Small Days and Nights Read online

  Coconut trees. Canopies of teak and tamarind. Flying foxes. Vacant bus stops. Temples and step-wells. Ugly new constructions, which I can just about decipher the outlines of in the dark. Police checkpoints and metal road barriers. Sometimes our headlights catch a spray of winged insects in their beams, the outline of a goat or dog, racing across into blackness.

  From the rear-view mirror dangle two black-and-white photographs: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – the mystics who lured my mother away from my father. Aurobindo is a bearded beauty, everything a sage should be. Eyes like bottomless wells gazing into the infinite. Over the years I succumbed to my mother’s instigations to read his teachings about Integral Yoga. But her? The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, Aurobindo’s spiritual associate? She I never got. People who met her said she could make you follow her anywhere. But in the pictures she looks like an alien, always with a banal saying typed along the bottom: It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.

  For the past few minutes Murali has been trying to send someone a text; the car snakes wildly, bumping across the median.

  ‘Please don’t do that, Murali,’ I snap. Immediately I feel like shit. That was Papi’s voice, Papi’s disgust. ‘It’s just dangerous, you know?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  We drive for another twenty minutes in silence, burrowing through the dark.

  ‘How is Blake Sir?’

  ‘All fine.’

  I wish he would shut up. If we cannot speak properly, I would rather make this entry in silence without pleasantries.

  I wonder whether I should have allowed Blake to come with me. It would have been our last trip together, and he might have helped ease things. But then I think about the way he always crouched in the back seat, pressing his khaki-clad knees together like a gangly bird, blinking at the oncoming lights, all the fear leaking out of his stringy body. And the questions. He would have had so many bloody questions.

  It’s after five in the morning when we arrive outside my mother’s apartment building on Marine Street, a kilometre away from the Aurobindo Ashram.

  Murali pockets his tip morosely and moves towards his luggage.

  ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘I can take the bags. Really! You go home. I’ll phone when I need you, Murali.’

  I push open the gates. The same watchman, a Nepali guy, leans forward to peer at me through half-closed eyes, and after registering who I am, slopes back to snooze in his chair again. I step into the lift and pull the squeaky metal gate towards me. There is an automatic electrical voice that repeats again and again: ‘Please shut the door. Please shut the door.’

  I go up to the third floor. My mother’s flat is marked with an avenue of potted ferns. Splotchy, lurid green things. The door is ajar. Inside, the paper lanterns in the drawing room are casting an orange glow over everything. There are photographs of the protecting talismans again – Aurobindo and the Mother – on the wall. From the veranda, pink fingers of dawn poke through the grilles like warnings.

  Ma’s best friend, Auntie Kavitha, sits on the day bed in a kaftan. She used to have such long beautiful hair but it’s shorn now, cut close to the scalp like a soldier’s, and it opens her face, pushes out the ridges of her cheekbones. Opposite her is Mrs Dalal, my mother’s neighbour and fellow devotee. They’re like two crows, these women, emaciated and agile, their voices rasping. They’ve been smoking and there are cups of tea on a tray beside them.

  I nod at them and leave my luggage at the door.

  My mother is in her bedroom in a freezer box on the floor. A grotesque stainless-steel contraption with an airtight glass lid. She is huge – arms and legs chunky as hams. That pretty mouth of hers slack, as though there were no longer teeth to support the pendulous lips. The skin on her face sags in abundance. And there’s grey in her hair, so much grey, mottled and streaked, spreading out of the crown of her head like the skin of a forest animal.

  Auntie Kavitha walks in behind me. She has that dull look people get when they’ve been crying too much. Face pinched with sleeplessness, eyeliner smudged. ‘Grace, are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. I’m okay. How are you?’

  To be intimate with people you’ve known for a long time but don’t really know is a difficult thing. I go over to her, lean in to hug, but it’s clumsy and we immediately step away from each other.

  ‘Does Papi know?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you better…’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. But what do we do now? Did Ma say what she wanted? We never talked about any of this.’

  ‘She wanted to be cremated.’

  ‘Okay, yes, if it’s what she wanted.’

