Inheritance (3 page)

Three

Joining me that summer at my grandmother’s was Jani. Despite her great spirit and flair for fashion, my cousin was afraid of the dark, timid as a mouse when it came to certain things. For example, if she wanted to go to a film, it could only be a matinee or else our great-uncle had to accompany us. Ice cream only in the afternoon and never at the night bazaars.

I used to tell her, “Look, I will protect you with the saber that once belonged to our grandfather, and before that, to a real maharajah. Its blade is dull, and most of the jewels have fallen out, but I can smash a green coconut with it.” True, the sword would only make a soft dent on the coconut to expose a bit of the hairy fibers, a hint of brown husk inside, but I thought it would prove my point. “And if a robber came for us, I
could protect us both,” I told my cousin. But she just smiled and shook her head.

Jani had introduced me to books at an early age. We would go together to the British Consulate Library in Madras and later come home to read our prizes in the shade. The library was a stuffy place, with a trio of circulating fans massaging the air. There were always people occupying every table, students taking notes, businessmen reading the paper. The librarians would not permit anyone to sleep, but people did anyway, hidden by stacks of hardbound books.

When I first visited the library with Jani, I must have been six or so. I remember clinging to my cousin’s hand and going through the doors. I wandered around the children’s section, fingering the backs of fairy tales, nature tales, adventures. I was dizzy with happiness. Overcoming my awe, I began to pull out the books that interested me. By the time Jani came back for me, I held a stack of fifteen and was reaching for more. Mortified, she replaced all but the first three. “We can come back,” she hissed.

By the time I was thirteen, I kept notebooks like Jani, and had acquired a library of my own, of sorts, a shelf of books bought whenever I had extra money. Jani told me that in Delhi she had a shelf full of her notebooks, thin books each tied with a different-colored ribbon. She bought a special kind of notebook, the kind without any lines, holding maybe eighty sheets of paper. She lined
the inside cover with pretty patterned paper, the kind used in bookbinding, lovely marbleized patterns with a satiny finish, or dainty fields of flowers. The outside she covered with a stiffer paper and then glued a picture to that. She had pictures of a girl standing at a seashore, the inside of a church in Italy, a couple of reproductions from the Ajanta caves, an old-fashioned map with strange spelling. Inside, she wrote all sorts of things, favorite poems, lists of her favorite songs, names she particularly liked. She also made diary entries that she wouldn’t permit me to see. She pressed flowers inside the pages, copied embroidery patterns and kolum designs, and sometimes sketched a nice scene or even painted a tiny watercolor. They were wondrous things, her work, and very dear to her.

Jani had visited me in Madras at my aunts’ house earlier in the year before I went to my grandmother’s. Aunt Leila and Aunt Shalani sent me shopping to buy some school supplies and new clothes. In July, I would be returning to P.U.C., pre-university college, called Our Lady Mary Mother of God. It was a pretty college, peopled with lots of brisk nuns in grey and white, camouflaged as doves. Some were from the French islands of Indonesia, and others, non-Catholics, were from Delhi and Madras.

I still missed my old school, my worn desk and my
blue and white uniform, my lovely pencil case with its sliding top. I had decided to buy a slimmer case, more sophisticated. It was one of the things on my shopping list. I also needed to get a steel ruler in centimeters, a compass and protractor, though God knows what for, and two or three notebooks, some pencils, and a good fountain pen that didn’t trail black on my fingers. I wanted an eraser—a transparent green one from Germany that smelled like candy—and a new satchel to carry everything in. Plus some everyday clothes. Here I could be fitted for some salwar kameezes. I refused to wear half-saris. Half-saris—a long skirt and blouse, and a bit of scarf to make yourself modest—are what the girls who sat up front wore. I was tired of sitting at the front; I wanted the back row.

Jani took me shopping and told me that if I stopped squirming like a child, we could have ice cream at the tea shop. I resented being bribed, but I tried to behave myself anyway. After all, I liked ice cream. Only, the seamstress was a fool and kept recommending the wrong patterns for my salwar. Patiently I explained that I didn’t want the large rose print that would make me look like a chair but the striped grey and green and the one in pale blue, batik-like. Also I begged for a pink tunic that I could wear with tight black pajamas, which Jani finally conceded to after I pointed out how much less indecent a big top over skinny pants was than the tight kameezes over the baggy salwars. Then I got six cotton underpants,
which I really loved even though I had sat next to a girl who bragged about the French lace ones she and her sister wore, and—to Jani’s amusement—two baby brassieres. I refused to try them on and simply chose a size, which Jani, dimpled to keep from laughing, gently replaced with ones that would fit more properly. No socks—hurrah!—but what to do for shoes? I chose a sturdy pair meant for walking, the kind I imagined zoologists wore in the field.

I took two hours to select a fountain pen. I insisted on trying them all, asking the clerk for two kinds of paper, the smooth, white, unlined kind and the blotty school blue. Finally I found one with a thickish nib that had a lovely green marbled casing. I got two bottles of ink, blue and black, and practiced my name several times until I was satisfied. It was important to have a good pen, one that wouldn’t skip or suddenly go dead in the middle of a chain of notes, one that would inspire me with the confidence to write good exams. I knew a girl who had cried for an hour because her special Parker pen, which she had used only for her exams for three years in a row, finally split its nib. She was terrified that, with her luck gone, she’d fail and have to do the year over.

