Illustration: Paul Aitchison
Illustration: Paul Aitchison

Some incidents related to what she saw at the Mona Lisa Apartments

‘In the last hours her prayers have taken the form of bargains: all that she can suffer offered in return for an end to her suffering.’

Mridula Koshy is the author of Not Only the Things That Have Happened (2012). Her short story collection, If It Is Sweet (2009; 2011) won the 2009 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.

In this story, an old woman prays. She prays right through to the end of the story.

Do you think you might be able, suddenly, to run fast enough to outrun a lion? What if it were chasing you? Do you think you might possess a reserve of strength that could translate into speed?

His father's father was a peasant. His father was therefore a peasant. A peasant is a man who starves in Malaysia where he has been shipped to serve a five-year term of indentured servitude, at the end of which he may return to his home in the village of Kurandi in the kingdom of Bastar, which after the colonial period becomes the district of Bastar, first in the state of Madhya Pradesh and eventually in the state of Chhattisgarh.

Japan occupies Malaysia in 1944. Hunger occupies first the peasant, then his wife, then three of his children, one by one, by order of age from eldest to youngest. They succumb to it. The fourth child, puling, filthy, bloated with terror, crawls out from under his mother's breast toward the sound of clanging coming from outside the hut. He crawls toward the light which reflects off an aluminium pail, and crawling forward as the line of people crawls forward, he comes to the head of the line. Rising to his knees, he extends his hand. It shakes. He cries out when rice is poured onto his hand, so hot it burns. He spills it.

Eventually, this child returns to his father's home. Home is a place he knows nothing about. The rubber-tree farming he's learned is of little use to him now. Between 1951 and 1967 he marries, becomes a father, and struggles against the droughts of '51, '65 and '66. In 1967 he dies. He is the first to go. After him go his wife, his first child (a son), then his second child (a daughter), and so on. The second-to-last child is the only one to survive. He stands at the head of a line and holds out his hand. His hand doesn't shake. The rice is so hot it steams. His hand doesn't spill it; he doesn't scrabble in the dirt. He laps at the rice in his hand till his tongue scrapes blistered skin.

His name is Chandu. His father was Dewa. He discovers his mother's name when he is fourteen. He reads 'Sukki' in the death registry kept at the tehsildar's office. He's grown up without knowing his siblings' names, or even how many of them there were. The aunt in whose home he has sheltered says, "Never mind." But he waits many hours for the clerk to return with the necessary form so he can add to the registry the names his aunt gives him – 'Bidde', 'Kosa', 'Podiya', and the youngest, too young to be named, who the aunt remembers vaguely was simply called 'Bachchi'.

He is leaving the village for the first time. It is time for the one daily bus to depart, and the clerk still has not returned with the form. Chandu can no longer wait for the clerk. He boards the bus. He sits with his elbow propped on the sill and his face set in either anger or sorrow, the aunt cannot tell. Too late, she realises it is fear. She reaches, up on her toes, to touch him. And when the bus spits smoke, she takes two steps forward with it and cannot think of what to say to reassure him.

***

His aunt is the old woman who prays. She prays for him.

His aunt it is, who finds me for him. By that time he is working in a hotel in the city. He wants someone from the city for his wife. And educated, he says. And just like that I am no longer a girl with a red ribbon wound in her hair. His aunt comes to the city to live with us. We become three: Chandu, his wife, his aunt. She tells me I am nearly a daughter to her. She does not tell me what she knows: the reason why she prays, even in the days when we are three and the men have not come for him.

You can close your eyes and say to yourself 'watermelon' or 'football.' They are both round things that can be burst. If you cannot picture them bursting, think instead of them being sliced open.

***

Chandu splashes water on the floor. The water does not puddle there, it spreads over the floor, travelling in long spokes, radiating from some lost centre. He motions his wife to observe.

"What do you see?"

"You spilled water."

"Yes, but what is the water doing?"

"The water is flowing."

"Why does it flow?"

"Because the floor slopes, see?"

"No, the floor may slope, but that is not why water spilled to the floor flows."

