Everlasting Love With Rosa Damascena
We three sisters, each born apart after five years, meet in 2024 after ten years of detachment. On the evening of the sixth January, to be exact. Our sister Neela, the youngest among us, who crossed thirty-five two months ago, lies wrapped in a coarse, bright, white sheet on the floor of her home in New Delhi’s Hauz Khas. In death, she is a picture of repose. Her eyes are closed, her fair face, evenly laced with turmeric and sandalwood, is composed, her ears are aglow with lustrous pearl earrings and her nostrils filled with cloud-like cotton wads lend her an angelic air. Surfaces lie; they don’t reflect a person’s inner life.
A tall, glowing brass lamp stands at her head in the darkening evening. Its flickering wick, the Hindu symbol of the soul’s radiance, is the only luminous thing in the pitch-dark landscape that flounders under a power outage, a complete blackout, and pelting rain. As my elder sister Kamala and I cannot find candles or flashlights and the power inverter has blown its fuse, the quietly devastating, dark, dense atmosphere sets the tone for the evening, for our reunion, our farewell. The tick-tock of the enormous grandfather clock in the room courses through our bodies, quickens our heartbeats, and meddles with our minds, confusing and cleaving them by turns. Funny how an inanimate object can submit new sensations and meanings.
At seven p.m., the winds pushing the rain into irregular lines heave their restiveness indoors. As we have left the main door and windows open, unable to bear the claustrophobia of the enclosed living room, the coarse night, its dripping trails of water, slams up cold against our insides. The numbing chill wicks at our body heat and we shiver through our pashmina shawls. Perhaps, this is one reason why Kamala and I, both clad in white as custom demands, sit by Neela coiled like springs. Kamala’s attire is traditional. She has silver hoops in her ears, a long silver fazan that holds her straight, hair in a top knot and thin silver bangles. My dress is West-inspired and my accessories are contemporary, platinum danglers and a choker. Our white clothes are appropriate, but they invite the cold, not peace, as they are meant to.
There is another reason for our edginess. This is our childhood home, Ma’s home, who raised us single-handedly, that now belongs to Neela. As we sit cross-legged on the floor, a captive audience as we are, we catch sight of our past life. It’s like waking ghosts. Images and characters flit between the dark and the dim as in a shadow puppetry show. But when reality collides with our imagined experience, we know this is not the home we knew and held dear. With its familiar elements missing: sagging cushions, frayed sofas, smells of cooking and incense, family photos, jasmine vines on old bamboo racks and mangy dogs with chewed ears on the portico, this de-cluttered, rearranged-in-texture-and-spirit place with abstract paintings is just a space, tasteful but impersonal and sterile.
Neela’s only mourners are frogs, their din makes silence not only becoming but an urgent necessity. It makes it easy to muzzle our history and its emotional complexities, love, loss, resentment, regret and nostalgia. “I don’t want to linger any longer than necessary,” I say to Kamala after a while, bothered by the drab dispiritedness of our surroundings, by our peculiar animosity that is direct yet oblique, poisonous yet harmless, repressed yet effervescent. I know I sound churlish. “We can’t be rescued from the pain of our past in a single evening and the tally between us and Neela won’t be evened out either. The cruelties and miseries she inflicted upon us will take time to heal.” Kamala is silent. Her face is stiff, speckled with red that spreads, and her jaw is rigid. I know broaching the subject of our dead sister is violent business. Is Kamala’s silence indicative of reproach, of “Enough now, she is dead, poor thing?” I see her flick the straying strands of hair from her forehead abruptly. Does it imply “I am uncertain and restless as well?” I can’t make out. She is gazing outside, vacantly. I follow her eyes. The trees, grass, shrubs, flowers, gravel, mud, asphalt and overhead wires, familiar to me from childhood, blur into gauzy impressions as if coaxed into a dull, neutral, oneness of gloom.
The cloying smells of roses and tulsi, which we have strung around Neela’s neck to stop souring odours, and sandalwood, which we have applied on her body, seep into our nostrils. We also smell the damask rose perfume we have sprayed on her, its sweet, spicy, fruity with honeyed undertones, one that we vowed as children that we would all use when we grew up and the only one we would use for it had the aroma of Ma. “Everlasting Love With Rosa Damascena is our signature of sisterhood,” we three had declared in more fortunate times as we bonded in this house over its name and its aromatic puffs from delicate, stolen perfume bottles. Ma believed she had hidden them well. Neela was five then, I was ten and Kamala was fifteen. I did not adhere to our pinky promise past my teens out of pique for Neela, for she aimed, without mercy, for both our vulnerable parts even as a child.
