by Manil Suri
“When Mr. Jalal comes home, I’ll send him down to see what can be done.”
Short Ganga didn’t reply. She rinsed the pot out, banging it around in the basin with unnecessary violence, her pigtail snaking angrily behind her. “Is there anything else you want me to do now?” she asked when she’d finished, wiping her brow with her forearm.
“No, nothing,” Mrs. Jalal said. She felt guilty, without being certain why. “Wait—these bananas—Mr. Jalal isn’t going to eat them. They’re not going to last another day—here—for the children.” She broke off two bananas from the bunch and thrust them into Short Ganga’s hand.
A look of such contempt sprang into Short Ganga’s eyes that Mrs. Jalal was appalled. For a moment, she wondered if Short Ganga was going to hand the fruit back to her. Then Short Ganga wrapped the edge of her sari around the bananas and left the room.
Mrs. Jalal took a series of tentative breaths, still alert to the possibility of pestilence in the air. What disease was going around these days that everyone was acting so bizarrely? Short Ganga storming off like that. Salim playing hide and seek with that Hindu girl from downstairs. Ahmed, her husband, whose behavior she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. She took a professional-sized gulp of the air, and satisfied that the answer didn’t lie in it, went back to the kitchen.
The remaining bananas sat on the table. She knew she never should have bought them. Salim was never around, Ahmed ate less and less every day, and she herself had always loathed their slimy feel. If they’d been less expensive, she’d have given the whole bunch to Short Ganga. But now there were three left, and she was the only one around to dispose of them. She peeled the darkest one, broke off the top section, and put it in her mouth. The ripeness made her gag, but stoically, she chewed on the mushy flesh.
Ahmed. She’d resolved to stop obsessing about him, but the banana fumes had for some reason sent her mind down that track again. She couldn’t believe it had started all the way back with the fasts at Ramzan. How happy she’d been then, when instead of one or two half-kept rozas, Ahmed had decided to stick with them for the entire fasting period. She had always been distressed by his failure to assume the proper role in their family’s religious activity. Month after month, year after year, it had been she who had written out the checks for the due to the poor, who had made all the arrangements for festivals, and taken Salim to the masjid on Fridays. Upon prodding, Ahmed would sometimes join her when it was time for namaz, but usually he simply left the room, still reading his book, whenever she unrolled the prayer mat. Her father had warned her, had almost turned the proposal down. “He seems to have read a lot of books, this Ahmed Jalal,” he’d remarked. “Perhaps one of these days he’ll even accidentally open the Koran.”
She’d realized, quite quickly after their wedding, that her father had been wrong about Ahmed. Her husband had read the Koran, in fact, he had read it frighteningly well, and could recite several passages from memory. The problem was his interest in religion only seemed to extend to reading about it, not practicing it. “Thought control,” he would call it, “something to keep busy the teeming masses.” Then, without looking up from his book, he would add, “Not to exclude you, my love,” and she would feel herself turn red at the blatancy with which he mocked her.
Some nights he would spout passages from the Bible or a Chinese religious book whose name she could never remember. He would compare these quotes to verses from the Koran, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each text, unmindful of the fact that she was covering her ears to deflect any possible blasphemy. She especially dreaded the times he brought up the Din Ilahi, a sixteenth-century amalgam of Hinduism and Islam that the Mughal emperor Akbar had concocted to unify his subjects. “Religion revealed by man, not prophet,” their school mullah had contemptuously asserted, “is religion fit for no one.”
Ahmed, though, was all for it, and regarded Akbar as a personal hero. “He really put the mullahs in their place,” he would say, as he looked for opportunities to taunt people. “Perhaps it’s time to give the experiment another shot—force everyone to convert to it, Hindus and Muslims alike. Just think of it—instant peace, instant harmony—the mullahs might have to share their masjids, but so what?”
Statements like these made her wonder how many more she could afford to hear before being condemned to accompanying Ahmed into the fires of hell. An image from the Koran kept coming to her—that of Abu Lahab being consumed by flames, his wife bringing the firewood, a rope tied around her neck.
