Stepmother
For non-identical twins, Vilas and Vikas, it was a red-letter day not because of the presidential medals they were just decorated with, nor because they were the first pair to secure million-dollar high-tech jobs in Sacramento; but because their stepmother, Sita, was proudly hobnobbing with the prime minister and president. While Indian media was in strength crowding into the resplendent Ashoka Hall, draped in a plain handloom sari, under Victorian chandeliers, Sita was going scarlet and the brothers longed for an unending evening. By remaining inconspicuous, they wanted Sita to hog all the limelight. In line with the society where stepmothers and seductresses are just the same, while impatient was the august gathering to dissect Sita’s stepmotherliness till cows came home, equally burning with curiosity were the luminaries.
While a posse of pressmen clicked away, as her stepsons mingled with celebrities, under the cover of darkness deep in her heart, Sita mused about her untaught, impoverished biological daughters. Having accomplished her deceased husband’s wishes and having parented her stepsons better than most mothers, at fifty, Sita’s liabilities were, indeed, half met; her daughters still languished in Kadambathur, her maternal village. As a single parent, although she was strong enough all these years, she was now physically, emotionally too sapped to face the callous neighbourhood all over again. The twins had not seen her daughters and whenever they probed, Sita would merely say, “They are cowherds.” “What about schooling?” Sita would reply, “I cannot afford...even if I could, they wouldn’t learn.” Surely, rest of her life was utterly insufficient to find wherewithal to marry off her twenty-something daughters, but she was obstinate enough to give her best shot before senility incapacitated or struck her down.
Ever since Sita began parenting the twins, they never felt stepmotherliness, not even for a moment. She embodied unalloyed motherhood and was more maternal than most biological mothers. If at all, given her impecunious conditions, unwittingly, she was a virtual ‘stepmother’ to her daughters. The twins were never told that the girls were their half-blooded siblings. Sita had always said, “My daughters run a dairy in my maternal Kadambathur.” And she hastily diverted their attention by serving one more portion of rice. Sita was perhaps the most unassertive of mothers on earth. But she never allowed her mind to sway her; she always listened to her heart, not mind. She doggedly forged ahead to realize what Rajan wanted, not what her umbilical instincts or kinsmen hinted; the secret lied in her extremely uncluttered reasoning.
At six, incommensurate to their physical age, the twin brothers were worldly enough to grasp of another woman in their father’s life. Their mother, Laxmi, and the boys had not seen Sita, the paramour. A passing reference to Sita was sufficient ground for Laxmi to throw tantrums. And Rajan, her husband, began alluding to Sita’s virtues, during rare family suppers, without uttering name. A sharp-witted Laxmi, perceiving the obliqueness, derided the virtues as, “A whore’s chicanery to usurp everything a successful man owned.” Ever since his affair was out in the open, Rajan teetered home well past midnight. On the rare occasions when Rajan showed up early, Laxmi turned acerbic, “Has she slept before time?” And on days he reached early next morning, she scoffed, “Could have completed your ablutions there...I don’t know what is so attractive about the wretched bitch. How can you spend even hours in horrible huts leaving these palatial ease?” Laxmi often jeered at while serving dinner; Rajan repeatedly kicked the chair and bolted out.
Whenever Laxmi turned, as Rajan often said, “Unreasonably crude,” he ended up in the farmhouse in Kadambathur, thirty miles west of Madras. In Sita’s graceful company, Rajan lamented, “Given her crude, cold and cruel nature, I don’t know what will happen to Vilas, Vikas...I want one of them to be a scientist...one of them to be a doctor.” An exasperated Rajan would look heavenwards for solace. “Of course they will grow into,” Sita’s such bold, sure-fire words placated Rajan and, as opposed to wife’s rancour, inclined towards such reassurance, tranquillity.
Rajan’s extended stays in Kadambathur turned Laxmi more hurtful, heartless. Consequently, as her outbursts grew vicious, Rajan spent months away from home and, during his absence, there was no one except the boys to face Laxmi’s flare-ups. Terrified at her belligerence, the boys starved many nights. As Rajan’s prolonged stays protracted, even before Rajan could realise, even before they were led to the altar, Sita was heavy with child. Rajan stayed on with her until childbirth not going home even once in eight months. A few months later, few weeks after the twins turned three; Sita bore one more child for him. Now there were four tiny tots; two born out of wedlock. Unlike unwed mothers, Sita never persecuted Rajan to take the plunge and confer legitimacy.
