Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall boy, a new chap, hands us stainless steel tumblers of piping hot tea and then hangs around to stare at me.
“Po da,” I say to him, eyeing his hairless chest, visible because his top two buttons are not fastened. “This is not a circus. Let me be.”
Lok and I have been friends since our primary school days, long before my cousin bribed the local police to issue my death certificate so he could cut me out of the family inheritance. I was hardly twenty when it happened. It was during the monsoon of ’84, and cyclonic winds crushed nearly all of Tamil Nadu. While everyone else was seeking shelter, my cousin used money he had been quietly collecting from the rest of the family to pay the bribe. After that, it was easy. The death certificate bore the official state seal, a green and yellow stamp with the image of the Srivilliputhur Andal Temple. My cousin took the official document to the land registrar’s office and had my name taken off my grandfather’s property. Unmarried and childless, I was declared a dead man with no issue. I was an orphan by then, and there was no one to help me reclaim my portion of my grandfather’s rice paddies. Such drama, my nilamai.
Today, Lok and I are meeting after a long break. His first wife died fifteen years back, and now he has married someone half his age. I don’t know whether he is a dirty old man or a lucky bastard. Both, I suppose. Malani is the servant girl of a rich family. Lok met her when she was picking up some sari blouses he’d stitched for the woman of the house. I tease him about his young wife.
“Honeymoon over?” I ask, giving him a wink.
“Still going, brother, still going.”
For years Lok was alone after his first wife died in childbirth. He moved out of his rental home and into his one-room tailor shop next to the Ganesh Temple—a shack, really—on the main road. He wanted a simple life. He’s a good man. And better off than me, in a way. People still require tailors for their blouses and salwars. My handwoven silk saris are in far less demand.
Lok and I talk about cricket and politics. I curse the fact that Modi has won again. Anna Hazare fasted for days. An anti-corruption bill was passed. What good has it done? Since 1964, Tamil Nadu has had a Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption. The Directorate does not even respond to my letters or calls requesting a meeting. The people of our nation long ago made it clear: Corruption pulses through our veins, and it is here to stay.
My wife, Sukanya, thinks Dead Man’s Association is a children’s tea party. It is true, in a way. I call it an association meeting, but I am here for the company. For Lok. When I see him, see that he has survived such great loss, it allows me to remember that I have Sukanya, and for this reason alone, I am a lucky man. The act of sitting together with Lok, of bringing hot tea to my lips, of feeling the steam: it allows me to go on for another day, another week.
“I wrote another letter to the chief minister,” Lok tells me, changing the subject.
I update him on the letters I have written recently to The Hindu and The Indian Express, as well as to the head of our district’s Rotary and Lions Clubs. For fifteen years we have been writing these letters, trying to get my case some attention. Never have we received a response from a Tamil Nadu politician. Once, a newspaper printed my letter. Another time the Rotary Club sent us a five-hundred-rupee donation.
Today, Lok says something I am not expecting: “I think we should create an online campaign for you.” He says the words “online campaign” in English.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Online campaign?”
“I made an Instagram profile for us,” he says.
“Us?”
Lok shows me his phone. It is a photo of the two of us, taken a few weeks ago right here at the tea stall. I remember the day he took it. I am smiling widely. “Dead Man’s Association!” the caption reads. Underneath there are hearts and thumbs-up, and some comments. “Bros 4 life,” Parul567 had written. “Naice. Excellent, etc, etc,” from TakeItEasyRajesh. “Justice will be yours,” from FreeFighter2010.
“Who are they? They don’t even know us,” I say.
“Fifty-four supporters! And it has been only two days,” Lok says proudly.
“You used my image?” I ask. “You used our name?”
I feel ill that so many know my situation. My face swells with warmth and shame.
I look at Lok, who, as always, is unperturbed, his forehead marked with a white, U-shaped tika tilak. He is dressed in a dhoti and white banyan, like a villager. He was not always like this, so religious and all—not until his wife died. I make fun of him often, but he does not care.
“Unbelievable,” I say.
“But you have written to the newspaper before. How is this different?”
“We both know nobody reads the newspaper these days, brother!” I say.
His new wife put him up to this nonsense, I am sure of it. The little twit has ambitions. I’ve seen her, clicking around on her phone like the modern daughter of some zamindar. I wonder what she thinks she can gain from my plight. Is she wanting my platform to post pictures of herself? Maybe she has modelling ambitions.