For the first few months of their marriage, she had meekly listened to everything Ahmed said, without comment. But she soon learned that her silence elicited increasingly outrageous pronouncements, which let up only when he had succeeded in provoking her into an argument. She had embarked then into the next phase, the one where she believed that she would be able to change him, that the intrinsic virtue of her beliefs would shine through and banish the shadows from Ahmed’s mind. But she had found herself unequipped to match his prowess at debate—the keenness of his words, the onslaught of his ideas, the way he spun strands of her own arguments into webs around her and then watched in amusement as she flailed and struggled and tried to cut herself loose. She had felt the ground of her own faith begin to soften, and had realized the danger of allowing herself to be further engaged. That is when she had summoned up the courage to deliver an ultimatum—Ahmed was forbidden to talk about religion in her presence, or she would leave, taking Salim with her.
Of course, Ahmed wasted no time calling her bluff, carrying on as usual, ignoring her threat. Until one night, in the middle of a lecture on the equality of all religions, she grabbed Salim and rushed down the stairs to the taxi stand. Although she returned soon enough (she had forgotten to take money for the taxi), it got Ahmed’s attention. At first, he was furious, railing at her for being unintellectual, calling her backward and brainwashed and bigoted. Then he tried appealing to her open-mindedness, her sense of fair play, arguing that a man should be able to discuss anything with his wife, that they were only words, not actions, so where was the harm? But she stood her ground, leaving the room whenever he brought up the subject, and for good measure, going to Salim’s crib and pressing him to her bosom to reiterate her threat. Ahmed gave up soon after, and the nightly discourses came to an end.
It was several weeks before Ahmed’s imposed stoniness thawed. But a trace of formality crept into all his dealings with her, a perceptible guardedness, that over the years hardened into something unbridgeable between them. He started lapsing into periods of secretive behavior—days, sometimes weeks, when he would keep to himself and hide things from her. She remembered one night in particular, not long ago, when he refused to let her look at his back, even though she could see a spot of blood soaking through his nightshirt.
Usually, though, the secrets he tried to keep were innocuous and easy enough to guess, and she would display just the right mixture of curiosity and consternation at his behavior to make him think he was getting away with them. What troubled her more, and what she blamed herself for, was the further deterioration in his observance of Islam. She watched in silent helplessness as his namaz-reciting dwindled month by month, as he started cheating at the one or two rozas he did keep and stopped going to the masjid altogether. Even more distressing was the fact that despite her best efforts, Salim was turning out more and more like his father. She reconciled herself to practicing her faith alone, and never being able to share this part of her existence with her family.
So when Ahmed started observing the rozas so diligently this Ramzan, Mrs. Jalal was startled, and quite pleased. Perhaps he had come around, maybe he was going to be like all the other husbands and fathers after all. Maybe there would even still be time to influence Salim. She had risen before dawn every morning to have turmeric potatoes and freshly fried puris ready for their breakfast, and stood on the balcony each evening with Ahmed, to wait for the sun to set. It had given her such a sense of fulfillment, doing the shopping herself every day, ma
king all his favorite foods, feeding him the first bite of mutton kebab or chicken biryani with her own hands. And to her relief, he had not brought up the old discussions of other religions. Even Salim, persuaded by their joint example, had been moved to keep a fast or two.
But then the rozas were over, and Ahmed was still fasting daily. Sometimes he would keep them two days at a time, not eating from sunrise the first day to sunset the second. When questioned about it, he claimed it helped his digestion, or he needed to lose weight, or he was doing it in empathy with all the people starving in the world. Uncertain about how to respond to these assertions, and limited somewhat by the apparent absence of health side effects, Mrs. Jalal tried not to dwell on it.
But it got worse. He started wearing the same clothes day after day, ignoring the fresh white kurtas she laid out on his bed every morning. She would have to sneak out with his dirty clothes at night while he slept, and hide them in the dhobi hamper. Which didn’t always work, since sometimes he would retrieve them the next day, and scold her for putting them there.
