FICTION 
The monsoon flowed – now thin, now dense, now slow, now fast; now whispering, now drumming; then gushing. There was never silence – always the roar and sigh of the tide, the moan of the casuarinas in the grove below, tossed and hurled about in grey, tattered billows, the clatter of palm leaves that hung their ragged fingers down and made channels for the rain to spout down onto the roof. The children stared about them with great, afraid eyes and spoke only to point out, bitterly, another leak in the roof, or a whole window frame comes loose from its hinges. It was clear they accused her of every mishap and misfortune. Whenever she turned or looked up, she saw them staring at her, watching her as though waiting for her to break down and admit failure. To them, she realized with a painful sloughing-off of disbelief, it was life in their flat on Napean Sea Road that had been right and proper, natural and acceptable; it was this so called 'escape' to the island that was madness.
It can't go on like this, it's impossible! She cried everyday, several times a day, in choked voice that fought speechlessness at the grotesquerie of their situation. She wanted to explain to them that it had not been madness to come, had not been a theatrical gesture, a romantic mistake. Romantic – rubbish! She protested, flushing – Manori was not a romantic island. Besides its palms, its deserted beach, its wild silence, there was that most squalid of villages, with its open drains, its mangy pai dogs, drunkyards. The atmosphere of that fishing village, of which Moses and Miriam, too, reeked, penetrated her own knoll, her palm grove and even the house; the continual wash of the rain could not quite cleanse it. Moses, stalking, cut with yet another lantern he had kicked over and broken, and Miriam, sitting on the haunches and smoking a cigar, saying with more insolence than despair, 'But there is nothing to cook!' made her remember those two vivid creatures, the 'original inhabitants' of Jeevan Ashram, dressed in throbbing shades of pink and orange. Seeing them as they were mow, bloated into two heavy purple presences like two aubergines on legs, she was confused – where was the magic of the island that she had promised herself, promised the children? Was this it?
If it had ever existed – black, sparkling and glamorous as in her memory – it was now buried beneath the soft grey-green mildew of the monsoon, chilled and choked by it. It was all the children saw, they had not memory of its past glamour, and so she and they moved always in opposite directions. Round and round that ruined house they stalked, hemmed in by rain and sea, clockwise and counter-clockwise and, whenever their paths crossed, every half-hour or so, they accused her in silence and she pleaded with them, in silence too.
In the veranda, the bucket she had put out overflowed. She ran out to fetch it in and was, briefly, pleased and wet. She had forbidden Miriam to draw water from the well after discovering that Ali's cow had fallen into it and drowned. 'And not been taken out?' she had gasped; and taken to putting out buckets to collect the rain. Karan had begged her to let him go and see the cow floating, swollen, in the well. Even Menaka – she could tell from a cool shift of her eyes – would not have minded. 'No!' she had forbidden them. Carrying the bucket into the kitchen she wondered that they could do with it – they could not have it for lunch.
Miriam still squatted there, smoking. 'There is nothing to cook,' she repeated, sulkily. 'Fishermen don't go out in monsoon time.'
'Cook another jackfruit then,' Sita said weakly, and dared not answer her children when they asked, 'What's for lunch?' She knew perfectly well what they thought of jackfruit.
They sat together, watching and listening to the occasional softening and paling of the rain and then its growing wilder, denser again. But, as it thinned that morning, allowing the palms and casuarinas to lift a little and the view of the far wall to stand out of the wet haze, a figure detached itself from the casuarinas grove, came up the path with bowed head but steady feet, up the stairs to the veranda, and Sita, standing up to watch, remembered how she had twined herself about a freshly painted white pillar to see the village folk come up that path, in winter sunshine, with flat baskets on their heads containing offerings for her father – green coconuts in bunches, pink shrimps fresh from the sea with a giant lobster or two wriggling beneath them, or paper roses, pink and yellow. Remembering them, the festivity and affection in the air around them, she opened the door now and called, 'Who are you?'
