Deaf Heaven

Prologue

img002.jpg Be a while before they find my body. Or as we always-always hyphenate in India, dead-body. When they find it I just hope I am not smelling somewhat. The library has no rats or insects, of this I have made sure. So, no toes or nose gnawed by Monday morning, when school reopens.

This morning we had our annual school sports day. The principal suggested I keep the library open in the afternoon. She’s new, desperately doing a new-broom-sweeps-clean but she will calm down soon enough. And if she does not, the system will wear her down, seeing that the school has six divisions of each class from standards one to ten with forty children in each. ‘The senior students should not feel bereft of access to knowledge, isn’t it, Saraswati,’ she says to me, archly smug in her pun since I am named after the goddess of knowledge. No student is going to come to the library on sports day. She knows, I know. But. She is the new broom, whisk-whisk.

For the first half of the day princi divided all our responsibilities down to fractions: mine was to get the thirdys on the box. All the winners – first, second, third – of all the events from relay, high-jump, swimming to special events for the primary learners like potato-spoon, three-legged and sack races have to be guided to the winning pedestal, with its 1,2,3 in freshly touched-up paint triumphantly glistening in the sun, for their awards and photo clicks. The secondary students are more television-trained, imitating cricketers looking to the sky after making their centuries or giving celebrity-like jabs in the air the moment they realize they have come first. When on the victory box they even deign to bend sideways to congratulate the seconds and thirdys.

Different matter with the primary children, the bachchas who get all confused when they cross the finishing line: some keep running, some start criss-crossing and careening into other children, a few simply sit down on the track and start howling for their mummies. At which point even the mol-most, i.e. the shittiest kind of children can make your lips twitch but your mouth goes ohhhhh, poor baby, what happened, come, come, come, it’s alright. What can a heart do but go out when it is a vulnerable wee body bathed in sweat, huge numbers the size of a bemused face tagged onto a wet t-shirt and a brave little chest trying not to heave in befuddled sobs while all around, the red-dust and mud of the track on teeny palms and tiny knees and little faces find their own trail through the tears melding with snot amidst all that heat and cheering and indecipherable announcements on the tannoy. Whatever else sports day means to the hyper-competitive parents of the children, it is a good day to invest in innocence.

And the power of the lap of love. Ergo, the mummies. It makes me smile how children always cry for their mothers. I have worked in other schools too, in other parts of India, as librarian and substitute teacher. And I have never seen even the boys crying for their fathers. Always-always it is ‘I want my mummy’. ’Course the non-complex explanation for this would be we want our mummy when we want the sugar and spice and all things nice. ‘You wait, I will tell my daddy’ is when it’s snails and tails and time to go off the rails.

I could never invoke a daddy because he wasn’t there. Did not have a brother either, just ma who was a senior schoolteacher and she never so much as raised her voice – she would actually lower it so that the occasionally unruly students simply had to fall silent to hear her. My sister would not even dream (think of the word dream in italics, throw in an exclamation if you want to imagine her saying it) of confrontation. You do not want to appear hot and bothered about the business of living when you have decided very early on that your life will be all arty-farty and into all sorts of meaningfulness about life’s internal layers (italics, please), paintings and poets and drama and acting and making a big deal of referring to him as Thakur when the whole wide world knows him as Rabindranath Tagore. Damayanti says Thakur, you crinkle your forehead in polite query and you hear her eyes roll at your density as she responds, ‘You know, of course, Bengal’s beloved poet and Nobel prize winner.’

With my only sibling busy being a neo-intellectual, it’s been mostly me on my own. I managed brilliantly: a swift series of mean mixed with mad movements with my lips which frightened the kakka out of them – especially the kids in my class who could be so casually cruel. Mummy shifted a few schools and cities; boarding schools were favoured because teachers got housing, we got free education. New schools meant a new batch of taunts and jeers for me till they got used to the hare lip.

I am quite used to seeing my cut lip in the mirror, like my eyes and nose and the rest, a part of my face. Very early on, my ma made me get used to it. She took me to the full-length mirror on our lovely old wooden cupboard, positioned me till I was fully reflected and said, ‘This is what you will, must always, see.’ Then she turns me around, holds up the small steel-mounted round mirror hanging on a wall-peg which magnifies her eyes when she applies kaajal to their rims every morning before work. She angles the mirror to reflect only a part of my eyes and nose and all of my lips. The left side of my upper lip slashes upward, creating an animal expression between a snarl and a grimace. The white of my teeth shows through, making it look, actually, much worse: drunken-dolt yet feral. The slash seems to be held together by tiny misshapen stitches, unevenly needled with an unpracticed hand. It looks hideous.

