Chapter 12 The War of the Grandmothers

Family legend had it that when Vidyucchika's father was born, her nonbaryonic grandfather sighed to see the child's traitor penis. "I am already having four sons," he complained, a gender essentialist to the core, performing in one sentence both this assignment and the erasure of his ghost son in the count, a fifth who had died as a boy and would not stop hovering at his mother's side even through her labour. "I wanted a daughter this time."

Family legend disagreed on the nonbaryonic grandmother's response from her birthing bed, sweat sticking her curls to her forehead, her mouth a grimace, holding the unwanted lastborn in her arms. Some say Grandmother Giri gave this husband—her third—a piece of her mind, which was so sharp and so heavy that he reeled back and could not bear it; he was soon to die, his brain slowly bleeding from the strain. Some say she laughed and told him his five living sons would bring him five daughters. The arithmetic did not quite work out that way, since of the five one was gay, one celibate, and one a bigamist, but it was close enough for prophecy. Some say Grandmother Giri merely swore so long and loud that even the foulmouthed nurses cried for relief.

As a small child, Vidyucchika asked Grandmother Giri for the truth of events, but she would not settle it. The truth is multiple, she would say. The truth, Vidyucchika decided, was that her nonbaryonic grandmother enjoyed the dark matter of her notoriety. She wanted more family legends out of her many grandchildren, so she obscured the truth and made space for mythology.

She never explained, for instance, how her ghost son died—Vidyucchika's ghost uncle who never grew up. When Grandmother Giri visited Vidyucchika's house before the troubled times, the ghost uncle would accompany her. He never spoke, and no one acknowledged his existence except Father, who at mealtimes would light a sandalwood joss stick for his big brother. The uncle ghost child would gulp silently at the smoke, like a fish.

Still, the fact of his death was not so mysterious. Vidyucchika understood as a child that children just died sometimes. Even more so in the old days. One day Mother pulled her onto her lap and told this story from her own childhood.

—My best friend, when we were little girls about your age, took a shortcut through the jungle when she was coming home from school one day, Mother said.—She came home running and sweating and trembling, her face sheened in sweat, her tears like jewels of morning dew. She had been chased by a devil, she cried; a silence had fallen in the cicada song, and she had run, but it had followed, and struck her in the back. She sickened and died a few days later, even though the family did everything right. They called for an adura, who put on the masks and did the devil dances… But some devils don't dance. They are lonely, murderous wallflowers, soaking in resentment and spite. They haunt the jungle paths, hiding behind trees. If they hunt you and strike you in the back, it will leave a pale, hand-shaped mark in the brown of your skin, which will not fade even after the death that it rapidly brings upon you. And that's why we don't go into the jungle, you hear?

Grandmother Giri told stories of dead children, too. She sat out on the verandah, crushing tobacco leaves in a small brass mortar and pestle before rolling them into cigarettes, smoking them, outliving her husbands, and she beckoned to the small girl-child as if she were a pet. When Vidyucchika came and sat, Grandmother Giri told her—We expected your father to die young.

She pointed at Father, who was at that moment weeding his vegetable patch across the way. He stood up and began talking to someone over the fence, in his neighbourly way. Father was reassuringly alive.

—When he was born, Grandmother Giri continued,—your grandfather and I, we thought this sickly baby boy would not survive his first days and weeks. So we kept him at home, in the house where he was born, good wattle and daub and thatch, not all this brick and tile like you have to grow up in, little thing. Even his living brothers didn't come to see him. They were all grown men already. They expected him to die.

Here Grandmother Giri glanced to her side, where the ghost uncle child sat in the same posture as Vidyucchika, cross-legged and looking up.

—It was a month before we began to suspect that the stubborn little shit might live, Grandmother Giri said.—When we could no longer deny it, we roused ourselves and had his birth registered with the government. It was a day trip in the bullock cart, your father crying the whole way, because our village was too small for its own officer and had to share with three others. We didn't backdate his birth on his papers; I misremember why. Perhaps the officer refused to allow it. Perhaps at the time I simply felt that the boy's life had not truly begun until that day. The days of his true and false births were both full moons, so a moon's-worth of ghost days sit banked in his heart, little thing. They will depreciate in value, but if you ever need a little extra time, ask your father. Here, I brought you a birthday present.

And she gave Vidyucchika a doll, a little soldier that came with his own little dollhouse. Vidyucchika turned the toys around in her hands, admiring them. Then, placing the dollhouse on the ground, she walked the soldier over to it. It didn't quite fit his proportions. She bent over and, peering through its windows, saw that the walls held tiny paintings depicting a family of altogether different dolls. It seemed that Grandmother Giri had mixed-and-matched two different sets of toys; she had a tendency to confiscate and redistribute toys among her many grandchildren. To balance things out, she would say. Perhaps there was a cousin crying somewhere over a lost dollhouse. The soldier looked old, though. Wooden, not plastic, old-fashioned, the paint long faded, as if representing a soldier from an old war, not the war to come. She imagined that perhaps Grandmother Giri had confiscated it from Father, long ago.