He stopped bathing for a while and only resumed when his body odor was so ripe that even the cigarettewalla was prompted to ask what was happening to the sahib. The radio suddenly started bothering him, making him irritable whenever it was playing in his presence. He would try to turn it off when he thought she was not looking, and if she objected, storm out of the room in a huff. One day she came back from the market to find it had disappeared altogether. That afternoon, a tearful Short Ganga demanded to know why the sahib had sold the radio for ten rupees to the paanwalla, when the opportunity to buy it should have been rightfully hers, given all the work she did for them, and who was the paanwalla to them anyway, when they hardly even ate two paans a month, if that? It had taken Mrs. Jalal an hour of standing on the pavement outside the paanwalla’s stall and hurling accusations of thievery at him in front of his customers before he agreed to sell it back.
And then had come the night when Ahmed had thrown off the covers, turned on the light, and started rearranging the furniture in their bedroom. She had watched, frightened, as he deposited all the chairs in the corridor outside, moved the desk against the wall, and dragged the heavy metal trunk clear across the floor. Then he put his shoulder against the frame, and with her still perched on it, started pushing the bed towards the wall in short, grunting thrusts, like some overstimulated beast of burden.
“Ahmed, what are you doing?” she cried, not knowing whether to get up and assist him or sit there and allow her body to be jerked sideways with each thrust.
“Too soft,” he mumbled through his exertion. “Bad for the back.” He pulled a sheet out of the cupboard, and spread it out on the space cleared on the floor, then plucked his pillow off the bed and switched off the light.
“Ahmed, come back,” she called to him in the dark, still sitting up in bed. “Why are you doing this?”
But he did not answer. She waited until she could hear his breathing grow soft and regular before lying down and trying to sleep herself. Sometime during the night, Ahmed tossed his pillow back on the bed, and she awoke in the morning to find him stretched out on the bare floor, the sheet draped over his body and his head.
The weeks went by, but he did not return. Although it had been years since they had done anything in bed but sleep, the presence of his body next to hers had always reassured her. She found now that if she happened to wake up at night (something that occurred more and more frequently as she grew older, or was it just her imagination?), she was unable to fall back asleep. Instead, she would lie in the dark for what seemed like hours, trying to lose herself in the sounds of his breathing, waiting for the dawn to paint its first strokes of pink across the ceiling.
She had been unable to solve the mystery of his behavior. She had tried reasoning with him and pleading with him, tried subjecting him to great big luxuriant blooms of tears (both silent and racking), and even threatened to leave him, but to no avail. He had stubbornly returned the same responses, insisting he was doing everything for his health, and accusing her of wanting to cripple him every time she asked him to start sleeping on the bed again. His answers had frustrated her, then made her despondent. These days, she was just plain exhausted—Ahmed’s behavior had so sapped her that even a trip down the stairs seemed a major undertaking.
Mrs. Jalal looked at the remaining bananas. How many more would she be forced to eat in her life? How many times again would the slime coat her tongue, the ripeness fester in her mouth? Her throat constricted at the injustice of it all. She was tired, so tired, of being the one. The eating, the fasting, the aloneness, the silence. How much longer, how much further, how much more was she supposed to endure? Tears, thick and salty, started flowing down her cheeks.
It wasn’t her fault this was happening. Perhaps she should let it out, tell her story, confide in someone. She had kept everything bottled up for too long. Maybe she would make a trip to her parents’ house this very evening and reveal everything to Nafeesa. Let herself be ashamed no longer.
The door slammed, and Mrs. Jalal heard Salim’s footsteps in the corridor. Quickly, she brushed off the tears with the back of her hand. There was no reason to get Salim involved in any of this—she would not let him find out.
Mrs. Jalal smoothed out her cheeks with her fingertips to capture the last traces of moisture. “Salim dear,” she called out. “Come into the kitchen and have one of these bananas with your mother.”
