Subhadra

In the old house, there was a tree at its porch, and in that tree was a Vairavar.

One Vairavar, different from all the others, in temples and in other trees. I never thought they were the same, the one at our temple and the one in our tree, although when I was a child I wondered if the god perhaps had two homes. A morning one and a night-time one. An office, where he went to work, and a hammock where he went to sleep. Other gods had equally many. Muruga had six houses, across six hills. Some had many faces, or many wives, and all had many names. It was easy to believe in multiplicity.

I don’t know now why there was a Vairavar in our tree. But in those years, my mother would light a single tiny lamp for him at twilight, each day, and place it among the tree’s roots. I don’t know now what kind of tree it was. As children we could only name the ones we ate from, plucking directly from the branches, or picking from the ground in their shades – the mango, the banana, the guava. Then there were the palm trees, the murungakai, the coconuts. This tree was none of those.

In the temple, Vairavar was a stone god with a dog by his side. In our tree, he was the tree itself. Nothing showed us he was there except the power of belief, or the consequence of its lack.

I don’t know how she did it sometimes, my mother, between everything that needed to be done and everything that was demanded of her to do – but each day, by six in the evening, it was there. A clay lamp at the foot of the tree, a little flickering that somehow lasted through the night. I wonder to this day how a thing so small that it cast almost no shadow could harbor that much light.

***

What I came to believe, much later, was that the tree predated the house, and something must have gone wrong in its construction that lead to it not being uprooted. It blocked the view of and from the gate, a great entity that obstructed and barricaded, looming above and between. In some ways it served to keep us, our house, from the rest of the world. In other ways, it withheld the rest of the world from us.

My mother believed Vairavar was a protective deity, like the Ellaiamman, the goddess of the border – distinctly indigenous to each settlement, yet unvarying in her element. I assumed the same, that his dog was the symbol of his ultimate domesticity, his role as protector of the hearth. It was years before I would find him again in his true element – fierce, annihilative, a god of the border too, the forest, the end of the time.

Still, there he was through my childhood, a presence in a tree; vigilant, vindictive. However little my mother said about her devotion, we understood it for what it was: a fear, an anticipatory measure. It was easier to light a lamp each day than to incur his wrath.

Once, she told us why: someone in the past had climbed the tree with the intent to trim it, and when he cleaved the first branch from the trunk with his saw, it dropped to the earth in a cascade of blood. The man, seeing this, fell to his death.

This was the old house, where I was born, but there was an older one, where my parents had begun their life together. I do not know if there were bleeding trees in that one.

We went on my first holiday when I was four years old. My brother was seven. We were going to Colombo. I remember nothing of this journey, only the story my mother told of it ever afterwards.

It was the first time since we had moved to this house that my mother would spend a night away from it, and she was anxious about how Vairavar would be propitiated in her absence. My parents fought over it. My father, the Marxist, chided her stupidity, calling her a creature of habit and superstition. My mother wept and threw tantrums for days, alternately pleading and yelling, meeting each insult of his with one of her own. Who knows where she got it from, that kind of defiance. That kind of devotion. Who knows, even, why she had taken it upon herself to propitiate that tree.

Finally, as a gesture of goodwill – my mother had threatened to stay at home if it came to that, if it came down to her gods against his ego – my father called some of the boys from the printing press and told them they were to see to it that the lamp would be lit before the tree each evening, just the way she did it.

“You can also pray if you like,” he said, dismissively.

The boys, their arms folded and backs bowed slightly, agreed. “Promise me,” asked my mother, and they did.

And satisfied, we packed ourselves into the car early the next morning. I don’t remember this, but I can name it to be true, because the memory of each journey blends into the memory of all other ones: my father would have rolled down the windows and sung and sung and sung, and my mother, her asthma reacting to the speed of the wind in her face, would have wheezed and complained until he made a compromise of some sort – slowing down, shuttering one side of the vehicle, or merely changing his song. This was how they were. His baritone, her belligerence. I turn their marriage over in my mind like a miracle sometimes, not comprehending yet utterly in awe of it. And I wonder what kind of wife I would have become, if the years had not become the years they have become. If in me too would have emerged a way to match that equilibrium, the symmetry of oppositions.

In Colombo, we arrived at the guesthouse, ate a full meal, and went to the beach. We played, I am told, well past our bedtime, until even our father had begun to need sleep. This is another thing I know: my mother would have caught sand-crabs, chasing them, anticipating their movements, a net in her hand, a shriek in her voice.

In her bed in the guesthouse that night, my mother wrestled with a voice that began its lament each time her eyes closed. You’ve forgotten me, you’ve forgotten me, you’ve forgotten me.

She shook my father awake. And when he refused to get out of bed, she stayed up all night, tortured by the sound of this voice, convinced that something had gone wrong in some unearthly way. As soon as it was a reasonable hour, she woke my father again and made him put a call through to Batticaloa.

Bhuvan, our caretaker, picked up the phone.

