The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

by Ratika Kapur

  These days my in-laws are worried that Bobby has become too quiet, that he spends too much time just lying around the house with a long face. I have heard them talk about this on the phone with their daughter when they think that I can’t hear them, and from time to time they even tell me directly. They think that he has become this way since his father went to Dubai. A boy has to have his father there with him, they say, especially at this age. I just keep quiet. In many ways my husband is a good father. He is not like other men, and he always did a lot for his son. In the mornings, for example, when he was still here in Delhi, he gave Bobby his breakfast while I prepared our tiffins. He also helped him with his homework and took him on outings. Still, a father is a father. A father is a man. Can he well and truly know just by the way Bobby holds his spoon at lunchtime that the girl with the green eyes at the bus stop has ignored him? Can he know just from how Bobby’s toes will sometimes twist and bend in a very odd way that the boy has had a difficult time at school? Can he know just by looking at Bobby’s eyes that the boy is sick? Can a father know everything that there is to know about his son, even without the use of his sight?

  I agree with my in-laws that something is a little bit wrong with Bobby, but the problem is actually not as serious as they think that it is. It is not these one and a half years without his father that troubles the boy. What troubles him, I am sure, apart from the bus-stop girl and some problems at school, is that the three of us, Bobby, my husband and I, were supposed to be on holiday just now. Before Bobby’s father left for Dubai in November 2009, he promised to come back to India this summer and take Bobby for a holiday to Manali. We were supposed to be in the mountains just now, we were supposed to be rolling around in the snow. But see, my husband’s boss is a difficult man, he is an Arab, who, like all Arabs, my husband says, hates Indians, and even though my husband is due his annual leave, actually, it is overdue by more than seven months, this Arab won’t approve his leave just now. Even though my husband gave him six months’ notice as per the rules, the Arab told my husband that if he wanted to go to India now, then he should just buy a one-way ticket to Delhi and forget about coming back. Obviously my husband was very angry about this, he even threatened to leave his job and come back to Delhi, but I told him to be calm and to not worry about it. I have also explained to Bobby that his father is having a difficult time just now, but that things will be fine soon. Bobby is a little bit sensitive, but he is a good boy and he will understand.

  Still, the day ended very nicely. It was Doctor Sahib’s sixtieth birthday party and apart from all his family and friends, he invited all the clinic staff to a huge lavish dinner at a banquet hall at the Taj Palace Hotel. I asked Bobby if he wanted to accompany me and he agreed. I had to tempt him to come by telling him that there would be a huge buffet. Food, eating food, talking about it, always makes my son happy. Sometimes he tries to tease me by telling me how he wants to be a chef, but I don’t encourage this type of jokiness and I tell him in my strict voice that cooking is fine as timepass, that it would make his future wife a happy woman, but that it is still only timepass and nothing else.

  I wore my mother’s pink and gold chanderi sari, and Bobby said that I looked pretty. That is the type of sweet boy that he is. And just for me Bobby shaved, and he wet his hair and combed it with a neat side parting, and even though he refused to wear a suit, he agreed to wear a smart shirt and pants. He looked handsome, very handsome. The truth is, and I don’t like to boast, but the truth is that he looked more handsome than Doctor Sahib’s son.

  I have lived in Delhi for a long time, I have lived in Delhi for seventeen years, actually, but I don’t think that I have ever been to a party like this before. It is still a little difficult to believe, but there must have been fifty different dishes at least, from fifteen different countries. And there were these chefs actually cooking in front of guests, cooking prawns and pasta and dosas and what not. Rosie said that they are called live stations. She said that this type of banquet would have cost Doctor Sahib four thousand rupees per person at least because it was a five-star hotel and also because they were serving alcohol. There were about three hundred people there. We don’t need a maths teacher to tell us how much money Doctor Sahib has to waste.

  And it is not only plenty of money that he has to waste, as my own son said to me after I took him up to meet Doctor Sahib and his wife. We had been talking to them for some time. They asked me about my husband, they asked Bobby about his studies and his career plans and what not. They were being very kind to us, I thought. Then, as we walked away from them, Bobby turned to me and said, Ma, have you noticed how these types of people blabber on and on?

  So? I said.

  They don’t just waste money, he said. They also waste words.

  I was a little bit shocked, not by what he had said, and he did say such a lot in less than ten words, but I was shocked by the idea that a child who still has so many years of growing up in front of him would think and speak like such a grown up. How is it that my young son was thinking with the tired, angry mind of somebody old? How was he speaking in those particular sharp, serious tones that only grown ups speak in? But my Bobby spoke the truth. A young crow actually is wiser than its mother.

  I could not think of the proper words to say back to Bobby so I said, Let them be. Now you don’t waste your thoughts on them. Then I quickly took his hand and pulled him to the pastries. The day, I can say, ended sweetly.

