Every word she spoke was laced with judgement. The ‘modern generation’ came in for much of her ire, though I refrained from pointing out I too belonged to it. I wasn’t immune from her questioning for long, though, as she soon asked me, ‘And you, child, are you married?’
‘No,’ I replied. Her gaze continued intent on me, and I added, ‘No, aunty.’ The pharmacist passed us, bowing to Mrs Bhatnagar, and she pulled at my arm to talk to him. ‘I will be visiting you soon, Kapoor,’ she pronounced, and as he bowed, telling her he would await her visit, I hoped the topic of my spinsterhood would be forgotten. But then, as we walked on, she said to me, ‘Not married yet?’
‘No,’ I replied. I looked overhead. The heat was intensifying; perhaps I could get away at the next turn.
‘Tell me,’ she said. She yanked my hand, ‘How old are you?’
I didn’t dare pretend to be offended by the question. I had turned thirty-seven the previous month, but as she stared unblinkingly at me, I gulped. ‘I’m thirty-six, aunty,’ I answered humbly.
‘Hmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You’re old.’ She looked at me dispassionately, and I lifted a hand to my face in defence. ‘Rashmi was married at twenty-five. But then,’ she added, ‘I’ve heard you had an unorthodox mother.’ This was pronounced with greater disdain than usual, and I was on the point of speaking up. ‘And,’ she continued, cheering up. ‘Things are changing. Maybe there will be some divorcé or widower who will be willing to take you on.’
She stopped in her path and stood looking at me with benevolence.
‘Besides,’ she told me, ‘that’s some serious real estate you sisters are sitting on.’ I looked away, embarrassed by her words, but she carried blithely on. ‘Of course, your sister is too old for marriage, but with you, the real estate you bring with you will add to your attractiveness.’ We had paused, taking up the entire pavement, and I saw other pedestrians dip down to the street to swerve around us. Mrs Bhatnagar took hold of my arm, shaking it in emphasis. ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘That would make you quite the pretty package.’
She was looking at me expectantly, and I knew I was expected to be grateful for her idea, but I saw a turn I could take, and pointed in its direction instead. I could have stood up for Ma, or could have told her I was in no hurry to marry, or that Maya wasn’t too old, but I just told her I had to get back, and rushed off towards home.
Back at the house, I kept thinking about what Mrs Bhatnagar had said. We were one of the only houses on the street that remained whole. Most of the rest had been divided—through family settlements, or through sales to property developers—and the few that remained whole had been recently restored and sold to large business families. Here too, several families co-existed; brothers running different arms of a large conglomerate occupying separate wings of the same house. It was only our house, it seemed, that was occupied by so few. Once, when I had been out in the evening with Tasha-di, I had returned to the area to see all the other homes ablaze with light. Most of the floors in each dwelling were lit, and in many, fairy lights twinkled in the garden. Our house, in comparison, felt funereal. I could see the light on in Shanti’s kitchen, and then, lights on in the veranda where Maya sat. If Pradeep was in his quarters, signs of his habitation were hidden from view by the gloom of the main house. Tasha-di must have read my thoughts, as she said, ‘This house hasn’t been alive for years.’
‘It’s too big,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But who is to tell Maya?’
They had been sure, mother and daughter, that I was after money. All the reserve that had permeated our relationship had solidified after I suggested that the house was too big for them. I looked up to see Tasha-di studying me. ‘Yes,’ I echoed, ‘who is to tell Maya?’
VI
Shanti fell down the stairs late one afternoon. She was rushing from the ground floor with some ironing when she slipped. I had been in the library reading a book, and trying to stay out of Maya’s way, when I heard her cry. I rushed first to the kitchen, but finding no Shanti, I moved towards the staircase that had terrified me for so long. There I hesitated, reluctant to tackle it, when I heard a cry, ‘Is someone there?’
I started. Then the call echoed again, and I yelled into the gloom, ‘Shanti?’
There was a panic in her voice that I had never heard before. ‘Hurry, baby.’
