‘I was actually on my way out,’ I say, looking at Teacher. ‘You might have called to let me know you were coming.’
‘Do you leave her often?’ the shrink asks.
‘Once or twice a month, yes.’
Mallika has sauntered into the house and started washing dishes even though it’s earlier than her usual time to do so. She wants to listen in on the action. Teacher must have called her last night to find out whether I’d be here and to make sure the gate would be unlocked.
‘The problem is that if I don’t leave her I might go mad,’ I say, smiling insincerely.
‘Of course, of course,’ Teacher soothes. ‘Nobody is saying you shouldn’t go, but is it the best thing for her to be alone? Shouldn’t you drop her off with me on your way, and pick her up on the way back? That way she can be with her peers. Otherwise, here she is all alone. What do you think?’
‘Remember the last time we tried that? How much she kicked and screamed and I had to come and get her?’
‘Yes, but that was so long ago. Now she must be missing us.’
The shrink wants to prescribe antidepressants for Lucia.
‘Why?’ I say. ‘So she can be more of a zombie?’
The shrink looks at Teacher as if to say, So this is what you’re up against.
‘We can take a call a few months down the road,’ she says. ‘Next time, perhaps you can bring Lucy to my clinic. We were just passing by here, so thought we’d drop in.’
‘Of course,’ I say.
After they’ve gone I realise I didn’t even offer them a glass of water.
Mallika loads the car with the rubbish bags, cooler box and shopping bags. ‘Don’t forget to bring liquid cleaner to wash the floors,’ she says. ‘And a new broom. A proper one this time.’ I press 500 rupees in her hands and remind her to lock the gate when I’m gone.
The nights I’m away, Mallika sleeps on a jute mat in the corridor between my room and Lucia’s room. When I call to ask whether Lucy is being good, Mallika says, ‘What is there for her? Eat and bathroom and sleep. She is fine.’
I take the two kilometres from the house onto the highway slowly because it is always a little startling to re-enter the world. On my way out I see two bee-eaters perched on the electrical wires, a bespectacled goat herder sitting outside his house, smoking.
Once on the highway, I turn up the music. I briefly think of taking off my top and driving in my bra. Hoot hoot. Here is the world and it is chaotic and loud.
This new highway is like a serpent, widening and thickening, swallowing all the villages that lie in its path. There are posters of our portly chief minister and her glowing face plastered on both sides of the road – placards and cutouts, ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Every time I see a smudge in the road I imagine it’s a dead dog and I swerve away. I pass all the familiar landmarks – the nuclear township of Kalpakkam, where I dump our rubbish and where I sometimes buy vegetables and fruit. The historic town of Mahabalipuram – degenerate and creepy, filled with crusty white tourists and rude locals. Past the Hotel Mammalla, Lucy’s favourite rest stop. On and on. The desalination plant on the right, dizzying in its ugliness. The road shimmers through it all.
Apartment blocks rise up from the flats with names like Horizon Properties and Coastal Dreams. I think about the kinds of families that will move here. Where will they get their water from? What will they do with their rubbish? Closer to the city things get more hectic and jumbled. Bakeries and furniture shops and mini-malls. Traffic chokes and stutters. Everything is pressing down on me, but I feel freer than I have in days. This evening at Samir and Rohini’s flat I will smoke many joints and drink a gallon of bad red wine. I will lay my head down in Vik’s lap and allow him to take me to the top of the terrace and push me against the water tank. I will remember my birth-control pill and vitamins, and when I sleep, I will not be listening for the sound of dogs or for the sound of my sister moving around in the dark.
14
If there was an Indian bourgeois symbol for dog, it would be the Pomeranian. White, fluffy, yippety. It’s the kind of animal that looks good in a woman’s lap, the brightness of its fur radiating like a small white church.