  4

  Sunday, 22 May 2011

  I am alone in my house. My in-laws and Bobby are at Feroz Shah Kotla watching a cricket match. My husband had surprised us with four tickets for an IPL match, for my in-laws, Bobby and me, four tickets that cost six hundred rupees each. Without telling us he bought the tickets online from Dubai and had them delivered to our house here in Delhi. But I did not want to go, so I said that I was tired and had to take some rest at home. Bobby’s friend Ankit went instead of me. We did not want to waste such a costly ticket.

  Instead of going for the match I went to Vineet’s hotel this evening. For some time now I have wanted to see this hotel that he works in, this fancy boutique hotel that he keeps talking about, so I called him up last night and asked him if we could go today. Since everybody was going for the match I thought that this would be a good chance. He agreed then and there. Sundays are best, he said, because business hotels have very low occupancy on holidays.

  And the hotel is well and truly something to be seen. From the outside it looks like a big fancy house with a big fancy gate, like almost all the other houses on that road. You would never guess that it is a hotel, there are no signs anywhere, and Vineet told me that this was done on purpose because it is actually illegal to run a hotel in a residential area. But then you enter, and then and there you realise that this is no house. You walk in and you feel like you have walked into some foreign country. It is beautiful, and so quiet and clean. There is soft music playing, and in the middle of the lobby there is a waterfall and all these different varieties of plants around it. It looks just like one of those Japanese gardens that you see in a calendar. One foreigner was standing at the reception. He was wearing a beige-coloured suit and he looked very smart. It was difficult to believe that there were just four people, the foreigner, one woman at the reception desk, Vineet and I, in that huge, huge room. It was quiet and beautiful, and empty.

  Vineet took me up in the lift to look at the guest rooms. I entered the first room and I think that my breath stopped for four or five seconds. I could not believe the beds, I could not believe how the beds were made. Not one wrinkle, the bedcover and sheets all tucked in so nicely, all stretched tightly over the mattress. It actually seemed that they were stitched on to the bed. And the pillows. I have never seen such white pillows, and so many of them on one bed. All the rooms, he told me, have Wi-Fi. And all around there was this sweet smell of jasmine. In the rooms, in the corridors, in the lobby, even in the bathrooms, all around there was this nice smell. Vineet said that they put
perfumed oils in the AC ducts. And then there were the bathrooms. What can I say about those bathrooms? They were so beautiful, the taps shone like silver and there was granite and glass all around, and everything was so clean, so clean, that I could have just lay down then and there on the floor and gone to sleep.

  Only three out of the twenty rooms were occupied because it was Sunday and business travellers want to be at home with their families on weekends. It is also low season in the summer, Vineet said. So, we went all around the hotel. He even took me into one of the occupied rooms to show me the thinnest laptop I have ever seen in my whole life. Obviously the guest was not there. The woman from the reception, who is a friend of Vineet’s, had told him that the guest had gone out for dinner. But this laptop, it was as thin as a news magazine, and I am sure that when Bobby completes his MBA and gets a job, I am sure that this is the type of computer that he will carry to the office. I wish that I could have shown it to him. And the guest also had this shiny red leather case that was only for carrying ties. I wanted to pick it up for my husband but it was too big to slip into my purse.

  Then Vineet took me to the kitchen, and again, it was something to be seen. How neat and clean it was, and it had a fridge that was bigger than my kitchen! And they only have RO-filtered water. Everywhere only RO-filtered water. You can even drink the water from the bathroom taps. Vineet said that they have to do this because most of their guests are foreigners and they have very delicate stomachs. I thought that this was quite funny. Who has a bath with his mouth open? When we finished looking all around the hotel we went to the restaurant near the lobby and Vineet ordered tea and snacks for us. He said that he did not have to pay for it, he said that senior staff are allowed such things from time to time. The woman from the reception, what they call the front office, came and sat down with us. Her name is Neha. She was friendly, but there was something a little bit odd about her. I did not like how she wore her sari. It was draped too tightly around her hips and chest. And she went on and on about how there were all these guests making passes at her, which, I suspect, was all just for Vineet’s ears. I wanted to tell her that it is all about the way that you carry yourself. Even if I am a little bit plump, I also have quite a nice body, but no man would dare put a hand on my shoulder because they can see from the way that I carry myself that I would never allow them to do that. I also think that she was being a little bit over-friendly, asking me too many questions, asking for my mobile number, and blabbering on and on like a schoolgirl, even though she looked like she was at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age. Still, maybe I am wrong about her. And Vineet says that she is a good person.

  After tea we went for a drive in the hotel’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Vineet is obviously a popular man because the hotel’s driver very happily agreed to take us. He took us on the Jaipur highway so that I could see how fast the car can go. Because it was Sunday, there was not a lot of traffic, and how fast the car went! But more than that, how smooth it was. It seemed that we were racing two or three feet above the road. Maybe that is how it feels to be in a plane. And apart from TV screens on the headrests, which I have seen before, and automatic windows and automatic this and automatic that, apart from all that, the owner’s initials were embroidered on the seats. On each seat, like a fancy company logo, the letters R and K were embroidered in gold! The owner had actually asked the car company to do that, Vineet told me, in gold silk thread. Even though it was machine embroidery, and I know if something is machine embroidery from ten feet away, even then it was very nice. But I should say that for the price of that car, I would have preferred to buy a flat in Faridabad.