I ran up the stairs two at a time. It was dark, and a narrower space than the staircase we used, and as I neared the first floor, I found Shanti crumpled against the wall. Her torso rested at an angle to her legs, and I was hesitant to touch her for fear of causing her harm. Piles of clean sheets lay a few steps above her.
‘I was in a rush,’ said Shanti. She looked in pain but smiled reassuringly when she saw me. ‘I should have looked where I was going.’
I asked her if she could walk. She nodded, rising on her feet, but then she yelped, a little like a trapped animal. Her arms circled mine, and I told her to rest on me. I took her carefully back to her room, asking her all the time if she was in distress, but she insisted she wasn’t. ‘You’ve come back home, baby,’ she kept on saying, but I saw how ragged her breath was. Pradeep was out at work, and I settled her on her bed. Maya was told of the accident, and she ran across to Shanti’s quarters with water and paracetamol. ‘You’ve fallen again?’ she asked Shanti, who nodded shamefacedly.
‘Again?’ I asked, but Maya appeared not to have heard me.
The doctor was called, and he recommended a trip to the hospital. We both went with Shanti, and as we waited for her to emerge from having her back X-rayed, Maya said to me, ‘You’re not going back to London, are you?’
I hadn’t had a single reply to my job queries. Benjamin had sent that one breezy text, but there hadn’t been any further communication. The lease on my flat was up for renewal in a few months, and I would have to decide what to do then, but in the meantime, there was nothing dragging me back to the life I had called my own. I didn’t respond to Maya, and she said softly, ‘You were right about the house.’
I didn’t dare speak. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to make me feel better, but I scarcely dared believe she meant her words. For so long, both Ma and Maya had suspected that my suggestion was driven by greed, and now that Maya herself had brought the topic up, I was wary of saying anything. ‘I was thinking,’ she said. ‘It is too big for us.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘It is.’ She looked at me, nodding animatedly, as if to invite agreement, and I saw what a watershed moment her admission was. She had resisted any interference for years, but now that she had admitted that things had to change, she couldn’t stop talking. ‘Most of the rooms are boarded up, and we get lost in the rest. That poor Shanti falling…’
Maya trailed off. I was cautious about offering my opinion, but I needn’t have worried. Maya was speaking again.
‘I didn’t want to listen to you. Ma didn’t either. She thought it would be an admission of weakness, somehow, to accept the thought that we couldn’t afford the house’s upkeep. And after Ma…’
Here Maya stopped. She took a deep breath, and then another, and I put my hand on her arm. This touch felt as awkward as our first meeting a few weeks back, and Maya rose. She walked up towards the X-ray department and peered in through the glass panel on the door.
‘Maya,’ I said, but she didn’t respond. I didn’t bring up the house again, and after Shanti emerged from the X-ray, our focus was on her. She hadn’t broken any bones, and the doctor prescribed painkillers and a week of rest. But relations between us seemed to have improved, as Maya joined me on my walk the next day. We avoided Mrs Bhatnagar when she came out and waved at us, and as we walked, we mulled through various options for the house.
Neither of us wanted to sell. The house, behemoth though it was, was part of our lives, and we were loath to part with it. The best option, then, was to partition it and either rent or sell bits off. We would have to call in a builder. Typically, Maya told
me, they would work for free in exchange for taking a chunk of a house—a floor or a wing. ‘My old school friend’s parents,’ she said, ‘were only left with a floor of their house once they called a builder in.’
I frowned. I told her I had some savings, and though I didn’t tell her a large part of this was the redundancy money I had received, she shook her head. ‘It will take millions,’ she told me, ‘everything needs doing.’
The idea of parting with the house was anathema to me, and I saw for the first time the struggle Ma and Maya must have endured. ‘I have some money too,’ I repeated, in the hope that my savings would at least kickstart the work, but she refused to let me offer my money.
‘I’ve been resisting this for years,’ she said to me. ‘But it makes sense to call in a builder. They’ll value the property, so getting them in will be worthwhile even if we change our minds.’
