Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Read online

  Narayana wriggled about and shot his brother sly grins but kept his mouth shut. Vishnu, however, could not keep quiet. “He says that our Leela is up-in-the-air like that upside-down king, Akka.” He covered his mouth with his hand and giggled again.

  “Like Trishanku?” Akka asked. “And why do you say that, Naani, my pet?”

  Leela glanced from her cousins to her grandmother, not sure whether she was supposed to feel flattered or upset by the comparison.

  “Because she is also half here and half there, that’s why,” Naani explained. “Like the Anglo-Indians of Cox Town.”

  Leela felt as if her heart would burst with shame and hurt. To be compared to those people, so reviled by good Hindu families like her own—it was unbearable! Tears burned twin trails down her cheeks as she rose to her feet and ran to the drawing room, where her father usually spent his afternoons, alone, lying on the divan reading law journals or the newspaper, while her mother rested upstairs in her darkened bedroom.

  Rosa was always resting; everything made her ill or nervous—the dust, the heat, the food, the old neem tree outside her window, which she had had trimmed so thoroughly that it listed to one side away from the house, as if in weary disgust. Most of all Rosa was sick of the people in this house, particularly her mother-in-law, Akka. Her dislike was reciprocated with much malice. Akka made it clear to all that she thought the foreign daughter-in-law was a disgrace to the family name, a conniving trollop who had snared her innocent son while he was lost in a foreign country without any of his family to guide and advise him properly. She refused to call Rosa by her name or to acknowledge that she was married to Hari Shastri.

  During the first few years of her life in the house, Rosa had energetically countered the old woman’s nastiness with her own sallies. Her favourite method of annoying her mother-in-law, who maintained a strictly vegetarian household, was to order the servant Savitri to bring her a tiffin-carrier full of mutton curry or a chicken biryani from a Muslim restaurant in the town market. The maid, who loved the dramatic confrontations between Rosa and Akka, would promptly report to the old lady that she was off to get the white wife some food from, of all places, a Muslim restaurant. And Akka would bang the heel of her hand against her forehead, call to her sons and complain, “I am telling you, if dead animals come into this house and are eaten by that woman, your mother will go away. She will leave and die on the street.”

  The maid would be sent back to Rosa, a tennis ball between two strong-armed players. Sometimes Rosa would win the fight and the maid would be successfully dispatched to the restaurant. And Akka would sit in tight-lipped silence, her eyes red from weeping, her suitcase packed and ready beside her so that she could move out of the house and expire as she had threatened, while Leela’s uncles would touch her feet and beg her to stay, saying, “Akka, if you go away who will be our mother?”

  Venki the cook, whose hatred of Akka predated Rosa’s arrival, was the only one who refused to be involved in this family drama. He would stand at the door of the kitchen, in his dhothi, stained with turmeric and oil and other kitchen ingredients, tied high under his chest, leaving much of his spindly, hairless legs bare, and smile cynically at the histrionics in the courtyard.

  On days when Rosa lost the battle she would sulk spectacularly in her bedroom upstairs, either shouting abuse-in German, English and the small amount of Kannada that she had managed to acquire—at anyone passing her room, or marching out the front door to the veranda in one of her cotton nighties, the outline of her panties and bra and her shapely legs clearly visible through the thin fabric. She knew her near-nakedness appalled Akka, especially when the bangle seller was at the door.

  “Go back!” Akka would hiss when Rosa drifted back into the house, a pleased smile etched across her pretty face, her arms jangling with the fragile bangles. “Go back where you came from, you piece of trash!”

  Many times Rosa had considered divorcing her husband and his family and returning to Germany or England, but she had lost contact with her family long ago. Then in 1938 Leela was born, and the following year World War Two broke out. After that, the energy and lively sense of self-preservation that had sustained her for so long seeped out of Rosa. She lost interest in everything, including quarrelling with Akka. She locked herself in her bedroom for long periods of time, ignoring the maid who brought the infant to her to be fed. She grew corpulent on a diet of forbidden meat that she ordered regularly from the Muslim restaurant and on which Akka had ceased to comment. On rare occasions, at dusk, just before the family gathered for dinner, Rosa would wander down the stairs and out, alone, into the backyard.

