by Shobha Rao
I had to keep you; I decided we would stay.
But remember what I told you: suffering is strange. That very night he came home and threw the four roti on the ground. “Did anybody come here?” he growled. “Tell me. Tell me the truth.”
I held my hand steady as I reached for the roti. “No, no one.”
He eyed me; his gaze followed me around the room. He lit a cigarette. “There’s talk that Indian soldiers have been snooping around here. Knocking on doors.” He reached over and grabbed my arm. “You remember what to do if they come around, don’t you?”
“I remember.”
“What?”
“Tell them you’re my brother. And that our parents died in the riots.”
“Good girl.” He squeezed my arm tighter. “And make sure they don’t see her.” He blew out a band of smoke, his yellowed eyes burrowing into my own, and then he took the cigarette from his mouth and pushed the lit end into my arm. The sizzle reached me before the pain. He smiled. “Just so you don’t forget,” he said.
* * *
The next morning I woke on the edge of a peculiar dream. I was at a river crossing. I could see clear to the other side. There was even a boat, as if that would make things easier. Oars too. But something kept insisting, insisting, and the throb of insistence was like the river. I woke up and looked down at my arm. Such a tiny crater. Perfect and round and raw where he’d put out his cigarette. Raw in the way that cinnamon is raw. The sizzle when the tip of his cigarette had touched my skin was simply papad in hot oil, just like that: common and unconfusing. Wound seemed too magnificent a word for it.
I looked at you, asleep in your makeshift cradle.
In the end it was the burn of the cigarette, really. Even when I ignored it, went about the morning as if nothing had happened, it kept throbbing and throbbing until I peered down at it—as if it were a raucous child in the quiet of a twilit temple—and said, Shh.
But it wouldn’t hush. Not for a minute.
Here’s what it told me: that he would hurt you as he’d hurt me. And though a cigarette burn can’t talk it can say this: it is easier to look at death than at pain. In one the grief lingers and then passes with time. In the other, it is relentless. It is unerring. And it throbs—said the burn—like me.
Funny, isn’t it?
And so I looked at you and I looked at you and I held you and I held you and then I killed you. I killed you.
* * *
Leela has been gone for some time now. Married and moved to Pune. I never told her any of this. Why? This is not a story for the young. But on one of our last nights sharing tea, a few days before she was to be married, she sat cross-legged on my bed, as she always did, and teased me about the piles of lentils. “Come now, auntie, you must tell me, why do you count those lentils, night after night?”
I thought at first that I would only smile, like I always did when she asked me that question. But then I thought of that ribbon. Lost so many years now. I could still see it twirling in the wind. What happened to that girl? The one who stood in the silence of a summer afternoon and felt her heart beating. Where is that girl? That heart?
“They’re so tiny. There must be thousands. Look, even your hands are shaking.” Leela took my wrists and turned them over. And there was that cigarette burn, throbbing. Throbbing. All through these many years.
“You must tell me,” she persisted.
“Because,” I finally said, “it distracts me.”
“From what?” she said. “Besides, there’s television for that. You could even buy a radio.”
“None of those are loud enough.”
“For what?” She laughed.
I looked at the piles of lentils. It takes me exactly thirty minutes to count out nine hundred and eighty-six lentils. That is what I give myself every day: thirty minutes. “The sound,” I said, “of throbbing.”
* * *
It’s raining tonight. The candle is burning out. The piles are nearly complete but my eyes grow heavy. I’m slower today, more tired. But just as I’m nearly finished the candle goes out. And I think, If only I could’ve had a few more moments of light.
THE OPPOSITE OF SEX
Mohan was dispatched to a tiny village—ten miles south of the nearest town of English Bazar—to map the new border between India and East Pakistan. His job, as the youngest member of the Calcutta Chapter of the Indian Geographical Society, was to survey the region that had just been bisected, and submit the findings so that the details of the border could be finalized. It was a serious task matched—surpassed, really—only by his own seriousness. He’d been orphaned at the age of five. A maternal uncle, who was a confirmed Brahmachari, had raised him. When he was six, Mohan had asked his uncle to buy him small painted figurines of a man and woman, dressed in colorful Rajasthani costume, holding a tiny baby in their arms. A goat and cow stood on either side. Mohan’s parents weren’t farmers but the toys reminded him of them. But his uncle hardly even glanced at them; instead he looked down at Mohan, and said, “What are you? A girl?” Then even his uncle died, and Mohan left his legal studies, which his uncle had insisted upon, and began to study cartography. He didn’t quite understand why. He only understood that he wanted to study something with one side to it. The law had two. But cartography had one: lines could be disputed, armies could fight, people could die, but really, when it came right down to it, maps could tell a truth that men could not.
It was immediately after Mohan’s mapping of this new border that his troubles began. Three troubles to be exact.
The first was that Lalita’s father committed suicide. He hung himself. Upon hearing this, Mohan didn’t feel particularly bad. He barely knew the man, after all. But Lalita. Now Lalita was a different matter.
