Introduction

These ten memorable stories explore interior worlds and moments of intensity, either awakening or loss, in the lives of diverse characters mostly young girls and married women, but also boys and long-laboring men. Whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, they are all burdened by the complex layerings of class and gender, and are variously able or unable to find escape from the conditions of oppression that surround them. Some manage to rise above their situations by experiencing the denials and hardships of their lives as temporary; others find no such relief.
In the title story, Rose Ammal, who married young and bore numerous children, survives her husband's betrayal and religious conversion by creating her own private redemptions and conversions. The Next Corpse Collector chronicles significant moments in the lives of two young brothers, Anwar and Amir, who seek to escape the destiny of corpse collector, the job their father is determined to bequeath to them. What the Watchman Saw offers a glimpse into the life of Venkatesh, a longtime watchman who is faced with the dilemma of whether to report the theft of stolen antiquities from the house of his new neighbor.
Esther is a tale of the haunting, troubled spirit of Leeza's grandmother, who lingers in Leeza's childhood home and unexpectedly helps her during the summer her grandfather dies as she wakes to an adolescent infatuation with a neighbor boy. In The Couple in the Park, a young middle-class wife, Laura, in a constrictive arranged marriage, finds comfort in watching a couple in the park who remind her of her own grandparents as she tips over the edge into schizophrenia. The Man on the Veranda traces a significant day in the life of retired government-worker Parameswaran the day his wife finally leaves him.

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Excerpt

Esther

It happens after midnight, like it has so many times before, on this night when my mother's away in the hospital at her father's dying bedside, and we're alone in the Madras house, my sister and I, with Kanthi, my grandfather's old servant-lady, who sleeps in the hall, two rooms away, on the floor.

Click. Scrape. Click.

Then sharper, more convincingly, as before: Click Clack. Click Clack. We hear the footsteps of death on the terrace, they are cool and hard, sound of heeled sandals on brick, the sound of resolution.

I wake and look across at my sister, huddled under her sheet. Moonlight streams down my face, shivers on Krista's form, plays in a silvery tangle of light and shadow on the wall. The window is open. Through bars I see the high three-quarter moon, swept-away shreds of cirrus and bright sky around it. Leaves of the cotton trees sway. There's a wind outside, rustling through sheets, breathing a cool touch on our skin.

Upstairs the dogs cry, a pained, whimpering sound. Zorro and Slim, our rescued mongrels, who like to sleep on the terrace and hear her each time, just as we do, as clearly as if she had just left the room. Click Clack. Click Clack.

It is 1978. I am almost fourteen, my sister is eight. We have come down from Bangalore to my grandfather Roderick's house in Madras a little earlier this summer than usual because he is sick, he is dying, and my mother is his only child and wants to be here with him.

Her footsteps click on the terrace sharp as gunshot, definite as the play of light going up at windows--one-two one-two as the lady of the house climbs upward.

But Esther is not the lady of the house, not anymore. Esther is not alive. Esther, my grandfather's long-dead wife, my mother's mother, was not even someone we knew.

My mother speaks of her often, and knows we can hear her now, walking about at night. We are not alone in this. She has often told us about what she loosely terms her "visions." Not dreams, she'd correct, these are real faces she saw, real people she heard. Not dream-figures. She'd wake from a dream sometimes, and her dream would open to an afterlife thick with long-departed relatives, climbing over the windowsill, standing beside her bed, curled up in 2 a.m. armchairs in the sleeping parlor. Once she saw old Mrs. Zulfikhar next door who died at eighty-three in her sleep (wearing a bright blue saree--seventeen, maybe eighteen, but it was her, she was smiling, I saw her face), she saw her grandfather for years (leaning on his cane, wearing the white suit he wore everyday to his work during British times in the Post Office), she saw my uncle Terence Ratnam who died prematurely of a heart attack at forty-five (sitting in the armchair, sipping tea at our house, reading the newspaper).

We are like her, she says. We hear without knowing we can. Because we are children. To us the stars are white stones still, half-raised, half-buried in the sky's dark. Our hands, unsoiled with the knowledge of the world, have not learned to press firm on our eyes, ears, minds yet. But mostly, she says, we hear the ghost of Esther Kanamma Samuel walk the dark corridors of the after-dead in this house where she was born because we are her children, we have inherited her skin.

All our lives our mother has half-believed she is psychic and half-believed she dreams. It is no clear thing, this feeling, and now she's gifted it to us, an amorphous certainty of stepping across borders and limits of the mummified heart, not too certain of what we're seeing.

It is like the feeling I had when I opened the old falling-apart crate on the terrace one afternoon last week. It had probably been thrown out by my irate grandfather, sifting through his things and deciding he didn't need to keep this. The wood was damp with rain, planks falling, nails pulled apart. Inside I saw sheets of old notebook paper, tied up in string. I saw sprawling words on yellowing paper, the fine blue ink of another time spoiled and rotting at edges.

My mother told me they were Esther's long-ago letters to herself. She took the sopping-wet packet away from us, put the ceiling fan on in the dining-room and dried the pages. She shooed us from the room, smoothed the crinkly sheets, squinted through dissolving ink, cried when she read the words--through the white cheese-crepe curtain I saw her.

I don't know the true story of Esther, I never will, although I grow up to read the scraps of her letters, sift through her photographs, hear everything about her my mother knows to tell. Krista and I have never heard Esther's footsteps before either, although we've spent many summers here. But the whole of the past few weeks, since we arrived, we've woken at night to the sound of a woman's footsteps across the terrace and the dogs making strange sounds, whimpering, questioning, shout-barking.

So perhaps my mother is right. Perhaps we've graduated now in some way and never knew it. Perhaps we'll be privy now to whisperings, barely-breathed, the afterthoughts, teeming undertones of the universe. Like her, to live on a border between worlds, hear the comings and goings of souls long-stilled. Summon them at will perhaps, have them open at our touch like hands parting, a flurry of birds, wings rising and rising.

I am not soothed by this feeling. I shiver as I lie and watch the silvery moon climb the waking, stretching mound of Krista-shadow underneath her sheet.

Tonight is the night my grandfather dies. I do not know this, not yet. What I do know is I have spent this summer dreaming of my grandmother Esther, as I hear her story, finally, in bits and pieces, at night, from my mother. What I know is the moon is nearly full tonight and slides easy as milk over our skin. We wake to this light, and for once it feels like the whole truth about Esther comes toward us. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1) In the title story, Temporary Lives, how does the narrator transcend the central struggles of her life?
2) In the story Esther, what is the most compelling narrative of retrieval that comes through?
3) In the story What the Watchman Saw, could the night watchman have acted differently?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Ramola D's web site

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