by Manil Suri
Could this be my invitation to mold you just as Parvati had done? Affirm my motherhood in the coming years as joyously as her? Hadn’t I always known that you would be the promised one? Entrusted to you the key to my future even before you were born?
A siren wails somewhere in the distance. You stir, as if trying to decide whether to remain asleep or heed its sound and awake. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m right here.” I pull you closer to myself.
PART FOUR
chapter twenty-six
THEY SAY ONE PASSES THROUGH FOUR STAGES OF MOURNING AFTER bereavement, or perhaps it is five. My experience was different. In the weeks after Dev’s death, I found myself seized by a keenness of mind, a lucidity, that I had not known before. I felt as if a wind had blown in from the ocean to clear away the cloudiness lingering for years. I remained oblivious to the workings of the world beyond, to the battlefield successes of Indira Gandhi, or her liberation of East Pakistan. But within my own sphere, everything seemed to intensify—sounds becoming sharper, colors more vivid, smells more pungent, as if I had suddenly acquired the faculties of a feline. I felt capable of absorbing the broad sweep of my life in a glance, of springing nimbly across the chasm between the future and the past. My powers of concentration seemed so enhanced that I might have solved algebra problems in my head had I tried.
I did, in fact, perform several mathematical calculations, as I appraised our fiscal condition. I pored over passbooks and records and the jumble of receipts that Dev had stuffed under the mattress over the years. Just after you were born, Paji secretly took out an insurance policy on Dev for one lakh and twenty thousand rupees with me as the beneficiary. Undoubtedly, he meant to use it someday as another hold on me, not knowing that the company had mailed us a copy of the statement by mistake the first year. My mind raced as I imagined a future free of financial worry—I could invest the money in the government’s Unit Trust, we could subsist off the interest, I wouldn’t have to go back to Delhi to live with Paji (as Mrs. Dugal had already started suggesting). It was true my father still had the flat in his own name, but even he wouldn’t dare press this to his advantage against a widowed daughter.
With the racing of my mind came an increase in energy as well. I scrubbed the floors and washed the walls, even dragging a chair into the bathroom to rub the stains off the ceiling with a rag. I emptied the cupboard of all of Dev’s clothes, sorting them into neat bundles of underwear and shirts and pants. Then it felt unseemly to be giving them away so soon, so I put them all back. I collected his comb, his toothbrush, his shaving set from the toilet, and stored these in a separate box. I even found myself dismantling his pantheon of gods—you looked so stricken that I simply gave each idol a good dusting instead.
Interspersed with these bursts of manic activity came bouts of guilt. Could I have prevented Dev’s death? Wasn’t my inability to love him enough what really killed him? And now that he was gone, why was I in such a rush to get on with the rest of my life? What evanescent delights did I expect to be waiting around the corner for someone like me, someone who had just established her own unworthiness? I stared at myself in the mirror every morning, at my eyes inflamed with sleeplessness.
Sandhya appeared behind my reflection in the mirror, offering words of comfort. “Believe me, Didi, you loved him quite a lot, even if you didn’t know it yourself. It’s only natural to keep so busy that you don’t have time to face regret. But you must find the sorrow inside and let it out, not be so hard on yourself.” I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t afford the luxury of following her advice. I couldn’t risk being immobilized by grief when what you needed was my strength.
I found it calming to play the roles others had scripted for me. I ushered mourners into the drawing room and served them subdued cups of tea. I acknowledged condolences from the vegetable hawkers with a silent nod of my head. Wherever I went, whomever I met, I learnt to hide the frenzy I felt. When Hema and Arya finally arrived (three days late due to war-related delays), I met them at the station, dressed irreproachably in widow’s white.
Although I submitted dutifully to the mourning ceremonies Arya organized, drama and unpleasantness broke out at the end. Hema threw herself across the flowers and the urns and the pooja paraphernalia as if it was Dev’s body underneath. “Come back,” she loudly wept, “come back for one last glimpse. For your sister to feed you one more time with her hands, to tie one last rakhi on your wrist.” As Arya helped her up, she suddenly turned on me. “First you snatch him away from us and bring him here to Bombay, then you kill him? Even his ashes you couldn’t wait to get rid of, has your thirst been finally slaked?”
