Once Upon a Time

By Ashok Srinivasan

First novel from an award-winning writer

Brinda is born in a traditional joint family, but behind the veneer of normalcy lurks an enigmatic life. She has detailed memory of things that happened before her birth. Physical contact with her heals the sick, the rotten and the corrupt. Brutalised repeatedly, she only becomes more beautiful and remains inviolate, unable to achieve physical intimacy even with the man she loves. There comes a time when she is arrested without any charges and moved from prison to prison. But in a world where time and history are as fluid as her memory, she stays radiantly young while those around her age and decay. Both as witness and victim, she lives through the horrors of a society sliding into superstition and intolerance. Ultimately, she is subjected to a farcical trial where every aspect of her past is presented to the court in a dark, new light before a tragic conclusion. Once Upon a Time is Ashok Srinivasan's powerful debut novel and the successor to his prize-winning collection of short stories, Book of Common Signs. A multi-layered fairy tale for adults that comes close to some of the harshest cruelties of our times, it reconfirms the arrival of an important new writer on India's literary firmament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789351777465

Ashok Srinivasan

Ashok Srinivasan's collection of short stories, Book of Common Signs, which was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, went on to win The Hindu Prize 2014. His fiction has been compared to the works of Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Haruki Murakami.Once Upon a Time is the story of the life of a feminine Christ figure.

Book preview

1

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, long, long ago in a land far, far away there lived a doll called Brinda…that is how all my father’s bedtime stories to me invariably began.

I remember every detail of every one of those stories and the slow rise and fall of his deep voice and the cadence of his speech and the smell of coffee and cigarettes on his breath as he intoned the words to his infant daughter in her cradle; I can still feel the infinitely gentle touch of his callused and horny hands as he caressed my downy pate.

I remember a house with a well in the front yard; where the front door opens directly into a hall which in turn gives on to an enclosed, central courtyard open to the sky, whose perimeter wall has a very large lavatory attached to it at the far end of the property. This large, roofless structure stood under a curry tree whose fragrant leaves and black berries in season found their way into the commode in the corner. The house, like the other big bungalows in the region, was constructed of dark green granite, the stones blasted and cut from the local quarries in the Yercaud Hills. But my maternal grandmother Nandini, who has a remarkable memory and head for correlating dates and events, is categorical that this is a false memory. She maintains that this is an image of her sister Rukmini’s house in Salem, which I am supposed to have visited when I was less than one year old.

‘How can you remember anything from way back then?’ she asks, with a frown. ‘It must be a received or planted memory from a much later period,’ she says. ‘It is probably something you picked up from overhearing the conversation of the elders as they chatted about the old days; something that sank like a stone into you when you were unaware of it because you were abstracted or your attention was distracted.’

This minor episode seems to have set her on edge. She is convinced that it is an image that I have constructed in bits and pieces out of the gossip of the adults over the years and stashed away in an unfrequented corner where it has fermented into a pickled memory. Nandini, accompanied by her children, had left her husband and returned to her father Doraisamy’s house because her husband, Atma Nathan, had slapped her. Atma Nathan was a cruel man of few words whose response to any question was a deep-throated gargling noise or silence. Earlier, Atma Nathan was a frequent visitor to Doraisamy’s household because unlike the others, he was a moneyed man of leisure who took a genuine pleasure in watching his father-in-law’s obvious envy and discomfiture in having to entertain him. In the old days, poor Doraisamy would begin grumbling on seeing from afar the approaching figure of Nathan: ‘He has nothing to do and I don’t understand why he insists on doing it here.’

Doraisamy was always contemptuous of his lazy ways and once when somebody said of Nathan that he was a deep-type person, he had pooh-poohed it out of hand, saying, ‘His depth is only skin deep. It’s all on the surface. Deep down, he’s shallow.’ Someone later said he had heard that crack before and that Doraisamy was merely quoting someone else.

After the incident of the slap Doraisamy recalled his daughter and her children to the parental home and forbade Atma Nathan from ever visiting Nandini or the children. With him out of the picture, my mother and her brothers and sisters grew up in the midst of a crowd of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and others, but without a father, as part of an extended family. It was one of those jolly joint-family households with forgotten relatives and even nameless strangers tripping over each other in its corridors. But it must be said of Nandini that though she never returned to her husband, she never said a word against Atma Nathan until her death at a ripe old age.

