True Tenacity

I was born to serve although I have never been in servitude. Amma told me when I was young that there were worse ways to live. I could have been born to those ladies who painted their faces and waited in dim lit corridors. I could have sold my body or sold my soul. Amma took my deaf sister, Malli, and me along to the only houses where our presence was grudgingly accepted and in these houses, we were fiercely instructed to do nothing but sit in a corner and watch, never to speak. One girl followed my mother’s instruction out of necessity, and the other out of obedience.

Watch my mother ignore her ailing back and sweep out the dusty countryside to where it belonged. Watch boys my age sit in front of color televisions, glued to the motions of animated figures that did not look like them or speak like them. Watch girls my age with dolls that their father had only recently bought them and then watch them refuse to engage me while I sheepishly held my hand out for their older unremembered and shelved memories. Watch the women of the household hustle through a revolving door of emotions, from lamenting their marriage to gushing about their newest diamond earring, and from bristling at the news that a neighbor’s incompetent child had been admitted into a prestigious school to pacifying a principle with the latest overwhelmingly negative reports on their children’s inadequacies. I would also watch the men of the houses on their days off, lifting their children into the air one at a time and handing them crisp rupees so they could buy bottles filled with rich, brown, bubbly liquid. I had never known my father. As was consistent with the parables of children similar to me, those not as fortunate as the offspring of my mother’s employers, fathers usually disappeared a few years after endowing with a baby, the wives forced on them by society’s rules. If they did not leave voluntarily, they were usually killed while in a drunken stupor, weaving along poorly lit roads that hosted somnabulant twenty year old truckers with a need for speed.

                

I learned my mother’s trade while watching her. As I grew older, my mother’s employers would allow her to have me help complete the household duties. While my mother scrubbed the tiles in the bathrooms, I would rinse the crusty dishes in the sink. While my mother cut fresh vegetables and bloody chunks of meat, I would mop the floors with lemon scented water. Malli remained a spectator and grew content idling in her own thoughts as we washed the windows and hung out freshly washed clothes to dry. As the Patel family or the Reddy family or the Mehta family sat together on their ornate dining tables and passed along saffron infused basmati rice, cashew flavored chicken korma, lightly spiced raita, and the obligatory accompaniments of pepper papad and raw mango pickle, I would look up at my mother’s sad, tired eyes as we shared yesterday’s cold, hardened, chapatti and the watery remains of the leftover dal in the lunch boxes the children brought back from school. Amma would make me wrap up half our dinner in a kitchen trash bag on days she felt most exhausted, just so she wouldn’t have to cook porridge to feed us at home. You may ask what my mother did with the money she was earning and why we were never bought new clothes or unassuming toys to play with. She was saving. Her money was supposed to do nothing else but accumulate until one day she could buy a modest house and own the land it sat on. It was a way out for her and her daughters to hose down the revolting stench of poverty that clung on to us like white did on rice. After all, homeowners could never be considered poor.

               

I was twenty when my mother decided I should bear children of my own. For this to happen, I would need a man of course, a man I could not fall in love with but rather a man chosen by my mother and her extended family. Selvan was his name. When I first met him, I immediately noticed his kind, brown eyes. Sensing that committing my life to him was not an easy prospect to grasp, he asked my mother after our first family meeting whether he could take me to the flower garden and spend time alone with me. Time he hoped would help him cement my trust in him and my trust in the entire, arranged, process. We strolled leisurely among fields of marigold and sunflowers and stopped to watch admirably as the sun slowly set beyond the horizon. I was immediately taken by Selvan’s poetic discourse about his family. He talked about his brother who had placed number one in the state for mechanical engineering. His brother supported him and his parents with his excellent job in Bombay. He spoke of his parents and how devoted they were to each other and how he wanted us to raise a family like they did. Love each other like they did. Here he was, Selvan, a stranger before this afternoon, but a partner soon after. Before we were married, I dreamt many wonderful dreams. Of Selvan providing for me and giving me the beautiful children my mother so desired. Of opening his own tailoring shop and us affording a home sooner than Amma – a home that would be the envy of the village.

