Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  ‘That’s your aunt, isn’t it?’

  All those years of togetherness, of intimacy without belonging, and he still needed me to signpost the relationships I did have. ‘She’s worried about Maya,’ and as he frowned, I added, ‘that’s my sister.’

  ‘I know who your sister is, Siya.’

  ‘Tasha-di wants me to go back to India.’

  This wasn’t strictly true, but I wanted to jolt Benjamin. He had been complacent about my unsuccessful applications, and about my giving up my flat, and I wanted him to realise that we couldn’t go on the way we had. Something had to give. Benjamin spoke now, his voice light, ‘It might do you good to go there for a bit. Get a break.’

  ‘No,’ I said, my voice raised. There had been a lull in the restaurant, and my voice emerged high-pitched and strained. The table next to us turned to see if all was well. ‘No,’ I said again, ‘If I go back, I’ll be going back.’

  He ran his hands through his hair, and as I smiled, happy to finally see him ruffled, he asked, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘My life isn’t exactly going anywhere, is it?’ I paused, waiting to see if he spoke, but he remained silent. ‘I have no job, I can’t afford my flat, and things between us…’ I trailed off to see him wince. He didn’t speak, didn’t rebut my words, and I repeated, ‘I think it’s better if I just go.’

  ‘Well,’ he said in a careful voice. He blew air into his cheeks, then pursed his mouth. It appeared a suggestion was on his lips, but he didn’t speak. His cheeks puffed up again with his breath before he expelled it with a large sigh. I was reminded of our earlier, smoking days, when we would stand outside restaurants in the cold, blowing perfect smoke clouds into the night air.

  He still hadn’t spoken, and I arched my brow. ‘Well,’ he said unwillingly. ‘If you’re absolutely sure, Siya.’

  I think I laughed a little. ‘I am,’ I said, bent on misery, on drawing blood if he wasn’t prepared to give any ground. ‘It’s not as if we’re going anywhere, is it?’

  He smiled a slow, small smile, his mouth turned down, his lips cast in a half-pout. How I had loved that pout! What insight I had claimed to have into his childish self, into his tantrums and foot stomping, into his ceaseless entreaties for attention, but now, as he made that same small face, I saw it as an admission of defeat.

  ‘There’s an evening flight to Delhi,’ I said. ‘I’ll pack up my things and book myself on a flight leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and as I hoped without hope for something from him, I scarcely knew what, a concession, an admission of love, he added, ‘I’ll help you pack.’

  ‘No,’ I said, shrill again, sounding unreasonable. People were turning to look at us again, and I knew I sounded like the aggressor. ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘I really would like to,’ he said, his voice earnest, and here it was, the easy act of charity, the line cast into the water, ‘You won’t be able to take everything with you. You can leave whatever you want—boxes, suitcases—with me. I’ll keep them safe until you return.’

  III

  The plane began its descent over Delhi, lowering itself over the town of Gurugram. Many of the capital’s technology hubs were located here, and as I peered past the child sitting next to me, I saw freshly manicured lawns bordering luxury apartment complexes. The green was vivid, even from where I sat, dotted with bright pinks and reds, and I could almost forget that this was a country that prayed for its rain. This was modern India then, the new land of opportunity. Lush at first sight, and sparkling. This was the Asian century, they were saying, and the new giants of the world were all close to this land. Fortunes were waiting to be made, a new future imagined, and a fresh, thrusting identity readily furnished for an old, tested land.

  I heard someone call out my name as I reached the arrivals hall, and for a brief moment I wondered if Maya had come to receive me.

  She hadn’t been enthusiastic when I had called to tell her I was coming to Delhi. ‘I don’t know if now’s the best time,’ she had said to me. ‘It’s very hot here.’

  I told her that I remembered Delhi’s summers, but she continued to try to dissuade me. ‘You’re not used to it,’ she told me, her tone measured and reasonable, and my voice acquired the younger sibling’s whine. ‘It’s my home too,’ I said, and she submitted with the firstborn’s fatalism.

  ‘As you wish,’ she said nonchalantly, as if she didn’t much care whether I visited or not.

