Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

  I ask my brother about college, and as he answers I notice that he is sprouting hair on his chin. I rarely consider him, mostly focus on my father. And the wife. I can barely see her eyes through her thick bifocals.

  As I leave, my father bemoans the sad problem of my mother one more time and tells me to see him more often. He says this every time we part, though inevitably six months pass before our next meeting.

  On the way home, I stop at Boat Club Road. The doorbell sounds like birds chirping and I can hear old Chanda bai’s Bata shoes squawking like rubber ducks as she comes to the door. She smiles with a trembling lower jaw and lays her hand against my cheek.

  ‘You’re looking very tired,’ she says.

  I go to the bathroom and wash my face in the sink. It’s slanted, attached to an errant pipe – a small porcelain afterthought. The tap splatters on full and wets my feet. The backsplash of floral tile is now faded, scummy and damp. Grey water circles the drain.

  Nani is seated cross-legged on a charpai, with three cordless phones in front of her. She sees me and raises her hand in greeting. We look alike, the three of us, my mother, my grandmother and me, besides the differences etched by time. Other variations are subtle: my grandmother has heavy ankles, and her hair is slicked down to her head, the parting glistening like an oily tributary. My mother has fair skin with ingrown hairs as black as mustard seeds populating the backs of her calves. I am the dark one, with curls that loosen only when they’re wet.

  When I sit down, Nani complains about the lane outside being dug up to introduce an electric line. She says it’s a municipal corporation scam. When I ask her to explain what kind of corruption the local government is guilty of, she shakes her head and looks away.

  ‘I grew up breathing Gandhian air,’ she says. ‘I cannot imagine the minds of goondas.’ Her English is wobbly, the kind learned from television rather than books.

  I follow her eyes out the window. The lane is full of tatty double-storey bungalows and flowering gulmohar trees. The sun shines in, like it does most days, drinking colour from the blue ceramic floor.

  She and my grandfather purchased this house twenty years ago from an aged Parsi spinster with marshmallow arms. The spinster had not wanted to sell to Hindus, but there were no other offers. My grandparents arrived with their old furniture: my grandmother’s chairs made from sheesham wood, and large Godrej cupboards as secure as tombs (she still hangs the keys from a rope at her waist).

  Nana and Nani were eager to move; their old flat was still inhabited by apparitions of my grandfather’s affairs and Nani’s many stillborn children, and load-shedding was a daily occurrence. Ironically, they moved into a house that felt haunted by the last owner’s dead ancestors – my mother said they were trading their bad memories for a stranger’s.

  On the day they took possession of the house, I watched as lace tablecloths were balled and packed by the movers – a group of some dozen men who came with a Tempo Traveller to transport the boxes. Open closets revealed the contents of many generations: old light bulbs no longer useable, unpolished silver ornaments, porcelain tea sets in their original boxes. Glass chandeliers were covered in a mist of cobwebs. The men lifted a chintz settee with sagging cushions that reminded me of the grey calico undershirt I wore beneath my school uniform. They left the smell of their bodies behind as they wrapped furniture in old blankets, and the forgotten Parsi owner sat in her wheelchair by the window, waiting for her nurse.

  That was many years ago, but the house feels the same, with the stench of unfamiliar musk and a coating of dust.

  ‘I need to talk to you about Ma,’ I say.

  ‘What about her?’ Nani asks.

  ‘We went to the doctor. She’s forgetting things.’

  ‘It’s because she isn’t married. Women forget things when they aren’t married.’ Then she adds, ‘Anyway, forgetfulness runs in the family. Her father was forgetful.’

  I shrug without agreeing, though I remember my grandfather would, on occasion, absent-mindedly offer Nani his newspaper, forgetting she could not read, and in response she, always imagining he was mocking her, would whack his hand away and stalk out of the room.

