Small revolutions

It is past noon. We are coloured twigs across parallel lines. We have been lying here for hours in the heat. There is some discussion about whether two hundred and fifty people will actually go through with 'mass suicide'.

There is nobody here with trucks or cranes – only cameras and lots of talking.

I can hear some people say: 'Lakshmi told everyone that there would be an eviction and then a demolition.'

'She got everyone to come and lie on the railway tracks.'

'The girl is so young and yet so …'

I don't care to listen to the end of that sentence. Right now, lying across the railway line in all this filth, I feel sick and defeated. My body is burning, and I feel the skin on my back beginning to peel.

'Thyagamma, what are we doing here?'

'Wait, Lakshmi. Just wait.'

'They think it's me, when you …'

'Shut up Lakshmi. Keep lying down.'

When my dead grandmother arrived at the doorstep just before lunch and announced, 'I am not dead. I am only un-living,' we were expected not to show the slightest surprise.

Amma was at the market selling onions, and would come home two hours later to watch our very dead grandmother having lunch with us, piling more food onto her plate. Then she would faint away, and sleep till the evening and wake up with a weak heart.

A few minutes after the only streetlight in our colony came on, the ground underneath us would shudder, and the noise would be too much to bear as the evening train to Chennai clattered by. For the two or two-and-a-half minutes in which our bodies became strings plucked by the noise, some of Amma's sanity would be restored. I think the routine comforted her.

She would repeat what Thyagamma used to say, but in a manner far more exaggerated: 'The daily train rumble is the source of our energy. It vibrates – and something in us lives.

Something we cannot remove from our rhythms, our lifetimes …'

Then Amma would remember that Thyagamma was right next to her, and widen her eyes.

Only after it became dark did they speak to each other.

'What are you doing here, Thyagamma?' Amma asked her in a low voice. 'Can the neighbours see you?' She started shutting our window before Thyagamma could answer.

'No. I am a family spirit. I walked down from near the market, took a right, crossed the railway line, walked through our street and nobody saw me. Parvati, you only said at my funeral, "If she has died in peace, let her go to heaven."

'So you didn't die in peace?'

'I think that is what I am trying to say …'

Thyagamma signalled for some water. I brought some over and sat down on the floor, so the three of us made a triangle.

'Okay, tell me, how is the onion shop doing?'

'Just like before. First Lakshmi used to come with me. Now she stays home and cooks.'

'Oh, and onions have become really expensive,' Amma said. 'Who cares about all that? Thyagamma! How could you come back?' We all called her Thyagamma, on her insistence.

'I had to,' Thyagamma said, and then shut her eyes to dismiss this interrogation. Later, after Amma had checked with me – for the last time – whether she was hallucinating, she decided to sleep, whining in incoherent whispers. I couldn't sleep of course, with a spirit in the house and all that. (And that too it was Thyagamma, whom we had burned three weeks ago!)

She lay on the mat next to Amma, and sprang forth when she heard her tiny snore. Then she took me outside and we both stood in front of the railway line, just in time to hear the night train to Hyderabad go by. She heard it through its length.

'Lakshmi, I have to tell you something,' she said. She looked at the night sky, like she wanted to rob it of its stars, and sighed. 'Of course Thyagamma, you have to tell me. What are you doing here?'

'We have to save everyone,' she said, putting her neck out to the wind.

'Thyagamma, stop talking in puzzles. Amma is already confused. She has a weak heart, you know,' I told her, although I didn't mind the conversation unfolding in a Thyagamma kind of way.

'I know what is going to happen to our small colony, Lakshmi. They are going to tear it down, and take the land for laying a wide road.'

'How do you know?'

In the seven months before her death, neither Amma nor I saw Thyagamma wake up and shut the door behind her every single night. We both knew she was meeting someone, and doing something, but we didn't dare to find out who or what. And not because either of us predicted she was going to die, but because questioning Thyagamma would mean other things: a long lecture about keeping secrets, being private and, finally, coming to the thing she loved talking about most, our lack of concentration on the most important part of our lives, namely, the onion shop.

So we kept out of her way. And we sold our onions and, sometimes, other vegetables. Thyagamma would come while we were at the market, cook, clean and leave again, never giving us reason to complain. One day Surya, from the other side of the railway line, came to our house, and my mother asked me to go sit outside for a while. First Surya said something about Thyagamma being a wicked witch, and they both started giggling furiously. She said something about an MLA. Then Amma began to cry. I couldn't understand much, but I knew that Thyagamma's departures were of interest to others too.

