Small Days and Nights

SMALL DAYS
AND NIGHTS

Tishani Doshi

For Ajay, Carlo and the Ar Lan y Môr legion

It’s in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights.

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

PROLOGUE

My sister Lucia.

How strange it is to say the word.

For three years we have lived together in a house without men. It is a large pink house with blue shutters and verandas, and a garden set on ten acres of beachfront land.

That we live here, in the deep south of India on this spit of isolated beach, is a matter of concern for the neighbouring villagers. The headman, Valluvan, who has named his daughters after Hindu goddesses – Bhubaneswari, Karpagavalli, Manjubharghavi, and inexplicably given his sole son the name Lenin – invites me to discuss issues of safety once a month. He insists I bring Lucia even though she has no interest in tea or politics.

It was Valluvan who suggested we bring a woman from the village to stay with us.

‘You put one small house in your compound,’ he instructed, ‘and you take this lady. She has nothing. Husband has disappeared. Parents are dead. No children. Her name is Mallika. She can help with the cooking and cleaning. And she can keep watch.’

Mallika is short and dark like most of the women in Paramankeni. She is beautiful even though her front teeth are big and crossed over, her fingers shooting up to cover her mouth every time she laughs. Her eyes are her best feature – brimming with calculation and astonishingly free of the wide range of sadness she has certainly suffered. Sometimes I spy on her from the terrace when she’s watering the lawn or hanging clothes out to dry. She is always draped in a bright polyester sari and a fresh flower in the bun of her hair. Every bit of gold she owns, she wears – earrings, nose-ring, a bangle on each twig-like wrist.

The three of us have managed to create a togetherness here with the dogs. In the beginning Mallika could not understand what was wrong with Lucia but she soon learned her habits. She was quick to pick up a few English words as well. ‘Ya, ya,’ she says impatiently when I struggle through my Tamil explanations. I think she watches American sitcoms on the television in her room, because when new friends visit, she shakes hands with them and says, ‘Hi. I’m Mallika.’

The night before the puppies arrive we hear sounds in the garden. Loud, gut-wrenching moans from the undergrowth that wake us from sleep. Lucia shuffles across the corridor from her bedroom to mine. ‘Grace,’ she says, ‘the new babies are coming.’

We go out on the terrace and lean over the balcony handrail. Everything is dark except for a rim of moonlight on the ocean, where we can see the outline of a few fishing trawlers. It is October. The heat of summer is behind us but the days still feel bedraggled and worn. In a few weeks the rains will arrive, transforming everything. For now, only the hibiscus and bougainvillea valiantly put out flowers. We go back and lie on my bed together, fans whirring madly above our heads.

In the morning she is eager to begin. We go in pyjamas and rubber slippers to check on the dogs. Hunter has hunkered in the neem bush close to the beach gate, Thompson has claimed the land behind the garage, and Flopsy is furthest away, in the casuarina groves behind the house. Between them we have thirteen new puppies. They are minuscule: eyes shut, blindly sucking at their mothers’ teats. They lie in a heap, one on top of the other, noses and paws, making tentative squeaky sounds. They move constantly, searching for warmth, these black-and-white finger-long creatures of fur and heart. It is an effort not to pick them up and squeeze their tiny bodies.

As they grow stronger, they will begin to explore and find their way to the house, towards the new source of food. When we return from our evening beach walks with the big dogs they’ll spring out at us from the bushes along the path – a harlequin splodge attacking our toes. ‘What will we do, Lucy?’ I say. ‘There’s too many of them.’

But it is marvellous – all this life.

Lucia and I drive to the AVM nursery to buy a row of flame trees to block our neighbour’s ugly orange house. The toothless gardener who works there reminds me to put red soil and earthworm fertiliser in the garden beds regularly. He keeps a stack of sweets by the cash register and gives Lucia a packet of Cadbury’s Gems, which she demands I open immediately. On the drive home she pops the Gems into her mouth one by one, according to colour.

