by Nillu Nasser
He waited while Arjun placed incense sticks in the earth and offered him one. Then, he took a deep breath and crouched to lay his hand on her grave. He placed the incense where he imagined her feet might be. “Your mother was a remarkable woman.”
“Yes, she was.” Arjun’s look stripped him bare. “That’s why I brought you here. You’ll think twice about lying to me at her grave.”
“Why would I lie?” Akash asked, surprised.
“You didn’t exactly tell me the truth when she was at death’s door, did you?” said Arjun. “She needed me.”
“That’s just it. She didn’t. She was strong. She knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t you.” The last words spilled out artlessly, a remnant perhaps from the time he and Soraya were lovers. He felt no possessiveness. He had merely expressed fact. Soraya hadn’t wanted to die with her son at her side.
Arjun flinched. “Tell me then, Akash. What happened in my mother’s dying moments? You owe me that much.” He didn’t wait for a response. He dusted his mother’s stone with his hands, a loving touch, and a whisper to return. Then he scooped up the carrier bag holding his litter and walked away towards a withered bench.
Akash took a moment at the grave. “Our son is spirited, just like you,” he said, not expecting her to hear, but talking to her all the same. Then he made his way to his son who sat, stern in a way that aged him, stiff as a board, bushy eyebrows over glowering eyes.
“I want to get to know you, to be a part of your life if you want. What can I do to convince you of that?” said Akash.
“Tell me, in detail, about my mother’s last moments.”
“The truth is a burden, Arjun. Be careful what you wish for,” said Akash, lowering himself onto the bench. Still, part of him felt maybe this would do him good, unburdening himself of the secrets he had voluntarily kept. Perhaps their love of Soraya would bond them, even though she’d gone.
“I’m ready.”
Akash traced the grain of the wood with his index finger, remembering. “She’d had cancer for some time. It was inoperable. She didn’t want you to know. She said she’d been both mother and father to you. She wanted to protect you.”
“How long had she known?” Arjun’s voice trembled at first, but he steeled himself.
“Close to a year, I think.”
“Why tell you, a stranger, when she couldn’t even tell her own son?”
Akash shrugged, unsure. “I owed her. I abandoned them both. My wife, your mother. You. I think she didn’t feel any guilt burdening me, abandoning me...” He grew quiet.
“Go on,” Arjun urged.
Akash’s eyes blurred as he retreated into his memories and the cemetery around him faded into nothing.
“I am a proud woman, Akash. My loved ones are settled and have no need of me. I don’t fear death. I fear the loss of my dignity. I want to choose when I go. And the time is near,” said Soraya.
He looked at her and the scales fell from his eyes. He saw a body that was brittle and frail, hair arranged in the best possible way to hide that it was thinning, inky blue shadows under her eyes. Desperation and bitterness flooded him.
“But what of me? Arjun? Leela?”
“What of you? Understand this at least, you silly man. You still have life left. Guilt has already consumed your best decades. Let this be a lesson to you to live, to find Jaya, to be a better man, a father to Arjun.”
“How can you do this?”
“The cancer is eating away at me, Akash. I can no longer deny that. It makes my bones hurt. My lungs tire and it hurts to breathe. Sometimes, it’s as if I can feel my organs rotting inside me.”
He no longer wanted to hear how her body was failing her. It was unfair. He resisted the urge to rail against the universe.
“We all have choices. Please understand mine. Help me act on it.” She hesitated. “I don’t want to die alone.”
It wasn’t Soraya he thought of in this moment, but himself. He might love Jaya, but Soraya was the mother of his child. They were bonded. They had history. She was a supporter, a friend.
“There must be something they can do.”
“I ‘ve seen the best doctors. I wanted to live. But I can’t hide from my fate. Life is fleeting. I have no regrets.”
“Not even what we had?” A memory overwhelmed him and he close his eyes as he remembered a stolen moment together, the air heavy with heat while he made love to her in a tangle of sheets to the sound of rickshaws outside. He shook it away, immediately guilty.