I wonder if Kamala or Neela did. I had forgotten about this perfume, its name, and its role in our lives, but Kamala has brought it along. Does that say something? Kamala’s eyebrows are stitched in a thick thread across her forehead. She is still distant. It makes it hard for me to ask. Yet I do. “Are you carrying the burden of an elder sister? Carrying the mantle of our Ma in an obscure way by keeping the memories of the perfume and the spirit of our sisterhood alive? Or did you choose, like me, to lose our childhood, our sisterhood?” She shrugs. She is not ready for conversation.
****
Neela is found dead by her maid Kanchan. “The guard and I had to force open a large window to enter the house this afternoon when Neela memsahib did not answer the door. She could have died the previous day, but we have no means to know, as I was on leave,” Kanchan says to each of us on the phone. She comes to meet us as we arrive. Her heavily kohled eyes, dark and direct, display no sadness. Instead, her thin, yellow and orange patterned nylon sari, which flaunts her belly button, and her blouse, cut audaciously front and back, display gaiety, odd, unexpected and out of place given our circumstances. “Pay me my salary now,” she demands, through paan-stained teeth, “and something extra for I have lost my job for no fault of mine.” We don’t begrudge her lack of love or loyalty.
Kamala and I arrive late afternoon at Neela’s house, past five p.m., as each of our homes is distant. We work in silence, talking only when needed. “Look for the gold sari Ma gave her,” Kamala instructs. “Heat water on the gas for her bath,” she orders. “Help me find strings to tie her toes together,” I beseech. “Rub the turmeric and sandalwood paste on her face,” she says. From six p.m. on into the icy, thickening dark, we work on Neela’s as-yet malleable flesh to get her into a state of cremation-readiness. Then we sit in wait for the doctor and the hearse.
As we sip tea that I have brought in a flask and nibble on digestive biscuits packed alongside, we decide we won’t be going to the cremation grounds. We agree to inform our out-of-town and country relatives, put out messages on our social media later and inform her office, as we know nothing about her colleagues. “It’s raining, it’s night, there’s no electricity and we feel unsafe,” I say, weakly, to the funeral agency manager on the phone. “And women in our community don’t go to cremation sites,” I add. He does not care for my guile or any one of my reasons. “Ma’am, we will only cremate her in the morning, but we will keep her protected until then in an ice box that our hearse will bring to you. If you change your mind about coming tomorrow, let us know, but we will have a stand-in representative for you to conduct the rites. Send a copy of her ID and yours and our payment with the driver and her certificate of death can be collected later from us,” he says formally, assertively. And as an afterthought, he says, “Do send the doctor’s certificate, too, to rule out complications.”
The doctor we summon, relying on the recommendation of the area’s resident welfare association, arrives at eight fifteen p.m., his heavy, wide girth swaying and his black jacket dripping with gloom and rain. “I walked over as I live close by,” he says, his voice gruff. Wheezing, he places his damp brown leather bag beside Neela to examine her. “Oh, you have called me before you bathed her,” he complains. “I attended to her hypertension a year ago. Do you know if she suffered from a heart condition later?” he asks. Seeing our nonplussed expressions, he changes tack to say, “I am putting down her death as fifth January, four p.m. and the cause of death as cardiac arrest.”
We fall silent after he leaves to stare unseeingly past her open, supersized front door as the night continues to stream down as long vertical shreds of bluish-black rain. Glossy droplets curdle against our skin from the open window, sharp, cold. The nighttime shower now has a raggedy, low, desolate buzz, a sort of murmured apology for our undesired experience. The air is cold and should take away the stagnant smells of the flowers, tulsi, sandalwood and Rose Damascena. It does. It brings in the aromas of wet grass and earth. But it also pulls in the niff of the mixed cargo of rubbish heaped on the roadside and the acrid smell of petrol and the pungent odour of diesel, the result of vehicles hitting the asphalt close to homes that is the bane of a polluted urban environment, the tony neighbourhood notwithstanding. Even as this smog gives us the feeling of swallowing glass shards, we watch the rain gather into puddles on the unpaved mud track on the side of the road. The water is dark purple, the colour of gangrene.
It is eleven p.m. when we hear the godawful horn of the hearse, its broken blasts. As the black van, its ungodly exterior scratched and bruised, departs honking in the steamy, dead light, and as we let Neela be carried into her future life in an ice box, the electricity that has been knocked out returns. The lighted interiors dismay me. I awaken to the ragged, remorseful guilt of letting Neela go alone, to the horror that my compassion for her as a sister is dead and to the shame that I lack basic humanity. The feeling is visceral, palpable and inconsistent with the righteous anger I hold against Neela. As I look at Kamala, I know she is being assaulted by similar feelings.
