Flying in Colors, page 12
“Why when we grow up?” Ruku asks. “Why can’t we do it now?”
I am very happy Ruku asks this, because it’s a question in my mind too.
Trim Aunty laughs. “Little women are asking big-women questions,” she says, pinching Ruku’s cheeks. “The answer is your bodies don’t know how to have babies yet.”
“That’s not fair, is it?” I say at once. “We are the same in every way, Trim Aunty, except we are smaller.”
“That’s a great enough big difference, and it changes everything. Anyway, I have lots of work to do and can’t be standing here arguing with you two. When you grow up, you will understand all that I am saying. You just let him be now.”
“We are old enough to understand many things, Trim Aunty. It’s all you grown people who treat us silly and make us feel like we are babies or something.”
Trim Aunty gives me a look and raises her eyebrows at me. “I can’t stand here arguing with you, Pavi.”
After Baluba has his milk, he is put into the cradle that they made with Naanamma’s old sari strung up from an iron hook in the ceiling. I want very much to swing in that cradle, but Trim Aunty won’t let me do that either. That’s probably a good thing: I don’t think that sari could have managed my weight. When she puts Baluba in, she lets us swing him and goes to have her lunch. Ruku and I take turns swinging him. As I rock him carefully, Baluba sings: “Waaa . . . waaaa . . . kaaaa . . .” It’s a very sweet, peaceful sound. It reminds me of how Amma made up Wawaka for comfort, how I continued with Wawaka stories, and here is Baluba saying, “Wawaka.”
Over the next week, we play with him all the time. When Trim Aunty leaves with Baluba on the weekend, we can think of nothing but babies.
It feels like forever since it was April 15, Uncle Selva’s birthday. So much has happened. This year when we visit his grave, Ruku comes with us for the first time. At the cemetery, I show her John Singleton’s grave with the cross and angel, and though Selva is not her own uncle, she is very sad that he died. Ruku, Manju, and I walk around and pick out our most favorite tombstones. Manju and Ruku exchange notes about their classes, and Manju promises to visit us in Purasaiwalkam.
I listen to their talk, but only half of me listens. Nothing has really changed. Selva is still in his grave and we are lighting the lamps, offering the flowers, laying out the dosai on the banana leaf. Last year it was nine years and five months ago. Now it is ten years and five months. Or maybe, last year it was eight years and six months ago, and now it is nine years and six months ago. I don’t know. I am completely mixed up. Perumi would know, of course. We didn’t see her this morning, thankfully, and I didn’t have to listen to her usual “Five months after this child was born.”
My head is tired, tired of these calculations. Oh, Selva, how long will this go on?
Sumi Aunty takes out her box of kolam powder. This time she hasn’t brought rice powder. Instead, it is the usual mysterious white stone powder with tiny, tiny sparkles in it. Before she makes the patterns, I startle her by abruptly taking the box from her.
“What, what are you doing, Pavi?” she says uncomfortably.
I bend down, take the powder between my thumb and first two fingers, and let it fall through to make the borders on the steps. “Janaki showed me how to do it,” I say, stopping and looking at my work.
“That’s very lovely,” Sumi Aunty says. “You have a natural way, Pavi. This is good. I will show you the book in which I have collected a lot of patterns.”
I finish the borders and hand the box back to Sumi Aunty.
Ammamma pats my shoulders. “So much love for your beloved Selva, Pavi, my good child,” she says, her eyes clouded.
Back at the Egmore house, the feast Ammamma spreads out is even better than last year. Two kinds of vadais, vegetable pulao, lime rice, tomato rice, plain rice, fried plantain, potato fry, rasam, eggplant kuzhambu, and paayasam. Sumi Aunty, Manju’s mother, has brought delicious gulab jamun. I tell Ruku that it is my favorite sweet from now on.
It’s a very happy day when we return home to Purasaiwalkam that evening.
In the night, Ruku and I sit on the steps that go up to the terrace.
“Birth is the opposite of death,” I say. “What is the opposite of dying, Ruku?”
