Matters Relating to Paternity by Ravneet Kaur Sandhu

Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die. She was a practical woman who looked after practical matters, and death was far from practical. It was messy, required too much preparation, and had taken too many of her own loved ones for her to particularly care for it.

“Death is nothing to be afraid of,” she would strongly state to her patients. “It an incoherent mess that plucks you from your own life at its convenience. It is inconsiderate and unwanted and that’s exactly how it should be treated. Don’t for a moment give it the power it wants. Don’t let it control your actions, and especially, your life. If you were afraid of dying since you were born, you would have never built a future with marriage and children, would you have?”

Sometimes the future included the down payment of a car and the end of a college education. Other times it consisted of a forlorn fiancé and an impending job promotion. Once it had been the lead of a Bollywood movie a patient had finally grabbed after years of struggle, only to visit the doctor about an ear pain before the shooting started. The pain had turned out to be lymphoma.

The actress had survived the cancer and scooped another role in a sleepy summer hit that launched her to the stars. She still sends a bouquet of roses to Mrs. Morrison on her birthday. Mrs. Morrison keeps it beside her bed for a week until the petals start to fall. Her son then re-fills the vase with chrysanthemums from their front garden.

The son was a tall man of marriageable age who studied at a nearby college. Mrs. Morrison carried his picture in her wallet, and would proudly show it the patients she conversed with. The first question everyone would ask was, “Is he married?” and then “Why not?” Mrs. Morrison would shush the patient, tell them to not be naughty, and move on to the next topic- happy children, caring spouses, antics of college kids and the friendships that last forever.

The rumor at the center was that Mr. Morison was out of the picture, if not dead. This further cemented the image they had of his wife- uncompromising, considerate with a soft heart wrapped in steel, fully able to come to work in the morning after crying her eyes out at a former patient’s funeral. She fought the good fight, they said, all voices in unison, old, young, baritone and shrill. She was like a relative, a family member returned to take care of them. There was a familiarity about her that always made them feel at ease.

***

Although Mrs. Morrison had no time for death, her husband was not exempt for life’s sure gift. He died when she was twenty-four, leaving her with a toddler and an income tax clerk’s pension. She was asked by her relatives to come back, to give up this nursing business and marry a richer, if older, man. Yet, Mrs. Morrison had dreams and a proper idea of romance- her husband was the love of her life and there would be no one after him.

The son grew up learning this story by heart. When classmates teased him about being fatherless, he loyally recited it.

There were some qualms about his name, especially since he wasn’t Christian. “Was your father Christian?” asked a well-meaning teacher. He stood in front of her with knees clamped together. “I don’t know Ma’am.” He asked his mother after she had finished her evening prayer. The tray in her hands had a stick of incense that wafted into Rahul’s hand. He cupped the lit diya and bowed, blessing his head with the flame. She replied after the prayers were over, turning off the television so he could listen to her speak. “Your father was a man with morals but he didn’t believe in God. Christian, Hindu, Muslim, none. He sometimes went to the gurudwara to serve langar with the Sikhs, but that was the most he would do for religion.”

“Was he a Sikh then?” His eyes widened at the possibility. Maybe his father had worn a turban, maybe his beard had been long enough for him to touch. There were no pictures of his father in the house.

“No, he wasn’t a Sikh. He grew up with Sikhs but he wasn’t one.”

And that was all she would say about his father’s religion. He was accepted in temples all over, for he looked like a regular Hindu and Rahul was a perfectly good sanskari name. It was the Morrison that bothered him.

An Anglo-Indian woman in indigo cotton dress and a sunhat reminded him of his history lessons. He wondered whether his father had been like that woman. Was he a remnant of the British empire, one generation too late to hold any power? He ran to his home excitedly to confirm his hypothesis, waking his mother from her afternoon nap. She told him no, that hadn’t happened, his father was as Indian as all could be, and could he please keep the curd in the fridge where it belonged and not disturb her on her leave day or else swear to Ganesh, she will lock him in his room for the entire day. Rahul scampered away, turning on the television to watch stories in which the end was a satisfied knot of explanations.

