Authors: Annapurna Potluri
Startled, Sarojini fell to her feet and pulled both girls—her daughter, Padmaja, and Anjali—to her body.
“FIRE!”
Anjali, deafened by the sounds of the guns, looked to her side. A baby lay under her mother’s motionless body, wailing. Anjali, balancing her weight on her forearms and good leg, slipped her hand around the child’s stomach and pulled the baby to her own body, crouching over her.
“FIRE!”
Sixteen thousand more rounds fired.
She wrote to Alexandre that for nine more minutes, she cowered, shaking under the sound of the gunfire. Anjali shook, her arms holding the baby girl so tightly that for seconds after the firing stopped she couldn’t release the child. Anjali looked up when for long minutes she heard nothing. Sarojini and Padmaja, both trembling, looked at Anjali, their eyes wide, their mouths open. In their eyes, horror. Anjali looked down. Her chest was covered in blood, and then she felt it warm and sticky on her arms. Anjali’s arms relaxed, and the baby’s limp body fell away from hers.
T
HAT NIGHT
, A
NJALI
, Sarojini and Padmaja stayed with the Singhs, friends of Sarojini. The army cut the wire cables, the railroads
and the city’s electricity and water. Quietly, a servant led Anjali to the washroom to clean herself. Anjali looked at herself in the mirror. The light was gone from her eyes, and she felt despair in every muscle in her body as she wrung the child’s blood out of her sari. Her fingers were numb in the cold water. She looked for several moments at a plump, yellow lizard on the wall, as still as death. The servants had filled every pot in the house with water when word spread that the water would be shut off, and she had been given only a small bowl of water.
It was a beautiful night; there was no breeze. Anjali looked out the window of the washroom at the trees—their leaves outlined in silvery moonlight. The stars shone brightly; the world looked endless. And quiet. No words. No one had spoken in several hours. Anjali closed her eyes and thought happiness. She thought of floating in the sea in Alexandre’s arms.
As night closed in on the home, Sarojini spoke at last to the maid. “Where is Mr. Singh?” She had not seen her friend leave.
“He is still at the garden, Madam. Helping to identify the dead.”
Anjali stretched her weak body on the floor. She fantasized that night of heroism. In her mind’s eye, she was an Indian Joan of Arc, and then a dark-eyed Athena with bow and arrow. She thought: “I can carry this city’s sorrow. I can walk these streets, and cradle the motherless children, and bring comfort to the young widows and herd the shepherdless goats. My heart is gentle and constant.” She cupped her hand outwardly, into the dark air, in a gesture of benevolence, as if bidding near her a child who was very close and incredibly dear.
But in the next moment she closed her eyes and hated herself more than ever for thinking of herself, of making a myth of herself, among
such despair. She hated herself with a burning intensity she had never felt before. In the darkness she saw again her hands covered in blood and dreamt then only of oblivion, of dissolving into the earth and becoming only embers and ashes. And in the morning, for a moment, she again fancied that she could be a heroine.
R
IOTS IN ALL
of India continued for days afterward. Anjali saw, on a thoroughfare in Amritsar, the corpse of a calf and a pig strung up on a post and she wondered if anyone would leave the city alive. The city continued under marshal law after spotty rioting. And Dyer ordered that on the Kucha Sawarian, the street where an Englishwoman had been attacked, the natives would have to crawl on their bellies, their noses in the ground as their eyes followed the tips of the soldiers’ gleaming bayonets.
A
LEXANDRE CHOSE NOT
to reply to Anjali’s letters and wished she would stop writing, but he reread her letters, again and again, keeping them in a drawer in his office at the university.
He thought of Anjali penned into that garden, with no means of escape.
He thought of her again when reading about the Siberian cellar where the once-tsar of Russia held his son in his arms—his wife and daughters were killed first, the diamonds they had hidden in their dresses proving too solid a shield against bullets. And so the women were speared to death with bayonets, producing the unusual sound of diamonds colliding with steel.