The first time he’d seen her was one morning when she was with a group of young women gathered near the village well, chattering and laughing and teasing. It was one of those wells that did not rise above the level of the ground; this he observed with interest. Wooden planks covered the opening, and one merely had to lift the hinged door cut into the planks and drop in a bucket. Eventually, his gaze left the brown planks and traveled to the brightly dressed women. He looked at each of them in turn, and with a certain degree of surprise. He had not in many years seen a group of people so unabashedly happy. It was as if happiness in his life, even the witnessing of it, had taken to the shadows. One that he knew lived somewhere—maybe in tunnels dug deep beneath the streets on which he walked, or growing like a mold behind the walls of his flat—but it had not shown itself. Not to him. Not for a very long time.
How long ago? he wondered once. How long had it been since he’d been truly happy? The memory that rose within him was so frightening that he pushed it back down instantly. The memory, of course, was of when he was five years old, just before his parents had died. His father’s friend had come for a visit. He’d stayed for three nights, and on the second night, he’d snuck into Mohan’s room. He’d crept in on the third night as well. Both nights, he’d left only after making Mohan promise not to say a word to anyone. “Especially not to your parents,” he’d said. “If you speak of this, if you do anything, something awful will happen.” But Mohan’s mother, a week later, finding him sitting alone and staring silently at a wall, had coaxed it out of him. He’d told her a little, not much. But even so, three months later, his parents had been hit by an oncoming lorry and had died.
And so, at the age of five, and every day since then, Mohan decided—against all reason and against all time—that he was the one who’d killed them.
* * *
Mohan looked again at the well. He studied Lalita particularly. He saw that she, of all the young women, seemed happiest. How was that possible? She was certainly not the prettiest: her nose was too wide and her skin much too dark, and he squinted and saw that she had a large birthmark splattered across her chin and left cheek. From where Mohan was standing, it looked like someone had taken mud and smeared it over her face. And yet.
And yet she was happy. He couldn’t understand it. He forced himself to turn away from her. By this time the young women at the well—six in all—began to disperse with their pots of water. They were moving quickly toward a turn in the road, balancing the water pots on their hips. Now he could only see their backsides. So full and round and alive that he nearly cried. Just as they turned the corner Lalita looked over her shoulder and said something to one of her friends. The two smiled, shimmering together with that same happiness Mohan had noticed before. But then Lalita did something odd. Well, not odd, but beautiful. She shifted the clay pot of water from her right hip to her left. She pushed it up against the curve of her waist, wrapped her arm around the neck of the pot, and disappeared around the bend. Mohan knelt to the ground; he could taste the earthen dampness clinging to her waist. He knew then that he’d been wrong: she wasn’t simply happy; happiness could not possibly explain the strange loveliness, the utter seductiveness, of that gesture. No, what Lalita had was something even more audacious than happiness. What was it? Mohan trembled. He tried not to flee: he fussed with the transit; he checked the level of the tripod; he practically ran after her.
Sitting on his bed that afternoon, after lunch, Mohan decided that the clay of the pot and the bronze of Lalita’s skin were the only true substances. They were why the rains fell, why the sun rose. His fingers had traced them all his life. Then he knew. He knew what Lalita had that the others didn’t, that he didn’t: she had sex. In fact, he realized, what she had was the opposite of what he had. But what was it that he had? What was the opposite of sex? It seemed like a question without an answer. Like, where does reality stop and unreality begin? Or, what goes deeper, the human soul or the human imagination? But this one had an answer. That much Mohan knew. He knew that the opposite of sex was fear. And fear was something he had an abundance of. He turned and looked at the wall: blue, watermarks sweeping down its length like curtains. It suddenly felt as if this was all he’d ever done: sit and stare at walls. With this thought his back straightened, his mouth grew resolute. And he knew what he had to do.
He leapt up, ran out of the door, and within a week learned everything there was to know about Lalita. She had failed her tenth class exams and was now at home, taking care of her father. Her mother had died just a few years ago, when Lalita had been fourteen. Her father, a wealthy local landowner, had kept his daughter close but had sent his son to be educated in Durgapur. The old man was tough, shrewd, but he doted on his daughter, the villagers said. Gave her far too many liberties. For instance, with a house full of servants, and the girl of marriageable age, why allow her to fetch water, why even let her out of the house? Why, indeed? Mohan smiled. The villagers looked at him curiously. Why do you want to know? they asked. It’s important for my surveying work to understand the community, Mohan said. The villagers—all farmers, none of whom had gone past fifth class—nodded gravely. The nugget in all of this was that Lalita’s father was looking for matches. Someone local, so his daughter would be close, and someone with a head for the farming business. Mohan had neither of these qualities but that scarcely deterred him. He could move; there was nothing in Calcutta that held him. And the farming business could hardly be more complicated than triangulation and theodolites and all those illusory meridians.
