Maya

The Mumbai sunset burned streaks into low-lying clouds. Bright green parrots grouped into pairs on the palm trees outside Maya’s window. She sat alone at her table to pour herself a cup of tea. She did not feel lonely.

Was it true what people were whispering? Was Shruthi here? Maya didn’t recall her daughter calling.

She strained against vapors clinging to shapes her mind conjured. Since she turned eighty, nothing made sense.

As she sat at her tea table immersed in thoughts of Shruthi, Maya didn’t at first feel surprised when she heard her outside. She tilted her head and listened to a loud, musical voice with undertones reminding her of rocks.

The familiar cadences drew Maya to the window. There, the reality of Shruthi’s voice, the solidity of its tone and texture, made Maya lose her balance.

Shruthi stood in the courtyard, two floors below, cursing.

“Bloody filthy railway stations. Don’t even have a decent place to wash! Country’s going to hell!”

Maya watched Shruthi struggling to pull over-sized suitcases from the backseat of an ancient taxi. She yanked the now-torn handles. The suitcases did not budge.

The dark-skinned driver, face impassive, stood politely. “Madame, may I try?” he said.

“No. These suitcases have had too much handling as it is. I’ll get the blasted things out myself.”

Shruthi’s hair stuck to her skin and sweat trickled into her eyes. Her neck muscles, which Maya could make out from where she watched, strained with the effort of tugging. Streaks of black lined her face from city pollution.

Oh, dear, Maya thought. She must certainly have a wash. I shall prepare for her a bath.

Was Shruthi home from school already? Hadn’t she left? Why is the child coming home in a taxi and not on the blue school bus?

Thoughts of Shruthi whirled around Maya as a dervish spinning confusion into the placidity of her flat. Shruthi as a child—mussing things up, knocking knickknacks off the table, pushing aside Maya’s paperbacks for her own ponderous textbooks. Spilling food Maya cooked, bringing dirt from outside onto Maya’s polished floors. As if a monkey, her child had run wild.

Maya turned from the window towards the bathroom to prepare Shruthi’s bath. Then she paused at the tea table and sat. Her hands shook; she focused on quieting them, proud at eighty she held her teacup steady without spilling a drop. Age, she often thought, can never diminish the grace of a true lady.

What did not see, on her hands: dark spots, pinkish knuckles, blue lumps rising under brown skin.

Instead, she imagined them slender, dove-soft, gloved with white satin. The hands she had always wanted—the hands Shruthi would have scorned.

Maya sipped her tea. She dipped and raised her head, imagining on it a large brimmed hat. She smiled at herself wearing a lemon-yellow hat—a true ladies’ hat. Her head had always been bare. Indian women do not wear hats, or gloves, or such frivolous, marvelous things.

Maya remembered years ago, when she’d worked as an ayah, how she’d slipped into her employer’s coatroom and run her fingers through fabrics, letting a shawl fall onto her arms. Amidst scarves, hatboxes, and stoles she’d breathed the sweet garden scent of England transported.

She enjoyed imagining rose gardens, rolling hills, and green fields. She loved British romances, and lost herself amidst their worlds: manors with straight-backed butlers, maids’ quarters, and furniture carved out of teak. Houses with oriental carpets, Mogul vases, and polished silver on display. Through these books, she came to revere everything English.

She sucked her teeth, seeing herself decades younger, tasting pastries at her employers’ home, butter-soaked crumbs coating her tongue. She shifted to relieve the pain of her hips and glanced at the clock: nearly five! Her guests should soon be arriving.

They had not yet appeared, and she, for the moment, was alone. With Shruthi’s absence, the void filled with voices—her own, Shruthi’s, the ghosts’. Unlike Shruthi living somewhere in America, her guests kept her company, gave her stimulating conversation, made her feel her best.

She frowned when she heard her shrill door chime. Who could it be? Her teatime ghosts didn’t use the door. Maya wiped her brow with her palu, tugged her sari back down, and groaned as she heaved herself off the hard chair.

The door opened before Maya reached the handle. Outside, Shruthi was wrestling with luggage marred by gashes. She looked at Maya.

“Mum, why do you leave the door ajar? You’re not living at an English country cottage, you know. It isn’t at all safe.” She rubbed grit from her forehead and pushed the suitcases to one side.

