House of Witches
Archana Nair
As Amma and I shared a berth in the Jan Shatabdi express from Kochi to Trivandrum, we tried our best to look normal and avoid each other’s eyes.
Growing up, summer meant sucking happy mangoes in Meema’s house. But I had skipped this tradition for a few years. I took up hobby classes during summer vacations and stayed at home with my father, while Amma went to Meema’s house and spent a few weeks out of formality.
But this year, my mother and I packed our bags on the very first day of our summer vacations and took the train to see Meema.
Amma was nervous beside me, biting her nails and scrolling through her phone. She taught Maths at the same school where I was in my final year. One more year, and we won’t share the same bus ride to school. I was fully prepared to move out next year, albeit a tiny hiccup.
When we reached my grandmother’s house, she hugged me and lifted me off my feet. She stood six feet tall, with no wrinkles or signs of aging other than her grey hair.
Meema lived with her best friend Cheriyamma in a small village, tucked away from the main town of Trivandrum. Though Cheriyamma lived a few houses away, she was always found at Meema’s house.
‘You have grown so tall!’ Meema put me back on my feet and scanned me. I cowered under her scrutiny. Meema always smelled of turmeric that she rubbed into her skin every night to lighten her skin colour. She wore a blouse and mundu around the house that I found too revealing to my taste.
‘You are as tall as me, Bhadra?’ Meema asked me.
‘And she will grow more,’ Cheriyamma said. She was a small woman with her hair in a grey bob and dimples on both cheeks that seemed to grow deeper with her age. She also wore a mundu and a blouse, but she covered her chest with another mundu and looked dressed up to receive us, with tiny gold earrings and a thin chain around her neck, that sparkled in the sun.
Amma looked around the house, taking everything in.
‘Your jasmines are dying,’ Amma said.
‘And you have grown so thin,’ Meema replied. She hugged Amma and I saw an exchange of tenderness that made me look away.
‘Durga, let them in first, then you start the interrogation.’ Cheriyamma said, taking the luggage from Amma’s hands.
Meema held my hands, and kept touching my hair and shoulder. I wished she would look away. All my anxiety to see her was boiling further under her direct glare. She had that power to read me with a single glance. The last I saw her was when I was ten, when she visited us in Kochi.
‘She is all shy,’ Meema muttered to Cheriyamma, like I couldn’t hear it.
Cheriyamma went to the kitchen and brought four glasses of mango juice. After I gulped down mine, she refilled mine.
‘I will take some rest, just tired from the journey.’ Amma said and left for the bedroom, leaving me alone with the sharks.
‘Her breasts are tiny, at seventeen, mine were bigger.’ Meema said.
‘Give it time, she has your genes,’ Cheriyamma said.
Both of them stared at my chest. Shocked, I collected my breasts and ran out of the room. It was true that I looked like my grandmother. My mother and I were like old photographs of her. We three were dark skinned, tall, broad, with round eyes and thick curly black hair. While Meema’s hair was greying, Amma’s was jet black and reached her bum. Mine were short and always in a pixie cut.
It was uncanny that the genes of men in our lives hadn’t touched us in any way.
*
By evening the heat of the summer drew us all outside to the verandah. I was struggling to set up a table fan while Amma cut long yellow slices of mangoes into a steel plate. I wore my oversized t-shirt over long pyjamas, Amma was in a see-through cotton nightie, and both Meema and Cheriyamma had their mundus up and folded till their knees.
My father was very particular about dressing up decently, I wasn’t allowed shorts in the house. I eyed the half-naked women with jealousy.
‘When your grandfather was alive, he wouldn’t let me step out. There were chores in the house from dusk to dawn. Anytime he saw me stretch my legs to relax, he would order me to do new things. Durga, that is not done, Durga this is not done! Durga, how dare you sit down!’ Meema began talking to me, like we had left off this conversation some years ago.
‘Mean old coot!’ Cheriyamma muttered. She was sucking on a whole mango in one hand and fanning herself with a newspaper from another. Some juice dribbled down her hand and I fought the urge to ask her to wipe it.