Am I ugly?

Mummy forces me into more minute scrutiny. ‘Look carefully, Saraswati,’ she says as if explaining to her senior students, ‘look also because people will try and not look at your face when talking to you. Then they will try and not talk to you because your answers will not be completely coherent due to your cleft lip and it will embarrass them that you do not meet with the accepted standard of social interaction. So look, get used to it, forget about it. For you will still be ahead of the babbling idiots, though they will think otherwise. You will be a mature adult with a mind of your own, and if there are things you can’t say, that is still okay because you will be thinking them.’

‘Why do I have it? Why not Damayanti?’

‘Because when I was pregnant with her, there was no eclipse while I was using scissors and needle-thread. There was one when I was carrying you and stitching nappies for your arrival.’

This is confusing and I still don’t know whether I qualify as ugly or not. I burst into tears. ‘I am not a bad girl,’ I bawl, ‘you are not a bad mummy!’

‘I hope not,’ my mother answers crisply. But she does draw me into a warm hug, though with her other hand she draws in Damayanti too. She has come from the next room to watch me howling. Mummy sits us down. ‘I do not believe in this eclipse nonsense and do not want you girls to believe in it either, though many people do. Like your father’s family whom we lived with till you were old enough for us to leave Kolkata to start a new life. When Saraswati was born, the old crones in that house gave everyone this eclipse story.’

‘What’s an eclipse?’

Ma explains it exactly as she would in class. ‘An eclipse occurs when one object gets in between you and another object and blocks your view. You might say, When she entered the crowded room, her presence eclipsed others or This problem has eclipsed our lives. The scientific explanation is a little less theatrical but far more fascinating.’

Mother does line-drawings on a partially empty page of her school-calendar. ‘This is the earth, which we live on. From here we routinely experience two kinds of eclipses: an eclipse of the moon and that of the sun.’ Neatly, efficiently, she explains-draws how both come to pass. ‘So that was an eclipse of the moon, or a lunar eclipse. And this one here,’ she taps with the rubber-end of her pencil-stub, ‘this shadow on the earth’s surface is an eclipse of, go on, answer me…’

‘The sun,’ we chant-respond in unison.

‘It is also called a solar eclipse,’ puts in Damayanti quickly, show-off that she is.

I am still confused. ‘I was born in which eclipse?’

Ma shakes her head dismissively. ‘Does not matter. Anything can be a reason to become foolishly superstitious. An eclipse is a beautiful celestial phenomenon, please just enjoy it when you see it. Make sure, though, you do not look at the solar eclipse with naked eyes; it can harm them.’

‘I have seen,’ says Damayanti importantly, ‘pictures of the lunar eclipse and…’

I jump right in, though I have never seen any photos but this is about me and my cleft lip and I am not going to let her hog our mother’s attention when the whole talk is supposed to be about me. ‘I have also seen.’

‘Oh?’ Damayanti arches an eyebrow the way those ladies do on the silver screen when cigarette smoke wisps over their face as they act in bad-woman roles. ‘Tell us then, describe it to us, we cannot wait to hear what happens to the moon during a lunar eclipse.’

I rush right into her trap. ‘The moon falls down!’

There goes Damayanti’s other eyebrow, up and away, after which she adds, a little too know-all than necessary, ‘The moon looks like God took a nicely neat geometry bite out of it.’

‘I will take you to the school library and show you pictures in the encyclopaedia of the difference between a partial and a total eclipse. Both, the moon and the sun have total eclipses.’

I am horrified. ‘So the sun fully falls down, it vanishes? Everything becomes all-dark in the day?’

Ma says, ‘It is dramatic, Saraswati, though not as scary as you are making it sound to yourself.’ She turns our attention to the school-calendar and the earlier drawings, adds another visual to the one explaining total solar eclipse. ‘It can be breathtaking, especially this diamond-ring formation.’

What does this have to do with my cut lip, yet Damayanti needs to know everything. ‘How long does a total solar eclipse last?’

‘I do not know,’ replies our mother honestly and I wish I was nestled in her lap, so that I could slip my arm around her waist and lean into her to hug her; I have always loved her so hard for the simplicity of her honesty. ‘I will check in the encyclopaedia and with the science teacher.’ She makes sure she does, she tells us later that it is a maximum of seven minutes, give or take some seconds.

This is about the confusion around my lip, and I do so want to decide that there is no connection between my face and the faces of the sun and the moon so I point out, in as adult a fashion as I can, ‘So since the sun and the moon are everywhere in the world at different times, everyone in the world must be having an eclipse. Everyone’s mummies are also having babies and it might be at the same time, like mine, so there is no connection between lip and eclipse.’

