Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (10 page)

Leela would lie beside her mother, stiff with pity, fear and revulsion, and run back to that other world as soon as she could, though she knew that downstairs—despite the sun and the noise, the colour and the life—she would be just as unhappy, and that everyone there—Akka, her aunts, her uncles and her cousins—would look sideways at her, the half-and-half child of mismatched parents. She would hide away in the gods’ room and pray to the silent
silver idols there to make her mother disappear, to erase Rosa Schweers as if she had never been, for only then would she, Leela Shastri, begin to exist whole and unblemished. Some days she would clumsily pile bits of her mother’s hair or nail clippings or a handkerchief stolen from her room, place half a lemon over the objects, add a sprinkling of vermilion powder and incinerate them with matches and oil stolen from the kitchen, all the while imagining that she was performing black magic spells like Venki sometimes did, cursing whoever had offended him with headaches or diarrhea, or cramping aches in the feet. She would crouch over the smoking debris, mutter her childish incantations and imagine that her mother was disappearing with each charred bit of hair and curved toenail.

After the story session that had ended so disastrously, Leela had gone first to her father, who offered little more than a pat on the back. Unsatisfied, she proceeded to the dark and oily kitchen, where Venki held her quivering little body, stroked her hair with his calloused hand and whispered gently, “Oh-ho, oh-ho, my sweetness, jewel of my eye, why are we so sad now, tell old Venki!”

Leela buried her face in the old cook’s chest, inhaling the odours of turmeric, asafetida, mustard, cumin and cardamom that had embedded themselves in his leathery skin. “Narayana said that I was half-and-half, like Trishanku,” she sobbed.

Venki reached for the tin in which he kept treats for Leela and fished out a round piece of jaggery. He popped it into her mouth. “So what is wrong with being like Trishanku? Was he not a lucky fellow to have a foot in
two worlds? Did he not have a heaven of his own around him? Hanh? Tell me? My chick pea, listen, it can be an advantage to live neither here nor there, like a frog, comfortable in water
and
on land. The thing is to understand how to make use of this ability.”

Venki, Leela thought longingly, was neither a frog nor a Trishanku. His entire life had been spent inside this house. His father and his grandfather had cooked here before him. He had grown up in this courtyard and had known Leela’s grandmother since the day she had arrived in the house as a bride. He had cooked the auspicious meals when Akka became pregnant with Leela’s father, Hari, when she gave birth to him and her other two sons, at their weddings, at the arrival of each new grandchild and, most recently, for Leela’s grandfather’s death ceremonies. He had his place in the world, and it was in this dark and smoky kitchen.

Beginning his preparations for the evening meal, Venki gave Leela small tasks to distract her from her sorrow. Soon dusk wrapped itself around the old house and long shadows lay in the empty courtyard. A fragrance of incense floated about as Akka and the aunts lighted the lamps for evening prayers in the gods’ room. From one of the rooms around the courtyard came the mutter of times tables as Narayana and Vishnu did their homework, which reminded Leela that she had work to finish as well. Venki paused suddenly in his peeling and raised his head.

“What is it?” Leela asked.

“Your mother,” the cook said. His sharp ears had caught a whisper slithering like a snake around the house.

And at once Leela too could hear the susurrating voices as Rosa made her slow, bulky way down the stairs:
She is coming down, she is coming down, where is she going, what is she doing, she is coming down.

She watched from the kitchen door as her mother emerged and waddled out the back door and into the garden, down the narrow path, past the well, past the guava trees, past the mango trees grown especially for use on funeral pyres. With a sudden, intense longing Leela followed her mother, keeping a careful distance but not sure why she did so. She watched Rosa trail her hand against the coarse, dark bark of the trees, brushed her small fingers against the same rough areas and felt her mother’s sadness.

