by Manil Suri
By teatime, the radiogram had been delivered as well. The enormous cabinet housing the components was made of a fine-grained wood stained so dark it was almost black. Mataji declared the color inauspicious, and suggested painting it something more cheery, like red. Hema wanted to alert the neighbors again, but wasn’t able to tear herself from the gramophone, on which she kept playing the same film record over and over again. She hadn’t listened to it for two years, ever since the family gramophone had broken, she explained. Babuji seemed taken at first by the multiple shortwave channels of the radio and the glow of the tubes inside. Later, however, he complained to Arya that they could have repaired the gramophone, that the old radio had been just fine. “It’s mostly wood, this radiogram—why didn’t we ask for more money instead?”
Me, they exhibited mostly in the bedroom. Each morning, Mataji selected the sari and jewelry set I was to wear that day, from the dowry chest I had brought with me. She was the one who orchestrated the viewings, making sure my gunghat was in position before the visitors entered, smiling proudly when they commented on the beauty of my ornaments (and, just as often, me). “Truly, Dev has brought Lakshmi to your house,” the women said, and a few reached out to appraise the heft of the gold in my bracelet or the size of the jewels in my necklace (one of them even pretending to brush back my hair in place so she could get a better look at my earrings). “Such full cheeks. Such nice eyes. And not too dark-complexioned, just right.” The questions they asked me were like those one might put to a child—what was my name, where did I come from, how I liked it in Nizamuddin. Afterwards, Mataji led them on a tour of the refrigerator and the radiogram and the kitchen utensils, tantalizing them with the myriad feats of magic reputedly possible with the pressure cooker (another first for the colony, this time imported in its entirety from England). “All we really wanted was Meera, but look how they insisted, look how they’ve given us so much,” she said.
It was good that there was so much activity those first days in my in-laws’ house, since it prevented me from steeping in regret every waking moment. Mataji must have understood what I was going through, because she quickly started introducing chores into my day. She would notice me staring balefully at Dev as he sat down to his evening liquor with Babuji and Arya, and quickly pull out a soda water bottle from the fridge. “Tell them to roll it over their foreheads before they open it. The way Babuji keeps grumbling about the fridge—it will remind him how warm his drinks were before you came.”
Every time I entered the toilet and braced myself for a cockroach to scramble over my feet or whir into my face (“The old one’s Shyamu,” Hema informed me. “You can kill the ones that fly, but not him”), I thought back fondly to the clean white tiles of bathrooms past. I smelled rich curries and Basmati biryanis each evening as I tried to plow through the clods of Sandhya’s rice on my plate. The sound of children playing outside transported me to the park in Darya Ganj where Sharmila and I played badminton every summer and flew kites in the spring. I even pictured myself back in Paji’s dreaded library, standing in the cold rush of the air-conditioning vents, each time the electricity failed in Nizamuddin.
Most agonizing of all was not knowing when I would see my parents again. Mataji had made no mention of it, although it was clear from her supervision that I was not to venture out by myself. I was too timid to ask her directly, though Hema somehow zeroed in on what was on my mind. “Everyone knows the bride isn’t supposed to return to her father’s house for three months,” she declared. “Didn’t you see that movie? Suraiya goes back after only five weeks and her husband gets bitten by a snake and drops dead.
“Don’t think your mother can just come by whenever she wants to see you either. She’s from the girl’s side, so she needs a proper invitation from us before she can show her face here. And who knows how many months it will be before Mataji and I both agree it’s time?”
ON MY THIRD EVENING in Nizamuddin, I decided to escape. The idea materialized on the spur of the moment—Mataji was with Hema in the kitchen, berating Sandhya for not browning the onions enough, and the men were all in the living room, their voices already a little unsteady, and punctuated by the pops of soda bottles. Why not sneak out to Darya Ganj while nobody was looking? Perhaps never to come back? My heart began racing at the prospect. I could be sitting on our terrace in less than an hour, enjoying guavas plucked freshly from the tree downstairs. My incarnation as a bride left behind like a spent nightmare—from which I could cull the more harrowing tidbits anytime I wanted to frighten Sharmila.