Samir and Rohini have two such animals, Loulou and Leela. They are really Rohini’s dogs. She bathes and brushes them, takes them for long walks around the colony, waits patiently while they squat on their haunches and piss outside other people’s gates. Most of the neighbourhood dogs are walked by bored watchmen who sit with other bored watchmen at street corners, smoking and gossiping while their poor charges tug at their leashes. I think of the wildness of our dogs. The acres of beach that belong to them, and how in this, at least, they are lucky.
I meet a new person at Samir and Rohini’s. He is called Praveen. At one point in his life he must have been gangly. Now he has the body of a middle-aged man trying to keep up. His jawline has thickened with alcohol, but his shoulders and legs are still powerful from years of playing a club sport – tennis or squash. He is talking about psychedelic music, something about which I know nothing.
‘Who cares?’ I say. ‘Tell me about the rich wives in this city.’ Living in isolation has made me a brusque person. ‘I hear you’re friendly with them.’
Praveen laughs. ‘Let me tell you something about rich girls,’ he says. ‘God had different ways of getting back at them. Most of them are not that great to look at. They got to feel they can prove themselves, right? So they catch hold of some young, beefy, brainless stud and marry him. They’re saying to the other ladies, Bitch, look what I got. The dynamics are changing, see? Earlier it was the good-looking girls that got married to the rich ugly guys. Now it’s happening the other way around too.’
Rohini had already told me about her friend Praveen the bachelor, who sometimes serviced the bored housewives of the city. Praveen manufactures small parts for cars. He lives with his mother. He does all kinds of drugs. Now that we are sharing a joint, Praveen is making a joke about Pomeranians. He tells me how the bored housewives sometimes use them for you know what.
‘What?’ I shriek.
‘Cunnilingus.’
‘Get out,’ I say. ‘I thought that was your job.’
Samir and Rohini’s neighbour Tanya is here with her child, a two-year-old girl who sits on the floor in a pretty smocked dress, playing with her stuffed pig. Tanya had a baby with a man who disappeared three months after the child was born. She is talking about how she can’t have sex any more because it makes her physically sick to think about it. Praveen mutters, ‘Yeah yeah, no one’s dying to have sex with you either.’
I want to call Praveen out on this. Say something about how the burden of child-rearing always falls on the woman. That he is judging her because she is overweight and dishevelled. But I like him too much and am bored of everyone else.
In the corner someone is talking about her mother’s insane jealousy. ‘My mother’s a Scorpio. Her whole life was jealousy. After thirty-five years of marriage she left my father because he danced with another woman at a wedding. Can you believe it?’
Across the room there is Gauri, forty-something, starting up about her failed marriage. Twenty years she and her husband have shared a bed. They have a son. ‘Everybody thinks we’re fine, but we haven’t had sex in fifteen years. That’s not a relationship, is it? He has his own thing going on, I have my own thing. I mean, I suppose it’s fine. For the sake of our son.’ And the next moment. ‘No, it’s not fine. It’s sick. It’s sick.’
‘It’s human,’ Samir interjects. ‘We all have things like that.’
‘We do?’ Rohini says, flashing him a look, before wrapping herself around the trunk of her husband, as if to prove to the rest of us that they are still strong, that while they can understand other people’s idiosyncrasies, they are far too much in love to suffer such problems themselves.
‘All this must be silly Sex and the City shit to you,’ Praveen says.
‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘Although, sh
it, this city has changed.’
‘But seriously, are you sorted out there? It’s brave and all, but are you going to be okay living out there by yourself?’
I know they discuss me in my absence. The eccentric dog woman and her sister with problems. I know they speak of me in tones admiring and disbelieving, like, What does she do all day, and doesn’t she get lonely, and how long do you think she can keep it up, and who knows how safe it is because you hear about what goes on in villages, plus climate change, and I hear she doesn’t even have security – just one woman who’s half her size and is supposed to be the guard.
I skate around the wives. They are an unforgiving breed. I make sure to sit with them, to reassure and cajole. It is the only way for a woman alone to survive in this city.