“I need to know what happened,” she said. “I know something is amiss.”

“Nothing is amiss, Amma,” said Bhuvan. “I have been here through the night and I would know if something was wrong,”

But that afternoon, word came, during one of my father’s calls about something else, that one of the boys from the press had been injured the previous evening while trying to climb one of our coconut trees, and my mother, who had agitated through the morning, suddenly came to her senses. She demanded that she speak to the boy’s mother.

“Those people have no telephone,” said my father, calmly.

“Then Bhuvan has to pass a message.”

For the third time that day, my parents spoke to the caretaker. “This boy is being punished,” my mother told him. “That is what I feel. Ask him what happened last night. Ask him if he lit a lamp for Vairavar.”

An hour later, Bhuvan called back. The boy, he said, had not only sustained an injury to his back, but had also confessed to having neglected the lighting of the lamp.

“Then ask his parents to go to the tree this evening, and ask for forgiveness, and light that lamp themselves.”

But my mother did not sleep that night either.

You’ve forgotten me, you’ve forgotten me, you’ve forgotten me. All night, that voice, a voice – she said – that was neither male nor female, but aching, angry, its cadence a chord so primal she could not replicate it no matter how often she retold these events.

We had to cut our trip short for two reasons. The first was that my mother, bereft of sleep for two nights, guilty and horrified, demanded it. The second was that the boy who had fallen had died, screaming through the night until he had torn the insides of his throat.

When we arrived in Batticaloa, my father left my mother and the two of us at home and proceeded immediately to the bereaved household. The first thing she did was to take us both inside and have us all bathe together, her petticoat tied above her breasts as she poured pails of water above our heads and scoured us all with salt. The second, as soon as we were all dressed in clean clothes, was to pray, lighting not one but three lamps at the foot of the tree.

Am I imagining this – holding hands with my brother on the porch, watching our mother, kneeling before Vairavar, the flames she offered him glowing in that darkening hour? Yet I can almost see it as though it was happening right before me all over again, the way the ellipses of the lamps as she drew them before her god illuminated, in a shifting circle, the contours of her face. Her dark eyes, her murmuring lips.

***

The story my father came back with struck my mother so badly that for days afterwards she trembled a little in distracted moments, which were suddenly many.

It was true that the boys from the printing press had been climbing coconut trees, in some sort of playful contest they had decided to hold in my father’s absence.

At some point, one boy, sensing the coming of the dusk, had stopped playing and volunteered to light the lamp as Amma had asked them to do. The others mocked him; one dared him to test his climbing mettle against the forbidden tree.

Shamefaced but duty-obliged, he had gone to get the oil for the lamp. But the other boys seized the lamp, and tossed it between themselves like a ball, the diffident boy struggling to reclaim it. Finally, the tallest of the group had held it high above his head and told him he could have it if he could climb just a short way up the tree and bring down a flower.

He slipped and lost his balance within moments of trying. And all the bullies became boys again and, frightened, lifted the screaming boy back to the coconut grove, lay him down there, and ran to get his parents.

The parents did not come to our house the next night, did not to come to visit the god in our tree. By the time my mother could ask them why, all their reasons had been replaced by regret.

I know it bothered her forever afterward, my mother, and I know that this is why she kept telling this story, not only as a means of scaring us but because she struggled to understand the events of those nights herself. The wrong child had been punished. That justice could be such an undiscerning thing was a more troubling idea to her than the idea that fate itself was absolutely arbitrary.

Did she want to be the keeper of the god in that tree? I don’t know. I don’t know if she wanted to be anything that she ever was. But she entered each role with a grace wrought from the assumption that it had been meant for her, and this is how she filled it, the way water will take any shape it is decanted into. She never struggled against the boundaries of her life the way that I did – the way that I do – with those in mine. Perhaps this is why she was able to take a god out of the tattered edge of apocalypse and embroider him into the fabric of her daily life so seamlessly, a weaver till the very end, while I, long unraveled, know only how to praise my destroyer.

***

It was a tamarind tree.

How could I have forgotten this?

After a cyclone, the ground would be littered with its pods. My brother and I would pick up as many as we could, and spend hours playing with the seeds and the skin and helping our mother clean the pulp so she could use it in her cooking and her remedies.

This was the only way we were allowed to enjoy the bounty of that tree, by taking from it what it gave and asking for no more. But how it gave – each windfall was so abundant that our mother had enough tamarind for a year afterward.

It comes back so clearly now: the sour-sweet taste of that fruit, and how we ate only what fell to the ground, and yet there was never a need to ask for more. A day she had gotten some in here eye, and cried with its sting. She must have used it in everything. We must have eaten it almost every day, my father and brother and I, and with not even a thought about where it came from. Only my mother, each evening, lighting a lamp in fear and gratitude. Everything I didn’t know I was supposed to thank her for. Everything she took from me. And I from her.

I’m forgetting you. I’m forgetting you. I’m forgetting you.

(An excerpt from “Constellation of Scars”, a novel in progress.)