“Dear, what took you so long? How was school? Do you want some fresh barfi?”

Shruthi paused, bent over the suitcases. “It’s been four years since I saw you, and you’re talking about school? Mum? Can you see me? Do you know who I am?” Shruthi leaned towards Maya, searching her face.

“What kind of question is that? Come inside, darling, tell me about your day.”

During her ayah years when she’d had the twins to look after, Maya hadn’t often bothered to ask Shruthi about her day. She’d worked for a Bombay based British couple who needed help with their baby girls. She spent hours reading to twins blessed with hair the ripe color of mangoes and eyes like monsoon seas. She could almost see again those little girls hiding, as they often did, in the pantry. They’d wait there, giggling, hunting for plum buns, until Maya joined them, leaving Shruthi asleep alone in a cradle.

Maya schooled the twins, and also later her daughter, about the art of being English.

“Act like a lady,” she’d instructed Shruthi. “Conduct yourself with decorum. Don’t show off your arms and legs.” It was only later when Shruthi threw back that word—lady—at her mother, spitting it out as if a curse, calling it a betrayal.

Shruthi, standing by the door, edged closer to Maya. “Mummy, what are you talking about? Why didn’t you tell me what the doctor said? I came to India fast as I could after his message. I tried to phone but your line must be out.”

Lovely gentlemen, the doctor. Hadn’t he waltzed with her? Maya pictured his pleasant gray eyes.

“Shall I introduce you to him? I think he is unengaged,” she said, arching her brows at Shruthi.

“Mum, you are not talking about marriage! And you’re ill. Why didn’t you phone earlier? I would have come to help.” Shruthi touched the top of Maya’s head. She looked around the flat. “You didn’t connect the phone I bought, did you? Probably still in the box.”

“How will the doctor show interest when you resemble some boy hooligan? Let’s draw your bath, shall we? And then I will help you to wear your sari and nicely oil your hair.”

“Sit somewhere, will you Mum? I’m going to get these suitcases into the bedroom.”

Shruthi made several trips transporting the luggage to the bedroom, then threw open her suitcases and scattered their contents across the room. “You really should’ve connected the phone,” she said, searching through suitcase flaps and pockets. “What if you collapsed and had no way to get help?”

After Maya’s husband, who had been the English employers’ driver, died, and the twins left to attend English universities, Maya’s grateful employees dismissed her with a generous sum of money. As she first approached her new flat, a widow with a small child, she felt only confusion. She was dismayed at the people on the streets—ragged children defecating within ditches, men wearing tattered loincloths. Men who chewed betal nut and spit red streams of paan onto buildings. Noises surrounded her—women’s loud bargains with street vendors, car horns, dogs’ barks, and students singing Hindi film songs.

Maya longed to bathe in a claw-footed bathtub, thick Turkish towels absorbing the sound of her splashing. As she had helped her ladyship, her English employer, to do each afternoon.

In her youth, Maya’s parents kept away disarray. Fastidiously clean, middle-class South Indians, they bathed from buckets, pouring fresh water over themselves twice a day. Maya could eat only with her right hand since the left was used for impure things such as washing the body.

As did her parents, she went outside the house to scrub her dinner plate so saliva would not contaminate the kitchen where sacred prayer lamps are rinsed. She learned to pleat a sari, oil and braid her hair, and protect her skin with massaging sandalwood paste.

In her flat, desperate to escape street garbage, saliva, and feces, and the chaos of rickshaws, reeking animals, and sweating bodies, Maya threw herself into the creation of balance. She read historical romance novels, bought saris, made tea, grew an abundance of roses. She maintained her parents’ rituals, but worshiped aloud the English.

She dressed her daughter in school uniforms of starched white shirts, navy skirts, and ribbon-tied braids; Shruthi soon grew out of these clothes. As a teen, Shruthi favored flowing skirts and oversized t-shirts. She got involved with rallies and verbal battles wherever she found them. Eventually, Shruthi told Maya she was neither English nor truly Indian. She was, therefore, going to America. She left Maya for a scholarship to study and teach what she called “postcolonial identity and resistance.”