I was seven months old when I first visited Salem. I remember Rukmini carried me on her hip into the central courtyard somewhere between the drumstick and curry trees one overcast day and holding me out in both her outstretched arms, she looked me in the eye and said: ‘You will never grow old. It is here, in this very house, that you will be raped by an Englishman. You will then burn with a secret fever. The world will go on as usual but not your clock. An element of incandescence will become part of your natural make-up. Sometimes contact with you or even just your aura will heal others. People will speak of you in hushed whispers. Intimacy with the rot and decay in others will increase your effulgence. Even as they emerge from the ooze of decomposition, made clean and whole, those whom you save will denounce you. Unrequited love will be your lot because your love will be a ghost and not a man like other men; he will be a composite construct of other people’s desire for you. That is why, his features will appear and disappear on other faces; just as other aspects of him like smell and touch will trouble you all your days. By the time of your death your fever will have burned both, those who have possessed and lost you and those who never had you. In brief, your life will be a series of set pieces culminating in your being publicly stoned to death which later generations will read as a supreme sacrifice and fashion for themselves from the fragments of your real and imagined life story, to satisfy their deepest needs, the image of yet another mother goddess.’

Rukmini was as fallible as any oracle and not everything she said was exactly true. However, I have memories of an even earlier period: of my elder sister Sarla’s last illness in my paternal grandfather Dev Murty’s house in Pudukotai – she was dead three years before I was born.

2

Heart’s Content

I am a woman in love. Smell me. I return to you, my mentor, my tormentor, to eat cock and crow, my tongue hanging out. My self-loathing drives me into your arms, as do my wandering mind and faltering footsteps. And I wait for you to disentangle yourself from the limbs of whoever has taken my face or whose place I am waiting to take. Whoever I sleep with when I look up, it is you I find. They say you treat me like dirt, but you and I know that it’s not true, right? You are cold, that’s all. You took over, you overtook and I return to you with the possessiveness of the dispossessed. People make up these things because they are jealous. They would have it that in matters of longing and belonging we were divided and damned. Wet and slippery, I return to you past the mudflats and the mangrove swamps, through the salt pans in the glittering arroyos and the kaolin on the riverbanks, with orchids in my hair and a bouquet of epiphytes in my hands, and console myself that I’ve travelled the distance to return to my source to give back what I’ve received or some small part of it. They were whispering something about us that I could not hear. But it does not matter. You wait for me and I wait for you to wait for me. You become me as I become you till I can’t tell man from woman or you from me. I am honestly tired of dragging this body with me all the drab days of my workaday life. Even my shadow deserts me in darkness but not this clay. Slathered in your musky sweat, I long for you in ways I myself do not understand. My every return to you makes inroads into our lives that lead us past milestones marking the measures of changing distances between our separate realities. I return to you by old and new roads, my head on fire, my feet smelling and my nose running, my very spirit leached out of me. I even survive the ablation of your entry into me, which takes me miles and eons away to other bodies thirsting for my nectar; I return to you yet again dusted with their pollen only to peer at your honeyed gaze where I too see two of myself. I no more wish to be understood.

Heart’s Content: From the asylum papers of Janak Murty.

I have later confirmed from distant relatives and ancient family friends who must have passed through Salem in those days that what my grandmother says about the house is true. But I am not lying either. I must confess that my timeline is all my own and often I sequence events and hearsay in my mind emotionally. I can see the house telescoped from garden gate and well in the front courtyard to the cavernous lavatory at the back etched clearly against the hazy backdrop of the Yercaud Hills in the far distance. My unreasonable memory of events is uncommonly precise, though I must admit that I sometimes do err in ordering them one before or after the other.

When everybody thought Sarla was recovering from a bout of chickenpox, the doctor said she could have her first bath after the fever. Though I was nowhere in the picture, I recall the scene vividly. The bath water had been set out in a copper cauldron with great clumps of neem leaves immersed in it. The servants had clambered up the neem tree and collected the leaves early that morning and carried the huge copper vessel up the staircase to the terrace and left it there in the sun to warm up. My father, Dakshina Murty, a powerfully built man, sat motionless on the porch swing with his gnarled hands lying still on the day’s newspaper in his lap as he vacantly stared into the dust-laden air, as if stunned in anticipation of the events that were yet to unfold that day. His cheeks dimpled when he smiled. One could see the pack of muscles shift under his cotton shirt when he moved his shoulders. The large frame of his exterior hid a surprisingly vulnerable and sensitive soul. My elder brother Janak was fast asleep with his thumb in his mouth on the divan in the hallway, undisturbed by the heavy human traffic of servants that continually went past him.

