A Daughter’s Debt
Before sending Sharmila off to her new home, Sharmila’s mother had sat her down to say a few things. As the buhari, she had to keep herself accessible lest anybody in the household needed her. Sharmila nodded. Her mother continued: if she went anywhere, she should always let the family members know where she was so she could return home as soon as someone came to call for her.
Sharmila knew she would be tending to the cows and buffaloes that her husband’s family owned.
Sharmila’s mother’s furrowed eye brows and her hushed quivering tone showed that she was concerned about her daughter. She should not do anything to bring shame to her father’s house. Her mother pleaded with Sharmila that she keep herself adaptable; she shouldn’t be seen as rigid.
“Be meek. Never seem rigid and proud. Always keep your back bent to your father-in-law and mother-in-law and the other elders in your new home. A good buhari,” Sharmila’s mother explained, “is like an adhesive. By her flexibility, she can hold even a difficult family together.”
Sharmila knew the trouble her father had gone through to give her an education and to gather dowry for her marriage. And she had other sisters whose marriages depended on how well she behaved with her in-laws. The last thing expected of her was lowering her father’s Nepali topi to the ground. In her red shimmering sari with shiny sequins, Sharmila bowed her head to mother. A tear drop slid down her cheek, off her chin, and splashed onto her hand.
During the days following the wedding, Sharmila cried herself to sleep at night. The abrasive snapping of her mother-in-law, Binita, jarred the new bride. She wondered what she had gotten herself into by marrying Binita’s son. The lady was so unpredictable. On only the second day after the wedding, while serving the morning tea, the stern woman spoke sharply to Sharmila as if the new bride had made a huge gaffe.
“Sharmila,” her mother-in-law chastised, “I don’t know what you did in your father’s home, but we are not used to people acting like that in this house.” Sharmila’s eyes glazed as she look around at all the staring eyes, mortified. Everyone else seemed to look around the room, uncomfortable. She managed a gray smile as she tried to understand what she’d done. Binita continued to castigate Shamila for being so simple-minded as to do what she had –- whatever that had been.
“If you want to be a princess, why did you marry into our house? I’m sure you had the option of marrying into many other palaces.”
The mother-in-law, of course, knew that Sharmila’s family considered her marriage into Binita’s house a boon for Sharmila’s family. They were ‘marrying up’ when they married their daughter to Binita’s son. That’s why Binita knew exactly how much she could get away when chastising her daughter-in-law with impunity.
Sharmila looked at the floor while Binita spoke. She tried to mentally take the edge off of her mother-in-law’s slapping words by recalling her father’s withdrawn face. The heat of anger tried to warm her face, but Sharmila firmly strangled her tongue. But it didn’t give up thrashing about within her. It writhed in the darkness of her soul like an offended snake.
Binita had her reasons for treating her buhari the way she did. Rebellious and undisciplined buharis resulted in embarrassment to the extended family in one too many aborted marriages. Binita wanted to make sure her household would not be the new laughing example in the village. She considered herself a proactive sasu: she was chastising her buhari before trouble had brewed. How else would these uppity, Hindi-movie-watching-modern-buharis know their place? It would be too late to show them where they stood when they were already dancing on top of the sasu’s head, right?
A week into her marriage, Sharmila went on a Tuesday to the local village Ganesh temple and rang the bell outside the entrance. She bowed down, offered laddus, closed her eyes and prayed, “Please Ganeshji, make my sasu be a little tolerant toward me. Why must her tongue be so sharp towards me?”
Rita, Sharmila’s closest friend who had been married to a man in the same village, told Sharmila that she made a similar prayer to Ganeshji. Rita had sprinkled the offered rice in her sasu’s room. This, according to Rita, did the trick. No more angry sasu.
Sharmila decided to do the same. After returning from Ganesh-than, Sharmila glanced furtively about to make sure no one was watching. She tossed raw rice into different corners of her new house, including underneath where her sasu slept. Then Sharmila scurried away. She only breathed a sigh once she had shut the heavy wooden doors of her bedroom behind her. The last thing she needed was for her sasu to accuse her of witchcraft.
