Shueli's Star

Previous Chapters
Novel
Anna Sujatha Mathai

Chapter 26
Mystery and Fright

"Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright." - W.B. Yeats

​Between sleeping and waking, between night and dawn, a dream possessed Shueli.  Graany was talking to her.  “You know that I never had much happiness in my life, don’t you? “ She embraced Shueli, holding her very tight. Clear, fine bells were ringing, almost like tinkling glass. Shueli was able to tune in to the happiness that surrounded them. “Can you feel how happy I am now?” Graany asked Shueli, who was drenched in this utter joy. Yes, Shueli breathed, Yes.  When, rather reluctantly, she woke up, she continued to feel the tight embrace that had held her. The sense of joy, of a perfect world followed her through the day.
Graany was alive and well when she had the dream. When they received the telegram. Shueli did not need to open it. Nor did she feel grief when the news came that Graany had fallen down while having a cup of tea, and had died soon after. The link with her beloved Tiruvella was broken, but would remain, as fresh as a flower, on the altar of her memory for ever.
 
*****
 
The incongruities of life are many; birth and death are imbedded in each other.
Shueli’s black kitten, her companion, to whom she confided many of her lonely thoughts, was now a full grown cat, and was going to have her first litter. She was in great pain, almost panic, mewing piteously, and running here and there, as if to find the right spot. Perhaps she knew that Shueli alone could comfort her in her hour of travail. Who but the human being she loved and trusted most could or would  support and comfort her more? She jumped up onto the bed where Shueli lay, and got hold of the gold bangle on her hand. With that clenched between her teeth, she delivered her first litter of kittens!.
Outside, the hibiscus tree by the door, was aflame with red blossoms. It made Shueli feel there was hope for her, too.
                                                    
*****
 
Her friend, Elvira, sent her a message. “Our paper, CRISIS, is getting read more and more widely. People are discussing it even in the Capital. We’re having a small party to meet some people who’ve shown an interest in it. We’d very much like you and  Dr. Kuri to join us  for supper on Thursday.”
 Shueli was excited. It would be such a change from the lonely walk with the dog. She barely saw Paul these days. He seemed very secretive, wrapped up in his own life. It would be a change for them to spend an evening together, especially after the long silences, and occasional bitter words.
 There would be some interesting conversation, and the dinner would be  excellent. She would enjoy wearing the lovely white sari with blue motifs that Ammy had sent her a while ago. She had put it away, thinking  there would be nowhere she could wear it, unless to one of the huge Kavipuram weddings.. Now she could flaunt it a bit!
The Kamath Mendoncas were seated in the spacious balcony, overlooking the Arabian Sea, and the white lighthouse, standing guard on the rocks.
“Dr. Kuruvilla and his wife Shueli – and this is  Chloris and Reggie Sequeira – he’s our architect, you know; Shyamala and Anand Shetty, the well known sociologist; and this is our young journalist friend, from Delhi – Mitran, Ravi Mitran.  He’s with The Times, and is currently writing a series for The Kavipur Times on social and human rights issues. We’re hoping he’ll do some articles for our Crisis.”
 Shueli took Mitran’s hand, and felt as if there was no one else in the room. Only the two of them. As he looked into her eyes, still holding her hand, she felt a current of electrical energy  connecting them both. She experienced a strange kind of recognition – as if she had known him for years . It was just a minute, but it seemed like several life times!
They did not get very much chance to talk to each other for the rest of the evening. She did tell him that she had been at College in Delhi, and missed it a great deal. He told her he was looking at some of the caste and other social inequalities that made progress in the country impossible. He hoped to turn it into a book, at some later date. Shueli was so interested, and mentioned her Social Studies at Edinburgh. There was so much for them to talk about, but they had to yield to Elvira’s commands to “sit at this end of the table,” or “Come and talk to Shyamala, Kuri. She was a physiotherapist in England, but gave up her career after coming here.. Besides, they have three lovely children”  And so on and on. She could feel the dark intensity of his eyes upon her. He was intrigued. She seemed a misfit here. There was something archaic and slightly pompous about the gathering. She seemed so very much a person of Today, even Tomorrow! He had an urge to take her hand, and run out into the  street below. She caught his eye, and they smiled at each other, conspirators who did not even know one another. She only heard fragments of the conversation. Paul was telling them about the poor, landless labourers and their families, who attended his village clinic. “Small things, - like a leg or arm operation, can make it possible for them to get work and change their own, and their families’ lives. “
Ravi said : “Years of injustice have made these villagers helpless and mute. It’s still a feudal society, especially in the villages. .”
“Democracy implies and requires  participation by reasonably educated and informed citizens..”
“It is painful to realise that bonded labour still exists in India, though it’s more than twenty  years since we got our Independence..
“Unless the population is kept under control, little progress can be hoped for..”
“We have never realised what a privilege it is to live in a society where others, too, have opportunities, and where no one starves …” Shueli’s idealism spilled over, and her eyes shone with that vision.
“Mitran is travelling all over the South, collecting material on – “
“Yes, I’m off to  Madras and  Bangalore tomorrow” he said.
Shueli thought, I shall never see him again.
*****
 