  This was about the time when Hari Shastri left his wife’s bed and began sleeping in his library. He too abandoned his daughter to the servants, waking early to leave for work and returning only late in the evenings.

  In the end, it was Venki who brought up Leela. Perhaps he did this to spite Akka, who refused to touch the child even while making a great show of cuddling the children of her younger sons. Or perhaps there was something about the frail baby, her eyes grey as the monsoon sky and with her desperate wailing, that tugged at the old cook’s heart. Whatever the reason, Leela became Venki’s child. She might not even have known that she was related to the pale woman who lived upstairs in a bed shrouded in mosquito netting, and who emerged once in a while at dusk to wander through the thicket of trees and plants in the large backyard, if not for Akka’s barbed reminders.

  “Half-breed,” Akka would mutter out loud. “Worse than an untouchable. At least a toilet cleaner has caste. But this girl, where does she belong? Tell me, somebody, where?”

  And when she was a little older, the reminders of her mixed origins came from Rosa, who would send the maid to fetch Leela up to her. The little girl would tiptoe into the dark, shuttered room to find her mother lying huge in the centre of the bed, cocooned in the white mosquito netting, the gramophone playing soft western classical music or German songs. Leela would advance reluctantly and stop just outside the netting draped about the bed. Her mother then would hold the net open, and Leela would be obliged to crawl into the stale-smelling space. Rosa would press Leela close to her spongy body and murmur in a mixture of languages that Leela only half understood. “Never forget you are mine. Even though you have their brown skin, you see the world with my grey eyes. They are wicked, filthy creatures, pigs, dirtyevilpigs.”

  Leela would lie beside her mother, stiff with pity, fear and revulsion, and run back to that other world as soon as she could, though she knew that downstairs—despite the sun and the noise, the colour and the life—she would be just as unhappy, and that everyone there—Akka, her aunts, her uncles and her cousins—would look sideways at her, the half-and-half child of mismatched parents. She would hide away in the gods’ room and pray to the silent silver idols there to make her mother disappear, to erase Rosa Schweers as if she had never been, for only then would she, Leela Shastri, begin to exist whole and unblemished. Some days she would clumsily pile bits of her mother’s hair or nail clippings or a handkerchief stolen from her room, place half a lemon over the objects, add a sprinkling of vermilion powder and incinerate them with matches and oil stolen from the kitchen, all the while imagining that she was performing black magic spells like Venki sometimes did, cursing whoever had offended him with headaches or diarrhea, or cramping aches in the feet. She would crouch over the smoking debris, mutter her childish incantations and imagine that her mother was disappearing with each charred bit of hair and curved toenail.

  After the story session that had ended so disastrously, Leela had gone first to her father, who offered little more than a pat on the back. Unsatisfied, she proceeded to the dark and oily kitchen, where Venki held her quivering little body, stroked her hair with his calloused hand and whispered gently, “Oh-ho, oh-ho, my sweetness, jewel of my eye, why are we so sad now, tell old Venki!”

  Leela buried her face in the old cook’s chest, inhaling the odours of turmeric, asafetida, mustard, cu
min and cardamom that had embedded themselves in his leathery skin. “Narayana said that I was half-and-half, like Trishanku,” she sobbed.

  Venki reached for the tin in which he kept treats for Leela and fished out a round piece of jaggery. He popped it into her mouth. “So what is wrong with being like Trishanku? Was he not a lucky fellow to have a foot in two worlds? Did he not have a heaven of his own around him? Hanh? Tell me? My chick pea, listen, it can be an advantage to live neither here nor there, like a frog, comfortable in water and on land. The thing is to understand how to make use of this ability.”

