The front grill is jangling; I can hear Agni wrestling with the three locks and I hear her swearing softly, but there is no one to help. Zu is asleep already, as is the night nurse, gently snoring on the armchair by my bed. That is all they are good for, the hired help, sleeping the sleep of the dead.
But sleep does not come to me. I stay awake, praying for the child to reach safely home. I wait for Agni to return, even on the nights that stretch till dawn. I can hear the door creaking open, and now, the double locking click on the grill on the front door.
She should have a man by her who would keep her safe in this darkness. Then, sleep would come easier to me, especially now that Jayanta has come back. It was such a shock to see him – after so many years – and so whole and healthy. He was such an emotional cripple, unable to stop his circling hands, his stuttering… I expected him to be grotesque, hunchbacked by his wants.
I fear for my Agni. Young women are blown up in fields near the old airport and no one is hanged for it. The case goes unresolved from court to court. What hope is there for people like us when someone as evil as Jay returns?
Agni is peering into the bedroom, so I invite her in with a soft sound. “You should be asleep, Dida! It’s been such a long day,” she scolds me, but her tone is tender as she snuggles up to me, taking care not to roll over my outflung arm in the dark.
I smell the smoke in my granddaughter’s hair, but I breathe in deeply anyway, just stroking her hair in ragged lines.
There are too many secrets between us.
She murmurs sleepily, stifling a yawn. “I am so knocked out Dida.” She kisses my forehead. “You need to stop staying up for me every time.”
I grunt, and she touches my face softly.
“Try to get some sleep, okay?”
Then the door closes and she is gone.
There is the buzzing sound of a telephone and Agni’s full-throated laughter floats into the room, riding on a night breeze that is heavy with the fragrant quisqualis flowers unfurling pink and white. I had so little to laugh about at her age. I was already a wife and a mistress, with the burden of two men and a young child.
I wonder if Jay has called again, and pray that she is not laughing that laugh for him.
Jay called here this morning. He told the idiot nurse that he had lost Agni’s office number and she gave it to him, saying the number wrong the first time. I made a lot of noise, trying to distract her, but she just turned her back on me, put a hand over her ear and gave him Agni’s office and mobile numbers, looking them up on her mobile phone. I have to get rid of this nurse; she is stupid, and impertinent too. She treats me like a willful child she hates.
Then he called again, asking for Mridula’s number. The nurse chattily told me he was invited to the Open House tomorrow. I know why he is calling so many times. He wants me to know that he is after something. He wants me to spend sleepless nights, like this, worrying about what he is doing with my granddaughter.
He looks at her as if he is searching for something, but there is lust in his eyes. He has his father’s eyes; I know that look too well.
If he was obsessed with Shanti – maybe he still is – he should leave Agni alone. Perhaps his obsession has festered into an unnatural hunger… I see it so clearly. An open-mouthed greed. I hope Agni can see it too. Desires should not grow so monstrous.
True strength is in resisting your desires, instead of succumbing to them. Falling in love is such an absurdity, with such predictable endings. Initially, the sustaining interest – that delicious unwrapping of the folds that make up another person. But when the layers are uncovered to the pulsating heart beneath, to its nakedness and imperfections, what mystery is left? Everything changes and you
realise that love is just shadow play and, like the immense shadows of a wayang kulit, it too is soon folded away.
Lust I understand. The body’s ache, a hollow core empty for another, any other – that is real; that is true.
I wish I had known this Malay story before my marriage to Nikhil. But this ancient story was never a part of my childhood, so I didn’t know it until much later. And then, it was too late to tell my daughter that a prince should not always get what he wants, especially an aged prince:
Sultan Mahmud’s wife passed away and he grieved deeply.
He decided he needed an extraordinary woman to ease his pain, someone skilled and beautiful, like the princess of Gunung Ledang, who lived on a high mountain in Johor.
Sultan Mahmud sent his nobles to the enchanted mountain, and the strong winds blew hard and the rains pelted the men, shielding the mountain with dark clouds.
Finally, after days of much hardship, they came to a garden. The brooks bubbled merrily over the stones and the birds of redyellowgreen flitted from the branches.
