A bad mother

She sat apart from the rest of the wailing mass, her disheveled face was an interesting portrait of grief. Lines of unbearable misery flowed smoothly with those of maddening guilt in the soft dimness of the room to produce a surrealistic effect.

The shouts of her mother-in-law drifted into her ears meaninglessly “What kind of a mother have you been? My only heirs have been wiped out due to your negligence.” She rushed towards her, the loose strands of grey air flying around her face in frenzied agony. Two more women restrained the old lady as she lunged forward, beating her chest rhythmically like an actress in a street play.

She watched curiously, her detachment was like a seed emerging from the wilted flower of her grief. Her mother-in-law was still screaming hysterically. “Wait. You just wait, you *******”

She spat through the knot of women holding her back. “ I’ll get Selva to marry another woman, who’ll be a better mother. Go back to the gutter you came from.” The words pierced through her like a knife softly cutting through butter without a mark. She saw the tears of rage trace her wrinkled face, running down the lines that striated her craggy face, a river making a path through eroded stone.

She lifted her head slowly to look at her husband; he was huddled in a corner, his face hidden by the mesh of his fingers interlaced over his head. She hadn’t been able to meet his eyes ever since they’d heard the news, when his face had turned ashen and cold all of a sudden, like a fruit falling down into a puddle from a careless pair of hands, only to emerge dull and rotten in spite of the efforts of running water.

Both of them averted their eyes carefully from the two bamboo mats in the center of the room. That’d be too painful. The buzz of whispers swept through the room like a gentle monsoon breeze. Except that the rains had ended, the storm was over; the breeze merely reminded them of what they had lost to its fury. “How can any mother let her children out of sight for more than an hour?’

“Imagine. Her boys went missing at 9 in the morning. She started looking for them only at 11. And their bodies were recovered at midnight.”

The loud piercing sounds of the elegies, the soothing smell of formaldehyde from the corpses (corpses? Her numbed mind registered mild shock- she had already resigned herself to her loss, referring to her sons as corpses. Maybe she was a bad mother after all.) The curses of her mother-in-law, the stuffiness of their one room house in the shantytown of Lakshmipuram all passed through her consciousness like a bad memory being relived.

She was thinking about that deceptively beautiful bright day. The skies were blue, there was a hint of cloud- but even the impending doom of a storm hadn’t been able to dampen their spirits. They were dressed in their best clothes- her husband Selva in his white dhoti and newest shirt, eleven year old Manoj in his kurta-pyjamas bought during Deepavali, seven year old Mahesh in a bright red T shirt and blue jeans. She only had a silk-cotton sari, but with the gratitude that the poor felt for their little blessings, while looking at the very poor, she shrugged it off.

Selva earned enough for them to lead a satisfactory existence -as a driver for Sun TV, and the four of them were as happy as a family could be under the circumstances. They had a home of their own, however small it might be, their kids went to an English medium school, and unlike their impoverished neighbours, and they had a colour TV with a cable connection.

Selva was still the besotted teenager who used to pursue her with a persistence that had won her over. He was still crazy about her, she smiled to herself as he leaned forward “You look great today.”

The newly renovated Marundeeswar temple was more ancient that the multi-coloured paint hurriedly daubed on it stony exteriors revealed. The name of the temple tells the story. Lord Siva is said to have given relief from health problems to the sage Agastya, the Sun God and the Moon God here. Crowds swarmed the temple to devour the Prasad, which supposedly possessed healing powers. Overall, the temple radiated vitality and health.

But the temple told another story for her- after all the story of her marriage and life was strongly connected to this place. She exchanged smiles with Selva. The place held too many memories for them; it was here that they had hurriedly exchanged garlands. And their elopement had caused an explosion of shock in their neighborhood. “Lucky girl” they’d said, “Selva’s quite a catch, he earns well. Good for her.” Of course, she had to face the wrath of his mother for stealing him away and destroying her plans for his future, but her resentment hadn’t been able to sour their love.

