Thrity Umrigar Read online

  (Years later, when I am thirteen, a kindly neighbour whom my mother had complained to about my nauseating habit, pulls me aside one evening and asks me whether I know what auto-suggestion is. I have never heard the term. ‘Before going to bed tonight, tell yourself over and over again, “I will not do soo-soo in bed tonight. I will get up when I feel the urge,”’ he suggests. ‘Just imagine yourself not wetting the bed.’

  So I do. With more fervour than I’ve ever mustered, I tell myself: ‘I will get up before I soil the bed.’ There is a fierce desperation in me as I repeat the message to myself before drifting off to sleep.

  It works. Since that night a problem which is the source of much friction in my house, which had left my family feeling helpless and ashamed and angry, for which my parents had tried to blame each other’s side of the family—the problem simply vanishes. Vamoose. It is the triumph of mind over bladder.)

  But that day is still many years away. Sometimes, Mehroo gets lucky because when she wakes up, the sheets are dry.

  Then, my aunt, who weighs less than hundred pounds, lifts my sleep-laden body and carries me down the long passageway that leads to the bathroom. I protest at being awakened but she shushes me into silence. ‘Quiet, quiet. Others are sleeping,’

  she says. ‘Go use the bathroom like a good girl and then you can go back to sleep. But sit for a minute after you think you’re finished, samji ne? Empty your bladder fully.’

  Ah, my Mehroo. What generosity of spirit, what irrational impulse made you love me so unconditionally? But wait, your love was not unconditional at all. I still recall my shock the day you candidly told me that if I wasn’t your beloved brother’s daughter, that if I had just been a girl who lived down the street, no telling if you would’ve still loved me. For a minute, I was mute with disappointment. We all flatter ourselves that we have earned our love, paid for it with our dazzling personalities, our irresistible charms and our noble characters. That love is more than an accident of biology and geography. And so, I was disappointed that the gift of your love had been bestowed because of chance and not because of the irrefutable logic of my magnetic personality. But then, I thought, Well, the fact is, Iam her niece. Nothing can change that. Why worry about What Ifs and If Onlys?

  And since we were linked by the ties of blood and destiny, you loved me as fiercely and fearlessly as a teenager in love for the first time. I can only imagine what needs taking care of a young child fulfilled in you. Perhaps it made up for the early death of your mother. Perhaps it helped take your mind off the joke life played on you a few years later.

  This I know: You resisted my mother’s constant complaint that you had stolen me away from her, that you had taken over her birthright, brainwashed me into loving you more than her.

  You withstood my father’s daily beseeching that you concentrate more on the business than on me, that you leave me to the attentions of my mother. (No, no, no, Mehroofui, I would pray to myself. Don’t do it. Don’t do that.) You were an unwavering soldier, a straight line, the North star, your stout love as constant as the slow rotation of the earth around the sun, your devotion as reliable as the ebb and flow of the tides.

  My earliest childhood memory: It is late at night and I am hot and restless from being unable to sleep. My four-year-old body is tired but I’m unable to relax, my body twitching and fluttering like a dying fish in Mehroo’s arms. She carries me across her shoulder and walks the length of the long balcony.

  A cool breeze comes in from the open balcony and lands like kisses on our faces. Mehroo’s hand is on my back, rubbing it and thumping it in a rhythmic motion.

  Thump, thump, thump goes her hand, light but firm against my hollow back. The rhythm is strangely elemental and comforting, like the purring of a cat. It soothes me, makes me languid and sleepy. A great sense of peace, different from the fevered restlessness of a few moments ago, descends on me. I know that this light woman with the brown, wavy hair who is pacing the balcony while she is holding me, I know that this woman loves me. That she is sacrificing her sleep, letting her arms go tired under my weight, stopping only occasionally to look at the half-moon, because she loves me. Her hand on me, thumping my back, begins to feel like a hum. Or maybe it is my body that’s humming, that’s vibrating with joy and peace.

  I fall asleep, knowing that I am loved.

