Some male orderlies came rushing along the corridor and they wheeled him through the swinging double doors of the emergency ward. I stood leaning against the wall in a daze. My knees felt weak. The baby inside me kicked, and I felt tears start at the back of my eyes. I looked at the bench, and the children were sitting quietly in a row, staring at me with large, fearful eyes. I smiled at them and walked back to the bench. My knees felt like jelly. They huddled around me.
Lakshmnan put his thin arms around my neck. “Ama, can we go home now?” he whispered in an odd little voice.
“Soon,” I said in a choked voice, hugging his small body so tightly that a whimper slipped past his lips. The children and I waited for hours.
It was night before we left with no news. He was still unconscious. In the taxi the twins looked at me solemnly. Anna fell asleep sucking her thumb, and baby Sevenese blew bubbles. I watched them and felt as if I knew how the widow who threw her sixteen children and then herself into a well had felt. The thought of bringing my children up on my own was terrifying. I stumbled alone in a tunnel, the voices of my children echoing around me.
Listlessly I fed them and put them to bed. I was too shocked to eat, and I sat on my bench, staring out at the stars. “Why me?” I asked again and again. “Why, dear God, do you throw such hardship my way?” That night I waited for Mui Tsai and missed her desperately when she did not come.
When the children awoke the next morning, I fed them and we went back to the hospital. A gray, unconscious figure with a very white bandage lay on a bed. I brought the children home for lunch and, unable to face the trip back to the hospital, sat down and cried. That evening I took the children to the temple. I laid baby Sevenese on the cold floor and stood my children in a row in front of me, and together we prayed. “Please, Ganesha, do not forsake us now. Look at them,” I begged. “They are so innocent and so young. Please give them back their father.”
There was no news the next day. He was still unconscious.
When I looked down at my hands, I saw that someone had lined the glass bangles of worry and fear on them. They caught the light and sparkled from afar. Distracted by their soundless jangle, I did the unthinkable. I stopped eating. I had forgotten about the little person inside me. For four days I starved my blameless baby. On the fifth day I woke up disoriented on my bench, my body aching all over.
I watched my children eat their favorite breakfast of sweet purple root broth. The sight of children eating is heartbreaking when you are frightened and alone. They chewed with their mouths open, purple goo swirling around small pink tongues. More purple dribbled onto Sevenese’s white shirt. I looked at them, so young and so unprotected, and felt sick with fear. Tomorrow I would be nineteen. Tears prickled the back of my eyes and blurred the wounded picture of my children, their virtuous mess, and their tiny teeth. Sometimes a face cried while its owner stood apart and made terrible plans, saw terrible things. That was what happened to me. I saw dying in the distance all the dreams and hopes that I had nurtured so carefully. I watched the flesh come off my dreams. It was a frightening sight. And when I turned my eyes away from the horrible sight, I saw my fate sniggering in a corner, my fleshless dreams imprisoned inside his iron box.
I rushed into the prayer room. At the altar I dipped a shaking finger in the silver bowl of red
kum kum
and drew such a large, uneven red dot that it nearly covered my entire forehead. “Look, look,” I cried to the picture of Ganesha. “I still have a husband.” He stared back at me calmly. All the gods I had prayed to for as long as I can remember stared back at me with exactly the same inwardly gratified expression they had worn all these years. And all these years I had mistaken that half-smile for gentle munificence. Inside my skull, the violent things bubbled into angry words that appeared on my tongue. “Take him if you must. Make me a widow as a birthday present,” I challenged, my voice incoherent with rage, my hand rubbing away at the red dot on my forehead. “Go on,” I screeched fiercely, “but don’t ever think I will drown my children in a well or lie down and die. I will go on. I will feed them and make something of them. So go on. Take the useless man. Have him if you must.”
The instant my mouth closed on those harsh, ugly words, and I swear this is the truth, someone called my name from outside the house. At the door was a lady that I knew from the temple who worked as a cleaner in the hospital. She had come to tell me that my husband was awake. Muddled, but asking about the children and me.
I gazed at her, mystified. God’s messenger? Then I saw her eyes flick to the red mess on my forehead and remembered that I had not bathed for three days.
