Inheritance
by Aparna Sanyal
I hadn’t known she was there. The young woman, small and slightly hunched, was on the couch in the sitting room (baithak khana) when I came downstairs. One hand balanced a cup of ice cream; the other held a tiny spoon. Thick spectacles overshadowed her pretty face. When I burst in, denouncing the Indian legal system, she peered up at me. I appeared for a moment in the shimmer of her lenses.
My mother, maternal grandmother, aunt, and uncle were also in the room. My father had died five years earlier. I stopped my complaints long enough to say “hi” to the girl, then resumed them. My lawyer had done it again— failed to warn me of a procedure that must be completed before the final hearing to settle my paternal grandmother’s will. Now I had to fetch a document from my bank. As I swung open the front doors of my two-story stronghold I turned and apologized to the girl for my outburst. She shook her head as if to say, “it’s nothing.”
My aunt and uncle, down from Siliguri, were scouting for a bride on behalf of a friend, whose only son Amit was unmarried. My mother’s yoga teacher had recommended this girl and Amit had come by to see my aunt. A thirtyish lawyer, he’d interrupted me repeatedly, at one point declaring that he considered it “easy to be a professor.” (I was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.) My relatives loved matchmaking. Fortunately they had given up on me.
As I marched off in the late-morning heat, I wondered what it must be like for the girl to face four scrutinizing adults alone. Whose idea had it been to give her that child-sized container of ice cream? She had looked to be twenty. Supposing she snagged Amit, would she cope with his overbearing ways?
When I got back, sweaty and tired, the girl was gone. No one was talking in the baithak khana. I passed through an open door into the adjoining kitchen. Mukti, the maid, was sitting on the floor grinding spices. I smiled in her direction, but she seemed in a bad mood. I grabbed a juice box from the fridge and sat on the couch next to my mother, under the whirring ceiling fan. The small, square room was cool. The grilled windows onto the quiet street were unshuttered; from time to time a passerby, including the vegetable wallah and the neighborhood physician, peered inside with sun-blinded eyes.
“She is twenty-two and finished her B. A. English. Everything is finished,” my grandmother said in Bengali.
“What number did she give?” asked my aunt. ”Mukti! Amar jaler botol dio!”
“Her uncle’s number,” replied my mother, holding out a small sheet of paper.
“But she said she had an older brother, didn’t she?”
“Hanh,” declared my grandmother. “Why didn’t he come with her? Why didn’t she give his number?”
“Isn’t he still studying?” asked my aunt.
“The brother is twenty-eight.” My mother looked at my aunt. “He is working as an engineer.”
They brooded. My grandmother sat in a white disapproving heap, close to my aunt on the divan opposite the couch; so rarely did she move that she seemed part of the divan. My uncle, a longheaded man of sixty with a droopy mustache, was silent and shapeless in a chair next to the divan.
“So why didn’t he come with her, Didi?” asked my aunt, resting her chin in her palm.
My mother said nothing, eyes thoughtful. My aunt sprang up and took the paper my mother was holding in her hand.
“Let me call,” she said. She extracted her cell phone from her purse and moved into the kitchen.
“Couldn’t the uncle come with her,” my grandmother muttered. “Uncle, brother, someone should have come with her.”
“Why, Dida?” I questioned, turning to her. My grandmother’s mouth dropped open. We had met on three previous occasions, each spanning a couple of days. My uncle had asked my mother to look after her during his assignment in Assam.
“Because that is how things are done here,” said my mother. “Mukti! Dorja ta kholona!”
My aunt was talking on the phone. After a minute she came into the baithak khana.
“That is so strange,” she said. “He didn’t know she was trying to get married. He said he didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t want to talk to me.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to talk to us?” queried my mother.
They began to speak so quickly in Bengali, I could not follow. My uncle stayed apart, slack-bodied in his short-sleeved shirt and brown-gray pants, as though none of this was his affair. My aunt paced, navy-blue sari swirling, while my mother played with the sun-orange folds of her aanchal. The sisters were swift, keen. What had transformed them?
“What’s going on? She seemed a perfectly nice girl to me.”
They looked at me with unseeing eyes. My aunt sat down on the divan. My grandmother tossed her silky white braid.
