Alekhya Mukkavilli
Barnard College, New York, New York
Times of India, September 13th 2008: SERIAL BLASTS ROCK DELHI; 30 DEAD, 90 INJURED
The bus to school always smelled like smoke. We would see it being cleaned, but it always smelled like smoke because Delhi’s scent was a mix of smog, spices, and body odor.
I was wearing an Abercrombie t-shirt and shorts, and I could feel my armpits already starting to get damp in the 100-degree weather. My friend Diksha and I walked slowly away from the Bus Gate towards our lockers. Other students poured in from the Gate 5 entrance, which was opposite a slum—a jugghi.
Foreigners who went to the American Embassy School of New Delhi got used to the jugghi because they quickly realized that there were more serious levels of absolute poverty. The inhabitants of the slum opposite the American Embassy School and the British School of New Delhi were quite well off. This was the realization of the ultimate theory of relativity.
No vehicles but the busses entered the gates. You had to have some type of affiliated ID and, if you didn’t, you had to go through Gate 2. At Gate 2, you’d enter the left part of the entrance. There, a door would close behind you, and you’d find yourself enclosed between four barred walls with a little opening for you to talk to a guard. He, always a he, would open the window and ask for your purpose of visit and for a form of ID. If you passed, you could enter. Our walls were massive, concrete, and had barbed wire on the top.
Delhi was not a safe city. Being close to Pakistan, it faced the aftermath and political implications of partition. Being the capital, it forced upon itself unreasonable amounts of attention from Muslim, Hindu, and East Indian extremist groups. Deep in the fabric of the city’s makeup laid interwoven strings of racial, religious, and social unrest. Fate and hate; the rhyme scheme for Delhi’s tapestry of earnest belief and misunderstanding.
Diksha and I would always make fun of the barbed wire. Our school was otherwise made of natural material and most buildings were LEEDs certified.
“AES and its fucking barbed wire,” I joked, while staring at a particularly ugly clump as we passed Gate 2 on the way to the high school building.
Diksha smiled appreciatively, but changed the subject, “So is it true that they’re planning to cancel Minicourse?” The topic of our annual school trip had been on everyone’s minds since the weekend.
“Oh I don’t know Diksha,” I teased. I loved the fact that being on student council meant that I had information that others didn’t.
Diksha, however, was one of the few friends who didn’t feed into my power-trip. She shrugged, “Yes you do.”
“Alright. I mean, yeah, they’re considering it. There were five bomb blasts this weekend.”
“Mm”
“And they were all in known areas, dude. Like near Connaught Place. Like, areas that tourists visit.”
“I know, but those bombs were low intensity. Lots of people died just because it was crowded.”
She paused to wave at someone while we continued walking.
“What was I saying again? Oh, yeah. We’ll be fine on the trains; they shouldn’t cancel Minicourse because of this.” Sometimes I wondered if Diksha criticized the administration just to spite me.
“I mean, I guess you’re right. I just know the embassy’s worried about us using national trains or leaving Delhi. Like, in the larger picture, is going river rafting as important as not getting bombed?”
We had reached the high school building. At this point we had to turn two separate ways to get to our lockers.
Diksha looked at me and said, “No farangis died. The American Embassy will make sure that stays the same.”
I thought about that comment as I walked to my locker.
Who was I, if not a foreigner? The haziness of my existence in Delhi mocked me. I had yet to realize that people like me, who had moved around a lot, were handicapped by their privilege. Our lives were built wholly on observation and very little on actual participation.
In the American Embassy School of New Delhi, five gates protected me from having to ever figure out where I stood on the spectrum of Indian and foreigner. My mom called it a bubble and I would get insulted. But, you know, even as a fifteen-year-old, five gates and concrete walls pointed to where I stood on that spectrum.
CNN-IBN Live, September 28th 2008: TARGET DELHI: CAPITAL STRUCK TWICE IN TWO WEEKS
My mom and I were coming home from the grocery store. We went to a special one that stocked all the foreign foods I got used to in Bangkok. I’d buy Nutella, Honey Bunches of Oats, and pesto. My mom always balked at the bill, but I knew she would let it go; she felt bad about the move. It had been about six months and a lot had happened.
I moved, halfway through my eighth grade year, from Bangkok to New Delhi. I am Indian by passport, not by behavior. I did not speak Hindi, and having been born in Bangalore, I was definitely not North Indian. I chipped the bone under my kneecap after the second week of moving to Delhi in a PE class. It was a lucky break. My cast was so large that I got to miss two weeks of school.
I eventually made friends, because that’s what you eventually do when you move schools. Delhi, however, was still foreign to me. People in and out of school were crude and vulgar. People could be so rich and so mean and so ruthless, and all of it played out on campus. It was a stage for all of India’s nonsensical idiosyncrasies with the West to play out. I’m talking about white privilege, classism, sexism and racism all well cloaked with a thin layer of fog and pollution that the city so well espoused. All covered with ‘good senses of humor’ and the normalcy of what several Indian scholars called ‘the colonial hang-up.’
It was a weird place to move to after Bangkok, where people could be mean to each other, but only in a basic high school way. They were mean in making petty comments that everyone learns how to shake off. No one in Bangkok would tell a student who was wearing a stained blouse that she “looked like a maid.” It wouldn’t be normal in Bangkok to tell a black kid to go to KFC. There were lines there, and there was nothing in Delhi.
