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Authors: Anita Nair

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‘Padma,’ she said, watching Padma’s fingers treat her daughter’s scalp as if it were a ball of dough. Knead it till it becomes malleable. Knead it till you drive out every single thought of resistance. Knead it so that it does your bidding when the time comes. ‘I’m thinking of buying a house.’
Padma looked up, interested. ‘I have also been thinking about it for some time now. Soon these girls will be of marriageable age and how can we find them decent husbands if we don’t even have a house of our own.’
‘Padma,’ Akhila said, trying to be as gentle as she could, ‘I am buying a flat; a one-bedroom flat.’
‘But how can we all fit in a flat that size? Can’t you afford anything bigger?’
‘Padma,’ Akhila repeated her name and she could feel steel coat the words forming in her mouth. ‘How much room does one person need?’
‘What do you mean?’ Suspicion rasped.
‘I wish to be by myself It is time I did this—lived alone. And it is time you did as well,’ Akhila said, meeting her eyes. Their gaze locked and Akhila noted with a tremendous sense of satisfaction that it was Padma who faltered first.
‘Are you feeling alright?’ Padma asked, wiping the oil on her palms on to her feet. ‘At your age, women go through a difficult time. It’s something to do with hormones. I was reading about it in a magazine the other day. Menopause, it said, can play havoc with a woman’s mind.’
‘Shut up, Padma,’ Akhila snapped. ‘I’m sick and tired of your know-it-all tone of voice when you talk to me. If you want the truth, I’ve had enough of you. The noise your children fill my home with. The way your husband and you have been sponging off me for years.’
Akhila stopped when she saw the look of horror on Padma’s face. And then she wished she hadn’t, for the words began to spill out of Padma’s mouth. Words with forked tongues spewing venom.
‘All these years that I cooked and cleaned for you … you repay me by telling me that you are sick and tired of us. You are a jealous old woman. That’s what you are. Full of envy and spite because I have a husband and children and you have nothing.’
‘All the more reason why you and I should go our separate ways,’ Akhila retorted icily.
‘Do you think the brothers will consent to this? Do you think they’ll let you live alone?’ Padma asked, smug in the knowledge that Narayan and Narsi would think the same way she did.
‘For heaven’s sake, I don’t need anyone’s consent. Look at me, I’m forty-five years old. And older than all of you. I will do exactly as I please and I don’t give a damn about what you or anyone else thinks …’
‘That’s what you think. They are the men of the family,’ Padma’s voice mocked.
Why am I standing here listening to her? Akhila asked herself She began to walk away. She felt calm and even more certain about what she intended to do.
For the next few days, an uneasy quiet prevailed. The children were admonished loudly and often in Akhila’s presence. ‘Priya,’ Padma would hiss, ‘do you have to recite that poem aloud to memorize it? Shut the book and set it aside. After all, what is the worst that can happen … you might just fail in the monthly test. But I don’t want you disturbing Akka.’
‘Madhavi,’ she would snarl, ‘why do you have to slam down that plate? Don’t you know the noise we make irritates Akka?’
Food was left in covered dishes for Akhila on the dining table. The clothes that she hung out to dry were stacked in neatly ironed piles on her bed. Padma was punishing her with her silence. And making sure at the same time that she understood exactly how well she ran the household for Akhila. And how without her, there would be chaos and confusion. All it did was make Akhila angry. How dare Padma subject her to her silences and reproach, her palpable anger and bitterness, and that too in a house Akhila paid the rent for?
Why does she grudge me my freedom? Akhila wondered again and again.
‘Why have you come to this decision, Akka?’ Narayan’s question was pitched in his usual low tones. Love for this younger brother washed over Akhila. Of the lot, he alone was non-judgemental and unconditional in his affection. The others – Narsi and Padma. – had been impetuous children, untouched by the tragedy in their lives, and they had grown up to become impetuous adults. Self-centred and definite that the world existed only to provide for them.
They had each finished their individual tirades.
Narsi – It’s improper for a woman to live alone. What will society say? That your family has abandoned you.
Besides, there will be a whole lot of questions that will pop up about your reputation. You know how people put two and two together and come up with five. Nalini’s family will be scandalized if they hear about this. Have you thought of how embarrassing my position will be?
Padma – Why do you have to live alone? Haven’t I taken care of your house for you? Apart from everything that Narsi Anna has said, have you thought of the expense? I have two girls and my husband doesn’t have a very well-paying job. I was counting on your help to get my girls married and settled in their lives.’
