One Day, One Morning is the story of two families — Ammachi’s and Molamma’s; of two pairs of school-going sisters, of similar age and socio-cultural affiliation, and through their stories, of many such girls and their families. It is the story of vulnerability and captivity within surroundings that are expected to be familiar and safe, yet are its very opposite.
Molamma’s husband died early this morning. Bindu insisted he was sitting and reading the newspaper in the verandah of his home when he simply fell over and died, goggle eyed, thick cloudy veins in the forehead nearly bursting. Ammachi scolded Bindu as usual for not referring to Molamma as Molamma aunty and for spreading silly rumours heard on the street about a nice man, then explained to us that of course, that was not how it happened.
She told us what she knew of the story after we all finally got home in the evening. Molamma’s husband was at the tea shop in the morning, having a simple glass of hot black tea, when, all of a sudden, he stopped, stared out of the window as if something horrible had appeared there, dropped his glass on the floor where it smashed to pieces, tried to rise from his seat, stumbled, crashed down like a drunk, and died.
Ammachi said that even as they tried to lift him from the floor, splashed water and pressed hard on his chest, his eyes gaped in awful fear at something only he could see. He was most likely dead by then.
Ammachi said he most definitely died because of the curse, as everyone expected he would one day. Poor man. You only had to look at that family to know there was something bad that hung over them, but not the way some people were spreading stories because they had nothing better to do with their time. And she looked towards our Appachan, though he had not said much. He was simply sprawled on his armchair, fanning himself with a thin towel, while Ammachi was drying her hair after her bath with another one. You had to have a bath first thing if you had been to a house where someone had died, even if their faith was different from yours, because that is how it worked.
Molamma was not told anything in the morning. She must have been wandering around their tiny backyard, hair hanging loose over her shoulder, maybe a rickety broom in one hand, muttering and mumbling to herself when it happened. The girls were of course at school while their grandmother was in the kitchen, cleaning rice and drinking tea, when the men came to the door with the tragic news.
Their grandmother, Molamma’s mother, made fresh tea for all of them and insisted they were not to tell her daughter anything yet. The grandmother is a tall, greying woman with long hair always braided, striking light-coloured eyes and full lips. Ammachi says she had been a very good-looking woman when she was younger, though the colour of her eyes was all wrong for a regular village woman from these parts. In fact, she had been good looking enough to decide for herself whom she would marry. She married a man who belonged to a family of snake charmers or those who practiced some form of black magic, ran away with him, and now they say she lives alone in Chennai, except when she comes back here to visit her daughter.
Molamma aunty, on the other hand is small and pale like a baby snake born too early. She has wispy hair that gives her a shabby look even when it has been combed back and tied into a thin braid with a bit of blue ribbon. Ammachi says that when she was younger, Molamma used to wear bright coloured saris with thick borders, to make up for her paleness. She would also fluff out her hair smartly and wear a big pottu in different colours that brightened up her face.
Now she hardly steps out of the house. As we walk past their house on our way back from school, Bindu and I see her on some days, standing at a little distance from their gate, holding a broom or an untidy cotton thorthu or some other such thing, the way a child holds a toy. She never smiles at us, but often we see a watery smile on her face while her lips keep moving, as if she is talking to herself or someone she alone can see. Some days, she does not come out of the house at all.
Her girls usually walk home on their own. They study in our school but have never sat next to us in the bus or joined us on the walk from the bus stop. They usually keep to themselves. Maybe because they think we will make fun of them and their mother, or worse, ask questions…
Their father, Sridharan Uncle, who died in the morning, was the one who did all the work at home except when the grandmother is visiting them. Ammachi says he cooked, cleaned, packed simple lunch boxes every day for the girls — freshly steamed rice and spicy buttermilk, or idlis and fish-gravy from the previous night that they eat on their own in one corner of the school playground.
The older girl is around my age and had started helping her father. I have seen her sometimes folding washed clothes behind their house before leaving for school or cleaning the rice, sitting in the verandah, with an open book next to her. I have seen her oiling and combing their mother’s hair on some evenings, braiding it into a thin plait with a bit of faded ribbon while her younger sister sat cross-legged on the floor near them, like a little kitten. All three of them would appear to be either laughing loudly, or sitting there very, very quietly, almost like shadows of real people.
Sridharan Uncle always came home around six in the evening, unlike our father who comes when he pleases and gets roundly scolded by Ammachi every day, which of course changes nothing. Once he returned, he would loudly call in the girls if they happened to be outside, lock both the gate and the front door and switch off the verandah light so that it looked like no one was home, unless you noticed the slashes of light between the drawn curtains of the small house, a little smaller than ours.
Molamma’s house (everyone calls it that), which they say actually belongs to the grandmother, is about two plots and some trees away from ours but we could sometimes hear them chant their prayers loudly in the evening and also see their windows from our kitchen window. Sometimes you could hear Sridharan Uncle talking in a loud voice or laughing heavily.
