The Elephant Chaser's Daughter Page 7

  Opening her eyes at last, she said, ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No, Grandma,’ I said, my thoughts elsewhere. She sat me down on the floor covered with a fresh coating of cow-dung. It felt cold to my touch. She pulled me onto her lap, pressing me against her comforting breast. Kavya stood against the wall watching me attentively. ‘Where is Amma?’ I asked for what seemed like the millionth time.

  Just like Appa, Grandmother didn’t reply immediately. She ran her hand lightly through my short, boyish hair.

  Her uncalled-for tenderness made me even more suspicious. ‘Where is Amma?’

  Her grip on me tightened, she took a deep breath, and sighed. ‘Amma’s not here, Chinna. She went in a plane to work in a faraway place.’ Using words an eight-year-old could understand, Grandmother explained that Amma had travelled to Singapore to take up work as a housemaid.

  I didn’t understand what a housemaid was. Grandmother explained to me that she washed plates and spoons and cleaned toilets in the homes of rich people. I wondered why Amma would go so far away to do such work. I’d learn later from Amma that she had found it difficult to look after the needs of the family with Appa’s meager income from the liquor business. She was sad that she couldn’t buy better clothes or give us gifts on special occasions like Christmas and Mother Mary’s feast.

  I stayed frozen for a moment in my grandmother’s lap before bursting into tears. The word plane made everything seem so distant. I wanted my Amma, and I couldn’t bear not being with her. ‘When will she come back?’ I asked, shrugging off my grandmother’s embrace.

  Grandmother started crying as well. Seeing us weeping, Kavya joined in, amplifying the chorus. Kavya was barely four, and with Grandmother always with her, she didn’t feel Amma’s absence the way I did. She even called Grandmother, ‘Amma,’ convinced that she was her real mother.

  I couldn’t understand why my mother had left without telling me. Why couldn’t she wait until I returned home from school? Suddenly remembering my father, I turned around to lash out at him, to call him a liar, but he had disappeared. The plastic bag filled with my schoolwork lay abandoned at the doorstep.

  Grandmother held me tight, humming a hymn and cradling me in her lap. I used to like the soothing melody but now it brought cold comfort.

  From that day on, I stayed with Grandmother when I was home. Appa and his side of the family were nearly invisible. Aunt Margaret and Aunt Rani, Amma’s two sisters, had joined the convent, so the house felt lifeless to me. Fortunately, Grandfather and Uncle Naresh showered me with much love and affection.

  On warm days, Grandmother would take Kavya, Francis, and me to the lake that lay behind the village. I loved running around in the shallow waters, chasing after white herons that came looking for fish. Whenever I went too far into the deep water, Grandmother would yell at me to get back to shore. ‘If anything happens to you, what will I say to your teachers?’

  After washing our clothes and laying them out to dry on the wild shrubs that grew everywhere, she would line us up naked on the bank and scrub the dirt off our skin with a stone. ‘Ajji, it hurts,’ I often screamed, trying to yank myself away from her strong grip as she ran the rough stone over my skin. ‘You have so much dirt on you,’ she would complain, ignoring the fuss I made. Sometimes, if we were lucky, she would fetch hot water from the liquor brewers for a special bath.

  Kavya was always adventurous, chasing little fish into deep waters when she barely knew how to swim. She was my joy. She was everything I could want in a younger sister. I enjoyed playing with her and looking after her. I begged Grandmother to let me bathe her and dress her up, as though she were my doll. In the evenings, as we wandered freely around the village, Kavya would introduce me to her friends as we passed by their houses. ‘She’s my elder sister. She just returned from school,’ she’d say. Everywhere we went young girls and boys stopped to stare at my strange presence by her side. And I was pleased with all the attention, happy to be with my sister without a care in the world.

  In the early mornings, when a layer of darkness still coated the sky and long before the rooster crowed, I would take Kavya to the bushes that served as the toilet. It was a good idea to go in the dark; during daylight hours, one risked the embarrassment of being seen by others and, more importantly, being harassed by flies. Even under the thick cover of darkness, I could see people walking towards their habitual spots.

