My Saintly Great-aunt, Rosie Coelho, and her Rebel Daughter Marie (From my memoir-in-progress Up to the Hills)

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Robert Frost

“I’ll never retire in Mangalore,” my father declared. “A sneeze at one end of the town is analyzed at the other.”

We visited my mother’s aunt, Rosie Coelho (who seemed too good to be true–though she was truly good), who smiled broadly with genuine sweetness, a woman in whom it was impossible to imagine guile or malice; benevolent, generous, gift-exchanging, to our embarrassment, the little box of sweets we gave her with a big basket of mangoes from her garden. And Mangalore is bright, benign Hobbiton.

But many a time, in the age of innocence, I naively walked into the sticky, tricky parlor of a Black Widow, who into her eighties and beyond, smiles and smiles and giggles girlishly, exuding sympathy and charm, offers little tidbits of gossip with a flattering assumption of shared wisdom and virtue, sucking all of interest about you, about everyone you know, to then villainously disseminate relationship-wrecking rumors; who combats the loss of status, interestingness and power which age and widowhood bring by weaving a web of whispers and malignant lies, whom people placate lest they become her next meal–futile–for it is the nature of black widows to bite, except, sometimes, some of their children. Bitter? Bitten. For when I hear my blithe words bloodied, mangled, regurgitated almost unrecognizably from another black widow in her treacly web, I feel that I am in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie, and small towns are no Shire, but the old sow that eats its farrow.

Rosie’s daughter, Martha, her grin wide, ingenuous, emerged in a housecoat, the Mangalorean woman’s unbecoming at-home garb. She, toothless and wrinkled, didn’t look much younger than her mother; like a baby or a saint, she was, without artifice, entirely herself. Ecstatic, electrifying gossip about Martha abounded; in fact, she told it herself.

“Ah Baa(Konkani for dearie). I can tell how shocked you are at how I look. I will not lie to you, Baa. It’s because of my diet. I have beer for breakfast everyday, and Mummy sends for a little” (signing a square bracket) “whiskey for lunch and rum for dinner. But no more than that.”

“But if I don’t have that, I feel sick.” Martha’s sweet-faced Mummy stood by, like a statue of acceptant love, smiling a somewhat absent smile, as if she hadn’t really heard what was being said, wasn’t entirely there.

My father and I listened, amazed; Marie was (improbably) the first cousin of my mother, whose most frequent expression, like that of her family’s, was WWPT, “What will people think?”

Virginia Woolf, imagining the ignominy and madness that would have befallen Shakespeare’s sister had she written, postulated, “Whenever we see a witch or a mad woman or a suicide, we see a thwarted poet.” Marie muttered in her sleep in rhythm and rhyme. She got into a lawsuit with the Bishop who’d asked her to leave the house she rented from him; sheltering behind tenant-protection laws, she refused.

She wrote doggerel to his minion: “Father Digby is a knave and goon; Father Digby has sealed his doom.” “I wanted to write an anonymous letter, baa, but then–I signed it.” Hired ruffians appeared, the usual way recalcitrant renters are evicted. “Baa, the walls were splattered with my blood. I lost all my front teeth.”

The witch that came (the withered hag)/ Was once the beauty Abhishag… Her cousins told us Marie’s story with controlled rage. She was, ominously, the best-natured of the cousins, honest, childlike, full of joie de vivre.

Smart, cheeky and charming as a young woman, Marie had been the favorite of her father, my grandfather’s brother, Dr. Louie Coelho, Professor of Dermatology, revered, decorated, and famous for treating lepers for free. (He had left instructions for the most spartan of funerals to avoid that guilty one-upmanship with baked meats that can plunge a grieving family into penury and debt—thus giving people “permission” to go and do likewise: “If Dr. Coelho’s family could…”).

When she was young, married, well-connected, and Cabinet Ministers, even the Chief Minister of Karnataka, came to her parties, nuns and priests crowded her. “Come with us to the Chief Minister, Marie,” they said. “Come to the Housing Minister. We have a request.” She went.

As an honored guest, she was served alcohol—which (in common with many Mangaloreans) happened to be her Achille’s-heel. She drank–to be dropped as her beauty vanished and her marriage, her money and connections, everything but her mother. No memory of having starred/ Can atone for later disregard/ Or keep the end from being hard.

Goals

Start Date—August 27^th, 2012

Completion Date—August 31st, 2013

Word Count Goal-120,000

Words per day Goal—515 words a day

Progress (Aiming to write 6 days a week, excluding Sundays)

Day 36—18367 (173 short)