Jaya, forgive me. It is you I want.
“Akash, I am not scared of death. It is the act of dying that I’m fearful of. I prayed for somebody to lighten my burden. And you came. An unlikely guardian, perhaps, but nevertheless someone to accompany me at my end.”
She held something up, turning it in her hand. Akash’s breath caught in his throat. This plan of hers felt so wrong, but how could he disagree with a dying woman’s wishes?
“This is the knife I want to use. I bought it especially. It felt wrong to take one from the kitchen where I’ve cooked family meals,” said Soraya. The blade glinted with sparkly malevolence in her palm. Its handle was a smooth ivory with gold markings. “I’ll do it. You don’t need to worry about a thing. I just ask that Arjun and Muna don’t witness it, and that I’m not left alone.”
“Let me come with you,” said Akash, suddenly weary. “I’m tired. We can do this together.”
Soraya’s voice cut through the air in a sharp slash. “No! Arjun has only just been reunited with you. He needs you, even if he doesn’t think he does. There’s no running away this time, Akash. You need to face life. When Arjun is ready, tell him I didn’t choose to leave. There are no winners with cancer. I’m not in a happier place. I wanted to stay here with him, with my granddaughter.”
Later, when it was nearly time, Akash watched Soraya as she slept. A slight sheen of perspiration coated her skin. She instinctively turned her body towards him. He drank in the curve of her lips, the fluttering of her eyelids as she dreamt and remembered when they had been lovers. The hours passed and still he lay beside her, awake, her silent watchman. Dawn was Soraya’s favourite time of day and it came too quickly, the golden light finding its way through the curtains he had opened while dark still reigned. Her eyes flickered open and held his. He fought the urge to run from the room, to call Arjun, to hide all the sharp objects he could find. He told himself over and over: it is what she wants.
She removed the knife from beneath her pillow and felt the cold, sharp edge of the blade. He pushed the blade aside and kissed her forehead, entreating her to stay with him and their son. She smiled, sad and resolute, and smoothed her hair. Then, with a cry of desolation, as the sun streamed through the curtains, Soraya buried the knife between her ribs. It was not the death she had hoped for; it was messy and he saw she struggled to hold onto the shreds of her courage. He looked away as her eyes flashed open in pain and red spilled out across her salwar kameez. Akash took her in his arms and wept.
“Thank you,” he thought he heard her say, but he couldn’t be sure.
She shut her eyes for the last time. The corners of her mouth were upturned.
Akash could no longer tell if she remained conscious. Wasn’t hearing the last sense to leave a dying body, the last grasp of a soul departing this physical life? He whispered to her about their son, their youth and how proud he was to have shared parts of her life. He told her that she had changed him forever and that though they had never belonged completely to one another, she was a part of him. He stroked her face as watched his tears trace paths down her cheeks. He thanked her for Arjun and their grandchild.
When her body grew cold, Akash arranged Soraya on the bed. He ran his hand over her eyes to make sure they were closed. He couldn’t leave the knife in her body. He clenched his jaw and removed it, taking care to be gentle though she was already dead. The knife fell from his trembling fingers onto the bed. Akash smoothed the sheet over Soraya. He blinked back the hot tear
s filling his eyes, then retrieved the locket and Jaya’s letter. Afterwards, he returned to the bed to take Soraya’s hand.
There, he waited for their son to find his dead mother, his mind a white-out.
Chapter 41
Dusk had settled across the sky. Red and orange fingers bled into blue. How long they had been there, Akash didn’t know. His voice was heavy with exhaustion and melancholy when he spoke. “You see, she wanted it that way. I’ve never met a braver woman.”
“So she planned it? It wasn’t an impulse thing? She’d planned it all along?” Arjun slumped on the bench.
“She knew she was dying. She’d had enough of the pills poisoning her body. She didn’t want you to see her suffer. Your mother was proud. She preferred a warrior’s end to her life.”
