Someone Else's Garden
Read Someone Else's Garden Online
Authors: Dipika Rai
Someone Else’s Garden
a novel
DIPIKA RAI
For Indira so she might remember
&
Shaan and Tara so they might know
Contents
‘SOMETHING SPLENDID’ - A Word from the Author
‘LEARN THE TRUTH’ - Things to Think About
P
EOPLE ARE DEFINED BY WHAT THEY
love and what they hate.
Lata Bai loves the sound of a cycle’s bell. She loves the rain. She hates having yet another baby.
She neither knows nor cares that somewhere the world has celebrated a new millennium, she only knows that another baby will make it seven in all. This time, after the first three weeks, she’ll give it to Sneha, her youngest daughter to look after. It really should be Mamta’s turn, but, with her getting married soon, her mind should be on other things. Mamta’s father was too hasty with her. He is determined to marry her off soon after the baby is born: as soon as Lata Bai can look after the marriage preparations, is how he puts it. Almost twenty, so old and still unmarried, Mamta’s very presence serves as a reminder of his failure.
Lata Bai’s face contorts with the first birth pains. After six children, she can tell exactly when it starts and when it will finish. Only her first had taken her by surprise, but she was strong then at fifteen, and had managed just fine, cutting the cord with her husband’s betel-leaf knife. She’d even cooked his meal that very evening.
‘When?’ Mamta is excited, almost too excited about her impending wedding; her world consists almost entirely of
whens
. She helps her mother change into her oldest sari, one she can cut into rags for the forty-day bleeds.
‘Soon,’ says Lata Bai, taking off her only bangle, more precious than anything else she owns, and hiding it in the pot of ash she saves both for her bath and her utensils. ‘Shsh,’ she says, ‘tell no one. Just in case I die, my spirit will know where to look for it. And don’t you dare pinch it!’
Lata Bai extracts her daughter’s wedding sari from the tin trunk. Luckily Seeta Ram bought it last week, and she can deliver the baby on its crisp, clean wrapping. She peels the noisy brown paper away carefully. Mamta tries to rub her hand over the precious material but her mother slaps it away and returns the sari to the tin trunk.
‘Shall I come?’ asks Mamta.
‘No, I must do this alone,’ she says. Mamta watches her mother from the doorway cautiously. She knows what is to come – another baby. ‘This is what will happen to you once you’re married,’ says Lata Bai, using the opportunity to impart a lesson.
The thought of babies makes Mamta smile.
The same thought of babies makes Lata Bai grimace. Most women have the widow Kamla helping them, but not her. After doing her first, then second, and third all the way to the sixth herself, why waste money on an expensive midwife now? The paper rustling in her hand, she rushes to her mustard field and into the misty grey cloud that has slipped from the sky to settle close to the earth where the sun has forgotten to fall.
Oh, Devi, give me a boy.
She prays to the goddess of her clan – Devi, universal female energy, absolute divinity.
She knows her destination. With distance in her eyes she lurches away from her house towards her lucky patch of ground (the same place where she found her golden bangle, the one she’s hidden in the ash). The baby’s water is running down her legs.
It won’t be long now.
Careful not to crush the paper, she lies down, the furrow her pillow.
Devi, give me a boy.
She prays aloud:
Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.
No one hears her.
It was always a different colour.
With her first it was the green of young wheat. Green everywhere. With her second it was yellow. Then there was another green, one gold, one white, one purple, and now again yellow.
All she can see is yellow. Dancing above her head, in her mouth, in her hair. Yellow in her ears, her toes, and, with her sari pushed up all the way to her waist, yellow on her big swollen belly. Even yellow in her navel and all the way inside her. All the way to the baby.
She knows this field intimately, suddenly in flower with the first rain.
Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.