Rosa walked until she reached a green, scummy pond at the end of the property. Here the trees ended their shadowy guard and the last of the day’s sunshine touched the deep water, making it glitter. White water lilies floated on the surface, and dragonflies hung in glittering concert over the flowers and leaves. The only sounds to be heard were the guttural croaking of frogs and the quieter humming of small insects. Stepping carefully over the moss-covered stones, Rosa reached the edge of the pond, where she stood silently, her entire body relaxing. Leela wondered what her mother saw in this place full of shadows where everything shifted with the movement of the sun. She longed suddenly for the safety of the house behind her, the solidity of its walls, its pillars, its foundations. Inside that house lived respectability and stability; rites and rituals were strictly observed, and festivals and
ceremonies were performed according to the rules laid down by her Hindu Brahmin forefathers. But she continued to stare at the woman by the edge of the water.

A mosquito landed on Leela’s bare arm. Sucking in her breath, she slapped at it. Her mother, hearing the slap, whirled around as sharply as her bulk would allow. She lost her balance and fell, arms flailing, face-first into the pond. The green water splashed upwards, a swarm of insects erupted from the surface of the pond, and then silence, only ripples. Leela waited, poised to run, for her mother to rise up and call out, to rise up,
to rise up.
But Rosa lay still, her legs sticking out like fleshy white batons from the edge of her nightgown, her small feet a cartoon pink in their bright blue Hawaii chappals.

“Mama?” Leela called softly, hardly able to believe that the silent, inanimate body lying a few feet away was her mother. She backed away, then ran panting and terrified back down the path to the bright, noisy house. No one noticed her. She sped up the stairs and entered her mother’s room, hoping the event she had just witnessed was a bad dream, that she would see her mother there in the gloom, shrouded in mosquito netting. But no one was in the room, only a lingering odour of old things—clothes, paper, food. She wondered whether she should tell anyone that her mother was lying face down in the pond. What if they blamed her? She went back downstairs and Venki, peering out of his kitchen, beckoned to her.

“Guess what I made for my little pet tonight for dinner?” he asked, smiling.

“My mother is not in her room,” Leela said.

“She went out to the back garden, remember? Now, do you want to know what I made for my baby?”

Leela shrugged and looked away. “I saw her go out there.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the backyard. “To the pond. But she hasn’t come back yet.”

Venki gave her a sharp look. “Didn’t you follow her? What happened?”

“She fell in the pond. I don’t know what happened to her,” Leela whispered.

Later, when Rosa’s body had been lifted out of the water and carried back into the house, Leela looked at the heavy, shapeless face of the woman who had once been her mother.
I have killed her,
she thought numbly, twisting the fabric of her long skirt tightly around her fingers.
It was me,
I
killed her.
She had performed black magic using her mother’s nail clippings, she had prayed hard that her mother would vanish, and now her wish had come true. What had she done? But hot on the heels of guilt came a confused relief that finally,
finally,
there would be no white woman to remind people that she, Leela, was a half-and-half.

At that moment, she looked up to catch Akka staring at her, her eyes cold as always, and understood that Rosa Schweers would never fully disappear from her life. Rosa would always be there in the colour of Leela’s eyes and, worst of all, in the memories of her family. She also understood that to survive she would have to use whatever means she had to get away from this house to a place that she could own entirely. She would have to create, like the sage Vishwamitra had done for Trishanku, a heaven
for herself. Venki was right: there were two ways of understanding that story. Leela stared back at her grandmother, and finally the old woman looked away.

Twelve years passed. Leela grew from a quick-witted, petite child into a short woman with a sharp, watchful face. She might have been pretty had she smiled more often, but Leela did not think there was much to smile about. She had, however, developed a shrewd confidence in her ability to survive. After Rosa’s death, she had reviewed her modest options and decided that she needed another ally besides Venki. The old cook gave her love and food, but she needed someone with more authority in the household. She devoted herself to her father, Hari Shastri, bringing him his slippers when he came home from work, taking his tray of food to him in his room, doing her homework on the floor of that room, asking him to explain this or that to her and generally insinuating herself into his life. She anticipated his wishes—ensuring that his pens were full of ink and that he always had sharpened pencils on his desk, that all his papers were neatly clipped together and filed—and if he needed anything, he only had to say “Leelu” for her to appear at his elbow. Before Akka knew it, the grey-eyed grandchild whom she thoroughly distrusted had somehow taken charge of her son’s life. Now that Leela was grown up, Hari Shastri gave his paycheque to his daughter instead of his mother. There was little the old woman could do when Leela bought herself saris with her father’s money, purchased gifts for her aunts to keep them happy in case
she needed their help and, after high school, decided to continue her studies in university. If she did not get married, she would at least have an education to fall back on. She could find herself a job as a teacher or perhaps study a little longer and become a college lecturer. But she kept these plans to herself and, to avoid offending her grandmother, Leela always made an ostentatious display of placing Hari Shastri’s paycheque at the old lady’s sharp-edged feet, respectfully touching them with her small hands.

