Unremembering
Hema Padhu
I was five when I last saw Aunt Chini. Chini wasn’t her real name. It was a baby name she never outgrew. As if inside her lived a little girl locked away from the prying eyes of the world, mercurial and wistful and free to dream. To me, she remained as mysterious as a painting an artist had abandoned mid-stroke. I remember little about her, but what I do remember is vivid. Her cupid lips, her mute, kohl-painted eyes, the cat-eye sunglasses dangling from her fingers, and her slim gold watch with a micro-dial. She dressed like a 1960s Bollywood heroine in polyester sarees that hugged her slim figure, her hair all teased up. I remember her smell, like burning camphor and sandalwood. I remember how abruptly she disappeared from our lives, never to be spoken of again.
Once, she arrived at my grandmother’s home straight from work in her nurse’s uniform, white and starched, a cap pinned to her updo. In that uniform, she was transformed into someone you could trust with your life. When she checked my grandmother’s pulse, I stuck out my arm for inspection. She placed two cool fingers and a thumb on my bony wrist and listened. I held my breath, waiting for her prognosis. With her other hand, she tilted my chin and said in a somber voice, You have a strong heart. Listen to it. I remember feeling lightheaded with joy. As if she had confirmed something I had known all along. I slept with my wrist under my ear, listening for the secret murmurs of my heart.
My other three aunts were garrulous and sharply funny. They cackled and swatted each other with rolled-up magazines.
Not Aunt Chini. She held herself as if she were in a play, and the audience might burst into applause at any moment. Her visits were infrequent and much anticipated. My grandmother would make her favorite dishes, sweet Poli or Rava Kesari, and I was not allowed to taste them until Aunt Chini had sat down to eat. Sometimes Aunt Chini brought her son with her. Tarun was my age. He was a very beautiful boy, so beautiful that I wished he was a girl. His hair was oiled and combed neatly. His shirt never wrinkled or escaped the waistband of his shorts like mine always did. I wanted him to play with my dolls, dress them up in scraps of cloth and day-old jasmine flower chains discarded by the women in the household. I wanted to take him to the playground and show him off to my friends. But he sat primly next to Aunt Chini and never left her side. She never stayed long, and she never stayed over like the other aunts.
Once, my father took me to Aunt Chini’s home. I remember it was far away and we had to take two trains to get there. A greasyfaced woman opened the door. She scowled at us and walked away. I recognized her as Aunt Chini’s mother-in-law. We followed her in, and I went to find Tarun. He was playing with his toys on the balcony. We began a game of hospital with a fire truck and an ambulance. From the balcony, we could see Aunt Chini in the kitchen preparing chai and singing a Bollywood ditty, her voice resonant and mournful as a conch shell’s song. Later, on our way home, I told my father about Aunt Chini singing in the kitchen. He gave me a faraway smile and said that she had wanted to become a Bollywood actress. When I asked him what happened, he told me that she got married. For a long time, I thought those two worlds were irreconcilable. You could be an artist or a wife, but not both. The next time I was at Aunt Chini’s home, I was standing with a crowd of people holding my mother’s hand. There was an ambulance and policemen. I remember my father’s gentle face
crumple as he wept like a babe. My grandmother, a woman who had words for everyone, the maid, the milkman, and the neighbor’s child, was struck mute. I remember seeing a body on a stretcher. I had seen enough Bollywood movies to know that a human form covered in a white sheet from head to toe and carried out on a stretcher was a dead body. I remember the outline of her husband. His light eyes and sharp jaw. His mole. Try as I might, I cannot recall where the mole marked his face. But I remember it as a stain on his too-handsome face.
Horror is a stain that spreads quietly in the dead of night. After the children were put to bed, the adults whispered in terrible voices. I made meaning from those whispers, shaping the rest of what happened to Aunt Chini from their broken reflections. The handsome but brutish husband. The festering mother-in-law. The bolted kitchen door. The cooking gas. Her synthetic saree, a kindling. The indelible smell of burning hair. Here’s what I know to be true, even if no one told me so. That it broke my father. My grandmother’s face was stamped with abiding grief. No justice was served. My aunt did not do it to herself. It was done to her. Her name was Mala. A garland of flowers.
We did not know how to grieve something we could not bring ourselves to name. So we let the silence grow until it entombed us. We remembered her by unremembering her. We turned off the radio when her favorite song was aired. We never made her favorite dishes. Never said her name. Never looked at her photographs. Never saw that beautiful boy who might have become a handsome man, just like his father, a few neighborhoods away from where I grew up to become a woman.