Then I felt a pang of regret. How to retrieve my dowry? For an instant, I wondered if I could gather up all the jewelry and saris and sling them over my shoulder in a bundle when I left. But there was no way to access the trunk in the bedroom unseen. Besides, it wasn’t as if I could tote along the radiogram or fridge. The only choice was to leave everything behind.
The actual getaway turned out to be smooth and quick. I walked along the courtyard perimeter to the gate, pretending to examine the dung fuel cakes stuck to the walls, left over from the time the family had owned a cow. The doors opened at a nudge, the chain clinking noisily, the wood groaning like something alive. But nobody seemed to notice, no voice called out to challenge me even when I stepped across the threshold and closed the doors behind.
It was dark already, but I blinked, as if emerging into bright sunlight. The air was thick with the pungency of chilies being fried in rancid oil—this, I told myself, was the scent of freedom, of liberty. I allowed myself to be swept towards the station in a surge of elation, gliding over the muddy street in my red and gold bridal regalia, the folds of my sari held raised so that the embroidered border didn’t get dirty. The vegetable hawkers beamed at me from behind their baskets, their tomatoes shiny and ruddy-cheeked in approval, their eggplants glistening vibrantly in encouragement. I passed the shops selling metal parts, the shanty huts made of gunnysack, the line of rickshaws by the station—all sights familiar from my days of stalking Roopa and Dev. How long ago had that been—years maybe, centuries even? Would this be the last time I set eyes on them? Rummaging through the garbage heap behind the station was the same brown and white cow I had petted so many times for good luck. It interrupted its activity to look up and nod as if in recognition, a wedge of watermelon rind in its mouth forming an enormous green grin.
I stood outside the station steps, contemplating the best way to proceed. I still had the rupee coin Sharmila had pressed into my palm for good luck at the wedding. Was that enough for a rickshaw to Darya Ganj? Or should I take a bus—one of the brightly painted vehicles spewing exhaust fumes opposite the station, the conductors shouting out routes through the windows to cram in as many passengers as they could? There was also a local train that ran during the day, but I didn’t know if it went close to where we lived.
Then a more alarming question occurred to me. Even if I made it to Darya Ganj, what was to say that Biji would take me in? Hadn’t she always impressed upon us that a woman’s place was by her husband, that he was her god, her Shiva, her pati-parameshwar? “Good or bad, she must accept him as her fate,” I heard her intone. I remembered all the times she had related to us the tale of Sati, who threw herself in a fire when her husband Shiva was insulted. A strange intensity would light up in Biji’s eyes each time she got to the part where the pyre was being prepared, as if this was a test to which she herself aspired, just to prove her mettle. I thought of all the bitterly unhappy years of Biji’s own marriage through which she had stuck by my father’s side. What if I appeared at her doorstep and she turned me away?
But there was always Paji, who didn’t believe in such things. Paji, who had tried to change Biji’s views so tirelessly. Paji, who quoted Jung and John Stuart Mill, who read out entire chapters from volumes written by Nehru to his daughter, to teach us we were equal to men. Except could it be possible that he wielded these texts so zealously to convince not us but himself? Hadn’t he been the one, after all, with the final say in my
marriage, the one who had ultimately said yes? The one who had contracted to hand me over to Dev’s family even as he told me exactly what I could expect? “One hundred and ten rupees for the pressure cooker, two thousand for the refrigerator, eighteen hundred for the radiogram,” I heard him recite, each figure enunciated with a chilling preciseness. “And that doesn’t even include the jewelry or the twenty thousand in cash.” If he had spent so much to give me away, why would he now want me back?
I had nowhere left to go, I realized. The only house that remained open to me was the one I had just left behind. All around me people flagged down rickshaws, boarded buses, scurried over tracks to catch trains. Was I the only one without a destination? No matter to whom I turned—relatives or friends or neighbors, what was to prevent my parents from finding out and returning me to Nizamuddin?