Despite the pomp and splendour of Ashoka Hall, like all evenings, even this ceremonious one had to end. The twins and Sita were driven to hotel in wee hours. On the way, lost in thought, Sita was feeling the precious medallions. “We will go to Kadambathur...you can’t say no this time, we will meet your daughters,” Vilas, elder by minutes, said. Gently extricating herself out of mulling, Sita tried to resist, “You both are leaving to California in a couple of days...there is not much time left...we will think of going to my village later.” “No way, we have to visit Kadambathur and see your daughters this time,” insisted Vikas. Sita nodded but brothers could make out that Sita was lost in thought, yet again; but, this time, it was about Rajan’s last days.
When the twins were about five, one misty morning, Laxmi was milking cross-bred milchers in cowshed. Just as Rajan entered verandah, right at doorsill, Laxmi heaved two brass pots aiming his head. While the first missile misfired, Rajan barely escaped the second vessel due to the only quality that saves life-forms in peril: alacrity. Her intent boomeranged; owing to her impetuous exertion, Laxmi tripped over crashing her head. Swiftly emerging out of evasive measure, Rajan found Laxmi writhing, bleeding. Within moments, even before Rajan grasped the gravity, she turned insentient.
In hospital, while she was still under anaesthesia, Rajan was apprised of Laxmi’s paralysis of the legs. Laxmi was all too physical all her life, but her snappy tongue, after paralysation, had turned too libellous, caustic. Being stationary, she could prattle on several places, on people she knew nothing about and on subjects she had no inkling about. Rajan, of late, ignored her vituperative utterances, sarcasm and desisted from alluding about Sita at home. And then he began coming home straight from work by dusk. Rajan’s odd behaviour was too incomprehensible. “Has the woman died? Or has she eloped with someone else?” she taunted Rajan. On many such and other instances, Laxmi was far more scathing but Rajan shrugged her off; pitying her physical predicament, he refrained from retorting.
Having reduced to two limbs, Laxmi’s rancour multiplied for Sita and her vindictiveness turned venomous by the day. The physician detected that though she was physically resting, her mind was hysterically active. The doctor made a prognosis, “Such prolonged malevolence may render her two active limbs inactive, dead.” “I don’t mind losing two more,” Sita yelled. She could not lose them; she was not alive to. Laxmi was so possessed of Sita that, within months, bronchial spasms triggered respiratory complications. She stopped speaking; only abused followed by convulsive coughs, followed by curses, followed by whooping cough. Rajan was frustrated and spent about four months on the trot in Kadambathur farmhouse. During those four months, Laxmi aggravated her asthma, blood pressure and died in a state that Indians love to die in: sleep
Benumbed by the fatality, Rajan’s businesses crumbled and he invited Sita to look after kids and businesses. Sita arrived leaving her daughters in Kadambathur with her aged, dying parents. Sita could only mind kids, not the businesses. And, within weeks, he fell seriously ill, was bed-ridden for months and the loss of businesses heightened his maladies. Rajan died sans a will. In a swift, blinding move, his brothers appropriated all immobile assets. Though Rajan’s brothers abhorred Sita, accused her of intrigue to usurp all that he owned, for the sake of six-year-old twins, they left a herd of cattle and cowshed to her. She chose to raise her stepchildren as Rajan would have raised and chose to raise her biological kids as she would have otherwise brought up. The four milchers yielded just enough milk to pay for their education. To pay college, hostel bills, Sita borrowed so much that, within months, the moneylender flung a drag-rope noose and tugged away two of the four milchers. Until the boys completed college, Sita vended milk and also supplemented income by labouring as housemaid. After the repayment, when the money-lender restored the milchers, the neighbourhood gossiped about her infidelity.
Sita and the twins boarded the plane in New Delhi. Clutching the gold medals in her palm, Sita brooded over ways and means of getting her daughters married. The moment they landed at Madras, the twins wished to drive to Kadambathur and wished to spend a day there. Sita tried to thwart by saying that they just have forty-eight hours before leaving to California but the twins were too adamant.
On the way to village, the twins saw miles and miles of paddy fields, eucalyptus and tamarind plantations. Everything on the way smacked of farming, cattle and dung. Kadambathur seemed much more urbane than the twins expected. They expected far more rustic surroundings. There were few rows of bungalows too, past the sparsely standing tiled houses there were the thickly populated hutments. Past the hutments, there stood a thatched hut in disrepair. Two impoverished girls, firewood stacks on heads, were plodding towards the hut. Spotting it, they dropped the faggots and galloped towards the claret sedan. “These girls are your half sisters,” Sita introduced. The girls looked uneducated, utterly malnourished and in tattered clothes.
