Small Days and Nights Read online

  Ma’s lawyer, Mr Sriram, comes to the house to discuss the issue of the upcoming coal plant, on Vik’s recommendation.

  ‘How odd,’ I’d said to Vik. ‘I ask for the name of a lawyer, and you suggest the one I already know.’

  Mr Sriram is a thin man with vitiligo. He lives in Madras, but I haven’t seen him since he brought me to look at the house after Ma died.

  ‘This must be strange for you,’ he’d said, as he drove through the front gate and the long scrubby driveway.

  It was strange. To think of my mother buying a plot of land, imagining she’d live out here like a pioneer, keeping secrets. I saw a grove of bright green trees. Mr Sriram said they were cashew. All along the ground were sunburnt weeds. There was a well – white and gleaming – an anachronism. Who builds wells like this any more? I had a vision of Ma leaning over the concrete rim, dropping the bucket into the cool moss of water, hauling it up with a frayed coir rope. It was like re-entering a scene from childhood. Women with their pots lined up at the well. Women at the street tap. Women waiting for the metro water tanker. You could trace a line from the present all the way back to Mohenjo-daro and there would be women with pots in the curve of their hips, waiting to collect water.

  Mr Sriram knew when to be quiet and when to speak. He had allowed me to wander around the house by myself. When I came downstairs, he was sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper he’d brought with him.

  ‘I expect you’ll want to sell?’

  ‘No,’ I had said. ‘I want to keep it. I think I might even want to live here.’

  Now, almost two and a half years later, I look at him directly in the face. The vitiligo has spread. His face is almost white, except for a few streaks of brown along his forehead and under his chin.

  ‘The house looks more lived in,’ he says. ‘Much better. Your mother hardly came here. Mostly she stayed in Pondicherry, but she had an idea that this could be a retreat of sorts.’

  Mr Sriram tells me that the ashram down the road has 100 acres and that they aren’t interested in selling. ‘It will be difficult for anyone to take that away. After the politicians, it’s the God people who are the most powerful in this country.’

  I tell him about the murder in Mugaiyur, how even though I lock all the doors before going to bed, I often wake up in the middle of the night to check the bolts and latches. ‘Should I be worried for my safety?’

  Mr Sriram agrees that hiring a security guard might not be the best option because there have been so many cases, particularly with women living alone, where the security guard is the perpetrator of the crime. ‘Have you received any direct threats?’ he asks.

  I cannot explain the vague sense of foreboding that hums in my body. It is not paranoia exactly, but I am always alert, always on the watch to convert any stray look into something ominous.

  When I see Valluvan later I will tell him that for the moment we are safe. The proposed coal plant ten kilometres down the coast has not been given the green light yet, but at some point, the monsters will come.

  Before Mr Sriram leaves, I try to thrust a puppy on him. He had been idly stroking Dimple’s head. ‘Take her,’ I say, ‘really. We need to find homes for them.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘My daughter only wants a pug like that one in the Vodafone advertisement.’

  Sometimes I think it is all an elaborate hoax. That my sister is perfectly fine. Is able to wash her own bum, put the sanitary pad in the strip of her knickers, yank them up over her thighs and then hold forth on Sebastião Salgado.

  I will walk down one morning and everything will be changed, as if in a fairy tale. Frog to prince. Tree to woman. Lucia will have breakfast ready. Perhaps she will be a genius omelette-maker. She will have an English accent for reasons unclear to everyone. But every word she utters will have the clipped weight of English authority. She will be funny, bossy, knowing – in the manner of an older sister. ‘That’s not how it happened,’ she’ll say, correcting some truant memory of mine. Or bolstering, ‘Oh, yes, Papi could be a real pain about those kinds of things.’

  Or maybe it will happen differently. She’ll be released from catatonia by some miracle drug, like in that movie Awakenings.

  The best would be if no transformation were involved. If she were just acting. If all this was part of a huge art project, something Marina Abramovic´ might have thought up. Three months of silence? How about thirty-eight years?

  I try to catch her out. Snoop on her while she’s on the bed droning, watch from the balcony as she sits on the floor of the patio with her pile of hankies and socks beside her, the puppies crawling over the flesh of her legs.

