A Light

A short story by Sindya Bhanoo
Photographs by Li Anne Liew

In my childhood we lived in a house without electricity. 

We used two kerosene lamps to light our whole home. My brother and I called the bigger lamp Gandhi, and the smaller one Nehru. Our father started the joke, naming them after our two most prominent and revered anti-colonial nationalists, and the two of us kept it up. For our modest space, the lamps were sufficient. We had only two rooms: a kitchen and a living room-cum-bedroom that we all shared. The loo was outdoors. 

I was the little sister, so I took care of the smaller vilakku. Every evening I cleaned the glass and checked whether there was enough kerosene in it. My brother, whom I called Anna though he was only two years elder to me, took care of the larger vilakku. It was 1944 and independence was not yet upon us. The British had modernized and lit the country as they saw fit, creating an electric constellation using the largest of our Indian cities. Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad. Mysore before Bombay because of Lord Sankey’s fondness for the Mysore Maharaj. I had seen electricity in relatives’ homes in Madras and Bangalore, so I knew it was possible, but I did not see it as a dependable source of light. A resource that you cannot access is not one that you can count on. In any case, even my city cousins complained of frequent cuts. There was power one moment and it was gone the next. 

In our small home in our very small town, our lamplight was guaranteed, as long as we fed it with kerosene and cared for it. What is the value in uncertainty? That is what I used to tell myself. Of course, later in life my views changed. Those who have power are the ones who keep others in the dark.

• • • •

My childhood was a happy one, though my parents’ marriage was not. Both worked in healthcare; Appa did clerical work in the hospital and Amma was a nurse. Theirs was an unusual marriage because before she married Appa, Amma had been married to someone else. Her first husband died. I did not know of that first marriage until I was a young mother myself; an aunt mentioned it to me and then it was never spoken of again. I still do not know the exact circumstances of Amma’s first husband’s death.

In India, back then, a widow was stripped of color and jewelry, forced to wear white and forbidden from physical contact. She went from being a she to an it, isolated and devoid of value. This would have been my mother’s fate, had my father not proposed to marry her. 

He was not a perfect man. He drank. There was another woman. Sometimes, Amma would shout at him, her body pulsing with anger. She was not meek, my mother. Surely the neighbors heard. Once, she flung a stainless-steel pot through the open kitchen and it hit the metal door of our loo, destroying the pot handle and denting the door. 

Another time, when Appa returned home late, breath heavy with the sour smell of liquor, she told him to sleep outside.

“Wash the stench of that whore off yourself in the morning,” she shouted. “Then enter the house.” 

Even then, as she spoke to him in pain and fury, she used the formal you, addressing him with respect. Her disgust could not break the deference the world expected of her. 

 I lay still while she said those words, feigning sleep, but I heard everything. 

Years later, on the day of my marriage, she pressed her palm upon my head and wished me a happy married life. It was a rare moment of tenderness between mother and daughter, and it never happened again. “You must choose happiness, even if it does not choose you,” she whispered into my ear. I did not ask was what her happiness was, where it lived, but perhaps she simply wished for me what she did not have.

• • • •

Appa may have been a bad husband, but he was a good father. He played with us. He made us laugh. He was fond of classical music. Once a year, he took Anna and me to Madras by train, where we stayed with our aunt and attended the big music festival. It was exhilarating to be in his company, to attend a string of kutcheris where we watched the greatest artists of the South sing and play tambura and mridangam and veena and violin. We would spread two bedsheets out at the venues, equipped with a woven plastic basket filled with water bottles and packets of lemon rice wrapped in banana leaves. We listened for hours, my father nodding his head and turning his hand to the beats.

Appa was a part-time employee at the hospital, so he had more time for us than Amma did. She never came to Madras for the music festival because she would lose two weeks’ worth of wages and we could not afford that. 

When I was twelve, Appa bought a Phillips valve radio in Madras and brought it home. There was only one station—All India Radio—but we tuned in without fail every evening at 6 p.m. to listen to Tamil serials. On Saturday mornings, there was classical music, and on Sundays, film songs and Papa Malar, a children’s program. We loved Appa for that radio, for bringing magic into our home. It was Amma’s nursing money that he used to purchase it, but we did not understand that. He was the one who went to Madras! He was the one who brought it home for us

Meanwhile, Amma worked long shifts, waking up early to make breakfast and lunch, preparing supper at the end of her very tiring day. 

