4
Kimi
A long time ago
A long time ago
Mamma was worried. Which was like saying the bitter gourd was bitter. It was, to use one of Mamma’s own phrases, stating the obvious, and to throw in one of Papa’s phrases, just her natural state. Mamma always worried.
Kimi had come home from school and sneezed. Three times. Usually, one sneeze was bad enough, but sneezing three times around Mamma was inviting the Big Box.
Mamma’s father had been a raj-vaidya, a grand master of ayurvedic medicine. Kimi had never met her grandfather. He had died just after Mamma had become pregnant with Kimi. It was a story Mamma could never tell without needing to dab her nose and eyes with her embroidered handkerchief. But then the story of Kimi’s birth was one no one ever seemed capable of telling without tears. The part of the story Kimi had not been able to piece together (because stories like this did not come with a question-answer section) was what her birth had to do with her grandfather’s death. All Kimi knew was that the two things were related.
The Big Box was her grandfather’s legacy to Mamma. The servants weren’t allowed to touch the leather-bound trunk with its two shiny brass latches. Iron locks hung by the latches, and the keys always hung by Mamma’s waist along with the cluster of keys she tucked into her sari with a large silver key hook. The hook with its bells and embossed statue of Saraswati the goddess of knowledge had been in Mamma’s family for centuries, mothers passing it down to daughters from generation to generation. According to Mamma this was the rarest of things, because most family treasures were passed down from father to son or mother to daughter-in-law.
Kimi loved to run her fingers over the timeworn silver when she hugged Mamma. No matter how hot it got, the key hook remained cool to the touch. When Mamma moved through the house, the tinkling sound of the bells mixed with the muted jangle of the keys. It was possibly Kimi’s favorite sound in all the world.
Inside the Big Box were all the herbs and remedies her grandfather had mixed into potions that could cure everything from a common cold to broken bones. Kimi loved to hear the stories of her grandfather’s miraculous potions. He had once saved the prime minister from an attempt to poison him by identifying and delivering an antidote after one look in the minister’s eyes. He had healed the warts on a grand maestro’s vocal cords and given him back his singing voice. Mamma had told Kimi that she could walk into any of the maestro’s concerts anywhere in the world and tell him whose granddaughter she was and she would be invited into the concert for free.
He was legendary, her grandfather. But he wasn’t a miracle worker, as Mamma made sure Kimi knew. He was a scientist. He could identify a plant not just by sight or touch alone but also by smell, even if the plant had been plucked years ago. He was said to have had a hundred thousand vials in his storerooms before his dispensary in Ahmednagar had been burned down during one of the communal riots. Fortunately, her grandfather had been traveling to Pune with the Big Box at the time to treat the dean of the Film Institute. It was the only reason his most precious remedies, or at least remnants of the most vital ones, had survived. Her grandfather had left the box to Mamma along with guidelines for formulations and their usage.
Three sneezes meant Kimi’s grandfather’s genius was in order and out came the Big Box. The first question Mamma asked Sarika tai, Kimi’s nanny, was if any of the servants had been sick recently.
Apparently, mali kaka had shown some signs of sniffling. Not that the gardener ever came inside the house. Kimi wasn’t about to tell Mamma that she had helped mali kaka pluck the flowers for Mamma’s evening prayers yesterday.
Mamma leaned over the open trunk, extracted one measure of gray powder from a jar with a silver spoon, and placed it in the glass Sarika was holding out. “Twenty milliliters of water and three drops of coconut oil,” she said, and then to Kimi, “up to bed.”
Kimi groaned. Not that anyone heard it. Kimi made sure no one ever heard her groaning. But she had an entire dictionary of inner groans tucked away. First, she hated coconut oil. It made her gag. But Mamma seemed to believe it was the cure for all evil. She had Sarika tai massage coconut oil into Kimi’s hair every Sunday and then wash her hair out with scalding-hot water. Anyone who saw Kimi and her hip-length hair seemed to remark upon it, so Kimi knew that Mamma’s remedies were not entirely without merit. Still, her grandfather’s potions were so vile tasting it wasn’t a miracle that the germs all died. They must choke to death from the taste alone.
