Small Days and Nights Read online

  Now Lucia is dragging out all her clothes and laying them on the bed. Smocks. A dozen of them – floral, baggy, shapeless things. We’ll have to get rid of those. Nighties, salwar kameezes, jeans, T-shirts. One ridiculous frothy pink frock. A couple of bejewelled ghagras for the annual Diwali and Christmas dance shows. Underwear – granny-style vests and knickers, pointy cotton bras. Petticoats. A pink terry-towelling bathrobe that I remember my mother wearing for many years. Sensible, sturdy Teva sandals for her flat, splayed feet. Rubber chappals and a pair of pink-and-silver Nikes.

  ‘It’s all a little old-fashioned,’ Teacher says, glancing at me apologetically.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll pack it all.’

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Lucia asks, suddenly, blinking.

  ‘Lucy, we already talked about this. This is your sister Grace. You’re going to go live with her. Mummy’s not here any more. Mummy’s gone to God.’

  ‘But I love Mummy.’

  ‘But Grace is here for you now. She’s going to take care of you like Mummy did.’

  ‘No,’ Lucia says, shouting louder and louder. ‘No, no, no, go away. I want Mummy.’

  A week after I visit Lucia at the Sneha Centre, she agrees to come and visit me at home. It is one of those lost days in the middle of the monsoon. No rain for a week but the air still heavy with it. The sky drips into the sea like an endless watercolour of grey, smudged only with a spume of white waves and a few scattered trawlers bobbing in the distance. The garden is spiky with green, shiny and luminous. Egrets sail and land languidly like Cessnas in the brush, while painted ladies skitter madly between bushes of bright yellow oleander.

  The dog, Raja, who has only recently adopted me, sits in the long grasses, surveying the newcomers.

  Lucia arrives with her friend, Priya Darshini, also a Down’s girl, and Teacher. They climb out of the taxi in flowery get-ups with sunhats and sunglasses, which they keep calling ‘coolers’.

  ‘Like my coolers, Grace-akka?’

  ‘What about my coolers, Grace-akka?’

  ‘You look like film stars!’ I say, carrying their bags into the house.

  I try to see the house the way they might see it, the way it appeared to me when my mother’s lawyer Mr Sriram brought me to see it. A pink blob on a mound of grass with blue shutters and a red-tiled roof set in a garden, and several acres of brush a few hundred metres from the sea.

  ‘Such a big place,’ Teacher exclaims. ‘Don’t you feel scared staying here all by yourself?’

  Teacher is searching the house for clues, but there are no photographs, no personal touches to infer anything of my previous life. Some of the furniture I’d salvaged from my mother’s flat – two wicker sofas, a couple of planter’s chairs, the dining table and an old rosewood bench from my grandparents’ Queen Street house in Tranquebar.

  The two upstairs bedrooms are sparse and functional. ‘I’m still getting settled in,’ I explain. ‘There’s a lot to unpack, and a whole load in storage, but I really don’t want to clutter this place up. I like it empty.’

  ‘What about safety? Any problems with the locals? Have you met any of your neighbours?’

  ‘Nobody’s bothered with me much. I’ve seen the thalaivar of course, a nice man called Valluvan, given him some money to keep him happy. It just takes getting used to. And besides, I have my Raja. He protects me.’

  Priya and Lucy are eager to get to the beach. They’ve changed into bathing suits – demure one-pieces with attached frilly skirts.

  ‘Don’t you both look cute,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’

  A Tamil Nadu beach at midday is something to marvel at. All that sweep of vast, uninterrupted sand. All those vanished people sitting in the safety of shade protecting their complexions.

  Not to say there aren’t chunks of coastline clotted with the odd row of tourists roasting themselves on sarongs. But there are few resorts, and fewer travellers who have tired of Goa and Kerala, who have swapped coasts to see what kind of ocean the Bay of Bengal is. Nothing like the sweet-lipped Arabian, is what. This sea is a rough, unpredictable, bash-you-about kind of sea, and at the peak of the day’s heat the beach is a desert. This is the time I love it best. The catamarans are parked quietly on the sand, and the palmyras and casuarinas stand, braced for any calamity. Only when the sun begins to dip to the west does life slowly resurge. In the cities people stream out to the sea like ants towards sugar – a carnival at dusk with mini Ferris-wheels, candyfloss stalls, peanut vendors. Here in Paramankeni it’s the time when goat herders lead their animals home, fishermen sit by their boats smoking and mending their nets, and village boys rush out in their underwear, diving in and out of the waves. On weekends, there will sometimes be a group of city slickers playing volleyball in the ramshackle resort down the road, but it is still mostly isolated.

