Aishwarya Mishra
New Voices Award Winner
Kalpavriksha
Time begins for me when I see Amma’s face. Or maybe her face is time itself, not merely the clock. There are no clocks here, or maybe they are those syrupy things that everyone keeps slipping on only to get cursed at. A broken arm or leg is bad news—beds are never available at the nearest hospital—and you come back with worms in your wounds or newer wounds or a wet back or a mouth sewn shut. In here, it is easy to forget if that is how hospitals have always worked.
In here, the smallest unit of time might as well be a kalpa—a single cycle of the cosmos.
Time begins for me when Amma grabs my palm and traces it with her calloused fingers—telling me I have a long life but a troubled marriage, lots of happiness but no children—and I cannot tell if she is engineering the future or the past; if she is cold reading me or telling me truths I have not yet confronted. This is where Amma plays with time, where she might be time herself.
Since Amma might be time, she does not need an origin story. The rest of us are supposed to have our own nebulae. Sometimes we are our own nebulae. It is as easy here to exist too acutely as it is to not exist at all, so nebulae are good.
To the nurses and the outsiders, we’re all the same. They have many names for us, all of which mean we belong here in the asylum.
And yet, we know we did not come here in the same way, as equals. The sixteen-year-old who came sometime last week and has not yet identified sleep from stupor was put on the train to Bangalore with a note and no return address. Another found out yesterday that she had a mother after the latter published a notice in the newspaper saying she did not have a daughter anymore. At least three of us are here because no one could interpret our words or silences in the outside world.
We get to know all this from a kind nurse who brings us newspapers and books every now and then and tells us about each other. She has been here for almost as long as Amma has. She is not scared of us but says her family looked at her funnily the other day when she laughed too loudly at the dining table and another time when she cracked a joke that no one could understand, and I know she can slowly feel her own nebula form.
Amma insists between raspy coughs that it does not matter how we came to be. We are here, and that is enough.
But I know that is not enough. I want to know if I laughed like a goddess with ulcers on her mouth or created the universe with a joke neither of my two kids could understand or looked at the sky for the first time ever and held the word azure on my tongue till it sizzled or ran away from home without running towards anything or held my third in my arms and buckled under the absence of their weight or carried a fever in my nerves better than the baby in my womb.
I want to know if it was my husband or my father or my mother or my child or a stranger who saw me readying the mist for dinner or called me by a name that was not mine or found my hair in the bright yellow dal and asked themselves what they ever did to deserve me.
If I was not born, how was I made?
Amma, our resident palm and face reader, keeps asking us who we are. In this place, with its empty beauty salons and art rooms—canvases and sewing machines without paints or needles or teachers, it is easy to believe she is teasing us. But she sneers at us when we say we don’t know, like we are hiding something from her. And the nasty nurse who comes in every other week says to no one in particular—“They are mad and will say anything.” So then we tell Amma—painter, singer, actress, athlete, mother, inchoate—and the source of these desires is as unsteady as our days here, as unreliable as us anywhere.
The girl who is an actress says she cannot wait to wear bangles and lipstick all the time, unlike her Ma who could never wear it at work. The athlete remembers outrunning the kids who told her she had the squalid energy of the pigs she ate. The painter only says this—“My father was a painter”—and because she remembers almost nothing else, we believe this to have the weight of a totem to her. When they look at me, I have nothing to say. I want to say that this is all I am but that sounds too smug even inside, so I shut up and rock myself till the froth in my mouth replaces the inadequacy of words, and then they leave me alone.
Amma has answers for everything. When the actress asks her how she has such a slim nose, she teaches her to pinch her nose till they both burst into bluish-red laughter. When the painter tries to flip the roles and holds Amma’s palm in her hands, she laughs and says the calluses are from constantly teasing fate. When the mother asks Amma if she remembers ever carrying a baby, she says without blinking, “one fetus and a dozen placentae.”
