Chapter 7: Anushka / Jhablo

# Chapter 7: Anushka / Jhablo

The almirah was in Shalini's bedroom.

Not the main almirah, the large, steel, double-doored one that held saris and blouse pieces and the fabric inventory of a woman who sewed for a living. This was the other one. The smaller one. Wooden, with brass handles that had turned green with oxidation, tucked into the corner of the room between the bed and the window. It was old, older than anything else in the house, older possibly than the house itself, because it had the look of furniture that had been inherited rather than purchased, furniture that carried the weight of multiple generations in its joints and hinges.

His fingers traced the edge of the photograph, the glossy surface smooth under his thumb.

Piano arrived three days after Anushka did. Yamaha P-125, the digital piano that she used for practice when the acoustic was not available, shipped from Mumbai in a padded case that was, itself, a minor engineering marvel: custom-built by a man in Dadar who specialized in instrument cases and who had measured the piano with the precision of a tailor measuring a body for a bespoke suit, the padding foam-and-felt, the exterior water-resistant nylon, the zippers marine-grade, the whole thing designed to survive the Konkan Railway's baggage handling, which was roughly equivalent to being handled by a team of enthusiastic gorillas.

She set it up in the living room. The room was not ideal for a piano. Too small, the acoustics wrong (hard floor, thick walls, low ceiling, the sound bouncing and accumulating rather than dispersing), but the room had the window, the window that looked onto the garden, and the garden had the river beyond it, and the combination of window and garden and river created a soundscape that no concert hall could replicate: the piano's notes leaving the instrument and travelling through the window and mixing with the bird calls and the river sounds and the rustling of the coconut palms, the music becoming part of the landscape, the landscape becoming part of the music.

Shalini watched the setup without helping. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her expression unreadable, the expression of a woman who was witnessing something she had not expected and was deciding how to feel about it. A piano in her living room. Her daughter's piano in her living room. The instrument that Anushka's adoptive parents had given her, the instrument that had shaped Anushka's life, the instrument that was, in some sense, the evidence of the life that Shalini had not been part of, the life that happened because Shalini gave a baby away and the baby grew up and learned to play Chopin.

"Where should I put it?" Anushka asked.

"By the window," Shalini said. And then, after a pause: "Your father would have wanted it by the window."

Shalini opened it after lunch. The lunch had been dalitoy and rice and fried bangda. Mackerel, the fish that was to Goa what vada pav was to Mumbai, a staple so fundamental it transcended the category of food and became identity. Anushka had eaten until Shalini was satisfied, which required approximately twice the quantity Anushka considered reasonable. Then chai. Then the almirah.

"This was my mother's," Shalini said, touching the wood. grain was visible through the varnish, or through the place where the varnish had once been, because the surface was bare now, the finish worn away by decades of hands and heat and the Goan humidity that took a percentage of everything, that levied its slow tax on wood and metal and fabric and skin. "Kasturi's. She kept her, important things here. Papers. Jewellery. Letters."

"The tulsi chain," Anushka said. She'd received the tulsi chain three months ago, from Sulochana — Kasturi's surviving daughter, Shalini's sister-in-law, Anushka's biological aunt. Four generations of women. The chain was in Mumbai now, in Anushka's bedside drawer, next to her watch and her metronome and the note Deepak had written, She is here. Our daughter is here. — in handwriting that looked nothing like hers and everything like the handwriting of a man she would have known if the world had arranged itself differently.

"The chain is with you. This, " Shalini reached into the almirah. The interior was lined with old newspaper, Navhind Times, dates visible: 1998, 2003, 2007, the layers of a life recorded in newsprint. She moved aside a stack of folded cloth and pulled out a plastic bag. Clear plastic, the kind that came from a garment shop, sealed with a rubber band that had dried and cracked but still held.

She put the bag on the bed.

Inside: white cotton. Small. Very small. size of a thing made for a body that hadn't yet existed, for a person who was still potential, still becoming, still folded inside another person's body.

"The jhablo," Shalini said.

Anushka didn't touch it immediately. She looked at it through the plastic. The white cotton was yellowed — not the yellow of stain but the yellow of time, the slow chemical change that happens to cloth when it sits in a sealed bag for twenty-six years, preserved but not immune. The blue border was still blue, though faded, the colour of a memory of a colour rather than the colour itself.

Weight of the garland pressed against her collarbones, the marigold petals damp and cool.

"Can I, "

"Yes."

Anushka peeled the rubber band off. It crumbled in her fingers — the rubber had lost its elasticity years ago and was now just a dried circle of material, holding on through habit rather than function. She opened the bag. Smell hit her first: not unpleasant, but specific. smell of stored cloth. The smell of time sealed in plastic. The smell of a thing that had been waiting.

She lifted the jhablo out.

It was tiny. She'd known it would be tiny, she'd been a newborn, newborns were tiny, this was not revelatory information, but the physical reality of it, the actual smallness of the garment in her hands, undid something in her that she hadn't known was held together. This was the size she'd been. This was the body she'd had. This was the garment that had been made for her by a woman she'd never met, a grandmother who had stitched blue thread through white cotton while Anushka was still inside Shalini's body, still swimming in the dark, still unborn, still the person everyone was waiting for.

