The mourner

The Mourner

Mina found Vijaya her older sister waiting for her at the rear entrance of the upscale boutique where Mina worked as a tailor. Vijaya’s appearance faithfully reflected her broken spirit— an unhealthily lined face, tobacco-stained teeth, and oversized rags for clothes. Jaya asked her, “What’s it Viji?” and immediately regretted her terse tones. Whatever their circumstances, Mina had only sympathy for this sad woman.

“Amma is dead, Mina,” she said, deadpan.

Mina’s reply was a cold “Oh!” She believed that emotional displays were a sham, a means of mental manipulation and had taught herself never to express grief. She always felt uncomfortable conveying condolences because she couldn’t get herself to communicate her feelings.

About an hour or so later, they were on their way to Chinnagudem, in an SUV which Mina’s employer had generously offered along with her sympathies and two days off work. On the fringes of Metropolitan Hyderabad, and now a part of the extended suburbs, Chinnagudem was the childhood home of Vijaya, Mina, and Seenu, the brother who was between them in birth order.

Mina felt a twinge of conscience as she studied her sister’s face. When she had gone home to collect a few essentials and say goodbye to her husband and fourteen-year-old daughter, Mina had to leave her waiting in the car outside. Her sister wasn’t welcome in Mina’s home. Raghu, Mina’s husband was a civil servant in the state secretariat and his family was considered ‘progressive’, but they drew the line at welcoming a former sex-worker into their lives. When the years caught up with her, Vijaya was forced to give up her line of work and depended on her siblings for financial support. They helped her ungrudgingly but neither of them acknowledged her existence in their other circles.

Is this really my sister? Mina thought, looking at Vijaya and reminiscing about the last day she had seen her happy. It was decades ago, when Vijaya was a fifteen-year-old child-bride. She was sitting in the back of a bullock-cart, accompanied by her sixty-year-old husband. Totally oblivious to her fate, she looked resplendent in her red and gold Sari and a huge bottu, the vermillion dot on her forehead. She kept waving, all smiles even as Mina’s trickle of tears became a torrent when the cart rounded off the street corner.

Nine-year-old Mina had been angry that her sister had abandoned her. She learnt the truth about Vijaya’s fate years later — A panicked Vijaya had let out a piteous scream after her house had disappeared from sight. But a tight slap across her face by the man who was supposedly her husband had abruptly put an end to it. She hadn’t ever smiled after that.

Noticing her tears, Mina asked, “Viji how can you mourn her? The woman who sold you off to a sex-trafficker when you were just a child?”

Vijaya inhaled long before replying, “She did what she had to, Mina. Baba died suddenly, leaving her with three children to feed and a house completely mortgaged. She needed 70,000 rupees to free the house. How could she have known that my husband wanted to pimp me? She honestly thought I’d be happily married.”

“Happy? With a man old enough to be your grand-father, in exchange for seventy-thousand-rupees?” Mina retorted and then immediately shut up, realising that her sister needed to believe the lies she had told herself to make life tolerable.

The bustling metropolis buzzed by, and they entered the quieter outskirts with its messy architecture and the occasional cow in the middle of the road. The traffic slowed down for a funeral procession, which not only mourned a death but also celebrated a life. A few people were holding up an open, wooden bier on which lay a person on their final journey. The body was decorated with orange and yellow marigold flowers, a few mourners walked ahead to the brisk beat of drums and some of them expressed their sorrow by dancing freestyle. The two sisters shot a quick glance towards each other and smiled.

“Who’ll mourn her?” Vijaya asked. Mina was amazed at how in sync they were despite the wide gulf between them. They had thought of the exact same thing at the exact same time!

“I certainly won’t,” she answered.

Their mother, Yadamma had been a professional mourner. While she worked as a maid in a few houses to make ends meet, her real talent lay in wailing at funerals. The image Mina always carried of her was the one where she was in her element, at the head of a procession. Her unkempt, waist-length curls flying about, her sari hitched up to her knees, she would writhe in the mud keening and beating her chest to the rhythm of the drumbeats. She was so good at this that people from all over the district invited her to mourn for their loved ones. Some of them paid for her services in cash, but her main compensation was something else— chicken curry and alcohol, which were luxuries for her.

This was great business for Yadamma because deaths don’t stop. On one or two days a week she would come home reeling in at midnight, reeking of toddy. The kids would stay awake for the leftover chicken curry. On most days, they had to tend to their sozzled mother. She would usually puke and promptly fall asleep at night. After Vijaya left, it was up to Seenu and Mina to clean up after their mother. The morning after every funeral however was a nightmare for them, when she would wake up with a headache. If they were lucky, she would lie in bed and order them about. They would have to skip school to cover for the households where she worked. But more often, she would wake up in a foul mood and use either or both of her kids as a punching bag.

