SHUELI’S STAR

Novel
~ Anna Sujatha Mathai

           “Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art! “
 
                                                                                      John Keats
 
                                               *   *   *         
 
            “Time is not a line, but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
 
             If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough 
 
             and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and
 
             exist in two places at once.
 
             I began then to think  of time as having a shape, something you
 
             could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of
 
             another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water.
 
             Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.
 
              Nothing  goes away.”
 
                                                             From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood.
 
                                                      *   *   *          
 
 
 
              “She opens an old story for us, like an egg, now-and finds the new story,
 
               the now-story we want to hear, within.”
 
 
                                              From Salman Rushdie’s Introduction to Angela Carter’s
 
                                              Short Stories: Burning Your Boats.                  
        

                                                       
                                                       CHAPTER ONE
 
                                                Summer Nights In Delhi
 
They always slept on the lawn, under a mosquito net, on those hot summer nights in Delhi. The mosquito net did not diminish the brilliance of the star-studded sky above. The crushed grass of the lawn gave off a wonderful smell, mixed with that of sweet-peas, which the Mali,Buddhi Ram, had trained onto neat rope frames in orderly lines. Equally fragrant were the tangerine and lime bushes, from which Ammy made that  delicious marmalade which tasted so good on hot toast at breakfast. After dinner, Ammy and Papa stayed up talking, or listening to the radio, and the girls would be told to go to bed. They knew it would be quite  a while before their parents came out to sleep on the lawn, because they had this habit of  telling each other everything that had happened during the day, with laughter, delight, and
the occasional raised voice. Pappan, the cook, discreetly coughing, would emerge from the verandah, to place a cool surahi of water on a low table outside. The coolness of the sheets, after the heat of the day, would be sheer delight. And, to lie there, watching the stars fall all around in abandon, was even more a joy. Shueli would try to talk to Gaya, who inevitably fell asleep, and then, with no one to talk to, would talk to herself. She was afraid of snakes, and there could be snakes on the lawn. Even a cobra had been spotted there once, and maybe all that fragrance, especially that of the jasmine bushes filled with tight white buds, and the pungency of the lime bushes, would evoke that cobra presence. But then, soothed by the cool night air, she’d begin to watch the shooting stars that tumbled across  that ancient sky. She’d been told that she could wish upon a shooting star, and the wish would come true. That’s if you wished fast enough, before the star burned itself out.  She always wished for love and fame, though she didn’t know much about either of these two things. They were  just lovely words she’d come across in some of her story books, or heard people talk about, or which seemed to blaze across the screen on their  few visits to the cinema.
Wishing thus, upon the tumultuous stars, she’d drift into a cool sleep, blotting out the  feverish heat of the day, the prickly heat, and the afternoons spent reading, wrapped in a damp towel, under the whirring fan. Not so far away, on the Ridge, hyenas and jackals would howl at the moon, and the peacocks would cry in their cat-like voices. The sounds of villagers, maybe tribals, singing raucously, accompanied by drums, or perhaps a distant flute, would add to the disturbing aliveness of the night, as sleep claimed  Shueli.
One night, as she lay there, one star seemed to shine extra bright, perfectly still. There was always that one star, not given to caprice like the others, exquisitely still and steady. In later years, Shueli, reading Keats, while studying the Romantics at College, always thought of that star, and it became a symbol, a prayer, for her disturbed and sometimes sad days. “Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as Thou art!” If she crinkled her eyes, that star looked like a distant planet, overflowing with a radiance which would, surely, spill over onto her life for ever. She could never, ever, lose it. 
                                                        **************