Malani is nothing like my practical, level-headed Sukanya. I picture Lok’s wife approaching him with this ridiculous idea, her thick, waist-length plait swinging, her plump breasts gently bouncing, hypnotizing him.
“We should not waste our time doing this type of thing,” I say. I don’t want to offend him, but I am not getting a good feeling about it.
“It costs us nothing,” Lok says. “Malani—”
“I knew it! She is the one who put you up to this.”
He ignores me.
“Malani says this will allow us to create a platform. Next, we need a website, and then we will raise funds. Soon the media will pay attention. Politicians will have no choice but to come to our aid.”
“Online-schmonline,” I say.
“Online is the way to join forces and organize. Once we have the attention of others in Tamil Nadu, maybe we can do a coordinated march to Fort St. George when the legislative assembly is in session.”
“Malani’s brainchild?” I ask, recoiling at the very idea of putting my life online, of exposing Sukanya to the public. Lok and I had such a good arrangement. For years, we came to each other at our weekly time without fail, and at the end of one hour and two cups of sugary tea, the world always felt a little brighter. Unchanged but brighter.
I finish my tea and sit, quiet and stewing, filled with hatred for Malani.
“Think about it, will you?” he says, before I leave. “Maybe we can finally do something. Maybe the Directorate will pay attention. Maybe his teenage son will see it and tell him.”
“I don’t know.”
“God is with us.”
I found out what my cousin had done when I went to the land registry office after the cyclones ended. My weaving business was going well, and I hoped to build a small weaving setup on the land my grandfather had left me. I could train my future children, and maybe my cousins’ children too, and revive the business. Heirloom saris. It was a thought I had.
At the land registry office, I met Balakrishnan, the sub-registrar and elder brother to one of my schoolmates. He was only a few years older than me, but he was already balding straight down the center. His desk job had gifted him a paunch. He greeted me jovially by name. But when I made my claim, Balakrishnan pulled out a brown file and shook his head.
“S. Arvind is listed as deceased.” He said it exactly like that, careful not to claim that I was dead, only that my name was listed as such. This is how someone who’s been paid off can face his wife and children and God each night when he goes home, by avoiding lies through partial truths.
“You just greeted me,” I said to Balakrishnan, smiling. “By name.” I was sure that he was pulling my leg, though I did not know him to be the type.
“Anna,” I said. Big brother. “You just called me by my name.”
He repeated himself: “S. Arvind is listed as deceased.”
I stared back at him, still thinking it was a joke. Then I felt my heartbeat in my tongue, my breath in my belly. I had come to claim my small fortune in the world. The fortune was there, but I was not. There was not even a hint of discomfort on Balakrishnan’s face as he spoke to me, his little brother’s school friend. The power of the bribe.
Over the years, I have not gone toward God like Lok. Would God have left me so helpless against my cousin? I have no power, no funds to hire an attorney. I do not see how lighting a flame for Ganesha will help. Instead, I choose to forsake Him altogether. Or Her. “Bhagavan is genderless,” Sukanya likes to say. Of course, she is right. She is always right.
When I reach home, Sukanya is working on the leaf-green sari we have been weaving for the last five days. Her hand moves across the loom, her eyes firmly focused on it. Click, clack. Click, clack. The sound of the shaft moving up and down is like that of a horse clomping in place.
“Good meeting?” she asks loudly, without looking up. A single error, a single snag, would cost us a week’s worth of time, several thousand rupees.
“Not really,” I say.
For fear of distracting her, I do not elaborate. Nor does she ask me more.
Sukanya and I are handloom weavers of silk saris. At one time, weavers like us were national treasures. The work of my great-grandparents was prized, their skilled fingers as precious as gold bars. They were called upon by queens and princesses who believed yards of silk could amplify their beauty, or at least distract from their unsightliness. The rich ladies brought gifts of sweets and fruit and jewels and would wait patiently for weeks while my ancestors wove them unique saris in vibrant violets, ravishing reds, and brilliant blues. We had enough money to buy land then, land that should have been passed down to me.
I don’t mean to say we were wealthy. Weavers like me were never rich, never in the history of time, but now we are poor as rickshaw drivers. Most saris today are machine-made on power looms by unskilled workers, in large factories that smell of sweat and formaldehyde. Over time, the power loom has gotten better and better at mimicking weavers like me, but is oil the same as nei? A bottle of Frooti the same as a ripe malgova in the thick of mango season? A true Kanchi sari has the zari woven in. It has a Korvai joint. It is a piece of architecture, a woven temple.
