“I wish to rest my bones now,” Bhima says. “Not after I’m dead.” Her eyes widen at her own insolence. “Listen to me. God forgive me, I am sounding like you.”
Parvati lets out a cackle. “Principal always used to say I was a bad influence on the other girls.”
“Principal? At school?”
“At the Old Place. The only school I ever go to. She was the madam there. She owned all of us.”
“Why do you call her Principal?”
Parvati shrugs. “Why not? She gave us the best education—showed us how the world really works. What could a school teach me that was more important?”
Bhima feels an unbearable heaviness in her heart. “Do you think the world is really such a dark place?” she whispers.
Parvati’s lips curl downward. “This is what I believe: There is only one true evil. And it is being poor. With money, a sinner can be worshipped as a saint. A murderer can be elected chief minister. A rapist can become a respectable family man. And the owner of a brothel can be a Principal. Understand?”
“Did you hate her?”
“Hate her? I cried like a baby when I left her. She was the only person in my life who never lied to me. My own father sold me like a bag of onions. My husband lied to me when he said he wanted a wife when all he was wanting was a servant he didn’t have to pay. All the men who crawl over my body and say ‘I love you’? They wouldn’t have recognized me if I passed them in the market. But Principal say, ‘This is what you’re worth.’ And when Rajesh want to marry me, she say, ‘Your market is down because of that thing defacing you. Plus you’re getting old.’ She was the only one who ever told me the truth.”
Parvati’s voice is low, her tone matter-of-fact, but Bhima feels each of the older woman’s words as a scratch to her face. How little she knows of the world in which Parvati has lived. She remembers how her own father used to smile fondly upon her no matter what she did, how doggedly Gopal had wooed her after the first time he’d set eyes on her, how tenderly he had held her on their wedding night, and all the nights after. Her own life seems so rich compared to Parvati’s. “Did you—have you ever really loved a man?” she asks timidly.
Parvati hesitates for a fraction of a second before shaking her head. “I can’t believe in something that doesn’t exist.”
“How you can say this?” Bhima says. “People love each other, no?”
Parvati raises her hand to cut her off. “It’s not love. It’s need. People just mix up the two.”
Bhima opens her mouth to protest, but again, Parvati stops her. “A new mother thinks her baby loves her.” She shrugs. “But he just needs her milk. A husband thinks his wife loves him. But she just needs his money. And we all know what the menfolk need. Principal teach me this, Bhima.”
How can she win against this clever, sharp, bitter woman? Bhima wonders. How to prove to her she is wrong, that her brain is twisted, too cynical? Bhima feels like weeping; there is a darkness in Parvati that terrifies her. In her own basti, there is a woman with no legs. There is a child who is blind. Another woman with burns all over her body. But in the basti, one thing sizzles from hovel to hovel, much like the illegal, overhead electric wires that some of the residents have connected to their homes. It is hope. Even in the depth of their despair, hope runs like electricity throughout the basti. It is what makes the woman with no legs weave wicker baskets that she sells to a fancy shop. What makes the blind boy’s mother spend her days picking rags to pay his school fees. What makes the burn victim look for a good match for her daughter.
And then it comes to her, the answer, and she sits up a little straighter. “You don’t believe in love?” she says loudly. “You should.”
Parvati waves her away. “Why should I?”
“Why?” Bhima taps her own chest with her index finger. “Because I’m sitting here with you in this wretched hospital. Because I’m here.”
29
“Good,” Parvati says, shaking her head vigorously. “God is great.”
The doctor looks at her curiously. “Did you not follow what I said? I said it is cancer. For sure.”
“I heard, doctor sahib,” Parvati says, a gleam in her eyes. “I will distribute sweets in my neighborhood this evening.”
The man pulls at a hair on his chin as he considers her. “If you had the money, we could’ve done a brain scan. Looks like the cancer is affecting your brain.”
Parvati smiles broadly. “I’ve spent the last twenty years praying for my death, ji,” she says. “Finally I have the good news. How soon before I pop off?”