Very soon after the rice sprinkling, Binita’s attitude seemed to change for the better. Encouraged, Sharmila reciprocated. She tried as much as she could to play the part of the dutiful buhari.
For example, when her mother-in-law had just made a cursory suggestion that the Gautams’ eldest son was having a birthday, Sharmila had immediately volunteered to go help. The Gautams were distant relatives of the family.
With that, Sharmila went the following Saturday and cut much of the vegetables, kneaded the dough and washed many of the pots. While stirring the deep frying pan full of oil, she smiled to herself, imagining the compliments she would receive.
They would probably say, “Oh Sharmila, you are such a wonderful buhari.”
Sharmila found herself mentally verbalizing her modesty: “What’s the big deal if I’ve been here all day? It’s my pleasure to cook for our Sanju babu’s birthday. Please, dijju, please don’t distance me by complimenting me. I am a part of this family too.”
Sharmila could see that her sasu would be pleased that even in this day and age she had a modern buhari like Sharmila upon whom she could count to be sent to make sel and puris for a relative’s birthday party. But a thought crossed her mind. Sharmila considered the other side of the story and stopped herself with a wry smile before getting too carried away with her dreaming. She calculated the precarious position she found herself in now that she had obediently volunteered to cook at the Gautam’s.
Since she had cooked at this relative’s house, she would naturally be expected to cook for those in the adjoining house as well. Otherwise, Sharmila reasoned, they would complain to her sasu: “What’s going on these days? Your buhari, Sharmila, seems to be getting very arrogant. Is she getting ready to leave your house with her husband, or what?”
As she flipped a sel in midair, drops of oil dripped back into the bubbly pan. Sharmila sighed, then shrugged. She realized a buhari’s debt was never paid. If anything, it seemed only to grow in relation to everyone.
That was ten years ago. Since then, Sharmila had given birth to a beautiful baby boy, Raju, who had recently celebrated his eighth birthday. She had another three year old son, Paramesh. Sharmila had given into her mother-in-law on most things, but when it came to the subject of her children and their future, Sharmila just couldn’t compromise. Luckily, her husband agreed with her.
“When Binita Mamihajur is around, Raju refuses to do anything I ask of him,” she said, sighing, her eyes wrinkling as she shook her head.
Sharmila’s husband grimaced. “Do you want me to talk to mother about this?”
Sharmila put up both her hands, fingers splayed, and said, “No, no, I was probably wrong. I will try to understand better how Binita Mamihajur is just looking out for our son. I must have missed something. I’ll try to be more conscientious about how to deal with such situations in the future.”
The last thing she needed was for her mother-in-law to say she was man-handling the husband against his own family. Sharmila, knowing her husband’s temper, was afraid that he would go marching into his parents’ room in a huff.
Sharmila’s husband, knowing his mother’s nature, wasn’t convinced. Straining forward, he blinked at Sharmila, unsure of how to react. He was no spring chicken and chose his words carefully. In a joint family, to unecessarily get between a mother and a wife meant playing mediator to all future squabbles. It also meant being labeled by both and taking the risk of tasting the frustrations and wrath of both. This in addition to being called hen-pecked by half the family. He swallowed hard and rolled around on the bed and pretended to close his eyes to sleep. His wife sighed in relief.
Sharmila shook her earrings and glanced into the bedroom mirror. She delicately arranged the pleats of her blue, stay-at-home sari. She then unpeeled the red sticky bindi she had stuck on the edge of the mirror last night and aimed it between her eyebrows as she got ready to go to the kitchen. Sharmila’s hands moved automatically, but her eyes roamed the room, as if looking for an answer.
