Blueprint for Love

by Chatura Rao

  After bidding Zahyan and Mahnoor goodbye Suveer had dropped her off at the bus stand from where she could take a bus back to Mumbai.

  ‘Message me when you get home,’ he said unsmiling, not touching her in the dim confines of the rickshaw.

  ‘“Where is home?’’’ she quoted his interview question back, her mouth twisting into an unsure smile before she stepped out.

  She couldn’t see his expression, the bleakness in his eyes. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he mumbled.

  His auto had turned and puttered off in the direction of the airport from where he’d probably boarded the first available flight to New Delhi. She hadn’t called to find out.

  She was startled when her husband’s voice broke into her reverie.

  ‘Had a good time?’ Tarun asked from the doorway of their bedroom. He looked good–clean shaven, hair gelled, dressed for work in a Jack Jones shirt and trousers that defined a physique sculpted in the gym.

  His office shift had changed to the afternoon one, Reva realised. She had forgotten. She turned his question over in her mind and looked uncomprehendingly at him.

  ‘Let’s talk in the bedroom,’ he said. ‘Papa and Ma can hear us out here.’

  Reva skirted him carefully to go through the doorway. He was watching her keenly and would not step aside. She sensed his anger.

  He closed the door and came at her. Gripping her arms he pulled her towards him and tried forcibly to kiss her. Shocked and repulsed, she pulled back. They struggled. He pushed her onto the bed, and tore at her neckline. Though he was stronger, she held her own, kicking him away and hitting at his arms and chest. He stopped moving and simply held her down, shifting his full weight onto her so she gasped for breath.

  ‘See?’ he said, his mouth an inch away from her cheek–she’d turned her mouth away. ‘You slept with him so now you don’t want me.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Reva choked, disgusted at his crude reasoning. When he released her, cynicism writ upon his face, she scooted on her hands and knees to the other end of the bed and off to the door, to put as much distance as possible between them.

  It was not that she hadn’t expected a quarrel on returning, but to actually try to force her into bed to prove a point was worse that she’d ever have expected from him.

  ‘It’s no sin,’ Tarun said tucking his shirt into his trousers and setting his hair right with his fingers. ‘I’ve had a fling or two. Last year the week after you lost your aunt, I went away to Pataya on work? If you remember I told you I met Monica, my college friend . . .’

  ‘Please!’ Reva cringed at his tone. She could tell he was deeply hurt by what he perceived as, and what indeed was, her infidelity. She wished he would simply admit it. ‘Don’t ruin everything.’

  ‘I’m not ruining anything, so don’t be dramatic,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you the truth, so that you tell me the truth. It’s only fair. Then we can begin again . . . clean slate. That is, if you’re not leaving me for the guy you’ve been screwing.’

  Reva felt her whole body turn hot and then cold at hearing the words with which Tarun summed up her time with Suveer.

  ‘I’m not leaving you for him,’ she said, willing him to just go away. ‘Give me time to think.’

  ‘Yup, think hard now since you didn’t bother to when you left town,’ Tarun said caustically. ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

  As soon as he left the apartment, she broke down. Who was this man she’d been living with? He wanted to ‘swap truths’ and then carry on as if nothing had changed. Had he been this calculative all these years? Had she? She must have been truly dishonest to have carried on in this marriage, such deceit on both sides.

  23

  S

  even years ago she went to the first formal party of her life. It was hosted by the architectural firm she’d newly joined. She’d worn her best salwar kurta and flat-heeled sandals. No make-up save a touch of kohl to the eyes. There among the suave South Bombay folks with their easy turns-of-phrase, salon-set hair, designer suits or sheath dresses, she felt tacky. The one colleague she was friendly with at the office had begged off with a cold, so here she was, sitting alone on a sofa holding the stem of a glass of wine like it was life support.

  Just as she was planning a polite excuse for leaving, a middle-aged builder who’d had one too many drinks seated himself next to her and tried to start a conversation.

  ‘My company Virat Constructions and I grew up like twin brothers, you won’t believe!’

  ‘Your firm and you?’ Reva wondered, feeling a headache coming on.

