As Sweet as Honey

9




Look at the way our neighbor conducts himself late at night,” said Aunt Pa. “Who is to say he is not at war with his whole life, all of the time like that? My uncle Das was his classmate, after all,” she told us, “arm in arm back in those days, one wiping his nose, the other scratching. Two peas in a pod, you know, the pair of them: and how often did my own grandmother take a broom to their shenanigans? My grandmother, who was so severe,” she said—and here we looked at each other, listening to Aunt Pa’s tale, astonished.

But Aunt Pa was looking off into the distance.

“You never expect your uncle to be killed so young, of course. This was your great-uncle from your grandfather’s side of the family. And it was our neighbor himself who went to the stationmaster’s office to demand reparation. Of course, it wasn’t that poor man’s fault—a train is bound to fail once or twice for all the times it runs properly. And your great-uncle, eighteen, he was fond of crossing the tracks to get home for tiffin. The train came at a quarter past, that was the schedule, and usually your uncle crossed while the roar of the departing train could still be heard and seen in the distance, receding. He liked to touch the rails, too, to feel their heat. And whose fault was it except that of the glass he struck his foot on, and later the stone he hit his head on before he passed out? No one saw him, that was the trouble, or in a wink they would have pulled him off the tracks. And that was the day the train chose to come late, too late that day.

And even though Auntie Pa was relating a story she must have related a hundred times before, and even though we had heard it before, there was something in her voice that told us that she would have given anything to have been there that day, to pull him away from the tracks, so even now her grandmother, were she too alive, could shake a broom at him still, to spare our neighbor who drinks late into the night and smashes bottles from his second-storey window onto the street below.

It wasn’t only for her uncle that our neighbor got drunk, but it was the start of his downward spiral, as Aunt Pa tells it—Aunt Pa, who often rises early and carefully sweeps up the glass before most of us are up the next day.



Nalani had a funny little finger, smaller than the usual small pinkie. It was a birth defect, a stub. We loved to hold it, and compare its littleness to our own little and littler fingers. Nalani had long, thick braids, and liked to wear chiffony dupattas over her skirts. We thought her laugh was like running water, all sparkle and stream. Nalani liked to paint on glass as well as fold paper fortunes; she was the artist in our family. She painted beautiful girls from the classical period, dancing girls and musicians holding tamburas and veenas, small drums and cymbals. She went to Madhupur Women’s Art College, and took two buses to get there. There had been a row about her going, but Auntie Pa prevailed, saying that all girls should go to college; it was nonsense to think otherwise.

My own mother had gone to college, but many of my aunts had not. Nalani’s mother had been in a class of four, one of the first girls to go to the local Catholic college in 1951. In those days, families who sent their girls to college were made fun of. Why do they protest, our grandfather had fumed (so we’d been told); our girls would be skilled at economy, home science, at the arts, make better wives than those without a B.Sc. Others resisted any Catholic institution, and the kneeling that went on within those walls. All this fuss over a class of four.

“What’s the matter, don’t you want her to get married?” persisted the neighbors, worried he had gone crazy. But my grandfather maintained that an educated woman could educate her family, and college was the natural step to take. But though the band of four was brave, there were faculty who refused to teach girls, who said “they were unteachable, that it was immoral, and even the Gita had concurred.” The president of the college, versed in Sanskrit and no slouch, defended his actions, and threatened to dismiss faculty who would not cross the border. It was a bold step; in other situations, a man might say this, but in private—it would be understood that the threat would not be carried out. Clustering close and walking hand in hand in the corridors, where the men frankly stared, then hurriedly looked away, the four sought to absorb information quickly and become good scholars.

The following year, the enrollment for girls at the college dipped to two and the coed program was done away with. Then, in 1954, a new women’s college was built, and the compulsory Catholic prayer with kneeling was made optional, and families sent their girls in droves, or at least dozens. My mother attended RKV Subalakshmi College and, together with her two best friends, Anu and Miriam, studied physics and chemistry. When Miriam told the girls she was going to become a nun, my mother and the other friend cried. “But, Miriam, what about your hair?!” was all they could think of to say, so shocked and hurt were they; but Miriam hugged her friends and said no shaving was involved, only a crop—“Think of Joan of Arc!”—which made the girls cry even more, followed by Miriam herself.



Everyone was full of stories about our grandfather. He had been posted to Malaysia, on assignment for the civil engineering project he was engaged in. He and a colleague subsisted on careful rations of rice, they were so poor. One morning his friend was so hungry, he ate the day’s supply, and Grandfather wouldn’t speak to him for the rest of the week. The friend apologized profusely, but my grandfather turned a stony ear. Years later, the friend married the daughter of a poet, and he asked his father-in-law to write a sonnet on a single grain of rice dedicated to my grandfather. My grandfather had the rice grain framed, and to this day, it hangs proudly in the house.


My mother adored my grandfather. She told me all the time about the good things he did. Even though his son-in-law had childhood polio, he never let him feel bad, so to this day, Uncle Darshan is the jolliest man we know. Grandfather married my mother off to a scholar who drank far too much espresso, who had too much brilliance for India, so he sent him to America. He was part of a crowd of men accused by India: Brain Drain! Sons abandoning Mother India! But even though Kennedy, a young, smart man who once had said, Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country, did not govern America, he had once, and that spoke of hope, even if they had killed him. He was an American who was as good as Nehru perhaps, but maybe not as wise, “for really, who could be as wise as Nehru and Gandhi, Mina?” My aunties loved to tell me about Indian history, about Asoka and the Pallavas. My head swam with story, lived for story—“Then what? … Then what?” I’d ask. In my school, my teacher said she could not continue the lessons, for I would constantly erupt with questions. She gave me a notebook so I could write them down to ask her later, but instead, I began to draw.