Nine Yard Sarees, page 6
Yew Tee Mdm: Sat 8-11 cfm?
Sivagami: Mdm I gg India...Husband pass away must go home
Yew Tee Mdm: Tk care..
Yew Tee Mdm: Msg when bk in Spore
Chinese Garden Mdm: [video message: Akka told me what happened. I already paid you for the whole month in advance but it’s okay, you can use the extra money for the funeral. Perumal will take care of you and your children. I’ll pray for you.]
Maid: [Forwarded message: “Mdm I gg India...Husband pass away must go home]
Bukit Timah Mdm: Oh no...Sivagami please take care.
Clementi Mdm: Sunday 3pm?
Clementi Mdm: [missed call]
Clementi Mdm: If cannot, come tmr? Must clean my son’s room.
Sivagami Maid: [Forwarded message: “Mdm I gg India...Husband pass away must go home]
Clementi Mdm: [video message: “Oh god, how awful. I’ll pray for your family Sivagami. Take care of yourself. You must be strong for your girls. They’re depending on you. You’re their mother. God bless you. If you need money, tell me. I will ask Saar to send you a money order. If you need to work again in Singapore, come to us. I’ll convince Saar. We’ll pay you as good as the cancer patient. Don’t worry, okay?”]
Fifteen days after Vasudevan’s demise, Clementi Madam, the only madam to respond to her pleas, sent a money order of 20,000 rupees. But it bypassed Sivagami’s hands entirely, like a wave that barely touched her toes before receding. Debts had emerged one by one: the funeral, and the money that her husband owed at the toddy shop, vetrillai shop, and the butcher. Even the precious dollars Sivagami kept for her daughters had to be exchanged into rupees to appease these rakshasas that frequently came to their doorstep, demanding for the ‘rich Singaporean madam’ to pay up, as if just six months of scrubbing pots and sweeping floors in affluent Indian homes in Singapore was enough to make her Singaporean. Worse still, the debts came with interest.
On the 20th night, after the rakshasas finally receded into oblivion and the children had been put to sleep, Sivagami’s mother pushed aside the gas cylinder in their small kitchen, reached into a deep hole within the wall, and pulled out a dark bottle of toddy. She cracked it open with her skeletal hands, poured some toddy into two tumblers and handed one to Sivagami.
“Got it from Parameswari. She confiscated it from her husband, but she doesn’t drink. So, who better to pass it to than her best friend?”
“Amma.” Sivagami’s jaw dropped as she followed her mother to the back of their house barefooted. They tucked their sarees between their knees and squatted, sweaty upper backs pressed against the peeling wall.
“What, only men can drink?” Amma snorted. “Our men are all dead, Sivagami. We’re the men around here.”
“Amma, when—”
“Give this dying woman a last wish, won’t you?”
“You’re not dying!” Sivagami snapped.
“We all are, Sivagami. Each day, we’re closer to death. Some of us just die quicker than others, by choice or not. Come.” Amma knocked their tumblers together, the clinking of metal ringing in the solemn night. “Drink with your mother.”
Against the chorus of crickets and under the moonlight, Sivagami tentatively placed her lips against the cool rim of the tumbler before taking a sip. It was as warm as the day had been. Her mouth tingled from the slightly sweet, fermented taste that she had only ever encountered on Vasudevan’s lips before. She gulped, and the toddy rushed down her throat too quickly, causing her to choke. Her mother only laughed, emptying the tumbler down her gullet as if it were second nature to her.
“Who knew Draupadi and I would have a drink together like this one day? The goddess herself coming to our house to have alcohol.”
“This is disgusting.” Sivagami cried as she tried not to gag. She reached for the end of her saree and wiped her mouth. “Why do men drink this?”
“Finish it, and you’ll see.”
Sivagami pinched her nose and drank the rest. “How many times have you done this?”
“More than you can count with your fingers.” Amma let out a phlegmy laugh. “After Kutti died, I started stealing swigs from your father’s bottles whenever he brought some home from the plantation. Women are not invincible, Sivagami. Why do men get to escape, but not us? He came from inside me. To this day, I can still remember the pain of birthing your brother. His head was too large and hairy, just like a coconut. How could I ever forget?”
“I thought you prayed.” Feeling a light rush of headiness, she slumped further down the wall until her saree-clad buttocks met with the ground.
“I pray because it feels strange when I don’t. But God doesn’t hear our prayers, Siva. Not ours. Haven’t you realised by now?”
Amma poured another round of toddy between them.
“Yet you think I’m your Draupadi.” Sivagami laughed, bitter.
“You are. You saved me. Without you, I wouldn’t have survived the awful things your father’s family said about me. They would’ve thrown me out onto the streets, left me to die. Your children wouldn’t stand a chance without you either.”
“Without me, they wouldn’t have been born,” Sivagami said, voice ridden with guilt. “They wouldn’t have to suffer the way they’re suffering now.”
Amma shook her head, swirling the toddy in her tumbler. She downed the alcohol and sighed, content. “That is life, Sivagami. Children are born, children are lost. Don’t for a moment be so self-centred to think that it was ever in your control. It’s the universe that decides the when’s and how’s. You were simply the vessel that brought them into this world. That’s all.”