  ‘My father, God rest his soul, raised us both as his sons.’

  Reva agonised over how to get away from him without being rude. She looked up to see a good-looking young man standing before them.

  ‘Mr Manchandani, so sorry but my girl and I really have to run. Excuse us.’ Reva stood up gratefully. Touching her elbow to signal leaving, he offered the nonplussed builder a hearty handshake in goodbye.

  On the way out he stopped to shake hands with several more people, handing his calling card to a few. He gave her a card too, winking humorously as if to say don’t take what’s printed on it seriously. She glanced at it. Tarun Khanna, Junior Associate, Victor & Shah. It was a well-known accountancy firm.

  He offered to drive her back to her cousin’s apartment where she lived. She agreed, surprised at how easily he’d broken through her reserve.

  ‘I’m small fry with big dreams,’ he grinned, motioning at the city lights whizzing by as they drove down Marine Drive in his modest Santro. The wind was in her hair.

  ‘The first business dinner I went to, I tucked a table napkin into my collar so my new shirt would not get stained. I held the spoon in my left hand and fork in my right–I was that gauche. Of course I didn’t know the word then!’ he laughed.

  ‘I bet you still made friends.’

  ‘Sure. But what’s so hard about that? I like people. You need to genuinely like people to do business.’

  Reva smiled. She was from a business family herself, but had never had the impression that her father or uncles actually enjoyed working with people. This young man was quite different from any she’d met.

  ‘I failed my Accountancy exams twice before I scraped through you know,’ he admitted, ‘but I can sell anything. And I’m the guy who can’t be ignored. I’ll eventually make my way into the hallowed circles of power in this city . . . see if I don’t!’

  His candour impressed her, and his humour–he laughed at himself a lot–disarmed Reva completely. She giggled at his imitation of Mr Manchandani’s pompous telling of his history and what Tarun called his own puppy-ness: the brash charm of an urban Punjabi youth.

  They took a drive along the seafronts of the city, him rocking to the song, ‘Baby, you can drive my car. Guess I wanna be a star. Baby you can drive my car, and maybe I’ll love you.’ She had never seen Mumbai by night . . . the Queen’s Necklace, Bandstand, Juhu Chowpatty. She’d never had Tequila shots or been so thoroughly kissed on her first date.

  Six months later he proposed marriage. She accepted, sure that he was the best thing that had happened to her since she’d arrived in Mumbai. He had a formula for success. He cranked up her confidence, encouraged her to get out there and show what she was made of.

  ‘Not everyone is a gold medalist from the Rack School of Architecture and gorgeous to boot: those eyes, the hair, that figure!’ A long wolf whistle to show his appreciation, equally to make her laugh. ‘Now if only you wouldn’t dress in yards of cloth like the neighbourhood aunty going to buy vegetables!’

  She thought about their week-long wedding six years ago. There was a crowd of a thousand people invited and a great many events, most of them planned by his family.

  ‘We could go away to the mountains,’ she’d suggested for their honeymoon. ‘If you want to go abroad, then to Nepal or Bhutan.’

  ‘Those are practically in India,’ Tarun laughed. ‘Let me show you the good life. You’ve been middle-class
too long.’ Their honeymoon was a wild fortnight in Amsterdam.

  She remembered September last year. This was the same man who had, along with three other members of her family, carried her aunt’s body on a bamboo stretcher to confer it to the flames of the crematorium. He’d held her close when she’d cried at night. Then he’d gone away to Pattaya, ostensibly on work. And now he thought they should forgive each others’ indiscretions and move on. Their marriage was, to use his crude language, screwed.

  Lying at the very edge of her side of the bed, Reva succumbed to the exhaustion her ruminations brought, and fell asleep. The hours passed and it was about 7 pm when she woke up.

  She went into the bathroom and carefully washed her face and hands and feet. She had to move out for now. There was no other solution to the impasse, or at least none she could think of. Taking a deep breath, she went out into the living room to meet her in-laws.

  They began by asking about her absence and telling her how angry Tarun had been that she had left town without telling him.