Rohini keeps her hair short and wears low-cut jersey dresses with chunky necklaces. She laughs vigorously and has a way of tossing her head back, opening her tiny throat, exposing the small pearls of her mouth. She has never lived alone, and any travel she has done has been with Samir, but she is always talking about Paris, about the ideas of some philosopher – never quite able to get to the point, except to let you know that she can say Rousseau. There is something carnal about her, and it is this asset that she constantly brings to the surface. I can’t get a sense of her beyond this, except to understand that she is ashamed of her provincialism, that she is ambitious with no discernible talent, and is trying on different personas as she goes along, in the hope of one day sliding into her self.
When Samir met her, he told me this is the reason why he came back to India. To find someone like her.
Samir and Blake went to the Kodai International School together. They weren’t great friends, but when they reconnected in America, the memory of their friendship deepened. I remember sitting across the glass-topped dining table in our apartment in Charlotte one Thanksgiving, the smell of Blake’s chicken curry still heavy in the air, Samir saying, ‘Maybe I’ll just go home.’
He’d been sleeping on our couch for a week, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon repeatedly. He wore the same flannel shirt and jeans for days, didn’t shave, didn’t help to clean up, did nothing except talk about how he had stopped feeling. He went on and on about the dullness. Blake was patient with him. I, less so. We would drive to Blockbuster most evenings to rent a film. For half an hour we would parade up and down the aisles of that brightly lit store, trying to home in on something that would make us laugh. By the end of the week I wanted to shake him. ‘Make him leave,’ I said to Blake one night, after we had turned off the lights, and the strains of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ floated up the carpeted stairway into our bedroom.
When Samir finally left, Blake and I were uneasy with each other. Whatever balance we had created for ourselves had been pulled apart.
Now when I look at Samir it is as though he became that sloth who slept on our couch simply to prod me out my own inertness. Because here in Madras he is transformed – clean-shaven, ripply with muscles, forehead shiny with sweat. He serves mojitos and gets broody only when he is stoned and listening to Leonard Cohen. He is always saying how moving back to India was a premonition, that even in the darkest moments he knew that life was eventually going to go right. ‘I didn’t know, but I knew, you know? Coming home was the beginning of that. Rohini was the continuation.’
‘So are you guys going to have kids or what?’ Gauri asks Rohini.
Gauri, who because she has just vomited her story, expects some recompense.
‘Why are people so obsessed with kids? My God!’ Rohini says. ‘I mean we just got married. What’s the hurry?’
‘Just asking, ya. No need to get uptight.’
‘I know, but everyone just asks. It’s like an epidemic. What if I don’t want to have kids? What if I don’t want to have to go through all that …’
Tanya, the jilted neighbour, stiffens. ‘For sure,’ she says, wanting to sound equable. ‘It’s not for everyone. It’s a huge thing to have a child. I mean, look at me.’ She trails off somewhat sadly, not able to get past the plea for us to look at her.
Praveen comes back in from the balcony, where he’s been smoking. ‘Your man is here,’ he says.
A few minutes later the doorbell rings, and it is Vik.
He is already drunk and smiling. An open bottle of red in his hands. I teeter over to collapse into him.
I’m surprised that Praveen and Vik know each other. They are friends, even though there must be twenty years between them. It’s a curious thing about this city. Some men never retire from the party circuit. They may marry or remain bachelors like Praveen, but come Saturday night they strike out, stags about town. Their circle widens with new entrants – precocious high-school kids and college boys, mostly wealthy, with gelled hair and slim-fit shirts damp with cologne. They call each other machan. There is a looseness about them. I envy it.
I watch Praveen and Vik standing together, and I imagine they are saying something about me. The novelty of having met someone new, of having talked as a person to another with no bind – that has gone. He already knew about me. Of course he did. Your man is here.
‘Grace, can you help?’ Rohini says, dragging me into the kitchen.
