Jasmine Skies, page 5
She looked up at her precious door, and you know what she said? ‘This door will last for longer than you and me and longer than this house even. It’s a work of art.’ Then she walked back up the wooden stairs, past the shop where Shudi uncle does his carving (and before that great-grandad used to have his doctor’s surgery), past the kitchen and up, up, up, back to her bedroom.
I will paint a picture of Dida, your Thakurma, how she was on her eightieth birthday.
She settles on her huge metal bed, propped up by cushions. She’s sitting on a cream quilt and wearing her thin white sari with gold edging, and a small blue cardigan rests over her shoulders. She sits cross-legged in the middle of her mattress, like a tiny frail doll, and her thin strands of white hair are pulled into a tight bun.
‘Dance for me, Anjali, on my birthday,’ she whispers in her dry crackly voice, and then she asks me to turn the little silver key with the heart-shaped end and open her sari cupboard. She says that it’s the most beautiful piece of carving Shudi Uncle has ever made for her. Inside the cupboard are all her saris, hundreds and hundreds of them, in every colour and style of silk and cotton.
This is our game. When she plays it she doesn’t seem so frail and sleepy any more. She likes me to choose a sari to wear to dance for her. I pick a turquoise one and I prance around the room to her old-fashioned sitar music. She taps her hand on her knee as I dance and her eyes begin to sparkle with happiness.
You asked me to tell you about the house, and I have ended up telling you about Dida. I suppose for me it’s impossible to describe the house without the people in it. Probably what I have said is just how your father describes it anyway.
You should come and see it for yourself.
Your loving cousin,
Anjali x
When I finish reading I realize that my heart is beating too fast. It’s strange how close I feel to Grandad, Mum and Anjali reading these words. I scan over the same lines again and again and, as I read, my guilt for taking these letters starts to simmer up into anger that Mum wanted to keep all of this from me when she was asking the same questions herself!
Grandad used to talk to me all the time about his childhood in the house in Doctor’s Lane. When he knew he was too ill to fly to India he told me that the place he would have liked to go to more than any other was his old home. ‘You should go there, Mira; it was a beautiful house,’ he said.
‘Are you OK in there?’ calls Anjali through the bathroom door.
‘Fine!’ I shout back, jumping up and shoving everything back into my bag. I turn on the taps to pretend I’m washing my hands, hang the bag on the hook on the back of the door and then step out into the bedroom.
‘I’ve just got to pop down to the refuge. Won’t be more than an hour. It’s very safe here. Manu’s wife is only downstairs and Bacha’s guarding the door! Unless you want to come with me?’
‘I’ll be fine here,’ I reassure her. All I can think about is getting back to the letters.
I climb on the bed to look out of the high window and watch Anjali walk quickly down the stairs, appearing and disappearing, until she reaches the street below, where the golden-brown cow is still ambling around. It’s so strange that in the middle of a city like this, with all the cars and shiny glass buildings and technology, cows still wander the streets.
Now that I’m here I’m starting to feel closer to the stories Grandad used to tell me. Like the time he talked about Partition, when the British left India and there was so much chaos and bloodshed that all the medical students were sent to treat the wounded passengers fleeing their old homes and coming in off the trains to Howrah station. I’ll never forget the way he described helping a woman in one of the carriages to give birth, and there were people around her already dead, and then she died and Grandad carried the baby out into the city to an orphanage. He said that the pavements smelt of blood. He remembered everything in so much detail it was as if it had happened yesterday. ‘I often wonder what happened to that baby,’ was the way that Grandad always used to end that story.
I know that it’s really gruesome of me, but knowing that my Grandad was connected to that moment in history made me want to read everything I could about Partition and Indian Independence from the British. I wouldn’t have known so much about it otherwise, because it’s not like they teach you about it in school. Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for his family in India, when Grandad married an English-woman and stayed in Britain instead of coming back home.
Nana Kath’s told me all sorts of stories about how difficult it was for them to marry in Britain, how the priest wouldn’t marry a Hindu man in a church and what a shock it was for her parents at first that she married a ‘foreigner’. She also tells me that gradually Grandad charmed everyone. I can believe that.
I think these stories about where you come from and the history of your own family help you to see where you stand in the world. I suppose it’s because of Jidé telling me about what happened to his family in Rwanda that made me understand him better. I think I have a right to know about what happened in my own family and reading these letters seems the only way to do it, seeing as no one will tell me the truth.
As Manu’s Ambassador turns the corner I step off the bed, lock myself in the bathroom again and open a thin pale blue airmail envelope addressed to:
Uma Chatterjee
2, Mill Lane
York Way
York
North Yorkshire
UK
I didn’t even know Mum had ever lived in York. It sort of jolts me into a place that always makes me feel a bit weirded out, thinking of my mum as a ‘Chatterjee’ not a ‘Levenson’ – her life before Dad, and before me. I would never give up my name. It would be like giving up half of myself.
6 October 1980
Dear Uma,
I can’t believe that you’re actually coming to see us, after all this time. Ma’s gone crazy preparing for your arrival. I’m telling you, if ABBA was touring India and coming to stay at our house, there would be less fuss than my ma is making of you!