At AES, white girls and non-white girls would never be compared with each other because there were different standards for each. I was considered pretty for an Indian girl.
White girls and non-white girls were ranked within their own categories, and the results would cause catfights between the girls but anger was never directed towards the boys. The richest boys had the most power and would pick on the kids who weren’t as outspoken. It was normal for people to make jokes about the darker Indian kids.
When they found out that I was South Indian, one of the kids surveyed me and said, “but you’re not black.”
Not that I’m complaining. I loved that shit. I loved making fun of people and laughing along with the crowd. After six months of feeling like an outsider, high school was where I had finally blended in. AES was a tiny, tiny, world and being comfortable in it allowed us to construct a tiny, tiny worldview. Because we lived in India and opposite a slum we convinced ourselves that we were exposed to hardship.
But smoke and barbed wire can exclude all real hardship.
The Hindustan Times, September 28th, 2008: “AAPKA PACKET GIR GAYA HAI (SIR, YOU DROPPED YOUR PACKET)”
When my mother and I came back home, we found my dad sitting in our family room staring unblinkingly at our television.
“Sujata, did you see this?”
My mom and I stared at the television screen. Never one to mince words, she muttered, “Shit.”
There was an image of a body bag in a crowded market. The words MEHRAULI MARKET and BLAST kept on flashing on the screen. A young boy closest to it died. Two others died from injuries a while after.
“Only three people were affected. That’s not that bad, right?”
As soon as I said it, I could tell that it was the wrong thing to say. My dad looked disgusted, and my mother’s face could only register shock. When she got mad, her voice took on this stony quality.
“Alekhya, the boy was 12-years old.”
I still didn’t get it. It could have been much worse. It could have been 15 or 30 dead people.
I sulked out of the room to my own and sat down in front of my desktop. I turned it on. The sound of it whirring to life helped me calm down, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the urgency in my mom’s voice, or my parents’ general disappointment.
I thought about the blasts. I thought about Minicourse, but then I thought about the actual blasts. I didn’t even know where Mehrauli was.
In the Google-search window I typed in “Mehrauli.” Apparently it was 20 minutes away from my home.
I typed in “Bomb blasts New Delhi.”
I saw pictures of the boy without the body bag and it was gruesome. I couldn’t even tell that it was a body; he was all limbs. I did not look away because the grotesqueness of a mangled 12-year-old was too captivating.
Once I finished looking through the pictures, I moved on to the news. There was no solid answer. It could have been a terrorist group called the Indian Muhajideen, or it could have been Bangladeshi terrorists.
“The bomb was dropped off in a disguised packet from a motorbike in Mehrauli Sarai market around 1 pm.”
The bomb was homemade, apparently. It could have been anyone because, apparently, people knew how to make bombs in their homes.
“A street-vendor’s son saw the motorbike and picked up the packet, because he thought the man on the motorbike dropped it by mistake.”
“The boy ran after the motorbike, saying, ‘aapka packet gir gaya hai.’”
At that exact moment, the power went out in my house. We lived in a city outside of Delhi called Gurgaon that grew in size faster than its infrastructure did. The power went out every hour and we’d just have to sit and wait for the beep of the generator to know that the electricity would be back in a matter of minutes.
My screen was black, but the image of the little boy running after that motorcycle, bomb in hand, kept on replaying in my head. It was all so goddamn poetic.
I was used to threats of violence. I grew up in Bangkok, where government coups occurred so often they became a bi-yearly norm. I lived for a year in Ho Chi Minh City, where the adults that surrounded me never bothered to hide stories of the Vietnamese wars, which the Vietnamese called the Chinese, French, and American wars.
I was used to instability, and I was used to the idea of violence. But I was only used to images and statistics; 30 dead, and pictures of fire that attacked the front pages of newspapers. Images and statistics never attacked my mind.
Sitting in the dark, I wondered if three dead people was such a small number after all. I wondered if I should have been more sad for the kid, or more scared for the city, or more happy that it wasn’t anyone I knew. I wondered if there was anything more for me to wonder about.
What I was not used to was the image of a 12-year-old literally running after, and with, death.
The Hindu, November 26th 2008: RASH OF TERROR ATTACKS IN MUMBAI
Two months later, I was returning with my friends from a ritzy vacation in a hotel a little outside of Delhi. My friend Saumya’s dad worked for a luxury hotel chain and would get free stays every now and then. She invited Diksha and me to come with her, and it was with them that I first watched Mumbai on fire.
While Saumya and I were packing our things, Diksha turned on the television.
Shit.
We checked out soon after. Three hours later, I was back in Delhi, 1400 kilometers away from Mumbai although my mind was so close.
The Guardian, November 26th 2008: ATTACKS DRAW WORLDWIDE CONDEMNATION
The dome of the Taj was on fire. When I saw images of roofs burning, I always thought about how a human inside could force the fire to fly. Did they just throw the bomb upwards, hoping that it would hit the right target? How does one throw a bomb at all? It would have to have been thrown for the roof to be set on fire, because NDTV’s headlines said that the bombs were low-intensity, almost home-made.
