Motherland (24 page)

A
MMAMMA DIED THE
next day. We emerged from two weeks in the hospital into the middle of the Onam holidays. Many people came to the funeral in their festival clothes, straight from boat races and elephant parades and flower exhibits. People were already waiting for us at the house when Reema auntie, my father, and I got back. Sanjay uncle and Mother would come after taking care of final arrangements at the hospital. Brindha had wanted to stay and wait with her father. In all her waking hours and some of her sleeping ones, she refused to let go of his hand. Ammamma was brought back to Sanjay uncle's house in the same jeep she had come down in, wrapped in blankets, dressed in white.

Reema auntie sent me into the garden to collect flowers for Ammamma. I could hear the chatter and arguing of factory workers and tea workers as they built a pyre on the side of the house beyond the garden. They brought their own bullock-carts from hillside farms, full of wood fuel. Some walked in sets of two, one on each end, carrying long branches of stripped mango wood, roped together around the middle. The branches were cut to even lengths and tied together to form a narrow bed.

I sat on the bed in her room where my mosquito nets still hung, their sides raised up and draped over the top to form an opaque canopy. Three of my mother's cousins, all sisters, washed Ammamma and dressed her in a new white sari. She lay on a bedspread on the newly swept floor next to our beds, where she often took her afternoon naps. They trimmed her fingernails and brushed out her hair. They put sandalwood paste on her forehead and on her throat. When they were finished, three workers came with the mangowood stretcher, lifted Ammamma onto it, and carried her to the drawing room.

The carpets had been rolled up, and the furniture moved to the guest rooms. Ammamma was laid out in the center of the drawing room, and the priest brought a tall temple velakku with him which had five wicks on each tier, six tiers high. He started chanting and lighting incense sticks and camphor, and blue smoke rose up around him and my grandmother.

Outside behind the kitchen, Madhu's mother directed the other ladies and Matthew and his wife and Sunil in cooking for the guests. No food could be cooked in the house until after the ceremony, so Matthew had built a big open fire. They made rice in big urns and boiled milk for yogurt. They soaked lentils and stirred red chilies and black pepper with tomatoes for rasam. Tea brewed in big pots, releasing vapors of clove and nutmeg.

Vasani and the gardener were outside the house near the well, where they had opened one of the pipes that carried cold clear water into the house. Vasani kept her fingers over the end of the pipe to direct the burbling flow into buckets that the gardener lined up around them. The buckets said FIRE on them, they were the big red ones usually filled with sand at the tea factory. Everyone had to bathe before the last rites. Madhu and Reema auntie were distributing clothes to anyone who was ready. White mundus for men, white saris for women. As the workers finished building the pyre, they came to the well, to accept a bucket and a tin cup to pour water over themselves. They took a sari or mundu and slipped behind the kitchen or into the servant quarters to change. Mother and many of the ladies bathed inside the house, simple, fast, cold baths, everyone emerging into bright sun with soft white cotton sticking to their wet skin, wet hair streaming down their backs. Reema auntie and Madhu and I bathed outside, each of us in four or five quick, deft motions, baptized in cold water from deep in the earth, blanketed in hot noon sun. Mother took me into Brindha's room to help me with my sari, folding and pleating and draping. I looked for hairclips on the dresser to cover the cutaway spot in my hair. Brindha came into her room just as we were finishing, and started tugging clothes out of her dresser and armoires. She was wearing her school uniform.

“Brindha, do you want some help?"my mother said.

Brindha looked at us, sadly. “I want to wear my uniform but some aunties out there said I have to change. And I'm too young to wear a sari. I don't know what to do.”

My mother said, “I'm sure Ammamma won't mind if you want to wear your uniform. That's the only person you have to think about today, really.”

Brindha's face fell. “I can't think about Ammamma. It's too sad.”

“I know it's hard for you,” my mother took Brindha into her arms. “Both of you should do whatever you feel up for. If you want to be in the procession and see the pyre, come, but if you don't want to, don't.” I finished clipping my hair in the mirror. We could hear my father calling for my mother to come out, so she kissed each of our cheeks, and left.

I turned to follow her, but Brindha tugged on my arm. “Maya … do you want a chocolate?”

She produced from her schoolbag the shiny package of Snickers bars that my father had given her at the hospital.

“They're going to begin the hymns,” I said. “Don't you want to come?”

Brindha punctured the plastic with her thumbnail and started unraveling the packaging. She wiped away tears from her eyes. “Can't we just wait a little while?”

I sat with her on the bed and we shared a chocolate bar. I could feel the caramel slithering through my teeth, settling into gaps and crevices. We could hear the chanting get louder as more people joined the priest.

“Let's go, Brindha,” I said. “Or you can stay in here and I'm going to go.” 1 wanted to be part of things. It didn't seem right to hide out in a back room like I was a kid and be excused for it. I didn't want to be excused, I wanted people to see me sitting with my mother, my uncle, and know that I knew my place.

Brindha didn't want to go but she didn't want to stay in her bedroom by herself. She held my hand but dragged her feet to try to slow my pace. We crossed through the dining room, and I could see and hear all the people sitting cross-legged around Ammamma and the priest. We would have to walk in front of them all to enter. On the dining table, there was a small pile of flowers left on a banana leaf, all that remained of the baskets I'd collected from the garden. I gave some flowers to Brindha in her outstretched palms, and I gathered flowers in my own hands cupped tightly together. We walked in together, the chants coursing over us. I tried not to look at anyone, and to walk slowly and primly, like a bridesmaid.