  I turned towards the exit, but there it was, my name being called out again, and a diaphanous chiffon dupatta being waved out towards me. I shook my head. Of course it wasn’t Maya. ‘Siya,’ she was calling, and before I could walk towards her, Tasha-di was moving forward, bustling aside other people waiting for loved ones, straining over the balustrade, and reaching out to take hold of my baggage.

  There was a man waiting patiently beside her who now darted forward. ‘Namaste,’ he said to me with a shy smile.

  ‘Do you recognise him, Siya?’ Tasha-di asked, and as I paused, she said, ‘This is Pradeep.’ I still looked uncertain, and she added, ‘Arre, child, this is Shanti’s son.’

  ‘Of course.’ He had been a constant presence as we had grown up, staying close to his mother in the kitchen. They were a quiet pair, Shanti and her boy. There was a husband in a village somewhere to the East of Delhi, but I knew nothing further about him, and had never thought to ask. Pradeep himself was unobtrusive, avoiding notice by us, either through reserve or some sense that he was intruding on our space. I often saw him as I returned from school, peering into the garage and performing odd jobs for the driver. He would polish the cars and dust out the car mats we littered with crumbs from our after-school snacks. He would change the oil as the driver directed, and watch rapt, a toolbox in his hands, as the driver disappeared under the older cars to perform repairs. He always carried the smell of car oil with him, even when he was in the house, and now, as he reached out to hold my luggage, I was sure I identified the same aroma. He smiled again at me, a slow, shy smile, and walked on towards the parking bay. He called the lift for us, clearing a path through the others walking towards their transport, but didn’t attempt any further conversation.

  ‘He’s working as a driver, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is,’ Tasha-di confirmed. ‘But he insisted on taking a half-day off to help me receive you.’

  Pradeep was a few yards in front of us, and I asked Tasha-di, ‘And Maya?’

  Tasha-di shrugged. This could encompass a multitude of complaints—her failure to pick me up, or her retreat from her work and her friends. I had looked her up online after my conversation, and Tasha-di was right. Maya hadn’t written in months. Her work had been sporadic even when Ma was alive, of course. She had been called on anytime Ma had a medical complaint, and inasmuch as I could have helped out too, neither had thought to call on me. Ma had contracted Tuberculosis, and Pneumonia, and had suffered accidents without anyone having informed me. They had formed an impenetrable band, Maya and Ma, and Maya’s writing had suffered as a consequence.

  Her other relationships had too. Ma had discouraged Maya from romantic liaisons, and though she was beautiful, Maya—with her wide eyes, full mouth and long, straight hair—she had followed her mother’s counsel. And so, while I, four years Maya’s junior, and plain looking, found it possible to attract interest from boys, Maya held herself aloof. There had been a boy at university, a tall, laughing law student with slicked-back hair, and I was never sure if interest had been expressed or reciprocated, but he had stopped visiting abruptly, and I suspected Ma was behind the rupture. Tasha-di sighed now, and put her hand behind my back. ‘You’ve come home, beta,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how much that means.’

  Tasha-di dropped me off at the door, but refused to come in. ‘I’ll visit soon,’ she said, and as I opened my mouth in protest, she added, ‘I’ll come tomorrow. But you’ll want to catch up with your sister now.’

  I entered on my own, then, and stood still for
a moment in the hallway, reorienting myself. The lighting was dim here, the shapes in front of me a haze, and I blinked to focus my eyes. The clutter seemed to have grown in the year since I’d last been here. Unopened mail lined the hallway, and was piled up both under and on top of the leather armchairs that had once been repositories for our sports bags. Maya and I would dump our tennis kit—rackets, headbands, water bottles—on top of them as we came back home with bursting bladders. Our belongings would land where they did, on the armchairs or beside them, and we would race to the bathroom, praying for our bodies to not betray us. We would return to find Ma on the warpath. ‘Everything must have its place,’ she would drill into us, even as we complained that we had been desperate to relieve ourselves. ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness.’

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ we would repeat, chastened, rushing to tidy away our things, but as I looked around at the accumulated debris of my mother and sister’s lives, I wondered who had first forgotten to heed Ma’s old homily. There was a noise overhead, a muffled footstep, Maya’s perhaps, and I moved forward. There were the public areas of the house in front of me; the living rooms and library and the kitchen, but I walked towards the staircase.