Once inside, they realised that the hut needed no electricity; permeating through millions of chinks, while daylight illuminated it, hearth-fires danced after sunset. Couple of plastic tumblers, few pockmarked dinner-plates stood about the earthen hearth that was heart of the hut. There was nothing else except two aged, dying folks cuddled up in a nook; while the hut was bare, the old couple was nearly naked.
“Why did you leave these girls in this condition for fifteen years? You could have at least educated them?” Vilas asked. “With the wherewithal, four buffaloes and a cowshed, your father had left, I could only raise two of you,” said Sita. “But we could have shared whatever we had,” said Vilas. “All four of you would have ended up cowherds,” answered Sita, “Now that I have fulfilled my promise to your father, once you both fly to California, I will have enough time to foster...by grace of god, I will marry them off well before I die.”
The brothers could not sleep the next two nights. Both deliberated their mother’s predicament and their own sagacity of leaving her and the girls to their lot. Sita had defied umbilical emotions and her illiteracy never diluted her sense of fairness. Her undying faith, in doing things right in face of unsparing hardship, has brought the brothers to this level. The twins thought of coming back from California next year and taking all three with them. But Sita was more motherly than their biological mother and, having lost their mother when they were just five, Sita was their mother incarnate.
On third day, at airport, Vikas touched Sita’s feet, sought blessings, waved goodbye and faded into departure lounge. “Amma, let us go to Kadambathur home,” said Vilas. “Why, why...aren’t you going to US Vilas?” asked Sita. “No amma...both of us will look after our sisters and will marry them off,” said Vilas. Even before Sita’s emotion rolled down her jaws, he said, “And then, in couple of years, Vikas would return and all of us we would live together.” Sita gazed skywards.
RAM GOVARDHAN is currently scripting his second novel and a bunch of short stories. His first novel Rough with the Smooth, longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, has just been published by Mumbai based Leadstart Publishing. His short stories have appeared in Asian and African journals. He works with Hansa Research Group, Madras/Chennai, India. Email: ram.govardhan@hansaresearch.com
For non-identical twins, Vilas and Vikas, it was a red-letter day not because of the presidential medals they were just decorated with, nor because they were the first pair to secure million-dollar high-tech jobs in Sacramento; but because their stepmother, Sita, was proudly hobnobbing with the prime minister and president. While Indian media was in strength crowding into the resplendent Ashoka Hall, draped in a plain handloom sari, under Victorian chandeliers, Sita was going scarlet and the brothers longed for an unending evening. By remaining inconspicuous, they wanted Sita to hog all the limelight. In line with the society where stepmothers and seductresses are just the same, while impatient was the august gathering to dissect Sita’s stepmotherliness till cows came home, equally burning with curiosity were the luminaries.
While a posse of pressmen clicked away, as her stepsons mingled with celebrities, under the cover of darkness deep in her heart, Sita mused about her untaught, impoverished biological daughters. Having accomplished her deceased husband’s wishes and having parented her stepsons better than most mothers, at fifty, Sita’s liabilities were, indeed, half met; her daughters still languished in Kadambathur, her maternal village. As a single parent, although she was strong enough all these years, she was now physically, emotionally too sapped to face the callous neighbourhood all over again. The twins had not seen her daughters and whenever they probed, Sita would merely say, “They are cowherds.” “What about schooling?” Sita would reply, “I cannot afford...even if I could, they wouldn’t learn.” Surely, rest of her life was utterly insufficient to find wherewithal to marry off her twenty-something daughters, but she was obstinate enough to give her best shot before senility incapacitated or struck her down.
Ever since Sita began parenting the twins, they never felt stepmotherliness, not even for a moment. She embodied unalloyed motherhood and was more maternal than most biological mothers. If at all, given her impecunious conditions, unwittingly, she was a virtual ‘stepmother’ to her daughters. The twins were never told that the girls were their half-blooded siblings. Sita had always said, “My daughters run a dairy in my maternal Kadambathur.” And she hastily diverted their attention by serving one more portion of rice. Sita was perhaps the most unassertive of mothers on earth. But she never allowed her mind to sway her; she always listened to her heart, not mind. She doggedly forged ahead to realize what Rajan wanted, not what her umbilical instincts or kinsmen hinted; the secret lied in her extremely uncluttered reasoning.
