by Manil Suri
The other hand was on my shoulder now, his lips in my hair, his chin against the nape of my neck. Each contact hushed and dreamlike—could he have succeeded in his attempts to mesmerize me? He stood unmoving behind me for a long time, as if he had bitten me in secret and was waiting for the venom to work its way through my body. Finally, when there was no resistance left, I felt him turn me around and kiss me. The couch seemed to vanish, like a prop whisked off the stage in a play. The floor stretched out all around us, smooth and white and bare.
Hadn’t I lived through this once before—another uncushioned floor somewhere long ago in my past? This time, though, a pillow from the sofa waited—I felt it cradle my head as I reclined in the center of my drawing room. Arya stared down at me, as if poised at the edge of an exclusive pool, whose waters he could finally explore. I imagined Sandhya hovering somewhere behind him, her eyes starry with approval, her lips spread in a grateful smile.
And now Arya kneeled shirtless between my legs, and I could see how the hairs flecking his chest had begun to whiten like the ones on his head. He cradled my neck in the crook of an arm to get to the buttons of my blouse. As I felt the cloth lift from my body, I wondered if such a momentous occasion in my life shouldn’t be marked once more by something melodramatic like the lights going off. Perhaps Nehru or Gandhiji could emerge from the darkness and stand next to Sandhya to watch, maybe even applaud. At the very least, the ceiling should open up above us to reveal a sky ablaze with fireworks.
But the night outside was not visible from where I lay—even the firecracker bursts on the street were muffled by the door to the bedroom in between. The electricity remained on, harsh and glaring, to illuminate Arya as he stripped the rest of his clothes off. The scent of Cinthol and Godrej vanished abruptly—what took its place was the smell of his desire. The familiar sweet emanation of overripe fruit, which began permeating the air in the room.
The odor jarred me out of my trance. The cells in my brain snapped alert as Arya loosened the drawstring of my petticoat. I felt the material being pulled down over my thighs, the breezy sensation of bareness as my pubic hair was exposed. Was this what I wanted?—the question lit up in my mind. Arya gazed down again, as if admiring the waters of his pool one final time before wading into them. Then, with a contented exhalation, he sank into me, and his throat emitted a groan.
At first, he seemed satisfied to simply lie there. His breath smelled of turnips, from the curry I had fed him; his skin was slick, as if oil had seeped from his pores. Even after all the weight he had lost, his body was still heavier than Dev’s. “I’ve dreamt of this since the night you first arrived in Nizamuddin,” he whispered boyishly into my ear. I waited under him without breathing, wondering if by some miracle, I might satisfy him with a hug.
He began inching himself into position, and I recognized what he was preparing for. How should I slow him down, explain the spell from which I had just emerged?
“All those years I waited patiently on the sidelines,” Arya said. “Never allowing myself to appear too interested in case I scared you away. The letters I wrote so painstakingly—did your response have to be so curt? ‘I always want to think of you as Ashvin’s uncle.’ Why? Am I not good enough to be your husband? Am I not as good enough as my brother? Is he the only one who gets to marry someone as beautiful and perfect and sophisticated as a Sawhney girl?” As if to punctuate his last point, I felt his penis jab against my groin.
So far, I only had an abstract intimation of the danger into which I had thrust myself. Now, with Arya signaling the imminence of his entry, the full seriousness of my situation seized me. I tried to squirm out from under him, but his arms caged me in like bars. His body was everywhere—his chest pressing into my breasts, his crotch rubbing against my pelvis, his thighs smearing me with their sweat. I panicked at the image of the violation to come, at the thought of my own powerless-ness. The muted explosions outside reminded me that there would be little chance of being heard if I shouted for help. “I don’t want to do this. Let me go, please,” I said. Even to me, it sounded as if I was just laboring through the motions, making one last protest for form, after leading him on.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt you,” Arya said, as he slid his thickness against my thigh. He kissed my neck, then raised himself on his arms, as if readying himself for the plunge. “I’m just here to change your mind.”