“What, a knife in her abdomen? Couldn’t there have been a better way? I saw her that morning. She looked like a victim, not a warrior!” Arjun’s voice rose and pierced the quiet. “You could have saved her.”
“No. You might have had another few days, a week or two maybe, but the end was close. Surely the autopsy report told you that?”
“You loved her?” said Arjun. The question was weighted, and Akash didn’t know which answer his son would prefer. He decided to speak the truth.
“Not in the way you might think. Maybe once, a long time ago. Mostly, I was infatuated with her.”
“Why didn’t you find a way to tell me all this before? You must have realised I need to know,” said Arjun. “Maa may have decided her fate but you were the executioner. I wish you’d died, not her.”
A child’s sentiment coming from a man’s body, but one Akash could understand. He knew only too well the disorienting nature of grief. Still, here his son faced up to his demons when Akash himself had run. There was more of Soraya in Arjun than the boy himself knew.
“You think you were justified in withholding the truth of Maa’s illness from me because she was dying anyway? Well, you were wrong! A few more days with her, a few weeks...who knows what you took away from me, from my daughter, from Muna? You stole those last moments from us. I wanted to be there for her, to close her eyes, to say in a illahi rajauun.”
A swarm of birds left a nearby tree. The waves of emotion rolled between them. Akash reached out to touch his son’s hand. Arjun snatched it away.
“I’m sorry, son.” It made his heart sing to say the word. Son. Son. Son. Despite all the tragedy, he was not alone.
Arjun sighed. “She’s gone, and the hole she has left is too big. I keep tripping over it.”
“When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,” said Akash, echoing Rajiv Gandhi’s words after his mother’s assassination.
Arjun stood, and fear clawed at Akash. He couldn’t let this chance to make something of his relationship with his son dissipate. He garbled his words he spoke, “Why did you come to find me, Arjun?” The seed of hope still lived that his son might want to reconcile. “You didn’t call Fortes to try to find me, you didn’t bring me here, just to walk away. Why, Arjun? Did you come to insult a stranger or to embrace a father?”
“I came because Maa left me a letter and I needed the truth. I came to look you in the eye and to see what kind of man you really are. I think I know now.”
A lonely ache accompanied Akash while he toiled at Janghir Saheb’s store. When the day was done and everyone had gone home to their families, when a threadbare blanket, shared pots and their shaving blade was all he had to remind him of Tariq, he locked up, tucked the jangling keys into his pocket and pounded the streets. The moon hid behind a blanket of clouds. Akash couldn’t resist. Jaya might have told him it was over, but he followed his feet to Tara Theatre nevertheless, as if pulled by an invisible thread.
It neared midnight when he arrived. The theatre was shrouded in darkness, actors and audience fled. He ran his fingers over the glass front. Perhaps this was his last pilgrimage to her before letting her go. He could not have what she did not want to give, that much was clear. He turned tired feet towards his empty home, already missing Tariq’s counsel. Jagged red lettering caught his eye. He read:
To A,
if you see this,
meet me on at dusk on Friday,
there where the flowers died,
J.
He froze, looking behind him, to the left, then the right. Could this be a joke? Maybe Zahid was out on bail, furious, had found a way to taunt him. But then, how could Zahid know about his Jaya? He considered the possibilities. If the note happened to be from Jaya, where could she mean? He struggled, jumping through their history as if it were a tape deck: his aunt’s house, where they first met; her parent’s neglected patio garden; a park, perhaps? Then he realised. It had to be where she had first seen him and Soraya, in the rose garden outside university, where their marriage had unravelled.
Where the flowers died. Only Jaya could know that. There could be no doubt it was his wife who summoned him. And he would go as a lamb to the slaughter. He yearned to have a happy ending, but there were no love songs or brightly-costumed dancers in sight. Whatever Jaya had planned, he was hers.
“You came.”
“I came.”
The clouds formed silver roads in the sky. The roses were not dead. They lived, as Jaya knew they did. It pleased her he had understood her little play on words, that Akash realised the turning point they had experienced here.