At last he seems to understand, and a melancholy look comes across his face. The next second, it is replaced by fury. “I see. Then what for are you wasting my time? Wasting government money on this-and-that test?”
Parvati looks chastened. “What to do, sahib? My friend dragged me here, only.” Her face collapses. “Also, this thing growing on my backside pains me a lot. If you have some medicine for that, I will be grateful.”
For a moment he looks as if he’s about to refuse, but then he nods. “I can give some tablets,” he says. “But they will make you sleepy and maybe give you nausea. You understand?” He reaches for his writing pad and then rises.
“Will it—will the pain be bad? At the end?”
He looks at her, and this time, his eyes are filled with pity. “It will be unbearable.” His face softens. “Get someone to bring you some daru when the time comes. And stay drunk.”
“How much longer?”
He shrugs. “Until God is ready for you.”
She manages a half smile. “In which case it may be a long time.”
But the doctor doesn’t smile back. “No, it won’t. Your wish will be granted sooner than you think.”
It is only after she is out of the gates that her knees buckle and she grips the low wall of the hospital for support. She stands there hyperventilating, attempts to reassure herself she is not upset, that she has known for some time that this new lump was vicious, different from the old, benign one. She tries hard to capture the nonchalance she had exhibited in the doctor’s office, to relish the memory of his confusion at her reaction. But her brain is racing, zigzagging, thinking too many thoughts at one time, and she is unable to hold on to that memory. She takes a few deep breaths, but this only serves to make her aware of how hard her heart beats against her chest.
If she fears death at all, it is only because it will mean rejoining the people she despises. Whereas all the people she is fond of—Bhima, Maya, Rajeev, and even that ungrateful nephew of hers, Praful—are still here, living. Parvati realizes that she has been lying to herself. She doesn’t really want to die. For the first time, there is something worth living for—that humble stall in the marketplace where she is an indispensable part of Bhima’s business. The hand-to-mouth existence, the years spent selling bruised cauliflowers are now thankfully behind her, and every day, there is some surplus money—to take the bus instead of walking everywhere, to buy some bread and butter to eat in her room when she feels like it, to once in a while afford a Pepsi or a Limca on a hot day.
She hears a sob and looks around, bewildered, before realizing that it has come from her. Then, there is another, a helpless sound that escapes from her and lingers in the air. She smacks herself, embarrassed by her own vulgarity. How selfish, how unseemly it is for a woman who is at least fifty and a score years old to cry about dying. What claim does she have to even one more cup of water, one more morsel of food, one more gulp of air, in a city where babies die moments after birth, where children walk around with bellies bloated from hunger? Hasn’t she lived enough? Hasn’t luck shined upon her of late, first with the extra money that Bhima has sent her way, and now, with something even more precious? What had Bhima said to her the other night in the hospital? Because I’m here. That is how she’d said it, and she had silenced Parvati with three words, slayed her rubbish talk about love being a fairy tale. Ever since that night, Bhima has insisted that she go to her
home and eat dinner with them. And truth to tell, more than the home-cooked food, she has begun to enjoy the simple pleasure of sharing a meal with two others. Of hearing Maya tell what she has learned at college that day. Of watching Bhima’s face shine with pride as Maya says the big-big words her grandmother has never heard. Watching those two, Parvati’s mind hiccups to the past, the past that she had believed could never be resurrected. She remembers her life as a little girl, when her mother was more than a cough and a pile of bones, when her father was her protector and not her merchant. Once, she, too, had had a family—poor, yes, uneducated, yes, but loving. Close-knit. Huddled together in their little house, bearing life’s many beatings together. Why hadn’t her father given her the choice? Between being sold and starving together, she knows what she would’ve chosen. Every night, she scoops a ball of rice and daal in her hand and listens to Bhima and Maya’s banter and realizes how terribly alone she has been these past several years.
