by Laura Furman
It was June, and the days were hot, cruelly hot. Kishen warned Mother not to go out, but one afternoon she said she had to—if she didn’t, goodness only knew what those new committee members would get up to. An hour later, the driver had to bring her back, and she was an old crushed woman. She lay on her bed and Kishen sat beside her; when he tried to get up, she clutched at his hand in a pleading gesture that she had never used with him before. She did it again, moments later, when they heard Naina’s voice outside, with Bari-Mai’s wild echo. “How do you stand it?” Mother whispered, and then he told her what he hadn’t quite told himself—that he was thinking of returning to England.
At once, she rallied. She said that he should take another degree, or at least some sort of course. “What—now?” he said, for he was almost forty. “A course in writing,” she said vaguely, and he said, teasing her, “I thought you liked my writing the way it is.” But he knew that she wanted him to leave for other reasons—in fact, for the same reasons that he wanted to go.
He looked into a writing school in Bristol, and Mother eagerly sent away for the application forms. She knew that it would take some time for these to arrive, but when six weeks had gone by she said that they would have to request them again. Although she and Kishen were alone in her bedroom, she lowered her voice: “I’ll write for them today, this time by express mail.” He nodded his consent, as though he, too, suspected that someone might be listening.
The next day, Naina invited him to go out with her. She drove with abandon, so fast that he feared for the rickshaws and the wandering animals that she kept missing by inches. His timidity amused her, so he tried not to show it and sat there tense and silent, his hands clutched between his knees.
She took him to an open-bazaar stall that was reputed to be the best for a kind of very spicy Delhi snack food. Kishen, with his delicate digestion, had never wanted to eat there, but Naina seemed perfectly at home. He watched her as she scooped up the little messes with her fingers in a trance of enjoyment; she soon sent him back for a second helping, which she finished just as quickly, and then—“I shouldn’t!”—for a third. At last she was sated, spread out on a rickety little bench as a tattered servant boy with a rag wiped the ground underneath it. She seemed oblivious of the looks of urgent desire directed at her by other customers and passersby, and by the proprietor himself, perched up on his platform stirring a vat of fly-spotted cream; or perhaps she was used to them, as she was used to the way that Kishen was looking at her across the table.
She was almost middle-aged now, her body widened, fattened by pregnancy, by excessive eating, and by long hours of deep sleep in the hot afternoons. Yet he talked to her as he had done in her youthful years, though he knew she wasn’t listening—not in the way his mother listened when he spoke of his work, or of himself.
And suddenly she interrupted him: “Why are you wanting to run back to England?”
He tried to explain it to her. He told her that it was better sometimes not to be too close to one’s source of inspiration. And, as if he were talking about her as that source, she said, “But if I don’t want you to go? If I say mat jao? Please stay?”
“Try to understand.” And he repeated it all—about being detached, about recollecting in tranquillity—everything that Mother and his friends in England understood and Naina didn’t. But as he talked he thought of a painting by an elderly English painter who was a friend of his mother’s; the painting depicted a giant hand caressing a mountain and was titled I Have Touched the Breast of Mother India. It had always made him laugh, and now Naina was laughing as though he had said something just as ludicrous.
“When will you send off your application?” she interrupted.
“As soon as it comes,” he said.
“It hasn’t come yet? No? Sachmuch? Really?” She suppressed a smile as she opened her handbag and dug around in its messy contents. An envelope emerged; she held it out for him to see but not to take. He realized that not only did she listen at doors; she lay in wait for letters to purloin.
Now she smiled at him openly, teasing him—and how could he help smiling back at her? “Shall I?” she said. “Tear it up?”
She held it out, pulled it back, held it out again. It was a game now—one that he was determined to win. He leaned forward and snatched the envelope out of her hand, quite easily, because she let it go as if she knew what he would do with it: tear it in half, then in half again, all the time gazing at her for approval, which she gave.