  How large those stairs had seemed in our childhood! I looked up and gulped. The steps were still large, and the flight of stairs in front of me felt like it was double the height of any I had encountered in London. The ceilings were high on every floor, and highest here, at the ground level, where the sun seemed to dart in through every window. We had clung onto the bannisters as we climbed, terrified of hitting the floor after a fall and breaking our heads.

  I began to climb the staircase, my hand creeping out of habit to hug the bannister. This space was cluttered too, serving as a repository for books and magazines. There was paper everywhere, parcels still in their boxes, and months, no years of dust gathered on top. Everything seemed dull brown, the carpet and the bannisters and the piled books, and as I lifted my hand off the staircase, I saw it was coated in a thick, furry film.

  The first floor was where all the family’s bedrooms were, but on an impulse, I climbed until I reached the second floor. This had been an unused space for as long as I could remember, and whenever Maya and I had the chance, we would make our way up here. We had built worlds for our dolls in the cavernous rooms in here, and by and large, we had been able to play undisturbed. I had a great curiosity to revisit these spaces, and to see if they were as big as they had been in my memory.

  There was a door I didn’t remember at the end of the landing. I applied pressure on the handle, but it didn’t budge. I bent down; it appeared to be locked. I tried once more, putting my weight behind me, but it was no use. I was looking around for a light switch when I thought I heard a voice call out my name. This was Maya, surely, but the voice didn’t repeat its call, and I paused outside the door for another moment. The entire corridor smelt musty, as if devoid of life, and when I tried to turn the door’s handle, it remained unyielding.

  I walked back towards my room. Shanti, Ma’s old maid, looked up at my approach, and smiled broadly. ‘Baby!’ she said as I towered over her. ‘You’ve come home.’

  Here was one thing that hadn’t changed. I folded Shanti into a hug. She smelt of the smells of the kitchen; of ginger and onion and of sharp tomato, and a little of sweat too, and I breathed the scent in deeply. ‘Tell me,’ I said to the woman. ‘How are you?’

  There was more grey in Shanti’s hair than I remembered. She had a sweet tooth, and I would make sure to buy her chocolates on my visits back. It would never be anything special; just whichever box of chocolate was on offer at my local Tesco, but Shanti was always grateful for the present. Now I said guiltily to her, ‘I didn’t bring you your chocolate.’

  The woman shook her head toothily at me. ‘Bas, beta,’ she said. ‘It’s enough that you’ve returned home.’

  She didn’t say anything about Maya. There was no sign of her, in spite of Tasha-di’s complaint that she never left the house, and I hoped she wasn’t trying to avoid me. ‘Shanti,’ I said, but the following words, ‘Where is my sister?’ felt like such an admission of failure that I didn’t utter them.

  Shanti was studying me. I smiled at her, and she said to me, ‘It’s so good to see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, then fell silent. The room was as I remembered it; large, spare, and high ceilinged. My old desk was pushed into one corner, and above it, set into the wall, was a shelf holding my favourite books. I got up from the bed and walked to the shelf, reading the spines of the volumes. It was as if I was taking a trip into the past, and though I began my inspection objectively enough, I was soon conscious that an earlier me had inhabited these alien worlds. How many hours I had spent reading these works in those early, happy years, and how many times I had reimagined my own fortunes. I would be set homework, and Ma would expect me to work until dinnertime, but the minute I was done, I would reach up for one of the titles on the shelf. How far I travelled with those books—to small town America, to Caribbean plantations and archaeological digs and quiet English villages. Nothing had been disturbed. Not the books, not the curtains, not the bed, and not the magazine rack by the door.

  I was conscious of Shanti’s gaze fixed on me. I smiled at the maid and turned towards the shuttered windows. There was a slight noise, a rustling from outside perhaps, and I looked out. There was no one there. Another noise followed, and I glanced up at the ceiling. The fan was whirling weightily around. It had come loose from its fitting, or maybe it had always hung low. As a child, I had been petrified of it falling on me, and had insisted on having my bed placed by the end furthest away from it. ‘You must be tired, Siya,’ Shanti was saying, but my eyes were fixed on the ceiling. There the fan whirled, slowly and insistently, forever threatening destruction. The sound was calming, hypnotic almost, and I found my eyelids growing heavy.