****
“As a thirty-five-year-old, is Neela’s heart, which cut her earthly life short, now open to the world beyond? Has she been united with Ma, who died ten years ago, who pleaded with us on her deathbed to mend our ties, to accept Neela as she was and allow a homecoming for her after her demise? Or is she still caught between worlds, with her sense of self unobliterated, as we haven’t called a pundit to oversee her last rites?” Kamala whispers to me urgently. She has found her voice. I have no answers.
“Don’t you find it strange that none of her neighbours of ten years have shown up to bid farewell? Isn’t it unusual for a close-knit North-Indian community as ours?” Kamala asks, after a breathing space. “As their homes are sunk in rainy darkness, it could be a ready excuse for them. To me, though, their absence speaks of her deceitful and manipulative nature, of her rankling them with it,” I say uncharitably. My bitterness towards Neela is back in minutes, moderation and empathy are no longer active and my decency finds its limits. “Admit it, we, too, are here not out of love for her; she is inherently unlovable for both of us, but because she has no one. No friends, husband or children. I am sure her soul is already scheming as it plots its way through future wanderings.”
Kamala nods. “What gives Neela the right to lower us into her darkness, to stretch her shadow beyond her life?” Her voice is steady, but I know her only too well. I know it’s the calmness of a disturbed person trying to hide it. My stomach grumbles. I am filled with fear for the words to follow, for the ferocious feelings I am not ready to deal with and for the hot pain the treacheries of remembrances will bring.
“Nirmala,” she says, “in the years running beneath this one, when we have known Neela’s small and big cruelties, her giving away of our secrets in childhood, her telling of false tales about us during our adolescence, making it hellish, and her unending stream of vehemence, we have both cracked from within and let some of her malice seep into us. I fear we will continue like this for the rest of our lives.” I agree as I recall the deep, intimate hurts she inflicted on me, on us, and her past rising to meet my present, our present. “Yes, Neela could lie easily,” I say. My words sound inadequate.
Without warning, the image of Neela I knew appears before my eyes. The girl with sharp intelligence who could recite verses she heard once with perfect enunciation, recall a hundred variations of a single colour and the woman who could be witty with panache. As time folds in on itself at that moment, I relive our childhood in my mind, but only our magic moments, her baby cheeks, the echoes of her first laugh, the memory of her little feet running in our hallway, our chasing of butterflies, exchanging clips and toys, making unshapely, messy cakes and nonsense verses. This touch of her life, her skin, almost, briefly quells the damage she has inflicted, the cruelty that drifted from her as naturally as steam off boiling water.
“Kamala and you should make up with Neela,” our mother whimpered to me on her deathbed five years ago. Ma suffered from cancer in her seventies and our family unity was important to her, supremely so, as she was estranged from her husband, our father, who left her for a younger woman when she was thirty-two. He flaunted his new wife and newfound prosperity in our faces when we bumped into him at our club or a social gathering. “Neela’s misdeeds spring from her deep sense of abandonment. She was just eight when your father left. I could not help her cope with that loss or protect her from dangers, both from the outside and from within her. I know the pain of being looked at sideways, for never being seen for who you are. She suffered like that as well.” “No, Ma, if Kamala and I made up with her, it would heal one wound but tear open others,” I argued, not allowing space for expectations. Ma’s face slackened with disappointment. I knew fully well how defeated, helpless and broken-hearted she was with our dysfunctional relationship and how I was stripping her of all emotional validation. It must have been the worst kind of suffering for her – cognizance of her collapse, dealing with the emotional wrench of her life slipping away and going away into the unknown with the knowledge that her girls have willfully disintegrated their bonds and that her ex-husband would never come to her funeral or lift a finger to help his abandoned daughters. It should, perhaps, then not have come as a surprise when one day, without preamble, Ma said to Kamala and me, “I have signed over my home, inherited from my father, to Neela as recompense for her suffering. I know this house should be divided equally among you three, but please, don’t fight her on this. You and Kamala are married and have your own homes. She has neither a home nor a spouse. As her mother, I have no choice but to engage in her suffering and help her heal, for unattended wounds of a daughter turn into something nasty.” It would have been barbarous to fight Ma on this, to stretch her role as a wailing matriarch. She had mourned alone and long enough for the death of our family kinship.
Nevertheless, the dispossession still rankles. The sympathy she elicited from Ma gives rise to something poisonous in me. I am sure Kamala is irked as well. Will Kamala argue on the side of choicelessness? Will she say it was Ma’s decision and we must respect her wishes? She says something contrary to what I expect. “We grew up breathing the air in this house and though Neela was financially stable, she inherited this house in a sort of twisted irony. Her death comes as a kind of redemption, a rebalancing of the order of cause and effect, though I feel she will spring back here any minute, the subtle folds of her sari swishing. I can picture her ducking her head to avoid the pendant chandeliers that Ma hung, lights she unexpectedly kept, and toss her curls at them, audaciously, as if to say ‘come get me’.” I turn around involuntarily, expecting to see her.
