English Lessons and Other Stories (11 page)

“I'll never try to help you again, Mama. You just wait and see. I'm going to have to defend this case and
you'll
be the one to be sorry.”

“Khansama,” I call. “Mem-saab will take breakfast in her room.”

Now I see Balvir swallow hard, changing course. “Amma, tell her she has made a mistake, bringing this kind of money-hungry woman into our private business.” He means the lady-lawyer.

I mouth his words for her, without sound.

She turns her head away; there is refuge in deafness. Sometimes I think the old custom of burning widows on their husbands' funeral pyres spared widows like my Mem-saab from the dangers of living unprotected.

She is breathing fast and hard again. Time is not on our side of the locked bedroom door.

*

At the court hearing, the lady-lawyer wears a black robe that covers the swirl of her sherbet-pink sari, and her voice, in English, is shrill and indignant for Mem-saab. I sit beside Mem-saab on a chair, though keeping my distance so everyone will know her to be born high on the ladder of Karma.

The judge is called Milord, just like in the Hindi movies we watch on Sundays, but the people in his court are not respectfully absorbed in the proceedings as they are in the films. I think the judge listens more attentively to Balvir's lawyer, a ponderous man with spectacles and plenty of uniformed peons to bring him notes and files.

I count eighteen fans humming on long slender stems, flowers twirled between unseen fingers, cooling the crowd in the high-ceilinged room. Mem-saab is waiting for Balvir to come to her, put his arms around her, say he will really look after her, say he and Kiran will be kind… but Balvir's turban never tilts toward her once. No one can churn butter from soured milk.

Afterwards, the lady-lawyer comes to my Mem-saab and takes her hands.

“The judge has decreed there will be a stay order. Status quo.”

Mem-saab looks at me but I don't know how to say the English words. She turns back to the lady-lawyer and offers her a slip-pad and pencil so she can write them down.

Mem-saab reads the English writing and draws her eyebrows together. The lady-lawyer writes some more. Mem-saab repeats the words aloud, in Hindi. “He cannot build the rooms but I cannot tell him to go back to Bombay?”

The lady-lawyer nods. “His lawyer said he had no place to live in Bombay. Balvir said you gave him part of your house as a gift to entice him to Delhi — to look after you.”

Mem-saab puts the slip-pad back in her purse. She shakes her
head slowly. She does not have enough breath today to discuss Balvir's lies.

“What has been gained?” I ask.

“Time,” says the lady-lawyer.

She helps my Mem-saab to rise. I follow them out to the car, Mem-saab's pashmina shawl on my forearm. There is some satisfaction in knowing Balvir will have to take a taxi.

Every day, Mem-saab asks if there is a letter from Jai.

“No,” I say, “no letter.” And since that one call the day after Balvir arrived, no phone call either. Now I am sorry I told him Mem-saab was well.

The Embassy-walla sends Mem-saab a note asking if he may come to tea. She sends me to him with a note saying Yes. I tell Khansama to make cake and jalebis, and by now I know this means Balvir and Kiran will be notified as well.

It takes her most of the morning to dress and prepare; she rests often to ease the pain in her chest. All afternoon, she sits waiting for tea as though the Embassy-walla were one of the relatives who no longer visit.

Khansama wheels in the trolley as usual, but he doesn't leave the room afterwards. He has to report back to Balvir. The Embassy-walla asks for tea without milk. Since he says it in English, I do not tell Mem-saab, and she pours it in his tea anyway. He should repeat himself often, and in Hindi, if he wants me to help him converse.

“As you know,” says the Embassy-walla, “my lease is till the end of this month.”

Mem-saab bows her elegant head and smiles. His lease has been till the end of each month for four rains now.

“I have been told I will be posted back to Washington after that.”

Mem-saab smiles again. “How nice.”

She has not understood.

“Posted back to abroad?” I ask.

He looks at me then. “Yes. Tell her I will be posted back to Washington — say, to America — after this month.”

I mouth his words to her again. She smiles at him, but this smile is tinged with dread. “I see,” she says, quiet.

He accepts a piece of dry sponge cake and declines the jalebis — crisp tubes oozing their red-gold sugar-water. Khansama will give them to his children tonight.