  When Kavya was done, we would walk over to the small brook, and I would wash her bottom. Years later, even after a toilet shed was built behind the house, I preferred to go into the woods. The shed smelt horrible even from a distance—just like the ones in bus stops and railway stations. Water had to be carried from the bore-well each time one used the toilet.

  As days passed, I turned quiet. I was often immersed in thoughts of Amma, hardly speaking to anyone or asking for anything. The mere mention of my mother’s name triggered an immediate burst of anger. Even Kavya, as little as she was, sensed my moods and kept away from me whenever I was upset.

  My father’s absence didn’t help. He was not to be seen most of the time, and whenever he did come to Grandmother’s house, his visit was brief. Once I watched, numb, as a landlord punched Appa in the face. Grandmother came running from her house at the commotion on the road. I could see the redness in Appa’s eyes shining through like jack-o’-lanterns against his black, shiny skin. He owed the landlord money he had borrowed for his drinks. In many nights to follow, I would wake up suddenly from a nightmare of the landlord punching my father over and over again.

  Grandmother tried to keep me engaged with teaching me how to clean rice on a straw pan or draw rangoli with colored powder. When no one else was home to help her, she would ask me to rub her back when she took a bath. I was proud when she entrusted me with such a big task. She would sit on a boulder in the small shed adjoining the hut, naked as a new-born, with a bucket of water she had warmed with firewood.

  Without turning around, she’d pass me a flat stone the size of the bar of soap I used back in school. I’d rub the stone slowly from top to bottom all along her back, occasionally glancing at her full breasts and big nipples that dripped water like raindrops when she poured it over her head. I found her sagging breasts beautiful and assumed that every mature woman was supposed to look like she did. The sight of her body made me feel very different about my own; I wanted so badly to look just like Grandmother someday.

  Grandfather joined us every evening after returning from work, dirty and tired. For a long time, he had been earning just three rupees a day as a laborer in the landlords’ fields. He supplemented his income by scavenging twigs and dry branches to sell in the village for a pittance. Later, when several sugarcane factories opened in the area, Grandfather found better work on a plantation, cutting stalks and boiling the liquid that had been pressed out of them in a machine.

  Grandfather sometimes took me to the factory and showed me how jaggery was made from sugarcane juice freshly squeezed from the stalks. The sight of the hot, bubbling liquid was nothing like the boiling ragi water spilling over Grandmother’s pot. I watched the process in fascination and loved it when Grandfather brought me one of the fresh pieces of jaggery to eat once it had cooled and hardened.

  I will never forget those lazy afternoons on the plantation when Grandmother and I would sit in the shade of a tamarind tree, chewing sweet sugarcane sticks cast away by the workers for being too tender or unripe. Occasionally, I would go to the narrow stone canals that provided water to the factories. I loved splashing my feet in the clean water and peering closely in search of tiny fish and frogs I could reach out and catch.

  But, like all good things, Grandfather’s plantation job didn’t last long. When competition from larger mills nearby forced the factory to shut down, he was out of work. Though only a laborer, he had been proud to be a factory employee. It was a step up from working for landlords.

  After losing his job, I could see that Grandfather was distressed and worried, hardly t
alking to anyone for days. Eventually he was able to find employment in a shop that sold grains and spices. With what little the family earned, Grandmother bought ragi and a few vegetables and somehow kept everyone fed.

  Grandfather had to work long hours at his new job. I liked to imagine him as the grand master of the shop, ordering others to carry the gunny sacks of rice and ragi. Grandmother later told me that he was just a coolie who did the carrying himself.

  As darkness set in, Grandfather would come home exhausted, and could hardly keep his eyes open. After dinner, as Grandmother and I stacked the dirty dishes in the kitchen corner for washing the next morning, Grandfather slept seated on the floor. Mouth wide open and nostrils fluttering with each deep snore, he looked like a giant, drowsy tortoise. Kavya and I couldn’t hold our laughter, hearing Francis imitating all those funny sounds coming from Grandfather.