And the birth of their rambunctious boys- head strong decisive Manoj and meek easily led Mahesh hadn’t changed anything. The boys, her face wrinkled with annoyance. “Where are those two?” she whispered urgently in Selva’s ears amidst the blare of the wedding music. “They must have gone somewhere to play. We’ll look for them when it’s time for the wedding feast. Don’t bother now.” was his unconcerned reply.

Later when she’d recounted the day’s happenings repeatedly to a variety of people- the police, her friends, they would always ask exasperatedly, “But are you sure you didn’t feel anything? A sense of foreboding? A pang? Mother’s intuition.”

And her reply was always the same painful word. No. Not at all. Maybe she was a bad mother, but then such things only occurred to women in movies, stories and the like, not to her, not to normal people with normal lives. Normal lives- the normalcy of her life had been wiped away, uprooted like a tree in a tempest. The tempest, it had started raining heavily the minute the knot had been tied around the bride’s neck. The bride had blushed at their teasing remarks about the rain- it was a good omen.

Manoj scanned the expanse of the grey water body through the blur of the drizzle. The Thiruvanmiyur tank was an intimidating sight with its crudely carved stone steps, its eerie silence contrasting with the noise of the bustling temple, and the sheer depth of the water. It was rumored that the kumbhabhishekham chariot had been lost forever after it’d gotten submerged in the tank. The water was dull green in colour with the stench of Thiruvanmiyur’s sewage system emanating from it. People hardly visited this tank, except during the days of the temple festival.

Mahesh tiptoed cautiously behind him. Manoj urged him down the steps, now quite slippery due to the rain. “Vaa namma color meen pakkalam.” Come, we can see the coloured fishes in the tank.

Mahesh pointed nervously at the watchman on the steps, but his elder brother, in a show of daring waved his apprehensions away and made his way downward.

“Hey you little ruffians.” The wheezy voice of the old watchman hovered menacingly behind them as they crouched near the surface of the water. The stinging blows of his long wooden stick chased them up the steps. Twice they tried getting around the watchman, twice were they repulsed by his curses and the wave of his stick. Mahesh was teary eyed now, “let’s go back to the wedding. I’m hungry now, and they’d have started serving the feast. And Amma will kill us.” He pleaded.

Manoj sneered cruelly at his doubts, “you can go back to that boring wedding if you like, sissy. I’m definitely going towards the tank, the watchman’s left for tea and I’ve got to seize my chance now.”

As Manoj leaned forward to catch sight of the fishes, his feet started slipping on the slickly wet steps. Splash. Mahesh peered fearfully into the brackish bubbling water that Manoj had disappeared into. Maybe he was seeing the fish close up, not wanting to miss out on this and dreading Manoj’s jibes that would follow if he did, he went in confusedly after him. Splash

Two successive splashes were devoured by the overpowering silence of the tank like a hurried whisper in the night being engulfed in the darkness. The splashes didn’t carry through to the noisy wedding hall. Nobody heard it all. Nobody. Not the tense parents who were so overwrought with anxiety that they stayed put at the temple, wet and feverish without eating anything at all. Not the hassled policemen, annoyed at having to work in the rain, who looked inside dustbins and under drains. Not the announcers in Sun TV who ran the story of the missing boys repeatedly without any success. Not the distraught relatives who hovered around the parents trying to infuse hope and optimism- hope that drained away rapidly with every passing second.

But everyone heard the explosion when the bloated bodies- with the tissues saturated with tank water hurtled to a height of 3 m above the tank and fell in a stinking heap on the steps. Everyone, the whole of Thiruvanmiyur heard the commotion that ensued after the panic-stricken watchman sounded an alert about the bodies.

And everyone heard her hysterical sobs at the sight of her boys, sobs that stemmed from overflowing regret, heart wrenching grief and mind-blowing guilt. She kept asking herself if it was genuine grief rather than guilt and pity at her plight, which directed the tide of her emotions. And the brutal honesty of her answer shocked her conscience. No.

Maybe she was a bad mother after all.