Fresh tears trickled down Sivagami’s face. All of her pregnancies had been filled with roiling anxiety; the image of her little brother’s bloated body, after he’d been found washed up into a villager’s home one street down, kept repeating itself in her mind. He should have been warning enough, that raising children safe from any and all hardship was impossible. Yet here she was a widow at 37 with three young daughters—a fool.
“Listen to me,” Amma said, reaching for Sivagami’s wrist. She curled her bony fingers around it, much like a bangle; Sivagami’s only bangles, two gold ones, had to be pawned off to pay Vasudevan’s debt. “As a woman, and especially as a mother, society will make you believe that everything that happens to your family is your fault. Why? Because women are meant to be infallible pillars of every home. But you and I both know you’ve tried your best despite everything. So, what more can you do?”
Indeed, Sivagami thought. What more could she do?
Outside Hussein’s pawn shop the next morning, Sivagami stood with a wad of cash stuffed into the petticoat under her saree. The victim this time? Vasudevan’s gold ring, his family heirloom that had been passed down to him on their wedding day. It had taken her a month to come to terms with this inevitable decision to part with something solid, and real, that belonged to her husband, snug around his right index finger. But the feeling of security from the layers of paper notes pressing into the flesh of her stretch marked stomach was something Vasudevan could have never given her alive. Sometime in the future, when she felt ready, she would walk to the travel agent’s office and book the cheapest one-way flight to Singapore. Then, from Changi, she would follow Clementi Madam and Saar back to their condominium, on the condition that she would work for them exclusively. And perhaps, in a couple of years, give or take, she might finally pack up and come home.
The Perfect Shot
2017
MIRA SQUATS AND FITS herself squarely under the window. The venetian shutters have been drawn halfway. The panels are at a precise angle, facing upwards, sunlight filtering through without an unflattering glare. She tightens her grip over a hefty Pentax 67 that hangs from her neck on a wide strap. Vani Shekhar, her subject of the day, leans against the opposite white wall. A 22-year-old marketing major about to commence her honours year. Light and shadow fall across her face as she waits to be instructed and photographed.
Wordlessly, Mira adjusts the Takumar 105mm lens onto the instrument, then loads a new 120 roll of Portra 800 into the back. Maybe she will switch to Ektar 100 later, she has not decided yet. While many of her photographer friends swear by digital, film photography has always appealed to her more. The need to put one’s imagination to an extreme test, the limited number of frames especially in a medium format camera like her Pentax, the unpredictability of the film emulsion—all make for thrilling catharsis. People are the same way too, Mira thinks. Unpredictable and therefore exciting. Once, she photographed a portrait of a nonbinary Chilean street busker in New York for a travel piece in an online international magazine. Later that night, she met them by chance again at a Mexican takeout spot ten blocks down. They, and a brown paper bag of burritos, ended up at her all-expenses-paid Airbnb on the edge of East Village for the rest of that weekend; they were also the reason why she started using gaffer tape around her cameras, after her Olympus was catapulted off the bed during an overzealous switch of positions.
Who knows what Vani will bring to the table?
When Vani was 9, she spent an entire month drinking a glass of water filled with ash for breakfast. It was on her mother’s orders, based on an ancient belief passed down through generations of pious Hindu mothers that drinking vibhuthi would cleanse one’s body of all toxins. The strange diet had begun after a family holiday in Gold Coast. Upon returning from the dry scorched summer of Australia, Vani’s scalp erupted. Spots of crusted flakes began to slowly spread under her thick lustrous hair, from back to front. At first, her mother thought it was some form of head lice that she tried to kill with Parachute coconut oil. But when she realised her diagnosis was wrong, she turned to God and began administering the chalky concoction. While Vani herself did not care for the drink, she did not put up a fight either. After all, the ash did nothing other than to slightly sweeten the water; it would still be years before Vani realised vibhuthi was actually made from cow dung. Once the first month was over, her mother added turmeric water to the mix as well, to heighten the chance of healing. But the crusting on Vani’s scalp continued, followed by the flaking. Worse, the screaming and sometimes weeping began too because her mother was sometimes too absent-minded. On several occasions, she would run a comb through Vani’s hair with too much force, plastic teeth catching onto scaly crevices or crusted peaks, drawing blood that dried into hair in turn making the act of showering the next day all the more painful. It took three months of trial and error for Vani’s mother to finally admit defeat and beg her husband to book Vani an appointment at the national skin centre. In the consultation room, the three waited for the doctor to call a spade a spade. And in their case, the spade turned out to be psoriasis.
The diagnosis came with a heap of topical steroids and a curse of incurability, which then led to a blame game between Vani’s parents. Which side of the family had caused this? Which ancestor’s mutated genes were to blame? Who decided to holiday in Australia? How could a child even be asked to use steroids? What if it got worse? How could the girl marry one day if her skin grew worse than it already was? What man would be okay with it when her own parents found it revolting?