I do this work because it is what I know how to do. My lazy, greedy cousins never bothered learning the craft. But it is my duty, my calling. If I had my parcel of land, we would not be suffering so, living from sari to sari. We would have a home, and land to lease to others for farming.
When she comes to a stopping point, Sukanya stands up and wipes the sweat off her forehead with the pallu of her sari. “I’ll set the rice to boil,” she says.
“Sit,” I say. I massage her shoulders and then her arms. At first, she is tense, but then she relaxes and leans her head back onto my chest.
She looks particularly drained today, my wife of two decades. She is only forty-three. For years she looked young, protected from the wear and tear that comes from pregnancy and childbirth. Now, it is the absence of children that is aging her.
Sukanya’s father, an old friend of my father’s, allowed me to marry his daughter despite whispers and warnings from townspeople.
“Dead or not, he is the best weaver in the district, and my daughter is the best weaver’s assistant,” he said. His own father abandoned his wife and ran away with another woman. His wish for Sukanya, his only girl, was not to settle her with a rich man or even a smart one, but simply a good one.
I follow Sukanya as she goes to the outdoor kitchen, to set the rice to boil.
She tucks her pallu in at the waist and surveys me from top to bottom. What does she see? I smell of the street, of tea shop paan, of a world that calls me dead. My hair is white. I, too, look old, like a grandfather.
“I have something to tell you,” I say.
Normally, she would insist that I tell her my news immediately and playfully refuse me food and other pleasures until I complied. But today she does not say that.
“We will have time to talk later. You should go wash up.”
When we sit down to eat, it is clear that Sukanya’s mood is slightly off.
“What are you and Lok doing but drinking that sugar water every week?” she asks. “I could make you better tea at home.”
I remind her that I do things. At least I try to. In 2004, I kidnapped my nephew after school by offering to get him a butterscotch ice cream from Corner View. This would get the attention of my cousin, his father, I thought. But Sukanya loved having my thirteen-year-old nephew in the house. My nephew loved her too, and his parents did not mind that he was with us. It was a total backfire.
Another time, I staged my own funeral, emceed the event, and demanded a widow’s compensation for Sukanya. Only Lok came, along with some teenage boys who simply laughed. I even tried running for MLA against K. Sundar. The law states that anyone who is registered to vote can contest. “You were registered to vote when you were alive,” the officer at the election commission told me. “Now you are dead.” I am surrounded by imbeciles.
I know my efforts frustrate Sukanya, but she never tells me to stop. No matter what, she keeps on with the weaving. She knows that my situation is delicate.
The truth is, I hang like a single filament of silk, with nothing and nobody to bolster my strength except Sukanya and Lok. But only Sukanya knows the blackness that comes over me at times, that came over my father and mother when they were unable to sell enough saris to feed me. My father died by suicide, my mother from grief three months after him.
So Sukanya has always let me be. We manage and keep our sorrows hidden from her parents and brothers; the energy instead poured into our silk weaves.
Today, we eat a simple but hearty meal of rice, sambar, rasam, and cabbage poriyal. Somehow Sukanya finds time to cook delicious, fresh food daily, even though she works alongside me all day. I tell her about Lok’s disastrous idea.
“What good will it do?” I say.
“You must ask yourself, instead, what harm it will do,” Sukanya says. “It seems harmless.”
I am so surprised by her reaction. She does not like any sort of public displays.
“It can do so much harm,” I say. “Inviting all these strangers into our lives, into our homes.”
“Is there not a strength in numbers?”
“But these people will make fun of us.”
“What exactly does Lok propose?”
“He wants me to take pictures and videos and post them.”
“Of what?”
“All the boring things in our daily life. Eating, sleeping, talking, laughing, weaving. To show that we are alive. If we are online, we are alive, he says.”
Sukanya laughs. Then she takes the remaining cabbage from the pan and puts it all on her plate.
“Take a picture of my plate,” she says. “Anything is worth a try.”
I reach for my phone, but I am also astounded. Sukanya always offers me the leftovers. It is her practice.
She shrugs. “I am hungry today.”
We sleep on a lumpy cotton mattress on the floor of our small, one-room home, on the opposite side from where our handloom sits.
“I cannot sleep. That rascal upset me today,” I say.