  ‘Baby…’

  I saw a flash. A long-tongued lizard stalked swiftly up the wall, and having reached the ceiling, was still. Its bulbous eyes seemed trained on me, as if observing me, but I was unused, after all this time, to the heat, and to my surroundings. I would have to acclimatise. And then, just by a corner, near where the waiting lizard lurked, I saw a patch of damp trailing down the wall.

  The events of the day were beginning to catch up with me. The long indirect flight, the queue at immigration, the heat and the crowds. Maya had still not turned up, and I assumed she was out of the house. Shanti was shuffling about, tidying my scarf from the bed, telling me I needed to rest, and I nodded. Shanti would be off to her quarters soon. ‘OK,’ I told Shanti, as she frowned. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘But baby.’

  ‘Enough, Shanti,’ I told her. ‘I grew up here too, remember?’

  ‘Maya hasn’t even called?’

  There was a disapproval in her tone she didn’t bother to disguise, and I tried to silence the urge to defend my sister. ‘It’s still a working day,’ I told the woman. She still shook her head, but as I repeated that I was able to occupy myself in my own home, she found another worry. ‘You’ll have to turn on the geyser if you want hot water for your bath,’ she told me, and I pretended to be affronted.

  ‘I’ve had thousands of baths in this house, Shanti.’

  ‘Ok, ok,’ she said unwillingly. She offered once more to make me tea, or to fetch me lemonade, but as I continued to refuse, she finally conceded defeat. ‘Stubborn girl,’ she scolded me. ‘I’ll see you in the evening.’

  Maya would return. In an hour, in two, once she was ready, and then we—sister, best friend, confidante—would be forced to talk to each other.

  I had thought of taking a short nap, but I worried that Maya would return and not want to disturb me. I hadn’t slept for over a day, but each time my eyes closed, I roused myself. It grew darker. The shadows from the trees outside the window pooled together, and still Maya wasn’t back. I caught myself on the verge of sleep once again and rose from the bed. I walked to the kitchen in search of food, and
once I was downstairs, I began to inspect the room.

  This too was just how I remembered, from the steel utensils that had been given to Ma on her marriage to the blue glazed dinner set Papa had bought. I picked up a plate and thought of the day of their arrival. Papa had just returned early from a work trip and had seen fit to purchase a new dinner set. The fact that the blue, a proud, unapologetic azure, didn’t match our furniture or our tablecloths, hadn’t occurred to him. In he had walked, weighed down by a cardboard box, calling out to all of us to gather in the living room for the grand unveiling. He had expected adulation, and when Ma didn’t speak, when she didn’t rush over to him with congratulations on his choice, he knew he had miscalculated. Slowly, the rest of the house adjusted to its presence. New tablecloths were bought. In a year or so, the dining chairs were reupholstered a deep red, and the blue plates began to feel like they had always been part of our home.

  The one I held in my hands had a chip, and as I looked through the range, I saw signs of damage in several others. I set the plate carefully back alongside its siblings and left.

  I haunted the house unhurriedly, wandering through rooms I had loved and forgotten. It was my own past I was exploring, and I got a strange sense of time standing still. There was the storeroom that was the depository for all the toys we had outgrown, and as I peeked in, I saw our old bikes stored carefully by the wall. Outside, near the kitchen, I spotted an old calendar. The writing had faded, and I had to strain to make out that it dated from 1995. The calendar hadn’t been taken off or replaced for over twenty years.

  I heard a noise, a soft crack, a footstep on a dry leaf, perhaps, and I started. I immediately wandered back to the hallway to meet Maya, but I had been mistaken. No light came on in the porch, no key scraped against the lock, and no Maya appeared in front of me. I thought of our neighbours. There had been a family, the Kapoors, to our left with daughters roughly our age. We would meet after school, taking walks in the evening as the weather turned cool. I hadn’t met either of the girls for a decade or more, and now as I struggled to recall their names, I walked outside. Their house seemed different—larger, with several cars parked outside it—and though I wanted to walk towards them, to ring their bell and learn of how their lives had turned out, if there had been successes and marriages and children, I didn’t. Try as I might, I couldn’t recall the names of the girls. They had both had long hair they wore in braids down their backs, and both had a dimple on their left cheeks. Both were conventionally pretty, slim and neat and cheerful, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what they were called.