In the Convent of Little Flowers (8 page)

“How is this even fair, Nana?”

“What will you do about this, Ram?” his grandfather asks. “Will you rage against it? Or will you do something? Write about this. Tell the world; break the silence that hangs over this village. Do what your grandmother wants you to do.” He slants his head toward the other end of the courtyard where his wife has stopped pounding the wheat and listens instead to his voice.

Ram sits down on the dirt floor, another border crossed
unbidden, and leans his back against his grandfather’s chair. This is what he has wanted—to know that his grandfather is a man with a heart. And this, he realizes, is what Nani wants too. Even after fifty years she will not ask this question of her husband—she uses her grandson to do so. Ram turns his face away for a moment as his eyes fill. The pain in his chest subsides as though a familiar hand soothes it away, and then comes back again, this time for that child who waits in the village to become a martyr.

Then he turns again to look up at his grandfather and follows the older man’s gaze to the woman at the other end of the courtyard. Her pestle thumps against the stone mortar gently, but beneath her strong hands the wheat crinkles and crumbles into powder. In this most important matter, she has molded them both, perhaps she has always done so, and perhaps they—husband and grandson—are who she wants them to be.

Ram turns away again. This will be a small item tucked into the second page of the newspaper, but its importance will grow as time goes by. He will have to get it to the editor as soon as possible. The nearest phone is at the village dry-goods merchant, but Ram will not go there. Instead he will walk the five kilometers to the next village, so that anyone who overhears his conversation, albeit in English, will pay small attention. Or so he hopes anyway. He will return to the city unseen. He has to. His Nana and Nani live in this village.

As the mist finally lifts and the sun bathes the courtyard
in its golden embrace, Nana’s hand steals slowly to stroke Ram’s head.

STOP PRESS

She walked away from the crowd to the pyre in childlike strides, her glance unwavering. All morning she had waited for this moment in patience as the men stacked logs of wood in the center of the square.

The banyan in one corner stood forlorn, its arms beckoning. But few sat under it. They crowded instead around the men, watching with a horrible fascination as the castle of wood rose, one log interlacing another in a tight embrace. The men worked in grim silence, not once lifting their heads to acknowledge the curious bystanders. All day, there was the thump of one log clutching another, building into a grotesque fortress of death for a young child. In the end it piled higher than her, higher than the tallest man in Pathra.

As night fell, a quietness descended upon the square. In an hour, the funeral would take place. But now the square was empty, the stack of logs standing alone as a symbol of what was to come. Passersby did not avert their gaze as they went into the square. The child had been condemned to her death by an entire village. There was no remorse in any face.

Finally, one by one, clad in their best clothes— maroons, pinks, greens, and blues, mocking the widow’s whites—they crept into the square. Men, women, children, even babes cradled in mothers’ arms, all gathered around. Faces gave away little; eyes burned with a fanatical light.

The old shopkeeper’s body was brought and laid upon the pyre. Disease had ravaged him long before death came to claim its share. He had been a small man, old and decrepit. It was hard to give him such a large share in history. In this twenty-first century
A.D
. he took with him on his long journey a girl who was old enough to be his wife, but too young for everything else life offered.

This is the first reported incident of a Sati in almost fifty years. The child was merely twelve, but she held herself with a dignity and poise well beyond her years. There was much she did not comprehend, much she wanted to ask, but a fatality had numbed her mouth.

Clad in the white sari of widowhood, devoid of ornaments, her face pale under ebony hair, she walked to the pyre with a look of defiance. Her husband’s head was placed on her lap. Her wrists were tied to the logs of wood. Only then did her brave look falter. But it was too late. Her forty-year-old stepson walked thrice around the pyre with a flaming torch before lighting the fire. As the flames
licked their way greedily upward, the girl twitched and pulled at the ropes which held her.

The crowd began chanting “Sati Ma,” their voices rising to a crescendo, their hands folded in prayer to the girl who would forever be revered in their village as the epitome of wifehood. The girl screamed as the fire roared toward her. It devoured her clothes, her hair; the ropes had burned through … She rose for a brief moment, a living inferno, then collapsed in a heap as the fire engulfed her still form.

Sati has been illegal in India since 1829. Yet more than a hundred years later, the entire village of Pathra condemned a child to her death to uphold a dubious custom. There was no regret at the end of it. As horrible as it sounds, they all wished they had done it before. But where would they have found another child willing to listen to her elders thus? Willing to give up her life because she was obedient? The Sati was conducted in the greatest of secrecy. This reporter watched hidden behind the shutters of a house in the village square.

After the fire died down and the frenetic crowd had disappeared, the girl’s family went home, their heads held high, their expressions of deep pride. Today their daughter had done what no other woman had done for a long time, even in Pathra. Tomorrow, they will build a shrine for their
daughter in their house. People will come from neighboring villages for a glimpse at the garland-bedecked photograph of their child, and will pay for the privilege.

The parents had already sold their daughter once to the highest bidder: the sixty-three-year-old man who married their child. Now they have sold her again.

Fire

I come to see her because my mother insists I should. She is dying, my mother says. She has but a few more days, perhaps hours. She wants to see you this last time. I don’t tell my mother that I wanted to see her anyway.