‘Clever child. Which is why all over the world pregnant mummies do not sit quietly during an eclipse. They chop food and cook, go to work and use scissors, look into mirrors. In our country we are told to sit in one room, give old clothes to beggars after the eclipse and all the rest of that rubbish which serves only to deny a woman choice in negotiating her daily life.’

lip clip

Three children born with cleft every hour in India

Causes: nature (genes)

nurture (deprivation, chemicals)

no-reason (bad luck)

‘Why to give clothes to beggars after an eclipse?’

‘Old clothes, un cooked rice and grains, anything. As they say in parts of our country, dey daan chhutey grahan.’

‘Means?’

‘In parts of India beggars – mostly eunuchs, and we will look up what that means in the encyclopaedia – come out on the roads during an eclipse and they shout to the people inside their homes, Dey daan chhutey grahan. Give charity and overcome any eclipse in your life. It is actually an ancient expression from more tradition-bound times. In north India the Hindi speakers say grahan lagna to signify unending bad luck.’

‘This means my life has the grahan? I will be ugly forever and ever and ever!’

‘Stop it, Saraswati!’ Ma sounds stern but leans over to take me in her lap. She strokes my hair almost absently. As she aligns her thoughts, her voice lowers. ‘When you were born, the doctor said be grateful the child does not have a cleft palate. That would be a cut on the inside of your mouth, on the upper side, because the bones did not form completely. Think about that child whose food comes out from her nose when she eats, because her mouth has no proper roof. Now look at what you have, a cleft lip. At present we can’t repair your lip because we don’t know a doctor who can. When we find a good doctor, we may not have the money for expensive surgery. So you grow up, earn money, see for yourself if surgery is a practical option. Meanwhile, do not think of yourself as ugly or you will start acting ugly. Ugly is as ugly does. Just as handsome is as handsome does. Nothing less and certainly nothing more.’

Damayanti looks thoughtful. She starts to speak, then shakes her head and falls silent.

‘What?’ asks our mother. ‘What is so meaningless that it pops up to the tongue but need not be spoken?’

Damayanti hesitates. ‘If we don’t do her lip-operation, who will…’

Mummy looks at my sister, she waits for the sentence to finish; the unspoken words hang in the air as if the biggest curse is about to befall. I feel fearful and press closer to my ma.

Damayanti changes tack. ‘I will grow up as quickly as I can and earn money so that we can do the operation and she can be happily married ever after.’

Mummy looks at her steadily. ‘Thank you, my child.’ She looks at me. ‘If you had any doubt that your sister loves you, here is proof. Though both of you need to understand that marriage is not necessarily an end in itself. Not just Saraswati but both of you when you are older will need to decide whether you want to marry at all. Yes, because of the cleft lip it might be an if for Saraswati while in your case, Damayanti, it might be when. Just remember two things: when and if you marry, not when and if some man marries you. Two, do not make yourself into a charity cause. Oh I have a cleft lip, oh I am a widow, oh I wanted a poet-husband and mine reads only the newspaper. You certainly have a right to expect the best from people. But remember, with rights come responsibilities. Not just to husband and family; that is too narrow a vision. You need to examine what is around you clearly, all three-hundred-sixty degrees. From this position of strength, you can make informed choices. And then you secure your lives, so that you can make more informed choices. That is how you can go from strength to strength without letting anyone circumscribe your lives with their poor choices. That, dear daughters, is happily ever after.’

My mother. Young yet wise. Timeless without resorting to meaningless mythological tales. Modern without shedding any part of the skin she cherishes. Traditional without merely copying something done mindlessly for millions of years. In its stead, she made place for the continuance of that which had worth by ending all those rituals which may have begun well but which had outrun their course in the present-day. Therefore making for me a compact portable bundle of customs which were easily practicable; the kind of traditions which provide happy memories in good times and comfort in the bad ones. Thus my mother gave the oft-repeated and much-abused phrase ‘traditional values’ real value.

As I get older and make my choices on a daily basis, I also grow to understand what our ma meant when she spoke of limiting choices. I watch other women – some men too – make bad choices, usually other people’s choices foisted upon them in the name of gender, duty and those two holy cows of religion and tradition. By which point it has ceased to be just an honest mistake. Learned mistakes, those are the real tragedies.

Won’t be making mistakes no more. Can’t look into a mirror either; does my lip look any more spliced in death? My first heart attack was a silent one, did not even know I was in its throes – just profuse sweating and what I thought was gut-gas – till I went for a full medical because of my diabetes. Well, you need a vice or two in life.

