Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“This time you were talking,” Frankie said. “And talking and talking. About what?”

“I was telling her something.”

“ You told her a story?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Shiv tried. He opened his mouth, and tried to form the words, but they were gone from him. “I can’t,” he said, trembling. He gestured at his throat, meaning to explain the tumult under the skin.

“All right, sure,” Frankie said, baffled but quick to the chase. “I’ll ask her. ”

And he did. Frankie stood by the window, his head cocked to one side. Under the long flutter and hiss of steam, Shiv could hear her words.

Amma woke in the morning and cleaned the house. She cleaned the storerooms, the rooms around the courtyard, she swept the dark mud floors and wiped the mantlepieces and the tops of the doorways. She put new wicks in the lanterns and filled them with oil. She washed the red brick of the courtyard and emptied out the ashes from the choola. And the children going in and out of the house, through the big door with iron hoops, told their mothers, Amma’s cleaning. And the women of the village said, one of her children is coming.

It was a small house, with a granary at the rear and a good well. Amma’s grandfather had built it in some time so far away that she thought of it as beyond numbers. He had built it solid and strong, and she came back to it after her school-teacher husband died of typhoid. She came back with four children, two sons and two daughters, the oldest just eleven, to this village called Chandapur, and here she lived and grew old. Her name was Amita but the village called her Amma. She could not read or write, but she educated her children. There was money, just so much, from the farming of her land, and she lived quietly and with a simplicity that was exactly the same as poverty, but she sent her children to school in the city. In her house books were sacred. She wrapped them in red cloth and stacked them on a bed in the biggest of the rooms in her house. Amma lived in a village and ate only twice a day but her children went to boarding school. Her eldest son went to Roorkee and became an engineer. Amma went sometimes to the cities, north, south, east, and west, to visit her children, but came back always to her house in the village, fiercely alone and happy.

It was this engineer son who came home that day. He sat on a charpai in the courtyard and spoke to the men from the panchayat , who came and sat around him in a circle and smoked. There were women in the kitchen, helping Amma and laughing with her. She had a wicked tongue, and liked to talk. They could hear her laughing in the courtyard, as they listened to the engineer. There were children running in and out of the house. The engineer was telling them, everyone, about the end of the war. He was wearing a white shirt, dark blue pants, and his hair came up on his forehead in a wonderful swell which the villagers, knowing too little, couldn’t recognize as stylish. He had a high querulous voice, and he was telling them about the American bombs.

“The bomb killed a city,” he said. “There were two bombs. Each finished a city.” He snapped his fingers, high in the air. They looked at him, not saying a word, and he felt the stubborn peasant scepticism gathering around his ankles, that unmovable slow stupidity. He was irritated, rankled now as he used to be when his mother laughed at his modernisms. Aji-haan , she would say, unanswerable. It baffled him that his most sophisticated explanations of cause and effect were defeated easily by snorting homespun scepticism, sure-yes, aji-haan. He could see her now, standing in the sooty doorway to the kitchen, her arm up on the wall, listening. “Fire,” he said. “Whoosh. One moment of fire and a whole city gone.”

“How?” It was Amma. Her hair was white, and she was wearing white, and she had a strong nose and direct eyes. The engineer looked up at her, a glass of milk in his left hand. “If you break a speck,” he said. He didn’t know how to translate “atom.” “You release energy. Fire.” Amma said, “How?” Now the children were quiet. Amma took two steps forward. “How?” The engineer gestured into the air. “It’s like that thing in the Mahabharata ,” he said finally. “That weapon that Ashwatthaman hurled at Arjun.” “The Brahmasira?” Amma said. “That was stopped.” “Not this one,” the engineer said, turning his hand palm down. “They used it.” Then the food was ready and he ate.

Nobody noticed until the next morning that Amma had stopped talking. “What happened?” the engineer asked. “Why aren’t you talking?” A little later he asked, “Are you angry with me? Did I do something?” Amma shook her head but said nothing. She refused to talk to her friends, and to their children. Now some people thought she had taken a vow of silence, like Gandhi-ji, and others thought that she had been witchcrafted by some secret hater. The engineer was annoyed, and then concerned. He wanted to take her to the city, to a doctor. She put a hand on the ground and shook her head. But she wouldn’t talk, couldn’t. Finally he left, her son. In the weeks after her other children came, one by one, and still she spoke to nobody. She smiled, she went about her daily business, but her silence was complete and eternal.

First it was just one child, Nainavati’s daughter, eight years old. Her skin cracked on her hands. Her mother rubbed her skin with neem -leaf oil, and held her close. The next morning the cracks were open, a little wider, and spreading to the elbows. And that afternoon Narain Singh’s son had it too. There was no bleeding, no pain, only the lurch of Nainavati’s heart when she looked at her daughter’s hand and saw the white of bone at the wrist. A week later all the children in the village were splintered from head to toe. Looking at each other they wept with fear, and their parents were afraid to hold them. Pattadevi said it first. One morning her baby, ten months old, gurgled against her thigh, and Pattadevi raised her head, forgetful and so smiling, and she saw the pulsating beat of a tiny heart. Pattadevi shut her eyes tight, and in her anguish she said, “Amma’s son brought it home, with his Japanese bomb.” That was then the understanding of the village, true and agreed upon.

Finally the horror was that they grew used to it. The months passed and they were shunned by the neighbouring settlements, and certainly they did not want to go anywhere. Life had to go on, and so they tended the crops, saw to the animals, built and repaired, and lived in a sort of bleak satisfaction, an expectation of precisely nothing. On the three hundred and sixtieth day Amma came to the panchayat .

They were sitting at their usual places under the pipal tree, the old men, and the powerful, and then the others. They fell silent when Amma walked among them, surprised by her appearance in an assembly of men, and a little afraid of her, her witchy quiet and her confident walk. She sat under the pipal tree. In her hand she had a letter.

“What is that, Amma?” the sarpanch said. “A letter from your son? What does he write?” He took the letter from her, as he usually did, tore it open, and began to read. “Respected mother …”

“I want to praise,” Amma said.

“What?” the sarpanch said, dropping the letter.

“The kindness of postmen, their long walks in the summer sun, their aching feet. The mysterious and generous knowledge of all those who cook, their intimate and vast power over us. The unsung courage of young brides, their sacrifices beyond all others, their patience. The age of trees, the years of their lives and their companionship. The sleeping ferocity of dogs — I saw two kill another last week — and their stretching muscles, their complete and deep and good happiness with a full stomach and a long sleep.”