Two things that Bakya never came to love were Chennai’s oppressive summers and her son-in-law. And today, it looked like they both teamed up against her. Bakya stood before her daughter, Eswari’s house, and had to step over the open sewerage every time she had to rap at the metal door of the house. And she had been doing it for ten minutes now. It was Bakya’s day of visiting her grandson, Palani.
“Can’t this cursed woman come later? Breaking the door at eight in the morning.”
She heard her son-in-law yell, intentionally loud enough for her to hear. She smirked, for she knew that the good-for-nothing fellow slept well into the morning, having spent the night at a TASMAC, drinking and arguing and getting beaten up by friends who had paid for his drink.
Heat pinpricked Bakya’s scalp, and she was tempted to kick open the lopsided door and get into the hut. But she was forbidden to set foot inside by her son-in-law after that ugly fight. Once a month Bakya was only permitted to visit Eswari and Palani. During her last visit, she had promised Palani that she would take him to the Guindy Zoo during the next visit.
After another round of knocking, the door opened with a screech, eliciting a few more expletives from her son-in-law. Palani rushed out to hug Bakya.
“So tall you have become in a month, no…” Bakya stopped midsentence. She noticed Eswari’s attempt to hide the three rows of angry fingerprints on her cheeks. It only made it more conspicuous. Bakya shook her head while lifting Palani and tucking him in the crook of her hips.
“You never learn? Can’t you leave this idiot once and for all? One of these days, your body is going to float in the Coovam, and I will have to drag it ashore,” she hissed at Eswari.
“Don’t make a scene, amma. He had too much to drink yesterday. That is all.”
“Yesterday? Only yesterday? I lost count of the times I had to take you to the hospital for stitches and plaster casts. Don’t you add any salt to your food at all? Don’t you feel any shame?”
“Just take Shrutheesh and leave without making a fuss,” her daughter pleaded.
“I will call my grandson Palani only. You and your useless husband can call him whatever tongue-twisting name you want,” Bakya said and grabbed Palani’s sipper from Eswari’s arms and slung the strap over her shoulders.
She let her grandson’s name roll in her tongue two more times out of spite, “Palani kannu, Shall we leave? My sweet Palani, you are.”
Among her countless resentments Bakya had against her son-in-law, one was that he named her only grandson after some Tamil actor instead of giving him her dead husband’s name. The twenty-minute walk in the hot sun made her limbs protest. But for her Palani, she would do it again and again.
“Aaya, you know what that kundu Kumar said? The zoo once had a tiger. But it escaped from its cage and ate someone sleeping on the roadside.”
“Aiyoo! The tiger is still roaming outside, is it?” Bakya asked.
Palani nodded. What would Bakya not do to see Palani bristling with the satisfaction of having shocked his aaya.
“Yes, yes. Kumar said that it had feasted on someone even last week.”
“Hmm..,” said Bakya.
Bakya let Palani slide down from her hips, holding his spindly wrist with one hand while she caught her breath. Her bones ground against each other when she walked for long, especially when she carried something heavy.
“I can walk by myself, aaya. I am not a small boy.”
“No, No. I can carry two people like you,” she said, swinging him back onto her hips. “When I worked for a maisthri, I used to carry ten bricks on my head at a time. You are not even half as heavy.”
Bakya said this more to convince herself than Palani and the kid knew better than to argue with his wilful grandmother.
Thankfully, Guindy Zoo was not crowded, and Bakya felt safe to let Palani walk alongside her. Together, they ambled from one enclosure to the next, peering to get a glimpse of the caged animals. They saw several spotted deer huddled under a lone tree, flicking their ears in annoyance. Hay stalks heaped at one corner of the enclosure remained untouched. A lone fox paced in agitation in the next enclosure as if he were hatching a plan to escape. In the aviary opposite to it, peacocks sat motionless on stripped branches without inclination to dance or strut. Herons and flamingos stood too stunned by the heat, ignoring the fish in the feeding trays, on which the crows were feasting.
The only commotion was in the monkey cages, where there seemed to be some fight going on. A female monkey with a sagging chest was being chased by an excited male monkey, its angry screeches scaring away other monkeys to the roof of the cages.
“Not very different from our situation, is it?” Bakya said.
The female monkey bled from her arms, probably bitten by her tormentor, and finally managed to scuttle away to a faraway branch.
“Even monkeys know to run away from a wife-beater, and my daughter does not.”
Palani was not bothered by his aaya talking to herself. He was used to this. He rushed towards a play area at the end of the zoo, where there were rusted swings and rickety slides. Bakya found a crumbling cement bench to rest her legs and gave in to the nagging worry in her mind, the slap marks on Eswari’s face. It perturbed her like an itch flaring on her back, too hard to ignore, too out of reach to do something about it. Why was Eswari so docile? Is it because Bakya was domineering?