  I lead the way up the stone path. Raja follows eagerly, past the thatch shack and the water pump, up to the brick wall and wooden gate. Midway, Raja lifts his hind leg to scratch himself, but after a few feverish cycles, he gives up and forges ahead. After the last bout of rain the beach plums have grown, gushing out of their beds like a rash, so I must bend back their large, rubbery leaves in order to push open the gate. We step out onto the burning sand, which is stippled with bits of Styrofoam and flotsam – dried husk of coconut, a carpet of purple-flowered weed.

  I set up the beach umbrella for Teacher and roll my trousers over my knees before walking over to the girls.

  We stand in the waves, the three of us – Lucia and Priya shriek every time a big wave slaps at their feet. An hour later, they become braver, dig holes in the shore and give Teacher their coolers and sunhats for safekeeping. They sit in these bunkers, burrowing their bums deep in the sand, and every time a wave knocks them over they flail their arms about and say, ‘Save us, save us.’

  Raja runs worriedly up and down the coast, refusing to get his paws wet. A beach dog that is terrified of water.

  We take a break from the waves for a picnic lunch. Biryani and Coca-Cola, but as soon as they’ve shovelled a plateful of food down their gullets they’re back in their bunkers, screeching.

  At four, Teacher begins to complain, saying the girls are getting too black.

  ‘You better get going,’ I say. ‘I don’t want you driving on that road in the dark.’

  ‘No no,’ they shout. ‘We don’t want to go.’

  Teacher gets up and starts waggling her finger at them. ‘You want to come again, don’t you? We can come next week, but you can’t behave like this. What will Grace-akka think?’

  When the girls finally stand up, their swimsuits are full of sand. They’re wobbly from all the extra weight, and they’re giggling because every time they take a step forward, mud slides down their thighs.

  ‘Look! Like kaka in the pants!’

  They point at each other and laugh till they’re choking.

  ‘Come on. We’ll hose you down inside. And you too,’ I say to Raja. ‘Let’s get you some food.’

  Lucia is intrigued by Raja. He has decided that she must love him, so he’s exerting all his charm, following her, letting her pat his head, gazing up at her with his wet brown eyes.

  ‘What a scam! He’s putting on a show for you, Lucy. See this big flea circling his head? That’s where his heart really lies. That’s his beloved wife, Rani. They’re always together. Raja and Rani.’

  When they pile into the taxi, Raja follows them all the way up the long driveway to the front gate. He squeezes under the gate and chases after them through the village, past the traditional thatch and newer concrete houses, past wells and bicycles, roosters, cows, children – his legs hurtling over ditches and heaps of stone rubble. And only when the car bumps over the little bridge, crossing the lagoon and fixing on to the main road, does he turn around and make his way home to me.

  The next morning Teacher calls to say, ‘Lucy wants to try. If it’s okay with you, we’ll come next weekend to spend the night.’

  6


  How often I dream of going back to sit on one of those cold, hard benches at PPCG just to listen to the heavens crashing down, even if it means being in the presence of those cretinous nuns for a few hours.

  There is nothing in the world like hill rain – epic, torrential – all drum rolls and whiplash. The smell of the earth, potent and warm like mud in your nostrils. It is the smell of sex, of a lover returning. And the nuns, knowing it, fearing it, herded us into the chapel for safekeeping, lit candles and incense, prayed and prayed for the storms to pass.

  My parents would come for me in the Ambassador. Ma at the wheel, tiny and bug-eyed; Papi with a raincoat and an umbrella, running to fetch me from the chapel. There was always hot chocolate and Miles Davis in Mahalakshmi when it rained. Papi would light a fire, and Ma and I would bring out blankets so we could huddle around the drawing-room table and play rummy. Outside, eucalyptus trees shook nervously in the gale, and stray dogs took shelter in the portico. Those were probably our closest moments as a family, and still, I would have given anything to be with Queenie and the other girls in the dorm.

