As Sweet as Honey

17




Mostly, it was Rasi, Sanjay, and I. Everyone else was too old, in boarding school or college. We three walked to school together and walked back. Sometimes, the bullies troubled us. The loud louts who picked on us and made us afraid. Walking home from school should have been joyous in those idyllic days of our childhood, but it made us nervous. Sometimes, the bullies would purposely ram into us, making our books tumble from our hands. They were rougher with Sanjay, leaving him with scraped knees. They used their slates, which hurt him badly. With us, they pulled at our schoolbags. That’s why Sanjay, Rasi, and I stuck together. We looked out for each other. The days they weren’t there, I ran as fast as I could back home, safe. We played races and counting games so we could be quick on our feet and outrun those bullies. And when we grew, and imagined bullies all around (and in truth, it was largely our imaginations that supplied us with fresh fear), our first thought was to run as well; whether it was from love or work or pain, we ran. It was a childhood habit that was hard to control and harder to get over, but we did—each of us, in our own way, got over it, or we thought we did.

Sanjay made jokes, and ran quickly. Rasi and I held our heads high, and sometimes held hands, two warriors. What was hard was not to snap out at the girls who teased us about Meterling. Sometimes we did snap back, choking—angry, hurt words that led to hair pulling and shrieks. Once my teacher came home to complain and Grandmother listened gravely, but never spoke of it again to us. It did not make sense.

“Don’t worry, my mother will punish us both,” muttered Rasi, but Aunt Pa said nothing. The schoolgirls had called our aunt Meterling a slut and a dirty pot in Tamil.

We always had to go to school, though, not like Sanjay who stayed home once after he was beaten up by a pack of boys. It made little sense. Our aunt was pregnant; she had married. Why should anyone care?


On the other hand, there were ceremonies that went with nearly every aspect of our lives. From pujas to holidays, there was always reason to celebrate, no matter how grim the world. During her fifth month, the aunties held a special celebration for Aunt Meterling and the baby-to-be, to help pave the way for an auspicious birth. It was held in another auntie’s house, because we were still in ritual mourning for Uncle Archer. For one year, we could only visit other people at their celebrations, have none of our own.

Aunt Meterling’s arms filled up with glass bangles as our aunties and neighbor aunties each took turns placing them on her, until they reached her elbow. Laughing, they then removed them, and everyone chose some to take home, different from the ones they had brought. Rasi and I chose some as well. Then, into Aunt Meterling’s open sari paloo, held like a pouch, went fruits of all sorts, describing a fruitful birth. Aunt Pa said these were ways to distract a pregnant woman, because she might feel restless, or even sad.

I wondered what it must feel like to have such a big belly. Sometimes, Auntie put her hand on her lower back, as if to help carry the weight. Once, Rasi and I imitated her at the mirror, stuffing pillows under our skirts. When we heard someone approach, we quickly tossed them away and jumped on the empty bed, giggling. Rasi did not play with dolls anymore, but I still did, in secret, at night. I’d hold my doll and rock her. She came with a bottle, which I could fill with water, and then she would pee, only, it was from a hole on her behind. She had beautiful black hair that was painted on, and her eyes would open and shut. Sometimes I whispered, “Good, good baby,” over and over in her ear.

In school, we were reading A Christmas Carol. I’d pretend that my doll was Tiny Tim’s sister, and I would hold her tight to keep her from shivering. I asked my mother if she was shivering in America in my weekly letter. No, she replied, she had a warm coat, and wore lots of sweaters. I knew she meant she had lots of sweaters to choose from, but for a minute, I imagined my mother bundled up in sweater over sweater. In her class, Rasi was reading Treasure Island, and she wanted to be a pirate. She made treasure maps, and buried toys that Sanjay and I had to hunt for. Sanjay said they were reading Asterix comics in his class, but I knew that couldn’t be true.

• • •

In her sixth month, Meterling became more beautiful, as if lit from within. The morning sickness had passed, and it seemed she had made peace with her situation. The baby moved inside her, and we felt it twitch. In a few months, she told us, we might be able to see a foot. I didn’t know if I wanted to see a foot.


My mother, writing from America, enclosed photographs of snow. I missed her, missed my father, but they seemed abstract, like sketches. They had been gone two years, and each day, it was easier to accept. In some ways, it was like Rasi without her older sisters or Sanjay without Appam. Yet they both got lots of visits back and forth, and it didn’t seem like a loss. No one clucked their tongue and shook their head at them as they did when I proudly told friends of the family that my mother and father were doing very difficult studies in the States. My grandmother told me to never mind them. I wondered if she missed my mother, but when I asked her, she said my mother had my father, and they were both working hard to give me the best life.


It was easy to hero-worship Meterling. She was our hero because she was brave enough to marry Archer; brave enough to say no to the not-so-great part of old culture, the part that asks women and men to walk a certain path. Meterling strayed away, and she married Archer. She was a freak of nature, people used to say, encountering her height as a child for the first time, and so was Uncle Archer. It was easy enough to wander into each other’s lives, some said, because like likes like and kind marries kind. And maybe that was the case. But it seems to me that Meterling was so fortuitously cast on a stage that was fast changing, born as she was in a time of shift and great disturbance. Even as islanders and Indians fought for the British in World War II, Pundit Nehru saw the hypocrisy. Gandhi believed the oppressed must fight for the oppressed. Meterling’s mother was five when Pi got its independence, and died before she saw thirty. Meterling naturally relied on herself when she was orphaned so unexpectedly, and she grew a lot taller than the girls around her. She was never really a freak of nature. No, she was just capable of change, which scared some people. She was still a dutiful daughter, they said, for don’t you know, who can ever really escape that bondage except with another kind of bondage? She sought security and she sought to fill in the blanks of the life that she had.