It is a still day. Nothing moves. Even the sea is lifeless – a sheet of metal suspended out of the sky’s head like an exhausted grey tongue. It’s the kind of day that allows for openings – makes me wonder how it happened that in another life I lived in America. I had a husband, a job, people I socialised with. Not friends exactly. There had been only one friend after a decade of living in America, and she moved away before I did. But there was the structure of a certain kind of life, one I’d imagined for myself before occupying it. And I had learned how to navigate that life even though I frequently felt removed from it.

That was me, wasn’t it? Being neighbourly and taking Rosemary Callahan’s kid to the school bus every morning because she and her husband left early for work. That was me feeling queasy about the sight of so many children piled in together, but smiling and patting the brat on his head anyhow, wishing him a good day because it was the dutiful thing to do. And still me – putting on something smart for work, driving half an hour to sit in my cubicle at the customer service department of Duke Energy, eating my grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, saying, How y’all doin? as if that’s the way words were meant to come out of my mouth.

Blake sent me a photograph recently, of us taken at the dance where we met. I’m showing off my skinny legs in a blousy geometric dress, my waist is encased with a thick studded belt, and every accessory on my person, including my pumps, are variations on the shade of Pepto-Bismol. Blake is smiling widely with his too-white teeth, a pansy wilting in the buttonhole of his shoulder-padded blazer. We are both sporting hairdos that resemble filo pastry – feathery tufts cascading around our emaciated faces.

On the back of the photograph Blake had inscribed: B&G, ‘Summertime’, Kodaikanal, 1994. Love at first blossom?

Back home, in our driveway, there’s a man leaning against a motorbike. As soon as he sees the car he hurries to open the gate and gives us a cheerful salute as we drive through. I pull the handbrake and step out.

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

‘Ah, hello, madam. I’m interested in buying land in this area. Can you help me?’

‘I’m not interested in selling.’

‘But you’re a foreigner, no?’ He squints. ‘How can you own land in India?’

‘I own this land and I’m not interested in selling. Please look somewhere else.’

Before I can climb back into the car, he thrusts a business card into my hand.

‘Sorry, okay, please don’t be offending? In case you change your mind, my name is Jiva. I’m a real-estate broker. Just you call me in case anything is changing.’

Opening the front door I let loose at Mallika. ‘Why aren’t you locking the fucking gate? Don’t you know any bloody fellow can just come in here whenever he feels like? What’s the point of keeping you, I don’t know. What are you people good for anyway?’

Sometimes I sound so much like my father it disgusts me.

PART ONE

1

Return is never the experience you hope for. After all those lost years in America I wanted to walk into the streets and know them, but there is a new tightness to the city, an exuberance that is difficult to understand.

Madras. August 2010. A swell of bodies. At arrivals there’s a crush of families and hotel chauffeurs, bouquets wrapped in plastic and welcome boards. It’s past one in the morning. What kind of parents are these who bring their bawling children out so late into the night?

The air attacks you at the threshold. Heavy, sweaty air, which smells of something that was once sweet, now rotting. Damp in the armpits and crotch. Jeans sticking to thighs.

Taxi drivers and porters are jostling about trying to cadge a passenger. Taxi, madam, taxi? Prepaid customers roll their luggage primly towards Fast Track and Akbar Cars without making eye contact. Madrasis returning home are on their mobile phones, instructing people to hurry and meet them at the pickup point.

Murali is waiting for me in the usual place. He is old and as dark as the night, hairy-eared and half blind. The way he drives, it will take us five hours instead of three, but Ma always valued loyalty over ability, even though she herself could rarely be relied upon to be steadfast.

‘Still smoking, Murali?’

‘What to do, madam? Now I’m an old man, no? Difficult to change.’

I’d ask him for a cigarette, but that would mean upsetting the order of things.

He’s trying to take my luggage off me now. ‘Please let me do it, Murali. Look at these arms. I go to the gym, you know!’

He gives me a lopsided grin and lollops along to open the boot of the car.

There’s a scar on Murali’s back that runs from top to bottom like a lazy river, thick and muddy pink. I know because I’ve seen him shirtless in a lungi doing odd jobs for Ma around the apartment – his back bare, except for the scar and the savannah of tightly coiled black hairs along his shoulder blades. I had asked him about the scar one summer, emboldened from my first year of studying in America. It was the war, he explained. He told me how the Tamil suburb he’d lived in on the outskirts of Colombo had been set upon by their Sinhalese neighbours, who came with hatchets, tyres, kerosene. He escaped with a butcher’s knife in his back, but his family perished. Now his life was in India.