“Borning?”
“Doesn’t sound right. I was born, I am born . . . Can we say, ‘I am borning’? ‘I was borning’?”
She thinks about it. “Born doesn’t have continuous tense, Pavi, I’m pretty sure. It only happens once.”
“You are right. You can be in a dying state for a long time, but you can’t be in a born state for long. We can’t know why Selva or anyone dies. But maybe, if we can understand how and why anyone is born, we won’t feel so bad about why anyone dies.”
“Are you sad about going to the cemetery today, Pavi?” Ruku asks.
I don’t answer, because if I do, she will know that I am crying in my heart. She puts her arm around me and holds me in the dark.
“There’s something Trim Aunty’s not telling us about babies, Pavi,” she says finally.
“Yes, Trim Aunty is very cunning sometimes. If only Chanki had not left us and gone away, he would surely have told us the truth.”
“Yes, poor Chanki. I wonder where he is. I hope he is not suffering. Naanamma is sad she has not heard from him at all after that first letter. Yes, he would have surely helped us. But you can ask your mother, no, Pavi? She’s going to have a baby.”
The very next day, I sit beside my mother when she rests in the afternoon. I put my hand on her stomach, which is big now. “So, Amma, this baby, how did it get inside you?”
My mother covers my hand with hers and laughs. She says, “This is exactly why you should be in school, Pavi. If your head is occupied with vocabulary and comprehension or equations and fractions, you will not be wasting time thinking about unnecessary things. Now, let me have a quick nap. I have to make lists and sort through cupboards and suitcases.”
How can babies ever be unnecessary? It’s no use.
After visiting Selva’s grave, Ruku and I create a new game: “having a baby in the stomach.” For this, we beg my mother for an old cotton sari to cut up and use as we wish. What a fuss she makes to give it to us, because she is saving it for bartering. My mother is very proud when she can exchange old clothes for new stainless steel dishes or plastic buckets. That’s how she got the big blue bucket that we use for having baths. She got it after trading three of Appa’s shirts, two pants, and four saris, and bargaining for nearly two hours. The bucket was kept carefully in the kitchen for everybody to admire, and only after a month were we allowed to use it.
The cotton sari she gives us has orange and green checks and is very soft. We go to Ruku’s parents’ room to work. First, Ruku takes out a big pair of scissors from her mother’s sewing box. We carefully fold the sari. Then Ruku cuts it into two halves. She has a pair of wooden marapachi dolls from Tirupathi. One is a girl and one is a boy.
“I would like the girl, Pavi,” she says.
“Fine, I’ll have the boy.” I do not fight with her about this. I really don’t mind one way or the other.
I hold the girl doll against Ruku’s stomach while she wraps the sari around and around her waist. Once the baby is nicely wrapped, I knot the ends of the sari behind her back. We look in the mirror. Ruku’s baby stomach looks very real. Then she begins to walk about uncomfortably, like how we have seen my mother walk. She puts her hands on her waist and stands with her stomach held out and sighs heavily. I clap and say, “Ruku, you are too clever.”
When Ravi joins us, poor fellow, he is very much left out of this game. We don’t mind sharing the sari with him. We are ready to make a baby stomach for him, but he is not at all interested. We do one for Arun as well, only his stomach is more than half of him, and he struts to the kitchen to Naanamma and tells her that he is going to have a baby. We follow him and watch her laugh very much and hug him a great deal. Then she pretends to be his doctor, examining him carefully with a little rope that she used for a stethoscope and prodding him all over, but really just tickling him.
The following Monday, Ruku whispers to me that she has guessed how to make our game real. We are hiding under the table with the beaded cover in my grandfather’s study. She says, “I’ve put the baby in my stomach.”
“In your stomach, the baby in your stomach? What do you mean, Ruku?”
She puffs out her lips victoriously. “I ate a doll, see. Remember the little wooden doll I used to have, that Chanki gave us? Yours broke when you were bathing it and tried to bend it.”