He decided the next day to go and visit Lalita’s father. Maybe even ask for her hand on the spot. That was what courageous people did, and that’s what he would do. He planned out what he would say, and how he would say it: be firm, insistent, yet mildly polite, he told himself, practicing in the mirror the night before the visit. Be heroic. But Mohan never got the chance. And what was more, the visit with Lalita’s father, he decided afterward, was when everything started going terribly wrong. Not the visit itself—that went fine—but what sent everything veering uncontrollably from the dream of Lalita into the realm of nightmare was Mohan’s grotesque underestimation of something that should have been obvious. Should’ve been crystalline, most certainly to a cartographer: Mohan had underestimated the power of land. Lalita’s father, though he was crippled, had practically seethed with it.
The room he was shown into was large and opulent. It smelled of sandalwood. There were silk divans and pillars of carved teakwood and a floor of polished marble. Toward one end was a sort of dais, on which the old man, his legs useless from a polio infection, was seated. Mohan was instructed to sit opposite him and a servant brought out a tray loaded with tea and colorful sweets and three kinds of savory mixture. The old man, once Mohan was seated, looked at him with delight and said, “So you want to marry my daughter.”
How had he known?
The old man didn’t wait for a response. He said, “What do you see when you look at her?”
“How do you mean?” Mohan said.
“You have looked at her, haven’t you?” Her father smiled.
“Well, yes.”
“Then what is it you see?” he said.
Mohan thought of Lalita, the earthen pot nestled in the curve of her hip, her wide nose, the birthmark on her face swaying before him like a strange and erotic pendulum. He looked at her father and told himself, Be heroic. “I see my future wife,” he said.
The old man didn’t even seem to hear him. “Do you know what I see?” he asked.
The room was silent. The servant who had brought the tea things reappeared and waited just beyond a silk curtain at the edge of the room. “I see dirt. Not just any dirt, Mr. Mohan, rich, black dirt. The kind where a mere whisper will sprout a seed. The kind that’s fed by every river there is, the Mahananda, the Yamuna, Ganga, the Nile! You see what I’m saying? The kind of dirt men were meant to plow. Do you see?”
“Yes,” Mohan said. And that was the end. Moments later the old man signaled for the servant, who showed Mohan to the door. He stumbled into the evening light and spun in circles, knowing, incontrovertibly and without a clue as to why, that he had failed.
* * *
Two weeks after his visit with Lalita’s father Mohan heard from one of the villagers that she was engaged to be married. Her betrothed was a young man from a neighboring village, with land of his own. The dowry—one thousand acres, to be transferred on the day of the wedding—would increase the groom’s landholdings tenfold. This news—the solidity of it, as if her engagement was a thick metal vault he now had to find a way to open—caught Mohan unawares. He sat at his desk and brooded. Only his old servant and companion, Basu, looked in on him and commiserated. “A girl of such wealth.” He breathed. “And those hips, those moist aams—”
“Shut up,” Mohan said.
“And as sweet as a rossogolla,” Basu added. Mohan glared at him.
“Use your head,” Basu said.
Mohan looked up.
“You don’t have any land, obviously, all you have is your head. Use it.” Then he left out of the back kitchen door after preparing Mohan’s dinner.
As night fell Mohan stared at his now cold plate of rice and goat curry. The chunks of goat had congealed in the gravy and looked like trapped canoes in a muddy river. The moonlight streaming through the window added an extra element of the sinister. This is the end, he thought. My Lalita is lost. He looked at the piles and piles of maps, papers, and figures at the edge of his desk and thought: my head. What’s the use: there’s nothing in my head. It’s all in my heart. He gaped some more at the maps, his surveying work stacked up, waiting to be used to finalize the border between West Bengal and East Pakistan. The turn of the Mahananda near English Bazar, the flow of the river south through the village in which he was stationed, and then, still farther south, the lands owned by Lalita’s father.
Mohan pushed the plate of food aside. He brought the sketches closer. Most of them were merely projections. The contours of the land, the river, and the general topography were all basically already bisected. All Mohan was sent here to do was to map it, and then to make recommendations as to slight variations, if necessary. If necessary, he repeated to himself. He looked at the map of L
alita’s father’s land; it ran right along the border, with both the village and the land in India. But what if his land ended up in East Pakistan, and his house remained in India? Out of necessity? The projection could be easily doctored, and then Lalita’s father would lose the one thing that bound his daughter’s engagement: the dowry of a thousand acres. He would have enough to live on, about twenty acres or so, but the rest would disappear. Then Mohan—the landless intellectual, the compassionate savior—could step in and volunteer, out of the goodness of his heart, to marry his daughter, the shamed, impoverished victim of a broken engagement. It was brilliant. It was using his head.
Mohan submitted the doctored maps; it took less than a month for them to be released. And it was then—the very next day—that Lalita’s father committed suicide. When Basu told him, the first thing Mohan wondered was how a man without the use of his legs could hang himself. Had the servant lifted him to the noose, or had the noose been low enough for a seated man? As to that, how had he constructed the noose in the first place? How could he possibly have tied it to a high enough place, or even a low place that was high enough for a man to hang?