Suman, tall and threatening, as if she already owned my stepmother and my house, and my Akka. The woman stared back.
“We shall hate her forever,” I whispered to Hem.
“For ever and ever,” Hem repeated solemnly.
Suman
I came to Merrit’s Point nine years ago at the end of March, a time when the ground is knee-deep in snow, and your breath hangs like a ghost before your face. I had flown from Madras to Vancouver. From there a single-engined plane that shook and rattled as it thrust through enormous cloud banks brought me to Merrit’s Point, once plunging into an air pocket with such sickening violence that I was sure that we were about to crash. I was one of five passengers on the shuddering twin-engine plane, and the only woman. The four men who sat scrunched up in their seats, knees wedged against the seat in front, their large heads nearly touching the roof of the plane, were like giants. What did they eat to make them so big? Vikram, my husband, was tall, but his head was long and slender, not like these men with their football-shaped skulls. I wondered what they thought of me—a bright exclamation mark in my yellow and black printed silk sari. I was also wearing all my jewellery because people back home, those with relatives abroad, had warned me that itwas better to carry my valuables on my person because suitcases were often stolen by luggage handlers. From their talk it seemed as if the world beyond our dusty street was full of thieves, smugglers, rapists, hoodlums and other criminals.
Mountains circled the quiet little airport at Merrit’s Point, looming over it. There were only a few passengers waiting for luggage. I dragged my two suitcases off the carousel and loaded them on a cart. Both had blue plastic rope wrapped thrice around them, giving them the happy look of birthday presents. It was Madhu Kaki’s idea. My aunt was certain that bags travelling on planes to foreign countries regularly came apart at the seams.
“Remember my sister-in-law’s nephew’s son Gopi, who arrived in the U.S.A. and received his belongings in bits and pieces?” she had said a week before my departure. She was bent over one of her six steel trunks that her father had given her as part of her wedding dowry, searching for a rope of the right thickness and colour. There was nothing that she couldn’t fish out of one of those trunks of hers: measuring tapes, geometry sets that had belonged to her sons, packets of seeds whose names she had forgotten and that she had collected from the garden of her late father-in-law’s house, stacks of saris which she was saving to sell to the raddhi-wallah, waiting for the gold prices to peak before she did so, because the saris, she claimed, had pure gold borders and she was determined to get the best price possible for them. There were tins of powder that had belonged to her long-deadmother and that she could not bear to throw away, photographs, ancient flowers from her bridal braid, six pairs of scissors, silver bowls and plates, ripped-up cotton saris and bedsheets, and dozens of other odds and ends for which she always managed to find a use.
She poked me on the head with her knuckles. “Well, do you remember the boy?”
“I can’t say I do,” I had replied, preoccupied with the thought that I had got married in too much of a hurry. I had wished that Chandra Raman was around to tell me how to deal with my fears, how to toss my head as defiantly as she had tossed hers and run away from my new Canadian husband.
Madhu Kaki rapped me again with her knuckles. “He was the one who would have come first in the All India Medical entrance exams, that brilliant he was, but forgot to write his student number on his exam paper in his hurry to hand it in and poor fellow had to enrol in a polytechnic instead. Ended up as a chef in a hotel chain, the top chef, I am told. Now do you remember who I am referring to?”
The nephew had eventually gone abroad, but since he had no aunt like
“We shall hate her forever,” I whispered to Hem.
“For ever and ever,” Hem repeated solemnly.
Suman
I came to Merrit’s Point nine years ago at the end of March, a time when the ground is knee-deep in snow, and your breath hangs like a ghost before your face. I had flown from Madras to Vancouver. From there a single-engined plane that shook and rattled as it thrust through enormous cloud banks brought me to Merrit’s Point, once plunging into an air pocket with such sickening violence that I was sure that we were about to crash. I was one of five passengers on the shuddering twin-engine plane, and the only woman. The four men who sat scrunched up in their seats, knees wedged against the seat in front, their large heads nearly touching the roof of the plane, were like giants. What did they eat to make them so big? Vikram, my husband, was tall, but his head was long and slender, not like these men with their football-shaped skulls. I wondered what they thought of me—a bright exclamation mark in my yellow and black printed silk sari. I was also wearing all my jewellery because people back home, those with relatives abroad, had warned me that itwas better to carry my valuables on my person because suitcases were often stolen by luggage handlers. From their talk it seemed as if the world beyond our dusty street was full of thieves, smugglers, rapists, hoodlums and other criminals.
Mountains circled the quiet little airport at Merrit’s Point, looming over it. There were only a few passengers waiting for luggage. I dragged my two suitcases off the carousel and loaded them on a cart. Both had blue plastic rope wrapped thrice around them, giving them the happy look of birthday presents. It was Madhu Kaki’s idea. My aunt was certain that bags travelling on planes to foreign countries regularly came apart at the seams.
“Remember my sister-in-law’s nephew’s son Gopi, who arrived in the U.S.A. and received his belongings in bits and pieces?” she had said a week before my departure. She was bent over one of her six steel trunks that her father had given her as part of her wedding dowry, searching for a rope of the right thickness and colour. There was nothing that she couldn’t fish out of one of those trunks of hers: measuring tapes, geometry sets that had belonged to her sons, packets of seeds whose names she had forgotten and that she had collected from the garden of her late father-in-law’s house, stacks of saris which she was saving to sell to the raddhi-wallah, waiting for the gold prices to peak before she did so, because the saris, she claimed, had pure gold borders and she was determined to get the best price possible for them. There were tins of powder that had belonged to her long-deadmother and that she could not bear to throw away, photographs, ancient flowers from her bridal braid, six pairs of scissors, silver bowls and plates, ripped-up cotton saris and bedsheets, and dozens of other odds and ends for which she always managed to find a use.
She poked me on the head with her knuckles. “Well, do you remember the boy?”
“I can’t say I do,” I had replied, preoccupied with the thought that I had got married in too much of a hurry. I had wished that Chandra Raman was around to tell me how to deal with my fears, how to toss my head as defiantly as she had tossed hers and run away from my new Canadian husband.
Madhu Kaki rapped me again with her knuckles. “He was the one who would have come first in the All India Medical entrance exams, that brilliant he was, but forgot to write his student number on his exam paper in his hurry to hand it in and poor fellow had to enrol in a polytechnic instead. Ended up as a chef in a hotel chain, the top chef, I am told. Now do you remember who I am referring to?”
The nephew had eventually gone abroad, but since he had no aunt like
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