Fishy Chronicles 71: Lockdown Diaries: The Webs We Weave (3) – Afterwards

Before we left our bedroom in the morning, my father listened quietly to my account of what happened the previous night (FC 70). He asked me about the photographs and journal that were still in the loft.

“Did you read the diary?”

I was embarrassed at how bad I looked. “No-no. Bobby found me by then.”

My father’s mouth tightened and his eyes bulged. He took a deep, noisy breath through his nose. Was Appa going to thrash me like his father did? “Keep away from Bobby.” Appa’s hands gripped my shoulders tightly – his face close to mine, looking deep into my eyes. “Don’t let any man touch your body. No one should touch your chest or in places that make you uncomfortable, understood?” My face burned, but I nodded.

My parents eyes met, their faces grim. Soon, my mother left our bedroom for the kitchen. All the women were expected to start chores early in the morning. Appa caught my hand and pulled me to a corner of the room. “Mol, this area,” he pointed at his groin, “is a sensitive area for men. If someone is attacking or touching you and you don’t want them to, punch hard here. Ball your fist, like this, and slam this area or grab and squeeze hard. You have my permission to do that to Bobby if he touches you again. Okay?” I nodded, wondering how I would ever grab a man’s privates. “Shout loudly that he’s a bastard and should keep his hands to himself. Make a noise, scream. If someone grabs you from behind, what will you do?”

I shook my head.

“Bite, kick, scratch. Keeping biting. Bite anywhere. Bite like your life depends on it. Tear out flesh, inflict as much pain as you can. Kick the knees, punch the Adam’s apple, punch their noses upwards, my darling, anything to free yourself. Don’t be frightened. Be calm when someone is attacking you. Think and plot attack. Also, him grabbing you is not your fault. And, it will happen again and again.”

“What?”

“Yes, mol. Men are like that. Any woman or child is fair game. Hit, fight, scream, bite. Throw stones and run like mad. Be smart and cunning. Hurt the bastard and make him scream.”

I nodded, unable to make much sense of it. My gentle father was asking me to inflict pain on another human being. And I was relieved. What Bobby had done was wrong (FC 70).

The bedroom door flew open and Sarayu Aunty charged in. She planted her hands on her hips, her face was red and her eyes burned into me. “What is this I hear that you are saying my son touched you.” Behind her, my mother’s eyes bored into the back of my aunt’s head. My grandparents were pushing each other to fit into the doorway.

My father put his arm around me. “I will thrash Bobby if he so much as looks at my daughter again, chechi (older sister).”

Sarayu Aunty screamed a volley of abuse and her husband mouthed something incoherent. My father pushed me behind him and my grandmother pushed my mother out of the door, jabbing her in the chest with her elbow. My mother’s mouth opened in pain, but she barged in through the crush of people, her hair askew, furious. She stood in front of us, her arms stretched wide.

The air was full of tension. Some people stood with arms akimbo, others were ready to pounce. Everyone looked unsure.

The silence stretched and then my grandfather said, “Teach your daughter some manners! Teach your daughter to behave herself around boys!”

My father leaped at the group of people standing near the door, an angry wordless roar reverberating around the room. My mother ran after my father and Bobby’s father and mine were scuffling and wrestling, Appa seemingly trying to push him out of our room. My grandfather shouted abuse at me, his eyes full of venom. I threw myself into the scrum, landing an explosive punch into Mathan Uncle’s lower back. He screamed in pain, arching backwards. He let go of Appa, his hands trying to reach his back to stanch the pain.

Sarayu Aunty shook me roughly, hitting me a couple of times until my mother grabbed her hand and held it tightly skewering my aunt with an icy look. Aunty pulled her hand out of my mother’s and rubbed her husband’s back, all the while glaring at me. My arms were around my father, his shirt torn and hair messed up, all of us breathing hard.

My angry grandfather pushed his daughter, son-in-law and wife out of the room. “Teach your daughter some manners… hitting elders!”

Appa pulled me closer. When the last person was out of the door, he murmured, “Good punch, mol. That’s the way to do it.”

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Things did not get better. The three of us were suddenly out in the cold. When the rest of my father’s siblings and their families arrived, we were left out of conversations and activities. No one talked to us and the children refused to let me play with them. Snide remarks were passed in my hearing. Only Roma talked to me when the others weren’t looking. A couple of days after their arrival, she asked me what had happened.

But the look of disbelief on her face and the doubts she voiced humiliated me all over again. She thought I was lying! I raged at her, angry at her reaction and we stopped talking. All the while, Bobby smirked at me. I stayed far away from him.