Sounds carry easily in the dark here, even though there are plantain, mango, guava and spreads of jackfruit trees all around our houses, and sweet tamarind and sapotta too, filled with crazy swarms of red ants, especially next to the houses close to the river. Our village switches off lights and falls silent early in the night, except for an occasional home where the TV remains on for no reason, or houses where the husband and wife continue quarrelling late into the night almost every day.
One night there was a big to-do in Molamma’s house.
This was just a few months back. Ammachi had switched off the TV at the usual time, as she always did and started washing up the dinner plates and vessels. She liked to do the night’s washing just before she went to bed, with a towel thrown over her shoulder and water running at a fierce force. She would sometimes hum to herself as she worked. Once done, she would wash her face and hands too in the kitchen, wipe her face with that same towel, switch off the kitchen light, then go off to sleep after calling out to us sternly to go to sleep too.
That night Bindu and I were already lying on our bed, reading the same magazine and talking about nothing in particular while listening to Ammachi move around in the kitchen, waiting to fall asleep curled up against each other like kittens, as we always had. It was a time of the day that always felt right and good to me, despite anything that might have happened before.
Suddenly, there was shouting outside, not too far away — sounds of things crashing to the ground. Someone was laughing loudly, cackling, almost like a yakshi or a pishachu. Lights came on in every house around and behind us.
Ammachi ran out of the kitchen to wake up our father who sat dozing at the dining table, head lolling over his mobile phone. Soon, we followed her out of the house into the cool, damp night that smelled of wild jasmine and flowers that we could not name. Someone in the neighbourhood started yelling that Maoists were attacking us, or that there was a police raid on some house that everyone knew was mixed up with the black-market gangs.
Almost everyone had come out of their houses with torches and flashlights to see what was happening but there was nothing much to see. All the noise was clearly coming from Molamma’s house.
We could now hear steel vessels bouncing off the floor and the girls, probably, wailing, though that didn’t seem likely. Sridharan Uncle’s voice too could be heard clearly, calling and shouting. Was someone having a bad dream? It must have been Molamma who was laughing in that flat, harsh way that didn’t sound very human. It must be the thing that was scaring the girls and maybe making them wail like that.
That poor man, somebody said. All the lights in their house were on this time, though all the curtains were still tightly closed. Our neighbours slowly went back to stand vigil in their verandahs. The night got cooler and stranger.
Then, suddenly, everything was quiet. The laughter stopped and so did the shouting and wailing. The lights were turned off one by one till almost all of their house slipped back into the dark. Except one small corner at the back, where one little lightbulb was left on, as if a child slept there or someone else who was afraid of the dark.
Next day we noticed that the girls did not come to school and poor Sridharan Uncle — of course everyone felt so sorry for him — did not go to work either. The front gate remained locked and no one from the family stepped out of their house the whole day, though everything went back to usual the day after. It was just one of those things about that strange house and family.
Molamma’s mother arrived the next evening and stayed on for weeks. Anyway, everything looked very different around there whenever she visited. She took charge of the kitchen, swept the yard daily, dusted windows and swept away cobwebs, went out by herself to buy fresh fish and vegetables, watered the overgrown plants in the yard and waited at the gate in the evening for the girls to come home.
She would smile at us too and sometimes hand out snacks she had made or brought with her — warm, sweet rice ada wrapped in plantain leaves, crisp twisty murukku that would taste of strange spices or dark jackfruit halwa.
Ammachi said she would sit in the verandah on afternoons, rubbing oil into her daughter’s hair or reading to her from an old magazine or just letting her daughter doze with her head on her mother’s lap while she mended the girls’ torn petticoats or simply sat watching the road.
Molamma would look different on those days, her hair neatly combed and braided, a small black bindi on her papery forehead, and her eyes brighter, a lot more focused, though she would still wander about the yard, mumbling quietly to herself, mostly in the morning after her husband left for work.
The girls would sometimes come to our house to borrow this and that, like a bowlful of coconut oil, or a few spoons of sugar, or a little mango pickle, especially when they were alone with their mother. They always came as a pair though the younger one would never say anything, just cling to her sister’s hand and go where she went. Ammachi always said that whatever they borrowed, they brought back the very next day, in exact quantity.
Once they came asking for rice when we were at home. This was in the evening, past the usual time for Sridharan Uncle to come home. I was about to start my homework when Ammachi called out to me to go and see who was knocking at the door. She was busy, frying fresh river fish for our dinner. The house was full of warm, spicy smells which meant our mother was in a good mood, there was some spending money still left in the house, and perhaps no fights likely between our parents that night.
Molamma’s two girls stood there holding out an empty steel vessel and politely asking if I could please give them two cups of uncooked rice, as if they didn’t know me at all. As if we hadn’t just come back from the same school a few hours ago, in the same bus as every day. As if this behaviour was not odd at all. I decided to play along, wondering if they could smell our wonderful fried fish.
‘Ammachi! Two strange girls are standing at our door asking for some rice! Never seen them around here, maybe they are beggar girls from that bus stop gang… or kids from that North Indian group working in the market.’
Excerpted with permission from One Day One Morning by Anuradha Vijayakrishnan published by Red River 2024