Was a burning dome a symbol for something? Was I supposed to gather meaning from the gusts of black smoke that now hung over the Taj hotel?
My family was in our living room staring at our television. We were not talking to each other because you could not say things to people when images of mangled bodies replaced the words in your mind. Crackling sounds from the on-site correspondent blared through the TV’s speakers and woke up our dog, Hutch. The unfolding of events engrossed him, too.
Apparently, railway stations got hit as well. So did a Jewish Cultural House. Many people got wounded simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Man, it just gets me.
I don’t know what about it; maybe all of it just gets me. The fact that the reason I knew anything about the Taj was because so many of my classmates’ parents stayed there, like that one time Rohit’s dad saw the great Shahrukh Khan drunk at the Taj’s restaurant. The fact that it was the first place that notably got reported on.
When a five-star hotel’s roof was on fire, it was a symbol for media revenue. The fact that I was sitting in a living room unable to do anything but be a spectator. The fact that I didn’t know whether it was right to watch Mumbai burn.
We just kept watching the jenga tower wobble and we were all just holding our breaths for the collapse.
The Hindustan Times, November 29th 2008: TERROR ATTACKS TARGETS
And here’s the real joke/cherry on the top/icing on the cake: “Terror Attacks Targets.” Do you want to know who the targets were?
You don’t even need me to tell you. That’s how obvious it was to us too. But do you want the breakdown of who got wounded?
The first people to get wounded were not the intended targets. The poor periphery.
The bad guy holding the bomb, crouching just so he could toss it up with enough velocity, probably so that newspapers could capitalize on the image of a burning dome, got the wrong people. Whatever that meant.
The Hindustan Times, November 30th 2008: 166 PEOPLE KILLED AND 300 PEOPLE INJURED IN MUMBAI
We woke up three days after the attack had started to find out that the Indian Secret Service, called the Black Cats, had contained the attacks. My dad just shook his head.
“Three days. What a fucking joke.”
The Black Cats neutralized the situation before the terrorist group, Lakshar-i-Taiba, could cause some serious harm to the intended bull’s eye.
Thank God they got there in time, it only took three days.
Man, a city under siege for three days. Angry young terrorists attacking the upper class and rich foreigners and the common man. News sources told us that the terrorists were linked to the Al-Qaeda. Another newspaper used the word ‘inferno,’ because Hell was the only term that you could use to describe this vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty.
News also revealed that the Pakistani government helped the terrorist group train for the attack. I resented this fact. International schools made conflict seem like silly misunderstandings. I resented the realization that past conflict seeped into and tainted the future. I resented that the conflict between India and Paksitan was not a silly misunderstanding, and I resented myself for ever believing that it was.
My family and I watched the events unfold everyday on television. It’s like we took shifts to keep track of what was happening. Just wondering and hoping that the tower would not collapse.
Our Minicourse was cancelled that year; there were no school trips outside of New Delhi. We were advised not to visit major markets for weeks. There was no repeat of Mumbai, but we all lived in the expectation that there one day could be.
The Hindustan Times, May 21st 2013: STICKY BOMB AT CENTRE OF EMBASSY CAR BLAST PROBE
I rushed out of baggage claim, past blown up posters of sari-clad women namaskar-ing me to New Delhi. DEL, New Delhi, Delhi, Dilli. The Capital. My mother greeted me outside of the terminal.
“They wouldn’t let me inside because of what happened at the Israeli embassy. Security’s up again.”
I got into the car and nodded at everything my mother talked to me about: our home, its decorations, the people we lived around, the people I went to school with. All the things that seemed central to my mother’s existence but were now so separate from mine the moment I went to college.
Since the beginning of my senior year of high school, I became increasingly disgusted with New Delhi. My family had moved to Chicago during my junior year in what had been the most random experience of my life. I went to the University of Chicago Laboratory School. I was the only student there who had lived abroad. Everyone else had grown up around or near the school, and around half of my grade had been ‘labbies’ for life.
I think subconsciously I knew I would never fit in, but I loved my friends there despite it. I liked that people were passionate about things that went beyond their social scene and what their parents did.
In March of my junior year of high school, my father moved to Dubai. Instead of moving to Dubai, my mother decided to move back to Delhi for my senior year. My dad visited once a month. They didn’t want me to go to a new school my senior year, so I ended up back at AES. I spent my senior year unable to un-see all of the Delhi’s inconsistencies. I stopped going to parties, and I stopped talking to my old friends. I could no longer will myself to enjoy all the things I had once loved.
The environment was both foreign and familiar, and the smell of smog still lingered menacingly in the air. It never left my clothes. It never stopped reminding me that I could never leave it.
It was especially strong in the car on the day I returned from my first year of college. All I could smell was dust and smog, and it made me carsick. My mother noticed how I started to massage my head.
“Are you car sick? Don’t worry, we’ll be home soon. Did you hear about the bomb?”
I took a break from squeezing my temples and answered, “Vaguely, what happened?”
“I thought you would have read about it. You know it was in international news, so I don’t know why you haven’t heard more about it. Unless you don’t read the news.”
“I read the news mom, what happened?”
“Well an AES mom whose husband works at the Israeli embassy was pulling out of the embassy when her car blew up.”
My mom gave me this information like it was morning gossip; slipping it in between when she handed me a cup of chai and when she’d serve the eggs.
