What old age has taught her is patience. The epiphany, if that is what it is, will come in its own time. For now, for today, she has to prepare herself for the journalist’s visit, for the reality of Raghu’s death. How did we get to this point, old friend, in our lives, in history?
History is not a straight line. That’s Raghu’s voice in her mind, but she’s saying it with him as she wanders back to sit in her chair. The children are having an argument over whether the biggest gourd—a pumpkin—is ripe enough to harvest. Mahua looks over at the western sea, from which he would have come, if he were coming, and sees how the light of the sun is shattered by the water’s surface into diamonds.
The past is a palimpsest. She imagines unrolling it—the surface is smooth, like vellum, but as she moves her hand over it, the words fade and disappear, to be replaced by a new script that is slowly revealed to the light. And touching the new lines, they, too, fade, and in their place appears what lies underneath. What is the last layer—if there is one? She’s dreaming over her second cup of tea in the garden chair, oblivious to the children’s voices. The palimpsest. Faces, voices, word fragments appear, disappear.
When Mahua had been a child in Delhi—between the scholarship that had rescued her from the slums and the start of college—she had been afflicted by a disease she could scarcely remember now, except for the fatigue, the lines of worry between her grandmother’s brows, and the smell of boiled rice and strange herbs. At the time, there hadn’t been much to do but lie in bed and look out of her second-floor window into the branches of an old mango tree. It stood in a small courtyard, the only greenery enclosed in a block of cheap flats where the roof leaked in the monsoons and one could hear the arguments of neighbours through the thin walls. But in the leafy, airy spaces of the tree, there were small, daily dramas. A black drongo chased off a cheel, coming back to strut on the branches and fluff its feathers. A line of large ants moved over the bark, negotiating each tiny gully, each ravine with mathematical precision. A bird’s nest, with the eggs a blue surprise, and later the ever-open mouths of nestlings. Too feverish to think clearly, she had let go of herself, crawling with the ants, soaring with the cheel. It had been an escape from her illness, her incarceration and, as she later understood, an expansion of her own limited self. Her cousin sister, Kalpana Di, home from work, would sit Mahua up to lean against her, and spoon rice water into her mouth while her grandmother went out to buy vegetables. Later, she had never had the courage to ask her grandmother precisely what kind of illness she had had; secretly, it was one of the happiest memories of her childhood.
As she grew up, she practised this letting go, this hyper-awareness. It helped to be a student of the sciences because that added another dimension. Walking in the rain, she would imagine the drops coalescing in clouds high up, then falling, faster and faster until drag reduced the acceleration to zero. She imagined the fat drops coasting down, shaped by surface tension and gravity, little water bags bursting against the concrete rooftops of the lab buildings, leaving a circular signature, a ring of daughter drops. Imagining she was there in the moist, cloudy heights, she was falling, refracting light, buffeted by wind, ridden by bacteria that travelled by cloud. She would be startled out of this reverie by a drop falling on her head, or her hand, and that would snap her back into herself, but not without a laugh of comradeship with water, with the clouds. It was a weird way to be. Impossible to explain to her grade-driven, ambitious fellow students, who scoffed at anything remotely poetic.
Her classmates had mocked and teased her for her poverty and her dark skin. “Junglee” they had called her, although she had lived in Delhi most of her life and knew nothing about her maternal grandmother’s people. Her grandmother had tried to teach her something of their origins, but the grinding toil of life in the slum, followed by the pressure of studies after the scholarship changed their lives, left no time for anything but the imperatives of the present. Within only a few years at the elite school, the junglee shocked her classmates by topping the final exams. Grumbles about reservations gave way to a resentful silence when it became clear that this demonstration of academic excellence was a trend, not a one-off. Those were difficult years—she would not have got through it all without her grandmother’s determination and her cousin sister Kalpana’s affectionate presence—Kalpana Di, whose life and death she still could not remember without pain.
“Kalpana Di, help me with my homework!”
The two of them would sit cross-legged on the bed, and Kalpana Di would look at Mahua’s mathematics notebook. After about an hour, she would say, with a little laugh, “Mahua, your sister is not as clever as you! Let’s eat something, then you try again. You can do it!”
Working into the night, Mahua would come upon the solution to the problem. Beside her, Kalpana Di would have fallen asleep, a faint smile on her lips.
Kalpana Di laughed no matter whether she was happy or sad. Fuelled by a desire to improve her lot, she had been the first to leave the village in Bihar. In Delhi, she had been a maid in rich people’s houses and had saved to go to night school so that she could get her school certificate and move up in the world. When Mahua’s grandmother and mother arrived, with the newborn Mahua, they had stayed in the slum in Mehrauli with Kalpana.
When Mahua was in high school and doing well, Kalpana decided she, too, wanted to go to college. It was then Mahua’s turn to tutor her. Kalpana Di grasped ideas, but slowly, and had to repeat rules of mathematics or grammar so that they would not slip out of her mind.
“I am slow, I am slow,” she would say, laughing. “Things fall out of my mind very quickly. I’ll try again.”
“It’s that fall you had when you were a child,” Mahua’s grandmother would say, shaking her head. “Fell off a tree, hurt her head. Now she can’t remember anything unless she repeats it a hundred times!”
Later, Kalpana had gone to live in her college hostel, thanks to a grant for underprivileged students. Whenever Mahua asked how she was doing, Kalpana would laugh and say all was well. But, after a while, her eyes turned sad, and her ready laugh sounded forced. It was only later that Mahua put two and two together. Kalpana Di’s fellow students—privileged, upper class—were like aliens from another world. Her English was utilitarian, but they were at home in it; their mannerisms and customs were unlike anything she had encountered. There were sexual orgies in the hostel to which she was mockingly invited. She was teased constantly by a group of college boys who called her Essie Esty and mocked her dark skin and slow mind. She started failing in her courses, but she was too ashamed to tell her family, especially now that Mahua was doing so well. In her suicide note, she wrote that three boys—sons of rich businessmen and government officers—offered to help her with the final exams in return for sex. Having been teased for what she herself had come to think of as her ugliness and her heavily accented English, she assumed at first that this was another cruel joke. But the boys were serious, she wrote. They said that nobody would want to marry her, so why not get a little experience?
The next few lines had been crossed out so many times that they were unreadable. “I can’t bear it,” she wrote at the end of the letter. “You’ll be better off without me. Forgive me.”