Teatime for the Firefly Read online

  “Vera Lynn,” murmured Manik softly. “What a magnificent voice. Do you listen to Western music, Layla?”

  “I listen to Western classical mostly,” I replied. “Dadamoshai has quite a collection of Russian and German composers.”

  “There is something I have wanted to ask you,” said Manik. “How did both your parents die?”

  I was not surprised he had heard about my parents. He must have thought it odd that I lived with Dadamoshai and not with my mother and father.

  “My father was a freedom fighter. He died in the Cellular Jail.”

  “In the Andaman Islands? Is this the same notorious Cellular Jail where they hanged political prisoners?”

  “Yes.”

  I did not tell him I had heard that political prisoners were not only hanged in the gallows there, they were sometimes tied to cannons and blown up. The British meted harsh punishments when it came to political dissenters.

  “Have you heard about the Chittagong armory raid?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. A famous guerrilla movement in the ’30s, was it not? To overthrow the British? It was led by a schoolmaster, I believe.”

  “That’s right. My father was a revolutionary in that movement. He was captured and hanged.”

  “And your mother? I know women fighters played a big role in that uprising.”

  “My mother...” I hesitated, because I had never shared this with anyone before. “My mother drowned. In a lily pond. She killed herself.”

  I have a photo of my parents and me, taken when I was about a year old, just before my father was captured and exiled to the Andaman Islands. The faded sepia image shows a thin man with fiery eyes seated on a straight-backed chair in what appears to be a courtyard, with a chicken pecking in the background. Next to him stands my mother, frail and taut. She is wearing a plain-bordered sari and old-fashioned blouse with sleeves up to the elbow. Her arms are crossed over her chest; her eyes are naked and staring, a quiet desperation lurking in their depths. By then she was already lost to the world.

  Another song was playing on the radio now by the same singer. It was a sentimental love song presented in a slow caressing style. The singer’s voice trembled with heartbreak as she expressed the unbearable sorrow of parting with her lover. It got me right in the gut.

  My face was hidden in the shadows, but Manik must have sensed my tears because he reached into his kurta pocket and fished out a clean white handkerchief, which he offered me across the coffee table. He did not try to touch my hand or say anything. In the dark, I tucked the handkerchief under the cushion of the sofa. I never gave it back to him. We both sat quietly till the song ended and the plaintive strains of the orchestra faded, followed by nine hollow strokes from the pendulum clock that echoed in the hallway.

  Manik leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette. He still had not said a word. I choked back a lump in my throat, thinking: This is our last time together. The next time I see him, he will be a married man, belonging to another.

  “Let me go and find Dadamoshai,” I said, dashing inside the house. In the dark passageway, I hastily wiped off my tears. Dadamoshai was nowhere to be found. Chaya said he had gone to the neighbor’s house to borrow a newspaper.

  I returned to the veranda feeling more composed. “Dadamoshai’s gone out, but he’ll be back any minute. Do you want to wait?” I said, hoping to buy a few extra minutes. “I am sure he would like to say goodbye.”

  “I am running terribly late, Layla,” Manik said, getting to his feet. “Please thank the Rai Bahadur for all his kindness and tell him I will write from Calcutta, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  We stood together awkwardly under the porch as we said our goodbyes. I watched a rain beetle dash itself on the naked lightbulb with a tiny ting, then spin in dizzy circles on the floor. I was about to turn and walk back into the house when Manik did something unexpected: he reached out and brushed his fingertips lightly across my cheek. It was a fleeting gesture, a butterfly’s caress.

  “Lay-la...” He breathed my name with such tenderness that it trembled in the air between us.

  Then he simply turned around and walked away, while my heart quietly broke, the pieces scattering like petals on the gentle night breeze.

  CHAPTER 6

  Soon after I was born, my mother began to unravel. Her descent into madness was slow and surreptitious. It began with a slackening of the mind, a stray thread, a small tug in the wrong direction. She complained that the Small People in her head kept her awake at nights. She pulled at her lovely waist-length hair till her scalp bled. The Small People scrabbled in her eardrums and pulled her nose, turning it inside out like a foot sock, right into her brain. This drove her even more insane, because every time she sneezed she imagined that bits of her brain blew out into her handkerchief. By the time I was two years old, my mother had sneezed most of her brain out of her head. She became empty and hollow, a green coconut devoid of substance.