Kamala is right. We both will inherit the house as per Ma’s will and the law, but will we ever be easy about it, knowing how miserable Ma was by our enmity with Neela? Is this the price we will pay for sisterly disaffection? To not have listened to Neela, with the kind of hearing that demands the attention of the heart. “Do you know that as Neela was staying with Ma for years, she used her pre-signed cheques to siphon her money? Do you know these funds were meant for the two of us, if not used for emergencies?” Kamala asks. It is news to me. “She also spirited away all the jewellery Ma left for us. I have seen boxes with both our names inside her safe. She even plied Ma’s bangles as she lay dead in the hospital. This malignant act of hers was the breaking point for me. Her betrayal of trust towards Ma was unforgivable. I vowed never to speak to her again and never did.” I am in shock.
*****
“Was Neela’s angst the result of abandonment as Ma firmly believed?” I want to know. Kamala shakes her head and says, “She was able to infuse violence into the mundane as she lived on another plane of reality from infancy, far removed from our world and world view. It had nothing to do with our father being absent or our upbringing. Remember, even when he was with us, she would yell, “Kamala and Nirmala are hitting me,” when we were doing no such thing. She would tear up our books and rob our pencils and erasers. You would wet your bed till you were ten and she would humiliate you by telling your friends and she would burn my clothes for reasons known only to her. I remember her feral look as she watched the flames feed on my clothes. There was something maniacal about her since birth. Ma used to say she was terrified as Neela would make strange noises and jerk her body involuntarily as a baby.”
I gnaw on my lips. “Though she smiled often, she never delighted in the lightness of the world. I find it annoying not to know why. Why she could not feel happiness, affection and love. Maybe she was because she was disturbed psychologically, plagued with worries about things she could not control, maybe she just did not like us, maybe she compared herself to our affluent friends or maybe she was plain bored. I wonder if heart failure was the result of her being ill-disposed.”
My cellphone rings. I ignore it and continue, “When she drove a rift in my marriage by suggesting to Raj that I was in a relationship with his best friend Amar, I broke all ties with her. She created many other monsters within Raj’s mind, telling him a pack of lies about how I splurged his money and how money-grubbing I was. I did flirt with Amar, but it was harmless social flirting, a playful exchange of words and glances. But I won’t admit to being a spendthrift or over-eager to make money. My marriage could have ended; there was chaos in it already for unrelated reasons, and, for a few perilous months, I thought it would. I would have been alone, childless as I am, and homeless and penniless as well. Amar, who was travelling when Neela made these allegations, returned to clear the air and drive sense into Raj. I clearly remember Neela as she sat through my screaming with a frosty sneer on her face, vicious in its icy chill, with not one pleat in her sari or one curl of her hair out of place.”
I reach out for Kamala’s hand. “I am sorry, I did not tell you. I was embarrassed and assumed you too would doubt and judge me. I feared she had told the world about this and I went into a shell out of mortification and cut ties with everyone, including you. My nerves were frayed for years as she stripped me of my dignity. When I did recover, I was still hesitant to deal with you, for in my mind, dealing with you meant dealing with her indirectly. I feel many searching, accusing eyes on me even to date.”
Kamala hugs me and shushes my sobs. She reminds me of Ma. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I understand now, though I have been furious and bewildered all these years. I guessed this to be the reason, but couldn’t be sure. I never did believe Neela anyway. I wish you could have found a way to tell me your side of the story or I had found a way to reach out to you. Please, forgive me for sulking and being awkward earlier this evening. Perhaps it was Neela’s deep fear of being nobody that triggered all this. She did try with little lies to jeopardise my relationship with my sons, Tushar and Ashwin, but her timing was off. My world could have fallen apart like yours, but as surly teenagers, they were caught in their battles to care about my misbehaviour. Bad manners, ingratitude and disrespect came with their territory, so it was no skin off my nose.”
We laugh. After we quieten down, she says, “We will keep the hate she planted alive only if we continue with the rules of her sad, stunted world. We need to both move on from her. Let’s see her end as a space opening up for us. Let’s use Ma’s home as our meeting ground. I know Neela has left many imprints behind there and certain parts of her will come to haunt us as phantom limbs, but, having been through so much and now knowing all that we do, we can deal with it together.”
Kamala hands me her bottle of Everlasting Love With Rose Damascena. “Yes, I have been using it all these years to recall and remind myself of our sisterhood.” A smile breaks out on my face. ”I will wear it when we meet again tomorrow at Ma’s home. Salut, to good times!”
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