“You really need to be more in touch with the news,” she continued. “Anyways, she was leaving the embassy and the police think that someone going by on a motorbike put a sticker bomb on it”.
I paused. A sticker bomb. God, I just couldn’t keep up with terrorists.
“Well, is she ok?”
“Yes, yes she’s fine, of course she’s fine, she’s a diplomat’s wife. You know nobody here will ever let anything happen to a diplomat, especially not a white one. It was strange, though; nothing happens that close, you know?”
“Yeah, that’s scary. I bet everyone at school’s pretty riled up.”
My mom had that look in her eyes, the little glint of hope. “You should visit AES. Maybe go for graduation or something. Don’t you have friends in the Class of 2013?”
“Sure. I haven’t kept in touch with any of them, though.” To make my point I added, “I hate going to AES mom.”
“Just go for graduation, go with your friends from your year. It’ll be nice to see everyone.”
The Hindustan Times, May 22nd 2013: USE OF STICKY BOMBS A CAUSE FOR CONCERN
Later in the day, after we had returned form the graduation ceremony, my friend Amrita and I waited outside of her building for her car. Amrita was a friend I had made due to proximity or, as my mother would call it, “the complex’s thriving community.”
We were wearing clothes that made the complex’s gardeners stare at us, unabashedly, as we waited.
“God I hate how they stare.”
Amrita looked up, “I’ve stopped noticing to be honest.”
Her driver pulled up, and we got into the car. Amrita gave her driver, in sweetly-paced Hindi, the address of the farmhouse where the after-graduation party would be. When Delhi-ites talked about farmhouses, they didn’t mean ranches. They meant mansions surrounded by vast gardens and a pool. Maybe calling it a farmhouse made people feel less guilty for living there. Most were located in an area on the outskirts of Delhi called Chattarpur, which used to be a village but was starting to be developed. There still were some instances of rape and violence in the area, but nothing out of the ordinary for Delhi.
As Amrita’s car pulled into the farmhouse driveway, I started to feel the familiar pangs of anxiety in my stomach. Tonight would be a night of conversations that seemed endless and purposeless.
I got out and walked through pulsing music towards the clothed tables, where I saw some members of my graduating class. We hugged and exchanged pleasantries. One of the kids, George, pulled out a box and opened it. Inside were three tightly rolled joints filled with Himalayan hash, and tobacco from a Gold Flake cigarette.
One of his friends, Raj, let out a laugh, “Jesus, George, at least wait for the party to really start.”
“No man, it’s not like we’re doing anything else.”
George had a point. His excuse was the one that every Delhi kid had for every tried substance and night spent past curfew. We had few options for entertainment.
The joint went around a circle of five of us. When it got to me I became achingly aware of how I held it and how I looked when I smoked. I did not want to ruin the smoothness of the joint’s transition, nor the level of interpersonal comfort that my classmates fabricated so well.
I breathed in the hash, still feeling that guilty pang that I had felt since 10th grade. But then again, it’s not like I was doing anything else. The high settled and I loosened up.
George was talking about being back in Delhi and going out. Apparently his return to Delhi was a lot less sober than my own. I cut through the conversation.
“What do you guys think about this whole Israeli embassy thing? Pretty fucked, right?”
“That’s India dude…”
“Remember freshman year, when Bombay got attacked?”
“It was just random— othing big will happen near school.”
“Unless the American Embassy gets attacked.”
“Nothing’s going to happen you idiot.”
George, who was taking in the dregs of the joint, looked pensive. We were all pleasantly stoned. The smell of the hash, sweeter than weed, perfumed the air. To this day, I am unsure of what I feel about this smell.
“What do you think about it, George?” I asked, hopeful.
He finished the joint, took out another one, and lit it.
“George.”
Someone hit the top of his head.
“What? Sorry. What were you guys talking about?” Everyone giggled.
Raj shook his head in awe, “Dude, you’re so fucking high.”
George took the compliment, “You should have seen me yesterday.”
I made a beeline for the bar, wishing instead that I was in a city where I could have taken the subway home.
The Times of India, May 23rd 2013: ISRAELI EMBASSY CAR BLAST; INDIAN INTELLIGENCE HINTS AT IRAN’S HAND
BOOM BOOM BOOM
An alarm even more horrifying than my phone’s warning bleeps; someone was cracking open a coconut. My stomach churned with last night’s alcohol. Arguably, I overdid it. I could argue that I needed too, but that was all beside the point. The point was that someone was opening a coconut in my living room, and I felt like my room was closing in on me.
My sister barged through the door with a smirk on her face.
“You’re gonna have a rough day.”
“What the fuck is happening?” My head was under a pillow; I was trying to pray away the headache.
“How did you forget? It’s one of the first things Mom told you when you landed.”
Absolute dread. My mother decided to have a pooja since my grandparents decided to visit. She called in a Priest from Noida, flowers from Central Delhi, and other religious necessities from West Delhi. We were praying good fortune, or safety, or all of the above. I made a mental note to pay more attention to my mother and launched myself off of my bed.
My reflection in the mirror was one that would make my Grandmother get on a plane back to Bangalore. I scrubbed my body, trying to rid myself of the dust that had already embedded itself in my skin. I tried to search my closet for a salwaar-kameez and was immediately reminded of how culturally defunct I was within my own country. I could only find one full outfit from 10th grade.