Selvan’s brother was driving his parents to see the latest Rajnikanth movie. Selvan couldn’t join them because he had a tailoring project he had to finish for a client the next day. The futile combination of slick tires, a muddy road, a carefree driver on the other side, and bitter luck killed every one Selvan cared about before he met me. In the days that followed, he decided that the only way to counter his soul crushing grief was the conspicuous partaking of voluminous liters of palm alcohol. He stopped going to work. My visions of our glorious future disappeared as I realized that he, somehow blamed me for their death. Night after night, alcohol was his only appeasement. The pale, clear liquid that gave him comfort every night would quickly turn him into a monster. Lakshmi was conceived on one such drunken night where my mother’s incessant demands for grandchildren created an apt and extremely convenient excuse for him to forcibly take me. A few months later, I learned that Lalita, Malli’s child, was similarly put into my deaf sister’s womb because Selvan knew she wouldn’t scream. I could yell, of course, and I did every night as he admitted to liberally spending the money I was forced to give him to present to our neighbors that he was indeed a provider. He would respond in kind, meeting my verbal blows with wild, animalistic swings at whatever part of my body he could connect his fists with. Lakshmi and Lalita witnessed this cycle every night and could do no more than cover their eyes and whimper, wishing daylight would take away the night sooner.

                

Lalita lived with me because I did not want her to grow up like her mother. If Malli couldn’t communicate with her daughter, Lalita would lose the need to verbally communicate and invariably become as mute as her mother. Malli begrudgingly agreed to let her go only after our mother, old and unable to work any longer, thought it best that Lalita live with me for I was far more capable than her of fostering Lakshmi’s education and the hope of her future. By then, Amma had realized her dream of buying a house and rented one of the rooms to a visiting blacksmith. The rental income would more than pay for Malli’s comfort and hers. They grew closer, Malli and my mother - Malli dependent on my mother for monetary survival and my mother dependent on Malli to perform simple household duties and keep her company. I was no longer very needed. I had two little girls and a slobbering adult to take care of – it was unfathomable in Malli’s eyes why I would even want to let go of my responsibility to the children and she made sure my mother agreed. While they celebrated with my cousins, my uncles, and my aunts, I worked over the holiday to build up our continuously depleting monetary inventory controlled by Selvan. One day, after many Pongals had passed on by, Malli would knock on the rickety door to my hut and hold up a piece of paper while brightly flashing her pearly whites. Malli would be deeded the house on my mother’s passing. Our mother had decided Malli would need it more of course; unfit to hold her own in society because of her handicap. Malli held her head up high – in her eyes, she always believed she was the superior sister and this act simply confirmed it. I protested briefly. Amma refused to listen.

                

Malli had been born gorgeous and she had a complexion fairer than freshly squeezed milk from a cow’s udder and even more so than the flower that bore her name. No wonder that soon after our mother decided to walk into the ocean one Friday morning, her only successful suicidal attempt among the many that her old and maddened mind conceived, Malli found suitors from all over the state, all eager to bed the deaf beauty and her newly deeded prime plot of land. The suitor that won the battle of the bachelors, Ramesh, was a leading professor from Dolours, Trichy’s esteemed school for the deaf. Not only could he communicate with Malli and deliver on her erratic and demanding whims, he carried the Mudaliar name on his business card. Malli had entered the higher caste –

Amma was right about the house after all.

Malli and Ramesh quickly became a power couple. Ramesh started a school for the deaf in our town and with Malli at the helm, people arrived from all over the state to enroll their children in the school. Malli’s rags to riches story had been glorified in every Tamil newspaper. Surely, if a deaf girl from the lower castes could become the master and commander of a successful school, others could easily follow in her footsteps. The moving pictures that played in cinema halls showed characters playing greater odds than Malli had to in order to win.

Surprisingly, Malli did not ask for her daughter back. Considering Ramesh could serve as more than an ample caretaker, Lalita might have realized greater possibilities with him and his wife. Perhaps Malli did not want to face the society’s wrath of mothering a bastard child. Perhaps she had resentfully accepted in her heart that Lalita would never leave my side.

The day that changed everything began quietly. I was getting Lakshmi and Lalita ready for school when Malli made her surreptitious entry into my home, startling me as her unplanned arrivals always did. Malli had brought a new present for Lalita and as she stroked Lalita’s oiled, dark hair, she asked hastily whether I was indeed using the money she was sending me to buy ingredients that made up Lalita’s favorite foods. I answered wearily in the affirmative and I knew Lakshmi could easily predict her standard follow-up request. Usually, I would angrily usher Malli out of my house but on that day, I smiled and gently told her I always did as she asked. Lalita was intelligent enough to understand her mother’s pettiness and stared at her mother with fiery eyes as she left our home in slow, shuffled steps. Before she closed the swinging bamboo gate that was imagined to be our front door, Malli looked disapprovingly at Selvan passed out in his usual corner and the bareness of our modest home in its ever squalid surroundings.