  I think of setting the house on fire just to see what she would do.

  She is unremittingly dense. We repeat the same actions day after day. Beyond shoving a spoon in her mouth, there is little she can do for herself.

  Everything becomes slowed down and elongated. The simplest of activities. Eating. Bathing. Dressing. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ I sometimes shout, losing my patience after two hours of watching her chew. I try adapting to her speed. I bring a book to the table to read in between prodding, but I can’t really get into the story if I have to keep taking my eye away from the page. Finally I take the plate away and say, ‘That’s enough, your stomach is getting too big,’ and she yells, ‘No. Gimme more.’

  She has started a new trick. Coming into my bedroom to play with the strings on the blinds. She barges in, walks up to the window that looks out on the sea, grabs hold of the string with the bobble on the end of it and swings it, tip tap tip tap. If the blinds are raised and she cannot reach the string, she just stands there, trying to lift her arms as high as she can. When she tires of stretching, she goes back to her room. Stupid little bitch, I want to say. There’s a stool right there! Move it to the window. Stand on it!

  The rains begin at the start of November. Everything smells musky and rich. Green things start shooting out of the ground. Then come the insects – millipedes, mayflies, midges, moths, mosquitoes. The evenings we can’t go for walks Lucia and I sit in the drawing room with jigsaw puzzles, listening to the rain beat down for hours. At night the sea is at our throats even though I’ve bolted the balcony doors and fastened all the windows and shutters.

  The dogs move from their hideouts in the garden to the shelter of the front veranda. After a few days of continuous rain we allow them inside. The rubber linings under the doors have been eaten away, so I lay rolled-up towels on the floor by the doors to keep the water out. The electricity goes for hours. The fridge leaks. The whole house stinks of wet dog. Golly is happiest of all, reunited with her clan, except they barely acknowledge her. She puffs herself up like a frigate bird and rolls into the other pups boisterously. Mostly they ignore her, but sometimes she gets pinned to the ground with a set of teeth at her jugular. Lucia comes to her rescue. ‘She’s just a baby, stop it!’

  I think of the rains we used to have in Kodai, the warm binds of those forced familial afternoons in Mahalakshmi. I begin a letter to Papi, trying to tell him about this life, but it’s difficult to know where to start. I send a photograph of Lucia and Golly instead. He writes back: Is everything okay?

  When I think of my childhood it is always with a sense of emptiness. I cannot know whether it really was that way, or whether I look at my parents now as having failed in some basic task. I know men and women frequently abandon one family to begin another, that it is sometimes impossible to reconcile the two, so the old family is forgotten. That the same people who failed utterly on their first attempt at parenthood are champions the second time around. I know people believe they have the right to change their life whenever they want, but this is different.

  Papi insists it was the right thing to do, that for the kind of person he is, he could live only with complete renunciation. ‘This thing your mother did, of going once a week, it tortured her. Her whole life was guilt. It is a moral question, Grazia. Will you give up your one life to completely devote it to this child who wi
ll never be independent, or will you do the kind, responsible thing, which is to entrust this child to someone who can take care of her, who is paid to look after her in a community of other children who suffer like her?’

  He could never answer my question about their duty to me, their other child, who grew up as an only child when she didn’t need to. ‘Children don’t get to say how a family is run,’ Papi said. ‘We decided for you, and it was always agreed that we would tell you when you needed to know.’

  I remember trying to find amongst one of my many cousins a sister, brother, friend, but it was useless. I was always the bastard at the wedding, the stranger at the feast. If I could have forged at least one connection, it might have proved to me that we were of the same tribe, but the more family reunions I went to, the more I realised it had been my parents’ intention all along to create a life that had nothing to do with their own beginnings. All my aunts and uncles on both sides had chosen to live within a two-kilometre radius of their parents, while my parents had taken the first opportunity to flee. I struggled with the forced intimacy of our family gatherings as much as my parents did, and so it was always a relief to return home, the three of us – to fall into our usual patterns of subterfuge and bickering, to be away from the particular politics we had temporarily been thrust into.

