Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

  The last three weeks before the wedding are the hardest. The approaching change seems like an impossible future, but is also close enough that Nimita can tick the days off one by one, counting down to her last day in Model Town.

  Mummy and Daddy are indulging her more than ever. Every day her favourites are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner: toast and butter and jam bought at ridiculous prices from N-Block market, parathas stuffed with potato or winter-sweet radish or cauliflower and served with mounds of white butter, gajar halwa for dessert, hot badaam milk before she goes to sleep. Anything she likes as long as it is vegetarian. Meat and achar are off the list because the fat and oil might make her break out in pimples.

  Bibi goes about the house singing wedding songs. Sometimes the songs are sad and make Bibi cry, sometimes she beats time with the long metal spoons she uses to stir the dal on the stove. The pressure saucepan is lovingly preserved for special occasions. Bibi is convinced that old-style, long-cooked dal is the best for Nimita-Babyji and anyway who knows when that devil’s creation from America might explode?

  Ghanshyam is a blur of motion, sent here and there by Mummy or Daddy, sometimes taking gifts, sometimes receiving them. He proudly wears one of the two new sets of clothes he was gifted this Diwali. He leaps to open the gate whenever a visitor arrives and then stands at parade rest, hoping they will notice the smart frogging on his kurta.

  Nimita’s and Mummy’s friends pop in and out of the Khosla bungalow to advise, chatter and comment. Mummy has no living sisters so Kaul-Auntyji and Sehgal-Auntyji take it upon themselves to criticise the preparations. Malhotra-Auntyji drops in twice but to lament the absence of her children: two in Dharamsala and one stranded with a still-traumatised wife in Bombay.

  Nimita is disturbed to realise that she can no longer lead conversations with her former classmates. She can order Roshna around, but she is shy with the students from Kinnaird who used to jump to her call when she captained the tennis and hockey teams. When she looks at these girls now, she hears Mrs Dalhousie’s voice: “They look up to you,” and thinks guiltily of a piece of paper bearing the name and address of Thomason College of Civil Engineering that is still tucked in the musical box.

  The unmarried girls enjoy this role reversal, where they are the teasers and tormentors, and watching Nimita squirm and blush. Their mothers are quite happy about this state of affairs. Weddings are where more weddings are negotiated and honorary “sisters” and “aunts” get first pick of the eligible bachelors in the groom’s and bride’s parties.

  Two weeks to go and Nimita is feeling slightly better. She has tired of waking every day to sentimental sadness. There are only so many times she can repeat: “This is my bedroom, which I must leave, oh, how I will miss this bed, the view from the window, the dressing table,” before inherited practicality takes over.

  She is taking her favourite paintings and photos with her; besides, she is very curious about the new rooms that will be hers. Roshna talks endlessly about the painting and carpentry that has gone into doing them up and Nimita already knows there will be a garden view. The Sachdevs’ garden is much smaller than the Khoslas’, but it has more ornamental flowers. She’ll miss the mango trees but she won’t miss having to pick chillis and bhindi off the stem for the pot.

  Ten days to go and her head is full of rules and injunctions and reminders about what to do and what not to do at each ceremony. It’s like the week before exams and all Nimita wants is to get it over with. “Just tell me what to do on the day itself and I’ll do it na,” she snaps at Mummy who snaps back at her: “You had better remember yourself!”

  This is the first wedding Sharada has ever organised. She hardly even remembers her own and knows her friends will be watching for every misstep.

  Thankfully, Pimmy-Auntyji and Poonam Thakral from Simla who was Sharada’s best friend back in school, arrives to save them. She’s accompanied by her married daughter Roopa Uppal. Roopa is only a few years older than Nimita. The two girls escape to the only corner of the garden not occupied by carpenters setting up the huge wedding tent or by bustling labourers and play a rousing game of open-air tennis to settle Nimita’s nerves.

  Afterwards they sit and have a serious chat. Roopa helps Nimita understand some of the important facts of life that no one has had the courage to tell her yet. It doesn’t have to hurt, make him be patient, you be patient too and remember, Roopa says, remember this is the one power you will always have over him. “And a lot of it is very nice,” she says, bursting into peals of laughter while Nimita looks at the flowers.