Tell the truth, she says to herself as she begins to walk back to the marketplace. She was lonely even while Rajesh was alive, wasn’t she? Maybe not the last two years of his life, when her days were a blur of chores—sponge-bathing him in the mornings, feeding him, turning him on his side several times a night, cleaning the bedpan, washing the soiled sheets. Strange, but she was less alone after he stopped speaking. The true, piercing loneliness had begun soon after his son’s visit. It was as if when Rahul left that day, he took with him his father’s affection for his new wife. Rajesh had begun to view her differently after that visit, as if he blamed her for his estrangement from his son. And as time went by, he compared her more and more to his dead wife and found her lacking in every area but one. Usha kept a clean house. Usha knew how to iron his pants just so. Usha knew just how he liked his Horlicks every morning. It took all of Parvati’s self-control to not tell the man that these comparisons mattered not one bit to her, because she never saw herself in competition with a dead woman.
During the day, Rajesh would spend hours in front of the television set while she sat in the kitchen or in the bedroom, trying to sew a button on his shirt or iron his clothes. This was something nobody had ever told her about being a housewife—it was boring. It dawned on her slowly—she had committed to a life with an uninteresting, older man. A man who, in retirement, had no hobbies or interests, whose idea of a good day was to sleep in until noon instead of ten a.m.
The first time he’d struck her was after they’d been married about a year. One of his old colleagues was being transferred, and they had been invited to his going-away party at a restaurant. Rajesh bought her a red sari for the occasion and even presented her with a gold necklace that had belonged to Usha. It was one of the few pieces of jewelry that his daughter-in-law had not claimed. He was lighting a cigarette when Parvati stepped out of the bedroom and he stopped, his eyes widening. “Wah,” he breathed. “Those men will not be able to keep their eyes off you.” She smiled, thankful that her husband was not repulsed by the deformity that everybody else noticed immediately.
It was a humid day, and Rajesh hailed a cab to the restaurant, to ensure that they wouldn’t arrive drenched in sweat. “Restaurant is first-class,” he told her. “Totally AC.”
“How can they afford such an expensive place?”
He winked. “This is in my old precinct,” he said. “Best for the owner to remain in the good graces of the police, no?”
At the restaurant, they are escorted to a private party room. The first thing Parvati notices is that there are no other women present. “Nobody else brought their wives?” she whispers, but Rajesh is distracted. “Arre, Rajesh, how are you, yaar? Enjoying your retirement?” someone says, while someone else thrusts a glass of Scotch into his hands. After a moment of backslapping and shaking hands, Rajesh reaches for her. “Friends,” he says grandly. “Let me introduce my missus.”
“Your missus?” someone yells. “I thought this was your daughter.”
“No, yaar,” someone else says. “That’s his granddaughter.”
Rajesh grins, unconsciously squeezing Parvati’s hand tighter. She looks down at the floor, grateful for the dim light in the room, which perhaps has kept them from noticing the growth under her chin. One of the older men comes up to them and smiles at her in an avuncular fashion. “Ignore these idiots, child,” he says. “Would you like a soft drink? Coca-Cola? Pepsi?”
“Pepsi is fine,” she says, although she would’ve liked a cold beer. She keeps her eyes downcast, enjoying playing this role of demure housewife. She turns to her husband. “Jao, ji,” she says. “Go enjoy your old friends.”
“And leave you to these vultures?” Rajesh says with a guffaw. “Do I look like I’m mad?” Despite his joviality, she hears the insecurity in his voice, and this makes her squeeze his hand back.
There is a commotion at the door, and Parvati turns her head to see a tall, well-dressed man with salt-and-pepper hair. A murmur goes through the room, and there is a palpable, electric shift in the atmosphere. Several people rush up to greet the newcomer, who towers over most of them. He greets a few of them and ignores the others as he walks toward the bar. Even in middle age, there is a coiled strength in the way he moves that reminds Parvati of a panther in the jungle. And as if he’s sensed her presence in the room, he suddenly notices her, stops midstride for just a second, smiles as their eyes meet, and then resumes walking. It happens so quickly that she is unsure if anyone else has noticed. She feels a tug of recognition, but before she can dig into her memory bank, Rajesh speaks, a breathless quality in his voice. “Kamal hai,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. That’s chief of police Verma. Hard to believe such an important man would attend this party.” He tugs at her hand. “Come. Let us go pay our respects.”
