The Secrets Between Us

by Thrity Umrigar

  When Chitra emerges from the bedroom an hour later, she has changed into a new outfit. She smiles wanly at Bhima and then busies herself in the kitchen, frying up golden raisins and almonds to garnish the pullao she has made for the birthday celebration. Bhima studies her surreptitiously, flushed with a new awareness of the younger woman. What she had thought of as childishness was strength; Chitra’s treatment of her was deliberate, a resolve to not inflict on others the kind of pain she herself had known. How many other times had this woman stood up to the kind of insults that Vimal had levied against her? Bhima had assumed that wealth and education protected people from other people’s insults; now she wondered if this was truly so. She wants to ask Chitra a hundred questions but is limited by her ability to formulate her thoughts. But something has changed, and now there is a protective instinct to shield this tender young woman from shrews like Vimal.

  Chitra turns to her, a shy smile on her lips. “I have a request to make of you, Bhima. Please don’t mention a word of what happened today to Sunita. I don’t want to upset her. She’s . . . very sensitive like that.”

  And then Bhima sees it—the quiver of the lower lip, the tentativeness in Chitra’s eyes, the slight flush of the cheeks—and she knows. Chitra baby doesn’t know how to navigate life’s meanness any better than she does. There is no protection against people like Vimal, just as there is no protection against snakes like Viraf. Life is fraught with danger, betrayal, cruelty. Which is all the more reason to cherish the moments of kindness, of connection, of sweetness—the pat on the knee, the offer to buy her a cake.

  “Just forget it, baby,” she says. “That woman is a witch. What for you bothering your head with her evil? You just mind your own business and live your life.”

  Chitra’s eyes brim with tears. “Thank you, Bhima,” she whispers. And then, before she can respond, Chitra takes two steps toward her and takes her hand in both of hers. “Thank you,” she says again.

  Something about the way Chitra looks at her reminds her of Maya. And as if she has read her mind, Chitra says, “She’s lucky. Maya is. To have someone like you to protect her.”

  A cavern opens up in Bhima as she hears the wistfulness in Chitra’s voice. “Are all your people in Delhi?” she asks. “Are none of your relations here?”

  Chitra makes a wry face. “Su’s my only family in Bombay.” And then, improbably, she adds, “And you. The two of you.”

  The words are out of her mouth before she can take them back. “How we can be family, baby? You must be of Brahmin caste, I am lower caste.”

  “Do you know most religions don’t have a caste system, Bhima? The Christians don’t, the Muslims don’t. So how do they form families?”

  She blinks in incomprehension. “How they know, then?”

  “Know what?”

  “How to live. Who to marry.”

  Chitra chuckles. “They just do. They follow their heart.”

  Out of the blue Bhima remembers Gopal’s dogged, single-minded pursuit of her and an involuntary smile forms on her lips.

  “Ah, Bhima. I see you know what I’m talking about.”

  She feels herself blush. “My husband . . . he was . . .” She stops, unable to convey to this young woman the circuitous paths of her life.

  “Is he dead, Bhima?”

  It is a simple enough question but impossible to answer. “What to say, baby?” she says at last. “He is living, but our marriage is dead. He killed it when he left me and returned to his ancestral village with our son.”

  “Oh, God.” She can hear the concern in Chitra’s voice. “How long ago was this?”

  But the old familiar shame is upon her. After all these years, the dishonor is still overwhelming because everybody knows that when a man leaves his wife, it is the woman’s fault. Chitra will not judge her but the sting of her pity will be almost as unbearable. And so, Bhima simply lowers her head. “Let it go, Chitra baby,” she says. “Let the past remain the past. Today is a happy day. Why we should darken it with sad stories?”

  Chitra watches her for a beat and then exhales. “You’re right. Today is a happy day. And I still have to wrap Su’s gift. You want to see it?”

  Despite herself, Bhima smiles. She has never met a grown woman as effervescent as Chitra. “If you like,” she says.

  “It’s in here.” Chitra takes Bhima’s hand and pulls her into the bedroom. Bhima marvels at how soft her hand is, like Maya’s. They make their way to the closet, and Chitra riffles through the hung clothes and then pulls out a package wrapped in newspaper. She sets it on the bed and unwraps it.

  Bhima gasps. It is Sunita’s face, sketched in black and white, staring back at them. There is the slight frown that is permanently etched on the woman’s brow. A smile hovers uncertainly on the thin lips. And the eyes in the painting are Sunita’s eyes, but there is an expression in them that transforms the face, making it more real than a photograph, as if Chitra has looked beyond skin and flesh and bone and into Sunita’s spirit. “You make this picture, Chitra baby?” she asks, and when Chitra nods, she is awed again. In capturing the essence of Sunita’s soul, Chitra has revealed something deep about herself.

