Epilogue

________

JAIPUR, 1990

Babu’s ashes were scattered in the Ganga at the foothills of the Himalayas, without any priestly intervention, his release from life accompanied only by the chants of his favourite mantras floating up from the remains of his family—his two daughters, one surviving son-in-law, and three grandchildren. Nearly a century of mysterious existence, several decades of angry disillusionment, his withdrawal into music and books, his stubborn refusal to compromise, his love of mangoes, the joy he found in the land’s seasonal bounty, his strict yoga routines, his early morning recitation of Sanskrit shlokas in a voice that boomed throughout the house, the transformation of that voice into a silken murmur when he sang his evening bhajans, his nightmares that would wake the whole household—all were reduced to a handful of lumpy white ash in an earthen container.

India was celebrating the forty-third anniversary of its independence. But for my tired, middle-aged self, it was just a much-needed holiday in the middle of the week. Although I was no longer anyone’s daughter, I was still a wife, a mother, and a sister, as well as an academic and a perpetual hostess who might someday learn to be a good housekeeper.

Perhaps it was Babu’s emotional disengagement, I reflected, that had allowed Didi to survive, with exemplary dignity, the dissolution of Thakur saheb’s ancestral fortunes and the early death of Jijaji. But it must have been Amma’s maternal devotion that had enabled her to raise, as a widowed mother, her adopted son—my third-born, a piece of my heart.

When, I wondered, did my life become the sum of my relationships? Was it when I agreed to marry a stranger and move hundreds of miles to an alien world? Was it when I first discovered, to my surprise, that I was pregnant? Or was it when Sinha saheb moved to Jaipur, forsaking a flourishing career to be tied instead to a steadily declining printing press? Or when Amma’s death left me with the fragments of her legacy and a father who was also falling apart? Or when I could no longer endure my sister’s sadness and bore a baby to give away to her? When did the demands of a busy household become more important than all the things I once thought would be at the centre of my life: vocal practice, public performances, research, and conferences? At what point did the need to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good sister, a good mother, a good teacher, and a good homemaker claim so much territory that no space remained for me? I wished I could say, “Enough. I cannot give any more. I am a person, not just a series of obligations.” But I couldn’t. Why was that? Had I learned too well the habit of self-sacrifice from Amma?

Amma made too many personal compromises—and yet her choices somehow expanded the space for freedom, for herself and for others. Amma’s life continued to inspire people not to lose sight of a higher purpose, even in everyday decisions. The only purpose I seemed to serve was to ensure that all meals were ready on time and served perfectly. I was the nanny, the maid, the companion, the nurse, the hostess, the solid ground on which my family stood.

I wasn’t sure that Amma would approve. Despite her unalloyed love for her family, she never wholly surrendered to domesticity: life was always something larger than that. But, even as I pondered my own choices, my thoughts were distracted by the many household tasks vying for my attention. The national holiday was my first opportunity in two months to turn to the long-neglected library on the terrace and survey the impact of an usually heavy rainy season.

At first glance, the library looked no worse than it had last year. The strong smell of damp paper and mouse droppings added an oppressive layer to the seasonal humidity at the edge of the desert. The ghosts of lives lived, of dreams dreamt and nightmares revisited, still lurked under heaps of paper silently disintegrating in this forsaken room. Nobody had ever fully counted, let alone catalogued, this eclectic collection of texts on history, philosophy, music and literature, ranging from ancient India to the unravelling Soviet Union. My guess was that there were at least twenty thousand books, along with endless letters, diaries, and other paper remains of my parents’ lives.

Hundreds of volumes in French, German, and Russian—remnants of Babu’s mysterious associations with various revolutionary groups—were lined up on haphazard shelves all along the south wall. An old, dusty tarp ineffectively sheltered them from the seasons that took turns pouring into the room through the gaps deliberately left in the wall. Huddled together in the most precarious part of the library, the volumes looked like immigrants in a crowded ghetto in some hostile land.

Yet the rest of the room was really no less perilous—rows and rows of makeshift shelves, crammed full of books in Hindi, English, Sanskrit, Bengali, Gujarati, Marwari, Marathi, Persian, and Urdu. All lay under layers of sandy dust, caked in places because of the recent rain, disturbed only by the trails of resident insects, geckos, and mice.

My unsure footprints left tracks in the soggy layers of dust on the cement floor. I made my way to the farthest corner of the north wall. I knew I needed to start from here, since I had ignored this section of the library for far too long. The top shelf was filled with the colourfully bound diaries of various vintages, arranged in no particular order, in which my mother had documented her life.

One diary jutted crookedly out of the uneven row, its cardboard binding covered in faded red cloth. I tugged gingerly at this thing, Amma’s oldest diary, which had survived the constant movement of her restless childhood and then my own. It was the one diary that Amma had scolded me for reading when I could not contain the burning curiosity of my early teenage years.

The red diary slid out limply, followed by a puff of papery dust and a scurrying of tiny creatures at the back of the bookshelf. The binding was sagging and warped, punctured by silverfish, the volume’s bottom corner chewed by mice. Between the fragile cardboard covers, a gaping hole ran through the entire thickness of the diary.

Faint words written in indelible indigo ink by a young girl seven decades before were still visible around the irregular edges of the cavity—a mouse nest, filled with soft shreds of paper and droppings, a urine-stained abode for the shiny silverfish that were scurrying and falling off the book in their rush to escape my intrusion.

I stared at this paper hole, this cavernous abyss, for a long, numb moment. Closing the covers, taking care not to spill any shreds of paper, I held the book close to my thumping heart. With my other hand, I started to pull out more diaries from the top shelf, raising more dust and more shredded paper, disturbing more droppings, mice, geckos, and silverfish.

Ignoring the swirling dust and the overpowering smell in this graveyard of books, I turned toward the visibly wet lowest shelf. Letters from comrades in the freedom movement, carbon copies of Amma’s letters to various people, telegrams, and postcards that should have been preserved in an archive somewhere, all reduced to clumps of paper mush in the two decades of my wanton neglect. Words, textures, pen strokes, messages, stories, all irretrievably collapsed into each other, devoid of any meaning.

My chest tightening with panic, I began to tear about the library in search of something that had survived—some trace of Amma’s life that remained legible. Amidst sodden, chewed-up, and brittle paper, I found one damaged copy of her autobiography, Smriti ki shrinkhalayen, and one green hardcover diary, damp but whole, that was filled with her handwriting.

I imagined Babu smiling mischievously, perhaps gratified by the destruction—a fitting end to his mysterious life of detachment. But Amma could not possibly have wanted it this way. Why else would she have written such detailed daily accounts, preserving her thoughts, recording her memories, amassing all the evidence? Why did I squander this treasure? In my determination to be there for others, why had I abandoned my own mother?

I sank down onto the dirty cement floor, surrounded by the rubble of my own creation, trying to grasp the enormity of despair.

How would I ever tell Amma’s story? How could I even begin?