  I don’t know the first thing about how one goes about burning a body. Some years ago in Kathmandu, Blake and I had stood on the banks of the Bagmati River and watched as a series of corpses were hauled on to the river bank, waiting to be set alight on the pyres. I remember only the smell, the smoke from so many fires, drums and chants, bands of monkeys that charged up and down the hillside, the sadhus in saffron robes and dreadlocks who posed picturesquely in the doorways of temples, summoning people over for photographs. ‘Don’t go,’ a tourist had said. ‘They’ll steal your soul.’

  I remember as well the sight of those toes poking sadly out of the swaddling cloths. Those desolate dead human toes that in a few hours would be turned to ash.

  ‘We have a slot at the crematorium for ten, so you should sleep a few hours.’

  I wheel my luggage into Ma’s room. Undress. Shower. Put on a cotton singlet and boxer shorts, and climb into my mother’s bed. Her smell is still in the pillows and sheets, something between milk and rose with a hint of sourness. The heat of her. I lie spread-eagled on my stomach, breathing her in. I sleep deeply while my mother keeps watch from a freezer box a few feet away from me.

  Do I dream? If I do, I remember only the feeling of it. I am in a place between places, childhood mostly, that transient land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, whirling, whirling.

  Auntie Kavitha is leaning over me. ‘Grace, get up. You should get dressed. People will start to come soon. We need to take your mother into the front room.’

  ‘What should I wear?’ I ask, looking at Auntie Kavitha, who has changed into a white cotton sari.

  ‘I have a salwar kameez if you want. I’ll get it for you.’

  In half an hour the front room is full of people. Most of them are ashramites and from the nearby community of Auroville, but there are also random people my mother befriended – beach friends, whom she chatted to every evening from her outpost on the promenade by the Gandhi statue, restaurateurs, shop owners, the fridge-repair man. Three of my mother’s siblings have come from Tharangambadi. Other than Auntie Kavitha and Murali, most of the people at my mother’s funeral are strangers to me.

  There’s a run-down black Maruti van downstairs that will transport the body. A group of men lift up the box and carry her out of the door, and it is at this moment that someone starts to cry. I don’t know who’s sounding that cry for my mother leaving her home for the last time, but it draws something out of me as well. I begin to cry and Auntie Kavitha thumps me gently on the back, saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’ But my tears are short-lived because soon there’s the practical question of how to get the freezer box down three flights of stairs without mishap. People shout. Slippers that have been left outside the door are kicked around. Murali takes charge of the situation, guiding people softly to move this way or that, and miraculously, the box reaches the ground floor and is manoeuvred into the back of the van.

  We follow the hearse to the ashram crematorium. It is nothing like the banks of the Bagmati River. Mother is removed from the freezer box and people begin to prepare her body for fire. First a layer of ghee, then big clods of cow dung over her face, body, arms. They wall her body in with a kiln of bricks. And all this is done wordlessly, with no songs or crying. A beautiful old man with a heart-shaped face and bright-white hair puts a flaming torch to the pyre. Au
ntie Kavitha brandishes a pouch of rose petals from the folds of her sari and begins to fling them on the body. We stand around the fire in silence, and I’m trying to photograph this moment of my mother’s final disappearance, but even as I watch, the whole scene is vanishing.

  Afterwards, my relatives corner me in the street outside the crematorium and say how I must visit them in Tharangambadi. Have I forgotten all my cousins there? They tell me to be strong. That my mother was too young to die. Then they make the sign of the cross and head for their cars.

  Auntie Kavitha is herding a woman over to meet me. This woman is skinny as a post, with deep creases around her black, teary eyes. ‘Grace, I want you to meet Mrs Gayatri. She’s an old friend of your mother’s.’

  Mrs Gayatri catapults her body into mine. ‘This is the daughter from America!’ she exclaims. ‘Om Namah Shivayah!’

  People trickle back to my mother’s flat. They sing bhajans. Auntie Kavitha organises tea and samosas. I want them gone. Unreasonably, I want Blake here. I want my father as well. But Papi is probably just waking up in his studio in Venice, putting the Bialetti on for coffee, checking to see if there’s still a heel of bread left over from the day before.