  During the rainy season Grandfather often came home fully soaked. In the forested hills of Thattaguppe, long monsoons brought torrential rain. The huts on both sides of the road were built upon slightly elevated land, and when drains overflowed, floodwaters flowed all around the huts, forcing the cowherds to let their cattle inside. Days got harder as the heavy showers made it difficult for anyone to venture outside.

  Rain or no rain, life followed a predictable routine. The women of the village rose each morning well before the sun came up and lit cooking fires to warm up left-over ragi paste. Men woke up just in time to begin another day in the landlord’s fields or brewing liquor in the forest. Appa would find his way through the woods to his designated spot, well hidden by the bushes, where he brewed liquor. For him, it was like going home. Brewing illicit liquor had been taught to him by Joseph Thatha in his early childhood and now it was a profession that offered him a livelihood and some measure of independence.

  In the evenings, Grandmother would boil corn in a small steel pot over the earthen cooking place and make black tea, as milk was expensive. It was her way of keeping us eagerly awaiting the treat instead of running outside to play in the rain. I would beg her to let me out of the house by myself, but she wouldn’t allow me to go out without my siblings or cousins.

  One evening, when she was busy corralling her chickens safely inside their straw baskets, I ran out onto the road, following the sounds of merriment that came from a small crowd of men gathered outside a neighbor’s house. I noticed a tall girl with hair much longer than mine dancing in the center of the crowd. It was Ann-Mary, a ten-year-old, who was once my senior at Shanti Bhavan but had been expelled a few years earlier. She didn’t notice me until one of the men called out, ‘Shilpa, come in and dance!’ I giggled and shook my head no.

  A few others joined in. ‘Shilpa, please dance,’ they begged. Finally, sighing, I joined Ann-Mary and danced, shaking my hips and arms in rhythm. I tried to imitate her, but couldn’t follow her seductive movements. The cheers from the crowd became deafening, adding to the excitement that filled me from inside. Within a few minutes, several men joined in the dance, their sweating bodies forming a wall around me. I recognized the familiar scent of alcohol that hung in the air in our hut around Grandmother’s sarayam customers and whenever Appa came home late at night.

  Suddenly, I noticed a ten-rupee note flapping on Ann-Mary’s salwar top; someone in the crowd had pinned it on her. I felt a rush of envy, wanting one for myself. Just then, a clean-shaven, middle-aged man sitting atop a stone near the edge of the gutter called out to another man, ‘Give this to her.’ In no time, a note was pinned to me as well.

  Overjoyed at the reward, I danced faster, becoming frenzied as the men laughed at my gyrations. A few minutes later the crowd began to break up. I was staggering with exhaustion and turned to go home.

  The man who had given me the note approached and said, ‘Come with me. I have some presents for you.’ I accepted, not realizing the danger in going with a stranger. Suddenly, it struck me that I was already late. ‘I will come later,’ I said and ran away.

  Grandmother was anxiously awaiting my return. I knew I’d upset her, but was still in a daze from the sound of the crowd clapping, shouting, laughing, and cheering. It rang in my head. But so did Grandmother’s frequent references to Ann-Mary as a ‘bad girl’. Fearing that Grandmother would take away my reward, I hurried to my place on the floor and lay down on my stomach to conceal it. Come the light of the morning sun, I was relieved to find my precious ten-rupee note still pinned to my dress. The wrinkled note looked fancy to me. For the first time in my life, I had earned money! It was liberating, but I was not entirely comfortable with the way I had earned it.

  Years later I would understand why Grandmother didn’t want me to associate with Ann-Mary. She was expelled from Shanti Bhavan for repeated thefts and for imitating sexual acts, having often witnessed her mother with men. And now, back in the village, men came to buy liquor from her house and to seek her company, and she, a child of ten, had begun to entertain them.