I braced myself. Was there some way of making it less repugnant, by focusing my attention elsewhere? Then I heard you call out to me. “Mummy,” you said, and I bent back my head to see an upside-down image of you standing sleepily outside the bedroom door. “The atom bombs woke me up.” Your voice quavered—had you come out because you sensed something awry?
I began to say your name, but it emerged as a sob. “It’s all right, Ashvin,” Arya said. “Go back inside.”
But you moved closer. “Did you hurt Mummy? Why is she crying? What happened to your clothes?”
Arya sat back up on his knees, undaunted by his swinging nakedness. I reached out towards my sari, to drape it over myself like a sheet. “Go back to bed. Yara uncle will tell you when you can come out again.” He patted you firmly back towards your room.
“No. I want Mummy to come with me.” You took my hand and tried to pull me up from under Arya.
“Yara uncle’s going to get very angry if you don’t listen to him. Now leave your mummy alone and get back inside.”
“No.”
For a moment, the two of you silently challenged each other with your stares. Then Arya slapped you. You were stunned for an instant, then flew back at him, and began raining your fists down on his head. “Let Mummy go!” you shouted, trying to topple him over with a wrestling lock around the neck. Arya bore your attempts for a few seconds, then tore your hands off and sent you careering into the gramophone console. The radio teetered in place, but a stack of records and the gramophone itself slid off and crashed onto the floor. You lay dazed on the ground, surrounded by glossy black fragments of broken record.
“How dare you touch my son!” I shouted, striking my palm against Arya’s face. He caught my wrist and hit me back—I tasted blood in my mouth. We scuffled on the floor, and I tried to pull away, but Arya grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me back. “Ashvin,” I gasped, trying to twist around to see if you were still lying hurt on the ground.
But you were already standing, throwing pieces of the broken gramophone at Arya. The handle, the microphone, a bracket that had come off—they all missed and clanged harmlessly to the floor. Then you spotted the turntable and took the record off. You hurled it across the room, striking your uncle in the face and shattering the bridge of his nose.
Arya’s blood dripped onto my face, speckled the parting of my hair. From the landing outside our flat, Zaida’s voice called out, asking if everything was all right. Hearing it, Arya sprang up with a roar. I tried to latch onto his foot, in case he went for you once more. Instead, he lunged to the door and threw it open. Still naked and bleeding and bellowing, Arya charged past Zaida, down the steps towards the street.
THAT NIGHT, AS ZAIDA helped me wash his blood out of my hair, I kept thinking of Arya skulking outside. I wondered if he would come back, and almost asked her to stay. By the time she left, after making sure we had suffered only cuts and bruises, it was so late that even the celebrations outside were dying down. You stood in the balcony, gazing at the sky to catch the last remaining rocket flashes. Below, urchins roamed the pavements, searching through the litter for unexploded firecrackers. You shivered, even though the night was warm with smoke. I put my arm around your waist and led you back inside.
We pushed the beds together for the night, the way they used to be—you were too upset to leave my side. For a while I sat straddling the seam between the two mattresses, rubbing Iodex over your bruises. You neither wanted to play a game nor be told a story. Instead, you worked your head into my lap and stared at me, your eyes doleful, your face full of turmoil. Every once i
n a while you would begin a sentence, but then not complete it—about Yara uncle, about me, about yourself. A part of me wanted to squeeze your trauma away, wipe from your memory the sight on the floor. I felt a heaviness in my heart, or perhaps it was shame, that you had seen your mother in that condition. Surprisingly, I also felt guilt—wasn’t it enough to have lost your father, that for my sake, you had now been forced to drive your uncle away? “Will he come back?” you asked as I rubbed in the Iodex. I heard fear in your voice, mixed with a trace of wistfulness.
“Don’t worry about your uncle tonight. What you did was right—we won’t be seeing him for a while.”
I felt the soreness in my shoulder blade, where Arya’s fingers had dug in. I tried to apply some Iodex to myself, but you took the jar from my hand and did it for me. Your fingers felt light on my skin—the astringency of the iodine began to clear the smell of Arya from my memory.