For twenty years Shruthi lived in America, flying back to see Maya every two years. Two years blurred into four. Maya suspected Shruthi no longer awaited the faded blue aerogram papers scrawled to the edges with ink. Her letters dwindled. Shruthi never asked why they stopped.

“No doubt some neighbors or cousins will stop by, get you help if you ever need it,” Shruthi consoled Maya the last time she left her old mother.

The neighbors and cousins hadn’t. Then the English ghosts came.

Maya’s went to her kitchen decorated with copper pots. She wiped at a fleck of dirt, checked that ladles and lids lined up, and opened and sniffed containers. From behind a tumbler of homemade ghee, a coconut rolled out. Maya placed her palm over the coconut, caressing it as she would a child’s head. Its wiry spikes tickled her hand. She needed to make coconut barfi. She hadn’t made barfi, Shruthi’s favorite, for years. Maybe Shruthi would want some when she got home from school. She was at school, wasn’t she?

Maya gripped the countertop, listened to her breath, stabilized herself. She gathered the ingredients: condensed milk, ghee, cardamom. White powdered sugar. She pulled out a wooden grater with attached curved blade and arranged herself on the marble floor. Lifting her sari above her knees, she exposing blue veins running like rivulets through the fine sand of her skin, and drew the grater between her open legs. She sliced through the rind with a hard blow; pain shot through her shoulders. She cupped one rounded half over the blade and twisted until flakes separated from crust. As she rocked back and forth grating, coconut crumbles drifted onto her hair and clothes.

Shruthi wandered into the kitchen. “What’s this mess? Coconut? You’re not actually making barfi? Mum, you shouldn’t be sitting on the floor, you know. It’s bad for your knees. Why not use the table?”

“You call this clothing?” Maya struggled to stand and tugged at Shruthi’s soiled t-shirt. She went to find Shruthi a lemon yellow sari, then herded her protesting, gesticulating daughter into the guest bathroom and pushed closed the door. She looked at her deserted tea table. Maybe I ought to bathe as well to better prepare, Maya thought. Maybe then my English guests will come.

Shruthi was swearing and vigorously splashing in the bathroom. Maya walked to her bedroom to undress. Her body seemed to diminish as she peeled off the layers of cloth draping her. Her exposed skin hung strangely off her aged body—from the middle of her back, her hips, her belly, and from her knees. Her torso resembled an ocean as seen from above—full of waves and undulations.

After scrubbing herself with a paste of gram flour, turmeric, and milk-cream, Maya rubbed with a rough cloth, daily washed. She couldn't tolerate reusing material once it touched her skin. Such contact left it unclean, as her parents had always told her. Clothes must be pressed and fresh.

She scoured her arm. Shruthi once pinched her there, below her shoulder, and asked her where she had put her bones—You’re squishy. I swear I can’t find your bones!—she had said, the cheeky thing. She had always been cheeky, this one.

Maya dusted sandalwood talcum powder under the various folds of her body to keep herself dry and smelling presentable. Sweat would not do. It was uncouth to sweat, unrefined. She had to use lots of talc to combat the humidity of pre-monsoon Mumbai; she shook the can until a fragrant cloud drifted around her, forming an aura.

Covered as she was with white dust she appeared in the hanging bathroom mirror as though a ghost, her body ephemeral. The sight did not frighten her. She felt comfortable around ghosts; she had grown used to them. She was a bit startled at seeing herself appear as one.

When I become a ghost I'd better be nicely dressed. I'll Shruthi, make sure I do not go unclothed when it comes time for me to go. Maybe I should go wearing the lilac sari with the little gold stars woven in. I’ll tell Shruthi—the lilac sari.

Maya shook her head. Shruthi never could listen or follow simple instructions.

Maya glowed, flushed and ruddy. She chose a rose-toned silk sari made in the olden days, with pure, good-quality Kanchipuram silk. Unlike the saris nowadays—showy with lots of flimsy gold thread, easy to tear. Many of hers had endured for sixty years and would continue, unless Shruthi—careless girl—took over their care.

With trembling, arthritic hands, Maya pleated and wrapped the sari about her with the precision of a fashion model, ensuring the folds draped perfectly, touching her ankles.

“See how I look like a lady?” she said, turning toward Shruthi, who stood with hair dripping.