  ‘I think I should call my father,’ I say to Auntie Kavitha. ‘It’s six a.m. there. He should be up.’

  ‘Okay, but let me get rid of all these loiterers first. Everybody wants to hang around like bloody vultures.’

  Within twenty minutes the apartment is empty. Auntie Kavitha moves assuredly around the kitchen. She removes a bottle of Talisker’s from my mother’s booze cabinet and reaches for two crystal glasses. She pours a heavy slug into each glass and then drops a gash of whisky on the floor. ‘That’s for your mother. The best woman I ever loved.’

  I stare at the puddle of whisky on the floor and wonder who’s going to clean that up.

  ‘It’s a gypsy tradition,’ Auntie Kavitha says, ‘to honour the dead. Technically, we should be out in the forest somewhere, and the whisky should be swallowed by the earth, and there should be brethren playing the guitar and singing sorrowful but celebratory songs. But seeing that your family are such a bunch of pricks, let’s just imagine it, shall we? Drink up.’

  I’ve never liked whisky. Never enjoyed the scorch of it at the back of my throat or the burning of it deep in my belly. But I lift the glass to my lips and drink all of it.

  ‘Good girl.’

  She pours another round. And another. Then, from the roll-top desk, she unveils a Kashmiri papier-mâché box. Inside are cigarette papers, coils of perfumed hash, tobacco filler. She rolls expertly and with concentration. Puts the joint in her mouth and sucks long, hungry drags.

  ‘You want?’

  I take the joint between my teeth and it reminds me of standing around the Kodaikanal Lake with Queenie and Blake, our lives teetering on the rim of change.

  We go like this, smoking and drinking until my arms and legs feel like water.

  ‘Now the first thing you must do is to stop calling me Auntie. How old are you now? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Christ! I think we can speak to each other as adults. There’s so much to talk about. How’s your marriage going? Tell me that first.’

  I tell her the truth. That my marriage has gone to shit. That Blake wants kids and I don’t. That there’s a loneliness that’s been swallowing me up in America and the thought of returning to my life there pounds like a great engine inside me.

  ‘Forget about America,’ she says.

  We sit on sofas facing each other. I feel like slumping down and closing my eyes.

  ‘Grace, didn’t you ever wonder where your mother disappeared to when you were a child? Didn’t you ever think to ask?’

  ‘I wasn’t inquisitive enough, I guess. I had my own theories.’

  ‘You should have asked.’

  Slowly, we unwrap the past.

  Kavitha Raman is unravelling every memory and replacing it with something else. It’s the first time I hear the name Lucia. None of it makes sense. I am drunk. This is what I want to tell her. I am jet-lagged. I want to lie down. Tomorrow morning we must collect what’s left of Mother’s bones. But this woman persists in talking.

  ‘There’s time for sleep later,’ she says. ‘Now, you must listen.’

  2

  My mother disappeared every Thursday.

  I knew no other mother who demanded a timeout, a rest from her maternal duties, except for mine. When I think of all the Thursdays she went missing and line them up, one against each other, there is nothing but sound: the great emptying sigh of the house, the soft swish-swish of her Mangalagiri sari rustling between her quick, powdered legs as she ran down the driveway away from us.

  The patterns of Thursdays changed as I grew older, but for the time we lived in Madras, they held a steady course. On Thursdays we would eat breakfast half an hour earlier so that Ma could be dressed and ready to go by the time Kavitha Raman honked at the gate. ‘Bye, kanna,’ my mother would say, kissing the top of my head. ‘Ciao, Giacinto.’ Or if it happened to be a day of reconciliation, ‘Ciao, amore.’ And then she’d be gone, with her tatty brown handbag in one hand and a basket of fresh bread for her bridge group in the other.

  It was always the same. Her leaving through the front door in a shroud of light, never turning to look back at us. And the savage return.