Now who will stop Balvir — or Jai — from putting their belongings or padlocks downstairs? The judge said everything must remain the same, but some changes cannot be decreed away. Four rains ago, Mem-saab could ask her English-speaking sons to place an advertisement in
The Statesman
saying “foreign embassy people desired” so she didn't have to lease to an Indian tenant. It takes a generation to oust Indian tenants, and they can never afford to pay. But now…? Who will listen to Amma if I ask them to write in their English newspaper that Mem-saab doesn't want an Indian for a tenant?

Mem-saab receives a note from the lady-lawyer; she reads it to me and begins to cry. The lady-lawyer says Balvir requested the court to restrain her from renting the downstairs “until a family understanding has been arrived at.” The judge has granted his request.

“What will I live on?” she weeps.

I remind her, “You are a rich woman, Mem-saab. You have money at Grindlays.”

“But that is family wealth — stridhan — just mine on paper, for my lifetime. I use just a little for my needs, Amma.”

I agree she keeps her needs to a minimum. She has always
had a strong sense of duty, my Mem-saab. It is the reason we understand one another. We were taught that widows such as we cannot claim our men's wealth. That our kismet dictates if our men be kind. But these are the days of Kalyug, and her men have forgotten
their
duty to be kind to their mother, or to me, who also raised them.

So I tell her, “Your husband would not want you to live in poverty. That is for women like your Amma, we are accustomed to it. Besides…” and here I perform a joker's mock pout like Amitabh Bachhan in the movies, “I don't want to go back to Jagadri just yet.”

She manages a smile, and she says in Punjabi so the words sound sweeter, more intimate. “Don't worry, Amma. It is my duty to look after you.” I bring my palms together and raise them high to my forehead. I call on all my Gods to bless her, and now she laughs.

This is my role in the movie of her life.

A Krishna-blue night shares his sky with the moon. I wrap them away behind curtains; the deaf must banish all light to find sleep.

The heat coils round us and the fan is stilled by another municipal power cut. Still Mem-saab complains she is cold — so cold. She says a train is roaring through her head but we both know that is impossible. She cannot hear Balvir or Kiran's party laughter or the tumult in her candlelit drawing room. I bring her sleeping pills and shawls and then blankets, but there is no rest, no peace.

At dawn, I bring her a glass of warm lemon juice and honey, as I did for her sons when they had fevers.

She asks for more pills and I bring her the old mithai-tin with its picture of Vaishnudevi, the many-armed, many-weaponed goddess astride a tiger.

When she takes her pills she tears at their plastic wrapping, trying to find the kernel. She looks at them carefully, holding them in her palm, examining their red, pink and white granules in the capsule-skin as though trying to fathom their power. She takes one to her mouth, sets it delicately within the fold of her lower lip.

She turns to me and asks for water, and I offer the silver glass. I watch the kernel pass her throat, then another and another, her head swung upwards, eyes closed as though in prayer. I have never seen her take so many pills, but then she has never been so sick.

When the pills are gone, we wait a moment together.

She hands the silver glass back to me and drops the capsule peels in my upturned hands. Discarded silver foil and plastic with English writing on the back. Letters that sit squat, round and comfortable, unlike our letters that hang from tired arms like rows of ragged kameezes fluttering upon a clothes line. It is my left, my unclean hand, that has learned to make Hindi letters, and so I only make them when I have to write something for Mem-saab.

She lies back and closes her eyes.

“Shall I bring oil for your massage, Mem-saab?”

“Not today, Amma. Stay with me.”

I am too old for such sleepless nights; she cannot hear the cracking of my joints as I take my place on the floor on her foot-carpet. I take her soft hand in my calloused ugly ones and I begin to rub gently. “I am with you, Mem-saab, Amma is here. I am with you, na. I am here. Amma is here.”

A dying fragrance from the kitchen recalls the turmeric I rubbed on my Leela's arms before I gave her to her husband. She has given me grandchildren, but I cannot recall their faces. Sleep-summoned images dance across my inner eye: Shiv's long lashes — or were those Jai's? Sardarji's haughty gaze, Balvir's eyes
downcast before it. Fragments of soft chappati fall from Balvir's hands and shrivel before I can reach them. My tongue seems afire with hot chillies. I cannot speak — and if I speak, who will listen to Amma?