“New bride?” It was an old woman on the station steps, squatting with a group of other villagers while the men crowded around the ticket window. Thick silver rings adorned her fingers and her nose, and her gold earrings were so heavy that elongated holes had opened up in her lobes. “So pretty,” she said, in a rural dialect of Hindi. “Such a pretty dress. But what are you doing here alone? Where’s your husband? Did he go to get tickets too?”
I looked at her, unable to speak. Could this be it? The single point that my existence had been reduced to? Where my husband was, and why wasn’t I with him? Was this the essence, the distillation, of all those years of Biji’s intonations? Why I wasn’t next to my god, my pati, my parameshwar? I started to suffocate at the unfairness of it, my necklace tightening around my throat, my sari weighing on me like a shroud. The woman on the steps looked up in concern, then rose and caught my arm in case I should fall.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, pressing a palm soothingly against my cheek. Her skin smelled of old tea leaves. “He’ll be here before you know it. He’s probably around somewhere, watching over you even when you think he isn’t. Just tell him not to leave you alone next time, such a pretty bride.”
I gazed at the wrinkles rippling her face, like tidemarks on sand. Tiny blue tattoos ran along her forehead below her hairline. In her eyes was the gift of empathy, a solidarity that I could not bear to accept. “May God always keep you with husband,” she said, and began to run her hand over my head in blessing.
I didn’t wait for her to finish. I tore away and ran back up the street, not caring where I stepped, not worrying whether my sari got soiled. The stallkeepers gaped at me as I stumbled by in my bridal finery—their laughter lingering behind in the air. I had been gone for twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, but Dev’s entire family was pacing outside on the street. “There she is!” Mataji cried, and rushed me inside, as if I was diseased or naked or raving and had to be whisked away from the neighbors’ eyes.
EVERYONE GATHERED IN the courtyard to witness my court-martial. Babuji even dragged his chair and drink table out of the living room for a better view. Dev stood next to his mother, looking at the ground so he wouldn’t accidentally catch my eye.
“As it is, all of Nizamuddin has heard rumors about your exploits at the tomb,” Mataji began. “And now the wedding fire hasn’t even cooled and you decide to further distinguish yourself? What were you thinking?”
“Yes, what?” Hema chimed in, as from behind her, Sandhya glared at me silently as if incensed over a personal affront. Babuji muttered that of course the bahu thought she could act as she wanted—after all, hadn’t her father bought them a fridge?
“Running off without your husband, roaming God knows where. What must people have imagined—a young woman decking herself up and parading up and down the street like that?” Mataji stepped forward, to hit me, I thought, but instead grabbed my wrist and squeezed it hard. “Aren’t there enough tongues you’ve sent wagging already, enough insinuations we’ve had to hear? Did you even stop to think what new scandal the Ahmeds next door will make up out of this?”
“The Ahmeds,” Babuji nodded, taking another gulp of his whiskey. “Tell the bahu how good these Muslims are at cooking up gossip.”
“I just wanted to take a walk, to look around,” I said, knowing even as I spoke the words that the guilt on my face would give me away.
“What do you think, this is Connaught Place, that you can—” Mataji began to say, then stopped. Visible under my fingers, which had opened up under the tightness of her grip, was the gleaming edge of the coin from Sharmila. Before anyone could react, Hema had pried it out of my hand.
“Look,” Hema cried, holding it triumphantly in the air. “A whole rupee she was running away with.”
Mataji let go of my hand. “I suppose you’re now going to tell us you went to buy samosas? That you had a sudden hankering for fruit mix?” She shook her head in disappointment. “Tell me, have we been mistreating you here that you have to hide things like that? Have we been feeding you on potato peelings or forcing you to haul bricks on your head? What have we required of you anyway but to sit on the bed all day and look pretty while Hema and Sandhya and I slave away?” She took the coin from Hema’s hand. “In this house, we don’t hide things. We don’t keep pockets of money stashed around secretly. I’ll hold this for you for safekeeping. I hope you can at least trust me with this.”
“I’m sure Meera didn’t mean anything—” Dev finally said, but Mataji raised a hand to cut him off.