Because of Kamala.

The room is at one end of the house, away from where the others live. It is an ancestral home, cavernous-looking on the outside, inside squirreled with small, limewashed rooms. Like a maze. To get from the front door to the back, there are seventeen different ways. I know. I counted them as a child. I could always escape from the caller at the front door—sometimes lodging myself under a dark, cool staircase, my frock pulled over my knees. From this vantage point the bottom half of an adult sari would pass by, bare feet flip-flopping on the mosaic floor, voice almost shrieking out
my name. Payal, where are you? Be polite, Payal. Come and see your great-aunt’s cousin’s wife’s second brother and his brood of children. Come see, and be shown.

I never went.

When she fell ill two years ago, they put her in this room away from all of them, in a part of the house I had explored a long while ago. But as I walk through the corridors and rooms, I realize that even I have never gone this far through the east wing.

There were many stories in my childhood. Of lights that came on in rooms never used. Of showerheads dripping and bathroom floors wet where no one had bathed in years. Of footprints in the untouched dust. Feet with seven toes, the maids would say. They must have had an effect on me. Even I never came this far.

Yet they have put her here. Alone. Away from all of them. As though she is an outcast, a nonentity. But I remember a time when she was powerful, when she was the only real presence in this house. The matriarch of us all, the voice that commanded, with a gaze that made my mother shrivel, that made my father grovel. How small the mighty have become.

Each day a maid trudges to her room with food, turns her over in the bed, washes down her tired limbs with tepid water, and then leaves. Each day someone in the family visits her. They take turns, my mother says. Draw lots. She never talks to them. She knows that they all blame her now.

For what she did to Kamala.

My feet slow and drag as memories come back.

Of gentle, quiet Kamala. Yet with a smothered fire inside her that on two—no, three—occasions, burned fervent. I bore witness to two of them. It is because of the third I am here. Because of what she did to Kamala. Because what they all—the people in this house—did to Kamala.

Fire.

In my childhood, we were twenty-one people in the house. My mother and father, of course, and aunts and uncles who were not terribly good at having or keeping jobs, and their even more useless children. And the servants.

The fat cook, who amply sampled every dish before it got to us. Just tasting, Amma, he would say. The
mali
whose thumb had never been green, who let the grass grow wild, yet who could coax rare blue-purple roses to bloom against the side wall. (The neighbor would pick them slyly for her
puja,
leading to loud, choleric fights between her and the
mali.
) A man to polish my father’s shoes—that’s all he did, polish my father’s shoes. The chauffeur, leaning against the car (he wouldn’t let us lean against it) smoking his smelly
beedis
all day. The khaki-clad
chowkidar
at the front gate with hot eyes that looked at us greedily when we hit puberty. Then there were the three maids who lived in a shack in the back garden, who swept and wiped the house each day, and spent the rest of the time on the steps, their voices delicious with gossip. They seemed to disappear a lot, one after another, leaving with heavy stomachs, made pregnant by the
mali
or the
chowkidar,
or even once, the chauffeur. The men stayed. The maids left.

It was, this queen of our house had said, their fault. A woman must always know when to keep her legs closed.

The room is dark when I enter. There are windows on two walls with iron grills on them shaped like peacocks in flight. The glass panes are shut and some industrious spider has spun fanciful webs over the peacocks, capturing them in needle-thin nets. The room has not been painted in many years; the walls are chipped, some places showing a light pistachio green, some an antacid pink. Like all the other rooms in this house, it is small. The floor gleams, although the mosaic, brilliant chips dulled to blackness, has not been properly scrubbed for a long time. Perhaps not since the house was built a hundred and fifty years ago. But then, I don’t think this room has been used in a hundred and fifty years.

She lies in the center of the room on a small cot. A ceiling fan clanks directly over her, shuddering with every revolution. I look at it, wondering if it will fall on her. Wishing it would.

She is on her side, barely making a dent in the mattress. A strange yet familiar old-person smell rises over her, even though I know she is clean. She has always been clean, scouring her skin with a fanatic’s fervor, as though all her sins would slough away with the scrubbing. Her hair shines silver on the spotless pillow. The strands are sparse; I can see her skull through them. Everything is white around her: the sheet that covers her body; her blouse, through which gaunt
arms protrude like sticks; the pearls she always wore; and her sari, of course. White, pure, spotless. To show she is a widow. To show she is faithful to her husband’s memory, to show that she does not consider it worth her while to preen in gold and colored silks for another man. To show that since he died she keeps her legs closed.

I approach and draw back almost at once. Everything is white, but her skin, that creamy, rich, rose-tinted Brahmin skin, that heralder of high birth, is now a blistered ebony. As though someone stripped her of her white clothes and dipped her into a fire. Not enough to burn, but enough to scorch.

Fire.

Her eyes open as I come near again. Even her pupils are white, clouded by cataract, milky white strands over once flashing eyes. But she knows I am here. She puts out her hand, and I take it.

It is a small hand, bony, the knuckles dried with age. The veins on the back are thick green lines, like rivers frozen under her skin.

Payal. Her voice is thin, reedy, like much of her body. Payal, look at my skin now. Look at the color of it.