  Now that I have Lucia in my life, that sense of loss has lifted, but other heavy things have come to settle on my shoulders.

  *

  Lucia’s nightmares have subsided, but one afternoon she screams so loudly all the dogs start howling. I run into her room, and she is standing on the bed hopping about. ‘Mouse, mouse,’ she shrieks. Golly is curled up uselessly in her basket, peering out with no intention of moving. I go to the bathroom and grab a mop with a wooden handle. ‘Where is it?’ I say, and she points under the linen cupboard. I start jumping about too, whacking the end of the mop on the concrete floor, shouting, ‘Get out of there!’ and when the mouse runs – Jesus, it’s huge – I try to beat it but it’s quick, and soon it’s jumping up the blinds. Who knew mice could jump so high? I whack the blinds madly, and the mouse falls on the floor, scrabbling away until I get it. I hit it, a dull thud in the centre of its body. I keep beating it. It’s as though I’m standing outside myself as I do this. Lucia is screaming, the dogs are barking. Mallika has run upstairs to see what the commotion is about. When she sees it’s a mouse, she laughs and picks the dead thing up by its tail. ‘Looks like it was pregnant,’ she says. ‘Good thing you caught it.’

  I am shaking and sweating. ‘I’ve never killed an animal before,’ I say.

  Mallika grunts. ‘Maybe you should get rid of all these dogs and get some cats instead.’

  She walks downstairs swinging the mouse by its tail. I watch her go over to the compound wall, lifting her legs high over the wet brambles. She stands at the brick, steadies one hand over the top of the wall and flings the carcase over. Within seconds a black-shouldered kite swoops down to take this unexpected prize in its mouth and disappears into the sky.

  16

  There is a ring of traffic around the mall so thick and tightly crammed I feel like giving up and turning around. Midweek, midday, but still we are among a pilgrimage of cars, motorbikes, mopeds, cycles, trucks, auto-rickshaws, buses, scooters – all spewing fumes into the air. The trees lining the street look weak and hung-over. We are here to find a dress for Lucia. She sits in the passenger seat wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt, one chubby leg hitched up under her. Two men on a motorbike at the traffic light beside us look at her transfixed and begin to make faces at her. Lucia carries on with her singing, oblivious to their stares.

  Once inside the mall I grab hold of Lucia’s hand. She shakes me away, follows at a distance from me. This is new. Her and me in a public place. I should have brought someone along – Rohini, Auntie Kavitha, my new friend Praveen – someone to bolster my confidence. People are looking, trying not to, but looking anyway. Something about the features of her face – the flattened-out nose, the slanting eyes, the tongue too big for her mouth. I feel, what? Defensive? I want to absorb these stares, divert their looks by talking loudly to Lucia as though she understands everything, as if there is nothing so different about her.

  ‘Shall we go in here, Lucy? You love Benetton, don’t you?’

  We look through the racks of clothing. Everything I choose is somehow too dull, too tailored, not to Lucia’s liking.

  I find a long red dress made of jersey and spandex with a square-cut top, three-quarter sleeves and slits up the sides that end demurely at the knee.

  ‘What about this? Come, let’s go try it on.’

  In the changing room we peel the jeans off. ‘I told you, we should have put you in something else. This is such a pain to do, Lucy.’

  I put the dress over her head and it is too tight. I call to the salesgirl, ‘Can we get this in a size forty-four, please?’

  A few minutes later I make Lucia walk out of the changing room to look at herself in the full-length mirror. The dress catches over all her fat bits, but the colour is strong and makes her look healthy. ‘I like it,’ I say.

  Lucia tugs at the material around her waist and pulls at it, irritated. ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Okay. We’ll keep looking.’

  The mall is packed. Two weeks from Christmas, so there are carols on loop, a giant artificial tree in the centre of the ground floor, flecked with bits of cotton and tinsel. In one corner a scary-looking mechanical Santa with a sleigh filled with presents waves his hand up and down. Blue-eyed elves nod maniacally with him. Around this winter wonderland runs a toy train making high-pitched choo-choo noises. Families gather around this installation and take photographs. College kids in skinny jeans pout in groups. Clusters of men, always clusters of men – hands in their pockets, fingers chocked to balls.

