Shiela Devi whispered to Ashish Kumar after Great-aunt Pola died. ‘The Four-Armed-One has been reborn as Indi. I’m sure of it.’
Indi was sent to Holy Mary Convent School where the nuns tried to teach her not to shake her legs while sitting in a chair and to button up her shirt, which she always left a little undone. She worked little, read voraciously in spite of her eyes, and streaked effortlessly to the top of the class, much to the disbelief of her parents.
After an impressive career in college where, because she couldn’t play tennis or go to the cinema, she spent most of her time fiercely reading in the library, she began to prepare for the civil service exam, as her father had.
If she passed, she would become a civil servant, like her father.
Ashish Kumar, six feet two and dashing in his youth, was a man of immense personality. When he was in a rage, government clerks whispered that the fire in his eyes could ignite piles of files and send official notices up in smoke. He liked his yoghurt thick and perfectly set. During meals, he would turn the bowl of yoghurt upside down to see if it was runny. If it ran water even a little, he would hurl it across the table at Shiela Devi’s face.
One night, as Indi watched her mother stand on the frontlines of her father’s airborne yoghurt, she had a bad idea.
A few days later, Sister Cyril, principal of All Saints College for Women where the girls from Holy Mary Convent went, rang Ashish Kumar saying that she was sorry to hear of his son’s death in a car accident.
‘Death of my son?’ exclaimed Ashish Kumar. ‘But, Sister, I have no sons!’
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
‘That’s what I thought, Mr Ray. But your daughter told us that you also have an older boy. Or you had one.’
‘No, Sister, I am blessed with only two daughters. The elder has graduated recently, thank god, and is now studying to join the civil service. Indira. As you know. The other remains in your college.’
‘Yes, of course I know your daughters, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril briskly. ‘Indira was one of our best, if not the best. How proud we were of her and what she achieved in spite of her suffering. Paromita, your younger, unfortunately has none of her gifts…In fact Indira was the one who told us about your son. She rang the college and told us. It was very kind of her. We’ve just had a memorial service for him. A fine young man by Indira’s account.’
‘A fine young man…’ said Ashish Kumar carefully.
‘We are so proud,’ said Sister Cyril.
‘Of who, Sister?’ inquired Ashish Kumar politely.
‘Your son, Mr Ray,’ said Sister Cyril after a pause. ‘Apparently he was a fighter pilot.’
‘Ah,’ mused Ashish Kumar. ‘My son. The fighter pilot.’
There was another silence. The rituals of sorrow are indeed extraordinary, Sister Cyril sighed. Perhaps bereaved parents cultivate a certain forgetfulness that shelters them against the empty days. ‘God bless you, Mr Ray.’
He thundered for her to present herself before him in his study. The study was a semi-circular room with casement windows set with dusty window seats. Outside the windows, swayed the jamun tree. Ashish Kumar often lay here on the white hospital bed, bought for dying Great-aunt Pola, reading The Last of the Mohicans.
‘What son? What car accident?’ he roared. ‘Are you mad or what?’
She hung her head, but he could see that beneath the lowered eyelashes she was barely listening to him. Naturally, he had been extremely disappointed when she was born. She had been such a big healthy baby that she could easily have been a male child. But she was not. As she grew older, he had begun to get even angrier because she seemed to succeed at everything in spite of being a disappointment…She grew unacceptably beautiful and embarrassingly curvaceous. She understood more mathematics than he ever could and on top of everything else, she was blind, blind to the horrors she was wreaking on those around her. She was freed by blindness, strengthened by blindness, made wanton by blindness. Blindness made her wild, a creature of the wilderness.
He was powerless to rein her in, helpless against her success, impotent against her unseeing dominance and powerless in the face of her scorn. Since she couldn’t see properly, he was easy for her to ignore. Easy for her to regard as negligible while he chafed and fretted about his own smallness, six feet two and still maddeningly small in his daughter’s disrespectfully absent eyes.
‘You told a lie? Why?’
‘Lie?’ she asked. ‘What lie?’
‘You told Sister Cyril that you have a brother. That he was killed in an accident. Why?’
‘I felt like saying it. I wish I had a brother. Instead of’– she jerked her head at the cowering Pom – ‘that idiot.’
‘Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie?’ His face was red with fury and triumph. ‘You’re not young. You’re going to become an officer in the civil service. And you act like a child.’
‘I felt sorry for you,’ said Indi calmly. ‘You don’t have a live son so you may as well have a dead one. A man without sons is not a man.’
‘Get out!’ shrieked Ashish Kumar. ‘Get out of my sight!’
‘Indira,’ Shiela Devi wept. ‘Was it you who sat in my poor womb for nine whole months?’
She sneaked out into the lawn that night, treading barefoot so she could recognize the path, to smoke her cigarettes which she stored in a test-tube buried under the semal. As she lit up and inhaled, Ashish Kumar came up behind her and whispered softly, ‘So, my dear. You are smoking?’
She started and exhaled hurriedly into his face. ‘Once,’ she held up her head, ‘in a while.’
She ran her feet over the triangular edges of the bricks that lined the flowerbeds. Tiny upturned bricks formed a neat mountain range enclosing the nodding pansies.
He stepped in front of her and snatched her wrist in a hard grip. His mouth was twisted in a sneer but his eyes were frightened. ‘Your lie about my son was a shameful matter. A very serious, disgraceful matter.’
She struggled to free her hand, the cigarette still burning between her fingers. ‘I was teasing you,’ she said, trying to laugh.
‘You must not do all this.’ He looked at the cigarette, ‘Telling lies to your college principal. Lying to a nun. Asking them to hold a full scale mass for someone who doesn’t exist…Now you are smoking. What will you do next? Sell your body to anyone who wants it?’ All of a sudden her father shifted his grip to her fingers and twisted the burning cigarette into her palm. The heat burned into her skin. Tears sprang to her aching eyes but she didn’t make a sound.
They stood under the semal, the father crushing the lit cigarette into the daughter’s palm, smelling the singed skin and watching her hand thrash involuntarily like a wounded bird. Then the cigarette fell to the ground and Ashish Kumar turned away red-faced.
Indi hopped around in pain. ‘You gave me a third degree burn!’ she shouted. ‘You burnt me!’
‘Go into the house,’ Ashish Kumar hissed over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘Your mother will make you better.
‘You fraud!’ she screamed after him. ‘Pretending you don’t lust for a boy!’
Loud prayers from the shanties surrounding Victoria Villa ran up the trees.
Indi sank to her knees and cooled her palm on the wet grass.
J The world became her adversary. Her blind and blinding beauty brought out the worst in everyone around her and made it impossible for