The next time Mother asked him about the application forms, he told her that he had filled them out and sent them off. She seemed satisfied, but a day or two later she fell ill. Instead of going to her meetings, she lay in her bedroom with the curtains shut and the air-conditioner on. Her face was drawn, and because her partial denture had been removed her mouth was sunken. The doctor came—he was a friend and contemporary who had worked with her on health-care reforms. He prescribed medicines, but when those didn’t work Kishen and Shiv called in other, younger doctors. Still the sickness failed to subside, and now Mother mostly lay on her bed with her eyes closed.
Once, Bari-Mai, quick and agile as a monkey, clambered onto the bed and began to press down on Mother’s legs. Mother cried out in shock and Kishen, too, cried out, so that Naina removed Bari-Mai and both left indignantly, protesting good intentions. Alone with Kishen, Mother apologized; she said she was aware that it was unfair to see anything but a poor old woman in Bari-Mai, sunk in the rites and superstitions of a backward part of the country.
But the cook saw more than that. He came into Mother’s room and, whispering just loud enough for her and Kishen to hear, told them how all day he was on duty in the kitchen, and even at night he stayed up to watch. But who knew—worn out by his vigilance, he sometimes dropped off to sleep for a few moments, during which Bari-Mai must have insinuated her powders and potions into his pots. How else was it that Mother had been laid low by a sickness that the greatest doctors in the world were unable to cure?
“It’s unhygienic,” Shiv said, after discovering the cook asleep in the kitchen one night. When Kishen and Mother told him the reason, he said that it was psychologically unhygienic to allow such thoughts to enter their minds. Still, they continued to feel uneasy, though they were ashamed to admit it, even to each other.
It was the summer vacation, and the two boys, Munna, now fifteen, and Chottu, fourteen, came home from their boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was the same school, modeled on Eton and Harrow, that Shiv and Kishen had attended in their time. Shiv had been very successful there, Kishen less so. Both Munna and Chottu followed in their father’s footsteps, played all sports, were popular; Munna already had Shiv’s confident voice and his pompous walk.
Naina couldn’t stop petting her two boys, stroking their downy cheeks, though they frowned and pretended not to like it. They bullied her, told her she was getting too fat, and did she have to chew that disgusting betel? They made her play cricket with them in the back garden; she flew like a young girl between the wickets, flushed, her hair coming down, but they kept getting her out before she could make a single run. Bari-Mai was appointed fielder; she squatted, motionless as a stone, only her jaws moving in their perpetual mumble.
Shiv tried to come home from work earlier and, instead of shutting himself in his study, he sat with the boys to discuss their future. Munna wanted to join the Administrative Service, like his father, and Chottu was thinking of the Navy. Shiv considered their choices, the three of them serious together. Naina hovered around them with unwelcome interruptions—“Did you finish your milk, Munna?”—until he shouted at her that his name was not Munna but Raj Kumar. “Oh, big man,” she said, her angry stare directed not at her son but at his father, who tried not to meet it. That night, for the first time since the boys’ arrival, he and Naina fought again.
The older boy was especially affected by what he overheard, and the next day he sought out Kishen. Trying to answer Munna’s questions about
his parents, Kishen had to admit that he knew nothing about marriage—how could he? All he knew was that there were bound to be clashes of personality, especially between two people as different as Shiv and Naina. The boy nodded. “So you think they shouldn’t be married?” he said. Kishen avoided a reply—not because he didn’t have one but because he suspected that Naina or Bari-Mai might be listening behind the door. The boy repeated his question, and when Kishen was still silent, he gave his considered opinion, as judicious and balanced as his father’s would have been: “Maybe they should get a divorce.” The next moment, Naina came flying through the door. “Divorce!” she cried. “You dare say that in this house!” She abused him in her native dialect and then she raised her hand and slapped him. The sound of the slap echoed through the house, and remained there, ineradicable even after the boys returned to school.