  Four

  ALTHOUGH I GET TEASED BY the other girls and despite the fact that Olga D’Mello is the bane of my life, school is my escape from home. Although all my grade cards say that I am fidgety and that I daydream too much and have a hard time sitting still, I like the sense of order and lack of chaos at school.

  Here, the adults do not fight with each other every morning and Mother Superior does not storm out of morning assembly, the way dad leaves the house at least once a week.

  But tomorrow, mummy is coming to school and I sense that my two worlds are about to collide. On my way home from school I plan when to give mummy the note that says Miss Bharucha wants to see her tomorrow, just how much I’m going to tell her about what happened earlier today and whether to explain how and why things spiralled downward so fast. Or will trying to defend myself make mummy even more angry?

  How can I possibly explain to her the absolute terror that I feel around Miss Damania and how it was that terror that made me do what I did?

  I’m in third-grade and the gym teacher, Miss Damania, is a tall, bony, ostrich-like woman with a beaked nose and long, thin, claw-like fingers. I live in mortal fear of her. I am a dis-mally poor athlete, an ungraceful, sickly child and unforgiv-ingly absent-minded. Miss Damania’s mode of punishment is particularly cruel and psychologically terrifying in a way that punishment from the other teachers is not. Miss Davidson, the Anglo-Indian piano teacher, for instance, throws us across her knee, lifts our green uniforms so that it exposes our underwear and then smacks our buttocks with a ruler. The nuns use the ruler to rap us on our knuckles and arms and occasionally, they slap us. But Miss Damania’s punishment is different and I’m her favourite target. She comes at me with her claws outstretched, like a witch from a bad theatre production. The time that it takes for her hand to shape itself into a claw and grab hold of the fleshy part of my throat, lasts an eternity. She then shakes my flesh, so that my head moves slightly from side to side. It is the most peculiar pain, being clawed at the throat, but what’s worse is the sensation it arouses. It feels like drowning, I think, but am not sure why.

  Perhaps it is that feeling of being tossed around by a force stronger and more powerful than you. But even weeks after the last shaking, I find it hard to swallow and can feel the im-print of Miss Damania’s fingernails on my throat. The other beatings I can laugh off, boast about even, but this one feels dirty and humiliating to me. I can get off Miss Davidson’s lap with a swagger, can take a blow across the arm without flinching and without tearing up, but being shaken like a rat makes my eyes well up no matter how hard I try. The shaking does exactly what it is intended to do—it makes me feel small and powerless and rodent-like. I want to hide from the flashlight gaze of Miss Damania’s eyes; want to burrow deep into the safety of the rows of girls in their green uniforms (‘Green parrots,’ the kids from the nearby school tease us) who stand around me. And I hate her with an intensity, a rage that only the powerless and voiceless can muster. Because by coming for my throat, she is literally rendering me voiceless, is freezing the explanations, the excuses in my mouth before I can voice them. ‘But…but…’ I begin, ready to give her what seems to me a perfectly reasonable explanation for whatever crime I’m guilty of but I can never get past this single word before I am being clawed. And I know, sure as I know anything, that she is enjoying this. Miss Davidson spanks with a certain gusto but there is always a wink behind her actions, a sense that she is playing a role—of the bullying, loud-voiced teacher who nevertheless has a heart of gold. Mother Superior hits and slaps wearily, sighing as she does, shaking her head at our unfathomable behaviour. She hits with a sense of obligation, as
if she is burdened with the duty and responsibility of turning a bunch of wild, untamed, Indian hooligans into polite, smart, obedient girls. But Miss Damania loves terrorizing us. She salivates at the sight of a cringing girl, she licks her lips with the anticipation of tears rolling down a cheek, she enjoys towering over us, thin and distant as a skyscraper, as we whimper and plead and try to squirm out of her grasp. It is not enough to punish us for our sins; we have to be broken first. So I am panic-stricken when I realize in the second period that I have forgotten to pack my gym shoes. I have on my black patent leather school shoes but where are the white keds that I have to wear to gym class? I look in my blue school-bag two times, three, as if looking will magically produce the shoes.

  Just two weeks ago Miss Damania had warned me about not forgetting my shoes any more. She had warned me in front of the whole class and I have now disobeyed her. That is how she will see it. I know better than to even try to explain the situation to her and to ask for her understanding. My throat constricts at the thought of the torture to come.