It was a ritual for Meema to fill me in on my grandfather’s life, who had passed away the year I was born. Some of this I already remembered from childhood.
Meema and Cheriyamma grew up together in the same neighbourhood. They were both seventh-class dropouts and married off when they were thirteen. Cheriyamma was married to a businessman from Dubai and Meema settled with her husband in her ancestral house.
‘He had no penny, everything was my father’s. All the land, all the crops, he took it all.’ Meema said.
‘The devil,’ Cheriyamma said.
After Cheriyamma’s husband had a stroke that made him invalid, they put him in a hospital and she settled back in her hometown. Of the two, Cheriyamma had landed a softer husband who had left her in peace.
‘One night when I returned home, it was way past dinner, he took a cane and beat me right there in the living room.’ Meema said. ‘Your mother tried to stop him but he grew madder. Poor child, she was twelve, what could she have done? He dragged her to the bedroom and locked her in the room door and then continued beating me black and blue.’
The mangoes turned icky in my mouth. I remembered this story, particularly one summer, when my father asked Meema to stop telling me these horrific tales of abuse. Meema went on, not leaving any details out.
‘Why didn’t you leave him?’ I asked Meema, my first conversation with her since our arrival. She looked excited to hear my voice.
‘Oh, he wasn’t that bad. He did some good things. May he rest in peace,’ she said.
‘Night night.’ Cheriyamma got up to leave.
‘You could stay,’ Amma said.
‘No no, you kids, catch up.’
The three of us stared at Cheriyamma disappear into the night. I was weary from the travel, my eyes were drooping and I started softly dreaming of my grandfather with his cane.
‘What happened, Shyama?’ Meema said very quietly.
At the sound of her voice, sleep left me mid dream. I felt my stomach drop. I kept my eyes closed, but I was sure that both of them could hear my loud heartbeat.
‘I am … pregnant.’ Amma said.
I imagined my grandmother getting up angry and picking up an axe, ready to murder my father. But what I heard was a child-like excited voice.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Don’t ask me, what, how ... I didn’t notice. It was a hectic school year and periods were always irregular and it just happened. I fainted once in school, and now the teachers know and it’s just…. O god, why me?’ She put her face in her hands and started rocking back and forth.
‘Shyama, I don’t understand!’
‘All my colleagues are laughing at me or talking behind my back.’
This was one thing that broke my mother’s heart. She hated being gossiped about. Unlike Meema, who was the talk of the town, Amma always liked to be under the radar.
‘Shyama, have you seen a doctor?’
‘It’s a perfectly healthy baby.’
‘At fifty?’
‘Forty-nine, Amma.’
Meema let out a loud laugh and I couldn’t keep my eyes shut anymore. I pretended to wake up and sat between them, looking from one to another.
‘Mahesh … doesn’t want to … keep the child … he…’ Amma trailed off.
‘We have never been lucky with men in our lives.’ Meema said. This was her answer to every problem related to my father.
‘He wants me to abort.’ Amma said.
‘Who is he to say that?’ Meema turned to me, ‘You are going to have a baby sister?’ ‘It’s a girl?’ I asked.
‘Well look at the ruckus, of course it’s a girl.’
*
My father was not like my grandfather. My father was a soft-spoken man who wore ironed, neatly tucked full sleeved blue shirts and taught Physics at Cochin University. Every time we took a walk around the expansive campus, students and teachers stopped to chat with him.
I was barely one when my grandfather passed away. Amma told me it was a sudden heart attack but Meema said he took to bed the day I was born and it was thanks to me that she could get rid of him. It was said that the morning he died he was shouting at Meema, while a nurse tended to him. His throat gave away mid-scream, and the body lay still, cutting short his abuses.
In Meema’s neighbourhood, a household is supposed to mourn for sixteen days after the head of the house dies, and the wife is supposed to mourn the longest. But Meema and Cheriyamma went shopping the week after his death. Whenever someone visited to give condolences, she would go silent and act sad, but other times she spent time with Cheriyamma silently celebrating.