  Long after Papi and I had finished eating dinner and were playing Briscola in the drawing room, she’d come back to us ruined and speechless, staring, as though she hoped we might not be there, dropping the empty wicker basket on the floor and striding into the bedroom to unwind the layers of sweaty cotton from the contours of her body. Then we’d hear the shower – half an hour of steam pounding on her head, drenching her long dark hair until the geyser ran out of hot water, and she was forced to step back into our lives.

  ‘Why is she behaving like this?’ I used to ask Papi, who I imagined must have had greater insight to the sorrow of my mother’s Thursday escapades.

  ‘You think I know?’ he’d say. ‘Other women dream of this arrangement – one day of the week, no cooking or cleaning, no questions, leave all the responsibilities to your schiavetto of a husband. Sì? But your mother, Grazia, she is not like other women. This much you should know.’

  Papi called me Grazia, the Italian version of Grace. For this, and for the hazelnut milk chocolates he smuggled into my lunchbox and cigarette breath of him when he kissed me goodnight, I loved him. Yes, he could be grumpy, and there were days, especially after one of his attacks, when there was no reaching him. Yes, we could not have clocks in our house like normal people because of my father’s fear that they would explode like bombs in the middle of the night and tear delicate, excruciating holes in his eardrums. But on Thursdays, when my mother disappeared, he made an effort to be the good parent, and as time went by, I came to treasure those days.

  On Thursdays, Papi would have a glass of Maltova and four slices of bread-butter-jam waiting for me on the kitchen counter by the time the school van dropped me home. He would even help with my homework. Always impatient with my sluggish and roundabout methods, he’d do most of it, and then we’d hurry with towels in hand and rubber slippers on our feet, drive an hour south along the coast to one of the many deserted beaches, strip down to bathing suits and rush into the salty arms of the Bay of Bengal.

  Those were happy evenings. The two of us getting thrashed about in the sea while the city held her noise at bay. My father would take care to wash the sand out from my curls when we returned, wring my bathing suit dry and stand our washed slippers up against the granite stone in the kitchen garden. We never intended to keep our beach expeditions secret, but as my mother never asked about our day and never told us about hers, it seemed fair to maintain a silence. I knew it was wrong to favour one parent over the other, but if I’d had to choose then, I would have chosen Papi.

  My father, contrary to all expectations of his name, was a sullen man. He was baptised Giacinto Luciano Marisola – an exuberant potpourr
i of Italian optimism. Hyacinth, light, sea, island – all these were part of his name, but nothing of his personality. By nature, he was untrusting and unforgiving, and his years in India had only served to intensify those attributes. He was not stingy with his affections, but when he chose to deprive you of them, the devastation was brutal. There was violence in the silence he created, a terrible asphyxiation, and because we had no clues to the mysterious mechanisms within him, there was no way for us to set about making amends.

  My mother frequently fell into dark moods as a result of his temperamental nature, and I remember her telling me in those moments, ‘Never believe a name, Grace. Names deceive more than people do.’

  My own name had been cause for a great argument between my parents. Papi had wanted to call me Filomena or Clementina after one of his grandmothers, and Ma had wanted Magdalena or Lumina after hers. Grace was finally agreed upon as a name that could travel widely and be easily pronounced. Also, as Ma pointed out, it did not remind one of an ageing matriarch. ‘Grace is simple, Grace is good.’

  Needless to say, I would have preferred any of the other names. But the middle path, as with so many other compromises in life, is the one that everyone can agree on precisely because it lacks nuance and daring.

  My father arrived in India in 1971 to look for oil off the coast of Tamil Nadu. Coming to India had not been his dream, but it had been a way of escaping the claustrophobia of his childhood. He was born in the northern Italian town of Vicenza, the eldest son of a pharmacist, and had been expected to follow in his father’s profession. As a child, he spent most of his summer holiday cooped up in the pharmacy on Corso Palladio, helping his father put prescriptions in paper bags and unearthing strips of medicines from the shelves in the stockroom. Aside from the rewards of an endless supply of coloured sugary sweets that his grandfather slipped him and the pocket money he earned, he could think of no worse fate for a man to endure than being the keeper of a shop.