I did not know the identity of the woman my mother shouted about. I did not wonder if she was beautiful—no one was more beautiful than my mother—but I did wonder whether that woman listened to Appa’s jokes and, like me, found them funny. My mother, after a day at the hospital changing bedpans and cleaning wounds, hardly had energy to speak, let alone laugh. 

My father often said he would send me to medical school, if I did well in my studies. Maybe it was because my parents worked in healthcare, and because doctors were the most important people at the hospital, the top of a long chain that began with the cleaners, shadows who silently moved from room to room with their grass brooms and dustpans made of palm tree leaves. 

“Why not send Anna to medical school?” I would ask my father. 

“He may go, if he’d like,” my father would say. “But you must.” 

There was only one lady doctor at the hospital, a stern-looking woman with round black spectacles named Dr. Roy. My mother did not like her, not least because my father, in plotting my future in medical school, often complimented Dr. Roy. 

“I will send you to Calcutta Medical College, just like Dr. Roy,” Appa said. “Then no man will be able to challenge you.” 

“Who can say your daughter will have that kind of choice?” my mother called out from the kitchen. I could hear the displeasure in her voice. She was mixing chapati dough, the side of her bowl angrily hitting the hard mud floor. “We women make do with what we are given.”

My mother said Dr. Roy acted like a man, that Dr. Roy treated the nurses badly, that Dr. Roy treated her badly. 

“That woman thinks she is better than the rest of us,” Amma said. “Show me a doctor who does not need a nurse.” 

My father’s face softened. He could see what he had done. “Jayanthi, your work is important.” 

My mother could not be appeased, but she also could not deny that despite his faults, Appa believed in female emancipation. He had married my mother, rescued her from a lifetime of being treated worse than a harijan. He admired Dr. Roy for doing what everyone else in India thought was man’s work. He wanted his own daughter to not only be educated, but to be more educated than he was. 

Dr. Roy was unmarried. She lived in one of the bungalows reserved for doctors, with a small dog resembling a puffy lion as her only companion. Occasionally, I’d see her from afar, out walking with her dog. We lived in the quarters designated for hospital employees and could see her bungalow, with white columns and a red roof, from our house. I liked to sit on our front steps at dusk, away from the light of our two kerosene lamps, watching Dr. Roy’s house to see her electric lights turn on when it went dark outside. In one instant the whole of her house lit up, creating a warm glow atop the hill. Sometimes I’d see her in a window upstairs, a shadow moving across the room. In the mornings her boxy figure emerged from the house, long white coat already on, sari visible below knee level. She had a white Ambassador. Unlike the male doctors, who used drivers, she drove her car herself. 

In all the years of my childhood, I only met her once, when Anna’s friend Subramanium was injured. 

After school one day, Anna, Subramanium, and their other friend George were playing field hockey outside our house. Amma and Appa were both at the hospital working. I was sitting on the front steps, reading a book of Tamil stories, snatched from Appa’s collection. Whenever I could, I took a book out from his shelf to read, always careful to put it back the way I found it before he returned from work. 

Anna and his friends were loud and boisterous, their sticks hitting hard against one another, but I was completely lost in my book. I was reading Kalki’s Thyaga Bhoomi, about the beautiful Savitri, a woman ill-treated by her husband and in-laws who escapes it all and ultimately becomes rich. I was at the thrilling scene when Savitri chooses not to spend her wealth on herself but to become a freedom fighter and devote her life to the fight for independence when I heard Subramanium howl in pain. I looked up and saw blood gushing from his forehead. George, who was fat and clumsy, had accidentally swung his stick too high, right into Subramanium’s face.  My brother and George carried Subramanium one kilometre to the hospital, and I ran ahead to announce they were coming. 

Luckily, it was my mother who was on operation theatre duty that day. She did the stitching quickly, under the brightest light I’d ever seen, a floor lamp with a bulb hanging from a golden dome. It cast a light on her face too, leaving one side bright and the other dark. Her waist-length hair was neatly braided into a single plait. 