"Why then?"

"It seeks its level. A stone floor might first have to be worn through, but water, and anger, both seek their level."

His wife is not impressed. Not even when he repeats the performance for each of their children in turn. Seven and a half years to give birth to three children, whom he teaches by spilling water on the floor.

She asks him what he meant when he asked for an educated wife. He speaks loftily of women who have their own story. She is amused. She has listened to him tell his father's story and his father's father's story. What, she asks, happened to his mother's story?

Chandu comes home with stitches crawling across his forehead.

Men who go to or come from the airport late at night or early in the morning are drunker than men at any other hour. The hotel is by the airport. It exists to cater to these men. The waiters are quick to step away from the tables, back as far as the far wall that they press their backs against. The men ask for more drink and curse the poor service that is huddled far away from them, back where the room is dark.

One man takes foil, and a paper that he rolls like a cigarette. They take turns, the three of them, cooking smack on more foil that they cut into shape with their cutlery knives. Later, foil lies crumpled on the table.

He tells his wife the details of what he saw. Of how the drug bubbled on this pan so thin.

"Like daal at home?"

"No, quicker, like the tadka. You have to pour it before it burns."

"Pour it?"

"Well, suck it in through the first thing they made – the pipe."

"I thought you said you were too far to see anything?"

She loses interest: he is making it up as he speaks. She hurries to ask him what and where and why the stitches. He tells her again about foil that lies crumpled on the table. A man, one of the three, lies crumpled on the floor. Another begins the slide from his seat to the floor. Chandu, seated on the rough concrete floor of their home, has trouble sliding his bottom along it to demonstrate.

"See, the seat is smooth, like leather, but plastic. I am the only one who approaches when the men shout."

She can picture it. The one who is sliding to join the one on the floor leaves a wet streak on the seat as he drags the rag of himself to his knees.

"They are shouting, and though I come fast one man throws the ashtray. It is glass but it hits me like a brick."

She touches the curving bite of thread. From his right ear it chews its way across his right eyelid and halts only on reaching the gristly meat of his brow.

The men are angry. They push past Chandu to the piano player, shout at him to play, push him from his seat, and take away the piano-seat. "Sisterfucker. Won't play when he is told to. Now there's no way for him to play, is there?"

***

His aunt is still praying. Her lips move without stopping. She holds a Styrofoam plate; it is tilted away from her; the food heaped into its compartments is in danger of spilling out. Plates lie tossed away everywhere along the footpath and in the street. Some plates have been tossed onto the rubbish pile. Above the pile, the sign on the wall says, "This Is A Holy Place. It Is Not Permitted To Urinate Here." His aunt staggers toward the rubbish heap. Yellow dogs follow her. Some other yellow dogs chase plates, which skitter and slide from their tongues. His aunt seats herself some distance from the vigour of their begging tails.

But this is comical. How will his aunt pray and also eat?

She has not stopped praying since the evening before. The dogs watch to see what she will do. I, Chandu's wife, sent her to the temple for the free meal. I watch from my doorway across the street.

Standing in the doorway and watching his aunt not eat, I am conscious of myself, my skin that rides the rise of my breasts, swelling to nowhere, nothing, never. He will not return. I can still breathe.

***

The clerk at the tehsildar's office – not the one who failed to show up before the bus taking Chandu to the city left, but the clerk before him, actually the father of the tardy clerk – remembers the baby who survived the drought of 1967 and came crawling to extend a hand and receive rice ladled out from a pail. This clerk is retired, but comes out of retirement when the men come with their sticks and questions. He is a man who remembers – "Chandu". He gives the name easily. He adds, "Chandu comes and goes from the city."

In the city the men move easily, beating Chandu’s feet now. Earlier they beat his hand as if he were a school-aged child.

The clerk is an old man, but age has not robbed him of reason. His reason is his tardy son, and his tardy son’s son, who must also someday sit at the registry office and answer when asked the names of those survivors who held out their hands, unshaking.

“Chandu.”

