by Manju Kapur
*
‘Where have you been? Dinner has been getting cold‚’ came her mother’s voice, as Astha tried her usual unobtrusive entrance.
‘Nowhere.’
‘Nowhere has a name or no?’
‘No‚’ said Astha, going to lock herself in the bathroom, free from voices, free from everything except the terrible things she was feeling, because Rohan didn’t love her, Rohan had lied to her. Rohan was what her mother had been warning her about since she was old enough to be warned, and how pleased she would be to know she had been right all along.
*
In the days to come Rohan neither called, nor sent the usual secret messages through her girlfriends.
It was over. Over. Over.
Astha entered her third year with a desire to get her education over as quickly as possible. Every day was painful to her. She was constantly reminded of Rohan, in the Coffee House, at the back gate, at their secret corner of the road, every evening at home. As for old black cars, they made her physically sick.
Rohan went abroad and Astha enrolled in MA, bored and unenthusiastic. Three years of an Honours course in English Literature had given her all she wanted to know of the subject. Not for her did the excitement of intellectual discovery lie ahead, only more of the same. After two years were over she supposed she would drift into teaching, that is what women like her did. School or college, remained to be decided.
All through third year her classmates had been busy preparing for competitive exams, or like Rohan, applying for higher studies abroad. Those not in this category had married and disappeared, to be heard of occasionally, moving around with husband, and later baby, stamped with the marks of confirmed adulthood.
Now in MA, her friends were few.
II
Astha was in her final year when the proposal came. The MBA, foreign returned son of one of the bureaucrats who lived in the larger houses bordering Lodhi colony, had seen her and wanted to meet her. His father dropped in on them, and acquainted the parents with their good fortune.
‘I don’t know him‚’ objected Astha when they told her the news.
‘He also doesn’t know you, Madam‚’ said the mother crossly. ‘That is why he wants to meet you.’
‘Give her the details, Sita‚’ reproved the father. ‘This is a question of our girl’s happiness. There is no hurry.’
‘With you retiring in one year, there is every hurry.’
‘That is no reason to marry.’
The mother fell into despairing silence. Retirement, father’s uncertain health, finances in a meagre state, the bridge to the plot unbuilt and their dearest daughter still to be settled.
‘How many times can I meet him?’ demanded Astha, a little excitement rising in her. Somebody found her desirable and had gone to lengths to find out who she was.
‘One, two times, what is the need for more?’ said the mother. ‘You cannot tell about a person before marriage, no matter how many times you meet him.’
Astha sat silent, twiddling her thumbs, staring down at her flat feet in their bathroom slippers. Had she known Rohan? Not really, and the soiled feeling she now associated with that interlude came over her again.
‘Papa?’ she quickly asked. ‘You think this is a good thing?’
‘I’m not sure‚’ said the father uncertainly. ‘The plus side is that he is the only son and both his sisters are married. The younger one, settled in the US, wanted to sponsor him, but he decided to return to his parents. He is twenty-six, five eleven, he works as an assistant manager in a bank.’
‘Clearly a good, family-minded boy‚’ said the mother complacently.
‘And Vadera’s ministry was allotted land in South Delhi. They will be able to build on it, they won’t have to wait for bridges and water and electricity connections, they won’t have to worry about thugs or gypsies‚’ continued the father bitterly.
‘Isn’t that a good thing for our daughter? She at least will have a decent home. God has heard my prayers‚’ added the mother piously.
‘Sita, are your prayers that the girl be married to a plot in Vasant Vihar? Why don’t you go and do the pheras there?’
‘What’s wrong, Papa? You don’t like the family?’
‘I have heard things about Vadera.’
‘What things?’
‘He is in the commerce ministry. Nice place to be if you want to keep a certain standard of living, and licences are needed by every manufacturing unit, big or small, for anything they do.’
‘So?’
‘He travels abroad, gives his daughters big weddings, buys a car, a new car every three or four years.’