Every time she tried to discipline her eight-year-old, Raju, her mother-in-law would step between them like a saint saving a dying animal. Raju seemed almost to look for opportunities to do what he shouldn’t just so he could wail loudly enough to attract his grandmother’s attention. He would purposefully break something and Sharmila would drop whatever she was working on and advance on him, her eyes wide open and her hand raised for effect. Invariably, he would holler “Aiya! Aiya!” before Sharmila could even reach him. And hearing the commotion, Binita would descend, cutting right between mother and child. With a sympathetic furrow of her eye brows, she tossed a loving, “Kathai … who is hurting my pooooor grandson?” and scoop Raju into her protective arms. Sharmila, flustered, forced herself to watch his victorious grin from the cave of his grandmother’s embrace.
He was learning about who had the power in the house a lot sooner than Sharmila cared for him to learn.
Sure, Binita was Raju’s favorite –- for now. But who was thinking of his welfare? Who was going to teach him right from wrong? Of course, if he got lippy or disobedient around the adults in the family, it wasn’t his problem or theirs. They could afford to look offended by his rudeness and compare him to some other child who would not behave like this. Sharmila heard these comparisons. How could she not? They dropped it within her ears-reach for a reason. She would feel the quiet weight of criticism of her parenting skills. Her lips would lock in a grim line as she felt resolve tighten into a knot within her.
But what could she do? She blinked, and pouted her lips as she shrugged.
Sharmila had prayed to have a son. She thought that having a son would bring her happiness. In the least having Raju was insurance in making sure that her husband wouldn’t discard her for another wife.
Perhaps if she had a daughter, her mother-in-law wouldn’t have shown as much interest in the child. Sometimes she wondered whether Raju was a lot more of a symbol of the future for Binita than she, Sharmila, was. But Sharmila didn’t want to think in this way. She loved her son as well and wanted nothing but the best for him. She didn’t want to feel like she was competing with her son for her mother-in-law’s affections. But how was she supposed to discipline her child if she didn’t have enough access and authority over her own children? If she didn’t even have control over her child, what did she control? Sharmila sighed. She didn’t have time to think about all of this.
She painted a smile onto her face and walked into the kitchen. Binita was trying to light the mud clay stove filled with firewood.
Before Sharmila sat on the wooden pirkha to help her mother-in-law in the kitchen, she took the black chulesi hanging off of the nail on the cream colored wall. The black curved knife with a swan-like neck bowed down to her. Sharmila had seen too many inexperienced hands bleed on that swan-like neck to be seduced by its feign of humility. She tucked her left foot underneath the sari-draped arch of her right leg and focused on the straight dark line where the blade surface paralleled the direction her nose was pointed. Clamping down firmly on the base of the chulesi with her right foot, she bounced the green cucumber from left to right. The vegetable sliced into equal pieces of ripe white flesh into her hand. Seedy white cucumber mucus dotted the shiny steel plate under the slant of the blade. Sharmila recognized the dish. It was one of the presents her father had given her in-laws as part of her dowry. Sharmila’s hands moved effortlessly with the chulesi, like she was patty-caking with her girlfriends in Father’s neighborhood. She knew she would sacrifice a tub full of vegetables through its erect saluting blade by morning end.
As her hands moved about the chulesi, Sharmila glanced to the side. Her husband’s ten-year-old sister, Sita, sitting next to Sharmila in the kitchen took the wooden toothpick and stabbed two stacked leaves. She twisted it off, breaking the toothpick in the wounded leaf. The leaves were now knotted together. Then she took another leaf and wrapped it around the bowl-to-be, pushed a slender stick into place and broke it off. She looked up at Sharmila expectantly with what looked like a shiny green bota. Sharmila twitched a smile and nodded. The girl pursed her lips with pride as she tossed her bowl at the growing mountain of leaf bowls. She picked up another set of leaves.
Sharmila looked about to see what else needed to be done to prepare for the Janmastami festival. The potato pickle had already been made. A large tub of lumpy yoghurt, tumeric yellow, sat in a corner. A bucket full of green pea pickle sat next to it. The yellow cauliflower wilting with ghee, ready to melt on the tongue of anyone who ate it, was finished. A stack of ghee-shiny rice dotted with raisins, cashews, and coconut sat in a pile on a leaf. Columns of green bowls littered a container the women had made out of leaves only the other day. Sharmila smiled at how much the three of them had been able to accomplish.