When someone refuses to mock-pay for the mock palm reading, Amma holds their hands firmly but gently, saying, “Touching is not cheap.”
She does not laugh with us when she says that.
There are nights when Amma holds her chest and coughs throughout.
This place is next to a TB sanatorium, but no one tests her, and Amma won’t go anyway. No one can make Amma go where she does not want to.
When Amma sees the shadow of a question in my eyes, she softly tells me of the simbal tree, which could cure the lungs of humans and the lungs of mattresses with equal ease.
Because that tree does not grow here, Amma keeps coughing, and no one is ever asleep or awake. Then Amma fills the lungs of the nights with the story of the kalpavriksha.
This is the story of a village, whose women did not know much, but they knew why frogs were condemned to have no taste, why elephants had their tongues turned backwards, and why some flowers couldn’t bear to look at the Sun. They also knew that when their husbands beat them, it was only because the paanwallah had forgotten to snap off the stalks of the paan leaves, which is where the devil resides. He might as well have fed them the devil himself.
They were content, or at the very least, didn’t yet have the words for their discontent. Which works just as well most lifetimes.
Time began in this village when an earthquake cracked open their homes and showed the outsiders what their walls held. This irritated the men because they had to veil their words, and the women because they had to veil themselves.
The women whose husbands owned the words of everyone else in the village owned the colors and the brushes. They drew kohbars for the newly-weds, filling them with images of Gods and Goddesses, lotus plants, bamboo groves, fishes, birds, turtles, and snakes. They filled the walls like they filled their days, with a horror vacui, because white spaces meant daydreams and everyone knew dreams were the tongues of Agni—that eater of clarified butter and everything else. No one wanted to be swallowed whole within themselves.
The outsiders kept asking them what it all meant, and their eyes sometimes resembled the eyes the women painted, large but blank, wonder that came from the ecstasy of knowing nothing and believing everything. They pointed towards their husbands and fathers and taught their daughters how to color within the soot sketched outlines of their existence till every girl and woman of the village knew how to paint.
Everyone except virgin child widows, for no one knew what to do with them. If they were unmarried virgins, they could be tied to a tree till one of the invisibles rescued and married them. If they were widowed after years or even months of marriage, they could have their heads shaved and kept away from the kohbars, but what could one do with those without the desires and the yearnings and the bodies of their husbands painted on them?
I want to ask Amma if this is where Amma came to be—this village that is an anti-conch—keeping the sounds of the world away, this place that could be ours as well.
It is easy to believe that we are always in this together. But that is not true. There are those among us who are really crazy and deserve this place. Some of us still don’t know why we’re here, others were found wandering by the police or by social workers in Bangalore, and still others were picked up at the hospital nearby because a fakir said their eyes shone too brightly for a mother’s eyes.
However, on some days we are all lying around stunned by our everyday—so close to each other we always have lice—and they shave all our heads to avoid wasting money on shampoos and medicines. On other days, the nurses pinch our noses and stroke our throats to keep us inside while they force-feed us mashed bananas or teas we know are laced with unnecessary medicines. On those days, we are not very different from the women in Amma’s village, except we are not the painters but the white spaces everyone feared.
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I wake up one night to a sharp pain that comes from a place once familiar to me, now as hazy as the word home. A nurse is jabbing a syringe into me over my clothes, and I remember another night of invasion like this: the first thing I remember since I came here. The thrashing about and the anger is enough to warrant a visit to the room that no one wants to go to but understands they must when they become too much for everyone. They strap me and all I want to do is scratch my head till the electricity coursing through me is nothing more than tiny jolts of lice I get from too much proximity to myself.
Then the doctor comes in and asks me a question that kicks me repeatedly in the shin.
“Are you sorry? Are you sorry?”
At some point I say, “yes yes yes.”