She apologized at the railway station, as we waited for the train to depart for Delhi. “He taught me to play marbles. I would cheat, and he would let me, pretend not to notice. I was so terrible in those days—always hiding shoes, dropping freshly ironed clothes into buckets of water, stealing schoolbooks and pencils and whatever I could get my hands on. Arya would chase after me with a cricket stump, but Dev would just shrug it off. I was always his little Hemali—do you know he used to make up a new song for my birthday every year?” She rested her head against the window of the train. Light filtered down on her face, erasing the pounds to make her look ten again.
“Tell me,” Hema said, and now the innocence in her eyes was replaced by something more worldly. “All these white saris you’ve been wearing—is this how you’re going to dress for the rest of your life?” She leaned forward, and behind her, I saw the silhouette of Arya’s figure on the adjoining seat. He was reading the Ramayana as part of the rites he had undertaken to complete for Dev. All through the duration of the visit, he had been scrupulously proper, dignified—I couldn’t have faulted his behavior if I’d tried. He had taken you on long walks to Chowpatty, to three different temples, and even, upon your insistence, to Dadar, in an unsuccessful attempt to locate Dev’s guruji. You had been so upset at his departure that you refused to come to the station.
“There’s Ashvin to consider, too, after all,” Hema whispered, as if able to peer into my mind.
Before she could connect the dots any further, the whistle blew. Hema squeezed my fingers tightly through the bars as from behind her, Arya nodded succinctly to me. Then the train started moving, and Hema’s face, with its round mixture of mourning and curiosity and childish intrigue, started receding. I stood on the platform and watched it grow smaller and smaller, until it melded into the blur of the compartment wall. Too late, I realized that my sari had been blown off to my shoulders, and lifted the white edge to drape it befittingly over my head.
I DIDN’T WEAR MY AURA of widowhood at home. My regalia of white protected me in public, but I shed it as soon as we were alone. Could you have interpreted my self-preservation as duplicity, is it why you became so reluctant to tell me what you were going through? Day by day I saw you become more distant, retract further into your carapace of grief.
I poured my newfound energy into trying to coax you out. I wooed you with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, but it became clear they no longer held you in their thrall. I recruited Pinky to entice you with her games of rope, but she gave up when you didn’t respond. Even Zaida couldn’t get through—you rebuffed both her offer to make your face up and to play her Beatles records. You went to school every morning and came back in the afternoon silent and withdrawn. “Ashvin needs to talk to the other children,” your first standard teacher called me in to say.
It was only natural for you to need time to make peace with Dev’s death, I told myself. Hadn’t I experienced your awkwardness firsthand, when on Parents’ Day I was the only mother from your class to show up without a husband? But as the months went by, your self-isolation did not diminish—it seemed only to intensify. You stood alone on the balcony and stared at the traffic for hours on end. You bolted to your hiding place in the bathroom each time the doorbell rang. “He still refuses to make friends,” was the remark in your April report card.
Hema’s husban
d Gopal popped in one morning to pay us a visit on his way to Poona. You scurried into the bathroom upon hearing the bell. After seating him, I knocked on the door to insist you say hello, but you had sneaked out by then. I found you in the bedroom, in a picture-perfect pose of sleep, complete with deep, even inhalations and a sheet drawn up to your neck. No matter how much I tried, you wouldn’t get up to say hello—when I shook you, you snored in response. “No need to rouse him,” Gopal finally called from the other room—you awakened just after he left.
There was one silver lining to your shyness, which I felt a twinge of guilt about. If you refused to interact with others, the bond between us had to grow.