It was a fisherwoman – one could tell by the way her drenched sari was pulled up between her legs and tucked in at the waist, by her spread feet and enormous toes made for gripping the fishing lines and nets of her trade. An old woman, with cataract lurking in one eye like a white fish. She lifted the flat basket off her head and placed it on the floor at Sita's feet. Sita drew back, hissing with astonishment, for the basket crawled with shrimps – pink and infantile, their transparent whiskers aquiver, emanating a stench that called, that shouted we live, we are shrimps! Karan ran forward to examine them and poke them and, from the way his face expanded and glowed, it seemed as though this were the first sign of life he had encountered on this island of the dead.
'You are Babaji's daughter,' the old woman said in a Knokani dialect as raw and harsh as we fishing lines. 'I brought oil for Babaji once, and coconuts, and he blessed me with a son. So I have brought something for you today.'
'What is your name?'
'Phoolmaya,' said the old woman, suddenly splitting open into a yellow smile.
Phoolmaya – Sita stared at he. She had been beautiful, lying on the floor with her arms, silver with bracelets, stretched out to touch her father's feet. She did not wish to refer to that age or that scene; it would be ludicrous and cruel to try to link them to the woman who stood there, grinning. 'How did you know I am here?' she asked instead.
'Moses told. Now I will tell in the village. They will all bring you fish.'
'How is your son?' Sita asked, not knowing how to thank her, feeling shamefully weak and ravenous to think of food, proper food, being brought and cooked.
'A big man,' the woman said with almost voluptuous satisfaction. 'Will you give me tobacco? Babaji always gave me tobacco.'
Sita went to fetch some cigars from Miriam and found Karan and Menaka squatting on the kitchen threshold, laughing as they watched Miriam who sat with her thighs spread out and the basket between her legs, tearing the transparent shells off the pink, trembling bodies of the infant shrimps. 'Fish fry today,' laughed Miriam, feeling in her blouse for some cigars.
After that, almost everyday, whenever the rain slowed or there was a short break, luminous and pure, in the monsoon, people came from the fishing village, over the beach, carrying full baskets as they had done in that other, magical age. With such concrete evidence as a vessel of milk, a cluster of hibiscus, a moss-covered crab or a lobster to point at, Sita found herself clasping Karan's shoulder, almost shakinghim, as she said, 'See, didn't I tell you?' It was clear even to the child that it was herself she was shaking, clasping, persuading. She had herself almost ceased to believe in magic, in life, in animation.
The monsoon continued like an unceasing burial. There was nothing to do with it but watch it, listen to it, sighing at the window. Very soon the cigarettes ran out. The last ones had been too damp to light and she had thrown them out, quite ashamed of the agony this waste caused her. Seeing her sit so desolate after this act of violence, Miriam – in the first burst of sensitivity ever revealed – suddenly bared her bright pink gums in a laugh and crowed, 'Amma, you have no cigarettes left. I shall make you some!' Sufficiently abject to succumb, Sita sat watching as Miriam pulled up her skirt over her thighs and rolled the soft leaves of tobacco from her pouch on them, leering up at Sita as she did so, then handing her surprisingly neat and slim brown cigarillos with an odour Sita could not resist. They were too thick to fit into her old yellowed ivory cigarette holder so she threw that away and tasted the tobacco direct on her lips, as she sat down to pull at the first with an indrawn breath of gratitude.
'Oh my dears,' she said, emotionally, to the children who sat dully watching as she dragged on that cigarillo with a white passion of satisfaction, 'When I am on my death bed, hold one of Miriam's cigars under my nose. If I don't leap up to snatch it from you, you can coolly go ahead and burn me.'
Then she stopped short, horrified at he mistake – this succumbing to a moment of adult pleasure, adult talk, in the company of children – for Menaka turned away, her face clenched with displeasure.
