In the Convent of Little Flowers (12 page)

His voice is harsh. “Has
she
eaten?”

“Of course not,” his wife says softly. “You know she will not eat before you. But your grandchild is fed. His little tummy is full; he is on his way to sleep.” She speaks in a low voice, so that, close as they are to Swamy and his wife, they will not hear this conversation.

“How are you?” Swamy’s wife yells as they pass by her, deliberately overloud. Nathan’s wife ignores her.

They sit as usual on the front verandah, where everyone else can see them. Nathan’s wife has spread a knitted jute
pai
on the concrete floor, and set out just one stainless steel plate and a steel tumbler with boiled water. This is because Nathan will eat alone—the women of his family have never joined him in the meal; they are there to serve him and then to eat after he has had his fill. Until the child Krishna came into his quarters, no one has eaten before Nathan in the house. Nathan’s wife first dots the outer rim of his plate with a jaggery
payasam
, so that he does not start his meal without a sweetened tongue. Then she heaps a mound of steaming rice in the center, ladles
rasam
over it, asks him how much of the potato curry he wants. She settles against the wall, watching him as he eats, anticipating second helpings of this, less of that.

Nathan eats like a king, for in his house, he is a king. Even if he is only a peon at work. Even he is the father of only daughters.

After Parvati there were no more children, and over the years Nathan grew accepting of the girls. They were a burden to be sure, all together, without the relief of a son. If Nathan had had a son, that son’s earned dowry would pay for his daughters’ given dowry. To earn this large dowry, the son would have to be educated somewhat, and have a good job, perhaps a peon at a large bank with air-conditioning, or personal peon to the managing director of some big company. For many years Nathan would conjure these ghost visions of the successful son he never had. Nathan would even painstakingly do some of the calculations or go to the department secretary to ask humbly for her to do the math. First, he would estimate education expenditures for the son, and add a little bribe for getting him a good job because that was necessary and a fact of life. Then he would add two dowries for his two older daughters (Parvati was supposed to be the son, so she was not counted in these grandiose schemes). The secretary would tell him what the total was and Nathan would add an extra ten percent to that amount for incidental expenses (one could never tell what Nathan might encounter as the children were growing up, the wretched girls might fall, or burn themselves in a kitchen fire, or some other demand would be made on his earnings).
The total was a very nice sum and eased Nathan’s burdens for many hours.

When in these reveries, he forgot that Parvati was their third child; and after that Nathan’s wife would not let him come near her without a condom, the chance of a son in their future be damned. He tried to reason with her, but
her
reasoning made more sense than his—she was tired of having children, saving for three dowries was enough, three was enough. Even the government said so. At this, Nathan stayed his arguments, for everywhere he went in the city, the government had family planning boardings picturing two adults and two children. “We are two, we have two.” Nathan and his wife already had three. But three girls? Even the government would pity him. Surely. He was being made to pay for some sin he had committed in a previous life.

Nathan waits for the rice to cool on his plate, separating the grains so that the steam escapes from between them. He nods and his wife adds a dollop of curds on the rice, and another one, and yet another, until he holds his left hand flat across his plate, palm down, to say that it is enough. Nathan never speaks during his meals, and his wife does not expect him to. Instead she talks, feeding him little bits of gossip from the barracks, the happenings of their household, what the girls did, what they said.

In the last three years, she has suddenly become mute, for she is unable to talk of their grandchild to him. She knows
Nathan disapproves so greatly that she is afraid the food will curdle in his stomach if she mentions the child. But they live in two rooms, the child has been tottering around them, his little cries of joy and his tantrums fill the air—how does one ignore this? Pretend it does not exist? She sighs as she puts a piece of mango pickle next to the curds and rice. The mango piece falls from the spoon and small flecks of oil splatter on Nathan’s rice. His hand stops on its way to his mouth but he does not look up at his wife. Even that small action is a reprimand in itself. She busies herself with asking if he wants more curds, more pickle, more of anything. He grunts and at that moment, his grandson wails in the room.

Nathan and his wife hear Parvati rise from her place in the other room and rush to her son. She croons to him.
“Jo, jo, raja.”
Sleep, my king. When she says that word,
raja,
her voice cracks and falls into a silence, but they can still hear her pat the child back to sleep. Nathan eats steadily, wiping his plate clean, licking his fingers. His heart is laden with hurt at his daughter’s slip of tongue in calling her son
raja.
For anyone else, this would be a common term of endearment, for her it is only shame. It is a pity, he thinks, that Parvati was not born a son—then none of this would be happening. Why, in the early years there had been nothing to indicate that such misfortune would befall them.

Even as his head filled with unfulfilled son dreams after Parvati’s birth, Nathan worked very hard at his job at the
Department of Electrical Engineering, and was always respectful to the professors. Their wives hired him in the evenings and on weekends when there was a function or a festival in the house. On the bicycle that the college had given him, he rode to the vegetable
mandi
early every morning for one professor’s wife who had fought with the grocer who wheeled his cart into the campus. Nathan took the bus to the train station to greet their relatives holding cardboard placards with names scribbled on them that he could not decipher. One professor did not send his children to the campus school, preferring a convent instead, so Nathan brought them back every afternoon by autorickshaw. Although he was long past his gardener status, he weeded gardens, mowed lawns, and with his meager carpentry skills even made tables and chairs on order. Nathan’s wife worked as a maid, sweeping and mopping houses, cooking at times, washing clothes and vessels.

The three girls went to the campus school. By then, Nathan did most of his outside work for the wife of one professor in the department, Mrs. Rao. She told him that his daughters had to go to school, so he sent them, watching the money he had saved for their dowries dissipate into textbooks, pencils, school uniforms. What use was it to educate girls? He had himself never learned to read and write too much and yet he managed at his job well enough. All the girls were fit for was to cook and clean and bear children. His wife could teach them that.