Shiv invited Kishen to lunch at one of the new hotels, a grand palace with slippery marble floors and hothouse blooms in man-size vases. The prices here insured that only the richest Indians could gain admission. But the richest Indians were no longer the old style of businessmen, the ghee-fed descendants of milkmen and moneylenders: they were younger men, better traveled, almost cosmopolitan. Several of them came over to greet Shiv, with the respect that was due to him as a member of the administration that controlled permits and licenses. When they returned to their tables, Shiv informed his brother of their positions in the corporate world, the multi-crore companies over which they ruled. Kishen noticed his almost wistful glances at these men—and at the lively young women who accompanied them. He guessed that these were their secretaries, or perhaps their lovers, but Shiv said that they were their wives: yes, these slim, youthful women were wives, many of them mothers, too, and at the same time helpmeets, social assets to their important husbands.
Here Shiv changed the subject. He said that he had now reached the highest rank of the bureaucracy; his next posting would be as an accredited ambassador, and his success in that role would depend to a large extent on his social skills, and those of his wife. “Naina wouldn’t be happy,” he said.
“How do you know that?” Kishen said. “You don’t know. You know nothing about her.”
Shiv, too, grew more heated. “And she knows nothing about me. And cares nothing, about my work, my career—what sort of marriage is that?” He changed the subject again. “What about you? And if you don’t mind my asking—you and the Great Indian Novel?”
“I thought you liked my little pieces.”
“You shouldn’t be hanging around the house so much. You should be getting out, meeting people. The middle classes. The new generation of businessmen. The entrepreneurs.”
“And their suitable wives,” Kishen said.
Shiv’s voice became more intense, charged with suppressed anger. “She has this mad idea that I have some grand love affair going.” He laughed without laughing, cut up his meat, chewed violently.
“And is it true, her mad idea?”
“Of course not! And, if it were, who could blame me? Living in that house, in that atmosphere—no wonder Mother’s sick. We’re all sick. The stench of those beasts alone is enough to poison the lot of us.” He put down his knife and fork and stared at his brother, shocked at himself, though presumably he had been referring to the buffalo head, long since disintegrated, and the tiger pelt, which was going the same way.
Alone with Kishen in her bedroom, Mother whispered, “Have you heard from Bristol about your application?”
“They turned me down.”
He lied without a qualm, and was amazed by her reaction. She covered her face and rocked to and fro. When he caught her in his arms, she clung to him and wouldn’t let him go. How thin she was, how worn away. When she released him, he tried to smile. “I didn’t realize you were so eager to get rid of me.”
She stroked his head, regretting perhaps all the hair he had lost. Then she kissed him. “Go to England,” she said. “You’ll have peace of mind there.”
“And if I’m far away and you get worse?”
“When I know you’re writing your book, I’ll be well.”
But the next day Naina told him, “Six months, that’s all. Three months, six, a year. At home we can always tell. My uncle had a mistress, Mrs. Lal, moti-taazi, plump and nice—oh, he liked her very much! But Bari-Mai knew, and others knew, too. In six months, it was all gone, like a balloon, psssst, no more moti-taazi. It was God punishing her.”
“Mother has done nothing to be punished for.”
“She wants my husband to leave me. She’s even set my sons against me! You think that such thoughts would come into my child’s head if she hadn’t put them there? I slapped him, God forgive me, but now God himself is slapping her—aré, sunno, where are you going?” He had got up to leave. She caught hold of his shirt, and it ripped in her hand. That made Naina laugh—her old playful, girlish laugh, like clear water running.
Kishen began to take Mother to various specialists. She enjoyed driving with him from one clinic to another; he held her hand the way she had held his on the first day of school. Whatever the doctors said, she claimed to be perfectly well—a little pain here and there, but what was that at her age, compared with what others had to suffer? Still, she grew more and more gaunt, while Kishen looked on helplessly; and every morning Naina and Bari-Mai sat on the front veranda and watched them drive away.