                                                       CHAPTER TWO

                                                   In the mirror     
                               
The train was always slow as it neared its destination, after a two day journey. Clumps of banana, bread-fruit and coconut trees standing proud and upright, with lots of red-tiled houses, and startling glimpses of the backwaters and the ocean.  Shueli would run from one window to the other, hoping to catch a glimpse of the graveyard where Graany and Graanpaa lay buried. “ Not this side. That side” someone would shout, and she would reel excitedly to the other side. Maybe she’d catch a small glimpse of the red-tiled house, and the two  sapota trees which Graanpaa had planted for her and Gaya. And what of the garden full of mango and  guava trees? Was there still the pungent, acrid smell of cashew fruit?  Would the low, moss-covered wall,  and the old well, from which Shueli had delighted to draw water,  still be there? Hadn’t she peered down into the well, trying to see her own reflection? The image of two little girls leaning dangerously over the old well, trying to know its secrets, flashed through her mind. That mossy well, with its little step-like ridges, which were meant to enable labourers to climb down for repairs - or for some other dark reason. Later, as a teen-ager, she had been told she could have a tiny waist if she regularly drew water from the well. “Let me. Let me” she’d plead with Ammu,the maid, who would show her what to do. She’d throw down the metal bucket, tied with a  thick rope, into the dark and mossy well. They would lean over the edge, as the bucket descended and hit the water with a splash. Then, holding the rope with both hands, - left hand, right hand, pulling, twisting, she’d draw up the cool, spilling water in the bucket, grasping it as it came level.  Ammu, the servant, would laugh at her child-like joy in this activity. “Pour!” she would instruct. And Shueli, would pour  the water into the large copper and brass vessels Ammu had kept ready. It was Ammu who had told  her some of the strange stories about wells, which had made Shueli feel that they were alive, watching, calling to women, adding strange things to their reflections, which they had never expected to be there. Shueli thought of the life-giving joy of wells. But Ammu told her of the dark side of wells. “Remember Chakki, who worked in the Southside House?”  Chakki, who was only fourteen, and came from the village, to look after Anumol next door? Yes, strange, she had disappeared, and no one seemed to know where to.  Ammu’s voice dropped to a whisper and a hiss: “The girl was expecting. Will anyone believe it now? Just a child herself. Wretched child, who allowed herself to be spoiled. It seems her body was found floating in that old, dark well, which no one uses. Her stomach was bloated. She had tied up her hair with that bright pink ribbon she was so crazy about, - remember?  I used to tease her, saying ‘Adee, Chakki, where did you steal that fancy ribbon from?’  Don’t know who seduced or raped that poor child. She didn’t even know she was having a child.  It was born - dead - late one night. The South side House people, poor things, they were shocked. You know how it is.  If the Communists get hold of such news -they surround the house, blame the men in the house, and shout for compensation. The child,  and the little mother,  Chakki, who had jumped soon after the birth, were buried together, very secretly. It was all hushed up.”
Shueli was trembling when Ammu told her all this. It had seemed so remote from
her own sheltered life. “Poor girl” thought Shueli, “just a few years older than me,
and imagine having to jump into a dark and frightening old well!”
But Shueli was fortunate, a school girl in Delhi, with a family and a future - she could stand dreaming and humming, as she looked into the well’s depth, smiling at her own reflection.
Now, she was returning, having traveled so far, not only in distances, but in the opening up of hidden places in her own heart, places she had not known even existed.  How prophetic that had been, thought Shueli bitterly, as she tried to shut out the horrifying memory that almost engulfed her at times. But now she was passing the old, familiar roads of her childhood, the red earth, the smoky kitchens, the castle-like ant-hills where the snakes hid.  And maybe - just maybe - Graany would be sitting on the black marble parapet, with her starched white chatta and kachumuri, the mundu slightly  rolled up, as she talked to Kurumba Chovathi, her friend since she  was seven?  But no. The train flashed right past the little cemetery, now overrun by bougainvillea, and it was difficult to make out much. Shueli remembered how Gaya and she had walked together, hand in hand, barefoot, along these roads, long before the railway line had been built. The land on which the trains now ran,  had belonged to Old Master Kuruvilla and to Widow Pennammachy, whose daughters were their playmates. Pennammachy, dressed in her starched white chattaa and kachumuri, always stood, with her arms crossed, resting upon her floppy bosom, permanently, it seemed to Shueli, leaning on them!  She had a habitual twitch, but kept a deadpan face and voice while recounting some of the latest scandals, which had escaped Graany so far. At first, Ammy had dressed her little girls in shoes with rolled up socks, and, when it was hot, dainty solar topees. But while they were playing, Pennammachy’s daughter, Susan, had said with a smirk to KochuMol:  “Schyeda.Ee Madamamar evidine  vannada?”  sure that Shueli and Gaya wouldn’t  understand that they were asking where on earth these Madams had emerged from! They had gone home in tears. “What does Madama mean?” Shueli asked Ammy, who laughed, and told her it meant English Madam. After that, Shueli and Gaya insisted on going barefoot and hatless, to visit their friends, stopping to watch in fascinated horror, the occasional grass snake slither past. That was when Ammy, had laughingly launched into one of her amusing and startling stories. 
“Keto molle?  I must tell you about the first Syrian Christian woman in the State of Travancore  ever to drive a car! What a feat that was!”