  Venki, Leela thought longingly, was neither a frog nor a Trishanku. His entire life had been spent inside this house. His father and his grandfather had cooked here before him. He had grown up in this courtyard and had known Leela’s grandmother since the day she had arrived in the house as a bride. He had cooked the auspicious meals when Akka became pregnant with Leela’s father, Hari, when she gave birth to him and her other two sons, at their weddings, at the arrival of each new grandchild and, most recently, for Leela’s grandfather’s death ceremonies. He had his place in the world, and it was in this dark and smoky kitchen.

  Beginning his preparations for the evening meal, Venki gave Leela small tasks to distract her from her sorrow. Soon dusk wrapped itself around the old house and long shadows lay in the empty courtyard. A fragrance of incense floated about as Akka and the aunts lighted the lamps for evening prayers in the gods’ room. From one of the rooms around the courtyard came the mutter of times tables as Narayana and Vishnu did their homework, which reminded Leela that she had work to finish as well. Venki paused suddenly in his peeling and raised his head.

  “What is it?” Leela asked.

  “Your mother,” the cook said. His sharp ears had caught a whisper slithering like a snake around the house.

  And at once Leela too could hear the susurrating voices as Rosa made her slow, bulky way down the stairs: She is coming down, she is coming down, where is she going, what is she doing, she is coming down.

  She watched from the kitchen door as her mother emerged and waddled out the back door and into the garden, down the narrow path, past the well, past the guava trees, past the mango trees grown especially for use on funeral pyres. With a sudden, intense longing Leela followed her mother, keeping a careful distance but not sure why she did so. She watched Rosa trail her hand against the coarse, dark bark of the trees, brushed her small fingers against the same rough areas and felt her mother’s sadness.

  Rosa walked until she reached a green, scummy pond at the end of the property. Here the trees ended their shadowy guard and the last of the day’s sunshine touched the deep water, making it glitter. White water lilies floated on the surface, and dragonflies hung in glittering concert over the flowers and leaves. The only sounds to be heard were the guttural croaking of frogs and the quieter humming of small insects. Stepping carefully over the moss-covered stones, Rosa reached the edge of the pond, where she stood silently, her entire body relaxing. Leela wondered what her mother saw in this place full of shadows where everything shifted with the movement of the sun. She longed suddenly for the safety of the house behind her, the solidity of its walls, its pillars, its foundations. Inside that house lived respectability and stability; rites and rituals were strictly observed, and festivals and ceremonies were performed according to the rules laid down by her Hindu Brahmin forefathers. But she continued to stare at the woman by the edge of the water.

  A mosquito landed on Leela’s bare arm. Sucking in her breath, she slapped at it. Her mother, hearing the slap, whirled around as sharply as her bulk would allow. She lost her balance and fell, arms flailing, face-first into the pond. The green water splashed upwards, a swarm of insects erupted from the surface of the pond, and then silence, only ripples. Leela waited, poised to run, for her mother to rise up and call out, to rise up, to rise up. But Rosa lay still, her legs sticking out like fleshy white batons from the edge of her nightgown, her small feet a cartoon pink in their bright blue Hawaii chappals.

  “Mama?” Leela called softly, hardly able to believe that the silent, inanimate body lying a few feet away was her mother. She backed away, then ran panting and terrified back down the path to the bright, noisy house. No one noticed her. She sped up the stairs and entered her mother’s room, hoping the event she had just witnessed was a bad dream, that she would see her mother there in the gloom, shrouded in mosquito netting. But no one was in the room, only a lingering odour of old things—clothes, paper, food. She wondered whether she should tell anyone that her mother was lying face down in the pond. What if they blamed her? She went back downstairs and Venki, peering out of his kitchen, beckoned to her.

  “Guess what I made for my little pet tonight for dinner?” he asked, smiling.

  “My mother is not in her room,” Leela said.

  “She went out to the back garden, remember? Now, do you want to know what I made for my baby?”

  Leela shrugged and looked away. “I saw her go out there.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the backyard. “To the pond. But she hasn’t come back yet.”

  Venki gave her a sharp look. “Didn’t you follow her? What happened?”

  “She fell in the pond. I don’t know what happened to her,” Leela whispered.