Dida has ordered Ma to buy a silver service of knives and forks in your honour. You know, she just sits on her bed now at the top of the house like a queen and waits for the daughter of her ‘shudurer putro’ (her ‘faraway son’) to arrive. She says it will be the highlight of her older years to see the daughter of her beloved son Bimal sit on her bed beside her and sing.
Sorry! That’s my fault. I told her about your voice, and you’d better be prepared because you are not going to get away with visiting your Thakurma unless you sing to her! (In answer to your question, that is what you, as the son’s daughter, should call her, and I call her ‘Dida’, because I’m her daughter’s daughter.)
I didn’t even know Mum had a good voice. With all the singing I’ve been doing recently, why wouldn’t she have told me that she used to sing too? I’ve never heard her, not even in the shower!
If it’s any consolation at all, I have to dance for her every day, so you and I can be the all-singing, all-dancing act together! You won’t believe the pleasure it will give her. She has photos of you all around her bed, like a little puja (prayer).
We’ve been painting the walls, a mint-green colour, Ma chose it; she said it would make you feel cool in the heat. On every single surface Ma’s placed a fan, and when I came in from school yesterday I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying to me, over the noise!
So I guess we’re just about ready for your arrival. You’ll find everything that I’ve described to be more or less exactly as I told you, but I want to warn you about something.
You and I have been writing for so long that, in some ways, I feel like we know each other so well, but there are a few things that maybe I haven’t described exactly as they are. You see, I’ve always felt free to say anything I wanted and occasionally I’ve told you things that I wanted to be true. You must realize by now that those six wise monkeys jumping in through my bedroom window every day were a creation to entertain you! I don’t remember Baba dying (I was only two), but Ma says the monkeys arrived soon after that. So, what I’m trying to tell you is that nothing will be quite as you pictured it.
Now I’m writing this by candlelight because we’ve had another one of the electrical power surges I’ve never told you about. They can happen at any time of the day or night, and if they happen at night the city blacks out, but there’s something I like about the way the darkness shrinks the whole city into one room; suddenly the birds go mad, as if to say, ‘You humans have switched off all your noise. Now it’s our turn to take over.’
There will be no more time to write again before you come, so instead of waiting for your letters, as I have done for all these years, now I am waiting for you.
Your cousin,
Anjali x
I could read these letters over and over again, just taking in every detail. I love the feel of the thin airmail paper, almost like material, and the sound of Anjali’s fourteen-year-old voice, which is so full energy and excitement, like Priya’s . . . These letters have so much history in them that I’m starting to understand why Mum wanted to keep them safe.
I take out the final letter.
6 March 1981
Dear Uma,
Thank you for your kind letter about Dida. We will all miss her so much.
What I want you to know is that I will never tell anyone, not your family or mine, that it was your idea. No matter how much they press me for the truth. And even though you ask me to tell you, there’s no point in dwelling on what happened after you left.
It’s awful. I don’t want to upset you, but I just want you to know that we should both have thought more carefully about what we were doing. I should have made you understand how it is here . . . that some things are unjust and some people have nothing . . . and, even though we don’t like it any more than you do, it’s not easy to fix. In many ways I feel responsible, because it was such a crazy, spur-of-the-moment act – I suppose I just wanted you to know that I care as much as you do. But how we tried to help was foolish and thoughtless and wrong.
I can’t tell you, when I remember the sadness in our grandmother’s eyes, how sorry I am for what we did, but I have not written to you to cause you pain.
I just don’t know what there is left to say to each other at this moment in time. Of course, I will always hold you in my heart. I’m not blaming you – we are both equally responsible for running away with our imaginations.
I think we should stop writing to each other for a while.
I hope that one day we will meet again when the pain of this has passed.
Anjali
I search through the pile again, but there is nothing else until the condolence letter for Grandad in 2011. I read this last letter over and over, trying to work out what could have happened to make them stop talking for thirty years. There’s no way the silence between them could have been ‘just losing touch’, and I feel terrible now because it’s obvious that the reason why Mum was in such a state before I left has something to do with what happened between her, Anjali and my great-grandmother. I know Grandad went to Great-Grandma’s funeral but then never returned to India after that. I feel like a thief stealing into someone else’s house of memories. I suppose it serves me right for taking the album in the first place, because now I won’t be able to let things lie until I know what really caused that silence. And I can’t ask Mum or Anjali for the answers.
I stand up, go over to the sink and stare into the mirror. I didn’t notice before that the frame is decorated with hand-painted cheeky-faced monkeys. I wonder if this mirror once belonged to little-girl Anjali. I look into it at the deepening rings of tiredness under my eyes and wonder if anyone else will be able to read on my face how guilty I feel. I take Mum’s earrings out of my bag and push them through the half-closed-up holes in my lobes. It hurts, and I think maybe that’s right, it should hurt, because I was so vile to Mum before I left, and she obviously felt bad about the argument . . . What if me coming here is all part of Mum’s sorry to Anjali for whatever it was that happened between them all those years ago. What if . . . without even knowing it, I’m the olive branch?