"Kasturi sewed the border by hand," Shalini said. She was sitting on the bed, her hands folded in her lap, watching Anushka hold the jhablo with the focused attention of a person watching something sacred. "She said machine stitching was too rough for a baby. She used a needle. Took her three evenings. She sang while she sewed. She always sang while she sewed. Mandos. Old Konkani songs. She said the baby could hear the singing through the cloth."

"Could she?"

"Could who?"

"Could the baby, could I, hear the singing?"

"I don't know. You were inside me. You couldn't tell me what you heard." A pause. "But you kicked. Every time she sang. You kicked so hard I could see my stomach move. Conceição was there once. She saw it. She said: 'This child is a dancer.' I said: 'This child is a listener.'"

Anushka held the jhablo against her chest. The cotton was thin, almost transparent from age, so fine that her body heat went through it immediately, warming it, making it feel less like an object and more like a skin. She pressed her fingers into the fabric and felt the hand-stitched border, the individual stitches, each one made by a woman's fingers, each one a small act of intention, of care, of the belief that this garment would be worn by a child who would live in this house and grow up on this floor and be, in every way that mattered, present.

"Why did you keep it?"

Shalini's eyes were wet. Not crying. Holding. The note sustained.

"Because I gave everything else away. When you, when I, when the adoption happened. I gave your clothes to the agency. I gave the blankets. The bottles. Everything." She pressed her hands together in her lap, the fingers interlocked, the knuckles white. "But I couldn't give this. Because my mother made it. Because her hands made it. Because if I gave it away, I would have given away the last thing that connected the three of us. You, me, and her."

"Shalini —"

"I'm not finished." Her voice was steady. The steadiness cost her — Anushka could see the cost, could see the effort in the set of her jaw and the straightness of her spine, the physical infrastructure of composure. "I kept it because I was wrong to give you up. I knew it the day I did it and I knew it every day after. And keeping this, " She looked at the jhablo in Anushka's hands. "Keeping this was my way of — not undoing it. I couldn't undo it. But remembering. Holding the proof that you existed. That my mother made something for you. That there was a plan. That the plan was this house and this floor and this village and you, here, wearing white cotton with a blue border, while your grandmother sang."

That room was quiet. The ceiling fan turned. Outside, Gopal barked at something — a passing cyclist, a crow, an offence that only Gopal could perceive. bark was distant, muffled by walls, by rooms, by the accumulated architecture of a house that had held this secret for twenty-six years.

She pressed her bare feet against the floor tiles, feeling the grout lines between each square.

Anushka sat on the bed next to Shalini. She put the jhablo between them. On the bed, on the sheets that Shalini had put out new for her arrival, on the surface that separated and connected them.

"I can't wear it," she said.

"Obviously."

"But I want to keep it."

"It's yours. It was always yours."

They sat together. The jhablo between them. The light through the window. The fan. The distant dog. The smell of stored time. And Anushka thought: this is what it means to come back. Not the arrival, not the gate, not the water in the steel glass. This. The opening of the almirah. unfolding of the plastic. The twenty-six-year-old garment that was too small to wear and too important to let go. This was the return.

---

That evening, Anushka called Mandakini.

"She kept my baby clothes."

That pause on the line. Mandakini was in the kitchen. Anushka could hear the pressure cooker, the three-whistle dal, the invariable setting.

"Of course she did."

"You're not surprised?"

"Beta, I kept your first pair of shoes. They're in a box under my bed. Pink shoes. Very small. You wore them for three months and then your feet grew and they didn't fit anymore. I should have thrown them away. They're twenty-five years old and they smell like old rubber." Another pause. "But they're yours. And mothers keep things."

"She said her mother made it. Kasturi. A jhablo with a blue border."

"Blue is a good colour for babies. Blue keeps the evil eye away." Mandakini's voice was matter-of-fact. The matter-of-factness was, Anushka understood, not indifference but generosity. The deliberate refusal to make this moment competitive, to make it about which mother kept what, which mother's love was measured in which object. "Did you cry?"

"A little."

"Good. Crying is the body's way of saying: I understand. If you didn't cry, I'd worry you didn't understand."

"I understand."

"I know you do." The pressure cooker whistled. One. Two. Three. "Now eat something. You sound emotional and emotional is close to hungry. Tell Shalini to feed you."

"She already did. Twice."

"Good. She's doing her job."

Anushka smiled. She wanted to say something — something large, something that encompassed the impossible geometry of loving two mothers, the way the heart expanded to hold what the mind said it couldn't, the thali growing, always growing. But the words were too big for a phone call. Too big for language. So she said:

"I love you, Aai."

"I know. Now eat."

She hung up. Put the phone on the bedside table, next to the photograph of Deepak. Looked at the jhablo, which she'd folded and placed on the chair. Not in a bag, not in a drawer, but on the chair, where she could see it, where the morning light would hit it, where it would be the first thing she saw when she woke.

White cotton. Blue border. Twenty-six years old. Too small to wear. Exactly the right size to mean everything.