“Let me have a quick shower,” I said to her, my heart beating very fast. Hyenas padded over to me bearing celestial flowers in their vicious jaws. God had answered my prayers. He had heard me. I was lightheaded with joy. God was only testing, playing with me as I did with my children.
I poured a bucket of cold water over my head, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water on my weakened body or the fact that I had hardly eaten for five days, but my lungs froze. Refused to take in air. My knees gave way beneath me, and I fell to the wet floor, my hands urgently banging on the door. God’s messenger came running to help me. Mirrored in her eyes was horror, and no wonder. A horrendously pregnant naked woman with blue lips and a twisted expression was writhing on a bathroom floor. Oddly there is no clarity anymore, but I can remember very clearly seeing the edges of the messenger’s lime green sari turning bottle green as it came into contact with water. She pulled me up with some difficulty, panting with the effort. My wet limbs kept sliding out of her small hands. Terrified I was dying, I leaned against the gray walls, gasping like a fish until inexplicably the muscles in my chest loosened and the tight bands of constricting steel relaxed. Small breaths became possible. The messenger covered my body with a towel, and slowly I learned to breathe normally like all God’s children. Suddenly my children, shocked and traumatized, lunged at me sobbing and screaming.
A few days later we brought him home. And a few weeks later he took a rickshaw to work. Things slowly got back to normal except for a slight wheezing in my chest on very cold nights.
Jeyan when he was born was a great shock. He had small dull eyes in a large square face and painfully thin limbs. I kissed him gently on the dewy eyelids of his tiny half-closed eyes and hoped for the best, but I knew even then that he would never amount to much. Life would treat him with the same contempt it had reserved for his poor father. I didn’t know then that I would be the instrument that life would use to torment my own son. In his poor head God had seen fit to release only a few words and a whole lot of spaces in between them. He didn’t speak until he was almost three years old. He moved as he thought—slowly. He reminded me of my stepchildren, whom I had so successfully pushed into the back of my mind. Sometimes it came to me to wonder guiltily if the terrible shock that I experienced in the bathroom when I poured that bucket of cold water on my head or the glass bangles that made me neglect food were responsible for his condition.
Mohini thought him enchanting. She cradled his dark, still body in her fair arms and told him his skin was as beautiful as the blue skin of baby Krishna. He stared at her curiously. He was a watcher. Like a cat he followed you around the room with his eyes. I wondered what went through his head. Unlike my other children, he refused to smile. Tickling him brought forth only short barks of involuntary laughter, but smiling as an art eluded him.
Eight months after Jeyan was born, Mui Tsai had another baby. The tiny infant screamed until he was red in the face when First Wife came to claim him. He was needed as a companion for “her” first child, who in the absence of brothers and sisters was becoming too spoiled and unruly for her to control.
January came rolling in, bringing not just its usual monsoon rains but also a new baby. Mrs. Gopal, who was present at the delivery, was very brisk and practical. “Better eat less of expensive shrimp and start saving now for the child’s dowry instead,” she advised, jangling the keys hanging from her petticoat. My poor daughter was the color and texture of bitter chocolate. Even as a baby Lalita was extraordinarily ugly. The gods were getting careless with their gifts. First with Jeyan, and now with this tiny mite, who looked at me through sorrow-filled eyes. Like the fading eyes of a very sad old woman, they looked at me as if saying, “Ah, you poor fool. If only you knew what I know.” It was as if my Lalita already knew then what unhappiness awaited her flat face.
My brood, I decided, was complete. The pot was full. No more unguarded moments in the dark. The months put little flesh on Lalita. Limbs thin to the point of emaciation waved peacefully about her body. She was as quiet as her father. She was never exuberant with her affection, but I think she loved Ayah dearly. In his eyes she saw all that was wrong in her forgiven unconditionally. Notoriously shy and impossible to provoke, she lived in her own fantasy world. She spent hours in the vegetable patch turning over leaves and stones, peering underneath them, and whispering secrets to the invisible things she found there. When she grew up and her invisible friends deserted her, life was very unkind to her but she withstood all that it threw at her without a fight. Nay, without a murmur.