Mamma stood and Kimi wrapped her arms around her. Her mother smelled as beautiful as she looked, like the tuberoses mali kaka planted in endless rows along the front wall of the garden.
“Were you careful in school?” she asked, stroking Kimi’s hair. “Have you been using your disinfectant gel?”
Kimi nodded. She was feeling a little achy in the head, so having Mamma stroke her head felt really good.
“Do you want me to come up and tuck you in?” But she was leading Kimi up the stairs even before she responded.
“Papa had promised to pick me up from school, but he never came. Did he have to leave town again?” Kimi asked as her mother tucked her quilt tightly around her. She really badly wanted to sneeze again, but she willed herself not to.
Mamma’s face paled. She had been a little distracted all afternoon. Kimi had thought it was because of her sneezes. Apparently, it wasn’t. Usually, Mamma’s face brightened at the mention of Papa. Sarika tai had once slipped up and told Kimi about Mamma and Papa’s grand love story that all of India had been envious of. This was discomforting, because, eww! But still, Mamma never looked like this when Papa was mentioned.
“He’ll be home soon. You rest up. He’ll need us to cheer him up when he comes home today. He’s had a horrid day.” Mamma closed her own eyes, indicating that Kimi should close her eyes too.
Sometimes Kimi wished Mamma would treat her like she was almost twelve and not five. She had a million questions. What did that even mean? What was a horrid day for Papa? From what Sarika tai told her, Papa got to be a king at his job. From what Papa told Kimi, he was a servant of the people. When she had asked him how he could be both those things, he had laughed and said, “In a democracy the public is the king, and the rulers the servants.”
Mamma said that meant he was a good man.
Despite the fact that Mamma’s head massages were always so comforting that Kimi’s eyes closed of their own will, she could not fall asleep. Not when she knew that something was wrong with Papa. Not when Mamma looked this worried. Not when her worry wasn’t about Kimi this time, but about Papa.
When she was convinced Kimi was asleep, Mamma dropped a kiss on Kimi’s forehead and left the room. There was no spring in her step, no bounce in her bobbed hair.
Why hadn’t Kimi tried harder not to sneeze? She knew this wasn’t about her, but it might have helped. She was used to the worry being focused on her. She knew how to handle that, had learned to work around it. Because Papa always said we had to know how to clean up our own messes. And her parents’ worry was entirely a mess of Kimi’s making.
Even her name was a reminder of it. Kimi was short for Kimaya, which means “miracle” in Sanskrit. She was her parents’ miracle, born after twelve years of penance. Prayers, fasting, denial, donation, every possible plea to every possible god. There was a corner outside the Babulnath temple named after Kimi—The Surviving Patil Baby Corner—where the homeless gathered every Thursday knowing there would be food. Her parents begging for blessings from the city’s beggars.
How many times had Kimi heard it? The saga of her parents’ pilgrimages around the world—from being blessed by the Pope, to being kissed by the Dalai Lama, to touching the holy wall of Babylon, to having laid their foreheads at Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to having hiked barefoot up to Vaishno Devi, and having stood through raging storms surrounded by the churning ocean at Haji Ali. In their desperation, her parents had found the ideal of the secularism those public service announcements kept preaching on TV. Any god. All religions. As long as they got what they wanted.
Maybe they had struck upon something, because it worked. Mamma became pregnant again. Kimi had heard Sarika tai call it her mother’s seven months of hell. A pregnancy spent waiting, barely moving, with a literal stitch sewed into her to keep Kimi inside until it was safe for her to be born.
“Your mother lost seven babies before you were born,” Papa had told her the first time she had thrown a tantrum because Mamma had refused to let her out of the house for a week after she coughed a few times. “You’re her miracle, so she wants to take care of you enough for all your brothers and sisters who are gone.”