***

When Chandu leaves on the bus to the city that first time, he is headed where he means to make a name for himself. And that name isn’t ‘Chandu’. He begins with a stint hauling goods, whatever goods need hauling – gas cylinders, crates of vegetables, battery blocks, air-conditioner units in need of repair, sacks of laundry thrown onto the backs of trucks in a sweeping arc from his waist, as if he were broadcasting seeds in the fields back home. The fields are burnt stubble now, but the pleasure of them is still strapped to his muscles, just like the basket of seeds he once strapped to his waist. He flings the laundry bags as if they were as light as seeds – no, lighter still, as light as chaff in the wind. He laughs in the face of the wind. He has a willing laugh. He earns a name as someone ‘willing’.

The manager submits his name for promotion from the laundry room to the bathroom. He receives training in how to stand: his bent arm becomes a towel-bar, his other arm extended, so the palm becomes a shelf for the basket of soap.

“All day I stand in a room till my feet take root and my arms grow leaves and I am nothing but a tree.”

“Try me,” his wife whispers. “Does your sap flow slow? Let me see your tree.”

She waits till the front door shuts behind him. He had said, “Careful.” He had meant for her to make sure the whole notebook – every page and even the cardboard cover – was burned. She douses the fire and reads what can still be read.

‘The Kota region.’

On another corner of the same page: ‘tea forgotten’.

‘Our Work in Urban Areas’

And in tall letters: ‘TCOC’

‘LMG, AK series, INSAS, .303’

Under the heading ‘Our Work in Urban Areas’ there is a mass of closely packed English text. She asks herself, whose notebook is this? She answers her own question. It can’t be his. She flips quickly through the half-charred pages, some of them clumped together by the water she used to put out the fire in her chula. She thinks she recognizes the names of places close to his village. Signboards she has glimpsed on the way there might have included ‘Bahmani’ and ‘Chapka’ and ‘Khorkhosa’ and ‘Jaitgiri’. She yelps softly. Here is ‘Kurandi’, his home. And she knows ‘Abhujmad’.

She doesn’t know ‘Unity of the Urban Exploited Classes’.

The word ‘requisition’ floats in silken ash, holding together just long enough for her breath to tear it. Silk soots her fingertips gray. Absently, she tucks away a loose strand of hair, leaving streaks of gray across her forehead. ‘Our Work in Urban Areas’ makes her afraid. She lights the match and touches it to the cardboard cover. It takes many tries before the wet pages burn again. Later, she sees the gray on her forehead. She scrubs her face repeatedly while her daughter stands by complaining as the bucket of water set aside for her bath is depleted.

“They called me ‘Willing.’ Now I am a dangerous thinker.”

His wife doesn’t laugh at his puffed-out chest. She doesn’t say, what dangerous, what thinker? You are a waiter. It was just yesterday you were working in the hotel bathroom. Remember, you complained they made you into a tree? She doesn’t tease him. She doesn’t say, you are a boy from Kurandi. What do you know about being a dangerous thinker?

She says, “Tell me.”

Chandu says, “It’s nothing for you to know.”

But he cannot help adding. “A hotel is a place where men come and go. Sometimes, on the same day, more than one set of VIPs. They don’t see the thinker. But I am there, I pay attention.”

***

Is his aunt still praying?

***

Once, he wakes his wife in the middle of the night. She turns to him, but he is already out of bed. He has been coming and going in the night for years now.

She turns her back to his movements in the dark. She will refuse to pack him a change of clothes, a tiffin for the road. Will he leave her with another pile of paper to burn?

But he says, “Come with me.”

“The children?”

“Never mind. They won’t wake. We will be back before the morning.”

“We must tell the neighbours to let the children know we will be back soon.”

“No, not the neighbours. Wake Suresh. Tell him to keep an eye on his brother and sister.”

He takes her to the Mona Lisa Apartments, up six flights of stairs to the door of Number 8. The doorbell is answered only after they ring it again and again. A man comes to the door. He is wearing a dirty vest. He leans against the doorway. His arms are heavy.

“You are late. It’s done.”

