THE TENT
When my mother was
16, she ran away from home to join a travelling theatre.
There, among cheap,
painted tributes to epic heroes and dim-witted gods immortalized by bad TV, she
learned to wriggle and sway in approximations of laavani and kathak that would
have made an item girl of her today. She forgot her middle class manners, and
lost her virginity to a mustached, tin-breasted Rama. Transfixed in the glare
of floodlit adulation, she became an addict to momentary dreams manufactured
under a brightly coloured shamiana tent. The smell of sooty kaajal and waxy pancake
were trusted confidantes. The cacophony of sound and belligerence were her
lifeline; her deity was the nautanki, erasing her past like it had never been. Stroking
the downy face of the boy harmonium player when he cried for his mother in the
moonlit night, she fancied she saw her future scrawled in the stars in a
handwriting that she swore she knew from somewhere.
Meanwhile, my
future father lounged on the lawns of a university in the belly of America,
surrounded by long-haired girls who gave him their bodies and their opinions
with equal fervor. He studied physics and advanced calculus and welcomed his
first hangover like a long lost friend. He memorized the words of songs that
had an alien yet achingly familiar beat and so drilled disco into his brain. He
wrote dutiful letters to amma that said nothing at all, his good grades payback
for his father’s desertion. Then they said he should come home, she was sick, and
he did. But she wasn’t sick. She was desperate.
When they finally
found my mother, she was washing her Draupadi costume and the water was running
green, red and yellow from the material. She heard them coming, but she didn’t
look up till her father was standing right in front of her. He said her name in
a strangled voice, and she stood up and went home with them. The colours of the
fabric ran in a little rivulet down the slope in front of them. The alta on her
feet was as bright as blood.
She went with
them, but if they’d looked closely, they would have seen a tiny multicolored
tent imprinted upside down in her eyes. She took her tent home with her. The
white walls of her bedroom became a screen where she projected the image and
watched it with delight, the filmy music in her head drowning out the voices
asking, asking, asking questions, my grandmother screaming and shaking her, her
sister scared to touch the stranger she had become. One evening my grandmother
came home from the office to find her box of sindoor lying upturned, most of
its contents smeared on my mother’s lips and eyes and forehead. Durga in all
her fury had slayed the demon Mahishasura and the pumpkin for tonight’s dinner
lay slashed like a bloodied head in the living room.
And so it
transpired that the son of a shamed widow met a girl who shamed her family. The
widow needed continuity of her family name and the girl’s family needed to
shroud theirs. In a crowded drawing room under the stern gaze of Raja Ravi
Varma calendars and glass showcases filled with a myriad pieces of broken
hearts, he looked into her eyes, and you know what? He saw that tent. And even
though it was upside down, he recognized the patterns drawn on it, and he liked
them. So he said yes.
When I was born
they moved to a town close to the sea. I know they loved each other because
they called each other names that sounded like caresses. Sometimes she would
put me on her lap and sing me sweet songs that made the image in her eyes
dance. At other times she would jump up and become Arjuna, shooting arrow after
arrow into the hearts of his cousins, then weeping tears of guilt. While other
children learned nursery rhymes, I recited loud monologues from mythological
dramas, threatening to send Sita through fiery examinations, or Satyavaan straight
to hell (I loved Yama). I shook with excitement when she was Shakuntala
demanding her wife-status from her amnesiac husband, and laughed uproariously
at Lanka burning by a dancing monkey’s tail. Tom and Jerry seemed sort of tame
in comparison.
She wore ghungroos
around the house and so I always knew where she was. I learned to recognize her
moods through the timbre and tone of those little bells: the quiver when he
snuck up from behind and wrapped his arms around her, the sudden giggly shuffle
when I walked into their bedroom unannounced, the raging jangle when she was
angry with him or me, the sad tinkle when she gazed out at the ocean at
twilight, every evening before he came home. I wanted to ask her what she was
thinking, why the roar of the waves made her cry, but I couldn’t. Instead, I
ran back to my room and found my new plastic camera, and took a picture of her.
That will remain my abiding memory of my mother.