He grew up, and stopped thinking about his father as much. He had never seen that man, didn’t remember him, and had no idea what he looked like. His mother said they were too poor for photographs and he believed her. He knew her frugal salary covered all their expenses and his father’s pension was being saved for his college education.

He asked her how she had managed to educate herself, coming from such a poor family, again family he had never seen and only heard of. Her answer was simple. She had done what had to be done.

“I didn’t want to be in a village where you work till you die and then your children work till they die. There was a doctor in the village who lived there in his old age, paying for women for pleasure and chores. I went to him as a fourteen-year-old and told him I was ready to do anything if that meant I could get out. He laughed at me but took me in. He never took advantage of me. He was a monster to the other woman but he taught me how to read and write and then made sure I was admitted to a college. Which you also have to do, unless you want to stay in the slums when I die.”

The idea that he had narrowly escaped being illiterate frightened Rahul. He studied day and night, leaving the television for vacations. He could have been living with some people he made fun of now, beggars knocking on cars for money, raiding the landfills for kitchen refuse to eat and glue to get high off. He walked on the road and saw himself in the face of the poor, the absolute poor who thieved, snatched, borrowed and killed to survive. Their faces almost matched, as if Rahul was the older brother from another father, the same dark skin (untouchable, a girl whispered in the classroom), the pudgy nose and thin limbs that refused to fill out, no matter how much he ran. He studied so he wasn’t them, driving a wedge of education until they stood at the edge of oblivion while he was in the middle of the rat race.

***

Mr. Morrison was dead because he had never existed. If he had been available to comment, he would have said this: “I am a helpless lie told by the perpetrator in the hopes of quelling a young man’s search for his father. I, however, am not his father. I was born after he was conceived. All I can say about this matter is that Mrs. Morrison is a liar. So are we all, for I have more siblings than all the humans that have existed. I have ancestors immortalized in history books and children trapped in internet browsers. Fiction is my cousin languishing in unreal worlds I can’t touch, and poetry is his sister who speaks when the sun sets, in front of old shrines and locked hearts. I could tell you more, about the playwrights and journalists, the staged lines and the fiction non-fiction, all testament to the short memories of humans. But what am I, but only a construct? I can try but never measure up to the hand of God in whose likeness I was meted. Truth is my only nemesis, a standard I was doomed to never achieve by birth. I am but nothing.”

***

Mrs. Morison’s real name was Anjali. It was that name a former acquaintance shouted in the center’s halls as Mrs. Morrison did her rounds. She stood for a moment, wondering where she had heard the voice before. Then she turned around and ran to the sound.

“Niya? Oh Niya, how are you?” Niya was an old woman now, sitting on the bed with her back to the wall. Her eyes had the same sparkle as Mrs. Morrison remembered. Her arms were open for Mrs. Morrison to fall in.

“I’m here, so that’s how good I am. But let’s talk about something else.” She inspected Mrs. Morrison at arm’s length. “I almost didn’t recognize you, Anjali. You look good in your uniform.”

Mrs. Morrison blushed. “Thank you, Massi. How did you end here of all the places?”

Massi looked at the walls before replying. “After you left, my younger son also wanted to go to the city. So I went to the doctor and asked him to be generous.”

“Is he still alive? The doctor?” Mrs. Morrison didn’t think so, but she had to ask.

“No, he died, all the alcohol and the women. But before he was gone, he made sure my son knew enough to go to school. We re-located after that so that our son could attend the school nearby. It was hard, they didn’t take him at first.” There were tears in Massi’s eyes. “But the worst part was that we could never go back. I know you never came back, you were always the bravest. But I tried, that was all I had ever known.” Mrs. Morrison gave a weak smile and tried to wipe her tears away. “Can you believe that I was told my mother died a year after she had? We could have taken her to the hospital, saved her life in some way. It was all for the best, that’s what we can say.” Mrs. Morrison held her hand until she stopped crying. They were silent for a moment, reminiscing about relatives long dead. Mrs. Morrison then broke the silence with her head bowed.