‘You heard them, didn’t you, Narayan?’ Akhila sheathed her voice with control; with a calmness she didn’t feel. ‘For twenty-six years, I gave all of myself to this family. I asked for nothing in return. And now when I wish to make a life of my own, do any one of you come forward and say, “It’s time you did this, Akka. You deserve to have a life of your own.” Instead you worry about what it will do to your individual lives.
‘Now tell me Narayan, why shouldn’t I live alone? I’m of able body and mind. I can look after myself I earn reasonably well.’ Akhila paused when her voice choked with tears, and began again.
‘Has any one of you ever asked me what my desires were or what my dreams are? Did any one of you ever think of me as a woman? Someone who has needs and longings just like you do?’
‘So, that’s what it is!’ Padua broke in. ‘She’s having a love affair. And she doesn’t want us to find out. That’s why she wants to go away by herself Who is he? And how did you find him?’
Akhila reached out and did what she had wanted to for a very long time. She slapped Padma across her mouth. A tight hard slap that echoed all the contempt and resentment she carried in her.
There was silence. A hard silence that reverberated with the resonance of that slap.
‘I don’t have to explain my actions to any one of you. I don’t owe you anything. I hope I have made myself clear to you.’
‘You don’t owe us anything. Instead we owe you our lives,’ Narayan said, seeking to soothe, console and heal the bruises that festered. ‘Which is why I’m afraid for you. How will you cope? This is not a reflection on who you are. How can any woman cope alone?’
His concern touched Akhila but she had her answers ready. ‘I know I can. I did once before when you were children. Now I can for me, for Akhilandeswari. Nobody’s daughter. Nobody’s sister. Nobody’s wife. Nobody’s mother. ’
‘Akka, please listen to me,’ he cajoled. The others had already turned their heads away. They didn’t care any more now that they knew her mind was made up.
‘Akka, please talk to a few others and you’ll hear for yourself how difficult it is for a woman to live alone,’ he held her hand between his and beseeched.
Akhila saw the fear in his eyes. She saw how scared he was for her. She knew he thought that she would fall easy prey to the first man who came bearing false hopes and empty promises. In his mind, her future would be striated with disappointment. Perhaps debasement and desolation. She felt a faint twinge of fear: Am I being stubborn? Am I being unwise?
Akhila brushed aside the thought. Her family would never accept her decision. That much was certain. Each of them had their own reasons. Perhaps Narayan was the only one who was concerned more about her welfare and less about what it would mean not to have Akka or her salary to depend on. So to protect him more than herself, Akhila forced herself to lie. She smiled, hoping the smile would mask the lie and said, ‘Fine, I will do as you say and talk to a few people. And only then will I make my mind up.’
One by one, they left the room convinced that she would see reason. Any woman she talked to would tell her
the universal truth that everyone but she seemed to know – how utterly awful it was for a woman to be by herself. She would revert to being their gentle, timid elder sister and all this could be forgotten as a time when Akka went temporarily and inexplicably insane.
Only the laugh remained with her. Karpagam’s cock-a-thumb-at-the-world laugh.
Opposite Akhila sat the last of the passengers who had boarded the train with her the previous night. All the others had got off. One by one, bidding her farewell, offering her advice.
Janaki at Ernakulam. ‘Whatever you do, think well and do it. And once you have, don’t think of the past and yearn for it,’ she said, patting Akhila’s head.
Prabha Devi had scribbled her telephone number on a piece of paper and taken down Akhila’s address. ‘Let’s meet one of these days. After all, we live in the same city. So don’t forget to stay in touch.’ Even the girl Sheela had smiled her goodbye and said, ‘Thank you for listening to me!’
Now there was only this woman. The sixth passenger. Akhila wondered who she was. She watched her pull out a magazine from her bag and read it. It was a Tamil magazine. Akhila went back to looking out of the window.
The train was crowded. Even the reservation compartments were not spared. People banged on the doors if they were locked from the inside or pushed their way in when someone opened the door to step out. Daytime passengers filled the aisles and insisted that three-seaters could hold four. Through the packed compartment, beggars and vendors wove their way with practised ease. Orange peel, biscuit wrappers and groundnut shells littered the floors. When the train stopped and the breeze ceased, the faint stench of urine wafted through the compartment from the toilets. Akhila heaved a sigh of relief The coupé was full but at least it was clean. An oasis of calm.
Akhila opened the packet of cashew nuts she had bought at Kottayam station. She felt their sweetish meatiness flood her mouth. I am not the Akhila who boarded this train last night, she thought. The other Akhila would have settled for peanuts. Cashew nuts suggested an excess, a grander scheme of things which she wouldn’t dare tempt herself with. But this Akhila would. She could feel a slow loosening within; a certain feeling that she was right; a heady anticipation that was the aftermath of Prabha Devi’s revelation. Perhaps more than any of the other women, Prabha Devi was the closest to her in age and manner, too. So if Prabha Devi could triumph over her innate timidity and rise above traditions to float, she could do the same, Akhila thought. I too must learn to move on with the tide of life rather than be cast on its banks.