At six, incommensurate to their physical age, the twin brothers were worldly enough to grasp of another woman in their father’s life. Their mother, Laxmi, and the boys had not seen Sita, the paramour. A passing reference to Sita was sufficient ground for Laxmi to throw tantrums. And Rajan, her husband, began alluding to Sita’s virtues, during rare family suppers, without uttering name. A sharp-witted Laxmi, perceiving the obliqueness, derided the virtues as, “A whore’s chicanery to usurp everything a successful man owned.” Ever since his affair was out in the open, Rajan teetered home well past midnight. On the rare occasions when Rajan showed up early, Laxmi turned acerbic, “Has she slept before time?” And on days he reached early next morning, she scoffed, “Could have completed your ablutions there...I don’t know what is so attractive about the wretched bitch. How can you spend even hours in horrible huts leaving these palatial ease?” Laxmi often jeered at while serving dinner; Rajan repeatedly kicked the chair and bolted out.
Whenever Laxmi turned, as Rajan often said, “Unreasonably crude,” he ended up in the farmhouse in Kadambathur, thirty miles west of Madras. In Sita’s graceful company, Rajan lamented, “Given her crude, cold and cruel nature, I don’t know what will happen to Vilas, Vikas...I want one of them to be a scientist...one of them to be a doctor.” An exasperated Rajan would look heavenwards for solace. “Of course they will grow into,” Sita’s such bold, sure-fire words placated Rajan and, as opposed to wife’s rancour, inclined towards such reassurance, tranquillity.
Rajan’s extended stays in Kadambathur turned Laxmi more hurtful, heartless. Consequently, as her outbursts grew vicious, Rajan spent months away from home and, during his absence, there was no one except the boys to face Laxmi’s flare-ups. Terrified at her belligerence, the boys starved many nights. As Rajan’s prolonged stays protracted, even before Rajan could realise, even before they were led to the altar, Sita was heavy with child. Rajan stayed on with her until childbirth not going home even once in eight months. A few months later, few weeks after the twins turned three; Sita bore one more child for him. Now there were four tiny tots; two born out of wedlock. Unlike unwed mothers, Sita never persecuted Rajan to take the plunge and confer legitimacy.
Despite the pomp and splendour of Ashoka Hall, like all evenings, even this ceremonious one had to end. The twins and Sita were driven to hotel in wee hours. On the way, lost in thought, Sita was feeling the precious medallions. “We will go to Kadambathur...you can’t say no this time, we will meet your daughters,” Vilas, elder by minutes, said. Gently extricating herself out of mulling, Sita tried to resist, “You both are leaving to California in a couple of days...there is not much time left...we will think of going to my village later.” “No way, we have to visit Kadambathur and see your daughters this time,” insisted Vikas. Sita nodded but brothers could make out that Sita was lost in thought, yet again; but, this time, it was about Rajan’s last days.
When the twins were about five, one misty morning, Laxmi was milking cross-bred milchers in cowshed. Just as Rajan entered verandah, right at doorsill, Laxmi heaved two brass pots aiming his head. While the first missile misfired, Rajan barely escaped the second vessel due to the only quality that saves life-forms in peril: alacrity. Her intent boomeranged; owing to her impetuous exertion, Laxmi tripped over crashing her head. Swiftly emerging out of evasive measure, Rajan found Laxmi writhing, bleeding. Within moments, even before Rajan grasped the gravity, she turned insentient.
In hospital, while she was still under anaesthesia, Rajan was apprised of Laxmi’s paralysis of the legs. Laxmi was all too physical all her life, but her snappy tongue, after paralysation, had turned too libellous, caustic. Being stationary, she could prattle on several places, on people she knew nothing about and on subjects she had no inkling about. Rajan, of late, ignored her vituperative utterances, sarcasm and desisted from alluding about Sita at home. And then he began coming home straight from work by dusk. Rajan’s odd behaviour was too incomprehensible. “Has the woman died? Or has she eloped with someone else?” she taunted Rajan. On many such and other instances, Laxmi was far more scathing but Rajan shrugged her off; pitying her physical predicament, he refrained from retorting.
