“Get her out of here,” Grandmother said. But even though he couldn’t hear her, Father held up his hand to keep me from leaving.
If you have ever witnessed something unspeakably painful, then you know what I mean when I say that everything stopped: the rain falling in buckets outside, the cries of my newborn sister in the midwife’s arms. Mother was lying motionless on her bed, and the sheet that twisted around her was stained with blood. I looked at her face: how could it be possible that someone so beautiful could be gone from this world?
“Maa-ji?” I whispered, and fresh tears pooled in Father’s eyes.
“Sita, your mother is dead,” the doctor said. “She’s not going to wake.”
I reached out and caressed Mother’s cheek, but the skin was cold and I drew back my hand.
“Until the milk nurse comes tomorrow,” the midwife said, “I will take care of Anuja.”
This was the name Mother had chosen, in case it was a girl.
The midwife came to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “This is the way of all things,” she said. “Birth and death. Samsara. Change is the only constant in this world.”
I looked down at Mother, who looked so lonely there, even with Father’s arms around her. How would life in our house go on without her? Who would teach my little sister her favorite hymns, or how to dress her hair in jasmine blossoms? “But why does it have to change for the worse?”
The midwife blinked back her own tears. “I don’t know. But these will be difficult days for your family.”
The midwife was right: the days that followed were terrible and traumatic.
Yet when I think back to this time, I remember very little. Perhaps this is the mind’s way of protecting us from events that are so devastating we would otherwise lose all reason. The same way a lizard, if its body is threatened, will drop its tail, providing a distraction to the predator in order to escape with its life. And grief, for anyone who has ever experienced it, is exactly like a predator. It steals first your happiness, and then—if you allow it—everything else.
There are some things I do recall, however, and my hatred for Grandmother is one of them. It’s interesting to think that in all of Shakespeare’s plays, there are almost no grandmothers. If I could have taken up a pen and written her out of my life, I would have done it. I was certain that if a doctor had been called while Father had been escorting my aunt to her home, Mother would have survived. Grandmother had chosen death, and for this I was determined never to speak with her again if I could help it.
Over the days immediately following my mother’s death, neighbors came to visit, and Grandmother made a show of taking them to Mother’s body. She walked each woman slowly through the house, dabbing her tears with the edge of her white sari, and every time she reached the chamber where Mother was laid out on an open palanquin, she drew in the same long staggered breath. She would have made a very fine actress.
I visited Mother only once in the three days her body lay in our house. It was when the priest arrived to make my newborn sister’s Janam Kundli, or natal chart. A person’s natal chart determines nearly everything in their life. What that person will do as a career, what kind of luck they will have in business, even who they will marry. This last is the most important, because if a prospective couple’s Janam Kundlis don’t agree, the match will not go forward, no matter how eager the couple or their parents are to proceed.
When Avani came into my chamber to help me dress for the priest’s arrival, she sat at the edge of my bed and watched me read King Lear.
“Do you understand all of those words?”
I nodded, since I believed that I did. Before Father and I read any play together, he explained it to me, writing out the summary so that even if I did not understand every word in English, I would know what was happening and what to expect.
“The king was betrayed by two of his children in this story. His own family,” I said, and I knew that Avani was clever enough to understand the point I was trying to make.
“I know you are very angry,” she said, and before I could form a reply, she added, “but you should understand something about your grandmother’s life.”
Then Avani told me something my own mother had kept secret from me.
“Your grandmother came from a very wealthy family. She had more servants than she could count, and half a dozen women to help her dress. She was also very beautiful. They say that men would try to sneak into her garden just to steal a glimpse of her face.”
This, I believed. Even though meanness had hardened her eyes into sharp pieces of onyx, Grandmother was a stunning woman.
“When she married your grandfather, her family gave him the highest dowry ever paid in Barwa Sagar. Everyone expected it to be a successful marriage. And why not? They were young and wealthy with beauty and good health. Then your grandmother fell pregnant and gave birth to a girl. Over the next five years there were two more girls.”