I remember vividly
the day the bells stopped jingling. I ran from room to room, calling for her, but
all that was left were the ghungroos lying forlorn on the bedroom floor. I
grabbed them and ran outside. I flung them as far as my little arms could into
the loud sea, the sea that made my mother cry. My father didn’t smile much
after that. The rapture had gone from our lives, without even a curtain call to
take credit for its performance. It was so, so quiet now, and would be for a
long time after.
* * * * *
Now I look for her
every chance I get, my camera slung around my neck, my fading hope wrapped
around my body like a warm fleece. I take pictures of tawdry trapeze artists in
circuses swinging from shaky ropes in impossibly shiny costumes. I sit through
interminable jatras and sleazy Marathi dance shows looking for a glimpse of her.
I follow a theatre troupe in Shimoga till it is clear they will eject me by
force if I don’t leave. I take thousands of pictures but I never find that
upside down tent in anyone’s eyes. My father sends me emails that I read
sporadically when I am in towns with stuffy booths masquerading as cyber cafes.
Come back, beta, he says, in every email. Why did I let you go? Why did I give
you that camera when you were small? Why can’t you work in Rishu uncle’s ad
agency instead? What good will all this do? The self-recriminations and
questions continue. Because although I haven’t told him, he knows I am
searching for her. But he is as well. I see him, hunched over the new computer
I bought him with my last salary from the agency. My search is surprisingly old
fashioned, whereas his is governed by the new detective devtas, Google and
Wikipedia.
* * * * *
I’m not sure when
his search began, because it wasn’t right after she left. I remember days of
stillness. All activity paused like a bad-print glitch on a pirated dvd. Someone
came in to cook, to bathe me, to send me to school. But in our house there was
thick air of hush. Moving through it was like navigating a muted warzone,
sticky as the treacle I read about in my Just William books and secretly
yearned to taste.
It must have
gotten better at some point I suppose, because I grew up all right, and he went
back to work, and my grandmother came to take care of us. We never mentioned my
mother; it was part of the stillness inaudible to anyone but the two of us.
Paati put all my mother’s pictures away, and I saw them again only after she
died. My father arranged them all on top of a bureau, like an altar to a living
goddess. The usual family photos of them, of me, of me with them, all of us
always laughing, smiling, wind blown. He lit agarbattis every day at the altar
of her, like she was dead. But I know she isn’t. And so does he.
* * * * *
The rain is coming
down, and I huddle with a hundred others under the tent, all of us steaming
with the smells of the monsoon and unwashed clothes. Two young girls dressed in
tight gold and silver gota-edged kurtas are teasing the audience with pelvic
jerks done brazenly to a Bipasha number. But they are just the opening act, and
as they twirl off the makeshift stage, there is a moment of quiet, when a
hundred drooling men take a collective breath in preparation for more. Then a song
starts blaring out of the distorted speakers, an old Mumtaz one from the
seventies where she is exhorting her lover to be unafraid of the silken shroud of
her hair. A dancer appears. She is older, perhaps in her thirties, maybe even
forty, and she begins to dance. There is nothing cheap about this one, and
every man in the audience knows it, and is rooted to his seat with
white-knuckling lust. I follow her movements with my eyes, unable to reach for
my camera lest she disappear the second my eyes leave her. For it is her, I am
certain. Certain in the way one is when about to take turn on a street knowing
it is leading home. The song is ending now, and she is whirling faster, her
purple saree a blur, the hoarse shouting and clapping of the men getting more
frenzied,
the screeching
singing reaching a crescendo…..
….. and then it is
done. I leap up and try to make my way to the stage but there are throngs of turned-on
men who have the same thought, and a stronger urge, ahead of me. I want to get
closer, but I can’t get to her, pushing, squeezing, elbows, ineffectual against
the heaving horniness of the crowd. I just want to get close enough to look in
her eyes, to find an image of that shamiana that I know is there in them. But she
is swallowed up and I can no longer see her.
* * * * *
I waited for hours
in the drizzle till the last person left, and then went to the backstage area.
She was gone. Guest performer, they said. No forwarding address. No looking
back. The cloth of the red and blue tent flapped loudly in the wind, like a
hard slap in the face.
Ruchika Chanana
rchanana@gmail.com 1726 words
