A few months into their affair, the Princess began to call Naga “jaan”—Beloved. She taught the servants in the house to call her Bai Sa in the tradition of Rajput royalty. She cooked Naga dishes made with secret family recipes from her family’s royal kitchen. She ordered new curtains, embroidered cushions and lovely dhurries for the floor. She brought a sweet, sunny, feminine touch to an egregiously neglected apartment. Her attentions were balm to Naga’s injured pride. Though he didn’t reciprocate her feelings with the same intensity with which they were offered, he accepted them with a tired grace. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be the doted-on one in a couple. Notwithstanding his general prejudice towards small dogs, he grew inordinately fond of Prince Charles. He took him to the neighborhood park regularly, where he threw a tiny, saucer-sized frisbee for him that he had sourced and bought online. Prince Charles would retrieve his saucer-frisbee, lolloping back to Naga through weeds that were almost as tall as he was. The Princess played hostess at a few dinners that Naga threw. R.C. was entranced by her and impressed upon Naga that he should lose no time and marry her while she was still of childbearing age.
Naga, still distraught and still vulnerable to R.C.’s disastrous advice, asked the Princess if she would like to move in for a trial run. She reached across and tenderly neatened his unruly eyebrows, pressing the hairs into a ridge between her forefinger and her thumb. She said nothing would make her happier, but that before she moved in she would need to liberate Tilo’s chi that still hung about the house. With Naga’s permission she dry-roasted whole red chilies and carried the smoking copper pot from room to room, coughing delicately and turning her glossy head away from the acrid smoke with her eyes screwed shut. When the chilies stopped smoking she said a prayer and buried them in the garden along with the pot. Then she tied a red thread around Naga’s wrist and lit expensive scented candles, one in each room, and left them to burn down to the wick. She bought a dozen large cardboard cartons for Naga to pack Tilo’s things into and take down to the basement. It was while he was cleaning out Tilo’s cupboard (that smelled so unashamedly of her) that Naga came upon Tilo’s mother’s thick medical file from Lakeview Hospital in Cochin.
—
In all the years he and Tilo had been married, Naga had never met Tilo’s mother. Tilo never talked about her. He knew the broad contours of course. Her name was Maryam Ipe. She belonged to an old, aristocratic Syrian Christian family that had fallen on bad times. Two generations of the family—her father and her brother—had graduated from Oxford and she herself had been educated at a convent school in Ootacamund, a hill station in the Nilgiris, and then at a Christian college in Madras, after which her father’s illness forced her to return to her home town in Kerala. Naga knew that she had been an English teacher in a local school before she started her own school, which grew to be an extremely successful high school known for its innovative teaching methods—the school that Tilo had attended before she came to college in Delhi. He had read a few newspaper articles about Tilo’s mother in which Tilo was never named, but always referred to as her adopted daughter who lived in Delhi. R.C. (whose job it was to know everything about everybody and to let everybody know that he knew everything about everybody) had once made a file of clippings for him, saying, “Your Foster-Mother-in-Law is a cool chick, yaar.” The articles spanned a period of several years—some were about her school, its teaching methods and its beautiful campus, some were about the social and environmental campaigns that she had led or the awards she had won. They told the story of a woman who had overcome great adversity in her early life to become what she was—an iconic feminist who never moved to a big city, but chose instead to take the hard path and continue to live and fight her battles in the conservative little town she belonged to. They described how she had struggled against cabals of bullying men, how she eventually won the respect and admiration of those who had tormented her and how she had inspired a whole generation of young women to follow their dreams and desires.
It was obvious to anybody who knew Tilo that she was not the foster-daughter of the woman in the photographs in those articles. Although their complexions were dramatically different, their features were strikingly similar.
From what little he knew, Naga sensed there was a substantial piece of the puzzle that had gone missing in the newspaper stories—a sort of epic Macondo madness, the stuff of literature, not journalism. Although he never said so, he felt Tilo’s attitude towards her mother was punitive and unreasonable. In his opinion, even if it was true that Tilo was her real child whom she would not publicly acknowledge, it was equally true that for a young woman who belonged to a traditional community, to have chosen a life of independence, chosen to eschew marriage in order to claim a child born to her out of wedlock—even if it meant masking it as benevolence and masquerading as the baby’s foster-mother—was an act of immense courage and love.
Naga noticed that in all the newspaper articles, the paragraph concerning Tilo was always a set piece: “Sister Scholastica called me to say that a coolie woman had left a newborn baby in a basket outside the Mount Carmel orphanage. She asked if I wanted to take her. My family was dead against it, but I thought that if I adopted her I could give her a new life. She was a jet-black baby, like a little piece of coal. She was so small she almost fitted in the palm of my hand so I called her Tilottama, which means ‘sesame seed’ in Sanskrit.”
Hurtful as this might have been for Tilo, Naga thought she should be able to look at it from her mother’s point of view—she needed to distance herself from her baby if only in order to be able to claim her, own her and love her.
According to Naga, the credit for Tilo’s individuality, her quirkiness and unusualness—regardless of which school you subscribed to, nature or nurture—went straight to her mother. But nothing he could say, directly or indirectly, led to a rapprochement.
So Naga was puzzled when, having kept away from her mother for so many years, Tilo so readily agreed to go to Cochin and look after her in hospital. He imagined (even though he couldn’t recall Tilo ever having betrayed any curiosity on the subject) that it could have been in the hope of gaining some information, a deathbed revelation perhaps, about herself and who her father really was. He was right. But it turned out to be a little late for that sort of thing.
BY THE TIME Tilo reached Cochin, her mother’s deteriorating lungs had led to a build-up of carbon dioxide in her bloodstream, which in turn led to the inflammation of her brain, which made her severely disoriented. To add to that, her medication and her extended stay in the ICU had induced a form of psychosis which doctors said particularly affected powerful, self-willed people who suddenly found themselves helpless and at the mercy of those they had once treated as minions. Other than the hospital staff, her anger and bewilderment were directed at her faithful old servants and the teachers from her school who took turns to be on hospital duty. They hovered around in the hospital corridor and were allowed to visit their beloved Ammachi in the ICU for a few minutes every couple of hours.
On the day Tilo arrived, her mother’s face lit up.
“I’m scratching all the time,” she said by way of greeting. “He says it’s good to scratch, but I couldn’t stand it any more, so I took the scratching medicine. How are you?”
She held up her dark purple arms, one of them attached to a drip, to show Tilo what had happened to her skin from having been prodded and poked with needles by the doctors’ endless search for veins that were still open. Most of her veins had collapsed and closed down and formed a darker purple web underneath the already-purple skin.
“Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say, ‘These wounds had I on Crispin’s day.’ Remember? I taught you that.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the next line?”
“Old men forget. Yet all shall be forgot. But he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.”