The man’s belly pushes out from underneath the vest. He pulls his vest up and scratches his belly. He lets the vest rest above the belly. His belly could be a football or a watermelon except for the thick mat of hair that covers it – jungle cover for vermin woken from their sucking sleep, fleeing along the intricate plaiting of hair that points from his belly button to the drawstring of his pants.

***

His aunt has been praying without pause.

I stand in my doorway and read the sign across the way, reading it for the dozenth time. “This Is A Holy Place. It Is Not Permitted To Urinate Here.” I study the rubbish heap below the sign, and try to see what it is that glistens in the dark there. I think of eyeballs plucked out, of fingernails plucked out, testicles, buttocks, the hard balls of his calves. In which rubbish heap are these scattered?

I pluck the air with my fingers.

I – my intestines, organs, skin and hair – don’t know how to measure nowhere nothing never. Where does it begin, where end? How will I order eternity? How will I live without him?

It was yesterday evening his aunt began praying. Only yesterday evening. Without stopping to think eat breathe. Now I know what she prays for. She prays that the men with their ordinary faces, with the sticks they rapped against their shoes, who said there was no need for her to worry, she prays for them to be right. It has already been a night and a morning. Now it is afternoon, and soon a whole day will have gone by. In the last hours her prayers have taken the form of bargains: all that she can suffer offered in return for an end to her suffering.

***

His wife brings her hands together, clasps them to stop their plucking, brings them to her mouth and bites to break the skin. They sliced his eyelids off first so he would not shut his eyes against what was being done to him. They plucked the eyes out after everything was done. Now she has ordered eternity, from beginning to end.

Between his aunt and his wife the street lies belly-up. A tear as wide as the street and longer than it is wide spills coils of black slime, torn pipes, stink. The figure of a man – attenuated, shiny from a coating of sludge – emerges, is swallowed by the sludge, and re-emerges. The figure of the man sucks air. The figure is dipped into the sludge. It emerges again. It is dipped in again and again. It emerges covered in muck. It emerges again covered in muck. It is dipped back in.

People gather. His wife cannot see past the gathered people. She needs to see if his aunt is eating. His wife leaves the doorway. She steps into the street. She draws near the crowd. She cranes to see past the line of shoulders obstructing her view. The crowd cranes to see what is below. A froth of yellow. Whole fat snakes of turd. A murmur, like one of pleasure: the crowd wonders which of what they see in the pit is theirs. The man in the hole grins his rage. He clings to the sloping sides of the pit with curled toes.

“Savages,” he shouts. “You won’t stop shitting long enough for me to clear this muck.”

He shakes his empty fist. Those at the front of the crowd step back from the spray of droplets. The crowd laughs in protest. Even as each one disclaims any interest in what lies at the man’s feet, a turd as thick as a sturdy wrist surfaces. Someone shouts about the man in the pit, “Look at him. As drunk as a…”

The man protests, but is lowered in once more. He treads the liquid sloshing at his chest, turns his head away and plunges in with his hand. Much of his face is obscured by the rag tied around his nose and mouth. Nevertheless, the crowd reads in his opaque eyes that somewhere deep in the excrement his hand has found the obstruction.

***

Chandu pushes past the hairy-bellied man at the door of Number 8.

“I was told to come here.”

He pulls her in by her hand. Her elbow brushes the man’s belly. She stumbles, then she is past him, and still pulled by Chandu’s hand she passes through the corridor, past the open doors of two or three other rooms, till she halts in front of a shut door.

A mewling calls to her from the other side. She pushes the door open. Her husband and the man confer behind her. She can hear the man urging her husband to “take it”. She enters the room. It is bare. A sheet on the floor. A girl on the sheet. She is too still. The baby is belly down on her belly. The baby moves. The baby is tied to her still. The blue-grey chord draped along the girl’s side slides into her between her thighs. Now the girl’s chest rises and falls. The newborn slips forward on her belly.

“Let me help you.” She races out the room. “There is nothing in the room. You haven’t given me anything to work with.” She darts back in. “You must push. You are not done yet.”

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