Mai left only those ashes.

And us.

We saved the ashes away from others’ sight, only for us. We kept them private, between us on our roof, and kept looking at them with uncomprehending eyes.

This is where it all was, all that we did not understand and could not understand, which was not part of us, which was apart, which was something beyond us.

Someone beyond us.

Recognition of whom we had erased in our pursuit of recognising ourselves.

And now we were in agony.

The house became a ruin. No-one was left to look after that huge ancestral house and that farming and garden. We had of course broken our ties with it long ago. Whatever was left was broken for us by mai, by her betrayal at the crucial moment.

She had let us down constantly.

We had become two from being one for quite some time. Now we split up even further, into many different ‘I’s’. One might talk cleverly with the lawyer, vakil uncle, about the property. The other might get entangled ghost-like with the cobwebs in the ventilators.

There was talk of selling the house. Bua was prepared to take the other shares together with her own. Wills were being read and pondered. Paintings, carpets, spittoons, jars, all kinds of things were being packed up.

Overhead spread a vast, overcast sky. Down below was a silent darkness.

We would forget to walk one moment, to stand still the next.

Very strange things came to mind. Seeing the karonda pickles in a jar, to scold that I had not been told how to make them. Or take down a photograph to look at it as if for the first time – mai and babu on a scooter, the husband laughing, the wife smiling shyly, looking at each other.

When? When? One would get dizzy wondering. Mai smiling at babu? Why? What did they have between them? Where were we? Were we not between them?

What had happened to the house? It had suddenly started whispering. Look at this. It was right here but have you seen it?

The taste of the food changed. The smell of the house changed.

The place, symbol of our frustration, was calling out to us sadly. Its call was creating a turmoil inside us. Our past was spread out on all sides in that house. It stared back at us, sometimes with dry, sunken eyes, sometimes with soft, loving ones. The stare of these helpless, imploring eyes tortured us.

The house was weighed down by this torture, this sadness. And right in the middle of it, like sparklers, was scattered our laughter. If our oppressed childhood had been spent there, so too had our joyous childhood. How could oppression ever be complete? If we had seemed to be silenced from the outside, was it that all the waves inside had been stopped as well? Our voices rising in song in the middle of this oppression had nothing repressed about them at all.

Pitilessly, Diwali came that year as well. Mai used to make camphor kajal in a little clay pot. Bua did the Lakshmi puja and lit one single lamp to put on the doorstep to allow all the ancestors of the house, from many generations past, to enter comfortably.

We, standing on the dark roof above, saw them enter the house. From up there in the dark, we listened to their mystery-filled narratives.

Bua and phupha tried one last time. ‘We’ll take charge of Sunaina. We must fix up her marriage somewhere.’

Subodh stayed calm.

No-one had the right any longer to take charge of me.

Many days must have passed. But not too many because vakil uncle was still coming and the talk about the house was going on.

Everything was going on without letting up.

Flowers were everywhere. It must have been February. The breeze would bring leaves fluttering down. If we sat in the sun during the day we would feel hot. If we sat inside we felt like wearing socks.

Hardeyi was cooking. The fields had spinach, beetroot, beans, carrots, peas, cabbage, everything. The jackfruit tree had baby jackfruit. The bottlebrush was blooming. Mai would put those flowers in the vase in the sitting room and champa and mogra flowers in a heap on a platter. Guavas were weighing down trees. The vendor regularly brought around fresh green peas for us.

It got dark early. Subodh and I went to bed early too. The warmth of the quilts was lovely. Lying in them we would listen to the noise of the city. It was the time for weddings. Tuneless bands kept playing late into the night. The whistle of the train sounded in the morning, then the restless sound of wheels on the bridge.

Evenings brought a strange feeling. Vakil uncle wore very thick glasses and from a particular angle, the pupils of his eyes would become like two stones staring from each side of his nose.

The air had sharp, cold bristles. We closed the windows and curtains and huddled. We could see vakil uncle depart from there – he in front and the chaukidar behind shining a strong torch on his legs. Which made his trousers transparent and the outlines of his legs become red and fuzzy stripes like the burning elements of a heater.

We were depressed. It seemed that nothing would work out. It seemed as if we were neither there nor anywhere else. It seemed as if the whole revolt had fizzled out. We felt that death could hardly know itself, only life really knew death. That mai did not know at all, only we knew. And we also felt that it was useless to try to break and mend everything around; why did we not peacefully accept things?

Subodh, lying on one side, would say something and his voice seemed to be coming from a faraway, closed cave. As if he was speaking with his mouth on a clay pot.

Subodh happened to break a pot around that time. Hardeyi was bringing water. Subodh jumped up to take it from her hands when there was a loud noise and the pot splintered.

Subodh and Hardeyi picked up the pieces and wiped the floor for a long time, and Subodh kept apologising ceaselessly, ‘I am sorry. How clumsy. Sorry. I am sorry. I don’t know how I dropped it. Sorry.’

Hardeyi was struck dumb with this unimaginable civility on his part.

I was annoyed. ‘It’s all right,’ I repeated many times. Subodh, looking helpless, kept on – ‘Oh, how clumsy, I am sorry.’

There had been a telegram. ‘Sorry about Rajjo. May God rest her soul in peace.’

There had also been a telegram from Kashmir addressed to me from Subhan Mian, who found out god knows how. He was nothing to me; Ahsan and I had stayed in his houseboat once. The telegram smelt of the wood of the boat. The night we stayed there, there had been a storm on Dal Lake and the houseboat seemed to be breaking up. It’s our last night, I’d told Ahsan. But we survived and Subhan Mian arrived early in the morning with tea. The houseboat had a foreign name and Subhan Mian fondly arranged German, French, Russian, and English magazines of odd years on the lounge table.

Bua was busy looking after mai’s house. We were wandering around like two shadows in the house, ready to take the things of our childhood away in boxes. Suddenly, on the way, we would hesitate when we found the cool ashes from mai’s eyes lying somewhere. In odd rooms, on odd things. As if she was saying, look, turn around and look. We would look around startled, with wide eyes and find mai coming towards us in strange forms, now laughing, now speaking, now hiding a blue bruise under a long-sleeved jumper, now with babu but not in the way we had seen them together, now Rajjo...and also crying, but not for us, not for anything known to us, but for something or someone we did not know.

We were running after mai for so long and now that it was absolutely too late, we found that our key, so to speak, did not fit that lock at all that we wanted to open to find mai. Our hands were empty after all.

We stood on the roof looking towards the gate as we had been doing since childhood. There was a strange new feeling. That mai had stood there, so many times, alone, looking at those coming and going through the gate, thinking something to herself. What?

But that was wrong. Completely wrong. Mai never came there. Even at Diwali it was we alone with Hardeyi and Bhondu who lit the lamps here. Why this feeling?

Then I had another feeling. Mai had stood in the very spot where I was standing now. But I had never seen her. This had happened before my time, because mai was mai before me, and even before that, and we had never ever accepted that.

This was a new agony.

Rather, this was mai in agony within me.

Excerpted with permission from Geetanjali Shree's mai: silently mother translated from Hindi by Nita Kumar (Niyogi Books, 2022).