“The girl usually does not come alone like that,” my mother said. “It seems her family does not want her to marry.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“We are trying to find out. She said her mother was ill and her father was dead. Usually in that case, the family will not want her to marry. And no family will want their son to marry a girl in that situation.”
“What! Why not?” My aunt began badgering my mother to call someone in that soft, plaintive way of hers.
My mother said, “I will call,” and swept off into the kitchen, where I heard her having a conversation on the house phone.
Their intensity was peculiar. Marriage had not meant liberation for either. The matches of both my mother and aunt, at twenty and twenty-four respectively, had been arranged, and the guidelines for doing so had been purely impersonal: family background, wealth, education. My aunt had, according to my mother, been mistreated by her in laws and neglected by her husband. My parents divorced when I was eighteen.
My mother came back from the kitchen and sat on the edge of the couch.
“Did she say anything?” asked my aunt. “Mukti! Amar mobile ta eno!”
“She said the girl’s mother is very sick.”
“Sick with what?” I interjected. “And who was that?”
My mother blinked.
“Something mental. That was my yoga teacher. She says the girl’s family expects her to look after her mother. If she marries, there will be no one to look after her mother.”
“She could share the responsibility with her brother. Chotomama took care of Dida for a while, didn’t he?”
My mother did not respond. I remembered her anger the last time she and my grandmother asked my uncle whether my grandmother could live with him.
“He should share that responsibility!”
My aunt, uncle, and grandmother listened in perturbed silence.
My mother sighed.
“You don’t understand how things work here. The mother usually lives with the son, not the daughter, if both children are married. If the daughter marries, the mother cannot live with her because she will not want to live on her son-in-law’s charity. That is how things are perceived. So the mother would have to live with her son, and depend on him and his wife.”
I thought about this.
“So the girl’s brother is making sure he’s not left with his mother on his hands?”
“Probably. Mukti, fridge-eh rakho!”
I felt a rush of anger. Was it natural for that babyish girl to graduate to nothing but lifelong caregiving? Granted, Amit was no prize, but he or someone like him probably represented liberty and social power to her. I’d shown up in India once with a man I loved and family members treated me with sudden deference.
I did not keep this to myself.
“Yes, you are right,” my mother said, while my aunt gazed at me sympathetically. My grandmother, who did not understand my English when it was too quick, looked from me to my mother to my aunt.
“Ki Bolche?”
“Kicchu na,” replied my mother in irritation. (It is nothing.)
“What does the mother have?” I asked.
“Something…” My mother hesitated.
“…mental. I know, but what?”
“I don’t know.
“How do you know she’s mentally ill?”
“I just know from the way my yoga teacher said things.”
I glanced at my mother with mistrust. She had recently been ill with a bout of depression, her second in six years. She was now on medication, and better than I’d ever seen her.
“Do you think the girl should have to spend her life looking after her mother?” I asked. “And why hasn’t Chotomama said anything about taking care of Dida?”
My mother straightened.
“Of course I don’t think that. I think it is very wrong, what is happening.” And turning to my aunt, she began arguing: “Shouldn’t she be able to marry? Why isn’t her family supporting her? It’s cruel, what they are doing. Why do they always do this to women? Why doesn’t her uncle help her? She is a young girl. It is so unfair!” She jumped up and began moving around the room. My aunt sat with head bowed. “And the brother! What kind of brother is that? He can’t help his only sister get married? He is so selfish. But no one will go against him, because he is the son.”
“For a daughter it is different…”
“Why?” my mother asked. “I want my daughter to be happy, even if you didn’t care for yours!”
My grandmother subsided into silence, brow aggrieved.
“You see, this is how they think here,” my mother said.
“Why did you move back here then?”
A confused expression overspread my mother’s face.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“Mukti!” cried out my grandmother. “O Mukti! Amar shaal ta eno!”
“Mukti!” echoed my aunt and mother. “Maar shaal ta eno!”
After a pause, my mother kept talking, sometimes to an invisible tribunal, sometimes to herself: “It is always like this, the girl always has to take the burden, the girl is always to blame. Why can’t she enjoy her life? Why is it wrong for her to be happy? Why does she have to suffer? Why are others only happy if she suffers?” My mother’s voice arced high like that of a priestess uttering an incantation. I was comforted. My aunt looked upset and signaled her agreement with inclinations of the head.
My mother sat down on the divan between my aunt and my grandmother.