  When I was three years old, my mother, on the advice of a Holy Man, decided to marry me off to a banana tree. This act was not the outcome of sheer lunacy alone, but a very antiquated ritual in our society: marrying off a bad-luck child to an object, traditionally a banana tree, was believed to “cancel out” one’s negative horoscope.

  One overcast morning in June, my mother dressed me like a traditional Bengali bride in a red sari with a gold veil, put kohl around my eyes, dotted my forehead with sandalwood paste and lined my tiny feet with alta, the red paste worn by brides. She carried me to the grove by the lily pond and tied me by my veil to a banana tree. She blew a conch, broke open a coconut, chanted prayers and sprinkled holy water, and left me there. A slanted drizzle fell straight through the afternoon. I was bitten by red ants and caught a death of a cold. I was discovered in the early evening by a neighbor.

  My mother was also found at dusk, floating in the lily pond, facedown in the water. Her skin was waxy and cold, her lips blue, and her eyes had turned dull as mud. Her delicate hands bobbed by her side like the wings of dead birds. She had been dead several hours.

  After my mother died, I was cared for by my maternal grandparents for a while and then I moved in with my great-aunt, Mitra Mashi, whom I called Mima.

  Mima was a great big woman who wore her sari a whole foot off the ground, the tail end tucked into her waistband like a sumo wrestler. She was an earthy woman who laughed easily and was given to manly backslapping that made the elders cringe.

  Mima stories abound in the family. My favorite one is about the time she laughed so uproariously that she accidentally swallowed a stinkbug. Another time she thumped an old uncle enthusiastically on the back and made him swallow his dentures.

  To Dadamoshai’s great delight and approval, Mima earned a master’s degree and fought her way up the teaching ladder to become the first female vice principal of the most prestigious boys’ school in Sylhet.

  Mima created a mild scandal when she fell in love and married the science teacher, Robi Das, a pigeon-toed young man with a nervous stutter, who was small enough to tuck under her armpit like an evening purse. She surprised everyone even further by giving birth to a healthy baby girl at the ripe old age of thirty-eight. Her daughter’s name was Moon.

  Although Moon was only six months older than me, she was technically my aunt, a fact she rubbed in with exasperating frequency. Moon and I existed in the same house like two prickly cacti in a pot, too close for comfort, our thorns occasionally poking each other.

  Moon had a round face and corkscrew curls that stuck close to her head, a gap-toothed smile and coal-black, starry eyes with lashes so thick that they jammed back into her eyes when she tried to look through her binoculars.

  Moon took her profession as an explorer very seriously. She carried her binoculars around like a doctor carries a stethoscope and viewed the whole world through the
m. She studied the grass, the clouds, the fence and even her own shadow.

  People stared at us both because we were so different. I was an oddity in our town of brown-skinned, dark-eyed people. I had delicate bones; dark, straight hair; and enormous, smoky, gray-green eyes that reminded people of sad, impenetrable things like forest fires and river fog.

  Mima, on the other hand, saw no difference. She hugged and spanked us both at the same time. Mima’s policy was if one child was naughty, the other one got spanked, as well. It was a preemptive measure, a disciplinary vaccination, to ensure the misdeed did not reoccur in any shape or form. The same applied to hugs: always a double shot.

  Mima’s child rearing defied all logic, but she had no patience for logic. “Everybody mind your ways, otherwise there will be trouble for all,” she would hiss fiercely, her eyes narrowed. Even my uncle Robi was terrified. He sat tucked into the sofa like a tiny brown cushion and looked at us sadly through his fat, foggy glasses. He was sympathetic, but of no help.

  I fitted easily into Mima’s boisterous household and all its bosomy comfort. My tragic childhood was all but forgotten. Bits of my past emerged at times, pieced together by gossip and a significant amount of embellishment thrown in by Moon. She was fed stories by their garrulous housemaid, Rekha, a wisp of a girl with gap teeth splayed out like the fingers of a hand, through which the gossip of the entire neighborhood flowed.

