‘I won’t budge,’ Taruna said. ‘I won’t let that man be a part of my wedding.’
Ankush placed his hand on hers. ‘I’m with you in this,’ he said.
Taruna smiled.
‘So, what about Iceland?’ Ankush asked then, to change the topic.
‘Oh yes, I wanted to talk to you about that as well.’
‘You have the itinerary?’
‘The thing is, I don’t know if we can really afford it,’ she said. ‘You must be under some strain. I don’t have much – being social sector and all – and I think an Iceland honeymoon will cost lakhs.’
The clear soups they had ordered arrived just then, and in the time it took the waiter to place the bowls on the table, Ankush realized that he had never once thought about how they would finance their trip to Iceland. It also dawned upon him that, in the back of his mind, he had always thought that Taruna’s father would pay for it.
‘It will be expensive, right?’ Taruna asked. Ankush, embarrassed by his own assumptions, couldn’t say anything. She didn’t notice anything amiss in his expression, though, and continued: ‘We will go somewhere in India. We can always do Iceland later.’
‘Yes,’ Ankush said now, looking down to the soup.
‘I see how much my father is spending,’ Taruna said, ‘and all for show. I argue with him all the time, about this and that novelty that he buys into. Thirty thousand or so spent on pugrees the other day. Can you believe it? And imagine if we went for an exotic honeymoon. Big wedding, and then honeymoon pics on FB – Iceland and all. He’d get to boast about it, too. So let’s go easy on the thing.’
‘Alright,’ Ankush said. ‘We will save up for a year and then travel somewhere fancy on our first anniversary.’
‘Yes, that’s better,’ Taruna said. ‘And no sharing photos on FB, okay? How’s the soup?’
Later that evening, on the flight back to Mumbai, Ankush thought of the Iceland affair, and was shocked by the intensity of his disappointment. He realized that he had made an error in investing so much mental energy in the honeymoon-in-Iceland idea. And that too based on an assumption that he was now ashamed to admit to himself. Subconsciously (he told himself that word), he had fallen into the notion that Taruna’s father would pay for the honeymoon – and wasn’t that criminal? On the plane, lodged as he was in a middle seat, he scolded himself silently. Yet, there was a part of him that answered from the other side as well. The question of dowry wasn’t there in this wedding, it couldn’t possibly be. He had talked to his mother repeatedly to ensure that she not raise even the slightest of demands – not even in the name of rituals – with Taruna’s family. Apart from the obligatory dinner for the baraat, Taruna’s father wasn’t expected to do anything more. With such pliancy from my side, Ankush thought, wasn’t Taruna’s father’s profligacy something that he had chosen for himself? And if the man was going to be profligate, was it really such a big crime to have expected that he pay for the honeymoon?
Conversely, Ankush also questioned the very expectation that the baraat be provided for. This tacit agreement – ‘that thing called patriarchy’ – was the crux of all conundrums. Perhaps, he thought, I could offer to contribute to the expenses. But the offer would have to be made secretly; and in any case it remained uncertain how Taruna’s family would see it: they might think of it as disrespectful and demeaning.
So he decided not to do anything of the sort, and began work at killing all the fantasies that he had built up about Iceland.
The festival of Holi was in late March that year, just two-and-a-half months after their wedding. It was customary in Ankush’s family for the new bride to spend her first Holi in her father’s house. So, train tickets to Delhi were booked. The day after Holi, they were to go to Muzaffarnagar to spend two days with Ankush’s mother, and then they were to return to Mumbai via Delhi.
One Friday, about a week before their scheduled travel, Ankush came back from work to find Taruna in a terrible state. Her eyes were swollen, darkness beneath them, and her face carried a pained expression. She didn’t have the energy for their usual hugs and kisses.
When he asked her what had happened, Taruna couldn’t answer immediately. She exhaled, as if in great fatigue, and moved to the bedroom from the living room. Ankush followed her there.
‘Is it about work?’ Ankush asked. ‘Things will start moving; it’s just that this is a new city.’