  I wonder where it comes from? That strange foreboding of childhood? That the universe is conspiring to keep secrets from you. Did it begin in Kodai? Or earlier?

  I remember little of my early life in Madras. It was always a place of exits and entries – a dreamy, transitional city, where time was either expanding or closing in. In Madras I had not felt lonely. Ma told me I had two friends at Rosary Metric, the school I attended from standard one through to five, although I have no recollection of them or the things we might have played. Savitri and Ayesha: two pigtailed, smiling girls. There are photographs of the three of us at successive annual days at school, dressed as peacocks and flower sellers and the Three Kings. There’s one taken of us at sports day in chaste, knee-length shorts. We are holding hands and smirking as if we’d just shared a joke. All the photographs of our years in Madras are as drained of colour and out of focus as my memories.

  I know for sure, though, that when I lived in Madras I had not felt the acute need for a witness in my life. When we moved to Kodai I began to have a real yearning for someone who shared my memories. Someone other than my parents.

  My friend Queenie always used to say, ‘You’re so lucky, Grace. You never have to fight for attention or have two brats constantly slobbering all over your things.’ She was the eldest of three girls, the star of the family. Pressure was always on her. But I watched when Queenie’s mother and sisters came to pick her up for holidays. The history she shared with her sisters bound them together from birth. How could she ever be truly alone? Sure, you could grow up in the same house and experience everything differently, but there would always be certain episodes that either brought laughter in the remembrance of them, or clots of purple bruising. Long after Queenie and I drifted apart, she would still have her sisters. They would call each other on the phone, their families would meet. And perhaps they would complain in secret, as all families do. But blood prevails. Sisters outlast friends. For me, this was something.

  The summer I turned sixteen we went to Italy, and I remember dragging my parents around all the museums of Venice and Padua, from one Visitation of the Angel Gabriel to the next, looking for beauty among all those Resurrections and Ascensions and Last Suppers. It was the summer I kissed the Bernardi brothers, who lived next door to Nonno and Nonna in their canary-yellow apartment building on Corso Fogazzaro, and I had returned feeling emboldened and changed. It only took a week to deflate everything. We’d been invited to Ma’s bridge partner Sundar Rajagopalan’s house for dinner. It was threatening rain, and Ma was the only one who really wanted to go. My parents were in their bedroom, arguing. I sat in the bay window reading, waiting for them to be finished.

  ‘You’re going to complain about this after I’ve spent a month cooped up with your family?’ Ma was saying. ‘He’s our friend, Giacinto. One of the few we have. But if you don’t want to come, that’s fine. Just don’t try to make me feel guilty about going.’

  ‘Oh, friend. Yes. We know whose friend he is. Let’s be clear.’

  ‘Yes, yes, let’s be clear. We wouldn’t want there to be any fucking unclarity on anything.’

  ‘This is not a word. Unclarity.’

  ‘Grace, let’s go,’ Ma screamed, slamming the bedroom door. ‘Your father isn’t coming.’

  Ma drove wildly, emitting a series of sharp, incomprehensible grunts as we sped along the treacherous hill roads. It was a misty night and I had to wipe the windows with the car cloth and shine the torch out through the windscreen so we could see. She was wearing a sparkly dress she’d bought in one of those fancy boutiques in Vicenza, and a maroon woollen shawl draped across her shoulders.

  The party was small but raucous, like most of the parties I got dragged to in those years. The Rolling Stones or the Bee Gees would inevitably be banging away in the background, and there was always a lot of hard drink involved. Most of my parents’ friends were functioning alcoholics. Not that I’d even get a taste of beer. I’d be stuck with a Gold Spot and a bowl of tapioca chips in a room playing Risk with the Swaminathan twins and Amin Bilimoria.

