buds.

Just then, Boli started barking loudly, and as we looked to see what had claimed his interest, he was drowned out by the approaching helicopters. The tea pluckers shielded their eyes to stare up at the sleek silver insects. As they passed directly over us, papers rained down on our heads. I unfolded a square of white paper to stare at the faces of Subha and Sivarasan. Beneath their pictures was a picture of a wad of bills, making the cash award for their capture clear even to illiterates. The pluckers clutched the photos and chattered excitedly, and I looked at Rupa, who would not look at me. What did she know? Would she ever tell me if I asked? The more I knew her, the less I hoped she knew. Yet, the more I knew her, the more I hoped she'd share what she knew. She was no longer a remote person, no longer an anonymous brush with danger, and history. She crumpled the paper in her hands and then thought better of it, opening it and smoothing it out. She made herself busy collecting the papers littering the path, putting a rock on top of a sheaf of them. As if the outdoors were a great big house she could tidy up and bring some order to.

Boli bounded into the bushes after one of his favorite girls and we waited on the path for him to come back. After some time passed, I called his name loudly, and then Rupa did the same. We waded through the bushes, and saw far ahead of us the bobbing heads of the women working farther down the hill. Rupa told me to wait, that she would go down and bring him back, but I went with her, trying to hold my arms in close to my body to keep from getting scratched up.

The women were entering a straw hut. The baskets of green leaves were lined up neatly in the clearing. Rupa and I heard Boli barking and we walked into the hut. There was incense and clouds of smoke and torches lit at a stone altar. Women were kneeling on the floor chanting, and each went to the altar and prostated herself before leaving. I squinted to see the altar through all the smoke, looking for a statue of Shiva or Vishnu or Lakshmi. But all I saw was a little pile of twigs, lying on a faded piece of silk. Boli was crouched on the floor between two women and I tried to reach him without stepping on anyone. I gathered him in my arms and headed for the square of daylight at the back of the hut. We were outside again, with fresh air, and light.

“What was that?” I said. “Who is that temple for?”

“It is just an altar they've set up for praying at the end of the workday,” Rupa said.

I'd never seen an altar like that, there was no icon or anything, just those sticks. “Who are they worshipping?” She didn't understand me. 1 reeled off names of common gods, “Shiva? Parvati? Vishnu?”

“No, it is not for any of our gods. These are country people, I told you, it is just for some god of theirs, the spirit of sticks or sun or tea leaves, who knows.”

I thought of temples I'd been in with my family, the elaborate architecture, marble pillars, gold and silver necklaces and hundred-rupee notes lying on big trays in front of statues of our gods. Statues painted in blues and reds and blacks, glossy from butter and oil, with aggressive, sometimes leering smiles. People crowded between the rails, leaning into those in front, waiting to drop coins in little boxes before making a full circle around each statue's shrine. My mother hunted for enough change in her purse, my father stood on another line to pay the priest the fees listed on a big menu for special prayers with our names in them. You could purchase prayers for specific good things, like good grades, good marriages, many children. If you paid a little extra, my father said, the priest would recite prayers for good things you didn't even know to ask for.

R
UPA CAME EVERY
day, and as we embarked on our various excursions we built a vocabulary of our own, mostly laughter and nudging and nodding interspersed with broken Malayalam. We rarely spent any time indoors because Rupa would not sit on the living-room couches or lounge on my bed or eat at the dining table, and it strained my idea of our friendship to see her crouched over her food in the corner of the kitchen or watching a television program squatting at my feet. So our world was the world out of doors, where we were equals before birds and snakes and fish. Ammamma would let us eat our lunch on the verandah, and when we were finally exhausted, we descended onto the twin porch swings and rocked ourselves into afternoon naps. Rupa went home to her brothers at the end of the day, I was not Brindha's age after all, and Ammamma had not hired her to stay the nights and ward off monsters in closets. Some days, we were so caught up in whatever we were doing that Rupa would have missed the last bus home if 1 didn't make Ram drive us to meet the bus.

Rupa was crying on the verandah one morning when I went out to join her after breakfast. She wouldn't be able to work for a few days, she said. It was hard to understand her through her tears, and hard to get her to speak more. She started backing away from me, turning to go. I made her sit down with me on a swing. I wanted to know and, unprompted, I promised not to tell. Her eldest brother was in some trouble and he had gotten himself to Madras, and from there he would get a train to go far away. She was going to go meet him in Madras to give him the family savings, though how she and her other two brothers would manage, she didn't know and couldn't think about right now. Her tears were subsiding, and she dried her face on her sleeve.

“What kind of trouble is he in?” I asked.

She looked at me. I had asked too much, seemed too curious. She stood to leave, and I could sense her distrust and her regret that she had told me anything. She was leaving now, and she was never coming back.

“Ammamma hasn't paid you for the week yet,” I said. “I'll go and ask her and bring it for you.”

She stood there uncertainly on the verandah. I needed her to know she could trust me. There was money Ammamma kept in a vase for household spending, and I took all of it, but it wasn't that much. I went into my own room, and took out the pocketbook 1 hadn't touched since the day I arrived. I removed two crisp twenties from a billfold. I gave all of this to Rupa, but she gave the twenties back to me, she said you couldn't change money without the right papers. But she saw that I was trying, and she seemed calmer and more friendly.

“You will come back?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, smiling a little. “I don't much like Madras.”

While Rupa was gone, I watched my grandmother to see how she filled her own days. She was on an unwritten but unvarying schedule. She studied and read Sanksrit verse in the early morning, before even the servants came at six. She helped them make breakfast and decided on the day's menu. After we had breakfast, she bathed and performed morning prayers. She used to bathe and pray as soon as she woke up, I remembered as a child creeping into her prayer room and climbing into her lap, helping her offer fruit and flowers, light incense sticks and triple-tiered velakkus, feeling against my body the vibration of hers in quiet chanting. But now the bathing and the praying had been moved to the midmorning hours, she was afraid of catching cold bathing any earlier. Everyone thought it was damp and cool in the morning, before the sun found our hill, but to me, even at that hour, there was a mugginess, a latent heat, just waiting for its cue to take center stage.