You began the second standard in June, when you were seven. Even though the monsoons were failing in great swaths of the country, Bombay, paradoxically, endured some of its most ferocious downpours. The sky ranged in mood from petulant to raging, battering the city with sudden torrents even while pretending to be on the verge of letting the sun emerge. The ganga claimed she had seen the new skyscrapers at Nariman Point actually sway in the winds from the Arabian Sea. Tardeo flooded repeatedly, as did Nana Chowk and Gowallia Tank—trains stopped running, cutting off the suburbs completely. I bought you a pair of gum boots to negotiate the water flowing through the streets, but it swirled easily over the rims and filled them to the top.
You loved this wet tromping, smiling for perhaps the first time in months. I looked away immediately—had you caught me, you might have pulled down a curtain of gloom on your delight. The next morning, the school bus didn’t show, and we had to walk to the BEST bus stop. You sloshed along at my side, your boots getting heavier with each step. “Wait,” you cried periodically, stopping to empty them one by one. The next morning you even wore socks, just so you could squeeze them out when they got waterlogged.
On the worst day of flooding, our double-decker BEST bus got stuck at Nana Chowk. Usually the drivers would barrel through recklessly, trying to generate the largest possible waves to douse the pedestrians wading along the sidewalks. But a momentary lapse of nerve had thwarted our driver—the engine died and water came streaming in across the floor of the bus. “Look, it’s covering my feet!” you exclaimed—precisely the reason why you had hedged against riding on the upper deck this morning. Outside, the water stood so high that I had to convey you to safety on my shoulders like the mothers of the other schoolchildren. “That woman’s carrying her daughter so fast,” you said, trying to spur me on in a race. One of your rubber boots came off—the bus conductor managed to grab it as it floated past.
A protracted volley of thunder broke out, like long and roaring laughter at my idea of taking you to school. The wind picked up, shooting bullets of rain directly into our faces. You shrieked as the wave from a more intrepid bus almost knocked us over. “Let’s go all the way home piggyback like this,” you proposed. But by now I was wobbling under your weight, and had to set you down.
Miraculously, the sidewalk vendor occupied his usual spot by the Irani hotel—perched on a stack of crates, huddled under a sheet of plastic, but still selling his wares. I bought you twenty paise worth of sugarcane. You tromped along happily through the shin-high stream of water, biting into the segments and watching the chewed-out fragments get swept away. We even stopped at the wall near Bhatia Hospital to search for snails. You had started a collection, storing them in a tiny old aquarium with an ill-fitting lid which Zaida had once used to hold goldfish, feeding them scraps of vegetable peelings retrieved from the trash bin. Today, however, they seemed to have decided not to wait around to be captured in the driving rain.
At home, you refused to get out of your wet clothes. “I want to go downstairs again to search some more for snails.”
It had been so long since I had seen you in such high spirits that I relented. “But first you have to have something warm to drink.”
“I think I need coffee to warm me up today,” you informed me gravely, knowing I never allowed it to you, unlike Dev. We settled on Ovaltine and I went into the kitchen to warm the milk.
When I returned with the glass of Ovaltine, I could see your mood had changed. You were sitting in front of your snail aquarium, watching one of the captives try unsuccessfully to escape. As it explored the gap between the lid and the case, you pushed it with a pencil, so that it fell down to the bottom again. Instead of a smile, your expression was bleak, pinched.
I tried drawing you to myself but you were stiff with resistance. “Look at how brown Mummy’s clothes have become,” I said, hoping to distract you with the mud on my sari from the water I had waded through. But you didn’t turn around, even when I attempted a kiss—you kept jabbing the pencil through the gap in the aquarium top again and again.
Wrestle with him, Dev whispered from nowhere. He’ll like that, Munna will.
I hadn’t heard Dev’s voice since the days right after his death. He would have simply grabbed you from behind, locked your shoulders in an arm hold, twisted your body to the floor to sit on you. Why did these maneuvers seem so awkward for me to perform, so forward, so inappropriate, so masculine? How could I be both your mother and father if something as innocuous as wrestling made me hesitate?