  Later, when Rosa’s body had been lifted out of the water and carried back into the house, Leela looked at the heavy, shapeless face of the woman who had once been her mother. I have killed her, she thought numbly, twisting the fabric of her long skirt tightly around her fingers. It was me, I killed her. She had performed black magic using her mother’s nail clippings, she had prayed hard that her mother would vanish, and now her wish had come true. What had she done? But hot on the heels of guilt came a confused relief that finally, finally, there would be no white woman to remind people that she, Leela, was a half-and-half.

  At that moment, she looked up to catch Akka staring at her, her eyes cold as always, and understood that Rosa Schweers would never fully disappear from her life. Rosa would always be there in the colour of Leela’s eyes and, worst of all, in the memories of her family. She also understood that to survive she would have to use whatever means she had to get away from this house to a place that she could own entirely. She would have to create, like the sage Vishwamitra had done for Trishanku, a heaven for herself. Venki was right: there were two ways of understanding that story. Leela stared back at her grandmother, and finally the old woman looked away.

  Twelve years passed. Leela grew from a quick-witted, petite child into a short woman with a sharp, watchful face. She might have been pretty had she smiled more often, but Leela did not think there was much to smile about. She had, however, developed a shrewd confidence in her ability to survive. After Rosa’s death, she had reviewed her modest options and decided that she needed another ally besides Venki. The old cook gave her love and food, but she needed someone with more authority in the household. She devoted herself to her father, Hari Shastri, bringing him his slippers when he came home from work, taking his tray of food to him in his room, doing her homework on the floor of that room, asking him to explain this or that to her and generally insinuating herself into his life. She anticipated his wishes—ensuring that his pens were full of ink and that he always had sharpened pencils on his desk, that all his papers were neatly clipped together and filed—and if he needed anything, he only had to say “Leelu” for her to appear at his elbow. Before Akka knew it, the grey-eyed grandchild whom she thoroughly distrusted had somehow taken charge of her son’s life. Now that Leela was grown up, Hari Shastri gave his paycheque to his daughter instead of his mother. There was little the old woman could do when Leela bought herself saris with her father’s money, purchased gifts for her aunts to keep them happy in case she needed their help and, after high school, decided to continue her studies in university. If she did not get married, she would at least have an education to fall back on. She could find herself a job as a teacher or perhaps study a little longer and becom
e a college lecturer. But she kept these plans to herself and, to avoid offending her grandmother, Leela always made an ostentatious display of placing Hari Shastri’s paycheque at the old lady’s sharp-edged feet, respectfully touching them with her small hands.

  “Akka,” she would say, “is there anything you want from the market? I’ll get it on my way home from college.” But before her grandmother could reach down for the piece of paper, she would whisk it away and tuck it into her blouse, where it stayed securely between her breasts until she deposited it in the joint bank account she maintained with her father.

  And whether her grandmother requested anything or not, Leela would return with long strings of jasmine buds strung together, fruits of various kinds—including golden apples from Ooty, an expensive indulgence for Akka, who loved their crisp sweetness—to place in front of the gods. For Leela continued to pray fervently twice a day, her fierce belief in gods that she could neither see nor hear jostling against the empirical truths of the maths and sciences she studied at university. She embraced the erratic gods on one side and rationalism on the other. Half of this and half of that.

  Then, in her second year of university, Leela was invited to the wedding of her best friend. She was seated near the aisle in one of a row of seats in the wedding hall, dressed in a pale green sari. On the raised dais at the far end of the hall, her friend circled the sacred fire with her new husband. Leela, feeling a cramp in her leg, stretched it out into the aisle just as a young man walked by. And Balachandra Bhat, cousin to Leela’s friend, tripped over her small foot and stumbled to the ground.

  “Ay-ay-yo!” exclaimed Leela, leaping out of her seat, embarrassed. “So sorry, hope you are not hurt …” She leaned down to give the young man a hand up, unwittingly repeating the actions of her mother so long ago. Coincidence? Perhaps. Chance brings lives together in unexpected ways and breaks them apart with equal randomness.