In bed at night, Alexandre sometimes recalled Anjali’s description of that day in Amritsar, and his heart beat in a slow, funerary rhythm
in the quiet and dark city. He thought of her in Amritsar: Anjali, the daughter now of no one, and he tossed fitfully in bed in his Parisian flat when the last candle burned out in a lightless city. He fell to sleep thinking of that dark, far-off country, India—a country the shape of an elephant’s ear, a greater distance away—in his sleep the map lines did not exist; he and Anjali and everyone else on the great Eurasian plate, and the ancient places—Bactria, Persia, the vanished kingdom of Rajaraja, the great Himalayan peaks, all moving with the spinning of a small, watery planet invisible from the rings of Uranus.
Alexandre’s was a ritual sadness and would never leave him.
I
T TOOK
A
NJALI
twenty-five years to understand the rhythm of the seasons. She wasn’t oblivious to the changes of season and temperature, of course, but she was a quarter century old before she saw that year to year all the patterns would be the same, that at Christmas the converted Christians and the British officers and civil servants would bring out the paper crowns and the holly wreaths that they draped on the doors and in the hallways, and that spring would start annually with at first just a sweet smell of blossoms, and that at each season she’d miss the one prior and also look forward to the one upcoming and be able to see months into the future to the next and the next season. It would always be the same; it both assured her and scared her, that the only change to be exacted upon Earth was the kind she could unleash, the change people can make.
For her associations with the likes of Gandhi, Sarojini, the Nehrus, kind-eyed Bacha Khan and his army of unarmed redshirts, and for any activity deemed seditious—every article, speech or demonstration—Anjali passed many of her days in prison. Often she would be released
only to be arrested at this rally or that only a few days later. In the silence of the prison walls, she would think of Mohini and how different their lives had become, from season to season, and wonder about their parents and if they were at all proud of her or if her actions had not only been politically offensive to them but unladylike in their estimation too. In prison she could not see the flowers bloom, or the fruit grow heavy on the vine, or see the monsoons sweep through the city like an angry sea.
Her cell at the Naini Central Jail in Allahabad, where she spent many of her prison days, was a six-by-six room, grey and dank, with only a cot and a chair. Without much ventilation, it trapped humidity and heat, but the bareness of it, its cement floors and ceiling, gave way to coolness in the evening. There was a bare, flickering lightbulb on the ceiling, which flashed on and off at the will of the current. At night, swarms of mosquitos would cluster around the light and make a low buzzing sound to which Anjali would fall asleep. She had a small window, an unreachable pane of glass high up that tilted open during thunderstorms and then clamored shut, and then open again, its wooden sill splintering. Through it, at night, were constellations. Like a sailor drifting in the sea, thrown overboard, she had become adept at telling time by the shifting of heavenly bodies, enough to impress any nautical expert. There was a great fortune in her disfigurement: the men would not touch her, while the other women cowered in fear of some of the male guards.
Still, Anjali preferred her steel-bared room to Mohini’s house arrest, her husband-jailor; prison imprisoned only one’s body.
Some few years before, Anjali had made rounds with Sarojini from one poverty-stricken village to another, their drought-plagued fields
brown and dry, scorched saplings in hundreds of neat, dizzying, infertile rows; the villagers were starving and desperate, struggling under the weight of unrelenting and unforgiving taxes. Many of the farmers had never recovered from seizure of their crops for the war effort, when the government replanted many of the fields with indigo, which left the soil barren. Sarojini was under direction to organize the villagers in protest, in a tax strike, but the work was slow. Anjali was charged with collecting endless notebooks of tedious data: how much the average annual yield was, how many plants were in each row, how many bushels of carrots or turnips were saleable, and so on until so much that in her dreams Anjali would see only numbers. The women were afraid of the men being jailed, and each family—long ignored—wanted to tell Sarojini and Anjali their stories. Sarojini was afraid that if even one family paid the tax, the whole effort would be ruined. “Everyone must be involved,” she said sternly, “or else the government will just pick off families, one by one, throwing all these farmers into jail and the women and children will starve.”
