a deer lives again

It was only when she pulled out the guest tablecloth from the linen cupboard that she finally wept. A faded orange stain on its right-hand corner triggered a reaction that wasn’t exactly sadness but something quite close to it.

Dhanam had been alone in the big house since Amma had died three months ago. Crowds of relatives and friends had attended the funeral because Amma was an important lady. Some of those relatives had teared up, most hadn’t but all of them had eaten and all of them had left. Now it was just her, with her day punctuated by different Tamil TV serials she had begun watching in Amma’s room. One serial reminded her that it was time for lunch, another kept her company during dinner.

That day however the lunch-time serial was left to blare in the background as she tidied Chinnaiyya’s bedroom. First she dusted the ceiling fan taking pleasure in scraping out furry knots of dust from its blades. Then she stretched out a freshly laundered sheet and tucked it firmly into the corners of the bed. The tablecloth that set off the tears was the last thing on her list of chores. She had meant to starch it and then iron it, instead its embroidered flowers were pressed against her fingers, their pattern blooming on her skin as she wept.

When Chinnaiyya came the next day, his wife made a big show of gifting her a shiny purse to hold her cell phone. The purse had sequins all over it and something written in English, she was meant to hang it around her neck. But it was far too big for her small Nokia phone. She thanked the wife anyway, carrying her bag into the bedroom along with Chinnaiyya’s suitcase. Chinnaiyyah made favourable remarks about the state of the house, particularly the fresh flowers (camellias- Amma’s favourite) that she’d arranged in a vase by Amma’s photo. She’d kept the flowers only because she knew he would appreciate it. “It’s like Mummy never left,” he said, somewhat sadly. 

–

On the third day of Chinaiyya’s visit she wondered what had happened to the daughter-in-law in the afternoon serial, had she been poisoned? She had no way of knowing now that Chinnaiyya and his wife were always in the house and she could no longer watch TV.

She had come to Amma’s house when she was 16. There were others in the house then. Lakshmi akka– the cook, a gardener- Kunju, a driver whose name she could not remember and a stream of watchmen who came and went. Aiyah was still alive in those days and Chinnaiyya was in college in Delhi. Aiyah, a military man who had retired from an important position, had visitors nearly every day. Before every visit, Dhanam was made to starch and iron napkins, polish the silver and bring out one of the five guest tablecloths depending on the importance of the guest. The table had to be laid in a certain manner for dinners and lunches, with a runner, tablemats, forks, spoons, knives and napkins arranged according to each course. Amma had trained Dhanam to do this by rigorously training her. Dhanam soon learnt that there were different kinds of settings for different kinds of meals; a formal setting, a casual setting which was a minor variation with fewer courses, a breakfast setting and a tea setting.

Amma would monitor Dhanam before every occasion, watching quietly from the back as she laid the table. Although she knew where to arrange each place setting and adornment, sometimes, Amma’s presence made Dhanam nervous and forgetful. On one such occasion Dhanam forgot the runner. Even though she’d noticed this error, Amma didn’t say anything right away. Later when one of the guest tablecloths was stained by a ring of grease from a dish of biryani, Amma gave her hell. As punishment, Dhanam was deprived of lunch that day, which was disappointing as she had been looking forward to the biryani that entire week. At the end of the month she found that dry cleaning money had been deducted from her salary.

Over time however, Dhanam got acquainted with the rhythm of the household and the quirks of its members. Her mornings began by serving ‘bed tea’ to Aiyah and Amma. Each time she knocked and entered their room, she sneaked a glance at Amma sitting up in bed in a frilly nightie looking oddly vulnerable. Amma must’ve been in her mid 40s around then, but to Dhanam, still 16, she seemed aloof and imperious. Except in these mornings shorn of her dark lipstick and coiffed hair, Amma looked almost defenceless.

Amma was regimented about everything, including her appearance –– her lipsticks were in varying shades of maroon, she wore the same perfume all her life and was aggressively particular about her saris and blouses. Every once in a while a tailor would come home and Amma would instruct him to follow patterns she had neatly drawn out on paper –– sweetheart and boat necks, press buttons instead of clasps – – the instructions were very precise. Sometimes if there was leftover fabric she would also ask him to stitch Dhanam a new pavadai. The tailor would leer at her when Amma wasn’t looking. But Dhanam didn’t mind, she loved new clothes and Amma was generous with them, so what if the tailor copped a feel? It was a small price to pay, she reasoned.