I felt sorry for my parents. They were being punished because of me. Something as innocent as wanting to look at the photos and journal in the loft had taken a horrible turn.

And its cause, Saroj Aunty, was sitting pretty and looking scornfully at us, and judging us. She had no clue what had led to the skirmish in the loft. The photos and diary were still in the loft. I had to get them out now, and have a good look. Now I had to know what was written in the diary. I wanted to punish them all.

A few days later, the family was readying for a baptism in church and I had the runs. My parents did not want me to be alone at home and were planning to stay back when my grandfather began to shout at my parents. Appa cut his father off midway, unusual for my obedient father. “She will sit alone at home.”

The others smirked and I went back to sit in our bedroom. “Lock the door and don’t open for anyone unless it is your mother or me, okay?” Appa said.

I read a book near the window. Sometime later, I unlocked the door, my heart beating insanely fast, and turned the door handle of Sarayu Aunty’s room. The door squeaked open. No one was there and I breathed deeply to ease my tension.

I listened for sounds in the house and tiptoed along the corridor. I ran lightly through the house to check for the dregs of humanity that might have lingered. No one.

I quickly climbed the table in the store room and hoisted myself into the loft. I looked for the photos and diary. I checked all the bags and holdalls – they were gone!

In one of the bags I found an old slingshot – the rubbery portion could still stretch. I took it and climbed down, ran to my room and locked the door.

Fear chased around my being. Who had the photos and diary? I was certain my grandfather didn’t know about them. I couldn’t believe Bobby might have them. I hadn’t heard him boasting or making fun of the photos with his male cousins. I lurked around all the time, I knew what was going on. Maybe I didn’t know my cousin enough.

My parents returned home early, before the others. My mother came around the house to the window of our room to check on me. I opened the kitchen door for them. 

“All okay, mol?”

“Yes, Appa.”

(Continued in the next episode)

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This is a fictional series following the Mumbai-based narrator. She is recounting a story about her aunt Saroj during a childhood holiday spent at their ancestral home in Kerala. Read the previous episodes here and later ones here 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91.  

 

Fishy Chronicles 70: Lockdown Diaries: The Webs We Weave (2)

I waited till I heard my parents snore. It took a long time. They had spoken in whispers and I occasionally heard a familiar name.

I grabbed the small torch I had kept under my pillow and slowly got off the mattress on the floor. I waited until my eyes got accustomed to the dark and then switched on the torch in bursts to show me where the door was and not wake my parents. I crawled forward until I reached the door and opened it slowly. I had oiled the squeaky hinges and door handle a couple of days ago and had been caught in the act by my grandfather.

“Good girl! I’ve never seen any of the other children show so much interest in managing a house. The hinges of all the doors and windows in my room are crying. Some days it is because of the wind moving the windows and it almost gives me a fright. Come on, I will be your assistant.”

I was tongue tied at first, and then gave in to my grandfather’s enthusiasm. Plus, he genuinely seemed to think I had a yen for home improvements. That day I oiled the hinges of the door of his walk-in cupboard, the hinges of his bedroom door and all the hinges in the windows. Because he smiled at me so sweetly, I gave in and cleaned all the windows of his room from the outside of the house. I wondered if I needed to avoid Appachan (grandfather), but he had so many stories to tell that I forgot my irritation soon enough.

At the back of my mind, I could hear my maternal great grandmother telling me how doing something bad would come back to haunt me. The more I thought of the photos and diary in the loft, I couldn’t figure out what was evil about wanting to have a better look at them.

A few days ago, I had discovered (FC69) photographs of my aunt Saroj with a man, who was not her husband, and a journal. My paternal grandmother, who had commandeered my services to clear out the loft in the storeroom, had emptied out a holdall that had belonged to Saroj Aunty and asked me if there had been anything else in the bag. While I was in the loft I had removed the photographs and diary and hidden them.

I shivered in the dark. My grandparents didn’t believe in keeping a weak light switched on in the long corridor outside our room. I was somewhat of a nocturnal being and didn’t need a light, but pitch dark in a rural household in Kerala is an eerie, scary business. So I switched on and off the torch until I reached the store room.

I opened the door and shut it. I didn’t switch on the light because the store room was opposite my grandparents’ room and there were opaque glass windows in the sides of the storeroom – you couldn’t see who was in the room, but you could make out outlines and see light. Earlier in the day I put an old plastic stool under the table. Once in the loft, I took out my stash from inside a holdall in a distant corner.

I shone the torch’s light over the faded colour photographs. Saroj Aunty was beautiful. She didn’t look like a typical Malayali and my grandmother had told me often that there had been many marriage proposals for her. She had also been smart and ambitious, which was why my grandparents had agreed to let her study in Delhi. My older aunt Sarayu, just as pretty as Saroj Aunty, had been married off young.