How they would laugh, as they relived that grand occasion together, over and over again.  “Can’t you just imagine Mrs. Achamma Elizabeth Thevaril getting into her old Austin, her sari worn high over her ankles, her fashionably bobbed hair cut straight below the ears, her closed shoes, pointed, with straps and a neat heel, (brought by her advocate husband from far-away England, where he’d gone to study). First, there would be a great cranking of the vehicle, then a rush into the driver’s seat, a terrible noisy start, as if crackers were being let off. And then, a  slow, triumphal drive through the streets of Tiruvella, with all the urchin boys of the area, half naked, except for the little mundu tucked around their middle, running behind the car, shouting, “Madaama! Madaama! Edo kando? Have you seen the Madaama driver? Lady Driver! Lady Driver!” Then they would beat imaginary drums, hoot and shout. But Mrs Achamma was unfazed. She, an England-returned woman, what did she care for these naked urchins? Her nose in the air, she proceeded on her triumphal way, honking the great horn, sitting very erect...She, a great committee woman, meeting English people often, the first to own and drive a car! Was she put off?  She, the Lady Driver? No.  Not at all. Not she.”
 Shueli could not see the houses or the road anymore, - ,just a flash of  the cemetery, and the little white church with the cross above it, where, Sunday after Sunday, the men sat on one side, and the women on the other, singing mournful  hymns in the most horrible voices that surely could not have pleased God, or so it had seemed to Shueli and Gaya.
Now it was all changed. The railway line had cut right across that road leading
to  that white cemetery, where Graany and Graanpa, who had never been close in life lay bound together in death’s irrevocable embrace.
Shueli had taken leave from the University, where she was teaching, to come and see if it would be best for Ammy to be taken back to Delhi, or to arrange a full-time trained Nurse to stay with her. Ammy would find the climate in Delhi difficult, and, being in a wheelchair, might find herself very isolated in a comparatively small apartment. It was going to be a hard decision to make, Shueli knew.  Also, there was that other unpleasant matter connected with her former husband, Kuri (Paulose Kuruvilla, sometimes called Paul), which had to be dealt with. The case was still dragging on, and she might be called as a witness. She thanked God for Mitran, dear friend, love, now husband. After rough seas, a harbour.  After long days  of  darkness, a light. She could count on his support and understanding in this, as  in so many other things. Mitran had been a journalist with the Kavipur Times, when she and Kuri had moved to that small coastal town on the West Coast, soon after getting back from England. He had, unwittingly, been drawn into that painful human situation, and, gradually, concern had grown into a deeper feeling.
The train would soon be reaching the station where she had to get down. A relief, after the exhausting two-day journey. She felt a wrench at her heart at the thought that  Papa would not be waiting there to receive her. She remembered how frail and shrunk he had looked on her last few visits, his intellectual and physical energy sapped by  the cancer which had crept into his oesophaegus, a ruthless, almost invisible enemy.  Never one to
give in without a struggle, always eager to know how things worked, he had gone from doctor to doctor, and it had finally been controlled. But five hours of radiation laid on by the doctor at the Medical Hospital, five hours of agony with all sorts of things stuffed right down his throat, had broken his fighting spirit. He beat the cancer, but his heart gave in. He passed away quietly in his sleep one night. With Ammy, his  companion of sixty years, lying beside him.
When Papa was born, in  Mavelikara, a small village in Travancore, he was so small and frail, his parents had thought he would not live. But the midwife had held him up and said: “This one. Even if you grind him on the grinding stone, he won’t die.” Shueli thought this may be true of the human soul too.. You could grind it on the grinding stone of life, but it would still leave its unique fragrance. Everything lives on in our consciousness, doesn’t it, to be passed on, like sap, to form the fresh green leaves, the sprouts, that form the everliving tree, the continuing generations.. Shueli, faced with death, had begun to believe that this might be the truth about that mysterious visitor, who comes to us in the afternoon, in the daylight, or in the midnight hours, in or sleep, as it did for Papa, a release after two months of agonising pain. As Shueli wept and bent to kiss his forehead, a radiant smile transformed his face. She had shouted “He’s not dead. He’s alive.” Later, as the priests and the  ‘Tirumeni’, the Bishop, chanted the magnificent liturgy in Malayalam and Syriac, Shueli remembered their childhood games, imitating the Bishops, chanting: ‘Devame, nee Parushudhan aagunnu.’ (O Lord, you are Holiness made Absolute). Gaya and she had strewn his body, clad in purest white,  with the anturiums in the garden, which he and Ammy had nurtured so lovingly. Shueli placed one upon his heart, before they lowered  the coffin into the earth..
There would only be strangers at the station from now on.  There would only be Ammy in the old house. Ammy, devastated by the loss of her lifetime’s companion. Ammy had lost her memory, and suffered from bouts of terrible anxiety. Her love of good food and indifference to exercise had made her suffer arthritis, and bound her to a wheelchair. But she still went shopping, and did her bargaining, sitting in the old car, fumbling desperately in her tattered old red bag, which she would not change. “I’ve lost my money. It’s gone! Good God! What have I done with the keys?”  a look of horror on her face, soon supplanted by a laugh, when she found the keys in the bag’s murky depths. Her memory had become fragmented and sporadic. She was an old moss-covered wall, and if you scratched away at the tendril-like roots, you’d find stories sprouting from every root, stories that stretched back across generations. Ammy had always found it difficult to express  affection except in the most circuitous ways. She usually expressed it through practical things, like cooking the most tasty dishes, or  launching into one of her stories. She was broken now by the loss of her dearest Piloo. Even the stories seemed to have dried up, like an old well in a drought. She was sitting in a wheel-chair on the verandah, when Shueli arrived from the station, and said “Thankamma will take out the tea now. I’ve ordered some puffs.”   Puffs, filled with meat, delectably flaky, were her special delight, though she knew perfectly well what her dear Thambaan doctor had to say about them!
                                                                *********
 