“You have nothing better to do,” Sukanya says. She sighs.
“Do you have something better to do?” I ask, teasingly, amused and aroused. I run a finger along the curve of her bare waist, but she pulls away.
“I am pregnant.”
“What?”
She nods.
“How could it be?”
She tells me she missed her cycle. Twice.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I wasn’t sure. I am of the age when things are not regular.”
Earlier in the week, she had purchased a test from the corner store.
“I went to the doctor this afternoon to confirm,” she says. “While you were having tea.”
“You did all this without telling me?”
“I am seven weeks along.”
“So, by New Year’s Day, we will have a baby.”
I try to process this. I had roughly ten thousand rupees in my bank account. Even a government hospital would require at least that much. What if there were complications? And we would need more food, and milk. We did not starve, but we did not eat the rich foods I had seen my female relatives eat when they were pregnant and nursing. How would I pay for ghee, for cashews, and saffron? How did this even happen? Sukanya had family-planning surgery years ago. Even so, once monthly I pick up a ten-pack of lubricated Nirodhs from the government hospital.
We had taken precautions, and they had failed us. In such cases, abortions are free, hundred percent covered by the government. Ours is not a land that values its unborn in the same way certain Christian nations do. But in that very instant I know I will not avail of this benefit. I, who have unfairly suffered through my own death well before my time, will not kill the child living in my wife’s womb. This is not a matter of ethics, or religion, or morality, or philosophy. Our baby, I tell Sukanya, is a matter of fate.
“I agree,” she says. “It is an act of God.” She links her pinky with mine.
“Perhaps,” I say, relieved that we are aligned. “But would God do this to us?”
She leans into me, her head to my chest. “I am happy about it,” she whispers. “Maybe God granted a wish I did not know I had.”
At the next association meeting, I tell Lok about the baby. “I don’t know what we will do,” I say. “I don’t wish to frighten her, but we do not have money for a baby.”
He calls the boy from the tea stall.
“Get us a plate of pakoras,” he says. “Hot, hot. Fresh pudina chutney on the side, not yesterday’s batch.”
When the pakoras come, Lok hands my phone to the boy.
“A momentous day,” he says. “We need a snap.”
When he takes my phone back from the boy to look at the picture, he sees the other ones, the ones I’ve been taking of Sukanya.
“Sabaash!” he says. “This might work.”
He tells me his idea, and I start to see it, see how he is right, how it is less about advertising our troubles and more about telling our story and celebrating our survival.
“It is about numbers,” I say. “You are right. If we can get the numbers, anything is possible.”
I also remember Sukanya’s words. How much harm could it do?
We finish the pakoras with gusto, and Lok insists on paying for everything. I promise to call him soon, after I talk to Sukanya.
At first, Sukanya protests.
“I don’t mind the association and all, but me? People may make fun of us; you said it yourself.”
“This is for our baby,” I argue. “We need to do this for him.”
“How do you know the baby is a boy?” She glares at me.
“It is just a few photos each day.”
“Of my belly, for the world to see!”
“For our supporters.”
“My parents will not approve.”
“Will your parents take care of our baby?” This quiets her. We both know the answer to this.
Sukanya’s parents and brothers are loving, but love has its limits. They are generous with bags of rice and daal, and small packets of money at Pongal and Deepavali, but they would not be able to support a child of mine. Tuition, school fees, clothes, books. Forget it, they would say. We have our own mouths to feed, they would say.
Each evening, I take a photo of Sukanya’s plate and then one of her in profile, so her growing belly is visible.
Sukanya does all the work during the week. I cannot concentrate. She finishes the leaf-green sari. It has small gold mangos along the border, and larger ones on the pallu. I look for signs of a baby growing, but she says it will be another few weeks before she shows.
When her belly starts swelling and the baby is the size of a mango, I take a new picture of her in side profile. I also take a picture of the sari we’re weaving. I send them to Lok, and he posts them online. “Dead Man’s Baby Alive and Kicking” is the caption. We get 165 likes within two hours. Things happen quickly. We get sixty, seventy, eighty, then two hundred people from across Tamil Nadu posting comments, then some from Karnataka and Andhra, and then from farther north, from MP and Gujarat. Some people share stories of similar predicaments with members of their family.
From Kanchipuram: “My brother had death certificates made for me, my husband, and my eight-year-old twins. A car accident.”