I nod. “Yes, yes, I remember. What do you mean? You ate it?”
She pats her stomach. “It’s all here now. I made it into little pieces and swallowed it. It’s becoming a baby here. You can do it too, if you want.”
I am quite impressed at how clever she is. But still I am a bit careful. “How long do you think it will take?”
“Oh, your mother is taking forever. But I don’t think mine will take that long, me being so small and the doll being smaller, you know. Maybe one or two months, let’s see.”
We feel an incredible excitement. To have a small living doll baby of our very own, to do what we please with it, to feed it, bathe it, dress it, and grow it, it is such a wonderful, wonderful matter. Though when we think about wiping its bottom and its poop and the smell of that, it’s a bit tough. But we would share it, so it should be fine. We whisper and whisper forever about it.
I start a journal and record whatever Ruku says or feels or does, so that nothing will be a mystery.
Ravi cannot understand what has happened to us. It’s our biggest secret so far. He follows us wherever we go. But we can’t tell him anything because we are not sure about anything.
Two more days go by. By Thursday, nothing happens. Friday ends. Still, nothing. Ruku is not worried about that. She is very calm and says, “You can’t be so impatient, Pavi. It will happen, just wait.”
I have lots of questions. Does she feel anything inside? My mother says that the baby is kicking inside. Does Ruku have any such experience? Does Ruku have to eat more than usual, because that’s what Naanamma told my mother, to eat a little more for the little one?
On Sunday morning, Janaki buys crabs, big gray crabs with orange feet. They are kept in a bucket. Ruku, Arun, and I watch them for a while. Then we begin to choose who should eat which crab for lunch. The two big ones are for my grandfather and father. Arun wants to mark the crab shells with each person’s name.
I say Ruku should have two crabs. We look at each other secretly, Ruku and me, and laugh with the thought of the wooden doll becoming a baby. Ruku brings one of her coloring pens, but the crabs move about so dangerously that she can’t do anything. When Naanamma sees us, she says, “You silly children, let them be. Once I cook them, you’re not going to be able to tell any difference. Go and play some other game now.”
When lunch is finally served, the crabs are beyond delicious. Naanamma and Mangalam Aunty take out the sweet white flesh from the legs and the body so we don’t hurt our fingers with the sharp shells. We mix the rice with the crab and crab sauce. It is the best combination. The whole kitchen has the crab-sauce smell for a long time.
After such a lunch, there has to be something sweet. So Naanamma gives us each a coin and says to get some ice cream when the man brings his ice-cream cart on the street. We wait and wait, but he isn’t coming. Arun puts the coin in his mouth. I tell him to take it out, but he won’t listen.
We watch the crows and a stray cat that walks on the opposite side of the street. Arun begins to cough, and when I turn to see, his face is all twisted. The coin has gone down his throat and is stuck there. He makes scary breathing noises. I don’t know what to do. So I run into the kitchen and get a glass of water and force him to drink and swallow the coin fully.
My mother comes out, and when we tell her what happened, she says, “Pavi, Pavi, what have you done? You should have made him cough it out, not swallow it. But, we can’t blame you. How could you know what to do?”
Since it is Sunday, Appa takes Arun to Doctor Karan’s house.
I look at Arun as he leaves with Appa and one thought after another squeezes through my brain.
First: Will he die?
It seems so easy to die. Yet everyone, that is, mostly everyone, is alive and doing whatever they have to do.
I cannot think like this about Arun. He will be fine. He will be fine.
If Ruku ate a doll to make a baby, what will Arun’s coin become in his stomach?
If something should happen to Arun . . .
I pray that I will offer grass to Lord Ganesha for the rest of my life; or at least every day till the end of the month. God is surely punishing me for getting angry about why he didn’t save Selva. Maybe I too should swallow a coin and suffer whatever Arun is going through.
Ruku worries with me. She also says she would swallow a coin and suffer with both of us.