  Then, a thought so perfect that it feels like a gift. Only last week, I had mastered the art of writing my ‘r’s like my mother does, rolling them instead of having them stand alone. It had felt like a rite of passage, an entry into the guarded fortress of adulthood. Practising her ‘r’ repeatedly and finally getting it made me feel adult and accomplished. Now, it suddenly occurs to me that I can disguise my handwriting to make it look exactly like my mother’s. My grammar is good and I know I can imitate my mother’s phrases perfectly. For instance, my mom begins her sentences with Kindly instead of Please. ‘Kindly excuse Thrity from…’ I can write a note to be kindly excused from carrying my keds and can sign it as my mother. The idea feels like inspired genius, a divine inspiration. Excitement replaces terror.

  During lunch recess, I sit alone and painstakingly write the note. I have to make sure none of the teachers see me at work.

  I put the torn sheet of paper in between the pages of a textbook, to make sure nobody sees what I am doing. When I am finished, I am pleased with my first work of fiction. Gym class is the second-to-last class of the day and the rest of the afternoon flies quickly.

  Miss Damania looks up from reading the note. ‘Who wrote this note?’ she says immediately.

  I am speechless at the question.

  The dark eyes narrow. ‘Who?’ she repeats. ‘Answer quickly.’

  ‘My mummy did. I swear, miss, she did.’

  ‘Bad girl,’ she spits. ‘Lying while standing under this picture of Jesus.’

  I am trapped in my own lie. Wretchedly, I realize there is no place to go but deeper. ‘I swear on God, miss,’ I say, pinching myself on the throat the way we do when swearing.

  Pinching myself was a mistake. Miss Damania’s eyes narrow as they focus on my throat. My eyes are already filling with tears as I watch her claw-like hands move in the direction of my throat. I feel her nails dig into my flesh. My head moves from side to side as she shakes me like a rat. ‘No, no, no, miss,’

  I whimper. ‘Please, miss, please.’

  ‘Who wrote the note?’

  Terror engulfs me. ‘I did, miss, I’m sorry. I did. Please forgive me, miss.’

  ‘Dirty girl,’ Miss Damania spits. ‘Incorrigible liar. Plague of Egypt.’ With each word, she shakes my throat for emphasis.

  When the other girls tell the kindly classroom teacher, Miss Bharucha, what happened in gym class, her face pales. ‘This is a note for your mummy,’ she says to me. ‘Tell her to come see me tomorrow.’

  Mummy comes to school the next day anxious to apologize for my lying and cheating and ready to commiserate with my teachers. But to my amazement, Miss Bharucha barely mentions the incident. Instead, she is sympathetic and solicitous and says that she has an idea: I should leave my gym shoes in the classroom closet at the end of gym class. That way, I don’t have to worry about remembering to pack them. I begin to breathe easier. But just as my mother is getting up to leave, Miss Bharucha says the dreaded word. ‘Your daughter is very sensitive,’ she says gravely. ‘She will have to learn to be a little tougher.’

  I want to bury my head in shame. For years I believe that being sensitive is a bad thing, another black mark like the others that follow me throughout my school years: Talks and fidgets in class. Does not live up to her potential. Makes careless mistakes. Daydreams. To which, my mother lends her own complaints: Reads too many novels. Is forgetful and absent-minded. Is a poor eater. Will not drink her milk.

  Most of these labels I can shrug off. But being called sensitive dooms me, marks me as an easy target for bold, brash girls like Olga D’Mello. But it would be too much to expect a grown-up to understand this.

  They are everywhere and they haunt me. They are on the streets, they appear quietly as shadows when we stop at a traffic-light, they gaze at us hungrily when we eat pani puri at Chowpatty Beach. Worse, they infiltrate my dreams at night.

  Still, the dreams are not unpleasant. Mostly, it is the same dream over and over again with some variation on the theme: It is thundering and raining heavily outside and I am herding them in, loading the city’s destitute and homeless and poor into school-buses and transporting them to the basement of my school. What we refer to as the basement is actually a large, open-air room that is located on the ground floor and overlooks the playground. During morning recess, we buy battatawadas and Cokes in the tiny cafeteria located in one corner of this room. Elsewhere, there are the long wooden benches where we eat our hot lunches everyday.