“Sometimes I am angry at the villagers. But when I was in college, I realized something. The outsiders could never understand us. We don’t fit in with what they call India, and we aren’t different enough to be called traitors like the Pakistanis.” Mrs. Morrison had been thinking about these topics for a long time, and finally had someone she could discuss them with. She looked at Massi in the eye now. “The Christians came and they wanted us to convert. Then Independence happened and Hindus wanted us to follow their traditions. They say it is Islamic, what we do, and therefore it must be bad. It is only in our own community that we could do what we did without someone categorizing us. To the outside world, we are inscrutable.”

“Do you really think so, Anju?”

Mrs. Morrison wiped her eyes and looked at hands of her mother’s elder sister, the only relative who had kept her after her parents’ death in a skirmish. “You know, I have a son. I named him Rahul. I also named myself Morrison. I read it from the back of polythene bag advertising tailors. ‘Morison Tailors: Western clothes only.’” She made an imaginary banner with her hands. “The sense of exclusivity stuck with me. That’s what I wrote when I had to put in my last name in the college registration. And my son, Rahul, asks me who is father is, what sort of man he was. You tell me, how can I explain what happened?” Mrs. Morrison lightly touched the stones on Massi’s hands. “But I couldn’t tell him. You see, his father was the champion that year I went away.”

“But you were exempt from the rule, you were unmarried! You didn’t have to sleep with him.” Massi looked affronted.

“No, I didn’t. It was worse. I loved him.”

Massi took a sharp intake of breath. Mrs. Morrison didn’t have to ask whether he was killed or not. The annual fight for the strongest man yields champions that don’t live for more than two years. Then the next champion kills the reigning one and wins the honor of impregnating all married woman in the village. The champions have their glory, but only for a short time. Theirs was a doomed destiny, whichever way one looked at it.

“He was quite brave in his last fight. But your departure, I think, must have taken a toll on him. He wasn’t as strong as he could be.” Massi tried to console her, but Mrs. Morrison shook her head.

“It’s good Massi, that your son would never have to compete.”

Massi sighed. “They were all for changing the rules. They said all men didn’t have to fight anymore. They were making it a choice. But the bolstered youth didn’t want the choice. They all wanted to fight to death. They said only the old didn’t fight. I had to get my son out of there.”

“The old fight all the time here, don’t you Massi? This is the center where everyone fights for survival. Cancer doesn’t stand a chance.” Massi laughed at the abrupt change of subject. That was Anjali’s way of dealing with every calamity. Change, and hope the circumstances change too.

They talked of the village and their lives outside of it. Mrs. Morrison left only when she was asked by the head nurse to attend another patient. The women smiled at each other and the younger one left, wondering at the surprises the universe would throw at her. The next patient was a nineteen-year-old woman sullenly staring at her mobile screen. Mrs. Morrison stopped in front of the door, straightened her skirt, took a deep breath and entered. “And how are we feeling today? Better, I hope.” The teenager shook her head and brightened up, talking about an upcoming Bollywood song she was excited about. Mrs. Morrison nodded and gave her cheerful input.

She went to take her break and the peon informed her that Rahul had called. She called him back.

He cut her off before she could greet him. “Hello, Ma, I have some news for you.”

“Yes, beta, what?”

“There’s a girl I want you to meet. She’ll come later in the evening when you are there, okay?”

There was some shock regarding this statement and the casual tone of Rahul. He wasn’t a child anymore, she reminded herself, and if there was a girl, she would meet her. And then yell at him later.

“Okay, Rahul. We’ll see what happens when I come home.”

“Okay, Mama, bye.”

She cut the line. There were birds chirping the end of daybreak outside. She went to the window to muse on the events of today, the events that had transpired and the events yet to come. She was happy, she realized, happy that she was content with her lot in life. Then the peon came to call her a second time. She was needed in Mrs. Gupta room, an emergency of the sadness kind. She nodded and followed him to the middle-aged lady’s room. Indeed, Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die, but not too busy to change.

Ravneet Kaur Sandhu is a college junior who likes thick novels and sugary coffee. She also has a dog she visits in India every summer.