She was found. The day had come. Valar was going to see Bani, her mother.
The skies were blue, but not too blue. It was the kind of blue that made the greens look greener, the earth softer; it reminded Valar of places with streams and apple trees, kids with nose leaks in sweaters and birds all puffed up.
Valar was on a bus that travelled from Palghat to Calicut. It was crammed full but the wind that rushed in as they sped past stretches of paddy fields was cool and comforting. Valar had managed a seat but on her lap she had a boy of about three, his mother stood somewhere in the crowd. The boy dozed. Valar tenderly held his head in place.
When she last saw her mother, Valar was about as old as the stranger boy on her lap, yet the day was still vivid in her.
They were in Mysore selling ceramic pots and vases on the street. Bani was holding the stall with Rinchi, who had three children of her own. They were vagrants, a group of sixteen, and between them they sold decorative home decors, umbrellas, pictures of gods, books, watches and kitchen utensils. Valar was Bani’s only child and she with the other kids spent the day playing behind the stalls in the weed-ridden poramboke lands, while the adults did business. On the day she last saw her mother after packing up their stall by the highway, all of them went to a nearby canal to wash up.
Valar was hungry and sulking, she wanted her mother’s milk but Bani was in the water with her own thoughts. The pink shawl that Bani had tied around her like a dress snuggled to her skin and her golden hair, which reached her ankles, floated behind her on the surface of the water like a strip of sunlight.
At that moment Valar was wholly unaware that that was how she would remember her mother for years to come. As a mysterious woman, soaked wet with a strip of sunlight that faithfully followed her.
After they washed up, they went back to their highway stall and finally her mother let her suckle. Valar remembered her mother’s golden hair flying as each truck drove by them, and her sun beat skin luminous.
That night they had rice, dal and roasted chilli; Heru, Rinchi’s son cried for fish, in vain, he starved himself the night. Bani sang her a song before sleep, about the moon and a rabbit in it. It was only four lines but Bani hummed the last two without words. Valar fell asleep on her mother, and she rose and fell, and rose and fell, with each of her mother’s breath.
The next morning, however, she woke up on the floor, between Sonu and Lalla, Rinchi’s daughter and other son. After that day and a few months that followed, Valar hardly remembered a thing.
The boy on Valar’s lap wanted to vomit, he told her. She rubbed the boy’s back and asked the man seated beside her to switch over. They switched over, while the boy moved this way and that, in the little space he had, looking sick. Once settled, the boy came back to Valar and thrust his head out of the window. Valar resumed the back rubbing. He made a few vomiting sounds but nothing happened. He turned around to Valar and announced that he was feeling better. The man beside her, who heard the boy, asked to switch back, so they did again. Back to square one. The boy’s mother stood somewhere in the crowd and advised the boy to go to sleep. The boy obeyed his invisible mother and leaned back on Valar.
After Bani went missing, Rinchi and the others did not so much as raise Valar but they allowed her to raise herself. They gave her food and proffered her safety as one of them, but there were no kisses or goodnight songs. There were no hugs or unbearable love.
Once she grew up, she fell in love with a man named D’Silva, who spoke only English. D’Silva was like no man Valar had ever seen. His clothes were vibrant; he had shoulder-length hair that stood up sometimes, like a halo, around his moon-shaped face. He sold vintage cameras in Chor Bazaar that he collected from all kinds of places. He said when it came to vintage things he could smell them from afar; he had the nose of a black bear. Valar had never known a black bear, but if Silva had its nose, she was willing to like it.
They got married when Valar turned eighteen and in a few months she gave birth to a pair of twins. Valar insisted that they name one of them Bani. He agreed and they named the other one Daisy. For years their lives went untroubled until Silva, on one peaceful morning, died.
Bani and Daisy were marriageable age but they had developed a kind of attitude that attracted no man. Bani wanted to join the Police force and Daisy spoke into a computer screen all day. Silva’s vintage shop was sold to his brother’s son Rudyard. Rudy. It was Rudy who found Bani, Valar’s beloved mother.
The boy on Valar’s lap had given up his attempt at sleep, and said he wanted to see his mother; the crowd had shifted but hadn’t dwindled. Valar asked the bus conductor– a chirpy man who squeezed through the seat-less ladies’ crowd with an earnest effort to not be inappropriate– to take the boy to his mother. He complied and the boy was gone. Valar stretched out the crinkles on her sari from the boy’s sitting.