This did indeed seem very bad; such high living had to have some dark reason behind it. ‘How does he do it, I ask you?’ went on the father. ‘Must be taking bribes. Will you be happy in a house that doesn’t share our values?’
‘Papa, you don’t think it is a good idea, I won’t meet the boy.’
The mother collapsed into rage. ‘Everybody is corrupt, are they? Throw out nine tenths of the government, run the country yourself with your high blood pressure. Expect the whole nation to be like Gandhi. Send your daughter to an ashram, because we have neither the means nor the money to get her properly married.’
‘I will look after myself‚’ said Astha bravely.
No one paid attention.
‘Their sole interest is the girl, her looks, her education, her qualities. That is something‚’ said the harassed father.
‘It’s more than something‚’ insisted the mother. ‘How many people do you know like that?’
‘Big dowries are being offered for Hemant. He is known to be quite smart.’
‘Is that his name?’ asked Astha.
‘Yes.’
A nice name. Hemant and Astha. It had a certain ring to it.
‘Why aren’t they going in for big dowries?’ inquired the prospective bride.
‘The boy does not believe in dowry. Must be the foreign influence, couldn’t be his father.’
Astha felt an even greater interest in the boy. ‘Let me meet him, Papa‚’ she declared. ‘After all, the father came with the proposal, they must be thinking alike to a certain extent.’
*
Hemant came to the house. The parents left them alone for half an hour. Astha was so nervous her palms were sweating. He had only gone by her face, she knew that was passable, but what about the rest of her? Should she tell him about Rohan, but what to tell? That though she had kissed a boy, her hymen was intact? That he had broken her heart but she hoped to find happiness in marriage? How could she say this to someone she didn’t know? She looked up at Hemant and smiled tentatively, he smiled back, asked about her hobbies before continuing to talk about his experiences in the USA.
A few weeks later the engagement between Astha and Hemant Vadera was decided upon. The wedding was to be held in June. By then Astha’s MA exams would be over, Hemant’s elder sister’s children would have their holidays, and his younger sister would be able to come for a month from the States. With all this settled, Astha and Hemant began to date.
The day of Astha’s wedding was like any other day in June. The heat rose and rose, dust gathered, and all activity struggled against a dull and heavy lassitude. In the morning Astha’s mother brought her tea and gazed at her approvingly.
‘Today you are getting married and leaving for your new home‚’ she murmured, tears in her eyes, while relatives clustered and consoled, speaking of the necessity of this moment, the pain of a mother at parting, the joy of a mother at her duty successfully completed. These murmurs fluttered around Astha, who, restless and ill at ease, waited for the action to begin.
Outside, the tent wallahs had started converting the central common ground into a wedding hall, enclosing it with shamianas, covering the stubbly parched grass with durries. In the afternoon the caterers came, putting up tandoors near the garage. Five hundred invitations had been sent out. Both the families lived in the same colony
, worked for the same government, had lived for years in the same city. A huge guest list was unavoidable.
In the evening there was a havan, during which Astha’s red and white wedding bangles, with the dangling chura, were put on. She sat before the fire, tossing the samagri in, feeling dazed and unreal.
After this it was time to get ready. Her wedding sari, fresh from the ironers, was laid out. She contemplated the thick red and gold silk in which sweat and discomfort were guaranteed. Normally summer brides wore thin tissue woven with gold, but with the wedding costing so much, she had to wear the heavy bridal temple sari bought years ago at a special price by her father on a government tour to South India. Now Astha hoped Hemant would not find her dowdy or unfashionable. She hoped he would not mind that she had little jewellery, she hoped he would like her without beauty parlour bridal make-up, and that he would hate, like she did, those assembly line creations, pink and white, with black-lined eyes.
*
Night came, the barat arrived. Astha was called to garland her groom to the taped music of shehnais. At the auspicious hour they sat down next to each other under a small rickety pandal, with a fan trained on them. The hot air from the fan, the smoke from the fire, the sight of her father waiting to do the kanyadaan, the feel of her hand in the hand of her bridegroom, in a trance she realised this was the beginning of the life ordained for her.