“Do you remember Dipali mashi’s friend? The one who kept writing her letters?” she asked my aunt.
“Oh yes. That teacher.”
“And they wouldn’t give her the letters,” my mother said. “She didn’t even know he was writing to her. She never married. She taught college all her life and gave her money to the family.”
“What is wrong with that?” asked my grandmother. “They married me off at sixteen!”
“Who wouldn’t let her see the letters?” I asked.
“Those people in Cooch Behar,” said my mother venomously. This meant my grandmother’s family. My grandmother, a few years after the Partition, had left both her daughters to be brought up by her own family in the North Bengal town. Their three brothers had stayed at home. My mother did not like to speak of her childhood.
“Why wouldn’t they give her the letters?”
“They don’t like it when people fall in love,” my mother said. “They don’t like it when women are happy.”
“He was a bad man,” said my grandmother, mouth bulldoggish.
“How do you know that, ma?” said my aunt, leaning toward my grandmother from behind my mother’s back. “You did not even know him!”
And all three, my mother, grandmother, and aunt, started quarreling like sparrows over crumbs. I could discern the words: Cooch Behar, mama (uncle), bieh (marriage), baba (father), pagal (madman), taka (money), “parasites,” and “humiliation.” My grandmother, assailed by both daughters, was objecting to everything they said, which infuriated them.
“What about the girl?” I asked.
They paused.
My aunt fixed her eyes on me and said:
“Khuki, I can’t present to Amit’s family a girl like this. His father is a big doctor, they have been my friends, his father got me the job in the clinic after my illness.” My aunt had had a vaguely described breakdown several years ago. “They are important people. I can’t bring them a girl like this. I can’t do it…” She was shaking her head, mouth crumpled.
Upon my aunt’s, “I can’t do it,” articulated in clear English, my grandmother spoke:
“Hanh, the girl has to stay with her mother, she has to stay with her mother.”
She emitted the words “has to” with violent clarity.
“Why has to?” I asked, with equal violence.
My grandmother contemplated me. A peculiar expression had come over her still-beautiful face, as though a curtain had been drawn to reveal an execution. I had seen it before, shot at me when she didn’t think I was watching. Was she also addressing my mother, whom she aggravated, and who sometimes wanted to ship her back to my uncle? I thought I had heard her use the same formula a couple of weeks earlier. I had been in the room, but she had spoken to my mother as though I were not there: “Her house is here, her mother is here, she has to come back here.”
“She hates women.” I stared at my grandmother.
“No,” said my aunt. “When I wanted to work a few years ago, my mother told me I should do that.”
“No, no, no,” my mother said, shaking her head. “She made sure we studied. She made sure we went to college.”
“That was so they could marry you off well! Why is she so hard on this girl?”
“Dida is like everyone here,” my mother said, darting the smallest of looks at me. “She thinks children should take care of their mothers.”
“Ki Bolche?”
“Kicchu na!”
“Just ask her,” I said. “What she thinks about the fact that girls today can do so much. Travel alone. Study overseas. Work. Speak their minds.”
My mother obliged.
“It is good. We didn’t used to have a voice,” my grandmother replied, using the English word “voice” and clutching her throat.
“Mukti!” called my mother. “Abar cheshta koro!” (Try it again.)
My uncle stirred, darted a sideways look at his wife, his long face as mild as my aunt’s. He had not let out a word but now offered:
“I felt very bad seeing her come alone like that.”
My aunt inclined her head.
“Hanh, I was saying, it is very sad,” she murmured. I eyed them sullenly. There was no resolution in their voices.
My grandmother chimed in:
“Yes, of course, I feel very bad for the girl.”
My mother’s voice rang out:
“Yes, yes, we all know how bad you feel.”
She stood up and began pacing. My grandmother gaped at my mother.
“Ki? Kano?”
My mother pivoted toward her.
“Why?” my mother repeated and paused. Her voice rising, she asked: “Do you want to know? Do you want to know what they did to us in that house?”
“No, I don’t want to know,” my grandmother said, fixing her eyes on the floor and beginning to rock. My mother and she seemed to be engaging in a recurring exercise.
“And you ask why!” shouted my mother.
I watched my grandmother’s set, grave expression. She refused to look at my mother. Her body continued to rock.
“You were never my mother!”