Some time later, Akhila turned from the window and caught the silent woman’s eye. Her magazine lay on her lap. Akhila smiled. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in Tamil.
‘Nagercoil,’ the woman said.
‘I’m going to Kanyakumari,’ Akhila said, even though the woman hadn’t asked. ‘Do your parents live in Nagercoil?’ she asked.
The woman shook her head. ‘I work for a foreigner. An Englishwoman who is a doctor. She has been posted to Nagercoil and I’m going ahead to set up the house before she arrives. The household articles are already on their way. The doctor and my son are driving down and will start tomorrow morning.’
‘How old is your son?’
‘Thirteen years,’ the woman said.
‘What about your husband? What does he do?’ Akhila asked.
The woman’s face stilled for a moment. ‘You are very curious,’ she said.
Akhila flushed. The other women had been so forthcoming with their lives that she had imagined everyone would be the same.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘That was rude of me. But last night, all of you shut me out from your conversation simply because you thought I didn’t belong. You looked at my clothes, my face, and decided that I was not your kind.’
Akhila flushed. ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to …’ she began.
The woman gazed at her unflinchingly. ‘Don’t apologize. You were right to think that I am not your kind. It is true. I don’t belong with you. Not because I am poor or uneducated. But because you have all led such sheltered lives, yes, even you. I heard each one of them tell you the story of their lives and I thought, these women are making such a fuss about little things. What would they ever do if real tragedy confronted them? What do they know of life and the toll it takes? What do they know of how cruel the world can be to women?’
Akhila stared at the stranger. Who was this woman from whom anger poured forth like a stream of lava?
The sixth passenger rolled her magazine and said, ‘I’m not telling you that women are weak. Women are strong. Women can do everything as well as men. Women can do much more. But a woman has to seek that vein of strength in herself. It does not show itself naturally.’
Sister to the Real Thing
My name is Marikolanthu. I am thirty-one years old. I was born in a little village called Palur near Kancheepuram. I have a son and a husband. My parents have been dead a long time and I have severed all ties with my brothers. I work as a helper in a mission hospital.
My father was a farmer. He was an only child, so when my grandfather died, he inherited both the land and the house. My mother belonged to another village; she was an orphan and was brought up by her aunt. We didn’t have any relatives or much money, but we were happy. My two brothers, Easwaran and Sivakumar, and I. But a few days after my ninth birthday my father died. He had a disease that even the doctors at Vellore Hospital couldn’t cure.
There was no one we could turn to for help and so Amma turned her face to the lime-washed walls of the Chettiar Kottai and pleaded. The house was enormous, with countless rooms and annexes. It stood three floors high and from the outside it seemed impregnable. Though its real name was Raj Vilas, everyone in the village and the nearby villages referred to it as the Chettiar Kottai – the Chettiar Fort.
The Chettiar was a rich man; they are still the richest
family in the district. The Chettiar made his fortune from silkworms. He bred them, stuffing them with mulberry leaves till they grew so fat that they burst out of their skins. To hide their shame the poor naked worms spun silk and wrapped it around themselves. But the Chettiar wouldn’t let them be even then. He boiled them and stripped their silk off them. Skeins of silk, ounces of silk. None of us in the village saw any of it for the Chettiar’s silkworm farm was somewhere else, but the ones who had seen it told us all about it.
I often thought of the silkworm, though, and felt sorry for them. ‘You are lucky to be you,’ I told every earthworm that wriggled on my palm.
I was still a child then. I talked to worms, trees and rocks. I believed the schoolmaster when he drew a circle on the blackboard and said, ‘This is the world. Half of it is lit by the sun and the other half remains in darkness. It is the same with life. There is good and bad and it’s our duty to remain in the light, be good.’
I nodded my head as did all the others and resolved to never step into the dark. Like I said, I was still a child then.
The Chettiar owned many looms on which men wove silk saris with real gold zari and these were sold in shops in Madras, Coimbatore, Salem, Madurai and in far-away cities like Delhi.
Our house was small; one among a line of houses that flanked either side of the temple street. Two streets away was the mango orchard and beyond it the Chettiar Kottai. My mother’s culinary skills were well known in the village and on special occasions she was often called in to help at the Chettiar Kottai. But now this became our sole means of livelihood.
