“Mr. Carter’s Women” by Ananda Kumar
A firm believer that the characters he creates are means to connect with the world around him, Anada Kumar expresses his dreams and innermost thoughts through his writing. He lives day-to-day as a dentist in Chennai, India, writing in his downtime. His stories draw on the lives of the people who inspire him, His first published book, Vanakkam Cosmos, an anthology of novellas, was first released in 2017.
Forward to Mr. Carter’s Women
Unfortunately, I grew up in a social bubble where men are given credit for the success of “their” women — emphasis on “their,” as many believe they posses the women in their lives. Fathers were applauded when their daughters graduated and became financially independent; housewives bragged about the size of the shrines built for men in their lives who “allowed” their them to continue their studies after marriage; brothers being the only voice for their sisters' rights.
When I turned twenty-nine, I felt deep in my heart that something was wrong with these values instilled in me, so I stepped out of my social bubble. I was fortunate to make new good friends, rational enough to open my eyes to the difference between letting a woman do something and understanding that one human being should not be allowed control over another. I learnt to cultivate some basic common sense and had the audacity to call out the people who defend this toxic masculine trend.
They are not YOUR women. That’s what I wanted to reiterate in my work.
That’s how Mr. Carter’s Women came into existence.
MR. CARTER’S WOMEN
On Sunday evenings, Amma and I took the Activa to visit my maternal grandmother, Subha Paati’s, and my great-grandfather in their Chennai home.
Subha Paati said her father loved the United States much more than the three wives and seventeen children he left behind in Madras, as he traveled to New York through safe delivery system of the Luce-Celler Act. As Brooklyn unraveled before his eyes, he changed his name to Michael Carter, married his lactose intolerant landlady, poisoned her cat, and bought a tobacco shop in Fulton Street from a man of Parsi origin who was secretly leaving his five motherless children to go to Paris and learn the violin.
In 2019, Mr. Carter learned that he had stage-four bladder cancer.
“But it is unfortunate,” Subha Paati added, “that things turn out to be fine and peachy for shifty old men like him. No matter how bad and irresponsible they have been, no matter how abusive, their family always takes care of them.” His now-fifty-year old American-landlady-bride turned out to be so fertile that she gave him seven daughters. And those seven daughters married seven young men (all of them white, protestant and non-smokers). And they all gave him twenty-five grandchildren.
Of his many grandchildren, only one, Linda, truly cared for sick Mr. Carter and thought it a great idea to send him back to Chennai, to Subha Paati, one of Mr. Carter’s daughters from his second marriage. Linda said she’d take care of his medical expenses and all my grandmother had to do was look after him.
“Wow, aren’t you the generous foreigner!” Subha Paati said to her on her Zoom call. “Sending him back to us, just so he wouldn’t stink up your fancy corner of the world!”
Linda never contacted us again. The third of every month, money comes into Subha Paati’s bank account, and she spends the money lavishly on herself.
Subha Patti was born the day before Mr. Carter left her mother in 1950. Everyone blamed Subha Paati for driving her father away from her mother. Her mother descended into melancholia: postpartum was another silly excuse for women to not work and so people thought she was just being difficult. Subha Paati's mother didn’t eat or sleep or talk for days, refusing even to feed her daughter.
When Subha Paati turned fifteen, her mother confessed to something: that she was taking a bath in the river, and had suddenly felt an unknown gaping hole develop in her chest, and seeing water all around her, she let herself go, letting the current take her, thinking that would fill the hole. Refusing to swim for several minutes as the waves took her, she suddenly came back to her senses and reached the banks after much struggle.
My grandmother was deeply affected by her mother’s confession. How could her mother think of leaving her, just as Mr. Carter left their family behind? At a very small age, Subha Paati understood that adults get to act reckless with impunity, and that children are the victims. So she decided she had to grow up faster because being a child doesn’t help. And for a start, she wanted to make some money for herself so as to afford to live on her own in the city and go to college. She knew that Mr. Perkins, the neighbourhood Anglo-Indian pianist could help, as he had friends in high places in Madras; and so she asked him if she could be his maid. He happily obliged, and after school, she went to Mr. Perkins' house, where she made him his evening tea, baked him his rum cakes, made him his gin and tonic, cooked him his dinners, and also kept house for him.
On Sundays, when she would spend the whole day at Mr. Perkins' house, she would stop stirring his stew or mopping his floors or doing his dishes to instead listen to him play. She observed him writing symbols on a sheet of paper. Soon the compositions were etched in her mind, and she started seeing the correlating pattern of the notes and the symbols on the stave and sounds she heard when Mr. Perkins played.
Two months into the job, Mr. Perkins came home late one evening and found Subha Paati, studying the sheets of a Tchaikovsky piece he was playing the previous day. Sensing his presence in the room, Subha Paati dashed out and waited in the kitchen for Mr. Perkins to dismiss her for the day. In a few minutes he summoned her. She found him sitting at the piano; on the table where he took his evening tea, there was a blank music sheet and a pencil. She knew what was expected of her. He started playing a bit of Beethoven’s Pastorale he arranged for the piano. In a few minutes he stopped, turned around and looked at Subha Paati expectantly.