‘It’s not the work,’ she replied.
‘Then what?’
‘The Bastard.’
Ankush didn’t grasp who or what this was about.
‘I’m talking about … you called him by that name on our honeymoon.’
His confusion stayed another moment. ‘Oh, what about him?’
‘He just won’t die,’ Taruna whispered, and started crying.
‘Hey,’ Ankush proceeded to hug her, ‘tell me what happened.’
Taruna told him that the Bastard had had a heart attack and that he had been transferred from her uncle’s house to her father’s house. Apparently, her uncle couldn’t afford the doctors and the care, and moreover, he had to go to a pre-scheduled stay at a vipassana ashram.
‘Bloody vipassana is just a pretence,’ Taruna continued. ‘Now my father will have to take the burden. And after all that the man did to me.’
‘Can’t your father refuse?’ asked Ankush. ‘Can’t he just say “I don’t care”? Whatever?’
In response, Taruna just looked at him questioningly with teary eyes, as if he had suggested something silly. After a minute of silence, Ankush spoke again: ‘If you don’t want to go home for Holi, you don’t have to.’
‘No,’ Taruna said. ‘I want to go. Your mother also wants me to go. We have bought the tickets and everything; so there’s no point not going. I will go. It’s my home, after all.’
Ankush nodded. He wondered how Taruna’s parents would manage keeping the Bastard out of Taruna’s sight in their three-room flat. He would want the Bastard out of his sight as well.
‘He can’t move,’ Taruna said. ‘And he’s taken my brother’s room. So we won’t have to see him, if that’s what you were thinking.’
‘Okay, that works,’ Ankush said.
Taruna started sobbing, and as Ankush proceeded to embrace her tighter he, too, felt a helplessness clasp him. Then he heard her whimper something. She was cursing, saying ‘fuck fuck fuck …’ Coming from her, the word sounded strange to Ankush. A moment later, she started shivering in his arms.
In the run-up to the journey to Delhi, Taruna tried hard to conceal her sadness. Ankush was trying hard too: he would come from office with a snack or some special dessert; he would play peppy songs, coax her to dance with him; he would wake up before her and fix her bed tea and breakfast. Taruna played along, and at times the simulation resulted in actual happiness.
Soon the day of their departure came. They took an auto to Borivali Station, from where they were to catch the Rajdhani. The decision of buying train tickets had been an easy one: both of them found overnight train journeys more comfortable than taking flights. During their courtship, when one of them had to make the journey to the other’s city, they had travelled by train whenever time permitted.
They had been allotted the two side seats for their journey. Once inside the train, they pushed their two travel bags below the seats, and then Ankush placed the three framed photographs – which they’d decided to take to their homes – on the upper seat with care. They were offered tea and snacks almost immediately after that. Biting into their kachoris, they shared a comment about the sameness of the evening snacks on the Rajdhani. Taruna then remarked that this was their first Rajdhani trip together. After the snacks, they took to reading: Taruna her Dickens, Ankush his next instalment in a Nordic detective series. What lay ahead in Delhi was on their minds and, as the train sped, they sought their private distractions and stopped talking to each other. Every now and then, one of them would look outside the glass window – but evenings still came
early in March and there wasn’t much to see except the unilateral rush of grey shadows. For Taruna, the shadows emerged into vision and vanished behind her; for Ankush, they popped out from behind his back and sped into a distant nothingness. On the one or two occasions when they both looked up from their books at the same instant, they shared a smile that had strains of conciliation in it. It confused them equally – conciliation for what?
They finished dinner early and were looking to stretch their legs even before the train reached Surat. Ankush jumped onto the upper berth after Taruna had helped him spread a white sheet on it. Soon, they were both supine, released from the weight of each other’s company.