Every morning, she left home by seven and returned only after six in the evening. So I did most of the chores. I didn’t mind that at all; it was like playing house.
I liked drawing water from the village well and carrying it home in the big brass pots balanced on the curve of my
hip. I swept and mopped the floors and washed the dirty dishes. When we came home from school, my brothers and I would go around the village picking pats of cow dung. I liked making balls of them and flattening them with my palms. I slapped rows and rows of them onto the back walls of our house. Greenish-black circles like a packet of stick-on bottus that turned grey-green when they were dry. As long as we had them drying on our walls, the fire beneath the cooking pots would never cease to burn.
Amma sometimes held me to her bosom and wept, ‘What have I reduced my child to? I have stolen her childhood from her.’
But I didn’t understand what she was fussing about. Why did she grieve for what I delighted in?
… When Brahma writes our destiny, they say, he allots a specific number of years to each one of us to experience all aspects of living. My time as housewife was spent long before I became an adult. In my mother’s house, I did all that a woman with her own house does. Perhaps that was the way it was meant to be. Even after I left the house, each time I returned, I took over its running until my mother died and my brothers staked their claim and I had no house to call my own … But here I am telling you of things that came much later. Before all that was the time when I went to work at the Chettiar Kottai …
My father the farmer didn’t approve of the Chettiar. ‘What a way to make money!’ he often said as he lit a beedi and inhaled the smoke.
‘To kill God’s creatures day after day and profit from their death. I’m glad I’m a farmer. The only creatures that die because of me are the ones that my plough cuts into and even those I kill unknowingly.’
The farmland was a long way from the village, but he never complained or tired of working on it. In the village, the people spoke of my father with an amazement that is
usually reserved for the foolhardy. ‘Only Shanmugam would expend so much energy on that piece of rock.’
The rest of them worked for the Chettiar one way or the other. The Chettiar was God, they said, generous and benevolent. But to my father, he was a slave king. ‘And I have no wish to be one of his grateful slaves,’ he told Amma when she complained that the fields yielded just about enough to make ends meet.
My father had a small piece of land on which he grew various crops by rotation. Groundnuts, chillies and rice once a year. But one field was always reserved for the kanakambaram flower. And this, my mother and I tended. In the light of the dawn, we were greeted by a riot of blooms that seemed to have gathered into their petals the hues of the rising sun. Before the sun sucked the moisture away and reduced the flowers to pale replicas of themselves, we plucked them. For every two flowers we picked, we left the third on the plant for seed. We kept some of the flowers for ourselves and sold the rest to the flower-seller by the temple.
Did my father, I wondered, grow kanakambaram because that was Amma’s name? ‘I wish you had called me Roja or Chempakam,’ I cried one day, vexed by the thought that a whole field of delicate orange blooms paid homage to my mother day after day while there was nothing for me.
‘Then I would have had a field of roses like Amma has a field of flowers. Marikolanthu? What’s a marikolanthu except a spike of green leaves?’
My father laughed aloud and drew me to his knee. ‘You silly girl,’ he cajoled. ‘What is a marikolanthu, you ask me? Haven’t you seen how a few marikolanthu leaves are always woven into kanakambaran garlands? Without the fragrance of the marikolanthu, the kanakambaram is a dead flower. But if it makes you happy, next season we’ll plant a patch of marikolanthu.’
Father worked the rock, making it green and fragrant, till the disease planted its roots in his body. He clung to his land
as long as he could, but the bills for medicines and X-rays, specialists and special foods, grew longer. So he sold the land to the Chettiar and then crumpled up and died.
Two years later, when Sujata Akka, the Chettiar’s daughter-in-law, had her son, they wanted someone to help look after the baby. That was how I came to be Prabhu-papa’s nursemaid. It was impossible for me to continue at school. The village school had classes only till the fifth standard so I would have had to go to the town if I wished to study any further.
‘We’ll send your brothers to the town school when the time comes but we can’t afford it on my salary alone,’ Amma said. ‘You do understand, don’t you, that it would be impossible for me to send you to the school by bus every day. It’s not just the money but how can I send a young girl by herself … there is too much at risk.’
I didn’t understand what was at risk. But I nodded anyway. In the black and white films that I saw in the village cinema tent, good girls always listened to their mothers. My favourite heroines did – Savitri and B. Saroja Devi, Vijayakumari and even Jayalalitha.
‘As you wish, Amma. It’s my duty to do everything for you and my brothers,’ I said, parroting the film heroines and enjoying the sensation of being able to mouth a film dialogue.