  ‘This is different,’ I say. ‘The other day she forgot who I was.’ She nods and I nod in return, and together we seem to imply that something has been understood, though I am not sure what. Miscommunications emerge from mislaid certainty. I consider whether I have told the whole truth or given something a meaning that never existed – whether I have, with a couple of words and the movement of my head, made my mother sicker than she truly is. Maybe that isn’t a bad thing. Maybe we all need to be careful, alert.

  I consider whether to share what happened at the doctor’s office, whether to draw the picture of the cloud and the amyloid plaque.

  Nani places her hand on her cheek. ‘She’s become so fat, your mother. Her knuckles are swollen to double what they were. How will we pry the jewellery off her hands when she dies?’

  Morning is the time for deep breaths, and discovering ourselves anew in our bodies.

  I read this in a magazine while Ma covers her greys at the parlour. I have started accompanying her everywhere I can. I double-check bills before she pays them and make sure she puts on her seatbelt. Sometimes, when others are within hearing distance, she shouts that I am torturing her, that she wants to be left alone.

  For some couples, a sound sleep can erase discord from the night before, the magazine continues. Does it follow that marital bliss must evade insomniacs or those with irregular circadian patterns?

  In the morning, I stretch and feel my arms and legs pulling in opposite directions, and my torso is the interstice between my heavy limbs. The hole in the middle of me is gnawing. I always wake up hungry and my mouth takes up my entire face, dry and warm, a dark, sandy pit. Dilip is beside me and the sheets below his body are damp and cool. He suffers from night sweats but never remembers the contents of his dreams.

  I wash the sheets every day after he leaves for work and dry them in the outer corridor of the building where the midday sun shines in. The neighbours have told Ila they don’t approve of seeing our bedding while they wait for the lift. The plaque outside their door, made of dark-blue-and-white painted tile, reads ‘The Governors’. They’re both retired, an ex-school teacher, an ex-navy man, and when she goes to visit her sister in Bombay, Dilip and I have seen Mr Governor sitting on their balcony, smoking cigarettes and crying.

  ‘He must miss her,’ Dilip says.

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t really visit her sister on these trips. Maybe he knows it.’

  Dilip looks at me, surprised, as if he never would have thought of it, and then intently, as though it means something that I did. There was a time when this might have amused him.

  ‘I don’t think you’re being generous or compassionate,’ I say. The magazine at the parlour mentioned these traits as vital to any thriving relationship. He looks into the distance as I talk, mesmerized by whatever it is he sees, as though by looking away he can understand me more fully.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ he replies.

  In the evening, we go to the gym in the building. He wears a sleeveless shirt made of polyester that has to be washed twice after every workout. He lifts free weights a metre from the mirror and exhales swiftly with every count. I find his noisy breath embarrassing, like the passing of gas or the exposure of innards. I’ve never liked the idea of someone hearing me snore.

  I use the stair-climber and tune my headphones into one of the music channels playing on the televisions overhead. Post-work is busy and I have to sometimes wait for a machine. I never worked out when I was younger, but since turning thirty, my body has started resembling an overripe pear.

  Dilip says the workouts are making a difference, but I can’t see it and tell him I don’t like working out with him.

  He doesn’t understand why I am offended, why I feel insecure when he compliments me, and why I never believe him anyway. I wonder, sometimes, at the
pathways in his mind, at the way his thoughts move, so disciplined and linear. His world is contained, finite. He understands what I say literally – a word has a meaning and a meaning has a word. But I imagine other possibilities and see the heaviness of speech. If I draw a line from point X to all its other connections, I find myself at the centre of something I cannot plot my way out of. There is so much to misinterpret.

  Dilip believes a single thought mirrors an entire landscape of the mind. He says it must be tiring to be me.

  ‘Your mother is upside-down up here,’ Nani says, knocking on the side of her head. She sits cross-legged on her charpai as I look at old pictures. Occasionally, she checks for a dial tone on her cordless phones.

