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C h a p t e r 1 Rehabilitating Ammi Here is all forest. Mother said outside is all forest. Here [ears] is forest; here [nose] is forest. The hands are forest. When I look at my hands I see this one is a forest, one, two, three, this is also forest, four, five. I look at my hands and I see them but I do not know what this face looks like. In October, on the eighth day of the festival Navratri, Mrs. M. called Eve to her dining room. Today was Kanya Puja, a day to worship young girls as the goddess, to feed them sweet things. Instead of taking from our hands the leftovers of deities’ feasts, they would eat first and we would take what they left. The children had strung doll-sized banners of mango leaves under the eaves of the knee-high temple next to the driveway. A red streak of vermilion dashed the stone cobra inside. That morning I put on accordion music and French songs, mixed eggs and the creamy top of milk with chapati flour, and poured the batter on the iron pan used to make rotis. Lime juice and sugar crystals were rolled into crepes that looked like dosas and tasted like Paris. I ate what Eve did not finish. Breakfast was interrupted by girls spilling out of the stairwell and onto our veranda. They took Eve to the front garden to gather platefuls of nightqueen petals that had fallen overnight, putting some in the temple and bringing the rest to Mrs. M. She had made channa and puris, goddess food, to offer the girls, whom she called in one by one. Everyday life in our Annexie was seldom banal; even long inactive stretches were filled with small events. Through all of it, Mrs. M. was an 40 Chapter 1 austere but loving companion. She was not a grandmother, neither affectionate Nani nor matriarchal Dadi. Our relationship was too formal for that. But neither was she Ma-ji or Mata-ji, terms, at once too removed and too intimate, used by her staff. ‘‘Auntie’’ did not feel right, either, though it would be suitable for any acquaintance a bit older than me. To both Eve and me, she stayed as she was when I first knew her, Mrs. M. We had met years earlier when I came to the city as a graduate student. I had arranged to stay in a neighborhood at what I did not realize was the edge of the city, a dust bowl of construction sites. I had never been to this city before and was invited to be a paying guest by the mother-in-law of a student who had been in my Hindi class the semester before, someone I barely knew. It was a strange arrival. I thought I knew north India well, but this growing suburb was neither Delhi nor Bihar, my two coordinates. I had not yet learned the system of shared autos, buses, and rickshaws that would get me in and out of the city, and finding my way to a shopping area was an accomplishment. My room was through a half-finished part of the house, stubbled with open wires and unfinished brickwork. I felt surreal and isolated. My host, a poet, was friendly in the first days, but grew anxious and severe. In my recollections, she yelled at me, ranting about small things. In all likelihood it had not been that bad, but I suppose I was experiencing the shock of the new and was naive about certain adjustments. I’m not proud to report that I phoned the man who had met me at the train station—also a friend of a friend—and said, ‘‘Auntie is going mad.’’ My language was too direct. He pretended he hadn’t heard but said he would come by. (I wish I had taken more time and care to get to know her.) I found a taxi company and hired a car for the morning, taking along a printout of an email from a scholar I had never met who mentioned a guesthouse run by ‘‘a Brahmin widow near the cantonment.’’ It turned out that she had meant someone different, but that scrap of information got me to Mrs. M.’s house, to a guesthouse in her large home in a neighborhood of old bungalows that was to be a sanctuary for years. On my first visit with Eve, as...

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