The Karuna Complex

In the silence that she held

Behind her eyes

In her fist

In her cramped chest

Karuna contained the grains of an unknowable future. She wished she could be anywhere else but here with her father sitting next to her, his head bowed down. Inside the room – walls peeling as water seeped through like unchecked anger, the corners of the floor caked in black dirt, the worn-out sofa, its stuffing oozing out like pus, the creaking fan an apology slicing through the air of the room – there was defeat, defeat that emanated from her father’s body, the remnant of a battlefield. The room stank of sweat that had been buried for a while, her breath shuddered in unexpected spasms.

‘There is nothing I can do, Gopi. Trust in God.’

The tears came without warning. Karuna watched her father dissolve into himself, an ache she could understand but not carry. She turned to the lawyer sitting opposite them, and was taken aback with the sudden comprehension of colour. The sofas were green, a light green, a summer green, the green of joy, the colour of her brother, eighteen years old.

The lawyer watched her father, quietly, and Karuna, did the same.

When Satish was four years old and she was fourteen, Karuna remembered obsessing over his cheeks. They fell out of his face like ripe fruit, and she was constantly pinching them, sometimes both together, sometimes on each side, till Satish would go crying to their mother, his cheeks red and sore. By the time he was eight, his cheeks were all but gone – and so was Karuna from the house, married to Kumaravel, working at a travel agency in a mall. She had many dreams of travel with Kumaravel, but two successive pregnancies meant she was home bound, mother to an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old at twenty-eight. Her boys did not have Satish’s cheeks. It was Karuna who was now always red and sore, hiding the violence of closed doors under her dupatta.

She held her father as they left the dank room into the equally dank and narrow corridor, the three flights of steps peppered with red stains, of men casually leaving their mark while the women had to hide it, and they exited into the crowded street, the mass of people walking, jostling, pushing – everyone had somewhere to go – and Karuna and her father allowed themselves to be swallowed up into someone else’s destiny, someone else’s reality, anything that would take them away from the debilitating, crushing image of Satish

In the news

In their neighbour’s tongues

In the wordlessness of her mother

and in Karuna’s denial and her father’s ready acceptance. It couldn’t have been Satish, it had to be him.

*

They close all the doors and windows at home, keeping the gloom in, keeping the words out. The heat at noon is oppressive – it is Madras after all, the three seasons are hot, hotter, hottest. It was May, the hottest. The winds of Agni Nakshathram, the fire of a blazing flame and the fire of a million stars, blew around them, but the darkness inside was complete. Her mother was on the floor, in the middle of the living room and her father was slumped against the wall, as far away from her mother as possible, his hand on his head. When Satish used to sit like that, groaning over his homework, hand on his head, her mother would admonish him. ‘Don’t sit like that, it will bring bad luck’.

The tv was turned off and the silence was unnerving. The tv was never off in their house. When her father brought home the new LCD flat screen tv, a gift from Palaniselvan, the local MLA – her father was his driver, dressing in his crisp white uniform every morning that her mother would have scrubbed and scrubbed with Nilam, (Karuna never understood how blue could make the white shine whiter than teeth, than the stars, than musical keys till she herself scrubbed and scrubbed her husband’s shirts, the collar proving most difficult, the stain of the day most stubborn) – the tv became the most important thing at home. It had pride of place, on a wooden table, always kept neat and tidy, no errant coconut oil bottle leaving crop circles of routine, no coffee cup or water bottle, no wallet or purse, and definitely no keys. It was the table that became the pedestal for the tv that was worshipped, the gods momentarily forgotten. Her mother would bring the arati with the tiny flame first to the tv and then to the gods, making a wide, careful arc around it, first clockwise and then anti-clockwise, because Sheila Aunty commented every day on how clear the quality of the picture was on their tv and Vamsini Aunty clucked her tongue and praised their good fortune in a way that almost always sounded like an insult and Karunakaran, the local handyman, was always zeroing in on some quality or the other of the tv – how many pixels is this? Is it Dolby surround sound? What is the colour density – and other such things her mother never understood but stood guard against like she was protecting a prodigy from prying eyes. And that tv, it was never off. They heard prayers in the morning, Tamil serials through the day, news in the evening and movies in the afternoon, music videos at noon and more serials in the night till the images swirled around them like lives they knew and loved and fed and nurtured and serial dialogues seeped into their everyday moods, and songs became the soundtrack of their day and the news dictated how to respond and movies made them live like superstars. Satish always flipped his hair like Rajnikanth and rolled the sunglasses around in his hands in impossible angles and put them on in one smooth motion and walked and laughed like the superstar of cinema much to the delight of everyone at home. Satish at five was already privileged with a tv and Karuna at fifteen was grateful. In the confines of the room she shared with Satish and her parents, Karuna would twirl in front of the mirror like her favourite actor Nayanthara, also called the Lady Superstar, and swing her hips in elaborate dance moves, imagining for a brief second that she had escaped this 1BHK existence, where everyone’s home was somehow stacked above and below and to the side, and there was no smell of detergent and fish and chicken and sambar and onion and garlic.