When Jeyan was one and a half, he tired of crawling and wanted to stand, but his legs were too weak to support his own weight. Mother wrote to advise me to dig a hole in the sand and stand him in it. Buried thus, his limbs would slowly grow strong and sturdy. I dug a hole a foot and a half deep just outside the kitchen window, where I could keep an eye on him while I cooked, and lowered him into the hole in the mornings, leaving him there for hours at a time. Often Mohini sat beside him to keep him company. Slowly his limbs improved, and when he could stand on his own two feet, the hole was covered up again.
When Lakshmnan and Mohini were six years old, they started school. In the morning they went to school, where they learned English, and in the afternoon for language classes, where they were taught to read and write Tamil. Lakshmnan had to wear navy blue shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt, and Mohini a dark blue pinafore with a white shirt beneath. White socks and white canvas shoes completed the outfits. Hand in hand, they walked beside me. My heart swelled with pride. First day at school. For me, too. I had never been to school and was so happy to give my children something I had never had. We started off early and made a detour to the temple first. On that cool morning we placed their schoolbooks on the floor by the shrine to be blessed, Lakshmnan rang the bell, and I smashed a coconut to ask for blessings.
I was twenty-six years old and Lalita six when a card arrived from my uncle the mango dealer. His daughter was getting married, and we were all invited to the wedding. My husband had used up all his leave, and he couldn’t come. I packed my best saris, my jewels, my golden beaded slippers, my children, and their best outfits.
That same polished black car that had picked up Ayah and me from Penang Harbor came to collect us, but Bilal had retired. Someone else in a khaki uniform grinned toothily, touched his skull-cap politely, and stashed our bags in the trunk of the car. I climbed into its leather interior with a sense of nostalgia. I had arrived a child, but now small bodies full of excited chatter, bodies that I had made inside my body, rubbed and bumped against me. The past shimmered briefly in the cool morning air. I remembered the lady with the deformed feet and the procession of
dulang
washers as if it was a lifetime ago. How life had changed. How generous had the gods been to me. Outside the thin bubble of my thoughts the children quarreled and fought for window space. My hand automatically reached out to slap away Sevenese’s fingers pinching Jeyan’s dark flesh.
Anna was terribly carsick, and Lakshmnan, royally ensconced in the front seat with the window wound down and the wind in his curly hair, twisted around in his seat with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. I caught the driver’s eyes resting on Mohini in the rear-view mirror and stifled a spurt of annoyance. I must marry her off quickly. The responsibility of great beauty sits uneasily on a parent’s head. She was only ten, and already attracting too many adult-sized looks. Sometimes I sat up on my many sleepless nights and worried about it. Friendly spirits stood in my kitchen and whispered caution in my ear. I should have listened to them. Taken more care. Left her white skin in the sun to bake. Taken her father’s shaving blade to her tiny face with my own hands.
Real surprise awaited me at my uncle’s residence. First because he lived on a hill, and hills were generally the preserve of Europeans, and second because he lived in a very large, in fact an enormous two-story house with lofty rooms, colonnaded verandas, and an impressive pitched roof. It was built, my uncle proudly explained later, in the English Regency style of John Nash.
The third, totally unexpected surprise was the impression that my uncle’s wife, who had never laid eyes on me before that day, hated me. I felt it from the moment she opened the door and smiled at me. It stopped me in my tracks, but the moment passed when my uncle ran forward and enveloped me in a bear hug. He looked at Mohini in disbelieving admiration and shook his head from side to side in satisfied approval to see how tall and strong Lakshmnan was. But it was Anna who made him cry as she looked solemnly up at him. Anna was small for her age. She had eyes that begged you to pick her up, and apple cheeks that made you want to bite her.
“Look at her face!” he cried, picking her up and pinching her cheeks. “She is the living image of my mother.” He wiped away tears that had collected in the corners of his eyes. Then he knelt on the floor, kissed Jeyan and Sevenese, and bade us all enter. He had no choice but to ignore Lalita, as she had hidden herself inside the folds of my sari in an acute moment of shyness.