From Tiruttani: “My husband now holds a fake annulment of our marriage, a death certificate for himself, and a false marriage certificate for him and his mistress. Such lengths he has gone.”
From Madurai: “My grandmother is 101, going strong and does not want to sell the family estate. My father and uncles have ‘killed’ her off because they are unwilling to wait any longer.”
At Padiyappa’s, Lok buys pakoras for anyone who wants some. He keeps slapping me on the back.
“His time has come!” he says to the tea boy, who looks alarmed. “His life is about to change.”
At home, I feel anxious. What is happening? Do I like it, or do I not like it? Sukanya feels it too. It is a shock that something could grow so fast. As the baby grows, mango to papaya to jackfruit, so do our numbers. Within three months, we have a half lakh followers.
“They call this ‘going viral,’” Lok says.
“Is that what Malani said?” I still find it irritating that all this came from that servant girl.
He grins at me.
“What good will come of it? I am still waiting to see,” I say. But I am hopeful.
Then someone from Avadi writes to our account and says they would like to buy one of our saris. This inspires us to hold an auction. Malani finds a site called BidGuru where we can do this. We put up photos of a red and gold sari with the two-headed eagle motif online and set the auction length as one week. First it is slow, going up one hundred rupees at a time, but on the second-to-last day, the bid goes from ten thousand rupees to twenty thousand, and then to fifty thousand.
A lawyer calls. His wife follows us, he says. She was outbid on the sari we just sold. He wants to help me take my case to court and get my land back. I tell him I cannot afford him.
“Pro bono and one silk sari for my wife. It is well worth my time. Pink with Fanta orange border is her preference.”
Slowly, I begin to understand what Malani meant.
Orders come in from all over the state—Chennai, Madurai, Mysore, Tiruvannamallai. Then from farther away—Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur, Kolhapur. Then one from America! From England! Sukanya and I cannot work so fast, but people are willing to wait.
Everyone wants more pictures. More saris. More stories. I switch from still photos to video. I film Sukanya as she cooks, as she weaves, as she reaches her fifth, sixth, seventh months of pregnancy.
Her hesitancy fades away. She likes it. Each night, we look at the comments our followers post, at the loving messages from strangers. For the first time, we have a pastime apart from weaving.
“You are Hindu, I am Muslim. But praying for you. Mashallah.”
“The queen is glowing.”
“Stomach has dropped. It is a girl.”
My mother-in-law calls one day and says she is worried about the evil eye. “Tell our mapillai to do dhishti for you,” she says to Sukanya.
As per my mother-in-law’s instructions, every night I take a pinch of salt and a black clove and circle my fist around Sukanya’s face. Then I go outside and throw it over my shoulder to complete the dhishti, protecting us from anyone who may be bringing us bad luck through their envy.
Sukanya starts to film me as I weave. I tell the story of my childhood, the difficulties my parents suffered, how it was too much for them, how they died. She figures out how to create a highlighted set of stories just about me. She titles it “Alive Again.”
She stares at the phone, eager for likes, waiting for comments.
“Sir is brave.”
“I am crying.”
“Common man’s plight.”
“Together we will make change.”
Sukanya puts the phone aside and turns from her back to her side, and her eyes grow heavy. “Maybe this is working,” she says. We fall asleep together, my arm over her belly.
Two months before the baby is due to arrive, my lawyer tells me that the Madras High Court will hear my case.
“When should I be in Chennai?” I ask him. “Tell me the date.”
“No need,” he says. “These days, small cases like these are done virtually.”
Small. I feel stuck on this word, but then let it go.
“Virtually? Will they confirm my existence virtually?”
“All these videos you are posting will do us good. All you need to do is speak honestly to the judge.”
We continue with the videos, the posts. My cousin knocks on my door one day.
“This is a personal matter,” he says. “We ought to discuss this in private, like family.”
“What family?” I ask. I shut the door in his face. Then, when it is time to speak before the judge, I tell him the whole story, including this indecent last-minute appeal by my cousin.
Sukanya and I treat ourselves to a box of imported blueberries. We have never tasted this fruit before, but a follower of ours had mentioned the health benefits. “Full of folates. Good for mother and child.”
Six weeks before the baby is due, Sukanya calls me from the doctor’s office. She is sobbing into the phone, so upset she cannot talk, and when she tries, it is incomprehensible.
“There is no heartbeat,” she says.