It was not that Menaka feared her death – not at all; but there had been a time when the idea of death had been unbearable, unacceptable to her. Looking at her, contrite, Sita remembered what she had been like as a small child, of Karan's age or smaller – a girl in a white cotton nightgown, after her bath, powdered, sweet, curled up in bed and crying in the dark. So loved, so carefully laid in bed but crying, 'Will they put you in the ground? When you are dead, will they put you in the ground?' Comforting her hopelessly – for what comfort was there? When she was dead she would not be put in the ground, no, but burnt to ashes and how could she tell the little girl that? Sita had searched for the cause of this sudden agony and remembered walking hand-in-hand with her through an old English cemetery on a weekend visit to Lonavla in the hills, and seeing Menaka's eyes rest on those white headstones scattered about the coarse grass and tumbled rocks of the hillside below their cottage, as her mind
stored away its memory and some fluttering, bat-like thoughts that she did not they express and had so led her mother to think she had forgotten them. She had not. For some years then death occupied her and terrified her as it should not any but the doomed, and Sita had been too incompetent a mother to know how to deal with her trauma, how to give her comfort – there was none, and it was not in her to concoct any.
She need not have suffered so much anxiety though for Menaka had grown into the most cool and self-possessed of her children, most closely resembling her father in her ability to cope with life and accept it with no more than a careless shrug of the shoulders. By the time she was ten – a supercilious, self-contained, and beautiful young girl – she had made up her mind to be a doctor and watched a student cousin dissect a mouse with an intense and dispassionate curiosity that sickened and inflamed her mother. Watching that unappetizing scene, Sita had been shocked at the transition from the small, weeping infant to this calm scientist.
So she knew it was not fear that made her grimace and turn away from her mother: it was disapproval. Menaka – the calm, reasonable scientist to be – this Menaka loathed her mother's proclivity for drama, for theater, for emotion, with more bitterness than any other suffering relation of hers. Being her daughter, she felt most disgusted and hurt by it.
Ashamed, hurt, Sita leant forward and touched her arm, pleadingly, lightly. 'Menaka,' she coaxed, knowing she was only making matters worse, and Menaka winced and shook off her hand.
'What is it?' she said impatiently.
Sita leant back, the cigarillo tasting of black ashes now, nothing more. She had grown very large and heavy and tired easily, now. 'Look,' she said, 'at that crow sheltering in the veranda. Poor thing, how wet and sorry it looks.'
Only Karan went to the window to look at it, Menaka would not. Quite possibly, Sita reflected, that scene she had made with the pop-gun over the wounded eagle would put Menaka off any pity, any feeling for birds forever. Children were like that, Sita sighed. Leaving Menaka alone, she turned to Karan. 'Why don't you play?' she asked when she felt he had stood an unnaturally long time at the window, staring at the bedraggled crow.
'What shall I play?' he asked without his sister's sulkiness but with as much despair at this exile she had led him into.
Blowing out white smoke, spitting out stray bits of tobacco, Sita tried seriously to think of an answer, 'We used to play,' she said, distantly, 'Jivan and I – such games on the beach, together.'
'But he can't go out in the rain,' said Menaka sharply.
'What did you play?' Karan came to stand near her. She made room for him to sit down beside her and put her arms around him in gratitude. She tried to make the telling of the games she had played as a child amusing for him, colourful, and knew all along that she had no gift for narrative at all.
To be truthful, she had no more gifts for play than he seemed to have. It was Jivan who invented the games and organized them with a ferocity touched with genius. He insisted always that they play in secret – in some weed-screened corner of the casurina grove where no one could spy them, or among the rocks on the beach when no one was about. The games had been elaborate.
'One game was called Funerals –' she began, then stopped, for she remembered, too late, that she had once again used the tabooed word.
'What is that?' he inevitably asked.
She avoided a straight answer, even though she knew Menaka was watching her with hate and enmity. She told him how they would collect bits of wood on the beach and light a bonfire and burn a large bivalve shell in it, or a crab's claw found in a pool, and then cast the blackened remains into the sea.