  “Think she’ll like it?” Chitra asks, and Bhima stares at her wordlessly. After she and Gopal had been married for six months, her husband had taken her to a photo studio where a man had taken many-many pictures of them, out of which Gopal had selected three. At that time, Bhima had chastised her new husband for wasting his money so foolishly, but over the years, the photos had become her most cherished possessions. “She will,” she replies. “She will keep it as a remembrance, forever.”

  “Good.” Chitra smiles, and then she pushes Bhima lightly. “Accha. You go finish up and then you’re free to leave early. I just need a few minutes to gift wrap this.”

  Before Bhima leaves, she removes two of the three oranges she had saved for Maya and leaves them on the kitchen counter. “A small gift for Sunitabai,” she says shyly. It is rare that she shares something she’s saved for Maya with someone else, but today’s exchange with Vimal has shaken her, made her feel a strange solidarity with these two young women and their solitary life together. Besides, she thinks, as she makes her way home later that evening, perhaps the extra income from working at the market will permit her to feel like a human being again. If, after all these years of labor, she cannot even share two pieces of fruit with someone as nice as Chitra baby, then for sure her time on this earth has been a failure.

  16

  Even though Rajesh has been dead for over twenty-seven years, Parvati is unsure as to whether she ever loved her husband. If she did, it was probably in the last two years of his life when he lay in bed dribbling saliva and helpless as a baby, following her with his eyes as she crossed the bedroom of their tiny apartment, or swallowing the food that she would mash for him.

  She had first met him when she was thirty-two, at the peak of her powers, her beauty, and ability to please a man making her more valuable than any of Principal’s other girls. Unlike the others, her eyes were not dull from smoking hashish, her teeth were not decayed from smoking bidis or chewing tobacco. Even after two decades spent in the brothel, she still retained some of the robustness, the musculature, of the farm girl she had once been. Indeed, despite the three abortions she’d had by the time Rajesh came calling, as well as the gonorrhea she’d contracted at least half a dozen times, she was one of the few women at Principal’s home who had not been run ragged and spectral by the demands of her job. Two things had saved her from that fate: her beauty, which made Principal reluctant to hand her over to every client who wanted her, and her aptitude for keeping the woman’s books. As Principal grew obese, gorging herself on goat biryani and parathas fried in ghee, she found herself relying more and more on Parvati to do the bookkeeping.

  Ordinarily, Principal never would have rented out Parvati to someone as lowly as Rajesh but would have preserved her for the businessmen and the rich college boys who blew their fathers’ m
oney on girls and booze. But Rajesh was a police inspector, and the brothel fell within his precinct. He showed up there on his first week on the job, asked to be given a tour of the place, and when it ended, pointed his nightstick at Parvati. “I’ll take this one,” he said simply, as if choosing a pineapple at the market, and Principal had no choice but to acquiesce.

  Tonight, Parvati sits at the edge of the bed in her room in Mohan’s place, and goes through the cloth bag that holds all her worldly possessions. She digs to the bottom until she finds what she is looking for—a blue plastic hair clip. Rajesh had brought it to her the second time he’d come. She had pretended to be grateful, but accustomed as she was to the lavish gifts given to her by her regulars, she had planned on throwing it into the trash as soon as the stupid man left. But she hadn’t. The clip had remained on her dresser, and the next time he came, she put it in her hair. And was amused by how gratified he looked. He was gentler with her this time than the first two times, and soon it became a ritual for her to clip her hair when he visited. Principal was pleased with this development because despite the weekly bribes and the free use of the girls and the liquor by his constables, the previous inspector hadn’t always looked the other way. Under Rajesh there would be no sudden raids, no publicity-generating arrests during election season.

  Parvati fingers the clip in her hand. There is something malevolent about this trick that destiny has played on her. Despite her strenuous efforts to escape her life in the brothel, she has ended up in yet another house of disrepute. She fears that she will end her life in this place, so similar to the place that had ended her childhood. The hair clip feels like a talisman, a reminder of the irrefutability of destiny. She is not even sure why she has carried it around all this time.

  Except that Rajesh was the first to discover the pomegranate seed growing at the base of her chin. They had been lying in bed one afternoon and he had his arm around her, one finger idly stroking her cheek. The finger wandered to her chin, stopped, then felt around. “Kya hua?” he said. What happened?

  “What?”

  “Over here. What is this?”

  She touched the spot where his finger lay. “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It’s nothing. Doesn’t hurt. It’ll go away.”

  But it didn’t. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it grew. At first, no one could see it. But Rajesh knew it was there and kept an eye on it. “It’s growing bigger,” he said one day. “I think tumko cancer ho gaya. Have you gone to the doctor?”

  “I have no time for a doctor-foctor,” she said dismissively. “It’s just a pimple. It will go away.”

  “I will pay,” he said quietly. “I will talk to your madam about giving you a day off.”