“You always act as if ladies have nowhere to go and nothing to do all day,” Shruthi said, running strands of hair through her fingers to push out the water onto Maya’s clean floor.

“I did plenty in my day,” Maya said with a sharp nod, “And I never wore my sari untidily, bunched the way you do.”

“At least I’m wearing one, Mum, since you insist, so be glad.”

“Anything is better than those obscene tops. Imagine a woman showing off her chest!”

“I don’t show it off! I wear t-shirts, for God’s sake.”

“You should be covered with a palu. The sari is the most decent dress.”

“But saris reveal your whole belly!”

“The most decent and beautiful dress,” Maya insisted.

Maya favored pastels—summer sky blues, greens softer than moss, buttercup yellows. Trusted sari shop owners kept her favorites aside to be examined by her ever-critical eye. At the store Maya chided: “What is this, Babu, a faded spot in the silk? And see the stringiness of these threads?” The shop owner, anxious to display his top-quality wares, spread for her a sea of rippling color—yards upon yards of shimmering silks. “I’ll show the latest colors, the newest cloth. Maybe today you’ll buy?”

Maya lost herself amidst the wavelets of gleaming cloth. Nothing except the long-ago skin of her baby daughter—the skin she had neglected to spend enough time touching—could ever feel this soft.

Maya set the table for tea, fussing with spoons. In the wet heat, the sugar lumped and grew hard. She brought out Britannia Marie biscuits. They looked stale, not moist as ladoo balls.

Every evening, her guests would materialize, their phantom shapes cloudy at first. She enjoyed determining how best to entertain them. She'd tilt her chin, laughed a tinny, elegant laugh. She outstretched her fingers, poised as if to touch a man’s coat sleeve the way one touches a man who knows how to charm. Sometimes she murmured dissent or agreement at something a lady or gentleman said. She feigned surprise at a slipped bit of gossip, a blush staining the concave hollows of her cheeks.

Across from Maya, dust motes glimmered and took shape. A fluttering napkin transformed into a lady waving her handkerchief. A burst of sun created a haze within which the ghosts to whom Maya spoke seemed to move and re-shape themselves. They were different every evening and they kept Maya on her toes. At her home, at a time when most of the British had left India, she could be the perfect hostess, serve to their spectral forms the perfect cup of tea.

Maya balanced a cube of brown sugar on a small, silver spoon, waiting for Shruthi. When she saw her daughter, she eased sugar into her tea, letting the liquid saturate the cube.

“Not like you, messy girl,” she said to Shruthi, who had emerged from her room. “Allowing the sugar to splash into the tea with a loud plop! and the tea spilling out of the cup, staining my lace tablecloth.”

“What are you saying, Mum? I just got here. Must you scold?”

“How you pour milk!” Maya shook her head, her finger wagging. “Spilling pools, making sticky rings in the saucers.” Maya pulled out a folded handkerchief hidden. “To blot your spills.” How could any daughter of hers make so many mistakes?

“I ought to have bent you over my knee and spanked you more,” Maya said. “I ought to do it now, as a matter of fact.”

She imagined her plump grown daughter bent over her fragile knee with its delicate protruding bones. Shruthi had never learned the importance of order, of keeping things neat and away in their places to stop life’s edges from coming un-tucked and wrinkling the well-ironed surfaces of Maya’s existence.

“You’re talking as though it’s twenty years ago,” Shruthi said, chewing the edges of her nails.

“See how I pour my tea,” Maya said. She always poured carefully, letting the little cup contain and tame scalding liquid, spiced with her chai masala.

Masala, the scent and sting of it on her tongue, made Shruthi throw her head back, her nostrils flaring, bright color creeping into the tan of her cheeks. “Love your tea, Mum,” she said. “So yum.”

Maya drank her own tea with tiny civilized sips, with only a mere tremor of her lips betraying its strength. It tasted of tealeaves grown on Indian soil, dark as her skin.

But only the English, Maya always reminded Shruthi, knew how to have a proper cup of tea.

They knew how to plunder and devastate, make us feel shame in our own skins, alien in our own nation, Shruthi had once flung back when she was seventeen and filling her head with fancy, angry books. “They wanted to civilize us, as if we’d been waiting around for them wearing jungle-print loincloths,” she'd said with a jeer.