  There are photographs of Ma as a young girl with long, difficult hair. She spent hours straightening it every week, lying across an ironing board with her hair between pages of newspaper. Rumours persist of what she was like at fourteen and fifteen, disappearing from school every afternoon to a roadside restaurant off the old Bombay–Pune highway. The dhaba bore a sign that read ‘Punjabi Rasoi’. There, she would order a large beer and drink straight from the bottle. From her school bag, she would dig out a pack of Gold Flake cigarettes and smoke one after the other. Travellers would break at the restaurant, arriving in taxis and scooters, stopping to take a piss or have a meal – foreigners especially, carrying little luggage and almost no money, on their way to the ashram. Ma would introduce herself, get to know them, sometimes catch a ride back into town. Nani believes these unchaperoned days piqued my mother’s interest in the ashram, but I wonder if her self-destructiveness was just another symptom of something there all along.

  It was around then that my mother started wearing white. All white, all the time, like the followers of the ashram. Always cotton. Thin, almost transparent, though the texture of the fabric is hard to tell in these faded photos.

  ‘Strange, she wanted to wear white when she never knew a single person who had died,’ Nani says. ‘Other girls wore miniskirts, bellbottoms. Not Tara. She looked like an old-fashioned aunty. Only, she never wore a dupatta.’

  Among the pile are some pictures of Nani from her wedding day, where she looks wide-eyed and small, no more than fifteen years old. She is a red bride, or so I must assume from the black-and-white picture, and her sari has a single line of embroidery. So bare, it wouldn’t even do for a wedding guest nowadays. Her nose ring glints for the camera. Behind her is her father, his stomach straining through his bush-shirt. Around her are other relatives, some semblance of people I know, her sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews.

  ‘What does a dupatta matter anyway?’ I say. Dupattas always seemed useless to me, an extra length of fabric, neither top nor bottom, serving no purpose except to recover what was already covered.

  ‘A dupatta is your honour,’ Nani says. She pulls the picture out of my hand, and I try to imagine the kind of honour that is so easily left at home.

  There are other pictures that Nani doesn’t keep with these, ones that have been hidden away, where Ma is about eighteen. Her hair is shorter, manageable, and she wears blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick. Her blouse is silk, printed with some hybrid tropical bird and tucked into high-waisted jeans. Shoulder pads come up to her earlobes. Her mouth is open, and I cannot tell if she is smiling or shouting.

  I never knew her like this, but this is who she was when she fell in love with my father.

  It was a golden age, a time when all the wrongs of the past were righted and the future was full of promise – that’s how Nani describes the time when Ma met my father.

  The match was arranged after my father and his mother were invited to Nani’s for afternoon tea, and Ma walked in late, sweating, with brown nipples showing through her chemise.

  He was thin, gangly, still learning the way around his new body. A dusting of dark powder seemed to coat his upper lip and his eyebrows scampered about before meeting in the middle. Even his joints inched towards each other as if by some magnetic attraction, elbow to elbow, knee to knee, his torso closing in on itself. His mother had to give him an occasional knock to straighten him up. He looked at the ground while Ma talked loudly, her weight on her feet as she spoke.

  For a while it seemed that Ma had shifted in what she desired, that her teenage rebellion had been quelled and she would fall in line with what her parents called a good future.

  She cut her hair, bought colourful clothes and started spending time at the Club. She professed a desire to study further, and even announced that she would take up hotel management or catering while my father finished his engineering degree.

  A year after the wedding, I was born.

  Five years after that, my father filed a petition for divorce. My mother was not present for this.

  A little while later, he was on his way to America with a new wife.

  ‘What are you going to do with all of these?’ Nani asks as I stuff the photographs into an envelope.

  ‘Show them to Ma,’ I say. ‘We have to make her remember.’

  ‘Why don’t we spend more time with him?’ Dilip says.

  He is talking about my father. I don’t look up at him.