One morning, Rudy came to their house in Palghat, with thrilled eyes round as marbles, and said that he had seen a woman who looked exactly like Valar. Valar instantly knew. She had dreamed of such a moment all her life. Valar drew out of him more details. She was careful to feign disinterest because if Rudy knew, he could reach up to unthinkable levels of cockiness.
‘You are saying she had golden hair?’ Valar asked as she made him cardamom tea.
Rudy vigorously nodded and said ‘It was like the sun’.
The next morning soon after sunrise, Valar boarded the bus. It was LS (Limited Stop) and the only one for the day. According to what Rudy had said, her mother sold flavored ice scrapes on the beach. Valar smiled at the thought of her mother on a beach pushing around a cart, she imagined her like how she once knew her; young, fit, beautiful but more than forty decades had passed.
And then Valar wept.
The man beside her glanced, but she wept, and he looked away.
#
In Calicut, at the beach, the skies were bluer. The beach sand glimmered and Valar’s feet warmly scrunched as she walked. The waves were mild, footballs zoomed crisscross all over the strand and sandy boys played.
Valar had passed four ice scrape carts. Half a mile away she could see another one. From afar it looked like a child’s toy left behind. Near the toy car, on a coconut tree stub, perched a thing, and its head was the sun.
Valar paced up, and from beneath her feet, glimmering sand grains burst up as spindrift.
Her mother was staring out at the ocean; her eyes were squeezed to slits. When Valar walked up to the cart and stood beside it, those fine slits tore away from the ocean and fixed themselves on Valar. Bani quietly walked towards the cart, her nylon sari flew all over in the wind. To Valar, her mother looked shrunken. Although her face still resembled her mother in her memories, it had lost its sheen.
In the slim shade offered by the cart, Bani wholly opened her eyes and perceived Valar.
‘I will have one’, Valar said, finding it disquieting to hold the old woman’s gaze.
A minute or two passed, Bani didn’t move. She stared at Valar, only her face and arms were still, the rest of her seemed to flutter in the wind.
Valar had her heart up in her throat; it made breathing an impossible task.
‘You left me. I found you’, wanting the moment to end, Valar conceded.
For a moment Bani looked away, at the waves it seemed, and then she started scraping ice. Valar held onto her mother’s cart for support, she was feeling sick, like the boy in the bus. But she had no one to rub her back.
The scraped ice piled up, the sound of it wedged in between them like another person. Valar saw that her mother’s hands had wrinkles; they were an old woman’s hands and not the ones she remembered. Her face too had wrinkles; she wanted to lash at Rudy for saying that they look exactly like each other. Bani was old, Valar was still young, only forty-five or fifty. Not more. Perhaps even less.
Bani scooped up the scraped ice in a paper cup and drizzled some colored, flavored liquid all over it. Pink, purple, green, yellow and red, she handed it to Valar like a trophy.
Bani gently held Valar by the shoulders and guided her towards the waves. A few feet out, she sat down cross-legged in a shaded patch of sand and looked expectantly at Valar to follow. Holding the trophy treat, Valar sat down beside her mother. She had the urge to embrace her, but also shout and claw at her wrinkly skin. She did neither.
Bani nudged Valar to eat the flavored ice before it melted. Valar slammed it down on the sand.
‘Which mother abandons her own child?’ Her lips quivered, the weep was threatening to come back.
‘I wouldn’t know.’ Bani’s teeth were red with betel nut, and lips were redder. Her eyes were pale grey with cataract. ‘I am your sister, not mother’.
The sun had moved, their shaded patch of sand was soon disappearing, Bani’s golden hair shone. Valar wished to die.
Bani’s breathing was raspy; she kneaded her wrinkly fingers together, bent with use, and they sounded coarse, like sandpaper. She stared at the waves, slightly aware of the crumbling woman beside her. The ice scrapes was melting into purple-red water. Valar blinked her eyes, bidding the tears to go back in.
‘The sun is too strong today’ Bani muttered.
‘First you abandon me, and now you lie.’ Valar felt helpless and alone, like the little girl that she once was who sulked by a canal wanting her mother’s milk. ‘You lie’, the tears defied her blinks and gushed out.
Bani turned around to entirely face Valar; she was quite mobile for an old woman. ‘I never said I was your mother, you assumed that’.
Her ears rang, and for a brief moment Valar blacked out.