I stood by with Anna and George. The whole time my mother did the stitching, she kept talking, asking Subramanium how his studies were going, whether his sister was getting on well after marriage. It must have taken her thirty minutes, but she did not stop stitching or talking. She told Subramanium what she was preparing for breakfast the following day, how the hospital was getting a new wing, how the windows would be larger in the rooms there so that patients could enjoy more sunlight. She went on and on, and before we or Subramanium knew it, she was done. I watched her in admiration, in awe of her brilliance and her beauty. 

Afterwards, Dr. Roy came in to follow up. Up close, I saw that I had been wrong about her looks. She was not stern-looking. It was only her black glasses that gave that impression from afar. She was, and there is no other way to put it, handsome. She had beautiful, creamy, unblemished skin, just like my mother, but unlike Amma, she did not have a petite or delicate frame. She was tall and broad shouldered. Square-jawed. She had heft. 

She completely ignored Amma. 

She went directly to Subramanium and inspected the stitches. My mother was out of the light then, and Dr. Roy was in it. 

“Fine,” Dr. Roy said. Who she was speaking to, I had no idea, but I presumed she was telling my mother, in a single word, that the work was acceptable. 

Subramanium was from a lower-income family. His father was a shoe cobbler. Although all three boys were dressed in identical school uniforms, all three of them filthy from playing outside, somehow Dr. Roy ascertained that Subramanium was not wealthy. I think it must have been that Subramanium’s clothes fit a little too tight on him, or perhaps they were more faded, worn out. 

“There will be no fees,” Dr. Roy said to Subramanium. Her voice was warmer now, caring. “You will be fine. But promise me you will come back in two weeks so we can make sure it has properly healed.” 

He nodded and she repeated herself. “Tell your parents that there will be no fees.”

She left the room as she had entered it, without acknowledging my mother. That was when I learnt that a person can be both kind and cruel, sometimes in the same moment. 

When the boys and I returned home, I went back to Savitri’s story, which ended with her husband, despicable as he was, joining her in the independence movement.

• • • •

In the spring of my thirteenth year, Amma went to Madras for three nights to attend a special nurse training at Apollo Hospital. She was head nurse by then, making triple what my father earned at his clerical job. She was proud of supporting our family, but prouder still of the work she did. She spoke for weeks about the upcoming training in Madras, where she would learn a new method of suturing that left less of a scar. 

For the three days she was gone, my father did not sleep in our house, nor did he tell us where he slept. He came home in the mornings, long after the lights from the vilakkus were out, in a good mood, whistling film tunes. We knew not to ask him where he’d been. I was familiar with my mother’s outcries by then, and assumed he was with the woman my mother referred to as “that whore.” I pictured the woman as low caste, someone who lived in the slums down the hill. Someone beautiful but poor, like the woman who came by with vegetables each afternoon and called out “Kai!” to my father. My father always hurried out when this woman came. He never negotiated with her and, to my mother’s dismay, often paid two rupees extra for the brinjal, three extra for the long beans.

“It is not market price,” my mother would say, when she came home from work, and found out what he had paid. 

“Let it be, she’s a poor girl.” 

On the last morning before Amma returned from Mumbai, I could not sleep. I went outside early, just as the sun was rising, and saw a figure emerge from Dr. Roy’s house. A man dressed in a sleeveless white bunyan and khaki pants, walking quickly. Likely one her servants, I thought. Perhaps her dog had escaped, and he had been sent to get it. 

But the figure was coming towards me, gradually getting larger. I began to make out the details: the soft hunch of the shoulders, the squareness of the head. It was my father.

• • • •

I did not become a doctor. 

My father married me off young. A rich family made a proposal when I was just eighteen, and my father thought it was the best decision, the best way for me to have an easy, comfortable life. 

The family owned a string of businesses in Tiruttani: a tobacco factory, a glass factory, two movie theatres, a petrol bunk. I would never be left wanting, my father said. Was that not the point of becoming a doctor in the first place, to have security?

The one thing he negotiated on my behalf was that I would continue with my studies after marriage. I was to finish my last year of secondary school and go to college. My future in-laws and my future husband, who had dreams of higher studies himself, agreed. I would go on to study botany, a degree for the showcase, something for display but not for use.