VII
Shanti was back in the kitchen two days after she fell. Maya and I had gone out for our walk, and returned to find her preparing breakfast.
We told her she was meant to rest, and that we could prepare food, but she waved our concerns off. We told her that her back needed to heal and she laughed. She continued to chop her onions and tomatoes with a manic zeal, and it was clear from watching her that she had built up a good head of steam. ‘My back,’ she said, ‘has survived much worse than a fall.’
‘Come on, Shanti,’ Maya said. She spoke with great tenderness, and I suspected such outbursts were a commonplace occurrence.
‘All my life,’ Shanti said. There were tears in her eyes, through her contact with the onions, through her agitation, and Maya tried once again to put a hand on Shanti’s shoulders. Shanti was having none of it. ‘All my life I have served people.’ She was looking at her board of chopped vegetables with distaste. ‘I have cooked their food, bathed their infants, cleaned their shit.’
This was so unexpected that there was an intake of breath from both Maya and me. Shanti huffed, putting a hand up to the small of her back as she returned to her work, and as I rushed to bring her a chair, she told me to stop. ‘All his beatings,’ she continued, glaring at me, ‘I withstood all of them. And now you want to send me back to him?’
‘Shanti…’
I was confused, but Maya remained by the woman’s side, running a hand on her back. ‘Nothing is going to change, Shanti.’
‘All these things you’re planning…’
‘What are you talking about, Shanti?’ I asked.
‘Are you not planning on bringing a builder in?’
Maya and I looked at each other. They would have heard us talking, mother and son, and worried our plans meant change for them too. ‘Well,’ I said, on the defensive, ‘you yourself said the house was too big.’
‘It is too big,’ she agreed, ‘But I don’t want to be made homeless.’
We both laughed at her hysteria, and she fixed us with an angry stare. ‘Come on, Shanti,’ I said.
But she wasn’t done. ‘I don’t want to have to go and live with that wretched husband of mine.’
‘No one is going to make you homeless, Shanti,’ Maya was saying, but I had a question.
‘Why are you calling your husband wretched?’
Shanti laughed. ‘He’s struck the lottery with me, that’s why.’ She finally let go of the knife she was using to chop vegetables and sat down on the chair I held out for her. She grimaced with pain. ‘I send all my money home to him, and he spends it on alcohol. He has hangers-on around him all day long, getting drunk and making trouble for other villagers, even when Pradeep and I visit. Now tell me, is this a good example to set for the boy?’ I looked sombre, but Shanti was carrying on. ‘If I say anything, he beats me.’ Shanti thumped at her right thigh, wincing with pain at the contact. ‘He brought out a rod the last time we argued.’
‘Oh Shanti…’
‘Guess who won that argument?’ She let out a mirthless laugh. Turning to Maya, she said, ‘Remember I wasn’t able to sit down for months?’
Maya nodded.
‘Even now,’ and Shanti’s hand rose to her waist. ‘Even now it hurts when I’m rising or sitting. It is painful when I lay down at night.’
There was a shudder that passed through her frame, and I asked, ‘When was this?’
‘Last winter.’ This could have been before or after Ma’s death, before or after my visit, but Shanti didn’t provide further details. ‘I’ll live my life here,’ he told me. ‘And you have your fun in Delhi.’
‘Shanti…’
‘Fun!’ she sniffed. She brought some phlegm up through her throat, and I half-expected her to spit it out, but it remained in her mouth, neither expelled nor absorbed. Her face puckered up, as if she had ingested something unappetising, but at length, she held her nose and swallowed. Maya and I looked at each other, and Maya rolled her eyes at me. It appeared Shanti had behaved erratically before. ‘Fun!’ she said again, bringing our attention back to her. ‘And now you want to bundle me off to that savage!’
I came to where Maya knelt, putting a hand on Shanti’s shoulder. She started at the contact. ‘No one is bundling you off,’ I said, and though she sniffed again, she didn’t move away.