When I go to meet her, she is pale, and the blood vessels in her eyes are visible. Something inside her has died. The baby must be delivered, and so he is, his mouth wide open, his lips purple, his skin flaking. His cheeks are soft, his hair black, his fingers tiny, nails formed, a perfect set of ten. Sukanya insists on holding him, and so we take turns doing this, passing the dead body back and forth until we are certain that no tricks, no sorcery, no prayers, and no amount of love will bring him to life.
Sukanya bleeds. Her breasts are sore. When her milk comes in, she squeezes it out herself, into a plastic cup. “Will you drink it?” she asks. It is pink, tinged with blood from her cracked nipples. I want no part of this, this milk of the dead. I have only just come back to life.
“Drink it,” she pleads. “Please.”
I say no, and she looks at me like she will never forgive me, like I am no longer hers.
When my mother-in-law arrives, she blames me for bringing Sukanya and the baby unwanted attention, for cursing her daughter with this hellish life. Her voice is thrashing, loud and angry.
The woman who used to serve me the best mutton curry and button mushrooms fried in ghee turns to me and says, “I never wanted her to marry you.”
My father-in-law, a gentle man, tries to quiet his wife for Sukanya’s sake, but it is of no use. She shouts at him too.
As for Sukanya, she says nothing.
They take Sukanya back to her childhood home, where she can eat food made by her mother’s hands and be pampered by her father and brothers.
The months Sukanya is gone are the most productive of my life. I stand taller, with my shoulders back and my chest forward, and walk proudly when I step out of the house each day. I have this belief now, this firm belief, that no more bad can possibly come my way. One day, a B-list Bollywood actress named Jessica Parmar orders a sari from us. She posts a picture of herself wearing it and tags us. “Dead Man’s Sari,” her post says. More orders come in from cine stars.
I weave and sell multiple beautiful saris and increase our base price to nearly one lakh. Something inside Sukanya may have died, but the prospect of a child lit a spark in me. I am hungry for more.
“Are you eating?” I ask, when I call her.
“Yes.”
“We can try again,” I say. “It happened once, so it can happen twice.”
“Can you come see me?” she asks.
“Tomorrow I am busy, but I will come soon.”
The next day, I take a break from weaving and go to the women’s clinic and inquire about the chances of us conceiving again. The doctor shakes her head at me.
“Absolutely none,” she says. “It was a miracle the first time.”
Looking at the ground, I tell her about the additional precautions we were taking. “Perhaps without them we have a better chance?”
She shakes her head again.
The surgery can be reversed, she says, though at Sukanya’s age it is extremely dangerous and not recommended. In any case, pregnancy itself can get very complicated after the age of forty. “Have you considered adoption?”
When I visit Sukanya, I tell her what the doctor said about adoption.
“What do you think?”
“How could you even ask?” she says.
“Just think about it.”
She looks frail in spite of the pregnancy weight, and she has been shedding hair. What is left is thin and flat against her face. She is wearing a nightie. All day long, she wears nighties. After her morning bath, she puts on a fresh nightie.
“I lost my child,” she says. “All I think about is my child.”
She does not ask me if I think about our child.
When she returns from her parents’ home after three months, her pregnancy weight is gone. Her belly has a floppy overhang where our baby once lived. Ever so slightly, her breasts now sag. She is wearing a sari. She looks beautiful. Sad, but beautiful.
At first, she still turns away anytime I mention adoption. Then, after some time, she opens her mind to it. We have money now, enough to support a child, I tell her.
“We can manage it easily now,” I say. “And remember my nephew? You treated him like your own.”
“If you wish,” she says. “If it is what you want, let us do it.”
It is true that we can afford a child now. We are selling our saris for ten times what we once did. The Hindu did a small profile of us, with the headline “Dead Man’s Saris Are Alive with Style and Color.” I am a dead man no more. But the name is good for business.
When I see Lok, he is so excited about the article.
“Idea!” Lok says. “Let us use the name!”
“Dead Man’s Saris?”
“Dead Man’s Handlooms,” he says.
“Boss, even better!” It is my turn to slap his back.
I am at the tea stall with Lok when my lawyer finally calls with the good news. We have won, and I will get my land back. Officially, I am alive.
Lok and I make a plan. We have so many ideas. We will open a workshop and train weavers to make beautiful saris for women across India. My job will be to supervise the weavers. Lok will handle the administrative tasks and the online marketing. Malani will also help. Sukanya, too, I hope.