She had dressed carefully. She’d applied her make-up with precision, enhancing her eyes, making her lips appear fuller with a deep red. Then she wiped it away, surveying the clown that looked back at her from the mirror. Did he deserve her attempts to impress him? In the end, she wore her favourite salwar in emerald green, not because she wanted to look beautiful for Akash, but because she felt at ease in it.
Ruhi and Firoz were hiding a few yards behind her, shielded by a group of palm trees, but Akash didn’t know that. Neither did he know about the pouch Ruhi had pressed into Jaya’s hand moments before, the one that held her discarded wedding band. He thought she’d come alone. As if she would meet him, a fly in a spider’s web, without seeing the colours of his remorse. She might love him still, despite herself, but she could make rational choices. Her plan hinged on it.
Akash stood before her, anxious, fiddling with his over-sized trousers, his shirt cuffs. She longed to touch his face, to trace the lines that made him. Her fingers itched, as if they had been given permission by the bonds of marriage. The stirring of dormant physical attraction upset her. She shrugged it off, suppressed it behind her still face.
“Won’t you sit?” The bench, too, she remembered. He had kissed his lover here, many moons ago.
“Thank you.” He sat, expectant, unsure. “You wanted to talk?”
“I want to test,” said Jaya. She had to protect herself.
“Okay.”
“For a woman, whether we marry or who we marry is one of the most important decisions in life.”
Confusion flashed across his face.
“I had little choice in the matter. I might have been a romantic—then—but I knew what was expected. I was a commodity traded by my parents.” She laughed, not with abandon but sadly. “I saw a photo and I believed you were a hero when you were full of flaws. I loved you like a god. That’s what a good wife does. Until you broke our vows and exchanged me for someone you liked more.”
“I’m so sorry for my mistakes,” said Akash, sorrow painting his face grey. “I wish...I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish I’d come back, even after the fire. Maybe we could have salvaged us. Facing you seemed the hardest thing in the world. Your father...”
“Yes, yes, I know. Again, the man in the driving seat. Don’t be sorry, though. You taught me the way of the world. The truth isn’t always beautiful but the need for it is. I need it today as much as I did then.” Her voice trembled. So much rode on his answers. On her reading the truth in his eyes. “I am more powerful now. I have no fear. What can happen to me worse than what I’ve already survived?” Jaya lied. Her
fear raged like a hungry beast. She quelled it.
Maybe if they could both break out of their prison of familiarity they stood a chance. She’d thought long and hard how to show Akash who she really was and who she wanted to be, and she had finally cracked it. First, she wondered how Soraya would have done it. And then she realised Soraya neither occupied the femme fatale role, as Jaya had attributed to her, nor the mother role. She was everything and nothing because she was herself. Could Jaya find love in the wreckage of her marriage? Could she have everything she wanted if she stopped doubting herself and him?
“I know why I’m here, Akash. When I love, I don’t give up easily. That is my weakness, and maybe my strength. The question is, why did you come here? Why insist on trying to save our marriage when you hardly know me anymore?”
His eyes danced in the lamplight, pools of black she tried her best to fathom. “I’ve spoken to you in my head for years, Jaya. What I see now is more beautiful than I imagined.”
“I will not be Soraya’s replacement.”
“I chose you. I’d choose you even if she was still alive.” After all this time, she had never imaged their voices would ring out again in the same place. “She was an obsession for me. I wasn’t ready for selfless love. What better way to guard myself than to go after the unobtainable, that which I never expected to keep? Finding an impossible partner meant that I didn’t risk intimacy. I liked my freedom until it became a prison. And I will never, never hurt you again.”
Jaya waved her hand impatiently. “Haven’t you learnt already? There are no guarantees. We’ve been tested by time and distance, by tragedy and lust, and I still love you. The strongest loves exist in spite of faults. There is no perfect love. I need to be sure, though, that you’re not in love with a ghost, Akash. I can’t compete with that. How can I be sure?”