The pundit was chanting. They were taking the seven steps around the fire, the steps that meant they were legally married. It was stifling, perhaps she was going to faint. Her cousins clustered around her, fussing with her jewellery, adjusting her palla and teasing the bridegroom.
This time tomorrow she would be in Kashmir, surrounded by mountains, trees, and lake, where waters rippled gently around gliding shikaras, where a book would not be her companion, but her husband bending tenderly over her, her companion for life.
On the plane to Srinagar Hemant held Astha’s hand, while she looked shyly out of the window at the mountains they were flying over. A deep seed of happiness settled in the pit of her stomach, she was married, she didn’t have to be the focus of her parents’ anxieties any longer. She was now a homemaker in her own right, a grown woman, experiencing her first plane ride.
Throughout the journey, Hemant kept touching Astha, a finger slid inside the sleeve of her blouse, a hand pressed on her knee.
The consummation took place in a houseboat on Dal Lake. Hemant undressed her slowly, gazing at her steadily, while Astha nervously looked at his stomach.
‘Now you undress me‚’ he said.
She shook her head modestly, wrapping the sheet around herself, tucking one edge in.
‘Come on‚’ he urged.
She bent her head still further and stared at his shoes planted next to her smooth, freshly waxed bare legs and pedicured feet, their mehndi patterns still a deep orange.
He took her hands and put them on his chest. She undid the buttons, and slid his shirt off. As he lifted his arms for her to remove his vest, the hair of his underarms sprang out at her, along with the smell of him. She pulled off the vest quickly and stopped. He drew her hands again to him, unzipping his pants himself in his impatience to guide her to the right spot.
‘There‚’ he whispered, jamming her hand into his underwear, swelling bulkily, ‘it’s yours. Do you like it?’
Astha hardly knew. She snatched her hand away, and rolled face down on the pillow, while Hemant excitedly finished his own undressing.
Afterwards they found a spot of marriage blood on the sheet. They both peered at it.
‘Did it hurt?’ asked Hemant fondly.
‘A little‚’ confessed his wife.
Later, in the privacy of the bathroom, Astha allowed herself to wonder whether she had been misled about the magnitude of the act.
*
Sex. There was so much of it. The pain Astha felt between her legs was never quite absent. She could only thank God they never spent that much time actually doing it. Hemant attacked the whole thing with great urgency, gazing at her a little anxiously after each time, while she uncertainly smiled back to a look of satisfaction that came over his face.
Unbidden thoughts of Rohan came. How slow his kisses had been, how infinitely long, how thorough. Then she scolded herself. Rohan had abandoned her, Hemant had married her, he valued her, he thought her pretty. The question of whose lovemaking she preferred did not arise.
During the day they wandered around the tourist spots of Srinagar, hand in hand. People looked at the bangles on her wrists and smiled. She was a bride, and her grip on Hemant’s hand grew more certain, and the blush on her face more conscious. Hemant’s attention was constant. He took endless photographs and never let her read.
*
Astha wanted to record what she felt. This was her honeymoon, a one-time thing. She tried writing in her journal, but as usual the words didn’t come. She tried sketching her surroundings, but the beauty was too overwhelming. She drew Hemant instead, his face, body, torso, arms, legs, it was the first time she had had so much nudity to work with. And when she was tired of art, she attempted writing.
One evening, sitting on the roof of the houseboat, drinking her evening tea, looking out on the lake, she wrote a poem about the sky, the shikaras, the sound of the birds, the sun behind the mountains reflected in the water. She wrote that she, the watcher, was part of that harmony, and it was fitting that her new life begin in beauty. As she put down her pen, tears filled her eyes.
Her husband saw. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ he enquired, leading her downstairs to the bed, where they had made love last night, this morning and afternoon.