In the middle of the garden was a wonderful gazebo. It was made of human bones, with a roof of human hair. Inside this strange structure sat an old lady with her handmaidens.
The lady asked, “What brings you here, noble sirs, so far from your own kingdom?” “We wish to convey the sultan’s wishes to the princess,” said the men, and related their story.
The old woman listened. Then she disappeared for a short while. When she returned, she said to the nobles:
“The Princess of Mount Ledang has heard all that you have said. Now please tell the Sultan that this is what the Princess has to say: The Princess agrees to marry him, but with the following conditions. As dowry, he is to provide:
A gold bridge and a silver bridge from Malacca to Gunung Ledang
Seven trays of the heart of mosquitoes
Seven dishes of louse livers
A jar of women’s tears
A jar of young areca nut juice
A bowl of the Sultan’s own blood
And
A bowl of the blood of the young crown prince, Raja Ahmad. Only then will the princess accept the Sultan of Melaka’s proposal of marriage.”
When the Sultan heard all this, he was quiet for a long time. “She can have all she asks for,” he said, “except for the blood of my son.”
And the marriage plans were cancelled.
A son’s pain on one side; on the other, lust fulfilled. Nikhil made the trade because my exultant heart had leapt up and said: Yes, I will, yes, yes, yes!
Nikhil brought me to Malaya. I was fifteen when I met my husband.
When Nikhil came for the bride-viewing in 1931, he was a civil servant in Calcutta, at a time when the British were the real gods. He was also a sometimes-poet, a fashionable accomplishment for such times, which made him not unlike the thousands of other Bengali gentlemen who wanted to be Tagore.
If I close my eyes I can still see our courtyard in Calcutta, heavy Doric columns flanking a red-cemented courtyard, filled with buzzing flies and hurrying people. There was the hum of bustling servants bearing Ilish dripping blood in fresh slaughter, plucked from the Ganges waters to be cooked with stinging mustard and chillies. Then the Koi fish, struggling for life, beaten on the head with vicious scythes but writhing fitfully, refusing to breathe their defeat. I was brought up hearing that a woman’s life is like that of a Koi fish, hanging on to life, despite all odds.
Such was the idiom of acceptance for other women; never for me.
For I was young and in full bloom. I could not but know of this power, although no one would tell me so. But the sooty kajol they applied under my hairline, and on my cheek to distract the evil eye, told me about this visitation of divine grace on a body I rarely had occasion to think about. How quickly I learnt to recognise that indrawn breath, that attempt at nonchalance! And how I revelled in it!
My father, like most gentlemen who frequented our house, had more learning than wealth. Delighted at my birth, he gave me the outrageous name of Shapnasundari, Beautiful-As-A-Dream. How could I not fulfill his prophecy, accept his benediction, at least for a few brief years? So I had willpower, and I had the gift of beauty. I practiced using them both. I was sure I could bend destiny to my will.
At fifteen I was ripe for marriage. A suitable boy had been found, and that is why I glowed as the courtyard hummed on that morning, buzzing with activity for me.
It was just before the puja season, as the breezes cooled and wafted heavy with the incense of the shefali and bokul flowers, and I remember a baul singing outside my window, dressed in ochre robes and strumming the ektara.
I have always loved music but, more than anything else, I loved reading about history. I spent days escaping from the monsoon into empires and wars, the treacherous and the heroic. Cramped into the small space between a Burmese teak four-poster and the damp wall, with the mould seeping into my splayed toes, I hid from prying eyes and read of magical Malaya through the dim light seeping through dark-grey clouds. It was Malaya then; this country became Malaysia later.
I first found Malaya in a Bengali poem about the sea maiden lover of an Indian voyager. It was a land whose cities rolled off my tongue with the flavours of the fabulous: Kedah, Perak, Malacca. Walking in the garden, I whispered the name of Sungei Bujang that swooped into the estuary of Merbok, where a bronze image of a Buddha from the fifth century was found. I traced my fingers over a print of this relic from the early Hindu colonisation of Kedah. The plump bronze Buddha always smiled his benediction, one arm outstretched, one hip slightly exaggerated in its bend, the other arm grasping something between thumb and forefinger. I imagined the curly hair in round Grecian clumps, the metal smoothed by the ravages of time.
