My Nine Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

to marry her Christian boy friend—his feelings on the subject were confined to this simple statement of fact, followed by other facts such as the high price of staples and vegetables. I don’t remember any mention of his own illness. When I was too busy to read his letter to the end, I stuffed it in my pocket for later and then forgot about it and put it through the washing machine; so he may have somewhere mentioned the mysterious illness and the tests and the hospitals and the expense, the expense.By now I knew for myself what it was to be consumed by worries, eaten up by Life not in the radiant Nina-sense but as something insidious as a worm. Finally his eldest son wrote. The letter was dignified, calm, weary with acceptance the way Somnath himself had been. It might have been a fitting elegy if it hadn’t lacked that other element I knew to be his: that sudden leap of recognition—as when listening to poetry or music—that this is how life could be and maybe, somewhere else, really was.
    Susie also died—or passed away, she would have said—as serene in her pastel nightie as she had been for the past two decades. By that time our money was gone, mostly on round-the-clock nursing for her. Fortunately I myself was an old woman by then and could draw my social security. It was not enough to live on in New York but would see me through a modest existence in India. I bought a one-way ticket to New Delhi where I have been ever since, first in the upstairs flat in the new colony with the landlords living downstairs. I’ve stopped traveling—I’m not planning to finish my thesis, for even if it were to be awarded the PhD degree, I’m too old to get a teaching appointment. But it’s all right, I don’t have to travel far now to be where my subject had been. Every Thursday evening I take a bus to Nizamuddin, to listen to the singers in the courtyard of the mausoleum compound. There is a wash of pink-tinted light over the white marble until the sun finally sets; then the sky, stretched between tombs and mosque, is a soft silk cloth with stars sewn into it—such a beautiful setting for the words of praise and longing so lustily sung for rupees by the muscular performers in shirtsleeves. One of them smiles and sways to the sounds he is squeezing out of the harmonium, and peace flows from thenight and the music, soothing the madmen in their chains who have been brought here to benefit from the influence of the live music and the dead saint. Other evenings I take another bus, which deposits me near the river. Here I join a little group of women—most of them widows, all of them old—and they too are singing, in the same strain though to a different god or, in their case, gods. I sing along with them, while they laugh at my pronunciation and try to teach me better. They have no difficulty accepting my alien presence, for though my face is white, it is as wrinkled as theirs; I have taken to wearing a cotton sari, which is more convenient, especially to draw over one’s head as a protection against the hot sun. We are all singing the same songs and all enjoying the river when it is in spate or, when it is not, the liquid luminous sky flowing above the bed of dry mud.
    I notice I’ve been using the present tense—as though all the above were the present. But it is not. If it were, I might have been able to end my days as serenely singing as Susie did hers. One day, while returning from an excursion to the river, maybe still singing and smiling to myself, I heard someone behind me in the bus line calling my name. “Is it you? Really you?” She embraced me as no one had done in a long time. It was Priti, Somnath’s daughter, though it took me some time to recognize her. I had last seen her when she was a student, in love, with a defiant short haircut and ideas to match. Now it was many years since her romantic elopement and she was almost middleaged. My