This house which Papa and Ammy had built after they retired from Delhi, looked rather imposing, sitting on a hill, especially in the beginning, when there had been no other houses, except that of the Thamburaans (the Senior Maharani’s Children) who had sold the land to Papa. Later, other houses, built by people returning from the Gulf, or Arabia or Persia, as they called it, had made this into a rather fine colony. The old residents, who had so much less money, no grand cars, and whose houses were often  rather dilapidated, spoke with resentment about “these Gulf People.”  The grand new houses had made the old ones look rather shabby and out of date.  But Papa loved that house, with its many trees, in which so many different kinds of birds sang through the day, right until the night he died. He locked himself into his room on that last day, when the pain became unbearable, and he felt he could share it with no one, sat in his old wicker chair, looking out at the valley, and the rather faint outline of the hills beyond. These were the hills they both loved. Every morning, just as the sun began to rise from the misty hills, Papa would take out his little tea-maker, and make a lovely pot of tea for both of them to savour, as they sat drinking in the beauty of the trees, the sunrise and the hills. Perhaps, on his last day, as the dark night was closing in, Papa had prayed:   “ I look up unto the hills from whence cometh my help.”
It was the monsoon season now, and the doors and windows rattled angrily as the wind wailed across the valley, a madwoman, filled with a wild and reckless energy, determined to shatter the windows, and force her way in. Perhaps she did. And from Ammy’s head the stories began to sprout, going back, it seemed to Shueli to the days when St.Thomas first arrived on the Malabar coast, and had  drawn some ten Brahmin and Nambudiri families to accept the  compelling revelations of  the drama of Jesus Christ’s life and death. It was the power of that story that had caused Ammy’s father to give up a possibly good career - he had just got a B.A. degree from Madras University- to go to Honavar, a small village nestling between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, as a Teacher to a small Mission School, set up by the Marthoma Church of the Malabar Syrian Christians.  So, he had travelled with his 17-year old wife, in a bus, all the way up the mountainous, lantana-covered roads of the Western Ghats, with startling views of the Ocean, to that remote village. Later, they had moved to Karwar, with its lighthouse on a rock, which jutted right out onto the Arabian Sea. “And that was how your Papa’s parents and mine became friends.” said Ammy, laughing at the memory.
Whenever Shueli looked  at the yellowing photos on the walls of the Tiruvella house, she would gaze especially keenly at one of three little children sitting stiffly together on a bench, dressed in Victorian clothes. A studio backdrop of  Victorian furniture, and a table with a bouquet of flowers, completed the scene. The boy, dressed in an ill-fitting coat, with a kind of cap on his head, -who would grow up to be Papa! Leaning against her protective brother sat the winsome Rahel Kochamma, who would grow up to be the femme fatale of that family. Next to them both sat another little  girl of two, in a starched, frilly white dress, with ribbons holding in place her abundant and tightly curly hair. That was to become their Ammy!
“Do you mean you knew each other even then?” the girls would ask in amused amazement. “Yes,” Ammy would reply, laughing shyly at the memory: “I was only two and your Papa was just four. Rahel Kochamma was exactly my age. If I fought with her, your Papa would chase me away with loud whoops. He always took his precious sister’s side! That was when we were living in Karwar. Both your grandfathers had gone there to teach in a small Mission School.. The two young wives,  our mothers, both cut off from home, became friends, went down to the beach at sunrise each morning, to buy fish cheap from the fishermen who had just brought in the catch, exchanged recipes, health tips and notes on household management. There we were, two families, strangers far from home, with no one to share our language, Malayalam, or our memories,- well, naturally we were always together, and firm friends, despite small jealousies and  disagreements.”                                
There were also pictures of  Tiruvella Graany and Graanpaa, (Ammy’s parents),
as a young couple -she in a starched white chatta kachumuri, and he with a full suit on. They had had their photographs taken in a studio, and sat stiffly side by side, next to a bowl of artificial flowers on an ornate Victorian table.
Will Time never stand still, Shueli wondered. Will people always just vanish and become  mere faded photographs? How can one hold fast-flowing water as it slips from your cupped hands?
                                                            **************