I was sure Amma disapproved of this. She liked rules and traditions. She found the world of numbers very comforting where there were less surprises and everything on the left equated to things on right, unlike the differences between her and Meema.
Meema stopped visiting us in Kochi, because my father found her obscene and loud. Amma agreed that it was better for me to stop visiting Trivandrum during the summer vacations. They occupied me with swimming and writing classes while Meema slowly faded away from my life. But it was difficult to forget her large presence. Every time my father brought up issues of Meema over the dining table, I remembered being held by her as a baby and the scent of turmeric washed over me.
Now, we had a new problem to discuss over dinner. My father didn’t want a baby at fifty-five. I couldn’t imagine him tending to a toddler. My father was too important and intellectual to waste time at home. He was a busy lecturer with conferences and travel lined up six months in advance.
I heard them fighting in the bedroom.
‘I am surprised you want this, you are in line to become Head of Staff!’ He asked Amma.
‘I can’t explain the feeling, I am unable to think of termination.’ Amma said.
‘You are acting like your mother. People will laugh, Shyama.’
‘I can’t, Mahesh.’
‘Let’s act before it’s too late.’
She didn’t act on it. She kept fighting with him. They slept separately now. They stopped going to movies and office parties. The house was silent as if someone was sick.
I wasn’t sure what they were fighting about till the day she fainted at school. I found out with the rest of the school.
‘I should have told you,’ She apologised at night.
‘Will you be okay?’
‘We will go to Meema’s, it will be fine.’
I didn’t understand my mother then. How would going to Meema fix having a baby in the house? The whole situation was ridiculous. I wondered if this was my mother’s tactic to keep me in the house after school. My father had planned my future studies abroad. I had everything prepared and lined up to move out.
On top of everything, my classmates had started to tease me at school.
‘Are they loud in the bedroom? Do they disturb you at night?’
‘How did it even happen?’ My English [teacher] asked me so seriously that I wondered if she wasn’t aware of the process.
As we packed our bags for the summer vacation, I was aware that by the end of it, she would have a big belly filled with a baby.
*
The next day, Cheriyamma came home with the head of a goat. Amma and I screamed at the sight of it. Cheriyamma hid it behind her and smuggled it to the kitchen. She then washed her hands and hugged Amma.
‘You need mutton soup for strength.’ She whispered.
We were a family of vegetarians.
‘Your father would turn in his grave looking at all this meat in the kitchen. Oh he never let me eat any, that brute. May he rest in peace.’ Meema said. I was sure this wasn’t the first time she was cooking meat in the house.
It was when Meema threw the whole kitchen upside down in the coming weeks that I realised that Amma did indeed look weak. They filled the shelves with greens, fruits, meat, nuts and everything they could think of to fatten Amma up.
‘She needs strength,’ they kept repeating like a mantra.
The network was poor in Meema’s house, so the days crept really slowly. I uninstalled social media for a detox, so that I could study and work on my applications. My father texted me about colleges and I replied, pretending like there was no pregnant woman in our life.
Amma grew tired often, but she came more alive here compared to home. She and Meema fought about small things. I had never heard Amma’s raised voice at our house. In the evening, they sat together and watched Malayalam tv Soaps. This too was a new revelation, I didn’t know Amma liked tv. I wondered if Amma actually liked it here, even though she pretended to be otherwise in front of my father and me.
Cheriyamma had moved back in, calling it the need of the moment.
The heat in the house made my brain melt.
‘Amma, I need AC, I can’t think in this heat!’ I complained to Amma one day out of frustration.
‘It will start raining soon,’ Amma said, but Meema overheard us.
‘She is right, we need AC in Shyama’s room.’ Meema declared.
‘Really? ACs cause cancers, I read on WhatsApp.’ Cheriyamma said.
‘Rubbish!’
I was happy. I waited for them to come to me to call my father and arrange for it. To my surprise, the AC arrived the same evening and was installed in the next hour. Meema tipped the guy a crisp five hundred rupee note.
*
One day, they put Amma in the backseat of Cheriyamma’s old Mercedes and left me with a bunch of instructions.