Nevertheless, I shoved the kurta over my head and pulled the matching pants and tightened the drawstrings above my waist. I checked myself in the mirror again. The paleness in my face would still catch my grandmother’s attention, but in a sick way that would make her think about its fairness. The salwar kameez crushed my chest. My body had changed a lot since 10th grade.
My room opened up to the living room, where a priest was starting a fire and arranging the offerings of fruit, flower, milk and rice. My mom, father, sister, and grandparents were waiting in the drawing room. When she saw me, my mother got up and went to talk to the priest. No one talked to anyone because we, myself especially, were all so hungry. My grandmother and mother had refused to feed us until the pooja was over.
My mother herded us back into the living room and the pooja began. The priest set fire to Agharbati incense, which filled the room with perfumed smoke that calmed and suffocated me at the same time. The priest, my parents, and my grandparents started to chant mantras out loud. My sister and I closed our eyes and imbibed all we could. Moments later, the fire was in full force. As I breathed in and coughed up its ashes, my hangover spread through every part of my body. Multiple explosions were taking place in my head.
Smoke. Smoke in my hair, in my mouth, in my head, in my brain, smoke everywhere. Smoke from the Delhi haze. Desert smoke from the sand in the Dusshera, constantly shifting. Smoke from terrorist attacks; smoke from continuous joints with hash that made everything a little bearable but twisted. Smoke from a burnt past where I used to enjoy everything here—all of this bullshit. Everything there was just left in smoke, and I was breathing it in and breathing it out.
That’s what Delhi does. You learn to inhale smoke. Your lungs learn to exhale it. You don’t teach it to love or hate anything, you teach it to tolerate and it teaches you to deal with toleration. You wake up one day and get a newspaper with black smoke and fire on the front page, but this image will not stay. A bomb blast does not stay front-page news in a city that is constantly a remnant of cinders.
Ananya and I
IN TRANSIT
If I gave you a picture of Yamuna, you would not believe. You’d look at this picture and wonder about the types of evil time can do to people. You’d notice that she is awake enough to think. She is staring towards the end of the photo and you, not knowing anything about her, will want to stare with her. This is the type of picture that will make you wish that you could walk into its subject’s mind.
But you can’t, unfortunately. Yamuna is a closed book. She has taken care of different ailments from orphaned childhood to shriveled Alzheimer’s and Yamuna Gubbi is beat. She walks with a limp, her language is a garbled mix of Kannada and English, and even if she tried to, she would not be able to hear you. Her husband has gone, her children live far away and talk to each other less and less. She has five grandchildren who are all a little bit confused, happy, and unhappy. She is scared for all of them, but then again, at her age, Yamuna is a little bit too old to feel.
So she sleeps a lot during the day. She rests her eyes and her soul and tries to think about what she would have done if she hadn’t been married at 17, or what she would still do now if her legs did not hurt so much. The only thing left on her body that does not bear the signs of what her life has done to her is her hair, which has started to cruelly shed all over her home. She still wakes up everyday and combs and oils it. She does this while looking in the mirror. This is the only time of the day where she acknowledges her wrinkles.
The wrinkles on her make a map of different paths that lead to nowhere in particular. You could get lost in her wrinkles—in what you want them to express to you about age and where you are in your own life. You will try to project yourself into those thin layers of skin, and you will be wrong to do so because those wrinkles are one of the only things in her possession that can speak for only her.
There are so many other things that I could say about my Ajji. That my mom and my aunt are mad at her because she loves my Uncle the best and “a mother is never supposed to pick favorites.” How she relates to my Uncle’s daughter the most because his daughter understands Kannada. Or maybe I could talk about how she’s the epitome of Bangalore to me: slow, steady, hard-working, and constantly shadowed by things that are a little bit bigger than her.
I could write about all these things that I think about my Ajji and, like you, the reader who may project yourself into her leather, I would be wrong. I don’t know her that well. I probably never will because she is losing memory of English and I have never learned her language.
All I have to write about her is how she looks in an old picture that I have scanned and photocopied and put on the wall of pretty much every room I have lived in, and how that photo makes me feel when I look at it. When I visit her, we try to talk to each other, and we both know we are not actually listening to each other.
Hold on.
I want to apologize to you for using the present tense. Because at this moment in time, as I keep glancing between this irrelevant photo and my computer screen, I have just received the news that Yamuna Gubbi has died. She lies peacefully on the second floor of the Krest Park Apartment Complex; her wrinkles finally relaxed in flat 1002.
* * *
48 hours later I am on Emirates Flight 204, and in the bathroom staring at my reflection, which is now dripping with water. I splash more water on my face, trying to remove the layers of confusion that have ingrained themselves into my skin over the past three months.
Where have I been? I guess I did the right things too quickly. Graduated from high school with the great private sector job. But then what? In work and then unemployed, and then? I slept on Sarah’s couch for two months after I stopped being able to pay rent. I haven’t talked to my sister in the past six months except for the random articles about the Jaipur literature festival that she sent me. Ajji died and I bought a plane ticket with a credit card that belongs to my father. He will see the charge and ask me why I did not pay for it with my own money. A familiar feeling of guilt and nausea settles in my stomach and tightens my face.