Actually, I am not particularly partial to sweets. Desserts which are too obvious in themselves for being chock-a-block with sugar, ditto those in sweetmeat shops masquerading as mithai, do not pass my lips. A different miracle-in-the-mouth is sandesh, the best Bengali mishti, wherein fresh milk is gently coaxed into molecules and really, not too much more messed with in its dna.

I stayed partial to some, oh alright, a saucerful of sandesh every night. Especially the seasonal nolen gur sandesh, you have to eat this jaggery-blend at its freshest. Nature’s clock ticks around to winter, all the while readying the nerves of an entire clan of trees, experienced tree-hikers shimmy up to where a rich vein can be tapped, an earthen pot is attached so that the tree can give up its juices just for me, this golden-brown liquid simmered on slow-fires so that the magic can meet sandesh and reach my nightly saucers. Nourished by nature almost first-hand. Nothing to do with mass-market retail in desserts. Where is the enchantment in chemically altered sawdust packed with preservatives, covered with cleverly printed plastic proclaiming next-century expiry dates?

So. I am appreciative, even if dead, that I ate only good sweets. Grateful too, that there was no lingering-malingering. My second heart attack this evening; outside the library the sunset smudges Thursday into dusk. The school building silent, emptied out, me in the library, surfing the net before locking up to leave. Swiftly savage with a deep lurch just below my heart – implosion.

Has my cleft lip twisted even further in a grimace of pain during the rictus of death? Oh dear. Not going to look good when they find me all crumpled up between Internet Facility and International Periodicals. Not going to smell like roses either, tomorrow being declared a holiday post-sports day, followed by the weekend. Some consolation: my legs are waxed and I am wearing relatively new undies, bra and chudds, both Marxsparx. Picked up in London, therefore not made in lax manufacturing country to be shipped to colony-shops, but quality-conscious place and in class cotton. My sister bought them for me during her last visit with her hero-husband.

Gosh, what fun they will have on Monday when they realize they have to phone Bombay to inform her. How will they do it, knowing they are talking to a still recognized though ex-heroine, wife of a famous Bollywood actor? In their minds as they dial, in their speech as they connect, in their post-phone staff-room recitation, my sister will metamorphose into a gracious diva; her actor-husband will acquire demigod status of the kind the swine keeps selling his soul for. And what will they say to her, as this telecon has now become about their feeling good about themselves? Will I become ‘the late librarian’?

People get past the severity of the word ‘death’ by either being over-respectful (‘his passing’, ‘she passed away’) or using black humour, which only serves to underline its inevitability. Gave up the ghost, called it a day, kicked the bucket. In Bengali some use the axiom ‘potol tulechhe’ (picked the potol vegetable). In Hindi it’s ‘uparwaley ko pyarey ho gaye’ (beloved to the upstairswala). In south India, where the polite expressions suggest infinity, the four languages cock their own slang snook, e.g. the Malayalam ‘pottitherichchu’ (a bursting, as in an explosion).

The Gujaratis do fun phrases: ‘off thay gaya’ (off and away), ‘dhasree gaya’ (slipped, even though a little painfully but by-and-large peacefully). In Bombay, that city with its own Indian language called Bambaiya, there is ‘ludak gaya’, no translation possible. There is also ‘tapak gaya’ for when you die of cancer, overeating, old age, suchlike. Though ‘tapka diya’ is if the person has been bumped off in police encounters or by the city’s tediously inevitable underworld, the latter likely unloved by their own families but dearly beloved to writers romanticizing them.

My vote, though, goes to straight-to-point, no time-waste, the brisk-businesslike ‘mar gaya’ – that’s that, died.

I died. I am in transit, on my way to heaven.

That’s where never-been-kissed virgins go, right?

Friday

img002.jpg ‘Neech Bangalan.’

Here’s Damayanti, hissing. She is on the phone, publicly famous composure and class flushed down toilet. Rather a lot has steadily drained itself out of Damayanti; post-marriage she is not what she set herself up to be in readiness of her happily ever after. Does this really need to happen to married women over the years, this slow leaking of what were once vital fluids? Damayanti justifies it loftily as ‘phases in the process of evolving’. Evolving into what – a better or a pointlessly changed human being? I don’t recall her answering; a pause on the telephone line between us, her mobile buzzed, she said she had to go.

Damayanti on the landline, in derisive double-barrel.

‘Low-caste Bengali woman.’

Eeesh, not good. This too happens when you lose yourself and become merely someone’s wife/mother/whatever – every single