It was the last time Kimi had ever thrown a tantrum.
Kimi didn’t move until she heard the car pull through the gates.
Usually, when Papa came home the house buzzed with anticipation before the doorbell rang. He would burst into the house and even before taking off his shoes he would bellow for Kimi and she’d fly down the stairs and into his arms.
She waited for the buzz of energy, the clang of the bell, the bellow of, “Where’s my princess?”
Nothing.
She slipped out her door and down the corridor.
Papa was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase by himself. None of the servants had dared to come anywhere near him. Mamma was nowhere to be seen either. Kimi tiptoed down the stairs and sank down next to him.
His quick intake of breath before he wiped his face on his sleeve was the only reason she knew that he had been crying. She sidled into him and he wrapped an arm around her. Until that day, Kimi had never seen her father cry. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time she would see him wet eyed with despair. All the fear she saw in his eyes that day when he pulled her close would appear there over and over again. But neither of them knew that then.
“I don’t think I could ever bear to lose you,” he said in a voice she had never before heard from him.
The only meaning the words lose you held for her then was her wandering off at the Mount Mary fair. Which could never happen because her mother never let her get out of the car when they drove past the rides and the stalls and went straight to the church where the parish priest led them right into the chapel through a back entrance so they could light their candles during the holy fair week. Kimi only ever saw the crowds from the car.
“I’ll be careful never to get lost, Papa,” she said, and he laughed through those tears and it was the scariest thing Kimi had ever seen.
“Sometimes it’s not in our hands,” he said and then went quiet for many minutes.
“Are you not feeling well?” she asked because the silence was starting to terrify her.
“I was just at the cremation of a policeman who did a very brave thing,” he said in that same unrecognizable voice.
Kimi squeezed in tighter.
“If not for his bravery, I may not have come home today.”
Kimi felt tears start to creep up her throat. Papa had to come home. What would Mamma and she do if he didn’t?
“The man has three children,” Papa said, as though he couldn’t believe that he was saying those words. There was a dull tremor in his voice, as though he had to force the words out, as though in telling her this he had just learned it himself.
“Who will take care of them?” The horror of losing Papa suddenly felt too real and Kimi wrapped her arms around him.
Papa seemed to feel her distress because he pulled away and met her gaze. He opened his mouth, straightened up, but he, who always took care of everything, couldn’t seem to form a response. He wiped his eyes on his shoulder again.
“You have to,” she said, feeling some sort of wild urgency. “You have to take care of them, Papa.”
The way he was looking at her changed. She had always seen delight in her father’s eyes; this was the first time she saw something she’d never seen before. It would be years before she knew that it was respect. He looked at her as though she had somehow saved him.
Years later, that look would become practically the only way he looked at her. Every time she fought for her life and won she would remember that this had been the first time.
Mamma hated when people ate or drank anywhere in the house except for the dining areas, but she brought Papa a cup of tea and sat down next to him on the stairs.
He took a sip. “Kimi thinks I should take care of the Savant kids.”
Mamma studied Papa, and one of those looks passed between them, the kind they passed around anytime she said or did anything that amused them, or made them proud, or worried them. Kimi thought of it as their parent code language. Usually, it involved Papa trying to convince Mamma to let Kimi do something. She wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t one of those times.
Mamma then turned her gaze on Kimi, reaching across Papa to wipe her cheek. “And how do you expect him to do that?”
Kimi looked away from her mother and into her father’s eyes, because she knew he was listening, really listening, and she had a sense that he was asking for her help. “You have to do everything for them that you do for me. Everything their papa would have done. You have to.”
He plucked the handkerchief Mamma was holding out to him and dried his eyes again, then he dabbed Kimi’s cheeks. “You are my pride and joy,” he said, and she knew that he would do everything he could for that policeman’s children.