To be continued...
The monsoon flowed – now thin, now dense, now slow, now fast; now whispering, now drumming; then gushing. There was never silence – always the roar and sigh of the tide, the moan of the casuarinas in the grove below, tossed and hurled about in grey, tattered billows, the clatter of palm leaves that hung their ragged fingers down and made channels for the rain to spout down onto the roof. The children stared about them with great, afraid eyes and spoke only to point out, bitterly, another leak in the roof, or a whole window frame comes loose from its hinges. It was clear they accused her of every mishap and misfortune. Whenever she turned or looked up, she saw them staring at her, watching her as though waiting for her to break down and admit failure. To them, she realized with a painful sloughing-off of disbelief, it was life in their flat on Napean Sea Road that had been right and proper, natural and acceptable; it was this so called 'escape' to the island that was madness.It can't go on like this, it's impossible! She cried everyday, several times a day, in choked voice that fought speechlessness at the grotesquerie of their situation. She wanted to explain to them that it had not been madness to come, had not been a theatrical gesture, a romantic mistake. Romantic – rubbish! She protested, flushing – Manori was not a romantic island. Besides its palms, its deserted beach, its wild silence, there was that most squalid of villages, with its open drains, its mangy pai dogs, drunkyards. The atmosphere of that fishing village, of which Moses and Miriam, too, reeked, penetrated her own knoll, her palm grove and even the house; the continual wash of the rain could not quite cleanse it. Moses, stalking, cut with yet another lantern he had kicked over and broken, and Miriam, sitting on the haunches and smoking a cigar, saying with more insolence than despair, 'But there is nothing to cook!' made her remember those two vivid creatures, the 'original inhabitants' of Jeevan Ashram, dressed in throbbing shades of pink and orange. Seeing them as they were mow, bloated into two heavy purple presences like two aubergines on legs, she was confused – where was the magic of the island that she had promised herself, promised the children? Was this it?
If it had ever existed – black, sparkling and glamorous as in her memory – it was now buried beneath the soft grey-green mildew of the monsoon, chilled and choked by it. It was all the children saw, they had not memory of its past glamour, and so she and they moved always in opposite directions. Round and round that ruined house they stalked, hemmed in by rain and sea, clockwise and counter-clockwise and, whenever their paths crossed, every half-hour or so, they accused her in silence and she pleaded with them, in silence too.
In the veranda, the bucket she had put out overflowed. She ran out to fetch it in and was, briefly, pleased and wet. She had forbidden Miriam to draw water from the well after discovering that Ali's cow had fallen into it and drowned. 'And not been taken out?' she had gasped; and taken to putting out buckets to collect the rain. Karan had begged her to let him go and see the cow floating, swollen, in the well. Even Menaka – she could tell from a cool shift of her eyes – would not have minded. 'No!' she had forbidden them. Carrying the bucket into the kitchen she wondered that they could do with it – they could not have it for lunch.
Miriam still squatted there, smoking. 'There is nothing to cook,' she repeated, sulkily. 'Fishermen don't go out in monsoon time.''Cook another jackfruit then,' Sita said weakly, and dared not answer her children when they asked, 'What's for lunch?' She knew perfectly well what they thought of jackfruit.
They sat together, watching and listening to the occasional softening and paling of the rain and then its growing wilder, denser again. But, as it thinned that morning, allowing the palms and casuarinas to lift a little and the view of the far wall to stand out of the wet haze, a figure detached itself from the casuarinas grove, came up the path with bowed head but steady feet, up the stairs to the veranda, and Sita, standing up to watch, remembered how she had twined herself about a freshly painted white pillar to see the village folk come up that path, in winter sunshine, with flat baskets on their heads containing offerings for her father – green coconuts in bunches, pink shrimps fresh from the sea with a giant lobster or two wriggling beneath them, or paper roses, pink and yellow. Remembering them, the festivity and affection in the air around them, she opened the door now and called, 'Who are you?'