All the photographs were either of the handsome Sardar, or of Saroj Aunty or both. All the stories I had heard of people falling in love or marrying, had ended badly. Either the girl or boy was found out and dissuaded from marrying their loves, or the ones that married now couldn’t get along.

While my cousins wanted to have boyfriends and love marriages, having boyfriends was taboo and we only discussed them when we knew there would be no adults around.

I reached for the holdall to remove the diary and a hand grabbed my wrist and tugged. I recoiled in fright, trying to pull myself backward and out of the strong grip. I struggled to free myself but the hand tightened like a deadly noose. A light flashed into my face and I tried to shield my eyes with my free arm.

“What are you doing in the loft?” my cousin Bobby said. He was Sarayu Aunty’s youngest child, around 18 years old. He tried to pull me to the edge of the loft but I struggled to keep myself away. “Come down, you idiot. What are you doing up there?”

“Let me go!”

“Why?”

“Er…”

Bobby was now standing on the desk and squinting at the pictures with the help of the light of my torch, which had rolled to my feet in my struggle. He let go of my hand and reached for the photos and I kicked his hand away and moved further into the narrow loft. I grabbed and pushed the photos out of his reach. “Fool! Give me that! It has to be something mischievous if you need to look at it in the middle of the night!”

“NO!”

Bobby grabbed my arm, shook me angrily and tried to drag me off the loft. I kicked him, catching him on the chin. He snarled and grabbed my hair and neck and shook. After an eternity, my head stopped shaking and I was free. But now his hand squeezed my breast. With his other hand he tried to pin me down. I flailed and toppled some of the things near me on to the ground.

“Shhh!” Bobby’s cold spit sprayed my cheek, his hands slamming me against the loft's wall.

Suddenly the light came on and I was blinded. Bobby let me go and jumped off the table. I lay supine, hearing someone speak. The door opened and closed.

I cried silently, until I heard a throat clear. My heart beats thundered in my ears, throat and chest. I reached for my torch, willing myself to beat Bobby if he looked into the loft again. I stayed flat, listening for noises, my breath escaping in shallow gasps.

“Come down, mol,” Appachan said.

I stilled, trying to stop crying.

“Come down. I don’t want anyone else to come in and find us.”

I sat up and looked at my grim grandfather. My eyes veered away. He held out one of his hands. My body trembled and I sat and slowly moved to the edge and let my legs dangle on the side of the loft. The life seemed to have gone out of my limbs.

Appachan stood under me and I caught his outstretched hand and slid off the loft slowly.

Suddenly I felt stinging pain across my arms and bare legs. I threw out my arms to fend off my grandfather’s attack, but he was hitting me with a plastic flyswatter that had rested on the storeroom's dusty window ledge for years. I yelped in pain wherever the flyswatter struck me and bits of it broke and flew about as it made contact with my skin.

“You… you…” Appachan choked. I pulled the flyswatter out of his hand and threw it into the loft and fled when he came rushing towards me with a raised hand.

I ran down the hall, and into my father’s arms, both of us falling backwards and onto the ground. I begged Appa to save me from Appachan and Bobby. By now lights in the other rooms were being switched on, my father immediately pushed me towards my mother and she pulled me into our room and shut the door.

Doors opened and we could hear Mathan Uncle, Bobby’s father, ask what was going on. But Appachan and Appa stayed silent. Later we heard angry voices, but mostly Appachan’s voice. After an eternity, my father returned to our room.

I burned with shame, unable to talk or make sense of what had happened. So I buried my head in my mother’s lap and cried. She patted and rubbed my back, begging me to tell her what had happened.

When I looked up, my father was lying on the bed his eyes staring at a spot on the ceiling and his arms over his head – his face unreadable. “Lock the door,” he told Amma. I was bundled into the bed, in between them, my heart speeding and bumping insanely. I turned away from Appa and curled desperately into Amma, afraid and unable to understand his silence.

Adrenaline rushed through my body. I relived Bobby’s hands on me and felt utterly humiliated and betrayed by my grandfather’s beating.

Sometime in the night, my father’s arms came around me and he whispered and told me to calm down and that he loved me. We spent most of the night staring at the play of light and shadows of leaves on the wall caused by the moonlight streaming in through the parted curtains. 

None of us slept.

(To be continued in the next episode.)

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This is a fictional series about the 30-something narrator who is recalling an incident from her past. The first part can be found here (FC69). And the rest of the episodes here  

71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91.