  Five days to go and the house is bursting with guests. All Nimita’s married friends camp in with her, sharing her room and squealing over her clothes and jewellery. “So much nicer than what I got,” says Shefali, tossing her long, loose hair to show off the elegant diamond studs her husband—what is his name?—bought her on their honeymoon.

  “Yours is really much nicer than mine was,” Aruna Gujral, formerly Sehgal, agrees for the sake of politeness. She casually adjusts the long sleeves of her kameez so the heavy gold kadas on her wrist clink and are observed along with the matching diamond ring.

  Nimita wishes they would leave her alone with Roopa but her former classmates see it as their duty to prepare her for the future. From them, she learns that Karan and Urmila-Auntyji can change her name at the marriage ceremony. A man named, say, Shankar, after the god Shiva, might want his wife to be called Gauri, the name of the god’s consort, never mind what her original name was. Stung, Nimita makes it very clear to Roshna that she loves her given name and will never answer to another. Hopefully the message will be received in time.

  Nimita is also worried about her period. Instead of the usual three days of bleeding, she has only seen spots of blood over a few days.

  “Don’t worry,” Roopa says, when asked in private. Her husband is a doctor and she would have been one too if his parents hadn’t approached hers for marriage. “Stress affects the body in these ways. Oh, by the way, the best part of being pregnant is that you won’t have to worry about period pains or stains because those go away. Nine months when you can pass the pickle jars around the table,” referring to a belief that menstruating women turn pickles bad.

  A day before the wedding and young women twirl in front of Nimita, singing and dancing to amuse her. She is seated in the living room in her finery, skin still tender from the heavy application of honey wax yesterday. Reheza Sheikh is covering her still sensitive arms and hands and feet with thick, cool lines of mehendi. The dark henna feels good and Nimita relaxes, feeling vines, flowers and birds blossom over her skin.

  Pimmy-Auntyji is banging away on the dholki. “You know this song, Shukoo, don’t you?” she asks Mummy. “No, don’t cry. This is the happiest time of both your lives,” she says, wiping away a tear with one hand.

  Mummy’s eyes are bright and she keeps rushing off to the kitchen to check on snacks and drinks for the guests. Every return is an excuse to touch Nimmy’s head and back, smoothing a trembling palm down her daughter’s chunni or adjusting her hair.

  Only women are invited to the mehendi ceremony and they laugh as they pass around a basket of brilliantly coloured glass bangles dotted with gold and silver. “I think this will match my clothes,” Aruna says, picking through the ornaments. “Or shall I take this?”

  “Take as many as you like, beta,” Mummy says. “Everyone take two or three sets.”

  Outside, the workers are decorating the marriage pandal with flowers.

  In the kitchen, Kanta-Bibi is frying up hot jalebis that the labourers will take home with their pay. No one leaves a wedding home empty-handed.

  Kanta-Bibi is using two separate kadais of hot oil for the frying, one for the Muslims and Parsis, one for the Hindus and Sikhs. There are also two separate piles of small plates woven of leaves for the jalebis. God forbid two religions should eat off the same plate or mix them up. Everyone knows the Muslims dip their hands into the same large plate and eat together, bu
t the rules of purity and pollution in a Hindu household will be observed for this wedding, as long as Kanta-Bibi is in charge of the kitchen.

  Sharada-Bibiji had no mother of her own to teach her and so Nimita-Babyji has not learnt either. The good thing and bad thing is that apparently her mother-in-law is equally lax about keeping the purity rules in the kitchen. Kanta-Bibi has heard this from the Sachdev bibi, whose name is Shukla.

  “Look, look,” Reheza says to Nimita, almost as pleased as if it were her daughter getting married. And why not? Wasn’t she the one to bring the rishtaa? She rejoices in the sight of Nimita-Babyji’s hands being reddened with henna and delights in thinking of fat babies and a prosperous life for this girl. “Do you see this?”

  Nimita peers at her hands and Reheza turns the palms slightly so she can read Karan’s name written aslant in Urdu.

  “I had to play a few tricks so he won’t see it easily,” Reheza says, proudly looking at the vines and flowers and stars and other auspicious symbols obscuring the groom’s name. “Remember to let him find it, don’t give him any hints. Let him take his time,” she adds, beginning to fill in the vacant spaces on Nimita’s palms.