  We are at the Club, waiting for our friends to join us. He is having a beer and I am drinking Old Monk with Diet Coke. We order dosas and chilli cheese toast.

  Dilip never understood how important a Club membership was until he moved to India. Up until that point, he always came for short visits, stayed with friends and family and was escorted around in air-conditioned cars. But for many of us who grew up here, our lives have always revolved around the Club. Where else could you find such a sprawling green space in the centre of the city? The building is a landmark, something every taxi driver knows the way to. My grandfather always joked that he didn’t consider the railways to be the only worthwhile thing the British left behind – it was the clubs, where we came to play sports after school, where our parents and grandparents would socialize, where we learned to swim. For many of us, it was where we had our first kisses behind the wild bougainvilleas that grow along the boundary walls, where we attended our first concerts, or New Year’s parties.

  I lost interest in the Club for many years, preferring to go to the new bars, cafés and restaurants that were sprouting up all over the city. It felt stodgy and old-fashioned. Something my grandparents did. But in the past few years, I’ve returned to it, finding comfort in greeting the same people year after year, in seeing the same broken steps, the same cracks in the walls that never quite get repaired. For me, it has been a constant when life was otherwise. Dilip has come to like it too.

  He likes to joke that the Club membership was the dowry for marrying me.

  On the tables are bells to ring for service. The alcohol is the cheapest in town. On Thursday nights, families gather on the lawn to play tambola, and there are eight tables in the card room just for rummy.

  ‘We can even invite your dad here,’ Dilip says. ‘To meet at the Club. So everyone is comfortable.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ I simplify for my husband. Dilip can understand only some of the repercussions which keep falling, to this day, like a line of dominoes – like when his mother insisted we keep up the charade of my father being dead for our wedding because an explanation of the truth might be complicated. And then, of course, Dilip likes to fix things. He believes every problem has a solution. He will search, dig, scratch until he finds it.

  ‘You don’t have to be scared,’ he says.

  I realize he is trying to be kind to me, so I am kind back. I smile and nod at these words and Dilip smiles in return with the belief that he has done his work, but I am only trying to move on, change the subject, settle on some other pasture before our friends arrive, because for thirty-six years this peace of mind has eluded me, and a few caring gestures on this clement night can’t ease a sickness that pre-dates us both and has no remedy.

  1981

  My father grew up as an army brat, moving schools every year, and had to resort to
bribery to turn classmates into friends. The most common gift was imported liquor from his parents’ stock. His father was a lieutenant general, and their homes changed with the seasons, but they were always filled with beautiful objects from foreign lands. Wooden shoes, knitted tapestries, and crystal so expensive his mother would oversee the washing of it herself. She didn’t like to enter the kitchen, and once proudly told my nani that she had never cooked an entire meal with her own hands. She could trace her lineage to some royal Marwar blood, which she brought up often. She knew the right people, and married her two daughters into what she considered good families, but received a blow when her husband died without warning one afternoon while travelling on official business to Delhi.

  In his wedding pictures, my father is a young groom mounted on a bedecked horse. A little boy sits in front of him, a nephew, looking terrified as the horse lurches forward with each blast from the horns. The boy and the groom are dressed alike, too, with matching safas wrapped around their heads and stiff collars edged in gold thread. The band that leads the procession wears red-and-green sherwanis and can pass off as wedding guests.

  The men make a circle around the musicians, cheering and whistling with the beat of the dholak. Women dance a little behind, managing their saris and waving one arm in the air, watching the young men but not joining in their play. There is a picture of the party halting outside a gate, presumably a wedding hall, where my mother and her family wait to receive the wedding guests. Others from the street in regular clothes appear now and again. They have joined in the spectacle, creating enclosures of laughter and outstretched hands. A spotlight falls on the groom, a stark yellow beam held up by the photographer’s assistant. The bright light floods the young man’s eyes. He blinks away perspiration in every frame. When his eyes are open, his gaze is on the horse.