“Akka,” she would say, “is there anything you want from the market? I’ll get it on my way home from college.” But before her grandmother could reach down for the piece of paper, she would whisk it away and tuck it into her blouse, where it stayed securely between her breasts until she deposited it in the joint bank account she maintained with her father.

And whether her grandmother requested anything or not, Leela would return with long strings of jasmine buds strung together, fruits of various kinds—including golden apples from Ooty, an expensive indulgence for Akka, who loved their crisp sweetness—to place in front of the gods. For Leela continued to pray fervently twice a day, her fierce belief in gods that she could neither see nor hear jostling against the empirical truths of the maths and sciences she studied at university. She embraced the erratic gods on one side and rationalism on the other. Half of this and half of that.

Then, in her second year of university, Leela was invited to the wedding of her best friend. She was seated near the
aisle in one of a row of seats in the wedding hall, dressed in a pale green sari. On the raised dais at the far end of the hall, her friend circled the sacred fire with her new husband. Leela, feeling a cramp in her leg, stretched it out into the aisle just as a young man walked by. And Balachandra Bhat, cousin to Leela’s friend, tripped over her small foot and stumbled to the ground.

“Ay-ay-yo!” exclaimed Leela, leaping out of her seat, embarrassed. “So sorry, hope you are not hurt …” She leaned down to give the young man a hand up, unwittingly repeating the actions of her mother so long ago. Coincidence? Perhaps. Chance brings lives together in unexpected ways and breaks them apart with equal randomness.

The young man who was sprawled on the floor rolled over awkwardly and found himself looking into a pair of anxious grey eyes in a freckled brown face. The unusual combination intrigued and charmed him, and by the time he had dusted himself off and accepted Leela’s apologies—made in a deep, husky voice oddly at variance with her small figure—Balachandra Bhat, fondly known as Balu by his friends and family, decided he was in love. As he floated home, he recalled and embroidered, in rich detail, the entire encounter with Leela. He thought her eyes were like a grey sky shot through with sunlight. He remembered her smile and the small dimple on the left side of her mouth. He wished he had had time to count the freckles scattered across the bridge of her small nose and high cheekbones. He confided his passions to his mother, who promptly sent a letter to the Shastris asking for Leela’s horoscope.

On the outskirts of Bangalore, in the little town of Balepur, Leela set Venki the task of collecting all the information he could gather about the short young man with the prematurely receding hairline who had fallen at her feet. The old cook, a wizened gnome by now, almost blind and deaf, cooking more by instinct than anything else, found out through his network of cooks and maids in various homes that Balachandra Bhat, the only son of the widowed Mrs. Bhat, had a doctorate in chemical engineering from the highly regarded Indian Institute of Science. He had recently found a job in a newly set-up research institute in Bangalore. But although Balu Bhat was an eligible young bachelor, Venki’s sources warned, he was difficult to please. He had a fondness for certain modern, western,
strange
notions about divorce and widow remarriage, the education of women and their inheritance rights. And there was another thing about this young man that made him less than desirable. He had the distressing habit of discussing books with his prospective brides. He quizzed them about history and independence and politics and made them feel like foolish students if they did not have the answers to his questions.

Leela wasn’t unduly worried. She read the daily papers, she knew what was going on in the world. She asked her father to send her horoscope, as it would have seemed indecent to do so herself, but she wrote the letter that accompanied it; and her father, used to letting her handle all his correspondence, signed it without bothering to read it. If he had, he would have been surprised to see that Leela had not included the usual information about her
beauty, the colour of her skin and her talents as a cook. She wrote about her love of books, her interest in current events and her intention to work after she had finished her studies.