When she emerged out of it, she saw Bani’s face too close to hers, gaping with a hint of worry.
‘You suckled me’ uttered Valar. And quietly thought, and sang songs to me; you loved me. Her heart was forming splinters; they hurt like fresh wounds.
Bani said nothing for a while, she retired an inch back and watched Valar as she cried.
A man leapt through the air and grabbed a football that had almost got them, which neither had noticed.
‘She was old when she gave you birth. Our mother.’ Bani said our mother with a deliberate force. ‘She didn’t survive, but you did.’
Bani awkwardly clutched Valar’s palm who considered slapping it away but didn’t. They sat palm in palm, one was coarse, and the other not. An amiable silence had wrapped them in a warm hug; with ease, they slipped into its bygone familiarity.
‘You came along and demanded that I be your mother. You locked me up’, Bani loosened her hold on Valar, ‘I wanted more’.
Valar was drained; her throat ached.
Bani repeated, ‘you locked me up’, and she doodled on the sand with her bent fingertip.
Valar felt like she was on the brink of being alive, and wished that her chagrin would simply rip her open.
Bani added, ‘you sucked my breasts but you got no milk. I always fed you other things.’
That piece of news hit Valar in a place that she didn’t know she had. She thought it was ridiculous and befitting to the farcical history that she was learning about herself. Valar burst out laughing, and at some point beat her head in her palms and bawled. Bani waited for calm.
The sun slipped in and out of clouds. The beach ballooned with the sound of waves.
The calm appeared in glimpses. ‘What was her name?’ Valar asked quavering.
‘Daru’, Bani said, holding her sister in an arm, ‘Daruni’.
The tide was still mild. Sky was still blue. In the sand, orange crabs dug hole after hole. A few kites circled above the ocean, fish swam under water, cautious. Kids ran from the waves carefree. Lovers strolled, their pants rolled up. Purple-red water soaked the slammed down paper cup and spilled onto the sand, tinting it.
Bani walked away to pack up her ice scrapes cart. Valar thought of the woman in the water, many years ago, dripping wet with a trailing strip of sunshine. She longed for the little girl who sulked by the water for her mother’s milk. She grieved for her mother that she never knew.
#
The moon was bright on that night years ago; its light had fallen perfectly on the toddler’s face. The girl is beautiful, Bani had thought.
She was certain that Rinchi would take care of her baby sister. Bani was restless that night, she wanted to be gone. She dreamt of being free, it was frightening. It thrilled her. She shivered. In a deep pocket in her heart, a reckless bat flapped its wings. She imagined meeting a man, she longed to know him, and feel beautiful. She dreamt of being in love.
That night, holding her baby sister close, she had uttered a prayer, before sprinting away, into the night.
To Bani, seeing Valar, as a grown up woman all these many years later was nothing short of a miracle, but it unsettled her and she felt weakened.
#
They were walking to Bani’s shack by the beach. ‘How did you find me?’ Bani was curious.
The women waddled through the beach sand like a pair of penguins.
‘Rudy, my nephew, it was him.’ Her dejection allayed at the thought of having a sister. ‘He told me about a woman who looked exactly like me.’ A slow but sure excitement was growing in Valar. ‘Who else could it be but you?’
‘When you appeared like that…’Bani carried traces of laughter in her voice, ‘I thought I was going mad’.
That night they cooked fish three ways and drank arrack.
After Bani ran away, years ago, leaving her baby sister at a street side stall, she glided through life like a derailed train. It was in a brothel room, beneath a client, that she first felt a pang of regret. Then guilt. She waited for it to pass, but it never did. The derailed train had fallen off an edge, it plummeted into an abyss and the passengers screamed and screamed.
She did find a man and drown in what was only an ephemeral love. She did it over and over again; Bani became an eternal lover. Until one day she woke up without it. She was emptied of love, and brimful of remorse. She walked away, a second time, from familiar streets and knowing faces. This time it was to repent.
A night owl, somewhere in the dark awake, declared its thoughts to the night. Waves beat at the shore, relentless; silver carpets with leaping fish. Valar slept enervated.
Bani, sleepless, lay awake and watched the grown woman, who once suckled her barren breasts, sleep. A cool breeze blew; and the moonlight was on her sister’s face. She was still beautiful.
Bani reached out and caressed her sister’s worn out feet.
A song of a rabbit in a moon swelled the night, like a lucid dream, Valar soared.