Dressed in just a sari, in front of the clay, firewood-fed stove, Binita stirred the rice with a thin, flat aluminum spoon. Binita’s eyes swayed looking at the flames like a snake stares into the snake charmer’s flute. She reached up to tuck a strand of hair away and touched her ear to tighten an earring that wasn’t there. Humming the tune to “Sita-Ram, Sita-Ram,” Binita squinted, and took a hollow steel pipe and, putting it to her lips, blew a stream of air into the pipe. At the other end sparks flew up like angry hornets viciously attacking a firefly nest. Binita crooned, “Sita-Ram, Sita-Ram, Sita-Ram, Sita-Ram,” as flames laced out of the smoldering wood. Ashy smoke billowed into puffy gray clouds that floated to the blackened kitchen ceiling.
“Mamihajur?” the daughter-in-law said.
Binita raised her eyebrows and turned her head, looking expectantly.
“Mamihajur, my brother called me this morning and invited me to come to my maaita for the morning lunch. Since the festivities will be over by this evening, would it be okay with you…if I took Raju and Paramesh and went?” Sharmila asked hesitatingly.
Binita looked back at the pot she was stirring. She snorted and wiped her cheek with her sari.
“Sure, that would be okay. You won’t be spending the night there, will you?”
Sharmila shook her head, her earrings dancing and jingling in her earlobes. She smiled to herself as her hands moved faster in collecting the vegetables she had cut up.
The next morning, Paramesh was tucked underneath Sharmila’s warm khasto. Raju walked besides her, a stick in his hand, striking any leaf that hung too low. They walked quickly to try to get there before the morning dal bhat was served. The closer she came to her parent’s house, the giddier Sharmila felt. Her steps seemed to bounce as she contained her smile.
Sharmila entered the old cottage and greeted her parents with a smile and saluted to them in Namaste.
“How have you been, daughter? We haven’t seen you in such a long time,” her mother said.
Raju got hugs all around.
“I’ve been good, Aama, how about you and Buwa?” Sharmila said.
“Are you sure? You look a lot more pensive than usual.”
Sharmila glanced at her son. He looked at her, and then looked around to see everyone else looking at him questioningly. He then went and sat on a wooden pirkha mat, ready to consume lunch. Raju had eaten dal and rice dozens of times. And yet, when his maternal Hajur-aama cooked it, it was like it came straight from the heavens. According to Hajur-aama, in some ways it did. She said that whatever food she made was prasad because she offered it to God before she served it out.
In the kitchen, the family sat around in a semi-circle, squatting on wooden pirkha mats. The floor was wiped with red mud and gave off a spicy aroma. Raju’s grandfather insisted in wearing a dhoti. Raju had asked him when he was younger about why it was that he sprinkled rice and water around his plate before he ate. Grandfather had told him that it was an offering to God. Raju wondered why he was offering the food if grandmother already had. Raju reasoned to himself that that just like he liked seconds, God must too. Grandfather didn’t explain more. And since he preferred to consume his plate of rice and dal quietly, Raju knew better than to ask more questions.
“Has Raju been giving you a hard time again?”
Hearing her mother’s soft voice, Sharmila warmed up to the tenderness that she remembered in this house. This was home, not enemy territory. A tear trickled down Sharmila’s cheek, as she inhaled. She wiped it away and smiled. Grandmother turned to Raju. “Raju! Stop giving trouble to my daughter. She has a difficult enough time in her life. Why don’t you try to love your mother sometime? She sacrifices a lot for you.”
Raju looked like he was having second thoughts about being so enthusiastic about coming to his maternal grand-parents house for lunch. He looked like he was ready to jump out of the open window. He desperately needed an out from all the glaring eyes.
“Grandmother, your sari is coming loose,” Raju said pointing at the top of her body.
Many eyes turned to grandmother’s top as she quickly adjusted herself.
