from Sarnami, Hai

I

The noise in the shack has died down. Ajodiadei breathes very slowly. Exhausted, she stares at the rough unpainted beams. She stays like that for a long while, then opens her eyes wide. Her gaze is hostile, full of hatred, probably aimed more at herself than at the intruder. She is just a number, a woman with a taste for drink. She has no one. No one to help her.

“Go away,” she says. “Go to your father.”

“Ah, so you know my father do you?”

“Stealthy . . . stealthy like a slave,” she replies.

“I didn’t come to ask you who my father is. I want to know why my grandfather went back by himself.”

“So why not ask him?”

“I don’t respect you, did you know that?”

“Did I ask for your respect?”

“No, it’s true, you didn’t.”

The woman has no desire to say more. S. wanders about somewhat at a loss in the muggy space, then goes back to the window. From a pan on the coal burner in the shack next door rise the sweet fumes of boiling rice. A dark hand wrapped in a filthy dishrag raises the lid. The crickets are scraping away in the trees in the back yard. Mosquitoes swarm and hum around the window. She slaps a few of them dead against her face and looks with some fascination at her own blood. Then she turns round.

“Your grandmother,” Ajodiadei says very slowly. She doesn’t finish her sentence. She brings her hand to her throat and bursts out laughing. She laughs until the tears stream down her wrinkles. It’s a horrible sight. She is laughing and sobbing at the same time.

“What do you mean?” asks S.

Again the woman raises her hand to her throat. S. opens her mouth. Not a sound comes out. She steps forward. Suicide. Suicide, flashes through her mind. She is indignant, ashamed.

“Vinegar?” she asks, almost whimpering.

The woman shakes her head, while a gleeful senile chuckle escapes her.

“A rope?”

“Don’t you know then? Haha . . . Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”

The girl bites her lip so as not to cry. She is defeated, feels ridiculed, humiliated, inferior to Ajoidiadei. Why do her eyes glitter like that? Did she hate Janakya? Could she have been in love with her grandfather? Is that why her grandmother committed suicide? Ajodiadei roars with laughter. She’s going mad, S. thinks. Mad with memories which have evolved over the years into sickening nebulous obsessions, tormenting and persecuting her and robbing her of all fondness and warm emotion.

S. thinks of the scar in the central parting of her mother’s hair. Her mother had stalled her at first when S. asked how she got it. After several evasive answers S. learned that Ajodiadei had hit her with a scythe. She was five and not strong enough to get the burlap sack with mown grass onto the woman’s bowed head. The sack had fallen back. Ajodiadei had been furious. Remembering that story, the girl fastens her gaze on the old woman’s wrinkled hands, the same hands that had tried to strangle her mother. One day during the long rains. Ajodiadei had come back from the market. Her mother had not heard her knock.

“What else do you want to know?” asks the old woman.

S. shoots her a contemptuous glance. She would like to torment the old woman until she got another coughing fit.

“D’you know what Soenderdei said about you? The vultures will get at you.”

“Go away, go to your father,” says Ajodiadei, drawing herself up.

“I will stay here as long as I like.”

“You are very rude. Your mother was quite different.”

S. steps closer. Her fingers are splayed into claws. Slowly she leans forward.

“No,” the woman begs. “No . . . No . . .”

The girl’s fingers relax. What’s come over her? She’ll never find anything out at this rate. The photographs, she thinks. She must give me the photographs. And afterwards, so much can happen afterwards. But why should...