Karuna sat in front of the mute tv, the metal sofa with flat cushions reflected back from the blank screen, her own vacant expression, a broadcast interrupted.

*

The news channels were brutal. Four men, they screamed, one woman, they wailed, and all Karuna could think about was when did eighteen become the age for manhood. When she got pregnant at eighteen, soon after her wedding, everyone applauded her husband for being a man. ‘Bulls-eye da, Kumar!’ they joked. He was thirty. And Karuna always assumed that was the sign. You became a man when you aided procreation and kept the woman and the products of her womb strictly on a leash. The first time Karuna visited her husband at the mall – a surprise, she thought, a romantic gesture she deluded herself – he looked up surprised, yes, and took the lunch bag from her hand. He introduced her to the two other people working there, a bespectacled, bald man in front of a computer, a heavily-lipsticked girl in a tight salwar kurta with no dupatta, pink flowers on yellow bursting all over her body, and then he pulled Karuna outside, into a little alcove at the back. The travel agency called Moonshine Travels was a small, non-descript office tucked at one end of Level One of the mall next to Jockey Innerwear and opposite VIP Suitcase, both travel essentials, and once comfortably hidden from view, he gave her a resounding slap. It took Karuna aback, the fire on her cheek and the fire in his eyes as he hissed, ‘What? Already looking for action outside the house? Or are you trying to humiliate me? Get back home, you whore.’ Then, with his arm around her shoulder, he guided her out, asked her to wave to his colleagues and walked her out and into an auto. That night, his belt would leave marks of his words on her body and Karuna learnt quickly her place in the world was

In the corners

In the edges

The nail that was cut and tossed

So she echoed what everyone else was saying: ‘what was she wearing’ ‘why was she out so late’ ‘why was she alone?’ and allowed them to ricochet off the walls of her mind. When they were younger – Satish six and Karuna sixteen – they loved playing twenty questions. Satish never knew how to ask the questions and Karuna enjoyed tormenting him.

Is it a man?

No!

Is it a woman?

No!

Is it a dog?

No!

Is it a cat?

No!

And he would exhaust his questions and then go crying to their mother complaining that Karuna was cheating, and her mother would come and scold Karuna, ‘will you shrink or what if you let him win sometimes?’ and she would cajole Satish, rub his back and pat his head and kiss his cheeks and invariably give him a maaladu from the steel tiffin dubba on the high shelf in the kitchen, the ladoo made of gram flour and lentils, bound together by ghee, shaped by her mother’s hands but breaking instantly free in their mouths. Karuna thought about this sitting in her parents’ house and had the urge to go and check if there were any ladoos left.

She went into the kitchen and switched on the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Immediately, a cockroach scuttled away to the back of a shelf. The kitchen was a nearly window-less space, the walls stained with grease of the past fifteen years that they had lived in this house. This was still an upgrade, Karuna knew, and remembered, the suffocation of the tiny slum they had lived in before this house of brick and cement, the smell of the open gutter running outside their one-room home where the room changed in form depending on the time of day – a kitchen in the morning, a laundry room later with soap foam running out the front door and colouring the sewage outside white and momentarily dispelling the stench, a living room plus kitchen in the evening and a bedroom at night. She remembered the sounds of her parents that would reach her from the bed her parents shared to the floor where she slept and she was schooled by her mother to make her bedsheet a cave and disappear into it, to close her eyes and ears and not speak, and when the sounds died down, if she was still awake, she could move the sheet to below her chin. If she had fallen asleep, her mother would do it for her. The year Satish was born was the year Palaniselvan won the local elections and their family moved into this house, with more than one room and a separate kitchen space. Satish was the good luck charm, Satish was the lemon and chilli hung outside their door to ward off the evil eye, Satish was the tv on the pedestal.