Brindha and 1 squeezed in between my mother and Reema auntie, near Ammamma's head. There were flowers heaped on her, except for her face. I tried to let the chants enter me and make me think about God and how he would look out for Ammamma. But I couldn't stop looking at Ammamma, who looked more now like she used to look, better than she'd looked in the hospital, like a snake who reemerges young from a crackly old skin. Her hair was shiny and perfectly in place, and she no longer looked uncomfortable, her shoulders relaxed, her hands resting at her side. I could see the scar from the long-ago monkey bite on her upturned wrist. A fat buzzing fly landed on Ammamma's face and I waited for her (expected her) to swat it away. I could hear the fly buzzing under the chanting, buzzing in a tonal scale all its own and then quietly landing for an investigation of Ammamma's chin, the corner of her mouth, then buzzing again. I looked at my mother, whose eyes were closed in prayer, at my father, who was looking at the ground. I rapped my knuckles against the ground in front of the mat we were sitting on, hoping to distract the fly. It was undistracted, too devoted to Ammamma to notice me. I felt angry, and disgusted, seeing it perched on her chin. I got on my knees and crawled the small distance into the middle of the circle of people, and I raised my hand and swept it across Ammamma's face.

The fly jumped up and buzzed away, and people looked up. I felt hot and embarrassed, realizing they had not seen the fly but had seen me reach out to touch Ammamma. I kept making grand flapping motions over her face so that gradually people would understand that there must have been an insect or something. But 1 couldn't look at her face as I bent over her, because touching her had established something that looking hadn't yet but might soon confirm: she was cold, smooth and rubbery and cold, and there was no life in her.

1 crawled backward, receding into my place near Brindha. She took the hand that had touched Ammamma and held it up, inspecting it closely like there was some residue she thought might be there, something that might make touching me be like touching Ammamma herself.

The priest moved on from chanting to call-and-response prayers. He called, in deep, assured tones, and we responded, some uncertain, some heartfelt, some in tears, some in meditation. I knew the words to some of the prayers, Ammamma had taught me long ago, so I spoke some of them, and others I just lip-synched. At certain points in the prayer, the priest showered Ammamma with more flower petals, and nodded for us to do the same. I stripped petals off the flower stems and tossed them, with a timid, underhand swing.

Brindha threw all of her flowers, stems and all, and didn't save any for the next interval. She used her now free hands to cover her eyes. After a few minutes of sitting like that, she tugged at me, and whispered, “Do you think we might have another chocolate bar now?”

I shook my head no, not wanting to move. I hoped no one had heard her, sounding so frivolous and unfeeling even though she wasn't. I knew she didn't want to watch, but I did; I was repelled but also transfixed, and it mattered to me to be strong like everybody else.

There was a lot of whispering and rustling among my mother and father and Sanjay uncle and the priest. A piece of gold—we needed a piece of gold for Ammamma. Reema auntie and Mother had taken all their bangles and rings off, all they were wearing were their wedding necklaces that they never removed. Brindha was wearing no jewelry at all. I took off my necklace, and gave it to Mother. She looked at me gratefully, recognizing it to be Steve's necklace. She yanked hard and the clasp came off in her hand and she gave me the remnants of the necklace back. She moved in toward Ammamma and the priest took the gold clasp, blessed it, and gave it back to Mother with directions. She said a low, halting prayer, and then put the gold in Ammamma's mouth.

Mother started to cry as we all stood up and men scurried around us to join Sanjay uncle and my father in carrying Ammamma on the bier. For a second, I imagined Ammamma still on the gurney at the hospital, just getting more tests. Some flowers tumbled off the bier and clung to our saris. We fell into a procession around the men.

Ammamma was laid on top of the pyre, her feet facing south, and the priest recited more hymns. Brindha asked Madhu's mother what these hymns were that she had never heard before. Madhu's mother said they were portions of the Veda only recited for the dead. We were asking Yama, Lord of the Underworld, to prepare a good place for Ammamma among the ancestors. We were asking Agni, God of Fire, to carry the departed soul safely to the next realm. We were asking Mother Earth to be kind in accepting the body.

We stood there around the pyre, dressed in white and bathed and cleansed and praying and still guilty for the various ways in which we feared we had failed Ammamma. We wore guilt invisibly, no one else saw or knew. Was that how it was for everybody, did it come in all sizes? There was no discovery process for personal crimes the way there was for political ones: while you were never proven guilty, you never felt innocent again.

Sanjay uncle walked around the pyre pouring coconut oil. The priest poured water into a big earthen pot and Sanjay uncle picked it up and made another full circle around the pyre. The pot had holes in it so the water dripped onto the ground, making a line in the red dust. Then Sanjay uncle stood facing away from Ammamma and threw the pot backwards, and it fell nearby and cracked open. He set the pyre alight. Sandalwood and incense and curls of blue woodsmoke ascended upwards. The flames blazed higher around Ammamma. Some more flowers fell off the bier and landed on the ground near us, crumpled roses and lilies, their faces blackened by flame. The flames lapped at Ammamma's sari, and the white cloth shriveled and darkened, cauterized.

“How much longer do we stay out here?” I asked Madhu's mother.

“It usually takes about an hour for the skull to crack,” she said. “When we hear it, then we can say the final prayers for today and bathe. The fire will burn itself out, after about a day, we don't have to watch the whole time.”

I couldn't stay. Ammamma's sari was getting blacker and blacker.

I whispered in Brindha's ear. “Do you still want some chocolate?”

Brindha nodded yes immediately, her whole face thanking me, relieved. She grabbed my hand and this time I dragged my feet, so it made it clear to everyone that she was the one initiating this flight, I was leaving only to help her, accompany her. We stepped on plants and vines crossing through the garden, but we didn't care, choosing the shortest diagonal. And then there was the quiet of the house, and the meticulous unraveling of the candy wrapper and the stickiness on our hands and teeth and lips. We ate candy bar after candy bar until the sun went down and everyone came back inside.