It was a fisherwoman – one could tell by the way her drenched sari was pulled up between her legs and tucked in at the waist, by her spread feet and enormous toes made for gripping the fishing lines and nets of her trade. An old woman, with cataract lurking in one eye like a white fish. She lifted the flat basket off her head and placed it on the floor at Sita's feet. Sita drew back, hissing with astonishment, for the basket crawled with shrimps – pink and infantile, their transparent whiskers aquiver, emanating a stench that called, that shouted we live, we are shrimps! Karan ran forward to examine them and poke them and, from the way his face expanded and glowed, it seemed as though this were the first sign of life he had encountered on this island of the dead.
'You are Babaji's daughter,' the old woman said in a Knokani dialect as raw and harsh as we fishing lines. 'I brought oil for Babaji once, and coconuts, and he blessed me with a son. So I have brought something for you today.'
'What is your name?'
'Phoolmaya,' said the old woman, suddenly splitting open into a yellow smile.
Phoolmaya – Sita stared at he. She had been beautiful, lying on the floor with her arms, silver with bracelets, stretched out to touch her father's feet. She did not wish to refer to that age or that scene; it would be ludicrous and cruel to try to link them to the woman who stood there, grinning. 'How did you know I am here?' she asked instead.
'Moses told. Now I will tell in the village. They will all bring you fish.'
'How is your son?' Sita asked, not knowing how to thank her, feeling shamefully weak and ravenous to think of food, proper food, being brought and cooked.
'A big man,' the woman said with almost voluptuous satisfaction. 'Will you give me tobacco? Babaji always gave me tobacco.'
Sita went to fetch some cigars from Miriam and found Karan and Menaka squatting on the kitchen threshold, laughing as they watched Miriam who sat with her thighs spread out and the basket between her legs, tearing the transparent shells off the pink, trembling bodies of the infant shrimps. 'Fish fry today,' laughed Miriam, feeling in her blouse for some cigars.
After that, almost everyday, whenever the rain slowed or there was a short break, luminous and pure, in the monsoon, people came from the fishing village, over the beach, carrying full baskets as they had done in that other, magical age. With such concrete evidence as a vessel of milk, a cluster of hibiscus, a moss-covered crab or a lobster to point at, Sita found herself clasping Karan's shoulder, almost shakinghim, as she said, 'See, didn't I tell you?' It was clear even to the child that it was herself she was shaking, clasping, persuading. She had herself almost ceased to believe in magic, in life, in animation.
The monsoon continued like an unceasing burial. There was nothing to do with it but watch it, listen to it, sighing at the window. Very soon the cigarettes ran out. The last ones had been too damp to light and she had thrown them out, quite ashamed of the agony this waste caused her. Seeing her sit so desolate after this act of violence, Miriam – in the first burst of sensitivity ever revealed – suddenly bared her bright pink gums in a laugh and crowed, 'Amma, you have no cigarettes left. I shall make you some!' Sufficiently abject to succumb, Sita sat watching as Miriam pulled up her skirt over her thighs and rolled the soft leaves of tobacco from her pouch on them, leering up at Sita as she did so, then handing her surprisingly neat and slim brown cigarillos with an odour Sita could not resist. They were too thick to fit into her old yellowed ivory cigarette holder so she threw that away and tasted the tobacco direct on her lips, as she sat down to pull at the first with an indrawn breath of gratitude.
'Oh my dears,' she said, emotionally, to the children who sat dully watching as she dragged on that cigarillo with a white passion of satisfaction, 'When I am on my death bed, hold one of Miriam's cigars under my nose. If I don't leap up to snatch it from you, you can coolly go ahead and burn me.'
Then she stopped short, horrified at he mistake – this succumbing to a moment of adult pleasure, adult talk, in the company of children – for Menaka turned away, her face clenched with displeasure.