  Sundar Rajagopalan lived in one of those old Kodai stone houses, which seem to have been designed specifically to promote pneumonia. The floors and walls emitted a cold, uniform dampness. Overstuffed taxidermied birds lined the entrance, while mounted deer heads looked on morosely from above. Any space that wasn’t utilised by a dead animal was seized by one of Uncle Sundar’s paintings – ugly, abstract abominations of what looked to me like giant red-feathered phalluses. Add to that the awful smell of piss and deterioration that no amount of long-stemmed lilies could smother. That was my mother’s idea of a good time.

  During dinner parties at Uncle Sundar’s, the grown-ups usually sat in the bar room while the children were herded into the shrine room – a grotto-like enclosure with candyfloss-coloured wallpaper and alcoves filled with icons and statues of every god ever invented. Uncle Sundar’s mother, who lived with him, and probably had something to do with the pervasive piss smell, was a devout woman who believed in appeasing the gods equally.

  That night we found dogs in the shrine room. Uncle Sundar’s dachshund, Boogie, was now consigned to a bed of blankets with three puppies sucking at her teats – two black and one white. Boogie growled when we came close, but she allowed Uncle Sundar to pick up the little white pup and plop it in my lap. He had pale eyes and a huge, wrinkled forehead and when his little body shivered in my hands, my heart corresponded metronomically.

  ‘Do you want him, Champ?’

  Ma gave me one of her glares when I said yes. ‘We have to ask your father,’ she started. ‘And what happens when we go visit Grandma and Grandpa?’

  I didn’t care. I wasn’t about to let go of that pup.

  ‘You know what?’ Uncle Sundar said. ‘Keep him for a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out, you can always bring him back, and if you need me to look after him when you’re away, I’m happy to do that too.’

  In that instant I loved Uncle Sundar. All the irritation I felt towards him because he dyed his hair black from a bottle and wore too-tight pants and most probably put his teapot into the backsides of other men flatlined.

  It was past midnight by the time we got home. Not a single light had been left on to welcome us. The puppy quaked in my lap – a pale, white, whimpering sausage.

  ‘Salsicciotto,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m going to call you.’

  ‘He’s your responsibility, Grace,’ my mother said, dragging her feet wearily. ‘You have to clean up his crap and feed him and walk him. Understand? And no letting him sleep on the bed.’

  I don’t know what time it was when the lights in my parents’ room were turned on. My father would have waited for my mother to fall asleep. I can see him patiently flexing his toes in his striped pyjamas. The anger inside him churning. He would have waited till her face softened, till that little ridge between her eyebrows eased and the corner
s of her mouth relaxed. He would have let her flip onto her stomach, as she always did before falling into the deep. And then he would have flicked on the lamp.

  ‘Sleeping? You can sleep through everything, can’t you?’

  ‘Put the light out, Giacinto, we can talk in the morning. You’re going to wake everyone up.’

  ‘But everyone is already awake.’

  There was that usual tightness that entered my body when they began. A slow pummelling in my stomach. If I tried to cover my ears, the menace would be there too, saying, Listen, this is important – all the disappointment they seemed to carry for each other rolled like waves out of them, one accusation after the other.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you behave like this?’

  ‘Maybe because I like when my wife goes around town without me. Maybe because I like being like a little castrated thing, crying that my wife is carrying on with mister so and so …’

  ‘You wake up and shit comes streaming out of your mouth, Giacinto. I swear, if you think I can’t have my own opinions and desires ...’

  ‘Desires? Cara. Don’t disillusion yourself. There must be a fridge between your legs …’

  That’s when Ma raised the lamp and threw it at him.

  I heard the crash of glass, footsteps, the front door slamming.

  ‘Where are you going, Meera?’

  By the time he opened the door she was gone. The car had growled out of the gate and into the night.

  I could hear Papi stand outside my door. Please don’t let him come in, I thought. Just leave me alone, the two of you. I don’t care if you kill each other. He stood there for a while, panting, and then padded softly away.

  That night it rained so hard I felt I was being thrashed around on a ship in the middle of a storm. Salsicciotto curled up close to me with his soft ears and paws. He peed continuously through the sheets, and I held him in that pungent pool of wet. I thought about how it felt to hold a small creature of blood, tongue and heart, and how it might feel to let go of everything and walk into the future.