‘Nothing‚’ gulped Astha, her head laid out on the pillow. Hemant scooped her legs up, and lay down next to her.
‘I don’t like to see my baby crying‚’ he said softly.
Astha pressed her face into his shoulder, and laced her arms around his back.
‘Are you missing your mother?’
She started to laugh, the idea was so absurd. ‘No, silly‚’ she said.
‘Then what? Tell me, I’m your husband‚’ urged Hemant. ‘Tell me, wife.’
Astha didn’t know why she had been crying. Nothing in her present life seemed to justify tears. Finally she mumbled, a little sheepish, ‘It hurts.’
‘Where?’
Astha’s hand vaguely danced over her middle. Hemant put his hand firmly between her legs. ‘There?’ he asked. She nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? You must tell me these things, I will never know otherwise. We are one, you know. Now promise.’ He bent to kiss her.
Astha responded more warmly than she had in her entire marriage. ‘I didn’t know what to say‚’ she went on whispering in the ears of her lawful wedded husband, her husband who would take care of all her hurts like he was taking care of this one.
‘Poor baby‚’ murmured Hemant, ‘we won’t make love till it stops hurting, all right?’
*
‘Hemant?’ asked Astha, a week after they were married.
‘Hum?’ replied Hemant sleepily. Astha’s head was on his shoulder, his arm was around her, and he had spread her hair across his chest.
‘Why didn’t you marry an American?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, you were there a long time, you must have gone out with girls. Fallen in love, thought of marriage.’
‘Never.’
‘Never had women?’
Hemant side-stepped this. ‘I was always sure I wanted to marry a girl from here.’
‘Me, you mean.’
Hemant’s grip tightened around his wife, while Astha felt thrilled and wanted. ‘Besides‚’ he said, playing dreamily with her hair, ‘I had responsibilities to my parents. I am the only son, and I wanted someone who would fit in with our family life. American women are too demanding. Their men have to cater to all their whims and fancies.’
‘Is that true?’ demanded Astha, visions of American women waited on hand an
d foot, basking in love, flashing through her mind.
‘You bet‚’ said Hemant with great certainty. ‘Besides you can’t be sure they won’t be up to something.’
‘Like?’
‘Other men. It’s not so unthinkable for them as it is for an Indian girl.’
Astha fell silent. She was wondering if she liked this conversation. She turned to kiss him, but Hemant was not to be distracted. This was a topic he had considered deeply. ‘I wanted an innocent, unspoilt, simple girl‚’ he went on.
There was a pause.
‘A virgin‚’ he elaborated.
‘Suppose I had not been one?’ asked the wife carefully.
‘And the blood on the sheet, what was that? A mirage?’
‘Some women don’t bleed, even though they have had no sex, you know‚’ said Astha. She had read this in a magazine.
‘Since that didn’t happen in our case, why talk about it‚’ said Hemant.
Rohan’s face bending over hers arose before Astha’s eyes. Had she been a virgin? Unlike Hemant, she was not sure. She decided to forget the whole business, after all now she was definitely not one, and what was the point of thinking about the past?
*
‘I see you are a writer’, said Hemant, looking through her notebook, ‘as well as an artist.’
‘Not really‚’ said Astha modestly, and waited for him to draw her out.
‘What are you doing now?’ he asked.
Astha showed him the paper on which she was writing a poem.
‘They say a picture’s worth a thousand words‚’ he read, then looked up and frowned. ‘But this is not a picture‚’ he objected.
‘I know‚’ said Astha, quickly. ‘I was just looking for a way to start. Whenever I sketch the scene, it ends up looking like a post card, so I thought I’d try words instead.’ She reached out to take the page, ‘I’ll work on it more and show you.’
‘No, no, let me read. Maybe I can help you. I used to read a lot when I was in college.’
‘Really?’ asked Astha interestedly. ‘What?’
‘Harold Robbins. Erie Stanley Gardner, Somerset Maugham, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, all kinds of authors. I was quite a reader, you know.’