But first, there was the bride-viewing.
When the groom’s party invaded our courtyard, accepting deference as their due and marching into our home as regally as only such a large party could, I was enjoying the attention being showered on me. Mani was very distracted, arranging the folds of my sari and tucking a loose tendril of hair affectionately behind my ear, her eyes wet with tears.
Then Mani ran out to welcome the groom’s delegation. The groom-to-be, a shy plump boy, lagged behind the men of the groom’s family who stared boldly around them with assessing eyes.
Mani had taught me to look directly at the world; my gaze did not scuttle around the periphery of faces as it should have, but held the male gaze. I was a most unusual bride but, in this roomful of men, they did not quite know how to explain what was different about me. They cleared their throats and looked obliquely at each other, disturbed by a dim prescience of impropriety.
Then the groom’s father, my father-in-law to be, lightly grasped my chin to look into my child-woman eyes, and caught his breath. In the stillness of the hall, I felt a serpentine power sweeping around my heart and squeezing it breathless, silent, just like everyone else.
“I will marry this girl,” the groom’s father said.
Over the murmurs, I heard my blood rushing into my head and felt the first stirrings of a wild exultation, a sense of power over a man so important. Then Mani pulled me out of the hall and took me down to an empty room, bringing down the heavy wooden bar to latch the door with a heavy thud.
She assessed me for a long time as I kept my head bowed and held my breath, unwilling to betray the excitement bubbling forth, the fear that washed over me in a returning tide.
Mani finally kissed my hair. “There are many kinds of slavery, Shapna. When your husband lets you do whatever you want, it is the greatest freedom of all.”
I bent down and touched her feet. Thus was my fate sealed.
Nikhil was forty years old when we married; I was fifteen. I was a child marrying an old man, but no one remembered that when they called me a whore.
Ah, it’s getting light outside. There’s the pale golden light of a Malayan dawn, do you know it? It’s a veiled glow through a misty rain that makes the air translucent with moist edges, as if the gods awaken us with a sprinkle of hallowed waters.
Agni lay awake, tossing in sleeplessness. It was too late to get out of the house and see Abhik tonight, but she wanted his arms around her now, telling her that they would be okay. That they were going to be fine.
Abhik was right; she needed to tell her grandmother about their relationship and make it public. Abhik and Agni… Everyone would be
so
delighted. Why was she so terrified?
Why was she thinking about the Professor so often?
Being old enough to be your father is the big attraction
. She had never had a long term relationship with anyone close to her in age, and Abhik was her first. This was a brand new relationship, not even a year old, started when she hadn’t been looking for another man. The four years with Greg had felt like a marriage; the six months with Abhik felt unreal.
The bond with Greg refused to unravel quickly, even though she realised that it was a different Greg she was seeing over the years, not the swaggering American with the fistful of dollars to be thrown at possible danger zones during weekend trips to Cambodia or Myanmar, or any of the tourist destinations in Southeast Asia which had promised more adventure than Holiday Inns. They had gone to those places, where life was cheap and, when fear and weapons met, death was almost a certainty. They had trawled the backyards of shantytowns as enthusiastically as they had the archaeological ruins to taste the essence of a country, not harbouring fear in their heavy backpacks.
Then Greg had gone home, seen the reflection of his mortality in the shattered glass of the Twin Towers more than a thousand miles away, and embraced the certainty of his death. In Malaysia, Greg had faced the inevitability of dying with a sense of procrastination that had allowed him to lead a life unfettered, accepting each new adventure as an affirmation of his being. He who had sauntered into the alleyways of dictators and dervishes, always telling others what could be changed,
must
be improved, was now cowed by the dynastic vengeance in his own backyard. Now his refrain,
Come back with me
, was asking her to die with him a thousand deaths, each colour-coded in a rainbow hue, the red and the yellow and the orange of terror.