A builder visited, a broad, waxy-moustached man who had carried out work for her school friend. He inspected the property thoroughly, shaking his head at the layers of books and magazines on top of every surface, tutting at the collapsed bookcase, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell in the abandoned rooms. He grimaced at the cracks spreading thin fingers across each ceiling, and we worried the problems with the house were insurmountable.
‘It’s a lot of work, I know,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘A lot of work?’ he said, still convulsed with laughter. He shook his head, his face flushed from his exertion, and pointed at the exposed wiring, and at the damp rising up the walls. He tapped at the ceiling, coughing as dust rained down on our shoulders. ‘The entire structure needs to be taken apart.’
‘Oh.’
‘I could,’ he said, smiling benevolently, as if the honour was ours, ‘make it easier for you and just take the thing off your hands. I’ve done this before, you see.’ He pointed towards the west. ‘There is another house in Civil Lines I have taken into my hands. Tore the whole thing down. Number 2, you know,’ and Maya nodded.
‘The new one,’ she told me, wincing. The builder smiled proudly. ‘The one that’s all chrome and glass.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. We put in two floors of parking, and a rooftop bar and swimming pool. It houses six families now, all top-notch executive sorts.’ He nodded. ‘That was a very worthwhile project.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You have given us a lot to think about,’ but the builder wasn’t done.
‘We need to talk numbers,’ he informed us. A price was named, a figure so low that Maya balked, and the builder was swiftly told we would revert to him with our thoughts.
‘They’re all sharks,’ she said to me. ‘They see two women alone and know they can take advantage.’
‘He would destroy the house.’
‘Glass staircases, just imagine. As if this was a Cinderella fantasy, and not a heritage property.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘He’s not getting the job. What are we going to do?’
Maya shrugged. ‘You left,’ she said, and though I worried she was signposting a return to her early froideur, I began to bristle. What had I been expected to do, tie myself to Ma forever? Remain as Maya had, the protected child, pampered and safe and invaluable? She could have tested her wings too, and if she had, perhaps I would have felt less alienated.
Nothing had ever been said, not explicitly, but things changed the minute I was out of the house. They told me I was overreacting anytime I pointed this out, but it felt to me like I was swiftly written out of the family. Suddenly, the unit at home seemed not to include me. New Year’s cards sent by friends were addressed to Maya, Ma and Papa, and not me, and it made sense. I no longer lived
at home, but it appeared as if I never had. Ma never asked when I would visit. They all, and in particular my mother and sister, developed their own vernacular. There were trips I wasn’t party to, meals and movies and jokes that I hadn’t partaken of. They had to be reminded—time and time again—with a regularity that soon grew fractious, that they could visit too. If they had shifted on purpose to flush out the space my absence created, they never said so, and to me it felt like the unit I looked at with such longing from afar was the only one that had ever been. There I was in England, bitterly homesick and friendless for the first few years, and life seemed to be carrying on just fine without me in Delhi. ‘And Ma,’ Maya was saying, and I looked up at her. ‘Ma,’ she continued, ‘took your move very badly.’
‘Sure,’ I said, the most aggressive response I felt capable of, but Maya appeared not to have noticed my tone.
‘She didn’t leave her room for days,’ she said. ‘Didn’t bathe, didn’t come out and order the staff around, didn’t come out for breakfast or for tea or for dinner.’ Maya flashed an involuntary smile. ‘For days, she left off her invasive questions—Where are you going, and who are you going to see? Will there be boys there? I was quite relieved, to be honest, but Papa was worried. He said Ma’s grief was ridiculous—you had won a scholarship to one of the best universities in the world, after all.’
‘Ma just stopped talking to me, Maya.’
‘Ma lost a bit of her sparkle after you left.’ She looked across at the library, where Papa had been in the habit of returning with his briefs. ‘And Papa didn’t say anything to her either.’ She looked at me with her hands held out. ‘I mean, he wouldn’t, would he?’ and I nodded in my turn. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘when Papa passed away, it was like the ground had shifted from under Ma’s feet.’ She looked at her hands. Her fingers were long and slim, and unadorned with either jewellery or polish. ‘She didn’t talk for days.’
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