“You go, ji,” Parvati says, suddenly queasy. “This is between you menfolk. I’m okay standing here.”
She watches as Rajesh elbows his way through the throng of men currying favor with Verma, and there is something so pathetic and needy about her retired husband still angling for an audience with his former boss that her eyes sting with tears. She sees Verma bend his head down to hear something Rajesh says, then follow her husband’s finger, which is pointing to where she is standing. Verma slaps Rajesh heartily on the back, and then, to Parvati’s mortification, makes his way through the crowd toward her. “Namaste-ji,” he says to her in a loud, deep voice, bowing his head in a show of deference that somehow makes her feel as if he’s mocking her. “I had to come say hello to the only member of the fair sex present at our humble party. May I ask your good name?”
“Parvati,” she says shortly, and now, an unmistakable look of recognition crosses Verma’s face.
“Ah, I thought so,” he murmurs.
“Pardon?” Rajesh says, confused.
Verma puts his arm around the man. “Arre, yaar, isn’t your missus named after the goddess of devotion? And fertility? And . . . love?” This time, his insolence is unmistakable, although Parvati is unsure of whether he’s mocking her or her husband. “The name obviously suits your . . .” he lingers for a beat, “wife.”
“Sir, I’m not understanding . . .”
“Jaane do, jaane do. Forget it.” Verma flicks his wrist, a big, benevolent smile on his face, as if he is forgiving Rajesh for some insult. He looks at one of his acolytes. “Bloody hell, is this a party or a funeral? What must a man do to get a double peg of Scotch?”
“Right away, sir,” the man says, scuttling away.
Verma looks down at Parvati, a sad smile on his face. “Sorry to leave your delightful company, bhabhi,” he says. “But kya karu? Duty calls.” And with a wink, he heads toward the buffet table.
They wait until he is a safe distance away and then Rajesh hisses, “What was he saying to you?”
“You were next to me the whole time. You heard what I heard.”
“But why did he talk to you like this? In so familiar a manner?”
Parvati tamps down the queasiness in her belly. “Why you
asking me? These are your friends. I would’ve been happy alone at home.”
Rajesh shakes his head. “Everybody always says he’s a strange man. But until today, I hadn’t seen that myself.”
As soon as Rajesh says the word strange, a pin drops, and Parvati remembers. Of course. This is the same man who used to come to the Old Place fifteen years ago. She remembers him now—his reputation for sadism, how the girls he called upon feared him, how their faces used to twist when they talked about his proclivities. Had she ever bedded him? She must have, given how easily he had recognized her, even though he was not one of her regulars. Principal must have protected her from him. There were a few customers whose desires were so dark, who thought so little of the girls they abused, their perversions used to shake up even Principal. Parvati can see him now: striding down the wraparound balcony in a dark safari suit, hair parted differently than today, sunglasses masking whatever perversity lay in those eyes, lips darkened by the Dunhills he smoked continually.
In order to cover up her apprehension, she excuses herself and goes to the bathroom, lingering for as long as she can. Please let the man be gone by the time I go back, she prays. Almost as soon as she rejoins the party, a waiter comes up to her and says, “Madam, please to go to the buffet line.” She nods but doesn’t move, waiting for her husband. A few moments later, Rajesh heads toward her, and one look tells her that he is drunk. “Control yourself, ji,” she scolds softly. “Just because the daru is free . . .”
“The daru may be free. But nothing else in this life is,” he replies. She stares at him puzzled, confused by the unmistakable hostility in his voice.
“What?” she begins, but is cut off by the noise on the other side of the room. Her stomach muscles tense as a familiar voice calls out, “Bhabhiji. Please, you inaugurate the buffet line. I will not allow any of these pigs to eat until you do.”
“Wah. Our police chief is an expert at line maroing, yaar,” someone snickers within their earshot, and she feels Rajesh tense beside her.
The Secrets Between Us Page 23