  But in the dream, the room is empty. Or rather, it is bare of furniture but filled to the point of bursting with Bombay’s unwanted humanity. Unshaven men with tangled hair, scrawny children with dirt-streaked faces, painfully thin women with large eyes, are huddled together, some sitting on their haunches, some standing, others laying down on thin but warm brown blankets. The slanted rain is coming in, wetting those on the edge of the basement so that they try to inch their way toward the warm middle. Their neighbours good-naturedly try to help them, so that there is no cussing or shoving, even when the food trucks arrive with milk and sandwiches. Instead, there is a constant hum of excitement and the tight quarters feel cosy, rather than stifling. Outside, there is rain and thunder; here, there is a warm, snug feeling, like sitting before a fireplace on a cold winter’s night except that we are generating heat from each other’s bodies rather than an external fire.

  The other variation on the dream is that we are on a ship rather than in my school’s basement. This time, the solid concrete reality of the basement gives way to the tossing and turning of the ship on the turbulent waves. But in the dream, nobody gets sick, nobody has to lean across the railing of the ship and lose their dinner. Rather, everyone is eating well, ignoring the heaving waves and the whipping wind and taking comfort in the safety of numbers. All of us in this together. Every inch of space on the ship is taken, with bodies tightly packed in but nobody seems to care as we bump up against each other. Again, the swell and thrust of humanity, again, dampness and cold on the outside, and the powerful warmth of human connection on the inside.

  I invariably wake up from these dreams with an amazing sense of exhilaration because I believe that I have found the solution to India’s most intractable problem—poverty. Every one of my civics textbooks starts with the line, ‘India is a rich country with poor people.’ Well, that has to be true no more.

  All one has to do is gather in all the street people every night and feed them milk and chicken sandwiches and Coke. I don’t understand why the adults always shake their heads grimly and declare that the poor will always be with us.

  I once try telling Miss Carlson about my dream, try describing to her how I fall asleep in the warmth of its glow and how happy I feel when I wake up from it. I guess I am hoping she’ll help me write a letter to the Prime Minister or something but Miss Carlson only hears me for a few minutes and then kisses me on the forehead and says I am a good girl and isn’t it a shame that I wasn’t born
Catholic. Then, as always, I give her ten paise from my lunch money and she sells me a picture of one of the saints. But on this day I refuse the card that she hands me. ‘No, Miss Carlson, it’s okay,’ I say. ‘You keep the picture today. You can sell it to another girl instead.’

  Miss Carlson’s blue eyes grow misty. Her pink face, which is as creased as a crumpled sheet of paper, grows red. ‘What a good child of God you are, my dear,’ she says. ‘Not like those other heathen girls, those plagues of Egypt. Perhaps you will join the convent someday.’

  Although Miss Carlson is not an ordained nun, she lives with the nuns at the convent for reasons that are unclear to me. I realize that she has just paid me the highest compliment and her words make me feel guilty. I have not refused Miss Carlson’s offering for reasons of piety or charity but because mummy has made me promise not to bring home any more pictures of saints. Since I give Miss Carlson ten paise everyday in exchange for a card, the card collection is getting unmanageable. And mummy is too superstitious to throw away any of the religious cards once I hand them to her.

  ‘Bloodsuckers, that’s what these nuns are—yes, even your beloved Miss Carlson, even if she’s not really a nun,’ mummy mutters…‘Taking lunch money from a child, as if they don’t charge enough tuition fees. But okay, baba, even if you give them the money, at least don’t accept another picture. Tell her to sell it to another unsuspecting bakra. More profit for them, that way.’

  If even Miss Carlson does not understand my dream then I know it is hopeless trying to talk to any other adult. With her pure white hair, which she wears in a page boy cut, her short, tiny, pixyish body and her kind, soft heart, Miss Carlson is a cross between an innocent child and a saint. If she doesn’t understand, nobody else will.