When she opened the steel tiffin dubba, on the shelf above the stove, next to smaller steel containers full of spices, the outside thick with oily imprints, she found one ladoo inside, all of it infested by an army of red ants that scattered in confusion, biting her hands in panic and abandon. She dunked the whole dubba in the sink, made of stone, the colour now a greyish-black from the greyish-white it once was, and she watched in satisfaction as all the ants drowned, disappearing down the drain.

*

The doorbell was ringing. The house burst with ‘appidi podu podu podu’, the song that defined a generation of cinemagoers for its catchy tune and fast beats, but sounded jarring and incongruous like

A crow in the morning

A clock in the silence of the night

A rebellious metaphor, unwanted but demanding

and Karuna ignored it. It was five days since her brother was found in a bus to Madurai, dragged out, beaten and pushed into a police vehicle, a series of actions that were instantly captured by several people on their phones so they could share it with each other, forgetting for a moment the miseries that crowded their own lives, and Karuna saw it that evening when her husband showed it to her. She watched Satish bend and snap like a coconut tree caught in a storm, she watched him being thrown to the ground, and watched a policeman savagely break his stick on Satish’s back. Her husband smirked and said, ‘serves him right, bloody good-for-nothing upstart from the house of rapists and whores,’ and Karuna had this inexplicable urge to do the same things that the police did to Satish to her husband. She closed her eyes tight as her tears escaped, and held her hands together because she knew, even as pain ripped through her chest to see her brother like that, even as the ignominy of the moment collided with the ignominy of what was to come, she knew if she retaliated, there would be nothing left of her. She reminded herself, as images of her brother

on the ground

in the phone

in her heart

 swirled behind her tightly shut eyes, a whirlpool centred in her stomach, sucking all of her into it, she reminded herself that she was attached to her husband like a shadow and shadows cannot move by themselves.

As the doorbell continued to ring, the song cascading around the house, Karuna went into the bedroom they all once shared. Under the bed was an old, metal trunk that belonged to her grandmother who had moved from Burma to India, as did several Tamils targeted during the military coup to make Burma strictly Burmese. She had become a refugee in her place of birth, Madras, and erased by the country she had adopted. Her grandmother loved to tell the story of a nurse in the refugee camp who had helped with her varicose veins, aggravated by the days of walking, the heaviness of uncertainty, the clattering of trains and the chattering of buses. The Malayalee nurse who smelled of lavender and roses, who had kind eyes and kinder words for a beleaguered woman pregnant with her fourth child, three small boys next to her, one of whom she would eventually lose in a beach festival, never to be found again, the guilt hanging around her neck like a cross, a nurse who found her husband a job at the local mill which is what got them out of the camp with its festering wounds that even Yesunathan couldn’t erase. But her grandmother believed in Mother Mary, and believed that the nurse was sent by Mary because her name was Karuna, and Karuna meant compassion, and it was God’s compassion that found them, God’s compassion that led them out of Burma’s quietly growing civil unrest and quiet neglect of Tamils, and that is why her first granddaughter was named Karuna. Both her other boys had only sons, and only Karuna’s mother, born in a mud-house and not a tent in the camp, was named Mary. First gratitude was always to God, her grandmother would say, and only then to human beings.