So at first, Parvati’s very presence was painful to Nathan,
thinking as he did of the son she should have been. Later, he began to see that what his wife had said in the postcard was true. Parvati was a beautiful child. Her two older sisters were regular hoydens in some senses, too attentive to themselves. They preened in front of the cracked mirror in the second room before school each day. Their uniforms needed to be starched and ironed. Their hair had to be well oiled, neatly plaited down their backs, one curl imprisoned and stuck to the sides of their cheeks. They painstakingly outlined their eyes with kohl. The
pottus
on the center of their foreheads were dabbed on with one finger dipped in glycerin, then with a dusting of red vermilion to form a perfect large circle. Jasmine flower garlands, measuring two elbow lengths, were pinned to the back of their heads. These two girls were so careful of their appearance that they would return home from school with their faces as though freshly done, not one hair awry, not one smudge on their skins, skirts still holding pleats as though they had not sat down during the day.

But Parvati was different from her sisters, and this Nathan saw when he allowed himself to take notice of her, and when his son fantasies seemed unlikely to come true. She did not have her sisters’ obsessions with themselves. She would rise early in the morning too, but to sit on the verandah outside, to play with the pariah dog in the compound, to tease the squirrels and crows with nuts and tamarind fruit. Then five minutes before she had to go to school, with his wife yelling at her, Parvati would don her uniform, comb
her long hair and plait it speedily, and run out of the house to catch up with her sisters. By the time she returned home the jasmine pinned to her plaits would be brown with age, her hair would be flying about her face, her shirt would be untucked from her skirt, and mud would ride up her shoes and socks, turning them a dull brown. She did not seem to care about this.

Over the years the girls grew up. They did not study beyond eighth standard; Nathan would not allow it, no matter what Mrs. Rao said. It was easy for her to say things like daughters should be educated and that she educated her one daughter. But Nathan saw that Mrs. Rao’s son went to college on the campus, to get a degree in engineering; her daughter just did a BSc in some science subject in a Chennai college. And then she was married to a doctor in the city. In Mrs. Rao’s world, her daughter had to have a college degree to be married. In Nathan’s world, if his daughters were too learned, they would not find a husband. Eighth standard was enough, and they could even read and write and speak some English.

The two older girls were married to alliances that came from Nathan’s home village. Good alliances, considering that he had only daughters, for even
that
fact was a strain on marriage negotiations. Prospective in-laws had hummed and muttered at his fate; asked if the other girls were married, if they had had their children already, all the while really asking
how much left over for this daughter, this girl you are offering us
? One boy was even a bank clerk. It was more than Nathan
could have hoped for, and the dowry he paid for that daughter was twice the other’s.

Then only Parvati was left at home with them. When she finished her schooling (at thirteen), Nathan put her to work at Mrs. Rao’s house, the same work his wife did—cooking and cleaning and washing clothes and vessels. This Parvati did well, her hands fluid as she worked, a song lilting under her breath. She was a quiet child, did not speak much to her father or her mother, listened to them when they said something. She rose in the morning at six, went to work, came home to cook the lunch meal, and went back in the afternoon for two more hours of work. As she grew older, Nathan said she should come back to the barracks before the sun set, and obedient to his wishes, she did so.

Nathan washes up over the dirt around the verandah, leaning over the perimeter of concrete as his wife upends a brass
chombu
filled with water over his hands; eventually, she asks, “Enough?” in a sharp-edged tone. She has also heard the word
raja
from her daughter’s mouth, and everything she forced herself to forget has returned.

A shouting rage rises within Nathan because she dares to take her dissatisfaction out on him. He struggles to retain the shreds of his shattered dignity. He has never had to raise his voice at his wife, beat his daughters, lower himself by making noise in front of the others in the barracks. Well, only once he had to, but that was an anger like none
else—it had swept through his blood, set him on fire, nearly killed him.

He ignores his wife, ponderously silent as he pads down the verandah steps to the bottommost one, where he sits down. His wife brings him the
vetalaipaak,
and dutifully makes up a parcel of betel leaves and nuts. Nathan wedges the
vetalaipaak
between his back molars and his cheek and sucks the leafy juice into his throat. When the betel has softened and leaked out all of its redness, he will move it between his jaws, chew out the last of the juice, and then spit it out.

By now, almost everyone in the barracks is outside on the verandah, squatting over their own steps, separated from one another by a few yards at most, but they all look ahead into the darkness of the tamarind tree, and if they talk, it is with low nighttime voices, fatigued and musical.

Vikram, the sweeper in their barracks, had only one child, a boy named Raja, born a few months before Parvati. When Raja was born, Vikram went to the sweetshop outside the campus and bought
jangiris
for all of them. Eat, he had said, eat and make your mouths honeyed to fete the birth of my child. Nathan and his wife had obediently followed his instructions, and at the time, Nathan waited for his wife’s round belly to give him a son. He had already decided what he would buy at the sweetshop—
gulab jamuns
bursting with sugar syrup,
aappams
that flaked and melted to the touch, and
palgova
so thick and creamy it could be fed with a finger. No mere
jangiris
for
his
son.

And this child Raja, called a king in the sweeper’s quarters, became Parvati’s favorite playmate. He had a mischievous face, thick swathes of hair that curled over his forehead, black eyes like an imp, a constant smile. When they were young, Parvati and Raja were inseparable, running to each other when they awoke, sitting together shoulder-by-shoulder, climbing the tamarind tree, fighting with the other children, defending only each other. Raja went to the campus school too, but all the way until twelfth standard.