‘Your lunch is in the kitchen, be careful with the stove when you heat it, water the plants, clean your room and start packing.’ Cheriyamma said.
‘Your mother’s friend, Lalitha is a gynaecologist in Trivandrum City Hospital, we have an appointment today. It’s only a thirty-minute drive.’ Meema said.
It looked weird that we were doing all this without my father. Amma and I ran everything by him before deciding on anything. Rather than thinking of my college applications, I was now worried about Cheriyamma’s reckless driving as she manoeuvred through a tiny lane.
*
Their first appointment brought in many problems. The news about pregnancy spread through the small town, and people poured into our house to see Amma.
Some thought it was finally time for a boy to arrive in this house of witches.
‘Like Shyama’s husband, fair and brown eyes. It’s high time!’
‘Is this an age to give birth? I asked you to plan the second child right after the first one, and now!’
This was my grandfather’s sister, who was probably the only one who had the power to silence Meema. She lectured Amma for hours and then packed tons of mangoes and left.
‘When will you stand up to her?’ Cheryiamma muttered.
‘She looks like him.’ Meema replied.
Others laughed and asked what the doctors were saying about this wonder. Meema closed the door to Amma’s room and told everyone to get lost.
‘I just want to see her once,’ an old, wrinkled woman slid past Meema and opened the door. Amma was changing, she stood naked in front of the old women in shock. She had a small belly protruding out now.
‘Durga! Devi!’ The old woman joined her palms and prayed. Meema was so angry that she called the woman many unholy things.
*
‘Don’t you want to go back?’ I asked Amma the night before I was leaving.
The curve of her belly had grown significantly since we arrived. My sibling had eyes, ears, and a heartbeat now, as per the internet.
‘I need her.’
I had never heard Amma say something like this. I thought we had a great life in Kochi. It hurt that Meema was the only one she needed now.
I went home the next day and resumed school the day after.
I missed my pregnant mother more than I expected. Her absence at the dining table was unsettling. My father’s lack of questions about her health made me furious.
‘Did you finish the applications?’ He tried to chat with me.
I left the table and paused all my applications. I lost the will to write how-I-would-be-great-fit for the colleges. All I kept thinking about was the baby. I tried video calling my mother, but the network was bad. Even two days of silence from my mother’s end filled me with such anxiety that I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling the baby kick inside me.
‘Can you get broadband, Meema?’ I complained to Meema on the phone. Meema was on my speed dial for three months now, a number that I had never called before.
‘Cheriyamma says the internet causes cancer.’
‘Rubbish!’
‘Pooja holidays are a month away, you come then, everything is fine here.’
I stopped speaking at school. I could hear everyone talk behind my back. I barely scraped through my mid-term exams.
When the news reached the campus of my father’s college, he was met with thumps and cheer. I learnt that some students and teachers got together and gave my father a party. I stopped eating with him.
One day I heard him call Amma. It was Meema who picked up the phone.
‘If you need anything…’ My father began to say.
‘She will always be taken good care of, I always said that to you, didn’t I?’ Meema’s voice came from the loudspeaker.
‘Can I send some money?’
‘Money that we don’t need?’
*
As the Pooja holidays neared, my anxiety hit the roof. The due date was in six days and I lost my ability to think straight.
‘Bhadra, be careful on the train,’ Meema said on the phone.
‘I think I know how to travel!’ I screamed at her.
‘The anger on this one, Bhadra Kali herself.’ I heard Cheriyamma mutter from behind.
My father offered to drop me to the station.
‘I can also come with you, I don’t mind,’ he said.
‘No, thank you.’
I never spoke to him this way. The past nine months had created a big distance between us. What was before tiny holes in the fabric of our relationship, had now torn open and relieved itself fully void.
I reached Meema’s house after a train ride, an auto ride and two instances of heavy rain.
When I saw Amma after three months, my breath left my body.
She was a bag of bones with a pregnant belly that she couldn’t stand straight with. All the anger inside me melted to a stream of tears down my cheeks.
‘Do you want to feel it kick?’ She said and her face broke into a grin.