In my head, I revise my itinerary. I left New York eight hours ago, and in 20 minutes I will land in Dubai. I will meet Ananya for the first time in a year, and we will travel together to Bangalore as representatives of both our mother and our aunt.
Our Uncle Jagath will be the only one allowed to be present at the cremation, according to Hindu custom. Our mother isn’t coming because she has had yet another argument with Jagath’s wife, Manjaree. Our aunt, Bharati, isn’t coming because she has not come to terms with her relationship with a living Yamuna, let alone with a dead one. Her children are equally confused.
An airhostess, who is well versed in airtime passive aggressiveness, bangs on the bathroom door.
“Excuse me, please take your seat; we are landing soon.”
I obey.
IN BANGALORE
Eight hours later, Ananya and I are sitting in the back seat of an ambassador taxi moving sluggishly through Bangalore traffic. We have only discussed Ajji’s passing and my mom’s ability to get into arguments with everybody in her family. We made some jokes about Indian airports. An hour into the flight, Ananya popped a sleeping pill and woke up half an hour before we landed. I stayed awake and watched Friends over and over again. The theme song is stuck in my head and makes for a jarring backdrop to Bangalore’s chaos.
“God, it’s ridiculous that the metro isn’t even done yet,” I say as the car moves past walls painted with murals of Karnataka.
“Yeah. Well I guess the only reason Delhi’s was built so fast was because of the Common Wealth Games.”
“Mmm. Typical India.” I chuckled mechanically, not knowing what else to do with my face.
Ananya looks away from her window and locks her eyes with mine. “So Gargi, how was your first year on the street?”
“Oh, you know, as good as a year can go in finance.” I look away, wondering when would be a good time to mention that I was fired.
“Why did you do it if you’re so indifferent to it?” She’s been waiting to lecture me.
I have no response for her.
“You know Ananya, I’m not really in the mood to discuss it. Let’s talk about you. What have you been up too? How’s the Dubai lifestyle treating you?”
“You know, Gargi, It’s good. I kinda like it now. It’s growing on me and I like consulting.”
“It’s good that you can teach yourself to like things. It’s not exactly someone’s dream job, is it?
“Those jobs don’t exist.”
Hard taps on my window save me from having to respond. A young boy looks into our car with his hands clasped. He taps again, almost demanding sympathy. I look at the back of the driver’s seat until the car moves past him.
Although my eyes feel moldy, I do not close them. I look out my window again, unable to tear myself from Bangalore. What did I leave India for?
I roll down the glass. This country smells so strong, and there’s so much noise everywhere, and everyone’s just moving and living as if there is no time to ponder stupid things like being unemployed or having a dead person in your family. Everything but life is irrelevant. People have the same noses as I do. I hear street vendors shouting at passers-by, advertising their food or clothes. As in Kannada, everything they say in English ends with the suffix –OO.
“T-SHIRT-OO, 100 RUPEES.”
It reminds me of how my parents’ friends used to call me Garg-oo.
The car weaves between what seems like a thousand roundabouts. We pass by temples and the Infant Jesus Church of Bangalore. Even though my Mother is Hindu, and has always been, she used to pray at that Church every time we visited Bangalore. She will pray to anything that will allow her to. The palm trees in front of the Church are decorated in dusty ferry lights, reminding its neighbors that Christmas is coming.
“I want to be Indian so bad Ananya.” I say this while still looking out of the window.
“You are Indian.” She responds with her eyes closed.
“You know what I mean.”
“People like us, we can’t just be Indian, American, Emirati, or wherever else we’ve lived in. We’re always going to be looking on the outside.”
I turn to my sister, “That’s an interesting philosophy.”
She shrugs her tiny shoulders. She used to have more weight on her body, but she started working out manically and counting all the calories she put in her mouth. Her favorite food is oatmeal. She runs five miles a day and, if she doesn’t, she walks around the Dubai Mall until she is exhausted. When she was in college, I used to think the dark circles under her eyes were from not taking off her make up properly, but upon closer inspection I realize they are permanent stamps of exhaustion.
Nevertheless, as my mother once announced while we were discussing the lack of resemblance between all the women in my family, “Anya is the prettiest.” She has straight, short, black hair and big friendly eyes. Her face, unlike mine, seems to always smile.
“What? Do I have something on my face?”
“Nah, you look nice.”
She smiles at me, and we both look away. I roll my window all the way down and let intermingling smells of spices and body odor fill the car.
* * *
All of a sudden, we are in front of a pair of familiar wrought-iron gates. The walls that enclose the complex are bright blue, but fading, and on the wall to the right of the gate is a plaque that reads “Krest Park” in ornate lettering. A cow sits below the sign, staring at both of us indifferently while it munches on the leaves of a fallen branch.
While Ananya hands the cab driver a 1000-rupee note, I get out of the car and begin to pull out our suitcases. While I compare Ananya’s brand new Samsonite to the rickety Travel Pro I’ve had since high school, a guard comes up to me and starts speaking in Kannada.
After I don’t respond he asks, “Whom are you visiting?”
“We are Yamuna Gubbi’s granddaughters.”
His expression changes and the pity in his eyes make me feel nauseous.
“Oh! Sujata’s daughters!”
I nod.