Raakamma, her neighbour and the only friend Bakya had in the colony, had joked once saying, “Good you have a daughter. Had she been a son, you would have castrated him just with your words.”
That was the day when Eswari had forgotten to pin her dupatta and it had slipped off her shoulder on the way to school.
“Whom are you exhibiting yourself for? You can’t even pin the damn cloth properly?” Bakya had screamed at her, blind to the children who had stopped to witness the circus. Eswari ran back into their hut crying and refused to go to school that day.
Bakya’s anger often simmered over, especially when it came to Eswari. But wasn’t this one way to toughen Eswari up and make her thick-skinned? How could pampering and indulging help a girl who would have to survive in this harsh world? Eswari was too touchy for her own good. Coy and delicate damsels were only good for films, not for real life. Definitely not for women like them who had no male family members to support them. Even last week, Bakya read in the newspaper about a man who pushed a girl in front of the running train because she refused his advances. Was it Bakya’s mistake that she had tried to prepare Eswari for the world that was beyond Bakya’s eight-by-ten house?
What shocked Bakya was how Eswari, whom she had kept under her thumbs, never allowing her to visit her friends, never letting her invite anyone over, still managed to fall in love with a wastrel of a man. Bakya had had Eswari within her sight all the time, except when she was in school, and even then, Bakya would accompany her until the school gates, though the building was just a kilometre away from her hut, and troves of children from the colony went in gangs to the same schools.
Eswari complied with all of Bakya’s quirky demands, sometimes murmured a weak retort, and sometimes cried herself to sleep. But only once she had defied Bakya with the stubbornness of an ass and that was when she wanted to marry the man who had come to paint a house in their lane.
“And look what it led to.”
It was Raakama who had mollified Bakya when she went livid after discovering that her daughter had been secretly meeting her lover when Bakya was away at work.
“Failed in two subjects in public exams, and yet this alone you know how to do. How did my cursed womb give birth to a slut,” Bakya had slapped the iron ladle on her daughter’s thighs.
Raakama, after hearing their screams, rushed to their hut and pulled Bakya away from Eswari. After sending Eswari away to her house, Raakama pulled Bakya aside and said, “Look, you can’t keep your daughter inside your steel trunk and lock her. What if, one day, when you are not there, she runs away with this painter boy? The world will only laugh at you. Ask the boy to come and talk to you formally, and then we will see if he is a good boy or not.”
Truth be told, the wastrel looked promising when he met Bakya for the first time. He even fell at her feet and told her to treat him as a son she never had. After their marriage, Eswari moved to a hut a few lanes down from Bakya’s, and Palani was born a year later. Soon, through neighbourhood rumours, Bakya heard about her son-in-law spending his evenings at the bar attached to the TASMAC. Then, someone told her about his fights with Eswari. When Bakya asked her about it, Eswari dismissed it as a routine husband-wife sort of fight.
Then, one day—it must have been when Palani was around four—someone banged at Bakya’s door in the middle of the night. It was Eswari who had come with a bleeding forehead. Her son-in-law had thrown a glass tumbler at her. She had managed to escape before another imminent attack. Bakya was enraged enough to wring her son-in-law’s neck, but Eswari pleaded to leave it alone. “These things happen between couples,” she said.
“I lived with your father for twelve years before fate took him away. He never even scratched me with his fingernails. But, the man you selected for yourself is not even a human,” Bakya shouted at her daughter, daubing away the blood with a rag. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on in that house. You can’t hide a whole pumpkin in a small mound of rice.”
Even after many bloodied rags, the cut kept oozing.
“We must go to periya aaspital tomorrow. It looks deep,” Bakya said as she tied a cloth band around Eswari’s head and waited until she went into a tired sleep.
By now, the day began to break. Bakya hastened towards her son-in-law’s house, ignoring women who called behind her, asking where she was going at this hour carrying a broom in her hand. When she reached Eswari’s hut, she found her son-in-law sprawled on the floor, with Palani squatting beside him, sucking his thumb. She brought down the broom with such force on her son-in-law that it immediately jolted him back to reality.
“Will you hit my daughter again? Will you?” she kept repeating, as she hit her son-in-law, who was too confused to defend himself from the blows raining on him. “You thought you could get away with hitting a fatherless girl? Rascal,” she screamed and only stopped hitting him when Palani began to cry in confusion.
Bakya picked up her whimpering grandson and turned towards her home, but not before taking a final kick at the man who had hit her daughter.
A week after the incident, much to Bakya’s chagrin, her son-in-law convinced Eswari to come back to him after promising never to hit her again, and, unsurprisingly, broke the promise within a few days. Everything went back to how it was before, except now, Bakya was forbidden to visit Eswari and Palani.