Anna Sujatha Mathai grew up in St. Stephen's College Delhi, where her father was Head of the English Department. It was an idyllic childhood, reading wonderful books, hearing poetry, seeing plays. She and her sister spent many sunny days exploring The Ridge, unimaginable now! Sujatha started writing Short Stories and Essays for The TREASURE CHEST, an All-India Children's Magazine edited by an American Editor, and translated into many Indian languages. At 14 she was chosen by Treasure Chest to be their youngest Special Correspondent! 
 What she loved most was the Theatre. She was selected, at age 14,  by the Shakespeare Society of St. Stephen's College, to be Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Later, doing her B.A.{Honours} in English Literature at Miranda College, she won the College Drama Prize, and later, the Best Actress Award of the University of Delhi.
  Getting married at age 20, to a young surgeon, changed her life completely. In Edinburgh, she joined the University for a Post Graduate Course in Social Studies. She worked in that field for several years, in York, Sheffield, London. Leaving it all behind, coming back to small-town India, was traumatic for her. She used to write on scraps of paper, and throw them away. Her sister, in Bangalore, sent her a cutting in which American professor, Howard McCord of the Univ. of Seattle asked for poems by "avant-garde young Indian poets" for his Anthology. Her sister wrote "At the most, you'll lose a few stamps!" Prof McCord's warm response to her poems, made her start taking her writing more seriously! Her first poems were published in P. Lal's MODERN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. She continued to write, and, later, moving to Bangalore her dream of theatre was somewhat realised. She had roles in plays by Shaeffer, Ibsen, Sartre, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, Lorca and others. She was a co-founder,with friend Snehalata Reddy, of THE ABHINAYA POETRY/THEATRE GROUP.
Her poems have been published in The Commonwealth Journal; Indian Literature; The Little Magazine; The Times of India; Dialogue India; Chelsea (New York); The London Magazine; The Poetry Review (London), Two Plus Two (Switzerland.), Contemporary Asian Poetry Ed. Agnes Lam, Hong Kong/Singapore: Post-Independence Poetry in English ed. by Arundhathi Subramaniam She was among 4 poets "show-cased" on the 50th Anniversary of the Sahitya Akademi. She was an Associate Editor of the prestigious Literary Journal, Two Plus Two,based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She has 5 collections of Poetry in English, and her poems have been translated into several Indian and European languages.
She now lives in Delhi. 

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