We buy looms and interview candidates. We hire five trainees, and plan for five more. We have made a pact to not grow beyond twenty and to never rely on the power loom. We will honor our heritage. We post pictures and document the process for our fan base. We make this promise to our customers online.
Sadly, the adoption application Sukanya and I put in is rejected. Our maximum combined age is above ninety, so we are not eligible to adopt a child under the age of four.
“We suggest you adopt a child in a higher age bracket,” the letter states.
Sukanya is so crushed she cannot speak. She stops wearing saris, and again only wears nighties, even after bath.
Every night for three nights, she sobs. It is as if she has lost another child. We do not speak about the possibility of adopting an older child. I know it is not what she wants, though in my head I consider that an older child could start working with me right away and learn the business.
I try to connect with her. I try to tell her all that I am doing for our future.
“Sukanya, my dear, won’t you speak?”
“All this is because of you,” she says. “I am so tired, and I have nowhere to go.”
She stays inside and spends her days preparing meals and keeping house. I wish I could help her, but I do not know what to do. There is no sorrow like quiet sorrow, no pain like quiet pain. I know this better than anyone.
Around her, I begin to stay silent, because I have a secret and I worry that if I speak too much, it will come out. The secret is that it is better this way, better that the baby did not survive. His conception confirmed to me that I am alive. His death ensured that my life is mine once again, that I will not be burdened with the responsibilities that fall on every other parent. I can never tell Sukanya this, that it has come to this, that my life is flourishing for the same reason hers is not. It has left me swollen with guilt. I want to turn back and go to her, but all I can do is extend a hand and hope she latches on to it.
I bring her things every day, small things. A milk sweet, a strand of jasmine flowers, designer bottus. I even gift her a silk sari. Never before could we afford our own saris. I still take pictures of her and post them, sometimes with the gifts. She does not like it, but she does not resist. She and I both know there is no other option. Social media is our livelihood now. It is what sells our saris.
Our followers have been posting condolences for months now, but she rarely looks at them. It is for the best, because there are also some cruel comments. One person wrote, “Was there really ever a baby?” And another: “What is the evidence?”
When she sees comments like these, they pain her so much that she retreats for days and begins praying. She chants the Gayatri Mantra 108 times in her nightie. I try to leave home before she starts. It scares me, the haunting tone of her voice, the chanting that pulls her deeper into her own world, entangling her with something I do not understand, something that is far away from my weaving, from the photos, from the online followers.
One day, she starts and finishes her prayers before I can leave and approaches me.
“What if we go away?” she says. “Delete the posts. Just disappear to a place where others cannot find us. It will be like it once was.”
I look at her. She is wearing an orange nightie. We could do it. We could live quietly with the land I have, maybe still make saris, and do business in a smaller way. But that is not what I want. I do not want to go back to that. What I want this morning is a new picture.
“Can you wear a sari?” I ask. “Just for today. And can you eat the sweet I bought? Pin the jasmine?”
She looks at me. So small and tired she looks.
“Please,” I say. “People are asking. People want to see that you are better. When they see, they believe.”
She does not want to eat the sweets, pin the flowers, wear the sari. But, for me, she does it. She wears, pins, eats, but she refuses to smile. I take photos of her from the back, from the neck down, never showing her face.
I ask her the same question I ask every day: “Will you help us at the workshop?”
“No,” she says.
Sukanya does not know, but God has blessed Lok and Malani. Before the year’s end, Malani will be delivering. She is not showing yet, but her cheeks are full, the way Sukanya’s were in the early weeks. We have not told Sukanya about the baby, but soon enough she will find out. Sukanya must agree to take Malani’s place in the workshop—there is no other way.
Then it just comes out of me.
“Sometimes, I think it is all for the best,” I say. “I am able to do all this without worry, since it is only us.”
I see her swallow, a little bump in her throat, a bit of tightening in her chin. I see that her armpits are damp. Round wet patches on her orange nightie.
“Everything has worked out for you,” she says.
“You are young,” I say. “We have years ahead of us, with or without a child. Maybe you just need some more time.”
“Maybe,” she says.
There is something I want to tell Sukanya. I will tell her soon. If I have learned anything from my death, from my birth, from my baby’s birth and death, it is this: Life moves on. If we do not follow it, it moves on without us. Someone else will weave the sari.
Sindya Bhanoo is the author of Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, an Oregon Book Award, and the New American Voices Award. She teaches creative writing at Oregon State University