Taruna now thought of what lay ahead with greater intensity, and the past soon began pressing down on her. In her pre-teen years, even after the fact of the abuse had come out, Taruna’s parents would expect her to meet and greet the Bastard cordially. She remembered how, when she entered teenage and became more sexually aware, the disgust she felt on such cordial occasions had increased. She had started touching herself when she was in Class XI, thinking of Hollywood actors or a classmate whom she fancied. But sometimes, the fantasies she would indulge in to arouse herself were cut short by a memory of the violation. Her urge would then collapse for days. Around the same time, she became an extremely difficult teenager for her parents – one who was always angry, always quick to pick a fight. Once, when she was seventeen, her father had asked her – ordered her, rather – to ‘forget about it’, to ‘come back to normal’. ‘You are stupid!’ she had shouted back at him.
As an adult, too, Taruna recalled now, she had initially found it difficult to express herself sexually. Her first few boyfriends had all been unsure of her attraction towards them. It was only in her mid-twenties, after she had gained a specialization in child psychology and started work in the area of her choice, that the grip of her traumas had loosened. Rounak came into her life after that, and became the first man she had intercourse with. Then she dumped him for no reason at all. By that time, she had started dictating terms to her family, rejecting any gatherings of which the Bastard was a part. If her parents tried to cajole her, she would put her foot down.
‘It isn’t my shame; it is his,’ she would say. This wasn’t a concept that had come easily to her. Her folks would often respond by saying, ‘You don’t have to make it ours, too.’ These were entreaties, and Taruna faced them with coldness.
She had been harsh to her parents over the years – harsh and inconsiderate, even in matters that did not concern that man – and, lying down as she was now, this fact hit her with force and nearly made her cry. The illusion of strength she had cultivated had to spill over to all her dealings, but did that also mean that she was condemned to keeping appearances one way or the other, always having to act tougher than she was? And how difficult it must have been for her parents: to know at every step the pain that was giving form to their daughter’s mind. Her tantrums had been tolerated more than her brother’s; her boyfriends had been well received; she had always worn whatever she had wanted to. Given who her parents were, Taruna couldn’t deny that these were concessions. They knew she had to save herself, and they did try to accelerate that saving. But they also judged its progress badly. That was the sum total, and now that monster was inside her home. She closed her eyes, wanting to sleep. It’s not my shame, she told herself again.
On the berth above her, a relieved Ankush had been scrolling through his phone. He was comfortable in withdrawing into himself now, with the knowledge that the whole affair would pass in a day.
He had read some articles about sexual abuse in the previous week. There were some damning statistics, but there were also some interesting takes on the whole thing. The philosophical question, which he believed he had rather smartly comprehended, interested him: At what age can a human being be thought of as being in control of their sexuality?
Thinking about the question vaguely again, Ankush was suddenly transported, by a not-so-indecipherable logic, to his first sexual experience. It was something that he hadn’t thought of in a long, long time, perhaps more than a decade. He was twelve when it had happened, and the girl – his neighbour’s daughter – was the same age. Her name was Gunjan, and in his memory, she remained a strikingly beautiful girl, the exception of whose beauty Ankush did not grasp entirely in his childhood. It was a hot afternoon in Muzaffarnagar and, away from the scrutiny of elders, they had rubbed genitals, without removing their clothes, in the shade of the lemon tree behind the building in which their families lived in adjacent flats. The exertion had led to his first orgasm, a dry one, and he still remembered how the weight of sin had crashed on him as soon as that was done. He had slapped Gunjan and accused her of making him do it. She, enraged, her cheeks flushing red, had pushed him back hard and run away. Afterwards, the incident became a huge ball of fire between them, making it impossible for them to even nod to each other ever again, which was difficult because, apart from being next-door neighbours, they were also in the same class in the same school.
Throughout his teenage years, though, Ankush had on countless occasions recalled the incident beneath the lemon tree to aid his private needs. He had fantasized about the passionate ways in which they would approach a repeat of the rendezvous, if there was ever to be one. In fact, Gunjan had remained part of his fantasies even after his family had left the residential colony for the house his father had bought in the town. It was only when he left for college that she withdrew from his mind.
The sound of someone’s snoring interrupted these reminiscences. He sat up and looked for his water bottle, which had shifted from where he had placed it. As he moved, he noticed a definite tension in his crotch.