But when the government threatened to seize the jewelry of the women in the village, a new panic spread through the place from home to home. Anjali and Sarojini and their volunteers helped the villagers hide valuables. At the home of the Pandya family, the young, thin mother nervously served watered-down coffee without sugar to Sarojini and Anjali as Anjali helped the old woman fold a small amount of cash into her saris. It was an amount that as a girl Anjali would have kept as pocket money for candies and toys at the railway station.
Sarojini looked at an empty amber bottle on the table and glanced up, making eye contact with Mr. Pandya, who hung his head.
“They will take our land! Oh God!” Mrs. Pandya looked heavenward and clenched her fists to her breasts, her face contorted in horror. “They’ve seized the land of our neighbors already! I don’t know what to do with my jewelry,” Mrs. Pandya said. She held up a meager, ancient, marriage necklace and a small set of silver anklets. “This is all the family has left. Should my daughter get married like a beggar girl?” She held a thin, weak baby to her chest.
Sarojini looked over the room listlessly as Anjali passed through her gaze. Suddenly she looked strong and sure and moved in to face Mrs. Pandya.
“Give it to Anjali, Mrs. Pandya.”
“What?”
“Give your jewelry to Anjali. They will never inspect a crippled girl.”
Anjali looked nervously at Sarojini, afraid; she did not want that responsibility. Mrs. Pandya anxiously clutched her jewelry more tightly. Sarojini took the items from Mrs. Pandya’s hand and thrust them at Anjali. Anjali recalled that there was a time, before, when she was small and thought jewelry would make her beautiful.
“Anjali, put these on,” she instructed, “you needn’t even hide them. The authorities will assume they are yours,” she laughed. “They wouldn’t dare.”
Anjali began to fasten the thin chains around her neck, ashamed that she paused for a moment as she considered that she was putting on peasant jewelry, and then she wondered if she belonged to any society or group anymore, having no father who would claim her as his daughter. She thought how her father and mother would reproach her for this, for taking coffee with farmworkers.
T
HE POOR WHOSE
lives she could not before imagine were now, in the jail, her neighbors. Anjali had been jailed beside pickpockets and prostitutes—women who couldn’t afford blouses to wear beneath their saris, with missing teeth and thin grey braids, rashes—some suffered from syphilis. She searched her memory and could only ever remember seeing that kind of person outside the home, from the view of their family carriage or inside a train station. And then she thought of her family’s servants, welcome only in that home when working, in the home but not of it; and she thought about her last image of that stately house—Peter’s blocking her view of the garden, his face parsed by the iron bars of the gate.
Anjali had known Peter all her life; he was the one who would run errands to the pharmacy for medicines when she was sick with polio. She had never known anything about him. He ate his meals quietly with the other servants outside of the kitchen, and Anjali realized she had never considered him. She had no idea what he thought about. Indeed, she’d never even considered that he did think about much; his was the realm of duty to her family, and she did not know about his family or where he came from. She wondered if he, Peter who guarded the gate, had a story of his own. It was just so difficult to think that someone who stood by their gate with an empty stare ever thought much about anything, imagined things. She wasn’t aware that he had a wife and children; it seemed he was always in the Adivi house anyways, but she supposed it possible. It was hard to consider the inner life of servants, but it was even harder to imagine that of beggars, their lives so animalistic, living from one meal to the next, and Anjali felt ashamed to think it but couldn’t deny that when she saw a pauper with his begging bowl, she first thought, “My God, how horrible,” and it wasn’t for
that beggar’s plight but because of the horror of his appearance, that beastly half-nude person, so unclean, so far from anything cultured that he seemed nearly inhuman. She almost felt angry at them for being so poor. Sometimes, if she saw someone particularly wretched, she felt herself fouled and would feel her day ruined. “How awful I am,” she thought. “Where is my compassion?!” That compassion it seemed was so much more easily accessible from inside the gates of her home, when she considered the poor as an idea in her mind, not a real and wretched mass of illness and hunger and filth. Anjali still could not look at the frail old coal thief imprisoned opposite her, that toothless mouth, the tattered sari, her bony hand pushing her cup against the bars of her cell like a begging bowl at the foot of the goddess.