In the months after my engagement and before my marriage, my father did not mention medical school a single time. A door of opportunity had opened, and though it was not the one he first imagined for me, he sent me through it with love and good wishes.

As for me, I thought it best not to follow in Dr. Roy’s footsteps. If education, power, and status might turn me into what she was, then I was better off without. I would have something neither Dr. Roy nor my mother had: a stable, pleasant future with a husband who could provide for me. 

When power finally came to my parent’s home, it was too late to impress me. I had daily electricity in Tiruttani, both at my college and in the home of my in-laws, where I lived with my husband.  I quickly came to see electric power not as something we were lucky to get, but something we’d been unlucky to live without for so very long. 

• • • •

India became her own nation when I was fifteen, three years before my marriage. Those leaders that my father loved so much—Gandhi and Nehru—helped bring us to that day of freedom. Gandhi left the nation dim when he was assassinated. Appa sobbed for days. We tuned into All India Radio that first day, to hear Nehru’s voice boom through the speakers. “That light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it,” Nehru said. “For that light represented the living truth.”  

Amma was home that day; all non-essential parts of the hospital were shut down because of the tragedy. She stood behind my father as we listened. 

“Light is not the same as truth,” she said. My father was lost in his own thoughts. 

Amma did not sob, though she, too, was heartbroken.  She had felt and seen too much by then, at home and in the hospital. “The Mahatma is gone,” she said. “But the rest of us are still here. Together we may shine as bright as he.”  

I have children of my own now, and they are old enough to have children of their own. I told them this story from my childhood, about those who had light and those who did not, about the importance of fighting for what you do not have, or what someone might try to take away, or keep away. About the kerosene lamps we named after our only hope.

“There is no shame,” I told my children when they fell short in this or that, or when someone did not treat them with dignity. “No shame in finding a way to get the electric lights that others have. Otherwise, you are the one left behind, working hard day after day, changing bedpans in the dark.”

• • • •

My mother died before my father. They lived, by then, in a house of their own that was seven kilometres from the hospital, equipped with light and, by the end, internet. I forced them to install the internet so they could see my children, both of whom moved to America for their studies. 

After my mother’s death, my father lived alone until the age of 85, when he had a heart attack. I was visiting my son in Pittsburgh and flew back to India right away. I was with him when he passed. When everything was done and settled, my father’s ashes scattered in the Cauvery, my cousins long returned to their city flats, my white-haired Anna back in his home in Salem, I sat on the front steps alone at dusk, hugging my knees like a child. I was an orphan—it is an unimaginable feeling at any age. It drains you of both life and joy and offers no promise that either will ever return. The power was out that evening, and I had only the small flashlight that my son had slipped into the front zip of my suitcase as I was leaving. I turned it on and shone it in the direction of the road. 

I saw a someone making her way towards me. She had a slight limp in her right leg, and her hair was gray, but I was struck by the handsome, majestic beauty, same as she had in her youth. How did I know it was her? I knew. And I knew, though I had never cornered my father, that they’d kept it up all these years, before and after my mother died. They’d kept it up, and she stayed somewhere nearby. 

I was an old woman then, observing an even older woman. I no longer believe she was as cruel as I thought she was in my childhood. She was a woman alone in a great big house, in a great big world run by men who thought they were better than her. She wished for company. Maybe my father also felt alone, in his small, crowded house where my industrious mother did not appreciate his poetic intellect.

I could have chosen differently that evening, sitting on the porch of my deceased father’s home. I could have chosen to speak to his mistress, to ask what he saw in her and she in him. I could have asked, How did you find it in you to do what you did to my mother, to us? I could have found out the sort of man my father was when he was with her. Someone different, someone satisfied. But what would have been the point? All that would have helped her, allowed her to spill her life and sorrow out to me. I did not want it, would not allow it. 

Before she could get too close, before she could call out my name—before, I suppose, I could truly confirm it was her—I turned my son’s flashlight off with a gentle push of a button. Those who have light, I tell my children, I will tell my grandchildren, can also make it dark. I turned it off, went inside, and locked the door. 

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