I unlock the bathroom door, walk over to Priya’s bed and lie down, looking up through the great arching branches of the tree . . . All the images from Anjali’s letters and a stream of questions bombard my mind as I read the letters over and over again.
When I can’t read any more I take out my iPod and listen to Jidé’s playlist and it makes me wish more than ever that he was here with me . . . ‘Summer Breeze’ . . . I’ve never heard this song before. Jidé spends hours trawling through old stuff on YouTube, and he always finds the perfect song for my mood. Lately he’s been picking out songs he thinks I could sing. I think it’s his way of encouraging me to write and sing my own stuff. He’s always going on about what a great voice I have and that I should record it, so that I’m forced to believe that I’m good. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?! I close my eyes and let the music wash over me, feeling the whisper of a breeze through the window, wafting that sweet smell towards me again. The tune is really pretty. I sing along to the refrain. It’s catchy, the sort of thing that keeps floating through your mind.
My Lips Are Sealed
Dust falling.
Dust through light,
Dancing glitter.
I try to catch the tiny specks, opening and closing, opening and closing my hands, reaching up towards a distant light. I look down. My hands are full of ash pouring between my fingers. Sand sifting through time. My head is numb and empty; the thoughts have drained out of me and all that’s left is colours, hundreds of silken rainbow colours spiralling through the air, cascading towards me, length after length of coloured silk shining through the darkness.
‘Mira, is that you? Climb up!’ calls a voice from above. That gentle lilting voice I know.
I climb and climb the lengths of cloth from pink to green to red and gold, up through turquoise blues and mustard. My arms ache so badly I stop and try to catch my breath, but the air is full of ash, filling my lungs.
‘Only a little way to go!’ says the voice in the darkness above my head, so I reach out for it and find myself clasping Grandad’s hands.
‘Be careful where you place your feet!’ he says, pulling me to safety.
I nod at him and look down, down, down to the crater below, swirling with dust.
‘What is that?’ I ask him.
‘History . . . takes time to settle.’ He smiles at me. ‘You know, Mira . . . as long as there are memories to hold on to, nothing ever really dies.’
Then I feel his hand slip out of mine.
‘Grandad!’ I call, but nothing but my own voice echoing comes back at me.
I’m trying desperately to search for where I am through a fog of dust, endless clouds and a constant thudding in my head.
‘Thought you would never wake up . . .’ Priya grins. The doors of her wardrobe are thrown open and she’s got something cranked up to full volume.
‘What do you think of this track?’
‘Heavy!’ I mumble, but I’m obviously not that convincing because she turns it off.
‘It’s metal, punk, dubstep . . . crossover. They’re all over this in the States, but maybe not the best to wake up to! Ma wouldn’t let me disturb you, but I’ve waited all this time to meet you. I couldn’t let you sleep any more! Sorry! So much to show you, so little time!’ Priya grins again and offers me a stick of gum at the same time as throwing three pieces into her own mouth.
‘So this is the hub,’ she says proudly, spreading her arms wide. ‘It’s where the magic happens! I’m just messing around really, learning to mix it all up.’
I nod, but I’m finding it difficult to get my head back in gear. That dream sort of pulled me into somewhere deep, and now I feel like I’m having to climb back out again. I think Priya realizes I’m still groggy, because she walks over and sits next to me on the bed . . . and that’s when I see, too late, that Anjali’s letters are still strewn everywhere. How could I have been so careless? I gather the pages as fast as I can, but Priya’s already holding one in her hands.
‘This is Ma’s writing, isn’t it?’
I suppose there’s no point in lying to her.
I nod.
‘It’s weird! So retro! I mean who writes letters these days anyway? Did your mum give them to you?’ she asks.
‘Not really. I sort of borrowed them,’ I whisper.
‘Rebel!’ teases Priya, casting her eyes carelessly over the letter. ‘Ah! The house in Doctor’s Lane . . . Well, the door’s just about still standing. I wouldn’t ask Ma about the old place though if I were you. It’s one of her sore points.’
‘Why?’
‘All I know is that the family had to give it up after Boro-Dida – old Grandma died. We had to move out because my other grandparents were ill, so we lived with them for a while. I think Shudi Uncle and his wife, Anishka, stayed on there for some time. You know, he was a carpenter and he had a workshop there, but apparently Anishka was keen to move to a modern flat. No one wanted to sell the house but no one wanted to live there either. I think Ma tried to have the refuge there, but it was not possible. So it got sold to developers. Ma calls them sharks waiting to eat up the whole of old Kolkata. If you ask her about it she just says that we all need to stop living in the past. She’ll tell you she doesn’t want to go back to the house because she wants to keep her memories sacred. Anyway, trust me, she’s so stubborn you’ll never get anything out of her unless she wants to tell you.’ Priya hops off the bed and tugs me to my feet. ‘Doesn’t your ma get like that from time to time, all emotional over nothing much?’