A note of hysteria had crept into my mother’s voice, and when I observed her face, I saw that its anger had dissolved into forlornness.
“What sort of mother does what you did? What sort of mother leaves her daughters to fend for themselves?”
She turned and stared, not at my grandmother, but out the grilled windows.
“Khub koshto” (Great difficulty), muttered my grandmother, still rocking, and looking at the floor.
My aunt asked: “Didi, Mukti chole galo?” (Has Mukti left?)
“Chole galo,” replied my mother heavily. Mukti had gone through the back door behind the kitchen. Quite often we would not hear her close the latched gate.
“Was there anything wrong? She seemed upset today,” I asked my mother. “Is her son asking for money? Or is it one of the cows?”
“Who knows. She is always leaving early these days,” said my mother. “Probably another tooth.”
I laughed, and my mother smiled. Mukti’s teeth loosened, one by one, every few weeks, and she would not show up.
“Qui hoiche?” asked my grandmother. “Mukti kalke ashbena?” (What happened? Mukti won’t come tomorrow?)
“Ma, boshe thanko!”
My grandmother was pulling herself off the divan to go check the fridge.
“Tomato acche? Potato acche?”
“Mukti kalke ashbe!” yelled my mother. (Mukti will come tomorrow!)
Mukti managed everything in our house.
My aunt got up and went into the kitchen. I watched her fly back and forth, getting the tea things together, while in the foreground my mother walked, flitting from couch to corner to chair.
A few minutes later we sat drinking tea and eating biscuits. No one spoke. My mother, my aunt, and my grandmother seemed sheathed in separateness. My uncle was reading the paper.
“What about the girl?” I asked, looking round at everyone. “What’s going to happen to the girl?”
No one answered.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” I said to my mother. “It’s not like getting married was such a good thing for you. You were never happy. And neither was Dad.”
My mother blinked.
“But without getting married, I would never have gone to Canada. I would never have gotten good jobs. I would never have done so many things.”
“Why did you come back then?”
My mother looked at me with the bafflement that always exasperated me. I had heard from her every possible explanation for her return, from the bad Canadian economy, to looking after my ill father, to having to take care of my house. Each was untrue and was like a false floor that led to other false floors: the economy had been fine when she’d left six years earlier, she had not taken care of my father, from whom she had been divorced anyway, nor had I inherited the house before her return to India.
“I had no choice.”
“Everyone has a choice!”
My mother stared into her teacup.
“I didn’t want to be alone. I have always been alone.”
“You’re alone here,” I muttered.
“Ki Bolche?” asked my grandmother, eyes darting from one daughter to the other.
My mother looked at me.
“I should have stayed, shouldn’t I? You wouldn’t have been alone there, if I had stayed?”
“I’m fine alone. I like being alone.”
Her features relaxed.
“Don’t worry, Khuki,” said my aunt with an intentness that irritated me. “Maybe that girl will find someone herself.”
“Is there a reason to contact the girl again? Will we know what happens to her?” I asked my mother.
“No, no reason,” my mother said. “Besides, we do not have her contact information, only her uncle’s, and he does not want to talk to us.”
As my aunt, mother and grandmother began to exchange news about my cousin-brothers Nikhil and Somnath, I wished all good things for the girl. She had done an endearing thing: tried to marry herself off. She might take other enterprising steps.
Seizing my bag, I opened the front door. The book and music shops were open, my favorite roll stand might be too, and I had to get out of the house. Four pairs of eyes looked up in surprise. It is demoralizing to be gaped at and yet, like a dead body, not be seen.
“Kothai jachhe?” (Where is she going?) asked my grandmother.
“Out,” I said, cutting off my mother, who had opened her mouth like a baby bird. “I’ll be back.”
My grandmother looked relieved that my mother was not coming with me.
“Won’t you eat something?” my aunt asked, distress creasing her forehead. I shook my head and smiled.
“I’ll bring you some rolls.”
“Hanh, asho” (Yes, come back), said my grandmother.
“Yes,” I said, and shut the door. My heart ached as I marched into the heat.
Aparna Sanyal is a Canadian writer currently based in Kolkata, India. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Oak Review, The Malahat Review, and Pif Magazine, among others. She recently completed a Master of Arts degree in English literature at McGill University, winning a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council award, and was a frequent literary contributor to The Globe and Mail.