Karuna pulled the trunk out and found the album she was looking for. Karuna never met her grandfather, who died in the mill, his hand cut at the machine and before the supervisor arrived from his lunch break and called for an ambulance and the ambulance arrived and he was taken to the hospital, he had already bled to death. The album was one of her grandmother’s most prized possessions. It had one stern picture from her grandparents’ wedding day, where neither of them was smiling, both glaring into the camera as if to stare the devil down, but her grandfather looked impossibly young with his mop of curly hair, clear eyes, and clean-shaven face, his jaw-line and nose sharp like a soldier’s, while her grandmother, to Karuna, looked the same, with her neatly-braided and oiled hair, her single plait adorning the side of her shoulder, her wide-forehead and big eyes, drawn out in kohl, the edges snaking out, and her nose-pin, a single stud, glowing like the tip of a far-away mountain catching the sun. Karuna loved this photograph and would tease her grandmother about how she looked like a heroine, and her grandmother would chuckle saying she could have been if she hadn’t fallen in love with her grandfather who whisked her away to Burma, a foreign land with the promise of riches that never came, and would tell Karuna, ‘but look at you, you look just like me, if only you would grow your hair long like mine’. There were few more photographs of her uncles as toddlers, including the lost brother, and some of her mother, and just one picture of Karuna the nurse. Dressed in her white sari, her dark face, cropped hair, and wide smile making her look ethereal, standing outside a white building that Karuna learnt was the local clinic. Her grandmother had seen this photo when it fell out of Karuna’s diary, while she was looking for a prescription, and her grandmother had picked it off the floor and asked Karuna if she could keep it. Behind the transparent flap that held this picture was present-day Karuna’s next favourite picture. Her grandmother had passed away much before Satish was born – she had tuberculosis that quickly took over her body, her incessant rasping coughs grating on their nerves towards the end, till the brothers said they couldn’t keep her in their houses and it became a ping-pong fight that Karuna’s mother often mediated, until her grandmother died, her coughs finally ceasing to puncture filial harmony, a year before Satish was born. It was a picture of Karuna holding a chubby one-year-old Satish. They had gone to the studio when he turned one, Karuna remembered. She was 11 and they had moved out of the lower slum to the upper slum areas, where homes still looked drab and squalid but held surprising treasures inside. A washing machine here, an iron box there, a hot water geyser here and a refrigerator there, a branded hand-me-down bag here or a foreign chocolate there (these Karuna found the most exotic and for a brief time dreamed of doing house-work for one of the rich households). Her mother was ecstatic with a separate kitchen and a separate living room and separate bedroom, but very quickly started to dream of more. So Satish’s first birthday became a grand event, with a massive billboard installed in the neighbourhood with his chubby face and Karuna dressed in a sparkly red frock – she loved the sequins shimmering in the sun – and her mother in a red silk sari, also adorned with sequins and her father in a crisp white shirt and veshti. There was a psalm from the Bible on that billboard that Karuna couldn’t remember anymore but it was something about the future and hope.

The day they went to the studio for all these pictures was a hot and humid day. Karuna remembered sweating while she was dressing up, immediately after a bath. Her mother generously poured Ponds powder all over Karuna’s face and body, till Karuna’s naturally dark skin took on a slightly whitish hue like the remnants of chalk dust on a blackboard. Then her mother drew out Karuna’s eyes with eyeliner and kohl, put bright red lipstick on her thin lips, and took out a pair of earrings, a necklace and bangles from her own pouch of imitation jewellery. She combed Karuna’s hair into a neat plait that Karuna quickly swished to the front of her shoulders, thinking of her grandmother. Then her mother shooed her out of the room and proceeded to dress herself up. Karuna waited in the living room, restless with excitement, and after half an hour, they all left in an auto. Satish was dressed in a white shirt and blue vest with black pants. It was a present from Palaniselvan and her father couldn’t stop beaming and telling every passer-by who chose to stop and listen. At the studio, the photographer fussed a little with more powder for Karuna, arranged them on two chairs – her mother on one chair holding Satish, Karuna on the chair next to her mother and their father standing behind them, his hands on both chairs, the proprietor of this particular shop. They took several solo pictures of Satish, that the photographer then put on interesting backgrounds – Satish in a green meadow, Satish on a cart, Satish in a flower garden. They also took pictures of her parents and put those against the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower and of Karuna in Disneyland, and then one picture, as an afterthought, of Karuna sitting on the chair and holding Satish. This had no fancy background, but it had Karuna looking at her brother and her brother looking at her, both of them smiling in deep recognition.