  “How clever,” says Pimmy-Auntyji, craning over the dholki. “You can write in Urdu?”

  “Of course,” says Reheza. “I’m Matric (Fail). I will make my daughters Matric (Pass).”

  “How many daughters?”

  “One. And two sons.”

  “Mashallah,” says Pimmy-Auntyji and Reheza echoes the word.

  Roshna comes flying in, a pink-and-yellow butterfly, with hugs and kisses for her new bhabhi. Behind her are Urmila-Auntyji, soon to be Mummy, and Shanti-Bhabhi. The festivities dim decorously in their honour. They eat jalebis, compliment Mummy on Nimita’s beauty and health and then leave. “Gori-chitti,” they murmur about Nimita’s skin.

  The wedding day dawns and Nimita is exhausted as the first rays of the sun peep out. Roopa and the other women have kept her awake half the night with their chatter and wedding night tales. “Don’t listen to them,” Roopa whispers in Nimita’s ears as she sits in an old salwar kameez and suffers having every woman in the house help her bathe.

  The ritual involves pouring fresh river water or well water over the muslin-wrapped bride. Mummy sensibly heats the water first. Turmeric paste is smeared on Nimita’s limbs, every woman joining in. Once the exposed bits of skin are decently covered in the golden body mask, Charan-Mamaji and Daddy duck in shyly to add two dots of haldi each.

  Another bath and then careful dressing. The winter day is cool and windy so Nimita is grateful for the pashmina Mummy ordered freshly woven and the thin inner wool kameez that protects her skin from the cold red silk of her marriage salwar kameez. Reheza, fortified with hot milk, carefully dabs little red-and-white dots along Nimita’s eyebrows, sweeps dark lines of kajal along her eyelashes and fills in the bride’s lips with Chambor lipstick all the way from France, thanks to Pimmy-Auntyji.

  Red, white and gold bangles cover Nimita’s arms all the way to her elbow. She clinks like a temple as Mummy adds the long sprays of leaf-like kaliras suspended from thin gold strings. “Don’t look up at all,” Mummy warns Nimmy for the 15th time. “Afterwards, when the unmarried girls come, bless them and clink your kaliras over their heads, so that at least one falls off on someone. Then they will make a good match too.”

  Nimita has eaten only a hard rusk with a cup of sweet tea. Sick to her stomach, she barely registers what is being said. This is my home, she thinks, this is my bed, my room, these four walls. Her clothes have been packed away, as have her books and pictures and photos. The bare, changed room full of chatter and laughter not her own holds no comfort.

  She follows Mummy down the stairs, not needing to be reminded not to look up. Jewellery weighs down her head, her neck, her arms, her legs. “See how they send out the bride, so much gold she can’t even walk,” the older women murmur approvingly.

  Nimmy has a headache and the scent of incense and ash, the sound of laughter and the doleful shehnai as her groom is welcomed make her stagger and hold the railing for support.

  At other weddings, Nimita was one of a band of girls who barred the groom from entering until he swore his devotion to the bride and paid off her sisters and friends with sweets and silver rupees. Today is Neela’s and Shefali’s and Aruna’s and Roopa’s turn to earn the money and stuff themselves silly with sweets. Nimita is a late entrant to her own party, brought out only once everyone else is in position and the pundit poised on the mandap to unite her with a stranger.

  First the exchange of flower garlands, then Charan-Mamaji presses down on her shoulder and she sits. Someone ties her chunni to the end of a long red silk scarf that is draped around the neck of a silver-clad stranger. His face is hidden by a curtain of rose and jasmine flowers hanging down from his turban.

  Hot air from the fire blows the mixed scent of the flowers to her. Nimita inhales as the same breeze parts the curtain of flowers. She sees as if into a mirror: a thin, white, dazed face, tired, drawn, afraid.

  Their eyes meet. A little red rushes into the face’s lips—into Karan’s lips, she realises. They part in a familiar movement.

  A smile, Nimita thinks at first, then realises, no, he’s saying: “Hello.”

  In English.

  The ritual calls both their eyes away, and the pundit joins their hands around sacred betel leaves and makes them pour water and ghee into the fire.