People's voices in my ears. Balvir, shouting, “Amma, tell her…” Kiran shrieking I am a fool because I cannot read English. The lady-lawyer: “Be strong. I will try to help you.” Manu's voice: “Daddy says you are nobody…” Khansama: “You too are becoming deaf…”

I am becoming deaf, too.

There is silence. Inert, static silence — a constant silence I thought only Mem-saab had ever known.

I stop massaging. Her arm droops heavy over the curve of the bed. I put my hands to my ears. I shake my head. I hear no sound. There is no sound.

No breath, no sound.

I rise, and the peels of Mem-saab's pills scatter from my lap. I discover I am weeping. I must not weep. Amma, you must not weep!

Ganesh, Krishna, Vishnudevi, Vaheguru, Guru Tegh Bahadur… an old woman begs you, give me strength.

I bring her kajal pencils and I draw her eyebrows dark above her eyes. I bring colour for her cheeks and lipstick to make her lips hibiscus-red. I take her hair in my hands, hair the colour of spent fire-coals, and I braid it for her though she is a widow.

When she is beautiful, I cover her face.

Outside her room, the empty drawing room echoes the taunting revelry of the evening past. I go to the kitchen. Khansama must still be sleeping in the servant's quarter; his new wristwatch never brings him too early to work. I take a sharp knife and return to Mem-saab's room.

“Be strong, Mem-saab,” I say. There is always the revenge of the powerless.

I cut her wrist slowly, as though I cut my own. I massage her arm from armpit to wrist with deep, powerful strokes of both hands to fill her silver water glass full of blood. She will not need it now.

In the drawing room, I struggle to climb on a low table. I manage to stand, with the glass in my hands.

Then I whirl. Round, with the silver glass aloft, I am a Katha-kali dance-girl of twenty. Blood spatters on the gold silk sofa. On crystal. On fine Kashmiri carpets. On white walls, on the raw-silk shimmer of curtains. I bend and I twist in soundless fury, till there is only a little of her blood left in the glass.

Then, suddenly, I am tired.

I slump to my knees. I climb off the table.

At the door to Mem-saab's room, I dip the index finger of my unclean hand in what is left. I squat again. I paint slowly — for this is important — slowly I paint a rangoli design in my Mem-saab's blood on the white chip-marble floor.

The design that says, “Welcome to this house and may you be happy.”

Balvir, Kiran and Manu still sleep when I finish.

I wash my hands, using water sparingly from Mem-saab's bathroom till I remember she doesn't need water anymore. And she no longer needs a pair of ears.

Down the stairs to the concrete driveway. I strain at the double gates. They open for me. As I walk through, I picture Balvir and Kiran waking, finding their treasure soiled and cursed. One woman will tell her God and this one — dark, quiet old Amma — will now tell anyone who has ears to hear.

At Jorbagh market, morning ripens from a mango-blush sky. The narrow caverns of shop stalls are still closed, their rippling silver garage doors padlocked to the ground. The only open shop is the one that sells marigold garlands for worshippers to offer at the temple before work, but today I pass it by.

I climb into the back seat of a scooter-rickshaw, shaking its
dozing driver. Weary again now, I settle back in my chariot, Arjun returning from battle. The scooter driver stretches and yawns. He takes his time pouring a soothing libation of oil into the tank. Then he winds a scarf about his neck with a flourish like Amitabh Bachhan and steadies the eager bounce of the scooter's green plastic-tasselled handles.

“Where are you going, Amma?” he shouts over the engine.

For a second, I hesitate. Shiv is closer. Then my mind clears; a woman will understand. “To the railway station,” I say.

“Luggage?”

“No luggage,” I say. Just a pair of ears and a very long memory.

Leela will be surprised to see me.

“Watch it!”

Janet winced as the Maruti swerved onto gravel to avoid another overburdened truck. She turned to glare at its driver, but all she could see were the words painted on the back: “Horn Please OK TA TA.” In Toronto he'd have been stopped for speeding, not wearing a seat belt, reckless endangerment, driving on the wrong side of the road, you name it.

“Relax,” unflappable Arvind said. “Pretend you're on a ride at Canada's Wonderland.”