Finally, Shiv decided to send her to England, to consult with a Harley Street specialist. Kishen would have to take her. If at all possible, Shiv would join them, but meanwhile he made the arrangements for his mother and brother—the plane tickets, the hotel, the appointment with the doctor.
Mother was glad to go and Kishen knew that it was for his sake. He wanted to leave, too, he thought, to be in a cool green place, to collect and recollect everything in its complexity, which was impossible here with it all pressing down on him. Yet, at the same time, he felt guilty—maybe he had no right to go, maybe his place was here, even if he hated it.
“When are we leaving? Have our tickets come?” Mother asked Kishen so often that he began to believe there was some weakness in her mind. “Let them be sent by courier,” she said, and then, every day, “Has the courier come?”
Kishen called the travel agent, who assured him that the tickets had been sent—yes, by courier. Kishen told him to cancel those and have duplicates sent to Shiv’s office. Shiv brought them home and Kishen at once hid them in the inner pocket of his waistcoat, where he could check several times a day and know they were safe.
Naina had one of her great fights with Shiv. “Why are you sending them away? What use are your wonderful English doctors? It’s written! Written here!” Kishen, listening from Mother’s bedroom, imagined Naina drawing her finger across her forehead in the place where one’s fate is inscribed.
• • •
“She won’t last the journey,” Naina warned Kishen. “And no one there will know the ceremonies. All they have is the electric crematorium; they’ll give you the ashes and you won’t even know whose ashes they are.”
“Why are you saying all this?”
“If you go, that’s what will happen. Did your tickets come?”
The way she was looking at him, through him, it was as if she could penetrate right to his heart. But he knew that she couldn’t see even as far as the contents of his waistcoat pocket, and for once he felt he had the upper hand.
Maybe she felt it, too, for she said in a different, cajoling voice, “When you’re gone, will you remember me? Will you remember me as I was?”
He looked back at her: no, she was not as she had been. She was heavy, her complexion spotted by the spicy pickles she consumed, her mouth stained red by the betel. Even her tongue was red—like a demon’s, he sometimes thought when he was angry at her. But at this moment he was not angry; he said, “No. Now. I’ll remember you as you are now.”
She threw back her head and laughed with a deep-throated pleasure that could swallow him whole. “Will yo
u write about me?” She took a newly prepared betel from Bari-Mai, and asked, “What will you write?”
“All the bad things you do.”
“Yes, I’m a bad woman.” She translated this for Bari-Mai, who broke into excited chatter. “Bari-Mai says she’s making you a very special paan.”
“Oh, yes? What’s she putting in it?”
“You’ll see—very special.” Her eyes were dancing over his face, looking to see whose turn it was to make the next move and win.
Bari-Mai handed her another betel, and Naina instructed him, “Open. Kholo.”
Kishen drew back slightly, and she said, “There’s nothing in it that you haven’t eaten a hundred times.”
He thought, Well, whatever it is—an aphrodisiac or whatever—it’s as superfluous now as it was all those other times. He opened his mouth and soon it was full of betel juices. “Good, isn’t it?” Naina said, and he affirmed, “Badiya.” Superb.
She said, “Come on. Show. Dikhao.”
He didn’t even pretend not to know what she was talking about. He took the tickets out of his waistcoat pocket. He handed them to her like a forfeit that he was called upon to pay.
She held them. “Shall I?” She waved them at him. “Or will you?”
“My turn,” he said.
She pouted. “You did it last time.” But she let them dangle loosely in her hand so that he could take them from her and begin to tear them in half—first his mother’s, then his own.
Joan Silber
Two Opinions
WHEN MY FATHER WAS in prison, my mother took us to visit him. I was nine when he first went in, and my sister was six. Some of my mother’s friends thought taking us there was a mistake. “The girls have to know,” my mother said. “They’re not too young. And why would I do that to Joe?”