Divine intervention did come in the end however, in the form of Padma Periyamma, Vani’s aunt. In a phone conversation with Vani’s mother, Periyamma put an end to the blame game between her younger sister and brother-in-law with a simple statement: “Sometimes, these things are just part of our karma.” Easy for her to say when she did not have to live with it. That answer satisfied Vani’s parents more than it should have though. Maybe because it reallocated blame to a mystical, divine system of checks and balances that was irrefutable and widely accepted. But in their eagerness to latch onto the first explanation that vindicated them, Vani’s parents failed to realise that it would be their daughter who would take the fall instead, scalp crusted with speculations of epoch-old mistakes.
Mira pads back and forth in the tiny room, right eye squinting into the viewfinder as she hunts for the ideal angle and depth of field. Though she cannot afford mistakes given that there are only ten exposures per roll of film, she knows she must be quick with the sun beginning to set outside.
“Whose flat is this anyway?” Vani asks.
“My relatives’. They’ve passed away already.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Could you turn your head slightly towards the window, Vani?”
Vani does as she is told, tilting towards the light.
The effect is immediate. The shutter’s shadow now falls higher on Vani’s face. The dark edges tease the skin right above her left brow, where there is an inflamed spot. The spot is the size of a 20-cent coin. Not large but enough to be visible. If one were to be imaginative, like Mira is, it even resembles a red-stained moon that was bitten off on one side by some impatient creature, its uneven circumference betraying signs of a messy attack. Hovering upon the brow’s arch, the spot is both waxy and dry at once, depending on where and how the light catches. Offhandedly, Mira wonders what it would be like to touch. To trace the spot with the tip of her index finger.
The sunlight deepens and the spot begins to glow amber. Almost the same way it had when Mira spotted Vani on an evening bus en route to Waterloo Street. At first, she simply recognised the familiar face, having once met Vani through a mutual friend at a wedding two years ago. But just as she was about to go over to say hello, she noticed the spot. She had not noticed it during their first meeting. However, on the bus, when the last rays of dusk hit Vani’s face between the gaps of her fringe, Mira beheld the perfect shot. Except, she did not have her camera on her then to commit it to eternity.
Vani grimaces.
“What’s wrong?” Mira raises her head from the viewfinder.
“My skin’s kind of sensitive to sunlight.” She gestures to the spot. “Hurts a little.”
“Oh, do you want to stop?” She asks, finger still circling the shutter.
Vani shakes her head, then musters a small smile. “Just keep going.”
Mira tightens her grip over the Pentax. It is larger than what her hands are meant to hold, but all the more affirming because of it. With its solid weight in her palms, the world is subdued in an instant and made palatable again. Even worth revelling in. She holds her breath and takes the first shot, the shutter music to her ears. Like artillery going off in a distance.
Vani laughs in surprise, bright eyes crinkling as she breaks out of her pose. “That’s loud.”
Mira nods with a knowing smile. “This fellow is notorious for it. But I like it—very satisfying.”
“How old were you when you started using film cameras?”
“About 9. I guess I always found it a good way to cope with the world.”
Vani frowns slightly, as if she has a question on her mind, but she does not probe further.
The first time Mira had paid attention to a film camera of any kind was through a door left ajar that led into her uncle’s bedroom. That incidentally was also the first time, before discovering the wonders of pornographic images that loaded halfway in dial-up internet, that she had ever seen people copulate. Except it was not her aunt under him but their young maid who cried silently throughout the encounter. Ordeal, Mira would now call it. A traumatic event. Something that ought to have landed him in prison. It is baffling to imagine a man like him pretending to understand the delicate art of photography, when his touch had seemed more like a torch, like the ashes of a lit cigarette deliberately pushed into writhing skin. It was when Mira thought to look away that she spotted the camera. The instrument was sitting on top of the 27-inch television, its lens pointing directly at the shaking bed frame before it. Yet, it only paid passive witness just like she had, because it needed someone else’s intervention to tell the truth.
By the time her aunt returned from the wet market an hour later, the need to confess had eaten away at the 9-year-old’s conscience. So, Mira told on him. Her aunt, though, chose passivity as well, lips sealed silent by some invisible wax that Mira imagined must have looked a lot like what had dripped out from between the maid’s legs onto the sheets earlier. “You keep your mouth shut,” she was told. And she promised to do exactly that, but on one condition—that she would receive a disposable camera, the same one as her uncle’s, by the end of the week as an early birthday present. By Sunday, she had a disposable Fujifilm camera in her hands, bought directly out of the pocket of the beast.
Mira still has the negatives from that camera. The 35-mm roll that she never developed, slotted into the bottom of a plastic box labelled ‘Miscellaneous’ that sits in the back of the storeroom in her family flat. It had just been random sights of the neighbourhood that she had photographed with childlike curiosity: a mimosa plant shutting upon touch; the stray cat under Block 92 and its newborn kittens; a close-up of a hunched, old woman with hands full of groceries, who hollered at her for taking a photograph without asking for permission first; a distant shot of a bride arriving at Block 93 for her wedding ceremony; and then a bunch of blurred shots because she lacked skill and got distracted easily. All imprisoned in negatives, waiting to find the light of a new day, preferably far away from the criminal roughhousing of a man who managed to slither away scot-free.