I touched her stomach and felt the baby. It was unreal. In the afternoon, she fell asleep in my lap holding her belly.
I kept an eye on Amma like a hawk for the next few days. I prepared myself for a boy because everyone was so sure it’s a girl. Meema had picked a name as well – Bhargavi.
Amma was on painkillers. The child kept hurting her back, she could barely walk around the room. Amma was wearing the same clothes as Meema now. She wore a blouse and mundu which was hiked up till above her knees, while Meema sat on the floor gently massaging her swollen feet with hot oil. Amma’s stretched belly was in the centre of the room, round, veiny and naked.
I looked at Meema, whose blouse had few open buttons. I had a full view of her big breasts that she was waiting on me to grow.
Cheriyamma sat in the corner cutting vegetables in a similar half naked state. She didn’t wear a bra under her blouse and her thighs were exposed.
Without men in our lives, it’s like there was no need to dress. I didn’t feel the need to avert my eyes, I looked at them whole, flesh and all, amidst potions and concoctions, preparing for a baby to arrive.
*
The evening before Vijayadashami, Amma cried with so much pain that we were out of the door in fifteen minutes. Cheriyamma drove us to the hospital.
The city hospital was big, clean and white. Amma was taken straight to the ICU. Meema and Cheriyamma stood awkwardly in the corner, slightly shaken and out of place.
I took charge. I found them seats and gave them both a bottle of water.
Cheriyamma held Meema’s hands and I saw them close their eyes and pray. I paced back and forth in the corridor. My father was on his way, it would take him five more hours to reach the hospital, but I wasn’t waiting for him.
My mother’s friend who often visited us in Kochi with her family, Lalitha aunty, came out and hugged me.
‘She is okay, everything is okay, the baby is coming soon.’ She told me. She then turned to Meema and Cheriyamma and talked about the complications with the birth, they blinked at her and looked at me.
‘But she will be fine, right?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah, yeah … where is your father?’
‘Do you want something from him?’
‘No. I mean, yeah, no, I guess. Aunty has signed, and everything is okay. Okay, so I am going in. But are you all…’ Lalitha aunty said, unsure of whom to address.
‘Yeah, we will stay here, don’t worry,’ I said.
After four hours, my mother delivered Bhargavi like she promised. Meema kissed Cheriyamma on her lips and then she kissed me. All three of our faces were wet.
But then Amma was taken into an emergency operation because of a third-degree vaginal tear.
Meema broke down.
She started sobbing and losing breath. A nurse put her on an oxygen cylinder and we had to scuffle to find a bed for her. I kept running between two rooms in my house slippers.
‘I think I should be near the ICU with Shyama, and you watch Meema. They may need an adult there.’ Cheriyamma said.
‘You are better here. I will manage that?’ I asked her. Cheriyamma looked relieved and took a chair next to Meema.
I kissed Meema’s head and remembered how my birth had sent her husband to the bed. A fear rose in me that I tried to shake off by pacing more aggressively outside the ICU.
The night passed. At the break of dawn, Lalitha aunty came out and said that the surgery went well and my mother was okay now.
‘She has to be admitted for a few days and needs to be monitored up close, but I am here. It will be okay. Her vitals are picking back up.’
I rushed to tell Meema the news and she started crying again. They hooked her back on the oxygen cylinder and gave her an injection to calm her down.
‘She is dramatic, don’t mind her,’ Cheriyamma said.
When my father arrived, I saw that his hair wasn’t combed well. He had left in his night suit. It made me feel better that he didn’t take time to dress. He exchanged a long conversation with Lalitha Aunty and then he took the seat next to me.
‘I tried my best to be early, just too many hurdles on the way.’
‘We were doing fine actually,’ I said, which pained him.
Lalitha Aunty put Bhargavi in his arms and for the first time I looked at her.
‘Born on Vijayadashami like Durga! Fighting and kicking!’ Lalitha Aunty said.’ ‘Like Meema,’ I said.
Bhargavi was dark skinned like the three of us, with a head full of black curls. She opened her eyes a tiny bit to look at me and broke into a loud cry.