I imagined rolling around in the heat of the bout, your thighs encircling my neck or my knees around your waist. What if clothes got torn, if flesh spilled out, if there was bare skin? And yet, wasn’t it only a few years ago, when you clambered across my body to feed from the nipple of your choice? When I stood you up naked to dance your tiny feet across my belly and clap your hands in the air?
“We’re going to wrestle, you and I,” I announced, in a tone I hoped sounded playful. I grabbed your legs to swing you around, but my own legs came in the way. When I attempted to lock you under my body, you offered so little resistance that I rolled right over. You lay on the floor, your face turned to the ceiling, your arms limp and splayed.
“Don’t you want to wrestle with Mummy?” I asked. “Come, it will be fun.” I knocked with my knuckles against the door of your chest, like I’d seen Dev do. In reply, you began to cry. Soft tears at first and then sharp convulsing sobs that thrust deep within my soul.
I took you, still crying, into my lap. You turned over to hide your face in my leg. I draped my muddied sari over the two of us like a tent. The Ovaltine cooled silently on the table, thunder sounded periodically outside. I kept my body curled tightly over yours, rocking you ever so slightly, waiting for your tears to be spent.
Afterwards, I threw away the Ovaltine and made some coffee instead. We sat together on the floor, tented again in my sari, and alternated sips from the cup. When it was empty, and you had licked the rim clean, we went into the kitchen to look for some dinner for your snails. The spinach was all gone, and there were no leaves left on the cauliflower, so I peeled some carrots into a plate.
We watched the snails together all evening, leave behind their glistening wakes as they crawled along. You attached each one to a carrot strip, then put your ear to the glass—to hear them chew, you said. “Will their caca be orange tomorrow?” you asked, just before going to bed.
BY THE END OF JULY, the monsoon was still setting records in Bombay, even though many regions of the country teetered on the brink of a drought. A cartoon in the Times of India showed a man drowning in the rain from a solitary cloud hanging over him, while all around, people crawled about with bulging eyes and parched tongues. “Why don’t you come to Delhi to get away from it?” Paji suggested. “It’s 1972, remember—they’re having a special ceremony for twenty-five years of independence at the Red Fort. With all the money I’ve been donating to the Congress Party, they had better give me seats in the box reserved for Indira Gandhi herself.”
I recognized this as another of Paji’s efforts to resettle me in Delhi. He had been tactful and restrained in his campaign, making his first attempt only a full four months after Dev’s passing. I had parried all his invitations. I knew I needed time to be alone, and didn’t want to risk being sucked in by ve
nturing too close. I also wanted to decide first on how to proceed with the insurance policy. Should I confront him with it, or should I leave the money untapped, in reserve? Right now, Paji took care of all our needs with the check he sent every month. Wasn’t there a danger in making a demand for the money—that he might use the excuse of my self-sufficiency to cut off all future assistance?
As it turned out, my response to Paji’s latest invitation was determined by something totally unrelated. While cleaning the aquarium, I forgot to replace the lid, allowing most of the snails to escape.
The first inkling of the getaway came when I sat on one of them. It had somehow dragged itself all the way to the sofa to meet its doom, and made a soft crumpling sound, more felt than heard, under my weight. After that, we located snails all around the room—sometimes trailing slime along the edge of a book, sometimes clinging to shirts or underwear, but much too often by the telltale crunch when they perished underfoot. You became so distraught that you stopped talking to me. At night, you stalked away from bed—whisking the dusty covers off your old half-mattress in the corner of the room to lie down.
I pleaded for you to come back to bed, but you pretended to be asleep. I sat on the floor in the dark for more than an hour, but you did not relent. Finally, I got my pillow and stretched out on the tiles next to your mattress. When I awoke at dawn, you were lying curled up next to me on the floor, your head against my chest.
That day, I braved the rain all afternoon to search for snails while you were at school. There were none to be found at Bhatia Hospital, so I prowled around the neighborhood, sneaking into the building compounds to scour the walls. The watchman at Sheetal Towers came running up to shoo me away, but then joined in the search when I explained what I needed. By that evening, I had your aquarium stocked again.