Eswari met Bakya surreptitiously, one day, and begged, “Just grind your teeth and ask for forgiveness, no. After all, you hit a man in front of the whole area.”
“Your husband thinks I will come dragging myself on my knees if he uses you as bait. Tell him I lit your father’s pyre with you still hanging from my hips. I will not grovel, not even for the sake of my daughter. ”
“Won’t Shrutheesh ask why his aaya is not coming to see him? Won’t your only grandson miss you? My husband is right about one thing. Your arrogance has gone to your head.”
“That arrogance is what gave us life despite your father leaving us penniless. That arrogance is what put food on your plate. Just because you tied a knot with a scoundrel, I can’t lose my self-respect, ” Bakya slammed the door on Eswari’s face.
Later—Bakya didn’t know what Eswari did to convince her husband, what humiliation and insults she had to endure—she came back with reddened eyes and permission from her husband to let Bakya visit them once a month. With a condition barring Bakya from stepping inside his house again.
“Palani, come and drink some water,” Bakya called out to her grandson, who was swinging from the monkey bar. He peeled away the sipper bottle from his ayaa’s shoulder and drank while Bakya sponged the sweat on his forehead using her saree.
“Aaya, can you get me Fanta? I am very thirsty. Please, please,” Palani pleaded, pointing at a sad-looking shop adjacent to the play area. He knew how to melt Bakya’s heart. A crinkle in his eyes and a slight downward pull of his lips always did the trick.
“Alright,” Bakya said, fishing out a worn-out purse wedged deep into her blouse. She had a fifty-rupee note, folded four ways. Fanta would cost her thirty rupees, and she could do with some tea and rusks. She hadn’t had her breakfast, and her stomach grumbled for something.
“How much does the juice cost?” Bakya asked the disinterested man at the shop.
“Fifty.”
“What! Don’t you have a smaller bottle?”
“No. Just this.”
Bakya brought a bottle of the garish liquid, too tired to argue about being fleeced. She gulped down whatever water was left in Palani’s bottle and filled it with the drink.
“Palani, come and drink your juice,” she called out. “Can we go back home now? The sun is in the middle of the sky now,” Bakya asked Palani.
“But we haven’t seen the snakes, yet.”
“Of course, after seeing that only,” Bakya said, taking a small solace in the fact that her grandson was not as meek as her daughter. After Palani took several slurps from his sipper, they both walked towards a row of glassed enclosures that held the snakes. The first one had a rat snake, coiled into a thick disk, in one corner of the see-through box. A zoo employee, who was on the other side of the glass enclosure, slid open a square of the casing and placed some greying meat into it. He did the same with the next glass box, which had a few slender green snakes, each one wound around a broken tree branch. The largest enclosure had an ungainly python, too swollen to move. Bakya and Palani bent at an angle to take a closer look at the sleeping reptile when a square shaft of light fell on it. Soon, two chicks, as delicate as a baby’s breath, tottered into the glass casing. Palani gasped, seeing the yellow chicks with clueless, beady eyes taking hesitant steps into the enclosure. Bakya rushed to the zoo employee, who had just come out through the door marked ‘staff only’.
“Why did you put live chicks in the enclosure? You could have at least killed it before shoving it into the cage.”
The zoo employee, taken aback by this sudden confrontation, said, “ Ade, move aside, kelavi. I am only doing what I am told to do.”
Bakya was still staring at his back while Palani looked up to her with glistening eyes as if she had all the answers to the chick’s impending misery.
“Wait here,” Bakya told Palani before she slipped behind the “staff only” door.
Her palms trembled when she slid open the glass square, which was just wide enough to put her arms through. Though the python stayed unmoving on the far side of the enclosure, Bakya was keenly aware that it could hiss and strike her if it wanted to. Her eyes still trained on the python, she tried to grab the nearest chick. The chick let out a piercing tweet and jumped closer to its predator, which stirred momentarily. Bakya leaned further onto her shoulder, trying to reach the chick, only to find it jumping closer and closer to the python. Bakya made a few more tries before realising that she was only making the situation worse. She pulled out her hand in defeat.
“Come. Let’s go,” Bakya said, coming hastily out of the restricted area.
She dragged Palani towards the exit, his eyes still darting between the enclosure and Bakya. During the walk back to the house, Palani sipped his drink in silence, the chirpy kid of the morning lost in heavy thoughts.
Eswari waited for them at the door. Palani ran into her embrace with a muffled sob perceptible only by his jerking shoulders. He put his face deep into his amma’s saree, not raising his head even to wave to his aaya. A nod and a wordless bye later, Eswari, along with Palani, disappeared into the darkness of her hut. Bakya, first time in many years, felt a knot in her heart, a sting in her eyes, thinking about all the helpless beings in the world who could not be saved by her rage and pride alone.