It may have been two months ago when Thyagamma came home looking like the train – our train – had flattened her. Her eyes were a bit wet, but Thyagamma crying would mean that every pukka house near us would tremble. I had never heard her cry, but Amma said that Thyagamma howled if she ever did. We let her be, but she began snarling at us and calling us donkeys.

'Both mother and daughter have to learn to handle the real world. Do you have any savings? Stupid women!'

Amma also shouted at her, saying she must be an even bigger donkey to have given birth to donkeys like us. 'Why are you suddenly talking about savings?'

'Because I am old now. Who will take care of you once I die?' she said. 'When will Lakshmi rejoin her school?'

I put my hands over my ears, warm and tight. I didn't want them to discuss this once again. I had finished the state board exams, and I thought that was enough.

They were being so cranky that night that I couldn't be around them. I went out and played with Anil and Chintu. They kept daring me to cross the railway line. It's easy for me to do that, but I still acted scared and crossed it with a fearful expression, to create some suspense for them. Then I forced them to clap and say I was brave.

I returned some hours later. Thyagamma was sitting on our threshold with some papers in a plastic cover. 'This is her ration card, Lakshmi, keep it carefully. Amma may sell it with her onions by mistake.'

'I know because I know important people,' she said that night. 'If your mother has not already told you … I used to go to the contractor's house. He loved me.' I laughed so much when she said the word 'love' that Thyagamma tried to beat me. But she couldn't because she was a gho – I mean, an un-living person.

It seems Thyagamma had quite an affair with this roads-and-buildings contractor; her whole body leaned forward, like a young girl's, when she started speaking about him. She tried to cut out all the sex parts, but after some time – after I was able to accept that Thyagamma had it in her – she included graphic details about her 39-year-old contractor, about how he lusted after Thyagamma, and how she herself lusted after him too.

'Lakshmi, you don't know what he was like. He spoke openly to me. He played with my hair. He used to sink his head in my belly for hours and he said he could help us … give us a better life.'

She looked away when she said this, and even though the moonlight allowed me to see every wrinkle on her face, her eyes found a place to hide.

'What is a better life? I liked our life. I just wanted you to rejoin school. But then he told me what he was being employed to do and I was so angry,' she glowered.

So this contractor – this daring man who slept with Thyagamma – came to find out how many of us lived in the small pukka houses and shanties near the railway line. He went over to my grandmother for this information, and she said that 52 families lived there. Many were hawkers in the main market. He asked more questions. Then some irrelevant questions.

She said she kept staring at his nice, burly body and bloodshot eyes in the sun.

'He told me one day when I was on top of him: "They're destroying your colony Thyagamma. They want to lay a big, smooth road through it."

'Oho. And…? "They will shift you to some houses on some wasteland far, far away. Don't be angry … Thyagamma! Thya-ah-ah-gamma!" He started to cry.

'I kept him on a leash that came out from between my thighs. I asked him everything he knew.'

An eight-acre marriage hall was being built for 'we-don't-know-who' to, well, marry in. It would have everything: four temples inside its high-walled campus. Several AC puja and reception halls, idols of gods everywhere – as garden ornaments and as full-length statues – and even a little cottage for the newly-weds to celebrate their first night in.

The next few days after this revelation began early for Amma, who I suspect did everything with her eyes shut, trying to ignore Thyagamma's presence: a distinctly hard task if you were her daughter. Before she left, she would remind to me to stay safe, and even shoved a 10-rupee note in my hand twice.

As she left one day, Thyagamma said to me through her paan-stuffed mouth: 'Forget everything Amma had said. Lakshmi, we women … we have to stick together. By the way, have you gotten your period?'

Four days after she died, I discovered blood in my underwear. Amma was sick then, and wept a little when I told her. When I was at school they had taught us about it, so I didn't really need Amma's help.

'I got it, Thyagamma.'

'Now you are a woman of this house.' She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a screech. 'They'll be here tomorrow,' she said.

When the evening train to Tamil Nadu goes by, there is nobody left on the tracks.

The eviction and demolition took place a little after midnight, the squad swooping down while we were all asleep. But by then, Thyagamma had left.

Amma and I stared at each other for a long time.

I am thinking: There isn't even a door to leave open for Thyagamma now, in case she decides to return.

~ Deepika Arwind is a writer and journalist based in Bangalore.