Premnath, Raju’s uncle, was looking at his mom intently. This is what Raju had hoped for. Seeing his flared nostrils and his slightly reddening face, Raju pursed his lips in a suffocated grin. Premnath was very insistent that his mother be fully clothed when cooking food. But Raju’s grandmother, a bauni lady, had been cooking food in one piece of sari for ever. She had a petticoat below her waist and her sari was modestly wrapped around the petticoat and then around top of her body.
Premnath, having passed his School Leaving Certificate from the local village school, struggled between his mom’s religiously dictated attire and the standards of modesty he wished she would exercise in the kitchen. He, as usual, started hiss in protest. But his mother’s reply came swiftly, “If I was good enough to dress up in a one piece sari and cook for all the men in the house when I was a hot young teenage bride, I certainly can do the same now that I’m a sagging old lady. What do I have to hide?” Premnath’s sagging jaw and tired face said that he knew that there was no point speaking further. He would never win this argument with his mother.
Raju watched the whole exchange intently. Now that the heat was off of him, he had more important things to worry about than culinary attire. He observed the work of art in front of him. It looked like a white mountain of rice had risen out of a silvery lake that was his plate. The white mountain had lava of yellow dal with speckled black seeds flowing down it. The silvery lake had yellow and green rocks on top of it amongst other landmarks. This was the fried potato and peas that Raju loved so much. Grandma, one hand grabbing the sari around her knees, dipped herself forward with a spoon that she had just brought out from over the fire. It was sizzling with ghee and spices. She emptied her spoon over the white mountain and the bed of yellow lava. “Okay, now start eating before it gets cold,” she said.
Now that the sculpture was complete with icecaps of hot ghee bathing the mountain, Raju smiled. He smashed the white mountain down with his fingers and watched as a pool of dal entered the crater that he just created. It was now time to dip his palms in the gooey mess and do the slippery slidey bit to deliver mouthfuls of lovely deliciousness to his mouth. Behind him, the sun flamed into the kitchen and his back felt warm. Raju wished he had taken his sweater off before he sat down to eat.
Raju glanced at Sharmila to see her mournful face drawn low as she pushed handfuls of food into her mouth. He didn’t mean to hurt her. He just wanted to have fun. Why couldn’t she just play along?
After lunch, Raju washed all the bits and pieces of dal and rice from his hands. He had to use soap to get at the grease from the ghee etched between his fingers. He wiped his face with his hanky and then did what he did best at mamaghar after lunch. Raju went and lay down on his grandfather’s bed and started leafing through the stack of comic books that he had brought from home.
Seeing Raju scurry downstairs towards the bedroom, Grandmother whispered to Sharmila.
“What’s going on daughter? You look a lot more troubled than usual? Has it been so bad for you?”
Sharmila nodded her head. Her parents looked grimly at each other and were silent.
Downstairs, Raju’s aunt, Reshma, hoisted a basket full of leafs and dragged it into the room. There would be many women coming to help their mom out with the upcoming festivities. She had another basket of flowers that needed to be made into garlands. Grandma had scheduled a whole other day to make sweets. And then there was the main meal to make.
As the morning turned into afternoon, Raju lay on his back, a wrinkled Amar Chitra Katha comic propped up on his stomach. He occasionally let his ears wander to the women talking on the floor next to the bed that he lay in. They were gossiping as usual. He caught something about how the buhari of the kanchha sasura in the next house had told her in-laws off in front of everyone. Scandalous.
Sita didi walked in. A chorus of greetings of “Gopal Gopal, Sita didi,” went up in the room. Sita didi bowed her head down as she put her flattened palms together up to her head in namaste. She put her brown leather bag down and picked up a piece of leaf before sitting down on a square pink chakati mat. She sat in the circle around a pile of green leaves being made into baskets joining his aunts, mom, grandma and a few other ladies.
Raju reached out for a handful of furandana from the steel plate next to him. His fingers shoveled a good amount unto his palms. He then let his furandana-filled fingers hang over his mouth and watched the fried flat-rice, nuts and coconut mixture tumble into his mouth. Being born and raised in the hills outside of Kathmandu, he had never seen snow fall. But he imagined that this is what it must look like. He returned back to his comic book, where the Phantom was kicking a jungle kidnapper’s butt. The ladies sitting on the floor were working hard preparing the leaf bowls that they would use to serve the guests in the upcoming festival. Raju was working hard crumbling the crunchy salty mixture between his side teeth into a salty paste before swallowing.