“Look, Bahu. We’re not the kind of family that believes in mistreating our daughters-in-law. Locking them up or starving them or beating them into submission. We’re modern people. You’re free to do what you want, go where you feel. Leave if you wish. All we ask is that you remember one thing. How you conduct yourself, what you do, reflects not only on you but on all of us. The reputation of the entire family sits balanced on your head.”
“Yes,” said Hema. “Remember that. Always.”
“I’m sure she will,” Dev said, taking my arm. He hustled me past Mataji and Babuji, past Hema with her gloating smirk, past the inscrutable expression on Arya’s face and Sandhya’s continuing glare.
THAT FRIDAY, HEMA PUT “Light the Fire of Your Heart” on the radiogram. The family had been gathering after dinner each evening to hear Dev sing duets with K. L. Saigal. It was uncanny how close Dev’s voice was to Saigal’s, how precise was his reproduction of every intonation, every pitch. Dev stood next to the gramophone at the beginning of the record, so that it sounded like twins singing together, then slowly circled around to the opposite point in the room. If I kept my eyes closed, it was only the orchestra that gave the recorded side away.
My failed attempt at running away had driven home an inescapable truth: there were no alternatives left to me, my only hope was with Dev. He was the one with the key to my happiness, my existence was now cuffed to his. He had asked me no questions that evening, just sat me on the bed and brought ice water from the fridge. “Don’t ever think of leaving me—I love you too much,” he’d said. As the sips had slipped down to cool my throat, I had looked at his head in my lap. He was handsome and not unkind, I had told myself, he had his boyishness, his charm. He too was coping with the newness of marriage—couldn’t I be the one adjusting my needs to his? How much easier everything would be if I could believe Dev loved me and I was truly in love with him. I had clung to him that night as he satisfied himself, and tried to rise above the pain. One day, I promised myself, I would find the words to give voice to what I wanted. To take him back to the tomb that day, to the furtiveness we had shared. To proceed from there in slow, unhurried advances, and see if we reached somewhere else.
I resolved to look for the positive in Dev. To search for seedlings that I could nurture over time so that they bloomed eventually into fondness, into attachment. Every evening I waited for Hema to play “Light the Fire.” What better way to recharge myself than to relive the moment of first hearing Dev? I imagined the music swelling up under and around me, the lyrics weightless as clouds carrying me aloft. I would float on them to the same heights as before, and feel a resu
rgence in my affection for Dev.
But the clouds never arrived. Instead of soaring, what I felt when I finally heard Dev sing that Friday was a stoniness that weighed me down. Could this really be the song that had changed my life, was this the voice that had mesmerized me that January day? Would this be all I had to work with, the magic remedy that was supposed to revive and rejuvenate? “Light the fire of your heart,” Dev sang, and the words now had an oppressive edge to them—their import no longer an invitation but a command, an imperative. I knew I had to succeed for my happiness, for my very survival. The realization that I might not plunged me into despair.
I closed my eyes as I had for every song and waited for Dev to begin to circle around. This time, he stopped somewhere midway through his arc. “Draw closer and take my hand,” he sang, and I felt an overwhelming urge to flee the room. To cower outside and cover my ears with my palms so that I could keep his lyrics out. “Lead me to a life with less heartbreak,” he urged, loudly and more insistently, and I realized he had not moved. As I opened my eyes, I knew what I would see—Dev standing in front, singing directly to me.
Through all my time in Nizamuddin, through the nights with Dev and the days of being a new bride, one thing I had been proud of was keeping the promise I had made before getting into the doli. I had not cried. No matter how suffocated I felt, no matter how homesick or miserable, I had not allowed myself to shed any tears. But perhaps it wasn’t true, perhaps I had been weeping all along, because now when I saw Dev, the tears came surging from some hidden reservoir behind my eyes. “Only love can bring back the light,” he sang, and I felt huge wracking sobs begin to shudder and break away from deep inside. I looked about in panic, trying to squelch them before they rose, trying to thwart them from reaching my lungs or exploding in my throat. All around the room, Dev’s family stood motionless in place, like an audience waiting patiently for the promised spectacle to unfold. Where were the nautch girls to distract them now, Nehru to turn off the electricity, Gandhiji to point out the way for my escape?