  ‘But what is the reason?’ they asked, bewildered, when she tried to say that the marriage wasn’t working out.

  ‘We don’t have the same ideals,’ she stammered. They stared uncomprehendingly.

  ‘I’ll teach you to cook food the way he likes to eat it,’ her mother-in-law offered plaintively.

  ‘Tch!’ her father-in-law signaled to his wife to shut up. ‘Ideal what?’ he frowned, thrusting his chin forward in an effort to understand what he’d often called the “modern way” of today’s generation.

  ‘Things like helping others.’

  ‘Tarun is very helpful,’ he shot back.

  ‘. . . without expecting anything in return,’ she clarified.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Are you still a schoolgirl?’ he asked with barely-veiled irritation. ‘If we do things for people without asking for anything in return how will we survive? Vedji rents this grand place out to us for far less than the market rate because Tarun handles his tax. This apartment, the Otters’ Club membership Tarun has arranged–the kind of lifestyle you live–this is all thanks to Tarun’s networking. Life is all about give-and-take. But you’re so lost in your “ideals-world” you can’t even see how hard he works to keep up your lifestyle!’

  ‘His lifestyle,’ she corrected, and felt petty. ‘There are other values to consider, like kindness . . . and respect,’ she finished in a mumble.

  ‘Tarun is a respectful boy,’ her father-in-law snorted. She vividly recalled being forced into bed, torn at, held down. It was payback for her disappearance. Give and take. Sure, it was the first time he had been violent with her. Perhaps he would never do it again. But could she live with him knowing intimately the skeletons that had tumbled out of the cupboard? She needed to go away, at the very least, to think.

  When they saw her packing, her mother-in-law was alarmed. She came into her bedroom to reason with her: Quarrels between a husband and wife die down in time. Take a vacation together . . .

  Plan a baby. A baby will cement the relationship! See how we’ve weathered so much? Reva felt like a brick in her mother-in-law’s dreams for a concrete future for the family.

  ‘You must at least give the marriage a good try until our 35th wedding anniversary. It’s only three months away,’ her mother-in-law insisted.

  ‘I cannot stay with . . . No, I won’t be staying,’ Reva declared, horrified at the prospect of living with Tarun following their altercation this afternoon.

  This really upset his mother.

  ‘What will we tell people if you’re not at the parties?’ she agonised. Reva continued packing.

  ‘You know that Pratik and Shimmy are coming all the way from America for this occasion? I always knew you were self-centred!’ she added shrilly.

  After she’d retired to the living room, it took Reva less than an hour to pack her essential clothes, books and personal belongings. She did not speak with them as she carried her suitcases to the door. Tarun’s mother was crying into a face towel and his father had retired behind a newspaper after telling his wife within Reva’s hearing that they were well rid of her.

  24

  H

  aving moved out of Puneet Nagar, Zahyan and Mahnoor reached Rizwan’s house at daybreak. They were served a hot breakfast of kheema paratha and made comfortable in the only bedroom in the house.

  Rizwan’s wife, Ashfiya, was a motherly woman in her early-thirties. The women were soon chatting about cooking, while listening to the latest Hindi songs on the radio. Mahnoor played with Ashfiya’s three small sons.

  ‘You seem to love children,’ Ashfiya observed.

  ‘I hope to have a child soon,’ Mahnoor replied, shyly avoiding Zahyan’s gaze.

  ‘Inshallah, you will!’ Ashfiya said cheerfully.

  Zahyan felt some of the weight lift from his heart to see Mahnoor blush and smile. Henceforth they would live among people of their own community, he promised himself. But even as he resolved this he knew it was not the solution to his problem. He could not forgive what had happened.

  There was also something physically wrong with him. His chest felt clogged. The air would not be drawn deep in. He could not eat, often feeling nauseous and ill at ease.

  Somehow Mahnoor seemed to have struck a vein of joy. Perhaps it was simply the passing of two nights and a day that put some distance between her and the assault. She had enjoyed being with Suveer and Reva, even through the darkness of that time. And she was happy about her newfound closeness with Zahyan.