One of my aunts, Mythreyi, had arrived from America with her family bearing a huge fruit cake in a grand looking tin. Her seven-year-old daughter, who was not allowed into the sick room, seemed listless and disoriented. My grandfather made two trips to the sick room to peer at the ailing child through his watery gray eyes. There were small spots, the size of coins, on his face and the backs of his hands, later diagnosed as harmless liver spots; they grew in number if not in size or shape as he grew older. He was a soft-spoken man whose physique belied his kindly nature. Behind his back, he was called the gentle giant. Some time between late afternoon and early evening, as the water in the cistern upstairs was sun-warmed, my unmarried paternal aunt Chuputai began singing the first notes of the evening raga, Purva Kalyani, with her music teacher downstairs; my mother Meenakshi, followed by the two maidservants, carried my sister Sarla upstairs to bathe her. Meenakshi was a qualified nurse who married my father without ever practising her profession. Everyone in the family seemed to be steeped in music but it was Meenakshi who had a genuine appreciation of the arts – particularly the graphic arts. Just as they began bathing the child, it momentarily stiffened its limbs in a spasm and suddenly went limp. Sarla’s small heart had stopped working. This death was too much for my mother, who had only five years before held in her lap the lifeless body of her firstborn daughter, Jyoti, who had succumbed to typhoid after eight days of fever during a heat wave at the height of the drought in the ancestral village of Vayalur; it was a day made dark by clouds of locusts that obscured the sun and fell like black rain on the land.

My mother was slender, tall and beautiful. She had the stance and hips of a boy and she was not heavy breasted. Her bewitching eyes drew you in like certain unforgettable paintings with their promise of honey and freedom; they were pools of immaculate innocence. You forgot yourself as you drowned in their depths. She had a lovely smile and her eyes crinkled up when she laughed. Her habit of smiling with both her eyes and mouth was inherited intact by my elder brother Janak. She had a thick head of wavy black hair without a hint of gray in it. But after Sarla’s death, she woke up the next morning like a solarized photographic image of herself, with her hair turned completely silver white without a single strand of gray or black in it. It was a complete and shocking transformation that even the people in her own family never stopped talking about.

The maidservant, who had run downstairs to call for help when my mother had swooned, returned just in time to help the other maid physically restrain my mother from throwing herself, with the dead child clutched to her bosom, down from the terrace. In order to nurse Meenakshi back into well-being, my father made the same journey that her grandfather Doraisamy had undertaken fifteen years ago when there had been a spate of deaths in that family.

Doraisamy surrendered his post as Honorary Secretary in the Theosophical Society to a colleague and friend, Dev Murty, when three of his daughters had died within a period of two weeks. Accompanied by his inconsolable wife Chelluma and daughter Bandana, and the household cook, they travelled by road and ship to Japan, returning home to the rest of the family in India only after nearly a year. Nandini took charge of the household in her father’s absence. She was a born worrier. She spent every single hour and day in apprehension of what the next hour and day would bring. Only calamities, large or small, gave her some respite from her anxieties in the sense that she breathed easy only in the immediate aftermath of unfortunate incidents. On hearing that somebody had fallen into the well she’d say, ‘Aiyo! Poor thing; hope he’s not dead.’ If he had been drowned, she’d say, ‘Aiyo! I hope the others are safe and dry.’

In the midst of a festive crowd of happy people celebrating something or the other, Nandini would give a deep sigh, expressive of an unmentionable woe, like the wind escaping from a balloon, that would put a damper on any gathering. Once people got used to her ways, they did not let such trifles hamper their spirits, acknowledging the fact that Nandini, though forgotten, was altruistically marking her presence for the benefit of the others. After her separation from her husband she busied herself with séances, planchettes and other occult modes of contacting the dead. Whatever her deficiencies in social intercourse with those around her, she seemed to get on famously in her communion with the dead.

After their return home, my great grandmother Chelluma, who had no training, formal or otherwise, in art began painting non-stop in the Japanese manner on rolls of handmade rice paper and silk scrolls which they had brought from abroad; and Bandana, who was a licensed medical practitioner, began working in a Japanese-owned ceramic factory as a prelude to taking up