Having reduced to two limbs, Laxmi’s rancour multiplied for Sita and her vindictiveness turned venomous by the day. The physician detected that though she was physically resting, her mind was hysterically active. The doctor made a prognosis, “Such prolonged malevolence may render her two active limbs inactive, dead.” “I don’t mind losing two more,” Sita yelled. She could not lose them; she was not alive to. Laxmi was so possessed of Sita that, within months, bronchial spasms triggered respiratory complications. She stopped speaking; only abused followed by convulsive coughs, followed by curses, followed by whooping cough. Rajan was frustrated and spent about four months on the trot in Kadambathur farmhouse. During those four months, Laxmi aggravated her asthma, blood pressure and died in a state that Indians love to die in: sleep
Benumbed by the fatality, Rajan’s businesses crumbled and he invited Sita to look after kids and businesses. Sita arrived leaving her daughters in Kadambathur with her aged, dying parents. Sita could only mind kids, not the businesses. And, within weeks, he fell seriously ill, was bed-ridden for months and the loss of businesses heightened his maladies. Rajan died sans a will. In a swift, blinding move, his brothers appropriated all immobile assets. Though Rajan’s brothers abhorred Sita, accused her of intrigue to usurp all that he owned, for the sake of six-year-old twins, they left a herd of cattle and cowshed to her. She chose to raise her stepchildren as Rajan would have raised and chose to raise her biological kids as she would have otherwise brought up. The four milchers yielded just enough milk to pay for their education. To pay college, hostel bills, Sita borrowed so much that, within months, the moneylender flung a drag-rope noose and tugged away two of the four milchers. Until the boys completed college, Sita vended milk and also supplemented income by labouring as housemaid. After the repayment, when the money-lender restored the milchers, the neighbourhood gossiped about her infidelity.
Sita and the twins boarded the plane in New Delhi. Clutching the gold medals in her palm, Sita brooded over ways and means of getting her daughters married. The moment they landed at Madras, the twins wished to drive to Kadambathur and wished to spend a day there. Sita tried to thwart by saying that they just have forty-eight hours before leaving to California but the twins were too adamant.
On the way to village, the twins saw miles and miles of paddy fields, eucalyptus and tamarind plantations. Everything on the way smacked of farming, cattle and dung. Kadambathur seemed much more urbane than the twins expected. They expected far more rustic surroundings. There were few rows of bungalows too, past the sparsely standing tiled houses there were the thickly populated hutments. Past the hutments, there stood a thatched hut in disrepair. Two impoverished girls, firewood stacks on heads, were plodding towards the hut. Spotting it, they dropped the faggots and galloped towards the claret sedan. “These girls are your half sisters,” Sita introduced. The girls looked uneducated, utterly malnourished and in tattered clothes.
Once inside, they realised that the hut needed no electricity; permeating through millions of chinks, while daylight illuminated it, hearth-fires danced after sunset. Couple of plastic tumblers, few pockmarked dinner-plates stood about the earthen hearth that was heart of the hut. There was nothing else except two aged, dying folks cuddled up in a nook; while the hut was bare, the old couple was nearly naked.
“Why did you leave these girls in this condition for fifteen years? You could have at least educated them?” Vilas asked. “With the wherewithal, four buffaloes and a cowshed, your father had left, I could only raise two of you,” said Sita. “But we could have shared whatever we had,” said Vilas. “All four of you would have ended up cowherds,” answered Sita, “Now that I have fulfilled my promise to your father, once you both fly to California, I will have enough time to foster...by grace of god, I will marry them off well before I die.”
The brothers could not sleep the next two nights. Both deliberated their mother’s predicament and their own sagacity of leaving her and the girls to their lot. Sita had defied umbilical emotions and her illiteracy never diluted her sense of fairness. Her undying faith, in doing things right in face of unsparing hardship, has brought the brothers to this level. The twins thought of coming back from California next year and taking all three with them. But Sita was more motherly than their biological mother and, having lost their mother when they were just five, Sita was their mother incarnate.
On third day, at airport, Vikas touched Sita’s feet, sought blessings, waved goodbye and faded into departure lounge. “Amma, let us go to Kadambathur home,” said Vilas. “Why, why...aren’t you going to US Vilas?” asked Sita. “No amma...both of us will look after our sisters and will marry them off,” said Vilas. Even before Sita’s emotion rolled down her jaws, he said, “And then, in couple of years, Vikas would return and all of us we would live together.” Sita gazed skywards.
RAM GOVARDHAN is currently scripting his second novel and a bunch of short stories. His first novel Rough with the Smooth, longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, has just been published by Mumbai based Leadstart Publishing. His short stories have appeared in Asian and African journals. He works with Hansa Research Group, Madras/Chennai, India. Email: ram.govardhan@hansaresearch.com