Aiyah died in a freak accident five years later, by then Chinnaiyya had left for the US and Dhanam had become a permanent fixture in the household. Far from being mellowed by her husband’s death Amma continued to live as she always had. She sat alone every afternoon and night, presiding over a full table, sometimes eating just a dosai, but slicing it imperiously with a fork and knife. The staff would gossip about what a comical figure she made, holding onto delusions of grandeur instead of accepting her widowhood. But Dhanam knew that Amma clung to these rigid structures because without them she would surely fall apart. Eventually, as there wasn’t much for them to do, many members of the staff were let go. The driver came by when he was called, only Kunju the gardener and Dhanam remained in the old house along with whichever watchman was hired. Occasionally Amma threw grand dinners and lunches for relatives and friends but Dhanam couldn’t help but notice that the crowds had thinned.

It was only during Chinnaiyya’s wedding that the second guest tablecloth was taken out. A kantha-work masterpiece it had been hand embroidered by women from a small village in Bengal. Across the tablecloth, deer wandered through a forest of trees bathed in blue evening light. Each deer and each tree had been coaxed out of hundreds of delicate running-stitches, and their bodies rippled with the light and shadow of differently hued threads. Each time she spread it out, Dhanam would find new details in the embroidery –– a deer trampling a flower under its hoof, a bird about to take flight…“I’ll give it to you one day,” Amma had promised Dhanam. But Dhanam didn’t take her too seriously, who would part with a thing this exquisite?

After the wedding guests left, while clearing the table Dhanam noticed that someone had splattered red chutney on one of the deer, nearly blotting it out. Amma asked her to use a mixture of talcum powder and lemon to gently press out the stain with a wad of cotton soaked in warm water. As the stain slowly seeped out, it seemed to Dhanam that the deer was coming back to life.

“Don’t make a fuss,” his wife had told Dhanam when she placed crisp, starched napkins beside their plates on the first day.

“We’re not Mummy, we don’t want such formalities,” Chinnaiyya explained to Dhanam, as if this was supposed to reassure her.

But Dhanam became weirdly stubborn about it, every day, despite the wife requesting her to keep things simple, Dhanam turned each meal into an elaborate affair.

It wasn’t that she missed Amma or her methodical ways, in fact towards the end Amma had become unbearable. Even though she slept beside her bed on the floor, Amma would shout for her at 4 AM every night, in an angry bark. She demanded to be taken for walks in the dead of the night or asked for things she was not supposed to eat, based on her whims – sometimes a vadai, sometimes a gulab jamun. If Dhanam could manage to make any of these things and give it to her, Amma would accuse her of trying to kill her. Despite all this, for a long time after her death, Dhanam found sleep hard to come by, she was so used to the rhythm of Amma’s snores, so attuned to waking up at 4 AM to the sound of Amma’s raspy bark.

One day, the wife told her about Chinnaiyya’s friend coming home for dinner, requesting Dhanam to set up a small table in the garden. “We will have drinks there and you can serve our dinner on the garden table. Please Dhanam don’t make a big deal, there’s no need,” she insisted, “no napkins, no table cloths, no hoo-ha, just our food please,” and then she smiled what she must’ve imagined was a kind smile.

Later that night, Dhanam turned off the lights in Amma’s room and watched them from the window, only their silhouettes were visible but she could hear every word they were saying. It was a balmy yet cool October night and Amma’s waxy white anthuriums glowed eerily in the moonlight. The friend asked Chinnaiyya what he intended to do with the house, now that his mother was gone. “We’ve been talking about putting it on the market,” the wife replied. Chinnaiyya didn’t say anything.

–

In the serial, the pregnant daughter-in-law froths at the mouth, her arms flailing, when her scheming mother-in-law makes her drink a poisoned glass of milk. Miraculously, the daughter-in-law manages to take an antidote but she also goes into labour. Will the child survive? For that Dhanam would have to watch the next episode which could only happen if Chinnaiyya and his wife left the house. They never seemed to go anywhere at all…

–

A few days later Chinnaiyya called her to the hall and offered her a seat on the couch next to him. But she politely declined and sat down on the floor by his feet.

“Dhanam, I hope the money we send has been enough to keep the house running?”

“Amaan, Chinnaiyya,” she reassured him.

