In the Convent of Little Flowers (3 page)

The letter is folded inside my jeans pocket. I wear pants now.

Tom Merrick showed me his citation for the Vietnam war. He said he was wounded in it and decorated for bravery. I don’t quite remember what the incident was, dear Padmini, no doubt you do. He must have talked to you about it. But when he told me, I wasn’t listening to his words, just the tone of his voice. Here was a man who would be kind to my little Padmini, I thought. Have they been kind?

It has been twenty-three years, yet I feel as though I know what you look like. You must have your mother’s looks. She has always been a beautiful woman; even now, when the cancer has ravaged her, she has an ethereal beauty, a charm of manner. Her children think so, and I agree with them.

That kills me each time I read it. She had time for other children, not just one more, mind you,
children.
Why did she not keep me? Sister Mary Bloody Theresa.

Yes, I know your mother well. As well as I know myself. You see, we were born to the same house, the same mother. Your mother is my little sister. She has always been somewhat young, somewhat petted. Your birth was unexpected. Enough said. I had found my calling before you were born, if I hadn’t I would gladly have taken you. As it turns out, I did take you, in another capacity. And perhaps you would have known me well these last twenty-three years if the Merricks had not come that day to the convent. But, everything happens for a reason. If the smallpox had not visited me and left its mark, I might have married … I might be married anyway, there was a man. But … things did not work out. I changed my name from Chandra to Sister Mary Theresa. When I was converted, they asked where I would like to do God’s work and I said it would be at an orphanage, at the Convent of Little Flowers. A year later, you came to me as a baby. But do not worry, your mother married well. The indiscretion was forgotten, not made public, anyway.

This is when I hate her the most. Bloody Sister Mary Theresa. How easily I was forgotten. How easily I was made
an “indiscretion,” how well my mother married because she was young and pretty and fair, Mary Theresa tells me. I don’t feel sympathy for the woman lying sick on Chinglepet street. She has her other children. I have never been her child. Even now, it is Sister Mary Theresa who writes.

In another world I would be your perima. Your Chandra perima. It means “Big Mother.” As your mother’s older sister, I am your mother too. Oh, Padmini, have I done right by you? Do not ever think I forgot, or didn’t know where you were. I knew. Just as I have known where to write now. And I write to ask this. May I come to see you? There is a conference of Catholic nuns in Seattle, imagine me coming to your hometown! I am not very old yet, but life tires me now. I cannot even look after your mother very well, for the duties at the orphanage weigh me down. But I do want to see that I fulfilled the responsibility your mother gave me. Would you like to see your perima, my dear Padmini?

A brief, stunning thought comes now. The frock in cheap cotton that came every birthday, was it Sister Mary Theresa who sent them? I have a sudden vision of a nun in a dimly lit shop, peering nearsightedly over bales of garish cotton, giving away two or three ill-afforded rupees for a few square centimeters of cloth. Then she would have gone to the tailor and put out a hand from the floor, measuring me for him.
This tall. Only this thin. The frocks never fit. For her, I was always taller and fatter than I actually was. She saw me as a mother would. And she let me go to a better life, away from her, as only a mother could.

I have wondered why Mom and Dad went to India. I asked Mom once. It was Vietnam, she said. Dad had done his tour of duty three years before India, but it stayed with him. So they went back for a vacation to that corner of the world, drawn to the mysticism, the history, even the peace in India, in search of something … and came back with a daughter. They never had more children. I did not ask why.

I have come alone to SeaTac. Now the terminal is hissing with muted conversation. It has started to rain. Again. The lights have become brighter inside; outside the tarmac glistens wet, and airplanes have their windshield wipers on. The little girl with the sand bucket and her mother are long gone, where I do not know. I did not notice them leave. I think only of
her.

I wonder what she will be like. My
perima
. I am to find out in two minutes. The plane landed and nosed its way to the gate a short while ago. As the people pour out of the doors I stand at one corner and look for her. And I see her. I had not realized she was so short or that a nun’s habit could look the same after twenty-three years. I should have known she would even travel in her habit.
Perima.
I roll the word around in my mind. No, to me she will always be Sister Mary Theresa. But I am suddenly glad we belong together. I stare at her. Fatigue creases her skin, and she walks a tired
walk. Just then, she sees me too and smiles. It is a shy smile, a wonderful smile. She will meet Mike today. Tomorrow, I will take her to Bellingham to meet Mom and Dad. I think they will like her. I do. Already.

She comes up to me and holds out her hand. I clutch it wordlessly; even tears will not come now.
Padmini, I am so glad you kept your name.
That smile again. I think I have always known this beautiful woman with her smallpox-marked face.

It is just like my face, after all.

Three and a Half Seconds

At first there is no sensation, no feeling at all, not even fear. Just an intense, heart-filled longing for freedom. Then strangely it is peaceful, no remorse at leaving behind the old life and stepping into the new. Meha laughs out loud, listening to the sound of her voice echo down the well of balconies. But no one wakes in the flats. No lights come on, no heads stick out of windows, no fists are shaken in disgust. They all still sleep. Tomorrow they will know, Meha thinks. Tomorrow they will see what Chandar and she have done. Time enough for that.

This really started when Bikaner had formed as a bud in her forty-one years ago. Meha had been married six months, her tummy was still flat, she did not yet gag at the sight of food or run out into the fields to retch, and as each additional
month passed the questions rose around her in a forest of whispers, buzzing louder every day.