“I brought chiya, hazur,” Reshma walked in with steel cups filled to the brim with orangish-colored creamy splashing fluid. Raju perked up. Raju liked tea time.
Grandmother saw the look on his face. She smiled. He saw her eyebrows mischievously coming together, “Raju, enough of you just lying there like a vegetable. Do you know that people that lie down and eat will become a python in their next life? Get up this instant!”
Raju shot up. All eyes were looking at him. He smiled knowingly and sheepishly. Everyone at one time or another had been a recipient of grandma’s sharp tongue. He knew from her tone that she was only mocking anger. Dragging his fingers through his hair, he scratched and tried to smile himself out of the awkward situation. He was relieved to see Hajur-aama look away to receive her cup of tea.
The servant went around in a circle and set steel cups of tea next to each of the ladies. He nodded before putting a cup of tea next to the eight-year-old. Raju leaned over the edge of the cup and took a sniff. The cinnamon and elaichi in the tea smelled so good. “Did you put extra sugar in my cup?” he whispered. Aunty Reshma winked and nodded affirmatively.
The eight-year-old held the tea cup between both his palms and dragged a long slurp between his pursed lips. Raju made sure to let out a customary “aaaah” after that delicious sip. He stopped in mid “aah” when Raju saw his mother’s sharp glance at his impudent manners. Unlike at his paternal grandparents, he knew that no cutsie smile was going to make her go easier on him at his maternal grandparents home. But Raju wasn’t done having fun. So in compromise, instead of completely stopping his shenanigans, Raju just lowered his volume.
Looking at Raju, Sharmila’s eyes hardened. Her eyebrows furrowed as she blinked a few times. She jumped to her feet and grabbed Raju by the hair and slapped him across the face. Hot tea splashed over the bed and unto the thighs of the eight year old. He howled at the shock of the slap and the scalding tea on him and started yelling, “Aiya….Aiya…aaaah.”
Hearing him yell seemed to enrage Sharmila even more. She started to slap him even harder and a few of her red wedding bracelets shattered. Sita didi dropped the flower garland that was in her hands and rushed to drag Sharmila away. What had come over Sharmila for her to act this way? Why react this way to an innocent child sipping tea?
Sharmila started to wail. “This is what he does at his house…” she said, throaty choked-up sobs coming out. “He does this all the time. And then his grandmother blames me for anything that happens. I am so tired of it all. I don’t know why you all married me to that house. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I went there.” Saying this, Sharmila propped her heavy head on her hands and started a wail.
Hajur aama’s eyebrows were raised hearing her daughter utter such nuclear words in the heat of the moment; and this too in front of people who weren’t immediate family. This is how gossip started and reputation of even good families went to hell. She immediately lowered her head and calculated the potential damage to the families’ reputation.
Premnath went to pick his nephew up and rush him outside to the well to wash away the orangish tea that was now staining Raju’s white t-shirt. If Boroline ointment or at least a little buttermilk wasn’t put on his thigh they could expect boils to burst in a couple of hours.
Reshma put her arms around Sharmila’s shaking shoulders as she tried to comfort her. The younger sister blinked, looking to the side. Her parents were talking about marrying her in a couple of years. Is this what she had to look forward to?
She watched her brother, Premnath bring Raju back into the room in a new T-shirt and shorts. Sharmila looked up to see her son approach mournfully.
“Raju, I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been thinking of jumping from the the cliff near where I take the lifestock and cut grass. I am going to kill myself. There is only so much that I can take. Either you become good and start listening to me at home, or you can live here with your maternal grandparents. I can’t handle you anymore.”
Raju blinked. He had never seen his mother so ...
Rest at http://www.nazarmagazine.com/2012/02/15/a-daughter%E2%80%99s-debt/
Last edited: 20-Jun-12 10:21 AM
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