  At the memory of this, Parvati digs through her cloth bag again. She pulls out a small metal photo frame with a picture of Rajesh in his police uniform and stares at it for a few moments, hoping to feel a wellspring of love for the man who got her out from under Principal’s thumb. But if there ever was love, it had dried up in the drought years that followed. Instead she feels a curl of gratitude for those early years of kindness. Rajesh became more and more territorial, arguing with Principal about ruining Parvati’s youth and health by pimping her out to too many men. Even after the doctor said that the growth was non-cancerous, he continued to advocate for her, and when Principal’s avarice proved greater than her fear of him, Rajesh played his trump card. Late one evening two of his constables, regulars themselves, swooped into the place and arrested Principal herself, their faces impassive in the face of her threats and curses. Two days in the lockup with no charges brought against her and no access to a lawyer made Principal realize who she was up against. Parvati never found out what words were exchanged between Principal and Rajesh, but after she was released, there was a new arrangement. Now, Parvati had only two duties—to comfort Rajesh and be his exclusively, and to help with the books.

  Over the years, their relationship changed. Now, Rajesh would show up at the end of his work shift and say, “Get ready. There’s a new film I want to see,” and off they’d go, Principal and the other girls glowering behind their backs. He would take her for a snack and mango kulfi at Chowpatty after the movie, then drop her off on his motorcycle. Somewhere around this time, Parvati remembers, he took to referring to her as his girlfriend.

  Taking over the accounting for Principal also gave her some say-so in the running of the brothel. Parvati knew that everybody assumed that she was siphoning off enough money each week to, say, allow herself to buy Camay soap and foreign-made nail polish from the smugglers at Flora Fountain, or to order an extra Limca or a plate of chicken biryani. But she didn’t. What she did instead was buy a chocolate every day for Praful. And use her influence to convince Principal to give a night off to his mother when she was in a particularly bad way. And badger the older woman to be the first one in the red-light district to offer free condoms to their clients, although so few of the men used them that Principal berated Parvati for wasting her money. “No man with any izzat, any honor, will use this if he doesn’t have to,” she lectured. “Stupid you are, for not knowing this.”

  Ten years after Rajesh first claimed her, Parvati’s life had fallen into a routine. During those years, Rajesh had been transferred twice to nearby precincts, but somehow his influence over Principal had not waned. There was also the fact that during that decade, the pomegranate seed had grown into an orange, and Parvati had gone from being the most desirable woman in the brothel to the most contemptible. Early on, she had encouraged the rumors and the superstition that ran rampant among the men who flocked to Principal’s place. It didn’t matter if the clients were illiterate taxi drivers or educated college boys—they all believed in the efficacy of curses. Parvati used this to her advantage, until their fever for her left their eyes. Rajesh alone seemed unaffected by the growth, possibly because he had first touched it when it was a seedling and also because he had heard with his own ears the doctor pronounce it a freakish, benign tumor, with no risk of infection to anyone else.

  And yet. It wasn’t always gratitude that Parvati felt toward Rajesh. Sometimes, before she had time to check her emotions, she bristled at the proprietary tone he took with her. And she resented him calling her his girlfriend. Who was he to give her that designation, for which he seemed to expect gratitude? What kind of a girlfriend was this, who had to acquiesce to all of his demands but never was allowed to make one of her own? What would happen if, one day, when he showed up to take her for an outing, she refused?

  Then there was the fact that Rajesh was a full eighteen years older than her. With a face as long as a white pumpkin and a ridiculous-looking mustache, he looked like a nawab from a hundred years ago. Everything about him was stiff and starched, as if he had sprouted from the uniform he wore. It embarrassed Parvati to have this man dote on her, claim her, call her his girlfriend. At one time or another, all of Principal’s girls had held the fantasy of some man—a boyish, gentle man with a face like the young Rishi Kapoor—falling in love with them and taking them away from this place. Parvati had even seen it happen, once or twice. But here she was, stuck for the last ten years with an older, stern-faced man, who expected her to be grateful for the outings and inexpensive gifts he occasionally bought her.

  “Kutta,” Parvati now spits. Dog. But even as she says the word she remembers how it was never that simple. Rajesh was increasingly talking about his retirement from the police force and how he’d promised his wife that they would retire in Pune. “I will miss you,” he would say, and Parvati would smile, half hoping for and half dreading the inevitable parting with the man who had spared her the worst degradations of her profession for almost ten years.

  And then, seven months before his retirement, Rajesh’s wife took ill with dengue fever. She was dead three days later.

  Perhaps she had loved him on the night he’d come to her a few days after the funeral, Parvati now thinks. That night, she had consoled a Rajesh she’d never encountered before, as he ne
stled into her like a wounded animal. In all their years together, Rajesh had barely mentioned his wife, had never uttered her name, and only referred to her as “the mother of my son.” But now he spoke of his Usha, how she made the best upma in the world, how well she had managed their finances and run their household all these years. The paradox hits Parvati only now, all these years later—if she had ever loved Rajesh, it was on the night that he had spoken of his affection for his wife. At that time, she had only wondered whether the dead woman had known of her existence during the last decade of her life; and how and why she had tolerated her husband’s visits to a prostitute.