My hair was still damp from its shampooing, so you brought in a towel from the bathroom and spread it over my pillow. You pressed at the strands, then arranged them into different patterns—a stream of ripples, a sunburst of rays. I let you carry on, since you seemed so completely distracted by this play. “If you’re going to make your mummy into such a princess, tell me, how is she going to be able to sleep?”
Your fingers curled a lock behind my ear and began to run down towards my chin. They came to a stop where Arya’s hand had left its mark on my cheek. “It’s swollen,” you said, dabbing at it lightly. “Does it still hurt?”
“Don’t worry about Mummy. You saved her, remember? Like her very own Prince Charming. All you were missing was a horse, or it would have been a real fairy tale.” My words seemed to cheer you, so I continued. “Rajesh Khanna couldn’t have done it better if he was rescuing one of his heroines. Whether it was Mumtaz or Zeenat Aman or Hema Malini. Which one do you think Mummy should be? Perhaps if she was a little fatter, she could even be Yogita Bali.”
We both remembered the film, with Yogita Bali making a thunderous splash when she had jumped into a pool to escape being molested by the villain. You began to laugh. Then, abruptly, you grew somber. “Yara uncle—was he trying to do the same thing to you as that bad man in the movie?”
I made room for your head beside me on the pillow. “This isn’t the time to think of these things.” I kissed you several times on your head, as if contact with my lips would conduct away the thoughts inside. “The important thing is that we’re both all right.”
You looked like you were getting sleepy. Just as I thought your eyelids would close, they opened up. “You can’t be Yogita Bali,” you said. “You’re not big enough, like her. Over here.” You ran your hand across your chest to indicate you meant my bosom.
“I saw you.” You blushed. “On the floor.”
I AWOKE LATER THAT NIGHT. I must have slept for only an hour or so, because it still wasn’t light. I had been dreaming—something with you in it—a dream that hovered tantalizingly at the edge of my consciousness, refusing to be enticed back in. I began to sit up, then stopped—you were asleep in the fold of my arm, your face snuggled against my bosom.
I thought about extricating myself, spreading you out more comfortably, climbing over to lie in your bed. But I stayed where I was, and let myself luxuriate in the feeling of your head at my breast. It hardly mattered that my shoulder blade felt stiff, that the Iodex didn’t seem to be working. Fears of Arya prowling naked through the Emergency outside, waiting to strike again, faded to a faraway corner of my mind. I lay back and tried to synchronize my breath to yours by following the rhythmic motion of your chest.
The dream called to me again—I willed my mind to empty, my attention to float free, to lure it back. What flitted in, as I watched you sleep, were thoughts of Parvati. The son she created to ward off her loneliness, using bath oil and sandal paste and dabs from her own skin. What would happen if Shiva never returned from his ascetic wanderings? Would Parvati and her boy spend the rest of their years in each other’s company? Playing hide-and-seek in the forest, eating when they wanted to, sleeping where and when and how they wished? Leading a life that had need for neither husband nor father, that was fulfilled and immutable and carefree?
Or would time change things? Would she notice his lip sprouting, his voice beginning to crack, his features being altered from the ones she had sculpted so lovingly? Would her own beauty fade, her step begin to waver, the wrinkles start to form over her skin? Would there come a time when she would grow too frail for the romping, too listless for the hide-and-seek, too old to sustain the breezy existence they shared? Or perhaps he would tire of it first, would want to strike out on his own, explore the world beyond, leave the forest and his aged, unattractive mother with it?
Surely, though, if she was lavish enough in her devotion, he would not leave. Her love would be a golden playroom, an enchanted palace, whose comforts he would be loath to surrender. A love so indispensable, like air itself, that a life without it he could not conceive. What choice would he have, in the face of such extravagance, except to love her back with a matching intensity?
But she had to be careful how much she allowed him to love her. Wasn’t there another son to give her pause, the one named Andhaka, the blind offspring of Shiva and Parvati? What lust erupted in his heart, how ravaged he was by passion, when his sight was restored and he was confronted by his mother’s beauty. It was only after Shiva burnt off his flesh and drained the blood from his body that he eventually became worthy to be a son again.