I wonder who will say it first? Him or me?

I feel sure that Murali is a man who knows how to hold his own in the face of any silence.

We heave the bags into the boot. My mother must be the only person in India who still insists on travelling around in an Ambassador. But there’s something reassuring about this car. It makes me feel as though I were riding in the belly of a whale on the crazy seas of the Tamil Nadu highways.

‘Traffic is terrible, madam.’

‘Yes it is.’

The new airport has been a decade in the making but it has the feel of a never-ending family summer project, with bits and pieces being added on to the main building as and when funds and the inclination to do something come through. Car horns are sounding out warnings, each more virile than the next. People move purposefully in this barrage of noise, glaring backwards at the offending vehicles, always with the same resigned look on their faces. Back to this shit again.

I’ve been travelling over twenty hours, but my body is suddenly alert. It’s the thing that surprises me every time I land in India. Despite all the blatant deterioration, all the decomposition, things survive. In fact, they thrive. Things are ready to bludgeon you with their aliveness.

I began my life in this city, four kilometres from the sea, in the clammy hallways of St Isabel’s. This was 16 April 1977, and if my birth certificate is to be believed, the exact moment when I was pulled from between my mother’s thighs was 4.12 a.m. ‘Your father wasn’t there, of course,’ Ma said, when I asked what it was like to give birth. ‘Showed up hours after you were born, making all kinds of demands.’

Blood debilitated Papi. As did certain sounds. Sartorial inelegance wasn’t something he went in for either. If my father had a say in the workings of the world, he would have made maternity wards off-limits to men.

I’d like to think my parents were held aloft with awe for at least a few days after my birth, but hindsight would indicate otherwise.

‘Childbirth is painful,’ Ma said. ‘But obviously you know that. Nothing as painful as what your father made that doctor do. Put my legs back into those stirrups and scrape the walls of my uterus looking for that damn placenta. Then your father made me eat a blessed piece of it because he said it would help me lactate better. Some Italian housewife’s tale. That was the moment I knew we were doomed. Any man who forces cannibalism on his wife after childbirth is a monster. Nothing was going to change that, not even you.’

We were happy in our small house on Gilchrist Avenue in Madras, even though my parents fought frequently. Our neighbours were meek people, content to stroll to the end of the lane that joined Harrington Road with their shopping bags, waiting at the appointed time for vendors with their carts to buy vegetables. Fruit-sellers didn’t come down our street calling out their wares, neither did knife-sharpeners or paper-collectors. My father was known as the crazy white man because he sometimes ran down the street waving a bamboo stick, threatening to beat people.

I have been travelling these roads ever since Ma moved to Pondicherry. It’s always a revelation, the shedding of the city and the opening-up of space as soon as you hit the coastal road. It’s 3 a.m. now and the Bay of Bengal lies like an inkblot to the left, spreading and hissing as we drive through barely lit villages on either side of the road. We snail along, catching the glare of high beams in our pupils, often skidding off the tarmac because of an oncoming lorry barrelling drunkenly over the divider.

Coconut trees. Canopies of teak and tamarind. Flying foxes. Vacant bus stops. Temples and step-wells. Ugly new constructions, which I can just about decipher the outlines of in the dark. Police checkpoints and metal road barriers. Sometimes our headlights catch a spray of winged insects in their beams, the outline of a goat or dog, racing across into blackness.

From the rear-view mirror dangle two black-and-white photographs: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – the mystics who lured my mother away from my father. Aurobindo is a bearded beauty, everything a sage should be. Eyes like bottomless wells gazing into the infinite. Over the years I succumbed to my mother’s instigations to read his teachings about Integral Yoga. But her? The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, Aurobindo’s spiritual associate? She I never got. People who met her said she could make you follow her anywhere. But in the pictures she looks like an alien, always with a banal saying typed along the bottom: It is only in quietness and peace that one can know what is the best thing to do.