“The quality of mercy”
Kanya D’Almeida
A novel, when you’ve finished with it, is finished more or less in the same way for everyone. Like Dostoevsky’s “Karamazov”.Despite the work being greatly enduring, the Brothers have been completely and similarly exhausted, for most, when you’ve finished reading.
A worthy short story, such as this, because it has no designed beginning, middle and end, no judging of its characters and no climax or neat narrative ending,enters the imagination of readers, each in a different way.
Kanya D’Almeida’s “I Cleaned The –” did this to me as a reader. My urge to re-title it as “Gooti Baba and the Carmelite Sisters of Mercy” tells how this wonderful offering took shape inside me, even saying affectionately what the author left out in her title.
The principal character in this story is Ishwari, whose younger days were as a teaplucker with basket on bent back in a merciless commercial enterprise.
Ishwari then became a servant whose primary duty was the cleaning, collection and disposal of the involuntary excreta of a mentally and bodily halted child of an upper middle class family. When Goo-ti Baba finally died, Ishwari was discarded.
The Carmelite Sisters of Mercy, “spend their days caring for women who have been dismissed, abandoned, maimed or otherwise left for dead. By night they walk the streets in search of us”.
The Sisters of Mercy found Ishwari “curled against a stone cross in the Catholic quarter of the Borella cemetery”, a moving metaphor in this fiction, and took her to “the Carmelite Sisters’ Sanctuary for the Forsaken”. “Twenty years I was with Chooti Baba. I couldn’t bear to leave her side,” said Ishwari. She loved the life deformed child.
Mercy is deep in the story long before Ishwari was given life and shelter by the Sisters of Mercy.
Ishwari shares a room with Rita, dying of a lung full of dark fungus from a comparatively short lifetime of smoking, yet: ‘I want to live,’ she tells the mute nun. ‘At least until I die, don’t I deserve that?’ Ishwari comments, “I indulge her because she’s dying.”
There is even suggestion that the faint remnants of bodily sexual inclination of declining years couple with mercy for these two room-mates, and the nun in charge.”It’s a new sensation for me, being close to a person with an active body. Parts that move, fingers that curl, muscles that tighten. I would like to spend hours exploring all the ways it can happen but we don’t have a lot of time. If we take too long, Sister Wilfred comes knocking.” Sister Wilfred’s mercy extends to some allowance. Sister Wilfred’s allowance may be fiction, as much in this short fiction is, but what fiction is, is what fine fiction does. Working through the imagination too brings you the truth in a way factual narrative may not.
The truth of Mercy, gently shadows the whole narrative and reminded one of Shakespeare’s:
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Ernest Macintyre