Grandmother Sits was Vidyucchika's other grandmother. She was baryonic, pale as paper from stray Abjesili ancestors, the slavers of old having left many descendants on the peninsula and across the span of their empire. She came from a small town on the northern coast called Look-There-Lies-Land, which she said no longer existed.

"It's slipped away in time," she said. If Vidyucchika clambered onto her bony lap and asked again, she would say something else, like: "It was taken back by the sea."

Mother rolled her eyes at her mother and said that this was all nonsense and Look-There-Lies-Land is very much still there. "Why, we took you there to visit just a few years ago," she said. "Even Vidyucchika remembers."

Vidyucchika shook her head to say she did not remember, in support of her baryonic grandmother's theory of alienation and loss. She liked sitting with Grandmother Sits on the verandah and staring off into space. There was nothing to see except their little garden, the fence entangled in climbing vines, and the lights of the city beyond, but Vidyucchika knew they were not looking at those ordinary things. Her grandmother patted her head.

"It's not the same when you go there by the coast road," Grandmother Sits said. "It's a different world now."

After Mother left the verandah, Grandmother Sits elaborated to Vidyucchika alone. "When I left home as a young woman, I didn't take the coast road. I went south, do you see? I went inland, into the upcountry, into the past. And then when I finally came back down, I didn't retrace my steps. Instead I travelled east—I came to this city. The future I came back to wasn't the one I'd left." And she sighed, leaning back in her chair and turning her face to the northwest. Her eyes unfocused, staring into the past, looking for the lights of her old town.

Grandmother Sits lived in the city like they did, but she had her own house, the one her only daughter had grown up in. Despite Mother's urging, Grandmother Sits liked living by herself in that house. It was not too far away. Fifteen minutes on the light rail brought her to Vidyucchika, so she came by all the time, unlike Grandmother Giri whose home was southwest of the city, two hours of a long drive and another two hours of a short drive on bad roads, a journey that from door to door involved a bullock cart, a small bus that was really just a van with pretensions, a large government bus where the regular driver sang too loudly, and a tuktuk once she got to the city, which was altogether way too expensive. Grandmother Giri only visited once a year. She had lived a hundred years in her place of power, chewing on the long-life fruit from the tree behind her house, ruling her village and household with terrible gravity. On the annual occasions she left it for her only distant grandchild's birthday, the whole village turned out to see her leave.

("Probably they cheer to see the back of her," Mother would say, and Father would shush.)

Even Vidyucchika knows Grandmother Giri is more feared than loved. Legend had it that she once locked her second husband in a dowry chest after an argument on her wedding night, and in the morning his beard had turned all white.

In the birthday season, when Grandmother Giri came to live in Vidyucchika's house for a few weeks, Grandmother Sits redoubled the frequency of her visits, showing up every day, morning and evening. It was not that the grandmothers didn't get along; it was that they could not. They were of different matter; they could not even interact. Moving about the house at the same time, they passed through each other like smoke. The only way each could perceive the other's presence was by observing the perturbations she caused in Vidyucchika's orbit.

"Happy birthday," Grandmother Sits said, and gave her a do-it-yourself explosives kit. Her smile, so often absent and pointed away into the distance, was for once brilliant and focused. "You too will go into the past one day, and come back into a different future than the one you left behind. I want you to know—it's not so bad, in the end. You lose your home and everything you fought for, but you get to love."

—Is she saying something to you, Grandmother Giri asked snappishly.—You have a gormless look on your face. Don't listen to that woman.

Grandmother Giri was always the one to get huffy first, the only one to formally acknowledge the war of the grandmothers. Grandmother Sits acted as if there was no one else in the world except her daughter and granddaughter. Even Father was a ghost, as far as she was concerned.

"—the last—" Grandmother Sits said.

—of a long line—Grandmother Giri said.

Vidyucchika had tuned them both out, arranging her gifts before her. A typical birthday meant that either Grandmother Giri would be loudly offended that she spent more time playing with that woman's gift, or Grandmother Sits would look softly wounded at the alternative. Grandmother Giri would grind her teeth and spit exotic bosons to splatter redly on the floor, or Grandmother Sits would hold up a hand to her heart and sigh as if her delicate bones had gained another fine crack, and either way Mother would glare at Father and Father would glare at Mother and Vidyucchika would glare at all four of them.

To please them both, she fashioned a doll-sized suicide bomber jacket from the explosives kit, and made the soldier wear it. His knees weren't articulated, so he would have to die sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out before him. She positioned him in the living room of his house, where his head nearly brushed the ceiling and his unbending wooden legs kept knocking over the furniture of other dolls' lives. For good measure, she used up the rest of the explosives rigging the dollhouse itself. She carried the whole thing out into the garden and fitted it for a long fuse, which she trailed back to the verandah.

Her grandmothers were sitting in the same chair, each having chosen it unknown to the other and unable to perceive that they were occupying the same space. When she blew the dollhouse and sent doll bricks and doll parts flying with a loud crack, both grandmothers clapped at the same time, their hands overlapping like a jerky, sped-up film.