Madhu stopped in the middle of the cemetery, a bunch of carnations in her hands, her mind embracing the peaceful silence of those who lay in eternal sleep, just the whispering wind and a soft crying somewhere nearby.
She continued along the path where her mother stood waiting, and a little further, they stopped at the grave of her grandmother. Madhu knelt and laid the carnations, regrets in her heart that she could not have been there when she died. She had been studying in the UK, but in those two years, she thought of her every day. Going home and paying her respects was the first thing she wanted to do.
As a little girl, she had learnt so much from her grandmother that had enriched her mind. Tears flowed from her eyes as fond memories filled her heart of this woman, an icon of Indian womanhood, who, though not highly schooled, possessed an invaluable knowledge of life through her strong faith and values.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” Madhu said softly, “That I could not have said ‘Goodbye,’ but you’ll be happy to know I graduated with top honours. I’m sure you’re smiling at me from Heaven.”
Her voice broke, and she cried quietly, her mother touching her shoulder in comfort.
That night, as the family sat down in quiet conversation, reminiscing about her life, Madhu’s mother brought a small box wrapped tightly with gold ribbon and handed it to her.
“She left this for you.”
“What is it?” Madhu asked, a bit surprised.
“I don’t know, but it must be something she treasured.”
Madhu unwrapped the box, and lying neatly between white tissue paper was an old journal. She flicked through the pages, where words were scrawled in Hindi.
“This is interesting,” she remarked, “I wonder why she wanted me to have this.”
“Maybe it’s a will that bequeaths to you an old mansion in India a long time ago,” her brother said in a dramatic tone.
“Very funny.” She said in mock annoyance.
She turned the journal over carefully, and from inside the back cover, she pulled out an old photograph of a young Indian woman. It was so faded that no one could recognise who she was, but from her dress and outlook, it was evident this picture was over a century old.
“She is one of our old ancestors,” Madhu gasped, excited, but there was more.
The little note attached to the photograph read,
“She is my grandmother, Kushmattie, who came on a ship from India, but I never knew her because she mysteriously disappeared one night, long before I was born. No one ever knew what happened to her. Can you find the truth or has too much time passed?”

No one said a word for a little while, then Madhu broke the silence, intrigued by the task of a century-old case.
“This is truly amazing because Grandma never really mentioned her, did she, Mom?”
Madhu’s mother thought for a short moment, and then she said, “I think she did when we were young, but it just faded away from everyone’s memories.”
“A century ago is a long time,” her brother stated, “And under Colonial rule then, a lot of bad things happened to the labourers.”
The journal of Kushmattie in Madhu’s hands was an invaluable piece of history, an ancestral link to someone whose disappearance so long ago was still a mystery to solve.
Later that night, lying in bed, she tried to read the excerpts in the journal, but they were written in a Hindi dialect she was not familiar with.
“Maybe my Indian friend in the UK can help me,” she assured herself. Putting the journal under her pillow, she muttered to herself as her eyes closed in sleep. “Maybe I’ll have a dream of something in that period.”
But she dreamt nothing, and at breakfast, as the family continued to talk about Kushmattie, the Indian woman who was the ancestral tree where they had sprung, Madhu’s mother said, “We may never know about her life.”
“At least we’ll know something about her from the journal,” Madhu said with certainty.
She emailed the first page to her friend in England to translate the writing in English and the first excerpt read,

“I unknot the navel string
of Mother India
and I walked away
my footprints erased
from the dusty village
of Mirzapur
looking back one last time
as the ship sailed away
deep sadness in my heart
Where am I going?
What will I find?”

“Such deep thoughts,” Madhu mused, “I wonder how she felt to live and work under such harsh conditions.”

“It wasn’t the dream
they had promised us
but a nightmare
the sweat and toil of bodies
would have to build bridges
to our dreams,
But how long to suffer
under the master’s whip?
How many to die?”

Madhu’s research on the internet during the period of Indentureship did not tell her what she wanted to know, except for caste and village Kushmattie was from and the fact she was a Pandit’s daughter. So, she decided to talk to the oldest people in the village, hoping their fading memories would shine a light on something interesting.
But though she heard many stories, none spoke of Kushmattie, who had chronicled her life until the time of her disappearance in a few sentences.

“Bitterness and blood flow
But our backs are strong
to bear the brunt
of their merciless hands
the cracking whip
no longer stings.”

As Madhu read page after page, she felt deep distress for the immigrants, her people, who had suffered so much, working tirelessly, hand in hand with time and history to make this land home.
“We have come a long way from then to now,” Madhu stated, “This is home for us all, for the ships that crossed the dark waters over a century ago do not sail anymore.”
She continued her groundwork in the village and found an old man, in his nineties whose father had worked as a little boy in the backdams. Late one night, he told them he had heard gunshots that had made the labourers uneasy, but no one had dared to venture out.
“What had happened?” Madhu asked him.
He did not answer for a while and stared at her blankly as though he had a memory lapse. Then he remembered and answered in a quivering voice, “Dun know but some workers been quarrelling that day.”
“Where?” she asked.
“By de clubhouse.”
The old man’s daughter explained to Madhu that the clubhouse that had long been broken down had stood near to a punt trench dam by an old cemetery.
No one knew what happened that night but several labourers were reported missing, who were never found.
“Were workers shot and killed that night?” she questioned herself, “And was Kushmattie one of them? If so, what happened to the bodies?”
Because of the brutal colonial system at that time, secret grave sites were on all the plantations.
Kushmattie’s last page in the journal were words that seemed laden with doom.

“I will go with the protesting workers tonight
for we have to stand strong
for our rights
already we are lost from
the bosom of Mother India
What more?”

Nothing more was written, for it seemed the last chapter of her life had ended. The good life they had promised her, her tired hands did not touch, her lips thirsty, her body worn.
Madhu found the old cemetery that had been there for over a century and standing there, she felt a little shiver, a sign that something bad had happened here.
It took a team of six men a few days to hack and chop through the thick, untamed shrubs that became like a guardian of the cemetery. Madhu searched around for a clue that could pinpoint a secret burial site, but by the fourth day, the search yielded nothing. She sat down tired, feeling like she wanted to cry and she whispered, “How do I find you, dear mother? Your bones would have long crumbled to dust.”
A strong wind blew, rustling the tree tops that allowed light to filter through and under the shade of the trees, Madhu noticed something. She walked over, a bit cautiously and gasped in astonishment.
A Tulsie tree, a Hindu religious plant stood there like a symbol, its roots embedded in the earth.
“How did this plant get here?”
She touched the leaves and a sudden chill passed through her body, giving her a clue, she had been searching for.
Kushmattie had left the motherland, but she never lost her faith and belief and on that fateful night when bullets silenced her, a prayer had escaped her bloody lips. In an unmarked grave, her body lay for a hundred years, but from the power of prayers, the roots of a plant sprung forth to stay there as a mark for the one who would search for her.
A tombstone was now erected with her name and those who died with her.
Madhu smiled with deep satisfaction as and she placed flowers on her grave,
“I found you, mother and we, your children, will honour your name for your courage and faith have defined a path for us, not in this land only but in the world.
Rest now in peace, Kushmattie.”