From her place on the floor she could see that his pants had been ironed (by her) so neatly that the points of his pleats were almost viciously sharp.

“Are you lonely here? You must be lonely without Mummy?” he asked so gently that she let her guard down, for just a moment.

She told him the last days had been very difficult, sometimes she slept for just 4 hours a day – Amma was relentless and demanding. And too often she’d fly into fits of rage and throw things at Dhanam, who could understand that she was in great pain and needed an outlet, but it didn’t have to be her.

“You should have come and looked her up,” she added.

“We couldn’t, the children had exams and…”

And then he paused and changed the topic abruptly-

“Dhanam, we’re worried about you.”

Dhanam thought this must have something to do with the evening his friend had come home. That evening she had refused to acknowledge the wife’s request and once again served a ridiculously lavish dinner at the dining table. She’d brought out the second guest tablecloth and arranged an unnecessary number of place settings, even going so far as to use the silverware. The wife had been angry, she’d taken her into the kitchen and demanded who the hell Dhanam thought she was. Dhanam had apologised and mumbled something about forgetting which made the wife calm down a bit. But ever since that day, they had stopped asking her ‘to not make a fuss’, they ate at the table in the proper way; Amma’s way.

“I’m sorry about that evening Chinnaiyya,” Dhanam muttered.

“It’s not just that evening Dhanam, we’ve seen you…” he trailed off, not completing a thought that was probably too harsh to be spoken.

Dhanam wondered if they’d caught her spying on them from Amma’s room. Or if they knew that she watched serials in Amma’s bedroom, on her TV.

“You cannot tell my wife that she can’t use this or that tea cup, this is her house, she’s your mistress,” he said finally.

“But those cups are only for guests!”

“You are no one to say that Dhanam…Mummy isn’t here anymore, we don’t live by her rules. Anyway…this is pointless, do you have any relatives that I can speak to? How old are you now?”

“50,” she said. She had no living relatives, her mother had died when she was 10, her father, a drunk, had abandoned them immediately. Her sister had raised her but she too had succumbed to TB at a fairly young age.

He looked grim after that and told her he would speak to her soon.

Dhanam knew that they were making arrangements to sack her and she struggled to make sense of what would happen to her. She couldn’t comprehend life outside the only house she’d known all her adult life.

–

Sunny the new watchman had a full, thick moustache and a slight paunch that suited him quite well –– he looked well-to-do, prosperous. Every afternoon when Dhanam passed by him to go to the market he sang snatches of what she presumed was a Malayalam song.

One day Dhanam stopped by the front gate and matter-of-factly told him that she didn’t know what language he was singing in. He was taken aback, he hadn’t expected her to react to his teasing. He took a minute to appraise her before he told her he was from Kerala and obviously the song was from there too. Later he told her a lot more, that he lived by the forest, that he ate fruit bats sometimes- he probably said that to shock her but she laughed. “I’ve eaten a snake in my village,” she said grandly. What she had eaten was a river eel, but it didn’t matter. She wanted to impress him.

She started to wear her long wavy hair in a loose braid that framed her face. She even sprayed a bit of Amma’s perfume on herself while dusting her dressing table one day. She began to come by every evening after work to talk to him about his life back home and movies he promised to take her to watch. She rarely had much to say to him but she liked to listen, daydreaming about a life outside the rigid confines of the one she currently knew. He kissed her roughly one evening and she let him. She liked Sunny, he made her laugh, made her feel pretty, he even went so far as to gift her a string of jasmine flowers wrapped in a damp banana leaf. She pinned it to the top of her braid and decided that she really liked him.

When Amma said she was going to Delhi to meet her son the next week, Dhanam told Sunny she would sneak him into the house the very night Amma left. They could watch TV and maybe she would cook him something nice. It was uncharacteristic of Dhanam but this reckless affection was all she could offer him.

Amma left late in the evening and as soon as she left, Dhanam fried fish that she had marinated in turmeric and chillies with a squeeze of lime. At 9:30 he arrived in a freshly pressed shirt and a lungi he’d folded up to reveal his strong dark legs. He sniffed appreciatively at the scent of frying fish and followed her to the kitchen, playfully patting her behind as she walked ahead. They ate intimately, sitting on the kitchen floor and he told her about the old women in his village who dived for oysters in the moonlight. “How old?,” she’d asked incredulously, she never fully believed any of his stories. “70 plus,” he said as he lit a cigarette by the window and she cleared their dirty plates. They had said and done no more than this when Amma walked in on them. She had missed her flight, Dhanam learnt later.