I move through the gates and up the winding pathway to apartment B, until I reach the middle of the path. Next to the walkway is the complex’s playground, and right in the middle of said playground is a gigantic Banyan tree. It’s over 150 years old and has been a part of Bangalore since before Krest Park was even conceived. Its branches cover more than half of the complex in a canopy of leaves and beehives.
Anya stands next to me and squeezes my shoulder.
“It’s one helluva tree, isn’t it?”
“Only thing in our lives that isn’t transient, right?”
“We’re as solid as we want to be Gargi.”
“Ha, you’re full of shit. Let’s just go to Jagath Mama’s house.”
“You can still call it Ajji’s you know.”
“It’s lawfully his now.”
Even though Jagath always did the right thing, and modestly so, he seemed perpetually indifferent to everyone outside of his immediate family and his mother. Due to a continuum of squabbles between his wife and my mother, my family has fallen into the camp that has felt the coolness of his indifference. He still, however, calls Ananya and me on our birthdays. Each year, we anticipate the awkwardness of those phone calls.
Together, we pull our suitcases towards building B, and once we enter, we pull open the grills of an old fashioned elevator. Ananya pulls her suitcases in, and I follow suit. We stand on opposite sides of the elevator, careful to avoid eye contact.
When the elevator lands on the first floor, Ananya cranks open the gates and walks to flat 1002. Ornamental garlands made out of crepe paper cover the door. Above the doorbell reads the name “M Subbarao and Yamuna Gubbi.”
We stand still and all the time I wonder, but am vaguely aware, of what Ananya is thinking about. Traces of their existence seem so out of place. Unable to handle the impact of dead silence, I step towards the doorbell and gingerly press it.
Measuredly clumsy thuds approach the door, and the owner of those thuds grapples with the door’s locks.
A lady with white hair yet wrinkle-free skin stands in the doorway. Her sari is a faded combination of yellow and blue, and it is neatly tucked in at her waist. Folds of soft comforting flesh hold it in place. She smiles, revealing a genuine and toothless grin that nearly breaks me. It’s always good to see Jayamma, my Ajji’s cleaning lady.
Jayamma tries to speak in English but resorts to body language. She pinches both of our cheeks affectionately, while repeating the words ‘amma’ and ‘Sujata.”
I’m at a loss for words and bend in for a hug that she half returns. South Indians aren’t used to physical displays of emotion. She smiles awkwardly and pats my face. Jayamma then leads us with hand gestures through the empty drawing room and into one of the apartment’s bedrooms. We pull our suitcases in and stare at the unchanged bedroom that always smells like talcum powder and coconut oil.
Anya rests her suitcase on the floor and I do the same, letting my duffel fall to the ground with a satisfying bang. I spread my body onto the single bed and put my hands behind my head while Ananya checks her email. This is the room that Ananya and I have shared when visiting our Grandparents since I was 5.
“Jagathmama and Manjaree emailed me. He says he’ll be back at 5 from work and Manjaree will come by at 3.”
I check the time on my phone, “It’s 2:40.”
“Well then get dressed, you look super ratty.”
“Shut up, Ananya.”
* * *
In the apartment’s tiny bathroom, I brush my teeth while going through my mind’s scrapbook of summers spent watching my grandfather clean his dentures in the very same spot. I finish up and walk into the drawing room, where Ananya is sitting with a cup of chai that Jaymma made for her. The doorbell rings and an all-too-predictable sense of dread floods through my body.
Someone unlocks the door from the other side, and then a thin, wispy-haired woman walks in. She looks tired. Ananya goes in for a handshake that turns into a half-awkward hug.
Manjaree first stares at both of us and then breaks into a smile.
“How was your flight? You both must be so tired.”
Ananya, always so proper, responds, “It wasn’t bad, we just slept right through. It was the traffic that was horrible.”
Manjaree lets off a high-pitched laugh that makes me cringe. “As always. How’s Sujata? And your father?”
“Mom’s fine. Sad, obviously, but mom’s fine.” I cannot help myself.
“I’m sorry she couldn’t come.”
Ananya opens her mouth as if to respond and closes it again and looks at her toes.
I stare at Manjaree; I don’t even care that she’s aware of my staring at her. Is she even my aunt if she’s not related to me by blood?
“So is she.”
Manjaree looks at her toes. They are chipped and un-manicured, unlike my mother’s. If my mother did live in Bangalore, though, I’m pretty sure hers would be as chipped.
“You’ve lost so much weight Ananya. Are you eating?” She does not give up.
“Of course! I just work out a lot!”
“Just be careful. Manjaree pauses. She turns to me, but avoids eye contact and says, “Look, I don’t know what your mother told you but I’m guessing that I’m part of the reason she’s not here.” She is neither apologizing nor instigating; her words are fact.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Manjaree.”
“Okay, I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
I shrug. “No worries. Hey Manjaree, I’m actually really tired. I think I’m going to go take a nap.”
I get up without waiting for an “OK” and close the door behind me, careful to muffle my sobs.
IN THE PAST
I wake up at five a.m. the next morning because Ananya keeps on kicking me in her sleep. As I crawl out of bed and prepare clothes and toiletries for my shower, I can hear Ananya stirring.
“Shut up,” She mumbles aggressively. She turns sharply and falls back to sleep.