  “Your mother was a madwoman and you are a Banana Bride,” Moon declared. We were both around six years old and playing in the backyard. “I wish I could marry a banana tree,” she added wistfully, and then with complete irrelevance, “but I have a doll that vomits and you don’t.”

  I did not care about being a Banana Bride, but I badly wanted a vomiting doll.

  “You can marry a banana tree anytime,” I said. “Why don’t you?”

  Moon sniffed with scorn. “Don’t talk like a donkey. Azzifff you can marry whomever you like. Your parents have to propose for you.”

  “Then ask your mother to propose for you.” Nobody would dare turn down Mima’s proposal, least of all a banana tree.

  “I told her I wanted to marry a banana tree and she got very angry. She wanted to know who had told me things about you. I said, ‘Rekha told me everything.’ Then Ma went into the kitchen and screamed, ‘If I ever hear you talking to the children about any of this, I will throw you out like a dirty rat and you can go back to your village.’ Rekha was crying and begging. Then Ma turned and yelled at me, ‘I will throw you out, too, like a dirty rat, if you tell Layla anything.’” Moon looked at me ruefully, absentmindedly pulling on a corkscrew curl. “I am not supposed to talk to you, about the banana wedding, your crazy mother, or anything.”

  Moon was so enthralled with my tragic childhood that our favorite pastime became to enact the macabre little drama in all its gory details. Our favorite character was my mother. We took turns playing her, tearing out our hair and sneezing our brains into a handkerchief. Nobody wanted to play Baby Layla the Banana Bride, because all she did was sit under the tree and cry. Instead we dressed up Moon’s vomiting doll in a red dishcloth and stuck her under the banana tree while we concentrated on elaborate wedding rituals, throwing rice and pretending to make conch sounds by blowing on a rock. The doll was then made to switch roles and become my mother. We sneaked out the plastic bucket from the bathroom and floated the doll facedown in the water. Moon and I became the professional mourners, throwing ourselves on the ground, beating our chests and wailing.

  Then one day we got caught like two stricken cockroaches under a flashlight. Mima came looking for the bucket and found us wailing and saw the doll floating in the water. She knew exactly what was going on and gave us both the spankings of our lives. She said she would throw us both out of the house like dirty rats if she caught us playing the game again.

  Many years later, I realized that all that role-playing must have been cathartic at some level, because my real-life tragedy had become woven through with imagination, a colorful fable to be accepted, elaborated upon and embraced, until—to the wonderment of it all—I could let my past go and fly free.

  * * *

  Moon and I spent our holidays in Dadamoshai’s house. Every summer, Mima’s family packed up and took the ferryboat across the Padma River from Sylhet to Silchar. Here we stayed for two lazy, sun-dappled months in paradise.

  We loved Dadamoshai’s huge, dilapidated house with its creaky, lopsided gate leading into a big, rambling garden with its birdbath, sundial and sleepy snails that waved their feelers up and down the garden wall. It was a peaceful time. Mima became cuddly and warm and threw discipline to the winds. She got foot massages and snoozed on the veranda. Moon and I climbed the mango tree, demolished anthills, mothered baby crows and challenged Dadamoshai’s brain with obtuse and difficult questions.

  One year, two crow chicks fell out of the nest in the mango tree. Moon and I adopted one each. Two days later, Moon woke up to find her chick dead. She burst into tears, shoved me hard against the wall and ran howling through the house, looking for Dadamoshai. She found him writing peacefully at his desk on the veranda.

  Dadamoshai was the appointed mediator of squabbles. Unlike Mima, who would have either smacked or hugged us, depending on her mood, Dadamoshai listened to both sides and was always judicious.

  In between angry sobs, Moon told him that her baby crow had died because of my bad luck.

  Dadamoshai pushed up the glasses on his forehead and rubbed his eyes wearily.

  “What is bad luck?” he asked innocently.

  “When somebody dies because of somebody else.”