It was not that Menaka feared her death – not at all; but there had been a time when the idea of death had been unbearable, unacceptable to her. Looking at her, contrite, Sita remembered what she had been like as a small child, of Karan's age or smaller – a girl in a white cotton nightgown, after her bath, powdered, sweet, curled up in bed and crying in the dark. So loved, so carefully laid in bed but crying, 'Will they put you in the ground? When you are dead, will they put you in the ground?' Comforting her hopelessly – for what comfort was there? When she was dead she would not be put in the ground, no, but burnt to ashes and how could she tell the little girl that? Sita had searched for the cause of this sudden agony and remembered walking hand-in-hand with her through an old English cemetery on a weekend visit to Lonavla in the hills, and seeing Menaka's eyes rest on those white headstones scattered about the coarse grass and tumbled rocks of the hillside below their cottage, as her mind
stored away its memory and some fluttering, bat-like thoughts that she did not they express and had so led her mother to think she had forgotten them. She had not. For some years then death occupied her and terrified her as it should not any but the doomed, and Sita had been too incompetent a mother to know how to deal with her trauma, how to give her comfort – there was none, and it was not in her to concoct any.She need not have suffered so much anxiety though for Menaka had grown into the most cool and self-possessed of her children, most closely resembling her father in her ability to cope with life and accept it with no more than a careless shrug of the shoulders. By the time she was ten – a supercilious, self-contained, and beautiful young girl – she had made up her mind to be a doctor and watched a student cousin dissect a mouse with an intense and dispassionate curiosity that sickened and inflamed her mother. Watching that unappetizing scene, Sita had been shocked at the transition from the small, weeping infant to this calm scientist.
So she knew it was not fear that made her grimace and turn away from her mother: it was disapproval. Menaka – the calm, reasonable scientist to be – this Menaka loathed her mother's proclivity for drama, for theater, for emotion, with more bitterness than any other suffering relation of hers. Being her daughter, she felt most disgusted and hurt by it.
Ashamed, hurt, Sita leant forward and touched her arm, pleadingly, lightly. 'Menaka,' she coaxed, knowing she was only making matters worse, and Menaka winced and shook off her hand.
'What is it?' she said impatiently.
Sita leant back, the cigarillo tasting of black ashes now, nothing more. She had grown very large and heavy and tired easily, now. 'Look,' she said, 'at that crow sheltering in the veranda. Poor thing, how wet and sorry it looks.'
Only Karan went to the window to look at it, Menaka would not. Quite possibly, Sita reflected, that scene she had made with the pop-gun over the wounded eagle would put Menaka off any pity, any feeling for birds forever. Children were like that, Sita sighed. Leaving Menaka alone, she turned to Karan. 'Why don't you play?' she asked when she felt he had stood an unnaturally long time at the window, staring at the bedraggled crow.
'What shall I play?' he asked without his sister's sulkiness but with as much despair at this exile she had led him into.
Blowing out white smoke, spitting out stray bits of tobacco, Sita tried seriously to think of an answer, 'We used to play,' she said, distantly, 'Jivan and I – such games on the beach, together.'
'But he can't go out in the rain,' said Menaka sharply.
'What did you play?' Karan came to stand near her. She made room for him to sit down beside her and put her arms around him in gratitude. She tried to make the telling of the games she had played as a child amusing for him, colourful, and knew all along that she had no gift for narrative at all.
To be truthful, she had no more gifts for play than he seemed to have. It was Jivan who invented the games and organized them with a ferocity touched with genius. He insisted always that they play in secret – in some weed-screened corner of the casurina grove where no one could spy them, or among the rocks on the beach when no one was about. The games had been elaborate.
'One game was called Funerals –' she began, then stopped, for she remembered, too late, that she had once again used the tabooed word.
'What is that?' he inevitably asked.
She avoided a straight answer, even though she knew Menaka was watching her with hate and enmity. She told him how they would collect bits of wood on the beach and light a bonfire and burn a large bivalve shell in it, or a crab's claw found in a pool, and then cast the blackened remains into the sea.
To be continued...
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