“What, no good news?” or “Are you not being a good wife?” or later, more boldly, “Lie back and let him do it— think good thoughts and a son will be born.”

No one dared talk with Chandar, of course. As Meha told him of each question, as worry drew lines on her young forehead, Chandar would take her slim hands in his, kiss the upturned palms, and say, “Ignore them,
jaaneman,
what do they know? What do we care?”

Six months and a tiny shiver still thrilled her spine when Chandar called her
jaaneman.
She was his life, his very mind. They knew each other better than anyone else in their lives. It was as though their childhood, their adolescence, all those who peopled their lives—parents and village teachers, uncles and aunts and cousins—had vanished in this haze of marital love. Yet a month before the wedding, they were to each other just names on horoscopes that matched perfectly.

The stars had decreed that they were ideal mates before they even met. At night, when the small kerosene lamp in the corner burned low and pungent, they talked as though they were children learning to talk; they touched as though seeing through blind eyes. A hundred different forms of love, all hidden from the outside world. In the other room—the only other room of the two-room hut—lived Chandar’s parents and his younger brothers.

Meha’s hands still glowed with the honey-orange whorls and curls of henna; her mother-in-law had told her to not let
the colors fade for a whole year. So one evening each month she sat by the lamp and piped little lines of henna paste over her wedding design. The in-laws watched approvingly—here was a daughter-in-law who did not expect to sit around all day while her henna dried; instead she wore it at night. They did not know what Meha knew: although she could not touch Chandar for fear of smearing the patterns on her hands, he could touch her.

Half a second.

When Meha came to the family as a bride she was first ushered to the room that was to be theirs, freshly added to the hut. Four mud walls, a swept-earth floor, and a dry palm thatch on the roof through which in the mornings a sun mosaic beckoned her to rise. The walls were slathered with cow dung, and the sweet-sickly smell, mixed with the aroma of hay, still drifted around in slow circles. There was no furniture other than a new
charpai,
its knitted jute bed taut in the wooden frame, a printed handloom sheet thrown over it. Both were part of Meha’s dowry. The
charpai
was newly strung, its ropes springy. Over time it would sag in the middle, scooping out the shapes of their bodies. On that single
charpai
she sat and waited, watching her hennaed hands clasped around her knees, tinkling the gold and red glass bangles around her wrist, something much like anxiety gripping her body. What would he be like, this man she had married? It seemed like a long wait for a man
who was to share her life from now on, from whom she would never be parted, whose face she had barely seen.

Chandar had come to her in exquisite kindness, lifting her veil, touching her face with gentle hands, saying simply, “Welcome to my life,
jaaneman.
”

It was a line from a Hindi film song that Meha herself used to hum. She had not seen the movie, but the chai shopkeeper’s transistor blared the music every day. When he used those words, her panic fled. Still she could not lift her head to look at him. But she knew then that they would always be together, that they were meant to be.

It is strange what events come to mind after forty-two years of marriage. And now of all times, when there seems to be so little time, she remembers a girl from her father’s village who had been married before her. She cannot remember her name, but she remembers other things about her.

That girl had gone to her
maikai
in a bullock cart, head bowed under her wedding veil, face wreathed with fearful smiles in anticipation of her new home. She had come back to visit her parents a month later. She had grown thin, sullen, though she still smiled, proud of her new status of wifehood. Yet no one in Meha’s village failed to see the welts that swelled in vertical lines where her back was bared between her blouse and the bottom half of her sari.

*  *  *

But it had never been like that for her, Meha thinks. There had never been scars to cover … until now.

Chandar’s family, like Meha’s, owned land in the southern part of the state. Five acres. And from that land came sustenance for them all. Each spring, the two white bullocks painstakingly plowed up great big clods of earth, a minor eruption from beneath. The lumps of earth were then hammered into smaller pieces with wooden mallets and stones. The whole family worked in the merciless sun: the men, bareheaded—for their turbans would slip off as they bent—and the women with sari
pallus
drawn over their foreheads. Each spring the dry, cracked overwinter fields powdered beneath their hands. Five acres can be large to mere human hands. But this did not deter them. This was their work, this was their life. The bullocks, their neck skins pendant like an old woman’s jowls, were hitched to a wheel in the well. With each turn, buffalo-hide buckets brought up water and tipped it into a channel. The water swirled through its muddy walls to the fields—at first soaking through the thirsty earth; then, as though sated, the earth spewed up the water, flooding the fields. Rice saplings toted in reed-woven baskets were planted in this standing water.

Meha’s arms darkened to the sleeves of her blouse. Her sari hiked up about her knees, the
pallu
wrapped around her thick black hair, she bent over the field each day. She would clutch a rice shoot and plunge her hand into the watery earth. Her fingers dug deep through the soil, leaving
a single, green rice sapling standing in their place. Then came long days of weeding the field, and watching it grow strong and lush. Toward September, thick golden rice buds encrusted the ends of the stalks.

There were lazy days too. A raised platform was built in the field; and here, under a cloth canopy to shield them from the heat, Meha and Chandar would lie and talk. Every now and then, they would lift their heads to yell at errant sparrows picking at their precious rice. They were human scarecrows. And here, when the sun hung in glaring shimmers around the ripening rice, Bikaner was conceived. They had little else to do, and it was early days yet in their marriage.