With deliberation and deep thought, she took the pencil and started writing on the stave. She looked up at him when she was done with the notation for the part he played, and he walked up to her slowly, took the sheet and studied it in disbelief. Astonished by his fifteen-year old maid’s ear for notation, he asked her whether she had experience transcribing before; to which she said that, to her, the whole thing looked like someone threw a bunch of crazy symbols at a precarious spider web. He then asked her whether she could play if he gave her a sheet to follow; and she said, sounding bashful and yet a little conceited: “I don’t think I need this sheet, Mr. Perkins.”
That’s how Mr. Perkins, and later the world, came to know that my Subha Paati had music in her soul. Mr. Perkins used his every connection to earn her entry into Trinity College and soon she travelled all over the world, moving closely with legends like Martha Argerich, Janet Baker, and John Barbarolli.
Things turned out well for her, but she hasn’t forgiven her parents. Though we call him Mr. Carter, to my grandmother, as long as he lies there on her rotten old bed riddled with bedbugs, in her care, the senile and sick absentee father is just a shifty absentee father.
Unlike, Subha Paati, Amma and I both treated Mr. Carter like any other human being. He had a soft spot for Amma because it is said she is the spitting image of my great-grandmother, which makes it easier for Subha Paati to stronghold a grudge against my mother. Amma said that she was used to it, that ever since she was a little girl, my grandmother had been holding her daughter’s uncanny resemblance to her own mother against her.
“Whatever I did wasn’t good enough,” Amma shared with me. Once when Amma came second in long jump when she was eleven, Subha Paati scoffed and muttered, “No wonder you fell short!” When Amma was bedridden by chicken pox, Subha Paati blamed her for spreading it to Murthy uncle, Amma's younger brother, muttering: “You can’t help it, can you?” When Amma was given a medal by the principal for not skipping school for even a day in eleventh standard, all Subha Paati had to say was: “Some medal for doing one’s duty!” When relatives and well-wishers remarked that Amma looked like my great-grandmother, the former scoffed and said: “Let's hope she doesn’t turn out to be useless as her as well.”
The only time Amma ever felt she was worth something was when she met my father in college. He made her feel she was the center of his universe. My grandmother didn’t approve of the match, so my mother eloped. I was born a year later, and Subha Paati came to visit in the hospital. My mother said she was standing a few feet away from the cradle and saw my father come in and take me in his arms. And one look at my father holding me, sitting beside Amma who was lying on the bed, the two of them sharing a quiet moment of admiration for the thing they created out of love—Subha Paati stormed out of the room, without a word. My father said the window in our hospital room had a view of the parking lot, and that he saw Subha Paati leaning against the hood of her car, her face buried in her palms, her body shaking from head to toe, trying so hard to keep it together.
The way Mr. Carter talked to Amma with such tenderness, the way he asked her to stay behind to complain about Subha Paati, the way he always wanted to hear her sing (as musical talent runs in the family, my mother’s voice is divine), the way he always asked timidly to feed him dinner—all the attention he gave Amma was so foreign and gratifying to her that she failed to see how much he was hurting Subha Paati in the process and that it was his way of getting back at his daughter for the way he was being treated.
Sometimes Mr. Carter would ask me about my paintings. He asked me to sketch him once; and while I sat there, conjuring his image on paper, I was reminded of the audacious tale of a fifteen-year old Casanova for a father and his three marriages in India and the one in America. I remembered that when Subha Paati was finished with the tale, the first thing that came to my mind was: how on earth did he convince four separate women to marry and bare twenty-four children for him?
But, like they say how a question answers itself, it made sense to me: the way he made Amma feel on our visits, and how proud Subha Paati was for being the only child in all the twenty-four to fulfil her filial duty (for believe it or not, the Hindu version of Heaven is not outside her gamut, and Mr. Carter made her feel better every day with a promising place in it), it was no secret that he could play any woman like a fiddle.
And yes, Mr. Carter took us for granted. He thought my grandmother who took care of him, and my mother and I who came to visit him on Sundays and public holidays were—I believe the right word is—non-essential to the quality of his existence. Why? Because we were always around, and he believed we’ll always be. My grandmother wouldn’t starve him to death fearing damnation. My mother and I wouldn’t hold what he did to Subha Paati against him because we were raised better.
I remember one Sunday when my father came to pick us up because my mother’s twenty year old Activa's engine finally gave up and ceased. He came in to visit Mr. Carter, and the old man was ecstatic to finally meet someone with whom he can talk politics, cricket and how feminism is the new fascism.
They were inseparable for two hours, and when it was time for us to leave, to my utter astonishment, I saw Mr. Carter's eyes well up.
He said, with violent fits of sobbing choking him from time to time, that he had been such a fool to abandon his loving third wife (my great-grandmother was his second wife) and his infant daughter to run off to America. I still remember my father’s words that were meant to console him: “Now, now, Mr. Carter, you shouldn’t worry. Look at them. Your girls all turned out to be great. Your daughter is a prodigy, your granddaughter is a leading virologist, and your great-granddaughter is a Picasso in the making. Look at these girls. Look at what you have made, Mr. Carter!”
