Trigger warning: Suicide
RAGE
Four hours after Pia cut open her wrist with a blade, Dashrath, her father-in-law broke open the door of her room with the family plow.
The village had collapsed into a siesta in the humid afternoon heat. 60-year-old Dashrath shook up the three young men sprawled under the Banyan outside, asleep with their mouths open.
“100 rupees to each of you if you can break open a door,” he barked at them. Bhola, the aging dog howled in fright.
The excitement of bringing a door down in a village where nothing moved, not even air, brought the boys to their feet. The trio grabbed 9 kgs of iron, and pulped the door of Pia’s room, lunging back and forth, back and forth, on the instructions of Dashrath, till the sorry wooden planks came crashing down.
Gopal, Pia’s young brother-in-law was barred from touching the plow, or entering Pia’s room; or standing in the courtyard, and showing his crumpled sobbing face to the neighbours. His presence could have inflamed the gossip about his alleged affair with Pia.
16-year-old Gopal and 24-year-old Pia had the hots for each other: Pia’s husband had set this whisper campaign rolling in the lanes of their village, before disappearing with an older married woman.
Everyone knew this to be a lie. But no one stopped anyone from spreading the lie.
Pia called a meeting of village elders to clear her name, cried her heart out in the village square, then stomped into her in-laws’ house, and cut herself in rage.
SHAME
By the time, news reached me about Pia, she had spent 7 days by herself in the Gosaba Rural Hospital in the Sunderbans. I stared at the Google image of the small, whitewashed building by the sea. It stood at the last inhabited point in the deltaic islands, before the start of a dark mass of floating mangroves.
Pia was lying, perhaps dying, in a hospital on the threshold.
In that week, between intermittent power cuts, and the odd caress of an attendant, Pia lost blood, stamina, and love. But what corroded her insides was the shame of self-harm. Guilt rusted her bones, like the grills of the hospital windows where she swung between life and death.
THREATS
In the haze between fainting and consciousness, Pia had mumbled an incoherent threat to the 15 folks who had tumbled into the boat to rush her to the hospital.
“If my family and employer in Delhi get a whiff of this incident, I will harm myself again.”
Everyone in the boat had broken into terrified cries and wails and then quickly surrendered to Pia’s demands as the boatman sliced through the waters of the Bay of Bengal.
PANIC
Nothing, not a whisper reached me or Pia’s parents.
All I knew was that Pia had traveled to the village of the man she madly loved. They were going to end their long-distance marriage, and, build a home for their young love in Delhi. Before leaving, Pia had entrusted me with the job of finding work for her ‘Mr’.
When Pia did not show up for work for seven days, and when my calls to her went unanswered, I panicked. I called her parents. They were also in a panic.
After 140 missed calls and two dozen text messages to Pia and her husband, I went into emergency mode. I called the Gosaba police station and pretended to be a very important person from New Delhi with big political connections. I demanded that Pia be traced immediately.
The next day, a doctor from the Gosaba Rural Hospital called, asking if I wanted to speak to Pia.
RESCUE
Okay, the plot did not unfurl quite that way. Neither was I the hero. Gopal, Pia’s brother-in-law, broke the deadlock.
He slunk out of home late one night and sobbed out the entire story to me over the phone. “Boudi (sister-in-law) should never know that I have told you everything,” he pleaded, drowning audibly in a mix of tears, snorts, and spit.
Gopal gave me the numbers of the Gosaba thana and the doctor attending to Pia. He tipped me on the thana officer’s servility to people from Delhi.
A 16-year-old who had been called a sex fiend by elders and peers, and received a battering by his entire village, had somehow emerged from the shroud of shame to throw a lifeline at Pia.
RELIEF
When I finally spoke to Pia, I sank in relief and imploded with rage.
“Didi, I am sorry. I am ten days late in returning to work. I should have called. But I fell sick. Please forgive me.”
Trauma had broken Pia’s voice and made it small.
I told Pia that she could rest more, and take a longer leave. I asked her if I could send her money. I informed her that my daughter was waiting to welcome her with jewelry of petals and leaves from the garden.
I was effusive and sweet on the phone, but I wanted to blow in rage. I controlled the tenor and pitch of my voice, but I wanted to sob in pain. Pia, my girl had been hurt.
In the end, Pia knew that I knew the full story.
RENEWAL
After two days, Pia called from the doctor’s phone. “Didi, I want to come home. I don’t want to stare at the sea and rot on this hospital bed.”
Pia had decided to live.
I wanted to fly down and bring her back home. “No need,” she cut me out. Please book me a ticket in Rajdhani, AC Three Tier.” Pia was decisive to the point of bossiness.
Four days later, Pia was at our door. Sharp at 8.30 am. In a crisp blue-collar shirt with long sleeves that covered her wrist and half her palms. Smart denim Jeans. A red cloth bag on her shoulder.
“I have thought through the breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu for today,” she said, as she disappeared into the kitchen.
Pia returned without light in her eyes. A sunk-in jaw. Dark circles that cradled sorrow. Cheeks that refused to crack into dimples and smiles for the next few years.
A few days later, Gopal also left his village. He got a job as an attendant in a hospital at Petrapole - a town on the Bengal- Bangladesh border.
Gopal had landed in a hospital on the threshold.
RESILIENCE
Pia and Gopal: two young people, held together in the cycle of betrayal and courage. Like millions of shamed children and young women, they navigated family harm by running into the anonymity of a city; by fading into an urban fog.
Back in Delhi, Pia’s parents embraced her with love tinged with a patina of shame. But the neighbours raised a stink. No girl who wore stigma as openly as Pia could be allowed to live in their lanes.
Pia moved out and rented a smaller room with a large window. Her hovel let in some light and some views of a scraggly urban forest outside. This became her resting place from where she rose to work, earn, study, and fund her father’s mental illness and brother’s cancer.
After their death, she raised her nephews in this home.
RETURN
Gopal became a wanderer. He left the hospital and started walking along the straight grey strip of Jessore Road – the highway connecting Kolkata and Dhaka.
He stopped by villages in search of the tender feel of his mother's hands rubbing warm mustard oil on his scalp. He lay in orchards to catch the chortle of his father in the passing breeze. He lived in bus stops, hoping for his brother to alight from a bus, haggard from his search for his runaway sibling.
When Gopal crossed the threshold, the Bangladesh police deported him back to his country of loss.
The last we heard, Gopal had been sent to a home: the Pavlov Mental Hospital of Kolkata; a home with iron gates fastened with locks; a home without Dashrath to break open the door.
This semi-fiction essay is inspired by Pia - our home manager and life manager.
Twenty years ago, Pia came to work in our home. She was 16. She told me she was 18. Her father’s advanced schizophrenia had sunk the family into an irreversible debt. This class IX topper turned her back on school to put food on the family table.
Pia went on to raise my daughter. She raised all of us. Her care for our home, and chops for housekeeping, enabled me to focus on my career and business.
Pia continues to show up everyday at home, dot at 8.30 am. Every morning, I open the door to a faceful of dimples and smiles.
(All names have been changed. The photographs in this essay were taken by me, at various points in time, in and around the villages and blocks of South 24 Parganas and the Sunderbans, where most of this story unfolds.)
As always brilliant. I am a bit lost for words!!
Such searing, evocative writing Manisha. And so much you speak to as you tell the story of migration and sheer, complete absence of any kind of support systems for millions. Heart breaking.