  Into the third week of my holidays, I was beginning to feel more hurt than angry with my mother. I missed her terribly and only talking about her could ease some of the pain. I asked Grandmother to tell me about Amma’s past, and she was only too happy to oblige, even if I wouldn’t fully understand the importance of some of the stories for several years to come.

  According to Grandmother, Amma was barely thirteen when she joined the family’s liquor business. She had grown up with three generations of her family packed under the same low roof. Her grandparents would frequently ask Amma and her siblings to fetch alcohol for them. If the children dared to refuse, their grandmother would twitch her puckered mouth and mutter, ‘Hope you vomit to death.’ The children were afraid of being cursed, so they quickly complied.

  The family liquor business goes back generations. My great grandparents were both heavy drinkers who fell asleep in a drunken stupor every night while Grandmother was left alone to sing songs to lull her thirteen siblings to sleep. With no one to pay any attention to the younger ones, Grandmother was forced to leave school at an early age. By the time she got married at sixteen, she was already quite familiar with the duties that came with mothering. Her parents’ weakness for sarayam not only made Grandmother a parent before her time, but also shaped her own daughters’ destinies.

  ‘I would send your Aunt Maria off with two rupees to the houses that sold cheap liquor,’ Grandmother said. ‘But Maria didn’t always succeed. She was too proud to beg. One day, your mother asked if she could try.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, anxious to hear every story I could about my amma.

  ‘The very first evening she returned home pleased with a plastic container brimming with two litters of sarayam,’ Grandmother said with a smile.

  From that day on, Amma became the family’s official liquor collector. Every other evening after sunset, she would set out along the dusty road with a lantern to break the impenetrable darkness.

  Her persistence with suppliers soon won her the reputation of a big-mouth bully, capable of talking even a forty-year-old man into giving her the liquor she wanted. She refused to allow men to intimidate her, and it was her boldness that drew Appa to her in the first place.

  In the mornings, Amma would stay home to cook for Grandmother who worked in the fields like Grandfather, and for her four younger siblings who returned for lunch from the local school. Once they went back to class, she would pack the leftovers in a small steel vessel to take to Grandfather as he worked in the fields. And in the evenings, with Grandmother shouting after her to be careful, Amma departed for the liquor hunt.

  Eventually Grandmother decided to get into the liquor business herself. She remembered telling Amma, ‘From today onward, we will buy sarayam from suppliers and sell it in our house.’ Grandmother was convinced that the business offered the promise of a good return for the family to survive better on the money earned from it. Amma was happy that both mother and daughter were to be at the helm of a business. I too was caught up in the picture Grandmother painted of the f
amily business, even though I knew first-hand that it wasn’t always so charming. I could only guess what Amma might have faced haggling for sarayam. After all, what did I know? My ideas of hunting for liquor came from the games of seek and find we played on the pleasant grounds of Shanti Bhavan.

  ‘Each time she went, I would pray to Jesus for forgiveness,’ Grandmother told me. ‘All my life I have seen what this evil liquid does to people. God, please forgive me.’

  Despite her reservations, Grandmother passed on the tricks of the trade to Amma who soon became capable of running the family business on her own, though it was never easy to handle drunkards. Once darkness set in, then as now, customers flocked to her house like ants to sugar. Grandmother would let them in, but seat them close to the entrance door before serving them and collecting money. When buyers consumed too much, they collapsed on the floor and refused to get up. It used to be Amma’s job to shake them, and if they still couldn’t manage to pick themselves up, she would have her younger brothers drag the drunkards out of the house and leave them outside for their relatives to find. Her resilience against adversity and her fighting spirit probably came from the way she grew up. Having watched Grandmother serving customers and drawing out cash from them, I too was growing familiar with the ways of the business.

  Grandmother told me that in the beginning Grandfather worried about the family’s safety and reputation. ‘This is not good. What will others say?’ Grandfather asked one night. ‘They will say you are not a proper woman. We have four daughters and anything can happen with those drunkards coming to our house.’

  Grandmother nodded, but reminded him, ‘We need the money. Things will get better if we continue to sell sarayam. Then you won’t have to borrow money to get a haircut.’