  “Explain to me, please. I am too old to understand,” said Dadamoshai, looking round-eyed and befuddled. I was incredulous. Did he not know what bad luck was? Why, he sounded like a numskull.

  Moon puffed with importance. She stood stoutly with her hands on her waist, looking like a mini Mima herself. “See, Layla is bad luck—everybody knows that, right?”

  “Really?” Dadamoshai looked astounded, as if she had just told him the chicken had laid a square egg.

  “Yes, yes.” Moon shook her curls. She was getting tired of our grandfather’s feeblemindedness. “Layla is very bad luck. Maximum bad luck,” she added for emphasis. Moon’s new favorite word was maximum. “Her father died because of her, her mother died because of her—let me see...who else? Oh, and now the baby crow died because of her. So see?”

  “Whose baby crow died because of whom?” Dadamoshai asked.

  “Mine, because of her.”

  “But if she was the bad luck, would not her baby crow die instead of yours?”

  Moon looked confused.

  “Am I bad luck?” Dadamoshai asked her, looking timid and fearful, as though something was going to bite him.

  “Ufff-ho! No, no, why should you be bad luck?” Moon retorted irritably. “Her! Her! She!” She pointed an accusing finger as I cowered behind Dadamoshai’s chair, feeling like a lowly insect. But Dadamoshai did not turn around to look at me.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” Dadamoshai lamented sadly, shaking his head, “I think I am very bad luck, too. My wife died, you know, very young, and my daughter. My father died, too, and my mother died...a cat, also, some chickens, and so many cockroaches I can’t even count. But sometimes my clogs have a mind of their own and do very bad things.”

  “Oh-ho, Dadamoshai! You are confusing anything with everything! Making a big kheechoori. Don’t worry—you are not bad luck. Layla is different.”

  “How? I don’t understand.”

  Moon sighed noisily. “Dadamoshai, you are too old. You don’t understand anything anymore,” she said and stuck out her lower lip, glowering at the floor.

  “Okay, come here, you two,” Dadamoshai said, suddenly very alert and businesslike. He capped his pen with a smart click and closed his journal. He motioned us
over to the sofa and scooped the sleeping cat off with the newspaper. “Sit down. I want to show you something.” He was tossing around a heavy glass paperweight in his hand. It had blue swirls and glass bubbles suspended inside. “See this paperweight?” he said. He held it up to the light with his thumb and forefinger. We could see the palm trees and sky through it. He positioned his hand above the coffee table and looked as if he was about to drop the paperweight on the glass.

  “If I drop this and break the glass, is it good luck or bad luck?”

  “Bad luck,” we said in unison.

  “If I drop the paperweight, but catch it with the other hand before it breaks the glass, is it good luck or bad luck?” While he waited for our answer, Dadamoshai dropped the glass ball, which he caught expertly with his other hand, an inch before it hit the table. We gasped.

  “Good luck or bad luck?” he repeated, looking at us both. His eyes were bright like a chipmunk as he tossed the orb around in his hand.

  Moon and I looked at each other. “Good luck,” we agreed. “Because nothing got broke, thank God,” Moon added, crossing her heart. I followed suit. That was the new thing we had both learned watching a nun at the Sacred Heart Convent, where Dadamoshai had taken us for a charity sale. Crossing our hearts was high on our list of priorities. We crossed our hearts several times a day. Sometimes Moon substituted it for “touch wood” or “bless you” when a person sneezed, or “don’t mention it” when someone said “thank you.” She was a prolific heart-crosser.

  “So tell me, who is making the luck happen?”

  It was a trick question.

  “You?” I ventured.

  “Are you sure?” Dadamoshai pinned me with his magistrate’s eye, sharp as a pickax.

  Moon skipped gingerly from one bare foot to another. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” she said ambiguously.

  “Layla is right,” Dadamoshai said. “I am in control here. I am making luck happen. Now listen carefully, you two. All of us can create our own luck, good and bad. We cannot make luck happen for anyone else, understand? This simple truth of life is called Karma. Now I want both of you to go and think seriously about what I just said.”