  Tragedy sometimes lurks, just around the corner of an ordinary day. Strikes when you least expect it. Shueli had a sixth sense for it. But even she could not have imagined the blow that was to strike her family. She did have an uneasy feeling, though, through the day. At night she even got up, unable to sleep. She sat on the stairs, gripped by a vague feeling of terror. The phone rang. She rushed to get it. A voice said: “Sorry to have to convey bad news.” She sat down on the steps, her legs weak and drained. “Your sister Gaya’s husband, - I’m sorry, - is dead. Please come at once.”  How? What? Why? He is only thirty-five , in perfect health. She could not bring herself to ask, instead, called faintly to Paul to “please come at once – take the phone…” and sat there, trembling and sobbing. She could hear snatches of the conversation. “Overseer.. workers.. Fell,.. back. Hit head. Hospital...Couldn’t save..” What on earth was this nightmare that had seized them? Dazed, she sat and listened to Paul calling Ammy and Papa to inform them. There was a terrible confusion, surely, some wires crossed, messages for the wrong people. Something like this, -yes,, one read about things like this, in the papers. It happened to other people, never to you, or your family. Gaya and Sheel, who’d been so happy, why had Fate struck at them?  Sheel was the one who’d come in, full of joie de vivre, saying “Where are the  car keys? Come on. Let’s go.” And he was the one who’d dreamed of beating the unjust, still lingering, feudal system in his own village, some day. Already, he’d challenged some of the traditional authoritarianism, which kept some people down, crushed families for generations, -  a perennial source of injustice. When a young man was arrested for a crime he had clearly not committed, Sheel insisted on interfering, forcing the issue with Church authorities who were conveniently turning a blind eye to the situation.  The young man was freed.
Once, when they were all out on a trip in the car, They heard a woman screaming.: “Let me die! I don’t want to live. You drink up everything. Go ahead. Kill me and the children.”  Despite Paul’s hesitation, “The man might have a knife or something –“ Sheel had jumped out of the car, dragged the man out of the hut, given him one strong blow, which seemed to sober him down.
“Don’t you ever try that again, hitting someone weaker. Come on. Try me if you like!” .“No Saar. I just lost my temper because she keeps nagging me…I won’t do it again!”
“Be careful, in future. Or I’ll be back – with the police!”
Paul had said then, and the two sisters had agreed, Sheel had taken a big risk. “It could have turned much uglier, Sheel. You really must avoid jumping into the fray like this,” they had cautioned.  Now , Sheel, who couldn’t bear injustice, and had intervened between overseer and workers, lay dead in that far away Estate.
Paul and Shueli packed a few things hurriedly, and set off in the car, driving all through the night. When they arrived, they found Gaya sitting in a dazed state on the bed, , her husband’s head upon her lap.
“ The statement has been given. She insisted on sitting up with him all night.” 
Her long hair was loose, and fell across his face. It was only when Shueli  went and put her arms around her sister, that Gaya began to weep uncontrollably.
Sheel had entered the scuffle between the overseer and the workers. In the struggle, he had fallen backwards, hitting his head against a rock.
“He was never one to just stand back, when people were in trouble. It was an accident, but what a price to pay, - what a price!” moaned Gaya.
Sheel’s parents would be waiting in the village, in Kerala, for their son’s body to be brought, for the burial ceremony.
“Ammy and Papa will come to the village. I’ve arranged a van to take Sheel’s body” said Paul.