It is days or seconds after that when Amma continues her story. She tells us of the virgin child widow in the village, Mansi, who disappeared one day and someone said they had seen her go into the forest with a Natin, one of those tattooed gypsies everyone feared and hated. Their husbands owned nothing and their necks should have been dragged down by the iron pieces they were meant to wear. Instead, they moved around with the pride and plumage of peahens, using their bodies as canvases.
Any other time, this would have been cause for alarm. But this time, everyone was relieved at hearing this. Mansi’s white sari had threatened them more than a blank wall ever could, so this was God’s will, they thought, and the men never spoke of it again.
The women were a different matter. In the months that followed, many women claimed to have seen them in the forest. Some said they were talking and giggling under a mango tree that had risen from the ashes of an enchantress’s misplaced desire for a princess. Some others said they had become creepers coiled around that mango tree. Some said that it was not a mango tree but an asoka tree whose fiery red blossoms had made both of them sorrowless. The strangest story however, was that the Natin had started painting Mansi’s body with a bamboo stalk, taking the flame of the palash for orange, the asoka for red, filling her spaces with the sieved soul of the sun and the gray from the clouds behind her eyes till they both merged—painter and painted—into a kalpavriksha.
Because it was the strangest, it was also the truest, they knew.
The women of the village did not know much, but they knew that sitting under a kalpavriksha meant you could be anything you desired. After that, their beds might as well have been made of sami wood, because if they were, the nature worshippers knew the devil would take away their sleep.
We have wide-eyed outsiders here as well, trying to find out what it all means, but no one gets irritated at them. No one except Amma, that is. Amma does not see the point of it all. When the others tell the outsiders, “Take us home, take us with you.” Amma and I don’t join them. It’s not only that I am still unsure where home is, but also that home seems more and more like a place where the day lazes around on empty swings, where everything is muffled theatre, where the lushness of nothing becomes too much to bear sometimes. Home is that innocent tickle in Amma’s throat, not yet ominous.
I don’t say this to anyone, but Amma understands it. I know because the kind nurse tells me Amma has been ‘fit for discharge’ for over twenty years now and still stays here—“Where will she go?” the nurse asks.
The day before my mother comes to meet me for the first time, Amma tells us the story of the kalpavriksha one last time.
After the women found out about the kalpavriksha, they waited till the night of sharad purnima. On that night, when the moon was blessed with all its sixteen kalas, they made kheer in their homes, which they then took to cool under the kalpavriksha. They had never seen the tree in real life, but they had painted it all their lives on kohbars, both in harsh reverence for and gentle ridicule of marriage. As they looked for it in the forest, their hearts became leaves in the wind, flip-flopping between green and white bellies. They heard it before they saw it—coppery breaths before the dirty gold leaves—and huddled under it. They found it large enough for all their desires, which were taking space for the first time.
As their bodies prickled against the smooth gold of the bark, a strange lightness tightened their chests. Sleep came, this time without dreams.
When the orange-souled parijat flowers fell off their branches, they knew the sun was up and they had to hurry home. They did not know if one of them carried a different sound for a name now or if another had wished to be a man instead of a woman. What if someone was no longer human and was now a Gandharva residing in the bark of the tree? No one looked at each other as they made their way back home, wherever that was.
And in time, too, for their husbands had started to get antsy. The women stepped inside, fumbling with the knots on their sarees to let the words out, but the moment their husbands saw them, they took them in their arms.
Amma tells us other stories before and after this one, but this is the only one I remember. This is the one that takes hold of me as I take hold of Amma and ask her—“Who did the women turn into?” “Were the desires of the women the desires of their husbands all along?” “How do we stay in our bodies and dream up new ones?” “Does a kalpavriksha grow only where nothing else does?” “Is transcendence as gendered a word as desire?”
Amma just laughs quietly and insists that this is all to the story, really.
It is the only time I resent Amma, but that resentment is full-bodied, like nothing else I have ever experienced.
* * *
The next day Ma comes to meet me. She had seen me on TV, she said, on one of those programs the news channels run. They had shown my video that the outsiders must have taken—labelling me a “suspected bipolar”—and the relatives had started calling. She had been trying to find me for months before that.
