Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa Page A

bumped: and the taut curve of her cheekbones is framed by a jaw as delicately oval as an egg. The hint of coldness, common to such chiseled beauty, is overwhelmed by the exuberant quality of her innocence. I feel she is beautiful beyond bearing.
    Her firm strokes, her healing touch. The motherliness of Mother. It reaches from her bending body and cocoons me. My thighs twitch, relaxed.
    Her motherliness. How can I describe it? While it is there it is all-encompassing, voluptuous. Hurt, heartache and fear vanish. I swim, rise, tumble, float, and bloat with bliss. The world is
wonderful, wondrous—and I a perfect fit in it. But it switches off, this motherliness. I open my heart to it. I welcome it. Again. And again. I begin to understand its on-off pattern. It is treacherous.
    Mother’s motherliness has a universal reach. Like her involuntary female magnetism it cannot be harnessed. She showers material delight on all and sundry. I resent this largesse. As Father does her unconscious and indiscriminate sex appeal. It is a prostitution of my concept of childhood rights and parental loyalties. She is my mother—flesh of my flesh—and Adi’s. She must love only us! Other children have their own mothers who love them ... Their mothers don’t go around loving me, do they?

    A portion of our house at the back is lent to the Shankars. They are newly married, fat and loving. She is lighter skinned than him and has a stout braid that snuggles down her back and culminates in a large satin bow, red, blue or white. At about five every evening Shankar returns from work. He trudges up the drive, up along the side of our house, and somewhere in the vicinity of our bathroom lets loose a mating call.
    â€œDarling! Darling! I’ve come!”
    No matter where we are, Ayah, Adi and I rush to the windows and peer out of the wire netting.
    â€œMy life! My Lord! You’ve come!” rejoices Gita, as if his return is a totally unexpected delight.
    At his mate’s answering call Shankar puffs out, and further diminishing a slender leather briefcase he carries under his arm, breaks into a thudding trot.
    Because theirs is an arranged marriage, they are now steamily in love. I drop in on Gita quite often. She is always cooking something and mixed up with the fumes of vegetables and lentils is the steam of their night-long ecstasy. It is very like the dark fragrance Masseur’s skillful fingers generate beneath Ayah’s sari. Gita is always smiling, bubbling with gladness. She is full of stories. She tells me the story of Heer and Ranjah, of Romeo and Juliet.

    Ayah, too, knows stories. Sitting on the lawn in front of the house she stretches her legs and dreamily chews on a blade of grass. Hari the gardener, squatting in his skimpy loincloth, is digging the soil around some rosebushes. He moves on to trim the gardenia hedge by the kitchen. It is the middle of the day in mid-February.
    Pansies, roses, butterflies and fragrances—the buzz of bees and flies and of voices drifting from the kitchen. The occasional clipclop of tonga horses on Warris Road, and bicycle bells and car horns. Hawks wheeling and distantly shrieking beneath a massive blue sky. I think of God, I pick up a dandelion and blow. “He loves me—he loves me not. He loves me—he loves me not ... ”
    Ayah hums. I recognize the tune.
    â€œTell me the story of Sohni and Mahiwal,” I say.
    Ayah’s hum becomes louder and she half croons, half speaks the Punjabi folktale immortalized in verse. We drift to rural Punjab—to a breeze stirring in wheat stalks and yellow mustard fields. To village belles weaving through the fields to wells.
    Ayah’s eyes are large and eloquent, rimmed with kohl, soft with dreams. “Beautiful Sohni—handsome Mahiwal... ”
    Their love is defiant, daring, touching. Their families bitter enemies. Sohni is not allowed to meet Mahiwal.
    The wide Chenab flows between their villages,