It is one of those narrow apartment kitchens designed for a maid who comes for a few hours to do all the kitchen work and then disappears. Two women are standing next to the water filter and talking, blocking the path.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Rohini says, shoving them out of the way. ‘I’m going to put the food out.’
We put the biryani into big bowls – one vegetarian, one mutton. Raitha, pappads, pickles. ‘That Gauri,’ Rohini says. ‘Such a bloody nosy person. Every time I see her she asks me when I’m going to have kids. Fuck. I mean, what the hell?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘having a kid has kind of been the centrepiece of her life, so I suppose for people like that it’s hard to imagine what else there could be.’
‘And you?’
‘What?’
‘Are you going to have kids?’
I laugh. ‘You’re doing a Gauri on me.’
‘I’ve earned it, right?’
‘I’ve inherited a kid. That’s plenty.’
We haul the platters of food onto the table. I’ve already put some biryani aside in Tupperware boxes to take back for Mallika and Lucia. A stab of sadness. That feeling of being among people and feeling alone. Of understanding that this is not your life but it will have to do.
‘Jaan,’ Vik says, coming over to me. He has taken to calling me Jaan. My Life. My Love. ‘Come with me.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I want to eat first. Let’s eat.’
We take plates of food onto the balcony. There are no stars to be seen, but all around, in the surrounding apartment buildings, the blue lights of televisions are flickering in the windows. Vik sits beside me, spooning biryani into his mouth. He has a way of eating, his left hand turned over like a leaf under his chin to catch any spilled grains of rice.
‘I don’t think we can do this any more,’ I say.
He puts his plate aside, puts that left leaf-like hand on my thigh. ‘What are you talking about, Jaan? It’s you and me. Forget about everything else.’
We both know it’s hardly enough but for tonight I let it go. We walk back into the flat. Loulou and Leela are tussling on the carpet. They’re growling and snarling, and Tanya’s toddler, who sits just a foot away from them, is bawling, saying, ‘Mummy, Mummy, they took Mr Pig.’
The Pomeranians cannot be broken up. Rohini is standing above them, shrieking, ‘Stop it, stop it!’ but the dogs don’t hear. They are intent on destroying the thing – teeth bared, their tiny bodies jerking around. They tear at the toy until all the stuffing of Mr Pig’s entrails has been gouged out and strewn over the carpet. After they finish, the fur on their backs that has been standing on end subsides a little, and they step away from each other. Rohini beats their noses with the flat of her fingers. ‘Bad, bad dogs,’ she shouts.
15
Lucia is having nightmares. I found her twice this week, sitting on the floor of the corridor between our bedrooms, shouting. I run to her half asleep, saying, ‘What is it, Lucy? What happened?’ But she is unable to explain, frantically jabbing her hand in the air at the imagined terrors. The moon shines through the grilles of the windows, lighting the corridor as if it were a stage. I look at my sister and the puppy, Golly, who is unhelpfully licking her toes. ‘Let’s get you back to bed,’ I say. I settle her in and stroke her forehead, the way Ma used to when I needed consoling, but she is already shrugging away, reaching for her socks and hankies underneath the pillow, drawing them out one by one. ‘Go away,’ she says, turning her back to me.
The new puppies have arrived. Even though Mallika has given away all the male pups from Bahgeera’s litter to workers at various construction sites, we still have twenty-two dogs. And while most of them are still suckling, it will soon become impossible to feed them. When it was just Raja and Bagheera I used to cook rice and meat and feed them in separate bowls. Now I buy ten-kilo bags of dry dog food and scatter the pellets on the patio. Only Raja still gets his food in a bowl, but he doesn’t like this processed food; he crunches at it desultorily, and leaves the remains for the mothers to fight over.
He hates the puppies. They come at him like locusts, snapping at his penis, thinking there might be milk there. Lucy has named this batch after Bollywood stars – Preity, Kat, Bebo, Dimple … Their sister, Golly, is universally despised because she’s the house bitch. Her hind legs are better now, but she is still fat, still slow.
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