At the grand party that evening in Satish’s honour, several people came and marvelled at the arrangements of loud Tamil music blasting in the background, of biryani in large quantities, of a stage set up for photo opportunities, and of alcohol quietly and swiftly being distributed. Palaniselvan had come with his two sons, both dressed in suits, one aged six and one eight, and both ignoring everyone present. Their mother dazzled in a purple sari with real crystals on her pallu and hugged Karuna and her mother with a warmth that surprised Karuna and made her feel like she was suddenly in the spotlight.

As she held the picture in her hand, she wished she could disappear into that warmth, into that time that was

Forgiving in its innocence

Deceptive in its illusion

Hungry in its connection

and that, somehow, she could extend it to her brother, the only one still in jail, while the three others, two of Palaniselvan’s boys and their cousin, were out on bail.

*

Karuna found out about Satish’s arrest a day after the video went viral. Her parents did not call her, and she couldn’t understand why or even ask. When she went home with her husband, she had to wade through a crowd of people in the settlement – reporters with large vans parked outside, camera crew, neighbours, spectators, police. She pushed through and got to the policeman keeping the crowd out who let her in after her uncle, identified her. Karuna walked into a funeral home. Several relatives were inside, her mother was wailing, her father was on the phone, a bunch of men dressed in white-and-white milling around him. Karuna went to her father first, who distractedly patted her on the back and pointed to her mother, gesturing for her to go there instead. Karuna’s steps felt heavy as she walked to her mother, on the floor, just outside the kitchen. The mismatched polka-dot pattern on their mosaic floor hypnotised Karuna. Wasn’t it Satish who told her once that the earth was a dot in the universe? Like this akka, and he had drawn a dot on her forehead with a black marker pen. He must have been seven? She reached her mother who saw Karuna, put out her hands that Karuna instantly clasped, and started to repeat

What will I do?

What will I do?

What will I do, Karuna?

till she fell into Karuna’s embrace, the pungent smell of sweat and tears making it impossible for Karuna to cry. It was too unreal and she tried to catch snippets of what people around her were saying but it was her husband, on the way back home in an auto, who told her. It was a girl from the cousin’s college who had rejected the cousin’s proposal, and they wanted to teach her a lesson, so they called Satish to drive them around in a van, while the cousin and Palaniselvan’s two boys did unspeakable things to her at the back, before dumping her out on the road, naked. ‘Look, here’s a video of the girl on the road.’ But Karuna couldn’t look, she covered her face and burst into tears.

*

Five days later, clutching the photograph of one-year-old Satish in her hand, Karuna wondered what her brother might be thinking at that moment? Did he know that Palaniselvan came crying to their father, a Tamil serial template they were all so familiar with? They had found the girl on a Sunday, there was instant public outrage and the police arrested the boys on a Friday to make sure there was no court appearance till Monday, and Palaniselvan had come a week after the incident, on the Sunday, and Karuna tried to hold on to this chronology as a way to hold her feeble heart, goal posts that she could touch, lean on, sag against as she moved through her day. Did Satish know that a price was negotiated for his confession? That their father had refused at first, gone to several lawyers, none of whom took up the case for fear of a politician’s wrath – another Tamil serial template – and Karuna knew that her father would have to accept the offer, as today’s meeting with yet another lawyer and his green worn-out sofa also failed. It was only her father who had gone to court and to jail to see Satish, but he never said a word after. Did Satish know Karuna too was bereft? Karuna wondered what Nurse-Karuna would have done? In her grandmother’s stories, she always seemed so fluid with life and energy. Who was going to save them now?

Karuna pushed the trunk back inside and looked up at the bed. The sheets were barely slept in, but they were worn out. The colours had faded from green to yellow, the patterns had blurred from bright red roses to bleached outlines and the threads at the edges were frayed by the unforgiving inevitability of time. Peeking from under her mother’s pillow, Karuna found the Bible. Also worn out, also barely holding on to its spine. She opened the first page and found, in her mother’s neat script, the verse they had used for Satish’s first birthday. The Tamil letters swirled around

In her eyes

In her breath

In her heartbeat

and she caressed the words with her fingers, a gentleness she was surprised by, a tenderness that erupted at the pit of her stomach, an explosion she knew she couldn’t contain anymore.

‘For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.’ Jeremiah 29:11