Maya knew otherwise, books aside. “How is it I have failed making you into a lady?” Maya asked now, her back stiff against the chair. Her elbows made angles as she brought the cup to her mouth.

Maya thought she'd spotted a ghost, though found only a shadow.

“Where are you?” she asked the air above her table.

“Mum, I’m next to you. We were just talking.”

“My guests. They should be arriving. I think I might see them.” Maya stood and hovered between a curtsy and a namaste. She said to a spot behind Shruthi’s left shoulder, “Welcome, my dears. I’ve been expecting you.”

“Mother? What are you saying? There’s no one here.” Shruthi moved near Maya and placed her face close to her mother’s. “You're sick, Mummy. Doctor said I should come fast. I took leave from the university. I’ve come to help. Do you understand, Mummy? We need to discuss options for treatment. See if we can get you fixed.”

Maya shook free her head. “I'm eighty. No need to treat me like a child. Care for another cup?” She smiled. A slant of light had illuminated to her, pale forms with translucent skins. Her guests had arrived. How lovely! She could introduce them to Shruthi. Lovely tea party!

“Have you met my companions, Shruthi?” Maya asked. “Where are my manners? Here is her ladyship, Lady Squires. Next to her, the Lord, of course. And there's Lady Charlotte—a bit of a wild one—and flirting with her is Lord Frederick, that rake. . .”

“Mum!” Shruthi jerked her chair back.

Maya partially covered her daughter’s mouth, whispering, “Shhhh, what will they think? Did I raise you this way?”

Maya turned away. “It’s why you’re unmarried, living in some godforsaken place, lonely, depressed, making a mess of your life teaching all those depressing books about India.” She scanned her own British paperbacks lining a shelf. “I know what you teach. Though what do you know of it?”

“So you do remember things. You do know.”

“I know a schoolgirl shouldn’t sit with adults for tea, but today I'll make an exception, though you've been a naughty one. Press your knees together properly, please.” She peered at her daughter. “Remember to enunciate. The English have such lovely pronunciation. We must learn from them to speak a language as it is to be spoken.”

Shruthi sank lower into her chair, holding onto it as if it might topple.

“Did you know,” she said, her voice low as she looked Maya. “Once, at a bookstore in New York, I found an Indian name book? It said your name, Maya, means ‘cosmic illusion.’ ” Shruthi put her hand on Maya’s, calming its movement. “Illusion. Wind lifting dust into shapes.”

Maya pulled her hand away.

After a moment, Shruthi picked up her teacup and poured into it Maya’s scalding Indian chai.

Shruthi’s still body emphasized the way Maya’s whole body quivered. Her hands, her legs, the tiny white flyaway hairs upon her head. Her eyes, unable to stay on Shruthi’s face though she concentrated, shifted back and forth.

“My dear,” Maya said, “I’ll just chat with Lady Charlotte for a minute?”

Shruthi lowered her cup.

“All these years,” Shruthi said, making it hard for Maya to concentrate. "you’ve been here alone. No one to keep you company, share with you a meal, or ask you to dance.”

Maya startled at the word “dance.” Shruthi kept talking. “No one to ask about your day, or what you think of the upcoming monsoon. Mum? Will it be a bad one?” Shruthi rubbed her face. “No one to ask after your health, and say, ‘My dear, are you feeling quite all right?’ ”

Maya glanced at Shruthi then. “My dear, I am feeling well, thanks for asking. Now I need to hear the rest of what Lady Charlotte is saying, you don’t mind, do you darling?”

Neither of them asked the question hanging silent as the moon on a windless night, between them: Doesn’t a mother need a daughter?

“By all means, finish your conversation, Mummy,” Shruthi said. Something in her tone made Maya look at her sharply. Shruthi’s body seemed twisted, as if she had started to move and then stopped midway. “But once you are done,” Shruthi continued, “tell me about your esteemed guests. I am enchanted to make their acquaintance.”

Smiling happily as a child playing with a toy tea set, Maya explained details of her guests’ intimate habits. As she chattered, her eyes glittered with youth. Her sari looked as fresh and unwrinkled as a bride’s. The tea in the cups they held sent forth its aroma into the dusky air.