  When Zahyan told her that the radio feature had not gone down well with his editor, ‘Suveer bhaijaan did his best,’ she’d mumbled with finality, averting her gaze to hide what disappointment had naturally welled up.

  Rizwan took him to Wajid Ansari’s electronics repair shop on the Juhapura main road the morning they arrived from Puneet Nagar. Wajid Ansari was an unofficial leader in Juhapura, affiliated to a secular political party, but considering leaving this party for a hardline one.

  ‘In these radical times you have to choose clearly to stand with your community or you’ll be nowhere at all,’ he pronounced with deep-throated rhetoric. ‘Not that I personally subscribe to the hardline approach. This is not Pakistan or Bangladesh, where we are in the majority. An eye for an eye here might well turn our world blind!’

  Wajidbhai was a beefy, affable sort, who lined his eyes heavily with kohl and wore a skullcap. Many of the men here in Juhapura dressed in kurta pyjamas and skull caps. A few women draped their heads with scarves, but most wore a burqa if they came out on the street. Zahyan and Mahnoor felt out of place, having lived in more ethnically diverse localities, and yet after recent events, safer here.

  Wajidbhai expressed his sympathy and solidarity and explained that Solanki was the kind of bastard who only understood the language of the fist. His speech did not make Zahyan feel any better or worse. Zahyan spoke almost nothing, only listening with his characteristic grimness, his ear trained for the semblance of an action plan, while Rizwan, Wajidbhai, Salim and a couple of their friends discussed the matter.

  Wajidbhai Ansari suggested to Zahyan that they go speak with Solanki, to garner an apology from him for the indignity that Mahnoor had suffered.

  ‘Yes, apology is due. We will wrest it from that motherfucker!’ Salim swore. Wajidbhai waved him aside as a bitch would swipe away a quarrelsome pup.

  ‘Let me do the talking,’ he instructed in his baritone.

  They went prepared for trouble, small sharp knives tucked into waist pouches and shoes.

  ***

  ‘What do you want me to say? Sorry?’ Hareshbhai pronounced the last as ‘soori’, his tone casually insolent.

  He leaned back in the swivel chair behind his desk in his real estate broking office in Raysan, Gandhinagar, as if emphasising his affiliation with his Party’s national leader whose picture was in a gold frame on the wall behind his head. He looked speculatively at the four well-built men sitting and standing acr
oss from him in their kurta pyjamas and skull caps. Only Zahyan stood apart in his jeans and T-shirt, though he too wore a skull cap. The look in his eyes did not bode well for Haresh Solanki.

  But Solanki wasn’t worried. This was his area. Besides he had already gestured to his assistant to call for reinforcements from among his party workers. They would be here in a few minutes.

  ‘Yes, brother,’ Wajidbhai said now, almost mildly. ‘You must say sorry to our sister, Mrs Mahnoor Sheikh. She is not very different from your own Hindu sisters. If any of them had been assaulted by us, we would be on your side of the table and you’d be on ours.’

  ‘But alas, that is not the case,’ Solanki gave a mock sigh. ‘Because you had the insolence to come and buy a house in our area. So you had to pay for it. Sometimes the innocent ones end up paying,’ he looked at Zahyan. ‘Though she might not have been innocent,’ he added without warning. ‘Have you asked her who that man was who came to “rescue’’ her? He was practically climbi–’

  His words were drowned out by Wajidbhai’s warning roar. Zahyan darted around the table, even as his companions made a grab for him. He cuffed Solanki hard across the head, sending his gold-framed spectacles clattering to the floor. He tried to yank open the zip on his waist pouch to retrieve a knife, by which time Rizwan and Salim grabbed his arms and dragged him, yelling, out of Solanki’s office and onto the street. They forced him into a rickshaw between them and rushed him away.

  ‘Be quiet. Calm down now.’ After this brief admonition, no one spoke. The brothers sitting on either side of Zahyan looked out at the passing streets. Zahyan broke down weeping, bent almost double with the strain of it. His tears were wrenched from a shaft of darkness where lived monsters of indignity and shame. There seemed no way to dredge anything like justice, when no one cared for your suffering or even your humanity.