By seven thirty, dinner is done. Naanamma makes idlis for everybody, with coconut chutney and tomato curry. Though Ruku and I don’t feel like eating anything, we eat because we want to act as if everything is quite normal.
Later, when we are all standing in the hall, my father returns with Arun. They are smiling.
“Doctor Karan said to watch his poop for a week,” my father says. “The coin should come out by then. If not, maybe we will go to the General Hospital and take an X-ray to see what’s what.”
It is somewhat of a relief. I volunteer at once to monitor Arun’s poop. Every day for the next two days, when Arun squats, I squat beside him. I don’t even mind the stink he makes. Nothing else matters, we have to somehow get the coin to come out.
During this time, I begin to know my little brother a lot more. He says he is afraid of darkness, of the dark noises, noises that go shoosh and ttch, ttch, ttch.
“I am so afraid, I don’t even like to sleep, Pavi.”
“That’s terrible, just terrible, Arun. If darkness is scaring you, you just tell it, ‘I will sleep and chase you away, Darkness.’ Tell it, ‘My big sister protects me always, and if I wake her up, she will fight all the Darknesses in the world.’”
He laughs.
“And, Pavi Akka, one of the high school girls comes to see me every day during lunchtime. She brings me chocolate and calls me her darling.”
“Arun, you have a fan! I want to see her, next time.” I laugh with him.
“My best friend is Rahul, Akka. He wants me to go to his house for his birthday. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Arun, we can ask Amma and go in Maari’s rickshaw.”
“I hope this thing comes out soon, Akka. Ruku says they’ll cut me open if it doesn’t.”
“Don’t listen to her, Arun. Let’s talk about which school period you like best.”
“My best is arithmetic, Akka. Yours?”
“Arithmetic! It’s so hard for me. Every time I think I understand a sum, I get the next one wrong. I hate that.”
Arun laughs. “Numbers are the best.”
“I like words, Arun. Words in stories, in books, words in my mind. I think my English teacher is so kind that my favorite subject is English.”
“My English teacher is very strict, Akka. She hits us with a ruler when we can’t spell.”
“Next time, I will help you before your spelling test.”
Arun looks happy. This is the good thing that has come out of all this—I feel I know him a whole lot better than before.
After he is done and washed up, I probe the poop with a stick, my entire concentration on the coin, only the coin. On the 28th of April, success! A round, flat, metal object emerges. I call my mother and Ruku with the greatest excitement. Amma confirms it is the coin.
Arun is very proud about this achievement and goes off with Amma for a cream biscuit.
After all that happened with Arun, Ruku says, “I don’t think eating the doll is the right way to make a baby.”
I agree. “Your stomach probably digested the wood, and you must have pooped it out.”
Ruku giggles. “Yes, I think so too, Pavi. Still, the grown-ups are hiding something from us, I am very sure. They just want us to go to school and keep on studying but not learning what we want to know. What a bore! That’s why they’re not telling. But I’ve been thinking about it. There must be some other space inside, different from the stomach space. That must be the place for the baby.”
“I think you are right, Ruku. A place like a nest where the egg can stay and hatch into a baby.”
“Pavi, Pavi, that must be it. You are so brilliant to think like this.”
We hug each other, feeling very proud of ourselves.
“Still, it is a mystery,” Ruku says, “I am going to find out soon, and when I do, I will tell you about it. Or, if you find out first, you tell me.”
Every day, Appa waits eagerly for the postman to come and bring news about our visas. As soon as he arrives home from work in the evening, his first question is, “Any letters?”
By April 30, there is still no news.
Appa tells us that something is holding up our papers and that he has to go to the US consulate in Delhi to see what that is. He will leave the next day.
Early the next morning, at 8 a.m., all of my mother’s and father’s families go to the Meenambakkam airport to see him off. We leave in three taxis—two Ambassadors and a Fiat.
Our trip to the Madras airport thrills us so much, I know that no one slept last night. Too exciting. It is our first ever visit to the airport, except for Vepery Thaatha, who traveled on a plane when he worked for the Indian Railways.