‘The Chettiar is a good man,’ Amma often said. But I could only think of how he boiled worms to rob them of their clothes.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Amma scolded when I pulled back at the gate of the Chettiar Kottai. ‘Your father liked to exaggerate.’
The Chettiar Kottai was huge. It had many rooms and many things I had never seen before except in films. A fridge that hummed as though a swarm of bees was trapped in it; ceiling fans that whirled round and round; chairs that
looked like thrones and beds that seemed to be stuffed with all the flowers in the world.
On my first day, I realized why my mother had begun to hate the smell of cooking. All she did in that house was cook. She cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for twelve people everyday. And extra for guests who turned up for just about every meal. ‘Let me keep her with me today so that she gets used to the routine of this household and tomorrow she can begin her duties,’ Amma said, washing her hands before cooking the first meal of the day. By the time breakfast was finished, it would be time to begin lunch.
‘If it was anyone else but your mother, they would have left long ago,’ Amma’s helper, another widow, grumbled. ‘Even if they see the milk begin to boil over, they won’t come and take it off the stove. Your mother or I have to rush to do it.’
‘They’ figured a great deal in Rukmini Akka’s conversation.
‘Do you think they gave us this job because they felt sorry for us? They think because we are widows, we know well enough not to pander to our taste buds. No chillies, no tamarind, no spices … our nerve ends, they think, are as dead as our husbands. So we won’t taste their food or hunger for it, and will be content with a bowl of gruel and a pinch of salt.’
’Ssh,’ Amma hissed. But Rukmini Akka had only just begun on her list of grievances that grew by the day. As if to make up for it, Amma never complained.
I watched my mother chop and sliver, saute and fry, grind and pound … I saw how she went about her chores expanding not even an iota of feeling. What did these wondrous foods my mother created taste of? Tears and bitterness; rage at an unfair destiny and fear?
But I liked my job. I liked the baby Prabhu-papa, and I liked Sujata Akka. Sometimes when I couldn’t stop talking about Sujata Akka, Amma would snap, ‘You give your
heart too easily, child. They’ll break it into a thousand pieces and leave it on the ground for others to trample into the dust.’
‘Is the heart a glass bangle?’ I giggled, amused by my own sauciness. B. Saroja Devi would have been proud of me. Easwaran and Sivakumar giggled too.
My mother sighed.
But from that day on, the boys greeted me every evening with, ‘So how’s the glass bangle? Broken or intact?’
And we’d giggle some more.
… But you know what, the heart is a glass bangle. One careless moment and it’s shattered … we know that, don’t we? And yet we continue to wear glass bangles. Each time they break, we buy new ones hoping that these will last longer than the others did.
How silly we women are. We should wear bangles made of granite and turn our hearts into the same. But they wouldn’t catch the light so prettily or sing so gaily …
Sujata Akka made me her slave with her cast-off glass bangles. She wore them for a few days and then either tired of them or broke so many that she had to buy a dozen new bangles. But to me they were precious possessions – red, blue and green, with purple flecks and silver dust.
‘Don’t you feel bad when you break a bangle?’ I asked Sujata Akka as I gathered the shards of one to take home. My brothers and I had created a game we could play with them.
‘Of course not. It’s only a glass bangle. I can always buy more,’ she said, opening her bangle-box to take out a new set of bangles.
No one grudged Sujata Akka anything. Whether it was her fondness for glass bangles or her greed for special Mysorepak, so rich with ghee that it dissolved as soon as you put it into your mouth. Sujata Akka often gave me a
piece and though I knew I should take it home so that my brothers could taste it, I never did.
The Chettiar had said that Sujata Akka’s every whim and desire was to be fulfilled. She was special. She was a city girl; she’d come from Coimbatore and she had even gone to college for two years. And Sujata Akka had given birth to a son. Next to the Chettiar, Sujata Akka was the most important person in that house.
The Chettiar had three sons. Rajendran Anna who looked after the silk looms. His wife Rani Akka was a timid woman made even more timid by the fact that she had failed to bear sons. She was the Chettiar’s niece and came from a rather impoverished family. How could she even consider competing against Sujata Akka? So she let Sujata Akka reign, content to remain in the shadows on the premise that out of sight was out of scorn.
Sridhar Anna was the Chettiar’s second son and his favourite. It was he who had added to the Chettiar’s extensive fortunes by bringing orders from far-flung places. So when the Chettiar chose a bride for Sridhar Anna, he made sure the girl would bring with her more than a fat dowry. She had to be beautiful and educated and from a family that had a predilection for bearing sons. Sridhar Anna was rewarded with Sujata Akka.
Then there was Ranganathan Anna who was studying to be a doctor in Vellore.

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