You press yourself closer against my body in your sleep, as if you are whispering into my breast. Could Andhaka’s desire be smoldering in your subconscious as well, waiting for the future to manifest itself? What if I fall into the trap of loving you too much—who will sustain me if you ever left?
I try to rein in the darkness of my thoughts, to concentrate once more on recalling my dream. You murmur in your sleep, and I pull you tighter to myself. I gaze at the hollow of your throat as it rises and falls, and ponder the traversing of each breath. If I had a wish, I think it would be that we stayed like this for decades. Time passing us by, letting you remain by my side, inscribing nothing on your chest.
PART FIVE
chapter thirty-two
ARYA WAS CAPTURED FIVE DAYS LATER, IN BOMBAY ITSELF. TO THE twenty-odd boons of the Emergency, so widely advertised around the city on billboards, I mentally added another—it kept me safe from my brother-in-law. Perhaps Hema found out he had visited me on Divali, because she sent a long, vituperative missive, in which she reviled me for leading her brother on and then turning him in. Among other rambling insults, she accused me of being selfish and perverted—charging that I had gotten rid of Arya just like I had deposed Dev, since I couldn’t bear the thought of sharing your affections with any rivals. (“Even Kali would be less bloodthirsty,” she wrote.) Oddly, she also suggested that I had engineered Arya’s nose to be broken on purpose, so that I didn’t have to worry about anyone else marrying him. The next summer when we were in Delhi, however, with Arya still incarcerated, she was warm and cordial, with no mention made of her charges.
After Arya’s visit, I had rejoined the beds. Cuddling up to me soon became a habit with you—there was a sense of safety in being together, of coziness, of protection. I would awaken to find your face pressed against some part of my body—the crook of my arm, the cushion of my abdomen, the curve of my neck. Sometimes I just went back to sleep—at other times, I arranged my pillow under your head and climbed over to occupy your bed instead.
I’m not sure why I became troubled by the frequency of these entanglements. There were no prying neighbors to cluck their disapproval, no Roopa around to make her nasty insinuations. From where did the unease spring that finally prompted me to push the beds against opposite walls of the room one afternoon?
The last time I had done this, after Roopa’s visit, you had barely seemed to notice. This time, you were confused by the new arrangement that greeted you upon your return from scho
ol. “Which bed will we use? Aren’t they too small for us to fit on just one?”
“We’ll each use our own. If they’re joined, we always end up on the same side—that’s why Mummy has separated them.”
“But I like sleeping on your side.”
“You’re ten already, Ashvin—you’re getting too big. You want Mummy to have a good night’s rest, don’t you, and not be cramped?”
“But they’re so far apart. How will I save you if some bad man comes at night?”
“Nobody’s going to come. And even if someone did, I’m right there, in the same room.”
“Daddy never minded when I slept next to him.”
You didn’t kiss me that night, retiring instead after brushing your teeth to your newly appointed side of the room. When I went over to tuck you in, you pretended to be asleep. The next day, you were more pensive than usual, as if brooding over some weighty problem. Even my announcement that I had made almond kheer for dessert didn’t elicit a nod or smile. As I spooned it out, tears began trickling down your cheeks. “Mummy doesn’t love me anymore,” you burst out crying, and I felt guilty, mortified.
We made a game of joining up the beds again—I pushed while you sat, pretending to be the captain of a ship, commandeering it across the ocean of the bedroom floor. Twinges of doubt arose in me as I held you asleep in my arms afterwards. Had I yielded too easily? Had I not given it enough time? But I felt my apprehensions dissolve when I gazed at your face, peaceful and guileless in the moonlight.
The beds remained joined. The hardest times to reconcile were when you transgressed too conspicuously on my side. When your face found its way deep into my bosom, or a palm settled flagrantly between my thighs. I would lie in the dark wondering whether to wake you up, or try to pry off your sleeping form. It was not as if you were conscious, as if you were making some crude advance. Where was the shame in any contact that was innocent, no matter how it might appear in anyone’s eyes?