Satisfied with my choices, I next decided on a pencil case. Jani and I chose a simple black metal one and some brightly colored pencils from Japan, Notebooks next, Schoolgirl ones with pictures of the gods or saints on the front were to be abandoned (though I dearly loved them)
for quieter designs. We took some dull geometric ones, but I would cover them with prettier paper later on. I was excited by the look of my purchases neatly wrapped in white paper and tied with twine. I loved the smell of new stationery and was very happy to sniff all the ink and the just sharpened lead of new pencils, the clean scent of fresh paper, and to listen to the gentle creak of a book binding. I would use my very best handwriting the first few days, elegantly taking notes until my regular scrawl would take over and pictures would fill the margins. How sorry I’d be when my notebooks became sullied, but how inevitable was their fall.

At the tea shop, Jani and I spoke of our plans. I wanted to become a zoologist, renowned for my work with chimpanzees or arachnids.

“Spiders!” exclaimed Jani.

“Why not? You can’t be afraid of them, Jani, They’re so small—and cute.”

Jani shuddered, and I quickly asked her what she wanted to become.

“I don’t want to become anything. I will finish my studies and perhaps work as a teacher, or as a nurse, if I take an additional two years in health science,” she said. Then, smiling, she added, “I just want a quiet life, no drama, no tension, just calmness and serenity.”

“I want some adventure, and I want to travel. I want to go to Africa and America,” I said. Jani laughed.

“What will you find in America?”

“Maybe my father.” I didn’t mean to say that but the words fell out. Jani was silent.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t dig around in the past,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I never spoke about her parents to Jani; I thought it would make her too sad. And Jani in turn never spoke to me much about mine, A long time ago, she had said that we were not bound by who had made us, that the only person we had to answer to was God.

The two of us plunged into our own thoughts for a while, silently spooning ice cream into our mouths. I imagined a smart life for myself, one spent in Kenya, Sri Lanka, and possibly the Amazon. I wanted something exciting, something different from my cousins and my friends who, I felt, would be confined within India. I did not want to be landlocked, and I saw my fortune beyond the sea. I knew I wanted to do something with my life, something extraordinary. When I was ten, I wrote a list of possibilities for my future, amazing things. I was going to be a deep-sea diver, a scuba explorer, a coral reef and anemone finder. I wanted to help colonize the oceans, build cities amid the mermaids, wear conch flowers in my hair, dangle sea horses from my ears. Then I thought I’d work with animals, ride around in a zebra-patterned truck, make friends among the pachyderms and newborn panthers. I wanted to live with gorillas, to live with lions. At fifteen, I still did. I wanted to be another
Jane Goodall. And I wanted to meet a rock-and-roll star. My dreams were limitless.

Jani could live in India, and I would write her letters, and perhaps we’d meet once or twice a year, brimming with news, and happy with our lives. Our future was pretty bright, only Jani did not look so happy. I tried to reassure her, telling her we could always meet at our grandmother’s. The island would always be ours.

“Life changes you as you become older, Sonil,” said Jani. “Things that were once important don’t seem so necessary. Maybe you’ll understand that someday.”

“The
core
of me will always remain the same. I’ll always be true to my dreams. We have to be,” I said.

“Dreams are funny. They’re ideas, playthings, food for thought. But they don’t give you sustenance.”

I disagreed but didn’t argue. I was firm in my beliefs.

My holidays were to begin and end in May. But my bronchitis arrived two days after Jani’s visit. I stopped going to school, and after two weeks I was sent to the island. Jani would join me soon, after her college let out in April. March, April, May, June, before my second-year pre-university course started. Four months on the island, four months to recover, four months to dream. Four months with a mother whose riddle I’d solve. Four months with my grandmother whom I adored. And four months to perhaps uncover what my cousin meant by her ideas on dreams.

Four

My grandmother’s house was old-fashioned, so old-fashioned that the Indus Valley civilizations probably had similar houses in 3000
B.C.
Around an open courtyard with a young jasmine tree (the kind that dropped hundreds of flowers when you shook its slender trunk) and a pedestal of holy basil, nine rooms were situated. One was the kitchen, with a gas burner, a small refrigerator, and a storeroom off to the side where rice, lentils, and sweets were stored. A vat of vadumangoes was ready for frequent sampling, and another stored grown mango pickles, floating in hot oil, that is, in chili oil. My grandmother loved to make pickles, drying the mangoes picked from her trees outside in the courtyard, slicing and arranging on trays, finally soaking them in spice. Sometimes her neighbors came over to help make papadum.
A group of women gathered in the courtyard, busily working dough into compact circles, chattering, having fun, talking all day, then going home with an equal share of the goods.

One summer, there were no papadums. This was when my grandmother fell ill. I was ten, on holiday, on my second visit to the island.

The Mystic of Madhupur told me how to save my grandmother. She said if I were to sit in front of a lighted candle, if I made a space in my heart and concentrated, and carefully drew a mandala for seven days, I could ease my grandmother’s pain.

I had gone to the Mystic in desperation one day when my grandmother could not stop trembling. At first she had trembled only at night, and the pills the doctor prescribed calmed her, but later she began to shake all the time, and complained of aches in her limbs. She had an illness of the nervous system, the doctor said, something that possessed her legs and would not allow her to rest. So she spent her days on the hard wood couch that served her as a bed. She lay on her side, swathed in a green cotton sari, a gently breathing hill in our house. My mother was away at the time and I saw little of my great-uncle.