I’m fascinated by what I see as the fundamental alienness of children. Even the most affable, well-adjusted child seems to me unknowable in a way that many adults are not. But outside of fairy tales and folktales, which allows children the degree of darkness and opacity they deserve, most fiction tends to treat them either as dim innocents to be protected or, if they are the troublemaking type, wild creatures to be tamed and won over. I wanted to write about a child who refuses to fall into these categories, who is immune to protection or taming, who retains her privacy and her unknowability to the very end, even if it comes at a painful cost to all involved.
Madhuri Vijay, Contributor Note
After having read this story four times, I have a hypothesis: the story itself is unknowable, refusing recognition. I hear my own voice in my head telling me I’m incompetent. And I wonder if that’s what Vijay was going for, or if I’m just really stupid and grasping at straws, looking for anything that will make sense of it.
The story starts with Geeta as an au pair for the Bakers, a British couple living in India. She’s great with their kids, and they depend on her, so they treat her well and she has a lot of free time when the kids are in school. This generates the title:
… it was possible that the maidservant resented her for her relative freedom. To ward off any ill feeling, every so often Geeta brought home of trinket for the girl, who was a chatty, dimpled creature from Jharkhand. Geeta was from Odisha and had nothing in common with her, except the fact that people in Bangalore knew almost nothing about where either of them came from.
At various times Geeta had bought the girl an alarm clock, a pair of leaf-shaped earrings, and a fake-silver pendant engraved with the words “You Are My Dear Friend.” She worried that she might have overdone it a bit with the pendant, but the girl loved it and loved Geeta for it.
Geeta sees Srikanth, who will become her husband, at one of the Bakers’s parties. It’s unclear what he’s doing there; apparently an invited guest brought him, but it’s possible he just crashed the party, as the Bakers have no idea who he is or who he came with. She runs into him a few days later at the market, and things go from there. He’s older – she’s twenty-nine, he’s fifty-three – but a husband’s a husband.
Geeta discovers she can’t have children. The maidservant from the Bakers suggests what sounds like a gray-market adoption, and Rani, eight years old, comes into Geeta’s life. She sets her up in a room with a lovely view of a jackfruit tree:
“Do I need anything?” the girl repeated. Her voice had an anesthetized quality, but within it twitched a slippery, mocking thing. Then she smiled. It was an unnerving smile to see on an eight-year-old face, somehow innocent, cunning, and flirtatious at the same time, and Geeta, to her shame, panicked.
“Then I’ll leave you to rest,” she said, turning her back on both the girl and the view. Her first failure, as she would later come to think of it.
Rani turns out to be a nightmare. Geeta tries to be sympathetic, since the girl has had an awful life, but things deteriorate as she demands Geeta send her mother jewelry and a man shows up with stories of her father. Srikanth kicks her out at one point, then runs after her to bring her back. He eventually turns it into Geeta’s fault:
“She’s too much for you,” he said. His breath smelled of onions and filter coffee. “Admit it,” he pressed her. “You can’t do this. You are not capable. Look at you. Your hair is a mess. You don’t take care of the house anymore. You hardly look at me. You only think of her.”
A month ago she might have protested, but it no longer mattered what was and wasn’t true. The threats had become too many, too nebulous. Later she would think of this as her final failure. The first and the last, the only two clear in her mind.
He talks her into giving Rani up; it reads like a seduction scene more than anything else. Their life post-Rina forms a sort of epilogue in which Geeta happens across a cosmetics salesgirl:
She would never go so far as to say that the girl – whose name is Ruby – remind her of Rani. No, that would be too easy, cowardly, as if all girls who have come from unknowable places to stand in front of her were somehow the same. It is the relationship that is the same: Geeta and Rani, Geeta and Ruby. The girl stands there blazing and exposed, and Geeta circles her, unable to look away.
The entire story seems to be about being unknowable, and Geeta’s fascination for that quality. Geeta and the housemaid, who never gets a name, are frankly described as unknowable to each other. The necklace means one thing to the girl, and another to Geeta; its cheap quality underscores the insincerity of the engraving. Srikanth is unknown to the Bakers. It occurs to me he might have crashed the party and is stalking Geeta, in which case, he succeeded. He and Geeta both speak several languages, but have only passable English in common. Rani is unknowable, as are the shadowy figures of her parents. As the story progresses, Geeta becomes unknowable even to herself: “She had lost the habit of speaking of herself, and now it was impossible to recover the details that could have made her permanent.” In her later life, she is unknown to the shopkeepers, who think she lives in an exclusive apartment complex.
And as I’ve said, as a reader, I don’t know what the story is doing. At first, I thought the initial portion was incongruous, but it’s necessary, not only to include the housemaid and the necklace, but to allow Geeta to meet Srikanth, and to give us the sense that she can indeed take good care of children who aren’t semiferal.
I have a feeling this story may have more meaningful layers for those who are familiar with the nuances of Indian cultures and the implications of the various locations and qualities mentioned. That adds to its unknowability for me; there’s only so much Google can help. Some comments on The Mookse and the Gripes gave me some idea of the kind of subtext that’s operating here.
This was another of the stories about young people according to Ward’s intro. I see it as less about Rani and more about Geeta. I might be tempted to include it in her “problematic characters” classification as well, since I find the three primaries to be hard to fathom.
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- Jake Weber follows the gold: “Even a small emotional inheritance can be powerful in providing the necessary resilience and self-esteem necessary to survive.”
A Just Recompense 
Unknowability.
OK. Sure. I have just read a novel by a universally acclaimed writer, whom I normally like a lot, and she also leaves the reader with the thought that even those closest to each other hardly know each other.
Well. All right.
The novel is quite well written, this story is quite well written. But with Peggy Lee, I cry, “Is that all there is?”
Is that even a particularly interesting thought?
We fail to know each other. Hmmm. I’d like a bit more.
i suspect there’s more to it (take a look at the comments I linked to, for instance). This is the second of Vijay’s stories that I’ve encountered; her earlier one, “Lory Raja” from 2014, interested me a lot more.