He had a gulp of water and kept the bottle in its overhead slot. He lay down again.
Their rubbing in the shadow of the lemon tree wasn’t a crime, he thought. He was a child then, so was Gunjan, and children are curious about these things. Nor was the recalling of the incident for masturbation a crime. Teenage is a tough time; one latches on to anything for release.
But could he tell Taruna about this semi-erection that he had now? It wasn’t the image of the girl-child that had aroused him, but the memory of the incident and the erotic connotations it had carried for him for a certain period in his life. It was the memory of being aroused that was the reason for this arousal. But was such an argument defensible? Had he really not reconstructed Gunjan just now in his head?
He shut his eyes and tried to force himself to sleep.
They entered the apartment at around ten the next morning. After the usual pleasantries with Taruna’s parents and her younger brother, Ravi, were done, they went into Taruna’s old room, to freshen up. The Bastard was locked in another room: gladly, they didn’t see him.
Once inside the room, Taruna hugged Ankush tightly. It was a gesture to break the general air of silence that had built around them in the train. But it was also a gesture that affirmed that such a thing had existed. They kissed, lightly.
Later, while having breakfast on the dining table in the living room, with his father-in-law and brother-in-law giving him company (Taruna was helping her mother in the kitchen), Ankush’s eyes fixated for a minute on the closed door of the other room, inside which the Bastard probably lay dying. The thought that the nasty old man might be aware of his presence discomfited Ankush. Then he looked towards his wife, working in the kitchen. How wrong would it be if a slice of bread toasted by her ended up going to the man?
After breakfast, two of Taruna’s cousins – Akanksha and Avantika – turned up at the door. Ankush’s presence apparently meant that it was a special Holi for them. Everyone, including Taruna’s parents, moved to the rooftop of the building. Ankush remained a favourite target for colour-splashing, a role he took on sportingly. Taruna’s brother Ravi once put ice cubes inside his shirt. Taruna saw this as the most carefree gesture the two of them had shared till date, and it made her happy to see the two most important men in her lif
e come closer. In the raucous enjoyment, Ankush and Taruna’s recent inhibitions were also shed. Soon, everyone was drenched and painted beyond recognition. Group photos were taken, as if to commemorate the disfigurement all of them had accepted for the day. In the hustle-bustle, Avantika’s mobile phone fell in a bucket of coloured water while she was trying to take a selfie. Miraculously, the phone showed no signs of malfunction after she took it out. ‘Holi Hai,’ everyone shouted in unison.
But the group’s energy was expended by then. Soon, the cousins left. ‘You guys are old, but we have more Holi to play for sure,’ Akanksha announced before leaving. Inside the house, Taruna went to the bathroom adjacent to her room for a shower. Ankush sat on the floor in the room, waiting for her to finish. He heard scraps of conversation from the living room. Taruna’s parents were arguing. The Bastard had fallen in his bathroom while they were celebrating upstairs. Ravi was trying to calm them down. Then Taruna came out of her bathroom and it was Ankush’s turn to bathe. ‘There is an argument,’ he told Taruna before going inside.
By the time Taruna dressed and got to the living room, there was no argument. She saw only her mother, busy with something in the kitchen. She had grown bulkier since the wedding, Taruna noticed. To help her in readying vegetables for lunch, Taruna proceeded to clean the coriander. ‘What happened?’ she asked her mother after a while.
‘He fell in the toilet,’ she replied.
‘So?’
‘So?’ Taruna’s mother turned to face her. ‘What do you mean, so?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Your father had asked Ravi to check on your grandfather,’ her mother said, returning to chopping the tomatoes. ‘He just got too excited playing Holi with you and Ankush.’
‘Does he need assistance while going to the toilet?’ Taruna asked.
‘He doesn’t need to be washed, thankfully; he manages to do that himself. But it’s better if someone lends a hand in helping him sit on the pot.’
Diwali in Muzaffarnagar Page 10