That same day, after I returned from the home of my newest client, a white-skinned couple who had emigrated recently from a land I could not pronounce, I began lighting the wood fire to cook lemon rice for my family. The fire felt good on my callused hands. The last few days had been a little chilly. I had bought a fillet of seer fish for Lalita with Malli’s money – I knew however that she would end up splitting the piece into two and giving the bigger piece to her little sister. Selvan had not returned yet from his daily sojourn to the local toddy shop with his friends. We were eating and laughing merrily about the impassioned pleas Lakshmi and Lalita heard on their way to school – political propaganda that was always ridiculous in its earnestness – when Selvan stormed into the house in a drunken fit of rage. Murugan, one of Selvan’s friends, had made a lewd remark and had told Selvan that everyone knew Lalita was his actual daughter. He believed I was the tale-bearer, that I had told Murugan of Selvan’s wicked tryst with my sister. He came at me with every muscle in his body eager to appease his rage. I grabbed the kitchen knife and implored him to stay away as I backed myself into a corner. This ploy usually worked but when Selvan kicked away a screaming Lalita who had wrapped herself around his leg in an attempt to drag him away from me, I knew my time had come. I closed my eyes and gingerly waited for the blows. Selvan stumbled as he approached me, his mouth breathing out wretched fumes of intoxicants, and as his heavy body fell toward me, I watched the dreaded result in motion slower than life itself. Selvan landed squarely on the knife whose handle I had pressed close against my chest but whose blade welcomed flesh.

                  

Selvan’s blood flowed out without mercy onto our hut’s muddy floor and colored it a vivid shade of maroon. He died quickly but not before shrieking many times in agony. Within minutes, neighbors had stormed into my house and together stood aghast, shivering hands covering their wide mouths. As I stood there, shaking profusely and dripping with blood that was not mine, the only ones who came near me where Lakshmi and Lalita, who were hugging me as the neighbors alternated between checking on Selvan and looking at me with curious discomfort. I welcomed the inevitable. Within days, although the police had confirmed my account of Selvan’s accidental fall onto my instrument of death and Lakshmi and Lalita made impassioned pleas to every one concerned of my need for self-defense, I was banished from the town for bringing morbidity and unwanted notoriety to the area, something the panchayat said would be hard to overcome. Nobody listened. Nobody wanted to hear my story.

We walked away later that evening with two bags over each of our shoulders.  Just as streams of forgotten sand were whispered away by our unapologetic feet, Malli and Ramesh watched the shadows accompanying our bodies disappear into the sunset. Malli had tried desperately to wring Lalita’s strong fingers away from my hand but she had refused to let go. A mother of two I remained.

                

It was only a little firecracker. Or so I thought. I offered to help light it for the child of one of my new clients. I had made my way to Chennai and the black skies broke out in furious technicolor during this time of the year. Diwali – the festival of light. Boom! It was the last sound I heard before the firecracker burst through my inner eardrum and took from me the only asset I had that Malli did not. Soon enough, I was no use as a servant. I was of no use as a mother. We couldn’t afford treatment and I became resigned to my fate. Our fate. Lakshmi and Lalita could do no better than care for me until I died. They would become servants too – a cycle I once thought could be broken would meander in its usual, devilish fashion. There would be no happy ending.

And then, millions listened.

Millions responded.

Lalita had met a writer in college, a writer who took a curious interest in her story and an even bigger interest in mine. Lalita’s diary helped. A diary she had kept from the first days she learned the language. A language she wouldn’t have experienced had I not taken her away from her mother. A language that flowed from her mouth and her ink to the welcoming ears of her friend. A language that moved from the cerebral cells of their minds through the fingers of his hand onto the screen of his machine. From that machine, my story, in Lalita’s language, travelled onto a hundred more machines. Soon, the story found other languages with which to spread itself, like water in streams, rivers, and creeks desperate to find its way to the nearest lakes, seas, and oceans. As a rousing finale, my story was transformed into a language that needed no written medium and demanded no acoustic quality – a medium that appealed to the very organ that pictured it all – a silent film. I had finally found an audience.

I watch the neighbors from my past now as I sit in a house bigger than anything they have ever seen before. My eyes would continue to watch just as they did when I was a child, unaware of where life would take me. Unaware that even though my mother had made me a servant, my daughter would make me a queen.

Perhaps, Malli would want to scream, just as she did the day her daughter was conceived.

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