  It is nothing like the expeditions Ma and I used to make to Spencer’s before it burned down. Such a dearth of stuff in those pre-liberalisation days. Christmas had still been about presents, but they used to be such meagre everyday things, like an orange or an apple in your stocking, a pair of plastic earrings. Rarely something extravagant like a new bicycle or a Walkman. This is new India – crazy, glitzy, spending India.

  Lucia and I manoeuvre through the crowds. We stop for an ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. My toes are sore and my head hurts. I’m lugging around a bunch of things I’ve bought for the house already – wooden hangers, towels, ceramic knives. Still no dress.

  We wander past a place called the Big Bazaar. Lucia drifts in. ‘Not here, Lucy, come on. It’s a mess.’ But she is already flicking through the racks, pleased with what she sees. I spy the dress before she sees it. It is a sequinned pink thing, tiered, with a full skirt and an unflatteringly tight bodice. Sparkles everywhere. No point telling her it will make her look like a giant ball of candyfloss. We tussle in the changing room to squeeze her arms in, but once it’s on, she flounces about on her toes and grins widely.

  The drive home takes longer than usual. I have never made a trip to the city without spending at least one night there, so I feel the fatigue of the traffic, the crowds, the ting-tong mall music. Lucia sleeps, head knocking against the glass of the window, tongue poking out of her mouth. Does she dream of her new pink dress? I feel angry, powerless; I can’t articulate it, but it has to do with the way people look at her. Families, children, grown people who can see there’s something different about her but who are so unused to the sight they can only gape. I wanted to smash in some of their ugly faces. I had hoped for what? Empathy? A jaunty day out with my sister. Instead, I am drained, barely able to drive back home.

  As soon as we are slipping through the long driveway, I feel the blood return to my legs. The dogs are around, making all kinds of noises, tails frantic, paws in the car, scratching at the seats.

  Mallika unloads the packages from the boot. ‘They were crying after you went,’ she says. ‘They thought you’ve gone, left them.’

  I ask Mallika to make some
instant noodles for dinner. Lucia is tired, but she looks pleased to see the dogs.

  ‘Whose birthday is it going to be soon?’ I say in a sing-song way. ‘Whose happy birthday?’

  She looks at me, smiles sideways and nods her head. ‘Lucy’s happy birthday.’

  The next morning we see dolphins. Hundreds of dolphins swimming north, their silver-pink bodies undulating in and out of the waves. Lucia and I run into the ocean, and when the sand bar drops and she can no longer touch her feet to the ground, she clambers on top of my back, clasping her hands around my neck tightly, saying, ‘Swim, Grace, swim fast.’

  I swim far into the blue, further than I’ve ever been, but there’s no sign of the dolphins. ‘Maybe they looked closer than they really were? Maybe we were too late?’

  We float there for a few minutes, turning around to look at the shore. The house looks like a pink speck in the distance, and the dogs, who followed us into the heat, are lined up like smudges of black along the beach.

  And then the dolphins are upon us, around us, charging ahead. I can feel the weight of each body, the pulsating quick of this fish-mammal, larger than I expected – wild and cracking with power. Suddenly I am scared for the both of us, for being caught in the middle of this squad of nose and fin, but Lucia is shrieking, her fingers tight around my neck, ‘Look, look!’

  When we swim back to shore, the dogs storm out from under the shade of the casuarina groves. Raja and Bagheera bark and lick the salt off our toes as if to make sure we are who we were before we swam out in the sea.

  The whole day is spent in the afterglow of the dolphins.

  Mallika scolds me when she finds out. ‘Where there are dolphins, there are sharks. What’s wrong with you?’

  Lucia and I watch the Attenborough episode about the deep ocean. All those strange sea creatures that lie at the bottom of the sea floor, blind and menacing. The fangtooth, the gulper eel, the hairy angler – grotesque things with out-of-proportion jaws, teeth, bodies. ‘This world might be alien, but it’s not without beauty,’ David is saying, but Lucia is already asleep, cheeks grazed from the swim.