Like a sleep walker, Gaya allowed them to take Sheel’s lifeless body into the van. Gaya and Shueli followed, with Paul driving the car. Some others, friends, family, joined the slow procession of cars. At one of the check points, - they were always looking out for smugglers at the borders, - the sentries would not take their word for it. “How do we know it’s a dead body?”  asked the crude, paan-spitting fellow on duty. ”You’d better open up, and show us. A lot of arrack and gold and such stuff gets across the border.” So they had to open the van door. Sheel lay there, like one sleeping peacefully, who might just jump up, and say,  “What is all this charade? Come on. Let’s go.” How often they had all raced along together in a car, singing, laughing, enjoying themselves. Now they had to make this infinitely sad journey, with that boy’s immense vitality packed into a wooden hold. Gaya never said a word the entire way, after her ordeal of the night before. She was no more than a lifeless creature herself. There was great wailing and weeping when they arrived at the village. Sheel’s grandfather, over ninety years old, came and looked at his young grandson, asleep in the dark embrace of death. “I think they made a mistake. The call was for me. He got taken by mistake.”  .They laid the body out, draped in the purest white, on the bed inside the room. Shueli noticed a slight trickle of blood from Sheel’s mouth. She could not bear to look. Outside, on the verandah, Sheel’s father was pacing up and down, with someone else.  Shueli heard him say, “What will happen, about the  property?”  How could he, at such a time, be thinking of such a thing? True, agricultural families were always concerned about their land., and later, that whole question of a young man dying without a will, was bound to come up.. But - now – with Sheel still lying there, the blood oozing from his mouth?
  Ammy and Papa were devastated, and wept like children. The funeral was simple. The family promised that a marble headstone would be erected later, as it was a family grave.
  Shueli helped Gaya to pack up her household things. “We asked for so little, and even that has been taken from us,” said Gaya brokenly. Is life ever just, or fair? We live by purposes hidden from us.
  When Shueli had  had her final operation, she had lain, broken in spirit, wishing she could die, her English friend, Sylvia, had come to visit her. She had grown up without a family herself. Her father, a psychotic, had put her gentle mother and herself, through a good deal of torture, before he died. Considering her circumstances, Sylvia was amazingly without bitterness. She had sat by Shueli’s bed, and spoken in a matter of fact way. No high sounding words of comfort. “You have two choices” she had said.
“ You can choose to live. Or you can choose to die.” It had sounded so indifferent and passive to Shueli at that time. But, suddenly, she had been flooded with the  energy of making that simple choice. “To choose to live, requires all our human courage.”
That was the choice given to Gaya too.
  What shocked and hurt Gaya, though, was the way Sheel’s family changed towards her. Letters from the father-in-law became legalistic in tone. She was asked to make an inventory “of all household furniture and possessions”  and send a copy to the family. As she grieved for her young husband’s death, she could barely comprehend that they were asking her to sign papers, giving up all claims to her husband’s property. It became very unpleasant when Papa insisted on her rights to her husband’s Provident Fund at least. A year or two later, when they were in Kerala, Shueli accompanied Gaya on a visit to her former in-laws. Gaya said she would like to visit Sheel’s grave, and  they were told, rather reluctantly, by the family how to locate it on their way back to the car. They searched and searched, but the grave site, among those green paddy fields, unmarked by even a simple cross, just could not be found. Gaya wept silently, while Shueli raged. Later, Gaya wrote to the family, saying she  would like to send some money for a marble headstone and cross to be placed over Sheel’s grave. The answer was: “WE will see to it. It is not your problem.” In other words, she had no rights.
  Gaya never smiled again, until  Shueli put the baby Kartik into her arms. 

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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