  Warm from their proximity to the flames, their palms meet easily, gliding and fitting into each other as if they were two drops of water merging into one. Her henna-decorated palm cupped in Karan’s hand, Nimita feels her shoulders relax in spite of the weight of the garland, her headache receding slightly. It is bearable now, thanks to the scent of roses and jasmine and the sight of one unguarded smile.

  Has anyone in the world ever smiled like that upon seeing her?

  Daddy on the day her Matric (Pass) result came, perhaps. Mummy, when Nimita gave her a sweater knitted all by herself in home science class. Thoughts of her parents make her eyes water and her breath catch, but the sadness is a sweet pain mixed with the fragrance of flowers and the growing, beating curiosity over the sensations caused by the warm palm under hers.

  Later, as she stands and greets the stream of well-wishers, Nimita’s back aches from the customary near-bend to touch elders’ feet—they all raise her up immediately and lovingly, the parade of auntyjis and unclejis she knows but is too tired to name. Mr and Mrs Qureshi, Mr and Mrs Kaul, Mr and Mrs Malhotra, Inspector and Mrs Khan, Mr and Mrs Damania, Mr and Mrs Batliwala, even Mrs Sharma, Mrs Luthra from Kinnaird College and—Mrs Dalhousie.

  Nimita thinks she is going to faint, but her principal only caresses her chin gently. “Be happy,” she says, not a hint of reproach in her voice. She shakes Karan’s hand, as if she is a man, before leaving.

  Pimmy-Auntyji comes up on stage to support Mummy. Roshna hangs around Nimita’s neck like another garland of flowers as Shanti-Bhabhiji adjusts the drape of her chunni, Tony-Baba asleep in Urmila-Auntyji—no, Urmila-Mummyji’s arms.

  “Very nice embroidery,” Shanti-Bhabhiji says, stroking the elongated loops and whorls of the Parsi-style flowers and birds Rukhsana Sheikh had embroidered on the pashmina. “Beautiful.”

  Karan—my husband, Nimita tries out in her mind, in English—her husband is a silver presence at her side, a shadow in the corner of her eye, but their fingers brush by accident. Without speaking, their bodies angle so no one can see and their fingers intertwine for a second before the next well-wisher arrives. Nimita smiles and bends and is lifted up, and in the back of her mind she wonders how it might feel to have those fingers trace their name over her palm.

  Mummy’s hand cups the back of Nimita’s head. Daddy and Charan-Mamaji stand just next to her. There are roses in their buttonholes and they say the smoke is making their eyes water.

  Somewhere in the crowd, people are eating, laughing, talking, singing, perhaps looking for more sui
table matches, preparing for the next wedding of the season. The sound and smoke and stream of people make it seem as if all Lahore has come out to bless Nimita at her wedding. With so many people wanting my happiness, she thinks with a rush of feeling, what else but good can happen now?

  Part Three

  2014

  1.

  The supermarket lights blink. No, it is me.

  I sit on my heels and close my eyes. The air-conditioning feels good on the back of my neck. Living in Singapore is going from one air-conditioned bubble to another: air-con in the buses, air-con in the MRT, air-con at work. Problem is that to move from bubble to bubble, you have to walk in the summer heat. Even five minutes is enough to exhaust you.

  Someone moves behind me.

  “Wah, potatoes so expensive. Better go wet market, I tell you.”

  The bag of potatoes lands close to my hand. Bits of earth fall off the dark brown tubers.

  “Sorry, sorry!”

  I open my eyes and look up. My neighbour Hafeezah puts her hands together in the namaste mudra. In a baby sling, Altaf peeks at me.

  “So sorry!”

  “It’s okay.” I turn back to the basket of onions on the floor.

  Hafeezah crouches next to me. “You want onions, you don’t buy from this NTUC. You come home with me. Abu went to wet market down near Marsiling, bought 10kg sack. You take from me. Too much.”

  “No, it’s okay.” I make up a story. “This week I don’t cook with onions. Or potatoes.”

  Hafeezah gets up with me. “Navratri over already, no?”

  She means the nine-day festival North Indian Hindus celebrate twice a year before the sowing and after the harvest seasons. Some fast, some go vegetarian, others eat like Jains, avoiding any food that would disturb the creatures in the soil. Hafeezah was born Sindhi. She would probably have eaten like a Jain.

  “This is another festival.”