I slam the door on my way out and get a towel from a cupboard in the living room. Once I get to the bathroom, I realize that both Ananya and I had forgotten to turn the geyser on last night.
“Nothing like a cold shower.” Nothing like talking to yourself at five o’clock in the morning.
I’ve always preferred bucket baths to showers, so I fill up a huge, deep, green bucket that stands on a stool underneath the shower’s faucet. A smaller bucket hangs from its edge. Ajji stopped using the shower altogether when she had to get a nurse for my Thatha. It was just too hard using a shower to bathe him. I hopefully test the water, trying to will it to be warm. Unlucky.
I dip the small bucket into the ice-cold water and quickly splash it onto my head. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Am I a bad person for swearing in the home of my dead grandmother? If the nurse had tried to bathe my Thatha in water this cold, he would have tried to hit her.
Not that he was a violent person. It’s just that when you lose your mind and Alzheimer’s makes the ridges of your brain look more like spaghetti, you turn into the worst version of yourself. Ajji told my mom that he would sometimes wake up lucid in the middle of night and start apologizing to her. If he ever tried to hurt someone that day, he would cry because he would wonder why he couldn’t control it. The last time I saw him he tried to punch me because he didn’t see me approaching him from behind. During his last days, Ajji told the nurse to make sure his hands were secured to his wheelchair with string.
The cold water doesn’t feel that unwelcome on my skin, and I begin to rub Head & Shoulders into my scalp.
My Thatha had this cupboard in his room that had every type of stationery that you can imagine. Once, when she was little, Ananya asked him if she could borrow a folder. He looked straight into her twelve-year-old eyes, right past her I’m-a-chubby-and-insecure soul and said, “My folders are too good for your work.”
He was not always a nice man, but he was a good man. When I visited four years ago with just my mother and the Alzheimer’s was starting to hit, he had forgotten my name.
Nevertheless, on my last day he shouted at my Ajji: “Yamuna, why didn’t you buy Ananya a gift?”
She looked at me apologetically and yelled back “This is Gargi!”
“You need to buy the children presents!”
My mother laughed, a rogue tear making its way down her cheek.
There’s shampoo in my eyes, and I pour more water onto my head. I then lift the whole bucket and pour the remnants of water on my head. I wrap my head in a towel and rub the rest of my body down with another. I use some of Ajji’s talcum powder and coconut oil because I don’t want the scent to die down.
I live the morning routine of my Ajji. All of a sudden, I remember how stuck I am. Stuck in a city that is indifferent to me, or stuck in a city that I am indifferent to. Stuck standing in lines for bars that I don’t care about, and feeling stuck with the low expectations I have set for everything around me. Stuck in a mindfulness class where everyone pays 15 dollars per lesson then goes out and starts being dicks again. I am stuck in familial relationships that are held by convention not love; I am stuck in unemployment because the thought of success in a bank would make me feel more stuck.
I think of Ananya, unaware of my immobility.
I wonder if she is or has been stuck too.
ON THE WAY
Ajji’s body was the carrier of her soul, and her cremation will set it free. She will be a freed soul.
I think a priest does it, someone at the crematorium. I know that my Uncle has to watch and that none of the women can. It bothered me a lot when I found out about this rule. It bothered me a lot when my mom didn’t get to see her own father’s passage into death.
“Ananya, do you know how Ajji’s getting cremated?” I have to yell this towards the back of the car. I’m sitting in the front of the car next to Jagath and Manjaree’s driver, while Jagath, Manjaree, Ananya, and our cousin Dhanashree sit in the back.
“Jesus, Gargi.” I can see Ananya glance nervously at the other three.
Jagath looks up from his copy of The Economist and says, “A priest does it at the crematorium, and then he gives the ashes to the male relative.”
“Where are the ashes?”
“They’re with me in this bag.” I turn around to see a plastic bag barely concealing an urn, sitting next to Jagath. I don’t know how I missed it.
“What are you going to do with them?” I imagine Jagath going off to the Ganges to give my Ajji a proper send off.
“We’ll probably give them to a Priest to take with him on a pilgrimage.”
“Why can’t we see it?” I know the answer to this.
Manjaree pipes in this time, “Women can’t see it, only men. It’s a custom.” Manjaree has gone to college and has worked at some point. So has my mother. These are educated women who choose to follow the same customs that have forced them to give up their jobs and become housewives.
“Ajji’s a woman though, and I am a woman. Why can’t I see a woman get cremated?”
Ananya shifts in her seat and says, “Shut up Gargi. You don’t need to be so intense all the time.”
I turn towards them and make a face at Ananya.
“The rule just sounds so stupid, doesn’t it Dhaneshree?”
“Oh, uh. I don’t know. It’s sad either way.” My cousin doesn’t sound sad or hysterical, the way that Ananya and Manjaree are acting like I am. She just sounds like her father, removed and passive.
That should be the tagline for my Ajji’s life. She was an orphan by age seven, watched her sister die, was married off at 17, took care of every sick person in our family—only to be rewarded with a husband struck with Alzheimer’s. She was constantly busy and constantly denied. When my Thatha died, she told my mom that she was depressed.
“I just don’t know what to do with my time.” It’s sad either way.
I turn back towards the window. “I guess it is.”