KAVITA ASRANI SLID the picture of Salim out from between the pages of the Eve’s Weekly she was reading. “Tonight, my sweet,” she said silently, and touched her finger to her lips, then to the picture. “Only a few hours left.”
She had thought about taking some clothes, packing a bag. Now would have been a good time to do it, with both her mother and father on the landing outside, engaged in their weekly fight with the Pathaks. But she had decided against it. She wanted it to be just like it had been for Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh in Zahreela Insaan, for Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in Daag. It was going to be a new world, a new life; why should her clothes be old? Besides, she had all the money from her savings account—the clerk had looked at her funny when she had given him the withdrawal slip, but she was eighteen now, and what could they do?
Kavita did not feel guilty about taking the money. After all, her mother had kept telling her over the years that it was for her dowry. While this was perhaps not (definitely not) the match her mother could have had in mind, they were going to get married, although they had not figured out yet how they would get a priest or mullah to perform the ceremony. Besides, there hadn’t been so much money anyway—her mother should be thankful the family was getting off so cheap. She remembered the huge wedding and reception that Anita’s parents had paid for last year, with the horse and the band and the dinner at Holiday Inn. A momentary wistfulness made her resolve waver, but then the prospect of romance won her over again.
Growing up, Salim had been one of the neighborhood boys, nothing more. She had seen him loitering around with the other teenagers, but had paid little attention to him. One day, the group had been particularly boisterous, and Kavita had complained to her mother about the catcalls and whistles they’d made. Mrs. Asrani had marched upstairs and accused the Jalals of harboring an eve-teaser. Salim’s parents had sent him down to apologize—not to Kavita, but to her mother, who had met him at the door, arms crossed emphatically across her chest. He had stuttered at first, but then expressed such eloquent regret that Mrs. Asrani had melted—she had pulled him to her bosom and declared him to be her own son.
“From now on, Kavita is your sister,” she said, and clasped their hands together. “If we can’t all live in harmony in this building, what hope is there for the nation?”
“Sister,” Salim said, with an expression so angelic that Kavita knew at once he was mocking her. She was going to pull her hand away, but stopped—there was some chemical reaction that had started between them. Electrons were being blown out of the
ir orbits, atoms and molecules rearranged, heat was being generated, and she was suddenly afraid to interrupt. She stood there and felt the blood surge in her fingertips; she looked into his eyes, and saw the hint of green mixed in slyly with the brown, she noted the whiteness of his teeth and the fairness of his skin. She would not be his sister.
Mrs. Asrani’s benevolence evaporated quite rapidly. “What all you keep doing to encourage this Salim character, I don’t know—day after day he buzzes around like a flying cockroach.”
“But he’s my brother. You said so yourself.”
“What brother-wrother? I pat him once on the head, and he becomes your brother? Who am I, the Queen of England?”
“But you said we all have to live in harmony.”
“Yes yes. Everyone in the building has seen your harmony. Even Mrs. Pathak—the nerve of that woman. ‘How broad-minded of you,’ she tells me in the kitchen. ‘He hardly even looks Muslim,’ she says. I felt like slapping her.”
“But it’s not my fault if people think like that.”
“Then whose fault is it? Parading up and down for everyone to see. Well, no more, I say. No more Master Cockroach Jalal. No more meeting him. Get rid of the bamboo, and the flute won’t play.”
“But that’s so unfair.”
“I’ll talk with your father today only. We’ll get your horoscope drawn. It’s time to put henna on your hands, before you blacken your face too much for anyone to marry you.”
Naturally, such proscriptions against seeing Salim charged their trysts with a new and delicious urgency. Whereas before Kavita had been content to just talk and spend time in his company, she now found herself consumed by the need for physical contact. She stroked his face with her fingers to feel the tingling rise up her hand, she brushed her lips against his mouth to experience the rush that raced through her body, she pressed her breasts against his shirt and fantasized about the thick dark hair on his chest rubbing against her uncovered nipples. And every time they met, she let Salim guide her hand closer and closer to places she had not thought about, before she pulled it away.