Mina learnt from her mother that grief was a theatrical performance, an opportunity for monetary gain. This was her only reference point for grief. She had never known real emotions. Which was why she couldn’t bring herself to mourn.

The car gave a lurch as the driver accelerated and the sisters travelled the rest of the way in silence. Who would mourn for the professional mourner?

It took them about three hours to reach their destination. The four-wheeler couldn’t navigate the narrow kaccha road, and the sisters had to walk nearly a quarter kilometre to reach the house that Yadamma had lived in till the day she died.

It looks uglier now, Mina thought, looking at the dried-up moss on the walls with disgust, 70,000 rupees worth of shame, still standing because of a little girl’s slavery. It was a basic structure built on one-half of a tiny 40x60 plot. There were just the two rooms—a kitchen, and a multipurpose room. The shared bath and toilet area outside had walls made of aluminium sheets. No one had ever cooked in the kitchen; it was a store for their mother’s used alcohol bottles. Yadamma had depended on the households she worked in to keep her family fed. On the days the children went to school, they ate the meal provided by the government. And of course, chicken when someone died.

Seenu was already there when they reached. He gave Mina a hug but just nodded awkwardly at Vijaya. “Died in her sleep. No one asked her to attend funerals anymore, so no decent liquor. She drank the cheap, adulterated stuff,” he intoned emotionlessly.

Looking at him brought back painful memories for Mina. Their lost childhood, their shared trauma... Puny Seenu had borne the brunt of Yadamma’s beatings until one fine day he realised that he had become bigger than her and hit her right back. The beatings stopped but the scars never healed. But we got out, she thought, we pulled ourselves out of this cesspool and became decent people.

All three of them avoided looking at the corpse laid out on the bier just outside the door. Mina wondered what her siblings were feeling. I feel nothing! She said to herself, crushing out the tiny kernel of sorrow she felt. Thankfully, she didn’t have to deal with conflicting emotions. Right then a white-sari-clad woman walked in, and Mina ran up to her, hugging her tightly.

A few months after Vijaya’s departure, their mother had announced that Seenu and Mina would no longer attend school but work at Pedda Reddy’s house. Seenu, who was sixteen by then, ran away to the city and found a job as a cleaner in a nursing home, taught himself the tricks of the trade, and rose to the position of orderly. Leading a respectable, honest life with his wife and son, he had never looked back on their mother. He maintained his relationship with Mina while doing his best to help Vijaya, which of course didn’t include opening his doors to her.

Shyamala, the matronly figure in the white sari, was Pedda Reddy’s widowed sister who lived with him. She had taken it upon herself to educate her numerous nieces and nephew in the joint family. She also took Mina under her wing, tutoring her between chores. Shayamala madam was more Mina’s mother than Yadamma had ever been. Mina owed her whole life to her—matriculation, tailoring classes, her job, her husband whom she met at adult education school, and most importantly her ability to dream of a life that didn’t involve prostitution or death.

Seenu had arranged for a priest and other funeral paraphernalia and the three of them readied the body for the procession, detachedly as if it were a mannequin. Shyamala madam also joined them, and they all sat talking quietly. The two younger siblings decided to let Vijaya have the house, although the neighbours would have to be persuaded to accept a former sex-worker in their midst. The atmosphere was quite un-funeral-like as they caught up with one another’s lives and made plans.

The distinct smell of the marigold flowers mixed with the alcohol still on her dead mother’s mortal remains, brought to the surface memories that Mina had tried her best to repress. She quickly brushed off the lone tear. Noticing this Shyamala madam said, “Your mother was one of a kind. Hard to either love or hate.”

Mina gave a mirthless laugh in reply.

Shyamala madam continued, “The day she brought you and your brother to me, she said ‘please keep them away from my demons, Shyamalamma, I don’t want these two to have Viji’s fate. God knows I will go to hell for marrying her off to that lecher. But these two… They can become something if you help them.’ It was probably the only time I had seen genuine tears in her eyes.”

Her words finally broke Mina. The multitude of emotions suppressed for all these years in the depths of her consciousness — anger, against her mother as well as the universe, guilt, for having made a life on her sister’s damaged being, regret for all the ‘what-could-have- beens’, were all suddenly released, and the tears started flowing.

When the pallbearers lifted the bier up, Mina at last, began to mourn, in the only way she knew. She sat down on her knees and started beating her chest, keening piteously, emulating the mother who for Mina, had died a long time ago.