She’s worked it for how long? Much longer than twenty years. So long she doesn’t remember. She has laughed in it and cried in it. Hidden in it and rejoiced in it. She’s had all her babies in it and played with all her babies in it. It is her history. The field has watched her through her life. It watches her now. Its soul reaches out to her and its arms protect her. She feels the field’s love pour over her. It sinks in through her pores and mixes with her blood, feeding every atavistic part of her with its generosity. Her field. She’d die without it.
She feels another pang.
At first she is like a cricket on its back, her arms and legs waving to the clouds above. Then she forces herself to be still. She knows she has to open like a flower. The more she holds, the more it’ll hurt. But the baby doesn’t come. Each time her body asks, she pushes, yet the baby doesn’t come. She thinks of the bangle in the ash. Why won’t the baby come? Should she shout for help? Who will hear her? Her life is pouring out of her. Great big rushes of blood. Every drop of blood that comes out of her dredges up another memory from her deepest being.
How was it? With her first, green, soon-to-be-married Mamta?
How green Mamta had hurt her coming out with a fat blob of blood. Mamta, her first born, who loves running in the wind. She loves to lie alone on the hay and hates the red birthmark over her eye.
With her second, yellow, Jivkant, it was over even before she knew it had started. Jivkant, already a man, disappeared on a train somewhere. Jivkant the cruel one. How he loved the power he had over his sisters, especially Mamta. How he hated the love his father showed for Mohit, his youngest brother.
With green Prem it was again over quickly. Slow plodding Prem, sent to work in the Big House to pay off his father’s debt, bringing home pats of butter each day. Being born was the quickest thing he’d ever done in his life. Prem loves the river. He loves flying his kite. He hates working the fields.
With gold Ragini there was some pain, and it took a long time, but that was the only trouble she ever gave her mother. Lucky gold Ragini with more marriage offers than any other Gopalpur girl. Ragini, hardly a woman, already married. She loves steaming her hair. She loved running her hands through her trousseau. She hates her brother-in-law accidentally brushing up against her.
White Sneha. She can’t remember Sneha’s birth . . . It’s all a haze now. Sneha with the beautiful eyes. She loves flowers . . . wading in the river . . . but beyond that what else?
Purple Mohit. What about Mohit? . . . Nothing. She remembers nothing. He’s her last born, still she doesn’t remember . . . and doesn’t remember. Only pain. Was it this painful with him too? All her births merge into one. Was it this one or the last one that hurt so bad? It’s odd that it should be so yellow . . .
‘Hey Devi, help me. Help me . . .’ Prayer is her only option. It is a plea, not just for her life, but for the outcome of her pain. Devi, the mother goddess, she is a finicky one; say her prayer all wrong and you could earn her wrath for eternity. ‘Hey Devi, accept your daughter. Hey Devi, save me.’
Devi knows all about suffering. Wasn’t Devi herself forced to hide in the Himalayas for ten days and nine nights to escape her pursuers, living off plants and seeds, but no grain? Come those same ten days and nine nights, Lata Bai and her daughters fast diligently, living off wild berries and water. By the third the mind starts to wander among forests of fruit, mountains of crisp twisted yellow jalebis oozing syrup, and rivers of sweet creamy lassi. The fourth night is probably the worst, when the mind returns and the stomach burns. An internal fire without any fuel. How is that possible? From then on, the girls feel little. Their desires leached from them like precious salt in desert soil.
She recites her childhood prayer. It is the one memory that hasn’t failed her. She’ll do well to placate the mother goddess. Everything lies in her eternal womb as seed. This day Lata Bai interprets the word seed literally. For herself, she asks that her seed might be pure. Uncorrupted. Whole. Male. For all those years of fasting, Devi must listen.
A long screech of pain. And then another. Another fifteen minutes and the pain becomes a slab, more blood and a huge slab of pain.
‘Devi, my mother, help me.’
Was it ever this bad? The clouds float over her head. She feels her self being pulled right into them. Floating away from her colourful children; and the yellow becomes white. She is dying and that’s why everything is so slow. Now the pain has gone into the clouds. It is floating away. Let me float in your arms forever, she prays.