Amma first slapped Dhanam, demanding how dare she felt bold enough to use ‘her house’ ‘her kitchen’ and ‘her food’ to entertain a lover. She called her a slut for good measure and said she would think about what she wanted to do with her. With that she locked her in the kitchen, refusing to let her out till late into the afternoon the next day. Dhanam had no idea what happened to Sunny, but assumed he had been fired.

For more than a week Dhanam cried herself to sleep every night on her straw mat on the kitchen floor, thinking about Sunny who hadn’t contacted her ever since that night. One day Amma called her to the hall and asked her to sit down on the floor. In a grave voice she told Dhanam that Sunny was a Christian, he would never marry a low caste girl like her. And even if he did, did Dhanam want to marry him? What did she know about him? For all she knew he could have a wife and family back home in his village.

But Dhanam didn’t care if he was married, she had only wished she’d spent that night with him. There was the question of chances and hers had slipped away.

Two months after the whole thing, Amma took Dhanam with her to Rajasthan on a trip to meet her old friends. They travelled by the Shatabdi express and stayed at a grand, old hotel where Dhanam was given a clean quarter in the staff area. She shared her room with a thin Manipuri girl who never spoke, but smiled at whatever Dhanam said in broken Hindi. Dhanam was meant to iron Amma’s saris and carry her bags and water each time she needed it. One afternoon, Amma and her friends drove to the outskirts of the city to watch the sunset in the desert. There they took turns to ride a camel called Sridevi squealing and laughing like a pack of school girls. Feeling sorry for her or perhaps to placate her, Amma encouraged Dhanam to go on a camel ride too. As the camel wobbled and stood up on its spindly legs, Dhanam was convinced that she was about to fall. She didn’t fall, instead the handler led his camel into the desert, far away from everyone else. Dhanam watched the sun dip into the distant dunes and felt that this –– a thing she’d never seen before and would probably never see again –– was worth all the trouble.

The wife drops Dhanam in the car to her new quarters, helping her carry two black plastic bags and one lumpy mootai which contains all her life’s belongings. Once inside, the wife takes on a friendly tone, telling Dhanam that she was still young, only 50, the wife herself is 45, they have their whole lives ahead. Maybe she could find another job?

The idea of a whole life ahead doesn’t reassure Dhanam who simply smiles and waits for the woman to leave.

They’ve set her up in a one-room shack somewhere in a slum near the bus stand. It is a steal, because it comes with an attached toilet. She doesn’t know anyone in this area, but then she hardly knows anyone, anywhere. They’ve given her Amma’s old TV and opened a bank account in her name. When she said she didn’t know how to use one, the wife tried to teach her but Dhanam stubbornly resisted learning, hoping that they’d let her stay. But they’ve decided to send her money every month by post now, a decent amount that will keep her comfortable enough.

She attempts to settle into her new home by fixing basic amenities- a stove, a bulb and a table fan. She shares a wall with the family next door and the everyday sounds of their life tend to seep into her home. Having nothing to do she often walks around the streets to acquaint herself with the neighbourhood. On these walks she has come across a mosque, a wholesale market for vegetables and fruit, a butcher with cats, and an old man who sells second-hand furniture on the street. Two weeks later, she takes an auto to Amma’s house, for reasons she can’t fully understand. Afraid of being seen, she doesn’t step down from the auto and peers at the house from within. Everything she knows so well is just as it has always been –– the row of anthuriums, the tall gate where Sunny once sang to her, a warm light in Amma’s room –– but the house no longer feels familiar in the way it once used to.

She buys a mid-sized table and a rickety chair from the old man who sells second- hand furniture. The table isn’t ideal, it is old and scarred, it nearly fills up her entire room and one of its legs is ungainly, making it wobble. But none of this is a problem because a table is just what she has always needed, she knows that now. She pushes a folded newspaper under the ungainly leg to balance the table. And then she spreads out the guest tablecloth, taking in its familiar scent of starch and fabric softener. She gently runs her hands over each tree, each prancing deer and each soft knot of embroidery. That night she eats her dinner on the guest table cloth, watching her serial as the sounds of the family next door drift in and out of her new home.