  When the driver took us back to the hotel he did not just leave us on the road. He drove the car into the driveway of the property, stopped at the main entrance, came out of the car and opened the doors for us, then he got back into the car and reversed on to the road, then turned the car around and then reversed it back into the driveway so that the car was parked properly, with its front facing out on to the road, ready for the next trip. It was just the way Doctor Sahib’s driver drops him to the clinic every morning.

  But now I am back at home. Now I am alone in my house. My in-laws and Bobby won’t come back from the match until after eleven o’clock. Now I am alone and it is quiet all around. I never knew that these rooms could be so quiet.

  First I thought that I would use this time to clean the prayer room properly, because we don’t allow the cleaning woman to enter it, and that after that I would sit down and look at different models for desktop computers on the Internet. Doctor Sahib has promised to buy me a computer and he said that I could choose any one I want as long as it is not too costly. But then suddenly I felt like doing nothing. I just wanted to enjoy this quiet. I just wanted to look at the black screen of a TV that is not switched on, just stare at this quiet.

  I like this flat. Actually, I like it very much. We shifted here one and a half years ago when my husband left for Dubai. The flat that we lived in before, which was just one floor above this one, had only one big room, a bathroom and a kitchen, which was suitable for my husband, Bobby and me, but would have been too small to share with my in-laws. So, when it was decided that my husband would take up the job in Dubai and that my in-laws would come to live with Bobby and me, we shifted into this flat, which has one bedroom, a hall where my in-laws sleep, because they insisted that Bobby and I should use the bedroom, a kitchen, one bathroom and a veranda that we partly enclosed to make the prayer room. My father-in-law helps us with the rent. This, also, he insisted on doing, but then he gets quite a good pension from the government, especially after the Sixth Pay Commission.

  One day I hope that we can buy this flat. It is in a very good locality. From here it takes only seven minutes to walk to the Malviya Nagar market and less than twenty minutes to the Hauz Khas Metro station. Water supply is also not a big problem, normally. And the neighbours are decent people hailing from good families. I have decided that if the day comes when we own this place, which can only happen if my husband works in Dubai for at least seven years more, then I am going to buy proper curtains, just like the ones in Doctor Sahib’s house. In his house, actually, not only do they have curtains all around, but they also have these transparent lacy curtains behind each set. It looks very nice. I think that I will buy curtains for the whole flat, with different prints and colours for each room. Maybe I will even put curtains in the kitchen.

  I am alone at night for the first time in seventeen years, for the first time since I got married, maybe even for the first time in my life because I cannot remember my father or mother leaving me at home at night-time, and it feels nice. It feels very nice, actually. Everything is so peaceful that I prayed again, at ten o’clock at night. Everything is so peaceful and quiet that I think that I could actually feel God tonight.

  Still, just because I am enjoying this, it does not mean that this is how I always want it to be. I like being married, I like having a full house and a family. People today complain that marriage means forgetting yourself and living for others, it means getting your husband’s tiffin ready before the sun comes up and washing your child’s school uniform and serving hot chapattis to your in-laws. Obviously marriage involves cooking and cleaning, looking after the house, looking after the family. That is how it is, that is a wife’s duty, and maybe, sometimes, it can make you feel tired. But marriage is also about two people who like to hear each other talk, two people who enjoy going on outings together, who can joke together and cry together. Maybe this is not the case in every marriage, maybe not in the marriages that you read about in the newspaper or in those marriages that they show in TV serials, but you will see it in many marriages. You will see it in my marriage.

  My husband is my friend. Maybe he is even my only friend. When I was young I never actually had friends. Maybe I was too busy with my studies and housework to find the time to meet other girls, but on my wedding night I know that I made a friend.

  The first t
en months that we were married, before I became pregnant with Bobby, were a lot of fun. My husband had already been working in Delhi for two years, so when I shifted here he spent a lot of time showing me this huge city. In the evenings and on weekends, he showed me all the grand monuments of Delhi, all the markets, east and west and north and south. He never ever allowed me to cook on Sundays, and we went to Bazaar Sitaram for chhole bhature, Ansari Road for kachoris, Gole Market for samosas and all types of other eating places. We roamed all around, we laughed, we blabbered on and on. You would have to put sellotape on our lips to make us stop talking. And even after Bobby was born we still went on our outings all around the city. We just took him wherever we wanted to go. Normally, for most couples, all the fun is gone, their whole life is gone, after they have had a baby. It is almost as if one small baby, one small, little baby, enters into the world, into his parents’ world, and in one second swallows that whole world up, and the only things that his Mummy and Papa can now think about are baby’s food and baby’s shit and baby this and baby that. Now, I think I can say that my husband and I were good parents, I think I can say that we are still good parents. Still, nothing, not even the beautiful son that we were blessed with, could stop us from enjoying ourselves.