“How long?”
“Almost six months now.”
She had fought with my father and my husband, who kept insisting that he knew nothing about all this, that he had taken the kids for ice-cream one night after dinner and when he returned I was gone. No note, no nothing.
“I know you better than that, you would never just leave your home like a mad woman.”
“What if I had?”—thinking of the Natin.
“What if I had had enough of not being able to paint on my body?”—thinking of Mansi.
“What if I couldn’t take anymore of always knowing what to paint?”—thinking of all the other women in the village.
I am still having difficulty remembering the night in question, so I ask her how she is.
“Oh, you know.”
She is most definitely a mother.
“Why did he not come?”
“Vinay?”
“Sure.”
“The children.”
“Ah.”
Am I a mother? Was I ever a mother?
Ma meets Amma, and asks her to take care of me, which makes me snort because Amma takes care of no one but herself. Maybe I am still mad about the ending of the story.
She says she will come back soon, and I smile because, in here, soon can be the same as never.
The next time Ma comes to meet me she looks fatigued. This fatigue is different from last time because it is a fatigue of knowing.
“What is it?”
“Vinay was the one who got you admitted here. He has filed a case against you, asking for divorce, citing cruelty and mental illness. Your father knew of it all along, was with him when he signed the admission papers.”
“Was I?”
“What?”
“Cruel?”
“Who can’t be?”
After Ma leaves, saying she will come with a lawyer next time, I take that word “cruel” and trace stabs of light on my palms, going from nowhere to nowhere.
When Amma came here, having the fits was reason enough to be brought in. Now, epilepsy is a distinct state of being, but cruelty isn’t.
The nights after that are tender, asking for consent before jabbing themselves into what is already sore.
Little by little it comes to me, that last night in all its ordinariness, the kids giggling and making faces at the karele ki sabzi, Vinay appeasing them with a promise of chocolate ice-cream, winking at me in that way that made me feel like we were always in cahoots, always partners in crime even if not partners in life. He will bring back butterscotch for me, and I like the idea of an hour or two all by myself.
I feel nothing when the bell rings not half an hour later—maybe they got the ice-cream someplace closer to home. I feel nothing when two women and a man tell me that they have to give malaria vaccines to everyone before the monsoons—what with the potholes and all, fogging helps but only so much—and nothing when I lose all consciousness.
I feel nothing when I open my eyes here, and nothing when I cradle the word ‘cruel’ inside me for the rest of my days.
The night that I came here should have been more significant, but it refuses to be a barbed wire between my two realities.
Maybe there are no two realities, maybe it is all me, ductile enough to exist as both lustre and thread.
A few days after the lawyer tells me that Vinay’s case is as flimsy as my existence here, and before Ma secures my discharge papers and the court proceedings begin, they bring a girl in. No one pays much attention to her until she holds her chest and creates a limbo with her coughing. One of the nurses spits at the girl and Amma chases the nurse till she has to be restrained.
The kind nurse calms her down while we look at Amma with the question we dare not ask her. But Amma—who always has answers for everything—tells us of cities like the one outside, where fires are swallowing up entire lakes, where the filth that causes these fires to lotus comes from homes not unlike mine.
She tells us of women with hands that need to take out the filth from the lungs of these homes, with noses that need to be pinched and throats that need to be stroked to keep them inside themselves, with fetuses in wombs that cannot bear the weight of placentae in baskets, and with minds that sometimes lose themselves in that nebula of a word—cruelty.
She tells us of cruel women who seek asylum in all the wrong places (themselves, each other) till they become that inviolable being—a kalpavriksha.
Outside, the deaths have thickened in the past few months, and the smoke has watered the eyes of an entire city, making the painters, tailors, actors, mothers invisible.
Inside, Amma goes over and grabs the girl’s palm, tracing an unbroken line from nowhere to nowhere.